Description
Book SynopsisFor a thousand days in the early 1970s, Chileans experienced revolution not as a dream but as daily life. Alongside Salvador Allende's attempt to democratically bring about a socialist regime, new understandings of the meaning of revolutionary change emerged. In her groundbreaking book Beyond the Vanguard, Marian E. Schlotterbeck explores popular politics in Chile in the decade before Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and provides an in-depth account of how working-class people transformed the existing social order by embracing radical politics. Schlotterbeck eloquently examines the lost opportunities for creating a democratic revolution and the ways that the legacy of this period continues to resonate in Chile and beyond. Learn more about the author and this book in an interview published online withJacobin.
Trade Review"Beyond the Vanguard is an outstanding, innovative work of social and political history. Wonderfully written and empathetic in tone, Schlotterbeck has produced a must-read account of Chile’s thousand days of living in revolution."
* H-Net Reviews *
"The great value of the author’s work is her extensive use of the testimony and reminiscences of the local participants in what became the transformation of their daily lives and the lives of those around them." * Anarcho-Syndicalist Review *
"Pivotal political lessons and vivid oral histories of everyday working-class heroism await readers of
Beyond the Vanguard." * Spectre *
Table of ContentsList of Maps ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. “We Lived Those Years with a Lot of Passion”: University Reform and the Rise of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria 15
2. “To Create a More Just Society”: Coal Miners and Textile Workers in the Revolutionary Workers Front 37
3. “By Our Own Means”: Socialist Utopia in Building Revolutionary Shantytowns 63
4. “Let the People Speak!”: Popular Democracy and the Concepción People’s Assemblies 90
5. “Building Their Own Power”: Grassroots Responses to the Bosses’ Lockout 115
6. “Living within a Special World”: The Unraveling Revolution and the Limits of the Vanguard 134
Epilogue: The Meaning and Memory of Radical Politics in the Twenty-First Century 162
Appendix: Sponsoring Organizations for the Concepción People’s Assembly, July 27, 1972 169
Notes 175
Bibliography 217
