In recent years, heterodox trends in Marxism, particularly the revisionism associated with the Italian Communist party, have manifested themselves in the positions and policies of leftist parties in Latin America. On the theoretical front, the writings of the much-venerated Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci have exerted a strong influence. Indeed, Italy’s former condition as a semideveloped capitalist nation with a democratic tradition but with important precapitalist residual structures—traits which served as a point of departure in Gramsci’s analysis—also characterizes much of Latin America.
Most of the essays in the book under review either explicitly or implicitly attempt to apply Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to Latin American politics. The underlying thesis is that the classic Marxist vision of a polarized social structure in which the proletariat is pitted against the bourgeoisie is too simplistic for a society with a myriad of classes and subclasses which have degrees of conflicting and converging interests. Many of the authors argue, as did Gramsci, that working-class parties should concentrate their efforts on aggregating interests of other sectors of the population rather than exclusively representing those of the workers. In practice, this strategy means paying special attention to the middle sectors and working within democratic institutions in an attempt to gradually take them over.
Perhaps the most discerning essay is by Juan Carlos Portantiero, who was one of the first to argue for the applicability of Gramsci’s ideas to Latin America. Portantiero maintains that organized labor was a junior (or “nonhegemonic,” p. 296) partner in the populist regimes which were overthrown in Argentina in 1955, Brazil and Bolivia in 1964, and elsewhere. At the time of these violent ruptures, the labor movement was beginning to go beyond the task of promoting the bread-and- butter interests of its constituency and was becoming the champion of popular interests in a broader political sense. This “increasingly aggregating role” (p. 296) was not discontinued, as labor unions continued to play it in the struggle against the dictatorships which were replaced in the early 1980s, a trend which Portantiero considers to have important revolutionary implications.
Among the 26 contributors to Hegemonía are leading Latin American leftist political figures (Teodoro Petkoff of Venezuela and Héctor Béjar of Pern) and renowned scholars (Ernest Laclan of England, Julio Cotier of Peru, Pablo González Casanova of Mexico, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil). The first half of the book is devoted mainly to theoretical discussion of Gramsci within a European framework, and would thus be of less interest to the Latin American specialist than the second set of essays which attempt to ground their analyses on specific conditions in Latin America on a country-by-country basis. This qualification notwithstanding, Hegemonía is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the recent theoretical directions of the Latin American left and the strategies which are being devised by some of its most prominent and influential thinkers.
