Thinking about transition and democracy: The communist party and its horizon of democratic expectations (1977 – 1989)

Abstract

The present article investigates in three fundamental aspects related to the Communist Party of Chile, during the military dictatorship. First, it investigates the ways in which the PC thought the transition process and the future democracy from 1977, giving an account of the ideological tensions that this effort involved. Second, it describes the role played by communist intellectuals when defining the new limits of “communist ideas”, in a national and international context of radical ideological change. Third, it shows how communist ideas and intellectuals responded to the ideological objections they had received from the so-called “socialist renovation.”