Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile

by Julia Paley

Amid protests against the Pinochet regime, a group of población (shantytown) residents came together in 1984 to challenge poor health care in their community and to denounce military rule. How did their organization respond seven years later when Chile's transition to democracy brought an end to dictatorship but no clear solution to ongoing health problems? Marketing Democracy shows how the exercise of power and the strategies of social movements transformed with the transition from a military to an elected-civilian regime in Chile. The term "marketing democracy" refers first to how contemporary democracies are shaped by transnational market forces, and second to how politicians have promoted democracy with the twin goals of attracting foreign capital and diminishing social movements.

315 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2001

Reviews

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Towards the end of 1980s, the Chilean bourgeoisie and its global lords trashed Pinochet and bought a brand new "democratic" regime for themselves. The new regime, very democratically, preserved the political institutions and economic structures Pinochet had built but gradually stifled the popular movement and its organisations.

With their neighbourhood assemblies, revolutionary parties and solidarity networks now peacefully smashed into pieces, the citizens were shepherded into "micro-enterprises" and the government controlled "non-governmental organisations". Finally, there was democracy in Chile, if it meant voting once in every 4 years and minding your own personal business for the rest of the time.

Paley investigates the quite normal phenomenon of more bourgeois democracy leading to less and less popular participation. She says:

"At the very moment when countries regained democratic political institutions, key decisions about public life and the economy had moved out beyond the reach of the electorate -ineed, beyond the reach of the nation-state. Elections may have been heralded as the sign of democracy, but in the context of neoliberal economics, they had largely been emptied of democratic force." (p. 4)

And throughout her book, she carefully analyses how the democracy was marketed by the ruling classes of Chile in a way to bolster a specific type of citizenship and participation where the person was forced to abandon her old political repertoire of protesting, demonstrating and criticising, and adopt the new neoliberal toolbox of taking responsibility for your own life, starting a businesses and providing, through NGOs, voluntary services the government is supposed to provide.

And Paley claims, "These processes meant that precisely when Chile and other Latin American countries were experiencing transitions to democracy, many of the crucial decisions that affected people’s lives were not accessible to the influence of citizens." Good old bourgeois democracy, starts working brilliantly well as soon as the citizens stop poking their noses into it!

The book is not an easy read though. It is a work of ethnography full of specific field notes and long narratives. I was more interested in the general socio-political history of the so-called democratic transition and book has some very good chapters about it.

[Javiera · Rating 5 out of 5]

An anthropological lens on squatter rights, delving into interesting paradigms of participation during a tumultuous period in Chilean political history.