Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left by Nikolas Kozloff, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 256 pp., $26.95, Hardcover
In the past decade, left-of-center governments critical of neoliberalism have appeared all over Latin America: Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. This has given rise to debates about the differences among them and the supposed dangers signaled by the more radical governments. The Bush administration branded the latter, particularly Venezuela, “radical populist,” while the U.S. press has been similarly alarmist, variously describing the offending governments as demagogic, anti-American, and even sponsors of terrorism.
Meanwhile, in academic and policy-making circles, many follow the lead of the former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Casteñada, who has been an important social-democratic critic of the region’s far left. In an influential article in Foreign Affairs (“Latin America’s Left Turn,” May/June 2006), Casteñada distinguished between two lefts: “one that is modern, open-minded, reformist and internationalist . . . and the other, born of the great tradition in Latin American populism, [that] is nationalist, strident, and close-minded,” and disastrous for the region. The “good” left comprises market-friendly social democrats who emerged from orthodox left parties; they include the leaders of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. The populist left, on the other hand, refers to those supposedly in Latin America’s strongman tradition—Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Néstor Kirchner of Argentina (and perhaps his successor and wife, Cristina Fernández), Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Rafael Correa of Ecuador. According to Castañeda’s view, these leaders are more interested in amassing power and lambasting the United States than in developing successful economics policies.
This penchant for quarantining the irresponsible, “hyperactive” left characterizes much of the mainstream U.S. academic work on the region. In contrast, Nikolas Kozloff’s book on the Latin American left turn, Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left, avoids this Manichean framework. Far from demonizing the radical left or populist leaders, he is interested in describing the commonalities that all the left-leaning governments share, while also attending to their differences. Kozloff, the author of a book on Chávez and a NACLA senior research associate, bases his work largely on interviews with activists, academics, and government officials, producing a lively and well-documented account for the general reader.
Kozloff’s sympathies openly lie with the forces for progressive change, yet he approaches his topic with an even-handedness that is a strength, insofar as he gives both reformist and radical governments, all of which are committed to poverty reduction and social welfare programs at a minimum, the credit they deserve for meeting long-suppressed social needs. And he does not portray radicalism as a foolish or antediluvian fantasy. There are drawbacks to this approach, however. (More on that below.)
Organized thematically, the book highlights trends across the region while giving the reader a useful account of developments in each country. The first chapters are devoted to regional energy policy and related sectors. (The author wrote about U.S. energy companies in the Amazon region during the early 1990s.) Chávez, he notes, has led the way to resource integration with several initiatives, among them agreements with Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil to explore joint ventures. Chávez and Ecuador’s Correa have sought greater- government control of and access to oil revenue, while Morales has done the same with natural gas.
Kozloff also evaluates trade policy, including that of the trade bloc Mercosur, which despite recent advances is still plagued by conflict between participating countries and the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), an arrangement to increase trade, economic integration, and political solidarity independent of U.S. influence and market constraints. Without neoliberal Brazil’s support for a new economic- model for the region, however, the prospects for ALBA remain uncertain.
The issue of nationalism comes up several times. Overlapping the pervasive desire for national autonomy is the anti-American sentiment characteristic of the more radical governments. Chávez’s vitriolic broadsides against the United States are now legendary, but Correa has also weighed in (“to compare Bush to the devil was an offense against the devil”), while Morales referred to the Free Trade Area of the Americas as “an agreement to legalize the colonization of the Americas.” Neither Chile under Michelle Bachelet’s left-center coalition government nor Brazil under Lula’s moderate leadership is interested in confronting Washington or jettisoning free trade.
Both nationalism and challenges to the United States and U.S.-style capitalism, Kozloff maintains, are reasonable responses to the Washington Consensus: Part and parcel of strengthening the region economically, they point the way to political integration down the road, an outcome the author seems to favor. This stance is a welcome change from the hand-wringing that often accompanies efforts to cast off Washington’s influence and to put forth a different economic model. (Moderate leftist critics dismiss such efforts as a hopeless throwback to the Cuban Revolution.)
Yet a regional approach is not only favorable but crucial, given the vulnerability of strictly national alternatives to the overwhelming forces of global capitalism. It is unclear how anti-capitalist structures can develop without transnational frameworks—social movements, economic arrangements, political organizations—to support radical transformation in separate countries. This issue remains only implicit in Revolution! while Kozloff does not take up the related and important debate about state versus grassroots, anti-vanguardist initiatives in securing socioeconomic transformation.
As long as mention is made of supranational as well as national contexts for change, the book could have—without sacrificing readability—taken the analysis a step further and given systematic attention to different development strategies: the neoliberal model of integration into the global economy without shifts in class/property relations (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay) versus the more radical, potentially anti-capitalist model (Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela). Describing and welcoming all progressive change in South America is fine as far as it goes. But it is not a substitute for critical analysis of alternative paradigms and their consequences.
Unlike academic theorists, Kozloff usually avoids the categories “social democratic” and “populist” to delineate moderate versus radical regimes. This enables him to take a more nuanced approach, as in the case of Argentina, where increasing employment and other measures to help the underclass are undermined by growing inflation and by prioritizing foreign debt repayment. The revival of Peronist clientelism is also noted. Yet the co-optation of popular struggles by Néstor Kirchner’s government is glossed over in the enthusiasm for a “vibrant and new working-class culture.”
However, Kozloff pays less attention to the internal political dynamics of the moderately leftist capitalist states than to their trade and energy policies. These states understandably do not capture his imagination as the more innovative and radical ones do. (He calls Chile and Brazil “uninspiring.”) What managed capitalism entails is therefore left vague more often than not. In Brazil, for example, one would hardly know that much lauded programs to subsidize the consumption of the poor, like Bolsa Família, are funded by taxes on the middle class and formal-sector workers rather than on big capital, an arrangement that also characterizes the financing of social programs in Argentina.
The same cannot be said for Venezuela, and to a lesser extent, Ecuador and Bolivia, where the governments have pursued a policy of popular empowerment and redistribution of resources. The author discusses Chávez’s notion of “socialism for the 21st century,” a somewhat vague mix of socialism and capitalism: worker-owned cooperatives, nationalization of key enterprises, and the participatory democracy of communal councils as an alternative source of power from below.
Kozloff refers to Chávez as a “populist,” meaning his penchant for personal rule. But in his account, populism is not a dirty word. Nor is participatory democracy, often viewed by social democrats as containing the germ of a populist authoritarianism. The ongoing tension between top-down and grassroots power in Venezuela is duly noted. There are no invidious comparisons, however, with the moderate governments of the region that are often said to hew to the “correct,” procedural definition of democracy. According to this definition, which ignores the issue of elite rule and economic clout, the popular will is appropriately filtered (and watered down, if expressed at all, say critics) through free and fair elections and representative institutions, rather than embodied in a political “savior.”
All told, Kozloff is positive about all the progressive regimes in South America, radical and moderate. And his lively, informed account of their development raises useful questions about the future of all of them.
Midge Quandt is a historian and solidarity activist who has written extensively on Nicaragua.
