Friday, May 20, 2011

The Latin American Left

This is a very interesting piece on the state of the Latin American left, noting its extreme diversity but also its lack of central principles and its tendency to move toward the center.

My sense is that while a broadly conceived left is stronger in Latin America than anywhere else in the world at this point, and that it has made positive progress in many areas, like elsewhere it represents working people today less than ever before and essentially accepts global free market capitalism as a good thing. Exceptions such as Bolivia and Cuba are seen as outliers by the rest of the world, including other Latin American nations governed by an increasingly moderate "left."