Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.5.1.0078
• Published date: 01 April 2013
• Date: 01 April 2013
• Pages: 78169-79
• Author: Steve Ludlam

78 BOOK REVIEWS

I J  C S 5.1 S 2013

Emir Sader, The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left

(London: Verso, 2011) hb 169pp. ISBN: 9781844676927

Reviewed by Steve Ludlam

Emir Sader is a veteran Brazilian activist and academic, a socialist and a social

theorist, a director both of the World Social Forum and of the Latin American

Social Science Research Council. The mole in his title is a reference to Marx’s

image of the anti-capitalist movement as, in Sader’s words, a ‘small, almost blind

animal which moves around below the ground unbeknownst to us, and then

suddenly appears where we least expect it’ (p. x). From this perspective, Sader

is analysing the rise of new left governments in Latin America as ref‌lecting the

unexpected forms of the new anti-neoliberal social and political movements that

have enabled such governments to take off‌ice, the whole constituting a crisis of

hegemony at neoliberalism’s ‘weakest link’ (p. 27), and producing a period of

political struggle for hegemony in the post-neoliberal period (p. 143).

The heart of the book – an 80 page chapter – is an extended commentary on

the historical experience of the left in Latin America, a commentary that reveals

both Sader’s enormous knowledge and his long engagement with socialist theory

and strategy. He himself writes from a Gramscian perspective that criticizes social

democratic reformism, dogmatic Marxism, and anti-political autonomism alike.

The f‌irst of these is condemned for surrendering to neoliberalism, the second

and third for underestimating its force and resorting respectively to maximalist

sloganizing against radical governments, and denial of the significance of

state power.

This central chapter shares a conclusion with the preceding case study of

Brazil. Here the accommodation of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers

Party) with neoliberalism and f‌inancial capital is explained, and its consequences

lamented. But Sader acknowledges the social justice achievements of Lula’s terms

in off‌ice, which improved the conditions of life of tens of millions of poor and

marginalised Brazilians and succeeded in narrowing inequality in that most

unequal of states. The analysis is detailed and compelling, and the conclusion is

that the left has two options: either to adopt an oppositional and dogmatic stance

and be irrelevant; or to form an ‘alliance with the progressive sectors of those

governments, with the aim [in the case of Brazil] of strengthening these sectors’ and

thus concentrating greater forces on the hegemony of f‌inancial capital and on PT’s

policy compromises with agribusiness and over central bank autonomy (p. 66).

In insisting on the centrality of progressive alliances in the construction of a

postneoliberal power bloc to conduct a prolonged war of manoeuvre against

capitalist imperialism, Sader offers as a positive example the f‌ive-stage struggle,

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