Beginning with the premise of global class conflict growing out of Western capitalist dominance in the Third World, this broad sociological analysis sets out to explain the current state of class, politics, and development in Latin America and to demonstrate how this is challenging U.S. hegemony.
The authors argue, in effect, that the previous U.S. success at maintaining dominance through various military and elected regimes is being so seriously undermined that the future will produce either a rash of military coups or a surge of popular revolutions, and they suggest that the collapse of U.S. capitalism has crippled its capacity to respond. The authors provide a well-informed and extensive discussion of mass movements and their interconnectedness with trade. debt, politics, and foreign policy. However, to fully appreciate this work, one must accept the authors’ premises and be comfortable with their sweeping assertions. For example, they state that the recent experiments with electoral governments have failed because of their invariable alignment with establishment forces and the governments’ betrayal of the masses after having used their votes to gain power. This trend has reaffirmed “the viability of the revolutionary option . . . [as] the most realistic route for political, social and economic transformations that will benefit the region’s urban and rural masses ” (p. 27). The authors assert that mass movements are pervasive in Latin America, and they accord importance to those movements in such unexpected places as Brazil and Chile. The Peronistas are painted with the same brush as Sendero Luminoso
At times the authors venture into novel territory. They borrow the concept of “deracination” from the Palestinian problem to explain, vaguely, the efforts of elites to deny the importance of race. They devote a chapter to nuclear warfare and attempt to “illustrate the direct relationship between the U.S. threat to use nuclear weapons and the national class struggles in the Third World ” (p. 92).
