Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America
Benjamin Dangl
AK Press, 2010
In Dancing with Dynamite, Benjamin Dangl explores the relationship between social movements and left-leaning governments in South America. In seven interesting if uneven case studies, he takes the reader across South America, attempting to map the left turn of the continent at the level of the grassroots.
While Dangl’s coverage of South American social movements brings the reader far beyond what one can glean from mainstream U.S. media coverage, Dancing with Dynamite could use less rhetoric and assertion and more research and analysis. Dangl’s methodology consists of interviews with social movement participants — apparently chosen by who would speak with him — and citations from newspapers and web coverage. Although this makes for lively reading, he could benefit from engaging with academic or theoretical literature, a broader pool of interviewees and more time spent in each country.
Dangl’s focus on interviewing participants in social movements perhaps contributes to his tendency to fetishize movements while viewing association with the state as inherently corrupting. For Dangl, the relationship between social movements and left-leaning governments takes on two basic forms: either social movements get states to grant their demands, such as land redistribution or social welfare programs, or the state co-opts, demobilizes or otherwise saps the strength of social movements. Or, sometimes, both.
Dangl seems loathe to admit that there can be a dialectic, productive relationship between social movements and states, wherein movements not only push governments to the left, but states also create space for and strengthen social movement activity. This is a particularly striking omission given that this is the process that his chapter on Venezuela depicts. The Communal Councils that Dangl discusses as means of community self-organization and empowerment were created by Chavez’s fiat.
It is perhaps useful here to remember the history of the New Deal. Roosevelt passed laws under pressure from social movements, but these same laws in turn laid the groundwork for further social movement gains. After the passage of the Wagner Act, the CIO recruited millions into the labor movement under the slogan, “President Roosevelt wants you to join the union.”
In his conclusion, Dangl attempts to draw lessons from South American struggles for the North American left, focusing on the transmission of tactics such as factory occupations or occupations of foreclosed homes. The real lessons to be drawn from the left turn in South America, however, are more strategic than tactical.
The most radical processes of social transformation that Dangl discusses, those taking place in Venezuela and Bolivia, are precisely the ones where strong social movements are closely connected to the state. By contrast, the piqueteros of Argentina and landless workers of Brazil, without strong ties to any electoral party, have been unable to convert their mobilizations into similar social gains. While Dangl is right that the left cannot simply vote and then go home, he is wrong to counsel so strongly against the perils of social movements dancing with the state.
The choice between taking state power and turning one’s back on the state is a false dilemma. It is high time for the left to move beyond stale debates that hark back to the First International and instead try to understand how actual processes of social transformation take place. While this is a question for practice, at the moment South America is a laboratory of practice. And for all its limitations, Dancing with Dynamite is a fascinating account of the experiments happening there.
Comments
The Indypendent is one of the best newspapers in the world, and I am grateful to Matt Wasserman for taking the time to read and review my book here. In his review, he engages questions in a debate which I hope Dancing with Dynamite contributes to. At the same time, I wanted to clarify a few things.
The book focuses on the diverse outcomes of the relationships between movements and states throughout South America. However, Wasserman writes in his review, “Dangl seems loathe to admit that there can be a dialectic, productive relationship between social movements and states, wherein movements not only push governments to the left, but states also create space for and strengthen social movement activity.”
Rather than not admitting this, this is a central relationship I focus on in the book. In each of the seven countries examined, and to varying degrees, movements and states participated in such a productive relationship. In some cases the state was an ally, and in some cases grassroots movements used the state, rather than being used by it. Such dynamics were reflected in the title of the book chapter on Venezuela: “The Uses of the Bolivarian Revolution.” There are also many cases of South American leftist presidents turning their backs on movements once taking office, among other outcomes of this dance with the state.
For this reason, I agree with Wasserman when he writes “It is perhaps useful here to remember the history of the New Deal.” And that is why I discuss the history of the New Deal in the final chapter of the book.
As for the methodology used to write and research the book, I didn’t haphazardly choose interviewees based simply on “who would speak” with me – as Wasserman suggests. Over the course of roughly eight years throughout South America, I interviewed dozens of activists in social movements, as well as presidents, miners, indigenous leaders, coca farmers, hip-hop artists, academics and politicians. These interviews, experiences and friendships, a broad reading of other books, and input on the book manuscript from experts on each country, informed my analysis. That said, the book is explicitly written from the vantage point of grassroots movements in these countries in an attempt to provide a kind of people’s history of the last decade of historic changes in South America.
As for, in Wasserman’s words, the “choice between taking state power and turning one’s back on the state” being a “false dilemma,” I wholeheartedly welcome any debate on the topic, and hope my book adds to the discussion.
I thank Benjamin Dangl for his thoughtful response to my review and openness to debate. Nonetheless, I think he is misrepresenting as clarifications what are really points of disagreement.
In his reply, Dangl states that productive relationships between states and social movements are “a central relationship” that he focuses on in Dancing with Dynamite. This is somewhat misleading, given that a leitmotif of his book is the betrayal of social movements by putatively progressive politicians. It is implicit in the very title of the book that he views engaging with the state as fraught with danger for social movements.
In the introduction to his book, Dangl cites Noam Chomsky, Emma Goldman and John Holloway to theorize the nature of the state and claims, “the state and governing party is, by its nature, a hegemonic force that generally aims to subsume, weaken or eliminate other movements and political forces that contest its power.” Rather than being truly open to the possibility of a productive, dialectical relationship between states and social movements, Dangl’s very definition of the state forecloses upon this possibility. In his conclusion, he even describes the lessons for US activists from the engagement of South American social movements with the state as lessons in “cooptation, demobilization, opportunism and repression.”
As for the question of methodology, what I was alluding to when I stated that Dangl apparently chose his interview subjects based on who would speak to him is that he gave no explanation of how he chose his interview subjects. Perhaps more problematically, the chapter on Ecuador references not a single interview or article conducted or written by Dangl, leaving it unclear whether he ever set foot in the country. Dangl’s defense of his methodology is telling: it boils down to the statement that he interviewed a bunch of people from various walks of life. Rather than undercutting the claim that his choice of interviewees was haphazard, his reply reinforces it. While I am sympathetic to the project of writing history from the perspective of grassroots social movements, this does not relieve Dangl of the burden of choosing a sufficiently large and representative pool of interviewees nor of carrying out adequate fieldwork for each case study.
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