What Comes After the Pink Tide?

Events in Central and South America are understandably forcing a rethinking of many assumptions long-held by many leftists, especially in Europe and North America.

What has been described as a Pink Tide has quickly faded into the washed-out colors of the hard right. Where left-leaning leaders like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Lula da Silva, and Rafael Correa once promised to defy the Monroe Doctrine and scorn US political and economic domination, more recent elected leaders have embraced the US administration and capitalist fundamentalism, often with a Trump-like social and economic agenda.

Since the first waves of the Pink Tide in the last years of the twentieth century, there has been controversy over its nature and prospects. Many western academics, many expatriates, and many solidarity activists rushed to proclaim the establishment of a new road to socialism-- the birth of twenty-first-century socialism in the Americas. They correctly saw a successful electoral renewal of resistance to US dominance of hemispheric politics and economics, but mistook it for a socialist revival.

It was easy for those of us on the left to rally around a defiant, fearless leader like Hugo Chavez, who spoke with such fire, wit, and courage in a 2006 address to the United Nations attacking George Bush:

The Devil came here yesterday, right here. It still smells of sulphur today. Yesterday on this rostrum the President of the United States, whom I refer to as the Devil, talked as if he owned the world. It would be appropriate to have a psychiatrist analyse yesterday’s address by the President of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his prescriptions for preserving the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.

While solidarity with the Pink Tide was never or should never have been a question for the left, some took issue with how best to view the political character of the movement. For some, primarily those associated with Marxism-Leninism, the movements were broad, multi-class, responses to US imperialism, with a social-democratic content. Granted, the rise of the Pink Tide might mark a preliminary, even necessary, step toward socialism, but it was not-- as some believed-- the realization of twenty-first-century socialism. Nor was defiance of US imperialism a sufficient first-step toward that goal. In nearly all the electoral victories won in the various countries joining the resistance to US imperialism, there was no substantial further movement toward abolishing the bourgeois state; there was no establishment of working-class power.

The Communist Party of Venezuela, established in 1931, with the longest record of any political organization resisting US imperialism against Venezuela , made the following argument in 2011:

For this transition to be actually oriented toward socialism, the PCV believes that some preconditions should be fulfilled: 

1. Development of the political vanguard of the working class,
2. Conquest of political power of the state,
3. Development of the productive forces,
4. Strengthening the state ownership under workers' control,
5. Weakening and subsequent suppression of imperialist domination mechanisms,
6. Establishment of economic planning,
7. Development of people's education, and others.

Further, they concluded that “[t]he Central Committee of the PCV has analyzed that the Bolivarian process of national liberation is making progress in the recovery of sovereignty ‘but still there are no subjective conditions of consciousness, nor social organization, nor transformation of the productive base and relations of production, i.e., we [do] not have a strategic plan for the construction of the social and economic base of a socialist society’.”

In essence, Marxist-Leninists strongly supported the Pink Tide as a struggle against US imperialism, for independence, and sovereignty, but maintained a critical stance toward its ability to achieve a qualitative transformation of society, its commitment to the socialist road.

Events have proven that the considered skepticism was warranted. Today, the Pink Tide seems a distant memory, with the last fading pink bastion-- Brazil-- about to succumb to or be eviscerated by far-right populism. It remains for the broad left to make an honest, critical assessment of the Pink Tide failure.

Of course, many still refuse to attribute the failure to the Pink Tide. They offer the excuse that US meddling influenced the election outcomes. That is, of course, true. But US influence-- NGOs, bribes, threats, and massive amounts of money-- has always, and will always, be a factor. They ignore the fact that in its hey-day the South and Central American social movements won popular support and electoral victory despite that relentless intervention. In spite of US meddling, they raised the hope of millions. 

They refuse to accept the harsh fact that they won support and then lost it. And they lost it, in many cases, to the populist right.

Apart from defiance of US dictates, the Pink Tide drew its popular support from a commendable and effective expansion of social security and welfare. But much of this was funded by a commodity boom and Chinese participation in the boom (from 2000 to 2013, South American trade with China grew from $12 billion to over $275 billion and reached $518 billion in 2024). In addition, Chinese investment and loans grew broadly over the rise of the Pink Tide. Interestingly, China’s trade with South America-- manufactured goods for primary materials-- mimics the trade asymmetry of classical colonialism.

Economic growth, rather than radical redistribution or appropriation, gave the center-left or left-populist leaders the means to sustain effective and popular programs. Predictably, imperialism sought to deny growth through trade. With the decline of commodity prices in the second decade of the new century, the ability to expand or even maintain those programs were, without further expropriation of the domestic bourgeoisie, diminished .

Consequently, the Pink Tide leftists could not sustain the incrementalism afforded by economies built largely on the extraction and exploitation of the continent's bountiful resources. Nor was the incremental reformism adequately meeting the needs of people ravaged by the scars of colonialism and the impoverishment inflicted by the pillaging by local elites.

Undoubtedly, Central and South American workers will rise against the cycle of left and right populists who promise more than they can, or will, deliver. This will come with leaders who grasp that it is not only the US empire, or neoliberalism, or corruption, or alien values that deny the people a future, but, most importantly, the capitalist system.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com