It was the early days of the negotiated transition when the magazine Punto Final published an article by James Petras that sparked outrage among the Concertación’s intellectual circles. Titled “The Metamorphosis of Intellectuals in Latin America,” the article highlighted a disturbing aspect: at the mercy of external influences—especially financial ones—these center-left intellectuals were reorienting their positions toward “a series of formulas that justified appeasement of the military and economic elites, both local and foreign, as the only viable and ‘possible’ option, thus freezing the transformation process.”
Thirty years later, Petras’s diagnosis remains one of the most insightful keys to understanding the profound transformation of critical thought in Latin America. The passing of the Greek-American sociologist on January 17, 2026, invites us to reread his work and ask: how did the revolutionary intellectual of the 20th century transform into the democratic operator of today’s revisionist left?
The Collective Intellectual: From Exile to the Militant Trench
For Petras, Latin American exile in Europe during the dictatorships of the 1970s was the crucible of a paradoxical transformation. Far from their countries, exiled intellectuals transformed into a collective intellectual: they abandoned the ivory tower to organize transnational resistance, build solidarity networks, and denounce crimes against humanity.
Petras was a key figure in this moment. A member of the Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America, alongside Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez, he helped document human rights violations that would lay the foundation for international justice. He also collaborated with Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, embodying the figure of the Gramscian organic intellectual: committed to social transformation, connected to popular movements, and anchored in a revolutionary conception of change.
This collective intellectual—Marxist, anti-imperialist, classist—operated according to a clear logic: identity-based struggles could achieve transformation only if connected to questions of property, labor, and power. Its political subject was the working class, the peasantry, and popular movements. Its horizon: revolution.
The Great Metamorphosis: From Marxism to Post-Marxism
The shift consolidated neoliberalism, and the working class retreated as a historical subject. “Post-Marxism became a fashionable intellectual position with the triumph of neoliberalism and the retreat of the working class,” wrote Petras. The space left vacant by the reformist left was occupied not only by capitalist ideologues, but also by a new generation of intellectuals, many of whom were former Marxists.
Petras has identified the ten fundamental arguments of the post-Marxist discourse:
• Socialism has been a failure and general theories of society are destined to repeat it.
• The Marxist emphasis on social classes is reductionist; the starting point is cultural identities (race, gender, ethnicity).
• The state is the enemy of democracy; civil society is the true agent of change.
• Markets, with limited regulation, are more effective than central planning.
• The struggle for state power is corrupting; only local struggles and non-governmental organizations are democratic.
• Revolutions always end badly or are impossible.
This ideological corpus did not emerge spontaneously. It was encouraged and, in many cases, subsidized by the major financial institutions and government agencies that promoted neoliberalism. The result was a “domestication of intellectuals” linked to their dependence on external funding.
The Role of NGOs: Dollars and Demobilization
The central mechanism behind this metamorphosis was funding. NGOs and independent research centers—which Petras described as “organizations whose ideology, connections, and practices directly compete with Marxist theory and practice”—became the new habitat of the critical intellectual.
These organizations, funded by governments, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and foundations linked to the establishment, spread leftist language—”people power,” “gender equality,” “grassroots development”—but emptied these terms of their transformative content. Petras was categorical: many NGOs are “government arms” and “batters for demobilizing social and political struggles rooted in the need for radical transformation.”
The consequence was the depoliticization of the intellectual. It was no longer a matter of building popular power to transform the state, but of managing projects, accessing funds, and producing reports. A salary in dollars replaced revolutionary commitment. Economics determined “comparative advantages” and, with them, the national political subject.
Democratic revisionism as a new orthodoxy
The current revisionist left is the product of this metamorphosis. Its political subject is no longer the organized working class, but a constellation of fragmented identities: gender, race, ecology, sexual diversity. Its method is not revolution, but activism, participation in NGOs, and pressure on national and international authorities. Its horizon is not socialism, but a liberal democracy with a human face.
Petras questioned this “democratic transition” as a simplistic dichotomy between military dictatorship and democracy. For him, what really emerged after the dictatorships were “neo-authoritarian electoral regimes”: systems that maintained exclusionary power structures while simultaneously co-opting intellectual elites through funding and institutionalization.
The organic intellectual has thus become the institutionalized intellectual. Critical Marxism has become rampant post-Marxism. Revolution has become management. Class has become identity.
Conclusion: Petras’ legacy
James Petras was an inconvenient critic: someone who dared to “criticize the left from within the left.” His diagnosis of the metamorphosis of Latin American intellectuals was not merely an academic exercise, but a warning. By abandoning class struggle as the axis of social change, the revisionist left not only lost its theoretical compass, but also became complicit—willingly or not—with the neoliberal order it claimed to be fighting.
Today, in an era where critical thinking seems diluted between NGO reports, funded projects, and identity activism, Petras’s question remains relevant: is it possible to reclaim the figure of the intellectual engaged in radical transformation, or is the metamorphosis irreversible? The answer, perhaps, lies in rereading Petras and remembering that the critical intellectual is not someone who administers what exists, but someone who dares to imagine what does not yet exist.
