Latin American Perspectives

Dependency and its Critics

The first theme identified with LAP, which quickly established its reputation as a pioneer in bringing cutting-edge theoretical debates from Latin America to readers in English, is what I call “dependency and its critics.” Some of it emanated from early debates within the URLA, but the launching of the first issue (1 [1], 1974) reassessing dependency theory was inspired by the historical analysis in a book (Chilcote and Edelstein, 1974) of country essays by scholars associated with LAP as editors and authors. Chilcote and Edelstein clearly laid out a framework contrasting two historical contradictory understandings of the Latin American experience, one based on traditional mainstream expectation of a region that would transcend its backwardness through a diffusion of development from the advanced capitalist countries and the other of a region overcoming its underdevelopment through resistance to capitalism itself and a break with dependence on Europe and the United States. Clearly influenced by the latter approach, the subtitle of Latin America: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond reflected the editors’ quest for a deeper theoretical analysis, and the inclusion of the Fernández and Ocampo essay in the first journal issue clearly contributed to their skepticism. That first issue also included a brief rebuttal to Fernández and Ocampo by the Brazilian sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso and an important essay on Latin American revolution by the Mexican anthropologist Rodolfo Stavenhagen, who had earlier questioned assumptions about feudalism in Latin America. Additionally, the economist André Gunder Frank offered an extensive rebuttal to the numerous critics of his theory of capitalist underdevelopment.

Chilcote’s opening essay in the first issue was, as its title proclaims, a critical synthesis that was widely read. Dependency theory was discussed as a response to and rejection of the diffusionist explanation that Latin America’s development would be secured by international investment and technology. Underdevelopment would be surpassed once sufficient capital, technology, and administrative resources were deployed through rational planning. To Chilcote, developmentalism was the continuation of a political program espoused by international capitalism. He documented the crystallization of a progressive approach among Latin American dependentista intellectuals who criticized developmentalism, arguing that Latin America’s inclusion in the international capitalist system was not the solution to but rather the cause of underdevelopment. He showed that they analyzed underdevelopment not as agrarian backwardness resistant to modern industrial capitalism but as socially unequal and economically unstable peripheral capitalism articulated with the world market. He noted that although dependency analysis became widespread among Latin American intellectuals, it was not a new theory of capitalist development in the periphery but an analysis of internal contradictions of that mode of production and its major social classes.

This initial issue opened up further debate on these ideas and a plethora of manuscript submissions to LAP, leading to publication of three more issues on dependency and underdevelopment: Dependency Theory and Dimensions of Imperialism (3 [4], 1976), Views on Dependency (6 [2], 1979), and Dependency and Marxism (8 [3 and 4], 1981). The demand was so intense that several issues sold out and were reprinted. The 1981 issue was an attempt to show the many theoretical lines of thinking about dependency and find closure to the debates. Soon out of print, it was formatted into a book (Chilcote, 1982) and published in the LAP Westview Series, selling several thousand copies, while the Chilcote and Edelstein anthology passed through a half dozen reprints and distribution of some 30,000 copies. Chilcote (2003) has synthesized the four LAP debates and their significance and influence on developmental theory and practice in Latin America.

The dependency debate described many historical situations but failed to reach a theoretical consensus on whether dependence was a permanent or a transitory stage in underdeveloped countries. Although four general approaches were surveyed by Chilcote— development of underdevelopment, new dependency, dependency and development, and dependency and imperialism—in fact the split pitted reformist nationalists against radical socialists. The former considered dependency to be a temporary situation that could be remedied by the institutional political action of a national state, while the latter saw dependency as a structural characteristic of late capitalism. Reformists followed the associated dependency approach of Cardoso, while the radical socialists were tied to approaches offered by political economists such as Theotônio dos Santos and Ruy Mauro Marini. All three of these Brazilian thinkers had served LAP as participating editors.

Cardoso (1[1], 1974: 66–74) argued that it was irrelevant to speak of feudalism and capitalism as structural forms, since that would entail a mechanistic application of European theories to Latin America. The issue was to reveal processes that related internal class structures to external economic and political constraints on development. That analysis of “situations of dependence” and processes of class conflict in the context of internal-external interaction forced the observer to comprehend the causes of dependence and the means to overcome it.

Cardoso’s first critique targeted the developmentalist position. He argued that since Latin American feudalism never existed in the classical European sense, industrialization by a national bourgeoisie was unlikely to overcome dependence and underdevelopment. In countries like Brazil, he argued, although associated dependency expanded the economy and accelerated industrialization, it caused severe and lasting social inequalities that could only be corrected by conscious political action.

Cardoso also rejected the dependent-capitalism interpretation. Dependency was not a static mode of production but a temporary situation in underdeveloped capitalist countries. For him the bourgeoisie had achieved its economic revolution but negotiated a temporary suspension of representative democracy to ensure the pacification of popular resistance against increasing inequalities. The local bourgeoisie, nonetheless, was a pragmatic economic class, willing to advance the causes of democracy and development once it attained a stable accumulation of capital. The agent of change would be a reformist government, most likely led by intellectuals, with sufficient autonomy from all contending classes to build a developed capitalism in which affluence was reconciled with equitable social conditions.

In contrast, the dependent-capitalism argument suggested a permanent stage of economic and social underdevelopment. Dependence was a product of capitalism imposed on Latin America since colonization. The surpluses transferred to Europe had financed the Industrial Revolution and kept Latin America in a permanent situation of unequal exchange. Corporate monopoly capital continued with that trend under industrialization. The internal market, a prerequisite for an autonomous reproduction of capital, was impeded by the advancement of labor-saving forces of production when monopoly industrial capital relocated its production to underdeveloped regions. Consequently, the bourgeoisie channeled its production toward the upper classes, permanently marginalizing large segments of the population. Fascistic governments became the norm, ideologically defending and reinforcing inequality as a natural condition. For the dependent-capitalism theorists, in developing countries capitalism was socially unjust, politically repressive, and economically unviable. The agent of change was the working class. Development meant socialism, implying the socialization of the means of production under workers’ control. Although these writers were not Trotskyists, their arguments were similar to the unequal and combined development perspectives of Trotsky and Lenin.

From the beginning the collective was uneasy about dependency as a viable framework for interpreting underdevelopment. The debates of the 1970s had shown the difficulty for dependentistas of including class analysis in their framework. And although the journal did not adhere to a specific political or theoretical school, it espoused Marxism as the theory of critical analysis of capitalism. Thus the examination of classes and their forms of conflict became a recurrent demand.

Another, more alarming issue was the rapid assimilation of dependency by some liberal Latin Americanists who sought to advise the dominant U.S. and Latin American elites on the negative social and political effects of underdevelopment. LASA mainstream liberals attributed human rights violations and social inequalities to external dependence, concentration of wealth, and authoritarian regimes supported by Reagan’s policies in Central America. They believed that reversing external reliance could promote democracies and avoid social breakdown. Berger (1995) documented some of those publications. LaFeber (1983) argued that economic growth in Central America was aborted by dependence on primary and mineral exports to developed countries. Regional distortions were reinforced by the alliances between foreign capital and the local elite supported by foreign powers. He believed that under the circumstances revolutions in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua were inevitable unless there were structural changes in external relations. Similar arguments were presented by Ropp and Morris (1984) and Newfarmer (1984), the organizers of Policy Alternatives for the Caribbean and Central America. For the LAP collective, dependency had evolved into a framework that served the interests of the dominant classes, and its advocates had become the sort of technical adviser of the elites criticized by Mills and seen as a disinvestment of cultural capital by Bourdieu.

The turn from dependence toward classes and class struggle evolved into a separate theme in the 1980s. The introduction to the 1981 issue on dependency and Marxism was the point of rupture. Chilcote pondered whether dependency analysis achieved its ambitious aim of indicating paths to the development of Latin America. He concluded that dependency failed that task yet had some success in deconstructing both left and right dogmas. A plausible theory for understanding and challenging Latin American capitalism could only be grounded in class analysis.

Alongside the debate on dependency, Cuban socialism and gender also constituted major concerns of the periodical from its first issues. LAP differentiated itself from other publications by linking those two issues with social classes, capitalist development, and the prospects for radical change in Latin America.

Cuban Socialism

In the first issue, Cuban socialism was one of four topics the collective identified as priorities for future issues, and it has remained a key concern throughout the four decades of the journal’s existence. Since their graduate student years, the founding editors had admired Cuba’s revolution and its social achievements. Nonetheless, Cuba’s greatest importance was not emotional but political. The collective defended the revolution’s relative success in meeting human needs and felt that the Cuban example would inspire the Latin American left to introduce an alternative to underdeveloped capitalism. They also analyzed its internal debates on the nature of socialism and the process of socialist construction. The first issue on Cuba (Cuba: La Revolución en Marcha, 2 [4], 1975) examined the evolution of the revolutionary process across multiple dimensions. As would be the case in future issues on Cuba, the articles recognized the revolution as a work in progress, changing in response to the enormous challenges it faced, learning from errors, and seeking to chart its own course in accordance with Cuban conditions despite unrelenting hostility from the United States. An example of this evolution was the intense debate over moral vs. material incentives based on different understandings of the dynamics of revolutionary transition that divided the Cuban leadership for more than a decade and in an updated form remains relevant even today. Che’s argument for principal reliance on moral incentives, which became national policy from 1966 to 1970, defended a rapid leap from socialism to communism through the socialization of a new person: a selfless individual mobilized psychologically to enhance collective welfare. That creative and highly productive socialist citizen would provide sufficient wealth to sustain the transition to communism. Socialist central planning would be the instrument of moral incentives through a rational allocation of goods and services based on necessity. Money would eventually disappear from circulation with the advancement of high productivity, rational planning, and new socialist values.

The contributors to this issue analyzed the return to an emphasis on material incentives after the failure to reach the unprecedented 10-million-ton sugar harvest goal in 1970. They identified this as a watershed moment for the revolution that prompted a wide range of changes and offered a complex economic, political, and institutional analysis that examined the multiple contradictions to be overcome in the transition to socialism. They related the debate over incentives to those over centralized vs. decentralized forms of economic production and administration and over the possibility of the simultaneous construction of socialism and communism. They also offered highly specific empirical reports on the material conditions underlying these debates based on firsthand experience in Cuba. The articles discussed the self-critical response of the Cuban leadership to its own failures of economic management and coordination and analyzed the institutional reforms under way to increase mass participation not only in production but in decision making, including revitalization of unions, promoting women’s participation, and initiating the Poder Popular electoral system, They also recognized that the transition to socialism would be a long and difficult process with new contradictions to overcome. The need to shift the balance between material and moral incentives, which were still employed but no longer primary, was a temporary technical setback demanded by a conjuncture of low productivity typical of transitions from agricultural to industrial production. They insisted that this did not signify a regression to capitalist exploitation, since individualism and consumerism were tamed by unrelenting belief in socialist values and a strong revolutionary command of the state. The fact that Cuba was still extending social rights to all citizens during the material-incentives period more than any Latin American capitalist society was the proof of the long-term viability of socialism. The country’s achievements were still more significant given massive U.S. economic and military pressure against the revolution.

Articles on Cuba continued to appear in broader thematic issues such as Culture in the Age of Mass Media (5 [1], 1978), Socialism and Imperialism in the Caribbean (6 [1], 1979), The Caribbean and Africa (8 [1], 1981), Destabilization and Intervention in the Caribbean (11 [3], 1984), Perspectives on Left Politics (13 [2], 1986), Marxism and the Transition to Socialism (15 [2], 1988), Political Economy in the Caribbean Basin (15 [2], 1988), and Obama and Latin America (38 [4], 2011).

Starting in 1991, LAP’s ongoing attention to and unwavering but not uncritical support for the Cuban Revolution was reiterated in a number of special issues with Cuban themes. Two issues, including the first-ever English anthology written by Cubans, were organized from the proceedings of the 1989 International Conference on Cuba at Dalhousie University in Halifax marking 30 years of the Cuban Revolution. In March 1990, to support the endeavor, Marjorie Bray, Ronald Chilcote, and Jennifer Dugan Abbassi flew to Havana and worked on revisions and corrections together with the Cuban authors. Back in California, Sheryl Lutjens and Rafael Hernandez edited and prepared the manuscripts for publication. The first product of this close collaboration, Cuban Views on the Revolution (18 [2], 1991), focused on the evolution and achievements of the Cuban Revolution and its response to the new challenges created by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of foreign aid from the socialist bloc. It also examined the process of “rectification” under way, which, as the Cuban economist Julio Carranza pointed out in his article, responded to internal problems that had been identified as early as 1985, before the Soviet collapse. Articles on structural change in the economy, the sugar industry, leadership, popular culture and participation, and youth addressed the question whether Cuba could sustain health care, education, social services, and infrastructure in a period of diminishing economic development and asserted the resiliency and adaptability of Cuban socialism. The second issue, Cuba: Labor, Local Politics, and Internationalist Views (20 [1], 1993), was edited by Jean Hostetler-Diaz, Jennifer Dugan-Abbassi, and Timothy F. Harding. It included contributions by scholars in Cuba on a range of issues, including Cuban foreign policy, Latin American social democracy, debt, and the drug trade. In addition, drawing on extensive fieldwork in Cuba, Peter Roman offered the most detailed analysis then available on the unique form of representative government that was being implemented through the Poder Popular system, examining the roles of the municipal, provincial, and national assemblies and their interaction with the Communist party. The detailed case study of a textile factory by Gail Lindenberg described the role of unions and explored the strengths and limitations of worker participation and control.

The next issue with a Cuba focus, edited by Jean Hostetler-Diaz, Ward Schinke, and Michele Weber, moved squarely onto political terrain. Titled Redefining Democracy: Cuba and Chiapas (22 [4], 1995), it featured Joel Edelstein’s “The Future of Democracy in Cuba,” rejoinders by six Cuban and U.S. scholars, and a response by Edelstein. This exchange emanated from debates within the Centro de Estudios sobre América (CEA) in Havana. Edelstein discussed recent reforms to the electoral system and the challenges of providing democratic representation within a one-party system. He also examined the political impact of recent economic changes such as expanding foreign investment and allowing small individual enterprises and contended that a centralized political paradigm was no longer viable. He advocated “decentralized socialism in which property is predominantly of a collective rather than an individual nature but principally social property below the level of the state . . . a pluralism of property in accordance with the actual requirements of each particular type of economic activity.” This decentralization would make it “possible for Cuba to establish institutional arrangements that will support higher levels of popular control and protection of civil liberties than prevail in most other societies.” The thoughtful exchange between Edelstein and his critics is an example of the kind of productive debate on the left that LAP has sought to provoke.

The Cuban Revolution Confronts the Future (29 [3 and 4], 2002), two issues organized by Donald and Marjorie Bray, examined Cuba’s challenges as it emerged from the Special Period of crisis following the demise of the Soviet Union but confronted intensified U.S. opposition such as the Helms-Burton Act and neoliberal entrenchment in Latin America. In a tone representative of the collective’s emotional attachment to the Cuban Revolution, the editors wrote that “contributors to this issue view the Revolution’s twists and turns, failures, learning, and setting off in new directions as a pattern reflecting resilience rather than simple confusion.” They noted that the articles in the first of these two issues were linked by their concern with the effect of introducing market measures and a dual (dollars and pesos) currency system into the Cuban economy and “the contradictions between centralized power and popular participation and representation.” They concluded that Cuba’s ability to adapt to the extreme economic dislocation and social deprivation of the Special Period validated it as an alternative to neoliberal globalization. The second of these issues was more wide-ranging and included three articles by Cuban scholars: Soraya Castro on U.S.-Cuban relations, Julio Carranza on the role of culture in development, and Haroldo Dilla on the contested use of the concept “civil society” by the Cuban leadership, the U.S. government, and Cuban intellectuals at the CEA and elsewhere. A book review by Joel Edelstein offered a more detailed look at the actual consequences of this and other internal debates in Cuba during the period of increased U.S. aggressiveness that began in 1996. In the resulting political closure, sectors of the Cuban leadership attacked the CEA as ideologically suspect. For their work supporting the revolution but within a “nondogmatic, creative Marxian framework,” the CEA scholars, including Dilla, Carranza, and its director Luis Suárez Salazar, also an LAP editor and contributor, were dispersed to other institutions, and the CEA’s preeminence as a center of intellectual inquiry and debate in Cuba ended. By featuring four Cuban contributors, these two issues again demonstrated LAP’s emphasis on bringing the work of Cuban scholars to its readership. The issues also included writers with competing views on economic restructuring and its impact, thereby continuing debates from earlier issues and recognizing the complexity and uncertain outcome of the transformations in progress in Cuba.

Cuba and the Security Frame (33 [5], 2006), organized by Sheryl Lutjens, addressed changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba after the September 2001 terrorist attack. The introduction pointed out that the Bush administration took advantage of the conservative political environment to engage in major as well as petty punitive actions against Cuba. It tightened economic sanctions, severely restricted remittances and travel to the island, and, of particular importance for progressive academics, denied visas for Cuban academics scheduled to attend LASA congresses. The tight restrictions imposed on academic exchanges jeopardized programs through which several members of the LAP collective brought students to Cuba. Lutjens’s article also noted the threat that the editing and publication of translations of articles by Cuban scholars would be interpreted by the government as violating U.S. law. To ensure LAP’s ability to continue publishing work by Cuban authors, Chilcote assumed personal responsibility for all editing of Cuban manuscripts if the threats were actually implemented, and LAP carried a resolution to LASA condemning the U.S sanctions. In this context, the collective decided to focus this issue on the history and significance of academic exchanges with Cuba and the Bush administration’s assault on them. Lutjens pointed out that U.S. policy bore no relation to actual terrorist threats but reflected the belief that the Cuban regime was vulnerable and might succumb to increased pressure and isolation. To Lutjens, Bush’s intensification of U.S. anti-Cuba policy confirmed the continuity of the U.S. hegemonic agenda. The issue contained three articles by Cuban scholars who participated with Lutjens and two others in the Rethinking Academic Exchanges between Cuba and the United States Working Group. Soraya Castro analyzed the Bush administration strategy to promote “regime change” in Cuba. Milagros Martinez offered a historical overview of academic exchanges and Cuban studies in U.S. universities as vehicles for improving U.S.-Cuban relations. Carlos Alzagaray used the concept of transnational relations to analyze cross-border exchanges between nonstate actors such as educational institutions as linkages that offered a counterweight to hostile U.S. government policies toward Cuba.

The collective decided to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution with a series of special issues coedited by collective members Sheryl Lutjens and Pamela Stricker: Cuba: Interpreting a Half Century of Revolution and Resistance (36 [1–3], 2009). These three issues varied from the typical LAP format. The first began atypically with a consensus statement by the collective, “On Celebrating the Cuban Revolution,” which was adopted after months of discussion and debate. In each issue, the introduction was followed by a combination of short personal reflections and analyses about the significance of the revolution, totaling 33 contributions from U.S., Cuban, and other writers. In addition, the second issue contained reviews of books about Cuba and a list of LAP articles and book reviews on Cuba from 1975 to 2008, totaling more than 100 publications.

The collective’s statement celebrated the revolution’s successes but presented a realistic overview of its shortcomings. It affirmed the importance of a knowledge of history to an understanding of the revolution’s internal evolution and its international impact. This involved not only Cuban history but the expansion of global capitalism and the role of the United States as an unrelenting antagonist and threat to the revolution’s very survival. A chronology identified five phases in the revolution process, relating changes such as the alternation between moral and material incentives to both domestic and international conditions. The statement’s remaining sections discussed revolutionary values, revolutionary institutions, overcoming contradictions, and open questions. The revolutionary values of social justice and nationalism were identified as fundamental to the social mobilization that had sustained the revolution. Gender, ethnic, and class inequalities were narrowed by state policies. Data were provided to supported the assertion that Cuba’s advances in providing people-centered services such as education and health care resulted in social and cultural advances unequaled by other Latin American countries. The discussion of revolutionary institutions examined the interrelationships between the Communist Party, Poder Popular, and the mass organizations, recognizing that although the Cuban model departed from Western systems of representation it offered opportunities for participation absent in capitalist democracies. It emphasized that the distinctive participatory options in Cuba were often overlooked or ignored by mainstream analysts because of political antipathy or “theoretical blinders.” Among the contradictions analyzed were those between the revolution’s social goals and both its material limitations and the need for survival. One of the open questions explicitly raised for the first time in the journal was whether the pro-market policies being implemented by the political leadership could sustain socialism: “Have materialist preferences eroded the social fabric of the revolution? In the face of capitalist investment from outside to shore up infrastructure and tourism, are the values of participation, egalitarianism, social justice, collectivity,and even socialism meaningful today?” (16) Other open questions included “Is Cuba today truly independent, or does it fit within the periphery or semiperiphery of the world order? . . . Should social justice and a just society rather than democracy be the basis for discussion of Cuban politics?” (15) “Is it still revolutionary or is it post-revolutionary? . . . Will Cuban joint ventures with outside capital erode [people-centered] development? . . . How will a new generation of leadership emerge?” (16).

As did the statement by the collective, the issue introductions, the first by Pamela Stricker and the next two by Sheryl Lutjens, expressed LAP’s ongoing firm support for the revolution but also noted the challenges it faced and laid out some crucial questions about it and the future of socialism. In expressing admiration for Cuban social accomplishments and resistance during five turbulent decades, Stricker wrote (17),

The Cubans have fought the violence, corruption, and impoverishment of the colonial period and the imperialist ambitions and counterrevolutionary attacks, overt and covert, of their powerful neighbor to the north and navigated a difficult but often necessary alliance with their cold-war partner, the former Soviet Union. Today they are challenged by the forces of neoliberal capital and globalization. Indeed, the revolution continues, and so does the struggle.

Lutjens situated the questions about Cuba in the context of broader changes in the international left, including a retreat from Marxism (5):

The left is no longer easily understandable, however. Neither are the rich complications of 50 years of revolutionary development in Cuba or the significance of the Cuban Revolution for the new constellation of leadership in Latin America. It is likely that the questions that loom large in looking at Cuba in 2009 might be better answered with more clarity about the nature, politics, and possibilities of the contemporary left.

The reflections by the international contributors were wide-ranging. For example, in the third issue, the Cuban Carlos Alzugaray called for more profound democratic deliberation to strengthen the legitimacy of Cuban socialism and its revolutionary achievements. Without ample political participation, Cuba could face the same decline as Soviet and Eastern European socialism. The Portuguese progressive scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos wrote that if Cuba succeeded in resolving its many problems within a socialist framework it would contribute to an urgently needed renovation of the international left. Richard Harris highlighted the significance of Cuba’s internationalism for its own survival and for the advancement of the world revolutionary project.

In 2009 and 2012, the Cuban scholars Francisco López Segrera and Luis Suárez Salazar were recipients of LAP Fellowships to write analyses of contemporary Cuba. López Segrera’s article, “Cuba: Past, Present, and Future” appeared in LAP 38 (2, 2011), and Suárez Salazar’s will be published in 2014.

Class Struggle and Social Change

By the late 1970s the intense debate on dependency, until then limited to theoretical disputes, spilled into political struggles within the journal. Conceptually, the managing editor had retained relative autonomy from the different dependency frameworks by showing that they were rooted in the continent’s intellectual debates and rivalries. But another key LAP founder, Timothy Harding, had related dependency’s origins to Trotsky’s critique of the Third International two-stages theory, a transition from semifeudalism to national capitalism followed by a struggle for socialism. In the first transition a nationalist multiclass alliance of workers, peasants, the industrial bourgeoisie, and the urban middle classes contests the feudal agrarian latifundio. In the second a socialist transition is propelled by the proletariat. Contrary to communist orthodoxy, Trotsky introduced a dialectical approach that related local and international capitalism. The geopolitical expansion of capital and its forced incorporation of new areas by financial investment, he argued, crippled the national bourgeoisie, leaving the working class and its allies as the only social force capable of leading development.

In the late 1970s, Chilcote’s synthesis of the Latin American literature and Harding’s Trotskyist interpretation clashed with the views of Maoist members of the editorial collective. The former questioned the viability of capitalist development in Latin America, while the latter defended the path of the national bourgeoisie. Soon the journal was embroiled in a political struggle between two lines. One, led by a traditional left, sought to dominate the journal and turn it into a partisan vehicle. The second, reacting against the authoritarianism, insisted on a journal open to debate, publication, and controversy from a diversity of progressive approaches critical of capitalism and imperialism. One symptom of the power struggle within the journal was a series of rejections of some important pieces on dependency. Although most pertained to the associated-dependency line, the reviews indicated a degree of politicization that collided with the journal’s original objective of being an open forum for progressive thought.

The defeat of the orthodox line in the late 1970s fortified the new-left interpretation, which, on one hand, criticized the dogmatic Soviet stages theory and the strategy of alliances between the working class and the national bourgeoisie and, on the other, championed autonomous workers organizations’ direct participation in political life. For the new left, direct forms of participation were incompatible with capitalist development. Although there was neither ideological nor theoretical closure to orthodox Marxism, LAP issues focused on the working class, rural labor, and the oppressed peasantry as the main agents of social change.

This tendency can be documented in the number of articles and issues that championed the working class and its collective organizations and action. Its origins could already be felt in earlier issues such as The Struggle Sharpens: Workers, Imperialism, and the State in Latin America: Common Themes and New Directions (3 [3], 1976), organized by Timothy F. Harding and Hobart A. Spalding Jr. They wrote of a revolutionary rupture led by the working class that unified different political forces in a march toward socialism: “Labor demands, throughout Latin America, have escalated in recent years. Purely economic goals increasingly give way to demands for basic structural reforms as more and more workers understand the necessity to destroy capitalism and the impossibility of reforming it” (10). The main impulse that fortified the new-left theoretical choice, however, was the political events of the late 1970s. The year 1979 saw the founding of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party–PT) and the victory of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front—FSLN), setting the stage for a fifth theme that engulfed the journal in lively debates—popular democratization and vanguardism. The departure of doctrinaire Marxism from the journal and the blockage of the associated-dependency framework had established a tacit agreement on an analytic framework (a class analysis framework that objected to economicism and historical stages) and agency (a broad class alliance of popular classes composed of workers, peasants, and other excluded groups). A dichotomy, however, appeared on political strategy. The vanguardists defended the leadership of a disciplined organization that “guided” a transition to socialism (popular hegemony), while the second advocated grassroots autonomous organizations that converged in mass political parties. The Sandinistas’ path was adopted by the first group, while the Brazilian PT was the ideal type for the second.

Between Vanguardism and Popular Democratization: The Popular Masses as Agents

The openness to a new-left framework meant a reexamination of key issues of classical Marxism. First, the objection to economicism and historical stages meant that social change need not emanate from the economic base but could also be achieved through political, social, and cultural struggles. Secondly, once determination by the economic base was contested, issues that were considered to pertain to the superstructure such as gender, race, sexual choice, etc., became equally important in the struggle for socialism. Thirdly, the Leninist definition of the proletariat, the revolutionary class of nineteenth-century capitalism, was replaced by a category that corresponded to realities of underdeveloped capitalism: the popular majority, the sum of excluded groups. In the introduction to a double issue (7 [2 and 3], 1980) dedicated to popular struggles in Central America, editor Norma Chinchilla spoke of different alliances and new issues introduced into the left but still described a vanguard that guided the popular masses. The Sandinistas, she wrote, had developed a more complex approach to political alliances that avoided the trap of either a dogmatic proletarian line or a naive reformist conciliation with the bourgeoisie. This liberated the working class to form broad, flexible alliances in support of a revolutionary program. The rejection of economistic dogmatic Marxism attracted other egalitarian ideologies, such as liberation theology, and included, in the struggle against inequalities, other forms of oppression such as gender and race. This strategy qualified the Sandinistas to become a legitimate vanguard that learned from, guided, and unified the masses to an unprecedented degree (3). In the introduction to The Revolutionary Process in Nicaragua (12 [2], 1985), editor Richard Harris was even clearer in emphasizing the value of the multiclass alliance, the popular hegemony strategy adopted by the Sandinistas, in opposition to the Leninist proletarian dictatorship. The “popular hegemony” strategy rejected the leadership of a single class in social revolutions. This failed strategy, which could lead to bureaucratic dictatorships, was abandoned by the FSLN in favor of the creation of a popular majority, a multiclass alliance of peasantry, wage workers, small businesspeople, and even large investors who supported the revolution. Those to be subordinated to “popular hegemony” would be not necessarily all the propertied classes but the remnants of the Somoza clique and their allies (6). Within the collective, the democratization group likewise concurred on the attribution of agency not to the proletariat but to a broad alliance of the popular masses. In their introduction to Democratization and the Class Struggle (15 [3], 1988), Timothy Harding and James Petras spoke of workers, peasants, women, Indians, blacks, and youth—the majority that longed for a “popular democracy,” a regime that sought an equitable distribution of economic resources (3).

Initially the two left practices were considered as not in opposition but a response to distinct forms of capitalist development and state power. That tacit consensus lasted until the Winter 1983 issue, when Harris and Petras openly clashed on strategy. Harris (10 [1]: 114–116) rebutted the position Petras had taken in the Spring 1981 issue (8 [2]: 74–94) identifying “popular representation and democracy” as the most urgent task of the Nicaraguan revolution. Harris countered that by 1983, faced with the contra war, the Sandinistas’ priority had to be the defeat of the imperialist counterrevolution and its internal allies. In his rejoinder, Petras insisted that democratization and defense of the revolution should not be counterposed; the former was essential for the latter. He feared that such a vanguardist position risked repetition of authoritarian scenarios of failed revolutionary experiences. From this perspective the threat to popular revolutions from both external enemies and bureaucratic tendencies could only be overcome through autonomous civil society organizations based on popular participation. Citing the Soviet example, Petras (10 [1]: 117–119) observed that prolonged exceptional authoritarian measures taken during revolutionary ruptures became institutionalized practices and eventually doctrines that consolidated a new dominant bureaucratic class in abandoning socialism. Socialism decayed in the guise of a “continuing threat” after the rescinding of workers’ organizational autonomy and their subsequent subordination to a bureaucratic centralist state commanded by a vanguard party.

In LAP 6 [4] (1979) on Brazil, Chilcote and Harding applied the theory of popular democratization to concrete analysis of the “democratic opening” when they documented the political crystallization of the working-class political program into a recently founded mass party. They analyzed the PT’s emergence as a significant social force in the democratic struggle and as an alternative to both the ultra-leftist armed-struggle groups and the reformist-institutionalist associated-dependency advocates. Made up of a broad alliance of progressive church members, workers, and the popular classes, it replaced classical left vanguardism with grassroots mobilization. Although armed struggle and reformism were politically opposite alternatives, they converged in their denial of the working class as the main agent of social change. The former believed in isolated guerrillas against the system while the latter centered on the opening of the political system. To the new left, workers allied with other popular forces and the progressive church reinvented progressive politics, bringing in mass popular mobilization as the driving force behind democratization. That Brazil issue featured contributions by historic political activists such as Márcio Moreira Alves and Michael Löwy and new PT organic intellectuals such as José Alvaro Moises, then the director of the Centro de Estudos de Cultura Contemporãnea (Center of Studies of Contemporary Culture—CEDEC), a PT think tank. The issue also included an interview with Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, then just a union leader from São Paulo’s ABC region, who would go on to become the twice-elected president of Brazil.

Political events in the mid-1980s further tipped the balance toward the democratization path. While the Sandinistas were facing mounting internal and external difficulties in sustaining their revolution, democratic forces were advancing in the rest of the continent. In Brazil the PT was accumulating victories in municipal elections, and its founder, Lula, emerged as a national political leader with large electoral appeal. The difficulties of the vanguardist path were evident in the retreat from socialist rhetoric and the move toward a more generic notion of national self-determination. Harris recognized, in his introduction to an issue on Nicaragua (14 [1], 1987), the difficulties the Sandinistas faced in reconciling nation-state building and advancing popular struggles with resisting the multifaceted imperialist attack on the revolution, including the contra war. Reflecting an official Sandinista change of strategy in the late 1980s, he argued that the option for an internal political and territorial unification should predominate over the causes of socialism and “popular hegemony” (6). The Sandinista Legacy (17 [3], 1990) saw another retreat, bidding farewell to the Sandinistas, although the articles had been written before the election. In the introduction, Marjorie Bray and Jennifer Dugan Abbassi analyzed the causes of the electoral defeat and argued that although neither socialism nor national self-determination had been achieved during the decade of attempting to combine vanguardism with democratization, the democratic gains during the revolutionary period created a new reality that would prevent a return to despotism. They concluded by noting that the persistence of Sandinista ideals presented a challenge to an incoming government that was unlikely to meet the people’s needs and suggesting the possibility of a future Sandinista electoral victory.

By the late 1980s proponents of the popular democratization path faced a challenge by institutionalists, an offshoot of the associated-dependency interpretation. Guillermo O’Donnell, an Argentine political scientist, had edited a four-volume study, a major project of the Woodrow Wilson Center led by himself, Alfred Stepan, Phillip Schmitter, Lawrence Whitehead, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, on the democratic openings in Latin America and Southern Europe (O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead, 1986). It adopted an institutionalist framework that clashed head-on with the popular democratization interpretation. The first collision with institutionalist analysis had occurred in the early 1980s, when articles by some of the leading advocates of this framework were rejected by the collective. One manuscript, “Class Analysis of Latin American Politics: Some Counterarguments,” played down class as a viable category in the study of Latin American societies. The author argued that while classes were determined by horizontal cooperation and vertical conflicts, in Latin America clientelism inverted class dynamics into vertical solidarity and horizontal conflicts. Clientelistic norms permeated the state, the source of legitimate authority, and determined the dynamics of social norms and consensus. This Weberian institutionalism reiterated Cardoso’s bureaucratic-rings model for explaining how the national bourgeoisie transformed personal ties with the technical bureaucracy into an economic resource for the control of the internal market. Another institutionalist submission, “Dilemmas of Democratic Consolidation in Contemporary Latin America,” which outlined the hypotheses and the theoretical framework of the Woodrow Wilson project, rang an alarm bell within the collective. After its rejection, Tim Harding circulated an informal note to the members of the collective advising them that James Petras was interested in developing an issue to challenge the institutionalist analysis.

There were three reasons for the collective’s strong reaction to the institutionalists. First, O’Donnell argued that democracy could be consolidated in Latin America without a radical change in socioeconomic relations. In that he followed in the footsteps of Cardoso, who had argued that accumulation of capital could proceed under dependence and that internal transformation of authoritarianism into pluralism was inevitable. Secondly, he associated democratization with a variety of socioeconomic situations created by authoritarian regimes. No general theory of democratic transitions could be developed because of distinctly national patterns. That empirical assumption contradicted LAP’s support for a theoretical framework centered on classes and social conflict as the motor forces of democratization. Thirdly, to O’Donnell democratization implied institutionalization of political life in parties, modern bureaucracies, and responsive governments. He established variables that tested the level of political development such as state structure, government capacity to decide and implement, interest articulation, demilitarization, and political representation. The emphasis on formal institutions also diverged from the participatory approach to democracy preferred by the collective. Finally, O’Donnell positioned his framework against three “inadequate” interpretations: the political development school of the 1950s, Huntington’s democratic pessimism and his bias toward authoritarian stability, and the leftist labeling of democratic experiences as “a bourgeois trap.” Indirectly the third critique was directed at radical collectives such as LAP.

A special issue, Democratization and Class Struggle (15 [3], 1988), organized by Harding and Petras, was devoted to refuting the O’Donnell approach. In their introduction, they considered the democratic transition to be a partial victory of the working class and its allies. They insisted that although mainstream social science, represented by the O’Donnell approach, talked about institutions and stable transitions, the popular forces were engaged in direct economic and political struggles. Those forces, they affirmed, were composed of a multiclass popular alliance much broader than the Marxist-Leninist proletariat-peasantry power bloc. Civil society, made up of an array of marginalized urban and rural masses but also of ethnic groups, indigenous movements, and feminists, was the concrete force behind real democratization. Harding and Petras concluded that eventually grassroots mobilizations, as opposed to institutional arrangements, would accumulate sufficient force to challenge the status quo and bring about significant social change.

Proponents of the democratization theme had reached consensus on the nature of political struggles. First, they believed that civil society, made up of a multiclass alliance of popular forces, was the driving force behind political change. Secondly, democratization meant an equilibrium of forces between the popular masses and the dominant classes, with the former accepting bourgeois economic rights in exchange for the freedom to organize and struggle for social rights. Thirdly, they envisioned a strengthening of grassroots mobilizations that would eventually cause radical social change. Finally, from this debate civil society became a central theoretical category in progressive analysis. The predictions of Petras and Harding on the virtues of grassroots organizations were interrupted by the neoliberal counterattack in the 1990s. It was only in the twenty-first century that Latin American civil society would regain political momentum and advance the interests of the popular masses. Meanwhile, the neoliberal project that had drowned Latin America in a decade of inequality and resistance would become LAP’s sixth theme.

Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Forms of Social Resistance

The neoliberal onslaught was propelled by the collapse of the socialist bloc and the aggressive policies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the international financial institutions, and transnational investors as well as the defeat of the revolutionary left in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The implementation of the Washington Consensus on neoliberal structural readjustment imposed the privatization of state-owned companies, austerity and the sharp curtailing of state services, liberalization of foreign trade, and orthodox monetarism, with devastating effects on the political unity and social rights of the popular classes. Analysis of the dynamic of this global capitalist restructuring and the ensuing struggle and resistance of civil society against the economic counterrevolution immersed the journal in its sixth theme.

Although individual articles had examined these processes earlier, a landmark in LAP’s confrontation with proponents of neoliberal globalization was Globalization and Globalism in Latin America and the Caribbean (29 [6], 2001), edited by Richard Harris. In considering the debates over globalization, the issue’s primary thrust was to challenge the mainstream view of globalization as an inevitable and positive process of economic, political, and cultural integration. As with the earlier critique of mainstream developmentalism, contributors to this issue focused on the class character of the transformations under way and equated corporate-led globalization with imperialism. Harris’s introduction on “contending perspectives” included an extensive review of the diverse literature and placed critical currents on the left in an analysis that saw globalization as “a largely unjust and inequitable process of transnational corporate expansionism that involves the increasing exploitation of a large proportion of humanity and the increasing despoliation of the biosphere of the planet” (7).

Drawing on Sklair (2001) and Held et al. (1999), Harris outlined three interpretations that differed mainly in their view of the role of the state: state-centric internationalists or skeptics, who still considered the nation-state to be the basic unit of international interaction; the transnationalists or tranformationalists, who elevated transnational practices, forces, and institutions to at least equal importance as the nation-state and highlighted the importance of nonpolitical spheres such as the economy, culture, communications, and civil society; and the globalists or hyperglobalizers, who saw states disappearing altogether as relevant actors in the era of electronic communications, financial investment, and migration but were split between those with a critical (globalist) and those with a celebratory (hyperglobalizer) view of the dominance of transnational corporate capitalism. Although the left’s focus was not on the state but on capital, the issue was whether capitalist class differentiation changed because of new technological and financial variables or continued to be determined by the private ownership of the means of production and the appropriation of surplus labor.

The 14 articles in the issue offered a range of critical perspectives. The articles by Chilcote, Petras, and Vilas emphasized globalization as imperialism, and that of Giménez focused on its capitalist character. Munck highlighted the contradictions and multiple dimensions of the “processes and flows” of globalization, and Watson focused on the way innovations such as new communications technologies advanced the transnational corporate agenda. Nef analyzed the crisis of democracy in the emerging global order. The Brays and Löwy addressed the need for resistance at a more theoretical level, while Ellner, Barkin, Martins, Beserra, and Harris analyzed specific examples. The importance the collective placed on continuing this theoretical and empirical analysis was demonstrated by LAP’s initiation of an online forum for discussion of questions raised in the issue.

Neoliberalism and the resistance to it continued to be major topics in LAP. Some articles debated the nature of globalization and documented the devastating economic and social effects of neoliberal restructuring; others focused on grassroots resistance to neoliberalism both at the micro level of individual factories or communities and at the level of large-scale movements such as the Zapatistas, the Argentine piqueteros and recovered-factory movement, and the Bolivian water wars. They described social and communitarian control of the means of production, participatory local public administration, and movements asserting cultural citizenship on issues such as ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Optimism about the resistance emerging from multiple forms of civil engagement was mirrored in case studies of unions, gender, ethnicity, indigenous peoples, sexuality, small farming, the informal economy, ecological groups, the progressive church, and so on.

Influenced by the growth of social movements, journal content increasingly tipped toward new-left approaches that emphasized organized civil society rather than the working class as the agent of social change. The emphasis fell on micro-resistance and issue-based mobilizations by multiclass organizations rather than on the Marxian notion of organized collective action by contending classes. This new post-Marxian tendency was further strengthened by the success of social movements during the struggles for democratization. In spite of economic reversals in Latin America under neoliberalism, organized civil society demonstrated resilience and advanced on the state supported by the left. Accompanying the enthusiasm for micro social relations and resistance was the growing theoretical influence of non-Marxian authors such as Foucault and Habermas.

By and large, Foucault and Habermas inverted the Marxian logic that had oriented the journal since its inception. Whereas Marx predicted the growing unity, consciousness, and collectivization of the working class, social movement theory saw an inverse tendency toward micro-resistance and micro-consciousness. For Foucault, social change was a process taking place through a multiplicity of spontaneous and unpredictable acts of resistance at every level and sphere of social life that jeopardized an unstable equilibrium. He emphasized the importance of the subjectivity of the actor in the exercise of power. Such an approach moved toward social psychology and empirical investigations of localized situations of domination and resistance.

Habermas’s central concepts of civil society and the public sphere offered attractive analytic tools for theorizing the action of social movements. However, the Habermas effect dislocated the left from the analysis of political power to communications and pedagogical experiences. His adherents believed that participation should focus not on objective social advances but on communications within and between public spheres. When flows of information and opinion are unimpeded, civil society will debate social problems and eventually reach consensus on resolving injustices. Whereas the traditional left believed that the political unity and collective consciousness of the working class would parallel the expansion of capitalism, the new trend saw greater complexity in autonomous groupings arising from multiple social cleavages that acted on narrowly focused issues. That thought produced an end-of-ideology effect in which micro movements multiplied, leading to changes in societal values and eventually in the distribution of political and economic resources. The key was not material conditions or political power but culture and social values. As a result, post-Marxism was indirectly reproducing Daniel Bell’s “end of ideology.”

The advance of the post-Marxist trend did not necessarily reflect a theoretical change within the journal but was part of the migration of progressive intellectuals to cultural categories. In fact, the collective, alarmed by this new orientation, published two issues, organized by Ronald Chilcote, on the withdrawal from class and concrete analysis of capitalism: Post-Marxism, the Left, and Democracy (17 [2], 1990) and Politics, Culture, and Postmodernism (27 [4], 2000). In the introduction to the first, Chilcote recognized an internal crisis in Marxism, attributing it to the electoral success of Eurocommunism. The accumulation of electoral force by the European left broadened its political alliances, moving it toward reformist centrist positions. Chilcote emphasized that the left needed to retain the working class as the main agent in social analysis to avoid an artificial separation between political and economic struggles. By abandoning class analysis, he believed the left fell into the pluralist trap in which class struggle was replaced by conflict negotiations. He wrote (6):

What distinguishes Marxism from the new thinking is the traditional view that the working class is essential for its revolutionary potential because of its structural position as the class that produces capital. In excising classes from a socialist perspective, the post-Marxists avoid analysis of the exploitative relations between capital and labor as central to the accumulation and reproduction of capitalism as a mode of production. Further, the emphasis on politics and ideology as autonomous from economics undermines the attention to political economy which has been of interest to classical and contemporary Marxists. Debate on the nature of the capitalist mode of production no longer appears as important. Consequently, classes and class struggle are displaced by an emphasis on political pluralism, political organizations, and interest groups.

The managing editor’s call for class analysis nonetheless was slow to change the course of the journal, since post-Marxism had widespread legitimacy among Latin American left politicians and progressive intellectuals. And since the founding principle of the collective was to bring in the voices of Latin America, it could not have silenced the inflow of post-Marxist articles.

Civil Society and Social Movements: Culture, Norms, and Beliefs

Recognition of the growing importance of social movements was marked by Social Movements and Political Change in Latin America (21 [2 and 3], 1994), edited by David Slater. His article in the first issue presented social movement theory as a new analytical force among progressive Latin Americanists. Disillusioned by the excessive formalism and reductionism of orthodox Marxism and disappointed by the decadence of real socialism, progressive intellectuals moved toward participatory associativism as an alternative to both formal democracy and bureaucratic socialism. They believed that social movements could build popular support for an equitable society in the context of broader democratic processes of social inclusion and resistance to economic exploitation. Slater argued that whereas U.S. and European-based social movement theory’s original concern was middle-class struggles for social rights in Western societies, in Latin America the focus was on struggles based on the popular masses. In fact, Slater critiqued “Euro-Americanism” in social movement theory for three ethnocentric biases: (1) the absence of any reference to Third World writers on political struggles, (2) the assumption of Western universality, and (3) “worlding,” conferring priority in political and economic importance on the developed West.

Slater’s analysis closely followed Mouffe’s, Laclau’s, and Nun’s suggestion that it was not class that was the main source of collective action in developing countries but multi-issue and cross-class alliances based on what Mouffe called each person’s “multiple subject positions,” including those grounded in class, gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, and religion. Besides traditional economic struggles, social movements mobilized to advance gender equality, cultural rights, ecology, and other identity and lifestyle issues, producing a “war of interpretations” that determined dominant cultural values. With such a theoretical construct, social movement writers departed from the Marxian notion of class power, determined by the private ownership and control of the means of production, and turned to Foucault’s microphysics of power.

For Foucault power was conceptualized in terms of micro struggles of domination and resistance in every possible sphere of society. Domination was established when power relations became “congealed” and an individual or a group obstructed the access of other subjects to the means of challenging existing power relationships. Domination, in Foucault’s analysis, was not limited to class but included social relations based on gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. Resistance to subjection implied that each citizen had the right to a certain identity and to self-expression and the right to demand the elimination of censorship and secrecy and of physical, economic, cultural, or psychological violence.

According to Slater, the turn toward political and cultural struggles by social movement theorists questioned the minimalist definition of representative democracy defended by Latin American conservative elites. Citing Rowe and Schelling (1991: 186), he wrote that they believed that social movements formed a “new political culture manifested in a broader concept of democracy and new methods of political resistance, entailing novel forms of organization and of cultural action” (23). Referencing Held (1991: 231), he noted their potential to promote a “double democratization” in the Third World of the state and civil society.

The linkage between new social movements and political change was the focus of José Nun’s studies of democratization. Slater emphasized Nun’s (1991: 25) contention that the continuity of democracy in socially unequal societies will depend on the advancement of “multiple forms of participatory democracy.” He observed that the democratic model adopted so far was based on a strictly utilitarian calculus of production and consumption in which the stability of democracy was undermined by elected elites’ failure to resolve historic problems of social inequality. For Latin America to overcome underdevelopment through democratic processes, he argued, it would need to move beyond electoral democracy to participatory democracy, building a new political culture rooted in social movements and direct popular mobilization for social rights.

The analysis of social movements in LAP took another step toward post-Marxism in Citizenship in Latin America (30 [2], 2003), edited by Evelina Dagnino, through the anthropocentric discourse of rights, civil society, and cultural representations. Notions such as “the right to have a right” emphasized cultural categories as a determinant variable of political power and social hierarchies. The “right to have a right” implied the right of social movements and excluded groups (now labeled “subaltern”) to assume control of their own representation. For Dagnino, culturally legitimated social subordination, manifested in the suppression of human dignity, constituted the main source for material inequality and political exclusion. Thus, reducing inequalities and advancing citizenship rights hinged on contesting “social authoritarianism.” New social movements differed from class-based collective action, she argued, by being multiclass, issue-focused, and concerned with securing rights as a precondition for achieving social equality. Antiauthoritarian values practiced in daily life would culminate in a new social contract, changing the political culture of institutions and political parties. The new culture of the “right to have a right” would make sociability susceptible to conflict resolution, dialogue, and debate in an open public sphere. Eventually, cultural change would lead to equitable social stratification.

By and large, social movements analysis highlighted subjectivity to the point of envisioning a societal free will to act against formidable political and economic structures. The question was whether recognizing rights was sufficient to achieve social justice, promote equitable distribution of power resources, and affect class hierarchies. Two methodological lacunae can also be detected in much of the social movement literature. First, by promoting case studies divorced from historical analysis, new social movement studies fell into the same trap as the case study approach of University of Chicago sociology, replacing the comprehension of social action with analysis of gestures, motivations, and communications. Ultimately, such a methodology produced overly optimistic views of society, an idealistic reverence for grassroots initiatives mutating endlessly in time and space, and an “end of ideology” ideology. Secondly, the case study approach neglected the structural political and economic changes that were developing in Latin America, such as the rise of the left, with its particular political and ideological alliances, an unforeseen withdrawal of social movements and the reemergence of party politics, economic growth, and the improvement of income distribution through national public policies.

On the whole, this digression into hyperempiricism among progressive intellectuals proved to be a healthy passage into the inner dynamics of a changing Latin American political culture. Although the new culture of the “right to have a right” may not have been effective in reducing socioeconomic inequality, it consolidated antiauthoritarianism and reinforced resistance to the neoliberal commercialization of social rights through nongovernmental organizations. Such a significant cultural change would eventually impel the left to empower and electorally sustain its antipoverty and social equity objectives.

The Left Wave in Latin America: The Return of Power, Class, and Social Change

The theoretical fragmentation of the 1990s diminished with a new focus on the left turn in Latin America. Since Hugo Chávez’s victory in the 1998 presidential election, a revitalized left achieved electoral success in one South American country after another, often described as a “pink tide” engulfing the continent. In Brazil Lula won two consecutive terms in 2002 and 2006, followed by Dilma Rousseff in 2010; Argentina elected Néstor Kirchner in 2003 and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in 2007 and 2011, Bolivia Evo Morales in 2005 and 2009, Ecuador Rafael Correa in 2007, 2009, and 2013, Paraguay Fernando Lugo in 2008, and Uruguay José Mujica in 2010. This wave of leftist victories generated the eighth theme, a renewed emphasis on class and power that returned the journal to its origins. This focus could be found in many individual articles and issues on Brazil (29 [1], 2002; 33 [4], 2006; 38 [5], 2011), Venezuela (32 [1 and 2], 2005), Bolivia (37 [3 and 4], 2010), and the twenty-first-century left in power (40 [3], 2013) as well as in three new issues on social movements (34 [2], 2007; 38 [1], 2011; 40 [4], 2013). Issues that will take up these questions for Argentina, Ecuador, and Brazil are in progress.

Themes of the 1970s on capitalism, socialism, and imperialism returned to the forefront of debates on ideology, sustainability, and the direction of the left governments. Were they revolutionary or reformist? Socialist or inclusive democrats? Mass mobilizers or populists? Authentic or vested leadership? Although many of the questions raised addressed substantive themes, the methodological and theoretical instruments seemed insufficient for the analysis of the direction of the left wave in Latin America. Was this a problem limited to LAP? I would say no. The abandonment of class analysis by the left in general deprived it of its most effective instrument for comprehending the nature of dominant power blocs and the social forces that sustain them. By adopting analytic categories such as civil society, imaginary sociology and social representation, identity, and discourse, studies prioritized the subjective bases for political action. Theoretically, they placed excessive emphasis on consciousness, thus departing from the concrete analysis of social forces in favor of the description of symbolic daily-life interaction in the tradition of Chicago sociology. The difficulty of achieving a concrete analysis due to the cultural turn among intellectuals could be contrasted with the realism of the new-left political elite. While intellectuals were absorbed by a decade of empirical investigations and studies of symbolic gestures, left politicians were formulating a coherent political practice derived from the concrete comprehension of class, power, state, and social conflict.

Much of the pragmatism and realism demonstrated by the new governing left was inspired by conscious reevaluation of the traumatic experiences of the 1960s and 1970s and greater comprehension of the complexity of social change in societies that have entrenched conservative political forces, globalized and associated economic interests, and high economic volatility caused by the collapse of international credit. At heart the new left was engaged in a long process of sustaining governments by managing the political system, directing the economy toward social needs, and avoiding external vulnerabilities. This program did not espouse socialism but rather involved a prolonged struggle for popular hegemony. Its apparent success is evident in its positive social, political, economic, and cultural results. Since the ascension of the left tens of millions of Latin Americans have been lifted from dire poverty and governments have built legislative majorities and stable alliances, producing the highest rates of economic growth in the past 20 years and, most important, realigning the popular vote toward progressive forces.

Two issues on Bolivia (37 [3 and 4], 2010), both edited by Benjamin Kohl and Rosalind Bresnahan, exemplified LAP’s return to concrete analysis. They combined articles by intellectuals and political activists, including a number of Bolivian academics who also held high-level positions in various government ministries, to debate the rise of the left and its social sustainability. In the pages of the first emerged the thesis that two decades of resistance to neoliberalism by social movements (identity, gender, class, etc), although they may have not changed politics or eradicated repressive cultural practices, paved the way for the electoral victory of the left and its consolidation as a leading political force. Apparently the issue for the new left was not an immediate socialist transition but national capitalism under the political hegemony of the popular masses. While the first issue dealt with the nature of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—MAS), the second focused on its long-term political strategy for sustaining the change in power relations between the dominant classes and the oppressed indigenous majority.

By and large, the first Bolivia issue described a gradual mobilization of two political forces that competed for hegemony. The MAS, representative of the great majority of Bolivians, achieved power driven by social movements mobilized against neoliberalism in the late 1980s and 1990s. Besides the resistance of the conservative dominant classes, the MAS had to cope with market-economy-induced fragmentation of the indigenous movement. These difficulties were overcome when Evo Morales was reelected in 2009, consolidating the MAS leadership in Bolivian politics. The question became how the Bolivian left would sustain its leadership and solidify its political project of advancing the rights of the masses.

The second Bolivia issue, published after Morales’s reelection, included an important piece by Álvaro García Linera, the vice president of Bolivia, and articles by Gustafson, who described the delegitimization by the local MAS of century-long practices of peasant public humiliation; Valdivia on the contestation of the productivity and modernity of large eastern properties; Fabricant on the internal debates within the agrarian reform movement between proponents of collective and individual rural properties; Kirshner on the internal cleavages within the indigenous movement caused by migration to Santa Cruz; Penã on the crystallization of rival discourses of oppressed and oppressors; and Bebbington and Bebbington and Centellas on the resistance of the departments of Tarija and Chuquisaca to the MAS proposal of centralization to implement development plans. Farthing and Kohl analyzed the Morales pro-peasant coca policies under the banner “Coca yes, cocaine no!” Finally, Dosh and Kligerman discussed gender equality practices of the MAS exemplified by women’s leadership of mobilizations on key issues such as gas and water policy and by efforts to reserve half of the cabinet posts for women and to increase women's presence in the congress.

The bits and pieces on power consolidation of the MAS came together in the article by García Linera, an engaged intellectual who applied his social knowledge to the task of creating a more equitable society. His combination of theory and practice highlighted the class and power-centric approach of the new left in Latin America. His main focus was the state as the materialization of conflicts between competing power blocs. For him the political status quo was simply the consolidation of a dominant correlation of forces at a point of bifurcation when “one social force or power bloc takes command” (47). An example of a point of bifurcation was the defeat of the miners under Paz Estenssoro, which consolidated conservative hegemony for decades. García Linera argued that since 2000 Bolivia under the MAS had been experiencing a period of political conflict between the old dominant elite and the ascendant forces. That power struggle made Bolivia “a state in transition” (36). Such periods of instability presented but did not guarantee the possibility of political revolution. Writing in 2009, he analyzed that moment in Bolivia as one at which the point of bifurcation was at hand and either the MAS forces would achieve hegemony or the old power bloc would reassert its control—“not, then, a simple change in power elites but a true substitution of one power class for another” (39).

García Linera’s analysis of competing political projects was derived from Poulantzas’s definition of the extended state. Concretely, the state was a “structure of territorial and political relationships . . . shaped by past material relationships tied to domination and political legitimacy” (34). It was made up of a correlation of social forces, government apparatuses with implementation capacities, and the symbolic power to achieve legitimacy. The equilibrium of power rested on “the construction of a dominant political coalition” that could achieve parliamentary majorities (35). The maintenance of dominant political coalitions, a sort of power bloc, depended on government efficiency, measured by the capacity of the executive to translate political decisions into public policies institutionalized in norms, procedures, budgets, and bureaucracies. The legitimacy of the ruling power bloc rested on concrete results that changed the objective conditions of citizens and created “a moral consensus between governors and governed.” The stable state was one whose legitimacy was not contested—that had achieved, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu (1989), a “monopoly of symbolic power.”

He applied this framework to the MAS, analyzing its class composition and its allies. The nucleus was made up of small and medium-sized rural and urban producers, the masses that participated in the 2000–2003 rebellion and later secured the election of the MAS. A second tier included intellectuals and labor unions. A third consisted of public servants, white-collar workers who had suffered from neoliberalism in the 1990s and considered state-centered social and economic projects crucial for their welfare. A fourth layer of medium-sized and large businesses concerned about internal development could render important support against reactionary businesses resistant to social equity.

The maintenance of the power bloc depended on pacifying the military, mobilizing public funds by nationalizing natural resources, and developing a new culture of universal rights in which ethnic groups were recognized as a pillar of the Bolivian nationality. The objectives of the project were decolonization (the end of external dependence) by reassuming control of natural resources, cultural pluralism, state financing of public policy, political democratization, and territorial decentralization. In addition to building an “indigenous/popular” power bloc, the MAS was expanding its power through public policies that transformed the economic power structure such as the nationalization of hydrocarbons and more favorable contracts with foreign investors.

The third dimension of the consolidation of power was the symbolic struggle to challenge right-wing ideology and create a consensus around concepts such as “decolonization, cultural pluralism, the productive state, and the territorial decentralization of power” (44). García Linera concluded that the MAS had shifted the correlation of forces in its favor, creating the conditions for reaching a point of bifurcation that would break the “catastrophic deadlock” (46) in favor of popular hegemony.

In addition to single-country issues like those on Bolivia, LAP continued to examine the changing nature of the popular forces resisting neoliberalism and bringing left governments to power. Globalizing Resistance: The New Politics of Social Movements in Latin America (34 [2], 2007) and A Second Look at Latin American Social Movements (38 [1], 2011) demonstrated a shift from the focus on subjectivity that was prominent in the issues on civil society and social movements to an analysis more concerned with the material conditions generating these movements, their organizational forms and mobilizing strategies, their relationships with economic interests, the state, and political parties, and their capacity to generate structural change, although attention to identity and consciousness was not absent. The first of these issues, edited by Richard Stahler-Sholk, Harry Vanden, and Glen David Keucker, became the core of a widely used book in the LAP in the Classroom series (Stahler-Sholk, Vanden, and Keucker, 2008). Stahler-Sholk and Vanden are currently completing a new anthology.

Latin America’s Radical Left in Power: Complexities and Challenges in the Twenty-first Century (40 [3], 2013), edited by Steve Ellner, related Latin America’s electoral successes of the new left to popular social mobilization, with a particular focus on the governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. It brought LAP full circle to its original purpose of studying capitalism, socialism, and external influences on the continent. However, in contrast to the abstract class analysis of the past, the new approach articulated empirical observations of political and social practices with theoretical reflections on political power, popular voting, and civil society mobilization. Contributors observed that the rise of left governments was closely related to the strengthening of social movements during two decades of resistance to neoliberal market-based policies. Macro and micro resistance against the worsening of social conditions and income concentration channeled the popular vote to the left, a sort of electoral realignment. For the first time in the history of the continent, the left achieved a solid political leadership of the popular masses, the majority of the region’s population.

The Latin American left was not, however, homogeneous. The national diversity of social movements, popular struggles, and political party and electoral systems implied that the new leftist governments were not guided by a single political program. Two paths emerged: a moderate conciliatory one along the lines of the Brazilian PT and the Mexican Partido de la Revolución Democrática and a radical one designated by Ellner as the “twenty-first-century Latin American radical left” of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

For Ellner, the moderates at heart legitimized capitalist domination as much as social democratic and Eurosocialist parties. While the twenty-first-century Latin American radical left accepted the legitimacy of representative democracy, it moved toward greater state control of the means of production, initiating a process that might end in socialism. It faced the challenges of attempting to rapidly transform economic structures within a pluralist multiparty system with a still powerful “disloyal opposition” committed to using all its resources to prevent radical change. The radical path differed from previous experiences of progressive governments: it played down capitalism’s economic capacity to develop Latin America, defended socialism as a viable alternative, acquired legitimacy by repeatedly and decisively winning highly competitive elections, transformed political structures through new constitutions, exercised greater control over the legislative and judicial branches of government and the military, and moved energetically to neutralize any reaction or external support for military coups. Ellner argued that the power of the radical left came from its ability to sustain mass support through tangible reforms, new participatory institutions, and a charismatic leadership that united a highly diversified and often unorganized popular mass base. The post–cold-war ideological milieu contributed to its consolidation with less intense U.S. efforts to undermine it—an advantage that Allende, the Sandinistas, and Cuba, labeled cohorts of Soviet expansionism in the Americas, had not enjoyed. The radical left had to cope with the need to articulate traditional electoral democracy with new forms of direct, participatory political involvement and the need to manage conflicting interests within the heterogeneous mass base as well as to balance economic and social long- and short-term goals.

Theoretically, there were significant differences between the radical left and the traditional left that had their origins in the 1940s, when national liberation struggles converged with anticapitalist programs in developing countries. From Mao Zedong’s peasant-centered theory through Fanon’s celebration of the wretched of the earth to the recent works of Laclau and Mouffe on the virtuous populist leader overcoming the “irreconcilability of differences” of subaltern groups and Harnecker’s and Sader’s support for communal power, the left had moved toward multiclass popular alliances as the transformative agency in late capitalism. In those societies, noneconomic struggles such as identity politics, gender, ecology, ethnicity, and sexuality replaced the bourgeois-proletarian dichotomy of orthodox Marxism.

For Ellner, although the radical left emphasized identity politics and multiclass alliances, it insisted on remaining within the Marxist tradition. Although its notion of the working class was much broader than the orthodox Marxian industrial proletariat in that it “place[d] all workers on an equal footing,” including those in the informal economy, and incorporated previously excluded groups such as women and indigenous peoples, it “place[d] a premium on demands and programs at the point of production, a focus that represents the essence of Marxism” (12).