‘Buen vivir’ and the dilemmas of the left governments in Latin America - II

Two crucial questions

The intransigent defense of sumak kawsay, stoked by the horrors of the “development” that fully legitimates that cosmovision, tends to leave no space in which to account for two very important questions: (a) What is the time frame to which sumak kawsay refers as a civilizing project?; and (b) what is the relation between the “buen vivir” of our original peoples and ecologism, in its distinct variants, including “ecosocialism” and, simultaneously, what might be the relation between sumak kawsay and socialism and communism?

Problems of sumak kawsay in a single country

Indeed, both the theoreticians and the supporters of sumak kawsay appear to have underestimated the temporal requisites of this project. The same criticism can be made of them that has been made by many, Marxists and others, of the fervent impatience of the communist revolutionaries at the time of the First World War and the Russian Revolution — that the establishment of socialism appeared in their eyes to be a project of immediate realization, its achievement posing no obstacles that a determined will for change could not overcome. Lenin was one of the first to warn of the error in this conception, observing that in the prevailing conditions in Russia the archaic nature of the social formation would become a formidable rampart against which the transformative projects of socialism would shatter. That is why Lenin foresaw a very long battle to overcome those fetters of the past, something which of course would not occur in the countries of the West when the time came to build socialism. In their case, the Russian revolutionary noted, the construction of socialism would be as easy “as lifting a feather.”

It seems to us that something similar could be happening with sumak kawsay, revealing a certain contradiction in the discourse itself. On the one hand we are assured, correctly, that it is a fundamental philosophical contribution that challenges the basic assumptions of modernity and capitalist civilization. However, the overcoming of five centuries of history (and what a history — with the horrors of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, racism, wars, genocides, state terrorism, the savage depredation of nature, etc.) is conceived by some social movements and political forces as a project that can realistically be confronted by two or three Andean governments and that significant results can almost immediately be obtained.

Just as “socialism in a single country” was intrinsically contradictory, and condemned to failure, why should we think that “sumak kawsay in a single country” fulfills the necessary conditions to assure its victory? If the Soviet Union and China, to cite the most convincing examples, were unable to build socialism regardless of the international equation that Marx and Engels posed in their earliest writings, how could much weaker countries like Bolivia and Ecuador be successful in their proposed refounding of civilization within a few short years and in an environment as unfavourable as the one imposed by the aggressive decadence of the imperial power? Could those countries resolutely advance in a proposal that, from the civilizing standpoint, is even more radical than the productivist socialism that the Soviet Union and China sought to achieve — and regardless of the other countries of the region or at least their immediate geopolitical environment? René Ramírez Gallegos recognizes the seriousness of the challenge when he writes that “we cannot, by ourselves, from Ecuador, build this society that we are talking about.”[1] Obviously, the answer to these questions will not spring from theory but will come from the historical praxis of the peoples. Meanwhile, we think the questions are legitimate and should be taken into account.

Up to now I have discussed the need to rely on a favourable geopolitical environment. But no less significant is the fact that a project of such a radical nature can hardly be imposed overnight, or in one or two presidential terms of office under leaders like Rafael Correa and Evo Morales resolutely identified with that program. Obviously, there are steps that can be taken immediately, but the question is to calculate, with hopeful realism and without needlessly abandoning ideals, just how far one can advance given the correlation of forces that defines the framework of the possible for governments like those of Bolivia and Ecuador.

Clearly, this entails an effort not to confuse the realism needed to transform the world (and not only study or interpret it) with “possibilism.” Realism requires the social forces committed to such a project to carefully plan their steps, to avoid falling into the traps the enemy holds in store. While realism recognizes the dialectical nature — the ever-changing movement — of the conjuncture, and the role of political will in modifying the relationship of forces at a given moment, “possibilism” is the resigned acceptance of what exists and a testimony to the intrinsic inability to respond creatively to the challenges of history. The realist is a general who knows that if he acts correctly he can defeat forces in theory superior to his own; the “possibilist” is someone who has been defeated ideologically and consequently gives up the battle and simply tries to accommodate to the unfortunate circumstances of the present. The realist keeps his eyes on the present and the future, while the “possibilist” is trapped in today’s reality and lacks the imagination or will to think of the future as something distinct from the infinite extension of the present.

While “possibilism” is a snare that has wrecked many transformative projects in Latin America, the other risk is utopianism. It is one thing to have a utopian horizon as an essential and non-negotiable guide to political action — for example, the construction of a communist, decidedly post-capitalist society — and quite another to fall into the utopianism that Marx and Engels criticized in the Communist Manifesto; its dreams were limited to signifying wonderful societies of the future but without identifying the subjects that would create these projects and the complex political, economic, cultural and international mediations — and who says mediations says contradictions! — which, through the class struggle, must necessarily be put in motion in order to convert those dreams into living realities. We are not saying that reflection about these problems is completely absent in the discussions around sumak kawsay. But it does seem to us that matters of such exceptional importance as these have not, at least up to now, received the attention that in our opinion they deserve.

In line with these concerns, Ecuador’s “National Plan for Buen Vivir” proposes a transition from an economy based on exports of primary resources to another based on the production of ecotourism and bioknowledge that is measured over decades. This expresses a prudent realism toward the pace of advance of civilizational change, the inexorable political correlative of which is a politics of compromises. It means that there must be a more or less extended period (depending on many factors that cannot be determined in advance, from theory) in which the old economic organization (that sustains the resources used by the state for its own maintenance and to finance the costly and complicated process of transition toward a new economy and a new sociability, congruent with the precepts of sumak kawsay) will coexist with the new “post-extractivist” economic order. The old order cannot disappear overnight without provoking traumatic shocks, nor can the new appear with the speed of lightning, desirable as that might be. However, this sober diagnostic is not shared by some social movements both in Bolivia and in Ecuador, convinced as they are that this transition can be made to measure with their impatience.

Sumak kawsay, ecologism and the post-capitalist society

Linked with the foregoing is the second element that we noted earlier, which is the relation between sumak kawsay and ecologism. This question, in our view, is of the utmost importance given the strategic role played in the theoretical discourse by Mother Earth and the relation between society and nature. However: what should be examined very carefully is just how consistent the unconditional and intransigent defense of Mother Earth is without an equally radical and intransigent critique of capitalism as a mode of production and hence as a civilization.[2]

Whence the fallacy of the various proposals for a “green economy” or a “green capitalism” advanced by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), which start from the premise that a new “environment-friendly” economic order, making possible an environmentally sustainable world with greater economic growth, full employment and welfare for all, can be built using market mechanisms and technological solutions without altering the power relationships, the logic of capital accumulation or the present profound inequalities.[3]

As we can see, a worrisome ambiguity prevails whenever the defense of the common goods of humanity is formulated in the abstract or, in the best of cases, with isolated questioning of capitalism but without posing, as must be done, the absolute impossibility of defending the rights of Mother Earth without at the same time developing an argument — both theoretical and practical — around the historical necessity to establish an unequivocally post-capitalist sociability. If that does not occur, sumak kawsay can easily be assimilated with some of the many currents of contemporary ecologism that lament the destruction of the environment while not recognizing that the ecocide will only end when the people send capitalism to the museum of history along with the bronze ax and the spinning wheel, as Engels noted in his time in a brilliant passage in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Accordingly, a sumak kawsay worthy of the name can only be that insofar as it is radically anticapitalist, since only the consummation of the socialist project — which involves the socialization of power, wealth and culture and hence the decommodification of society and nature — will make it possible to save Mother Earth. When we say socialization we should clarify that this process should not be identified with the statization of the economy, society, politics or culture. When we speak of socialization we are referring to “popular empowerment,” or in the language of classic Marxism, to a project that will end the despotism of capital while instituting the self-government of the producers. It seems to us that this is a second major theme to discuss, one that likewise seems not to have drawn the attention it deserves.

As will be gathered from the previous point, only a “socialist buen vivir” could offer a way out from the trap in which we are locked by the logic of capital. There is no redemption for Mother Earth if we do not manage to rescue the women and men who people this planet. And within capitalism there is no salvation for humanity, as Fidel Castro told us many years ago. Accordingly, a genuine project of “buen vivir” must in some way redefine the socialist program for the 21^st century. The problem is that this is an eminently practical task, since theory — like the celebrated owl of Minerva mentioned by Hegel — always spreads its wings at nightfall, that is, when the historical praxis of the peoples resolves (or tries to resolve) the challenges confronting society. The major challenge today is to overcome capitalism before it has finished off life on planet Earth. This task is just beginning, which is why theoretical thinking about the new socialism of the 21^st century and its project is only in its initial stages.[4] In other words, not only must sumak kawsay adopt a socialist identity, but socialism itself is searching for a new identity, convinced that the painful (but also highly instructive and in some respects positive) experiences of the 20^th century imperatively require rethinking of the project as a whole.

As we have stated elsewhere, the best way to mistake the road is to try to copy a political experiment. If Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador continue to be examples of significant processes of profound social transformation, it is because, among other things, none has copied from the other and each of them is an original, unique and unrepeatable creation of its own peoples. That is why Simón Rodríguez was right when he said that “either we invent or we go wrong.” In that sense, it is worth paraphrasing anew the poetry of Antonio Machado when he said something to the effect that socialists have no model, the model is made while walking. It is made in the concrete historical praxis of building socialism and in the unrepeatable — original, as Rodríguez said in the twilight of the colonial order — conditions under which each of those processes takes place.[5]

One of the new components of the socialist project for the 21^st century (refused in those of the previous century) has to do precisely with Mother Earth, sacrificed on the altars of a productivism that was no less harmful for the environment than that practiced by the capitalist economies. Referring to this theme, René Ramírez Gallegos (2010: 10), in the previously cited article, writes that “we aim, in the economic model, to build the biopolis, that is, to go beyond the economy of the old consciousness and to make the move from manufacturing to mentefactura, while beginning to consider the production of relational goods. What is the economic model? It is of course that biosocialism that I talked about earlier; and political power will be sustained in people’s power. But that is not done overnight.”[6] And, insisting on the difficult transition from a model based on export of raw materials to one that is a clear departure from capitalist logic, he notes that “to leave this model overnight is not viable, and it is necessary therefore to outline a medium- and long-term road map.”[7]

---

[1] René Ramírez Gallegos, “Izquierda postsocialista” (Quito: SENPLADES), Discurso No. 2, November 2010.

[2] This subject has been brilliantly addressed in a recent work by Elmar Altvater, Los limites del capitalismo. Acumulación, crecimiento y huella ecológica (Buenos Aires: Mardulce, 2011).

[3] Edgardo Lander, “Un nuevo período histórico,” pp. 2-3.

[4] We tackled the analysis of this topic and proposed some bibliographical orientations in our book Socialismo sigle XXI. ¿Hay vida después del neoliberalismo? (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Luxemburg, 2008).

[5] Socialismo siglo XXI, op. cit., p. 114.

[6] “Izquierda postsocialista,” op. cit., p. 10.

[7] See Working Document No. 2, “Socialismo del sumak kawsay o biosocialismo republicano,” by René Ramírez Gallegos, SENPLADES, Quito, p. 36.

‘Buen vivir’ and the dilemmas of the left governments in Latin America - II

Two crucial questions

The intransigent defense of sumak kawsay, stoked by the horrors of the “development” that fully legitimates that cosmovision, tends to leave no space in which to account for two very important questions: (a) What is the time frame to which sumak kawsay refers as a civilizing project?; and (b) what is the relation between the “buen vivir” of our original peoples and ecologism, in its distinct variants, including “ecosocialism” and, simultaneously, what might be the relation between sumak kawsay and socialism and communism?

Problems of sumak kawsay in a single country

Indeed, both the theoreticians and the supporters of sumak kawsay appear to have underestimated the temporal requisites of this project. The same criticism can be made of them that has been made by many, Marxists and others, of the fervent impatience of the communist revolutionaries at the time of the First World War and the Russian Revolution — that the establishment of socialism appeared in their eyes to be a project of immediate realization, its achievement posing no obstacles that a determined will for change could not overcome. Lenin was one of the first to warn of the error in this conception, observing that in the prevailing conditions in Russia the archaic nature of the social formation would become a formidable rampart against which the transformative projects of socialism would shatter. That is why Lenin foresaw a very long battle to overcome those fetters of the past, something which of course would not occur in the countries of the West when the time came to build socialism. In their case, the Russian revolutionary noted, the construction of socialism would be as easy “as lifting a feather.”

It seems to us that something similar could be happening with sumak kawsay, revealing a certain contradiction in the discourse itself. On the one hand we are assured, correctly, that it is a fundamental philosophical contribution that challenges the basic assumptions of modernity and capitalist civilization. However, the overcoming of five centuries of history (and what a history — with the horrors of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, racism, wars, genocides, state terrorism, the savage depredation of nature, etc.) is conceived by some social movements and political forces as a project that can realistically be confronted by two or three Andean governments and that significant results can almost immediately be obtained.

Just as “socialism in a single country” was intrinsically contradictory, and condemned to failure, why should we think that “sumak kawsay in a single country” fulfills the necessary conditions to assure its victory? If the Soviet Union and China, to cite the most convincing examples, were unable to build socialism regardless of the international equation that Marx and Engels posed in their earliest writings, how could much weaker countries like Bolivia and Ecuador be successful in their proposed refounding of civilization within a few short years and in an environment as unfavourable as the one imposed by the aggressive decadence of the imperial power? Could those countries resolutely advance in a proposal that, from the civilizing standpoint, is even more radical than the productivist socialism that the Soviet Union and China sought to achieve — and regardless of the other countries of the region or at least their immediate geopolitical environment? René Ramírez Gallegos recognizes the seriousness of the challenge when he writes that “we cannot, by ourselves, from Ecuador, build this society that we are talking about.”[1] Obviously, the answer to these questions will not spring from theory but will come from the historical praxis of the peoples. Meanwhile, we think the questions are legitimate and should be taken into account.

Up to now I have discussed the need to rely on a favourable geopolitical environment. But no less significant is the fact that a project of such a radical nature can hardly be imposed overnight, or in one or two presidential terms of office under leaders like Rafael Correa and Evo Morales resolutely identified with that program. Obviously, there are steps that can be taken immediately, but the question is to calculate, with hopeful realism and without needlessly abandoning ideals, just how far one can advance given the correlation of forces that defines the framework of the possible for governments like those of Bolivia and Ecuador.

Clearly, this entails an effort not to confuse the realism needed to transform the world (and not only study or interpret it) with “possibilism.” Realism requires the social forces committed to such a project to carefully plan their steps, to avoid falling into the traps the enemy holds in store. While realism recognizes the dialectical nature — the ever-changing movement — of the conjuncture, and the role of political will in modifying the relationship of forces at a given moment, “possibilism” is the resigned acceptance of what exists and a testimony to the intrinsic inability to respond creatively to the challenges of history. The realist is a general who knows that if he acts correctly he can defeat forces in theory superior to his own; the “possibilist” is someone who has been defeated ideologically and consequently gives up the battle and simply tries to accommodate to the unfortunate circumstances of the present. The realist keeps his eyes on the present and the future, while the “possibilist” is trapped in today’s reality and lacks the imagination or will to think of the future as something distinct from the infinite extension of the present.

While “possibilism” is a snare that has wrecked many transformative projects in Latin America, the other risk is utopianism. It is one thing to have a utopian horizon as an essential and non-negotiable guide to political action — for example, the construction of a communist, decidedly post-capitalist society — and quite another to fall into the utopianism that Marx and Engels criticized in the Communist Manifesto; its dreams were limited to signifying wonderful societies of the future but without identifying the subjects that would create these projects and the complex political, economic, cultural and international mediations — and who says mediations says contradictions! — which, through the class struggle, must necessarily be put in motion in order to convert those dreams into living realities. We are not saying that reflection about these problems is completely absent in the discussions around sumak kawsay. But it does seem to us that matters of such exceptional importance as these have not, at least up to now, received the attention that in our opinion they deserve.

In line with these concerns, Ecuador’s “National Plan for Buen Vivir” proposes a transition from an economy based on exports of primary resources to another based on the production of ecotourism and bioknowledge that is measured over decades. This expresses a prudent realism toward the pace of advance of civilizational change, the inexorable political correlative of which is a politics of compromises. It means that there must be a more or less extended period (depending on many factors that cannot be determined in advance, from theory) in which the old economic organization (that sustains the resources used by the state for its own maintenance and to finance the costly and complicated process of transition toward a new economy and a new sociability, congruent with the precepts of sumak kawsay) will coexist with the new “post-extractivist” economic order. The old order cannot disappear overnight without provoking traumatic shocks, nor can the new appear with the speed of lightning, desirable as that might be. However, this sober diagnostic is not shared by some social movements both in Bolivia and in Ecuador, convinced as they are that this transition can be made to measure with their impatience.

Sumak kawsay, ecologism and the post-capitalist society

Linked with the foregoing is the second element that we noted earlier, which is the relation between sumak kawsay and ecologism. This question, in our view, is of the utmost importance given the strategic role played in the theoretical discourse by Mother Earth and the relation between society and nature. However: what should be examined very carefully is just how consistent the unconditional and intransigent defense of Mother Earth is without an equally radical and intransigent critique of capitalism as a mode of production and hence as a civilization.[2]

Whence the fallacy of the various proposals for a “green economy” or a “green capitalism” advanced by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), which start from the premise that a new “environment-friendly” economic order, making possible an environmentally sustainable world with greater economic growth, full employment and welfare for all, can be built using market mechanisms and technological solutions without altering the power relationships, the logic of capital accumulation or the present profound inequalities.[3]

As we can see, a worrisome ambiguity prevails whenever the defense of the common goods of humanity is formulated in the abstract or, in the best of cases, with isolated questioning of capitalism but without posing, as must be done, the absolute impossibility of defending the rights of Mother Earth without at the same time developing an argument — both theoretical and practical — around the historical necessity to establish an unequivocally post-capitalist sociability. If that does not occur, sumak kawsay can easily be assimilated with some of the many currents of contemporary ecologism that lament the destruction of the environment while not recognizing that the ecocide will only end when the people send capitalism to the museum of history along with the bronze ax and the spinning wheel, as Engels noted in his time in a brilliant passage in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Accordingly, a sumak kawsay worthy of the name can only be that insofar as it is radically anticapitalist, since only the consummation of the socialist project — which involves the socialization of power, wealth and culture and hence the decommodification of society and nature — will make it possible to save Mother Earth. When we say socialization we should clarify that this process should not be identified with the statization of the economy, society, politics or culture. When we speak of socialization we are referring to “popular empowerment,” or in the language of classic Marxism, to a project that will end the despotism of capital while instituting the self-government of the producers. It seems to us that this is a second major theme to discuss, one that likewise seems not to have drawn the attention it deserves.

As will be gathered from the previous point, only a “socialist buen vivir” could offer a way out from the trap in which we are locked by the logic of capital. There is no redemption for Mother Earth if we do not manage to rescue the women and men who people this planet. And within capitalism there is no salvation for humanity, as Fidel Castro told us many years ago. Accordingly, a genuine project of “buen vivir” must in some way redefine the socialist program for the 21^st century. The problem is that this is an eminently practical task, since theory — like the celebrated owl of Minerva mentioned by Hegel — always spreads its wings at nightfall, that is, when the historical praxis of the peoples resolves (or tries to resolve) the challenges confronting society. The major challenge today is to overcome capitalism before it has finished off life on planet Earth. This task is just beginning, which is why theoretical thinking about the new socialism of the 21^st century and its project is only in its initial stages.[4] In other words, not only must sumak kawsay adopt a socialist identity, but socialism itself is searching for a new identity, convinced that the painful (but also highly instructive and in some respects positive) experiences of the 20^th century imperatively require rethinking of the project as a whole.

As we have stated elsewhere, the best way to mistake the road is to try to copy a political experiment. If Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador continue to be examples of significant processes of profound social transformation, it is because, among other things, none has copied from the other and each of them is an original, unique and unrepeatable creation of its own peoples. That is why Simón Rodríguez was right when he said that “either we invent or we go wrong.” In that sense, it is worth paraphrasing anew the poetry of Antonio Machado when he said something to the effect that socialists have no model, the model is made while walking. It is made in the concrete historical praxis of building socialism and in the unrepeatable — original, as Rodríguez said in the twilight of the colonial order — conditions under which each of those processes takes place.[5]

One of the new components of the socialist project for the 21^st century (refused in those of the previous century) has to do precisely with Mother Earth, sacrificed on the altars of a productivism that was no less harmful for the environment than that practiced by the capitalist economies. Referring to this theme, René Ramírez Gallegos (2010: 10), in the previously cited article, writes that “we aim, in the economic model, to build the biopolis, that is, to go beyond the economy of the old consciousness and to make the move from manufacturing to mentefactura, while beginning to consider the production of relational goods. What is the economic model? It is of course that biosocialism that I talked about earlier; and political power will be sustained in people’s power. But that is not done overnight.”[6] And, insisting on the difficult transition from a model based on export of raw materials to one that is a clear departure from capitalist logic, he notes that “to leave this model overnight is not viable, and it is necessary therefore to outline a medium- and long-term road map.”[7]

---

[1] René Ramírez Gallegos, “Izquierda postsocialista” (Quito: SENPLADES), Discurso No. 2, November 2010.

[2] This subject has been brilliantly addressed in a recent work by Elmar Altvater, Los limites del capitalismo. Acumulación, crecimiento y huella ecológica (Buenos Aires: Mardulce, 2011).

[3] Edgardo Lander, “Un nuevo período histórico,” pp. 2-3.

[4] We tackled the analysis of this topic and proposed some bibliographical orientations in our book Socialismo sigle XXI. ¿Hay vida después del neoliberalismo? (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Luxemburg, 2008).

[5] Socialismo siglo XXI, op. cit., p. 114.

[6] “Izquierda postsocialista,” op. cit., p. 10.

[7] See Working Document No. 2, “Socialismo del sumak kawsay o biosocialismo republicano,” by René Ramírez Gallegos, SENPLADES, Quito, p. 36.

‘Buen vivir’ and the dilemmas of the left governments in Latin America - I

Excerpt from a prize-winning book by Atilio A. Boron

Introduction

Argentine Marxist scholar Atilio Boron’s book, “Latin America in the Geopolitics of Imperialism” — América Latina en la geopolítica del imperialismo — was awarded Venezuela’s coveted Libertador Prize in Critical Thinking for 2012.

Published in several editions throughout Latin America, the book has attracted much attention, and some debate, for its detailed analysis of Latin America’s strategic importance to the United States and the challenge this poses to the continent’s left governments and progressive social movements.

Of particular interest to ecosocialists are two chapters — ch. 6, on “Common goods in Latin America: The debate between ‘pachamamismo’ and ‘extractivismo’,” and ch. 7, on “Buen vivir (sumak kawsay) and the dilemmas of the left governments in Latin America.”

The following is my translation of most of chapter 7. Because of its length, I have divided it into three separate parts. This is Part I. The others are:

II – Two crucial questions

III – A new development model?

They are all available at http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Atilio Boron with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro

The critique of development

In recent years Latin America has made a crucial philosophical and ethical-political contribution, instituting in two new constitutions of the Andean world, Bolivia and Ecuador, a new doctrinal concept going beyond the classic rights and guarantees established in the framework of liberal constitutionalism. This is the concept of sumak kawsay, conventionally translated as “buen vivir” or “vivir bien.” One of its fundamental aspects is the proposition of a relationship between society, individual and environment that is completely distinct from — it could even be said antagonistic to — the one manifested with the advent of modernity. As it is now formulated in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia, the environment is presented as Mother Earth and, under the new normative framework, as a new and hitherto unrecognized legal subject.[1]

Sumak kawsay radically challenges the concepts congealed in the old Latin American constitutions (and in a dense normative apparatus constructed throughout the history of the Latin American national states), all of them tributaries of the liberal tradition. It proposes, instead, a cosmovision that is rooted in the cultures of the oppressed ethnic groups of the continent, and especially of its original peoples, an idea that has emerged forcefully in the last quarter-century. That is why Boaventura de Sousa Santos is right when he says that what has emerged in Latin American politics — with greater force in countries like Ecuador or Bolivia, with less in the others — is more than a debate over development, growth or the environment; it is a profound controversy over the course of civilization itself.[2]

This radical innovation was not a sudden bolt of lightning on a calm day but the product of old struggles, eloquently recognized in the preambles to the new constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador, that have begun to bear fruit in the new regional sociopolitical context inaugurated by the triumph of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the weakening of U.S. power in the region, and which has significantly moved the South American political pendulum to the left. If these innovations were able to crystallize in the new social and political context in our regions, it was, on the one hand, because of the vigour and richness of old traditions in the Andean world that have survived five centuries of supposedly civilizing barbarism, and on the other hand, because of the gradual ecological, social and cultural holocaust unleashed by capitalism in its neoliberal stage, the most aggressive and predatory in its entire history, which has shaken the consciousness of our epoch and put a serious question mark around the cosmovision that revolves around the conceptual duo of progress and development.

As tends to occur in all popular traditions, there is no single meaning given to sumak kawsay. All the more when it refers to a broad universe of more or less institutionalized values, ideas and practices that have been transmitted from generation to generation, in most cases through oral tradition. However, bringing this proposal into the present debate essentially involves a dual redefinition: of the relationship of men and women with nature and of the relationship of men and women among themselves. Of course, sumak kawsay is not limited to that. A project developed by some Bolivian popular organizations involved in “buen vivir” includes a very full catalogue of questions relative to the identity of the original peoples and ethnic groups as well as other issues relating to water, environmental warming, the food crisis, the energy paradigm, agrofuels, industrialization, development, consumerism and popular sovereignty.[3]

Likewise, Ecuador’s “National Plan for Buen Vivir” relates it to the full range of proposals included in the content of sumak kawsay. Among the constituent principles of this cosmovision are such topics as unity in diversity, the desire to live as a society, equality, integration and social cohesion; universal rights and the strengthening of human capacities, an harmonious relationship with nature; cohabitation in solidarity, fraternity and cooperation; work and leisure alike viewed as liberating, and the reconstruction of the public sector; the construction of a democracy that is representative, participative and deliberative; and a democratic, pluralist and secular state.[4]

The complexity, breadth and iconoclastic nature of sumak kawsay was a source of puzzlement and confusion to many of the members of Ecuador’s constituent assembly who had gathered in Montecristi to develop the new constitution. According to one of its protagonists,

“the buen vivir proposal… was put to various interpretations in the Constituent Assembly and in society itself. In one debate, which in reality had just begun, the predominant tone was one of lack of understanding and even fear in certain sectors. Some assembly members, in the habit of undebatable truths, and disturbingly echoed by our mediocre press, which hoped for the failure of the constitutional process, clamoured for definitive and precise formulations. Others, who naively understood buen vivir as an indifferent and even passive dolce vita, found it unacceptable. There were even some, fearful of losing their privileges, who were sure that buen vivir would take us back to the stone age. And there were some who voted in favour of this founding principle of the Montecristi Constitution who apparently had no clear understanding of the importance of this decision… And still others, opposed from the standpoint of an autistic left, who clung to traditional (and in reality empty) concepts of change, bereft of importance since they had not been implemented in the practice of the social struggles.”[5]

For the purposes of this discussion, which of course is much more confined, we will center the analysis on the implications of sumak kawsay for the problematic of development and the strategies of the social movements in the reaffirmation of “buen vivir” as a principle for the refoundation of social life. That invites us not only to examine the concepts of development but also to think about its social agents (classes, social movements, political forces, governments) and, especially, about the resulting tensions between the new doctrinal proposition, the subjects that embody those tensions, and the hard day-to-day realities that must be confronted by any governmental administration. The matter acquires special relevance given that the governments of Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Evo Morales in Bolivia are targets of implacable criticism not only from the national right wing and imperialism, but also from left-wing sectors that, with differing emphasis, accuse them of having betrayed the principles of sumak kawsay.

The critique of development

There is no doubt that this cosmovision sharply challenges the dominant concepts concerning the theme of development. Not surprisingly, therefore, we encounter a whole series of writers who have been arguing that what is alleged to be development is in reality “maldevelopment.” According to José María Tortośa, one of those who has done the most work on this subject, this concept synthesizes the practical refutation — that is, from empirical observation — of what is undesirable and perverse in what has in fact turned out to be development.[6]

It could rightly be argued that this critique, while correct, is far from novel. In fact, since the 1970s Marxists in Latin America (Theotonio dos Santos, Aníbal Quijano, Fernando H. Cardoso at he then was, Agustín Cueva and Pablo González Casanova, among many others), and not only in this part of the world (as testified by the contribution of people like Samir Amin, André Gunder Frank, from the major capitalist powers), have been harshly critiquing the notion of development as it is used in the social sciences, the international agencies and by almost all governments. Not unrelated to this are the thoughts of major personalities in the world of politics such as the Fidel Castro of the “Second Declaration of Havana” (February 1962), the Che Guevara of his numerous speeches (and especially the one made at Punta del Este in August 1961), and the various writings of Juan Bosch, the former president of the Dominican Republic. The leitmotiv of all these interpretations has been the deforming and predatory nature of development in a capitalist economy, and the fact that it is a process that is not only incapable of improving the welfare of the peoples but, to make matters worse, encounters insurmountable limits in the capitalisms of the periphery.[7]

The canonical text of orthodox thinking about development in the early 1960s was the book by Walter W. Rostow, entitled The Stages of Economic Development, with the subtitle, devoid of any subtlety, A Non-Communist Manifesto. The book had an overwhelming influence on the Latin American social sciences in those years and, needless to say, on the governments and experts in economic affairs, all of them caught in one way or another in the spider’s web of the Alliance for Progress.[8]

The basic idea of the Rostowian argument was that there was a single process of development and that it was lineal, accumulative and equal for all countries. The word “capitalism” had been carefully excised from the text, with the obvious purpose of reinforcing the naturalization of this mode of production; in the discovery of its laws of development, the assumption was that any economy, without exception, had to go through, in the long run, an ordered succession of stages with a series of technical, not political, imperatives. The consequence of all this was that there was only one way to deal with economic problems, and that this was dictated by technical issues that did not allow any transgression. To do so would mean falling into the swamp of “populism.”

The process of capitalist development — with its struggles, its plunder and pillage, entering the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” as Marx described it in Capital — is sublimated and decontextualized by Rostow, who manages to convert it into an ahistorical, formal and lineal deployment of potentialities present in each of the planet’s social formations. Thus, for this tradition of thought, the now developed countries were, in a not so remote time, poor and underdeveloped nations. This reasoning was based on two false assumptions. First, that by disappearing all the historical and structural determinations, localized societies at both extremes of the “development-underdevelopment” continuum were converted into real pipedreams, vaporous essences uncontaminated by the prosaic realities of time and space. Second assumption: that the organization of international markets lacked structural asymmetries (or if they existed, they were irrelevant) that could affect the chances of development of the nations of the periphery.

For Rostow and his Latin American disciples, such terms as “dependency” or “imperialism” were not useful in describing the realities of the system and were above all a testimony to “political approaches” and thus unscientific, and of no help in understanding the problems of economic development.[9] Consequently, the so-called “obstacles” to development did not have structural foundations or restrictions anchored in the world economy, but were the product of clumsy political decisions, unfortunate choices of governments or inertial social and historical ballast that had to be removed.

The conservatizing implications of this reasoning, which a priori ruled out any other form of economic organization alternative to capitalism and that completely ignored the reality of imperialism and dependency, are so obvious that they require no further demonstration beyond their statement alone. As we can see, monolithic thinking is not as novel as is commonly assumed. And its impact on supposedly non-conformist thinking was as harmful then as it is today.[10]

But there was something more. Both the orthodox thinking and that of its Marxist critics shared at that time (not now, of course) a tacit non-debatable assumption: far from being an extremely rich depository of “common goods,” nature appeared, in the conventional thinking and in that of the left critics, as one more “natural resource” that deserved no special treatment and consequently was to be exploited using the productive techniques developed by capitalism, albeit with a vague “social sense.” A distant antecedent of that attitude can be found in the early years of the Russian Revolution, when V.I. Lenin stated that “socialism = soviets + electricity.” Thus, even for the forces challenging capitalism, the model of relationship between society, economy and environment remained unaltered and continued to be the one that capitalist modernity had established. What had changed was only the recipient of the fruits of economic progress. This was not a minor change, but as was noted much later by the new Latin American critical thought and sumak kawsay, that assumption now proved unacceptable for the renewed social and ecological consciousness of our peoples. The environmental and social havoc produced by unbridled developmentalist and extractivist productivism has profoundly shaken Latin American societies, speeding the formation of a new culture that is increasingly sceptical about the alleged benefits of “development.”

Not surprisingly, we find therefore that one of the harshest — and, we would add, unjust — criticisms levelled against the present governments of Bolivia and Ecuador is that they have become committed to the same pattern of the relationship between society and nature, converting them into de facto prisoners of the predatory and inhuman logic of capitalism. In that sense, the charge is that owing to many factors (economic and financial necessities, foreign trade imbalances, political weaknesses, ideological frailties, indifference to popular demands, etc.), both La Paz and Quito have promoted, to the frustration of their initial followers, the same type of “developmentalist” and “extractivist” economic policies as their neoliberal adversaries. Ricardo Verdum spells it out: “What attracts the attention of some analysts is that it is precisely the progressive and left governments, elected on a political platform contrary to that model (and that describe themselves as post-neoliberal), that now reaffirm the function of a region that is a provider of natural resources, and that now govern approximately four fifths of the population and some three quarters of the territory of South America.”[11]

---

[1] In the case of Ecuador, the 2008 Constitution states: “We the sovereign people of Ecuador… Acknowledging our age-old roots, forged by women and men of distinct peoples… Celebrating nature, the Pacha Mama, of which we are part and which is vital to our existence… have decided to build… a new form of citizen cohabitation, in diversity and harmony with nature, to achieve bien vivir, sumak kawsay.” The 2007 Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia states that “the Bolivian people, of plural composition from the depth of history, inspired by the struggles of the past, in the anticolonial indigenous uprising, in independence, in the popular struggles for liberation, in the indigenous, social and trade-union marches, in the water war [of 2000] and the October war [the 2003 mass mobilizations that overthrew the government of Sanchez de Lozada], in the struggles for land and territory, and with the memory of our martyrs, are building a new State… based on respect and equality for all, with principles of sovereignty, dignity, complementarity, solidarity, harmony and equity in the distribution and redistribution of the social product, and in which the quest for vivir bien is predominant; with respect for economic, social, legal, political and cultural pluralism of the inhabitants of this Earth; in collective cohabitation with access to water, work, education, health and housing for all.”

[2] See “El socialismo del buen vivir,” by Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

[3] See “El buen vivir como respuesta a la crisis global,” of the Ministry of Foreign Relations of the Plurinational Estate of Bolivia (La Paz, n.d.).

[4] See “Plan Nacional para el Buen Vivir 2009-2013: construyendo un Estado Plurinacional e Intercultural,” in the Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, República del Ecuador (Quito, 2009, pp. 33-43).

[5] Alberto Acosta, “El buen vivir, una utopía por (re)construir,” in Boletín ECOS (CIP-Ecoscial Madrid), No. 11, April-June 2010.

[6] See “El futuro del maldesarrollo,” by José María Tortośa, in Revista Obets (Alicante), No. 4, 2009, p. 68.

[7] Che participated as Cuba’s Minister of Industries in the Conference of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council, a dependent agency of the OAS, which met in Punta del Este, Uruguay, August 5-18, 1961, barely four months after the failed invasion at Playa Girón. In his first speech in the conference, he delivered a ringing indictment of the extremely modest scope of a supposed program of economic development sponsored by the United States, the unsuccessful Alliance for Progress, represented at the conference by the U.S. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon; because of its emphasis on sewage systems, the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary sarcastically labelled it the “latrinization of Latin America.” The timid objectives proposed by the Alliance, which were not achieved by any country, loudly contrasted with the huge achievements of Cuba in two and a half years of Revolution, which, among other things, had made it the first territory free of illiteracy in the Americas. On these topics see our article “Teorías de la dependenciea,” in Realidad Económica (Buenos Aires), No. 238, August 16/September 30, 2008. A revealing fact: the first “democratic” country (not like Cuba, as Washington would say!) to receive funds from the Alliance for Progress was democratic Paraguay under the dictator Stroessner.

[8] For an analysis of the nature and impact of Rostow’s ideas, see “Entrevista a Samir Amir,” by Graciela Roffinelli and Néstor Kohan, October 1, 2003, www.paginadigital.com.ar/articulos/2003/2003sept/noticias6/24530-9.asp.

[9] The coincidence of perspectives between the work of a conservative theoretician like Walter W. Rostow and the work of those who, from a presumably critical perspective, are inspired by the writings of Hardt and Negri, is rather astonishing. In an interview with the Argentine newspaper Página/12, Giussepe Cocco and Toni Negri discredit the concept of imperialism and consider “anti-imperialism” deplorable. They would not have been more in agreement with the preferred theoretician of the Kennedy administration. See “América Latina está viviendo el momento de una ruptura,” by Verónica Gago, in Página/12, August 14, 2006, www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/dialogos/21-71388-2006-08-14.html.

[10] A current example is found in the book by Hardt and Negri, Empire, in which they assure us that countries like Bangladesh and Haiti are part of the empire, because it encompasses everything. But are they therefore in a position comparable to that of the United States, France, Germany or Japan? While they do admit that they are not identical from the standpoint of capitalist production and circulation, Hardt and Negri conclude, to the amazement of some scholars, that between “the United States and Brazil, Great Britain and India, there are differences only of degree, not of nature,” a thesis that Rostow himself would have enthusiastically embraced. As Samir Amin reminds us, the peripheries of the world system are not so much “unequally developed formations” as social formations that are interdependent precisely in terms of that unevenness. For a critique of the radically mistaken and functionally pro-imperialist vision of Hardt and Negri, see Atilio Boron, Imperio & Imperialismo. Una lectura crítica de Michael Hardt y Antonio Negri (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2004), published in English as Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

[11] See his “El nuevo extractivismo desarrollista en Sudamérica” (Quito, CAAP), in www.extractivismo.com/noticias/verdum-extractivismo-desarrollista-sudamerica.html.

‘Buen vivir’ and the dilemmas of the left governments in Latin America - I

Excerpt from a prize-winning book by Atilio A. Boron

Introduction

Argentine Marxist scholar Atilio Boron’s book, “Latin America in the Geopolitics of Imperialism” — América Latina en la geopolítica del imperialismo — was awarded Venezuela’s coveted Libertador Prize in Critical Thinking for 2012.

Published in several editions throughout Latin America, the book has attracted much attention, and some debate, for its detailed analysis of Latin America’s strategic importance to the United States and the challenge this poses to the continent’s left governments and progressive social movements.

Of particular interest to ecosocialists are two chapters — ch. 6, on “Common goods in Latin America: The debate between ‘pachamamismo’ and ‘extractivismo’,” and ch. 7, on “Buen vivir (sumak kawsay) and the dilemmas of the left governments in Latin America.”

The following is my translation of most of chapter 7. Because of its length, I have divided it into three separate parts. This is Part I. The others are:

II – Two crucial questions

III – A new development model?

They are all available at http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Atilio Boron with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro

The critique of development

In recent years Latin America has made a crucial philosophical and ethical-political contribution, instituting in two new constitutions of the Andean world, Bolivia and Ecuador, a new doctrinal concept going beyond the classic rights and guarantees established in the framework of liberal constitutionalism. This is the concept of sumak kawsay, conventionally translated as “buen vivir” or “vivir bien.” One of its fundamental aspects is the proposition of a relationship between society, individual and environment that is completely distinct from — it could even be said antagonistic to — the one manifested with the advent of modernity. As it is now formulated in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia, the environment is presented as Mother Earth and, under the new normative framework, as a new and hitherto unrecognized legal subject.[1]

Sumak kawsay radically challenges the concepts congealed in the old Latin American constitutions (and in a dense normative apparatus constructed throughout the history of the Latin American national states), all of them tributaries of the liberal tradition. It proposes, instead, a cosmovision that is rooted in the cultures of the oppressed ethnic groups of the continent, and especially of its original peoples, an idea that has emerged forcefully in the last quarter-century. That is why Boaventura de Sousa Santos is right when he says that what has emerged in Latin American politics — with greater force in countries like Ecuador or Bolivia, with less in the others — is more than a debate over development, growth or the environment; it is a profound controversy over the course of civilization itself.[2]

This radical innovation was not a sudden bolt of lightning on a calm day but the product of old struggles, eloquently recognized in the preambles to the new constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador, that have begun to bear fruit in the new regional sociopolitical context inaugurated by the triumph of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the weakening of U.S. power in the region, and which has significantly moved the South American political pendulum to the left. If these innovations were able to crystallize in the new social and political context in our regions, it was, on the one hand, because of the vigour and richness of old traditions in the Andean world that have survived five centuries of supposedly civilizing barbarism, and on the other hand, because of the gradual ecological, social and cultural holocaust unleashed by capitalism in its neoliberal stage, the most aggressive and predatory in its entire history, which has shaken the consciousness of our epoch and put a serious question mark around the cosmovision that revolves around the conceptual duo of progress and development.

As tends to occur in all popular traditions, there is no single meaning given to sumak kawsay. All the more when it refers to a broad universe of more or less institutionalized values, ideas and practices that have been transmitted from generation to generation, in most cases through oral tradition. However, bringing this proposal into the present debate essentially involves a dual redefinition: of the relationship of men and women with nature and of the relationship of men and women among themselves. Of course, sumak kawsay is not limited to that. A project developed by some Bolivian popular organizations involved in “buen vivir” includes a very full catalogue of questions relative to the identity of the original peoples and ethnic groups as well as other issues relating to water, environmental warming, the food crisis, the energy paradigm, agrofuels, industrialization, development, consumerism and popular sovereignty.[3]

Likewise, Ecuador’s “National Plan for Buen Vivir” relates it to the full range of proposals included in the content of sumak kawsay. Among the constituent principles of this cosmovision are such topics as unity in diversity, the desire to live as a society, equality, integration and social cohesion; universal rights and the strengthening of human capacities, an harmonious relationship with nature; cohabitation in solidarity, fraternity and cooperation; work and leisure alike viewed as liberating, and the reconstruction of the public sector; the construction of a democracy that is representative, participative and deliberative; and a democratic, pluralist and secular state.[4]

The complexity, breadth and iconoclastic nature of sumak kawsay was a source of puzzlement and confusion to many of the members of Ecuador’s constituent assembly who had gathered in Montecristi to develop the new constitution. According to one of its protagonists,

“the buen vivir proposal… was put to various interpretations in the Constituent Assembly and in society itself. In one debate, which in reality had just begun, the predominant tone was one of lack of understanding and even fear in certain sectors. Some assembly members, in the habit of undebatable truths, and disturbingly echoed by our mediocre press, which hoped for the failure of the constitutional process, clamoured for definitive and precise formulations. Others, who naively understood buen vivir as an indifferent and even passive dolce vita, found it unacceptable. There were even some, fearful of losing their privileges, who were sure that buen vivir would take us back to the stone age. And there were some who voted in favour of this founding principle of the Montecristi Constitution who apparently had no clear understanding of the importance of this decision… And still others, opposed from the standpoint of an autistic left, who clung to traditional (and in reality empty) concepts of change, bereft of importance since they had not been implemented in the practice of the social struggles.”[5]

For the purposes of this discussion, which of course is much more confined, we will center the analysis on the implications of sumak kawsay for the problematic of development and the strategies of the social movements in the reaffirmation of “buen vivir” as a principle for the refoundation of social life. That invites us not only to examine the concepts of development but also to think about its social agents (classes, social movements, political forces, governments) and, especially, about the resulting tensions between the new doctrinal proposition, the subjects that embody those tensions, and the hard day-to-day realities that must be confronted by any governmental administration. The matter acquires special relevance given that the governments of Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Evo Morales in Bolivia are targets of implacable criticism not only from the national right wing and imperialism, but also from left-wing sectors that, with differing emphasis, accuse them of having betrayed the principles of sumak kawsay.

The critique of development

There is no doubt that this cosmovision sharply challenges the dominant concepts concerning the theme of development. Not surprisingly, therefore, we encounter a whole series of writers who have been arguing that what is alleged to be development is in reality “maldevelopment.” According to José María Tortośa, one of those who has done the most work on this subject, this concept synthesizes the practical refutation — that is, from empirical observation — of what is undesirable and perverse in what has in fact turned out to be development.[6]

It could rightly be argued that this critique, while correct, is far from novel. In fact, since the 1970s Marxists in Latin America (Theotonio dos Santos, Aníbal Quijano, Fernando H. Cardoso at he then was, Agustín Cueva and Pablo González Casanova, among many others), and not only in this part of the world (as testified by the contribution of people like Samir Amin, André Gunder Frank, from the major capitalist powers), have been harshly critiquing the notion of development as it is used in the social sciences, the international agencies and by almost all governments. Not unrelated to this are the thoughts of major personalities in the world of politics such as the Fidel Castro of the “Second Declaration of Havana” (February 1962), the Che Guevara of his numerous speeches (and especially the one made at Punta del Este in August 1961), and the various writings of Juan Bosch, the former president of the Dominican Republic. The leitmotiv of all these interpretations has been the deforming and predatory nature of development in a capitalist economy, and the fact that it is a process that is not only incapable of improving the welfare of the peoples but, to make matters worse, encounters insurmountable limits in the capitalisms of the periphery.[7]

The canonical text of orthodox thinking about development in the early 1960s was the book by Walter W. Rostow, entitled The Stages of Economic Development, with the subtitle, devoid of any subtlety, A Non-Communist Manifesto. The book had an overwhelming influence on the Latin American social sciences in those years and, needless to say, on the governments and experts in economic affairs, all of them caught in one way or another in the spider’s web of the Alliance for Progress.[8]

The basic idea of the Rostowian argument was that there was a single process of development and that it was lineal, accumulative and equal for all countries. The word “capitalism” had been carefully excised from the text, with the obvious purpose of reinforcing the naturalization of this mode of production; in the discovery of its laws of development, the assumption was that any economy, without exception, had to go through, in the long run, an ordered succession of stages with a series of technical, not political, imperatives. The consequence of all this was that there was only one way to deal with economic problems, and that this was dictated by technical issues that did not allow any transgression. To do so would mean falling into the swamp of “populism.”

The process of capitalist development — with its struggles, its plunder and pillage, entering the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” as Marx described it in Capital — is sublimated and decontextualized by Rostow, who manages to convert it into an ahistorical, formal and lineal deployment of potentialities present in each of the planet’s social formations. Thus, for this tradition of thought, the now developed countries were, in a not so remote time, poor and underdeveloped nations. This reasoning was based on two false assumptions. First, that by disappearing all the historical and structural determinations, localized societies at both extremes of the “development-underdevelopment” continuum were converted into real pipedreams, vaporous essences uncontaminated by the prosaic realities of time and space. Second assumption: that the organization of international markets lacked structural asymmetries (or if they existed, they were irrelevant) that could affect the chances of development of the nations of the periphery.

For Rostow and his Latin American disciples, such terms as “dependency” or “imperialism” were not useful in describing the realities of the system and were above all a testimony to “political approaches” and thus unscientific, and of no help in understanding the problems of economic development.[9] Consequently, the so-called “obstacles” to development did not have structural foundations or restrictions anchored in the world economy, but were the product of clumsy political decisions, unfortunate choices of governments or inertial social and historical ballast that had to be removed.

The conservatizing implications of this reasoning, which a priori ruled out any other form of economic organization alternative to capitalism and that completely ignored the reality of imperialism and dependency, are so obvious that they require no further demonstration beyond their statement alone. As we can see, monolithic thinking is not as novel as is commonly assumed. And its impact on supposedly non-conformist thinking was as harmful then as it is today.[10]

But there was something more. Both the orthodox thinking and that of its Marxist critics shared at that time (not now, of course) a tacit non-debatable assumption: far from being an extremely rich depository of “common goods,” nature appeared, in the conventional thinking and in that of the left critics, as one more “natural resource” that deserved no special treatment and consequently was to be exploited using the productive techniques developed by capitalism, albeit with a vague “social sense.” A distant antecedent of that attitude can be found in the early years of the Russian Revolution, when V.I. Lenin stated that “socialism = soviets + electricity.” Thus, even for the forces challenging capitalism, the model of relationship between society, economy and environment remained unaltered and continued to be the one that capitalist modernity had established. What had changed was only the recipient of the fruits of economic progress. This was not a minor change, but as was noted much later by the new Latin American critical thought and sumak kawsay, that assumption now proved unacceptable for the renewed social and ecological consciousness of our peoples. The environmental and social havoc produced by unbridled developmentalist and extractivist productivism has profoundly shaken Latin American societies, speeding the formation of a new culture that is increasingly sceptical about the alleged benefits of “development.”

Not surprisingly, we find therefore that one of the harshest — and, we would add, unjust — criticisms levelled against the present governments of Bolivia and Ecuador is that they have become committed to the same pattern of the relationship between society and nature, converting them into de facto prisoners of the predatory and inhuman logic of capitalism. In that sense, the charge is that owing to many factors (economic and financial necessities, foreign trade imbalances, political weaknesses, ideological frailties, indifference to popular demands, etc.), both La Paz and Quito have promoted, to the frustration of their initial followers, the same type of “developmentalist” and “extractivist” economic policies as their neoliberal adversaries. Ricardo Verdum spells it out: “What attracts the attention of some analysts is that it is precisely the progressive and left governments, elected on a political platform contrary to that model (and that describe themselves as post-neoliberal), that now reaffirm the function of a region that is a provider of natural resources, and that now govern approximately four fifths of the population and some three quarters of the territory of South America.”[11]

---

[1] In the case of Ecuador, the 2008 Constitution states: “We the sovereign people of Ecuador… Acknowledging our age-old roots, forged by women and men of distinct peoples… Celebrating nature, the Pacha Mama, of which we are part and which is vital to our existence… have decided to build… a new form of citizen cohabitation, in diversity and harmony with nature, to achieve bien vivir, sumak kawsay.” The 2007 Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia states that “the Bolivian people, of plural composition from the depth of history, inspired by the struggles of the past, in the anticolonial indigenous uprising, in independence, in the popular struggles for liberation, in the indigenous, social and trade-union marches, in the water war [of 2000] and the October war [the 2003 mass mobilizations that overthrew the government of Sanchez de Lozada], in the struggles for land and territory, and with the memory of our martyrs, are building a new State… based on respect and equality for all, with principles of sovereignty, dignity, complementarity, solidarity, harmony and equity in the distribution and redistribution of the social product, and in which the quest for vivir bien is predominant; with respect for economic, social, legal, political and cultural pluralism of the inhabitants of this Earth; in collective cohabitation with access to water, work, education, health and housing for all.”

[2] See “El socialismo del buen vivir,” by Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

[3] See “El buen vivir como respuesta a la crisis global,” of the Ministry of Foreign Relations of the Plurinational Estate of Bolivia (La Paz, n.d.).

[4] See “Plan Nacional para el Buen Vivir 2009-2013: construyendo un Estado Plurinacional e Intercultural,” in the Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, República del Ecuador (Quito, 2009, pp. 33-43).

[5] Alberto Acosta, “El buen vivir, una utopía por (re)construir,” in Boletín ECOS (CIP-Ecoscial Madrid), No. 11, April-June 2010.

[6] See “El futuro del maldesarrollo,” by José María Tortośa, in Revista Obets (Alicante), No. 4, 2009, p. 68.

[7] Che participated as Cuba’s Minister of Industries in the Conference of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council, a dependent agency of the OAS, which met in Punta del Este, Uruguay, August 5-18, 1961, barely four months after the failed invasion at Playa Girón. In his first speech in the conference, he delivered a ringing indictment of the extremely modest scope of a supposed program of economic development sponsored by the United States, the unsuccessful Alliance for Progress, represented at the conference by the U.S. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon; because of its emphasis on sewage systems, the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary sarcastically labelled it the “latrinization of Latin America.” The timid objectives proposed by the Alliance, which were not achieved by any country, loudly contrasted with the huge achievements of Cuba in two and a half years of Revolution, which, among other things, had made it the first territory free of illiteracy in the Americas. On these topics see our article “Teorías de la dependenciea,” in Realidad Económica (Buenos Aires), No. 238, August 16/September 30, 2008. A revealing fact: the first “democratic” country (not like Cuba, as Washington would say!) to receive funds from the Alliance for Progress was democratic Paraguay under the dictator Stroessner.

[8] For an analysis of the nature and impact of Rostow’s ideas, see “Entrevista a Samir Amir,” by Graciela Roffinelli and Néstor Kohan, October 1, 2003, www.paginadigital.com.ar/articulos/2003/2003sept/noticias6/24530-9.asp.

[9] The coincidence of perspectives between the work of a conservative theoretician like Walter W. Rostow and the work of those who, from a presumably critical perspective, are inspired by the writings of Hardt and Negri, is rather astonishing. In an interview with the Argentine newspaper Página/12, Giussepe Cocco and Toni Negri discredit the concept of imperialism and consider “anti-imperialism” deplorable. They would not have been more in agreement with the preferred theoretician of the Kennedy administration. See “América Latina está viviendo el momento de una ruptura,” by Verónica Gago, in Página/12, August 14, 2006, www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/dialogos/21-71388-2006-08-14.html.

[10] A current example is found in the book by Hardt and Negri, Empire, in which they assure us that countries like Bangladesh and Haiti are part of the empire, because it encompasses everything. But are they therefore in a position comparable to that of the United States, France, Germany or Japan? While they do admit that they are not identical from the standpoint of capitalist production and circulation, Hardt and Negri conclude, to the amazement of some scholars, that between “the United States and Brazil, Great Britain and India, there are differences only of degree, not of nature,” a thesis that Rostow himself would have enthusiastically embraced. As Samir Amin reminds us, the peripheries of the world system are not so much “unequally developed formations” as social formations that are interdependent precisely in terms of that unevenness. For a critique of the radically mistaken and functionally pro-imperialist vision of Hardt and Negri, see Atilio Boron, Imperio & Imperialismo. Una lectura crítica de Michael Hardt y Antonio Negri (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2004), published in English as Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

[11] See his “El nuevo extractivismo desarrollista en Sudamérica” (Quito, CAAP), in www.extractivismo.com/noticias/verdum-extractivismo-desarrollista-sudamerica.html.

Amir Khadir – ‘Desperately lacking in this election campaign: a global vision to end hydrocarbon dependency’

Québec solidaire leader calls on federal parties to make climate change the central issue

I will have more to say later about Canada’s federal election, to be held October 19. It is an important election, the neoliberal Conservative government led by Stephen Harper dropping in the polls, the social liberal New Democratic Party credited with a slight lead, barely ahead of the other neoliberal party, the Liberals. But this column by Amir Khadir, a Québec solidaire member of the Quebec national assembly, seems a good place to start. It was published on the editorial page of today’s issue of the Montréal daily Le Devoir. My translation.

– Richard Fidler, August 20, 2015

* * *

Federal leaders must come up with a substitute for oil

by Amir Khadir

Photo by Jacques Nadeau, Le Devoir

The longest election campaign in recent Canadian history is an opportunity to point to the contradictions of the major parties on the question of ecology. If there is one issue that touches simultaneously on economic development, the protection of ecosystems, public health, climate warming, transportation and the legitimacy of public institutions, it is the exploitation of the tar sands and the many pipeline projects for exporting the most polluting oil in the world.

Let’s say it straightaway: No federal party at this time has a credible plan to get out of hydrocarbons. They have not said where they stand on controversial projects like Old Harry, Anticosti or shale gas.[1] As long as Quebec remains in the Canadian federation, the Québécois are entitled to demand more from the parties that hope to govern in Ottawa, and that they take decisions that measure up to the issues of the 21^st century.

It is in good taste to say that economy and environment should not conflict. However, we often overlook the contradictions between the imperative of unlimited growth of tar sands operations and the fight against climate change.

Oil interests

A brilliant journalist of the Toronto Star, Linda McQuaig, running for the NDP in Toronto, put her finger on the problem. During a television debate, she reminded us of an obvious fact on which there is scientific consensus: a large quantity of tar sands will have to remain below the ground if Canada hopes to achieve its objectives in the fight against climate change.

This simple factual statement unleashed a media storm in which all the leaders, including [the NDP’s] Thomas Mulcair, took their distance from this position. “When men cannot change things, they change the words,” said Jean Jaurès. And that’s exactly what happened.

These leaders hurried to characterize the New Democrat candidate’s statement as extreme! And to reiterate their support for the energy industry under the pretext that it provides well-paid jobs. Of course, since no one is against virtue, sustainable development, social acceptability and renewable energies, each was quick to promise environmental assessments, forgetting that these are all too often entrusted to agencies heavily influenced by people from the industry, in particular the oil industry.

In the end, the oil interests have imposed themselves on the politicians, twisting the meaning of words and harping on “business as usual.” Canadian petropolitics requires that no one disrupt the dominant economic and energy paradigm, where powerful fortunes have an interest in ensuring that nothing changes.

Pipelines of dissent

Another example of ambiguity on the part of the major federal parties concerns their positions on the many pipeline projects. In Quebec, we are of course concerned about TransCanada’s Energy East project, which will convey 1.1 million barrels of oil per day for export abroad, with tiny economic benefits and increased risks to hundreds of waterways and local communities. But there are also the Northern Gateway, Keystone XL and Kinder Morgan projects, as well as the projects for exploration and drilling in the deep waters of the Arctic and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

In the case of Energy East, it is clear that the interests of Quebec are opposed to those of the economic elite that dominates Canadian politics. From this standpoint, petroleum is not only a national issue for us as Quebec independentists, it is also an environmental and social issue affecting the people of Quebec, the people of Canada, the First Nations and the entire planet!

What is desperately lacking in this election campaign is a global vision, a desirable, viable and realizable solution that will replace the relentless exploitation of hydrocarbons. In short, a credible plan that starts from “where we are now” and shows us the path to follow “to where we want to go.” This is not utopian, but showing realism, to carry out an energy transition toward a post-carbon economy by 2050.

As the philosopher André Gorz pointed out, it is time to think from back to front, to define the changes to be made by looking at the goal to be achieved and not to set the goals by starting with the interests of those who resist change. It is necessary, therefore, to go beyond a mere papering over of the current petropolitics. We need a prosperity based on sources of sustainable and ecologically responsible energy.

---

[1] Old Harry is a project to mine hydrocarbons under the sea floor in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the nautical boundary between Quebec and Newfoundland. Anticosti is the largest island in Quebec’s St. Lawrence river, where oil companies have been authorized by the Quebec government to conduct exploratory drilling for shale oil and gas.

Amir Khadir – ‘Desperately lacking in this election campaign: a global vision to end hydrocarbon dependency’

Québec solidaire leader calls on federal parties to make climate change the central issue

I will have more to say later about Canada’s federal election, to be held October 19. It is an important election, the neoliberal Conservative government led by Stephen Harper dropping in the polls, the social liberal New Democratic Party credited with a slight lead, barely ahead of the other neoliberal party, the Liberals. But this column by Amir Khadir, a Québec solidaire member of the Quebec national assembly, seems a good place to start. It was published on the editorial page of today’s issue of the Montréal daily Le Devoir. My translation.

– Richard Fidler, August 20, 2015

* * *

Federal leaders must come up with a substitute for oil

by Amir Khadir

Photo by Jacques Nadeau, Le Devoir

The longest election campaign in recent Canadian history is an opportunity to point to the contradictions of the major parties on the question of ecology. If there is one issue that touches simultaneously on economic development, the protection of ecosystems, public health, climate warming, transportation and the legitimacy of public institutions, it is the exploitation of the tar sands and the many pipeline projects for exporting the most polluting oil in the world.

Let’s say it straightaway: No federal party at this time has a credible plan to get out of hydrocarbons. They have not said where they stand on controversial projects like Old Harry, Anticosti or shale gas.[1] As long as Quebec remains in the Canadian federation, the Québécois are entitled to demand more from the parties that hope to govern in Ottawa, and that they take decisions that measure up to the issues of the 21^st century.

It is in good taste to say that economy and environment should not conflict. However, we often overlook the contradictions between the imperative of unlimited growth of tar sands operations and the fight against climate change.

Oil interests

A brilliant journalist of the Toronto Star, Linda McQuaig, running for the NDP in Toronto, put her finger on the problem. During a television debate, she reminded us of an obvious fact on which there is scientific consensus: a large quantity of tar sands will have to remain below the ground if Canada hopes to achieve its objectives in the fight against climate change.

This simple factual statement unleashed a media storm in which all the leaders, including [the NDP’s] Thomas Mulcair, took their distance from this position. “When men cannot change things, they change the words,” said Jean Jaurès. And that’s exactly what happened.

These leaders hurried to characterize the New Democrat candidate’s statement as extreme! And to reiterate their support for the energy industry under the pretext that it provides well-paid jobs. Of course, since no one is against virtue, sustainable development, social acceptability and renewable energies, each was quick to promise environmental assessments, forgetting that these are all too often entrusted to agencies heavily influenced by people from the industry, in particular the oil industry.

In the end, the oil interests have imposed themselves on the politicians, twisting the meaning of words and harping on “business as usual.” Canadian petropolitics requires that no one disrupt the dominant economic and energy paradigm, where powerful fortunes have an interest in ensuring that nothing changes.

Pipelines of dissent

Another example of ambiguity on the part of the major federal parties concerns their positions on the many pipeline projects. In Quebec, we are of course concerned about TransCanada’s Energy East project, which will convey 1.1 million barrels of oil per day for export abroad, with tiny economic benefits and increased risks to hundreds of waterways and local communities. But there are also the Northern Gateway, Keystone XL and Kinder Morgan projects, as well as the projects for exploration and drilling in the deep waters of the Arctic and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

In the case of Energy East, it is clear that the interests of Quebec are opposed to those of the economic elite that dominates Canadian politics. From this standpoint, petroleum is not only a national issue for us as Quebec independentists, it is also an environmental and social issue affecting the people of Quebec, the people of Canada, the First Nations and the entire planet!

What is desperately lacking in this election campaign is a global vision, a desirable, viable and realizable solution that will replace the relentless exploitation of hydrocarbons. In short, a credible plan that starts from “where we are now” and shows us the path to follow “to where we want to go.” This is not utopian, but showing realism, to carry out an energy transition toward a post-carbon economy by 2050.

As the philosopher André Gorz pointed out, it is time to think from back to front, to define the changes to be made by looking at the goal to be achieved and not to set the goals by starting with the interests of those who resist change. It is necessary, therefore, to go beyond a mere papering over of the current petropolitics. We need a prosperity based on sources of sustainable and ecologically responsible energy.

---

[1] Old Harry is a project to mine hydrocarbons under the sea floor in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the nautical boundary between Quebec and Newfoundland. Anticosti is the largest island in Quebec’s St. Lawrence river, where oil companies have been authorized by the Quebec government to conduct exploratory drilling for shale oil and gas.