Petras’ book is a series of essays on the causes of underdevelopment in Latin America from a Marxist standpoint, comparable to André Frank’s Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 1969), but written with a primary focus on the late sixties in contrast to Frank’s historical perspective.
The series begins with a section of three essays on class and politics which discuss the relation of the various classes in Latin American society to the “promotion of dynamic social change and economic development.” Here Petras outlines his basic position, arguing that the groups traditionally relied upon for development initiative (the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, and the military) are too tied to the traditional elites and too fearful of mass mobilization to be capable of it, contrary to expectations of both North American observers and the orthodox Communist parties. He further contends that the process of urbanization (occurring without necessary increases in industrial employment), the “proletarization of the middle class,” and the cycle of peasant uprisings in the 1960s make it possible to speak of the viability, though not the inevitability, of mass intervention in the process of radical political change. The second section of the book deals with individual cases that could loosely be said to illustrate that theme, including a study of Peronism in Argentina, an analysis of the military regime in Peru, and an updating of his earlier work on guerrilla movements.
The third section focuses on U.S. policy toward Latin America. The United States orientation toward agrarian reform, the role of the multinational corporation, and the biases of the Rockefeller report are among the patterns of interaction examined. Here as elsewhere there is no attempt to relate the essays explicity to a common set of assumptions. The final section provides a most useful criticism of Latin American studies in North America and reviews a selection of books ranging from Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? to Stanislav Andreski’s Parasitism and Subversion.
As a necessary antidote to conventional U.S. thinking, which tends to ignore imperialism or to argue for its necessity or usefulness along diffusionist lines, the book is invaluable. The attack on the “dual society” approach to research and policy making is superb. And the reader may gain some useful insights along the way into the nature of the debate over revolutionary strategy on the left, a debate in which Petras consistently argues for direct mass action (“a new urban and rural insurgency involving white collar, industrial and rural workers”) as opposed to “Communist collaboration with the bourgeoisie” and to Debray’s “guerrillerismo.”
Criticism should be directed at the analysis itself and particularly at the unwillingness of Petras to apply to Marxist post-revolutionary alternatives the same rigor and vehemence with which he attacks the bourgeois regimes. In Marxist analysis the ritual of labelling can all too easily become a substitute for thought or empirical accuracy, a process which occurs because the terminology has a history and a legitimacy all its own. Does the existence of foreign investment prove “dependency” without reference to the conditions in which it enters an economy? Is it always correct to argue from the “model” of dependency that Latin American elites could not survive without the infusion of U.S. economic and military aid? What is needed is the realism of Hobsbawm’s recognition of the ability of many non-socialist regimes to adopt radical policies (New York Review, September 23, 1971), and of I. F. Stone’s concern (quite relevant to the assumptions of mass action) that economic mobilization requires “some form of socialism and—to be honest—some form of coercion of the labor force . . .” (New York Review, February 10, 1972). Without the projection of more vigorous post-revolutionary alternatives linked to concrete mass movements, we will be left with the elitism of Velasco and Allende and with the irony of Velasco as the radical socialist and Allende as the bourgeois reformer.
