As I watched
a film marking the Pinochet coup – 40 years since Chile’s 9/11 - I found myself
thinking about how a person would go about dealing with that sort of abrupt,
catastrophic increase in state repression. Would it be possible to scramble
together street protests or strikes, or would the level of state violence be
such that you’d just have to either go underground or flee? If you were not
known to the authorities you’d probably just keep your head down, stay off the
streets, and hope for the best.
But of
course in Chile the attack was not just the physical attack on individuals – arrest, prison, torture,
‘disappearing’ – but the economic shock treatment that came afterwards, and which
was inflicted on the whole society. This meant privatisation, deregulation, the
introduction of competition and individualism into industrial relations,
pensions, health, education. Crucial to the more long term process was the
destruction of collectivism, of social solidarity, and the insertion of a
‘me-first’ mentality as atomised consumers compete with each other for
resources, jobs, benefits, housing. Eventually repression is internalised. We
begin to police ourselves. Does any of this sound eerily familiar?
Chile went
from being a democracy with trade unions where a Marxist could be elected
president, to a military dictatorship overnight. But turns to increased state
repression do not have to be sudden and dramatic. In many ways the UK today is
morphing gradually, incrementally, into a more repressive society. This is the
‘darker side’ of economic neoliberalism. There is a direct link between the
level of state control & repression & the type of economic structure we
have. In post-coup Chile the society became a massive economic laboratory
experimenting with the nostrums of the free market. Neoliberalism, as it
bulldozes the middle class & immiserates workers & the poor, of
necessity will close down those areas of civil society where resistance could
begin – trade unions & the organs of political protest. And it will do so
piecemeal, in the name of protecting us and improving our lives.
Under neoliberalism
banks and big corporations rule, and the state is strengthened to keep order so
that these companies can continue to make profits. Anything that gets in the
way of this has to be removed. A shift to the free market does not mean the
state is done away with, it means that only the more repressive functions of
the state remain. Those aspects of state ownership which redistributed money
and resources to ordinary people – what used to be called the ‘social wage’ –
are sold off to billionaires, hedge fund managers and those corporations already
poised to buy up schools, security services and the NHS.
UK
governments over the next five years, whether Tory, Lib Dem or Labour, will be
seeking to further restructure the economy along these lines without provoking unmanageable
social unrest. The move from managing consent to managing coercion will mean
the closing down of democratic spaces. Slowly, the unthinkable will become
thinkable. It is already happening. The first targets are not yet the
beleaguered middle class, but the more peripheral groups: the disabled, the
poor, people in social housing, claimants, Travellers, immigrants, asylum
seekers…
We who
disagree with this social model need a political response. But in electoral
terms, this has yet to be constructed. Labour has already sunk into the
neoliberal mire and can’t help us. So the long-delayed strikes that are coming,
from teachers, firefighters, civil servants and perhaps most importantly,
postal workers, are important, as is the demonstration at Tory conference on 29th
September. Large, militant and disruptive strikes and protests would draw a line
in the sand. They would be a restatement of social solidarity, shifting the
centre of gravity from passive, vapid, atomised consumerism to mass action.
They would be a badly-needed reminder of our own collective strength.
Otherwise,
we may wake up one day to find that a tolerant, social democratic society can
change to a highly repressive one with no space for protest or resistance
without the necessity for a violent military coup. Chile 1973 was a combative
society with a strong left and powerful unions. The US government, the CIA and
the Chilean ruling class understood that an ‘iron fist’ was necessary to smash
this, and Pinochet was prepared to be their man. But for any ruling class
massive physical force is a huge gamble, fraught with risk. Far better, if
possible, to enforce gradual, constitutional changes, dealing with one group
after another until you have eliminated all the forces that might resist you.
In many
ways, the gorillas are already amongst us…
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