Evo Morales gave a speech (extract over the fold) a week ago, so what is really happening in that part of the world? The usual knee jerk reaction of the right is to bring out the “commy” and ”narco” labels, among others, but hey, if a nation elects a lefty government, isn’t that their sovereign right? Or is that such governments only get elected by “cheating” and skulduggery, like the way they run presidential elections in Florida? Now while Cuba is certainly no democracy, the rest of Latin America, to varying degrees, seems determined to democratically soften all those hard edges of neo-liberalism which arguably has structurally entrenched poverty and misery at the bottom of the socio-economic heap.
Now Evo Morales may crash and burn, he may even have some forces of darkness from the north support a coup against him as happened to amigo El Presidente Hugo Chavez in Venuezuala. Les Gringos lost that battle but it threatened their oil supply at the same time as now Bolivia, joins the ranks of those who are re-negotiating the perceived unfair oil deals made under former complaisant Latin American administrations.
Is using oil wealth to lift up the poor so bad? Is selling it preferentially to polite countries like China and India a heinous offence in international law? What will les Gringos reaction be to all of this ultimately?
In answer to perhaps some of these questions, we turn to the man of the moment:
By EVO MORALES
This is the text of a speech given on December 24 at the “In Defense of Humanity” conference.
What happened these past days in Bolivia was a great revolt by those who have been oppressed for more than 500 years. The will of the people was imposed this September and October, and has begun to overcome the empire’s cannons. We have lived for so many years through the confrontation of two cultures: the culture of life represented by the indigenous people, and the culture of death represented by West. When we the indigenous people–together with the workers and even the businessmen of our country–fight for life and justice, the State responds with its “democratic rule of law.”
What does the “rule of law” mean for indigenous people? For the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, the “rule of law” means the targeted assassinations and collective massacres that we have endured. Not just this September and October, but for many years, in which they have tried to impose policies of hunger and poverty on the Bolivian people. Above all, the “rule of law” means the accusations that we, the Quechuas, Aymaras and Guaranties of Bolivia keep hearing from our governments: that we are narcos, that we are anarchists. This uprising of the Bolivian people has been not only about gas and hydrocarbons, but an intersection of many issues: discrimination, marginalization , and most importantly, the failure of neoliberalism.
The cause of all these acts of bloodshed, and for the uprising of the Bolivian people, has a name: neoliberalism. With courage and defiance, we brought down Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada–the symbol of neoliberalism in our country–on October 17, the Bolivians’ day of dignity and identity. We began to bring down the symbol of corruption and the political mafia.
And I want to tell you, companeras and companeros, how we have built the consciousness of the Bolivian people from the bottom up. How quickly the Bolivian people have reacted, have said–as Subcomandate Marcos says–ya basta!, enough policies of hunger and misery.
For us, October 17th is the beginning of a new phase of construction. Most importantly, we face the task of ending selfishness and individualism, and creating–from the rural campesino and indigenous communities to the urban slums–other forms of living, based on solidarity and mutual aid. We must think about how to redistribute the wealth that is concentrated among few hands. This is the great task we Bolivian people face after this great uprising.
South America is now the go to place for those wishing to hop onto the racial socialistic movement.
And luckily it’s a scenic continent
Of course Latin Americans have the God-given right to elect out-of-the-closet communists if they want. Who cares? Nothing to do with us. And, when they have finally destroyed their economy and eradicated the productive classes, I will reserve the right to have absolutely no sympathy for their plight, to resist any demands that Australian taxpayers be screwed out of a single centimo of “foreign aid”, to angrily oppose any proposed IMF/World Bank confiscatory “bailout”, and to laugh at all communists both domestic and abroad for their repeat-offence stupidity.
I might add that the same logic not only holds for democracies, but for dictatorships and semi-democracies such as North Korea, China, Sudan, Rhodesia, Cuba, and Apartheid-era South Africa. There is simply no moral case whatsoever for placing sanctions (i.e. arbitary restrictions on exchange between free entrepreneurs, just because we don’t like their government) on “human rights violators”, “racists” and other evildoers. The only real justification for sanctioning or otherwise aggressing against any country is on security criteria, and as no Latin American country poses an obvious “threat” to anyone’s “national security” (other than each others’), it follows that there is no reason to take any notice of the fact that they are likely to miss out on the 21st century.
The poor people under Chavez seem to be as happy, Steve E. Are you implying that past non-socialist Latin American governments never destroyed economies, and even then, were they helped much with ”one-size-fits-all” IMF medicine which destroyed many livelihoods?
In Argentina for example:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/630/630p16.htm
Without their oil wealth being stolen by neo-liberal entrepreneurs, local and foreign, perhaps the lefty governments can do much better by throwing off the IMF shackles. They couldn’t do much worse than past examples of crony capitalism and IMF medicine if Argentina was a benchmark.
That’s wonderful news, and only serves to strengthen my point! Now that I have it on good advice that Morales, Chavez, et al will preside over sound, growth-enhancing, policies, we can safely assume that they will refuse in advance all future foreign aid, or any submarket loans underwritten by western taxpayers. In fact, because market lenders will recognise stable, sensible governance, when they see it, Bolivia and Venezuela shall have no problem selling government bonds to private investors, implying that they can not only refuse all foreign aid (and we decline to supply any if asked), we can also fold up pointless international bureaucracies such as the World Bank and the IMF. This will no doubt be welcomed by Morales, etc, who are obviously of a high level of integrity, and would never dream of getting their regimes underwritten in any way by “imperialists”, “colonialists”, and other such exploiters.
And I do thank you for the Green Left Weekly link. I have no doubt that the GLW is of a sufficiently high morality as to oppose the entire foreign aid racket, recognising that it is nothing more than a plot to redistribute some of the surplus labour value of the Australian proletariate to foreign bourgeois kleptocrats. GLW will no doubt be the first to demand that we allow the East Timorese workers’ state to stand on its own, and receive not a cent from our sub-imperialist government, with which I’d wholly agree.
As I am now confident that these workers’ economies will prosper into perpetuity, it follows that we can fold up all international agencies (exploiters) that are designed to “help” them, to give not a cent of “foreign aid” in any form, and to allow them to survive by selling their superior workers’ produce on the world market, thus providing all the foreign exchange required for them to remain independent from the global imperialists.
Yes, really nasty Steve E, that involuntary transfer of wealth, libertarians call it theft I think. Wicked, diabolical taxation for illegitimate uses of say, educational aid that can assist individuals/nations from coercion from GATT and Trade Related Intellectual Property (TRIPs) arrangements that impoverish the 3rd world by dumping subsidised agricultural products on them while keeping their exports out; pinching their plant genes and selling them terminator seed for ultimate dependency on Monsanto for indigenous agriculture.
That’s laissez-faire for you, that’s the free market, Darwinian survival of the fittest and any one who tries to tax a libertarian and grab that copper coin he holds to give to the 3rd world will be reinventing electrical cable.
Let’s get the means of 3rd World production into the private hands of McWorld and bury that centralized state control of anything, especially oil. The poor will always be with us, so why help them breed more poor people?
Let’s banish the word egalitarianism from our dictionaries and unite behind the ideology of Nozic, Hayek and the gang!
Steve’s got the ladder up for the developed world, and kicking out all the bottom rungs is the laissez-faire way to go for the “haves” and “have more” as Bush so eloquently put it.
Democracy is definitely on the world-historical march, one way or another. This is a not alogether unmixed blessing for some peoples.
Democracy is a means of choosing a government, not a type of society. That means that democracy is based on demography - the characteristics of the populus.
Many nations in the Southern hemisphere, or to the south of the domminant Northern states, have been ruled over by market-dominant minorities (MDM), usually of North Eurasian extraction. These nations usually have market-subordinate majorities composed of natives or indigenes.
As native majorities in these states take the democratic control of the state they are usually driving the minority groups from power and privilege. The natives then attemp to run things for themselves and their clients and cronies, with varying degrees of success.
It follows that the spread of democracy to nations in the Southern hemisphere, where societies are still run along ethnic lines, will give rise to ethnological, rather than ideological, politics. The political debate is shifting from “What kind of state is best” to “Whose group shall rule the state”.
National politics in these states will be less about the traditional Enlightenment duo - individual liberty and social equality. They will be more about satisfying the demands of ethnic communities - communal fraternity.
That is what I call ethnic, rather than ethical, politics. And it is giving rise to illiberal democracy.
The Jews of East Europe are the most spectacular example of an MDM. Others include the Chinese in Malaysia, the Indians of the South Pacific, the Chinese of Indonesia, the Europeans in Zimbabwe. The Suunis in Iraq are (sort of) another example, with an Islamic twist. It looks like the European inhabitants of indigenous Latin America are going to go the same way.
All these ethnic groups are examples of minority groups with superior economic competence who are being disposessed or persecuted because of their ability or privileged legacies. In all these states majority rule is trumping minority rights. Illiberal democracy is leading to the rise of racial socialism.
Maybe this is a good thing, maybe it is a bad thing. It is certainly a thing.
All this is irrelevant to Australia where 90% of the nation is composed of a market-dominant majority, of mainly North Eurasian (Europeans, Asians, Jews)extraction. These ethnic groups still see politics in the traditional Enlightenment way, as an arena for the clash of economic realities with ethical ideals.
Such market-subordinate minority ethnic groups that do exist in Australia lack the power to dominate the state. Although there are worrying signs that they have taken over large parts of the social democratic parties.
Social democrats need to think long and hard about what kind of immigration policy will best suit their ethical philosophy. Importing and supporting ethnic cultures that do not accept the Enlightenment constitution will lead to the downfall of traditional social democracy.
Last time I checked Jack, like for eight years living in Indonesia, the Chinese were doing not so bad. Discriminated against–yes, used as scapegoats by the likes of Prabowo–yes. But as roughly 7% of the population they own something like 60% of the wealth and over there almost anything’s for sale. In fact the TNI and the Chinese elite have been in partnership with TNI from the time they were hiding out in the jungle from the Dutch. Suharto was militarily bankrolled by the Chinese at that time. I know he killed half a mill PKI in 1966 but that was the anti-commy politics of the day.
I wouldn’t therefore call Chinese in Indonesia today as driven from ”power and privilege…disposessed” but they are persecuted in times of economic upheaval, which are relatively rare instances.
Given the record of right wing governments in Latin America with crony capitalism, the IMF and ruin, my point is they may succeed from a bottom up approach as clearly the top down neo-liberal ”trickle down” was an abject failure for the masses at the bottom. It’s an argument that I propose that resonates strongly with Keynesian economics for vulnerable and fragile nations in a somewhat different and difficult age of unfair western-set rules and laissez-faire globalisation. It’s also an argument that the free-market doesn’t do well with public utilities, including foreigners in partnership with indigenous robber-baron elites controlling oil wealth.
Peter Kemp on 1 January 2006 at 12:40 pm
In fact the “year of living dangerously” was ethnological politics with the ideological mask fallen off.
I don’t argue that neo-liberal top-down “trickle down” economics was a success in Southern hemispheric states. Although it is obviously worked well enough in North hemispheric states.
I simply point out that throughout the South the neo-liberal “Washington Consensus” being replaced by a neo-nationalist political economy along Castroist lines. This approach claims to be “bottom-up” spread the wealth, using socialist rather than capitalist means.
Nations states in the South seem to be more interested in following ethnic politics, which provides some support for Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis. So clearly Fukuyama’s rosy view about the spread of liberal democracy ideology and institutions needs some adjustment.
The combination of intellectual, institutional and ideological factors that best predict the progress of nations is one that has obsessed the greatest minds in social science, eg Smith, Marx, Weber.
My own opinion is that Christian values (Jewish morality, Greek logicality and Roman legality) provide a good foundation for social progress. These were more or less given a secular grounding by Kant.
Add the Westphalian nation state, the Westminster governance system and the joint-stock corporation and you should be laughing.
It also helps to have a pretty large and well rewarded “smart fraction” of the population. It does no good to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Erm, Steve - Australia hasnt actually given any aid to Latin American countries since Howard came to power. Its all business tenders in the Asia-Pacific nowadays.
More broadly, the complete failure of IMF structural readjustment programs to do anything more than further immiserate ordinary people (eg slashing retirement pensions in Argentina) that has toasted the centre-Right parties, continent-wide.
Hey, look, I don’t support the IMF or the World Bank, so you aren’t going to hear me defend any of their programmes. It’s obvious to me that they are a massive threat to national sovereignty, and by implication, limited constitutional governance. These world government bodies are nothing more than a wealth transfer scheme from the poor of the Western world to the rich of the Third World, through the means of forcing our productive classes effectively write sub-market loans for a pack of thieves, looters and criminals.
Hence, it seems perfectly fair to me that all third world governments should raise loans the usual way - by finding private investors prepared to freely invest in government debt. This is fine by me, because I object to these disgraceful globalist wealth-transfer schemes promoted by international agencies such as the UN, the World Bank and the IMF, and it should be fine by the third world, assuming they are serious about upholding their own national sovereignty.
Steve, the going rate of desirable aid as confirmed by the Monterrey Consensus in 2002 was 0.7% of GDP. For most that’s less than a third of the annual increase. To call it a wealth-transfer scheme is a bit over the top.
There was a good background article on Bolivia in June last year in the Guardian via Mark’s post. It refers to the typical pattern in Latin American capitals of “a tiny enclave of unbelievable privilege surrounded by a gigantic swamp of poverty”.
The problem, Jack, seems to be that this division seems to be along racial lines. In Venezuela a fair part of the problem was that the wealthy elites saw spending money on the education and health of the masses as a waste of money. In that case the socalled economically competent classes went on strike in an attempt to bring the oil industry to its knees. Luckily it didn’t work.
The larger economic context is that over the last three decades of the 20th century the per capita GDP of Latin America basically stood still. While the US economy progressed, according to Holly Sklar:
“Average hourly earnings dropped 5 percent, adjusting for inflation, between 1979 and 2004 — while domestic corporate profits rose 63 percent.”
Some people are understandably thinking that it’s time to explore new forms of political economy.
But the Monterrey “Consensus” was just a globalist junket of politicians, hacks, NGOs and other tax graspers getting together to demand that other people pay for their pet schemes. We should bestow no legitimacy on any such group of people. If they want to “develop” the “Third World”, they can either pay for it themselves, or actually do something productive such as agitate for the disembowelment of the governmental beast that not only restricts commercial opportunities for the poor abroad, but also ourselves.
Steve, I’m still a bit old-fashioned and believe that aid has a role, especially when people and indeed countries are not just poor, they’re destitute. On Radio National recently I heard the journal of a young Brisbane doctor who had spent 6 months (that’s about all anyone can take at one go) with one of those evil NGOs working at a clinic for young babies in Africa, Uganda, I think. At that clinic they had 48 deaths per month. She said you could never really pick which ones were going to die. Some looked like surviving and just went out like a light; others looked as though they were going to die but survived.
She also said that you never got used to death.
Capital, especially private capital avoids poverty like the plague, so unless you are happy with people dying from hunger, disease etc I think aid is inevitable as one component of doing something about genuine need. Jeffrey Sachs says that aid has never been tried in a fair dinkum way. Unless you count Israel which gets as much aid from the US as the continent of Africa, or maybe the 25,000 US cotton farmers who actually get more.