The first two decades of the twenty-first century and the political phenomenon which has been called the ‘Pink Tide’, ‘twenty-first century socialism’ or the ‘post-neoliberal turn’ have both come to a close. For those engaged in the study and analysis of the past two decades in Latin American politics, Jeffery R. Webber's 2017 book adds value to the related literature by offering the reader an ambitious retrospective of the period, drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, macroeconomic data, secondary literature and analysis. While the book is empirically rich as a stock-taking exercise, Webber's ‘Romantic Marxist’ politics prevents him from delving deeper and asking more critically-minded questions about the period of study and serves as an example of the predictability of many of the criticisms of the Pink Tide governments put forward by ultra-left scholars like Webber.

The first two chapters of this book provide a thorough overview of the Pink Tide period, reviewing factors ranging from national-level politics, international political economy and, to a lesser degree, regional and international politics. Chapters 3–4 present the ambitious theoretical discussion, which is central to this book, structured as a critique of the ‘social democratic’ framework developed by Evelyne Huber and John Stephens as well as the ideas of Bolivian ex-Vice-President Álvaro García Linera. Webber rejects Huber and Stephens’ social democratic perspective and García Linera's defence of neo-developmental state capitalism in Bolivia as alternatives to neoliberalism. As a leftist alternative, he proposes a politics of ‘Romantic Marxism’ following Peruvian Marxist theorist José Carlos Mariátegui's proposal for communitarian or ‘allyu socialism’, or, as Webber puts it, a ‘… utopian-revolutionary dialectic of seizing upon selective values and practices of the precapitalist past while struggling for a socialist future’ (p. 133). The remainder of the chapters in the book focus on specific country case studies, including Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

While Webber is correct in his assessment that none of the Pink Tide governments came close to implementing a political strategy to overcome dependence on natural resource extraction, let alone capitalism, Webber's proposal for ‘Romantic Marxism’ as an alternative to neo-developmentalism offers little beyond ultra-left rhetoric and contrarianism. In addition, Webber does not seriously engage with the economic, political and sociological changes that have actually occurred in the region over the past two decades. For example, Webber is dismissive of the ‘emergent layers of [indigenous] petty capitalists’ (p. 176) in Bolivia, but is their emergence not a significant historical rupture? Does the success of a new class of indigenous capitalists in Bolivia really just amount to ‘the first day of the same’, or might it also be one kind of ‘emancipation’ from the racist exploitation and unfree labour of the past? Borrowing Raymond Aron's critique of Marxist intellectuals in France put forward in The Opium of the Intellectuals published in 1957, I would suggest that Webber projects his own ‘ideal emancipation’ (i.e. ‘Romantic Marxism’) onto political and social movement actors while not engaging seriously with what Aron called ‘real emancipation’ (material gains resulting from social democracy rather than the exotic ‘ideal emancipation’ of the Soviet Union). Webber dismisses the ‘real emancipation’ of what he derisively calls the ‘compensatory state’ (p. 287) in the case of Pink Tide governments while exalting the ‘ideal emancipation’ of ‘Romantic Marxism’. While Webber rejects John Holloway's anarcho position of ‘changing the world without taking power’ (p. 149), it is not clear how Webber's denunciation of actually existing leftist Pink Tide governments differs much from Holloway's autonomist position. A ‘Romantic Marxism’ seems to be a politics beyond realpolitik, or politics itself, which is an ethical, strategic and analytical dead end, the stuff of ultra-left academics, not political and social actors with a stake in processes of political change.

Webber's proposed dialectic of building a socialist future by ‘seizing upon selective values of the precapitalist past’ (p. 133) ignores much of the research and arguments by social scientists (including, importantly for Webber, Marxists like José Sánchez-Parga, Henry Bernstein and Tom Brass), whose work emphasises processes of ‘class differentiation’ in indigenous and peasant communities. Though communal ties can facilitate kinds of collective action and solidarity that may be a springboard for leftist politics in some cases, there is nothing inherently communist about ‘community’ as communal ties can also form the basis for projects of accumulation from below through exploitation of poorer kin or right-wing political mobilisation. Today is not ‘the first day of the same’ in Latin America because, for better and for worse, the communal institutions and forms of social organisation Webber argues could be the basis for a socialist future have been transformed by the dramatic processes of economic and social change that have impacted the region over the past two decades. Webber does not seriously engage with these changes and what they mean for the political Left or social movements in the region. I read his proposal for a Marxism, wrapped in the romanticisation of ‘the other’ he borrows from ‘post-development’ populism, to be more an admission of defeat than a robust proposal for a renewal of a Marxist anti-capitalist politics.

As social scientists studying political change, whatever our normative commitments may be, we need to remember the fact that politics is the art of the possible. While the leaders of the Pink Tide changed history, they did not have the luxury of doing so ‘under conditions of their own choosing’, to quote Karl Marx. All of these governments operated within the constraints of a global order unfavourable to economic nationalism and social democracy, to say nothing of ‘socialism in one country’ or ‘Romantic Marxism’. While Webber argues that the Pink Tide governments and social movements lost sight of ‘… a revolutionary horizon of transforming capitalist society in its totality’ (p. 299), this naively frames political change in terms of voluntarism rather than structural and institutional constraints. With all the shortcomings, contradictions and disappointments of the Pink Tide, Latin America remains the only region in the world where leftist politics have had widespread success since the end of the Cold War. Future scholarship on the Pink Tide period needs to critically and ‘unromantically’ analyse the successes and failures of these governments, and the political parties and social movements that helped bring them to power, in order to keep building a better world.