The Chilean Socialist Party (PSCh): Constructing Consent and Disarticulating Dissent to Neo-Liberal Hegemony in Chile

Abstract

Adopting a neo-Gramscian framework, I argue that the Chilean Socialist Party (PSCh), as part of the governing Concertación coalition, has played a key role in constructing consent and disarticulating dissent to neo-liberal hegemony in Chile. This is the result of its co-optation into the neo-liberal historic bloc formed during the Pinochet dictatorship, of which the Concertación is the democratic political face. This process occurs in relation to the popular classes within, and outside, the PSCh, actualised by a series of intra-party, extra-party, policy-making and policy-discourse mediations. The analysis of the PSCh's role in (re)producing neo-liberal hegemony in Chile helps to unlock the black box of empirical and theoretical investigation as regards the construction of consent to neo-liberalism in the subordinated. In doing so it highlights the conflictual, contradictory and therefore contingent nature of this process.