Abstract, Sodré and the Dialectics of Brazil’s Social Formation

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Sodré and the Dialectics of Brazil’s Social Formation

by Marcos Del Roio

In the early 1960s, Nelson Werneck Sodré developed a complex and sophisticated theory of Brazilian reality and its historical dynamics. In the light of the criticism and distortion of his views of the intervening years, a clarifying summary of his most important work is in order. Such a summary suggests that the new absolute truths of Brazilian historiography and political sciences have elements that can be questioned and that in interpretations of Brazil one can never forget that science is also expressed as ideology and political practice.

Political Report # 1320 Cuba ante el traspaso presidencial: enojo e indiferencia

Political Report # 1320 Cuba ante el traspaso presidencial: enojo e indiferencia By Elizabeth Dore Nueva Sociedad (also LAP Editor)

En Cuba la gente está enojada. Los militantes se quejan del hermetismo que rodea la selección del sucesor de Raúl Castro. Durante un almuerzo con amigas al que fui invitada y en el que circuló bastante alcohol, una funcionaria de la segunda línea del Partido Comunista en Pinar del Río se queja airadamente de que la jerarquía partidaria no haya tomado en cuenta las opiniones de sus principales referentes en el proceso sucesorio. «Solían hacer sondeos. Se dice que hicieron consultas en los niveles más altos, pero ninguna aquí. Nos sentimos abandonados». Dice señalándome: «Ella sabe tanto como yo sobre el traspaso. Hay otro problema. A la gente no la entusiasma Miguel Díaz-Canel [el presunto sucesor de Castro]. Es frío, distante, nunca sonríe. Ha hecho muy poco para diferenciarse». Me sorprende que sea tan directa, tan osada. Estoy con una amiga cubana que está haciendo trabajo de campo en Pinar del Río, la provincia más occidental de Cuba. Mucha gente, entre ellas militantes del Partido, le dice que el gobierno local no funciona y que se sienten abandonados por La Habana. Cuando mi amiga les pregunta qué están haciendo al respecto, se encogen de hombros. Una amiga cercana que vive en La Habana, una respetada escritora, es inusitadamente categórico: «El socialismo cubano, nuestra reputación internacional de defender la dignidad humana, ha terminado en este extraño cuasicapitalismo». Los cubanos más jóvenes y quienes están fuera de los círculos oficiales tienden a ser indiferentes. Mario, un joven pero relativamente importante funcionario y militante del partido algo renuente vive en La Lisa -un barrio pobre de las afueras de La Habana- y dice que sus amigos son apolíticos. «No creen que el traspaso traiga algún cambio. Raúl seguirá siendo cabeza del Partido. Sus vidas seguirán siendo tan difíciles como lo son hoy. Nada va a cambiar». Ofelia, de Alamar, un complejo habitacional de la era soviética ubicado al este de La Habana, vende ropa de segunda mano donada por la Iglesia Pentecostal Evangélica a la que pertenece, una filial de una congregación en California. «No importa quién sea presidente. Los grandes se harán más ricos, los de abajo, la gente como yo, seguirá siendo pobre». Inclina la cabeza y con una leve sonrisa dice: «Ya no tenemos a Fidel de nuestro lado». Cuando le pregunto por la situación actual a mi amiga Yudith, leal militante del Partido de toda la vida, me responde: «No hablemos de política. Es demasiado triste. Hablemos de cosas agradables».

Book, "Twentieth-Century Latin American Revolutions" by Marc Becker

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PURCHASE THIS EDITION 

Twentieth-Century Latin American Revolutions (Latin American Perspectives in the Classroom) by Marc Becker

Revolutions are a commonly studied but only vaguely understood historical phenomenon. This clear and concise text extends our understanding with a critical narrative analysis of key case studies: the 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution; the 1944–1954 Guatemalan Spring; the 1952–1964 MNR-led revolution in Bolivia; the Cuban Revolution that triumphed in 1959; the 1970–1973 Chilean path to socialism; the leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua in power from 1979–1990; failed guerrilla movements in Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru; and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela after Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998. Historian Marc Becker opens with a theoretical introduction to revolutionary movements, including a definition of what “revolution” means and an examination of factors necessary for a revolution to succeed. He analyzes revolutions through the lens of those who participated and explores the sociopolitical conditions that led to a revolutionary situation, the differing responses to those conditions, and the outcomes of those political changes. Each case study provides an interpretive explanation of the historical context in which each movement emerged, its main goals and achievements, its shortcomings, its outcome, and its legacy. The book concludes with an analysis of how elected leftist governments in the twenty-first century continue to struggle with issues that revolutionaries confronted throughout the twentieth century.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 272 • Trim: 6 1/4 x 9 1/4

978-1-4422-6586-8 • Hardback • June 2017 • $85.00 • (£54.95)

978-1-4422-6587-5 • Paperback • June 2017 • $30.00 • (£19.95)

978-1-4422-6588-2 • eBook • June 2017 • $28.00 • (£18.95)

Book Review, The Diplomacy of Revolution and Counterrevolution: Some of the Secrets Revealed

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The Diplomacy of Revolution and Counterrevolution: Some of the Secrets Revealed
by Nelson P. Valdés

Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana

LeoGrande William M. & Kornbluh Peter Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

The authors and publishers of Back Channel to Cuba have an extraordinary—in fact impressive—sense of timing. The book became available to the general public just a few weeks before the Cuban and American presidents announced, on the same day (December 17, 2014), that full diplomatic relations would be restored by the governments of the United States and Cuba. LeoGrande and Kornbluh describe their book as presenting “a comprehensive chronicle of the history of dialogue between the United States and Cuba since 1959” (3). They call this unknown history “secret back-channel diplomacy”and note that the process of negotiation has been arduous, difficult, and complex. Indeed, and long overdue.

Book Review, Changing Dynamics in Bolivia

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Changing Dynamics in Bolivia
by Linda Farthing

Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia, Past and Present

Crabtree John & Whitehead Laurence (eds.). Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia, Past and Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.

The Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1952 to the Present

Siekmeier James F. The Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1952 to the Present. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.

Along the Bolivian Highway: Social Mobility and Political Culture in a New Middle Class

Shakow Miriam Along the Bolivian Highway: Social Mobility and Political Culture in a New Middle Class. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land

Fabricant Nicole Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia

Webber Jeffrey Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia. Chicago: Haymarket, 2011.

Bolivia’s recent trajectory toward greater inclusion of its indigenous majority has brought more scholarly attention to the Andean country than in any previous era. The five books reviewed here, published between 2008 and 2014, reflect this international interest in what Evo Morales’s government calls the “process of change.” Three of the books address political economy broadly speaking, and the other two are anthropological studies of two groups—the emerging middle class in the provincial town of Sacaba, outside Cochabamba, and the landless workers in the eastern lowlands in Santa Cruz. Taken together they consider Bolivia from the national political and economic scale to the specificity of daily life.

Book, Twentieth-Century Latin American Revolutions

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Twentieth-Century Latin American Revolutions
by Marc Becker

Revolutions are a commonly studied but only vaguely understood historical phenomenon. This clear and concise text extends our understanding with a critical narrative analysis of key case studies: the 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution; the 1944–1954 Guatemalan Spring; the 1952–1964 MNR-led revolution in Bolivia; the Cuban Revolution that triumphed in 1959; the 1970–1973 Chilean path to socialism; the leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua in power from 1979–1990; failed guerrilla movements in Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru; and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela after Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998. Historian Marc Becker opens with a theoretical introduction to revolutionary movements, including a definition of what “revolution” means and an examination of factors necessary for a revolution to succeed. He analyzes revolutions through the lens of those who participated and explores the sociopolitical conditions that led to a revolutionary situation, the differing responses to those conditions, and the outcomes of those political changes. Each case study provides an interpretive explanation of the historical context in which each movement emerged, its main goals and achievements, its shortcomings, its outcome, and its legacy. The book concludes with an analysis of how elected leftist governments in the twenty-first century continue to struggle with issues that revolutionaries confronted throughout the twentieth century.

Political Report # 1252 Un Triunfo por Construir Lo mas difícil no es hacer la revolución, es mantenerla

by Veronica Silva,   writing from Madrid, Spain LAP Participating Editor

El 2 de abril de 2017 los ecuatorianos nos enfrentamos a dos opciones: terminar con el Gobierno de la Revolución Ciudadana a cualquier precio o fortalecer una década de transformaciones históricas que han hecho de nuestro país un referente mundial de buen gobierno. A pesar de la reñida contienda, la Revolución Ciudadana ganó las elecciones. Ahora, la tarea urgente es analizar cuáles fueron las debilidades que pusieron en riesgo este proceso y a partir de ello mirar hacia adelante. Los resultados de las elecciones 2017 nos impulsan a repensar la ruta que como Movimiento País hemos tenido en este proceso. Aunque se logró el triunfo, la respuesta del electorado no fue la esperada. En Europa, Asia y Oceanía, por ejemplo, el Movimiento obtuvo el 54,02% de los votos, frente a la votación arrasadora del 2013, cuando logró el 82,25% de respaldo. En este caso, el desafío es que el proyecto de la Revolución Ciudadana vuelva a ser la apuesta de la gran mayoría de los ecuatorianos en Europa, estando aún más cerca de la realidad de nuestra comunidad migrante.

Political Report # 1250 Passive Revolution: The Transnational Capitalist Class Unravels Latin America's Pink Tide

By William I. Robinson, Truthout

The day after the Organization of American States (OAS) met in Washington, DC, on May 31 at the behest of the US and right-wing Latin American governments to debate the crisis in Venezuela, judge Nelson Moncada was gunned down at an opposition protest in Caracas, in a crime that some claimed was an act of revenge for his involvement in the sentencing of a prominent opposition politician. The OAS, however, remained silent on the crime, as well as on the deepening crisis and escalating state repression against mass protests sweeping Brazil and Colombia. Bolivian President Evo Morales accused the OAS of seeking to "politically eliminate the anti-imperialist presidents and governments" in Latin America in line with the historic pattern of US intervention in the region to prop up right-wing dictatorships and crush revolutionary and progressive movements. The leftist governments in Latin America that swept to power in the early 21st century, known collectively as the Pink Tide, transformed the political landscape in the Americas and inspired popular and revolutionary struggles around the world. The Pink Tide governments came to power on the heels of mass popular resistance to the late 20th century juggernaut of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization in the region. Yet nearly two decades after the turn to the left, the right has resumed power with a vengeance in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Honduras, while the Venezuelan revolution is in deep crisis and the leftist projects in Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Nicaragua and El Salvador have been emptied of much of their socialist pretensions. If this ebbing of the Pink Tide demonstrates the limits of parliamentary changes in the era of global capitalism, it also points to the renewed hegemony of the transnational capitalist class over the region. The social model pursued by the Pink Tide governments involved the capture and redistribution of surpluses generated by the export of raw materials to global markets. Notwithstanding the leftist rhetoric, these governments oversaw a massive expansion of raw material production in partnership with foreign and local contingents of the transnational capitalist class, that is, the transnationally integrated ruling capitalist groups that emerged in countries around the world through globalization and that exercise collective control over the new globalized system of production and finance. As a result, the Pink Tide countries became ever more integrated into emergent transnational circuits of global capitalism and dependent on global commodity and capital markets. There was no attempt to break with this extractivist model, even in the more radical experiments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, where energy and other natural resources were nationalized. All three countries deepened their dependence on the export of hydrocarbons and industrial and precious minerals. Venezuela is even more dependent on oil exports in 2017 than it was at the turn of the century. Soy production in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia experienced an explosive expansion as transnational corporate agribusiness displaced millions of smallholders and converted the countryside into a vast sea of industrial-scale soy plantations. With the exception of Venezuela during the height of the Bolivarian revolution, what stood out were the absence of any shift in basic property and class relations despite changes in political blocs, a discourse in favor of the popular classes, and an expansion of social welfare programs. In effect, these governments carried out what Italian Marxist theorist and politician Antonio Gramsci referred to as passive revolution, whereby dominant groups undertake reform from above that defuses mobilization from below for more far-reaching transformation. The Pink Tide governments were "progressive" insofar as they introduced limited redistribution and restored a role for the state, less in regulating accumulation than in administering its expansion in more inclusionary ways. When we cut through the rhetoric, many of the Pink Tide states were able to push forward a new wave of capitalist globalization with greater credibility than their orthodox and politically bankrupt neoliberal predecessors. The commodities boom financed the expansion of social programs that reduced poverty and raised the standard of living of the working and popular classes. Yet because there were no more substantial structural transformations that could address the root causes of poverty and inequality, these social programs were subject to the vagaries of global markets over which the Pink Tide states exercised no control. Once the 2008 world financial crisis hit, they came up against the limits of redistributive reform within the logic of global capitalism. The extreme dependence on raw materials exports threw these countries into economic turmoil when global commodities markets collapsed, undermining governments' abilities to sustain social programs and generating political tensions that helped fuel popular protest and open up space for a right-wing resurgence. Brazil was most indicative of the mild reformist thrust of many Pink Tide governments, and the most tragic for the popular classes. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the 2002 election only after his wing of the Workers' Party moved sharply toward the political center and promised not to default on the country's foreign debt. In Brazil, as elsewhere, the Pink Tide state remained a part of the larger institutional networks of the global financial system and beholden to transnational finance capital. The Workers' Party government demobilized the mass social movements that brought it to power and then imposed austerity after the collapse. Only in this light can we understand the brazen return of the far right. US intervention, of course, is a critical part of the story of the unraveling of the Pink Tide. As in other historical moments of counterrevolution, such as in Chile under Salvador Allende in the early 1970s and Nicaragua in the 1980s, US strategists have been deft at exploiting mistakes and limitations of the Pink Tide governments and manipulating legitimate grievances among the popular sectors in these countries for the purposes of destabilization. This is especially the case with the Bolivarian project in Venezuela -- by far the most radical and socialist-oriented experiment among the Pink Tide -- that has faced an all-out strategy of US counter-revolution since its inception. There are other factors to consider as well, such as the particular dynamics of class and social struggles in each country that shaped the trajectory of Pink Tide experiences and the attempts at building an alternative regional economic bloc around the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). Yet these dimensions played out to the drumbeat of the expansion of capitalist globalization in the region followed by crisis. The transnational capitalist class used its structural power in the global political economy to defuse the Pink Tide challenge to its rule. In this way the transnational capitalist class demonstrated its capacity to subordinate leftist projects at the national and regional levels to its logic of global accumulation. The lesson seems to be that a viable project from below requires a more significant rupture with that logic than the Pink Tide was able or willing to undertake. Original article and sources can be found here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40837-passive-revolution-the-transnational-capitalist-class-unravels-latin-america-s-pink-tide

Book, "The Portuguese Revolution: State and Class in the Transition to Democracy" By Ronald H. Chilcote

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The Portuguese Revolution: State and Class in the Transition to Democracy 
By Ronald H. Chilcote

Building on decades of research, leading scholar Ronald H. Chilcote provides a definitive analysis of the 1974–1975 Portuguese revolution, which captured global attention and continues to resonate today. His study revisits a key historical moment to explain the revolution and its aftermath through periods of authoritarianism and resistance as well as representative and popular democracy. Exploring the intertwined themes of class, state, and hegemony, Chilcote builds a powerful framework for understanding the Portuguese case as well as contemporary political economy worldwide.

Meet LAP Editor Sheryl Lutjens

Dr. Lutjens joined the Women’s Studies Department at CSUSM as Chair in January 2008.  Her teaching areas include Feminist Theory, Women and Politics, Gender and Organizations, Gender and Development, and Women and Revolution.

Education
Sheryl Lutjens earned a B.A. in German from the University of California, Riverside, a secondary teaching credential from CSU San Bernardino, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.



 Research

Sheryl’s research has focused on power, participation, the state, and democracy; women/gender and politics in the U.S., Spain, and Latin America; and feminist politics and political theory.  As a Cuba specialist, her research on Cuba has explored the state and administrative reform, popular participation and democracy, women, education, and U.S.-Cuba academic relations.   Her publications include two books, The State, Bureaucracy, and the Cuban Schools: Power and Participation and the co-edited collection Rereading Latin American Women: The Political Economy of Gender, six special issues of the journal Latin American Perspectives (two on women/gender in Latin America and four on Cuba), numerous articles and chapters in books, and North America and the Caribbean, a volume she edited for the six-volume The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Children’s Issues Worldwide.  Her recent publications include “The Subject(s) of Academic and Cultural Exchange:  Paradigms, Power, and Possibilities,” in Debating U.S.-Cuba Relations:  Shall We Play Ball? eds. Rafael Hernández and Jorge I. Domínguez (Routledge, 2011).

Sheryl is a member of the editorial boards of Cuban Studies and The International Journal of Cuban Studies, and a coordinating editor of Latin American Perspectives.  Among other collaborative projects, Lutjens has worked since 1994 with the Association of Cuban Educators in the organization of annual seminarios, in Cuba, for U.S. and Cuban educational professionals, teachers, and graduate students.  She is a founding member of the Latin American Studies Association’s Section for Scholarly Relations with Cuba and is currently co-chair of the 665-member section.


To learn more about Sheryl Lutjens...

Book, "The Portuguese Revolution: State and Class in the Transition to Democracy" By Ronald H. Chilcote

The Portuguese Revolution: State and Class in the Transition to Democracy 
By Ronald H. Chilcote

Building on decades of research, leading scholar Ronald H. Chilcote provides a definitive analysis of the 1974–1975 Portuguese revolution, which captured global attention and continues to resonate today. His study revisits a key historical moment to explain the revolution and its aftermath through periods of authoritarianism and resistance as well as representative and popular democracy. Exploring the intertwined themes of class, state, and hegemony, Chilcote builds a powerful framework for understanding the Portuguese case as well as contemporary political economy worldwide.