COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Privatization: the Engine of Human Misery : From Brazil to Russia, people are turning with fury against neo-liberal depredations.

Neo-liberal heroes are beginning to totter from the stage. Brazil’s President Ferdinand Collor de Mello jumped before he was pushed, resigning rather than face impeachment on corruption charges. Half a world away, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, shorn of most of the immense power he held a year ago, watches impotently as his knights of the free market--Yegor Gaidar and others--are forced out.

History is changing step. A year ago, the core economic message of the 1980s--the glories of untrammeled “free markets,” the evils of state regulation--still seemed to be carrying all before it.

Journalists excitedly chronicled entrepreneurial, privatizing achievements in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations. In Latin America, too, they hymned an end to the statism of the past and gave glowing accounts of the triumphs of Collor as he presided over the continent’s most significant economy.

Today, frank appraisal discloses a very different story. Shortly before Christmas, one of Brazil’s leading newspapers, Jornal do Brasil, gave the true coordinates of what neo-liberal strategies had done to the country. Nearly a third of the population--some 45 million people--now live on as little as $10 to $15 a month.

As acting president since the impeachment process began against Collor, old-line politician Itamar Franco has been wildly popular simply because he rejected the policies imposed by Collor and the Northern bankers.

Asked if he was concerned by falling stock prices, Franco told the Jornal: “I don’t worry about the stock market. I’m not here for them. We’ve had 2 1/2 years of unemployment, high inflation, rigid monetary controls, high interest and a sad and impoverished people. The country has lost 2 1/2 years. . . . I can’t wait to act until after the patient has died.”

Elsewhere in Latin America, popular hostility toward neo-liberalism is mounting. In a recent referendum on privatization, Uruguayans soundly rejected the sale of government enterprises. In Argentina, recently privatized operations are mired in scandal. In Venezuela, the new mayor of Caracas, Aristobulo Isturiz, is a radical opponent of privatization.

In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the broad picture is one of economic misery. Most of Poland, outside the capital, is battered by soaring unemployment, with workers organizing in Solidarity-type drives against the government. The people of the former Czechoslovakia now face the glories of private enterprise, specifically the termination of free health care.

Economic output in Russia fell by 25% in 1992. To most Russians, the “free market” is simply a system by which gangsters and entrepreneurs shamelessly loot public assets. Amid affecting scenes of thousands of homeless crowding Moscow’s main railway station, a reporter on ABC’s “World News Tonight” intoned that “under communism, this was not meant to happen.” Russians at least would recall that under communism, the station was where you went to catch a train.

One portent of the changing mood in the former Soviet Union was so sensational that in the end everyone agreed that somehow it hadn’t happened at all. On Dec. 14 in Stockholm, Andrei V. Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister, rose to his feet in a closed session of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and, to a thunderstruck audience, closed the book on post-communist Russia’s entente with the West. He lashed out at NATO’s meddling in the Baltic and in “the internal affairs of Yugoslavia” and proclaimed that “the present government of Serbia can count on the support of Great Russia in its struggle.” So astounding were Kozyrev’s remarks that the Associated Press and Reuters held back their reports, fearing that the sensational speech would send world financial markets through the floor.

After a private session with U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, Kozyrev returned to the podium to say that it had all been a joke intended to dramatize what Yeltsin’s enemies were saying daily. But can anyone seriously suppose that if Kozyrev intended his remarks as a macabre flight of fancy, he would not, before he stepped off the podium the first time, have said, “It’s all right, fellas, only joking”?

But Kozyrev was entirely correct when he said that his first speech had been the rhetorical currency of the opposition to Yeltsin. What he could have added is that Yeltsin is crumbling in the face of that opposition. If we take Kozyrev’s first speech as genuinely meant, it was the flag of surrender to that opposition, a declaration that the neo-liberal crusade had indeed failed.