Contents

Acknowledgements vii
List of Figures and Tables viii
List of Abbreviations ix
Note on Contributors xii


1 Introduction – Systemic Logics and Historical Specificity:
Renewing Historical Materialism in Latin American Political
Economy 1
Susan J. Spronk and Jeffery R. Webber
Part 1
The ‘New’ Working Class: Decomposition and Recomposition
under Neoliberalism
2 Roots of Resistance to Urban Water Privatisation in Bolivia:
The ‘New Working Class’, the Crisis of Neoliberalism, and
Public Services 29
Susan Spronk
3 The Neo-Developmentalist Alternative: Capitalist Crisis, Popular
Movements, and Economic Development in Argentina since
the 1990s 52
Mariano Féliz
4 The Reproduction of Democratic Neoliberalism in Argentina:
Kirchner’s ‘Solution’ to the Crisis of 2001 73
Emilia Castorina
5 Doubly Marginalised? Women Workers in Northeast Brazilian Export
Horticulture 98
Ben Selwyn
6 Emergent Socialist Hegemony in Bolivarian Venezuela: The Rôle
of the Party 120
Gabriel Hetland

7 Venezuela’s Social Transformation and Growing Class Struggle 138
Dario Azzellini
8 Socialist Management and Natural Resource Based Industrial
Production: A Critique of Cogestión in Venezuela 163
Thomas F. Purcell
PART 2
State and Market in Late Capitalist Development
9 Conspicuous Silences: State and Class in Structuralist and
Neostructuralist Thought 193
Juan Grigera
10 Sugarcane Ethanol: The Hen of the Golden Eggs? Agribusiness and the
State in Lula’s Brazil 211
Leandro Vergara-Camus
11 From Global Capital Accumulation to Varieties of Centre-Leftism in
South America: The Cases of Brazil and Argentina 236
Nicolas Grinberg and Guido Starosta
12 The Three Dimensions of the Crisis 273
Claudio Katz
13 Revolution against ‘Progress’: Neo-Extractivism, the Compensatory
State, and the TIPNIS Conflict in Bolivia 302
Jeffery R. Webber
References 335
Index 380

Crisis and Contradiction: Marxist Perspectives on Latin America in the Global Po

crisis is over