For the last couple of months, we have witnessed the country’s greatest mobilization since the return to political democracy. Hundreds of thousands of people are demanding the term of the neoliberalism prevailing in the country over the past four decades. After decades of abuses, prevalence of precarious employment, low wages relative to the cost of living (currently, about $480 per month for half of workers, with consumer goods prices similar to those in Spain, where the minimum wage more than double scans chile), a profit-subordinate education, privatized pensions with low-term retirements, state and uniformed, medicines with unassumable prices for the majority of the population, indebtedness and a huge inequality that is the Achilles’ heel of the economy with the highest GDP per capita in Latin America.
In a way, the effervescence and breadth of the current cycle of protest had been predicted from various dynamics: the persistence of the student movement, the demonstrations against the AFPs, the demands for greater autonomy and equity Mapuche claims, demands for gender equality, and as an additional symptom of citizen discontent and its estrangement from the political class, an electoral turnout that in recent presidential elections barely surpassed the 46% of the census. It is palpable that there is a deep unrest in the vast majority of the population affecting both the popular sectors and the middle and even aquefiated classes. Polls and opinion studies agree that virtually 90% of Chileans support the current wave of protests reflecting the separation between citizens and their representatives, whose corollary is the unquestionable crisis of the neoliberal regime. From the evasion in the Santiago metro, several ignored and delayed demands have converged, activating a citizen movement that, overcoming mistrust and individualism is convened in streets and squares with the purpose of triggering changes structures that successive governments elected from 1990 onwards have not carried out.
Now, let’s do a brief historical retrospective. As is well known, the 1925 Constitution will enshrine a democratic state that will replace the oligarchic regime, establishing a set of rights, political, labor and social rights, from which the institutions will be shaped in matters of health, pensions public distribution, and free education, personifying the realization of a welfare state which, while with significant shortcomings such as discrimination against farmers and excluded segments of the formal labour market, existed as such up to the military coup of 1973. In this period, following the 1929 international economic crisis, with a severe impact in Chile, a mixed economy will be set up where the private sector will target consumer goods and intermediate markets, and the State will proceed to create and manage companies in the basic industries, energy and telecommunications sectors, promoting the industrialization of the country.
At present, it is palpable that among the claims of citizens and social organizations that directly participate in this massive mobilization, there is no attempt to replace Chilean capitalism with an opposing system, or with a variety of capitalism that static some springs of economic activity; what is clearly required is to overcome the most extreme version of capitalism, that is, the neoliberal. In short, it is demanded to form a social or welfare state that universalizes social and labour rights for all citizens without distinction, which allows to definitively reduce inequality by integrating society. This involves differentiating and separating crucial services and services for social, personal and family reproduction from the market, creating effective social security. This is linked to the work of a new Constitution that deepens democracy and channels legal reforms that ensure health and public education, free and quality with a state pension system that provides decent retirements with rates of internationally, with the strengthening of wages and the negotiating capacity of workers. It is to be expected that for this purpose a tax and tax collection effort is required where, by way of example, a reduction in tax evasion is achieved, or a fraction of the large surpluses of highly concentrated markets are channelled that exist in the country through the redistributive capacity of the state. This reform, together with leading to inclusive economic development that culminates in the acute inequality afflicting the country, will help to put in place the under-rigidity of representative institutions and political leadership, favoring the social peace or stability genuinely based on the quality of life of the population. Countries with an income level similar to that of Chile such as Portugal, others such as Spain, and much of the members of the OECD, a body of which Chile is a member, have such institutions.
On the basis of the mobilization which is resolutely exercised by citizenship, it is to be hoped that, with the opening of a deferred constituent process in a first instance by April 2020, the country’s contemporary imperatives, which, to a large extent, coincide with the development of a social state that makes it possible to form a more just and livable country among all.
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