- Political Power and the World Market
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- The twin nemesis of Latin America's quest for more equitable
and dynamic development, US imperial and local oligarchic power have been
subject to profound changes over the past decade. New capitalist classes
both at home and abroad have redefined Latin America's relation to world
markets, seized opportunities to stimulate growth and forged cross class
coalitions linking overseas investors, agro-mineral exporters, national
industrialists with a broad array of trade unions, and in some countries
peasant and Indian social movements. Parallel to these changes in Latin
America, a new militarist and financial political configuration engaged
in prolonged wars, colonial occupations and widespread speculation has
weakened the structural economic links dominance between US
imperial economic interests and Latin America's dynamic socio-economic
classes.
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- In the present conjuncture, these basic changes in the
respective class structures in the US and Latin America define
the contours, constraints and 'reach' of the imperial classes as well as
the potential autonomy of action of Latin America's leading socio-economic
classes.
-
- Notions which freeze Latin America in a time warp such
as "500 years of exploitation" or which conflate earlier decades
of US political-economic dominance with the present, have failed to take
account of recent class dynamics, including popular insurrections, mass
electoral mobilizations and failed imperial-centered economic models which
have redefined the power equation between the US and Latin America. Equally
important,
-
- fundamental changes in market relations and market competition
has lessened US influence in the world market and opened major growth opportunities
for new and established sectors of Latin America's capitalist class, especially
its dynamic export sectors.
-
- Understanding imperialism, especially the US variant,
requires focusing on class relations, within and between countries and
regions, the changing balance of power as well as the impact of fundamental
changes in world market relations. Equally important the private economic
institutions of imperialism (banks, multi-national corporations, investors)
are contingent on the composition and policies of the imperial state. Insofar
as the state defines its priorities in military and ideological terms and
acts accordingly, by channeling resources in prolonged wars, the imperial
policymakers weakens their capacity to sustain, finance and promote overseas
private economic interests. As we shall analyze and discuss in the following
sections, the US has suffered a relative loss of political and economic
power over key Latin American regimes and markets as its military commitments
have widened and deepened over time. The result is a Latin American political
configuration which has changed dramatically over the past two decades.
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- Latin American Political-Economic Configurations and
US Imperialism
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- The upsurge of social movements, the subsequent ascent
of center-left political regimes,the dynamic economic growth of Asian economies
and the consequent sharp increase in prices of commodities in the world
market has changed the configuration of political power in Latin America
and between the latter and the US between 2000-2010.
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- While the US exercised almost absolute hegemony during
the period 1980-1999, the rise of a militarist caste promoting prolonged
imperial wars in the Middle East and South Asia and the rise of relatively
independent national-popular and social-liberal regimes in Latin America
has produced a broad spectrum of governments with greater autonomy of action.
-
- Depending on the criteria we use, Latin American countries
have moved beyond the orbit of US hegemony. For example, if we examine
trade and investment, all the major countries, independent of ideology,
have to a greater or lesser degree diversified their markets, trading and
investment partners. If we examine political alignments, we find that all
the major countries have joined UNASUR, a regional political organization
that excludes the US. If we examine policy divergences from the US on major
regional issues, such as the US embargo on Cuba, its efforts to isolate
Venezuela, its proposed military bases in Colombia, Washington remains
in splendid isolation, to the point that the new Colombian President Santos,
chooses to "postpone" implementation in favor of maximizing billion
dollar trade and diplomatic ties with Venezuela. If we focus on ideological
divergence between the US and Latin America, particularly on global issues
of free trade, military coups and intervention, we find a variety of positions.
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- For example, Brazil opposes US sanctions against Iran
and supports the latter's program of uranium enrichment for peaceful uses.
If we focus on joint US-Latin American military exercises and support for
the Haitian occupation, most Latin countries with the exception of
Venezuela participate. If we examine the issue of bilateral trade
and regional trade agreements, the US proposals on the latter were voted
down, while several countries pursue (so far with little success) the former.
On a rather fluid measure of 'affinity for neo-liberal' ideology, in which
a mixture of elements of statism, deregulated markets and social welfare
co-exist in varying degrees, we can draw up a tentative 4 fold division
between "left", "center left", "center right"
and "right".
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- On the "left" we can include Venezuela and
Bolivia which have expanded the public sector, economic regulations and
social spending. On the "center-left" we can include Argentina,
Brazil and Ecuador which have increased social spending, public investment
and increased employment, wages and reduced poverty, while vastly increasing
private national and foreign investment in agro-mineral export sectors.
On the center-right we can include Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay, which embrace
free market doctrines, with mild poverty programs and an open door to foreign
investment. On the right we find Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico,
Peru, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, all of whom line up with
Washington on most ideological issues, even as they may be diversifying
trade ties with Asia and Venezuela.
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- Internal shifts in class power within Latin America and
the US have spurred divergences. Latin America has witnessed greater policy
influence by a more 'globalist elite' less tied to the US, and an emerging
'nationalist bourgeoisie', and greater pressure from reformist working
class and public employees trade union. In contrast within the US industrial
capital has lost influence to the financial sector and exerts little influence
in shaping economic policy toward Latin America, beyond rearguard 'protectionist'
measures and state subsidies. The US ruling political elite, highly militarized
and Zionized, shows little capacity to engage in launching any major new
initiatives toward recapturing markets in Latin America, preferring massive
military expenditures on wars and paying tribute to their Israeli mentors.
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- As a result of major socio-political shifts within the
US and Latin America and the singular importance of dynamic changes in
the world market, there are four axis of power operating in the Western
Hemisphere.
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- The emerging economic power of Brazil and the growth
of intra-regional trade within and between Latin American economies.
- The dynamic expansion of Asian trade, investment and
markets leading to a long term, large scale shift toward greater economic
diversification.
- The substantial financial flows from the US to Latin
America in the form of "hot money" with destabilizing effects,
as well as continued substantial investment, trade and military ties.
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- The European Union, Russia and the Middle East as real
and potential influentials in particular settings, depending on the countries
and time frame.
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- Of these 4 'vectors of power', the most significant in
recent times in reshaping Latin America's relation to the US and more importantly
in opening up prospects for 21st century capitalist growth, is the boom
in commodity prices and demand the dynamic of the world market. On
the 'negative side', the prolonged US-EU economic crises has limited trade
and investment growth and encouraged greater Latin American integration
and expansion of regional markets. A serious threat to Latin America's
growth, autonomy and stability is found in the US currency devaluation
and subsequent overvaluating of Latin currencies (especially Brazil) imposing
constraints on industrial exports and prejudicing the manufacturing sector.
Equally important US and EU manipulation of interest rates downward
has driven speculative capital toward higher interest rates in Latin
America, creating destabilizing "bubbles" which can derail the
economies.
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- US Empire Strikes Back: Protectionism, Devaluation and
Unilateralism
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- By the middle of 2010 it was clear that the US economy
was losing the competitive battle for markets around the world and was
unable to reduce its trade and fiscal deficit within the existing global
free trade regime. The Obama regime, led by Federal Reserve head Bernacke
and Treasury Secretary Geithner unilaterally launched a thinly disguised
trade war, effectively devaluating the dollar and lowering interest rates
on bonds in order to increase exports and in effect 'overvalue' the currency
of their competitors. In other words the Obama regime resorted to a virile
"bugger your neighbor policies", which outraged world economic
leaders, provoking Brazilian economic leaders to speak of a "currency
war". Contrary to Washington's rhetoric of "greater co-operation",
the Obama regime was resorting to protectionist policies designed to alienate
the leading economic powers in the region.
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- No longer in a position to impose non-reciprocal trade
agreements to US advantage, Washington is engaged in currency manipulation
in order to increase market shares at the expense of the highly competitive
emerging economies of Latin America and Asia, as well as Germany.
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- Equally prejudicial to Latin America, the Federal Reserve's
lowering of interest rates leads to heavy borrowing in the US in order
to speculate in high interest countries like Brazil. The consequences are
disastrous, as a flood of "hot money", speculative funds flow
into Latin America, especially Brazil, overvaluating the currency and provoking
a speculative bubble in bonds and real estate, while encouraging excess
liquidity and public and private consumer debt. Equally damaging the overvalued
currencies price industrial and manufacturing out of world market competition,
threatening to "de-industrialize" the economies and further their
dependency on agro-mineral exports. US resort to unilateral protectionism
tells us that the decline in US economic power has reached a point where
it struggles to compete with Latin America rather than to reassert its
former dominant position. Protectionism is a defense mechanism of an empire
in decline. While Washington can pretend otherwise, the weapons it chooses
to arrest its loss of competitiveness in the short run, sets in motion
a process of growing Latin America integration and increased trade with
Asian economies, which will deepen Latin America's economic independence
from US control.
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- Latin America's Center-Left and the US: Economic Ties
Trump Geopolitical Strategies
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- The consolidation of Latin America's center-left regimes
has had major consequences for US policy, namely a reconciliation between
arch-adversary Venezuela and Washington's foremost ally, Colombia. The
power of the market, in this case over $4 billion in Colombian exports
to Venezuela, has trumped the dubious advantage (if any) of being Washington's
military launching pad in Latin America.
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- The election of Lula's chosen candidate Dilma Rousseff
as President of Brazil, the likely re-election of Chavez in Venezuela and
Cristina Fernandez in Argentina, means that Washington has little leverage
to reverse the dynamic diversification and greater autonomy of Latin America's
leading economies. Moreover, as the political rapprochement between Venezuela
and Colombia, including the mutual extradition of Colombian guerrillas
and drug traffickers demonstrates, closer economic relations are accompanied
by warmer political relations, including a tacit pact in which Colombia
abjures from supporting the rightwing opposition in Venezuela, while the
latter does likewise toward the Left opposition to Santos. The larger meaning
of this obscuring of ideological boundaries is that Latin America's economic
integration advances at the expense of US prompted ideological divisions.
The net result will be the further exclusion and diminution of the US as
the dominant actor in the Southern Hemisphere. At the same time it should
be remembered that we are writing about greater capitalist integration,
which means the continued marginalization of class based trade unions and
social movements from strategic economic policy making positions.
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- In other words, the decline of US hegemony is not matched
by an increase in working class or popular power. As both decline, the
big winner is the rising business class, mostly, but not exclusively the
agro-mineral, financial and manufacturing elites linked to the Latin American
and Asian markets.
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- The prime destabilization danger now includes US currency
wars, the growing potentially volatile extractive exports and the high
levels of dependence on China's (and Asian) appetite for raw materials.
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- Imperial Wars, Free Trade and the Lumpen Legacy of 1990's
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- One of the paradoxes leading to the current eclipse of
US hegemony in Latin America is found in the very military and economic
successes in the 1990's. A broad swathe of North and Central American and
the Andean countries has witnessed the rise of what we call "lumpen
political-economic power" which has devastated the formal economy
and legitimate political authority. The concept of "lumpen" is
derived from 'lupus' or Latin for 'wolf' a metaphor for a 'predatory' actor,
or in our context, the rise of a political and economic class which preys
upon the public and private resources and institutions of an economy and
society. The lumpen power elites are based on the creation of a dual system
of legitimate and illegitimate political authority backed by the instruments
of coercion and violence. The emergence and formation of a powerful lumpen
class of predatory capitalists and their accompanying military entourage
is what we refer to in writing of the "process of lumpenization".
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- Today, "lumpenization" no longer merely entails
the overt violent organizers of illicit production, processing and distribution
of drugs but an entire array of 'offspring' economic activity (kidnapping,
immigrant smugglers, etc.) as well as large scale long term interaction
with 'legitimate' economic institutions and sectors, including banking,
real estate, agriculture, retail shopping centers, tourist complexes, to
name a few. Money laundering of illicit funds is an important growth sector,
especially providing important flows of capital to and from major US and
Latin American financial institutions. Today over three-quarters of Mexico's
territory and governance is contested by over 30,000 organized armed lumpen
led by centralized political-economic formations. Central America is a
major transit point, production center and terrain for bloody lumpen struggles
for power and revenue collection. Colombia is the major center for 'raw
material production'of drugs, marketing,and import and export center under
the leadership of powerful lumpen capitalists with long standing ties to
the governing political, military and economic elite. The lumpen economy
has supply chains further south in Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay and distribution
networks through Venezuela and Brazil as well as multi-billion dollar money
laundering and financial links in the Caribbean, the US, Uruguay and Argentina.
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- Several important issues to keep in mind in discussing
the lumpen political economy.These include: (1)the growth in size, scope
and significance over the past 20 years (2) the increasing economic importance
as the 'legitimate' economy goes into crises (both cause and consequence)
(3) the increasing public cynicism as previously thought of "legitimate"
economic and political actors (capitalists) engage in multi-billion dollar
financial swindles and are "bailed" out by political leaders.
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- The 'boom' in lumpen political-economic growth can be
dated to the end of the 1980's and early 1990's, coinciding with several
major historical events in the region. These include: the North Atlantic
Free Trade Agreement; the US-oligarchy defeat of the revolutionary movements
in Central America and the demobilization but not disarmament of the paramilitary
and armed militia; the total militarization and paramilitarization of Colombia
especially with the advent of Plan Colombia (2001) and the end of peace
negotiations; the deregulation of the US financial system in the mid 1990's
and the growth of a financial bubble economy.
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- What is striking about all the countries and regions
experiencing 'deep lumpenization', is the profound disarticulation of their
economies and smashing of their social fabric due to free trade agreements
with the US (Mexico and Central America) and the large scale US military
intervention during their civil wars (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras,
Colombia). The US politico-military intervention left millions without
work and worse, destroyed the possibility of reformist or revolutionary
political alliances coming to power and carrying out meaningful structural
changes. The restoration of US backed neo-liberal-militarist collaborator
regimes left the young unemployed peasants and workers with three choices:
(1)submit to degradation and poverty (2) emigrate to North America or Europe
(3) join one or another of the narco-trafficking organizations, as a risky
but lucrative route out of poverty. The timing of the rise and dynamic
growth of lumpen power coincides with the imposition of US free trade and
political victories in the aforementioned regions.From the early 1990's
forward lumpen power spreads across the region fueled by NAFTA decimating
the Mexican small producers and the US imposed Central American "peace
accords" which effectively destroyed the chances of socio-economic
change and dismantled but did not disarm the militias and paramilitary
gunmen.
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- Case Studies of Lumpen Dual Power: Mexico
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- Mexico, unlike the other major economies of Latin America
did not experience any popular upheavals or center-left electoral outcomes
during the late 1990's or early 2000. Unlike Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil,
Bolivia and Ecuador, in which new center-left regimes came to power imposing
regulatory controls on financial speculation, Mexico witnessed electoral
fraud and signed off on NAFTA, deepening its ties to Wall Street .As a
result it experienced a series of financial shocks, undermining its capacity
to launch a more diversified trading and investment model. Unlike Argentina
which launched state directed employment generating investment policies,
Mexico, under US tutelage, relied on emigration and overseas remittances
to compensate for the loss of millions of jobs in agriculture , small and
medium manufacturing activity and retail sales. While popular uprisings
and mobilization in Latin America led to the rise of center-left regimes
capable of securing greater independence in economic policy from the US
and the IMF, the Mexican elite literally stole elections in 1988 and 2006,
blocking the possibility of an alternative model. It successfully repressed
alternative peasant movements in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero unlike the
successes in Bolivia and Ecuador. While the center-left regimes captured
the economic surplus from the agro-mineral sectors and increased public
and private investment in production and social spending, Mexico witnessed
massive illegal and legal outflows of investments into speculative ventures
in the US: an outflow of over $55 billion between 2006-2010.
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- Regional migration within Latin America fueled by high
growth, led to rising income; overseas immigration depleted Mexico of skilled
and unskilled labor ; in some cases 'return migration'from the US of deported
gang members, with arms and drug networks fueled the growth of lumpen power
. With the severe recession, US immigration policy led to the closing of
the border, the massive deportation of Mexican immigrants and the decline
of the major source of foreign earnings: remittances. Pervasive and deep
corruption throughout the cupula of the Mexican political and economic
system, combined with the decline of the legitimate economy, the absence
of channels for popular redress and Washington's insistence that militarization
and not social investments was the solution to rising crime, led to the
huge influx of young recruits to the growing network of lumpen-capitalist
directed narco enterprises. With almost all US and Mexican financial institutions
and arms vendors as willing partners and an unlimited pool of young recruits
with a 'lean and hungry look', Mexico evolved into a fiercely contested
terrain between a half dozen rival lumpen organizations,and the Mexican
military, with nearly 30,000 deaths between 2006-2010.
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- Lumpenization: Central America
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- Drug gangs dominate the streets of the major cities and
countryside of all the countries which were militarized during the US backed
counter-revolutionary wars between the 1960's to early 1990's. US proxy
military dictators and their civilian clients, in El Salvador, Guatemala,
Nicaragua and Honduras decimated civil society and particularly the mass
popular organizations. In El Salvador over 75,000 people were killed and
hundreds of thousands were uprooted, driven across borders or into urban
shanty towns. In Guatemala over 200,000 mostly Mayan Indians were murdered
by the US trained "special forces" and over 450 villages were
obliterated in the course of a scorched earth policy. In Nicaragua, the
Somoza dictatorship and the subsequent US financed and trained counter-revolutionary
("contra") mercenary army killed and maimed close to 100,000
people and devastated the economy. In Honduras, the US embassy promoted
and financed in-country and cross-border counter-insurgency operations
which killed, uprooted and forced thousands of Honduran peasants into exile.
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- Highly militarized Central American societies, in which
US funded and armed death squads murdered with impunity, in which the economy
of small producers was shattered and 'normal' market activity was subject
to military assaults, led to the growth of illegal crops, drug and people
smuggling. With the so-called "peace agreements", the leaders
of the insurgents became "institutionalized"in elite electoral
politics,while large numbers of unemployed ex-guerillas and demobilized
death squad militia members found no place in the status quo. The neo-liberal
order imposed by the US client rulers with its free market ideology built
"fortress neighborhoods", hired an army of private "security"
guards, while the productive bases of small scale agriculture was destroyed.
Millions of Central Americans faced the familiar "routes out of poverty":
outmigration, forming or joining criminal gangs, or attempting to find
an economic niche in an unpromising environment. Outmigration for semi-educated
former members of armed bands led to their early entrée into armed
groups, deportation back to Central America, swelling the ranks of narco
traffickers in their "home country". Highly repressive immigration
policies implemented in the new millennium closed the escape valve for
most Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty. Former guerrilla fighters
and their families, abandoned by their former leaders embedded in electoral
parties, turned their military experience toward carving a new living,
as security guards for the rich, or as armed traffickers competing for
'market shares' with and against the discharged deathsquad militia members.
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- Between 2000-2010 the annual number of homicides exceeded
the number of deaths suffered during the worst period of the civil wars
of the 1980s. US imposed peace agreements and the neo-liberal order which
resulted, led to the total lumpenization of the economy and polity throughout
the region, the practice of electoral politics and even the election of
"center-left" politicos in El Salvador and Nicaragua notwithstanding.
Lumpenization was a direct consequence of the 'scorched earth' and 'mass
uprooting' counter-insurgency policies which were central to US re-establishing
dominance in the region. Economic and personal insecurity and social misery
were the price paid by imperial Washington to prevent a popular revolution.
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- Case Study: Colombia
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- The ties between the world centers of finance and the
most degenerate and blood curdling ruler in the Western Hemisphere were
most evident in the slavishly laudatory puff-pieces published in the Financial
Times and the Wall Street Journal in praise of President Alvaro Uribe,
while over 3 million Colombians were driven off their lands, several thousands
were murdered, over a thousand trade unionists, journalists and human rights
activists were killed. Two thirds of his Congressional backers were financed
by narco-traffickers .Incarcerated deathsquad leaders identified top military
officials as their primary supporters. All of Colombia's Presidents collaborated
closely with US military missions and all were financed and associated
with the multi-billion dollar drug cartels, even as the Pentagon claimed
to be engaged in a "war against drug trafficking".
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- Landlords and their financial and real estate backers
organized private militias, which terrorized, uprooted and killed hundreds
of thousands of peasants, others fled to the urban slums, or across the
border to neighboring countries. Others joined the guerrillas, and still
others were recruited by the deathsquads and military. With the advance
of the guerrilla armies and then President, Pastrana's opening to peace
negotiations, President Clinton launched a $5 billion dollar military scheme,
"Plan Colombia" to quadruple Colombia's air and ground forces
and deathsquads. With Washington's backing, Alvaro Uribe, a notorious narco-deathsquad
politico, so identified by US officials, took power and launched a massive
scorched earth policy, murdering and displacing millions of peasants and
urban slum dwellers in an effort to undermine the vast network of community
organizations sympathetic to the agrarian reform, public investment and
anti-military program of the guerrilla movements.
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- Mass terror and population flight emptied whole swathes
of the countryside; livelihoods were destroyed and landlords in alliance
with drug cartel bosses and Generals seized millions of acres of land.
For the financial and respectable mass media, the massification of terror
mattered not: the insurgents were 'contained', driven back, put on the
defensive. They trumpeted the killing of key guerrilla leaders: foreign
corporate property was secure. Rule by Uribe , the military and the narco-deathsquads
secured US power and influence and created an ideal "jumping off"
location for destabilizing the democratically elected Venezuelan President
Chavez. The latter was especially important by the mid 2000's when Washington's
internal assets attempted coup and lockout were resoundingly defeated in
2002-03. Having gained strategic territorial advantage over the guerrillas,
Washington in collaboration with Uribe moved to shift the balance of power
between the narco-deathsquads and the state: a disarmament and demobilization
and amnesty was proclaimed. The result was detailed revelations of the
deep structural links between narco-deathsquads and the Uribe police state
regime, up to and including family members and cabinet ministers. While
'nominally' the cartels are in retreat, in fact, they have become decentralized
.Equally important top politicos and military officials continue to collaborate
in the production, processing and shipping of billion dollar cocaine exports
with major US banks laundering illicit funds.
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- Rule of Lumpen-Capitalism in the Imperial System
-
- Drug trafficking has deep roots in the economies of North
and South America and has profound ramifications throughout their societies.
One cannot understand the tremendous growth of US banking and financial
centers if not for the $25 to $50 billion dollar yearly income and transfers
from laundering drug funds and double that amount from illegal money transfers
by business and political leaders directly and indirectly benefiting from
the drug trade. Lumpen capitalists, their collaborators, facilitators paramilitary
mercenaries and military partners play a major political role in sustaining
the imperial system. Washington's major influence and principle area of
dominance resides in those countries where lumpen power and deathsquad
operations are most prevalent, namely Central America, Colombia and Mexico.Both
phenomena are derived from US designed 'scorched earth' counter-insurgency
strategies that prevented alterations, modifications or reforms of the
neo-liberal order and blocked the successful emergence of social movements
and center-left regimes as took place in most of Latin America.
-
- The contemporary imperial system relies on lumpen capitalists,
their economic networks and military formations in practically every major
area of conflict even as these collaborators are constant areas of friction.
-
- As in Afghanistan and Iraq today and in Central America
in the recent past and in Latin America under the military dictatorships,
the US relies on drug traffickers, military gangsters engaged in extortion,
kidnapping, property seizures and the pillage of public property and treasury
to destroy popular movements, to divide and conquer communities and above
all to terrorize the general public and civil society.
-
- The singular growth of the financial sector especially
in the US is in part the result of its being the massive recipient of large
scale sustained flows of 'plunder capital' by lumpen rulers and their economic
partners via 'political crony' privatizations, foreign loans which never
entered the local economy and other such forms of pillage characteristic
of 'predator' classes.
-
- The deep structural affinities between Wall Street speculators
and Latin lumpen-capitalists provided the backdrop for the ascendancy of
a new class of lumpen financiers in the imperial financial centers: bogus
bonds, mortgage swindles, falsified assessments by stock ratings agencies,
trillion dollar raids on state treasuries define the heart and soul of
contemporary imperialism.
-
- If it is true that the promotion and financing of lumpen
warlord capitalists was an essential defense mechanism at the periphery
of the empire to contain popular insurgencies, it is also true that the
growth of lumpen capitalism severely weakened the very core of the imperial
economy, namely its productive and export sectors leading to uncontrollable
deficits, out of control speculative bubbles and massive and sustained
reductions of living standards and incomes.
-
- Lumpen classes were both the agencies for consolidating
the empire and its undoing: tactical gains at the periphery led to strategic
losses in the imperial centers. Imperial policymakers resort to terrorist
formations resulted from their incapacity to resolve internal contradictions
within a legal, electoral framework. The high domestic political cost of
long term warfare led inevitably to the recruitment of mercenary lumpen
armies who extracted an economic tribute for questionable loyalty. Lacking
any popular constituency, mercenary armies rely on terror to secure circumstantial
submission. Having secured control, local warlords preside over the rapid
and massive growth of drugs and other lumpen economic practices.
-
- The alliance of empire and lumpen capitalists against
modern secular and traditional insurgencies, brings together high technology
weaponry and primitive clan based religious-ethnic racists in Iraq and
Afghanistan and deracinated psychopaths in the case of Colombia.,Mexico
and Central America.
- For Washington military and political supremacy and territorial
conquests take priority over economic gain. In the case of Colombia the
scorched earth policy undermined production and lucrative trade with Venezuela.
Imperial ascendancy had similar consequences in Asia, the Middle East and
Central America.
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- When Lumpen Power becomes a Problem for the Imperial
State
-
- Lumpen capitalism develops a dynamic of its own, independent
of its role as an imperial instrument for destroying popular insurgency.
It challenges imperial collaborator regimes. It displaces, threatens, or
cajoles foreign and domestic capitalists. In the extreme, it establishes
a private army, seizes territorial control, recruits and trains networks
of intelligence agents within the armed forces and police, undermining
imperial influence. In a word lumpen organized military capitalism threatens
the security of imperial hegemony: newly emerging predators threaten the
established collaborators. The imperial attempts to use and dispose of
lumpen counterinsurgency forces has failed; the demobilized paras become
the professional gunmen of a "third force" neither imperial
nor insurgent. The decimation of the reformist center-left option, which
took hold in Latin America, precludes a socio-economic alternative capable
of integrating the young combative unemployed, stimulating the productive
economy, diversifying markets and escaping the pitfalls of a US centered
neo-liberal order.
-
- The divergence of priorities and strategies between Latin
America's center-left and Washington has as much to do with economic and
class interests as it has with ideological agendas. For the US security
means defeating the rising power of lumpen military economic formations
in their remaining 'power bases'. For Latin America, security concerns
are secondary to diversifying and boosting market shares within Latin America
and overseas. Lumpen power is currently under the political control of
domestic rulers in Latin America; it is out of control in US clients. The
US solution is military; the Latin approach is greater growth; social expenditures
and police repression especially in Brazil. The Latin solution has greater
attraction, evident in Colombia's break with the US military base and encirclement
strategy toward Venezuela. Colombia's new President opted for $8 billion
dollar trade deals with Venezuela's Chavez over and against costly million
dollar military base agreements with the US.
-
- Clearly the US economic decline in Latin America as a
direct result of its reliance on military and lumpen power, is in full
force. The driving force of accelerated decline is not popular insurgency
but the attraction and lucrative opportunities of the economic marketplace
within Latin America and beyond for the local ruling classes. Insofar as
militarism defines the policies and strategies of the US Empire there is
no remedy for the challenges of lumpen power in its 'backyard'. And Washington
has nothing on offer to recapture a dominant presence in Latin America.
The world market is defeating the empire. Latin America's twenty-first
century capitalists are leading the way to further decline in imperial
power.
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