Latin American Perspectives at 50!

What I wrote for the celebration of its 25^th Anniversary in 1998 remains as true now as it was then, and it is that under the stewardship of its Managing Editor Ron Chilcote, and the Collective Coordinating Editors, LAP remains the premier journal of the Left on Latin America and the Caribbean, and second to none on the quality and intellectual rigor of the articles it publishes. It has achieved that status, not by insisting on a dogmatic interpretation of Marx’s writings or of Marxist perspectives that conform to a particular version of it (e.g., Lenisist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Guevarist, Castroist, Gramscian, Luxemburgist), but by offering arguments that may draw on their writings and those of other scholars/activists that contribute to critical analyses of Latin American and Caribbean societies.

In the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1973), Marx pointed to the need to distinguish between the abstract concepts and categories that are specific to the capitalist mode of production and the actual, concrete development of that social system in space and time. This means that when we are analyzing specific countries in the contemporary capitalist world economy, we need to consider its class structures and relations of production, and its position in the international division of labor and relations to other countries that foster or impede the development of its social, cultural, and productive forces.

To illustrate these points, I did a random search of articles published in the journal between 2000 and 2023.

In Vol. 34, Issue 1, 2007, Orlando Caputo Leiva revisits the dominant view that the United States is the hegemonic power whose policies based on global finance and production for profit shaped the modern world economy. Instead, he argues, the emergence of China and its increasing role in global production and commerce could in fact shift the preeminence of financial over productive capital and make the world more dependent on the latter than on the United States.

In Vol. 39, Issue 2, 2011, Tanya L. Saunders’s article “Black Thoughts, Black Activism: Cuban Underground Hip-hop and Afro-Latino Countercultures of Modernity” shows how young Afro-Cubans created links to a wider transnational Afro-diasporic movement for social equality through their underground networks. The public presence of these artists, she argues, increased their visibility throughout the Americas, and although it also challenged the depiction of Cuba as a repressive state, it showed that it still has a long way to go to eliminate racism notwithstanding its redistributive policies.

In Vol. 47, Issue 1, 2019, Afredo Saad-Filho offers a critique of the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil under the Lula and Rousseff governments between 2006 and 2013. That article dealt with the tension between the party’s commitment to income redistribution, social inclusion, and democratization of the state, and its attachment to and inability to challenge the neoliberal policies championed by the international financial institutions in the 1980s. It showed how the inability or unwillingness of the Workers’ Party to confront the constraints of these policies to transform Brazil’s class relations led to the imposition of what it calls an authoritarian variety of neoliberalism.

In Vol. 49, Issue 4, 2022, Ronaldo Munck analyzes the thought and practice of José Carlos Mariátegui to develop a Marxism that is appropriate to the realities of Latin America to create what he called a “practical socialism.” To do so he had to break with his previous attachment to an orthodox European interpretation of Marxism to develop one that was relevant to the Amerindian people.

I could go on. But the descriptions of the randomly chosen articles make my point that LAP continues to be the premier outlet for the dissemination of first rate, critical, undogmatic analyses of the social, cultural, political, and economic realities and dynamics of Latin American and Caribbean societies.