Surviving Capitalism (Not) : What Happened to the Pink Tide?

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

What Happened to the Pink Tide?

Click here to access article by Kyla Sankey from Jacobin.

This review of left movements and governments in South America is long overdue, and Sankey makes a very good effort to meet this need in this analytical report. We should have many more to fully understand the deficiencies of these movements/governments and to determine what strategies revolutionaries must pursue in the future.

The weakness of this analysis as I see it is that Sankey too often obliquely and abstractly alludes to what I think is the core problem with these pink governments: attempting to promote radical change within nations whose economies are overwhelmingly dominated by owners (capitalists) and these owners have strong ties with multi-national corporations and agents of the US-led Empire. I don't have a definitively practical remedy for this defect, but it is a problem that needs to be widely discussed among revolutionaries and left activists.