Anyone interested in the recent renewal of social movement activity and the rise of ostensibly left or center-left governments in Latin America might be tempted to pick up this book, with its provocative jacket photo and appealing title. Unfortunately, the book cover is nearly the only thing going for this sectarian jeremiad from James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer. If one is looking for serious scholarship, or even solid journalism, neither can be found here. Instead, one finds a poorly organized collage, including descriptions of recent history, critiques of government policies, and tendentious and contradictory evaluations of left strategy. Despite the promise of the title, the authors do not engage the literature on social movements, nor do they contribute much in the way of new analytical perspectives. The class analysis announced in the introduction only emerges occasionally in the subsequent chapters, and even then it is applied mechanically and reductively, yielding an extremely limited capacity to help us understand the character and trajectory of social movements or the nuances of political behavior in diverse contexts. Important cross-national differences in terms of political institutions, ethnic composition, and international constraints are not addressed, much less systematically compared. Furthermore, the book lacks consistent citations of sources, and serious empirical and orthographic errors are sprinkled throughout. Those knowledgeable about the countries in question might be amused by the almost congenital inability to spell correctly the names of politicians, political parties, and labor confederations; those without such knowledge, especially undergraduate students, will only be confused or misinformed.

Summarizing the authors' main claims is made difficult by the book's contradictions and haphazard organization. Each chapter is structured differently, and incoherently, with abrupt changes of topic and time period, while words, phrases, and entire paragraphs are repeated at different moments. Roughly halfway through the book, what could have been a main organizing principle emerges: The last three chapters, including those on Ecuador and Bolivia as well as the conclusion, contain (different) lists of the ways in which the state has attempted to contain social movements, such as repression, co-optation, and division. Had they been introduced from the outset and made into consistent categories of analysis, these modes of state control might have provided useful lenses through which to compare the dynamics in the four countries. Regrettably, such questions as why states adopt one mode rather than another, which modes best succeed at containment, or how social movements respond when faced with different modes are left unanswered, and even unasked.

One clear message the authors convey is that mass mobilization is the best and only route to socialism. Indeed, in the introductory chapter, they proclaim their hope that this book will contribute to the “advance of the popular movement towards social revolution” (p. 7). Toward that end, the bulk of each country-case chapter is dedicated to arguing that the presidents of the four countries are neoliberal (supporting an agenda of privatization, fiscal austerity, and trade liberalization) and are contributing to an actual or impending economic crisis, that all left parties and leaders that engage in electoral politics have become or will become neoliberal, and that social movements have failed to capitalize on opportunities to take state power.

Some of the evaluations of presidential economic policies seem more or less correct, if fairly obvious, yet the authors' credibility is severely damaged by their lack of proper sources, their factual errors (e.g., the claim that the coca workers in Bolivia are not unionized [p. 189], when in fact the country's current president first gained notoriety by helping to organize the coca workers' union and its entry into a leading labor confederation), and their awkward invective (e.g., calling Brazil's economic policy “Taliban neoliberalism,” p. 108). The authors' numerous predictions for the near future, including impending economic crises in Argentina and Brazil, are almost uniformly wrong. They claim that participating in elections leads left parties to neoliberal views because the class composition and class consciousness of their elected leaders change. This claim is based mostly on the experience of the Workers' Party (PT) in Brazil and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia. It seems potentially more apt for the PT than for the MAS, but the argument ignores other factors that might have the same net effect of moderating economic policy, such as fears of capital flight or currency collapse and political constraints like the lack of congressional majorities.

Perhaps the most serious flaw in the book is the blindness to the possibility that Latin American social movements value democracy and do not desire to seize power by force (or at the very least, that movement leaders have legitimate fears that should they attempt to seize power, the military would react violently). The authors never define the term “social movement,” but they imply throughout that all social movements have revolutionary and socialist agendas, something most social movement scholars would reject in all world regions. Yet Petras and Veltmeyer equate social movements and mass mobilization with revolution, and distinguish social movements from political parties, elections, and (at times) a focus on local politics, which they equate with reformism. It should go without saying that these equations and this distinction are problematic. In the cases of Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, major labor or indigenous social movements created political parties (the PT, the MAS, and Pachakutik) and entered into elections but did not abandon mobilizational tactics. At the same time, they also placed emphasis on proving their governing abilities at the local level. What Petras and Veltmeyer view as mutually exclusive paths have been combined consistently by the most successful left parties in Latin America. The authors repeatedly disparage electoral politics as a “dead end” and a “trap” (pp. 216, 225–28), and they castigate leaders like Evo Morales of MAS for choosing elections and political parties over mass mobilization, yet Morales's strategy seems vindicated by his resounding first-round victory in Bolivia's 2005 presidential election. In sum, this book succeeds neither as social science nor as guidance for would-be revolutionaries.