A leading expert on Latin American politics, James Petras, who passed away at the age of 89, on January 17, 2026, was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. He was Greek American scholar, who earned his B.A. from Boston University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
He joined Binghamton University in 1972, where he became Bartle Professor of Sociology, later Professor Emeritus, and also served as an adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. His upbringing in a Greek immigrant working-class family shaped his lifelong dedication to issues of class struggle, inequality, and marginalized communities.
Petras stood as an unwavering advocate for social justice across the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. His body of work, which explored the struggles of workers, peasants, and social movements, constitutes a powerful intellectual and moral legacy. He was one of the most prolific critical sociologists of his generation.
He authored more than 62 books, which were translated into 29 languages, and published hundreds of academic articles in leading journals such as the American Sociological Review, the British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, the Journal of Contemporary Asia, and the Journal of Peasant Studies. His reach extended to a broad public through over 2,000 essays in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Monthly Review, New Left Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, Partisan Review, Canadian Dimension, Le Monde Diplomatique, and La Jornada, as well as his official websites. His books were published by major presses including Random House, Wiley, Routledge, Macmillan, Verso, Zed Books, Pluto Press, and Clarity Press, reflecting the global impact of his ideas.
A leading expert on Latin American politics, Petras examined how neoliberalism, transnational capital, and U.S. foreign policy shaped society and political resistance movements. His influential works include "Unmasking Globalization: Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century" (2001); "The Dynamics of Social Change in Latin America" (2000); "System in Crisis" (2003); "Social Movements and State Power" (2004); "Empire with Imperialism" (2005); "Multinationals on Trial" (2006); and "Rulers and Ruled in the U.S. Empire" (2007).
Beyond academia, Petras engaged with leaders including Salvador Allende in Chile, Andreas Papandreou in Greece, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and met with Fidel Castro in his later years. His commitment to social justice included 11 years of work with the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST). From 1973 to 1976, he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He held that scholarship should support struggles for justice, a principle that guided his teaching and extensive public engagement.
His distinguished career earned him honors such as the Best Dissertation Award from the Western Political Science Association, the Lifetime Career Award from the American Sociological Association's Marxist Sociology Section, and the Robert Kenny Award for Best Book.
Outside his scholarly life, he was a devoted father and grandfather who shared his love of the Boston Red Sox with his children. He was an avid fisherman and brought home stamps and coins from around the world. He enjoyed simple living, playing games, and cultivating a robust garden for both food and flowers. He is survived by Professor Elizabeth Petras, Stefan Petras, Anthippy Petras, Wendy Petras, Liam Petras, and Xana Petras-Roper. He is remembered for his fierce intellect, moral clarity, and enduring faith in the possibility of social transformation.
Examined through a Marxist or Maoist lens, James Petras's work played a pivotal role in fostering anti-imperialist critique while also offering a critical perspective on certain analytical trends that deviated from revolutionary Marxism. His contribution to the critical Marxist tradition was particularly significant in relation to Latin American social movements and the study of imperialism.
Petras's work stands as a testament to the idea that global inequality must be understood through class relations, state power, and concrete political struggles. He demonstrated how powerful states continue to sponsor global capitalism, enforce financial rules, and deploy military force to protect corporate interests. He argued that imperialism had not receded but had transitioned into new economic forms while retaining its political foundations. He assessed that 21st-century imperialism is driven by the internal dynamics of capital, resulting in the "super-exploitation" of the Third World, often facilitated by NGOs and neoliberal policies.
Latin America was his primary focus. He wrote extensively on neoliberal reforms, trade agreements, and financial dependence, exploring how these processes transferred wealth upward while undermining labor movements and national sovereignty. His support for popular movements never precluded criticism of their compromises or authoritarian tendencies.
His approach embodied the principle of "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." His optimism allowed him to perceive revolutionary potential within particular frameworks, while his pessimism compelled him to dissect situations into their constituent tendencies, class forces, and balances that might shape the realization of that potential. For him, as for other Marxists, history is not linear. At any given moment, multiple tendencies, counter-tendencies, and social variables are in motion, synthetically determining the future.
In his writings on post-Marxism, Petras argued that the departure from class politics reflected political defeats rather than intellectual progress. He believed identity-based struggles could achieve transformation only when connected to questions of ownership, labor, and economic control. He rejected the fragmentation of social sciences into isolated disciplines, advocating instead for the reintegration of political economy, sociology, and history to analyze the forces driving modern societies. He steadfastly opposed views that class conflict had disappeared or that imperial politics had evolved into neutral globalization.
Petras's analysis of U.S. imperialism, particularly in Latin America, aligns with Marxist-Leninist perspectives on the nature of capital, exploitation, and the predatory character of the U.S. state. His work maintained a class-based analysis against "post-Marxist" tendencies, emphasizing that class struggle remains central, contrary to theories suggesting the working class had been absorbed into the system. He was a fierce critic of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which he viewed as agents of neoliberalism that depoliticize social movements. He consistently supported landless worker movements and other grassroots, combative, class-oriented struggles.
While Petras accurately described imperialist actions, some critics from more radical positions have suggested his analysis sometimes lacks the nuance needed to fully address the subtleties of neoliberal ideology. Others have argued that his focus on the overwhelming power of imperialism could inadvertently stifle the development of concrete revolutionary political projects, particularly in regions like the Middle East. Although Petras worked within a Marxist framework centered on class struggle, his work did not engage extensively with Maoist doctrines such as "protracted people's war" or the specific agrarian strategy of surrounding cities from the countryside.
A Maoist analysis would likely view James Petras as a strong ally in the fight against neoliberalism and imperialism, whose work serves as an encyclopedic resource for diagnosing the concrete dynamics of exploitation, even if it does not fully incorporate the revolutionary, armed-struggle-focused strategies central to Maoism.
Regarding Latin America, Petras's perspective was often characterized by a critical engagement with progressive regimes. In his analysis of Hugo Chávez following the 2004 referendum in Venezuela, he noted the internal contradictions of the political process while acknowledging that Chávez's support was based on class and race divisions. He observed that while the referendum victory represented a defeat for imperialism, it did not necessarily lead to revolutionary transformation, pointing to post-election appeals to Washington and big business. He distinguished Chávez from other national-populist leaders by noting that his principal allies were mass social movements and Cuba, standing against a bloc of neoliberal regimes.
In his assessments of leaders such as Lula in Brazil and Morales in Bolivia, Petras consistently focused on critiquing euphoric evaluations and providing a political-economic perspective on developments. While some have suggested his pessimism regarding Venezuela was not entirely borne out, the fact that a predicted outcome did not occur does not invalidate the analysis of what was possible at the time.
Petras's perception of Bolivian and Brazilian developments was shaped by examining the self-organization and assertion of urban and rural working classes. The central question for him was whether the political-parliamentary impact of social movements—including the accommodation of sections of their leadership within state structures—sharpened the striking capacity of the working class or simply institutionalized these movements, transforming them into representative lobbies and reducing class struggle to clashes of interest groups. The fact that progressive governments in Latin America were constituted within the framework of bourgeois democracy posed new challenges for popular movements and their relationship with the state.
Among his notable articles, "U.S. Offensive in Latin America: Coups, Retreats, and Radicalization" (2002) examined how the U.S. military-political offensive aimed to prop up decaying client regimes, destabilize independent regimes, pressure center-left governments rightward, and isolate popular movements challenging the empire. In "Porto Alegre 2002: A Tale of Two Forums," he investigated how increased media coverage and favorable reporting resulted from the presence of political notables embracing centrist positions. Another article traced three waves of social movements in Latin America over 25 years, from the "new social movements" of the late 1970s to later formations. In "What is the Third Way?" he examined historical and contemporary examples of political leaders and movements declaring allegiance to alternatives positioned against dominant paradigms. Reviewing Frances Stonor Saunders's Who Paid the Piper, he detailed how the CIA co-opted intellectuals in service of imperial policies during the Cold War. In "A Marxist Critique of Post-Marxism," he analyzed how institutions promoting neoliberalism sponsored organizations whose ideologies and practices competed with Marxist theory, describing how neoliberal politicians promoted "grassroots" organizations with anti-statist ideologies to intervene among potentially conflictive classes.
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*Freelance journalist
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