Deconstructing hegemony: The state/labor partial regime in Chile

Abstract

Hegemony is viewed through the lens of the state-labor partial regime in post-authoritarian Chile. A review of the hegemonic "debate" reveals that agricultural labor was excluded from labor incorporation in 1932. Rural labor's subsequent superexploitation subsidized industrial workers with cheap production of wage goods. Agricultural workers' incorporation in the mid-1960s unified the workforce and initiated the organic crisis that intensified with the election of a Socialist executive. The dictatorship that overthrew Allende disarticulated all forms of collective action. Its coercive foundation and neo-liberal economic project forced a retreat from collective to individual strategies. The current regime is left with hierarchical state/labor relations wrapped around a core of atomizational pluralism. Inclusionary pluralist labor reforms simultaneously fulfill ideological bases of consent and obstruct the working class unity needed to achieve substantive gains. On this foundation of individualism, a bourgeois hegemonic project (safe from collective counter-hegemonic threat) is being constructed to protect the rule of capital.