Chilean election thread (?)

[Travis B.]

Umm that is precisely what I am for—making it so that only workers have a direct say in the operation of businesses, with businesses acting democratically within. Note that not all workers necessarily must have an equal share, e.g. how much weight one's vote has may vary upon, say, how many hours one works or how long one has been with the business. While there would be outside funding—e.g. funding by the state, as without such how would new businesses practically get off the ground—such would not entail taking a share of control over said businesses.

Well, I hate to quibble over nomenclature, but you, my friend, are not a "Democratic Socialist" in any recognizable sense. At all the DSA parties, you'd be known as "that hard-core Stalinist guy." This isn't Communism with a capital C, it's got three Cs and a P!

Umm I don't get where you're getting this from. Forbidding alienation of control over capital is perfectly compatible with democracy. If anything, it is necessary to preserve workplace democracy, as otherwise it will soon be eliminated through private investment necessary due to a lack of other sources of funding—if there is not public funding of one sort or another—resulting in alienation of direct control from the workers themselves. Also, this by no means entails party dictatorship, which is a key aspect of Communism, but rather is perfectly compatible with democratic government.

I'm fine with State Capitalism (I mean, who isn't? Oh, right, Democratic Socialists), but you have to accept what this entails. Whatever underpaid party aparatchik is in charge of deciding which new businesses get access to the only source of capital investment, and enforcing bans on private loans, and identifying which factory worker has violated the rule against building spare parts (i.e. generating new capital) in their garage, will quickly become the most bribable human being that has ever lived. The giant sack of power is still there, only now, due to our own clever attempts to hand it to a disintrested party, it's not directly benefitting the person holding it, meaning someone else can easily persuade them to move the sack this way or that. And so goes the oversight committee. And the committee to oversee the oversight committee. All Hail the Sack of Power.

There is no need to ban private loans directly, but rather to forbid the alienation of direct control over businesses from their workers (as mentioned), i.e. transferring control to non-workers. (Indirect control would be still permitted, by cutting off the flow of money if the goals of those providing are not met.) Note that of course there can be multiple sources of funding—just as there is more than one source for research grants for academia today—rather than a single central state funding agency for everything. You could very well get funding through GoFundMe if you wished, as there is nothing involved in a GoFundMe campaign that entails giving up control of one's capital.

Also, I don't get where you are getting the idea that it would be forbidden to create new capital in the first place. You are not alienating control of capital by building spare parts in your garage, whether one uses them in one's own business or one sells them to other businesses. If anything, this would be the norm.

[Kuchigakatai]

Totally unrelated, but I came across this and I can't resist sharing it in our Chilean thread:

[zompist]

Totally unrelated, but I came across this and I can't resist sharing it in our Chilean thread:

The two main characters there are Condorito and Pepe Cortisona, from the Chilean comic strip by Pepo (René Ríos). Not sure who the kid behind them is.

[rotting bones]

in Russia and China general living standards did not improve when the Leninists took over

I don't support non-democratic socialism, but I don't think that's true. Even in Russia, living standards eventually improved under the Leninists. But although the economy kept growing throughout the Soviet period, living standards plateaued, causing the intelligentsia to believe that socialism had reached the limits of its growth. This was seen as a problem because Marxism had led them to believe that socialism can outcompete capitalism in terms of productivity.

After the Soviet Union was dissolved, Russian living standards fell drastically, and they still haven't caught up to Soviet times. Because of the low income in Russia, it is not uncommon for there to be Russian families where both parents are forced to work multiple jobs to support the family. These people often say they wish the Soviet Union was back because they knew their parents didn't have to work so hard back then.

[hwhatting]

in Russia and China general living standards did not improve when the Leninists took over

I don't support non-democratic socialism, but I don't think that's true. Even in Russia, living standards eventually improved under the Leninists. But although the economy kept growing throughout the Soviet period, living standards plateaued, causing the intelligentsia to believe that socialism had reached the limits of its growth. This was seen as a problem because Marxism had led them to believe that socialism can outcompete capitalism in terms of productivity.

After the Soviet Union was dissolved, Russian living standards fell drastically, and they still haven't caught up to Soviet times. Because of the low income in Russia, it is not uncommon for there to be Russian families where both parents are forced to work multiple jobs to support the family. These people often say they wish the Soviet Union was back because they knew their parents didn't have to work so hard back then.

Parallel posts... I answered to that in the other thread. But you shouldn't rely on anecdata like some people saying this or that - look at surveys or at election results; they show that while people may not like aspects of the current system and miss aspects of the Soviet system, only a minority of 15-20% actually wants the Soviet system back. Nostalgia is independent of that; simply a lot of people who are now middle aged had their childhood and adolescence in that time, and most people tend to be nostalgic for that period (I remember how my grandmother used to reminisce about the fun she had at the Nazi youth organisation...).

[MacAnDàil]

I've discovered the most anxiety-inducing thing I have experienced in life: being a few days away from maybe being under a far-right government. How do you manage to put up with it Torco?

[Torco]

lmfao I love that. the kid behind them is the mascot for the ACHS, asociación chilena de seguridad <yeah it means what english intuition suggests>. here's a recent incarnation of him.
youtubelink
the rest of them include various characters from chilean TV shows.

I've discovered the most anxiety-inducing thing I have experienced in life: being a few days away from maybe being under a far-right government. How do you manage to put up with it Torco?

honest? a mix of fatalism, accelerationism and a general sense of 'honestly it can't be that much worse than the damned neoliberals: piñera was not very meaningfully different from lagos, and hey, trump's the only us president not to declare a new genocidal war'. I don't think it'll work for everyone tho.

Honestly, though, it's not surpising that however many people miss the soviet days in russia: the transition to capitalism was, in a world, horrific. not that I'm saying the CCCP was some wonderful utopia, but it wasn't the hell US media would have one believe either, at least according to the people I've known who lived there (a handful of old allende supporters my family knew fled to the soviet union and the GDR for different lenghts of time), and it mostly worked as far as countries go: they remember it neither as heaven or hell, but just a country: a big, relatively powerful, relatively corrupt, sometimes prosperous, easier for some than for others to navigate and survive and prosper in, horrible in some ways, neat in others. I incidentally think this is the correct way to think about those regimes our overlords wish us to think of as the enemy: sure, they torture and disappeared dissidents, but so does china, and israel, and persia, and arabia, and so do the angelic bulwarks of freedom knows as the western countries (environmental activists being suicided, anyone? not to mention assange) the soviet people were ruled by a dystopic as hell tyrannical regime in cahoots with the rich, the military, shadowy church authorities and organized crime, but then again so are we, so... yeah.

[Ares Land]

Honestly, though, it's not surpising that however many people miss the soviet days in russia: the transition to capitalism was, in a world, horrific. not that I'm saying the CCCP was some wonderful utopia, but it wasn't the hell US media would have one believe either, at least according to the people I've known who lived there (a handful of old allende supporters my family knew fled to the soviet union and the GDR for different lenghts of time), and it mostly worked as far as countries go: they remember it neither as heaven or hell, but just a country: a big, relatively powerful, relatively corrupt, sometimes prosperous, easier for some than for others to navigate and survive and prosper in, horrible in some ways, neat in others. I incidentally think this is the correct way to think about those regimes our overlords wish us to think of as the enemy: sure, they torture and disappeared dissidents, but so does china, and israel, and persia, and arabia, and so do the angelic bulwarks of freedom knows as the western countries (environmental activists being suicided, anyone? not to mention assange) the soviet people were ruled by a dystopic as hell tyrannical regime in cahoots with the rich, the military, shadowy church authorities and organized crime, but then again so are we, so... yeah.

Post-Soviet Russia is indeed dystopic in its own right. Though I'm still not eager to use the Soviet Union as a model!

I do think of Russia as our enemy; I mean, besides all the rest it's gotten into, it has tried its best at destabilizing my own country, and succeeded. Our politics is now a contest between between the evil and the insane; that's a direct result of ten years of propaganda efforts.

In the EU, we never treated Russia as the enemy. We treated it, in fact, in the exact same way you suggest. The end result was, as I mentioned, a steady flow of propaganda, plus economic dependence. We can't, in fact, follow the foreign policy we'd like since we depend on Russian gas.

[hwhatting]

@Torco: Yes, on one hand, all is relative, and few places are the caricature hell some people make them out to be. Even Nazi Germany was a nice place to live, if you weren't Jewish, Roma or Sinti, not involved in communist or social democratic politics, and generally kept your mouth shut when you disagreed, at least before the war began affecting the average German. My maternal grandmother had fond memories of her youth in the 30s, and like they tend to say about authoritarian regimes, "you could walk the streets at night without fearing crime". (She also believed the propaganda lie that Poland started WW II).
But I'd maintain that there are differences in degrees; in Germany, I know that there is money influencing politics and corruption in some parts of politics, but it's not as pervasive as in other countries I've lived and worked in. I never had to go through people with "connections" or pay bribes to get any official business done here, as opposed to some places in the Middle East, Africa, or the former USSR. Whatever the merits of Assange's case, he could fight in court and drag it out for years, instead of simply being disappeared or shot in the back. I understand that you in Chile have different experiences and that for you, the distance of your system to various authoritarian regimes looks less, but I think these distances still should also not be underestimated, .

[Torco]

I do think of Russia as our enemy; I mean, besides all the rest it's gotten into, it has tried its best at destabilizing my own country, and succeeded. Our politics is now a contest between between the evil and the insane; that's a direct result of ten years of propaganda efforts.

I think you're right: russia is in a way your enemy... or, perhaps more precisely, your country's geopolitical enemy. those things (destabilization, propaganda and the rest of it) are reciprocal and I suspect inherent to the way the great game is and will be played this century. I don't *know* how much, for example, of the antivax and qanon movements are the product of russian intervention, but I'd be intensely surprised if their equivalent to the CIA () is not cheering it on and figuring out how to assist it.

@hwhatting: I don't think everything is relative, tbh: there is a fact as to whether or not, say, China is hell: what's relative is the sort of messaging one is exposed to, how much resistence one exerts to maintain one's views independent to the constant barrage of propa one is subject to, how much info one has access to and so on. I agree, in principle, as to differences in degrees: sure the states in the imperial core work better than those in the periphery, but the degree of totalitarianism (or, at least, the things one objects to about totalitarianism) doesn't seem so different to me: it's not the case all chinese dissidents, for example, are disappeared and shot in the neck: plenty are tried and given limited sentences (i think there's a wikilist), just like the us does not disappear all of its dissidents, but tries and punishes limitedly many of them. the difficulty of differences in degrees as a methodology to ascertain which regimes are the most evil is that every regime will indoctrinate its people to only pick degrees of certain parameters in their evaluation rubric: the liberal regime will make you think "yeah, our government is evil, but at least we have separation of powers", the soviets will make you think "yeah, our government is evil, but at least we have some rights guaranteed and we're walking towards communism", Daesh will make you think "yeah, our caliphate is evil, but not as evil as the demonic kuffar we fight". like, in other words, distances are to be considered, but every distance is a choice, and which distances to measure and add up is... well, complicated.

man, I think I'm kind of becoming an anarchist...

[Ares Land]

I'm really not sure about the propaganda, at least here in France (things may be different in the US.)

China here is portrayed as a very respectable industrial powerhouse, which may be taking things a little too far in some respects but still has the right idea, and one we'd be well inspired to follow if we don't want to end up a Third World nation.
The idea that China is evil exists and is stated on occasion but it's very much a minority view.
With Russia it's about a fifty-fifty thing.

From a leftist perspective, I do believe we should keep in mind that Russia and China are exactly the models conservatives have in mind.
Lots of manly discipline, plus you get to exploit your employees as you wish and pay no taxes. Oh, and none of that nonsense about minorities: these can simply disappear. This is exactly what the modern right-winger has in mind.

(Oh sure, Russia and China 'suicide' or disappear their oligarchs sometimes. Western conservatives aren't that different: they like big business as long as it toes the party line. Go check Twitter and watch the far-right frothing at the mouth when they talk about Netflix.)

[hwhatting]

it's not the case all chinese dissidents, for example, are disappeared and shot in the neck: plenty are tried and given limited sentences (i think there's a wikilist), just like the us does not disappear all of its dissidents, but tries and punishes limitedly many of them.

But here again there are differences of degree - the scope of what you can say and do before you get on the wrong side of the security apparatus is much wider in the US or European Democracies than in China or Russia.

the difficulty of differences in degrees as a methodology to ascertain which regimes are the most evil is that every regime will indoctrinate its people to only pick degrees of certain parameters in their evaluation rubric: the liberal regime will make you think "yeah, our government is evil, but at least we have separation of powers", the soviets will make you think "yeah, our government is evil, but at least we have some rights guaranteed and we're walking towards communism", Daesh will make you think "yeah, our caliphate is evil, but not as evil as the demonic kuffar we fight". like, in other words, distances are to be considered, but every distance is a choice, and which distances to measure and add up is... well, complicated.

Well, of course we all have views based on how we were socialised and value different things, and on what we know from personal experience. Personally, besides Germany, I have lived iand worked in countries in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South-East Asia, so I think I am not totally blind to the possibility of other systems and values. I also know that, as a Western Expatriate, I have a higher degree of freedom and protection in many of those countries than the locals. Based on that, I actually value the separation of powers, free media, an independent judiciary, the possibility to change things through elections, etc,, because countries who don't have those, independent of what they profess as their official goals and ideology, in general fuck over their own people more than those who have them (they may be better on this or that individual metric, but in General they are worse when you take the whole picture and look at the long run). There's a reason why those countries don't want these things, and that is that the powerful done't want to be accountable.

man, I think I'm kind of becoming an anarchist...

That's not my position, but I think it's not a bad position

[MacAnDàil]

I've discovered the most anxiety-inducing thing I have experienced in life: being a few days away from maybe being under a far-right government. How do you manage to put up with it Torco?

honest? a mix of fatalism, accelerationism and a general sense of 'honestly it can't be that much worse than the damned neoliberals: piñera was not very meaningfully different from lagos, and hey, trump's the only us president not to declare a new genocidal war'. I don't think it'll work for everyone tho.

Honestly, though, it's not surpising that however many people miss the soviet days in russia: the transition to capitalism was, in a world, horrific. not that I'm saying the CCCP was some wonderful utopia, but it wasn't the hell US media would have one believe either, at least according to the people I've known who lived there (a handful of old allende supporters my family knew fled to the soviet union and the GDR for different lenghts of time), and it mostly worked as far as countries go: they remember it neither as heaven or hell, but just a country: a big, relatively powerful, relatively corrupt, sometimes prosperous, easier for some than for others to navigate and survive and prosper in, horrible in some ways, neat in others. I incidentally think this is the correct way to think about those regimes our overlords wish us to think of as the enemy: sure, they torture and disappeared dissidents, but so does china, and israel, and persia, and arabia, and so do the angelic bulwarks of freedom knows as the western countries (environmental activists being suicided, anyone? not to mention assange) the soviet people were ruled by a dystopic as hell tyrannical regime in cahoots with the rich, the military, shadowy church authorities and organized crime, but then again so are we, so... yeah.

That's a disappointing answer, to be honest, because I find that part of the problem is false equivalence, acting like Macron and Le Pen would just as bad which I strongly disagree with: Le Pen is much worse, and I think I would have a similar opinion of Trump and Kast.

[Travis B.]

I've discovered the most anxiety-inducing thing I have experienced in life: being a few days away from maybe being under a far-right government. How do you manage to put up with it Torco?

honest? a mix of fatalism, accelerationism and a general sense of 'honestly it can't be that much worse than the damned neoliberals: piñera was not very meaningfully different from lagos, and hey, trump's the only us president not to declare a new genocidal war'. I don't think it'll work for everyone tho.

Honestly, though, it's not surpising that however many people miss the soviet days in russia: the transition to capitalism was, in a world, horrific. not that I'm saying the CCCP was some wonderful utopia, but it wasn't the hell US media would have one believe either, at least according to the people I've known who lived there (a handful of old allende supporters my family knew fled to the soviet union and the GDR for different lenghts of time), and it mostly worked as far as countries go: they remember it neither as heaven or hell, but just a country: a big, relatively powerful, relatively corrupt, sometimes prosperous, easier for some than for others to navigate and survive and prosper in, horrible in some ways, neat in others. I incidentally think this is the correct way to think about those regimes our overlords wish us to think of as the enemy: sure, they torture and disappeared dissidents, but so does china, and israel, and persia, and arabia, and so do the angelic bulwarks of freedom knows as the western countries (environmental activists being suicided, anyone? not to mention assange) the soviet people were ruled by a dystopic as hell tyrannical regime in cahoots with the rich, the military, shadowy church authorities and organized crime, but then again so are we, so... yeah.

That's a disappointing answer, to be honest, because I find that part of the problem is false equivalence, acting like Macron and Le Pen would just as bad which I strongly disagree with: Le Pen is much worse, and I think I would have a similar opinion of Trump and Kast.

Agree myself. It is easy to fall into the trap of false equivalence, and from there it is easy to adopt positions that effectively favor what is clearly the worse choice, whether it's Russia, Le Pen, Trump, or like. Unless you are deliberately taking an accelerationist position, which then is simply evil.

[Ares Land]

I don't want to answer for Torco, but the political situation in Chile is way different.
As far as I can see, Piñera was as bad as Trump. Probably worse. I mean Trump didn't make his fortune exploiting his connection to a ruling fascist dictatorship.

In France we're rather privileged. We're big enough that nobody tried to force the Washington consensus down our throats(*) or organized coup. I think it's naturally for expectations to be different.

(*Our centre and our right-wing are supposedly neoliberal, I know, or at least we like to say that a lot. But everything is relative: Macron's a hard-line bolchevik compared to what they put up with in Chile.)

[Travis B.]

I don't want to answer for Torco, but the political situation in Chile is way different.
As far as I can see, Piñera was as bad as Trump. Probably worse. I mean Trump didn't make his fortune exploiting his connection to a ruling fascist dictatorship.

In France we're rather privileged. We're big enough that nobody tried to force the Washington consensus down our throats(*) or organized coup. I think it's naturally for expectations to be different.

(*Our centre and our right-wing are supposedly neoliberal, I know, or at least we like to say that a lot. But everything is relative: Macron's a hard-line bolchevik compared to what they put up with in Chile.)

The difference with Piñera Kast is that the whole false equivalence thing did not apply to him because the person he was running against was clearly not equivalent by any measure, so it was harder to throw one's hands up in the air and declare that "they both suck" in his case.

[Ares Land]

This year's fascist was Kast. Piñera was the previous one, unless I'm mistaken.
My point is, a certain amount of fatalism is certainly understandable when every other president is a Pinochet fan, as seems to be the case in Chile.

(I still don't condone false equivalence either!)

[Travis B.]

This year's fascist was Kast. Piñera was the previous one, unless I'm mistaken.
My point is, a certain amount of fatalism is certainly understandable when every other president is a Pinochet fan, as seems to be the case in Chile.

(I still don't condone false equivalence either!)

Yeah, I meant Kast; I corrected my post above.

[Torco]

omg we lost the damned plebiscite wtf happened aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

wacky shit, huh? if you've not been following the chilean process, on sept 4 the chileans went to vote on the second plebiscite of the constitutional process, which consisted on voting approve/reject (the idea of a new constitution, where 80% voted approve) and then voting on the people who would compose the convención constitucional. on this last of votes, something like 62% of voters went with 'reject', meaning no this new constitutional draft is not the constitution. the constitutional process which began with the estallido social -or, rather, with the november accords and the subsequent constitutional ammendments- ends with this result, and all is, nominally, as it was: the 1980 constitution remains the law of the land, with -almost- all of its locks and authoritarian enclaves, and the hope of a new constitution is, legally speaking at least, totally dead. this, of course, was sad and frustrating for me personally, and so I claim no objectivity here whatsoever lmao. anyway, the results were quite unusual as far as chilean elections go for the following reasons

* turnout was as high as the republic ever has had by a large margin: this was to be expected, because of how the history of voting laws has happened: basically, we used to have voluntary registration and obligatory voting for those registered (fines are seldom enforced, but they're hefty and they're not never enforced). then, not so long ago, voting became optional and registration automatic (which is the same as mandatory, you just are in the voting rolls if you're an adult and have voting rights, which means being a national or a foreigner with some years living in the country under legal resident status, i think it's 5. this resulted in turnout rates relative to the whole voting rolls which are considered by talking heads on TV land as quite low, though not that low, internationally: they generally were 50% for important elections and 35 for the rest. Chile has for my whole life <and possible before> had this one meme in relatively high frequency, i.e. a lot of people think like this and it's expected that one does: the meme goes something like "voting is your civic duty". most don't really has any reasons, that i've heard of, of *why* it's a civic duty beyond platittudes like "if you don't vote how then can you complain" or "it's your duty to participate in democracy cause it's bad if you don't". it's not very clear *why* voting was made optional when it did, though it could have to do with the subsequent passing of various bills giving money to candidates for getting voted through bank loans and stuff, but the only period of my life where there has been politics in chile was during the time it's been voluntary: the frente amplio coalition started, as well as many other smaller parties, bills getting passed or not was in the news and in conversations of people, etcetera. anyway, low turnouts eventually miffed politicians and now for this most-important voting of the exit plebiscite, the november accords stipulated obligatory voting. anyway this meant that everyone legally allowed to vote was legally mandated to vote against like a 200 dollars fine. I don't know purchasing parity with rich anglo countries but think of it like the rent of a really shitty appartment in santiago... so quite a bit of dosh. anyway, yeah, huge turnout.

* results were exceptionally homogeneous at the national level. like, really. sure, I'm bummed that my precious left-wing constitution was rejected and now we're stuck against with the pinochet one, but abstractly, intellectually, the thing I find most interesting about the whole thing is this. everywhere it was 63-37 +- 5 or somethig. poor areas, rich areas, city areas, rural areas, in atacama as well as in the jungles of valdivia, both in the summer beach resorts of the central coast and in the frozen wastes of the strait of magallanes.... everywhere! outliers to this are like three boroughs(counties?districts? we call them comunas, you know, city hall level, parking, where you take the driving test and pay parking fines). but yeah, as cross-comuna as I've ever seen an election result in this here country.

a few other tidbits to understand the situation
* there was a vast campaign of both fake and real news against the constitutional convention: coverage of its content was kept to a minimum, and the airwaves resonated the whole day with this or that nothing-controversy in the constitution, like "OMG ELISA LONCÓN WENT TO A PARTY OMG". in addition, there was no paucity of actual controversies that were "newsworthy", like an elected convencional having lied about having cancer, some guy singing and playing guitar during his intervention in a session, another convencional going "this convention's fucking retarded", and like seventy thousand other stories. but fake news were also powerfully implemented, including 'NC gonna nationalize your house', 'NC gonna close the police and give the country to the criminals', 'NC gonna force children to get abortions', and you can imagine the rest.

* the only relatively left-wing TV channel got closed, cause advertisers withdrew their financial support for it, leading to a strike, leading to now that signal has informertials all day every day.

* the ukraine war and covid have hit here relatively hard: only argentina and venezuela have recent bigger inflation that us, gdp is negative, and there's really really high levels of homelessness: you're not gonna take a bus anywhere without passing a few tents, and in some places there are veritable tent citites: not in the periphery, like it used to be, but a lot more and mostly downtown and besides highways. sad shit.

* leftos did a really really bad job of campaigning, and rightos did a very good job: not in canvassing and the like, canvassing efforts for apruebo were really really big, but the right was a) campaining for the rechazo since the convention b) on every channel every day c) and using social media a lot. we did none of those things.

* the constitutional draft was very ambitiously written: this angers me somewhat, I'd have been okay with the most minimalist constitution ever, something like "article one chile is a country", "article two we have like a congress and also president", "article three we respect human rights", and little else: the *reason* we wanted to change the constitution <the left wing, that is> was that it made politics impossible, and so just preserved the status quo: want to deprivatize any of the things pinochet privatized? unconstitutional. want to reduce the working week? unconstitutional. anti-monopoly legislation? unconstitutional. the 'tribunal constitutional' functions as bit like the supreme court in the US, blocking any meaningful legislation except for those right wingers want. anyway, instead, the convención wrote up this huge document with like 500 articles covering anything and everything from abortion being a woman's right to closing down the senate to establishing native people's law systems... deprivatizing water rights, establishing gender parity in any and all government bodies, everything. it wasn't radical enough on what matters, i.e. it said nothing about the economic system, but it was strong enough on that front to basically delete the "estado subsidiario" constitutional mandate of the 80's paper: subsidiary state means that the role of the state is to subsidize the market, meaning it can't do anything a private business can do but must instead comission it through, I don't know, requests for proposals and so on. bids: this doctrine, that of subsidiarity, is the keystone of the pinochet economic model and the flagship issue of the right-wing: anyway, the constitution wasn't super left wing economically, but it was super left wing on all of the "culture war" stuff: abortion, trans, gay, bi, immigrants, native peoples, black chileans (referred to as the 'afrodescended tribal peoples', i know, fucking yikes!) the neurodivergent, everyone got explicit mension and addressing of their issues.

so what happened?
fuck if I know, it'll be the central debate of chilean politics for the next year, and *a* central debate of chilean politics for the next ten. Far as I can see, though, it was the media. yeah, yeah, lefto whining that under capitalism the mass media influences opinion at the behest of the burgeoisie, real original, ah? but really: the model fits. people who are somewhat left-wing <and, at least in chile, left wing/progressive functions kind of like an ethnic descriptor>, which are kind of flatly about 20~30% throughout the country didn't buy the fake news and the media campaign, but everyone else did. if this is true, we'd expect the very flat geographical distro that we get, and I can't think of any other explanation that would give you such smooth results: chile is very diverse, tbh, because of its geography, and this shows on elections in general. the weakness of the model is the concept of "left wing", of which I'm not very sure, but I *do* observe a strong tendency of bimodality here: anecdotally, people are either left-wingish progressive, pro gay, pro trans, sympathetic culturally to the whole victor jara inti illimani thing, and voted apruebo, or they aren't... but you can change left wing with 'against neoliberalism', or simply 'academic coastal elites' <not coastal in chile> and the model works fine. whatever the reason, the results were very cross-geographic and so I believe the explanation must be found in cross-geographic causes as well, and an obvious one is the media.

And why shouldn't, tbh, a non-political person vote rechazo? like, if I imagine myself not caring about politics, well... I don't know, changing the constitution is a big deal, and everyone on TV is saying this one is bad... well, then i guess it's bad, so fuck it. ain't nobody got time for all that reading, and informing myself on nuanced political issues everyone seems to say something different about. meh, sure, rechazo.

or, I don't know, it may be the venezuelans and colombians... we've gotten like million venezuelans these last 20 years, and the overwhelming majority vote with the right... cause if you like the bolivarian revolution you don't escape it to sodding latin american ancapistan, do you?

what now?
fuck if I know. well, immediately after the rechazo vote students and other of the core groups that the estallido social functioned around resumed protests: buses have been burned and whatnot, but the scale is very very small. it's *possible* that on october people will take to the streets again, on the very simbolic date of october the 18th, but i wouldn't bet on it. most right-wing parties (sauf Kast's) promised that even if they won they'd just start another constitutional process, instead of doing the whole "okay, no constitution then. we keep this one, end of story" thing... though they really want to.

one option is that the kast party wins this internal dispute amongst the right and they just stay with the 80' constitution. this seems to me likely, but not certain.

some in the right wants a panel of experts to just write a "good" constitution, preferrably unelected. lagos, the man who privatized inter-urban highways and turned urban transport in santiago into a lattice of private monopolies wants to be one such expert.

maybe there will be a new process, and the right will again sabotage it with the same tactics, in which case, that's it, end of story, business as usual, nothing to see here.

maybe we win the second time around? though who knows, if the convención constitucional 2 electric boogaloo elections constitute a "moderate" enough convención, it's possible they'll just write the 80ies constitution again, or worse...

finally, we leftos have adopted a despondent and sneerful attitude towards the voters in general after thsi surprising result: now whenever some news exposes corruption, businesses abusing the poor, or yet another case of the rich and the military being immune from the law, there's seventy guys like me in the comments going "yeah, well, that's what yall voted for, fuckos, enjoy being fucking ancapistan for 30 more years." and laughing at "hahaha fucking idiots you believed the right, enjoy your fucking granny dying waiting for that operation in the public system". like, the idea is that people who fell for it <it being the media campaign> are bad and should feel bad, but somehow I don't expect that strategy to work.

the mainstream media narrative is that "the convention was bad cause it wasn't open enough to dialogue with the right and also because they scandals which is bad, let's hope this new process is better", or something like that. This could be because the country's ruling class is split regarding whether it is good or not that we have a new constitution, even if it knew for sure they didn't want this one.

so yeah, I don't know what's going to happen.

[Ares Land]

Thanks, man. That's a very nice summary and I'm glad I understand the issue better.

(Over here the coverage was um... poor. Which is a pity really. It's not like we see how constitutional referenda go every day.)