Counter-Globalization and Socialism in the 21st Century

Thomas Muhr, Thomas Muhr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135052454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Framed by critical globalisation theory and David Harvey's 'co-revolutionary moments' as a theory of social change, this book brings together a multi-disciplinary team of researchers to empirically analyse how socialism is being constructed in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean, and beyond.

This book uses the case of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples' Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP) to invite to a re-thinking of resistance to global capitalism and the construction of socialism in the 21st century. Including detailed theory-based ethnographic case studies from Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the USA, the contributors identify social and structural forces at different levels and scales to illuminate politics and practices at work. Centred around the themes of democracy and justice, and the more general reconfiguration of the state-society relations and power geometries at the local, national, regional and global scales, ALBA and Counter-Globalization is at the forefront in the trend of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of social phenomena of global relevance.

Counter-Globalization and Socialism in the 21st Century will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American politics, global governance, global regionalisms and rising powers.

1 Introduction

The enigma of socialism¹

Thomas Muhr

If the crisis of capitalism has been good for one thing, then it is for the reawakened interest in socialism and, arguably, communism, as alternative forms of social organization. A growing body of publications (e.g. Altvater, 2009; Anton and Schmitt, 2007; Jünke, 2010; Radice, 2009; Smith, 2009; Veltmeyer, 2011), accompanied by the launch of such journals as The Journal of Democratic Socialism at the University of Sussex in 2011, are reintroducing the discussion in academia and society at large. Paradoxically, however, as the eyes of many international relations and international political economy scholars are on the Middle East and Asia, the challenge to the capitalist status quo in Latin America and the Caribbean is scarcely recognized outside the field of Latin American Studies. The social, political, economic and cultural processes that are transforming ‘Our America’, which is Cuban liberation fighter José Martí' decolonialist conception of ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’, may be subsumed under the following three dimensions: popular rebellion and social movements resistance to neoliberalization across the entire geographical area since the late 1980s; the proliferation of ‘progressive’ governments that in the sense of Boaventura de Sousa Santos reject the supposed inevitability of global inequality and fight for alternatives (Santos, 2001: 209), most notably Venezuela' Bolivarian Revolution led by President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías; and the construction of ‘third generation regionalisms’ within this rationale (Muhr, 2011b): the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples' Trade Agreement (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América – Tratado de Comercio de los Pueblos – ALBA-TCP), constituted in 2004; the Union of South American Nations (Unión de Naciones Suramericanas – UNASUR), formalized in 2008; the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños – CELAC), officialized in 2011; and the imminent redefinition of the Common Market of the South (Mercado Común del Sur – Mercosur) following the ratification of Venezuela' full membership in July 2012. While all of these movements, processes and projects constitute challenges to colonialism and imperialism, this book is concerned with the at presentmost explicit, consistent and comprehensive articulation and institutionalization of these counter-hegemonic efforts: the ALBA-TCP.²

The studies that compose this volume capture and discuss some of the politics, projects, processes and protagonists involved in the construction of this rival structure to global capitalism. Collectively, they show how socialism is being constructed in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean and beyond. Some chapters centre their analyses around Venezuela' Bolivarian Revolution, but with reference to more general global and theoretical issues. After all, Venezuela is central to the project: in contrast to most socialist revolutions that occurred in peripheral peasant societies with heavy dependence on the raising of agricultural productivity in order to finance (industrial) development (Cox, 1996: 218), Venezuela constitutes an important case of resource endowment mobilized for counter-hegemonic transformation beyond the national. Hegemony, throughout this book, is used in the Gramscian sense as the supremacy of a social group, which manifests itself in economic, intellectual, political and moral leadership, to which the subalterns give their active consent, while coercion is used only exceptionally as a disciplinary measure (Gramsci, 1971). The consensual element in hegemony, i.e. the ‘acceptance by the ruled of a conception of the world that belongs to the rulers', which appears as ‘common sense’, mystifies the power relations upon which the order rests (Fiori cited in Carnoy, 1984: 68). If, despite the current global crisis, neoliberalism remains the ideological common sense, counter-hegemony requires offering ‘new understandings and practices capable of replacing the dominant ones’ (Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito, 2005: 18) while ‘building up the sociopolitical base for change through the creation of new historic blocs’ (Cox, 1996: 140).

***

This introduction aims to develop a framework for analysing the construction of socialism through the ALBA-TCP by drawing on my own work of recent years while integrating the key arguments from the individual chapters that address the complex and multifaceted project from different disciplinary angles: Globalization and Development Studies; Politics and International Relations; Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Anthropology and Cultural Studies; Sociology and Political Economy; Socio-Legal Studies; and Human Geography. This cross-disciplinary, perhaps undisciplinary³ approach generates a holistic understanding of the project beyond the sum of the individual contributions. Thus the book challenges some of the orthodoxies of the construction of socialism, especially the assumption of the organization of production being the major or sole determinant. Key historical, analytical and theoretical insights will elucidate why the ALBA-TCP is a revolutionary project while deployment of David Harvey' ‘co-revolutionary moments’ structures the discussion. Some of the ontological, epistemological and methodological underpinnings of this book will be made explicit in the final section, through which a critique of much of the literature on the processes in question is formulated.⁴ A particular strength of this volume is that by drawing largely from doctoral and post-doctoral research, mostly work in progress, the collective of authors from North America, Europe and Our America has enjoyed the rare privilege of extended participation in these processes in distinct but interconnected places. This may be understood as regional or spatial ethnography.

The ALBA-TCP

The Castilian acronym ALBA means ‘dawn’ and is antithetical to ALCA (Area de Libre Comercio para las Américas), the neoliberal US-promoted Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The idea originated in the Cuba-Venezuela Integral Cooperation Agreement of 30 October 2000 and was first articulated as such by Chávez at the Association of Caribbean States Summit, Isla Margarita (Venezuela) on 10 December 2001. The initiative was formalized by the Cuban president Fidel Castro and Chávez on 14 December 2004 via the Agreement for the Application of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and the accompanying Joint Declaration that provides the normative framework (ALBA, 2004a, b). With the Plurinational State of Bolivia joining in 2006 President Evo Morales Ayma' proposal of a ‘peoples' trade agreement’ (Tratado de Comercio de los Pueblos – TCP) was accommodated, defined as a ‘fair trade’ alternative to bilateral capitalist ‘free trade agreements’ (FTAs) (ALBA, 2006). Subsequently, the initiative has been joined as full members by the Republic of Nicaragua (2007), the Commonwealth of Dominica (2008), the Republic of Honduras (2008), the Republic of Ecuador (2009), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (2009) and Antigua and Barbuda (2009). While the Republic of Haiti, Saint Lucia and the Republic of Suriname entered into the process of accession at the 11th ALBA-TCP Summit in Caracas, Venezuela, in February 2012, and a number of countries, including the Republic of Paraguay, Grenada and the Dominican Republic have (had) observer status, the Honduran membership was renounced in January 2010 by the successor government to the de facto regime installed after the military – entrepreneurial elite coup d'état against President Manuel Zelaya in 2009.

ALBA has evolved from standing for ‘Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas’ to ‘Bolivarian Alternative for Our America’ (January 2007), ‘Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America’ (April 2008) and ‘Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America’ (June 2009). ALBA-TCP has officially been adopted especially since the 7th ALBA-TCP Summit in October 2009, when the Fundamental Principles of the Peoples' Trade Agreement were presented (see ALBA-TCP, 2009). At the 11th Summit of the ALBA-TCP in Caracas in 2012, the Agreement for the Constitution of an ALBA-TCP Economic Space was signed, whose 23 articles consolidate the establishment of ‘an economic zone of shared inter-dependent, sovereign and solidarian development’ whereby ‘the equitable distribution of wealth and the strengthening of popular, cooperative and social ownership of the means of production constitute powerful tools to ensure social justice and the progress of our societies and economic systems’ (ALBA-TCP, 2012). These norms – solidarity, cooperation, complementarity, reciprocity, sustainability⁵ – seek to generate synergies: ‘productive specialization according to the strengths of each country without, however, limiting the integral development of its productive apparatus while permitting to overcome the existing asymmetries among the Parties’ (ibid.: Article 1).

Although the de jure alliance unites one quarter of the 33 independent Latin American and Caribbean states, only about 75.3 million inhabitants out of a total of over 560 million live in the ALBA-TCP member territories. Not only a small market, to date the bloc has attracted underdeveloped economies exclusively which seek structural transformation from natural resource and agro-export towards a productive, labour-based value-adding economy. Consequently, Antulio Rosales and Manuel Cerezal (Chapter 8⁶) find that intra-ALBA-TCP trade is ‘still rather marginal’. Nevertheless, while comprehensive ALBA-TCP trade statistics are sketchy, the authors also state that between 2000 and 2006 the Venezuela-Cuba trade volume increased from USD 12 million to USD 2,000 million. In the context of global crisis these new relations may be decisive in preventing small dependent economies from collapsing: in the case of Nicaragua, exports to the major world areas declined by (on average) 18.4 per cent in 2008/09, while exports to Venezuela increased by almost 300 per cent, as Venezuela has become Nicaragua' second most important trade partner; simultaneously, the Venezuela/ALBA-TCP official development cooperation rose to USD 500 million in 2010, equalling 41.9 per cent of the total financial inflows to Nicaragua (BCN, 2010, 2011). As a geopolitical project among politically like-minded governments and social forces, the ALBA-TCP thus resuscitates the 1970s ideas of a New International Economic Order and South-South development cooperation. Accordingly, with reference to the Cuban Revolution' challenge to the law of value, Helen Yaffe (Chapter 6) argues that the ALBA-TCP follows the long history of opposition to the liberal doctrine of comparative advantage in Our America by undermining the unequal terms of trade that characterize international commodity exchange. Yaffe particularly points to the barter exchange between Cuba and Venezuela as the most explicit example of abandoning trade prices set in the global capitalist market. Similar principles regulate the Petroamérica integration strategy composed of the three sub-regional blocs Petrosur, Petroandina and Petrocaribe (see Muhr, Chapter 3; Yaffe, Chapter 6; Aponte-García, Chapter 7). With respect to the latter, Norman Girvan observes that

[b]y 2008 Petrocaribe had become by far the largest provider of concessionary finance in absolute terms to the recipient countries; exceeding the flows of development assistance from the EU, USAID, the IADB and the World Bank [while] individual countries [enjoy the] flexibility to negotiate the terms of their participation which are appropriate to their idiosyncrasies.

(Girvan, 2011: 163, 165)

Elsewhere I have theorized the ALBA-TCP as a pluriscalar, neo-Gramscian counter-hegemonic war of position that seeks the construction of ‘21st century socialism’ across the de jure (formal ALBA-TCP members) and the de facto regions (the entire Latin America/Caribbean) and beyond (the global). I have also stressed that the notion of ‘revolutionary democracy’, which (to date) coexists with pluralist representative democracy, constitutes the definitional foundation of 21st century socialism (Muhr, 2008b; 2012). While the distinct concepts used vary in the different ALBA-TCP territories – for instance, in Nicaragua the idea is embodied in the ‘Citizen Power’ development model (Muhr, 2013) – ‘revolutionary democracy’ can be theorized as integrating Karl Marx' direct democracy with C.B. Macpherson' participatory democracy: the former denotes social and popular control of the means of production and political organization in a pyramidal council structure (Marx, [1871] 1942); the latter refers to the political, economic, social and cultural conditions for exercizing protagonism related to ‘the equal right to self-development’ – a process of conscientization, from an individualist consumer identity to a sense of community accompanied by a substantial reduction of social and economic inequality for the full development of people' capabilities (Macpherson, 1977). These different forms of democracy converge in the ALBA-TCP governance regime composed of two dialectically intertwined forces, the ‘state-in-revolution’ (constituted power) and the transnationally ‘organized society’ (constituent power).

As Figure 1.1 shows, what I have termed the ‘state-in-revolution’ is manifest in the Council of Presidents, three ministerial councils, commissions and working groups. The organized society is in...