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Learning from Latin America
by Lee Brown
As Europe struggles to deal effectively with the economic crisis and stares a lost decade in the face, radically different alternatives are urgently needed.
The ideas from the right of the political spectrum, most notably the commitment to unrestrained free market capitalism, not only caused the crisis, but are now exacerbating it through cuts and privatisations that damage the wider economy. They offer no way forward.
The solutions will have to come from progressive movements. But the economic depression has exposed a weakness. Having to a large degree ceded to the right’s idea of the supremacy of the market, much of the social democratic left in Britain and wider Europe has been unable to offer serious alternatives to austerity. The right has had the left in check-mate.
Where then can progressives gain the confidence, inspiration and radically different ideas that are necessary to return to growth and build a more equal society?
Attention should be turned to Latin America. The mood at the São Paulo Forum, a gathering of Latin American left parties and social movements that I attended earlier this month, was in complete contrast to Europe. Under the slogan ‘the people of the world against neo-liberalism and for peace’, the conference was brimming with ideas – a confidence gained from successfully governing their countries and mobilising vast swathes of the population against free market orthodoxy.
Around 100 parties from 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries came together to discuss how to move beyond the free market capitalism that by the turn of the century, under right wing governments, had left nearly half of the population of Latin America, more than 200 million people, in poverty.[1] As Walter Pomar of the Brazilian Workers Party – the party of former President Lula and President Dilma – explained, at the time of the first Forum in 1990 there was just one left party in government on the continent, in Cuba. It was against this backdrop that the São Paulo Forum was established with the objective of debating the new international political situation following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and arguing for alternatives to neoliberalism. The so-called Washington Consensus was then being pushed as the only way forward and the apparent triumph of capitalism was even being described as the end of history.
Today in Latin America, the political panorama could not be more different. Progressive governments predominate and ideas hold sway that have long been marginalized amongst the left in Europe such as the nationalisation of strategic economic sectors to foster social development, as we have seen in Argentina recently.
This shift stems from people’s struggles and experiences gained over thirty years. First this was against dictatorships and then against brutal free-market ‘shock therapy’ which outstrips anything even currently seen in Europe. Latin America became a laboratory for testing the neoliberal model that today predominates in Europe. In Latin America though it was often imposed at the barrel of a gun – most infamously in Chile where the popular Allende government was violently overthrown by the US-backed General Augusto Pinochet.
Resistance by the Latin American left created movements and leaders that today command huge support and have been governing successfully across the continent for the past decade. As former Brazilian President Lula said in his message to the Forum:
Progressive governments are changing the face of Latin America. Thanks to them, our continent is developing rapidly, with economic growth, job creation, distribution of wealth and social inclusion. Today, we are an international reference of successful alternative for neo-liberalism.
In Venezuela where this year’s Forum was held, neoliberalism left the country poorer in income per head in 1998, when President Hugo Chavez was first elected, than it had been in 1960. Today poverty, which had peaked at 70% in the mid 1990s, has been slashed to 27% in 2011, while extreme poverty has fallen to 7%. Venezuela’s rejection of neoliberal orthodoxy has resulted in five million Venezuelans being lifted out of poverty and three million from extreme poverty since 1998.[2] Venezuela’s on-going challenge to neoliberal austerity includes a staggering 250,000 social houses being built in the last 18 months as part of a huge fiscal stimulus that has got the economy back on track after worldwide recession hit it hard. This house building scheme has driven a rapid expansion in the construction sector which grew 29.6% in the first quarter of 2012, compared to a year earlier, and made an important contribution to the overall growth of 5.6%. Such a policy is clearly relevant to Britain.
As the US economist Mark Weisbrot has highlighted, in Bolivia economic growth has been higher than at any time in the last 30 years since left wing President Evo Morales took office in 2006. Key to this has been expansionary fiscal policy and control over national resources, especially the hydrocarbons sector. That this was achieved in one of the regions poorest countries shows that what is lacking in Europe is political will not economic resources.
Likewise in Brazil, which hosted the first ever São Paulo Forum, governments of the left have turned the nation into a serious economic power after decades of underachievement and the country’s deep inequality is now being tackled. In Ecuador, there are innovative mixes of environmental and economic development policies including proposals to avoid greenhouse emissions and protect indigenous communities by leaving oil underground.
Across the continent a form of integration and social solidarity is taking place which contrasts sharply with the punishment meted out to the people of Greece, Ireland and elsewhere by EU diktats that serve only financial interests. Nowhere is this difference in approach starker than with Operation Miracle, a joint programme that combines Venezuela’s oil resources with Cuba’s health system to provide free eye operations to restore the sight of poor people unnecessarily blinded by cataracts and other treatable conditions. Since its creation in 2004 more than 1.5 million people have benefited across Latin America and the Caribbean. Even Mario Teran, the man who shot dead Che Guevara, had cataracts removed and his eyesight restored in 2007.
There are real opportunities for progressives in Europe to learn from these experiences and the Latin American parties involved in the Forum seek to build bridges. The preliminary Forum document stated it would ‘support the efforts made by the European left wing to overthrow the neoliberal paradigm’ and ‘use our experience in Latin America’ to help the European left and ‘to prevent the current situation from being politically capitalised on by the extreme right’.[3] Already some European political forces that are completely opposed to cuts and to replacing the free-market capitalism with something more advanced are building strong links. Jean-Luc Melanchon, recent Presidential candidate of the Left Front in France, for example, attended the conference, as did senior representatives from Greek anti-austerity party Syriza.
With Latin America rising in importance in world affairs – as evidenced by Brazil’s place in the so called BRIC economies – the old ways of thinking about the continent will have to change. Today Latin America should be considered the most advanced place in the world for progressive politics and Europeans have everything to gain by learning from this development.
Lee Brown is Researcher and Campaigner on Latin America and a member of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign Executive Committee.
References
[1] For a full list of participating parties see http://forodesaopaulo.org/?page_id=52
[2] Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, Venezuala: how democracy and social progress are transforming a nation. Available at: http://www.vicuk.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=24&Itemid=58
[3] Original Spanish version http://forodesaopaulo.org/?dl_id=97 and English translation http://forodesaopaulo.org/?p=1378
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/learning_from_latin_america
Editor's Note: Last night I received a phone text mail message from a friend citing news that Bank of America Merrill Lynch recognized in an investment report that President Chavez will be re-elected and even if he cannot stand for re-election for health reasons, his substitute will win anyway. - LMB
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'Hugo Chávez and his co-religionaries have called for 21st-century socialism, not a return to Soviet-style economics.' Photograph: Handout/Reuters |
Some years ago, travelling on the presidential plane of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela with a French friend from Le Monde Diplomatique, we were asked what we thought was happening in Europe. Was there any chance of a move to the left? We replied in the depressed and pessimistic tones typical of the early years of the 21st century. Neither in Britain nor France, nor anywhere in the eurozone, did we see much chance of a political breakthrough.
Then maybe, said Chávez with a twinkle, we could come to your assistance, and he recalled the time in 1830 when revolutionary crowds in the streets of Paris had come out waving the cap of Simón Bolívar, the South American liberator from Venezuela who was to die at the end of that year. Fighting for liberty, Latin American style, was held up as the path for Europe to follow.
At the time, I was encouraged but not persuaded by Chávez's optimism. Yet now I think that he was right; it was good to be reminded that Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Greece's radical left party, Syriza, had visited Caracas in 2007 and inquired about the future possibility of receiving cheap Venezuelan oil, much as Cuba and other Caribbean and Central America countries do. There was a brief moment when Ken Livingstone and Chávezconjured up an oil deal between London and Caracas which looked promising until it was rejected by Boris Johnson.
More important than the prospect of cheap oil is the power of example. Chávez has been engaged since the turn of the century, even before, on a project that rejects the neoliberal economics that afflicts Europe and much of the western world. He has been opposed to the recipes of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and has fought hard against the policies of privatisation that harmed the social and economic fabric of Latin America and with which the European Union is now threatening to destroy the economy of Greece. Chávez has renationalised the many industries, including oil and gas, that were privatised in the 1990s.
The words and inspiration of Chávez have had an effect beyond Venezuela. They have encouraged Argentina to default on its debt; to reorganise its economy thereafter and to renationalise its oil industry. Chávez has helped Evo Morales of Bolivia to run its oil and gas industry for the benefit of the country rather than its foreign shareholders, and more recently to halt the robbery by Spain of the profits of its electricity company. Above all, he has shown the countries of Latin America that there is an alternative to the single neoliberal message that has been endlessly broadcast for decades, by governments and the media in hock to an outdated ideology.
Now is the time for that alternative message to be heard further afield, to be listened to by voters in Europe. In Latin America, governments following an alternative strategy have been re-elected time and time again, suggesting that it is effective and popular. In Europe, governments of whatever hue that follow the standard neoliberal template seem to fall at the first fence, suggesting that the will of the people is not engaged.
Chávez and his co-religionaries in the new "Bolivarian revolution" have called for "21st-century socialism", not a return to Soviet-style economics or the continuation of the mundane social democratic adaptation of capitalism, but, as the Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa has described it, the re-establishment of national planning by the state "for the development of the majority of the people". Greece has a wonderful chance to change the history of Europe and to throw their caps of Bolívar into the air, as once the Italian carbonari did in Paris all those years ago. Lord Byron, who planned to settle in Bolívar's Venezuela before sailing off to help liberate Greece, named his yacht Bolívar; he would certainly have been pleased with contemporary developments.
Source: The Guardian
Editor's Comment: Venezuela's National Assembly passed extraordinary new labor laws in support of workers on April 30, 2012. In a time when workers have had their rights stripped away and capitalist economies are collapsing throughout the United States and Europe, the Venezuelan government has managed to keep its economy thriving and has given the bounty to Venezuelan workers. We regard these new laws to be the most progressive labor legislation in the world today. We thank Axis of Logic Columnist, Arturo Rosales for his report and analysis.
- Les Blough, Editor
Arturo Rosales: This report does not include all the benefits to Venezuelan workers in the new labor law passed by the Venezuelan National Assembly but it provides the following key elements:
Note that all demonstrations and riots in France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Hungary have been against loss of wages, cuts in benefits, high unemployment, otherwise known as "austerity measures." At the beginning of this year in France, unemployment hit A 12-Year High and showed no signs of slowing down with 2.85 million people out of work. November, 2011 was the seventh consecutive monthly increase in unemployment in France and unemployment among their youth is now around 20%. As of March, 2012 Spain's unemployment is 24.4% and Portugal's unemployment rate among youth rose from 27 to 30% in 2011 with Portugal’s conservative Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho actually telling the unemployed to walk - you got it right - to emigrate! - to leave their country family and culture and "move to Portuguese-speaking countries like Brazil or Angola" to find work. And those are conservative perspectives on unemployment in Europe. In his article, "This Is Europe's Scariest Chart" Tyler Durden wrote on January 30, 2012:
"Some may be surprised to learn that while Portugal, and Greece, are quite bad, at 30.7% and 46.6% respectively, it is Spain where the youth unemployment pain is most acute: at 51.4%, more than half of the youth eligible for work does not have a job!"
Compare all this with Venezuela. In March, 2012 the active unemployed population in Venezuela decreased to 7.9 percent in March, which represents a variation of 1.3 percent and is 0.7 percent lower compared to March of last year. When Venezuela's unemployment rate today is compared with its unemployed in 1999, at which time 14.6 percent lacked jobs, its unemployment rate has fallen by 6.7 percentage points. This information comes from the Monthly Labor Report of the National Institute of Statistics. The lowered unemployment rate for March, 2012 is due in part to the boost to the economy provided by the Great Mission Knowledge and Work, a social program aimed at helping match individuals with employment opportunities and helping young people obtain their first job. The biggest change in recent years came in 2003, when the unemployment rate soared to 19.8 percent. That was due to the US-backed opposition's sabotage of the oil industry in December 2002 and January 2003.
The Venezuelan economy has brought new working-aged youth into the job market between 1999 and 2012 and also 370,000 of the formerly unemployed. As a result, 3.34 million people have been added to the labor market during that period. Elías Eljuri, the president of the National Institute of Statistics, explained that:
"the evolution of employment patterns continues in Venezuela, with an emphasis on boosting the most stable and productive sectors ... In 1999, formal employment was possessed by 49.5 percent of the working population, while as of March 2012, that figure rose to 58.7 percent, an increase of 9.2 percentage points."
Regarding the informal sector, 50.2 percent participated in this area in 1999, while last month, that number was 41.3 percent. The "informal sector" consists of those Venezuelans who are actually working but not in jobs considered within this statistiical analysis.
2012 is the year for national elections in Venezuela. Some surveys give Chavez a 77% approval rating and a 64% vote intention despite 85% of the media being against Chavez and the Revolution. Go figure.
Arturo Rosales is a seasoned journalist who has worked in a number of Latin American countries. Since 1999 he has been writing on a voluntary basis to disseminate the truth about environmental and energy issues which are often obfuscated in the corporate media. With the advent of the Bolivarian revolution he turned his hand to more politically angled writing, especially when analyzing the effects and strategy of the Global Corporate Empire on the third world and Latin America in particular. Currently, Arturo is a staff writer for Axis of Logic.
READ MORE ANALYSIS AND ESSAYS BY
AXIS OF LOGIC COLUMNIST, ARTURO ROSALES
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