Exactly. The ruling class seldom do what is in their long-term interest -- reproduction of the capitalist mode of production -- on their own. They normally prefer either short-term individual profit or short-term collective class power to any long-term interest on the systemic level. When they reform capitalism, they usually do so only after pressures from below, which they resist by any means necessary, approach a level dangerous to the legitimation of their rule.
That is also true of populism and socialism. Leaders themselves, often petit-bourgeois, seldom do what is in the interest of their own government, unless pushed by masses from below. Hugo Chavez, a quite decent petit-bourgeois leader, started out as a clean-government man championing social economy who wasn't fundamentally at odds with the neoliberal stage of capitalism. The quality of any government, capitalist, populist, or socialist, depends more on masses than on leaders.
<http://monthlyreview.org/0707lebowitz.htm> Venezuela: A Good Example of the Bad Left of Latin America by Michael A. Lebowitz
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Initial Venezuelan Path
Although the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999 focused upon the development of human capacity, it also retained the support for capitalism of earlier constitutions. That constitution guarantees the right of property (Article 115), identifies a role for private initiative in generating growth and employment (Article 299), and calls upon the state to promote private initiative (Article 112). And, support for continued capitalist development was precisely the direction of the initial plan developed for 2001–07. While rejecting neoliberalism and stressing the importance of the state presence in strategic industries, the focus of that plan was to encourage investment by private capital—both domestic and foreign—by creating an "atmosphere of trust."
To this was to be added the development of a "social economy"—conceived as an "alternative and complementary road" to the private sector and the public sector. But, it is significant how little a role was conceived for self-managing and cooperative activities. Essentially, this was a program to incorporate the informal sector into the social economy; it is necessary, the plan argued, "to transform the informal workers into small managers." Accordingly, family, cooperative, and self-managed micro-enterprises were to be encouraged through training and micro-financing (from institutions such as the Women's Development Bank) and by reducing regulations and tax burdens. The goal of the state was explicitly described as one of "creating an emergent managerial class."
The social economy, thus, was to play the role it plays in Brazil and elsewhere—islands of cooperation nurtured by states, NGOs, Grameen-type banks, and church charities and serving as positive shock absorbers for the economic and political effects of capitalist globalization. Of course, if seriously pursued, this could make things easier for the unemployed and excluded, the half of the Venezuelan working class in the informal sector, by providing them with a better opportunity for survival. But, the social economy was not envisioned in the 2001–07 plan as an alternative to capitalism (except insofar as survival within the nooks and crannies of global capitalism constitutes an alternative).
A Third Way for Venezuela: it would turn its back on neoliberalism, would change the distribution of oil rents by acting against the state within the state that was the national oil company (PDVSA), and would move via an active state in the direction of the "endogenous development" supported by structuralist economists. The goal, in short, was a different capitalism. The Bolivarian Revolution at its outset clearly belonged in the Good Left.
On 10/10/07, Lajany Otum <lajany_otum at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Most of the arguments offered to bolster the case that reforms
> inevitably strengthen capitalism are an idiotic fallacy that takes
> correlation for causation: capitalism emerged stronger after
> the 30 year wave of anti-colonial, anti-racist struggles that that
> began after WW2, ergo the struggles themselves were responsible
> for the strengthened capitalism.
I have never argued that _struggles for equal rights themselves_ are necessarily "responsible for the strengthened capitalism" (in <http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/10/freedom-equality-property-and-bentham.html> or <http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May2004/Furuhashi0504.htm>). The strengthening comes _after_ the victories of the struggles, if the working class fail to make use of those victories -- removals of legal obstacle to class solidarity -- in their class interest and the ruling class succeed in marrying social liberalization with political liberalism and economic liberalization in the new spirit of capitalism.
On 10/10/07, Lajany Otum <lajany_otum at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Furuhashi and her followers
Do I have followers? If that is true, I'd propose a new religion for my hidden disciples -- Shi'ism that is at once scientific and utopian -- of which they are to be infidels and exegetes at the same time. (Good News also comes in Spanish, thanks to Julio Fernández Baraibar.)
<http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/10/shiism-scientific-and-utopian.html> Sunday, October 07, 2007 Shi'ism, Scientific and Utopian
What is the greatest danger to intellectuals in the Iranian diaspora today? Their desire to "look to the West."1 Their temptation to appeal to "American power," in the name of "a supposedly grateful Iranian public, led by a Westernized middle class," through ideological warfare that makes Iran out to be a Republic of Fear.
. . . [Kanan] Makiya argued, that, once freed, they [Iraqis]
would throw off the tired orthodoxies of Arab politics and,
in their despair, look to the West.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"It was doomed," [Ali] Allawi told me. "What was doomed
was the attempt to refashion Iraq in a sort of civilizational
makeover, using American power in an alliance with a
supposedly grateful Iraqi public, led by a Westernized
middle class. The assumption turned out to be false. And
it was compounded by a series of disastrous decisions."
(Dexter Filkins, "Regrets Only?" New York Times
Magazine, 7 October 2007)
Kanan Makiya ought to be an object lesson for leftists among the diaspora intellectuals. They cannot love Iran in a way that I can, for they are saddled with the burden of personal losses and historical defeats, but if the US-led multinational empire succeeds in destroying Iran,2 whether through economic warfare, "democracy assistance," military force, or (as is most likely) the last after a decade of the first two, they will miss it more than I will, just as Kanan Makiya must miss Iraq more than I do.
1 The following words of Jalal Al-e Ahmad still ring true when one looks at the culture of the top 20 percent or so of just about all nations in the South, actual proportions depending on levels of their capitalist development:
To follow the West -- the Western states and the oil
companies -- is the supreme manifestation of occidentosis
[westoxification] in our time. This is how Western industry
plunders us, how it rules us, how it holds our destiny. Once
you have given economic and political control of your
country to foreign concerns, they know what to sell you,
or at least what not to sell you. Because they naturally seek
to sell you their manufactures in perpetuity, it is best that
you remain forever in need of them, and God save the oil
reserves. They take away the oil and give you whatever
you want in return -- from soup to nuts, even grain. This
enforced trade even extends to cultural matters, to letters,
to discourse. Go flip through our half-dozen so-called heavy
literary publications. What news do you see of our part of
the world? Of the east in the broadest terms? Of India,
Japan, China? All you see is news of the Nobel Prize, of
the new pope, of Françoise Sagan, the Cannes Film
Festival, the latest Broadway play, the latest Hollywood film.
This is not to mention the illustrated weeklies, which are
quite notorious. If we aren't to call this occidentosis, what
are we to call it? (Occidentosis: A Plague from the West,
Mizan Press, 1984, p. 62-3)
The habit "spontaneously" cultivated by many intellectuals of all nations who look to the West, or rather the mythical West, serves the ruling classes of the US-led multinational empire, incorporating the upper classes and strata of their nations into liberalism, Americanism, the ideology of "Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham." See Shirin S. Deylami, "In the Face of the Machine: Westoxification, Cultural Collision, and the Making of Perso-Islamic Ideology" (October 2006) for a criticism of two common misinterpretations of Ahmad's ideology (and others like it) as "a call to the Past" and "a disdain for modern globalization" in all its actual and potential forms. These misinterpretations, Deylami argues, miss the point of the criticism of "Westoxification": "a particular targeting of one form of economic, political, and cultural hegemony" (p. 1).
2 Iran, but for the curse of oil and the faith in the Twelfth Imam, might have been a Japan of West Asia; conversely, if Japan had not become an imperial power in its own right, Kita Ikki might have been a Jalal Al-e Ahmad of Japan. As things happened, our paths went into completely opposite directions. Intellectuals in the Iranian diaspora do not realize that stubbornly religious working-class men and women of their nation, who rejected them and followed Khomeini instead, still made a finer choice than my compatriots. But if they don't look West and look East instead, they will appreciate what they have. The Iranians have a republic, albeit religious, of their own; the Japanese have a client state, albeit secular, run by Japanese bureaucrats and gangsters for the American emperor. Moreover, the republic that had expelled its cosmopolitan intellectuals may, if it is permitted to live, eventually welcome them back, perhaps under the banner of a Shi'ism that is at once scientific and utopian.
Update
Julio Fernández Baraibar, my friend in Buenos Aires, translated this article into Spanish: "Chiísmo, científico y utópico," Critical Montages, 7 October 2007. <http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/10/chismo-cientfico-y-utpico.html> -- Yoshie