The Left at a Crossroads: Ideological Break or Surrender to Liberalism?

Original article: ​La izquierda en el laberinto de espejos: ¿Voluntad de ruptura o capitulación ideológica?

By Belén Carvajal

Today, our left seems ensnared in a maze of mirrors. In its progression, it no longer seeks its own path; rather, it repeatedly collides with the reflection of the adversary’s values.

It is imperative to ask: How can a left prioritize the values of liberal democracy? How can it understand human rights without questioning the political and economic role of the State that administers them?

By embracing this framework, we succumb to the fetishism of legality, that liberal illusion that presents norms as neutral entities devoid of conflict, when they are, in fact, a reflection of a specific correlation of forces.

We forget that the State is the organized apparatus for class domination. The liberal State systematically violates human rights; it is not designed to protect life, but to safeguard private property over the dignity of popular majorities.

However, we cannot continue to shy away from a fundamental distinction for fear of media rhetoric: one cannot measure the repressive violence of a State that protects elite privileges against the conflicts and contradictions of processes seeking popular emancipation.

By capitulating to the liberal narrative, we ignore the political nature of these processes, desperately attempting to ingratiate ourselves with the story of our enemy. By being functional to the statu quo, we hasten to point out that other States fail to meet liberal standards, entering into a perpetual cycle of justification and self-blame.

Thus, we respond to a script imposed by those who, from media and economic hegemony, dictate what democratic means while keeping their boot on the neck of the people. We succumb to a morality that only serves to ideologically disarm those trying to build an alternative to the model.

When we talk about human rights, the dilemma lies in the class character of the liberal State. It is a contradiction to pretend that the same apparatus designed to guarantee accumulation and extractivism is the guardian of human dignity. Therefore, the evaluation of any political process cannot ignore the nature of the State that supports it.

We cannot fall into the trap of measuring with the liberal yardstick processes aiming, with successes and contradictions, to break with market logic. Understanding human rights without criticism of the liberal State is merely the ethical veil the executioner uses before striking the axe.

Liberal democracy, in countries like ours and in the main models such as the United States, has proven to be a mere illusion, designed to conceal the management of capital under the guise of institutions.

The reality in Chile has brutally exposed that the separation of powers is nothing more than a fiction for official propaganda. What we witness daily is the decomposition of a system where judges, prosecutors, and notaries operate in the shadow of a market of favors, responding to a political power that acts as the articulated arm of large businesses.

When influence peddling and the purchasing of judgments become the norm, the Marxist thesis is terrifyingly confirmed: the State is not a neutral arbitrator of social life, but the political and legal architecture designed to shield capital accumulation, where law becomes the will of the ruling class made norm.

We must be honest in our self-critique: we have fallen into the trap of professing a purely rhetorical socialism and anti-imperialism while allowing our actions to be absorbed into liberal hegemony.

This capitulation has birthed a much-discussed “Allende socialism,” curious and contradictory: a cult of Salvador Allende’s image that strips his figure of its anti-imperialist and internationalist essence, reducing him to an icon of democracy as an abstract entity devoid of class content.

When Salvador Allende invited Fidel Castro to our country in 1971, it was not out of an aesthetic fascination with revolutionary epics, but from a strategic understanding of the historical block, which required staunchly defending the Cuban Revolution even as Chile traversed its own democratic path to socialism, that socialism infused with empanadas and red wine.

His stance was not a gesture of courtesy but an acknowledgment that the peoples, in their struggle to overcome humanity’s prehistory, have the sovereign right to equip themselves with the means to define their destiny outside the yoke of the liberal State and imperial tutelage.

Being Allendean today is not an exercise in nostalgia or merely wearing his shoes; it is about recovering his political perspective, understanding that our horizon does not end in managing the State, and realizing that servitude does not allow for the sovereignty of peoples.

When the left renounces this vision, it stops being a transformative force and becomes an instrument allowing the system to regain its equilibrium and manage its crises without ever altering the capitalist order.

On the contrary, when socialism is the horizon, we understand that politics is a war of positions where each conquest is not an end but a partial milestone in the process of accumulating forces. It is not about managing the existing but building the foundations of a new historical block that tensions the structure towards its radical transformation.

This identity crisis urgently requires us to recover the path of our own organic intellectuals; figures such as Gladys Marín, Luis Emilio Recabarren, Clotario Blest, or Miguel Enríquez, who enjoy unbreakable legitimacy and symbolism because their practice was never adaptation but conscious rupture.

The role of the organic intellectual is to dispute common sense from the root, not to domesticate discourse to align it with the common sense imposed by the dominant class through the press and its propaganda instruments. We cannot prevail if we continue to allow the adversary to define the limits of the possible through its headlines.

We need a left capable of dismantling the dominant ideology to articulate a popular and sovereign ethics, a left that does not seek validation from a corrupt elite on bourgeois morning programs but to dispute consciousness and build an organized people.

In this sense, when we summon the aforementioned political leaders, we should not do so as an exercise in nostalgia or as a cynical short-term electoral strategy. We summon them in their capacity as organic intellectuals: those whose political practice was not one of adaptation but of conscious rupture.

Gladys Marín or Miguel Enriquez did not seek to fit into the mold of bourgeois respectability to gain applause; their presence in institutions echoed the people, serving as a tool for State transformation. An electoral strategy that is not accompanied by a design to dismantle the liberal architecture is simply a jobs office for a vanguard disconnected from its people.

The most evident proof of this dislocation is the orphanhood of leadership in critical moments. Why did none of the parties of the Chilean left lead the social explosion of 2019? The answer is harsh: because we are in the midst of an ideological crisis. We have turned towards integration in the dominant class’s institutions, believing that simple management of the State apparatus equates to real power.

We must understand that presence in these institutions should be a trench in the war of positions, not an end. The goal is not to manage the State with liberal sensibility while buying judges and militarizing territory, but to build social and political strength.

This paralysis is also explained by the sanctification of republican virtues that prevail in our sectors today. Civility, power alternation, and representative democracy are presented to us as supreme values. By attributing intrinsic virtue to these rites, where citizens are only called to delegate their sovereignty every four years at the ballot box, the left validates permanent political demobilization.

This devotion to the empty forms of republicanism is nothing more than the acceptance of a low-intensity democracy, designed so that nothing changes while diplomatically respecting the adversary. It is an ideological trap that reduces the struggle for power to an exercise of institutional courtesy, forgetting that true democracy does not end with voting; it lies in the direct and ongoing exercise of popular sovereignty against the structures that oppress it.

It is precisely within this framework of republicanism that the repressive nature of the State today manifests with naked violence.

It is paradoxical, and politically revealing, that a government that self-defines as “progressive,” one that came with the promise of transforming the structures of injustice, is now the one that supports and deepens militarization against the Mapuche people. There, the democratic veneer of the current administration completely dissolves, for in the face of threats to property and forestry extractivism, the State, under progressive management, sheds its transformative mask and applies its coercive core.

States of emergency and political persecution are neither miscalculations nor unintentional excesses of the current government; they are mechanisms of a class that, unable to sustain its hegemony through consensus, resorts to brute force to discipline resistance.

At the end of the day, the “historic and transformative” government has ended up demonstrating that, without a real break from the power block, progressivism is nothing more than the friendly face of the same administration that protects capital.

Transformative power, therefore, does not reside in the Palacio de La Moneda, in Parliament, or in campaign promises; it resides in the capacity of the people to recognize themselves as a historical subject and break with the simulation of the existing.

We speak of a democracy that dares to subordinate private property to the common good and replaces capital management with conscious organization of production. It is the bet for a new block capable of disputing hegemony in every trench of society, replacing the dictatorship of the market with a solidarity ethics of sovereignty. Everything else is mere simulation, a continued state of being lost, willingly trapped in the adversary’s maze of mirrors.

It is disconcerting, and politically cruel, to observe how the current government and some parties and figures of “progressivism,” who have chosen to mask “transformation” as mere management of the model, join the chorus of condemnations against the processes in Cuba and Venezuela under the hypocritical standard of liberal purism.

It is profoundly intellectually dishonest to judge the health of a foreign institution while allowing a decomposition at home where justice is for sale to the highest bidder, pointing an inquisitive finger at peoples resisting under conditions of asymmetric warfare and imperial siege.

These criticisms do not arise from a real commitment to human rights; they operate as validation of economic asphyxiation as a method of geopolitical discipline, turning this left into the moral megaphone of those seeking to annihilate any alternative through hunger and financial siege.

This alignment with the adversary’s lexicon, and with the White House, has resulted in disarticulation within the left’s subjectivity, damaging its intellectuality and forcing it to renounce its capacity to think sovereignly.

It is time to decide whether the left will continue to operate as mere decorators of the liberal State, ensuring the stability of an order that oppresses, or if it will reclaim the will to be a genuinely transformative material force.

The only possible democracy is popular democracy, one where sovereignty is not a loan granted by citizens every four years, but the real power of peoples to plan their material and social life based on collective needs.

One cannot be anti-imperialist with euphemisms, nor anti-capitalist while efficiently administering the variables that sustain capital accumulation. Seeking respectability in a judicial and political system rotten to the core is not a clever strategy; it is simply the elegant name for ideological surrender.

This column does not aim to close the debate. The goal is precisely to force a debate that, as a left, we systematically avoid: What do we want power for? To manage the model better, or to build a civilizational alternative?

We cannot keep dodging this question with management, for silence condemns us to fight peripheral disputes that do not touch the center of our identity. The purpose is not to resolve the problem but to pose it so radically that it admits no evasion.

It is time to decide whether we will break the mirror of the adversary to look at our own reality, or if we will continue to be the friendly face of an administration that, in the name of “sensibility,” always ends up managing our own defeat.

Belén Carvajal