Chile and the recipe for the extreme right: austerity and punishment

Austerity and punishment: The far right’s recipe for disciplining the popular classes in Chile

In the recent public accounting of President Kast, representative of the Chilean extreme right, Latin America is offered a clear mirror of the political laboratory that was installed in the lands of Southern Chile. More than a mere bureaucratic accountability, the Chilean president’s speech functions as the programmatic manifesto of a conservative restoration that merges a more orthodox ultra-neoliberal recipe with elements characteristic of neo-fascism.

From a critical look at the current crisis of capitalism as hegemony, what is observed in Chile is not an episodic crisis of representative democracy, but rather a coordinated and systematic attempt to refound social consensus through the strengthening of the state coercion apparatus and the preventive criminalization of the working class and subordinate sectors.

Organized crisis, austerity and autocratic state capture

Discourse analysis from a political economy perspective reveals, firstly, the elementary function of the dependent capitalist State: shielding and ensuring the accumulation and profit rates of the dominant classes in periods of stagnation. Kast structures his diagnosis based on an “economic, labor and fiscal emergency”. By pointing to a structural deficit of 3.7% of GDP and classifying the reforms of the last decade as a deviation of priorities and fiscal irresponsibility, the presidency adopts the classic tactic of converting a systemic crisis of capital into a crisis of public management.

The remedy administered in the short term is a brutal fiscal adjustment of 1.452 billion dollars. From a medium-term perspective, the structural objective takes on the contours of a profound administrative counter-reform: the proposal to move towards the institutional merger of strategic ministries — such as the unification of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the General Secretariat of Government into a single organic structure — points to the reduction of spaces for political mediation and the centralization of power.

This deliberate suffocation of the State’s social capabilities operates in perfect symbiosis with the facilitation of capital flows. The speech celebrates the acceleration and unlocking of 389 private investment projects, totaling around 89 billion dollars. Under the justification of combating unemployment, the rationalization of sectoral and environmental licenses is promoted through enabling techniques that reduce regulatory scrutiny. If we understand historically that the State is the apparatus that ensures the conditions for the expansion of the ruling class; In Kast’s project, the State gives up any claim to well-being to explicitly function as the executive committee and legal guarantor of large economic and extractive blocs.

The construction of passive consensus and its class thesis

If the economic structure requires adjustment, the superstructure requires the construction of a new cultural hegemony that legitimizes domination. This is where thought becomes indispensable to decipher the traps of government discourse. Kast tries to build a new common sense based on three bourgeois ideological pillars: merit, individual effort and the traditional family as cells of order, empathy and social containment. For the government, national progress does not derive from rights or collective struggles, but from people’s free initiative and voluntary submission to the laws of the market.

In this hegemonic cultural arrangement, poverty, job insecurity and social dissent are not understood as inevitable consequences of capitalist exploitation, but as moral deviations, lack of temperance or criminal pathologies. The classist bias translates into the rhetoric of social hygiene. The informal dynamics of urban survival of the unprotected working class — such as the illegal sale of alcohol, consumption on public roads or unauthorized social protest — are categorized and typified as “incivilities”. The hidden objective is to remove the political character of social exclusion, transforming economic marginality into a police and public order problem.

This cultural and material violence reaches its peak in the proposal to reform the Indigenous Law in the so-called Southern Macrozone of Chile. By proposing the elimination of restrictions on land use by Mapuche communities, allowing individual titles to be leased and mortgaged under equal conditions in the financial market, the project advances non-capitalist community ways of life and social reproduction. Under the guise of agrarian development, territorial dispossession and the total subordination of land to real estate and agricultural capital operate, dismantling the bonds of historical solidarity that resist mercantile logic.

The punitive political reflex of the far right in power

The transition from hegemony — consensus — to pure and simple domination — coercion — manifests itself in political-administrative measures of an openly anti-democratic nature, which mimic the actions of the proto-fascist global extreme right. The hard core of this social control strategy is embodied in the creation of the Registry of Vandals and Incivilities (1). This provision establishes that individuals sanctioned for certain conduct associated with protest, contempt or change of order will lose access to historic social rights and benefits, such as free higher education, rent subsidies and the Universal Guaranteed Pension (PGU) itself.

This is a profound break with the democratic conception of citizenship. Neofascism operates a perverse inversion: the universal and inalienable rights of the working class are converted into precarious state privileges or concessions, subject to immediate revocation if the citizen demonstrates ideological insubordination or participates in social mobilization as a space for public expression. The right to survival becomes conditional on political docility towards the regime.

To guarantee the effectiveness of this iron discipline, the institutional design foresees a punitive increase: the increase in the legal period for arrest from 12 to 24 hours, unrestricted political support for the use of legitimate force by the police and the Armed Forces, and the announcement of a Penitentiary Infrastructure Plan designed until the year 2030, which seeks to initially incorporate more than 20 thousand new places in the Chilean prison system. The State that withdraws from social mediation is the same State that expands its walls and its weapons to preventively suffocate the capacity for uprising of the exploited classes.

Synthesis. The projections of authoritarianism

In short, a critical reading of the presidential Public Accountability reveals the profile of an authoritarian restoration regime. Under the cynical guise of the appeal to the “common good”, “essential unity” and dialogue in parliament, the historic bloc in power articulates the closure of effective channels of democratic participation and the disarticulation of the popular bases that have shaken the country’s structures in the last decade.

For Latin American people, especially Brazilian people who have experienced similar dynamics of the rise of the far right, the Chilean script appears as a strict warning. The project led by Kast does not represent a temporary dysfunction of liberal democracy, but the consolidation of a neo-fascist arrangement perfectly functional to the current needs of capitalism in its new imperial phase: a minimalist State in guaranteeing the social rights of the population, but maximalist, violent and vigilant in safeguarding private property and imposing social silence. The legal and administrative system is mobilized not to emancipate, but to discipline, monitor and punish the exploited on the Latin American periphery.

Use

1 – The Registry of Vandals and Incivility is a bill signed by President José Antonio Kast in June, which is still at the beginning of its legislative process. As the article states, under the proposal, protesters convicted of “vandalism” (simple graffiti is included) will lose access to free education, retirement and will even be prevented from registering and transferring vehicles and properties in their name, among other penalties. The opposition denounces that the project is unconstitutional (editor’s note).