There is no question that Chile’s workers and poor are better positioned today than they were just ten, to say nothing of twenty, years ago. Indeed, popular forces enjoy the most auspicious balance of power since the 1973 coup that stamped out Chile’s democratic road to socialism. And Bachelet did shepherd through a series of reforms in her first year, including higher education legislation that attracted international attention.
But obtaining a firmer grasp on the prospects for emancipatory politics in Chile calls for examining both the electoral results and first-year reforms in relation to elite interests and movement strategies. Such scrutiny reveals an unequivocal preservation of bipartisan oligarchic neoliberalism, along with continued extra-institutional opposition from merging movements.....Why is it so difficult to shake neoliberalism even after elections? Neoliberalism — the political theory based on the market state and market fundamentalism — has been institutionalized globally over the last several decades and it will take broad and deep reform to change it. This, too, will take decades unless there is global revolution, which seems unlikely. A lot of time and money went into a building a powerful neoliberal consensus. It's won't be easy to reverse it when the interest of the powerful and wealth is to preserve and extend it.
Jacobin » Blogs
Insurgency and Orthodoxy
René Rojas, doctoral candidate in sociology at New York University
