The Rise of the Left

Rethinking the way forward for the Latin American lefts is an urgent task if the gains of the past decade are not to be left high and dry when the political tide retreats. Emir Sader in The New Mole adds a fresh perspective to a long list of mainly Northern, mainly academic perspectives on the challenges and the opportunities for social and political transformation in contemporary Latin America. This is a broad continental perspective and more of a longue-durée approach than a conjunctural one. Sader has a solid academic grounding, but his judgment is sometimes quite succinct and based on his political activism. This is a very readable and accessible text and does not demand a specialist knowledge of the region. It would probably be read most easily by the alter-globalization movements in Europe and North America, perhaps best in conjunction with some of the more factual accounts to provide the indispensable historical and political background.

As other writers have done recently, Sader situates his analysis in terms of a crisis of hegemony. The story is a familiar one to most students of the political economy of Latin America. The diverse reactions to the global capitalist crisis of 1929 led to industrialization and a national development project in many countries. Up until then the capitalist periphery had been condemned to exporting primary commodities. This project was followed by the great neoliberal revolution ushered in by the Chilean generals in 1973 and their counterparts in Argentina in 1976. It is simplistic to think that this was a return to the pre-1929 agro-export model, although it contained elements of that model. The new neoliberal model was based on closer integration with the global economy, deregulation, privatization, and financialization. However, by around 2000 the so-called Washington Consensus around which it was built began to fray, and alternative development models came into play. It was in this context that the continent experienced an unprecedented turn toward left-of-center governments that attracted considerable international attention.

Not surprisingly, Sader does not buy into the “good left”–“bad left” dichotomy of some conservative observers. Perhaps surprisingly, however, he does not go along with some far-left critiques of Lula/Dilma for “selling out” to neoliberalism. Thus, for example, he offers a sober alternative reading: Yes, Lula was a good manager of neoliberalism, but his was also a government with an independent sovereign policy that halted the erosion of the state and strengthened the public health and education systems. With regard to the “glass half full” or “glass half empty” dilemma, Sader plumps for the former. He is also particularly supportive of the new Amerindian orientation of many of the Andean-country governments. Latin American critical thinking is now in a position to offer alternatives to the dominant neoliberal development paradigm in ways that are relevant to Latin America but also globally. The New Mole is a contribution to this task and opens up a new problematic of transformation that others may well wish to pursue.

As a quick review of the Latin American lefts’ dilemmas and prospects, this is a useful book. It is sure-footed in its political judgments and often comes up with novel interpretations. It ends up on a Gramscian note, stating that today “Latin America is living through a crisis of hegemony of enormous proportions. The old is struggling to survive, while the new has difficulty in replacing it.” Another way of putting this is that the false cosmopolitan promises of neoliberalism are tarnished but at the same time the old national development projects lack purchase. This is a period of extremely exciting rethinking of the way forward for Latin America. The last time there was a comparable period of intellectual and political ferment was in the mid-1960s with the emergence of dependency theory. A new power matrix has been shaped in the post-neoliberal era, and the various lefts—of many different shades—are taking up positions in response to a very fluid but ultimately positive conjuncture.