Abstract

This chapter addresses the passage from the State of Nature to the State of Society according to fictional stories published in the periodicals. The common thread to all the primary sources studied is that workers depict the pre-capitalist world as an idyllic state where men lived in perfect communion, where there is no private property or class differences. According to these narratives, the harmony of this fraternal community of brothers is destroyed by unknown monsters who came to kidnap the women of the community. It argues that these narratives are presented as metaphors for the origin of capitalism inspired by the colonial experience. This chapter will conclude showing that Chilean workers understood communal property from a patriarchal perspective, in which women were conceived as communal goods from the outset. This implies that these traditional revolutionary narratives were not blind to sexual difference since they were based upon (1) a commodification of women (as communal property); (2) an interpretation of private property based upon an original expropriation of ‘communal women’; and (3) a depiction of the revolution as the ‘repossession’ of women by working-class men. These writings thus are not considered mere fictions, but as part of the political theory of the early Chilean working-class movement. In order to do this, these working-class writings are interpreted from Silvia Federici’s concept of primitive accumulation and contrasted to (1) Rousseau’s and Bakunin’s critique of Hobbes and Locke theories of the State of Nature; and (2) Charles Fourier’s utopia of the Community of Women and Marx’s critique of it.