Latin America in the Age of Inequality: Confronting the New "Utopia"

This essay examines the experience of Latin American social movements and the prospects of a popular counterhegemony in the age of globalization. Social movements have proliferated in an increasingly dense civil society. But they have not been able to offset rising social inequalities, increased polarization, and the growth of poverty brought about by globalization. The declining ability of social movements to achieve egalitarian outcomes is explained by the liberation of transnational capital from the compromises and commitments placed on it by diverse social forces in the nation-state phase of capitalism. This has shifted real power away from popular majorities and toward an emergent transnational capitalist class or elite. The neoliberal program advanced by this elite has torn down nonmarket structures, facilitated the integration of Latin America into global capitalism, and transformed the terrain on which social movements have struggled for egalitarian outcomes. These struggles are examined in four areas: the development process, labor, women's movements, and human rights and democratization. The prospects for a more egalitarian outcome to the globalization process rest on the ability of social movements to transnationalize their struggles and to build a counterhegemonic movement in emergent transnational civil society.