What doesn’t grow perishes
- Opinión
In politics, as in nature, what does not grow perishes. In Latin America, Peronism[1] is the only enduring political movement because Peron proposed a consensus among actors of production (unions and employers) to draw up national policies. For this reason, Peronism grew with transversal social support.
Chavismo also started with transversal social support. 68% of the votes is proof of that.
The support that Chavez received is not due to the attractiveness of a political proposal. Chavez said that his movement was inspired by Bolivar's ideas, therefore the name Bolivarian.
Bolivar only made one known specific political proposal: a draft for a Constitution in Angostura (present day Ciudad Bolivar): where there was a Senate with lifetime hereditary senators, in imitation of the British Chamber of Lords; a feudal anachronism incompatible with a modern republic.
It so happens that the electoral landslide in Chavez's support did not come from a specific political proposal.
Support for Chavez came from the national fatigue over 40 years of thievery and abuse of a collective partisan dictatorship installed in Punto Fijo, under the auspices of the United States Embassy.
Sympathy for Chavez stemmed from the fact that he represented the group of military officers who attempted to end 40 long years of shameless complicity agreed in Punto Fijo among a group of politicians, to prevent the return of the prosperous nationalism led by Perez Jimenez.
Discontent with the supposed democracy, built around bipartisan complicity, was detonated by Carlos Andrés Perez's naked servility to Washington.
Rafael Caldera became aware of the popular sympathy for the officers of the attempted army coup and made a come back in politics by expressing sympathy for them. Caldera won the following elections with no further political program than a promise to release the officers sentenced to prison for the coup against Carlos Andrés Perez. The first electoral victory for the young Commander Chavez, was embodied by the second victory of a decrepit, Rafael Caldera.
In the following elections, Chavez was himself the candidate and he won by a landslide, with no more of a proposal than a vague anti-imperialist rhetoric which seems to have attracted to his Movement for a Fifth Republic a group of politicians nourished with the Marxist doctrine of class hatred.
Marxism limits its own political support growth. Its theory prevents the cross-sectional growth of political support because of its strategy of class struggle. By claiming to be the spokesperson for a single class against the other in a class struggle, Marxism limits its own expansion.
Marxism is a political outlook inspired by the pauperization of English workers during the Industrial Revolution.
It is a historical fact that doesn’t exist anymore
It was Sismondi, not Marx, who first spoke of proletarians, in 1819, (proletarian is a Roman term to name the class of those who guarantee with their prole, their offspring, the provision of labor).
It is again Sismondi who discovers the surplus value (mieux value) of labor and denounces the exploitation of the wage earner class. He adds that it is convenient for the capitalist system to pay good wages, because wages are the income that pushes demand. (Keynes took on the idea).
Marxist theory is based on labor relations in the 19th century. An awful period that Sismondi described in 1819 and Marx in 1848. Sismondi is widely quoted by Marx in his Capital
In the 21st century there are other problems. The biggest one is wealth concentration; precisely the subject of Sismondi’s New Principles of Political Economy. The fashionable issue in international economics is Value Chains. An interpretation of the processes of international production that increases social and international inequality in international wealth distribution.
The Value Chains concept attributes patent owners a right to a greater share in the value of the product of a transnational production process.
Another big problem in modern International Economy is that of unequal poverty in the XXI century.
Modern poverty is a random product of collateral damage of the concentration of wealth in the financial sector.
The distribution of inorganic dollars that the Federal Reserve gives away to banks under the euphemism Quantitative Easing (QE) is a lousy example copied by the ECB.
QE is a Virtual Public Debt issued on the pretext that banks will have more money to lend to entrepreneurs who are going to use the money to create new jobs.
Hopefully virtual money would be used only to pay with debt for the goods and services produced by the real economy.
What is most dangerous is that QE money and financial flows no longer follow trade flows. Now they have their own pattern of flows.
The virtual money that the banks receive from the Federal Reserve and the ECB is used to fuel speculation on the stock market that are variants of the Ponzi pyramid called derivatives, which when it collapses drags savings and pension funds along with it, and all the real wealth produced by labor
Thus, the financial sector it a parasite feeding on the real economy whose actors are employers and workers.
Since the 19th century, the international economic structure has changed a lot. Now employers and workers have common interests and common enemies.
Let us return to our subject.
Once power is seized, the expansion of social support is essential to sustain and stabilize power.
This requires transversal growth between classes.
The enduring success of the Peronist model is due to its proposal for collaboration between the classes to define a national policy in the face of international dynamics.
Agreement between the actors of the real economy is necessary to balance the excessive concentration of wealth in the virtual economy of the financial sector.
The model for concertation among the actors that produce real wealth was proposed by Peron in his speech before the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange in 1944. Peron's proposal is still valuable.
The globalist international oligarchy is not at all afraid of Marxism, an anachronistic ideology that today is not supported by the working class, but only by harmless groups of vociferous minorities.
On the contrary, Marxism is useful to globalist transnational corporations, because when Marxists gain power, they eliminate competition from national capital and production, thereby freeing local markets for the penetration of transnational corporations in both national and regional markets.
As an example, I put the case of the Venezolana de Cemento. Originally it was a fully Venezuelan capital company, underwritten by the middle class who invested their savings in the most successful private company in Venezuela.
Its Venezuelan cement competed advantageously in the North American, Caribbean or Andean market with the cement of the transnational corporations (Lafarge, CEMEX, et al).
The Bolivarian government of Mr. Chavez expropriated the Venezolana de Cemento and didn’t compensate Venezuelan shareholders, but only foreign shareholders (CEMEX).
Venezuela now has cement shortages and must import cement and the largest share package of Venezolana de Cemento was sold by the Bolivarian government to the US subsidiary of transnational cement maker Lafarge.
This is how things work behind the rhetorical anti-capitalist shouting.
These facts remind me of the brilliant definition of opposition by Ramon Diaz Sanchez in his Guzman: “The opposition is the platform where the ambitious wait their turn, while, vociferously screaming”.
Incoherence is the most permanent feature in the politics of Venezuelan governments. They tend to oppose even themselves.
The Marxist theory of confiscation of all the means of production creates automatic scarcity of everything, as has always been proven.
It is impossible to maintain political support in the midst of scarcity.
That is the reason for Washington's policy of blockade, sanctions and economic sabotage against disobedient governments.
Economic failure causes disappointment and erodes political support. Except in Cuba, someone may say; maybe, but Cuba in the 50’s was a model of agriculture that Venezuelan agronomists went to study there.
Cuba is now dependent on the import of U. S. food (discretely shipped from New Orleans) in order to avoid another Special Period as they call the years when, without further help from the USSR, Cuba was left to its own devices, and Cubans suffered from hunger.
That food dependency may explain why, after the usual confrontational rituals, in the end, Cuba always yields to whatever Washington proposes at the International Forums in Geneva (WTO, et al).
The social problem of the 21st century is not the exploitation of workers by private capital.
The social problem now is the global concentration of wealth in the financial sector and the consequent unemployment in the other sectors.
Sismondi or Peron propose to improve the distribution of wealth by seeking agreement among the actors who create it, without ever stopping the productive process of wealth.
Marx believed that the way to end the class struggle was to confiscate the entire productive apparatus; which, in effect, ends the class struggle; by elimination of all the others classes.
In the 21st century the distribution of knowledge is very wide. That speeds up circulation between classes. The social changes produced by modern communication technologies leave no room for class hatred as a political tool. Marxist theory was surpassed by technological development.
The current economic and political problems are two and linked.
The greatest is the concentration of wealth in a group of global financial oligarchs; the other problem is the corruption of the entire political class of the group of countries known under the label "Western democracies."
As for the corruption of the political class generated by the current representative system, I suggest reading José Ortega y Gasset's La Rebelión de las Masas.
Ortega explains that democracy can only function as representation of people’s will when people vote in communities where they know each other through direct contact. The Real Economy wealth production sectors constitute communities of employers and workers, were personalities and reputations are usually known.
The anonymous masses are influenced by mass media and mass media mobilizes for money.
So it is inevitable that, in a political world where candidates for election are known only through the media, a representative democracy will only represent the will of the oligarchy.
Aristotle was right: Democracy always degenerates into Oligarchy.
The globalist oligarchy is not afraid of Marxism, which is useful for ruining national capital.
The globalist oligarchy fears national agreements, of the type proposed by Peron.
The doctrinal basis of Peronism is in Peron's speech before the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange, in August, 1944.
Peron pointed out that workers and employers have common interests regarding the prosperity of the respective sector.
The government's role is to coordinate the sum of these sectoral interests and those of professional associations as a guide for a national economic policy.
Peron's speech, and the actions that followed, bristled the hair of United States Ambassador to Buenos Aires, Spruille Braden.
In 1946, Peron was the most popular presidential candidate. Braden's hostile involvement was so notorious that it inspired the Peronist campaign slogan "Braden or Peron"!
Peron's message created such strong cross-sectional support that Peronism returned to the presidency – 76 years later – in the October 2019 election.
[1] Editor’s note: Peronism or justicialism is an Argentine political movement based on the ideas and legacy of Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974).
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