The Contemporary Left in Mexico and the Class Politics of Anti-corruption

1. This talk examines the success of Mexico’s contemporary electoral left. It outlines crucial aspects of its historical trajectory, focusing on its understanding of corruption as a structural feature of a neoliberal political economy. It sketches, as well, the budding features of ‘actually existing’ post-neoliberalism in the country, tracing the emergence of a new social pact premised on a re-legitimization of the state as a social actor, and the reinstatement of class cleavage as a primary organizer of the political field – a political project carried out within the enduring structural constraints inherited from decades of neoliberalism: a disarticulated working class and a hollowed state apparatus.
    

Edwin F. Ackerman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He uses comparative-historical methods to understand how political identities are formed, articulated, and become operative. He has studied this process in three contexts: the historical trajectory of debates over ‘illegal’ immigration in the U.S., the relationship between political economy and political party formation in Latin America, and the rise of transnational grass-roots right-wing mobilization against “gender ideology” in Latin America and the U.S. He is the author of Origins of the Mass Party: Dispossession and the Party-Form in Mexico and Bolivia (Oxford Press), and his work has been published in multiple journals, and has been featured on Democracy Now!, Jacobin, and National Public Radio (NPR), among other media outlets. Edwin is a former American Sociological Association MFP Fellow and Ford Fellow and was a Global History Fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center (2018-19). He received a Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley.

Livestream: tinyurl.com/CLAS092625