Re: Musings of a Brennerite

["Martin Zehr" <m_zehr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"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."

I guess what your saying is that Pinochet made the trains run on time and
that fascism really is beneficial for children.


>From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
>Reply-To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Musings of a Brennerite
>Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 14:25:00 -0500
>
>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/

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