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Spurred by curiosity, after I read that some vicious attack on me in the list "latest 100" archives quoted someone I respect, I dug into the Pipermail archives to find this by Anthony Boynton: "Colombia is a country which really did develop its own capitalist class, which was not simply a comprador class. The most important sector of that capitalist class was based in the "eje cafetero" - the coffee zone of the country. Profits from exporting coffee, mostly to the USA, were used to build the country's airlines, textile industry and food processing industry. They were also important int he electrification of the country. The big Colombian bourgeoisie did something more or less like Nestor proposes, in the 1950's. They set up a military dictatorship led by General Rojas Pinilla which implemented import substitution economic policies much like those developed earlier in Argentina. Rojas Pinilla's nationalism failed to win over the working class however, because his government, after promising to make peace and end la violencia, ended up joining the massacre of the working class, student and peasant organizations of the day. The bourgeoisie told Pinilla he was no longer needed, and established something called the National Front, which continued Pinillas' economic policies, while instituting a kind of "power-sharing" system between the Conservative Party and Liberal Party (which had been killing each other during la violencia). Pinillas's supporters organized a political party called ANAPO which ran candidates int he elections against the two parties of hte power sharing system - and WON. So the elections were stolen and business continued as usual. Except that a lot of the young militants of ANAPO decided that elections in Colombia obviously did not work, so the only possible way to really change the country was to get some guns. They formed M-19 and joined the ranks of the guerrillas (whom their president had been killing not long before.) After killing a lot more guerrillas, M-19 , ELN, FARC and others, the bourgeoisie moved to Miami, sold their companies to multinationls, and joined the American bourgeoisie as compradors". I don´t understand in what sense does the above imply that almost direct rule by US is better (or equal) to rule by a national bourgeois regime, which if I don´t remember wrongly was my hypothetic comment on Colombia. I would add some comments, however. 1) An oligarchy is not of necessity a comprador class. Oligarchies include, and many times include in an hegemonic position, some comprador class. But what defines the oligarchy as such is not the compradors. Thus, though the Colombian upper classes are not comprador classes, they still may not deserve (please see I wrote "may", thank you) the name of bourgeoisie. 2) There is a generalized Liberal mistake when dealing with Peronism, which consists in explaining it in terms of "import substitution". Nothing furthest from reality. What defined Peronism were NOT the "import substitution policies". These had been adopted already in the early 1930s, under the oligarchic dictatorship of General Agustín P. Justo, and were an oligarchic answer to the Global Depression. An unwanted child in a beleaguered agroexport "factoría" under extreme pressure. The first serious impulse towards industrialization of this kind in Argentina was led by imperialist companies, while a bourgeoisie appeared (though here not from the landed oligarchy, but from the middle classes and even some individuals of working class origin) in the midst of the shivering warmth of Depression. Peronism, in fact, was the dialectical superation of that process of import substitution which kept the social structure of the country crystallized in what it had been since 1910. Peronism´s bid was to change that social structure towards that of a modern, capitalist, self-centered nation. And, also, to unify Latin America against imperialism and for its own sake. It was the last child of the process of import substitution, the Zeus that was to murder Chronos. It came to life exactly when it was necessary to decide whether this process should proceed in agreement with imperialism or against it (that is, if there was to be a national-democratic dialectical superation of the process or not). Because the full, programmed, pro-imperialist import substitution scheme had already been devised. In 1940, one of the wisest and most perverse politicians of the oligarchy, Dr. Pinedo (BTW, he was of "socialist" origin, like Dr. Prebisch and the Alemann family), elaborated a plan to put Arg industry to the service of the global expansion of US imperialism. This Pinedo plan was the first example of what would later on be the right-wing developmentalist vision, both in Argentina and -with great success- in Brazil. On this particular issue, Peronism was the objective answer of a portion of the state, the Argentinean lower classes and a tiny speck of the Arg bourgeoisie to such plan. What defined Peronism was that the import substitution process, spontaneous and thus reproductive of the former colonial condition, was to be used by the government (by way of the state) according to plan, in order to generate a self-centered economy. This is important to measure whether it was a (historically considered) national movement or simply a bourgeois accomodation with imperialism. And this is precisely what gets blurred when one considers it just another form of import substitution or, simply, import substitution (period). I don´t know enough Colombian history to speak too long on Rojas Pinilla. But I would like to mark some points in Anthony´s rendition that I feel somewhat "noisy". First and foremost, yes, I know that some kind of industrialization in Colombia is rooted in old coffee capital. Same thing happened in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This, probably, has to do with the technical conditions of coffee planting, which require more work, even from the oligarch, than the almost "naturally cybernetic" meat production in the Pampa region (I am speaking about the early decades of the 20th Century), and thus less of a rentier ethics. But I don´t see in Anthony´s comment any reference to two important issues a) Gaitán b) why the "bourgeois" parties (Liberal and Conservative) did not accept the victory of ANAPO, and, moreover, why didn´t they incorporate ANAPO members to their own ranks What Anthony calls "bourgeois" parties are, in my own prima facie and avowedly quite uninformed reading, oligarchic parties, which is NOT the same thing. And the different (sometimes brutal) ways in which the tension between the oligarchic regime and the potential consequences of the development of a strong manufacturing sector expresses itself are the red link that runs from Gaitán to the ANAPO people in the 70s. I don´t support either bourgeoisies or oligarchies, however. What I do is to _make a difference_ between them. And what remains of Anthony´s contribution on the behavior of the grand bourgeoisie in Colombia is no surprise to me, since something very similar has taken place in all of Latin America, and of course in Argentina. Again, I can´t understand in which possible manner Anthony´s comments can be used to undermine my simple position that siding with imperialism against a national bourgeois administration in Latin America betrays the interest of the working class. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
