More News on Chile

November 2019

Dear Friend,
The Capitalist State has been reduced to the increasingly repressive management of violence—its guard dogs do not hesitate to crush us as soon as we try to break the yoke of its commodities. The police force engages us by shooting in schools and hospitals, terrorizes us in our homes, making us disappear, and imprisoning and mutilating on the streets. Political theater seeks normalization by using the tools and mechanisms of democracy. A few days ago, the National Security Council was convened, bringing together the highest representatives of the military bureaucratic dictatorship, to organize the repression and announce a series of laws to criminalize the protest.

From the beginning, it has been a tenacious struggle against the logic of the commodified world, as such. The students, who lit the first spark of insurrection by refusing to pay, affirmed the possibility of a new way of life to counter against economic barbarism. Therefore, this uprising has quickly found accomplices in all territories. What the rebels have in common is the awareness that life, subjected to the domination of money, is needlessly material and spiritually miserable.

Now that our libidinal energy has, even for an instant, gotten rid of the tyranny of wage labor, it transforms into pure creativity—into a party in the streets. This can be seen in several ways. In some cities, individuals have taken charge of the noble effort to demolish the monuments to colonial and modern oppressors—staging acts of poetic justice, such as putting one of their heads in the hands of one of the heroes of Mapuche resistance, or plundering churches and building barricades with their furniture. Some streets and squares have been spontaneously renamed in memory of the events of the last few weeks (Dignity Square, October 18th, etc.). In all the streets there are spontaneous parties in the midst of tear gas and bullets—with just a wooden spoon and dented pot, everyone is a musician! Everyone knows what they want to do for themselves—showing those with technocratic tendencies no authority is necessary to make decisions about one's way of life. Intelligence and generosity spring from the masses—from those who are truly alive.

Now, how to deal with state terrorism? The media of mass stupidity repeat the mantra of politicians and experts, “At any cost, we must return to peace.” But, what do they really mean? This peace was nothing but the “peaceful coexistence” of the reigning lies. What normality led to the massacre of the Mapuche in southern Chile, of the marginal population of the cities (La Legua, Lo Hermida, etc.), in territories heavily contaminated by profit (Quintero, Puchuncavi, etc.), some low intensity because simply, “because the life we were leading was gradually killing us with heart attacks, malignant tumors, or depression.” Today, the friendly veneer overlaying capitalist social relations has disappeared. And we clearly see the structural violence they generate emerging. “Chile has woken up,” signals the collective cry.

In the grotesque extreme of an upside down world, politicians clinging to power try to divide us, using the old fashioned, moralistic rhetoric of blame. In the last few days, a new form of social organization has emerged. The masses stop traffic, drivers must get out of the car and dance with the people if they want to get through. On Sunday afternoon, a U.S. Citizen in the middle of one of these demonstrations fired his weapon in front of the protesters, demanding a “legitimate defense”. Since then, the state has condemned the spontaneous manifestation as psychological torture. They call it a “fascist practice”, a form of humiliation to take away your dignity, to tell you, “you do not own your life, we control it and will tell you what you have to do.” What a ridiculous absurdity! For the authorities, this form of social encounter is comparable to the violence of the Nazi extermination camps because their neuronal armor prevents any spontaneity, and, in the face of the eruption of vitality, they experience, for the first time, the terrible pain of its rigidity. They cannot play—all they can wish for is that we go and lick their boots, silent, and devoid of life, just like them. They use the yellow vests, (who come out armed with baseball bats, golf clubs and guns) singing the national anthem and praying to defend their collapsing world—while claiming the people who give out food and water at the protests have been funded by factions of the international left. Poor souls! They have never known human solidarity, for them everything can be bought, including empathy.

Even if they want to continue sucking on blood—saying we must get back to work, to isolate ourselves, to live only to buy—trying to channel the energy of this new uprising by offering us a new distribution of miseries, the mask of the power of social welfare has fallen. For the first time, we collectively observe, without fear the grotesque position of political clientism, the violent nature of democracy, the cynicism of the mangers of social reorganization and the terrorism of the mafia state—and we take note that we have only one choice: to free ourselves from voluntary slavery by self organizing the production of all aspects of our social life. This work has lasted for more than twenty days and is the result of a collective birth. We are always awake, more alive than ever. They took away so much from us, that they have also taken our fear. With or without an official call, people take to the streets en masse in Chile. It almost seems that the struggle for life has taken on a life of its own!

The reality of our dead tends to make us rediscover new life inside us.

Translated by Văn Thuần Nguyễn and M Alan Cox