The recent controversial declarations of the current president of COSEP, César Zamora, suggesting a dialogue with the Government, make this analysis of the role of Nicaraguan big business published a month ago seem prescient today.
The crisis of the dictatorship and the “new arrangement” with big business
By Oscar René Vargas in Artículo 66, May 9, 2022
The biggest fear of the dictatorship is not that an “arrangement” not happen with Big Business, but that things break out on the streets.
Political tactics have to be found based on an analysis of the current situation, otherwise they are not tactics, but an ongoing strategy. Studying the correlation of forces requires political lucidity. When the reality changes, the tactics have to change, the situation changed after 2019, we need to change the tactics to defeat the dictatorship. Since 2018 the formal opposition was able to successfully diagnose the disease, but was not able to provide the remedy.
The strategy of implementing the same erroneous tactic implies rigidity, and sacrifices political intelligence. The analysis of the context of 2022 tells us that the real opposition continues in a defensive posture. The members of the opposition who do not consider the new correlation of forces are the victims of self-deception.
Since May 2021 every time the crisis of the dictatorship increased, Ortega scaled up the repression to a more destructive level. Since the repression is no longer enough to ensure his indefinite permanence in power, the repressive level is increased to keep the dominant classes in their place of privilege. Strictly speaking, we should no longer speak about repression, nor the crisis of the dictatorship, because the mutations underway go beyond those concepts.
First of all, because the dictatorship had never been challenged by movements of self-convened citizens, and the elections of November 2021 have not solved anything, Ortega did not achieve any legitimacy. For that reason, Ortega continues seeking to paralyze and further undermine the organizations and political leadership of civil society making use of rampant repression.
Secondly, because the dictatorship is now at the limits of its sustainability because of the lack of legitimacy and because of its greater international isolation. The country is doing poorly, but is heading for worse. That is why Ortega attacks with paramilitaries, repressive laws and spurious trials creating a “police state”, turning into a government on the right that tries to rebuild the unity of all the internal tendencies under his strict command.
The third element is the consequence of the combination of the two prior ones. We are facing a process of the breakdown of the mercantilist profit seeking corporate model, which is much more than the simple crisis of the dictatorship understood as a pure social and political crisis. At the same time, Ortega has an important challenge concerning how to deal with the domestic currents, palace intrigues, internal fights and disputes. A phenomenon which is not new, which up to now the radical and coercive tendency has controlled.
In broad strokes, the situation created starting in 2018 can be resolved now, be it with the installation of a “new arrangement” of Ortega with the US in addition to Big Business, or through the implosion of the regime, which would threaten the interests of the dominant class in its entirety. Starting in 2019 the norms of profits, low salaries and the mercantilist, profit, extractivist model established itself again, which ensures the privileges of Big Business and the new dominant class.
The mercantilist corporate system did not emerge promoted from the outside, nor under the US influence. It was gestated from above and with the complicity of the old bourgeoise. At the same time, the nomenclature was transformed into oligarchy through a simple change in clothing. It is a mutation of the “standard-bearers of orthodox socialism” to people who exalt the unstable, profit-seeking and extractivist crony capitalism.
The dynamics of the internal market face the obstacles of a low productivity, inefficient, bureaucratic, non-transparent, corrupt economy, with a banking structure dependent on abroad, very low development of internal credit circuits and business practices in conflict with the manuals of economic liberalism. The country has the lowest GDP of all the Central American countries, and its labor productivity is also the lowest in Central America. The weight of the oligarchies (old and new) is as dominant as the existence of mafias in the state sector, it is a system identified with “crony” capitalism.
The development of the accumulation of crony capitalism is marked by the omnipresence of clans and their corresponding modalities of personal dependency on the dictator. There is a close relationship with the beneficiaries who profit from informal mechanisms of appropriation, based on state coercion. Crony capitalism functions under the shade of the dictator, to the benefit of an elite that enlarges their patrimony with limited investment, productive boom or expansion of consumption.
Under the current conditions and correlation of forces, Ortega has been able to numb and put to sleep a sector of society, by subjecting it to live in a state of “hybrid war” (repression, manipulated trials, repressive laws, etc.), controlling de facto subaltern powers (unions, collaborationist parties, evangelical churches, etc) which allows us to think that the political solution that is more possible is that of a “new arrangement” with Big Business, given the lack of unity and strategy of the real opposition. The opposition groups of civil society have little capacity to have a political impact on the current situation which would keep the “new arrangement” from happening. Big Business, the US and Ortega fear, for different reasons, that the internal implosion of the regime might translate into a fall of the current mercantilist profit-seeking corporate system, because due to the lack of a united political alternative on the part of the opposition, the implosion of the system could be anarchical and disastrous for the elites.
The problem is that the real opposition has no real strategy to face this period. It is not simple, but they have to work on it to avoid being the object of the powerful. Nor have knowledge and methods of doing resistance in the current militarized society been constructed, where “those above” are betting on violence to continue in control.
While they, the nomenclature and Big Business, abduct the economy and enrich themselves in an obscene way, they offer themselves as the only possible future, with the power of money as the only reasonable response. They impose the idea that they can clean up politics and that every concept of organized people is a synonym for failure. That the best development plan is trusting in the alliance of the dictatorship with business men, because only in that way are there possibilities for wealth and well-being that some day would trickle down.
The dictatorship is trying out every type of ideological sophistry in order to disrupt the different expressions of the real opposition, discourage all their transformative forces and disfigure their democratic proposals. Their tactic is to intimidate the opposition with skepticism and disillusionment, taking advantage of the control over the communications media. The establishment of an alliance with Big Business is the precondition for the dictatorship to have the possibility of overcoming the current crisis.
Each word that the spokespeople of the dictatorship utter is an ideological ambush. They are whining over the social hardships of the popular sectors that they themselves have caused and benefit from. They condemn the political leadership of the opposition for the dirty tricks that they themselves carry out while they seek the support of their victims. It is the ideological war that disguises the thinking of the executioner as a popular clamor. It is the very old perverse tradition incubated in the very soul of the traditional political culture.
With the skyrocketing inflation, the increasing social tension, without a strategy for the economic crisis, the gap between the population and the halls of power is growing. The inflation is mixed with the insecurity, the actions of the paramilitaries, the fight inside the regime: there is no calm, there is tension, everything is happening so as to produce a “black swan event”.[1]
The deep water is the deterioration in the standard of living of 80% of the population. The macroeconomic statistics are not having an impact, due to the dead weight of inflation, unemployment, low salaries and social inequality. Those people feel that the members of the halls of power are far from reality, and this feeds the process of the implosion of the dictatorship. In other words, the erosion of the regime is ongoing.
The country has turned into an enormous Sisyphus boulder: it goes up the hill for some years to fall over a precipice later. Each new comeback starts from a lower step, people are tired. That is what is heard on the streets. The chasm between the political agenda and the needs of the people is growing. The biggest fear of the dictatorship is not that an “arrangement” with Big Business might not happen, but that things might break out in the streets.
What is Ortega looked for with the attack against society? Will the possibility of a new “arrangement” with Big Business be broken? I think that a definitive rupture is discarded, because it would have a very high costs for both, and Ortega cannot allow more isolation. Even within Big Business there are important members that would not allow it, because it is not helpful to neither of the two. Therefore, the objective of the dictatorship is to have more strength in the current negotiation.
In this social and political context the verb that I like to conjugate is aggregate, aggregate and aggregate. Aggregate diversities, aggregate different projects, aggregate to build a counter power that would weaken the dictatorship more. Of course, what I would like is that the real opposition of the self-convoked not turn their backs on the signs of the times, but that they look forward and toward aggregating. Together we are the majority, together we are stronger.
[1]A black swan event is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.