Socialism, social struggles and the new way of life in Latin America/O socialismo, lutas sociais e novo modo de vida na America Latina.
| Autor | Antunes, Ricardo |
An initial note (1)
At the threshold of the twenty-first century, the search for a new socialist project is in today's agenda once more. Nowadays we have the conditions to take a more conclusive account of the experience lived in the twentieth century: considering its most important experiences defeated, with the USSR at the forefront, it is possible to certify that these projects were not able to defeat the system of social metabolism of capital.
This system, constituted by the tripod of capital, labour and state, can not be overcome without eliminating all elements which comprise it. As Istvan Meszaros (2) says, it is not enough to eliminate one or even two of its poles. The challenge is to overcome the tripod, including the hierarchical social division of labour which subordinates work to capital.
By not having advanced in this direction, post-capitalist countries, led by the USSR, were incapable of breaking the logic of capital. A similar phenomenon occurs today with China, which oscillates between a broad opening to the world market under the command of capital and the strengthening of rigid political control exercised by the state and the Chinese Communist Party. I believe that the reflection on this point is a first and decisive challenge.
Let's focus on a second point: the experience of "socialism in one country" or even in a limited set of countries was also a defeated enterprise in the century which has passed. As Marx says, socialism must be conceived as a world-historical processuality; political revolutions may initially assume a more limited and partial national conformation. But social revolutions have an intrinsic universalizing (3) meaning.
In the phase of globalized capital, marked by a globally unequal capital system--in the characterization of Francois Chesnais (4), socialism can only be conceived as a global / universal enterprise. Its effectiveness in the national space will depend, decisively, on its development in other national spaces, which tends to give it a historical-world process. In this movement, the more it can reach the heart of capital (the United States, Unified Europe and Japan in the foreground), the greater will be its effective possibilities.
Likewise, the preservation of market elements during the socialist transition of the twentieth century proved to be a condign path for the capital system to be reinstated. Thus, the constitution of a free association of workers, creating a new system of social metabolism based on autonomous and self-determined work, is incompatible with the gears of the market. The apologetic and justifying "concepts" of the "socialist market economy" or "socialist market" are euphemisms used to cover up the return and command of the capital system in its restoration process.
The cases of China and the former USSR are too strong. Many believed that Soviet economic openness, alongside with its political openness, was going to be a condition for the preservation of what was also mistakenly termed as "real socialism". The collapse of the Soviet system is already part of our recent history, and only a lot of naivety could imagine that "Chinese socialism" can control the system of capital that spreads intensely throughout China, whose degradation of labour has become the standard used by the system capital to further dilapidate the workforce on a global scale.
The major difference, when we compare the Chinese case and the Soviet one, is that the first one made a monumental economic opening to capital, hypertrophying the political apparatus of the state and its control over the class society which exists today in China. With that in mind, the economic opening was materialized, maintaining ultra-centralized control of the state through the Communist Party and the Army. An example of these changes and the advance of the capital system is the fact that the Chinese Communist Party already allows, among its members, businessmen affiliation. It is not difficult to imagine what will result from this picture in the coming years and decades.
Disregarding this processuality, when one thinks of socialism of the twenty-first century, would be the same as disregarding history. And the critical history of the socialist experiment of the twentieth century is fundamental to the effective exercise of socialism in the twenty-first century.
In this context, the possibilities of socialism in Latin America must be thought of as part of a processuality that is not depleted in its national space. As we saw earlier, throughout the twentieth century, the thesis of "socialism in one country" had a tragic result. The major challenge, therefore, is to seek the rupture with the logic of capital on a national, continental and global scale simultaneously. Countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Colombia may play significant roles in this scenario, since that, on one hand, they are important poles of the global structuring of capital and, on the other, they have a significant number of social and political forces of work and struggles and social movements of extreme importance.
Economically, several of these countries have a significant productive base, such as Brazil and Mexico; others have strategic political importance, as in the case of Venezuela, which, together with Bolivia and, to less extent, Ecuador, seeks alternatives that are contrary to the dominant neoliberal logic.
Along with the outbreak of struggles and popular uprisings in India...
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