Profilaxis inmunoactiva frente a las infecciones

One of the theses to be problematized through this work corresponds to Aricó’s (1999: 13) argument of the tributary character of the Marxist theory produced in this region. Tributary here means a non-original and hence derivative relation between the concept and his object. If the Marxist conceptual apparatus was since its very beginning elaborated regarding the most advanced capitalist regions of the world, the nature of its gaze towards Latin America must of necessity project a backward, non -scientific reality. The lack of interest displayed by original or classical Marxism regarding Latin America, in these terms, is read as the evidence that the value that Marxist theory might hold was placed in a future still to be accomplished. In other words, for Aricó the partial inadequacy between theory and reality worked thus as reinforcement of the evolutionist conception which was apparent in many (if not the majority) of Marx’s epigones.

In the period between the Paris Commune and the First World War, Marx and Engels were just part of a myriad of authors that populated the shelves of Latin American reformists and revolutionaries. Together with them, there were the names of Bakunin and Blanqui, Ferri and Lassalle, Proudhon and Tolstoi, in a list that not infrequently included intellectuals such as Spencer or Loria. Raúl Fornet-Betancourt (2001, ch. 1 and 2) identifies in this process a preparatory or “blurred” (confusa)

55 diffusion of Marxism in Latin America, a period of inception that will be followed by a time in which the elaboration of the canonical Marxist textual corpus (the task undertaken by Engels, Plekhanov, Kautsky, Labriola, Bernstein, and Guesde among others) operated in the demarcation of socialism from both anarchism and liberalism as ideological-political fields. Fornet-Betancourt calls this second period the moment of the “conflict among socialisms”, in which in particular the spontaneous apolitical nature of the subaltern classes was taken up by anarchism and, conversely, the Marxism of the Second International appeared as the ideological expression of urban workers and European migrants.

In the midst of this process, the debate on the theory’s scientific character was increasingly populated. However, as Jaime Massardo has correctly indicated, a mistranslation played a role in such a debate. Engels’ Socialism: from Utopia to Science was no doubt a crucial landmark in the proclamation of Marxism as science of history, albeit two precisions are in order here. First, the meaning of the German wissenschaft is indeed quite different from both the French science and the Spanish ciencia, the former having a wider meaning. As Georges Labica argues in the voice

‘Science’ of the Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, “Wissenschaft is broader than science (inheritor of the Greek epistêmê). It does not only connote knowledge systems, or the disciplinary repertoire of the kind of mathematics, physics or biology, or even the human sciences; it equally covers the meaning of know [savoir], of knowledge taken generally, of teaching method…” (Labica and Bensussan, 1985: 1030, my translation) But the German term traversed the Atlantic only after having been adopted as ciencia through the influence that German Social-Democracy (socialism’s ‘guide party’, in Engels’ famous assertion) instilled, first, over its French counterpart, and then over the Spanish Socialist Party.³² The result of this mistranslation in Latin America was, as Massardo points out, a conception of socialism based on a fetishistic idea of its scientific nature (2001: 30), for which science appeared as both the a priori for historical inquiries and the political outcome of human development.

32 Outlining this transit from Social-Democracy to Guesdisme to Madrid’s El Socialista to Buenos Aires, Massardo observes that “issues so important as the peasant question and the specificity of cultural forms which, conversely, constitute the essence of the political, remained outside the Spanish codes through which Madrid socialist represented society.”

(2001: 17).

56 The struggle for ideological demarcations that characterized the process of conformation of workers’ incipient organizations was a component of the growing presence and circulation of socialist literature in Latin America. Marx and Engels were thus participants within this cultural fabric in Latin America, albeit at the outset in a rather subordinated position. Certainly crucial for the increasing prominence of Marxism was the publication of the first complete translation of Capital into Spanish, made by Argentinean Juan Bautista Justo (1865-1928) between 1897 and 1899. Justo can be seen as representing the epochal synthesis of a markedly eclectic Marxism and an undisguised evolutionism. In Aricó’s view, he constituted

“the first attempt in thought and action to establish a politically productive relationship between [Marxist] theory and social movement” (1999: 15). The significance of Justo in the early history of Latin American Marxism is parallel to the importance of the Argentinean Socialist Party (PSA), the first of its kind funded in the sub-continent in 1896. Among other reasons, this party held a marked influence upon other similar organizations because it exhibited a solid and well-recognized leading group, counting some important intellectuals such as José Ingenieros and Leopoldo Lugones among them. This group also created the paper La Vanguardia, of enormous impact in the diffusion of Marxist debates in Argentina and Latin America (cf. Tarcus, 2007, ch. X), for which Justo himself translated articles from other European journals such as Die Neue Zeit.

Regarding Justo’s intellectual underpinnings, Marx and Engels appear as part of an open, progressing debate leading to a scientific, positive knowledge of capitalist society. Indeed, for him positive reality worked as the verification instance for scientific knowledge. He shared with Engels and Bernstein a marked dismissal of the philosophical dimension of Marxism, prioritizing instead its scientific valence.

In this regard, Justo understood scientific socialism as the refutation of speculative philosophy, in what Aricó considers as the foundation of the tradition of

‘positivistic socialism’ in Latin America. (1999: 37) This amounted to a notion of

“naïve realism” (realismo ingenuo) placed at the heart of his conception of socialism:

“[since] popular and scientific movement, in order to be genuine socialism must be naïve; to be conscious, it has to be vulgar” (cited in Tarcus, 2007: 382; cf. Justo, 1914).

This is also expressed in Justo’s reduction of the dialectical method to the notion of evolution: “[t]he idea of evolution seems to be the substantial part of dialectics”

57 (cited in Tarcus, 2007: 381). What Jorge Dotti (1990) renders as Justo’s naturalist conception of history – based on the ideas of evolution and progress – was therefore the framework of a perspective in which capitalism and socialism were placed in a linear and ascendant continuity; socialism appears in this view as the highest degree of a rational organization of society (cf. Aricó, 1999: 44).

This conception was at the centre of both Justo’s reading of Capital and the PSA’s political definitions. He believed that “democracy and science are the two greatest revolutionary factors of present times” (cited in Tarcus, 2007: 380).

Consequently, the socialist party must work on both political and the scientific terrains. In what Aricó reads as a perspective in which the economic dominion over nature is translated into politics in a non-mediated way –hence exhibiting a significant contempt for the concrete forms through which the incorporation of popular masses to politics takes place– the socialist party held for Justo the role of engine for the political modernization of the country (Aricó, 1999: 63, 85; see also Tarcus, 2007: 395). Situated in a conjuncture where economic modernization was accompanied by political ‘backwardness’ and cultural ‘traditionalism’, Justo understood the task of the PSA as the promotion of science within the political, the building of a democratic institutional framework based on rational, modern pillars mirroring European states, and oriented to reinforcing the evolution from capitalism to socialism.

Largely derived from the hegemonic perspectives within the Second International, Justo’s conception of socialism was severely put into question during the twentieth century’s second decade. On the one hand, the outburst of the First World War provoked a schism famously termed by Lenin as the ‘bankruptcy’ of the foundations that working-class politics had been built upon, the thorough collapse of the terrain hitherto grounding the socialist movement (cf. Kouvelakis, 2007: 165).

On the other, the events of the Mexican revolution (1910-1918) questioned the generalized belief of peasant masses as incapable of waging their own liberation struggle, hence opening a question about the particular infrastructures upo which Latin America’s class struggle finds place. As Lenin put it in his 1919 address to the First Congress of the Third International, “the time has passed for ever when the cause of democracy and socialism was directly tied to Europe” (cited in Kouvelakis, 2007: 167) Mariátegui also considered that only with the emergence of the new, truly

58 international communist movement –that is, with the Third International- did Marxism become equipped so as to translate the analytical categories of Marx into non-European realities.