‘A Strange Mixture of Guevara and Togliatti’
José María Aricó and the Pasado y Presente Group in Argentina
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by Daniel Gaido in
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This article analyses the intellectual and political trajectory of the Pasado y Presente group in Argentina, focusing on its main representative, José María Aricó (1931–91). Although usually described as ‘the Argentine Gramscians’, the ‘Gramscianism’ of the Pasado y Presente group was actually little more than a theoretical cover for its erratic political behaviour, which led them from Stalinism to Guevarism, from Guevarism to Maoism, from Maoism to Montoneros’s branch of Peronism, and from Peronism to Alfonsín’s Radicalism. Politically, their weakest point was that they distanced themselves from Stalinism empirically, because of the popularity of foquism, without undertaking a thorough critique of Stalinism. This made them vulnerable to the subsequent crisis of Stalinism, which they identified with a ‘crisis of Marxism’ sans phrase. What made them historically significant was that they articulated the radicalisation of a whole social layer in Latin America under the impact of the Cuban Revolution, as well as its subsequent deradicalisation and adaptation to bourgeois parliamentary democracy. The article closes with an analysis of Aricó’s intellectual legacy, particularly his well-known book Marx y América Latina (1980).
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1
Aricó 1988, p. 75.
-
3
Marx and Engels 1972.
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4
Rubin 1974.
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5
Krassó, Mandel and Johnstone 1970.
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6
Procacci (ed.) 1972a and 1972b. Both the documents and the Introduction were culled from an Italian edition (Procacci (ed.) 1970), illustrating the problem we have just mentioned of retranslation of sources.
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7
Burgos 2004.
-
8
Aricó 1957.
-
9
González Canosa 2012a, pp. 121–6.
-
10
Anderson 2010, p. 574.
-
11
Rot 2010, pp. 194–6.
-
13
Anderson 2010, p. 599.
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15
Grenat 2011, pp. 131–64.
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17
Burgos 2004, p. 105.
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29
Rosenberg 1981.
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33
Petras 1990.
-
34
Campione 2004.
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36
Carlo 1973a; English version: Carlo 1973b.
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37
Portantiero 1977, pp. 20, 22.
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38
Thomas 2009, p. 57, n. 46.
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39
Aricó 2012.
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40
Aricó 1999b.
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41
Aricó 2012.
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42
Aricó 2012, p. 11.
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43
Aricó 2012, p. 24.
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44
Aricó 2012, p. 50.
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45
Aricó 2012, p. 59.
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46
Aricó 2012, p. 58.
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47
Aricó 2012, p. 68.
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48
Aricó 2012, p. 86.
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49
Bernstein 1982.
-
50
Aricó 2012, p. 62.
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52
Aricó 2012, p. 93.
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53
Aricó 2012, p. 236.
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54
Waldenberg 1980.
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55
Aricó 2012, p. 69.
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56
Aricó 2012, p. 70, a reference to Claudín’s edition of Lenin 1974.
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57
Kautsky 1886, the review of the second volume of Capital appears on pp. 117–29, 157–65.
-
58
Aricó 2012, p. 146.
-
59
Aricó 2012, p. 175.
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61
Aricó 2012, p. 190.
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62
Grossmann 1979. The Pasado y Presente group issued a Spanish version of Lucio Colletti and Claudio Napoleoni’s Il futuro del capitalismo: Crollo o sviluppo? in two volumes (Colletti 1978 and Napoleoni 1978). Aricó edited, and indeed added texts to, the first part of the anthology, called El marxismo y el ‘derrumbe’ del capitalismo and containing texts by Marx, Bernstein, Cunow, Schmidt, Kautsky, Tugan-Baranovsky, Lenin, Hilferding, Bauer, Luxemburg, Bukharin and Grossmann (Colletti 1978).
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63
Aricó 2012, p. 268. Cf. Gramsci’s original statement in the Quaderni del carcere: ‘la formula quarantottesca della «rivoluzione permanente» viene elaborata e superata nella scienza politica nella formula di «egemonia civile». Avviene nell’arte politica ciò che avviene nell’arte militare: la guerra di movimento diventa sempre piú guerra di posizione’ (Q13, §28; Gramsci 1975, p. 1566).
-
64
Aricó 2012, p. 273.
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65
Aricó 2012, p. 274.
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66
Aricó 2012, p. 290.
-
67
Aricó 2012, p. 253.
-
68
Aricó 2012, p. 279.
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69
Aricó 2012, p. 329.
-
70
Aricó 2012, p. 338.
-
71
Aricó 2010, p. 272.
-
72
Aricó 2010, p. 114.
-
73
Aricó 2010, p. 135.
-
74
Aricó 2010, p. 114.
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75
Marx 1976, p. 799.
-
77
Aricó 2010, p. 118.
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78
Aricó 2010, pp. 165–8. The Pasado y Presente group issued a Spanish translation of Roman Rosdolsky’s Friedrich Engels und das Problem der ‘Geschichtslosen’ Völker in the same year that Aricó’s Marx y América Latina appeared (Rosdolsky 1980). Engels’s writings on the South Slavic peoples, which Rosdolsky arbitrarily attributes to a survival from Hegelian philosophy (the concept of ‘peoples without history’ in the Philosophy of Mind), were motivated by the reactionary role played in the revolutions of 1848–9 by the Croats under the leadership of their ban Josip Jelačić, who supported the Habsburg monarchy against Kossuth’s revolutionary government in Hungary and against the October 1848 insurrection in Vienna, crushed by Windischgrätz immediately after the repression of the revolution in Slavic Prague. Engels suspected (not at all incorrectly as shown by Bakunin’s later ‘confession’ to Tsar Nicholas i) that the Pan-Slavists were being used as tools of tsarist foreign policy. Russia was then, before the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the bastion of reaction in Europe: it fielded the 200,000 troops that enabled the Austrian emperor to crush Kossuth’s army.
-
79
Aricó 2010, p. 117.
-
80
Aricó 2010, p. 150.
-
81
Aricó 2010, p. 167.
-
82
Aricó 2010, p. 150.
-
84
Aricó 2010, p. 161.
-
85
Aricó 2010, p. 162.
-
86
Aricó 2010, p. 155. A contributing factor was Marx’s ‘theoretical blindness’ to the fact that ‘the state has the capacity to “produce” civil society and, by extension, the nation itself’ (p. 168), because, due to ‘his theoretical opposition to Hegel’s concept of the state’ (p. 174), Marx refused to ‘recognise the political moment in its autonomy’ (p. 173). Thus Marx stands accused of both retaining certain Hegelian categories such as the geschichtslosen Völker and of rejecting others.
-
87
Aricó 2010, p. 112.
-
88
Aricó 2010, p. 258.
-
90
Aricó 2010, p. 260.
-
91
Aricó 2010, p. 279, n. 16.
-
94
Lynch 2007, p. 147.
-
95
Lynch 2007, p. 287.
-
96
Lynch 2007, p. 105.
-
97
Lynch 2007, p. 288.
-
102
Lynch 2007, p. 289.
-
109
Lynch 2007, p. 290.
-
110
Lynch 2007, p. 291.
-
111
Aricó 2010, p. 176.
-
113
Aricó 2010, p. 177.
-
114
Aricó 2010, pp. 176–7, n. 21.
-
115
Aricó 2010, p. 180.
-
116
Aricó 2010, p. 292.
-
117
Draper 1968.
-
119
Aricó 1988, p. 75.
-
120
Ginsborg 2003, pp. 44–5.
-
121
Abse 2003.
-
122
Aricó 1999, p. 35.
-
123
Ginsborg 2003, p. 394.
-
124
Ginsborg 2003, p. 400.
-
125
Anderson 2009, p. 337.
-
126
Labastida and del Campo (eds.) 1985.
-
127
Burgos 2007.
-
128
Aricó 1999a, p. 88.
-
129
Aricó 1999a, p. 117.
-
130
Wald 1987.
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‘A Strange Mixture of Guevara and Togliatti’
José María Aricó and the Pasado y Presente Group in Argentina
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by Daniel Gaido in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Search for other papers by Constanza Bosch Alessio in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
This article analyses the intellectual and political trajectory of the Pasado y Presente group in Argentina, focusing on its main representative, José María Aricó (1931–91). Although usually described as ‘the Argentine Gramscians’, the ‘Gramscianism’ of the Pasado y Presente group was actually little more than a theoretical cover for its erratic political behaviour, which led them from Stalinism to Guevarism, from Guevarism to Maoism, from Maoism to Montoneros’s branch of Peronism, and from Peronism to Alfonsín’s Radicalism. Politically, their weakest point was that they distanced themselves from Stalinism empirically, because of the popularity of foquism, without undertaking a thorough critique of Stalinism. This made them vulnerable to the subsequent crisis of Stalinism, which they identified with a ‘crisis of Marxism’ sans phrase. What made them historically significant was that they articulated the radicalisation of a whole social layer in Latin America under the impact of the Cuban Revolution, as well as its subsequent deradicalisation and adaptation to bourgeois parliamentary democracy. The article closes with an analysis of Aricó’s intellectual legacy, particularly his well-known book Marx y América Latina (1980).
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 467 | 104 | 9 |
| Full Text Views | 211 | 4 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 54 | 9 | 0 |
