Transformative Possibilities in Latin America

L atin America has been the cutting edge of struggles worldwide against neoliberalism. Several alternatives to the dominant model of global capitalism appear to be emerging in the region. A new model of revolutionary struggle and popular transformation from below for the 21 st century may be emerging, based on the Venezuelan experience, but more broadly, on mass popular struggles in Ecuador, Bolivia, and elsewhere. Yet global capital has been able to blunt some of these struggles from above and a reformist bloc allied with global capital seems to be competing to shape a post-neoliberal era. Neoliberalism, we should recall, is but one model of global capitalism; resistance to this model is not necessarily resistance to global capitalism. Behind the so-called 'pink tide' that has swept the region are competing configurations of social and class forces, ideologies, programs and policies. The crossroad that Latin America has reached is not about 'reform versus revolution' as much as it is about what social and political forces will achieve hegemony over the anti-neoliberal struggle and what kind of project will replace the orthodox programs that have ravaged the region over the past 25 years. As long as neoliberalism reigned supreme and the neoliberal states remained impenetrable fortresses the refusal to deal with state power appeared reasonable. The neoliberal national state is not a space for engaging in politics ; it is an apparatus for the technocratic administration of transnational capital accumulation, infrastructure, and social control. But what is the historical context here? The dominant groups in Latin America reconstituted and consolidated their control over political society in the 1980s and 1990s, but the new round of popular class mobilization in the 1990s and early 21 st century pointed to their inability to sustain hegemony in civil society. The renewal of political activism by subordinate groups at the grassroots level has been outside of state structures and largely independent of organized left parties. Grassroots social movements flourished in civil society at a time