The Civil Wars in Chile: (or The Bourgeois Revolutions that Never Were)

by Maurice Zeitlin

Overview

This penetrating sociological study of the causes, consequences, and historical meaning of the civil wars in mid- and late-nineteenth century Chile argues that they were abortive bourgeois revolutions fought out among rival segments of Chile's dominant class. Indeed, it concludes that, in general, not only class but also intraclass struggles can be decisive historically, especially at transitional moments.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691630571
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #541
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Civil Wars in Chile

(Or the Bourgeois Revolutions that Never Were)

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By Maurice Zeitlin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07665-2

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CHAPTER 1

PRELUDE: CLASS, STATE, AND CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT

The civil wars in Chile had decisive history-making consequences. They were crucial in shaping the pattern of capitalist development in Chile, the distinctiveness of its class relations, and the form taken by the Chilean state. If the development of capitalism took contrasting "classical" paths, revolutionary and democratic in England and Western Europe, reactionary and authoritarian in Prussia and Japan, Chile took neither of these paths into the twentieth century. But at two different historic moments, in the civil wars of the 1850s and of 1891, it came close to taking both. The first civil war was, as I shall show, an abortive bourgeois revolution (though its terrain was, paradoxically, neither feudal nor absolutist); the second, a generation later, was a "revolution from above" that failed.

The first of these revolutionary possibilities opened up in the wake of the early nineteenth century incipient development of capitalist production relations, spurred especially by the accumulation of capital in copper mining, grain milling, and cereal exports and by the ensuing dislocations and rapid changes in the countryside and in the burgeoning mining centers of the northern provinces. This mid-century revolutionary movement in Chile, unlike that quintessential bourgeois revolution in France, was, as we shall see, led and participated in directly by the young bourgeoisie — by leading capitalists and their representatives, allied in armed struggle with peasants and artisans, self-consciously aiming to break the dominion of large landed property and erect a democratic state.

The second revolutionary possibility appeared with the quick growth of manufacturing that took place during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) and the burst of capital accumulation following Chile's annexation of the nitrate territories of its defeated Bolivian and Peruvian neighbors. Under the presidency of José Manuel Balmaceda (1886–1891), Chile's own variant of a "revolution from above" — of capitalist development enforced by an authoritarian state under the aegis of a hegemonic segment of its dominant class — became a proximate historical alternative. But that historical alternative was suppressed by Balmaceda's defeat in the civil war of 1891, just as the revolutionary democratic alternative had been suppressed a generation earlier; with that unwitting revolution from above undone, the nature of Chile's unique and composite social formation was essentially determined: a capitalist democracy in which the large landed estate was pivotal.

The historic peculiarity of Chile's "bourgeois democracy" — until it was smashed by a reactionary military coup in the autumn of 1973 — lay in the anomaly that the society it governed never became quite bourgeois itself. What explains this? How, on the one hand, was capitalist development in Chile stunted? How, on the other, did it become a relatively stable political democracy? These are the inseparable theoretical issues involved in my empirical analyses of the causes and consequences of Chile's two decisive nineteenth-century civil wars. They are also the historical questions that, taken together, constitute the mystery of the development of, as Max Weber would have said, "the characteristic uniqueness of the reality" of Chile.

The Dominant Class and the State in Historical Development

To understand the historic consequences of these civil wars and their outcomes, to discover the extent of their social reverberations, it is necessary first to reveal their origins. They were, I shall show, bourgeois revolutions — first from below and then from above — that never were. The thesis that these insurrections were not merely civil wars but abortive bourgeois revolutions is the issue of Chile's historical development. It also implicitly places the discontinuities, ruptures, and transformations of the precapitalist social and political fabric, of class relations and state structures, by and through concrete class and intraclass struggles, at the very center of the analysis of development and "underdevelopment." This in turn requires us to take seriously as an empirical question the issue of the so-called "autonomy of the state": of the extent to which, at critical moments, the activities of the state may generate new social relationships and productive forces or inhibit their development, even against the historical interests of the dominant class itself. State policy, and therefore the matter of who holds state power and even of who staffs it directly, can be crucial if not decisive in those determinant but contingent transitions when unwonted forms of social production emerge; it can effectively determine the extent and nature of their development and consolidation.

But this does not necessarily imply, though the possibility is not denied, that the so-called state is fully independent, unconditioned by class relations. "Class power" and "state power" assuredly differ; but the problem is what the relationship between them is, not merely in an abstract model but in concrete, historically specific circumstances. To what extent the state is effectively "insulated from the impact of non-political groups and procedures," run by "state rulers" who have "fundamental conflicts of interest" with "the existing dominant class," is not and simply cannot be a so-called general theoretical question. It must be an empirical question: the question of social causality, in this instance as elsewhere, is not a question of laws or of ahistorical propositions meant somehow to be universally valid (and thus vacuous), but a question of concrete causal relationships. We shall see, for instance, that contrary to what now passes for political theory in "structuralist Marxism," a state that was bourgeois in "structure" governed a social formation that was surely not yet dominated by capitalist relations of production, and it enforced the dominion of large landed property — if it was not indeed the mere "instrument" of the ruling great landlords of the Central Valley. This can be understood only by a historically specific theory of these concrete class-state relations.

It need not trouble us either that the "political crises that have launched social revolutions" have scarcely been mere "epiphenomenal reflections of societal strains or class contradictions." It may well be correct, as Theda Skocpol argues, that "the political-conflict groups that have figured in social revolutionary struggles have not merely represented social interests and forces. [What does "merely" mean? If it means "only," then "mainly" and surely "partially" are not precluded.] Rather, they have formed as interest groups within and fought ["merely"?] about the forms of state structures." For this is, again, an intrinsically empirical question. The critical question is the causal relevance of political crises and class contradictions in a revolutionary situation and how they are related.

In the historical literature on the civil war of 1891 in Chile, the so-called autonomy of the opposing political-conflict groups has long been a major issue (antedating the current "structuralist" vogue by many decades). In the view of most scholars who have studied it, the fratricidal split in the dominant class under President Balmaceda was not "social" but rather "political," with the divisions that led to civil war originating over questions of state principles. In this reigning interpretation, the "Congressionalists" and their opponents, that is, President Balmaceda and his adherents, constituted political-conflict groups that arose within the state itself, fighting over how it was to be structured but not differing otherwise in their social locations. In one variant of this interpretation, the crisis that launched the civil war of 1891 was a crisis internal to the state itself, in part generated by the state's effort to appropriate resources (nitrate revenues, in particular) and devote them to social objectives contrary to the desires and objective interests of the dominant class. The civil war of 1891 was, in short, either a conflict between the dominant class and the state, or a conflict within the state itself, according to the prevailing view. My empirical analysis will reveal, however, that the men who sought to defend their nation from continuing foreign encroachment and to put Chile on the path of independent capitalist development were not — whatever others may have found elsewhere — free-floating "state rulers" or "relatively autonomous bureaucrats." On the contrary, they were the consummate representatives of a distinctive bourgeois segment of the dominant class — of a productive class segment of capitalists having its own aspirations, needs, and imperatives.

Thus a critical error in those analyses that purport to find such intrastate crises within the old regimes as the "real" source of revolutionary crises may well be their conception of "the dominant class" as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt (as was true of Balmaceda) "attempts of state rulers merely to perform the state's 'own' functions may create conflicts of interest with the dominant class." But the interests of that class, and its internal structure, may be anything but homogeneous, and state policies may impinge differently and have opposing effects on its various internal segments. Although it might appear to have been a conflict within the state itself, or between "state rulers" or "relatively autonomous bureaucrats" and the dominant class, that created a revolutionary situation, either from above or below, the reality could have been quite different. In fact, that crisis could well have originated in a conflict between segments of the dominant class, on whom the activities and policies of the state impinged in opposing ways, because of their different locations in the productive process as a whole (and in the accumulation and appropriation process in particular), despite their otherwise common ownership of the means of production. Such "class segments" thus have the inherent potential of developing their own specific variants of "intra-class consciousness" and common action vis-à-vis each other as well as against other contending classes. Of course, the extent to which their varying "intraclass situations," as Weber might have called them, manifest themselves politically depends on the specific combination of concrete historical circumstances and structural relations (in particular, those differentiating or integrating the various class segments).

But to discover the relevance of intraclass contradictions in originating what appears to be a crisis within the state itself, one has to have a theory that is causally adequate to the historically specific, even conjunctural, contradictory interests at stake in the conflict. The empirical analysis of concrete causal relationships and the elaboration of a theory of the specific historical sequence involved has to precede the attempt to analyze the social location or "social composition" of the leading antagonists in these historic struggles. No general count of social differences or associations can be adequately revealing: one must first know where to look and what to look for; counts that are not the product of a historically specific theory of the social processes at work can only "denature historical inquiry before it starts."

In fact, I do count; I do closely examine the contrasting class situations of the most conspicuous protagonists and antagonists in the nineteenth-century civil wars, in these epochal dramas in Chile's historical development. But I do so as an integral part of the analysis of the sources of the conflict and of the realm of historical possibilities they embodied and the real structural choices they represented. Only by combining an analysis of the specific historical circumstances in which they acted and of their concrete interests and objectives — and what these circumstances and interests compelled as well as permitted them to do, wittingly or not — with such an analysis of their different social locations can we learn why they fought, what the defeat of one or the other side meant for Chilean history, and what those who lost might have done had they won.

Thus if history often has the retrospective appearance of inevitability, the analysis of the concrete historical circumstances in which rival segments of the dominant class in nineteenth-century Chile fought for political hegemony in their class and power in the state reveals how contingent and historically decisive the attainment of such hegemony really is. It reveals again how thoroughly social structures are themselves historical products, actively shaped — within the limits these structures impose — in real political struggle. My research thus led me to conclude that not only the class but also the intraclass struggles that occur when capitalist production relations are still emerging in a given area or nation can decisively shape the extent and historical form of their ascendance (or decline). In particular, which segment of the dominant class itself wins political hegemony and enforces it through the use of state power is crucial in determining the pattern of capitalist development (or underdevelopment). How a specific class segment succeeds in transforming its particular interest into the general interest of its class and nation and what historic consequences this has must thus be a central question in any fruitful inquiry into the sources of the development of capitalism and the formation of the bourgeois state.

The Origins of Capitalist Democracy

The historical situation in which Chile's parliamentary republic was originally forged and the vitality of its existence for over a century until its recent violent destruction reveal once again that bourgeois democracy is the fragile flower of a specific historical constellation of class relations and political struggles. The peculiarity of Chile's own "bourgeois democracy" was that it governed a society in which quasi-manorial landed estates, extracting the surplus product of the agrarian tenantry, continued to be dominant in the countryside and preponderant in agriculture, despite the overriding sway of capital and the dominance of the capital-wage labor relationship in the economy as a whole. From the revolutionary wars of the 1850s until the Left's penetration and organization of some elements of agrarian labor a century later, the supremacy of the large-estate owners in the countryside went unchallenged, especially in the Central Valley, where most of the rural population and the bulk of agricultural production were centered.

Chile experienced neither prolonged agrarian struggles in which the rural population gradually freed itself of the dominion of the large estate nor a sudden revolutionary convulsion that broke the base and destroyed the political power of the great landlords, thereby sealing politically the emergent capitalist relations and laying the basis for the democratic republic. Unlike the capitalist development of Western Europe and England, the political hegemony of the lords of the soil was not broken or transformed in Chile nor was much of the rural population ever turned into independent farmers. If these social transformations constituted the revolutionary preconditions for the emergence and durability of capitalist democracy in the West, it was nonetheless consolidated in Chile without such transformations.

A century after the radical bourgeoisie's call in the 1850s for a "revolution in landed property," Chile still had one of the highest concentrations of landownership in the world. Within the large estates reigned a paternalistic system of social control, enhanced by the ever-present threat of expulsion into a landless rural population and enforced in the countryside as a whole by an apparatus of coercion, legal and extralegal, at the behest of the large-estate owners. In practice, until the middle of the twentieth century, alternative sources of information were prohibited and independent associations forbidden in rural areas. Thus the landowners controlled both the vote and the labor power of the agrarian tenants (inquilinos) and dependent peasants (minfundistas), and this was the sine qua non of their continuing political hegemony. Such class relations surely provided an unfavorable soil for political democracy. Yet despite the unshaken dominion of the large estate, Chile was governed for over a century by one of the world's few stable parliamentary representative governments. How was this possible? An adequate answer requires a concrete historical analysis of the origins, course, and consequences of Chile's nineteenth-century civil wars — as does an understanding of the real historical reasons for the so-called "development of underdevelopment," in Andre Gunder Frank's apt phrase, in Chile.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Civil Wars in Chile by Maurice Zeitlin. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Tables and Figure, pg. ix
• Preface, pg. xi
• Acknowledgments, pg. xv
• Chapter 1. PRELUDE: CLASS, STATE, AND CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT, pg. 1
• Chapter 2. THE ABORTIVE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION, pg. 21
• Chapter 3. “CHILE FOR THE CHILIANS”, pg. 71
• Chapter 4. THE REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE UNDONE, pg. 134
• Chapter 5. REPRISE: CLASS RELATIONS, THE “WORLD SYSTEM,” AND DEVELOPMENT, pg. 217
• References, pg. 238
• Index, pg. 257

Editorial Reviews

"[A] fascinating and provocative book. . . . The relationship between class contradictions in a revolutionary situation and the development of the state is carefully explored. . . . Zeitlin makes a major contribution to understanding the interaction of international and domestic forces. . . . He argues that it is the class relations within nations that shape the global relations between them and that determine how these global relations will affect their internal development. . . . Zeitlin's case is brilliantly argued."—-Elizabeth Ferris, Journal of Politics

From the Publisher

". . . Zeitlin has produced one of the most impressive case studies of Latin American development to appear in the past ten years. . . . should be required reading for anyone interested in comparative historical analysis, regardless of how they define their interests geographically."

Politics & Society