Does Bachelet represent "the left"? This question has become a bit more relevant today as countries throughout Latin America have elected and reelected a string of left-wing candidates. Evo Morales in Bolivia, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Nestor Kirschner in Argentina, Lula Da Silva in Brazil,etc. The international press has included Bachelet in this "turn to the left" panorama. When the international press focuses on Bachelet’s personal history, it’s easy to assume that Bachelet belongs to "the left". Because of her militancy and her personal tale of torture and exile, it makes sense to identify her with the historical leftist movements. But like most of the socialists who make up the ruling coalition party in Chile, Bachelet exhibits almost no apprehension when it comes to welcoming "free market" policies and processes, which are clearly not associated with "the left". James Petras*, this week on Democracy Now, had the following apprehensions about this "left-leaning" Chile:I don't think they're left-leaning, because -- for many reasons. Lula, for example, has opened the country up to more foreign investment. He’s paid more on foreign debt than any previous, supposedly, conservative president. Certainly Bachelet is not anything leaning to the left. She’s led the arms race, free trade agreements, promoted enormous increases in arms spending. Chile leads per capita arms spending.
I think you have to look at what the business press says, what they're saying in Washington, and when you get pronouncements from Condoleezza Rice and others, saying that Chile is the U.S.'s best ally and we're talking about the U.S. that has been aggressively pursuing bellicose policies, we have to moderate that that perception that is left-leaning. Washington has shown an enormous capacity to tolerate rhetoric, as long as it’s not consequential.
*James Petras is a professor of sociology at Binghamton University in New York and is an anti-imperialist writer and researcher. He's worked intensely with the Landless Peasant Movement in Brazil and has written several books on globalization and the market.
The Free Market and The Left
Neoliberal economic policies are inherently not "leftist" policies no matter how much rhetoric you slap on to them. Free Trade agreements with northern economies, and China, do very little to promote worker’s rights and social justice in general. In fact, quite the opposite is true. As soon as you leave local businesses, workers and farmers exposed to "free" market competition from much more competitive corporations, who besides being able to set up a factory anywhere in the world, are also in a position to harness all the newest destruction technology in the tasks of production, coordination, distribution, public relations,etc, then these local economies, these local and national businesses, along with the livelihoods associated with them, are destroyed. The big economic groups behind all this foreign investment (all this capital which moves mountains and mobilizes people at will) are just not interested in anything else other than making a profit. Most of the real social issues "the left" represents run counter to the interests these big groups push to institutionalize in their host countries. Policies that promote unregulated export production require ecological nearsightedness, which is a level of blindness that leads to ecological destruction on a mass scale. We're seeing this in Chile right now.
The Left has also been associated, historically, with worker's rights. In Today's Chile, the situation of workers is laughable. We live in a country down here where to say that you have a job is enough to be considered lucky. Nevermind that the job is precarious, that you don't even work for the boss you're working for (Chile has a pathetic sub-contracting system which violates worker's rights and which the governing elites have done nothing about, except as part of a shameful act of campaign coercion in the last week before the presidential election), that your salary doesn't even take you out of poverty, that the type of work you do is so devoid of humanity that you end up becoming a pharmacy junkie who mistreats your wife and kids, that the pension you pay exorbitant amounts of money for each month won’t cover a decent retirement.
Free Trade Agreements Never Discussed
I am embarrassed when the president of Chile, who considers himself a socialist, goes on TV and sings praises about a recently signed free trade agreement (which no one has read and which was never a campaign issue in the recent presidential election) and the main reason he gives is that people will have access to cheaper goods. More than embarrassment, I think it is almost criminal for a president to go on TV and talk down to the Chilean people in that way. Does he think that people don't understand that to open a country up to this sort of economic dumping (based on human rights violations in China, or on artificial subsidies in the United States) spells disaster for local industry, or of what's left of it? Moreover, to have your only argument for virtually imposing, by decree, such an economic situation on people be that now everyone can have access to cheaper shoes and plastic cups! If that is not a media crime, then what is?
Box Stores
It seems that the great vision for Chile, according to the governing economic and political elites, as well as the media establishment (who paint it nice for people to hear and see) is that every Chilean be both a responsible, law-abiding consumer of plastic crap at their local box store AND a hard-working receiver of lousy wages as an employee at the next box store further down the privatized highway.
What is considered "The Left" in Chile is really just a group of ex-idealist, born-again capitalists and self-righteous elites whose vanguard banner reads: "Everything in Chile is for sale!" Just because they're educated in the discourse of economics (at Princeton, at Stanford, at Harvard) and can call this type of pillaging "economic development" or "economic growth",doesn't change the fact that, in the end, they’re nothing more than arrogant sell-outs.
Will Michelle Change Things?
Only time will tell if Bachelet represents a drastic change in the policies of the ruling coalition. I have a feeling, however, that at most she’ll try to extend the breadth of social programs in order to bridge the embarrassing gap between the rich and the poor. This will be a political necessity for her, to say the least, because any international economic crisis could mean the dwindling of popular support which the coalition has enjoyed until now. If this happens, then that's great, and on a practical level we can feel better about this country. But at the level of real and revolutionary change, her four years in office are doomed to become yet another chapter in the "important business" of administering the neoliberal model and spewing discourse after discourse on how we’re slowly getting there. Consequently, the fate of all Chileans will remain in the hands of these economic monsters who are hell-bent on destroying as much of this earth as they can, as quickly as possible.
