Rethinking Latin America: Development, Hegemony, and Social Transformation

256 Pages·2013·1.631 MB·English

by  Ronaldo Munck (auth.)

Rethinking Latin America
Also by Ronaldo Munck
Politics and Dependency in the Third World: The Case of Latin America (1984)
Revolutionary Trends in Latin America (1984)
Ireland: Nation, State and Class Confl ict (1985)
Argentina: From Anarchism to Peronism. Workers, Unions and Politics in Argentina
1855–1985 (with R. Falc ó n and B. Galitelli) (1986)
The Diffi cult Dialogue: Marxism and Nationalism (1986)
Belfast in the Thirties: An Oral History (with B. Rolston) (1987)
The New International Labour Studies: An Introduction (1988)
Latin America: The Transition to Democracy (1989)
The Irish Economy: Results and Prospects (1993)
Marx @ 2000: Late Marxist Perspectives (2000)
Labour and Globalisation: A New Great Transformation? (2002)
Contemporary Latin America (2002, 2008, 2012)
Globalisation and Social Exclusion: A Transformationalist Perspective (2005)
Globalisation and Contestation: The Great Counter-Movement (2006)
Globalizaci ó n, Migraci ó n y Sindicatos en la Era Neoliberal (2012)
Rethinking Latin America
Development, Hegemony, and Social
Transformation
Ronaldo Munck
RETHINKING LATIN AMERICA
Copyright © Ronaldo Munck, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-00411-6
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 Placing Latin America 17
2 Conquest to Modernity (1510–1910) 45
3 Nation-Making (1910–1964) 73
4 Hegemony Struggles (1959–1976) 101
5 Market Hegemony (1973–2001) 1 29
6 Social Countermovement (1998–2012) 157
7 Globalization Within (1510–2010) 1 89
References 2 19
Index 2 31
Introduction
Why would we seek to “rethink” Latin America today from a critical
global development perspective? For one, Latin America is assum-
ing an increasingly important position on the world stage with its
heterodox economic policies and bold political experiments attract-
ing worldwide attention in an era characterized by a general crisis
of perspectives. Another reason is that most of the countries in the
region achieved their independence between 1810 and 1820 so we
are now two hundred years into political independence and thus a
balance sheet would be useful. At its origins, as a land colonized by
the European powers from 1500 onward, Latin America played a key
role in the modernization and enrichment of Europe. Today Europe
is in crisis—in economic, political, social, cultural, and even moral
terms—and the whole Enlightenment discourse is in question. Is it
possible that Latin America is now showing Europe where it is head-
ing? Marx was always fond of saying “d e te fabula narratur ” referring
to the way in which an understanding of industrial England showed
the rest of the world where it was heading. Today the very complex,
dynamic, conflictual but above all, original processes of development,
new constructions of hegemony, and vision of social transformation in
Latin America offer a fascinating laboratory for the rest of the world
and, maybe, a mirror to the future. The “Brazilianization” of the
West, which some European social critics have referred to, can mean
different things: accelerated economic development, political recom-
position but also acute social inequality and a cauldron of potential
unrest. Can Latin America, critically reinterpreted, offer something
to a world where economic stagnation and political despair seem to
be the order of the day?
Latin American politics increasingly impinge on global affairs and
thus we can expect a sharpening of theoretical and political debates
that poses a further persuasive reason to rethink our conceptual
2 Rethinking Latin America
paradigms to make them “fit for purpose” for the present era. The
modernization theory of the 1950s–1960s was effectively replaced
as a dominant paradigm by the dependency approach in the 1970s
and 1980s. Since then the neoliberal globalization optic has prevailed
whether one saw this as a positive or a negative feature. Even the
so-called populist backlash through the likes of Hugo Chá v ez in
Venezuela in the early twenty-first century also had this neoliberal
paradigm as the dominant horizon even when it was being questioned
rhetorically. However, since the Great Recession unleashed by the
banking crisis of 2007–2008, we need to rethink the horizon of pos-
sibilities opening up before us. Have the likes of Brazil escaped the
vicious circle of dependency and underdevelopment? Has the negative
relationship between development problems and lack of democracy
been overcome? Are we seeing the emergence of new post-neoliberal
economic systems and post-liberal democratic political orders emerg-
ing? Is the indigenous Amerindian view of the world gaining trac-
tion and will it offer a new cosmovision for and from Latin America?
In exploring these questions we are relating to issues that are much
broader and more complex than the study of Latin America from a
now obsolete and faintly colonialist area-studies perspective. A criti-
cal renewal of perspectives and opening up of the horizon of possi-
bilities is now essential if we are to rethink Latin America in a way
that will provide useful lessons and new outlooks for a world after
neoliberalism.
Before we embark on this analysis, though, we need to review the
key framing concepts for this text, namely those of development,
hegemony, and social transformation. It is well known that the defi-
nition and understanding of development has been the subject of
major controversies over the last 50 years at least and still there is
no agreement. In its dominant guise it is conceived very much as a
meta-narrative with a clear goal of where societies should be heading.
This perspective tends to be quite ahistorical, posing desirable targets
for societies with certain key performance indicators acting as proxies
for development or modernization in a rather unsatisfactory manner.
On the whole, we see here a fairly short-term perspective focused on
specific policy outcomes to the measured, as with the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) now coming to a close without achiev-
ing their objectives. The postmodern critique of this quintessentially
modernist paradigm points us toward its discursive nature, its cultural
bias, and its manipulative political intent. Development is thus recast
as a top-down and ethnocentric approach to the very real issues of
Introduction 3
underdevelopment and poverty. However, while agreeing with much
of the post-development critique, I believe we still need a more robust
and operational understanding of development in practice. The issues
of development and underdevelopment are real enough and they can-
not just be reduced to Western colonialist discourse.
For the purposes of rethinking development in Latin America, I
thus return to a quite basic Marxist understanding of capitalism as a
relation between capitalists and free-wage laborers in which competi-
tion spurs technical progress and capital accumulation. Our attention
needs to be focused on the formation of and struggle among social
classes leading to the development of specific relations of production.
Without entering this “hidden abode” of production and class forma-
tion, development can only be reduced to a few quantitative indicators
of sometimes dubious validity. While I would not, of course, enter-
tain any ethnocentric stance in regard to development I would posit
that there is only one capitalist mode of production, thus rejecting
the search for an “underdeveloped” capitalism whatever that might
mean. Despite its external origins capitalist development in Latin
America needs to be analyzed in endogenous terms—that is to say in
terms of its own dynamic—rather than as a perpetually exogenous, or
external, phenomena such as a “global system” somehow constrain-
ing national development.
Hegemony, our second key term, is closely associated with the
political philosophy of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, but he was
not, contrary to popular belief, its creator. Nor was it designed to act
as a bridge beyond revolutionary Marxism to some form of cultural
reformism as some of its modern-day proponents seem to assume.
Rather, in its original Russian rendering ( gegemoniya ) it was very
much a part of the discourse of the Russian Revolution, designed to
theorize the role of the working class in what was acknowledged to
be a bourgeois revolution. It was then, under the Third International,
extended to embrace the domination of the bourgeoisie over the pro-
letariat by confining it to a merely corporate role, for example, exclu-
sively “economic” trade union struggles. Gramsci was very much
aware of these debates and his work was to a considerable extent
derived from them even if he took them further. However hegemony
in the Gramscian sense must also be understood as an ethical and
strategic concept that sought to articulate a coherent and consensual
alternative to capitalist rule across the oppressed classes, in his era,
of course the proletariat and the peasantry, but today it could be
extended more widely across the subaltern classes as a whole.