LATIN AMERICA
No easy road to victory
BY PHIL HEARSE
Much of today’s world bears the scars of the huge defeats suffered by the Left and the international workers movement in the 1980s and ‘90s – rampant privatisation, the worsening of working conditions, the weakening of the labour movement and deepening wealth differentials. Although we can say there has been something of a rise of the Left and militant struggle in the first decade of the new century, nowhere has this been so marked as in Latin America.
The fact that there is today in Venezuela a government which projects socialism as the future, and the fact that in Bolivia the government comes from the ‘Movement Towards Socialism’ (MAS) is of enormous ideological significance. Whatever the final outcome of this phase of struggle, the poor of Latin America and the gigantic social movements they have generated have enabled big sections of the global justice movement to give an substantive content to the slogan ‘another world is possible’ – “socialism.”
Turmoil throughout the continent has generated a new wave of strategic debate about how to defeat the oligarchy and imperialism – a debate that is rooted not in what appears to young people as the distant past (for example Chile in the early 1970s or Central America in the 1980s), but in real life alternatives in the here and now. However the experience of the last six years shows that no matter how big and militant the mass movement, there are enormous obstacles to victory – not just tenacious resistance from the local ruling classes, but also a ‘crisis of political representation’ among the popular masses which is only slowly and gradually being overcome.
Mainstream commentators in Europe and North America tend to talk about the ‘Latin American’ Left as an undifferentiated force. But as we will see, this is far from being true. There are many Latin American Lefts, with a crucial divide between the moderate ‘Centre Left’ which largely seeks an accommodation with neoliberalism, and a militant Left which wants to uproot it. Generally beneath the divisions is one simple question – is socialism and workers’ power possible, or even thinkable, in the modern world? Centre-Left politicians give the explicit or de facto answer ‘no.’ And that inevitably leads to an accommodation with neoliberalism and to holding back, or even repressing, the mass movement.
It is worth going back a few years and reviewing the developments in Argentina and Brazil. The outcomes there can tell us a lot about what is happening now.
ARGENTINA – THE MOVEMENT THAT VANISHED
Between December 19 and 21, 2001, a massive popular rebellion overthrew the Argentinean president de la Rua amid bloody street battles in which 38 people were killed. The uprising led to an unprecedented alliance between the unemployed, underemployed workers and a substantial sector of the middle class which had lost its savings in the financial crisis.
Between December 2001 and July 2002, the popular classes took over the streets blocking highways as well as the centre of Buenos Aires and provincial capitals. Some commentators say four million people took part in the movement, in an adult population of less than 30 million.
Even Right-wingers talked of a “pre-revolutionary situation,” and discussion of “dual power” between the piqueteros, neighborhood assemblies and the occupied factories on the one hand and the state apparatus on the other was common.
The most popular slogan, “Que se vayan todos!” (“Out with all the politicians!”), reflected the general hostility of the public toward the major parties and political institutions. Yet 17 months later, over 65 percent of the electorate voted and the top two candidates were from the Justice Party (Peronist) including Carlos Menem, President between 1989 and 2000, the main culprit of the collapse of the economy and the impoverishment of millions of Argentines.
By mid-2004 president Kirchner enjoyed an approval rating of some 75 percent. Only a shadow of the former movement remains in the form of some worker collectives in occupied factories and smallish groupings laying claim to the title “piqueteros.” How can such a dramatic turnaround be explained? For sure Kirchner is a clever politician who has acted against some elements of corruption and gangsterism in national and state government (while being careful not to antagonise key sections of capitalists and the armed forces). But that is not the main answer, for Kirchner came to power when the mass movement had already seriously declined.
The simple answer is that this huge mass movement, an incredible display of self-organisation which won over substantial sections of the middle classes to the side of the poor, had no unified vision of what measures to advocate to solve the economic crisis, and no mass alternative to advance in the arena of government, the antechamber of power.
Here immediately we run into important strategic debates which have been happening in and around the global justice movement. Naomi Klein in a widely circulated article asserted that the movement had been destroyed by small Left groups which had turned the neighbourhood groups into debating circles for their own views on power, and bored everyone to death. Probably there is an element of truth in the accusations of sectarianism in the many small Left parties, but even if Naomi Klein was right, several questions would remain unanswered. For example, why didn’t these mass organisations have the confidence and organisational abilities to shut these disrupters up? And in any case, what is Klein’s view of what the neighbourhood committees, piqueteros and occupied factories should have done?
The most brilliantly self-organised movement will not continue unless it has a reason for existing. In Argentina the power vacuum was obvious. But the Argentinean workers and urban poor lacked a mass party-type formation to the left of the Peronists, which could at least have put forward a challeng in the national elections to get into government, if not actually challenged the capitalist class at the level of overall social and political power. Such a formation could not be improvised in the middle of a relatively short political crisis. In the end the Argentinean masses went back to what they thought was the least worst option in the situation, the corrupt and almost unrecognisable shell of the Justice Party.
BRAZIL: POLITICAL COLLAPSE OF THE WORKERS PARTY
In Brazil, the election to the presidency of Luis Ignacio da Silva (‘Lula’) of the Workers Party (PT) in October 2002 created immense hopes and expectations for radical reform, which have largely been disappointed. Lula’s failure can be measured by one simple fact. State spending in Brazil is around 14 percent of GDP, as opposed to nearly 50 percent in France and 42 percent in Britain. This represents the fact that Brazil’s hyper-rich ruling class in one of the most unequal societies on earth refuses to pay any serious taxes and has complete contempt even for its own state apparatus, except as a target for corruption and a source of repression when needed. It means that no serious health system, education system or social insurance infrastructure or welfare services can be created. Without the assets of the state, the poor stay poor. Lula has blown it even if he just wanted to create a serious reforming government to modernise capitalism, let alone remove the capitalist class from power.
This result was especially disappointing for much of the international Left which had seen the PT as a model of a united, democratic and pluralist movement to the Left of both Stalinism and social democracy. Worse, a big section of the militant and Marxist Left within the PT, including the majority of the Democracia Socialista (DS), the Fourth International section in Brazil, supports with only limited criticisms the course of the Lula government. How could such a thing have happened?
In reality my guess is that the majority of people who had followed the situation closely were not at all surprised. As the level of class struggle declined in Brazil in the 1990s, the PT and its analogue in the trade union movement, the United Workers’ Confederation (CUT), moved to the Right. According to Joao Machado, a long-timer leader of the DS and a founder-member of the PT, a crucial factor in the evolution of the DS was that a majority of its activists became full-time functionaries in the trade unions, the party itself or in the city and state local governments controlled by the PT. Revolutionaries and Marxists are often the most experienced and articulate in broad formations, and thus often called on to take important responsibilities. But when the movement is going to the Right, being a full-time functionary imposes pressures towards ideological accommodation and political excuses for inexcusable facts. The Left opposition then gets reduced to the role of Left flank-guard for more Rightwing leaders.
Already in the early 1990s there was ambiguity in some of the DS’s political formulations (“For a popular democratic government”). In retrospect however it seems obvious that the DS theorisation of the experiment in popular participation in local government in Porto Alegre, where the city council was led by the PT and the DS was politically dominant, was extremely ambiguous, if not suspect. Popular participation is of course a desirable end in itself, but it is not a strategy which will yield popular power at a national level.
The formation of the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) is an important step in regrouping an opposition to the Left of the PT. But despite the election result of its presidential candidate Heloisa Helena (6.85%, more than six million votes) in the October 2006 elections, P-SOL remains a small formation and the task of rebuilding Brazil’s militant Left will be a long one. The Right-wing evolution of the PT is a massive defeat, and almost certainly one that could not have been prevented by revolutionary Marxists within the party. But the capitulation of the majority of the DS in front of it only made the situation worse.
STRATEGIC PROBLEMS FOR THE LEFT
The intensification of the political crisis on the continent and the problems for the oligarchy have been dramatized in 2006 by the election of Evo Morales and the advent of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government in Bolivia, as well as the long hot summer of struggle in Mexico, which culminated in the giant mobilisations against the electoral fraud which installed Felipe Calderon of the ruling PAN (National Action Party) and robbed Manuel López Obrador of the Left-of-Centre PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution).
Each of these crises pose basic questions of socialist strategy which can be summarised as follows: 1) What is the nature of these societies and their relationship with imperialism? 2) What is the nature of the ruling class? 3) What is the character of the revolutionary subject? What popular forces might be mobilised into an alliance to make a revolutionary breakthrough? 4) What are the key steps needed to make an anti-capitalist transition and a break with the capitalist state and imperialism?
Each of the countries of Latin America is oppressed by imperialism. Each has a super-rich ruling class which is hand-in-hand with the imperialist bourgeoisie. This has created some of the most unequal societies on earth; in Mexico and Brazil the rich are rich by international standards and the poor are poor by the same standards.
The idea that there can be any kind of ‘anti-imperialist alliance’ with any sector of the ruling class whatsoever is tremendously far-fetched. At best there can be alliances around democratic objectives and only conjunctural national interests. To put it another way, to achieve real democracy and real national independence requires a complete break with imperialism and the oligarchy.
For example, for Bolivia to achieve real national independence means really taking control of its own resources, i. e. gas, oil and of course water. That means inroads into the rights of private property — in other words, tasks of the socialist revolution. Equally, radical democracy at a national level cannot be achieved other than by breaking the grip of the oligarchy who ensure their control of the political process by corruption and violence. Democratic questions are directly interlinked with the issue of working-class power. The rapid evolution of a Right-wing counter-offensive and the crisis in the MAS’s orientation only confirm this.
The same considerations directly relate to the land struggle. The advent of (often US-controlled) agribusiness swivels the enemy from being simply local landlords, a sub-sector of the domestic bourgeoisie, to transnational capitalist corporations. The fight against imperialism is one and the same as the struggle against the local oligarchy.
REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECT
The enormous growth of the cities, the development of agribusiness and semi-industrialisation in the major countries has significantly changed the revolutionary subject. This is summed up in the governmental slogan of nearly all of the Mexican militant Left: “un gobierno obrero, campesino, indígena y popular,” or, a workers’, peasants’, indigenous and popular government. This crystallises what we can expect a revolutionary alliance in most of Latin America to be like.
Since the formulation of the “workers and peasants government” formula in the 1920s, the growth of the informal sector in the cities, the barrio or favela dwellers, has been dramatic. Most of the urban poor are not regularly employed, but get by through street trading, small businesses, crime, etc. The urban poor are a vital part of the base of the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela and of course of the mass movement which eventually brought Evo Morales and the MAS to power in Bolivia. The key demands of these people revolve around the basic questions of the provision of the essentials of life: clean water, proper housing, sanitation, education and of course freedom from violence and paternalistic manipulation by the state, i. e., democracy.
A new and positive feature of the Latin American movement has been the emergence of indigenous movements, the most well-known example being the Zapatistas in Mexico and sections of the movement in Bolivia. However there is a difference between the indigenous movement in those two countries. Subcommandante Marcos and the Zapatistas pose the solution to the demands of the indigenous people as being part of a transformation of Mexico nationwide, which Marcos tends to pose as “democratization” (not socialism).
Two central issues cannot be avoided by the Latin American Left: machismo, and its opposite, women’s liberation. While the leaders of the social movements in the barrios are disproportionately women, the violence against and super-exploitation of women on the most machismo of continents is incredible; from the daily subjugation of women as the most exploited workers in an often suffocating paternalistic family to the ghastly mass murder of women in Guatemala. A more stable integration of women’s liberation into the strategy of the Latin American Left would unleash tremendous new forces and energies into the struggle.
THE QUESTION OF POWER
For the Left, the decisive issue is how to integrate all these questions—of democracy, land reform, the destruction of the oligarchy, an end to economic robbery of the elite and imperialism, the basics of life for the urban poor and liberation for indigenous people and women—into a coherent overarching strategy for the popular masses to conquer power. The “Centre-Left” forces like the PT in Brazil, the Frente Amplio in Uruguay and the PRD of Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, obviously do not agree with this way of posing the question. For them it is about getting more justice within the system, and we have seen what this means in Uruguay and Brazil: abject capitulation to neoliberalism.
This poses first a question and then a problem—that of class independence, creating political parties of the popular masses led politically by the working class independent of bourgeois nationalist and populist forces. Building a broad class struggle party on a national basis is a task which Subcommandante Marcos and the Zapatistas have avoided confronting. However, the “Other Campaign”—a bold and audacious attempt to move out of their Chiapas mountain redoubts and unify the Mexican social movements—indicates a renewed strategic thinking which objectively points in the direction of a new “party” of the oppressed. How far this will go has yet to be seen.
How is the idea of the popular masses taking state power relevant to developments in Venezuela and Bolivia? In Venezuela the bourgeoisie have lost, or partially lost, control of the government but are still the economically ruling class —linked parasitically to the nationalised oil industry.
On the other hand, there has been tremendous development of popular self-organisation from below in the barrios and in the countryside. In addition substantial social progress has been made through the social missions, funded by oil revenues. However the poor remain legion in Venezuela and the solution to their problems will not be found outside of a radical redistribution of wealth, which means breaking the power and wealth of the oligarchy.
But in the context of a tremendous political polarisation in which the whole of the bourgeoisie and a big majority of the middle classes are against Chávez, this unstable equilibrium between the bourgeoisie and the masses, mediated by Chávez, cannot continue forever. Sooner or later there will be a gigantic confrontation and the Bolivarian movement and the Chávez leadership will have to make a choice. Depending on the loyalty of key army officers is useless.
With the threats of the Right and imperialism, the consolidation of popular committees into a national network of popular power is crucial. This must involve the arming of the popular sectors and the building of a popular militia.
There are important signs that polarisation is deepening rapidly. In Merida, Right-wing students have organised prolonged riots. The recent national congress of the progressive union federation, the UNT, split between Left and Right and did not conclude its business or elect a new leadership. These are straws in the wind and it would be stupid to ignore the gathering storm clouds. Imperialism and the bourgeoisie want Chávez out, and there is now a race between revolution and counter-revolution.
In Bolivia the summer has seen massive conflicts over the now-stalled “nationalisation” of oil and gas, and the fight over the Constituent Assembly. It seems that the MAS is internally divided; in any case the government has stumbled and made important concessions to the Right. These are very worrying signs.
Morales and his team will have to make their choice between the oligarchy and imperialism on the one hand and the self-organised masses on the other. The example of Lula and the fate of the Brazilian PT is eloquent. If you try to avoid the question of power, you will end up either defeated or capitulating.
I will leave the last words to James Petras in his conclusions about the outcome in Argentina:
“What clearly was lacking was a unified political organisation (party, movement or combination of both) with roots in the popular neighborhoods which was capable of creating representative organs to promote class-consciousness and point toward taking state power. As massive and sustained as was the initial rebellious period (December 2001-July 2002) no such political party or movement emerged — instead a multiplicity of localised groups with different agendas soon fell to quarreling over an elusive “hegemony” — driving millions of possible supporters toward local face-to-face groups devoid of any political perspective.”
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Phil Hearse is an editor of International Viewpoint and the editor of Marxsite
