The Policies that Nobody Wants?

So far Latin America has been spared the worst of the crisis. Economists concur in thinking that for the region the crisis has been more a problem in trade than a financial stranglehold. However, the evolution of the global economy indicates that Latin American countries too should take rational prudential measures in the second decade of the century. This runs counter, of course, to the political needs of the moment that lead governments to spend more than they should in periods of elections. Moreover, at the global level itself-in the central economies-the rescue measures that were originally taken have been partial and shy. By leaving culprit institutions in place, they end up fostering a return to the dubious practice of speculation; they promote the further concentration of wealth and power; and they leave in the shadow of a weak recovery hundreds of millions of people who wish to work but can't. The appropriate slogan for this “recovery” should be “more of the same” or “let's fall forward.”

In this rather somber context of recovery with slow growth, big unemployment, and greater social inequality in two thirds of the world, we may anticipate an even worse crisis in the future. It is no longer just Japan that faces a “lost decade,” but the United States and Europe as well.

This book is not a conventional study of Latin America—either in survey fashion or in depth. It is rather a set of polemical perspectives on the dynamics of globalization by a Latin American who stands in a New York observatory. The book contains observations from this center of the global economic crisis, where it originated and then spread like wildfire to the rest of the world, prompting a series of questions about what has happened and what might happen in the countries of the South, in this tempestuous context.

From the bottom of the global South, in Latin America, a small group of pensadores gathered in an NGO—The South North Development Initiative—has been voicing their opinions and concerns in the Internet newsletter Opinión Sur. As a participant in the group it is my belief that the crisis is an interesting moment of provocation to find a lodestar to sustainable development, a strategy for economic growth with social inclusion. This book is a contribution to that conversation: how the world affects Latin America and how a Latin American perspective can contribute to thinking about the world.

Because the circumstances of my life have caused me to straddle the North and the South, I look at the shifts in global power through different lenses than those whose views reflect the more settled habits of their particular geographies.

Introduction

The body is not one. This is a commonplace in the postmodern parlance. But how is the body rendered many? If the body of the individual is the unit of this multiplicity, that is, if bodies are many by virtue of the multiplicity of individuals who have bodies, at least two problems arise. The first, the logical problem, is that of defining the features of this universal category named the body – by what logical step does one mark and name a generality, the body, out of the particular individual bodies. The second problem arises out of the historicity of the category of individual – what about bodies of people who themselves do not mark their selves as individuals bounded by the proper definitions of the body. And both these questions show that once the im-mediate presence of the three dimensional space of the body is put under scrutiny, the obviousness of the individual as the unit of multiplicity gets displaced. One can then think of the singularities of the body at different registers – across identities (the body marked by caste, class, coloniality or gender) – being haunted by its others in each of these registers.

In Chapter Two, we have discussed the need of addressing the roles of ideology along with those of power in the construction of the neutrality of the sexed body as a thing.

Introduction

An awareness of the inevitable metaphoricity of the corporeal does not refute the fact that the body, although constituted by language, is constituted as the body. As metaphor, it is no less ‘rea’ than ‘reality’. For, in this theoretical frame, the real and the metaphor constitute each other and every ‘real’ or ‘metaphorical’ being has its own specificity. The blurring of the real/metaphor binary does not lead, of itself, to a blurring of the specificity of all conceptmetaphors. On the contrary, the understanding of the generality of the beings may lead on to a better perception of the particulars. In this chapter, I deal with how the notion of the body – which is the master-metaphor for location in space – negotiates with its ultimate other, death. In this negotiation, I mark two distinct moments. In one of these, the modern moment, the body tries to deal with death as a separate other to be won over in battle. In the so-called postmodern moment, an apparent dissolution of the body-death binary questions this separation. This moment thus seems to avoid the model of war and winning, only to lead on to a forgetfulness of the other/death. This act of erasure through non-definition remains equally, if not more, violent. The deconstructive gesture that I propose consists in working at the aporia of thinking death in its intimate and unknown embrace with life, through a sense of respect for and responsibility to the ‘other’.

The crisis at the core of the global economy, and especially the ensuing absence of imagination, the hesitation, and the insufficiency of the response among leaders have caused perplexity among Latin Americans. The crisis has not been catastrophic in the South of the globe. It has left many countries with more freedom from the North, but that also means with fewer excuses to avoid self-examination. More freedom yes, but freedom to do what? I subscribe to the notion that capitalism is fate, but that is not a consolation, because its own future is uncertain. We are creatures of a world historical process that has no return, yet it has led us to hard choices. How to reconcile the indispensability of a system with policies that avert its most pernicious consequences? Capitalism teeters on the verge of bankruptcy; the tried alternatives to it have been wanting—if not outright unviable or worse. What therefore is to be done? Latin America is a region of bewildering diversity, so its visions, and its reactions to the world crisis also vary. My task in this chapter is to highlight the differences, but also to point to common themes. Here are some of the dilemmas, beginning with the overall system and zooming in on the different trajectories of some countries enmeshed in its web.

What the South Can Tell the North

As the crisis first loomed and then broke out, the US presidential campaign raised an important question for that country and for the world: in view of the multiple problems hovering over it, was American society willing to accept a cast generational change and a shift in course regarding state policies? The election was between fear and hope. Seen from the Latin American experience, the election gave the crisis in the North another face—an opportunity for action that would be less conditioned by the restraints of the recent past and the outgoing administration.

The great changes in social, economic and political direction in Latin America in the last decades have been propelled less by a plan, a will agreed by consensus, or a coherent ideology than by the harsh necessity and the strong and recurrent crises that have shaken the continent. Those crises, and their respective exits, have had both good and adverse effects. A sign of discontinuity thus characterizes recent Latin American history. Therefore, there has been neither sustained economic development nor systematic social progress.

To simplify, I will say that the last decades' great Latin American crises have been two: the first one was the hyperinflationary crisis of the eighties, which marked the exhaustion of a substitutive industrial development style, mainly geared to domestic markets.

As we have seen, global capitalism is in crisis and each region does its best to wiggle within it. The diagnosis and the proposals multiply. It is important to take stock of the different views and ask: What is Latin America's destiny in this new world?

The recent publication of William I. Robinson's Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective that tries to think “outside the box” about the predicament and the options for Latin America allows me to survey the field of interpretations of the world crisis and the region's position within it. This volume is part of a welcome turn to the classic roots of political economy. In it “globalization” refers to the dynamics of late capitalism, an economic system that now covers the entire planet and “critical” means that the system must be examined in terms of costs and benefits, potentiality and actuality.

Taking Positions

The field of globalization studies is organized around a set of questions about late capitalism and its various articulations in different areas—in this case Latin America. The situation of the field has been well stated by Eric Hobsbawm, who maintains that the paradigm capitalism/socialism is over. Moreover, the failure of socialism preceded the bankruptcy of capitalism. In fact, the socialist collapse may have precipitated the current capitalist crisis by launching an unopposed search for cheap labor—with the consequent migration of industry to hitherto out-of-bounds nations—and the overspecialization of former industrial countries in the service sector, including financial speculation and leveraged consumption.

Pictures, it is often said, are worth a thousand words. For sociologists, figures and tables can have a similar eloquence. In the simple projections below (Figure 5), the figures of the International Monetary Fund tell the story of a post-crisis “recovery” that entails a geo-political realignment in the concert of nations, and provide substance to the expression “emerging markets.”

In the first chapter of this book I tried to present the main contours of a new global division of labor that combined the Chinese and the American economies. Chinese exports and American consumption led the world's economic growth. From 2000 on, this symbiosis produced robust rates of growth in the American economy and spectacular rates of growth for the Chinese. At the time and on the surface, it seemed like a “win-win” arrangement. As one took a closer look, however, one noticed something strange and lopsided about such grand deal. As early as 2005, and to an observer not blinded by the irrational exuberance of the markets, the bargain did not seem sustainable for too long. It was beset by a peculiar imbalance. In essence, the bargain consisted of a credit line from the People's Republic to the United States that allowed Americans to overspend, that is, to live beyond their means—an indulgence that American policy makers had always scolded Latin Americans for practicing with irresponsible abandon.

At the beginning of the new century the volatility of the dollar betrayed the structural weakness of the American economy, an economy based on indebted consumption and enormous military spending. In my native Argentina I spoke to many citizens through whose eyes I could see the first signs of a potential geopolitical restructuring and the incipient emergence of new blocs. Those Argentines were always interested in the broader world as well as in my experiences on the ocean as an offshore sailor.

It wasn't easy explaining to them how tropical cyclones take shape and grow—the kind of storms called hurricanes when they batter the Atlantic and typhoons when unleashed in the Pacific. However, I tried my best, since I found they served a perfect analogy. A hurricane takes shape gradually at first, but then strikes with catastrophic results. Moist air from warm waters rises to phenomenal heights (from the atmosphere to the troposphere, grazing the stratosphere). The navigator's barometer registers a tremendous drop in atmospheric pressure. The mass of air rises in a revolving fashion. In the Northern Hemisphere, this revolution is counter-clockwise. Upon reaching the highest strata the air mass, instead of running into a reverse air flow that would brake its circulation, runs into another current flowing in the same direction that imparts amazing velocity to this high cloud spiral-speeds in excess of 74 miles per hour.

Introduction

There is no obvious connection between the body as a category and the categories of power and ideology. The obscurity of this connection is the symptom of a not so hidden assumption regarding the ‘body’. A belief – that the body is only a concrete, immediate presence in three dimensional space – prevents the understanding of the links between the body and the ostensibly abstract notions of power and ideology. This book does not rest content with the knowledge that power and ideology are as palpably concrete as any other formation. Nor does it constrain itself to the insight (acquired through decades of painstaking critical scholarship now available in monographs, articles and commentaries) that the body is always and already mediated through categories of meanings and power. If mediations of power and ideology produce the body as something unmediated, then some form of ideological work has to be performed in order to produce this leap from the mediate to the immediate, to make the shift from the abstract to the concrete. This book tries to trace the itineraries of this work. It tries to observe and make visible the processes at work in producing the concreteness of the body from the abstract workings of meanings. One way of doing this is to describe different concrete modes of producing the category of the body through differentiating it from other categories like death and sexual difference.

A Provocation

Before the global financial crisis exploded, social change on the planet seemed as vigorous as it was problematic: awesome technological development; the emergence of new vibrant economies such as China, India, and Brazil; marked inequality between countries and within them; persistent poverty in most parts of the world; continued destruction of the environment; deviation of resources toward financial speculation; growth of economic bubbles and occasional blowouts, terrorism and violence, genocide and civil war, epidemics. These were a few of the challenges that faced humanity in the new millennium—conflicts and conundrums stemming from the deep-rooted way in which so many of the countries had been functioning. Then the crisis arrived at the very center of the global system. Panic ensued, and political authorities in most nations hastily adopted emergency measures.

Today different ways out of the global crisis are being tried. Some of the solutions have led me to think that we are rebuilding the pre-crisis world instead of transforming it, while other efforts seem focused on rethinking who we are and what we aspire to become so that we may choose a better global direction. The struggle that marks the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century will determine whether a collective course and way of functioning will be adjusted for everyone's good or just for the good of a few.

The world wire services have recently reported that China has agreed to invest about $10 billion over several years to renovate Argentina's dilapidated railway system and build a subway for Rosario—its second-largest city. To expedite the export of beef and wheat to Europe the British had built Argentina's onceextensive rail network a century ago. It was nationalized by Perón in the late forties (when it was already in disrepair and largely obsolete), and dismantled during the neoliberal privatizations of the 1990s. But as agricultural output soars, farmers and the operators of grain elevators—who send more than 80 per cent of grains by costly road transport—have been calling for investment to revive the railways. Mark Twain was right: history may not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. China in recent years has been funding infrastructure projects in emerging economies that bolster relations and further Beijing's own economic goals by helping bring goods and raw materials to market faster. One has a sense of déjà vu.

There is no better time than the present crisis to dust off the old theory of dependency and draw from it those points that remain relevant. Latin Americans need to think about which ties to sever and which to strengthen. The fate of thought is a curious thing—above all in times of crisis. As the current crisis continues along its destructive path, some regions have been more affected then others, oftentimes in defiance of prevailing wisdom. This represents something new.

Start with the ultimate question in politics.

What is to be Done?

May one (can one?) question the question itself? Question the primacy of this one question that circumscribes – limits, defines, paradoxically deifies – theory? Puts theory to the ultimate test of effectivity. Can one seriously contest the word is between the query ‘what’ and the phrase ‘to be done’, question the surety in the be-ing of the act? As Simon Critchley (1999a, 2) reminds us, “… the copula in predicative propositions – S is P – is one of the principal targets of deconstruction”.

But remember, questioning does not mean a forgetting, not a total abandonment of the matter at hand. One engages as one interrogates.

What is to be done? How to engage with the problem, responsibly? The history of the more than hundred years that separate us from Lenin's raising of that question is not innocent enough for an easy response.

Before embarking on the seemingly fashionable gesture of deconstructing the query, before the ‘petty’ squabbles about words that irritate the propriety of the ‘responsible’ theorizer, let us move on to another sentence known well for its direct condemnation of ‘armchair theorists’ and an almost unequivocal call to action:

Let us remember the way Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985, 346) has dealt with the word ‘change’.