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Proceso 1134
February 23, 2005
ISSN 0259-9864
Editorial: Popular, but not democratic enough
Politics: Do the economic laws have the last word?
Economy: The economic or the social factors?
Popular, but not democratic enough
President Saca is indeed very popular, and this, without a
doubt is a very positive factor for the situation of ARENA during the next
elections. However, that does not mean that what is good for the party is
necessarily good for the country. Not even Saca’s interpretation about his own
popularity is valid enough, because even if the people approve of his
administration, that does not mean that this population is well informed about
his performance. His popularity is an unquestionable fact, but that popularity
depends on the propaganda launched by the Presidential House, which is good
according to the results. President Saca and his team of advisors have
demonstrated that that they are very sagacious team and have not let the crisis
of the national reality overshadow the presidential image. This successful kind
of propaganda, on the other hand, shows the weak side of the opposition, and
specifically, the weak side of the FMLN, because the position of this party has
not been able to affect the image of the President.
Beyond Saca’s popularity and beyond his successful advertising campaign, this
administration has to work with an incipient democracy in one of the most
violent societies of the world. The present violent situation challenges the
capacity that the presidential administration has to demonstrate that a
democracy is better than a military dictatorship. At the moment, the government
cannot guarantee the physical integrity of the population. And before these
circumstances this administration’s irresponsible proposal is that “the honest
citizen” should carry a gun. This administration cannot guarantee either that
the reformed institutional situation of the country (created with the Peace
Accords of 1992) is fulfilling its basic duties. It is evident that, in such a
complex field, President Saca, in spite of his popularity, has not been able to
do much. It seems as if he is losing control. This is the failure that the
propaganda intends to hide away from the public opinion.
It is not easy to develop a democracy in these conditions, because violence
denies several of democracy’s basic principles and it weakens its institutional
performance, at the same time that it eventually destroys the governmental
legitimacy. The ARENA administrations, for either historical or ideological
reasons, have not been able to see the difference between the democratic actions
and the authoritarian actions of power. Their origins and their mentality have
made them somehow follow the line of a dictatorship, and use repression as the
ideal mechanism to impose the law and order. The memory of the efficient manner
in which the military dictatorships confronted the national problems of the past
makes people prefer that dictatorship and not the democratic system, that is why
it gains more legitimacy. Today, the efficiency of the democratic system to take
care of the law and order is measured by the amount of repression that it
imposes, independently from how democratic the procedures actually are.
Before the incapacity of the brief democratic experiment used to guarantee the
civilian security, people is more prone to choose an authoritarian institutional
performance. In this point, it is admissible to talk about a step backwards in
the Salvadoran democratic transition. In 1992, the presence of the military
forces was removed from the institutions of the State; however, the society was
not. That is why the administration style of a party such as ARENA is easily
accepted among the public opinion, and it takes advantage of this situation to
gain popularity and legitimacy. The authoritarian behavior that people tried to
left behind has made its comeback, so it seems, to remain hand in hand with
social violence and the failure of the ARENA administrations and control it.
They have not been able to convince the citizenry that the democratic system is
superior to the authoritarian one. Not much effort has been put into that,
because they do not care for it, but also because they do not quite understand
it.
The development and the consolidation of the democratic project, negotiated
exclusively among the elite in 1992, depend on the efficiency and the democracy
of its institutions, and on the degree of conviction that the citizenry has.
However, the politicians have overlooked the citizenry, except when it is time
to vote, which is technically all they are interested in. ARENA has the highest
degree of responsibility in this issue because it has been the governmental
party for more than 15 years. That is why people do not collaborate with the
police, and, in general, with the democratic process; the people have already
left them behind, while the Saca administration impassively stares at its
destruction and to its incapacity to respond to the uncompleted tasks of the
transition.
The transition intended to build a governmental administration based on the
support of the population and on the democratic regulations, against the use of
force or violence, a couple of features of the military dictatorships. However,
the persistence of violence and the extremely insecure situation of the country
challenges the wisdom of the transformations and makes people doubt about the
efficiency of democracy before the power of a dictatorship. Those that are
directly affected by violence tend to express less support to the system than
the rest of the population does. And the most affected ones by fear and
insecurity tend to feel disenchanted with the post-war regime. In these
conditions, there are a couple of possible roads:
1. The citizenry could pressure the system to become more efficient and
responsible.
2. The other way is to stop considering democracy as the ideal kind of
governmental administration.
The little degree of experience that people have about democracy is connected
with insecurity and chaos, and a small amount of respect for their civilian
rights. The available alternative is, therefore, the authoritarian regime,
something that could encourage or tolerate a coupe d’état and a dictator, which
is not very probable. On the contrary, it would be more probable to support an
authoritarian leader able to compete inside the democratic regulations. In fact,
that is the direction ARENA is heading at. That is why the country is becoming
more involved with an authoritarian regime, which was established through an
election process.
This last possibility is being underestimated, because the authoritarian
attitudes are associated with the army. It is necessary to remember that the
army was an important institution, but not the only one involved. Somehow the
society cooperated with the dictatorship and its repressive methods. The pretext
of crime and insecurity has already reactivated networks of the multipurpose
illegal armed groups to clean-up the society and the world of politics from the
opinion builders that create “discomfort”; to adjust pending debts, or to take
care of personal “vendettas”.
It is paradoxical to see that the most critical menace for the democratic system
is the people. However, it is important to remember that people have become used
to violence, and used to the idea that they can do without the State, which
lacks legitimacy for the same reason. When the Saca administration invites
people to defend themselves by carrying a gun, it is actually telling them to
live outside the law and outside the State of rights, and one of the main duties
of the later is to control violence. A sample of this situation is the massacres
that involve a complete family, the growth of the networks of hit-men and
illegal armed groups. These events show the deficient performance of the
institutions and the lack of legitimacy of the State.
Do the economic laws have the last word?
In spite of the extremely critical disagreements that
separate Marxists from Capitalists (whether they are liberal or neo-liberal
ones), all of them would agree to affirmatively respond to the question
presented as the title of this comment. Although they would respond with
different expressions, in the end, it would be necessary to say that,
ultimately, economy is the foundation of the entire social system.
Capitalism has always seen the economy as the angular stone of its existence.
There is no doubt that the economic sub-system, the main axis of the system,
cannot exist without other extra-economic, social, and political factors.
However, the defenders of the system have not hesitated to rave about the role
of the economy in their vision about the world’s organization.
What this is ultimately all about is guaranteeing the free game of the market
forces to assure the welfare of humankind. According to this conception, the
State has to be at the service of the economic system, its performance has to be
a guarantee. Norberto Bobbio indicates that “in the era of the emerging
capitalism (the liberals) fought for the economic freedom; the State was not to
interfere with the free game of the market, which sometimes seemed as a natural
thing or as a civil society based on contracts that were negotiated in private.
The State was seen as a police officer, leaving the resolution of the conflicts
between employers and employees to the companies themselves”.
In addition to the announcement of the inevitability of the instauration of
Communism, the Marxist doctrine sustains that the social movement is very much
like a process of natural history. It is controlled by laws that are independent
from the will, the conscience, and the intentions of the individuals, and, at
the same time, they determine the individual’s conscience, his intentions, and
his will. In other words, the social being determines the social conscience.
At the base of that social being –which ultimately determines the behavior of
the individuals- are the economic laws that control production, distribution,
change, and consumption in the society through the different stages of its
development. Therefore, according to this conception, the economy would be the
most important factor to understand the functioning of the societies. And this
is found in the infrastructure, the one that determines and imposes its laws to
the superstructure. According to the German ideology (which was written between
1945 and 1946), Marx openly approaches this relation: “the material life of the
individuals, which basically depends on their will, their production mechanisms,
and the type of exchange, while they mutually condition each other, constitute
the real foundation of the State, and they remain as such in all of the
following phases where the division of duties and the private property remain
necessary with an absolute independence from the will of the individuals”.
Marx wanted to break free from the political superstition. Marxists assume that
politics does not have the last word in reference to what is going on in the
society. The State, according to this conception, is not the one controlling the
economic forces; these forces manipulate the State according to their own
interests and their own rules. This conception led Marx to indicate that the
French revolution was not completed because the human liberation cannot only be
reached through political emancipation. In his works on The Sacred Family, this
author refutes the idea of Bruno Bauer, which indicated that “the universal
being of the State could gather each one of the selfish atoms”. Marx sustains
that “only the political superstition believes, even today, that the State has
to keep the bourgeois life united, when it is actually the bourgeois life the
one that keeps the cohesion of the State”.
A trembling common vision
In spite of the apparent unanimity of the determining role played by the
economic laws, there are signs that seem to indicate that the world is now
heading to a different direction. According to the French newspaper Le Monde,
the idea of the Christian identity of Europe is reemerging. At least that is the
argument used by those who do not want Turkey inside the European Union. In the
United States, they know that George W. Bush was reelected because of his faith
and because he defends the moral values against the matrimony among people of
the same sex, and against abortion.
Sometimes the less fortunate are the ones that support the political positions
that go against their own economic interests. In the United States, the democrat
party is the saddest example. The poorest sectors of the society that have been
affected by the economic decisions of Bush were the ones that supported him on
last November. In El Salvador, beyond the lack of credibility of the left-wing
party, its leaders keep wondering why the same Salvadorans that complain about
the disastrous situation of the economy and the endemic corruption that
characterizes the official party, are the same ones that fall into the arms of
evangelic religious leaders that not only insult them because of their wealthy
position among such poor parishioners, but they also lead them to vote for the
right wing, an institution that is mainly responsible for their misery.
According to this article in Le Monde, Alain Tourraine speaks about a new
paradigm, a new phase of the social and the intellectual history of humankind,
which assumes that economy is not such a determining factor. According to
Tourraine, we have gone through different stages. The first one was politics.
During that stage everyone talked about order and disorder, war and peace, the
power of the State, the governments, the nation, the people, and revolution.
Later on, the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism managed to create a franchise
with the political power and they called themselves the foundation of the
construction and the organization of the society. The second one was the
economic and the social paradigm. This analysis included the social classes and
wealth, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, unions and strikes, social
stratification and social mobility, inequality and redistribution.
Tourraine explains that this second phase is dying. The economy has been
separated from the rest of the institutions, the capital is already making fun
of the national laws that guarantee work and the rights of the workers, and the
salaries are subjected to the most ferocious competition. In a word, the idea
about the “social” concept is dead. What is important now is individualism and
the logic about “saving ones’ neck”, which has become both a law and a paradigm.
Globalization has much to do with this new way of seeing things that Tourraine
calls the new paradigm.
If these considerations are true, the poorest countries, especially the area of
Latin America, will have to reflect about these new key factors in order to
understand the reality of the world. For instance, if, in the United States, the
values, the war between the east and the Islam, and the security issues are more
important than the economy itself, it would be interesting to reevaluate the
terms of the commercial negotiations with this country. Undoubtedly, it seems
that many politicians have not understood what are these factors about. For both
the political and the social organizations of Latin America, these
considerations deserve to be thoroughly evaluated if they want to strengthen the
mechanisms that they use to fight against poverty and against the political
marginalization of the majorities in Latin America.
The economic or the social factors?
The official discourse indicates that, after the Peace
Accords were signed, the country finds itself in the pathway of both democracy
and economic development. It also indicates that the economic policies of the
last 15 years have been implemented to improve the life standards of the
Salvadoran population. The privatization of the State’s services, the fiscal
reform of the early nineties, and the accelerated process of commercial
openness, along with other aspects, have turned the economy into an open and a
dynamic piece of machinery driven by the logic of the free market.
However, when the life standards of most of the Salvadoran population are
evaluated what we see is just an incipient improvement that seems to be
incompatible with the “great” efforts that the ARENA administrations have
allegedly accomplished. In other words, there are no visible results of the
economic reform that distorted several of the essential aspects of the economic
performance.
There are certain groups of the right wing that truly believe that the
Salvadoran population is now better than it was a couple of decades ago, when
the country was in the middle of an uncertain environment with a severely
deteriorated economy due to the civil war. These “paladins of freedom” do not
hesitate to accept that the improvements are evident, because there are more
shopping malls, people have more access to credit cards, and because imported
goods keep arriving to the local market, something that diversifies the offer of
products in the country.
Even if this is true, it is not enough to define if the country is all right or
not. To do that it is necessary to experience the kind of life that most of the
Salvadorans live: decreasing real salaries, the growing poverty levels, and the
increasing unemployment levels. The interaction of all of these aspects exposes
the population to serious problems. Ultimately, that would be the best evidence
of the actual situation of the Salvadorans.
The crisis
At present, the country is being affected by a series of infectious diseases,
especially by diarrhea. In just the metropolitan area of San Salvador,
approximately 300 people look for medical assistance every day. In January of
2004, there were 15,680 cases of diarrhea, this number increased by over 100%
this year with 30,997 cases. For this reason, the Ministry of Health announced
on January 17th a state of preventive alert.
The country’s health problems cannot be understood if we do not consider the
uneven distribution of water. Different experts have admitted that the
increasing levels of the infectious diseases are somehow due to the deficient
service of potable water and the inadequate sewage system. In this sense, the
State would be responsible for the defective services, since such deficiencies
are the ones that intensify the country’s crisis.
The malnutrition cases reported by the end of the year are another problem that
connect the policies of the State and the health levels. The increasing prices
of the basic food basket, especially the price of corn and beans, negatively
affected the basic diet of the Salvadoran population. The rural areas were more
affected by this problem, since the adverse conditions in which people live
there increased the cases of malnutrition.
As it is evident, the official discourse is only a partial version of the
situation. The development and the improvements that the government raves about
are not enough to satisfy the most fundamental needs of the Salvadoran
population: nutrition and health. This is the reality forgotten by those who
pompously talk about the achievements of the government in the last years.
The economic policy and the social policy
One of the most critical comments made about the last administration of ARENA
was that “the social aspects have been overlooked”. This meant that the Flores
administration had been more concerned about the economic stability (through
dollarization) and about the support to the process of commercial openness, than
it was about the aspects strictly connected with the social matters.
This vision is the result of a clear disarticulation between the economic policy
and the social policy in the context of a Neo-Liberal style of government. This
prevented the last ARENA administrations from noticing that the search for
improvements in the economic indicators should not be an objective in itself,
but an action that directly affects the quality of a country’s life standards.
The State demands that the taxes are paid in order that, by administrating them
correctly, a series of social services can be developed to improve the life of
the citizenry. By implementing such services, they necessarily have to make
economic decisions connected with the lack of resources in a specific territory.
The State has to build an habitable society where one of the main objectives of
the social policies should be to shorten the gap between the economic and the
social differences of the people. However, in El Salvador, the taxation
structure manages to achieve the opposite effect, and that is why the
differences keep growing, while the political stability grows weaker.
The control of the monetary offer is not exclusively established to reduce the
inflation levels, but to create employment opportunities so that the economic
agents can make effective decisions about the productive activities. Here,
however, they renounce such control by implementing the dollarization process,
which, although it has reduced the investment risks in the country, it has not
been able to increase the investment level, while the external impacts keep
affecting the country.
The last administrations have worked under a perspective that sees the State
playing a “subsidiary role”. With this, the market becomes the mechanism to
assign resources, and the State, renouncing to play a leading role, becomes a
secondary institution. Hopefully, in the future, the governments will be able to
see that the economic and the social policies are two different aspects, but
that, inside a good performance of the society, they should be perfectly
synchronized. A correct regulation of the market’s performance, the
implementation of the fundamental social services, a net of social security not
determined by the amount of profits that a certain company might intend to make
are important aspects that have to be considered to create a better country.
If this does not happen someday, the country will keep accumulating a series of
social demands that will not make it possible to improve the situation of the
political stability. In this sense, the economic, the social, and the political
factors are articulated inside the society as a whole, and a lack of attention
to these “facets” of the reality can have critical repercussions in the
performance of the society. The State should place democracy and the economic
development as the main objectives of the country. The exclusion of one of these
elements because others seem to be more important could lead in the end to a new
social crisis. It is necessary that these objectives grow in harmony.
Tel: +503-210-6600 ext. 407, Fax: +503-210-6655 |