[Marxism] The Paradoxes of Latin American Development

[Richard Fidler]

Sometimes it's hard to take Petras seriously. Compare and contrast
the dyspeptic article cited below with this one, written just a
little more than two months ago:
http://www.lahaine.org/petras/b2-img/petrasven.pdf

Excerpt:

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez remains the world’s leading
secular, democratically elected political leader who has
consistently and publicly opposed imperialist wars in the Middle
East , attacked extra-territorial intervention and US and European
Union complicity in kidnapping and torture. Venezuela plays the
major role in sharply reducing the price of oil for the poorest
countries in the Caribbean region and Central America, thus
substantially aiding them in their balance of payments, without
attaching any ‘strings’ to this vital assistance. Venezuela has
been in the forefront in supporting free elections and opposing
human right abuses in the Middle East, Latin America and South
Asia by pro-US client regimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia.
No other country in the Americas has done more to break down the
racial barriers to social mobility and the acquisition of land for
Afro-Latin and Indio Americans. President Chavez has been on the
cutting edge of efforts toward greater Latin American integration
– despite opposition from the United States and several regional
regimes, who have opted for bilateral free trade agreements with
the US.

Even more significant, President Chavez is the only elected
president to reverse a US backed military coup (in 48 hours) and
defeat a (US-backed) bosses’ lockout, and return the economy to
double-digit growth over the subsequent 4 years.1 President Chavez
is the only elected leader in the history of Latin America to
successfully win eleven straight electoral contests against
US-financed political parties and almost the entire private mass
media over a nine-year period. Finally President Chavez is the
only leader in the last halfcentury who came within 1% of having a
popular referendum for a ‘socialist transformation’ approved, a
particularly surprising result in a country in which less than 30%
of the work force is made up of peasants and factory workers.

President Chavez has drastically reduced long-term poverty faster
than any regime in the region,2 demonstrating that a
nationalist-welfare regime is much more effective in ending
endemic social ills than its neo-liberal counterparts. A rigorous,
empirical study of the socio-economic performance of the Chavez
government demonstrates its success in a whole series of
indicators after the defeat of the counterrevolutionary coup and
lockout and after the nationalization of petroleum (2003).

GDP has grown by more than 87% with only a small part of the
growth being in oil. The poverty rate has been cut in half (from
54% in 2003 at the height of the bosses’ lockout to 27% in 2007;
and extreme poverty has been reduced from 43% in 1996 to 9% in
2007), and unemployment by more than half (from 17% in 1998 to 7%
in 2007). The economy has created jobs at a rate nearly three
times that of the United States during its most recent economic
expansion. Accessible health care for the poor has been
successfully expanded with the number of primary care physicians
in the public sector increasing from 1,628 in 1998 to 19,571 by
early 2007. About 40% of the population now has access to
subsidized food. Access to education, especially higher education,
has also been greatly expanded for poor families. Real (inflation
adjusted) social spending per person has increased by more than
300%. 3

His policies have once and for all refuted the notion that the
competitive demands of ‘globalization’ (deep and extensive
insertion in the world market) are incompatible with large-scale
social welfare policies. Chavez has demonstrated that links to the
world market are compatible with the construction of a more
developed welfare state under a popularly-based government. 

The large-scale, long-term practical accomplishments of the Chavez
government, however have been overlooked by liberal and social
democratic academics in Venezuela and their colleagues in the US
and Europe, who prefer to criticize secondary institutional and
policy weaknesses, failing to take into account the world-historic
significance of the changes taking place in the context of a
hostile, aggressively militaristdriven empire.4

No reasonable and rigorous contemporary analysis can seriously
provide an accurate assessment of Venezuela while glossing over
the tremendous accomplishments achieved during the Hugo Chavez
presidency. [...]

And so on....  And unlike the article below, this one is
referenced, with no fewer than 53 footnotes. It came on the heels
of Petras’s month-long sojourn in Venezuela, which included some
personal conversations with Chávez. Of course, it includes
Petras’s usual litany of policy prescriptions, which he has been
handing out freely throughout his many decades of “membership in
the class struggle”.

Perhaps a more appropriate title on the piece below should be:
"The paradoxes of the petulant Petras".

-- Richard

 -----Original Message-----
From: marxism-bounces+rfidler_8=sympatico.ca at lists.econ.utah.edu
[mailto:marxism-bounces+rfidler_8=sympatico.ca at lists.econ.utah.edu
] On Behalf Of Pance Stojkovski
Sent: July 1, 2008 9:25 AM
To: rfidler_8 at sympatico.ca
Subject: [Marxism] The Paradoxes of Latin American Development

A good summary of the situation in Latin America.

Pance.
========================

The Paradoxes of Latin American Development
By James Petras

Latin American development presents us with a rich array of
paradoxes, which
befuddle the predictions, prescriptions, and commentaries of
writers and
academics from the right and left. Abrupt changes and shifts in
the
political correlation of forces is matched by striking structural
continuities.

PDF of the complete article:
http://petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1740

HTML version:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9475






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