Digressions on the Materiality of Class Struggle. Neoliberalism, Insurrectional Germ, and Becoming Minority

Abstract

The present article constitutes an approximation to the nature and materiality of class struggle in Chile, aiming to unravel some of the architectonic aspects that articulate its current moment. For this reason, the analysis has been divided into four paragraphs in which it is considered, from a materialist and micropolitical perspective, a dimension of class struggle in the neoliberal context. The first paragraph addresses the neoliberal dynamic and its rational configuration as a strategy that weakens the political condition of the social contract and thus promotes the precariousness of life in all its dimensions. The second paragraph analyzes two social control mechanisms that are self-administered by the same individual (derealization of the individual, on the one hand, and, on the other, depersonalization of the subject) but which he aims to resist. Subsequently, the third paragraph reflects on the individual’s possibilities of curving the political trajectories of his existence through protest and the incubation of an insurrectionary germ to develop. Finally, the fourth paragraph suggests understanding protest as an instrument that enables the individual to make sensitive an-other reading of reality, as long as he does not abdicate it, turning it into the condition of possibility of a future revolutionary offensive.