CIAO DATE: 04/2009
December 2008
The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies
The division of Latin America’s contemporary left into the “populist” or “social democratic” originated as a disciplinary move by neoliberals. Such dichotomous categorizations derive from an impoverished notion of the political in which a positivist sphere of exalted expertise and enlightenment, based on reason, rationality, and objectivity, is juxtaposed against a lesser sphere of emotion, passion, and personalism. This underlying dualism, which derives from liberalism, permeates academic disciplines and crosses lines of ideology while tracking established markers of hierarchical distinction in a region profoundly divided along multiple lines of race, class, and cultural capital. Politics is better understood as embodied work, done with words, based on real and imagined relationships between flesh-and-blood humans as they are inserted into a larger cultural and symbolic universe. Embracing the notion of many lefts but one path, the article argues that the unity of a heterogeneous and plural Latin American left is defined within an anti-neoliberal politics forged since 1990 through the Foro de São Paulo and eventually the World Social Forum. While Chávez and Lula share broad similarities, their distinct styles are marked by key differences but not those captured by established taxonomies. Leadership—understood as unity, as in the case of Chávez—is distinguished from Lula’s praxis of convergence across difference derived, in part, from the subaltern origin of Lula’s distinctive trajectory from trade unionism to the presidency. Such divergences need not endanger the shared left terrain that has provided the basis for the unprecedented success of this generation of Latin American leftists.
Resource link: Understanding the Politics of Latin America's Plural Lefts (Chávez/Lula): Social Democracy, Populism, And Convergence on the Path to a Post-Neoliberal World [PDF] - 2.4M