Melissa Sepulveda calling for a free and quality education system in Chile, June 2014. Demotix/Andres Bravo.All rights reserved In recent weeks, the collective action of Chilean citizens has made a return. Protests came four days after Bachelet overhauled her cabinet to stem a plummeting approval rating due to corruption scandals linking politicians and prominent financial companies, including one that involves her son. With 150,000 people marching in Santiago, citizens are calling for a constitutional assembly to be convoked via referendum, a more open process of creating the new magna carta for the country, in which the social collective would be an integral part of its formation.
While in previous years Bachelet only hinted at reforming the constitution through Parliament, the recent wave of scandals hitting her administration has opened new dialogues between the movement and the Presidential Palace. During a press conference last week, La Moneda’s spokesperson Alvaro Elizalde said, “the government has reviewed all democratic, participatory or institutional mechanisms to form part of the alternatives on which the President will make a decision.”
The democratic agency of the Chilean multitude faces a real possibility of social transformation today. Through self-governance, engaged in the same democratic struggles for effective equality and ‘real democracy’ of citizen insurgencies abroad, Chileans are posing a political question crucial to left renewal worldwide: is it possible to claim back people’s sovereignty by taking a radical distance from the State in pursuit of direct social self-governance? Foucault’s research into governmentality, Badiou’s ideas on communism, Hardt’s and Negri’s concept of empire and Álvaro Garcia Linera’s La Potencia Plebeya, all have a theoretical bearing on over a decade of social struggle in Chile.
