Review of Jeffrey W. Rubin and Vivienne Bennett, eds.,Enduring Reform: Progressive Activism and Private Sector Responses in Latin America's Democracies

NACLA Report on the Americas ISSN: 1071-4839 (Print) 2471-2620 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rnac20 Review of Jeffrey W. Rubin and Vivienne Bennett, eds., Enduring Reform: Progressive Activism and Private Sector Responses in Latin America's Democracies Anthony Petros Spanakos & Mishella Salomé Romo To cite this article: Anthony Petros Spanakos & Mishella Salomé Romo (2016) Review of Jeffrey W. Rubin and Vivienne Bennett, eds., Enduring Reform: Progressive Activism and Private Sector Responses in Latin America's Democracies, NACLA Report on the Americas, 48:2, 203-204, DOI: 10.1080/10714839.2016.1201286 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2016.1201286 Published online: 11 Jul 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 26 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rnac20 Download by: [Pepperdine University] Date: 08 August 2017, At: 23:38 ARTS AND REVIEWS ANTHONY PETROS SPANAKOS AND MISHELLA SALOMÉ ROMO Downloaded by [Pepperdine University] at 23:38 08 August 2017 Review of Jeffrey W. Rubin and Vivienne Bennett, eds., Enduring Reform: Progressive Activism and Private Sector Responses in Latin America’s Democracies T Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015 he Latin American commodity boom is over, and those leftwing governments that are still in office around the region are facing significant challenges. Left-leaning media outlets have long contended that governments led by figures as distinct as now former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro face anti-democratic roadblocks, often erected by leaders within the business world. There is nothing new to the charge that “oligarchs” have opposed the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, though the recent uptick in vitriol towards the Brazilian Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT), until recently a poster child for the international financial lending community, has been more surprising. Jeffrey Rubin and Vivienne Bennett’s excellent edited collection Enduring Reform: Progressive Activism and Private Sector Responses should encourage reconsideration of the assumption that business leaders will necessarily thwart progressive politics. In fact, the two scholars contend that business motivation does not “result primarily from economic interest” (p. 3). The essays included in the volume suggest that the relationship between business and progressive activists is far more nuanced and has changed quite significantly in recent decades. More specifically, Rubin and Bennett’s book shows how the simultaneity of an era of democratization, on the one hand, and economic globalization, on the other, created a new legal, electoral, and institutional landscape in which business leaders now must operate. The support of repressive regimes by business leaders is no longer feasible in an era of broad democratization, many of the volume’s contributors contend. As Ann Helwege notes in her contribution, business leaders discovered that pro-business, authoritarian regimes often pursued policies that were detrimental to their own interests. Import substitution policies that began in the 1940s and lasted until the 1980s, for example, yielded mixed results since the expansion of state bureaucratic control over the market worked to the advantage of business at certain moments but to their detriment at others. The discovery that repressive regimes were not necessarily good for business does not mean that progressive sectors have been the natural allies of NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS, 2016, VOL. 48, NO. 2, 203-204, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2016.1201286 © 2016 North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) 203 Downloaded by [Pepperdine University] at 23:38 08 August 2017 business in the region. Their interests often do not comfortably align—for example, higher minimum wages impose a cost on business, as do new taxes on businesses and higher-income earners intended to fund progressive redistributive programs. Rather than understand these tensions as the necessary result of material conditions and economic interests, Rubin and Bennett’s collection focuses on the “range of cultural and interpretive factors” that “shape how business people evaluate their [own] interests and the actions they take” vis a vis progressive reform initiatives (p. 3). There are certainly moments and ways in which reform can be initiated that will facilitate cooperation between the two groups, and Rubin and Bennett identify these moments using several analytical categories—namely, “crisis,” “surprise,” “visibility,” “media representation,” “experiences of invitation and inclusion,” and “contestation over language” (p. 16). As the editors suggest, crises and unanticipated events can open the possibility to collaboration that was previously imagined impossible. Fundamental for the contributors of the book is the way business groups recognize reform initiatives by engaging with them positively or partially, and/or countering them with their own alternative proposals. C hanges in attitudes are not unique to business leaders; progressive activists in Latin America have changed as well, in many instances moving away from old commitments to revolutionary change. Much of this change in attitude is attributable to the new political environment of democracy in which actors interact. Wendy Wolford’s chapter on the history of social movements in Latin America posits that progressive activists have drawn “lessons from previous decades but appl[ied] them to new ends” (p. 61). For Wolford, activists have become more strategic and less ideologically driven in their methods. Instead, they have turned to quotidian challenges and devised more focused responses to address the deep-seated inequalities that persist in the region. In so doing, many activists have accepted free markets in exchange for recognition by elites. Shifts among business elites and progressive activists have at times resulted in innovative bargains, some of which feature in the book’s case studies. For instance, Carlos Forment’s examination of recuperated factories in Buenos Aires following the debt default in 2001 shows how a moment of economic “shock” produced elite support for basic workplace reforms. In the midst of one of the country’s worst economic crises, Argentine 204 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS | VOL. 48, NO. 2 workers taught themselves business jargon to make deals with local business leaders, who subsequently began to reconsider their perceptions of the workers, recognize workers’ demands, and even accept worker self-management of once privately-owned factories. A chapter by Rubin and Sergio Gregorio Baierle similarly finds that a considerable amount of space was opened for citizens to gain political voice and decisionmaking power in public affairs through participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil. However, business leaders perceived this process as exclusionary and “illegitimate” because they had not been invited to participate. Once the PT lost the mayor’s seat in the city, business elites pushed for a “corporate social responsibility” program as a counterproposal to the reform, supporting some ideas of inclusion but rejecting the power of popular decision-making that participatory budgeting represented. As such, the Porto Alegre case raises the broader issue of where the limits of positive business response to innovative reform lie. One of the most important political lessons to be drawn from this insightful volume is that business leaders may be more open to recognize groups previously excluded if such inclusion comes through distributive economic policies, rather than the diffusion of political decision-making powers. Enduring Reform cites the importance of democracy—but in particular crisis—for facilitating businessactivist bargains. While these groups may have distinct interests, crisis can affect everyone with sufficient intensity that it inclines conflicting groups to discover areas of mutual concern. But the opposite may also be true: one group may find it propitious to eliminate its political enemies, who have become disabled by the crisis. What makes this collection so valuable is that it hopes for the former, expects the former and the latter, and perhaps most importantly, explains that the actual outcome will result from the ways that actors perceive their and others’ interests, identity, and tactics. Anthony Petros Spanakos is an associate professor of political science and law at Montclair State University. He is most recently co-editor of Conceptualising Comparative Politics (2015) and a forthcoming special issue of Latin American Perspectives on “The Legacy of Hugo Chávez.” Mishella Salomé Romo is a graduate student studying law and governance at Montclair State University.