An Essay on an Open Window

By Valter Pomar
The present essay addresses four main issues: the situation of the Latin American left as a whole in 1991; what has happened with that left ever since; what its current situation is; what its prospects are.
The context chosen is 1991 due to the disappearance of the Soviet Union, which we will discuss below.
However, before doing so, it need be reminded that the downfall of the Soviet Union itself brought an attempt initiated in 1917 to an end; this attempt originally consisted in seizing power in a country where capitalist development was but in its early stages and embarking on the socialist transition, in the hope that this would give rise to revolutions in those countries where capitalism was further developed. These revolutions would, in turn, advance the socialist transition in Russia itself.
But it so happened that in the decades following October 1917 no revolution succeeded in capitalist developed countries.
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