THE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF CONTEMPORARY LATIN-AMERICAN SOCIALISM Cover Image

Caracteristicile socialismului latino-american contemporan
THE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF CONTEMPORARY LATIN-AMERICAN SOCIALISM

Author(s): Răzvan Victor Pantelimon
Subject(s): History
Published by: Ovidius University Press
Keywords: socialism; Latin America; crisis; democracy; reform

Summary/Abstract: This article tries to analyze the evolution and characteristics of actual socialist parties and movements from Latin America. We believe that the collapse of Soviet Union and of “real socialism” states was the start of an important crisis for the Latin-American socialism, a crisis from which revives a new socialism in Latin America. The main characteristics of this new socialism could be the following: the renunciation at the traditional ideology and theories (like social classes war, the central place of the working class, the nationalization of the private business and production medias, the central place of the Communist Party like an vanguard etc); the building of a new discourse; the change of the political subject from the worker to the citizen; the acceptance of an multi-party system; strong elements of populism; the use of social movements. But the main change, and this is our hypothesis of research, is the acceptance of democracy as the “only game in town” and the substitution of the insurrectional and violent way to reach power by the use of democratic and electoral rules. In ideological terms is the passage from the Leninist “assault for the power” to the Gramscian “obtaining hegemony”.

  • Issue Year: 2008
  • Issue No: 05
  • Page Range: 107-122
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: Romanian
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