Elecciones en Chile, 2009. ¿Que Paso?

On the streets of Santiago, supporters of the arch-neoliberal candidacy of multi-billionaire Sebastián Piñera were celebrating the electoral victory of the right wing coalition against the once hegemonic ‘left-wing’ Concertación party. The Concertación, a left-wing coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats, ruled Chile, uninterruptedly, since the return to democracy in 1989. They fielded former President Eduardo Frei (1993-1999), who left office with an approval rating of only 28 percent—imagine fielding George W. Bush for the presidency again and you get a feeling of how ‘unwise’ the decision was.

Unsurprisingly, the Concertación was only able to receive a mere 29.6 percent of the vote, largely in line with Frei’s popularity back in 1999. The Concertación was unable to get the message that voters wanted ‘real change’ and it nominated a former President who instituted much of the neoliberal reforms that Chilenos today are itching against. However, many commentators are making egregious mistakes in deciphering what is happening in Chile. They assume that the defeat of the Concertación is a defeat of the left and the ascendency of the right in Chile; if one were to actually look at the results the opposite is true.

To some commentators, Piñera’s ‘victory’ proves that the change Chilenos want is more neoliberalism, more of the same policies that have engendered the same pessimism and hopelessness that millions of Chilenos voted against. If one were to take the time to look back at the trends electorally we can see that the right-wing parties in this round actually got a smaller share of the vote than previous elections, post-1989:

RN+UDI, as a percentage of the total vote

1989: 44.83
1993: 40.84
1999 (1): 47.51
2000: 48.69
2006 (1): 48.64
2006: 46.50
2009 (1): 44.05

One can clearly see that for all the hype, the right in Chile has actually lost a lot of ground and has been reduced to generally the same constituency that it had in 1989; thus, it also obvious that the left in Chile has increased in strength, but not in cohesiveness. Chilenos do not want to have a more neoliberal government, what Chilenos want is another alternative. The Concertación is unable to offer that alternative, because it was the same party that legitimized and institutionalized neoliberalism structurally and democratically; however, it would be unfair to state that the Concertación was not forced to enact these policies, since Pinochet and Pinochetismo were potent forces politically after 1989. The Partido Communista, with the baggage of the Allende era, also is unable to offer a viable alternative, that being said, the party has increased its voting share from 5.4 percent in the 2006 election to 6.21 percent in 2009.

Enter Marco Enríquez-Ominami, popularly known as MEO. He protrudes an Obama/Clintonesqe style and offers not only a more progressive economic platform, but also a socially progressive platform as well. He was part of the Socialist Party wing within the Concertación party, but left the party raising objections to the candidacy of Frei. MEO did not have a clear platform, nor did he have an actual party organization behind him, but he was arguing for a new Chile, who has claimed to have sympathies to Chavez. I do not believe that MEO offered anything of real substance other than to become an ‘empty signifier’ for a nascent populist movement seeking change that no other party was able to give.

It is obvious that the Chilean ‘third way’, neoliberal state is reaching its limits of co-optation and demands are beginning to go beyond what the neoliberal ideology and state is able to concede. The second round will determine whether or not Piñera can articulate his vision of Chile as one of ‘change’, I do not think he will succeed, because the trend is to the left.

On climate change, Part I

Climate change has become the rallying point for the left in the aftermath of the ‘end of history’ in 1989. Apparently, it seems, humans aren’t good agents to overthrow capitalism and save society from the ever-encroaching tyranny that is ‘privatization’, as defended by liberals. This defeatism is best manifested by J.A. Cohen in his work, If you’re an Egalitarian, how come you’re so Rich?:

I remain skeptical of the human-nature premise of the selfishness defense of inequality, for something like the old reasons. But I am no longer so skeptical of the sociological premise...if people are by now irreversibly selfish (not by nature but) as a result of capitalist history, then, so I now think, structure alone could not suffice to deliver equality, in the face of selfishness. Even on reasonably sunny views about the limits of human nature itself, capitalist history would have thrown us into a cul-de-sac from which we could not exit and regain the road to socialism. (119-120).

The aforementioned quote is truly a concession to Fukuyama’s ‘the end of history’, and I think that most people of the ‘left’ agree with Cohen. Since the left has given up fighting this ‘human nature’ element of liberal-capitalism—even if it admitted as a sociological construction of capitalism—, it has thus conceded defeat to the forces of reaction and regression. The best that we can do is admit defeat, via Giddens ‘Third Way’ liberal-democracy, which seeks to ameliorate capitalist exploitation of Polanyi’s ‘fictitious commodities’—land, labour, and capital—, by exporting the worst elements of capitalism to the Third World and living in our debt-fueled, post-modern, ‘creative economy’. Since human beings cannot be the agents of change, a new agent of change is needed, one whose internal mechanisms can be predicted and act as a deus ex machina to save us from ourselves—no longer is the social-system that is capitalism the enemy, but rather our own inferior ‘human nature’. However, to admit such a fundamental and definitional defeat is not manageable by the left, because it would render the left irrelevant; the left needs a “fetish” in order for it to live with its apparent defeat: enter the environment.

The logic is as follows: the environment is a non-negotiable element in our collective space that has its own laws of regulation that transcend human manipulation and articulation, viz., that cannot be hegemonized. However, due to man’s uncontrolled exploitation of the Earth’s resources, primarily fossil fuels, the self-correcting mechanisms of the planet are no longer functioning properly and leading us towards the apocalypse. One of the effects, that affect every human regardless of class position, is climate change. Climate change, as agreed by most scientists, is a result of human action, linked to the industrial revolution; however, what is obfuscated is that this is fueled by the unending accumulation of capital in private hands as its motivation. Thus, climate change is like a semi-religious condemnation of capitalism from the abstract planet. Therefore, we must either conform to nature, or suffer the consequences of its wrath. What we are unwiling to do is actually conform, we are trying everything in our power to prevent the dirty truth of capitalism from exposing itself, with greater and greater unpaid debts, a la Wallerstein, accumulating in the future. 

For the left this is the perfect agent of change, it has all the power of God and cannot be re-articulated. Nature, not man, has become the Jacobian agent of unrelenting, blind terror that delivers justice on a massive scale with no sense of hesitation. Of course, we all know that this is scientifically true and we, as a species, rich or poor, deserve this wrath. Why? Because we, as a species, have alternatives to this system that could help stop things from getting worse. First, the left has to fight the fundamental battle, which Cohen has given up, that human nature is not set in stone, but rather is a result of hegemonic articulation and was and can be changed. If we accept the liberal/neoclassical notion of human nature, of homo economicus, then the capitalist ‘free market’ is the only way that we can organize society and that means ‘the end of history’, literally. Secondly, assuming we have transcended capitalist subjectivity, we could democratically organize our societies in such a way to live within our means and socialize the means of production to take away the incentives that exist to ‘cheat’. Thirdly, we could strive for a more cosmopolitan world, something that can only be realized under socialism, rearticulating our sense of identity from our ‘nations’ to humanity in general, thereby allowing for a global distribution of resources.

I am not foolish enough to think that this is possible within the time frame given to us by an increasing number of climatologists, before we are essentially doomed. The recent climate change conference in Copenhagen will not result in substantive change, because real change means a post-capitalist society and those who are negotiating at the conference tables cannot even imagine such a reality. As Zizek once wrote, paraphrasing, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism’. The movie 2012, which I saw in theaters here in Uruguay, is a perfect testament to that axiom. The main characters looked at who was being allowed on the ‘arcs’, the rich who paid $1 billion  for a "ticket", and knew that those who merited survival—like the Indian scientist who discovered the tectonic shifts in the first place—were left to die. The interesting thing about this is that the main characters knew it was wrong, yet did nothing and worse, could not even articulate what was going on: capitalism. As Marx wrote about ideology, “they do not know it, but they are doing it”.

Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story', Review-Part II

Ironically, the argument that the government could not do anything was proven time again by Republican mismanagement of the economy, the budget, national emergencies, etc. Indeed, it was to be expected, if you believe that government cannot do things right and you are in charge of government the result will be bad government. Thus, in their quest to reduce the size of government, the right and eventually the left increasingly privatized more and more of governments responsibilities leading to perverse incentives and bad outcomes; something that Moore showed effectively with the ‘PA Child Care’ example. Arguably, the Republican’s purposefully engaged in mass deficit spending so that the next government would have to cut spending, ergo, cut off the remaining remnants of the ‘New Deal’, which would then have the effect of further lowering taxes on the rich. The greatest effort was Bush’s effort to privatize social security, FDR’s greatest achievement, so that Wall St. could get trillions of dollars of new money to move around, unproductively. Since raising taxes in the United States was increasingly not an option for Republicans or Democrats, the only option--politically--was to cut spending. Herein lies the another defeat of the left in the United States. It occurred when the left, via Bill Clinton’s triangulation, accepted the meaning of the ‘government’ as defined by the right; as Slavoj Žižek argues: “The true victory...occurs when the enemy talks your language. In this sense, a true victory is a victory in defeat: it occurs when one's specific message is accepted as a universal ground, even by the enemy” (Žižek 2007).

This is where Moore’s movie really makes a difference, it finally puts ‘capitalism’ into contention in the American political arena. This is crucially important, because it creates the conditions for real change. The right created those conditions in the 1970s and 1980s by making the term ‘government’ contentious, or what Ernesto Laclau calls a ‘floating signifier’; meaning that the content of the term is contested between different antagonistic camps in a hegemonic battle that structures the political. Throughout the movie Moore parodies and attacks the very idea that capitalism is a benevolent system that it is still somehow presented as being the same system, as imagined by Adam Smith of small firms that cannot influence prices, sentiments and are constrained by competition--premises effectively destroyed by Marx, Veblen, Sraffa, Harvey, Nitzan, etc. Moore then makes the case that capitalism proper is a system in which greed, avarice and anti-social behaviour ‘cannot be regulated’, because capitalism is what nurtures those sentiments in teh first place--it ‘retroactively’ creates its own presuppositions.

However, the weakness in Moore’s movie is that he is actually not asking for the destruction of the capitalist system, while at the same time seeking to destroy it--it reminds one of the eternal crisis of Social Democrats during the interwar period. In reality, Moore’s message is reformist, Moore wants to bring about a social democracy in the United States. Indeed, Moore used FDR’s rousing speech on the ‘Second Bill of Rights’, where FDR emphasized the importance of having positive rights along with negative rights, using FDR’s speech as a rallying point of his movement. FDR was a reformer that greatly improved the lives of millions of Americans, but he was still a capitalist--meaning he supported the essential social system of exploitation based on private property and private appropriation of the social surplus; the market system, as the superior means by which one allocates resources; and the existence of inequality and exploitation and domination of labour by the bourgeois, albeit certainly not to the same morally unacceptable extent that currently exists. Moore points to Italy, Germany and Japan’s constitutions where elements of FDR’s ideas were incorporated and uses them as examples of how society should look like, but they are still capitalist states themselves.

The thrust of Moore’s movie is, in reality, an argument against neoliberalism, against the concentration of society’s productive assets into fewer and fewer hands through the process of what David Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and ‘spatio-temporal fixes’--best exemplified by Flint, Michigan. In addition, it is an argument against the justificatory discourse of neoliberalism that ‘greed is good’, there is no ‘we’ just ‘I’, and that profit motive--code for bourgeois income--is the be-all-end-all of our socio-economic existence; indeed, the best parody in the movie was Moore using Jesus Christ as a hack for the profit motive. Neoliberalism enabled this to occur by eroding the regulations, particularly financial regulations, and the social compact that enabled the stabilization of capitalism during the ‘golden era’. Moore’s compelling case is that capitalists depended on the exploitation of labour, land and capital in a certain place at a certain time to become rich and once that particular social arraignment no longer serves their interests they destroy that very socio-economic infrastructure, leaving those who created that wealth with nothing but misery, unemployment, debt and eventually abject poverty. Thus, what Moore is pointing to is that there is a unpaid ‘social debt’ that if left unpaid, could create a serious backlash against the system. Something even Citibank in its ‘plutonomy’ article noted:


Furthermore, the rising wealth gap between the rich and poor will probably at some point lead to a political backlash. Whilst the rich are getting a greater share of the wealth, and the poor a lesser share, political enfrachisement remains as was – one person, one vote (in the plutonomies). At some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich. This could be felt through higher taxation (on the rich or indirectly though higher corporate taxes/regulation) or through trying to protect indigenous laborers, in a push-back on globalization – either anti-immigration, or protectionism. We don’t see this happening yet, though there are signs of rising political tensions. However we are keeping a close eye on developments (10).

Implicit in this quote, one can sense an agitation and apprehension with “political enfranchisement”, a recognition of the incommensurability between democracy and neoliberalism. This does not bode well for the future of our democracy if the rich are unwilling to compromise as social antagonism will certainly increase and both sides of this social antagonism may harden their absolutist positions. Not only that, the advances made by the American working class during the New Deal era have eroded as inequality has gone back up to pre-depression levels through the gradual erosion of the welfare state. The left has failed because it has accepted the socially-constructed pressures of globalization as truth--the ‘Third Way’--, as inevitable conditions of capitalism. Materially, the destruction of the union movement through deindustrialization and regressive tax policies have eroded the institutional means that labour was able to defend its interests against capital.

However, Moore at the same time raises the important question about capitalism proper. The real question embedded in Moore’s polemic is, can this socio-economic crisis be avoided within capitalism? Certainly, the immutable laws of capitalism, accumulation, lead it endemic crises of overaccumulation and underconsumption. Thus, the economic part of the socio-economic equation leaves me with no doubt that, no we cannot avoid crisis within capitalism. However, that alone is not enough to create the sort of systemic crisis that could undermine capitalism as a system. A truly revolutionary and/or hegemonic moment occurs when capitalism is unable to absorb, or ‘transform’ demands within the political system. A well functioning liberal-democratic state was able to ward off the crisis of the Great Depression, because it was able to absorb the demands stemming form the population before those demands manifested into something entirely different. This is Gramscian notion of ‘transformism’ is termed as ‘democratic demands’ by Laclau. What Moore is advocating is for this sort of welfarist, liberal-democracy that can deal with particular demands within a capitalist system, with the added element of worker-democracy. Thus, Moore is ironically trying to save capital from it own avarice and greed and if capital had any vested interest in its long-term existence, it should listen to Moore instead of dismissing him.

If we want to be truly anti-capitalist, then we have to stop believing in it:

While capitalism is resolutely "materialistic" (what ultimately matters is wealth, real power, pleasures, all other things are just "noble lies," chimerae covering up this hard truth), this cynical wisdom itself has to rely on a vast network of belief: the whole capitalist system functions only insofar as one plays the game and "believes" in money, takes it seriously, and practices a fundamental trust in others who are also supposed to participate in the game. Capital markets, now valued at an estimated $83 trillion, exist within a system based purely on self-interest, in which herd behavior, often based on rumors, can inflate or destroy the value of companies —or whole economies —in a matter of hours. (Zizek 303)