James Petras: Class, State and Power in the Third World — With Case Studies on Class Conflict in Latin America, Zed Press, 1981, £16.95
In the wake of the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 there has been a [illegible] interest in the Latin American area. Petras has written widely on agrarian reform and imperialism and this book collects his most recent articles on class conflict (a number of which appeared in Monthly Review and other journals). Overall there is a clear break with Gunder Frank's version of 'the sociology of underdevelopment' and a partial endorsement of the concerns of revolutionary marxism.
The first set of essays take up various aspects of 'the Imperial State (ie the USA) and World Economy', such as the changing pattern of US investment in Latin America, the role of the Trilateral Commission, the prospects of a new international division of labour and so on. Two more political essays examine the increased role of Social Democracy in Latin America, and provide a rather questionable analysis of 'The Revival of Fascism'. This last article shows up the strengths and the weaknesses of a 'critical sociologist' like Petras: there is a clear-cut condemnation of the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone which other academics have politely dubbed 'bureaucratic-authoritarian' regimes; on the other hand, there is a lack of historical and political clarity which allows him to transpose a category (fascism) to a quite distinct situation from that of Nazi Germany.
The second part of the book is undoubtedly much stronger. Two articles on Peru examine the peasant movement and urban radicalism respectively, and a broad survey of 'Socialist Revolutions and their Class Components' is reprinted from New Left Review (No 111). These are sound but not exceptional pieces of work, To my mind the best articles are the ones on Cuba, Argentina and Nicaragua respectively, which in different ways raise some of the fundamental tasks of Latin American socialists, The Cuban Revolution is shown to be more than just a handful of guerillas descending from the hills: rather the urban working class had become the driving force of a broad social movement from the aborted 1933 revolution onwards. That the popular anti-imperialist rising of 1959 became a socialist revolution was due [illegible] of the working class. The workers stamped their class content into the emerging advanced democratic forms which arose after the fall of the Batista dictatorship, Twenty years later the Nicaraguan revolution provided similar lessons and revived the hopes of those who had suffered at the hands of the bloody dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and elsewhere. Both guerrilla Organisation and the mass urban insurrectionary movement were necessary ingredients to sustain each others struggles, The previous debates that counterposed one approach to the other have been surpassed. The mass Organsations that were instruments of struggle against the dictatorship are now becoming the instruments of the socialist reconstruction of Nicaragua. Petras says rightly that the Factory Defence Committees, the Civil Defense Committees and the militia, which were the parallel power to Somoza are now 'ensuring that the revolution continues uninterrupted.'
To my mind the best article is that on the rank and file organisation of the working class in Argentina. According to Petras the left in Argentina has two faces: a 'political class' composed of trade union and political leaders, intellectuals and all those in formal Organisations, and a 'rank and file' working class with its own social, political, and family networks. This explains why the Argentine working-class struggle continues, despite the [illegible] of the formal organisations and the all-pervasive activities of the 'security forces'. The 'informal' working class maintains a strong sense of class solidarity through an intricate web of relations between family, [illegible] government (1946-55) in which unionisation advanced by leaps and bounds and powerful shop stewards committees ('Comisiones Internas') were formed in most workplaces. Throughout successive military governments from 1955 onwards this hardy rank and file organisation has been the backbone of labour resistance, Petras places a welcome emphasis on the internal organisation of the labour movement and its own working class culture, but he tends to neglect some major political questions. Basically the social strength of the Argentine working class has not been matched by political clarity. The dominance of Peronist populism over the labor movement even after the death of Peron in 1974 is a basic impediment to further advance by the working class in Argentina.
Petras has moved away from the rather global critiques of the 'dependency' theorists and from their neglect of the class struggle. Classes and the class struggle are at the very centre of his analysis. Some of his themes — dual power, workers' councils, permanent revolution and so on — show a welcome engagement with the classical debates of the international workers' movement. He even mentions that 'the Stalinist takeover transformed Marxism into an ideology of the State', and criticises the utopian/reactionary notion of 'building socialism in one country'.
However, there are a number of problems with his analysis, It divides 'economics' and 'politics' into separate chapters as though they could be divorced in real life. His new-found enthusiasm for Marxism, as with many radical US academics, tends to be rather simplistic, as though it were just another brand of sociology. A more nitty-gritty criticism is that the fifteen chapters [illegible] cover too much ground and jump from one question to another without an overall guiding theme. When all is said and done, however, this is a [illegible] excellent introduction to the Latin American situation.