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NAFTA, Capitalism and Alternatives: Debate, IV
On Wed, 26 Apr 1995, Victor O. Story wrote:
> Harry seems blind to the fact that in most parts of Mexico the PRI did
> not have to cheat to win elections,
Victor: The difference is simple. You accept the PRI's version of events
and I don't. I accept as accurate a wide variety of accounts of fraud and
consider all the other things the PRI does, including buying votes and
controlling the news, as "cheating". There has been plenty of debate on
this issue elsewhere. Given that I don't consider the formal electoral
politics that exists in Mexico as democratic anyway (nor in the US for
that matter) I don't want to spend time debating just how undemocratic
it was in a particular case.
> the Peruvian people voted overwhelmingly for Fugimori,
Victor: I haven't followed the situation in Peru that closely, but there,
as in general, the choices appear to have been between tweedledee and
tweedledum so the results don't matter that much and vast numbers of
people, seeing that, don't bother to vote.
> the Nicaraguans voted the FSLN out a few years back,
Victor: from what I've read about the situation in Nicaragua you are
quite right. They voted out the FSLN with good cause, in as much as the
Sandinistas were imposing the same kind of austerity on their own people
as the IMF was doing elsewhere. Whether that situation would have
developed the way it did without the Contra war, the economic blockade,
etc. is an interesting issue, but not one I'm interested in taking up
here. I was criticizing the Sandinistas for their treatment of women, the
indigenous and campesinos years ago --and took a lot flack from the Left
about it.
>the Brazilians voted against Lula and for free amrkets by electing Cardoso,
Victor: once again, I haven't kept track of the evolution of the
campaigns and elections in Brazil but my previous comments hold with
respect to elections everywhere. When the capitalists and their
politicians gig the whole electoral process in their own favor and
command the vast majority of resources that can be brought to bear in it,
it is hardly surprising that their guys usually win. What is astounding
is how, from time to time, they lose.
At any rate, I'm not sure what the point is of what appears to be a
litany of Right-wing victories and Left-wing defeats (and I'll accept the
classification of the PRD, the Sandinistas and the PT as Leftists). You
seem to have wanted to argue that these votes prove that many people in
these countries "desire stability and have faith in better times ahead".
Of the first, I have no doubt, regardless of the vote. Few people
desire instability. Even the campesinos in revolt in Chiapas have not
desired instability, but as they have said, their lives have never been
"stable", but always on the edge of the precipice (or tumbling down it).
They have decided to fight the instability of their lives, not accept it
and the death it brings. As for the second, my guess is that in the midst
of all the economic and political crisis of Mexico this last year or so,
not even the capitalist apologists have "faith" in better times ahead,
much less the rest of the Mexican people. The elite may try to restore
the kind of "stability" they profit from, in order to gain "better
times" and others may yearn for better times, but the degree of
political tumult and bitter challenge to the existing order make it quite
clear that vast numbers of people are doing more than yearning. They are
willing to fight, fight not only for better times, but for times that are
better than they have been in the past with the PRI party-state squatting
on their lives like some giant blood sucking spider and weaving a tissue
of corruption and insecurity throughout the society in which they live.
Try as you may, vote counting does not the whole story tell, or even the
most essential part of it.
> and to top this off, Lenin and Stalin built socialism
> on the backs of the workers and pesants in a more hellish fashion than
> capitalism, and betrayed the workers and democracy with their blind
> ideology.
Victor, Victor, Victor: Why the red-baiting? You know I am no apologist
for either Lenin or Stalin. You have read my denunciations of
Soviet-style regimes as "state capitalist", differing from Western
capitalism more in form than in substance. Such unprovoked harangues
sound like a broken record of Jean Kirkpatrick's Cold War rhetoric.
What's the point in setting up a strawman and burning him down with
vitriolic words? [It works in print, where it takes forever for the
object of the miss-aimed attack to reply and point out the kind of fact I
just did. It doesn't work on the net, where the original arguments are
easily referenced and replies can come too quickly to be lost in the
haze of memory.]
> It is that blindness, that inability to see that the world is
> much more complex than our ideological propensities to explain IT, that
> makes the left impotent today.
Victor: Ah, we do, always, see through a glass darkly. But don't take
cheap shots about others not being as enlightened as you. I've
never met a person who didn't understand the difficulties of
understanding (except those who just don't want to think about it).
It is the human condition. That the world is more complex
than we can ever understand, is NOT the problem of the Left, it is the
problem of humankind. If the Left is "impotent" (as you insist on putting
it), it is because its visions of socialism (even those visions not tied
to the USSR, or China, or Cuba) have never really seen beyond capitalism.
They have always been visions warped by preoccupations with "greater
efficiency", "less anarchy", "a unified social project", "labor as the
essence of man", and so on, --all ideas permeated by capitalist values.
> The people of Latin America vote for
> capitalism because all else so far has been even worse.
Victor: to my knowledge no people, anywhere in Latin America, have ever
had a chance to vote AGAINST capitalism. Thus nowhere have they ever
voted FOR it either. Whether, on the other hand, people have sought to
construct alternatives to capitalism is a much better question. And I
think the answer is quite obviously yes. Your discourse suggests that YOU
think that "all else so far has been even worse" because the only
alternative you know of or can imagine is Lenin/Stalin style socialism
--which (although but a variation on the theme) WAS worse. As your
comments below make clear, you seem to like Marcos' writings. Yet within
those writings ARE alternatives to capitalism. If you can't find any
elsewhere at least you could examine those and stop beating the very dead
Stalinist horse.
> What is
> beautiful about the Zapatista Subcommandante Marcos is that he does not
> suffer from this blindness - he talks about democracy, honesty, dignity,
> and attacks NAFTA because the governments of the US and Mexico, and the
> bigshot capitalists, have abused the open markets and not allowed
> capitalism to develop in a way that will benefit the common people.
Victor: I'm not sure I want to get into a debate about what Marcos
"really means", if the man lives we'll have time to discuss it with him.
But my reading seems to be quite different from yours. Yes he talks about
democracy, honesty, dignity --none of which are characteristic of
capitalism, nor do I see any indication that he thinks they are, either
presently or in some reformed version. He attacks NAFTA because it is
designed to destroy the communities and lives of the indigenous people of
Chiapas. No where in his attack on the way the wealth of Chiapas has
been drained from it, have I found ANY appeal for "unabused" "open
markets". Nor do I see any indication that he thinks that left to
itself as it were, unperverted by governments and bigshot capitalists,
"capitalism" would "develop in a way that will benefit the common
people". Yes, he attacks particular forms of capitalist policies, like
neo-liberalism, but I see no trace of an embrace of some purer, less
adulterated variety. I see little evidence that Marcos is some kind of
libertarian merely bemoaning the distortions imposed on the market and
dreaming wistfully of a golden age when "open markets" will solve the
problems of the common people.
> Marcos has wisely abandoned the narrowminded Marxist rhetoric of the 19th
> century that still pervades chiapas-l and Mexico94.
>
> Victor Story
> Kutztown University
>
Victor: Yes, I agree, it is wise to abandon the narrowminded Marxist
rhetoric of the 19th Century. And Marcos's discourses have
been delightfully free of it. Unfortunately, you seem to equate
any and all critique of capitalism with that rhetoric. Please note: no
one that I've read on chiapas-l or Mexico94 has been raving about the
"historic mission of the proletariat", or calling for the "dictatorship
of the proletariat. Nor have I heard any orthodox Marxist/Leninist
rhetoric from the 20th Century such as calls for the "overthrow
of the Winter Palace/Los Pinos" or appeals to organize "the vanguard
party", or discussions of "contradictions among the people". I am well
aware that a variety of Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists (of all
types)and Maoists still exist. But the fact is: Chiapas-l and Mexico94
have been refreshingly free from the kind of sectarian squabbling
usually associated with such groups. Thus I would say that not only
does such rhetoric not "pervade" our lists, it is almost completely
absent and you have just killed another dead horse.
What IS present in the discourse of many on the lists, is a healthy
critical attitude toward capitalism. A widespread recognition that much
of what we see and do not like about what is going on in Chiapas, and
elsewhere in Mexico, is intimately bound up with capitalism. I suspect
that for many it is an open question as to what degree the evils they
observe and struggle against can be eliminated within the framework of
capitalism. Certainly the history of capitalist society demonstrates that
people can fight and win reforms of the system --at least in some places
and some times. But the depressing fact that throughout its entire
history, right down to the present, capitalist society has never
demonstrated the ability to move beyond exploitation, racism, sexism,
ethnic and cultural discrimination, gross inequalities in
opportunity, income and wealth, state and private brutality and a
host of other evils, has led a great many to consider the need to find
other ways of organizing society. What I find "beautiful" about the
texts of the Zapatistas (and not only those of Marcos, but also those of
other men and women) has been their ability to articulate a vision of a
better society and their efforts to begin the construction of such a
society today. I am amused when Durito blasts neo-liberalism. I am
inspired by the women warriors who have not only been able to draft a
bill of rights but who continue to build and elaborate new kinds of
gender relations. What they (like other women elsewhere) can see, and
imagine, goes beyond even the gains of the strongest, best organized
sectors of women in the world. They are doing what all of us are, or
should be doing: studying our desires and the constraints which limit
them (both their fulfillment and their development), fighting to defeat
those constraints and in so doing opening space, time and energy for the
further growth and flowering of our desire. Where they have not already
done so, I am convinced that the women in Chiapas will find (as so
many other women have discovered elsewhere) that one
of the most insidious but strongest constraints that they will need to
break is capitalism.
======================================
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173
USA
Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036
(off) (512) 471-3211
Fax: (512) 471-3510
E-mail: hmcleave@mundo.eco.utexas.edu
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