Table Of Content

Catalyst volume 2 issue 2 summer 2018 3 Editorial 7 101 rené rojas kristen r. ghodsee The Latin American & julia mead Left’s Shifting Tides What Has Socialism Ever Done for Women? 73 benjamin fogel 135 Brazil’s Never- chris maisano Ending Crisis Public Sector Unions After Janus debate 151 183 jason brownlee richard lachmann The Limits of Military The Making of US Counterrevolution Military Defeats review 205 pam morris Writing Hope: Politics & the Novel CONTRUBUTORS jason brownlee chris maisano is a professor in the department is a contributing editor at Jacobin and of government at the University of a union staffer in New York. He is on Texas – Austin. He is the author the national political committee of the of Democracy Prevention: The Politics Democratic Socialists of America. of the U.S.-Egyptian lliance (Cambridge, 2012) and is completing a book julia mead manuscript on US military is a history PhD student at the interventions after the Cold War. University of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in the Nation, New benjamin fogel York Magazine, and elsewhere. is doing a PhD on the history of Brazilian anti-corruption politics pam morris at NYU, and is a contributing editor is an independent scholar, previously with Jacobin and Africa is a Country. a professor of modern critical studies and head of the Research Centre kristen r. ghodsee for Literature and Cultural History teaches Russian and East European at Liverpool John Mores University. Studies at the University of Her books include Dickens’s Class Pennsylvania. Her research focuses Consciousness: A Marginal View on gender, socialism, and post- (Macmillan, 1991), Realism (Routledge, socialism in Eastern Europe. 2003) and Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism (Edinburgh richard lachmann University Press, 2018). teaches sociology at the University at Albany, State University of rené rojas New York. His book, First Class teaches sociology and political science Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Politics and the Decline of Great Powers, His research is on neoliberal develop- is forthcoming from Verso. ment and politics in Latin America, where he spent years as an activist. Editorial T he rise and fall of the Left dominates this issue of Catalyst. Or to be more precise, the Left in the global periphery. In the advanced capitalist world, the last few years have seen a tremendous turn against the political establishment, and even a revitalization of socialist politics. Jeremy Corbyn continues to be the most popular politician in Britain, while Bernie Sanders’s political influence is not only formidable, but gathering momentum. It seems only yesterday that similar changes were underway in Latin America. After two decades of brutal neoliberal austerity, left-wing governments came to power across the region — in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, among others. This was the onset of the Pink Tide, a resuscitation of radical politics and, in some cases, even of a socialist vision. But in contrast to the events in the North, the left turn in South America seems to have run its course. In our lead essay, René Rojas offers a sweeping analysis of this quite dramatic reversal of fortune. Rojas echoes the observation made by Pink Tide critics, that, despite their rhetoric, the regimes failed to break out 3 CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2 of the neoliberbal orthodoxy they had inherited. He insists, however, that this failure was not due to insufficient will, but to political capacity. Whereas the classical Latin American left in the 1960s and ‘70s acquired power in an era of rapid industrialization and growth of the working class, the Pink Tide formed amid a period of deindustrialization and labor-market informalization. The Left in Allende’s time could rely on a social base located in core economic sectors. The more recent left was based in shantytowns and a precariat which, while radical and mobi- lized, could not give it the leverage needed to push through reforms against bourgeois opposition. One of the symptoms of the Pink Tide’s weakness was a slide into clientelism and patronage politics. Nowhere has this been more evi- dent than in the decline of the Workers’ Party (pt) in Brazil. Once held as the beacon of the regional left resurgence, the party is now reeling under the blows of a massive corruption scandal and the conviction of its leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Benjamin Fogel provides a lucid analysis of the forces behind the scandals. He shows in some detail how the constraints that Rojas describes in his essay, both political and economic, have operated in the Brazilian context. But just as impor- tantly, he criticizes the pt for failing to devise a strategy to overcome them, succumbing instead to the tawdry machinations of the political class. Here, as in other episodes of left accommodation, acquiring and holding office has rapidly overtaken the vision that originally inspired the movement. The despair that so many Brazilians feel today is what the Palestinians have lived with for decades. As Bashir Abu-Manneh shows in his study of Palestinian literature, the experience of defeat and dispossession in 1948 had profound consequences for the people, not just politically but also culturally. He argues that the trauma of the nakba triggered not just a search for meaning, but also for a literary form in which to express it, a turn away from realism toward modernist techniques of representa- tion. In a sensitive review of Abu-Manneh’s book, Pam Morris notes 4 EDITORIAL that while György Lukács criticized modernist literature as a retreat from reality, a turn inward, Abu-Manneh sees it as a struggle to retain a sense of hope amid an unending political retreat. It is the recovery of lessons from a submerged past that motivates Kristen Ghodsee and Julia Mead’s essay. For much of the Western left today, Eastern European state-socialist regimes comprise episodes best forgotten — experiments in social control that only discredited attempts to build a more humane future. But as Ghodsee and Mead point out, there are still some positive lessons to be gleaned from them, especially with regard to gender relations. Chief among these is the importance of economic redistribution — precisely what makes establishment liberals nervous today. The issue is rounded out by a clutch of articles on the capitalist core. Chris Maisano offers a short note on the historic Supreme Court ruling which eliminated agency fees for public sector unions. As Maisano observes, the case was intended to further weaken the labor movement by striking it where it still has some power. But the story is anything but over — just weeks before the ruling was made, several states were rocked by the largest strike wave in recent years, all in the public sector. Even as unions reel under its blow, the strikes show a way forward. Finally, we feature a debate between Jason Brownlee and Richard Lachmann on US imperialism. Brownlee agrees with Lachmann’s argument, in his essay from Catalyst 1, no. 3, that the military has proven to be a weak instrument for American global expansion since Vietnam, but suggests that Lachmann has misdiagnosed its causes. Lachmann offers a defense of his views, while agreeing that there is much to Brownlee’s argument. The question of US power will occupy a prominent place in forthcoming issues of Catalyst. 5 CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2 Viewed by many as the most promising development for the global left in decades, the Pink Tide is in retreat. To understand its decline, this essay compares its rise and achievements to the rise of the region’s classical left, which emerged following the Cuban Revolution. Whereas the classical left’s accomplishments were rooted in the structural leverage of industrial labor, the Pink Tide has been based on movements of informal workers and precarious communities. The Pink Tide built its base from a social structure that had been transformed by two decades of deindustrialization and industrial fragmentation. This had two critical implications — it gave newly elected governments far less leverage against ruling classes than the earlier left, and it also inclined them toward a top-down, clientelistic governance model, which turned out to be self-limiting. In the end, Pink Tide regimes were undone by their own constituents, whereas the classical left was toppled by the elites that it attempted to dislodge. 6 THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT’S SHIFTING TIDES rené rojas T he new millennium unleashed a wave of popular rebellions in Latin America, which propelled a number of left governments into power. These governments came to be known as the Pink Tide, and while they have not pursued full-blown “red” policies, they received enthusiastic support from radical quarters, including from some of our leading thinkers. Noam Chomsky, for instance, praised the achievements of the new reformers in the areas of democracy, sover- eign development, and popular welfare.1 The ability of these countries to soften neoliberalism’s worst effects, empower popular sectors, and stand up to US domination mark a welcome rebound from the prior “lost decades” of market fundamentalism and social exclusion. In the global context, the Pink Tide contrasts starkly with full-blown neoliberal continuity in the capitalist core and the discouraging outcomes of the Arab Spring in the Middle East. Yet the tide is receding, and unlike daily coastal ebbs, the decline of 1 See also Tariq Ali’s enthusiastic praise of the Pink Tide in Tariq Ali and David Bar- samian. Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of hope (London: Verso, 2006). 7 CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2 the region’s left is a longer-term retreat of reform governments. After Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999 as an outsider populist-nationalist, Lula, the historic leader of the Workers' Party, was elected president of Brazil in 2002, followed by Nestor Kirchner in Argentina in 2003, Evo Morales in Bolivia a year and a half later, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador one year after that. They and their successors enjoyed impressive runs. But beginning in 2015, key losses initiated a reversal of the Left’s for- tunes. That year, elections took down reform Peronism. Then followed a “constitutional coup” that toppled Dilma Roussef in Brazil. Rafael Correa’s coalition in Ecuador is crumbling after his reform candidate just eked out a win. Although Morales’s hold on power remains firm, when Nicolás Maduro goes in Venezuela, bringing down with him what remains of the Bolivarian Revolution’s accomplishments, the cycle will be complete.2 How should we evaluate the Pink Tide? What is its true record of achievements and failures? What undercut its promise and AS reversed its ascent? Interestingly, most assessments, from friends OJ R and foes alike, point to avoidable mistakes made by politicians and their parties. From the Right, analysts divide Latin American reformers into good and bad lefts, arguing, unsurprisingly, that Pink Tide shortcomings emanate from their original populist sin. There, while natural rents could buy popular allegiance, such patronage corroded stable republican institutions, irreparably polarized political and civil society, and inevitably led to fiscal disaster. Others from the Left, mostly radicals, point not to its demagogic overreach, but to the reformers’ docility and acquiescence to elite power. Here, reformers are scolded for not going far enough; indeed, even the “wrong” strategies scorned by conservatives confined themselves 2 As in all stylized periodizations, there will be exceptions, which are no less import- ant by virtue of being outliers. The landslide election of national-populist AMLO in Mexico will take on special meaning if the former PRI and PRD politician manages to adopt a genuine reform program despite his dubious pedigree. There are also promising new radical lefts, such as the Broad Front in Chile, that must consolidate before they can vie for power. 8