MEDIA COLUMNA (english version) miércoles 11 diciembre 2019

A crack in the left wing

Jorge Morelli

@jorgemorelli1

jorgemorelli.blogspot.com

State ownership of natural resources explains why the left seeks everywhere to capture the State. There would be no Chavismo in Venezuela if oil did not belong to the Venezuelan government. 

Therefore, if natural resources were controlled by those who control the surface above 
-as proposed today by the leftist intellectuals in Ayacucho- it would no longer have any purpose to capture the State. 
Who wants to capture a State that does not own any natural resources? 

In other words, today's intellectuals at the peruvian university where Shining Path was born 

have made a spectacular turn: they have implicitly and finallly put aside the idea of capturing the State. 

On the other hand, however, the reactionary plan for Latin American of the “gauche caviar” in Lima aims to hand the State the monopoly of natural resources in order to capture it later on. 

It has not given up on doing so even through violence -as it has been the case once again in Santiago, Quito and Bogota- following instructions from its masters in Havana and Caracas profitting on the legitimate unrest of Latin American 
people over the slowdown in economic growth. 

Where does the gap between the radical and the “caviar” leftists come from, however? Go over the property question. The radical left demands ownership of natural resources for those who hold the land. The “gauche”, on the

other hand, would  retain all natural resources in the hands of the State. 
The gap today has become a crack. 

The contradiction stems from the fact that on one side are all those who have actual roots in the land -the Andean “comuneros” and the informal miners- who have a de facto control of the surface on top of the natural resources. On the other, those who seek to keep the subsoil in the hands of the State -and, if possible, also the land itself in the limbo of an informality in a perpetual state of 
precarious possession where no property can exist-.

Unlike comuneros and miners who have a strong connection to the real economy, “gauche” intellectuals live everywhere, directly or indirectly, connected only to the State and create constantly and massively every form of public employment, because that is its political constituency as well that will provide votes in the next election.

That is not the case of  intellectuals at the university of Huamanga, however, whose close connection and proximity to the real economy of the andean communities prevents them from drifting into a political no man´s land. This is why many radical leftists have come to understand that State ownership of natural resources is the enemy. 

If both leftists may be wrong, it is for very different reasons. Handing ownership of natural resources to the communities may be unfair to other communities with no resources beneath their land, and to other Peruvians. It is therefore a path of an uncertain outcome. But it doesn't attack property. On the contrary, it makes the idea its own. 

The “enemy”, therefore, is not necessarily the radical left -even the anti-mining left- if property is what they are after. The enemy is the Latin American “gauche” -the useful fool of Havana and Caracas- who aims to capture the State in order to take on the natural resources and perpetuate itself in power, as it did in Cuba and in the 
unfortunate Venezuela. 

Wars are lost by fighting the wrong enemy. You need to know exactly who the enemy is. T
he radical left may be a very tough adversary, but the absolute enemy is the other left, the "gauche", a political class with no roots in the real economy that makes its living from the State 
and aims to capture it to control the natural resources and remain indefinitely in power.