Introduction: Social Movements,Progressive Governments,and the Question of Strategy

Political Context

By the beginning of the 1990s there was consensus that neoliberal economic policies were hegemonic in Latin America. For its part, the left seemed to a large extent confused and bereft of a viable strategic compass. By then the intense struggles that had characterized the region in the 1960s and 1970s had been firmly pacified, and the chances for a revival seemed remote. Unions were in retreat, undermined by structural adjustment and a dirty war that had decapitated its leadership (Grandin, 2006; see also Carneiro, Fuentes, and Midaglia in this issue for a wider view). Their ties to the peasant movement had been severed and previous “incorporation” into political parties eliminated under authoritarian rule. Organized labor, rural populations, and even sections of the urban middle classes were in increasingly precarious conditions. Swaths of people catapulted into the ranks of the poor were rendered irrelevant to the economy, while free-market policies tore up the safety nets that had kept them afloat. There was, it seemed, no alternative to neoliberalism even with the “transition to democracy,” where democracy was regarded as a political regime while the economic model driving extreme inequality and marginalization remained intact (Munck, 2013; Weyland, 2004).

Seen in this context, the dramatic resurgence of mass popular revolts throughout the continent was both surprising and momentous. The first signal was the 1989 Caracazo in Venezuela, an unexpected urban uprising that quickly saw a semi-insurrectional situation emerging in a previously stable country. By and large it was peasant and indigenous groups that were now at the leading edge of the new challenge to neoliberalism. The Zapatistas in Chiapas and large-scale indigenous rebellions in Ecuador were the first sustained challenge to neoliberalism in the mid-1990s, marking a major shift in the terrain of social protest. Soon after, they were followed by the eruption of urban-based movements: street protests in Argentina and the Bolivian gas and water wars. By the turn of the century, popular movements had returned with new vigor; the neoliberal policies that had once reigned supreme were now being delegitimized, and a truly continental transformation was under way (Rodríguez-Garavito, Barrett, and Chavez, 2008; Zibechi, 2007).

The increased pace of political activity, albeit diverse in terms of both social base and political character, demonstrated not only that neoliberalism’s hegemony was more fragile than it had seemed but also the potential for mobilizing a broad array of groups behind anti-neoliberal and even anticapitalist projects. One notable feature of this radical upsurge was that it was not propelled by any particular sector of the working class in the traditional sense, such as industrial workers, or even the political parties or peasant guerillas. The new wave of mass mobilizations against neoliberalism was led by movements of indigenous groups, unemployed people, precarious workers, community organizations, and landless peasants—a constellation of groups that had been economically marginalized and politically excluded. Organized resistance was turning away from wage-based struggles toward new forms of activism that sometimes called the political system itself into question. Despite the weakening of traditional labor and peasant movements, new coalitions and antisystemic projects were still a very real possibility, but this would also require a rethinking of the way political subjects were formed and coalitions built.

At first these struggles were defensive in nature. They adopted direct action tactics— roadblocks, strikes, occupations, and mass protests—to resist the effects of marketization. The much-celebrated Zapatista armed uprising, with all its emphasis on autonomy and alternative political imaginaries, was iconic in this sense. But the Zapatistas were but an instance of what was in reality a far more diverse and complex panorama of dissent—and by no means a typical one at that. Many of the movements that emerged in this period quickly developed a mobilizational infrastructure with the capacity not only to question the hegemony of neoliberalism but also to unite broad coalitions of anti-neoliberal forces and wield considerable political power. This was demonstrated in the toppling of presidents in Ecuador, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, and Brazil and the delegitimization of corrupt regimes in Venezuela and Peru.

Many of these emergent social forces were directly oriented toward the state as the means to secure change, and the massive popular rebellions opened the way for a political shift with the emergence of anti-neoliberal, progressive governments. The leaders were often charismatic—think Chávez, Evo, Lula, Correa, Kirchner—and prone to bold pronouncements challenging capitalism and imperialism. The turn to a state-centric strategy for change did not follow one single model and was driven as much “from below” as “from above.” In some cases, such as the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—MAS) in Bolivia, the Frente Amplio (Broad Front—FA) in Uruguay, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) in Brazil, and the Frente Farabundo Martí de la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front—FMLN) in El Salvador, “social movement parties” were built to varying degrees from the bottom up, often through long processes of dialogue and alliance building between the labor and social movements (Almeida, 2010; Baiocchi, 2018). In others, the connection between political leaders and popular movements was less organic, with coalitions forming rapidly from situations of crisis, intense polarization, and political turbulence. In Venezuela, where social movements were more fragmented and lacked organizational infrastructure, Hugo Chávez eventually succeeded in channeling the discontent of the Caracazo into a spectacular electoral victory. In Argentina, as the unemployed workers’ mobilizations and citizen assemblies threatened an “Argentinazo” in 2001, it was Kirchner’s brand of twenty-first-century Peronism that eventually capitalized on the crisis (see Gamallo in this issue).

The electoral success of left-wing governments did not necessarily lead to an abandonment of alternative or extraparliamentary forms of political activity, but it did mean that movements would have to revise and clarify their strategy in response to shifts in political circumstances. Progressive governments came into office, often promising redistributive measures that offered opportunities for consolidation but also meant new challenges for sustained mass mobilization. This scenario opened up new discussions among movements not only about how the promises of a left-wing government could be kept on track once in office but also, more important, about what forms of political organization or strategic visions could produce lasting movements for transformation. In light of the changes in social composition of the popular movements, as well as the decline and limitations of the traditional institutions of workers and peasants, this also raised strategic questions about what forms of organization and practice might be best suited to building and strengthening popular power.

The promotion of radical projects across Latin America from 2000 on challenged U.S. imperialism and neoliberalism in the region; it clearly put socialism back on the public radar, but it also demonstrated how difficult it is to build popular power for advancing and sustaining challenges to capitalism within the constraints of liberal democracy. The eventual decline of the left governments from around 2012 on was not inevitable, but it does indicate the difficulty of sustaining a program of government while pushing for broader social transformations. The rise and fall of social movements in Latin America also needs to be set in the context of the broader political economy of development, the particular regimes of accumulation, and the dominant hegemonic order (see Munck in this issue).

This issue evaluates the shifting political panorama in Latin America over the past two decades from the perspective of the experiences and practices of social movements, exploring the alternative visions, innovations, and strategies they adopted in response to left governments in power. This examination of the evolution of the diverse experiences, goals, strategies, and realignments of these movements under progressive governments can help us understand whether and how social movements can continue to build their base and develop popular capacities as well as the strategic vision and organizational forms needed to sustain a lasting process of social transformation.

Building Popular Power

It was during the 1990s after the return to democracy that Latin America gained its reputation as the “continent of social movements,” given the latter’s diversity and impact on politics (Mezzadra and Gago, 2017). The spirit of the times was antipolitical or neoanarchist as movements such as the Zapatistas or the piqueteros became iconic for theorists privileging a “no-to-power” road to emancipation, which repudiated the struggle for state power in the name of popular autonomy. There was much talk of the end of the political party, along with a rejection of revolutionary vanguardism and state-oriented reformism as a strategic aim. The alternative preference for autonomy and nonhierarchical forms of organizing was often loosely defined but based on the belief that the energy and creativity emanating from social movements could transform people themselves and lead to the creation of noncapitalist social relations through new practices and democratic capacities. Abandoning the state as the principal driver of social change, they emphasized building alternative institutions such as the Zapatistas’ juntas de buen gobierno, the recovered factories, assemblies, and cooperatives in Argentina, the ayllus of the Aymara Altiplano in Bolivia, and the participatory budgeting experiments in Porto Alegre. At a time when no alternative to the neoliberal project seemed possible, these alternative visions and ways of doing politics captured global imaginations, demonstrating that a multiplicity of counterpractices did in fact exist.

Much of this new thinking, however, was prone to a certain fetishization of the notion of autonomy with romanticized notions of participation, diversity, and process as ends in themselves (Hellman, 1992). They implied a rejection of organization or engagement with institutions of any kind, an approach that neither addressed the practical and strategic considerations faced by social movements in dealing with state institutions nor offered a viable or sustainable alternative strategy. The neighborhood assemblies in Argentina that were modeled on horizontalist principles arose in response to the immediate needs posed by the 2001 crisis. They certainly encouraged new forms of participation, but these never presented themselves as an alternative to state power. Autonomy was more a search for another way of doing politics, as expressed in the protests, assemblies, and neighborhood meetings, than a self-sufficient strategy.

Thus, tactical positionings in response to particular circumstances of crisis should not be taken as representing inherent characteristics of social movements. In fact, as many contributions to this issue make clear, social movements’ stance vis-à-vis political parties pivots on multiple conditions and possibilities and is subject to frequent shifts. The tension between autonomy and engagement with party politics cannot be seen as a binary opposition, since many movements in fact adopt an array of protest and conventional strategies for influencing governments and achieving their demands. It is noteworthy that the big increase in popular revolts after 2000 combined roadblocks, factory takeovers, and assemblies with cross-class demands for better political leadership and more comprehensive antipoverty policies. While rejecting the political classes, many of the groups were organized within political parties that also interacted with the state to deliver social benefits. The famous slogan of the protests in Argentina during the crisis ¡Qué se vayan todos! was a call to reject the political class and more precisely the neoliberal policies of Fernando de la Rúa. It did not express a politics of pure autonomy or a vilification of political strategy tout court. It was quickly followed by another slogan, ¡Elecciones ya!, demonstrating that the protesters had not given up on political parties or state power completely. An overemphasis on political autonomy would deny the possibility of social movements’ engaging in a range of flexible tactics for working both within and outside the state (Rossi and von Bülow, 2016).

We argue for a more nuanced approach to the dynamics and tensions surrounding the notions of autonomy and co-optation that played out within social movements as they related to left-leaning parties coming to office. In the case of the post-2000 progressive governments, there was an overlap between the agendas of political parties and social movements, even though there were also many tensions. While governments did respond to popular demands with redistributive and anti-neoliberal policies, they did not necessarily seek to develop the transformative agenda and in some cases actively sought to block it. At the same time, it was the task of movements to build and consolidate popular power by working in communities and building alliances with other social groups. This is not to conclude that any relation to the state should be rejected automatically but to point out that movements need to learn to navigate that relationship without being subsumed by it. Social movements cannot but be marked by their political environment, and their engagement with the political arena is a key determinant of their capacity to sustain and develop the process. The cases of Brazil, Bolivia, El Salvador, and Venezuela presented in this issue testify to the fact that the early successes of left governments sparked an impressive growth of political activity and popular alternatives whose survival depended on their engagement with political processes. But such a strategy also brings tensions when it comes to deepening popular power, and movements’ being subsumed by the state can lead to their demobilization and institutionalization.

In this context, to gain a better understanding of the relationship between social movements and the state it is useful to distinguish between independence and autonomy. Whereas independence can be conceived of as an absolute choice, with groups either allowing themselves to be co-opted or not, autonomy is more a matter of degree, referring to the amount of external influence there is in the movements’ decision-making processes. Therefore the issue is not whether social movements have a relation with states but the terms on which that relationship is conceived and negotiated. This calls for a closer examination of the problems of engaging with the state, insofar as the risk of co-optation is of course strong but is not the only possible outcome. Many movements learned to negotiate that relation, as many of the contributions below show. These cases demonstrate the magnitude of the challenge, which involves a constant battle to mobilize popular anger and win elections while also transforming the state and building counterhegemonic power.

Movements and Governments

While a wave of popular rebellions first paved the way for the emergence of new left and center-left coalitions, once they were in power the relationship between social movements and political parties was more fraught. As was soon discovered, it is one thing to mobilize in the streets or build anti-neoliberal coalitions but quite another to continue to occupy, sustain, and transform state power once governments take office.

First, their time in office was often incomplete and fiercely contested. The capture of executive office often came without control of parliament or the judiciary, while other institutions—the media, business, the church—remained hostile. It was significant that governments had come to power in societies damaged by decades of market hegemony, in which the power of finance and corporations reigned supreme and state capacity was at an all-time low. All this hampered attempts to implement and extend reforms, and every advance was made in the midst of intense conflict and polarization. For the progressive governments, pulling together political coalitions and winning elections had been enough of a challenge, but these new governments faced even more difficult battles after electoral victories had been won. Progressive governments faced the careful balancing act between pursuing a transformative program and dealing with the state apparatus and dominant classes threatened by the program. For social movements, this meant that their energies and organizing capacities were too often spent on mobilizations to face off with the opposition and keep “their” governments in power.

Second, notwithstanding the radical mobilizations that opened the way for left governments to come to office and the anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist pronouncements of the governments themselves, the political coalitions that emerged from these processes never fully challenged the neoliberal economic status quo. It would be more precise to say, overall, that these governments were anti-neoliberal in rhetoric and social democratic in practice. There was certainly an attempt to bring the state back in as the driver of the economy through increased taxation and state spending, and there were also attempts to create a new developmentalist pact, with a measurable impact on poverty reduction. Yet these reforms were limited by their dependence on closer integration with the liberalized global economy and the reliance on commodity rents to fund social programs. Thus social programs were faced with severe fiscal constraints, but also the type of political transformation envisaged by this strategy was placed in question. While left governments harnessed the power of the state to create a social safety net to protect citizens from the impacts of neoliberal policies, the more challenging issue of developing the types of capacities and forms of political organization to pursue further transformation was never fully resolved.

This speaks to a much broader difficulty for any radical project seeking to deepen the process of transformation while working within the confines of liberal democracy. The mobilizations of the 1990s and 2000s saw an explosion of new initiatives that sparked an intense flourishing of cultural and political activity, expressed in community development initiatives, participatory budgeting, solidarity economies (on which see the Mandache contribution in this issue), neighborhood assemblies, recovered factories, and the praxis of sumak kawsay/buen vivir. Popular sovereignty took center stage; the focus was on bringing about transformations within people and organizations themselves—creating new political subjects. Yet the fate of left-wing governments following electoral success demonstrated just how difficult it is for such initiatives to be harnessed to build the type of working-class power and popular capacities required for deepening and sustaining the transformative process. It involved the tensions between efforts to reform institutions within the state and the capacity of popular movements to mobilize, educate, and organize beyond it.

A major issue was the fact that many prominent activists were drawn into government positions. Brazil’s PT, the Kirchners in Argentina, and the MAS in Bolivia recruited rank-and-file activists from social and labor movements into professional positions at various levels, from high-ranking officials to functionaries, transforming the social composition of the state. These changes were advocated as “state decolonization” in Bolivia and a “democratic revolution” in Brazil. As McNelly says in this issue, by offering a quota of government positions to supporters from within movements, the legitimacy of the state was increased significantly. For the first time, historically excluded sectors—of peasants, indigenous people, and cocaleros (coca growers)—could recognize their friends, families, and comrades in the state bureaucracy. While this process certainly had the effect of bolstering the access of the poor to state services and challenging the dominance of the political, business, and financial elites within the state, the strengthening of popular sectors within the state was paralleled by the weakening of communities and popular movements outside of it.

Another problem was the limited character of the participatory experiments themselves. The results from various experiments from participatory budgeting to community councils indicate an impressive activation of self-organization from poor communities, including among the poor, women, and indigenous and black people. Yet on the whole these experiments were unable to expand beyond localized issues, technical fixes, and the making of pragmatic demands. The problem was that despite their emancipatory aims, their redistributive capacities were restricted by the state. Popular democratic processes remained separated from governmental decision making on the redistribution of resources at both the national and the municipal level. Despite the growth in confidence and capacities of activists and assemblies, participatory budgeting was never generalized, even when participants demanded more democratic control and involvement at a higher level. Thus the creation of alternative economic forms such as community councils, cooperatives, participatory budgets, and even nationalizations failed to translate into a more socially controlled or mixed economy. In brief, while these processes promoted a growth in democratic capacities, the role of technocratic state management in the hands of government officials was never overcome.

In Bolivia, the 2006 constituent assembly was a defining moment for state-movement relations. The call for the assembly had originated with the 1990 March for Territory and Dignity and later reemerged in the gas war. Its realization came to be a legitimizing feature of MAS rule. Announced shortly after Morales’s election, the constituent assembly was a broadly participatory process. In 2009 the Unity Pact saw five organizations working with the MAS committed to a transformation in the Bolivian state. Yet the movements had no direct participation in the assembly; rather, they were forced to stand as individuals and affiliate with a party. The proposals put forward by the Unity Pact for institutionalizing indigenous political and judicial forms were rejected by the MAS leadership. The failure of the constituent assembly to further mobilize the movements was evidenced in the lull in social activity that followed, with social organizations becoming more domesticated and leaving governing responsibilities to the government rather than developing popular power. There was a decisive shift in the movements, which went from being offensive, pushing for further radicalization, to “defensive” mobilizing. With many leaders in official positions, they were unable to mount a critique of tightening relations between the state and transnational capital. While they were critical of the MAS’s model of “neoliberal nationalization,” their official roles prevented them from mobilizing opposition. Thus while tensions from below certainly emerged, the political maneuvering by the MAS prevented them from driving the process forward. For their part, with the co-optation of leaders into state positions, movements were demobilized, left without any clear path forward. As Brown notes in this issue, there was a significant shift in the internal balance of forces. The popular power upon which Morales’s electoral victories were built and upon which, according to Álvaro García Linera, the future of the process depended, was weakened. The “creative tensions” between government and movements threatened to become destructive.

Created at a high point of mobilization and polarization in 2006, Venezuela’s Bolivarian communal councils have often been conceived as one of the most radical initiatives emerging from the pink tide, combining massive redistribution of state resources with popular empowerment. The idea of the councils was to foster the popular capacities of ordinary people, creating a communal state as the legitimate expression of popular power and community. The result was an unprecedented boost in popular participation. It is not surprising, however, as Boni details in this issue, that the concrete dynamics of popular empowerment were far more complex. There was much variation in terms of who participated, what their aims were, how they were run, their relation to the state, and the extent to which they advanced radical goals. Heavily dependent on oil revenues, they never fully broke with the logic of clientelism. The communal councils were characterized by tensions between two aspects of their character: their self-management and their role as channels for electoral patronage. While some were seen as vehicles for radical autonomy, others were more technical-clientelistic in nature: the former were often in conflict with government officials, while the latter tended toward a more clientelistic approach to community management in terms of securing access to resources.

Political Challenges

A turn in the direction of the progressive governments began in the wake of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis. At first its impact was muted in Latin America, but it slowed down the growth of China, which had generated much of the demand for raw materials in the previous era. Social tensions began to mount, and the social and political wings of the left-of-center governments began to diverge. We can date the change to the death of Chávez in 2013, which had more than a subjective impact on the plans for regional integration under an anti-imperialist banner. It also led to the breakup of the Venezuelan political order and encouraged the mobilization of a hard right opposition in Venezuela and beyond. The dominant classes saw an opportunity to fight back after having to some extent acquiesced in the turn to the left so long as their fundamental interests were not threatened.

In 2015 a right-wing business leader swept to power in Argentina, effectively labeling the Kirchner regime corrupt and inefficient. He inaugurated a new phase of “postpolitical” antileft politics dubbed populist, with a focus on effective economic management. It is, however, significant that he did not try to openly roll back the social gains of the previous era. In a different way, Lula’s successor in Brazil was overthrown through a constitutional coup in Brazil in 2016, again with corruption a major theme. In Chile, after a long period of stable center-left governance, another millionaire, Sebastián Piñera, swept into power in the 2017 elections, gaining an unprecedented 55 percent of the popular vote (on social movements and political parties in Chile, see Albala and Tricot Salomon in this issue). The Conservatives were again electable and did not need to rely on the army.

The intense explosion of political activity that surrounded the left’s rise to power and the subsequent disillusionment and tensions that surrounded the progressive government project raise once again the question whether electoral strategy is still a viable option for radical politics. The diverse experiences of the Latin American left in power require a broader discussion on how a transformative agenda can be pursued through the electoral system while continuing the struggle outside of it. Co-optation and demobilization of the social movements is not a forgone conclusion: some of the contributions to this issue show that movements developed many initiatives to mitigate this threat. Thus, rather than falling into decline, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement—MST) was able to strengthen and consolidate its leadership and internal organization under the PT government. The MST’s success was largely due to the movement’s organizing structure and political strategy, which it labeled the accumulation of forces. Pahnke points out that, because of changing state policies under the PT government, including efforts to regularize landholdings and increases in resources and programs, public sympathy for the MST declined and its capacity to mobilize was curtailed. In response, the MST went through a long process of discussion and debate on the struggle for agrarian reform under changed conditions. Part of this strategy involved a more nuanced understanding of the state and its institutions. It also recognized the internal weaknesses of the movement, including a lack of creativity among the rank and file, an overeconomistic approach to organizing, and a lack of political education, self-criticism, and debate. These reflections point to an awareness that social movements need to develop and strengthen their own organization through different political conjunctures. This is important not only for the continuation of the movements themselves but also because only strong movements will ensure that a progressive government moves in a leftist direction.

Thus we need to understand better how social movements build, develop, and become consolidated internally. Rossi and von Bülow (2016: 31) refer to this process of building from experience and learning processes as the “stock of legacies” process: “the concatenation of past struggles, which, through the sedimentation of what is lived and perceived to be lived as well as what is intentionally learned, produces an accumulation of experience that adds or eliminates specific strategies from the repertoire of strategies as both a self-conscious and oblivious process.” Movements can thus learn how to retain their autonomy in their interactions with the state. Cogovernance can, indeed, “deepen” democracy, permitting both a redistribution of wealth and resources, on the one hand, and a development of popular capacities, on the other. Burridge’s contribution below explores how, through tactics of “critical collaboration,” El Salvador’s feminist movements were able to work alongside government institutions, participating in the formulation, implementation, and oversight of public policies. By engaging in the public policy-making arena, these movements were able to oversee tangible results in the defense of women’s rights, gender equality in community development, and the securing of leadership positions for feminist activists in state institutions.

A strategy of critical collaboration by social movements can thus deepen emancipatory processes and help revitalize state institutions without becoming subordinated to state power. This requires a commitment to building grassroots strength through organizational independence—projects for training, education, and leadership development and participation in local administration bodies such as community water boards or food distribution networks. The experience of feminist cogovernance demonstrates that local and national government institutions can be open to the possibility of restructuring public administrative apparatuses on the basis of critical civil society dialogue. However, in order for these small-scale achievements to be expanded, left governments need to respond to public criticism to prevent a bureaucratic style of leadership from developing. There is no template that can be mechanically applied in all circumstances where social movements interact with progressive governments, but both mobilizing, educating, and consolidating at the grassroots level, engaging with institutions, and building political organization are certainly required. This means returning to the emancipatory visions and utopian practices of the social movements while also engaging with dominant institutions—particularly the state. The second part of this issue, to appear in September, will take up these and other strategic dilemmas in a more concrete and focused way.

This Issue

This issue starts with a scene-setting piece by Ronaldo Munck that introduces the main theories seeking to explain the nature of social movements in Latin America and calls for an indigenous theory to replace the current impasse between the political opportunity approach and the new social movement theory. Inspired by Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch), Munck stresses the centrality of complexity for an understanding of social movements from a grounded Latin American perspective based on lived experience. This is an approach that guards us against reducing the whole to the sum of its parts. We are urged to go beyond current dichotomies between being and becoming and also understand (as Cortázar was trying to do) that order and disorder are an integral part of all physical and social worlds. This is also a call to go beyond the Northern accounts of iconic social movements such as those of the Zapatistas, Chilean students, Brazilian landless peasants, and Argentina’s piqueteros, which may provide international icons but do not deliver a strategy for transformation in Latin America. We lose the multilayered complexity of the real social movements and their inevitable contradictions when we opt for the heroic mode.

This is followed by three articles on Bolivia under the MAS government of Evo Morales, often taken to be the epitome of the post-2000 progressive governments. John Brown focuses on confrontations between the MAS-led government and sectors of Morales’s original support base that have raised concerns regarding Bolivia’s proceso de cambio. Supported by empirical analysis of the Central Obrero Regional (Regional Workers’ Union—COR) and the Federación de Juntas Vecinales (Federation of Neighborhood Associations—FEJUVE) in El Alto, this article examines how extensive and intensive linkages forged between the MAS and its base during confrontations with conservative forces would later debilitate the contestatory power of the popular organizations. Furthermore, the MAS’s efforts to curb the autonomy of the popular organizations fostered internal organizational splits that it and the right-wing Unidad Nacional (National Unity—UN) parties actively promoted. The upshot was the emergence of parallelism whereby two versions of COR and FEJUVE exist side-by-side, one aligned with the MAS, the other with UN. In this scenario the capacity of the base to hold the government to popular demands is greatly diminished. The progressive government could either emphasize consolidation or further radicalize the process. While the MAS mandate was to boost the quality of political and social citizenship for the popular sectors, it has faced global, regional, and national pressures from the forces of capital to adhere to promarket norms and adopt a centrist policy program.

Soraia de Carvalho takes up the oppression of indigenous nationalities under capitalism through a critical analysis of Bolivia under the government of Evo Morales. She proposes a class-struggle lens that emphasizes the neoliberal policies beginning in the late 1980s and the subsequent weakening of the traditional labor movement. The constituent assembly restored the credibility of democracy in Bolivia and enabled the emergence of a new, strong indigenous social movement. There are limits to this new constitutional order, according to Carvalho, who stresses the incompatibility between the continuation of large-scale private property ownership and a commitment to self-determination by the indigenous peoples of Bolivia. In theoretical terms she contrasts the often-used “heterogeneous society” frame of René Zavaleta Mercado with that of the legendary Trotskyist labor leader Guillermo Lora, who advanced a “combined and uneven” development frame for an understanding of capitalist development and social movements in Bolivia.

Also focused on the Bolivia of Evo Morales is the piece by Angus McNelly, which examines the nature of social movement incorporation into Morales’s political project. Drawing on the theoretical framework of passive revolution and the second incorporation in Latin America, McNelly argues that Morales’s first presidential term was marked by a policy of incorporation of the militant social movements through both economic and political concessions. By 2010 this policy had limited the capacity of the social movements to mobilize for change and they had become largely reactive or defensive movements protecting the gains from the previous period and state–social-movement relations. Taken together with the Brown and Carvalho articles, this article contributes to our understanding of whether the MAS government represented a break from the previous period and whether the discourse of “a government of social movements” has actually transformed state-society relations.

We turn next to the Southern Cone and the relationship with unions and other social movements of the progressive governments deemed populist, such as that of Argentina. Leandro Gamallo addresses the social conflicts in Argentina during the Kirchner administrations (2003–2015) and briefly describes the reconfiguration of popular organizations after Mauricio Macri’s victory in 2015. The article links three fundamentals of collective action—contentious actors, their demands, and their modes of struggle—to the dynamics of the political-institutional processes and, to a lesser extent, to the different models of economic development. They are seen as independent but interrelated in such a way that alterations in one area lead to changes in the others. The article concludes that the field of social conflict in Argentina has undergone important changes since the country’s return to democracy in 1983. Collective action has expanded to multiple actors, channeled weightier demands, and expanded its forms of manifestation. This heterogenization of conflict seems to be irreversible, given the complexity that runs through the popular sectors and middle classes in their various labor, identity, and political insertions. This does not mean that the working class has forever lost its leading role in social conflict; it is simply a matter of acknowledging the transformations in the world of labor and the coexistence of workers’ struggles with a broad spectrum of social movements.

The next article, by Fabricio Carneiro, Guillermo Fuentes, and Carmen Midaglia, draws on the theory of power resources to analyze and interpret the relations between political parties and union movements in Latin America in the first 15 years of the twenty-first century. The union movement is a classic social agent supportive of the redistribution of wealth in Western societies that had a significant impact in European countries during the twentieth century. Latin America did not, however, have an economic and political context similar to those of the developed nations despite promoting a pattern of growth since the 1950s favoring state intervention, the import-substitution industrialization model. Nevertheless, liberal democracy was far from being consolidated on the continent. Repression of popular demands, including those of unions, became a regular government strategy, whether of the successive dictatorships or of the new “emerging democracies” of the 1980s. During the first 15 years of the twenty-first century the possibility opened up for a new relationship between the state and the collective social actors, the unions in particular, in a context unprecedented for the region marked by economic integration and a more favorable political context for the organization of the labor movement.

Following on with the Southern Cone focus, Adrian Albala and Victor Tricot Salomon turn to an analysis of the emergence of issues around social movements and collective action in posttransition Chile. Studying the intersection of the main political elites and a quantitative and qualitative analysis of social movements and collective action, they focus on the emergence since the beginning of the 2000s of myriad social movements. In addition to the high-profile student movement of 2011, initially condemning the cost of university study and then including more structural demands, other movements focusing on diverse issues emerged or became visible. While these new demands on the part of Chilean civil society constitute proof of their “normalization,” what stands out about these events is the profound transformation of the parameters of political identification. Political parties that used to represent social transformation in Chile seem to have lost their capacity for mobilization and been replaced by collective action and social movements, both spontaneous and more structured and organized. We see the coexistence of an apparently very institutionalized party system but one weakly linked to civil society, with a high level of mistrust of parties and low electoral participation.

Next Daniel Burridge directs our attention to the complex relations between feminist movements and political transformation through a case study of El Salvador. The article interrogates the complexities and horizons of the negotiated relationships between feminist social movements and state institutions controlled by the leftist FMLN party. On the basis of ethnographic research in the semiurban municipality of Suchitoto, the article shows that “critical collaboration” characterizes the local feminist movement’s efforts to work alongside state actors in the formulation, implementation, and oversight of public policies addressing women’s rights, violence against women, and gender-equitable community development. Critical collaboration means that civil society actors interested in deepening emancipatory processes under moderate leftist governments need not be subordinated to constituted state power or contentiously confront it. Rather, by pursuing their agendas through critical engagement with sympathetic state institutions, feminist movements may engender practices and demands for flexible and responsive “cogovernance” that radically transform elements of the state and society in the long run. This article helps us foreground the interactions between leftist social movements and left-controlled state institutions and go beyond simplistic dichotomies such as confrontation vs. co-optation, in which movements see their struggles absorbed and neutralized by ostensibly sympathetic state institutions.

This theme is continued in the next article, by Stefano Boni, which addresses the state’s compatibility with the autonomous sovereignty of popular sectors in the socialist policies of Chávez’s Venezuela known as poder popular (popular power), intended to promote citizens’ direct exercise of power on local issues. Its most relevant and widespread implementation is the communal councils, neighborhood assemblies that have received sizable state funding to implement self-managed projects ranging from house renovation to local public works and from social events to small-scale productive activities. Their establishment and operation in Cumaná (Estado Sucre)—their successes and failures, popular involvement and personal corruption—are examined. The specific contribution of the paper is the ethnographic focus on the ambiguous role within the communal councils of political brokers employed by local administrations and heading the party’s smallest organizational units. Attention is paid to the way the incorporation of forms of direct democracy into larger institutions (the government and the party) hinders the exercise of autonomy.

Finally, we turn to Brazil, one of the countries where the left in government was backed by strong social movements. Luminiƫa-Anda Mandache takes the example of the Palmas Bank project, on the periphery of Fortaleza, to explore the contradictions embedded in the solidarity economy project in Brazil. The article argues that the solidarity economy, rooted in local liberation theology practices, can hardly be seen as form of practicing a human or alternative economy, because its proximity to party politics through its funding and its institutionalization affected not only its long-term social sustainability but also its capacity to have a political voice. This case study sheds light on the challenges of grassroots organizing under progressive regimes, in a moment in time that obliges activists to learn from the past if they want to put in place more sustainable forms of community organization.

In a review of the complex relationship between the PT and the Landless Movement in Brazil, Anthony Pahnke returns to the theme mentioned above of the need to go beyond a friend-or-foe model. For the Brazilian Landless Movement, it is difficult to clearly characterize the PT administrations of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2002–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016). For instance, shortly before his successful bid to become Brazil’s thirty-fifth president in 2002, Lula, whose support for the Landless Movement dates to its emergence in the early 1980s, stated that a PT government would lead “a real agrarian reform” through “expropriating large estates.” His statement carried tremendous weight for the Landless Movement, which includes the MST, its many allies, and the more than 1.5 million people who have been engaged in a multidecade struggle for agrarian reform. But Lula’s claims also worried Brazil’s economic elite, and he then issued the infamous “Letter to the Brazilian People” to emphasize his commitment to free-market capitalism and reassure the markets. This ambiguity with respect to the Landless Movement and its struggle for agrarian reform continued throughout Lula’s time in office and that of his successor Dilma.

Finally, Emelio Betances analyzes a social movement in the Dominican Republic that through an active campaign from 2009 to 2012 forced the government to implement the commitment to spend 4 percent of the gross domestic product on preuniversity schooling. Framed in terms of the political opportunity structures approach, this piece examines what creates the conditions for success for a social movement. It shows how the movement, initiated by teachers themselves, managed to create a broad alliance and the political support necessary to force a concession by government. Ultimately, however, the movement was a victim of its own success, unable to continue mobilization to force the government to deliver on its promise.

The contributions to this issue have not sought definitive answers to the dilemmas posed by the left in power or at least in office. The social movements during the progressive wave did achieve a degree of partial recognition by the state, and their reach was broadened, but there was also a tendency to co-opt or domesticate the social movements in the interests of political expediency. This is not surprising and reflects the tensions between the social and political aspects of transformation. We have brought together here a rich set of experiences from the various progressive perspectives. The social movements will continue to organize and mobilize, and the parties of the left will continue to seek power. We are now clearer on the structural constraints posed when the left achieves political office. We can learn the lessons and seek to understand what it means for the future. In Part 2 of this issue we will continue to map the terrain of social transformation from a social movement perspective.