Bread, Justice, and Liberty: Grassroots Activism and Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile by Alison J. Bruey, and: Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile by Marian E. Schlotterbeck (review)

These two books on grassroots organizing and revolution in Chile share many characteristics. Both are based on oral histories, and both approach the history of Chile’s tumultuous late twentieth century, including the three-year revolutionary presidency of Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition, by focusing on the grassroots rather than political parties and politicians and on the local rather than the national arena. Both study the working, or popular, classes, paying particular attention to the informal settlements, or poblaciones, founded by recent migrants to Chile’s burgeoning cities who organized collectively to invade unused land and establish communities. Both emphasize the vibrancy of Chile’s working-class culture, which encompassed multiple identities and transcended party and sectarian lines. Both examine the complex relationships between Marxist ideologies, Marxist parties, and this heterogeneous working class. Both explore how the 1973 coup and reign of terror that followed it attempted to expunge all traces of Chile’s Road to Socialism. And both note how what Bruey calls the memorias soterradas — buried memories — are slowly surfacing in the second decade of the new century.

In other ways, the books complement each other. Beyond the Vanguard takes as its subject the southern industrial city of Concepción through the years of Popular Unity government and ends with the coup; Bread, Justice, and Liberty focuses on the shanty-towns of the capital city of Santiago during the Pinochet regime beginning in 1973. The former pays special attention to the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), or Revolutionary Left Movement, Chile’s far-left revolutionary party that chose to stand outside the Popular Unity coalition and pressure Allende’s government from the left. The latter traces the fragments of parties decimated by repression. It also examines the growing role of the Catholic Church in providing an institutional home for those struggling to rebuild a movement for basic rights under a far-right neoliberal dictatorship. Thus together the two books give readers a spectrum of popular mobilization during revolutionary democracy and repressive dictatorship.

Chilean labor history owes a great debt to Peter Winn’s classic 1986 factory study, Weavers of Revolution. In Chile’s Yarur textile mills, Winn showed, the revolutionary program and rhetoric of the compañero presidente (Allende) unleashed a revolution from below that challenged the Popular Unity government’s disciplined, hierarchical, party-based project for bringing about socialism through legal means while maintaining Chile’s constitutional order. Chile’s deeply rooted and disciplined party structure was integral to the project — but the bases had little patience for the compromise and negotiation required by the Chilean Road to Socialism. Yarur workers had suffered grim defeats when they had attempted to organize in the past — but now they believed that a utopian future of worker control was within reach, and they jumped at it. This conflict between a more conservative party hierarchy trying to manage a negotiated transition to socialism from above and the grassroots revolution is central to Beyond the Vanguard as well.

Five hundred miles south of Santiago, the port city of Concepción was already known as Chile’s “red zone” due to the strength of labor and Marxist organizing among coal and textile workers. Marian E. Schlotterbeck does not center her research only in the mines and the factories, though, but emphasizes the multiple locations and identities of the working class in the city’s public university, in the poblaciones, and in the streets. Working-class youth organized at high schools and at the University of Concepción, where student struggles progressively opened the institution to more and more children of the working class and to...