Monday, December 7, 2009

Classifying the Mexican Left

On Friday, José Fernández Santillán offered a clarification in response to a recent article by Enrique Krauze about the Mexican left. Here he takes on the modern Mexican left, which Krauze evidently described (I can't find the piece online) as a tug-of-war between the forces of AMLO and Marcos:
Before a neoconservative wave that began with the ascent of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to power, we proposed the renovation of the left through the route of liberalism. And that certainty was affirmed in the only revolutionary act with which we continue identifying; which is to say, "the recovery revolution" (Die Nachholende Revolution), as Jürgen Habermas called it, that was symbolically represented by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

From that liberal point of view we made our own the classic ideas of political thought like John John Locke, Montesquieu and Immanuel Kant, as with contemporary authors like John Rawls, Bruce Ackerman and Amartya Sen.

With Krauze we share the vision that the neopopulism of Hugo Chávez is the gravest threat that menaces Latin American democracies.

With regard to the leftist option that could be put forth in Mexico, I think that this should be some species of a Mexican third way that combines, within the democratic framework, economic efficiency with social justice. It is a proposal that would be close to what is, for example, the Spanish model.
It's a shame that people like Santillán and Ricardo Raphael (whom he mentions) are underrepresented in terms of leftist political representation. The fact is, you don't get the feeling that most prominent leftists in Mexico are at all concerned about finding "a third way", if that's the term you want to use for a responsible movement concerned more about finding solutions than problems. See the Schettino post from earlier today for more.

No comments: