From global capital accumulation to varieties of centre-leftism in South America

NICOLAS GINBERG & GUIDO STAROSTA

Crisis and Contradiction: Marxist Perspectives on Latin American in the Global Economy

Brill Academic Publishers

Lugar: Leiden; Año: 2014;

In the last decade there has been a broad shift to the left in South America. However, different types of political economy regimes can be discerned within this general common trend. There is currently a relatively widespread consensus that two different varieties of centre-left administrations are in office in the region. Mainstream analyses distinguish countries where a ?responsible left? governs from countries where old style ?populism? is in control of the national state. By contrast, some left-wing commentators conceive of that distinction as one between formally centre-left but substantively ?neo-liberal? governments, and more genuinely ?progressive? ones. The first group includes countries like Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. The second group includes Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. Colombia, with its own singularities, is usually left out of these comparisons. The present article challenges those distinctions on the grounds that they fail to uncover the essential material basis of those apparently different political economy regimes. In other words, most positions in the debate fail to offer foundations for the comparative analysis in the economic forms of these national processes of capital accumulation. Instead, they posit the different political forms that mediate the economic content as the basis for the comparison between the ?varieties of centre-leftism? in Latin America. This article offers a materialist inquiry into the historical development of capitalism in Brazil and Argentina and argues that capital has been accumulating in these countries under the same specific form, namely, through the appropriation of the extraordinary mass of social wealth existing there under the form of ground-rent. From this starting point, the article then explores the commonalities and also singularities under which the same specific form of capitalist development has unfolded in these countries, and explains why this qualitatively identical content has recently given rise to diverse political forms within a broader trend of a shift to the centre-left. Based on this discussion, the article critically engages with the claim that different political economy models currently prevail in those two groups of countries. It also provides a critical perspective on the prospects for long term development in the region.