Wills to Act: Conceptualizing Chile’s New Left

There is considerable disagreement, especially between Greg Grandin and Eric Zolov, over what made the Latin American New Left new and who made it what it was (whatever it was). Was, as Grandin suggests, the New Left in Latin America defined by its “will to act” via armed struggle, or, as Zolov asks, did its morphology entail a more expansive notion of agency that was not necessarily defined by the Cuban revolutionary experience?  In Chile, when one thinks about the Left, the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) comes to mind as the Chilean “New Left” that emerged alongside the “Old Left” that became the Popular Unity coalition and constituted Salvador Allende’s vía chilena al socialismo. The MIR very much fits Grandin’s typology for a Latin American New Left, given that its revolutionary platform endorsed direct action, including armed struggle, for revolutionary change. But was the MIR the Chilean New Left? This paper argues for a more broad understanding—a larger conceptual vista—as we think about who and what constituted a Chilean New Left on the eve of and during the Popular Unity years. It focuses on modes of revolutionary thought and practice that envisioned revolutionary change anchored in the individual first and foremost, with social/outward change resulting from it, and rejected violence as a reasonable means to achieve social change. Simply, this paper writes some countercultural elements into the history of the Chilean “New Left,” arguing for a less strict and more inclusive definition of the term. It does so by focusing on countercultural and esoteric movements, especially the group that developed around Argentine thinker Mario Luis Rodríguez Cobos, as examples of “revolutionary” gestures that were informed by Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and others who influenced the European and U.S. New Lefts.