[News] Neoliberalism Was Born in Chile; Neoliberalism Will Die in Chile

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/newsletter-10-daniel-jadue/
Neoliberalism
Was Born in Chile; Neoliberalism Will Die in Chile: the Tenth Newsletter
(2021)
Vijay Prashad - March 11, 2021
------------------------------

[image: Daniel Jadue speaks to Vijay Prashad.]

Daniel Jadue speaks to Vijay Prashad.ƒ

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://thetricontinental.org/>.

Daniel Jadue is the mayor of Recoleta, a commune that is part of the
expanding city of Santiago, Chile. His office is on the sixth floor of a
municipal building in whose lower reaches one can find a pharmacy, an
optical shop, and a bookstore run by the municipality that are dedicated to
providing fairly priced goods. On the walls of his office are emblems of
his commitment to the Palestinian people, including flags and an iconic
cartoon of Handala created by Naji al-Ali, a Palestinian cartoonist who was
assassinated in 1987. ‘I am Palestinian’, Jadue tells me with pride. ‘I was
born on 28 June 1967, just days after the Israelis took Jerusalem’. The
struggle of the Palestinians, which has haunted much of his political life,
he says, is ‘not so different from the struggle of the Chilean people. Both
are fighting for the same thing: justice’.

[image: Naji Al-Ali, Handala, no date]

Naji Al-Ali, *Handala*, no date.

Last year, Jadue said that he would run as the opposition candidate in the
Chilean presidential elections in November 2021. Polls show
<https://www.tuinfluyes.com/assets/estudios/ESTUDIO_TUINFLUYES_FEBRERO_2021.pdf>
that he could be a serious contender, even the possible winner. Chile has
been wracked by a wave of protests against the right-wing government of
President Sebastián Piñera. These protests – as well as the mobilisations
for a new constitution – provide the basis for hope that the left might
re-take the presidential palace for the first time since Salvador Allende
took office on behalf of the Popular Unity slate in 1970.

Within minutes of our meeting, it became immediately apparent why there is
so much support for Jadue: he is an affable and decent man with a clear
sense of his work and a deep commitment to people and their needs. Jadue is
not afraid of the penalties that his candidacy has and will invite.
Already, without any evidence
<https://lavozdelosquesobran.cl/carta-de-apoyo-a-daniel-jadue-academicos-y-organizaciones-judias-repudian-informe-del-centro-wiesenthal/>,
the Simon Wiesenthal Centre has called
<https://www.wiesenthal.com/assets/pdf/top-ten-worst-global.pdf> Jadue one
of the ten most dangerous anti-Semites in the world.

As a member of the Communist Party of Chile since 1993, Jadue is on a
mission to reverse the course of Chile’s long experiment with
neoliberalism. It is often said that neoliberalism
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/working-document-1/> – the policy
platform of austerity for the people and riches for the billionaires – was
first implemented in Chile. As the popular slogan goes, neoliberalism was
born in Chile, and it will die in Chile.

[image: Renato Guttuso (Italy), Comizio di quartiere, 1975.]

Renato Guttuso (Italy), *Comizio di quartiere*, 1975.

Trained as an architect, Jadue has a clear sense of long-term planning. In
2001, he tells me, the communists in Recoleta developed a strategic plan to
win the mayor’s office by 2012. At that time, the extreme right controlled
the commune, winning over fifty percent of the vote. The communist plan
seemed outlandish. Jadue ran unsuccessfully for the mayor’s post in 2004
and 2008, finally prevailing in 2012 after building a wide coalition
amongst the working class, the excluded sectors, and small merchants. Now,
it is the extreme right that is marginal while the left wins over half the
votes in Recoleta.

When General Augusto Pinochet led the coup regime from 1973 to 1990, the
economic policy of the government was dominated by the Chicago Boys, a
group of Chilean economists whose neoliberal policies served the interests
of foreign multinationals. The essence of neoliberalism is the
privatisation of social and economic life, the reduction of taxes on the
wealthy and on corporations, and the attrition of social welfare schemes
and the public sector.

When Jadue and the Communists reclaimed Recoleta, the commune became a
laboratory where they began to reverse the neoliberal dynamic. The
mechanisms for this reversal were not a wholesale pivot to socialism, which
is not fully possible given the legal and political constraints upon the
mayor’s office; rather, they were an experiment in rebuilding the public
sector. Since 2003, Jadue has pushed an agenda for moving government
resources to public education and to the neighbourhood councils as the
president of the local social and cultural organisation La Chimba. From the
mayor’s office, Jadue created a municipal pharmacy, optical shop, bookstore
and record store, an open university, and a real estate project that
operates free of the profit motive. ‘I have dreamt of this plan all my
life’, Jadue tells me.

[image: Varvara Stepanova (USSR), Study the Old, but Create the New, 1919.]

Varvara Stepanova (USSR), *Study the Old, but Create the New*, 1919.

There is nothing especially radical about the Recoleta project, Jadue
admits. Previously, the impoverished would come to the municipal office,
ask for cash transfers to assist with medicines, for example, and then use
whatever money was given to them to buy medicines from the expensive
private sector. Now, instead of subsidising the private sector with public
funds, Jadue says, the municipality runs the pharmacy, which then sells the
medicines at a just price. In doing so, the municipality is able to source
the drugs at a reduced cost, which has saved them an enormous amount of
money.

If this rational policy not only provides care for the poor and saves the
municipality money, I ask him, why don’t other municipalities follow the
Recoleta model? ‘Because they are not interested in the well-being of the
people’, Jadue tells me. ‘Capitalism’, Jadue says, ‘creates the poor’, and
the poor then come to ask for goods and services from the state due to
their relative powerlessness. ‘The poor are more honest than the rich. If
the poor can buy goods and services at a just price, then they don’t ask
for money’.

[image: Charles White (USA), General Moses (Harriet Tubman), 1965.]

Charles White (USA), *General Moses (Harriet Tubman)*, 1965.

In 1910, six years before he published his powerful *Chicago Poems*, Carl
Sandburg wrote a little pamphlet for the Socialist Party of America called *You
and Your Job*. Written in the form of a letter to a person named Bill,
Sandburg opens with a long section on how Bill’s friend has just lost his
job. It is easy, Sandburg writes, to say that it is the fault of the
unemployed person that he is without occupation: he is lazy, he is
incompetent, his failures are his. But these ‘failures’, Sandburg writes,
are the consequence of the class to which he was born and not of his person.

‘What you do yourself is individual’, Sandburg writes in a plainspoken
style that would be familiar to Jadue. ‘What you do or with or for others
is social. Get the distinction, Bill? Well, paste it in your hat and fasten
it in your memory. But don’t lose it. If I can get you to keep in mind this
difference between what is social and what is individual, I’ll hammer you
into a Socialist’. Neoliberal policy makes it harder to experience society
in a civil manner. If people have a hard time getting a job, or if jobs
themselves are more stressful, or if commute times increase, it is easy to
expect tempers to fray. If medical care is hard to attain, if pensions
deteriorate before higher expenditures (including taxes), and if it just
gets harder to deal with everyday life, then anger will rise, and a general
social misery will come out on display.

[image: Otto Griebel (Germany), The Internationale, 1929/30.]

Otto Griebel (Germany), *The Internationale*, 1929/30.

Civility is not just a matter of attitude. Civility is a matter of
resources. Imagine if society used our considerable social treasures to
ensure a decent livelihood for one another, to secure medical and elder
care, and to guarantee that we tackle our pressing problems in a collective
way. Only then will there be the necessary leisure time to rest among
friends, to be a volunteer in our communities, to get to know one another
and to be less stressed and angry.

Neither is ‘hope’ an individual feeling; it has to be produced by people
doing things together, building communities, fighting for their values.
This is precisely what one sees in the Recoleta project, and it is
precisely what is on display in other socialist projects across the world,
from the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala and the revolutionary
project in Cuba.

Imagine what all the resources hidden away in illicit tax havens and spent
on wasteful things such as weapons and tax cuts could do to build a decent
society: they could fund schools from pre-kindergarten to university,
public transportation that can supplant fossil-fuel cars, public housing,
hospitals accessed by universal health care, arts and community centres,
and above all, a four-hour day at a full day’s wage so that there is time
to help rebuild society.

When Kurt Vonnegut was asked whether Dresden should have been bombed by the
Allies during World War 2, he answered that it was, after all, bombed; the
point, rather, was how one behaved after the bombing. The withdrawal of
resources by the billionaires enabled by the policy slate of neoliberalism
effectively bombs society, which is why the question on the table is how we
behave in the midst of the carnage.

Talking to people like Daniel Jadue – and to others like TM Thomas Isaac
<https://mayday.leftword.com/blog/post/kerala-finance-minister-thomas-isaac-talks-to-vijay-prashad/>
(finance minister of Kerala) and to Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta
<https://mronline.org/2019/09/18/why-argentinas-elites-are-waging-war-against-milagro-sala/>
(Minister of Women, Genders, and Diversity in Argentina) – gives one a good
sense of how to reverse the erosion of our social life. They do not only
imagine the future; they are starting to build it now.

Warmly,

Vijay


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