ALBA and UNASUR – The Emergence of Counter-hegemonic Regional Associations in Latin America and the Caribbean

In June of this year, I had the privilege of being able to facilitate a speaking tour for two senior Cuban scholars. Dr. Concepción Nieves Ayús is Dean Institute of Philosophy of Havana, and Dr. Hugo Pons is Vice President Cuban Society of Economists. Working with me on this project, was Dr. Nchamah Miller who I knew as a scholar at York University in Toronto, and is now Visiting Research Professor, Institute of Philosophy, Havana, Cuba. The four of us presented papers on the theme, “Contours of anti-neoliberalism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Case studies from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia and ALBA”. The principal venue for the presentation of this research, was at Congress 2012, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS), which this year took place in Waterloo, Ontario, using both the campuses of Wilfrid Laurier University, and the University of Waterloo. The response to the panel was quite positive. It was co-sponsored by two scholarly associations – Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID/ACÉDI), and Society for Socialist Studies (SSS-SÉS), had a very good turnout, and sparked a lively discussion. To take advantage of the visit to Canada by the scholars from Cuba, two other events were organized. An informal, Spanish language event in Toronto, where members of the Hispanic community in the city were able to meet with and discuss with our guests issues relevant to both Cuba and Canada, as well as an additional presentation of the Congress panel at the University of Toronto, organized by Ideas Left Out. Both of these events were also well attended and well received. One of the challenges with these kinds of cross-border exchanges is, of course, that of language. In both Waterloo and Toronto, we were able to get the assistance of extremely professional translators, who provided English translations for the oral presentation of Dr. Nieves Ayús, and provided a wonderful written translation of her text (Dr. Pons both wrote and delivered his paper in English). The panel’s focus was on the challenges facing small Caribbean countries in the context of neoliberalism. There were three different aspects to the discussion. Dr. Pons and Dr. Nieves Ayús provided fascinating, in-depth insights into the complex evolution of economics and politics in contemporary Cuba. Dr. Miller provided an outline and analysis of relations between Colombia and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. My paper focused on the impact in the region of the emergence of two new regional organizations, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). In the discussions which occurred during these presentations, there was considerable interest in developing some of these papers into articles for publication, contact from a publisher interested in a book project, and discussions about how some of this material could be the basis for the development of online courses. All told, it was an extremely fruitful experience.Latin America and the Caribbean have been victims of more than 500-years of colonialism and imperialism. A key component of both colonialism and imperialism has been the denial of and/or distortion of sovereignty throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Neoliberalism has been but the most recent frame within which to continue this project. The FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) was to have consolidated neoliberalism across the hemisphere, under U.S. hegemony. But the rise of massive social movements throughout the region, prevented the launch of the FTAA in 2005. This has not stopped the attempt to institutionalize neoliberalism. Both the U.S. and Canada have turned to bilateral deals as an alternative to the FTAA. However, we have also seen the creation of regional trade and investment associations independent of the United States and Canada. This paper will examine two of these – ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) and UNASUR (the Union of South American Nations) – and assess their impact as counter-hegemonic projects. The paper builds on earlier research published in New Political Science and forthcoming in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization

Fall of the House of Euro – German capitalism and the long search for a ‘spatial fix

Historical Materialism is one of the newest entries into the scholarly conference circuit in Canada, but has established itself as an important one, particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is part of a network of conferences, including an annual one in Britain and a bi-annual one in the United States, organized by the editors of the Historical Materialism journal. The journal now has an ongoing collaborative relationship for book publishing with the Netherlands-based Brill, a highly-respected academic publisher, in business since 1683. This May, Historical Materialism Toronto held its third conference, and I had the opportunity to organize one of the sessions (as well as speaking on a panel in a second session). The session I organized was entitled “Debt, displacement and dispossession in the 21st century”. In the 1980s, Latin America was the epicentre of sovereign debt crises. Today, the focus is on Europe, the very core of “old capitalism.” The panel linked these two spaces and outlined critical issues posed for theories of debt and money. The first paper, presented by Dr. Susanne Soederberg of Queen’s University, was focused on Latin America, and analyzed Mexico’s “debtfare state”, and its ties to global capitalism. The second paper, presented by Jesse Hembruff, a doctoral student at Queen’s University, focused on Greece, one of Europe’s weakest economies and on the front lines of the current EU sovereign debt crisis. The third paper – the one I presented – deployed David Harvey’s concept of the ‘spatial fix, through a focus on Germany, one of Europe’s strongest economies. Conferences are an indispensable tool in the development of academic research. The research in my paper was first stimulated by an invitation from Ideas Left Out to speak in Toronto in January of this year, on the topic “Eurozone from Greece to Germany – Explaining the Crisis.” This then led to a panel at the 2012 Research Forum in April in Athabasca, “Histories of Capitalism: Critical Perspectives.” Through each of these iterations of the research, feedback and comments from the participants has proven very fruitful.From the standpoint of capitalism in Germany, the European Union and the Eurozone are but the two most recent stations on the long pilgrimage to find a spatial fix, attempts to alleviate the perennial problem of a nationally-based centre of capital accumulation, bursting the bounds of its home market, but without easy access to overseas empire. But these “spatial fixes” – from Bismarckian imperialism on – have occurred undemocratically, have fostered chauvinism and racism, and have remained trapped in the fetishized forms which are the curse of private-property. All of these superstructural impediments have become prisons, holding back social development in Germany and throughout Europe. This paper will develop these themes through a survey of three distinct “moments” in the search for a spatial fix to the contradictions inherent in German and European capitalism.

The Ideal Immanent Within the Real: On Peter Hudis' Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism

A discussion of Hudis' Marx's Concept of an Alternative to Capitalism

Canada's National Questions, Free Trade and the Left

It is now more than 30 years since the launch of the bilateral:anada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA), predecessor to the multilateral North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the (now abandoned) Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). For a generation, these "free trade" initiatives provided an important part of the framework in which political movements developed in Canada, engendering debates and controversies which continue to this day. When a new moment of trade politics emerged with Donald Trump's challenge to NAFTA, some veterans from those earlier anti-free trade battles were unable to see the new, white nationalist terrain upon which Trump was operating. This article - organized principally around the author's own engagement with the anti-free trade movements of the 1980s - suggests that this inability to see clearly the new context of anti-free trade politics was rooted in the incomplete and contradictory left-nationalist theory which underpinned most anti-free trade politics of that earlier era. The article suggests that while there are national questions in Canada - in particular those associated with Indigenous peoples and with Quebec - the attempt to articulate a parallel "national question" in Canada as a whole has proven to be impossible

Gordon, Todd. 2010. Imperialist Canada.

Gordon, Todd. 2010. Imperialist Canada. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. ISBN 978-1-894037-45-7. Paperback: 24.95 CAD. Pages: 432

“Truth Behind Bars”

Just north of the Arctic Circle is the settlement of Vorkuta, a notorious camp in the Gulag internment system that witnessed three pivotal moments in Russian history. In the 1930s, a desperate hunger strike by socialist prisoners, victims of Joseph Stalin’s repressive regime, resulted in mass executions. In 1953, a strike by forced labourers sounded the death knell for the Stalinist forced labour system. And finally, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of strikes by new, independent miners’ unions were central to overturning the Stalinist system. Paul Kellogg uses the story of Vorkuta as a frame with which to re-assess the Russian Revolution. In particular, he turns to the contributions of Iulii Martov, a contemporary of Lenin, and his analysis of the central role played in the revolution by a temporary class of peasants-in-uniform. Kellogg explores the persistence and creativity of workers’ resistance in even the darkest hours of authoritarian repression and offers new perspectives on the failure of democratic governance after the Russian Revolution.illustrato

Workers Versus Austerity: The Origins of Ontario’s 1995-1998 ‘Days of Action’

The Great Recession has left in its wake an expected “age of austerity” where deficits accumulated to stave off economic collapse, are being addressed through steep cuts to government spending, with profound implications for social services and public sector employment. In an earlier era of austerity, eleven mass strikes and enormous demonstrations swept through the major cities of Ontario. This Days of Action movement – which has real relevance for the current period – began in the fall of 1995, continued through all of 1996 and 1997, and came to an end in 1998. This article, part of a larger research project, focuses on the movement’s origins. Two themes shape the overall project: the relation between social movements “outside” the workplace and union struggles themselves; and the relationship between the energetic inexperience of newly-active union members, and the pessimistic institutional experience embodied in a quite developed layer of full-time union officials. It is the former – the dialectic between social movements and trade unions in the Days of Action, that will be the focus of this article. La Grande récession a donné naissance, comme on pouvait s’y attendre, à une « ère de l’austérité » où les déficits accumulés pour contrer l’effondrement économique sont pris en charge via des coupes brutales dans les dépenses des États, avec des répercussions majeures pour les services sociaux et l’emploi dans le secteur public. Durant une période d’austérité précédente, onze grèves de masse et des manifestations monstres se sont succédées dans les principales villes de l’Ontario. Ce mouvement des Journées d’action – qui est tout à fait pertinent dans la période actuel – a débuté à l’automne 1995, s’est poursuivi durant les années 1996 et 1997, pour se terminer en 1998. Cet article, une composante d’un projet de recherche plus vaste, met l’accent sur les origines du mouvement. Deux thèmes traversent l’ensemble du projet: les rapports entre les mouvements sociaux situés hors des lieux de travail et les luttes syndicales, et les liens entre l’inexpérience énergique des syndiqués à l’implication récente et l’expérience institutionnelle et pessimiste incarnée dans une couche bien développée de responsables syndicaux à temps plein. C’est la première des deux relations, la dialectique entre les mouvements sociaux et les syndicats dans les Journées d’action, qui sera l’objet du présent article

Leninism: It's Not What You Think

Leninism is universally understood as involving an emphasis on centralism and discipline inside the workers’ party, a centralism and discipline necessary as a counter to the centralized power of the capitalist state. This article argues: 1) that Lenin’s famous centralism was a necessity imposed on all socialists of his generation because of conditions of tsarist autocracy; 2) that when given the chance during moments of revolutionary upheaval, this centralism was pushed to the background, and a heavy emphasis was placed upon democracy and debate; 3) that late in life, Lenin realized that the ‘Leninism’ being aggressively promoted by the Communist International was too heavily weighted towards Russian conditions, and was a barrier to the development of the left outside of Russia; and 4) that this immanent critique of actually-existing Leninism was cut short and buried by the rise of Stalinism, for which an emphasis on centralism was a useful counterpart in party organization to the authoritarianism being constructed in the Stalinist state. On pense généralement que le léninisme insiste sur le centralisme et la discipline dans le parti ouvrier, centralisme et discipline nécessaires pour contrer le pouvoir centralisé de l’état capitaliste. Cet article defend que: 1) le centralisme célèbre de Lénine était une nécessité impose à tous les socialistes de sa génération du fait de l’autocratie tsariste; 2) dès lors qu’il y avait un espace pendant les moments de bouleversement révolutionnaire, ce centralisme était mis en retrait et un accent lourd était mis sur la démocratie et le débat; 3) plus tard dans sa vie, Lénine a réalisé que le ‘léninisme’ qui était promu d’une façon agressive par l’Internationale communiste était trop lourdement biaisé par le contexte russe et que ceci était une barrière au développement de la gauche en dehors de la Russie; et 4) cette critique immanente du léninisme en place a été muselée et enterrée par l’ascension du stalinisme, pour qui l’accent sur le centralisme était un parallèle utile dans l’organisation du parti à l’autoritarisme en construction dans l’état staliniste

Of Nails and Needles: A Reconsideration of the Political Economy of Canadian Trade.

The hegemonic view in Canadian political economy is that Canada’s trade profile is weighted towards the export of unprocessed products, and away from manufactured products. With the soaring value of Canadian energy exports, combined with an import history weighted towards the import of finished manufactured goods, left nationalist political economy seems to be on strong footing painting a picture of an economy with an underdeveloped manufacturing sector. This article will empirically re-examine Canada’s trade profile, question some common assumptions about what constitutes ‘manufactured’ exports, and argue that Canada’s trade profile is perfectly compatible with that of an advanced capitalist economy. Left nationalism has mistakenly relied on categories appropriate to dependent economies, categories inappropriate for Canada. A Marxist approach reveals an economy with a more or less developed ‘home market’ economy, where the ‘self-expansion of value’ is directed towards the Canadian capitalist class, not away from it, as would be expected in a dependent economy