From Marx to Heidegger: Oscar del Barco and the crisis of Marxism

This article traces the path from Marx to Heidegger along which the Argentine philosopher Oscar del Barco responded to the crisis of Marxism. Interrogating Heidegger’s own suggestion of a ‘fruitful dialogue’ with Marx’s thinking of history and alienation, Del Barco gradually moved to a critique of Marxism as being part and parcel of the twice millenarian tradition of Western metaphysics. If, in an earlier collection such as El otro Marx, he still believed in the possibility of retrieving the ‘other side’ of capitalist reason in the margins of Marx’s texts, starting in the collection El abandono de las palabras this hope gives way to a mystical or messianic expectation to welcome the sheer ‘there is’ of being through an attitude of non-doing that would be neither nihilist nor conformist. In this sense Del Barco’s itinerary can be considered paradigmatic of the way in which a whole school of radical theory and philosophy responded to the crisis of Marxism as part of a much vaster, epochal or civilisational crisis of reason and technology in the West.

Is Oscar Del Barco a perverse man?

This article seeks to contextualise the ‘Heideggerian’ or destructive critique against Lenin in the 1980s. The hypothesis I develop is based on Oscar Del Barco’s critique against Leninism and on the theoretical moments in which this critique has been resisted by other Latin American thinkers. Del Barco is one of the leading philosophers in Latin America. His extraordinary effectiveness reconstructs the history and thought of the Bolshevik leader in order to abandon the leader’s enlightened programme. I argue that the demonisation of Lenin and the complex relationship with a demand for the authenticity of the Bolsheviks’ original project leads the philosopher to omit the birth or the genealogy of extreme liberalism or neoliberalism. The demonisation of Lenin and the omission of the historical context in which he writes makes Del Barco’s philosophy a propitious place for the neutralisation of the relationship between politics and emancipatory programmes. This hypothesis is confronted with the resistance of authors such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, García Linera, Bolívar Echeverría, Dominico Losurdo, Marta Harnecker and Tomás Moulian, among others. The article concludes by affirming that the Leninism reloaded by these authors constitutes a ‘toolbox’ for thinking the conflictive and never-finished relationship between politics and emancipation.

Chicanx histories of the present: a praxis against gang injunctions in Orange County, California, 2008–2016

Chicanxs Unidxs de Orange County (CU) is a community organisation in Southern California. Founded in 2006, CU is small, multigenerational and multi-ethnic. Its organising has focused predominantly on building community power by focusing on local politics, abusive policing and the gentrification of Chicanx neighbourhoods. This article presents an evidence-based narrative of several CU campaigns (primarily between 2008 and 2016). CU’s tactical aggressiveness and strategic pragmatism forced significant changes to ‘civil gang injunctions’ in California. For decades, California law enforcement has used such injunctions to suppress a generation of young people of colour as ‘gang members’. Minors and adults have been prohibited indefinitely from engaging in otherwise legal activities without due process. CU’s emphasis on the longevity of institutionalised and societal racism, rooted in the colonial conquest, resembles arguments associated with critical race theory (CRT) – though CU was not inspired by CRT. CU’s praxis resembles practices of critical pedagogy – though it was not directly modelled on it either. Rather, we argue that CU’s praxis is embedded in the members’ lived experience and study of the local history of racism, community and social movements. All five of this article’s authors were members of CU and were involved in the organising described in this article. The authors wrote this at the request of the CU membership, and it has been discussed and revised by the full membership.

Subject/ive bodies: the resistance poetics of Chrystos and Mahadai Das

Recent criticism has considered how literary texts harness historical and ideological forces in the representation of the body. However, much of that scholarship focuses on hegemonic structures such as Western medicine, post-human technologies or colonial race theories. This article looks at how two poets from the Americas – Indigenous North American Chrystos (Menominee) and Mahadai Das from Guyana – express representations of the body from a position of marginalisation to emphasise the connections between individual subjectivity and social transformation. I discuss the body as theme for producing a resistance poetry that directly connects desire, disaffection, sexuality and mourning to decolonisation. I perform close readings that emphasise the linkages between intimate relations and social movements. Chrystos and Das speak to a constitutive divide in post-colonial studies between the personal and political in what is called resistance literature. By centring deeply personal perspectives on decolonial struggle within a figurative context that encourages contemplation and complexity, these poets contribute to a diversification of resistance theory that addresses gender, anti-racist, sexual diversity and other movements of the last few decades.

Fifty years after Popular Unity: Chile’s estallido social in historical context

In this article, the co-editors introduce key themes and contributions of this special issue of Radical Americas, particularly as they pertain to the 50th anniversary of Chile’s Popular Unity revolution (1970–3) and the more recent estallido social (social uprising), which began in Santiago de Chile in October 2019. They underline the historical context for contemporary events, arguing the need to recognise the influence, memory and significance of the past in the present.

The politics of the street: Street art, public writing and the history of political contest in Chile

This commentary focuses on the politics of public space in democracy and dictatorship. It delves into what Peter Winn calls the revolution ‘from below’ from the perspective of urban conflict, suggesting a political history that attends to urban and visual culture as a crucial arena of political practice. It suggests that the often-conflictive battle over public spaces was, and continues to be, a mechanism by which an unprecedented range of citizens entered into an ongoing debate over the boundaries of citizenship, practice, politics and that this practice was adapted, transformed and reimagined over the last five decades. The struggle over streets and walls continues to be central to Chilean political history, and urban space remains a field of ongoing contest and debate: the estallido of social unrest in contemporary Chile connected a new generation of activists to this longer history of creative politics of protest and protest art and gave them the opportunity to articulate new forms of intersectional political thought in public space, even in the face of state-sponsored violence. Studying these forms of unrest reveals that theirs is an incisive, intersectional critique of the limits of the ‘transition to democracy’, of neoliberal democracies and of the legacies of dictatorship.

‘To work more, produce more and defend the revolution’: Copper workers from socialism to neoliberalism

On 11 July 1971, Chile’s National Congress, in a historic vote, unanimously approved reforming the constitution, which opened the door to nationalise the large-scale copper industry. Traditional historical accounts of the nationalisation of copper had emphasised a history of negotiations between foreign capital and the Chilean government, documenting how economists and political leaders experimented with different approaches to obtain a share of the profits from the country’s most valuable commodity. By focusing exclusively on the political economy, however, scholars have overlooked the role of workers during and after the process of nationalisation and failed to account for why copper miners continued to fight to protect a state-owned company. Influenced by Peter Winn’s Weavers of Revolution and recent studies on people’s experience during the Popular Unity (UP) era, this article looks at the nationalisation of copper from below. It analyses how workers fought for, understood and experienced the nationalisation; how the UP transformed labour relations at the local level; and how the military, after 1973, redesigned the state company. By placing workers at the centre of the nationalisation, this article can help better understand its importance as a matter of both political economy and workers’ power and explain why the copper mines became the first site of labour resistance against the military regime.

Movements in dialogue

In this interview, historians Mario Garcés Durán and Peter Winn discuss the emergence of the estallido social, or social uprising, that began in Santiago de Chile in October 2019 and quickly spread throughout the country. The two historians also consider connections between past and present, in particular the legacies of the Popular Unity revolution (1970–3), in which both were active participants.

La rebelión permanente: una interpretación de levantamientos mapuche bajo el colonialismo chileno

El presente artículo busca comprender las rebeliones del pueblo mapuche en una perspectiva de “la larga duración”. Su temporalidad se desarrolla entre la Ocupación de La Araucanía 1861 hasta los últimos sucesos ocurridos en el transcurso del año 2020. Entre ellos, tomamos como determinante los sucesos ocurridos durante la Unidad Popular y en específico el “Cautinazo”, intereptado en este artículo como un lenvatamiento que sintetiza las discusiones y aspiraciones del pueblo mapuche pos Ocupación, repolitizandolas bajo la perpesctiva de las recuperaciones de tierra. Esa experiencia entrega importantes elementos para la creación de un nuevo ciclo de movilización en los albores del siglo XXI que sintetiza la experiencia de la Reforma Agraria. En ese ámbito, la reforma durante la Unidad Popular significó un escenario de levantamiento que desempolvó problemas coloniales como: la construcción de la propiedad privada, usurpación de tierras y arremetida de agricultores. La respuesta de estos último, regeneró las estrategias del movimiento mapuche hasta los albores del siglo XXI.

Mujeres en Chile a 50 años de la UP: “La revolución será feminista o no será…”

Este ensayo aborda la posición de las mujeres durante los años de la Unidad Popular desde la perspectiva de la Mayo Feminista de Chile y el Estallido Social.