With Latin America’s remaining progressive governments facing considerable uncertainty, this issue reflects on the lessons of the past 20 years for political strategy from a social movement perspective. Our points of departure are the various experiments in new ways of doing politics—the new forms of political participation and organization that were opened up—and how these have fared in the shifting political terrain of the progressive governments in power across Latin America since the turn of century. Rejecting the persistent but misguided and simplistic distinction between a “good” left that respects liberal democracy and does not seek radical change and a “bad” left that is supposedly “populist” rather than democratic and sometimes articulates radical intentions (Castañeda, 2008; for a discussion see Ellner, 2013; Munck, 2013; Webber and Carr, 2012), we emphasize the complex interplay of political and social struggles. We cannot conceive of government and state politics in isolation, nor do we seek to explain their “rise and fall” as if they were a tide that supposedly ebbs and flows according to the phases of the moon or “cycles” that come and go according to some underlying mechanism not totally explained. In the retrospective analysis that follows we will not assume any model along these “naturalistic” lines. We will foreground concrete politics and not take a position of exteriority that interprets, judges, and corrects the actions of others. Against any schema that posits binary oppositions, we will see that politics is always complex and cannot be analyzed the way meteorologists analyze the tides (and even there complexity now rules). The past 20 years in Latin America cannot be understood in terms of any simplistic schema that foregrounds mysterious mechanisms rather than the day-to-day political struggles to construct a “people,” adopt alternative visions and values, develop political alliances, and maximize the articulation of social forces contesting the dominant order.

中文翻译：

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导言：社会运动、进步政府和战略问题

由于拉丁美洲剩余的进步政府面临相当大的不确定性，这个问题从社会运动的角度反映了过去 20 年政治战略的经验教训。我们的出发点是新的政治运作方式的各种实验——开放的政治参与和组织的新形式——以及这些在拉丁美洲自上个世纪以来不断变化的执政政府不断变化的政治领域中的表现世纪。拒绝在尊重自由民主且不寻求激进变革的“好”左派与被认为是“民粹主义”而非民主且有时表达激进意图的“坏”左派之间存在持久但被误导和简单化的区别（Castañeda，2008；对于讨论参见 Ellner，2013；Munck，2013；Webber 和 Carr，2012），我们强调政治和社会斗争的复杂相互作用。我们不能孤立地看待政府和国家政治，我们也不会试图解释它们的“兴衰”，好像它们是一种根据月相或“周期”来来去去的潮汐。一些未完全解释的潜在机制。在接下来的回顾性分析中，我们不会假设任何沿着这些“自然主义”路线的模型。我们将突出具体的政治，不采取解释、判断和纠正他人行为的外在立场。与任何假设二元对立的模式相反，我们将看到政治总是复杂的，不能像气象学家分析潮汐的方式那样进行分析（即使现在复杂性也是如此）。