What Europe's Hopeful Left Can Learn From Latin America

[Judi Lynn]

What Europe's Hopeful Left Can Learn From Latin America
Sunday, 08 March 2015 11:51
By Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, The Conversation | News Analysis

After years of austerity and economic turmoil, mass movements based on hope are finally taking root in Europe – and not just on the streets. Syriza is now in power in Greece, and enjoying a surge in the opinion polls. Meanwhile, its success is inspiring Spain’s Podemos to make a serious stand in elections there; its rallies are drawing Spaniards in their tens of thousands.

These movements are not just part of the everyday turnover of domestic politics. They are a real rejection of the insidious politics of austerity, and the beginning of the end of the politics of fear.

Austerity politics, after all, depends on fear. It relies on worries about the future to justify swingeing cuts and sacrifices in the present. Creating a sense of hopelessness is a very efficient way to quickly implement irreversible structural economic changes, even if they degrade living standards, worsen working conditions, and generally spread fear and unhappiness.

And as it goes in Europe today, so it went in Latin America in the 1990s.

Living in fear

In various South American countries, particularly Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, hopelessness was central to the rhetoric that accompanied the deeply damaging structural adjustments imposed by the IMF and Western creditors.

References to sacrifice, pain, danger, fear, uncertainty, and the like were used to frame the implementation of stabilisation plans – plans which dramatically destabilised both economies and their people’s lives. By presenting this as the only weapon against crises such as hyperinflation in Bolivia, austerity’s Latin American adherents changed the terms within which their democracies could operate. Radical and revolutionary dreams were thwarted, and protest and assembly were crushed.

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/29514-http-theconversation-com-what-europes-hopeful-left-can-learn-from-latin-america-37422

[swilton]

1. I would say

that the North American left could learn a few things as well.