Militantes, Intelectuales Y Revolucionarios: Ensayos Sobre Marxismo E Izquierda En América Latina

Abstract

Militantes, intelectuales y revolucionarios is a collection of essays with many qualities. The book brings together a cohort of scholars who examine the Left from various angles and from different countries and periods, mostly during the Cold War era. Most of the essays have been published previously and have been updated for this edition. Labor, Marxism, communism, and armed struggle are better represented for Argentina than for other countries. One essay deals with the Mexican Left of the 1960s and another with Marxist historiography of the Mexican Revolution, invoked with some nostalgia by Luis Ruiz. An essay dealing with the Peruvian Communist Party and the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) in Ayacucho after the Second World War showcases a brief period of their confrontation when communists and communism became a casualty of the Cold War, which the anticommunist APRA cashed in on by defending “landed interests against campesino challengers” (p. 74). It was followed by the proscription of both parties by the military government of General Manuel Odría.The book is divided thematically, and the Peruvian Left is traced in another section through the intellectual output of the prolific and morally committed historian Alberto Flores Galindo. One essay unveils the intellectual portrait of the Córdoba-born José Aricó, who became a protagonist in debates that rocked the Latin American Marxist Left for decades, which the entrepreneurial Aricó turned into books, publishing houses, and journals in his native Argentina both during his Mexican exile and after he returned to Buenos Aires. The Cuban Revolution is omnipresent in the book, although the sole essay dealing with the revolution is concerned with the historiographical conundrum of nationalism. This topic, which transcended the revolution, was discussed and written about during the ideologically defining 1960s in Cuba.The volume is framed by the image on the book's cover of a boyish José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian Marxist, sitting at his typewriter and by the memory of the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died in 2012. Drawing upon both, Carlos Aguirre outlines in his introduction that the book is a contribution to the Left's self-criticism and reexamination at a time of the renascent academic and political Left in Latin America, a point that Massimo Modonesi, with Antonio Gramsci in hand, puts in a different way. Citing the Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa from his presidential inauguration in 2007, Modonesi conceptualizes the ongoing process of change as the breakup of the neoliberal hegemony under the strain of popular subaltern opposition.Eric Zolov's imaginative and beautifully written essay, titled “Expanding Our Conceptual Horizons,” explores the contours of the New Left in 1960s Mexico. A crossroads for the New and old Left, Mexico became the place where Ernesto Guevara became the revolutionary Che and where Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg created the “New Left sensibility” (p. 111), with lasting impact on the present. Within the framework of the book and the larger picture that Zolov draws, it may be worth pointing out that the Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL) was not founded in 1949, as the author claims (p. 107). Created in 1938 by the Mexican Marxist Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Zolov's example of the old Left, a left-wing continental labor federation such as the CTAL, would have been impossible to form after the democratic spring was over and the Cold War set in. It required another old leftist, Lázaro Cárdenas, to be president of Mexico and Franklin D. Roosevelt president of the United States for such an enterprise to strike roots. In fact, by 1949 the American Federation of Labor succeeded in creating a well-financed organization to embark on destroying the CTAL.In this volume, as elsewhere, Marc Becker stresses the communist contributions to the construction of indigenous nationalities in Ecuador in contrast to the Peruvian, and specifically Mariátegui's, refusal to ally with the Communist International to create an indigenous republic in the Andes. Becker's work also goes against the grain of interpretations claiming that Marxism relegated ethnic and nationalist identities to a secondary status, highlighting instead individuals' class origins. In light of these contrasting national pasts, Becker argues that while by the 1980s Peru descended into the bloody and destructive neo-Maoist Shining Path insurgency, activists in Ecuador pursued a nonviolent, successful struggle of indigenous nationalities “that the Comintern had originally articulated in the 1920s” (p. 231). One might add that this is perhaps a unique occurrence in the history of the zealous Communist International's attempts to advance the class-based proletarian world revolution.In sum, this collection of essays opens a much-needed reexamination of the history of the hemispheric Left, Marxism, communism, and anticommunism in their manifold expressions and regional variations, and it hopefully will be followed by many such reassessments.