Mobilizing at the Urban Margins: Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post-Dictatorial Chile
Simon Escoffier
Cambridge University Press, £85

AT the heart of debates about citizenship lies a distinction between the passive and the active that is often overlooked by a left, drunk on its own promises of distributive justice, but which goes a long way to explaining the limitations of activism. 

In contemporary democracies, citizenship is addressed largely through liberal wordplay that describes it in terms of legal equality, codified monopolistically by bourgeois states in the virtuous language of rights and entitlements.

This, however, is a massive historical distraction from what Marx saw as a core issue in the construction of socialism, namely: the quality of social relations between people, not legal entities.

To Marx, bourgeois citizenship assigns us to “civil society,” where we enjoy egotistic rights that focus on an illusory status of formal equality, ignoring our affiliation to human society and the real social conditions required to realise the rights that are ours to enjoy.

Put another way, this bourgeois delusion preserves the privileges of propertied classes through paper equality and hence, by extension, real inequality in wider society.

It does not take a huge leap of faith to understand socialism in alternative ways that go beyond distributive fairness to questions of shared objectives and solidarity, visions by which citizenship is never passive but always active and dynamically constructed.

This debate is at the heart of Simon Escoffier’s comparative study of marginalised urban communities in Chile, poblaciones, in which he devises a theoretical framework for understanding such active citizenship that can offer succour to socialist visions.

The author calls this “mobilisational citizenship” and it is the product of a concatenation of factors that distinguish the persistent activism of some poor communities from others which succumb to more predictable patronage within existing political structures.

It is a relevant theme of study, because neglected urban communities from the favelas of Brazil to the celebrated El Alto in Bolivia have, like Chile, often been in the vanguard of insurgent, democratising change in Latin America. 

Among the settlements examined by Escoffier is Lo Hermida, a poblacion in eastern Santiago that was in the vanguard of the nationwide uprising against inequality in 2019.

These protests would ultimately result in a bid to replace the Pinochet-era constitution with one that greatly expanded citizenship rights — since derailed, and now at risk from Chile’s far right — and then in the presidency of Gabriel Boric since 2022. 

Like many communities, Lo Hermida could build on a history of political mobilisation from before the brutal coup that installed Pinochet — the 50th anniversary of which is now being marked — and suffered its repressive aftermath. 

Like others, it also engaged actively in the movement that developed to oppose the dictatorship in the 1980s, often as the result of brave communist activists mobilising resistance.

What makes it distinct, however, is that Lo Hermida did not subsequently demobilise during the democratic transition in the early 1990s, demonstrating recurrent leadership since then in campaigns for justice engaged in by poor Chilean communities.

In an effort to determine why, Escoffier examines memory and the mechanisms by which some communities recover identities through collective action, delineating the active creation of citizenship through struggle. 

He writes: “The result is a new type of citizenship, a mobilizational citizenship that empowers pobladores and avoids corporatist forms of collective action. Rights-claiming, dignity, and mobilization grow from urban dwellers’ rejection of institutional authoritarian legacies.”

It is an uplifting study that provides clues to how the dispossessed can continue to struggle in even the most adverse conditions, and spurn the machine politics in which liberal mantras of citizenship are hegemonic illusions aimed at tricking the poor.