opinion

In recent days, I noticed a group of University of Panama School of Social Communication students marching in the protests over the fate of Seguro Social and its fired director, and I read the tale of a stone-throwing journalism student in La Prensa. Meanwhile, passing through the university to gather information for the calendar, I again noticed the complete lack of student media.

On the day of the strike, I was called a tourist posing as a local journalist by MEDCOM --- RPC-TV’s “Codigo Cuatro” show --- and I demanded but didn’t get a correction. The whole flap gave me an excuse to watch a TV show I usually ignore to see if a correction would be forthcoming. In one of their “community” segments merchants of Chinese descent (“chinitos” was the racist epithet used) were generically accused of selling alcohol to minors, and in another report I noticed the prominent play given to a lady who had lost her free apartment when a condemned slum partially collapsed, and who was demanding that the politicians solve her housing problem.

At the September 25 march by the coalition protesting the government’s Social Security Fund policies, people chanted slogans denouncing the existing political parties. Nobody distributed any literature promoting an electoral alternative to them, or gathered signatures to put a new party on the ballot.

I trace a common thread running through all of this, one that traces out an unfortunate message about the Panamanian left and its natural base of support and which reveals an important but usually unrecognized truth about the forces against which the left finds itself arrayed in the social struggle of the moment.

The name of the game that the power elite plays is paternalism, and it appears that those who most oppose those in command of this society accept the dependency upon which this paternalism rests.

The journalism students demand a monopoly on jobs with the mainstream media for graduates of the University of Panama School of Social Communication. They apparently accept the power of those who own the media that are now bashing them so. They are not demanding a student newspaper or control over educational TV. They are not promoting a genuine journalists’ union to represent their profession in collective bargaining with management. Nor are they creating their own alternative media. For all of their red flags, masks and molotov cocktails, they’re not radical enough to pose an independent challenge to the information control that so badly hampers their movement.

That woman whose slum collapsed is demanding that some government bureaucracy take care of her. She isn’t demanding a bit of land to homestead and the materials with which to build a new home for herself and her children. She’s looking for a padron rather than a dignified independent existence.

The left is demanding that the political parties and the system in general heed its protests. It is not looking to establish itself as a political force to be reckoned with in its own right, with a share of the elected offices and a chance to gain control over the government. The differences between a protest movement and a force that’s contending for power are vast and diverse, but nowhere is the contrast greater than in the nature of their demands. A real contender thinks positively about how to run the government and manage society’s common economic resources, rather than just complaining about mismanagement by those currently charged with such duties.

So might the young militants object that I’m thinking in terms of bourgeois reformism, and counterpose a Marxist ideological framework instead?

Fair enough. Let's talk Marxism if we must. By accepting the ruling elites’ paradigm, they tend to ignore one of the core teachings of Karl Marx, the Labor Theory of Value. That idea was not original with the co-founder of communism --- actually, capitalist economists made the case before him --- but Marx stated it succinctly and made it a cornerstone of his economics.

Simply, put, the Labor Theory of Value is that the true value of any good or service is a function of the amount of labor that went into its production. (You may argue that the cost of materials is important, that two things that take a day to make, one of which is made of plastic and the other of gold, will naturally have different pricetags. However, gold is rare and takes a lot of labor to find and extract, so the varying prices of different raw materials also flow from discrepancies in the work that’s involved in their production.)

Of course, various cartels try to distort the value of things. The Labor Theory of Value describes how capitalism is supposed to work, but we have seen both in Panama and elsewhere how huge fortunes have been made of accounting smoke and mirrors. That’s why, for example, no competent international capitalist believes in Panama’s Bolsa de Valores, and for another example, why the real promise of the Internet as a medium of commerce and advertising turned into The Dot-com Bubble.

What the journalism students face but fail to recognize is that the Panamanian media are controlled by an advertising cartel that offers horrible service at inflated prices. Do they want to challenge MEDCOM and La Prensa and EPASA and TVN, building their own alternatives with their own labor and offering advertisers prices that are based on the labor involved in production, rather than on the social need for someone with an illustrious surname to give his teenage kid a BMW? Or are they willing to just accept the power of those against whom they protest to structure the communications media and set advertising rates, and scream Marxist slogans while seeking positions in the system they denounce?

Which gets to RPC’s broad-brush smear against the “chinitos.” The Chinese community, which has existed here for more than 150 years, has its own alternative financial structures. Its wealth is based upon the hard labor of small family businesses, not political patronage or the largesse of the high and mighty. The people who own and manage the rabiblanco media feel compelled to spew racist abuse against the Chinese precisely because the Chinese-Panamanian business sector is not a dependency of their rigged economic structure. That’s also why the Chinese- language press and The Panama News are not recognized as legitimate by the print and broadcast appendages of the advertising cartel that have pompously set themselves up as the National Council of Journalism.

I am not preaching rugged individualism or family values here. Economic challenges to the powers that be can be mounted by individuals or families, but they tend to be more viable when they are group efforts. (Isn’t that the original idea behind the cooperative movement?) The point is, what’s lacking in the recent agitation against the system is a challenge to that system. Instead, I see the ruling elites’ gross underestimate of the value of people’s labor tacitly accepted by the protesters.


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FUNDAMUJER, Supporting Mireya's call for dialogue
Lorenz, The Venezuelan opposition calls for a US invasion
Hartmann, Bush's bounced blank check
González Maicas, Tourist safety

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