[was: Re: [PEN-L:13540] Re: Re: Unfree Labor, Subsistence, &
Dependent Development (was Re Postscript...)]
I wrote:
> >Of course, a lot of this is political: the reason why hacienda and
> >plantations were able to block the development of industrial capitalism was
> >because they usually controlled the government (until after the
> >liberal/conservative civil wars that plagued Latin America). On the other
> >hand, peasants were sometimes able to assert power and achieve some
> >victories, as with the Mexican Revolution after 1911 or the French
> >Revolution of 1789.
Louis ejaculates:
>False. Anglo-American imperialism is the main explanation.
Instead of such a single-factor explanation, I'd say that Anglo-American
imperialism was _allied with_ the hacienda- and plantation-owners. Just as
Mexico's Porfirio Diaz wasn't a total puppet of the U.S., the hacienda- and
plantation-owners weren't total creatures of imperialism. (They forced
their workers to toil. They probably would have done so even without
external domination.) This is reminiscent of the old debate about
dependency. A lot of supporters of Allende in Chile saw the problem as
being simply a matter of US domination & subversion. However, though this
was clearly crucial, there were also home-grown subversive forces. It's not
simply that the "School of the Americas" (or whatever it's called now)
teaches Latin American pigs to be worse or that the CIA teaches them to
torture. There are class relations which encourage the demand for torture
methods. It's a mistake to see the people of Latin America -- including the
rich and powerful ones -- as mere dependent variables, representatives of
nefarious foreign forces.
It's also important to remember that English imperialism didn't start
running Latin America to the extent that it did until after Spanish
imperialism (which involved the plantation- and hacienda-owners _directly_
as part of the ruling class) started fading, while US dominance didn't take
hold until the English version started waning. The English didn't simply
dominate, since they were allied with only one side of the
liberal/conservative civil wars. (Typically, as I understand it, the
English allied with the conservatives (who also favored free trade with
England), just as they backed the Southern slave-owners in the U.S. civil
war.)
Finally, a crucial reason why the English -- and later the U.S. -- were
able to dominate Latin America was because of the dynamism of industrial
capitalism in the Anglo-American countries and the conservatism of the
forced-labor and other modes of production in Latin America. Of course, the
Anglo-American countries' elites tried to preserve their relative dynamism,
but they got help from the local exploiters in Latin America. They were
also fought by the urban elites, who tried to imitate the U.S. in applying
import-substituting industrialization.
Of course, the story (the dates & names) varies according to which Latin
America country you're talking about, because it's not simply a matter of a
one-sided domination by the center. In fact, the heterogeneity of Latin
American experience is a central part of the argument against the one-sided
imperialism-is-the-whole-story theory: if imperalism were the whole story,
all Latin America would be the same.
>Read Galeano.
What a useful & illuminating comment! I have one, too: go read the Bible.
If you're going to treat Galeano's book as a Fount of Truth, a force that
wins all arguments without any explanation of how or why it does so, why
not go all the way and read a _real_ Holy Book?
If I had the money, I'll bet a million dollars that Eduardo Galeano doesn't
want his book treated as if it were a bible. It's a wonderful and
informative book -- but journalistic. I value journalism, but it's not enough.
Galeano's book is very useful for "bending the stick" away from the
anti-dependista orthodoxy that preceded it (and preceded books by A.G.
Frank and others), to point the real and important role of external
domination. But it's a mistake to bend the stick too far, so that it breaks
and all internal class relations are forgotten.
BTW, when you assert the falsity of my passage, are you saying that the
Mexican revolution didn't play a role? was it simply a matter of
imperialist plotting? are you saying that peasants are never able to assert
their power?
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
