Academic Institution: Goldsmiths, University of London/ANID. Beca Doctorado en el Extranjero 2019-2023
Researcher: Andrés Cabrera
Supervisor: Alberto Toscano
The social upheaval unleashed in Chile on 18 October 2019 revealed the innermost contradictions of a Latin American country that has been depicted by intellectuals across the ideological spectrum as a ‘laboratory of neoliberalism’. This research seeks a historical and sociological explanation for these political events, which led to the Constitutional Convention being approved by a large majority in the plebiscite on 25 October 2020. Based on the ‘polysemic theory’ of crises developed by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks as well as the itinerary of the reception of Gramsci’s work in Chile, this research considers the entire historical cycle that stretches from the military coup d’état perpetrated against the socialist government of Salvador Allende in September 1973 to the social explosion that emerged in October 2019 under the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera. Alongside this chronological framework, the project maps the evolution of three key structural dimensions that would present immanent contradictions according to the level of maturity of the ‘Chilean road to neoliberalism’: the neoliberal model (economic), the constitutional order (juridical), and the ‘two-coalition’ consensus (political).