Social Movements in Latin America: Neoliberalism and Popular Resistance

Recent decades have witnessed a worldwide change in social and economic relations, accompanied by a multi-dimensional global crisis and major popular uprisings led by sociopolitical movements. While many critics see in these developments the agency of imperialist exploitation, mainstream development thinking and practice attribute them to the irresistible forces of progressive free market policies. They are content to believe that the pain and misery of poverty, and the degradation of people’s lives and livelihoods, is the price of admission into the new world order – the inevitable price of progress. However, waged and unwaged workers, the self-employed poor, small-scale or landless peasant farmers, and others in the popular sectors have proven themselves to be disposed to and very able to resist the machinations of imperial power and corporate elites, taking direct action as well as voting for political parties promising structural change. This book tells the story of popular resistance in its multiple forms with and against the new post-neoliberal regimes and of the changing social conditions in an era of globalization and worldwide crisis.