1. Ecuador's "national revolution" began as a reaction against Bonaparte's extension of French capitalism to Spain, cannonading the tricolor and imperial crown onto the Bourbon throne. In this, its origins in reaction, the Ecuadorean "revolution" is not so far removed from the beginnings of the French Revolution itself-- brought forward first by the reaction of the aristocracy against the "progressive," national measures of the crown.
But that's where the parallel ends. While the peninsulares pretended to be an aristocracy, the criollos couldn't quite make it as the bourgeoisie.
In a rebellion against usurped colonial rule and for the restoration of the Bourbon king, Quito's criollos ousted Bonaparte's agents....but not for long. As soon as "loyalist" troops approached, the criollos abdicated power, hoping to avoid reprisal and retribution. They had no such luck.
The criollos had initiated a revolt against colonial rule in loyalty to colonial rule. Tripping over their own feet, the criollos make their entrance onto the stage of history with their pratfall nationalism, providing overture and coda to the development of bourgeois rule in developing Ecuador. Confusion, misstep, cowardice in everything save exploitation and oppression of the indigenous people was the singular contribution of the criollos to liberation from Spain.
2. The criollos of Quito emerge as attendants to an economy of forced labor, of compulsory exports, of the repressed and depressed domestic market. As such they inherit servility; they exhibit equivocation. They are, by the terms of historical origin, inadequate to the tasks of emancipation. They are detached from the organization of property and labor that could transform them from agents into owners; that would propel them into leadership. Only the merchant, trading bourgeoisie of Guayaquil have the attachment to bourgeois property that permits them to proclaim the indentity of patriotism, freedom, and commerce.
In October 1820, independence is proclaimed in Guayaquil by a junta under the leadership of the poet, Jose Joaquin Olmedo. But the criollos of Quito are silent. They lack a voice, even the voice of the second-rate bourgeoisie of Guayaquil which is strong enough, at least, to appeal to foreign allies, in Venezuela, in Argentina for the armies they themselves are to weak to raise, organize, lead.
Bolivar dispatches Antonio Jose de Sucre Alcala at the head of a detachment from his army of continental liberation. Sucre achieves a number of successes only to be defeated at Ambato at which point, he appeals to a foreign ally, Jose de San Martin of Argentina with his southern army of liberation. San Martin sends Andres de Santa Cruz Calahumana and 1400 troops to aid the "patriotic" army of foreigners, the international army of national liberation. And finally, on May 24, 1822, after the Battle of Pichincha, on the slopes of a volcano outside Quito, the Audencia of Quito is overturned. Ecuador is freed from the formality of Spanish rule; from Spanish administration. But the legacy of Spain, of conquistadore, of encomienda, of mita, of obrajes, of hacienda, and of course of peninsulares, criollos, and indigenas, remains and informs the future.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Sunday, November 13, 2005
The Importance of Being Ecuador, 2
1. Division
The territory that was to become Ecuador was divided economically and ethnographically by coast, the Costa; by mountain, the Sierra, and to the east, the jungle, known as Oriente . The coast was inhabited by four major indigenous groups, the Esmeralda, the Manta, the Huancavilca, and the Puna. Hunters, fishers, traders, these groups traveled by sea along the coast of South America and also maintained an exchange of fish for salt with the inland, mountain groups.
The valleys and mountainsides inland were populated by the Pasto, the Caro, the Panzaleo, the Puruha, the Canari, and the Palta groups. Cultivation of maize, beans, potatoes, quinoa and fruits was widespread, with extensive systems of irrigation supporting agricultural production.
In the 15th century, northward expansion of the Inca empire from Cuzco was strongly contested in both the coast and the highlands. The resistance of the Canari and Cara peoples and all the groups on the coast around the Gulf of Guayaquil lasted for forty years, outlasting the 9th Inca, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui; his son, the 10th Inca, Topa who conquered Quito but not the coast; succumbing about 1500 to Topa's son, Huayna Capac.
The Inca introduced new crops to both mountain and coastal agriculture-- sweet potatoes, yucca, coca, peanuts. Land was proclaimed the property of the emperor; land was worked collectively by groups of families called allyu. Each family in the allyu also held small plots of land for their own consumption.
2. Dis-integration
The Spanish conquest was the destruction of the Inca empire's unique integration and autonomy of the region. Spanish rule was the economics of extraction and wages of extraction are economic dis-integration.
Lacking the apparent and accessible mineral wealth of other territories of the Inca, the indigenous people of Ecuador were spared the deadly mita exacted in servicing the silver, mercury, and tin mines of Peru and Bolivia. Instead the people of the Sierra labored in the workshops, obraje, chained to looms and producing the clothing of wool and cotton exported to Spain.
On the coast, Guayaquil was the center for shipping and trade, and although intra-American trade was prohibited by the Spanish mercantilist monarchy, Guayaquil served just such an extensive trade in hardwoods, textiles, and coca.
In the 18th century, the rise of British capitalism, the expansion of English textile manufacturing protected by its very own mercantilism, increased economic pressure on Spanish monarchy. Mother country and its mercantile satellite fell into extended and severe depression. It is estimated that textile production in Ecuador declined 75 percent between beginning and end of the century. The cities decayed, and the ruling elites were compelled to sell their jewelry an their haciendas to survive. In this the peninsulares and criollos of Spanish rule in Ecuador brought to themselves a taste of the life they had imposed on the indigenous peoples: production for export based, at best, on subsistence; production for export requiring always, and sooner or later, sub-subsistence.
3. Gran Plan Colombia
The Spanish royalty confronted its economics of dis-integration with re-formation of its agency of political authority, the Viceroyalty. In 1720, the Quito audiencia (sub-viceroyalty, or court) was transferred for the Viceroyalty of Peru to that of the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, headquartered in Bogota, Colombia.
In this re-formation the Quito based elite was awarded jurisdictional autonomy over local political and military matters, basically the exploitation of the indigenous people.
The award carried a cost and the cost was the redistricting of the audiencia. The southern and eastern borders of the audiencia were reduced with territory transferred to other viceroyalties. This shrinkage by decree and degree continued into the 19th century. In 1802, Quijos and Mainas provinces in the Oriente were transferred out of the Quito audiencia. Well before Bolivar's attempt at liberation and integration through the plan of Gran Colombia; before the US even dreamed of replacing Spain as the royal family of Latin America; the Spanish had attempted a post pre-Columbian pre-Plan Colombia Plan Colombia.
The territory that was to become Ecuador was divided economically and ethnographically by coast, the Costa; by mountain, the Sierra, and to the east, the jungle, known as Oriente . The coast was inhabited by four major indigenous groups, the Esmeralda, the Manta, the Huancavilca, and the Puna. Hunters, fishers, traders, these groups traveled by sea along the coast of South America and also maintained an exchange of fish for salt with the inland, mountain groups.
The valleys and mountainsides inland were populated by the Pasto, the Caro, the Panzaleo, the Puruha, the Canari, and the Palta groups. Cultivation of maize, beans, potatoes, quinoa and fruits was widespread, with extensive systems of irrigation supporting agricultural production.
In the 15th century, northward expansion of the Inca empire from Cuzco was strongly contested in both the coast and the highlands. The resistance of the Canari and Cara peoples and all the groups on the coast around the Gulf of Guayaquil lasted for forty years, outlasting the 9th Inca, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui; his son, the 10th Inca, Topa who conquered Quito but not the coast; succumbing about 1500 to Topa's son, Huayna Capac.
The Inca introduced new crops to both mountain and coastal agriculture-- sweet potatoes, yucca, coca, peanuts. Land was proclaimed the property of the emperor; land was worked collectively by groups of families called allyu. Each family in the allyu also held small plots of land for their own consumption.
2. Dis-integration
The Spanish conquest was the destruction of the Inca empire's unique integration and autonomy of the region. Spanish rule was the economics of extraction and wages of extraction are economic dis-integration.
Lacking the apparent and accessible mineral wealth of other territories of the Inca, the indigenous people of Ecuador were spared the deadly mita exacted in servicing the silver, mercury, and tin mines of Peru and Bolivia. Instead the people of the Sierra labored in the workshops, obraje, chained to looms and producing the clothing of wool and cotton exported to Spain.
On the coast, Guayaquil was the center for shipping and trade, and although intra-American trade was prohibited by the Spanish mercantilist monarchy, Guayaquil served just such an extensive trade in hardwoods, textiles, and coca.
In the 18th century, the rise of British capitalism, the expansion of English textile manufacturing protected by its very own mercantilism, increased economic pressure on Spanish monarchy. Mother country and its mercantile satellite fell into extended and severe depression. It is estimated that textile production in Ecuador declined 75 percent between beginning and end of the century. The cities decayed, and the ruling elites were compelled to sell their jewelry an their haciendas to survive. In this the peninsulares and criollos of Spanish rule in Ecuador brought to themselves a taste of the life they had imposed on the indigenous peoples: production for export based, at best, on subsistence; production for export requiring always, and sooner or later, sub-subsistence.
3. Gran Plan Colombia
The Spanish royalty confronted its economics of dis-integration with re-formation of its agency of political authority, the Viceroyalty. In 1720, the Quito audiencia (sub-viceroyalty, or court) was transferred for the Viceroyalty of Peru to that of the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, headquartered in Bogota, Colombia.
In this re-formation the Quito based elite was awarded jurisdictional autonomy over local political and military matters, basically the exploitation of the indigenous people.
The award carried a cost and the cost was the redistricting of the audiencia. The southern and eastern borders of the audiencia were reduced with territory transferred to other viceroyalties. This shrinkage by decree and degree continued into the 19th century. In 1802, Quijos and Mainas provinces in the Oriente were transferred out of the Quito audiencia. Well before Bolivar's attempt at liberation and integration through the plan of Gran Colombia; before the US even dreamed of replacing Spain as the royal family of Latin America; the Spanish had attempted a post pre-Columbian pre-Plan Colombia Plan Colombia.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
The Importance of Being Ecuador, 1
1. Cartels
Hard on the heels of OPEC's 1999 "3rd time's the charm" price increase, the US provided a spike of its own with its 2000 "Plan Colombia." No surprise there; what Saudi Arabia is to oil reserves, home to the largest and most profitable, the US is to guns and death squads. The US Congress authorized $1.3 billion to kit out the Colombian military with latest in counter-drug, counter- insurgency armaments. The size of the appropriation made it clear that there would be enough materiel to go around. There would be enough for the military and political officials to sell to the drug cartels thus offsetting any drop in their own income in the unlikely event the military actually interrupted the drug commerce; and enough to resupply the FARC and ELN militias who would tax the drug producers, accepting payment in weapons and ammunition. Who says the market is not the most perfect of mechanisms for the distribution of resources?
Of course the elements of the "plan" had existed prior to its designation as Colombian, prior to 2000, prior to 1999. More packaging than plan (everything under capital is more packaging than plan), more regional than Colombian, the United States ruling class had begun assembling the components after ceding control of the Panama Canal and Canal Zone to Panama. That, in conjunction with and under the cover of "drug interdiction," led the US to negotiate for and obtain "forward operating locations" (FOLs) from governments in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The FOLs were/are military bases from which the US military can conduct, and sub-contract, surveillance, interdiction, and insertion operations against.... against everything and anything. FOLs have been used to base air surveillance of the Andean countries; to intercept, and interrogate those attempting "unauthorized" immigration into the United States; for insertion of military advisors into conflict zones.
And since repackaging failed policies-- like reincorporating and renaming bankrupt companies, is essential to capitalism, indispensable for maintaining cash-flow-- each year of big bucks and little bangs brings forth pre-Plan Colombia and Plan Colombia repackaged as expanded regional initiatives, involving Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil (in 1999 Chavez began limiting and withdrawing Venezuela's participation US anti-drug schemes).
In1999, Ecuador agreed to a 10 year lease by the United States for the Eloy Alfaro airbase at Manta on the Pacific Coast. While the advertised function of the US at Manta is "aerial detection, monitoring, tracking, and control of illegal narcotics activity," US actions have included naval intercepts of ships suspected of carrying "illegal immigrants," and accumulating intelligence regarding guerrilla fighters and movements of indigenous people on the shared border of Colombia and Ecuador.
Under Plan Colombian, the Colombia military was to take the war to the FARC and ELN guerrillas, covering anti-left warfare as anti-drug intervention; securing the benefits of pipeline capitalism for... for the pipeline capitalists, of course. But the Colombian military, armed and transported by the US has failed to isolate, encircle, and destroy the guerrillas of the FARC.
The FARC military and political command has been able to secure and protect rear areas, establishing bases in the Colombian region of Putumayo.
Unable to penetrate and control the Putumayo, Colombian military actions have created waves of refugees, with estimates of up to 75,000 Colombians forced into and through the Putamayo to seek safety in Ecuador. The FARC itself has reportedly set up areas for medical treatment of its fighters on Ecuador's side of the border with Putamayo.
Putamayo, surprisingly enough, is the area in Colombia considered the most promising for future exploration, discovery, and development of oil reserves. Or maybe not so surpisingly, since Putumayo borders the Ecuadorian areas of Sucumbios and Orellana, the two regions responsible for Ecuador's daily 500,000 barrels oil production; the two areas explored, exploited, and fouled by Petroecuador and the international oil majors, ChevronTexaco, Occidental Petroleum, Encana: two areas that, prior to 1967, were inhabited by indigenous tribes that recognized neither Ecuador nor Colombia, much less a border between Ecuador and Colombia; two areas where the indigenous peoples have been brought "forward" from their "archaic" past of isolation to the thoroughly modern conditions of advanced extraction capitalism-- the conditions of immiseration, oppression, and abandonment.
Since 2001, the US has added yet added another component to the identity of the enemy to be targeted by Plan Pipeline-- that of the indigenous peoples. And in a burst of serendipity, or radical simplification, or co-branding, the US found the one word, that ultimate in packaging, to describe them-- the Marxist guerrillas, the cocaine growers and manufacturers, the indigenous peoples-- all, and all of them: Testifying before a US House of Representatives subcommittee, US undersecretary of state, Richard Armitage announced that Al Qaeda cells were operating near Ecuador's borders with Colombia and Peru. There was the word, the package that was the best and the worst of times, the apex and nadir of capital, the fear and greed and trembling all in one: terrorists.
Hard on the heels of OPEC's 1999 "3rd time's the charm" price increase, the US provided a spike of its own with its 2000 "Plan Colombia." No surprise there; what Saudi Arabia is to oil reserves, home to the largest and most profitable, the US is to guns and death squads. The US Congress authorized $1.3 billion to kit out the Colombian military with latest in counter-drug, counter- insurgency armaments. The size of the appropriation made it clear that there would be enough materiel to go around. There would be enough for the military and political officials to sell to the drug cartels thus offsetting any drop in their own income in the unlikely event the military actually interrupted the drug commerce; and enough to resupply the FARC and ELN militias who would tax the drug producers, accepting payment in weapons and ammunition. Who says the market is not the most perfect of mechanisms for the distribution of resources?
Of course the elements of the "plan" had existed prior to its designation as Colombian, prior to 2000, prior to 1999. More packaging than plan (everything under capital is more packaging than plan), more regional than Colombian, the United States ruling class had begun assembling the components after ceding control of the Panama Canal and Canal Zone to Panama. That, in conjunction with and under the cover of "drug interdiction," led the US to negotiate for and obtain "forward operating locations" (FOLs) from governments in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The FOLs were/are military bases from which the US military can conduct, and sub-contract, surveillance, interdiction, and insertion operations against.... against everything and anything. FOLs have been used to base air surveillance of the Andean countries; to intercept, and interrogate those attempting "unauthorized" immigration into the United States; for insertion of military advisors into conflict zones.
And since repackaging failed policies-- like reincorporating and renaming bankrupt companies, is essential to capitalism, indispensable for maintaining cash-flow-- each year of big bucks and little bangs brings forth pre-Plan Colombia and Plan Colombia repackaged as expanded regional initiatives, involving Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil (in 1999 Chavez began limiting and withdrawing Venezuela's participation US anti-drug schemes).
In1999, Ecuador agreed to a 10 year lease by the United States for the Eloy Alfaro airbase at Manta on the Pacific Coast. While the advertised function of the US at Manta is "aerial detection, monitoring, tracking, and control of illegal narcotics activity," US actions have included naval intercepts of ships suspected of carrying "illegal immigrants," and accumulating intelligence regarding guerrilla fighters and movements of indigenous people on the shared border of Colombia and Ecuador.
Under Plan Colombian, the Colombia military was to take the war to the FARC and ELN guerrillas, covering anti-left warfare as anti-drug intervention; securing the benefits of pipeline capitalism for... for the pipeline capitalists, of course. But the Colombian military, armed and transported by the US has failed to isolate, encircle, and destroy the guerrillas of the FARC.
The FARC military and political command has been able to secure and protect rear areas, establishing bases in the Colombian region of Putumayo.
Unable to penetrate and control the Putumayo, Colombian military actions have created waves of refugees, with estimates of up to 75,000 Colombians forced into and through the Putamayo to seek safety in Ecuador. The FARC itself has reportedly set up areas for medical treatment of its fighters on Ecuador's side of the border with Putamayo.
Putamayo, surprisingly enough, is the area in Colombia considered the most promising for future exploration, discovery, and development of oil reserves. Or maybe not so surpisingly, since Putumayo borders the Ecuadorian areas of Sucumbios and Orellana, the two regions responsible for Ecuador's daily 500,000 barrels oil production; the two areas explored, exploited, and fouled by Petroecuador and the international oil majors, ChevronTexaco, Occidental Petroleum, Encana: two areas that, prior to 1967, were inhabited by indigenous tribes that recognized neither Ecuador nor Colombia, much less a border between Ecuador and Colombia; two areas where the indigenous peoples have been brought "forward" from their "archaic" past of isolation to the thoroughly modern conditions of advanced extraction capitalism-- the conditions of immiseration, oppression, and abandonment.
Since 2001, the US has added yet added another component to the identity of the enemy to be targeted by Plan Pipeline-- that of the indigenous peoples. And in a burst of serendipity, or radical simplification, or co-branding, the US found the one word, that ultimate in packaging, to describe them-- the Marxist guerrillas, the cocaine growers and manufacturers, the indigenous peoples-- all, and all of them: Testifying before a US House of Representatives subcommittee, US undersecretary of state, Richard Armitage announced that Al Qaeda cells were operating near Ecuador's borders with Colombia and Peru. There was the word, the package that was the best and the worst of times, the apex and nadir of capital, the fear and greed and trembling all in one: terrorists.
2. Nation(s)
If historically the nation is the product, the symbol, and the package of the bourgeoisie's triumph over its predecessors; over the pre-conditions of its own existence; over feudal and near-feudal conditions of land and labor; of its unification of city and countryside into a home market-- if all that, then Ecuador was formed in the defeat, the strangulation of that revolutionary impulse of capital. Ecuador preserved in its very creation the power of those predecessors, those pre-conditions, that feudal and near-feudal relations of land and labor, that divergence between city and countryside, that insignificance of the home market.
And all these, these indexes of backwardness, these bundled incapacities, were/are but facets of capital's thoroughly modern incapability: the inability to emancipate the labor of the indigenous people. Capital's gleaming failure is the dirty secret to it tarnished success. And that success is the preservation of private property. In its preservation of the legacy of indentured labor, in its maintenance of the miserable, impoverished terms of labor, capital maintains its miserable, impoverished self.
From the 16th century, when half the indigenous population were confined to the slavery of the encomienda system through the late 20th century when 2/3 of the rural indigenous population served the hacienda economy, the huasipungo, by laboring 4 days of every week for the hacienda owners, through the 21st century where the national and international oil companies have destroyed the environment, the culture of the indigenous peoples, the oppression of the indigenous peoples has been the bedrock upon which church and state have rested.
In February 2004, the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights of the OAS ordered the government of Ecuador to protect Leonide Iza, leader of the Congress of Indigenous Natives of Ecuador, from threats of assault and assassination. Responded Ecuador's then Minister of Energy and Mines, "The OAS doesn't give orders here." So does capital preserve the haciendaist in its modern terms of expropriation.
S. Artesian, October 22, 2005.
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, September 11, 2005
The Sinking of New Orleans
1. As if..
Capital's identity and contradiction, identity in contradiction, in relations of production-- private property, ownership, profit-- and means of social production-- improved methods of transportation, communication, circulation-- endows it with an "as if" personality. Capital's agents and owners act as if every action ensuring private property and profit is also an action to better social development, improve infrastructure, a greater good for the greater whole.
The as if personality, the as if class cares for nothing but appropriates everything. The as if class pretends that development, progress, is inherent in the aggrandizement of wage-labor, imminent in poverty. The as if class creates the personality that pretends, poses, imposes. It recreates itself through the reproduction of pretenders, posers, impostors, charlatans, failures, fuck-ups, greeters and calls them entrepreneurs.
Capital's identity and contradiction, identity in contradiction, in relations of production-- private property, ownership, profit-- and means of social production-- improved methods of transportation, communication, circulation-- endows it with an "as if" personality. Capital's agents and owners act as if every action ensuring private property and profit is also an action to better social development, improve infrastructure, a greater good for the greater whole.
The as if personality, the as if class cares for nothing but appropriates everything. The as if class pretends that development, progress, is inherent in the aggrandizement of wage-labor, imminent in poverty. The as if class creates the personality that pretends, poses, imposes. It recreates itself through the reproduction of pretenders, posers, impostors, charlatans, failures, fuck-ups, greeters and calls them entrepreneurs.
2. Less Than Zero
At beginning and end, and every point between, the maintenance of bourgeois property and of the as if class requires denial and disavowal of reality. Responsibility is replaced by surprise, by shock, by real and feigned ignorance. The ideological alibis of the ruling class' agents change from the DC Watergate "I don't recall. I don't recollect," to the New Orleans Floodgate of "We didn't know. Who would have guessed?"
Accounting and accountability are screens for the destruction of assets; screens onto which the destruction of assets is projected as progress, growth, development, expansion--as creativity, creation, as intelligent design.
With the disavowal of reality, "loss of affect" is transformed from a highly subjective description of an emotional state to a historical necessity, a prerequisite for the accumulation and protection of bourgeois property. The bourgeoisie selects as its agents, its perfect representatives, not murderous psychopaths governed by a personal need to kill, to destroy; but rather compliant, facile, sociopaths governing by the larger class need to allow, potentiate, accelerate the murder and destruction inherent in capital's compressed identity. We get a government not of Ted Bundy's, but matchmakers for Ted Bundy; a government of dating services, chat rooms, for Ted Bundy capitalism.
3. As ifers...
The agents of the bourgeoisie pretend to be responsible; pretend to listen to "neutral," "objective," "scientific" assessments of danger, natural and social; they act as if preparations have been made; they pose as competent, deliberative, organized, capable. "Shock" follows exposure of incompetence, ignorance, failure. And the follow up to shock is a "mobilization" that only carries through to the bitterest of ends the prior destructive passivity.
The government is on vacation; the government acts as if it is monitoring the situation; the government acts as if it has been briefed; the government acts as if surprised; the government. acts as if shocked, appalled, sympathetic, remorseful, grieving, sorrowful. The government acts as if it will shorten its vacation; the government acts as if it is mobilizing; the government acts as if has assumed command and control; the government acts as if it will provide, will restore, will rebuild. The government is a government of by and for as ifers.
Rice needs another pair of shoes to govern effectively, as if that befits a secretary of state; Bush acts as if... Rumsfeld acts as if... Cheney acts as if...Brown acts as if....Chertoff...acts as if...
Meanwhile the destruction of the hurricane is furthered by neglect. Then the destruction of the hurricane is capitalized, literally, by deportation, forced expulsion, of the population; the letting of contracts without bid, without control, without command.
More as if is organized and distributed as the government, executive and legislative, vows to investigate, to probe, to determine, to assign, to determine, to rectify... As if the government is capable of anything more than as if..
Meanwhile, the as if government has a vision for the future of an as if New Orleans; and that vision is Nigeria, or Sucumbios in Ecuador, or, and at best, Santa Cruz in Bolivia enclaves of, by and for extraction capitalism
Response and opposition to as if begins with opposition to the invasion and occupation of the city by the military, by the mercenaries, by the contractors.
S. Artesian 91105
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
This material may be freely reproduced provided the source is credited.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Like Oil and Water....Land and Labor...Then and Now
1. The Persistence of Memory
Revolutions are born, so to speak, in the breach, the rupture between the means and relations of production, the struggle between private property and collective labor. And the birth itself is often breech, the delivery being ass-backwards, feet first; so that the revolutionary agent sees its future in the unfulfilled wishes of the past.
The old relations of production cling to emerging revolution like an umbilical cord, and a tether. So that the opportunity for the success of a new society, for the triumph of the ruled, the dispossessed, the expropriated, appears to reconstruct the failures of the old society, to repeat past defeats, to confirm the impossibility of revolution, to re-form the collapsing relations of capital, of private property.
Where labor has been collectively indentured to landed property, where capitalism has proven itself capable of absorbing, but not breaking the archaic relations of land and labor, the revolution imagines a solution in the fragmenting of estates, the individual ownership of small parcels, the transformation of tenants, and landless, into peasants and peasants into farmers.
In the first page of his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx analyzes just this reverse self-projection of the revolutionary forces, their compulsion to cover themselves with the cloth of the past. There Marx writes, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." Nightmare it is and the nightmare weighs in as a dream-- a dream of happy pastoralism, of rural democracy, of "subsistence-plus" agriculture providing just the right things in the right amounts to markets of just the right size; a dream of farmers' communism.
Revolutions are born, so to speak, in the breach, the rupture between the means and relations of production, the struggle between private property and collective labor. And the birth itself is often breech, the delivery being ass-backwards, feet first; so that the revolutionary agent sees its future in the unfulfilled wishes of the past.
The old relations of production cling to emerging revolution like an umbilical cord, and a tether. So that the opportunity for the success of a new society, for the triumph of the ruled, the dispossessed, the expropriated, appears to reconstruct the failures of the old society, to repeat past defeats, to confirm the impossibility of revolution, to re-form the collapsing relations of capital, of private property.
Where labor has been collectively indentured to landed property, where capitalism has proven itself capable of absorbing, but not breaking the archaic relations of land and labor, the revolution imagines a solution in the fragmenting of estates, the individual ownership of small parcels, the transformation of tenants, and landless, into peasants and peasants into farmers.
In the first page of his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx analyzes just this reverse self-projection of the revolutionary forces, their compulsion to cover themselves with the cloth of the past. There Marx writes, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." Nightmare it is and the nightmare weighs in as a dream-- a dream of happy pastoralism, of rural democracy, of "subsistence-plus" agriculture providing just the right things in the right amounts to markets of just the right size; a dream of farmers' communism.
2. Terms and Conditions
At origin capitalism distiguishes itself from its predecessors, and from coincident modes, through the enforced separation of land and labor. A specific relationship is established in this specific form of separation. Ownership, private property, exists as a condition of production. Ownership appears as a value in itself, as wealth in itself but essentially, ownership only has value to that degree that it transforms itself, is "lost," into the production of exchange values. The separation, expulsion of labor from land, is the source of that exchange value. Labor finds itself without use. The "owner" of the labor finds it useless, save for its value in exchange for the means of subsistence. Ownership of land, its organization as production for exchange, the expulsion of labor, and the engagement of labor power are the necessary, and coincident, opposites forming the totality, the identity of capitalism. Each exists only in the other.
Agriculture is transformed from a means of survival to a method of accumulation. Land becomes a value to be exchanged, piecemeal as products, or in total and all at once in outright purchase and sale; and in the assumption of debt.
Land as capital maintains its value as private property to the extent that it reproduces the expulsion of labor and the appropriation of labor power. And in this process, capital necessarily undermines ownership itself.
Property is private, sanctified, beatified even; but exchange, and the production of exchange, is a vulgar, profane, social process. Production, as private property, has to prove itself, never once but always eternally in the markets as social, as necessary, as useful. Ownership is subject to social validation, a validation that carries directly to the bottom line, a validation that materializes as profit. Simultaneous with the reemergence of capital as socially necessary, as certified, as profit, the profit loses its divine status. Profit must be restored to the organization of capital-- to the expulsion of labor from use, from ownership, from land, from the means of production.
It is not the markets that drives this process forward. It is this "genetic" make-up of capital, this metabolism of expulsion and engagement of labor, that drives production and the markets; that drives production into and even against the limitations of the markets.
Production for exchange subordinates consumption to the process of reproduction of capital. Where before markets are itinerant, transitory, limited by geography and climate, capital pushes them forward as permanent, universal, supra-natural, and supra-national. Surplus is transformed from a happy accident, a gift of nature, into the purpose, the subject of production. Accumulation of the realized surplus values becomes its object.
Capital, at once narcissistic and universal, sees itself in every moment of exchange, in every article of exchange brought to the markets. But the actuality of capitalist development is uneven, particular, mediated. Capital absorbs into itself, and embeds itself within, the pre-existing, archaic modes of expropriation. At one and the same time the bonds of private property and exchange tie capital into the preservation of landed property, the maintenance of indentured, "unfree," undispossessed labor, while the needs of capitalist production require the access to and expulsion of "free" labor, and thus the undermining of that same property.
History and Class, Bolivia Then and Now
The legacy of colonialism in Latin America is the legacy of indentured labor. The legacy of Spanish colonialism in Bolivia is the indentured labor of the indigenous peoples, the systems of the encomienda in the countryside, of the mita in the mining centers, of the alcabala . The legacy of the Bolivarian Revolution of the 19th century is the failure overturn and destroy the legacy of indentured labor; preserving instead the hacienda system, and its complementary opposite, subsistence agriculture, each and each other manifested in pongaje, peon labor.
The failure of the national revolution and the rule of the MNR from 1952-1964 was in its attempt to establish "idealized," "free," capitalist agriculture in the countryside through the conversion of the indigenous rural laborers and peasants into small capitalist farmers.
Upon seizing power, the MNR undertook extensive land tenure and political reform programs to enfranchise, and "property" the rural populations. Universal suffrage without property or literacy requirements was enacted, quintupling the size of the electorate.
The mines of the three major companies, Patino, Hochschild, and Aramayo, were nationalized.
The MNR took its main political inspiration not from the Russian Revolution, but from the Mexican Revolution; not from the Bolsheviks, but from the PRI. The hacienda system was attacked, with land distributed to rural tenants, but the hacienda system was not expropriated. Owners received generous compensation. Transfer of title to land was never made complete as most indigenous people did not have "suitable" documentation of either their own identities, or their historical claims to land.
Most importantly, production was not managed collectively. The hacienda system itself never created a developed, sustained, agricultural output. Indeed its survival was based upon a poorly developed infrastructure, isolation from internal and external market forces, and the absence of advanced technical inputs like irrigation and electric power.
Division of the hacienda system into small parcels only made the development of the supporting structure for agricultural growth more difficult, more expensive, for the MNR.
On a deeper level, however, this legacy of underdevelopment is intractable in the face of individual, peasant ownership. Capitalism at its origin, in its whole history, has never been established on the basis of individual peasant ownership. Just the contrary, capitalist agriculture begins with the expulsion of the peasantry from ownership, the expropriation of the land and its conversion from means of subsistence to means of exchange.
In Bolivia, the lack of infrastructure, the lack of technical development, combined with the individual parceling of the landed estates, pushed the rural populations back to subsistence production, without product or access to markets.
The indigenous rural populations of Bolivia had never been organized around individual, peasant production. The original, pre-colonial forms of agriculture had been based on communal ownership and communal production. The "settling" of the indigenous people as tenants on haciendas was rooted in more than the destruction of those communal forms. It was rooted in the decline of the colonial mines, a "pre-deindustrialization" so to speak, that forced the indigenous workers into the hacienda forms of tenancy, peonage, indentured labor.
During the MNR 1952-1964 tenure, the fragmentation of large estates into parcels of direct ownership and self-labor, without adequate infrastructure development debilitated agricultural output, and exhausted the land.
The MNR's policy, this agricultural oxymoron, to make subsistence production and labor the basis for capitalism, when capitalism is based on the expulsion of labor as the means to the end of subsistence production, fed into the economic collapse that engulfed Bolivia.
In desperate attempts to control the rural population in the countryside, and the workers in the mines, the MNR turned to the US to resupply, retrain, and reorganize Bolivia's military. Thus the democratic revolution of 1952 organized its own overthrow in 1964.
Like Oil and Water...and Land and Labor... and Santa Cruz
Between 1971 and 1978, the Hugo Banzer's military government in Bolivia distributed some 30 million hectares of publicly owned land in the Santa Cruz and Beni departments. The land was distributed in large units to few individuals, creating what has been called the "neo-latifundismo."
In Santa Cruz and Beni, extensive tracts, given extensive financial credits and technical support, have resulted in significant expansions in soybean, cattle, cotton, and timber production. These areas of "true" "modern" capitalist agriculture are the product of international penetration, rather than "national revolution." The Banzer regime relied upon two pillars for support, the bayonet and the international banks to protect and subsidize its economic policies.
And who received these subsidies, these credits, this support for a truly modern capitalist agriculture? The new latifundistas of Santa Cruz are not the offspring of the old latifundistas, the offspring of the haciendistas. The modern farmers of Santa Cruz are Mennonites from North America, Japanese, Okinawan migrants, and Brazilian investors.
As the oil companies and their agents in Santa Cruz are international in production, in ownership, in exchange, so is the capitalization of agriculture in Santa Cruz. Soybean production has transformed itself from simple export of the primary product into increased imports of soybeans, and processing of both imported and local production into oils and cake for export exchange.
Oil, soybean and petroleum, describes the "modernization" of Bolivian bourgeoisie.
Both sections, the "modern sections" of the Bolivian bourgeoisie are demanding "autonomy" from La Paz. In reality, they are demanding separation from the indigenous peoples, from the rural landless, from the unemployed and dispossessed miners, from those who have felt the failure, the impossibility of the national revolution; from those who know that the only path forward-- for development, against exhaustion of the land, destruction of the environment-- is the elimination of subsistence through the collective expropriation of the means of production
S. Artesian
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Reproduction of this article may be made freely provided the source is acknowledged.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Like Oil and Water, 2
1. On May 1, 2005, the Bolivian Senate approved legislation, already approved in the Bolivian House of Representatives, instituting an effective 50% combined tax and royalty rate on gas and oil, with no credit for this tax against income taxes. Ten days later, after Mesa vetoed the energy bill, the struggle left the parliamentary arena and returned to the streets and highways of Bolivia.
Parliaments, created first as the instruments of civil war, as the instruments for the ascendancy of bourgeois property, are endured by the bourgeoisie only to the extent that they remain true to their origins, true to that form of property, by becoming their opposites; to the degree and to that degree only that parliaments functions as substitutes for civil war. As long as legislation functions to preserve private property, legislatures are tolerated. When and if legislation violates that condition, becomes a contradiction reflected back unto itself, it means parliament, and parliamentary maneuvering has become obsolete. History, sooner or later, accepts no substitutes. In Bolivia, that sooner or later is here and now.
2. Mesa vetoed the energy law and triggered his own downfall. Eleven months earlier, Mesa had initiated a national referendum on how Bolivia should exploit its natural gas resources. The results of that referendum overwhelmingly supported Mesa's stated intentions to raise royalties on production to the 50% mark, and to export gas through Peru rather than Chile.
In October 2004, Mesa sent the Bolivian Congress a new energy bill that re-nationalized Bolivia's hydrocarbon reserves, increased royalty rates, and returned regulatory control over production and export to the government. The international energy companies protested and threatened court action if the bill were enacted. The energy companies claimed the law would violate the terms of 40 year contracts the Bolivian government had signed in 1996.
International energy companies, through the good offices of the US ambassador, then entered into intensive discussions with Mesa's government where, once again, Mesa showed his ability to listen and compromise. When Mesa vetoed the legislation of May 2005, vetoing essentially the legislation he proposed in the national referendum, he cited the possible illegality of the law in nullifying the 40 year contracts.
The workers and poor of Bolivia, with a life expectancy of about 60 years, in a country with a poverty rate of 66%, and an infant mortality rate of 53 per 1000 live births, didn't want to kill time for 40 years, especially when time was killing them. By May 23, the streets of El Alto were completely in the hands of protestors. In the first week of June, three oil fields belonging to the Spanish company Repsol YPF were occupied by workers and poor. Repsol YPF has rights to 35% of Bolivia's natural gas reserves. The Chaco fields of British Petroleum were also occupied.
Proving once again that he could listen and compromise, Mesa announced, "I have only hours left as president." He was right about that.
3. The origin of the 40 year contracts was in Bolivia's Capitalization Law of 1994. The capitalization act was specifically aimed at Bolivia's major public companies: ENDE (electricity), LAB (the national airline), ENFE (railways), ENAF (smelter) , ENTEL (telecommunications), and YPFB (petroleum and natural gas). The program awarded, by international tendering of shares, 50% of the company to investors. The other 50% was designated as a national reserve "belonging" to the Bolivian people, but only through private pension funds handled by international trustees. Sound familiar? Marx, 150 years, ago advised those trying to understand the future of India to look to Britain. Today that advice is just the reverse. For those trying to understand the future of international capitalism, the future for living standards, wages, and pensions; for those trying to understand that future has already begun, the advice is to look to Bolivia, Indias, Sri Lanka, Senegal, as capitalism seeks ways to reduce living standards, to "third world" the working class everywhere.
Administrative control of the privatized company would rest solely with the private investor. This control was guaranteed by the law, by the execution of the capital contracts of purchase, and through administrative contracts for management services. The private investors maintained this control for a minimum of 5 years, or until their investment had been recuperated, or for the terms fixed in the contracts themselves. Thus 5 would get you 40, or rather 50 got you 100 for 40. Nice math, if you can get.
And the bourgeoisie got it because they tried. YPFB was split into two "upstream" (extraction and production) companies, a transport company, a refining company, and several oil and gas service companies. BP Amoco and Repsol YPF purchased 50% of the two upstream companies. Transredes, a joint venture of Enron/Royal Dutch/Shell Game, bought the natural gas transport company.
Competing against the EU/US energy majors, Argentina's YPF, Pluspetrol, and Brazil's Petrobras pushed investment in natural gas reserves and pipeline construction.
Foreign direct investment following the 1994 capitalization law soared, tripling between 1994 and 1995, doubling again between 1996 and 1998, reaching $957 million. While FDI in the energy sector peaked in 1998, total FDI peaked in 1999 at $1.017 billion, only to decline 27% in 2000.
Proven reserves of oil and gas followed the investment boom, with proven gas reserves exceeding 50 trillion cubic feet, and oil reserves tripling to 440.5 million boe.
The overinvestment in petroleum production that led to the price collapse of 1998 was reflected in a decline in the number of exploratory leases bid upon by, and awarded to, the international energy companies. While 16 blocks were awarded for exploration in 1997, only 2 were awarded in 2000. The awarded blocks provided reserves far exceeding original estimates, with proven reserves of natural gas in 2000 exceeding 1997 estimates sevenfold.
Despite this increase in reserves, annual gas production was essentially unchanged between 1995 and 2000 as infrastructure and markets were inadequate to both reserves and production capacity. Half the produced gas was being reinjected or flared off.
4. In keeping with their inability and disdain for the tasks of actually governing Bolivian society, and with international capital's love of concession, enclave, capitalism, the criollos eastern provinces bang the drum for autonomy, the autonomy of the propertyholders of the gas and oil leases, although the east is not the area of the greatest reserves. The overwhelming portion of the growth in reserves is in the Tarija region of the south. But fragmentation is the goal, and the east is where the criollos and the energy majors formed their first alliances.
Bolivia, the class struggle, is the critical manifestations of uneven and combined development-- a property organization incapable of supporting a domestic market, of "emancipating" enough labor to develop the society, coupled with the highly advanced capital intensive petroleum industry where the fixed expenditures wind up reducing the rate of return on investment, thus further depressing economic growth, and inhibiting the reproduction of capital itself. Expropriation of the expropriators is the only method for the resolution of this contradiction.
If the struggle for control of hydrocarbon reserves and production was precipitated by the capitalization law of 1994, that law itself was pre-figured in the IMF proposed, national bourgeoisie imposed, dismantling and destruction of the tin mining industry.
S. Artesian
070205
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
this material may be reproduced freely as long as the source is identified.
Parliaments, created first as the instruments of civil war, as the instruments for the ascendancy of bourgeois property, are endured by the bourgeoisie only to the extent that they remain true to their origins, true to that form of property, by becoming their opposites; to the degree and to that degree only that parliaments functions as substitutes for civil war. As long as legislation functions to preserve private property, legislatures are tolerated. When and if legislation violates that condition, becomes a contradiction reflected back unto itself, it means parliament, and parliamentary maneuvering has become obsolete. History, sooner or later, accepts no substitutes. In Bolivia, that sooner or later is here and now.
2. Mesa vetoed the energy law and triggered his own downfall. Eleven months earlier, Mesa had initiated a national referendum on how Bolivia should exploit its natural gas resources. The results of that referendum overwhelmingly supported Mesa's stated intentions to raise royalties on production to the 50% mark, and to export gas through Peru rather than Chile.
In October 2004, Mesa sent the Bolivian Congress a new energy bill that re-nationalized Bolivia's hydrocarbon reserves, increased royalty rates, and returned regulatory control over production and export to the government. The international energy companies protested and threatened court action if the bill were enacted. The energy companies claimed the law would violate the terms of 40 year contracts the Bolivian government had signed in 1996.
International energy companies, through the good offices of the US ambassador, then entered into intensive discussions with Mesa's government where, once again, Mesa showed his ability to listen and compromise. When Mesa vetoed the legislation of May 2005, vetoing essentially the legislation he proposed in the national referendum, he cited the possible illegality of the law in nullifying the 40 year contracts.
The workers and poor of Bolivia, with a life expectancy of about 60 years, in a country with a poverty rate of 66%, and an infant mortality rate of 53 per 1000 live births, didn't want to kill time for 40 years, especially when time was killing them. By May 23, the streets of El Alto were completely in the hands of protestors. In the first week of June, three oil fields belonging to the Spanish company Repsol YPF were occupied by workers and poor. Repsol YPF has rights to 35% of Bolivia's natural gas reserves. The Chaco fields of British Petroleum were also occupied.
Proving once again that he could listen and compromise, Mesa announced, "I have only hours left as president." He was right about that.
3. The origin of the 40 year contracts was in Bolivia's Capitalization Law of 1994. The capitalization act was specifically aimed at Bolivia's major public companies: ENDE (electricity), LAB (the national airline), ENFE (railways), ENAF (smelter) , ENTEL (telecommunications), and YPFB (petroleum and natural gas). The program awarded, by international tendering of shares, 50% of the company to investors. The other 50% was designated as a national reserve "belonging" to the Bolivian people, but only through private pension funds handled by international trustees. Sound familiar? Marx, 150 years, ago advised those trying to understand the future of India to look to Britain. Today that advice is just the reverse. For those trying to understand the future of international capitalism, the future for living standards, wages, and pensions; for those trying to understand that future has already begun, the advice is to look to Bolivia, Indias, Sri Lanka, Senegal, as capitalism seeks ways to reduce living standards, to "third world" the working class everywhere.
Administrative control of the privatized company would rest solely with the private investor. This control was guaranteed by the law, by the execution of the capital contracts of purchase, and through administrative contracts for management services. The private investors maintained this control for a minimum of 5 years, or until their investment had been recuperated, or for the terms fixed in the contracts themselves. Thus 5 would get you 40, or rather 50 got you 100 for 40. Nice math, if you can get.
And the bourgeoisie got it because they tried. YPFB was split into two "upstream" (extraction and production) companies, a transport company, a refining company, and several oil and gas service companies. BP Amoco and Repsol YPF purchased 50% of the two upstream companies. Transredes, a joint venture of Enron/Royal Dutch/Shell Game, bought the natural gas transport company.
Competing against the EU/US energy majors, Argentina's YPF, Pluspetrol, and Brazil's Petrobras pushed investment in natural gas reserves and pipeline construction.
Foreign direct investment following the 1994 capitalization law soared, tripling between 1994 and 1995, doubling again between 1996 and 1998, reaching $957 million. While FDI in the energy sector peaked in 1998, total FDI peaked in 1999 at $1.017 billion, only to decline 27% in 2000.
Proven reserves of oil and gas followed the investment boom, with proven gas reserves exceeding 50 trillion cubic feet, and oil reserves tripling to 440.5 million boe.
The overinvestment in petroleum production that led to the price collapse of 1998 was reflected in a decline in the number of exploratory leases bid upon by, and awarded to, the international energy companies. While 16 blocks were awarded for exploration in 1997, only 2 were awarded in 2000. The awarded blocks provided reserves far exceeding original estimates, with proven reserves of natural gas in 2000 exceeding 1997 estimates sevenfold.
Despite this increase in reserves, annual gas production was essentially unchanged between 1995 and 2000 as infrastructure and markets were inadequate to both reserves and production capacity. Half the produced gas was being reinjected or flared off.
4. In keeping with their inability and disdain for the tasks of actually governing Bolivian society, and with international capital's love of concession, enclave, capitalism, the criollos eastern provinces bang the drum for autonomy, the autonomy of the propertyholders of the gas and oil leases, although the east is not the area of the greatest reserves. The overwhelming portion of the growth in reserves is in the Tarija region of the south. But fragmentation is the goal, and the east is where the criollos and the energy majors formed their first alliances.
Bolivia, the class struggle, is the critical manifestations of uneven and combined development-- a property organization incapable of supporting a domestic market, of "emancipating" enough labor to develop the society, coupled with the highly advanced capital intensive petroleum industry where the fixed expenditures wind up reducing the rate of return on investment, thus further depressing economic growth, and inhibiting the reproduction of capital itself. Expropriation of the expropriators is the only method for the resolution of this contradiction.
If the struggle for control of hydrocarbon reserves and production was precipitated by the capitalization law of 1994, that law itself was pre-figured in the IMF proposed, national bourgeoisie imposed, dismantling and destruction of the tin mining industry.
S. Artesian
070205
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
this material may be reproduced freely as long as the source is identified.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Like Oil and Water, Part 1
1. In January 2005, Carlos Mesa, the soon-to-be ex-President of Bolivia, backtracked, partially, on the fuel price increases that had triggered mass protests and calls for his resignation, sooner rather than later. Perfect president of and for the class that can do things only partially and always backward, Mesa addressed the nation and said the he was "capable of listening and compromising."
The Bolivian people however weren't. Blockades continued. Demonstrations against privatization of resources and basic utilities gained strength.
The residents of El Alto, the city that overlooks La Paz had taken to the streets, had taken the streets, in order to drive out a French company which, after having secured private control of the city's water supply, failed to deliver the water. La Mesa capitulated to El Alto and cancelled the contract.
The table was set and Mesa was on the way down. The commanding heights of the society were the city streets, the village roads, and those belonged to the people.
Protests and demonstrations ebbed only to flow again. Since January the country has been locked in close quarters class combat.
Actions against water privatization and fuel price increases became demands for the expulsion of international oil companies and for the nationalization of the entire energy sector.
In March, Mesa threatened/promised to resign when the Bolivian Congress was reluctant to consider his proposal for a new tax rate on oil and gas extraction. With the full approval of Washington, Paris, Madrid, and Brasilia, Mesa offered a 32% tax on gas extraction, a rate that could be both reduced and deducted from income taxes.
Evo Morales, leader of the Movement for Socialism, MAS, the major opposition force both in and out of Congress with extensive ties to those blockading highways and streets, introduced a flat 50% royalty assessment against the international companies, which will prove that the difference between Mesa and Morales, in the long run, is one of percentage and not one of principle or principal.
The Congress agreed to review Mesa's plan, thus delaying the inevitable, Mesa's resignation. But first the lower house of the Bolivian Congress adopted a tax/royalty structure equal to the 50% non-deductible assessment, and the senate soon followed.
The international petroleum companies, led by Repsol and Petrobras, weighed in with threats of disinvestment if the 50% bill was enacted. Said the chief of Petrobras' Bolivian operations: "Don't take this as an irrational threat. The money is there, but if it is not going to be profitable, we will not invest it." Apparently, the ability to listen and compromise only goes so far, 50%, halfsies, being far too irrational a compromise.
But here's the joke, international investment in Bolivia's energy sector had peaked in 1998 at $605 million. In 2003, the amount invested had declined to $281 million. Overall foreign direct investment declined 45% between 2002 and 2003 to $357 million. In 2004, investment in the energy sector declined another 16% to $235 million.
So while the bourgeoisie, local and international, warned of shortfalls, disinvestment, declining production, in reality it is overproduction that has driven the workers, the poor, the landless, the indigenous peoples into the streets and across the highways to block yet another effort by capital to extract value through the extension and expansion of poverty. Profit, uncompromised profit, is the eternal and ultimate rationality of capitalism. Poverty is the once and future product, as the people of Bolivia know, of enlightenment.
S. Artesian
June 12, 2005
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
material may be used freely provided the source is credited.
The Bolivian people however weren't. Blockades continued. Demonstrations against privatization of resources and basic utilities gained strength.
The residents of El Alto, the city that overlooks La Paz had taken to the streets, had taken the streets, in order to drive out a French company which, after having secured private control of the city's water supply, failed to deliver the water. La Mesa capitulated to El Alto and cancelled the contract.
The table was set and Mesa was on the way down. The commanding heights of the society were the city streets, the village roads, and those belonged to the people.
Protests and demonstrations ebbed only to flow again. Since January the country has been locked in close quarters class combat.
Actions against water privatization and fuel price increases became demands for the expulsion of international oil companies and for the nationalization of the entire energy sector.
In March, Mesa threatened/promised to resign when the Bolivian Congress was reluctant to consider his proposal for a new tax rate on oil and gas extraction. With the full approval of Washington, Paris, Madrid, and Brasilia, Mesa offered a 32% tax on gas extraction, a rate that could be both reduced and deducted from income taxes.
Evo Morales, leader of the Movement for Socialism, MAS, the major opposition force both in and out of Congress with extensive ties to those blockading highways and streets, introduced a flat 50% royalty assessment against the international companies, which will prove that the difference between Mesa and Morales, in the long run, is one of percentage and not one of principle or principal.
The Congress agreed to review Mesa's plan, thus delaying the inevitable, Mesa's resignation. But first the lower house of the Bolivian Congress adopted a tax/royalty structure equal to the 50% non-deductible assessment, and the senate soon followed.
The international petroleum companies, led by Repsol and Petrobras, weighed in with threats of disinvestment if the 50% bill was enacted. Said the chief of Petrobras' Bolivian operations: "Don't take this as an irrational threat. The money is there, but if it is not going to be profitable, we will not invest it." Apparently, the ability to listen and compromise only goes so far, 50%, halfsies, being far too irrational a compromise.
But here's the joke, international investment in Bolivia's energy sector had peaked in 1998 at $605 million. In 2003, the amount invested had declined to $281 million. Overall foreign direct investment declined 45% between 2002 and 2003 to $357 million. In 2004, investment in the energy sector declined another 16% to $235 million.
So while the bourgeoisie, local and international, warned of shortfalls, disinvestment, declining production, in reality it is overproduction that has driven the workers, the poor, the landless, the indigenous peoples into the streets and across the highways to block yet another effort by capital to extract value through the extension and expansion of poverty. Profit, uncompromised profit, is the eternal and ultimate rationality of capitalism. Poverty is the once and future product, as the people of Bolivia know, of enlightenment.
S. Artesian
June 12, 2005
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
material may be used freely provided the source is credited.
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