Carlos Peña: "Transforming the condemnation of violence into a mere neurotic gesture that is repeated time and time again does not lead anywhere."

The social outburst of October 2019 is viewed by some as a criminal event, while others frame it as an expression of societal contradictions arising from accelerated modernization and unmet expectations. Carlos Peña suggests the reaction to the unrest was an illusion of elite expectations rather than a purely revolutionary movement. The phenomenon is understood as a trauma that interrupts historical continuity, generating anguish without full reflection. While some focus on violence as the central protagonist, others emphasize the pathologies of modernization—specifically in education and the social subject emerged from progress. A deeper critique suggests that the left’s subsequent reaction reflects an intellectual crisis where it fails to understand the social subject it promoted. The author ultimately argues that moving forward requires shifting attention from condemning the event to analyzing the underlying social processes that persist, particularly concerning educational stratification and societal risks like aging and illness.

The narrative surrounding the October 2019 event reveals a tension between historical materialism/revolutionary frameworks and sociological realism concerning modern social development. Peña’s central move is to deconstruct the simplistic reading of the outburst—either as a criminal conspiracy or a pure class revolt—to focus instead on the "pathologies of modernization" that created the conditions for unrest. This challenges the tendency, observed in both revolutionary narratives and subsequent political reactions, to isolate agency within specific groups (elites or revolutionaries) while ignoring the objective material pressures operating beneath the surface. The left’s failure is not merely tactical but ontological: it failed to grasp the social subject forged by modernization, leading to an internal crisis where radicalization became a focus, suggesting that the revolution was less about seizing a zero point and more about reacting to the instability inherent in the achieved state. This pattern suggests that when societies achieve high levels of material well-being (as Chile did), the subsequent political struggle is often internalized as a crisis of meaning rather than a simple class conflict. The shift from focusing on *what* happened (violence) to analyzing *how* society was configured (pathologies) resists the impulse toward simplistic attribution, forcing an engagement with the persistent structures of inequality embedded in institutional promises.