Such critiques of the Pink Tide reformers share a curious commonality. Both adopt voluntarist approaches to assessing the region’s left turn. Resurrecting a hobbyhorse of revolutionary socialists — notably pounded by those who argue that revolutionary opportunities have routinely been squandered in absence of “correct” leadership lines — they focus on the decisions made by those in charge of the reform process. But they ignore, or give scant attention to, the opportunity structure in which these forces operated. Assessing the tactics of officials and activists in this fashion makes for, at best, an incomplete analysis. However much we sympathize with their programs, we need to understand how the circumstances of their rule substantially constrained their choices. The region’s contemporary left can best be evaluated only by situating its record within contemporary structural conditions.

Latin America’s prior radical surge culminated between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. Although its defining characteristic was the militancy of workers and other popular urban sectors, this left cycle originated with the 1959 Cuban Revolution and closed with the demise of the Central American campesino-based insurgencies. The classical Latin American left did not replicate the Cuban Revolution’s distinctive dynamics and features, but the barbudos’ triumph was instrumental in opening a new radical path.

For one, it broke with Moscow-dominated Communist Parties’ Popular Front orientation, which hinged on alliances with modernizing capitalists. The key characteristic of the new left was its forceful rejection of subordinating working-class organization and demands to the requirements of a so-called bourgeois-democratic stage of development. It relied instead on militant class struggle to achieve decisive influence over, rather than remaining subsidiary to, the ruling class. And reflecting the radical policies implemented by the Cuban revolutionaries, this generation of the Left adopted a program of expanding and deepening the structural transformations unleashed by bourgeois modernizers. These involved comprehensive land reform, a thorough nationalization of key productive sectors, and the decommodification of vast swaths of social provision. In addition, the classical left proposed a profound democratization of political and economic affairs.

Of course, this more radical agenda sometimes created fissures between the forces leading the militant movements and their representatives in the state — as witnessed in the debates that wracked Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile — but overall the classical left agreed that state power was a lever to push forward their transformative agenda. In the postwar period, this agenda was pursued via two distinct routes: labor insurgency in the growing manufacturing sectors of South America, and, a decade later, agrarian insurgency in the countryside of Central America.

The Pink Tide is characterized by two key features. First, its base in the mass mobilizations that began roughly in the second half of the 1990s. As structural adjustment and austerity threw growing swaths into the economic insecurity of the informal sector, laboring classes were also severed from their established links to establishment parties. Facing an intensified instability and material insecurity and cut off from parties that once represented their interests vis-à-vis the state, the region’s “dis-incorporated” masses responded with increasingly militant protest. As traditional political institutions lost the ability to effectively represent the interest of working people, and basic living conditions deteriorated, mass defiance grew in waves. This characteristic — expanding mobilization amid political disintegration — is central to the rise of the Pink Tide. The present comparative analysis, therefore, relates to cases where it was prominent, chiefly Venezuela, Argentina, and Bolivia.

When world commodity prices plummeted, the result was an unavoidable tightening of services and goods for their urban poor backers. Leftists in power could only think of tapping and squeezing as much as possible from their countries’ existing production and commercial circuits rather than developing new, alternative, and more reliable means to provide for their constituents. A recent Chavista voter could not have put it better, declaring that the government “just needs to find a way to make an economic revolution, so we can eat once again!” In short, poor urban voters abandoned the Pink Tide for its inability to break through the limits set by the neoliberal economy. Whereas elites beat back the classical left for going too far, the Pink Tide governments are falling to the very sectors that voted them into office, who are punishing left regimes for not going far enough.

The main factor distinguishing the Pink Tide from the classical Latin American left is not just the latter’s more radical will. The classical left’s aggressive pursuit of reform derived, as just noted, from its greater ability to pursue radical reforms. This enhanced sense of its ability, in turn, was rooted in greater transformative capacities. To understand this difference, we need a conceptual framework that helps us unpack the mechanisms that govern subaltern political leverage. There are two axes on which laboring groups’ power turns: the first measures their mobilizational resources, and the second, their structural leverage.

Mobilizational resources refer to the social ties, organizations, and institutions that help working people engage in collective action. The ability of popular sectors to mobilize effectively is built on shared resources that underpin organizational bonds, cultures, and infrastructure. These help working people overcome the divisions and the costs that normally inhibit collective action. Atomized workers and the poor in general have very diverse sets of immediate needs, which often makes it hard to come together around a political agenda; in addition, they typically confront particularly high costs when taking on powerful elites. Without robust and internally vigorous organizations to bring them together, they have a hard time developing the solidarity and preparation needed for collective action. Mobilizational resources, in other words, give workers and the poor the ability to construct and maintain the organizations they need to confront their ruling classes.

Once they had exhausted their disruptive potential, the Pink Tide subaltern constituencies lacked the leverage necessary to push further. Without constituencies with the structural power necessary to take on business elites, left governments focused on appeasing their followers with neo-corporatist welfare provision, avoiding harsh confrontations with leading economic sectors on which they relied for the revenues they redistributed. Ironically then, in one sense, Pink Tide commitments to their urban poor voters blocked more aggressive reforms. Pink Tide restraint, therefore, did not flow from pledges to defend the interests of commodity-based business elites and restore neoliberalism’s legitimacy. Its timidity, rather, was a symptom of the least costly strategy they could devise to satisfy their constituents’ interests and secure reelection, despite its built-in limitations.

Self-interested elite responses to either adversity or new opportunities in the world economy enhanced popular classes’ capacities for struggle. Elite efforts to modernize their economies, through industrialization or the promotion of agro-industrial exports, provided the foundations for working-class and peasant militancy. Absent these programs, the structural and organizational backbone of the classical left would not have acquired the power it did.

The process was initiated by the Great Depression. In the larger economies, mainly in South America, the ruling class confronted shrinking trade, and then the turmoil of the war years, by adopting an inward-oriented development model known as import-substitution industrialization, or ISI. For ruling classes in these countries, the global crisis undermined profit strategies based on traditional commodity exports. Trade restrictions in traditional markets and declining export revenues caused financial havoc and sharply reduced their ability to import manufactured goods. This loss of externally produced manufactures persuaded states to turn to the development of local industry. The state created incentives for domestic business to invest more heavily in local industry, which had been slowly developing since the turn of the century. This new economic strategy had the added benefit of giving political elites more bargaining power in the global state system as their economies expanded and deepened their industrial base.

While top state managers were transforming the industrial structures of the region’s larger economies, market forces were reshaping the composition of isthmian agriculture.

Labor demand for export crops was driven both by territorial expansion and by the steadily rising yields from productivity-enhancing inputs. Whereas cattle ranching had low labor requirements, the new plantations were extremely labor-intensive, particularly during peak times of the production cycle, Again, cotton best illustrates the exponential growth of seasonal wage employment in Central America. Until the mid-1950s, cotton cultivation in the region required less than 100,000 pickers come harvest. Ten years later, the number of cotton-harvesting jobs surpassed 350,000. A decade after that, cotton plantations employed nearly half a million pickers.35 In addition, limited processing segments such as ginning, baling, sugar refining, and meatpacking created tens of thousands of permanent jobs. Many of these, along with employment in the modest manufacturing in wage goods tied to market agriculture, were taken by the growing numbers of displaced peasants forced to migrate to capital cities and other towns. The most precarious of those in the sprouting slums also supplied large portions of the seasonal labor. In Nicaragua, for instance, a third of cotton pickers came from large urban areas. Most harvesting, however, was done by the growing rural population languishing on the peasant margins.

Throughout the region, the very communities that were squeezed by export farming and ranching sent hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to earn cash at harvest time. The more modern agriculture encroached on their lands, the more rural communities relied on seasonal wage labor. Unable to survive on the diminishing returns of subsistence farming, seasonal wages became indispensable. Not only did these communities supply major shares of harvesters on coastal plantations, but the proportion of their populations making the yearly trips down to the coast also grew. In El Salvador, up to 70 percent of beleaguered peasant communities in the north migrated annually in search of wages. In Guatemala, whereas between 10 and 15 percent of cotton-harvest workers were from the capital during the 1960s, far more descended yearly from peripheral highland provinces: by the end of the decade, over three-fifths of seasonal migrants came from two western highland Mayan provinces, and most of the working population from Kiché and Huehuetenango were harvesters.36