NEOLIBERALISM AND IMPERIALISM IN LATIN AMERICA: DYNAMICS AND RESPONSES

The political economy and sociology of development in Latin America has been obscured by the theoretical and political discourse that surrounds the concepts of globalization and international development. The aim of this paper is to cut through and look behind this discourse and to deconstruct it in terms of the ideology embedded in it, and to reconstruct, in the Latin American context, the actual dynamics of capitalist development. These dynamics, we argue, arise out of the policies and workings of an imperialist state that through the efforts of a succession of U.S. administrations has come to dominate the entire region. To this end, the paper presents a framework designed to facilitate the analysis of the dynamics of capitalist development in Latin America. Our central argument is that these dynamics have both an objective-structural and a subjective-political dimension and that a class analysis of these dynamics must include both. Thus, going beyond the objective conditions that affect countries and people according to their class location, we examine in this paper the political dynamics of popular and working class responses to neoliberal policies of structural adjustment in Latin America in recent years.