 Okay, good morning. Welcome everyone to this rainy and windy autumn day in London. And yeah, we're going to be talking about Latin America, and Latin America has really been through a period of abhivel and revolution for over 20 years now. You could say that this wave or this period started back in 1998 with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. That was a significant event. It was not just a normal election. It was a turning point in the history of Latin America that opened a whole wave of revolutions. But that was not a single act or something that just happened in Venezuela. Obviously the events in Venezuela in 98, you could even trace them back to 1989 when there was the Caracazo uprising, which I would say was the first mass uprising of that kind in the period after the fall of Stalinism. This was more or less at the same time, the fall of the Soviet Union, 1989-91. And after that, there was a general offensive campaign on the part of the ruling class to say socialism has failed, socialism doesn't work. And this had a big impact on workers around the world, but also on the leadership of the workers movement, the labor movement everywhere. There was a marked shift to the right. And I would say that one of the main contributions, one of the main features of Hugo Chávez and his time as a president of Venezuela, leader of the revolutionary movement was that he brought socialism back onto the agenda. And he did not start from socialism, far from that. During his election campaign in 98, he visited Britain. He spoke a thing at Oxford and Cambridge. He met with Tony Blair, if some of you might remember him, and he said at that time, Hugo Chávez said that the third way sounded like a very good idea. Only the third way meant one thing for Tony Blair and a completely different thing for Hugo Chávez. Hugo Chávez meant something that was different from what had failed in the East, a Stalinism, but also something that was different from capitalism. But at that time Hugo Chávez was not a socialist by any stretch of imagination. He didn't describe himself as such. He did not even, in fact, describe himself as an anti-imperialist. That came later through his own experience. He drew the conclusion around 2004, 2005, that the only way forward for Latin America was socialism. That capitalism had failed to develop these countries. These countries where they are very wealthy in mineral, natural resources, ecosystems and so on. But in these countries the majority of the population were poor. And that this was down to capitalism. And the only way forward was socialism. He did this very clearly and then opened the way for a whole number of leaders throughout and elected presidents throughout Latin America to declare themselves socialists. Even though many of them were not really socialists by any definition. Chávez, you could say he was a socialist. He genuinely believed that you had to overcome capitalism and go forward. He didn't know exactly how to do that and he was very confused in his theoretical ideas. But he was open to changing his views, to learning and so on. And the main thing is that he was at the head of a revolutionary movement. And he was not, for most of the time, he was not an impediment to that movement. But he was pushing the movement forward and vice versa. The movement was also pushing him forward. The subject of this talk is not Venezuela. But there are many interesting things about the history of the Venezuelan Revolution. I just wanted to give one anecdote. In 2002 was the coup in Venezuela in April. Then in December that year, in January the following year, there was an oil lockout. The ruling class and their agents in the oil industry, which at that time was already state-owned, Pedro Vesa, the main state-owned oil company, they organized the sabotage of the industry. They abandoned their posts, they sabotaged operations and they brought the industry to a halt. This was an industry that at that time was producing 3 million barrels of oil a day and came to a complete standstill, really hitting the Venezuelan economy in a very serious way. After that, there was a wave of occupations and workers' control. The workers in the oil industry took over the installations. They made them work under workers' control. This is not some abandoned textile factory in Argentina that the workers take over. It's more or less simple to run. This is a highly developed, technologically advanced industry that is run mostly through computer and satellite systems. The workers made wonders through workers' control in running and recovering products. Then there was a meeting of workers who had been involved in the oil industry, workers' control, workers who were occupying factories in other parts of Venezuela. This meeting was a meeting of worker activists. The most radical worker activists in Venezuela, the most advanced worker activists in Venezuela, there must have been 200, 300 people. Chávez was asked to give some closing remarks to this. This is the president of the country, right? So he went there and he spoke. Before he spoke, he asked the people on the table, so what are the conclusions of your meeting? What can I say? I don't know much about workers and so on, so you tell me what I'm supposed to say. There was a big banner there that said, fabrica cerrada, fabrica ocupada, said the factory that's closed should be occupied by the workers. The bosses closed the factories, the workers opened them and occupied them. Chávez thought that this was a very good idea, caught his eye, the banner, and then he spent most of his time in his closing remarks talking about workers' control. He said, well, it's clear. And he used a Venezuelan saying, if you don't want to attend the shop, we'll take it over, something like that. And then he started, so you can see that it was the movement pushed Chávez in this direction and then Chávez amplified the call. Not only this, he then instructed the minister of labor to produce a list of factories that were either closed down by the bosses or paralyzed or underutilized. And the minister of labor produced the list, 1,500 of those factories. And then in a national televised speech, he produced the list and he said, this is 1,500 companies that are closed down. The bourgeoisie is sabotaging the revolution. The workers must take over these factories and run them under workers' control and we'll legalize it from the government. And yes, this did happen. Not all 1,500 factories were taken over, but many of them were taken over. And in most of the cases, the government then legalized workers' control, gave it the legal. Then the story goes on, the workers sabotaged workers' control and there's a whole number of other things. But I'm just trying to say that this was a revolution. This was a revolution in which the workers, the peasants, the poor people in the cities took the future in their own hands. And this happened not only in Venezuela. In the turn of the century, year 2000, there was a revolutionary uprising in Ecuador, another country that's been in the news in the last couple of years. A massive revolutionary uprising which was led by the peasant indigenous organizations but then spread to the cities, they occupied the cities, they created mass popular assemblies and basically they brought the government down. Then there was in 2002, I think it was, around the same time, 2000, 2000, there was the so-called water war in Cochabamba, massive uprising against the privatization of water, which was victorious, which opened the way then for the gas war in 2003, 2005, another revolutionary event, the miners, the main workers in Bolivia which have very revolutionary traditions, marched on the capital with dynamite sticks and said to the government, unless you stop the privatization of gas, the sale off of gas, will bring the government down and the workers should rule the country and they could have. And so I'm just saying, it was not as it's presented sometimes in the bourgeois media or in academia, a pink tide, they call it, a series of left-wing governments that were elected. No, no, no, this was a revolutionary wave that then brought some of these people onto power as a byproduct of this revolutionary movement. Now I'll deal with this, with the experience of this left so-called progressive governments a bit later on, but just to give you the picture of what is happening now in Latin America with the impact of the COVID pandemic and the economic recession, it's not just a new thing, it's at the back end of 20 years of revolutionary upheaval and experiences and that is quite important to understand. Now, Latin America is probably the region in the world that's been worst affected by the COVID pandemic, both from a health point of view and from an economic point of view. The whole of the region as a whole Latin America and the Caribbean, as it's usually grouped together, has had a collapse in GDP of something between 6.8% and 7.7%, according to different figures or ways of measuring. This is the worst ever recession in the whole continent, worst ever, there's never been in 150 years, 120 years, there's never been a recession like this. But not only this, this recession comes after a sexenio period of 6 years from, we can find the figures, from 2014 to 2019 where the average economic growth in the whole region was 0.3%. There was no growth for 6 years before the pandemic struck. And in fact, if you think about it, over here in Europe, we mostly talk about the 2008 financial economic capitalist crisis, but in Latin America, 2008 was mild in comparison. There was a deep in the economy, but it recovered quite quickly. On the back of Chinese thirst or hunger for natural resources, oil and so on. China was not so affected by the 2008 crisis or rather it recovered quickly and continued to import massive amount of natural resources, sources of energy, raw materials and so on from Latin America, there was a quick recovery. But when the recession hit, Latin America was 2014. I want you to remember this date because it has a big impact, has a big significance for the political processes in Latin America I'll discuss later on. But then from 2014 to 2019, there was no economic growth. So the situation was already quite bad because 0% economic growth, 0.3% is less than population growth. So in effect, in practice, it's a recession. As I said, the impact of the coronavirus on the health and the economy of Latin America has been the worst in the world. The region contains 8% of the world's population, but it has had almost a third of all COVID deaths. So percentage wise is much higher. And this is according to official figures which clearly underestimate the real situation, which is situations like in Peru where it's been complete disaster in Ecuador at one point last year there were so many people were dying that people were corpses were gathering outside people's homes. No one could pick them up. And then Brazil that you might have heard of has been in the news. The impact of the pandemic has been completely aggravated by the completely irresponsible policies of far-right President Bolsonaro and has meant I think the official figures 600,000 people have died in Brazil. Over one and a half million people have died in the whole continent according to official figures which underestimate. This is a massive impact not only from the point of view of people who have had relatives dying and so on, but also from the point of view of the economy and for most of this period hundreds of thousands of people in Latin America were faced with a stark choice of staying at home and protecting themselves from contagion and dying of hunger because they can't get any income. In most of these countries there was no state subsidies for low and so on or where there were plans like this they were very small and insufficient or going out to work and having something to bring home to eat and then getting infected with coronavirus and then dying almost inevitably because of the situation of the health systems in these countries, been destroyed by decades of neoliberalism. Now before I go any further I don't like this word neoliberalism. I use it for shorthand sometimes because everyone understands what, but neoliberalism is a really bad word, let's say because it kind of implies that there is something else that is not neoliberalism but it's still capitalism many people say oh we're against neoliberalism yeah so what are you in favor I mean neoliberalism is the phase of capitalist policies in these countries in the period of imperialism and in the period of capitalist crisis. There's no other alternative to these policies other than socialist revolution, challenging capitalism head on and the problem is that for many academics, leaders of left-wing organizations, the problem is just neoliberalism, if we just change the policies a bit the system remains but we can manage things in a different way, more in favor of workers and persons this is not the case so that's why I usually don't use this word but in any case the health systems in these countries have been ravaged by decades of policies of privatization cuts in public spending opening up to foreign trade which I mean this is also a bad use of languages, opening up to foreign trade, what it means is opening up for imperialist expoliation, because it can be no equal terms of trade between Latin American countries that are subject to imperialist domination and US multinationals this is no, I mean when they talk about opening up the economy what they mean is putting up the electricity grid the health service and so on out for tender so that big multinational companies can make profits out of this so anyway this 20 years of these policies had ravaged these countries economies and on top of this then the Covid pandemic came on top of this and it's had of course the Covid pandemic has not had the same impact for everyone as it was the case prior to the Covid pandemic some have benefited, yes some people have become rich out of this pandemic the inequality of the distribution of wealth has increased during the pandemic and you had situations where people were dying because of lack of access to vaccination while politicians, government officials and so on were getting vaccinated ahead of the jumping the queue in a completely illegal manner or worse you had wealthy people throughout Latin America traveling to Miami to get vaccinated while millions were dying and hundreds of thousands dying in the countries of origin which also tells you something about the character the Latin American capitalist class if it can be called like that sometimes you use this word oligarchy and you might think it's not very precise it's not very scientific but it is in my opinion it is because it's not a normal bourgeois class it's a capitalist class yes, because they are the owners of the means of production but they play a subordinate role to imperialism they are the local office boys of angels of imperialism they are the lieutenants of foreign multinationals foreign interests their heart, if you want is more in Miami or in Washington than it is in Rio or in Mexico City or in Caracas and you can see that very clearly and they rule this countries it's a conglomerate of the owners of the land, the owners of the main companies the owners of the mass media and they are all in conjunction with the US Embassy it's an oligarchy, that's what it is and we have people like, and we have seen for instance the total number of billionaires in Latin America in 2020, Latin America and the Caribbean increased by 31 to 107 anyone as quick with maths will tell you that's 40% increase or 30% increase in one year, the number of billionaires this is not a relative measure it's an absolute measure, number of people who went over the barrier of 1 billion dollars in personal assets increased from whatever it was 70 to 107 and they combined net worth increased even more from 196 billion sorry from 284 billion to 480 billion the increase was 196 billion, that's over 40% increase and that amount equals to the GDP of a country like Ecuador, middle size country in Latin America, just to give you a comparison point just to give you one example there's a guy called Jorge Molle Filho from Brazil, he's a cardiologist who set up one of Brazil's biggest private hospital chains, Revedor and he has seen his net worth in one year increased from 1 billion in April 2020 to 12 billion a year later in April 2021 and there's a clear reason for this because although Bolsonaro is the president of the ruling class in Brazil and he has completely crazy policies in relation to COVID, criminal policies in relation to COVID the rich, the wealthy in Brazil, they were getting vaccinated they were getting treated in private hospitals run by this cardiologist I'm not sure that's within the hypocratic oath that doctors take to make profits out of health provision make massive profits these profits are going to happen six times anyway so this is the situation that you have in Latin America in this period and this has had obviously a massive social impact poverty has increased massively 34% of the people in the region are now under the poverty line and 13% under the line of extreme poverty over 40% of food insecure that means people who cannot eat the necessary amount over a certain period of time, a week or a month in Argentina Argentina is quite a rich country and at one point it was even an industrialized country that had GDP per capita quite high not anymore after many years of economic crisis and imperialist exploitation but nevertheless Argentina is a country that you think of as a more or less developed country 40% of the population live in poverty 54% of those under 14 live in food insecurity and these figures have gone up massively in the past two years as a result of the pandemic but obviously building up, building on the previous conditions that existed before and in Argentina you don't have Bolsonaro, you have a government that's nominally progressive government the government of Fernández and Fernández now before the pandemic in 2019 they were already as a result of these six years of no economic growth the accumulation of contradictions there were already revolutionary uprisings why do I say revolutionary uprisings because they were revolutionary uprisings this was not a case say in Ecuador two years ago October 2019 in Chile around the same time October November December 2019 these were not just protest demonstrations in which people march from A to B and demand the end of one particular law not only to the whole system not only to the whole capitalist system but also the system of bourgeois democracy completely discredited by corruption scandals incidentally now we're talking about wealth accumulation in Latin America you know these recent revelations with the Pandora papers 90 out of the 300 people named in the Pandora papers politicians and public officials in Latin America including three serving presidents including I don't know exactly who they are but there's a president of Chile, Piñera the president of Ecuador Lasso and another one can't remember the finance minister in a central bank governor so anyway corruption scandals and the lack of legitimacy of bourgeois institutions normally the ruling class does not rule through brute force people are not forced to go to work every day by armed men at the doorstep or anything like this they're not kept in the factories by armed guards people go along with the daily capitalist exploitation because they think it's normal or they think it's no alternative or they think that there's at least there's democracy when vote one set of politicians or another but in this case this whole system of voting one set politicians or another have been completely discredited because people realize that whoever you vote they'll carry out the same policies and they're all corrupt and they are so this was a questioning of the whole regime in Chile they said it's not 20 pesos it's 20 years meaning it's not the 20 pesos that was the fair increase in the subway fairs in Santiago that sparked the protest it's 20 years of this kind of policies privatizations and so on 30 years more like since the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship now I can't give you all the details I can't go into all the details of those uprisings but these were certainly revolutionary uprisings like in Ecuador two years from today almost from this weekend the government had been forced to flee the capital Quito and the Carondelet presidential palace the government had been forced to flee to Guayaquil the center of the oligarchy surrounded by masses of protestors workers peasants indigenous people the youth they were clashing with the police on a daily basis they had declared the state of emergency they had brought the army on the streets they couldn't stop the movement over the national assembly they set up a people's assembly and they basically said they were gonna take power so this is a revolution this is an insurrectionary uprising in Chile it was similar the government brought the army on the streets the carabineros hundreds of people were injured dozens were killed by police repression this didn't stop the people there was two general strikes one on the 25th of I think another one earlier on the 12th there was a demonstration two years from today which was the largest demonstration in Chilean history over a million people in the capital this is a relatively small country in terms of population million people or more in the capital what did they want? to clear the decks everyone should go we must remove all of the system and they set up popular assemblies cabildos abiertos and so on and they were starting the process of masses ruling their own destinies now these two insurrections which were the most advanced of a series of other insurrections that took place in Puerto Rico in the summer of 2019 in Haiti for over two years of mass protests and demonstrations and so on were defeated they were derailed because I would argue that the Chilean insurrection for instance has not been defeated it's been derailed and it's been thrown back temporarily but last week on the first anniversary of the second anniversary of the insurrection there was a mass demonstration in Santiago again people clashing with the police and so on for the lack of leadership for the lack of leadership the workers could have taken power in Ecuador very clearly and in Chile very lightly but there was no leadership that was raising that idea or rather the leadership that the movement had or had it from the previous period reached a deal with the existing power forces and diffused the whole movement and then on top of that then the pandemic struck in April 2020 and obviously with the pandemic came lockdowns and so on and it was more difficult or almost impossible to maintain this level of mobilization in the streets plus you can't be on the streets all the time unless you have a perspective of where the movement is going finally maybe not disillusionment but tiredness sets in people are prepared to make great sacrifice they did make great sacrifices but they will only remain on the streets fighting if they can see there's a perspective that we going somewhere that someone knows where we going and this is the way forward but they have not been defeated and they have not been crushed by repression or anything like that and so these movements will reemerge they are in fact reemerging as we speak this last week there was a two day general strike in Ecuador against the Lasso government with road blockades, mass demonstrations workers and peasants fighting together against this right wing government in Chile as I said the big demonstrations but even during the lockdown there were mass movements during the pandemic let's put it this way there were mass movements in Guatemala people assaulted the parliament set the building on fire to prevent privatization law from being passed and the budget from being passed in Peru there was a parliamentary trickery and the masses came out on the streets to say we don't want any of those and they were on the streets for a week there were three presidents in a week they could not recover legitimacy in Colombia now in Colombia I don't know how much you know about Colombia but Colombia is the country in Latin America that is under the most tight domination by imperialism and with a really vicious ruling class in Colombia there's been so-called bourgeois democracy for a very long time but it's a bourgeois democracy that relies on fascist paramilitary gangs organized by the state and the cattle ranch owners which are linked to narco-trafficking that basically will kill anyone who threatens their power at a local, regional national level as I'm telling you this is not an exaggeration there was a political party the popular unity about 20 years ago or so they abandoned the guerrilla struggle they went into political struggle they made a deal and all of their leaders were killed presidential candidate their MP candidates their local candidates everyone since the peace agreement 2, 3 years ago, 3, 4 years ago hundreds of people have been killed by paramilitary gangs and these paramilitary gangs they don't operate outside the law they are illegal but they operate under the cover of the state of the bourgeois state and the government, the government of Uribe the government of Santos the government of Duque so what happened in Colombia this year is really extraordinary the last country where you would think there would be a movement like that and there was a movement there was already a movement in 2020 movement against police brutality when police killed a young worker in a working class neighborhood in Colombia there was an uprising of protests and people burned down I think 36 neighborhood police stations that was in the middle of the pandemic and this movement this year a three month long national stoppage took place in the middle of the pandemic in fact the pandemic was going up the number of cases were going up and people were out in the streets with signs saying when people are more fearful of the government than of the pandemic then that's why we are on the streets we don't care if we die about the pandemic because we are being killed anyway and people came out on the streets against the attempt of the Duque government government of Colombia to introduce a law series of packages of tax reforms they will unload the burden of the public spending during the pandemic on the poor through VAT taxation of all sorts of things for instance they wanted to tax they want to put VAT on tap water in your homes but not on bottled water so that's quite clear who is going to hit the most and people came out on the streets and they came out on the streets despite repression despite state of emergency despite the fact that the government sent the army not the police or the police the riot police in Colombia is quite rightly feared they are smart but then which is semi-military riot police force but they sent the army to places like Cali for instance which was one of the strongholds of the movement and the movement continued for three months the most interesting thing I will say about this movement it reveals not only that people have had enough and they prepared to fight even against a government like that with the means at their disposal but also it reveals the the complete bankruptcy of the trade union and left wing leadership in Colombia and everywhere else you know what happened in I can't remember the exact date I think it must have been the 26th of April something like this is when this movement started so all the trade union the trade union confederations the teachers unions all of the main trade unions called for this day of action against the tax reform and they called it a national stoppage but they didn't mean exactly a national strike but a day of mass protest and so on road blockades and then and then people came out on the streets and this was just before May day just before this was on the 28th of April sorry this was just before May day which this year fell on a Saturday if I'm not wrong and then people said ok we're out on the 28th we're going to continue to be out throughout the week until May day and we're going to escalate this movement and the trade union leaders after the first day they said no no no we're calling the whole movement off because of the pandemic it's very dangerous to be on the streets and so on May day we're going to have online protest rallies and people completely ignored the trade union leadership and they remained on the streets for three months without any leadership imagine that that just gives you and the situation is very similar throughout Latin America in Chile exactly the same exactly the same there was no leadership or rather the leadership that there was was behind the events pulling the masses back trying to prevent the movement from escalating and giving no direction so this is really very important movement and also destroy this idea that was so popular maybe five years ago six years ago of a conservative wave they said there's a conservative wave in Latin America and this idea was very prevalent not only in bourgeois circles but also in progressive circles I have to say don't like to have a dig at all the organizations but two years ago we were having a meeting so this same meeting we had a big meeting about the Latin American revolution this was in the middle of the Chilean and Ecuadorian events and the SWP were having a meeting in Soas nearby and the title of the meeting was the end of the pink wave in Latin America completely taking in all the bourgeois propaganda about what was going on unfortunately for them this was a meeting they organized back in August 2019 by the time the meeting was taking place the masses were in the streets challenging for power in Ecuador, in Chile and the title of the meeting had nothing to do with what was happening in reality but there was no such conservative way however it is true that around 2014, 15, 16 a whole number of these progressive governments fell or were removed from power in elections in in December 2015 the Kirchner government lost the election in Argentina in same year same month, same year the Venezuelan PSUV lost the national assembly elections later on you saw the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil, 2018 but prior to that there had been big movements in 2013, 2015 the election very narrow election of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and a whole number of things like this the betrayal of the Ecuadorian government of Lenin Moreno who had been elected on a progressive ticket and then became a right wing government with all the assange to the Brits in this country and so how do you explain that if you say that's not a conservative way what is it and my argument is that our argument is that this was not the masses shifting to the right in most cases these governments were defeated by abstention it's not people who voted for progressive tickets before were now voting for right wing governments but mainly they were abstaining they were demoralized and so on there was perhaps one exception to this which is Brazil but we can go into that in more detail but in general this was the case and why was this happening at this time remember what I said before, 2014 the beginning of the crisis in Latin America prices of raw materials collapsed for instance the price of oil went from 100 120, I did speak dollars per barrel of oil I did speak to down to 20, 30, 40 massive collapse this had an impact on the ability of many of these so called progressive governments to implement social programs and social measures without challenging capitalism because all these governments stayed in power for more or less the same time 2015 2005 to 2015 you can see it in Ecuador in Brazil in Argentina and a whole number of countries more or less coincides in the same period of time and the reason is clear there was a short but important period of high prices of raw materials and this allowed these governments to navigate certain room of manua to navigate this contradiction of implementing social programs of which there were many education healthcare and so on without challenging the ownership of the means of production without challenging capitalism this is what these governments did and in most cases in Bolivia in Ecuador in Argentina the role that these governments played was to re legitimize the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy which had been extremely damaged by these revolutionary upheavals of the century and this was the case for instance in Bolivia there have been two revolutionary waves or three 2000, 2003, 2005 the workers who have taken power but they did not and then someone who had not been involved in any of these movements, Evo Morales in fact Evo Morales was in Europe during the October 2003 uprising was traveling around Europe and giving lectures and then he was elected as president with a massive majority 55, 60 percent at one point he had and he was able he was able to to carry out some social programs on the basis of this making compromises with the ruling class the same time making concessions to the workers and peasants because of this exceptional period of high prices of raw materials and the pool of the Chinese economy which has now become the main trading partner of the whole of South America in countries like Argentina, Brazil Peru, Ecuador, Chile Venezuela and what's the relationship these countries export raw materials grains, soybeans meat copper, tin gas, lithium oil and so on and that's it and Chinese invest in infrastructure works through debt, through loans this is classic imperialism if you want to look it up in Lenin's book on imperialism this is the relationship but this relationship has finished now, not the relationship continues but this period of high prices of raw materials has finished the raw materials collapsed created a period of five, six years of economic stagnation or recession and this was before the Covid pandemic the Covid pandemic has come to aggravate all of these processes and once it's over, if it's over because the levels of vaccination in most Latin American countries with few exceptions are very low so the impact of the pandemic will continue affecting the economy but once that is over the previous situation will be re-established and that will not be necessarily a good thing and it will not be in my opinion the conditions for re-establishing the legitimacy of the bourgeois democratic system in Latin America no, not at all in fact what you've seen since is precisely the opposite, for instance you've seen the election in Peru where Pedro Castillo won the election Pedro Castillo was complete, unknown before this election he stood for a party, that's not his actual party but he stood for a party of Pedro Libre, Free Peru party that had never occupied any national office and it was polling very low in the opinion polls, why was he elected because he was the most outsider candidate in that election people voted for the candidate that was against everyone on the left now some of his political platform is actually reactionary on questions like same-sex marriage women's rights, abortion rights and so on, it's completely reactionary some people call it conservative it's a reactionary platform however that's not the main reason why people voted for him the main reason people voted for him is summarizing his main election slogan no more no more poor people in a rich country Peru is an extremely rich country has a lot of mineral resources being exploited by US Chinese, Canadian multinationals meanwhile the majority of the people are poor and this is the contradiction that exists in all Latin American countries and that he crystallized in this slogan and he basically said listen to this very carefully because this election program has been completely misinterpreted and misrepresented by the bourgeois media around the world his program, I've read it it's in the website as a PDF you can download it, it says it doesn't say we're against capitalism it says we're against neoliberal capitalism and we are in favor of a popular economy with markets, whatever that means specifically about the mining resources mineral resources he says we're gonna renegotiate these contracts with these multinationals to make it much more favorable to Peru and we think there's room for that because these multinationals are making multi-billion profits and we're gonna and we're going to and if they don't want to renegotiate these contracts then we're gonna nationalize them this is what he said he didn't say we're gonna nationalize them he said first we're gonna so you can see that his program is not particularly radical it's not a socialist program certainly even though his party describes itself as a Marxist Leninist and Mariathegist party Mariathegist is the founder of the Peruvian Communist Party or the Peruvian Socialist Party and the Peruvian trade unions the 1920s and 30s early 30s so that's how they describe them but they're not in fact their program is a strange mix of a national popular program and Stalinist two-stage and yeah I might need five minutes more or something like this but I want to concentrate on this question of Peru because I think it's quite it reveals a lot about the situation in other countries as well because the program of many of these other people are very similar so a program that says neoliberalism is bad and there is a different way of running capitalism making deals with the multinationals so that we can benefit the majority of the population however the problem is that this cannot work and the very experience of the first three months of the Pedro Castillo government revealed this very clearly first of all he watered down his program in the second round of the presidential election he was no longer saying we're going to nationalize this he was just only saying we're going to renegotiate the contracts the second part of the clause was dropped he brought in a minister of finance in waiting he wasn't president yet but this guy was going to be the minister of finance Pedro Franca who is a World Bank economist and a member of the left academic left and he watered down the program he issued a statement that said we're not going to nationalize anything we're not going to bring anything into state ownership and we have nothing to do with the Venezuelan revolution calm down we're going to work with big business and so on but obviously big business didn't vote for this government the people who voted for this government were workers and peasants who wanted radical change they voted for this government because they wanted nationalization so this is the contradiction of the Pedro Castillo government we've seen it first of all the bourgeois media started attacking his minister of foreign affairs Bejar who had been a guerrilla in the 1960s and a member of the Alvarado revolutionary government in the 1970s late 60s until they got him out he was sucked from the government as a gesture towards big business then they started attacking the president sorry the prime minister the president of the council of ministers Bellido who was a radical and had been talking about nationalizing gas and this and that and then Pedro Castillo made a trip to the United States met with the American Peruvian Chamber of Commerce and he met with Biden and all that and then he was convinced that we have to work with big business and then he sucked his government because he was too radical and he put more moderate people in but still the bourgeois are not happy with this government it's not their government they don't trust this guy who's been elected by the workers and peasants to carry out one policy they don't trust him at all and they're going to continue this campaign against minister of justice too radical, it's involved in corruption or whatever, it's a terrorist and this is the contradiction that you find yourselves in 10 years ago it might have been possible to carry out some sort of negotiation with the multinationals maybe get a bit more money but fundamentally this policy cannot work it's the same, it's the equivalent to the policy that says we're going to tax the rich and we're going to make them pay tax instead of siphoning it off to tax havens i.e. the policy of reformists in this country of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell and this policy cannot work because fundamentally the capitalists are not there to subsidize healthcare and education they are there to make profit it doesn't really matter whether they are nice people or not nice people some capitalists might be nice personally although the position they occupy in society tends to make them psychopaths there's a study that shows that psychopathic personalities i'm not a psychologist or anything like this psychopathic personalities are people who don't care about nobody else they only care about themselves are more prone to become managers and direct CEOs of companies but anyway, it's not about whether they're nice or not if let's say a capitalist decides to yes, I'm going to pay more tax and so on, then he's going to be out of business because his main competitor is going to do the opposite and he's going to sell his products cheaper he's going to put him out of business but in Latin America this is even more the case there's even less room for any maneuver, particularly the time of capitalist crisis I think that this is very important to understand, the main lesson from the progressive governments is that they made too many concessions, they made too many compromises with the ruling class, with the oligarchy with the capitalists and they carried out a program which could be implemented for a certain period of time but when it came to the crisis in 2014 they were left with nothing to offer they demoralized and disillusionized with that award their own base of support and they lost the elections they were removed from power through elections because even in Brazil you can say that Dilma Rousseff was removed through parliamentary maneuver and that is true, but at that point had approval rating was already down to 10% so the parliamentary maneuver could only take place because there was no one prepared to come out on the streets to defend that government incidentally the parliamentary maneuver was led by Temer who had been a minister in Dilma's government so if you ally yourself with the ruling class either inside your government or through deals outside they are not trusting you they are going to organize a coup against you all the same, who organized the coup in Bolivia against Tebo Morales the oligarchy in Santa Cruz what was the opening rally of that election campaign was in Santa Cruz and Tebo Morales stood there with the main representatives of the oligarchy saying we can work together make Bolivia great and all of this so you make a deal with you attempt to make a deal with the ruling class the ruling class the moment they think you are no longer useful to them they will stab you in the back and they will remove you from power because you are not a representative of them and so I will finish with this there is no room for compromises in Latin America as they might have been for a short period of time in the mid-2010s and so therefore the stage is set for class struggle but the problem remains that there is no leadership and there is no clear program of where to go it's extraordinary that the masses have fought so courageously against all odds there is their own leadership in places like Peru and Ecuador and they are still on the streets these days in Chile in Ecuador and so on but they need a program what is this program this program in my opinion is a program that already exists in Latin America the program of José Carlos Mariátegui founder of the Communist Party in Peru the program of Julio Antonio Mella the party in Cuba the program of the Communist International had at that time in the 1920s the program that Trotsky put forward for Latin America in the 1940s and what is this program Mariátegui says in 1928 in an editorial for his magazine called anniversary and balance and he says in this America of small revolutions the same word revolution frequently lends itself to misunderstanding we have to reclaim it rigorously and intransigently we have to restore its strict and exact meaning the Latin American revolution will be nothing more and nothing less than a stage a stage in the world revolution it will simply and clearly be the socialist revolution that is important because Mariátegui is usually misused by all sorts of academics and reformers saying oh no Mariátegui said that revolution in Latin America must be unique and special he did not say that this is what he said very clearly he said we cannot copy all the revolutions but he didn't say the revolution must not be socialist he said this very clearly he said to this add all the adjectives that you want to this word revolution socialist revolution according to the particular case in the national revolutionary socialism supposes precedes and includes all of them said there is no separate revolution other than the socialist revolution and the socialist revolution in Latin America is only part of the world revolution it's quite clear this is the program of permanent revolution is the program of the communist international and Mariátegui certainly was not a Trotskyist and he was a bit confused about this question but nevertheless he was a communist a Marxist and he stood by the program that the communist international had given itself in the 1920s and Lenin Julio Antonio Mella the founder of the communist party in Cuba was killed very young 1929 he says in order to say that Marxism is exotic in America, i.e. it's foreign or not applicable you will have to demonstrate that there is no proletariat here that there is no imperialism with the characteristics described by Marxist before that the productive forces in America are different from those in Asia and Europe but America is not a continent of Jupiter but of planet Earth I think it's quite clear as well people say oh no Marxism is Eurocentric Marxism doesn't apply to Latin America the class composition in Latin America is different well of course the class composition in Latin America is different than in Britain in imperialist country Latin America is dominated by imperialism in which say the peasantry in some places plays a bigger role the urban poor represent a bigger section of the population in many of these countries but the role of the proletariat is the same and in any case the specific role of proletariat in society in every single one of the Latin American countries even the most backward of them is bigger than it was in Russia in 1917 it's bigger this country is a more capitalist than for good or for bad a more capitalist in the sense that the capitalist country is dominated by imperialism than Russia was in 1917 which class led the revolution in the Soviet Union in Russia in 1917 the working class and finally I'll just quote I'll finish with this quote from Trotsky in the war on the international, a manifesto of the 4th international in 1940 he wrote South and Central America will be able to tear themselves out of backwardness and enslavement only by uniting all their states into one powerful federation this is another important point Latin America has been independent for 200 years Peru is celebrating its 200 years of independence now it was a bit earlier but then it was divided in 20 something 29, 30 different republics each one ruled by their own little oligarchy subject to imperialism the dream of Bolivar, the liberator was the unity of Latin America he participated in the liberation of 7 or 8 of the Latin American countries and Trotsky says South and Central America will only be able to tear themselves out of backwardness and enslavement by uniting all their states into one powerful federation however this is not exactly the same that Bolivar said 200 years ago there's an additional clause and this additional clause is the following but it is not the belated South American bourgeoisie a thoroughly banal agency of foreign imperialism who will be called upon to solve this task but the young South American proletariat the chosen leader of the oppressed masses the slogan in the struggle against violence and intrigues of world imperialism and against the bloody work of native comparador cliques is therefore the Soviet United States of South and Central America so South and Central America in Latin America will only be free and united on the basis of a socialist revolution and there's no other revolution that is pending yes in some countries there are national democratic tasks to be carried out the agrarian reform national independence the respect for the national minorities and so on but this can only be fully resolved as part of a struggle against capitalism and against imperialism and that can only be a struggle for socialism