Working In These Times
‘Dancing with Dynamite’: The Future of Latin America’s Leftist Movements
(Book cover courtesy of Benjamin Dangl)
What happens after you win?
That is, as fearless grassroots social movements have brought leftist, pro-worker parties to power in one after another Latin American country during the past decade, how do these movements maintain true democracy and commitment to the rights of the marginalized once faced with the challenge of a neoliberal global economy?
After the wave of worker factory takeovers following its economic collapse a decade ago, such questions played out on smaller scales in Argentina. Taking cooperative control of the factories was only the first step; the workers had to actually run them competitively in a capitalist economy. Similarly, after movements of union members, indigenous activists and other previously marginalized people bring leaders like Bolivian Evo Morales and Venezuelan Hugo Chavez to power, how do they make sure their struggles aren't declawed and co-opted by the new government?
In his captivating book Dancing with Dynamite, to be released in September or October, Ben Dangl explores the complicated choreography between unfettered popular struggle and the state institutions that are necessary to a functioning civil society—yet by nature are forces of moderation, compromise and cooperation.
Using a very literal metaphor, Dangl invokes Bolivian miners to describe the “dynamite” of uncompromising popular struggle. The miners and displaced former miners who played a major role in bringing current president Evo Morales to power are part of a movement forged through intense repression and violence, followed by perhaps even more insidious economic suffocation.
In 1964, the government sent in troops against miners in Oruro who were protesting the government’s bloody crackdown on labor rights activists. A miner named Domingo spoke of the violence that began when the soldiers attacked his community. “They even entered into houses of families and took people out, forcing people into the streets in their underwear and killing them. We miners in Itos tried to defend the mines. We put up a fierce resistance with dynamite...” The soldiers won the battle, and Domingo has suffered from insomnia ever since.
Bolivian mines were privatized and closed in the 1980s in keeping with larger neoliberal restructuring of the continent, breaking the “backbone of the country’s radical workers’ unions” as Dangl describes it.
In Argentina, Dangl describes how neoliberalism’s strangulation of the labor movement gave rise to the processes that would ultimately topple the status quo and a series of presidents within months:
Neoliberalism undermined the base from which many workers were organized. There were fewer factories employing people due to deindustrialization. Closed factories meant losses for unions which had taken decades to form. Many of the jobless had been previously employed in public energy and service industries privatized by (former president Carlos) Menem.
Thus was born the piquetero movement which drew from waves of unemployed workers. Piqueteros—the name is based on the word piquete (picket or road blockade)—hit the streets together to demand work and social assistance. This movement set itself apart from the dominant Peronist labor movements and federations in which workers called for better conditions and salaries, partly because the older movements had been repressed extensively under the dictatorship, and because economics were changing the country, forcing social movements to change with it.
With previous movements weakened by neoliberalism, the piqueteros rose up from the wreckage of the 1990s as a formidable force in 2001.
In Argentina's economic crisis of 2001, formerly middle-class people suddenly found themselves unemployed and desperate, becoming instantly politicized with a sharp new understanding of the class system.
Dangl describes this dynamic among the workers who took over a quarry in early 2003. The company had told workers to take a sudden unscheduled, unpaid vacation over the holidays, and when they returned they saw their employer had left town without paying them severance or other wages. The workers armed themselves with shotguns for self-defense and proceeded to occupy the quarry. It became a grueling exercise in survival as they ended up using the guns to hunt rabbits and fished from the lagoon. By that spring a judge awarded the workers legal control of the quarry, and it’s run as a cooperative business to this day.
But Dangl notes that while countless such worker-run businesses are still flourishing in Argentina, the forces of political intransigency meant the leftist shift after the economic crisis – including the election of president Nestor Kirchner and later his wife Cristina – has not born a fundamental change in the neoliberal policies or class structure of the country. He explains:
First of all, Kirchner effectively demobilized and bought off the middle class…After applying these divisive, demobilizing, and repressive tactics, the government used the simple strategy of patience and attrition while public activism died down.
A similar thing happened in Uruguay, where Tabare Vazquez of the left Frente Amplio party was elected in 2005. As Dangl describes it, he proceeded on a
…reformist route, sprinkling his own neoliberal projects with social programs that didn’t address the root causes of poverty and exclusion. And yet, given the record of past governments, these small nods to social change were enough to placate many voters.
Current Uruguayan president Jorge “Pepe” Mujica, also a beloved man of the people and former leftist guerilla, summed up the typical transformation from radical to reformer himself, as Dangl quotes, telling business leaders he is a “wild cat that has turned into a vegetarian.”
The examples Dangl puts forth of popular politicians and movement leaders essentially selling out and going soft time after time is a somewhat depressing drumbeat. But he sees the rise of leftist, popular governments in Latin America overall as a promising and unstoppable trend wherein the path may not be straight but will ultimately lead to greater democracy and human dignity.
In this dance, the urgency of survival trumps the law, people acting based on the rights they were born with makes the state irrelevant, and anything is possible when the community moves.
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Comments
Dear Kari:
This was an excellent piece, and paradoxically, reassuring to people like me who have watched union density in the US continually shrink and the movement get increasingly marginalized despite the best efforts of so many people. Working people WILL find new forms of struggle, and new ways of asserting the democratic will of the majority.
As in Latin America, de-industrialization and the break-up of the surrounding communities has destroyed the sense of social solidarity essential for a collective response to the “creative destruction” of capitalism that creates new forms of financially-based wealth and new levels of mass impoverishment.
At the same time, polling data marshalled by Noam Chomsky (especially in Failed States) and author Paul Street demonstrate that most Americans actually hold a “social-democratic” consciousness (eg., support for single-payer healthcare, opposition to “free trade,” income support for the poor (as long as they are not stigmatized by the “welfare” label).
The contradiction between economic and social policies that are popular with relatively narrow elites ( sometimes enlarged with what Thomas Frank calls “election-season” moral issues (eg., Fox’s hypocritically-contrived furor over the Islamic center in lower Manhattan) and genuine majority sentiment must at some point begin to explode as Americans find new forms of social struggle.
The Latin Americans have found such new forms as in “recovered” factories in Argentina and unified a variety of new social movements to win democratic elections in nation after nation.
Still trapped within a “neoliberal” [we need to develop a better, less confusing term that makes sense to Americans] corporate-dominated world, there are limits to what progressive governments in Latin America can do. Moreover, the economic enforcement mechanisms are much more powerful than during Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist experiment in Chile and insurgent new administrations often get tamed.
Yet there are now so many leftist governments in Latin America that the US can no longer isolate its fury against a single government like Allende’s. Ultimately, it is heartening to all of humanity—especially those of us in the de-mobilized, demoralized social movements in the US—to see powerful new forms of progressive democracy flower in Latin America.
Again, terrific piece, Kari! Best, Roger Bybee
My main critique is, when have US leftists elected a leftist to power? I appreciate the critique but how can you maje thesw comments when you have NEVER achieved a fraction of what LA have achieved. Mind you despite your imperialist gov intervention. US leftists are still imbued with imperialist feelings of supremacy.
Dear companero rodrigym:
I’m afraid we have a misunderstanding, and I’m not quite sure of its source.
First, of course the US has never elected a leftist president, and I thought my support and enthusiasm for Latin America’s political advances—electing a number of progressive presidents all serving at the same time—were quite evident.
Second, I am in no position to offer a thoughtful critique of these governments, and merely pointed out the powerful structural limits that they face imposed by US domination.
Third, I have always felt that North Americans had much to learn from the Latin American movements for global justice. For example, Henry Kissinger correctly worried in the early 1970’s about the “bad example” that Chile would set for the West, particularly in Italy where the Left was strongest and most deeply rooted in the working class. Allende’s Chile was built upon a very broad popular alliance that took strenuous effort to build, and Kissinger feared a similar Socialist-Communist alliance in Italy.
Moreover, the Allende government’s resolute commitment to democracy showed the harmony between democratizing Chile’s institutions with the democratization of the economy.
But unfortunately, despite widespread support for progressive policies in nations like the US, the main progressive institutions, especially unions, have been severely weakened both by corporate globalization and systematic union-busting. However, Latin America shows that working people can adapt to the most difficult of circumstances and invent new strategies and organizational forms to challenge corporate power.
Best, Roger Bybee
Dear Roger:
I appreciate your comments and while I think that Kari’s article was quite precise, I think that it has very high expectations about what a progressive democratic government (and as you correctly point out with a weakened working class) can achieve. To critique Pepe Mujica because he is realistic seems a bit unfair. Uruguay is not Cuba and neither is Venezuela. Cuba, ironically, dismantled its ruling class and kept US intervention at bay because of the USSR, no leftist government has those “conditions.” La Lucha continua!
Dear rodrigym::
I’m glad we’re having this exchange, because we’re clearly understanding each other more clearly.
Let me lay out a couple observations:
1) Yes, the USSR provided a protective umbrella (although, as Noam Chomsky has documented, Cuba became an incessant target of US-directed and/or funded terror attacks on a massive scale)and crucial source of economic support for Cuba. This provided the space for Cuba to pursue its own direction until the Yeltsin years. But the enormously unpopular (among US citizens as well as Cubans) blockade has severely limited Cuba’s economic achievements and fostered authoritarian strains in the Cuban system.
2) The relatively sudden emergence of left-populist governments reflects an unstoppable wave of popular defiance to the system of investor-rights globalization.
The US empire has been grudgingly forced to yield ground to democracy, although it continues to crush it when possible (as in the removal of Aristide in Haiti and support for the Honduran military coup.)
3) While forced to acknowledge the outcomes of democratic elections—particularly when the Latin left governments stand in unity—US banks and corporations and their counterparts in Europe, Japan, and China—enforce an economic order much more disciplined than in the post-World War II to 1973 era. Today, the tolerance for policies to nurture domestic industries, maintain a high level of public services, and pursue other forms of economic independence seems more limited.
As progressive Latin governments attempt to stretch these boundaries—aided by their collective strength—we may glimpse new alternatives to a global economic system that renders humanity its servant rather than existing to fulfill human needs. Best, Roger
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