Argentina failed as settler state (was Re: National consciousness and material conditions of existence)

["Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: National consciousness and material condition, 
el 26 Oct 01, a las 15:46, Edward George dijo:

>  I would still argue very strongly that an acceptance of the fact that 
> nations exist at the level of ideology and consciousness, while it does not
> exhaust the subject, is an essential starting point for any further 
> discussion.
> For once you begin to accept the 'objective' existence of 'nations' (not 
> nation
> states or nationalities, but nations) then you begin to travel the road of an
> ahistorical understanding of national existence and you begin to accept
> nationalist mythology, and for Marxists this blinds us to the point where we 
> see
> nations where they don't exist (in the Malvinas, for example), or fail to see
> them where they do (in Scotland, Wales, Catalunya, Euskadi, etc. etc. etc. 
> ...)

Though I may take exception to some of Edward's examples (but very 
shyly, since then we would get entangled in the road that takes from 
"nations" to "nationalities" and this is not the core of my contention here), 
I agree that the issue of consciousness is a crucial one. Not in the sense of 
Nairn, however (Jim Blaut has written a massive destruction of Blaut from 
a fully Marxist and Latin American national-revolutionary point of view, 
which if I am not wrong is available somewhere in the list's webpage; at any 
rate, it can also be consulted in the _Antipode_ magazine where it as first 
published).  Anyway, since Edward is so kind to me (" I greatly look forward to 
what Néstor has to say"), here begins my series on why Argentina is NOT a 
settler state, or, at most, it could have become a settler state but it failed 
to reach such a blissful condition. 

*****************************************************************

The European immigrants who reached Argentina between 1875
and 1925, with a peak between 1880 and 1910, did not
coalesce as a settler state.  The main feature of settler
states, which is radical opposition between the newly
established community and the former residents, does not
exist here.  This does not mean that these immigrants were
not racists (much to the contrary, and the Socialists were
among the most racist ones!) but racism is but one
constitutive element of a much more complex issue when we
speak of settler states.

Someone, I think that it was Anthony B., pointed out that
settler states implied a genocidal wiping away of the
original populations, as a precondition for settlement of
the new residents.  This can be easily seen in Israel, for
example:  Israel is still debating whether to cleanse the
whole Western Bank and the Gaza strip or to turn them into a
Bantustan.  What is excluded, by definition, is the
coallescence of both Palestinian and Israeli in a single
nationality.

And this is a most important issue.  As it was also noted on
this list, I think by Edward G (who, living in Spain as he
does, may have something to say about nationalities in
"imperfect" capitalist formations), we can either have national
movements OR national states.  And national movements, at
the core (now please refer to Jim Blaut's excellent
definition: national struggle is class struggle across
borders), seek to establish full control of the state by the
local community against some external source of power.

Now, everything begins to turn around what we mean by "local
community".  Israelis established themselves as the "Jewish
community in Palestine" during the British Mandate, and in
the name of that "local community" they revolted against
England and threw their luck into the lap of the USA.  They
were, in fact, the only "national revolution" that
progressives and leftists in Argentina, 1945, accepted as
such on the world scene. So that what really matters is the
definition of the "local community", thus we are facing an
issue of political consciousness, not of color of the skin.
Racism is a strange thing indeed, please remember that White
South Africans considered the Japanese "white". I wonder
what would they have considered a Bolivian peasant...

Let us now turn to Argentina.  And allow me to be blunt: in
Argentina, the local population was _not_ wiped away by the
immigrants.  It had been decimated during the civil wars
(those interested in the 19th. Century, please refer to my
notes on the issue kept in the 1998 and 1999 archives of the
Marxism mailing list), and the lower masses were pushed down
into the social scale during migration and afterwards.  But
they did not disappear.  And, what's more important:  they
kept weighing in politics and, eventually, the immigrants
(except for a recalcitrant group) ended up mingling with
them and rooting their own struggles in the struggles of
those masses.

That is, the "national movement" here survived through
miscegenation, through a POLITICAL miscegenation (and partly 
through concrete physical miscegenation, by the way), between
the local populations and the newcomers.  This process was
not easy, nor was it clear to its actors, but it took place,
and that is why Argentina is not a settler state, why we
don't have a Northern Ireland or an Israel here, that is why
the mass of the Argentineans recognize ourselves in the
Martín Fierro or can understand the Juan Moreira, stories
depicting the drama of a class that, in rigorous terms,
disappeared as such between 1853 and 1870. That is, before the immigrants 
became to massively flow to our shores. 

What's more, the Argentinean working class of today 
feels that the tragedy of Fierro (the fact that his own 
country has no place for the Argentinean mass of the 
people other than marginalization or criminalization) 
is his or her own tragedy. And rightly so: it is the same 
social class which leads both processes.

Allow me to put it differently, with a very pungent 
comparison:  IF Israelis considered themselves the 
continuation of the struggles of the secular, national 
minded, intellectuals and politicians of Ottoman
Palestine, IF Israelis considered themselves the
continuation of Saladdin (not of Allenby), IF Israelis had
readily adapted culture and modalities from the Arabs who
lived in Southern Syria or had created a culture of their own 
by taking basic elements both from their own Central 
European  origin and the Arab culture prevailing in 
Palestine (tango...), IF Israelis had massively joined
ranks with the Palestinean masses in support of Nasser's
progressive struggles against Anglo-French and American
imperialisms, would then the Israelis be a "settler state"?
This is absolutely ridiculous, isn't it?

But this is exactly what happened in Argentina.  The
immigrants were incorporated to the core of our historical
struggles by both the Radical (petty bourgeoisie) and
Peronist (working class) movements.  They consider
themselves the continuation of San Martín and Belgrano (not
to speak of my generation who consider ourselves the
continuation of the struggles by the Federal masses of the
19th. Century).  They have not only joined ranks but also
provided some of the most daring leadership to
anti-imperialist Latin Americans (Guevara, for instance: I
can't see a Leftish Israeli going to struggle with, say, a
Marxist Lebanese party --and the Guevara who joined Castro
was exactly that, a Leftish Argentinean).  So, can we be
termed a "settler state" of any sorts?

No, we can't.  But Anthony is right in a sense.  Although
Argentina (and Uruguay) is not a settler state, it could
have been (in fact, it would have split if this project had
been implemented, and probably this is one of the reasons
why the project failed).  To understand this, we must begin
by assessing the real nature of the forces that presided
over the division between the ruling classes in the
Argentina which received the immigrants, that is the
division between Generals Mitre and Roca in 1880-1910.

But this is the subject matter of another posting.  Will try
to keep all of them very short.  More news from the past,
later.


Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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