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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/newsletter-10-daniel-jadue/">https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/newsletter-10-daniel-jadue/</a></font>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Neoliberalism Was Born in Chile; Neoliberalism Will Die in Chile: the Tenth Newsletter (2021)</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Vijay Prashad - March 11, 2021</div>
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<div id="gmail-attachment_37766" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Daniel-Jadue-speaks-to-Vijay-Prashad-1024x576.jpg" alt="Daniel Jadue speaks to Vijay Prashad." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="451" height="254"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-37766" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Daniel Jadue speaks to Vijay Prashad.ƒ</span></p></div>
<p>Dear friends,</p>
<p>Greetings from the desk of the <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_37777" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Naji-Al-Ali_Handala-1024x603.jpg" alt="Naji Al-Ali, Handala, no date" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="451" height="266"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-37777" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Naji Al-Ali, <i>Handala</i>, no date.</span></p></div>
<p>Last year, Jadue said that he would run as the opposition candidate
in the Chilean presidential elections in November 2021. Polls <a href="https://www.tuinfluyes.com/assets/estudios/ESTUDIO_TUINFLUYES_FEBRERO_2021.pdf">show</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://lavozdelosquesobran.cl/carta-de-apoyo-a-daniel-jadue-academicos-y-organizaciones-judias-repudian-informe-del-centro-wiesenthal/">evidence</a>, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre has <a href="https://www.wiesenthal.com/assets/pdf/top-ten-worst-global.pdf">called</a> Jadue one of the ten most dangerous anti-Semites in the world.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/working-document-1/">neoliberalism</a>
– 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.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_37799" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Renato-Guttuso-Italy-Comizio-di-quartiere-1975.-960x1024.jpg" alt="Renato Guttuso (Italy), Comizio di quartiere, 1975." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="423" height="451"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-37799" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Renato Guttuso (Italy), <i>Comizio di quartiere</i>, 1975.</span></p></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_37832" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Varvara-Stepanova-USSR-Study-the-Old-But-Create-the-New-1919.-1.jpg" alt="Varvara Stepanova (USSR), Study the Old, but Create the New, 1919." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="385" height="451"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-37832" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Varvara Stepanova (USSR), <i>Study the Old, but Create the New</i>, 1919.</span></p></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_37843" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Charles-White-USA-General-Moses-Harriet-Tubman-1965.-1.jpg" alt="Charles White (USA), General Moses (Harriet Tubman), 1965." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="451" height="309"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-37843" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Charles White (USA), <i>General Moses (Harriet Tubman)</i>, 1965.</span></p></div>
<p>In 1910, six years before he published his powerful <i>Chicago Poems</i>, Carl Sandburg wrote a little pamphlet for the Socialist Party of America called <i>You and Your Job</i>.
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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_37854" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Otto-Griebel-Germany-The-Internationale-1929-30-2.jpg" alt="Otto Griebel (Germany), The Internationale, 1929/30." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="451" height="303"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-37854" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Otto Griebel (Germany), <i>The Internationale</i>, 1929/30.</span></p></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Talking to people like Daniel Jadue – and to others like <a href="https://mayday.leftword.com/blog/post/kerala-finance-minister-thomas-isaac-talks-to-vijay-prashad/">TM Thomas Isaac</a> (finance minister of Kerala) and to <a href="https://mronline.org/2019/09/18/why-argentinas-elites-are-waging-war-against-milagro-sala/">Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta</a>
(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.</p>
<p>Warmly,</p>
<p>Vijay</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/newsletter-10-daniel-jadue/?output=pdf">Download as PDF</a> </p></div></div></div>
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