When we speak of globalization, images like the global network of the internet come to mind, millions of optical cables and satellites making possible the free flow, not only of information, but also, and above all, of capital, by all the banks and stock exchanges in the world. And, proceeding from that, the terrible image of being able to decapitalize a country in a matter of minutes by hitting the enter key. And, even more terrible, what follows from that vision: the idea that it is impossible in this day and age to be opposed to this reality. And, since it is impossible, opposition is absurd as well. It is going against the development of history and the tyranny of financial capital and, most especially, of speculative capital, which is here to stay.
When we project these nightmares even further, we see not only the McDonalds or the Hondas swarming every which way, where before there were only Tizoncito taquerías or the classic Volkswagen vochitos. We also see the millions of unemployed, the millions of underemployed in the informal market, the millions of employees engaged in work in which there is an ever increasing lack of respect for working conditions and benefits and the minimal salaries necessary for eating poorly one day and returning to the place of work the next. The belts of poverty no longer just encircling, but now within, the great cities. The millions of internal and external migrants. In short, the recent and increasingly insulting concentration of wealth in the few and the abject poverty of the majority.
And fate, the future which this present holds in store for us, is very much related to a backwards leap in history. Capitalism is closing a parenthesis, which was opened by the Soviet October Revolution. It is returning to its "natural" development, which it has been following for centuries, and that is how it is seeking to correct, as rapidly as possible, the "detour" which it suffered for 72 years, from 1917 until 1989. It is not the purpose of this document to make a value judgment concerning the Soviet Revolution, and everything which subsequently came to be known as real socialism throughout the 20th century. No one, however, can deny that, because of 1917, there was a dislocation in the world market, as a consequence of a change in the relationship between the forces between capital and labor. We must stress that millions of human beings, and of lands, were therefore left outside the direct dialectic of the world market, without judging whether the so-called real socialism was in fact the seeds of a change in relationships of production or market. Capitalism itself, in its need to make a social response to what that socialist hope involved - as well as to the reality of several States and societies which had left its camp of direct control - had to present several changes in its methods of operation. And so the development of the policies of the Welfare State, of Keynesian laws, of populism. Elmer Alvater explained it thusly:
"Certainly many intellectuals and non-communist politicians throughout the world were profoundly impressed and influenced by the Soviet alternative, the Communist movement and the concomitant upheaval of the market system by the crisis. Keynes himself explicitly warned, in the last chapter of the General Theory, about the danger he saw in the simultaneity of a successful Russia and a capitalism in crisis with massive unemployment. From that he predicted the political formulation of an anti-cyclical policy of full employment. Simultaneously, Roosevelt's New Deal presented a response by the United States to the Soviet challenge, and it created the trend to an extreme intervention in the dialectic of Ford regulation (massive production plus massive consumption), whose momentum extended until after the Second World War."
With the fall of the "wall" of current real socialism, large capital finds itself once again with access to all the lands and inhabitants of Planet Earth. It is joyfully launching itself, as it did during its first years of development, towards its conquest. Meanwhile, inside each country, it is strengthening all political, social, economic and legal mechanisms, in order to put an end to its parenthesis and to return to absolute control of the exploitation of the labor force and natural resources, in the interests of pure and simple private profits, that is, in the interests of a few.
And so, once again, geopolitical thinking concerning control of natural resources and their free exploitation and flow, is back dominating the national security agendas of the great powers - shelving the Cold War ideology regarding the competition of communism - if not to the control of the planet itself.
"During the Cold War, the areas of greatest interest for military planners were the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet bloc, Central Europe, Southeast Asia and the Far East. Since the end of the Cold War, however, these areas have lost much strategic importance for the United States (except, perhaps, for the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea), while other regions - the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin and the South China Sea - are receiving increasingly more attention from the State Department."
(Michael T. Klare: The New Geography of International Conflicts).
They say that democracy is no longer under threat, but now the old enemies - who continue to exist and who might come to have regional power - are threatening the control of resources vital to the world economy, confusing the latter, of course, with the management of the great transnational companies. They once again are establishing their precedence by ensuring the control of oil bearing strata, of forests where precious woods grow, of deserts where uranium or diamond mines are found, along the inter-ocean pathways where world trade passes, and in those lands which, because of their geographic positions, facilitate this world trade. In 1999, the National Security Council, in its annual report to the White House, noted the following: "The United States will continue to have a vital interest in ensuring access to foreign oil supplies (...) we should remain aware of the need for regional stability and security in key areas of production, in order to guarantee our access to those resources as well as to their free movement." The infamous "humanitarian interventions" in the Balkans and in Africa have to do with the idea of "regional stability and security." They are attempts to prevent Russia from turning into a power of regional control, the French from taking advantage of African ethnic conflicts in order to become the dominant power in that part of the world, and, going further, preventing the pan-African dreams of South Africa. Even projects such as the Colombia Plan have a clear oil objective behind them, not only in relation to that country's oil wells, but also, and fundamentally, with the oil wells of Venezuela, and even more so now, faced with the Chávez government, which deserves no sympathy. And further:
"Bush's advisors are composed of a clique of friends who represent the interests of the energy industry and who look more like the members of a board of directors than members of a cabinet. As Secretary of Defense for Bush's father's government, Vice President-Elect, Dick Cheney, orchestrated the Gulf War in 1990 in order to reaffirm US control of oil in the Middle East. When he returned to the private sector in 1993, Cheney headed the Halliburton company, whose headquarters are in Texas, which is the biggest oil drilling firm in the world. Bush and Cheney will be supported on energy questions by a team of men with a record of favoring the industries they should be regulating. The former Secretary of Transportation, Andrew Card, was a leading lobbyist for the automobile industry prior to being designated as a member of Bush's cabinet. The designate for Secretary of Energy, Spencer Abraham, fought against Clean Air regulations and improved the yields of the fuel sectors as a Senator from Detroit. And, as Treasurer of Colorado, the Secretary of the Interior designate, Gale Norton, was a strong defender of the ownership rights of individuals and businesses opposed to federal efforts to regulate the drilling of oil wells, mining, forest exploitation and pasturage. With an oil business oligarchy at the helm, what can be expected of George Bush II in the White House? (...) On the domestic front, an increase in energy consumption can be expected. At the present time Americans produce 12% more carbon dioxide than they did eight years ago, and they are consuming 1.3% more fossil fuels than 12 months ago. Only a world recession could reduce the growing energy demand. An aggressive exploitation of new domestic and foreign energy sources is predicted. A proposal by the Bush government to carry out oil prospecting in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska stirred much controversy. Its defenders argue that it would reduce North American dependency on foreign oil, but geologists predict that the most it would be able to reduce the imports would be from the current 60% to 50%. Forecast also is the use of military power to reinforce US control in regions rich in oil throughout the world. The intensification of hostilities in the Middle East could easily provoke a new war in the coming years. Some observers suspect that Bush Jr. and Cheney will be launching their own techno-Holy War with the same team that led a "blitzkrieg" in the Gulf, perhaps to avenge Poppy's humiliation, who was not able to defeat Saddam Hussein."
(Mark Sommer)
It is not for no reason, then, that Zbiniew Brzezinsky's (the architect of the Trilateral) latest book, was "The Great World Playing Field," in which he posited the need for the United States to formulate "a comprehensive global strategy," whose purpose would be to increase its primacy in the face of what he called "regional powers": the European Union, China, Russia, Japan and India. Revisiting Kant's old concept of the "Perpetual Peace," he finds it in the building of a geopolitical process and a territorial strategy.
But also, thanks to the new technologies, and to the destruction which capitalism has wreaked throughout the planet through its irrational use of natural resources, other resources are acquiring geo-strategic importance, such as water, micro-organisms, seeds and thousands of plant and animal varieties. And so the new pirates of the 21st century are undertaking the conquest of the old and the new, of the proven and the potential, in the production of profits and even of survival. Just to give one example, it is enough to state that in the year 2020 the demand for potable water could approach 100% of the available supply. Who is going to be left without that treasure? The war for water in Cochabamba, Bolivia was just one example. Behind that conflict lies the tremendous problem of control of the water. Sally Burch explained it in the following manner:
"Although three-quarters of the earth is indeed covered by water, only 2.5% of the planet's water is not saline. Of that amount, two-thirds is in the form of ice, and, of the rest, less than a fifth is accessible and fit for use by human beings. In the book The State of the World 2000, by Lester Brown of the World Watch Institute, the danger is pointed out that subterranean aquatic pools are becoming exhausted, due to the action of powerful diesel and electric pumps, which, for the last 50 years, have been allowing water to be extracted much more quickly than nature can restore it. This over-extraction, whose primary purpose is agricultural irrigation, is concentrated in China, the United States, Northern Africa and the Middle East. It is estimated that, at the present time, 10% of the water used by human beings comes from the over-extraction of subterranean reserves. Instead of reversing these trends, this figure will be significantly higher in the coming years, whereupon the reserves could become exhausted. The report estimates that the per capita availability of renewable water sources - which today is 6.600 cubic meters - will decrease to 4800 cubic meters in 2025. Given the unequal distribution of these sources, and the estimated population increase, it means that, at that point, some 3 million persons - close to half the world population - will be living in arid or semi-arid regions where they will have less than 1200 cubic meters per capita, which is considered the minimal level, under which it is considered a shortage."
If the control which capitalism exercises is global, the territory must be also. And, since human beings and human resources are not virtual, they do not respond meekly to the enter keys - like they want to make us think, due to the nature of globalization. They must also be controlled, they must be possessed. And so, once again, as if we had returned to the 16th century, we are experiencing in our country, in its first steps in that which they call globalization, a new conquest of territories, a reorganization of physical space, where borders, and the people who reside within them, are seen as a hindrance to great capital. That is why, while we are experiencing the complete opening of our borders, we are also experiencing new attempts at divesting campesino communities of those lands to which they had been flung, strangely, centuries ago, when those lands were not viewed as profitable by the capital of that time. In the 16th century, they were expelled from the fertile valleys, from the riverbeds, and confined in the mountains and the selvas - where capital at that time primarily saw insects and extreme climates. Today it is being discovered that it is exactly those regions which are a potential horn of plenty because of their reserves of minerals, oil and gas, water, as well as millions of micro-organisms, which are coveted by the great pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. But, just as before, there is a problem: the communities, backwards in themselves, do not understand progress, and they refuse to enter in to the logic of depredation. Nothing else remains, they must be civilized, that is, be employed as labor, for those who can manage it, and for those who are left, that is, the majority, they are expelled.
And, on its barbaric road to world control, great capital has already once again reassigned roles in the world division of labor. It is already quite sure about what each country can and cannot do. Like ours, for example, to whom the following challenges, among others, are assigned, so that we may contribute to the happy world distribution of wealth and maintenance of the global system:
1) Our geographic position has once again made us the natural bridge between the Atlantic and the Pacific, but this is not being utilized in our development as a nation, rather in relation to the need to link the eastern part of the United States, the granary of the world - in addition to being the area where its energy and industrial production are located - with its Asian market. And thus our infamous National Development Plans are nothing more than an extension of the needs of great yankee capital in its search for control of world trade routes. (See the article "Corredores mexicanos", by Andrés Barreda, in the book No traigo cash, México visto por abajo, FZLN Editions, March 2001)
2) We are, and must be, the energy reserve for the United States. So much so that one of new President Fox's first actions was to sign the North American Energy Agreement, which inevitably links the national energy sector to the needs of the United States. The recent energy crisis in the state of California reflects the terrible energy problems which exist in the country to the north. From the perspective of American capital, Mexico's oil, electricity and gas have become national security problems.
3) We are, and must be, the reserve for the exploitation of biodiversity by a few cutting-edge transnational companies in this field (See "Ni mas ni menos patentes de corso", by Ramón Vera, in No traigo cash, op cit.)
4) We are, and must be, a land open to the establishment of the maquila, but no longer just in the northern strip. Thinking more globally now, they are also in those places where the passage of world trade would be more "rational", if it is possible, the furthest away from their borders, that is, in the Gulf and South-Southwest of the country. It was not without reason that the maquiladora corridors are concentrated there: Veracruz-Guerrero, Tabasco-Chiapas, Tamaulipas-Colima. In addition to being geographically "viable," do not forget that another of maquiladora capital's needs are met there: an abundance of cheap labor, no union organization and extreme poverty.
One must dwell a bit more on this last point, because of the serious social implications it entails. By once again becoming a maquiladora country - and remember, not just on the northern border, but the entire country - great transnational capital is not only again making us scabs in order to keep world salaries low, but it is also preventing any possibility for millions of Mexicans to escape from poverty. And, in addition, the Mexican government accepts its complicity in this injustice, and it promotes it by way of the administration of poverty, by being the only real option promoted in extremely impoverished regions. Not one single peso for the building of infrastructure for regional development, not one single peso for the recovery of the local countryside. The only thing being offered is the negligible salary of a maquiladora, (to whom [the maquiladoras], by the way, they give all advantages and facilities, economic, labor, political), which, in such a poor region, is even seen as a benefit. The offer is horrific: forget about your unproductive little parcels of land, that is if they haven't already been seized by the bank or the mortgage company, and you'd better come to the local maquiladora, you'll at least be able to eat a little bit. Those who do not find work emigrate to the nearest city or simply further north, to the ranches where they can live once again as landless peons. And some can still make it to the United States, yes indeed, contracted by the Mexican government itself, by way of the Department of Foreign Relations and its Guest Workers programs, that is, in order to help the businesses and the yankee government, so that they can have a flow of controlled labor, without labor demands, and who, in turn, pressure their "so expensive" labor force over the amount of benefits they are still supporting. A great deal, but for whom?
The problem for capital, of course, is that, in this reassigning and, in some cases, reinforcement, of assigned roles on the playing field of the world division of labor, in this reassigning of population and land, other collective histories exist on these lands, coveted today and always, which carry with them, for better or worse, another development. In the area through which the superhighway, which will link the ports of both oceans, will pass, and through which trailers with merchandise will be sold on markets very distant from those of the area, will circulate, it so happens that thousands of vegetable growers live. They will not, of course, derive any benefits from losing their lands for the good of world trade. Where there are trees of precious wood and exploitable biodiversity, booty for certain global companies, it so happens that an indigenous community also lives, and they have no interest in, or benefit from, allowing their forest to be done away with or moving elsewhere - to where? What does capital do then? The same thing it has been doing for centuries: it takes out its same old song that progress is inevitable, that globalization is here to stay, and it acts accordingly, that is, if you oppose it, it destroys you.
The land, then, must be cleared. And there are several ways to do this. We have seen previously that one way is via the administration of poverty. I buy you, or, if you continue to be foolish, I expropriate your land, I set up a maquiladora, and I facilitate your emigrating. If the foolishness about incorporating into progress continues, then I use more direct methods, judges, paramilitaries, police and the army. But, since this option carries certain political risks with it - sometimes collective histories do not even give up with repression - the globalized system has discovered that its best tool for breaking resistance is individualization of conflicts, that is, the elimination of the collective in order to force the individual to confront globalized power alone, a game which he has no way of winning, nor even of resisting.
It is exactly because of this that we see how lately the ideology of individualization has become the touchstone of globalization, and how the same scenarios are repeated all over the world: everything that implies organization must be disrupted beyond the point of what is necessary to keep things "functioning" as they are. So we see in the world of labor how attacks are becoming more intense against unions, against collective contracts, and against all the regulations which check a bit of capital's voracity. We are horrified when we find out about the working conditions which are being imposed today. It is as if we were reading a novel like those written in the 19th century about the living and working conditions of workers and their families. Here in Mexico we have had several examples in the last few months: the maquiladoras in the state of Tlaxcala, where children between the ages of 9 and 12 are working as soon as they leave school (from 2 PM to 10 PM). The punishment jails in the maquiladoras of Tehuacan, Puebla, or the near slavery that was discovered in a ranch in Chihuahua. Working conditions have gone back to being the same as those recounted in Germinal by Sola. The circumstances of the children are not much different than those Dickens told us about in Oliver Twist, or in Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.
We see how all local and state administrations, regardless of what party they belong to, are setting themselves against those social organizations which are fighting, not for power or revolution now, but simply for housing and better urban services for the thousands of their union members who cannot survive in the cities. The government says it does not want intermediaries. They fail to say that they prefer for everyone to be fighting tooth and nail, being kept as their captive, controlled clients.
We see how they reduce political participation to its electoral aspect, to representative democracy, in which citizens do not have to join with others in order to exercise their political rights, but purely and simply go to the polls periodically and delegate their political participation and, in fact, their fate, to their "representatives."
We see how in the poorest communities there has been an increase in supposed social programs such as Progresa, based on individualizing the collective and in giving a little to a few and none to others, breaking the social fabric of solidarity. We see how private ownership is being promoted there. Collective ownership, and therefore control of natural resources, is being broken, as is control over their own production and, in the long run, what is going to end up being broken is the community itself.
Let each one look out for himself, that is the prescription. Globalization, therefore, entails the destruction of the collective. The logical consequences, then, the destruction of the collective and the individualization of economic, political, and social relationships, entail the strengthening and continuance of this very unjust system.
The questions we should be answering, in order to ground our analysis of globalization in our own country, have to do, then, with the role which the Mexican political system itself is playing in order to readapt this entire system to the objectives being imposed on us by tired old globalization. We should, therefore, speak of the role of the Mexican state.
Fox's victory has represented a false dilemma for political analysis: on the one hand, those, infected by the victory, see it simply as the end of the corporate regime of the PRI, combined with the end of corruption and the beginning of a transition to democracy. On the other hand, there are those who identify it as a return to the conservatism of the 19th century, or as new encouragement for the Cristero movement of the Jalisco heights and the country's lowlands.
The situation is, however, a bit more complicated. Elsewhere we have tried to explain the reasons for the PRI defeat and for the Fox victory. We will not repeat them, but it is essential to say that, one way or another, the triumph of the Guanajuato native represented the culmination of a mutation process which was promoted from the highest levels of economic power outside and inside the country.
The economic restructuring process which began in the mid-eighties was characterized by the following:
a) The transfer of a large part of public assets into private hands;
b) Constant attacks against workers' labor relations, through the transformation of collective contracts, all of which ended up undermining the influence of work and of unions in national life. This process cannot be reduced to the loss of political and social influence by the union bureaucracy. We can determine the exact measure in the fact that labor went >from representing 45% of the Gross National Product in 1982 to 23% in 2000;
c) The consequences of restructuring were fragmentation: fragmentation of labor relations through the introduction - not of technology, as some superficially note - but of new forms and new methods of work. Fragmentation of agrarian relations, which culminated with the 1992 reforms of Article 27 of the Constitution, in which the land itself, not agricultural products, was put on the market, through Mexico's conversion into a maquiladora country. The fragmentation of the domestic market, abandoning countless private producers to a competition which led them to bankruptcy. Today the national domestic market is a fiction. The fragmentation of educational processes through the federalization of teaching. The fragmentation of social security through a slow but sure process of privatization of medicine and the culmination of the privatization of pensions. The fragmentation of Mexican international policies, initiating a policy of servility towards the United States.
d) These policies of social fragmentation were accompanied by others, by political fragmentation, through the old mechanisms of corruption. The difference is that money was not distributed only among the old and increasingly inoperative PRI corporations, but also, and fundamentally, to those who formed part of the newly emerging social movements. A high point was the case of the campesino movement, which, seized by a productivity dynamic, was made accomplice to the modifications to Article 27. The group of organizations who are inside the Permanent Agrarian Council played this sad role, with varying degrees of responsibility. Those policies are being maintained to this day, and now it is the NGOs' turn. There was also a fragmentation process in the old Mexican bourgeoisie, with the old bourgeoisies being set aside. Taking their places were authentic adventurers, especially speculators.
e) The merger of drug trafficking lords with the State apparatus meant that organized crime would have a voice and a vote in the rebuilding processes of power. Because of that, administration after administration, the winning group has settled accounts with the drug groups which they were not a part of. This has allowed the criminalization of the state apparatus..
Neo-Cardenismo arose as a reaction to that. The Cardenista ideology was based on state ownership, the domestic market, on the old sectors of capital (although they had no impact on that ideology), the old union groups, the old agrarian structure, and the old international politics. In its confrontation with the capitalist restructuring process (neoliberalism), this ideology was seen by important sectors of the population as the best path for resistance. However, it quickly caved in to neoliberal ideology, trying to appear as an option for change without profound changes. Cardenismo was reduced, in practice as well as in its programs, to seeking "to polish off the rough edges of neoliberalism." Given that dynamic, at the key moment it did not look to the people like an option for change. Nor was it seen by the owners of money as a tool for political modernization.
The results of that entire dynamic reached their conclusion, initially, with Vicente Fox's victory. We say initially because what follows is even more profound.
What we are speaking about now is not just the concluding of a process which began in the mid eighties, but that of assuring a long term dynamic, which necessitates carrying out a transformation of what had been the key tool of the previous model: the State.
The objective of Vicente Fox and his gang, therefore, is not to simply achieve an alternating of power, as has been erroneously analyzed not only by the PRD leadership, but also by the entire party as a whole (we are saying this while the PRD, at its Congress, is analyzing Fox's victory in this manner). Rather it is to achieve a series of mutations which Rhina Roux calls "a transfer of sovereignty: a transfer of ownership of supreme political command (...) a transformation of the organizational principles of a political community." Let us look at these three elements more closely:
A Transfer of Sovereignty: This refers to a two-fold process. On the one hand, the transfer of sovereignty understood in terms of national borders, the domestic market, monetary sovereignty, etc. Beginning with the French revolution, the Nation-State has represented the ideal adaptation between an economic space (the national market and an individual currency), a social space and a political space (legal and institutional). The current crisis of the Nation-States is owing to these three elements being called into question. The economic space (territorial market) is being replaced by regional markets and by a multi-nationalizing of goods and of work. The social space is becoming more and more complex. Millions of Mexicans, for example, are working in the United States, and millions of Central Americans are working in Mexico. The political space has mechanically capitulated in the face of this new reality. Laws have been adapted, regulating a deregulation of the State in order to strip it of any social features. In this way, a new triad is being created: regional economic space (United Europe, the North American Free Trade Treaty, MERCOSUR, etc.), the multi-nationality of work and the loss of state sovereignty.
On the other hand, this transfer of sovereignty cannot only be understood as regards its relationship with other States, but also for its loss of independence in relation to the stronger groups of national and international power. This inevitably leads to a rationale of attacks on civil rights and an increase in the power's punitive forces. The State acquires an increasingly belligerent nature. It confronts social and political problems and ideological divergences by seeking maximal confrontation, rather than by seeking minimal consensuses. It uses the scare tactic of the Rule of Law (virtually nonexistent) in order to wreak violence against social relationships, while, on the other hand, protecting a small political oligarchy. The oligarchization of the State becomes evident in the fact that is no longer the final goal of the citizenry: "The State is the reality of the ethical Idea, it is the Holy Ghost as far as will is expressed, clear unto itself, substantive, which thinks and knows and knows how it thinks (...) The State is the rational in and of itself." (G.W.F. Hegel: Fundamentals of the Philosophy of Law). It blatantly becomes an instrument of a small social group (not even of the bourgeoisie as a whole), which maintains close ties with the great financial centers, acting as their minority shareholders. Elmer Alvater explains it thusly:
"It does not disappear with the eroding of its national character, nor are the national innovations weaker. More of a transformation of the sovereign Nation State takes place: in the course of the all-embracing internationalization and globalization of the economy, the Nation State comes to lose its monopolistic domination of a territorial space, as regards the traditional manner of national unity, of sovereignty and of its ability for domestic and foreign demarcation, as well as the configuration of space in time. Although the territorial space is no longer founded on sovereign unity, the 'functional space' of national hegemony remains, which is now reorganized as a 'new commercial State' or as a 'national competitive State'."
A Transfer of Ownership of the Supreme Political Command. The most perverse of all these privatization processes lies in this "oligarchization of the state," that is, in the privatization of the State, which loses all relationship with public aspects. This attack on the public is demonstrated day after day. When Fox was a presidential candidate, he turned a paradigmatic phrase: "It's easier to run a business than to run the State." Now that he is president, the phrase which defines his regime was expressed a few days ago in Central America: "We are a government made up of businessmen, for businessmen and by businessmen." A handful of businessmen, not even all of them, are the new owners of the supreme political command. The problem is not, neither nor solely nor fundamentally, that Fox had wanted to put a council of businessmen on the PEMEX board, but that the Mexican State in its entirety is in the hands of a fistful of businessmen who are now controlling the better part of the State apparatus.
A Transformation of the Organizing Principles of the Political Community: Behind this vision is also found the ideology of "solidarity" of the charismatic wing of the Catholic church. It was put into practice in Central America during the 80's, and it was a fantastic counterinsurgency instrument for defeating the church's program for the poor and, above all, for defeating the revolution. The ideology made fashionable by Hernán de Soto, in Peru, after the impressive progress of the left, allowed him to win that country's most important city governments (Lima, Arequipa, Cuzco, Catamarca, etc.), and allowed them to fight the Sendero movement when it was at its peak (which it did have). Hernán de Soto's book was disingenuously called "The Other Sendero" movement, and it posited as ideal a society in which everyone was owners, some little ceviche carts, of course, and others from the country's most important mineral companies. Vicente Fox and his gang are now positing a similar model: it envisages the disappearance of any collective and community relationship, "citizenizing" the worker, the campesino, the townsperson, the indigenous, seizing from them all mechanisms for social and political pressure. In this way, the citizen becomes the client of the State, and his only right as a citizen resides in voting every three or six years. Taking advantage of the influence which the theories on new concepts of citizenry have had, it seeks to undermine and fragment any community social relationship, denigrating them as corporate (in this arena, the PAN, as well as the PRD, in local governments, have demonstrated that it is not a new program). It is not overstating the case, of course, to clarify that this has nothing to do with the new visions of citizenry which are today being discussed and implemented in various parts of the world, of which the example of the indigenous communities of Chiapas serve as experience and inspiration (it will be necessary, in another text, to return to this, which deals with the struggle for autonomy, self-management, communality and citizenship).
In this manner, the State ceases to have social responsibilities. The old State, regulating production factors (to use Keynesian jargon) is sent to the trash bin of history, at it becomes a new regulating State, only now it only carries out this function between the owners of money, national as well as international.
In order to achieve this, Fox and his gang have followed the counsel of Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, who noted that, in order to transform the State, it was necessary "to sweep the stairs from the top down, and not in the other direction." The problem with this metaphor is that everyone knows that when the stairway is swept from the top, all the trash is thrown towards the lowest stairs, and it is increasingly clear that what is being sought is not sweeping the entire stairway, but only the highest steps. This is where the strength and the weakness of the project lies. Let us see why:
The Strength: Since the very beginning of Fox's government it has been made clear that his intention is to reorganize political power, through the creation, and the re-creation, of a new political "class" (we are obviously not using the term in a sociological sense), understanding that what Fox and his team are seeking is not the strengthening of the political parties, but the creation and consolidation of a "new political class" which will act within, and above, the political parties. A new political class which is located among some groups in the PAN (the neo-PANistas of the past), in the PRI (those of the "new labor culture", Sergio García Ramírez, and the Zedillistas - Diódoro Carrasco, Borrego Estrada, etc.), in the PRD (the Amalios, the Chuchos and those to come), an important group of intellectuals who are around Enrique Krause, the same as the recovery which was achieved, with a few losses, by the Nexos team, a significant group of technical teams >from big business who were, and are, active in the great private educational institutions, a good part of the leaders of Non-Governmental Organizations (Marie Claire Acosta, Rogelio Gómez Hermosillo, Sergio Aguayo, etc.), of whom, except for the glorious exceptions, as Luis Hernández Navarro would say, - to whom it fell to not to become completely governmental ("...Co-optation takes many forms, but notable in this era are the contracting of some of their services, turning them into advisors and public officials, encouraging them to become counselors between the government and civil society, providing for them financially for projects which serve the privatization plans of the public services [promotion of educational, economic, health, etcetera, projects]" - Rafael Sandoval, FZLN-Jalisco). All of them guided by the great new ideologues and fixers (the old San Angel group, with the sole loss, quite insignificant certainly, of Señor Manuel Camacho), Santiago Creel, Jorge Castañeda, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser and, along with them: Elba Esther Gordillo, Amalia García, etc. That is why, when the possibility of a new Constitution is discussed, a large number of them demand that Fox do so through the creation of a consensus among all of them. Demanding a social vision does not occur to any of them.
In this arena, from the point of view of the men and women of power, Fox's achievements are indisputable: there is no one, in the institutional arena, who is presenting another vision, another program, another model. Let us simply remember that, during the last PRD Congress, the "great" debate took place between those who were proposing "a long term agreement with the government," and those who were proposing "tactical agreements with the government." No one, not even in jest, proposed raising a global alternative against the policies of plunder which Foxism represents.
("...the mobilization and struggle of organizations that have demands specific to their trade find themselves exhausted, through being subjected to the old rules of the market of supply and demand, negotiated in the framework of a government structure which no longer functions and which is not recognized by economic institutions. And so wage percentages and social benefits, collective contracts, employment, and the federal labor law and national sovereignty themselves, are at risk with the new market rules, which serve as the only valid and recognized referent by the economic interests of international financial capital. There is no other way that what has been happening with the legislative and executive decisions can be understood: the betrayal of the law for the Indian peoples, the Puebla Panama Plan, the offer to the Japanese and the North Americans to invest in oil and electricity, the Free Trade Agreement for America, the invasion of the maquiladoras, the looting of natural resources, etc. And so the prevailing rules favor the fragmentation and disarticulation of the civil society movement, which operates under the logic of the rules of politics and the economy, and which no longer consider them as interlocutors. It could be ventured that the upper echelons, which have remained as leaders of these social organizations for many years, are trying to remain clinging to this method of doing politics, and they might be willing to change, but, to all appearances, within the logic of the government's new client corporatism."
- Rafael Sandoval).
All of this has helped Fox exercise a policy of damage control on those issues which have been most unpopular: the indigenous law, the IVA question, the Puebla Panama Plan, etc. Lastly, on this issue, one might note that the Senate vote on the indigenous law demonstrated the formation process of that "new political class."
The Weakness: By having the construction of this new political class, and its national as well as international image, as a fundamental priority, Fox and his gang have not been able to build the bridges, links or ties which would allow them to interact with organized civil society and with the Mexico of below in general.
The PRI indisputably relied on an organizing framework of client relationships which allowed it to put forward its programs. Fox does not have this to rely upon. There are no social interlocutors with his government, and this, sooner or later, will blow up into a huge problem. The explanation for this does not lie solely in Fox's weakness. It is also due to the crisis which the majority of the large social organizations (unions, ejidal organizations, popular urban movement, feminism, etc.) are going through. Some of them because they are yearning for the past, others because they are trying to join the new program, but not finding enough space. Others because they are going through a great downturn, and others because they are trying to compete on the same playing field with the powers, and they are taking steps for the building of "new" parties which will participate in the electoral process.
Fox exists because of his election success. The story was truly believed that, in this phase of capitalism, everything is defined in terms of the media and publicity (the idea is that publicity and polls not only replace the debate of ideas and proposals, but they make them unnecessary). The problem with this vision is that no one can live off polls and the media. The crisis of the Party political form allowed for the emergence of "fortuitous men and women," who won precisely because of their apparent distance from the political parties. The examples are in plain view: Collor de Melo, and even Henrique Cardoso, in Brazil, Abdalá Bucará in Ecuador, Fujimori and even Toledo in Peru, Portillo in Guatemala, or Berlusconi in Italy, Putin in Russia. In the end, with the exception of Putin - and even Berlusconi, who has already lost once - all of these neo-caudillos failed, and all of them, in the beginning, relied on media support and truly overwhelming polls. The difference is that in none of the previous cases had the business nature been so marked, and, of course, none of them represented the end of a State as stable and durable as the Mexican one.
Perhaps that is why the phenomena appears so overwhelming to our eyes. If the reduction of the public space (which they want to limit strictly to the electoral arena) is not halted, it will then indeed represent an historic defeat for the secondary sectors. It is precisely that space where the future of the nation will be defined.
This reduction has to do, of course, with the privatization processes which are continuing to be carried out, and which are being announced (electricity and oil), but also with what has always been the fundamental struggle of the Mexican nation: land.
In 1992, 45% of the national territory was ejidal. Today, 1% of the population controls 50% of the land. This transfer of ownership represents not only a fundamental change in land ownership, but also a loss of national and social sovereignty. The sale, renting and association of the Ejido with large agribusinesses is behind the horrific growth of poverty, of bracerismo, of the arrival of maquiladoras in agrarian communities. This will not be resolved by welcoming the maquiladoras as a source of development, but by that which continues to be the fundamental task of Mexican campesinos, be they indigenous or not: the recovery of control over the land and expropriation of the new latifundas. The struggle for control over the land, for, by and of campesinos, continues to be the touchstone for an eventual recovery of public (social) space against a privatization which, we are sorry to say, cannot have a human face. In this regard, the elevation of the San Andrés Accords to a constitutional level would be an opening in the land problem. Not because the issue of possession of the land is explicitly expressed in them, but because this issue would undoubtedly be assumed by the Mexican indigenous through the route of actions.
Parallel with the privatization of the public is the publicity of the private. Like a bone being tossed to starving people, the powers play at publicizing the private. Proceso, in its front page, had "The Loves of Fox" as a headline, as if this were the great conflict dividing the country. Beyond the hypocrisy with which those in power conduct their private lives, what could be more convenient for them than to center the attention of the population on the new made-for-TV movie from Los Pinos: "The Loves of Fox."
There exist, nonetheless, processes of social reorganization, less eye-catching, which barely appear in the media, but which are real and which have a very interesting dynamic.
The takeovers of municipal presidential offices in various states has become a privileged form of conflict (the case of Totonacapan in Veracruz and those in several municipalities in Chiapas are merely a few examples). In contrast to other occasions, these actions are not tied solely to election problems, but fundamentally to social problems. In many of them, resistance and rebellion has allowed them - inspired by the example of the EZLN - to posit autonomy and some mechanisms of self-determination.
A similar questioning is taking place among peoples who are resisting the establishment of the new corridors which are being implemented in Mexico. An authentic network of resistances is beginning its process of establishing resistance against a project of great importance. And, once again, we are quite sorry, but opposition to these corridors is the only guarantee that community relationships, and the peoples themselves, will not disappear.
Those above are quite clear about the fact that they must inflict an historic defeat on those of below. They are preparing for this by following, without even knowing it, the critical words of one of the great utopians of the 16th and 17th centuries, Tommaso Campanella: "In order to acquire and govern and maintain empires, three instruments are necessary; language, the sword and treasure." Fox has the three instruments. What he does not yet have, despite the deceptive manipulation of polls, is the people.
It is becoming increasingly clear that, faced with the great changes that world capitalism and the Mexican State have experienced, it is not possible to continue to insist on playing on the same field and by the power's rules. A new playing field and new rules! The path will be long and winding, but more secure, since it will be ours and no one else's.
It is difficult to give a final response, exactly because a fundamental part of collective resistance is to collectively seek responses to the "how". But we can point out another hypothesis: not only must the rules of the games which are imposed by globalization be changed, but even the playing field must be changed, the chips, the goals, in short, the playing field itself must be kicked in and another, new one must be built through resistance. One in which the objective will no longer be control or defeat of the adversary, the golden rule of the capitalist system. Rather, one which allows us to interact without the existence of adversaries or of being defeated. In political language, this would be translated into something like the struggle to accede to, or to conserve, power must be abandoned and one must move on to the understanding that this power, as it is now, serves for nothing other than maintaining the system. Therefore, if we do not move beyond that logic, the only thing we are doing, in the best of cases, is retrofitting it so that it will survive. This implies that we must forget that playing field, and we must begin to search, along with others, for the means of acting so that it will no longer work under their rules. We must understand, and we have to be clear about this, that this will inevitably lead us to confronting it directly in the future. That is why from now on we must be very much aware of the fact that only a great collective, or, in better terms, the combination of many collectives, is what will be able to destroy it.
It is not, then, about continuing to act in a way that is designed to humanize a capitalism which is purportedly savage and capable of being humanized. Capitalism is what it is, period, and, if it is not defeated, it is going to end life on earth. It is that drastic. It is no longer only a contradiction between capital and labor, as old Marx saw it, but between capital and the human species. Thousands of millions of human beings dying of hunger and curable diseases, millions of hectares turned to desert every year, the ozone layer ever more narrow, thousands of animal species who are made extinct every day, an ever decreasing supply of potable water. These are just a few of the factors which confirm that the future which globalized capitalism has in store for us is the film Mad Max, and that is being optimistic. The dilemma posited by Rosa Luxembourg between socialism or barbarism - beyond what each may understand by socialism - posits something to us which is undeniable. Capitalist "progress" is inevitably leading us to barbarism. This barbarism does not mean returning to the cave age. It means, rather, continuing with a model of production and consumption, of distribution and exchange, which assures the destruction of an essential part of the human race, of a good part of nature and of any civilizing vision. Capitalist barbarism is growing day by day as the economy, technology, production and consumption, are advancing and growing.
The struggle against the system is, thus, an exploit which is civilizing, that is, we shall be reborn as a civilization or we shall die as a species, taking millions more species along with us. That is why we cannot continue with the same playing field and its rules. That is why another must be invented, collectively. We do not fear utopia. What we do fear is the destruction we are now experiencing, a destruction which is unstoppable if we continue under its logic.
Sergio Rodríguez and Javier Elorriaga
Comité Espejo, of the FZLN
July of 2001
Originally published in Spanish by the FZLN <fzln@fzln.org.mx> ________________________ Translated by irlandesa