The Ecuadorian Left during Global Crisis: Republican Democracy, Class Struggle and State Formation (1919-1946)

Abstract

This essay studies the Ecuadorian left in its specific organizational forms as well as examining its interventions in spaces of dialogue and dispute with other political forces such as the public sphere and in State formation. It examines the press and different spaces of leftist participation in political contestations concerning collective action and the organs of the state. It is suggested that the emergence of the Ecuadorian left was rooted in the press and other political organizations closely aligned with Alfarist radicalism, and that within the context of the crisis of 1920 the left adopted notions of justice that had been previously popularized during the democratic revolution, combining them with the discourse of twentieth century revolutions, including Russian, Mexican and Peruvian variants of Marxism. The Ecuadorian left had notable successes between the 1920s-1940s, challenging conservative rights, fascism and the threat of the transnational oligarchy; it instigated discourses of the national popular State that successfully connected regional and ethnic identities in the popular imaginary, it promoted popular organization and demanded public recognition of popular causes; and it participated in the political life of the State and its reform. While it had only limited success at the electoral level, it nevertheless maintained a notable presence in the legislative arena, the army, in agrarian politics, labor policy, education and in democratic representation. The left marked the public sphere with a characteristic cultural production that combined notions of radical modernity with notions of popular culture, in the process managing to displace Spanish intellectual currents in these cultural disputes. From the end of the IIWW, the Ecuadorian state formed by the left and by popular struggle became the main target of the counterrevolution, unifying the oligarchies in their attempt to configure a modern right, and catching the attention of the political intelligence agencies of the Western Hemisphere during the Cold War. The left associated with the beginnings of neoliberalism nevertheless maintained a somewhat distrustful gaze upon this previous stage of the national popular left.