Foreign Rights

This book approaches neoliberalism on the ground that has been its own since its origins: the choice of civil war as a means of bringing about the vision of a pure market society. A polymorphous war of domination which can sometimes involve military and police coercion but is too often mistaken for the exercise of government power, and which is waged through and by state institutions. From Hayek to Thatcher and Pinochet, from Mises to Trump and Bolsonaro, and from Lippmann to Biden and Macron, neoliberalism has taken and still takes various shapes depending on the circumstances. And what emerges, in this strategic perspective, is the history of an unrelenting dogmatic logic that will use any means necessary to weaken and, if possible, crush its enemies.

The bolshevik myth is worn out. It only remains a significant reference for a few sinister regimes and a handful of sects, clutching to dried out emblems, rituals and phrases. What’s the use, then, of talking about it? The repression of this history risks blinding us on the persistence of practices that are a direct inheritance of bolshevism : open or covert verticalism around a leader, the cult of the nation-state, obsession with the assumption of power through the means of insurrection, rejection of democracy and of autonomous self-organisation forms… All these elements compose « the shadow of October ». The Bolshevik seizing of power has been a disaster for the Worker’s Movement and for emancipation itself. It is important to understand its deep logic and the structural continuity between the sovereign Party and the national State : Bolshevism was the fanatical and delirious climax of the western doctrine on state sovereignty. Turning its back on this type of state communism, a politics of the commons is in the course of inventing itself. Reviving another set of revolutionary experiments and instantiating the democratic principle of self-government.

Chile, October 18th, 2019: a popular uprising of unprecedented magnitude shakes the neoliberal system maintained since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. September 4th, 2022: the Constitution proposed by the Constituent Assembly resulting from this revolt is rejected by popular referendum. Throughout these three years, social movements have carried out a process of politicization of uncommon intensity, fuelling debates in and out of the Constituent Assembly. The experience gained from this political process, rich with insights that extend beyond Chile, has opened up an entirely new path, the reinvention of democracy as an activity for all citizens, rather than as the monopoly of professional politicians. Such reinvention will go on, one way or another. It requires an exercise of the political imagination that forbids any will to restore or reproduce a distant idealized past or to replicate recent «progressive» governments. An exercise that Chilean feminists call the «memory of the future».