Resizing 60 Years of Chilean Politics: Small Acts, Grassroots Movements, and Individual Responsibility

• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20962084
• Author: Jesse Freedman
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Dupuy / BOOK REVIEW 167

The use of this new concept has enabled Fatton to offer a trenchant analysis of the

causes and consequences of Haiti’s position in the lowest echelon of the capitalist

world-system, but his analysis raises an important question about the concept itself. As

he has shown, the descent into the outer periphery by formerly peripheral countries like

Haiti results from the interaction between domestic actors (the business and political

classes) and the imperial powers to which they are subservient and whose policies they

embrace despite their detrimental effects. The existence of the outer periphery as a

source of extra-cheap labor for foreign investors and their domestic collaborators is

clearly advantageous to them, but is the outer periphery a permanent and essential

substratum of the world-system, as the periphery is for Wallerstein? Put differently, if

the countries that Fatton identifies as belonging to the outer periphery were to pursue

reforms that allowed them to climb back into the periphery, what effect would this have

on the functioning of the world-system? Or does he envision that the outer peripheral

countries must, as Wallerstein (2006: 29) has argued for the peripheral countries, simply

“accept the lot that has been given to them”?

REFERENCES

Wallerstein, Immanuel

1974 The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-

Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.

2006 World-System Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.

Resizing 60 Years of Chilean Politics

Small Acts, Grassroots Movements, and Individual

Responsibility

by

Jesse Freedman

Marian E. Schlotterbeck Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s

Chile. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.

Carolina Muñoz Bank Building Power from Below: Chilean Workers Take on Walmart.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.

Michael J. Lazzara Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018.

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20962084

On October 14, 2019, a coordinated fare evasion led by Chilean students as a response

to a fare increase in the Santiago metro system became the spark that has since precipi-

tated dozens of protests, demonstrations, and confrontations with police across the

country. While the larger protests have generally subsided, it is not difficult to find

smaller groups on an almost daily basis in the streets of Santiago and other cities

holding strong in their commitment to fighting and demonstrating against the Piñera

Jesse Freedman is a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of California,

Riverside.