A "Marxist" defense of Pinochet

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a fascinating exchange from the Radical History mailing list at
H-Humanities. I occasionally try to find interesting things to read out
there, sandwiched between job announcements, journal publication dates,
etc. Daitsman, a professor in Chile who I recall as a graduate student from
an earlier version of the Marxism list, is using arguments closely allied
to Brenner's in order to come up with a left-Hegelian defense of Pinochet.
Jim Blaut is correct. This stuff can be toxic.

=====

From: andy daitsman <adaitsma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

At 10:05 AM 27-09-1999 +0000, Chris Brady wrote:
>(You first have to accept the premise that the capitalism
>Pinochet brought in was fundamentally new and different from previous
>capitalism.  As any good yarn, that would require a willing suspension
>of disbelief.)

Ok, let's suspend disbelief for a moment and look at a major difference in
Chile before and after the neoliberal revolution, the role of the state in
the economy.  Prior to 1970, the Chilean state practiced import
substitution industrialization (also known as ISI), creating new industries
through direct investment, protecting private industries through high
tarriffs and local content legislation, and heavily mediating labor
relations in the protected sector.  The CUT, the national labor federation,
negotiated with the state, rather than employers, and got much of what it
wanted.  Relatively high wages, for example, considering the level of
workers' productivity, and relatively low food prices, considering the
costs of food production.  The difference was made up through state
subsidies, financed fundamentally through taxes on export goods, especially
copper.

These subsidies went to everybody, by the way.  Industrialists received
protected markets, easy credit, and in some cases direct payoffs from the
state (glance through Peter Winn's Weavers of Revolution if you want to see
how the state created and supported the domestic textile industry in the
twentieth century).  Workers received higher real wages, that is take home
pay minus the cost of food, than they could have negotiated on their own.
Landowners, for their part, got direct payoffs from the state, as the price
paid by the state to the planter was actually higher than the one paid by
consumers for their food.

Now, what is capitalism?  We could say it's an economic system in which the
means of production are privately owned, and are operated by
proletarianized labor.  By that standard, Chile prior to 1970 looks
somewhat capitalist, but even by this restricted definition there are pesky
little differences.  Rural labor, for example, was not really
proletarianized, as large estates continued to rely heavily on workers
bound by debt obligations to the land for their labor force.  (Look at Jose
Bengoa, Historia social de la agricultura chilena, dos tomos, Santiago: SUR
Ediciones, 1988-1990) for a succinct description of inquilinaje in Chile as
it was practiced up until the agrarian reform.)  Also, important parts of
the means of production were socialized, that is owned by the state,
through its development arm the Corporation for Industrial Development
(CORFO in Spanish acronym).  And, considering the paternalistic role of the
state in labor relations, you might even make an argument that the urban
labor force was not fully proletarianized.  At least, I can imagine the
lines such an argument might take.

But, if it's necessary here to cite the bible, let's see what Uncle Karl
himself has to say about what capitalism is:

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without permanently revolutionizing the
instruments of production, that is to say the relations of production, and
therefore, all social relations.  In contrast, the unaltered conservation
of the old mode of production was the primordial condition for the
existence of all previous industrial classes.  The continuous disruption of
production, the uninterrupted commotion of all social situations, eternal
insecurity and mobility distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all others....

"To the great sorrow of the reactionaries, [the bourgeoisie] has removed
the terrain of national sustenance from under the feet of industry.  The
ancient national industries have been annihilated, and continue to be so
daily.  They are displaced by new industries, whose establishment becomes a
vital question for all civilized nations, industries that no longer
elaborate local raw materials, using instead others that come from distant
regions, and whose products are no longer consumed only in the country
where they are made but rather, in a simultaneous way, in all the
continents....

"We have seen, then, that the means of production and communication on
which bourgeois society is based originated in feudal society.  In a given
stage of evolution, these means of production and communication ...
inhibited production instead of stimulating it.  They became bonds
restricting development.  It was necessary to break them, and they were
broken.

"Their place was taken by free competition, with the appropriate social and
political constitution, under the economic and political hegemony of the
bourgeois class." (Manifiesto del Partido Comunista, in Encuentro XXI 4:12
(Winter 1998), p. 88-9, my translation from the Spanish).

Capitalism, then, for Marx, implies a dynamic and vigorous mode of
production, one engaged in a constant process of revolutionizing the means
and relations of production, a revolutionary process driven by the forces
of competition in the marketplace, dominated by constant change and social
insecurity, a mode of production under the direct domination of the
bourgeoisie.  By this definition, I think it's really difficult to
characterize Chile prior to 1975 as a capitalist country.  A socialized
economy in the industrial sector competes with, and perhaps even dominates,
the bourgeoisie, while rural social relations strongly resemble European
feudalism.  The economy is stagnant, lacking that dynamic, permanently
revolutionary character Marx insists upon.

After 1975, however, the capitalism that Marx describes in the Manifesto,
and in Capital, closely resembles Chile today.

You can resume your disbelief now, if you care to.

>There is a flip side, a darker side to the glorious victory of
>capitalism in the fin de siecle vingt, something my debate partner has
>consistently neglected in all his trumpeting of capitalism's triumphs
>and his redundant jeering that socialism failed.

I'm jeering at the failure of socialism?  I didn't realize.  I thought I
was insisting on a fairly basic historical point, that people make their
own history (even if not always under circumstances of their own choosing).
 Likewise, I didn't realize I was glorifying the capitalist victory in
Chile.  It's a fact that socialism failed here, and that capitalism
succeeded.  Given that fact, we have to look at the nuances of what
capitalism means.  In a very basic sense, it means the liberation of
productive forces that had been restrained under the previous mode of
production.  Capitalism means greater wealth overall in society, even if it
means increasingly unequal distribution of that wealth (though I for one am
not convinced that the poorest of the poor in Milwaukee, for example, are
worse off than the poorest of the poor in, say, Port-au-Prince).

My problem with your analysis of Chilean capitalism, Chris, is that you
emphasize unequal distribution to such an extent that you can't see the
greater overall social wealth.  And being unable to see the first part
locks you into a mode of social analysis that makes Lavin's success in the
polls look simply irrational, rather than as a response to concrete social
and economic factors.  It also makes you unable to understand the depth and
breadth of the sentiment that Pinochet's detention in London is an affront
to national honor.  It makes me sick to my stomach, but most Chileans
appear to feel that way.

I don't know if the economy determines in the last instance -- I tend to
find Laclau and Mouffe's critique of Althusser to be fairly convincing.
But there is absolutely no doubt that the capitalist revolution here has
created new levels of prosperity, especially in terms of the broad
availability of consumer goods.  The social costs of that transformation
were extremely high, as you continuously note and I've never challenged --
public education and public health were gutted, organized labor was smashed
and real wages decimated, an entire generation lost their pensions in the
economic collapse of 1983.  When the dictatorship was defeated at the
polls, twice (in 1988 and 1989), reliable estimates put the number of
people living in poverty at over five million, more than a third of the
total population of fourteen million.  To this day, there are gaping holes
of inequity in the public economy, the minimum wage is less than two
hundred dollars a month, even though the cost of living here is not much
less than in the US, public school teachers earn less than three hundred
dollars a month, the public health system is severely underfunded.  The
estimate of those living in poverty, however, has dropped tremendously in
the last nine years, down to about two million individuals.

Capitalism, with all its alieniation, atomization, and class divisions
included, is nevertheless delivering to substantial portions of this
population some things they really think they want.  Of course there are
voices here that question the new alignments, and in particular the Chilean
Communist Party has been articulating a critique very similar to yours.
But the CP at the moment is living one of the lowest points in its history,
with its presidential candidate garnering less than five percent of the
vote in pre-electoral polls, down from a peak of nearly fifteen percent
during Popular Unity.  Of course we could spend all our time moaning about
how evil imperialist capitalism stole that beautiful Chilean experiment
from us, and then spent nearly twenty years brutally oppressing all those
wonderful, long-suffering Chilean peasants and workers.  But we wouldn't
even come close to getting what really happens here if we did that.

For a rigorous critique of all things existing,
Andy Daitsman

Profesor de Historia                            adaitsma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Instituto de Estudios Human=EDsticos            fono: (56)(71) 20 1518
Juan Ignacio Molina
Universidad de Talca
Talca
Chile


--




Louis Proyect

(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)