Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende's Chile

by Marian E. Schlotterbeck

For a thousand days in the early 1970s, Chileans experienced revolution not as a dream but as daily life. Alongside Salvador Allende’s attempt to democratically bring about a socialist regime, new understandings of the meaning of revolutionary change emerged. In her groundbreaking book Beyond the Vanguard, Marian E. Schlotterbeck explores popular politics in Chile in the decade before Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and provides an in-depth account of how working-class people transformed the existing social order by embracing radical politics. Schlotterbeck eloquently examines the lost opportunities for creating a democratic revolution and the ways that the legacy of this period continues to resonate in Chile and beyond.

Learn more about the author and this book in published online with  Jacobin .

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics

248 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2018

Reviews

[Steven Volk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional history of the way that grassroots struggles in Concepción merged with and diverted from the political center of the Popular Unity government. Based on interviews and extensive archival work, it is beautifully written and argued.

[Bree · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was amazing . . . and remarkably readable considering the depth of information contained within. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding how to initiate social change from below.