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Now
Every Generation of North Americans Must
Come to Terms with Latin America
A
Perilous Way to Socialism
By VIJAY PRASHAD
You'd have to be living under a rock
not to know that major developments in Latin America have created
a tectonic shift in geo-political calculations. Ecuador is the
latest entrant into the win column for the left. Rafael Correa's
new government joins the list that already includes Venezuela,
Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Bolivia.
One Left,
Many Paths.
Jorge Castaneda, writing in
Foreign Affairs (May-June 2006), conjured up a categorical
divide between the "two lefts." The first left (Argentina,
Brazil, Chile) is "modern, open-minded, reformist, and internationalist,
and it springs, paradoxically, from the hard-core left of the
past." The second left (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador) is
"born of the great tradition of Latin American populism,
is nationalist, strident, and close-minded." Such a division
is attractive to those of the neo-liberal persuasion because
it allows them to peel away the former from the latter, demonize
the "populists" and claim that there is no difference
between the neo-liberal agenda and that of the "modern"
left. Many in the U. S. left reproduce this divide, valorize
its other half (Venezuela, Bolivia) and pillory Lula and others
as sell-outs.
Such divides are not only unreasonable,
but they are also singularly unhelpful. Every country gets the
left political force that it deserves. Each social formation
has a different class composition, a different relation of ethnic
minorities to a majority population, has a separate colonial
history with differential capitalist development, and has very
distinct progressive political traditions. A broth of Anarchism,
Anarcho-Syndicalism, Marxism, Communism, agrarian Populism, social
Catholicism alongside messianic great leaders (from Bolivar to
Peron) and indigenous communitarianism created a stew of ideas,
traditions and resources for the political struggles across the
region. In 1959, Silvio Frondizi, who founded Argentina's Revolutionary
Left Movement, put the notion of the "left" plainly,
"Although the word 'left' does not have much scientific
value, its use has conferred on it the meaning of a critical
revolutionary position vis-à-vis the current capitalist
society, aiming at its transformation into a future socialist
society." Frondizi's impatience with reform belied his own
catholic understanding of the left tradition, whose parties had
to trod a fine line between the alleviation of immediate grievances
and the creation of a collective will decisive enough to risk
total social transformation. Brazil has its own history, as does
Venezuela. In one place, revolutionary time moves faster than
the other. That does not mean that the leadership is to be exculpated
for its own failures: Lula's regime, for example, has smothered
any state and non-state institutional forms that might have kept
his delegates honest. Nevertheless, those who carry around a
litmus paper to gauge the acidity of a regime will surely always
be disappointed.
The Washington Consensus helped
equalize suffering for the lower ranks of Latin American society:
fifty percent of the region's people live in poverty, with a
quarter in what is known as "extreme poverty." The
situation was so grave that a well-regarded survey (Latinobarometro)
found that less than a third of the region's people believed
that privatization was good. The rest knew that its impact was
diabolical. The new regimes in Latin America have worked very
prudently. They came to power by the ballot, in many cases holding together a wide and
shallow coalition. This meant that very radical reforms could
not be accomplished within the space afforded by this shallow
width. So far, the moves have been very guarded: reduction of
public foreign debt (Argentina) and cautious contract disputes
over rent distribution (with the exception of Bolivia's nationalization
of gas, which was itself not as militant as theoretically possible).
The regimes have also not acted to increase the minimum wage:
there appears to be a consensus that unless productivity is raised,
any rise in wages will result in inflation, which will collapse
the impact of the rise on real wages.
Against inflation, there have
been some modest attempts: the Argentine government has put price
caps on products like beef, and set up limits on utility rates.
Even in Mexico, under pressure from this leftist dynamic (and
the great fight of the people over the election), the newly installed
conservative government has indicated that it will craft pragmatic
anti-poverty means (which is a big move for the PAN, which is
programmatically anti-poor). A report by Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid
and Igor Paunovic of ECLAC-Mexico argues that the new developments
presage the creation "of a new paradigm of economic development
policies." But they are vigilant about being too optimistic.
"Whether this [new wine in a new bottle] will age gracefully
and have a rich and memorable taste or, on the contrary, sour
and decay is too early to know," they conclude (their essay
is in Revisita: Harvard Review of Latin America, Spring
2006).
Venezuela is an outlier. As
oil prices are high, the revenues from this sector enable the
Bolivarian Revolution to finance its social justice agenda. But
even its agenda is on unstable foundations. If oil prices drop,
the regime will have to slash some of these programs. Which is
why the Bolivarian Revolution has moved rapidly for social transformation:
the attempt to move urban slum-dwellers to develop rural areas,
the writing of a new Constitution, the reconfiguration of the
oil ministry, the creation of Telesur, the television network
these are all useful developments to consolidate the Bolivarian
agenda when the oil is bringing in revenue. Chavez is also able
to create regional and international solidarity based on these
favorable budgets. As Tariq Ali writes in his new book (Pirates
of the Caribbean, Verso, 2006), "While it is perfectly
true that during the first period in office, the Bolivarians
remained prisoners of macro-economic policies and were unable
to bring immediate benefits to those who needed them the most,
the partial solutions that began to be implemented after 2002
were extremely important. They improved the lives of millions
of poor people by providing them with education and better health
care. These achievements cannot be measured simply in cash terms
and those who dismiss or ridicule them have, in most cases, little
awareness of the social crisis that had gripped Venezuela or
the reasons for the popularity of the process."
But again there is a limit
on the macro-economic side. The Revolution's reliance upon its
oil revenues makes it dependent on the U. S. market. Sixty percent
of Venezuela's substantial oil exports go to the U. S. Chavez
intimates that he wants China to become a leading oil importer
from Venezuela, but this will take immense infrastructural changes
and include high transport costs. Chavez will not be able to
diversity the consumer base for Venezuelan oil in the short or
medium term. The Venezuelan reforms are viable and achievable
because of the oil money. Similar reforms might be possible in
Bolivia if the revenues rise, as expected, to $780 million from
$320 million (and the recent land reform can be combined by infrastructural
development funded by this capital infusion). But they are not
so easily possible in states that don't have such a revenue stream.
"The tragedy of investment," the wise Michal Kalecki
warned us, "is that it is necessary."
The View
from North America.
During the Dole-Clinton election
in 1996, I was in Rhode Island. It was dull election, and during
one of those interminable discussions about who to vote for,
I got into an argument with an otherwise interesting man who
belonged to one of the American socialist parties. He began to
lecture me about the failures of the Cuban Revolution. Some of
the points he made were correct, but on the whole, it was a most
disagreeable rant. He had little care for the history of the
island, or for its complex place in global geo-politics. What
bothered him was that it was a "Stalinist regime."
This was it. And it was convenient for him that the Cubans perforce
began to innovate with all kinds of economic mechanisms during
the Special Period (in addition, the confusion over the regime's
response to AIDS patients emboldened him for a more measured
view, see Anne-Christine D'Adesky's chapter in Moving
Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS, Verso, 2004).
The U.S. movement suffers from
a historic inadequacy in our relations with radical movements
across the planet. Since the suppression of the left in the United
States there has been a tendency to either dismiss or to valorize,
to hate or to love, movements elsewhere in the world. Balanced
strategic assessments that are a necessary prerequisite for genuine
solidarity are often missing. What we have instead is a desire
to use other social movements for our own line struggles, or
else to measure these movements based on a theoretical purity
rather than on the historical constraints and possibilities in
those societies, as well as on a dialectical theory for the transformation
of humanity (whether Marxism or something else).
For almost fifty years Cuba
provided the U. S. left with just this kind of ideological football.
Cuba became the object around which people in North America belabored
their disagreements. The objective developments and subjective
disagreements within Cuba were rarely at the center of the conversation
(but for an interesting beginning, go read Socialism and Democracy's
special issue from 2001). C. Wright Mills, the New Left guru,
critically presaged this use of Cuba in his 1960 book Listen
Yankee, where he wrote, "I do not worry about [the Cuban
Revolution], I worry for it and with it." To worry "for"
and "with" is a useful formula for solidarity. Close
study, patience and a keen ear should be our requirements. Radicals
do not seek messiahs; rather we search for social motion that
might move forward a just political agenda that gains widespread
support as it draws more and more people into its dynamic.
In 1972, Salvador Allende warned
his compañeros to work hard, but patiently. "The
creation of a socio-economic regime entails the development of
social and economic factors which are essentially opposed to
that regime. Those factors, engines of revolutionary change,
are not the laws or the institutional apparatus of the state;
they are inherent in the economic structure, in the new relations
of production which we are promoting, in the conscience of the
workers, in the new labor organizations which are changing the
infrastructure. It is a rudiment of materialist scientific analysis
that the accumulation of quantitative changes produces qualitative
changes. No one can have illusions of changing from day to night
a socio-economic regime. The institutional form of a state can
be transformed rapidly, but not its economic structure."
Chavez, Correa, Lula, Morales:
they stand in for the hopes of millions. But they are also on
quicksand, hastening to harden their footfalls, to create the
ground for social transformation. Rather than our condescension
or our adulation, they need our North American critical solidarity.
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair
of South Asian History and Director of International Studies
at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His most recent book is a co-edited
volume (with NACLA's Teo Ballvé), Dispatches
from Latin America: On the Frontlines Against Neoliberalism
(Boston: South End Press, 2006).
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