LAUSR

The tension between a charismatic vanguard leadership and a mass popular movement has long been a complicated issue for the revolutionary left. Strong leadership such as what Fidel Castro provided in Cuba seemingly is vital to the success of a revolutionary movement, but it tends toward authoritarianism that undermines the democratic aspirations of the people. Mass movements embody the will of the people but often lack the ideological grounding or guidance that is crucial for the realization of profound and permanent change. John Holloway (2002) uses the neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, to build an argument for changing the world without taking control of state power, while Greg Wilpert (2007) inverts his argument to illustrate how President Hugo Chávez fundamentally transformed Venezuelan society precisely through government structures. This anarchist/communist divide has long run through the revolutionary left and more recently has been refocused through discussions of horizontal versus vertical forms of social organization. In Utopia and the Dialectic in Latin American Liberation, Eugene Gogol, a Marxisthumanist activist, contributes a theoretical aspect to these debates. Gogol draws on Raya Dunayevskaya’s reinterpretations of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin’s discussions of dialectical thought and action to examine how concepts of utopia and the dialectic of negativity have emerged in Latin American social movements during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Dunayevskaya has not had a particularly strong influence in Latin American leftist circles or among Latin American scholars, and this book is part of Gogol’s attempt to introduce her theoretical contributions to the region. Dunayevskaya was born in Ukraine in 1910 and immigrated to the United States as a child. In the 1930s she served as Leon Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary during his exile in Mexico but soon broke with the communist leader over the concept of a workers’ state. She subsequently founded the philosophy of Marxist humanism, which emphasizes Marx’s theories of alienation. Dunayevskaya (1982; 1991; 2000) published a series of works on Hegel’s influence on Marxist theory, culminating with a detailed examination of Rosa Luxemburg’s contributions to Marx’s philosophy of revolution. In Utopia and the Dialectic in Latin American Liberation, Gogol places special emphasis on the way her concepts are expressed in indigenous movements and highlights women’s experience of utopia and the dialectic. In particular, he wants to shift the terms of the debate from the forms of organization (hierarchical versus horizontal) to one that focuses on the philosophy of organization. Gogol’s book is divided into four parts, beginning with a theoretical framing of a Latin American concept of utopia emphasizing how it intertwines with the Hegelian dialectic. In this section Gogol builds on his previous book The Concept of Other in