The concentration crisis in Chilean society: a critical systemic perspective of a developing problem

Abstract

The question that guides this paper is clear: How can we understand Chile’s “social uprising” that began on October 18, 2019? At the risk of rushing to deliver a thesis on a situation that is still in progress –although it is in pause due to the coronavirus  health emergency–, some ideas can be offered that are based on the theoretical approaches of both Karl Marx and Niklas Luhmann. This connection allows for the development of a systematic observation framework to detect the objective triggers of the concentration crises in which Chilean society is immersed. The analysis presented here seeks to investigate the form that such a concentration takes, namely: a concentration of the achievements of the different social systems. This kind of concentration, taken to the extreme in the Chilean case, contributes to the generation of stratification schemes, homogenizes the diversity of options and choices of the social systems and, captured in inertial patterns of growth, ends up producing crises scenarios such as the one visible today. In this context, it is possible to maintain, at the end of this paper, that only a decision that allows society to face the inherent logic of concentration might be able to offer a definitive way out of the convulsion witnessed in Chile.