The New York Review of Books: The Rise and Fall of Evo Morales

Beyond politics and ideology, it was the wild informality and humility of it all that made me love Bolivia that night as much as I ever had in my family’s nineteen years there (from 1998 to 2017). And that is why watching Evo’s resignation on Bolivian television on a Sunday morning three weeks ago was so dreadfully sad. Something that had begun beautifully, Bolivia at its best, had ended in a familiar scene of a leader chased out by the anger of the people, flying off to another country. And then it unleashed a wave of violence that has already claimed more than a dozen lives, and counting.[...]

With his base solid, Evo began to do some very good things. By bringing the nation’s once-privatized natural resources back under state control at the start of the global commodities boom, he built an industrial foundation that produced solid economic growth through the entire global recession following the 2008 financial crash. His government used those funds to build schools and health clinics, to pave roads, and to establish a cash subsidy program to help children stay in schools. Poverty rates fell and indigenous pride was on the rise. In his second election, in 2009, Morales dispatched his opponent by a thumping margin of almost three to one. On the platform of his national popularity, he also thrust himself forward as a potent international symbol, making powerful speeches around the globe on indigenous rights and the protection of Mother Earth.

Back home in Bolivia, however, Evo’s actual commitment to both those causes was increasingly called into question. This tension came to a head in 2011 when Morales declared that he would ignore the vehement objections of local indigenous communities and build a highway through the TIPNIS rainforest in the country’s east. In protest, those communities mounted a long and difficult but high-profile march to the capital. Morales met this demonstration with brutal police repression that was broadcast on national television. When the women marchers yelled their dissent, Morales’s police bound their faces with masking tape to shut their mouths. Dozens of people were injured in the conflict, and a baby died. The shine on Evo’s presidency began to look tarnished.

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The New York Review of Books: How China’s Rise Has Forced Hong Kong’s Decline

China has sought to explain the unrest by blaming socio-economic reasons for tensions that could be defused by technocratic solutions—and indeed this is what Ms. Lam implied in a statement Monday, referring to “people’s dissatisfaction with the current situation and the deep-seated problems in society.” This reasoning holds that if certain public policy issues, especially unaffordable housing, could be solved then many of the protesters could be won over. A few conspiracy theorists, or those inside China’s Great Firewall, might buy Beijing’s other line of argument—that “foreign forces” are behind the protests (whereas systematic opinion surveys show most protesters to be well-educated, middle-class people motivated by fear of losing their liberties). [...]

In reality, the city has lost its global allure. Tourism is booming but only because of Chinese tourists, who now account for nearly 80 percent of arrivals. These aren’t savvy Chinese travelers—that rising class has long since written off Hong Kong as a backwater—but people for whom a visit is their first “foreign” experience. As for the rest of the world, despite a global tourism boom, the number of non-Chinese visitors this decade has stagnated or declined. [...]

Again, one can argue that if Hong Kong feels left behind, it is because China’s rise made wealth and prosperity flow elsewhere in the region. But this is another indictment of China’s stewardship: it failed to install visionary leaders who might have helped Hong Kong retain its place among the handful of truly key global cities. Instead, the city has been run by a series of Beijing-approved mediocrities, all of whom have either resigned in disgrace or been engulfed in crises. All the city’s chief executives were fatally hampered by having to defer on all important decisions to Beijing, making them more like colonial governors than autonomous rulers of a dynamic metropolis. [...]

Debating these contingent points, though, may cause one to miss something more important: that the protesters’ anger stems from the structural violence that Beijing has stealthily inflicted on them over the past decade. This includes the gradual but steady erosion of liberties, from putting Chinese customs officers in the territory and limiting use of the local dialect to the kidnapping of critical book publishers. Combined with Beijing’s unwillingness to follow through on written promises of universal suffrage, these measures make clear that China intends to assert control now and not in 2047, as promised in the 1997 handover agreement with Britain.

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Jacobin Magazine: In Sri Lanka’s Ethnocracy, Tamils Will Always Lose

Tamil families of the disappeared, some of whom last saw their loved ones in one of Gotabaya’s infamous “white vans,” recently marked their one-thousandth day of protest. In Sri Lanka, there are at least 60,000 to 100,000 unresolved cases of enforced disappearances — most of which were perpetrated by the state against Tamils during the final phase of the armed conflict between the state and Tamils. [...]

In a press conference last weekend, a white-van driver spoke plainly of his experience abducting and torturing people during the armed conflict. Without flinching, he explained this was done under the authority of former defense minister and now freshly elected President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He provided gruesome details of the torture campaign run by Gotabaya — at one particular site in Monaragala, victims’ organs were removed and flung into a nearby reservoir to be fed to crocodiles.[...]

Following the Easter Sunday bombings, in which three churches and three luxury hotels were targeted in attacks by militant Islamists that killed 259 people, Rajapaksa capitalized on the severe failure in state security that led to the worst terror attack this year. He gallantly announced his presidential bid post-attacks and built his campaign around being Sri Lanka’s strongman. His counterpart, Premadasa, was considerably the “lesser evil,” though he too ran on a platform of securitization and bolstering intelligence networks. Neither intended to address the issues of concern to Tamils, including enforced disappearances, military occupation, land grabs, and security sector reform. [...]

This fails to recognize the ferocity with which Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism is protected by the state and the intensity with which it infiltrates its institutions and structures. The constitution itself places Buddhism as having the “first and foremost” place in the country, a testament to the island’s nationalist politics following independence. This analysis further ignores the decade of impunity following the end of the armed conflict that has enabled genocidaires to be treated as “war heroes” and elected to Sri Lanka’s highest office.

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openDemocracy: Catalonia mon amour

The answer wasn’t too difficult to find. First, there was the “great recession” of 2008-2014 which led to record high rates of unemployment, in particular among young people (Spain’s unemployment rate was twice the eurozone average in 2012, with a staggering 57.9% of youth unemployment in 2014). Then, there were the politicians eager to tap into the “pool of rage” created by the unprecedented economic crisis to further their own agendas. Chief among these was Artur Mas, former President of the Government of Catalonia (2010-2015) and the former leader of the centre-right Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union), who succumbed to intraparty pressures in 2012 and decided to break with the traditional – middle-of-the-road – approach of his predecessor Jordi Pujol to carry the banner of independentism, till then brandished by Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (The Republican Left of Catalonia) and other groups; and Mariano Rajoy, the notorious Prime Minister of Spain between 2011-2018 whose centre-right Partido Popular (Popular Party) initiated the process which ended with the amendment of the 2006 Estatut on Catalonia’s autonomy by the Spanish Supreme Court in 2010, after it was approved by both the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, and by the Catalan people in a referendum – thereby partially crushing Catalonia’s hopes for more self-rule. [...]

Yet facts can help only so much when it comes to understanding the current crisis in Catalonia where reality is bifurcated, with few, if any, points of contact between the opposing secessionist and unionist visions. In this bifurcated world, one’s “independence referendum” is another’s “illegal consultation” just as one’s “political prisoner” is another’s “imprisoned politician”. But truth is not the only casualty of this battle of realities. Another important casualty is rule of law, the sine qua non of any democracy. After voicing his concerns on la sentencia, or the final ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court on independentist leaders, Xavier Arbós, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Barcelona told me, “The Spanish government acted as if the only thing that exists is the law whereas the Catalan government acted as if the law didn’t exist.” [...]

First, independence means different things to different people. According to the latest barometer of the Catalan Centre for Opinion Studies, only 34.5% of the population believes that Catalonia should be an independent state – as opposed to 27% who would want Catalonia to remain as an autonomous community in Spain (status quo). But there are also those who believe that Catalonia should be a state within a federal Spain (24.5%), thereby bringing the total percentage of people who would like to see a change in the existing state of affairs to 59%.

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In Defence of Marxism: Marxism vs. Queer Theory

The main premises of Queer Theory, which we will examine more closely below, are the following: our (gender) identity is nothing but a fiction. Hence, hetero-and homosexuality is also a cultural fiction. This fiction is produced by discourses and power in society. We must uncover how these discourses function and parody them (ridicule them, show their contradictions, “displace” them). [...]

Feminist theories that portray class struggle as secondary to the cultural struggle against patriarchy, or that deny the existence of class struggle altogether, gained influence. It was no longer about fighting against class society and women’s oppression rooted within it, but about fighting against “transhistorical patriarchy” (i.e. remaining the same throughout different forms of society). The revolutionary subject was no longer the working class but woman oppressed by man. From this premise an abundance of texts and discussions were launched that dealt with the question of the essence of patriarchy and how “woman”, who had become the main subject of analysis, could be defined. The idea of differentiating between biological sex and social, acquired gender became prominent. [...]

If we translate this pompous formulation into comprehensible English, Butler tells us that every form of Being is simply an effect of ‘discourses’ (language), that is to say: Idea, the word, language is primary, matter an effect derived from it, ultimately also only language. This means that, for her, anatomy, biology and the natural sciences are all language constructs. That’s why sexes are not “artificial” – because from her point of view there is nothing outside of cultural constructs. To think of material reality as something that exists independently from our ideas only means to be hoodwinked by the ruling discourse, which tells us that there is such a thing as a Dualism between “matter” and “culture”. This ruling opinion (“hegemony”) makes us believe that there is a “real” sex and an “unreal” gender. But Butler has seen through it all! ALL is culture, all is language – all is Idea! [...]

This division of labour, however, did not mean that women were deemed lower than men – on the contrary. As those who ensure the reproduction of our species, they were held in high esteem. Only when humans, in their struggle with nature, found ways of creating a surplus product, which in turn led to the emergence of private property, did the division of labour lead to the oppression of women. In the words of Engels, this was the basis for “the world historical defeat of the female sex” – that is, a historical, not a “biological” event. This means that, while women’s oppression in the last instance does have a biological foundation , it is not an iron natural law. Women’s oppression, over thousands of years, sank deep roots within our society, and it can assume many forms that are not strictly derived from the fact that women can bear children, and were in turn adapted to the respective dominant system. [...]

In critiquing one crude philosophy, Queer Theory goes to the other extreme and adopts its mirror image. No phenomenon coincides directly with the general categories by which we know them. No man or woman fits perfectly with the universal category that we know them by. Nevertheless, men and women exist. Nature expresses itself in patterns that we as humans can learn to recognise. Our ideas of a man or a woman, stripped away from all the accidental and inessential attributes, are crucial for our understanding of any individual man or woman. Queer Theorists, like their postmodern brethren, however, deny the existence of any form of category or patterns in nature. Instead of understanding the dialectical relationship between the individual and the universal, they renounce the universal and raise the individual and accidental to the level of principle.

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