Re: Forwarded from Anthony (bourgeois nationalism)

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[ Part II ]

N O T E S

(1) Moreno's group was born in 1943, as Grupo Obrero Marxista,
rechristened Partido Obrero Revolucionario in 1949. In 1954 the POR,
true, entered the Partido Socialista de la Revolución Nacional (PSRN),
a party which was promoted by Perón and which included from stale
Socialists who had admitted the necessity of a national revolution in
Argentina (like Dickmann) to the Izquierda Nacional. But the
"entrance" of the POR to the PSRN was very peculiar. They did not only
keep their organization. What in fact happened was that they kept far
from the central activities of the PSRN -particularly from the issuing
of the _Lucha Obrera_ weekly- and remained as a feudalized fraction in
the Buenos Aires Provincial Section of the party.

After the 1955 coup (and the subsequent banning of the PSRN) they
appear as the "Palabra Obrera" fraction OF THE PERONIST MOVEMENT which
lasts up to 1964, when they become the Partido Revolucionario de los
Trabajadores (PRT) which by early 1968 split in two, the "La Verdad"
group, or Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST), and the "El
Combatiente" group, or Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores
(PRT).

Afterwards, the PRT formed the kernel of the ERP "guerrilla", while
the PST formed the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) with "pure"
socialist, overtly anti- Peronist, positions in 1973. Later on, after
the dictatorship which hit them terribly, the MAS reappeared under
different names and eventually split, in at least three fractions
(PTS, PST, and MST), in recent years.

(2) From the point of view of theory, the most important Argentinean
representative of this tendency was the late Milcíades Peña, who gave
a flourishing knowledge of Marx and his work to the basic positions by
Moreno.  Peña's group is, today, the Partido Obrero. Moreno defined
Peña, who soon broke with the insipid party of his teacher, as the
"first Marxist philosopher of Latin América".  Peña was, however,
basically a market research professional with a tortured personality,
who had a portrait of Trotsky presiding the office where he struck his
commercial deals with his wealthy and usually foreign customers. He
commited suicide very young.

Curently, he is enshrined by the "Partido Obrero" "Trotskyist", in
fact ultra- leftist, party. This Partido Obrero comes down from the
"Política Obrera" group which far back in the early 70s displayed the
most gorgeous girls in the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas where I was a
student of biology (this is not a _macho_ remark: they catered their
followers in the "nice", well to do, families of the managers of the
great firms, mostly multinationals, which goes a long way in
explaining the good appearence of their feminine branch). In those
times, "Política Obrera" had gone to the extreme end of their own
petty bourgeois solipsism, by stating (remember, in Argentina,
1970-73!) that the "students' avantgarde" was already ahead from the
"working class avantgarde", thus clearly exposing the intention of the
radicalized sepoy wing of the petty bourgeoisie to put the
"proletarians" under their enlightened conduction...

Another representative of this tendency was Silvio Frondizi, a
forerunner of the "world systems" theory that famous academics such as
Gunder Frank never recognized as such. Frondizi, in 1946, established
similar positions but with a serious theoretic structure, thus setting
himself apart from the empyricist morass that mars most of Moreno's
texts. Further evidence to the proposition that these ideas are
concrete expressions of social forces is that Moreno did not know
Frondizi's work when he wrote his 1951 essay. Frondizi and his
"Praxis" group witnessed a short-lived boom after the demise of Perón
in 1955.  Silvio himself was murdered by a right-wing commando during
the mid-1970s, not before having accepted, in theory at least, the
revolutionary character of Peronism.

I remark Silvio Frondizi's positions here, because those of Anthony
are more congruous with these than with the ideas of Moreno. While
Moreno, in practical political action, was strongly anti-Peronist to
the last consequence, Frondizi took Peronism as a vernacular form of
Kerenskyism (an identification that is also made by Anthony on the
posting that I am replying to here). Moreno, as we shall see,
explicitly REJECTS this view!  Frondizi, in a clear difference with
Moreno, was able to define the 1945 anti-Peronist front called the
Unión Democrática as "the most reactionary coalition". This sets a
clear division between both, and explains in a good degree their later
trajectories.

(3) It can be seen here that Moreno, who sometimes sounds like a
salesman of American machinery and technology, sticks to the
imperialist proposition that (a) only through investment of foreign
capital can industry be developed, and (b) the only true origin of
industrial development is foreign capital. On his essay, by the way,
he explains that when the Industrial Chambers of Argentina rejected a
large loan contracted by President Castillo with the United States in
1942, they elliminated "any possibility that manufacture would have
any technical development".  Technological independence?  Local
creation of our own solutions? Absolutely out of Moreno's visual
field...

(4) A critical-historical analysis of the _Economic Survey_, which
shows its deepest roots thanks to an interview that Katz conceded in
the early 60s, has been done by Arturo Jauretche, the great
Argentinean national-revolutionary politician.

(5) Again, any similitude with the imputations of Great Serbian
Chauvinism exerted by today's Trotskyists against the struggle for the
unity of Yugoslavia made by Milosevic is anything but a matter of
chance.


Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx