Our America after the pandemic

 
Our America after the pandemic

x Guillermo Cieza: Surely after the coronavirus in many parts of the world the peoples will go out to "settle the accounts"

The previous historical journey of our American news

In Our America we had a process of rising popular struggles at the beginning of the new century whose antecedents were the Caracazo in 1989 and the neo-Zapatista insurrection in 1994. This rise in struggles had its highest points with the Water and Gas wars in Bolivia, the The piquetera insurgency and the popular rebellion that overthrew the government in Argentina and the CONAIE mobilizations in Ecuador, which contributed to the removal of Presidents Abdala Bucaran in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in 2002.

As a result of this process of struggle, there was a setback of neoliberal policies and, in some countries, those who had been the direct protagonists of the confrontation with adjustment policies came to the government, as was the case in Bolivia and Venezuela. In other countries progressive lines were imposed within traditional parties such as Argentina; and in others, new parties and center-left alliances came to the government, as was the case of Brazil, Honduras, Uruguay, Paraguay and Ecuador.

These governments, which were grouped under the label of "progressives", had in common the promotion of distributive policies, the revaluation of the role of states and diplomatic alliances that favored their position of distancing themselves from US foreign policy, but they did not share strategic horizons. In particular, there were differences with Venezuela, which, taking the example that Cuba proposed 50 years ago, was in favor of socialism and, to a lesser extent, with Bolivia, which, governed by a party that defines itself as socialist, proposed a model of transition, that Álvaro García Linera defined as Andean Amazon capitalism.

This "progressive bloc" was almost annihilated in the second decade of the 2000s. The advance was the removal of Luis Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, and then came the palatial coup against Fernando Lugo in Paraguay in 2012, the removal of Dilma Roussef in 2015. in Brazil, Macri's electoral triumph in Argentina in 2015, the neoliberal turn of Rafael Correa's successor, Lenín Moreno, elected president of Ecuador in 2017, and the coup against Evo Morales in 2019. All these events warned a direct interference of the US government that tried to get rid of presidents and government projects that were not aligned with its policy.

At the end of that triumphant decade for neoliberalism in Nuestra America, another cycle of popular resistance appears that is expressed in the rebellion on the streets in Chile against the Piñeira government that began in 2019, in the mobilizations promoted by CONAIE and students in Ecuador, in the strikes and days of protest in Colombia and in the struggles of the people in Haiti. This challenge to neoliberal policies, which has spread again on the continent, has contributed to the survival of Venezuela and Cuba and also to the electoral defeat of the leaders most aligned with US policy in Mexico and Argentina. And that's where we were when the coronavirus arrived ...

The red numbers of Our America

The pandemic and the global crisis surprise all the countries of Our America with very weakened economies, indebted to international creditors, with unsustainable production models and with very deteriorated living conditions for the majority of the population. In the last decade, Our America has grown little and unevenly. The average GDP of the countries barely increased by 1.9% per year (ECLAC figures), but as this growth is unevenly distributed, the numbers of poverty eradication and their indexes of health, education and housing are much worse.

By way of illustration, Argentina ended the macrista period with 35% of poverty and the public external debt amounted, in December 2019, to 323,177 million dollars, a figure that represented 91% of GDP. The country has two million unemployed, another seven million are informal workers, and 360,000 receive social plans. It has 43% of its idle industrial capacity, its industrial production and its exports are linked to value chains that will be affected by the global crisis. This will affect the income of foreign currency but also the provision of inputs.

It is not self-sufficient with conventional oil extraction and the great bet of the previous and current government has been the Vaca Muerta reserve, which can be accessed only with hydraulic fracturing technology ('fraking'). In addition to the environmental damage caused by this type of extraction, it is added that, due to the drop in oil prices, production costs are higher than their market value.

At a historical moment in which food shortages are on the rise in the world, the agricultural production model is finding its limits. On the agricultural side, our main exports are not food but fodder to feed confined animals. This model of industrial livestock farming, which is considered one of the main responsible for the mutation and spread of new virus diseases, is beginning to be widely questioned in the world for its obvious danger. It is also added that almost all agricultural production is input-dependent on herbicides and fertilizers that depend in most cases on imports and oil. This dependency places economic obstacles in a country where foreign exchange is scarce.

Adding new difficulties in the country grows a desertification process promoted by intensive agriculturization, clearing and the advance of the agricultural frontier on unsuitable or more vulnerable soils, generating a desertification process that advances annually. As an illustrative example, in the Province of Santiago del Estero 600,000 Ha of soy were planted on land that was later abandoned.

On the Argentine livestock side, it cannot be deluded in obtaining large incomes either, without affecting domestic prices. It is correct that the world market is going to be a great demand for food of animal origin, which could be raised and fattened on grass. But the beef 'stock' is similar to that of the 1960s of the last century. Sheep have dropped from 50 million heads in 1950 to 15 million in 2019. Pig and poultry are raised in a complete cycle under confined conditions, with the mentioned precautions. Milk production is the same as 20 years ago.

The world after the pandemic

Having cited the background, and illustrated with some numbers the situation of our economy, I will try to frame my opinion on what can happen in Our America, in some ideas already expressed in a previous article, "The world after the coronavirus", where I proposed as hypothesis main:
- The coronavirus pandemic has brought forward a global crisis of capitalism that has long been predicted by analysts. This crisis will be more profound and lasting than that of 2008-2009.

- The pandemic will also advance the change of world leadership of the powers, where China will take the lead over the United States. Those who felt overcome, in other historical moments of leadership change, appealed to increase the warlike confrontation. This could be repeated in the current circumstances.
- The immediate effect of the crisis has been the setback of globalization and the deepening of the political and economic disconnect between countries, the most illustrative example of which is the process of disintegration of the European Union. This disconnection will cause a withdrawal of the national states, whose most extreme expression is the current and transitory closure of borders.

- From the political-ideological perspective, the crisis has exposed the criminal nature of neoliberal ideas for disarming public health policies implemented by national states, leaving health care, scientific and pharmacological research in the hands of the market.

- It has also shown that Nature can take revenge and that all the warnings from ecologists and scientists that this economic model of production and consumption leads to catastrophe, were not alarmist.

- Finally, he warns that the next crisis may arise from the shortage and increase in the price of food, caused because the current mode of production begins to find objective limits. The case of swine fever in pig farms in China and other Asian countries is illustrative. A supply vacuum is generated, which cannot yet be replaced by agroecological production.

Nation states take off chest

We lived in a world that presented the evident contradiction of an internationalized market and political powers in the hands of the national States, with a clear predominance of the great powers. This contradiction had two possibilities of being resolved from the capitalist point of view. From a greater political globalization with the construction of a supranational state, or with a setback in the processes of economic globalization. Theorists of US hegemonism added to the first variant the promotion of a chaotic periphery where States and national identities would dissolve and peoples would be involved in fratricidal struggles, facilitating the looting of their natural assets (Libya model and failed attempts in Syria and Venezuela) .

The point is that this crossroads did not occur in a vacuum tube, but within the framework of the development of the contradictions of world capitalism. Those who warned that the 2008 crisis was not resolved and that it would recur with greater intensity and duration, did not hesitate in which way to choose. Much of the left confused their wishes with the reality of how the world works, and they were enthusiastic about the idea that revolutions would be global and that national borders would disappear; President Macri was delirious that if they did their homework, foreign investment would rain. Meanwhile, the neoconservative right embodied by Donald Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in England closed borders, tried to shorten value chains and prepared for the new stage.

This analysis is not an exaggerated lucidity, it hardly implies knowing the history of humanity and drawing conclusions. In moments of great crisis such as the world wars, the reflex movement of the States has been to withdraw on itself, trying to discipline the whole of society, including the bourgeois, to save the strategic interests of local capitalism.

This movement, which started from the awareness that a global crisis was looming, prevailed in all countries, including ours, when the pandemic preceded the global crisis. What Trump and Johnson did not foresee was the coronavirus and that is why today they face the problems they have. It should be clarified that the fact that these characters have been more insightful than Macri, the European social liberals and a good part of our left, about the path that the world would take, does not necessarily mean greater advantages for the right.

In Venezuela, for example - a country blocked and heavily hit by the hybrid war unleashed by the United States - when the epidemic began, right-wing analysts diagnosed it as the missing push to bring down the Maduro government. On the contrary, the fight against the coronavirus has strengthened the national unity around the government and has made it possible to revalue what exists in public health created by Chavismo, and has even allowed the government to make better decisions than those it had been taking.

In the Argentine case: for decades, health and education workers struggled defending free public systems and not leaving such sensitive issues in the hands of private companies. Today it is evident that it was left standing by public health, whose illustrative example is the underfunded Malbrán Institute, they are the bulwarks of the fight against the pandemic.

In all cases, it has been shown that state planning is the only one that has been able to face the pandemic with satisfactory results. The most powerful example has been that of China, whose actions reveal the inability of US lumpen capitalism to give coherent answers. But it is also very interesting to compare the results between very small but densely populated countries like Cuba and the Dominican Republic, or even countries like Colombia and Venezuela where the role of the State and state planning is very different.

A first conclusion on the subject: The global crisis will deepen global disconnection and strengthen the role of nation states, and there will be a popular appreciation of their policies and greater concern for those who govern. If pretending to do politics ignoring the national question, the dispute between State and State policies, was a mistake that a good part of our left incurred without obvious costs, repeating these positions in the new stage of crisis, will lead to the worst marginality politics

The search for the herd

The second aspect that seems necessary to me to consider is that, in moments of deep crisis, there will be a massive movement that I would call "search for the herd". The herd was the natural way ruminants grazed when Nature included the presence of predators. The animals knew that whoever isolated himself was in danger of death. This herd also presupposed the presence of strong leadership.

On this point, it seems necessary to make the clarification that the search movement of the herd does not necessarily mean a transformative orientation. As if to provoke: it is very likely that to face the crisis, the American people will unify by guaranteeing Trump's reelection. But it happens that this historical moment of revaluation of the national States and search for the herd occurs in a particular context of strong challenge to neoliberal policies.

The neoliberal offensive at the political level, but also from the ideological one that the peoples of Our America have suffered in the last decade has been enormous. The entrepreneurial culture, the cult of individualism, the anti-collective and anti-organization preaching, the anti-state fury as a place where some collective interest could be expressed, the promotion of difference without any intention of obtaining more comprehensive syntheses, the exaltation of the winners who are the ones who exist in the media or accumulate fortunes and power, all the values ​​of capitalism exacerbated by neoliberal preaching are stripped bare.

The new heroes begin to be the doctors and nurses, those who collect garbage and those who serve community canteens, food producers, small merchants, etc.

The chances of survival are beginning to be measured in each country in terms of the capacity for care and containment of their public health. Powers that were presented as great world leaders appear overwhelmed by the infected and the dead. They can hide the corpses but they cannot cover the testimonies of a terrified population before the evidence that they are no longer safe. Those who were educated in fear but also in the certainty that in their country they were protected, discover that they are out in the open.

It seems important to me, then, to point out that this "returning to the herd", which means joining together, closing ranks, concealing or postponing differences, trying to act together, has the special flavor in Our America that a revival of popular struggles is coming with a strong challenge to neoliberalism.

So when we talk about getting together, the question is getting together around what or who. Will Chileans be able to unite around the Piñeira government, which had a 6% approval before the pandemic? Will Ecuadorians and Ecuadorians be able to gather around the government of Lenin Moreno, who repressed the people and today hides figures of the infected and dead but cannot hide the corpses thrown on the street? Can Bolivians and Bolivians accept to go through the crisis that is coming led by the illegitimate and racist president Jeanine Áñez?

The most probable, then, is that as the Venezuelan compa Reinaldo Iturriza says "After the quarantine, in the streets, our peoples, perhaps even the United States, will know how to do what corresponds: to continue and deepen the struggle already begun and settle the due accounts "(https://lahaine.org/cZ4D).

The threat against Venezuela

The threats of the US government, putting a reward on Maduro's head and threatening them with an invasion, are very badly stopped due to the objective fact that whoever offers himself as a savior has a health system overwhelmed by the epidemic and is headed for a million of infected, while the supposed "dictatorship that oppresses the people" is controlling the pandemic.

In any case, the history of the United States shows that it does not need good arguments to start a war raid, it has a network of no less than 20 obsequious countries that can support any adventure, including some neighbors to Venezuela such as Colombia or Brazil and the support from the unpresentable Secretary of the OAS. Its limits are not the United Nations, but the decision to resist the Venezuelan people, and the support that China and Russia can give them.

The question to ask in any case is: Is the US willing to immediately seek a military escape valve from its enormous political, financial and civilizational crisis and its loss of world leadership? If the answer is yes, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that it begins with an aggression against Venezuela

Opportunities and possibilities

The confluence of two positive factors for social transformations, such as the weakening of the local bourgeoisies due to the greater global disconnection and the growing challenge to neoliberal policies by broad popular sectors in Our America, provides an opportunity for changes but not necessarily determines them. They need an organized popular force, a revolutionary institutionality and leadership capable of linking all potentialities with a transformative vocation. Also, the ability to add sectors that, from their conscience and interests, do not overcome the condition of suffering victims of the extreme policies of capitalism.

In the great world crises, those who were able to capitalize on the crises in a revolutionary direction had those attributes. What has been built in popular protests and in a long previous accumulation in Chile, Ecuador and Colombia, will it be enough to turn repressive and corrupt governments in the next decade? In this new stage of global crisis, will they be able to build political alternatives that are imposed on those who today govern without country projects that contemplate popular interests?

The neoliberal offensive at the political level, but also from the ideological one that the peoples of Our America have suffered in the last decade has been enormous. The entrepreneurial culture, the cult of individualism, the anti-collective and anti-organization preaching, the anti-state fury as a place where some collective interest could be expressed, the promotion of difference without any intention of obtaining more comprehensive syntheses, the exaltation of the winners who are the ones who exist in the media or accumulate fortunes and power, all the values ​​of capitalism exacerbated by neoliberal preaching are stripped bare.

The new heroes begin to be the doctors and nurses, those who collect garbage and those who serve community canteens, food producers, small merchants, etc.

The chances of survival are beginning to be measured in each country in terms of the capacity for care and containment of their public health. Powers that were presented as great world leaders appear overwhelmed by the infected and the dead. They can hide the corpses but they cannot cover the testimonies of a terrified population before the evidence that they are no longer safe. Those who were educated in fear but also in the certainty that in their country they were protected, discover that they are out in the open.

It seems important to me, then, to point out that this "returning to the herd", which means joining together, closing ranks, concealing or postponing differences, trying to act together, has the special flavor in Our America that a revival of popular struggles is coming with a strong challenge to neoliberalism.

So when we talk about getting together, the question is getting together around what or who. Will Chileans be able to unite around the Piñeira government, which had a 6% approval before the pandemic? Will Ecuadorians and Ecuadorians be able to gather around the government of Lenin Moreno, who repressed the people and today hides figures of the infected and dead but cannot hide the corpses thrown on the street? Can Bolivians and Bolivians accept to go through the crisis that is coming led by the illegitimate and racist president Jeanine Áñez?

The most probable, then, is that as the Venezuelan compa Reinaldo Iturriza says "After the quarantine, in the streets, our peoples, perhaps even the United States, will know how to do what corresponds: to continue and deepen the struggle already begun and settle the due accounts "(https://lahaine.org/cZ4D).

The threat against Venezuela

The threats of the US government, putting a reward on Maduro's head and threatening them with an invasion, are very badly stopped due to the objective fact that whoever offers himself as a savior has a health system overwhelmed by the epidemic and is headed for a million of infected, while the supposed "dictatorship that oppresses the people" is controlling the pandemic.

In any case, the history of the United States shows that it does not need good arguments to start a war raid, it has a network of no less than 20 obsequious countries that can support any adventure, including some neighbors to Venezuela such as Colombia or Brazil and the support from the unpresentable Secretary of the OAS. Its limits are not the United Nations, but the decision to resist the Venezuelan people, and the support that China and Russia can give them.

The question to ask in any case is: Is the US willing to immediately seek a military escape valve from its enormous political, financial and civilizational crisis and its loss of world leadership? If the answer is yes, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that it begins with an aggression against Venezuela

Opportunities and possibilities

The confluence of two positive factors for social transformations, such as the weakening of the local bourgeoisies due to the greater global disconnection and the growing challenge to neoliberal policies by broad popular sectors in Our America, provides an opportunity for changes but not necessarily determines them. They need an organized popular force, a revolutionary institutionality and leadership capable of linking all potentialities with a transformative vocation. Also, the ability to add sectors that, from their conscience and interests, do not overcome the condition of suffering victims of the extreme policies of capitalism.

In the great world crises, those who were able to capitalize on the crises in a revolutionary direction had those attributes. What has been built in popular protests and in a long previous accumulation in Chile, Ecuador and Colombia, will it be enough to turn repressive and corrupt governments in the next decade? In this new stage of global crisis, will they be able to build political alternatives that are imposed on those who today govern without country projects that contemplate popular interests?