Hugo Herrera’s Fabianism and the Kast Government: A Deep Incoherence Revealed

Original article: El fabianismo de Hugo Herrera y el gobierno de Kast

By Leopoldo Lavín Mujica

The latest column by academic Hugo Herrera from the UDP, «The Chilean Left Between Fabianism and the Third World Inflection«, attempts to position itself as a defense of concertacionism against the «moralizing drift» of the PC-FA axis. However, it ultimately uncovers a much deeper incoherence: it demands a developmental state that its own political option denies.

Herrera voted for José Antonio Kast. In doctrinal terms, the Kast government precisely negates what he says he desires in other columns. Kast’s administration is identified as neoliberal and conservative, leaning more towards Hayek than Lord Beveridge (read this document about the neoliberal demolition project of Kast).

Nevertheless, Herrera champions the «Fabian» tradition, born in the late 19th-century United Kingdom with the Fabian Society, advocating for gradual transformations through the state, institutional reforms, technical frameworks, and the expansion of social rights rather than revolutionary paths.

Strategic patience, strong public administration, and internal modernization form the core of this ideology. This is precisely what Herrera highlights when he talks about enhancing education, productivity, and territorial planning—not advocating for a minimal, pro-neoliberal state, but for one capable of planning, educating, and leading.

This is, in fact, the tradition he associates with the peak of the center-left under Ricardo Lagos: a mixed, technical, and reformist state socialism. Up to this point, the thesis could be considered valid, albeit somewhat crude. The diagnosis is not trivial.

However, a central problem eludes the column, ultimately undermining it. The same author who calls for this strong state legitimizes the government of José Antonio Kast as a possible space for «composition,» contending that there are «signs of openness» and that we are not dealing with a fanatical right-wing government closed off to agreements.

Here, Herrera’s column collapses under its own weight. José Antonio Kast and the right-wing coalition that makes up his government do not represent a developmentalist tradition, nor do they support the expansion of public education or a robust technical-professional training policy. Historically, their doctrinal foundation has been the defense of a subsidiary state, suspicion towards public planning, and a preference for private solutions. In other words, exactly the type of neoliberal framework that undermines what Herrera claims to promote.

Thus, the question arises: Does H.H. truly believe that a dialogic approach from the center-left towards Kast’s government will yield the educational and productive reforms he insists upon? Is this political naivety or a sophisticated form of self-deception?

One cannot demand serious state technical training while supporting those who have no structural interest in strengthening public education but, on the contrary, aim to destroy it. It is contradictory to invoke Fabianism as a model while voting for Kast as a solution. One cannot call for a social and guiding state while aligning with a right-wing faction whose historical rationale has been to prevent such a state from emerging. This inconsistency renders the advocacy for Fabianism incoherent.

H. Herrera Aims to Divide the Left

The academic faults social democracy for having lost its reformist substance, yet he entrusts the possibility of reformism to an extreme neoliberal right. He calls for institutional seriousness but seeks it in a project aimed more at reducing public presence than enhancing it. That is not political realism. It is voluntarism dressed in classical quotations.

Furthermore, he criticizes the left for moralizing politics, while his own leniency towards Kast seems less based on a political economy analysis than on a philosophical preference for order and a primary anti-communism (‘Better dead than Red’).

Herrera’s disquisitions appear laden with negative passions. It is evident that he has a distinctly ideological agenda: a desire to discipline, divide, and subordinate the left using the language of realism while exonerating the right from accountability regarding its historical failure to build the state he considers indispensable.

Ultimately, Herrera expresses a desire for Fabianism, yet what he promotes is a neoliberalized social democracy resembling that of Ricardo Lagos: a strong state in rhetoric but devoid of actual distributive conflict, technical training void of strengthening the public sector, modernization without challenging the oligarchic interests obstructing it—and always seeking to win their favor—alongside denial of ecological destruction, privatizations, and increased market reliance.

This was not an alternative project to neoliberalism; it was its disguised version, a concertacionism that, when replicated with Boric, paved the way for the far-right Kast.

Leopoldo Lavín Mujica