Abstract
My book La “vía chilena” al socialismo (1970–1973): Un itinerario geohistórico de la Unidad Popular en el sistema-mundo (Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago de Chile, 2015) was reviewed by Matías Fernández in issue 57(4) of International Journal of Comparative Sociology. While I was pleased to see this piece in an international journal, I was disappointed that Fernández seemed to have read the book too hastily as his review cherry-picked its most glaring deficiencies while avoiding comments on its central arguments. I didn’t initially feel compelled to respond to Fernández’s brief review, but recently other scholars around the world voiced different views on my interpretation (Artigas et al., 2020; Gaudichaud, 2016; Rinke, 2020).
The central thesis of the book is not only that the world-system imposed structural restrictions on the transformations program carried out by Allende in Chile, but that the transformations program itself by his UP government could also have had its impact on the world-system. To support these claims, government documents from the National Planning Office (ODEPLAN) were used to link economic policies as well as its program with world-systemic conditions. Instead of discussing the merits of the argument, Fernández states that the book 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. (2016: 259)
While Fernández is correct to point out my lengthy discussion of world-systems analysis, the reason I did so was because this perspective is relatively unknown to Chilean readers as there are to my knowledge no world-systems analyses of the Allende regime.
The following assertions by Fernández about my book are very ironic since the whole purpose was to explain what he criticized. First, he claimed that the primary sources I used “illustrate [the] existence of plans to develop a solidary international monetary system and to achieve technological autonomy” but then questioned “whether Garrido is actually filling any gaps in scholarship at all” (2016: 260, 261). This is odd since no other scholarly account on the matter makes these arguments. Second, the fact that Fernández understood that “the UP sought to serve as a bridge between the G-77 and the socialist block” to construct a new international monetary system refers precisely to the fact, acknowledged in my book, that “small peripheral countries do not set the rules of an international trade system – this is in fact what make them peripheral” (2016: 261). In a table in Chapter 3 (2015: 238–239) I presented evidence: Chile had only 0.5% of the votes within the IMF, while the United States had 21.7%, the United Kingdom 9.1%, Germany 5.2%, and Japan 4%. Those four countries had 40% of the votes within the IMF. The Andean Pact (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru) controlled just 2.1%. The G-77 and the socialist bloc were peripheral in international monetary issues and, therefore, Chile proposed to use the UNCTAD III as the multilateral platform to overcome intra-core unilateral decision-making, formally within the IMF and informally among the core central banks with the Federal Reserve at its apex.
Last, but not least, Fernández seemed to confuse ideas with ideology and text. Surely I criticized ideology as a relevant variable for explaining the trajectory of the UP, but I never criticized the existing historiography “for giving too much relevance to ideas” (Fernández, 2016: 262). On the one hand, not every action, event, or process can be explained primarily because of the ideological commitment of the subjects and, on the other hand, Fernández’s criticism seems to conflate ideas with its physical supports in texts and documents used by historians. Actually, I provided an alternative interpretation of the military coup of 11 September, arguing it to do in part with the Allende government’s attempt to displace the US dollar in 1972. It is not necessary that documents from the IMF or the Federal Reserve say any word about Chile, the Unidad Popular, or UNCTAD III—nor is a conspiracy theory needed—since the facts as well as agency are there. World-systems analysis just provided a conceptual framework, comprehensive enough, to thread these disparate dynamics together. The potential structural relevance of the UP for the world-system is clear.