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Exactly. It is a long-term phenomenon but surveillance digital technologies have enhanced its power by orders of magnitude. So in 2012, Obama did wonders with this approach in galvanizing his supporters and shaking them down for contributions. It only took another election cycle for these technologies to turn to the dark side: instead of trying to locate and cultivate potential supporters, use the power of this technology to demonize your opponent and undermine support for your opponent. This has proven to be the most frightening development by far.
So you are describing a deeper phenomenon that’s now taking root,
which is that political parties see their voters as a demographic which
they try to manage, just the same way that corporations try to manage
market perceptions. Voters are part of a marketing ploy, rather than a
component of a democratic culture.
No, I don’t think that can work. These markets tend toward monopoly. They’re easy to capture because you get tremendous network effects, which basically means that whoever is bigger gets the whole game, because all the users have tremendous incentives to go to the largest network. All the smaller networks disappear. When social media was starting up, there was initially great competition between Facebook and Myspace and one or two others. But pretty soon, once everyone starts going to Facebook, no one’s going to Myspace, because Facebook has so many more people on it. When you’re on social media, you go where everyone is. So all the other ones disappear and Facebook is all alone, and they’re left with a monopoly. That’s a network effect. McDonald’s hamburgers never got that. You didn’t have to go to McDonald’s to get a hamburger. You could go to other places still, so Burger King and Wendy’s can compete with them.
When you combine that, then, with traditional concentration techniques in capitalism, the massive barriers to entry — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, all five of these companies have to spend billions and billions of dollars annually on these enormous server farms and computer farms and their cloud, and in the case of Amazon, they have huge warehouses — that, along with network effects, pretty much precludes any lasting competition. So the idea that you can break up companies like that into thirty or forty smaller parts and have competitive markets doesn’t make any sense. These are natural monopolies, so to speak.
So that leaves two reforms. One is, you let them remain private, but you regulate them like the phone company was in America for a long time, AT&T. You let them make profits but hold them to public regulations, in exchange for letting them have a natural monopoly. To me, it doesn’t take much study to see that this is not realistic. These are huge, extremely powerful entities. The idea that you’re going to regulate them and get them to do stuff that’s not profitable to them — it’s ridiculous. Do you think you’re going to take on the five largest companies in the world and have that be successful? There’s no evidence to suggest that.
The other option is to nationalize them or municipalize them. You take them out of the capital-accumulation process, you set them up as independent, nonprofit, noncommercial concerns.
That’s probably the case. But, ironically, what I’m proposing hasn’t always been associated with the anticapitalist left. One person who wrote on this exact subject was Henry Calvert Simons, a laissez-faire economist from the University of Chicago, who was Milton Friedman’s mentor. He opposed the New Deal. He lived in the mid-twentieth century. Not a fan of labor unions or social security — a pure, free-market capitalist. But he wrote widely that if you have a monopoly that can’t be broken into small bits, the idea that you can regulate it is nonsense. This monopoly is not only going to screw over consumers, it’s going to screw over legitimate firms, legitimate capitalist enterprises, because it’s going to charge them higher prices. He said, the only thing you can do if you believe in capitalism is nationalize them. Take them out of the profit system. Otherwise, they’ll completely distort the marketplace and corrupt the system into crony capitalism. I think that’s true, whether you believe in capitalism or, like me, you are a socialist.
But as difficult as it may seem today, this is going to be an unavoidable fight. Cracks in the façade like the Edward Snowden revelations and the Cambridge Analytic scandal are chipping away at the legitimacy and popular acceptance of these monopolies, but we have a long way to go. The place to begin is to identify the problem and talk about it and get it on the table. Don’t assume the issue cannot be raised because there is no ready-made functional alternative in hand. In unpredictable and turbulent times like these, issues can explode before our eyes, but it helps if we lay the groundwork in advance.
Once you start talking about taking the center of the capitalist economy and taking it out of capitalism, well, then I think you’re getting, like you said, you’re getting to very radical turf, and that’s exactly where we’re pointed — where we have to be pointed.
But even if we organize around journalism and eliminating the isp
cartel, what do we do about those five monopolies that now are the
US Steel and the Standard Oil of the information age? What do we do
about Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft? It is hard
to see how we can have a progressive and democratic society with
these behemoths dominating the economy, the culture, and the polity.
and
Are you talking about breaking them up into smaller companies, like
the telephone companies in the 1980s?
and
But you’re talking about nationalizing five of the biggest corporations
in the United States. That would require a massive social movement, even an anticapitalist one.
In our lead essay, René Rojas offers a sweeping analysis of this quite dramatic reversal of fortune. Rojas echoes the observation made by Pink Tide critics, that, despite their rhetoric, the regimes failed to break out of the neoliberbal orthodoxy they had inherited. He insists, however, that this failure was not due to insufficient will, but to political capacity. Whereas the classical Latin American left in the 1960s and ‘70s acquired power in an era of rapid industrialization and growth of the working class, the Pink Tide formed amid a period of deindustrialization and labor-market informalization. The Left in Allende’s time could rely on a social base located in core economic sectors. The more recent left was based in shantytowns and a precariat which, while radical and mobilized, could not give it the leverage needed to push through reforms against bourgeois opposition.
Such critiques of the Pink Tide reformers share a curious commonality. Both adopt voluntarist approaches to assessing the region’s left turn. Resurrecting a hobbyhorse of revolutionary socialists — notably pounded by those who argue that revolutionary opportunities have routinely been squandered in absence of “correct” leadership lines — they focus on the decisions made by those in charge of the reform process. But they ignore, or give scant attention to, the opportunity structure in which these forces operated. Assessing the tactics of officials and activists in this fashion makes for, at best, an incomplete analysis. However much we sympathize with their programs, we need to understand how the circumstances of their rule substantially constrained their choices. The region’s contemporary left can best be evaluated only by situating its record within contemporary structural conditions.
Latin America’s prior radical surge culminated between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. Although its defining characteristic was the militancy of workers and other popular urban sectors, this left cycle originated with the 1959 Cuban Revolution and closed with the demise of the Central American campesino-based insurgencies. The classical Latin American left did not replicate the Cuban Revolution’s distinctive dynamics and features, but the barbudos’ triumph was instrumental in opening a new radical path.
For one, it broke with Moscow-dominated Communist Parties’ Popular Front orientation, which hinged on alliances with modernizing capitalists. The key characteristic of the new left was its forceful rejection of subordinating working-class organization and demands to the requirements of a so-called bourgeois-democratic stage of development. It relied instead on militant class struggle to achieve decisive influence over, rather than remaining subsidiary to, the ruling class. And reflecting the radical policies implemented by the Cuban revolutionaries, this generation of the Left adopted a program of expanding and deepening the structural transformations unleashed by bourgeois modernizers. These involved comprehensive land reform, a thorough nationalization of key productive sectors, and the decommodification of vast swaths of social provision. In addition, the classical left proposed a profound democratization of political and economic affairs.
Of course, this more radical agenda sometimes created fissures between the forces leading the militant movements and their representatives in the state — as witnessed in the debates that wracked Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile — but overall the classical left agreed that state power was a lever to push forward their transformative agenda. In the postwar period, this agenda was pursued via two distinct routes: labor insurgency in the growing manufacturing sectors of South America, and, a decade later, agrarian insurgency in the countryside of Central America.
The Pink Tide is characterized by two key features. First, its base in the mass mobilizations that began roughly in the second half of the 1990s. As structural adjustment and austerity threw growing swaths into the economic insecurity of the informal sector, laboring classes were also severed from their established links to establishment parties. Facing an intensified instability and material insecurity and cut off from parties that once represented their interests vis-à-vis the state, the region’s “dis-incorporated” masses responded with increasingly militant protest. As traditional political institutions lost the ability to effectively represent the interest of working people, and basic living conditions deteriorated, mass defiance grew in waves. This characteristic — expanding mobilization amid political disintegration — is central to the rise of the Pink Tide. The present comparative analysis, therefore, relates to cases where it was prominent, chiefly Venezuela, Argentina, and Bolivia.
second one: 'the new governments’ commitment to ameliorating the welfare of the mobilized constituents that paved its road to power'
When world commodity prices plummeted, the result was an unavoidable tightening of services and goods for their urban poor backers. Leftists in power could only think of tapping and squeezing as much as possible from their countries’ existing production and commercial circuits rather than developing new, alternative, and more reliable means to provide for their constituents. A recent Chavista voter could not have put it better, declaring that the government “just needs to find a way to make an economic revolution, so we can eat once again!” In short, poor urban voters abandoned the Pink Tide for its inability to break through the limits set by the neoliberal economy. Whereas elites beat back the classical left for going too far, the Pink Tide governments are falling to the very sectors that voted them into office, who are punishing left regimes for not going far enough.
The main factor distinguishing the Pink Tide from the classical Latin American left is not just the latter’s more radical will. The classical left’s aggressive pursuit of reform derived, as just noted, from its greater ability to pursue radical reforms. This enhanced sense of its ability, in turn, was rooted in greater transformative capacities. To understand this difference, we need a conceptual framework that helps us unpack the mechanisms that govern subaltern political leverage. There are two axes on which laboring groups’ power turns: the first measures their mobilizational resources, and the second, their structural leverage.
Mobilizational resources refer to the social ties, organizations, and institutions that help working people engage in collective action. The ability of popular sectors to mobilize effectively is built on shared resources that underpin organizational bonds, cultures, and infrastructure. These help working people overcome the divisions and the costs that normally inhibit collective action. Atomized workers and the poor in general have very diverse sets of immediate needs, which often makes it hard to come together around a political agenda; in addition, they typically confront particularly high costs when taking on powerful elites. Without robust and internally vigorous organizations to bring them together, they have a hard time developing the solidarity and preparation needed for collective action. Mobilizational resources, in other words, give workers and the poor the ability to construct and maintain the organizations they need to confront their ruling classes.
Once they had exhausted their disruptive potential, the Pink Tide subaltern constituencies lacked the leverage necessary to push further. Without constituencies with the structural power necessary to take on business elites, left governments focused on appeasing their followers with neo-corporatist welfare provision, avoiding harsh confrontations with leading economic sectors on which they relied for the revenues they redistributed. Ironically then, in one sense, Pink Tide commitments to their urban poor voters blocked more aggressive reforms. Pink Tide restraint, therefore, did not flow from pledges to defend the interests of commodity-based business elites and restore neoliberalism’s legitimacy. Its timidity, rather, was a symptom of the least costly strategy they could devise to satisfy their constituents’ interests and secure reelection, despite its built-in limitations.
Self-interested elite responses to either adversity or new opportunities in the world economy enhanced popular classes’ capacities for struggle. Elite efforts to modernize their economies, through industrialization or the promotion of agro-industrial exports, provided the foundations for working-class and peasant militancy. Absent these programs, the structural and organizational backbone of the classical left would not have acquired the power it did.
The process was initiated by the Great Depression. In the larger economies, mainly in South America, the ruling class confronted shrinking trade, and then the turmoil of the war years, by adopting an inward-oriented development model known as import-substitution industrialization, or ISI. For ruling classes in these countries, the global crisis undermined profit strategies based on traditional commodity exports. Trade restrictions in traditional markets and declining export revenues caused financial havoc and sharply reduced their ability to import manufactured goods. This loss of externally produced manufactures persuaded states to turn to the development of local industry. The state created incentives for domestic business to invest more heavily in local industry, which had been slowly developing since the turn of the century. This new economic strategy had the added benefit of giving political elites more bargaining power in the global state system as their economies expanded and deepened their industrial base.