Revisiting the Political Economy of the Rise and Fall of the Unidad Popular: The Twin Crisis of the Prebischian Populist National State and Global Fordism
Date:
Conference presentation at SASE 2023 - Socio-Economics in a Transitioning World, Windsor Florida Hotel, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
This talk reinterprets the rise and collapse of Chile’s Unidad Popular through a global Marxist political-economy lens, positing a “twin crisis”: the domestic breakdown of the Prebischian Populist National State and the international crisis of Atlantic Fordism. Using a Variegated Capitalism framework extended to the periphery, it specifies “peripheral Fordism” in employment relations (industrial patronage), capital-circuit bottlenecks, and financial subordination, contrasting its institutional anchor in the PPNS with the core’s KWNS. An analytical schema organized around profitability, wage share, and markups periodizes Chile’s dynamics and locates crisis tendencies, linking shifts in distribution and accumulation to regime instability. The conclusion connects high structural dysfunction to state crisis and socialist revolution, and outlines next steps to trace channels from the U.S. profit squeeze to broader sociopolitical conflict.
Presented at the SASE 2023 conference, “Socio-Economics in a Transitioning World: Breaking Lines and Alternative Paradigms for a New World Order,” 20-22 July 2023.