Coloniality of Power and Progressive Politics in Latin America: Development, Indigenous Politics and Buen Vivir, Ronaldo Munck, 2024, Springer
Only the limits of our individual and collective imaginations restrict our ability to construct new futures, writes Ronaldo Munck.
And by dipping into the deep well of a lifetime’s scholarship to explore those limitations, he offers clues from Latin America about how we might begin to transcend our “current civilizational impasse”.
The result, Coloniality of Power and Progressive Politics in Latin America, is a remarkable survey of transformational possibilities not only for the future of a region largely marginalized in debates about globalization, but also for the rest of us.
Its inspiration lies in the rise of progressive governments that came to power after 2000 which offered ways to inform new notions of globalization that can lead us out of the labyrinth of neoliberalism.
Munck seeks in particular to ground one Latin American trajectory in the Amerindian pre-Conquest past, an explicit effort to compensate for the invisibility of this epoch in the civilizational narratives of a western modernity built upon Euro-American capitalism.
Above all he turns to the debates about “Buen Vivir” within a wider framework of cultural political economy to conduct a heterodox political analysis of the complex twists and turns of the left in Latin America since 2000.
The Buen Vivir discourse that arose in Andean countries—and in particular its indigenous, environmental, and socialist variants—contains the potential to offer an alternative to the dead end of neoliberalism by stimulating imaginaries that situate social life and transformational development in ancient precepts which retain modern relevance.
The author argues that Buen Vivir is the most significant Latin American contribution to debates about our global future of the current era, equivalent in its importance to dependency theory in the 1970s, offering an alternative to the status quo that can inspire new progressive governments and movements.
Munck writes: “There has, in recent decades, been considerable rhetorical attention paid to the notion that ‘another world is possible’ and it has served as an effective slogan for the alter-globalization movement, especially in the early 2000s, after the 1990s neoliberal nostrum ‘there is no alternative’ had seemed to reign supreme. However, what does this mean in practice, other than a slogan for gatherings of the faithful?”
Known by different names but largely sharing an indigenous cosmovision, Buen Vivir appeared in the 2000s as a “civilizational proposal for the present, that sought to overcome the long colonial night and the oppression of the indigenous peoples”.
What is important about it is that it is not a single, ideological discourse containing lost magical solutions to our malaise that enable us suddenly to rediscover ways of “living well”, but that it is a contested, fluid discourse with multiple interpretations all of which seek alternatives to neoliberal development models.
Munck situates Buen Vivir within the broader array of potential alternatives to neoliberal globalization—from the environmental to the anti-capitalist movements—and finds parallels between it, and an exciting source of inspiration, in pre-Conquest Inca communism.
Mythologies in popular culture about an Andean utopia since the Conquest era are potent as creations of memory because, as Munck argues, they speak about re-inventing a future in which the “return” of the Inca is a mobilizing element—not a prolongation of pre-Hispanic Andean thinking into the present, but a “utopian horizon” for a people without hope.
Scholars of Latin America know almost instinctively that the region offers critical lessons for the rest of us, and Coloniality of Power and Progressive Politics in Latin America is a noble recognition of this.
Indeed, as the West stumbles through the debris left scattered across its own societies by decades of neoliberal globalization, the region’s time may finally have come by shining a light on other possible futures.
Of critical importance here is the approach Munck takes to political culture and, in particular, identity politics, arguably hitherto neglected areas of Latin American studies yet of fundamental importance to an understanding of this region.
The author reiterates the importance of the “cultural turn” in social theory and its influence upon scholarship in Latin America, where hybridity is a ubiquitous principle, which led to the emergence of cultural political economy as a key tool of analysis.
In this respect the importance of the region to debates about globalization cannot be overstated—was Latin America simply going to be swallowed by the homogenizing wave of 1990s globalization, or could its hybridity make a distinctive contribution to the search for “a transformative paradigm seeking to create a new world order”?
It is this cultural sensibility that lies at the heart of the question Munck is ultimately posing: are we reaching the end of capitalism?
He writes: “We have allowed ourselves to be mesmerized by the power, consistency, and infinite flexibility of capitalism, ever since the somewhat over-inflated concept of globalization presented itself, sometime in the 1980s or 1990s. Buen Vivir can be part of the move to think of capitalism in a less unified and bounded manner, open to the possibility of systemic change.”
The result is an argument as fascinating as it is important: this modest book is, in fact, a magisterial summary of the progressive possibilities offered by Latin America and how these might even shape the future of us all.
The text consistently brings out alternatives to the dominant models colonialism, dependency, or globalization, counterposing to encroaching market dominance that reached its full form in neoliberalism the concealed values of reciprocity, redistribution, and social solidarity embedded in social practice across the region. A triumph of the political imagination, it is, as a result, suffused with wisdom and hope.
As Munck himself says, referencing a methodological approach that draws upon the pragmatism of Mangabeira Unger and the liberation of thought of Deleuze, he works with “empowering theory of society that argues for the inherent plasticity of social organizations and their permanent potential to be shaped in new ways by human agency.”
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