The Americas reject neoliberalism

Berta Joubert-Ceci WW photo

By the hundreds of thousands, undocumented workers, their families and their allies have courageously filled the streets of dozens of cities, including right here in New York, the center of world finance capital. Their demands might have been different from their comrades’ demands south of the border, but their defiance and their challenge, and above all, the origin of their struggles are the same.

And that origin is neoliberalism—that imperialist straitjacket that through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank has choked the possibility of oppressed nations to develop on behalf of their peoples; that imposes fiscal austerity when it comes to provide health, education, affordable housing and social benefits like pensions and child care but on the other hand promotes the so-called free trade agreements that are nothing but a road for the transfer of the national wealth and the natural resources to the coffers of transnational corporations on Wall Street. Trade agreements like NAFTA forced millions of Mexican peasants and workers, who had no other choice but to risk their lives, into crossing the border in order to find jobs in the United States so they could survive and feed their families.

But what the capitalists were not expecting, since they always underestimate the power and the will of the working class, is the enormous wave of resistance to their neocolonial plans throughout the whole hemisphere. This is where neoliberalism went on a collision course with the masses.

There is hardly any country south of the Rio Grande that has not rejected this imperialist plan in one way or another. The masses have responded with a sweeping upsurge of opposition, trying to take back their countries away from capitalism. Even the capitalist press worldwide, including in the United States, constantly refers to the “tilt to the left” of Latin America. This is where neoliberalism is collapsing.

—Berta Joubert-Ceci, co-editor, Workers World Spanish page (Mundo Obrero)