Latin America
Is “lactose” really a missing ingredient in Latin America’s leftist movement?
Are we witnessing the end of the cycle for
Latin America’s progressive governments
or, perhaps better said, their demise?
Might it be that, anti-imperialist rhetoric aside,
relying on extracting and exporting raw materials
and fully inserting their countries into the global market
has distanced them from the leftist movements
that gave them birth?
Eduardo Gudynas
In recent months South America’s political debates have undergone a substantive shift. While leftists who aren’t working in Latin America’s progressive governments are honing their critiques of those governments, clearly distinguishing their criticisms from those of conservative Presidents, Vice Presidents, ministers and even well-known intellectual supporters, the progressive governments themselves have noticeably toughened their opposition to these leftists.
Ecuador’s situation is best known. Those in positions of power have criticized, ridiculed and harassed the leftists with increasing intensity and are now reshaping and justifying their perspective with a new discourse. One of the clearest examples was heard in Quito in September in the speech by Bolivia’s Vice President Alvaro García Linea, given in the Second Latin American Progressive Encounter. In that meeting, García Linera requested permission to criticize what he called the “lactose-free Left,” a term approximately equivalent to “infantile Left,” a label used in Ecuador.
In a word, he described the “lactose-free” leftists as follows: they are decaf, perfumed sissies who cringe at the “smell” of common folks or the sound of “fighting language” and are discomfited by the sounds of the street or the barricades. They are radical or pseudo-radical pseudo-leftists, abstract, fearful, ineffective and indecisive schemers. At best they are observers from a balcony or a café or during a break in their morning fitness sessions, when they crank out their analysis while watching television; and the only revolution they are familiar with is the one featured in a documentary aired on the History Channel. They have good salaries, but “no concrete measures” or “practical proposals rooted in social movements.”
Is this metabolic metaphor valid?
By this evaluation, the lactose-free Left must be a frightening thing. Those few sentences contain at least 21 disparagements, almost all of them in the form of adjectives, with virtually no arguments. Such an evaluation can only produce a semi-serious, semi-joking reaction.
Let’s begin by analyzing the word “lactose” as a referent to the Left. Lactose is a sugar, produced by the mixture of glucose and galactose, present in mothers’ milk. It has become well known due to the intolerance some people exhibit to the molecule, which has led to the sale of lactose-free milk.
When García Linera rails against those who are lactose free he is introducing into politics a biochemical metaphor that allows for the identification of two positions: a very good one, supposedly the one defended by the progressive governments, that would contain a lot of lactose, and another, that of the supposedly marginal claims of a Left that operates outside of government and is lactose free, a “diet” version.
Whether by this route or another, they want to drag us into a discussion in which lactose would replace other classical elements of political debates in the broad field of leftist ideology. It goes without saying that the pathway of metabolic analysis doesn’t make much sense, but even if we accepted it, we could argue that the current situation is precisely the opposite. The progressives are the ones who have been left without energy, the ones who are lactose free, while in the realm of plural and independent leftists, energies and the strength to propose and seek changes still persist.
Trapped in extractivist development
In order to establish that the lack of sugar resides elsewhere, it needs to be specified that the democratic, plural and independent Left has focused its questioning on the progressives’ development strategies and their ways of understanding politics.
Today’s South American progressive movements have been trapped in development models that, beyond their changes, many of which are admittedly positive, are still based on “extractivism,” i.e. the export of raw materials, the exploitation of natural resources in the primary sectors, and are thus suffering a broad range of impacts, as they maintain their dependence on globalization. This has forced them to readjust their political practices so they can maintain their well-known social cushioning measures on the one hand and placate, slow down or impede social mobilization to prevent it putting such extractivism at risk on the other. Such a posture is unquestionably not neoliberal but it has given rise to political regimes that are substantially different from the leftist ideals that created them.
The entire machinery of the progressive stance is viable only so long as the State succeeds in accumulating adequate surpluses. Governments need to support themselves financially, which is no trifling matter because public employment has multiplied in almost all the progressive countries, and they simultaneously need to maintain their social compensation programs.
The primary engine to achieve this balance has been extractive activity: mining, hydrocarbon production or monocrops. In place of seeking new options, the progressives have opted to plunge even more deeply into their extractivist dependence, no matter how much evidence has been gathered to show its grave social and environmental impacts, its hidden economic costs and its dependence on international buyers and investors. As a consequence, they lower environmental and social controls, offer sizable subsidies and secret contracts, or repress civil protests against extractivism.
What are the leftists really saying?
The progressives maintain that it would be unwise to fall into the “trap” of those who are lactose free, who would counsel dropping “in six months something that has gone on for centuries,” as García Linera affirms. In my opinion, this kind of affirmation grows out of a faulty reading of reality.
I know no one who proposes abandoning extraction in a matter of months, or even years. What needs to be understood is that in place of insisting on this type of development, changes must be contemplated and gradually tested so they can be proposed as an alternative way out. No one is insisting, for example, that all mining should be prohibited but rather that it should be framed within real controls and that only those resources truly needed in the given region be appropriated. Based on the metabolic metaphor, the Left has a lot of lactose because it is accepting the risk and challenge of imagining another kind of economy to move beyond the dependence on globalization.
The progressives also contend that they could abandon extractivism only in the event of a planetary change, a global rejection of capitalism or a revolution that breaks with present-day development in all countries more or less simultaneously. Such thinking is simple-minded, the equivalent of waiting for the Germans or the Chinese, for example, to be suddenly and simultaneously enlightened to change their life styles, their consumerist appetites and their understanding of economics and politics.
We Latin Americans can’t continue waiting for all of this; we must begin to change. That’s what the Left says. For example, selective delinking from globalization should be initiated, in parallel with a strengthening of regional production networks on the continent.
There are alternatives, movements
discussions and experiments
Many progressives accuse those on the left of lacking alternative proposals or living in a world of dreams removed from reality. “They don’t have any concrete measures, nor a single practical proposal rooted in the social movement,” contends García Linera.
What is happening is very different. Not only in the Andean countries but also in the Southern Cone, all kinds of alternatives to extractivism and dependence based on the sale of raw materials have been put forward and are being discussed. An example: it was Ecuador’s own civil society that innovated by proposing a moratorium on petroleum extraction in the Amazon Basin. Ultimately, this initiative did not succeed, but today the scientists who are studying climate change give credence to this proposal when they argue that approximately 80% of the hydrocarbons should remain underground in order to safeguard life on the planet.
There are more examples, for example economists who warn of the de-industrialization generated by the commodities export boom and propose alternate forms of industrialization, especially those related to the agricultural economy. Others have explored alternate tax and tariff systems. There are networks of groups and organizations, meetings, seminars, books and articles devoted to alternatives to extrac¬tivism, including a specific reflection on transitional routes out of raw materials exportation.
This quick list demonstrates the existence of multiple discussions and essays, both conceptual and practical. One may agree with their contents or not, but it cannot be said that they don’t exist. There are arenas brimming with energy and innovation. The progressives, on the other hand, haven’t generated any alternative development ideas. It’s hard to tell if they don’t understand this discussion of alternatives or have no other recourse than to ignore it and claim it isn’t happening, since if they accepted the truth they would be forced to begin examining their own practices.
Where are the contradictions?
All this insistence on strange metabolic metaphors misrepresents the steady disappearance of a fundamental element of political analysis: contradictions. The study of contradictions was critical to previous leftwing theory, from simple mention of the discrepancies between what governments say and what they really do to the complex analyses of interpretations offered by unions and grassroots-based NGOs. Present-day South American progressivism, however, doesn’t speak of contradictions but instead offers flowery metaphors and adjectives. From that vantage point, the problems appear to be only in the eyes of the infantile and lactose-free group or in those of the conservatives and the Right.
Despite these attempts to interpret reality, an understanding of contradiction is essential. It would allow us to better understand the phenomenal tensions that exist between the progressive notions of the organization of production and their inevitable commercial dependence as providers of raw materials, which presuppose structures and dynamics common to predetermined varieties of capitalism.
The fact is that anti-imperialist rhetoric aside, if Latin America’s economic insertion occurs within the global economy, those involved have to accept and behave according to its rules of operation. That means becoming ever more interested in increasing profitability, avoiding taxes, externalizing environmental impacts, delaying union demands and paying commissions.
That scenario presents us with multiple contradictions that need to be examined in order to avoid traps, the generation of inequalities in other ways or the destruction of nature. Let’s check to see, for example, whether it’s true that a state company, to be successful, can avoid being as contaminating, pitiless, exploitative and corrupt as a transnational corporation. The analysis of contradictions will serve to determine if the domination of some individuals over others and over Nature itself has been halted or is continuing forward.
There’s a lot of energy in the
independent leftist movement
Another frequent objection is the claim that those on the left are socially marginalized or small in numbers. García Linera contends that “inoperative pseudo radicalism in the abstract” doesn’t work, doesn’t lead to “any” mobilization or even “reinforce collective action.”
The reality is quite the opposite. Independent democratic and plural leftists stand shoulder to shoulder with those communities suffering serious social and environmental problems in various countries. Their interaction allows them to exert explicit impacts that governments and companies want to hide, and to defend basic civil rights while serving as a barrier to corruption. Not only that, but in those communities we hear accounts of progressives in public service who comfortably remain in their offices and know little or nothing about what’s going on now in the streets and the communities.
The current renewal of the confluence among organized groups has enabled mobilizations for some time now, such as the citizen marches in defense of Nature occurring in different Andean countries, for example, among them the one organized by CONAIE in Ecuador or TIPNIS in Bolivia. The progressives rejected these and other mobilizations and, moreover, accused the organizations supporting them of politicizing peasants and indigenous peoples. Given the strength of these mobilizations, the NGOs would appear to be so powerful that they need to be closely monitored and controlled by governments, an extreme that is growing in intensity in Bolivia.
Faced with this reality, it’s hard to come to terms with the progressives’ words. On the one hand, those in government insist that the lactose-free faction is incapable of mobilization, and on the other, that they are so powerful at mobilizing they need to be controlled.
The demise of progressive governments
Do these two contrary ideas catch our attention? Possibly not. And if it doesn’t it’s because this kind of contradiction has become so common it’s already quite evident to large majorities. This is, in effect, one of the signs of progres¬sivism’s waning energy. We are not, therefore, at the end of a cycle; we’re witnessing its demise. The progressives are finding it ever more difficult to find new rationales, so they turn to other means: publicity campaigns, strange metaphors, repeated use of adjectives and, when they can, a little ridicule.
Could lactose be a measuring stick for political ideas and government practices? Will we have to install a political “lactose-meter”? I hesitate to sink to such extremes. Aren’t there more adequate words or a more precise vocabulary to explain what’s going on? No doubt there are.
This should be the attitude of the leftists, who, to further their mission, need to use the best terminology and concepts possible and refer always to real, not fictitious problems. The left wing must defend their ideas, dissenting when necessary, but always with respect and logic. This is imperative because people aren’t stupid and they expect it!
Eduardo Gudynas is a researcher in the Latin American Center of Social Ecology (CLAES), headquartered in Uruguay. This text was published in www.rebelion.org
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