Latin American/Late Marxist Perspectives

Abstract

The world today is very different from the one in which LAP first saw the light of day. I first read LAP as a graduate student who had come out of the political/cultural turmoil of 1968-1969 (a more significant date in Argentina), and its editors and contributors seemed to be asking some of the same questions I was. It was exciting to see, for example, a radical approach that was quite critical of the then-dominant dependency approach to underdevelopment. The early issues, for anyone seeking a theoretical formation while not forsaking a radical political perspective, were heartening. They made the Latin Americanist milieu, with its academicism and the faint whiff of colonialism about it, seem a mite fusty. Then LAP went professional, with Sage as its publisher, but so by then had I as a budding university lecturer. LAP took on a new life as a teaching aid and, I presume, made new friends. Of course, during this time, the world was changing dramatically, and so too were our tools for understanding it. From 1969 to 1979, the radical upsurge seemed unstoppable in Vietnam, Nicaragua, and even Grenada. Then the democratic forces in Latin America began to roll back the fascist onslaught that began with the Chilean coup of 1973. Yet, if 1979 was a high-water mark for noncapitalist regimes and movements, it was also the beginning of the end for Marxism as a theoretical discourse. It was, symbolically, the late Jean-Fran,ois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1984[1979]), innocuously subtitled A Report on Knowledge, that began that process. Already in 1958 Lyotard, in discussing the war in Algeria and Marxist interventions therein, had roundly criticized the dogmatism of a political discourse that simply tries to impose its theories on a recalcitrant empirical reality. Postmodernism was taken up in earnest by Lyotard only after many years of internal critique within the Marxist sphere. However, the new theory or, more precisely, mood of postmodernism rapidly began to permeate the humanities. The gloom and doom-end of metanarratives, death of the author, ethical relativism, and so on-of the pessi-