marxism/resistance mp3's, part I
robin hood, judy cook (1993): judy cook tries to distinguish between three robin hood narratives: the ruling-class'/hollywood attempt to co-opt robin hood as a disenchanted noble who only wants a better king, the other attempt to portray him as a lawless and aimless bandit, and the third--the one she advocates--which is to put him in the context of the horribly oppressive world in which he matured (roughly by the 1200s you see the first references to robin hood in various literature)--a world in which armed banditry was a terribly attractive form of social entrepreneurship, if you like (freedom from serfdom, etc.). she makes the important, if somewhat stale point, that we couldn't have expected a lenin, insofar as there was no class ready to take over the administration of society (but that's all a bit formulaic, even if also obviously true).
bolivia, andy brown (2008): brown details the revolutionary insurrection from 2003-2005, which came on the back end of two decades of solidly neo-liberal policy ("bolivia as lab-rat for neo-liberalism"). it marked the decisive defeat of national and transnational elite. he asked the question of how to characterize the movement, whether indigenous or national-popular; settled on a developed conception of the former, i think, in the sense that the movement would have been impossible without the contribution of the indigenous campesinos--they were decisive (here some instructive history about how the traditional left in bolivia, in the 50s and 60s, neglected the indigenous movements; this created an opening for their co-option by the military, and thus the downfall of the first revolution). brown is relatively dismissive of what evo morales had accomplished thus far, identifying three key policy areas in which he has not been nearly as radical as the insurrection which took him to power (hydrocarbons--better terms, but not nationalization, land reform--only unused land, which does hurt elite interested in keeping land for speculative purposes, and the constituent assembly--quite insufficient, failing to transcend liberal logic of representation). in sum: the "first revolution of the 21st century," perhaps, but all that energy is, as of now, being only uneasily represented by evo morales in power.
simon bolivar, andy brown (2007): interesting observations about the man's thoroughly liberal commitments (which he "picked up" in Europe). some discussion over how representative he was of the elites' desires around him, which was torn between staying tied to the bourbon monarchy in spain and emulating revolutions on the mainland/to the north. bolivar's liberalism, brown argues, co-existed uneasily with his belief in the paramount importance of a highly centralized state (perhaps this was pragmatic, though), and the danger that he would be caught up in the military, almost bonapartist logic of his own rebellion. nonetheless, he was a believer in racial equality, though the new republics did not emancipate the slaves immediately. all in all, the way in which the contemporary bolivarian republics lay claim to his legacy is, of course, strategic, in the sense that he can only ever represent the bourgeois liberal in his revolutionary role.
who really ended slavery, robin blackburn and weymann bennet (2007): excellent antidote to the official propagandizing around the 200th anniversary of abolition, which celebrates the role of william wilberforce without ever theorizing the context in which this legislation occurred. primarily, blackburn and bennet emphasize that the oligarchical elite in britain were assailed by the revolutionary specter of (a) slave rebellion and resistance in british colonies in the Caribbean, given the fact that in the 1790s slaves in haiti had successfully launched their rebellion; (b) the general rebellions in europe (french revolution, of course) and the american colonies, where a "social contract" was being pursued that exposed the british oligarchy for the reactionary form of government it was (excessively limited franchise, etc.); (c) the explicit anti-slavery agitation of quakers and even working-classes at home, who had launched one of the first mass campaigns against the slave trade. in sum, their hand was forced--they needed to stave off the specter that was haunting their lands (and then, don't forget, they re-wrote this history and deployed it in the civilizing mission--cue leopold and that rubbish).
a people's history of the british empire, john newsinger (2006): the thesis of the talk was simple--"brutality" was a central part of the civilizing mission, throughout. john insisted on the importance of understanding Empire not on the basis of the pretext it provides for its invasions and occupations, but on the objective basis of actual material causes that explain this intervention, the simple barbarity that has always ensued. there are a few examples of this, that are memorable in the worst way: prisoners in the revolting jamaican colonies in 1865 being used as target practice for the new enfield rifle, the obliteration of canton in the second opium war (the fallujah of that war), britain announcing its imminent withdrawal from its seventy-year occupation in egypt on some sixty occasions, the horrors of the suppression of the mau mau rebellion in kenya where some 130 people were hung from the same tree (this is the 1950s, remember).
Showing posts with label bolivia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bolivia. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Sunday, June 7, 2009
"che guevara and the cuban revolution," mike gonzalez
take-home: it's impossible, of course, to disagree with the bulk of the author's critique of Che's sense of "revolutionary impatience." he was beholden to a kind of military vanguardism, no doubt.
at the same time, however, there is a way in which this critique is too easy--for by presenting the entire history of guerrilla warfare through the prism of this commitment to a misguided heroism, mike gonzalez is able to recover a "lost possibility:" "if only they'd remembered to make links to the working-class," one thinks. a more responsible book about che would begin with the premise that it is never this easy--does it not make more sense to think of "military vanguardism" as the recognized worst of all possible options? could it not be that, amidst a workers' movement that is uninviting and co-opted, che took refuge in sheer voluntarism. not because he was self-involved, but because he couldn't stomach "patience" or failure? rather than allow us to wrap ourselves in the wonderful gifts of hindsight and orthodoxy, that would permit us to ask the really important questions: "they were aware of what they were doing, of their departures from the orthodoxy, and they still failed. now what?"
there is a way in which this line of defense, of course, is itself "too easy." nonetheless, the author can't be allowed to get off so easily--he often elides the question of "leadership" and "vanguardism" by supplying this trite rendering of revolutionary theory as dedicated entirely to "self-emancipation" (it seems like everyone's read a different translation of "What is to be done?" than I have, to be honest). but--again-- what do you do when self-emancipation doesn't present itself? perhaps one ought to ignore the feeling of urgency that motivated che (and the book makes a strong case for the futility and analytical fallacies of that impatience), but the author doesn't do his thesis any favors by implying that the alternative is more-or-less as simple as "making links with the workers" and snapping your fingers.
none of that is to deny the points of value in the book, just to object at the simplicity of its pedagogy. the author makes important points about the way in which the pathetic state of Communist politics in pre-WWII (owing in large part to the diktats of the Stalinists) turned an entire generation off of Marxist politics, and--he seems to suggest--towards this path of "revolutionary impatience." (at the same time, he doesn't answer the question this begs--if these were the only two alternatives, was Che preferable to the "bureaucratic patience" of the orthodox Marxists of the time?)
--- important quotes/excerpts ---
(7-18): Che's upbringing in the context of the history of Argentina
(17-18): "Peronism had mobilised masses of working-class people, but in support of an authoritarian figure whose devotion to the people's cause seemed shallow and temporary. In any case, the people with whom the young Ernesto talked politics were unlikely to offer any kind of defense of Peron--they shared his distrust. On the other hand, authentic revolutionary tradition--the Communists and the socialists--were a poor lot in the Argentina in which he was growing up. They were rigid, corrupt, and manipulative, and unprincipled in their willingness to form alliances with people who should logically have been the enemies of the class they claimed to represent."
(20): "In many ways, the history of modern Argentina is a struggle between the city on the banks of the River Plante, whose connections were always with Europe, and an interior--a vast expanse of varied landscapes--whose natural links are with Latin America"
(24): in 1952, revolution (at the forefront of which were miners) and co-option in Bolivia
(29-30): history of Guatemala:
(31-32): "At a fairly basic level, the intransigence of the North Americans encouraged Che's instinctive feeling that there was no alternative to armed resistance. When the coup came, and Guatemala City was bombarded from the air for weeks, there was very little armed resistance. The reasons why are still a matter of debate..."
(34): what Che would learn from the Arbenz coup:
(39-40): Cuban history:
(44): "Like many middle-class student nationailsts, [Castro] was suspicious of the Communists... In Cuba, as elsewhere, they had colluded with governments that were corrupt and authoritarian in exchange for support for the Soviet Union. Communism was a discredited and corrupted notion by the time Castro's generation encountered it."
(46-47): Raul was the link between the July 26 Movement, and the Communists. Nonetheless: "For Raul and Fidel, change could be the result of armed actions of a minotirity. They, and not the working class, would be the subjects of this process of change. This way of understanding what it means to be a revolutionary reflected the group's middle-class background, but much more importantly it betrayed the political distance between them and workers. Their project saw an independent state which could decree change in society from above. In this process, the main instrument was not mass organization or the power of workers, but the arms held by the revolutionaries."
(58): December 1956--Celia Sanchez was to meet them; but waited two days and left. There was also an abortive urban uprising, led by Frank Pais. "Of the 82 men who had boarded the Granma, just 19 had survived. Another eight would join them later... The 26 July Movement had supporters and sympathisers scattered across the island, but they were not connected with the trade unions or any other organizations outside their own circle... "
(59): "No guerrilla group (or foco, as Che would later describe it) could survive without the support of an urban movement. The relationship between mountain (sierra) and plain (llano) was at the heart of the political debates in the years that followed--above all, in the argument about which section should lead the movement."
(62): "The reality is that in [Che's] vision of the revolutionary war--a war conducted by revolutionaries on behalf of the masses--the staet of the workers' movement or the mass urban resistance was not an essential issue. In Che's view, the heart of the struggle was in the guerilla struggle in the mountains--la sierra."
(66): Frank Pais making the right noises about building support in the urban areas, maybe opening another front; Fidel, though, "imposed his political vision. The building of the rebel army was to be the absolute priority, and a call was to be issued for the organization of a 'civic resistance' whose essential function was to support the guerrilla fighters..." Author attributes this to increasing authoritarianism on Fidel's part.
(70): [crux of author's critique]"[Che] identified urban politics (the llano) with reformism and the politics of the guerrillas in the hills (the sierra) with revolution. Che spoke about the city as an undifferentiated place. In fact, his dismissal of the urban struggle effectively marginalised trade unions and workers too. Yet the sierra was not rural Cuba, where a class of peasant farmers and agricultural workers might have been seen as an alternative base for a revolutionary movement. These sections of Cuban society lived on the 'plains' too. Che (and Fidel) meant the more remote and difficult terrain of the Sierra Maestra--ideal for a cat-and-mouse military strategy, but not a region whose sparse and scattered population could build a social movement. The strategy that Che and Fidel had in common envisaged a guerrilla war conducted by small groups of revolutionary fighters rather than by the masses in whose name they claimed to be waging the struggle."
(72): failure of the Cienfuegos attack in 1957--300 tortured and killed by Batista. US increasing fed-up of Batista, it seems, rumors of possible contacts through Frank Pais?
(73): Che on discipline: "Che was extremely harsh with his own men and with anyone who endangered the cause, deliberately or otherwise. He readily executed informers and deserters, yet was magnanimous with enemy soldiers. This was a response that could only have arisen out of military code of honour."
(73): "He described himslf as a Marxist now. Yet for Marx, a revolution was the moment when the working class achieved its own liberation through collective action. This does not appear in Che's worldview."
(78): failure of the general strike called by 26 July Movement in 1958 (Batista had postponed elections). "In the aftermath, the 26 July Movement made a decisive turn..." towards the guerrilla struggle. Fidel's authority confirmed.
(78): "Che had reached the conclusions that he would later develop in Guerrilla Warfare.First, that a popular army can win a military struggle against a regular army. Second, that in the particular conditions of Latin America it is the poor peasants who are the most revolutionary class-rather than organized workers in industry or agriculture. Third, that the conditions for revolution do not need to exist before the struggle begins--the revolutionary foco can create them."
(79): Key page of author's critique [not very satisfying, i must say, particularly this strange fealty to the orthodox prescription in demonstrably heterodox circumstances]: "Che was reacting against a certain pessimist gradualism that he had heard from other socialists--the notion that 'objective conditions' had to exist before change was possible... Yet in identifying the poor peasantry as the key social group in the revolution, Che was specifically rejecting Marxistm's central idea--that it is the power of the organized working class alone that can bring about a social revolution. Some countries in Latin America were still dominated by small-scale agricultural production--and the argument that the peasantry was a revolutionary class still had some weight in those circumstances. But like his own country, Argentina... Cuba was integrated into an international economy as a mono-producer of sugar and was already highly urbanized... Che's conception of revolution only acknowledged the role of those who carried the arms and did the fighting. They alone were the revolutionary actors. What of the uban workers, the students, the people in the small towns? Their task was to supply the fighters... In a military structure there could be neither democracy nor transparency--both could spell disaster in a military context. But in a society, their absence would be a disaster."
(83): Fidel towards the Communists was at this stage, pragmatic--didn't want to give the US an opportunity, in particular. "Che, on the other hand, while fiercely critical of the Cuban Communists in many respects, described himself as a Communist. He supported the Soviet Union... Yet as the revolution evolved, Che would become increasingly critical of the Soviet model while Fidel would become the leader and symbol of Cuban communism."
(89): the tide turned mainly due to objective factors: "The failure of the elections, the sucess of small-scale but well publicized guerrilla actions in the area, the increasing brutality of Batista and the growing alienation of the population that it produced, had accelerated the collapse of the regime--particularly as increasing numbers of conscript soldiers gave up the fight."
(92-93): argument here that though Fidel was eager to take full credit on behalf of the 26 July Movement, there were many other factors that led to Batista's downfall, notably the ending of support by the US (an arms embargo was in place), as well as agitation by other political organizations.
(95): dispensing "revolutionary justice:" about 55 executed in Havana in the first few days (70 executed by Raul, in Oriente). By May the number had risen to around 550. "These were the torturers, the police spies, the most zealous servants of Batista's police state."
(102): again, the critique re-phrased: "The notion that revolution comprises the self-emancipation of the working class is absolutely central to Marx's thought. From being the objects of the interests of others, the majority become the governors of their own lives by transforming society through their own actions. It is a core principle in revolutionary Marxism. Yet the guerrilla war theory replaces this idea with another--that the revolutionaries will make the revolution on behalf of the wider class."
(105-106): "Who were these young revolutionaries? ...they came largely from the middle class and were driven above all by a hatred of imperialism. They were largely nationalists for whom national independence and self-determination was the most important issue. For the most part they did not come from a Communist tradition... When Che insisted that revolutionaries need not wait for the objective conditions for revolution to exist, he was obliquely referring to the Communist parties..."
(106-108): three concerns in the early months--(!) how to ensure defence of the revolution; (2) an economic program, and what kind of land reform (class of peasants, or collectivization); (3) what would the political direction of the revolution be?
(108): "How could a small economy, dependent for more than 80 percent of its export earnings on one product--sugar--break its dependency? One answer was to diversify the economy--the other was to develop industrially."
(123-124): The beginnings of revolutionary terror--Che making illegal any offense to "revolutionary morality," founding a "labor camp," etc.
(125): "At first, the response of the Cuban population was extremely positive. Yet there was a missing element in Che's argument. Involvement and participation could be ends in themselves, provided they were real. Endless declarations of loyalty by the leaders to the led, however, were no substitute for a genuine workers' democracy in which it was the popular organizations which made the decisions and the government which carried them out."
(127): on eve of Bay of Pigs, Cuban state rounds up 35,000 people!
(129): by 1962, 500,000 people, bulk of Cuba's professional class, had fled to the US
(131): "Che's impatience with material realities was at the heart of his political theory. If the revolutionaries could substitute for the masses in making the revolution, the revolutionary state could overcome the material limitations it faced, he argued."
(140-141): "Che emphasises over and over again in his essay that the guerrilla army must be located in the countryside, and recruit above all among the peasantry, because it is they who have suffered the most brutal exploitation. But suffering, of course, does not create revolutionaries. On the contrary, without collective organisation and the confidence that comes from the experience of struggle, and without the power to strike at the very heart of capitalism--the machinery of production--suffering can produce despair and a sense of impotence." This impatience, the author argues, came into conflict more and more with the USSR's commitment to "peaceful coexistence."
(148): Che's critique of the USSR in Algiers, declaring in favor of Third World solidarity--decrying the USSR for their failure to support liberation movements, calling them 'accomplices of imperialism.'
(149): on Man and Socialism: "Why did he lay such emphasis on the question of a new consciousness? It was certainly not for economic reasons, or because committed people are more efficient producers... It went to the very heart of Che's political ideas, for it emphasized the subjective over the objective, the effort of will that could overcome uncompromising material conditions. This was a central notion in his Guerrilla Warfare... It flew in the face of a revolutionary tradition which recognized the dialectical relationship between the individual and his or her circumstances...
(149-154): misadventure in Congo, where the "disorganization was total." Nasser had warned him that he would become 'Another Tarzan, a white man among black men, leading and protecting them... It can't be done.'
(160): most salient critique of Che's strategy in Bolivia--he set up shop in the Eastern region, which was home to the peasantry that the 1964-coup leader, Rene Barrientos, had wooed. much more suited would have been the mining areas of the West that Barrientos had repressed and home to a "glorious revolutionary tradition."
(164): "This was not an ideal moment for a major offensive, but it would have been a perfect time for the patient rebuilding of political organization, especially with the enormous moral authority of Che behind it. Guevara, however was wedded to the idea of guerilla warfare, and did not see the organized working class as a central actor in his vision of revolution."
(168): in the words of one Richard Harris:
(168): "It does Che's memory no credit to refuse to acknowledge the brutal truth that this was a terrible and costly failure born of Che's insistence that the will of the revolutionar can overcome objective conditions and substitute the individual for the movement of an entire class. That way lies martyrdom, not social revolution."
take-home: it's impossible, of course, to disagree with the bulk of the author's critique of Che's sense of "revolutionary impatience." he was beholden to a kind of military vanguardism, no doubt.
at the same time, however, there is a way in which this critique is too easy--for by presenting the entire history of guerrilla warfare through the prism of this commitment to a misguided heroism, mike gonzalez is able to recover a "lost possibility:" "if only they'd remembered to make links to the working-class," one thinks. a more responsible book about che would begin with the premise that it is never this easy--does it not make more sense to think of "military vanguardism" as the recognized worst of all possible options? could it not be that, amidst a workers' movement that is uninviting and co-opted, che took refuge in sheer voluntarism. not because he was self-involved, but because he couldn't stomach "patience" or failure? rather than allow us to wrap ourselves in the wonderful gifts of hindsight and orthodoxy, that would permit us to ask the really important questions: "they were aware of what they were doing, of their departures from the orthodoxy, and they still failed. now what?"
there is a way in which this line of defense, of course, is itself "too easy." nonetheless, the author can't be allowed to get off so easily--he often elides the question of "leadership" and "vanguardism" by supplying this trite rendering of revolutionary theory as dedicated entirely to "self-emancipation" (it seems like everyone's read a different translation of "What is to be done?" than I have, to be honest). but--again-- what do you do when self-emancipation doesn't present itself? perhaps one ought to ignore the feeling of urgency that motivated che (and the book makes a strong case for the futility and analytical fallacies of that impatience), but the author doesn't do his thesis any favors by implying that the alternative is more-or-less as simple as "making links with the workers" and snapping your fingers.
none of that is to deny the points of value in the book, just to object at the simplicity of its pedagogy. the author makes important points about the way in which the pathetic state of Communist politics in pre-WWII (owing in large part to the diktats of the Stalinists) turned an entire generation off of Marxist politics, and--he seems to suggest--towards this path of "revolutionary impatience." (at the same time, he doesn't answer the question this begs--if these were the only two alternatives, was Che preferable to the "bureaucratic patience" of the orthodox Marxists of the time?)
--- important quotes/excerpts ---
(7-18): Che's upbringing in the context of the history of Argentina
1880s: President Hipolito Yrigoyen in power; Argentina becomes a meat-exporting economy, exchanging foodstuffs for goods from Europe (lots of Italian, Spanish and German immigrants drawn to the country at this time)
1916, 1918: full male suffrage introduced, as well as social security. author gives this as time of increasing militancy of this immigrant working-class, which complemented the "rising discontent of an urban middle and lower middle class largely excluded from political life." a university reform movement which demandeda "democratic higher education."
1930: the "old interests" respond--a military coup, and in 1933 the new gov't signed a trade agreement with Britain, a defeat for the working-class. this military harbored sympathies for the Axis powers; Che's father was active in anti-fascist circles.
1940: military gov't of Castillo, though, locked into dependence with Britain, of course; and "there were also ideological reasons why an authoritarian nationalist government would feel neutral towards the old imperial power, Britain." regardless, "war, for a country whose main exports--meat and wheat--drove the competing armies, was a commercial opportunity."
1943: because of Castillo's suspected sympathies for the Allies, the GOU--a group of army officers--launched a coup; state of emergency was declared. nonetheless, by 1945 the army had declared with the allies, even though the fact that many Nazis fled to the country indicates that this was more opportunism than anything else. Juan Domingo Peron was among the officers now leading--he becomes Secretary of Labor, a position which gives him a pulpit for his populism. "Peron's base of support was a layer of newly arrived workers, recent immigrants from the countryside or the smaller provincial towns, who had gravitated towards the capital in search of work in its expanding industries... Evita came from the same world as they... They were Peron's mass base..."
1946: elections pitting Peron (who enjoyed support from business groups and right wing nationalists, as well) against the Democratic Union (which enjoyed support from other business interests as well as socialists and Communists). the Communists' base had been eaten into by Peron, and they also saw his support for the German-Italian axis through the eyes of the Soviet Union. Guevara's parents' sympathies were similar, resoundingly anti-fascist. all this spelled disaster for the Communists, insofar as they were "siding with imperialism, with the US government which was relentless in attacking Peron, and with the old landowning and industrial class against the man who claimed to speaking for all Argentines..."
(17-18): "Peronism had mobilised masses of working-class people, but in support of an authoritarian figure whose devotion to the people's cause seemed shallow and temporary. In any case, the people with whom the young Ernesto talked politics were unlikely to offer any kind of defense of Peron--they shared his distrust. On the other hand, authentic revolutionary tradition--the Communists and the socialists--were a poor lot in the Argentina in which he was growing up. They were rigid, corrupt, and manipulative, and unprincipled in their willingness to form alliances with people who should logically have been the enemies of the class they claimed to represent."
(20): "In many ways, the history of modern Argentina is a struggle between the city on the banks of the River Plante, whose connections were always with Europe, and an interior--a vast expanse of varied landscapes--whose natural links are with Latin America"
(24): in 1952, revolution (at the forefront of which were miners) and co-option in Bolivia
(29-30): history of Guatemala:
1900s: coffee and later banana economy, oriented towards the US market--"for the first forty years of the 20th century is the history of one major North American company, United Fruit, and its founder and owner, Sam Zemurray... By the early 1940s, some 40 percent of Guatemala's land was under the control of the company known throughout Central America as La Yunai.
1944: Rafael Arevalo annuonces a reform program--key to which was land reform and trade union rights
1951: Jacob Arbenz, a young military officer who had served under Arevalo, comes to power, intending to carry the program through to completion. "It is important to emphasize that Arbenz was no revolutionary. In a sense, his project was the modernization of the economy under a Guatemalan state able to control and determine the allocation of its own resources. But the process of fairly moderate reform that he set in motion unleashed other forces which he could not easily control... The process, therefore, was announced from above but driven from below."
1954: "...several key figures in the Washington government were intimately involveed with the United Fruit Company--among them John Foster Dulles, Secretary of Staet, and his brother Allen Dulles, head of the CIA... Together they organized the overthrow of Arbenz, which was to led by a financed military force under Carlos Castillo Armas."
(31-32): "At a fairly basic level, the intransigence of the North Americans encouraged Che's instinctive feeling that there was no alternative to armed resistance. When the coup came, and Guatemala City was bombarded from the air for weeks, there was very little armed resistance. The reasons why are still a matter of debate..."
(34): what Che would learn from the Arbenz coup:
He could have given arms to the people, but he did not want to... Now we see the result.
(39-40): Cuban history:
1898: Cuban "independence"
1901: Platt Amendment, which gave US right to intervene to defend its interests. Guantanamo Bay ceded on a 99-year lease--"Washington nominated the head of the national bank, the customs service, and the police. It was an early step in the incorporation of Cuba into the US economy--as a supplier of the sugar that was becoming so important a component of the new urban diet, and as a market for US goods [raw materials and captive market, check] "Within the first three years of indepdence... speculators from US... bought up an estimated 60 percent of the land."
1921: by this date, US owned bulk of large sugar plantations.
1929: Depression hit Cuba hard--popular resentment against then-in-power Machado grew.
1933: protests toppled the government--the leader of the non-commissioned officers in the army, Batista, called upon the students to name the new president. He was a professor named Grau San Martin. He "introduced the eight-hour day, rescinded the Platt Amendment, and announced the coming nationalisation of the electric industry."
1934: Sergeants' revolt led by Batista takes power, though, with tacit backing of US--Batista in effective control from this point on, though he takes presidency in 1940. Communist Party supports him, owing to the "popular front policy"--"this strategy was not a consequence of the particular conditions in any one country, but the result of the Soviet Union's concern to build a wide international coalition against Nazism... its political cost was enormous... In Spain for example, the consequence was that the Communist Party opposed the development of a revolutionary response to the fascist uprising of 1936 and instead threw in its lot with a coalition of centre and right wing parties whose one unifying feature was their fear of a workers' revolution."
1944: Grau San Martin becomes president. by 1947, after the end of the peace of the "popular front" era, he has turned on the Communists.
1948: "the slippery and corrupt" Prio Socarras takes his place.
1951: Chibas kills himself on air in the run-up into the 1952 Congress elections. soon after Batista takes power in a coup that was to last till the revolution. "His immediate actions once in power were a sign of things to come: he banned political parties, filled the state with his cronies, and launched a campaign of repression."
(44): "Like many middle-class student nationailsts, [Castro] was suspicious of the Communists... In Cuba, as elsewhere, they had colluded with governments that were corrupt and authoritarian in exchange for support for the Soviet Union. Communism was a discredited and corrupted notion by the time Castro's generation encountered it."
(46-47): Raul was the link between the July 26 Movement, and the Communists. Nonetheless: "For Raul and Fidel, change could be the result of armed actions of a minotirity. They, and not the working class, would be the subjects of this process of change. This way of understanding what it means to be a revolutionary reflected the group's middle-class background, but much more importantly it betrayed the political distance between them and workers. Their project saw an independent state which could decree change in society from above. In this process, the main instrument was not mass organization or the power of workers, but the arms held by the revolutionaries."
(58): December 1956--Celia Sanchez was to meet them; but waited two days and left. There was also an abortive urban uprising, led by Frank Pais. "Of the 82 men who had boarded the Granma, just 19 had survived. Another eight would join them later... The 26 July Movement had supporters and sympathisers scattered across the island, but they were not connected with the trade unions or any other organizations outside their own circle... "
(59): "No guerrilla group (or foco, as Che would later describe it) could survive without the support of an urban movement. The relationship between mountain (sierra) and plain (llano) was at the heart of the political debates in the years that followed--above all, in the argument about which section should lead the movement."
(62): "The reality is that in [Che's] vision of the revolutionary war--a war conducted by revolutionaries on behalf of the masses--the staet of the workers' movement or the mass urban resistance was not an essential issue. In Che's view, the heart of the struggle was in the guerilla struggle in the mountains--la sierra."
(66): Frank Pais making the right noises about building support in the urban areas, maybe opening another front; Fidel, though, "imposed his political vision. The building of the rebel army was to be the absolute priority, and a call was to be issued for the organization of a 'civic resistance' whose essential function was to support the guerrilla fighters..." Author attributes this to increasing authoritarianism on Fidel's part.
(70): [crux of author's critique]"[Che] identified urban politics (the llano) with reformism and the politics of the guerrillas in the hills (the sierra) with revolution. Che spoke about the city as an undifferentiated place. In fact, his dismissal of the urban struggle effectively marginalised trade unions and workers too. Yet the sierra was not rural Cuba, where a class of peasant farmers and agricultural workers might have been seen as an alternative base for a revolutionary movement. These sections of Cuban society lived on the 'plains' too. Che (and Fidel) meant the more remote and difficult terrain of the Sierra Maestra--ideal for a cat-and-mouse military strategy, but not a region whose sparse and scattered population could build a social movement. The strategy that Che and Fidel had in common envisaged a guerrilla war conducted by small groups of revolutionary fighters rather than by the masses in whose name they claimed to be waging the struggle."
(72): failure of the Cienfuegos attack in 1957--300 tortured and killed by Batista. US increasing fed-up of Batista, it seems, rumors of possible contacts through Frank Pais?
(73): Che on discipline: "Che was extremely harsh with his own men and with anyone who endangered the cause, deliberately or otherwise. He readily executed informers and deserters, yet was magnanimous with enemy soldiers. This was a response that could only have arisen out of military code of honour."
(73): "He described himslf as a Marxist now. Yet for Marx, a revolution was the moment when the working class achieved its own liberation through collective action. This does not appear in Che's worldview."
(78): failure of the general strike called by 26 July Movement in 1958 (Batista had postponed elections). "In the aftermath, the 26 July Movement made a decisive turn..." towards the guerrilla struggle. Fidel's authority confirmed.
(78): "Che had reached the conclusions that he would later develop in Guerrilla Warfare.First, that a popular army can win a military struggle against a regular army. Second, that in the particular conditions of Latin America it is the poor peasants who are the most revolutionary class-rather than organized workers in industry or agriculture. Third, that the conditions for revolution do not need to exist before the struggle begins--the revolutionary foco can create them."
(79): Key page of author's critique [not very satisfying, i must say, particularly this strange fealty to the orthodox prescription in demonstrably heterodox circumstances]: "Che was reacting against a certain pessimist gradualism that he had heard from other socialists--the notion that 'objective conditions' had to exist before change was possible... Yet in identifying the poor peasantry as the key social group in the revolution, Che was specifically rejecting Marxistm's central idea--that it is the power of the organized working class alone that can bring about a social revolution. Some countries in Latin America were still dominated by small-scale agricultural production--and the argument that the peasantry was a revolutionary class still had some weight in those circumstances. But like his own country, Argentina... Cuba was integrated into an international economy as a mono-producer of sugar and was already highly urbanized... Che's conception of revolution only acknowledged the role of those who carried the arms and did the fighting. They alone were the revolutionary actors. What of the uban workers, the students, the people in the small towns? Their task was to supply the fighters... In a military structure there could be neither democracy nor transparency--both could spell disaster in a military context. But in a society, their absence would be a disaster."
(83): Fidel towards the Communists was at this stage, pragmatic--didn't want to give the US an opportunity, in particular. "Che, on the other hand, while fiercely critical of the Cuban Communists in many respects, described himself as a Communist. He supported the Soviet Union... Yet as the revolution evolved, Che would become increasingly critical of the Soviet model while Fidel would become the leader and symbol of Cuban communism."
(89): the tide turned mainly due to objective factors: "The failure of the elections, the sucess of small-scale but well publicized guerrilla actions in the area, the increasing brutality of Batista and the growing alienation of the population that it produced, had accelerated the collapse of the regime--particularly as increasing numbers of conscript soldiers gave up the fight."
(92-93): argument here that though Fidel was eager to take full credit on behalf of the 26 July Movement, there were many other factors that led to Batista's downfall, notably the ending of support by the US (an arms embargo was in place), as well as agitation by other political organizations.
(95): dispensing "revolutionary justice:" about 55 executed in Havana in the first few days (70 executed by Raul, in Oriente). By May the number had risen to around 550. "These were the torturers, the police spies, the most zealous servants of Batista's police state."
(102): again, the critique re-phrased: "The notion that revolution comprises the self-emancipation of the working class is absolutely central to Marx's thought. From being the objects of the interests of others, the majority become the governors of their own lives by transforming society through their own actions. It is a core principle in revolutionary Marxism. Yet the guerrilla war theory replaces this idea with another--that the revolutionaries will make the revolution on behalf of the wider class."
(105-106): "Who were these young revolutionaries? ...they came largely from the middle class and were driven above all by a hatred of imperialism. They were largely nationalists for whom national independence and self-determination was the most important issue. For the most part they did not come from a Communist tradition... When Che insisted that revolutionaries need not wait for the objective conditions for revolution to exist, he was obliquely referring to the Communist parties..."
(106-108): three concerns in the early months--(!) how to ensure defence of the revolution; (2) an economic program, and what kind of land reform (class of peasants, or collectivization); (3) what would the political direction of the revolution be?
(108): "How could a small economy, dependent for more than 80 percent of its export earnings on one product--sugar--break its dependency? One answer was to diversify the economy--the other was to develop industrially."
(123-124): The beginnings of revolutionary terror--Che making illegal any offense to "revolutionary morality," founding a "labor camp," etc.
(125): "At first, the response of the Cuban population was extremely positive. Yet there was a missing element in Che's argument. Involvement and participation could be ends in themselves, provided they were real. Endless declarations of loyalty by the leaders to the led, however, were no substitute for a genuine workers' democracy in which it was the popular organizations which made the decisions and the government which carried them out."
(127): on eve of Bay of Pigs, Cuban state rounds up 35,000 people!
(129): by 1962, 500,000 people, bulk of Cuba's professional class, had fled to the US
(131): "Che's impatience with material realities was at the heart of his political theory. If the revolutionaries could substitute for the masses in making the revolution, the revolutionary state could overcome the material limitations it faced, he argued."
(140-141): "Che emphasises over and over again in his essay that the guerrilla army must be located in the countryside, and recruit above all among the peasantry, because it is they who have suffered the most brutal exploitation. But suffering, of course, does not create revolutionaries. On the contrary, without collective organisation and the confidence that comes from the experience of struggle, and without the power to strike at the very heart of capitalism--the machinery of production--suffering can produce despair and a sense of impotence." This impatience, the author argues, came into conflict more and more with the USSR's commitment to "peaceful coexistence."
(148): Che's critique of the USSR in Algiers, declaring in favor of Third World solidarity--decrying the USSR for their failure to support liberation movements, calling them 'accomplices of imperialism.'
(149): on Man and Socialism: "Why did he lay such emphasis on the question of a new consciousness? It was certainly not for economic reasons, or because committed people are more efficient producers... It went to the very heart of Che's political ideas, for it emphasized the subjective over the objective, the effort of will that could overcome uncompromising material conditions. This was a central notion in his Guerrilla Warfare... It flew in the face of a revolutionary tradition which recognized the dialectical relationship between the individual and his or her circumstances...
(149-154): misadventure in Congo, where the "disorganization was total." Nasser had warned him that he would become 'Another Tarzan, a white man among black men, leading and protecting them... It can't be done.'
(160): most salient critique of Che's strategy in Bolivia--he set up shop in the Eastern region, which was home to the peasantry that the 1964-coup leader, Rene Barrientos, had wooed. much more suited would have been the mining areas of the West that Barrientos had repressed and home to a "glorious revolutionary tradition."
(164): "This was not an ideal moment for a major offensive, but it would have been a perfect time for the patient rebuilding of political organization, especially with the enormous moral authority of Che behind it. Guevara, however was wedded to the idea of guerilla warfare, and did not see the organized working class as a central actor in his vision of revolution."
(168): in the words of one Richard Harris:
The defeat of Che's guerrilla operation and the main flaw in Che's strategy--as well as Debray's theorising about revolutionary guerrilla warfare... might be called a kind of military vanguardism. By reducing popular revolution to a special form of guerrilla warfare, Che's strategy and Debray's early writings overemphasized the military aspects of initating a revolutionary struggle against an unjust regime. And they underemphasized the political dimension of organizing the base of popular support needed for a successful revolutionary struggle.
(168): "It does Che's memory no credit to refuse to acknowledge the brutal truth that this was a terrible and costly failure born of Che's insistence that the will of the revolutionar can overcome objective conditions and substitute the individual for the movement of an entire class. That way lies martyrdom, not social revolution."
Friday, February 27, 2009
from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part II)
(62): After centuries of imperialism, the new nations had been left with economies that relied on the sale of raw material and the import of finished goods. This fundamental imbalance meant that countries like Argentina had to export vast amounts of raw materials at relatively low prices, whereas their import bills would be inflated with the high prices commanded by industrially manufactured goods.
(62-63): Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the dominant classes in Argentina had no brief for nation building. The oligarchs... ran the country with an iron fist and held their own wealth in European banks (which mean that they preferred fiscal policies that favored Europe's currencies against Argentina's economic strength). This detachment of the elite fueled the growth of a socialist movement... Argentina's industrialization grew in the breach, when European and US capital neglected the region for the period between the Depression of the 1920s and the wars of the 1940s... British capital owned most of Argentina's railroads and the Swiss, the United States, and the British owned almost half of its industries. The authoritarian populist Juan Peron bought the railroads from the British...
(63-64): A combination of technological advantages, unionization, and the vagaries of the prices of primary products meant that the core enjoyed a sizable gain in the "terms of trade."
(66): Why is India poor, asked Dadabhai Naoroji? It is not the pitiless operation of economic laws, but it is the thoughtless and pitiless action of the British policy; it is the pitiless eating of India's substance in India, and the further pitiless drain to England; in short, it is the pitiless perversion of economic laws by the sad bleeding to which India is subjected, that is destroying India." The Third World bled to make Europe grow. Modernization theory avoided this, and rather sought to "Protestantize" the cultures of the world to seed capitalist culture.
(66): Colonialism ravaged the world, and left more than half of it bereft of capital and with a surfeit of poverty. In 1500, the average per capita income in Europe ran only three times more than that in Africa and Asia, whereas in 1960, it was ten times greater.
(67): Prebisch rejected the theory of comparative advantage, because he demonstrated that each region of the world could enjoy the fruits of modernity as much as the others. [T]rade is crucial because some regions have smaller markets than otehrs, and raw materials and agricultural lands are not evenly distributed along national lines. But the basis of trade had to be altered. It could not be premised on the idea that some states are naturally good at being harvesters of low-value raw materials and others are naturally proficient at being producers of high-value-added finished products. The theory of comparative advantage, Prebisch claimed, stifles genuine economic development.
(68): The contempt of the First World's economists was palpable. John Maynard Keynes, for instance, complained to the English government about the invitations being sent out to the darker nations for the Bretton Woods Conference. Those that had been invited from Colombia to Venezuela, from Liberia to the Philippines, he noted, "clearly have nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground." For Keynes, this is "the most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years." Only technocrats from the advanced industrial states should be allowed to formulate the rules, because otherwise thsoe from the raw material states would begin to make unbearable demands.
(71): The US president of the World Bank, Eugene Black, quite forthrightly remarked, "Our foreign aid programs constitute a distinct benefit to American business. The three major benefits are (1) foreign aid provides a substantial and immediate market for United States goods and services, (2) foreign aid stimulates the development of new overseas markets for United States' companies, (3) foreign aid orients national economies toward a free enterprise system in which United States' firms can prosper.
(73): [BARAN'S CRITIQUE OF ISI] Paul Baran published The Political Economy of Growth in which he demonstrated the futility of foreign aid and the import-substitution industrialization strategy... While Baran might have overstated his thesis and the role of monopoly capitalism within the darker nations, his critique on the reliance on the growth strategy was on point. The aid from outside (whether capitalist or socialist) purchased time for the dominant elites, who used that money to prevent necessary social transformation. A more substantial way for development would be the destruction of feudal social relations, band by the socialization of production. These parasitic elites acceded to the Prebisch logic in order to benefit their own class interests, rather than move their societies to socialism. The cominant classes in each of these societies purchased third-rate, out-of-date plants and machinery from the advanced industrial states, and paid top dollar for them... Prebisch recognized this major limitation in the Third World order: "We thought that an acceleration of the rate of growth would solve all problems. This was our great mistake." What was needed alongside growth were "changes in the social structure," indeed "a complete social transformation."
(74): It had already become sufficient to be critical of the First World alone, which became a shield that protected the national bourgeoisie from criticism for its own lack of imagination and self-sacrifice. In other words, development theory and public policy emphasized economic growth as an end in itself without a built-in consideration for equity.
(75): One million dollars. That's all it took in 1953 for the CIA to overthrow a nationalist government. Langley's man in Tehran was Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. Ordered to take out the democratically elected National Front government led by Muhammed Mosaddeq and restore the Shah of Iran, Roosevelt spread the cash and waited for it to do its magic...
(76): The Tudeh Party (heir to the Communist Party founded in 1920) had a cadre of 25,000, while its union federation boasted a membership of 335,000. The influence of the Tudeh angered the US establishment, which offered the National Front leader a choice: either crush the Communists, take US aid and remain in power, or else fall under Soviet-Communist influence. On May 2, 1953, Mosaddeq revealed the shallowness fo his class, whose investment in nationalism and national sovereignty only went as far as it would guarantee its rule and luxury; he wrote a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which he cowered, "Please accept, Mr. President, the assurances of my highest consideration." Afraid of the Soviets, Mosaddeq crushed the Tudeh Party, thereby destroying the most organized defenders of Iranian sovereignty, and then fell before a coup engineered by the CIA's representative and a far more reliable US ally, the Shah.
(76-77): The Shah exiled tens of thousands of National Party members and Communists, and killed thousands of both... The Tudeh was paralyzed by the coup. The USSR paid it little heed, preferring to make every concession to the Shah in hopes of pacifying a border state and gaining access to the oil--all this despite the close relationship between the United States and the Shah.
(80): Although Iran had never been formerly colonized, it belonged with the hungry.... English oil firms... had dominated Iran's oil fields since 1901... Iran's government paid for the infrastructure to remove the oil, and earned a pittance from the oil company cartel. Not for nothing did Mossadeq's struggle over oil earn him the affection of the masses.
(97): Whereas when the Bolshevik Revolution took Russia out of World War I in an anti-imperialist flourish (the new government revealed the hidden imperialist correspondence of the European regimes), the Soviet state under Stalin had a much more cautious approach toward the new postcolonial states. The Soviet Union had been battered by the war... The USSR could neither afford to rest easy nor antagonize the hoards that gathered on its borders. In this vise, the USSR's principle leadership offered two contrary theses: that any entente between the United States and the USSR was "perfectly feasible" (as Stalin put it in December 1946), and that the United States and its allies were "rapacious imperialists" who were on the verge of defeat by the tide of socialism... Zhadanov's two-camp theory privileged the national Communist parties at the same time as the USSR's commissars made arrangements with bourgeois forces within the postcolonial states at the expense of the local Communists. This vacillation manifested itself in the ambiguity over the Soviet position regarding the Third World and peaceful co-existence. After the demise of Stalin, the new leadership led by Khruschchev and Bulganin adopted peaceful co-existence and pledged their support to the bourgeois nationalist regimes (often against the domestic Communists). The unclear situation suggested that the USSR seemed keener to push its own national interests than those of the national Communist parties to which it pledged verbal fealty.
(98): Secretary of State Dulles traveled to both Egypt and India in 1953. In South Asia, Dulles found Nehru "utterly impractical," whereas he enjoyed the "martial and religious qualities of the Pakistanis."
(100-101): In 1961, the other big three welcomed the representatives of twenty-two states from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe to Belgrade to create NAM, an institution that gre in stregnth from conference to conference, within and without the UN, and lumbers on today. The nature of the regimes that participated in the NAM meeting reflects its limitations. With their pageantry came the monarchs... This was a mixed crowd, and its sheer political diversity made an ideologically coherent and unified stance by NAM almost impossible. NAM would remain a political platform, a sub-United Nations, but it would only be able to act in concert on two broad issues: to champion global nuclear disarmament, and to democratize the United Nations.
(103): Cabral acknowledged that while PAIGC's struggle is also the struggle "for peaceful co-existence and for peace," he made it clear that "to co-exist one must first of all exist, so the imperialists and the colonists must be forced to retreat so that we can make a contribution to human civilization, based on the work, the dynamic personality and the culture of our peoples."
(104): In early December 1964, Che Guevara took this message to the floor of the UN General Assembly: "We should like to wake up this Assembly. Imperialism wants to convert this meeting into a useless oratorical tournament instead of solving the serious problems of the world. We must prevent them from doing this... As Marxists we maintain that peaceful co-existence does not include co-existence between exploiters and exploited."
(106): Between 1900 and 1933, the US military intervened to scuttle the national hopes of the people of Cuba (four times), the Dominican Republic (four times, including an eight-year occupation), Guatemala (once), Haiti (twice, including a nineteen-year occupation), Honduras (seven times), Nicaragua (twice), and Panama (six times).
(106): For Castro, part of the problem lay in the new doctrine that had been developed by the Third World project and adopted by the Soviets, the "strange concept of peaceful co-existence for some and war for others." Castro expected NAM and the USSR to do something concrete for Vietnam as well as other colonized people.
(108): In a letter to the Tricontinental, Che asked the hardest question of all: What is the value of solidarity when the imperialist guns were not challenged? "The solidarity of the progressive forces of the world towards the people of Vietnam today," he wrote, "is similar to the bitter irony of the plebians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victims of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory."
(110): Nehru and Sukarno had been ruthless against the Communist movements in their own countries, and they were incapable of a genuine challenge to finance capital. Like Nehru and Sukarno, Nkrumah of Ghana enjoyed the momentum of a successful freedom struggle and disliked any opposition. His Preventive Detention Act and use of the state apparatus against the rail workers in 1961 led inexorably to the creation of a one-party state in 1964 with Nkrumah as Osagyefo or Redeemer... Nkrumah's populatrity plummeted along with world cocoa prices, and in 1966, the CIA encouraged his opposition to conduct a coup against him.
(120): The FLN's gambit succeeded politically, even if the military cost was enormous. During the course of the war, from 1954 to 1962, between three hundred thousand and a million people lost their lives. It was a heavy price to pay. All the factions within Algeria, even the liberals, lined up behind the FLN.
(123): The 1963 Constitution of Algeria abolished all political parties except the FLN, and elevated the president of the FLN to the sole formulator of state policy. The energy of the Algerian Revolution would now be concentrated in the body of the president, who for the moment was Ben Bella. The 1964 Charter of Algiers defended the abolishment of parties other than FLN. "The multiparty system allows all particular interests to organize into different pressure groups. It frustrated the general interest, that is, the workers' interest," and therefore, in the workers' name, there should only be one party, the "vanguard party."
(125): The seven-and-a-half year war and the long period of colonial rule (1830-1962) had drained Algerian society. The FLN inherited the desiccated earth... Algeria's wealth had been siphoned off by the First World... Few factories, few schools, and few hospitals--the emblems of modernity had been built around the colonial maintenance of "tradition."...Of the twelve million Algerians, four and a half million lived in poverty, and two million had been locked in concentration camps, from which they went to abandoned herds and overgrown lands.
(127): National liberation parties that came to power without a well-honed class analysis opened themselves up to pressure from the newly confident mercantile and industrial classes, whose own position was greatly enhanced by the national liberation agenda for the domestic creation of industry, for the creation of a national economy. Although the national liberation party remained largely beholden to the bureaucratic-managerial-intellectual (sometimes military) elite, it did build close ties to the industrial class. Import-substitution type projects opened some space for institutional reform and social-development projects, but in most cases they simply protected domestic industrialists who had no long-term commitment to the Third World agenda.
(128): [IMPORTANT] Algeria followed a tradition already established and defended in large parts of postcolonial Africa, whether ruled by governments of the "Right" or the "Left"--in Guinea (1958), Congo (1960), Ivory Coast (1961), Tanzania (1963), Malawi (1963), and Kenya (1964). The defenders of the "one-party staet" argued that rival parties "have generally little interest for the great majority of the people."...The one party vision is one of fear of the people, fear that any devolution of power would lead to antinational activity... A state that acted bureaucratically on a population had a built-in tendency to rely on congealed, traditional sources of social power and control. Older forms of association returned to the fore, such as tribal and class loyalties. These power bases became indispensable for elections or the implementation of the state's development agenda. The national liberation state that came into being as the instrument of popular power now turned to the very agents who had often not supported it to enact its policies.
(129) [ATTEMPTS AT FIGHTING THE BUREAUCRACY] At the 1961 Second Congress of the Vietnam Workers' Party, Ho Chi Minh warned his party and nation about the tendency toward bureaucratization and commandism, for the bureaucratic attitude "shows in fondness for red tape, divorce from the masses of the people and reluctance to learn the experiences of the masses," while commandism did not allow the people to "work on their own initiative and own accord tand to use compulsion to do unexplained tasks." ... Che's lyrical esays on volunteerism and Communist morality come from and engendered the "work councils" that continue to be a feature of Cuban social life. Cabral's speeches on the duty of the Communist address the problem. Within a year of Guniea-Bissau's freedom from Portuguese rule, Cabral's government invited the renowned Brazilian educator Paolo Freire to visit the country, study its educational system, and provide assistance on a popular pedagogy for the creation of a nonbureaucratic society.
(132): By the late 1960s, Algeria had moved from an attempt to create a socialist state to a state capitalist one, with a parasitic bourgeoisie confident beside the strong arms of the military.
(136) : [BOLIVIA] The second reform came in 1953, when the MNR conducted farily extensive land redistribution on behalf of the landless labor, the campesinos. The 6 percent of the landowners who owned more than a thousand hectares, the hacendados, controlled 92 percent of the land, and they had not more than 1.5 percent of that land under cultivation... Despite the drawbacks of the revolution, Bolivia in the early 1950s was in the same sort of social ferment as Algeria a decade later. For a few years, Bolivia trod a path unfamiliar to most Third World states... From 1952 until the late 1950s, the MNR attempted to dismantle the military and hand over the power of the gun to the militias of the campesions and the tin miners, and the MNR's own grupos de honor. Its 1951 experience with the military led the MNR to shut down the Colegio Militar, dismiss a fifth of the officer corps, drastically cut the expenditure for the army from 22 percent in 1952 to 7 percent in 1957), and even consider the complete elimination of the armed forces...
(137-138) [ALAS]... the MNR had by the late 1950s already begun to build up the military and had ceaed to rely on its central allies for popular support... [Coup in 1964].
(138): The events in Bolivia replicated those elsewhere in the darker nations, from its neighbor Paraguay's 1954 coup led by General Alfredo Stroessner to the distant Thailand's 1957 coup led by Army Chief Sarit Tanarat. From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, one scholar estimates that at the most two hundred coups took place in Africa and Asia as well as Central and South America.
(138-139): [THE ARMY] Where every other instituion had been batttered by colonialism and neocolonialism, the military stood out as efficient and disciplined. The bureaucracy is often poorly trained and prone to corruption, whereas the political parties are frequently, even in South America, better at the struggle for freedom or the creation of manifestos than governance. In this situation, and with the general demobilization and disarmament of the population, the military is an obvious actor for social order. Fanon has a prescrption to prevent the golpe. "The only way to avoid this menace," he writes, "is to educate the army politically, in other words to nationalize it."... Indeed, Third World states that did not disarm the population, and that created citizens' militias and retained the population in a general political mobilization, did not succumb to coups or easy intervention by imperialism. The classic case is revolutionary Cuba.
(140): Most new nations that demobilized and disarmed their populations fell prey to military intervention, often driven by imperialist pressure.... The US-engineered coup in Iran (1953) is an early example... Whereas the evidence of US involvement is unclear in most of the coups in the Third World, the footprint of the CIA and the US military intelligence has been clearly documented in the coups in the Dominican Republic (1963), Ecuador (1963), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Congo (1965), Greece (1967), Cambodia (1970), Bolivia again (1971), and most famously Chile (1973). This is the short, uncontroversial list.
(146-148): I want to distinguish betwen at least two kinds of coups: the generals' coups and the colonel's coups. All coups are structurally reactionary, because they adorn the military with the solitary role for social change... Some coups are, however, more reactionary than others. Coups that are conducted in countries that have had either a national liberation struggle... or an electoral victory against the oligarchs tend to be reacitonary. The military frequently takes power to reverse the gains... The generals often lead these goups... To the rank and file, the generals say that the revolutionary government wanted to cut back on the role of the military in social life... The aggreived military brass in Algeria (1965), Dahomey (1965), Ghana (1966), Togo (1967), Uganda (1971), and Chad (1975) [and Pakistan (1958, 1977), Chile (1973)]. (...) For states where there is no national liberation movement, and where there is no hope for social reform, the coup d'etat is often the means for aggrieved social classes within the military to asser the rule not so much of the military as for their social class. These are the colonels' coups.... The modular form of this coup is the Egyptian overthrow of the monarchy in 1952... The latest variant of the colonels' coup comes from Colonel Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in 1999. The colonels' coups succumbed to their authoritarian roots in military culture... Even if the colonels' cop comes with tremendous promise, it can only momentarily deliver the administrative apparatus to energetic officers.... The military in power, as Frist shows, regardless of its motivations, freezes the political process and cuts down the ability of social movements to move the historical process in a progressive direction. Nothing good comes from a military dictatorship.
(152): Unhappy with the nationalist negotiations with the Dutch, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) urged a popular uprising agaisnt both the Dutch and the newly emergent bourgeoisie in Indonesia... The army killed many of the PKI's leaders, jailed about 36,000 people, and crushed the party into relative insignificance. The "adventure of 1948" ended swiftly. President Sukarno's rise to power came with the blood of the Communists on his hands. His fall, in 1965, would be accompanied by the murder of one or perhaps two million Communists and sympathizers. [in 1965... the party commanded the oloyalty of more than 20 million Indonesians, in a country of 110 million]
(153): The PKI followed a well-hewed analysis among Marxists across the Third World: that a relatively nonindustrial society cannot have a proletarian revolution, and so the Communist Party must work alongside progressive sections of the bourgeoisie to create democratic capitalism. When the conditions of industry are more developed, the Communists can come to state power.
(62): After centuries of imperialism, the new nations had been left with economies that relied on the sale of raw material and the import of finished goods. This fundamental imbalance meant that countries like Argentina had to export vast amounts of raw materials at relatively low prices, whereas their import bills would be inflated with the high prices commanded by industrially manufactured goods.
(62-63): Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the dominant classes in Argentina had no brief for nation building. The oligarchs... ran the country with an iron fist and held their own wealth in European banks (which mean that they preferred fiscal policies that favored Europe's currencies against Argentina's economic strength). This detachment of the elite fueled the growth of a socialist movement... Argentina's industrialization grew in the breach, when European and US capital neglected the region for the period between the Depression of the 1920s and the wars of the 1940s... British capital owned most of Argentina's railroads and the Swiss, the United States, and the British owned almost half of its industries. The authoritarian populist Juan Peron bought the railroads from the British...
(63-64): A combination of technological advantages, unionization, and the vagaries of the prices of primary products meant that the core enjoyed a sizable gain in the "terms of trade."
(66): Why is India poor, asked Dadabhai Naoroji? It is not the pitiless operation of economic laws, but it is the thoughtless and pitiless action of the British policy; it is the pitiless eating of India's substance in India, and the further pitiless drain to England; in short, it is the pitiless perversion of economic laws by the sad bleeding to which India is subjected, that is destroying India." The Third World bled to make Europe grow. Modernization theory avoided this, and rather sought to "Protestantize" the cultures of the world to seed capitalist culture.
(66): Colonialism ravaged the world, and left more than half of it bereft of capital and with a surfeit of poverty. In 1500, the average per capita income in Europe ran only three times more than that in Africa and Asia, whereas in 1960, it was ten times greater.
(67): Prebisch rejected the theory of comparative advantage, because he demonstrated that each region of the world could enjoy the fruits of modernity as much as the others. [T]rade is crucial because some regions have smaller markets than otehrs, and raw materials and agricultural lands are not evenly distributed along national lines. But the basis of trade had to be altered. It could not be premised on the idea that some states are naturally good at being harvesters of low-value raw materials and others are naturally proficient at being producers of high-value-added finished products. The theory of comparative advantage, Prebisch claimed, stifles genuine economic development.
(68): The contempt of the First World's economists was palpable. John Maynard Keynes, for instance, complained to the English government about the invitations being sent out to the darker nations for the Bretton Woods Conference. Those that had been invited from Colombia to Venezuela, from Liberia to the Philippines, he noted, "clearly have nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground." For Keynes, this is "the most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years." Only technocrats from the advanced industrial states should be allowed to formulate the rules, because otherwise thsoe from the raw material states would begin to make unbearable demands.
(71): The US president of the World Bank, Eugene Black, quite forthrightly remarked, "Our foreign aid programs constitute a distinct benefit to American business. The three major benefits are (1) foreign aid provides a substantial and immediate market for United States goods and services, (2) foreign aid stimulates the development of new overseas markets for United States' companies, (3) foreign aid orients national economies toward a free enterprise system in which United States' firms can prosper.
(73): [BARAN'S CRITIQUE OF ISI] Paul Baran published The Political Economy of Growth in which he demonstrated the futility of foreign aid and the import-substitution industrialization strategy... While Baran might have overstated his thesis and the role of monopoly capitalism within the darker nations, his critique on the reliance on the growth strategy was on point. The aid from outside (whether capitalist or socialist) purchased time for the dominant elites, who used that money to prevent necessary social transformation. A more substantial way for development would be the destruction of feudal social relations, band by the socialization of production. These parasitic elites acceded to the Prebisch logic in order to benefit their own class interests, rather than move their societies to socialism. The cominant classes in each of these societies purchased third-rate, out-of-date plants and machinery from the advanced industrial states, and paid top dollar for them... Prebisch recognized this major limitation in the Third World order: "We thought that an acceleration of the rate of growth would solve all problems. This was our great mistake." What was needed alongside growth were "changes in the social structure," indeed "a complete social transformation."
(74): It had already become sufficient to be critical of the First World alone, which became a shield that protected the national bourgeoisie from criticism for its own lack of imagination and self-sacrifice. In other words, development theory and public policy emphasized economic growth as an end in itself without a built-in consideration for equity.
(75): One million dollars. That's all it took in 1953 for the CIA to overthrow a nationalist government. Langley's man in Tehran was Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. Ordered to take out the democratically elected National Front government led by Muhammed Mosaddeq and restore the Shah of Iran, Roosevelt spread the cash and waited for it to do its magic...
(76): The Tudeh Party (heir to the Communist Party founded in 1920) had a cadre of 25,000, while its union federation boasted a membership of 335,000. The influence of the Tudeh angered the US establishment, which offered the National Front leader a choice: either crush the Communists, take US aid and remain in power, or else fall under Soviet-Communist influence. On May 2, 1953, Mosaddeq revealed the shallowness fo his class, whose investment in nationalism and national sovereignty only went as far as it would guarantee its rule and luxury; he wrote a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which he cowered, "Please accept, Mr. President, the assurances of my highest consideration." Afraid of the Soviets, Mosaddeq crushed the Tudeh Party, thereby destroying the most organized defenders of Iranian sovereignty, and then fell before a coup engineered by the CIA's representative and a far more reliable US ally, the Shah.
(76-77): The Shah exiled tens of thousands of National Party members and Communists, and killed thousands of both... The Tudeh was paralyzed by the coup. The USSR paid it little heed, preferring to make every concession to the Shah in hopes of pacifying a border state and gaining access to the oil--all this despite the close relationship between the United States and the Shah.
(80): Although Iran had never been formerly colonized, it belonged with the hungry.... English oil firms... had dominated Iran's oil fields since 1901... Iran's government paid for the infrastructure to remove the oil, and earned a pittance from the oil company cartel. Not for nothing did Mossadeq's struggle over oil earn him the affection of the masses.
(97): Whereas when the Bolshevik Revolution took Russia out of World War I in an anti-imperialist flourish (the new government revealed the hidden imperialist correspondence of the European regimes), the Soviet state under Stalin had a much more cautious approach toward the new postcolonial states. The Soviet Union had been battered by the war... The USSR could neither afford to rest easy nor antagonize the hoards that gathered on its borders. In this vise, the USSR's principle leadership offered two contrary theses: that any entente between the United States and the USSR was "perfectly feasible" (as Stalin put it in December 1946), and that the United States and its allies were "rapacious imperialists" who were on the verge of defeat by the tide of socialism... Zhadanov's two-camp theory privileged the national Communist parties at the same time as the USSR's commissars made arrangements with bourgeois forces within the postcolonial states at the expense of the local Communists. This vacillation manifested itself in the ambiguity over the Soviet position regarding the Third World and peaceful co-existence. After the demise of Stalin, the new leadership led by Khruschchev and Bulganin adopted peaceful co-existence and pledged their support to the bourgeois nationalist regimes (often against the domestic Communists). The unclear situation suggested that the USSR seemed keener to push its own national interests than those of the national Communist parties to which it pledged verbal fealty.
(98): Secretary of State Dulles traveled to both Egypt and India in 1953. In South Asia, Dulles found Nehru "utterly impractical," whereas he enjoyed the "martial and religious qualities of the Pakistanis."
(100-101): In 1961, the other big three welcomed the representatives of twenty-two states from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe to Belgrade to create NAM, an institution that gre in stregnth from conference to conference, within and without the UN, and lumbers on today. The nature of the regimes that participated in the NAM meeting reflects its limitations. With their pageantry came the monarchs... This was a mixed crowd, and its sheer political diversity made an ideologically coherent and unified stance by NAM almost impossible. NAM would remain a political platform, a sub-United Nations, but it would only be able to act in concert on two broad issues: to champion global nuclear disarmament, and to democratize the United Nations.
(103): Cabral acknowledged that while PAIGC's struggle is also the struggle "for peaceful co-existence and for peace," he made it clear that "to co-exist one must first of all exist, so the imperialists and the colonists must be forced to retreat so that we can make a contribution to human civilization, based on the work, the dynamic personality and the culture of our peoples."
(104): In early December 1964, Che Guevara took this message to the floor of the UN General Assembly: "We should like to wake up this Assembly. Imperialism wants to convert this meeting into a useless oratorical tournament instead of solving the serious problems of the world. We must prevent them from doing this... As Marxists we maintain that peaceful co-existence does not include co-existence between exploiters and exploited."
(106): Between 1900 and 1933, the US military intervened to scuttle the national hopes of the people of Cuba (four times), the Dominican Republic (four times, including an eight-year occupation), Guatemala (once), Haiti (twice, including a nineteen-year occupation), Honduras (seven times), Nicaragua (twice), and Panama (six times).
(106): For Castro, part of the problem lay in the new doctrine that had been developed by the Third World project and adopted by the Soviets, the "strange concept of peaceful co-existence for some and war for others." Castro expected NAM and the USSR to do something concrete for Vietnam as well as other colonized people.
(108): In a letter to the Tricontinental, Che asked the hardest question of all: What is the value of solidarity when the imperialist guns were not challenged? "The solidarity of the progressive forces of the world towards the people of Vietnam today," he wrote, "is similar to the bitter irony of the plebians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victims of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory."
(110): Nehru and Sukarno had been ruthless against the Communist movements in their own countries, and they were incapable of a genuine challenge to finance capital. Like Nehru and Sukarno, Nkrumah of Ghana enjoyed the momentum of a successful freedom struggle and disliked any opposition. His Preventive Detention Act and use of the state apparatus against the rail workers in 1961 led inexorably to the creation of a one-party state in 1964 with Nkrumah as Osagyefo or Redeemer... Nkrumah's populatrity plummeted along with world cocoa prices, and in 1966, the CIA encouraged his opposition to conduct a coup against him.
(120): The FLN's gambit succeeded politically, even if the military cost was enormous. During the course of the war, from 1954 to 1962, between three hundred thousand and a million people lost their lives. It was a heavy price to pay. All the factions within Algeria, even the liberals, lined up behind the FLN.
(123): The 1963 Constitution of Algeria abolished all political parties except the FLN, and elevated the president of the FLN to the sole formulator of state policy. The energy of the Algerian Revolution would now be concentrated in the body of the president, who for the moment was Ben Bella. The 1964 Charter of Algiers defended the abolishment of parties other than FLN. "The multiparty system allows all particular interests to organize into different pressure groups. It frustrated the general interest, that is, the workers' interest," and therefore, in the workers' name, there should only be one party, the "vanguard party."
(125): The seven-and-a-half year war and the long period of colonial rule (1830-1962) had drained Algerian society. The FLN inherited the desiccated earth... Algeria's wealth had been siphoned off by the First World... Few factories, few schools, and few hospitals--the emblems of modernity had been built around the colonial maintenance of "tradition."...Of the twelve million Algerians, four and a half million lived in poverty, and two million had been locked in concentration camps, from which they went to abandoned herds and overgrown lands.
(127): National liberation parties that came to power without a well-honed class analysis opened themselves up to pressure from the newly confident mercantile and industrial classes, whose own position was greatly enhanced by the national liberation agenda for the domestic creation of industry, for the creation of a national economy. Although the national liberation party remained largely beholden to the bureaucratic-managerial-intellectual (sometimes military) elite, it did build close ties to the industrial class. Import-substitution type projects opened some space for institutional reform and social-development projects, but in most cases they simply protected domestic industrialists who had no long-term commitment to the Third World agenda.
(128): [IMPORTANT] Algeria followed a tradition already established and defended in large parts of postcolonial Africa, whether ruled by governments of the "Right" or the "Left"--in Guinea (1958), Congo (1960), Ivory Coast (1961), Tanzania (1963), Malawi (1963), and Kenya (1964). The defenders of the "one-party staet" argued that rival parties "have generally little interest for the great majority of the people."...The one party vision is one of fear of the people, fear that any devolution of power would lead to antinational activity... A state that acted bureaucratically on a population had a built-in tendency to rely on congealed, traditional sources of social power and control. Older forms of association returned to the fore, such as tribal and class loyalties. These power bases became indispensable for elections or the implementation of the state's development agenda. The national liberation state that came into being as the instrument of popular power now turned to the very agents who had often not supported it to enact its policies.
(129) [ATTEMPTS AT FIGHTING THE BUREAUCRACY] At the 1961 Second Congress of the Vietnam Workers' Party, Ho Chi Minh warned his party and nation about the tendency toward bureaucratization and commandism, for the bureaucratic attitude "shows in fondness for red tape, divorce from the masses of the people and reluctance to learn the experiences of the masses," while commandism did not allow the people to "work on their own initiative and own accord tand to use compulsion to do unexplained tasks." ... Che's lyrical esays on volunteerism and Communist morality come from and engendered the "work councils" that continue to be a feature of Cuban social life. Cabral's speeches on the duty of the Communist address the problem. Within a year of Guniea-Bissau's freedom from Portuguese rule, Cabral's government invited the renowned Brazilian educator Paolo Freire to visit the country, study its educational system, and provide assistance on a popular pedagogy for the creation of a nonbureaucratic society.
(132): By the late 1960s, Algeria had moved from an attempt to create a socialist state to a state capitalist one, with a parasitic bourgeoisie confident beside the strong arms of the military.
(136) : [BOLIVIA] The second reform came in 1953, when the MNR conducted farily extensive land redistribution on behalf of the landless labor, the campesinos. The 6 percent of the landowners who owned more than a thousand hectares, the hacendados, controlled 92 percent of the land, and they had not more than 1.5 percent of that land under cultivation... Despite the drawbacks of the revolution, Bolivia in the early 1950s was in the same sort of social ferment as Algeria a decade later. For a few years, Bolivia trod a path unfamiliar to most Third World states... From 1952 until the late 1950s, the MNR attempted to dismantle the military and hand over the power of the gun to the militias of the campesions and the tin miners, and the MNR's own grupos de honor. Its 1951 experience with the military led the MNR to shut down the Colegio Militar, dismiss a fifth of the officer corps, drastically cut the expenditure for the army from 22 percent in 1952 to 7 percent in 1957), and even consider the complete elimination of the armed forces...
(137-138) [ALAS]... the MNR had by the late 1950s already begun to build up the military and had ceaed to rely on its central allies for popular support... [Coup in 1964].
(138): The events in Bolivia replicated those elsewhere in the darker nations, from its neighbor Paraguay's 1954 coup led by General Alfredo Stroessner to the distant Thailand's 1957 coup led by Army Chief Sarit Tanarat. From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, one scholar estimates that at the most two hundred coups took place in Africa and Asia as well as Central and South America.
(138-139): [THE ARMY] Where every other instituion had been batttered by colonialism and neocolonialism, the military stood out as efficient and disciplined. The bureaucracy is often poorly trained and prone to corruption, whereas the political parties are frequently, even in South America, better at the struggle for freedom or the creation of manifestos than governance. In this situation, and with the general demobilization and disarmament of the population, the military is an obvious actor for social order. Fanon has a prescrption to prevent the golpe. "The only way to avoid this menace," he writes, "is to educate the army politically, in other words to nationalize it."... Indeed, Third World states that did not disarm the population, and that created citizens' militias and retained the population in a general political mobilization, did not succumb to coups or easy intervention by imperialism. The classic case is revolutionary Cuba.
(140): Most new nations that demobilized and disarmed their populations fell prey to military intervention, often driven by imperialist pressure.... The US-engineered coup in Iran (1953) is an early example... Whereas the evidence of US involvement is unclear in most of the coups in the Third World, the footprint of the CIA and the US military intelligence has been clearly documented in the coups in the Dominican Republic (1963), Ecuador (1963), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Congo (1965), Greece (1967), Cambodia (1970), Bolivia again (1971), and most famously Chile (1973). This is the short, uncontroversial list.
(146-148): I want to distinguish betwen at least two kinds of coups: the generals' coups and the colonel's coups. All coups are structurally reactionary, because they adorn the military with the solitary role for social change... Some coups are, however, more reactionary than others. Coups that are conducted in countries that have had either a national liberation struggle... or an electoral victory against the oligarchs tend to be reacitonary. The military frequently takes power to reverse the gains... The generals often lead these goups... To the rank and file, the generals say that the revolutionary government wanted to cut back on the role of the military in social life... The aggreived military brass in Algeria (1965), Dahomey (1965), Ghana (1966), Togo (1967), Uganda (1971), and Chad (1975) [and Pakistan (1958, 1977), Chile (1973)]. (...) For states where there is no national liberation movement, and where there is no hope for social reform, the coup d'etat is often the means for aggrieved social classes within the military to asser the rule not so much of the military as for their social class. These are the colonels' coups.... The modular form of this coup is the Egyptian overthrow of the monarchy in 1952... The latest variant of the colonels' coup comes from Colonel Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in 1999. The colonels' coups succumbed to their authoritarian roots in military culture... Even if the colonels' cop comes with tremendous promise, it can only momentarily deliver the administrative apparatus to energetic officers.... The military in power, as Frist shows, regardless of its motivations, freezes the political process and cuts down the ability of social movements to move the historical process in a progressive direction. Nothing good comes from a military dictatorship.
(152): Unhappy with the nationalist negotiations with the Dutch, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) urged a popular uprising agaisnt both the Dutch and the newly emergent bourgeoisie in Indonesia... The army killed many of the PKI's leaders, jailed about 36,000 people, and crushed the party into relative insignificance. The "adventure of 1948" ended swiftly. President Sukarno's rise to power came with the blood of the Communists on his hands. His fall, in 1965, would be accompanied by the murder of one or perhaps two million Communists and sympathizers. [in 1965... the party commanded the oloyalty of more than 20 million Indonesians, in a country of 110 million]
(153): The PKI followed a well-hewed analysis among Marxists across the Third World: that a relatively nonindustrial society cannot have a proletarian revolution, and so the Communist Party must work alongside progressive sections of the bourgeoisie to create democratic capitalism. When the conditions of industry are more developed, the Communists can come to state power.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
"Over the last two or three decades, there have been a number of cities where the population keeps growing and growing, uncontrolled. With that, the infrastructure is not keeping up with the population, and that has resulted in cities becoming very densely populated," she told Al Jazeera... That allows the aedes mosquito, which likes to live among humans, to thrive and breed and multiply in this kind of environment."
Friday, September 12, 2008
neoliberalism in latin america:
A precondition for the privatization programmes imposed across successive Latin American countries in the 1980s and 90s was the defeat and disarming of earlier movements of the left and organized labour. During the decades of development the emphasis was on import-substitute industrialization—in particular in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, but also to a lesser extent in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica. These developments were underwritten by broad politico-ideological projects that encouraged the strengthening of the working class and its trade unions, backed by local party formations and democratic-national blocs, in a context of nationalistic ideologies and identities. The potential this built up burst onto the political scene in the 1960s as a radical force, when the long cycle of growth petered out in conflicts over workers’ rights, at a time when the Cuban example was pointing towards alternatives that transcended the limits of capitalism and us imperial domination. The response to these struggles was an era of military coups, first in Brazil and Bolivia in 1964, in Argentina in 1966 and 1976, and finally in Uruguay and Chile in 1973.
(...) The first cycle, from 1959 to 1967, saw the triumph of the Cuban revolution and the spread of the rural guerrilla movement to Venezuela, Guatemala and Peru, in emulation of those of Colombia and Nicaragua. The period saw mass mobilizations in several countries, including Brazil during Goulart’s 1961–64 government and broad resistance to the dictatorship that followed the military coup there in 1964. For the Latin American left this was a period of upswing, directly influenced by the success of Cuba, but cut short by the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. The second cycle runs from 1967 to 1973. It saw the decline of the rural guerrilla movements and the rise of new urban guerrillas in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. Allende was elected president in Chile (1970–73); the same years saw the government of Juan José Torres (1971) in Bolivia, and nationalist governments under Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1967) and Omar Torrijos in Panama (1968). In summary, this was a mixed period inaugurating an era of reverses, marked by military coups and dictatorships.
(...) The years 1973 to 1979 saw the consolidation of military dictatorships across the Southern Cone. As in Brazil, juntas came to power in Bolivia in 1971, Chile and Uruguay in 1973 and Argentina in 1976. Velasco Alvarado was overthrown in Peru. The neoliberal model was rolled out in Pinochet’s Chile. This was a period of unmitigated downturn. By contrast, the long decade of 1979 to 1990 brought Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, revolution in Grenada and a nationalist government in Surinam. Castro was elected president of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, and guerrilla forces expanded in El Salvador and Guatemala. The 1980s were a period of overall progress.
(...) In another switch, the years from 1990 to 1998 saw the Sandinista defeat, the start of the ‘special period’ in Cuba, and the entrenchment of neoliberal hegemony across the continent, with the collaboration of the pri in Mexico, Menem in Argentina, Pérez in Venezuela, Cardoso in Brazil, Fujimori in Peru and the continuation of Pinochetist economic neoliberalism in Chile under the Concertación coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats. This was definitively a period of net regression. Yet from 1998 onwards, the wind turned in the other direction with the election of Chávez in Venezuela, followed by the launch of the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre in 2001, Lula’s election victory in 2002, and further gains for the left and centre-left in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and finally Paraguay. Mercosur was expanded to incorporate Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador while the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas—or alba, ‘dawn’—brought together a new left grouping of the Andean–Caribbean axis. So far, this has been a period of appreciable progress.
(...) Cross-cutting these political cycles, three overall strategies of the Latin American left can be discerned. The first sequence, dating back to the 1940s, was one of major structural reforms contemporaneous with the hegemony of the import-substitution model. The left opted for an alliance with sectors of the national business elite in the name of economic modernization, agrarian reform and a certain autonomy with respect to Northern imperialism. This strategy was implemented by legendary nationalist leaders such as Getúlio Vargas of Brazil, Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico and Juan Perón of Argentina, in concert with parties of the left or centre-left. In Chile, textbook cases of this approach were the Popular Front of 1938 and the Allende administration in 1970–73. But the programme failed at the same time as the industrialization effort, when the internationalization of economies pushed the corporate elites into solid alliance with international capital, laying the groundwork for the eventual neoliberal model. These same entrepreneurs also supported the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone, making no secret of their readiness to liquidate the popular movement for the sake of an export-centred economy geared to luxury domestic consumption by way of intense labour exploitation.
(...) A second great strategy emerged with the Cuban revolution. Any revolutionary victory—above all when it is the first of its kind in a whole region—carries charismatic persuasive force, as we know from the Russian and Chinese experiences in 1917 and 1949. The Cuban triumph coincided with the end of the cycle of Latin American economic expansion under the popular governments and democratic regimes that had prevailed over much of the continent during the 1940s and 50s. The first Argentine coup was carried out in 1955, the second in 1966; the Brazilian and Bolivian coups took place in 1964, and already by 1954 Guatemala was in the throes of counter-revolution. It seemed that the cycle of democratic governments had run its course, in parallel with the economic crises. It was then that Cuba unexpectedly presented an alternative route, in contrast to the impasse that popular struggles in other countries had reached under their traditional leaderships. Latin America was no stranger to guerrilla movements; it had known rural insurgencies such as those of Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1930s, as well as the national-revolutionary struggles in Mexico in the 1910s, or in Bolivia in 1952. Yet events in Cuba radiated a special appeal, pointing the way to a new epoch for the left. Due to the similarity of levels of development reached at that period by most of the countries of Latin America, the Cuban revolution was immediately more influential in the region than the Russian revolution had been in Europe in its day. All the more so, thanks to the way it was presented by such—attractive, if misguided—codifications as Régis Debray’s account of the Cuban experience and how it might be replicated in other countries and continents.
(...) The abandonment of popular forces by former nationalist or social-democratic allies, together with the harsh social consequences of free-market economics, have propelled social movements into the forefront of the resistance to neoliberalism—the third and latest strategy from below. The Zapatistas, the landless peasant movement (MST) in Brazil, the indigenist movements of Bolivia and Ecuador, the piqueteros or unemployed workers’ activists in Argentina—these are just some of the groups that have pioneered the new militancy.
(...) There are two main problems with this position. Firstly, it blurs the boundaries with neoliberal discourse, since as we pointed out above, the latter likewise regards the state and party politics as its great enemies. Secondly, given that neoliberalism is characterized by the wholesale expropriation of rights, it can only be overcome in the political sphere: through the universalization of rights enacted by the governing authority of the state. Otherwise, the struggle against neoliberalism would remain perpetually on the defensive, having discarded the political instruments necessary for its own realization. Some movements have remained trapped in this paradox, ostensibly embodying hubs of resistance yet unable to move forward into challenging neoliberal hegemony, via a fresh articulation of the social with the political. Their critique of the state is subordinated to the terms of the theoretical discourse of neoliberalism, structured around the polarization of state versus private. This polarity is designed to demonize the state, take control of the private sphere (in which market relations are embedded) and abolish the indispensable framework for the democratization and defeat of neoliberalism: the public sphere.
(...) Faced with this crisis of hegemony for the traditional political parties—the Partido Radical in disarray after De la Rúa’s resignation, the Peronists bitterly divided—the social movements coined the famous slogan, ¡Que se vayan todos!: Out with the lot of them! This amounted to a refusal to take part in the electoral process, yet without suggesting any way in which power might be rethought or reorganized. It was a quintessential expression of the ‘autonomy of social movements’, disdainful of politics but lacking any alternatives. From a position of strength, one can indeed get rid of ‘the lot of them’. Without organized political forces, the slogan is merely a way to bow out from the fight for an alternative hegemony... In all these instances, the notion of the autonomy of the social served not to help the regrouping of mass forces intent on organizing new forms of political action, nor as a way to construct alternative forms of power, but rather as a refusal to confront the issue of power. The clearest theoretical expositions of such tendencies are to be found in the works of Toni Negri and John Holloway. They argue explicitly for the abandonment of power, of the political sphere, on grounds that power corrupts everything since its forms of representing the popular will are intrinsically tainted and distorting; the will of the people can only be legitimately represented within the social sphere. Furthermore, Negri portrays the state as a conservative brake on globalization. Yet neither makes any attempt to construct concrete anti-neoliberal strategies; their prescriptions lead only to the inertia of the social movements. The wsf, for its part, made the need to regulate flows of finance capital one of its founding theses; yet this can only take place—as, for example, in the case of Venezuela—through state action.
(...) Why has a full-fledged challenge to capitalism not emerged? The answer must be sought in the global balance of forces following the victory of the West in the Cold War. The extensive processes of deregulation and marketization that this unleashed did not produce an era of sustained economic growth; instead, productive investment was in large part transferred to the speculative financial sphere. The social and geographical concentration of wealth has intensified. The limits and contradictions of the capitalist system are revealed on a greater scale than ever before. Yet the subjective factors—forms of collective organization and of consciousness, politics and the state—necessary for the construction of alternatives have been disequipped by these same processes. The state and the public domain have withered under the onslaught of rent-seeking capital, backed by international agencies that relentlessly preach the doctrine of free trade. Ideologically, the triumph of liberalism has imposed its own interpretation of the world as a hegemonic monopoly: democracy could only mean representative parliamentarism; the economy could only mean the capitalist market economy; the client and the consumer occluded the citizen and the worker; competition replaced rights and the market subsumed the public sphere. This is why the successive crises of the neoliberal economic model have not prompted an overt challenge to capitalism as such. In Latin America, the countries that have gone furthest in combating neoliberalism are those in which it was least entrenched. In Venezuela the advance of free-market policies was halted by the failure of the Carlos Andrés Pérez and Rafael Caldera administrations; in Ecuador, by the fall of three governments in a row. In Bolivia, indigenous communities managed to preserve their identities not only in the countryside, but also in the urban districts where they are most highly concentrated, cities like La Paz, El Alto and Cochabamba. Ideologically, neoliberalism has put down deeper roots in the relatively more developed countries: Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina. Brazil was ruled by an unbroken sequence of neoliberal governments for ten years; in Argentina, Menem also ruled for ten years; and neoliberal orthodoxy was fully implemented in Mexico as much under the pri as under the pan. In Brazil and Argentina the neoliberal model continues to hold sway, despite certain areas of flexibility.
(...) On the ideological plane, Latin America is better placed to table issues for debate: the pluri-national, pluri-ethnic state; the notion of 21st-century socialism; alternative formulas for regional integration such as alba. But there are few platforms for disseminating the new ideas, raising them against the pensée unique and its theories, incessantly propounded by the mass media. Latin American critical thought, which can boast a long tradition of far-sighted interpretations and theoretical innovations, is faced with fresh challenges in response to issues such as the new nationalism, indigenous peoples, the new model of accumulation, processes of socialization and de-marketization, and the historical and political future of the continent. In some countries—most importantly Bolivia—the experiments under way are accompanied by a rich process of reflection and theoretical elaboration. In others, there is a considerable dissociation, not to say contradiction, between much of the intelligentsia and the process the rest of the country is embarked on: the most striking example is Venezuela. In countries with a strong university-based intelligentsia such as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, a significant part of the educated elite will not commit itself to participating in the principal areas of social and political struggle, even if it maintains a high standard of intellectual elaboration. The existing theoretical potential may play an important role in the construction of post-neoliberal models.
(...) In retrospect, the international rise, consolidation and jeopardization of neoliberalism falls into three distinct phases. The first was marked by the Thatcher-Reagan tandem, corresponding to the strongest and most openly reactionary ideological expressions, with Pinochet in Chile and Jeffrey Sachs in Bolivia as its most authentic regional equivalents. The second phase corresponded to the governments of the so-called Third Way, represented by Clinton and Blair, which pursued a supposedly ‘light’ version, a consolidation of the model, given that the heavy lifting—privatizations, unlimited predominance of the market, opening-up of the economy—had already been carried out. Now it was as if the green light had been given for governments of similar tendency in Latin America—social-democrat and nationalist—to set out on the same path: from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, the Washington Consensus swept the board. The third phase was inaugurated with the Mexican peso crisis and the onset of turbulence in the globalized economy, while the Bush-Cheney White House imposed a harsher, more conservative tone in response to the attacks of 2001; aggressive policies from Washington combining with an economy in stagnation.
A precondition for the privatization programmes imposed across successive Latin American countries in the 1980s and 90s was the defeat and disarming of earlier movements of the left and organized labour. During the decades of development the emphasis was on import-substitute industrialization—in particular in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, but also to a lesser extent in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica. These developments were underwritten by broad politico-ideological projects that encouraged the strengthening of the working class and its trade unions, backed by local party formations and democratic-national blocs, in a context of nationalistic ideologies and identities. The potential this built up burst onto the political scene in the 1960s as a radical force, when the long cycle of growth petered out in conflicts over workers’ rights, at a time when the Cuban example was pointing towards alternatives that transcended the limits of capitalism and us imperial domination. The response to these struggles was an era of military coups, first in Brazil and Bolivia in 1964, in Argentina in 1966 and 1976, and finally in Uruguay and Chile in 1973.
(...) The first cycle, from 1959 to 1967, saw the triumph of the Cuban revolution and the spread of the rural guerrilla movement to Venezuela, Guatemala and Peru, in emulation of those of Colombia and Nicaragua. The period saw mass mobilizations in several countries, including Brazil during Goulart’s 1961–64 government and broad resistance to the dictatorship that followed the military coup there in 1964. For the Latin American left this was a period of upswing, directly influenced by the success of Cuba, but cut short by the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. The second cycle runs from 1967 to 1973. It saw the decline of the rural guerrilla movements and the rise of new urban guerrillas in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. Allende was elected president in Chile (1970–73); the same years saw the government of Juan José Torres (1971) in Bolivia, and nationalist governments under Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1967) and Omar Torrijos in Panama (1968). In summary, this was a mixed period inaugurating an era of reverses, marked by military coups and dictatorships.
(...) The years 1973 to 1979 saw the consolidation of military dictatorships across the Southern Cone. As in Brazil, juntas came to power in Bolivia in 1971, Chile and Uruguay in 1973 and Argentina in 1976. Velasco Alvarado was overthrown in Peru. The neoliberal model was rolled out in Pinochet’s Chile. This was a period of unmitigated downturn. By contrast, the long decade of 1979 to 1990 brought Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, revolution in Grenada and a nationalist government in Surinam. Castro was elected president of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, and guerrilla forces expanded in El Salvador and Guatemala. The 1980s were a period of overall progress.
(...) In another switch, the years from 1990 to 1998 saw the Sandinista defeat, the start of the ‘special period’ in Cuba, and the entrenchment of neoliberal hegemony across the continent, with the collaboration of the pri in Mexico, Menem in Argentina, Pérez in Venezuela, Cardoso in Brazil, Fujimori in Peru and the continuation of Pinochetist economic neoliberalism in Chile under the Concertación coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats. This was definitively a period of net regression. Yet from 1998 onwards, the wind turned in the other direction with the election of Chávez in Venezuela, followed by the launch of the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre in 2001, Lula’s election victory in 2002, and further gains for the left and centre-left in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and finally Paraguay. Mercosur was expanded to incorporate Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador while the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas—or alba, ‘dawn’—brought together a new left grouping of the Andean–Caribbean axis. So far, this has been a period of appreciable progress.
(...) Cross-cutting these political cycles, three overall strategies of the Latin American left can be discerned. The first sequence, dating back to the 1940s, was one of major structural reforms contemporaneous with the hegemony of the import-substitution model. The left opted for an alliance with sectors of the national business elite in the name of economic modernization, agrarian reform and a certain autonomy with respect to Northern imperialism. This strategy was implemented by legendary nationalist leaders such as Getúlio Vargas of Brazil, Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico and Juan Perón of Argentina, in concert with parties of the left or centre-left. In Chile, textbook cases of this approach were the Popular Front of 1938 and the Allende administration in 1970–73. But the programme failed at the same time as the industrialization effort, when the internationalization of economies pushed the corporate elites into solid alliance with international capital, laying the groundwork for the eventual neoliberal model. These same entrepreneurs also supported the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone, making no secret of their readiness to liquidate the popular movement for the sake of an export-centred economy geared to luxury domestic consumption by way of intense labour exploitation.
(...) A second great strategy emerged with the Cuban revolution. Any revolutionary victory—above all when it is the first of its kind in a whole region—carries charismatic persuasive force, as we know from the Russian and Chinese experiences in 1917 and 1949. The Cuban triumph coincided with the end of the cycle of Latin American economic expansion under the popular governments and democratic regimes that had prevailed over much of the continent during the 1940s and 50s. The first Argentine coup was carried out in 1955, the second in 1966; the Brazilian and Bolivian coups took place in 1964, and already by 1954 Guatemala was in the throes of counter-revolution. It seemed that the cycle of democratic governments had run its course, in parallel with the economic crises. It was then that Cuba unexpectedly presented an alternative route, in contrast to the impasse that popular struggles in other countries had reached under their traditional leaderships. Latin America was no stranger to guerrilla movements; it had known rural insurgencies such as those of Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1930s, as well as the national-revolutionary struggles in Mexico in the 1910s, or in Bolivia in 1952. Yet events in Cuba radiated a special appeal, pointing the way to a new epoch for the left. Due to the similarity of levels of development reached at that period by most of the countries of Latin America, the Cuban revolution was immediately more influential in the region than the Russian revolution had been in Europe in its day. All the more so, thanks to the way it was presented by such—attractive, if misguided—codifications as Régis Debray’s account of the Cuban experience and how it might be replicated in other countries and continents.
(...) The abandonment of popular forces by former nationalist or social-democratic allies, together with the harsh social consequences of free-market economics, have propelled social movements into the forefront of the resistance to neoliberalism—the third and latest strategy from below. The Zapatistas, the landless peasant movement (MST) in Brazil, the indigenist movements of Bolivia and Ecuador, the piqueteros or unemployed workers’ activists in Argentina—these are just some of the groups that have pioneered the new militancy.
(...) There are two main problems with this position. Firstly, it blurs the boundaries with neoliberal discourse, since as we pointed out above, the latter likewise regards the state and party politics as its great enemies. Secondly, given that neoliberalism is characterized by the wholesale expropriation of rights, it can only be overcome in the political sphere: through the universalization of rights enacted by the governing authority of the state. Otherwise, the struggle against neoliberalism would remain perpetually on the defensive, having discarded the political instruments necessary for its own realization. Some movements have remained trapped in this paradox, ostensibly embodying hubs of resistance yet unable to move forward into challenging neoliberal hegemony, via a fresh articulation of the social with the political. Their critique of the state is subordinated to the terms of the theoretical discourse of neoliberalism, structured around the polarization of state versus private. This polarity is designed to demonize the state, take control of the private sphere (in which market relations are embedded) and abolish the indispensable framework for the democratization and defeat of neoliberalism: the public sphere.
(...) Faced with this crisis of hegemony for the traditional political parties—the Partido Radical in disarray after De la Rúa’s resignation, the Peronists bitterly divided—the social movements coined the famous slogan, ¡Que se vayan todos!: Out with the lot of them! This amounted to a refusal to take part in the electoral process, yet without suggesting any way in which power might be rethought or reorganized. It was a quintessential expression of the ‘autonomy of social movements’, disdainful of politics but lacking any alternatives. From a position of strength, one can indeed get rid of ‘the lot of them’. Without organized political forces, the slogan is merely a way to bow out from the fight for an alternative hegemony... In all these instances, the notion of the autonomy of the social served not to help the regrouping of mass forces intent on organizing new forms of political action, nor as a way to construct alternative forms of power, but rather as a refusal to confront the issue of power. The clearest theoretical expositions of such tendencies are to be found in the works of Toni Negri and John Holloway. They argue explicitly for the abandonment of power, of the political sphere, on grounds that power corrupts everything since its forms of representing the popular will are intrinsically tainted and distorting; the will of the people can only be legitimately represented within the social sphere. Furthermore, Negri portrays the state as a conservative brake on globalization. Yet neither makes any attempt to construct concrete anti-neoliberal strategies; their prescriptions lead only to the inertia of the social movements. The wsf, for its part, made the need to regulate flows of finance capital one of its founding theses; yet this can only take place—as, for example, in the case of Venezuela—through state action.
(...) Why has a full-fledged challenge to capitalism not emerged? The answer must be sought in the global balance of forces following the victory of the West in the Cold War. The extensive processes of deregulation and marketization that this unleashed did not produce an era of sustained economic growth; instead, productive investment was in large part transferred to the speculative financial sphere. The social and geographical concentration of wealth has intensified. The limits and contradictions of the capitalist system are revealed on a greater scale than ever before. Yet the subjective factors—forms of collective organization and of consciousness, politics and the state—necessary for the construction of alternatives have been disequipped by these same processes. The state and the public domain have withered under the onslaught of rent-seeking capital, backed by international agencies that relentlessly preach the doctrine of free trade. Ideologically, the triumph of liberalism has imposed its own interpretation of the world as a hegemonic monopoly: democracy could only mean representative parliamentarism; the economy could only mean the capitalist market economy; the client and the consumer occluded the citizen and the worker; competition replaced rights and the market subsumed the public sphere. This is why the successive crises of the neoliberal economic model have not prompted an overt challenge to capitalism as such. In Latin America, the countries that have gone furthest in combating neoliberalism are those in which it was least entrenched. In Venezuela the advance of free-market policies was halted by the failure of the Carlos Andrés Pérez and Rafael Caldera administrations; in Ecuador, by the fall of three governments in a row. In Bolivia, indigenous communities managed to preserve their identities not only in the countryside, but also in the urban districts where they are most highly concentrated, cities like La Paz, El Alto and Cochabamba. Ideologically, neoliberalism has put down deeper roots in the relatively more developed countries: Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina. Brazil was ruled by an unbroken sequence of neoliberal governments for ten years; in Argentina, Menem also ruled for ten years; and neoliberal orthodoxy was fully implemented in Mexico as much under the pri as under the pan. In Brazil and Argentina the neoliberal model continues to hold sway, despite certain areas of flexibility.
(...) On the ideological plane, Latin America is better placed to table issues for debate: the pluri-national, pluri-ethnic state; the notion of 21st-century socialism; alternative formulas for regional integration such as alba. But there are few platforms for disseminating the new ideas, raising them against the pensée unique and its theories, incessantly propounded by the mass media. Latin American critical thought, which can boast a long tradition of far-sighted interpretations and theoretical innovations, is faced with fresh challenges in response to issues such as the new nationalism, indigenous peoples, the new model of accumulation, processes of socialization and de-marketization, and the historical and political future of the continent. In some countries—most importantly Bolivia—the experiments under way are accompanied by a rich process of reflection and theoretical elaboration. In others, there is a considerable dissociation, not to say contradiction, between much of the intelligentsia and the process the rest of the country is embarked on: the most striking example is Venezuela. In countries with a strong university-based intelligentsia such as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, a significant part of the educated elite will not commit itself to participating in the principal areas of social and political struggle, even if it maintains a high standard of intellectual elaboration. The existing theoretical potential may play an important role in the construction of post-neoliberal models.
(...) In retrospect, the international rise, consolidation and jeopardization of neoliberalism falls into three distinct phases. The first was marked by the Thatcher-Reagan tandem, corresponding to the strongest and most openly reactionary ideological expressions, with Pinochet in Chile and Jeffrey Sachs in Bolivia as its most authentic regional equivalents. The second phase corresponded to the governments of the so-called Third Way, represented by Clinton and Blair, which pursued a supposedly ‘light’ version, a consolidation of the model, given that the heavy lifting—privatizations, unlimited predominance of the market, opening-up of the economy—had already been carried out. Now it was as if the green light had been given for governments of similar tendency in Latin America—social-democrat and nationalist—to set out on the same path: from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, the Washington Consensus swept the board. The third phase was inaugurated with the Mexican peso crisis and the onset of turbulence in the globalized economy, while the Bush-Cheney White House imposed a harsher, more conservative tone in response to the attacks of 2001; aggressive policies from Washington combining with an economy in stagnation.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
weisbrot on bolivia:
Morales had promised to regain control over the country's hydrocarbon - mostly natural gas - resources. This was accomplished and has brought in an extra $1.5 billion of revenue to the public treasury. (For comparison, imagine an extra $1.6 trillion, or four times the current U.S. federal budget deficit, in the United States.)
(...) These provinces produce about 82 percent of Bolivia's natural gas, and get nearly three times the gas revenue per person as do the other five provinces. The Media Luna states have a per capita income that is about 40 percent higher than the other five states. Their population is also much less indigenous: ranging from 16 percent (Pando) to 38 percent in Santa Cruz, as compared to 66-84 percent in the other states.
(...) The Media Luna states also have the big landholdings that give Bolivia one of the most concentrated land distributions in the entire world. Well under one percent of landowners have two-thirds of the country's farm land. These include the big soybean producers of Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest province and bulwark of the Media Luna alliance. Some of the big landowners are leaders of the political opposition.
(...) With forty percent of the labor force in agriculture and more than three-quarters of rural Bolivians in poverty, a redistribution of arable land is not only a central demand of the voters, but an important part of an economic development strategy that can boost employment and income in the countryside.
Morales had promised to regain control over the country's hydrocarbon - mostly natural gas - resources. This was accomplished and has brought in an extra $1.5 billion of revenue to the public treasury. (For comparison, imagine an extra $1.6 trillion, or four times the current U.S. federal budget deficit, in the United States.)
(...) These provinces produce about 82 percent of Bolivia's natural gas, and get nearly three times the gas revenue per person as do the other five provinces. The Media Luna states have a per capita income that is about 40 percent higher than the other five states. Their population is also much less indigenous: ranging from 16 percent (Pando) to 38 percent in Santa Cruz, as compared to 66-84 percent in the other states.
(...) The Media Luna states also have the big landholdings that give Bolivia one of the most concentrated land distributions in the entire world. Well under one percent of landowners have two-thirds of the country's farm land. These include the big soybean producers of Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest province and bulwark of the Media Luna alliance. Some of the big landowners are leaders of the political opposition.
(...) With forty percent of the labor force in agriculture and more than three-quarters of rural Bolivians in poverty, a redistribution of arable land is not only a central demand of the voters, but an important part of an economic development strategy that can boost employment and income in the countryside.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Thursday, August 23, 2007
the struggle for bolivia's future:
On one side stand the pro-imperialist business elites from the eastern department of Santa Cruz, with direct ties to gas transnationals, large agribusiness, and the U.S. embassy. Their public face is the Santa Cruz civic committee and the four opposition-controlled governorships of the east. Through a concerted campaign they have begun to win over sections of Bolivia’s important middle classes, many of whom voted for Morales but backed opposition parties for the departmental governors.
(...) On the other side stand the combative indigenous and social movements rooted in the western highlands and the center of Bolivia, but which also reach into the east. Together with the middle classes they elected Bolivia’s first indigenous president in 2005. Morales’s victory on December 18, 2005, with 54.7 percent of the vote, was a product of two interlinked factors. First, after five years of intense social struggle, it marked the coming together of Bolivia’s oppressed classes and the eruption of a national revolution, led for the first time by the country’s indigenous majority. Second, it heralded the opening of a path out of the historic crisis of the Bolivian state, a consequence of internal colonization and imperialist domination.
(...) This new wave of struggle was the result of the three components of the historic crisis of the Bolivian state—the lack of economic development, due to its submission to imperialism, the social exclusion of the indigenous people, and the lack of any real popular representation through the existing political party structures.
(...) Instead, it was the platform of Evo Morales and Alvaro Garcia Linera (now vice-president), calling for a constituent assembly and the nationalization of gas, that provided an outlet for those seeking a way out of the crisis. MAS’s program was to promote a process of the decolonization of power, and renationalization of the economy and the state. The results of the December 18 congressional and presidential elections, where MAS received over 90 percent of the vote in the Chapare, around 80 percent in the El Alto and the altiplano, a surprising 30 percent in Santa Cruz, and a clean sweep of all the middle-class seats in La Paz, demonstrated the unification of Bolivia’s oppressed behind a national project of liberation spearhead by the indigenous, campesino, and cocalero movements. It was an unambiguous expression of the desires and hopes of the indigenous majority, who had drawn large sectors of the other oppressed classes behind them, to begin to chart a new path for Bolivia.
(...) Morales was quick to point out there existed the huge problem of the “colonial state”: winning government was not the same as decisively winning power. Morales explained, “After hearing the reports of the commission of transition, I have been able to see how the state does not control the state, its institutions. There is a total dependency, as we have seen in the economic sphere, a transnationalised country.”
(...) Crucially, Morales has continued to organize and shore up his support amongst his main social base. Central to this strategy has been moving forward in the economic sphere—the nationalization of gas, a measure supported by over 80 percent of the population. While some have criticized the measure for being too moderate, Morales has continued to point out that the nationalization is a process aimed at rebuilding the state petroleum company, YPFB, expanding state intervention to the entire productive chain, and increasing the industrialization of gas. Morales has stated that the process can only move forward with the continued mobilization of the people. To ensure this, Morales has made sure personally to deliver the fruits of the nationalization, traveling each week to numerous rural areas to hand out land and tractors, and to inaugurate new literacy and health care programs.
(...) The biggest flashpoint has been the Constituent Assembly, through which the movements hope to “constitutionalize” the steps forward taken so far, and out of which they hope to construct a new Bolivia. This new Bolivia would be based on recognition of the indigenous majority through a united, pluri-national, decentralized, social, and communitarian state. Decision-making power would be exercised by the indigenous and social movements through the creation of communitarian social power.[11] Such a state would “be the principal actor in economic planning and production, imposing a policy of equal distribution of the benefits” and would control all nonrenewable resources together with the indigenous communities that live in those regions. Fundamentally, the aim is the creation of a new state power through which the indigenous majorities can play their rightful role in Bolivian society.
(...) Confronted with this dilemma, the Morales leadership has opted for a change of tack reflected in the growing weight of the line of Garcia Linera: avoid unnecessary radical discourse, work toward achieving consensus in order to move forward, and win back the middle classes.
On one side stand the pro-imperialist business elites from the eastern department of Santa Cruz, with direct ties to gas transnationals, large agribusiness, and the U.S. embassy. Their public face is the Santa Cruz civic committee and the four opposition-controlled governorships of the east. Through a concerted campaign they have begun to win over sections of Bolivia’s important middle classes, many of whom voted for Morales but backed opposition parties for the departmental governors.
(...) On the other side stand the combative indigenous and social movements rooted in the western highlands and the center of Bolivia, but which also reach into the east. Together with the middle classes they elected Bolivia’s first indigenous president in 2005. Morales’s victory on December 18, 2005, with 54.7 percent of the vote, was a product of two interlinked factors. First, after five years of intense social struggle, it marked the coming together of Bolivia’s oppressed classes and the eruption of a national revolution, led for the first time by the country’s indigenous majority. Second, it heralded the opening of a path out of the historic crisis of the Bolivian state, a consequence of internal colonization and imperialist domination.
(...) This new wave of struggle was the result of the three components of the historic crisis of the Bolivian state—the lack of economic development, due to its submission to imperialism, the social exclusion of the indigenous people, and the lack of any real popular representation through the existing political party structures.
(...) Instead, it was the platform of Evo Morales and Alvaro Garcia Linera (now vice-president), calling for a constituent assembly and the nationalization of gas, that provided an outlet for those seeking a way out of the crisis. MAS’s program was to promote a process of the decolonization of power, and renationalization of the economy and the state. The results of the December 18 congressional and presidential elections, where MAS received over 90 percent of the vote in the Chapare, around 80 percent in the El Alto and the altiplano, a surprising 30 percent in Santa Cruz, and a clean sweep of all the middle-class seats in La Paz, demonstrated the unification of Bolivia’s oppressed behind a national project of liberation spearhead by the indigenous, campesino, and cocalero movements. It was an unambiguous expression of the desires and hopes of the indigenous majority, who had drawn large sectors of the other oppressed classes behind them, to begin to chart a new path for Bolivia.
(...) Morales was quick to point out there existed the huge problem of the “colonial state”: winning government was not the same as decisively winning power. Morales explained, “After hearing the reports of the commission of transition, I have been able to see how the state does not control the state, its institutions. There is a total dependency, as we have seen in the economic sphere, a transnationalised country.”
(...) Crucially, Morales has continued to organize and shore up his support amongst his main social base. Central to this strategy has been moving forward in the economic sphere—the nationalization of gas, a measure supported by over 80 percent of the population. While some have criticized the measure for being too moderate, Morales has continued to point out that the nationalization is a process aimed at rebuilding the state petroleum company, YPFB, expanding state intervention to the entire productive chain, and increasing the industrialization of gas. Morales has stated that the process can only move forward with the continued mobilization of the people. To ensure this, Morales has made sure personally to deliver the fruits of the nationalization, traveling each week to numerous rural areas to hand out land and tractors, and to inaugurate new literacy and health care programs.
(...) The biggest flashpoint has been the Constituent Assembly, through which the movements hope to “constitutionalize” the steps forward taken so far, and out of which they hope to construct a new Bolivia. This new Bolivia would be based on recognition of the indigenous majority through a united, pluri-national, decentralized, social, and communitarian state. Decision-making power would be exercised by the indigenous and social movements through the creation of communitarian social power.[11] Such a state would “be the principal actor in economic planning and production, imposing a policy of equal distribution of the benefits” and would control all nonrenewable resources together with the indigenous communities that live in those regions. Fundamentally, the aim is the creation of a new state power through which the indigenous majorities can play their rightful role in Bolivian society.
(...) Confronted with this dilemma, the Morales leadership has opted for a change of tack reflected in the growing weight of the line of Garcia Linera: avoid unnecessary radical discourse, work toward achieving consensus in order to move forward, and win back the middle classes.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
europe at the world bank:
For far too long European governments have supported policies at the Bank that their domestic constituencies wouldn't tolerate for one second if a foreign bureaucracy imposed them at home. Would social democrats in Denmark tolerate that the World Bank impose on them "education reforms" like the school fees that have blocked access to primary education in Africa? Would Labor Party activists in Britain tolerate that the World Bank impose on them "health sector reforms" like clinic fees blocking access to prenatal care? Would European social democrats have tolerated that the World Bank impose on them the corrupt privatization of the water utility in Bolivia, the corrupt privatization of public pensions in Chile and Argentina, the destruction of Mozambique's cashew nut processing industry, the "labor sector reforms" that undermined the right to organize?
For far too long European governments have supported policies at the Bank that their domestic constituencies wouldn't tolerate for one second if a foreign bureaucracy imposed them at home. Would social democrats in Denmark tolerate that the World Bank impose on them "education reforms" like the school fees that have blocked access to primary education in Africa? Would Labor Party activists in Britain tolerate that the World Bank impose on them "health sector reforms" like clinic fees blocking access to prenatal care? Would European social democrats have tolerated that the World Bank impose on them the corrupt privatization of the water utility in Bolivia, the corrupt privatization of public pensions in Chile and Argentina, the destruction of Mozambique's cashew nut processing industry, the "labor sector reforms" that undermined the right to organize?
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
capital gone wild:
Previous Bolivian governments had signed a flurry of bilateral investment treaties that gave foreign investors the right to bypass domestic courts and file such lawsuits through international tribunals. Morales complained that these rules made him feel like a "prisoner" in the presidential palace.
(...) The Bolivian president's predicament is a common one for political leaders around the world. They are caught in an interlocking web of rules and institutions that promote and protect foreign investment -- with little regard for the costs to democracy, the environment, or the public welfare. These increasingly controversial investor protections have become the "get out of jail free" card for corporations in the global economy. They are promoted by the World Bank and other international financial institutions, codified by bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements, and enforced through the World Bank's arbitration court and other international tribunals.
(...) Argentina has been socked by more than 30 such claims, many of them in retaliation for measures to alleviate the pain of the country's 2002 financial meltdown. A U.S.-based gas company, for example, sued over an emergency law that froze utility rates to protect consumers from runaway inflation. The company, CMS Gas, won $133 million in compensation, money that could have compensated Argentine consumers.
(...) Ecuador is facing a $1 billion suit by Occidental Petroleum, a company widely reviled in that country for alleged human rights and environmental abuses, including using child labor to clean toxic materials, failing to repair pipeline leakages, and operating in protected indigenous lands without authorization.
(...)
In another case with disturbing human rights implications, Italian investors are targeting post-apartheid affirmative action policies in South Africa. They are suing over a law designed to redress historic racism by requiring mining companies to have 26% black ownership and 40% black management by the year 2014. These policies, the investors claim, violate protections against expropriation and discrimination in the Italy-South Africa bilateral investment treaty.
(...) Currently, there are more than 100 cases pending before the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), which decides most investor-state disputes. More than 90% have been against developing countries. Meanwhile, these rules are not delivering increased foreign investment. Tufts University researchers recently found that signing bilateral investment treaties with the United States had no effect on Latin American and Caribbean investment flows. In fact, Brazil, which has refused to sign any such deal with the United States, is by far the region's biggest recipient of U.S. investment.
(...) Canada currently faces a case in retaliation for terminating a project to transport garbage from Toronto to an abandoned open pit mine 600 kilometers (370 miles) away. To protest the mega-dump, the nearby Algonquin indigenous community joined with farmers and other local citizens in a railroad blockade that was the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of Ontario province. When the government responding by dropping the plan, it offered some compensation to the mine owners. But one U.S. investor is still using NAFTA to sue for lost potential profits.
(...) Their demand to include sweeping investor protections in the Free Trade Area of the Americas was one factor in the collapse of those negotiations, after 11 years of talks involving 34 countries.
(...) However, over the past 14 years U.S. trade officials have managed to insert excessive investor protections in trade agreements with 14 countries and in pending deals with four additional nations (as of May 1, 2007). The only exception is a 2004 U.S.-Australian deal. That country's negotiators refused to accept investor-state dispute settlement. Worldwide, these rules have proliferated through more than 2,500 bilateral investment treaties.
(...) On April 29, 2007, the leaders of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua announced plans to withdraw from the World Bank's arbitration court. Their joint declaration stated that "(We) emphatically reject the legal, media and diplomatic pressure of some multinationals that … resist the sovereign rulings of countries, making threats and initiating suits in international arbitration." This surprise announcement will not be enough, legally, to release the three Latin American countries from the interlocking web of rules and institutions designed to shield foreign investors. Bilateral investment treaties signed by Bolivia and Venezuela would still be in force, and getting out of them could take years. Nicaragua would still be bound by the investment rules of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. And ICSID is the dominant but not the only enforcement option. Foreign investors could instead demand that their cases be heard under similar United Nations arbitration rules.
Previous Bolivian governments had signed a flurry of bilateral investment treaties that gave foreign investors the right to bypass domestic courts and file such lawsuits through international tribunals. Morales complained that these rules made him feel like a "prisoner" in the presidential palace.
(...) The Bolivian president's predicament is a common one for political leaders around the world. They are caught in an interlocking web of rules and institutions that promote and protect foreign investment -- with little regard for the costs to democracy, the environment, or the public welfare. These increasingly controversial investor protections have become the "get out of jail free" card for corporations in the global economy. They are promoted by the World Bank and other international financial institutions, codified by bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements, and enforced through the World Bank's arbitration court and other international tribunals.
(...) Argentina has been socked by more than 30 such claims, many of them in retaliation for measures to alleviate the pain of the country's 2002 financial meltdown. A U.S.-based gas company, for example, sued over an emergency law that froze utility rates to protect consumers from runaway inflation. The company, CMS Gas, won $133 million in compensation, money that could have compensated Argentine consumers.
(...) Ecuador is facing a $1 billion suit by Occidental Petroleum, a company widely reviled in that country for alleged human rights and environmental abuses, including using child labor to clean toxic materials, failing to repair pipeline leakages, and operating in protected indigenous lands without authorization.
(...)
In another case with disturbing human rights implications, Italian investors are targeting post-apartheid affirmative action policies in South Africa. They are suing over a law designed to redress historic racism by requiring mining companies to have 26% black ownership and 40% black management by the year 2014. These policies, the investors claim, violate protections against expropriation and discrimination in the Italy-South Africa bilateral investment treaty.
(...) Currently, there are more than 100 cases pending before the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), which decides most investor-state disputes. More than 90% have been against developing countries. Meanwhile, these rules are not delivering increased foreign investment. Tufts University researchers recently found that signing bilateral investment treaties with the United States had no effect on Latin American and Caribbean investment flows. In fact, Brazil, which has refused to sign any such deal with the United States, is by far the region's biggest recipient of U.S. investment.
(...) Canada currently faces a case in retaliation for terminating a project to transport garbage from Toronto to an abandoned open pit mine 600 kilometers (370 miles) away. To protest the mega-dump, the nearby Algonquin indigenous community joined with farmers and other local citizens in a railroad blockade that was the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of Ontario province. When the government responding by dropping the plan, it offered some compensation to the mine owners. But one U.S. investor is still using NAFTA to sue for lost potential profits.
(...) Their demand to include sweeping investor protections in the Free Trade Area of the Americas was one factor in the collapse of those negotiations, after 11 years of talks involving 34 countries.
(...) However, over the past 14 years U.S. trade officials have managed to insert excessive investor protections in trade agreements with 14 countries and in pending deals with four additional nations (as of May 1, 2007). The only exception is a 2004 U.S.-Australian deal. That country's negotiators refused to accept investor-state dispute settlement. Worldwide, these rules have proliferated through more than 2,500 bilateral investment treaties.
(...) On April 29, 2007, the leaders of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua announced plans to withdraw from the World Bank's arbitration court. Their joint declaration stated that "(We) emphatically reject the legal, media and diplomatic pressure of some multinationals that … resist the sovereign rulings of countries, making threats and initiating suits in international arbitration." This surprise announcement will not be enough, legally, to release the three Latin American countries from the interlocking web of rules and institutions designed to shield foreign investors. Bilateral investment treaties signed by Bolivia and Venezuela would still be in force, and getting out of them could take years. Nicaragua would still be bound by the investment rules of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. And ICSID is the dominant but not the only enforcement option. Foreign investors could instead demand that their cases be heard under similar United Nations arbitration rules.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
making bolivia´s new constitution:
Bolivia’s Constitutional Assembly has been charged with a huge task, not just to rewrite the nation’s constitution but also to ‘refound’ Bolivia. This includes restructuring the government, reforming education, dealing with natural resources and deciding what the constitution will say on controversial issues such as coca and autonomy.
(...) Party politics stalled the initial work of the Assembly for seven months over a debate on voting procedures. The assembly eventually ratified a compromise which requires 2/3 approval for each article, while unapproved articles will be presented to the Bolivian public in the national referendum.
Bolivia’s Constitutional Assembly has been charged with a huge task, not just to rewrite the nation’s constitution but also to ‘refound’ Bolivia. This includes restructuring the government, reforming education, dealing with natural resources and deciding what the constitution will say on controversial issues such as coca and autonomy.
(...) Party politics stalled the initial work of the Assembly for seven months over a debate on voting procedures. The assembly eventually ratified a compromise which requires 2/3 approval for each article, while unapproved articles will be presented to the Bolivian public in the national referendum.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
racism in bolivia:
The Indians have had two approaches towards the Bolivian state and white or mestizo society. On the one hand, they have pursued integration. They have linked up with populist parties, principally the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (known in Spanish under the acronym MNR). But if you go back even to the colonial period, you can find many instances in which the Indians pursued negotiation and integration with white and mestizo society. Aymaras on the other hand have cultivated their own sense of identity and self determination.
(...) At certain times, we might speak of a white minority in Bolivia, although no one is really white here. As in the U.S. with the black codes, the municipal government of La Paz had certain established forms of discrimination in the beginning of the twentieth century. On buses and trams, you had to sit in the back. There was explicit and implicit discrimination. The possibility that Indians would ever attain important government positions was practically nil.
(...) No. I think actually what has happened is that the Indians´ discourse, which has tended on the radical side, i.e. that all whites have oppressed us, etc., has produced a reaction amongst the middle class which reside in the south of La Paz. As a result, the middle class has become more racist. There's a lot of fear, now that there's an indigenous president. The middle class has been excluded from the positions it occupied before, and has lost a bit of its social position.
(...) I think Morales didn't use to cultivate an ethnic discourse, he was someone who defended coca, who had a more worker oriented, anti-imperialist rhetoric. But then he incorporated Quispe's radicalism, i.e., "I am an Indian, that is why they mistreat me," etc.
(...) In Bolivia, armed movements have never achieved any kind of importance. The 1952 Revolution was much less bloody than the Cuban and Mexican Revolutions and it was also shorter. It was three days of struggle in the streets and boom!, the oligarchy fell. There's no culture of long term violence here in Bolivia. On the other hand we do have a tradition of participatory democracy which comes out of the ayllu [a pre-Inca form of political organization based on extended family groups] and labor movement, which de-emphasizes delegation of power towards leaders.
The Indians have had two approaches towards the Bolivian state and white or mestizo society. On the one hand, they have pursued integration. They have linked up with populist parties, principally the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (known in Spanish under the acronym MNR). But if you go back even to the colonial period, you can find many instances in which the Indians pursued negotiation and integration with white and mestizo society. Aymaras on the other hand have cultivated their own sense of identity and self determination.
(...) At certain times, we might speak of a white minority in Bolivia, although no one is really white here. As in the U.S. with the black codes, the municipal government of La Paz had certain established forms of discrimination in the beginning of the twentieth century. On buses and trams, you had to sit in the back. There was explicit and implicit discrimination. The possibility that Indians would ever attain important government positions was practically nil.
(...) No. I think actually what has happened is that the Indians´ discourse, which has tended on the radical side, i.e. that all whites have oppressed us, etc., has produced a reaction amongst the middle class which reside in the south of La Paz. As a result, the middle class has become more racist. There's a lot of fear, now that there's an indigenous president. The middle class has been excluded from the positions it occupied before, and has lost a bit of its social position.
(...) I think Morales didn't use to cultivate an ethnic discourse, he was someone who defended coca, who had a more worker oriented, anti-imperialist rhetoric. But then he incorporated Quispe's radicalism, i.e., "I am an Indian, that is why they mistreat me," etc.
(...) In Bolivia, armed movements have never achieved any kind of importance. The 1952 Revolution was much less bloody than the Cuban and Mexican Revolutions and it was also shorter. It was three days of struggle in the streets and boom!, the oligarchy fell. There's no culture of long term violence here in Bolivia. On the other hand we do have a tradition of participatory democracy which comes out of the ayllu [a pre-Inca form of political organization based on extended family groups] and labor movement, which de-emphasizes delegation of power towards leaders.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
analyzing bolivia:
I think the fact that topics are being discussed that never have been before is an exceedingly positive “forest”, as if the reality was what is and could not be otherwise. Secondly, the participation of social layers that have never had any decisive say over what happens to them. Thirdly, the fact that an institutional solution has been achieved — which apparently is going to work — in which the topics that are not being defined by two thirds will subsequently be put to a popular vote, so popular sovereignty is maintained with the later decision. Therefore, I think this is a good solution, I think it is a very positive perspective.
(...) Latin America was the laboratory for political experiments by neoliberalism, which were generalized over virtually the entire continent, so now it is experiencing a backlash against what it has suffered. And so the people are voting for changes.
(...)The dividing line today in Latin America is not between a good left or bad left, it is between countries that are signing free-trade treaties with the United States and those which, to the contrary, are prioritizing regional integration processes. These include some that have broken with neoliberalism — this is the case with Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Cuba — and others that have a foreign policy that favours regional integration but maintains the model. These include Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, so there are some significant differences among them. But let’s not forget that the fundamental difference is between the countries that have given up being co-opted by the USA and those that have mortgaged their futures on free-trade agreements; Chile is the clearest case.
(...) And the Bolivian social movement — and apparently now the Ecuadorian movement — have realized that they have to build their own alternatives, so it is a new the fact that the social movements have built a party, with all the problems that entails, because it is a big leap forward. Furthermore, they are not building a party to argue in Parliament, but a party that now has a governmental alternative, something they have never had throughout the history of Bolivia, so this is not a mere exercise but it is a very promising road, because the social movements cannot simply carry on in resistance. To remain at the level of so-called civil society is a road to defeat, because it fails to challenge hegemony at the national level. Autonomy makes sense to prevent the interests of other forces being imposed on the social movement, but it is autonomy to contend for hegemony; if it is an autonomy to not recognize the State, to not recognize the government, I think it is a road that leads nowhere, that leads to exhaustion, to demobilization and the cooptation of some sectors. It is not a question of governing with that State.
(...) The democracies have been governments of the elites to reproduce the power of the elites, so we must not limit ourselves to that type of State that is there, which was made by inertia, by the reproduction of the existing power relationships. I think the social movements will have to do what they are doing in Ecuador or Bolivia, which is to reconsider their instrument of power, to become a transformer, not a reproducer of existing relationships, that smashes the private monopoly of the oligopolies over the media, over the ownership of energy resources, over the banks, the financing capacity, etc.
(...) If the enemies are reacting so forcefully it is because their interests are being undermined. It would be sad event if that white bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz were in agreement with the government. It would mean either that it had no class consciousness — but clearly it does have that, as it has demonstrated — or that the government was not affecting its interests.
I think the fact that topics are being discussed that never have been before is an exceedingly positive “forest”, as if the reality was what is and could not be otherwise. Secondly, the participation of social layers that have never had any decisive say over what happens to them. Thirdly, the fact that an institutional solution has been achieved — which apparently is going to work — in which the topics that are not being defined by two thirds will subsequently be put to a popular vote, so popular sovereignty is maintained with the later decision. Therefore, I think this is a good solution, I think it is a very positive perspective.
(...) Latin America was the laboratory for political experiments by neoliberalism, which were generalized over virtually the entire continent, so now it is experiencing a backlash against what it has suffered. And so the people are voting for changes.
(...)The dividing line today in Latin America is not between a good left or bad left, it is between countries that are signing free-trade treaties with the United States and those which, to the contrary, are prioritizing regional integration processes. These include some that have broken with neoliberalism — this is the case with Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Cuba — and others that have a foreign policy that favours regional integration but maintains the model. These include Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, so there are some significant differences among them. But let’s not forget that the fundamental difference is between the countries that have given up being co-opted by the USA and those that have mortgaged their futures on free-trade agreements; Chile is the clearest case.
(...) And the Bolivian social movement — and apparently now the Ecuadorian movement — have realized that they have to build their own alternatives, so it is a new the fact that the social movements have built a party, with all the problems that entails, because it is a big leap forward. Furthermore, they are not building a party to argue in Parliament, but a party that now has a governmental alternative, something they have never had throughout the history of Bolivia, so this is not a mere exercise but it is a very promising road, because the social movements cannot simply carry on in resistance. To remain at the level of so-called civil society is a road to defeat, because it fails to challenge hegemony at the national level. Autonomy makes sense to prevent the interests of other forces being imposed on the social movement, but it is autonomy to contend for hegemony; if it is an autonomy to not recognize the State, to not recognize the government, I think it is a road that leads nowhere, that leads to exhaustion, to demobilization and the cooptation of some sectors. It is not a question of governing with that State.
(...) The democracies have been governments of the elites to reproduce the power of the elites, so we must not limit ourselves to that type of State that is there, which was made by inertia, by the reproduction of the existing power relationships. I think the social movements will have to do what they are doing in Ecuador or Bolivia, which is to reconsider their instrument of power, to become a transformer, not a reproducer of existing relationships, that smashes the private monopoly of the oligopolies over the media, over the ownership of energy resources, over the banks, the financing capacity, etc.
(...) If the enemies are reacting so forcefully it is because their interests are being undermined. It would be sad event if that white bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz were in agreement with the government. It would mean either that it had no class consciousness — but clearly it does have that, as it has demonstrated — or that the government was not affecting its interests.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
morales en bolivia, un resumen:
La nacionalización de hidrocarburos fue el acto más popular de su primer año de gestión. Según los nuevos contratos, el gobierno recibirá 82 por ciento de ingresos de gas, una subida de $240 millones a $1.6 mil millones. Pero la nacionalización solamente se trata de recursos del subsuelo, dejando las refinerÃas en las manos de las empresas extranjeras que mantienen derechos exclusivos a explorar y explotar las reservas de gas.
(...) El gobierno ha procurado usar las vÃas legales para implementar las nacionalizaciones y otras reformas. No obstante, la derecha no está interesada en hacer acuerdos, porque no quiere reforma ninguna, por moderada que sea. Los partidos de la derecha bloquearon avance en la asamblea constituyente hasta la última semana de febrero, insistiendo que cada artÃculo fuera aprobado por dos-tercios. El MAS hizo una concesión que da un veto efectivo a la minorÃa derechista.
(...) El MAS, lamentablemente, cree que el enfrentamiento con la derecha le hará más audaz. Pero las concesiones del gobierno han provisto un espacio a la derecha para organizarse y cobrar intensidad. Al mismo tiempo han desmovilizado la base que podrÃa defender al gobierno.
(...) Como dijo Eusebio Merlo, un dirigente de la Federación de Juntas Vecinales en El Alto (FEJUVE), “Sabemos que la lucha es larga. No acaba con Evo Morales--la lucha sigue. Continúa--es un proceso. Entonces, nosotros como dirigentes tanto decimos, escuchamos a las regiones, a sus pensamientos, que son distintos, pero quieren un cambio profundo. Queremos que realmente los originarios aprendamos a administrar los recursos naturales, y aprendamos a dirigir nuestro paÃs. Esta es la visión de nosotros, esta es la visión de los vecinos, esta es la visión de los lÃderes”.
La nacionalización de hidrocarburos fue el acto más popular de su primer año de gestión. Según los nuevos contratos, el gobierno recibirá 82 por ciento de ingresos de gas, una subida de $240 millones a $1.6 mil millones. Pero la nacionalización solamente se trata de recursos del subsuelo, dejando las refinerÃas en las manos de las empresas extranjeras que mantienen derechos exclusivos a explorar y explotar las reservas de gas.
(...) El gobierno ha procurado usar las vÃas legales para implementar las nacionalizaciones y otras reformas. No obstante, la derecha no está interesada en hacer acuerdos, porque no quiere reforma ninguna, por moderada que sea. Los partidos de la derecha bloquearon avance en la asamblea constituyente hasta la última semana de febrero, insistiendo que cada artÃculo fuera aprobado por dos-tercios. El MAS hizo una concesión que da un veto efectivo a la minorÃa derechista.
(...) El MAS, lamentablemente, cree que el enfrentamiento con la derecha le hará más audaz. Pero las concesiones del gobierno han provisto un espacio a la derecha para organizarse y cobrar intensidad. Al mismo tiempo han desmovilizado la base que podrÃa defender al gobierno.
(...) Como dijo Eusebio Merlo, un dirigente de la Federación de Juntas Vecinales en El Alto (FEJUVE), “Sabemos que la lucha es larga. No acaba con Evo Morales--la lucha sigue. Continúa--es un proceso. Entonces, nosotros como dirigentes tanto decimos, escuchamos a las regiones, a sus pensamientos, que son distintos, pero quieren un cambio profundo. Queremos que realmente los originarios aprendamos a administrar los recursos naturales, y aprendamos a dirigir nuestro paÃs. Esta es la visión de nosotros, esta es la visión de los vecinos, esta es la visión de los lÃderes”.
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