[News] The Left Has Culture, but the World Still Belongs to the Banks

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Left Has Culture, but the World Still Belongs to the Banks: The 
Sixth Newsletter (2022)
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*The Left Has Culture, but the World Still Belongs to the Banks: The 
Sixth Newsletter (2022)*


Greta Acosta Reyes 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=2c6c2f9e2f&e=d206d0a40d> (Cuba), 
/Women Who Fight/, 2020.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social 
Research 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=33e3ce1702&e=d206d0a40d>.

‘[T]here is great intellectual poverty on the part of the right wing’, 
Héctor Béjar says in our latest dossier 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=11e14bd0b6&e=d206d0a40d>, 
/A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar/ 
(February 2022). ‘There is a lack of right-wing intellectuals everywhere’.

Béjar speaks with a great deal of authority on these matters because, 
for the past sixty years, he has been intimately involved in the 
intellectual and political debates which have taken place in his native 
Peru and across Latin America. ‘In the cultural world’, Béjar notes, 
‘the left has everything, the right has nothing’. When it comes to the 
great cultural debates of our time, which are manifest in the political 
sphere around social changes (the rights of women and minorities, the 
responsibility to nature and to human survival, etc.), the needle of 
history bends almost fully to the left. It is difficult to find an 
intellectual of the right who can get away with justifying the 
destruction of nature or the historical violence against indigenous 
people in the Americas.

Béjar’s assessment reminded me of a conversation I had last year with 
Giorgio Jackson in Santiago (Chile). Jackson, who will be the secretary 
general to incoming president Gabriel Boric, told 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=2aba271128&e=d206d0a40d> 
me that the broadest left agenda prevails easily on many key social 
issues. Despite the deep roots of conservatism in large parts of Latin 
American society, it is by now quite clear that there are majorities of 
people – particularly young people – who will not tolerate the 
rigidities of racism and sexism. While this is true, it is equally true 
that the objective structure of economic relations, such as the nature 
of migration and household labour, reproduces all the old hierarchies in 
ways that people might not want to acknowledge, and which retain the 
harshness of racism and sexism. Béjar and Jackson would agree that 
neither in Peru nor in Chile nor in many parts of Latin America would an 
intellectual be able to credibly mount a defence of reactionary social 
ideas.

Túlio Carapiá 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=29885d42e9&e=d206d0a40d> and 
Clara Cerqueira 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=a212ec63e3&e=d206d0a40d> (Brazil), 
/Frutos da terra (‘Fruits of the Earth’), /2020.

Héctor Béjar is not only a leading left intellectual in Latin America, 
but, for a few weeks in 2021, he was President Pedro Castillo’s foreign 
minister in Peru. The brevity of his term is best understood by the 
limited space available for the Castillo government to manoeuvre as 
immediate and immense pressure was exerted to remove the most respected 
left intellectual in Peru from his government. The basis of that 
pressure is twofold: first, that the Peruvian ruling class remains in 
power despite the electoral victory of Castillo, a trade union leader 
and teacher who ran on a platform that was much more to the left than he 
has been able to put into practice, and, second, that Peru is, as Béjar 
put it, ‘a country dominated from abroad’. The word ‘abroad’ is clearly 
understood in Latin America: it means the United States.

Even if the intellectuals of the right have an outlook that is 
threadbare – the most famous of them being the novelist and professor 
Mario Vargas Llosa – it is these writers and thinkers who reflect the 
views of the Peruvian oligarchy and Washington’s ‘backroom boys’, as 
Noam Chomsky calls 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=23727c828b&e=d206d0a40d> 
them. Being the mirror of power allows right wing intellectuals’ barren 
ideas to appear reasonable and enables these ideas to continue to shape 
our institutions and socio-economic structures. For those unaware, 
Vargas Llosa publicly supported 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=40a2c22fbc&e=d206d0a40d> 
the failed Chilean presidential candidacy of José Antonio Kast; Kast’s 
father was a Nazi lieutenant and his brother was one of the Chicago Boys 
who developed the neoliberal economic policies implemented during the 
military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whom Kast continues 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=31b16f90fe&e=d206d0a40d> 
to praise.

Lizzie Suarez 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=b234a22b41&e=d206d0a40d> (United 
States), /Abolish Neoliberalism, Resist Imperialism/, 2020.

If the debate on the major social processes of our time favours the 
left, this is not the case when it comes to discussions about the 
economic system. As Béjar put it, ‘the world still belongs to the 
banks’. It is bankers’ intellectuals – such as the professors who repeat 
the slogans of ‘market liberalisation’ and ‘personal choice’ as a cover 
to justify the power, privileges, and property of a tiny minority of 
people – who control intellectual property and finance. Bankers’ 
intellectuals do not worry themselves about the deep costs paid by the 
people for their bankrupt ideas. Salient issues – such as global tax 
abuse (which costs 
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governments nearly $500 billion per year), the illicit tax havens that 
harbour 
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trillions of unproductive dollars, and the great social inequality that 
has generated mass suffering – rarely figure into the concerns of 
bankers’ intellectuals. Though the right might be ‘intellectually poor’, 
their ideas continue to frame socio-economic policy across the globe.

It is fascinating to engage with the ideas of a someone as learned as 
Héctor Béjar. The wide-ranging interview featured in our dossier 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=61d39b48c7&e=d206d0a40d> 
suggests many lines of enquiry, some of which require our urgent 
attention for further analysis and others which are merely points to 
note down as we build a proper assessment of why the ideas of the right 
continue to be dominant. Of course, the most important reason for this 
is that the political forces of the right continue to hold power in most 
of the world. These forces support right-wing ideas with their largesse 
through foundations, building think tanks, and financing universities to 
suffocate realistic analysis with the clichés of power. Béjar notes that 
intellectual thought in academic institutions suffers from a culture 
that discourages risk and – because of the scale-back of democratic 
public funding – becomes addicted to the funds of the powerful elite.

Beyond these institutional limitations, the ideas of the right prevail 
because there has not been sufficient accounting of the ugliness of 
history along two axes. First, Latin America, like other parts of the 
formerly colonised world, remains in the thrall of a ‘colonial 
mentality’. This mentality continues to draw intellectual sustenance 
from the establishment ideas of the West rather than from the 
emancipatory ideas that exist both in Western thought and in the long 
histories of countries such as Peru (such as the work 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=ff63813481&e=d206d0a40d> 
of José Carlos Mariátegui). An example of how this limitation manifests 
itself, Béjar says, is in the way we understand the idea of ‘investor’. 
It turns out that in many countries such as Peru, the main investors are 
not the multinational banks but rather working-class migrants who send 
remittance payments home. Yet, when the idea of ‘investor’ is discussed, 
the image that comes up is that of a Western banker and not a Peruvian 
worker in Japan or the United States. Second, countries such as Peru 
have provided impunity to those who participated in and benefitted from 
the era of dictatorships, during which time the elites drew even more of 
the society’s wealth than they had done previously. None of the 
political regimes in Peru pursued an agenda to unearth the power of the 
dictatorship’s elites after it had formally ended. Consequently, those 
extraordinarily powerful economic elites, with their close ties to the 
United States, remain in charge of the policy levers in the state. The 
Peruvian state, Béjar says, ‘is a state colonised by business’, and 
‘anyone hoping to manage the state will be met with a corrupt state’. 
These are strong and powerful words.

Colectivo Wacha 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=eafb55acb9&e=d206d0a40d> (Argentina), 
/Imperialismo Not Found/, 2020.

Béjar’s clarity, and that of thousands of other intellectuals like him, 
offer proof that the battle of ideas 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=7488393158&e=d206d0a40d> 
is alive and well. The intellectuals of the right – characterised by 
their ‘great mediocrity’, as Béjar puts it – do not have a free run to 
define the world. Serious debates are needed to affirm a better side of 
history. That is what we do at Tricontinental: Institute for Social 
Research.

When I was listening to Béjar talk, the last parable in Eduardo 
Galeano’s /Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone/ (2008), titled ‘Lost and 
Found’, came to mind. Here it is, a reminder of what lies hidden:

The twentieth century, which was born proclaiming peace and justice, 
died bathed in blood. It passed on a world much more unjust than the one 
it inherited.
The twenty-first century, which also arrived heralding peace and 
justice, is following in its predecessor’s footsteps.
In my childhood, I was convinced that everything that went astray on 
earth ended up on the moon.
But the astronauts found no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises 
or hopes betrayed.
If not on the moon, where might they be?
Perhaps they were never misplaced.
Perhaps they are hiding here on earth. Waiting.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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