THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT A Painful Rebirth
IF OBJECTIVE SUFFERING WERE THE ONLY criterion, the 1990s would look good for the Left. Capitalism's failures could not be more evident. Today 183 million Latin Americans live in poverty, 44% of...
...Rejecting party politics as corrupt and domineering, people have focused on more pragmatic vehicles for advancing the struggle for political freedom and economic development...
...Self-styled revolutionaries, with rare exceptions, have yet to get beyond the statecentered vision of socialism so discredited by the experiences of the Soviet Union and Latin American populism...
...The Left's efforts to accept the challenges of new times, though tentative in some cases and bumbling in others, point toward the fundamentally new sort of politics required if those aspirations are to be achieved...
...Riots, not unlike the recent one in Los Angeles, have swept major cities...
...they seek effective citizenship rights, insist on autonomy from all political parties and the state, and assert local control over natural resources and development policies...
...Governments of all political stripes are pursuing policies that have had a disastrous impact on the poor...
...BELIEF IN TOTAL LIBERATION VIA STATE ownership of the economy, and faith in one party and one truth belong to the past...
...A S JONATHAN FOX NOTES, THE TRADITIONal left notion that democracy is either "real" or "false" leaves out most of the ways people are represented most of the time...
...Over the past decade, living standards have dropped precipitously for all but a tiny elite...
...On the other hand, though the new movements comprise a minority and probably always will, they have met with growing success in local and regional politics...
...Environmental consciousness, born of a degradation of living conditions which falls hardest on the poor, has enriched people's vision of development alternatives...
...The parties of the Left are in many ways as conservative and authoritarian as those of the Right...
...And some parties, following the PT's lead, are coming to grips with new realities and transforming themselves into effective instruments of popular will...
...Enrique Leff writes of grassroots environmental movements that question the rationality of economic growth, and point to a redefinition of socialism based on a new relationship to nature...
...The lack of critical thinking is, as Vilas puts it, "astounding...
...Much of their thinking, Virginia Vargas notes, is based on exclusive logic, reductionism, and the impulse to universalize partial experiences...
...Among these vehicles are women's groups, squatters associations, rankand-file union caucuses and peasant leagues...
...Carlos M. Vilas, Juan Carlos Portantiero and Jos6 Aric6 all call for a fundamental rethinking of progressive politics...
...Left politicians denounce official policies with vigor, but fail to offer concrete alternatives...
...We asked several prominent Latin American thinkers to reflect on the lessons of recent history...
...what a new vision of socialism might be...
...Yet the Left in Latin America is on the defensive...
...Today 183 million Latin Americans live in poverty, 44% of the population...
...Economic growth seems only to aggravate the bitterness of the majority, whose living conditions continue to erode...
...The retreat of dictatorship, combined with the crisis of the parties, has generated new possibilities from the grass roots...
...During the transition to electoral regimes, most revolutionaries either stuck to their guns, decrying democratization as false, or embraced the establishment, abandoning altogether their hopes of achieving socialist reforms...
...From these movements some see the emergence of a new democratic paradigm for building socialism...
...what might be done to recover the initiative...
...Another problem, Vilas adds, is the identification of armed struggle with radical politics and socialism itself...
...But as Jos6 Aric6 muses, perhaps the Left was always a counter-cultural force championing freedom and justice, a pragmatic movement to enhance the rights of the poor-and it only thought it was the vanguard in the quest for some utopia...
...their practice is unable to rise above the sexism, racism and elitism that infect society at large...
...Brazil's Workers Party (PT) is perhaps the only political party to successfully channel the emerging grassroots vision into an effective strategy for building national power and winning elections...
...For this report, our twenty-fifth anniversary issue, we set out to examine the crisis of the Latin American Left: how Latin Americans are responding to the questions and doubts that plague socialists the world over...
...To pose an example: they challenge the populist and old left belief that the state must be the center of society and the prime agent of change...
...According to Margaret E. Keck, socialism for the PT is inseparable from radical democracy: the extension of democracy as the means to achieve a society without exploiters or exploited...
...While the Right would simply "privatize" state functions, these new lefts would transfer them to a community-controlled "public" arena, distinct from both the private sector and the state...
...Aspirations for alife of dignity,justice and liberty-the values that underlie socialism--did not fall with the Berlin Wall or the Sandinista regime...
...Revolution has lost its allure, and in nearly every national electoral contest the Left has either self-destructed or gone down in ignominious defeat...
...They are perhaps best described as civil rights movements...
...The widening gap between the starving many and the wealthy few may provoke new flights into the past: the yearning for a "strong government," for instance...
...Working against the rebirth of the Left is the increasing alienation of Latin Americans from politics altogether, an alienation encouraged by the continuing incompetence of most politicians and the intransigence of a few revolutionaries...
Vol. 25 • May 1992 • No. 5
