ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter of the book reflects on the emergence of a progressive cycle in Latin American politics and the meaning of the more recent turn towards the right. The main theoretical point is that the forces of resistance generated in the capitalist development process can be mobilized either to the right or to the left, depending on the correlation of force in the class struggle. The chapter, and the book, ends with a tentative assessment of this correlation of class forces. Although the immediate future is impossible to predict, there is considerable mounting evidence that the rightward swing in electoral politics, and with it a return to neoliberal orthodoxy, is mobilizing new forces of resistance, this time located in the urban centres and engaging the activism of the working class, which in previous development-and-resistance cycles had always taken a back seat to the protagonism of the social movements of landless rural movements.
