1. The discovery and development of petroleum fields in the Oriente reprised the theme of export capitalism, export enclave capitalism, but with a vengeance. What was to have been a cash asset, a capital plow, turning over the rotted remains of the hacienda, of the mita, of the conquest economy, became instead the vector, the vehicle for the infiltration and subjugation of the entire economy by international debt. In this modern form of capital, debt, there was preserved, secured, the impossibility of national, capitalist development. It, the petroleum based expansion of the Ecuadorean economy, was the old rags to new oil-soaked rags story.
Earnings are a sometimes thing, but debt is forever. Between 1967 and 1974, Ecuador's foreign exchange earnings increased tenfold. The average annual rate of growth (AARG) for real GDP during this period exceed nine percent. Manufacturing GDP AARG exceeded 13 percent. But the growth of external debt far outstripped GDP growth and foreign exchange earnings. By 1979, external had grown to $4.5 billion dollars, an AARG of 60 percent in a decade.
Ecuador's debt doubled again between 1979 and 1986. Petroleum revenues increased in relation to GDP while revenues from non-petroleum commodity exports declined by 25 percent. The government increased public expenditures as a portion of the revenues from oil exports were used to subsidize consumption and finance public works. Transportation and utility infrastructure were improved as were water, and sewer systems.
By 1989, 50 percent of the goverment's budget was financed by oil export revenues, and 38 percent of expenditures were dedicated to foreign debt service.
OPEC 2, the oil price spikes of were the overture to the contraction of the world markets and the collapse of rates of growth. More than overture, OPEC 2 was the coda, signifying more than the end of the post WW2 expansion, more than the end of the post OPEC 1 recycling of petro-dollars, and more than just the inability of capitalism to sustain reproduction of capital. The coda of capital was announced in the attack on living standards, in the transfer of wealth from poorer to richer, in the creation of a "lost decade"stretching in space and time through the 1980s and from Seattle to Buenos Aires.
Overproduction of oil, overexpansion of the productive assets for extraction, transportation, and distribution of oil; overexpansion of manufacturing as a whole, of the assets for production, transportation, and distribution, created a declining rate of return on investment and production, and had created that decline globally.
The decline of oil earnings after OPEC 2, slowly at first, then dramatically in 1986, and then catastrophically in 1988-89, was marked by the usual government efforts of devaluation, austerity, and the attack on living standards. The sucre was devalued twice between 1981 and 1983. Government spending was reduced and domestic interest rates climbed. IMF debt was rescheduled which then allowed the government to reschedule foreign private bank debt in 1985.
In 1987, however, the decline in oil revenues forced the government to suspend interest payments to the private lenders and impose import surcharges. The Trans-Ecuadorian Petroleum Pipeline was partially destroyed by the earthquake of March, costing the economy approximately $700 million in export revenues. GDP declined 5.2 percent from the 1986 level, despite increased government spending to stabilize the contracting economy.
2. The cycle of austerity, constrained economic recovery, expanding debt continued for Ecuador throughout the 1990s. AARG of manufacturing reached 6.9 percent in 1995. The percentage of gross fixed investment dedicated to machinery and equipment climbed from 43 percent in 1990 to 60 percent in 1995 and was maintained at 60 percent until 1999.
The financial crisis of the Asian economies in 1996-97-98, in reality the result of the peak and decline in the rate of profit throughout capitalism as a whole, and in the US in particular, worked its way east and west. The determinant of this contraction, overproduction, was particularly acute once again in petroleum production. Oil prices again head down, this time falling below the $12 a barrel mark touched a decade earlier.
Capital stumbled. Ecuador's capitalism staggered and neared collapse in 1999. The contribution of external financing to domestic investment actually turned negative. The negative net transfer of resources in 2000 was 20 times larger than the 1995 measure. Per capita growth of GDP, barely positive 1991-1995, turned negative and stayed negative 1996-2000.
With each successive iteration of commodity nationalism, the capitalism of Ecuador has become always and only that much more integrated into and dependent upon the world market, upon international capital. The economic collapse of 1999 and the dollarization of the economy were not actually variations on a theme, but the theme itself.
The theme of course is the maintenance of capital through the assault on wage rates and living standards, by the deconstruction of even the incremental development afforded by the "upswing" in world markets. Between 1997 and 1999 labor income declined by half. Even after the "recovery" of 2000, 2001, labor income was still 30 percent below its 1997 mark.
The dollarization of 2000 "stabilized" the economy, in effect, by guaranteeing the value of debt repayment.
With the contraction of world markets in 2001 and its reduced rate of growth since then, capital, international and national, in Ecuador, is at it was: the heir and the servant to the conquest economy and its legacy. Capital, international and national, in Ecuador, find its task to be more and more, and never less, the constraint of the very expansion of growth that requires an actual reorganization of property to move development out of an enclave, out of a concession, out of zone. Those concessions require more and more and never less military bases, and military organizations to "protect" the pipelines, the production facilities in the Oriente, in Sucumbios, Orellana; bases and organizations that will be used to "pacify" Putumayo, to sever Beni and Santa Cruz from Bolivia.
The UN in its 2006 report on the state of the world's cities wrote: "Around the world, the wealthy have created an architecture of fear by retreating behind fortified residential enclaves." Residential property is merely the reflection of the private property in production. It is in the hacienda that capital finds its security, its lost future.
S. Artesian
July 15, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Saturday, May 27, 2006
The Importance of Being Ecuador, 9
1. Throughout the 1960s, while the political arena in Ecuador suffered the repetition compulsion of Velasco, coup, Velasco, self-coup (the autogolpe), and coup again, the economic scene was changing, but changing within its export framework.
In the later 60s, after the 1965 collapse in export earnings, Ecuadorean banana planters initiated a change in the variety of banana under cultivation. The Gros Michel variety was replaced by the Cavendish. Cavendish yields were triple those of the Gros Michel, but the Cavendish banana bruised easily. Consequently, boxing, and preparation for export had to take place on the plantation itself. The factory had to come to the plantation, and the increased capital investment required a further concentration of ownership and expansion of plantation size to utilize, and circulate, the increased investment.
Packaging, that most modern marvel of modern capitalism, meant to present the same old same old as brand new, actually brought an end to small farm banana production.
The military juntas, likewise iterations of packaging, that had taken and relinquished power throughout the 60s and 70s had intended to rule "evenhandedly;" with one hand, enacting basic social and economic reform, while with the other, maintaining a stranglehold on left-wing militant and labor organizations. Anti-communism was the anti-red thread of populist and oligarchic nationalism.
The Agrarian Reform Measure of 1964 outlawed the huasipungo, the land-tenure/debt peonage system embedded in hacienda and latifundista agriculture. However, with one hand wrapped tightly around the throat of the labor and Marxist militants, there was no agent of execution, no class organized to effect in the field the changes enacted in the junta. Agrarian reform withered and died.
In the years following the reform of 1964, less than 15% of the arable land and less than 20% of the rural population had been affected by reform programs. At the end of the 1970s, Ecuador contained 350,000 farms of an area of 5 hectares or less, and 150,000 of 1 hectare or less.
With and without agrarian reform, the countryside was more and more incapable of supporting the rural population, as domestic industry and infrastructure could not, did not support the expansion of individual, small scale ownership. The decay of both latifundista and minifundista agriculture quickened and mimicked the "normal" migration to the cities that historically accompanies economic development.
Agriculture in pre-conquest pre-Ecuador had not been organized along the property lines of individual ownership. At no point in pre-conquest, conquest, or post-conquest Ecuador does a class of agricultural producers equivalent to the peasantry of Europe achieve a real economic significance. Small-scale "subsistence+" agricultural production, the supposed bedrock of capital development and "freedom," is imposed upon rural agriculture, and is nothing other than a pastoral equivalent to the sham of representative government and universal suffrage.
In truth, it is not individual ownership of farming units that describes capitalism, advanced or emerging; nor is it surplus production, production for the market. Capitalist agriculture is distinguished precisely by its capitalist nature-- that is to say by the separation of laborers and owners; by the separation of laborers from the means of production; through the expulsion of labor from possession of the means of production and reproduction of that expulsion throughout the productive process itself. Land is transformed into a means for the expansion of value through the simultaneous aggrandizement and expulsion of labor transformed itself into a value solely of and for exchange, into wage-labor.
2. Marx, writing in volume 3 of Capital states: "But the contradiction of this capitalist mode of production consists precisely in its tendency to an absolute development of productive forces, a development which come continually in conflict with the specific conditions of production in which capital moves and alone can move." Now that contradiction is operative in every facet of capitalism's miserable history. The limitation to capital is capital and not just, not primarily in, and not only when capital has achieved a certain level of development, has overcome all archaic, pre-existing, limitations to its growth. On the contrary, even when capital confronts, attacks, ruptures those fetters it embeds them into itself, and itself into them through the most general and specific conditions in which it moves, private property.
So while Guayaquil resents Quito, so while capital feels the restrictions of the hacienda, confronts limitations to itself in the limitation to "free" "detached" useless labor, capital finds in those specific conditions the fundamental guardian of its own condition of production-- private property, private ownership of the means of production. Ultimately, Guayaquil relies on Quito. Both rely upon the bayonet.
Capital in Ecuador, in the Andean countries, is not just an intrusion into the conquest economies, not simply a product of the world market, but simultaneously an extrusion of the conquest economies. Capital develops as an internal concession, enclave capitalism.
The limitations to capital internationally and within the enclave converge. While the growth of the means of production requires ever greater access to "free" wage labor, overproduction demands ever greater restrictions on that labor, ever more contained, confined, and controlled islands of capitalist production and value extraction. Overproduction makes capital incapable of fulfilling the whispered promise of "development."
The expansion precipitated by the exploration, discovery, and development of petroleum reserves in the Oriente came to fruition with the decline in the rate of profit, the rate of return, that coursed through capitalism in 1970, 1971, 1972. Actually investment and development acted as producers of that decline.
The convergence of expansion and decline, the creation of decline in expansion, brings forth in capitalism the images of the "classic" bourgeois revolution, the reorganization of agriculture, the rapid employment and deployment of detached labor, but it brings these images forth in their negative. "Bourgeois" revolution, the "emancipation of capital," national economic development, appears as telescoped image viewed light years after the event, so that its existence appears and is apprehended only after its eclipse and extinction.
The military regime that took power in 1972 called itself nationalist and revolutionary. And it proved that in its failure.
Oil policy, sustained by the OPEC price spike of 1973 and Ecuador's own entry into OPEC, gave voice to the commodity nationalism of the regime. In this case, the full barrel was making a lot of noise. Petroleum profits, sowing the oil in Ecuador as in Venezuela, did not resolve the economic contradictions. Petroleum exacerbated those contradiction.
The oil revenues that had increased sixfold between 1970 and 1975, stalled. International oil companies, led by Texaco, Gulf, Occidental, cut back on oil exports in retaliation for the military's demands for larger shares of revenues and ownership. In 1975, the military backed down and announced a reduction in tax rates.
In August, 1975, the military, "even-handed," "nationalist," "revolutionary" that it was, then announced a dramatic 60 percent duty on luxury imports. Finally, Quito and Guayaquil had found common ground. "Let us eat caviar!" demanded the national bourgeoisie of Ecuador. "Two, three, many Mercedes-Benz!"
The inevitable two coups followed. The first in September failing; the second in January, 1976 succeeding. The inevitable announcement of the intended imminent return to civilian rule was made. And inevitably the return was delayed.
When the return to civilian rule was made, in 1979, it was made grudgingly. The social democratic Izquierda Democratica candidate Jaime Roldos, won the election, but achieved a victory without power. The military junta, before allowing Roldos to take office, awarded itself the power to approve the directors of major state corporations and select the minister of defense.
Roldos thus took power as another president without portfolio, a minister not at large, but at a loss.
S. Artesian
June 10, 2006
address all comments to:
sartesian@earthlink.net
In the later 60s, after the 1965 collapse in export earnings, Ecuadorean banana planters initiated a change in the variety of banana under cultivation. The Gros Michel variety was replaced by the Cavendish. Cavendish yields were triple those of the Gros Michel, but the Cavendish banana bruised easily. Consequently, boxing, and preparation for export had to take place on the plantation itself. The factory had to come to the plantation, and the increased capital investment required a further concentration of ownership and expansion of plantation size to utilize, and circulate, the increased investment.
Packaging, that most modern marvel of modern capitalism, meant to present the same old same old as brand new, actually brought an end to small farm banana production.
The military juntas, likewise iterations of packaging, that had taken and relinquished power throughout the 60s and 70s had intended to rule "evenhandedly;" with one hand, enacting basic social and economic reform, while with the other, maintaining a stranglehold on left-wing militant and labor organizations. Anti-communism was the anti-red thread of populist and oligarchic nationalism.
The Agrarian Reform Measure of 1964 outlawed the huasipungo, the land-tenure/debt peonage system embedded in hacienda and latifundista agriculture. However, with one hand wrapped tightly around the throat of the labor and Marxist militants, there was no agent of execution, no class organized to effect in the field the changes enacted in the junta. Agrarian reform withered and died.
In the years following the reform of 1964, less than 15% of the arable land and less than 20% of the rural population had been affected by reform programs. At the end of the 1970s, Ecuador contained 350,000 farms of an area of 5 hectares or less, and 150,000 of 1 hectare or less.
With and without agrarian reform, the countryside was more and more incapable of supporting the rural population, as domestic industry and infrastructure could not, did not support the expansion of individual, small scale ownership. The decay of both latifundista and minifundista agriculture quickened and mimicked the "normal" migration to the cities that historically accompanies economic development.
Agriculture in pre-conquest pre-Ecuador had not been organized along the property lines of individual ownership. At no point in pre-conquest, conquest, or post-conquest Ecuador does a class of agricultural producers equivalent to the peasantry of Europe achieve a real economic significance. Small-scale "subsistence+" agricultural production, the supposed bedrock of capital development and "freedom," is imposed upon rural agriculture, and is nothing other than a pastoral equivalent to the sham of representative government and universal suffrage.
In truth, it is not individual ownership of farming units that describes capitalism, advanced or emerging; nor is it surplus production, production for the market. Capitalist agriculture is distinguished precisely by its capitalist nature-- that is to say by the separation of laborers and owners; by the separation of laborers from the means of production; through the expulsion of labor from possession of the means of production and reproduction of that expulsion throughout the productive process itself. Land is transformed into a means for the expansion of value through the simultaneous aggrandizement and expulsion of labor transformed itself into a value solely of and for exchange, into wage-labor.
2. Marx, writing in volume 3 of Capital states: "But the contradiction of this capitalist mode of production consists precisely in its tendency to an absolute development of productive forces, a development which come continually in conflict with the specific conditions of production in which capital moves and alone can move." Now that contradiction is operative in every facet of capitalism's miserable history. The limitation to capital is capital and not just, not primarily in, and not only when capital has achieved a certain level of development, has overcome all archaic, pre-existing, limitations to its growth. On the contrary, even when capital confronts, attacks, ruptures those fetters it embeds them into itself, and itself into them through the most general and specific conditions in which it moves, private property.
So while Guayaquil resents Quito, so while capital feels the restrictions of the hacienda, confronts limitations to itself in the limitation to "free" "detached" useless labor, capital finds in those specific conditions the fundamental guardian of its own condition of production-- private property, private ownership of the means of production. Ultimately, Guayaquil relies on Quito. Both rely upon the bayonet.
Capital in Ecuador, in the Andean countries, is not just an intrusion into the conquest economies, not simply a product of the world market, but simultaneously an extrusion of the conquest economies. Capital develops as an internal concession, enclave capitalism.
The limitations to capital internationally and within the enclave converge. While the growth of the means of production requires ever greater access to "free" wage labor, overproduction demands ever greater restrictions on that labor, ever more contained, confined, and controlled islands of capitalist production and value extraction. Overproduction makes capital incapable of fulfilling the whispered promise of "development."
The expansion precipitated by the exploration, discovery, and development of petroleum reserves in the Oriente came to fruition with the decline in the rate of profit, the rate of return, that coursed through capitalism in 1970, 1971, 1972. Actually investment and development acted as producers of that decline.
The convergence of expansion and decline, the creation of decline in expansion, brings forth in capitalism the images of the "classic" bourgeois revolution, the reorganization of agriculture, the rapid employment and deployment of detached labor, but it brings these images forth in their negative. "Bourgeois" revolution, the "emancipation of capital," national economic development, appears as telescoped image viewed light years after the event, so that its existence appears and is apprehended only after its eclipse and extinction.
The military regime that took power in 1972 called itself nationalist and revolutionary. And it proved that in its failure.
Oil policy, sustained by the OPEC price spike of 1973 and Ecuador's own entry into OPEC, gave voice to the commodity nationalism of the regime. In this case, the full barrel was making a lot of noise. Petroleum profits, sowing the oil in Ecuador as in Venezuela, did not resolve the economic contradictions. Petroleum exacerbated those contradiction.
The oil revenues that had increased sixfold between 1970 and 1975, stalled. International oil companies, led by Texaco, Gulf, Occidental, cut back on oil exports in retaliation for the military's demands for larger shares of revenues and ownership. In 1975, the military backed down and announced a reduction in tax rates.
In August, 1975, the military, "even-handed," "nationalist," "revolutionary" that it was, then announced a dramatic 60 percent duty on luxury imports. Finally, Quito and Guayaquil had found common ground. "Let us eat caviar!" demanded the national bourgeoisie of Ecuador. "Two, three, many Mercedes-Benz!"
The inevitable two coups followed. The first in September failing; the second in January, 1976 succeeding. The inevitable announcement of the intended imminent return to civilian rule was made. And inevitably the return was delayed.
When the return to civilian rule was made, in 1979, it was made grudgingly. The social democratic Izquierda Democratica candidate Jaime Roldos, won the election, but achieved a victory without power. The military junta, before allowing Roldos to take office, awarded itself the power to approve the directors of major state corporations and select the minister of defense.
Roldos thus took power as another president without portfolio, a minister not at large, but at a loss.
S. Artesian
June 10, 2006
address all comments to:
sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Return to Ecuador, 8
1. In all its iterations, the nation represents for capital nothing more or less than a market. The geographical, ethnic, cultural compositions of a nation are, like biology, accidental, temporary, and limiting: more or less useful, more or less useless, depending upon the rates of return.
The viability, and practicality, of the nation are its economic, social determinants, and chief among those is the strength of the domestic market. The domestic market is itself the product of the transformation of agriculture, the transformation of the land itself, simple property, into expanded, compounded property; from a useful object into value producing value; into a means of reproducing the expropriation of labor.
The domestic market requires that labor itself be detached, expelled, expropriated, "freed" from the necessity or ability to sustain itself; that is to say, the labor must be useless to itself other than as means of exchange. Useful production, collective or individual for the collective, is a limit to the creation of the domestic market, to the expansion of production.
The Spanish conquistadors confronted and destroyed just such an agricultural system of collective useful production. The conquest destroyed the collective agriculture labor and the useful production of the indigenous peoples of the Andes substituting the hacienda, the mita, the encomienda, the huasipungo. The conquest did not detach, "free" that collective labor, but bound it in ever greater misery and dependency to subsistence and subsistence production.
2. The urban centers of the conquest economy emerge, grown, and function as either administration centers for the destruction of the indigenous culture and economy through installation of the hacienda; or as transit centers, warehouses, depots, transfer points for the extraction of the natural resources, for the liquidation of the accumulated values of the indigenous cultures, and the export of commodities.
The distinction between Sierra and Costa in Ecuador is just this distinction between administration and export; between hacienda and export crop production. In neither Sierra nor Costa does the city function as the permanent market. In neither Sierra or Costa are the cities the centers for establishing reciprocating reproduction of value, where labor expelled from the land, from agricultural production, is aggrandized in the expansion of manufacturing, with the manufacturing sustaining the expansion in agricultural output, with the increased agricultural output supporting increasing urban populations. It is not just poverty that distinguishes the stunted capitalism of Ecuador. It is the incapacity of capitalism to absorb that poverty, to detach the poverty from its rural roots, to reproduce the poverty as expanded value that so defines capitalism in Ecuador as the decayed offspring of the conquest.
3. The poverty of national development in Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, in the Andean countries all, is not the deformation, suppression, of an embryonic but modern "healthy" national capitalism under the weight of the developed economies of Europe and North America. Capitalism creates itself, to be sure, but not out of thin air, and not as it might like to be. Capital, after all, is not born as or from a homunculus, a "little man." In its specific deformations, capitalism maintains and reproduces the conditions of its own pre-history. The specific distortions of capitalist, national undevelopment in Ecuador contain, the truth and the lie, the limits and potential of capital to create any of the material pre-requisites of development. Thus the inadequacy of the domestic market is the ultimate product of the market system itself; the persistent indenturing of labor to landed property is the proof positive, and negative, of the congenital inadequacy of the wage-system.
Production for export-- textile, cacao, bananas, petroleum-- is based on the inability of capital to overcome the limit of its own existence, private property. Underdevelopment is not so much imposed as it is achieved. It, underdevelopment, is the national project of the bourgeoisie.
S. Artesian
May 27, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
The viability, and practicality, of the nation are its economic, social determinants, and chief among those is the strength of the domestic market. The domestic market is itself the product of the transformation of agriculture, the transformation of the land itself, simple property, into expanded, compounded property; from a useful object into value producing value; into a means of reproducing the expropriation of labor.
The domestic market requires that labor itself be detached, expelled, expropriated, "freed" from the necessity or ability to sustain itself; that is to say, the labor must be useless to itself other than as means of exchange. Useful production, collective or individual for the collective, is a limit to the creation of the domestic market, to the expansion of production.
The Spanish conquistadors confronted and destroyed just such an agricultural system of collective useful production. The conquest destroyed the collective agriculture labor and the useful production of the indigenous peoples of the Andes substituting the hacienda, the mita, the encomienda, the huasipungo. The conquest did not detach, "free" that collective labor, but bound it in ever greater misery and dependency to subsistence and subsistence production.
2. The urban centers of the conquest economy emerge, grown, and function as either administration centers for the destruction of the indigenous culture and economy through installation of the hacienda; or as transit centers, warehouses, depots, transfer points for the extraction of the natural resources, for the liquidation of the accumulated values of the indigenous cultures, and the export of commodities.
The distinction between Sierra and Costa in Ecuador is just this distinction between administration and export; between hacienda and export crop production. In neither Sierra nor Costa does the city function as the permanent market. In neither Sierra or Costa are the cities the centers for establishing reciprocating reproduction of value, where labor expelled from the land, from agricultural production, is aggrandized in the expansion of manufacturing, with the manufacturing sustaining the expansion in agricultural output, with the increased agricultural output supporting increasing urban populations. It is not just poverty that distinguishes the stunted capitalism of Ecuador. It is the incapacity of capitalism to absorb that poverty, to detach the poverty from its rural roots, to reproduce the poverty as expanded value that so defines capitalism in Ecuador as the decayed offspring of the conquest.
3. The poverty of national development in Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, in the Andean countries all, is not the deformation, suppression, of an embryonic but modern "healthy" national capitalism under the weight of the developed economies of Europe and North America. Capitalism creates itself, to be sure, but not out of thin air, and not as it might like to be. Capital, after all, is not born as or from a homunculus, a "little man." In its specific deformations, capitalism maintains and reproduces the conditions of its own pre-history. The specific distortions of capitalist, national undevelopment in Ecuador contain, the truth and the lie, the limits and potential of capital to create any of the material pre-requisites of development. Thus the inadequacy of the domestic market is the ultimate product of the market system itself; the persistent indenturing of labor to landed property is the proof positive, and negative, of the congenital inadequacy of the wage-system.
Production for export-- textile, cacao, bananas, petroleum-- is based on the inability of capital to overcome the limit of its own existence, private property. Underdevelopment is not so much imposed as it is achieved. It, underdevelopment, is the national project of the bourgeoisie.
S. Artesian
May 27, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Beginning a New Interruption, Closer to Home
1. US capital, after 30 years of pounding down the living standards of workers at home and abroad; after driving Latin American into the lost decade of the 1980s, and leading it into the advanced export deprivation of the 1990s; after ruining village, small scale agriculture; after IMF/WB austerity program after austerity program dismantling mine and factory; after a one dozen, two dozen years of NAFTA, the Plaza Accords, the Washington Consensus; after decades of "special zones," "entrepreneur enclaves," "development areas," turning borders and entire countries into maquilladoras, sweatshops, and massage parlors, finally found itself face to face in its home territory with the labor it had imported as the result of the capital it had exported.
Capital, sparkling white and dripping blood and dirt from every pore, was confronted in the streets of its home land by the workers who had migrated, never by choice, but always be need-- economics is never discretionary, always compulsory-- to the land of opportunity, the land of opportunity of sub-minimum wages, unpaid labor, threats, assaults. A place like home.
When capital, recognizing that compulsion without discrimination, that wage-labor without intimidation, was really private property without protection, decided to formalize its degradation of labor and indigenous cultures at home and abroad, just that immigrant wage labor, now concentrated in the cities of the US, took to the streets in the colors of its orgins-- red, yellow, brown, and black.
2. The "immigration issue" is first, last, foremost and everwhere in between an issue of labor. The attacks on migrants are the attacks of capital on labor. The struggle is no more successfully resolved by any piece of legislation, more or less liberal, than that of the Delphi workers can be resolved by pension bailout guarantees, legislated "retraining" or buy-out packages, or contract compromises.
While "leftists" and "Marxists" ponder slogans, actions, demands; while retread Maoists all dressed up in guayaberas excuse their own ignorance by advocating "learn from the masses," the issue of immigration, the struggle of migrants is the issue and the struggle of labor itself. It is the struggle against the wage system itself.
No legislation deserves endorsement. No liberal democrat or Democrat deserves support. Exactly the opposite is required-- the class based rejection of democrat/Democrats.
The opposition to all forms of border control, all punitive measures against migrant peoples, the demand for the reorganization of education, health care, social services, regulatory agencies under the control of workers, with workers represented in their own political party, are the first steps, the lowest common denominators, the minimal demands against the rule of capital.
Open borders are the prerequisite to expelling the capitalists.
S. Artesian
April 15, 2006
address all comments to sartesian@earthlink.net
Next: Return to Ecuador
Capital, sparkling white and dripping blood and dirt from every pore, was confronted in the streets of its home land by the workers who had migrated, never by choice, but always be need-- economics is never discretionary, always compulsory-- to the land of opportunity, the land of opportunity of sub-minimum wages, unpaid labor, threats, assaults. A place like home.
When capital, recognizing that compulsion without discrimination, that wage-labor without intimidation, was really private property without protection, decided to formalize its degradation of labor and indigenous cultures at home and abroad, just that immigrant wage labor, now concentrated in the cities of the US, took to the streets in the colors of its orgins-- red, yellow, brown, and black.
2. The "immigration issue" is first, last, foremost and everwhere in between an issue of labor. The attacks on migrants are the attacks of capital on labor. The struggle is no more successfully resolved by any piece of legislation, more or less liberal, than that of the Delphi workers can be resolved by pension bailout guarantees, legislated "retraining" or buy-out packages, or contract compromises.
While "leftists" and "Marxists" ponder slogans, actions, demands; while retread Maoists all dressed up in guayaberas excuse their own ignorance by advocating "learn from the masses," the issue of immigration, the struggle of migrants is the issue and the struggle of labor itself. It is the struggle against the wage system itself.
No legislation deserves endorsement. No liberal democrat or Democrat deserves support. Exactly the opposite is required-- the class based rejection of democrat/Democrats.
The opposition to all forms of border control, all punitive measures against migrant peoples, the demand for the reorganization of education, health care, social services, regulatory agencies under the control of workers, with workers represented in their own political party, are the first steps, the lowest common denominators, the minimal demands against the rule of capital.
Open borders are the prerequisite to expelling the capitalists.
S. Artesian
April 15, 2006
address all comments to sartesian@earthlink.net
Next: Return to Ecuador
Sunday, March 19, 2006
The Importance of Being Ecuador, 7
1. Love and Chocolate
Divided by their particular attachments to specific forms of private property, the ruling classes of Ecuador were, and remain, united in, by, and around private property itself. Church, state, faux aristocrats, haciendistas, all swoon, indulge, and shared with the liberal planters, manufacturers, exporters of Guayaquil in the richness brought by the cacao trade. And where chocolate leads, love is sure to follow. And follow it did.
The commercial and industrial bourgeoisie of the costa intermingled and interbred with the latifundistas of the Quito region.
Money can't always buy love, but it can always buy land. The purchase of land by the traders and manufacturers of Guayaquil was an essential step in attaching status to the accumulation of capital. The newly enriched bought land and stature, turning economic success into position by marrying into the older, and debt-strapped, established families. Kinship and marriage made the bourgeoisie again what they always had been, servants and financiers of backwardness. The pre-nuptial agreement, and the marriage bed, were the consummation of illegitimacy-- the marriage of the bastard offspring from the conquistadors' original destruction of the indigenous communities.
2. What a Difference a Year Or Two Make
In May 1944 Jose Maria Velasco assumed the presidency for a second time. He promised a government of "national resurrection," saving the "national honor." Conservative opponents of Velasco's Democratic Alliance were jailed, silenced, or otherwise removed from government. A constituent assembly, dominated by left-wing elements, was convened.
One year later, Velasco dismissed the assembly and called for new elections. These elections produced a right-wing constituent assembly, reflecting the rightward movement of the Democratic Alliance. And the constitution produced by this assembly was far more palatable to Velasco and the elites of Quito and Guayaquil.
For the next two years this poor imitation of that apotheosis of poor imitations, Louis Bonaparte, ruled by the bayonet and the concrete pour. Military parade and public works, the imitations of wealth and empire, were the closest capital could come to "national resurrection." Salvation was found, but only in the bank accounts of the elites. By 1947, the national treasury had been emptied of the revenues brought by the increased demand and higher prices paid for commodities during WW2 and Velasco was on his way out.
Overthrown by his own minister of defense in 1947, Velasco resumed the presidency for a third time in 1952.
He, Velasco, proclaimed himself "the national personification." And in his inabilities, Velasco personified the congenital incapability of capital, of the Ecuadorean bourgeoisie to resolve the conflicts between city and countryside; landed property and free, detached, labor; private property and social need.
Some things had changed in the Ecuadorean economy. Bananas had replaced cacao as the country's primary export. As diseases ravaged the banana plantations of Central America, Ecuador's banana exports to the US accelerated. Whatever the source of revenues, the contradictions remained.
Again, export earnings supported government financed infrastructure construction and military armaments.
Again Velasco moved against his own left-wing, mobilizing conservatives, social Christians, and the thugs of the nationalist, anti-communist ARNE (Accion Revolucionaria Nacionalista Ecuatoriana) against students and workers.
Again, Velasco left office, suceeded by a conservative ally and cabinet member, Camilo Ponce Enriquez, and again Velasco reappeared as the "national personification" of opposition to his follower.
Again export earnings fell, and the end of the banana boom created enough social conflict to restore Velasco's national personification. In 1960, Velasco was elected yet again to the presidency.
Again Velasco lurched left, abrogating the hated 1942 Rio protocol under which Ecuador had been compelled to cede 200,000 square kilometers to Peru. And again, the social forces behind Velasco's "national personification" split left and right, and a military junta took power.
History is not supposed to be simply a repetition compulsion, but capital in its very origin the product of the unresolved conflicts, the legacy of the conquest, rather than the resolution of those conflicts, the overthrow of that conquest, acts as an historical neurosis. Velasco's periodic overthrows and restorations become a social tic, a clock resetting itself backwards...
S. Artesian
April 09, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, March 05, 2006
The Importance of Being Ecuador, 6
1. Politics
When Clausewitz asserted that war is the continuation of politics by other means, he left something out. War is the continuation of political economy by the meanest of means. War is the compressed expropriation and destruction of labor so essential to political economy. And the officer corps of the military is the condensed expression of the weakness, the brutal incompetence of the bourgeois class by just those same meanest means.
In 1926, the junta of the League of Young Officers ruling Ecuador appointed Isidro Ayora to the presidency. Possessed of great wealth by marriage, and a social conscience by temperament, Ayora imagined himself establishing a dictatorship of reform bourgeoisie. But once and forever incapable of establishing a independent class program, the bourgeoisie could not create their own reforms. Instead, Ayora imported a reform commission from Princeton University of New Jersey.
The Princeton commission created the Banco Central, expropriating and transferring to the government the private banks' currency issuing power. The commission also transferred the customs and revenue collection functions from la argolla of Guayanquil to the government in Quito.
The golden era that followed this redirection of revenues was short-lived and quickly dead, strangled in its crib by the great capitalist depression of the 1930s. Export revenues declined by two-thirds in the period 1928-1931. Ayora was overthrown by the military in 1932, and near civil war erupted when the candidate of the populist, nationalist Compactation Obrera Nacional (Consolidation of National Workers) Neptali Bonifaz Ascazubi was elected to the presidency. The Liberal paramilitary forces defeated the CON in the streets as the military, giving full expression to the ferocious paralysis of capital, the furious inability of the bourgeoisie to actually govern, stayed in their barracks.
But the Liberal president, Juan de Dios Martinez lasted only 2 years in office. The Chamber of Deputies encouraged the CON to return to the streets to protest, and in 1934, the then president of the chamber, the man who would appear and reappear, or not so much reappear as recur, like a delusion or an infection, throughout the next four decades of Ecuadorean politics, Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra, won the presidency by a huge margin.
But not for long. "Not for long" were the words inscribed on the presidential seal of Ecuador. Not for long Ayora. Not at all Bonifaz. Not for long Dios. Not for long, this time, Velasco.
Velasco was overthrown by the military in 1935 after he had dissolved the Congress. Federico Paez was awarded the presidency. But not for long. In 1937, Paez was overthrown by the minister of national defense, General Alberto Enriquez Gallo. But not for long. In his brief tenure, Enriquez appears as the pre-Peron Peron of Ecuador, instituting and enforcing the Labor Code of 1938 giving legal status to labor protections. Enriquez also confronted the United States over the US owned mining corporation, the South American Development Company. The company, backed by the US government, refused to raise wage rates for Ecuadorean workers, and increase the portion of profits retained in Ecuador.
Enriquez died in 1939 and was followed in office by another representative of the Guayaquil liberals and friend of the US, Carlos Alberto Arroyo del Rio. As WW 2 approached, the US rethought its position on mining profits, ending its support for the South American Development Country, in exchange for agreement allowing the US to build a naval base and an air base in Ecuador.
In 1941, Peru invaded and occupied portions of Ecuador's eastern and southern provinces. The war ended with the Rio Protocol. Arroyo del Rio ceded 200,00 square kilometers of territory to Peru. In 1944, supporters of Velasco, civilian and military, attacked Arroyo's police. Arroyo resigned, and Velasco returned from exile in, where else?, Colombia naturally, to take the presidency one more time. But not for long.
s.artesian March 5, 2006
address all comments to:
sartesian@earthlink.net
When Clausewitz asserted that war is the continuation of politics by other means, he left something out. War is the continuation of political economy by the meanest of means. War is the compressed expropriation and destruction of labor so essential to political economy. And the officer corps of the military is the condensed expression of the weakness, the brutal incompetence of the bourgeois class by just those same meanest means.
In 1926, the junta of the League of Young Officers ruling Ecuador appointed Isidro Ayora to the presidency. Possessed of great wealth by marriage, and a social conscience by temperament, Ayora imagined himself establishing a dictatorship of reform bourgeoisie. But once and forever incapable of establishing a independent class program, the bourgeoisie could not create their own reforms. Instead, Ayora imported a reform commission from Princeton University of New Jersey.
The Princeton commission created the Banco Central, expropriating and transferring to the government the private banks' currency issuing power. The commission also transferred the customs and revenue collection functions from la argolla of Guayanquil to the government in Quito.
The golden era that followed this redirection of revenues was short-lived and quickly dead, strangled in its crib by the great capitalist depression of the 1930s. Export revenues declined by two-thirds in the period 1928-1931. Ayora was overthrown by the military in 1932, and near civil war erupted when the candidate of the populist, nationalist Compactation Obrera Nacional (Consolidation of National Workers) Neptali Bonifaz Ascazubi was elected to the presidency. The Liberal paramilitary forces defeated the CON in the streets as the military, giving full expression to the ferocious paralysis of capital, the furious inability of the bourgeoisie to actually govern, stayed in their barracks.
But the Liberal president, Juan de Dios Martinez lasted only 2 years in office. The Chamber of Deputies encouraged the CON to return to the streets to protest, and in 1934, the then president of the chamber, the man who would appear and reappear, or not so much reappear as recur, like a delusion or an infection, throughout the next four decades of Ecuadorean politics, Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra, won the presidency by a huge margin.
But not for long. "Not for long" were the words inscribed on the presidential seal of Ecuador. Not for long Ayora. Not at all Bonifaz. Not for long Dios. Not for long, this time, Velasco.
Velasco was overthrown by the military in 1935 after he had dissolved the Congress. Federico Paez was awarded the presidency. But not for long. In 1937, Paez was overthrown by the minister of national defense, General Alberto Enriquez Gallo. But not for long. In his brief tenure, Enriquez appears as the pre-Peron Peron of Ecuador, instituting and enforcing the Labor Code of 1938 giving legal status to labor protections. Enriquez also confronted the United States over the US owned mining corporation, the South American Development Company. The company, backed by the US government, refused to raise wage rates for Ecuadorean workers, and increase the portion of profits retained in Ecuador.
Enriquez died in 1939 and was followed in office by another representative of the Guayaquil liberals and friend of the US, Carlos Alberto Arroyo del Rio. As WW 2 approached, the US rethought its position on mining profits, ending its support for the South American Development Country, in exchange for agreement allowing the US to build a naval base and an air base in Ecuador.
In 1941, Peru invaded and occupied portions of Ecuador's eastern and southern provinces. The war ended with the Rio Protocol. Arroyo del Rio ceded 200,00 square kilometers of territory to Peru. In 1944, supporters of Velasco, civilian and military, attacked Arroyo's police. Arroyo resigned, and Velasco returned from exile in, where else?, Colombia naturally, to take the presidency one more time. But not for long.
s.artesian March 5, 2006
address all comments to:
sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, February 26, 2006
The Importance of Being Ecuador, 5
The Replicant Bourgeoisie
1. Capitalism in Ecuador doesn't actually emerge from the struggle against the vice-royalty, but oozes and seeps out of the pores of the successful and failing vice-royalty. Capitalism in Ecuador withers as it grows, expands here faster there more slowly that its rates of decay, but never without decay. At every moment between origin and demise, capitalist development in Ecuador is the product of accelerated decrepitude.
At origin, capitalism in Ecuador is the offspring, the idiot offspring of conquest and conquerors, survives on a stipend, a "trust fund" established in the impressment, the forced servitude, the degradation of the labor of the indigenous peoples.
With no economic life of its own, the bourgeoisie of Ecuador exist as caretakers of poverty; as agents and the agency of anti-development, and anti-history. Where there has never been a nation, and only a suppressed domestic market, the bourgeoisie propagate a myth of a nation; a pseudo-history of imagined development. The failure of the struggle to overturn the social legacy of the vice-royalty is refurbished and recirculated as the future of liberation. Nostalgia for the construction of an obsolete historical project, "democratic," "national" "independent" capitalism, brands the programs of "progressive" democrats and radicals. The bourgeoisie pursue memories of emancipation, but as with the actual fundamentals of the economy, the memories are not their own, the memories belong to others.
2. Loathed and adored, condemned and honored, tyrant and savior, Garcia Moreno is the perfect picture of the triumphant and failed Ecuadorian bourgeoisie; in his very existence the compressed composite of the baptism of Ecuadorian capitalism in the church of counterrevolution. Born of the proverbial "modest circumstances" in Guayaquil, Garcia Moreno studied in Quito where he married into the local aristocracy. Journeying to Europe after the failed revolutions of 1848, Garcia Moreno studied the importance of counterrevolution to Christianity under the learned theologians of the Catholic Church.
Upon those rocks of Catholicism and counterrevolution, Garcia Moreno built his church and state. Catholicism was not just the official religion, it was the only religion, named as such in two constitutions of Ecuador. The "republic" itself was dedicated to the "Sacred Heart of Jesus."
The anti-clerical, trading liberals of Guayaquil were incensed by the restrictions on exchange, on access to property inherent in the conservative church-state. Garcia Moreno, however, fought off coup and invasion, and even overthrew his own successor in 1869 when it appeared that scheduled elections favored the Liberals.
Finally, or not, in 1875 Garcia Moreno was hacked to death on the steps of the presidential palace by a Colombian man wielding a machete, avenging perhaps his own sense of aggrieved "national honor," that Ecuador had left the Confederacion Gran Colombia in the first place.
Garcia Moreno's rule had overseen significant structural change in the economy. Economic growth was restored as a product of export and production for export. Roads and railroad were constructed linking Quito, Guayaquil, Riobamba, Babahoyo, Esmeraldas.
Exports grew tenfold between 1850 and 1890, and cacao became the number one export crop. Production tripled in this same period. With this growth in exports, the economic power of the Guayaquil liberals grew, but their social cohesion did not.
It took the Liberals 20 years to consolidate themselves enough to take power in Ecuador. That opportunity was seized not when the Conservatives were in power, but when the Progressives, who pretended at a compromise between Liberals and Conservatives, assumed leadership.
In 1895, the Progressive president, Cordero, resigned amid charges of bribery and betrayal in allowing Chile to used the Ecuadorian flag as cover for selling a warship to Japan. In June 1895, the Liberals in Guayaquil seized power in the name of a caudillo, General Jose Eloy Alfaro Delgado. In September, Alfaro returned from his exile and marched into Quito.
3. In the first years of Liberal rule significant political and structural changes of occurred. The Catholic Church was divested of its official status and of its control of the educational system. Civil marriage and divorce were institutionalized. More than that, the church's rural properties were seized by the government. The Church in turn incited a civil war. The church in Ecuador, led by its foreign-born bishops of Portoviejo and Riobamba, preached and fought agains the "atheistic alfaristas."
The arbitrary debt-peonage that had survived from the conquest was not abolished. It was regulated. Imprisonment for debt was finally abolished in 1918. Still, these structural changes were overwhelmed by the real economic decline that pressed upon the indigenous and workers. The liberal government suppressed by force of arms the struggles of both groups for economic power.
The economy remained what it always had been. In decline, ruinous to the living standards of the indigenous and the poor. In expansion, opposed to improvements in those standards. In expansion, the Ecuadorian economy remained deformed, suppressed, stunted; its deformation being the greatest achievement of bourgeois power.
Exports and export earnings financed the spending plans of the governments, with such plan inevitably requiring the assumption of greater debts. The power of the Liberals was centered in Guayaquil; the center of power in Guayaquil was the group of bankers, landowners, merchants known as la argolla-- the ring. At the center of the ring was the Commercial and Agricultural Bank of Guayaquil, making large loans to the government. What the Catholic Church was to the Conservatives, the bank was to the Liberals.
And then, again as before, the influence of Britain in the world markets pushed the export economy of Ecuador to collapse. This time however, in the 20th century, it wasn't the domestic industry of British capitalism that overwhelmed export Ecuador. This time, in the 20th century, it was the cacao production from Britain's African colonies that undermined Ecuador's position.
Inflation coupled with declining export earnings forced the the economy into depression. A general strike in Guayaquil in 1922, and a rebellion by indigenous rural workers and peasants in 1923 were subdued only after massacres of the strikers.
Finally, or not, in 1925 a group of reformist military officers, the League of Young Officers, overthrew the Liberal president Cordova.
S. Artesian
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
1. Capitalism in Ecuador doesn't actually emerge from the struggle against the vice-royalty, but oozes and seeps out of the pores of the successful and failing vice-royalty. Capitalism in Ecuador withers as it grows, expands here faster there more slowly that its rates of decay, but never without decay. At every moment between origin and demise, capitalist development in Ecuador is the product of accelerated decrepitude.
At origin, capitalism in Ecuador is the offspring, the idiot offspring of conquest and conquerors, survives on a stipend, a "trust fund" established in the impressment, the forced servitude, the degradation of the labor of the indigenous peoples.
With no economic life of its own, the bourgeoisie of Ecuador exist as caretakers of poverty; as agents and the agency of anti-development, and anti-history. Where there has never been a nation, and only a suppressed domestic market, the bourgeoisie propagate a myth of a nation; a pseudo-history of imagined development. The failure of the struggle to overturn the social legacy of the vice-royalty is refurbished and recirculated as the future of liberation. Nostalgia for the construction of an obsolete historical project, "democratic," "national" "independent" capitalism, brands the programs of "progressive" democrats and radicals. The bourgeoisie pursue memories of emancipation, but as with the actual fundamentals of the economy, the memories are not their own, the memories belong to others.
2. Loathed and adored, condemned and honored, tyrant and savior, Garcia Moreno is the perfect picture of the triumphant and failed Ecuadorian bourgeoisie; in his very existence the compressed composite of the baptism of Ecuadorian capitalism in the church of counterrevolution. Born of the proverbial "modest circumstances" in Guayaquil, Garcia Moreno studied in Quito where he married into the local aristocracy. Journeying to Europe after the failed revolutions of 1848, Garcia Moreno studied the importance of counterrevolution to Christianity under the learned theologians of the Catholic Church.
Upon those rocks of Catholicism and counterrevolution, Garcia Moreno built his church and state. Catholicism was not just the official religion, it was the only religion, named as such in two constitutions of Ecuador. The "republic" itself was dedicated to the "Sacred Heart of Jesus."
The anti-clerical, trading liberals of Guayaquil were incensed by the restrictions on exchange, on access to property inherent in the conservative church-state. Garcia Moreno, however, fought off coup and invasion, and even overthrew his own successor in 1869 when it appeared that scheduled elections favored the Liberals.
Finally, or not, in 1875 Garcia Moreno was hacked to death on the steps of the presidential palace by a Colombian man wielding a machete, avenging perhaps his own sense of aggrieved "national honor," that Ecuador had left the Confederacion Gran Colombia in the first place.
Garcia Moreno's rule had overseen significant structural change in the economy. Economic growth was restored as a product of export and production for export. Roads and railroad were constructed linking Quito, Guayaquil, Riobamba, Babahoyo, Esmeraldas.
Exports grew tenfold between 1850 and 1890, and cacao became the number one export crop. Production tripled in this same period. With this growth in exports, the economic power of the Guayaquil liberals grew, but their social cohesion did not.
It took the Liberals 20 years to consolidate themselves enough to take power in Ecuador. That opportunity was seized not when the Conservatives were in power, but when the Progressives, who pretended at a compromise between Liberals and Conservatives, assumed leadership.
In 1895, the Progressive president, Cordero, resigned amid charges of bribery and betrayal in allowing Chile to used the Ecuadorian flag as cover for selling a warship to Japan. In June 1895, the Liberals in Guayaquil seized power in the name of a caudillo, General Jose Eloy Alfaro Delgado. In September, Alfaro returned from his exile and marched into Quito.
3. In the first years of Liberal rule significant political and structural changes of occurred. The Catholic Church was divested of its official status and of its control of the educational system. Civil marriage and divorce were institutionalized. More than that, the church's rural properties were seized by the government. The Church in turn incited a civil war. The church in Ecuador, led by its foreign-born bishops of Portoviejo and Riobamba, preached and fought agains the "atheistic alfaristas."
The arbitrary debt-peonage that had survived from the conquest was not abolished. It was regulated. Imprisonment for debt was finally abolished in 1918. Still, these structural changes were overwhelmed by the real economic decline that pressed upon the indigenous and workers. The liberal government suppressed by force of arms the struggles of both groups for economic power.
The economy remained what it always had been. In decline, ruinous to the living standards of the indigenous and the poor. In expansion, opposed to improvements in those standards. In expansion, the Ecuadorian economy remained deformed, suppressed, stunted; its deformation being the greatest achievement of bourgeois power.
Exports and export earnings financed the spending plans of the governments, with such plan inevitably requiring the assumption of greater debts. The power of the Liberals was centered in Guayaquil; the center of power in Guayaquil was the group of bankers, landowners, merchants known as la argolla-- the ring. At the center of the ring was the Commercial and Agricultural Bank of Guayaquil, making large loans to the government. What the Catholic Church was to the Conservatives, the bank was to the Liberals.
And then, again as before, the influence of Britain in the world markets pushed the export economy of Ecuador to collapse. This time however, in the 20th century, it wasn't the domestic industry of British capitalism that overwhelmed export Ecuador. This time, in the 20th century, it was the cacao production from Britain's African colonies that undermined Ecuador's position.
Inflation coupled with declining export earnings forced the the economy into depression. A general strike in Guayaquil in 1922, and a rebellion by indigenous rural workers and peasants in 1923 were subdued only after massacres of the strikers.
Finally, or not, in 1925 a group of reformist military officers, the League of Young Officers, overthrew the Liberal president Cordova.
S. Artesian
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
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