Thoughts on globalization, Marxism, and the left.(Celebrating 25 Years)

To me, the most important fact about LAP on its 25th anniversary is the people who are associated with its publication, especially the collective of coordinating editors under Ron Chilcote's leadership. Their unwavering commitment and intellectual stewardship are largely responsible for making LAP the premier journal of the left on Latin American affairs and second to none in terms of the quality and intellectual rigor of the articles it publishes.

Another important fact about LAP is that, while it has always recognized that there are many Marxisms and contending theories and strategies within the left, it has not succumbed to the current postmodernist, post-Marxist, and antisocialist trends within the academic "left" in the United States, in Europe, and in Latin America and the Caribbean. This postmodernist trend seeks to replace the central concept of class in the analysis of capitalism, which is said to imply what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls a "metadiscourse" or a "grand narrative" theory of history, with a perspective that emphasizes the "decenteredness," heterogeneity, fragmentation, and plurality of reality and denies the possibility of arriving at an objective understanding of that reality or a theory of a just society.

This is not to say that LAP has focused only on the analysis of the class contradictions, dynamics, and consequences of capitalism and imperialism and has avoided dealing with other social divisions and contradictions based …