From poverty to power (2008)

Book Review from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World by Duncan Green (Oxfam Publishing 2008)

Duncan Green defines an effective state as one that “can guarantee security and the rule of law,” and has an effective strategy “to ensure inclusive economic growth”. Such a state should be accountable to citizens and able to guarantee their rights. Active citizens are linked to the state by a “combination of rights and obligations”: making use of these rights to improve their conditions.

He argues that it is the combination of poor men and women and their national governments that provide the main actors in the fight against poverty and inequality. Case studies are given to illustrate how even the poorest people have by their organised and persistent actions brought about beneficent change in their circumstances. Like the Chiquitanos people of Bolivia who after 12 years of “unremitting and often frustrating struggle” won legal title to the 1m-hectare indigenous territory of Monteverde.

He is aware that the scales are weighted against the poor in all areas. For example, research is dominated by the private sector: in agriculture 5 large multinational corporations spend $7.3bn per year on agricultural research on high value, high profit products while the staple foods of poor communities are “likely to be overlooked.” In biotechnology the picture is the same with GM crops being genetically engineered to meet the needs of large scale farms. There is no serious investment in the five most important semi-arid and tropical crops.

Half of the world’s population lives in the countryside and the majority of people in absolute poverty live in the rural areas. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) sources are given for the claim that over the past 20 years aid donors and governments have effectively withdrawn from the countryside. Mention is made of the well known ‘structural development programmes’ which imposed a ‘radical free market’ on debtor countries.

Agricultural growth, Green argues, reduces poverty but is most effective when small farmers are able to capture a fair share of the benefits. Local farmers, he says, should be helped to improve the quality of their produce so that for example retail giants like McDonalds and Pizza Hut use local produce instead of importing produce from the USA. Here his ‘active’ citizens would be small farmers “organising their ability to negotiate a fair deal”. However when it comes to buying fertilizer or seeds, or selling produce or their labour, small producers are dominated by the large corporations. Small farmers are “de facto employees”.

In Green’s view efficient states should take the environment and the enhancement of the daily lives of the poor as prime considerations. Global governance (the “web of international institutions, laws regulations, and agreements”) could help, and the 8 main ways he lists include managing the global economy, redistributing wealth through aid or international taxation, averting health threats and avoiding war. However global governance fails to live up to its ideals. “The WTO is frozen, regional trade agreements are proliferating and introducing profoundly unfair trade and investment rules, the G8 is failing to keep its promises on aid…”, then there is the threat of climate change and “a looming financial crisis”.

The book is well sourced with a 24-page bibliography and three further pages listing background papers. There is much useful information covering more areas than can be dealt with in a review. However Duncan Green takes a moral stance whereas under capitalism the prime consideration cannot be the welfare of citizens active or otherwise, but sale and profit; this drives development (forget sustainable) – and can also inhibit it. And the state that in his view is supposed to facilitate change will only do so to the extent that the interests of the owning class are served.

Pat Deutz

Letter: Self-Determination (2005)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Self-Determination

Dear Editors

The last two decades have witnessed an increasing number of anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movements seeking a voice through protest and opposition to the damaging practices of trans-national corporations and the World Bank, IMF and WTO. The probability is that the vast majority of these individuals have never studied economics or politics and don’t understand much of the workings of current economic policies, but they certainly do see and feel the results and negative effects of these policies and they have a feel for what is unjust. They share a common desire for a better world, a fairer world. They may not have identified clearly or explicitly what it is they want in this other, better world, but they have undoubtedly recognised much of what they don’t want. Their protests and their slogans are demands to be heard; these are ways of expressing anger, frustration and disagreement with the status quo.

Around the world such groups are voicing many different grievances from many different angles. Bolivians grabbing their water rights back from Bechtel, who are now suing the Bolivian government for compensation for what they would have earned in the future. Hundreds of thousands of Indians being forced off their fertile productive farmland in favour of huge dams which promise fat profits for fat cats. Millions of AIDs sufferers denied access to life-giving treatments for lack of cash.  Empathisers in the minority world protesting against the methods and results of worldwide capitalist business.

So many different reasons from so many different perspectives; different stages of anger, deprivation, disenfranchisement. It would be unrealistic to make broad generalisations about the myriad individual goals but it’s certainly possible to gather the separate bits and pieces together and view them as discrete perspectives with converging aims. All these fingers may not be poised over exactly the right button but at least they are scrabbling in the right area. Surely, better something rather than sitting in a darkened room absorbing more mind-numbing images from another evening’s bombardment courtesy of the capitalist media?

It’s about choices. People’s first choice should be socialism. It seems such a small step from the examples given here, but a huge paradigm shift. For people focused on life’s necessities – enough food for the family everyday, somewhere safe to sleep, healthcare and childcare for increasing numbers of chronically ill, a job this month, next year that will pay the bills – it’s hard to focus on the light at the end when the tunnel is long and dark. So, as socialists, how do we address this last little push, this yawning gap? Let’s not criticise those who haven’t figured it out yet. Let’s harness their strengths and energies. We need first to get people to see the light, recognize it for what it is and then to keep focused on heading for it through the long dark tunnel of capitalism, in growing numbers, with growing strength in the knowledge that there is a better world, a fairer world, a socialist world.

Janet Surman, 

Turkey.

The Great Tin Crash (1987)

Book Review from the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Great Tin Crash. Bolivia and the World Tin Market by John Crabtree, Gavan Duffy,  Jenny Pearce.  (Latin American Bureau, London, 1987)

1985 saw the collapse of the world tin market with the price of tin falling from over £8.000 a tonne to less than £4,000 in October alone. A market surplus of tin had been occurring for some years but changes in dollar and sterling exchange rates exacerbated the market collapse. The repercussions were felt in areas as wide apart as Cornwall and Bolivia, where tin miners lost their jobs.

But capitalism takes no account of the human misery it causes as this book makes clear. It quotes Eduardo Galeano as saying that:

Bolivians die with rotten lungs so that the world may consume cheap tin. Tinplate is made from tin and the tin is worth nothing: a half dozen people fix its global price.

Seventy per cent of workers in Bolivia’s state mining company, Comibol, lost their jobs and this in a country where poverty is second only to that in Haiti in the Western hemisphere. Bolivia is a country in debt. It has been estimated that as many as 50 per cent of the population may be unemployed. It is also a country unable to compete effectively — a victim of new technology, of changes in consumption patterns and of economic recession. But the authors of this book also point out that Bolivia is a victim of capitalism, a "system [which] is fundamentally wasteful of the resource which lies at its very foundation: human beings".

But the human tragedies created by poverty are not the concern of the London Metal Exchange which dominates the world metal market. It ensures that consumers are not dependent on a single producer and guarantees a single price for metal of a given type and quality, regardless of source. But the metals market has been subject to the economic recession that has affected all aspects of the world economy. Demand for tin has fallen and so only low-cost tin producers could survive. The International Tin Association attempted to maintain the price of tin by the operation of a stockpile: during periods of shortage tin was released onto the market and during periods when demand was low tin was purchased for the stockpile.

Bolivia is a high cost tin producer and its position has been worsened by competition from Brazil — a major low cost producer — and a fall in the amount of tin sold on the world market due to substitution, technological change and the use of alternative materials for packaging. In addition. Bolivia was more vulnerable because of its dependence on tin production — in 1980 tin made up about 40 per cent of Bolivia's exports — and its generally weak economy. In 1985 the inflation rate was 8,163.5 per cent. The exchange rate fell from 25 peso to the dollar in 1980 to over one million peso in September 1985. In an attempt to stabilise the economy the government froze wages (but not those for members of parliament or the military). It is little wonder that many Bolivians turned to coca cultivation where money could be made preparing cocaine paste for export to USA. The tin miners' response to the wage freeze and the removal of subsidies on food was to organise mass underground hunger strikes. The response of the management at Comibol was to be grateful to be freed from their contractual responsibility to pay wages.

Bolivia's future looks bleak. It will perhaps be able to weather the present crisis because of the informal economy — one estimate suggests that the production of coca has risen to 160.000 tonnes in 1985, enough to produce 437 tonnes of cocaine. But, as with other exports, it is the American sellers who make the profits. Nevertheless it does provide employment, with as many as one in six families engaged in coca production. Meanwhile the Bolivian miners' union. FSTMB. still argues that losses at Comibol have been exaggerated by the government and they reject "the closure of any mine without a prior technical and economic survey", a rearguard campaign not unlike that waged by the NUM in Britain over pit closures. But increasingly the role of the FSTMB has been one of negotiating compensation for redundant miners.

The precarious situation of tin miners in Bolivia is typical of workers in any industrial nation. The FSTMB has long been a thorn in the flesh of the Bolivian government and the present administration of Paz Estenssoro has been happy to see a weakening of the miners' influence. At the same time the competition for employment has turned miner against miner within Bolivia and. internationally, the insecure future of tin mining divides workers between countries.

This book claims that the failure of the rich nations to maintain stable exchange rates and to support the International Tin Council means that they must "bear the considerable responsibility for this hardship". The use of tin is undergoing a profound change and the management of that change is harsh because capitalism permits change to occur regardless of human cost.

 Under capitalism, however, not only are the benefits not shared but the very process of change itself generates losses and hardships to its victims. National agreements in the third world do not have the resources to compensate their citizens for changes in the international division of labour. The tin crash has shown the importance of sharing the costs of a crisis of this dimension equitably, with wealthy consumer nations assuming more of the burden.

Benevolent capitalism, as suggested here, is a pious hope. The authors call for "a more humane and democratic world order" and "a genuine transfer of economic power and wealth". Neither are possible without the abolition of the capitalist system which, they recognise, takes no account of the needs of human beings.

Philip Bentley

Che Guevara (1996)

From the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The name of Che Guevara was recently in the news again as an ex-officer of the Bolivian military claimed to know where the dead guerrilla's grave is. Guevara was a heroic revolutionary icon throughout the 1960s and 1970s. A famous poster of him wearing a jaunty beret adorned many radical walls and protest tee-shirts. The popular perception of Guevara is as the idealist or utopian dreamer of the Cuban revolution compared with the more tough-minded and pragmatic figure of Castro. But behind the mythology, who was the man, what did he stand for and what is the socialist view of his life and work?

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was born in Argentina in 1928. Graduating with a degree in medicine from Buenos Aires in 1953 he commenced an extensive tour of Latin America, ending up in Guatemala in 1954. He was there when the leftist, reform-minded Arbenz regime was overthrown in a CIA-organised coup. At this period of the cold war the agrarian programme of Arbenz, which threatened extensive American land-holdings, was viewed as a prelude to "communism” by the suspicious Eisenhower administration. Forced to leave Guatemala from the vindictive new authorities. Guevara moved to Mexico City and continued mixing in radical political circles. Anti-American sentiment was commonplace amongst Argentinean intellectuals at the time and the Guatemala episode must have accentuated it with Guevara. He considered himself a revolutionary Marxist but more accurately could be described as being in the Leninist tradition. While in Mexico he met the exiled Fidel Castro who was organising a rebellion against the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. Che quickly agreed to join Castro’s “army of liberation" known as the July 26th Movement.

Cuban Revolution
The rebellion began in 1956 and was based amongst the peasants in the Sierra Maestra. Guevara’s reputation as a heroic fighter dates from this era of mountain struggle where he was a leading military commander in Castro's forces. The historical context to the conflict was that Cuba did not achieve independence from Spain until 1902 and from then until the eventual success of the rebellion in 1959, it was in effect a US protectorate. American business interests dominated the economy and the US government retained the legal right to intervene in Cuban affairs. This was a major irritant to patriotically-minded Cubans and it meant that amongst left-wing nationalists, capitalism was always erroneously identified as being synonymous with American imperialism. The Cuban Communist Party—with the Soviet Union—regarded the 26th July Movement as radical populists fighting against political dictatorship and excessive American interference, being in favour of vague goals to promote social justice. Castro's regime eventually aligned itself with the Soviet Union more as a reaction to Washington’s paranoia rather than out of intrinsic ideological commitment.

Upon the overthrow of Batista, Guevara became Director of the National Bank and than a de facto Minister for Industry. He was prominent in the nationalisation of the foreign controlled sugar production, oil refining, banking and mining industries. He combined these roles with a roving ambassadorship to developing countries seeking to gain international support for Cuba and investigating opportunities to propagate the Cuban revolution. Gradually however his influence waned in Havana and by 1965 he had become almost irrelevant. He criticised the Soviet Union’s treatment of its allies in the developing world saying that in extracting hard-headed trade concessions, they were acting little better than “capitalist” countries. This outspokenness embarrassed Castro. Furthermore he advocated the paying of an equal wage to all Cubans and the use of "moral incentives" to encourage productivity, as a path that would eventually lead to a moneyless society. These arguments were dismissed by the regime in favour of wage differentials and bonuses. Feeling that his talents as a theorist of guerrilla warfare could be put to better use elsewhere, he left Cuba and by 1967 ended up in Bolivia. There with a tiny band of fighters he tried to emulate the Cuban revolution. Despite his initial optimism, the Bolivian peasantry proved to be indifferent and support was unforthcoming. The Bolivian army tracked down the insurgents and in October 1967, Che Guevara was captured, shot and immediately passed from history into myth.

Dictatorial measures
On one level socialists can sympathise with the life of Guevara; from his travels he became aware of the poverty and oppression of the majority of the people in Latin America. This made him a social critic and he was determined to do his part to change society. Undoubtedly the Cuban revolution in which Guevara played a major role brought some initial benefits to the people of the island. The worst forms of worker exploitation (widespread prostitution, the plight of landless labourers) were ended and advances in health and education were tremendous by comparable standards. But side-by-side with this went political oppression; the independent press was closed down, trade unions became an adjunct to the state, there was imprisonment and sometimes execution of political dissidents. Workers were expected to put in long hours in dangerous conditions to satisfy Castro's various industrialisation schemes. In a further parallel with Stalin these dictatorial measures were always justified by reference to an external threat. More recently over the past ten years with the ending of Soviet aid, the fate of the Cuban workers has worsened considerably under the Beijing-like gerontocracy of the Havana leadership. In the popular mind Che Guevara is never linked with this repressive state apparatus though he was an important element in its construction. Ironically too, while Guevara has always in the west been associated with the libertarian “student counter-culture", the regime of which he was a member carried out a severe and ultimately fruitless campaign against western pop music, “decadence" and homosexuality. In fact gay people have been treated particularly harshly in Cuba.

Confusion about the basis on which society is organised meant that Guevara was destined to become part of a doomed experiment in social change. That this same process has repeatedly happened to so many reformers is of immense frustration to socialists. We have a number of reasons for opposing the politics espoused by Che Guevara. We would point to the mistaken Leninist equating of capitalism with imperialism which as in so many other cases inevitably led down the blind alley of nationalism. A good illustration of this is that for the past thirty years in Cuba the 19th century patriotic figure of Marti has been invoked by the establishment as often as Marx.

Another disagreement lies in seeing military action by the self-chosen few as the force to change society. Socialists are not pacifists and have genuine sympathy for those fighting political dictatorship but we recognise that the only meaningful transformation that can occur in society is when the majority of the people on a world-wide basis make a conscious voluntary decision to re-organise their lives and change the system that they live under. At the heart of our difference with Guevara was his belief that an equal wages society would be the spring to a socialist summer. The essence of socialism is a moneyless society; the break with using a means of exchange must be distinct and irrevocable. Equal wages and labour vouchers must inevitably lead back rather than forward as they are based on, and assume, capitalist consciousness continuing.

Denouncing Che Guevara with the easy benefit of hindsight would be facile. Socialists are keen to analyse and discuss such people's lives for the lessons to be learnt. We understand that historical figures like Guevara, Lenin, Garabaldi and Connolly cannot be wholly held responsible for the societies that arose in their wake. Such an approach overestimates the role of the individual as opposed to the political/economic/cultural factors prevailing at the time. Hindsight does show us though that without a proper understanding of the material basis of society any attempts at social change, no matter how initially laudable they may be, will certainly fail.

Kevin Cronin

Material World: Bolivia – Morales comes up against capitalism (2018)

The Material World Column from the November 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many, the years following Evo Morales’s 2005 election in Bolivia were marked by jubilation and hope. For Bolivia’s indigenous people, support for Morales appeared to be paying off. The poverty rate dropped from 59.9 percent in 2006 to 36.4 percent. Access for indigenous communities to electricity, sewerage and water service all grew.

Morales presided over an economy that has grown by an annual average of 4.6 percent since he took office, more than twice the rate for all of Latin America. After nationalising the country’s natural gas reserves, he pursued market-friendly economic policies and invested export revenue in social programs that helped lift more than two million people.

Now Morales faces growing opposition from the diverse ethnicities that made him Bolivia’s first indigenous president. After clashes with native groups over development, and constitutional manoeuvres to stay in office, across Bolivia, indigenous people are increasingly turning against Evo.

‘His way of thinking and his actions aren’t indigenous,’ said Gualberto Cusi, a former judge and ethnic Aymara, an Andean tribe from which Morales himself also hails. ‘He always said he would consult the people,’ said Salles, the former Conamaq leader. ‘Now he doesn’t.’

Two major indigenous rights organisations, Cidob and The National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu, left the Unity Pact. Government supporters began to stage what some described as coups within the organisations. Politics and loyalty to Morales began to matter more than the indigenous cause and pro-Morales activists said those organisations’ previous leaders were tools of American imperialism.

‘I have heard many debates in the UN where presidents condemn climate change but they never say – cowardly enough – what causes it. We say clearly that it is caused by capitalism,’ Morales declared in 2009.

Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second largest body of water covering 2,400 sq km, dried up completely by late 2015. The government blamed climate change exclusively for the lake’s disappearance, allowing it to avoid taking any responsibility for the lake’s drying and ignoring the effects of irrigation schemes and water taken for mining which Morales is reluctant to regulate.

Morales has accused developed countries of pushing ‘colonial environmentalism’ in Bolivia when NGOs criticise the construction of a highway through protected ecosystems. The 190-mile (300km) road would cut through the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park, known as Tipnis.

‘This is the beginning of the destruction of protected areas in Bolivia and indigenous peoples’ territory,’ Fernando Vargas, a Tipnis indigenous leader, explained, ‘Evo Morales is not a defender of Mother Earth, or indigenous peoples. He’s in favour of extractivism and capitalism.’

Opponents of the road say it will open up the park to mining and oil and gas exploration, as well as loggers.

Morales has also lost another pillar of his support. Historically the mining cooperatives have been allies of the President. With the global commodities downturn in prices such as in zinc, tin, silver and gold it has reduced the income of the miners and the miners want a larger share of the mining revenues. The pie is smaller for the cooperative miners’ returns. The pie is smaller for the state and its taxes. The cooperatives want the right to form partnerships with transnationals. As the Guardian put it (28 August 2016): ‘They want to be able to associate with private companies, which promise to put more cash in their pockets, but are currently prohibited from doing so.’

A cooperativista is willing to risk poor health and water pollution in the hopes of benefiting. With commodity prices well down the outlook is for fewer prospects for co-operatives to make a living — and thus more anger, discontent and unrest. An article in Dissident Voice reached the same conclusion as the World Socialist Movement:

‘…like many cooperatives in the US that arose out of the 1960s, they have turned into small businesses. Regardless of their initial intentions, cooperatives existing in a surrounding capitalist environment must compete in business practices or go under’ (our emphasis, LINK).

As we now see from the series of articles here on Latin America, capitalism is a global system and no matter how genuine politicians may be or how well-meaning their policies may be, capitalism has its own laws which must be eventually submitted to and which cannot be disregarded for very long. In Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia, each nation may have encountered issues unique to them but all three shared one common problem – capitalism dominated their economy. Declaring that your government is anti-capitalist does not make it so and they are most definitely not examples of socialism or even aspiring to be.

ALJO

Material World: Evo Morales: A Call for Socialism? (2008)

The Material World Column from the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 21 April, 2008, President Evo Morales of Bolivia delivered the opening address to the Seventh Session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. His speech included the following passage:

“If we want to save the planet earth, to save life and humanity, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system. Unless we put an end to the capitalist system, it is impossible to imagine that there will be equality and justice on this planet earth. This is why I believe that it is important to put an end to the exploitation of human beings and to the pillage of natural resources, to put an end to destructive wars for markets and raw materials, to the plundering of energy, particularly fossil fuels, to the excessive consumption of goods and to the accumulation of waste. The capitalist system only allows us to heap up waste. I would like to propose that the trillions of money earmarked for war should be channelled to make good the damage to the environment, to make reparations to the earth.”

Despite the striking anti-capitalist content of most of this passage, the last sentence reveals that Morales does not have a clear conception of the socialist alternative. He still thinks in terms of the money system.

The accurate way of posing the problem focuses not on the waste of money but on the waste of real resources of all kinds – the waste of nature and its bounty, of human life and labour, of knowledge and its potential. True, money represents or symbolizes some – far from all -- of these real resources, but in a very inadequate and distorted manner. To substitute the symbol for the reality is a mystification.

Nevertheless, I would like to argue that Morales is a good deal closer to a true understanding of socialism than most of the so-called “left” in Latin America or elsewhere. The very fact that he is addressing a world forum about the future of the species and the planet suggests that he is seeking an alternative at the global rather than national level. Although nationalization forms part of his domestic policy (the oil and gas industry in Bolivia was nationalized in 2006), he does not equate nationalization with socialism.

The model of the ayllu
In a number of interviews Morales has been asked what he and his movement – the Movement for Socialism (MAS) – understand by socialism. Thus, Heinz Dieterich of Monthly Review (July 2006) asks him what country the socioeconomic model of the MAS most closely resembles. Brazil? Cuba? Venezuela? Morales does not like the way the question is put. (“[Socialism] is something much deeper. … It is to live in community and equality.”) He talks instead about the traditional peasant commune or ayllu of the indigenous peoples of the Andes, based on communal landholding and “respect for Mother Earth.” He himself grew up in an ayllu of the Aymara people in Oruro Province; in some parts of Bolivia such communities still exist.

In another interview, to journalists from Spiegel, Morales says: “There was no private property in the past. Everything was communal property. In the Indian community where I was born, everything belonged to the community. This way of life is more equitable.” As the World Socialist Review, published by our companion party in the United States, comments: “This is more than just a variation on the leftist copout that socialism is a goal for the distant future; it is, on some level, an acceptance of it as a real alternative to capitalism” (See here.)

Rejecting vanguardism
Another indication that Morales is closer than most of the “left” to a genuine understanding of socialism is his opposition to the Bolshevik idea of the “vanguard party.” The MAS, he tells Dieterich, “was not created by political ideologues or by a group of intellectuals, but by peasant congresses to solve the problems of the people.” It has always rejected the pretensions to “leadership” of Leninist groups of different varieties -- followers of Stalin, Trotsky, or Mariategui (a Peruvian Bolshevik who has had great influence on the left in Latin America).

Of course, Morales is not only a thinker with more or less clear ideas about capitalism and socialism. He is also head of the government of an underdeveloped country that has to operate within the parameters of a capitalist world. As such he is no position to realize his more far reaching aspirations. At most, he has been able – like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela – to divert some of the proceeds from the sale of oil and gas to making some improvement to the life of the impoverished indigenous communities.

The fact remains that an internationally known figure has stood up at the United Nations and called upon the world community to bring the capitalist system to an end. Morales’ concept of socialism may be less clear than we would like, but it does at least bear some relation to the real thing. Viewed from the time when the UN and its specialized agencies are converted into the planning and coordinating centre of world socialism, this will, perhaps, be regarded as a milestone in its history.

Stephen Shenfield

Hope Over Experience (2007)

Book Review from the September 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pirates of the Caribbean – Axis of Hope. Tariq Ali. (Verso Press)

A need to "counter systematic disinformation by the corporate media networks" coupled with the "revival of hope and the emergence of a modest alternative to the status quo" is the stated motivation for this book. One wouldn't expect neutral views on any topic from Tariq Ali, but however strongly he presents them they are backed up with ample evidence of and references to the truths he is presenting. What one would expect and what one gets is a well-written, clearly argued book exploring the growing movements (mainly in South America) against the Washington Consensus which "can allow no enemies of globalization."

Included is a reminder of the ravages of primitive accumulation affecting the whole continent; a brief history of Venezuela's politics, dictatorships juxtaposed with spells of democracy and the odd coup thrown in; military control; states of emergency; mass protests following IMF restructuring; massacres and decades of exclusion for 80+ percent of the population. The background to the founding of the Bolivarian groups (in the army and air force starting in 1978) by young army officers including Chavez. Ali's sources telling of the programme of political interventions in Venezuela are many, including one 1960s senior CIA officer. He lists books, documents and websites for those wishing to delve further. Two of the many interesting footnotes, one re: V .S. Naipaul's refusal to be drawn into the disinformation racket after the 2002 coup attempt and the other re: a soon to be published book by Gregory Wilpert which totally supports "with a wealth of facts" the Irish documentary film "The Revolution will not be Televised."

Ali is overtly supportive of the moves in South America against the Washington Consensus and points to the ways the balance of power is changing.

There is a section on Bolivia outlining the struggle of the people to oust Bechtel and their water privatization scheme described as the democracy from below that is feared by neo-liberal elites everywhere. Also offered is an insight into Evo Morales' search for "a form of radical social democracy that is totally unacceptable to the Washington Consensus and its institutions." Ali suggests we should all look at strength in unity (e.g. Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia), "All Andean paths that divert from the neo-liberal motorway will be worth exploring." He gives some details of his first trip to Cuba in 2005 and reminds us of the 1962 Second Declaration of Havana expounding that their struggle was continental and anti-imperialist, as Chavez and Morales say now. Visiting the University of Information Technology he discovered Richard Stallman's free software GNU/Linux to be the system of choice. When Ali met Stallman earlier in Caracas, at which time Stallman was 'Linuxing the country' and looking to do the same in Cuba, Stallman told him that China, too, had been very interested until they learned they couldn't charge users for the facility.

The appendices prove informative too, with first-hand information, straight from the mouths of several involved horses, information we are not privy to from the general media. Evo Morales' speech 'In Defence of Humanity' in Mexico City talks of ending selfishness and creating solidarity and mutual aid, of organizing and uniting against the (neo-liberal, imperialist) system, of strengthening the power of the people. The messages from this book are rousing, loud and clear, if, unfortunately, they are not the whole story; end of neo-liberalism and of empire, but no mention of the end of capitalism. According to Tariq Ali, "Hope has been reborn and that is half the battle won." However inspirational it may be socialists suspect that this will in all likelihood be another triumph of hope over experience.

Janet Surman