In The Impasse of the Latin American Left, Franck Gaudichaud, Massimo Modonesi, and Jeffery R. Webber explore the region's Pink Tide as a political, economic, and cultural phenomenon. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Latin American politics experienced an upsurge in progressive movements, as popular uprisings for land and autonomy led to the election of left and center-left governments across Latin America. These progressive parties institutionalized social movements and established forms of state capitalism that sought to redistribute resources and challenge neoliberalism. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, these governments failed to transform the underlying class structures of their societies or challenge the imperial strategies of the United States and China. Now, as the Pink Tide has largely receded, the authors offer a portrait of this watershed period in Latin American history in order to evaluate the successes and failures of the left and to offer a clear-eyed account of the conditions that allowed for a right-wing resurgence.

In this bold and innovative book, Massimo Modonesi weaves together theory and political practice by relating the concepts of subalternity, antagonism and autonomy to contemporary movements in Latin America and elsewhere. In a sophisticated account, Modonesi reconstructs the debates between Marxist authors and schools of thought in order to sketch out informed strategies of resistance. He reviews the works of Gramsci, Negri, Castoriadis and Lefort, and engages with the arguments made by E. P. Thompson, Spivak, Laclau and Mouffe. Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy firmly roots key theoretical arguments from a range of critical thinkers within specific political movements in order to recover these concepts as analytical instruments which can help to guide contemporary struggles.

In The Impasse of the Latin American Left, Franck Gaudichaud, Massimo Modonesi, and Jeffery R. Webber explore the region's Pink Tide as a political, economic, and cultural phenomenon. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Latin American politics experienced an upsurge in progressive movements, as popular uprisings for land and autonomy led to the election of left and center-left governments across Latin America. These progressive parties institutionalized social movements and established forms of state capitalism that sought to redistribute resources and challenge neoliberalism. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, these governments failed to transform the underlying class structures of their societies or challenge the imperial strategies of the United States and China. Now, as the Pink Tide has largely receded, the authors offer a portrait of this watershed period in Latin American history in order to evaluate the successes and failures of the left and to offer a clear-eyed account of the conditions that allowed for a right-wing resurgence.

In this important contribution to political theory, Massimo Modonesi develops the thesis that a Marxist theory of political action can be developed from the notion of antagonism, defined as a distinctive feature of struggle and of the political experience of insubordination. The author argues this central idea with close reference to the concept of class struggle. He advances a theoretical proposal based on the triad subalternity-antagonism-autonomy, as well as the uneven and combined character of the processes of political subjectification. At the center of this triad, the concept of antagonism stands out as a logical principle and the core of a Marxist theory of political action. At the same time, subalternism reappears frequently, as the counter-pole of antagonistic activation and autonomous practices, and as the root of what Antonio Gramsci calls 'passive revolutions'.

Going from classic to contemporary authors, the authors of this volume consider theorists that provided contributions that became representative of trends, schools of thought and original theoretical perspectives, and that grew into the backbone of Marxist thought: Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci, Edward Palmer Thompson, Nicos Poulantzas, Erik O. Wright, Antonio Negri, and John Holloway, with references to Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ralph Miliband. The authors seek to provide a basis for the knowledge of the main contributions in contemporary Marxism and to place the debate on the concept of social class at the center of current sociological reflections. In this sense, the last chapter is not a balance nor an assessment, but offers an exercise in the problematization of the concepts of struggle and class, geared towards highlighting its relevance and potential in Marxist sociology within an agenda centered in the principle of antagonism. Beyond the endeavor to recognize and revitalize the Marxist perspective, the authors offer tools for reflection that allow readers to refresh and expand their knowledge on a fundamental concept and a debate of great theoretical importance in social thought.