Re: On Academe and the list was Re: NACLA and Colombia

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nestor:
>academic work. So that I know what I am talking about when I say that what
goes
>on applies like glove to hand to the situation in Argentina (BTW, need I
remind
>list members that Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the current and awfully
>subservient President of Brazil, was a bold "academic Marxist" up to the
>late 70s and even early 80s?):

Something similar is happening right now in Mexico. Vicente Fox, the new
President, has made "leftist" Jorge Castaneda his Foreign Minister.
Castaneda is best known for a biography of Che Guevara. Although the book
is not hostile to Che, it is certainly hostile to the idea that revolution
is feasible in this hemisphere. According to the Boston Herald, the
biography "skillfully personalizes Guevara's most elusive and unexpected
traits: a highly romantic, idealistic nature, and unconventional
intellectualism. Readers are also treated to an insightful glimpse into the
fatal flaw that would ultimately be Guevara's undoing: a profound inability
to reconcile Communist ideology with the bleak political and economic
realities of the Latin American countries he tried so earnestly to
transform."

So how does one deal with this "profound inability" which is not only
expressed by the failure in Bolivia, but in Cuban-type struggles in
Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala 20 years later? He spells this out in
"Utopia Unarmed : The Latin American Left After the Cold War". In it he
makes the case that social democracy is the only feasible option for Latin
America, but is very much a postmodern version with NGO's and "civil
society" playing a key role. In a nutshell, these are the ideas that have
seeped northwards to NACLA.

Not content to present his ideas in best-selling books, Castaneda has also
been working overtime with like-minded intellectuals and politicians to
push his agenda on the state level.

Gathered together as the "Buenos Aires consensus," it is dominated by
center-left opposition leaders who see themselves as the coming wave of
Latin American politics. Trying to stake out a middle ground between the
extremes of left and right that have dominated the region's recent history
in sort of a "Third Way" Latin American style. One of their communiqués
proposes:

"We are firm proponents of overcoming the 'neoliberal' policies that have
extracted the market from its condition as an instrument and elevated it to
the status of a religion," the group stated. "Unrestrained privatization,
systematic reduction of taxes and deregulation of labor markets . . . have
aggravated social tensions and conflicts, deepening the poverty of vast
sectors of the population."

Anxious to distinguish himself from conventional bourgeois politicians,
Castaneda told the Los Angeles Times in 1997: "This is not 'neoliberalism
lite,' Clearly, the momentum has shifted. The participants see that this is
more and more important. They see that they may reach power soon."

One of the participants is Argentine politician Graciela Fernandez Mejide,
a "human rights crusader turned lawmaker" who perhaps Nestor knows
something about.


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