Musings of a Brennerite

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Posted to the Radical History mailing list by Andy Daitsman, Profesor de
Universidad de Talca, Chile:

Popular support for Pinochet (which amounts to at least thirty percent of
the total population, and perhaps ten to fifteen percent of the working
class) comes from two sources. First, the depth of the collapse of Popular
Unity in 1973. We really do have to remember that Allende's Chilean road to
socialism failed, and failed spectacularly. US leftists tend to blame that
failure on Kissinger and the CIA, but Chileans much more realistically
attribute it to severe divisions within the Popular Unity coalition and the
nature of the class struggle in Chile. In any event, by mid-1973 the
Chilean economy was a disaster and political society was completely
polarized into two competing and mutually exclusive camps. By September,
most Chileans were worn out from three years of intense political conflict,
and more than anything else simply wanted an end to the fighting -- and to
have food back in the supermarkets. Pinochet gave them both.

===

The evolution of infant mortality in Chile is also pretty interesting. When
Frei Montalva took office in 1964, more than 100 children died out of every
1000 that had been born, a rate that had dropped to about 80 when Frei
handed over the presidential sash in 1970. By the time Allende was
overthrown, his administration had achieved a further reduction to about 66
per 1000. Now comes the surprise, a bit of data I simply didn't believe
when I first heard it, but which has been confirmed by every source I've
looked at since. The Pinochet dictatorship achieved a drastic reduction in
infant mortality, despite the highly regressive redistribution of income
its economic policies promoted. In 1982, Chile reported an infant mortality
rate of 23.6 deaths per 1000 life births, and in 1989, it was reported at
22. The rate for 1999 is about 10 deaths per 1000 life births, which
compares very favorably to the US rate of 6.3. Again, major progess is this
critical indicator at the same time the capitalist revolution is taking place.

===

Javier Martinez and Alvaro Diaz argue in _Chile: the Great Transformation_
(Geneva and New York: United Nations and the Brookings Institute, 1996)
that an independent capitalist class had not yet emerged in Chile as of
1990, but they leave open the possibility that it could emerge during the
1990s. I think any contemporary analysis of Chile has to acknowledge that
that possibility became reality, the country does now have a recognizably
autonomous national bourgeoisie. Ricardo Lagos promised when he won the
primary elections a few months back that Chile would be a developed country
by the time he finishes his presidency in 2006; another way of saying it
would be that with its capitalist revolution Chile has moved (or is in
motion) from periphery to center, from Third World to First.

Wow. Wonder what Gunder Frank would say to that? Or Jim Blaut, for that
matter...

===

To sum up, I think the development of European capitalism is separable from
the European conquest of America. Capitalism began its development in
Europe before 1492, fundamentally out of domestic features pertaining to
the collapse of feudalism, but the conquest occurred not because Europe was
economically (or culturally, or technologically) more advanced than America
(the evidence suggests it was not), but rather because Europe belonged to a
larger epidemiological community than did America, and therefore the
European conquerors enjoyed the overwhelming advantage of their invisible
microbial allies. _After_ the conquest, colonial domination over America
did make European capitalism stronger than the other capitalisms with which
it was already in contact, capitalisms which, up until the eighteenth
century or so, Europe had been unable to defeat.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/