Marx, Mariátegui, and Mining

• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18782412
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 223, Vol. 45 No. 6, November 2018, 183–184

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18782412

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

183

Book Review

Marx, Mariátegui, and Mining

by

Heather Williams

Jeffery Webber The Last Day of Oppression and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and

Economics of the New Latin American Left. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.

In 1993, to much acclaim in establishment periodicals such as Foreign Affairs, the New

York Times, and El Financiero, the Mexican political scientist Jorge Castañeda published a

book, half analysis and half treatise, entitled Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after

the Cold War. In it he proclaimed the death of the Latin American revolutionary left.

Cuba, he maintained, was a crumbling anachronism. The socialist revolutionary move-

ments and parties that had backed armed movements from Argentina to Mexico from

the 1960s through the 1980s were similarly museum pieces. The future, Castañeda

preached, belonged to free-market liberals on the right. Leftists could stay around in

public life, though, if they recognized the inevitability of global capitalism and stuck to

working on modest goals such as better-run social programs and expansion of educa-

tional opportunities for women, indigenous people, or the poor. Just weeks after the

book’s publication, Castañeda had some explaining to do when an armed revolutionary

movement of indigenous fighters in southern Mexico launched an offensive on seven

municipalities in the state of Chiapas. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional

(Zapatista Army of National Liberation—EZLN), or E-Zeta, as it became known on the

streets and on the brand-new Internet, would then help set in motion a series of events

that deeply destabilized the government and ultimately ended the Partido Revolucionario

Institucional’s 70-year political monopoly on Mexican politics.

In many ways, Jeffrey Webber’s new book stands 25 years later as an ironic bookend

to Castañeda’s work. Whereas Castañeda argued that the Latin American left faced obso-

lescence because it had clung too long to Marxist theory and practice, Webber would

argue that a somewhat differently constituted left faces obsolescence in the 2020s because

it has abandoned many of its erstwhile Marxist pursuits. The Last Day of Oppression and the

First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left attempts to

chronicle three historical trends at once: first, the nadir of the Latin American left in the

early 1990s as neoliberal ideas and statecraft hollowed out many of its institutions and

platforms, including traditional left parties, agrarian fronts, labor unions, and revolution-

ary organizations; second, the unforeseen rise of a reenergized left in the late 1990s

through 2013 in a series of electoral sweeps in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil,

Argentina, and Chile; and third, the exhaustion and collapse of much of the left in a series

of electoral defeats, corruption scandals, and accommodationist arrangements between

left governments and right-wing business giants.

Webber argues, in an extended quarrel with other theorists and actors on the Latin

American left, that the ballot provides no viable means of bringing about thoroughgo-

ing structural change in the region’s deeply unequal economies. The broad popular-

class electoral victories of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo

Heather Williams teaches politics at Pomona College.

782412LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18782412Latin American PerspectivesWilliams / Book Review

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