Exemplary Comrades

Alfonso Salgado

This dissertation studies Chilean communists’ public and private lives. It examines the experience of being a communist and the Communist Party of Chile’s efforts to shape that experience, both in the street and at home. To what extent did communists follow party principles regarding public and private life? To what extent did communism succeed in challenging the public-private divide so dear to liberalism? These are the questions I seek to answer in this dissertation. I argue that communism was lived quite intensely, but that it would be an exaggeration to claim that most party members lived and breathed communism. Communists lived a bifurcated life: one life lived to the fullest in the public sphere and another life lived less intensely at home. This dissertation provides a detailed portrait of communist men and their relations, both at home and in the street, in order to understand...