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

Marian Schlotterbeck’s book presents a nuanced narrative of the experience of members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) at the grassroots level and the tensions that beset their relations with the national leadership of the movement in the years of its greatest influence in Chilean politics and society. By exposing the memories of MIR militants in their own terms, Schlotterbeck successfully portrays the meanings attributed to political action by those who concentrated their participation in social organizations and mobilization at the grassroots level. Those meanings differed significantly from the way the revolutionary politics of the MIR was conceived and conducted by the national leaders of the movement, especially in the last two years of the Allende administration.

The greatest strength of Schlotterbeck’s book is its exposition of the experiences of MIR members through the prism of their own memories, which are not shaped fundamentally by the events and course of Chilean national politics, but by their own agency in social organization and mobilization. As Schlotterbeck correctly points out, the literature on the political history of Chile in the 1960s and 1970s has focused mostly on events and processes at the level of state institutions and national political parties. Furthermore, the traumatic overthrow of Salvador Allende and the military dictatorship that followed have become a seemingly teleological horizon to the course of Chilean politics in the years prior to 1973, thus shaping the retrospective views of contemporary actors and numerous scholarly assessments of the period.

The memories of the MIR members interviewed by Schlotterbeck, none of whom occupied high leadership posts in the movement, tell a story that, although not bereft of a natural sense of defeat, emphasizes the hopes and perception of empowerment that the conduct of revolutionary politics at the grassroots level gave them. Students, workers, and women in search of a place to live, among others, found recognition and a sense of purposeful belonging in assemblies, unions, and associations because the ideology and strategy of the MIR promoted horizontal participation at the grassroots level, even as its leaders conceived the movement as a Leninist vanguard of revolution at the national level.

The positive side of the memories evoked by Schlotterbeck’s interviewees, however, poses the question as to why the MIR and its own understanding of revolutionary politics failed to obtain a more massive following and become a more significant actor in Chilean politics, beyond Santiago and Concepción. Schlotterbeck characterizes the instances of social organization and mobilization in which her interviewees participated as experiences in radical or participatory democracy, mostly because they remembered those experiences in that key. The brief conceptual discussion of the notions of democracy and revolution from below offered in the introduction (5–6) falls a little short of providing a satisfactory explanation of why the MIR, even considering the content of the memories of its members, was such a singular conductor of the sort of radical democracy that the author extolls in her account. After all, one of the outstanding features of Chilean politics in the 1960s and 1970s was the considerable politicization of many forms of social organization at the grassroots level, from peasant unions, to student federations, to mothers’ centers, all of them promoted and exploited by parties across the political spectrum. The lack of a wider conceptual discussion about these forms of democracy at the grassroots level, which clashed with the more rigid Leninist structure and views of the MIR’s national leadership, makes it a little difficult to understand whether there was something especially democratic in the revolutionary project of the movement. The MIR’s foes, who constituted a majority in Chile and were distributed across the entire spectrum of institutional politics, certainly did not see it that way.

The question about the meanings of democracy goes to the core of the conflicts that engulfed Chilean politics in the years of the Allende administration, and the MIR was...