A belated history of Argentinian Left: Installment 4, part II

[Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky <nestor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, friends.

Here comes the second part of the fourth installment of my
history of Argentinian Left. We are approaching the moment
when our first Socialist party was founded, and (if you
still keep in mind my previous posting on Roca and the
Roquists) this is not an easy moment to describe. So that
today I am sending some general considerations that are an
absolute necessity when describing the circumstances that
gave birth to our mainstream Left.  On my previous posting
I began to talk of the construction of an Argentinian
state, today I am commenting some important cultural issues
at stake.

So that here it goes.

Fourth installment, part II
A brief history of Argentinian Left: some ideological and
cultural precissions

We have arrived at the point where the founders of the
Argentinian Left are coming down from the ships, and the
builders of the Argentinian state are at command in the
country.  The latter, the Generation of the 80s (1880s),
will be misunderstood by most of the immigrants who
were to build the first self-avowed Leftist political
parties,
in a process that I will explain on the next posting.
Today, however, I will stop telling the story and insert
some important notions on the cultural side of the
isolation from the vast Argentinian masses that blighted
those parties.

The key mistake that plagued the early Argentinian Left
was the easy but shallow assumption that Argentina was
an "European" country where modern capitalism was
represented by the cosmopolitan Liberals of the port of
Buenos Aires and regressive feudalism was represented
by the forces of the parochial Inland country.  The
immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s that made
up the bulk (if not the totality) of this early Left
adhered to
a version of the history of the country that was receiving
them that flocked them together with the "progressive"
forces of the Port in the already triumphant, though hard
to win, battle against the primeval and -ultimately-
contemptible forces of the Inland country. In this view,
these forces had to be removed, such as feudalism had
been removed in Europe, to allow capitalism to develop
unobstructed.  This remotion had to be political at the
very least, and physical at most, if need be (as Sarmiento
or Mitre, the two heroes of the newly spawned
historiography that the immigrants were so fond of, had
been either preaching or accomplishing).

Was it just a matter of another Eurocentric ideology in the

colonial world?  Well, as a general rule, it was. But there

was much more to that, because Latin America and
particularly Argentina and Uruguay do nevertheless
belong to what one must loosely define as the "cultural
West".  In a sense, this is why it is quite easy for an
Argentinian to understand the Serbians today.  This is
what needs an explanation, and this is what I shall deal
with on this posting.

Today, the West has become synonymous with Western
imperialism, NATO interventions, the slaughter of entire
peoples and cultures, and so on. And rightly so, since in
the age of decadence of capitalism that imperialism
implies (something too easily forgotten: imperialism, as
defined by Lenin, is a phenomenon of decadence), this is
what the bourgeoisies of the West have made of the
"official" West.

But there is another Western tradition, the great tradition

of revolutionary struggles that can be traced back, at
least, to the peasants of Reformation Germany, even to
the uprisings in the towns of the late Italian Middle Ages
and to the _Jacqueries_.  This Western revolutionary
tradition links together, as a strong though sometimes
dim red thread, events like the upheavals of the Castilian
communities, the Dutch and English revolutions, the
struggle of the King of Paris against the feudals that
eventually came to an end with the French revolution, the
Spanish Wars against Napoleon, the Spring of the
Peoples of 1848, the Chartist movement, the Paris
Commune, the Balkan uprisings and turmoil of the late
19th. Century, the Russian revolution and even the
failures of the German and Austrian revolutions, the
Spanish Revolution and War, the Soviet resistence
against Nazism, the struggle of Tito's Partizans and their
Greek counterparts, and so on.

I have, not naively, presented this red thread as a series
of events centered in Europe proper.  But this is a
misguiding and partial view, since this Western tradition
has an "overseas" version that peaks with the American
Civil War, a veritable Revolution that Marx himself was
the first to hail.  And if one must include both victories
_and defeats_, then the thread is directly linked to the
Latin American own revolutionary tradition.  If Latin
America is to exist some day (and if it does not come to
life as a political entity we are doomed to become non-
entities somehow; San Martin's motto "You will be what
you have to be or you will be nothing at all" holds
stronger than ever), it is bound to exist in the only way
that history has made it possible to us, that is a vast
arena unified by the common Iberian cultural and
linguistic heritage.

Due respect to the sometimes awesome and always
admirable local Indian cultures, which do certainly have a
first rank place in the development of a Latin American
identity, cannot make us lose sight that Latin America is,
from the point of view of a socialist revolution, a part of

the West: our revolution is part of the vast revolutionary
thrust of the West, even against the inescapable hatred
of those who today want to monopolize the West, that is
the Greater Europe that Jim Blaut has so capably
described on this same list. It is not a matter of chance
that the conservative or counter-revolutionary trends of
thought in Latin America tend to stress the "indigenous
quality" of our realities, either to dismiss socialism as
alien to our own peoples' political and cultural tradition
(a
doctrine that anti-socialist antiimperialists are fond of,
and
that can be discovered even in such intelligent types as
Darcy Ribeiro) or to explain the need for dictatorship in
the built-in primitivism of the lower classes of Latin
America, doomed by the great "mistake" of the too
promiscuous early Iberians: racial --and cultural--
intermixture. Thus, the two sides of our own culture, the
European and the local (Indian, so to say), which have
been blended in our historical originality,  are split in
two
and thought runs along avenues that take you very far
away from what should be the essential political goal of a
revolutionary: to understand the feelings and beliefs of
her or his more exploited fellow countrymen, and to be
able to engage in a creative dialogue with them that
eventually will take all of us to a victorious revolution.

A caveat:  it is not in my mood to be "politically correct",
but I will yield to political correctness here in accepting,
and with pleasure, that this basic blend requires a lot
more to be completely described.  There is a strong and
healthy background of African culture in most of the
Caribbean and Northern South America, even in areas
such as Peru and Bolivia, and the contribution that the
non-Iberian Caribbean peoples have made and will make
to our own socialist revolution and national constitution
is far from little (just think of Bolivar learning the ABC of
revolutionary politics in Haiti!).  But I do nevertheless
believe that Haya de la Torre was right. Haya -whose
ways of thinking stem from the Argentinian Reforma
Universitaria, a movement we shall speak about on future
postings- aptly defined as "Indoamerica" what we now
call Latin America out of bending to tradition.  But the
formulation by the Peruvian petty bourgeois revolutionary
is, in my view, more adequate and less prone to stress
the European side of the thing (America being, in itself, a
concept coined -and Christened- in Europe).

But, the fact is, in the country I am talking about now,
that is Argentina, neither the African nor the Anglo or French
heritage is excessively important, nor was it in the
moment when the first Leftists arrived.  There was an
American indian substratum, but also in a mixed way. We
did not have, not even in the Northern provinces, strong
Indian traditions such as in Bolivia or Peru.  Nor did the
Guarany give us anything the like, either.  The Guaranys,
by the way, had generated the culture of the Missions by
blending the traditions of Catholic Europe with their own
culture.  This early -though guided by European priests-
experiment in Indoamerican originality was crushed, as I
have already told, by the colluding Portuguese and
Spanish bandeirantes and encomenderos, during the
18th. century, then by the Portuguese and the proto-
oligarchies of Montevideo and Buenos Aires in the early
19th. century (remember it was a group of Guaranys that
gave Artigas his last support before cast away into
Paraguay), and in the Paraguay slaughter (misnamed
war) of the late 1860s.

So that here in the Southern Cone we had, by the end of
the 19th. Century, a peculiar, mostly Creole, society, that
had endured a long civil war which was unknown by the
immigrants. The results of that civil war, the ways it was
put to an end, the mighty task accomplished by the
Generation of the 80s and the results of that task could
not be understood within the framework of "capitalism"
versus "feudalism" nor that of "Civilization against
Barbarism" that the Argentinian oligarchy fed the
immigrants with, and they delightfully ate and drank to the
last morsel and drop. This would take a long, painful
process that has not still ended, of building a truly
revolutionary Left that unites both the tasks of socialism
and the duties of the construction of an unfinished nation
in Latin America.  The reasons for this cruel detour of
history were rooted in the ideological problems I have
hinted here, and will deploy themselves in the following
postings of this long and slowly dripping (but hopefully
not uninteresting) series.

Nestor.