Alternatives International

Highlights of the Seventh Asia-Europe People's Forum (AEPF-7)

Tina EBRO and Maris dela CRUZ — 2009-05-04T08:10:35Z

The Asia-Europe People's Forum 7 with the theme “For Social and Ecological Justice” took place in Beijing between the 13th and 15th October 2008. Since the venue was China, there were intrinsic limitations and challenges that emerged from the very outset of its preparatory phase. Nonetheless, AEPF-7 turned out to be a hugely successful event and a number of Asia-Europe observers considered it as 'historic'.

It was the biggest NGO conference ever to take place in China since the NGO women's Conference in 1995. It was also the first of its kind to focus on Europe-Asia relations and issues.

Features
Participants

Crucial to the People's Forum was the involvement of over 500 participants from 40 countries, most of whom were from organizations that are active in the global justice movement.

Over 200 from China, the majority from organisations that are part of the China NGO Network for International Exchanges (CNIE) but also a range of grassroots organisations and NGOs based in Beijing and Hong Kong.

Over 200 from other parts of Asia who are representatives of key regional issue-based formations or NGOs and important national networks in Asia, e.g. human rights, peace and security, labour, migrants, trade, debt, women, water, ecology.

Examples of these prominent regional networks and NGOs are: Jubilee South-Asia Pacific Movement on Debt and Development, Forum Asia, Action Aid, Bank Information Center, Focus on the Global South, NGO Forum on ADB, Committee on Asian Women, DAWN-Southeast Asia, Doctors Without Border, Non-violence International Southeast Asia, Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives, Migrant Forum Asia, International Committee of Women, International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development, Pakistan-India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy, Globalization Monitor, and International Center for Health Equity.

Over 100 from the European Union from 18 member states, mainly representatives of key Euro-wide issue-based networks and development institutions that are mostly focusing on Asia.

Examples of these networks are: International Peace Bureau, One World Action, Asia House, Transnational Institute, 11.11.11, Oxfam, Pax Romana, World Peace Council, Euro-Burma Center, Eurodad, No to Bases, Clean Clothes Campaign, ATTAC, Institute for Globalisation Studies & Social Movements, Council of Europe, European Youth Forum, Observatori del deute en la Globalització ODG, Corporate Europe Observatory, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Commission for Filipino Migrant Workers, European Network against Arms Trade, Seattle to Brussels Network, Friends of the Earth, Europe solidaire sans frontiers, Disabled People International, FIAN, Women in Development Europe, Ecologistas en Accion, Carbon Trade Watch, StateWatch, War on Want, Solidar and UNISON.

There were a number of present and former Members of Parliament, policy-makers, and state advisers (Malaysia, UK, Finland, Philippines, India, Romania, Spain, Pakistan, Vietnam, Greece, Italy) who attended and most of whom AEPF can closely work with in the future as the focus for the activities after the forum will be a 'People's Agenda for Parliamentarians'.

There were prominent development activist- scholars who served as speakers/ resource persons for the plenaries, workshops, side events and strategy meetings. Among them were Walden Bello, Boris Kagarlitsky, Charles Santiago, Heidi Hautala, Dot Keet, Luciana Castellini, Achin Vanaik, Ben Hayes, Brid Brennan, Athanacius Pafilis, Koen de Feyter, Pierre Rousset, Johannes Schmidt, Ramon Duran, Anu and Kamal Chenoy, Hillary Wainwright, Farooq Tariq, Seema Mustafa, Pushpa Bhave, Tran Dac Loi, Christa Wichterich, Ruth Manorama and Rodney Bicherstaffe.

Plenaries and Workshops

The participants had a lively and fruitful interaction in three Roundtable Plenaries on 'Peace and Security,' 'Social and Economic Rights, and Environmental Justice' and 'Participatory Democracy and Human Rights' and in 30 workshops.

Most participants expressed that there was a high quality of exchanges and debates, which can also be attributed to the excellent speakers/ major resource persons from Asia, Europe, as well as from China (from top academes, institutions and think-tanks) and to the key campaigners who actively contributed to the discussions.

Moreover, a significant outcome of the workshops was the report of a number of workshop linkpersons that participating organisations resolved to pursue further exchanges and intitiatives after AEPF-7. These are the Workshops on Religious Fundamentalism, Alternative Regionalism and People-centered Political Parties & Social Movements.

A full list of the workshops is attached. They included

the first workshop in the AEPF on the Rights of People Living with HIV/AIDS. This was also an important workshop in the Chinese context.

An 'historic' workshop linking a range of organizations including NGOs from inside Myanmar/Burma, as well as representatives of internationals solidarity formations for Myanmar/Burma, i.e. ALTSEAN BURMA Network, ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AIPMC), Euro-Burma Center, etc. This led to what was considered by both the participants and the organisers as an auspicious and significant contribution to the people's dialogue with respect to Myanmar/ Burma. The fact that this workshop took place in Beijing has extra significance.

The workshop on human rights brought together key national human rights groups in the ASEAN (from Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam) who were able to discuss the prospects and requirements of building an Asian regional human rights mechanisms. European human rights specialists also shared in the workshop their insights and lessons in this field.

Specific workshops included ones on strategies for conflict prevention; the arms trade; the MDGs, Food Sovereignty and Security; Migrant Labour; Decent Work and Labour Rights and Protection; Social Security; Alternative Energy policies; Climate Change and Ecological Justice; Local Governance: Participatory Democracy; Women's Political Participation; Protecting Rights of the Disabled; Regional Human Rights Mechanisms in Asia and Europe.

Strategy Meetings for Post-Beijing Initiatives

There were also a wide range of additional meetings and caucuses to strategize on common activities after AEPF-7.

There were Strategy Meetings of the following: Migrant networks (Asia and Europe) , Urban Poor formations (ASEAN), No Bases Network (global), EU-ASEAN FTA Campaign Network, Water Justice Network (Asia-Europe), and Women's Organisations (Asia, China and Europe). Most of these meetings resulted in the formulation of some resolutions and consolidation of ideas for post-Beijing actions that will be pursued.

The campaign plan of the EU- ASEAN FTA coalition (a major AEPF campaign) for next year was firmed up. In addition, a new inter-regional advocacy towards parliamentarians and policy-makers, “Universalising Social Protection for the Poor in the Period of Crisis”, was planned that will be spearheaded by urban poor coalitions.

Geographical caucuses of Burmese, Indian, Vietnamese and Philippine groups were held and AEPF-7 had provided venue for country-based organizations to discuss urgent issues and develop further cooperation in the future.

A major result of these meetings was the proposals for AEPF expansion in South Asia. Three proposals from India, Pakistan, and Nepal were submitted to the AEPF International Organising Committee (IOC) to expand and activate AEPF committees in these countries and to hold a South Asia caucus in the near future. These proposals are manifestations of the realization by the participants of the importance of AEPF.

Response to the Current Crises

Since AEPF-7 was held soon after the “eruption” of the financial meltdown in the US, the IOC provided a timely response to the present crises that was commended by most of the participants. First, the IOC ensured that the opening speeches of both speakers from Asia and Europe tackled not only the financial/economic crisis, but also the crises of food, energy and climate change. The two speakers showed that the current crises, which is multiple and systemic, threaten the lives of millions who are already poor and suffering across the globe, and posed a compelling challenge to the participants.

In addition, there was a series of nightly debates on the analysis of the financial/economic crisis as well as on possible solutions and alternatives. These rich and animated discussions produced a statement called “The Beijing Declaration” which summed up the key analysis and proposals in addressing the present crises.

Relationship with Chinese Foreign Ministry

The AEPF-7 not only provided venue to build relations with the civil society in China, but it also gave an opportunity to present the people's issues and concerns of Asia and Europe to the Chinese government through its Foreign Ministry.

Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi attended the opening ceremony on Monday 13th and gave an opening keynote speech. He met with other speakers , MPs from Malaysia and Finland and representatives from the AEPF International Organizing Committee and the National Organizing Committee beforehand

The Final Declaration was presented at the Foreign Ministry to Shen YongXiang, Deputy Director-general

The Final Declaration was presented at the ASEF Conference to Ambassador Wang Xuexian, Chinese Senior Official for ASEM

Before AEPF-7, extended and intense negotiations took place both directly with the Chinese Foreign Ministry and indirectly through the National Organizing Committee of the Asia-Europe People's Forum – the China NGO Network for International Exchanges (CNIE) for the Forum to happen. These continued during the Forum itself on some key issues.

Eventually, the Forum received substantial financial support from the Chinese Foreign Ministry as well as clear encouragement for the Forum to take place and for the range of topics and participants.

Relationship with the European Commission and European Union Delegation

Generous support from External Relations Directorate General and AIDCO, and realised commitment for 101 Asian participants (95 managed to actually attend)

Excellent solidarity and support from Head of EU Delegation and staff in the Philippines

Invitations to Head of Delegation and international Relations in the EU delegation in China

Attendance by representative from EU delegation in China

Planned meetings with EU delegation in China after AEPF7

Limitations and Challenges
Since AEPF-7 was held in Beijing, the IOC had to work with major Chinese NGOs that served as members of the National Organising Committee (NOC). These organisations are close with the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Chinese government itself and are not working closely with independent ngos. While the IOC highly appreciated their competence and hardwork, social commitment and solidarity, there were some differences in perspectives on the issue of civil society development in China and on Tibet, and Myanmar/Burma that resulted in tensions during the preparatory period of AEPF-7.

Among the difficulties experienced by the IOC was that it had to struggle up to the last minute in order to help invited participants (especially the independent Burmese NGOs) get their invitation letters and visas. The IOC also had to negotiate until the first day of the event to ensure participation of autonomous Chinese NGOs in AEPF-7.

The venue was located in a secluded area, thus inaccessible to the media and other local groups. It was 45-minutes away from the city center although still in Beijing. The tight security measure enforced in the venue made the participants uncomfortable and was denounced publicly by some participants (i.e. there was a police security post in front of the hotel that tightly checked every incoming participant)

The Chinese Embassies also invited participants without informing the IOC, and some are representatives of conservative political parties.

There were also observations that in many workshops, the Chinese made sure they controlled the facilitation of the program as well as the report of the workshops. While a number of participants appreciated the participation of excellent Chinese resource persons in the workshops, some had also expressed dissatisfaction to Chinese speakers who merely mouthed state and party positions.

In spite of the problems along the way, the Chinese members of the NOC expressed their willingness and openness to develop cooperation with the Asian and European civil society organisations, and to further promote AEPF issues especially on the areas of social and ecological justice.

Likewise, IOC members and many Asian and European participants expressed their common desire to continue working together with Chinese NGOs and strengthen solidarity ties with social movements in China.

Conclusion
To conclude, AEPF-7 reached a new height in terms of advancing the perspectives and interests of “the people” in Asia-Europe relations, especially in the areas of peace and security, democracy and human rights, and social and economic rights. The event significantly helped in consolidating and expanding AEPF's network of progressive civil society organisations, in strengthening their existing campaigns, and in solidifying their linkages and working in between the biennial Forums on urgent issues common to both regions.

One very significant achievement of AEPF-7 was that it had responded timely to the present crisis situation. It not only came up with alternative policy proposals, but it had also paved the way for the coming together of sectors such as the poor, human rights and democratisation advocates, as well as the progressive parliamentarians who shall pursue the universalisation of social protection for the poor in the period of crisis.

Though there were issues such as Tibet and Taiwan that were not allowed by the Chinese to be part of the AEPF-7 program, it was a breakthrough that this civil society event could take place in China and take on critical global issues on peace, social and economic justice, democratisation and human rights. Moreover, the Forum provided an opportunity for the Chinese civil society to have exposure on these issues.

On the other hand, the Asian and European civil society learned a lot from the interaction with the Chinese. Also, solidarity linkages between various Chinese NGOs and the Asian and European civil society organisations were forged and there were prospects for further cooperation in the future.

To quote a noted specialist on Asia-Europe relations: “The AEPF remains as the only permanent network linking Asian and Europen movements. It retains, thus a significant function – all the more because Asia is a weak link in European solidarities; and Europe is a weak link (compared with the US !) in Asian solidarities”.

Indeed, for over a decade now, AEPF has remained a rare and valuable vehicle for people's solidarity and joint actions across the two regions, and for advancing the people's voice within Asia-Europe relations in the areas of peace and security, socio-economic rights and ecological justice, and democratisation and human rights.

EBRO Tina, dela CRUZ Maris

The Crisis of Finance Capitalism: Challenges For The Left

Rosa Luxemburg Foundation — 2009-04-19T10:57:41Z

The brave new world of neoliberalism lies in ruins. Its wealth turned out to be based on robbery, sham and deceit. The Left is in a new situation. Without its self-transformation and development of a capacity to act that is adequate for these times, it will squander for a long time any possibility of becoming a force of social, ecological, democratic and peace-promoting social transformation beyond capitalism. This paper, presented here in a shortened form, aims to contribute to the discussion about the strategies of a Left that is renewing itself in the crisis of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism in Crisis

The hard-pressed, insecure, plundered community is supposed to pay the bill of a more than thirty-year long orgy of redistribution from below to above, from the public to the private. Millions of workers have lost not only their jobs, but also their homes and pensions. The financial crisis is intertwined with a cyclical economic crisis and the exhaustion of previous fields of growth of a self-centered society and the information technology revolution. At the same time, the costs of global warming explode and take away from hundreds of millions of people the foundation of their life. The economic crises interwoven with each other threaten to flow into strengthened constraints of repression and competition and to become the lever of a perfected system of neo-colonial exploitation.

Neoliberal Responses to the Over-Accumulation Crisis

The crisis of neoliberal financial capitalism broke out in its core and has a systemic cause: it was triggered by a previously unrecognized self-governance of the financial sphere with respect to other economic fields and the inclusion of all social fields into speculative financial businesses beyond any possibilities of social or state organization.

Fundamentally, in the face of the real relations of forces, different ways of overcoming the current economic crisis are thinkable and are to be viewed from an historical perspective as possible. Each of these ways is of a political nature and does not emerge spontaneously from the economy. They all presuppose active dimensions of the state. It would be a catastrophe if the economic crisis were to be coupled with a collapse of such dimensions of the state.

One can attempt to direct the surplus capital into new areas of investment. A current possibility, in no way to be discounted, is also an inflation policy, linked with extreme social and international tensions. Both - the opening up of new fields of accumulation or the inflationary devalorization of capital - can also go together hand in hand. If the current tendency of over-accumulation of capital is not stopped, the explosive material of an even greater financial, economic and social crisis will build up.

The Social Crisis of Financial Capitalism and the Necessity of Alternatives

Whether or not the current crisis will become a systemic crisis is an open question. As a structural crisis of capitalism, however, it is in many respects a social crisis of capitalism.

First: with the crisis of the market radical mode of regulation whose exposed expression is the financial crisis, the ideology of neoliberalism has been shaken.

Second: neoliberalism has brought forth structures that are not viable. Important goods for a life with human dignity were only completely unsatisfactorily produced. The current crisis pushes large parts of the global society into growing insecurities and leads increasingly to revolts among those who are hit most hard in the foreign and domestic peripheries. Protest and resistance are forming on all levels, still fragmented and many without clear direction, but growing.

Third: democratic governmental forms have been implemented in many countries in the last twenty years. At the same time, the social, economic and cultural basis of democracy is undermined.

Fourth: neoliberal capitalism has also squandered its legitimation on the terrain of domestic and foreign security. In the Iraq war, the imperial claim to structure order in every region of the world according to the paradigm of the West with military violence when other methods were not possible has failed. Expenditure for armaments and war are lacking for the financing of development in the South and the public services even in the rich countries.

A New Orientation of Social Forces

Very different forces are working on projects, tendencies and scenarios for the re-establishment and/or development of bourgeois capitalist domination. Just like in the crisis of Fordism from 1968 onwards, different crisis moments come together, which are met by an intensification of the old mechanisms of regulation, while already something new is coming into existence. The following tendencies within neoliberalism, which at the same time point beyond it, are developing at the moment in parallel.

(A) New State Interventionism

The rulers are reacting to the crisis by changing rapidly and suddenly the open, decades-long contempt for the state - in reality, regularly active even in neoliberal capitalism - into massive state interventions.

The state rescue actions also include elements - even if very limited - of a consensus securing support for social groups with low incomes, the limitation of manager incomes and even consideration of state participation in industry enterprises. The bank rescue packages were followed by state anti-cyclical conjuncture programs. Within the EU the Lisbon strategy, with all its problems, is maintained.

(B) The Regulation of the Financial Markets and the Fight over a New Bretton Woods

Now the future of the global financial system becomes the centre of the debates: restorative forces that want to use the state and its finances for the re-establishment of the old order and "crisis gamblers" who try to become winners out of the crisis are pitted against reformist initiatives that clearly want to go beyond the previous status quo. A real break with neoliberalism, however, cannot yet be discerned.

With the renewal and the building up of the public sphere above all through new investment programs in public infrastructures, education and health systems and the creation of new jobs in those branches, particular groups around President Obama attempt both to make up for the crash of the U.S. economy and to deal with the crisis of reproduction and jobs and to submit new offers of consensus to the lower social groups. A Public New Deal is supposed to deliver the reconditioning of the general conditions for the reproduction of capital.

(D) Green New Deal

A green New Deal contains a state initiated and massively subsidized transition (transformation) to an "ecological" mode of production that opens up new fields of accumulation for capital seeking investment possibilities (the further commodification of natural resources in the field of bio-diversity or gene technology; technologies for ecological increase in efficiency in production and energy conservation); new investment and speculation possibilities open both new markets in certificate or emissions trading and in ecological consumption. Nature and environmental protection becomes a commodity, which limits the possibilities of solving the ecological crisis. The green New Deal is thus not the solution of the ecological crisis; rather, it is the attempt of its elaboration in the sense of a re-establishment of expanded capitalist accumulation and hegemony over the inclusion of progressive oppositional groups and interests of the subalterns.

(E) Millennium Goals and Struggle for a more Just World Order

Global catastrophe or global cooperation - tendencies toward a global cooperative capitalism are intensified under the pressure of this alternative.

A great signal for the cooperative reduction of poverty in wide regions of the globe was the decision on 8 Millennium Goals at the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in September 2000. Supplementary steps were agreed upon at previous and following conferences. However, the reality in the developing countries admonishes the weakness of cooperation against poverty.

Tendencies toward international cooperation exert an effect on global environmental politics. In the last minute of the negotiations, the USA, still under Bush's presidency, saw itself forced at the environment conference in Bali in December 2007 to vote for a compromise suggestion, which opened the way for Kyoto follow up controls. The ecological components in Obama's conjuncture program confirmed that.

(F) The emergence of an entire range of variations and
the competition of post-neoliberal development

The Washington consensus was already delegitimated before the crisis; after the crisis it will be completely gone. Neither can the USA and Europe determine alone the rules of the game, nor is a transnational consensus recognizable.

In South America, strong social movements have upset governments, centre-left governments have been brought to power, approaches of participative politics and economies based on solidarity have been established, and indigenous movements have forced another way of dealing with representation, public life and property.

Also in India strong movements have been formed, of peasants, the landless, "untouchables" and networks critical of globalization.

Even more clearly, China's state capitalism or the investment policies of the Gulf States seek - from above, that is - to bring capitalist dynamics and state controlled development with selective opening into another relation, and thus to determine (more) independently the future of their countries.

In Scandinavia, despite neoliberal hegemony, different elements of another type of capitalism as well have been maintained.

Internationally, there was formed inside the WTO another G20+, as a loose union of countries of the ‘global South,' in order to put something against the negotiation power of Europe, the USA and Japan and to strengthen the position of the ‘global South.' Whether or not these developments will lead to the formation of a new capitalist bloc with its own hegemonic political or imperial ambitions, is still not clear.

As counterweight to the transnational institutions like the IMF, the World Bank or the WTO, regional integration projects that go beyond them like Mercosur or ALBA in Latin America are promoted, cooperation between China, Japan and South Korea or the ASEAN states is slowly deepened, and regional development banks like the Banco del Sur have been founded.

Nevertheless, this should not be overlooked by any means: people in Africa are further taken down and are nonetheless confronted massively with free trade demands. The Millennium Development Goals were not reached.

(G) A New Authoritarianism

For years, the movement of particular social groups toward the right has been observable. The precaritisation of modes of labour and life and the thinning out of the so-called middle classes is linked to the return of strong boundaries of exclusion and respectability, authoritarian educational and service notions as well as an intensification of migration politics and exclusion. With the assumption of governmental power by clearly right wing governments, there is the attempt to forge a social consensus, under the cover of nationalistic invocations, between the upper and lower layers of society.

In terms of foreign politics, imperial policies, the war against terror is emphasized as a war of cultures and linked to the intensification of security and control politics. The asylum and migration politics of the EU aims overridingly at economic gain and treats people as "security risks." Repressive measures are implemented in an intensified form against oppositional positions, and also in social policy: the strengthening and broadening of the police and "punishment of the poor" are supposed to guarantee their assimilation and prevent their unrest.

For their own hegemonic project, authoritarianism is certainly not sufficient, since attractiveness and economic potential remain limited. Just as bio-dictatorial measures are only imaginable as a tendency within other hegemonic projects or for limited and defined spaces, so authoritarianism and even elements of fascist-like politics can only have an effect in a way complementary to other projects, thus supporting them.

What is to be done? Left Politics in Times of Crisis

The depths of the current crisis will lead to no enduring solution being implemented in the short term. The still unbroken predominance of neoliberal forces of financial market capitalism blocks fundamental alternatives. There is a constellation of openness and of transition that can perhaps last for a decade. Since many fundamental problems will not be substantially dealt with, the danger of even worse financial, economic, ecological and social crises grows.

The rulers are divided. The interest conflicts that are linked to this and debates, the unavoidable search for compromises and the consequence of ever new partial steps, offer the chance of actualizing and making efficacious some positions.

In large parts of German society, however, neither the Left Party nor unions and many social movements are granted a capacity for building the future. In Europe, it is not the Left that determines the agenda. Globally as well, the positions developed above all in the context of the World Social Forum process are certainly strong enough to place in question the legitimacy of neoliberalism and the current search for solutions from above, but still too weak to intervene directly in setting the course.

The chief tasks of a renewed Left will be:

to link up the resistance against the shifting of the consequences of the crisis onto the backs of workers, socially weaker and the global South with the development of a perspective oriented to the values of global solidarity, to organize social struggles and to network,

to create room for collaborative work and self-organization of actors who are ready to develop and to live alternatives,

to meet reactionary answers of continued expropriation, de-democratization and new wars with all decisiveness,

to prevent the conservative continuation of neoliberalism by other means,

to support progressive forms of state intervention, of renewal of the public sphere, of socio-ecological transformation and global development in solidarity,

and in this, to develop approaches of transformation beyond capitalism, as well as to introduce and to realize steps toward socio-ecological transformation and to implement elements of a society based upon solidarity.

That requires transformative processes in the left movements themselves, transformation of the relation between them and the ways of life represented by them.

The Strategic Triangle of Left Politics

The Left can intervene simultaneously on three levels: by protest, critique and education, struggle over the meanings of the crisis and the development of forms of elaboration based on solidarity as well as by intervening in decisive processes and practical organization. It must prove itself in the strategic triangle of left politics of social learning, the broadest coalition politics and the transformation of social property and power relations.

Education and Effective Development of Common Alternative Positions in the Public Sphere

Emancipatory educational work in unions, social movements, citizen initiatives, in firms, schools, universities, in parties and churches as well as in the media and in the parliaments is the condition for overcoming the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism and its guiding principles of a market society, of the authoritarian state and people as entrepreneurs of their own labor power and social services. Education means, against this background, creating the foundations for common action in solidarity and encouragement for the self-organization of all actors interested in alternatives from the local to the global level.

The Left should submit in parliamentary and also in extra-parliamentary contexts proposals that pick up on and push further determinate aspects of this agenda (reconstruction of the social security system, tax reform, state intervention in private property rights, capital regulation, ecological transformation, conjunctural programs, security policy etc.).

In conditions of economic crisis this struggle must be bound together with a new internationalism.

Mass propaganda of concrete examples that show that things can be different, the promotion of forms of exchange of experience, in which the experiences of the individual can become a common good, are in this situation important forms of learning and education. Forms like social accounting from below or the monitoring of budget policies also belong to this, forms that aim at education through transparency.

The confrontation with the causes and the global consequences of economic crisis must flow into its own culture of resistance in the face of the insecurities and threats. Precisely in crisis periods, left wing movements need to understand themselves as networks where solidarity can be lived and security can thus be found.

Putting Alternative Concrete Projects on the Agenda

Left wing movements must in particular work where they are strong - and that is above all on the local and municipal level and in their workplaces. Political actions should be put in the foreground that similarly aim at the implementation of democratic forms of social regulation and against the pushing of the consequences of the crisis onto society.

The Struggle against Poverty: 2010 in the EU is supposed to be the year against poverty. Its effective preparation and realization shouldn't be subordinated to "the crises."

Redistribution from above to below and from private to public: the accumulation of wealth in the hands of ever fewer people and social groups imposes a monstrous nightmare on society. Belonging to this dimension, above all, is subtracting the field of social security from the grip of the financial markets and renewing the social security systems on foundations of democracy and solidarity.

The Socialization of the Finance Sector: the finance system in its totality must be brought under public control. It is to be directed to the needs of municipal and regional development, to the support of projects of supranational integration and cooperation in solidarity.

First, it must be assured that the cooperative banks and municipal savings banks are maintained and democratized. Second, there must be a fundamental new organization of the business model of public banks. The European Central Bank (ECB) must be drawn into the dialogue on European economic strategy alongside the Council and the European Parliament. There should be a further pillar: a council or a board of civil society actors.

Economic democracy: all enterprises and workplaces are to be compellingly enjoined to take up co-determination. The economy should no longer remain a democracy-free space. Here it is a case of the development of alternative economic models in the context of enterprise and job co-determination and beyond. Central here in the current crisis context is the question about the future of the auto industry and armament production, but also those sectors that are now promoted in the context of ecological modernization. Public support should follow in the form of direct enterprise participation by the public hand, and be linked to an extension of co-determination rights, including a new type of co-determination also of the regions as well as ecological and consumer organizations, and the obligation of orienting themselves to socio-ecological transformation. This is at the same time the foundation of a broad support of small and middle-sized enterprises.

Democratizing democracy: democratic cooperation and radicalization of democracy are important forms of learning about politics, about power relations, about room for maneuver and limits of society. They legitimate alternatives and resistance, they can be used in order to give acting in solidarity a space. This calls for democratization of budgetary policy through public budget analysis and participatory budgets as well as support of initiatives for remunicipalisation, in order to take away legitimacy from the integration of municipal finances and public property in speculative businesses as well as in questionable concepts of budget consolidation.

Politics of New Full Employment and Decent Work: it is time to take the idea of publicly supported employment sectors out of its current direction oriented to a cure and to gear it toward an actively and democratically new economic politics supporting social structures. Publicly supported employment sectors should be understood as a process of the creation of new spaces of cultural and social service delivery, self-organization and initiative from below, integration of solidarity and thus as a basis of new paths of an economy of solidarity as well as of the development of economically and socially sustainable business.

An Education System of Solidarity and the Renewal of Public Spaces of Democracy and Culture: social transformation is only possible if access to education, democratic cooperation, art and culture are decisively transformed and the social selection in the education system is overcome. Here we need fundamental reorganizations of the education system, beginning with the extension of an integrative early childhood support, the introduction of community schools as "schools for all" and places of being together in solidarity, of a meaningful life in childhood and youth, of the interrelation of learning, playing, mutual help, democratic co-determination, of self development and practical social projects.

Renewal and Democratization of the Municipal Economy as central axis of economic-political initiatives with the focus of energy provision, health care, transport. Going along with that is a corresponding qualification of the labor of municipal representatives in observing bodies in the sense of a real participative communalization of public serves beyond old patronage economies and paternalistic welfare. The municipal economy must be the point of departure of a socially and ecologically oriented regionalization of economic cycles.

For a Free Public Transport System: an essential step of social and ecological transformation would be to implement a transition to a public transport system that would make it free for the users and ensure high levels of individual mobility also for socially weak groups.

Peace Politics and Commitment to Global Development in Solidarity: We need a gain in capacity to build the future in the greater part of the world as a precondition for sustainable development in the world in general: the security and defense politics strategies and guiding principles of the EU and its member countries should be subjected to moratoria. Wide ranging debates at all political levels should clarify what "security in a globalized world" means.

For a Society of Solidarity

The time of a lack of alternatives is over. If the rulers are compelled to address systemic causes, then possibilities of intervention from the Left and below open up. But how can they be unlocked and used?

It is time to put the perspective of a transformation that points beyond capitalism on the agenda, the goal of a society of solidarity.

The socialization of losses can and must be opposed by the demand for socialization of the control over property. Help for the industry of the fossil epoch has to be replaced by a conversion to solar energy sources. The Left should respond to the proclaimed return to a failed "social" market economy with the demand for going forwards toward a society of solidarity with a socially and ecologically regulated mixed economy with strong public, common economic sectors as a step in the direction of a socio-ecological transformation. The continuation of a politics of world trade and development in the interests of the North can be opposed by the concept of common work together in solidarity.

If the belief is diffused that it would only be a matter of informing better the selfish private individual, the Homo Oeconomicus, and more explicitly taking responsibility, so the Left should stand for another image of the human - that of self-determined acting people who take matters into their own hands in solidarity and strive after the whole wealth of life.

The concept of a society of solidarity is a concept of the re-appropriation of these productive forces with the goal of overcoming the destructive tendencies of the last decades and the self-awareness of the masses of their own power to solve together the problems of the world. This regards all levels - the local, the regional and the global. Another world, a world of solidarity, is not only necessary - more than ever, it is also possible.

The elephant not in the room: Castro and the Summit of the Americas

Norman Givan — 2009-04-18T09:20:28Z

Cuba, and in particular its former President, Fidel Castro, is already a player at the fifth Summit of the Americas which takes place Friday and Saturday, April 17 and 18, in Port of Spain, Trinidad. That much is evident from information coming out of Havana, Moscow, Santiago de Chile and La Paz in recent days.

On Friday April 3, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega met with Fidel Castro and handed him a copy of the proposed Declaration of Port of Spain, which will be sent for adoption by the leaders of the 34 countries attending the Summit, including Canada.

What about the blockade?

Fidel expressed strong views about the draft Declaration, noting the absence of any mention of Cuba's exclusion from the meeting or of the United States' long-standing blockade of his country, routinely condemned by the overwhelming majority of member countries of the international community.

He also appeared to be predicting that there would be several reservations to the draft expressed by heads of state who find some of the ideas ‘unacceptable.' Fidel went on to publish his account of the meeting and his views on the Declaration in his regular column – the convalescing 82-year-old has still been writing prolifically, especially since formally relinquishing power over a year ago – which is widely available on the Internet.

The significance of all this seems to have escaped the mainstream media. For a head of state due to attend a summit to disclose the contents of the Declaration to be adopted to a non-attending state; and to someone who is — technically at any rate — a private citizen of that state in effect soliciting his views on the Declaration; for this disclosure to be itself disclosed and the critical views of the private citizen on the Declaration given widespread media exposure; all this seems to me to be virtually unheard of in the practice of international relations.

Except that the summit in question is supposed to be ‘of the Americas;' that the non-attending state is Cuba, which has full diplomatic relations with almost all of the attendees; and that the ‘private citizen' is Fidel Castro.

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Respect for Cuba's legacy of defiance, solidarity

Fidel, of course, commands enormous respect amongst most hemispheric leaders for having defied the hostility of Washington for close to fifty years, for the impressive social accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution and for Cuba's numerous acts of solidarity in the hemisphere and internationally.

As President, he gave strong support to Nicaragua's Ortega in the 1980s when the Sandinista government was struggling to defend itself in the ‘dirty war' being waged by the Contras backed by the Reagan administration, a war which cost thousands of Nicaraguan lives.

It seems to me unthinkable that Ortega, having shown the Declaration to Castro and receiving his response, will not follow this up by raising the subject of Cuba at the Summit; even if he had not planned to do so before. And it is likely that he would have the support of the other Latin American and Caribbean leaders; all of whom are on record as supporting the lifting of the blockade. It is even possible that some of the leaders had prior knowledge of his intention to discuss the proposed Declaration with Fidel.

Chile, Russia: Old Cuban allies raise the heat on U.S.

The day following the Ortega-Castro meeting in Havana, President Michelle Bachelet of Chile met with President Medvedev of Russia in Moscow.

The two Presidents found space, in their joint Communiqué dealing with such weighty matters as energy and military cooperation, to call for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba and for its integration into the "regional multilateral structures" — an oblique reference to the OAS, from which Cuba has been excluded since 1962.

Michelle Bachelet, let it be remembered, is regarded as part of the ‘moderate' left in Latin America. She suffered some political embarrassment at home when, after a meeting with Fidel earlier this year, her host wrote a column that appeared to endorse Bolivia's claim to a land passage to the Pacific Ocean through what is now Chilean territory, seized in a war with Bolivia over a century ago.

The incident caused a political row in Santiago that led to the resignation of Bachelet's foreign minister. Nonetheless, her government has signalled, on the very eve of the upcoming Summit, that its principled position on Cuba remains intact.

The same goes for President Medvedev, whose warming of relations with Washington under Obama is equally matched by a warming of relations with Havana, which he visited earlier this year, expressing the desire to rebuild many of the close ties that existed between the two countries in the heyday of the Soviet Union.

On the same day as the Bachelet-Medvedev meeting, President Evo Morales of Bolivia, speaking at a press conference in La Paz, was appealing to Barack Obama, “to lift the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed on Cuba since February 1962.”

This call was already adopted at the first Summit of Latin and Caribbean leaders in Bahia, last December; as well as at the Cuba-Caricom summit in Santiago de Cuba held earlier the same month.

Obama must cope with ‘change' in realities of hemisphere

The calls have now reached a crescendo. Cuba has become the unseen guest at the Summit in Port of Spain, and Fidel Castro the spectre haunting its deliberations, the elephant not in the room.

Hopefully, someone in the White House will have the good sense to ‘wise up' Barack Obama about the new realities in the hemisphere; and he will have the grace to recognise — indeed embrace — them.

Otherwise, who will be isolated: Cuba? Or the United States?

Norman Girvan is Professorial Research Fellow at the UWI Graduate Institute of International Relations at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.

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Y Tu, Daniel? The Sandinista Revolution Betrayed

Roger Burbach — 2009-04-10T11:26:35Z

Upon his inauguration as Nicaraguan president in January 2007, Daniel Ortega asserted that his government would represent “the second stage of the Sandinista Revolution.” His election was full of symbolic resonance, coming after 16 years of electoral failures for Ortega and the party he led, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN). The Sandinistas' road to power was paved with a series of previously unthinkable pacts with the old somocista and Contra opposition. The FSLN's pact making began in earnest in 2001, when, in the run-up to that year's presidential election, Ortega forged an alliance with Arnoldo Alemán, an official during the Somoza regime who had been elected president in 1997.

But even with Alemán's backing, Ortega was unable to win the presidency. So, before the 2006 election, he publicly reconciled with his old nemesis, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, a potent symbol of the counterrevolutionary movement in the 1980s. Ortega and his longtime companion, Rosario Murillo, announced their conversion to Catholicism and were married by the cardinal. Just before his election Ortega supported a comprehensive ban on abortion, including in cases in which the mother's life is endangered, a measure ratified by the legislature with the crucial votes of Sandinista deputies. To round out his pre-election wheeling and dealing, Ortega selected Jaime Morales, a former Contra leader, as his vice presidential candidate.

Even with these concessions to the right, Ortega won the presidency with just 37.9% of the votes. Once in power, he announced a series of policies and programs that seemed to hark back to the Sandinista years. Educational matriculation fees were abolished, a literacy program was launched with Cuban assistance, and an innovative Zero Hunger program established, financed from the public budget and Venezuelan aid, that distributed one cow, one pig, 10 hens, and a rooster, along with seeds, to 15,000 families during the first year. Internationally, Nicaragua joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a trade and economic cooperation pact that includes Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela.

But the Ortega government's clientelistic and sectarian nature soon became evident when Ortega, by presidential decree, established Councils of Citizen Power under the control of the Sandinista party to administer and distribute much of the social spending. Even more importantly, under the rubric of ALBA, Ortega signed an accord with Venezuela that provides an estimated $300 million to $500 million in funds personally administered by Ortega with no public accountability.

As Mónica Baltodano, the leader of is the Movement for the Rescue of Sandinismo (MPRS), a dissident Sandinista organization, argued in a recent article, Ortega's fiscal and economic policies are, in fact, continuous with those of the previous governments, despite his anti-imperialist rhetoric and denunciations of neoliberalism. [1] The government has signed new accords with the International Monetary Fund that do not modify the neoliberal paradigm, while the salaries of government workers remain frozen and those of teachers and health workers are the lowest in Central America. According to the Central Bank of Nicaragua, the average salary has dropped the last two years, retrogressing to 2001 levels. [2]

Moreover, the government and the Sandinista party are harassing and repressing their opponents. During an interview in January, Baltodano told me the right to assembly has been systematically violated during the past year, as opposition demonstrations are put down with goon squads. “Ortega is establishing an authoritarian regime, sectarian, corrupt, and repressive, to maintain his grip on power, betraying the legacy of the Sandinista revolution,” she said.

****

The core of this legacy was the revolution's commitment to popular democracy. Seizing power in 1979 from the dictator Anastasio Somoza, the Sandinista movement comprised Nicaragua's urban masses, peasants, artisans, workers, Christian base communities, intellectuals, and the muchachos—the youth who spearheaded the armed uprisings. The revolution transformed social relations and values, holding up a new vision of society based on social and economic justice that included the poor and dispossessed. The revolution was muticlass, multiethnic, multidoctrinal, and politically pluralistic.

While socialism was part of the public discourse, it was never proclaimed to be an objective of the revolution. It was officially designated “a popular, democratic, and anti-imperialist revolution.” Radicalized social democrats, priests, and political independents as well as Marxists and Marxist-Leninists served as cabinet ministers of the Sandinista government. Images of Sandino, Marx, Christ, Lenin, Bolívar, and Carlos Fonseca, the martyred founder of the Sandinista movement, often hung side by side in the cities and towns of Nicaragua.

A central attribute of the revolution that has made its legacy so powerful is that it was a revolución compartida, a revolution shared with the rest of the world. [3] As Nicaragua, a country with fewer than 3 million inhabitants, defied the wrath of the U.S. imperium, people from around the world rallied to the revolution's support. In a manner reminiscent of the Spanish civil war half a century earlier, the Sandinista revolution came to be seen as a new political utopia, rupturing national frontiers. It marked a generation of activists around the globe who found in the revolution a reason to hope and believe.

With the deepening of the U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary war from military bases in Honduras, activists from the United States came to be the largest contingent to support the Sandinista revolution. An estimated 100,000 people from the United States visited Nicaragua in the 1980s, many as simple political tourists. Some came as part of delegations, but most of them arrived on their own. It was an experience totally different from that of Cuba, where the prohibition of U.S. travel to the island meant that only organized delegations arrived via Mexico or Canada with assigned accommodations and structured tours. But it was not just the travel arrangements that were different. Those going to Nicaragua found an “open door” society: They could talk with anyone, travel to the countryside, and stay where they pleased with no interference from the government.

The Sandinista revolution's commitment to democracy led it down a new political path. This was not a revolutionary government conducted, in the classical sense, by a dictatorship of the proletariat. While the National Directorate of the FSLN oversaw the revolutionary process, it was not dictated by a single strongman but by nine people who reached consensus decisions with input from popular organizations. The Nicaraguan Revolution thus responded to internal and external challenges by deepening its democratic and participatory content, rather than by declaring a dictatorship.

In October 1983, when a U.S. assault appeared imminent in the aftermath of the invasion of Grenada, the National Directorate adopted the slogan “All Arms to the People” and distributed more than 200,000 weapons to the militias and popular organizations. I was there as U.S. aircraft flew over Managua, breaking the sound barrier, trying to “shock and awe” the populace. Bomb shelters and defensive trenches were hastily built as the country mobilized for war.

We may never know whether the threatened invasion was a ruse or if the popular mobilization forestalled a U.S. attack. But it did reaffirm the revolution's commitment to democracy. In 1984, in the midst a deteriorating economy and the escalating Contra war, the country held an election in which seven candidates vied for the presidency. The election was monitored by “at least 460 accredited observers from 24 countries,” who unanimously described it as fair. [4] A reported 83% of the electorate participated, and Ortega won with almost 67% of the votes. [5]The election demonstrated that a revolutionary government can solidify its hold on power in the midst of conflict, not by adopting increasingly dictatorial powers but by building mass democratic support.

The adoption of a new constitution in 1986 marked yet another step forward in the democratic process. The constitution, which established separation of powers, directly incorporated human rights declarations, and abolished the death penalty, among other measures, was drafted by constituent assembly members elected in 1984 and submitted to the country for discussion. [6] To facilitate these debates, 73 cabildos abiertos, or town meetings, were attended by an estimated 100,000 Nicaraguans around the country. At these meetings, about 2,500 Nicaraguans made suggestions for changes in the constitution.

But this bold Sandinista experiment in revolutionary democracy was not destined to persevere. As occurred in the Spanish civil war, the tide of history ran against the heroic people of Nicaragua, sapping their will in the late 1980s as the Contra war waged on and the economy unraveled. Often as I departed from the San Francisco airport on yet another flight to the Central American isthmus, I would look down on the Bay Area, with its population roughly the same size as Nicaragua's and an economy many times larger, and wonder how the Sandinista revolution could possibly survive a war with the most powerful nation on earth.

Perhaps the die was cast in neighboring El Salvador with the failure of the guerrillas there to seize power as the United States mounted a counterinsurgency war. The inability to advance the revolution in Central America seemed to confirm Leon Trotsky's belief that a revolution cannot survive and mature in just one nation—especially in small countries like Nicaragua with porous borders, which, unlike island Cuba, lend themselves to infiltration and repeated forays from well-provisioned military bases.

To end the debilitating war, the Sandinista leaders turned to peace negotiations. Placing their faith in democracy, they signed an accord that called for a ceasefire and elections to be held in February 1990, in which the Contras as well as the internal opposition would be allowed to participate. Once again the popular organizations mobilized for the campaign, and virtually all the polls indicated that Ortega would win a second term as president, defeating the Contra-backed candidate, Violeta Chamorro, whose campaign received generous funding from the United States.

Nicaraguans and much of the world were shocked when Chamorro defeated Ortega with 55% of the vote. Even people who were sympathetic to the Sandinistas voted for the opposition because they wanted the war to end, as the threat of more U.S.-backed violence remained looming. The day after the election, a woman vendor passed me by sobbing. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, “Daniel will no longer be my president.” After exchanging a few more words, I asked whom she had voted for. “Violeta,” she said, “because I want my son in the Sandinista army to come home alive.”

****

During the next 16 years, three Nicaraguan presidents backed by the United States implemented a series of neoliberal policies, gutting the social and economic policies of the Sandinista era and impoverishing the country. Ortega ran in every election, drifting increasingly to the right, while exerting an iron hand to stifle all challengers and dissenters in the Sandinista party. Surprisingly, Orlando Nuñez, with whom I wrote a book with on the revolution's democratic thrust, remained loyal to Ortega while most of the middle-level cadre and the National Directorate abandoned the party. [7] Many of these split off to form the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), the largest dissident Sandinista party, founded in 1995.

When I asked Nuñez about his stance, he argued that only the Sandinista party has a mass base. “Dissident Sandinistas and their organizations,” he said, “cannot recruit the poor, the peasants, the workers, nor mount a significant electoral challenge.” Nuñez, who works as an adviser on social affairs to the president's office, went on to argue that Ortega allied with Alemán not out of political cynicism, but for the sake of building an anti-oligarchic front. According to this theory, Alemán and the somocistas represent an emergent capitalist class that took on the old oligarchy, which had dominated Nicaraguan politics and the economy since the 19th century. [8] A major thrust of Ortega's rhetoric is bent on attacking the oligarchy, which is clustered in the opposition Conservative Party.

But it is also true that some of the most famous Sandinistas, many of whom are in the dissident camp today—like Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda Belli, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, and others—are descendents of oligarchic families. Accordingly, Ortega and Murillo have accused them of being in league with conservatives in an effort to reimpose the old order on Nicaragua. While the dissident Sandinistas have yet to mount a significant electoral challenge, the Ortega administration has nonetheless gone after them with a particular vehemence. Case in point: Chamorro, the onetime director of the Sandinista party newspaper, Barricada. In June 2007, Chamorro aired an investigative report on Esta Semana, the popular news show he hosts. According to the report, which included tape-recorded conversations, FSLN functionaries tried to extort $4 million from Armel González, a partner in a tourist development project called Arenas Bay, in exchange for a swift end to the project's legal woes, which included challenges from campesino cooperatives over land disputes.

The government's response to the bad publicity was swift and ruthless. While the district attorney buried the case, González was charged and convicted of slander. National Assembly deputy Alejandro Bolaños, who backed the denunciation, was arbitrarily removed from his legislative seat. And Chamorro was denounced in the Sandinista-controlled media as a “delinquent,” a “narco-trafficker,” and a “robber of peasant lands.”

The harassment of Chamorro and other government critics continued during the run-up to Nicaragua's November 2008 municipal elections, which were widely viewed as a referendum on the Ortega administration. The Ministry of Government launched a probe into NGOs operating in the country, accusing the Center for Communications Research (Cinco), which is headed by Chamorro, of “diverting and laundering money” through its agreement with the Autonomous Women's Movement (MAM), which opposes the Ortega-endorsed law banning abortion. This agreement, financed by eight European governments and administered by Oxfam, aims to promote “the full citizenship of women.” First lady Murillo called it “Satan's fund” and “the money of evil.”

Cinco's board of directors were interrogated, and a prosecutor accompanied by the police raided the Cinco offices with a search warrant. Warned in advance of the visit, some 200 people gathered in the building in solidarity, refusing the police entry. Then as night fell, the police established a cordon around the building and, in the early morning, police broke down the door. After kicking out the protesters, the police stayed in the office for 15 hours, with supporters and onlookers gathered outside, shutting down traffic for blocks around. The police rummaged through offices, carting off files and computers. No formal charges were been filed, but Cinco and the MAM were officially investigated for money laundering.

Along with MAM, the broader women's movement in Nicaragua, which firmly opposes the Ortega government, was among the first to experience its repressive blows. In 2007 the government opened a case against nine women leaders, accusing them of conspiring “to cover up the crime of rape in the case of a 9-year-old rape victim known as ‘Rosita,' who obtained an abortion in Nicaragua in 2003.” [9] In August, Ortega was unable to attend the inauguration of Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo because of protests by the country's feminist organizations; from then on, women's mobilizations have occurred in other countries Ortega has visited, including Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Peru. [10]

Charges were levied against other former Sandinistas who dared to speak out against the Ortega government, including 84-year-old Catholic priest Ernesto Cardenal, the renowned poet who once served as minister of culture. In August, after Cardenal criticized Ortega at Lugo's inauguration, a judge revived an old, previously dismissed case involving a German citizen who sued Cardenal in 2005 for insulting him. [11] The money-laundering investigation against the MAM and Cinco was officially dropped January 22, although the prosecutor recommended a further audit of the organizations' finances. In a statement, Cinco director Sofia Montenegro later demanded that the government investigators be fired for abuse of power. [12]

In addition to harassing critics, the Ortega government also displayed its penchant for electoral fraud during the run-up to the November municipal balloting. Protests erupted in June, after the Ortega-stacked Supreme Electoral Council disqualified the MRS and the Conservative Party from participation. Dora Maria Tellez, a leader of the renovation movement, began a public hunger strike that led to daily demonstrations of support, often shutting down traffic in downtown Managua.

Meanwhile, bands of young Sandinista-linked thugs, claiming to be the “owners of the streets,” attacked demonstrators while the police stood idly by. Then, to prevent more demonstrations, Ortega supporters set up plantones, permanent occupation posts at the rotundas on the main thoroughfare running through Managua. Those who camped out there were known as rezadores, or people praying to God that Ortega be protected and his opponents punished.

Besides the FSLN, two major political parties remained on the ballot, the Liberal Constitutionalist Party and the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance. While independent surveys indicated that the opposition candidates would win the majority of the seats, the Supreme Electoral Council, which had prohibited international observers, ruled that the Sandinista candidates won control of 105 municipalities, the Liberal Constitutionalist Party won 37, and the Alliance won the remaining six. An independent Nicaraguan group, Ethics and Transparency, organized tens of thousands of observers but was denied accreditation, forcing them to observe the election from outside polling stations. But the group estimates that irregularities took place at a third of the polling places. Their complaints were echoed by Nicaraguan Catholic bishops, including Managua's archbishop, who said, “People feel defrauded.” [13]

After the election, militant demonstrations erupted in Nicaragua's two largest cities, Managua and León, and were quickly put down with violence. The European Economic Community and the U.S. government suspended funding for Nicaragua over the fraudulent elections. On January 14, before the election results were even officially published by the electoral council, Ortega swore in the new mayors at Managua's Plaza de la Revolución. He declared: “This is the time to strengthen our institutions,” later adding, “We cannot go back to the road of war, to confrontation, to violence.” Along with the regular police, Ortega stood flanked by camisas rosadas, or redshirts, members of his personal security force. A huge banner hung over the plaza depicting Ortega with an up-stretched arm and the slogan, “To Be With the People Is to Be With God.”

“This despotic regime is bent on destroying all that is left of the Sandinista revolution's democratic legacy,” Chamorro told me in January. “Standing in the way of a new dictatorship,” he continued, “are civil society organizations, the independent media, trade unions, opposition political parties, women's organizations, civic leaders and others—many of whom can trace their roots back to the resistance against Somoza.” As the Nobel-winning novelist José Saramago put it: “Once more a revolution has been betrayed from within.” Nicaragua's revolution has indeed been betrayed, perhaps not as dramatically as Trotsky depicted Stalin's desecration of what was best in the Bolshevik revolution. But Ortega's betrayal is a fundamental political tragedy for everyone around the world who came to believe in a popular, participatory democracy in Nicaragua.

Footnotes
[1] Mónica Baltodano, “El ‘nuevo sandinismo' es de la izquierda? Democracia pactada en Nicaragua,” Le Monde diplomatique, Southern Cone edition (December 2008): 16–17.

[2] Ibid.

[3] The concept of revolución compartida is developed in Sergio Ramírez, Adios muchachos: una memoría de la revolución sandinista (Mexico City: Aguilar, 1999).

[4] Rosa Marina Zelaya, “International Election Observers: Nicaragua Under a Microscope,” Envío 103 (February 1990), envio.org.ni/articulo/2582.

[5] BBC, “1984: Sandinistas Claim Election Victory,” available at news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday.

[6] Harry E. Vanden and Gary Prevost, Democracy and Socialism in Sandinista Nicaragua (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996), 84–85.

[7] Roger Burbach and Orlando Nuñez, Fire in the Americas, Forging a Revolutionary Agenda (Verso, 1987).

[8] Nuñez develops this argument in his book La Oligarquia en Nicaragua (Managua: Talleres de Grafitex, 2006). See also Nuñez, “La Agonía política de la oligarquia,” El 19 no. 14, November 27–December 3, 2008, available at sepres.gob.ni.

[9] Human Rights Watch, “Nicaragua: Protect Rights Advocates from Harassment and Intimidation,” October 28, 2008, available at hrw.org.

[10] Baltodano, “El ‘nuevo sandinismo' es de la izquierda?”

[11] CBC News, “Latin American Artists Protest Persecution of Nicaraguan Poet,” September 6, 2008, available at cbc.ca.

[12] "NGOs, Cleared of Charges, Demand Firing of Government Officials," Nicaragua Network Hotline, February 17, 2009, nicanet.org/?p=621.

[13] “How to Steal an Election,” The Economist, November 13, 2008.

Seattle's Lessons for London

Amy Goodman — 2009-04-02T12:32:08Z

Protests dominate the news as world leaders gather in London for the Group of Twenty meeting. War, the economy, corporate globalization and grass-roots opposition to financial bailouts are at the forefront.

Executives receive golden parachutes while workers and unions are forced to make concessions. President Barack Obama has inherited a slew of deep, interlocked crises, yet elicits broad global hope that he can be an agent of change.

Obama last week held an "Open for Questions" town hall meeting, streamed online, with questions posed by the public and voted on to rank their popularity. Obama answered a question about marijuana:

"Three point five million people voted. I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation. And I don't know what this says about the online audience ... this was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was answered. The answer is, no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy."

That question's popularity might indicate audience concern with U.S. drug policy, and the enormous toll on our society of the so-called war on drugs.

I am traveling around the country this spring, visiting more than 70 cities. In Seattle, I interviewed a strong critic of U.S. drug laws, who said, "I ... support the legalization of all drugs."

These words come from an unlikely advocate: former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper. Stamper is an advisory board member of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and a speaker for the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. He explained:

"We have spent a trillion dollars prosecuting that war ... and what do we have to show for it? [D]rugs are more readily available today at lower prices and higher levels of potency than ever before. So it's a colossal failure. And the only way to put these cartels out of business and to restore health and safety to our neighborhoods is to regulate that commerce as opposed to prohibiting it."

As Stamper pushes for reform, his successor as Seattle police chief, Gil Kerlikowske, is, as Stamper blogged, "on his way to the other Washington to assume the mantle of ‘drug czar' ... to make his case for a continuation of the nation's drug laws."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted recently, en route to Mexico, "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade." It also fuels a rising U.S. prison population (some cash-strapped states are simply releasing nonviolent drug offenders to save money), the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the epidemic of drug-related violence in Mexico. Drug cartels purchase AK-47 assault rifles and other arms in the United States, then smuggle them into Mexico. Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told me recently, "The folks in Mexico have figured out what criminals in the U.S. figured out a long time ago: Our weak and nearly nonexistent laws in the U.S. are making it very easy for these guns to get to Mexico."

With the increasing state-by-state acceptance of the medical uses of marijuana, with decriminalization of possession of small amounts in various jurisdictions and with the high cost of imprisonment versus treatment, public sentiment seems disposed to favor a change.

It took Stamper years to learn the hard lessons of the failed war on drugs. Hard lessons seem to be his forte.

He was the Seattle police chief during the World Trade Organization protests of 1999: "I made major mistakes leading up to that week and during that week. ... Not vetoing a decision to use chemical agents, also known as tear gas, against hundreds of nonviolent demonstrators." He now sounds more like one of the WTO protesters his forces tear-gassed: "We're now reaping what we have sown in the form of unbridled globalization and unfettered free trade ... it's time for all of us in this country, as we attempt to pull ourselves out of this global economic meltdown, to really take a look at what issues of social and economic justice mean within the context of globalization."

The leaders of the G-20 in London, and those at the NATO summit to follow, have an opportunity to learn from Norm Stamper, to instruct their security to put away the Tasers and the tear gas, and to shock the world by seriously considering the voices of the protesters outside.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the "Alternative Nobel" prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

An Exception to Lula's Rule

Sue Branford — 2009-04-02T00:26:31Z

Now and then there emerges somewhere in the world a social movement that is really exceptional for its integrity, astuteness and mass appeal. For me one of those rare movements is Brazil's Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST, the Landless Workers' Movement). Ever since it was founded in the early 1980s it has confounded predictions of its imminent demise. In the early days academics said that it was doomed because the peasantry was dying out all over the world. And today economists say the MST is fighting a lost cause because of the rapid and apparently unstoppable expansion of agribusiness in Brazil. Yet, against the odds, the movement has not only survived but steadily expanded. And, who knows, its ‘historical moment' may yet come with the looming crisis in destructive, energy-profligate industrial farming.

Although many of us who went out into the streets to celebrate Lula's election in October 2002 find it painful to admit it, nearly all of Brazil's social movements and trade unions are weaker today than they were then. The clearest example is the Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (CUT), the left-wing trade union body that, like Lula's Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, the Workers' Party), was founded in the late 1970s, as the country mobilised to force the military government to step down.

Since those early days the CUT has always been closely linked to the PT, so it was no surprise when Lula, who has always felt more at ease with trade unionists than with left-wing intellectuals, invited leading members of the CUT to become ministers or top aides in his government. Unfortunately, this has meant that the CUT has become, in practice, little more than the labour arm of the government, and has even supported Lula when he has taken measures that have weakened the labour movement.

A similar fate has befallen the country's main rural workers trade union, Contag. Members of Contag have administered the country's timid land settlement programme and have occupied top positions within the ministry for rural development. This has meant that Contag no longer campaigns for radical agrarian reform and limits itself to lobbying for piecemeal advances for rural workers and peasant families.

From blind trust to disillusion

The main exception to this depressing story of co-option has been the MST, not that the movement has escaped scot-free. The rural poor were jubilant when Lula was elected president. Tens of thousands of families joined the movement and squatted on the verges of federal highways, confident that Lula would honour his earlier pledge to the MST ‘to give you so much land that you will not know what to do with it'. The MST leadership, however, was wary from the start, turning down Lula's repeated offers of top jobs for MST leaders.

For a few years, the blind trust that many rural families felt in Lula caused problems for the MST. On several occasions militants organised marches in support of the movement's radical demands, only to have Lula come down from the presidential palace and speak directly to the marchers in his charismatic way. On one memorable occasion, Lula doffed the MST's characteristic red cap and spoke to the march. ‘You have waited for 500 years to see a working-class man in the presidency of Brazil,' he said. ‘But I can't achieve everything you want in just a few years. And I beg you to be patient.' Lula was applauded at the end of his address, to the evident discomfort of some of the militants.

However, as time has passed, it has become increasingly clear to the grassroots that the leaders were right not to align the movement too closely with the Lula administration. The grassroots know now that the government will not deliver the kind of agrarian reform that they want and they have become disillusioned. Lula no longer comes to speak to the marches and MST leaders have become more open in their criticisms.

In a typical statement, João Pedro Stédile, one of the main MST leaders, said earlier this year: ‘Our analysis of the Lula government's policies shows that Lula has favoured the agribusiness sector much more than family-owned agriculture. The general guidelines of his economic and agricultural policy have always given priority to export-oriented agribusiness. And agrarian reform, the most important measure to alter the status quo, is in fact paralysed or restricted to a few cases of token social compensation.'

Along with more radical rhetoric, the MST is carrying on with its former strategy – which was never entirely abandoned, even in the early years of the Lula administration – of occupying latifúndios (landed estates). Even though the Lula administration is not repressing the occupations with the same ferocity as earlier governments, MST members are still dying in the ensuing conflicts.

Avoiding co-option

So how is it that the MST has managed so successfully to avoid co-option? The MST is, after all, a movement drawn from landless peasants and rural labourers, the sectors of society that throughout Brazil's history have suffered most from patronage and clientelismo?

It is perhaps this very history that has made the MST different. From the beginning, MST leaders were suspicious of the authorities, which were always seen as allies of the landowners. It was a lesson that was driven home during the MST's first national congress back in January 1985. The politician Tancredo Neves – already selected to become Brazil's first civilian president after 21 years of military rule (even though, in the event, he died before he could take office) – had promised to attend. But, despite his repeated pledge to carry out wide-ranging agrarian reform, he never turned up and the organisers left an empty chair on the podium as a chill warning to the plenary that, just like the seat, the new government's lofty promises might also prove empty.

It was a presentiment that proved all too accurate. Brazil's new constitution in 1988 brought important advances in the many areas – personal freedom, labour legislation, rights of ethnic minorities and children, and so on – but it dashed the hopes of the landless. Even though progressive organisations, including the MST, collected over one million signatures for a petition calling for agrarian reform, landowners lobbied Congress and the clauses dealing with land distribution were watered down into almost meaningless generalities. This was not a temporary setback: one after another Brazil's civilian rulers backed away from confrontation with Brazil's powerful rural elites.

Abandoned by the authorities, the MST coined one of its most powerful and enduring slogans: occupation is the only solution. MST leaders told the movement that they would only win land through grass-roots mobilisation and the organisation of daring and dangerous land occupations. Today MST activists often boast (not altogether accurately) that every hectare of the seven million or so they farm today was conquered through land occupations. This mentality that goals can only be achieved through struggle has permeated the movement, even affecting the internal balance of power. Even though rural trade unions only allowed heads of household (which generally meant men) to affiliate, the MST decided from the beginning to permit women and young people to become full members. It was an important advance but not, by itself, sufficient to guarantee gender equality: women members found that within the movement they were expected to conform to a patriarchal culture dominated by sexist peasant values. So, as one woman leader confided to me, ‘We decided to “occupy” the MST.' And indeed they did, filling all the available political space and gradually opening up the movement to full participation by women. ‘It's an ongoing struggle,' another activist said recently. ‘But we're getting there.'

Today self-reliance has become one of the main characteristics of the MST. This does not mean that the MST sees itself as isolated from the rest of society. On the contrary, it believes it is involved in a broad struggle to ‘democratise' the state, in the sense of making the state break its age-old links with the ruling elites and respond to the needs of the mass of poor Brazilians. To do this, the MST must maintain its own independence from government.

The MST and PT

There has traditionally been a certain mistrust between the MST and the PT, partly because petistas have resented the MST's wariness of them, along with all politicians. But today some petistas realise that perhaps they might have done better to follow some of the MST's precepts. When Lula became president, he demanded total loyalty from all petistas, with some federal deputies being expelled from the party for failing to support a key government bill on social welfare reform. But from the beginning this was a dangerous tactic: Lula was elected by an alliance of parties and formed a coalition government. As a result, Lula frequently adopted policies that ran counter to the PT's programme.

If the PT had retained some degree of independence and turned down Lula's demand for blind loyalty, the party would be in a stronger position. It is not the PT but the MST that is today a beacon for the left worldwide. No one within the MST expects the future to be easy, partly because it will take a decade, at least, to rebuild the left in Brazil. But the MST has remained faithful to its principles and will be able to seize opportunities, whenever they arise.

View online : www.upsidedownworld

The new tragedy of Santa Catarina

Marina Silva — 2009-03-31T11:43:10Z

At the end of 2008, images of the great tragedy of Santa Catarina¹ impregnated with pain and perplexity eyes and hearts of all Brazilians. Floods happen, but the impact was much greater because of the systematic destruction of the environment in the state, national champion of deforestation of the remaining rainforest in the last decade.

Now, precisely more tomorrow, new tragedy threatens Santa Catarina and Brazil. This time it is political. The Legislative Assembly will vote, in a mega schedule a of aggressive propaganda against the environmentalists, a bill that incredibly aims, among other absurdities, reduce the range of protection of riparian forests on the banks of the courses d 'water, from 30 to only 5 meters!

Since 2001 there are initiatives to develop a state environmental code. In 2006, the productive sector entities recommended that it is based on "land structure of the state and its regional peculiarities." What does this mean there is now.

Throughout 2007, discussions coordinated by the state environmental agency (Foundation of the Environment of Santa Catarina - FATMA) resulted in the proposal sent to the Secretariat of Maintainable Development and solemnly delivered to the governor in March 2008. Since then, government and members of the disfigured the text so that it can be called the Code Anti-environmental.

Withdraw powers and responsibilities of state agencies in environmental protection, protected areas and reduces attack on the Constitution and federal law, a genuine civil disobedience to back, on behalf of an alleged development. Good times in civil disobedience that was practiced in favor of society.

This type of development we already know the results, both in global and in local, as you well know the catarinense (people of Santa Catarina ) who lost their families and homes in the floods of 2008.

Where they want to reach? Impossible not join the case in Santa Catarina with the repeated attempts in Congress, to change the Forest Code to relax environmental standards.. As the pressure of society and the attention of national media have tied these joints in Brasilia, it is now for a strategy to undermine the code in the states, focusing on the accomplished fact of "state laws" in order to disfigure the federal legislation.

Santa Catarina has the password to break the door. Now is the time to know of which the substance is done the brazilian State.

¹ Santa Catarina is a state in Brazil. It is situated in the southern part of the country. The capital of this Brazilian state is Florianópolis.

Marina Silva is the former federal Minister of evironment of Brazil

Victory for the Left in El Salvador

RICHARD GOTT — 2009-03-17T18:06:31Z

El Salvador is the most tragic and oppressed country in the Americas, yet today it wakes up to a new dawn of hope and anticipation, with the election victory of Mauricio Funes, the candidate of a historic leftwing party, the Farabundo Martm National Liberation Front (FMLN). Funes himself is a journalist, a former television presenter and a moderate social democrat, but his party is the heir to the principal radical tradition in the country established over the past 80 years, years of extreme conservatism punctuated by periods of excruciating violence unleashed on the population by the most reactionary landed oligarchy in the Americas. The 500-year struggle in Latin America between indigenous peoples and white settlers from Europe is finally being won, and El Salvador will now take its place beside Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador as a country where the rights of the continent's indigenous peoples are recognised and defended.

The party of Funes takes its name from Agustmn Farabundo Martm, a member of that first generation of communist leaders in Central America in the 1920s that included Augusto Cisar Sandino of Nicaragua, the inspiration of the Sandinistas. Farabundo Martm took part in the famous peasant uprising of 1932, sparked off by the global economic crisis that led to a collapse of the coffee price, the country's principal export earner. The crisis was crushed by the US-backed military dictator of the time, General Maximilian Martmnez, in what was called "La Matanza", or "slaughtering" , in which 30,000 mostly indigenous people were killed.

Farabundo Martm was captured and shot, but his name was taken up by the guerrilla movement that emerged in the 1970s, to carry on the struggle against the successive military governments that dominated the country in the 20th century. That struggle, waged throughout the 1980s, was even more viciously crushed than "La Matanza" of the 1930s, and led to the deaths of more than 70,000 people. The war in El Salvador was one of the best-reported stories of its time in the international media, which highlighted the huge financial support provided by the Reagan government to the local military.

A particular feature of the war was the repression ordered by the army of the Catholic church, with the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero in March 1980 and of four American churchwomen in December that year, and of six Jesuit teachers in November 1989. The war was finally brought to an end with a UN-brokered peace process in 1991, but although the FMLN was then able to participate in politics, the country has remained dominated by the ultra rightwing Arena party that had once fuelled the paramilitary militias and death squads of the 1980s. Until today. The Arena candidate, Rodrigo Avila, himself a former police chief, gracefully conceded on Sunday night that he had lost the election. As in the 1930s, El Salvador is feeling the effects of the global economic crisis, and the neoliberal model inflicted on Central America over recent decades is already being rejected in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. El Salvador is just the latest country to follow this trend.

Much was made during the election campaign of the possible leftist influence of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, but the FMLN made considerable efforts to emphasise the national dimension of their ambitions. In an interview last year, Funes explained his modest aims:

We do not need to be close to Chavez, close to Lula or close to Bush in order for our institutions and democracy to work. What we need is to build a model of public management that responds to the needs of Salvadorans and that will resolve Salvadoran problems. We respect the process being followed in Venezuela, as well as we respect and closely watch the new society which Lula is building, and the one that the new President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay has promised to build. Those processes are a response to other circumstances. What we hope to build are relationships based on co-operation and solidarity with the people represented by each one of these countries. However, we are not going to follow the same recipe or model that might have worked in other countries, but has nothing to do with our reality.

The election campaign brought back many memories of the country's troubled and divided history, but today's FMLN is very different from the Marxist guerrilla movement that once sought to bring the Cuban revolutionary style to Central America. Yet another victory for the Latin America left is certainly a challenge for the new government in the United States. President Lula met President Obama in Washington on Saturday and suggested that he should create a relationship of "trust not interference" , with Latin America. "What I said to President Obama, and I hope he will make it happen, is that there would be closer ties with Venezuela, closer ties with Cuba, closer ties with Bolivia," Lula told reporters. In April, when Obama travels to Trinidad for a meeting with Latin American presidents, he will have to explain where his new administration will stand.

Richard Gott is the author of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution and Cuba: a New History. He can be reached at: Rwgott@aol.com

This article originally appeared in the Guardian.

`More of the same'? Or a break with `traditions'? The MAS: a paradoxical case of democratisation

Hervé DO ALTO — 2009-03-17T18:03:03Z

The Santos Ramirez affaire marked, undoubtedly, a shift in the social perception of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS). [In February, Santos Ramirez, a former head of the state energy company YPFB, and former head of the Senate from 2006-2007, was charged with corruption and faces a lengthy prison sentence of up to eight years.]

As several researchers of the “political instrument” have highlighted, including Moira Zuazo, the credibility of the party created by Evo Morales in 1999 was largely constructed on bases of ethical politics. [1]

This “ethical principle”, symbolised by the implementation of the Austerity Law at the beginning of the Morales administration in 2006, played a fundamental role in establishing the dichotomy between, on the one hand, the so-called traditional parties (members of the “agreed democracy”) and, on the other, movements that raised the slogan of the moral reform of the discredited Bolivian politics.

Among them were urban middle-class organisations that struggled against corruption and the authentic transparency of electoral mobilisation – such as the Movement Without Fear (MSM), which repeatedly criticised the “partydocracy” – and movements, such as the MAS, that insisted in rejecting the label of “party” in favour of “instrument“– emphasising, also, its close links to the popular organisations (trade unions, local committees ...) which led the period of protest that rocked the Bolivian political system beginning with the”water war" of 2000.

Ethics as `symbolic principle'

In light of the scandal which seriously affects the public image of the “honest” party which benefited the MAS so far, it begs asking a simple question, frequently debated in the Bolivian media by the generators of opinion – with the vast majority linked to the neoliberal ancien régime – that have access to newspapers columns with greater circulation, or to the screens of television channels with more diffusion: is the MAS not just more of the same? Does not the “Ramirez case” illustrate, perhaps, the failure of the MAS in its effort to renovate political practices – including the classic “cronyist” vision of public administration – and democratisation of political life?

By the very fact of having erected the “honesty” in symbolic principle, i.e., in the form of authority in front of the rest of the parties that structure the institutional political sphere, the leaders of the MAS are in a paradoxical situation: all observers and rivals alike demand from them a permanent demonstration of political ethics in their daily practice, including those, that in the years of the “agreed democracy”, were able to assume public office in times when “cronyism”, the “quota” and the extensive use of the famous reserved expenses were seen as part of the routine exercise of power. In other words, the MAS was not allowed any stumble in ethical order, less by those who, yesterday, were stigmatised for not having respected these principles.

In that way it can be understood how a case of relatively “mild” corruption – the sale of guarantees in January 2007 – in which a few thousand dollars circulated in exchange for state positions could unleash a media scandal of an enormous scale, without giving the slightest attention to the sociological dynamics which permits one to understand the “why” of the facts. This is not to apologise for objectively questionable attitudes (such as the acceptance of bribes or the imposition of clientelistic practices in the selection process of public staff), but to see how, precisely in a party that includes ethics and honesty as a component of its political identity, its own militants arrive at such paths.

The peasant matrix

Founded in January 1999 on the initiative of Evo Morales and his followers, the MAS-IPSP [Instrument for the Sovereignty of the People] was initially presented as a sort of “extension” of rural trade unionism within the institutional political sphere. In this sense, political militancy was presented as the logical continuation of a rural militant trajectory – a tendency reinforced by the gradual hegemony of Morales over the entire peasant movement, having managed to marginalise his rivals Felipe Quispe and Alejo Veliz – and not as a parallel activity to the trade union activity, as was often the case in the COBista unionism. And this “genetic letter” will have a decisive influence on the constitution of the party later.

The unexpected arrival of Evo Morales in second place in the 2002 presidential elections would generate an expectation among the popular sectors that would begin to build a MAS party apparatus genuinely urban, with a view to the 2004 municipal elections. Likewise, a strict link does not exists between the popular-urban mobilisations of 2000-2005 and the growth of MAS-IPSP in the cities: in fact, in a city with a strong MAS vote today such as El Alto, the days of October 2003 did not play a fundamental role in the implementation of the MAS, but rather the disaffiliation of El Alto people from the traditional parties. The perspectives of victory created within the party such as MAS that could be characterised as “peasant” then led to a process of “forced implantation”: building the party becomes a necessity, but carries with it the risk of a “distortion” of what is the “instrument”.

From there the distinction between urban and rural areas within it, is reproduced in all areas where it acts. In parliament, tensions regularly arise between uninominal and plurinominal deputies in the period 2002-2005. The first, with a peasant trade union profile, elected by their bases, repeatedly denounced the attempts of the second, with a middle-class profile (intellectuals, NGOists and/or ex-militants from left), of driving the activities of the bench, in a institutional space in which the latter reveal themselves much more comfortably. Here, unlike the “principled militant” – understood as knowledge accumulated over time – among urban and rural areas is to emphasise the difficulty for peasants to adapt to the new sphere, as well as changes in the party for the incursion into the institutional space, whose centre of decision-making is no longer the National Directorate, but the bench. In a sense, the presence of the MAS in the national institutional enclosures creates the possibility of the reproduction of domination, structural in Bolivian society, of the peasants within their own emancipatory tool.

In response to this process at the institutional level, peasant leaders will aim to consolidate their domination in the party apparatus, before the urban militants that are converted into second rank: likewise, the access to “work” — that becomes an incitement to militancy of great importance after the victory of Morales in 2005 — is growing and tightly controlled by union leaders. And there are few cases of “compañero” peasants whose entry into public office translates into an experience of symbolic violence that is particularly hard, that often ends in the desertion of the job post.

Being a popular-urban militant in the MAS, therefore, requires recourse to a wide range of strategies to legitimise to the rest of a party that, while there is diversification from a sociological point of view, remains configured by its peasant matrix. To be able to obtain “work” through the militancy within the MAS, it is necessary, therefore, to gradually forge a series of alliances with rural leaders who, subsequently, consolidate the legitimacy of the “urban” militant in front of their rivals who are in competition for “work”.

Such situations, of course, leads to internal conflicts if these same urban sections are not adequately channelled through by the rural leaders. Thus, in 2006, the divisions between campesinos in departments such as La Paz or Beni have led to the utilisation of the urban section as “cannon fodder”, as each campesino fraction demands from the cities an absolute loyalty to it. This led, in the cities, a reproduction of the divisions that govern the sphere of rural organisations.

The ambiguous attraction to the state

It would be easy to draw from this analysis the conclusion that, within the MAS, there is a “peasant tyranny” underway towards the urban sectors, a desirable myth to give validity to the prejudices according to which the peasant movement does not demonstrate nothing but contempt to the exercise of representative democracy.

Such a conclusion would deny two fundamental problems. First, the symbolic structural domination suffered by peasants and indigenous peoples in Bolivian society, against which the MAS was constructed as a political project. While it is true that the history of colonisation has been a history of mixed races and the building of mutual loyalty, a history of which campesinos have been active subjects – illustrating up to some extent what could be a process of “voluntary servitude” [2] – there is no doubt that the configuration of Bolivian society has been constructing on the establishment of unequal and asymmetrical relations between “colonisers” and “colonised”, structuring also an exclusive society based on an often blatant racism.

This structural dominance has not stopped in staining the most ambitious projects of emancipation that Bolivia has known, as the National Revolution of 1952, or even the left-wing parties that reduced the “peasant compañero” to a strategic ally devoid of any political initiative worthy of being taken into account. In some ways, the permanent struggle conducted by the peasant leaders for preservation of the monopoly of power within the MAS – a party built by them and for them – is a struggle for preservation of the originality of a political project that, for the first time, consecrates the autonomy of the peasants as political subjects. In that sense, although the extension of the party to the cities, in a country highly urbanised, imposed an obligation to decisively consolidate a hegemony at a national level, it becomes even more necessary to contain any danger of professionals and other “white-collar” people who take ownership, tomorrow, of the “instrument”, beyond asking if, in case the situation presents itself, the continuation of the MAS as a party would still have some meaning.

To this socio-historical matrix specific to the peasant movement, it should be added as another key part of the analysis, above all to understand the permanence of clientelistic practices within it: the Bolivian state. Indeed, this was, in large part, an essential component of the structural domination suffered by rural trade unionism. As Max Weber sensed by observing the incipient German social-democratic movement, the risk of a party is not so much penetrating the state, but being penetrated by it and by its operational logic.

Paradoxically, although the peasant movement has been marginalised throughout many years in the institutional political sphere, there is no doubt that the latter exercised upon him a principled influence. The relationship established by the revolutionary State (1952-1964), then the military regimes until the slaughter of Tolata (1964-1974) with the National Confederation of Rural Peasants of Bolivia (CNTCB), was based on the use of co-optation, resulting in systematically instrumentalising the movement [3]. And the state as a loot, which can be accessed as a kind of “lesser evil” compared to the structural dominance, other potential sources of revenue were added with the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s: NGOs and international cooperation. Without a doubt, to break with a vision both of the state as with international cooperation as “baby bottles” will not depend solely on the ethics of the leaders, but also on the structural changes carried out by the government in order to put an end to the “NGOist projector” [4] and generate a renewed model of development in which the state (and its “work”) do not appear as the main channel of social ascent that the country's economy can provide for the most humble sectors of Bolivian society.

Upon massively penetrating the institutional political sphere beginning from 2002, the peasant leaders were faced with another challenge, even more important. In a strict continuity with its previous approaches, the MAS would continue, in each of its electoral appearances, emphasising “honesty” as part their political identity, which would be illustrated systematically by a rejection of public financing of their campaigns. Likewise, all candidates nominated by the MAS have an obligation to self-finance their campaigns – which implies the possession of sufficient financial resources – leading some of them into debt, sometimes significantly, to be able to compete with the possibilities of being elected.

In the 2005 elections, that “honesty” was translated into a key demand: the “institutionalisation” of the state, understood as a break with the traditional practice of the total renewal of state personnel with the arrival of each new government, emphasising also the intrinsic quality of public officials, whose presence in the administration no longer depended on partisan affiliation. The demands completed two objective strategies: on the one hand, it was about conserving those public officials with the abilities of management of which the vast majority of the MAS militants lacked – the spectrum of a scenario “do it as the UDP [Popular and Democratic Unity]” obsessed then some of the MAS cadre – and, on the other hand, to reassure the Bolivian middle class which stigmatises the “inexperience” of Evo Morales and his party.

If the MAS comes to fulfilling its promise in its first year of government, with the replacement of public officials limited to no more than 5% [5], the pressure by the “cronyists” exercised by the “bases” – fundamentally the urban sections – illustrated by the repeated questioning of their leaders in many public events, led the ruling party to proceed to a gradual, but significant, opening of public positions to its militants.

In this particular context, which combines a tremendous shortage of available positions accessible to the militants due to external causes (a reduced neoliberal state) and internal (the promise of the party to institutionalise the public service) and an exasperation of these against an organisation that does not comply with the traditional role attributed to a political party in Bolivia (the granting of a public position against the participation in the electoral mobilisation) which gives the scandal of the sale of guarantees in the Departmental Directorate of the MAS in La Paz, in January 2007.

It should be noted here that the practice of “guarantees”, existent since the National Revolution, is generalised as a means of regulation of access to the public service since the1990s, when the neoliberal reforms severely affected the ability of the governments effort to satisfy “work” for its militants. In a sense, the circulation of guarantees is again, since the beginning of that period, a common practice within the parties who control the state apparatus. The scandal, the first major blow to the “honesty” of the MAS, will involve some prominent leaders, both of a local and national level, but will be soon forgotten. However, it is significant, that among the Bolivian opinion makers, to have not only reproached the party of Morales for the sale of guarantees, a case of corruption reprehensible in itself, but also the deed of having resorted to that method of selection, precisely when dealing with a widespread practice whose use arises in the proper structure of the national political institutions, as with the militant praxis common to all Bolivian political parties.

More of the same?

To evaluate the contribution of the MAS to the democratisation of the Bolivian political life in light of the recent cases of corruption that has been shaking the government of Evo Morales has little sustenance for now, and this for several reasons. Among them, the “individual” character of these, which does not reveal any system of systematic corruption within the party, as seen with the mensalão scandal that brought to light a system of buying votes from Brazilian parliamentarians, in 2005, by the ruling Workers Party. However, there is no doubt that the “Ramirez case” will be a litmus test for the government of the MAS if it intends to preserve its “ethical principle” in the future. This case, indeed, is showing a lack of control that may currently exist in the ruling party over its own leaders in the performance of their duties. But beyond the individual dispositions of the protagonists in facilitating these events, it should be emphasised the role of the Bolivian political structure that permits the expression of these types of dispositions with ease, and the difficulty the government has to remove them. Combined with the difficulty of replacing the debilitated neoliberal institution – including the judiciary apparatus – with a new institutional framework in line with the new post-liberal and decolonised principles.

From there should we draw the conclusion that the MAS is, finally, more of the same? Many of the criticisms formulated these days against the government party on the basis of this scandal are fuelled by the caricature vision that many of the editorialists maintain on this, as combined with the Bolivian popular organisations.

It is not about denying here that this latest evidence shows, frequently, many dark faces. Clientelism, the lack of internal democracy, verticalism and authoritarian practices, without physical violence, are some of the facets of these movements that undermine its credibility before the middle classes. But do these characteristics have anything to do with the criminal practices observed in the Ramirez case?

The challenge consists in trying to understand where these characteristics come from that are so stigmatised by the middle class: perhaps clientelism which is so criticised does not come directly from practices imposed by the rulers of yesterday, who did not hesitate to use them to benefit their own interests? Perhaps the use of physical violence is not the result of a long history of bloody confrontations with the repressive state, as occurred in El Alto in the days of October 2003, or, more recently, during the slaughter of El Porvenir on September 11, 2008?

Undoubtedly, a lot remains to be done in the Bolivian popular movement and the MAS to meet the heights of the political, economic and moral reforms which the majority of Bolivians expect, and that is in many areas. But to evaluate their commitment to democracy in light of their more obvious defects lacks intellectual honesty. In fact, the French political scientist Dominique Colas, studying the case of the communist parties of Western Europe, noted a curious phenomenon: despite the obvious lack of internal democracy within their organisations, the Communist militants, to develop in a democratic environment, began to internalise democratic practices such as voting or contradictory debate, and show a commitment to the rules of democracy, such as multiparty competition.

But at the same time, these parties extended the democratic game to workers and to the popular sectors previously excluded. And it is precisely what we observe in Bolivia in the case of the MAS: although one can observe a deficient internal democracy, authoritarian attitudes or psychological pressure, the MAS contributes decisively to entrenching democratic practices in a profound manner in the emerging militants in sectors hitherto marginalised from the institutional political sphere.

Moreover: having won a series of elections, representative democracy won validity before the popular movement as a whole. What better way to illustrate the manner of which has resolved the political crisis that crossed the country in recent years: both in the “gas war” as in the days of May-June 2005, the constitutional avenue was imposed by the will of the popular movements. Is this democratisation paradoxical? Perhaps. But it is real, without a doubt.

Notes

[1] Moira Zuazo, ¿Cómo nació el MAS? La ruralización de la política en Bolivia, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, La Paz, 2008.

[2] Sinclair Thomson, Cuando sólo reinasen los indios; La política aymara en la era de la insurgencia, Muela del Diablo/Aruwiyiri, La Paz, 2006.

[3] Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Oprimidos pero no vencidos; Luchas del campesinado aymaray qwechwa 1900-1980, Aruwiyiri/Yachaywasi, La Paz, 2003 [1984]

[4] Antonio Rodríguez-Carmona, El Proyectorado, Bolivia tras 20 años de ayuda externa, Intermón-Oxfam, Barcelona, 2008.

[5] Conferencia de Álvaro García Linera, Washington D.C., EE.UU, 21 de julio de 2006.

* By Hervé Do Alto, translated for Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal by Gonzalo Villanueva with Do Alto's permission. It was first published in Le Monde diplomatique (Bolivian edition) Febrero 2009, nº 11, pp. 6-8.
http://links.org.au/node/944

* Hervé Do Alto is a political scientist (IEP Aix-en-Provence. France). He is co-author, with Paul Stefanoni, of Evo Morales: from coca farmer to the presidential palace (Malatesta, La Paz, 2006).

This country has a woman's face

Jesse Blanco — 2009-03-02T12:58:29Z

Venezuela is a beautiful land with 26 million habitants, around 49.6% of which are women, half the population. Looking at the situation of these women we see the highest rate of teen pregnancy in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 100% of women have suffered gender violence, whether its expression be psychological, physical, or above all cultural, and who have given up to a fateful rise in the number of deaths thus caused. Around 5 women are killed weekly in gender related violence[i].

With regards to labour relations, the National Institute of Statistics declares that 23% of women of working age have spent at least the last 2 years looking for work. Domestic work, though recognised as such in article 88 of the Constitution, is rarely if ever viewed as productive labour. Of the entire workforce only 31.9% are women as such domestic work isn't counted, an inequality exacerbated by its tendency to fall particularly heavily on working class women. Of those with work 63.8% receive an income of less than 500 Bolivares per month ($260 at the official exchange rate, $120 at the unofficial rate). Confinement of women to the home results in an effective feminization of poverty. International poverty rates find women comprising 70% of those living in such conditions, our reality fails to escape the global norm.

The oppression of women isn't a product of one single government in particular, nor one single country, a common core to the many different currents of feminist thought is that the oppression of and discrimination against women is universal. As such, we cannot hope that via one government, or one isolated battle, the culture of patriarchy, far older than that of capitalism, will be defeated.

In the majority of cases women suffer from a plurality of discriminations for reasons of sex and gender, class, ethnicity, and identity among others. In the case of Venezuela women are entrapped within an imaginary and semi mythological concept of "beauty" - as talked of by Naomi Wolf - a product of marketising beauty contests, fixated on image and its exportation. This is the shape of the global suffering of women in global systems of patriarchy and capitalism, symbolic violence with an import stamp.

Standing against this brief and perhaps pessimistic analysis are recently implemented government policies, which though insufficient do perhaps bring the refuge of equality closer. I am referring to the proclaimed successes of the Bolivarian process, specifically the reality of women fighting for their rights within this process.

The significant participation of women in the Constituent Assembly brought concrete results: the adoption of non sexist language in the subsequently formed Constitution (pdf), the aforementioned article 88 which recognises work in the home as productive activity, the emergence of institutions dedicated to designing policies to meet the needs of women, such as the National Insitute of the Women (INAMUJER by its Spanish acronym), the Women's Bank (BANMUJER), a Ministry of state for women's matters, and Mission Mothers of the Slum (Mision Madres del Barrio) which despite criticism (pdf) at least gives substance to a policy aimed at confronting flagrant gender inequality. Legal conquests have also aimed for the heavens: the Law of Equal Opportunities, the Law in Contra to Violence Against Women and the Family which was then substituted for the even more progressive organic Law for a Life Free from Violence, and the refuges created for the victims of domestic abuse.

These victories are important and indisputable yet do not mean that the war for women's liberation has been won. As Livia Vargas in the magazine "A Full Voice" (sic) explains, "Yes, its true that with capitalism women have succeeded in gaining certain democratic and progressive rights, like the right to vote, to divorce, and to work outside the home - though this last be more about economic realities than a step to liberation, yet forms of domination and exploitation seem to endure and seem unlikely to be overcome without the overcoming of capitalism itself...Today we see that in no capitalist country have women succeeded against the multidimensional working day imposed under it. The liberation of women from domestic slavery can only be seen as a cost from the capitalist perspective, and neither the state nor the private sector is ready to bear them."

We could say that capitalism takes the added value from the patriarchal system and that therefore the principal gendered violence is that which occurs within the class system, the division imposed is not only social but gendered. As such legal and formal battles will never be enough from a structural perspective, whereby material impossibilities impede real equality of rights, maintaining injustice and inequity. The question is not only of men hitting women, but the blows inflicted by a culture of misogyny, exploitation and oppression.

Jesse Blanco
UCV, Editor of the magazine Feminista Matea

Translated by Carolina John and George Gabriel

[i] Statistics released in the Venezuelan daily, Vea on the 2nd of September