SUL «SOCIALISMO CON CARATTERISTICHE CINESI», OVVERO DEL CAPITALISMO REALMENTE ESISTENTE IN CINA

di Michele Nobile

1. Il problema posto dalla epocale trasformazione sociale della Cina 

La «pacifica ascesa» o «pacifico sviluppo» della Cina costituisce uno dei processi più notevoli dell’economia mondiale a cavaliere dei secoli XX e XXI, forse ilpiù importante. Nel corso dei quattro decenni dell’epoca delle riforme economiche i tassi di crescita del prodotto per abitante, della produzione industriale e delle esportazioni sono stati impressionanti. Il governo cinese può sostenere con orgoglio che dal 1978 il prodotto interno si è moltiplicato e la parte della Cina nella produzione mondiale è aumentata di 4 volte, che la Cina è il primo paese esportatore del mondo e quello con le più ampie riserve valutarie (la maggior parte in dollari). Per millenni l’Impero cinese è stato il più vasto serbatoio mondiale di forza lavoro contadina: nel 1949, anno di nascita della Repubblica popolare, la popolazione residente in aree urbane era l’11% del totale e solo il 19% trenta anni dopo, all’inizio delle riforme. Nel 1999 la quota della popolazione urbana era già salita al 35% ma entro il 2010 era cresciuta di altri 15 punti, fino al 50%, e nel 2017 ammontava a oltre 813 milioni di persone, il 58,5% della popolazione totale¹. 

TEN REFLECTIONS AND A COMMENT: THE CYCLE OF FEAR IN THE MIDST OF THE ANTHROPOCENE, by Roberto Savio and Michele Nobile

IN DUE LINGUE (Inglese, Italiano)
IN TWO LANGUAGES (English, Italian)

It is now clear that we are in a period of transition, even if we do not know where we are headed. It is evident that the political, economic and social system which has accompanied us since the end of the Second World War is no longer sustainable.

According to Amnesty International, exponentially growing inequalities have practically taken us back to the levels of Queen Victoria’s days: however, today on a global level. Ten years ago, 652 people possessed the same wealth as 2.3 billion people. Now they number just eight.

According to International Labour Organisation projections, the eighteen-year-olds of today will retire with an average pension of 632 euros.

Despite official statements, and surrounded by general indifference, we are reaching the limit of a 2 degrees centigrade increase in the temperature of the atmosphere since 1854, which is considered the limit beyond which our planet will suffer irreversible changes.

Finance has become detached from the economy creating a world of its own, the only one with no international control bodies, where financial transactions in a day are forty times higher than the production of goods and services around the entire planet. Since 2009, the major banks have paid over 800 billion fines as a result of illegal operations.

Political participation has fallen from an average of 86%, in 1960, to 63.7% today.

While an in-depth analysis of the situation would be extremely complex and involve all aspects of our life, it is possible to identify important – and at the same time simple – points of reflection on which to dwell together.

Reflection 1

The crisis has deep roots.

In 1973, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a global governance plan – designed to reduce inequalities among its members – known by the name of New International Economic Order. The plan was born with the support of the United States (even if launched by Mexico and Algeria).

The post-war international system – of which the United Nations is part, for example – had come about on the initiative of the United States, the main winners of the Second World War, which was interested in preserving peace and development after a war in which it lost 405,000 soldiers out of a population of 132 million people. Germany lost more than five million out of 78 inhabitants, of which over two million civilians, against 8,000 in the United States and nearly thirteen million in the USSR).

The United Nations was created with Washington’s commitment to contribute 25% to the budget, which illustrates the difference with today, when Trump is threatening to withdraw.

But until the 1981 summit in Cancún, which brought together the twenty-two most important Heads of State in the world (excluding the communist camp), we lived in the illusion of the end of inequality, based on a world democracy where the majority of countries decided the course to follow for the common good.

Newly-elected president Reagan took part in Cancún and announced that the United States no longer accepted being subjected to the rules of an abstract world democracy. The United States – he said – is not a country like the others, and would go back to deciding its own international and trade policy. Margaret Thatcher was also at the same meeting, becoming the European counterpart of Reagan.

A different vision of the world was born: “Society does not exist. Individuals exist (Thatcher); “It is not factories that pollute, but trees” (Reagan). Poverty produces poverty, wealth produces wealth. So the rich should be taxed as little as possible, because they distribute wealth.

Reflection 2

In 1989, a few years after Cancún, the Berlin Wall came down: it was the end of ideologies, the straitjackets that had led us to Nazism and Communism.

The core idea was that we must be pragmatic. Politics had to solve concrete problems, not pursue utopias. But the solution of a given problem without being part of a total vision of society – right or left, it does not matter – is actually called utilitarianism, and politics aimed at administration rather than at ideas distances political participation and increases corruption.

Without ideal programmes, the importance of the politician’s personality, possibly telegenic, increased and was measured on TV and not in public squares. Marketing, not ideas or programmes, became the main instrument for electoral campaigns.

Reflection 3

At the same time, neoliberal globalisation came into play as a single thought without alternatives (Thatcher’s There Is No Alternative – TINA; it is interesting to note that, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the term globalisation had never appeared in the media).

This globalisation was based on the socioeconomic and political model of the so-called Washington Consensus, the development paradigm imposed by International Monetary Fund, World Bank and US Treasury. It envisaged the adoption of the following reforms: macroeconomic stabilisation, liberalisation (of trade, investments and finance), privatisation and deregulation.

It eliminated national protection barriers everywhere, reduced non-productive expenditure (education, health and social assistance) and promoted free competition among States. It is famous the definition of it given by Kissinger: “The new paradigm of American supremacy”. Developing countries experienced it as submission to economic rules imposed by the North. But Kissinger did not see that once the way to free competition had been opened, China and other countries would emerge.

Reflection 4

The reaction of the left to the single thought was the “Third Way”, successfully proposed by Tony Blair: it was time to abandon the old ideas of the left and ride the globalisation, accepting the lack of alternatives.

Social democracy, from Blair to Renzi, seeks to transform itself into a transversal party which also embraces the centre, with an active policy on concrete facts and no outdated ideological cages.

In fact, in this way the left has lost its popular base, and the 2008 crisis, caused by the absence of controls on American banks and then come up to Europe (with the left in government almost everywhere), has eliminated its capacity to redistribute surplus.

Workers, middle classes in crisis and victims of globalisation seek new defenders and vote for Le Pen (France), Farage (Britain), Wilder (Netherlands) and so on, up to choosing Salvini and the Five Star Movement (Italy).

Reflection 5

Numerous historians believe that greed and fear have been among the main engines of change in history.

In his latest book, Nel nome dell’umanità, Riccardo Petrella argues that these engines were implemented using three “traps”: in the name of God, in the name of the Nation and in the name of Profit. There is no doubt that since the fall of the Berlin Wall the values of globalisation (competition, profit, individualism and exaltation of wealth), together with the disappearance of social justice (solidarity, transparency, equity, etc.) from political debate, have created an ethics based on greed.

And twenty years later, in 2009, the economic and financial crisis – first in the United States (on real estate speculation) and then in Europe (on sovereign bonds) – has opened up a second cycle: that of fear.

Reflection 6

The cycle of fear which is in full swing (without having abandoned greed and while the three “traps” are once again in use) has created a new right which is not about ideas, but is based on emotions.

Brexit and Trump are easy-to-see phenomena, but the real phenomenon is much deeper. We are in a liquid society that is not structured on ideologies or classes. And in this society it is easy for leaders who ride fear and greed to leap into the limelight.

The 2009 crisis joined up with mass immigration from countries invaded by the West to depose their dictators and automatically introduce democracy. (Nevertheless, the disintegration of Yugoslavia – a modern and European country – after the death of Tito should have been a warning.)

It is not democracy that is ushered in, but chaos, civil wars, blood and destruction.

In 2003, George W. Bush began the invasion of Iraq. In 2011, civil war broke out in Syria, becoming soon a clash among Arab powers, Europe, the United States and Russia (as a result: six million displaced and half a million dead). In 2013, Sarkozy pushed an invasion into Libya.

From the ruins of Iraq, ISIS was born – terrorism in the name of God, for a return to original Islam (Wahhabism, financed worldwide by Saudi Arabia with 80 billion dollars in the last twenty years). Fifteen years before, the veterans of the US-funded war against Russian occupation in Afghanistan had gathered under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden in another organization, Al Qaeda, making the first attack in history on North American soil, in 2001.

As El Roto, famous cartoonist of El País, says: “We send them bombs, and they send us migrants”.

Two “traps” are triggered on the arriving refugees: in the name of God and in the name of the Nation.

Now, in Europe, identitarian and sovereignty parties are the second political force, ahead of socialist parties. If European elections were held today, the radical right would gather forty million votes. It is in power in Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria, but it also conditions the governments of the Nordic countries, Netherlands and Germany itself (since Alternative für Deutschland won 92 seats).

In Hungary, Orbán has launched the so-called “illiberal democracy”, Poland has denounced the secularism of the European Union and called for a huge march with populists and sovereignists from all over Europe, to the cry of “In the name of God”. The Visegrád Group (Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and now also Austria) has denounced the yielding of Europe to Islam and created an East-West rift of Europe, which joins the North-South rift on the vision of the economy: austerity or solidarity.

But there is something new: the United States intervenes in Europe openly supporting nationalist and xenophobic right-wing parties, which at the same time look not only to Trump, but also to Putin (who is also intervening in the European elections), considering him a point of reference.

As a result, in a rapidly aging Europe (in Italy, for example, young people between the ages of 18 and 25 account for only 3% of those entitled to vote), immigration has become a great populist and xenophobic right-wing banner.

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund has launched a warning: Europe needs to absorb 20.5 million immigrants in the short term, so that it can support its pension system and maintain productivity levels. Statistics show that immigrants contribute to the system more than they cost; they constitute the great majority of new small businesses and their dream is to be quickly integrated into the European system.

But there is no debate on immigration and what categories of immigrants to welcome. They are now all seen as dangerous invaders, intent on destroying the European identity, on crime and as taking work away from European citizens, victims of intense unemployment. Even Trump, in a country made up of immigrants, has made immigration control one of his warhorses.

A tragic phenomenon is that young people, many less than retirees, are no longer politically active. In history, young people burst onto the political scene to change the world they find. If they had voted, Brexit would not have happened. But the political system – of the elderly – ignores them. In Italy, the Renzi government allocated 30 billion euros to save four banks. In the same year, the total in the budget for young Italians was two billion.

Since the creation of the United Nations in 1945, we have risen from 2.5 billion inhabitants to 7.5 billion today. The growth will stop only in 2050, when we will number 9.5 billion. Either we find an agreement on governability and immigration that we need, or we will have to shoot immigrants, as some have already proposed.

‘TIMOCHENKO’ PRESIDENT OF COLOMBIA?, by Marcelo Colussi

IN DUE LINGUE (Inglese, Spagnolo)
IN TWO LANGUAGES (English, Spanish)

Signing of the peace agreement between Juan Manuel Santos and commander
Timochenko. Cartagena de Indias, September 26, 2016 © Presidency El Salvador

Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, better known by his nom de guerre ‘Timochenko’, leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), intends to run for the presidency of his country. It is difficult to predict what will happen in the next presidential elections in May 2018 but, if won by Timochenko, what might happen?

First of all, two considerations: 1) deepest respect for the struggle of an armed revolutionary movement such as FARC, and 2) this is no whimsical exercise in futurology.

This is to make it clear that in no way can the participation be called into question of a leftist force – until recently up in arms – in an electoral contest within the framework of the monitored and “drop by drop” democracies that the capitalist system can permit. In any case, this participation is a political manoeuvre, perhaps useful at this time (perhaps, even the only possible in the current circumstances), and it can in no way be judged. Political struggle, of course, allows for many variants.

At the same time, as another indispensable consideration for completing the above, in no way is continuation of revolutionary armed struggle being called for. It is patently obvious that, at this point in time, there is no political space for this to grow, differently from what happened in the Latin American context five decades ago.

Even more: there is not even the slightest space for it to come to life, but this is only valid at this precise moment, now that we are at the height of neoliberalism and demobilisation of the popular camp.

How will revolutionary struggle for social change continue in the future? We don’t know. Guerrillas are likely to rearm, why not? But today, there are definitely no possibilities for that to happen. Will hackers be an option, or electoral victory in local administrations, like city halls? It’s not clear. It will have to be invented.

What would happen if Timochenko won the elections?

This does not pretend to be an analysis of the personal figure of this Colombian guerrilla; it is, however, an attempt to interpret a complex reality, where the FARC’commander who becomes a politician within the framework of the current institutional system has limited – perhaps very limited – space for manoeuvre.

For now, the bulk of the commercial press is criminalising him. He is already being accompanied by a chorus of clichés about Castro-communism and the failure of Chavism.

However, what is important is looking at the limited space available to Timochenko. What can be modified within the capitalist institutional system? Is it possible to modify something? Is it worth attempting? Why enter the electoral contest as a political party more than the ruling class?

All these questions deserve long and complex analysis. Here the aim is not to be exhaustive, but to give some indications.

How far can something substantial be changed within the system of bourgeois political parties? Experience shows that there are insurmountable limits. Social democracy (capitalism with a human face, Keynesian policies, “humanist” regulations within the ruthless logic of the market) has achieved fairly balanced societies, but only in very few countries.

In fact, this presupposes an international division of labour where capitalist profit reaches a few places that can afford such “luxuries”.

Why are there no social democratic proposals in most nations of the so-called Third World? Because the exploitation and extraction of surplus value does not allow the product of social work (the wealth generated by work) to be distributed with equity, since that difference is the precondition for the offensive wealth of the ruling class.

Even if the wealth cake were to be shared by all, the system does not allow its equitable distribution, because it contains in itself that insurmountable negation: the rich are rich since there are poor, period.

If it was a matter of equitably distributing this wealth by achieving true social justice, the capitalist system cannot allow it, even if it wanted (and it does not want to!). The most it can aspire to is a scheme where the state plays a regulatory role, facilitating social policies that moderately benefit the majority. But it cannot go beyond that.

So the game of the political parties of the right cannot go beyond a relative regulation of the income generated by the working class. Really equating living conditions by empowering workers is absolutely impossible. This is socialism!

Put another way: bourgeois political parties are there to administer the system, not to change it. The FARC, like any revolutionary group that took up arms, tried to change the system, not to administer it with neat and measured correction, not with jacket and tie and being “well-dressed”, following the dominant logic. If Timochenko were to become president, could he change basic structures? Or … will he have to put on his jacket and tie?

History shows – unfortunately with much blood and pain in between – that real changes via ballot boxes are not possible. Every time an administration that emerged from a popular election within the framework of capitalism wanted to go beyond what the system allows – like Salvador Allende in Chile or Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala – it was hit hard. In any case, the system allows cosmetic changes, nothing more. Could Rodrigo Londoño ‘Timochenko’ change that?

THREE MONTHS OF DONALD TRUMP: MORE OF THE SAME, by Marcelo Colussi

IN DUE LINGUE (Inglese, Spagnolo)
IN TWO LANGUAGES (English, Spanish)

© Dominick Reuter

More than three months have passed since the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the world’s leading capitalist power: the United States of America. Nothing has changed. If someone had thought that something could change with his arrival at the White House, they were mistaken from beginning to end. Why should anything change?

The rhetoric used by the tycoon during his presidential campaign could certainly have led one to imagine - mistakenly - some change of scenario. Given the current crisis experienced by the US economy, his programme appeared to be - at least in words - a promise to revive a downcast national industry.

But here comes the mirage. What is downcast is the purchasing power of America’s working class, while its companies remain prosperous, very healthy, managing the outlook with prospects for the future. While it is true that, in technical accounting terms, China’s gross output has surpassed that of the United States, the latter still remains the world leader in economic, political, technological and military terms.

Of the largest corporations in the world, the eleven largest have their headquarters in the United States, and 54 are the most capitalised among the first 100 on the planet. They continue to manage all domains: oil (ExxonMobil Corporation, ChevronTexaco Corporation), communication technologies (Apple Inc., Microsoft, Google Inc., Facebook, Inc., Hollywood), banking (Wells Fargo & Company, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Berkshire Hathaway Inc.), chemicals (Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble Co., Pfizer Inc.) and, of course, the military industry (Lockheed Martin, Boeing Company, BAE Systems Inc., Northrop Grumman Corporation, Raytheon Company, General Dynamics Corporation, Honeywell Aerospace, Halliburton Company. All these corporations of the industrial-military complex recorded sales of almost one trillion dollars in 2016, having also seen increases of 60% since 2010, a clear sign that the economic crisis does not count for them).

There is decadence and, as has happened with every empire in history, it seems to have reached the peak of its expansion and begun its slow decline. But it is far from being a defeated empire: it continues to set the pace in many aspects.

Immediately after the end of World War II, America was the great capitalist power dominating the scene. The only nation with nuclear power at the time, it accounted for 52% of the world’s gross product. At this point in time, it no longer holds a monopoly of the atomic bomb (at least Russia and China are its rivals in parity), and its contribution to global production has dropped to 18%.

Undoubtedly, it is not continuing to expand, as it did from the middle of the 19th century and throughout the entire 20th century. Furthermore, although it is beginning to be called into question, its currency - the dollar - remains largely the universal currency, and English is still the obligatory lingua franca. Hollywood, no matter what, is the cultural referent of the planet, as much as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s.

TRIUMPH OF THE LEFT IN ECUADOR: SETBACK FOR LATIN AMERICA’S RIGHT?, by Marcelo Colussi

IN DUE LINGUE (Inglese, Spagnolo)
IN TWO LANGUAGES (English, Spanish)

Lenín Moreno

The triumph of left-wing candidate Lenín Moreno in the presidential elections at the beginning of April is a breath of fresh air and a sign of hope for the people of Ecuador, who can expect to see a continuation of the social measures initiated previously by the government of Rafael Correa.

Had right-wing candidate Guillermo Lasso won, these policies would have been radically suppressed, and society as a whole would have been led towards models of the most savage capitalism with semi-feudal nuances, as had been the case for centuries in the country.

The triumph of Moreno means that the progress recorded in recent years will be maintained and, in this sense, transmits hope.

For the workers, the poor and the excluded of the entire Latin American continent, however, it is difficult to imagine this being a barrier that will stop the prevailing rampant capitalism which goes by the name of “neoliberalism”.

For this reason, it is worth looking in detail what is at stake here, and the scenario in which Ecuador’s presidential elections were held.

For decades throughout Latin America - and throughout the world, and of course, also in Ecuador - policies of extreme capitalism, euphemistically called “neoliberalism”, have been imposed.

For some time it has seemed that the great enemy to be overcome - at least by those in the popular camp - is this neoliberalism, that “monstrous deformation” which appeared to have dominated the planet for years: a capitalism that prioritises the free market and private enterprise over the State.

That “villain of the piece” was said to represent the great problem, the cause of our misfortunes, of exclusion.

In recent years, roughly since the end of the last century, there has been a series of moderately progressive governments in the Latin American region. With the arrival of Hugo Chávez to the presidency of Venezuela, a discourse was retrieved that appeared to have been condemned to the archives, sunk at the same time as the Cold War.

In the popular camp, there was again talk of revolution, of socialism, of anti-imperialism. Socialist ideology seemed to have made a return. And, in order to overcome the constrictions and stigmas of the Stalinism of the Soviet era, the idea of ‘21st century socialism’ was born.