Challenging the Pink Tide

Taking on the Pink Tide: A Brief Review of Ben Dangl's Dancing with Dynamite

The raw force and passion of social movements do not lend themselves easily to investigation from the Ivory Tower. Dynamic and fluid, a “movement’s” impetus and value depend largely on who is telling the story. A union leader’s perspective on a wildcat strike will differ from that of a rank-and-file member. Students raging against debt and bankers fighting to keep the payments coming will have radically different understandings of the loan crisis. It’s all tied up in perception.

In Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America, author Benjamin Dangl attempts to harness the explosive, subjective energy of South American social upheavals long enough to commit them to paper. Alongside chronicles of upheaval and solidarity, readers are granted a quick glance into the parallel workings of the proverbial state – cooptation and exclusion are among the most common tactics. He has decided to (cordially) address the elephant in the room: how can/do South American social movements interact with the state while defending their goals and integrity?     

Dangl’s analysis centers on this interplay (a “dance”, he says) between social movements and states, highlighting the inherent tug-o-war the relationship embodies. Sometimes a movement’s demands are reflected in policy. Other struggles are camouflaged by stealthy repression or coopted by center-left parties of the now-famous Pink (aka pseudo-socialist/populist) Tide. 

With the notable exception of the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, Dangl focuses on movements which are not opposed to working within the proverbial Machine. In Uruguay, for example, left wing activists morphed into ardent supporters of “The Party” when the Frente Amplio needed support, abandoning their grassroots beginnings and ideals to work within the state apparatus. 

The selection of less combative movements implies another set of exclusions, but the choice lends his work mainstream legitimacy. Many of the region’s purportedly left-wing leaders Dangl discusses engage in the same neoliberal, authoritarian tactics as their right-wing predecessors, but with more fashionable branding (hope, anyone?). The author is drawing an obvious conclusion: a government cannot be both progressive and repressive, especially when the targets are democratic, nonviolent movements. 

A bread-and-butter protester outraged by the shortcomings of the Correa presidency in Ecuador is more sympathetic than a Mapuche militant disillusioned by former Chilean President Bachelet’s anti-indigenous tactics. Dangl expertly shows his readers feeling excluded and disenchanted by the state is not just for wingnuts anymore. In the context of the mainstream’s idea of South America (ex: bearded, jumpsuit-clad communist dictators bellowing orders from the Presidential Palace to a sea of obedient, jumpsuit-clad followers), Dynamite challenges some of the most pervasive stereotypes regarding support for the likes of the Morales or Kirschner regimes. 

But Dangl does go the way of many lefty academics in his inability to sufficiently critique Chavez (a negligible discussion of the problematic nature of top-down revolution fills a few pages), he checks Western naiveté by questioning the true radical potential of these leaders. The implication of acceptable anti-authoritarianism begs the question of whether state or social movement is the dynamite in Dangl’s analogy.

In the final chapter, Dangl attempts to tackle the relationship between contemporary US and South American movements. Readers will be relieved to note the obvious comparison he draws between the disabling of US radicalism by the Obama election and similar co-optive coups in Argentina and Ecuador.  Dangl’s insight is tempered by his suggestion that South American movements are directly inspiring uprisings in the US. 

To an extent, Dangl is right. Movements in the Global North certainly have much to learn from those in the South, and an exchange of knowledge is not only desirable, but necessary.  Many specific instances exist - Dangl notes the Republic Window and Doors occupation in Chicago was specifically inspired by Argentine factory occupations. Here in the Belly of the Beast, tactical and ideological exchange with Latin American movements can make organizing more potent and efficient. It's a welcome development when compared to the southward-flow of neoliberalism and US crop surplus, right?

But the Argentines were not the first to occupy a factory and water sovereignty struggles are not unique to Bolivia. To suggest this is to engage in a bizarre sort of paternalism which essentializes Latino knowledge and is likely connected to the Indigenous character of many South American struggles. Besides, Dangl’s work is evidence of a trend even more encouraging than a one-way flow of radical knowledge from South to North. Dancing with Dynamite, in documenting that which cannot be pinned down, is indicative of a vibrant exchange of knowledge where South informs North and the North repays the favor: a globalization of resistance.