Showing posts with label venezuela. Show all posts
Showing posts with label venezuela. Show all posts
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Watkins and others will continue to follow the issue, holding the IMF to its commitment to debt relief and non-conditionality. They're also pressing the case on Haiti's other outstanding debt. The largest multilateral holders of Haiti's debt are the Inter-American Development Bank ($447 million), the IMF ($165 million, plus $100 million in new lending), the World Bank's International Development Association ($39 million) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development ($13 million). The largest bilateral loans are held by Venezuela ($295 million--hello, Chavez!?) and Taiwan ($92 million).
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
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).
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).
Sunday, March 1, 2009
from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part III)
(154): The island of Bali lost about 8 percent of its population, or a hundred thousand people, in the assault on the PKI in 1965-1966.... The actual massacre came at the hands of the army and the activists of the right-wing, mainly theocratic, political parties. They had lists of names of activists and organizers of the PKI and its affiliated organizations. They used these lists to gather the victims for execution. Although the US and Australian governments neither instigated nor conducted the massacre, they encouraged the purge, fattened the lists of Communists for the army, funded the paracommandos, and supported the media effort to blame the entire genocide on the Communists.
(156-158): Moscow and Beijing remained mute. Since the 1920s, the USSR had an ambiguous relationship with Communist parties in the darker nations. On the one hand, the USSR had been the one state that gave enormous ideological, diplomatic, and material support to many independence struggles... From the early 1920s to 1935, [the Comintern] urged Communists in the darker nations to keep some distance between their activity and that of the nationalist groups in their regions... In China, though, the Comintern pushed the Communists into an alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang that ended in the disastrous Kuomintang 1928 massacre of the Communists in Shanghai... At the 1935 Seventh Comintern Congress, the Soviet Communists reacted to the development of fascism within Europe by telling Communist parties to work in a "popular front" with all patriotic social forces... While the strategy of the Comintern developed out of the German Communist Party's failure to stop the Nazi rise to power in 1933, that experience now came to dominate the work of Communists in far different settings... By the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the class collaborationist line had substantially weakened the Communist parties in the Third World, and they became easy prey for attack by the CIA and the nationalist regimes... The concepts of the national democratic state and new democracy allowed Moscow and Beijing to accept noncommunist regimes and national liberation movements as sufficient for the nonindustrial world.... Nasser's Egypt, Qasim's Iraq, Boumedienne's Algeria, Indira Gandhi's India, New Win's Burma, Sekou Toure's Guinea, Ayub Khan's Pakistan, and Mobido Keita's Mali became part of the USSR's and the People's Republic of China's most favored states, even though most of these leaders suppressed their local Communist parties.
(158-159): By the early 1960s, the three largest Communist parties (outside a Communist state) in Asia, Africa, and the Arab lands were the PKI of Indonesia, Sudan's al-Hizb al-Shuyu'i al-Sudani (SCP), and the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), respectively. These parties commanded the respect of a large section of their societies... Within a decade, these three parties would be devastated when the national bourgeoisie (with the assistance of the United States as well as a blind eye from Moscow and Beijing) would call the military out of the barracks to exterminate them. If the USSR and the People's Republic of China had taken a strong stand in any one of these instances, they might have given courage to Communists elsewhere... Instead, the silence scared Communists into alliances with political forces that wanted to use and then destroy them. The Communists were useful. Sukarno needed the PKI for its program and cadre. When Brigadier Qasim overthrew the Iraqi monarchy (1958) and Colonel Jaafar al-Nimeiri rejected a corrupt military junta in Sudan (1969), both leaned on the strong Communist parties... A military coup has little institutional basis for legitimacy...
(159): [BAATH PARTY, SADDAM, THE SOVIETS AND THE ICP] When the ICP took advantage of the opening to revive its banned organizations... [it] grew to more than twenty-five thousand cadre members with an additional mass membership of a million (about a fifth of the total population of Iraq). The growth of the ICP and its social power terrfied the dictatorship of Qasim. Shortly after Qasim came to power, the founder of the Baath, Michel 'Aflaq, visited Baghdad from Damascus to promote his party over the ICP. "We represent the Arab spirit against materialist Communism"... The Baath had only three hundred members in Iraq, and would grow to only three thousand in the early 1960s. In May 1959, Husain ar-Radi, the ICP's first secretary, entered a politburo meeting and argued that the time had come for the party to make a move for power. He was outvoted. The Soviets had sent an envoy with a message not to provoke Qasim. The Baath took the initiative; the US backed it. The ICP defended the nationalist military regime when the Baath attempted a coup in October 1959... The Baath's way had been prepared, and it eventually captured the state in 1963... In 1968 Hussein came to power. The USSR became a major ally of Hussein, who cultivated a split in the battered ICP... [A] ppro-Soviet faction of the ICP joined hands with him. The anti-Baath group...felt the wrath of the Baath's militia... The ICP that remained within the government enabled Iraq's 1972 friendship treaty with the USSR, but as Hussein increased his hold on the country he began a campaign against the ICP itself. In 1978, Hussein had the "loyal" party members arrested, executed many cadre... Hussein's campaign against the ICP led to his enhanced stock among Washinton's policymakers, whose own alliance with him began in 1983. The remainder of the ICP's cadre either fled overseas or else remained within Iraq to continue the struggle, notably in the Kurdish regions (long a bastion of the Left).
(160-161): [SUDAN, NIMEIRI AND THE COMMUNISTS] In Sudan, Nimeiri came to power on a Nasserite agenda, and he, like Qasim, could not rule without the SCP. After the coup he banned all political parites, but allowed the SCP to continue its activities. Founded in 1944, the SCP was the onl political party with national standing because, unlike the sectarian and racialist parties, it recruited equally in the north and south, among Christians as well as Muslims. Nimeiri needed the SCP. In the typical formula, Nimeiri first went after his right flank. In 1970, he began an assault on the reactionary Umma Party... When that party had been substantially pacified, Nimeiri turned his attention to the SCP. The brutal repression of the SCP drove the Communists to attempt a coup of their own along with sympathetic army officers... When news of the events in Sudan reached the Soviet leadership, it tried to negotiate with the Nimeiri government, as well as with the Egyptians and the Libyans, for asylum to the SCP's leaders. Once rebuffed, it did not pursue the matter. It is not that Moscow felt nothing for its comrades in the tropics, but that the fortunes of the Communist parties in the Third World came second to the strategy mapped out by the USSR and the People's Republic of China. When the Nimeiri regime executed the SCP leaders despite the entreaty from the USSR, Moscow rewarded the dictator with economic and political treaties as well as a special honored place as a delegate to the Communist Party of the USSR's twenty-fourth Congress in late 1971.
(162): As Sukarno fell, no significant word of protest came from New Delhi, Belgrade, Rangoon, Cairo or Accra... Indonesia's Sukarno had played a crucial role in the creation of the political platform of the Third World, and Bandung had been its omphalos. Yet there was silence. The personal or political demise of the five major leaders of the progressive tendency in Bandung reveals much about the collapse of solidarity: Nehru died in 1964, Both U Nu and Nkrumah had been recently deposed by military coups, Nasser's role had been weakened by the collapse of his United Arab Republic, and Tito had begun a genial rapproachement with the USSR.
(163): At the 1977 NAM meeting in New Delhi... neither Iraq, Sudan, nor Indonesia were laughed out of the room--their pogroms against the Communists in each case became the sacrosanct "internal affairs" of each country. The major Third World powers accepted Indonesia, Sudan, Iraq, and others simply because they signed on to the basic principles of non-alignment, and because they shared a similar international economic analysis... The destruction of the left had an enormous impact on the Third World. The most conservative, even reactionary social classes attained domiannce over the political platform created in Bandung. As an adjunct to the military regimes, the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the Left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.
(166): In 1920, the Karakhan Manifesto from the USSR repudiated the treaties between the Czarist regime and the Manchu Empire, with the statement that the Soviet Republic "renounces all the annexations of Chinese territory..." In the late 1950s, the USSR would rescind this statement and insist on territory that it had abrogated.
(167-168): Nehru's Congress Party did not expend foreign exchange on the import of foreign arms. The armed forces had to do with British remainders and whatever could be produced domestically. From 1951-1962, the Indian treasury spent less on arms than either the British government before it or the Indian governments that would follow the Sino-Indian war (1962). Despite the war with Pakistan in 1947-48, the Indian government reduced its military expenses to 2 percent of its total budget... After the war, the Indian government would not stint on its military to become the world's largest importer of weapons by the 1990s.
(168): [WHY 1962 WAR]: Another way to look at the Sino-Indian border war is to see it as a commonplace occurrence in the new postcolonial states that had, as far as the borders went, begun to adopt a more "European" notion of nationalism than their own previous anticolonial form... Indeed, the Himalays that run along the borders between today's states of Burma, Nepal, India, China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are home to people at high altitudes whose lives rely on transit across the mountain passes to the plains for trade or religious pilgrimages. The boundary is not in the interest of these people...
(170): Colonial powers based their borders on what they were able to conquer, and guarded these boundaries in terms of security rather than any other principle. The cartography of the Himalayas by the British had little to do with the needs and desires of the people who lived in the hills; it had everything to do with the creation of buffer states to protect their Indian empire from the threats by the Czarist Russians and the Manchu Chinese. In 1893, the British created the Durand line, which ran right through the homelands of the Pashtu speakers so as to maintain Afghanistan as a border territory between Russia and India, just as in 1914, the British fashioned the McMahon line to divide their Indian domains from those of the Chinese.
(173): [In the 3rd World, not military Keynesianism, but militarization by gutting of welfare state] WB President Robert McNamara's study of military expenditures in the darker nations found that states had quintupled that one line item between 1960 and 1988; military expenditure increased at twice the rate of per capita income.
(174): China's foreign policy wound its way from Bandung to a rapproachment with the United States and its impossible alliances with dictatorial regimes. As China began its new relationship with the United States, the Chinese government praised the Greek military junta (1972), took the side of Pakistan against the liberation of Bangladesh (1971), welcomed Niemeiri to Beijing after the dictartorship's massacre of its Communists (1971), sent emergency aid to the Sri Lankan government to defeat the left-wing Lanka Samaja Party's insurrection, and quickly recognized Pinochet's coup in Chile (it expelled the Chilean ambassador to China when he refused to support Pinochet). The Sino-Indian war compromised the credibility of India and China.
(178): In 1850, fossil fuels supplied only 6 percent of the world's energy needs, while humans and animals provided the rest. A century later, human and animal power had declined to 6 percent, while fossil fuel use accounted for the remainder.
(178): By 1950, the main energy corporations organized themsleves into seven conglomerates known as the Seven Sisters: Exxon, Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Socal (or Chevron). Even though oil is a lucrative product, in its crude state it is nothing more than a raw material. To remove oil from the ground requires an immense capital outlay, both for exploration and extraction. This initial capital outlay is the carrot and stick used by the Seven Sisters. They came to the oil lands in the early years and staked out "concessions" for themselves... These seven firms, in 1950, controlled 85 percent of the crude oil production in the world outside Canada, China, the USSR, and the United States...
(178): The regimes that ruled over the oil lands could have used the rent paid by the oil companies to increase the social wage--to expand public education, health, transport, and other such important avenues for the overall advancement of the people. Instead, the oil rent went toward the expansion of luxury consumption for the bureaucratic-managerial or monarchal elite--the oligarchy in Venezuela or the Ibn Saud clan in Saudi Arabia--and to oil the military machine (the oil war of Bolivia-Paraguay, 1932-1935, was a preview of the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war)...
(178-179): In 1957 alone the Seven Sisters made $828 million in Venezuela, whose regime allowed them to remit all their profits without restrictions... The United States supported the junta that came to power in the 1940s, whose goal was to maintain good relations with the oil cartel rather than pusrue social development policies... The oil wealth was not, therefore, reinvested for the overall development of the country. The junta reversed the land reforms of a decade previously, sold the land to private speculators, and moved Venezuela to become a net importer of food grains... In 1958 the new relatively progressive government led by Accion Democratica (AD) expressed an interest in recouping a larger share of the profits... Venezuela had been able to increase its share of the world oil market for serendipitous reasons. Mexcio used to be a major provider of the world's oil (25%). After the Mexican Revolution (1911), the new regime attempted to get a better handle on its oil profits... In 1934, after two decades of tussle, the general who had once guarded the oil region, Lazaro Cardenas, became the president... In 1938, Cardenas nationalized the oil industry... The Seven Sisters moved their focus from Mexico to Venezuela...
(180-181): In the late 1940s, Raul Prebisch complained about the low prices earned by the raw material producers because private cartels controlled international prices. Whether the crop is cocoa, sugar, rubber, or oil, the structure of the commodity cartel did not differ much... The declining price of raw materials over time meant that the Third World would never be able to earn enough from the sale of raw materials to effect both meaningful social development and industrial growth. Many of the formerly colonial states had a problem: they had either been carved out as one-commodity producers or else they had developed into one-crop countries. With no economic diversification, these states additionally had less power than the private corporate cartel. They had only one crop, and unless other countries that produced the same crop banded together, they had to accept whatever terms the private corporate cartel offered...
(181): Because of the low level of capital available in the darker nations, the regimes tried to stregnthen the one economic process that had already been perfected: the colonial crop. The regimes in the Third World relied on the singular colonial crop. They also had little capital to refine and process the crop to create some value before export. In other words, its raw material frequently left the old colonial rail lines and ports in its rawest form possible for transport, and brought a mediocre return to the former colony.... The low level of capital in the arsenal of the darker nations meant that they gave "reasonable" terms to the transnational conglomerates that worked in the private cartel, and had the funds to explore and excavate, cultivate and transport. The concessions given to these conglomerates meant that the regime frequently lost control over production, and would only be able to resrict the giants through licenses, increased taxation, and other minor irritations.
(181): By 1980, of the 115 "developing countries," according to UNCTAD, at least half remained dependent on one commodity for over 50 percent of their export revenues. Most of these countries had come to rely on petroleum exports.
183): [JUAN PABLO PEREZ ALFONZO] In April 1959, Nasser's Egypt and the Arab League hosted the first Arab Petroleum Congress... The congress gathered just as the Seven Sisters reduced the posted price for Middle East oil. Venezuela's representative, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, was an experienced AD politician. Perez Alfonzo made his political mark in 1943 during a debate in Venezuela over the oil concessions enjoyed by the Seven Sisters... In 1958, Perez Alfonzo joined the AD government as the minster of mines and hydrocarbons. He led the charge against the Seven Sisters, earned the government 60 percent of the oil revenue, and established the notion that Venezuela had sovereignty over its subsoil so that the entire oil industry was a public utility.
(184): Exxon egged on the nationalists with another price reduction (this time, by 7 percent of the posted price). When the oil producers met in Baghdad in September 1960, a month after the decrease, they came with a purpose: to form a public cartel of oil producers. After a week of deliberation, the group created OPEC. The five charter members nominally controlled or at least produced 82 percent of the world's crude exports...
(185-186): A major disappointment in this was the failure of the OPEC nations to use their massive oil profits for the creation of such a fund to help stabilize other commodities. Not only did the OPEC powers refuse to contribute to a global fund to stabilize raw material prices but they also had a poor record int heir ad contributions to their neighbors... Despite its political origins, OPEC became an economic cartel as it fought to defend oil prices and do little else...
(187): [FAUX NATIONALIZATION] In sum, the nationalization of economic assets from transnational firms replicated the problems of political independence from colonialism; it was an advance, but it created an illusion of freedom. The Seven Sisters transferred the burdens of extraction on to the state, while it continued to enjoy the fruits of the industry. Furthermore, the state's newfound power over the fields and its ability to negotiate with the Seven Sisters over the prices and taxes moved it to bargain on two sides of the commodity cycle: with the oil workers for lower wages, and the Seven Sisters for higher prices. To raise the export receipt and increase the coffers of the state did not itself presage a strategy for the generation of equity.
(191): The announcement of socialism came alongside the recognition that its construction would not be easy in a formerly colonized state. Not only had the German and British colonial regimes stripped bare the economy of eastern Africa but they also left behind a state apparatus designed to exploit and not to liberate. The institutions of the state and the civil bureaucracy grew from a culture of imperial hierarchy, a value quite removed from the egalitarianism of national liberation... Hemmed in by pressures from the advanced industrial states, the aristorcratic rural classes, and the emergent mercantile classes, the new state had little time. Things had to change in a hurry. But socialism requires imagination and time. It cannot be made in a hurry. To create socialism in a hurry without mass support, and institutions that can channel this support, led many Third World states to disaster.
(192): Instead of foreign aid or commercial loans, the national liberation states developed a three-pronged approach to development: the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy (finance, infrastructure, energy, crucial raw material extraction, and capital goods production), the development of the agricultural sector, and the encouragement of industrialization. The plan expected the capital for industrialization to come from the nationalization of finance and an increase in the agricultural surplus. Nationalization put financial decisions in the hands of the state rather than transnational corporations, and it arrested the hemorrhage of capital...
(193): The Third World agenda, for states such as India and Egypt, was not socialist as much as welfarist. The state centralized and nationalized the commanding heights of the economy to ensure that its dominant classes gained some purchase on a complex international economy... Tanzania under Nyerere's TANU attempted something more than the welfarism of India and Egypt. The Arusha Declaration drew from the socialist experiments: there was an insistence that the state must create equity among the population, and that this equity needed to be crafted at the level of production and not simply consumption.
(194): [BUT] [T]he state talked of the people, and yet it stoopd apart from them... The TANU regime came to power, abolished the trade unions, and collected the unions' personnel into one government-authorized union, the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (1964). The natural aliies of a socialist experiment were marginalized. There was no well-developed strategy for how the state planned to build power for its ideas. Instead, the state stood above the people, directing them, preaching "socialism from above."
(196-197): Tanzanian ujaama is quite of a piece with a vast number of examples of Third World development or Third World socialism in a hurry. Most of the Third World states hurriedly built industrial factories and dams, cleared forests, and moved populations. This labor came for many reasons, of which the most important was to rapidly increase the productive capacity of the new nation, to make a Great Leap Forward into a moment of propserity before the political capital of the liberation movements had been spent... The intentions of the leaership, by all accounts, were not malevolent. Yet its modernist dream--to adminster nature and society, and build vast industrial monuments without either a democratic governance structure or a mobilized population--led to the worst excesses of commandism and bureaucratism. In India, in the period from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, the state displaced some 25 million people, while in the same period, the Chinese shifted some 40 million people. These are the dramatic figures, because these states have substantial populations, but in small countries the percentage of the population that the state shifted by its bureaucratic commandism is staggering (in Tanzania, a fifth of the population was resettled).
(199): In 1961, after two five-year plans, India's Nehru rued the failure of his regime to tend to the sufferings of the population... Market socialism or the mixed economy was a socialism of consumption not production. In the attempt to industrailize and create agricultural change, there was only a muted effort to change the relations and methods of production. The process of industrial as well as agricultural production remained similar to that found in any advanced capitalist country: workers had no say in the process of production, which was run by a detached management.
(200): In 1932, the El Salvadorian rural elites engineered the massacre of twenty thousand peasants who occupied private land and opposed export-led agriculture.
(200): When India won its freedom, the Congress relied on rural power brokers to deliver the vote. It did not want to alienate the landowners who financed these agents of the party.
(200): In the Philippines, the Land Reform Act of 1955 froze land relations in plantation-like conditions...
(208-209): [In 1983] NAM came to New Delhi at a crucial time for Indira Gandhi... When Nehru died in 1964, Indira Gandhi took on a major role in the Congress Party. In 1966, she won elections and was prime minister until 1977. She returned to power in 1980 with a weakend mandate because of the excesses of the martial law (Emergency) regime she ran from 1975 to 1977. When NAM came to Delhi, the ciety was under siege... In Nellie, Assam, five thousand refugees were killed...
(209): Between the 1966 Tricontinental and the 1979 sixth NAM meeting in Havana, a number of important events transpired. A Marxist revolution in Ethiopia (1974) inaugurated a set of defeats for the imperialist bloc. In 1975, the National Liberation Front defeated the US in South Vietname and the Pathet Lao took Vientiane. That same year, five Portuguese colonies in AFrica seized their independence after the Salazar dictatorship ended in Lisbon. In 1978-1979, the Marxists seized control of Afghanistan, the New Jewel Movement took power in Grenada, and the Sandinista revolution prevailed in Nicaragua. Additionally, a number of African regimes (such as in Benin, Madagascar, Liberia, and Libya) adopted Marxism-Leninism as their official ideology. The mood in Havan was exuberant... The conflict between the capitalist and Communist worlds did not mean neutrality in that struggle. The Havana meeting raised the question of a formal anti-imperialist alliance between NAM and the USSR--a move pushed by Castro...
(210) [BUT] Between Havana and New Delhi, a great deal occured to dampen this enthusiasm. Ronald Reagan's forward policy extended the increase in military expenditure initiated by Jimmy Carter...
(215): By 1983, the NAM states produed less than a tenth of the worlds' industrial output, although transnational corporations controlled three-quarters of the industrial output in these states. Among the NAM states, five produced more than 80 percent of this total industrial output: Brazil, South Korea, India, Mexico, and Argentina.
(215): The changes in the general character of NAM were reflected in the changes within India. By the mid-1970s, India's economic agenda floundered. The long-standing failure to reconstruct agrarian relations, an excessive reliance on industrial development over any other sector, a burgeoning military sector... A dissatisfied population rose in a host of rebellions... The party of the freedom movement claimed to rule with the anticolonial nationalist agenda, but it adopted economic policies inimical to the vast mass of the population...
(217): Mexico, an oil-rich country, defaulted on $80 billion in public-sector debt in 1982. Forty countries joined Mexico in arrears, and a year later another twenty-seven had to restructure their massive debt. The total debt in the brusied nations was $500 billion, which at the time threatened the financial stability of the world market.
(218): The domestic elites were always a weak link for the national liberation agenda. When the benefits of import substitution produced a more aggressive and self-confident bourgeoisie, this class wanted to break the cross-class alliance. This class looked forward to a rearrangement of alliances, with a closer relationship with the "West" for economic gain and consumer pleasure. The erosion of the Third World state allowed this class to carry the standard of the First World. In India, by the early 1980s, this class was the size of the French population.
(218): [ANTICOLONIAL NATIONALISM BECOMES PAROCHIAL, AS ECONOMIC AGENDA IS DERAILED] With the demise of import substitution and no other plans for economic sovereignty on the table that appealed to the masses, the Congress Party lost its claim to anticolonial Third World nationalism. Its leaders knew this implicitly, because Indira Gandhi's clique immediately fanned the flames of ethnic and religious difference to reclaim their electoral majority. The appeal to the "Hindu" majority against the secessionism in the Punjab and Assam as well as against Muslims and oppressed castes opened the door for the corruption of the idea of anticolonial nationalism. The massacre at Nellie, for instance, was a result of this venal appeal. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Congress Party was met toe to toe on this line, and it was found wanting by a genuinely cruel cultural nationalist political force, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
(219): The great home of the bourgeois social imagination was that the international order be based on free markets and individual identities, and that the deracinated latter be able to benefit from the unhampered former. Rather than realize [this] dream, what manifested itself wa the simultaneous growth of IMF-driven globalization and parochially cruel nationalism. Sectarian nationalism in the formerly colonized world is not only an adequate form of globalization, especially as the socialist bloc collapsed later in the 1990s, but it seems to be the form that IMF-driven globalization has taken since the late 1970s.
(220): In 1972, the Third World expended $33 billion on arms, already a vulgar amount. A decade later, the figure totaled $81 billion. In 1977, the Cuban government proposed that $650 billion wasted on the worlds arms trade be transferred into a capital infusion into the Third World. The G-7 did not consider the proposal, the corporate media mocked it, and NAM did not give it serious attention...
(222): In the 1970s, the IMF shifted its three-decades old mission from the provision of short-term credit to countries with current account deficits (lender of the last resort) to the use of its crucial finances as a weapon to demand structural economic changes mainly in the bruised nations. In other words, the new IMF eroded the institutions of state sovereignty...
(154): The island of Bali lost about 8 percent of its population, or a hundred thousand people, in the assault on the PKI in 1965-1966.... The actual massacre came at the hands of the army and the activists of the right-wing, mainly theocratic, political parties. They had lists of names of activists and organizers of the PKI and its affiliated organizations. They used these lists to gather the victims for execution. Although the US and Australian governments neither instigated nor conducted the massacre, they encouraged the purge, fattened the lists of Communists for the army, funded the paracommandos, and supported the media effort to blame the entire genocide on the Communists.
(156-158): Moscow and Beijing remained mute. Since the 1920s, the USSR had an ambiguous relationship with Communist parties in the darker nations. On the one hand, the USSR had been the one state that gave enormous ideological, diplomatic, and material support to many independence struggles... From the early 1920s to 1935, [the Comintern] urged Communists in the darker nations to keep some distance between their activity and that of the nationalist groups in their regions... In China, though, the Comintern pushed the Communists into an alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang that ended in the disastrous Kuomintang 1928 massacre of the Communists in Shanghai... At the 1935 Seventh Comintern Congress, the Soviet Communists reacted to the development of fascism within Europe by telling Communist parties to work in a "popular front" with all patriotic social forces... While the strategy of the Comintern developed out of the German Communist Party's failure to stop the Nazi rise to power in 1933, that experience now came to dominate the work of Communists in far different settings... By the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the class collaborationist line had substantially weakened the Communist parties in the Third World, and they became easy prey for attack by the CIA and the nationalist regimes... The concepts of the national democratic state and new democracy allowed Moscow and Beijing to accept noncommunist regimes and national liberation movements as sufficient for the nonindustrial world.... Nasser's Egypt, Qasim's Iraq, Boumedienne's Algeria, Indira Gandhi's India, New Win's Burma, Sekou Toure's Guinea, Ayub Khan's Pakistan, and Mobido Keita's Mali became part of the USSR's and the People's Republic of China's most favored states, even though most of these leaders suppressed their local Communist parties.
(158-159): By the early 1960s, the three largest Communist parties (outside a Communist state) in Asia, Africa, and the Arab lands were the PKI of Indonesia, Sudan's al-Hizb al-Shuyu'i al-Sudani (SCP), and the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), respectively. These parties commanded the respect of a large section of their societies... Within a decade, these three parties would be devastated when the national bourgeoisie (with the assistance of the United States as well as a blind eye from Moscow and Beijing) would call the military out of the barracks to exterminate them. If the USSR and the People's Republic of China had taken a strong stand in any one of these instances, they might have given courage to Communists elsewhere... Instead, the silence scared Communists into alliances with political forces that wanted to use and then destroy them. The Communists were useful. Sukarno needed the PKI for its program and cadre. When Brigadier Qasim overthrew the Iraqi monarchy (1958) and Colonel Jaafar al-Nimeiri rejected a corrupt military junta in Sudan (1969), both leaned on the strong Communist parties... A military coup has little institutional basis for legitimacy...
(159): [BAATH PARTY, SADDAM, THE SOVIETS AND THE ICP] When the ICP took advantage of the opening to revive its banned organizations... [it] grew to more than twenty-five thousand cadre members with an additional mass membership of a million (about a fifth of the total population of Iraq). The growth of the ICP and its social power terrfied the dictatorship of Qasim. Shortly after Qasim came to power, the founder of the Baath, Michel 'Aflaq, visited Baghdad from Damascus to promote his party over the ICP. "We represent the Arab spirit against materialist Communism"... The Baath had only three hundred members in Iraq, and would grow to only three thousand in the early 1960s. In May 1959, Husain ar-Radi, the ICP's first secretary, entered a politburo meeting and argued that the time had come for the party to make a move for power. He was outvoted. The Soviets had sent an envoy with a message not to provoke Qasim. The Baath took the initiative; the US backed it. The ICP defended the nationalist military regime when the Baath attempted a coup in October 1959... The Baath's way had been prepared, and it eventually captured the state in 1963... In 1968 Hussein came to power. The USSR became a major ally of Hussein, who cultivated a split in the battered ICP... [A] ppro-Soviet faction of the ICP joined hands with him. The anti-Baath group...felt the wrath of the Baath's militia... The ICP that remained within the government enabled Iraq's 1972 friendship treaty with the USSR, but as Hussein increased his hold on the country he began a campaign against the ICP itself. In 1978, Hussein had the "loyal" party members arrested, executed many cadre... Hussein's campaign against the ICP led to his enhanced stock among Washinton's policymakers, whose own alliance with him began in 1983. The remainder of the ICP's cadre either fled overseas or else remained within Iraq to continue the struggle, notably in the Kurdish regions (long a bastion of the Left).
(160-161): [SUDAN, NIMEIRI AND THE COMMUNISTS] In Sudan, Nimeiri came to power on a Nasserite agenda, and he, like Qasim, could not rule without the SCP. After the coup he banned all political parites, but allowed the SCP to continue its activities. Founded in 1944, the SCP was the onl political party with national standing because, unlike the sectarian and racialist parties, it recruited equally in the north and south, among Christians as well as Muslims. Nimeiri needed the SCP. In the typical formula, Nimeiri first went after his right flank. In 1970, he began an assault on the reactionary Umma Party... When that party had been substantially pacified, Nimeiri turned his attention to the SCP. The brutal repression of the SCP drove the Communists to attempt a coup of their own along with sympathetic army officers... When news of the events in Sudan reached the Soviet leadership, it tried to negotiate with the Nimeiri government, as well as with the Egyptians and the Libyans, for asylum to the SCP's leaders. Once rebuffed, it did not pursue the matter. It is not that Moscow felt nothing for its comrades in the tropics, but that the fortunes of the Communist parties in the Third World came second to the strategy mapped out by the USSR and the People's Republic of China. When the Nimeiri regime executed the SCP leaders despite the entreaty from the USSR, Moscow rewarded the dictator with economic and political treaties as well as a special honored place as a delegate to the Communist Party of the USSR's twenty-fourth Congress in late 1971.
(162): As Sukarno fell, no significant word of protest came from New Delhi, Belgrade, Rangoon, Cairo or Accra... Indonesia's Sukarno had played a crucial role in the creation of the political platform of the Third World, and Bandung had been its omphalos. Yet there was silence. The personal or political demise of the five major leaders of the progressive tendency in Bandung reveals much about the collapse of solidarity: Nehru died in 1964, Both U Nu and Nkrumah had been recently deposed by military coups, Nasser's role had been weakened by the collapse of his United Arab Republic, and Tito had begun a genial rapproachement with the USSR.
(163): At the 1977 NAM meeting in New Delhi... neither Iraq, Sudan, nor Indonesia were laughed out of the room--their pogroms against the Communists in each case became the sacrosanct "internal affairs" of each country. The major Third World powers accepted Indonesia, Sudan, Iraq, and others simply because they signed on to the basic principles of non-alignment, and because they shared a similar international economic analysis... The destruction of the left had an enormous impact on the Third World. The most conservative, even reactionary social classes attained domiannce over the political platform created in Bandung. As an adjunct to the military regimes, the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the Left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.
(166): In 1920, the Karakhan Manifesto from the USSR repudiated the treaties between the Czarist regime and the Manchu Empire, with the statement that the Soviet Republic "renounces all the annexations of Chinese territory..." In the late 1950s, the USSR would rescind this statement and insist on territory that it had abrogated.
(167-168): Nehru's Congress Party did not expend foreign exchange on the import of foreign arms. The armed forces had to do with British remainders and whatever could be produced domestically. From 1951-1962, the Indian treasury spent less on arms than either the British government before it or the Indian governments that would follow the Sino-Indian war (1962). Despite the war with Pakistan in 1947-48, the Indian government reduced its military expenses to 2 percent of its total budget... After the war, the Indian government would not stint on its military to become the world's largest importer of weapons by the 1990s.
(168): [WHY 1962 WAR]: Another way to look at the Sino-Indian border war is to see it as a commonplace occurrence in the new postcolonial states that had, as far as the borders went, begun to adopt a more "European" notion of nationalism than their own previous anticolonial form... Indeed, the Himalays that run along the borders between today's states of Burma, Nepal, India, China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are home to people at high altitudes whose lives rely on transit across the mountain passes to the plains for trade or religious pilgrimages. The boundary is not in the interest of these people...
(170): Colonial powers based their borders on what they were able to conquer, and guarded these boundaries in terms of security rather than any other principle. The cartography of the Himalayas by the British had little to do with the needs and desires of the people who lived in the hills; it had everything to do with the creation of buffer states to protect their Indian empire from the threats by the Czarist Russians and the Manchu Chinese. In 1893, the British created the Durand line, which ran right through the homelands of the Pashtu speakers so as to maintain Afghanistan as a border territory between Russia and India, just as in 1914, the British fashioned the McMahon line to divide their Indian domains from those of the Chinese.
(173): [In the 3rd World, not military Keynesianism, but militarization by gutting of welfare state] WB President Robert McNamara's study of military expenditures in the darker nations found that states had quintupled that one line item between 1960 and 1988; military expenditure increased at twice the rate of per capita income.
(174): China's foreign policy wound its way from Bandung to a rapproachment with the United States and its impossible alliances with dictatorial regimes. As China began its new relationship with the United States, the Chinese government praised the Greek military junta (1972), took the side of Pakistan against the liberation of Bangladesh (1971), welcomed Niemeiri to Beijing after the dictartorship's massacre of its Communists (1971), sent emergency aid to the Sri Lankan government to defeat the left-wing Lanka Samaja Party's insurrection, and quickly recognized Pinochet's coup in Chile (it expelled the Chilean ambassador to China when he refused to support Pinochet). The Sino-Indian war compromised the credibility of India and China.
(178): In 1850, fossil fuels supplied only 6 percent of the world's energy needs, while humans and animals provided the rest. A century later, human and animal power had declined to 6 percent, while fossil fuel use accounted for the remainder.
(178): By 1950, the main energy corporations organized themsleves into seven conglomerates known as the Seven Sisters: Exxon, Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Socal (or Chevron). Even though oil is a lucrative product, in its crude state it is nothing more than a raw material. To remove oil from the ground requires an immense capital outlay, both for exploration and extraction. This initial capital outlay is the carrot and stick used by the Seven Sisters. They came to the oil lands in the early years and staked out "concessions" for themselves... These seven firms, in 1950, controlled 85 percent of the crude oil production in the world outside Canada, China, the USSR, and the United States...
(178): The regimes that ruled over the oil lands could have used the rent paid by the oil companies to increase the social wage--to expand public education, health, transport, and other such important avenues for the overall advancement of the people. Instead, the oil rent went toward the expansion of luxury consumption for the bureaucratic-managerial or monarchal elite--the oligarchy in Venezuela or the Ibn Saud clan in Saudi Arabia--and to oil the military machine (the oil war of Bolivia-Paraguay, 1932-1935, was a preview of the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war)...
(178-179): In 1957 alone the Seven Sisters made $828 million in Venezuela, whose regime allowed them to remit all their profits without restrictions... The United States supported the junta that came to power in the 1940s, whose goal was to maintain good relations with the oil cartel rather than pusrue social development policies... The oil wealth was not, therefore, reinvested for the overall development of the country. The junta reversed the land reforms of a decade previously, sold the land to private speculators, and moved Venezuela to become a net importer of food grains... In 1958 the new relatively progressive government led by Accion Democratica (AD) expressed an interest in recouping a larger share of the profits... Venezuela had been able to increase its share of the world oil market for serendipitous reasons. Mexcio used to be a major provider of the world's oil (25%). After the Mexican Revolution (1911), the new regime attempted to get a better handle on its oil profits... In 1934, after two decades of tussle, the general who had once guarded the oil region, Lazaro Cardenas, became the president... In 1938, Cardenas nationalized the oil industry... The Seven Sisters moved their focus from Mexico to Venezuela...
(180-181): In the late 1940s, Raul Prebisch complained about the low prices earned by the raw material producers because private cartels controlled international prices. Whether the crop is cocoa, sugar, rubber, or oil, the structure of the commodity cartel did not differ much... The declining price of raw materials over time meant that the Third World would never be able to earn enough from the sale of raw materials to effect both meaningful social development and industrial growth. Many of the formerly colonial states had a problem: they had either been carved out as one-commodity producers or else they had developed into one-crop countries. With no economic diversification, these states additionally had less power than the private corporate cartel. They had only one crop, and unless other countries that produced the same crop banded together, they had to accept whatever terms the private corporate cartel offered...
(181): Because of the low level of capital available in the darker nations, the regimes tried to stregnthen the one economic process that had already been perfected: the colonial crop. The regimes in the Third World relied on the singular colonial crop. They also had little capital to refine and process the crop to create some value before export. In other words, its raw material frequently left the old colonial rail lines and ports in its rawest form possible for transport, and brought a mediocre return to the former colony.... The low level of capital in the arsenal of the darker nations meant that they gave "reasonable" terms to the transnational conglomerates that worked in the private cartel, and had the funds to explore and excavate, cultivate and transport. The concessions given to these conglomerates meant that the regime frequently lost control over production, and would only be able to resrict the giants through licenses, increased taxation, and other minor irritations.
(181): By 1980, of the 115 "developing countries," according to UNCTAD, at least half remained dependent on one commodity for over 50 percent of their export revenues. Most of these countries had come to rely on petroleum exports.
183): [JUAN PABLO PEREZ ALFONZO] In April 1959, Nasser's Egypt and the Arab League hosted the first Arab Petroleum Congress... The congress gathered just as the Seven Sisters reduced the posted price for Middle East oil. Venezuela's representative, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, was an experienced AD politician. Perez Alfonzo made his political mark in 1943 during a debate in Venezuela over the oil concessions enjoyed by the Seven Sisters... In 1958, Perez Alfonzo joined the AD government as the minster of mines and hydrocarbons. He led the charge against the Seven Sisters, earned the government 60 percent of the oil revenue, and established the notion that Venezuela had sovereignty over its subsoil so that the entire oil industry was a public utility.
(184): Exxon egged on the nationalists with another price reduction (this time, by 7 percent of the posted price). When the oil producers met in Baghdad in September 1960, a month after the decrease, they came with a purpose: to form a public cartel of oil producers. After a week of deliberation, the group created OPEC. The five charter members nominally controlled or at least produced 82 percent of the world's crude exports...
(185-186): A major disappointment in this was the failure of the OPEC nations to use their massive oil profits for the creation of such a fund to help stabilize other commodities. Not only did the OPEC powers refuse to contribute to a global fund to stabilize raw material prices but they also had a poor record int heir ad contributions to their neighbors... Despite its political origins, OPEC became an economic cartel as it fought to defend oil prices and do little else...
(187): [FAUX NATIONALIZATION] In sum, the nationalization of economic assets from transnational firms replicated the problems of political independence from colonialism; it was an advance, but it created an illusion of freedom. The Seven Sisters transferred the burdens of extraction on to the state, while it continued to enjoy the fruits of the industry. Furthermore, the state's newfound power over the fields and its ability to negotiate with the Seven Sisters over the prices and taxes moved it to bargain on two sides of the commodity cycle: with the oil workers for lower wages, and the Seven Sisters for higher prices. To raise the export receipt and increase the coffers of the state did not itself presage a strategy for the generation of equity.
(191): The announcement of socialism came alongside the recognition that its construction would not be easy in a formerly colonized state. Not only had the German and British colonial regimes stripped bare the economy of eastern Africa but they also left behind a state apparatus designed to exploit and not to liberate. The institutions of the state and the civil bureaucracy grew from a culture of imperial hierarchy, a value quite removed from the egalitarianism of national liberation... Hemmed in by pressures from the advanced industrial states, the aristorcratic rural classes, and the emergent mercantile classes, the new state had little time. Things had to change in a hurry. But socialism requires imagination and time. It cannot be made in a hurry. To create socialism in a hurry without mass support, and institutions that can channel this support, led many Third World states to disaster.
(192): Instead of foreign aid or commercial loans, the national liberation states developed a three-pronged approach to development: the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy (finance, infrastructure, energy, crucial raw material extraction, and capital goods production), the development of the agricultural sector, and the encouragement of industrialization. The plan expected the capital for industrialization to come from the nationalization of finance and an increase in the agricultural surplus. Nationalization put financial decisions in the hands of the state rather than transnational corporations, and it arrested the hemorrhage of capital...
(193): The Third World agenda, for states such as India and Egypt, was not socialist as much as welfarist. The state centralized and nationalized the commanding heights of the economy to ensure that its dominant classes gained some purchase on a complex international economy... Tanzania under Nyerere's TANU attempted something more than the welfarism of India and Egypt. The Arusha Declaration drew from the socialist experiments: there was an insistence that the state must create equity among the population, and that this equity needed to be crafted at the level of production and not simply consumption.
(194): [BUT] [T]he state talked of the people, and yet it stoopd apart from them... The TANU regime came to power, abolished the trade unions, and collected the unions' personnel into one government-authorized union, the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (1964). The natural aliies of a socialist experiment were marginalized. There was no well-developed strategy for how the state planned to build power for its ideas. Instead, the state stood above the people, directing them, preaching "socialism from above."
(196-197): Tanzanian ujaama is quite of a piece with a vast number of examples of Third World development or Third World socialism in a hurry. Most of the Third World states hurriedly built industrial factories and dams, cleared forests, and moved populations. This labor came for many reasons, of which the most important was to rapidly increase the productive capacity of the new nation, to make a Great Leap Forward into a moment of propserity before the political capital of the liberation movements had been spent... The intentions of the leaership, by all accounts, were not malevolent. Yet its modernist dream--to adminster nature and society, and build vast industrial monuments without either a democratic governance structure or a mobilized population--led to the worst excesses of commandism and bureaucratism. In India, in the period from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, the state displaced some 25 million people, while in the same period, the Chinese shifted some 40 million people. These are the dramatic figures, because these states have substantial populations, but in small countries the percentage of the population that the state shifted by its bureaucratic commandism is staggering (in Tanzania, a fifth of the population was resettled).
(199): In 1961, after two five-year plans, India's Nehru rued the failure of his regime to tend to the sufferings of the population... Market socialism or the mixed economy was a socialism of consumption not production. In the attempt to industrailize and create agricultural change, there was only a muted effort to change the relations and methods of production. The process of industrial as well as agricultural production remained similar to that found in any advanced capitalist country: workers had no say in the process of production, which was run by a detached management.
(200): In 1932, the El Salvadorian rural elites engineered the massacre of twenty thousand peasants who occupied private land and opposed export-led agriculture.
(200): When India won its freedom, the Congress relied on rural power brokers to deliver the vote. It did not want to alienate the landowners who financed these agents of the party.
(200): In the Philippines, the Land Reform Act of 1955 froze land relations in plantation-like conditions...
(208-209): [In 1983] NAM came to New Delhi at a crucial time for Indira Gandhi... When Nehru died in 1964, Indira Gandhi took on a major role in the Congress Party. In 1966, she won elections and was prime minister until 1977. She returned to power in 1980 with a weakend mandate because of the excesses of the martial law (Emergency) regime she ran from 1975 to 1977. When NAM came to Delhi, the ciety was under siege... In Nellie, Assam, five thousand refugees were killed...
(209): Between the 1966 Tricontinental and the 1979 sixth NAM meeting in Havana, a number of important events transpired. A Marxist revolution in Ethiopia (1974) inaugurated a set of defeats for the imperialist bloc. In 1975, the National Liberation Front defeated the US in South Vietname and the Pathet Lao took Vientiane. That same year, five Portuguese colonies in AFrica seized their independence after the Salazar dictatorship ended in Lisbon. In 1978-1979, the Marxists seized control of Afghanistan, the New Jewel Movement took power in Grenada, and the Sandinista revolution prevailed in Nicaragua. Additionally, a number of African regimes (such as in Benin, Madagascar, Liberia, and Libya) adopted Marxism-Leninism as their official ideology. The mood in Havan was exuberant... The conflict between the capitalist and Communist worlds did not mean neutrality in that struggle. The Havana meeting raised the question of a formal anti-imperialist alliance between NAM and the USSR--a move pushed by Castro...
(210) [BUT] Between Havana and New Delhi, a great deal occured to dampen this enthusiasm. Ronald Reagan's forward policy extended the increase in military expenditure initiated by Jimmy Carter...
(215): By 1983, the NAM states produed less than a tenth of the worlds' industrial output, although transnational corporations controlled three-quarters of the industrial output in these states. Among the NAM states, five produced more than 80 percent of this total industrial output: Brazil, South Korea, India, Mexico, and Argentina.
(215): The changes in the general character of NAM were reflected in the changes within India. By the mid-1970s, India's economic agenda floundered. The long-standing failure to reconstruct agrarian relations, an excessive reliance on industrial development over any other sector, a burgeoning military sector... A dissatisfied population rose in a host of rebellions... The party of the freedom movement claimed to rule with the anticolonial nationalist agenda, but it adopted economic policies inimical to the vast mass of the population...
(217): Mexico, an oil-rich country, defaulted on $80 billion in public-sector debt in 1982. Forty countries joined Mexico in arrears, and a year later another twenty-seven had to restructure their massive debt. The total debt in the brusied nations was $500 billion, which at the time threatened the financial stability of the world market.
(218): The domestic elites were always a weak link for the national liberation agenda. When the benefits of import substitution produced a more aggressive and self-confident bourgeoisie, this class wanted to break the cross-class alliance. This class looked forward to a rearrangement of alliances, with a closer relationship with the "West" for economic gain and consumer pleasure. The erosion of the Third World state allowed this class to carry the standard of the First World. In India, by the early 1980s, this class was the size of the French population.
(218): [ANTICOLONIAL NATIONALISM BECOMES PAROCHIAL, AS ECONOMIC AGENDA IS DERAILED] With the demise of import substitution and no other plans for economic sovereignty on the table that appealed to the masses, the Congress Party lost its claim to anticolonial Third World nationalism. Its leaders knew this implicitly, because Indira Gandhi's clique immediately fanned the flames of ethnic and religious difference to reclaim their electoral majority. The appeal to the "Hindu" majority against the secessionism in the Punjab and Assam as well as against Muslims and oppressed castes opened the door for the corruption of the idea of anticolonial nationalism. The massacre at Nellie, for instance, was a result of this venal appeal. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Congress Party was met toe to toe on this line, and it was found wanting by a genuinely cruel cultural nationalist political force, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
(219): The great home of the bourgeois social imagination was that the international order be based on free markets and individual identities, and that the deracinated latter be able to benefit from the unhampered former. Rather than realize [this] dream, what manifested itself wa the simultaneous growth of IMF-driven globalization and parochially cruel nationalism. Sectarian nationalism in the formerly colonized world is not only an adequate form of globalization, especially as the socialist bloc collapsed later in the 1990s, but it seems to be the form that IMF-driven globalization has taken since the late 1970s.
(220): In 1972, the Third World expended $33 billion on arms, already a vulgar amount. A decade later, the figure totaled $81 billion. In 1977, the Cuban government proposed that $650 billion wasted on the worlds arms trade be transferred into a capital infusion into the Third World. The G-7 did not consider the proposal, the corporate media mocked it, and NAM did not give it serious attention...
(222): In the 1970s, the IMF shifted its three-decades old mission from the provision of short-term credit to countries with current account deficits (lender of the last resort) to the use of its crucial finances as a weapon to demand structural economic changes mainly in the bruised nations. In other words, the new IMF eroded the institutions of state sovereignty...
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.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
The credibility of Transparency International, a global "non-partisan" organisation which "promotes transparency in elections, in public administration, in procurement and in business", is on the line. Their latest report on Venezuela, which was produced after months of research, is factually inaccurate in almost every respect. TI say that they "stand by their report" and stand by the person who compiled the data, an anti-Chávez activist who backed the 2002 military coup against democracy.
Friday, May 9, 2008
afl-cio and unt/ctv:
-------------------SUSTAR FIRST------------------------
“Here in Venezuela, the situation in the unions is similar to all the countries in Latin America and, I would say, the greater part of the world,” Gil said in an interview last August. “The number of unionized workers isn’t more than 12 percent. That means we can’t win.” Therefore, he said, the UNT demands “universal unionization,” in which “workers in every enterprise, economic sector, and branch of work can vote for a union in a way that’s massive, plural, and in a representative [labor] central.”[5] Gil’s perspectives on unions put him squarely on the left wing of the UNT, which is contending with more moderate forces for leadership of the new federation. In October 2004, Gil, who had previously served as the general secretary of SINTRALCASA, recaptured his old post in a recall election that ousted his rival, Trino Silva. But the Venezuelan Supreme Court ruled the election to be illegal, several weeks later.[6]
(...) The internal struggle in the UNT reflects the pressures on organized labor in a highly polarized society. Yet, for both the AFL-CIO representative in the Andes and the CTV executive board member Froilán Barrios, the UNT is an “arm of the state.”[7] An example, said Barrios, is the recently launched gas workers union, Sindicato Unitario de Trabajadores del Gas (SUTG). “Every day this union seems more like the unions of the ex-USSR and Cuba—a type of commissariat of the Communist Party, where they are more repressive organs against the workers.”[8] Barrios acknowledged that there are clasista (class-conscious) leaders in the UNT. But others, he said, “are using their relationship with the state, well, to enrich themselves.”
(...) In fact, the Venezuelan state provided 90 percent of the funding for the CTV in the 1960s and 1970s.[10] The AFL-CIO’s ties to the CTV, moreover, have been among its closest with any foreign labor federation. This relationship has continued despite the CTV’s alliance with the forces that mounted the April 2002 coup—of which the CIA had foreknowledge—that was embraced by the Bush administration.[11] The AFL-CIO’s support for the CTV continued through the devastating oil industry lockout, and the strike that followed.
(...) There are in fact serious criticisms to be made about the Chávez government from a trade union standpoint. Yet, by rejecting the legitimacy of the UNT out of hand, and backing the CTV, the AFL-CIO has lent political credibility to the conservative Venezuelan opposition. This, in turn, has revived debate over the AFL-CIO’s involvement in U.S. foreign policy.[12] Indeed, a look at the AFL-CIO’s past and present in Venezuela points to two conclusions: that the files on organized labor’s collaboration with U.S. foreign policy should be opened, and that the AFL-CIO’s reliance on government funds for international work should end.
(...) The situation for Venezuelan labor, he said, “is closer to Colombia than anything else” in Latin America. “You have a government that is systematically and consistently violating fundamental labor rights in an attempt to eliminate independent labor.”
(...) Yet, under Ortega, the CTV quickly swung further to the right into an alliance with the business chamber of commerce, the Federación de Cámaras y Asociaciones de Comercio y Producción (FEDECAMARAS), calling four general strikes with the backing of the employers. The general strike of April 2002 became the pretext for the unsuccessful coup.
(...) The representative dismissed as absurd the charge that, through its support for the CTV, the AFL-CIO gave de facto backing for the coup. He acknowledged that the CTV “is far from perfect,” but defended the CTV-FEDECAMARAS alliance and their meetings on the eve of the coup attempt. “They [the CTV] were meeting regularly with civil society organizations, looking for strategies to confront Chavismo,” together, he said. “But these meetings were open, they were public.” He pointed out that Ortega and other CTV leaders didn’t sign the dictatorial decree issued by FEDECAMARAS chief Pedro Carmona. Rather, Ortega was “utilized” by Carmona, he added. (Ortega was ultimately arrested for his role in the coup nearly three years later.)
(...) What is indisputable, however, is that Ortega joined with FEDECAMARAS to call the strike and march that set the stage for the coup. This alliance was facilitated by the Solidarity Center, which funded five regional meetings to promote labor-business collaboration, capped by a national CTV-FEDECAMARAS gathering on March 5, 2002—a month prior to the coup. “The joint action further established the CTV and FEDECAMARAS as the flagship organizations leading the growing opposition to the Chávez government,” concluded a Solidarity Center report about the effort, which was funded by a National Endowment for Democracy (NED) grant for $125,7114 in 2001-2002.[25] This direct support for the opposition’s mobilization appears to go far beyond the Solidarity Center’s stated aim of “building capacity” in the CTV.
(...) The AFL-CIO’s Gacek said that the federation supported the Chávez government wherever its policies are “pro-labor” and “reflect a pro-social agenda.” “Really, the only area where we are in disagreement has been with regard to the incursions against freedom of association,” he said. Assumptions about the nature of Solidarity Center activities in Venezuela today are based on a mistaken comparison with AIFLD’s role in the past, Gacek continued. “I’m not saying in any way these things were done,” he said, about criticisms of AIFLD’s past role. “But…the premise was that there was a pro-U.S. government position that was assumed by the institutes in the past in the Cold War period.” The critics’ arguments, he said, boiled down to this: “There was a coup, ergo the AFL-CIO was involved in making the coup. [It’s] basically using a certain syllogistic reasoning where the premises are totally faulty.”
(...) Steve Ellner, the labor historian, disputed this, pointing to the CTV’s support for the regressive “reform” of Social Security in the 1990s, and the termination of the severance payment system for laid-off workers.[33] “The argument that the AFL-CIO was supporting the good guys in the CTV, the leftists and the moderates who were anti-Chavista but also anti-Ortega, doesn’t explain the fact that the CTV joined hands with FEDECAMARAS to oppose [land reform] legislation,” he said.[34]]
(...) [important: UNT's autonomy] Such policies give pause to trade unionists wary of government interference in organized labor. Yet, the picture is far more complex than the CTV, the AFL-CIO—and for that matter, the Chávez government—have acknowledged. The UNT isn’t a creation of the state, but the result of a break by some union leaders from the CTV after the oil lockout-strike, to form a bloc with pro-Chávez leftists and dissident social Christians in 2003.[35] Alliances with the UNT’s 21-member interim coordinating committee have been shifting ever since, with the Left calling for a more aggressive stance towards employers, and emphasizing workers’ self-management.[36] A major influence on the UNT is the experience of the “new unionism” in Ciudad Guyana’s steel industry in the 1970s and 1980s.[37]
(...) The challenge for the UNT is how to support the “revolutionary process”—known as “el proceso”—yet independently assert the interests of workers.
(...) This freewheeling debate within the UNT has little in common with the centralized pronouncements of a state-controlled union.
(...) Where does this leave AFL-CIO policy in Venezuela? The Solidarity Center’s focus on trade union independence is necessary, but far from sufficient. The CTV was, after all, formally free from state domination, but in practice was subsidized and controlled by a corrupt party duopoly that ruled Venezuela for more than 40 years. Therefore, the Solidarity Center’s attempt to shore up the CTV-FEDECAMARAS alliance in the name of “dialogue” inevitably meant aiding the effort to re-impose a discredited status quo.
-------------------GACEK RESPONSE------------------------
(...) The CTV executive refused to sign the infamous decree of the short-lived Carmona regime that dissolved the National Assembly. The CTV refused any and all offers to serve in the coup-installed government, and made a point of not being present at the inauguration of Carmona’s cabinet.
(...) There exists an unfortunate conventional wisdom which depicts a socially progressive, thoroughly incorruptible, and perfectly democratic Chávez administration pitted against an opposition that is 100 percent corrupt, putschist, antidemocratic, and fascist. Yet, the thousands of CTV members who marched to Miraflores to protest Chávez’s violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights were not demanding his ouster by means of military force.
(...) We did not finance the March 5 event. However, the symposium produced a constructive, joint CTV-FEDECAMARAS proposal calling for direct negotiation with the Chávez administration on job creation and poverty abatement. The statement expressly rejected “all forms of violence and military coups,” reaffirming “dialogue and discussion as the path to resolve conflicts.”
(...) [hmmm...] Sustar parrots the Venezuelan government’s line that the shutdown of PDVSA’s operations in December 2002 was basically a management lockout engineered by the CTV’s leadership. Then why did the government fire nearly 20,000 workers in retaliation? There are only 35,000 PDVSA employees, so the idea that all of the fired employees were “management” is absolute nonsense.
(...) In fact, the unions representing PDVSA workers (including those of FEDEPETROL, with its pro-Chávez President Rafael Rosales) joined the job action to demand a change in the Company’s overall public policy, planning, investment, and labor relations practices. Both the Venezuelan judiciary and the ILO’s Freedom of Association Commission concluded that the shutdown was a legitimate strike, ordering the reinstatement of the fired workers. (Upon receiving the news from Geneva, Chávez retorted that the ILO could “go fry monkeys.”)
(...) [question of universality] Nonetheless, saying that the AFL-CIO should never have worked with an internally democratic national labor central of 1.2 million (2001 CNE census of CTV membership), representing well over 80 percent of Venezuela’s organized workforce, is the functional equivalent of saying we should not have a relationship with the Venezuelan labor movement.
(...) [this is obviously where an apparent tension appears: for some leftists, a necessary evil; for the AFL-CIO, cannot be violated - paper can argue that this is a false dichotomy, in the venezuelan case, as agency appears on the grassroots] We have praised Chávez for agrarian reform, public health and education, and his advocacy of social justice. We have joined him in its criticism of the FTAA. We have publicly condemned the coup attempt against him. But we will continue to denounce his systematic and reprehensible violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights.
-------------------SUSTAR RESPONSE------------------------
Stan Gacek systematically avoids addressing the central thrust of my article: that social polarization and class conflict in Venezuela has led to the revival of militancy in that country’s labor movement, expressed through the creation of the UNT.
(...) What’s more, in February 2003, the AFL-CIO Executive Council passed a resolution criticizing the Venezuelan government’s prosecution of “brother Ortega” for his role in the oil lockout-strike. If this isn’t “support” for Ortega, then what is it? (As for Ortega’s current predicament, he’s been charged so far only with his role in the lockout-strike, but still faces possible charges in connection with the coup, according to the website of Venezuela’s Panorama newspaper.)
(...) It’s telling that Gacek chooses to rehash old news rather than provide evidence for a comment made by the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center’s Andean representative—that the new UNT is an “arm of the state.” That’s because the UNT, as I tried to show, is full of tension and debate on issues ranging from organizational structures to relations to the government, and from contract negotiations to socialism. Moreover, extensive interviews with Venezuelan workers highlighted the way in which the CTV leaders’ alliance with business shattered its little remaining credibility with union members—particularly in the oil industry, where the rank and file effectively ran the refineries during the strike-lockout.
(...) I don’t claim that the UNT is immune to government influence or manipulation—no union federation can be. I do, however, argue that the UNT is not a creation of the Venezuelan state, but is a product of workers’ struggle and is worthy of international solidarity. Gacek gives a nod in that direction with his stated willingness to “work with” the UNT. But that doesn’t mean much in view of his attempts to justify the AFL-CIO and Solidarity Center’s support for the CTV—with U.S. government funds—during the period of the coup and oil lockout-strike.
-------------------SUSTAR FIRST------------------------
“Here in Venezuela, the situation in the unions is similar to all the countries in Latin America and, I would say, the greater part of the world,” Gil said in an interview last August. “The number of unionized workers isn’t more than 12 percent. That means we can’t win.” Therefore, he said, the UNT demands “universal unionization,” in which “workers in every enterprise, economic sector, and branch of work can vote for a union in a way that’s massive, plural, and in a representative [labor] central.”[5] Gil’s perspectives on unions put him squarely on the left wing of the UNT, which is contending with more moderate forces for leadership of the new federation. In October 2004, Gil, who had previously served as the general secretary of SINTRALCASA, recaptured his old post in a recall election that ousted his rival, Trino Silva. But the Venezuelan Supreme Court ruled the election to be illegal, several weeks later.[6]
(...) The internal struggle in the UNT reflects the pressures on organized labor in a highly polarized society. Yet, for both the AFL-CIO representative in the Andes and the CTV executive board member Froilán Barrios, the UNT is an “arm of the state.”[7] An example, said Barrios, is the recently launched gas workers union, Sindicato Unitario de Trabajadores del Gas (SUTG). “Every day this union seems more like the unions of the ex-USSR and Cuba—a type of commissariat of the Communist Party, where they are more repressive organs against the workers.”[8] Barrios acknowledged that there are clasista (class-conscious) leaders in the UNT. But others, he said, “are using their relationship with the state, well, to enrich themselves.”
(...) In fact, the Venezuelan state provided 90 percent of the funding for the CTV in the 1960s and 1970s.[10] The AFL-CIO’s ties to the CTV, moreover, have been among its closest with any foreign labor federation. This relationship has continued despite the CTV’s alliance with the forces that mounted the April 2002 coup—of which the CIA had foreknowledge—that was embraced by the Bush administration.[11] The AFL-CIO’s support for the CTV continued through the devastating oil industry lockout, and the strike that followed.
(...) There are in fact serious criticisms to be made about the Chávez government from a trade union standpoint. Yet, by rejecting the legitimacy of the UNT out of hand, and backing the CTV, the AFL-CIO has lent political credibility to the conservative Venezuelan opposition. This, in turn, has revived debate over the AFL-CIO’s involvement in U.S. foreign policy.[12] Indeed, a look at the AFL-CIO’s past and present in Venezuela points to two conclusions: that the files on organized labor’s collaboration with U.S. foreign policy should be opened, and that the AFL-CIO’s reliance on government funds for international work should end.
(...) The situation for Venezuelan labor, he said, “is closer to Colombia than anything else” in Latin America. “You have a government that is systematically and consistently violating fundamental labor rights in an attempt to eliminate independent labor.”
(...) Yet, under Ortega, the CTV quickly swung further to the right into an alliance with the business chamber of commerce, the Federación de Cámaras y Asociaciones de Comercio y Producción (FEDECAMARAS), calling four general strikes with the backing of the employers. The general strike of April 2002 became the pretext for the unsuccessful coup.
(...) The representative dismissed as absurd the charge that, through its support for the CTV, the AFL-CIO gave de facto backing for the coup. He acknowledged that the CTV “is far from perfect,” but defended the CTV-FEDECAMARAS alliance and their meetings on the eve of the coup attempt. “They [the CTV] were meeting regularly with civil society organizations, looking for strategies to confront Chavismo,” together, he said. “But these meetings were open, they were public.” He pointed out that Ortega and other CTV leaders didn’t sign the dictatorial decree issued by FEDECAMARAS chief Pedro Carmona. Rather, Ortega was “utilized” by Carmona, he added. (Ortega was ultimately arrested for his role in the coup nearly three years later.)
(...) What is indisputable, however, is that Ortega joined with FEDECAMARAS to call the strike and march that set the stage for the coup. This alliance was facilitated by the Solidarity Center, which funded five regional meetings to promote labor-business collaboration, capped by a national CTV-FEDECAMARAS gathering on March 5, 2002—a month prior to the coup. “The joint action further established the CTV and FEDECAMARAS as the flagship organizations leading the growing opposition to the Chávez government,” concluded a Solidarity Center report about the effort, which was funded by a National Endowment for Democracy (NED) grant for $125,7114 in 2001-2002.[25] This direct support for the opposition’s mobilization appears to go far beyond the Solidarity Center’s stated aim of “building capacity” in the CTV.
(...) The AFL-CIO’s Gacek said that the federation supported the Chávez government wherever its policies are “pro-labor” and “reflect a pro-social agenda.” “Really, the only area where we are in disagreement has been with regard to the incursions against freedom of association,” he said. Assumptions about the nature of Solidarity Center activities in Venezuela today are based on a mistaken comparison with AIFLD’s role in the past, Gacek continued. “I’m not saying in any way these things were done,” he said, about criticisms of AIFLD’s past role. “But…the premise was that there was a pro-U.S. government position that was assumed by the institutes in the past in the Cold War period.” The critics’ arguments, he said, boiled down to this: “There was a coup, ergo the AFL-CIO was involved in making the coup. [It’s] basically using a certain syllogistic reasoning where the premises are totally faulty.”
(...) Steve Ellner, the labor historian, disputed this, pointing to the CTV’s support for the regressive “reform” of Social Security in the 1990s, and the termination of the severance payment system for laid-off workers.[33] “The argument that the AFL-CIO was supporting the good guys in the CTV, the leftists and the moderates who were anti-Chavista but also anti-Ortega, doesn’t explain the fact that the CTV joined hands with FEDECAMARAS to oppose [land reform] legislation,” he said.[34]]
(...) [important: UNT's autonomy] Such policies give pause to trade unionists wary of government interference in organized labor. Yet, the picture is far more complex than the CTV, the AFL-CIO—and for that matter, the Chávez government—have acknowledged. The UNT isn’t a creation of the state, but the result of a break by some union leaders from the CTV after the oil lockout-strike, to form a bloc with pro-Chávez leftists and dissident social Christians in 2003.[35] Alliances with the UNT’s 21-member interim coordinating committee have been shifting ever since, with the Left calling for a more aggressive stance towards employers, and emphasizing workers’ self-management.[36] A major influence on the UNT is the experience of the “new unionism” in Ciudad Guyana’s steel industry in the 1970s and 1980s.[37]
(...) The challenge for the UNT is how to support the “revolutionary process”—known as “el proceso”—yet independently assert the interests of workers.
(...) This freewheeling debate within the UNT has little in common with the centralized pronouncements of a state-controlled union.
(...) Where does this leave AFL-CIO policy in Venezuela? The Solidarity Center’s focus on trade union independence is necessary, but far from sufficient. The CTV was, after all, formally free from state domination, but in practice was subsidized and controlled by a corrupt party duopoly that ruled Venezuela for more than 40 years. Therefore, the Solidarity Center’s attempt to shore up the CTV-FEDECAMARAS alliance in the name of “dialogue” inevitably meant aiding the effort to re-impose a discredited status quo.
-------------------GACEK RESPONSE------------------------
(...) The CTV executive refused to sign the infamous decree of the short-lived Carmona regime that dissolved the National Assembly. The CTV refused any and all offers to serve in the coup-installed government, and made a point of not being present at the inauguration of Carmona’s cabinet.
(...) There exists an unfortunate conventional wisdom which depicts a socially progressive, thoroughly incorruptible, and perfectly democratic Chávez administration pitted against an opposition that is 100 percent corrupt, putschist, antidemocratic, and fascist. Yet, the thousands of CTV members who marched to Miraflores to protest Chávez’s violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights were not demanding his ouster by means of military force.
(...) We did not finance the March 5 event. However, the symposium produced a constructive, joint CTV-FEDECAMARAS proposal calling for direct negotiation with the Chávez administration on job creation and poverty abatement. The statement expressly rejected “all forms of violence and military coups,” reaffirming “dialogue and discussion as the path to resolve conflicts.”
(...) [hmmm...] Sustar parrots the Venezuelan government’s line that the shutdown of PDVSA’s operations in December 2002 was basically a management lockout engineered by the CTV’s leadership. Then why did the government fire nearly 20,000 workers in retaliation? There are only 35,000 PDVSA employees, so the idea that all of the fired employees were “management” is absolute nonsense.
(...) In fact, the unions representing PDVSA workers (including those of FEDEPETROL, with its pro-Chávez President Rafael Rosales) joined the job action to demand a change in the Company’s overall public policy, planning, investment, and labor relations practices. Both the Venezuelan judiciary and the ILO’s Freedom of Association Commission concluded that the shutdown was a legitimate strike, ordering the reinstatement of the fired workers. (Upon receiving the news from Geneva, Chávez retorted that the ILO could “go fry monkeys.”)
(...) [question of universality] Nonetheless, saying that the AFL-CIO should never have worked with an internally democratic national labor central of 1.2 million (2001 CNE census of CTV membership), representing well over 80 percent of Venezuela’s organized workforce, is the functional equivalent of saying we should not have a relationship with the Venezuelan labor movement.
(...) [this is obviously where an apparent tension appears: for some leftists, a necessary evil; for the AFL-CIO, cannot be violated - paper can argue that this is a false dichotomy, in the venezuelan case, as agency appears on the grassroots] We have praised Chávez for agrarian reform, public health and education, and his advocacy of social justice. We have joined him in its criticism of the FTAA. We have publicly condemned the coup attempt against him. But we will continue to denounce his systematic and reprehensible violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights.
-------------------SUSTAR RESPONSE------------------------
Stan Gacek systematically avoids addressing the central thrust of my article: that social polarization and class conflict in Venezuela has led to the revival of militancy in that country’s labor movement, expressed through the creation of the UNT.
(...) What’s more, in February 2003, the AFL-CIO Executive Council passed a resolution criticizing the Venezuelan government’s prosecution of “brother Ortega” for his role in the oil lockout-strike. If this isn’t “support” for Ortega, then what is it? (As for Ortega’s current predicament, he’s been charged so far only with his role in the lockout-strike, but still faces possible charges in connection with the coup, according to the website of Venezuela’s Panorama newspaper.)
(...) It’s telling that Gacek chooses to rehash old news rather than provide evidence for a comment made by the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center’s Andean representative—that the new UNT is an “arm of the state.” That’s because the UNT, as I tried to show, is full of tension and debate on issues ranging from organizational structures to relations to the government, and from contract negotiations to socialism. Moreover, extensive interviews with Venezuelan workers highlighted the way in which the CTV leaders’ alliance with business shattered its little remaining credibility with union members—particularly in the oil industry, where the rank and file effectively ran the refineries during the strike-lockout.
(...) I don’t claim that the UNT is immune to government influence or manipulation—no union federation can be. I do, however, argue that the UNT is not a creation of the Venezuelan state, but is a product of workers’ struggle and is worthy of international solidarity. Gacek gives a nod in that direction with his stated willingness to “work with” the UNT. But that doesn’t mean much in view of his attempts to justify the AFL-CIO and Solidarity Center’s support for the CTV—with U.S. government funds—during the period of the coup and oil lockout-strike.
co-management (november 2005):
(...) Part of this is an experiment in cogestion or co-management, where workers are given a role in the running of their workplaces. The idea of co-management has been around for some time. In Germany, for example, co-management was used to co-opt the workers’ movement by giving workers shares and some nominal decision-making power, aimed at convincing them that their interests lay with increased production and profits for the bosses. However in Venezuela, co-management is being posed as an alternative to the interests of the bosses, and more fundamentally, to those of capitalism. As Canadian academic Michael Lebowitz, now living in Venezuela, explained at a recent national gathering of workers for the recuperation of factories, “the point of co-management is to put an end to capitalist exploitation and to create the potential for building a truly human society. When workers are no longer driven by the logic of capital to produce profits for capitalists, the whole nature of work can change. Workers can cooperate with each other to do their jobs well; they can apply their knowledge about better ways to produce to improve production both immediately and in the future; and, they can end the division in the workplace between those who think and those who do — all because, in co-management, workers know that their activity is not for the enrichment of capitalists. “The development of worker decision-making, the process of combining thinking and doing, offers the possibility of all workers developing their capacities and potential.”
(...) Barreto Nestor, a worker from Rudaveca in the state of Carabobo, told GLW: “Unless this capitalist system is transcended, the workers, regardless of the best collective contract signed, will not achieve our goals. We need to transcend capitalism, and co-management is part of that. It is giving power to the workers, power to us.”
(...) Part of this is an experiment in cogestion or co-management, where workers are given a role in the running of their workplaces. The idea of co-management has been around for some time. In Germany, for example, co-management was used to co-opt the workers’ movement by giving workers shares and some nominal decision-making power, aimed at convincing them that their interests lay with increased production and profits for the bosses. However in Venezuela, co-management is being posed as an alternative to the interests of the bosses, and more fundamentally, to those of capitalism. As Canadian academic Michael Lebowitz, now living in Venezuela, explained at a recent national gathering of workers for the recuperation of factories, “the point of co-management is to put an end to capitalist exploitation and to create the potential for building a truly human society. When workers are no longer driven by the logic of capital to produce profits for capitalists, the whole nature of work can change. Workers can cooperate with each other to do their jobs well; they can apply their knowledge about better ways to produce to improve production both immediately and in the future; and, they can end the division in the workplace between those who think and those who do — all because, in co-management, workers know that their activity is not for the enrichment of capitalists. “The development of worker decision-making, the process of combining thinking and doing, offers the possibility of all workers developing their capacities and potential.”
(...) Barreto Nestor, a worker from Rudaveca in the state of Carabobo, told GLW: “Unless this capitalist system is transcended, the workers, regardless of the best collective contract signed, will not achieve our goals. We need to transcend capitalism, and co-management is part of that. It is giving power to the workers, power to us.”
open letter to the ILO (february 2005):
We, the undersigned leaders of the National Union of Workers of Venezuela (UNT), issue this appeal to the trade unions around the world that are represented in the Workers' Group of the International Labor Organization (ILO), as well as to all our sisters and brothers who are championing the trade union battles in defense of workers' rights.
(...)The joint Complaint by FEDECAMARAS and the CTV is highly unusual, as trade unions are generally the ones filing ILO Complaints against the employers and seeking support from the ILO Workers' Group against all violations of trade union rights, including the right to strike. It is unprecedented, as well, on account of the convergence of interests between FEDECAMARAS and the CTV.
(...) Later, in December 2002 and January 2003, FEDECAMARAS – together with the same leaders of the CTV – organized an employer lockout/work stoppage that was political in nature and that sought to bring down the government through the sabotage of the country's main source of income: the oil industry. In both the attempted coup and the bosses' lockout/work stoppage, the CTV leadership took actions that were repudiated by the overwhelming majority of the workers of Venezuela.
(...) At no time, in fact, were the workers consulted by the CTV leadership about the work stoppage in the oil industry. Quite the contrary, upon learning of this action by the CTV leadership, the workers mobilized massively to occupy the oil rigs and refineries to ensure the resumption of oil production.
(...) From our vantage point as the UNT, genuine democracy means respecting the sovereign will of people to determine their own fate. And we wish to reiterate this point: Venezuela's right to self-determination must be respected and upheld independent of whatever one may think about the current government of Venezuela. It is not up to the U.S. government to decide in the place of the Venezuelan people what is "positive" or "negative" for Venezuela.
We, the undersigned leaders of the National Union of Workers of Venezuela (UNT), issue this appeal to the trade unions around the world that are represented in the Workers' Group of the International Labor Organization (ILO), as well as to all our sisters and brothers who are championing the trade union battles in defense of workers' rights.
(...)The joint Complaint by FEDECAMARAS and the CTV is highly unusual, as trade unions are generally the ones filing ILO Complaints against the employers and seeking support from the ILO Workers' Group against all violations of trade union rights, including the right to strike. It is unprecedented, as well, on account of the convergence of interests between FEDECAMARAS and the CTV.
(...) Later, in December 2002 and January 2003, FEDECAMARAS – together with the same leaders of the CTV – organized an employer lockout/work stoppage that was political in nature and that sought to bring down the government through the sabotage of the country's main source of income: the oil industry. In both the attempted coup and the bosses' lockout/work stoppage, the CTV leadership took actions that were repudiated by the overwhelming majority of the workers of Venezuela.
(...) At no time, in fact, were the workers consulted by the CTV leadership about the work stoppage in the oil industry. Quite the contrary, upon learning of this action by the CTV leadership, the workers mobilized massively to occupy the oil rigs and refineries to ensure the resumption of oil production.
(...) From our vantage point as the UNT, genuine democracy means respecting the sovereign will of people to determine their own fate. And we wish to reiterate this point: Venezuela's right to self-determination must be respected and upheld independent of whatever one may think about the current government of Venezuela. It is not up to the U.S. government to decide in the place of the Venezuelan people what is "positive" or "negative" for Venezuela.
solidarity and disinformation about venezuela (interview with orlando chirino, september 2005)
(...) Mentioning the ILO, it is important to underline the major shift in ILO support away from the CTV and towards the UNT. In the ILO conference of June this year, the Fedecamaras/CTV complaint against the government of Venezuela was withdrawn and the CTV was voted off the ILO Governing Body. Nevertheless, in November, Venezuela will again be on the agenda at the ILO conference in Geneva. We hope that the complaint relating to the dismissal of the PDVSA white collar/administrative workers (the people who did all they could to sabotage the oil industry and destroy the Venezuelan economy during the 2002/2003 employers’ lockout) that has been referred to the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association - will be rejected. Things should certainly be easier for us with the new ILO Governing Body (i.e. without the presence of the CTV). Certain sectors within the ICFTU have been using the issue of the PDVSA dismissals to attack the Chavez government.
(...) A big challenge for the Bolivarian Revolution is to reform the inefficient bureaucratic state institutions and eradicate corruption. We need to strengthen peoples’ participation in decision-making processes at all levels of government - a sort of ongoing social-based audit (“Controlaria Social”). Our Constitution allows for this to take place. The Chavez government is encouraging the formation of local planning councils with grassroots participation. A new initiative is that of the “Mobile Cabinet” (“Gabinete Móbil”) where the president and his ministers are making visits all over the country and are talking to people at all levels (state governors, mayors, local communities, etc.).
(...) [important to question of universality] A solidarity movement should embrace all the different sectors in a similar way that the Bolivarian Revolution is doing in Venezuela (e.g. with women’s groups, indigenous groups, workers, peasant organisation, etc.). It is important to link up these different sectors in Venezuela with their counterparts in Britain.
(...) Mentioning the ILO, it is important to underline the major shift in ILO support away from the CTV and towards the UNT. In the ILO conference of June this year, the Fedecamaras/CTV complaint against the government of Venezuela was withdrawn and the CTV was voted off the ILO Governing Body. Nevertheless, in November, Venezuela will again be on the agenda at the ILO conference in Geneva. We hope that the complaint relating to the dismissal of the PDVSA white collar/administrative workers (the people who did all they could to sabotage the oil industry and destroy the Venezuelan economy during the 2002/2003 employers’ lockout) that has been referred to the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association - will be rejected. Things should certainly be easier for us with the new ILO Governing Body (i.e. without the presence of the CTV). Certain sectors within the ICFTU have been using the issue of the PDVSA dismissals to attack the Chavez government.
(...) A big challenge for the Bolivarian Revolution is to reform the inefficient bureaucratic state institutions and eradicate corruption. We need to strengthen peoples’ participation in decision-making processes at all levels of government - a sort of ongoing social-based audit (“Controlaria Social”). Our Constitution allows for this to take place. The Chavez government is encouraging the formation of local planning councils with grassroots participation. A new initiative is that of the “Mobile Cabinet” (“Gabinete Móbil”) where the president and his ministers are making visits all over the country and are talking to people at all levels (state governors, mayors, local communities, etc.).
(...) [important to question of universality] A solidarity movement should embrace all the different sectors in a similar way that the Bolivarian Revolution is doing in Venezuela (e.g. with women’s groups, indigenous groups, workers, peasant organisation, etc.). It is important to link up these different sectors in Venezuela with their counterparts in Britain.
british trade union congress gives support to UNT (september 2005):
(...) Then John Wilkin explained how the vacuum left by the CTV had been filled by the UNT. He mentioned that the UNT was the response of democratic and revolutionary trade unionists to the betrayals of the CTV. At this point in his speech he turned to address Orlando Chirino, national coordinator of the UNT, who was in the visitors’ gallery listening to the debate accompanied by Hands Off Venezuela supporters. He addressed him in Spanish. Comrade Chirino responded to the applause he got at that moment by standing up and clenching his fist in front of the approximately 1500 delegates present in the hall.
(...) Then John Wilkin explained how the vacuum left by the CTV had been filled by the UNT. He mentioned that the UNT was the response of democratic and revolutionary trade unionists to the betrayals of the CTV. At this point in his speech he turned to address Orlando Chirino, national coordinator of the UNT, who was in the visitors’ gallery listening to the debate accompanied by Hands Off Venezuela supporters. He addressed him in Spanish. Comrade Chirino responded to the applause he got at that moment by standing up and clenching his fist in front of the approximately 1500 delegates present in the hall.
unity and UNT (december 2004):
According to UNT activists, the CTV has never represented such a tool, and their new-found progressive rhetoric is a product of pressure from the alternative confederation. UNT leaders argue that the CTV’s subordination of worker’s issues to their political attempts to topple Chávez has been a main factor in many unions’ decision to leave the traditional central. The CTV’s close cooperation with business, their historic ties to the two traditional political parties—Democratic Action (AD) and Copei—a sordid history of anti-democratic leadership and corruption, and their complicity in the implementation of neoliberal reforms detrimental to Venezuelan workers in the 1980s and 90s also gave impetus to the creation of the UNT.
(...) Both centrals are racing to hold their elections first. In a statement last month, Cova noted the “urgency” in holding the upcoming elections as quickly as possible. At stake for the rival confederations is the upcoming International Labor Organization meetings scheduled for the first week of June, 2005. The UNT represented Venezuelan labor in 2003 and 2004, despite the CTV’s claims that they remain the most representative central. The Venezuelan government has refused to recognize the CTV leadership since their 2001 elections were invalidated by the National Electoral Council (CNE) on the basis fraud charges.
(...) Chirino represents the Bolivarian Workers Force (Frente Bolivariano de Trabajadores - FBT) faction in the UNT, along with fellow coordinators Marcela Maspero and Eduardo Piñate, among others. The FBT was formed as an alternative federation within the CTV in 2000. The 5th Republic Movement (MVR), one of the official Chavista parties, initially exerted significant influence over the new federation, causing consternation in labor activists attempting to a tradition of dependent unionism. Though the MVR holds less influence in labor today, the FBT is still seen by some critics within the UNT as being too close to the Ministry of Labor. Chirino however works now with his own political party, Option for a Revolutionary Left (Opcion de Izquierda Revolucionaria - OIR), a grouping of trotskyites and other marxists which hopes to strengthen the working class' role in the deepening of the Bolivarian Revolution. Since the formation of the UNT, relations between the FBT and Machuca supporters have been shaky at best. Mutual accusations have escalated over the past few months, with both sides seemingly preparing for the upcoming campaign by trying to knock the other out of the race before it starts.
According to UNT activists, the CTV has never represented such a tool, and their new-found progressive rhetoric is a product of pressure from the alternative confederation. UNT leaders argue that the CTV’s subordination of worker’s issues to their political attempts to topple Chávez has been a main factor in many unions’ decision to leave the traditional central. The CTV’s close cooperation with business, their historic ties to the two traditional political parties—Democratic Action (AD) and Copei—a sordid history of anti-democratic leadership and corruption, and their complicity in the implementation of neoliberal reforms detrimental to Venezuelan workers in the 1980s and 90s also gave impetus to the creation of the UNT.
(...) Both centrals are racing to hold their elections first. In a statement last month, Cova noted the “urgency” in holding the upcoming elections as quickly as possible. At stake for the rival confederations is the upcoming International Labor Organization meetings scheduled for the first week of June, 2005. The UNT represented Venezuelan labor in 2003 and 2004, despite the CTV’s claims that they remain the most representative central. The Venezuelan government has refused to recognize the CTV leadership since their 2001 elections were invalidated by the National Electoral Council (CNE) on the basis fraud charges.
(...) Chirino represents the Bolivarian Workers Force (Frente Bolivariano de Trabajadores - FBT) faction in the UNT, along with fellow coordinators Marcela Maspero and Eduardo Piñate, among others. The FBT was formed as an alternative federation within the CTV in 2000. The 5th Republic Movement (MVR), one of the official Chavista parties, initially exerted significant influence over the new federation, causing consternation in labor activists attempting to a tradition of dependent unionism. Though the MVR holds less influence in labor today, the FBT is still seen by some critics within the UNT as being too close to the Ministry of Labor. Chirino however works now with his own political party, Option for a Revolutionary Left (Opcion de Izquierda Revolucionaria - OIR), a grouping of trotskyites and other marxists which hopes to strengthen the working class' role in the deepening of the Bolivarian Revolution. Since the formation of the UNT, relations between the FBT and Machuca supporters have been shaky at best. Mutual accusations have escalated over the past few months, with both sides seemingly preparing for the upcoming campaign by trying to knock the other out of the race before it starts.
divisions in UNT congress (june 2006):
when key leaders of the UNT started speaking the internal differences became evident. There were boos and calls of “elections, elections” during the address of UNT national coordinator Marcela Maspero. Maspero leads the largest minority group within the UNT, and favours postponing the union elections until the first quarter of 2007, mainly on the grounds of giving priority to the campaign to re-elect President Hugo Chavez in December this year.
(...) In a statement issued on May 28, Chirino argued: “For C-CURA there was no doubt that the democratic will of the workers and trade union leaders from the grassroots was that the UNT should have a new, legitimate direction, that there be an end to all the fights and conflicts, and that in December the re-election of President Chavez be achieved as a form of defending the social and democratic conquests. The majority of workers supported the position that there should be elections this year, that a UNT leadership would then be legitimate, it would be strengthened, and in a better position to fight for 10 million votes for President Chavez.”
(...) Marcela Maspero, for her part, declared, according the May 30 daily Ultimas Noticias, that the “majority of delegates agreed to have elections in the first trimester of 2007 in order to give priority to the 10 million votes [campaign] for the presidential elections”. The three other currents supporting her were the Bolivarian Workers Force (FBT), the Autonomous Union, and followers of Franklin Rondon, who was roundly booed at the congress as a former supporter of the April 2002 coup against Chavez.
(...) In his speech to the section of delegates remaining in the hall after the walkout, Chirino said that every effort had been made during the all-night meeting the previous evening to find a compromise, involving a transitional election to be held soon with a commission being set up to hold permanent elections at a later date. The interim election would involve a system of special consideration for minority representation.
when key leaders of the UNT started speaking the internal differences became evident. There were boos and calls of “elections, elections” during the address of UNT national coordinator Marcela Maspero. Maspero leads the largest minority group within the UNT, and favours postponing the union elections until the first quarter of 2007, mainly on the grounds of giving priority to the campaign to re-elect President Hugo Chavez in December this year.
(...) In a statement issued on May 28, Chirino argued: “For C-CURA there was no doubt that the democratic will of the workers and trade union leaders from the grassroots was that the UNT should have a new, legitimate direction, that there be an end to all the fights and conflicts, and that in December the re-election of President Chavez be achieved as a form of defending the social and democratic conquests. The majority of workers supported the position that there should be elections this year, that a UNT leadership would then be legitimate, it would be strengthened, and in a better position to fight for 10 million votes for President Chavez.”
(...) Marcela Maspero, for her part, declared, according the May 30 daily Ultimas Noticias, that the “majority of delegates agreed to have elections in the first trimester of 2007 in order to give priority to the 10 million votes [campaign] for the presidential elections”. The three other currents supporting her were the Bolivarian Workers Force (FBT), the Autonomous Union, and followers of Franklin Rondon, who was roundly booed at the congress as a former supporter of the April 2002 coup against Chavez.
(...) In his speech to the section of delegates remaining in the hall after the walkout, Chirino said that every effort had been made during the all-night meeting the previous evening to find a compromise, involving a transitional election to be held soon with a commission being set up to hold permanent elections at a later date. The interim election would involve a system of special consideration for minority representation.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
may day 2007 (may 2007):
Just as in previous years, two Venezuelan union federations organized competing demonstrations in support of the May 1 International Workers’ Day. While the pro-government demonstration attracted more marchers, it appeared more divided than the smaller anti-Chavez demonstration.
(...) The UNT-Aragua issued a statement with ten points yesterday, in which it called for union autonomy, denounced the actions of the state security forces, and called for the governor’s resignation. It also stated that the UNT-Aragua is “concerned” about Chavez’s recent statements that questioned union autonomy, when he called for the unions that support the government to join the newly forming Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Similarly, the UNT faction headed by Orlando Chirino, known as C-CURA (Classist Current, Unitary, Revolutionary, and Autonomous), sent an open letter to Chavez for May 1st, that insisted on the importance of union autonomy. Chavez had stated in early April, during a PSUV event, that “unions should not be autonomous, one must put an end to that.” The letter cites Vladimir Lenin, who once stated that unions should be independent of the state and goes on to refer to Chavez’s comment that the PSUV will not be a Stalinist party. “When Stalinism took political power and led the state and the party, one of the first things it eliminated was the independence of the unions, precisely against the opinion of Lenin, who had already died.”
Just as in previous years, two Venezuelan union federations organized competing demonstrations in support of the May 1 International Workers’ Day. While the pro-government demonstration attracted more marchers, it appeared more divided than the smaller anti-Chavez demonstration.
(...) The UNT-Aragua issued a statement with ten points yesterday, in which it called for union autonomy, denounced the actions of the state security forces, and called for the governor’s resignation. It also stated that the UNT-Aragua is “concerned” about Chavez’s recent statements that questioned union autonomy, when he called for the unions that support the government to join the newly forming Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Similarly, the UNT faction headed by Orlando Chirino, known as C-CURA (Classist Current, Unitary, Revolutionary, and Autonomous), sent an open letter to Chavez for May 1st, that insisted on the importance of union autonomy. Chavez had stated in early April, during a PSUV event, that “unions should not be autonomous, one must put an end to that.” The letter cites Vladimir Lenin, who once stated that unions should be independent of the state and goes on to refer to Chavez’s comment that the PSUV will not be a Stalinist party. “When Stalinism took political power and led the state and the party, one of the first things it eliminated was the independence of the unions, precisely against the opinion of Lenin, who had already died.”
call for unity (july 2007):
Various leaders of Venezuela's primary pro-government labor union, the National Workers Union of Venezuela (UNT), called on all sectors of the organization to join together and hold elections later this year. At a press conference on Tuesday, labor leaders Marcela Máspero and Orlando Chirino invited all sectors of the UNT to a general meeting on July 26th to organize general elections and, in that way, unite the principal labor union of the country that has remained divided in recent years.
Various leaders of Venezuela's primary pro-government labor union, the National Workers Union of Venezuela (UNT), called on all sectors of the organization to join together and hold elections later this year. At a press conference on Tuesday, labor leaders Marcela Máspero and Orlando Chirino invited all sectors of the UNT to a general meeting on July 26th to organize general elections and, in that way, unite the principal labor union of the country that has remained divided in recent years.
the reforms (october 2007):
The Venezuelan left debated what to do earlier this year. There were divisions inside the UNT, the national trade union federation and several other organisations. For example, Orlando Chirino, a highly respected leader of the UNT, remained outside the PSUV; others in the leadership opted to go in. The same argument developed within other organisations of the left. Eventually, given the mass affiliation, most decided to join in the hope that it would be possible to build a critical current within the new party. That seems less and less likely.
(...) [chavista cronies] Many of them were opportunists who had enjoyed the privileges of the previous corrupt regime and switched to Chavez late in the day. Some proved to be fair weather friends, and supported the attempted coup against him in 2002. Others kept their powder dry and remained within government - but they maintained the habits of previous times, above all the habit of corruption. They interlocked with the powerful state governors too, as well as many of the city and town mayors, and they began to establish relationships with elements of private capital. We could define these people as the Chavista right.
(...) [could people's power become this:] There is, of course, another point of reference in the discussion about what poder popular can mean. The Cuban model of people's power is pyramidal and centralised, with a leadership appointed from the state and nominated delegates, with a national assembly meeting twice a year for a few days to give (invariably) unanimous support to the proposals coming from the state. The organs of local power in this model are simply given the role of executing those decisions and discussing how best that might be done. The Cuban influence on the Venezuelan government is an open secret. The fact that what Denis calls the "democracy of the people's assembly" is replaced by what is simply another vote of confidence in Chavez, with which no one could disagree, is a sign of the limitations of people's power.
The Venezuelan left debated what to do earlier this year. There were divisions inside the UNT, the national trade union federation and several other organisations. For example, Orlando Chirino, a highly respected leader of the UNT, remained outside the PSUV; others in the leadership opted to go in. The same argument developed within other organisations of the left. Eventually, given the mass affiliation, most decided to join in the hope that it would be possible to build a critical current within the new party. That seems less and less likely.
(...) [chavista cronies] Many of them were opportunists who had enjoyed the privileges of the previous corrupt regime and switched to Chavez late in the day. Some proved to be fair weather friends, and supported the attempted coup against him in 2002. Others kept their powder dry and remained within government - but they maintained the habits of previous times, above all the habit of corruption. They interlocked with the powerful state governors too, as well as many of the city and town mayors, and they began to establish relationships with elements of private capital. We could define these people as the Chavista right.
(...) [could people's power become this:] There is, of course, another point of reference in the discussion about what poder popular can mean. The Cuban model of people's power is pyramidal and centralised, with a leadership appointed from the state and nominated delegates, with a national assembly meeting twice a year for a few days to give (invariably) unanimous support to the proposals coming from the state. The organs of local power in this model are simply given the role of executing those decisions and discussing how best that might be done. The Cuban influence on the Venezuelan government is an open secret. The fact that what Denis calls the "democracy of the people's assembly" is replaced by what is simply another vote of confidence in Chavez, with which no one could disagree, is a sign of the limitations of people's power.
the reforms and the PSUV:
Despite their overall contradictory and transitional nature, key aspects of the reforms are aimed squarely at the heart of the capitalist system, specifically measures which although they don't abolish private property altogether, provide a framework for further inroads into the rights of capital and the "new geometry of power" aimed at transforming the capitalist state through the construction of organs of popular power, such as communes, workers councils, student councils, and campesino councils.
(...) When Chavez first announced the formation of the PSUV in December 2006 he clearly conceived of it as an anti-bureaucratic measure, as a tool to broaden the leadership, overwhelmingly centered on Chavez himself, and push forward with the revolution. "A new party needs new faces," he said.
(...) However, despite Chavez's intentions to build a party with "new faces" from below, many of the old faces remain and a key contradiction the new party faces is the struggle between the radical grass roots and what many on the Venezuelan left refer to as, the "endogenous rightwing" of Chavismo (based on a nexus between the state bureaucracy and sections of capital). As José Miguel Casado points out, "This is the objective reality that reflects the true contradictions of the complex political universe that is the Bolivarian Revolution, it is the live expression of the class struggle, a phenomenon that the PSUV will not escape, nor any other social or political space."[13]
(...) However, despite this there are in reality a myriad of radical left groupings organizing within the PSUV. These include; the majority of the most class-conscious workers from all the union currents that organize in the National Union of Workers (UNT), including the majority of C-CURA (whose rank and file workers agitated for and voted to go into the PSUV, while a smaller section around Orlando Chirino stayed out), the Revolutionary Front of Workers in Occupied and Co-managed Factories (FRETECO), and the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front (FNCEZ).
(...) Bilbao points to the extraordinary potential of the PSUV, "The possibility of carrying out the battle [for socialism] in a scenario of 5.7 million people who want to construct a revolutionary party is," he says, "something that changes the political face of the planet, not just Venezuela and Latin America."
(...) What the struggle for the constitutional reform and the construction of the PSUV has revealed most clearly is that the battle lines are drawn between the endogenous rightwing and the revolutionary grassroots of Chavismo. Chavez has designated 2008 as the year of the "revolution within the revolution"- it remains to be seen if the PSUV can truly become "a political instrument that puts itself at the service ...of the people and the revolution, at the service of socialism."[18]
Despite their overall contradictory and transitional nature, key aspects of the reforms are aimed squarely at the heart of the capitalist system, specifically measures which although they don't abolish private property altogether, provide a framework for further inroads into the rights of capital and the "new geometry of power" aimed at transforming the capitalist state through the construction of organs of popular power, such as communes, workers councils, student councils, and campesino councils.
(...) When Chavez first announced the formation of the PSUV in December 2006 he clearly conceived of it as an anti-bureaucratic measure, as a tool to broaden the leadership, overwhelmingly centered on Chavez himself, and push forward with the revolution. "A new party needs new faces," he said.
(...) However, despite Chavez's intentions to build a party with "new faces" from below, many of the old faces remain and a key contradiction the new party faces is the struggle between the radical grass roots and what many on the Venezuelan left refer to as, the "endogenous rightwing" of Chavismo (based on a nexus between the state bureaucracy and sections of capital). As José Miguel Casado points out, "This is the objective reality that reflects the true contradictions of the complex political universe that is the Bolivarian Revolution, it is the live expression of the class struggle, a phenomenon that the PSUV will not escape, nor any other social or political space."[13]
(...) However, despite this there are in reality a myriad of radical left groupings organizing within the PSUV. These include; the majority of the most class-conscious workers from all the union currents that organize in the National Union of Workers (UNT), including the majority of C-CURA (whose rank and file workers agitated for and voted to go into the PSUV, while a smaller section around Orlando Chirino stayed out), the Revolutionary Front of Workers in Occupied and Co-managed Factories (FRETECO), and the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front (FNCEZ).
(...) Bilbao points to the extraordinary potential of the PSUV, "The possibility of carrying out the battle [for socialism] in a scenario of 5.7 million people who want to construct a revolutionary party is," he says, "something that changes the political face of the planet, not just Venezuela and Latin America."
(...) What the struggle for the constitutional reform and the construction of the PSUV has revealed most clearly is that the battle lines are drawn between the endogenous rightwing and the revolutionary grassroots of Chavismo. Chavez has designated 2008 as the year of the "revolution within the revolution"- it remains to be seen if the PSUV can truly become "a political instrument that puts itself at the service ...of the people and the revolution, at the service of socialism."[18]
report on venezuela's trade union situation (may 2004):
Carlos Ortega, the president of the CTV, has been out of the country since early 2003, and is currently in Costa Rica. He is currently at risk of being kicked out of that country because of his insistent calls for the overthrow of the Chávez government. Most others who planned the coup continue to function as before. The ongoing ramifications of that impunity continue to haunt the government.
(...) In December 2002, the FEDECAMARAS and a CTV union representing managerial workers at the state-owned petroleum company, PDVSA, organized a work stoppage in the sector to shut down the oil industry. This was a clear attempt to paralyze the country's main source of wealth. The action prevented hourly workers not involved in the labour action from continuing their work. The protesting management workers led a very aggressive attack, including sabotaging computer control systems, damaging valves and other operational equipment in the refineries, and removing hard drives containing exploration maps and reports. The shutdown (which one observer has identified as 1/3 lock-out, 1/3 strike, and 1/3 sabotage) was all but over in March. It was at this point that the government fired approximately 18,000 petroleum workers for dereliction of duty, mainly from the management echelons of PDVSA. These fired workers have also lost their company-provided housing and benefits, and are pursuing legal avenues as well as complaints to the ILO to achieve redress. There have been very few legal charges against the protesters, and the Venezuelan courts again determined in pre-trial hearings that because the demands were not related to collective bargaining, this was not a strike.
(...) [this group's summary of CTV history] The Venezuelan labour affiliate of the ICFTU is the CTV. Founded in 1936, the organization has a history of struggle for the rights of organized workers as well as on behalf of the working class in general. It survived several periods of dictatorship, the last of which ended in 1958. At that time, the CTV formed a "strategic alliance" with the business association, FEDECAMARAS to move the country in a more democratic direction. This was not the last of such alliances with this powerful employer group. Through the 90s the CTV accepted privatization and made no sustained efforts to resist neo-liberal or free trade policies. The organization's executive committee is composed of individuals who were elected at large by delegates, and are not selected with regard for sector or elected office. Obviously, this reduces the accountability of individual members of the executive to any particular rank and file base. The executive has historically been dominated by the Acción Democrática, in theory a social democratic party currently aligned with the country's right wing forces, and a major component of the Coordinadora Democrática coalition working for Chávez' ouster.
(...) A number of academics, as well as consultants from labour NGOs who work intensively with the CTV, expressed the concern that the executive committee had abandoned its concern for basic trade union functions and was focussing all its attention to political opposition.
(...) In May 2003, the government approved Orlando Chirino, a leader of the very new UNT, to represent Venezuela at the ILO's annual convention. In order to be appointed, the government must certify that the appointee is from the country's most representative union formation. Communication from the ILO on Venezuela's designation of the UNT representative used sharp words, and concluded with the wish that such a manipulation not recur. The government holds that the CTV placed itself ‘out of the running’ for nomination as it did not send a representative to the 2003 meeting at which all the labour centrals met to choose their delegate. The CTV sent a lawyer with no decision-making authority. This year the CTV sent a full-fledged member of the executive committee to the meeting, held on May 13 and then extended to May 17. The decision was pending as of this writing, but it seems likely that the government would take the position that the UNT is now the most representative labour body in the country, despite the lack of elections to establish this claim.
(...) In 2003, The ILO singled out China, Colombia, Belarus and Venezuela as countries with the most serious violations of trade union freedoms. Noting systematic physical harm to trade unionists in the first three countries, in the case of Venezuela, the allegations were more procedural: delays in registrations, suspension of trade union dues, obstruction of collective bargaining, dismissals, and extensive interference in trade union activities.
(...) Beginning around the time of the general strike and resulting coup, a number of labour leaders sought to distance themselves from the CTV and began to discuss disaffiliation from that central labour body and the formation of new central. Currently, many labour leaders in the strategic petroleum, public, auto and rubber sectors (likely a majority in these sectors) have signed on to the UNT. The major union in the steelmaking sector, SUTISS, is seen as being close to the UNT. Within the UNT, some leaders maintain a union independence stance, while others are firmly identified with the current government and see defence of the government as a major axis of their formation. The next phase for that emerging centre is to hold elections for its leadership at all levels, and to confirm formally the will of the members to affiliate to the new central. Members of the national coordinating body stated their hope that such elections would be held in October. However, with the potential for a referendum on the country's leadership on the horizon for August, a delay is likely.
(...) At the same time, SUNEP-SAS leaders vigorously denied any participation in the coup by the CTV. However, this participation is alleged to be a fully substantiated "fact" by human rights and labour NGOs close to the CTV, including PROVEA and the Ebert Foundation, as well as the government and UNT sources.
(...) There appears to be substantial evidence that members of the current CTV executive participated in the plot to overthrow the government by "extra-legal" means. However, no union leader has ever been charged with any violation of law in the coup. Due to the fact that the initial charges were subject to pre-trial hearings at which no merit to the charges was established, all charges were thrown out. Video documentation aside, in the eyes of the country's judiciary, the coup "never happened."
(...) The novel, emblematic of the "magic realism" genre in Latin America, seems particularly appropriate to the Venezuelan scene, where all parties assert that any official document can be produced or altered to order, to be passed off as authentic. This means that no documentary evidence, transcript of a speech, official document, or election ballot can be definitively verified.
(...) We were told about the parallel trade union central, UNT, while in Canada. What we learned once on the ground was that parallelism exists in other realms, in particular the five "missions" (Robinson, Sucre, Ribas, Vuelvan Caras and Barrio Adentro) created to deliver programs such as educational and health services directly to the people. In general, the government's creation of parallel structures responds to the government's concern desire to circumvent bureaucratic and highly corrupt government service delivery systems built up over the last 60 years. The old systems were anything but universal in service delivery; the new services are reported to be reaching the people. While we made no attempt to verify the accounts of corruption in delivery of services, the allegations are wide and consistent and we had no reason to doubt their truth.
(...) As the strength of the UNT grows, the CTV is being revealed as an organization lacking in even the most basic trade union agenda. Its top leadership has suffered a serious loss of credibility with its rank and file membership. It is almost universally seen to be dominated by a partisan political agenda, displaying single-minded determination to oppose the government. On most policy issues, CTV continues to act in conjunction with business representatives, such as the FEDECAMARAS, a key player in the failed April 2002 coup d'état. For example, the CTV and FEDECAMARAS recently opposed both the increase in minimum wage and the no-layoff policy adopted by the government.
(...) For all its centralism, the CTV is far from monolithic. Affiliated national unions and federations represent a range of programmatic approaches and styles of operation, from democratic to authoritarian. However, there are few spaces in which the lack of trust and respect between the CTV and the UNT can be bridged, and virtually no such expressions of trust between the government and the CTV. All parties believe that their opposite numbers cheat and lie.
(...) When we asked what steps the CTV planned to take to ensure that "historic errors" (such as intertwining with political parties and employers' associations, distance of the leadership from the base, and corruption) do not recur, the CTV executive would only say they planned to implement procedures long on the books to increase the transparency of their financial dealings. Perhaps this is all that can be expected of them.
Carlos Ortega, the president of the CTV, has been out of the country since early 2003, and is currently in Costa Rica. He is currently at risk of being kicked out of that country because of his insistent calls for the overthrow of the Chávez government. Most others who planned the coup continue to function as before. The ongoing ramifications of that impunity continue to haunt the government.
(...) In December 2002, the FEDECAMARAS and a CTV union representing managerial workers at the state-owned petroleum company, PDVSA, organized a work stoppage in the sector to shut down the oil industry. This was a clear attempt to paralyze the country's main source of wealth. The action prevented hourly workers not involved in the labour action from continuing their work. The protesting management workers led a very aggressive attack, including sabotaging computer control systems, damaging valves and other operational equipment in the refineries, and removing hard drives containing exploration maps and reports. The shutdown (which one observer has identified as 1/3 lock-out, 1/3 strike, and 1/3 sabotage) was all but over in March. It was at this point that the government fired approximately 18,000 petroleum workers for dereliction of duty, mainly from the management echelons of PDVSA. These fired workers have also lost their company-provided housing and benefits, and are pursuing legal avenues as well as complaints to the ILO to achieve redress. There have been very few legal charges against the protesters, and the Venezuelan courts again determined in pre-trial hearings that because the demands were not related to collective bargaining, this was not a strike.
(...) [this group's summary of CTV history] The Venezuelan labour affiliate of the ICFTU is the CTV. Founded in 1936, the organization has a history of struggle for the rights of organized workers as well as on behalf of the working class in general. It survived several periods of dictatorship, the last of which ended in 1958. At that time, the CTV formed a "strategic alliance" with the business association, FEDECAMARAS to move the country in a more democratic direction. This was not the last of such alliances with this powerful employer group. Through the 90s the CTV accepted privatization and made no sustained efforts to resist neo-liberal or free trade policies. The organization's executive committee is composed of individuals who were elected at large by delegates, and are not selected with regard for sector or elected office. Obviously, this reduces the accountability of individual members of the executive to any particular rank and file base. The executive has historically been dominated by the Acción Democrática, in theory a social democratic party currently aligned with the country's right wing forces, and a major component of the Coordinadora Democrática coalition working for Chávez' ouster.
(...) A number of academics, as well as consultants from labour NGOs who work intensively with the CTV, expressed the concern that the executive committee had abandoned its concern for basic trade union functions and was focussing all its attention to political opposition.
(...) In May 2003, the government approved Orlando Chirino, a leader of the very new UNT, to represent Venezuela at the ILO's annual convention. In order to be appointed, the government must certify that the appointee is from the country's most representative union formation. Communication from the ILO on Venezuela's designation of the UNT representative used sharp words, and concluded with the wish that such a manipulation not recur. The government holds that the CTV placed itself ‘out of the running’ for nomination as it did not send a representative to the 2003 meeting at which all the labour centrals met to choose their delegate. The CTV sent a lawyer with no decision-making authority. This year the CTV sent a full-fledged member of the executive committee to the meeting, held on May 13 and then extended to May 17. The decision was pending as of this writing, but it seems likely that the government would take the position that the UNT is now the most representative labour body in the country, despite the lack of elections to establish this claim.
(...) In 2003, The ILO singled out China, Colombia, Belarus and Venezuela as countries with the most serious violations of trade union freedoms. Noting systematic physical harm to trade unionists in the first three countries, in the case of Venezuela, the allegations were more procedural: delays in registrations, suspension of trade union dues, obstruction of collective bargaining, dismissals, and extensive interference in trade union activities.
(...) Beginning around the time of the general strike and resulting coup, a number of labour leaders sought to distance themselves from the CTV and began to discuss disaffiliation from that central labour body and the formation of new central. Currently, many labour leaders in the strategic petroleum, public, auto and rubber sectors (likely a majority in these sectors) have signed on to the UNT. The major union in the steelmaking sector, SUTISS, is seen as being close to the UNT. Within the UNT, some leaders maintain a union independence stance, while others are firmly identified with the current government and see defence of the government as a major axis of their formation. The next phase for that emerging centre is to hold elections for its leadership at all levels, and to confirm formally the will of the members to affiliate to the new central. Members of the national coordinating body stated their hope that such elections would be held in October. However, with the potential for a referendum on the country's leadership on the horizon for August, a delay is likely.
(...) At the same time, SUNEP-SAS leaders vigorously denied any participation in the coup by the CTV. However, this participation is alleged to be a fully substantiated "fact" by human rights and labour NGOs close to the CTV, including PROVEA and the Ebert Foundation, as well as the government and UNT sources.
(...) There appears to be substantial evidence that members of the current CTV executive participated in the plot to overthrow the government by "extra-legal" means. However, no union leader has ever been charged with any violation of law in the coup. Due to the fact that the initial charges were subject to pre-trial hearings at which no merit to the charges was established, all charges were thrown out. Video documentation aside, in the eyes of the country's judiciary, the coup "never happened."
(...) The novel, emblematic of the "magic realism" genre in Latin America, seems particularly appropriate to the Venezuelan scene, where all parties assert that any official document can be produced or altered to order, to be passed off as authentic. This means that no documentary evidence, transcript of a speech, official document, or election ballot can be definitively verified.
(...) We were told about the parallel trade union central, UNT, while in Canada. What we learned once on the ground was that parallelism exists in other realms, in particular the five "missions" (Robinson, Sucre, Ribas, Vuelvan Caras and Barrio Adentro) created to deliver programs such as educational and health services directly to the people. In general, the government's creation of parallel structures responds to the government's concern desire to circumvent bureaucratic and highly corrupt government service delivery systems built up over the last 60 years. The old systems were anything but universal in service delivery; the new services are reported to be reaching the people. While we made no attempt to verify the accounts of corruption in delivery of services, the allegations are wide and consistent and we had no reason to doubt their truth.
(...) As the strength of the UNT grows, the CTV is being revealed as an organization lacking in even the most basic trade union agenda. Its top leadership has suffered a serious loss of credibility with its rank and file membership. It is almost universally seen to be dominated by a partisan political agenda, displaying single-minded determination to oppose the government. On most policy issues, CTV continues to act in conjunction with business representatives, such as the FEDECAMARAS, a key player in the failed April 2002 coup d'état. For example, the CTV and FEDECAMARAS recently opposed both the increase in minimum wage and the no-layoff policy adopted by the government.
(...) For all its centralism, the CTV is far from monolithic. Affiliated national unions and federations represent a range of programmatic approaches and styles of operation, from democratic to authoritarian. However, there are few spaces in which the lack of trust and respect between the CTV and the UNT can be bridged, and virtually no such expressions of trust between the government and the CTV. All parties believe that their opposite numbers cheat and lie.
(...) When we asked what steps the CTV planned to take to ensure that "historic errors" (such as intertwining with political parties and employers' associations, distance of the leadership from the base, and corruption) do not recur, the CTV executive would only say they planned to implement procedures long on the books to increase the transparency of their financial dealings. Perhaps this is all that can be expected of them.
labor and the reforms (november 2007):
For Orlando Chirino, a national coordinator of the National Union of Workers (UNT) labor federation, Chávez’s reforms herald the “Stalinization” of the state and state control of the labor movement “along the lines of the Cuban CTC labor federation,” he said in an interview.
(...) Chirino, a key leader of the C-CURA class-struggle current of the factionalized UNT, is among the most prominent figures on the left to oppose the reforms. He made waves on the left when he granted an interview with a leading opposition newspaper and appeared on the platform with leaders of the CTV, the corrupt old trade union federation implicated in the 2002 coup.
(...) Despite some criticisms of the centralizing aspects of the constitutional reform, including the new provisions for states of emergency, the Marea current has joined the majority of the Venezuelan left in calling for a “yes” vote to achieve social gains and defeat the opposition. Arias and his C-CURA allies are already at loggerheads with prominent members of the PSUV, including Oswaldo Vera, a member of the National Assembly and leader of the Bolivarian Socialist Labor Front (FSBT), a faction of the UNT that also controls the ministry of labor.
For Orlando Chirino, a national coordinator of the National Union of Workers (UNT) labor federation, Chávez’s reforms herald the “Stalinization” of the state and state control of the labor movement “along the lines of the Cuban CTC labor federation,” he said in an interview.
(...) Chirino, a key leader of the C-CURA class-struggle current of the factionalized UNT, is among the most prominent figures on the left to oppose the reforms. He made waves on the left when he granted an interview with a leading opposition newspaper and appeared on the platform with leaders of the CTV, the corrupt old trade union federation implicated in the 2002 coup.
(...) Despite some criticisms of the centralizing aspects of the constitutional reform, including the new provisions for states of emergency, the Marea current has joined the majority of the Venezuelan left in calling for a “yes” vote to achieve social gains and defeat the opposition. Arias and his C-CURA allies are already at loggerheads with prominent members of the PSUV, including Oswaldo Vera, a member of the National Assembly and leader of the Bolivarian Socialist Labor Front (FSBT), a faction of the UNT that also controls the ministry of labor.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)