Street Roots • June 30-July 6, 2017
Book Review
Page 11
Global lessons from Latin America’s left
BY MIKE WOLD
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
I
n the early 2000s,
South America was
a beacon of hope
for developing nations.
In country after
country - Venezuela,
Argentina, Chile,
Ecuador, Paraguay,
Brazil, Uruguay,
Bolivia and more —
leftist or at least left-of-
The Last Day of center governments
Oppression, and came into power,
the First Day of supported by social
movements of poor and
the Same: The
indigenous groups.
Politics and
Fifteen years later,
Economics of
Venezuela’s Bolivarian
the New Latin
American Left,” Revolution is in deep
trouble. Brazil’s and
by Jeffery
Paraguay’s leftist
Webber
presidents were
removed through
“constitutional coups.” A right-wing
president was elected in Argentina. Leftist
governments in Ecuador and Bolivia are still
in power, but are having significant conflicts
with the social movements that elected
them.
Was the swing to the right inevitable? Not
at all, says Jeffery Webber, in spite of the
title of his book, “The Last Day of
Oppression, and the First Day of the Same:
The Politics and Economics of the New
Latin American Left.” The title is coined
from an Ecuadorian saying that is roughly
the equivalent of The Who’s famous lyric,
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Webber’s thesis is that the leftist
governments in South America alienated
their base and opened the door to the right
by failing to challenge capitalism at its root.
Although specifics differ from country to
country, similar patterns emerged:
Governments in the 1980s and 1990s
inflicted economic hardship with neoliberal
free-market policies and social movements
organized to bring those governments down.
In countries with dictatorships, democracy
was restored. Free elections allowed left
leaning governments to come to power.
Once in power, the new governments used
revenues from oil, minerals and agriculture
to fund social programs to start to eliminate
poverty and give poor people a greater
voice. This approach worked — to a point —
mainly because commodity prices were
high, fueled particularly by China’s rapid
industrialization. But part of the reason it
worked was that the rich elite were still able
to make substantial profits, while
government programs reduced social unrest.
In most countries, the rich elite eventually
made their peace with the new
governments; those governments, in turn,
incorporated portions of the upper class
into their ruling coalition.
This approach to development had its
downsides. Little was done to reduce these
countries’ dependence on the world market
by developing their own industrial base,
leaving them at a disadvantage in the global
division of labor. The dependence on oil,
mining and export-oriented agriculture for
government revenue pushed ostensibly
progressive governments to expand
corporate farming and large-scale mining
into rain forests, leading to conflict with
indigenous supporters and creating new
entrepreneurs with an economic stake in an
“extractivist” economy. Then, as China’s
industrialization slowed down and the 2008
recession hit, revenues fell, reducing the
amount of surplus available for social
programs, which threatened the leftist
parties’ base and brought them into conflict
with the rich elite.
Webber’s chapters are semi-independent
essays, some having to do with analyzing a
specific country, some more focused on
theoretical issues of development and social
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F W IK IM E D IA C O M M O N S
People in Sao Paulo, Brazil, turned out to
protest Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution in
May. M any leftist governments in South
America are struggling.
revolution. His detailed analysis of the
economic program of Evo Morales’
government in Bolivia — one of the most
promising of the leftist tide in South
America — convincingly demonstrates the
divergence between the rhetoric of social
change and what really happened on the
ground.
Most of the other chapters are more
abstruse; the book is mostly written in
academic Marxist terminology, barely
understandable to anybody outside that
theoretical framework. Apparently, Webber’s
intended audience is other academicians
rather than people in the social movements
or even the governments he describes. This
is a pity, because the lessons from South
America seem applicable to countries across
the globe, shedding light, for example, on
the failure of the left in Greece to find a
solution to their economic crisis. Unlike
some Marxists, Webber works to
incorporate the dynamics of race and
gender into his analysis, though the
discussion is often quite abstract.
Many radical discussions of developments
in Latin America focus mainly on the
culpability of the U.S. and corporations in
disrupting democratic processes and
preserving inequality and corporate profits.
Webber’s focus on the internal dynamics in
these countries is helpful in understanding
why this outside intervention is inevitably
successful. Webber also distinguishes
himself from radical commentators who
suggest that the state is inherently corrupt
and that social movements should organize
only outside it, rather than trying to take
power. He agrees with Daniel Bensai'd, who
said that, “You can pretend to ignore power,
but it will not ignore you.”
What does Webber think leftists in power
should do? Some of that is implicit in his
analysis: transform government to give
social movements control; deepen
democracy; avoid co-optation, corruption
and bureaucratization; build an industrial
base independent of international capital.
The likely outcome, however, is not defined
very well. Webber finds promise in Peruvian
Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui, who looked
to indigenous methods of organization as
forerunners of socialist transformation. But
one suspects that Webber, like many of his
Marxist colleagues, doesn’t believe that
single countries, or even regions of the
world, can successfully extract themselves
from exploitation without a world revolution.
Even if they’re right, there needs to be a
vision for what countries such as Bolivia or
Brazil can do in the meantime.
Reprinted from Street Roots’ sister paper,
Real Change News in Seattle
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