Kevin A. Young – författare

Many treatments of the twentieth-century Latin American left assume a movement populated mainly by affluent urban youth whose naïve dreams of revolution collapsed under the weight of their own elitism, racism, sexism, and sectarian dogmas. However, this book demonstrates that the history of the left was much more diverse. Many leftists struggled against capitalism and empire while also confronting racism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism. The left's ideology and practice were often shaped by leftists from marginalized populations, from Bolivian indigenous communities in the 1920s to the revolutionary women of El Salvador's guerrilla movements in the 1980s. Through ten historical case studies of ten different countries, Making the Revolution highlights some of the most important research on the Latin American left by leading senior and up-and-coming scholars, offering a needed corrective and valuable contribution to modern Latin American history, politics, and sociology.

Many treatments of the twentieth-century Latin American left assume a movement populated mainly by affluent urban youth whose naïve dreams of revolution collapsed under the weight of their own elitism, racism, sexism, and sectarian dogmas. However, this book demonstrates that the history of the left was much more diverse. Many leftists struggled against capitalism and empire while also confronting racism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism. The left's ideology and practice were often shaped by leftists from marginalized populations, from Bolivian indigenous communities in the 1920s to the revolutionary women of El Salvador's guerrilla movements in the 1980s. Through ten historical case studies of ten different countries, Making the Revolution highlights some of the most important research on the Latin American left by leading senior and up-and-coming scholars, offering a needed corrective and valuable contribution to modern Latin American history, politics, and sociology.

Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism”-the conviction that resource wealth should be used for the benefit of the “nation”-has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century.Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian and US sources, Kevin A. Young reveals that Bolivia became a key site in a global battle among economic models, with grassroots coalitions demanding nationalist and egalitarian alternatives to market capitalism. While US-supported moderates within the revolutionary regime were able to defeat more radical forces, Young shows how the political culture of resource nationalism, though often comprising contradictory elements, constrained government actions and galvanized mobilizations against neoliberalism in later decades. His transnational and multilevel approach to the 1952 revolution illuminates the struggles among Bolivian popular sectors, government officials, and foreign powers, as well as the competing currents and visions within Bolivia’s popular political cultures. Offering a fresh appraisal of the Bolivian Revolution, resource nationalism, and the Cold War in Latin America, Blood of the Earth is an ideal case study for understanding the challenges shared by countries across the Global South.

Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism”-the conviction that resource wealth should be used for the benefit of the “nation”-has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century.Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian and US sources, Kevin A. Young reveals that Bolivia became a key site in a global battle among economic models, with grassroots coalitions demanding nationalist and egalitarian alternatives to market capitalism. While US-supported moderates within the revolutionary regime were able to defeat more radical forces, Young shows how the political culture of resource nationalism, though often comprising contradictory elements, constrained government actions and galvanized mobilizations against neoliberalism in later decades. His transnational and multilevel approach to the 1952 revolution illuminates the struggles among Bolivian popular sectors, government officials, and foreign powers, as well as the competing currents and visions within Bolivia’s popular political cultures. Offering a fresh appraisal of the Bolivian Revolution, resource nationalism, and the Cold War in Latin America, Blood of the Earth is an ideal case study for understanding the challenges shared by countries across the Global South.

It's no secret that the 1%-the business elite that commands the largest corporations and the connected network of public and private institutions-exercise enormous control over the US government. While this control is usually attributed to campaign donations and lobbying, Levers of Power argues that corporate power derives from control over the economic resources on which daily life depends. Government officials must constantly strive to keep capitalists happy, lest they go on "capital strike"-that is, refuse to invest in particular industries or locations, or move their holdings to other countries-and therefore impose material hardship on specific groups or the economy as a whole. For this reason, even politicians who are not dependent on corporations for their electoral success must fend off the interruption of corporate investment. Levers of Power documents the pervasive power of corporations and other institutions with decision-making control over large pools of capital, particularly the Pentagon. It also shows that the most successful reform movements in recent US history-for workers' rights, for civil rights, and against imperialist wars-succeeded by directly targeting the corporations and other institutional adversaries that initiated and benefitted from oppressive policies. Though most of today's social movements focus on elections and politicians, movements of the 99% are most effective when they inflict direct costs on corporations and their allied institutions. This strategy is also more conducive to building a revolutionary mass movement that can replace current institutions with democratic alternatives.