Counterculture, Revolutionary Ideology, and Allende's Road to Socialism

This paper examines Chilean culture and politics at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius by juxtaposing counterculture with the cultural politics and ideology of the Left(s) during the ‘Chilean road to socialism’ (1970-73), led by President Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition. Many countercultural youths in Chile and elsewhere engaged in what were transnational forms of cultural heterodoxy and cultural action that were powerful expressions and symbols of alienation and discontent. As Eric Zolov has argued in the Mexican case, counterculture (and bohemianism) were closely related to a ‘New Left’ inspired by the Cuban Revolution and revolutionary movements in the developing world. Indeed, Mexican anthropologist and cultural critic Roger Bartra once recalled, ‘In my house, beatniks and aspiring revolutionaries would get together; those searching for artificial paradises along with those who wanted to destroy systems of oppression.’ Zolov, who embraces a broad, polycentric conceptualization of ‘New Left,’ rightly posits that scholars have ignored the countercultural elements of Latin America’s New Left, and therefore much of the cultural politics and patterns of (counter)cultural praxis of the 1960s and early 1970s. In Chile’s case, Zolov’s conceptualization of Latin America’s New Left runs into some interesting challenges. Efforts by some young Marxists to realize a countercultural dimension in revolutionary politics were squashed by an Allende government best described as an ‘Old Left’—a Left forged during the ‘popular frontism’ of the 1930s. Meanwhile, counterculture and bohemianism were not characteristics of the youthful and armed Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), which criticized Allende’s peaceful road to socialism (i.e., the Old Left) and was the closest thing to a Chilean New Left. This paper, then, gets at the Chilean Lefts’ forthright rejection of countercultural and bohemian gestures and the roots of that denial in their ideological architectures.