On the Chilean "transition" part 3

The static transition to the same: "radical" critics of the transition

For the intellectuals and political actors of the left who are openly critical of the Concertación and their political and cultural strategies, the difference between "transition" and "post-dictatorship" is not insignificant. "Transition" denotes movement, whereas the "post-dictatorship" designates that moment where it is retrospectively possible to look at the whole process of the coup, dictatorship and transition as part of the same movement. The transition is then the continuity, the successful final phase of the dictatorship, not its overcoming.

Willy Thayer makes the argument that the transition is what happened during the dictatorship, that is, the transformation from the modern state to the market economy, where the state stopped being a referent for political activity and social change, or more broadly, as the referent for the conduction of a national project. This transit throws into a crisis the main modern categories that acted as the referents of politics (the State, the People, progress, and so on).This is a point with which even Garretón agrees, but gives a different interpretation. While for Garretón economy and political order and not mutually determined, for Thayer the political order is the object of the economy. The social climate of boredom and immobility and sameness that accompanies the post-dictatorship is related to the end of "the epic" and with the innocuous proliferation of ideologies, not as antagonistic historical projects, but as a cosmetic diversity of the neoliberal consumerism menu. One of Thayer's main points is that neoliberalism and globalization as inaugurated by the coup never stopped happening, but rather constitute the everyday event of contemporary Chile, expressed in urban marginalization, class discrimination, the violence of the educational system, of the health system.

Chilean sociologist Tomás Moulian, in his book Chile Actual: Anatomía de un Mito argued that the transition can be seen as a transvestism: the planned adjustment of the dictatorship to "dress with democratic garments," involving a process of whitewashing, where the narratives of oblivion and consensus are imposed over a perplexed, traumatized and still fearful civil society. Oblivion is necessary, says Moulian, because the past is presented as incompatible with the future, so that in order to live together as a society we can only forget. Whitewashing, as a series of operations aiming to re-found Chile without the recent history of the political and social confrontations, the conflicts, the violence. The transition as a transvestism aims to make Chile a marketable product abroad, to attract investors, to reinvent our identities as a modern and developed country. This was evident when using the Expo Sevilla in 1992 as an international stage, the transitional governments performed Chile's modernity and "clean act" by representing the country with a piece of a real iceberg. Another example of whitewashing for Moulian was the mockery or "simulacrum" of justice that was performed with the imprisonment of human-rights criminals Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza described above.

For Moulian, the formal end of the dictatorship and the transition to a representative democracy —with a restricted electoral political system— was always subordinated to furthering the neoliberal model. Since the dictatorship managed to establish the economic and social model, democracy only came as a "minor adjustment" to invest with rationality and institutional legitimacy (and sustainability) what had been imposed by brutal force. Moreover, the real victory of the dictatorship was not only to establish the model and anchor it in a virtually unchangeable constitution, but to win the ideological battle, convincing many of its former adversaries (Moulian points in particular at Eugenio Tironi and Alejandro Foxley) that the free market was the only alternative possible. The current socioeconomic order was "naturalized" to the point that no alternative project could be visualized or deemed feasible (this is evident in the discourse of "political realism" of the Concertación). Moulian opposes Garretón's thesis of the "authoritarian enclaves," as he deems the whole political order authoritarian and subordinated to the continuation of the free market economy. Contrary to Garretón's perception that the state and the economy run through different and autonomous channels, Moulian sees the political order based on Pinochet's constitution as creating the necessary conditions to sustain the economic system.

In cultural terms, an endless transition has had its main symptom in the depoliticisation of Chilean society, where any divergence is seen not only as undesirable, but straightforwardly as irrational. There is yet another dreadful effect that Moulian notes: the disconnection of the contemporary effects of the neoliberal economic system with the dictatorial past. In this way, as he notes, many people discontent with the precariousness of the public health system, the pension system, poverty and marginalization, by 1999 were starting to give their vote to the candidate of the right, Joaquín Lavín, without making the connection between Lavín and Pinochet, and Pinochet and the neoliberal model, and between the neoliberal model and their malaise (Tomás Moulian. "Chile; la transición eterna o la inmutabilidad del régimen semi-representativo". Revista Persona y Sociedad. Vol. XV, n.1. Santiago, May 2001). This is in Moulian's eyes, a direct effect of the way the Concertación, since the inauguration of the civilian democratic order has identified with the free market model and adopted the rhetoric of "modernization of the state." The real transition, was the one operated under the dictatorship from a strong developmentist-state to a free market society, which transferred the focus so that citizens are not defined by their social rights as workers anymore, but rather by their individual capacity as consumers.As historian Gabriel Salazar has also made clear in his analysis of the worker's class historic subjectivity, under the neoliberal paradigm of the dictatorship they were stripped of their status as subjects who negotiate their rights with the state. In the post-dictatorship, they have been stripped further of their historical political identity and agency to become passive "beneficiaries" of social policies. This is accompanied by a nationalist triumphalism represented by discourses of Chilean economic leadership in the region, as well as the illusion of social integration via credit indebtedness consumerism, contribute to the cultural climate of living in a "successful" system, one of which we all ought to be proud.

More relevant at the symbolic level, Moulian goes on to describe the transition as a surgical operation by means of which, Pinochet was transformed from Dictator to benevolent Patriarch. Sustained on the pact of the impunity of the military, Pinochet acquires in the transition the symbolic status of guarantor of the new democratic order. As Brian Loveman also notes, the fact that he remained the commander chief of the army after he stepped down the presidency in 1990 reinforced the idea that the nation needed his “guiding presence” to ensure the order that he had established through his regime. Politico-institutional order: subordinated to the economy. Socioeconomic order: in direct continuity with the dictatorship. Cultural-symbolic level: whitewashing, ahistoricism, oblivion. No transition anywhere, just transvestism.