My book review of Jeffery R. Webber’s “The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same"

The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left, by Jeffery R. Webber. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.  Paper. Pp. 327. 

Published in Science and Society, July 2018 issue

Over the recent past, Jeffery Webber has been one of the most prolific leftist critics of so-called Pink Tide governments in twenty-first century Latin America. This book, which consists mostly of adopted versions of previously published journal articles, is strong on both theory and empirical content. In his analysis of contemporary Latin American politics, Webber draws on various theoretical concepts and writings while pointing to their main shortcoming, namely their failure to use an effective class-based framework.

One theoretical formulation used by Webber is the concept of “passive revolution,” originally developed by Gramsci to refer to revolutionary transformations from above that lacked input from the popular sectors. Italian-Mexican social scientist Massimo Modonesi has applied the concept to the Pink Tide phenomenon to demonstrate how progressive government leaders bypassed the social movements that brought them to power and ended up forming alliances with elite sectors. Along these lines, Webber argues that the initial social thrust of the Pink Tide movements was “contained” (166) as the government made efforts to demobilize social movements, particularly after 2012 when the economic collapse of 2008 reached Latin America in a big way. Pink Tide governments “fully or partially co-opted” social movement activists and employed “clientelistic arrangements,” while charismatic leaderships reinforced the “pacifying and delegative characteristics of these passive revolutions” (167).  

A second school of thinking that informs Webber’s analysis is the thesis of neo-extractivism. According to this line of thinking, twenty-first century Latin American nations including those governed by progressives have reverted to the type of dependent relationships with developed nations characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century. Their economies center on the export of soy beans, hydrocarbons, minerals and other primary commodities “within the evolving international division of labor” (102). The negative consequences of this “re-primarization of Latin American economies” (288) include massive ecological devastation and economic and political instability generated by sharp international market fluctuations. Another result is the decline in industrial production, though some who write along these lines (and who refer to the trend as “commodities consensus”) “exaggerate[s] the extent of the decline” (288). 

Webber attempts to fill what he perceives to be a major gap in the writings of Modonesi as well the neo-extractivism school by providing a class analysis to explain the movement of Pink Tide governments toward the political center. Webber informs the reader, however, that his aim is not to correct the class shortcomings of Modonesi’s interpretation of passive revolution by “returning to any crude economic reductionism or determinism” (168). In response to Modonesi and others, Webber analyzes the class underpinnings of the government of Bolivia – the nation he is most familiar with. Webber points out that once Evo Morales consolidated support by gaining ratification of the new constitution and re-election as president in 2009, he reached an agreement with the economic elite of Santa Cruz, the country’s most prosperous region. Webber claims that “at the epicenter of the governance formula underpinning” the Morales presidency is an alliance between agro-industrial interests of the extended Santa Cruz region and transnational capital in hydrocarbons and mining, on the one hand, and “an incipient indigenous bourgeoisie  in cooperative mining, commercial trading, contraband and narcotics,” on the other (177). 

Chapter eight on Venezuela consists of a critical review of George Ciccariello-Maher’s book We Created Chávez, which can be classified as a people’s history of the Chávez phenomenon. Webber calls Ciccariello-Maher “a scholar-activist formed in the anarchist tradition, broadly conceived” (239) and credits We Created Chávez as being “the single most important book available in English advancing an explicitly anticapitalist framework for understanding… the rise of Hugo Chávez” (241). The underlying thesis of Ciccariello-Maher’s book is that “the people, as a collective protagonist in Venezuela, has been forged through shared experiences of conflict in recent decades” (244). For Webber, however, the concept of “the people” is nothing other than “a way around the identification of any singular revolutionary subject” (245). Webber is equally critical of Ciccariello-Maher’s privileging of the “quasi-lumpen barrio dweller” – largely those belong to the informal economy – who is uniquely capable of grasping “the totality of Venezuela’s lumpen-capitalism” (as quoted on page 268). Webber gives much greater weight to workers in strategic sectors (such as tin miners in the case of Bolivia) “with their ability to shut down the country’s principal source of foreign exchange” (265). 

Webber also takes issue with Ciccariello-Maher’s concept of “dual power” in which alternative power partly consists of “the condensation of popular power from below into a radical pole” that serves as a “fulcrum to radically transform and deconstruct” the old state (as quoted on page 246). This view of dual power in Venezuela, undoubtedly borrowed from the writings of Nicos Poulantzas, underestimates according to Webber the urgency of a definitive rupture or revolution. Webber adds that Ciccariello-Maher conceptualizes “the capitalist state as more malleable than it is” (251). 

Webber is not only a harsh critic of Pink Tide governments, but also of those analysts on the left who underscore their positive features. Webber labels some of these writers “social democrats” and claims they never really supported revolutionary change and thus consider the Pink Tide “move toward the center of the political spectrum… as merely an adaptation to reality” (274). Other analysts uphold a “statist vision of socialist transition” and view the “growing tension between social movements and left governments” as nothing more than “creative and revolutionary impulses” (274) which actually contribute to the process of change. Webber places Bolivian vice-president Alvaro García Linera as well as Marta Harnecker, Atilio Borón and Emir Sader in this second, not particularly favorable, category.

Webber overstates his case for denying the progressive character of the Pink Tide phenomenon. Scattered throughout the book are acknowledgements of certain positive features of these governments: reduction of inequality, modest redistribution of wealth, social policy based on the principle of universalism, incorporation of social movement activists and other progressives in important government positions, avoidance of the “extreme violence of paramilitary dispossession associated with intensified extractivism in right-ruled countries” (95), higher royalty and taxes on extractive activities, reversal of the privatization trend of the previous neoliberal period, “legalization of indigenous territories” (234) in the case of Bolivia, and “important but strictly limited structural transformations” (295). In addition, Webber fails to cover the foreign policy of Pink Tide governments which challenged U.S. hegemony to a degree unmatched in the history of the continent. These developments, as well as the undeniable war declared on progressive governments by powerful national and international actors would appear to contradict Webber’s tendency at times to put progressive governments in the same sack as the political right. Thus Webber writes that Lula’s Workers Party and the Brazilian right “have more in common than is commonly recognized” (63). Notwithstanding these shortcomings, overstatements and omissions, the merits of Webber’s book are undeniable. In it, he presents cogent arguments in a cohesive way, and backs them up with a wealth of empirical evidence.

                                                                                                            STEVE ELLNER