Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile by Marian E. Schlotterbeck (review)

The 1960s global political currents have received widespread scholarly attention. Many such works point to the middle-class origins of the New Left and to the distinction between culture and politics in the emergent social struggles of that era. Yet for the Latin American case, binaries of Old/New left fall apart, and recent works showcase the ways in which prior experiences of labor and student mobilizations have led to cross-class alliances and the generalized politicization of everyday life. Marian E. Schlotterbeck’s Beyond the Vanguard provides invaluable insights on the fraught relations between the leadership and activist base of Chile’s Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento Izquierdista Revolucionario, MIR) in Concepción province, between local and national dynamics, and between the daily, bottom-up struggles for social change and the top-down Popular Unity revolutionary process.

According to Schlotterbeck, the experience of university student organizing and the blending of Old Left tactics with new revolutionary rhetoric led to the MIR’s expansion. The tensions that in 1969 split the MIR “between the democratic practices of assembly-driven mass fronts” and “the centralized hierarchy of a vanguard party of professional militants” would continue to cast a shadow over its organizing efforts (34). In spite of these internal contradictions, Schlotterbeck contends that the MIR gained influence among coalminers and textile workers and overcame class barriers by establishing personal connections, drawing on previous experiences of labor organizing in the region, and creating study circles with workers at the University of Concepción. These cross-class alliances were further facilitated by the geographic proximity of the surrounding working-class towns to Concepción and its university, where MIR school trips allowed students to connect with local communities. Among the MIR’s most surprising labor gains, she shows, was its ability to attract workers in the Communist Party dominated coal industry. Here too, the MIR’s strategies of direct action and emphasis on labor autonomy and transparency won over workers who had long desired union democracy.

One of the many strengths of this book is the author’s ethnographic ability to capture local struggles for material gains as experienced by grassroots activists during moments of escalating political tensions. Schlotterbeck’s narration of the land takeover that led to the construction of Campamento Lenin serves as a case in point. Unconfined by the Old Left’s notion of workers as sole revolutionary subjects and given the Christian Democratic Party’s shortcomings in meeting housing needs, the MIR saw a political opening and took advantage of it by organizing pobladores and peasants. While the planning phase for Campamento Lenin was a concerted effort among MIR-affiliated labor unions, students, and pobladores, she shows, the community organizations that followed became the purview of primarily local community leaders. Following the example of the university student movement, pobladores collectively organized via participatory assemblies. After Salvador Allende’s election in 1970, land seizures quickly multiplied and Concepción experienced them in unprecedented scales. The MIR’s tactics of direct action and consciousness-raising quickly escaped their control as pobladores ignored the leadership’s directions to only occupy large landholdings. Thus, Schlotterbeck argues that the MIR leadership “paradoxically, found itself moderating grass-roots goals or mediating negotiations between Allende’s government and an increasingly radicalized base” (88). Amidst an escalating revolutionary process, the MIR struggled to provide direction and leadership to the social movement it helped create.

Nowhere are the tensions and internal contradictions of Chile’s revolutionary process clearer than in the last three chapters, which focus on popular responses to regional leaders, the Bosses’ Lockout, and the impending counterrevolution. By giving emphasis to the previously overlooked July 27, 1972 People’s Assembly, Schlotterbeck reveals one of the limitations of scholarship bound by the revolutionary and counter- revolutionary dichotomies of the Cold War. She argues that the “People’s Assembly questioned the idea that only political parties and national leaders should direct the course of change,” and...