I believe it is Doug who is quoted as saying that “At first, the
military dictatorships of Latin America weren’t trying to impose
neoliberalism--they were trying to defend the system of private
property against a variety of populists, socialists, and communists.”
At the time of Chilean coup (Sept. 1973), I clearly remember that the
anti-Allende people reacted very strongly against the Chilean
government's massive intervention in markets (and the collective
efforts by working-class people to replace markets to survive the
crisis that preceded the coup). They weren't overtly engaged in the
standard special pleading ("Allende's policies were hurting our
interests") because that would have sounded tacky (and would hardly
build political support outside the hard core). Instead, the screams
were all about how _inefficient_ Allende's policies were (while
workers' self-organization was simply dismissed). A right-wing Chilean
acquaintance in grad school actually channeled Hayek (consciously or
unconsciously) to argue that central planning was impossible (even
though Allende didn't engage in that kind of planning). The
economic-political expression of this kind of disgust with what Reagan
later called "guvmint" was to move in the _laissez-faire_ direction,
which has been the usual default political position of bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois forces since the 19th century.[*] Thus, the "Chicago
Boys" didn't create the neoliberal wave in Chile as much as their
ideology fell on a fertile field.
This was also true of Monetarism: Friedman and his followers offered a
"magic bullet" to end inflation, which most people (even on the Left)
agreed had gotten out of hand. His "solution" was embraced by
bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces, whose political ascendancy was
insured by the Kissinger/Pinochet coup. At the same time that the coup
reflected the interests of international and domestic Chilean
businesses, it strengthened the political base for the shift toward
"free market solutions." MF and the Chicago boys then provided the
ideology.
One other reason for the "free market" nature of Pinochet's policies
was an effort to atomize the basis for political organization of the
Chilean working class, by fragmenting communities, etc.
I think that the 1973 coup was really the start of the neoliberal
policy revolution that swept the capitalist world in the decades that
followed. The ideology crystallized and became clearer as the years
went on, as the strength of bourgeois forces rose and as many
professional economists and politicians jumped on the bandwagon. (The
financial segment of the capitalist class took over the revolution,
but that's another story.)
BTW, I don't know much about this so I can't say much, but didn't the
1965 coup against Sukarno in Indonesia have a strong "free market"
tinge? (That time, ideology was provided by the boys from
UC-Berkeley.) At the time, the social-democratic and New Deal-type
forces (advocating "rational government" and the welfare state) were
strong enough to counteract the rise of free-market irrationalities.
Does this interpretation make sense?
--
Jim Devine / "An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of
support." -- John Buchan
[*] Standard economics ideology has a simplistic bipolar vision of the
economic world: it's either government running the show or the market
that's doing so. So if the pendulum has swung "too far" toward
government, there are many who say it's okay to "bend the stick" (to
use Lenin's phrase) to go "too far" toward market rule in order to
correct the imbalance.
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