[Marxism] The "Left Turn" in Latin America

[Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus@xxxxxxxxx>]

full article at:
http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/left_turn.htm

Hugo Chávez is not willing to accept that in a country
like Venezuela, so rich in oil reserves and natural
gas, a majority of the population is struggling in
misery and held down by force while the wealth of a
small upper class is growing; that multinational oil
companies make enormous profits while the country
accumulates debts; that international companies get
rich off location conditions such as the water and
electricity supply while for the majority of the
population not even these elementary living conditions
are duly available.

What he finds scandalous is the consequences of the
inclusion of Venezuela as a oil supplying country into
the world market in general and specifically the
devastating political-economic direction at the end of
the 1980s: in the 1980s most countries of Latin
America, including Venezuela, fell not for the first
time into a debt crisis because the revenue from their
international business was less and less sufficient to
finance the increasing costs of their credits. The oil
dollars and other earnings from the business with
natural resources and agrarian products were
unproductively consumed by the private beneficiaries
or were transferred to foreign countries; the foreign
currency earnings mainly had to be used by the
government to pay the increasing debt service,
creditworthiness was perpetuated again and again
through new debts and with it the growing claims of
the international credit providors. That's how the
capitalistic handicap that the essential revenue
source of these countries is the utilization of their
natural resources and agricultural goods for the
capitalistic centers, i.e. for capitalistic business
elsewhere, and that they never got their own industry
capable of competing on the world market, asserted
itself.
They could never get rid of the status of a raw
material exporting country lacking capital; on the
contrary: for most of them it has consolidated.
National efforts to induce a profitable national
production in competition with foreign capital failed
because of the superiority of the established world
market powers and the conditions of the world market
enforced by them. And because a national accumulation
has not been induced, the majority of the people is of
no capitalistic use and only an encumberance for a
nation aiming for national enrichment, and they are
left to degenerate in slums.

>From the debt crisis, the Latin American governments,
in accord with the IMF, drew the conclusion that they
should further open their countries to foreign
business interests and advocated this policy as the
best way to more national wealth. The foreign
participation in the extraction of raw materials and
the business with agricultural exports, in Venezuela
especially the partially nationalized oil industry,
was again reorganized in favor of the multinational
companies in order to fetch more foreign capital for
the development of raw material extraction in the
country, to maintain creditworthiness with the private
and official international financial institutions and,
last but not least, to secure the goodwill of the USA,
the supervising power of the world market and world
finance. Additionally, the remaining state-owned
enterprises were privatized; the water and electrical
supply, as well as telecommunications and banks were
turned into investments for North American and
European multinationals ? under conditions which
guaranteed them a profitable business, guarantees for
the monetary value of their profits and free foreign
exchange operations.

Those countries indeed realized some billions of
additional revenues and new credits, but they only
found themselves soon again, and on a new level, in
the debt trap and this sped up the conflicts within
them. The privatization of the public utility
companies turned into only one long list of demands on
the governments: to ensure higher prices and profits,
indifferent to the poverty of the masses, so that a
large part of the population can no longer afford
water and electricity. Mass protests were put down
partly by force, partly by delaying tactics.

The arrangement of the concessions and the modalities
with the tributes, also in Venezuela, led to the
situation that the national revenue did not grow,
although the prices for crude oil and natural gas were
rising, whereas the multinationals, together with the
management of the national oil industry, made huge
profits and shifted the increasing dollar funds into
foreign countries, to the disadvantage of the national
foreign currency account.

This internationally demanded and nationally
implemented ?neoliberal? program of the countries of
Latin America - to prosper as an investment place for
foreign businesses, to make the debt service the
leading priority of budgetary policy and to manage the
drastic consequences for the country and people by
force - Chávez finds intolerable. Impoverishment and
forced oppression of growing parts of the population,
on the one hand, and domestic and foreign enrichment
on the other hand, proves to him that politics lacks a
proper national conviction.

In the poverty of the masses he detects the
subjugation of his country to foreign demands to
wealth and power and sees this as a betrayal of its
people. And it is also clear who is meant in
particular: the USA with their multinationals
companies, which claims Latin America as their
economic and political backyard.

Chávez is emphatic on the point of view that the
realities of the world market are not ?inherent
necessities? that have to be used to make the most out
of them, but rather interests that harm people and
nation, and which should be fought against.

The ex-military man who has close ties to the people
does not want to accept that the vast majority of the
population has to be kept in poverty by force because
it is - according to the hitherto valid criteria - a
capitalistically useless overpopulation. He wants to
eliminate the capitalistically produced and
governmentally supervised pauperism in his country:
out of a sump of social misery and suject of state
repression they should become a proper people
recognized in their life needs and requirements. The
masses, until now excluded from all the achievements
of civilization, should be granted what they deserve,
the right to a life in ?dignity.?

The means for such a social development program should
come from the money that the government gets from
world market relations. Instead of subjecting the
whole country to a terms and conditions which condemn
the vast majority to being a crowd without work and
income, the first man in Caracas agitates and acts for
the opposite: with the money from the raw materials
trade he wants to organize living conditions in which
his population can reproduce itself.




      
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