PRELUDE: CLASS, STATE, AND CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT

The civil wars in Chile had decisive history-making consequences. They were crucial in shaping the pattern of capitalist development in Chile, the distinctiveness of its class relations, and the form taken by the Chilean state. If the development of capitalism took contrasting "classical" paths, revolutionary and democratic in England and Western Europe, reactionary and authoritarian in Prussia and Japan, Chile took neither of these paths into the twentieth century. But at two different historic moments, in the civil wars of the 1850s and of 1891, it came close to taking both. The first civil war was, as I shall show, an abortive bourgeois revolution (though its terrain was, paradoxically, neither feudal nor absolutist); the second, a generation later, was a "revolution from above" that failed.

The first of these revolutionary possibilities opened up in the wake of the early nineteenth century incipient development of capitalist production relations, spurred especially by the accumulation of capital in copper mining, grain milling, and cereal exports and by the ensuing dislocations and rapid changes in the countryside and in the burgeoning mining centers of the northern provinces. This mid-century revolutionary movement in Chile, unlike that quintessential bourgeois revolution in France, was, as we shall see, led and participated in directly by the young bourgeoisie — by leading capitalists and their representatives, allied in armed struggle with peasants and artisans, self-consciously aiming to break the dominion of large landed property and erect a democratic state.

The second revolutionary possibility appeared with the quick growth of manufacturing that took place during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) and the burst of capital accumulation following Chile's annexation of the nitrate territories of its defeated Bolivian and Peruvian neighbors. Under the presidency of José Manuel Balmaceda (1886–1891), Chile's own variant of a "revolution from above" — of capitalist development enforced by an authoritarian state under the aegis of a hegemonic segment of its dominant class — became a proximate historical alternative. But that historical alternative was suppressed by Balmaceda's defeat in the civil war of 1891, just as the revolutionary democratic alternative had been suppressed a generation earlier; with that unwitting revolution from above undone, the nature of Chile's unique and composite social formation was essentially determined: a capitalist democracy in which the large landed estate was pivotal.

The historic peculiarity of Chile's "bourgeois democracy" — until it was smashed by a reactionary military coup in the autumn of 1973 — lay in the anomaly that the society it governed never became quite bourgeois itself. What explains this? How, on the one hand, was capitalist development in Chile stunted? How, on the other, did it become a relatively stable political democracy? These are the inseparable theoretical issues involved in my empirical analyses of the causes and consequences of Chile's two decisive nineteenth-century civil wars. They are also the historical questions that, taken together, constitute the mystery of the development of, as Max Weber would have said, "the characteristic uniqueness of the reality" of Chile.

The Dominant Class and the State in Historical Development

To understand the historic consequences of these civil wars and their outcomes, to discover the extent of their social reverberations, it is necessary first to reveal their origins. They were, I shall show, bourgeois revolutions — first from below and then from above — that never were. The thesis that these insurrections were not merely civil wars but abortive bourgeois revolutions is the issue of Chile's historical development. It also implicitly places the discontinuities, ruptures, and transformations of the precapitalist social and political fabric, of class relations and state structures, by and through concrete class and intraclass struggles, at the very center of the analysis of development and "underdevelopment." This in turn requires us to take seriously as an empirical question the issue of the so-called "autonomy of the state": of the extent to which, at critical moments, the activities of the state may generate new social relationships and productive forces or inhibit their development, even against the historical interests of the dominant class itself. State policy, and therefore the matter of who holds state power and even of who staffs it directly, can be crucial if not decisive in those determinant but contingent transitions when unwonted forms of social production emerge; it can effectively determine the extent and nature of their development and consolidation.

But this does not necessarily imply, though the possibility is not denied, that the so-called state is fully independent, unconditioned by class relations. "Class power" and "state power" assuredly differ; but the problem is what the relationship between them is, not merely in an abstract model but in concrete, historically specific circumstances. To what extent the state is effectively "insulated from the impact of non-political groups and procedures," run by "state rulers" who have "fundamental conflicts of interest" with "the existing dominant class," is not and simply cannot be a so-called general theoretical question. It must be an empirical question: the question of social causality, in this instance as elsewhere, is not a question of laws or of ahistorical propositions meant somehow to be universally valid (and thus vacuous), but a question of concrete causal relationships. We shall see, for instance, that contrary to what now passes for political theory in "structuralist Marxism," a state that was bourgeois in "structure" governed a social formation that was surely not yet dominated by capitalist relations of production, and it enforced the dominion of large landed property — if it was not indeed the mere "instrument" of the ruling great landlords of the Central Valley. This can be understood only by a historically specific theory of these concrete class-state relations.

It need not trouble us either that the "political crises that have launched social revolutions" have scarcely been mere "epiphenomenal reflections of societal strains or class contradictions." It may well be correct, as Theda Skocpol argues, that "the political-conflict groups that have figured in social revolutionary struggles have not merely represented social interests and forces. [What does "merely" mean? If it means "only," then "mainly" and surely "partially" are not precluded.] Rather, they have formed as interest groups within and fought ["merely"?] about the forms of state structures." For this is, again, an intrinsically empirical question. The critical...