“Marx and Latin America” by José Aricó, 1980
This short analysis is a classic of independent Latin
American Marxism. It is an inquiry into
Marx’s – and by extension the Marxist movement’s – mistakes concerning Latin
America’s specific social reality - up to around 1926. Aricó’s analysis is
erudite and detailed and he ends up explaining how Marx got it wrong, why it
happened, and how he began to get it right. Aricó challenges the notions of Marx’s
Eurocentrism, the idea that every society has to go through capitalism and that
developments in the colonial or oppressed world are irrelevant to the class
struggle in the ‘center’ countries. In fact it is the reverse. He indirectly challenges the old idea that the
indigenous have little role to play in the fight for socialism.
If Marx making a mistake and later beginning to correct it
shocks those dogmatic ‘lefties’ who think everything is set in stone – well,
then, you are not living in a real, changing world. That is precisely what Marx grasped after the European
revolutions of 1848. Marx’s theory
developed as he observed the benefits colonialism accrued to capital, reviving its
fortunes, and the subsequent weakening of the proletarian movements in Europe.
Aricó especially cites Marx’s writings on Ireland’s key role in the English social
revolution – regarding Irish workers in England and the Irish national struggle
against English colonialism. It was also expressed in Marx’s positive appraisal
of the Russian peasant commune – obshchina or mir – aiding the development of
socialism in Russia. It was still an
agrarian country with very little capitalism in 1875 at the time he wrote this.
Regarding Latin America, this relates to the ‘national’
question in developing societies as they emerged in the 1800s from tribalism,
tributism, so-called ‘Asiatic’ features, feudalism, colonialism and the
consequent building of socialist movements in Latin America. Argentina, Brazil and Peru all had sections
associated with the Socialist 2nd International, so a good material
grasp of social reality directly related to their strategies. Aricó’s touchstones are Gramsci,
Mariategui and Luxemburg, all original thinkers and not associated with Soviet
Marxism. This work is surrounded by 1
essay, 2 prefaces, 1 introduction, 9 appendixes and an epilogue, as befitting a
work of academia, but in itself it is only 53 close-packed pages.
The problems Latin American Marxists saw were based on what
Marx wrote. Marx fervently disliked
Bolivar and politically compared him to Napoleon III, as a caudillo with no connection
to the population. This came out
especially in an encyclopedia essay penned by Marx about Bolivar in 1858. Marx also wrote in 1848 that the U.S.
invasion of Mexico was a plus, supposedly bringing capital to underdeveloped
agrarian lands. Of course that is not all it brought! Marx hinted that Latin America’s social
structure was raw and its leaders irrational, to the point that Bolivar’s ‘war
of independence’ reminded him of Hegel’s concept of a ‘non-historic people’
operating in a social vacuum. No one uses
this concept now, even though in 1951 W.Z. Foster endorsed it. Foster’s comments reflected the ‘scientific’ and
dogmatic style of the CPs, who unquestioningly accepted everything from the
USSR. Aricó points out Marx’s attitude towards
Bolivar was also perhaps part of a political battle with bourgeois historians
who treated Bolivar well or as a one-sided hero.
Another concept involved is a somewhat obscure one - that a
‘state’ is created by a real nation according to Hegel. Hegel believed that without
a state of some sort a ‘national’ people do not exist for all practical
purposes. This seems to be a reactionary
idea, as some nations like the Palestinians or Kurds are without an official
state and yet exist. Marx opposed Hegel on this and denied that only the state
produced civil society. Which is why he looked askance at the weak, subservient
states produced by early upper-class, creole Latin American leaders. Specifically, Bolivar’s top-down dictatorial state
in actual fact became a place of chaotic military rule, unable to organize
production or much of society. Bolivar himself
was no Zapata, Hugo Blanco, Che Guevara or Tupac Amaru, but an educated
militarist from the upper class. Watch one
episode of the dull series on him and you’ll get an idea. As Aricó notes: “Bolivar
… saw the masses as having more capacity for destruction than construction.” Bolivar’s weaknesses were not individual, but
expressed the conditions from which he arose.
This hints at one cause, up to the 1990s, of why so many
Latin American countries were run by caudillos or military dictatorships -
though in my mind that probably had more to do with the Cold War and the global
class war. Aricó himself escaped
Argentina for Mexico, running from Argentina’s anti-communist dictatorship and murderous
‘dirty war.’ Aricó himself seems to note some truth to this view of the weaknesses in Latin America. He also discusses Marx and Engels’ notion of
national battles that advance proletarian agendas or retard them.
Aricó faults Marx for his narrow view of Latin
American history, including ignoring information on class struggles involving peasants,
indigenous and workers against the colonialists, landlord patron class and creole
city rulers. Latin America was clearly not a place of ‘non-historic’ peoples. Bolivar wanted independence from colonialism,
but also realized the necessity for a Latin American Union – an LAU similar to
the EU. Today this level of continental
coordination and integration is still unachieved, even on a bourgeois
level. This is probably due to the role
of U.S. imperialism in the hemisphere. Even the embrace of the ‘Bolivarian
revolution’ by the Venezuelan government and Socialist Party has not seen a
breakthrough.
Aricó attacks claims that Marx was ‘Eurocentric’
thusly: “The result (of these claims
– ed.) has been a fragmentation of
left-wing thought, divided between accepting authoritarianism as an inevitable
cost of any process of mass democratization, or else seeing elitist liberalism
as the only possible means of bringing about a new society…” Aricó ends the essay by clearly pointing to
the crisis of Marxism as a failing ‘state
philosophy’ which his work is intended to counter. Aricó wrote this in 1980, so he’s referring
to Soviet Marxism.
Marx in the 1860s noted the progress of proletarianization
in Turkey, India, Poland and Russia. Today
– 2025 - capital has injected itself into almost every social and economic
relation across the world, even though pre-capitalist forms still exist, along
with post-capitalist ones. This is an
example of combined and uneven development.
Pre-capitalist ones like debt or virtual slavery are used to accrue
profits anyway. Subsistence farming
sustains peasants who sometimes contribute to the labor economy. Criminal gangs inject their cash into the
capitalist banking system. And dominant state
ownership funds private enterprise, such as in China.
While formal independence has been declared in nearly every
country, with exceptions like the Western Sahara and certain oppressed
nationalities, who can actually identify a country that is truly ‘independent’
in the economic or even political sense anymore? No one. The world is instead working as a ‘division
of labor.’ A world economy, a world
proletariat, a world social structure, a world environment has more and more
come into existence with the spread of imperialist capital. This was the prediction of Karl Marx, Lenin,
Luxemburg and communists since then. So the colonial debate about Marx in the
1800s is really moot, except to certain enduring anti-communists, even those dressed
in anti-colonialist colors. This book
will be ammunition in their face.
Prior blogspot reviews of this subject, use blog search
box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Latin America,” “Peru,” “Bolivar,” “Mexico”
“Mariategui.”
And I got it at a college library!
Red Frog / March 17, 2025
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