Political Parties and the Rise and Decline of Popular Civil Society (II): The

Emergence of a Subaltern Counterpublic in Chile 1950-1973

Edward GreavesUniversity of Florida

Department of Political Sciencegramsci@ufl.edu

Paper prepared for delivery at the Latin American Studies AssociationWashington D.C.

September 6-8, 2001

Abstract: This paper examines the impact that political parties had in thedevelopment of popular civil society and a popular public sphere in Chile by looking atpolitical parties as mobilizing structures and as resources for the mobilization of popularorganizations. It also examines the role that party ideologies play in the development ofcollective action frames and in creating cultures of resistance. Finally, it examines thedecline of political parties and its potential impact on the development of civil society.

Social Movements and Political Parties The social movement literature hasexamined the relationship between political parties and social movement organizationsprimarily in terms of the extent to which parties are able to dominate and bring socialmovements to heel. Similarly, much of the literature on civil society has seen politicalparties as having a noxious effect on the development of civil society. Indeed, politicalparties have been seen as acting as a brake on the development of social movements, or asa factor in disciplining and dampening social movements (through incorporation andco-optation, for example). At best, political parties have been seen as providing anotherchannel of representation for social movement interests.

These views ignore the role that political parties can play in intentionally orunintentionally nurturing the development of social movements and the emergence ofspecific types of civil societies. In his critique of Putnam’s account of the development of

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civil society, Tarrow has pointed out that institutions such as political parties can serve asthe catalysts for high levels of organizational activity.1 In short, accounts of civil society

underestimate the ability of specifically political associations such aspolitical parties to foster aspects of civil community and to advancedemocracy.2

More to the point, Hanagan has observed that students of social movements havegenerally failed to “note the existence of social movements embedded in political parties.”3

Following the lead of these arguments, then, I argue that students of social movementshave, with a few noteworthy exceptions,4 failed to take account of the role that politicalparties have played in giving birth to social movements, and in weaving these movementsinto counter-hegemonic mass social movements.

Moreover, these popular movements emerged in the context of highly centralized,hierarchical, and vertically structured parties; which is paradoxical because the literatureon civil society suggests that such an outcome is highly unlikely. Indeed, Putnam hasargued that “vertical networks, no matter how dense and how important to itsparticipants, cannot sustain social trust and cooperation.”5 However, grassrootsorganizations at the base of these vertical networks became sites for the creation ofhorizontal networks of cooperation and solidarity. The implication is that centralized,vertically structured political parties can contribute to the development of a specific sectorof civil society by generating the conditions for the development of social movements frombelow.

This paper will examine the role that political parties had as incubators ormidwives in the birth of popular social movements and in the creation of a popular civilsociety in the period 1950-1973. Secondly, it will examine the role that political partiesplayed in the “resurrection of civil society” during the transition to democracy. Third, itwill examine the role that parties play in the post-transition conceptualizations of the roleof citizens in the political process.

Studies of Chile’s political parties during the pre-1973 period have generallyfocused on party elites and their role in charting the course of Chilean politics and on therole that changes in the dynamics of the party system played in destabilizing Chile.Although all studies have pointed to the strong linkages between parties and popularorganizations during this period, when seen in the context of the development of civilsociety, the full nature of these linkages has not been adequately understood or explored.While Schneider’s study of protest in Chilean shantytowns focuses on the role of thecommunist party in giving rise to the first protests against the Pinochet regime, I believe

1Tarrow, Sidney “Making Social Science Work Across Space and Time: A Critical Reflection on RobertPutnam’s Making Democracy Work” American Political Science Review 90 19962Foley, Michael W. and Bob Edwards “The Paradox of Civil Society” Journal of Democracy 7,3 19963Hanagan, Michael “Social Movements Incorporation, Disengagement, and Opportunities--A LongView” From Contention to Democracy Marco C. Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly (eds.)Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield 1998 p.294Schneider, Cathy Lisa Shantytown Protest in Pinochet’s Chile Temple University Press 19965Putnam, Robert D. Making Democracy Work Civic Traditions in Modern Italy Princeton 1993 p.174

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that understanding the role of political parties in fomenting the development of civilsociety requires that we understand the role of parties more generally in the developmentof a “popular public sphere.”

Many studies that have examined the developmental trajectory of popular civilsociety in Chile have argued that prior to 1973 popular organizations were little more thanclientelistic, subservient appendages of political parties which lacked a collectiveself-identity or the capacity to act autonomously. Oxhorn, for example, argues that inlarge part as a result of the strength of political parties, Chile had an “overdevelopedpolitical society and an underdeveloped civil society.”6 Thus, according to this readingpolitical parties were a drag on the development of an autonomous civil society.

I believe that this reading only captures one dimension of a more complex socialreality. Arguments such as this cannot adequately accommodate the process of intensepolitical mobilization that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Only if wedisaggregate civil society into several different spheres can Oxhorn’s argument bereconciled with the process of mobilization that took place during the late 1960s and early1970s. As conceptualized in much of the literature, the term civil society is only able tocapture the dimension of societal interaction relations that emphasizesnon-confrontational, non-political, harmonious cooperation to achieve consensual goals.

To fully capture the multiple dimensions of civil society, however, the term “civilsociety” should be viewed as a space in which a myriad of different types of associations,organizations and networks are present. It should also be viewed as a space in whichoften intense conflict takes place. It is in the context of such conflict, moreover, that aGramscian civil society can emerge, take root, and evolve. In the absence of thisGramscian dimension, civil society can become a tool for distorting, stifling, andsquelching grievances from below.

Political parties in Chile, and the process of political polarization that took place inthe 1960s and early 1970s, contributed to the development of a specific type of civilsociety that can be generally classified under the rubric of what Foley and Edwards7 havetermed “civil society II”: organizations and associations that are capable of providingcatalysts for resistance to some form of tyranny and oppression--in this case class basedsocioeconomic and cultural oppression.8 More broadly stated, the salient characteristic of“civil society II” (or Gramscian civil society) is that it is comprised of organizations andassociations that challenge hegemony and that can mobilize contentious collective actionand foster the development of a popular public sphere where counter-hegemonicdiscourses are constructed and deployed in challenges to the status quo.

Moreover, it is highly implausible to suggest that in a society where the organizedworking class was militant, well organized, and had a well developed and radicalizedpolitical identity, organizations in the poblaciones, where many workers lived, would

6Oxhorn, Philip Organizing Civil Society The Popular Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in ChileUniversity Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press 19957Foley, Michael W. and Bob Edwards “The Paradox of Civil Society” Journal of Democracy 7 19968By contrast, “civil society I” is the more cooperative, consensual version of civil society that is found insoccer clubs, PTA associations, birdwatching groups, etc.

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remain insulated and remain untouched by such discourses. In short, in the period fromthe mid 1950s to 1973 organizations in the poblaciones were increasingly subject tocounter-hegemonic discourses from several sources: territorial penetration by politicalparties, workers living in the poblaciones, and elite discourses.

Thus, while it is true that political parties were the hegemonic actors in theirrelationship to popular organizations, and that they extensively used clientelisticmechanisms to attempt to control and dominate popular organizations, it is also true thatanti-status quo, externally created political parties did have a major role in shaping keydimensions of political culture, in fostering a change in consciousness, and in moldingdurable popular identities that were linked to the ideologies of the parties. Indeed, as apart of their strategy to build bases of support, political parties provided what Panebianco9

has termed collective incentives of identity that served to anchor networks of solidarity.In the period 1950-1973, grassroots party organizations became spaces for theconstruction of identity and the networks of solidarity that contributed to the emergenceof popular movements. These identities were subsequently deployed in the creation ofpopular movements from below. At the grassroots level, in short, political parties thatemerged to challenge the status quo provided the organizational space for the incubationof popular social movements.

Political parties, moreover, were also instrumental in shaping the politicalopportunity structure for mass popular mobilization during the latter 1960s and early1970s. Intense polarization among political elites provided an incentive for populargroups to engage in contentious collective action. As Tarrow has pointed out:

Divisions among elites...encourage portions of the elite that are out of powerto seize the role of tribunes of the people.10

In their bid for support among unincorporated groups, political elites who sought tochallenge the status quo seized the role of “tribunes of the people” and unleashed aprocess of mobilization from below. In their discourse, political leaders eloquentlyarticulated the grievances of the workers, the peasants, and the urban poor.

This served to forge a strong personalistic bond between political elites and themasses that facilitated mass mobilization and collective action in support of a politicalleader. Indeed, paternalism and caudillismo were deeply rooted in Chilean politicalculture. One scholar has pointed out that in Chile “political struggle consisted in placingthe right leader in power, not in supporting or working with him or in carrying outprojects for which they were also responsible.”11 The intense nature of these bonds canbe seen in popular chants that became commonplace at mass rallies, such as “Allende,amigo, el pueblo esta contigo.” (Allende, friend, the people are with you.) However, inChile, this personalistic dimension was tempered somewhat by the institutional presence ofhighly developed and well organized political parties. People also developed intense

9Panebianco, Angelo Political Parties: Organization and Power Cambridge University Press 198510Tarrow, op. cit. 1998 p.7911Fleet, Michael The Rise and Fall of Chilean Christian Democracy Princeton University Press 1985p.40

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bonds of loyalty to political parties as institutions. In the 1960s and early 1970s, however,those elements of political culture that stressed paternalistic dependence on a caudillofigure would experience significant transformation as a culture of resistance was forged inmany working class and poor communities around Santiago.

Changes in the dynamics of competition among the political parties stemming fromthe emergence of the center-left Christian Democrats, from new electoral laws thatdramatically expanded voting, and from the penetration of the countryside by the left andthe center-left, all amounted to a seismic shift in political alignments that served as one ofthe catalysts for mass mobilization during the period between 1950 and 1973.12 Inseeking to incorporate peasants and the urban poor, political parties opened the floodgatesto popular mobilization.

In order to understand the way in which political parties influenced thedevelopment of popular political culture and identity we must understand how it was thatin the period between the mid 1950s until 1973 political parties organized the grassroots,and the role that party organizations and activists in the poblaciones played in fosteringthe development of popular movements. Grassroots party organizations (local partyorganizations that were created to build bases of support in newly created popularcommunities), in conjunction with community organizations that were formed andcolonized in many cases by party activists and given recognition by the state provided aspace within which popular social movements and a popular public sphere could emerge inthe 1960s and 70s. Despite being embedded in the hierarchical and vertical organizationalstructure of the political parties, at the grassroots this provided the space for theincubation of a popular movement. Indeed, the popular public sphere was a crucialbuilding block of the popular movements that emerged in the latter 1960s and early 1970sthat became known under the rubric of “poder popular” because it provided a social spacewhere three processes crucial to the emergence of social movements could take place.

First, they were central to the process of identity formation. Studies of individualcommunities have shown that in the poblaciones, leftist political parties such as MIR(Movement of the Revolutionary Left) sought to establish, through organization andpolitical education, the social category of pobladores as a cultural identity that would beanchored in the struggle for class rights.13 Similarly, the communist party (and to asomewhat lesser extent the socialist party) built extensive urban organizational networksduring this period in which the identity of poblador as a historical actor began to takeshape and emerge. In many of the poblaciones that surrounded Santiago (La Victoria, LaBandera, La Legua, Villa Francia, Villa Sur, Poblacion San Gregorio, etc.), the termpoblador became imbued with a cultural significance during this period. The termpoblador became synonymous with the poor who struggle for their rights. Indeed, LaVictoria and La Legua, among others, are still synonymous with tenacious struggle andare treated with respect by municipal governments. Many of the poblaciones built a

12Scully op. cit. 199213Paley, Julia Marketing Democracy Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile Berkeley:University of California Press 2001 p.47

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legacy of intense struggle during this period (it would be in these poblaciones that theanti-Pinochet struggle would first emerge in the early 1980s). Political parties wereimportant in this process because they performed important cultural and organizationalwork needed to develop the building blocks of popular identity.

Grassroots party leaders and activists were crucial in the process of identityformation because they brought the discourses of the political parties to the communityand translated these discourses in ways that resonated with the members of thecommunity. It was grassroots activists embedded in party organizations, acting through anetwork of community organizations, that did the day to day cultural work of forging acommon social identity. Thus, they linked the ideologies and discourses of the party elitesto the community by appropriating the cognitive framework of the party to addresscommon issues. In the pre-1973 period, grassroots party leaders and activists wererelatively well versed in the main principles of Marxist doctrine (or Christian socialdoctrine in the case of the PDC). Indeed, all party members (militantes) of the PCCh, thePSCh, and the PDC had to go through a relatively intense period of apprenticeship(pre-militancia) where they learned the key tenets of party ideology and doctrine. Thesegrassroots leaders provided a cadre of organic intellectuals that could connect politicalideologies to popular culture.

The identities that were forged during this period, moreover, would have lastinglegacies. The identities that were constructed in the context of the popular public spherethat emerged between 1950 and 1973 would also become expressed and articulated in theinformal organizations that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Grassrootspolitical activists, who would be crucial in organizing resistance to Pinochet, would bringwith them the cognitive frameworks that they learned through participation in partyorganizations prior to 1973.14 The identities forged in the national-popular periodprovided important building blocks of the identities that became the cultural basis of thepoblador movement that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s. That is to say, the identitythat Oxhorn has called “Lo Popular” has its historical roots in the period 1932-1973.

Second, political parties were important because they engaged in the framingactivities and consensus formation that are crucial to the emergence of social movements.Grassroots party organizations provided a space in which a collective action frame15 (i.e.an overarching framework within which to analyze different social and political issues andassign meaning and significance to them) that subsumed many different organizations wasconstructed. As Snow and Benford have shown, collective action frames

serve as accentuating devices that either underscore and embellish the serious-ness and injustice of a social condition or redefine as unjust and immoral whatwas previously seen as unfortunate but perhaps tolerable.16

14Schneider, Cathy Lisa 1995 op. cit.15Snow, David A. and Robert D. Benford “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest” Frontiers in SocialMovement Theory Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (eds.) Yale University Press 199216ibid. p.137

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The Marxism of the communists and the socialists, and the Catholic social doctrine of theChristian Democrats provided the broader discursive frameworks within which distinctcollective action frames were created and articulated.

Marxism and the discourse of Catholic social doctrine provided the key ingredientsof a collective action frame. That is, they defined oppression and economicmarginalization as unjust and intolerable, and they provided prognostic attributions17--ablueprint for action to remedy the situation that was anchored in organization andcollective action. Marxism and Catholic social doctrine also assigned blame for thesituation of exploitation and marginalization in which workers and the poor lived. Theyblamed the exploitative social and economic relations of liberal capitalism for the plight ofthe working class and the pobladores. These two discursive frameworks, moreover, hadsignificant points of convergence and agreement that became key components for thedevelopment of popular political culture and the basis for the crystallization of a broaderand longer term societal mentality--popularly held values and about private and publicbehavior.18

Political party organizations also provided the crucial organizational mechanismsto link community organizations within specific communities, and to link individualcommunities to a broader national popular movement comprised of the organized workingclass and important segments of the urban poor--the pobladores. Thus, political partiesperformed critical articulation and mobilization functions because they provided theorganizational infrastructure that linked different organizations in a particular communityand integrated them into a broader movement. In short, political parties provided crucialmobilizing structures--those “meso-level groups, organizations, and informal networksthat comprise the collective building blocks of social movements.”19

Indeed, grassroots party organizations in many communities became one of thenerve centers of the social networks that constituted the popular community (poblacion)as a political and social actor. When we speak about the organized/mobilized communityduring this period, we are speaking of a dense network of organizations (the neighborhoodcouncil, community associations, self-help groups, food distribution organizations, youthgroups, women’s centers, etc.) linked to each other and organized under the umbrella of aparticular political party (the PCCh, PSCh, MIR, and the center-left PDC).

The organizational network comprised of grassroots party organizations andcommunity organizations provided members with a rich social life and with a strong socialnetwork that could be counted on in times of crisis. Local party organizations came toprovide a support network that socialized members into the political process and whichshaped the political culture and identity of participants. The Chilean communist party, as

17ibid.18Tarrow, Sidney “Mentalities, Political Cultures, and Collective Action Frames Constructing MeaningThrough Action” Frontiers in Social Movement Theory Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller(eds.) Yale University Press 199219McAdam, Doug, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (eds.) Comparative Perspectives on SocialMovements Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings Cambridge UniversityPress 1996

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one scholar has observed, “represented both an extremely disciplined left politicalorganization and a bedrock of Chilean working class and popular culture.”20 In Chile,then, parties of the left (PSCh, PCCh) and the center-left (PDC) were instrumental inproviding the institutional medium for the making of the popular sectors as a social actor.Indeed, Sartori has observed that in many cases

it is not the objective class that creates the party, but the party that createsthe subjective class....the party is not the consequence of class. Rather andbefore it is the class that receives its identity from the party.21

This is nowhere truer than in Chile. Parties of the left (and to a lesser extent thecenter-left) provided a cadre of organic intellectuals that were instrumental in shapingpopular political culture. However, the doctrines of the parties were appropriated by baselevel militants.

During this period, Marxist and populist discourses and ideas also became widelyaccepted and embraced in the arts and in literature as prominent members of the Chileanintellectual and artistic community, such as Nobel prize winning poet Pablo Neruda andsingers Victor Jara, Los Jaivas, and Quilapayun influenced the broader popular culturethrough their writing and their singing. Victor Jara, who would be murdered by themilitary shortly after the coup, wrote songs about exploitation and class solidarity thatlinked Chilean national identity with the workers and the poor who struggled againstsocial injustices. Popular music and literature reflected and articulated the grievances andexperiences of the popular sectors and provided narratives of oppression, exploitation andheroic accounts of subaltern activism. Indeed, the songs of Victor Jara can still be heardnostalgically coming from houses in the poblaciones.

Marxist doctrines and ideas became an integral part of the popular political cultureand discourse during this period. This process has its roots in the early decades of thetwentieth century. As DeShazo writes, during this early period revolutionary ideologiescrystallized and became deeply embedded in working class culture in Chile through thedissemination of Marxist ideas in the union movement.22 In the period between1932-1973, Marxist ideas, some blended with populist discourse, increasingly becameaccepted among wider spheres of popular society. The institutional spaces in which thispolitical culture was forged were the unions, the communist party block organizations, thesocialist party block organizations, and grassroots community organizations. In the firsthalf of the twentieth century, communist party activists became very active in the laborunions and established a strong presence in the labor movement.23

In the second half of the century (from the mid 1950s until 1973), parties that werebased on Marxist theory and discourse expanded their support base to include grassrootscommunity organizations in the shantytowns that were mushrooming up on the periphery

20Hite, Katherine When the Romance Ended Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1998 New York:Columbia University Press p.3221Sartori, Giovanni “Sociology of Politics and Political Sociology” Politics and the Social SciencesSeymour Martin Lipset New York 1969 p.8422DeShazo Peter Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile 1902-1927 Madison 198023Angell, Alan Politics and the Labour Movement in Chile Oxford University Press 1972

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of Santiago. Marxist ideas became, as Moulian argues, more than the discourse of anarrow group of communist party leaders:

In Chile, Marxism represented more than the ideology of a group of parties inwhich party ideology only bears a superficial relation to the masses, and relevantonly to the political intellectuals. It is possible to argue that Marxism constitutedan important component of the national political culture, especially in the popularsectors.24

Parties of the left became more than an organizational mechanism for contesting electionsand acquiring political power, they became one of the pillars of popular political cultureand one of the foundations of popular social organization in Chile. They also providedbase level activists with a rich social, cultural and political life.

Grassroots party organizations (sedes locales de partido) in working class urbancommunities and in the shantytowns became centers for social activity and for politicalsocialization and mobilization. Political party organizations at the grassroots, in short,fulfilled many of the roles that church groups and the PTA play in a US community. Baselevel leaders of the socialist and communist parties organized regular discussion groupswith rank and file party members and with the community in which political and socialissues were discussed, analyzed, and debated.25 Through these interactions anddiscussions, a master frame for analyzing, interpreting and understanding social andpolitical events was developed.

The discourses of the parties, that was filtered through and articulated bygrassroots activists, changed several the crucial dimensions of popular politicalculture--cognitive orientation, affective orientation, and evaluational orientation--thatserve to comprise the building blocks of political cultures.26 Thus, the ideologies anddiscourses of the political parties provided a conceptual framework for understanding thepolitical process, for understanding the role of the citizen vis a vis the state and otherformal institutions, and it provided standards of justice and fairness that could be used toevaluate the performance of government and political leaders. Indeed, in stressingorganization, collective action, and participation, political parties changed the way theurban poor saw their role vis a vis the government. Political parties that challenged thestatus quo also provided a blueprint for a revolutionary transformation of the socialorder--whether this revolution was the workers socialist revolution or the ChristianDemocrats communitarian “revolution in liberty”, the parties that competed for the heartsand minds of the popular masses in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s advocated majortransformations of the social order. In doing so, they introduced or redefined key termssuch as citizenship and democracy.

Grassroots party organizations and the network of community organizations thatthey were connected to became spaces for the articulation of these broader transformative

24Moulian, Tomas “La Evolucion Historica de la Izquierda Chilena: La Influencia del Marxismo”25Interviews with grassroots party activists from the period.26Almond, Gabriel A. and Sidney Verba The Civic Culture Political Attitudes and Democracy in FiveNations Princeton University Press 1963

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discourses to the popular masses. Party meetings held in these communities werefrequently attended by leaders of community organizations (such as the neighborhoodcouncils, and women’s organizations--such as the mother’s center) and the constituents ofdifferent community organizations.27 Through their linkages to political parties, then,community associations in many cases became more than supplicant/client organizations:under the overarching umbrella of political parties (particularly the PCCh), they becamecenters for the forging of a more radicalized political culture and for political mobilization.Because participation in community organizations was fairly high28 during this period, theextensive linkages that existed between the party and the Tocquevillian substructure of thecommunity provided a key mechanism for the diffusion of party ideology and for theconstruction of popular identity and consciousness.

At the local community level, political parties elected a leadership council(directiva comunal) that generally consisted of a president, a vice president, a secretaryand a treasurer. Supporting the leadership council was a group of delegates that assistedthe council in maintaining linkages to the community and in organizing specializedactivities. On a day to day basis, the leadership councils of the political parties hadconsiderable autonomy in running the day to day affairs of the party at the grassroots.Although they were organizationally under the authority of regional party leaders and localpoliticians, grassroots party leaders were not simply the pliant foot soldiers of the parties.In many cases they played a key role in community affairs. In many instances, members ofthe leadership council of the party were also leaders of community organizations. In thisway, community organizations became another vehicle for the expansion of the politicalparty at the grassroots, and at the same time, parties also became an important part of thegeneral organizational network of the community. Typically, grassroots party chaptersalso had a physical space (sede del partido) within the community that became the hub ofparty activity, and also became a central point for organizing the activities of thecommunity.

Meetings that were open to the community took place on a regular basis. In thepoblacion La Victoria, which was predominantly loyal to the PCCh, the communist partygenerally held monthly community meetings in which the residents of La Victoria wereinvited to participate in political discussions and to socialize. The discussions that tookplace at these meetings, which were open to the general public of the poblacion, could attimes be quite open and democratic in the sense that the rank and file was afforded thechance to voice concerns and raise issues.29 Thus, at times these meetings became spacesfor deliberation and debate, which served to foster horizontal ties between grassrootsparty leaders, community leaders, and the participants in the community. They also wereimportant as spaces for the raising of popular consciousness.

27Interviews with many grass roots community leaders who were active during this period.28Regular participation in neighborhood councils, for example, reached levels of 50% in manycommunities. See “Estudio Sobre Participacion en Tipo de Asociacion Voluntaria: Junta de Vecinos”Santiago: Promocion Popular 196829Interview with Claudina Nunez, former president of the communist party of La Victoria and currentlycouncilwoman for the municipality of Pedro Aguirre Cerda.

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The structure of these gatherings, whether they be formal or informal, wasconducted in a way such that they fostered comradeship and solidarity among themembers, while at the same time affording the possibility of debate. That is, despite thevertical structure of the party hierarchy, relations at the base level among members had asignificant horizontal element associated with it. Bonds of community solidarity werestrengthened as a result of the overarching presence of the party. Because for the mostpart the communist and socialist parties pursued state conquest through parliamentarymeans, mobilizing voters and building an electoral base of support became essential.Although building a base of support through clientelistic exchanges was an important partof the process, political parties also made strenuous efforts to diffuse their ideologies andtheir associated identities as well. In short, political parties acquired characteristics ofvanguard, catch-all, and organic parties and became a hybrid of all three.

One of the main purposes of party meetings at the grassroots was to raiseconsciousness and to provide a cognitive framework through which to interpret socialreality. Important issues became politicized and became the subject of intense politicaldebate. At community level meetings, political ideas and discourses were exchanged andrank and file members learned to see the political world through the master frame of theparty ideology. Many of those who participated in these meetings learned to make senseof the world in class terms, and the inequalities in society were exposed and placed in anideological context. The glaring contradictions between formal equality within the politicalsphere and the reality of sharp inequality in economic society were made sense of throughthe prism of the ideology of the party. That is, Marxism (in its revolutionary or populistvariants) seemed to provide a way for understanding class dynamics, and seemed to offer ablueprint for achieving social justice. Similarly, Christian Democrats and Catholic socialdoctrine stressed the marginalization and exploitation of the poor and prescribedcommunitarian models of society as a blueprint for the amelioration of these problems.

Aside from formal meetings, the party was also important on an ongoing dailybasis because grassroots party activists often acted through community organizations inthe poblacion. Party activists were encouraged to run for leadership positions incommunity organizations, such as neighborhood councils and mother’s centers. Whencommunist party activists were elected to leadership positions in these organizations, forexample, these organizations became stamped with a distinct political identity. Grassrootsactivists brought with them a distinct view of the role of associations and this view shapedthe activities of the organization. In the offices of the municipality and the statebureaucracy, for example, neighborhood councils that were led by communist activistsbecame known as organizations of struggle--organizaciones de lucha--because grassrootsactivists in the communist party saw neighborhood councils and other communityassociations as instruments of popular struggle.

Political parties provided a model or vision of the ideal society and of the idealstate. Whether it was the corporatist communitarian social order advocated by the PDCor the proletarian state advocated by the PCCh, the “good society” pictured in thesevisions was radically different than the existing social order or the society envisioned byliberal capitalist democracy. Through the diffusion of party ideologies, important politicalconcepts, such as democracy, representation, justice, fairness and exploitation came to be

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seen and defined through the discussions that took place in these meetings and that werebased upon the discourses of the parties. Standards of justice and fairness (i.e. a moraleconomy) came to be defined and shaped through the prism of party ideology.

Issues that would otherwise appear to be fragmented and unrelated issues, such asthe construction of a local health care clinic, or the need for housing and schools, becamelinked through the political discourses of the parties into a coherent set of proposals thatamounted to a democratizing transformative project (the extent and scope of the projectvaried from one party to another). Organizations and community leaders learned throughpolitical parties to see the linkages between micro-level issues, to understand the linkagesbetween micro-issues and macro-politics, and to understand politics in broader structuralterms. In short, real material needs, such as housing, health care, and education becamelinked to specific political discourses and broader political agendas.

The role that political parties fulfilled as organizers of the discourse was crucial inthe emergence of a “popular movement” (movimiento popular) in the 1960s and early1970s. The ideologies of the parties of the left (PC, PS, MIR, and MAPU) provided thediscursive and organizational infrastructure that linked disparate grass roots organizationsin the shantytowns and working class communities surrounding Santiago, and wove theminto a broader social movement sector that emerged under the rubric of “popularpower”--poder popular--to demand fundamental changes in society in the late 1960s andearly 1970s.

Local party organizations, then, were crucial in the forging of this movement thatis the precursor to the poblador movement of the later 1970s because they gave form andstructure to the space in which consciousness raising or what McAdam30 has called theprocess of cognitive liberation--the development of a sense of efficacy, a new way ofidentifying and understanding problems, and a demand for major change--took place. Asone woman, who was a socialist party activist at the grass roots during this period, toldme about her attendance at party meetings:

In those days the party gave me eyes to see how things work...the party taughtus how to organize and make demands so that people would listen to ourproblems. Before the party helped us to organize, people had no idea abouthow to get things done. Those were the days when parties did what theywere supposed to do...build consciousness and solidarity.31

This sentiment was echoed in other interviews as well. Parties (especially those of theleft--the PC in particular) provided the pobladores with the cognitive tools needed toorganize and mobilize.

Further support for the argument that political parties were instrumental ininstilling a sense of efficacy among the urban poor is found in surveys taken during theperiod. In one survey conducted by sociologists at the University of Chile in 1970, close

30McAdam, Doug (1982) Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970Chicago: University of Chicago Press31Interview with a long time socialist party activist in the municipality of Lo Espejo. May, 2000

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to 80% of the residents who lived in the poblaciones expressed confidence in their abilityto influence and change the government.32 Pobladores were asked the following question:

Suppose that the pobladores of your poblacion needed the government’shelp for some reason, and that the government denies such requests for help.Do you think that it is possible for the pobladores to make the governmentchange its decision?It is possible to make the government change its decision: 78%It is not possible to make the government change its decision: 16%

It is not possible with the data available from the period to acertain which partiescontributed most to this sense of efficacy. Nevertheless, the data does point to thefluidness of the political opportunity structure during this period.33 It is plausible,however, to suggest that political parties had a significant role in shaping suchperceptions. It also points to the fact that political parties like the PCCh organized themasses and imbued them with a sense that major transformations were possible, and thatthey had a role to play in such transformations. They provided the ideational andorganizational tools for the popular masses to emerge as a protagonist on the politicalstage.

The process of political learning and identity formation began early. Most politicalparties had youth sections that were designed to socialize children into the party ideologyas early as possible. The communist party, for example, had (and still has) its own youthsection, the Juventudes Comunistas (“La Jota”). The Jota integrated young people inSantiago’s working class districts into the political debate by providing a forum for earlypolitical socialization. The Jota, as Winn has described it, was the “Boy Scouts, churchgroup and finishing school for many working class children.”34 In the shantytowns andworking class neighborhoods of Santiago where the communist party presence wasstrong, many children received their political orientation through the jota.

Working class and poor adolescents were taught the basic principles of Marxistpolitics and Marxist political theory, they were taught the principles of working classsolidarity, and they were taught the central message of the communist party: withoutorganization and class based collective action, the working classes would remain weak andexploited. It became an axiom of popular political culture that organization is the onlyway for the lower classes to achieve effective political representation. One of the cruciallessons taught by the jota was the injustice of the liberal, capitalist social order andbourgeois democratic institutions. Similarly, the PDC and the PSCh also had their own

32Vandershueren, Franz “Pobladores y Conciencia Social” Revista EURE 1, 3 October 197133This can be compared to the response I obtained to the following question that I asked in three popularsector municipalities: “What level of influence do you think that you have over the decisions made by thegovernment?”

None Very Little Some Alot61.5% 27.5% 8.9% 2.1% N=1002

34Winn, Peter (1986) Weavers of Revolution The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism OxfordUniversity Press p.86

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youth sections--the Juventudes Democrata Cristianos and the Juventudes Socialistas(JJSS).

During this period, most political parties also had their own newspapers thatprovided the party rank and file with news about political events that were framed in thecontext of the party’s ideology. These newspapers provided a mechanism to disseminatethe discourse of political parties. Newspapers like the communist party’s “El Siglo”, and“El Clarin”, the socialist “Pagina 19”, the revolutionary left’s “Punto Final”, and theChristian Democrats’ “Politica y Espiritu” became bedrocks of the news media in the1950s and 1960s, and were instrumental in structuring the political discourse and debate.These newspapers highlighted important current issues and they also featured sections inwhich broader political debates were analyzed and discussed by the party’s intellectualsand framed in the context of the ideology of the party. These newspapers became, ineffect, a politicized subaltern media. They also provided readers with a schedule ofupcoming political activities, particularly collective actions such as street mobilizations.

Political Activists and Grassroots Mobilization: Grassroots political activists alsoplayed a major role in organizing and mobilizing communities and in shaping popularculture.35 From early on in the formation of many of these communities, political activistsmobilized and led communities to pressure the state for the distribution of resources andto resist efforts by the police to evict land invasions. In the process of organizingcommunity mobilizations, they taught community leaders and the broader communityrepertoires of contention and collective action that would become institutionalized inChile. To the extent that such mobilizations and contentious forms of collective actionbecame successful in extracting concessions from the municipality or the state, this furtherreinforced the notion that organization and the politics of pressure were appropriatevehicles for articulating demands vis a vis the state. Success, in short, led to a kind ofsnowballing effect in that it bread imitation.

Many of the poblaciones were born on the crucible of intense struggles in the formof land invasions and subsequent efforts to build communities. Land invasions were oftenfollowed by long and often arduous struggles to defend the occupation from attempts bythe government to evict the occupants and to build viable communities. Land invasions(tomas) were generally organized and led by grassroots party activists, who organized andled homeless people’s committees (comite sin casa), in many cases with the support ofpolitical parties. Because they were given state recognition, homeless people’scommittees had some measure of autonomy vis a vis political parties. That is, they werenot mere appendages of the parties. Nevertheless, it is also true that in many cases comitessin casa were organized by the autonomous action of grassroots activists who were at thesame time members of a political party (generally the PCCh).36 Thus, it was grassroots

35In her study of Peru, Stokes has also pointed to the important role of outside actors in shaping popularconsciousness. See Stokes, Susan C. Cultures in Conflict Social Movements and the State in PeruBerkeley: University of California Press 199536I interviewed several people who led land invasions during the 1960s and they told me that the impetusfor many of the land invasions came from below. Moreover, they often organized comites sin casawithout the direct instructions of a political party.

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party activists who provided the impetus to the creation of these organizations.Moreover, after they were created, the parties competed intensely for their support.

Nevertheless, the discursive framework of political parties, particularly thecommunists, underpinned the collective action frame that legitimized a land invasion. Forexample, when I asked Luzmenia Toro, a woman who helped lead and organize a landinvasion that resulted in the founding of the Poblacion Pablo Neruda in 1968, about hermotivations for carrying out a land invasion, she said that

everyone has a basic right to a home...that is something that should beguaranteed by law...the rich who owned this land kept us homeless andexploited us by hoarding too much land. We had a right to take thatland for our homes. Housing is a basic right that is more important thanthe right of the rich to control property.37

Luzmenia Toro’s understanding of the world was shaped by a lifetime spent embedded inthe sociopolitical networks of the communist party. She joined the party at an early ageand continues to be a community activist and ardent supporter of the PCCh. Herunderstanding of the rights of the homeless and of the role of militant collective action insecuring basic rights was informed by her membership and participation in the communistparty. Indeed, her understanding of democracy has been strongly shaped through activismin the communist party. For Luzmenia, democracy is intimately associated with the basicmaterial rights of the poor and the working classes (the “pueblo”).

Acting on the discourse of the rights of the pueblo to a home, the initiative for thetoma that resulted in the creation of Poblacion Pablo Neruda, according to Luzmenia,came from below, from among a group of grassroots PCCh activists in the campamento.In organizing the toma Luzmenia knew, however, that she could count on the communistparty for political support after the toma. That is, the vertical linkages to the communistparty provided the supportive foundation upon which the comite sin casa could mobilizeand engage in a toma de terreno. Indeed, in many cases, political parties were crucial insupporting organizations once the land invasion was over and the poblacion had beengiven legal recognition.

There were also many instances when land invasions were carried out against thewishes of political elites and regional party bosses. Indeed, homeless committees thatwere affiliated with a political party began to take independent actions to secure what theyhad come to perceive, through the rhetoric of the political parties, to be their fundamentalright to a home.38 In doing this, militant poblador organizations deployed the discourseof the political parties to take actions that often contradicted the strategic objectives of theparty leaders. Once presented with a fait accompli, the communist party (and other partiesas well) was often hard pressed to reverse a toma. As one communist party activist put it:

How could the party (the communist party) tell us to get off the land? Theywould be seen as acting against the people, and they risked the anger of the

37Interview with Luzmenia Toro, president of the Neighborhood Council of the Poblacion Pablo NerudaMay, 199838Interview with Juan Gonzalez, official within the communist party. February, 1998

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pobladores.Examples such as this strongly suggest that by the late 1960s and early 1970s, certainsegments of the pobladores had become skilled political activists and had acquired acertain measure of autonomy vis a vis the political parties and a willingness to actindependently if necessary. They were not merely the docile supporters of political elitesthat they are portrayed to be in much of the literature. It was the political parties thatprovided the organizational space and the discursive framework within which suchindependent actions were possible. In short, a Gramscian civil society was beginning todevelop within the womb of the political parties.

Moreover, grassroots party activists who lived inside these newly emergingpoblaciones had power resources that they deployed in negotiating the terms of theirrelationship vis a vis the political parties: they were trusted by the community. They werethe key individuals that linked the party to the poblacion. Indeed, it was extremelydifficult for outsiders to come to a community and gain the support and trust of thecommunity without the support of a community member. Thus, the parties needed localactivists to cement their relationship to the pobladores. Mobilizing communities requiresthe trust and participation of the community. Local activists knew this and used theirposition of trust in the community as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from partyleaders.39 In short, the relationship between party bosses and the activists was much moreof a negotiated relationship than the one way street of elite domination and manipulationsuggested in much of the literature.

By the late 1960s, the discourses of the parties of the left (and inadvertently, thePDC as well) had served to open a Pandora’s box of mobilization that by the early 1970swas becoming increasingly difficult to control and manage. Evidence for this can be foundin rising numbers of land seizures that were taking place around Santiago, land seizuresthat were taking place in the countryside, and in the numbers of strikes carried out byorganized labor. In short, workers and shantytown dwellers had come to the conclusionthat the political environment was ripe to press ahead with long standing grievances.

Thus, although popularized Marxism as a discourse articulated by politicalleaders--such as Carlos Altamirano (PS), Volodia Teitelboim (PC), Andres Pascal (MIR)and others--was intended to be counter-hegemonic vis a vis the Chilean bourgeoisie, whileat the same time providing for discipline and social control within the movement, it hadthe effect of unleashing a process of mobilization from below that was becomingincreasingly autonomous from party leaders. That is, the leadership thought thatmobilization could be used as a tactical weapon. However, popularized Marxism (and toa lesser extent Catholic social doctrine40) was appropriated by grassroots leaders toconstruct a discourse against power, that was then deployed against political elites as wellas against the bourgeoisie, and which became the seedbed upon which the faint outlines anautonomous popular public sphere began to emerge.

39Interview with communist party activists in the Poblacion Jose Maria Caro April 200040Within the discursive framework of Catholic social doctrine there could be found a communitariansubdiscourse that in many ways was even more radical than the marxism of the parties of the left.

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It has also been pointed out that the process of struggle itself is important inbuilding consciousness and identity. Indeed, as E.P. Thompson41 has written,consciousness of a common identity is forged to a large degree in the process of struggleitself. Land invasions served to build popular consciousness and to further underline theusefulness of organized struggle because they required the active cooperation andparticipation of everyone in the comite. In the process of carrying out a toma, moreover,people acquired critical skills that are important in sustaining social movementorganizations: how to cooperate with each other, how to delegate tasks, how tocoordinate collective action, and how to effectively interact with the state and politicalactors. Organizations that were formed to support the toma may have been verticallylinked to political party leaders, but at the grassroots level their linkages to each otherwere often more horizontal in nature. Thus, they served to foster the development ofwhat Putnam42 would identify as a form of social capital. However, it was a social capitalthat was forged through and for resistance and struggle, and was embedded in the idiomof community and class consciousness. In short, it was the social capital of resistance.

Processes of mobilization and struggle also buttressed popular identity andexpanded popular consciousness. The process of struggle itself, then, had a significantimpact on consciousness and identity because it created a sense of unity, solidarity, andempowerment. As one older poblador recalled at a meeting that I attended in LaVictoria:

I remember marching with my fellow pobladores to the Moneda to supportcompanero Allende in 1972, and the feeling that we all had that the pueblowas acting. We carried signs that said “Poblacion La Victoria Presente EnLa Lucha del Pueblo” and this gave me a feeling that we, the pobladores ofLa Victoria were going to change Chile, that we were part of the pueblo...43

In this case, the term pueblo (i.e. “the people”) is intended to mean the workers and theshantytown dwellers. Many interviews that I had with those who participated in thoseheady days recalled the feeling of empowerment and solidarity that came from the massmarches, from the rallies, and from the protests. The sense was that for the first time, thepueblo--i.e. those who had been silent and marginalized--was becoming a historicalprotagonist. The process of organized struggle and mobilization in the factories, and inthe poblaciones reinforced class based identities.

Grassroots party leaders, then, were crucial in building a particular form of socialcapital--that type of social capital needed to mobilize contentious collective action and toorganize counter-hegemony that is essential to building “civil society II.” They alsohelped to forge what Booth and Richardson have called political capital--a set of attitudes

41Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class New York: Vintage Books 196342In Putnam’s terms, the social capital that was created was probably a form of bonding social capital asopposed to bridging social capital. See Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival ofAmerican Community New York: Simon and Schuster 2000 Bonding social capital is social capital thatlinks people of one class against another class.43Interview with former activist in the Poblacion La Victoria November 1999

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that has an impact on state-society relations.44 Although these attitudes were consistentwith democracy (in that they provided the underpinning for demands for social andeconomic rights), in many ways they were not consistent with liberalism. Indeed, becausethey served to link citizenship to the economic/material sphere, they undermined theconceptual bifurcation of the political sphere and the economic sphere that is at the heartof liberalism. Too, the emphasis on collectivism as opposed to individualism wasantithetical to liberalism.

Through grassroots activists and leaders, political parties also provided blueprintsfor collective action--they taught people how to organize, how to mobilize, and how toapply pressure on the government and on the private sector. Political parties also taughtgrassroots community leaders the value of organization and mobilization. Indeed, one ofthe central messages of the communist party, the socialist party and other parties of theleft was that organization, unity, solidarity, and collective action were crucial in redressingsocial problems. They also served to generate particular conceptions of rights andcitizenship that have shaped the basic political culture of the popular sectors.

Moreover, parties provided the institutional framework that linked differentorganizations under one umbrella. It was through the networks that were articulatedthrough political parties that base level organizations connected with each other toorganize entire communities and to engage in contentious collective action. Thus, partieswere crucial in providing the cognitive frameworks and the mobilizing structures for massmobilization.

It was not only the communists and the left that taught the value of organizationand collective action to solve problems. The Christian Democrats emphasizedcommunitarian organization as one of the keys to solving pressing social problems createdby marginalization. Indeed, one of the main policy proposals of the PDC was the creationof the organized community at the grassroots and the expansion of channels for popularparticipation. During Eduardo Frei’s government (1964-70), as part its war on povertyand marginalization-- known as Promocion Popular--the state moved to recognize andcreate base level organizations in low income and poor communities throughout Chile.Somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 base level organizations (neighborhood councils,women’s centers, youth groups, soccer clubs, etc.) were created and given formalrecognition by the state during the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva. By the end ofthe 1960s, the number of people participating in these organizations in urban areas hadreached several hundred thousand.

As implemented by the Frei government, the objective of Promocion Popular wasto keep organizations subservient to the state and to build and consolidate support for thePDC’s political project in popular sector communities. In short, the model of civil societyin PDC discourse had many affinities with civil society I (it was decentralized andfragmented), with one important exception: in contrast to a Tocquevillian civil society I,PDC efforts were directed toward state control and regulation of these organizations.

44Booth, John A. and Patricia Bayer Richard “Civil Society, Political Capital, and Democratization inCentral America” Journal of Politics 60, 3 August 1998 pp.780-800

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Because Promocion Popular raised such high expectations that for the most partwent unfulfilled, by the end of the 1960s many of these organizations began to mobilizeindependently of the state and the Christian Democratic party. Indeed, by the end of the1960s, the PDC was increasingly becoming internally fragmented as rebel factions(terceristas) emerged that articulated an increasingly radicalized anti-capitalistdiscourse.45 Eventually, these groups would break off from the PDC to form their ownpolitical party and ally with the left. At the grassroots level, a considerable number of theorganizations that were created by the PDC turned to the communists, the socialists, orthe MIR and would become associated with “poder popular” that would emerge after theelection of Salvador Allende in 1970. Others appropriated and radicalized the discoursesof Catholic social doctrine by turning to Liberation Theology to mobilize a ChristianLeft.46 Another group of community organizations worked within the PDC and pressuredparty leaders to accelerate the “revolution in liberty” and move to the left.47 Anunintended outcome of Promocion Popular, then, was to broaden and expand a popularmovement in Chile’s marginalized communities.

The “Sede Comunal del Partido” and the Popular Public Sphere: Workingtogether, community and party organizations at the grassroots taught people the value oforganization and of working collectively to achieve goals and engage in claimmaking vis avis the state and the structures of production. Meetings at the community level that weresponsored by local political party organizations served to create a social space withinwhich community leaders could forge the horizontal linkages that are the building blocksof mobilizing structures. Leaders of the myriad of community organizations cametogether under the aegis of the party to work together to achieve common politicalobjectives. Although these organizations were embedded in the broader vertical,hierarchical network that linked political elites to the grass roots, the parties did teachcommunity leaders at the grass roots the value of collaboration and collective action at thecommunity level and the value of coordinating actions across communities. The party, inshort, served as a space in which to build the social and political capital needed to sustaincommunity organizations and mobilization.

At the local level, then, in many cases political parties served to build communitiesof discourse and solidarity that raised the political consciousness of those whoparticipated. In many cases, base level party organizations became key nodal points forthe creation of local community networks where neighbors and friends congregated andwhere community solidarity was built. Networks of political and community activistswere built within the party infrastructure. These activists served to connect communityorganizations (such as neighborhood councils and women’s centers) to the politicaldebates of the time by articulating these organizations to the political sphere and byproviding a discursive framework within which community organizations acted.

45Fleet, Michael op. cit.46Smith, Brian H. The Church and Politics in Chile Challenges to Modern Catholicism PrincetonUniversity Press 198247Interviews with various PDC activists.

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The “sede comunal del partido” (community party chapter) became a centralsocial, political, and cultural pillar of popular communities around which politicaldiscourse was organized. As one former communist party activist observed, somewhatnostalgically:

The party used to be almost like my family, and my companeroswere like my brothers. Together we struggled against the government,against the momios (the rich), and against the system...we had to counton each other. We would get together in the sede and have a “vinito” and discuss the situation and to make plans.48

The sede, he told me, was open every Friday night, and the party leadership of thepoblacion would be there having a glass of wine and listening to a cumbia or a tango, orto the songs of Victor Jara that played on the radio. Party militants and supporters wouldstream in and out all night, for a glass of wine and an empanada and to share the latestpolitical news and engage in debates about issues. It was in the context of thesediscussions that the discourse of the party (in this case the PCCh) was used to construct apopular set of discourses that were centered on an understanding of the rights ofcitizenship. Too, these informal gatherings served to build intense bonds of loyalty andcomradeship. Thus, informal gatherings to chat and share a glass of wine gave the partyorganization a social significance beyond that of a merely political organization to mobilizean electorate.

In many cases, during formal meetings, after the formal political discussion tookplace, the militantes would have an asado (barbecue) where the food and the wine wouldflow, establishing the basis for strong comradeship and social solidarity among partymembers. During the asado rank and file party members who were also leaders ofcommunity organizations could build horizontal ties of community that went beyond themere competition for resources vis a vis the state. As one former activist remembers:

the organizations of the “pobla” struggled together back then, and there wassolidarity among the vecinos. Now, each organization does what it wants andsees the other organizations as a rival...there is no solidarity anymore...that iswhy I stopped participating.49

Indeed, the contemporary lack of community solidarity and solidarity among differentorganizations, as we shall see, was a common theme that I encountered in interviews withcommunity leaders. The institutional context of party taught cooperation and solidaritywithin and among community level organizations.50 The communists and socialists, inparticular, taught the idea of class and community solidarity, which are crucial insustaining mobilization over time. Solidarity is a crucial resource in sustaining movementsduring latent periods.

48Interview with Communist Party activist in the municipality of Pudahuel June 200049Interview with former community activist in the poblacion “La Pincoya” in the municipality ofHuechuraba. July, 200050Interview with communist and socialist party activists in the municipality of Pedro Aguirre Cerda

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The density of organization and the vast number of participants in grassroots partychapters and politicized community organizations, coupled with the density of linkagesbetween these organizations provided the basis for the emergence and development of atype of popular public sphere51 within which political discourses, such as Marxism andCatholic social doctrine, made sense of out of social reality. It also provided a space inwhich these discourses could be appropriated and interpreted by the popular masses.Fraser provides a definition of a “subaltern counterpublic” that can be seen as analogousto the popular public sphere. A subaltern counterpublic, Fraser writes, can be defined as

parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groupsinvent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpre-tations of their identities, interests, and needs.52

The popular public sphere served several purposes: it provided a space for theconstruction of identities, and it served as a space within which mobilization for collectiveaction took place.

Participants in the popular public sphere put the issue of social inequality squarelyon the table to challenge the idea that formal political equality could be divorced from thereality of social inequality. In short, they challenged conventional liberal ideas aboutdemocracy. Social equality came to be seen as a requirement for political equality. Thepopular public sphere emerged to a large extent in isolation from a bourgeois publicsphere, i.e. it emerged in community centers in shantytowns and working classcommunities, and unlike the bourgeois public sphere, which brackets out the problem ofsocial inequality, was built upon the social dilemma of class inequality.53

The popular public sphere also functioned as a political amplifier because itprojected grievances and demands to societal elites. In short, the popular public sphereserved to make public a semi-hidden transcript that lurked in working class communitiesand shantytowns, but which until then had remained local, fragmented, isolated, andincoherently articulated. Thus, although grassroots party organizations were originallyestablished as the lowest level of party organizational hierarchy, and were intended byparty leaders as a way of integrating the popular masses into a vertical party structure, inthe 1960s they provided the basis for the development of a popular public sphere and forthe emergence of social movements that became increasingly difficult for party leaders tomanage.

There are those who in arguing for a civil society that is autonomous from politicalparties, have argued that internally Chile’s political parties were never very democratic.Political parties, these studies argue, were highly rigid, centralized, bureaucratized,hierarchical organizations dominated by a network of political “caudillos” who made thekey decisions which then flowed downward to the bases. While this is in many ways true,

51The popular public sphere that emerged during this period functioned in a way that is analogous toHabermas’s bourgeois public sphere: it provided a space for deliberation and debate, a space in which theissues and dilemmas of the popular sectors could be worked out and made sense of.52Fraser, Nancy “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually ExistingDemocracy” Habermas and the Public Sphere Craig Calhoun (ed.) MIT Press 199753ibid.

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popular sector groups did nevertheless get a hearing within the political parties. The“caudillos” within the parties had to establish a base of support within base levelorganizations. In order to establish a base of support within popular communities, theparty leaders granted a measure of access and influence to grassroots organizations.

Despite having in many cases created an extensive organizational infrastructure,political parties generally did not have the organizational capacity that was needed toexercise the day to day domination and control that was required to turn the popularsectors into mere docile supporters. Moreover, in the context of a multiparty systemwhere competition among the parties was intense, maintaining organizations in acompletely subservient status proved to be very difficult.54 That is, the veryfragmentation of the party system (in the 1970s, there were more than ten political partiesin Chile), made the outright domination of base level organizations more difficult becauseof the availability of viable alternatives.

More importantly, because the communities that they penetrated often had afragmented organizational structure that had state recognition, absolute control bypolitical parties was more difficult to sustain. By the late 1960s community associationshad acquired legal recognition, which gave organizational leaders a legally independentspace, and hence party control over these organizations was more tenuous. Control, inshort, had to be based on more than domination through vertical, subservient, clientelisticexchanges. Grassroots party leaders, in short, negotiated the terms of hegemony withparty elites.

Moreover, despite the vertical, hierarchical nature of mass political parties, theyprovided PCS with the tools to engage in collective action, and in the early 1970s PCSshowed itself willing to challenge political elites and use the mobilizing structures of theparties to engage in collective action that political elites saw as threatening to their controlover the political process.

Thus, although the linkages between the party elite and the grassroots were muchstronger then than they are today, and centralized control of the parties vis a vis civilsociety was more extensive, local party organizations did have some autonomy in their dayto day affairs from the centralized, bureaucratic party elites. This is particularly the casewith the PSCh, for example, that did not have the well developed bureaucraticinfrastructure that the communists did. Indeed, within the PSCh, there was anorganizational gap between the party elite and the grassroots party organizations. Theintermediate organizations that linked party leaders and base level groups was not welldeveloped in the PSCh.55 The political meetings that took place within the communitieswere primarily attended by members of the local community (poblacion), and party elitesexercised relatively little real control over the course of these meetings. The party elitewas seldom notified of these meetings, nor did base level party activists and organizershave to ask permission from party leaders in the hierarchy to hold these meetings.56

54Angell, Alan 1972 op. cit.55Drake, Paul op. cit. 1992 p.14556Interview with Lidia Silva, activist for the communist party and president of the federation of

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Although they had their own internal structures and hierarchies, partyorganizations at the grass roots level nevertheless provided critical space for politicaldiscussions and debates that today’s depoliticized, technocratized, and politicallyautonomous (or apolitical) community organizations sorely lack. The technocratic contextin which state-society relations unfolds is largely devoid of the broader cognitiveframework within which problems can be analyzed and interpreted. That is, in the currentcontext, specific demands are not placed in a broader cognitive political framework. Thus,the framing activities that are crucial to the emergence and development of socialmovement organizations are subverted.

The point is that in the context of vertical ties to the party leadership, base levelparty organizations often served as vehicles for the creation of dense horizontal networksat the grassroots that became the organizational tissue of a popular movement--poderpopular. It is important to understand the role played by parties of the left in the forgingof this movement: political parties of the left provided the discursive framework withinwhich identities were subsequently constructed by grassroots activists and communityleaders. Grassroots party activists appropriated key elements of popularized Marxist andradicalized Catholic discourses to forge a popular identity in the debates and discussionsthat took place in the sede local de partido and its network of satelliteorganizations--neighborhood councils, women’s centers, youth groups, etc. Thus, theentire network of community organizations at the base level became integrated into anoverarching set of discourses that provided a blueprint for action and a set of guidingobjectives.

Indeed, these meetings often became spaces for expanding and radicalizing thediscourses of the party. It was at the grassroots that the popular movement becameradicalized and turned into “poder popular” in the latter 1960s and early 70s. Informed bythe discourses that were constructed and disseminated through political parties, grassrootsactivists in the early 1970s emerged from within the context of the organizationalstructures of parties of the left to challenge the leadership of the Popular Unity coalitionand push the leadership in a more radical direction. As Winn has argued, this movementbecame a catalyst for accelerating the revolution from below.57

In short, the organizational space created at the grassroots by local party leadersprovided the catalyst for unleashing what Winn has termed the “revolution from below”that was centered around a discourse of democracy defined in terms of expandedconceptualizations of citizenship and in terms of class rights.58 The revolution from belowin the 1970s was underpinned by specific conceptions of democracy and social justice thatwere constructed within the context of party discourses. Thus, political parties providedand organized the space at the grass roots level within which political discourses could beconstructed and in which political socialization took place.

neighborhood councils of the municipality of Lo Espejo. Sept, 199957Winn, Peter Weavers of Revolution The Yarur Textile Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism OxfordUniversity Press 198558ibid.

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Popular organizations, then, overwhelmed the leaders of the political parties: in thelatter 1960s and early 1970s, grassroots organizations created by the communist andsocialist parties became even more radicalized than the parties themselves and began aprocess of mobilization that extended far beyond the controlling ability of the parties.However, this process of mobilization, which became known as poder popular (popularpower), was underpinned by the discourses of the parties themselves. In creating keyinstitutional spaces that comprised the organized community, the parties had provided thespace in which a “civil society II” could emerge. In training grassroots leaders, theycreated a network of organic intellectuals within the community that could use thesespaces as vehicles for organizing poder popular by using the discursive tools provided bythe parties.

The relationship between party elites and the base was not a one way street ofdomination. In using the discourse of the parties of the left to challenge the parties andthe state, poder popular shows that the relationship between parties and grassrootsorganizations was not solely based on vertical ties of clientelism, docility, and obedience.Poder popular emerged from the confines of party organization as a product of a situationwhere the government and the parties could not effectively address many of the demandsbeing articulated, and where the organizational structures built by the parties createdpopular leaders who, while still loyal to party, created a powerful social movement thatescaped the control of the parties.

Moreover, it was possible for base level party activists to rise through the ranksand make it up to the middle, and in some cases, the upper echelons of the partyorganization. The linkages between the upper echelons of the party and base levelactivists and associations was much stronger than it is today.59 Party members from thesocialist and Christian Democratic party that I interviewed who had been members andactivists prior to 1973 all shared a common consensus that the political parties prior to1973 were much more internally democratic and much more closely connected to the basethan the post-transition parties. Indeed, for party many activists, internal partydemocracy was intimately connected to the strength and tenor of party connections to thebase. They remembered the pre-1973 period as a period when “political parties werepolitical parties” (i.e. they fulfilled their role as organizers of the pueblo) as one activisttold me.

Political parties, then, established strong, durable linkages to organizations in civilsociety during this period, and became the axis around which popular civil societygravitated. Local party organizations established strong linkages to labor unions inindustries in peripheral areas of Santiago and to popular sector community organizations.Typically, the president of the local party chapter (presidente comunal) was also animportant actor in community organizations. The lines between civil society and thepolitical parties became blurred as parties engulfed and politicized local organizations byembedding them in ideological debates. In the process of politicization, grassrootsorganizations became much more than representatives of the neighborhood vis a vis the

59Interviews with the president of the Frente Poblador of the socialist and Christian Democratic parties.

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development programs of the state: they became centers for the forging of a popularculture, centers for representing demands that were couched in the militant discourse oflucha organizada, and centers for political debate and deliberation.

The Transformation of the Popular Public Sphere--From Civil Society II to CivilSociety I? Since the transition to democracy in 1990, political parties (except for thecommunist party) have become much more technocratic and insulated from civil society,and the nature of their discourse has changed significantly. Indeed, Victor Barrueto, a keyfigure within the Party for Democracy (Partido Por la Democracia--PPD), recentlylamented the decline of political parties in Chile:

The political parties are mere instruments to accede to the power of the state,and have almost completely lost their role as intermediaries between civilsociety and public authority.60

It is clear that the more technocratic, insulated, and distant style of the political parties inthe post-transition has contributed to widespread apathy and declining participation.Indeed, during the 1980s there were transformations taking place in the structure,organization, and political culture of party leaderships that has had a major impact onstate-society relations.

These changes have impinged on the relationship between the civilian politicalclass (CPC) and popular civil society (PCS) in important ways. Within the upper echelonsof the political parties, the relative weakness of party traditionalists and activists (whowere the main force behind popular mobilition) vis a vis a new class of politicalentrepreneurs and technocrats, coupled with the growing distance between the CPC andPCS has deprived popular civil society of important mobilizing structures that in the pastenabled popular movements to use political parties as a resource to sustain mass collectiveaction and pressure. The technocratic, distant style of the political parties has contributedto a growing malaise and sense of powerlessness, which has contributed to a qualitativechange in political participation that has had an impact on the popular public sphere. Inshort, the insulation of the CPC from PCS has contributed to a decline in what Almondand Verba have called a sense of “civic competence.”61

As political parties assumed their traditional role functions following the transition,the traditional vertical-hierarchical authority patterns vis a vis PCS were re-established.What has been lost, however, are those qualities that made political parties a space forgrassroots organizations to constitute themselves as a popular public sphere and as asubaltern counterpublic. As grassroots organizations (neighborhood councils, women’scenters, etc.) have become increasingly disarticulated from the political sphere, theseorganizations have become more discursively sterile (i.e. more technocratic and morefocused on narrow immediate needs as opposed to engaging in broader deliberations onpublic issues).

60Barrueto, Victor “Nosotros Tenemos Que Cambiar” Internal Document of the PPD, January 200161Almond and Verba 1963 op. cit. Civic competence is the sense that by becoming involved, citizens canhave an impact on the political process.

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From the perspective of leaders of popular organizations and movements, theinsulation of the civilian political class following the transition has come in large measureat the expense of popular civil society. Instead of invigorating and strengthening civilsociety, the distancing of the civilian political class from popular civil society in thepost-transition period has been seen by many grassroots activists as a key factor inaccelerating the continued demobilization of and decline of civil society II. Indeed, manymovement leaders have argued that popular movements and organizations have been leftto wither on the vine by the parties of the concertacion. Without the institutionalresources, leadership, and legitimation that has been traditionally furnished by politicalparties, argued one movement leader, what had once constituted an organized popularmovement has become a myriad of atomized grassroots organizations, each pursuing itsown narrow and immediate ends at the margins of the state:

Although we want autonomy and respect from political parties, this does notmean that we don’t want a relationship with them. Political parties are very im-portant in mobilizing and in organizing. Without the support of the politicians itis difficult to organize and to pressure the government.62

Indeed, at a conference for social movement leaders that was held in June of 1990,only three months after the concertacion took power, the disengagement of the CPC andPCS was already being viewed by movement leaders and activists as the “crisis of theleft.” From the perspective of movement leaders, the crisis “consisted in the left’s currentincapacity to recognize and deal with the difficulties of opening strategic horizons topopular social movements. From the perspective of the movement, it can be affirmed thatthe heart of the crisis lies in the rupture of the political left and the social left.”63

Thus, what in Chile has been called the “distance” (distancia) of the politicalparties from popular civil society has in many ways contributed to a decline in civil societyII, while at the same time generating conditions for the emergence of a tenuous civilsociety I.

Parties and Political Subcultures: However, at the same time, the contribution ofpolitical parties to the continued existence of distinct political subcultures among thepopular sectors in Chile is still fairly clear. The impact of political party discourses andideologies on political culture can be seen by examining how actors conceptualize politicalcitizenship and how such conceptualizations relate to identification with political parties.

In a survey of 1002 residents of five popular sector communities in low incomemunicipalities throughout Santiago, respondents were asked questions that were intendedto examine how citizens perceive their role in government and their relationship to thestate. In table I below, responses to the following statement were analyzed according toparty affiliation: “There are certain people that are best qualified to govern this countrybecause they have a better education and better traditions.”64

62Interview with the vice president of a Women’s center of the municipality of Lo Espejo, March 200063VI Taller de Movimientos Sociales “La Crisis de la Izquierda in la Perspectiva de los MovimientosSociales” August 6, 199064Those who agree to this statement are more likely to believe that aside from voting, politics should beleft to the “experts.” The idea that politics should be left to experts is undemocratic because it serves to

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Those who stated that they have no identification with any of the political partieswere more likely to respond in ways that reflect the discourse of the Pinochet regime;namely that politics and policymaking is a technocratic matter for educated individuals.65

By contrast, those who are identified with a party of the left or center-left weresignificantly more likely to disagree with the notion that politics should be left to theexperts. Those who identified with the communist party were most likely to disagree withsuch notions. Indeed, community leaders affiliated with the communist party were quickto point out that such discourses are intended to discriminate against workers and thepoor, who are generally less educated than the upper classes.

TABLE IParty Identification

None PC PS PPD PDC RN UDIAgree 81.0% 49.2% 71.6% 70.8% 75% 76.5% 86.4%Disagree 19.0% 50.8% 28.4% 29.2% 25% 23.5% 13.6%

In the same survey, respondents were also asked what they felt that they should doif the government enacted a law that they strongly disagreed with: “What do you thinkyou should do if the government enacts a law that you think is unfair and that you disagreewith?”

Responses to this question were also analyzed according to party identification(see Table 1) and ideological self-identification (see Table 2). It is clear that identificationwith political parties of the left or with left wing ideologies is associated with a moremilitant rights based notion of citizenship, and with the idea that organization andcollective action from below are crucial to the defense of popular rights.

TABLE II Party Identification

None PC PS PPD PDC RN UDINothing 64.3% 6.6% 14.7% 20% 41.7% 82.4% 54.5%Organize/Petition 10.2% 28.7% 38.8% 30.8% 31.7% 5.9% 14.3%Organize/Protest 10.2% 61.5% 37.1% 29.2% 12.5% 0 5.2%Individual/Petition 9.8% 3.3% 6.9% 13.9% 10.8% 5.9% 5.2%Use The Vote 2.6% 0 1.72% 6.15% 3.3% 5.9% 5.2%

exclude people on the basis of level of education and on the basis of class.65Such discourses have a long historical trajectory in Chile that go back to the period 1833-1891 when aconservative elite built a centralized state with authoritarian tendencies based on the notion that thepopular masses do not have the knowledge needed to participate.

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TABLE IIIIdeological Identification

None Left Center-Left Center-Right RightNothing 67.1% 12.8% 32.6% 68.4% 59.1%Organize/Petition 12.3% 28.6% 35.7% 5.3% 13.6%Organize/Protest 9.6% 51.5% 17.6% 10.5% 4.5%Individual/Petition 10.1% 5.3% 11.8% 5.3% 19.3%Use The Vote 2.5% 1.8% 2.3% 10.5% 3.4%

Respondents were also queried as to what strategies for dealing with the government wereconsidered most effective and appropriate. “When dealing with the government, is itbetter to use methods of struggle (organization, mobilization, and protest) or bureaucraticmethods (such as individual petitions)? The response to this question was analyzedaccording to party identification.

TABLE IVParty Identification

None PC PS PPD PDC RN UDIPetition 83.0% 8.2% 25% 41.5% 75% 94.1% 85.7%Struggle 17.0% 91.8% 75% 58.5% 25% 5.9% 14.3%

These responses suggest that political parties continue to shape important aspects ofpopular political culture in Chile. They can be seen as the residues and echoes of thepre-1973 era that are gradually being overwhelmed by the “politics of consensus.”Indeed, one can say that in Chile, distinct political “subcultures” continue to exist that arerelated to identification with particular political parties.

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