Brudney (Review) - La justicia peronista (2020)

Hahr-hispanic American Historical Review, 2020

Global Labor Journal

Sergio Saravia, Syracuse University, USA Capitalism, Class and Revolution in Peru is a book that has not been sufficiently discussed within the Peruvian and Latin American social sciences despite its theoretical and empirical contribution to the analysis of social classes, their link with the development of capitalism and the party politics of the (socialist) left. Unlike other research on social classes centred on the works of Bourdieu and Weber or prioritising occupations and levels of economic income, Lust proposes a Marxist approach, recovering the relational quality of this concept and focusing on the relations of production. The puzzle posed by the author begins with a crucial premise: the weakness of the socialist left is not the result of the strength of the right; the right's strength is the result of the defect of the left itself. By recovering the "agency of the left parties", the book shows that the socialist left in Peru could not interpret and understand in depth the neo-liberal capitalist development of the last thirty years and its impact on the transformation of the social class structure. Although the failure of the Peruvian left has been studied in terms of its strategicelectoral decisions, the consequences of the internal armed conflict and the impact of the neoliberal reforms, which weaken its traditional social bases, the author argues that the equation is incomplete if we do not consider how these parties acted in the face of the transformation of the class structure. In this sense, the absence of a creative political praxis to analyse, study and understand in-depth capitalist development has prevented the recovery of their social bases, which were diminished after the economic crisis at the end of the 1980s and the introduction of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s. Through interviews with former members of leftist parties and the analysis of their official documents and strategic plans, the author shows that (1) although the socialist parties saw the changes undergone by the class structure in the country, (2) their analysis of this process was partial and superficial, preventing (3) a political practice under the new specificities of capitalist development in the country. The theoretical corpus behind this argumentative logic recovers the Marxist concept of class consciousness. Lust argues that the material conditions of the class structure do not determine class consciousness. Thus, class consciousness does not emerge automatically if it is not constructed by the political and intellectual work of political parties and workers' organisations. Therefore, the author calls attention to the fact that the absence of social bases that support socialist left programmes is not only the fault of the political crisis, structural reforms and the growth of the informal sector, but of the renunciation of political praxis to build this class consciousness in a changing class structure. In that sense, it is in the interaction between material conditions and political praxis where class consciousness(es) emerge as collectivities. The book has a double contribution. On the one hand, it analyses how the political and

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2023

Book review: Élites, radicalismo y democracia: Un estudio comparado sobre América La-tina, by Asbel Bohigues, Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2021

Estudios Interdisciplinarios De America Latina Y El Caribe, 2014

As part of a transnational politicization of everyday life during the 1960s in Colombia, many professionals, white-collar employees, and small business owners experienced a radical political change in their lives. Although intimately connected with developmental programs such as the Alliance for Progress, they began to question their political and social identifications as middle class in an effort to redefine what they thought their role should be in a changing society. Some of these radicalized members of the middle classes recall the second half of the 1960s as the moment when they became aware of who they really were, the moment when they drastically changed what they thought, felt, and dreamt. 2 They began to discuss relentlessly what they now remember as one of the most important questions of their generation: they were very much part of a petit bourgeoisie and, in seeming contradiction, wanted to participate in revolutionary movements. Marta Jaramillo, a sociologist who first worked for the Agrarian Reform Institute in Colombia and then as a professor at the Universidad Nacional from the late 1960s, remembers this experience as a vital moment for her professional career. In a very long discussion, she tells me, I had always thought I was very much part of the middle class. … Although I had seven siblings and I had to get a job to support them because my father died too soon, I got a really good education. My parents wanted me to be educated and I worked hard to get where

Latin American Perspectives, 2022

José Carlos Mariátegui's "heroic creation" of Indo-American socialism had both political and epistemic dimensions and involved a rethinking of the revolutionary subject-the proletariat-in Latin America. This proletariat was, from Mariátegui's perspective, an articulated subject centered on the indigenous. Consideration of Mariátegui's work from a perspective that subverts the view of the historical/structural heterogeneity of Latin America and seeks a bridge among the region's revolutionary currents in popular praxis may contribute to deepening the study of its potential for enriching the political and epistemological alternatives to the neoliberal project. La "creación heroica" del socialismo indoamericano de José Carlos Mariátegui tuvo dimensiones tanto políticas como epistémicas e implicó un replanteamiento del sujeto revolucionario-el proletariado-en América Latina. Este proletariado era, desde la perspectiva de Mariátegui, un sujeto articulado centrado en lo indígena. La consideración de la obra de Mariátegui desde una perspectiva que subvierta la visión de la heterogeneidad histórico-estructural de América Latina y busque un puente entre las corrientes revolucionarias de la región en la praxis popular puede contribuir a profundizar el estudio de su potencial de enriquecer las alternativas políticas y epistemológicas al proyecto neoliberal.

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies Vol. 29, No. 3 (January 2021).

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2019

Historical Materialism, 2015

George Ciccariello-Maher’s We Created Chávez is the most important book available in English proposing an anti-capitalist framework for understanding the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela, as well as its historical backdrop dating back to 1958. The book contains within it a laudable critique of Eurocentrism and a masterful combination of oral history, ethnography, and theoretical sophistication. It reveals with unusual clarity and insight the multiplicity of popular movements that allowed for Hugo Chávez’s eventual ascension to presidential office in the late 1990s. We Created Chávez has set a new scholarly bar for social histories of the Bolivarian process and demands serious engagement by Marxists. As a first attempt at such engagement, this paper reveals some critical theoretical and sociological flaws in the text and other areas of analytical imprecision. Divided into theoretical and historical parts, it unpacks some of the strengths and weaknesses by moving from the abstract to the concrete. The intervention begins with concepts – the mutually determining dialectic between Chávez and social movements; ‘the people’; and ‘dual power’. From here, it grounds these concepts, and Ciccariello-Maher’s use of them, in various themes and movements across specific historical periods of Venezuelan political development – the rural guerrillas of the 1960s, the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the new urban socio-political formations of the 1980s, Afro-Indigenous struggles in the Bolivarian process, and formal and informal working-class transformations since the onset of neoliberalism and its present contestation in the Venezuelan context.