We saw this defeat coming, but we couldn't avoid it. Why? Or, more precisely, why did it happen to us again? There's a natural resistance to asking these questions, because it's always difficult to process defeats, even to see them as such (…) The title of this text evokes Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte for two reasons. First, because in it Marx studies why the 1848 revolution in France failed and why, instead of hiding behind the disqualification of the adversary or lamentations about the misfortune, it was better to dissect the turn of events (…) Second, because for a long time The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was read in an ideological key, that is, as a scheme of ideas and concepts that defined a way of approaching events. Subsequently, however, many historians and biographers of Marx have read it as history, that is, as a text that is part of the crisis it sought to elucidate and which, therefore, is more alive, complex, and penetrating than later attempts at canonization. If it is examined in this way—that is, if its distinctions are viewed as history and not ideology—it helps to understand why and how the revolutionary or reformist moment—the distinction between which makes little difference for these purposes—of recent years in Chile also ended in failure.

This book is included in DOAB.