Empire, bases and accumulation through dispossession

By Raúl Zibechi

From La Jornada, Mexico

When George W. Bush decided to reestablish the Fourth Fleet, the decision seemed like one more cog in the wheel of militaristic actions that characterized his administration. Now that Barack Obama prepares to deploy the forces of Southern Command in seven military bases in Colombia, it is likely that some people may feel betrayed, recalling the good behavior he displayed during his first few months in the White House. It is difficult to assume that there is continuity between the two administrations, not due to any intrinsic wickedness on the part of either president.

Both the Plan Colombia and the negotiations to utilize the seven bases are conducted among small groups of “specialists” and, once everything is decided, they are subjected to a parliamentary vote that confirms decisions already taken, and nothing more. That procedure is at the heart of the current democracies.

Brazilian diplomats, aware that the deployment of Southern Command goes against Brazil’s hegemony in South America, have formulated this uncomfortable question: If President Álvaro Uribe insists that the FARC are very much diminished and on the brink of annihilation, how is the increase in U.S. military presence justified? There is no answer to that, because the objective is not the FARC or drug trafficking but an intensification in U.S. control of the continent and the routes to Africa, as posited unequivocally by the Air Force report titled “2009 Global En-Route Strategy.”

In Latin America and Africa, there is a fierce competition for the common goods: water, biodiversity, minerals, fossil fuels, single crops for biofuels. The Andean region supplies 25 percent of the petroleum consumed by the United States, and Amazonia contains many of the riches that could lengthen the life of the weakened U.S. empire, if the empire seizes them. The recent offer made by China’s state-owned oil company for 85 percent of Repsol YPF shows that the struggle over fuels is being waged with great ferocity in South America. The Andean region, plagued by U.S. and Canadian mining projects, is a decisive space for the consolidation of mining multinationals that seek gold and strategic metals.

The second question involves the wedge being driven between the countries of Unasur and China, Russia and Iran. Especially between Brazil and China, which have maintained a strategic alliance since 1990, that is, since before Lula’s arrival. “Some 20 years ago, China was Latin America’s 12th-ranking partner, with a commercial volume of little more than $8 billion. But beginning in 2007, [China] occupied the second spot, multiplying that figure by 13. Today, it surpasses $100 billion,” says The People’s Daily (Aug. 11, 2009).

This year, China became Brazil’s top commercial partner, surpassing the United States. In addition, China has strengthened trade links with Venezuela, Argentina and Ecuador.

To control the networks that convey all that merchandise is an undeclared objective of the Southern Command’s new military display. In view of the speeches from the White House and the Uribe administration to the effect that there will be no U.S. military bases on Colombian soil, but “only” the authorized use of facilities, we should remember that the Cold War concept of a military base is no longer operative.

The enormous human and machine concentrations, fixed and immobile, have been made obsolete by the new technologies, but above all by the objectives designed by the Pentagon, consisting in long-distance control and dissuasion, leaving direct intervention for exceptional cases. This is done to create good relations with the governments that will permit the Americans easy and quick access to the facilities so they can deploy battalions in a matter of hours.

In the third place, there have been changes in the functioning of the capitalist system in the past three decades that give a priority to financial capital. In the mid-1970s, a mutation took place in answer to the offensive of the “dangerous classes” for the control of capital. When changing productive capital into financial capital, the system abandons the amplified reproduction — as the axis of accumulation — for the accumulation by dispossession, a term coined by the geographer David Harvey. That way, the principal form of accumulation resembles the original accumulation that Marx studied at the dawn of capitalism.

In plain language, this means theft, plunder, appropriation. It goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the State of Welfare, the biggest attempt to integrate and control the people below ever essayed by the system. The same way, and for the same reasons, liberal democracy loses interest, because there is no assurance that, without benefactor states, the people below won’t rebel. Crisis of the mechanisms of integration, crisis of the parties and labor unions, crisis of the democracies, which, from now on, are barely electoral regimes to grant a certain legitimacy to those who govern.

In South America, two projects attempt to redesign the continent from above: the rigorous control of the people below and the appropriation of common goods. They are two faces of the same project for the indefinite prolongation of imperial domination. To that end, the military bases are multiplied and an effort is made to turn Colombia into the main launching pad for domination without hegemony. It is imperative and urgent to emerge from this state of affairs because the survival of the people is at risk. It is necessary to expand regional integration and prevent the installation of bases. But we also have to break the logic of accumulation through dispossession, something that in our continent only Cuba has managed to accomplish.

Raúl Zibechi is a Uruguayan writer, thinker and activist, who works with social movements in Latin America.

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/08/14/index.php?section=opinion&article=018a1pol