Rethinking Latin America

Mariátegui’s Problematic

Rethinking Latin America today from a left perspective might well take inspiration from the work and example of José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), the Peruvian socialist and labor organizer who set out to “Latinamericanize” Marx and make him “fit for purpose” in a continent that he misunderstood so badly (see Aricó, 1983). Mariátegui had an intense engagement with Peruvian social, economic, political, and cultural reality in the period leading up to 1930, when a major crisis and transition period opened up in Latin America. The 1920s saw a whole series of upheavals among the indigenous peoples of Peru that shaped or, rather, reshaped Mariátegui’s political vision for change. This was also, of course, the period when the great Mexican Revolution was coming to the close of its most active phase. Far away, in Russia, the October Revolution of 1917 brought onto the world scene a new world-historical subject, the proletariat, and a bold ideology for social transformation, Leninism. Mariátegui, during this tumultuous period, laid the foundations for an original and critical Marxist understanding of Latin America in his writings and a political practice that is, once again, receiving renewed attention in a continent at the forefront of conflict and change.

In his short but very active and influential career Mariátegui was a labor organizer, an exile in Europe, a radical journalist, and a leader of the emerging Latin American communist movement. His early career as a journalist shaped his crisp, unpretentious writing style and led him to support the revolutionary demands of students and workers around 1917. In 1919 the dictator Augusto Leguía sent Mariátegui into exile; he went first to France (where he met Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse) and soon after to Italy, where he witnessed the mobilization of the landmark Turin workers’ councils of 1919 and the founding of the Italian Communist Party in 1921. Returning to Peru as a committed Marxist, he threw himself into worker education (through the emerging democratic nationalist leader Haya de la Torre) and in 1926 founded the influential journal Amauta, dedicated to critical ideas in all spheres of life. In 1928 he launched the Partido Socialista Peruano, serving as its first secretary general, and published his main work, the Siete Ensayos. The Partido Socialista Peruano was a broad-based socialist party (with a communist core) that went on to organize the Central General de Trabajadores del Perú to organize and lead the workers’ movement.

Mariátegui’s Marxism was what we might call a “warm” one, far removed from the scientific pretensions of the analytical and theoreticist Marxisms (Althusserianism) that dominated Latin America during the 1970s. His whole rationale was one of practical engagement with the lives of workers and indigenous peasants. He was never a follower of Leninist “theoretical practice” or the theoretical preoccupations of what later became known as “Western Marxism.” Far removed from grandiose or general ideas, he focused his energies on social transformation as a result of popular practices and traditions. Rejecting all forms of a “class essentialism” that would reduce life to its class origins, Mariátegui focused on the broad, emancipatory potential of social, popular, and ethnic social forces. His thinking and practice were the very antithesis of the statism that came to dominate Latin American Marxism. For him there was an overwhelming need for a practical socialism—springing from the daily practices of the subaltern classes—that would change society and for a strong state that would act from above. His fascination with Peru’s Inca past was not with the Inca state (and what orthodox Marxists called its Asiatic mode of production) but with its communal social practices and ethos, which he saw as prefigurative of communism.

Mariátegui also understood nationalism and the national question better than most Marxists of his era, and his approach is becoming influential again today. International debates tended to be polarized between a Leninist pragmatics around “national self-determination” and Rosa Luxemburg’s principled opposition to any tarnishing of the proletarian cause by nationalist colorings. The defense of national sovereignty was for Mariátegui a given, and, for example, he followed closely and supported the Sinn Féin revolution in Ireland at the time. He also offered an early critique of Eurocentrism, declaring roundly that “socialism was an international doctrine, but its internationalism ended within the confines of the West” (Mariátegui, 1969: 136). Only socialism, however, could for him achieve the unity of Nuestra América (Our America) and supersede the little nationalisms that had emerged since independence. At the same time, Mariátegui eschewed all forms of backward-looking romanticism or populism. He was greatly influenced by the Italian avant-garde cultural currents of the time and reveled in futurism. He was a firm promoter of internationalism. Thus he was well placed to break with current (and subsequent) sterile counterpositions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Latin America.

Finally, Mariátegui provided an early Marxist engagement with the situation and aspirations of the Amerindian peoples, breaking with his own early, quite orthodox socialism in a European frame. He began to focus on the land question as the main underlying factor in Amerindian subjugation. Above all, he argued against all forms of paternalism—the liberation of the Amerindian peoples was a matter for themselves. His analysis was based on an early critique of Marxist and mainstream arguments on “dualism” between country and city and between advanced and backward sectors of the economy. Rather, these were seen to be in dialectical unity, and the path of social transformation needed to be conceived in a holistic way. Mariátegui is extremely contemporary again today in his analysis of the “indigenous communist economy” and even the “agrarian communism” of the ayllu (Inca community), and its principles of reciprocity and redistribution of wealth, its habits of cooperation and solidarity, and its “communist spirit” were for him harbingers of the socialist transformation required in Peru and Latin America more broadly. These categories are very much part of contemporary debates in the Andean countries under left-of-center governments today (see García Linera, 2006).

Mariátegui’s political thinking and practice have been pulled in many ways by his followers and critics, having been seen as a populist, romantic, and bourgeois nationalist and devoid of a concept of power. Today, as Miguel Mazzeo (2009: 57) says, “We need a Mariátegui who is at once prelude and spring, path and promise” to help us in the task of rethinking, reinventing, and reimagining what Latin America is and what the options for its transformation now are.

Mariátegui shared with Gramsci a strong antipositivist philosophy, and it is well to recall that the latter welcomed the Russian revolution with an article called “A Revolution Against Capital” (Gramsci, 1978), thus firmly rejecting the mechanical evolutionism of Marxism at that time. But Mariátegui went a lot farther in adapting much of Sorel’s rhetoric of revolutionary myth: “The proletariat has a myth: the social revolution. It moves toward that myth with a passionate and active faith. The bourgeoisie denies; the proletariat affirms” (Vanden and Becker, 2011: 387). The emphasis on faith, passion, and will was a source of acute discomfort for many orthodox Mariátegui scholars, and they tended to relegate this strand to a youthful error or unfortunate personal deviation. However, shorn of its class essentialism—the proletariat as unique revolutionary subject—the emphasis on subjective will and the reality that social transformations do not occur in a purely rational laboratory-like domain has much contemporary relevance.

Following Mariátegui we could say that “we do not want American socialism to be a copy or an imitation, it should be a heroic creation. We must give life to Indo-American socialism with our own life, in our own language” (Vanden and Becker, 2011: 130). This statement should not be read as a simple nativist reaction to a foreign import, and Mariátegui’s internationalism was never in doubt. It was, however, a view that was very conscious of the deeply Eurocentric nature of contemporary reformist socialism. Today we still see a tendency, both in mainstream political analysis and in radical contestation of the status quo, to mirror North Atlantic views of the world and analytical approaches. To rethink Latin America it is necessary to develop a Latin American perspective that prioritizes the actually existing social transformation processes on the ground,. In this way Latin American subaltern knowledge can make a genuine contribution to the current search for a social order that is sustainable and equitable after the failure of neoliberal globalization to deliver on its promises.

Gramsci and Peripheral Hegemony

In a period when the old political approaches are clearly defunct, a fresh reengagement with Gramsci’s thought in Latin America, one not burdened by its uses and abuses in the past, is called for. His thinking is certainly not posed here as a simple key to an understanding of contemporary Latin America. However, the conceptual armory he developed in prison after the defeat of socialism in Italy has considerable purchase on Latin American reality and may provide some leverage for its progressive transformation. Above all from Gramsci, as from Mariátegui, we can take a firm commitment to Marxism as critique and not as dogma. It is very much a creative Marxism, flexible and not at all closed off to other intellectual currents. Gramsci’s was a consistent and unique drive to forge a political vocabulary capable of understanding peripheral capitalist social formations and arming the subaltern classes with an alternative strategy to submission and adaptation.

If Mariátegui sought to “Latinamericanize Marx,” we might also (following Portantiero, 1983, and Aricó, 1988) seek to “Latinamericanize” Gramsci. What he provides us with is an extremely rich repertoire of concepts—from passive revolution to organic crisis, from the national-popular to hegemony and counterhegemony—of relevance to an understanding of contemporary Latin America. There is also a clear methodology based on an understanding of national realities and the invaluable advice to balance “optimism of the will” with “pessimism of intelligence.” However, I would also argue that to be known properly his work needs to be grounded in the reality of current popular struggles in Latin America and their aspiration to create a world beyond neoliberalism. In the current era of globalization and its crisis, the struggle for emancipation in Latin America takes multiple forms. Gramsci in Latin America, alongside Mariátegui, may assist us in deconstructing the hegemonic imaginary of neoliberalism and constructing a counterhegemonic culture.

Gramsci’s theoretical and practical engagement with Italy’s social, economic, and political development provides us with a rich repertoire of concepts relevant to a rethinking of Latin America along these lines. He focused on “the typical peripheral states, like Italy, Poland, Spain or Portugal, [where] the state forces are less efficient” (Gramsci, 1978: 409). Latin American states were and still are peripheral in the global order, and they are characterized by a late development. Suitably contextualized—within Gramsci’s own political workshop, as it were—this is an engagement with political questions that could be inspirational for our present need for a grounded critical analysis.

The Italy that Gramsci engaged with was characterized by uneven development—symbolized in the status of the Mezzogiorno—and national unification was not easily achieved. In an unfinished 1926 essay entitled “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (Gramsci, 1978: 441) he traced the relationship between city and countryside that underlay uneven development and hindered the political unification of the country, which occurred only in 1860. Economic, political, and social integration had hitherto been weak,and the nation-state was not consolidated until the Risorgimento. Securing national unification also involved the institutional integration of the state, consistently a major focus for Gramsci. As Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (1971: 45) put it, “The basic problem confronting Gramsci was that of identifying the specific weaknesses of the Italian national state which emerged from the Risorgimento [which culminated in unification in 1861]—weaknesses which culminated in the advent to power of fascism sixty years later.”

Italian unification was not seen as a classic bourgeois revolution, and revolutionary France was a constant counterpoint. In Italy, according to Gramsci (1971: 105), “what was involved was not a social group which ‘led’ other groups, but a state which, even if it had limitations as a power, ‘led’ the group which should have been leading.” It is this insight that lies behind Gramsci’s key concept of a “passive revolution,” which has, I will argue, great resonance in Latin America. The Italian Risorgimento is one such case, in which we witness not a revolution but “molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes” (109). This is a historical process that Gramsci also dubs “revolution/restoration,” and in Latin America we can detect clear parallels in the early twentieth-century processes of “conservative modernization,” in which change from above co-opts and defuses demands for change from below.

If there is one overarching concept that provides a key to the overall Gramscian paradigm for social transformation, it is the notion of hegemony. For Gramsci, hegemony is the process through which a social class produces itself as a historical subject. It moves beyond narrow class interest to achieve consensus across society. It reflects a process of leading rather than merely dominating the rest of society. A hegemonic system leads to the creation of a “historic bloc” in which the hegemonic class dominates society through the institutions of political society (state-government) and civil society (state-society). Hegemony rests not on coercion alone but also, fundamentally, on consent.

The whole history of Latin America since the Conquest could be seen as a struggle for hegemony by the dominant classes. There was no “bourgeois revolution” in the classic Jacobin sense of the French Revolution. There was no bourgeoisie conquérante rising to modernize the country against reactionary feudal landowners. Rather, hegemony was always a fragile affair based on compromise with the established order. There were, of course, dominant classes, but they were rarely constituted into a stable and powerful ruling class that could achieve consent and not just domination.

The political economy of national development under the import-substitution-industrialization model after 1930 had as its correlate the compromise state typical of the populist period. The economic crisis of the 1930s and the subsequent crisis of political representation had prompted the need for a renewal of the historic bloc. The agrarian oligarchy retained a position of dominance, but it had clearly lost its hegemonic role. Industrialization was creating a working class, but the important role of foreign capital prevented the emergence of a strong national bourgeoisie that could articulate a coherent alternative hegemonic project. The compromise state and the populist modality of politics represented a form of political domination typical of a power vacuum, with no class able to assume a hegemonic role.

The “compromise state” was the form of state appropriate to the national-popular era and the commitment to state-led industrialization. The era of oligarchic hegemony, in which the state simply expressed the interests of one particular social class or group, was over. The unstable equilibrium between different dominant sectors, some going up, some going down, meant that they would have to reach compromises with each other. As Garretón et al. (2003: 15) put it, “The resulting political formula was a hybrid democracy and authoritarianism, around which emerged, in an uneven, often implicit, and sometimes tension-ridden fashion, an informal coalition of the most significant social and political actors in order to sustain it.” The decline of the oligarchic order had led to a period of great instability in many countries, including the emergence of military regimes. Industrialization and urbanization had created a new social order, but the political system adapted to it only slowly. The form of democracy that emerged was, naturally enough, one that reflected these conditions and did not mirror the European liberal democratic model.

The national-popular compromise state in Latin America played a crucial role in bringing the subaltern classes into the political arena. The dominant interpretation of it and the populist discourse underpinning it has been that it was included by the dominant classes to co-opt or disarm the subaltern masses. Certainly there was an element of Gramscian transformismo to it, in which progressive sectors find their discourse taken over by conservative modernizers, but that is not the only interpretation possible. The interpretation that prioritizes manipulation ignores the very real element of popular mobilization that the compromise state either facilitated or led to indirectly. For example, while it is undoubtedly true that Perón manipulated the working classes in Argentina and even possibly diverted them from an evolution toward socialism continuing the trend of the 1930s, Peronism also represented a massive entry of the subaltern into politics and a radical rupture of the oligarchic landowning elites’ grip on power.

In terms of Gramsci’s elaboration of a complex theory of the state fit for purpose in the modern democratic era, the Latin American experience considerably enriches his Prison Notebooks. The period of passive revolution had led to the national development of capital accumulation but in a manner that did not resolve the inherent political contradictions of the process. The hegemonic project was at best incomplete, and certainly it did not create a sustainable democracy. What occurred, rather, was an acceleration of instability mirroring the progressive variant of Caesarism in the Gramscian vocabulary: “Caesarism is progressive when its intervention leads the progressive force to triumph, albeit with its victory tempered by certain compromises and limitations” (Gramsci, 1971: 222). The 1930s was indeed a period of crisis, and the contradictions of the old regime came to the fore. From the resulting catastrophic balance of forces between the various social forces emerged the compromise state as a particular expression of Gramsci’s progressive Caesarism albeit with a much stronger national-popular coloration.

This statist-national-popular sociopolitical matrix, as Garretón et al. call it, was quite stable in its heyday. The development model was based on national industrialization led by the state. The political system of representation was based on a compromise state that showed both democratic and authoritarian tendencies, but there came a time when the contradictions of the import-substitution-industrialization model and of the compromise state burst into the open. One watershed moment was the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil that brought to power the first of the “modern” military dictatorships. The mass mobilizations under the Goulart government combined with the state’s ineffectiveness in controlling them and the economic conditions of the time to create a perception—perhaps exaggerated—of regime instability or even crisis among the dominant classes. The military organized an effective takeover committed to order and stability and providing an impetus to the economy through the disciplining of labor. We could, from a Gramscian perspective, hypothesize that the underlying objective of the 1964 coup was to create a more stable hegemonic bourgeois order.

Polanyi and the Double Movement

A combination of global economic transformations and Latin American political shifts came together in a decisive move to impose free-market politics in the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. The previously dominant development model was no longer delivering in economic terms, and it had failed to secure stable hegemonic governance. The result was a process of market “disembedding,” a concept found in Gramsci’s early political economy and the World War II–period theorizing by Karl Polanyi on the relationship between market and society. According to Polanyi (2001: 3), writing during the cataclysm of the war, “The fount and matrix of the [capitalist] system was the self-regulating market.” Polanyi traces market society as we know it to Britain’s Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Previous societies had been organized on principles of exchange, reciprocity, and redistribution; now market-based exchange would be the sole form of social and economic integration. Markets were previously an accessory feature in a system controlled and regulated by social authority. Henceforth the market ruled unchallenged and changed society in its image. “A market economy can exist only in a market society” (74). The self-regulating or self-adjusting market was, for Polanyi, a “stark-utopia” in the sense that it could never be achieved. “Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surrounding into a wilderness” (3). In modern terminology, the self-regulating market was neither socially nor environmentally sustainable.

Central to Polanyi’s noneconomistic understanding of the contemporary economy was the notion of “embeddedness,” which has since led to a copious literature in economic sociology. For Polanyi, the economy is normally embedded in social relations; it is not autonomous. The self-sufficient precapitalist peasant household was regulated not by the market but by a moral order. Even when mercantilism began to free trade from localism, it was very much regulated. In fact, according to Polanyi (2001: 71), “regulation and markets, in effect, grew up together.” Economic relations had always been subordinated or submerged within social relations that were at the core of human existence. Even today, at the height of globalization as the dominant development matrix, we find many spheres of social life, such as the household, that are not subordinated to the logic of the market.

The rise of the liberal order requires, however, the systematic “disembedding” of the economy from society. This is an order in which “instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system” (Polanyi, 2001: 135). There are long-term tendencies under capitalism toward marketization, commodification, and what we could call “economization.” They all entail a “disembedding” of the economy and economic relations from social, community, cultural, or religious forms of regulation. What Polanyi analyzed in terms of the “great transformation” wrought by the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century we can see, in a magnified and more intense form, in the globalization revolution of the late twentieth century.

Latin American Pathways

In Latin America this process played out after the compromise state was shattered by military intervention and its development model was equally decisively overthrown. Some analysts point to 1975 as a turning point in this regard that was as decisive and as punctual as 1929 in terms of being able to see a clear before and after. Be that as it may, the transformed and increased role of international finance after that date saw a new form of international integration beginning. Since World War II the more industrialized countries of Latin America had been integrated into the international circuit of production through foreign direct investment. Now the internationalization of the money-capital circuit opened up a new era in which the international financial markets were dominant. Capital flight out of Latin America was a key feature of the 1970s and 1980s, with financial liberalization increasing even further the vulnerability of the Latin American economies. The new financial conglomerates brought profound socioeconomic transformations and also severely weakened the ability of the state to negotiate with foreign capital or take the measures necessary for national economic development, a concept that would itself soon be deemed irrelevant with the arrival of globalization in the 1990s.

The impact of the new economic model was uneven across countries, economic sectors, and social classes. It may not have absolutely restricted the choices open to developing countries, but it certainly set clear limits on what was possible. It acts, as Cardoso (2001: 302) puts it, “more like a fragmenting force than a leveling force which would make the world more homogeneous. It disconnects and reconnects segments of countries locally and internationally as economic growth produces more inequality . . . within.” Just as with the earlier turn in the 1930s toward industrialization, the 1990s adaptation to the new era of globalization was more or less successful depending on the prior level of economic diversification. Thus a Brazil or a Mexico was more likely to have the resources to find a form of integration—albeit subordinate— into the new order on those smaller, less diversified countries that were more likely to continue in a more traditional agro-export form of integration. The latter was the fate of Argentina too after the dramatic collapse of the economy in 2001.

The “bottom line” for the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s was quite simple really. Sebastian Edwards (2010: 97), who was the Latin America head at the World Bank for many years, put it plainly when he declared that

in order to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the world economy—and not to succumb to international competition—countries need a lean and dynamic labor market. Companies should be able to adjust their payrolls quickly and at a low cost. This means that employment laws should be flexible and that hiring and dismissal costs should be kept as low as possible.

While this imperative was a driver of change, it was set within a more ambitious strategic plan to transform the whole society. In retrospect, then, the 1980s were a clear transition phase to a new model of development and social regime of accumulation. Social differentiation was thus accentuated at all levels of society. This was truly a new great transformation, comparable in its impact to the one observed by Polanyi for the emergence of industrialization. Society, politics, and culture would all be utterly transformed by this new order.

Critical analysts were, however, always aware of the contradictions of the neoliberal model. As Marcus Taylor (2009: 67) puts it, “Unfortunately for the neoliberal utopians . . . the vision they pursued was unrealizable owing to the implausibility of the assumptions from which neoclassical assumptions of the market began.” Earlier critics, such as Polanyi, had since World War II clearly expounded on the limitations of a free or unregulated market policy. It was quite simply not a viable or sustainable development strategy. Critics from within such as Joe Stiglitz could be said to want to save globalization from neoliberalism and reconstruct it on a more stable and consensual basis, but, one way or another, the illusion of a “one true way” to development had evaporated.

Within Latin America, the illusions around the Washington Consensus as a viable development strategy began to fade with the so-called Tequila Crisis in Mexico in 1994. In 1995 the Inter-American Development Bank was warning that this crisis showed the vulnerability of the Latin American economies to internal and external shocks (IDB, 1995). This was not just an economic outcome whereby inherent contradictions of the model were coming to the fore. Clearly it was having a political knock-on effect as the social benefits (at least for some sections of the population) were being brought into question. As Francisco Panizza (2009) recounts, the questioning of the paradigm affected even some of the organic intellectuals of the model, such as Sebastian Edwards. Barely a year after publishing a book lauding the achievements of the free-market reforms, Edwards was writing in an influential article in Foreign Affairs that while the region “had gone through a notable transformation, economic results were disappointing and the region’s social situation showed little signs of improvement” (quoted in Panizza, 2009: 124). Reality was beginning to sink in.

No paradigm collapses, however, from its internal contradictions alone. For a considerable period of time it can adjust its theories, models, and policies to suit the changing environment, including facts that contradicted it. Thus the various crisis situations (at least until Argentina’s economic collapse at the end of 2001) could be absorbed and adjustments made. Gradually, however, a post–Washington Consensus emerged that sought to keep faith with its original postulates while modulating the message to suit the more hostile environment and questions being asked. A new development agenda began to take shape without seeking to openly question the old model. The role of the state was quietly reestablished. The combating of poverty and inequality was given a new-found urgency, and it was openly acknowledged that the market did not hold all the answers.

From a broad historical perspective there can be little doubt that it was events in Argentina at the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002 that finally shattered any remaining illusions about neoliberalism as a sustainable hegemonic project. The 1990s had seen Argentina follow a textbook version of the neoliberal development model. By the end of the decade the model was in crisis, and toward the end of 2001 the banks collapsed, with social and economic chaos ensuing. The convertibility of the peso to the U.S. dollar was the linchpin of the neoliberal model, and its collapse meant the model’s collapse. Banks were closed down; small investors saw their savings frozen in the notorious corralito (corral), and the middle classes, for once, rebelled openly. In the months that followed, an alternative social order was forged with neighborhood assemblies and barter clubs set up to compensate for the virtual evaporation of the state. Of course, order was eventually restored, but all had changed for politics in Argentina and the neoliberal model.

The massive mobilization of early 2002 had one overarching slogan—¡Qué se vayan todos! (Let them all go!), by which the demonstrators meant the political class as a whole. This was a genuinely popular—cross-class—rebellion expressing a total rejection of the neoliberal model and the politicians who had imposed it on Argentina. All illusions were at an end: there was total clarity that this path could not continue. The subsequent government of Néstor Kirchner restored social and political stability to Argentina. However, the impact of this episode in Latin America and globally cannot be overestimated. The crisis in Argentina in 2001–2002 was a harbinger of what was to occur in the United States (and across the North) in 2008–2009: the banking system that was at the core of neoliberal financial strategy was no longer stable, and its unraveling would lead to a systemic crisis. Debt default became not only an option but a successful one—something that was promoted as an example in Ireland, for example, in 2009, when the crisis of the euro began to unfold.

Counterhegemonic Moments

While Gramsci was the theorist of hegemony par excellence, it was Karl Polanyi who most clearly articulated a theory of counterhegemony fit for the global era. It is not simply, as some have argued, that Gramsci was a “pessimist” while Polanyi was an “optimist.” They were, in reality, acting in very different contexts, and their political practices were quite distinct. However, they both operated within the broad framework of Marxism even if Gramsci developed a more open Marxism, though Polanyi was influenced by other political strands such as the Christian socialism of the British guilds movement. I think we can find complementary insights from the two political theorists that can inform the post-neoliberal–hegemony era in Latin America.

In a famous passage Gramsci (2011: 169) wrote that “in the East the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relationship between state and civil society, and when the state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was revealed: The state was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements.” Post-1989, a simplified version of Gramsci’s concept of civil society took off internationally, directly influenced by events in Latin America and, later, in Eastern Europe. It basically posited civil society as a democratic space against the state and all forms of state politics. In fact, Gramsci made no firm division between civil society and political society as distinct zones of a social formation. The function of hegemony (civil society) and the function of direct domination (political society or state) were inextricably linked in Gramsci, and the former presupposed the latter.

The East-West distinction has also given rise to very simplistic readings in which Russia = East and Europe = West. However, for Gramsci this was not a simple geographic distinction, nor was the “West” seen as homogeneous. In fact, Gramsci’s passages on Americanism and Fordism (1971: II-3) referred to the weakness of civil society in the United States, and he characterized Italy as an “underdeveloped” civil society given its belated modernity and mixed modern/premodern class structure. Thus in Gramsci’s East-West paradigm the world was not divided into different temporalities. It was a historical and not a geographical-analytical device. We take from this reading the possibilities of placing Latin America in the West category, albeit with the specificities dictated by the nature of its colonization and subsequent development and social transformation.

For its part, Polanyi’s problematic poses the possibility that history advanced through a series of “double movements.” Thus market expansion led to the “one big market” that we call “globalization” today. Yet, as Polanyi (2001: 136) argued and we could argue even more today, “simultaneously a counter-movement was afoot.” This countermovement reacted against the dislocation of society and the attack on the very fabric of society that the self-regulating market led to. The “double movement” consisted of economic liberalism driving the extension of the self-regulating market, on the one hand, and the principle of “social protection,” defending social interests from the deleterious action of the market, on the other. This can be through protective legislation or through various collective associations such as trade unions, as Polanyi showed. As a new way of life spread over the planet—“with a claim to universality unparalleled since the age when Christianity started out on its career” (136)—a diverse countermovement began to check its expansion. This not only involved specific social classes—directly engaged in the process—but also was a generalized societal reaction. It was largely a defensive movement; it was for Polanyi “spontaneous,” and there was no agreed-upon societal or political alternative involved.

Taken in its broadest sense, Polanyi’s notion of a social countermovement could be seen as an incipient theory of counterhegemony. For Gramsci, modern “Western” class orders are able to impose “hegemony” over society as a whole, with consent being as important as the direct control of repression. It is through the organs of civil society—such as churches, schools, trade unions, and the media—that capitalist hegemony is constructed and maintained. Gramsci, in practice an orthodox communist, saw the proletarian party as the agent of counterhegemony. For Polanyi, in contrast, who had broken with both social democracy and communism and was more influenced by the socialist guild and Christian socialist traditions, it was a primarily social reaction to the market that would spur a counterhegemonic movement. Not only the subaltern classes but also powerful capitalist interests would be threatened by the anarchy of the market and would therefore react. For Polanyi (2001: 136), “This was more than the usual defensive behavior of a society faced with change; it was a reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric of society, and which would have destroyed the very organization of production that the market had called into being.”

Movements struggling for national or regional sovereignty, those seeking to protect the environment, and the plethora of movements advancing claims for social justice or recognition are all part of this broad countermovement. In different but interrelated ways they are bids to re-embed the economy in social relations. Challenging the movement toward commodification, they seek to “decommodify” society and reassert moral and cultural values. Against materialism and market-determined values, the social countermovement generated by neoliberal globalization brings to the fore the democracy of civil society and the social value of all we do. As Polanyi (2001: 151) put it for his era, “The great variety of forms in which the ‘collectivist’ counter-movement appeared [was due to] the broad range of the vital social interests affected by the expanding market mechanism.”

Latin American Futures

We could argue that we are now living through an interregnum in Latin America. The national-popular state-based hegemonic model cannot be revived under conditions of globalization, but the neoliberal hegemonic project is, for its part, patently exhausted. As Manuel Antonio Garretón and coauthors (2003: 99) put it, even before the Great Recession, “the region confronts a vacuum left by the failure of the neoliberal project.” They posit the emergence of a new multicentered sociopolitical matrix based not only on continued linkages with the world economy but also on “strengthening autonomy, complementarity, and mutually re-enforceable interactions among the state, the system of representation, and civil society” (100). Examining the extent to which a new development matrix and hegemonic system have been built in the decade since this argument was put forward is now our focus.

We are now faced with the exhaustion of developmentalism without its objectives’ having been achieved. Of course, modernization and development have occurred, but they have not created a stable and sustainable new matrix for development. Francisco de Oliveira (2003: 44) analyzes the limitations and deformations of contemporary Brazil in a way that is clearly relevant to the rest of Latin America, which aims to follow in Brazil’s footsteps. Brazil’s “passive revolution,” according to Oliveira, did achieve a substantial leap forward for the forces of production and the country’s successful adaptation to the Second Industrial Revolution characterized by Fordism. This was a “distinctively Brazilian form of transformismo, as a conservative modernization, or of revolution in production without bourgeois revolution.” Each cycle of modernization—whether led by a civilian or a military government—simply confirmed Brazil’s subordinate role in the international division of labor. Agrarian reform would have gone a long way toward achieving a more thoroughgoing modernization of the relations of production, but no bourgeois force seemed willing or able to achieve this.

Where Oliveira’s analysis becomes most interesting is in this founding member of the Workers’ Party’s withering critique of the Lula government. Essentially he reads it as “a novel combination of neo-populism and party statification, shored up by social-liberal handouts, on the one hand, and government graft, on the other,[which] has helped to forge a new form of class rule that could be characterized as ‘hegemony in reverse’”(Oliveira, 2006: 5). Whether a new class (characterized by its access to public money) has been formed or not is a moot point, but we can certainly see the state morphing into the Workers’ Party and vice versa. Despite Lula’s own unassailable position, the succession of corruption scandals affecting the upper echelons of the party argued poorly for its transformative potential. External dependency remained, and inequality persisted despite some reduction in absolute poverty rates. The working class—which created the Workers’ Party—has been decimated, and informalization/precarization is dominant. Maybe we are witnessing (as in South Africa) a form of hegemony in reverse whereby the dominant class strengthens its grip on the economy while the progressive (or once-progressive) political forces assume the “moral leadership of society.”

If something like “hegemony in reverse” is occurring in Brazil—clearly the vanguard of capitalist development in Latin America—then the prospects for social transformation will have been deferred indefinitely. The Workers’ Party, along with Brazil’s dynamic trade unions and landless peasant movement, came closest to providing an alternative counterhegemony. The globalization of the economy and the decomposition of the working class caused by financialization seem, for example, to close the avenue toward progressive modernization with equity as advocated by the Economic and Political Commission for Latin America. If capitalist rule in Brazil under a leftist government has, indeed, been stabilized, we may be looking at a new political phenomenon. For Oliveira the Gramsican equation of “force + consent = hegemony” has been stood on its head; consent clearly prevails, but “it is no longer the dominated who consent to their own subordination, now it is the dominant who consent to being sensibly ‘led’ by representatives of the dominated—on condition that they do not question the forms of capitalist relations” (Oliveira, 2006: 22). While we cannot yet envisage this analysis as a new paradigm, it should perhaps make us look elsewhere for new counterhegemonic struggles.

Looking Forward

José Carlos Mariátegui, who was rethinking Latin America as the crisis of 1929 loomed, looked toward the indigenous peoples of the Americas for inspiration. Amerindian cultures and identity, could, again today, play an important role in constructing a new matrix for rethinking social transformation. While having very varied relationships to democracy and socialism, the contemporary Amerindian movements have seriously unsettled dominant cultural meanings and created new ways of doing politics. Alternative conceptions of nature, culture, and citizenship have emerged out of these varied struggles, particularly but not exclusively in the Andean countries. While we cannot, of course, generalize the indigenous, cultural politics have unsettled dominant Eurocentric themes such as universality and individualism. Cultural differences are accepted and not subsumed under a false universalism determined by Enlightenment rationalism. Western individualism—with its rational economic actor—gives way to a more complex communal form of belonging and of constructing an alternative future based on traditions and the past.

Amerindian identity and cultural politics also feed directly into the emerging Polanyian countermovement whereby society reacts against its distribution by unregulated market policies. Polanyi himself stresses the very different economic rationality of precapitalist societies, when the “free” market and commodification did not prevail. What we are possibly seeing is the emergence of alternative modernities today. The indigenous movements, according to Fernando Calderón (1988), pose the question of how to be modern and different at the same time—“how to enter modernity without ceasing to be Indians.” The emerging Amerindian politics is a hybrid formation and, just like nationalism, an “invented tradition.” It has not emerged today in direct descent from the Incas and is subject to very modern forms of interpretation and contestation. Perhaps we can follow Carmen Martínez (2010: 30) and “deploy the indigenous as a metaphor to articulate broader political utopias” as part of the (re)imagining and (re)thinking of any counterhegemonic project.

Polanyi’s rather neglected writings on precapitalist societies (see Munck, In press, n.d.) can greatly assist us in this task of recovery of pre-Conquest forms of social interaction beyond the market logic. And from Mariátegui—perhaps more than from Gramsci—we can develop a political approach to match the “magical realism” of Gabriel García Márquez that is so much part of the Latin American “way of seeing” and that allows us to give free rein to creativity and avoid compartmentalizing our thinking.