Marian E. Schlotterbeck, Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende's Chile.

• Date: 22 June 2019
• Author: McSherry, J. Ratrice

Marian E. Schlotterbeck, Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende's Chile (University of California Press, 2018)

MARIAN E. SCHLOTTERBECK'S SOCIAL HISTORY OF CHILE CAPTURES the massive popular participation, hope, commitment, and energy that characterized the late 1960s and especially the early 1970s, when the Popular Unity (Unidad Popular, UP) government took power with democratic socialist Salvador Allende at its helm (1970-1973). In her study of grassroots organizing, focusing on the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) in Concepcion, the author highlights the agency of ordinary people as they began to transform their lives under the popular government." The election of a companero president, who promised that state force would no longer be used to repress, afforded an opening for grassroots movements on an unprecedented scale" (5), she explains. Schlotterbeck argues that revolutionary change took place in "the form of quotidian transformations in people's everyday lives" (6), in workplaces, classrooms, public plazas, and homes. The book provides a welcome regional analysis, adding to scholarly knowledge about key events and social forces in an important industrial region in Chile s south.

Schlotterbeck makes the key point that many studies, using retrospective lenses, have presented Chile's experiment--to move toward socialism through constitutional institutions--as "an inevitable march toward destruction.... With time, the responsibility for its failure increasingly moved away from the military and civilian leaders who plotted...