Capitalist Democracy & Resistance: Contextualizing Honduran Counter-hegemony.

Abstract

In this thesis, I evaluate the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) in Honduras as a counterhegemonic movement. In order to do so, it is necessary to contextualize the political-economic history of the territory that has come to define the material basis from which modem Hondurans derive their ideological and material actuality. As one will see through the regional Honduran context, separating political sociological analysis from capitalism and the material basis from which ideas and institutions are constituted by and through can offer only partial analysis. Thus, I reject conventional political sociological theories such as "political opportunity theory" and "new social movement theory" on the grounds that social movements that seek to alter the social system in which they operate cannot be adequately understood without referring to the material and historical underpinnings that have contributed to and continue to shape their existence. In lieu of conventional theories, I offer that a neo-Gramscian understanding of counter-hegemony more accurately explains the current resistance movement in Honduras, and may be more useful in elucidating the alternative developments in progressive Latin American societies.