Wanderings & Meanderings. Digressions & Detours:  Freewheeling reflections on Latin America in relation to the UK (2006)

    The following is an interpretation of merely a few facets of the contemporary situation in Latin America some of which are regularly commented upon, others not so. They concern ecological issues; ones related to violent drug gangs, ones related to armed struggle and ones related to the transcendence of art. Interest was sparked by attending a number of Latino events and conferences in London plus speaking to a number of individuals from the continent now working in England presumably for shite wages in the burgeoning service sector. Neoliberal policies have generated a huge out-migration with many ending up on England’s shores and in Ecuador, remittances from these migrants have become the second largest source of the country’s revenue after the export of oil.

     Curiosity turned to fascination and then in no time you were completely hooked. Around the same time Phil Meyler in Dublin had been asked by Joao Bernardo (a significant ultra-leftist intellectual who’s written a number of good books including: Para uma Teoria do Modo de Producao Comunista & Ecologia - O Inemigo Oculto) to help write an introduction to a book on Combate, the ultra left organization which sprang up in Lisbon and Porto during the revolutionary wave engulfing the country between 1974-76. Living in Lisbon, Phil was intimately connected with Combate and wrote what has come to be regarded as the definitive critical account of that amazing time: Portugal: The Impossible Revolution?  For the future it is to be hoped something of the complexities of the relationship between soldiers and workers which, at the heart of the Portuguese revolt, and honestly presented in the Combate weekly magazine may be of assistance to Latin American struggles today.

     More to the point we’d rapidly become aware how much the Portuguese events were raised in present day conversation among many young Latinos desiring a new revolution. Immediately they emphasise Copcon and Otelo and how that battalion of soldiers breaking with the limited aims of the Captains’ revolt assisted all kinds of workers in occupying many factories and rich landed estates in Portugal. It seems the closest experience historically and where parallels could possibly be drawn with the here and now in Latin America. Many too have been the grave words we’ve recently heard pronounced on the subsequent fate of Otelo (the battalion’s commander) who, framed as a terrorist, spent 15 years in jail only to die of a broken heart soon after his release. Today there are sufficient number of people in Latin America who are aware that something of the same fate could befall them if they don’t take full account of this precedent incorporating it into their present day critiques.

     Then we were in for a shock! Evidently Otelo is alive and kicking despite remembering reading - rather sadly - his obituary two or three years ago! In reality it would seem some Dadaist joke/sleight of hand was practised here as Otelo - or a prankster perhaps - had written a “self-obituary” which was uploaded in Wikipedia for all the world to read and must have provided the spur to various newspaper obituaries. Now all have been withdrawn from the Internet though a Wikipedia ‘ghost’ remains which cannot be accessed. Perhaps there is a story to tell and maybe the last laugh resides with Otelo?

      Then there was a pleasant surprise. Time and again relatively recent incidents from the history of social subversion in these islands were brought up in almost casual conversation. It was exhilarating as it proved just how internationalist in perspective the present situation in Latin America is, generally marking how quite small events throughout the world can have a positive impact elsewhere sometime later rather like that familiar comparison whereby the consequences of a butterfly flapping its wings can end up thousands of miles away as a tornado. Equally though and sadly, Blair’s “third way” or the real life Blair Witch Project has also had a devastating effect in Latin America. Inevitably such drift evolved in the thinking process behind this text meant reflections on the UK and ‘the west’ in general ended up included here. Stylistically it’s resulted in a certain haphazard construction with lengthy digressions inserted here and there though hopefully in a meaningful context. Footnotes have been avoided and what’s written here now no longer really has a beginning or end and can be opened at any page.

      As this bit of writing moved towards some kind of provisional conclusion comparisons between the UK and Latin America increasingly looked more and more wooden and an inaccurate description as ineluctably a grotesque indivisible world system began to shape-up as a simple centre ground. Similar factors were at play everywhere like de-industrialisation, the end of welfare, community break-up and increasing isolation, the longevity of the property price bubble, drug gangs and anti-social behaviour to name the most salient, pressing factors. The only difference rapidly became a difference in emphasis though this could be a yawning chasm, and what was bad enough in the UK like say, welfare cutbacks usually were utterly catastrophic in poorer parts of the world. The fact that UK PLC has so far been able to limit and stagger these disasters has meant a semblance of social peace reigns though how long this can continue is another matter.

    Finally there are some general doubts. Perhaps the whole thing can be criticised simply because of its geographical distance from Latin America, which means necessary nuancing coming from direct experience is lacking so if there are any appalling mistakes or lapses here we apologise in advance.

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     Everyone has a problem seeking to explain why Latin America has drifted ‘leftwards’ like it has.  The Chiapas uprising in southern Mexico during the early 1990s appeared totally isolated – ringed by a huge army – and going nowhere. Nonetheless, it was the first clear sign launched on the eve of the NAFTA agreement being put in practise, that the days of the free market in Latin America were numbered. Moreover Chiapas communicated to the Euro-American world in a way no other Latin American revolt had ever communicated appealing to the high points of the 1960s reformulations of revolutionary theory. Or so it seemed… In comparison, the earlier Cacarazo of 1989 in Venezuela appeared a typically bloody Latin American event in which probably 2000 people were killed by the police and military. It was a revolt against price rises in food stuffs, petrol, transport etc, triggered by a demand from the IMF. In fact the repression was so bloody in a country that fancied itself more ‘civilised’ that most of Latin America it broke the traditional Venezuelan oligarchy apart once it reflected on what it had done. Many in the oligarchy were mortified. Out of its bad conscience there emerged from the military a lower ranking officer named Hugo Chavez. Imprisoned in the mid 1990s he said at his trial when sentenced: “I will be back”. He must have known there was irresistible support behind him.

     Then there were the weeklong anti-globalisation riots in Seattle in 1999, which, in turn were more than a tad influenced by the slightly earlier anti-road protestors in England. Seattle though galvanised the whole world having a particularly deep impact upon Latin America encouraging emerging forces. It brought into inspiring relief the alliance of “teamsters and turtles” – of workers and ecos – that the killing of the rubber tapper Chico Mendes, in the Amazon rain forest had, unbeknown to him, detonated. In the following years all this was followed by further anti World Trade Organisation revolts, especially Genoa, until impact became mere repetition and the creative sparks lost their lustre as Davros faded into Gleneagles and sheer hypocrisy as the multi-millionaire pop musicians took hideous control.

     Maybe too the  Argentinazo of December 19^th-21, 2001, was also extremely significant. It was the moment when the world’s investment banks on the prompting of the IMF pulled the plug on Argentina’s indebtedness causing mass bankruptcy over night. Presidente de la Rua went on TV to admonish the people like an over-bearing schoolmaster telling people they shouldn’t loot supermarkets. He takes off his glasses at the end of the broadcast saying; “enough is enough”. In fact the Argentinean people had had enough. Someone then came out onto a balcony in Buenos Aires and started banging pots and pans and the hint was taken up and in no time the whole of Buenos Aires was deafened by their sounds. Spreading to the rest of the country for two weeks all one could hear was the sound of pans banging together. The police and military were stunned and dared not intervene as harshly as under the Generals. Nonetheless, 38 protestors were killed in the largest mass battle since the1969 Cordabazo. Shortly afterwards De la Rua had to resign. This was the beginning of the recovery of Argentina’s historical memory marking (perhaps) the beginning of the rest of Latin America’s savagely repressed historical memory. And most likely it is no coincidence that Argentina’s bankruptcy coincided with the election of PT (Partito Trabalho) and Lula in Brazil. It was a stern warning shot though capitalism needn’t have bothered as PT had been rendered useless years previously. Yet it was Lula who had led the biggest working class engineering strike in Brazil’s history mainly based in Sao Paulo in 1980  – even perhaps the world’s – and sent shock waves throughout the country’s military. Lula had played on the fact the strike was a break from traditional trades’ unionism and had an autonomous character. Years later elected as Brazil’s president, Lula has gone from wearing boiler suits to wearing Armani suits and is regarded as weak and bribeable. Chavez likes to upstage him.

     For example, in 2005 Lula held an open-air meeting in the southern city of Porto Alegre – the most ‘radical’ city in Brazil – at least in Social Forum circles. Few people turned up. Chavez had been invited to attend – which he did – flying in over Lula’s head in a helicopter to land in a local football stadium next to PT’s venue where there were 100,000 there to greet him. What an astute showman rivalling his offer to send medical aid to New Orleans after the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katarina later in the year! Chavez’s red beret is now becoming a symbol of defiance amongst American Blacks, which hopefully may mark the end of the baseball cap, gangsta rap image. However, emphasis here is on the image and fashion must have its way at a time when Leopardi’s comment: “Fashion. Mr Death. Mr Death.” becomes more prescient than ever.

      Latin America is undergoing deep cultural shifts. Evo Morales in Bolivia is the first indigenous president. Chile has elected in Michelle Bachelet its first woman president. At the same time indigenous Bolivians are resisting the sinking of mine shafts in the Andes by American companies looking for coal – their search predicated on the on-going energy crises. In fact one could say that Latin America has woken up to the reality it possess enormous amounts of raw materials the west and China are avid for and are in a position to play off Washington against Beijing etc. And they know it!

Turmoil at the heart of Andean capitalism….

      Nevertheless, all this background sound and fury is merely surface as behind the mask lurk entangled forces difficult to define and separate. There is an overlap between the real, active movement of people at the sharp end and an increasingly ideological state representation, which sits uneasily on top of this ferment and which has to pretend there is no fundamental conflict between the two that cannot be sorted out through open discussion. Would it were that simple! Put bluntly, the former is heading towards a sort of international workers’ autonomy, the latter towards a never previously realised form of  “Andean Capitalism”  - as Bolivia’s second in command Garcia Linera described it. More precisely Etcetera in Spain recently prefixed an article in their magazine entitled: “Workers Assemblies or an Andean Capitalist Utopia”. It’s capitalism if you like based as much on swaps and exchanges as the usual round of brute competition and exploitation. A Cuban initiative ALBA (Dawn) emphasises the Bolivarian alternative of mutual cooperation and aid together with inter-regional bank cooperation etc. Set beside NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) openly pushing a rapacious free market it is an attractive form of capitalism limiting usurious interest rates and ‘pillage and run’ policies. But beneath the rhetoric of “the people” deployed by this new generation of statist populist patricians in Latin America there can never be any question that enforced wage labour or commodity production be abolished. More likely people will be exhorted to work for nothing – a familiar Cuban example – in order to build this ‘new’ society.

    Increasingly too it is an unstable mix and must indefinitely remain so marking extreme fluctuations bordering at times on chaos which this particular (Bolivarian) form of left wing social democracy must always exhibit finally giving way to a renewed endgame right or international social revolution. Essentially it is now marked by celebrity-like masquerades for passive (or not as the case may be) TV audiences deploying much demagogic rhetoric and vaudeville window dressing – like a political Living Theatre – knowing full well it is riding the wild tiger of an awakening people. Personality politics rule in a period where contradictory alliances are “formed and re-formed by the week” (Josie Appleton). Heated anti-imperialist rhetoric, especially anti-Bush rhetoric is a sop to the people as well as a somewhat soothing balm for the traditional Latin American oligarchy, which has always hypocritically deployed the anti-Yankee card when appropriate to do so. Shout and rave as much as you like on TV while behind the cameras ambassadors engage in quiet diplomacy! In reality, Chavez practises social welfarism and neoliberalism. Away from the spotlight, discreet trade pacts have been signed with Texaco-Mobil and Exxon to exploit the Orinoco gas and oil fields and many American and European banks are doing OK through the auspices of Chavez. Not great but OK and so far their mutual relationships are pretty stable.

      Indeed it could be said that Chavez practises a kind of bellicose version of a Brownite public private partnership, which means he still wants the Venezuelan elite on board with the rider they need to abandon their traditional arrogance by simply obeying him, even grovelling at his feet if necessary. It’s one of the main reasons why Chavez hasn’t arrested any of the big shots that have plotted coups against him. Behind the scenes policy turns out to be rather more complex than simply saying Chavez is scared of them.

       Using the example of Gordon Brown here is appropriate as no one can deny the huge effect the ‘third way’ Blair government has had on Latin America. This massive change in social democratic emphasis to the point of denouement has had everything to do with the obliteration of the UK miners after their defeat in the yearlong 1984-5 strike. It was an incredible struggle and their defeat meant something then equally incredible unfolded, terrible though it was. No wonder the British miners’ strike is mentioned so wistfully often in somewhat hushed awe by young Latinos determined again to try and make a new world.

     Almost immediately defeat in the UK dramatically changed the composition of the PT (Partito Trabalho) in Brazil, the most consequential country in Latin America in capitalist terms.  Prior to this change the party life of PT was described somewhat naively as creatively “chaotic” full of worker initiatives and participation plus  big practical involvement in strikes. Blair’s high profile but poisonous example meant sudden death to these old ways. Critical lefties and assembly gatherings – despite only being a pale reflection of the real thing – were gotten rid of replaced by the serious business of cultivating city gents, hip entrepreneurs and a general emphasis on a Brazilian version of Will Hutton’s baneful “stakeholder” garbage meant to satisfy the lower orders. The UK election of 1997 proved to be the killer punch as the triumphant Blairistas rapidly proved to be worse neoliberals than the Tories. In Brazil this sunk in. On coming to power in 2002, Lula immediately aped the antics of his friend Tony and within days proved to be more right wing than the previous Cardosa regime. It was cleverly executed. An Orwellian newspeak language was quickly deployed making everything appear the opposite of what it was. Thus 4 state banks and the Central Bank were privatised described in the media as moves towards “autonomy” from elected officials (obviously suggesting corrupt clientalism) playing on what’s become a favourite term culled from the grass roots. Political Correctness was brought on-line with Blacks and women in the cabinet, all so reminiscent of Blair’s Babes etc and just like in the UK strikes have been virtually abolished as Lula, even more than Blair, generously over-fills neoliberal financial goals. Truly both laboristas  are as Brazilians say, “Robin Hoods for the rich” though unlike Blair, Lula as the worker worm who turned (the other way) is able to deploy the popular sentimental touch crying “real tears faced with child poverty then abruptly follows with a major reduction in social spending and a massive transfer of wealth to the creditors.” How depressingly familiar! Though we don’t have a Lula as head of state in Britain we do have in the figure of John Prescott a similar second in command, ex-leader of the 1966 seafarers’ strike, who rapidly turned against the very workers he was part of and whose major contribution to reaction came many years ago before he was nicknamed “2 Jags” or showed a marked predilection for sucking-up to wealth. During 1984 Prescott was probably the only patsy around able during the miners’ strike to get the British dockers back to work ‘resolving’ (i.e. undermining) the Hunterston conflict in Scotland thus ensuring the miners’ most formidable support was broken meaning general defeat was, from then on, well on the cards.

     Despite all of this, when referring to social democracy in Latin America it is wise to be careful as put like this it’s a relatively meaningless catchall phrase. It is and it isn’t like its present day western European counterpart. In terms of personal past histories the comparison couldn’t be more inappropriate where in the UK governmental personnel, despite the presence of Prescott, have only known well-protected middle class environments and for certain have never had a job at the coalface. In Latin America many of these new leaders at a state level have not only spent at least parts of their lives doing gutty, low paid work but have spent periods in jail - even tortured - during the previous period of military dictatorships. All these experiences have permanently marked their psyche and are visibly uneasy when having to deploy any kind of heavy police measures. In exasperation they tend to lash out right and left. One such head of state is President Michelle Bachelet of Chile who was tortured by Pinochet’s goons. In early June 2006 she responded to “The March of the Penguins” (the school kids revolt) by raving against those kids who had engaged in violent demonstrations, looting, plus assaulting intrusive journalists/cameramen etc yet merely a few hours later she was dishing-out the same medicine to the police dismissing ten officers through the auspices of her Minister of the Interior. This was followed by further rants against  “impossible” student demands only to give into a fair number of them (like low public transport fares) a few hours later.

    What we are getting in Latin America, though in unique Bolivarian form, is something more akin to an earlier moment of left social democracy one more characteristic of PM Atlee in Britain from 1945-51 around the syndrome of “the pits belong to the people”, or else it exhibits aspects of Roosevelt’s New Deal minus, mega public works schemes. Not that nationalisation is something new in Latin America – far from it – and it came from both left and right. For instance, some Generals who had destroyed guerrilla uprisings in their countries also took power in Peru in 1968 and Bolivia in 1969 seizing vast tracts of lands from traditional latifundistas. The difference is its reappearance in a seemingly more aggressive left wing form than previously though much of this is for the benefit of the cameras guaranteeing media attention and subsequent fashionable status. You can get an echo of Atlee in Bolivia where Presidente Evo Morales of MAS (Movement for Socialism) proclaims that the country’s oil and gas reserves are “under the control of the Bolivian people” but behind the demagoguery what does it mean? The ex-owners haven’t been expropriated without compensation and the government is now finding it difficult to find the money to weigh them out. Moreover these installations are certainly not clustered into autonomous collectives but are functioning capitalist enterprises where foreign investment is still very influential though profit margins are considerably down though nonetheless,hovering around a healthy 20% to 25%.

      Development NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations)

       If we have a problem with the Blairistas; if we have a problem with old time “red in tooth and claw nationalisation” as the Yorkshire miner John Dennis mockingly – though with underlying serious intent - put it, we also have another. In this entire shift in action and perspectives the presence of ‘outside’ NGO’s must seriously be looked at and assessed. It’s not easy. Leaving aside organisations like Oxfam and Medecines sans frontieres concerned with instant aid when war, famine or natural disaster strike, we concentrate here on the developmental (even eco-oriented anti-development) NGOs. The vast majority of the NGO’s in the world now numbering up to 40,000 came into existence in the 1980s, followed by a big acceleration throughout the 1990s as the state was rolled back further with the demise of the Soviet state capitalist bloc. In the interim between post second world war social democratic consensus throughout much of the highly developed world (and not so highly developed) and the rise of neoliberalism, the para-state, especially throughout the 1970s, had appeared.  They were informal organisations usually anchored in issue politics marking the collapse of total critique demanded by the aborted revolutionary explosions of the late 1960s, and were discreetly funded, though often only minimally, by the state. The experiment hardly survived the seventies decade.

      In the following lacunae the NGO’s shakily evolved. Indeed many of their earlier employees merely transferred their allegiances from the para-state and were from radical left or feminist movements with funding coming from various sources especially private sponsors often on a hands-off, discreet basis and were resignedly seen by some committed employees as a necessary evil. However, right from the word go the World Bank figured high though it was a World Bank still reflecting a social democratic disposition. All this was to be slowly jettisoned as the Thatcher/Reagan generation welcomed the emphasis on private economic initiatives. Today this generation are now in commanding positions.  The NGOs were slowly and cleverly manipulated as their orientation moved from voluntary and non-profit often claiming charity status into accepting a financial game plan. Over the years they’ve finally become ‘strategic partners’ in the neoliberal project.

     On the ground the practise wasn’t as simple as that. It very rarely is and the original NGO projects were simply too leaky as too much cat was let out of the bag. Indeed occasionally it’s still true. In Latin America faced with really impoverished though rebellious people they swayed this way and that. Down there on the ground, despite having their own programmes which meant encouraging grass roots initiatives around alternative projects their employees were also attracted to the emerging mass movements. On the one hand they mediated between the grass roots and external donors supplying usually measly sums of money for eco initiatives and what have you, while on the other hand in one spectacular instance, the NGOs were well to the fore of an un-worked out but near insurrection in La Paz on October 18^th 2001 when 5000,000 people took over the city in the biggest demonstration in Bolivia’s history.

       Such things led to alarming though interesting overlaps. It’s only a few years ago that the World Bank set up PRODEPINE (The Development Project of Ecuador’s Indigenous People & Blacks) encouraging alternative development prioritising an indigenous agenda with the aimed for recovery of ancestral identity. More importantly it’s real though hidden aim was to try and break collective indigenous insurgency that was making great strides. This intent was so cleverly disguised it even wore the mask of working in tandem with the mass movement, a movement that was reaching a crunch point headed by CONNAIE (Confederation of Indiginenous Nationalities of Ecuador), a huge combative grass roots kind of union that, along with others, was so powerful it was able to literally occupy the very centre of the state in January 2000. (We all saw it on our UK TV screens sandwiched between Cherie Blair’s gurus and freebies and David Beckham’s thongs). Within days not knowing what to do or where to turn the movement floundered.  Seeing it’s historical chance, PRODEPINE rushed in immediately offering the head of CONNAIE, Antonio Vargas, it’s top managerial job. Vargas accepted immediately and is now handling an account estimated at 25 million dollars. Today the mass movement is still reeling from having hit such magnificent heights and such gully low betrayal.

      One further point just in case people read this and see in it a cynical excuse to do nothing having decided in advance that all attempt to fundamentally change the world is doomed from the start: An insurrection of such magnitude in a small country like Ecuador in present historical circumstances probably must end like this despite all the local ins and outs (was Gutteriez, the future President in league with the CIA etc?) if on the very next day insurrection isn’t joined by another adjacent small country, followed immediately by others and so on. It’s unfortunately the grim reality of the world market and a local autarchic road leading to immediate emancipation from the economy just isn’t possible.

     Neoliberalism also learnt from all this and though saving its skin in the nick of time was no longer going to allow such things to continue if it could possibly prevent them. Remember neoliberalism is a project full of self-critical re-examination with a willingness to change tack ever ready to begin afresh. It cleverly learns from its enemy. It’s also why it is well down the road of creating the most effective and ruthless totalitarianism in history making fascism and Stalinism look like hide-bound, child’s play. Thus some NGO power brokers, almost exclusively financiers, can also see the “Washington Consensus” as too atrophied, too imperial and discreetly say so yet get away with it.

    The NGOs have finally become the instruments of outside interests and many well  meaning but naïve individuals have unwittingly become their instruments. The mask though is falling off. An umbrella organisation of American NGOs even threatened their members recently with the big stick saying they’d better fully acknowledge where they were coming from, their ties to governments and especially financial institutions otherwise they risked losing their funding. Independence from donor sources is most likely now a thing of the past. Today, especially after the experience of Latin American insurgency there must be no encouragement to direct action or getting all cuddly with the people you are dealing with. Professional impersonality has become the benchmark possibly cloned on the Bill Gates model. It means in practise that NGO employees are increasingly now between a rock and a hard place.

     Similarly the NGO brief has become more and more limited. Broader educational perspectives have been cut out as knowing something about your own history, especially all those difficult moments that should be permanently hidden from view, might encourage restlessness. Emphasis is now on the “skills training” approach in hi-tech, building trades or whatever, subsidised on an individual basis by low level poverty grants – they are called “alleviation funds” – and forcibly guided towards self-employment in the small business interpretation of that euphemistic term. It’s also applied in Imperial donor countries and may have originated there as, for instance, the Prince of Wales trust in the UK operates on similar lines. The paltry grants handed out come with so many strings attached you are forced into accepting the given structures of capital domination. Recipients are forced to take full responsibility for themselves in fulfilling the neoliberal agenda where all rules fall on the lone punter’s shoulder. In modern cognitive therapy language - incidentally a language it adores - it’s an‘empowering’ of the poor without disempowering the rich. Most importantly, in Latin America, minifundista mustn’t oppose latifundista.

     Funded now by so many IFIs (International Finance Institutions) and not only the World Bank, major NGOs like USAID and the OECD (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development) have become contemporary neo-Christian missionaries sporting an up-to-the-minute, polite fresh face of the future weightless economy of subtle imperial domination doling out clever terms like “relations of difference” which not so long ago wouldn’t have been amiss in some bright-eyed social forum. Increasingly too, these bodies are advertising for skilled admin staff those with IT spread sheet skills plus a good knowledge of accountancy etc, so money flows can be more vigourously monitored.

 Greenwash and Green-lite? Ecological critiques in sustained mass action? Has Cuba ecologically reinvented itself?

      Generally – and in this respect like everywhere else in the world – production is no longer accepted unconditionally as a universal good. It all depends what is been made and are their harmful effects etc. The difference is, in Latin America thousands take to the streets unlike in Europe or America where only a handful have the temerity to oppose the truly unsustainable with the rest bowed down by depression, grief and isolation. (As one of the slogans of the early spring uprising in France 2006 said: “War on Sadness”).

       In Fray Bentos in Uruguay – meaning here the town and not the canned food tins we in the UK are familiar with - it is proposed two vast Finnish and Spanish owned pulp mills be constructed on the side of the Uruguay River. These new factories will use up enormous amount of Amazon rain forest timber, pollute huge areas of water and emit potentially cancerous gases and local people, both Uruguayan and Argentinean, are up in arms. This situation has rapidly developed into  a pointed example of  seeming opposites, of  “front line workers and fence line communities” whereby it becomes necessary to make common cause between those who need jobs to survive under capitalism and those who fear the effects of these jobs. Like the flowing Uruguay River it’s probably one of the most difficult bridges to cross there’s ever been historically and we await with fascination the outcome.

        Despite being a kind of wilderness over large areas of land, nevertheless pollution and toxic waste is rife in Latin America. It really could be no other. To take two examples among hundreds: In the poor state of Minas Gerais in Brazil in 2003 3bn tonnes of toxic waste was dumped in the Paraba do Sul river. More recently pulp mills (again the dreaded production required for the society of the spectacle’s relentless publishing blitz) owned by the Aranca group is held responsible for the deaths of hundreds of black-necked swans in Chile’s Rio Cruces nature reserve.

      Behind this left social democratic recuperation, indigenous people are being reintroduced into natural parks in Ecuador by radical ecologists from where they’d been expelled. In Bolivia the indigenous people of Amazonia live in communal form largely engaging in a hunter-gatherer existence where any kind of state is absent. Considering the gradual return of a primitive inclination at the peripheries of western society sickened by the calamitous industrial waste of capitalism these remnants are acquiring a mythic status a bit like the old village meer was to the Russian communal tradition, 19^th century anarchism and even the later Marx, though of course, these pre-historical remnants  go much, much farther back. Thus communal rights to natural resources are now encouraged in a desire to restore the Q’uollasvyo, the anarcho-primitive communes of the original ayulla people. In the Chiapas uprising the ancient form of the village council (the caracoles) was more than respected, it was updated becoming the central form where discussion and consensus are the guiding principles through constant encuentros which the Zapitista guerrilla army gladly submits itself to and though Subcomandante Marcos writes respectfully about Che Guevara - who doesn’t in Latin America? – this is exactly the type of behaviour Che would have ridden roughshod over.

      Perhaps the messages of the social ecologists are getting through, something that would have warmed poor old Murray Bookchin’s heart. One must also remember fear of America is ever-present in poor peoples’ minds and what they have done and will do again if they can. What is emerging throughout Latin America is an immense yawning dual gap existing side by side: One, the dominant force, fostering unsustainable modernity, the other, a recently encouraged neo-primitivism something that for the time being no longer happens much in Europe or America or, at least, has low profile. Groups of people actually wish to preserve a traditional way of life. They now feel empowered by the amount of ecologists/archaeologists/historians etc visiting them and saying that their ways of life are sustainable and ours in the west is not. It is a form of future primitive in practise, which we in the west have no choice but to learn from. Indeed it is one of our only hopes. It’s also one of the main reasons Morales was elected reinforced by Castro’s reinvention of himself and the revival of old ways of agriculture Cuba was forced to return to once the supply of oil dried up following the collapse of the Soviet Union and East Europe.

      Even before Cuba’s mainly agricultural trading partner the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 the scientific and technical community with the support of an all-powerful state, had began to opt for alternative farming methods considerably reducing chemical fertilisers. The demise of the Soviet Union massively accelerated this process. Now most farming deploys biological controls rather than chemical ones. Manure, sugar cane derivatives, organic fertilisers, compost, bio soil, worm humus, shade, honey syrup and micro-organisms have been developed to produce soil nutrition and combat erosion.

     No longer having the support of a Soviet Union, Castro had to switch from industrial farming to more organic forms and from horticulture back to agriculture with horticulture pushed to the margins of fields and the wayside just as in the title of a pre Second World War book in the UK, “Flowers of the Wayside and Woodland”, for horticulture was pretty much a bourgeois invention and concomitant with the rise of industrial capitalism. Tractors were replaced by oxen and horses and roof gardens turned into kitchen gardens etc in urban centres. The latter was a genuine innovation with no precedent in Cuba’s past though none of these developments should be taken as implying that Cuba is a post-capitalist society. (With the developing energy crisis it’s almost certain that something like this will happen in Europe and America). What we have now in Cuba are huertos, which resemble British allotments, organoponics that resemble large urban farms and autoconsumos are attached to hospitals, schools and workplaces whereby they are able to grow much of their own food. Unfortunately all such splendid directives – and Cuba has become an ecological beacon to the world – have been carried out from the top down. It would have been so much better if all this essential experimentation had fully come from the people themselves and not via a state programme no matter how inspired.  Inevitably though it’s packed full of typical work scene initiative by all kinds of individuals which vitiates the paternalism of the former. At the moment it’s also something of a market/state solution. The dominant form means the state takes 50% of the produce with the rest up to the gardeners’ choices whether for sale in cheap farmers’ market or for barter. The state looks after the gardeners providing them with a roof over their heads and free food.

      In a way this can still be viewed as an extension of the land reform program, which runs like an unbreakable thread through the wars of liberation and what happened subsequently in Latin America. It is popularly said in Latin America that Simon Bolivar died “ploughing the sea”. It’s a beautiful description. As a student Che Guevara was much impressed by the land reform program of the short-lived 1953 Bolivian government, in particular the resettlement of the indigenous people on the barren wastes of the alti-plano formerly theirs prior to the arrival of the conquistadors. He was less impressed by the nationalization of the tin mines if all it amounted to were a few pesos more for the miners many of whom were indigenous. He also quickly realised that all hopes of a revolution in Latin America would fail if the indigenous peoples were not brought into the revolutionary process. His failure to make meaningful contact with them in Bolivia such as had happened somewhat in the Sierra Maestra in Cuba (made easier probably by the fact the peasantry there were mainly Spanish speaking liberated slaves) doomed his Bolivian adventure and sealed his fate. Though championing land reform, (as the last consequential Bolshevik by default, slipping with Fidel almost unintentionally into the mould, that meant under the aegis of a new class state already present in guerrilla foci) at no point did Guevara ever question the mode of production i.e. the application of industrial methods to modern agriculture – though to be fair no one outside of a handful of people in the USA did at this point in time and most were related to the ultra leftist Contemporary Issues group. We cannot be so blasé and by insisting on a change in the social relations of production (expropriation of ranchers, big farmers, the residues of the latifundistas derived from the colonial past) we are obliged to vigorously argue for a change in farming techniques, the actual mode of production. In this respect Latin America again is leading the world but, apart from Cuba, only on the peripheries, and then under the guise of neo-primitivism, a label that renders this only hope as somehow innocuous and even a bit cranky. Hopefully over the coming years this perspective will change.

                     What happened to Industrialised Agriculture?

      In considering these formidable changes or reversals to the agricultural mode of production – a welcome stepping back into the past as it were – we must also consider what happened in Cuba in the aftermath of Castro and the communist party coming to power.

     There is literally no doubt that Castro and co abolished the old ways of farming almost immediately after the 1959 ‘revolution’. INRA (National Institute of Agrarian Reform) was established imposing industrialised farming almost everywhere. Mechanisation was given maximum priority. Thousands of peasant farmers were evicted once the Agrarian Reform law was enacted making way for gigantic state farms essentially based on the Russian kolkhoz model. This resulted in  a long and drawn out guajiro (peasant) uprising whereby some  took to the Escambray Mountains becoming guerrillas yet again. The Cuban state organised a Che Guevara Trail Blazers Brigade run on strictly militaristic lines which cleared huge amounts of lands for large scale industrialised state ranches (ironically usually called cooperatives) often given over to sugar production for export especially to the Soviet Union. The farm was declared dead.

    The transformation and updating of agriculture was carried out in such haste that disaster was the outcome. Giant crop harvests failed and food shortages kicked in as the country resorted to importing a high percentage of staple foods. Things like this had never happened before even under the most repressive right wing regimes. In a country where bananas are literally everywhere  - and even more than bread the staple diet - at one point nearly ceased to exist! Around this time the leftist French agronomist Rene Dumont initially sympathetic to the new Cuban regime, finally ascribed shortages to the abolition of the small peasant holding. Given the restricted circumstances he was probably right, as after all he had worked out a way to make the capital city, Havana, self-sufficient in foodstuffs more or less surrounding the urban centre. Dumont suggested in his book, Is Cuba Socialist? that the hypertrophied city of Havana be surrounded with a ‘green belt’ of market gardens and fruit farms together with a concentric belt producing sweet potatoes, potatoes, plantains etc and that a dairy farm should be established, all to be administered by a federation of small cooperatives. Moreover he concluded, “If every family that wanted to had been able to have a small garden plot, it could have raised a good portion of its own food”. His plan was rejected though you can’t help but feel Dumont’s plans have recently been dusted-down from library shelves as Cuban bureaucrats, nearly 50 years later, have finally responded to his proposals though, no doubt, as a post-festum add-on.

Workers’ Control and the beginnings of the transformation of production or just another damp squib and we’ve been here before?

      De-industrialisation is not only a North American and western European phenomena; it is also having major impact in Latin America. Nowadays, according to the ideologues of the “new world (dis)order” apart from India and China, industrialised factory workers are now being abolished everywhere. Yet throughout Latin America workers over the last few years, admittedly in fits and starts, are occupying factories, a large proportion of which have been abandoned by their owners. It is heartening to reflect that the biggest continent-wide meeting in history of delegates in occupied factories took place in Venezuela in 2005. Those who were present at these meetings were visibly reminded of the Portuguese experience of 1974-6 noting a similar breadth of vision and desire to learn even asking questions after all these years about the year long miners’ strike in Britain in the early 1980s when here it’s all but forgotten! It would seem in these conferences that the dense ideological rhetoric of revolution is markedly absent which seems all to the good, concentrating more on questions of everyday survival, taking into account the local community and therefore  more social than the activities of  typical capitalist enterprises. Well this is what’s been said though we have to be careful about its veracity. The question of the transition from capitalism to what is still referred to, as socialism is latently but quietly uppermost. Accounts relating to past experiences of workers’ control are avidly read and especially there’s rejection of the post Second World War Yugoslav and East German experiments around competing ‘socialised’ enterprises. It remains to be seen if they are taking into account all the contradictory tendencies inherent in the Portuguese experience between 1974-76 and it’s doubtful if texts like Nicholas Will’s Lip’s Self-Managed Counter-Revolution (in the early 1970s in France) or Chris Pallis’s The Bolshevik’s and Workers Control or even Otto Ruhle’s from way back even get a look in. Though cooperatives have long been numerous throughout Latin America there’s recently been a big extension. However, the old time practise of one competing with another is vigorously condemned. Indeed the latter type is often rightly seen as a setup engineered by the state.

     Cogestion is the name Venezuelan workers have given to the process that guarantees different levels of workers’ participation and ‘control’ in the management of companies. Specifically and reinforcing what was said above, they insist this cogestion has nothing to do with the European model of co-management as say in East Germany after the end of World War Two arguing that particular form meant the cutting of their own wages and conditions. Again though, we have to be careful of the propaganda factor in all of this.  Also, Chavez encourages occupations like the one at Invepal, a valve-making factory tied to the oil industry, which has recently been taken over after a bitter two-year standoff. We suspect in the Cogestion movement that Trotskyists play quite a part as there’s more than a few mentions about the German revolution of 1917-21 and all the old shibboleths of “expropriating and nationalisation of Venezuelan industry under workers control” together with “revolutionary trades unionism” is well to the fore. When all is said and done and with all flimflam cut out there’s also a difficult conundrum here where material circumstances impose severe restrictions on any kind of leap into the unknown: the cogestion movement in Venezuela has no choice at the present time but to make use of state expropriation otherwise there would be no wages paid at the end of the week as the factories are often bankrupt and remember despite all the ‘socialist’ rhetoric you are still dealing with rampant capitalism.

     In Argentina and Venezuela – though spreading elsewhere – a fair number of occupied factories are the result of the owners having fled to safer countries where they can put down plant and machinery and profits are guaranteed. Such occupations are often able to utilise holes in the law and like the “temporary permit” in Argentina are able to bend legal limits to their own ends. There they are referred to as “recuperated factories” (“fabrica recuperado”) or more precisely as reclaimed or recovered factories. (Incidentally this doesn’t refer to recuperacion in the French sense of the term). Discussions about “autogestion” are everywhere but you wonder just how much cutting edge they possess. Obviously sometimes there is a quite remarkable state of flux at play but equally such occupations don’t seem to transcend the old razzmatazz. In Argentinean factories workers bring in artists and musicians at the weekend to do ‘their thing’ banging on about social conflict in a pretty airy-fairy way.  At a distance it seems not too dissimilar to our own dim and distant rebellious past in the UK.

     In Argentina the factory occupations have now been fairly well contained and for awhile at least, the movement is all but over, largely displaced from a none too insistent form of workers’ control to full-blown state management. Under Kirchner the Argentinian state has often been able to coerce these firms into becoming profit-oriented cooperatives in exchange for legal recognition removing the anxiety of being forcibly evicted by police or even worse, paramilitaries.  Often too, self-managed factories have been clearly subordinated to the big boys placed in a sub-contractor type position meaning workers often have to work longer hours for lower rates etc. Others have been able to play on a kind of radical chic to supplement their incomes inviting rich kids (perhaps well-heeled professional social forum attendees) from North America or Europe to come have a ball while paying for the privilege of submitting to weeks of hard graft in liberated space! Other occupations are a thorn in Kirchner’s side and interestingly tend to be those that have thrown up the most clued-in workers who in their daily lives have broken free from the dumb and dumber media prolefood in that telling Orwellian phrase. One such former enterprise is the large Zanon ceramics factory in Neugen province where there’s no pay differential between skilled and unskilled. Aren’t we surprised that Kirchner doesn’t like such class-conscious action and refuses to recognise the Zanon cooperative.

      Looked at from a European, specifically British perspective of the early 1970s a lot of these occupations and cooperatives are work-ins, which, as well as taking a somewhat desultory interest in we would have also condemned at the time as “workers control of your own alienation”.  Places like Fisher Bendix in Liverpool, The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders or, the Triumph motorcycle factory in the West Midlands. There were many more. We were gobsmacked to find out that these occupations still resonate in the renewed workers’ control movement throughout Latin America. Somehow you felt really good inside and Marx’s pertinent comment “well grubbed old mole” referring to the hidden underground memory of subversion seemed very apposite. It was just like yesterday as the pain inside, testimony of years of increasing counter-revolution, momentarily lifted. So all these aborted experiments weren’t useless, they did matter and still do. Then you suddenly realised there’d been no good accounts of these events coming from those distant days. Why at the time hadn’t you scribbled down a few notes because you certainly had ideas on the subject?

        Then, finally like a blast from the past, the Lucas Aerospace plan from the mid 1970s was given another airing, if only in passing. And yes it made sense especially in the Latin American context for here was a serious attempt at the heart of the military industrial complex to redirect production to socially beneficial ends. Had there ever been anything similar elsewhere in the world?  Yet again, even in the most unlikely discussions the question of the military had reared its head in Latin America! Lucas Aerospace in Bristol; The Shop Stewards Plan; The draughtsmen and Mike Cooley: Unconnected thoughts flooded through the brain. A few hours later, looking at a yellowing book on the subject stuck away on a dusty bookshelf you remembered your take at the time. Why all the rhetoric on nationalisation under workers’ control when at the same times in Portugal this rhetoric among Combate (& others) was undergoing telling scrutiny? Then there was the Parliamentary perspective as the Bristol constituency was that of lefty MP Wedgewood Benn who gave full support to the initiative. And as for the plan itself, you felt many of the proposals were somewhat nutty like updated Heath Robinson machines. Why design a bus that also has wagon wheels that can be placed on railway lines? Wasn’t all this like the Russian Constructivists, say the Ornithopter minus Tatlin’s often breathtaking flair? But then there were the innovative kidney dialysis machines and you couldn’t fault that.

      Inevitably too, you also thought of a more significant moment at Lucas Aerospace, which was to happen nearly ten years later. During the miners’ strike of 1984-5 there was constant talk about opening up a second front and it did unfold somewhat though tragically only in dribs and drabs. A strike at Lucas Aerospace was one of them as barricades went up around the factory. At the time you felt this made a lot more sense that the previous alternative technology plan because breaking the UK’s power structure was - and still is - the essential prerequisite for realising a future of liberatory technology. Those who thought like this – and there were more than a few, weren’t wrong…

         On the level of thoughts and future projects in Latin America there seems nothing to compare at the moment with the Lucas Aerospace plan but does it really matter when on the ground essential small but significant moves out over are being made as in these circumstances, practical communication rather than airy-fairy schemes means everything. Thus in Venezuela large tracts of land surrounding factories have been handed over to the local community for allotment-type cultivation. Perhaps it’s all influenced by the organic Cuban huertos or, more likely, it’s an obvious move to make. At the same time, increasingly, peasants are occupying land probably more or less for the same reason though some in the Chavez government oppose it. This is hardly surprising as private companies own 99% of the land in Venezuela and in recent years paramilitaries on behalf of landowners have killed 164 peasants in the country.  Even the National Land Institute (INTI) is afraid of taking over land, as so often it is are owned by giant corporations or powerful individuals. In fact most of the privately owned land wasn’t bought back in the mid 19^th century when it was parcelled out, but stolen by robber barons. Most small farmers and landless peasants know this and recently have threatened to occupy INTI offices when told by officers to wait the outcome of official court procedures which endlessly delayed, probably won’t take place. One recent dispute is concerned with our old sparring partner, Lord Vestey as peasants have occupied some of his land at his El Charcote ranch. Interestingly, though probably only for the moment, Vestey has backed down. More to the point here as we’ve been discussing all these unfortunately historically-staggered though potentially insurrectionary overlaps, it’s worth pointing out that in 1972 it was Vestey who managed to get 5 pickets arrested at his Midland Cold Storage depot in east London precipitating an impressive UK national dock strike. More recently the McLibel trial in London had Vestey firmly in its sites. We have been told that the most clued-in small farmers and landless in Venezuela are now acquainted with these facts.

      Interplay between workers and community is becoming quite something in Latin America. During the bosses’ lockout in Venezuela in 2002 (described even in The Guardian as a workers’ mini general strike (!) against Chavez) the oil workers, after repairing the extensive sabotage to the installations perpetrated by managerial goons, ran the industry for 60 days whilst outside the refineries, the mass presence of the dispossessed local poor defending the area ensured no right wing military unit could come along unannounced and turf them out. And later as an extension of this spontaneous coming together, say a self-managed factory becomes commercially successful, are the profits to be distributed to the workers or used to facilitate the funding of community amenities?  Perhaps it’s payback time. Perhaps also an idea whose time has come as workers and local community get it together. Apropos of what was just said about cooperatives, throughout Latin America there’s now much condemnation of self-contented cooperatives shutting themselves off from the world. There are more than a few!

    Interestingly too, Sem Terra (Without Land – see later) in Brazil and contrary to what a lot of people think, isn’t just a movement among traditional peasantry, it’s also made up of the dispossessed urban poor fed up with the difficulties and anxieties of trying to survive through the black economy who simply wish to cultivate abandoned land guaranteeing that at least they have regular food in their bellies.

      Finally are these the first faltering steps of a transition that cannot be avoided though openly acknowledging all the many inevitable pitfalls once this path is pursued? Though we are talking money here we are also talking about its potential disappearance. Abolition of money, abolition of the wages system are fine ringing slogans to shout at the top of your voice but how do we get from exchange to use? A transition from capitalism to the new society is inevitable if there is to be any hope for life continuing. Having said goodbye to the state as the false mediator in this process we are left with the moves we make among our collective selves. Responding to the needs of those right next to you is an essential pre-requisite even if it is a gesture that can find no means initially for full realisation. The essential thing is are we embarking on the path of human fulfilment, the one which allows all the unexpected additions to be immediately included in the process of freeing ourselves from the spectacular commodity economy and finally hopefully avoiding any hardening of the arteries throwing us back into the arms of the old ways. It’s easier said than done! Certainly, in these new self-managed agri-somewhat-industrial-setups some direction has been delineated. Perhaps we must trust our hearts here; our gut instincts because if not, in the further pursuit of ever more consumer madness, we are certainly courting our own self-destruction.

     All these, or some of these constitute first transitional steps. What more is meant by transition? Is the Participatory Budget practised in Brazil’s Porto Alegri, capital of Rio Grande do Sul, part of this transition? Porto Alegri, home of the World Social Forum: It seems the latter thought it was possibly impressed - before PT came to national power – because Porto Alegri had gained a UN habitat prize for best governed city in the world. You cannot help but ask: Did any among the Forum see this official ‘recognition’ as a kind of death knell?

      The Participatory Budget has been active for a fair number of years administered by PT rank ‘n’ file members. Basically it’s a form of city government whereby activated neighbourhood blocks often from the ‘periphery’ or small peoples’ assemblies decide what should happen to a limited city budget whereby manipulations of all-powerful local officials and technicians are circumvented and financial decisions are no longer taken behind closed doors. The PB started off with a critique of voters as “mere spectators” (Silvio) needing to transform themselves into protagonists of social change as “the world is experiencing a huge social collapse” (Silvio again). This much is true. A permanent, on-going activity rapidly developed and though initiated and sustained by grass roots PT militants it did finally mean that  transparency about money matters was forced on the legislature. It also means that money from the federal state for public use no longer goes to rescuing banks and bankers as happens elsewhere in Brazil and city councillors have been forced to approve the spending decisions of the assemblies. Thus under their pressure the PB has been able to invert spending priorities in favour of the poorest neighbourhoods bringing about very basic improvements relating to extensive road maintenance, street lighting, bus routes, building sewers and municipal housing and as time has moved on, is now able to concern itself with health centres and schools. One can say this is all very pedestrian even though necessary with the PB having “a half-in, half-out relationship to the state” but how about all the real big, big, big things?

       The problem is the PB in Porto Alegre is basically a local para-state and as such really nothing like some kind of insurgent assembly as it must more or less obey the paradigm set by the federal government though pushed beyond the limits of remit. Is it really that different to the time in the early 1980s when the Trotskyist Militant Tendency controlled Liverpool Council even though more obviously contemporary in methods and in turn didn’t Liverpool tend to somewhat ape Red Bologna in the Italy of the late 1970s? All that though belonged to the time of a loosening but still patrician Stalinism especially in Bologna. The Porto Alegre experiment however skirts the farther reaches of radical social democracy even suggesting its own future negation. In this city today hip rhetoric tends to outstrip the more mundane backdrop citing experiments like the Paris Commune or the Workers’ Soviets from 1917-21 in a way that even British Solidarity of forty years ago, the Solidarity of Chris Pallis’s The Bolsheviks and Workers Control would not have completely disagreed with though doubtless would have been wary about all those still extant old power structures still functioning albeit feebly. In Porto Alegre today a relatively popular slogan proclaims: “All Power to the Participatory Budget” mimicking in tone that old more genuine chant: “All Power to the Workers Councils”.

     A real subversive assembly ushering in a new world (if indeed there is to be another such assembly or even new world which is now plainly doubtful as the times are so bad) must take on an ever-widening connotation heading towards some kind of totality where all major problems – and possible solutions – become practically indivisible. Porto Alegre’s PB quite quickly hits a ceiling after having dealt with immediate bread and butter issues. It cannot even intervene in the growing drug problem and related violence in poor areas, as this is not part of local authority remit but a federal issue etc.  However – and this is a difference and something new – these PT ideologues foresee the end of radical social democratic limitations  (its realisation if you like?) talking of a “rupture” to come. As we know from our own European pasts these limits were breached in an often wild, unrepressed explosion, a convulsive rupture, if you like. Raul Pont, one of the instigators of PB, tries to explain something about this referring back to Rousseau’s utopia where a time and space is reached where there’s no delegation, no transfer of power and sovereignty is completely undivided. It may happen; this break; this rupture – call it what you will – and the PT reformers of the Participatory Budget may joyfully join in a much more authentic example of revolutionary becoming – but don’t hold your breath!

The Big Bad Guys: International companies, compliant unions and no workers’ control

     The big bad guys yet a short story! What should here be the largest section on the workers sadly turns out to be the smallest and a sure reflection on these appalling times. Although there are conferences and much talk about the fabrica recuperado  among Latin Americans, conversation tends to trail off when it comes to the trans-nationals somewhat on the lines of: “For sure we would like to do something about Firestone or whatever but we’ll have to put a rain check on that one until there’s movement elsewhere” and then silence ensues as if not wanting to say, “we’re stumped until European, American or Chinese workers joining in the fray make a break for it.” Maybe somewhat nervous about ruffling feathers in a foreign country our Latino companeros make no mention of the sheer passivity and sense of complete impotence workers in America or Europe presently experience. The weeklong Seattle riots of 1999 seem like light years away when all those American trade unionists took to the streets mainly in a peaceful capacity objecting to cheap out-sourcing and global wage reductions. Then there were perhaps higher hopes for the emergence of the international global strike even if bureaucratically organised initially by trade union hierarchies. It had been long awaited. We are still waiting! Despite more recent promise of international action like say at Wal-Mart stores globally they are only straws in the wind never materialising into something really significant.

       The most that can be said optimistically here is there’s a renewed awareness among energy workers throughout the world who increasingly realise decreasing supplies of many basic raw materials from oil, gas, coal, iron, tin and copper give them increasing power as the companies they work for make giant profits. Latin American workers recently are no exception as violent strikes have broken out in Mexico and Argentina copper mines and oil installations though there is never a word about this in the UK press. Evidently Mexican workers recently lost a bitter 3 month strike ending up unceremoniously dismissed replaced with scab labour and in Patagonia in the spring of 2005 and centered in the town of Las Heras there was one heck of a set to during an oil workers’ strike. People were killed in clashes and the police sealed off the town. No doubt it’s part of President Kirchner’s vision of “normal capitalism.”

      Finally the news blackout seems to have broken as the strike in the Chilean Escondida copper mine owned by the Anglo Australian consortium BHP Billiton, the world’s largest miner, threw world energy leaders – even Russia’s Putin – into panic. On Wall St the two concerns on commodity brokers’ lips were the fall in US house prices and Escondida afraid other fulcrum energy workers throughout the world could receive an upbeat message, do the same shit and ask for substantially higher wages. All we can say for the moment will there be copycats and will practical links be forged between workers throughout the world via internet and email? We’ve seen this breakthrough elsewhere and it’s been an excellent high-tech development but it must happen now on the transnational workers’ front. International, concrete open-ended dialogue and contact must be established one capable of transcending trade union bureaucratic hierarchies which, always manage to cut out the real voices of those at the sharp end. For sure miners  both in Patagonia and Chile have gone in for direct action known as cortas de ruta -  blocking highways to the plants. And considering what’s gone down over the last few years in Latin America they may have taken their tactics from the piqueteros. 

     Most of the copper workers in Chile are highly paid by any standards but that doesn’t mean they are simply bought off. Radicalism was always strong among the Chilean miners and indeed were well to the forefront of the increasingly wildcat, self-organised, often armed upsurge that flourished beneath President Allende’s weak

Presidency before being crushed by Pinochet’s goons in late 1973. It’s not a unique contradiction: before the Yorkshire miners were vanquished across the River Styx to eternal damnation they tended to get quite upset if anyone in some patrician pitying mode making them cringe, suggested they were poor, penniless victims. They’d hit back with genial contempt: “Fuck off, we earn better wages than most round here”. In Chile as one can imagine the mines aren’t united into one homogenous block owned by the state, as was the case more or less before 1973. Now everything is diversified as outside transnationals like BHP Billiton have grabbed lucrative holdings as part of the neoliberal deal. Nevertheless BHP’s miners are not the highest paid;  that honour goes to those who work for Codelco, the state-owned mining group.

     However, any significant move away from neoliberalism in Latin America will be – make no mistake about it - sternly resisted by international capital markets and the IMF. Thus Repsol, the Spanish company owns Argentinean oil. People in that country want renationalisation of basic industries and in the era of the mad privatisations of the 1990s Repsol was bought for a song off of the state but President Kirchner also knows full well that the rate of profit for outsiders has to be perpetually increased as that’s the neoliberal game and he knows he has to conform to it. Rock and hard places spring to mind. It’s the same for Brazil, which still could move towards Roosevelt-like mega public works projects providing the PT government has done with neoliberalism by cancelling debt repayments and the incentive initiatives of global companies. Fat chance.

      Trade unions throughout Latin America would generally welcome such moves but there again some big wigs among them get cut a good deal from neoliberalism. Peronist unions in Argentina are among the worst and are often funded like a private business setup opposing any shade of militancy and local officials were even down on  the Patagonian oil workers’ strike. In fact Peronist unionism is so corrupt most officials own large share portfolios in the companies they deal with.

    The general situation in Latin America is now so edgy – at least that’s what we’ve been told – that small conflicts over wages and TU recognition can quickly become a full blown fracas. Remember too, like everywhere else unions have been completely decimated and for instance, in Ecuador in the mid 1980s –only a meer 20 years ago – unionism covered 40% of the workforce. Nowadays it’s down to 5%.

The Argentinazo. The Escrache. Telesur. Latter-day derives and cultural expropriations. Down with celebrity…

      When the military lost all heart after the dirty war from 1976-82 it was the Peronist Menim who took over. Although feared by the armed forces in Argentina nonetheless Peronism is all things to all people and Menim was no exception as he became the chief architect of neoliberalism and privatisation abolishing runaway inflation and achieving parity of the real  (the Argentinean peso) with the dollar. So began the decade of sleep in Argentina. For the first time expensive electronic goods – computers, mobiles, camcorders, cameras etc - became much more evidently available. At the same time privatisations ruined many in the statist middle classes built up over many decades. These newly ruined middle classes with entrenched middle class aspirations suddenly found themselves having to participate in local barter schemes (Lets) and myriad different kinds of neighbourhood currencies appeared with (sort of) local labour vouchers. But all this was obscured, brushed under the carpet as it were, on account of Argentina achieving the economic stability (miracle) long craved for and finally on par – it seemed - with Europe. Also the country was now free to massively borrow money from any source throughout the world  as exchange controls had been abolished. Everywhere people and institutions were eager to lend and bit-by-bit the country became massively indebted so much so that in 2001 the International Monetary Fund and World Bank declared Argentina a bad investment risk. And that was it: it was all over for the many illusions fostered on that decade of privatisations.

    The Argentinazo seemed to focus a critique of culture and the Paris of the South –Buenos Aires – began to live up to its reputation. However, it was all building up beforehand throughout the 1990s. In fact, the assemblies had started to come into play before the 2001 uprising, as had those wild, jubilant street youths, the piqueteros.  In1999 the first escrache (a collective personal denunciation) took place. Someone in the streets encountered Artiz – the notorious naval commander – and torturer. Perhaps influenced by the Madres de la Plaza Mayo protesting against their disappeared sons and daughters  (30,000 people disappeared more than were killed by Pinochet in Chile around the same time) they decided to humiliate Artiz harassing him through non-violent condemnation. Other escraches followed. It would be good to know some of the unknown colourful details though basically escraches initially involved painting slogans all over the walls of the neighbourhood of a person targeted explaining their past misdeeds and what they were up to now. This is then followed by other tactics like a number of people surrounding a particular individual on the street demanding detailed explanations of what they did. The Argentinazo led to a much greater expansion of these activities becoming almost commonplace. Maps were produced (the cartographia des control) which were clearly influenced by the Situationists maps of the late 1950s in Paris. Hardly surprising they were mainly aimed at the military and the police and rather different from observing human flows, which the early Situationists had done in Paris. Groups such as “Grupo de Arte Callejero” – street artists and the Colectivo Situacones, helped these spontaneous actions. (An oral history on CD about them by Marina Sitrin is to be published funded by Anarchist International Studies but we have an inkling that the necessary sharp questions will probably be lacking, though more on this later). As for eschraches today, although Kirchner had little choice but to repeal the laws of amnesty designed to protect the generals responsible for the mass killings, surprise, surprise, they haven’t been tried for their crimes.  This guy sure knows how to tire a movement by endless stalling but that’s capitalism the world over.

             Though Argentina was temporarily a success in neoliberal terms there were not the same amount of sweeteners as available in Thatcher’s Britain and the stability was very illusory. However the subsequent economic implosion created situations, which have become relevant pointers to all our futures anywhere in the world. This is especially true in the way hi-tech commodities can be put into play when redirected towards communal ends as throwaway culture takes a step backwards towards sustainable maintenance now that reserves of raw materials are near to exhaustion. When the real collapsed and imported electronic goods became incredibly expensive the country had become well equipped with these consumer items. A pooling of resources suddenly took place and seeing there were now many electronic experts and engineers around, a demand went out for all old computer equipment, abandoned terminals, peripherals etc because they could all be repaired/adapted for redistribution. The Argentinazo ensured an end to the practise of throwaway electronic goods with the emergence of hi-tech repair shops where equipment was redirected for next-to-nothing towards social ends, a process which would have warmed Vance Packard’s old – but unfortunately always sociological - heart. And not one factory occupation went by without its filmed accompaniment and film was used like never before in Argentina to raise support for particular struggles. For an all too brief period various collectives would swop their particular tradeable expertise with others with different expertise for free. Thus a printing coop like Chilavert would print stuff for a collectivised medical clinic in return for free medical treatment and in turn the same clinic struck a deal with an IT collective who then provided customised free software, and so on…

       Apropos of this salvaging and re-directing tendency even Latin American states seem to have picked up on something of the same. Recently the PT Brazilian state has thrown out Microsoft opting for file sharing in the shape of Open Source programming. Microsoft has replied threatening a lawsuit but it probably won’t get anywhere. In a way Open Source fits more the prevailing Bolivarian mutual aid ideology beginning to dominate Latin America as it also challenges the sheer domination of money and sickening recourse to patent laws and copyright, a tactic usually hypocritically insisted on by robber barons ensconced in the top drawer of the computer universe. Something else is also at play. The development of computer science is the only technology since the beginning of the industrial revolution which tends to put something like the rejection of money at the heart of its technical practise even though this recognition has been pushed well to the side over the last decade or so. It’s a history yet to be written never mind realised. Railways in the 19^th century were never anything like this even though they brought into central focus the reality of the mass public. For those who are understandably in many respects very critical of the computer age accusing it of technolatry and increasing isolation, it is well to remember these enlightened tendencies within the field of high tech. And for all we know maybe something of this relating to the very core of computer science is stirring in Latin America? Equally though, or rather not so equally, so-called ‘illegal’ free file sharing exhibiting a momentary freedom from the economy can open doors to new ways of doing business mainly via ‘unseen’ advertising revenue.  At the heart of neoliberalism there’s also a perversion in practise of the rational need to abolish money where cut-price drifts into no price at all.

     With the Argentinazo, many independent media organisations began to appear like a group of independent filmmakers. One cannot help but feel this was the initial spur to the recent Telesur initiative in Venezuela, which sounds like a far more radically recuperative Channel 4 in Britain. It is possibly the most ‘radical’ TV channel in the world even though it probably draws the teeth of independent film makers, counter information services, etc on whose example Telesur is based. Its advent is hardly surprising as the right in Venezuela control 90% of the media in print, TV and radio. 70% of the funding comes from Venezuela though it is open to participation from other Latin American countries and Argentina avidly participates. Chavez wishes to be a real cinematic celebrity within his own terms. Recently he has launched an $11 million film studio to counter the “dictatorship” of Hollywood though careful to take what were once called the traditional Yankee “swimming pool reds” with him. Thus Oliver Stone is about to make a film of the failed coup attempt of 2002 against Chavez.

         A recent blockbuster movie Encuestro Express (Kidnapping Express) has quickly come to be regarded as “the most successful Venezuelan film of all time” and as a home produced, independent movie directed by a Venezuelan guy called Jonathan Jakubowicz, has been picked up by a major distributor.  Though probably empirically accurate as a portrayal of a drug gang into kidnapping members of the rich - a familiar Latin American experience - it employs a Meyerhold-like mix of professionals and amateurs in an archaic storyline/novelistic form. The film frowned on by the Chavez administration and ‘punished’ in a mild sort of way and from a director who spending most of his life in Los Angeles, doesn’t even approve of the recent rather mild redistribution of wealth. Instead Jakubowicz suggests that a solution to the ills of Venezuelan society can only be found if the poor and rich find a way of coming together. Some forlorn hope!  Nonetheless, though purely for reasons of greed and celebrity, the film does at least raise the thorny problems of hard drug gangs when those with a more genuine hope for society still absolutely refuse to get to grips with. There is no question though, a broad, theoretically based, perhaps somewhat documentary-like film discussing contemporary crime in the megs-slums of Latin America in all its complicated ramifications and really biting the bullet, would be an excellent thing to do. Perhaps even some of the arguments deployed here could figure if made more precise?

        More to the point, you wonder how much Telesur is an attempt to stifle better forms of media dissent or even moves in the direction of a certain autonomy one playing with skilled technical negation. This happened a few years ago during the revolt of the Intermittents in France when those individuals computer-savvy in their ranks were able to disrupt live consumer TV with pointed agitational slogans. Whilst nothing so inspirational has yet occurred in Latin America, in some of the Argentinean barrios the main Channel 5 TV has been intercepted to make different local transmissions organised by “Abajo la TV” (Down with TV though plainly it’s merely alternative TV). In La Gomera barrio – one among others - alternative TV was broadcast for up to 5 hours replacing official broadcasts with videos of the Mothers of Plaza Mayo, shorts made by local children at barrio schools plus, independent documentaries. Though welcome, the problem with much of this type of thing is that it quickly becomes merely another mode of entertainment, a mode here cemented by chacerera-style (Argentinean folk dance) of Rolling Stones numbers which “Abajo la TV” emphasises etc.

       Essentially, Hollow-woodisation was pushed aside by the mammoth social event of the Argentinazo though the same process was beginning to happen all over the world, though much more discreetly. In Argentina it received its clearest expression up to date. These independent films coming out of the turmoil must be seen in terms of the increasingly imaginative tactics deployed in the escraches. Thus for example, street signs were removed in Buenos Aires. At this moment too there was a lot of street theatre, which was more theatre than contestation. In itself these types of activity from the late 1960s onwards, especially throughput western Europe were easily prone to recuperation, and were in fact, often its very essence. For instance, the reality of renaming street signs can easily become funded by the local state like has happened fairly recently in the UK in Newcastle and used as a kind of ad in the Tyneside Metro. Here it’s totally devoid of interest apart from the installation artist who did this renamed the job centre in Latin the slave market because Newcastle was one of the far-flung outposts of the Roman Empire.

     In Argentina however one must bear in mind that such actions (not funded by the state) were taking place within the context of a reawakened people with sizable street corner meetings taking place everywhere often discussing profound problems. A reawakening of everyday encounters rapidly unfolded.

      How relevant is this for elsewhere? Though the Argentinazo released at one and the same time currents which clearly harked back to the radical experiments of the Lettrists and the Situationists in Paris in the mid 20^th century as well as earlier phases particularly between 1918 to 1925 – when there was genuine radical avant garde art about - a kind of cultural conservatism based on a dilution of the latter quickly spread. In Argentina from the financial crash onwards the latter persuasion was still able to release a plethora of political theatre to packed audiences. The same applied to cinema too. No doubt for any naïve not to say brain-dead alternative artist in Europe or America it would be a dream come true. Unfortunately subversive reality cannot cradle their illusions. In May ’68 or ’77 in Italy the culture houses were massively ignored and deserted to such an extent Dario Fo in Italy after writing The Accidental Death of an Anarchist and feeling he was being pushed into the background and no longer the radical he thought he was – in order to reclaim his relevance - was reduced to the absurdity of occupying his own theatre rather than burning the fucker down.

     In this respect the Argentinazo indicates how retrograde the critique of culture has become and marks a step backward in comparison to May ’68 in France or Italy ’77. Maybe though we should see the artistic tendencies in the Argentinazo not merely as cynical recuperation but also as means of employment within a world economy where survival has become much harsher than 30 or 40 years ago and where it’s more a question of survival than total rejection. It may also for some people simply help in getting by as they flog their DVDs for a few quid that they’ve made on computers interpreting this or that event. However, it clearly still holds true the subversive act can be the first step up the career ladder because even in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, all recuperative mechanisms have since been put in place, especially now Telesur is in existence. Might not Telsur buy and occasionally show films of factory occupations or is there a creeping process of censorship?

      It’s probably not too far from the truth that the Argentinazo saved the footballer Maradona’s life. Grotesquely overweight with a mega-cocaine habit as an uber-celeb he was the equal of David Beckham but without the fashion, style and wife. He became a tribune of the people with his own TV slot and thus able to save himself from ridicule and a pathetic end which David Beckham will never be able to do. We will listen to Latin American superstars like Gilberto Gil or Bianca Jagger – she can put interesting questions to Chavez - because they talk more sense. Those of similar status in Europe or America cannot.  Once – two or three decades ago – it was felt that the pressures on western superstars, their tantrums, freak outs etc would lend them to a clearer appreciation of their position as private prisoners of  paradise-syndrome simply because everything about their lives is so utterly false. We can no longer have any faith in this…

     Today, once media celebrities are involved in any charabanc of protest or obvious social injustice it spells its ruin, all authentic passion having been spent as celebrities join the bandwagon simply to keep their names in lights which, they know they have to do to keep cash flows lubricated. These events can also add a little essential finesse to their image further oiling the dollario machine. Thankfully, this is now becoming more and more well known. Moreover, celebrity and in particular, stadium rock is only for the benefit of those people in such desperate plight they’re hardly capable of helping themselves and there’s now so much of this bullshit around that  people everywhere are getting sick of it as it finally sinks in that money made only really benefits the celebrities themselves. (Poor things, these celebrities; are they finally beginning to feel somewhat unwanted?) Moreover you can hardly imagine this unsavoury crew touting for support for an awakening people beginning to give the authorities hell like is happening throughout Latin America. Standing on your own two feet also means a developing critical capability is on the move and sooner or later, it could end up taking out celebrity. Celebrities don’t like this as celebrity demands passive, unconditional worship and obedience, ever in awe of their grace and favour. Celebrity can abide no criticism of their avowed role of saving the world, which is why the sooner finks like Emma Thompson and Greg Wise are clobbered the better it will be for all of us at the sharp end.

   Past counter-revolutionary strategies and the failings of urban guerrillas

      Though our view of the Montoneros and other similar armed groups tend to be negative, the Argentinian magazine, Lucha Armada, (Armed Struggle) containing accounts of former Montoneros activists, sells out practically instantly even though there isn’t a sign that the classic form of the urban guerrilla is likely to put in a reappearance in the immediate future. A number of recent books available throughout the continent have also appeared on the subject. It seems one of the most telling: De Los Sesenta a La Tablada (From the Sixties to La Tabalda) was written by Enrique Gorriaran Merlo, an Argentinian guerrilla – obviously influenced by Che -  who together with the ERP (Peoples’ Revolutionary Army) tried to create a ‘free zone’ in the poor province of Tucamen. The guy was larger then life and after many hair-raising escapades, was responsible for assassinating the former brutal dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Samoza after he fled to the safer havens of General Stroessner’s Paraguay in the wake of the brief armed Sandinista victory. Basically, Merlo’s book – the guy recently died – seems more an exciting memoir than a critique though he does admit a few mistakes especially continuing with armed action after Peron’s return to Argentina in 1973. But that’s as far as it goes. Nonetheless, the book helped prise open the door for essential reminiscences.

   These various guerrilla reflections were influenced in turn by the heady atmosphere in the aftermath of the Argentinazo. However, it seems that was the case up to a little while ago. Nowadays the editors of Lucha Armada are finding it a lot more difficult to continue prising articles from past insurgents exposing a problem current everywhere in the world where very few people wish to reflect on what happened to them. In Argentina, it’s probably extra difficult as opening up such wounds for all the world to see is like reliving a dreadful trauma risking  recurrence of mortifying personal pain as the defeats and state murders of the past are mulled over. Nonetheless it must be done if only to make sense of a nightmare of historical memory, which, may help find a way out even if it does entail a lot of reflective self-criticism regarding terrorist organizations. After all, the question of the armed struggle and the arming of the people are still very much to the fore in Latin America and is seen as an absolutely essential question and one of immediate relevance. The problem of finding the right path probably remains elusive as ever because maybe there isn’t one though some directions make a lot more sense than others.

     The Argentinazo has been interpreted as one of the great epochal events of Argentine history but what about its equal, the Cordabazo of 1969 when thousands upon thousands of people in what was then, a heavily industrialised city went on the rampage and smashed the police and army? This event was clearly influenced by Paris’68 and the Autumno Caldo in Italy over a year later (there are many Italians in Argentina). In 1967 Che met his death in the Bolivian jungles. Che believed in the primacy of peasant guerrilla movements and had completely lost faith in workers’ insurrection in the urban centres. One could say from the Cordabazo you get the beginnings of an urban guerrilla movement and the foundation of the Montoneros. The concept of the urban guerrilla was marked by a profound voluntarism and substitutionism spreading everywhere through the highly developed and less highly developed world -Weathermen, Angry Brigade, Baader Meinhof, Action Directe, Red Brigades, Tupmaros and so on – who all believed they were essential detonators of struggle and on some occasions they were though  mainly in small ways. (Obviously say knee capping a particularly sadistic factory foreman was helpful to the workers undergoing their daily grind in the Turin factories). More importantly terrorism was easily manipulated by the state and we refer to that summaily in the section here on Toni Negri although anybody wanting to follow this up should read Sanguinetti’s “On Terrorism and the State” published in London by BM Chronos.

      We have to ask the question were they consequential? So far it seems not. Essentially they played into the state’s hand creating the fearful ogre of state manipulated terrorism we have no means seen the end of and has over the last decade fed directly into militant Islam. During the same period a fair number of guerrillas did a quick about turn becoming increasingly opportunist and some ended up with top jobs at the heart of  increasingly neoliberal state apparatus’s throughout Latin America. The paradox is in Argentina the reaction to the brutal liquidation of the Montoneros by the military created Los Disparachos (the missing ones) formed by the madres and abuilas (mothers and aunts) of the Plaza de Mayo, which has been very consequential. During the era of privatisations and well being for more than a few and the historical amnesia that engulfed the country it is now recognised that these brave women were the conscience of the nation. One could perhaps say the ‘cultural revival’ – would it had been an ‘anti-cutural revival’ - in Argentina started from resistance to the military and brought to greater prominence through the Argentinazo, as previously mentioned. Now alas too the example of the madres has faded as, demonstrating an all too familiar Achilles Heel, they welcomed the Peronist Kirchner’s presidency with something like open arms.

                           Spontaneity, autonomy and assemblies

     The greatest thing to emerge throughout Latin America is the collapse of vanguardism and the rise of the belief in self-activity and ‘auto-convocados’ (the self-organised). It’s general thrust is so powerful it marginalises all leftist parties of a Bolshevikh stamp and there are still large-ish amounts of them about. All of these leftist parties whilst initially welcoming the sentiment behind “que-se-vayan-todos” (to hell with the lot of ‘em – meaning politicians of all sorts) gradually have fallen back on the old rubbishing now seeing it as a terrible threat that is going to hand power throughout Latin America over to the extreme right and military once again. However, nervous of the real movement these cadres are still afraid to say so openly. What they hate about “que-se-vayan-todos” is the fact that it really is not political in the best sense of the term – i.e. it is actively anti the state. Trotskyists like the British SWP’s Mike Gonzales think “que-se-vayan-todos” should be translated as “don’t vote it only encourages them” – a basic anarchist slogan – and that is its inherent weakness as it rejects politics in toto. It really is beginning to freak them out as for the first time in the history of Latin America they have to confront a vague ‘anarchism’ that is everywhere. Interestingly John Holloway (see elsewhere) elicits an interesting take on the slogan suggesting it has a more contemporaneous ring to it referring to the flight of capital neoliberalism has imposed on all of us meaning when we resort to protest, capital ‘flies’ to another country. The slogan then becomes: “Let them all go away”. However we may interpret“que-se-vayan-todos”  it is also a mood that’s somewhat skin deep so the lefties needn’t worry too much as two years after the slogan was on everybody’s lips 65% of the Argentineans voted in Kirchner.

     Historically anarchism in pockets has been around in Latin America for a century or so though usually very marginalised. In the late 1920s Chile boasted having 20,000 members affiliated to the American Wobblies (IWW) proving that not all Yankee influence was to the bad and Durutti carried on his agitation in Argentina in the 1920s holding up banks and the like before returning to Spain etc. Anarcho-syndicalism has also played its part since especially in Argentina though we really don’t want to go into that here as that’s a story in itself. By the early 1970s a tendency towards libertarianism, though by then not specifically referring to itself as ‘anarchist’ more assemblista, was very much there during the workers’ uprising under Allende in Chile and present in the ‘cordones industriales’. COBI (Communist Organization of the British Isles) based in Edinburgh and a disintegrated Leninist outfit (in fact so disintegrated, unlike Autonomia Operaia, ended with an outright rejection of Lenin!) produced a very interesting report from the early internment camps set up by Pinochet after the 1973 coup. It vividly spotlighted that even under such brutal conditions autonomous workers refused to communicate or even pass the time of day with vanguard cadres

     Throughout Latin America - though more so in some countries than others - many actions are assembly led or throw up coordinations rather like in Spain in the mid 1970s (See the book Wildcat Spain Encounters Democracy elsewhere on this web) The film: Bolivia is Not for Sale which catches the ebullient insurgency and life-enhancing mood of the times covers the resistance to water privatisation in Cochabamba. A participant casually mentions the Coordination of Water and Life – what a great title – passionately emphasising that 100, 000 people made collective decisions and not by way of  3 or 4  self-appointed leaders. True the assemblies weren’t ‘pure’ organisations like that. Old and new union formations were in there somewhere though they went with the flow. In the same film Oscar Olivera of the Federation of Factory Workers of the faviles says; “We don’t believe in parties anymore”. Later, on April 18^th 2006,  Olivera further states: “We work towards the strengthening of autonomous organisations, such as the cooperatives, the water committees…to obtain our own management of water” After Morales’ election he participated in a blockade of the runaways of Jorge Wilsteram Airport in Cochabamba during a pilots’ strike. The action came up with another inspired name – a roadblock of the skies - and the police detained Olivera for deploying aggressive tactics. It seems the guy is no longer afraid of jail though for sure, Morales must increasingly dislike Olivera as through the evolution and changing character of the autonomous movement Morales once thought his own, there are clear signs it is turning against his presidency. Like “que-se-vayan-todos” autonomy is a word on many people’s lips in Latin America. However, a word of caution is needed here. It feels more like the ‘autonomy’ of the disintegrating Leninism of Autonomia Operaia in the Italy of the 1970s which is perhaps why Negri’s Empire book was so popular in Latin America three or four years ago and to some degree still is. It’s none too clear and Olivera is possibly part of this syndrome. He seems to like his name in lights readily accepting the 2001 Goldmann environment prize and on July 19^th 2006 wrote a small, quite tepid article in The Guardian for the benefit of UK readers.

     A kind of instant form of direct action has appeared in some countries of Latin America which can probably be summed up in the activities of the radical piqueteros who for nearly a decade “have been grappling with the problem of strategy and tactics in the epoch of de-industrialisation, precarious employment, temp jobs and mass unemployment, a period in which the old workplace-centred strategies no longer seem viable” (Clausewitz on the Pampas). These activities apply just as much to the huge new shanty city of an insurgent El Alto surrounding La Paz in Bolivia as to Argentina where the piquetero was founded around 1997. In a way this movement is a combination of the displaced working class and middle class often grouped together in survival gangs touting for temp jobs.  According to Latin Americans we’ve listened to some of these collectives are really clued-in and some not though all are constantly in flux regarding size, ‘membership’ and consciousness. When writing about consciousness here it’s a bit of a hazy concept. No doubt the ex-middle class members who came into the piqueteros around 2001 at the time of the Argentinazo, took with them their bookish learning and, no doubt, high among the readings were the often Delphic comments of Subcomandante Marcos (‘leader’ of the EZLN in Mexico’s Chiapas province) which paved the way for the far more academicised ramblings of John Holloway in his book How to Change the World Without Taking Power along with the somewhat impenetrable mumbo jumbo of the Hardt/Negri book Empire. Boy, did they impact both to the good and the bad but more on that a little later! Now this influence has it seems waned what, if anything, has taken its place? We don’t know but what you have (or did have) in the piqueteros was a quick unformulated direct democracy in action quite unlike the debating atmosphere of the oft-mentioned neighbourhood general assemblies of a few years ago usually situated in more middle class areas which were prone to infiltration  by leftist vanguard parties causing  bewilderment and demoralisation to set in as people simply no longer turned-up at these gatherings. More proletarianised spontaneous piqueteros action has had the advantage of curtailing any such manoeuvring but how long can spontaneity continue simply under its own momentum alone?

       Recently, the piqueteros in Argentina have developed a bureaucracy as part of an ever-changing broad inclusion, which is at the heart of the Peronist Kirchner’s social plans. Remember too, inclusion has always been part of the amazing Peronist umbrella and the main reason for its surprising longevity, well,…until the shit hits the fan which, is never too far off. Kirchner though has developed “work plans” – essentially work for your welfare plans that local, self-appointed piquetero leaders oversee. Typical Peronist clientalism is at the heart of this welfare programme and those piqueteros who are the best at drawing attention to themselves get given the most money. Not to be excluded from the umbrella, “barrio bosses” also get in on the act salting away dollops of welfare relief for themselves and dodgy business acquaintances. As an ad hoc extension of the state and a divide and rule tactic it is brilliant as those clued-in and intransigent piqueteros are cut out the loop in a way not dissimilar to the class conscious factory workers whom Kirchner hates. Moreover, the piqueteros could tire and with people getting older in the movement - losing perhaps their youthful exuberance partially through getting nowhere - some could decide to throw in their lot with their gangs – if only a little – and make a bob or two simply because you cannot keep fighting all the time. Weakening like this are precisely the openings where worse things can begin to flourish although for the moment such pessimism is perhaps ill judged. Nonetheless, it could maybe be said that the challenging moment of the piqueteros has past. We hope not, though there’s only a slim chance at the moment that something better is in the offing and anything approaching the size of the Argentinazo is unlikely in the near future.

Brazil. Tropicalia. The favela and the lost dream of avante garde urban transformation. The hell of drug gangs, maimed street culture and the contradictions of endless despair

    When mentioning under-development in Latin America it’s wise to be careful. Openness amidst savage repression seems to be a fundamental characteristic and the influences of many up-to-the-minute radical tendencies, especially from Europe, were never far in the background even forty years ago. May ’68 in France had a massive impact and the critique of art also played a part especially in the more economically advanced Latin American countries though without the finely tuned cutting edge acquired in France. This was particularly true of Tropicalia in Brazil. Tropicalia was a kind of combative hippy phenomenon founded in the 1960s and took its name from a 1967 installation by Helio Oiticicia exhibited in London’s Whitechapel art gallery. The movement was a kind of combination of music and happening espousing at its height a watered down critique of recuperation, which again had been most clearly announced in France. Remember though this was the moment in Brazil of a tightening military dictatorship lasting from 1964 to 1985 and what could be interpreted as a light and somewhat mildish upset in democratic Europe resulted often in heavy repression in Brazil ensuring certain jail and even torture. Oiticicia daubed a slogan  “be an outlaw, be a hero” on the national flag protesting against a military death squad shooting of a favela marginal ‘criminal’ for which he was banged-up. Others like the musician Gilberto Gil were exiled to England after a stretch inside. Later returning to Brazil and stellar fame, finally in 2003 he became PT’s minister of culture.

      Riding manifest contradictions Oiticicia as an installation artist condemned the mode of a “devouring TV” railing against the “bourgeois voracity” of cultural commoditisation eating up everything living and vital – a familiar case if you like of having your cake and eating it as he in turn was devoured culturally, via recuperation Brazilian-style.  The musician Velosa even recycled a May ’68 wall slogan in a song E Proibido Proibir (It is Forbidden to Forbid). And so on. Os Mutantes of increasing underground prestige – and recently revived - even did commercials for Shell whilst incorporating concrete poetry (a banal fall out from the much more incisive Lettrist critique in the late 1940s), the atonality of Stockhausen plus John Cage sound effects which all became blended seamlessly together as merely another cultural example of the cornucopia of modern day commodity production. Finally, these experiments merely teased with rebellion and there was nothing more explicitly liberating in the offing.

    Emphasis on the street did indeed play a major part in Tropicalia or  as Oiticicia put it: “ the art of the streets, of unfinished things, of vacant lots”. Many of them bigged-up their poor backgrounds hailing from the multiracial province of Bahia (the poor north eastern sugar producing state) as against the rich white-ish elite of Rio. Having, whether they liked it or not, accepted the enforced paradigms of the cultural set-up the outcome could only have one conclusion that of pro-moing the emerging mystique of favela fabuluous  when singing the praises of the attractive marginal hooligans of those times in the early 1970s who were very different kettles of fish from the monsters they  evolved into two and a half decades later. Nevertheless favela fabulous helped outline the shape of things to come as a misshapen Pandora’s box of sheer horror threw open its lid over the next two decades.

    The relatively recent Brazilian film Cidade do Deus (City of God) has captured something of this ghastly transformation and setback. In one episode, a 1970s Rio gang in the favela holds up a petrol tanker truck in order to requisition it for a no doubt cut-price social redistribution. Behaving in a splendidly spontaneous cavalier style they happen upon a stash of bank notes in the tanker’s cab that they partially joyously throw in the air scattering the notes to a strong wind. Characteristic of the time the image of Guevarist guerrilla is reinterpreted by the favelas social banditry. Hardly surprising such acts became the stuff of local Robin Hood folklore.

     How times change. The on-set of the free market made a relatively free and somewhat easygoing gang structure serious business indeed. Money became God along with the latest armaments as the gang or posse often became more tooled-up than the police, sporting today 9mm automatic weapons which neither the population or police are allowed to own. Indeed nowadays some posses work in tandem with some police regarding the division of monetary spoils. And for those people living cheek by jowl with the posses in the favelas adoration of the romantic rebel has given way to fear and hate though very rarely dare they express such opinion. Within the gangs a psychotic active nihilism has