In many aspects, where the emancipation of the Global South is more advanced is in parts of South America; I was hugely impressed when I was in Bolivia in early 2008. Prashad neatly summarizes Linera's analysis of how the process develops:
"It begins with a crisis of the state that enables a 'dissident social bloc' to mobilize the people into a political project. A 'catastrophic stand-off' develops between the bloc of power and the bloc of the people, which in the case of Latin America was able to be resolved for the moment on the side of the people. The new government must then 'convert opposition demands into acts of state,' and build a deeper and broader hegemony by 'combining the ideas of mobilized society with material resources provided by or via the state.' The turning point ('point of bifurcation'), for Garcia Linera, comes through a 'series of confrontations' between the blocs that are resolved in unexpected ways, with either the consolidation of the new situation or the reconstitution of the old. We are at or near the point of bifurcation. What will come next cannot be predicted."What is definitely known by now by the best minds in Asia, Africa and Latin America, is that there was never an end of history, as parroted by pathetic orphans of Hegel; and there was never an end of geography, as parroted by "world is flat" globalization dancing fools. The Global South's intellectual liberation from the North is finally on. And it's irreversible. There's no turning back to the old order. If this was a movie, it would be 1968 replayed all over again -- full time, all the time; let's be realists, and demand, and implement, the impossible.
The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, by Vijay Prashad. Verso, March 2013. ISBN-10: 1844679527. Price US$26. 300 pages.
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