The Left Strikes Back

Class And Conflict In The Age Of Neoliberalism

James Petras

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367318659
• eBook ISBN: 9780429975981
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

James Petras shows that the current stage of capital globalization and the weakening of the ability of established popular groups to defend themselves have generated an important organized response on the part of those whose standard of living is most undermined and threatened by the process. The book argues convincingly that we can now see the emerging forms of resistance in new, popular organizations that, while frequently local and provincial, nevertheless have developed an international consciousness. By discussing their spatial-economic focus, social base, style of political action, and political perspective, The Left Strikes Back both identifies and differentiates the different waves of the left. Further, it presents data documenting the growth, contradictions, and political challenges that confront these burgeoning socio-political movements.

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Introduction: Ten Theses on Latin America

A great debate is taking place in Latin America over the appropriate development model for Latin America: On the one hand, there are the advocates of the free market promoted by the United States and its allies among the Latin American political and economic elite, and on the other, there are the continent-wide sociopolitical movements in large part rooted in the countryside. These two dynamic poles of social action have established the groundwork within which academics, intellectuals, journalists, policymakers, and party leaders are debating whether to continue on the neoliberal path or to seek alternatives to neoliberalism.

This book is about the opposition to neoliberalism—a significant political movement that has voice, numbers, and increasing influence, particularly among the popular classes:. U.S. hegemony and the ascendancy of neoliberalism are being challenged and questioned by the most dynamic political and social movements in Latin America: in Brazil, by the Landless Workers Movement; in Mexico, by the Zapatista peasant communities, guerrilla movements, and their urban allies; in Colombia, by peasant and guerrilla movements influential in half the rural municipalities of the countryside.

The triumphalist rhetoric emanating from Washington that celebrates the victory of '"tree markets and free elections" is premature. There is another reality, found in the growing electoral and extraparliamentary opposition demanding participatory democracy and social equality. In Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere, new pragmatic Center-Left political alliances have emerged to challenge the incumbent neoliberal regimes. In some cases, their coalitions are supported by the growing extraparliamentary movements; in other cases, they go their separate ways. The different opposition groups in turn have opened a political debate over programs, tactics, and strategy. In many cases, the critics of neoliberalism appeal to different social constituencies. Extraparliamentary movements draw political sustenance from intellectuais who combine ideas drawn from Marxism and from theology of liberation, national-ethnic, and feminist ideologies. The Center-Left electoral coalitions are advised and influenced by pragmatic Social Democratic and social liberal ideologists. The ideas and debates among the intellectuals are frequently linked to political leaders and often have political consequences. In many cases, the intellectuals interpret and reinterpret the past to fit the particular strategies of the moment. For example, the pragmatic ideologue Jorge Castañeda argues (see Chapter 5) that the military defeats of the guerrilla Left in the 1960s and 1970s have resulted in the demise of utopias and the ascendency of "possibilism"—piecemeal "reform mongering" within the interstices: of U.S. hegemony. However, Marxists argue that revolutionary ideas are far from dead. They point to the rich mosaic of radical ideas and practices in the 1960s and 1970s that were not associated merely with guerrilla groups but found expression in a wide gamut of popular movements. In the contemporary world, they point to the new revolutionary social movements that have resurfaced today, headed by young leaders who have renewed the revolutionary tradition.

Contrary to the mass media and conventional academia's view of Latin America as having consummated a democratic transition and having become an "emerging market," the leaders and activists of the new revolutionary movements point to the authoritarian and elitist nature of the political system and to the social exclusion endemic to the economic model as justifications for the primacy of extraparliamentary activity. Their opposition to neoliberalism takes the form of hundreds of land occupations in Brazil, expansion of guerrilla influence across a wide swath of rural municipalities in Colombia, and general strikes in Bolivia and Ecuador involving peasants, Indians, trade unionists, and urban street vendors.

The reality of extraparliamentary opposition and its increasing presence contrasts with the meager social reforms and progressive changes that have emerged from the electoral process and electoral politicians who promise populist reforms in their campaigns but pursue a virulent neoliberal agenda once they are elected. For a growing number of Latin Americans, the electoral regimes today have become the sources of authoritarian practices and poverty inducing strategies. Their compromises with generals and bankers and their facile acceptance of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity programs have engendered a cycle of increased militarization of regions of social conflict and a downward spiral of incomes for wageworkers and peasants.

The intersection of rising authoritarian civilian rule and declining living standards marks the point of departure for the new extraparliamentary social movements. Today, there are 70,000 soldiers surrounding the Indian communities of Chiapas; the peasants of Guerrero and elsewhere in South Mexico are living in virtually military-occupied territory. The military-police repression in Brazil has resulted in the assassination, injury, and arrest of scores of peasant activists. In Colombia, thousands of peasant activists have been assassinated by military-sponsored right-wing paramilitary groups, while over 1 million have been forcibly displaced by the counterinsurgency strategy. Washington has increasingly been drawn into this conflict, providing arms to the Mexican and Colombian armies under the pretext of an antidrug campaign. But the Huey helicopters that daily fly over Zapatista villages and transport Colombian commandos to firelights with the peasant guerrillas make it clear that Washington is deeply implicated.

Although the struggles and debates take place in Latin America, many of the key beneficiaries and supporters of the status quo are in Washington, Wall Street, the City of London, and elsewhere. The issues involve not only social justice and equitable development but national sovereignty. The United States is not an "external actor"; its representatives in the international financial agencies design the macroeconomic policies that promote the privatizations, free trade, and debt payments agenda of Latin regimes. U.S. government officials promote and negotiate the openings for the multinational corporations. Officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), CIA, and FBI are present, enforcing U.S.. drug laws within Latin America. Cultural commodities and media products are ubiquitous in Latin America, influencing the values and outlook of Latin consumers and providing lucrative returns, in accord with U.S. business interests.

Yet the very system of exploitation and hegemonic control has provoked widespread opposition. Power is a two-way relationship, and the Latin American Left is striking back with diverse voices^ programs, and strategies. As resistance increases, a coherent systemic alternative is beginning to take shape. For example, there has been massive popular rejection of the austerity measures and structural adjustment programs. The glaring contrast of a hundred or so new multibillionaires amid 200 million new and old poor reflects the growing polarization. Further, the Left is debating the question of incremental reform versus radical structural change. The majority of the opposition favors reform, but a growing number of the poor are openly expressing support for a radical social transformation. The relationship between reformist and radical opposition may be reversed. President John F. Kennedy once said, "Those who make reform impossible make revolution inevitable." All the indications to date point to the likelihood that the current neoliberal regimes will deepen and extend their "exclusive" strategies, despite mounting popular resistance. For this reason, it is worthwhile to give careful and reasoned attention to the new extraparliamentary opposition that is emerging.

The chapters in this book are organized around ten interrelated theses that link the growth of oppositional movements to the intellectual political debates and strategies occurring in Latin America. These debates are contextualized within the broader framework and constraints imposed by Washington's policies and strategies toward Latin America. The book concludes with a perspective on political change in Latin America that rescues state and class analysis from the tyranny of "globaloney" doctrine and provides some solutions to these dilemmas of change.

At the core or the discussion here is a single question: Is neoliberalisra the only viable economic system? One would think so if one listened only to World Bank officials, IMF directors, and many of our leading academics and journalists. This book disputes this assertion. Neoliberalism is at the moment the hegemonic paradigm—but it is not the only approach, at least in the eyes of the leaders and activists in the burgeoning peasant movements in Latin America. Increasingly, the neoliberal ascendancy is showing signs of decay. After a decade and a half, the pain resulting from the implementation of neoliberal economic doctrine should be giving way to plenty, but the pain persists and the prosperity has failed to materialize. There are more landless peasants than ever, and living standards of wage and salaried workers have failed to recover from the "lost decade" of the 1980s. Rather than a linear trajectory in which neoliberalism is seen as the "end of history," we are experiencing a more familiar cycle of ascendancy, consolidation, and decay. Instead of the harmony of interest between producers, smallholders, and labor in North and South, we are witnessing the reemergence of political, social, and economic contradictions and conflicts among classes, states, and ethnic groups.

Thesis One

The uneven and unequal development and crises provoked by neoliberal policies have narrowed the social base of support for such policies. The integration of the economic elites with the state creates a formidable basis of institutional power but opens the elites to sociopolitical opposition from the majority of the labor force, which is marginalized by the decisionmaking process and excluded from the economic expansion generated by the economic enclaves in the export and financial sectors.

Marginalization of young job seekers in the working class and displacement of millions of peasants and rural laborers has generated mass opposition, which has found expression in the growth of popular resistance in the countryside and among sectors of the unemployed young in the cities. In Chapter 2, the two phenomena of resistance and marginality are discussed, looking at the burgeoning peasant movements in Latin America. The challenge of these new movements calls into question the premises of globalization theorists who argue that we are entering a new phase of globalized capitalism in which class divisions and struggles have been transcended by an integrated and interdependent world. This study argues that globalized capitalism represents a continuation of history, in which historical exploitative relations between states and classes have been extended and have intensified the rates of exploitation of wealth from producers and labor in the front of rents, interest, profits, and royalties. This exploitative system is institutionalized throughout the world in the form of free trade agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA).

Thesis Two

There are several lines of debate that influence the political alignments: the debates between neoliberals and their intellectual adversaries; between Marxists and pragmatic critics of neoliberalism; and between the past and the present generation of opponents of neoliberalism. These debates are discussed in Part 1, "Resistance, Pragmatism, and Alternatives."

The neoliberal opposition essentially pits intellectual advocates of self-help and community-based projects against those intellectuals who favor reforms and others who propose fundamental systemic changes at the national and even international level. Among the intellectuals who discuss structural change, there is a further debate between the pragmatiste, who essentially advocate piecemeal redistributive reforms within the parameters of neoliberalism, and the Marxists, who propose transforming the structures of property ownership and the role of the market.

The variety of responses to neoliberalism can be conceptualized as occurring among the following: intellectuals who propose adaptive strategies to bring about change in the interstices of the system; policy advisers who advocate measures to increase social spending without changing the neoliberal foundations; and revolutionary writers who propose to change underlying property relations. These different perspectives appeal to different political constituencies. The "adapters" work through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), frequently collaborate with overseas banks and local regimes, and focus on local projects. The pragmatic reformers are largely oriented toward building cross-class coalitions and focus on capturing voters. The Marxists, or transformative intellectuals, collaborate with extraparliamentary movements and focus on linking local struggles with national structural changes.

Thesis Three

Small-scale projects and reforms are neither viable nor effective in dealing with the systemic imperatives of neoliberalism: The problems are rooted in the market and the neoliberal state. The current regimes have eliminated the social welfare pact between labor and capital, which produced the minimalist welfare state that existed in Latin America between 1950 and 1980. The choice today is between neoliberalism or a highly regulated economy in which the market is subordinated to socialized enterprises.

Thesis Four

Electoral politics have been ineffectual as a vehicle for realizing progressive social changes. Political parties and groups that have relied on electoral styles of politics have drifted to the right and have accommodated themselves to the neoliberal political and economic elites. This thesis is discussed in Part 2, "Elections and Extraparliamentary Politics." A corollary to this thesis is the argument that although extraparliamentary movements have suffered severe state repression (and thus the cost and risk of participation is higher) and occasional setbacks, they have been more effective in blocking, limiting, or challenging neoliberal initiatives than Center-Left electoral coalitions.

Thesis Five

Political parties that were on the Left in the 1970s and 1980s have moved to the Right in the 1990s. This shift was induced in part by the repression and terror employed by the military and civilian regimes of the period and in part by the co-opting of the intellectuals through overseas funding of NGOs. This right turn was influenced by the bureaucratization of the trade unions and the decline in union membership, due to the growth of the informal sector. A comparison of the leaders and followers of the Left parties reveals sharp social differences. Most leaders of the Center-Left parties are upwardly mobile middle-class professionals who temporarily "detoured" toward the revolutionary Left and then returned to their original middle-class milieux. Their followers, however, are mostly peasants, urban poor, and workers, who have no such possibility of social mobility. The drift toward the center by the ex-leftist parties and leaders (like the Chilean Socialists, the Workers Party in Brazil, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, and so forth) in one sense is "irrational." The possibilities of social reform under neoliberalism are minimal. The few remaining social programs that do exist are being dismantled. Rather than reform the system, the Social Democrats are being converted to social liberalism.

Thesis Six

The right-wing drift of the Left does not respond to the needs of their original lower-class constituents. The shift reflects the social interests of the leaders of the Left parties ( upward mobility) and the hegemony of the neoliberal doctrine over the intellectuals, leaders, and opinion makers of the Left (see Chapter 7). This hegemony of ideas influences the "material reality" that shapes the form and direction of political competition.

Thesis Seven

The establishment of neoliberal hegemony is directly related to the role of international actors, that is to the strategy of the U.S. state and multinational corporations operating in Latin America. This is discussed in Part 3, "The United States and Latin America."

Thesis Eight

In pursuit of strategic economic interests, the U.S. government has played a major role in promoting the ascendancy of neoliberalism. Washington and Wall Street have opposed the emergence of any alternative to neoliberalism, past or present. In the 1970s, Washington collaborated in the overthrow of the Democratic Socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. In the 1980s, Washington organized and financed the contra war in Nicaragua. And in the 1990s, Washington is tightening the blockade of Cuba (see Chapter 9). In none of these cases of U.S. intervention were strategic national security interests seriously threatened. Nor, for that matter, were narrowly defined private economic interests of great importance. Rather, the threat, as perceived by Washington, was found in the fact that these regimes represented a challenge to U.S. multinational corporations and the neoliberal doctrine. In the discussion of U.S.-Latin American relations in this book, several issues related to the conflict between the neoliberal Washington consensus and the Left are confronted. The U.S.-Cuba conflict is central to the ongoing debate on neoliberalism and its alternatives. The enactment of the Helms-Burton Act and President Bill Clinton's embargo policy is Washington's effort to change Cuba's mixed economy. This conflict of paradigms is discussed and elaborated in Chapter 9, "Clinton's Cuba Policy." Contrary to pundits, Clinton's hostile policy toward Cuba is not merely electoral pandering to the Miami exiles but is based on a larger policy of eliminating the only regime that has a consequential critique of the inequitable consequences of U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere. Cuba is part of the ongoing challenge to globalist thinking and still represents an alternative to neoliberalism, despite market reforms.

The state creates the framework for the expansion and consolidation of U.S. multinationals in Latin America. The state also provides material support for Latin regimes for the repression of opponents of neoliberalism. This continued and even expanded role of the state argues against the doctrinal assumptions of globalist and neoliberal theorists and practitioners. The latter argue that the global world order is a new phenomenon that transcends nation-states and narrow class interests. They argue that globalization is the product of irresistible market forces, which makes national integration into the world market inevitable and social transformations at the national level impossible or anachronistic. Neoliberals and not an insignificant number of pragmatic critics argue that governments, movements, and parties should seek ways to "adjust" to the inevitable and seek the best terms for integration in the new globalized market.

Thesis Nine

The state—in this case the U.S. government—plays an essential role in the increasing flow of investments and loans of U.S. multinationals in Latin America and plays a powerful enforcer role in securing the prompt and effective outflow of profits, interest payments, and royalties from Latin America to the United States. Far from being transcended by the emergence of a global "market," the U.S. state continues to p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Acronyms
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Ten Theses on Latin America
• Part 1 Resistance, Pragmatism, and Alternatives
• Part 2 Elections and Extraparliamentary Politics
• Part 3 The United States and Latin America
• Index