Abstract
This paper arises from two questions: why do paternalism and clientelism phenomena in modern Latin America populism remain so insensible to the Marxist critic of capitalistic exploitation? Why, are they, at the same time, hostile to any kind of regional or indigenous power (in the case of Amazonia and Andean countries)? My hypothesis is that such mechanisms could also popular identification processes that may correspond to progressive forces, as well as to some forms of alienation of the logic of economic and social reciprocity. On the one hand, they can express the resistance of a reciprocal economy and community to the expansion of the capitalistic exchange domain. But, on the other hand, they could represent the alienation of the logic of reciprocity, through its asymmetric forms of redistribution (or centralized reciprocity): paternalism and clientelism. I see, in the limits of socio-political critiques and in the renewal of populism in Latin America, a superposition and cohabitation between the alienation specific of reciprocity systems – the paternalist oppression – and the alienation arising from the exchange system: the capitalistic exploitation.