Abstract
Although the Unidad Popular (UP) has been one of the most studied, discussed, and controversial periods in Chile’s history, it has progressively disappeared from scholarship in the last two decades. Luis Garrido’s book contributes to bringing this unique experience back into historical focus, seeking to reinterpret Chile’s ‘creole’ socialism in light of Wallerstein’s world-system theory. In doing so, the author aims to go beyond the ‘methodological nationalism’ and ideology-centered interpretations that, he states, have historically prevailed in explaining the fall of Allende’s government. Instead of focusing on local politics, Garrido claims that the fall of the UP should be understood in relation to the cyclical ‘Kondratiev waves’ of economic expansion and contraction of the capitalist world system. In its simplest formulation, Garrido’s posits that the fall of the UP has to do […] with a change in the rate of economic growth at the world-system level as a whole, which transitioned to a stage B of global economic contraction that made somewhat harder to carry out Allende’s project. (p. 31, this and subsequent translations are mine)
The book, however, is severely lacking. Obscurely written and poorly structured, it is unnecessarily difficult to read. Most of the book is devoted to summarizing the world-system approach and to defend it against any and all potential criticism, leaving the analysis of the UP on the back burner. In the first hundred pages, the historical case is hardly mentioned. The bibliography almost solely consists of publications by authors that openly adhere to the Wallersteinian academic program, while much of the existing empirical research on the UP is not discussed at all. Even more importantly, empirical research is scarce and the argument remains highly speculative, offering little historical support to Garrido’s claims.
At a very general level, Garrido’s concern is clear and explicit: he claims that the existing literature has focused exclusively on the ‘internal’ factors leading to the fall of the UP, neglecting the relevance of the global political and economic conditions that had determined the destiny of the UP’s project. Garrido considers that methodological nationalism has severely biased existing scholarship on the UP. An effort to analyze sociohistorical processes beyond administrative boundaries should always be welcomed, but his promise is not delivered. Given the centrality of this claim in Garrido’s book, one would expect to read not only that external conditions mattered for the rise and fall of the UP but also empirical evidence aiming to answer the how, when, and to what extent they did. But instead, the author merely restates the importance of considering the capitalist world system as a whole, with its multiple interdependences, without showing the empirical global connections and uneven constraints that would have determined the fall of the project led by president Allende.
In addition, Garrido’s concern is not fully justified. He presents a highly incomplete and tendentious review of existing literature, accusing every existing historical account of methodological nationalism and suggesting that his book will fill this gap in existing scholarship. This is problematic for two reasons: first, it is based on an unwarranted and misleading assumption; second, and more importantly, it is not really true. Garrido simply equates the consideration of the global political economy to the adoption of the world-system approach that he fervently defends. Because the UP has not been studied under a Wallersteinian perspective, Garrido concludes that existing scholarship on the UP has not paid attention to the objective pressures coming from the world economy and the international geopolitical system. This leads to the second problem: the author illustrates this gap by quoting a very limited number of works, most of which only tangentially deal with the UP’s experience, and he does not even reference some of the most important works that have addressed the fall of Allende and the UP’s political economy. The early works of Barbara Stallings or Stefan de Vylder’s Allende’s Chile, for example, are not even mentioned. Even more surprisingly, Arturo Valenzuela’s The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile is not cited once, even when it is the most quoted work on the fall of Allende and when Valenzuela’s main thesis – focused on the polarization of the party system – could be the most illustrative example of the methodological nationalism that Garrido criticizes throughout the book. Instead of offering a comprehensive historiographical review, the book presents a cartoonish view of methodological nationalism as an approach that conceives ‘nation-states’ as ‘autonomous entities unrelated to the exterior’ (p. 49). As a consequence of these problems, it becomes unclear whether Garrido is actually filling any gaps in scholarship at all.
The author does attempt to define his problem in a somehow more specific manner, but this is done in a completely unsatisfactory way. The problem is so confusedly formulated that it is truly impossible to understand and to translate. Garrido states that de lo que se trata acá es de explicar por qué la UP pasó del estado inicial A al estado final B desde el punto de vista, si lo comprendemos como ‘analogía’ de [sic] las ‘leyes físicas’, de las continuidades/cambios estructurales manifestadas en ritmos cíclicos por las fases A/B del ciclo Kondratiev, provocando a su vez, y en larga duración […] las tendencias seculares que permiten hacer inteligibles las diferentes condiciones histórico-estructurales a escala del Sistema-mundo. (p. 78) [the goal in here is to explain why the UP moved from the initial stage A to the final stage B from the point of view, if we understand it as an ‘analogy’ of [sic] the ‘laws of physics’, of the continuities/structural changes manifested in cyclical rhythms by the phases A/B of the Kondratiev cycle, causing in turn, and in the long-term […] the secular trends that allow to make intelligible the multiple historical and structural conditions at the world-system scale.]
The incomprehensibility of this sentence is not lost in translation. As a sentence and as a problem, it is simply nonsense.
The historical research behind the book is scarce and rendered trivial by the deductive and structuralist argumentation. Garrido’s thesis on the influence of ‘multilateral connections in the world system’, ‘mediated by the international monetary system’, in the defeat of the UP is the book’s assumption and the book’s conclusion. The author pretends to support his argument by showing that the UP project ‘coincided’ with a capitalist crisis of accumulation at its core (pp. 190–191). After a period of instability, the costs of that crisis would have been externalized to the economy’s ‘periphery’ through the Smithsonian agreement (p. 233). But how this coincidence and ‘externalization’ actually determined the fall of the UP is not developed, and the suggestion remains purely speculative. The book offers some theoretical discussion and abstract macroeconomic indicators showing a global transition toward phase B of economic contraction, but this does not make up a proper historical explanation.
Garrido’s interpretation of the UP itself is also problematic. While he contends that ‘the global is the locus of the real’ (pp. 53–54), he gives to the UP an unwarranted relevance for the capitalist world system. The author repeatedly criticizes Chilean historian Gabriel Salazar for neglecting the possibility that a political project such as the UP could have had a repercussion in the world economy (p. 33). But, once again, he only states that the UP had ‘structural repercussions […] in the core of the world-economy, repercussions that clearly existed’ (p. 157; last italics added). The reader is left without actual evidence to accept this claim.
The book’s argumentative strategy is mostly counterfactual, but the counterfactuals are under-developed and unrealistic. Garrido insists that the UP did not represent, ‘from a world-systems point of view’, a radical break with the previous political project because ‘no one questioned the final objective: to capture the state’s power to bring about social transformations’ (p. 101). His implicit assumption is that the UP could have broken with the past and, in doing so, would have achieved the desired social transformations without placing the state’s power at the center of its political project. This assumption, however, is completely unrealistic, and if it were used as an evaluative criterion, the history of the modern revolutions would also be a history of continuities. The author characterizes as ‘enigmatic’ the fact that ‘worker movements have tended to give strategic priority to the sphere of production instead of the sphere of circulation, besides the emphasis given to the state’ (p. 310). But is this really enigmatic? Should popular political action be global, not state-centric, and focused on the mechanisms of circulation? So far, this has never happened – in Chile or elsewhere.
The historiographical material in the book seeks to support that the UP could have been much more relevant in different historical conditions. Garrido’s evidence on Chile’s presentation at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the archival materials from the Secretary of Planning (ODEPLAN) are arguably the most interesting part of the book. Among other things, it reminds readers that amid the political effervescence of the early 1970s, the UP project rested not only on popular mobilization but also on sophisticated technical agencies whose historical role tends to be forgotten. Primary sources illustrate existence of plans to develop a solidary international monetary system and to achieve technological autonomy. They also show that, in order to achieve these goals, the UP sought to serve as a bridge between the G-77 and the socialist block (p. 251). What is unclear is whether these were actual, feasible plans or simply well-intended yet irrelevant ideas that political leaders normally advance in international meetings. Was the plan for a new monetary regime an important component of the UP’s political project? One could well argue that the UP did not and could not have carried out this plan not only due to the Kondratiev cycles and the Smithsonian agreement, but simply because small peripheral countries do not set the rules of an international trade system – this is in fact what make them peripheral. Garrido thinks differently: ‘why did the UP fail at reforming the international monetary system? I could answer simply: because the world economy was not ready for it’ (p. 315). He goes further with his speculations, contending that ‘it would not be ventured to suggest that the monetary reform system sought by the UP, if successful, might have prevented the future “debt crisis” of the 80’s’ (pp. 296–297) and that the UP ‘unconsciously’ ‘aimed to prevent’ ‘the current crisis of neoliberalism’ (p. 304). But these assertions, as most of the assertions in this book, are purely speculative, wishful, and unwarranted.
The most interesting parts of the book are the UP’s ideas and plans, never carried out, about alternative models of development. But these plans could have been just ideas. After condemning the entire local scholarship – Marxist and liberal alike – for giving too much relevance to ideas, Garrido also relies on ideas to suggest that the UP was, or could have been at least, relevant at the world level. But actions speak louder than ideas, and in this book, the ‘structural’ relevance of the UP, either actual or potential, is never quite proven.