On social memory and the Chilean political crisis

The word crisis refers to different meanings. It can refer to a tension of two or more different “forces” or tendencies, whose clash creates a conflict (for example, in van der Poel, 2019). Another meaning of crisis is the idea of a decisive moment of change. For example, Mikhail Bakhtin talks about crisis as a breaking point of a life, “the decision that changes a life, or the indecisiveness that fails to change a life” (1981, p. 248). In this sense, crisis is about uncertainty and moments when decisions matter, moments that may define a way out of a crisis, and demarcate a before and after the crisis. Additionally, crisis resonates with the idea of an exceptional moment that determines the course of a conflict. In social theory, Holton (1987) stresses that crisis is not a permanent state, rather, it is a moment of dislocation and destabilisation that may lead to social change. He also stresses that crisis is about the refusal to accept the given and the assumptions that govern our everyday social life. In this sense, crisis brings normality into question (O’Connor, 1989), and opens up possibilities for living differently.

From these different approaches, crisis can be understood as the product of a tension of tendencies that come to question the current state of a society, thus opening the possibility of a different future. These conflicting tendencies consist of different ways of conceiving our everyday social relations, our economic, political and cultural organisation. Thus, a crisis questions our everyday life.

However, as Ghassan Hage (2019) remarks, a different notion of crisis refers to the closure of possibility. In this notion of crisis the distress of living a merely bearable life deactivates the political imagination, which kills another possibility on the horizon that differs from the precariousness of the everyday life. Living in a permanent state of crisis condemns the future to the repetition of the present. In Hage’s (2019) argument, the difference between these notions of crisis is that in the first sense, we are talking of crises we want to bring about, whereas in the second sense we are talking of extended crises in which the only and ever defining moment is the present. When the only possibility of thinking is circumscribed by the present, and making it through day by day, there is no room for imagination of divergent futures or political horizons.

This article is an attempt to connect these notions of crisis with different reflections, between my current and past research, and the ongoing political crisis in Chile. My central point is that social memory plays an important role when bringing about a crisis that imagines a different possibility for the future. I will argue this in the context of the protests that took place during the Chilean crisis of 2019, referred to in the press as the “Social Explosion” (El Estallido Social). Even though this crisis is still unfolding, I believe that a key to understand the effects of this crisis is thinking about how social memory played a part in the imagination of a different future, thus calling into question the “normality” of a precarious life for a majority of Chileans. By taking into account different materials, I argue that the act of remembering allows people to dislocate from the present in order to imagine divergent futures. An implication of this argument is the role that forgetting plays to keep the present as a static reality, thus making the future a repetition or a mere extension of the present. I present the relation of memory and crisis by bringing some reflections of a Chilean exile in England, whose initials are H.O. (see Haye et al., 2018), in dialogue with some theories of social memory, particularly Halbwachs’ (1925/1992) theory of social memory. I connect these ideas with Chile’s 2019 crisis and reflect on how it has opened multiple possibilities for political action and social change in different dimensions of social life.

Class Struggle and the Chilean Dictatorship

As a brief context and introduction, it is relevant to trace part of the history of the Social Explosion through the precedent of the civic-military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990. This experience shaped the Chilean social life in a definitive way.

In 1973, the socialist government of the democratically elected president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup d’état led by the military forces. This coup d’état inaugurated 17 years of a right-wing civic-military dictatorship, characterised by the persecution and repression of the political opposition, systematic violation of human rights, and a structural economic reconstruction that aimed to make possible the neoliberal project in Chile, thus implementing free-market oriented policies and reducing the State’s role in granting social rights.

Since 1990 and the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, different reports by the State commissions of truth and reconciliation declared that more than 3,200 Chileans were executed or ‘disappeared’ during the dictatorship, 38,000 were victims of torture, and more than 200,000 Chileans were exiled (for more details, see the 1991 report of the National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, and the 2003 report of the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture). Different State-led policies of memory in the post-dictatorship scenario have attempted to foster a message of reconciliation among Chileans to never repeat the horrors of the past (Stern, 2009; Stern & Winn, 2014). However, different social and political organisations that advocate for social justice see in the State’s efforts a gesture of blindly moving forward, as nothing has been done to deal with the inequalities that the neoliberal system produces (Cárdenas Castro & Arnoso Martínez, 2018), arguing that there cannot be memory and reconciliation without justice.

H.O., Class Struggle and Memory

It is in the context of this political landscape that I want to situate H.O’s reflections on memory and class struggle. H.O.’s reflections were recorded as part of a case study research led by Andres Haye between 2004 and 2007. H.O’s life history is intertwined with the history of struggle of the Chilean working class in the 20th century. He was exiled during the dictatorship because he was a peasant leader during the 50’s and 60’s, and for having participated in the land reform during Allende’s government.

Andres Haye, the researcher who led this study, met H.O. in Sheffield, an English city marked by the coal industry, unemployment, and immigration to the UK. Haye’s study was based on recurrent biographical interviews that H.O. and Haye decided to record in order to transmit H.O.’s experiences to future generations. I participated in this project as an analyst, and with a broader team we have published elsewhere (Haye et al., 2018) an account of how H.O connects his own life to the history of the working class, as a history of struggle against the injustices created by capitalism.

Here I focus on passages of H.O.’s reflections that are related to memory, forgetting, and the violence against the left and the working class during moments of crisis in Chile. Parts of these passages can be found in Haye et al. (2018) in their original language. In the following fragment, H.O. is remembering a speech he gave to the Chilean Communist Party when he was a deputy candidate:

“I consider myself the first peasant deputy candidate, a regular unattractive man, but I want to remind you that when communists sought more freedom for the people, they fought – we fought in those times – to get out of the bag shirt [referring to shirts peasants made out of cutting potato bags] to a better shirt, we were claiming our dignity, a little better wage […] And let’s think about what González Videla did, how he killed them [referring to communists that were imprisoned and tortured] in Pisagua, remember the abuses in jail, the torture and the disappearances. The communist comrades must have this present.”

González Videla was president from 1946 to 1952, and was elected with the support of the Communist Party. In 1948 he banned the Communist Party (with a law that now is called “La Ley Maldita” or the Damned Law) and created a detention centre in Pisagua, which is why H.O. reminds the communist party of González Videla’s actions. To remember these events  is to remember how the official powers of the State repressed the communists’ fight for emancipation and equality, and to remember a betrayal and the naive position of the communists at that time. He is stating this because forgetting is dangerous, inviting the possibility of making the same mistake again.

As H.O. goes on, he is critical about the politics of fighting for dignity only, and addresses the radicalisation of the working class’ aspirations. As context for the following fragment, he is still reproducing the speech that he delivered to the Chilean Communist Party, but now he shifts the focus of the fight, not anymore claiming for dignity in minimum things, but aspiring for equality:

“Now we want everything, we want class equality, we want to participate in the universities, the worker wants an education, we want a developed country with class equality; slowly, but we want it. And how do you think the coup will be? How we need unity to defend from those blows. This was not even considered by the Communist Party [sighs].”

As the working class movement radicalised its demands, and started fighting for class equality and social rights, H.O. warned the communists of the possibility of the coup, or blow to the working class. In this context, it is relevant to note the double meaning of the word coup in Spanish; the word H.O. uses is golpe. In this context, golpe refers literally to a blow, as a blow to the face; and a coup, as in coup d’état. When stating this, he refers to both meanings, as his history of being a peasant leader is also marked by the violence of the landlords and the police. Thus, H.O. is arguing for the need to keep the workers united as a class to literally defend from the blows of the ruling class, and to defend the socialist government from a coup. At the end of this passage, he sighs, as his warning wasn’t heeded. Now situated in the present, he continues:

“It seemed that this [the coup d’état] would never come, and it came a thousand times crueller than I thought. So, in order to return to this past, I have had to make efforts because my mind was stuck. I repeat that when you [referring to Andres Haye] told me you were coming, just at those moments, I doubted it, and it seemed that I was dreaming. And when I saw you (…) leaning from the door, it seemed to me that I was dreaming. My mind was in total darkness, because of time, like it was losing itself in time and space, as if it was convenient; but it is not convenient, that realities are lost (sighs). It is also not convenient to think that the situation will change slowly, no, today being 86 years old and landlords grant nothing, neither political tendencies grant anything, nor governments; we need to fight for everything[1], and serious men are needed, very, very thinking men. So now that I am saying this to you it is like a return, to what I thought, to the reality that was lived in Chile, a return.”

There is a lot to unpack from this fragment. H.O. makes an argument about forgetting and remembering, and the relation to losing realities. First, when he says that it seemed like he was dreaming, and that he doubted when he saw Andres, he is implying that he did not recognise Andres at first. He had forgotten Andres’ face as his mind was lost in darkness, as there was no spatial or temporal frame to orient him. Hence the reference of the stillness of his mind and the reference to a dreamlike experience. Second, and this point needs more unpacking, is what H.O. mentions about the apparent convenience of forgetting, but in reality, the inconvenience of forgetting as it implies losing realities.

Forgetting as Losing Realities: H.O. and Halbwachs

I believe that in H.O.’s reflections there is a lesson about remembering in order to act for the future, and there is a lesson about forgetting as losing realities. But what does he mean with the apparent convenience of forgetting? And what is inconvenient about forgetting in terms of losing realities? I suggest that we can find hints in Maurice Halbwachs’ (1925/1992) theory of memory, as it allows understanding how individual memory and society are interconnected.

According to Halbwachs (1925/1992), remembering consists in a reconstruction of the past in response to the needs of the present. More importantly, in his perspective, all memory is social, which means that individuals are able to remember by relying on social frameworks of memory. These frameworks are “concatenations of ideas and judgements” (Halbwachs, 1925/1992, p. 176) that groups embody. Groups provide the means that individuals use to remember their past, upon the condition that the individual adopts the group’s way of thinking. As long as individuals are able to take the perspective of one another, by seeing themselves from “outside” and connecting with these ideas and judgements, they are able to remember, and thus orient themselves in the present.

Halbwachs (1925/1992) recognises that different groups compose society, and that individuals participate in different groups as well. As groups embody currents of social thought, individuals participate in different currents when reconstructing the past. Participating in these diverse currents explains why the past is not static and is not reconstructed the same way by different groups and individuals. Thus, the way Halbwachs pictures society is as the coexistence of different currents of thinking, with different duration and antiquity. Halbwachs states that “present-day ideas are traditions, and both refer at the same time and with the same right to an ancient or recent social life from which they took their point of departure.” (1925/1992. p. 188) He also states that ideas from the past are able to change ways of thinking of the present as long as they correspond to ancient or larger collective experiences. Thus, present ideas involve recollections as ideas have a developing social history (Halbwachs, 1925/1992). Social frameworks, or concatenations of ideas and judgements are alive as long as individuals rely on them to make sense of the present. As long as individuals maintain a connection with these currents, these different traditions persist.

Thus, following H.O. and Halbwachs, forgetting implies that some social frameworks disappear, hence, that ideas that depart from other forms of social life disappear from the present. I think that it is relevant that H.O. talks about this as losing realities, in plural, which suggest that multiple ways of living are lost when we forget. Forgetting is losing our connection with social frameworks, which suggest that these frameworks have no place in the society’s present, and thus, that the existing present reaffirms itself as the only possibility or as the only form of social life that is possible to imagine.

Social Memory and Political Struggle

I think that H.O.’s emphasis on the inconvenience of forgetting is a political gesture of remembrance. I suggest that forgetting is inconvenient as it involves losing parts of our reality that may fuel new ways of fighting the injustices of the present. Forgetting is not convenient as it implies losing historical realities of struggle and resistance, and thus conforming to the present state of the Chilean society, characterised by a violent neoliberal system that generates systematic inequality. Forgetting is losing our orientation without the aid of alternative social frameworks, and it may seem convenient because conforming to the present’s normality seems easier, remaining still and living out of trouble, keeping our lives as they are. However, as H.O. makes clear, forgetting is not convenient, as its order produces and reproduces precariousness and injustice for a majority.

Memory has political value as it allows keeping divergent traditions alive, anticipating the violence of the ruling class as well as fuelling the desire of fighting against the hegemony of present-day ideas (Molden, 2016). When H.O. says that we need to fight for everything, he refers that fighting, or resisting, involves a desire to run against dominant currents of thought.

Following H.O.’s thoughts, the act of remembering creates the conditions for a crisis, inasmuch as people rely on frameworks that keep alive the realities of struggle against capitalism. As I said before, crisis can be thought as a product of a tension of tendencies that question the current state of a society. In H.O.’s account, these tendencies are ideological worldviews derived from the struggle of the working class against the ruling class in Chile. When he urged the communists to remember it was to anticipate the violence, as the ruling class could strike back at any moment as the crisis was developing. Later, being 86 years old and urging us to not forget, he is reminding us that if Chileans want to fight against the post-dictatorship’s regime of normality, that is, to bring about a crisis of the Chilean neoliberal order, it is necessary to remember and think, and learn from the past and open the present for the imagination and desire of a different society.

In the particular case of H.O’s memory, crisis is about the possibility that in the future the working class does not settle with claims for dignity, and fights for freedom and autonomy. Thus, H.O.’s memory not only deals with the past, but is also a project of a future for the Chilean working class. In the process of remembering there is also an anticipation of possible developments for the future (Simondon, 2013). H.O.’s memories illustrate that imagination and memories are not purely anticipatory or purely mnemonic.

Memory and the Social Explosion

I suggest that H.O.’s reflections are pertinent to think about the development of the ongoing crisis in Chile. I do not want to suggest that memory is the only factor in the production of a crisis. My point is that memory and imagination work to make room in the present for different futures. Social memory provides a framework to understand how, in the current Chilean crisis, different projects for diverging futures flourish in the protests. These projects demand, for their realisation, a radical transformation of the Chilean society. At the same time, the police violence, repression, and the calls from the right-wing government to go back to normality are calls to keep things as they are. In this section, I give some context of how the crisis started, and how it has evolved to make room for other futures that imply fighting against the inequalities and injustices in health, education, pensions, considering the feminists movements in Chile, as well as the fight of the indigenous people for sovereignty.

On October 6^th 2019, the government  increased public transport fares in Santiago, the capital city of Chile. This measure was received with discontent. In response, on October 7^th Juan Andrés Fontaine, minister of economy at that moment, said that “the people who wake up early can be benefited by a lower fare”, given that the fares vary at different times of the day, and suggesting that workers should wake earlier in order to access the lowest fare. In this context, another minister, Felipe Larraín, said on October 8th that “for those romantic people, the price of the flowers have decreased, so people that want to give flowers this month, they have decreased a 3.7%”. I cannot help but to imagine that H.O. would have read these declarations, if not as violence, at least as taunts to the working class.

In response to the fare increase, different student organisations led fare dodging demonstrations as well as protests that led to the interruption and suspension of the metro service during those days. The protests and demonstrations increased in response to the sayings of the government representatives and in response to the police repression that took place, and in October 18^th, after the metro service was completely shut down, massive protests took over Santiago, leading to confrontations and repression from the police. While this dissent was happening, the president Sebastián Piñera was photographed eating pizza at his grandson’s birthday party in a high-class restaurant, away from the protests (Villarroel, 2019).

In the midst of protests and police repression, at midnight, Piñera declared state of emergency in Santiago and, for the first time after the end of the dictatorship, the military controlled the streets. On the morning of October 19^th, the government declared a state of emergency in five other regions; and by October 23^rd, 15 of the 17 regions in Chile were controlled by the military, who installed curfews and restrictions of civil rights. During the weeks of the state of emergency, as well as after, the police and military brutally repressed the protesters, systematically violating human rights (Amnesty International, 2019; Human Rights Watch, 2019; United Nations Human Rights, 2019). Protesters have been killed, raped, mutilated, among other practices of political violence.

Despite this crude reality, the protests and demonstrations did not stop. As the government addressed the situation as a problem of “public order” and urged citizens to “go back to normality”, the protests addressed and criticised deeper dimensions of the Chilean way of life, pointing to the huge inequality in the country. The effects of this inequality can be summarised in that a majority lives in precarious conditions, whereas a minority lives comfortably, without having to worry about their pensions, education or health. The minority can afford an increase in the public transport fares, whereas the majority of Chileans have to struggle and make adjustments to face this. From the beginning, the protests were pointing to this injustice, which was ignored by the government and their representatives.

As the protests developed, different symbols of fight and struggle began to appear, such as symbols related to the indigenous people’s fight for sovereignty, like the Mapuche (the largest group of indigenous people in Chile) flag, the green handkerchiefs as symbols for feminist fights, as well as signs to protest for the poor quality of education, health and the unjust pensions system in Chile. Additionally, artists and songs from the 70’s and 80’s that are typically associated with the left were listened during the protests, such as Víctor Jara and Los Prisioneros[2]; and new songs were created, such as “A rapist in your path” by “Colectivo Las Tesis”, which became a global anthem against patriarchal violence.[3] 

I think that Chileans remember the fights of the past and present by using these symbols that connect with different projects, such as socialism, feminism, indigenous justice, student movements, and also with the protests against the dictatorship during the 80’s. I think that as the protests have roots in these different projects, the present crisis has turned into a profound critique of the neoliberal way of life imposed during Pinochet’s dictatorship and prolonged during the post-dictatorial years. This critique is the result of the intersection of multiple currents of thought that, as Butler suggests (Ibáñez, 2019), create the affective conditions that fuel’s today’s protests and that have led to a destabilisation of the hegemonic ideas that configured Chile’s normality. It is in this context that the phrases that have characterised the protests, “Chile has woken up” or “Chile has awakened” have a powerful political meaning, as the conditions of inequality and precariousness in which a majority of Chileans lived are now seen as problematic and unjust, and the people have collectively organised to change that. If before these protests this way of living was “normal”, after October 18^th, Chileans cannot go back to normality.

Present Crises and the Role of Memory

At the current moment of writing this essay, Chile is deeply impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly 200,000 cases and more than 7,000 deaths. During this pandemic, the attitude from the government has been arrogant and inhumane, prioritising economic and business interests over human lives, urging Chileans to go back to normality when the conditions imply putting the lives of workers at risk. At the same time, the pandemic in Chile shows once again the inequality in the country, as a large proportion of workers have had to keep exposing themselves in order to have an income to survive, and even in lockdown, people from the poorest neighbourhoods have had to protest given the lack of social protection and food shortage[4]. If anything, the way the pandemic has been managed in Chile is just another reason to keep the protests going.

The crisis in Chile, triggered by an increase in the public transport fares, is a crisis of a model that is unsustainable. In the protests and in the development of this social movement, memory and imagination work together, opening the possibility for other ways of living that do not repeat our inconvenient present. As Ahmed has argued in her discussion of happiness, social and political movements play a key role in making room for other worlds, as they “imagine what is possible when possibility seems to have been negated or lost before it can be recognised.” (2010, p. 196) I suggest that imagining and recognising these possibilities depend on remembering and learning from the past’s struggles. At the same time, I believe that Ahmed invites us to think that social movements change the horizon of what is possible in the present through concrete collective action, that is, by changing our way of life through action.

Memory and imagination are not independent of the concrete conditions of their production, they are grounded in social ways of living. Thus, as social movements strive to change reality, memory and imagination dislocate and open the current state of things, allowing us to deviate from the present’s hegemonic ideas and thus reinvent projects and dreams from the past to imagine other possible futures. What the Chilean experience allows us to learn about crisis, is that crises are not only about decisive moments in the present regarding the future, but also of the possibility of rewriting and making justice for the past.