The Nation Magazine Digital Edition (www.thenation.com) has an article by
Mark Cooper on Chile today that includes the following passage:
"Chile hardly holds the patent on a pullback from politics, a reflex now
rampant from Peoria to Poland. But few countries in recent decades have
traveled quite the distance backward that Chile has. In Eastern Europe the
economic systems were stood on their heads, but decades of Stalinist
cynicism and duplicity served to grease the way for the savageries of
frontier capitalism. Chile was different, though. In 1970, on the eve of
Allende's election, one U.S. researcher found Chilean teenagers--along with
their Israeli and Cuban counterparts--to be among the three least
alienated, most optimistic groups of youth in the world. But years of
military dictatorship and a quarter-century now of the most orthodox
application of sink-or-swim social policy has imposed a sort of collective
neurosis on Chileans--it has driven them crazy, driven them to market.
"Chilean millworkers now assiduously follow daily stock quotes to make sure
their private pensions will be there when they retire. When their children
leave the school gates, they plop Velcro-backed insignias from elite
academies onto their uniforms, lest the other subway riders guess they go
to more downscale institutions. Bookstores that once brimmed with political
classics now stock huge piles of translations of Anthony Robbins and other
quick-road-to-success gurus. National "educational" TV features training
films in entrepreneurship and good customer relations. Prime-time
infomercials beam dubbed-over blue-eyed gringos blissfully hawking
vegetable Smart Choppers and Sure Fire bass lures to the rural and fishing
villages of the Chilean south, where horses are still sometimes a preferred
means of transportation.
"A recent police checkpoint in the posh Vitacura neighborhood found that a
high percentage of drivers ticketed for using their cell phones while in
motion were using toy--even wooden--replicas. Other middle-class motorists,
pretending they have air-conditioning, bake with their windows closed.
Workers at the ritzy Jumbo supermarket complain that on Saturday mornings,
the dressed-to-kill clientele fill their carts high with delicacies, parade
them in front of the Joneses and then discreetly abandon them before having
to pay. In the tony La Dehesa neighborhood, Florida palm trees are the
landscaping fashion à la mode and black butlers are all the rage. But they
better be stocky six-foot Dominicans, as the first wave of imported help,
from Peru, turned out to be unfashionably short-statured. In the rickety
shantytowns around Santiago, readily available Diners Club cards are used
to charge potatoes and cabbage, while Air Jordans and WonderBras are bought
on a twelve-month installment plan."
Cooper points out that the very first experiment in Reagan-Thatcher
economics was Chile in 1973. Although the article focuses on Chile itself,
there certainly can be an argument that the Pinochet coup was the opening
salvo against both Social Democracy and Soviet style Communism, two of the
pillars of Allende's Popular Front government.
The architects of the economic "reforms" in Chile were the "Chicago Boys",
including Milton Friedman who personally directed the changes. His disciple
Jeffrey Sachs has adapted this austerity program for Bolivia, the USSR,
Poland, etc.
Reagan and Thatcher implemented the program also. It persists through the
Clinton administration, which like the new regime in Chile, or Blair's
government in Great Britain, represents Pinochet with a smiling face.
As Maggie Coleman pointed out yesterday, the key to the "success" of
capitalism in the USA is a transfer of wealth. In order for this to happen,
you have to break the workers movement. In Chile, this was accomplished
with guns. In the USA, it was accomplished because the labor movement did
not know how to fight. The airline controllers strike was the first in a
series of punishing defeats. These defeats made it possible to transfer
wealth from the working class to the ruling class.
Cooper quantifies the income redistribution that took place in Chile:
"The New York Times recently celebrated this state of affairs by crediting
Pinochet with a 'coup that began Chile's transformation from a backwater
banana republic to the economic star of Latin America,' and the Clinton
Administration wants Chile to be the next member of NAFTA. Putting aside
the fact that the pre-Pinochet "banana republic" produced a bumper crop of
world-renowned artists, scientists and other intellectuals, including the
winners of two Nobel Prizes in Literature, the Times also got it wrong on
the economy. The 7 percent annual growth since 1986 cited by enthusiastic
supporters of the Chilean economy obscures several other less attractive
figures: There was no growth between 1973 and 1986; real salaries have
declined 10 percent since 1986; and salaries are still 18 percent lower
than they were during the Allende period. One-fourth of the country lives
in absolute poverty, and a third of the nation earns less than $30 a week.
"A recent World Bank study of sixty-five countries ranked Chile as the
seventh-worst in terms of most unequal income distribution, tied with Kenya
and Zimbabwe. To get a notion of just how skewed this is, consider the
following: In the United States--hardly a paragon of wealth sharing--60
percent of national income goes to workers and 40 percent to capital; in
Chile, 40 percent goes to workers and 60 percent to capital. The top 10
percent of the Chilean population earns almost half the wealth. 'The 100
richest people in Chile earn more than the state spends on all social
services,' says Christian Democratic Senator Jorge Lavandero."
The same thing, of course, has taken place in the USA. This is a big
victory for capitalism since it has not only restructured the economy, it
has also restructured people's thought. The rise of "market socialism" is
one such token of the victory of the bourgeoisie in the ideological arena,
so is "postmodernism."
What it will take to reverse these trends is a strengthening of the labor
movement, which is already beginning. Alex Cockburn's column in the same
digital edition of the Nation reports on the struggle of Oakland
longshoremen who had been fined for picketing in support of their Liverpool
brothers and sisters. The bosses are trying to bankrupt the union through
the courts.
Cockburn's column concludes with some words that relate not only to the
task of defending the union movement, but a more general call to action
against the ruling class:
"A few years back, amid the rubble of Communism and the hosannas of the
capitalist choirs, I quoted here from a wonderful letter by Dr. Nguyen Khac
Vien, one of the most distinguished figures in the Vietnamese revolutionary
movement. Dr. Vien was outlining what he thought the current world
political situation demanded: 'If a world front of capital is being
founded, its counterweight, the democratic popular front on a world scale,
is also in formation.... Freedom of the press, of association, of petition,
of demonstration, to strike and of election are the forms of struggle of
our epoch.' Dr. Vien had it right, and as was noted often enough by
speakers in Oakland, the ability of workers to withhold their labor, to set
up and honor picket lines, and to support one another worldwide is labor's
bottom line. This Mr. Miniace well knows. Send money for the defense
against these lawsuits to The Liverpool Dockers' Victory Committee, Box
2574, Oakland, CA 94614. For more information, call (510) 594-4303."
Louis Proyect
