Global Discourse

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Deconstructing Latin American development:

postdevelopment critical theory or Marxist
political economy?: A reply to Munck

Henry Veltmeyer

To cite this article: Henry Veltmeyer (2018): Deconstructing Latin American development:
postdevelopment critical theory or Marxist political economy?: A reply to Munck, Global Discourse,
DOI: 10.1080/23269995.2018.1461439

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2018.1461439

Published online: 12 Jul 2018.

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GLOBAL DISCOURSE, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2018.1461439

REPLY

Deconstructing Latin American development:

postdevelopment critical theory or Marxist political
economy?: A reply to Munck
a,b
Henry Veltmeyer
a
Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Zacatecas, México; bSociology and International Development
Studies, Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia, Canada

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Munck (2018) provides us with a thoughtful reflection on the lessons Received 16 August 2017
that can be drawn for the Left from a review of recent Latin American Accepted 3 April 2018
experiences and debates. I am in total agreement with his central KEYWORDS
point regarding the critical importance of these experiences and Coloniality; buen vivir;
debates for augmenting the global Left by the provision of theore- developmentalism; Marxism
tical and political tools that can be used for the Left to come to terms and radical Left; social
with the forces at work in the current phase of world capitalist transformation
development – and in moving forward. On the other hand, I disagree
with the way that he conceptualizes the challenge that recent devel-
opments in Latin America presents the Left.

This is a reply to:

Munck, R. 2018. “Rethinking the Left: a View from Latin America.”
Global Discourse. https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2018.
1461438.

Ronaldo Munck (2018) provides us with a thoughtful reflection on the lessons that can be
drawn for the Left from a review of recent Latin American experiences and debates. I am in
total agreement with his central point regarding the critical importance of these experi-
ences and debates for augmenting the global Left by the provision of theoretical and
political tools that can be used for the Left to come to terms with the forces at work in
the current phase of world capitalist development – and in moving forward. On the other
hand, I disagree with the way that he conceptualizes the challenge that recent develop-
ments in Latin America presents the Left. Let me briefly elaborate.
First, the problem with the approach used by Munck (2018) in his reflections on these
developments and his ideal-type analytical schema do not capture well or fully the complex
and changing conditions and forces generated by the workings of the capitalist system. More
particularly, they fail to take into account the ‘objectivity’ of these conditions, which, as Marx
theorized and established as a fundamental principle of scientific analysis, affect individuals –
and countries for that matter – according to their location in the system. The problem is that
from Munck’s (2018) postdevelopment standpoint (‘postcolonial perspective’), ideas are
assigned the capacity of self-realization, lacking only an agency to act upon them.

CONTACT Henry Veltmeyer hveltmeyer@smu.ca

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 H. VELTMEYER

This is to say, together with other advocates of critical theory in the postdevelopment
mould, Munck (2018) seems to assume that for change to occur, and for the Left to
contribute to the process, all that is needed is for the Left to give form to alternative
ways of thinking about the forces of social change; that these ideas themselves con-
stitute the primary force of change once they are acted upon. In effect, critical theorists
like Munck (2018) who criticize the workings of capitalism argue from what is the
essentially an idealist standpoint, relying on a poststructuralist discourse analysis rather
than a concrete [class] analysis of actually existing conditions, put themselves in the
same position as Feuerbach in Marx’s early works, namely as ‘philosophers’ (the ‘German
ideology’, as Marx had it), content to reflect on reality. But for Marx – as for critical
theorists in the Marxist tradition of Political Economy – ‘[t]he philosophers have only
interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’.
This is my first criticism of Munck’s (2018) brand of critical theory, which is like other forms
of critical theory, such as that associated with the Frankfurt School, but also the postmodernist
critics of capitalism and colonialism in the 1980s who rejected and turned their backs on
Historical Materialism and Marxist class theory. The issue I have with this approach is that the
postdevelopment critique of science (and delegitimation of all forms of ‘structuralism’,
including Marxism) gives rise to a sort of intellectual and political – as well as cultural –
relativism, which results in the demobilization of class-based social movements and under-
mines diverse political projects on the Left to bring about substantive if not transformative
change.
My second criticism, which arises from the first, is that the various ideas and ideal-typical
models of alternative development or an alternative future presented by Munck (2018) fail to
ground and contextualize these ideas and models in the material conditions and situations
generated by the workings of the capitalist system. At issue here is what can be described as
the new geoeconomics and geopolitics of capital at the turn into the twenty-first century. By
failing to give due regard to the objectivity of the changed conditions and forces of change
generated in this new context, Munck’s (2018) analysis over-subjectivizes the agency of
transformative social change (i.e. the social and political actors and the projected social base
– and more generally the potential ‘revolutionary subject’ – for political action by the Left).
What is needed is an analysis that takes account of both the objective-economic and
subjective-political conditions of transformative social change and political action; that
combines a concrete analysis of the concrete situations that many, if not all, people find
themselves in with a relevant discourse analysis – not an idealist post-structural form of
discourse but a ‘materialist discourse analysis’ that seeks to deconstruct discourse from
the perspective not of the diverse subaltern voices embedded in it but rather from its
underlying ‘materialities, processes and social relations’ (Aguilar et al. 2015). Larrea
(2010) also emphasizes the necessity of this.
On this point Munck’s (2018) ‘postcolonial perspective’ (the ‘coloniality of power’) is not a
particularly useful or relevant way of framing an analysis of the forces of change at play in the
Latin American context. For one thing – to paraphrase Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach – this
perspective fails to recognize the objectivity of conditions generated by the workings of the
capitalist system, whether or not this objectivity is grasped in thought or reflected in the
collective actor’s ‘theoretical awareness’ (or class consciousness). This ‘postcolonial perspec-
tive’ not only is not precisely relevant – in that it derives from and essentially relates to an
entirely different non-Latin American historical experience and context – but it is based on an
 GLOBAL DISCOURSE 3

idealist or nonmaterialist epistemology: the idealism of the subject or agency. What is needed
is a discourse that incorporates both the question of ‘agency’ (collective actions on certain
ideas) and a class analysis of the structural-strategic factors implicated in the capitalist
development process – what Georg Lukács, in his analysis of Marx’s thinking in his early
works, described as the ‘identical subject–object of history’, and what David Barkin and
Alejandra Sánchez (2017) in the current Latin American context aptly (from the perspective
of the Left) describe as a ‘collective revolutionary subject’, the central protagonist in the
struggle against the advances of capital and capitalism in Latin America in the neo-liberal era.
To expand on this point, the analysis presented by Munck (2018) needs to be contextua-
lized in terms of what might be described as a period of transition from one type of
capitalism to another – that provides a political economy rather than postdevelopment
frame to an analysis of the dynamic forces of capitalist development in the current context
and the resistance to it. Within this frame, the forces of change and the proposals for
transformative social action are located in, and traced back to, the workings of a system
rather than an alternative postdevelopment critical imaginary. At issue here are objective-
economic conditions and subjective-political forces of change generated by the workings of
the capitalist world system both in Latin America and in the global economy. The former
relates in particular to the disenchantment and widespread rejection of neo-liberalism as an
economic doctrine and development model to guide macroeconomic policy – a rejection
that can be attributed to the activism of the social movements in the 1990s (Petras and
Veltmeyer 2005). The latter relates to the ascension of China as an economic world power
and other ‘emerging markets’ in the first decade of the twenty-first century, developments
that gave rise to both a primary commodities boom and the recourse of many governments
in South America to an extractivist model based on the extraction of natural resources and
their export in primary commodity form. Under these conditions, many observers and
analysts, including Munck (2018), have pointed towards the emergence of a sea tide of
regime change associated with a ‘progressive cycle’ in Latin American politics (Petras and
Veltmeyer 2009), and Munck’s (2018) essay does indeed recognize the importance of
deconstructing and reconstructing the politics and economics of social change in the
context of this progressive cycle.
From a Marxist political economy (as opposed to postcolonial) perspective, the
diverse models and ways of thinking about development to which the author makes
reference are viewed very differently along two axes, but not the two used by Munck
(2018) to construct his ideal-typical matrix of alternative models. From the critical
standpoint of political economy, the new development thinking and practice in Latin
America over the last three decades can be seen as a series of critical counterpoints to
both mainstream thinking about the development process and the forces of resistance
in the popular sector – forces that predominantly take the form of social movements.
The first axis is constituted by ‘images of revolution’ conceptualized by Munck (2018)
from the vantage point of a ‘postcolonial perspective’, which, as he reconstructs it, derives
from the image of revolutionary change associated with the response of the rural poor in
Latin America as well as the revolutionary Left in Cuba and elsewhere to the advance of
capital. This response – the formation of movements of revolutionary change – led to a
twofold response from the architects and guardians of the capitalist world order, as well as
the local forces of law and order (the agents of the state): developmentalism – a project that
offered the ‘rural poor’ (the semi-proletarianized ‘peasantry’) an alternative programme of
4 H. VELTMEYER

‘integrated rural development’ (institutional and policy reform, financial and technical
assistance); and armed force and repression – when or if necessary – of these movements
by mobilization of the state’s apparatus of armed force.
With the successful defeat of the political Left/popular movement (in the twofold form
of the land struggle and the labour movement), and the installation in the 1980s of ‘new
world order’ designed to liberate the ‘forces of economic freedom’ (free-market capitalism)
from the regulatory constraints of the welfare-development state, leading elements of the
‘global Left’ – intelligentsia of the political Left – responded paradoxically by abandoning
the class struggle and – armed with a postcolonial subaltern anti- or postdevelopment
perspective – turning away from the revolutionary (and anti-imperialist) struggle towards
the ‘new social movements’ that were rooted not in the class struggle but in a postmo-
dernist perspective of the inherent power of ‘radical praxis’ (alternative thought). From this
postmodernist, postdevelopment perspective, the agency of transformative change is
found not in a class conscious of its historic mission (to overthrow capitalism) armed
with a scientific understanding of the objectivity of class conditions, but in an awareness
of the subaltern class of its potential power – its subjective capacity to act in the realization
of its own ideas about constructing an alternative future.
The second axis is provided by neodevelopmentalism, a model constructed in the 1990s by
Latin American economists at Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
(ECLAC) on the basis of a post-Washington consensus as to the need to bring the state back
into the development process (Infante and Sunkel 2009; Bresser-Pereira 2007). This model is
advanced in two forms, as a reformist form of political economy – a ‘new dependency theory’
adapted to changed conditions of the new millennium – and as an alternative form of
(capitalist) development based on the need for a more inclusive form of development.
Recent developments (the widespread rejection of neo-liberalism, the emergence of a
progressive cycle of centre-left policy regimes) have given rise to an alternative stream of
development thinking put into practice by the ‘progressive’ centre-left regimes formed in the
context of a primary commodities boom on the world market: neoextractivism, a synthesis of
neodevelopmentalism and extractivism (natural resource extraction, primary commodity
exports), and inclusionary state activism (the channelling of the fiscal resources derived
from commodity exports to fund poverty reduction programmes).
Like all forms of capitalist development, as Munck (2018) emphasizes, neoextractivism
has generated new forms of popular resistance and inspired new postdevelopment ways
of thinking about the future, most particularly one based on an indigenous cosmovision
regarding ‘vivir bien’ – how to live well in social solidarity and harmony with nature
(Gudynas 2011). This conception of the future constitutes a second axis of development
thinking conceptualized by Eduardo Gudynas, a social ecologist and major critic of the
now dominant extractivist approach towards national development, put in the following
terms: postdevelopment as critique, vivir bien as alternative (Gudynas 2011). Munck (2018)
is correct in signalling the importance and potential lessons of this approach (postde-
velopment, vivir bien), but to appreciate its relevance for the process and prospects of
transformative change in other regional and historical contexts, it is of vital importance
to not only identify the power of ideas associated with this approach but to undertake a
contextualized concrete analysis of existing conditions of collective social action and to
assess the correlation of forces engaged in the political process. But the schematic
offered by Munck (2018) does not allow for or lead to such an analysis.
 GLOBAL DISCOURSE 5

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Henry Veltmeyer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4967-0585

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