Social Movements in Latin America

Mapping the Mosaic

Ronaldo Munck

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788213721

Social movements play a significant role in the political and social landscape of Latin America. They emanate from different sections of society and are motivated by many different concerns, including workers' rights, agrarian and land reform, the rights of indigenous peoples, gender inequality and the fight against environmental degradation.

Ronaldo Munck explores the mosaic of interlocking and connected issues that make up the complex map of social movements in Latin America and shows why, despite being a fragmented political force, these movements are at the centre of any future progressive politics in the region. As such they require careful understanding and, he suggests, a more nuanced theoretical approach than previous studies have offered.

Combining insights from Latin American approaches to social movement theory and detailed empirical case studies, the book provides readers with an understanding of the vital role social activism plays in the region and offers students the methodological tools to develop their own research agendas.

1

Introduction

We first need to ask ourselves: what is a social movement? An often cited definition is that of Mario Diani, for whom “social movements are defined as networks of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organizations, engaged in political or cultural conflicts, on the basis of shared collective identities”.¹ Social movements are not necessarily progressive, as some analysts assume; they can be revolutionary, reformist and, indeed, reactionary, as I have shown elsewhere.² Furthermore, social movements cannot, in my view, be reduced to a bland category of “civil society”, sometimes conflated with NGOs (non-governmental organizations) or placed in a generic basket called “social protest”. The question of human agency will loom large in this account of social movements.

I then move on to answer the question: why Latin America? As a continent that lies betwixt and between the global North and South, it has generated internationally significant social movements, and it may provide global lessons, not least, on how we should approach the study of social movements. By grounding the studies in a particular region, I hope to avoid the tendency to seek universal validity for what is sometimes known as “social movement theory”, seen as a self-contained discipline.

Finally, I propose an open paradigm, which will serve as a backdrop to the chapters that follow on specific social movements in Latin America. Although I agree in general with the “grounded theory” approach (basically, that theory needs to be based on experience), I will argue that two opening sensitizing concepts will serve us well: Michel Foucault’s intuition that “where there is power there is resistance”, and Karl Polanyi’s vision of history as a “double movement” of market expansion and societal reaction for self-protection. It is the practice of the social movements in Latin America, however, that will help us build and refine a grounded framework subsequently.

What is a social movement?

The first thing we need to recognize is the complexity and fluidity of social movements. Anyone who has been part of a social movement will understand that there is a degree of unknowability about such movements, something that cannot be captured by sociological theory alone. My own understanding of this developed when rereading Julio Cortázar’s early Latin American “literary boom” text, Rayuela (Hopscotch), which had first appeared in 1963, when I read it without much interest at school in Buenos Aires. The main character, Horacio Oliveira, is a well-read bohemian who participates in life intellectually rather than actively. His obsession is to attain a centre, a unifying concept of life he can be contented within. His interlocutor, Lucía (known as “La Maga”), has a love of life and spontaneity that Horacio finds beguiling but also threatening to his peace of mind. As with the novel itself, Horacio is torn between order and chaos as he switches jobs, countries and lovers. He states that

once again I imposed the false order that hides chaos … There are metaphysical rivers, she swims in them like that swallow swimming in the air … I describe and define and desire those rivers, but she swims in them. I look for them, find them, observe them from the bridge, but she swims in them. And she doesn’t know it, any more than the swallow. It’s not necessary to know things as I do, one can live in disorder without being held back by any sense of order. That disorder is her mysterious order, that bohemia of body and soul which opens its true doors wide for her. Her life is not disorder except for me, buried among the prejudices I despise and respect at the same time.³

Horacio, in his nomadic existence, seeks to find a sense of order in the world’s chaos. In his statement above he expresses openly and lyrically what his conundrum is and his differences with La Maga. We can take these thoughts as an opening gambit for the study of social movements. We will seek theoretical frameworks that will assist in our task of analysis and understanding but we will not force them on a recalcitrant reality. We will seek to “know things” but also accept that we cannot “impose a false order” on complex phenomena with a degree of unknowability.

Another way of expressing the limitation of social theory in terms of understanding social movements would be in terms of what motivates people to join or follow them. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward wrote a neglected classic on poor people’s movements and “why they succeed, how they fail”. They reinsert the question of agency and the vital role – for good or ill – that leadership plays in creating, sustaining and sometimes failing social movements. A particular contribution they make – and one we need to bear in mind – is that people experience deprivation and oppression in concrete settings and not through abstract categories. As they put it: “Workers experience the factory, the speeding rhythm of the assembly line, the foreman, the spies and the guards, the owner and the pay-check. They do not experience monopoly capitalism.”⁴ Our analysis needs to be concrete and our social theories need to be grounded.

A further layer of understanding that we need to develop is in terms of the way social movements do not obey other people’s rules: try to think like La Maga. They have their own logic, which cannot be discerned through a simple focus on structural conditions. Structuralism – in its Marxist as much as Durkheimian variants – has always been twinned with functionalism. It leads to a form of determinism – in which such and such structural conditions lead to this or that social movement outcome. We thus lose any sense of contingency (things can always turn out differently) and the vital role of human agency. In social movements – possibly above all other forms of human association – the roles of agency and of leadership are absolutely vital. It is the historians of social movements who have most clearly shown how structural conditions may set the parameters of social action, but they do not determine the outcome – that is the product of spirit and struggle – and there are always alternative historical outcomes.

In a study of the social bases of obedience and revolt based on a close study of the failed German revolution of 1918–20, Barrington Moore Jr challenges what he understood to be the Marxist theory of revolution, arguing against the tendency to “overemphasize the underlying long-run social trends” that do not determine history but, rather, “provide opportunity for political leaders and set outer limits on what is possible in terms of thought and action”.⁵ Workers being brought into large factories to work did not, in and of itself, create stable union organization, let alone “socialist consciousness”. Pain and suffering alone do not create a social movement. In response to the brutal treatment of workers in the Industrial Revolution, what the workers had to learn, argues Moore, “was not to feel pain, but how to stop feeling that the pain was just an inevitable aspect of their existence”.⁶ For orthodox Marxists, it was as if it was simply a question of demonstrating exploitation for consciousness to emerge. We know now that the equation is much more complex and involves understanding, as Moore does, the “moral economy” of injustice and protest, for example.

Although the discussion above points us towards what a social movement might be, there are two current forms of analysis that present obstacles to this understanding, in my view. The first is the civil society frame, which first emerged in Latin America in the 1970s, to be followed in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. Defined as the territory between the state and the economy, the concept gained considerable purchase during the democratization wave of the 1980s. “Civil society” became a slogan for social movements and international organizations alike. It thus became part of the vocabulary of the World Bank, serving its mission of “good governance”, whereby civil society guarded against the state, seen as the source of all problems. As we moved into the 1990s there was a marked “NGOization” of social movements in Latin America, to the extent that this frame now dominates (even when it is being criticized) in the North American literature on social movements.

We also began to see a slippage in language, with social movements increasingly being called CSOs (civil society organizations). The NGOs began to fill the gap in social provision created by the dismantling of the state in the 1990s under the neoliberal pro-market economic policies. At the same time, they gave political cover to the World Bank, which could claim it supported “empowerment” and “bottom-up” development. This is not the place to carry out a balanced evaluation of NGOs and the civil society discourse. Suffice it to say it is not the same thing as social movements and the struggle for social transformation. A separate but related discourse is that of human rights, another Western liberal notion that has gained near-universal acceptance as the new paradigm for both development and social movements. Although we might rhetorically argue that “labour rights are human rights”, the reality is that social gains have historically been made through struggle, and today the main priority for labour and other social movements lies in organizing even when demands are posed in terms of rights.⁷

The second contemporary approach to social movements I would view as problematic is the one that merges them with a broader “social protest” genre. Protests of various types – from boycotts to marches, from sit-ins to rent strikes, from petitions to wildcat strikes – are seen to be part of the “repertoire of action” of social movements. Although other actors, such as political parties and pressure groups, also engage in protest actions, they are seen as the privileged tool of the social movements. There has been much emphasis on protest as “performance” and also the role of the mass media in relation to protests. Reflecting on this approach, we can, of course, agree that social movements engage in protests. It is a quite different proposition, however, to replace the social movement problematic by that of social protest. I would argue that protest is certainly an activity that social movements engage in, but it cannot be seen as their raison d’être, which would amount to reducing their specificity and diluting them within a much broader frame of analysis.

In Latin America the “protest” lens came to the fore in the 1990s, around the same time as the civil society frame mentioned earlier. With the decline of mass social movements, such as the trade unions, in the 1980s, there was a shift towards direct action: local uprising, mass looting and road blockages. It became widely believed that traditional social movements were in terminal decline and their capacity to articulate alternatives severely compromised. As stable collective identities crumbed – or at least appeared to – the disarticulated masses would respond through a more incoherent social protest modality. Direct action could be disruptive but could never lead to the creation of a new historical subject leading social transformation. Driven by the academic sector, and supported by international research funders, this perspective became hegemonic across Latin America to some extent. This changed after the turn of the century with the rise of the left governments, which only goes to show that “social protest” can never replace “social movements” as an adequate theoretical lens or paradigm.

In this section I have reviewed some basic preliminary matters before entering our full study of social movements in Latin America. I have argued that social movements cannot be red...