Social Scientist

From Neoliberalism to Post-Neoliberalism

Author(s): Samyukta Bhupatiraju and Rahul A. Sirohi
Source: Social Scientist , Vol. 46, No. 7-8 (July–August 2018), pp. 41-54
Published by: Social Scientist

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26530817

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 From Neoliberalism to Post-Neoliberalism:
Dilemmas, Strategies and Tactics
of the Latin American Left 1

Samyukta Bhupatiraju and Rahul A. Sirohi

Introduction
The 1980s and 1990s were a difficult period for the Left across the world.
Depleted by the brutal repression of authoritarian regimes that had cropped
up in various parts of the developing world in the 1970s, discouraged by
the collapse of the Soviet Union and severely weakened by the neoliberal
turn, it almost seemed as if Left politics was heading towards increasing
irrelevance.
All that changed when in 1998, Hugo Chávez, who until then was
a complete outsider to Venezuelan electoral politics, rose to power in a
spectacular electoral debut. Apart from the fact that he was a relative newbie
fighting elections in what was historically a highly institutionalised political
system, what took the world by surprise was that he won despite having
an explicitly leftist political programme. In a region where neoliberalism
was supposedly hegemonic and where government after government had
pursued extremely liberal policies, the victory of the Left was not something
that observers of the region had expected. This momentous occasion was
followed by a series of victories of Left parties in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador
amongst other countries; a process that has been dubbed the ‘pink tide’.
A little over a decade after Fukuyama’s optimistic prognostications about
the ‘end of history’, the Left was back on the international political agenda
(Fukuyama 1989).
In this context, this article seeks to review the experiences of the Latin
American Left, and attempts to draw out important commonalities in the
strategies and tactics that they have employed. The recent crisis in Brazil
and the ongoing class wars in Venezuela have created intense debates on the
limitations of the Left tactics in the region, and analysing these discussions
is useful for understanding the opportunities and challenges faced by
the Left in its project of creating a post-neoliberal society and economy.
Analysing these questions are important in their own right, but this exercise
is also useful because it provides an alternative perspective on Left politics
in other developing countries. Drawing direct generalisations from the
experiences of one region is always a risky and potentially misleading thing
to do; thus the goal of the paper is to contextualise and understand leftist
political strategies in Latin America to draw out important lessons that may
help provide a different insight into the dilemmas faced by Left movements
in other parts of the world. 41

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 Social Scientist

El Agua es Nuestra, Carajo!

Vol. 46 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2018

In the 1980s, after three decades of state-led development, Latin American

economies found themselves in a deep crisis. In the 1960s and 70s, leading
economies in the region opted to raise resources from external capital
markets to fund their industrialisation drive. The failure to restructure the
domestic tax system combined with an overly optimistic outlook regarding
international conditions meant that over time these economies became
increasingly dependent on external loans. The strategy worked for a while,
but the two oil shocks in the 1970s and the interest rate hike in the US in
1979 suddenly sent these economies into a spiral. As capital flew out of the
country and as import bills mounted, these economies found themselves
unable to repay their external loans (Franko 2007).
Turning to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for emergency
loans marked the beginning of a long and harsh tryst with neoliberalism.
The IMF surmised that the debt crisis was a result of excessive demand
relative to supply and that, as a result, crisis-hit economies ought to find
ways to reduce current consumption through deflationary policies so as
to release resources for repaying their debt. To complement these harsh
austerity measures, as a part of IMF loan conditionalties, the crisis-hit
economies were pushed to liberalise their labour markets, privatise public
resources and open their economies up to multinational corporations.
It was recognised that these adjustments would likely hurt the common
public but swallowing this bitter pill, neoliberals argued, would eventually
lead them all to a brighter neoliberal future.
As it turned out, that promised future never actually came to fruition.
Trillions of dollars were squeezed out of the region for repayment of external
debt and even by the early 2000s, the region as a whole remained heavily
indebted to external creditors. Further, with the retreat of protectionist
barriers that IMF-enforced liberalisation entailed, deindustrialisation
struck major economies and evaporated decades of progress. In agriculture,
phenomenal corporatisation that came about in the wake of the IMF
adjustments had adverse fall-outs on livelihood strategies of the peasantry.
All these changes had devastating effects on employment and by the late
1990s, millions found themselves working in precarious and insecure
informal sectors to eke out a livelihood. The result of all these structural
changes was that between 1980 and 1999, the absolute number of poor
increased from approximately 136 million to 211 million (Grugel and
Riggirozzi 2012).
This was the context in which popular struggles exploded on to
the streets of Latin American capitals. In 1989, when the Venezuelan
government privatised transport and hiked bus fares, scores of poor rioted
on the streets of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. The army was called in,
and anywhere between 300 to 2,000 people are said to have been killed.
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 From Neoliberalism to Post-Neoliberalism

In 2000, in Bolivia, in the town of Cochabamba, the government backed

Samyukta Bhupatiraju and Rahul A. Sirohi

by the World Bank privatised water supply leading to sudden price hikes.
The reaction from the public was immediate as thousands of protestors
poured on to the streets with cries of El Agua Es Nuestra, Carajo! (Water
Is Ours, Damn It!), demanding a reversal of the privatisation. Water, they
argued, was what the human body was made up of, and turning it into
a commodity was akin to commodifying human beings themselves. In
reaction to this, the government acted with ferocious brutality, killing and
injuring several protestors. But rather than quelling the ‘water war’, these
government excesses magnified the protests which soon spilled over into
other cities, culminating in a nationwide movement against neoliberalism.
The ‘pink tide’ regimes that emerged in the region were products of
these mass insurrections. It was clear from these experiences that there was
a structural incongruity between neoliberalism and human welfare, and
that therefore the basis for a more egalitarian alternative to the current
economic system had to be found, epistemologically speaking, outside the
framework of neoliberalism and not in some social democratic version of it.
Thus, the strategy of reforming neoliberalism as many centrist parties had
attempted in the 1980s and 1990s had to be discarded in favour of a more
radical project of replacing neoliberalism with an alternative system.
The anti-neoliberal contentions also taught the Left that if it was to
have any hope of constructing a post-neoliberal society, it would have
to harness el poder popular (popular power) rather than shackle it. Time
and again, it was popular mobilisation involving trade unions, church
base communities, indigenous organisations, middle class associations,
pensioners and unemployed youth that had put the brakes on neoliberal
forces and had created openings for radical ruptures. Many began to
question the traditional leftist party structures and many came to critique
the dominant views that had been cultivated for decades regarding the role
of democracy in anti-systemic projects (Linera 2007, 2015; Harnecker 2015;
Lebowitz 2006, 2010, 2016). More generally, a consensus emerged that
building a post-neoliberal society had to go hand in hand with a deepening of
democracy. In contrast to the traditionally held leftist view that democracies
were merely an eyewash that were in need of being replaced by a proletarian
dictatorship, the emerging Left in Latin America argued that while capitalist
democracies indeed suffered from severe limitations, the problem was not
with democracy itself but with the fact that liberal models of democracy
did not really empower people. The Left, from this perspective, ought not
to shy away from democracy but rather must deepen it by transforming
existing institutions which with all their limitations do provide avenues
for progressive changes, and by developing parallel participatory forms of
democracy to give to constituent powers the ultimate voice in matters of
economic and political issues (Chávez 2012).
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 Social Scientist

Reform or Revolution: The Two-Track Approach

Vol. 46 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2018

In the matter of political strategy, one of the most contentious debates

within the Left was on the question of acquiring state power.2 The Zapatista
experiment in Mexico generated considerable sympathy for the anti-statist
position which argued that the Left ought to ‘change the world without
taking power’ – a slogan made famous by John Holloway’s work. But with
increasing political marginalisation of the EZLN, the strategy came to be
viewed as being politically unrealistic (Katz 2005). On the other end of
the spectrum the strategy of mass mobilisation and armed insurrection
was also an option that many well-known leftist thinkers advocated.
James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, for instance, were of the view that
existing institutions of capitalism were too powerful to be ignored, and
too functionally linked to capitalism to be amenable to be reformed or
manipulated by leftist electoral parties. Thus, class-based action aimed at
a frontal assault on state institutions was necessary for the revolutionary
structural changes that the Left wanted to make (Petras 2005; Petras and
Veltmeyer 2005).
The problem with this view was that while the insurrectionist strategy
had worked marvellously in the case of Cuba, these tactics failed disastrously
in other parts of Latin America, including in Venezuela in the early 1990s.
Many leftists therefore felt that a Bolshevik-style frontal assault on state
institutions was not a realistic option. They instead advocated a third
possible road that was open to the Left, which was of acquiring state power
through electoral means. This meant that rather than a frontal assault on the
state, the Left would have to undertake a ‘war of position’ in which it would
try and gain hegemony over civil society, transform existing institutions
from within, and open spaces for participatory forms of decision-making
so as to subject existing institutions to popular pressures (Sader 2008). But
this strategy was a risky one. The problem as many understood it was that
while the Left had to commit itself to building a post-neoliberal society, by
choosing this electoral road, the entire process would paradoxically have
to begin from within the existing institutionality of neoliberalism. But
existing institutions were not some neutral instruments that were waiting
to be used by subordinate classes for a transition to socialism; years of
bitter experience had taught the radicals that the central institutions of
peripheral capitalism were organs of class rule; a functional complement
to the economic base of peripheral capitalism. To take part in the everyday
corruption of elections, to form alliances that would be frowned upon by
intellectuals and to be a part and parcel of the state system in the hope that
they could be transformed ran the risk that the Left may get trapped in its
institutionality and may somehow end up protecting the very system that
it wanted to transcend. The problem, in other words, was the following:
So, the construction of this other way of being, to which we can give the
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 From Neoliberalism to Post-Neoliberalism

generic name of good living, necessarily has to leave capitalism behind, but at

Samyukta Bhupatiraju and Rahul A. Sirohi

the same time it has to transform capitalism, with the constant risk of being
trapped in the attempt, because, among other reasons, such a search process
is undertaken from within the institutionality of the (still capitalist) state, with
all the historical and political burden it entails. (Ceceña 2009: 41)

How was the Left to chart its path on the electoral road, then? How was
it to tread this thin line between reformism and revolution?
Many on the Left argued that since the state with all its coercive powers
existed and that since no amount of wishing it away could change that
reality, the strategy of shunning state power would be politically naïve; if
for nothing else but the fact that its armies, prisons and police could be
turned against popular movements at any moment, as had occurred during
the authoritarian regimes of the 1970s. The task at hand was therefore not
so much to give up parliamentary politics as as it was to reconstitute and
democratise it so that it may serve the developmental needs of society. To
do so would require significant changes in how the parliamentary system
works, whether it was by targeting corruption or by regulating the use
of money power in elections. But even more than that, the immediate
need was to move beyond ‘fossilised’3 conceptions of democracies where
democracy was reduced to a simple act of voting, towards one which
empowered people ‘to participate in what’s happening in the country, from
the matter of municipal investments to deciding if a petroleum contract
should be signed or not signed’ (Linera 2007). The emerging Left therefore
argued that radical movements would have to follow a two-track4 strategy
of acquiring state power through elections and pushing existing institutions
towards a more egalitarian direction, but ultimately realising that given the
structural limitations of the existing set-up, the transformations from above
would have to be complemented by creating extra-parliamentary channels
of participatory democracy from below which would ultimately provide a
decisive push towards post-neoliberalism (Azzellini 2010, 2016; Harnecker
2016; Katz 2007; Ciccariello-Maher 2007). As Katz (2007) explains it:
In the face of the false dilemma of accepting or ignoring the rules of
constitutionalism, there is a third viable path: to combine direct action with
electoral participation. With this approach, the expressions of people’s power
– which any revolutionary process requires – would be made compatible with
the maturation of socialist consciousness, which to a certain extent takes place
in the constitutional arena.

This constitutional road, many recognised, was filled with uncertainties

and pitfalls. The centrifugal inertia of existing institutions was extremely
powerful and there was a constant lurking danger of being overwhelmed by
it. All one had to do was turn to history and see scores of examples where
parties had acquired power on leftist platforms, only to subsequently turn
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 Social Scientist

their backs on those who voted them in. The pitfalls didn’t end here. If the
Vol. 46 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2018

Left did somehow manage to dig its heels in and use existing institutions
to turn the screws on capital, it would likely face substantial opposition –
and, as history shows, it could even face a situation where democracy itself
may be sacrificed by the rich and powerful to restore order.5 Thus, at the
last instance, transformations from above were only likely to be of limited
use. The success of the dual path would therefore ultimately depend on the
Left’s ability to strengthen existing links with the popular sector and build
new ones where necessary. Extra-parliamentary mobilisations would thus
remain key to the Left’s agenda.
Venezuela provides the most striking example of this dual-track
strategy. Since the elections of Hugo Chávez in 1998, there has been a
steady radicalisation of the government, and despite an aggressive class war
by the opposition which has led to shortages and massive inflation, the Left
government has been able to dig in and has begun to establish alternative
organs of popular decision making. Though the situation today is extremely
precarious, the Left continues to be a dominant force in the country. On
the other hand, in Brazil the Left has faced very big reversals. In 2016, the
Workers Party’s (PT) president was impeached despite winning elections in
2014. This was preceded by a grave economic recession and large protests
across its major cities. Brazil’s case provides an interesting background to
analyse the inherent risks and opportunities that the parliamentary, anti-
neoliberal Left faces when in power, and thus in the next section we briefly
touch upon this example to elucidate some of these complexities.

Brazil’s Experience
To evaluate the multifaceted and complex experience of Brazil during
the last decade-and-a-half, it is necessary to place the Brazilian Left in a
historical context. Since a detailed analysis of this sort cannot be taken up
here given limited space, we shall provide only a brief summary of PT’s
origins and its governance record prior to the recent crisis.
The Worker’s Party or Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) originated
in the anti-dictatorship movement of the 1970s, and after considerable
debate within the trade union movement, it was formally established as a
political party in 1980. In its early years it championed the cause of clean
and corruption-free governance, called for a reversal of neoliberalism, and
openly declared its goal to be socialism. During these early days it honed its
skills in electoral politics by gaining experience with local, municipal-level
governments, and these initial forays into the electoral sphere earned it a
reputation for being an honest and principled party.
While it gained considerable success at the local level, at the national
level it faced increasingly difficult odds. After starting out strongly in the
presidential elections of 1989, it faced bitter defeats in 1994 and 1998 at the
46 hands of the neoliberal Fernando Henrique Cardoso. This created intense

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 From Neoliberalism to Post-Neoliberalism

debates within the PT about its electoral tactics and alliance strategies,

Samyukta Bhupatiraju and Rahul A. Sirohi

and eventually these discussions led to a considerable moderation of PTs
programme (Hunter 2007). This internal churning occurred at a time when
there was growing disenchantment with the orthodox policies that the
neoliberals had been implementing. Sections of the industrial bourgeoisie
and the middle class which had been hurt by Cardoso’s deflationary policies
were looking for an alternative. More significantly, the industrial working
class, informal workers and landless peasants who had faced the brunt of
the neoliberal assault began rallying around the PT. In 2002, two decades
after its formation, the PT was finally able to garner enough support from
these disparate sections to win the President’s post (Morais and Saad-Filho
2005).
In the early days of the government, PT was faced with two immediate
pressures. First, on the external front capital had started to exit the
economy at the prospect of a PT-led government. The PT leadership felt
that it could not afford to derail economic stability in those early days, and
therefore it made efforts to calm markets by promising to abide by the
neoliberal policies introduced by its predecessors. This tactical retreat was
severely criticised by many on the Left as a capitulation to neoliberalism.
The alternative course would have been to risk an all-out economic crisis,
but many within the PT felt that they did not have a verdict for going ahead
with a revolutionary rupture with neoliberalism (Fortes and French 2005;
Fortes 2009). Given the nature of their mandate, they decided to prioritise
pragmatism over potential instability. Second, despite its large electoral win,
the PT realised that it did not have sufficient members in the legislature to
form a stable government and was therefore forced to find a broader set
of allies. Rather than allying with large established parties, it decided to
have truck with smaller ‘patronage parties’,6 which it felt would be easier
to manage. It would subseqently be revealed that the PT convinced these
smaller parties to join its coalition not by the power of its ideology but by
making regular bribes in return for their support to the government. This
would later explode in its face as a major corruption scandal.
In 2005, a year before the national elections, the first ever PT
administration was in a mess. During the three years in power it had been
able to implement a few welfare programmes but this was nothing close to
what it had promised in its election manifesto. Growth remained low and
macro indicators showed little signs of recovery from the recession that
started in 1997-98. Moreover, by 2005 the mensalao corruption scandal
involving its highest members ha­d also come to light. When this came to
be revealed, PTs entire image of being clean and uncorrupt was tarnished.
The opposition cornered the PT and it seemed like all was lost.
But in the 2006 elections, much to the surprise of observers, PT romped
home to a victory in the presidential polls (though the margins were not big
enough to form a government by itself). A look at the electoral data reveal 47

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 Social Scientist

that what had pushed Lula across the line was the massive support that he
Vol. 46 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2018

received from the north east, the poorest region of Brazil. This was also the
first time in many elections that voting occurred along clear class lines, with
the poorest and least educated voting for the PT in large numbers (Bohn
2011). It turned out that even the most minimal of welfare policies that
the government had instituted – which was much more than any one had
previously attempted – was appreciated by the poor. The 2006 elections
electrified the government and it increased its intervention in the economy
by opting for fiscal deficits, increasing social security expenditure, imposing
tariffs and reducing interest rates that had remained extremely high ever
since the stabilisation plans of the 1990s. In a world where globalisation
had dampened wages, Brazil witnessed a rise in the total wage share of
national income. Employment rates increased and growth of formal
employment outpaced that of informal employment for the first time in a
decade. Poverty declined at a fast pace and purchasing power in the hands
of common Brazilians increased to historic highs.
In hindsight it is clear that the early success of the PT was based on a
contradictory mix of policies. More specifically, the PT sought to introduce
activist industrial and social policies, but it did so by ‘stealth’ rather than
by an open defiance of neoliberal interests. It chose not to take neoliberal
forces head on and it instead sought to cleverly work around the existing
framework in order to get its way. Call this ‘reconstituted neoliberalism’,
‘neoliberalism lite’ or whatever you may, but one can’t think of any
neoliberal party making the kind of social progress that the PT did during
its tenure. In a world where financial interests rule the roost, it is easy to
forget how even the minor interventions that the PT made constitute a
programmatic attack on financial interests.
Yet, however impressive its achievements were, at the end of the day,
the problem with PT’s strategy was that all its clever management worked
well as long as commodity markets were booming internationally. This
gave the government room to invest in social policies without having
to take on more radical measures. But with the Great Financial Crisis
of 2008 and the subsequent slowdown of China, the Brazilian economy
was suddenly robbed of its props. As the economy slid into recession, the
transnational capitalist oligarchy which had always opposed the PT and its
experiments saw an opportune moment to take on the government. In the
legislature, the PDSB (Brazilian Social Democratic Party), which represents
the transnational sections of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, launched its attack
(Boito and Saad-Filho 2016). Externally, international rating agencies added
to the chorus by bringing down Brazilian ratings to ‘junk’ status. When a
sordid corruption scandal involving members of the PT government came
to light, PT was put on the defensive. All this culminated in the 2015
impeachment charges brought against the President. The opposition led
48 by the PDSB charged her for violating the fiscal responsibility clause that

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 From Neoliberalism to Post-Neoliberalism

is considered a crucial pillar of neoliberalism, and by the middle of 2016,

Samyukta Bhupatiraju and Rahul A. Sirohi

in an unexpected turn of events, Dilma Rousseff was ousted from her
presidency, bringing down the curtain on a decade-and-a-half of PT’s rule.
There are a number of ways in which one can evaluate the demise of
the PT. That the impeachment was a reflection of class war in its extreme
form cannot be denied (Bhupatiraju and Sirohi 2017). It is also possible to
argue that PT’s moderation and its inability to rupture with neoliberalism
resulted in the predicament that it currently finds itself in. There is much
literature that criticises PT for its pragmatism. From this perspective,
had the PT restructured property rights, had it delinked itself from the
world economy and transformed the country’s production structures, the
economy may have not succumbed to an economic crisis and PT may
not have crashed and burnt the way it did.7 Instead of doing any of this,
it continued to respect the rules of neoliberalism, it diluted its ideological
purity, and it brokered wide and unprincipled alliances, with the result that
it ended up transforming itself from a party of the workers to a party of the
elite. In short, it became reformist.8
For all the important insights that the Left criticism provides us,
the problem with the Left-gone-reformist explanation is that it is a crass
oversimplification of what has been an extremely complex evolution of
the PT. To begin with, to label PT as a neoliberal party, as many have, is to
gloss over all its achievements on the social front. PT’s record on making
growth equitable has been anything but neoliberal. Secondly, one has to
remember that PT came to power not in an institutional vacuum but in
a situation where macro policies and political institutions were deeply
shaped by what its predecessors had done. Its policy moderation has to be
understood in this context. It was a response to the deep-rooted inertia of
existing institutions, and these cannot be wished away however much one
wants to. One of course needs to interrogate why PT failed to shift gears
even when it faced an existential threat at the critical juncture of 2015–16,
but this in itself cannot be used to paint the entire decade-and-a-half of its
tenure as nothing more than some lite version of neoliberalism. PT had,
of course, the option of not even considering formation of a government
under the unfavourable conditions that it faced in the first place. Instead of
forming a government in 2002, it could have, for instance, remained a loyal
opposition and continued the highly selective alliance strategies that it had
adopted during its formative years. Had this been done, however, it is not
entirely obvious that the Brazilian Left would have been better off. Here,
a comparison with the strategies adopted by the Indian Left is instructive.
Though the pink tide is used to describe the leftist resurgence in Latin
America, India may have beaten Latin America to the punch on this front
had the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – the CPI(M) – accepted
the offer for Jyoti Basu to head a coalition government supported by
regional parties and the Congress in 1996. In what has been described as a 49

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 Social Scientist

‘historical blunder’ by Jyoti Basu, the offer was rejected by the organisation
Vol. 46 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2018

on ideological and political grounds. The understanding was that being

a minority member of a coalition may make it impossible for the Left to
make pro-poor interventions. Ideologically, the idea of having to ally with
bourgeois parties was also unacceptable to many within the Left. And so it
was that a historic opportunity of a communist leading the most populous
democracy in the world was lost, that too precisely at a time when the
Indian electorate was searching for political alternatives to the Congress.
What followed, as we know, was a slow but steady drift towards the Right in
Indian politics. The Indian Left today has become a shadow of its earlier self
and while there are several factors underlying its current state – including,
and perhaps primarily, its inability to take up radical extra-parliamentary
mobilisations on a national scale – the decisions made during the critical
juncture of 1996 have undoubtedly also weighed heavily. All this is not to
suggest that the Left in India would have been better off had it become
more ‘moderate’ or more ‘reformist’. The point is that while forming broad
alliances and participating in the institutionality of neoliberalism runs the
risk of becoming trapped in its own logic, the alternative of remaining
in the opposition and waiting for favourable conditions to emerge may
be worse. In order to gain hegemony, the Left must prove to the public
that it is ready and capable of governing the country in less-than-ideal
circumstances, where coalitional pressures matter, where the dominance
of financial interests is deep-rooted, and where right-wing forces and elite
mobilisations are likely to derail social stability. Had Lula in Brazil or, for
that matter, Chávez in Venezuela opted out of governing their countries
because the objective conditions were not ideal, it is not entirely clear if the
Left movement in their respective countries would have been any better
off. For all the flaws, PT’s era in Brazil was important because it opened up
radical possibilities that would simply have been unavailable had the Left
not taken up the mantle of governance at all.
Another way of looking at Brazil’s experience is to view it from the lens
of the Venezuelan Left – because, unlike in Brazil, the Left in Venezuela
remains a dominant force. It is of course true that in recent months it
has faced an uphill battle with worsening economic conditions including
shortages of basic commodities and hyperinflation, all of which have been
worsened by US economic sanctions. But despite these obstacles it has been
able to claw itself back and to some extent it has even been able to further
radicalise the Bolivarian Revolution that began in 1998.
While Venezuela has become a beacon for the international Left today,
what is often forgotten is that when Chávez first arrived on the scene, his
was a very moderate platform – much like Lula’s. Chávez in fact openly
declared that his aim was to reform and civilise capitalism by emphasising
social policies (Wilpert 2013; Ellner 2008). Running on this moderate
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 From Neoliberalism to Post-Neoliberalism

platform for his first election, he even managed to earn substantial support

Samyukta Bhupatiraju and Rahul A. Sirohi

from an otherwise conservative Venezuelan middle class. It was only after
his moderate policies were frustrated by elite opposition and only after they
orchestrated violent coup attempts against him that his government began
taking on more radical steps, eventually culminating in Chávez’s 2005
declaration that his party’s aim was twenty-first century socialism.
That Venezuela was able to move from a moderate to a more radical
stance when it faced an existential threat while Brazil opted for pragmatism
even when it should have gone on the offensive cannot be blamed only on
the moderating pull of electoral politics. The differing outcomes between
the two Lefts to a large degree stem from the fact that whereas Chávez
was able to build programmatic connections with grassroot movements
and was able to prepare alternative channels of participatory democracy,
Lula and Dilma’s PT shied away from unleashing its social allies and
actively diluted participatory decision-making (Bruera 2013; Ciccariello-
Maher 2013). As a consequence, whereas the popular sectors protected
Chávez from opposition assaults during the 2002 coup and pressurised his
government to move from reform to revolution, PT lost touch with its base
and found that it lacked the leverage needed to shift gears when it mattered.
Thus when Dilma Rousseff was impeached – on completely flimsy grounds,
one might add – not only had her allies in the legislature abandoned her
party, but the distance that the PT created with its social allies meant that
none of them came to her rescue either. The point is, the fact that PT
did not radicalise its course in the face of an existential threat in 2015–16
may not have been a pre-given fact stemming from the highly moderate
economic stance early on, or even because it began with a broad coalition of
parties which no doubt must have diluted some of its radicalism. Looking
at Brazil through a Venezuelan lens reveals that the failure of the Brazilian
Left should be understood as a result of its active policy of discarding the
same popular power on whose coat-tails it rode to power.

Conclusion
That neoliberalism has to be dismantled is no longer a matter of choice.
The insane ecological and social destruction that it has wrought upon the
world implies that our very planetary existence is predicated upon replacing
it with a more rational economic system. However, for the Left, the deep
contradiction involved in forging a path towards post-neoliberalism is
that its project must begin from within the world it has inherited, with
all its corruption, its flaws and its irrationalities. Unless one believes in
immaculate revolutions, there is little option but to tread this long and
treacherous path. It would follow, therefore, that if the parliamentary Left
is to have any success in its efforts, it must learn to walk on two legs9 – by
acting within the existing framework, while simultaneously undermining
51

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 Social Scientist

it and laying the basis for a new one. If the Latin American experience
Vol. 46 / Nos. 7–8 / July–August 2018

has taught us anything, it is that the relationship between reform and

revolution is far subtler than it has been made out to be.10

Notes
1 This article draws on Sirohi (forthcoming).
2 See Raby (2014) and Katz (2005; 2007) for a brief review of some of these debates.
3 See Linera (2015). Also see his speech by at the Opening Ceremony of the
20th Meeting of the São Paulo Forum. Available at http://forodesaopaulo.org/
speech-by-vice-president-of-state-alvaro-garcia-linera-at-the-opening-ceremony-
of-the-20th-meeting-of-the-sao-paulo-forum/
4 Azzellini (2010; 2016).
5 See Namboodripad (1973) for an Indian perspective on Latin American experiments
with elections.
6 Boito and Saad-Filho (2016).
7 See Robinson (2017) for a recent statement along these lines. Webber (2017)
provides a similar analysis though he does not analyse Brazil’s case in as much
detail as he does for Bolivia. Earlier works along this line include Morais and Saad-
Filho (2005).
8 See Petras and Veltmeyer (2005) for this perspective.
9 The idea of walking on two legs has been discussed by Martha Harnecker and
Michael Lebowtiz in a more general context.
10 In the Indian context, see the recent article by Prabhat Patnaik, which is available
at http://www.networkideas.org/news-analysis/2017/12/the-problem-with-the-
indian-Left/, viewed 14 March 2018.

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Samyukta Bhupatiraju is an independent researcher.

Rahul A. Sirohi is Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Tirupati.

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