“It’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years!”
On October 13th, 2019 Chilean President Sebastián Piñera declared ” in the midst of this turbulent Latin America, our country is a true oasis.” Days later students in Santiago de Chile kicked off protests against a 30 peso metro fare increase.
“Evadir, no pagar, otra forma de luchar” (“Evade, don’t pay, another form of struggle”) the battle cry in a city where the costs of circulation are on par with major US cities, but wages lag far behind. Combustion.
After 30 years, marked by the brutal US backed dictatorship and neoliberal rule, Chile “woke up”. The impact of the explosion swelled the wave of rebellion sweeping the globe in 2019. From Hong Kong to Quito, Algiers to Paris, and into 2020 where global Black rebellion has rocked the foundations of the American Empire; it seems we’ve reached a stage of constant rebellion, the question to answer is if it can happen everywhere at the same time.
Anti-blackness, the pandemic, the looming global economic crisis and climate disaster make ongoing rebellion a certainty. There’s no going back, no restructuring of capitalism to buy peace, and we offer this translated text by the Círculo de Comunistas Esotéricos – a collective in Chile – precisely because it questions and critiques in way that is necessary if we’re ever going to overcome the limits of our struggles. It is also one of our aims as a project to amplify & translate texts and ideas that might not otherwise reach radicals locally and beyond.
In San José liberal recuperation of the black rebellion was swift and shows it will take a great effort not just to uproot the tendencies and ideas that poison this place and local struggle, but also to find the measures and ideas that make communism & the abolition of capitalist totality possible.
There is much to rethink and imagine, and while the pull of a multitude of crises compel call us to constant action, we recognize the importance of theory and study in order to push past the defensive struggles keeping us on the backfoot, while avoiding ideas that perpetuate the social relations that hold capitalism together (anti-blackness, colonialism, gender to name a few). Let’s get free!
https://confrontacionesblog.noblogs.org/files/2020/11/Better-times.pdf
Big thanks to the homies Contraedicciones in $hile who shared this text with us.