From Ha’aretz, May 11: Fear and loathing in Petah Tikva / Neo-Nazi gangs assaulting ultra-Orthodox Jews A week after the desecration of the Great Synagogue in Petah Tikva, nothing remains of the horror the worshipers encountered there last Thursday when… Read moreIsraeli neo-Nazis attack Jews
According to this decision, if he married her now and she was under 25, an Israeli parliamentarian’s wife wouldn’t be allowed to live with him in Israel. From Ha’aretz, May 14: MK Barakeh: High Court ruling supplies an ‘alibi for… Read moreIsraeli court upholds apartheid
The two were shot with rubber bullets at close range in the head. From the International Solidarity Movement: [photos at the link] May 12, Bi’lin, occupied West Bank “I saw blood gushing out of his head, and helped bandage it…. Read moreIsraeli troops shoot two foreigners
From the Egyptian NGO, Civil Monitors for Human Rights, in Cairo, May 11: Egyptian Authorities Continue Crackdown on Opposition Today Continuing in their policy of oppression, the Egyptian authorities are trying to prevent protests which the Egyptian opposition is organizing… Read moreEgypt: opposition crackdown continues
From the American Library Association, May 5: Brandeis Students Protest Removal of Palestinian Art Some 100 people, many of them students at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, marched May 4 to protest the removal a week earlier of “Voices from… Read moreBrandeis students protest removal of Palestinian art
An exhibition of artwork at Brandeis University featuring 17 paintings by Palestinian youths from the al-Rowwad cultural center at the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, was removed by the university last week, after several… Read moreCensorship at Brandeis
It seems Mehlman and the AJC have not heard the message from more moderate elements of the Israel lobby, or from right-wing pollster Frank Luntz. The following May 3 AP article ran in the
From the respected Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, April 30: Southern Hebron hills: Israel reinstates the cancelled barrier route “through the back door” The army has recently issued new orders requisitioning land in the southern Hebron hills along Route 317… Read moreIsraeli wall threatens Palestinian cave-dwellers
The following ran in the New York Jewish Week. It marks a post-M&W pendulum swing, in which more centrist elements of the Israel lobby are speaking out with alarm over what more hard-line elements — The Weekly Standard, The Wall… Read moreCentrist Jewish leaders to Bush: back off the Israel rationale
Electronic Journal & Daily Weblog “BIONOIA” Part 3 The Mystery of Plum Island: Nazis, Ticks and Weapons of Mass Infection by Mark Sanborne BIRD FLU: HYPE, HYPOTHESIS, AND HYPODERMIC by A. Krondstadt ELECTIONS IN PALESTINE & HAITI: This Is What… Read moreIssue #. 121. May 2006
And the New Challenge to Global Capital
by Peter Hudis
At a moment when the Bush administration is facing a quagmire in Iraq and growing opposition to its policies at home, Latin America may not appear to be its central area of concern. Yet events there are becoming as worrisome to it as those in the Middle East.
A left-wing government under Evo Morales took power in Bolivia in December; a radical who favors nationalizing U.S. mining interests, Ollanta Humala, is hoping to become the president of Peru in April; and a left-of-center government may take power in Mexico if Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PRD wins its presidential election in July. Meanwhile Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s effort to create a “counter-hegemonic pole” to the U.S. is becoming an increasing irritant to the Bush administration.
The move to the Left by Latin America’s electorate is only one reflection of a continent in upheaval. In Ecuador the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities last month called for a nationwide uprising to protest a possible free-trade agreement with the U.S. In Colombia, the government is being sharply criticized for signing a free trade agreement with the U.S. in late February that may throw 2.5 million Colombians out of work once tariffs are lifted on U.S. agricultural imports.
From Mexico to the southern cone, Latin Americans are expressing disgust with decades of U.S.-sponsored neoliberal restructuring that has sunk 44% of Latin Americans into poverty and made income disparities between rich and poor even worse than ever.
BUSH’S FAKE TALK OF “DEMOCRACY”
That the Bush administration’s policy towards Latin America is coming apart at the seams was seen last fall when its Free Trade Agreement of the Americas died in the face of withering attacks by Chavez and other Latin American leaders. Although the U.S. since then has tried to promote an Andean Free Trade Agreement, Morales’ election has left that in tatters as well. The administration is responding to this situation by accusing its critics of being “undemocratic.”
In February Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said of Chavez: “He’s a person who was elected legally just as Hitler was elected legally and then consolidated power and is now, of course, working with Castro and Morales. It concerns me.” Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte (ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s when the U.S.-supported government murdered thousands of people in Central America) stated a few weeks later that Chavez is a threat because he is “diminishing freedom of the press” in Venezuela.
Aside from the fact that these advocates of domestic spying, torture, and the use of death squads against liberatory forces in Latin America are hardly in a position to lecture others about “democracy,” one thing that cannot be said of Chavez is that he has ended freedom of expression. The open and vibrant debate that is taking place in Venezuela over whether or not his “Bolivarian Revolution” is a viable path to the future is proof of it.
A lively debate is in fact taking place in Latin America today among democratic grassroots groups of indigenous peoples, feminists, workers, national minorities and youth. There are few places to get a better sense of the battle of ideas taking place there than at the World Social Forum (WSF), held in Caracas, Venezuela in late January.
THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM
This year’s WSF in Caracas, attended by 80,000, took place in a radically different context from last year’s gathering in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Last year’s event was held in the midst of growing mass disillusionment with the accommodationist stance of Lula da Silva’s Workers‚ Party (PT). Although the PT came to power through decades of struggles by movements-from-below of metal workers, feminists, Christian base communities, and the Landless Peasants’ Movement (MST), Lula has adhered to the neoliberal policies that the masses expected him to challenge.
No mass upsurge preceded Chavez’s rise to power. He became president through a national election in 1999 after having earlier staged an abortive military coup. Since then, his promotion of what he calls “Bolivarian Socialism” has created an opening that many in Venezuela are using to promote radical demands, at the same time that many questions are being asked about where his “revolution from above” is headed.
The Venezuelan political context directly impacted this year’s WSF. It had a larger presence of traditional Marxist-Leninist tendencies than previously. For the first time 850 participants attended from Cuba.
Most important, whereas at previous WSFs it was rare to hear extended discussion of “socialism” let alone a serious analysis of what constitutes a non-capitalist society, this year’s WSF was dominated by much discussion of socialism—in part because Chavez has anointed the “Bolivarian Revolution” as a project of “socialist reconstruction.”
The question is what is meant by such discussions of socialism and whether the radicalization that characterizes Venezuela today will accentuate or impede the search for a viable alternative to capitalism.
BATTLE OF IDEAS IN VENEZUELA
Chavez’s attraction for many inside and outside of Venezuela lies in his attacks on Bush and in his effort to funnel Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs.
Chavez is using a fourfold increase in oil revenue since 1999 to forge a “counter-hegemonic” pole to the U.S. He is selling oil at below market prices to several friendly Latin American countries. He has floated bonds to help Argentina pay off its debt to the International Monetary Fund. And he is also trading oil for commodities (like soybeans) as part of an effort to curry favor with Morales’ Bolivia.
His ambitions extend even further. He is forging close relations with China and talks of using its technological expertise to bypass Venezuela’s dependence on the U.S. He is also trying to forge a “strategic alliance” with Iran. Venezuela is one of only a handful of countries that opposes placing restrictions on Iran’s access to nuclear technology. This is occurring at the moment when Iran’s right-wing president is cracking down on its labor movement, as seen in the arrest last month of 1,000 striking bus drivers.
Inside Venezuela, Chavez is solidifying his mass support by funneling much of the nation’s oil revenue into social programs. This year 41% of Venezuela’s budget is earmarked for spending for health care, literacy, housing, and other needs. It represents the largest and most comprehensive program of social spending in Latin America.
He has also set up a dozen “missions” that provide emergency health, education, and welfare as well as paid subsidies to the poor. The missions are financed out of the growing oil revenue under a separate budget subject to Chavez’s personal discretion.
While many at the WSF hailed these moves as proof that Venezuela is moving in a “socialist” direction, such policies have done little so far to dent the nation’s massive unemployment. Only 37,000 new jobs have been created in the past year. And many in the missions complain of never getting paid for their work or being paid only occasionally.
Many working people also complain about growing bureaucracy and the risk of one-man rule. Chavez’s tendency to appear on television several evenings a week to give four-hour speeches has many critiquing him for a cult of personality and “Bonapartism.”
The most applauded as well as contentious aspect of Venezuela concerns the explosive growth in cooperatives. Thousands have sprung up, encompassing everything from food vendors to health care providers to efforts to form cooperatives in industrial enterprises.
These cooperatives, which are also funded by the state from oil revenues, are touted by the government and its supporters as a way to “popularize capital.” As one official put it, “The principal idea is that cooperatives or development zones should integrate with other cooperatives to add value through processing and transformation” while avoiding intermediaries such as foreign corporations or private businesses.
Most cooperatives are contracted to sell goods to the government, which gives it a significant role in determining which ones thrive and which fail. At the same time, many socially conscious activists are creating nonprofit cooperatives that provide health care, housing, and social assistance to raise the standard of living of Venezuelans.
Thus the situation in Venezuela is highly contradictory. While some programs being enacted from above have a bureaucratic or state-capitalist stamp to them, large numbers of people are making use of the present situation to press for radical changes on their own.
WHAT IS SOCIALISM?
Such distinctions often did not get made in discussions at the WSF, however, where enthusiasm over Chavez’s specific policies tended to trump serious analysis of them.
Even government ministers admit that some enterprises are being turned into cooperatives “not with the intention of transferring power to their workers, but to evade taxes from which cooperatives are exempt.” Minister for Popular Economy ElĂas Jaua stated: “There are many cooperatives that are registered as such on paper, but which actually have a boss who is paid more, salaried workers, and unequal distribution of work and income.” Many workers in the cooperatives earn less than the minimum wage, $188 a month, as they are not subject to national labor laws.
Yet many at the WSF argued that capitalist relations will erode as “social ownership of the means of production” and the elimination of private competition take hold. Clearly there is a growing tendency in today’s movements against global capital to return to more traditional approaches that focus on nationalized property and statification of natural resources as the solution to the problems of neoliberalism.
There is nothing wrong with demanding that global capital be prevented from continuing to rob the natural and human resources of Latin American nations. Just as it is vital for workers to demand a more equitable redistribution of the surplus value that is robbed from their hides each day at work, so it is important for the nations of the South to demand a redistribution of wealth from global capital.
Yet by the same token, just as a worker who obtains a wage increase still lives in a capitalist environment in which those gains can be readily taken away, a popular regime that demands a redistribution of the surplus value robbed from its people by multinational corporations still exists in the context of the world market and capitalist social relations.
In a word, socialism is not the same as nationalized industry and property—even when a “co-management scheme” operates between workers and the state.
As Raya Dunayevskaya put it: “Even where a state like Cuba is protected from the worst whims of the world market and where state planning is total, the price of sugar is still dependent upon the socially necessary labor time established by world production. In a word, to plan or not plan is not the decisive question. The state of technological development and the accumulated capital are the determinants, the only determinants when the masses are not allowed their self-activity.” (Philosophy and Revolution, p. 225).
WHICH WAY AHEAD?
The turn back to statism in much of the movement against global capital is by no means complete, including in Venezuela. Independent movements are gaining strength there, such as an abortion rights movement.
The growth of the women’s movement explains why Venezuela is the only Latin America country with a constitution that recognizes housework as economically productive activity. Housewives are now able to obtain social security benefits.
However, women are still under-represented in the government. Only 12% of the members of the National Assembly are women. Demands are being raised that 50% of its seats be reserved for women candidates.
Many are probing into a genuine alternative that avoids the dead ends of both neoliberalism and state-capitalism. This was reflected in an “Alternative Social Forum” held at the same time as the WSF by Venezuelan anarchists. Its sponsors stated at the forum: “In the last four years Venezuela has undergone a polarization induced by the top players vying for power against the new Chavez bureaucracy that has supplanted the previous one. Part of the demobilization of the social movements answers to this logic: having taken part in, and assumed blindly, the agenda imposed from above, postponing their own claims. Another chapter belongs to the expectations created by some of the social activists faced with a ‘progressive and left’ government, spokesmen of a discourse that assumes the language of the movements but whose policies go in the opposite direction.”
Clearly an important debate is going on in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America over the direction of the movements against global capital—even if the initiative for now rests with those favoring a return to more statist tendencies of the old Left.
One reason for this shift is that while the movement against global capital has raised the important slogan “another world is possible,” it has tended to avoid an in-depth discussion of exactly what constitutes a society that negates and transcends capitalism.
Reticence about imposing programs and devising “blueprints for the future,” both of which have been integral to the anti-vanguardist nature of the movements against global capital since their inception in the Seattle protests of 1999, is understandable. Yet no movement can live forever on generalizations and good intentions. If anti-vanguardists fail to spell out in precise and specific terms the basic features of a socialist society that transcends the parameters of value production, other less liberatory tendencies will surely do so instead. This is what we are now witnessing, as many who want to know “what is socialism” find that the more traditional, statist leftists are the ones who have a ready-made answer to their questions, albeit a superficial one.
The debate is by no means finished, yet it will not be brought to a successful finish unless we concretize the creativity of cognition by spelling out “what happens after” the revolution, beginning right here and now.
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This piece originally appeared in News & Letters, Chicago-based journal of Marxism-Humanism, April-May 2006
http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2006/April-May/Lead_April-May_06.htm
RESOURCES:
“Tehran bus strikers appeal for solidarity,” News & Letters, April-May 2006 http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2006/April-May/Tehran_April-May_06.htm
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
HONDURAS, NICARAGUA IN CAFTA
After a number of delays, the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) went into effect in Honduras and Nicaragua on April 1. Honduran president Manuel Zelaya held a ceremony with US ambassador Charles Ford, who acknowledged that “changes generate fear” but insisted: “[W]e have confidence in the future.” Nicaraguan president Enrique Bolanos marked the occasion by certifying the first shipment of Nicaraguan beans–a container reportedly valued at $20,000–for export to the US under the new agreement. The ceremony was held in El Crucero, a town south of Managua, with US ambassador Paul Trivelli participating. Nicaraguan government sources predicted that DR-CAFTA will increase Nicaraguan exports by 20%; last year Nicaragua exported goods worth $291.7 million to the US and imported $524.8 million, with a net deficit of $233.1 million. (El Diario-La Prensa, April 2 from AP)
Thousands of Honduran doctors, teachers, students, workers and indigenous people marched in Tegucigalpa on March 31 to protest the planned DR-CAFTA implementation. The marchers passed in front of the US embassy and the presidential offices chanting slogans against Zelaya and the US government. “The treaty was designed to benefit big business and the rich,” union leader Juan Barahona told the demonstrators. “[F]oreign investment, which the trade accord is supposed to attract, is the hook…[but] investors have never helped the country; on the contrary, they’ve looted it throughout our history.” The current unemployment rate in Honduras is 46%, while 71% of the country’s 7 million inhabitants live in poverty. The protest was organized by the Popular Bloc and the National Resistance Coordinating Committee. (ED-LP, April 1)
DR-CAFTA, a trade bloc incorporating Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the US, was supposed to go into effect on Jan. 1. Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly has still not approved the accord; the other countries have ratified DR-CAFTA, but the legislatures failed to enact laws that the US insisted were necessary for full compliance. El Salvador passed the legislation in time for DR-CAFTA to take effect there on March 1.
Nicaragua’s National Assembly cleared the way for the DR-CAFTA implementation when it voted unanimously on March 21 for a series of reforms to existing laws: the Patent Law, the Law of Brands and Other Distinctive Signs, and the Special Law of Crime Against International Trade or International Investment. (Diario el Mundo, San Salvador, March 22)
The vote in the National Assembly was made possible by the decision of the second largest bloc, the deputies from the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), to reverse their previous opposition to DR-CAFTA. On March 15 the Sandinista Assembly, the party’s official decision-making body, voted to “promote proposals in favor of the Nicaraguans in all those reform laws currently being promoted by the government for the implementation of CAFTA.” At the same time, the Sandinista Assembly insisted that “national production should be the primary axis for the development of a sustainable and self-sustainable economy” and that DR-CAFTA “represents a serious threat to our natural resources, to the producers, workers and other Nicaraguan sectors.” (Associated Press, March 16)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 2
GUATEMALA: MURDERS FOLLOW UPRISING CALL
Four heavily armed men dressed in black murdered Tz’utujil Maya indigenous leader Antonio Ixbalan Cali and his wife, Maria Petzey Cool, on April 5 in their home in the community of Valparaiso, Chicacao municipality, in the Guatemalan department of Suchitepequez. Ixbalan was a local leader of the National Indigenous and Campesino Coordinating Committee (CONIC) and president of the Farmers Association of Santiago Atitlan. The Valparaiso community is composed of 44 families that carried out a successful struggle for their land, formerly a private ranch; they were granted the legal title on Feb. 8, 2002.
The murders came within days of two other apparently political killings. On April 2 Meregilda Suchite, a community leader and member of the local Women’s Network in Olopa, Chiquimula municipality, in the Ch’orti region, was shot six times and attacked with a machete. Suchite’s husband said police failed to arrest the murderer, Cesar Perez Gonzalez. On April 6 two men on a motorcycle gunned down legislative deputy Mario Ronaldo Pivaral Montenegro, of the center-right National Hope Unity (UNE), in front of the party’s headquarters in Guatemala City. He had gone outside to answer a call on his cell phone. (Guatemala Hoy, April 6, 7)
National CONIC leaders tied the murders of Ixbalan and Petzey to a call they issued hours earlier on April 5 for a “National Mayan and Popular Uprising.” In a press conference CONIC leaders and leaders of the National Teachers Assembly (ANM) announced the uprising as they broke off talks with the government of President Oscar Berger. “The response to our demands mocks the Maya and popular movement,” said CONIC general coordinator Pedro Esquina. Another CONIC leader, Juan Tiney, projected actions starting after Easter weekend ends on April 16 that could include taking over farms, blocking highways, and holding assemblies and demonstrations. “They are forcing us to choose the route of popular struggle,” he said. “Ecuador and Bolivia are examples of the results that can occur, and we believe that in Guatemala this is also possible. Everything CONIC says, it does.” The CONIC leaders called on all Mayans who hold government posts to resign and join the Mayan people’s struggle, including human rights activists Rosalina Tuyuc and Rigoberta Menchu.
The movement’s demands include the resolution of more than 100 land conflicts, forgiveness of debts to the government for land awarded to campesinos, the suspension of mining concessions, a law on nationality and indigenous peoples, and an end to the effort to fire ANM leader Joviel Acevedo from his teaching job. (Guatemala Hoy, April 6, 7; Prensa Libre, Guatemala, April 6)
The call for an uprising followed a demonstration by thousands of campesinos and others in Guatemala City on March 30, largely organized by CONIC and ANM around the same demands. March 27 and 28 had brought road blockades by people whose homes and land had been damaged by hurricane Stan in October, along with demonstrations against DR-CAFTA. (La Semana en Guatemala, April 4)
On March 29, in the midst of these mobilizations, army troops, reportedly backed by tanks and helicopters, violently evicted some 310 members of the Worker and Campesino Labor Federation (FESOC) from land they were occupying in the community of La Bendicion, Flores municipality, Peten department. The campesinos were waiting for the National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP) to comply with its commitment to relocate them on other suitable land. The troops reportedly injured campesinos and burned their homes and possessions. (Amnesty International Urgent Action, April 3)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 9
HONDURAS: GENERAL LOSES IN U.S. RIGHTS SUIT
In a ruling issued late on March 31 in Miami, US district Judge Joan Lenard ordered a former Honduran military officer, Lt. Col. Juan Lopez Grijalba, to pay $47 million to torture survivors and relatives of victims murdered by troops Lopez Grijalba commanded in the early 1980s. The plaintiffs, who now live in the US, were Gloria and Oscar Reyes, a married couple abducted and tortured by soldiers in and around Tegucigalpa in 1982; Zenaida Velasquez, the sister of Manfredo Velasquez, a university student leader murdered in 1981; and the two sisters of university student Hans Madisson, mutilated and decapitated in 1982. During this period, Lopez Grijalba headed the National Investigations Directorate (DNI) and the death squad known as Battalion 316. Judge Lenard ruled that Lopez Grijalba was responsible for the actions of the troops, and that he was present and giving orders during the raid in which Madisson and Gloria and Oscar Reyes were captured.
The monetary award was mostly symbolic, since Lopez Grijalba is living in Honduras and apparently has no assets in the US. He moved to the Miami area in 1998; US immigration authorities arrested him in April 2002, and he was deported to Honduras on Oct. 21, 2004 for his participation in human rights abuses.
But Matt Eisenbrandt, litigation director for the San Francisco-based Center for Justice & Accountability (CJA), which brought the suit in 2002 on behalf of the plaintiffs, said the decision might advance a case the Honduran human rights prosecutor opened against Lopez Grijalba when he was deported. “A judgment in the United States can carry a lot of weight in that country,” Eisenbrandt said. Bertha Oliva, coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared in Honduras, called the decision “historic” and said it “obligates the Honduran authorities to review their role as fixers and builders of impunity.” (El Nuevo Herald, Miami, April 4; Miami Herald, April 4; La Nacion, Costa Rica, April 3; CJA press release, April 3)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 9
EL SALVADOR: FEW CHANGES IN ELECTIONS
March 12 elections in El Salvador for municipal governments, the National Assembly and the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN) failed to show major shifts in the strengths of the main parties. According to the final results presented by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) on March 18, the governing right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) won 34 deputies’ seats in the 84-member National Assembly, followed by the leftist Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) with 32. The right-wing Party of National Conciliation (PCN) won 10 seats, the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) won six and the social democratic National Change (CD) came in last with two. No party has the 43 votes necessary for a majority, and ARENA will have to bloc with the FMLN to get the 56 votes required for constitutional changes or major fiscal decisions.
ARENA and the FMLN both gained slightly from their totals in 2003, when the FMLN came in first with 31 seats, followed by ARENA with 27.
ARENA won 147 municipal races, followed by the FMLN with 52 municipal governments, the PCN with 39, the PDC with 14 and the CD with two; various coalitions won in the remaining eight municipalities. The FMLN held on to San Salvador, which it has governed since 1997, but slipped in other large cities, winning in just two of the other 14 departmental capitals; ARENA won seven departmental capitals. FMLN supporters charged ARENA officials with fraud and intimidation. In the close San Salvador race, the government initially indicated that ARENA candidate Rodrigo Samayoa had won. Some 20,000 FMLN supporters marched in San Salvador on March 16 to protest alleged irregularities; the police dispersed the marchers with tear gas and rubber bullets. In the end the TSE declared FMLN candidate Violeta Menjivar the winner, by just 44 votes.
ARENA and the FMLN each won eight seats in PARLACEN; the PCN won two and the PDC and CD two each. (Terra March 19; La Nacion, Costa Rica, March 19; La Prensa Grafica, San Salvador, March 19; El Diario de Hoy, San Salvador, March 20; Adital, Brazil, March 17)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 2
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Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html
See also WW4 REPORT #119
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“El Salvador: No Business as Usual as CAFTA Takes Effect,” by Paul Pollack. WW4 REPORT #120
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution
