00:00 Jeffery Webber: …for the introduction, and thanks to Socialist Resistance for inviting me to speak tonight. What I'm going to do, because I'm only going to speak for 20 minutes, I'm just going to take a little sliver of what the book talks about and try to cover basically four moments or cycles of the left since the 90s, focusing really on the late 1990s until the present, and trying to get a sense of where we're at today in Latin America in broad, broad terms. So I'm obviously going to be speaking generally about the region, and there's a lot of particularity that will be glossed over, which I'm happy to talk about in the Q&A.
00:31 So I think as a starting point, if you begin in the early 1990s, the Latin American left is at its lowest point in its entire history, I would argue. You have, on the back of the physical military annihilation of huge layers of the left through bureaucratic authoritarian regimes in the Southern Cone, the counter-insurgency in Central America to defeat the last guerrilla movements in Guatemala, El Salvador, the defeat of the Nicaraguan revolution, first through counter-insurgent efforts, through the Reagan-backed Contra counter-insurgency, and then eventually the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990. And of course the collapse of the Soviet Union and its client states meant very serious economic, not just ideological, repercussions for the Cuban Revolution, which I won't talk a lot about because Dave will be talking about that, but just to say that they lost their principal export destination for sugar, and with the embargo continuing from the United States they enter into their own Special Period and so on.
01:35 And this is really the high end of the right-wing neoliberal offensive: massive economic restructuring, liberalisation, financialisation, the privatisation of most state-owned enterprises of all kinds, the restructuring of public sector work through retrenchments of state employment, which was a key sector of union activity. Manufacturing starts to decline in major ways, and with the liberalisation of agriculture you have an incredible intensification of depeasantisation of the countryside and migration towards the city. So what this means for the cities is an informalisation of the world of work [?], a decline of the traditional basis of union organising, which fed into formal left organising and parties and so on traditionally.
02:37 And in the world of left parties you saw party after party of what had been sometimes revolutionary left parties or social democratic parties embracing many of the [tenets?] of neoliberal restructuring. That is to say, the common-sense parameters of debate in Latin America by the mid-90s was really limited in the formal sphere to the intensity and scope of neoliberal restructuring, not any challenge to that basic dynamic. And in terms of social movements you had a real retreat to localised concerns, with the falling away of any kind of sense of challenging power at the level of the state, never mind at the level of the region [?] of Latin American power.
03:39 So that's to say that it was very surprising that by the end of the 1990s Latin America emerges again as the leading edge of anti-neoliberal resistance in the world. And part of the way that this happens is through the economic crisis of neoliberalism in South America between 1998 and 2002. I don't want to suggest mechanical political consequences of a crisis, but this economic crisis is key and underplayed in certain accounts. South America as a whole endured four years of negative growth after two decades of neoliberal restructuring, which had already increased absolute poverty levels, unemployment levels and so on. And on the back of that then you had a very steep economic recession for four years, in which all of these negative social indicators intensified.
04:10 And what is important politically is that those governments in office throughout South America were without exception centre-right or right-wing parties that explicitly embraced neoliberalism and were responsible for its implementation in the eighties and nineties. So when the crisis hits, their response was effectively a continuation of the same, that had no ideological appeal, as it did in certain parts of the area in the early 90s, in periods of hyperinflationary crisis, debt crisis and so on, when neoliberalism wasn't just a coercive offensive; it also won over layers of the popular sectors ideologically and so on. But in the 1990s neoliberalism is completely discredited over this period throughout South America, and to a lesser extent in parts of Central America and into Mexico.
05:14 And what you find is, of course, the first expression of the new left, I think, is not the most important, although it's typically signalled as that, is the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. He wins in '98 [?], becomes office in the beginning of 1999. Why that's not the most important turning point is because, if you recall, Chávez in his first election was not running on what he would later describe as 21st-century socialism. It's a very modest ticket of anti-corruption and anti-neoliberal [?] programme. But Hugo Chávez was basically a candidate expressing a populist coalition whose strength was really the product of the absence of an articulated left rather than the expression of an articulated left.
06:15 What was more important, I think, was the emergence of extra-parliamentary social movements that took all different forms in different countries, sometimes taking on very militant and powerful articulations. In Argentina this was led by unemployed workers in the steepest financial crisis in that country's history, in 2001, 2002. They were joined by downwardly mobile middle-class sectors who had their bank accounts frozen during the financial crisis, as their life savings disappeared because the currency was crashing and they couldn't get access to their money. They joined in major demonstrations in December, early January 2001–2002, and effectively overthrew a series of governments, laid the basis for what then would be a rearticulation of a new kind of Peronism under first Néstor Kirchner and then later his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
07:21 But the key aspect there is the overthrow of a series of governments, the creation of ungovernability and the expression of a social left, even if there was no left political articulation of this content. In Bolivia it took the form of left-indigenous insurrection, both in the countryside and in the cities, of a much more powerful form, I think the most powerful form in this whole story, beginning with the Water War in 2000 in Cochabamba against the privatisation of water in that city, and escalating to create a national crisis for neoliberalism in 2003–2005, the so-called Gas Wars over the key hydrocarbon sector, calling for the nationalisation and socialisation of gas, and overthrew two presidents, and laying the basis for, famously, Evo Morales's election in 2005, again right at the end [?] of the 2000s [?] and so on.
07:54 In Ecuador similarly you have sectors, this time primarily rural sectors, leading through the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, CONAIE, as their confederation is called. Economic crisis hits Ecuador very, very strongly at the end of the 90s, and there too [?] you see the ability to overthrow a series of governments, and eventually laid the basis for the election of Rafael Correa in 2006. So those are the three most militant cases. You also see, though, an efflorescence of extra-parliamentary activism throughout this region coming out of the crisis of neoliberalism. So that's the first period, 1998–2002, more or less.
08:56 2003 to 2011 — and obviously this periodisation is region-wide, each case has its own particularity — but by 2003 two things happen that had paradoxical impacts on this dynamic. One is this social left finds a muted expression in parliamentary forms. That is to say, left and centre-left parties start to win elections dramatically throughout South America. So if in the mid-1990s South America was governed almost exclusively by centre-right and right-wing parties, by the mid-2000s it's governed almost exclusively, with Colombia, Peru and Chile as exceptions, by centre-left or left parties, or self-described centre-left or left parties. And even right-wing parties need to run on a ticket that distances them from orthodox neoliberalism. Even if they're aligned to the right, it is a toxic electoral platform to be aligned with [neoliberalism?]. This is an expression of the strength of the social left.
09:28 And then it finds — this is why I say the muted expression — has to do with this second dynamic of this period, which is that economic dynamism comes back to Latin America through a commodities boom driven by the most dynamic centre of accumulation in the world market, China, which is driving up mineral prices, natural gas and oil and so on. And what you have is a paradoxical situation in which centre-left and left governments come to office out of this crisis and start to govern in a period of relatively easy access to high rents.
10:29 And what they do is they introduce relatively modest increases in taxes and royalties in the extractive sectors — agro-industry, natural gas and oil, mining, minerals and so on — but they do not, and this is what I think is a delayed contradiction of the centre-left model, is that they do not confront capital in a forceful way, but introduce modest taxation and royalties. But what this has is a dramatic effect on state revenue. Even though these are modest tax reforms, given the price of these commodities it is a huge influx of revenue into these governments, even if these are modest tax increases, and even if net profits of multinational capital accelerated in this period. In fact, none of these multinational firms that are there at the beginning are not there at the end, and the only reason they're there is because their profits are continuing over this period.
11:00 But nonetheless the state is capturing more of a share of this than they were in the 1990s, and they're distributing this typically through cash transfer programmes that were already introduced by the neoliberal governments, but with much, much larger influxes of revenue. So famously the most familiar, the anti-poverty programme in Brazil, Bolsa Família [?], these cash transfer programmes, programmes for the elderly, for pregnant women, programmes for education, health care and so on, start to expand. But this is contingent on — this is what the political economist Eduardo Gudynas called a compensatory state. That is to say, a redistribution of some of this rent to relatively [poor?] hands to ameliorate the social base that put these governments into office, but without any confrontation with profitability, property regimes and so on of the dominant classes.
12:04 And their social [?] programmes are contingent in that moment on the continuation of high commodity prices. And even more than that, there is already conflict, even in the period of high growth, with indigenous groups, peasant groups and so on who are being dispossessed by the expansion of mining, extraction, natural gas and oil, and some of these groups are coming into conflict with governments that they helped to put into office. And you start to see these contradictions even before the economic crisis. How much time? OK.
12:35 So I should move into the third phase. So this is the period of high growth and so on. So of course the global crisis of capitalism, the worst one since the 30s, as we all know, begins in 2007 in the United States and then becomes an international dynamic by 2008. But many social democratic commentators who were close to or very sympathetic to the centre-left governments of most of South America were commenting at the time that it seemed as though South America had somehow stepped outside of world dynamics, because you had aggregate growth in 2008, 2009 as a whole [?], but high [?] growth in 2010–2011 is still quite high. And it seems to some of these commentators that that means that these countries had regulated their way out of the processes of capitalism that were happening elsewhere.
13:39 What becomes very apparent by 2012, if it wasn't beforehand, is that all this was, was a delayed reverberation of the crisis in Latin America, and the channel was the slowing down of Chinese growth, beginning in 2011 but really accelerated in 2012 and 2013 and ever since. So each year since 2011 China's growing at a slower rate than any year since 1990. OK, so this is a very important facet in terms of driving up commodity — sustaining commodity prices, sustaining all of this extractive dynamism that was at the key of the compensatory state: easy access to revenues for these governments, and redistributive outcomes of increasing the livelihoods of their social bases without confronting capital in a serious way.
14:41 So when this starts to happen in 2011, centre-left and left governments and parties [?] are faced with the class question that they were able to somewhat avoid up until that point. That is to say, in a situation of contracting [?] state revenues, there were class decisions to be made: whether you continue the social programmes that you introduced, find new ways of funding them through more or less radical means of appropriating the proportion of national income going to capital — so that could be modest to radical tax reforms, that could mean all the way to expropriation, nationalisation, socialisation of certain parts of industries — and moving it towards the continuation of the programmes that they installed. That would obviously be a radicalisation of this process in a situation of austerity.
15:42 And obviously this wouldn't just be a technical question — I'm not suggesting it's a technical question — it would be an orientation towards building the capacities of popular sectors to fight the fight that would be necessary to make those inroads into the interests of capital. Instead what you saw systematically between 2011 and 2013, and depending on the case it rolls out unevenly, is the beginning of the introduction of first modest and then quite severe austerity programmes by centre-left and left regimes. They start to lose the legitimacy of their social bases. Very clear in Dilma Rousseff's first choice [?] as finance minister — her first finance minister is a ferocious neoliberal hawk, which was a signal obviously to finance, both domestically and internationally.
16:14 But the paradox for these centre-left governments was that although capital had learned to live with these governments — that is to say, in the beginning of these governments, 2003, 2005–2006, you see various attempts by the right to destabilise these regimes, but once that was ineffective, and once it became clear that these governments were willing to compromise in major ways with capital, you start to see that really disappear. But this isn't because capital has elected these governments as their first option, but as a reasonable option, given that they were experiencing high [?] profitability over this period.
16:45 But once economic crisis happens, the right starts to rearticulate, and capital starts to move to its so-called natural home, that is, away from centre-left support for these parties and back towards either the reactivation of old rights or novel configurations of new rights in different ways. And this happens both in extra-institutional, extra-constitutional forms, where the right doesn't have the means of winning elections, or it happens through electoral, institutional, liberal democratic forms, where it's possible for them to win.
17:47 So in Honduras in 2009, the earliest indication of this, a military coup overthrowing Manuel Zelaya, introduction of a far-right regime; parliamentary coup against Fernando Lugo in Paraguay [?] in 2011–2012; and then just last year the premature, extra-constitutional impeachment coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. In the liberal terrain of institutional politics you have the electoral defeat by Mauricio Macri of the Kirchnerist successor in Argentina. But it's important to remember that Peronism — that is to say Kirchnerism, in Peronism in its new style in Argentina — who they had chosen for their candidate to run against Mauricio Macri, the right-wing candidate, the former [governor of] Buenos Aires [?], was himself the furthest-right Peronist candidate in recent memory, since Carlos Menem of the 90s.
18:47 So this was really a competition between the very far right of a Peronist [?] party — this wasn't a continuity of Kirchnerism — but even that lost to the right of Mauricio Macri. In the congressional elections of just December 2015, a month later, in Venezuela you have a convincing [?] victory of the right, and the very probable defeat of Nicolás Maduro in any near-term presidential contest.
19:21 So just to wrap up, what you are facing, though, is not, I would argue, some kind of shift in hegemony or domination, ideologically, politically and so on, from the left to the right. It is more an impasse, because although the centre-right and right are going to win elections and are going to assume office in different ways, either extra-institutionally or through institutional channels of liberal democracy, they have no solution to the crisis, which is bound to continue, that they have inherited, and therefore without the ability — and you see this in Temer in Brazil; he has single-digit popularity. This isn't the new hegemony of the right. There are major demonstrations against it. Macri has had three days of strikes just last week in Argentina. So this isn't some kind of easy shift, a rearticulation of the right that is stable and confirming itself.
20:24 But the question will be for the Latin American left to look back on this experience and try to be as brutally honest and ruthless about the limitations of that experiment, so that there is no return to the Workers' Party as an alternative to Temer, which I think would be an absolute disaster, the rehabilitation of Lula, which is what's being accepted [expected?] by the PT, or Peronism in Argentina, etc. Obviously these have institutional capacities to rearticulate themselves, but if they do we are in the same bind that we were in in the last period. The real prospect, I think, which is longer-reaching, is this medium- to longer-term attempt to rebuild an independent left that obeys a temporality that isn't restricted to the electoral cycle. That is to say, it doesn't try to just win the next elections, but tries to build [?] the left that is actually capable of transforming society, not tomorrow, but in the coming years, and sometimes that means— Thank you.
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