Utopia and the Dialectic

• Date: 01 November 2018
• Author: Marc Becker
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17741291
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 223, Vol. 45 No. 6, November 2018, 179–182

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17741291

© 2017 Latin American Perspectives

179

Book Review

Utopia and the Dialectic

by

Marc Becker

Eugene Gogol and Latin American Colleagues Utopia and the Dialectic in Latin American

Liberation. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015.

The tension between a charismatic vanguard leadership and a mass popular move-

ment has long been a complicated issue for the revolutionary left. Strong leadership

such as what Fidel Castro provided in Cuba seemingly is vital to the success of a revo-

lutionary movement, but it tends toward authoritarianism that undermines the demo-

cratic aspirations of the people. Mass movements embody the will of the people but

often lack the ideological grounding or guidance that is crucial for the realization of

profound and permanent change. John Holloway (2002) uses the neo-Zapatistas in

Chiapas, Mexico, to build an argument for changing the world without taking control

of state power, while Greg Wilpert (2007) inverts his argument to illustrate how

President Hugo Chávez fundamentally transformed Venezuelan society precisely

through government structures. This anarchist/communist divide has long run through

the revolutionary left and more recently has been refocused through discussions of

horizontal versus vertical forms of social organization.

In Utopia and the Dialectic in Latin American Liberation, Eugene Gogol, a Marxist-

humanist activist, contributes a theoretical aspect to these debates. Gogol draws on

Raya Dunayevskaya’s reinterpretations of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin’s discussions of dia-

lectical thought and action to examine how concepts of utopia and the dialectic of neg-

ativity have emerged in Latin American social movements during the first decades of

the twenty-first century. Dunayevskaya has not had a particularly strong influence in

Latin American leftist circles or among Latin American scholars, and this book is part

of Gogol’s attempt to introduce her theoretical contributions to the region.

Dunayevskaya was born in Ukraine in 1910 and immigrated to the United States as

a child. In the 1930s she served as Leon Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary during his

exile in Mexico but soon broke with the communist leader over the concept of a work-

ers’ state. She subsequently founded the philosophy of Marxist humanism, which

emphasizes Marx’s theories of alienation. Dunayevskaya (1982; 1991; 2000) published

a series of works on Hegel’s influence on Marxist theory, culminating with a detailed

examination of Rosa Luxemburg’s contributions to Marx’s philosophy of revolution. In

Utopia and the Dialectic in Latin American Liberation, Gogol places special emphasis on the

way her concepts are expressed in indigenous movements and highlights women’s

experience of utopia and the dialectic. In particular, he wants to shift the terms of the

debate from the forms of organization (hierarchical versus horizontal) to one that focuses

on the philosophy of organization.

Gogol’s book is divided into four parts, beginning with a theoretical framing of a

Latin American concept of utopia emphasizing how it intertwines with the Hegelian

dialectic. In this section Gogol builds on his previous book The Concept of Other in

Marc Becker is a professor of Latin American history at Truman State University.

741291LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X17741291Latin American PerspectivesBecker / Book Review

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