Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems, and Debates in Post-war Argentina (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms) 303098561X, 9783030985615

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Intellectuals and Communist Culture Itineraries, Problems, and Debates in Post-war Argentina

Adriana Petra Translated by Rebecca Wolpin

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

Adriana Petra

Intellectuals and Communist Culture Itineraries, Problems, and Debates in Post-war Argentina

Work published within the framework of “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Argentine Republic / Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina

Adriana Petra National University of General San Martin Buenos Aires, Argentina Translated by Rebecca Wolpin Buenos Aires, Argentina

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-030-98561-5 ISBN 978-3-030-98562-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2 Translation from the Spanish language edition: “Intelectuales y Cultura Comunista: Itinerarios, Problemas y Debates en la Argentina de Posguerra” by Adriana Petra, © Fondo de Cultura Economica 2017. Published by Fondo de Cultura Economica. All Rights Reserved. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Delegation of Argentine intellectuals and artists participating in the May Day celebrations in Moscow’s Red Square 1956. Raúl Larra Archive Fund, CEDINCI, Argentina This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach Chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018. 11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. v

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TITLES PUBLISHED

12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism Versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels Before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, 2020. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, 2020. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction, 2020. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2020. 30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, 2020.

TITLES PUBLISHED

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31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, 2020. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy, 2020. 33. Farhang Rajaee, Presence and the Political, 2021. 34. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism, 2021. 35. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century, 2021. 36. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World, 2021. 37. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, 2021. 38. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism, 2021. 39. Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics, 2021. 40. Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation: Critical Studies, 2021. 41. Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives, 2021. 42. Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism, 2021. 43. Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists, 2021. 44. James Steinhoff, Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry, 2021. 45. Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism, 2021. 46. Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism, 2021. 47. Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Notes,” 2021. 48. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism, 2021. 49. Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in Midcentury Italy, 2021.

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TITLES PUBLISHED

50. Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx, 2021. 51. V. Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, 2021. 52. Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values, 2022. 53. Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance, 2022. 54. Achim Szepanski, Financial Capital in the 21st Century, 2022.

Titles Forthcoming

Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Capital After Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of Social Theory Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party

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TITLES FORTHCOMING

Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism and Migration

TITLES FORTHCOMING

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Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of Political Economy in the Late Marx Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis David Norman Smith, Self-emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the Working Class José Ricardo Villanueva Lira, Marxism and the Origins of International Relations Bertel Nygaard, Marxism, Labor Movements, and Historiography Fabio Perocco (Ed.), Racism in and for the Welfare State Marcos Del Roio, Gramsci and the Emancipation of the Subaltern Classes Marcelo Badaró, The Working Class from Marx to Our Times Tomonaga Tairako, A New Perspective on Marx’s Philosophy and Political Economy Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, & Matthias Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society Mauricio Vieira Martins, Marx, Spinoza and Darwin on Philosophy: Against Religious Perspectives of Transcendence Jean Vigreux, Roger Martelli, & Serge Wolikow, One Hundred Years of History of the French Communist Party Aditya Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism Fred Moseley, Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation Armando Boito, The State, Politics, and Social Classes: Theory and History Anjan Chakrabarti & Anup Dhar, World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud Hira Singh, Annihilation of Caste in India: Ambedkar, Ghandi, and Marx Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, An Introduction to Ecosocialism

Notes and Acknowledgments

The original version of this book has its origins in the doctoral thesis in history which I defended at the Faculty of the Humanities and Educational Sciences at the National University of La Plata, Argentina, in 2013. In 2017, the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) publishing house published it under the name of Intellectuals and Communist Culture. Itineraries, Problems, and Debates in Postwar Argentina. This translation is based on the work that was published in 2017, to which only a few historical references have been added in order to facilitate its reading for an audience that’s not specialized in the nuances of Argentine and Latin American political life. However, I believe that the book offers elements that help reflect on the political compromise on the part of intellectuals and on a portion of communist history in the twentieth century, even though it’s centered around a local example. This story is impossible to observe and understand if it is not inserted within a transnational plot that involved thousands of men and women around the world and which shaped ideas, symbols, languages, practices, cultural artifacts, and a sense of the world that constituted an unavoidable part of contemporary identities and political cultures. Presenting an investigation from the periphery is an arduous and often impossible task, which is why I thank the Palgrave Macmillan publishing house for the opportunity to make my work accessible to English language readers and the “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Argentine Republic,

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NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

without whose support this translation would have been impossible. Said translation was carried out with the enormous compromise and laboriousness of Rebecca Wolpin. Mariana Rey, editor of the FCE, generously collaborated with the whole process. The long years of work that this book required were made possible by a grant from the National Scientific and Technical Investigations Council (Conicet), an organization which I now form part of as a researcher. Horacio Tarcus, Mariano Plotkin, and Carlos Altamirano were incredible guides. Bruno Groppo and Ricardo Melgar Bao gave me suggestions and recommendations worthy of their own pioneering work. Debate and formation circles allowed me to share my advances and receive specific and accurate critiques: the Center for Documentation and Investigation of Leftist Cultures (CeDInCI), the Economic and Social Development Institute (IDES), the Master’s in History from the Torcuato Di Tella University, the Intellectual History Workshop (organized by the National University of Quilmes’ Intellectual History Center and the History and Cultural Anthropology program at the University of Córdoba), the “Oscar Terán” Intellectual History Seminar at the University of Buenos Aires’ Dr. Emilio Ravignani Argentine and American History Institute, and the Iberoamerican Network for Communist Studies (RIECOM). This investigation would not have been possible without a lot of investigation into sources and archives and for this my thanks go to the CeDInCI, one of Latin America’s most important institutions dedicated to the preservation, cataloging, and spreading of leftist cultures. A grant from the cooperation program from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation (Argentina) and ECOS (France) allowed me to consult documents and bibliography dedicated to French communism, which served as a guide for the intellectuals whose itineraries I mention here. The same goes for the grant from the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections from the Princeton University Library, through which I gained access to the archives of Argentine writers and intellectuals like María Rosa Oliver. Some people helped me with their time and their memories through lengthy interviews which they faced with patience and enthusiasm: Roberto Raschella, Horacio Crespo, and four great men who are no longer with us: Héctor Schmucler, Isidoro Gilbert, Juan José Manauta, and Francisco Delich. The Center for Latin American Studies from the School of Humanities at the National University of San Martín and the Human Sciences’ Investigation Laboratory (LICH) have been my home for the past few

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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years and an open door to the future in the tough times that the world is currently facing. I say the same about my friends and colleagues Ana Clarisa Agüero, Emiliano Álvarez, Clara Bressano, Martín Bergel, José Casco, Martín Cortés, Diego García, Luciano Nicolás García, Alejandra Mailhe, Laura Prado, Martín Ribadero, Mercedes Saborido, and Mariano Zarowsky as wise as they are affectionate. Lastly, my love and thanks go to Joaquín Vitali, for the years shared, my family and above all to my son Blas, for his luminous eyes and his presence, always full of happiness.

Praise for Intellectuals and Communist Culture

“Historian Adriana Petra has written a remarkable book. Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems, and Debates in Post-War Argentina is a meticulously researched work illuminated by the resources of the sociology of intelligence and the political history of intellectuals. Post-war Argentina is Peronist Argentina, a great challenge for Communism, a politically exiguous force, but one of influence in the country’s intellectual field.” —Carlos Altamirano, Sociologist, CONICET (National Council of Science and Technology) and Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina “Despite the limits of the Argentinian Communist Party to conquer massive ideological influence in the working class, this organization had intellectual impact on the new illustrated middle classes as well as in the diffusion of Marxism. This book offers solid research about the dynamics and content of this activity as well as its limits and contradictions.” —Agustín Santella, Doctor of Social Sciences, CONICET (National Council of Science and Technology) and Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

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Contents

1

Introduction

2

Vanguardists, Reformists, Anti-Fascists 1 Culture Between Proletarianism and Anti-Fascism: The Early 1930s 2 Ponce and the Beginnings of Communist Anti-Fascism 3 The AIAPE and the Consolidation of an Anti-Fascist Sensibility

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Intellectuals and Communist Culture in the Second Postwar Era 1 Soviet Organization 2 Structures of Cultural Activism: Institutions and the Print Network 3 Towards a New Type of Party Intellectual 4 Literature and the “Party Spirit” 5 The Anti-Vanguard Purges 6 The Journal Cuadernos De Cultura Anti-imperialism and Peronism 1 The Rift with the Liberal Space: The “Real Crisis” and Intellectuals 2 The Giusti-Agosti Controversy 3 Facing the Imperial Threat: Readings and Cultural Organizations

1 25 37 44 52 63 69 74 91 101 113 124 131 136 158 170 xix

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CONTENTS

4 5 5

6

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The Casa de la Cultura Argentina Literature and Nation: The Question of the Gaucho Genre

Communists and Peace: Figures and Problems in a Global Movement 1 Latin Americans in a New Geography 2 Argentine Pacifists: The Argentine Council for Peace 3 María Rosa Oliver: On the Utility of the Bourgeois 4 Cinematographic Epilogue: The Case of Alfredo Varela The Communist Decade: Héctor P. Agosti and the Debates of the 1950s 1 Disconformities 2 Echeverría: Between Gramsci and Ingenieros 3 Betrayals and Revolutions 4 Communism After Peronism 5 The Intellectuals: Definitions and Roles 6 The “Argentine Path” to Socialism and an Ambiguous Balance 7 Nation and Culture 8 The Third Front: The Neo-left and Neo-marxism Gramsci and the New Left: The Morphology of an Intense Reception 1 Sur: An Argentine Connection to Italian Literature 2 Fascism, Peronism, and the Generational Problem 3 Literature and Revolution: The Question of Realism 4 The First Peninsular Moment: The Development of a Communist Gramscianism 5 Pasado Y Presente: New Forms of the Marxist Intellectual 6 The Fabric of the Reformist University 7 The Second Peninsular Moment: From Gramsci to “Workerism” 8 The End of an Era Conclusions

183 190 205 210 220 229 241 249 256 261 269 273 282 304 311 324 335 340 348 360 367 388 392 397 403 409

Sources and Bibliography

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Communism, one of the key political and ideological movements of the twentieth century, provided an identity and a political culture to millions of men and women around the world. These men and women were not only workers and peasants, by rights called on to join workers’ parties, but also broad sectors of the middle classes and petit bourgeoisie, including professionals, artists, writers, and scientists. From the 1917 Russian Revolution, a truly catalyzing event for a generation that embraced the promise of redemption born in the East, through the great anti-fascist campaigns of the 1930s, to the years following World War II, when, after a conflict that demanded enormous sacrifices and produced millions of deaths, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) emerged with all the prestige it acquired from its leading role in the defeat of Nazism, many intellectuals were attracted by the idea of communism and the Soviet experiment. For the Marxist tradition, the issue of intellectuals has been a source of significant controversy. However, the political movement founded in its name was backed by distinguished representatives from these strata, from Marx and Engels to the great figures of the Second International. Socialism, affirmed Karl Kautsky in 1895, was born in the minds of bourgeois intellectuals. Of the fifteen members of the Council of People’s Commissars, the first Soviet government, eleven were intellectuals. In the following decades, once the Stalinist project had been consolidated, intellectuals, and experts were the target of persecutions and purges. Given © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2_1

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their class origin, it was feared they might act against their party and their people, forge alliances with their enemies, and retain old individualist and anti-popular vices. However, writers such as Maxim Gorky and even the ill-fated Vladimir Mayakovsky were ascribed almost sacred qualities and the international communist movement continued to curry favor with Western intellectuals, many of whom lent their support to communist causes even at the expense of their silence on the Soviet terror, putting their own prestige on the line for questions such as socialist realism and the “theory of the two sciences.” The parties born from Bolshevik inspiration around the world attracted the interest and support of intellectuals and artists and, although the conditions in each case were different, Argentina was no exception. For decades, the Communist Party of Argentina (PCA, for its Spanish acronym) was backed by a broad group of figures who participated in cultural life and public debates through a rich network of organizations, publishing houses, and periodicals publications. However, there are very few works dedicated to their study. This is likely because the figure of the “communist intellectual” itself implies a difficulty that extends beyond it and involves myriad other experiences. How can one analyze the political commitment of intellectuals to a project or party experience that demands absolute loyalty? A variety of answers have been given in response to the recurrent and controversial question regarding the reasons that led cultured, sensitive individuals to submit to a doctrine deployed in an elemental manner and accept a subordinate role in concert with pragmatic and often mediocre leaders who scorned or simply distrusted those qualities, especially in countries where the communist experience was a long-lasting mass phenomenon with deep social roots, as in France. However, it should be noted that the intellectual commitment to a political and ideological project that promised radical social transformation and gave way to a series of representations and dynamic, uncompromising, and totalizing speeches was not the exclusive territory of the communists, let alone of the left. As Giuliano Procacci contends in his Storia Degli Italiani, the unrefined Savonarola not only seduced Florence, deeply permeated by popular animosity, but also the elegant Botticelli and the very wise Pico della Mirandola. The experience of intellectual communism in the short twentieth century, however, continues to be paradigmatic because it condenses all the paradoxes of the modern intellectual figure. This book proposes an exploration of the relationship between intellectuals and communism in Argentina during the period between World War

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INTRODUCTION

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II and the early 1960s, when the initial signs of a “new left” emerge and a series of crises and breakdowns eventually reduce the PCA to its bare minimum. Although it covers a more extensive period, the focus of this book is an examination of the 1950s, one of the least explored decades in the history of ideas and culture, which generally considers it a slightly lackluster preamble to “the Sixties.” However, for communist culture and, it could be said, for Argentine culture in general, it is a key period and, in several ways, a definitive one. These are complex years in which ideological events and processes and global politics, such as the emergence of the United States as a world power, the Cold War, the Soviet Thaw, and the irruption of the Third World, intersect in intricate ways with the Argentine context, where Peronism—as a government, mass movement, cultural event, and ideological motivation—plays a leading role.1 As can be seen, this is not only a question of political chronology. In the world of ideas and intellectual life deep changes also took place with their own logic and temporalities. Establishing the relationship between both processes to highlight the history of Argentine communist intellectuals was one of the objectives that guided the research behind this book. Since it explores the ties intellectuals maintained with the party institution and the roles they were assigned and played within it, this book covers a portion of the history of the PCA related to its cultural figures and policies. At the same time, it also analyzes the way in which communist intellectuals produced social discourses, intervened in public life, and participated in institutions, publications, networks, and social spaces where they were called upon to be creators, cultural producers, professionals, and artists. It also considers a segment of Argentine intellectuals who identified with communism, such as party activists, sympathizers, and fellow travelers. This is a history of communist intellectuals that pays particular attention to both the social and cultural characteristics of the party’s cultural space, its structures of participation, and the trajectories of the intellectuals that supported it, as well as the political ruptures in that support and the discourses and representations those intellectuals developed about their mission and their place within the structure that accommodated them. It also explores the ways in which the party 1 The bibliography on Juan Domingo Perón during the 1946–1955 period and Peronism as a political movement into the present day is extensive. See, for instance, the classic work by Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946–1976, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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conferred diverse functions on its “intellectual workers” and defined the contours of their public activities according to strict conditions that nuanced or modified the perception of the role they should or could play within the party and in relation to the broader cultural sphere.2 In the course of this book, the aim is to develop a more complex analysis of the visions centered on bringing forward a party institution that is monolithic, self-regulated, and transcendent in the practices of its leaders and supporters, as well as to discuss the reduction of the issue of intellectual commitment within the party to mere anti-intellectualism. Therefore, it will avoid framing the relationship between intellectuals and the party as entities with a previous identity that enter into conflict, ending in the submission of the former to the latter. That perspective finds an explanation in the teleological dimension of the commitment to the Soviet cause for the belief that, in the name of Reason, individuals were able to be educated with a critical spirit to justify or claim to be unaware of a totalitarian and criminal system and submit themselves to a secondary role within parties that only offered them obedience to a crude and schematic doctrine.3 On the contrary, this book seeks to 2 The definition of intellectuals as a particular type of worker is associated with the figure of the “intellectual proletariat” as defined by Karl Kautsky in the context of the debates surrounding the Second International. It will constitute the base for all later interpretations that have tended to consider intellectuals in terms of their position within the social structure and resolved their interpellation in trade union or corporative terms. In Kautsky’s view, capitalist development increased the number of individuals dedicated to intellectual pursuits as a result of a division of labor within the ruling classes that tended to delegate new professional and bureaucratic roles to groups not directly tied to capitalist exploitation. However, he observed that capitalism, although it caused these “intermediate strata” to grow, was incapable of completely absorbing them, resulting in an overproduction of intellectuals whose living conditions were not significantly different from those of the working classes. See “La inteligencia y la socialdemocracia,” in Max Adler, El socialismo y los intelectuales, Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1980, pp. 244 and ss. The topic of the “overproduction of intellectuals” as an ideological motivation in Europe starting in the seventeenth century is skillfully analyzed by Roger Chartier in “Espacio social e imaginario social: Los intelectuales frustrados del siglo XVII,”in El mundo como representación, Barcelona, Gedisa, 1995, pp. 165–180. 3 See François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion, essai sur l’idée communiste au 20e siècle, Paris, R. Laffont, Calmann-Léyy, 1995. For an overview of European historiography on communism and a critical perspective with respect to the totalitarian paradigm and the idea of the uniqueness of the communist world, see the essays included in the first part of Michel Dreyfus, Bruno Groppo, Claudio Ingerflom et al. (eds.), Le Siécle des communismes, Paris, L’Atelier y Ouvrières, 2004; and Enzo Traverso, “Historicizing Communism: A Twentieth-Century Chameleon,” in South Atlantic Quarterly, no. 116

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situate the question of communist intellectuals at the juncture of multiple contexts, within which the permanent tension between culture and politics, a constitutive part of the figure of the “party intellectual”—whose “main task is to exemplify or defend the doctrine and/or ideological line of the space they joined”—has produced diverse organizational and discursive forms and representations.4 Though constrained by the logic governing it and constant interference from the party institution during a period in which Cold War ideological battles stimulated a concept of creative work as a function of political propaganda, the communist cultural space was far from homogeneous and uneventful. Within the framework of a political culture codified by a redemptionist ideology (a universalist revolutionary project embodied by the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the USSR) and a schematic and self-sufficient doctrine (Soviet Marxism-Leninism), unified by an identity and a rigidly structured system of institutional membership (the party of the working class) expressed in coarse and propagandistic language, communist intellectuals could present themselves and be presented as a disciplined and uniform collective.5 However, their place within long-established social and cultural worlds, the survival of personal and intellectual traditions and affinities, generational disputes, hierarchies, and disciplinary logic, and the various ways of conceiving “orthodoxy” and interpreting party directives in matters that concerned them indicate that they experienced the voluntary relinquishment of autonomy that characterized their condition as party intellectuals in a variety of ways. Forced to move within a space of permanent tension between values and interests that were almost always contradictory—between those of the intellectual sphere and those based on the political demands of the party—communist intellectuals are situated between two worlds prone to paradox. To serve a universal (4), 2017, pp. 763–780. For Latin America, see the works collected in Elvira Concheiro, Horacio Crespo, and Massimo Modonessi (eds.), El comunismo: Otras miradas desde América Latina, Mexico, UNAM-Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, 2007. 4 Gisèle Sapiro, “Modelos de intervención política de los intelectuales: El caso francés,” in Prismas, no. 15, 2011, p. 143 [“Modèles d’intervention politique des intellectuels. Le cas français” in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 2009/1, no. 176–177]. 5 For a definition of “political culture,” see Serge Berstein, “La culture politique,” in Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (eds.), Por une histoire culturelle, Paris, Seuil, 1997, pp. 371–386, and Marc Lazar, “Cultures politiques et partis politiques en France,” in Daniel Cefaï (ed.), Cultures politiques, Paris, PUF, 2001, pp. 169–189.

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and transcendent cause, they accept dependence on an external, nonintellectual authority that demands complete commitment and before which they must legitimize themselves. However, as long as they maintain their identity as intellectuals, they must participate in the cultural sphere without completely leaving behind their specific logic and, as a result, associate it with the idea that the mission conferred on them by their position can only be fulfilled within the framework of an organization that bestows a meaning and an orientation on their work that is not purely intellectual, thereby freeing them of the individualism, elitism, and alienation of the capitalist world. In conclusion, the diverse ways in which communist intellectuals approached their desire to achieve a “perpetually relative autonomy,” not without sacrifice and integrated the political demands into their intellectual practices make it necessary to establish distinctions within a space erroneously portrayed as monolithic. What are we referring to, therefore, when we refer to communist intellectuals during this period? To begin with, this book distances itself from the substantialist criteria used by the party to define intellectuals. That is, as a particular social group characterized by the intellectual labor they do and which, therefore, includes a wide range of activities and professions, from artists and writers to lawyers, engineers, and physicians.6 Adopting this point of view would have meant embarking on a different course of research, capable of accounting for very diverse realities without necessarily accurately identifying the party’s own policies, which were not one and the same for all of the categories included under the term “intellectual workers.” Our criteria, therefore, were political and cultural rather than substantive or socio-professional, so we understood communist intellectuals as those who intervened in public debate through their work, written and otherwise, and through positions taken. As a result—and although their study remains essential for a social history of communist culture—those who, practicing intellectual occupations, acted mainly in the domain of politics, community, trade unions, or within the sphere of their activity of expertise (even when placed at the service of party needs, such as lawyers) were not considered the object of this study. Nor were the artists who formed part of circles that, even though they shared 6 On the “substantialist” and “nominalist” definition of intellectuals, see François Dosse, La marcha de las ideas: Historia de los intelectuales, historia intelectual, Valencia, PUV, 2007, p. 19 [La marche des idées: Histoire des intellectuels-histoire intellectuelle, París, La Découverte, 2003].

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certain details related to symbolic production and commitment, had their own very pronounced tendencies. With the understanding that there is a vast range in the ways intellectuals supported communism, depending both on the type of intellectual profession and the role the party assigned them according to their field of activity, this book focuses on the figure of the writer-intellectual, that is, on “creator intellectuals” in the area of literature and cultural essays. Unlike other areas, such as medicine and psychiatry, where a segment of communist intellectuals managed to combine their expertise and an autonomous professional practice (even in economic terms) with the demands of the ideological struggle and the cultural partisanship that characterized the intellectual policies of international communism after 1946, in the cultural-literary field they encountered multiple difficulties and communists were not able to generate relevant work or claim a space of recognition and legitimacy beyond the party circle.7 This is important because, despite the fact that during the period studied here the social projection previously reserved for the representation of literary arts was extended to academics, scholars and experts, the figure of the writerintellectual, through Sartre and Sartrism, remained relevant as the matrix of reference for the modern intellectual and acquired particular importance in Argentina, where literature enjoyed an extended centrality in the intellectual sphere.8 Within the communist tradition itself, literature 7 The political situation of the Cold War and the demand for partisanship in all areas of artistic creation and scientific research resulted in the establishment of an active and cohesive group of communist psychiatrists who managed to integrate the transmission of Soviet scientific knowledge with the creation of a “scientifically and politically valid psychological and psychiatric approach” and the ability and dedication to dispute and generate institutional spaces within the Argentine “psych field.” Given that Pavlov’s psychophysiological theories were considered a loyal expression of Soviet dialectical materialism, the establishment of a communist psychiatry that used them as a main reference lent scientific and party support to its proponents, extending their legitimacy beyond specific fields and transforming them into “generic Marxist intellectuals.” This is based on Luciano Nicolás García’s conclusions in La psicología por asalto: Psiquiatría y cultura científica en el comunismo argentino (1935–1991), Buenos Aires, Edhasa, 2016. On the reception of psychoanalysis among communists, see also Hugo Vezzetti, Psiquiatría, psicoanálisis y cultura comunista: Batallas ideológicas en la Guerra Fría, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2016. 8 On Sartre and the emergence of a writer’s ideology after 1945, see Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, Paris, Seuil, 1999, p. 485, and Ana Boschetti, Sartre y “Les Temps Modernes,” Buenos Aires, Nueva Visión, 1990, p. 110 [Sartre et “Les Temps modernes”. Une entreprise intellectuelle, Paris, Les éditions de Minuit, 1985]. On the sanctity of the exponents of literary arts starting in the seventeenth century, see Paul Bénichou, Le

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garnered particular attention from party authorities and writers enjoyed a recognition as unusual as the stringency used in controlling their artistic production and role in constructing a prestigious image of Soviet culture and the socialist world. Given that for the communists—revisiting an idea that did not originate with them, but rather can be traced back to all the discourses on social art produced by the socialist movement since the end of the nineteenth century—9 it was clear that literature and art were useful tools in the task of emancipating the proletariat and the people, they attributed high pedagogical value to what they produced and promoted an aesthetics of representation based on the accessibility and communicability of a progressive and hopeful message. Revolutionary writers and artists were, therefore, those who were able to consciously accept that their work would only acquire authentic meaning when, divested of the degradation inflicted on it by the bourgeois world, it was able to serve a cause that held the promise of restoring art to its true function, distancing it from market logic and reestablishing its ties to society as a whole.10 Soviet “socialist realism,” which from the early 1930s until well into the 1960s sought to govern artistic life within the communist world, codified this idea of the social functionality of art into an aesthetics that reduced creative work to a set of schematic and propagandistic formulas, and legitimized the conception of the party’s leading role both in the ideological sphere and in the formal aspects of artistic-literary production.11

Sacre de l’écrivain (1750–1830): Essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel laïque dans la France moderne, Paris, Joseph Corti, 1973. The influence of Sartre and Sartrism on Argentine intellectuals in the 1960s, as well as its intersection with the Peronist question and nationalist and anti-imperialist motives, have been analyzed in an indispensable manner by Oscar Terán in Nuestros años sesentas: La formación de la nueva izquierda intelectual argentina 1956–1966, Buenos Aires, El Cielo por Asalto, 1993. 9 See Marc Angenot, El discurso social: Los límites históricos de lo pensable y lo decible, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2010, pp. 95–128. 10 On the role of art and literature in socialist thought and Marxist tradition, see Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, Western Europe: A Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970, pp. 67–115, and Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Estética y marxismo, vol. 1, Mexico, Era, 1970, pp. 17–73. 11 On socialist realism as an aesthetics and doctrine of Soviet art, see Henri Arvon, La estética marxista, Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 1970, pp. 83–98 [L’esthétique marxiste, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1970]; Régine Robin, Le Réalisme socialiste: Une esthétique impossible, Paris, Payot, 1986, and Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Estética y marxismo, op. cit., pp. 60–64.

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In the Argentine communist intellectual space, writers were the dominant, albeit not the only, category throughout the period studied in this book. As Chapter 1 demonstrates, it was writers and artists from anarchism and the aesthetic avant-garde, many from immigrant backgrounds, who were the first fellow travelers of vernacular communism. During the anti-fascist stage, although the spectrum of party adherence broadened considerably to include other categories, it will be in the literary sphere that a dense network of political and cultural sociability is organized. It will end up structuring both a lasting ideological identity and a circuit of intellectual pursuits associated with writing. Writers will make up the majority during the 1940s and 1950s in many of the politicalcultural party initiatives, from the mass “fronts” such as the World Peace Council and the cultural organizations that the communists promoted at the national and regional levels to the pages of communism’s most significant intellectual publication, the journal Cuadernos de Cultura. On the other hand, writers were a constant source of problems for the party institution given that, unlike other intellectual professions with more evident or immediate political or trade union functionality, they lacked a specific task beyond lending their names to the ideological and cultural battle. Therefore, it is through the figure of the writer-intellectual that more light can be shed on the tensions that arose between the willingness of communist intellectuals to intervene publicly in the dispute over the definition of long-standing issues (national culture, cultural traditions, the role of critique) and the limits imposed by the logic and demands of the party institution. Throughout this book, we will explore several figures who, within these boundaries, stood out at various times or within organizations in party life. This is not, it should be noted, a prosopography of all communist intellectuals or writers. In fact, only a few names have been considered, those who were judged to be representative in addressing both diverse forms of support and commitment and certain political-cultural issues and debates. The PCA lacked a relevant figure in the literary sphere. In contrast to other Latin American communist parties, in Argentina there were no equivalents to Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, or Nicolás Guillén, who were capable of lending prestige to communist positions in culture, blending their political commitment with a popularity earned through inspired writing. In fact, Argentine communist writers occupied marginal spaces in both the national intellectual sphere and within transnational communism, where they were rarely given a platform. In the area of cultural

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essays, Héctor P. Agosti was an exception, since he enjoyed genuine recognition in progressive intellectual circles, which saw merit in him “despite” his being a communist and beyond the concessions he made in his writing to meet the demands of his condition. Even so, in the artisticliterary field the “system of compensations” that Jeannine Verdès-Leroux analyzed to evaluate the figure of the “party intellectual” can be seen more clearly. In her view, unlike the “autonomous intellectual,” the “party intellectual” lacks a name of their own, does not come from a legitimate university background or an artistic practice recognized by the “bourgeois tribunals” and, as a result, owes their prestige, power, and privilege to the party institution that rewards their discipline and doctrinaire zeal with a wide range of honors and cultural opportunities. These include a vast number of journals and publishing houses in which their participation is encouraged, an international circuit of translation and circulation of their works, positive critiques in line with “party spirit,” and the possibility to travel and participate in international events.12 Although this book does not aim to explain the commitment of intellectuals to communism by establishing an analogy between marginal positions in the intellectual sphere and political positions favorable to the party, this fact cannot be ignored.13 Indeed, one of the main functions of communist cultural space and its institutions was to legitimize their own intellectuals. This can be verified just by reviewing a list of those who were published by the publishing houses associated with the party or the semi-closed system of press reviews and their specialized publications. This mechanism was more fluid in certain sectors of the literary and artistic sphere where they were offered both critical backing, as well as a market and a readership, especially if they responded to expected aesthetic ideals. In the same regard, Ricardo Pasolini has pointed out the way in which the cultural institutions promoted by communists in the heat of the anti-fascist battle encouraged culturally and geographically marginal figures to become writers.14 This

12 Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Au service du parti: Le Parti Communiste, les intellectuels et la culture, 1946–1956, Paris, Fayard and Minuit, 1983, pp. 19 and 20. 13 For a critical view of this interpretation, see Frédérique Matonti, Intellectuels communistes: Essai sur l’obéissance politique. La Nouvelle Critique, 1967–1980, Paris, La Découverte, 2005, p. 8. 14 Ricardo Pasolini, “El nacimiento de una sensibilidad política: Cultura antifascista, comunismo y nación en la Argentina: entre la AIAPE y el Congreso Argentino de la Cultura, 1935–1955,” in Desarrollo Económico, vol. 45, no. 179, 2005, pp. 403–433,

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dependency on the party institution made it particularly attractive for the leadership to intervene in and legislate on literary and artistic issues, as is evidenced in the polemics on “socialist realism” and “cultural heritage” that took place starting in the late 1940s. The cultural world of Argentine communism was structured through a broad network of institutions, publishing houses, periodicals, and associative undertakings that had an impact on and occupied a space in the intellectual sphere, generating an image of the “cultural apparatus” of the PCA that managed to prevail over its mid-level theoretical and creative production. It was also one of the elements through which the story of the communist “threat,” widespread in Argentine political life, was constructed. In 1956, for instance, the nationalist publication Esto Es stated with some alarm that the PCA’s “powerful organization” controlled, in addition to its official organizations, over forty cultural, professional, and community associations and produced sixteen publications, not to mention an extensive number of newsletters and mimeographed periodicals publications. According to the author’s calculations, the communist periodical press released and circulated around 200,000 copies per week. Add to this the number of publications that came from outside the country and the total is close to an exorbitant one million copies per month.15 In the pages that follow, we will analyze some of the institutions and undertakings of this network in which intellectuals interpreted in different and sometimes complex ways the political obedience the party demanded of them. This was reflected through public debate as well as through their cultural productions and political and theoretical texts, in line with specific local and international contexts that must be reconstructed. Indeed, within the cultural sphere communist parties should also be analyzed in view of their double role as members of the international communist movement and actors within the political life of their respective countries. The international dimension of the support of intellectuals for communism is key to understanding the logic behind the commitment of a group that was particularly sensitive to world ideas and decisively affected by global events such as the Russian Revolution, the and La utopía de Prometeo: Juan Antonio Salceda, del antifascismo al comunismo, Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, 2006. 15 Daniel Luján, “El comunismo local se prepara para tomar posiciones políticas,” in Esto Es, no. 114, February 1956, pp. 4–7.

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two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution, true catalysts for generational, political, and cultural identities and sensibilities.16 It is also important to evaluate the way in which intellectuals handled this “sociologically unique” phenomenon, as Perry Anderson calls it. From the creation of the Communist International (CI or Comintern, after its name in Russian) in 1919 until at least the dissolution of the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform, after its name in Russian) in 1956, communism shifted from an international space characterized by discipline and loyalty to a single ideological, symbolic, and political center, giving rise to diverse modes of relating the belief system that ensured unconditional support for the USSR to the national and social dimension of each party.17 However, the issue of dependence on Moscow is especially relative in the case of the intellectual sphere. From the point of view of its intellectual and cultural logic, during the period analyzed in this book, the communist cultural sphere was organized through the existence of multiple though hierarchical centers, and many other peripheries, related to those centers in unequal ways. Far from unilateral or homogeneous, the communist movement’s transnational space was constituted by superimposing itself on previously existing local traditions and reproducing the logic through which each national culture developed its own provincial or metropolitan conditions. Argentine communist intellectuals had ties to the symbolic and political center located in Moscow in ways that should be evaluated in their specificity. They participated, of course, in the system of circulation and recognition it offered and were translated into various languages. They traveled, played a role in cultural diplomacy, and were published by Soviet, European, and Latin American publishing houses. However, in terms of the reception of theoretical and doctrinal codifications in cultural matters, the center was Paris, not Moscow. French communism, strong in organizational and political terms, was weak in theoretical terms and occupied a marginal space with respect to the ubiquity of Sartrism in that intellectual sphere. Nevertheless, for Argentine 16 Jean-François Sirinelli, “Effets d’âge et phénoménes de génération dans le milieu intellectuel français” in Les Cahiers del’IHTP, no. 6, 1987, pp. 5–18. 17 Perry Anderson, “Communist Party History,” in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, New York, Routledge, 2016 [1981], pp. 145–154. See also Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution. A History of International Communism, 1917–1991, New York, Oxford University Press, 2014.

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communists, or at least for the generation that participated, due to legacy or education, in the Francophilia of the Argentine cultural elites, France was the point of reference for processing Soviet cultural mandates. Paris acted as an intermediary between Moscow and the communist periphery and Argentine communist intellectuals were “orthodox” in the French manner, as we will see in many of the debates and polemics analyzed in the following chapters. Once the unity of the communist world had been broken, the question of centers and peripheries became notably more complex with the emergence of China as a rival of the USSR in the late 1950s. This can be seen clearly in the case of the Peace Movement analyzed in Chapter 4. But the Italian case is crucial for the approach proposed in this book. As we will see in detail in the last chapter, in the case of the journal Pasado y Presente, the emergence of Italy as a political-intellectual center of European Marxism, supported by the theorization of polycentrism that the Italian Communist Party (PCI) pursued under Palmiro Togliatti, converted the peninsular cultural world into a new prism for observing the course of the emancipatory project that communism could still foster and, at the same time, into a path for understanding the Peronist situation and modernizing Marxist language. This political and geo-cultural displacement accompanies a morphological change of the communist intellectual space that, although presented as a generational break, was an important consequence of the insertion of many young communist intellectuals into new cultural circuits facilitated by their time spent in university classrooms. For them, Moscow ceased to be a center, not only in an immediate political sense, but also in a strictly cultural sense. Endowed with greater intellectual capital, they were able to do away with the alternative legitimization offered by the communist world and open up to the system of references supplied by a new political-intellectual space, though not central in academic terms, such as the Italian one. In short, in the following chapters, the transnational dimension of communism will be considered less as a necessary perspective than as an intrinsic quality of the object of study.18

18 See Sabine Dullin and Brigitte Studer, “Communisme + transnational. L’équation retrouvée de l’internationalisme au premier XXe siècle,” in Monde(s), no. 10, 2016/2, pp. 9–32.

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Understanding the “complex dialectic” between national and international determinants also means qualifying the purely teleological dimension of intellectual support for the communist idea and therefore considering that national contexts, the effective position of the parties in each society and political system, and the particularities of leadership groups, were elements that to a large extent influenced the possibilities of the commitment of intellectuals and the forms this took at various junctures. In this sense, it can be stated that the greater the marginality of the party institution with respect to the political system and social movement, the greater the propensity to emphasize the pretensions of autarchy, of a separate world, and therefore, become a defensive and authoritarian institution. In the case of the PCA, subjected since the 1930s to constant persecution and conditions of illegality, this defensive closing off did not contribute to its capacity to attract sectors of the intellectual sphere, given that party membership often cost those involved their career or job, if not exile and imprisonment. Only on a few occasions did it contribute to additional prestige. Moreover, given that its relationship with the working-class sector and its ability to provide fragments of that sector with a social and political identity constitute a fundamental factor in the potential for workers’ parties to appeal to other social categories, particularly intellectuals, Argentine communism had to face the fact that since 1945 a movement that is characterized as “fascist and reactionary” was successful in competing with it for worker support. During the first two decades of its existence, the PCA was a strong current among the Argentine industrial proletariat and an important actor for the working class and worker sociability.19 Once Peronism came to power, it was reduced to a marginal position, politically and within the trade unions, from which it never recovered and has since been converted into a party with an ascendancy above all among the middle classes. It has found its main space of influence in the field of culture and the ideological battle. During the Peronist years, this situation— fatal for a class-oriented party—did not mean, however, that it lost the support of intellectuals. The combination of the prestige of the international communist movement following World War II and the certainty, widely shared in the cultural sphere, of the nature of the “fascist experiment” led by Juan Domingo Perón’s government resulted in the support 19 See Hernán Camarero, A la conquista de la clase obrera: Los comunistas y el mundo del trabajo en la Argentina, 1920–1935, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2007.

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of numerous intellectuals and artists, some of whom decided to join party ranks as an extension of their anti-fascist activism, whose topics and sensibilities persisted in the interpretation of the new reality. However, it is important to remember that it was the communist intellectuals of great prestige and party influence who were the most quickly challenged by Perón’s ascendancy among the working masses and who undertook the revision of their communist loyalties, as was the case with Rodolfo Puiggrós, Elías Castelnuovo, Manuel Sadosky, Cora Ratto, and Carlos Dujovne. This became more evident following the military coup that overthrew the government in September 1955. Once the “revisionist situation” of the Peronist experience opened up within the left, the purely ideological and cultural attractiveness of the PCA was questioned by the same educated middle classes it sought to interpellate. They began to ask themselves by virtue of what qualifications, other than the “good use of doctrine,” were the communists claiming political representation of the working class.20 Indeed, communism was not immune to the process of generational questioning and ideological objection which situated the liberal space, and with it the “traditional” left, at the center of a profound change in the political identity of intellectuals, whose rereading of Peronism was accompanied by a remarkable process of cultural modernization and an openness to new theoretical-political horizons, where Marxism could be joined with existentialism, nationalism, and, following the Cuban Revolution, the armed struggle. This book will also analyze the conflict between the new generation of intellectuals and the political elites, who had until that moment held on to the monopoly over Marxist knowledge as part of a global process shared by most of the communist parties in the West: the appearance of a new type of professional intellectual within the party and new knowledge, disciplines, and theoretical regions in the context of an accelerated process of cultural modernization. Together with the “party intellectual,” the emergence of a new type of “intellectual within the party” who was prepared to claim a specific role in the formulation of theoretical and political-party strategy, although not unique to Argentina, in this case meant the abrupt closure of a crucial chapter in

20 Carlos Altamirano, Peronismo y cultura de izquierda, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2011, p. 68.

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the history of communism and its intellectuals in the country.21 Concurrent with this morphological change, the impact of the Cuban Revolution will generate a reformulation of the discourse on intellectuals, which will also have an effect on the communists. Although from the early 1950s the party relaxed the typical tones of anti-intellectualism and workerism by conceding intellectuals a specific place in the organizational structure, albeit a politically and ideologically subordinate one, the politicization that viewed Cuba as a prospect for openness and belonging and the intensification of the debates on the role of the intellectual, which ended up delineating the contours of the figure of the “revolutionary intellectual,” made communist intellectuals the object of a challenge that associated them with the liberal elites practicing armchair politics and seeking to maintain their prerogatives qua intellectuals.22 ∗ ∗ ∗ The debate over intellectuals in modern societies is as vast and complex as the range of definitions of what an intellectual is. It is not the lack of answers to this last question, as Tulio Halperin Donghi has stated, but rather their diversity that makes the task of deciphering them difficult.23 This book is part of a history of intellectuals as defined since the 1980s by French historian Jean-François Sirinelli and his school, and taken up in Argentina by Carlos Altamirano. That is, as an approach that distances itself from the classical history of ideas to reintroduce itself in the field of social and political history of cultural actors and their practices. This approach attempts to avoid normative views regarding what an intellectual “should be” to effectively explore what they really are, according to multiple contexts and based on certain fundamental elements: the reconstruction and analysis of itineraries and trajectories, networks and social spaces, and intellectual traditions and generational affinities.24 A history of intellectuals conceived in this way is not only interested in canonical 21 See Frédérique Matonti, Intellectuels communistes, op. cit. 22 See Claudia Gilman, Entre la pluma y el fusil: Debates y dilemas del escritor

revolucionario en América Latina, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2003, pp. 143–231. 23 Tulio Halperin Donghi, El espejo de la historia, Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1987, p. 43. 24 A brief and accurate summary of Sirinelli’s research program can be found in “Le hasard ou la nécessité? Une histoire en chantier: l’histoire des intellectuels,” in Vingtième

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texts and major figures, but also in the material and intellectual processes of cultural mediation. It, therefore, draws on studies of the reception and circulation of ideas, on the flourishing field of the history of the book and of publishing, and on biographical approaches concerned with figures who are lateral or marginal to the centers of cultural recognition. At the same time, this research also relies on certain tools from the sociology of intellectuals developed by Pierre Bourdieu and used in several exemplary studies on the communist cultural space since it takes into account the relationship between the set of social dispositions that characterized the profile of certain communist intellectuals and the positions they occupied within the party structure and in the broader cultural sphere. Without reducing political and ideological choices to questions of strategy and disputes between the dominant and the dominated, this type of analysis enables a nuanced look at a relationship that otherwise runs the risk of oscillating between a subjectivist explanation, that sees the commitment of intellectuals to communism as an act of pure conviction and dedication in itself, and an image of the party institution as a blind mechanism of arbitrary impositions and orders. This book is also an exercise in the history of the left, an area of research that, although still not quite considered a disciplinary field or subfield subject to common criteria and broad consensus, has experienced notable growth and professionalization in recent decades, both in Argentina and in Latin America. Within this generally auspicious panorama, the fate of the PCA has not exactly been that of a bestseller. It is not an exaggeration to state that of all the experiences of leftist political parties or organizations in Argentina, communism has received the least attention, constituting a paradigmatic case of a disjuncture between an organization that had a relevant weight in certain sectors of Argentine social life—from the workers’ movement of the 1930s and 1940s to significant cultural and intellectual sectors in the following two decades— and the low proportion of works devoted to its study. This situation has been partially remedied through the publication of several recent studies, which represent substantial progress in building an empirical knowledge base and working hypotheses. In most cases, these are studies that focus on the relationship between the PCA and the workers’ movement and workforce, on the elucidation of the founding moments of the party, Siècle: Revue d’histoire, no. 9, 1986, pp. 97–108. In a similar vein, see the book by Carlos Altamirano, Intelectuales: Notas de Investigación, Bogotá, Norma, 2006.

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on the recovery of sections of its institutional history, or on its ties with the international communist movement. There are also works on recent periods, such as those dedicated to the thorny topic of the “tactical support” given by the PCA to the 1976 military dictatorship and those that address party positions on international political events. On the topic of culture, only the “anti-fascist” period has been the object of a careful study of the mechanisms of construction of a dense communist cultural network and a lasting political identity for the intellectuals involved.25 In some cases, attention has been paid to professional groups and/or disciplines, such as psychiatry and historiography, although from a monographic perspective or within the context of more extensive studies or research focused on disciplinary objects, with the exception of the works previously mentioned dedicated to the reception and circulation within Argentine communism of Soviet neuropsychology and the ties between communist culture and psychoanalysis.26 Several important figures in Argentine intellectual communism have garnered more attention, such as Aníbal Ponce, Rodolfo Puiggrós, and Ernesto Giudici.27 In the field of literary criticism and cultural analysis, writers and cultural and publishing initiatives associated with the communist space have inspired enduring essays, although only laterally

25 See the works cited above by Ricardo Pasolini, “El nacimiento de una sensibilidad

política: Cultura antifascista, comunismo y nación en la Argentina,” op. cit., and La utopía de Prometeo, op. cit. 26 See Alejandro Cattaruzza, “Visiones del pasado y tradiciones nacionales en el Partido Comunista Argentino (ca. 1925–1950),” in A Contracorriente, vol. 5, no. 2, 2007, and “Las lecturas comunistas del pasado nacional en una coyuntura incierta (1955–1966): Herencias, ajustes y novedades,” in Badebec, vol. 5, no. 9, 2015; Jorge Myers, “Rodolfo Puiggrós, historiador marxista-leninista: el momento de Argumentos,” in Prismas, no. 6, 2002, and Omar Acha, Historia crítica de la historiografía argentina, vol. I: Las izquierdas en el siglo XX, Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2009. 27 Oscar Terán, En busca de la ideología argentina, Buenos Aires, Catálogos, 1986; Horacio Tarcus, “Aníbal Ponce en el espejo de Romain Rolland,” in Aníbal Ponce, Humanismo burgués y humanismo proletario: De Erasmo a Romain Rolland [1938], Buenos Aires, Capital Intelectual, 2009; Néstor Kohan, “Ernesto Giudici, herejes y heterodoxos en comunismo argentino,” in De Ingenieros al Che: Ensayos sobre el marxismo argentino y latinoamericano, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2000; and Omar Acha, La nación futura: Rodolfo Puiggrós en las encrucijadas argentinas del siglo XX , Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 2006.

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dedicated to the problem of the ties between the party and its intellectuals.28 Along the same lines, we should mention the works that have addressed the issue of literary realism, from the pedagogical didacticism of the Boedo writers to the narrative regionalism that characterized some of the literature written by communists during the 1940s and 1950s.29 The relationship between art and communism has been analyzed to a certain extent for the period from the 1920s to 1940s, and with a focus on journals and periodicals publications or on certain artistic groups.30 In short, there is still a lack of substantial studies on the question of intellectuals in communist culture, to the point that it is barely even mentioned in the most recent historiographical overviews of the left, with the exception of works dedicated to the “intellectual new left,” such as José María Aricó’s books on the Pasado y Presente experience and the circulation of Gramsci in Latin America and Néstor Kohan’s work on the journal La Rosa Blindada.31 This selection is symptomatic of a recurrent perspective: the history of intellectual communism in Argentina has 28 These include the essays by Beatriz Sarlo on the impact of the Russian Revolution on Argentine writers and on Raúl González Tuñón in Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930, Buenos Aires, Nueva Visión, 2007, and the works by Sylvia Saítta, “La dramaturgia de Elías Castelnuovo: Del teatro social al teatro proletario,” in Osvaldo Pellettieri (ed.), Escena y realidad, Buenos Aires, Galerna y Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (UBA), 2001; “Entre la cultura y la política: Los escritores y la izquierda,” in Alejandro Cattaruzza (ed.), Nueva historia argentina, t. VII: Crisis económica, avance del Estado e incertidumbre política (1930–1943), Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 2001; “Polémicas ideológicas, debates literarios en Contra: La revista de los francotiradores,” in Contra: La revista de los francotiradores, Bernal, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2005; and Hacia la revolución: Viajeros argentinos de izquierda, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007. 29 The “Boedo group” refers to the artists and writers who in the 1920s would meet on the street of the same name in a working-class neighborhood of the city of Buenos Aires, where the Claridad publishing house, owned by the socialist Antonio Zamora, was located. With a social orientation, realist aesthetics, and plebeian social origins, in Argentine literary tradition it is usually contrasted with the “Florida group” which consisted of avant-garde artists associated with the journal Martín Fierro, based on the elegant Florida Street. One of the best known members of the Florida group was Jorge Luis Borges. 30 See María Cristina Rossi, “En el fuego cruzado entre el realismo y la abstracción,” in María Cristina Rossi, María Amalia García, and Luisa Fabiana Serviddio, Arte argentino y latinoamericano del siglo XX: Sus interrelaciones, Buenos Aires, Fundación Espigas, 2004; Daniela Lucena, Contaminación artística: Vanguardia concreta, comunismo y peronismo en los años 40, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2015. 31 José María Aricó, La cola del diablo: Itinerario de Gramsci en América Latina, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2005, and Néstor Kohan (comp.), La Rosa Blindada: Una pasión de los ‘60, Buenos Aires, La Rosa Blindada, 1999.

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been evaluated from the point of view of dissidences and divisions, an emphasis that has occluded the study of the party’s own formation. In fact, there are numerous studies that, seeking to account for the diverse aspects of Argentine culture and politics in the years following the ousting of Juan Domingo Perón, mention communism as a central player in leftist cultural space, though emphasizing the fact that dogmatic monolithism, chronic anti-intellectualism, and deeply rooted adherence by party leadership to the directives from Moscow kept it far from being a “party of ideas.” From this point of view, the ties between the party and its intellectuals are reduced to a simple equation: obedience to party leadership or expulsion to the ranks of the “apostates” or “petit bourgeois ideologues.” The demand for loyalty and constant interference from the party in cultural work subjected intellectuals, in the words of José María Aricó, to a “mandato incumplible” [unfulfillable mandate], and forced them into constant marginalization in decisions on matters that constituted their own field of work.32 Recent academic studies have questioned this interpretation, pointing out that both the prism of “monolithism” and that of faithfully towing the party line are erroneous and insufficient in analyzing the question of communist intellectuals. Generally centered on the particular figure of Héctor P. Agosti, they represent significant progress, both in terms of the empirical reconstruction of essential periods of party life in which the author of Nación y cultura played a leading role, as well as in opening up new interpretative horizons on someone who appears to encapsulate all of the contradictions of the typical communist “clerc.” This book is organized both chronologically and thematically but can be best understood as a mosaic in which small pieces are added from chapter to chapter to form a larger picture. Although in its title this book announces a history of Argentine communist intellectuals, the geographic and cultural space it addresses is mainly Buenos Aires, more for practical rather than analytical reasons. Future research will account for the scope and limitations of this study by expanding toward a broader and more complex national space. The first chapter aims to provide a general overview of the intellectual sphere within Argentine communism in the years prior to the period covered by this study, specifically from the founding of the PCA in 1918 to the decline of the anti-fascist movement in the early

32 José María Aricó, La cola del diablo, op. cit., p. 37.

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INTRODUCTION

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1940s. Focusing on a series of political-cultural journals and the intellectuals who supported them, the objective is to reconstruct, in broad strokes, the various ways in which Argentine intellectuals committed themselves to communism during this period, starting with the admiration for the 1917 revolution and solidarity with the Soviet experiment, shown through attempts to create a proletariat art during the “classagainst-class” period, and ending with the creation of an anti-fascist sensibility tied to the defense of liberal culture after the mid-1930s, when international communism promoted the creation of popular fronts. The second chapter studies communist cultural policies and the reconfiguration of communist intellectual space starting in 1945, when the end of World War II and particularly the beginning of the Cold War created an international scenario in which ideological confrontation and more stringent party discipline in the artistic, cultural, and scientific fields were brought to the fore. The process of the professionalization of the Argentine communist intellectual space is analyzed as part of a general move in which Western communist parties sought to define the activity of party intellectuals in the “realm of ideas,” combating “workerist” tendencies and giving them specific structures for participation.33 There we can observe how this situation had an impact at very different levels, from the controversies, ruptures, and expulsions over realist literature and figurative art to the creation of organizations and specialized fronts and the diversification and extension of editorial work and periodicals. The third chapter focuses on reconstructing the impact of the ideological motives of anti-imperialism among Argentine communist intellectuals that took on new life during the Cold War, while the party was also faced with the emergence of Peronism as a mass political phenomenon. Through this lens and in light of these two related processes, this chapter explores the incident of rapprochement with Juan Domingo Perón’s government that took place during the last months of 1952 and was associated with its main initiator, Juan José Real, then Secretary of Organization. It also looks at the consequences it had on the internal restructuring of the communist cultural space and the role this played in the geography of the Argentine intellectual sphere. We will also analyze communist readings of imperialism within the cultural sphere, the figure 33 Gisèle Sapiro, “Formes et structures de l’engagement des écrivains communistes en France: De la ‘drôle de guerre’ à la Guerre Froide,” in Sociétés et Représentations, vol. 1, no. 15, 2003, pp. 168 and ss.

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of “cosmopolitanism,” and the way in which, in this context, communist writers began to concern themselves with topics such as language, territory, and national literature, particularly gaucho literature. These changes were accompanied by support from local, continental, and international organizations that sought to organize intellectual labor around the defense of national cultures and pacifist and anti-imperialist content. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of Latin American alternatives to the Peace Movement, the most important “frontist” initiative of postwar international communism. Through the trajectories of some of its main figures, such as Ernesto Giudici, María Rosa Oliver, and Alfredo Varela, we will seek to give an account of the various roles intellectuals played in the expression of a discourse that combined a defense of the USSR as a bastion of progress and peace and the antiimperialist and nationalist motives underpinning communist discourse from the late 1940s. This chapter is dedicated to analyzing the difficulties and obstacles that the pacifist appeal to communists encountered in the Argentine context, characterized by the dichotomy between Peronism and anti-Peronism, and the way the networks of Soviet pacifism fostered the encounter between Latin American intellectuals and a new political-cultural geography: the Third World. The fifth chapter centers on the figure of Héctor P. Agosti in order to explore, through him, the political, ideological, and cultural debates of the 1950s. In the context of the revelations of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where the crimes of Stalinism and the personality cult were denounced, of the subsequent deepening of the de-Stalinization process, of the progressive emergence of China as a rival of the USSR in the communist world, of the theorization of polycentrism, and, finally, of the trauma involved in the invasion of Hungary at the end of 1956, Argentine communist intellectuals also had to face the crisis that began with the end of the Peronist experience and its almost schismatic consequences on the political and intellectual spheres. During this period, Agosti became a central figure and it is with respect to these coordinates that his contributions on the issue of intellectuals, culture, and the national question, as well as the move toward party renewal he attempted under the guidance of Antonio Gramsci are analyzed. This last chapter aims to reconstruct several moments in the reception of Italian culture in Argentina and to analyze the impact the experience of the Italian communist left had on the intellectual debates in Argentine communism and the way it introduced a new series of aesthetic

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and political problems and defined a space of political and generational contestation, expressed through a series of political-cultural journals with modernizing intentions. In this context, the chapter addresses the specific case of the publication Pasado y Presente and the way the process of the reception of Antonio Gramsci’s works, initiated by Agosti, coincided with a morphological change in the communist intellectual space—and the intellectual sphere overall—leading to the rupture that would mark the beginning of the end of intellectual communism in Argentina.

CHAPTER 2

Vanguardists, Reformists, Anti-Fascists

Until the late 1920s, there was little relationship between intellectuals and communism. Despite the enormous repercussions of the Russian Revolution on intelligentsia throughout the world, including Argentina, the parties organized based on the Bolshevik experience did not manage to attract intellectuals to their ranks. With a few exceptions, such as Henri Barbusse in France or Diego Rivera in Mexico, it was not until the following decade that, through anti-fascism, writers, artists, academics, journalists, and professionals became communist militants or “fellow travelers.” In these early years, the reasons an intellectual might feel drawn to communism were mostly related to the interest in and solidarity with the triumph of the 1917 revolution, its consolidation, and the vicissitudes of constructing socialism in a country subjected to long years of backwardness and despotism. Of course there were also those who had strictly cultural motives. When the civil war ended and the Bolshevik government initiated the New Economic Policy, news of Soviet culture began to circulate through the Western world inspiring curiosity at first and then outright enthusiasm. The 16 million people who visited the pavilion that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) mounted at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts held in Paris in 1925 were met with an extraordinary display of revolutionary vitality. The surprising and modern structure designed by constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov housed Aleksander Rodchenko’s avant-garde photos and El © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2_2

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Lissitzky’s posters. Soon after, it was impossible to get a ticket to see Sergei Eisenstein’s films in Paris, while the names Vsevolod Meyerhold and Vladimir Mayakovsky associated the avant-garde with their role as cultural officials of a country that, perhaps like no other, seemed to grant intellectuals and artists a privileged status.1 This image produced empathy not only among the great French intellectuals, whose rapid support of the Soviet experiment has often been explained by their deeply rooted passion for officialdom, but also modernist and avant-garde sectors who, from the early twentieth century had expressed their sympathies for the antibourgeois content of movements such as anarchism and revolutionary socialism and even, and perhaps above all, the more decentered and modest groups who saw in Russia a solution to the rigors imposed by the market on artists born without genius or birthright. The cultural organization of the Soviet country, as innumerable travelers observed, while bestowing significant dignity on intellectual labor, also freed it from the mercantile reduction of the capitalist and bourgeois world and reconciled it with the people, in whose service it now acted. The Communist Party of Argentina emerged in 1918 in a split from socialism. It was initially called the International Socialist Party (PSI, for its Spanish acronym) and was formally constituted as the Communist Party, Argentine Section of the Communist International (CI), in December 1920. At that time, the PSI, which had over a thousand members, voted unanimously to comply with the 21 conditions that the CI had established for taking parties under its wing, which meant it not only became the Argentine chapter of an international movement based in Moscow, but more importantly, adopted the principles, programs, and organizational methods of Soviet Marxism. Although no prominent intellectuals participated in these distant origins of Argentine communism, there was no shortage of writers, teachers, and professionals, all of whom existed almost in the same proportion as workers. In contrast to the socialists, whose leading cadres were mainly academics with significant prestige in their university positions and their writing, the communist novices lacked degrees and published works and the

1 Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–40: From Red Square to the Left Bank, New York, Routledge, 2007, p. 12.

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majority came from less advantaged social sectors.2 Following two significant crises, which excluded several names from the party who would later become prominent in the intellectual world, such as philosopher Héctor Raurich and educator Angélica Mendoza, local communist leadership consisted of three main figures: typographer José Penelón, trade clerk Victorio Codovilla, and schoolteacher Rodolfo Ghioldi. In 1928, a new faction, this time headed by Penelón, left the party under the direction of the duo Codovilla-Ghioldi, whose influence and power in the leadership of Argentine communism only ended with the death of the latter in the 1980s.3 From that point on, the party was characterized by its strong ties to the USSR and a complete lack of tolerance for differences or internal criticism. The establishment of a “rigid, centralized and vertical structure” 2 Daniel Campione, “El partido comunista de la Argentina: Apuntes para su trayectoria,” in Elvira Concheiro, Horacio Crespo, and Massimo Modonessi (coords.), El comunismo: Otras miradas desde América Latina, Mexico, UNAM-Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, 2007, pp. 171 and 172. 3 In 1922, a group of members—accused of liquidationism—were expelled from

the party, including Alberto Palcos, Pedro Milesi, Luis Koiffman, Silvano Santander, and Simón Scheimberg (the latter were from a group known as “terceristas,” literally “thirdists,” who had joined the party in 1921 after a break with the Socialist Party). The expulsion of the “frontists” (in reference to the debate over the scope of the United Front’s strategy that sparked the crisis) was followed in 1925 by that of the “chispistas,” this time in the context of the policy of Bolshevization adopted by the party at its 7th Congress. The roughly one hundred members who were expelled included important working-class leaders, such as Mateo Fossa, Cayetano Oriolo, and Teófilo González, as well as professionals and intellectuals, such as teacher and union leader Angélica Mendoza, architect Alberto Astudillo, and, from the libertarian university group Insurrexit, philosopher Héctor Raurich and the young couple Micaela Feldman and Hipólito Etchebéhère. They went on to publish the newspaper La Chispa, thus the popularization of its name. In late 1927, as a prelude to the definitive stabilization of the longstanding local communist leadership, there was another split within the party. Those who left were known as the “Penelonists,” in reference to José Penelón, party leader who ordered the dissidence of around 300 members over a disagreement on trade union issues, foreign language immigrant groups, and participation in municipal politics. Penelón formed the Communist Party of the Republic of Argentina, later known as Concentración Obrera (Workers’ Movement), through which he played an important role on the Deliberating Council of Buenos Aires. See Horacio Tarcus, “Historia de una pasión revolucionaria: Hipólito Etchebéhère y Mika Felman,” in El Rodaballo, no. 11/12, Buenos Aires, 2000, pp. 38–50; Augusto Piemonte, “Comunistas oficiales y extraoficiales en competencia: El rol asignado a la Internacional ante el surgimiento de la facción ‘chispista’ del PC de la Argentina,” in Archivos de Historia del Movimiento Obrero y la Izquierda, no. 5, Buenos Aires, 2014, pp. 93–112, and “La compleja relación entre la dirección del Partido Comunista de la Argentina y la representación de la Comintern ante la ruptura de 1928,” in Políticas de la Memoria, no. 16, 2015/2016, pp. 236–244.

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became an unstoppable and unmistakable trend throughout the history of the party.4 This characteristic of the political leadership is important in analyzing the way Argentine communism handled its relationship with intellectuals, who very seldomly attained decisive positions within party leadership. In fact, the “historic leadership” of Argentine communism that will take shape in the late 1920s will not involve any intellectuals, including in this term professionals and those in “intellectual professions,” with the exception of Rodolfo Ghioldi and his brother Orestes, also a teacher. In the following decades, almost certainly in consonance with the “frontist” tactics defined in relation to anti-fascism, the presence of intellectuals on the Central Committee will increase. By 1945, of a total of fourteen members, in addition to Ghioldi, the leadership included educator Florencia Fossati, lawyer Benito Marianetti, physician Alcira de la Peña, and physician and writer Emilio Troise. It is not that Argentine communist leadership began to view intellectual labor with less suspicion or that they reconsidered the subordinate and marginal role they assigned to the world of ideas and culture in the process of the social transformation they hoped to lead, but in practice, they granted intellectuals a new role. The anti-fascist period that began in 1935 was the context for the birth of a generation of communist intellectuals with defined and abiding traits. The idea that the highest values of culture and civilization were under threat and intellectuals had a duty to defend them was an unprecedented force of attraction in the communist world, which managed to organize and channel the militant spirit of men and women of culture with exceptional skill. With the objective of reconstructing the context prior to the period analyzed in this book and with the understanding that actors and structures, as well as sensibilities and ways of comprehending party commitment, continued to operate in the years following, this chapter is dedicated to exploring the relationship between intellectuals and communism in the period that begins with the founding of the Communist Party of Argentina (PCA, for its Spanish acronym), continues with the change of popular-front tactics in 1935, and ends with the coup that in 1943 marked the beginning of Juan Domingo Perón’s political ascent. This periodization does not respond to the assumption that the link between intellectuals and communism has closely followed the

4 Hernán Camarero, A la conquista de la clase obrera, op. cit., p. xxxii.

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chronology imposed by political events. The reasons that intellectuals were attracted to the Soviet experience and the communist idea were often unrelated to the implementation of a particular party strategy. However, the shift from a worker-oriented and ultra-sectarian political approach to one that encouraged the formation of fronts with other political trends, including reformist and social-democratic parties, facilitated the rapprochement of certain young and emerging groups of intellectuals to the party. In the years following the 1917 revolution, the wave of sympathy the Soviet experience inspired among a fraction of the Argentine intelligentsia took the form of nonpartisan nuclei, so its most immediate effects were felt more within the intellectual sphere than the political one.5 The “long decade,” that began with the local echoes of the October Revolution, the eruption and growth of the 1918 University Reform movement, and the major workers’ strikes of 1918–1919, and culminated in the 1930 coup d’état, was characterized by an atmosphere of social, political, and cultural effervescence which led to the proliferation of cultural groups, literary journals, and publishing initiatives.6 In an intellectual field undergoing a 5 See Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930, Buenos Aires, Nueva Visión, 2007, p. 123. 6 The University Reform movement was the process of renewal and democratization of university education initiated by the student movement in the city of Córdoba, most notably following its “eruption” in 1918 in the form of an attack on the university and active mobilization in the streets. One of its core documents was “La juventud argentina de Córdoba a los hombres libres de Sud América,” better known as the “Manifiesto Liminar,” signed by several student leaders and whose authorship is attributed to notable graduates of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. The reformist movement, with significant precedents in the universities of Buenos Aires and La Plata, revitalized by this active and resounding demand, soon spread throughout the country and the entire continent, and in many cases merged with anti-imperialist and leftist issues. See Pablo Buchbinder, ¿Revolución en los claustros? La Reforma universitaria de 1918, Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 2008. The 1930 coup d’état was the first in a long saga of interruptions of democratic rule in Argentina. It was carried out against the government of Hipólito Yrigoyen (Unión Cívica Radical), the first president elected under the new secret and mandatory voting regulations, and was led by Lieutenant General Félix Uriburu, who established a nationalist and conservative dictatorship. In 1932 he was displaced by another military officer, Agustín P. Justo, who assumed the presidency with the Radical Party banned and partially restored the constitutional order, which from that point on was marked by electoral fraud. This political cycle came to an end in 1943, when a new nationalist military coup, with considerable sympathy for the Axis powers, paved the way for the election of Juan Domingo Perón to the presidency in February 1946. For an exceptional overview of the ideas shaping Argentine life during those turbulent years, see

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profound process of modernization, the links between politics and culture were fluid, and the winds of aesthetic change could converge with distinct ideological positions without becoming irreconcilable differences.7 The consolidation of a modern and professional style of journalism represented in an exemplary way by the newspapers Crítica and El Mundo proved a favorable context for new types of writers and literary expressions, while at the same time lending a cultural legitimacy to leftist discourse that later authoritarian attacks were unable to counter. Thus, local echoes of the Russian Revolution found their first enthusiastic audience in writers and artists with anarchist sympathies—mostly of immigrant origin and drawn to realist writing—and the aesthetic avant-garde associated with journals such as Martín Fierro and Proa.8 The weak theoretical background of the majority of them, in Beatriz Sarlo’s view, fostered a moral rather than political reading of what was taking place in Russia and established a utopian and redemptionist lens for interpreting the revolution and the space it afforded to culture and art.9 This was certainly not unique to Argentina. Henri Barbusse, a key intellectual of the period, joined the Communist Party of France (PCF, for its acronym in French) and founded the Clartè movement with little to no knowledge of Marxism. The beginning of World War I, economic malaise, and disenchantment with liberal politics formed the substrate out of which young reformists and their teachers, another faction of the political intellectual space, offered their sympathies to the Soviet Union. As Oscar Terán has noted, the optimistic outlook on Argentina’s future that constitutes the almost unanimous assessment of the nineteenth century begins to crumble as a result of the crisis of civilization on an international scale initiated by the beginning of the Great War and the start of a new political era in the country with the rise of Yrigoyenism in 1916. While for some intellectuals these events paint a bleak scenario marked by the failure of liberalism and the decline of Western values, for others it represents the beginning of a

Tulio Halperín Dongui, La Argentina y la tormenta del mundo: Ideas e ideologías entre 1930 y 1945, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2003. 7 Horacio Tarcus, “Revistas, intelectuales y formaciones culturales izquierdistas en la Argentina de los ‘20”, in Revista Iberoamericana, nos. 208/209, 2004, p. 749. 8 For a detailed study on the Argentine reception of the Russian Revolution, see Roberto Pittaluga, Soviets en Buenos Aires: La izquierda de la Argentina ante la revolución en Rusia, Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2016. 9 Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica, op. cit., pp. 121–153.

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new period. This was the case of the influential psychiatrist and essayist José Ingenieros, who viewed the global conflagration as an unprecedented reconsideration of the civilizational certainty of Europe. In Ingenieros’ view, the suicide these “barbaric nations” were headed for was not something to be lamented by Argentines and Latin Americans, but rather a bridge towards the future.10 This “Europeanist rift” was the entry point for an intellectual current of thought that would cease to look to the West to envision the future and, in responding to the call for anti-imperialism, would be willing to scan new horizons, Russia among them. Through a prism that envisioned the elites, and among them young people especially, as the basis for the driving forces of social progress, Ingenieros fervently welcomed the October Revolution as a civilizing move forward in the universal projections that, this time in the hands of the Russian maximalists, saw regeneration emerging out of the ruins of economic capitalism and liberal parliamentarianism. Los resultados de la gran crisis histórica dependerán, en cada pueblo, de la intensidad con que se definan en su conciencia colectiva los anhelos de renovación. Y esa conciencia solo puede formarse en una parte de la sociedad, en los jóvenes, los innovadores, en los oprimidos, pues son ellos la minoría pensante y actuante de toda la sociedad, los únicos capaces de comprender y amar el porvenir.11 [The results of the great historical crisis will depend, in each society, on the intensity of the desire for renewal in the collective consciousness. And that consciousness can only take shape in a part of society, among youth, innovators, the oppressed, because they are the thinking and acting minority of society as a whole, the only ones capable of understanding and embracing the future.]

Through the Revista de Filosofía (1915–1929) and, after 1923, the Boletín Renovación, Ingenieros and the group of young people he inspired advocated for a continental network centered on the university reform movement, anti-imperialism, and Latin American unity. Many future communists forged their first political weapons in the pages of these publications that the untimely death of the author of El hombre mediocre 10 José Ingenieros, “El suicidio de los bárbaros” [1914], in Obras completas: Los tiempos nuevos, Buenos Aires, Elmer, 1956, pp. 11 and 12. 11 José Ingenieros, “Significación histórica del movimiento maximalista” [1919], in Obras completas, op. cit., p. 41.

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would leave in the hands of his most important disciple, Aníbal Ponce. The figure of José Ingenieros quickly became a key element in communist political culture. Eminent intellectuals who later supported the party formed under his guidance or close to him—Ponce, mentioned above, but also Ernesto Giudici, Emilio Troise, Gregorio Bermann, and Rodolfo Aráoz Alfaro—and his manner of interpreting Argentine history through the lens of liberal reformism would remain central in the historical imagination of Argentine communists for decades. The space for readings of the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet experience was broad and nuanced, although within it prominence was given to leftist cultural journals, participants in a dense field of publications, some of which were even transatlantic in nature, as revealed by the influence of the French movement, Clartè, and the journal of the same name.12 Cuasimodo (1919–1921), Insurrexit (1920–1921), Revista de Oriente (1925–1926), Revista de Filosofía and Documentos del Progreso (1919– 1921), to name only the most important, constituted spaces of expression for a segment of the Argentine intelligentsia to discuss the October Revolution and offered various options for supporting or sympathizing with communism, in an atmosphere that admitted and tolerated nonconformity, devotion to novelty, eclecticism, and even a certain distance from the party structure. Even in the early 1930s, when communism hardened its official positions on artistic creation and intellectual practices, journals such as Actualidad (1932–1936), Contra (1933), and Nueva Revista (1934) were able to express their support for communism while combining it with diverse aesthetic and cultural concepts, from their attempts to create a “proletarian art” to the first signs of a communist style anti-fascism. 12 The journal Clartè was a model of intellectual engagement with the Soviet experience for Argentine intellectuals, in the same way that writers such as Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, and, sometime later, the surrealist group would become. Heir to the internationalist and pacifist impulse of the Clartè movement, led by Henri Barbusse and backed by Anatole France between 1919 and 1921, the journal Clartè was created in late 1921 by a group of communist youth who expressed support for Bolshevization and the ideas of the Communist International. They included Raymond Lefebvre, Paul VailantCouturier, and Marcel Fourrier. It was essentially the expression of a faction of youth who took the revolt against the war as a starting point for its politicization and whose support for communism became a desire for total revolution following the model of the Russian Revolution. See Nicole Racine, “Une revue d’intellectuels communistes dans les années vingt: Clarté (1921–1928),” in Revue Française de Science Politique, no. 3, 1967, pp. 484–519.

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Sometimes it was not cultural or political reasons but humanitarian reasons that served as a bridge between intellectuals and communism. The Soviet state was, from the outset, a skillful organizer of popular diplomacy, sometimes the only option available when many countries had not officially recognized the Bolshevik-backed government. The CI was not far behind and, since the failure of the revolution in Europe was clear, it set out to collaborate in the establishment of a broad public opinion favorable to the USSR, where intellectuals and artists played a key role. During these years, two institutions were responsible for channeling Soviet cultural relations. On the one hand, the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (better known as VOKS, for its Russian acronym) created in 1925 by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, with the mission of establishing, promoting and maintaining relations between institutions, public organizations, and academics and Soviet cultural workers and their Western peers. And on the other, the International Association of Revolutionary Writers (MORP, for its Russian acronym), backed by the CI’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) with the aim of disseminating Soviet literature and culture in the West through the promotion and provision of translated materials to a global network of communist and pro-communist press. It also achieved this through its own publication, Literatura Internacional, the Spanish version of which was available in Buenos Aires from the mid-1930s. The organizations and national sections promoted by VOKS and MORP along with the Internacional de Trabajadores de la Enseñanza (Educational Workers International) and its continental branch, the Internacional Magisterial Americana (American Magistral International), International Red Aid, and the Anti-Imperialist and AntiWar Leagues represented the CI’s intellectual activism in Latin America at least until 1935 and possibly beyond.13 In the years immediately following the October Revolution, the main topic of the internationalist mobilization was aid for the Russian people,

13 See Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–40, op. cit.;

Michael David-Fox, “From Illusory ‘Society’ to Intellectual ‘Public’: VOKS, International Travel and Party: Intelligentsia Relations in the Interwar Period,” in Contemporary European History, vol. 11, no. 1, 2002, pp. 7–32, and Ricardo Melgar Bao, “Cominterismo intelectual: Representaciones, redes y prácticas político-culturales en América Central, 1921–1933,” in Revista Complutense de Historia de América, vol. 35, 2009, pp. 135–159.

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victims of the civil war, imperialist persecution, drought, and famine. Aid committees sprang up around the world and in 1922 an international organization was formed under the leadership of Norwegian Fridjof Nansen. In Buenos Aires, the communists promoted the Comité de Ayuda a los Hambrientos Rusos (Russian Famine Relief Committee) and the Comité de Ayuda a los Estudiantes Rusos Víctimas del Hambre (Russian Student Famine Relief Committee) (later, the International Workers’ Aid), in which Paulino González Alberdi, a young student of Spanish descent, was an active participant, from the time he joined the party until his death in 1989, after having been a member of the Central Committee for years. Following the guidelines of the CI, the PCA generated fundraisers in factories and neighborhoods, cultural activities, and a well-promoted and successful artistic exhibit organized by visual artists Emilia Bertolé, Agustín Riganelli, and José Fioravanti.14 It is estimated that in the first two years of the civil war, Argentina sent food, clothing, and medicine to the USSR valued at a total of 650,000 pesos (equivalent to approximately 260,000 dollars).15 The figure of lawyer Arturo Orzábal Quintana stands out in this context as an example of how a commitment to the USSR could be sustained without expressing clear sympathies for national communist parties. A man of culture, member of a family of high-ranking politicians, educated in France, and associated with the circle of young reformists who surrounded José Ingenieros in his last days, Orzábal Quintana remained loyal to his anti-imperialist and Latin Americanist convictions and never joined the Communist Party, although he was an outstanding and visible participant in the frontist organizations promoted under its auspices, to which he offered his prestige, his contacts, and his organizational skills. Similar to what later occurred with María Rosa Oliver, Soviet cultural diplomacy treated him with care and the CI accepted VOKS’ promotion of his activism through the Association of Friends of the USSR, which is created in 1925, the first organization of its type in Latin American and one of the first in the world. Located in more than twenty countries, the 14 Daniela Lucena, “Por el hambre en Rusia: Una ofrenda de los artistas argentinos al pueblo de los soviets,” in Nueva Sociedad, no. 27, 2007, pp. 20–41. 15 Magdalena Garrido, “Las relaciones político-culturales de Argentina y España con la Unión Soviética: La proyección internacional de las asociaciones de amistad (1927– 1956),” in Avances del Cesor, year VI, no. 6, Centro de Estudios Regionales y Universidad Nacional de Rosario, 2009, p. 9.

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Associations of Friends sought to promote Soviet achievements in all areas among non-communist intellectuals, bringing them closer to the USSR and, of course, to push for governments to recognize the Bolshevik State, which was not the case in Argentina until 1946. Orzábal Quintana headed the organization until 1926, when his work at the Unión Latinoamericana (Latin American Union) backed by José Ingenieros required all of his energy. He was then replaced by writer and translator Honorio Barbieri and later by Oscar Montenegro Paz, both associated with the Argentine Section of International Red Aid and the Anti-Imperialist Leagues. In 1927, he traveled to Moscow on an invitation from VOKS to participate in the celebration of the ten-year anniversary of the revolution. Along with delegates from 43 countries, he took part in the First World Congress of Friends of the USSR, which eventually brought together a vast network of support and propaganda for the Soviet model, including trips, a well-oiled press service, the translation and dissemination of books, and transnational publications. Until 1956, VOKS published a newsletter in Russian, English, French, and German and, later, Culture and Life, which was also in Spanish and regularly circulated among Argentine communists. The organization that followed it in 1958, the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, published Moscow News, representing the organization, and the press agency Novosti, created in 1941. Orzábal Quintana’s measured commitment and independent interpretation of Argentine communist leadership were echoed in the Revista de Oriente, an Association of Friends of the USSR publication that in its first issue declared by way of presentation: La última guerra europea ha acelerado el despertar de una nueva conciencia humana. Una tragedia tan inmensa no podía resultar estéril. Por encima de los escombros de la guerra, Rusia encarna hoy el anhelo universal de realizar una humanidad nueva y por eso, frente a la política imperialista de Occidente representada por Estados Unidos, es para nosotros el símbolo de una nueva civilización.16 [The last European war accelerated the awakening of a new human consciousness. Such an immense tragedy could not prove unfruitful. Out of the wreckage of the war, Russia today embodies the universal desire for a new humanity and is therefore, faced with the imperialist politics of

16 Revista de Oriente, no. 1, Buenos Aires, June 1925, p. 1.

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the West represented by the United States, the symbol for us of a new civilization.]

The association of the ravages of the Great War with the emergence of the hope Russia offered for the renewal of humankind was a generational discourse that spread around the world.17 The position taken regarding the conflict and the massacre will be decisive in defining the revolutionary drive of numerous intellectuals, just as Western communism found its first supporters in the shocked consciences of humanist culture in the generation “born from the war”. The Revista de Oriente acted, towards the mid-1920s, as a “journal of passage.” Looking back, it represented a change in the perception of the Soviet experience, where the sign of absolute novelty “cede su lugar a un esfuerzo más sereno por comprender los complejos caminos de la construcción del socialismo en la URSS, a una acción más realista y pragmática por contribuir a romper el aislamiento del Estado Soviético. El clasismo inicial se complejiza con una perspectiva antiimperialista” [gives way to a more serene effort to understand the complex path to the construction of socialism in the USSR, to more realistic and pragmatic actions to help break the isolation of the Soviet State. The initial classism becomes more complex through an antiimperialist perspective].18 Looking ahead, it meant the end of a way of engaging with the Soviet experience that could remain on a moral plane and in solidarity with an event of a magnitude directly proportional to the reservations caused by its local incarnations. Over the course of its 12 issues Revista de Oriente fulfilled its objective of promoting and defending the achievements of the Soviet system with the same tenacity it used in addressing the anti-imperialist topics that were a constant presence in the publication. The journal can easily be considered a node in the network of anti-imperialist organizations of the 1920s, including the Latin American Union, the Continental Alliance, and the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas, created in Mexico in

17 For an analysis of the Revista de Oriente in the context of the reevaluation of the image of the East by Argentine anti-imperialist intellectuals, see Martín Bergel, El Oriente desplazado: Los intelectuales y los orígenes del tercermundismo en la Argentina, Bernal, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2015, pp. 163–173. 18 Horacio Tarcus, “Revistas, intelectuales y formaciones culturales izquierdistas en la Argentina de los ‘20”, op. cit., p. 757.

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1924 as a peripheral organization with a united front. This last organization soon had sections in the United States and several Latin American countries, including Argentina. The weight of the anti-imperialist imagination for an entire generation of Argentine communist intellectuals has not been emphasized sufficiently, in part because the party itself abandoned the most suggestive traces of a problem that faded with the class-against-class period and almost disappeared with the change of tactics in 1935. However, the anti-imperialist movement of the 1920s, as well as many of the names associated with its continental structure, such as the Cubans Julio Antonio Mella and Juan Marinello and the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui, remained in the memories of those who later became the main reference figures of party intelligentsia, including Héctor P. Agosti.19

1

Culture Between Proletarianism and Anti-Fascism: The Early 1930s

Between 1927 and 1929, Argentine communism established the political repertoire it would maintain until 1935. In its 8th National Congress in November 1928, the party adopted the policy known as class-againstclass or third period, in accordance with the orientation suggested by the CI and then definitively enshrined at its 6th Congress held July through August of 1928. Broadly speaking, it was an alarmist reading of world capitalist development, which saw its fall as imminent and emphasized inter-imperialist struggles. In this context, the middle classes and socialdemocratic parties were characterized as reactionary elements against which the working class must practice absolute political and organizational intransigence. Also in line with the CI’s resolutions, the party will go on to interpret Latin American economic formations through a “feudal” lens and, as a result, determine that the Argentine Revolution must be “agrarian and anti-imperialist,” adopting a “bourgeois-democratic” form rather than a socialist one. In that context, two key events were held in 1929 that determined the subsequent course of Latin American communism: the Conferencia Sindical Latinoamericana (Latin American 19 On the Anti-Imperialist Leagues, see the study by Daniel Kersffeld, Contra el imperio: Historia de la Liga Antiimperialista de las Américas, Mexico, Siglo XXI, 2012 and Fredrik Petersson, “La Ligue anti-impérialiste: un espace transnational restreint, 1927–1937,” in Monde(s), no. 10, 2016, pp. 129–150.

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Trade Union Conference), that took place in May in Montevideo and formed the Confederación Sindical Latinoamericana (Latin American Trade Union Confederation), and the I Conferencia Comunista Latinoamericana (First Latin American Communist Conference) in June in Buenos Aires. The latter was the occasion of polemics and the subsequent defeat of the positions of the Peruvian communists surrounding José Carlos Mariátegui, whose theses regarding the need for a broad and frontist strategy were branded dangerous due to, among other things, their willingness to appeal to intellectual sectors.20 In this context, communism entered a stage in which its own hostility toward other political trends, including the leftist sectors of socialism, coincided, following the 1930 coup, with the beginning of a strong repressive period during which the party was declared illegal and became a target of State persecution. In the context of this “workerist” and ultra-left perspective, it began a successful process of insertion within the workers’ movement. At the same time, it was during those years that the first communist intellectual groups began to form around journals such as Actualidad, Nueva Revista, and Contra. Contrary to what one might imagine, at this stage in communist life, characterized by a political activism with a decided focus on the working class and refractory to any concessions or alliances with other social sectors, the party continued to incite enthusiasm in intellectuals and artists, who moved closer to it promoting a series of publications aimed at attempts to constitute a “proletarian culture” and the first signs of a communist style anti-fascism. During those years, Argentine communism fostered a political culture aimed at the dissemination of Marxism and the achievements of the Soviet 20 One has only to remember the words of Swiss communist leader Jules HumbertDroz, then head of Latin American affairs in the CI: “El solo hecho de querer atraer a los intelectuales demuestra que el Partido Socialista tendría una base y una composición social distinta a la de un verdadero Partido Comunista. Hay que tener en cuenta otra posibilidad: es posible que durante algún tiempo, los pequeños burgueses y los intelectuales sean disciplinados; pero en el momento decisivo, traicionarán, como ha pasado siempre, y es preciso precavernos de ese peligro” [The mere fact of wanting to attract intellectuals demonstrates that the Socialist Party would have a different base and social composition from that of a true Communist Party. Another possibility must be considered: it is possible that for a time the petit bourgeois and intellectuals may remain disciplined, but at a crucial moment they will betray the party as they have always done and we must guard ourselves against this danger] (El movimiento revolucionario latinoamericano: Versiones de la Primera Conferencia Comunista Latino Americana, Buenos Aires, Correspondencia Sudamericana, 1929, pp. 199 and 200).

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experience in areas such as film and literature, the denunciation of bourgeois and imperialist art, and the promotion of social denunciation art focused on the figure of the worker and party morals. Through a circuit of workers’ libraries, centers of various immigrant communities, theatres such as the Marconi and Excelsior, and cinemas such as Étoile Palace and Estándar, the communists sought to promote “proletarian culture,” establishing a separation within leftist cultural space, since social literature, the socialist reformism of the journal Claridad, and the popular theatre promoted by Leónidas Barletta were all deemed part of “bourgeois culture.” Several years later, some communists will remember this moment as a gesture of well-intentioned albeit useless rebellion.21 Ultimately, the extension of the “class-against-class” struggle to the cultural sphere was plagued with difficulties. To begin with, the party was only able to exert control over intellectual output on a political and ideological level, but not in the area of artistic creation, a goal it was almost never able to fulfill. Moreover, the solidarity of many non-communist intellectuals with the Soviet Union and even with party organizations and the press, along with an output that had clear social aims making it hard to disqualify, in practice prevented a total confrontation on the cultural level. The existence of a circuit of intellectual sociability transcending any party directive made it difficult to establish rigid divisions between writers and artists with common social aims and leftist sympathies.22 Against a slightly delayed backdrop of the Soviet processes, in Buenos Aires Elías Castelnuovo along with Roberto Arlt produced the journal Actualidad, an illustrated monthly that published 32 issues between 1932 and 1936 of which Castelnuovo directed the first 12. Framed in this conception of culture as a continuation of class conflict, on its first anniversary Actualidad reaffirmed its position as “a genuinely proletarian voice at this decisive hour for the antagonistic social classes that are waging a tougher struggle every day in all areas.”23 In its pages, it encouraged the creation of autonomous cultural organizations, such as 21 Raúl Larra, Leónidas Barletta: El hombre de la campana, Buenos Aires, Conducta,

1978, pp. 86 and 87. 22 See José María Aricó and María Caldelari, “La AIAPE como organización cultural de nuevo tipo,” unpublished document, Fondo José María Aricó /José María Aricó Collection, Biblioteca José María Aricó/Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; FJMA/UNC, box 5, folio 2, c. 1988. 23 “Nuestro primer aniversario,” in Actualidad, no. 12, February 1933, p. 2.

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the Teatro Proletario (Proletarian Theatre) in 1932 founded by Ricardo Passano and, that same year, the Unión de Escritores Proletarios (Union of Proletarian Writers), with statutes drafted by Arlt and Castelnuovo and inspired by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, the most representative literary organization of the Soviet “cultural revolution” during the period of the first five-year plan.24 Como una consecuencia de los tiempos que vivimos —afirmaba su Declaración de Principios— aparece, en la tierra, el escritor proletario. Aparece en Europa primero, donde la lucha es más tirante y aparece luego en América del Sur, donde la tirantez comienza a extremarse. […] Entre los escritores proletarios y los burgueses hay una diferencia fundamental. El escritor burgués, ciego ante la vida, hace solamente observaciones que, sin poner el menor obstáculo, son aceptables para la burguesía. Sus ideas y sus actividades son de tal índole, que no sacuden en lo más mínimo el armazón del estado actual. Naturalmente, el escritor capitalista-burgués no quiere tomar en cuenta la lucha de clases. El escritor proletario, del otro lado de la barricada, es la fuerza propulsora. Su tarea no es la de satisfacer el gusto de sus lectores. El escritor proletario trabaja para forzar la lucha de clases y acelerar la inminente caída del sistema capitalista.25 [As a consequence of the times we live in —its Declaration of Principles stated— the proletarian writer appears on earth. He appears in Europe first where the struggle is more tense and then in South America, where tensions begin to increase. [...] There is a fundamental difference between proletarian and bourgeois writers. The bourgeois writer, blind to life, only makes observations that, without the slightest obstacle, are acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Their ideas and activities do not cause the slightest tremor in the structure of the current state. Naturally, the capitalist-bourgeois writer has no interest in taking the class struggle into account. The proletarian writer, from the other side of the barricade, is the driving force. His task is not to cater to the tastes of his readers. The proletarian writer works to exacerbate the class struggle and hasten the imminent fall of the capitalist system.]

24 See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution and Class War,” in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 28–36. 25 “De la Unión de Escritores Proletarios,” in Actualidad, no. 3, June 1933, p. 45.

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Roberto Arlt’s interest in communist cultural initiatives turned out to be, by virtue of polemics and anathemas, more fleeting than that of Elías Castelnuovo, who remained a fellow traveler until the second half of the 1940s, when his proximity to Peronism made him, in the eyes of the communists, a representative of the “pro-fascist response.” According to the testimony of Raúl Larra (pseudonym of Raúl Laragione), it was Rodolfo Ghioldi who encouraged the inclusion of Castelnuovo and Arlt on the team of contributors to the newspaper Bandera Roja (1932), just as it was Ghioldi who confronted them on successive occasions, prompting the distancing of the author of El juguete rabioso and thwarting the affiliation of Castelnuovo despite repeated demonstrations of loyalty and dedication, not the least of which was incorporating aesthetic criteria in tune with those of communism. This willingness to adapt artistic works to reflect party allegiance was not shared by poet Raúl González Tuñón, who in 1933 directed Contra, one of the cultural undertakings that was most successful in the attempt to combine political and aesthetic vanguard in a modern and revolutionary program. Despite its brief existence consisting of only five issues, Contra is a key reference in understanding the climate of ideas generated as a result of the 1930 military coup, as well as the complex relationship between the intellectual world and communism. Like Roberto Arlt, Elías Castelnuovo, and many other young communists of their generation, Tuñón was born into a modest family of immigrant origin and he was quickly fascinated by the Buenos Aires bohemians and their avantgarde experiments. At 18, he participated in the journal Inicial: Revista de la nueva generación (1923–1926), a year later he was already contributing to Proa (1924–1925) along with Jorge Luis Borges, Brandán Caraffa, Pablo Rojas Paz, and Ricardo Güiraldes, and later he worked on Martín Fierro (1924–1927), directed by Evar Méndez. By the early 1930s, he had become a journalist for the newspaper Crítica directed by Natalio Botana, a fundamental undertaking of modern journalism at the time and a prodigious source of work for communist writers, who managed to organize a cell there. In 1929, he traveled to Europe and connected with the artistic world of the interwar period, a particular combination of bohemian lifestyle and political radicalism. Journalism gave him contact with social reality and a glimpse of the political events that shook an era definitively changed by the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The experiences from this trip—which he accessed through his role as

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a journalist—helped him incorporate a cosmopolitan tone and an internationalist sensibility into his literature and life story which will later constitute a central trait of his poetic work and his ideology as a public writer.26 Contra reflected the beginning of the process of Tuñón’s politicization as a fellow traveler of the PCA, as well as the attempt to create a “proletarian culture” that integrated aesthetic innovations and revolutionary certainties. The conviction regarding the need for this crossover is reflected in the confluence of writers and artists from both social art groups and the aesthetic vanguards of the previous decade in the pages of Contra: Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, Ulyses Petit de Murat, Julio Payró, Liborio Justo, Álvaro Yunque, Leónidas Barletta, Nydia Lamarque, Jorge Luis Borges, Nicolás Olivari, Vicente Barbieri, Oliverio Girondo, and José Gabriel. The same happened with visual artists for whom the journal reserved a prominent space. In a similar fashion to Actualidad, Contra addressed the problem of the relationship between art and politics, the contrast between “pure art” and “propaganda art,” while also promoting the unionization of artistic activities in specific organizations outside the “bourgeois institutions” created during those same years, such as the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (Argentine Writers’ Society) and the Círculo de Prensa (Press Circle). In its last issue, it published the “Manifiesto de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios” (Manifesto of the Union of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), an initiative based out of Rosario and promoted by visual artist Antonio Berni, following in the footsteps of the proposals of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose visit to the Río de la Plata region in 1933 was not without incident.27 From the first issue, Tuñón was keen to make his revolutionary intentions explicit, delineating the elements of an autobiography that could easily be collective: a particular generation (a young intellectual), a vital discovery (the intellectual world of postwar Europe), a foundational event

26 Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica, op. cit., p. 171. 27 See María Cristina Rossi, “En el fuego cruzado entre el realismo y la abstracción,” in

María Cristina Rossi, María Amalia García, and Luisa Fabiana Serviddio, Arte argentino y latinoamericano del siglo XX: Sus interrelaciones, Buenos Aires, Fundación Espigas, 2004, pp. 83–125, and Alicia Azuela de la Cueva, “Militancia política y labor artística de David Alfaro Siqueiros: De Olvera Street al Río de la Plata,” in Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México, no. 35, pp. 109–144.

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(the Russian Revolution), and a specific position in the intellectual sphere (journalist of a modern newspaper like Crítica). Within these coordinates, he defined his commitment to communism in similar terms to those used years earlier by the young writers of Clartè: a question of sensibility, rather than knowledge; a matter of conviction that the poet must announce without wasting time on sterile discussions or ambitions of orthodoxy. But it is also a deliberate choice, a “revolutionary mentality” that puts a painstakingly acquired cultural capital at the service of the proletariat. For that reason, Contra is not a Marxist journal—if by that we mean a publication dedicated to doctrinal clarification, like Soviet, which appeared during the same period—but rather a journal of communist, proletarian, and revolutionary culture. The Catholic intellectuals of Criterio, a journal focused on Bolshevik political activism whose writers nevertheless knew very little about communism, were well aware of this. As Sylvia Saítta has pointed out, a good number of the articles in Contra must be analyzed in the context of the aesthetic-ideological debates over political art that characterized the period from 1928 to 1934, that is, between the first measures the CPSU introduced to regulate artistic production and the establishment of socialist realism as the official aesthetic. In its defense of the need for revolutionary art with models that could be based on surrealism, new Russian literature, or American leftist writers, Contra supported a “project in which the formal procedures of the aesthetic vanguard are inseparable from their ideological content.”28 Revolutionary art, therefore, established a distance from both pure art as well as proletarian romanticism and social art. “Brigadas de choque” (Shock Brigades), the poem that landed Tuñón in jail and hastened the shutdown of Contra, summarizes the spirit behind the intense life of the “journal of the francs-tireurs ” as a manifesto and as an aesthetic-political program.

28 Sylvia Saítta, “Polémicas ideológicas, debates literarios en Contra: La revista de los francotiradores,” in Contra: La revista de los francotiradores, Bernal, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2005, pp. 13–33.

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2

Ponce and the Beginnings of Communist Anti-Fascism

Born in 1898 into a family of liberal professionals (his father was a notary public and his mother a teacher), Aníbal Ponce received a relatively classical education for a member of the new Buenos Aires middle class. After graduating with a gold medal from the Colegio Nacional Central (now the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires), at eighteen he entered the Faculty of Medical Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). During the same period, he published his first pamphlet devoted to Eduardo Wilde, politician and writer of the Generation of 1880. Gifted with a talent for writing, he soon began to contribute to cultural and scientific journals, an output which increased as he grew closer to José Ingenieros, who became his teacher and friend. When Ingenieros died in 1925, Ponce took over the direction of the Revista de Filosofía until it ceased publication in 1929. As with other communist intellectuals of his generation, his university studies were cut short when he unjustly failed a final exam. This did not prevent him from dedicating himself to psychological studies, a topic to which he devoted books and pamphlets, and serving as the head of Psychology at the Instituto Nacional de Profesorado (National Teachers Institute). An active participant in the University Reform movement, Ponce belonged to the sector of anti-fascism that found in the “spirit of 1918” a point of ideological and generational identification, as was also the case of psychiatrist Gregorio Bermann, a PCA fellow traveler for decades. The reform experience was a decisive moment for Ponce, equal to that of the Bolshevik Revolution, and he viewed them as united by the same redemptive impulse. When he was invited in 1927 to write a prologue for Julio V. González’s book on the University Reform, he did not hesitate to affirm that “las mismas llamas que enrojecían a Oriente incendiarían, con nosotros, la universidad” [the same flames that reddened the East will, with us, set the university ablaze]. Educated with an admiration for the writers of the Generation of 1880 and liberal French thinkers, such as Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan, his first matrix of thought centered on positivism, a current that is heterogeneous but organized around the need for science as a foundation for understanding the social world, and on liberalism, which gave him a dual

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conception of the future of the societies he crystallized in the disjunction between civilization and barbarism.29 According to the periodization proposed by Oscar Terán, a new stage began in Ponce’s thinking in the late 1920s when his talk “Examen de conciencia” (Examination of Conscience), delivered at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, revealed not only the impact of the Soviet experience, but also a clear turn towards socialist positions, which he would embrace explicitly in the early years of the following decade.30 However, as Luciano García has observed, this passage was articulated and sustained by certain psychological conceptions so that for Ponce it was more of a replacement than a jump from positivism to Marxism. Convinced that scientific rationality was necessary for constructing the bases of a society, he found in dialectical and historical materialism the foundation that positivism had ceased to give him.31 Upon returning from his third trip to Europe and his first to the Soviet country, Ponce founded the Asociación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores (Association of Intellectuals, Artists, Journalists, and Writers or AIAPE, for its Spanish acronym), along with Raúl Larra, Emilio Troise, Alberto Gerchunoff, Vicente Martínez Cuitiño, Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, and Rodolfo Puiggrós. At the height of his commitment to Marxism and the anti-fascist cause, he created the journal Dialéctica and at the same time, a publishing house of the same name, which he used to disseminate classic Marxist texts, some published for the first time in Spanish. Exonerated from his teaching post during that

29 The term “Generation of 1880” refers to a group of writers, essayists, and politicians who played a prominent role in the period that began with the federalization of Buenos Aires and the arrival of Julio Argentino Roca to the presidency and the first decade of the twentieth century. At a time of profound social transformation and the consolidation of the Argentine State and nation, this group set out to modernize the country under the imperatives of liberal progress, secularization, Europeanization, and enlightenment. Its literary representatives included Miguel Cané, Lucio V. Mansilla, Eduardo Wilde, Lucio V. López, Martín García Mérou, José S. Álvarez (under the pseudonym of Fray Mocho), and Paul Groussac. This term is the subject of debate in the fields of historiography and literary criticism, as Paula Bruno has shown in “Un balance acerca del uso de la expresión generación del 80 entre 1920 y 2000,” in Secuencia, 2007, no. 68, 2007, pp. 115–161. 30 Oscar Terán, En busca de la ideología argentina, Buenos Aires, Catálogos, 1986, pp. 131–178. 31 Luciano N. García, “La civilización de la psiquis: Ciencia y psicología en el pensamiento de A. Ponce”, in Luciano N. García, Florencia A. Macchioli, and Ana María Talak, Psicología, niño y familia en la Argentina, 1900–1970, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2014, pp. 97–162.

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same year of intense political activism and aware that despite the public outcry, he would not be offered his job back, Aníbal Ponce decided to seek exile in Mexico. The following year, he was granted a position as a professor at the Universidad Michoacana in Morelia, where a short time later he was appointed rector. In the autumn of 1938, while on his way to give a lecture on Marx, he died in an accident shortly before his fortieth birthday. In 1934 and 1935, Ponce, along with Faustino Jorge, Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, and Álvaro Yunque, edited Nueva Revista, a journal with only four issues that set out to denounce “the advance of the (fascist) response” [el avance de la reacción], imperialism, and clericalism in schools and universities, while at the same time encouraging the creation of a popular front that, based on the unity of the working class, was presented as the only option capable of confronting the war and fascism. A publication that represented a turning point between the end of the third period and the beginning of the era of popular fronts, Nueva Revista, along with Aníbal Ponce, defended the idea that, faced with the new barbarity of capitalism, only the working class could ensure the preservation of the principles of progress and reason. The red thread that runs through Ponce’s work, Horacio Tarcus asserts, is the Soviet proletariat implementing the unfulfilled program of bourgeois humanism: Abandonada por la burguesía decadente y recuperada por el proletariado ascendente, para Ponce la Filosofía del Progreso cambiaba de manos pero proseguía su marcha histórica. Mientras los ideólogos burgueses lanzaban sus diatribas contra el maquinismo y la “racionalización”, la antigua “confianza en el progreso, en los ideales humanos, en el conocimiento racional” es recuperada ahora por un marxismo entendido como una versión proletaria de la Filosofía del Progreso.32 [Abandoned by the declining bourgeoisie and recovered by the rising proletariat, for Ponce, the Philosophy of Progress changed hands but continued on its historical course. While the bourgeois ideologues launched their diatribes against machinism and “rationalization,” the ancient “belief in progress, human ideals, and rational knowledge” is now restored by a Marxism understood as a proletarian version of the Philosophy of Progress.] 32 Horacio Tarcus, “Aníbal Ponce en el espejo de Romain Rolland,” in Aníbal Ponce, Humanismo burgués y humanismo proletario: De Erasmo a Romain Rolland [1938], Buenos Aires, Capital Intelectual, 2009, p. 17.

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If the civilizational crisis that began with the outbreak of World War I and was consummated with the arrival of Hitler to power in Germany gave way, in the cultural sphere and through the avant-garde, to a radical critique of the faith in progress and reason and a visceral rejection of tradition, art, and bourgeois institutions, in Ponce’s view the insistence on the violent and definitive break with the past and subsequent aspiration to obliterate the existing culture was nothing more than a whim of petit bourgeois intellectuals. In this sense, he saw experiences such as the Proletkult movement, with its disdain for style and its didactic tendency, as a “clumsy boasting of illiterates.” In reference to Mayakovsky and the Russian futurists, he affirmed in 1935: Mientras el poder obrero, con Lenin a la cabeza, se esforzaba por asimilar críticamente la cultura universal y en incorporarla a la actividad cultural de las masas obreras y campesinas, los grupos inquietos de la pequeña burguesía pensaban que servían mejor a la revolución no preocupándose tanto en forjar un arte nuevo, como de arrasar, prácticamente, con el arte. Bajo el antifaz de la revolución, Arlequín irrumpía con su nihilismo bohemio, su declamación de café, sus fanfarronadas de media noche; e irrumpía proclamándose la vanguardia estética del proletariado y exigiendo nada menos que la dictadura revolucionaria sobre el frente cultural.33 [While the workers’ power, led by Lenin, sought to critically assimilate universal culture and incorporate it into the cultural activities of the working and peasant masses, the restless groups of the petite bourgeoisie believed that to best serve the revolution, rather than focus on forging a new type of art, it was better to do away with art. Under the guise of the revolution, Harlequin burst in with his bohemian nihilism, his coffee shop declamation, his midnight swagger. He burst in, proclaiming himself the aesthetic vanguard of the proletariat and demanding nothing less than the revolutionary dictatorship on the cultural front.]

When the world faced the terrifying scenario of fascism and the war, Ponce reflected, the revolutionary intellectual would not find answers in anguish or in fleeing toward the past, but rather in a commitment to the triumph of the proletariat, that in Russia opened up unsuspected prospects for human progress. While the cultural heritage of humanity was denied by capitalist barbarism, the workers retrieved it as a legacy.

33 Aníbal Ponce, Humanismo burgués y humanismo proletario, op. cit., p. 104.

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Consequently, for intellectuals, the taking of sides was definitive and dramatic: La hora que vivimos reclama de los intelectuales una definición categórica: o se está con la sociedad capitalista, sus injusticias, su decadencia, su anarquía; o se está con la sociedad proletaria, con la dignificación de la vida, con la conquista final de la naturaleza. O se está con lo acabado, con lo podrido, con lo vacilante, o se está con lo nuevo, con lo promisorio, con lo puro. De un lado el agotamiento, la cobardía, el servilismo. Del otro la nueva cultura, la fuerza del espíritu, la conciencia libre, el vuelo audaz, vale decir, las posibilidades infinitas de una sociedad sin clases.34 [These times demand a categorical definition from intellectuals: one is either for capitalist society, with its injustices, its decadence, its anarchy; or for proletarian society, with its support for human dignity, with the final conquest of nature. One is either with the finished, the rotten, the faltering, or one is with the new, the promising, the pure. On one side attrition, cowardice, servility. On the other, the new culture, strength of spirit, a free conscience, bold flight. That is, the infinite possibilities of a classless society.]

In its second issue in November 1934, the journal dedicated a doublepage spread to the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, the first corporative organization created within the framework of the new Soviet cultural policy implemented in 1932, when the experience of proletarian culture ended and the CI decided to group intellectuals in unitary organizations and, at the same time, attract the discontent of Western minds that, faced with the war and the economic crisis, could observe the failure and injustice of capitalism without supporting the right, identified with warmongering.35 The World Congress Against War, held in Amsterdam in August 1932 and continued in Paris in June of the following year as the European Anti-Fascist Congress (which formed the European Committee against War and Fascism, better known as the Amsterdam-Pleyel Committee), was the first step in a new policy of intellectual mobilization on an international scale that the communists launched. They followed through on it with a change of strategy in 1935. 34 “Justificación de estas páginas,” in Nueva Revista, no. 2, November 1934, p. 4. 35 Jean-François Sirinelli and Pascal Ory, Los intelectuales en Francia: Del caso Dreyfus a

nuestros días, Valencia, PUV, 2007, p. 122 [Les intellectuels en France, de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, Paris, Armand Colin, 1986].

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The pacifist cause, under the command of German Willi Münzenberg, was placed from the beginning under the tutelage of renowned intellectuals, and anti-war congresses sprang up around the world, including Latin America.36 The Latin American Congress Against Imperialist War was held on March 11, 1933, in Montevideo, which saw the creation of the Latin American Committee Against Imperialist War, as well as student, professional and women’s organizations that were active in each country. The Argentine committee was presided over by poet and translator Nydia Lamarque and in Montevideo, Aníbal Ponce delivered his lecture “Las masas en América contra la guerra en el mundo” (The American Masses Against War in the World). As Pablo Stefanoni has observed in reference to the war in Chaco against Bolivia and Paraguay, the anti-war agitation not only renewed the motives of Latin American anti-imperialism, but it also proved fundamental in the expression and extension of continental communism and its ties to the nascent European anti-war movements, predictably led by renowned intellectuals.37 In fact, for many, the cause for peace and then the anti-fascist crusade led to the conviction that only the USSR would have the ability to form parties that in some cases, until then, had been small and intransigent. La gran causa de la paz, de cuya vigencia no podía dudarse después de la agresión japonesa a la Manchuria en 1931, pasaba por la defensa de la URSS. Lo que fue la primera tarea de los partidos comunistas del mundo entero, su razón de ser, se transformó en el objeto de la más vasta movilización intelectual nunca antes realizada por los comunistas. En el momento mismo en que Stalin arrancaba con la campaña de colectivización forzosa del campo, que vendría a revelarse como uno de los episodios más sangrientos de la historia de la URSS, los intelectuales de Occidente, a la manera de Gide, tomaban la defensa de una revolución soviética imaginada. Un mito cuidadosamente cultivado por los propagandistas a la Münzenberg que provocó el eclipse de la razón crítica de los compañeros de ruta.38

36 Kasper Braskén, The International Workers’ Relief, Communism, and Transnational Solidarity: Willi Münzenberg in Weimar Germany, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 37 Pablo Stefanoni, “Guerra a la guerra: Comunismo, antiimperialismo y reformismo universitario durante la contienda del Chaco,” in Bolivian Research Review/Revista Boliviana de Investigación, vol. 11, no. 1, 2014, pp. 14–49. 38 Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels, Paris, Seuil, 1999, pp. 282 and 283.

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[The great cause for peace, which proved more relevant than ever after the Japanese attack on Manchuria in 1931, took on the form of defending the USSR. What had until then been the primary task of communist parties worldwide, their fundamental purpose, was suddenly the object of the greatest intellectual mobilization carried out by the communists up to that point. While Stalin was embarking on his campaign of forced collectivization of the countryside that would turn out to be one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of the USSR, Western intellectuals, like Gide, took up the defense of an imagined Soviet revolution. This was a myth carefully cultivated by propagandists á la Münzenberg that generated an eclipse of critical reasoning among the fellow travelers].

The First Congress of Soviet Writers took place in Moscow in August 1934 under the guidance of Maxim Gorky and with the participation of writers from around the world, including André Malraux, Louis Aragon, André Gide, Jean-Richard Bloch, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, and Iliá Ehrenburg. It was a crucial event for communist culture, given that the approval of “socialist realism” as the basic method of Soviet creation and literary criticism meant, in practice, the end of any kind of aspiration for the autonomy of artistic creation from politics. However, in the pages that Nueva Revista dedicated to the Congress, there was no mention of socialist realism nor of the power the party had to define literary and artistic criteria. This despite the fact that Ponce believed, as he would state several months later, that a society that considered its writers “engineers of human souls” was one in which the barriers between writers and the masses, the book and life, had finally been reconciled.39 The journal instead preferred to emphasize the topic of intellectual commitment and published fragments of the more moderate discourses, such as those of Bloch, Malraux, and Ehrenburg, who were opposed to the Soviet attacks on liberal, pacifist, and simply avant-garde writers, such as Joyce and Remarque.40 As transpired in the communist intellectual sphere during the anti-fascist period and even more following World War II, vehement Soviet cultural dogmatism proved a constant obstacle to the desire for unity that the communists themselves claimed to promote through frontist policies. The resurgence of violence unleashed in the USSR following

39 Aníbal Ponce, Humanismo burgués y humanismo proletario, op. cit., p. 128. 40 Margot Heinemann, “Left Review, New Writing y la gran alianza contra el fascismo,”

in Debats, vol. 3, no. 26, 1988, p. 74.

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the start of the Moscow Trials in 1936 was, in this sense, even more dramatic. Aníbal Ponce’s trajectory is interesting when it comes to defining a type of profile within the context of what could be dubbed the “foundational generation” of Argentine communism. His early death undoubtedly fostered his posthumous consecration in the communist space, where he was the object of notable veneration and a significant influence, especially on the figure who would later be considered his disciple and successor, Héctor P. Agosti. From that initial group, only Rodolfo Ghioldi would have a lasting presence in both party life and the intellectual sphere. In the former, as a top official for several decades; in the latter, as a kind of intermediary between intellectuals and the party, a role he fulfilled with remarkable skill and dogmatic zeal. Born into a family of Italian socialists, Ghioldi came into contact with politics at an early age. In 1916, at age 19, he graduated from the Escuela Normal Mariano Acosta with a teaching degree, a background he shared with other early members of the PSI, such as Angélica Mendoza, who was his partner for a short time. Due to his labor union activism in the Liga Nacional de Maestros (National Teachers League), he was exonerated from his position. He then worked as a journalist in various national media outlets and in the 1930s published his first historical essays in the official communist journal Soviet (1933– 1935). Throughout his extensive activism, he was in charge of several party publications, such as La Internacional, Bandera Roja, Orientación, and La Hora. His ascendancy in party press could be considered a key element in his relationship with intellectuals, as well as the carefully cultivated construction of his own figure as an intellectual and party leader. Gifted with indisputable political and organizational capabilities, Ghioldi was the first Argentine delegate to participate in a CI Congress and, in his role as secretary of the CI’s Propaganda Bureau in Latin America, he helped organize communist parties in Brazil and Uruguay. His status as an official with a direct line to Moscow facilitated his task of consolidating and defending the party line against dissenters and dissidents, who beginning in the 1920s were successively expelled from the party. General Secretary on two occasions and a member of the party’s Executive Committee starting in 1924, Ghioldi was central to the history of Argentine communism, as well as in the establishment of a relationship between the party and intellectuals, for whom he had a particular predilection and over whom he always sought to maintain a theoretical ascendant, earning him as much public recognition as it did private animosity.

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Unlike Victorio Codovilla, who neither revealed any particular interest in attracting intellectuals to the party he headed for decades nor attempted to exert any specifically intellectual command, Rodolfo Ghioldi showed constant interest in finding them a place within the organization while also defining the terms that made that space possible in the context of the tendency towards workerism that characterized the Argentine communist leadership from the outset. That ambition and this boundary marked the successive polemics in which he played the role of censor and disciplinarian of the “deviations” to which “petit bourgeois intellectuals” were prone. The first and one of the most memorable—along with that of the young intellectuals from Córdoba who in 1963 published the journal Pasado y Presente—was the dispute with Roberto Arlt in the pages of Bandera Roja. Not coincidentally, it was José María Aricó who revived it in the journal La Ciudad Futura, proposing a dilemma that for Arlt was his own and perhaps even that of several generations of communists: “¿Cuál debía ser el camino a seguir para un intelectual radicalizado en un país ‘donde el proletariado y la gran masa rural’ se mantenían alejados e impermeables a la influencia del marxismo y del movimiento comunista?” [What should the path forward be for a radicalized intellectual in a country ‘where the proletariat and the great rural masses’ are kept distanced from and impervious to the influence of Marxism and the communist movement?] In Aricó’s view, Arlt had found an answer where the political sectarianism and cultural conservatism of the communist leadership had drawn an unbridgeable barrier: the possibility of autonomy for leftist culture and its intellectuals.41

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The AIAPE and the Consolidation of an Anti-Fascist Sensibility

The awareness that fascism had managed to attract not only the petit bourgeois and marginalized sectors, but also workers and intellectuals, led to the thinking that only a broad and politically plural alliance would be capable of suppressing it and organizing an ideological battle in which, predictably, men and women of culture would be called upon to play a leading role. Readers of books, argued Eric Hobsbawm, including Hitler’s

41 José María Aricó, “La polémica Arlt-Ghioldi: Arlt y los comunistas,” in La Ciudad Futura, no. 3, 1983, p. 22.

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Mein Kampf (My Struggle), had more potential to recognize in the racist rhetoric and the horror of the concentration camps the potential for a world in which civilization was deliberately subverted. For this reason, in the 1930s Western intellectuals were the first social stratum to mobilize in masse against fascism.42 The Spanish Civil War, with the dramatic quality and heroic spirit that accompanied the republican resistance until the fall of Madrid to the rebel troops, was an event of sufficient magnitude to give rise to a generation of anti-fascists in which intellectuals and artists played a key role. Throughout the world, with an intensity that would not be repeated until at least the 1960s, the Spanish conflict and the struggle against Nazism propelled intellectuals towards increasingly emphatic forms of commitment, commensurate with the scale of what was perceived to be in play. The internationalization of the conflict generated a network of contacts on a global scale, and apart from the forced displacement of exiles and refugees added an established structure of supranational organizations dedicated to the anti-fascist cause, initiatives in which communists proved to be unsurprisingly effective and forthcoming. Although present as early as the 1920s in the Italian liberal and socialist associations, anti-fascism became an inevitable reference point in Argentine politics following the events in Spain, reinforcing the conviction that the country was polarized between fascists and non-fascists. The latter included everyone from radicals and conservatives to anarchists, socialists, and communists, as well as progressive democrats, liberal intellectuals, francs-tireurs, and nonpartisan artists. The connection between international events and the situation in Argentina, characterized by authoritarianism and fraud following the military coup in September 1930, was key to the success of the communist anti-fascism initiatives, which could, at least until 1939, also present the USSR as the only power that had intervened in favor of the Spanish republicans. The “anti-fascist appeal,” as Andrés Bisso has called it, despite its predictable fractures and internal differences, managed to create a “cultural tradition” flexible and powerful enough to last over time. It served both to define the “true face of the enemy” and to provide a common identity to very heterogeneous

42 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, London, Michael Joseph, 1994, p. 150.

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groups.43 Anti-fascism, in the words of Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, was the “universal background” of intellectual life in the Río de la Plata region before 1939. For communist intellectuals, anti-fascism represented the challenge of abandoning the political and cultural narrowness that characterized them in order to build a broader and more inclusive movement. In the 7th World Congress of the CI, held in Moscow in August 1935, Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov declared the “class-against-class” period over in order to promote the creation of an international anti-fascist bloc through the establishment of United and Popular Fronts in each country.44 Argentine communism adopted this new tactic at its III Conferencia Nacional (3rd National Congress), held in Avellaneda in October 1935, where the requisite self-criticism of the “sectarianism” of the previous period was rehearsed. The shortcomings cited included the characterization of the socialists as “social fascists,” of Yrigoyen’s government as an attempt at fascism, and of the president himself as the first in a long list of local expressions of fascism that would extend on into the next decade, up to and including the figure of Juan Domingo Perón. In this context, culture and the figure of the intellectual acquired functions that had until then been absent: the intellectual ceases to be the spearhead of a new revolutionary culture following the Soviet example and instead becomes a defender of Western cultural traditions threatened by the forces of regression. In fact, one of the most prevalent readings of the fascist phenomenon considered it an enemy of culture and civilization, a regression to barbarism and backwardness, the inverse of progress and reason. Francoism, with its clericalism, its anti-modern preaching, and its inveterate anti-communism, easily fueled this idea from the outset of the Argentine anti-fascist cycle, and it was further endorsed by the enthusiastic support it received from most of vernacular Catholicism, which went as far as to consider it a holy war. Meanwhile, liberal sectors—including the ruling classes—identified with the cause of the Republic, warning that the ideology of the rebels was shared by those who, following the 1930 coup, sought a more vigorous ecclesiastical restoration than that of the period before the secular laws. “La contienda española —claimed 43 Andrés Bisso, El antifascismo argentino, Buenos Aires, CeDInCI and Buenos Libros, 2007, p. 21. 44 See Manuel Caballero, La Internacional Comunista y la revolución latinoamericana, Caracas, Nueva Visión, 1987, pp. 179 and ss.

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Halperin Donghi— logró hacer revivir por un instante la moribunda llama de la tradición liberal argentina.” [The Spanish conflict managed to revive the dying flame of Argentine liberal tradition, if only for an instant.]45 The 1930 coup and the advance of a Catholic and nationalist right-wing on state spaces gave local weight to the world crusade for liberty and culture, the pillars of anti-fascism. Thus, if a significant number of intellectuals considered Uriburu’s coup a reaction of the old Argentine ruling elites to the democratizing effects of Yrigoyen’s government, by 1935 the restrictive policies of Agustín P. Justo’s government were seen as a constitutive characteristic of the “fenómeno universal fascista, que resulta de una gestación paulatina en el seno de la reacción antiimperialista” [universal fascist phenomenon, the result of a slow gestation at the heart of the anti-imperialist response]. In other words, beyond the question of whether or not a fascist threat was present in Argentina, some intellectuals observed that the political system was heading towards an increasingly corporative organization in the mid-1930s. When Aníbal Ponce returned from his third trip to Europe in May 1935, his relationship with the French intellectual world was reaffirmed through his close ties to Henri Barbusse, an apostle of communist antifascism. In 1934, before leaving for the USSR, he participated in the World Student Congress that took place in Brussels and, in April 1935, he represented Latin American intellectuals at a meeting in Paris, where the International Union of Anti-fascist Intellectuals was formed. Steeped in the spirit of intellectual mobilization that dominated the capital of anti-fascism with its proliferation of events fostered by communists, upon returning to Argentina Ponce created the AIAPE on July 28, 1935.46 Although formally outside the party, this organization was the first step in constituting a “cultural front” within the PCA and one of the most important political-cultural undertakings fostered by the Argentine communists.

45 Tulio Halperin Donghi, La Argentina y la tormenta del mundo: Ideas e ideologías entre 1930 y 1945, op. cit., pp. 102 and ss. 46 See James Cane, “Unity for the Defense of Culture: The AIAPE and the Cultural Politics of Argentine Antifascism, 1935–1943,” in Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 3, no. 77, 1997, pp. 443–482, and Ricardo Pasolini, Los marxistas liberales: Antifascismo y cultura comunista en la Argentina del siglo XX , Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 2013.

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Its achievements and limitations, content and structures would help sustain communism in Argentina for at least the following two decades. The creation of the AIAPE was inspired by the Comité de Vigilance del Intellectuels Antifascistes (Watchfulness Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals) in Paris, an organization founded in March 1934 with a specific objective: confront growing activism among right-wing intelligentsia through an aggressive publishing and journalism campaign throughout France. The anti-fascist cause was particularly mobilizing and effective in France to the extent that even before the CI’s seventh and last Congress, frontist policies were already on the agenda of the party led by Maurice Thorez, which went on to successfully create a “popular front” that in 1936 led socialist León Blum to power. The work of French intellectuals in the materialization of an anti-fascist union was an indispensable precedent for the success of the frontist policies later achieved, and the impact this experience had on Argentine intellectuals, always attentive to the cultural movements coming from the cradle of the Enlightenment, should not be underestimated. A spirit of secularity and open-mindedness dominated the establishment of the organization’s first Board of Directors, as befitted the frontist strategy and as occurred throughout the world where unitary and anti-fascist organizations were created. Aníbal Ponce, as president, was accompanied by three men of similar generational characteristics: writer and journalist Alberto Gerchunoff, affiliated with the Partido Demócrata Progresista (Democratic Progressive Party); playwright and theatre critic Edmundo Guibourg, who sympathized with the socialists and until 1932 was a correspondent in Paris for the newspaper Crítica, and playwright Vicente Martínez Cuitiño. In the years following, and despite the unquestionably broad participation of intellectuals from diverse backgrounds, the presidency of the association remained in the hands of intellectuals close to communism, such as physician Emilio Troise (who did not formally become a party member until 1945) and psychiatrist Gregorio Bermann. The same strategy was followed with respect to publications, which were, after the “neutralist period,” increasingly controlled by communists. Unidad por la Defensa de la Cultura, the first journal published by the AIAPE between 1936 and 1939, was replaced in 1941 with Nueva Gaceta, which appeared regularly until 1943 under the leadership of a council including Héctor P. Agosti, Raúl Larra, Gerardo Pisarello, and

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Arturo Sánchez Riva.47 AIAPE also founded a small publishing house that published Cuadernos de la AIAPE and then a number of titles under the Ediciones AIAPE name. It also hosted an intensive series of outreach activities in the form of courses and lectures. Following the model successfully implemented by the PCF, it was organized into branches according to specializations. Visual artists, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and journalists formed subcommittees. The Asociación Juvenil de Escritores Proletarios (Youth Association of Proletarian Writers), founded by Elías Castelnuovo, constituted the youth section. In 1936, Unidad reported that AIAPE had more than 400 members and a year later it had formed branches in Rosario, Tandil, Paraná, Corrientes, Tucumán, Tala, Crespo, and Montevideo. Additionally, AIAPE led to the creation of another important antifascist organization, the Comité contra el Racismo y el Antisemitismo de la Argentina (Argentine Committee Against Racism and Anti-Semitism). Uruguayan doctor and writer Emilio Troise, its first president, recalled years later that the International League Against Anti-Semitism, created in Paris in 1927, inspired AIAPE to create a national organization especially dedicated to combating racial discrimination. The meeting that marked its foundation was held on the former premises of the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores on Belgrano Street. A Declaration of Principles was issued and the first signatory was progressive democratic politician Lisandro de la Torre.48 A leading figure in Argentine intellectual communism, from a very young age Emilio Troise was active in socialism, within which he formed part of the trade union movement, averse to parliamentarian activity and prone to Sorelian theses on the revolutionary general strike promoted by politically independent unions. From this platform, he became interested in the Soviet experience and joined the Association of Friends of the USSR created by Orzábal Quintana. Before being delegated to the leadership of the Committee by his friend Aníbal Ponce, 47 Unidad por la Defensa de la Cultura: Órgano de la Agrupación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores (AIAPE) published three issues in 1936 and five during a second period between 1937 and 1939. Nueva Gaceta: Revista de la AIAPE published 24 issues between 1941 and 1943, when it was shut down by the military government. 48 Emilio Troise, “Discurso en el banquete del 25 aniversario del Comité contra el Racismo y el Antisemitismo,” 1963, Fondo Emilio Troise/ Emilio Troise Collection, Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas en Argentina (CeDInCI)/ Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM); FET/CeDInCI, box 4, folder 5.

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Troise had already been trained in Latin American communist and procommunist activism, joining International Red Aid, collaborating with the organization of the 1933 Anti-war Congress, and, as mentioned above, in the creation of AIAPE. The organization he presided over until it was shut down in 1943 brought people together from diverse political-ideological affiliations, including Jorge Luis Borges, Julio A. Noble, Luis M. Reissig, Deodoro Roca, and Carlos Sánchez Viamonte. This was also reflected in the plurality of presentations delivered at the First Congress Against Racism and Anti-Semitism held in the halls of the City Council of the City of Buenos Aires in August 1938. With branches in Mendoza, Córdoba, San Juan, Rosario, La Plata, Paraná, and Santa Fe, the Committee published the newsletter Contra el racismo y el antisemitismo and generated activities typical of intellectual activism, such as talks, conferences, and trips to the provinces and towns in the country’s interior. Despite from the outset declaring itself a nonpartisan group for intellectual workers with the sole mission of defending national culture against fascism, the close relationship AIAPE maintained with the PCA affected its entire existence and represented a limitation on attempts at political unity and intellectual collaboration. The vagaries of Soviet foreign policy, especially the Non-Aggression Pact signed with Germany in 1939, were a crucial impediment to preserving the cohesion of that opposition space, which from then on would exchange occasional personal differences for a definitive division into two opposing blocs. There was also no lack of tension in strictly cultural terms since, despite calls for unity and the defense of pluralism, the party did not shy away from requiring intellectuals to adopt a militant attitude that preferably involved their own work. However, as discussed in the next chapter, it was not until the Cold War years that party discipline would seek to impose an alternative to the so-called socialist realism, the official aesthetic doctrine of the USSR since 1934. Meanwhile, appeals for politically engaged work would be more a matter of intellectuals discussing, once again, the role of politics in aesthetic creation rather than a party policy. The anti-fascist period was also the backdrop for the first outlines of a national history produced by the relatively few intellectuals in Argentine communism at the time. Among those involved in this task were the historians grouped around Rodolfo Puiggrós, the young son of a family of immigrants who had experienced the adventure of social ascent and who would go on to become the most important historian of Argentine

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communism before his expulsion in 1946. This allowed the communists to forge a more or less systematic vision of the national past and, at the same time, establish a shared genealogy with other political forces through their common rejection of nationalism, which at the time was beginning to develop an alternative reading of history which would come to be known as “historical revisionism.” The identification between fascism and revisionism became a regular topic in anti-fascist discourse, which quickly detected a ploy for Nazi penetration in the revisionist attempts to alter the patriotic pantheon established by liberal historiography in order to find a place for Juan Manuel de Rosas and the federalist caudillos.49 “Rosism” and “totalitarianism” would go on to become an inextricable pairing in anti-fascist discourse on the national past, the effectiveness of which would be immediately reinforced with Juan Domingo Perón’s accession to power. The stabilization of certain interpretations of Argentina’s history that transformed, albeit with some nuances, the vindication and defense of the liberal legacy and its progeny into the starting-point for the promise of revolution was a central aspect of anti-fascist identity. Communism, which at the time still lacked a local tradition it could claim

49 Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877) was a military man, rancher, and politician who governed the province of Buenos Aires from 1829 to 1832 and from 1835 to 1852. During the latter period, he wielded a de facto hegemony over the Argentine Confederation, until his defeat in the Battle of Caseros, an event that put an end to the civil war that following the independence of the territories that formed the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata pitted the so-called unitarios (advocates of a national centralized government based in Buenos Aires) against the “federales” (supporters of a federal or confederate system). Juan Manuel de Rosas is considered one of the most important federal “caudillos” and his government was characterized by a strong predominance of the interests of the Buenos Aires region over the rest of the territories that integrated the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, the extreme concentration of power, and its authoritarian methods. At the same time, it attracted the support of the popular sectors, particularly in the extensive rural territories. Rosas and his government, as well as all federal caudillos, have been the subject of numerous political and historiographical debates. One of the most enduring and powerful contemporary readings was that of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who characterized the period as a confrontation between civilization and barbarism. During Juan Domingo Perón’s government, opposition sectors drew many parallels between Rosism and Peronism. See Tulio Halperin Donghi, De la revolución de independencia a la Confederación Rosista, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1993.

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as its own, forged a vision of the Argentine past that would prove decisive in later history.50 When it was shut down in 1943, the AIAPE had still not managed to create the long-desired popular front that, under the effigies of José Hernández and Romain Rolland, 250,000 people had rallied for in the streets of Buenos Aires in 1936.51 It was, as a result, a political failure. The change in climate that began with Peronism weakened the anti-fascist appeal until it languished, although it did survive much longer than in other Latin American and European countries. The defeat of the Unión Democrática (Democratic Union)—an alliance of liberal and conservative parties including communists and socialists—in the elections that led to the presidency of Juan Domingo Perón for the following ten years was probably the beginning of this decline, at least among the working class and popular sectors. However, despite the loss of its political effectiveness, anti-fascism continued operating residually as a “culture” throughout the entire Peronist period and even afterwards, particularly among educated sectors. It was on that terrain, much more than in terms of politics, that anti-fascism managed to constitute a space endowed with symbolic and material resources, the sustainability of which must be measured by its own logics of commitment and intellectual life. As Ricardo Pasolini has shown, anti-fascist identity defined—but, as we will see, did not exhaust— the vision that intellectual communists had of politics, culture, and the Argentine past, at least until the mid-1960s. Structured around a climate of opinion and a more or less stable set of idées-forces on the Argentine political experience, its past, and its future, anti-fascism fostered a solid and effective structure of sociability with the AIAPE and its institutions as an organizing force. Branches were created throughout the country and there was no lack of long and strenuous trips of its key figures to small towns and remote provinces, where intellectual vocations also emerged, finding in that network a source of cultural and professional opportunities that would have been unattainable for them in traditional circles. These “new intellectuals,” who were both outsiders and newcomers in terms 50 See Alejandro Cattaruzza, “Visiones del pasado y tradiciones nacionales en el Partido Comunista Argentino (ca. 1925–1950)”, in A Contracorriente, vol. 5, no. 2, 2007, pp. 169–195. 51 José Hernández (1834–1886) was an Argentine military man, politician, poet, and journalist. He was the author of El gaucho Martín Fierro, a narrative poem later considered the crowning work of gaucho literature and the beginnings of a national literary tradition.

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of geography, culture, and specialization, were formed within the antifascist space which, alongside them, played a role in the democratization and expansion of the cultural map that communism took advantage of in hostile times.52

52 Ricardo Pasolini, “El nacimiento de una sensibilidad política: Cultura antifascista, comunismo y nación en la Argentina: entre la AIAPE y el Congreso Argentino de la Cultura, 1935–1955,” in Desarrollo Económico, vol. 45, no. 179, 2005, pp. 403–433.

CHAPTER 3

Intellectuals and Communist Culture in the Second Postwar Era

“The communist intellectual Cold War” corresponds to the period from 1947 to 1956, when the schism caused by the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the invasion of Hungary put an end to the anti-fascist cycle of the commitment of intellectuals to communism.1 The climate at the end of World War II that had allowed communists—European in particular, but also Latin American— to accumulate considerable prestige and fill their ranks with numerous intellectuals grew increasingly strained and ended up isolating them. In response to the fierce campaign of demonization and repression generated by Western foreign policy, communists responded with a hardening of disciplinary power at all levels, that in the so-called “popular democracies” reached pathological levels of control and terror.2 Communism’s sustained stigmatization of intelligentsia in the years after 1945, as Michel Winock reflected in the late 1980s, constitutes one of the “principales misterios de los últimos cuarenta años” [main mysteries of the last forty years].3 1 Jean-François Sirinelli and Pascal Ory, Los intelectuales en Francia: Del caso Dreyfus a nuestros días, Valencia, PUV, 2007, pp. 189 and ss [Les intellectuels en France, de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, Paris, Armand Colin, 1986]. 2 Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 301. 3 Michel Winock, “La edad de oro de los intelectuales,” in Debats, no. 16, 1988, p. 45.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2_3

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During this period, communist parties throughout the world tended to reinforce their internal discipline through the resignification of old concepts. “Proletarian internationalism” came to mean an absolute loyalty to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which symbolized, more than ever before, a political model and an economic, cultural, social, and scientific prodigy. “Party spirit” translated into a demand for total submission to directives that acquired almost sacred attributes. “Class conflict” prevailed over any other type of combat, particularly on the ideological level, although the anti-imperialist mandate turned communists into advocates for the defense of national cultures threatened by American “cosmopolitanism” and “bourgeois degeneration.”4 In the communist international movement, the tendency to perceive politics in terms of policing and espionage increased, while the involvement of the party institution in all fields of artistic and scientific production took on characteristics of a veritable inquisition.5 Soviet regulations on art, literature, philosophy, and science, which were codified by Andrei Zhdanov and circulated in communist press around the world, added to the loss of prestige communists were suffering as a result of the accusations against Tito in Yugoslavia, the trials of László Rajk and Traicho Kostov in Hungary and Bulgaria, and the growing certainty that in the USSR there were forced labor camps. Although this period in Argentina must be judged considering the extended life Peronism generated for the anti-fascist intellectual front until 1955, the space communist intellectuals occupied in the cultural sphere during these years both in general and within the party was modified. Up to that point, communists had managed to maintain their position within that circle due to the strength that anti-fascist clichés lent to a discourse centered on the common defense of liberal culture and traditions threatened by the “reactionary, clerical, and Hispanist” nature of the government that emerged from the 1943 coup and which was extended, in their view, by its most skillful exponent after the February,

4 Stéphane Courtois and Marc Lazar, Histoire du Parti Communiste français, Paris, PUF, 2000, p. 273. 5 Gerardo Leibner, Camaradas y compañeros: Una historia política y social de los comunistas del Uruguay, Montevideo, Trilce, 2011, p. 115.

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1946, elections.6 But the shifts the party went through in characterizing the Peronist phenomenon throughout the decade ended up being lethal to its continuation in the anti-Peronist intellectual community. As long as, Argentine communists were unambiguously able to sustain their oppositional role, the climate of besiegement experienced by communists around the world did not fully affect them, at least not within the space of intellectual culture. However, as analyzed in the next chapter, in 1952 the party briefly attempted to seek unity with Peronism and, aware of the needs imposed by the international scenario and the anti-imperialist mandate that organized Soviet discourse for Latin America, violently redefined both their policy of alliances and the terms that governed their interpretations of the past and local ideological traditions. At that time, communist intellectuals abandoned—not without personal losses—the cultural institutions that they had been a part of and even led up to that point, such as the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (SADE, or Argentine Society of Writers) and the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores (CLES, or Free College of Higher Education), causing the first great fracture within the “democratic camp” of Argentine intelligentsia. This circumstance had two consequences. The first was that the communist cultural space took on a more defined profile in ideological and institutional terms. Starting in 1952, the Argentine intellectual sphere was divided, at least for a brief time, into three recognizable families: nationalist, liberal, and communist.7 Finding themselves isolated from the

6 The 1943 coup d’état overthrew Ramón Castillo’s conservative government, the last of the ruling elite that since 1930 had maintained a partially constitutional regime by means of electoral fraud. The military secret society Grupo de Obra y Unificación (Work and Unification Group, or GOU), with nationalist ideas and Axis sympathies, played a leading role in the coup. Its members included Juan Domingo Perón, who would soon be appointed Secretary of Labor and Welfare. From that position, as well as those of Minister of War and Vice President of the Nation later on, Perón began to implement vigorous policies in favor of workers’ rights, progressively gaining the support of tradeunion sectors. Due to differences within the military government, in October, 1945, Perón was forced to resign from all three positions and was imprisoned on Martín García Island. A massive popular mobilization demanded his release and launched his rise to the presidency and the political movement that would bear his name. During the two years the “June government” dictatorship lasted, left-wing movements were persecuted and outlawed, and many of their leaders and other members were forced into exile in the neighboring Uruguayan city of Montevideo. 7 In the years following 1955, this also included the “Trotskyist family,” which from that point on was more vocal. For more on the topic, see Horacio Tarcus, El marxismo

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spaces that organized cultural life and provided a platform for intellectuals who were in opposition, banned, or persecuted (a condition that communists never lost), party intellectuals and their fellow travelers set about creating their own institutions, such as the Casa de la Cultura Argentina (House of Argentine Culture); established a specific party commission to organize and conduct intellectual labor; and created new publications, such at the weekly Propósitos, and renewed existing ones, like the journal Cuadernos de Cultura. On more than a few occasions, these spaces provided alternative employment for intellectuals who either made a living in journalism, and were now unable to publish, or professionals who had been expelled from their positions in official institutions. The second consequence was that the tangible climate of anti-communist hostility in the country and around the world strengthened the desire for autarky that the party had always had with respect to culture. In this sense, the communists acted as a fort besieged by pressures from the outside world, threatened, as Codovilla had said, by a double divergence: that of sectarianism, which led to the camp of systematic opposition, and that of opportunism, which led to assimilation with Peronism.8 This chapter will begin with an analysis of the process of the “professionalization” of communist cultural space that took place in the late 1940s, before outlining the general traits of Soviet cultural policy during Stalinism. As we have seen, until 1935 there was no lack of initiatives for organizing communist intellectuals and artists in a differentiated space within the cultural sphere, either through the proposal of classist aesthetic criteria indebted to Soviet “proletkultismo” or through the organization of specific unions. Though not very successful at the time, they were completely forgotten once the era of popular fronts began, since after that point the priority was strengthening the anti-fascist space. In Argentina and in the rest of the world, communist intellectuals and their opportune fellow travelers acted publicly as inheritors of the Dreyfus treason. That is, they risked their name and cultural capital to defend the universal values they perceived as being under threat from Nazi barbarism. The international communist movement did not ask them to do otherwise. In fact, it encouraged and courted intellectuals to head the anti-fascist initiatives olvidado en la Argentina: Silvio Frondizi and Milcíades Peña, Buenos Aires, El Cielo por Asalto, 1996. 8 See Carlos Altamirano, Peronismo y cultura de izquierda, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2011, p. 29.

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regardless of the level of commitment involved (sometimes it was enough to simply sign a manifesto, although joining or presiding over an aid or frontist organization was one of the most valued services). Although many writers, artists, and journalists put not only their names on the line but also their own lives at risk on the European battlefields or in the defense of the Spanish Republic, they were never explicitly asked to extend their commitment to the area of creation, that is, to write or paint “communist” works. This situation changed after 1946, especially following Andrei Zhdanov’s codifications of art, literature, and philosophy.9 The USSR began systematically disciplining intellectuals and artists, who were forced to submit to the ideological dogma imposed by the party, which after that point retained strong traits of cultural chauvinism, whether through the imposition of socialist realism or the biological genetics of Trofim Lysenko. National genius became such a revered quality that the Soviets may even have come to believe that the first airplane had been built by Alexander Mozhaysky and the telephone invented by Grigory Ignatyev.10 Patriotic campaigns proliferated and anti-Semitism flourished in their shadow. In his memoir, writer Ilya Ehrenburg recounts how his books were no longer published and his name was removed from newspaper articles. “Every night I waited for the doorbell to ring,” he wrote, although that did not prevent him from later traveling the world to defend peace in Stalin’s name.11

9 Various sections of the 1946–1948 Soviet resolutions on literature and art were reproduced in Argentine communist press in the following order: “Literatura y arte al servicio del pueblo: El informe de A. Zhdánov, secretario de CC del PCUS,” in Orientación, January 8, 1947; “La literatura soviética en pleno auge,” in Orientación, November 5, 1947; “Sobre la ópera ‘La Gran Amistad’ de V. Muradeli (resolución del CC del PC [B] February 1948),” in Orientación, April 7, 1948; George Cogniot, “El informe Zhdánov sobre la historia de la filosofía,” in Orientación, May 12 1948; “Degeneración del arte burgués,” in Orientación, August 4, 1948, and “Las tradiciones de los clásicos,” in Orientación, October 15, 1948. Zhdanov’s book Historia de la filosofía was published by the communist publishing company Anteo in 1948 and that same year a compilation of the resolutions was organized under the title Literatura y filosofía a la luz del marxismo by the Uruguayan communist publishing company Pueblos Unidos. 10 David Priestland, The Red Flag. Communism and the Making of the Modern World, London, Penguin Books, 2009, p. 283. 11 Ilya Ehrenburg, Gente, años, vida (Memorias, 1891–1967), Barcelona, Acantilado, 2014, p. 1590 [Liudi, gody, zhizn. Moscow, Sovietsky Pisatiel, 1990].

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In non-communist countries, incapable of imposing this type of coercion, efforts were made to “professionalize” the participation of intellectuals. That is, to combat the “workerist” tendencies that led them to feel more useful to the cause carrying out non-intellectual tasks (an alternative often encouraged by the party organizations themselves) and to promote the idea that the main duty of communist intellectuals was “to create,” even if that meant the mere practice of polemical journalism in the pages of party press. This demand for professionalism resulted in the establishment of a new structure of participation aimed at creating commissions and fronts for each specialization. With this, a double and paradoxical objective was fulfilled: at the structural level, it enabled the relative autonomy of the intellectual professions, while at the same time the reasoning was that since intellectuals played an essential role in party strategy, they should be oriented and subjected to the same discipline as other party members. The professionalization of intellectual activities was a recognizable phenomenon in Argentine communism starting in late 1945 and represented a significant change in its cultural policy. Secondly, we will analyze how the demand to subordinate cultural life to the political-partisan mandates that characterized the Soviet Union during this period affected Argentine communism, whose leaders took on the task of replicating it with more drive than skill, causing polemics and internal dissent—especially among writers and artists—and reviving the certainty, at least from abroad, that in the country of socialism there was no freedom for creation, but rather an inadmissible regime of authoritarianism and coercion that had reached the extreme of indicating how to write poetry or perform an opera. Within the framework of the antiimperialist mandate that governed communist policies during the Cold War period, and in the face of requirements to mark a division within the literary field by appealing to class criteria that reduced artistic creation and criticism to a simplifying political scheme, the communist cultural space was divided, particularly over the question of the cultural heritage that communists should recognize as their own. The discussions around the existence of a “realist-socialist” literature, the relationship between artistic phenomena, ideology, and politics, and the ways in which communist critique should be undertaken with respect to Argentine literary and cultural traditions as well as the artistic legacy of modernism and the avant-garde was a specific chapter, within the realm of literature, of the cultural cold war of Argentine communists.

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Soviet Organization

The standstill in the debates and theoretical developments of the international communist movement starting in the 1930s and the establishment of Marxism-Leninism as a new orthodoxy separated the question of intellectuals from consideration in cultural or ideological terms and reduced it to a paradoxical situation. While on the one hand, given the needs generated by the anti-fascist struggle and World War II, they were exalted as defenders of universal values and prestigious intellectual discourse represented a precious asset for communist politics, the role of intellectuals in communist parties was increasingly still reduced to that of merely towing the party line, acting as mouthpieces for the policy of alliances, or serving as agitators among the middle classes and professional sectors. The toughening of the ideological stance precipitated by the beginning of the Cold War took this paradox to the level of caricature. Stalinist workerism did not reject the integration of intellectuals into party structures, but established a way of interpreting “orthodoxy” that reduced Marxism to a kind of “manualistics” or didacticism and conditioned intellectual labor on two things: the party, as the vanguard of the working class, and the proletariat itself, as a symbolic form of legitimization. The ideological hardening that took place in the USSR after 1945, associated with Andrei Zhdanov, can be considered the culmination of the policy initiated in 1928 known as the “cultural revolution.” This term describes the process by which communists sought to expel the cultural authorities inherited from the previous regime and encourage the creation of a “proletarian intelligence” using the method of class warfare. This was a radical shift from the first revolutionary decade when Soviet authorities avoided open confrontation with the intelligentsia as a whole and tended to regard hostility toward intellectuals and specialists as a reprehensible by-product of revolutionary enthusiasm.12 Lenin himself had a very different notion of what the concept of cultural revolution could mean in a society like that of Russia and he believed that in a society of “illiterates” with significant deficiencies in the development of the means of production one could hardly speak of a proletarian or socialist culture. Cultural power, he believed, could not be achieved through a revolutionary coup, like political power could. Rather, it should be patiently 12 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution and Class War,” in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 8 and 9.

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constructed without rejecting cultural heritage, assimilating its conquests to move beyond them. The fact that the political and social revolution preceded the cultural one in Russia, showing that socialism could take root even in a “backwards” country, did not prevent the proletariat from creating its own culture, denying the inheritance of past legacies. On the contrary, it proposed both the expansion of education and the improvement of the cultural level of the masses as its principal tasks in order to take advantage of the bourgeois intelligentsia, particularly the specialists. This posture led Lenin to censure the proletarian culture movement or Proletkult that in the view of its founder and main theorist, Alexander Bogdanov, posited the class character of all cultural and scientific expressions and proposed the possibility of creating a purely proletarian culture as a product of the experimentation and creative work of the masses themselves. Lenin characterized this position as fanciful and also considered all attempts to “invent” a particular culture and to claim autonomy for specialized organizations as “false in theory and harmful in praxis.” He demanded that the Proletkult movement be placed under the aegis of the Commissariat of Instruction and, therefore, under the leadership of Soviet power and the CPSU.13 Given that for Lenin the “cultural revolution,” as he understood it, constituted an essential element of the socialist transformation of Russia, it could not develop independently from political power but rather the party must exert complete control in this area as well. The cultural policy promoted by Stalin from the late 1920s will be, as noted, a synthesis between Leninist dirigisme and a particular reading of proletarianism outlined by Bogdanov and his school. The shift toward the conception of the cultural revolution as a class conflict occurred in the context of Stalin’s confrontation with the opposition, initially from the “left” and later from the “right.” One of its founding episodes was the so-called “Shakhty trials” (1928), in which a group of engineers was accused of deliberate sabotage and conspiracy with foreign powers. These trials, which received exceptional publicity, were the starting point for a series of exemplary measures against “bourgeois experts,” who were identified as class enemies and thereafter submitted to strict surveillance. However, as Fitzpatrick has explained, beyond the rhetoric of class conflict what was important was the significant upward mobility of the industrial workers and workers within the party toward 13 Vladímir I. Lenin, “Sobre la cultura proletaria” [1923], in Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Estética y marxismo, vol. 2, México, Era, 1970, p. 222.

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higher education and administrative and management positions. The cultural revolution was the means for training the future communist elite and creating a new Soviet intelligentsia.14 This “new intelligentsia” could therefore be considered both an emanation of the living forces of the people and a particular creation of Soviet power to which it owed its position entirely. Especially, following World War II and as a result of the state of total mobilization due to reconstruction and the new demands of foreign policy, both artistic culture and the intelligentsia were placed at the service of the ideological-political project developed by the party: the shift from socialism to communism. The mandate for these sectors revealed the paradoxical nature of their situation. While their responsibilities were expanded and exalted as organizing cadres of the labor and consciousness of the working class, giving rise to an elitism tied to the excellence, professionalism, and specialization that resulted in an enormous and complex organizational structure, the very fact of possessing these specific skills, far from increasing their autonomy, made them ideologically suspect and forced them to assume an unconditional commitment to the party and to the workers’ perspective of Soviet ideology. The entire organization of Soviet culture and the representations of the figure of the intellectual in the communist world were imbued with the tensions arising from the fact that the pursuit of specific artistic and intellectual skills was exalted in virtue of the principles of excellence and relativized in a systematic way, if not directly denied, in the name of an ideology that proclaimed the end of all social differences and divisions, including that of manual and intellectual labor.15 Within the institutional structure of Soviet culture, the “creative unions” played a central role. They were organized starting in 1932 under the resolution “On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations” that, among other measures, put an end to the experience of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP, for its Russian acronym), one of the most successful associations of the Stalinist cultural revolution and the only experience where communists achieved power as a result of their

14 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution and Class War,” op. cit., p. 11. 15 Antoine Baudin and Leonid Heller, “Le réalisme socialiste comme organisation du

champ culturel,” in Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 312 and 313.

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own efforts.16 The “unions” sought to organize the authorized representatives of the intelligentsia by sector with two complementary imperatives: the defense of their “autonomy” and their unconditional subordination to “general interest” as defined by the party. Under a strictly corporative formulation, they had the specific prerogative of establishing and imposing the norms and criteria of professional recognition and determining the material, ideological, and aesthetic conditions of their practice within the general framework outlined by the political organization. The admission criteria required a dual loyalty: “The demonstration of professional skills (masterstvo) in accordance with current technical and aesthetic norms and the adherence to socialist realism (partistnot) statutorily defined as the ‘fundamental method’ of Soviet art.”17 Socialist realism thus became the main integrator within and between different organizations which were themselves united under a greater structure, the Union of Soviet Writers, created in 1934. The fact that the Union of Writers became a model for the organization of the entire Soviet artistic-cultural realm is significant since it is an indicator of the privileged status that literature occupied in communist culture, where perhaps more than any other creative activity, it was the object of particular attention in political-party spheres. As Vittorio Strada has explained, the rich and intense cultural life that the Bolsheviks inherited underwent profound changes in the years following the revolution. The subordination of culture to politics and the extension of the Marxist-Leninist ideology to all areas of scientific and speculative research resulted in a notable intellectual decline (in terms of both people and works), particularly perceptible in areas such as philosophy, history, and economics. Literature, in contrast, though also depleted by emigrations and persecutions, became the center of the country’s cultural activity and, therefore, the focus of power.

16 By 1928, the RAPP had effectively taken the lead in the campaign against the “right-wing peril” in the arts and education as well as in the promotion of proletarian literature. Until its dissolution, it exerted a veritable dictatorship over literary and artistic publications. Although carried out in the name of the proletariat and Soviet power, the RAPP’s activities were not under the effective control of the Central Committee, and it was this that determined its fate. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution and Class War,” op. cit., p. 29. 17 Antoine Baudin and Leonid Heller, “Le réalisme socialiste comme organisation du champ culturel,” op. cit., p. 317.

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Este privilegio procedía, evidentemente, de la naturaleza específica del lenguaje artístico y literario, que no es “unívoco”, como el de las “ciencias de la cultura” (y de la política) sino más elusivo y difuso, pero al mismo tiempo más “popular” y por lo tanto más apto para ser usado (o para ser elaborado con propósito de uso) como instrumento de comunicación con amplias capas de lectores. Si se tiene en cuenta el hecho de que al mismo tiempo tenía lugar una destrucción de la religión como momento de vida espiritual, este “privilegio” de la literatura y del arte no solo se justifica mejor, en cuanto que el nuevo poder lo necesitaba como canal de verificación y de influencia, sino que clarifica también el cambio radical que la literatura y el arte como institución social habían sufrido en el mundo posrevolucionario, profundamente transformado con respecto al mundo “tradicional” anterior a la revolución bolchevique.18 [This privilege evidently came from the specific nature of artistic and literary language, which is not “unambiguous” like that of the “sciences of culture” (and of politics) but rather elusive and diffuse, while at the same time more “popular” and therefore more suitable for use (or to be developed for use) as a communication tool with a broad strata of readers. If we consider that the destruction of religion as a spiritual point in life was taking place at the same time, this “privilege” of literature and art not only makes more sense, insofar as the new power needed it as a means for verification and influence, but it also clarifies the radical change that literature and art as a social institution underwent in the post-revolutionary world, profoundly transformed in comparison to the “traditional” world prior to the Bolshevik revolution.]

Literature was placed at the top of the cultural hierarchy, to the point that it became the basic code for all the other arts.19 “Socialist realism,” adopted as communism’s official aesthetic in the First Congress of Soviet Writers held in 1934, was replicated in most Western communist parties, especially following the 1946–1948 resolutions of the CPSU Central Committee on artistic and literary questions. Based on the 1905 article by Lenin “Party Organization and Party Literature,” these resolutions went even further than the ideological accusations against the “bourgeois

18 Vittorio Strada, “De la ‘revolución cultural’ al ‘realismo socialista,’” in Eric Hobsbawm (ed.), Historia del marxismo: El marxismo de la III Internacional, vol. 2, Barcelona, Bruguera, 1983, p. 435 [Storia del marxismo: Il marxismo della Terza Internazionale, Torino, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1981]. 19 Antoine Baudin and Leonid Heller, “Le réalisme socialiste comme organisation du champ culturel,” op. cit., p. 337.

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survivals” that the Soviet authorities believed they detected in writers, painters, and musicians, seeking to establish directives on the expressive means they should use in their works, which resulted in a complete sterilization of creative activity.20 Following the parenthesis opened by the anti-fascist struggle and the war, where Western communists did not seek to impose any criteria of orthodoxy on the writers they called on for unifying work, and in the context of the atmosphere of Cold War ideological confrontation, the various party authorities attempted to shape a “party literature” through both internal discipline and the promotion of new authors and structures of circulation and participation. In all cases, the results were abysmal. The construction of an optimistic and edifying literature dedicated to “reflecting reality in its revolutionary development” turned out to be an arduous task outside the USSR and ended up reduced to a production plagued with ideological schematics and aesthetic populism, undermining the cultural prestige of communist activism even when it had no lack of prestigious exponents.21

2 Structures of Cultural Activism: Institutions and the Print Network In Argentina, the process of the professionalization of the communist cultural space was facilitated by the climate of hostility that Peronism generated among the professional and educated sectors. One of the immediate effects of the irruption of Peronism in the intellectual sphere was, as Flavia Fiorucci has explained, its political deceleration and corporative withdrawal in the area of unions, a survival strategy that coincided with the desire of the communists to influence the cultural institutions that brought together intellectuals and artists or, when this was not

20 Although Lenin’s text had an immediate political motivation and referred, albeit ambiguously, to the press or Publizistik, and not artistic literature, the idea that a “nonpartisan” literature could exist became a fundamental element of partinost (party spirit) applied to art and literature and a justification for the extreme intervention of the party in these affairs. See Vittorio Strada, “De la ‘revolución cultural’ al ‘realismo socialista,’” op. cit., pp. 431–477. 21 Some notable writers had their “socialist realism” period. For example, Louis Aragon (Les Communistes, three volumes published in 1949, 1950, and 1951), Paul Éluard (Poèmes politiques, 1948), Jorge Amado (Los subterráneos de la libertad, 1954), and Pablo Neruda (Las uvas y el viento, 1954).

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possible, to create their own organizations.22 Following the shutdown of the Association of Intellectuals, Artists, Journalists, and Writers (AIAPE, for its Spanish acronym) in 1943, communism did not encourage a “frontist” organization of intellectuals and artists until a decade later with the Congreso Argentino de la Cultura (Argentine Congress of Culture), analyzed in the next chapter. Until the late 1940s, only the Frente de la Solidaridad (Solidarity Front, which channeled its activities through the Argentine League for the Rights of Man) acted as an umbrella organization for the participation of intellectuals, although their objectives did not include any particularly “cultural” action, but rather participation in protests and workers’ strikes, the defense of political prisoners, humanitarian aid, and international solidarity. The months prior to the February, 1946, elections saw the appearance of the first organizations grouped by specialization. One of the first was the Asociación de Médicos Democráticos (Association of Democratic Physicians) launched, among others, by psychiatrist Jorge Thénon, who had recently joined the party. Although the stated purpose of this association was to help “overthrow the dictatorship and reestablish the power of the National Constitution” it was presented as an trade union alternative to the Asociación Médica Argentina (Argentine Medical Association) which, according to Thénon, had fallen prey to a collaborationist attitude with the “dictatorship” by accepting a wage increase with clear demagogic motives.23 A short time later, the Asociación de Educadores Democráticos (Association of Democratic Educators) and the Asociación de Ingenieros Democráticos (Association of Democratic Engineers) appeared, grouped under the Junta de Coordinación Democrática (Democratic Coordination Board), which actively participated in the electoral campaign. Since then, and in contrast to what happened in the workers’ movement, communist trade-union activity was strengthened and expanded to all branches of intellectual labor, including professional and artistic sectors. In the context of its recovered legality, a status which would shortly prove to be ephemeral, in August 1946 the Teatro del Partido Comunista (Communist Party Theatre) was created, based at 2936 Victoria Street (later Hipólito Yrigoyen). Presented as an alternative to commercial

22 Flavia Fiorucci, Intelectuales y peronismo: 1945–1955, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2011, p. 71. 23 “Los médicos se unen,” in Orientación, August 29, 1945.

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venues and the “amateurism” of the independent theatre movement— with which the party nevertheless maintained fluid ties through their sympathizers—it had sections for puppets, set design, technology, choir, dance, orchestra, native art, and film.24 The Instituto Cultural ArgentinoRuso (ICAR, or Argentine-Russian Cultural Institute) was created at nearly the same time, the product of a reestablishment of bilateral Argentine-Soviet relations and in the context of a cultural agreement signed between the new Peronist government and the USSR and was followed by the Colegio de Estudios de Lengua Rusa (School for Russian Language Studies). In its statement of principles, the ICAR announced that its objective was: Conocer y divulgar lo que la Unión Soviética ha hecho en el campo de la cultura; estudiar sus instituciones y su régimen social y hacerle conocer lo que el pueblo argentino ha hecho y hace en esas materias es, en el actual momento de las relaciones internacionales, trabajar por la paz y el progreso humanos, además de enriquecer el propio caudal.25 [To discover and promote the Soviet Union’s achievements in culture; to study its institutions and social system and to share what the Argentine people have done and are doing in these areas is, at the current point in international relations, to work for peace and human progress, as well as to enrich our own cultural wealth.]

The ICAR had the same spirit and structure as the defunct Association of Friends of the USSR and its creation should be read in the context of a reactivation of Soviet cultural diplomacy after the end of the war. Its semi-official nature was reflected in the names promoting its foundation, headed by high-ranking diplomat Enrique Corominas. With a clear academic-professional profile, the first Executive Committee consisted of public figures from prominent intellectual circles and diverse political affiliations, unlikely to meet in other historical contexts. Its president was mathematician Alberto González Domínguez, a prestigious professor from the Faculty of Exact Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), who four years later would receive the National Prize for Sciences. Included in the list of figures invited to organize 24 “El teatro del P. Comunista,” in Orientación, August 14, 1946, and Álvaro Yunque “Teatro del Partido Comunista,” in Orientación, September 18, 1946. 25 “Constituyen el Instituto Cultural Argentino-Ruso,” in Orientación, August 28, 1946.

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the various departments of the institute were the then director of the UBA’s Ethnographic Museum, Francisco de Aparicio, who headed the Anthropology and History section; the nationalist editor Ernesto Palacio in charge of Philosophy; agricultural engineer Lorenzo Parodi and geologists Horacio Harrington and Luciano Catalano followed suit in the area of Natural Sciences; while Dr. Alfredo Lanaria directed the department of Medical Sciences; and Bernandino Horne and Cornelio Viera, Agricultural Sciences. Engineer Ricardo Ortiz, a longtime communist fellow traveler, organized Technology. The artistic disciplines were represented by composer Luis Gianneo in Music, while theatre and dance were handled by Cirilo Grassi Díaz, the driving force behind the Ballet Estable del Teatro Colón. Scriptwriter and director Lucas Demare, whose biggest film La guerra gaucha received high praise from communist critics, headed the Film department; Antonio Berni, Visual Arts; illustrator and ceramist Fernando Arrans, Applied Arts; Atahualpa Yupanqui, Folk Music; and the editor and printer Bartolomé Chiesino, Graphic Arts. The unquestionable prestige of many of the names, the “celebrity effect” behind the public presentation, and the precedence the sciences were given over the arts and humanities were signs of a new era in which scientific achievements and the endorsement of “scholars” would become the evidence and the example of Soviet cultural development. The ICAR functioned in relative normality until 1949, when the international climate became tense and the Peronist government declared communists once again illegal. Up to that point, prominent lecturers passed through its halls decorated with the portraits of Joseph Stalin and José de San Martín, art exhibits and concerts were organized, and trips were planned for intellectual and scientific sympathizers and the like by the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS, for its Russian acronym). On September 29, 1949, while writer and journalist Alfredo Varela was giving a lecture on his visit to the Soviet Union to an audience of three hundred people packed into the second floor of the elegant building at 735 Maipú Street, the Federal Police entered and arrested many of those in attendance. They were jailed and accused of participating in an unauthorized communist meeting. As an indication of the affront, in the complaint presented before the Supreme Court to request that the charges against Varela and the 209 people who were imprisoned with him be dropped, emphasis was placed on the fact that some of them were well-known Catholic activists and that there was no lack of ladies whose last names alone were a kind

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of certificate of anti-communism.26 After that, the ICAR staggered its public activities and only fully resumed them in 1953, under the name of the Instituto de Relaciones Culturales Argentina-URSS (Institute of Argentine-USSR Cultural Relations or IRCAU, for its Spanish acronym), relocated to a building in the more modest Constitución neighborhood and in the context of reinstated commercial ties between both countries. The IRCAU enthusiastically fulfilled its mission to improve bilateral ties, promoting a high level of sociocultural and editorial activism, both in Buenos Aires and in the branches it created in the provinces and towns of Argentina. Through the vast materials VOKS distributed around the world, it promoted learning Russian and organized translations of Soviet authors and conversely, of Argentine authors, some of whom occasionally collaborated with the VOKS newsletter, such as Alfredo Varela, Margarita Ponce, and the scientist Pablo Chanussot, president of the institute in the 1950s.27 It also promoted trips for Argentine delegations to the USSR and acted as a host to distinguished visitors, such as writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Polevoy, violinist Tatiana Nikolayeva, and the large Soviet delegation that attended the first Mar del Plata International Film Festival in 1954. A prodigious source of work in the publishing world, under its imprint the IRCAU published several books and pamphlets on Soviet culture and science and specialized journals, such as Cuadernos para la Juventud, Cuadernos de Teatro, and Medicina Soviética, whose editorial committee included Carlos Bardeci, José Calzaretto, Jorge Thénon, and Luis Baliño. But the institute’s most important publication was the quarterly Argentina y la URSS, which as of 1953 was directed by the recently affiliated José Luis Mangieri. It reached a print run of 20,000 copies, regularly sold at newspaper stands. The young Mangieri, who at that time embarked on the path that would lead him to become one of the most important independent publishers in Argentina, made a journal that could have been a compilation of diplomatic bureaucracy into a meeting point with no lack of prestigious contributors. Like so many other communist cultural institutions, the IRCAU generated a space that produced contacts 26 Fondo Samuel Schmerkin/Samuel Schmerkin Collection, CeDInCI; FSS/CeDInCI, box 2, folder 8. 27 See Magdalena Garrido, “Las relaciones político-culturales de Argentina y España con la Unión Soviética: La proyección internacional de las asociaciones de amistad (1927– 1956),” in Avances del Cesor, year VI, no. 6, Centro de Estudios Regionales y Universidad Nacional de Rosario, 2009, pp. 12–18.

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and friendships with unanticipated outcomes in terms of the party’s objectives. Sociologist Juan Carlos Portantiero, poet Juan Gelman, Mangieri, and many others crossed paths for the first time within its walls. The IRCAU’s publications, in addition to the books, pamphlets, and journals published or distributed by the Soviet embassy itself through its press section, constituted an important, though not the most significant, share of the publishing network of Argentine communism, undoubtedly the most extensive of any political party in the recent history of the country. It goes without saying that the printed word took on a decisive role in communism’s political and organizational strategy, as well as a precise function in the processes of the social emancipation it hoped to lead. Heirs to the end of the Enlightenment traditions that run through the history of progressive and leftist movements since the mid-nineteenth century, the communists believed, as did the socialists and anarchists, that the struggle against ignorance, which required a mastery of the printing press and use of the written word, was a fundamental tool in the liberation of the exploited and the downtrodden. However, by placing organized party activity at the center of political activity, Leninism also introduced an essential novelty in the history of political books. A weapon in the political-ideological struggle, a tool for popular education and also for training political activists, the “communist book” was organized with particular emphasis placed on its pedagogical aspects, limiting other potential uses, and was placed from the outset under the control of specific party structures. The book as a privileged medium for agitprop constituted a central element in communism’s world strategy from the early years of the Communist International (CI), but to a much greater degree after the process of Bolshevization lent urgency to the training of political cadres in the parties reorganized following the Soviet model. Thereafter, the typists and translators stationed in Moscow under the supervision of the CI Publishing Office ensured that the communist parties across five continents were provided with manuscripts that were ready for publication. This was complemented with international journals that disseminated political and doctrinal guidelines and promoted an ideological coordination of themes, authors, and works, inaugurating a model that moved

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editorial forms closer to the periodical press.28 Communism was, in addition to a regime of state power and an international political movement, a print network with unprecedented international reach. The Latin American communist parties formed part of this global network, which also connected them through the specific mechanisms of the continental organizations, such as the South American Bureau of the CI, that published newsletters, pamphlets, books, and most notably, the biweekly journal La Correspondencia Sudamericana, published in Buenos Aires and Montevideo between 1926 and 1930. In the case of Argentina, the party had a press organ, the newspaper La Internacional, from its inception. It was created in August, 1917, as an outlet for the group that would later break away from the Socialist Party to create the International Socialist Party (PSI) and then the Communist Party of Argentina (PCA). La Internacional was published at varying intervals but without difficulties until 1930, when it was banned by the dictatorship, after which it was only able to appear sporadically. In 1921, after acquiring a rotary printing press with the imprint of the same name, in addition to selling books and pamphlets, it began to publish its own. These consisted of a diverse set of genres and authors that became increasingly restricted until names, themes, and disciplines disappeared and official publishing houses were transformed into distributors of Marxist propaganda and manuals—much like what happened throughout the world during the Stalinist period. In Argentina, recurring periods of illegality complicated the print activities of Argentine communists in every way possible, beginning with strictly operational questions. There were few print shops that would run the risk of printing banned materials and on numerous occasions print workers or their bosses were arrested and ended up sharing details that landed the communists in prison. In any case, legal press publications were needed and the party persisted in publishing them. Bandera Roja, Mundo Obrero, and Frente Único, all from 1932, were also shut down and their directors and contributors prosecuted.

28 See Serge Wolikow, “Le livre et l’édition dans le monde communiste européen,” in Le Parti Communiste français et le livre: Écrire et diffuser le politique en France au XX siècle (1920–1992), Dijon, Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2014, pp. 41–53, and MarieCécile Bouju, Les Maisons d’édition du Parti Communiste français 1920–1968, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010.

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During these years, several of the names that would later become ineludible appeared in the publishing scene: Rodolfo Ghioldi and his brother Orestes, Paulino González Alberdi, and Héctor P. Agosti.29 The history of the print activity of Argentine communism became, after 1930, a permanent and favorite section of crime reporting, to the extent that virtually the only details for reconstructing it can be found in judicial records, summaries, and legal files, documents that curiously have so far seldom been consulted by leftist historians.30 Additionally, political books and publishing activities promoted by political organizations and politicalcultural groups still occupy minimal space in the studies on the history of the book and publishing that have flourished in the last several years and not only with respect to the left. Liberals, conservatives, radicals, and nationalists have not yet been considered from the perspective of their work in publishing, and in more general studies of Argentine publishing history, ventures that are not strictly commercial occupy a marginal space. As a result, there are few details to assist in the contextualization of certain catalogs, which can sometimes lead to errors in evaluating the importance of particular imprints and the weight and role that publishing has had for specific leftist groups, and can increase the tendency to disregard or not attribute sufficient importance to the relationship that many political publishing initiatives have maintained with the book market and its circuits. Even so, it is safe to assume that Argentine communism’s cultural space was, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, the largest publisher of political literature in Argentina and, quite possibly, in Latin America. Between 1939, when the publishing house Problemas was inaugurated, and 1966, when the coup d’état led by Juan Carlos Onganía put an end to several of the initiatives discussed here, the publishing houses associated with the communist sphere (inside and outside the party)

29 These appear alongside other less well-known figures, such as the Russian Isaac Tomalski, Jacobo Gringauz and José Cucagna. 30 The catalogs of the following publishing houses have been reconstructed for this book: Problemas, Anteo, Cartago, Futuro, Lautaro, Fundamentos, and Hemisferio, as well as smaller imprints such as Quetzal, Nuevas Sendas, and Procyon (which belonged to Lautaro). This data has been collected from catalogs of public and private libraries in Argentina and abroad and from the lists of books seized by the police and municipal authorities, available for consultation in the archive of communist lawyer Samuel Schmerkin, housed at the Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas (Center for Documentation and Research of Left-wing Culture in Argentina, or CeDInCI).

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published, in almost constant illegality, over 1200 titles and 570 authors, not counting the materials published by specific language groups, associations, mutual societies, and trade unions, the books and pamphlets published by cultural journals31 or, for that matter, periodical publications. Of that multitude of titles, 450 were by Argentine authors and 412 by Soviets, followed by a significantly lower proportion of French (84), German (67), American (43), Italian (27), British (20), Spanish (12), and Chinese (6) authors. The presence of Latin American titles was proportionally minimal, with Cuba at the top of the list (7), followed by Brazil (5), Paraguay (5), Chile (4), Bolivia (3), Uruguay (2), Mexico (2), and Ecuador (2). With the exception of Anteo, dedicated entirely to doctrinal literature, the remainder of the publishing houses published a variety of genres (essays and literary fiction, in particular) and reflected interests in diverse fields of knowledge (science, history, and to a lesser degree, economics, philosophy, and psychology). Despite its sustained albeit circumscribed publishing activity, it was not until 1939, when Carlos Dujovne launched the Problemas imprint, that Argentine communism would have its own autochthonous publishing house. As discussed, up to that point the communists followed a model initiated by the socialists. That is, they published books and pamphlets, generally grouped under the term “library” as an extension activity of the party press organs, or they sold titles published by regional or international organizations linked to the CI, as in the case of the Sudam publishing house, created in 1929, or the Argentine section of International Red Aid. By the 1930s, it was the anti-fascist organizations, such as the AIAPE and the Comité contra el Racismo y el Antisemitismo (Committee Against Racism and Anti-Semitism) that took on the task of putting together a catalog suited to the politics of the hour, while personal

31 In her well-documented book on the cultural activism of the Jewish community linked to the PCA and to the Idisher Cultur Farband (ICUF) in particular, Nerina Visacovsky points out that, within the multifaceted spectrum of political, literary, theatrical, recreational, and sports activities promoted by the institutions of the Argentine Jewish left, the publication of books and periodicals occupied a prominent place. In her partial reconstruction of the catalogs of the ICUF’s publishing house and others related to it, she found almost a hundred titles, most published between 1947 and the early 1960s, including some really notable undertakings, such as a Yiddish translation of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quijote de la Mancha by Pinie Katz, which the ICUF published in two volumes in 1950. See Nerina Visacovsky, Argentinos, judíos y camaradas tras la utopía socialista, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2015.

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ventures, such as that of Aníbal Ponce with his journal and publishing house Dialéctica, offered a sampling of Marxist readings in line with, although not necessarily congruent with, the party canon. Born in Entre Ríos to a family of Jewish immigrants, Carlos Dujovne formed part of the founding group of the International Socialist Party at the age of 15. In 1923, he traveled on his own to the USSR, where he lived for five years and graduated with a doctorate in social sciences from Moscow State University. In 1926, he began to work at VOKS, where he served as a guide and a translator for both illustrious and unknown visitors to the Soviet country, from Henri Barbusse to the young Rodolfo Puiggrós, with whom he struck up a friendship that would be key to his future editorial project. After collaborating on the Latin American Section of the Red International of Labor Unions, which was active, legally or clandestinely, in Montevideo, Peru, and Chile, in 1935 he returned to Argentina, traveling first to Córdoba, where he grew up, and then to Buenos Aires. In 1938, he joined the party’s Central Committee and a year later, in the midst of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he began his editorial career with the publication of a text by Georgi Dimitrov, “El proletariado y la guerra actual,”32 Between 1939 and 1943, Problemas published almost 150 titles, an extraordinary number for any publishing venture focused on political activism, becoming the largest company for the dissemination of Soviet culture in Latin America. Under the slogan “El libro para el obrero” (“Books for workers”), Problemas focused on publishing lowcost pamphlets and books, although without abandoning more select publications, such as the first Spanish-language edition of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, translated by Augusto Bunge; the Soviet history and philosophy manuals, such as the Historia de la filosofía compendium edited by Shcheglov and translated directly from the Russian by V. M. Dalmacio; and the biography of Napoleon, written by Eugenio Tarle and translated from the French edition by Delia Ingenieros, daughter of the famous philosopher and psychiatrist. During these years, Problemas dedicated over half of its catalog to the dissemination of Soviet Marxist authors and, to a lesser degree, to publishing the works of Marx

32 For more on Carlos Dujovne, see the corresponding entry in Horacio Tarcus, Diccionario biográfico de la izquierda argentina: De los anarquistas a la “nueva izquierda” (1870–1976), Buenos Aires, Emecé, 2007, pp. 190–192, and the novel his daughter Alicia Dujovne Ortiz wrote about him, El camarada Carlos: Itinerario de un enviado secreto, Buenos Aires, Aguilar, 2007.

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and Engels. It published books on various aspects of the construction of socialism in the USSR, as well as literature for children and young adults (such as the novels and stories of the Russian Mikhail Ilin and the German Lisa Tetzner), biographies, classics of “socialist realism” (such as Ostrovsky’s), a few titles by Latin American communist authors, and finally, Argentine authors. The latter were divided among the most eminent party leaders (Victorio Codovilla, Rodolfo Ghioldi, and Paulino González Alberdi), realist and pro-communist writers (Bernardo Kordon, Álvaro Yunque, Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, Raúl González Tuñón) and the group of communist historians associated with Rodolfo Puiggrós, who in the pages of the newspaper La Hora celebrated the initiative in an anti-imperialist tone attuned with the circumstances: as a commitment to “national culture” in the face of the persistent Europeanizing trend of Argentine publishers. Until 1942 when the publishing house Anteo, devoted to publishing doctrinal and partisan literature, was created, Problemas acted as a quasiofficial publishing house of the PCA, although the persistent mark of its director (whose name and position were indicated in each volume) gave it an identity and an aspect of autonomy that would not be repeated in similar undertakings. However, the Problemas model was taken up again by independent ventures directed by communists, such as the case of Lautaro, created in 1942 under the direction of Sara Jorge, and Futuro, inaugurated in 1944 by writer Raúl Larra. In turn, these paved the way for future publishing houses of the new left, such as Pasado y Presente and Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente. June 16, 1943, only a few days after the coup d’état that ended Ramón Castillo’s government and marked the beginning of the rise of Juan Domingo Perón, Problema’s storefront and warehouses were raided in four successive police procedures. The same thing happened to the Anteo publishing house, the newspapers La Hora, Orientación, and Avanzada and over thirty social, ethnic, and neighborhood organizations, including the Junta de la Victoria (Victory Board), headed by Victoria Ocampo.33 Eighty truckloads of books, worth approximately 300,000 pesos (equivalent to approximately 75,000 dollars) were taken to the Banco Municipal warehouses and then destroyed. In the subsequent months, the newsreel Sucesos Argentinos portrayed the assault on the premises at 1462 33 The closures took place under Decree 1050 of January 17, 1944, which established the dissolution and shutdown of associations of political and social propaganda.

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Sarmiento Street as part of the official campaign against communism. The images show a man in work clothes reading M. Sobolev’s Historia de la Primera Internacional immediately followed by a sequence of a demonstration, fires, and armed mobs while a voice-over explains: Por medio de la propaganda impresa, una ideología perturbadora y extraña a nuestro medio ha estado y pretende seguir amenazando a nuestra sociedad argentina: el comunismo. El virus ideológico prende en los ambientes donde impera la vagancia, el mal se propaga también mediante la acción organizada de agitadores profesionales. Gérmenes de esta naturaleza incuban fácilmente en las mentalidades incultas y en la juventud ingenua e inexperta. […] Completando el exterminio de esa disolvente propaganda, para arrancar de cuajo el mal que amenaza minar nuestro medio social, la policía dispuso recientemente la destrucción de cientos de miles de libros y folletos de propaganda, así como la utilización de imprentas clandestinas incautadas en cantidad verdaderamente alarmante.34 [Through printed propaganda, a disturbing and alien ideology has been and intends to continue threatening our Argentine society: communism. This ideological virus takes hold in environments where laziness prevails. The evil is also spread through the organized actions of professional agitators. Germs of this type easily breed in uneducated minds and among naive and inexperienced youth. [...] Completing the extermination of that solvent propaganda, to uproot the evil that threatens to undermine our social environment, the police recently ordered the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books and pamphlets, as well as clandestine printing presses seized in truly alarming numbers.]

This concatenation between books, reading, and social agitation, that gives ultimate meaning to the idea of the “communist threat” did not change throughout the years studied in this book, reinforcing from the perspective of the police and repressive forces the pedagogical and organizational function that the communists themselves, or at least their leadership, tended to attribute to books within the framework of their publishing enterprises. It is also the easiest starting point for studying a phenomenon whose restriction to mere propaganda would be erroneous and incomplete.

34 Sucesos Argentinos, available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbk3rU hitL8 (Last access December 2021).

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After 1945, thanks to their recovered legality during the national elections and benefiting to a large extent from the normalization of the international market after the war, the editorial activities of Argentine communism were extended and became more specialized, occupying a place in an expanding market during what has been called the “golden age” of Argentine publishing houses.35 By that time, the party had its official publishing house, Anteo, the “pro-communist” Lautaro and Futuro, and several bookstores at various points throughout the city of Buenos Aires. That same year it organized its own distributor, Amauta, with headquarters at 836 Córdoba Street. It also functioned as a publishing house and bookstore and gave shape to the Distribuidora Rioplatense de Libros Extranjeros (Rioplatense Distributor of Foreign Books), which supplied the Argentine public with Soviet publications and foreign communist journals, especially those from France, which during the Cold War years would come to form a strongly organized international circuit of political publications. That same period saw the creation of ephemeral imprints such as Argonauta and Elevación, and the publishing house Brújula, dedicated to a young public. Carlos Dujovne, while serving a prison sentence in Neuquén where he remained until July, 1945, planned the relaunching of his editorial venture, this time more extensive and autonomous, which he described in the pages of Orientación as “una gran empresa editora y un emprendimiento de cultura” [a sizeable publishing company and a cultural venture], calling for intellectual and financial support.36 With this idea, he created a directory of important figures: Emilio Troise, Roberto Giusti, Antonio Valiente Ortega, Samuel Schmerkin, Ricardo Ortiz, Enrique Amorim, Isaac Kornblit, Julio Luis Peluffo, Jorge Durvano Viau, and Leopoldo Hurtado, and inaugurated the new location, two floors located at 1677 Sarmiento Street, with a large party. He left the editorial plan in the hands of Héctor Agosti, who organized an ambitious project consisting of 19 collections and a monthly journal that, it was hoped, would pay its contributors and be economically independent from the

35 This term is used to refer to the period from 1930 to 1955. For a general overview, see José Luis de Diego (ed.), Editores y políticas editoriales en Argentina, 1880–2000, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006. 36 Carlos Dujovne, “A los viejos lectores de la editorial Problemas,” in Orientación, 1945.

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publishing house.37 The new publication, Expresión, under Agosti’s direction, was the first literary journal with communist participation following the experience of Nueva Revista, a decade earlier. With an Americanist orientation, contributors to its beautifully-produced pages included Jorge Amado, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Juan Antonio Corretjer, Caio Prado Jr., and Juan Marinello.38 With rigorous and unusual regularity, Expresión published eight issues between December, 1946, and July 1947. Several months later, Problemas’ activities ceased definitively, putting an end to a political and dynamic cycle in Carlos Dujovne’s life. This time, the cause was neither a police raid nor prison, but rather his definitive distancing from a party that now observed him with distrust. As happened to some of his old friends, such as Rodolfo Puiggrós, although with less enthusiasm for the virtues of popular nationalism, Peronism would cause Dujovne to challenge some of his hard-won ideological certainties. 1946 was a successful year from a publishing perspective. The communists, out of a need to establish their positions vis-à-vis the new government and in the context of favorable international opinion, published incessantly. In the midst of the “golden age” for the Argentine publishing industry, Anteo, Futuro, Lautaro, and Problemas published 96 titles that year, almost four times the previous year’s numbers and six times what they published in 1949 and 1954, when they barely managed to release 15 titles. The fall of Perón’s government was, at least in commercial terms, a relief for the political publishing houses that had been subjected to successive closures and losses, in some cases substantial, during his presidency. Lautaro—founded in 1942 by Sara Maglione, a young uppermiddle class woman, who had become politically involved through her longtime husband, Faustino Jorge, one of the first directors of Orientation, but primarily in the context of solidarity with the Spanish people and

37 “Programa de Bibliotecas y Colecciones de la editorial Problemas,” FSS/CeDInCI, box 2-41-25. 38 Expresión’s board of directors consisted of Enrique Amorim, Roberto Giusti, Leopoldo Hurtado, and Emilio Troise. In its first editorial note, it was presented as an Argentine publication with a continental vocation, affiliated with the tradition of modern rationalism and open to the values of the new generations. It dedicated space to Latin American folk and cultural traditions, as well as short stories and poetry and maintained an informed section of book reviews, an overview of European (mainly French) journals, and an epistolary section. The journal had a significant number of ads, most of them from publishing houses, and in several issues it announced the release of new issues of the journal Sur.

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Fig. 1 Total number of titles published by publishing houses associated with communism between 1939 and 1966 (Source Compiled by the author)

the Republican cause—sustained six closures between 1943 and 1955. In the last closure of the Peronist period, in May, 1955, its books were burned in the municipal plant in the Flores neighborhood, along with the 997 volumes seized from the offices of Cultura’s publishing house and bookstore, located at 502 Medrano, and the 16,000 that the police confiscated from the warehouse where Gregorio Lerner kept the holdings of his imprint Hemisferio, founded in 1943.39 According to court records, between April and May, 1955, police and municipal authorities seized slightly more than 65,000 volumes for an estimated total of over one million pesos (equivalent to approximately thirty-five thousand dollars) (Fig. 1). Although the communists repudiated the political climate that finally led to the downfall of Juan Domingo Perón in September, 1955, the end of his government meant a truce for communist cultural activity, particularly in publishing. Although the situation proved temporary, it was nevertheless clearly reflected in the catalogs of publishing houses. Until the early 1960s, the number of published titles grew, although it

39 The Cultura publishing house was created in May, 1954, by the Ukrainians Miguel Worona, Jacobo Dacij, Trofim Onyszuk, Eustaquio Ulianiuk, and the Belarusian nickel plater Basilio Olipo.

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would never again reach the levels of 1946. The end of police persecution improved the production, distribution, and sales conditions of the existing publishing houses and facilitated the creation of new ventures (Table 1). In 1955, Cartago began operations. Although it occasionally published literature and national authors (from Domingo F. Sarmiento to Roberto Salama and Raúl González Tuñón), it focused most of its activity on the monumental undertaking of translating and publishing the Complete Works of Lenin into Spanish for the first time. The first volume appeared in 1957 and it was completed 44 volumes later in 1960.40 During the period in question, Cartago, along with Anteo and Fundamentos, were the party’s official publishing houses in charge of doctrinal literature, by both Argentine authors (mostly party leaders) and particularly Soviet ones. However, the communist print network expanded to include imprints that were not strictly partisan, directed by party members or sympathizers who established ties of mutual support and convenience with the party structure, as was the case with Lautaro, Futuro, and Platina. The last one was created in 1955 by communist lawyer Bernardo Edelman and his wife Fanny and, before its definitive closure in 1966, it published approximately one hundred titles in literature, history, philosophy, psychiatry, politics, and science. The party offered support for those who were interested in venturing into publishing, whether in the party or on the margins. For instance, legal advice and protection in a context of persistent harassment, financial assistance when needed, and access to the copyrights and translations of hundreds of authors for free or for token amounts. Also notable was the integration into a transnational circuit for the circulation of publications that, following World War II and the incorporation of the countries of Eastern Europe into the Soviet bloc, along with the triumph of the revolution in China and other Asian territories in the years that followed, would reach, as the communists recalled, hundreds of millions of souls and cover a third of the Earth’s surface. The complexity and breadth of communism’s print network make the publishers, processes, and objects associated with it particularly interesting cases for an intellectual history of the left, as well as for a history of 40 The edition was based on the fourth Russian edition prepared by the Marx-Engels Institute, annexed to the Central Committee of the CPSU, respecting its order and presentation. The party set up a special commission for this task, headed by Orestes Ghioldi.

Source Compiled by the author

52 73 8 16 9 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Problemas 0 15 12 37 33 18 16 18 26 38 26 31 41 35

Anteo 0 2 45 50 53 16 12 8 6 38 12 12 12 6

Lautaro 0 0 6 17 7 4 3 0 2 15 23 11 3 6

Futuro 0 0 0 1 0 5 17 7 1 2 0 1 0 4

Hemisferio 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 10 17 9 18 21 21

Platina 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 13 24 45 0 8 33

Cartago

Number of titles published between 1939 and 1966, by publishing house

1939–1940 1941–1942 1943–1944 1945–1946 1947–1948 1949–1950 1951–1952 1953–1954 1955–1956 1957–1958 1959–1960 1961–1962 1963–1964 1965–1966

Table 1

0 0 0 0 0 1 6 2 3 3 5 3 7 0

Fundamentos

0 0 0 2 0 1 7 5 6 9 14 5 1 1

Others

52 90 71 123 102 45 61 40 67 146 134 81 93 106

Totals

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the book and publishing, with a focus on the role specifically played by the political book. In communist political culture, books and publishing had particular significance and constituted concrete forms of activism, fulfilled multiple functions (not only pedagogical and formative, but also economic), and involved various agents (party leaders, publishers, translators, and booksellers as well as salesmen or “brokers” who brought communist books to remote places and contributed to the creation of family libraries that established signs of party identity and ideological affiliation that transcended generations). These are elements that a cultural and social history of communist culture must account for more broadly, representing a research agenda that is just beginning to take shape.

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Towards a New Type of Party Intellectual

The communist preoccupation with ideological unity and the education and theoretical advancement of its members, shared by the entire communist movement worldwide, was also reflected in its editorial policy. It is in this context that the 1947 edition of the Esbozo de historia del Partido Comunista de la Argentina—a local emulation of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) published in Argentina in 1939—should be considered. It fulfilled the role of an official and standardized account of the trajectory of Argentine communism, of its founding fathers, heroes, and reprobates.41 That same year, the publishing house Problemas, with significant support from the party and particularly from Secretary of Organization Juan José Real, began to

41 Rodolfo and Orestes Ghioldi and Héctor Agosti participated in writing the report. In April, 1948, while the Central Committee of the CPSU announced its resolutions against the “formalist and anti-popular” music of Vano Muradeli and the controversy about the role of intellectuals in communist parties occupied a good part of Orientación’s cultural page, the PCA organized a conference on Communist Education with Victorio Codovilla as the main speaker. Over the course of nine lectures, the top Argentine communist leader sought to complement the work of “ideological clarification” that had begun with the publication of Esbozo…, “masterfully” explaining the essential principles of MarxismLeninism-Stalinism and demonstrating with “irrefutable documentation” that the peoples led by the USSR and popular democracies had already decided in favor of the struggle against imperialism and the reaction and for progress, freedom, and national independence. Anticipating major events to come, the assimilation of these teachings would, they affirmed, avoid divergences and revolutionary spontaneity, arming the communists against the hesitant and reactionaries. See José Morillas, “Las jornadas de educación comunista y el camarada Codovilla,” in Orientación, August 18, 1948.

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publish a Marxist Library, directed by Emilio Troise. It brought together the “essential works” of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist doctrine for the first time in Spanish and instantly became mandatory reading material for old and new communists alike.42 In 1945, after being shut down for two years and under the leadership of Ernesto Giudici, Orientación, the official party publication, reappeared. Its artistic-literary page translated communism’s cultural policy until its new and definitive shutdown in January 1950. With the closure of Orientación as well as the newspaper La Hora in June 1943, the party began to publish Nuestra Palabra, a weekly directed by Héctor P. Agosti, which, though operating in almost constant conditions of illegality, appeared regularly until 1976.43 That same year under the direction of Rodolfo Ghioldi, the publishing house Anteo relaunched the Cuadernos de Cultura Anteo, a series of pamphlets dedicated to disseminating topics related to the Soviet Union and the European communist movement at a time when, as the presentation of the first issue stated,

42 The Marxist Library included: Vladimir I. Lenin, Obras escogidas (4 volumes, 1946), Friedrich Engels, Dialéctica de la naturaleza (1947), Joseph Stalin, J. V. Stalin: Esbozo biográfico (1946), El marxismo y el problema nacional y colonial: Recopilación de artículos y discursos (1946) and Cuestiones del leninismo (1947). For an official reading guide of these works, see Juan José Real, “La edición de una biblioteca marxista,” in Orientación, May 28, 1947. 43 The newspaper La Hora was created in 1940 under the direction of Orestes Ghioldi, Benito Marianetti, and Emilio Troise, fulfilling a long-held desire of the communists for a daily newspaper. In 1942, at the time under the direction of Rodolfo Ghioldi and the sub-direction of Julio Notta, it was suspended on the grounds that it violated the provisions for the press established by the state of siege proclaimed by Roberto Ortiz’s government. After the June 6 coup, it was shut down until 1945, when it reappeared, only to be banned again in 1950. This last closure lasted until May, 1958, when the day after Arturo Frondizi’s presidential inauguration, it reappeared, accompanied by festivities, with Ernesto Giudici as managing editor. The triumph was brief, since in January, 1959, in the midst of a fierce anti-communist campaign, publication ceased, this time definitively. During this period, La Hora welcomed many young people who would later leave the party or be expelled: Andrés Rivera (in charge of trade union news), Juan Gelman (national news), Manuel Mora y Araujo (university news), and Ezequiel Gallo (sports). In that short time, Nuestra Palabra changed its format, began to publish in two colors and abandoned its informative role to become an “ideological and cultural” weekly distributed through subscription. The director was Héctor P. Agosti and Juan Carlos Portantiero acted as managing editor. For a first-person account of the experiences of Nuestra Palabra and La Hora between 1958 and 1959, see Edgardo Mocca’s interview with Juan Carlos Portantiero, Juan Carlos Portantiero: Un itinerario político-intelectual, Buenos Aires, Biblioteca Nacional, 2012, pp. 40 and 41.

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“la artillería del munichismo en decadencia concentra sus fuegos sobre Moscú” [the artillery of Munichism in decline fires on Moscow]. The creation in April, 1949, of the Central Committee’s theoretical journal, Nueva Era, under the direction of Codovilla himself, and a year later of the journal Cuadernos de Cultura Democrática y Popular, dedicated to disseminating the Zhdanovist theses on art and science, would more clearly define the communist leadership’s concern with theoretical and cultural issues and its desire for specialization. The primacy of politics in defining the communist cultural enterprise and its positions was also reflected in the names of those who headed or directed its projects: Ghioldi and Codovilla were the top party leaders, but their prestige in the intellectual field was practically non-existent, though the communists insisted on presenting the former as a great journalist. Cuadernos de Cultura, until the arrival of Agosti in 1952, was directed by Roberto Salama and Isidoro Flaumbaum, two unknown young men, with no capital of their own save what they had accumulated within the party institution due to their persistent attacks on “bourgeois” philosophers and writers, including Francisco Romero, José Luis Romero, Roberto Arlt, Eduardo Mallea, and Ricardo Güiraldes. La aparición de Nueva Era —se afirmaba en Orientación en marzo de 1949— constituirá un hecho de gran importancia en la vida del movimiento obrero y progresista de nuestro país, puesto que en la etapa actual del desarrollo de los sucesos nacionales y mundiales, la lucha en el terreno ideológico ocupa un lugar prominente. Las pseudo teorías que la reacción interna y externa, que los ideólogos y lacayos de la oligarquía, la gran burguesía y el imperialismo tratan de hacer penetrar en el seno de nuestro pueblo, y en primer lugar, de la clase obrera, deben ser desenmascaradas y destruidas, como una de las condiciones para el fortalecimiento de la unidad de nuestra clase obrera y de nuestro pueblo en la lucha por la democracia popular, por la libertad e independencia de nuestra patria.44 [The appearance of Nueva Era —Orientación affirmed in March 1949— represents an important event in the history of the workers’ and progressive movement in our country, since the struggle on ideological terrain plays a prominent role in current developments in national and world events. The pseudo theories that the internal and external reaction, that the ideologists and lackeys of the oligarchy, the big bourgeoisie and imperialism are trying to force into the hearts of our people, and 44 “Nueva Era,” in Orientación, March 30, 1949.

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especially the working class, must be unmasked and destroyed, as one of the conditions for strengthening the unity of our working class and our people in the struggle for popular democracy, for our country’s freedom and independence.]

At the party’s 4th National Conference, held in December, 1945, the issue of intellectuals was openly raised within the framework of the policy for “national unity” being promoted during that period by the communists. At the time, the main problem was channeling the politicization that the “clerical and reactionary advance” of the “June government” had given rise to among intellectuals from the most diverse social and cultural backgrounds. In the preceding months, several professionals, writers, and artists had made their entry into the party public, following the example of Pablo Picasso’s famous text “Why I Became a Communist.” Some of them were already well-known fellow travelers, such as physician Emilio Troise, psychiatrists Jorge Thénon and Julio Luis Peluffo, and illustrators Manuel Kantor and Bartolomé Mirabelli. As a generation shaped by anti-fascist culture, their reasons for joining the party were based precisely on the persistent battle the communists had waged since 1930 and which from 1943, they observed, had become a “heroic resistance” to “Nazi-fascism” and its local acolytes.45 Others, such as musician Atahualpa Yupanqui and the members of the Grupo ArteConcreto Invención (Tomás Maldonado, Edgar Bayley, Manuel Espinosa, Claudio Girola, Alfredo Hlito, and Aldo Prior) based their decision to join the party on more strictly cultural reasons, confident that communism would open up new significance and sensibilities for creativity, art, and life.46 But party support extended far beyond this handful of names. The Festival de la Victoria (Victory Festival), which took place in the Luna Park Stadium on September 25 of that same year and brought together several thousand people, received public support from writers and intellectuals known in communist circles, but also from important popular 45 In the communists’ official account, the period between the June 4, 1943, coup and August 6, 1945, was called the “clandestine resistance,” of which the party was apparently the standard bearer. The parallels with the European communist parties’ resistance during World War II is evident and was one of the reasons why many intellectuals joined the party. See “Páginas de Historia,” in Orientación, October 3, 1945. 46 “El ingreso de los intelectuales al partido,” in Orientación, September 5, 1945; “Artistas adhieren al comunismo,” in Orientación, September 19, 1945, and “Por qué ingreso al PC,” in Orientación, September 5 and 19, 1945.

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artists, such as Delia Garcés, Ada Luz, Francisco Petrone, Roberto Galán, Ángel Magaña, Libertad Lamarque, Narciso Ibáñez Menta, and Zelmar Gueñol.47 The candidacy of Héctor Agosti as a national representative for the Liga por la Libertad y la Resistencia (League for Freedom and Resistance) in the February, 1946, elections was supported by two hundred prominent figures led by Eduardo Mallea, Raquel Forner, Horacio Butler, and Jorge Luis Borges.48 At that conference in late 1945, mathematician Manuel Sadosky explained why so many intellectuals, who were previously indifferent, now found themselves compelled to participate in political life. He argued that the June 4, 1943, military coup had caused them not only moral but also economic and professional harm, exonerating university professors, removing engineers from public office, preventing architects from acting in the private sector, imprisoning lawyers, and censoring journalists, writers, and artists. But he also noted, insightfully, that the intellectual and professional sectors were particularly sensitive to news from around the world, which constantly emphasized the heroic role of the Soviet people in the final defeat of Nazism. Moved and impressed by the development of Soviet culture even at a time of great sacrifice, “first-rate” intellectuals turned their sights to communism and lent their support. It was therefore necessary for the party, in return, to pay them all the attention possible. For Sadosky, who only a few years later would be accused of sympathizing with the Peronist government and expelled along with his wife, scientist Cora Ratto, it was necessary for intellectuals (from teachers to writers) to be active in the trade-union organizations, even in the context of a difficult situation such as the one the new government prefigured, since abandoning the struggle for their rights constituted a political error that facilitated Perón’s strategy of co-optation. Furthermore, although Juan José Real, Secretary of Organization, had remarked in the same conference that the party should make it easier for intellectuals to carry out creative work in their field, the scientist stressed that this should not prevent them from assimilating other forms of party organization, such as working in cells, as all communists did. “En nuestro partido no hay 47 Atahualpa Yupanqui oversaw the artistic programming of the event which included folk groups, tango and jazz orchestras, choirs, Spanish dances, and poetry. See “El gran festival se realizará el martes 25 en el Luna Park” and “Festival de la Victoria,” in Orientación, September 19, 1945 and October 3, 1945. 48 Escritores apoyan la candidatura de Agosti,” in Orientación, February 2, 1945.

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más que una sola clase de afiliados. […] Por lo tanto los intelectuales deben ser asimilados para hacerles adquirir la ideología del partido, que como dijo Stalin, es la ideología del obrero de la gran industria.” [In our party, there is only one type of member. […] Therefore intellectuals must be assimilated to ensure they acquire the party’s ideology, which, as Stalin said, is the ideology of the large-scale industrial worker.]49 For Héctor Agosti, however, the task of that vast group of professionals, technicians, and professors he called “the intelligentsia” was clearly located within the territory of ideas and cultural action, as opposed to at a purely trade-union level. In his remarks, he stressed the fact that Peronism’s “Nazi-Rosist rhetoric” had generated an unprecedented unity among intellectuals, preventing the full realization of the regime’s agenda of “cultural Nazification” and demonstrating that culture was as important a front as any other.50 Nevertheless, the country’s intelligentsia should not settle for participating in an isolated event, but rather take advantage of the occasion to identify the deeper problem it was facing, that is, the social condition of the intellectual in a country where the democratic-bourgeois revolution had been dramatically postponed. Technology and culture, he asserted, cannot expand through a countryside pauperized by latifundia or in a barely industrialized urban environment. Without the economic means to sustain it, there is no technological or scientific development, nor is there a market for culture, since a poorly educated population is incapable of consuming cultural goods. Therefore, in fulfilling its historic mission, the bourgeoisie had to free the peasant masses from the “idiocy of rural life” and spread technology and culture in areas far from civilization. Only then could the intelligentsia deploy its full creative capacity, overcoming its initial contradiction and moving towards a humanism in line with the liberation of mankind. Culture had to take on an essentially civilizing and civic-minded role, and in this context the task of the intelligentsia was to rid official teachings of the scholastic resurrections and existential doctrine that constituted the ideological basis of “local fascism.” Communist intellectuals (writers, artists, and teachers),

49 Manuel Sadosky, “Cuestiones del trabajo intelectual (intervención en la Conferencia Nacional del PC),” in Orientación, January 2, 1946. 50 Héctor P. Agosti, “Sobre algunos problemas de la cultura argentina (discurso pronunciado en la conferencia nacional del Partido Comunista),” in Orientación, February 1946.

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for their part, were to fight the ignorance and slander that plagued dialectical materialism and disseminate it through educational institutions, just as Aníbal Ponce had done or as the French communists did through the Maisons de la Culture. A short time later, as we will see in the following sections, the project of creating a Casa de la Cultura (House of Culture) took shape within the context of the communists’ break with liberal intellectuals and, in particular, with the authorities of CLES which Ponce had helped establish. As often happened in the Argentine communist press, particularly with regards to cultural issues, the discussion between “professionalism” and “workerism” was introduced by referring to the French debate. On two occasions, Orientación published fragments of speeches by the French communist philosopher Roger Garaudy, head of the Commission of Intellectuals of the Communist Party of France (PCF) until 1947, in which the author of Le Communisme et la renaissance de la culture française argued that the work of intellectuals must be professionalized and organized within the party structure, providing them with specific instances in which they could develop their knowledge in favor of the theoretical and cultural improvement of the organization. For Garaudy, intellectuals, as a group, played as important a role as young people, women, or peasants in the task of rebuilding postwar French culture, which is why they needed the same level of monitoring and guidance from the leadership. For this reason, the workerist tendency of some intellectuals, who considered themselves more useful to the party by undertaking tasks that were not specifically intellectual, should be rejected. No podemos permitirnos continuar en nuestra rutina pequeña y estrecha que brinda al partido dos tardes semanales para tareas que no están en consonancia con nuestra propia vocación. Coloquemos en el centro de nuestra vida, particularmente de nuestra vida intelectual, a este gran partido que forja hombres. El partido no tendría ninguna conexión con nosotros y permanecería extraño a nosotros si no nos rehiciera nuestras vidas, ampliándolas, dándoles otro estilo, el estilo de la grandeza. El partido llama la atención hacia nuestros problemas nacionales. Evitemos el individualismo, el esteticismo, la soberbia de tantos desraizados y decadentes intelectuales. […] Solo comportándose de esta manera trabajaremos en forma digna por

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la gloria de Francia, digna de las responsabilidades nacionales de nuestro partido.51 [We cannot continue with our limited and narrow routine of dedicating two afternoons a week to the party for tasks that do not coincide with our own profession. We must place this great party, a party that forges men and women, at the center of our lives, particularly our intellectual lives. The party would have no connection to us and would remain alien if it did not remake our lives, expanding them, giving them a different style, the style of greatness. The party draws attention to our national problems. We must avoid the individualism, the aestheticism, the arrogance of so many uprooted and decadent intellectuals. [...] Only by conducting ourselves in this way can we work in a dignified manner for the glory of France, worthy of the national responsibilities of our party.]

Garaudy’s contribution is interesting because to a large extent it summarizes what the politics of communism will be for intellectuals in the following decade: in political-ideological terms, the adoption of the national problem as a core issue of party intellectual labor; in organizational terms, the framing of this within specialized structures; in functional terms, the promotion of a professional concept which, moving away from both the model of commitment and worker militancy, demanded that intellectuals place their work, their knowledge, and their experience at the service of party needs. After the Cold War broke out, this demand for professionalism exceeded all the limits hitherto known in Western communism. However, as Gisèle Sapiro has pointed out, maintaining the frontist organizations led to the paradox that the extremely coercive nature of the intellectual support for communism in this period was accompanied by the implicit acknowledgement, at the level of the organizational structures, of the relative autonomy of the intellectual professions.52 Ernesto Giudici, then secretary of propaganda of the PCA, in the early years of Peronism proposed a model for reorganizing the various sectors and intellectual and cultural groups around a national structure that would channel specific trade-union demands and at the same time 51 Roger Garaudy, “El marxismo y la cultura francesa,” in Orientación, August 21, 1946. 52 Gisèle Sapiro, “Formes et structures de l’engagement des écrivains communistes en France: De la ‘drôle de guerre’ à la Guerre Froide,” in Sociétés et Représentations, vol. 1, no. 15, 2003, p. 176.

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respond to general issues of national culture. In 1937, as part of the battle against repealing Law 1420,53 Giudici had already posited that the only way to stop the clerical advance was to promote a National Congress of Culture that would unite various political and social sectors in consolidating a comprehensive approach to the issues of national education and culture.54 In the new context that emerged with Perón in the government, he would repeat the formula, noting that the best way to oppose the corporativist attempts of the general in the presidency and to carry out cultural actions in keeping with the new social reality that the country was experiencing was to develop a “new concept” of culture, which he defined as “organic and comprehensive,” channeled through a new type of national organization. Quizás no se obtengan éxitos inmediatos, pero este es el único camino, y solo en él se cosecharán buenos frutos. Preséntense los hombres del campo cultural con un programa común al pueblo, y cada una de las ramas de la cultura con su programa propio como parte de ese programa general, y recomiéncese la batalla sobre nuevas bases y con nuevas perspectivas. Que no se pierda por la desesperación y el pesimismo ningún valor para la democracia y que se ganen otros valores y fuerzas. Y así, todos juntos, en ese gran frente cultural, triunfaremos.55 [Though success may not be immediate, this is the only path forward, and the only true way to reap a fruitful harvest. The men of culture must present an agenda for the people, and each of the branches of culture their own agenda as part of that general agenda, and may the battle recommence on new grounds and with new perspectives. Let no democratic value be lost through despair and pessimism, and may other values and forces be won. In this way, we will all triumph together on this great cultural front.]

The ambition of creating a national organization of intellectuals that would bring the various “branches” of culture and intellectual labor together under a single structure, like the French Union Nationale des Intellectuels (National Union of Intellectuals), was long cherished by the 53 Law 1420 was enacted in 1884 by Julio Argentino Roca’s liberal government and established universal, free, and compulsory education throughout Argentina. 54 See Andrés Bisso, El antifascismo argentino, Buenos Aires, CeDInCI and Buenos Libros, 2007, pp. 258 and 259. 55 Ernesto Giudici, “Frente cultural en la nueva realidad social,” in Orientación, December 11, 1946.

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communists throughout the period studied here, always with little or no success.56 The first systematic attempts to proceed in this direction took place in the wake of the communists’ calamitous efforts at a rapprochement with Peronism in 1952, as we shall see in the next chapter with the Congreso Argentino de la Cultura (Argentine Congress of Culture). Although the topic of the “union of intellectuals” was not original and its foundations could be traced back to the AIAPE, the emphasis on the trade-union issue was part of a new strategy in the cultural domain to which writers—one of the intellectual professions most sensitive to the material facets of creative work due to its precariousness and limited institutionalization—were particularly receptive. Si en los ‘30, el escritor se licuaba en una dimensión política que excedía la especificidad de su campo para lanzarse a la política, en los primeros ‘50 aunque las definiciones macro no estaban ausentes, el escritor —al menos el que se inscribía en la tradición antifascista— se perfila como un profesional de la palabra, condicionado por elementos materiales.57 [If in the 1930s the writer blended into a political dimension that exceeded the specificity of his field to launch himself into politics, in the early 1950s, although macro definitions were not absent, the writer —at least if he were part of the anti-fascist tradition— presents himself as a professional wordsmith, conditioned by material elements.]

The call for professionalism affected all the frontist attempts by the communists to create a national entity to organize intellectual life, from the Asamblea Nacional de Intelectuales (National Assembly of Intellectuals, 1952), through the Congreso Argentino de la Cultura (Argentine Congress of Culture, 1954–1955), to the Unión de Escritores (Writers’ Union, 1962), and the Alianza Nacional de Intelectuales (National Alliance of Intellectuals, 1963–1965).

56 See Daniel Virieux, “La ‘direction des intellectuels communistes’ dans la Résistance française,” in Sociétés & Représentations, no. 15, 2003, pp. 133–153. 57 Ricardo Pasolini, “Avatares de la intelectualidad de izquierda en la Argentina: De la Alianza Nacional Antifascista al Congreso Argentino de la Cultura, 1945–1955,” in Jornadas Académicas “Los opositores al peronismo, 1946–1955,” Buenos Aires, Centro de Historia Política, Escuela de Política y Gobierno, UNSAM, 2010, p. 9.

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Literature and the “Party Spirit”

From the publication of Zhdanov’s report on literature and art in January, 1947, to the anti-vanguard purges of August, 1948, the Argentine party press reflected the bewilderment of the entire communist cultural world in the face of the new Soviet cultural policy. In that unfortunate text, the secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the highest Soviet authority on cultural affairs censored the journals Zvezda and Leningrad for publishing works that were “podridas, vacías y sin profundidad” [rotten, empty, and shallow] and described the satirist Mikhail Zoschenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova as “representantes del obscurantismo reaccionario y renegados en política y en arte, de inspiración burguesa y aristocrática” [representatives of reactionary obscurantism and renegades in politics and art, of bourgeois and aristocratic inspiration].58 The resolutions on art and literature issued by the CPSU Central Committee between 1946 and 1948 were the culmination of a process dating back to the 1930s, when the conflict between the various artistic trends was resolved administratively in favor of socialist realism and the literary and artistic organizations were dissolved to create a single entity, the Union of Soviet Writers. Con ellas no solo se consumaba la ruptura total entre el realismo socialista y las tendencias acusadas de decadentes y formalistas, sino que se rechazaba en bloque el arte de occidente a la vez que se exaltaba en un sentido nacionalista la tradición marxista rusa. Para asegurar la realización de los principios del realismo socialista no solo se exigía una representación verídica que había que conjugar con la exaltación de los “héroes positivos” velando los aspectos negativos (es decir, las contradicciones y dificultades reales), sino que se establecía el alcance de la comunicabilidad artística, y los medios de expresión adecuados para lograrla. Partiendo, a su vez, de una concepción estética utilitaria-social, el partido se convertía en guardián de la pureza ideológica del arte elevando para ello el criterio político al rango de criterio fundamental, con la particularidad de que el criterio político se convertía por ello en estético, consumando así una identificación tan justamente condenaba por Gramsci.59 [These resolutions not only marked a complete break between socialist realism and the tendencies accused of being decadent and formalist, but

58 “Literatura y Arte al servicio del pueblo,” in Orientación, January 8, 1947. 59 Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Estética y marxismo, op. cit., p. 66.

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also rejected Western art as a whole, while at the same time extolling the Russian Marxist tradition in a nationalist sense. In order to ensure the realization of the principles of socialist realism, not only was a true representation required, which had to be coupled with the glorification of “positive heroes” while at the same time guarding against negative aspects (i.e., real contradictions and difficulties), but the scope of artistic communicability was also established, as well as the appropriate means of expression to achieve it. At the same time, starting from a utilitarian-social aesthetic conception, the party became the guardian of the ideological purity of art by elevating the political criterion to the level of a fundamental criterion, with the particularity that the political criterion thus became aesthetic, thereby achieving an identification so rightly condemned by Gramsci.]

By proclaiming an inextricable link between the forms and means of realistic expression and the socialist ideological perspective, and making reflection theory the fundamental aesthetic principle and the cognitive function of art its essential function, realism became the most appropriate—and only—art for the new Soviet society. As Sánchez Vázquez has explained, although realism was capable of fulfilling a more effective ideological and educational function than formalist experiments, often rejected by peasants and workers, the curious thing about its enshrinement is that it was not the result of an artistic development, but of a bureaucratic decision taken with purely political-partisan criteria. The intensification of the surveillance of cultural and intellectual activities left an indelible mark on the period that began in 1946. At its core was the certainty that the party was in a position to play a leading role in the area of artistic activity, not only by fulfilling an ideological-political role, but also by determining the very methods and forms acceptable for creation. All of the Western communist parties tried to apply this kind of control in their respective countries and according to their own conceptions and cultural traditions, with varying degrees of effectiveness and almost inevitably negative consequences. The intellectuals, for their part, did not react en bloc, and their response depended to a large extent on the position that each held both within the party organization and in the broader intellectual sphere. Although during the peak of Zhdanovism, party authorities intervened in all areas of intellectual activity, including those that had previously been excepted, such as scientific research, it was in literature and art where the complete lack of distinction between culture and politics that characterized it was most evident, and also where

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it most affected the space that communists had conquered in the cultural sphere thanks to frontist policies. In Argentina, the communist space was divided by the demand to shape party literature and art according to the postulates of “socialist realism” and the establishment of a critical style that sought to replicate the condemnation of “bourgeois art” within the local literary tradition, which in practice resulted in the condemnation of “bourgeois writers” such as Roberto Arlt and Ricardo Güiraldes. Those who were more willing to defend and promote the new cultural policy, although not always for the same reasons, were, on the one hand, young people who had made a name for themselves in the communist press through virulent attacks on non-communist intellectuals and, on the other, provincial writers and artists who cultivated some form of folklore or poetry with campesino themes, as was the case of Atahualpa Yupanqui, Amaro Villanueva, and Carlos Ruiz Daudet.60 Professionals and leaders who were not involved in literary activity, but who occasionally ventured into essay writing or had responsibilities in some area of cultural work, such as Julio Notta, Benito Marianetti, and, above all, Rodolfo Ghioldi, took on the defense of Zhdanovism with the sole conviction that it was a policy that came from the USSR. Meanwhile, realist writers in the Boedo tradition, such as Raúl Larra and José Portogalo, critical essayists influenced by Aníbal Ponce, such as Héctor P. Agosti, and non-realist artists and critics, such as Cayetano Córdova Iturburu and the Concrete artists who joined the party in 1945, despite differing and often conflicting aesthetic positions created the front that opposed the party’s policies. Within the communist movement, the controversies multiplied. In late 1946, Roger Garaudy and Pierre Hervé publicly rejected the idea that there was only one form of artistic expression and that aesthetics should be subject to political criteria, and Louis Aragon wrote a vehement response to them in the pages of Les Lettres Françaises, with the support of party leadership.61 Shortly thereafter, Garaudy was removed 60 In June, 1948, Atahualpa Yupanqui joined Orientación as a regular contributor through a weekly column called “Hombres y caminos.” That same year, writer Amaro Villanueva from Entre Ríos began to publish stories on campesino themes until October, when he was granted a weekly column dedicated to literary themes. See “Frente y Perfil de Atahualpa Yupanqui,” in Orientación, June 23, 1946. 61 See Philippe Olivera, “Aragon, ‘réaliste socialiste’: Les usages d’une étiquette littéraire des années trente aux années soixante,” in Sociétés & Représentations, no. 15, 2003, pp. 229–246.

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from the leadership of the Commission of Intellectuals and replaced by Laurent Casanova, who, at the 9th Congress of the PCF in June, 1947, called for increased discipline in the intellectual sectors.62 In Italy, Elio Vittorini, director of the journal Il Politecnico, was criticized by Mario Alicata and Palmiro Togliatti as eclectic and intellectualist, giving rise to a controversy that made its way around the world and transformed the Sicilian writer into a symbol of the rejection of Zhdanovism and its national variants. This was the case of Edgar Morin, Dionys Mascolo, and the circle of young writers grouped around Marguerite Duras and her husband Robert Antelme, but also of the young Concrete artist Tomás Maldonado, who had personally participated in the debates that took place at the Encounter of Communist Intellectuals held in Milan in 1948. Sitting before a partisan court that was to decide on his expulsion based on charges of propagating irrationalist, dehumanized, and reactionary art, Maldonado also used Vittorini’s position to defend the possibility that creative activity was not entirely subject to the criteria of political evaluation.63 The Argentine communist publications immediately echoed these European cultural debates and, using them as a base, outlined a map of positions that were closer to perplexity than to peremptory certainties. The journal Expresión (1946–1947), in its section “Espejo de revistas,” directed by Pedro Weill Pattin, dedicated three issues to exploring the Garaudy-Hervé-Aragon controversy.64 The weekly Orientación, while publishing the Soviet resolutions, also opened its literary page up to the European debates covering everything from a reproduction of the speech the disciplined Laurent Casanova gave before the Congress of the PCF to the interview of Vittorini conducted by Morin and Mascolo for Les Lettres Françaises. And although it warned that the statements of the “great Italian novelist” could be controversial, it defended their publication, since “ellas aluden al gran drama cultural de nuestro tiempo, y

62 Olivier Frolin, “Un débat intellectuel en période de Guerre Froide,” in Nouvelle

Foundation, vol. 1, no. 5, 2007, p. 157. 63 See Ana Longoni and Daniela Lucena, “De cómo el ‘júbilo creador’ se trastocó en ‘desfachatez’: El pasaje de Maldonado y los concretos por el Partido Comunista. 1945–1948,” in Políticas de la Memoria, no. 4, 2003/2004, p. 126. 64 This controversy was discussed by Pedro Weill Patin in the journal Expresión, no. 3, pp. 314–316; no. 4, pp. 93–96, and no. 5, pp. 187 and 188.

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hemos preferido publicarlas in extenso, como una contribución a la dilucidación de cuestiones que también a nosotros nos afectan muy de cerca” [they allude to the great cultural drama of our time, and we preferred to publish them in full, as a way of contributing to the clarification of issues that hit close to home].65 In fact, the interview with Vittorini addressed a central problem: the relative autonomy of culture with respect to politics, the premise that a writer’s political positions are different from the nature of their work, and, essentially, the conviction that communism could not be guided by a desire for order or the impulse to construct a collective soul. Es posible que algunos marxistas se engañen sobre este punto. Se engañan aquellos que vendrían al marxismo por amor de la organización, de la unidad por la unidad, por espíritu de “catolicidad”, para hallar la comunión mística de una nueva edad media constructora anónima de nuevas catedrales. Ellos forjan sus sueños de porvenir con sueños del pasado. A todos aquellos que forjan catedrales es necesario oponer el espíritu del protestantismo. […] El marxismo es por esencia antioscurantista. ¿Qué es el oscurantismo? Es querer destruir las cosas de la cultura por otros medios que los de la cultura, es querer destruir libros con otras cosas que libros.66 [It is possible that some Marxists deceive themselves on this point. Those who might turn to Marxism for the love of organization, of unity for unity’s sake, for a spirit of “catholicity,” to find the mystical communion of a new Middle Ages, anonymous builder of new cathedrals, are deceived. They forge their dreams of the future out of dreams of the past. All those who are building cathedrals must be opposed with the spirit of Protestantism. [...] Marxism is by essence anti-obscurantist. What is obscurantism? It is the desire to destroy cultural objects by means other than those of culture, it is the desire to destroy books with something other than books.]

During the first years of the Cold War, this distinction between politics and culture represented a line of resistance for many communist intellectuals, the defense of an “mínimo vital intelectual” [intellectual

65 Laurent Casanova, “La función creadora de los intelectuales,” in Orientación, April 14, 1948, and “Vittorini y la función del escritor revolucionario,” in Orientación, April 21, 1948. 66 Laurent Casanova, “La función creadora…,” op. cit., and “Vittorini y la función…,” op. cit.

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vital minimum], in the words of Edgar Morin, threatened by the pragmatism and religiosity of postwar Stalinism.67 But it was a temporary and ephemeral weapon. In 1951, Vittorini himself left the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). In France, the two main journals created during the Resistance, Les Lettres Françaises and Action, passed into the hands of disciplined communists and La Nouvelle Critique, through Jean Kanapa, emerged to express the cultural discourse of the Cold War.68 The enshrinement of figurative painting and the “realist-socialist” novel as well as the defense of the principles of “proletarian science” were eventually imposed publicly and, despite resistance, shaped the cultural destinies of many communist parties even beyond 1956. One of the first local interpretations of the Zhdanov report was undertaken by essayist Ernesto Giudici. In an article published in Orientación in April, 1947, he stated that since intellectuals could only be leftist—the right-wing intellectual was an impossible category, if not an aberration, at the time and remained so for decades, even in academic studies—it was that vital position that determined their capacity for creation and the content of their work. “En toda obra interesa, pues, en primer lugar, el concepto que tiene de la vida y de sí mismo. Eso es lo que vale y lo que lo define. […] El autor no es una cosa separada del contenido de su obra. Su conducta es parte de su obra como su obra expresa su conducta.” [What is most interesting about every work of art is, first of all, the concept (the author) has of life and of himself. That is what matters and what defines him. […] The author is not separate from the content of his work. His conduct is part of his work just as his work expresses his conduct.]69 For Giudici, a leftist writer should not distinguish his “intellectual profession” from the works he creates, even if that profession is a way to earn a living in a trade outside of artistic creation. In the same way, party activism

67 Edgar Morin, Autocrítica, Barcelona, Kairós, 1976, p. 102 [Autocritique, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1970]. 68 On the early years of La Nouvelle Critique, see Jeannine Verdès, Au service du parti: Le Parti Communiste, les intellectuels et la culture, 1946–1956, Paris, Fayard y Minuit, 1983, pp. 179–188, and for a later period, Frédérique Matonti, Intellectuels communistes: Essai sur l’obéissance politique. La Nouvelle Critique, 1967 –1980, Paris, La Découverte, 2005. 69 Ernesto Giudici, “Creación intelectual y militancia política,” in Orientación, April 2, 1947.

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could not exist in opposition to creation, but rather must form a part of it. No concebimos una creación intelectual al margen de la militancia, ni una militancia que, para el intelectual, no se introduzca en la creación. Admitirlo sería justificar un dualismo irreal, una disociación entre la teoría y la acción, donde la acción es puramente externa, sin convicción, algo así como un trabajo forzado, y la teoría carece de contenido, de empuje, por estar separada de la vida, la propia vida del intelectual es, en esas condiciones, un dualismo.70 [We cannot conceive of intellectual creation outside of political militancy, nor of militancy that, for the intellectual, does not enter into the creative process. To admit this would be to justify an unrealistic dualism, a dissociation between theory and action, where action is purely external, without conviction, rather like forced labor, and theory lacks content, drive, because it is separated from life. The very life of the intellectual is, under these conditions, a dualism.]

This dualism, characteristic of the bourgeois intellectual and of the leftist intellectual subject to the conditions of bourgeois intellectual creation, he affirmed, could only be overcome by uniting the intellectual with the creative forces of the proletariat, whose vanguard was the party. Denying this function meant feeding on the ideas of capitalist decadence, as Zhdanov warned when he demanded that all literature must be party literature. This concept, Giudici observed, was not fully understood by intellectuals, who found it constricting. However, ¿Qué es el partido sino la avanzada de la clase obrera, y qué es esto sino la fuerza revolucionaria de la sociedad? ¿De qué otra ideología puede alimentarse el arte? En el partido se concentra todo y a través del partido se expresa todo. Una literatura de partido es, pues, sobre una fidelidad revolucionaria, la más amplia, la única, por otro lado, revolucionaria. […] El intelectual que siente la vida del partido es el que mejor podrá crear. […] Ocuparse de política no solo es realizar tareas políticas, es sentir la política del partido, conociéndola en toda su proyección. […] Entiende mal su arte quien crea poder alejarse de esa condición política para realizar obras no políticas. El intelectual debe ser político, con la obligación de traducir lo político al lenguaje y expresiones propias del arte. Su campo

70 Ibid.

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específico, integrante del todo social, es el de las ideas, y con ellas debe operar. Su primera tarea, por lo tanto, es ser beligerante contra las ideas enemigas o reaccionarias presentes en el campo de la cultura. Debe estudiar sus formas y desenmascarar sus contenidos.71 [What is the party if not the vanguard of the working class, and what is this if not the revolutionary strength of society? What other ideology can art feed on? The party is the center of everything, and everything is expressed through the party. A party literature is therefore of revolutionary faithfulness, the broadest, the most unique, and, on the other hand, revolutionary. [...] The intellectual who understands life within the party will have the greatest capacity to create. […] To engage in politics is not only to carry out political tasks, it is to have a feeling for the politics of the party, knowing them to the fullest. [...] Those who believe that they can distance themselves from this political condition in order to produce non-political works misunderstand their art. The intellectual must be political, and has the obligation to translate the political into the language and expressions of art. His specific field, part of the social whole, is the field of ideas, and he must work with them. His first task, therefore, is to be belligerent against enemy or reactionary ideas that are present in the cultural sector. He must study their forms and unmask their contents.]

The revolutionary quality of intellectual activity therefore consisted in opposing and denouncing ideas that were contrary to those of the party. In practice, this was often reduced to both an exercise in personal disparagement that dispensed with the possibility of a Marxist critique of the works and the promotion of a pamphletary and aesthetically impoverished art. The intellectual who did not take on this task remained a slave to the enemy, becoming a conduit for their ideas within the working class. “Su ser pertenece al enemigo, independientemente de su voluntad o deseos. Esa es la libertad que no tiene y que debe conquistar o reconquistar. Su propia contradicción es la que, en primer término, debe suprimir.” [His very being belongs to the enemy, regardless of his will or desires. That is the freedom he lacks and which he must conquer or re-conquer. It is his own contradiction that he must first suppress.]72 One of the first to sound the alarm about the poor results that could arise from the implementation of Zhdanovism in literature was writer 71 Ernesto Giudici, “Creación intelectual y militancia política,” op. cit. 72 Ibid.

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Enrique Wernicke. With a plebeian trajectory like many other communist writers, Wernicke supported his literary work through a wide variety of trades, including puppetry, advertising, making tin soldiers, and growing orchids. Marginal with respect to the established literary circles, including the cenacles of communism, from which he would be expelled, Wernicke was able to clearly see the tensions that arose between the outlines of his literary project and party demands and, ultimately, the absurdity of a gesture that although useless was no less harmful. In June, 1947, he wrote in his diary: “Sé cómo sería el libro que me gustaría escribir. Pero es indudable que, aparentemente, mis gustos contradicen mi ideología. O será que no, que profundamente, en lo más hondo de mí, están de acuerdo.” [I know what the book I would like to write would look like. But it is undeniable that my tastes apparently contradict my ideology. Or perhaps they don’t, perhaps deep down, in my heart, they coincide.]73 And two days later: “Para mí, trampa sería hablar de obreros que no ‘he vivido’, de miserias físicas que no he conocido y de angustias económicas que hasta hoy no he probado.” [For me, it would be cheating to speak of workers whose shoes I have not walked in, physical hardships I have not known, and economic distress I have not experienced to this day.]74 A few months later, those private dissidences were made public when Wernicke decided to respond to the criticisms that the essayist and party leader Julio Notta leveled against his book of short stories El Señor Cisne, published by Sara Jorge, his partner at the time, through Lautaro in 1947. Resorting to terms commonly used in communist criticism of the period, Notta described the book as “decadent literature” depicting “petit-bourgeois characters” and its author as an anarchist and libertine. Wernicke replied: Como es de suponer, estoy en absoluto desacuerdo. Advierto, en primer lugar, que tengo absoluta conciencia de lo que escribo y cómo lo escribo. En segundo lugar, también conviene decirlo, pretendo como comunista saber que lo hago. Y ahora, recordemos el problema particular de si es decadente o no, pintar personajes negativos, ha sido discutido por los

73 Excerpts from Wernicke’s diaries were recovered by Jorge Asís and published in issue no. 29 of the journal Crisis, under the title that the writer himself had chosen: “Melpómene,” Buenos Aires, September 1975, pp. 28–35. The citations belong to that edition. 74 Ibid., p. 28.

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comunistas de todo el mundo (Francia, Hungría, Unión Soviética, e inclusive Argentina). Desgraciadamente, la discusión sigue en pie y hasta la fecha no se ha dilucidado nada. Los escritores comunistas argentinos no hemos tomado ningún partido todavía. Yo, el autor del “Señor Cisne”, no tengo el menor reparo en decir que para mí la literatura decadente no es aquella que pinta personajes negativos, sino aquella que los enaltece. De otro modo, debería incluir en la categoría de decadente a muchos escritores realistas como ser Maupassant, Gorki, Erskine Caldwell, Balzac, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky y tantos otros bien leídos y apreciados por los comunistas de la Unión Soviética. Que me perdone el compañero Notta esta afirmación tan rotunda, pero piense que si mi manera de pensar puede significar un peligro, también la suya es excesivamente apresurada y estrecha.75 [As you might expect, I strongly disagree. First of all, I am absolutely aware of what I am writing and how I am writing it. Secondly, it should also be said, I expect as a communist to know what I am doing. And now, let’s remember that the particular question of whether it is decadent or not, to depict negative characters, has been discussed by communists all over the world (France, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and even Argentina). Unfortunately, the discussion is still ongoing and so far nothing has been clarified. Argentine communist writers have not yet taken any stand. As the author of “Señor Cisne,” I have no qualms in saying that for me, decadent literature is not that which depicts negative characters, but that which exalts them. Otherwise, many realist authors such as Maupassant, Gorky, Erskine Caldwell, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and so many others read and appreciated by the communists of the Soviet Union, ought to be included in the category of decadent. I hope comrade Notta can forgive me for this categorical statement, but if my way of thinking can represent a danger, his is also excessively hasty and restrictive.]

Given Notta’s demand to produce literature of an uplifting nature that not only reflected reality, but also envisioned its future, Wernicke was clear on the difference between the party activist and the writer, the difference between the militant from the party base who is capable of approaching the working class world and the writer who, because of his class origin, is unable to depict that world without mediation.

75 Enrique Wernicke, “Respuesta a una crítica,” in Orientación, November 19, 1947.

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Se me dirá que el mismo partido me brinda ahora la oportunidad de compartir la lucha proletaria. Así es, realmente, y por esta razón milito en la base, en el pueblo de Vicente López. Pero el compañero Notta debe comprender que ese “conocimiento” que me exijo no se logra en un día, ni en un año, sino en muy largo tiempo. A veces todavía no se logra nunca, pues son tales las barreras reales, económicas, sociales, etc. que separan la burguesía del proletariado que, aun cuando se pueda salvar como militante, a veces como artista no se lo consigue.76 [I am told that the same party now gives me the opportunity to share in the proletarian struggle. This is indeed the case, and that is why I am involved at the party grassroots, in the town of Vicente López. But comrade Notta must understand that this “knowledge” I expect of myself is not achieved in a day, or in a year, but over a very long time. Sometimes it is never achieved, since the actual barriers, economic, social, etc., that separate the bourgeoisie from the proletariat are such that, even if one manages to save oneself as a party militant, sometimes as an artist this cannot be achieved.]

On the same page that this text appeared, the Concrete artist Tomás Maldonado contributed to the discussion regarding the accusations of formalism that the Soviets had leveled at Picasso and Matisse in Pravda and the reaction this had provoked among seasoned communists, such as Ilya Ehrenburg and Louis Aragon. These discussions, Maldonado insisted, demonstrated that in the communist sphere there was room for dissent and freedom of artistic expression, since, as Garaudy had affirmed—in a statement he would soon regret—party artists did not wear uniforms. It was not a matter, then, of pondering whether or not these artists were responsible for “polluting” the pure air of Soviet art, but that such things were responded to and criticized, given the slanderous bourgeois press bent on discrediting the USSR. “En verdad, no hay una estética oficial del comunismo, no puede haberla. Hay, sí, una ética comunista que el artista militante no puede de ningún modo desoír —no es posible ser comunista y cantar a la desesperación, al nihilismo, al sueño o los parques desolados— pero no una estética.” [In truth, there is no official communist aesthetic, there cannot be. There is, however, a communist ethic that the committed artist cannot in any way disregard—it is impossible to be a communist and sing of despair, of nihilism, of sleep, or

76 Enrique Wernicke, “Respuesta a una crítica,” op. cit.

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of desolate parks—but not an aesthetics.]77 Maldonado joined the PCA in 1945, bringing his colleagues of the Arte Concreto-Invención group with him. Although the group never held a prominent position in the communist visual arts scene, which was monopolized by the Arte Mural workshop led by Antonio Berni, the Concrete artists achieved a degree of visibility in the party press, although it preferred their articles to their paintings and non-figurative productions, which were rarely reproduced. For a couple of years, Argentine communism was able to accommodate an eclectic coexistence, as Daniela Lucena has explained, between several different aesthetic proposals and promote an “expanded conception” of realism where tradition and vanguard, realism and abstraction merged.78 In 1948, that uncomfortable but achievable coexistence would no longer be viable, as demonstrated in the response of muralist Raúl Monsegur to Maldonado’s celebration of democratization: not only is there a communist aesthetics, but denying it is tantamount to rejecting “Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist philosophy” and its development. The party held aesthetic principles that communist artists should not hesitate to proclaim, even at the cost of losing new members or friends along the way. Frontism ended where eclecticism began. Unity was a thing of the past.79 While communist writers were debating internal controversies, liberal intellectuals were quick to react to the news coming from Moscow. The journal Realidad, directed by philosopher Francisco Romero, commented extensively on the artistic purges and their European echoes, especially Vittorini’s statements.80 In the pages of Sur, poet and critic Eduardo González Lanuza launched an appeal “To the communist intellectuals of Hispanic America” where he called for a rejection of the sanctions against composers Sergey Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich for their “antidemocratic” music. If such “delusional absurdity” and “sinister” attitude were really the case for the political party, he said, then intellectuals who

77 Tomás Maldonado, “Picasso, Matisse y la libertad de expresión,” in Orientación, November 19, 1947. 78 Daniela Lucena, Contaminación artística: Vanguardia concreta, comunismo y peronismo en los años 40, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2015, p. 109. 79 Raúl Monsegur, “Sobre la estética comunista,” in Orientación, January 6, 1948. 80 See the section “La caravana inmóvil,” in Realidad, no. 9, May/June, 1948,

pp. 412–418.

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remained silent should refrain from “ever uttering the word freedom.”81 As the writer Raúl Larra later explained, perhaps because no communist writer wanted to take on the defense of the denigrating measures against Soviet artists and writers that Orientación published in full page form, the initial response to Lanuza’s call was limited to the reproduction of fragments of an article by Pierre Kaldar originally published in Les Lettres Françaises, where he defended the right of the Soviet State, which promoted art more than any other in the world, to deem certain musical experiments unpopular.82 Several days later, however, lawyer Benito Marianetti presented a long and clichéd response, noting that he was doing so as a communist and not as an intellectual or representative of the intelligentsia. In it he argued that in a socialist society artistic creation should be approached in the same way as agriculture or dam building, since art was not a separate activity from society, but rather one among many. The direct link between organized society and artistic “production” was, in the USSR, an innovative development, since it allowed the people to intervene in all aspects of cultural life through a sustained process of discussion and criticism, after which there was no room for dissent or individual rebelliousness typical of capitalist societies, where they were necessary and even revolutionary. Based on this, it was absurd and outrageous to conclude that the Soviet state was exercising a dictatorship over artists and their works, since, as long as the State represented organized Soviet society in political power, it was doing nothing but codifying what the people and the intellectuals themselves had debated and resolved.83

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The Anti-Vanguard Purges

In mid-1948, Argentina’s communist leadership sought to put cultural affairs in order since they appeared increasingly removed from the need at the time for “ideological unity.” In an effort to eliminate discrepancies, Juan José Real, Secretary of Organization, and Rodolfo Ghioldi, an informal authority of the intellectual front, convened a series of meetings 81 “A los intelectuales comunistas de Hispanoamérica,” in Sur, no. 160, February, 1948, pp. 65 and 66. 82 Interview with Raúl Larra, 1990, courtesy of Alicia García Gilabert; “Formalismo e inspiración: Sobre la carta de Lanuza y otros,” in Orientación, June 23, 1948. 83 Benito Marianetti, “Respuesta a una invitación,” in Orientación, July 7, 14 and 21, 1948.

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with writers and artists, which, due to the animated discussions, extended over the course of three days in August. The only detailed testimony available of the events of those days is that of Raúl Larra, who spoke of them in an interview in 1990 and later in an unpublished text dedicated to the memory of Héctor Agosti. According to Larra, the publication of a series of articles by Soviet writers on the degeneration of bourgeois art, the condemnation of Prokofiev, and similar topics in Orientación caused significant malaise among a group of communist writers, including Héctor P. Agosti, who had already been denounced for his presumed opposition to the new cultural directives.84 According to Larra, Agosti was warned that the ultimate purpose of these meetings was to uncover an “intellectual faction” among the writers and artists that would result in their expulsion.85 For this reason, he chose not to attend the first session, and consequently had to respond to the accusation that his work did not take the party’s political positions into account. In the following meeting, the inquisitorial tone caused Agosti to look to older and recognized figures for support, such as physicians Emilio Troise and Jorge Thénon, whose views had the advantage of being backed by science rather than increasingly weak and essentially capricious artistic discourse. Emilio Troise was also a member of the Central Committee and a recognized and esteemed figure in the Argentine intellectual milieu, president of the Liga por los Derechos del Hombre (League for Human Rights) and the Comité contra el Racismo y el Antisemitismo (Committee Against Racism and Anti-Semitism), and author of one of the first and only books on Marxist philosophy written in the country. Expelling him was not a cost that Ghioldi and Real were

84 A few days before the first meeting, an incident had taken place between Héctor P.

Agosti and the young Salama and Flaumbaum regarding the issue of culture. It ended in insults, the two youths thrown out of the essayist’s house, and Agosti denounced to Real. 85 According to Raúl Larra, the aim of Juan José Real was to discredit Rodolfo Ghioldi in the eyes of the intellectuals, over whom he had significant influence. With the usual indulgence with which the communist intellectuals treated Ghioldi, Larra maintains that Real intended to “isolate” Ghioldi, who got involved out of a characteristic sense of absolute solidarity with the USSR. Larra also points out that Real had a particular dislike for Agosti, dating back to the days when he visited him at the boarding house on Callao Street where the essayist stayed when he returned from his exile in Montevideo. Interested in his views on national politics, Real had come face to face with Agosti’s blunt anti-Peronism at the time (interview with Raúl Larra, 1990, op. cit.).

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prepared to pay, and the group of writers survived, even going as far as to believe they had defeated the Central Committee. El polémico debate partidario en tres sesiones en que so pretexto de discutir las teorías de Zhdánov y el realismo socialista se buscaba descubrir una supuesta fracción de intelectuales con Héctor a la cabeza para expulsar a sus integrantes. Héctor no asistió a la primera pero sí a la segunda y rechazó una absolución de posiciones ante los prosélitos del Gran Inquisidor. Advertido de la maniobra convenció a Emilio Troise y a Jorge Thénon a asistir a la sesión siguiente, que habría de ser la última. Troise, el viejo soreliano, el amigo de Pepe [José] Ingenieros, se puso a repartir mandobles verbales a los dogmáticos, con el apoyo tácito de Thénon. Entonces, en trance de sancionar también a ellos, clausuraron el debate y la reunión. Salimos eufóricos y el meridional Pepe [José] Portogalo no cesaba de vociferar alborozado: ¡derrotamos el comité central, lo derrotamos!86 [The controversial party debate, which lasted three sessions and was held under the pretext of discussing Zhdanov’s theories and socialist realism, sought to uncover a supposed faction of intellectuals led by Héctor in order to expel them. Héctor did not attend the first session, but did attend the second and refused an acquittal before the proselytes of the Grand Inquisitor. Aware of the maneuver, he convinced Emilio Troise and Jorge Thénon to attend the next session, which would turn out to be the last. The old Sorelian Troise, Pepe [José] Ingenieros’ friend, started to deliver verbal blows to the dogmatists, with the tacit support of Thénon. So at risk of sanctioning them as well, they shut down the debate and the meeting. We left euphorically with the southerner Pepe [José] Portogalo continuously shouting in excitement: we defeated the central committee, we defeated it!]

Cultural Zhdanovism was, in Argentina as in most Western countries, a Soviet export that was imposed by the leadership on its intellectuals and artists, who reacted in different ways, according to their position within the party structure as well as in the broader cultural sphere. Throughout the world, prestigious writers such as Louis Aragon, Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Amado heeded the call for socialist realism and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to produce a literature that responded to its requirements, only to abandon it a few years later. Despite the fact that their names lent legitimacy to a process that broke away from 86 Raúl Larra, “Héctor Agosti: Ausente y presente,” July 29, 1991, courtesy of Alicia García Gilabert.

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previous practices and resulted in the distancing or expulsion of numerous comrades, it was intellectuals of lesser renown or prestige who became true crusaders of the more sectarian, conservative, and confrontational aspects that the process entailed. In Argentina, cultural Zhdanovism in literary and artistic circles was met with resistance by intellectuals who, educated in the anti-fascist experience and coming from the social literature of the 1920s, were not willing to accept its more crudely dirigiste and reductionist elements, without questioning realist epistemology. This was the case of Raúl Larra and José Portogalo, two writers who had gained prestige in leftist cultural circles, albeit outside the sphere of “legitimate” culture as established at the time by the constellation of writers surrounding the journal Sur. Raúl González Tuñón and Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, though from the same generation, took divergent paths, influenced by their ties to the artistic avant-garde. Tuñón barely participated in the disciplinary meetings, limiting himself to saying “everything that comes from the USSR is fine” and leaving without looking back. However, this dismissive gesture does not necessarily imply that he supported the terms set out to govern communist literary activity. In his speech before the Congreso Continental de la Cultura (Continental Congress of Culture) in 1953, while Pablo Neruda condemned the “degenerate art” of the bourgeoisie, Tuñón championed the legacy of modernism, the formative experience of the avant-garde, and the freedom and breadth of forms in which social and realist “content” could be expressed, while at the same time condemning naturalism, photographic copying, and the convention of reality. For Tuñón, socialist realism, as defined by Maxim Gorky, was not a “restrictive theory,” but a “guide” according to which diverse forms, styles, and genres could be chosen, in addition to being an unworkable formula in its fullest sense in non-socialist countries. No es obligatorio escribir siempre poemas sociales o civiles o novelas sociales y políticas. […] Siempre habrá una literatura de la realidad y siempre habrá una literatura de la fantasía, y de ambas a la vez, que para mí es el armonioso equilibrio. ¡Siempre habrá rosas! Pero esto no quiere decir que el poeta, el novelista, el artista, cuando el destino le reclama y le exige el poema de actualidad palpitante y contenido combativo, la novela con salida histórica implícita o explícita, etc., debe negarse a ello, porque sería renunciar a otro acto de belleza y desvirtuar la propia esencia humana del arte, negarse a la defensa de la vida. […]

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Por eso entiendo que se impone ahora una poesía, una literatura en general, un arte, en fin, que esté en la línea de la herencia cultural progresista de la humanidad —que no está en el camino del artepurismo à outrance ni de la desviación sectaria—. Es la línea del nuevo realismo. Yo exalto una poesía, una literatura, un arte, que no rechaza la gran imaginación creadora, ni el vuelo y la riqueza de la forma, pero que tiene sus raíces en la tierra, consustanciándose con el hombre, el mundo y la rosa, con la defensa de la cultura y la transformación de la vida.87 [One does not have to always write social or civil poems or social and political novels. [...] There will always be a literature of reality and there will always be a literature of fantasy, and of both at the same time, which for me is the most harmonious balance. There will always be roses! But this does not mean that the poet, the novelist, the artist must refuse when destiny calls on him and demands a poem with topical vitality and combative content, a novel with an implicit or explicit historical outcome, etc. because that would mean renouncing another act of beauty and distorting the very human essence of art, refusing to defend life. […] That is why my understanding is that at the moment, what prevails is a poetry, a literature in general, an art in line with the progressive cultural heritage of humanity —which is not on the path of art-for-art à outrance or sectarian deviation. It is the path of new realism. I celebrate a poetry, a literature, an art which does not reject the great creative imagination or flight and the richness of form, but which has its roots in the earth, in harmony with man, the world, and the rose, with the defense of culture and the transformation of life.]

Agosti’s intellectual background, his experience as a cultural critic, and above all, his rejection of any attempt to make a radical break with the cultural traditions that would lead to a form of artistic populism did not appear to indicate the slightest willingness to accept the new cultural coordinates coming from the USSR, particularly with respect to drawing a line between a “misanthropic culture of the bourgeoisie,” as Alexander Fadeyev had defined it in Wrocław, and a “culture of the people” that had to be defended and exalted, a position that reminded him with distaste of the Proletkult of the 1920s, which Lenin had so strongly opposed. Moreover, since the publication of his Defensa del realismo in 1945, he had become the only non-European communist intellectual to propose

87 “La batalla del espíritu,” speech delivered at the Continental Cultural Congress, in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 12, July, 1953, p. 16.

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a theoretical approach to realist aesthetics whose most immediate political purpose was to combat the “vulgar sociologism” that reduced realist literature to a mere record of reality. In Agosti’s view, the resurgence of the sectarianism that the Soviet positions encouraged did not coincide with the “national” needs of Latin American countries, and the aesthetic discussions the party had become immersed in seemed to him to be a prime example of the disconnection and the futility of attempting to mechanically reproduce the Soviet dictates. While recognizing that the battle against the “mechanistic distorters of Marxism” had resulted in writers being regarded with suspicion by the leadership, his position was backed by Victorio Codovilla, uninterested in aesthetic considerations and more concerned with ensuring that Agosti simply declared his loyalty to the “party line.”88 In that sense, his favorable response and the promise of organizing facilitated the creation of Nueva Gaceta, a biweekly journal with a modern design and a broad conception of cultural issues, which he co-directed with Roger Pla and Enrique Policastro. Nueva Gaceta, a name which reflected the legacy of the AIAPE, published four issues between October and November 1949. With a pluralistic spirit and a marked focus on the graphic aspects that earned it widespread praise from the mainstream press, it published articles on painting, film, social sciences, and the visual arts by authors from Argentina and abroad. Its pages included praise and recognition of everyone from Antonin Artaud and Edgar Allan Poe to Jorge Luis Borges, in addition to treating those who issued ultimatums

88 Letter from Héctor P. Agosti to Enrique Amorim, in Héctor P. Agosti, Los infortunios de la realidad: En torno a la correspondencia con Enrique Amorim, Buenos Aires, n.d., p. 52.

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to writers and artists as “cretins.”89 Nueva Gaceta did not manage to publish a fifth issue, apparently due to problems with the printing house. Agosti’s relative good fortune did not extend to the essayist, journalist, and art critic Cayetano Cordova, who ended up expelled along with the artists of the Concrete avant-garde. Like Raúl González Tuñón, Córdova Iturburu joined the PCA in 1934 through the anti-fascism movement. From a family of distinguished predecessors, he was a leading figure in the avant-garde groups of the 1920s, one of the founders of the AIAPE, a correspondent on the Republican front for the daily Crítica, and a constant contributor to the communist journals and press, where he never ceased to defend the idea that political art did not owe its condition to the imposition of a method or style, realistic or otherwise. This position proved fatal in determining his future in the party, to the point that Larra himself defined Córdova’s views as a defense of “art for art’s sake,” and Agosti was saddened that those who had objected to “simples traducciones mecánicas de ajenas realidades de la vida y el pensamiento” [simple mechanical translations of the foreign realities of life and thought] exchanged “muchas macanas” [a great deal of nonsense], like that of the “inefable Policho” [ineffable Policho].90

89 In its second issue, the journal echoed a debate in the French communist media about Colette, described by some critics as the “testimony of a stinking, vicious, and corrupt world.” Reproducing André Wurmser’s remarks, the journal stated: “Nosotros (aclara el autor) debemos desear y propulsar una literatura cuya estética corresponda a nuestra lucha, a nuestras esperanzas; pero ¿qué cretino ha pensado jamás en la eficacia de una crítica con carácter de ultimátum a los escritores y artistas?… La crítica realista no juzga a ningún autor ni obra maestra fuera del tiempo y el espacio.” [We (the author clarifies) must desire and promote a literature with an aesthetic that corresponds to our struggle, to our hopes; but what cretin has never thought about the effectiveness of criticism as an ultimatum for writers and artists?… Realistic criticism does not judge any author or masterpiece outside of time and space.] (“Colette: El más grande escritor viviente de Francia,” in Nueva Gaceta, no. 2, p. 6). According to Larra’s testimony, the journal’s support for Wurmser’s words did not go unnoticed and it received a reprimand from Rodolfo Ghioldi and Alfredo Varela (interview with Raúl Larra, 1990, op. cit.). It is nevertheless interesting that in a journal that resulted from the struggle against Zhdanovism, Gregorio Bermann published an article condemning psychoanalysis, directly echoing the French debate, but in the opposite sense to that intended by the writers. See Hugo Vezzetti, Psiquiatría, psicoanálisis y cultura comunista: Batallas ideológicas en la Guerra Fría, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2016, pp. 23–78. 90 Pseudonym of Cayetano Córdova Iturburu. Letter from Héctor P. Agosti to Enrique Amorim, in Héctor P. Agosti, Los infortunios de la realidad, op. cit.

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The dispute between Córdova Iturburu and Rodolfo Ghioldi that began in August was carried on through letters that allow us to reconstruct just how unacceptable the position of the author of Cuatro perfiles was to the communist leadership. Indeed, faced with the indefinite continuation of the debate among visual artists, Ghioldi decided to approach Córdova Iturburu through a private letter in which he reproached him for his inveterate defense of the modernist heritage, attacked by the Soviets. In Ghioldi’s view, Córdova’s error consisted in reducing the appreciation of the modernist tradition to the search for new expressive means, when the appropriate method was to evaluate it with respect to the artistic conception he was proposing.91 “No veo pues la injusticia de los soviéticos, sino la inconsecuencia de los escritores y artistas comunistas que no lo comprenden, y que adoptan el realismo militante como norma crítica para la filosofía, la religión, el derecho, la pedagogía o lo que sea, para abandonarlo cuando se trata de cuestiones estéticas.” [I do not therefore see the injustice of the Soviets, but the inconsistency of the communist writers and artists who do not understand it, and who adopt militant realism as a critical standard for philosophy, religion, law, pedagogy, or the like, in order to abandon it when it comes to aesthetic concerns.]92 For Ghioldi, modernism could not be considered a necessary stage in the formation of a communist creator, as Córdova Iturburu argued, just as the position that critical work should not be subject to any externally imposed criteria of legality was unacceptable: Tú reclamas la plena libertad del artista, del escritor; piedra libre sin limitaciones. Lenin no piensa así, ni Engels. […] Si libertad quiere decir que el creador pone lo suyo, lo propiamente suyo, ¿qué duda cabe? Eso no se lo quita ni se lo da ningún reglamento. Pero nosotros, hombres de vanguardia también en la cultura, ¿podemos admitir que en nombre de la libertad se propague el irracionalismo, el antihumanismo, la reacción?93

91 There were two meetings, one of visual artists and the other of writers. Córdova Iturburu, writer and art critic, attended both. 92 Letter from Rodolfo Ghioldi to Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, Buenos Aires, August 23, 1948, Fondo Cayetano Córdova Itruburu/ Cayetano Córdova Iturburu Collection/CeDInCI; FCCI/CeDInCI. Reproduced in Horacio Tarcus and Ana Longoni, “Purga antivanguardista,” in Ramona: Revista de artes visuales, no. 14, July 2001, pp. 55–57. 93 Ibid.

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[You demand full freedom for the artist, for the writer; carte blanche with no limitations. Lenin does not think that way, nor does Engels. [...] If freedom means that the creator offers something of himself, something truly his, who can doubt that? There is no regulation that can take that away or give that to him. But as men of the avant-garde in culture as well, can we allow irrationalism, anti-humanism, and the reaction to propagate in the name of freedom?]

Córdova Iturburu’s response arrived three weeks later. In a cordial tone though not without a certain degree of authority on the matters addressed that Ghioldi obviously lacked, he began by stating: Yo no me quejo —como parecés creerlo vos— del tratamiento injusto que los soviéticos dan a los modernistas. Mi actitud es otra. Lamento ese tratamiento. Y lo lamento no por los modernistas, sino porque pienso que no es posible un arte revolucionario, nuestro, comunista, sin la utilización de los elementos estéticos y técnicos proporcionados por la gran experiencia artística y literaria de nuestra época. Pienso, en una palabra, que no podemos hablar válidamente, desde el punto de vista artístico sino con el idioma artístico de nuestra edad. La sensibilidad del hombre moderno es una consecuencia de los factores sociales, políticos, económicos y técnicos de nuestro tiempo.94 [I am not complaining —as you seem to believe— about the unfair treatment of the modernists by the Soviets. My position is different. I regret that treatment. And I regret it not because of the modernists, but because I do not believe that an art that is revolutionary, ours, communist, is possible without the use of aesthetic and technical elements produced by the great artistic and literary experiences of our era. I think, in short, that we cannot speak validly, from an artistic point of view, unless we use the artistic language of our age. The sensibility of modern man is a consequence of the social, political, economic, and technical factors of our time.]

Rejecting the concept of the “dehumanization of art”—which, he reminds him, was launched by José Ortega y Gasset in a lecture “for well-dressed and perfumed ladies”—as an inconsistent generalization for speaking about all modern art, Córdova does not hesitate to challenge 94 Letter from Cayetano Córdova Iturburu to Rodolfo Ghioldi, Buenos Aires, September 16, 1948, FCCI/CeDInCI. Reproduced in Horacio Tarcus and Ana Longoni, “Purga antivanguardista,” op. cit., pp. 55–57.

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the nineteenth century naturalism that permeated Soviet art. Far from being a revolutionary art, it was merely a way of expressing the “new world with an old language.” To affirm, moreover, that expressionism, impressionism, or surrealism represented a dehumanized art was mistaken and imprecise, since all of these schools had attempted to express specific tangible worlds, achieving along the way “descubrimientos e invenciones en el terreno de la expresión formal que, en mi criterio, son positivos, esto es, utilizables para la realización de un arte revolucionario” [discoveries and inventions in the field of formal expression that, in my opinion, are positive, that is, usable in the creation of revolutionary art]. A short time after this apparently friendly exchange, Córdova Iturburu would be expelled from the party, citing a lack of commitment to working in the cell he was part of. The publication of a letter stating the reasons for his expulsion gave rise to a wide range of interpretations, some clearly celebratory and anti-communist, which he found deeply disturbing. Comparing him to Victor Kravchenko, the communists accused him of providing ammunition to the reaction, of colluding with Peronism, and of trying to infuse the party with aesthetic conceptions of bourgeois decay.95 In April, 1949, Córdova circulated a new letter among his friends and acquaintances, in which he expressed great regret that his statements had been used by “class enemies” against the party and against his own ideas. Reaffirming his faith in communism, his loyalty to 95 Victor Kravchenko was a Red Army captain and Ukrainian official who in 1944, taking advantage of an official trade visit to the United States, requested asylum in that country. In 1946, he published an autobiographical book entitled I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official, in which he denounced the Soviet prisoncamp regime, which a year later was translated into French by the publishing house Selft. The book sparked a memorable controversy typical of the Cold War era. In the pages of the most important literary journal of the PCF, Les Lettres Françaises, it was denounced as a fraud and it was alleged that the text had been written by American intelligence services and that the supposed author was a phony and a drunkard. Kravchenko filed a lawsuit against those responsible for the publication and demanded compensation. The main figures of French intellectual communism appeared as witnesses to the alleged falsity of the testimony and military and high-ranking officials traveled from the USSR. The echoes of the trial were felt around the globe and the book became a veritable bestseller. In Argentina, it was published under the title Yo elegí la libertad in 1947 by the Guillermo Kraft publishing house, translated by Enrique Rojas Vela. Kravchenko visited Argentina in September 1950, invited by Kraft. The communist press immediately blamed Perón’s government and accused him of using the Soviet defector as a propaganda agent to promote the country’s support for the Korean War. See “A la Argentina, confundida con un recipiente de basura, llegó Kravchenko,” in Nuestra Palabra, September 25, 1950.

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the USSR and to the values of social justice that had led him to join the party, he stated: Nadie —ni enemigo ni amigo— espere, por eso, verme engrosar las filas de la reacción o convertido en testigo de cargo contra la Unión Soviética, con el comunismo, contra nuestro Partido Comunista o contra los comunistas mismos, sea cual sea el sentido o el carácter de los ataques o halagos que se me dirijan. […] Sigo siendo comunista, insisto en ello. Y si alguna idea concibo, por eso, relacionada con una futura participación mía en política, es la de mi retorno a las filas en que viví, junto a camaradas queridos, tantas felices e inolvidables jornadas de batalla. Pero, entretanto, ni la incomprensión de unos ni el regocijo malevolente de otros van a empujarme a las turbias posiciones de la apostasía, a la abjuración de las convicciones que animan mi esperanza y mi fe en el advenimiento de mejores días para el hombre.96 [No one —neither enemy nor friend— expects, therefore, to see me join the ranks of the reactionaries or become a witness for the prosecution against the Soviet Union, against communism, against our Communist Party, or against the communists themselves, regardless of the significance or character of the attacks or flattery directed at me. [...] I am still a communist, I insist on this. And if I have any thought, therefore, related to my future participation in politics, it is that of returning to the ranks in which I experienced, along with my beloved comrades, so many happy and unforgettable days of this struggle. But, in the meantime, neither the incomprehension of some nor the malevolent joy of others will push me into the turbid waters of apostasy, to the abjuration of the convictions that give me hope and faith in the coming of better days for mankind.]

The “anti-vanguard purge” of 1948 had an effect on the potential for an autonomous conception of culture within communism for years, in an almost definitive way. From that point on, the “cultural question” would continue to be a source of conflict and permanent suspicion. Until the traumatic year of 1956 when the Primera Reunión de Intelectuales Comunistas (First Meeting of Communist Intellectuals) in the thirty-eight years of the party’s existence took place, the internal conflicts resulting from the differing positions on literary work and cultural criticism emerged with great virulence. Most of these disputes took place within the pages of the Cuadernos de Cultura, a journal

96 Cayetano Córdova Iturburu [Friend], Buenos Aires, April 1949, FCCI/CeDInCI.

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conceived merely as an instrument for the dissemination of Zhdanovism in artistic and scientific matters but which later became the most important and longest-running cultural publication the communists managed to produce.

6

The Journal Cuadernos De Cultura

Created in 1950 at the initiative of Rodolfo Ghioldi, its first six issues were called Cuadernos de Cultura Democrática y Popular (CCDP) and were edited by Roberto Salama and Isidoro Flaumbaum, two young men who had briefly passed through the halls of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. Without any other prestige or support beyond what the party itself granted, they accepted the task of editing a handful of mimeographed pages with the main objective of disseminating the new Soviet cultural policy on philosophy, art, literature, and music as codified by Zhdanov and popularized through the resolutions of the Central Committee of the CPSU. The journal took on the mission to “poner al alcance del lector documentos y ensayos fundamentales que reflejen el verdadero carácter de la cultura socialista” [make available to the reader fundamental documents and essays that reflect the true nature of socialist culture].97 Its objective was not to be a cultural or theoretical journal (a task that Nueva Era fulfilled), but simply a space for propaganda. Its lack of intention to intervene in the cultural field was already evident in the informality of its presentation in print, which disregarded all the rules of the genre. Inspired by those who proved to be the most conspicuous disseminators of Soviet scientific and cultural theses for the Western world—the young French communists associated with La Nouvelle Critique (Jean Kanapa, Jean Desanti, Pierre Daix)—the CCDP faced, like its French counterpart, a fundamental problem: the insignificant cultural capital of its creators was compensated by constantly resorting to politics as a principle of authority in cultural matters. In addition to Stalin, Zhdanov, and Lysenko, the journal also featured Rodolfo Ghioldi, who in the second issue devoted an article to Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in which he accused him of being reactionary, feudal, and “putting the brakes on”

97 Cuadernos de Cultura Democrática y Popular, no. 2, December, 1950, p. 1.

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the revolution.98 The local staff would eventually be completed with the collaboration of essayist Julio Notta, psychiatrist Julio Luis Peluffo, and folklorist Atahualpa Yupanqui. Agosti published a preview of his book on Echeverría while Raúl González Tuñón published an article on Victoria Ocampo in which, reviving a dispute dating back to the days of the journal Contra, he claimed that the only merit the director of Sur had to deserve the Faja de Honor distinction that the SADE—which he defined as an “aristocratic recreational center”—had recently awarded her was her anti-popular passion and her dedication to American imperialism.99 In July, 1952, this foundational stage came to an end by way of a literary controversy. During the first weeks of that year, the writer and journalist Raúl Larra published Roberto Arlt, el Torturado, a biography of the author of El juguete rabioso, which prompted his rediscovery after almost a decade of silence and became for several years an essential reference book.100 The son of immigrants and a frustrated university student who had had to finish his secondary studies at a night school, Larra entered literature through his friendship with Álvaro Yunque and the Boedistas101 Following down this same path, he became politically active and in 1935 was one of the founders of the AIAPE together with Aníbal Ponce. Three 98 Rodolfo Ghioldi, “Gilberto Freyre, sociólogo reaccionario,” in Cuadernos de Cultura

Democrática y Popular, no. 2, December 1950, pp. 5–21. 99 Raúl González Tuñón, “El caso de madame Victoria Ocampo,” in Cuadernos de Cultura Democrática y Popular, no. 4, December 1951, pp. 105–107. 100 Roberto Arlt (1900–1942) was an Argentine author, playwright, and journalist. Although associated with the Boedo literary group, his fiction cannot be classified within a realist or “social literature” aesthetic. Several years after his death his work was rediscovered, not only by Raúl Larra, but also by the group connected to the journal Contorno (1953–1959), a legendary publication directed by the brothers Ismael and David Viñas. Contorno was highly critical of Argentine cultural traditions and their most prominent representatives (both from the liberal sectors, such as the journal Sur directed by Victoria Ocampo, as well as from the socialist and communist movements) and placed Arlt at the center of the national literary system. Writers such as Ricardo Piglia and César Aira have called Arlt the greatest Argentine novelist of the twentieth century. 101 The “Boedo group” refers to the artists and writers who in the 1920s would meet on the street of the same name in a working class neighborhood of the city of Buenos Aires, where the Claridad publishing house, owned by the socialist Antonio Zamora, was located. With a social orientation, realist aesthetics, and plebeian social origins, in Argentine literary tradition it is usually contrasted with the “Florida group” which consisted of avant-garde artists associated with the journal Martín Fierro, based on the elegant Florida Street. One of the best known members of the Florida group was Jorge Luis Borges.

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years later, he published what would become the first in a long series of biographies of literary and intellectual figures, a book on Roberto Payró, who from then on was considered by the communists a model of realistic writing and social commitment. The use of biography as a method of political-cultural intervention through the appropriation of a figure from the past was to become a constant in Ponce’s life as a writer, and this book is a paradigmatic example. When the critical silence on Arlt had reached the point where he was practically unknown to new generations, Larra undertook his biographical resurrection of him while at the same time republishing his work through Futuro, the publishing house he had founded in 1944 and which was dedicated to disseminating the work of local realist authors as well as great works of literature written by communists, such as Les Beaux Quartiers by Louis Aragon (translated into Spanish by Juan L. Ortiz in 1945) and Jorge Amado’s trilogy Los subterráneos de la libertad. At that time, Arlt’s place in the communist literary tradition was, to say the least, ambiguous. From early on, he had represented an uncomfortable and unclassifiable figure. Elías Castelnuovo rejected the idea that Claridad should publish La vida puerca (later renamed El juguete rabioso thanks to the intervention of Ricardo Güiraldes), arguing that it was a poorly presented text with syntax errors. In 1932, Aníbal Ponce, under the pseudonym Lucas Godoy, referred to the novel El amor brujo as the product of a “bewildered lad” rather than an “authentic and artistic naturalist writer.” Leónidas Barletta, however, was an early and consistent defender of Arlt’s writing, which from the outset he aligned with the realist tradition, a critical lens that Larra would come to share.102 As discussed in the first chapter, Roberto Arlt was involved in a number of initiatives close to communism, such as the journal of “proletarian literature,” Actualidad, which he promoted along with Elías Castelnuovo, with whom he also founded the Unión de Escritores Proletarios (Union of Proletarian Writers). In 1932, he joined the editorial staff of Bandera Roja, with the encouragement of Rodolfo Ghioldi, where he soon published “El bacilo de Carlos Marx,” sealing his fate under the anathema of his mentor, who accused him of being petit-bourgeois. With these limited and flawed antecedents and appealing to memories and anecdotes that were more affectionate than critical, Larra managed to position 102 See Omar Borré, Arlt y la crítica (1926–1990), Buenos Aires, América Libre, 1996, pp. 17, 29, and 55.

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Arlt in the party’s vicinity and, at the same time, justify the circumstances that would have prevented his total commitment to the communist cause and the “Marxist understanding” of reality. The first public reception of Arlt’s biography in the communist media was written by Roberto Salama and appeared in the February 5, 1952 issue of CCDP. Under the title “El mensaje de Roberto Arlt,” it was an extensive article that began by questioning whether Larra’s efforts in defending Arlt were not doing a disservice to Argentine culture. Applying a purely ideological analysis that was legitimized using Zhdanov and Stalin, Salama affirmed, without a doubt, that Roberto Arlt was a fascist writer who cultivated a decadent, psychological, anti-realist, and anti-popular literature.103 Following the procedure recommended by Malenkov of determining the ideology of a writer by the typical nature of his characters, the whole article is based on a syllogism: if the characters and environments that populate Arlt’s literature are negative, then all his work is negative and must be rejected.104 Larra’s response was published in the following issue under the unequivocal title “Arlt es nuestro” [Arlt is Ours]. There he noted Salama’s error of judging an author by his characters’ ideas, attributing an autobiographical significance to them (a procedure that Larra himself used, as poet Hugo Gola immediately pointed out in the pages of Propósitos, and later Oscar Masotta as well) and disassociating the author from his social setting and the ideas of his generation. This context was precisely, according to Larra, what explained the “ideological limitations” of the works of the author of Los siete locos. To refute his opponent’s arguments and demonstrate that Arlt had an affinity with the working class and the party, Larra incurred in the same procedure that, taken to an extreme, was behind Salama’s criticism: explaining a work by appealing to extraliterary factors and citations with political authority, including from the Esbozo de historia del Partido Comunista. His response and the polemic that unfolded in the pages of the newspaper Propósitos reveal not only the climate of hostility that the adoption of the Soviet dictates generated within the communist cultural space and the efforts that many of its intellectuals would make to construct a cultural tradition in which they could recognize themselves,

103 “El mensaje de Roberto Arlt,” in Cuadernos de Cultura Democrática y Popular, no. 5, February 1952, p. 76. 104 See Omar Borré, Arlt y la crítica, op. cit., p. 338.

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but also, more generally, the difficulties that writers and critics of the party would encounter in the face of the morphological and institutional changes that the Argentine intellectual field would undergo from that point on. The renewal of literary criticism which started in the journals Centro and Contorno, as well as the emergence, within these formations, of a model of a university-based intellectual (although not necessarily academic) willing to question both the methods used to reflect on literature and the ways in which literature and politics could interact directly challenged the ideological and impressionistic criticism undertaken by the communists and, ultimately, their conception of political commitment. When Contorno published its issue dedicated to Roberto Arlt in 1954, it not only objected to Larra’s attempt to “communize” Arlt, but also marked the beginning of a total reconsideration of Argentina’s literary heritage.105 This public controversy marked the end of the first stage of Cuadernos de Cultura. In its seventh issue in July 1952, the journal eliminated the term “democratic and popular” and replaced the mimeographed bulletin with a journal-book format that had a cover printed in two colors and a sober and modest design. The management passed into the hands of a triumvirate with ecumenical pretensions consisting of Roberto Salama, Héctor P. Agosti, and the physician Julio Luis Peluffo, a member of the close-knit group of Pavlovian psychiatrists. In line with the proposed changes, the space dedicated to Soviet literature in translation was considerably reduced and more was given to local authors. In a gesture of autonomy and professionalization, in the presentation of this new stage it was announced that each article would be the responsibility of the writer, since, it was explained, on controversial topics subject to prior elucidation—such as the shaping of a critical history of Argentine culture—the journal’s editorial staff could not venture beyond general principles. Just a few months later, the journal would be faced with the abrupt change of course brought about by the party’s rapprochement with Peronism, a defining event for the future of the communist intellectual space, which will be discussed in the next chapter. During its first fifteen years, literature was the central theme of the communist journal. Although there was no shortage of scientific, historical, artistic, and to a lesser degree, philosophical debates, literature and

105 David Viñas, “Arlt y los comunistas,” in Contorno, no. 2, p. 8.

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essays on literary topics represented a significantly larger proportion than any other field of interest, both in its articles and in its book reviews. The reasons for this can be traced to at least three situations. The first is the tribute that the communists paid to a specificity of the Argentine intellectual sphere of the twentieth century, in which the weight of literature was ascertainable even in ideological discussions and doctrinal debates. Writers, including novelists, poets, and essayists dedicated to politicalcultural themes, were dominant in all political tendencies across the cultural sphere, from the liberals to the Peronists. Secondly, for a journal that emerged at a time when the issue of the relationship between culture and politics was at the forefront, the discussions on the autonomy of literary creation, its forms and languages played a central role within the communist movement itself, for, as David Caute pointed out, it was in the literary field that the communist leadership felt particularly empowered to intervene in the name of “orthodoxy,” and it was the arts and social sciences that were the hardest hit during the dark years of Zhdanovism in the USSR.106 Finally, as analyzed in the previous chapter, writers and artists were in the majority among the intellectual professions that made a commitment to communism starting in the 1920s, followed by doctors and lawyers. The centrality of literature in the pages of Cuadernos de Cultura can also be viewed as a reflection of the background of its editors: of the 49 contributors who published more than five articles between 1950 and 1965, 27 were writers and published on literary subjects, while only four were physicians and five were lawyers. Even those who did not have a profession associated with the field ventured into literary criticism, such as lawyer Bernardo Edelman, founder of the party publishing house Platina, and dentist Blas Raúl Gallo, dedicated to dramaturgy. With the exception of psychiatry and pedagogy, the limited specialization of communist criticism also extended to other areas: historical topics were covered by Leonardo Paso, trained as a dentist, while economics was the domain of Mauricio Lebedinsky, a physician and essayist, and philosophy was in the hands of another physician, Emilio Troise. This same hierarchy of interests can also be found in analyzing the bibliographical reviews. Out of a total of 256 reviews published in the sections “Los libros” and “Notas de lectura,” 136 are dedicated to fiction books, while only 106 David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1914–1960, New York, Macmillan, 1964, p. 318, and Boris Kagarlitski, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present, London, Verso, 1988, pp. 128 and ss.

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15 are dedicated to scientific books, 14 to books on political topics, 14 to books on education, and 11 to books on philosophical topic For a journal that purported to be the mouthpiece of Argentine Marxist intellectuals, the fact that in fifteen years only eleven books dedicated to Marxist theory were reviewed indicates both the weight of the literary question in communist culture and the theoretical deficiency of the party institution. This is even more evident if we note that the only section dedicated to commenting on non-Soviet Marxist bibliography was the one created in 1962 by Juan Carlos Portantiero under the name “El marxismo en el mundo”—evidence of his push for theoretical renewal. Until the early 1960s and the discussions that culminated in the expulsion of Agosti’s disciples who edited the journal Pasado y Presente in Córdoba, the battlefield of communist intellectuals was defined through literary debates. In this chapter we have analyzed the process of the professionalization of the communist cultural space, which began in the years following World War II, at the confluence of two concomitant processes: the Peronist experience and the climate of the early years of the Cold War, one of the most complex and darkest periods for communist culture and its intellectuals. By analyzing the debates and discourse that party leaders and the intellectuals themselves produced regarding their role and the place they should occupy in the new circumstances, as well as the structures of participation, the organization of their print network, and the institutions that drew them together, it is clear that, paradoxically and with significant consequences, the growing institutionalization of the party’s intellectual space was accompanied by an attempt to discipline intellectual activity. This led to sanctions, expulsions, and reorganizations that had adverse, but not permanent, effects on a party that until the 1960s continued to play a central role in the cultural space of the left.

CHAPTER 4

Anti-imperialism and Peronism

Although the subject of popular nationalism had been circulating in leftwing culture since the 1920s, in the communist world the defeat of Nazism and the end of the war brought about a radical transformation in the notions of nationalism and internationalism. As Perry Anderson explains, this was one of the great milestones of the twentieth century: Hitherto the dominant forms of nationalism—from the noblest ambitions of Enlightenment patriotism to the most criminal inhumanities of fascism— were always an expression of the propertied classes, while from the 19th century onwards the corresponding forms of internationalism—whatever their vices or limits—were an expression of the laboring classes. After 1945, this double connection—capital/the national, labour/the international—capsizes. Nationalism becomes predominantly a popular cause, of exploited and destitute masses, in an intercontinental revolt against Western colonialism and imperialism. Internationalism, at the same stroke, starts to change camps—assuming new forms in the ranks of capital. This was to be a fateful mutation.1

Geographically centered in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, antiimperialist nationalism had a heterogeneous social character (the Third 1 Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” in New Left Review, no. 14, March/April 2002, p. 16.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2_4

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World national liberation movements were led, depending on the circumstances, by the local bourgeoisie, the middle classes, the bureaucrats of the colonial state itself, intellectuals, and, as in China and Vietnam, by the communist parties) and an intellectual language characterized by syncretism (merging diverse and even contradictory ideological movements, currents of thought, and doctrines), but its emergence was one of the fundamental ideological phenomena of the second half of the century. Although in the Latin American political-intellectual traditions it was certainly not a novelty, in the 1960s, as Oscar Terán would say, anti-imperialism, like God, was everywhere. This new significance for nationalism had its correlation in the notion of internationalism. The rise of the United States as a hegemonic power in the capitalist world within the new context of bipolarity made it necessary to establish international mechanisms of coordination to ensure the predominance of American interests, in a process that Anderson calls “an internationalism of its own” and which resulted in growing commercial, ideological, and strategic unification.2 The same occurred in the area of culture, and the United States began to play a central role in an extensive process of the internationalization of artistic and scientific disciplines in which international and philanthropic organizations played a key role.3 Additionally, the consolidation of a cultural industry soon reached a global scale, expanding the boundaries of the circulation and consumption of goods and genres and formats of mass entertainment, such as radiotelephony, magazines, comics, cinema, and jazz. With a notion of fluid borders that from that point on began to acquire negative attributes, the communists labeled this process cosmopolitanism. Following the German invasion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1941, most Latin American communist parties aligned themselves with the patriotic discourse emerging from the USSR and the European communists, giving internationalist content secondary importance. The task of uniting the entire nation in defense of the Homeland and against the aggressor (imperialism)—wrote Victorio Codovilla in 1941—positioned Argentine communists in the footsteps of the purest traditions of the world communist movement. “The creator of our 2 Ibid., p. 18. 3 See Andrea Giunta, Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política: Arte argentino en los

años sesenta, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2001, and Alejandro Blanco, Razón y Modernidad: Gino Germani y la sociología en la Argentina, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2006.

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doctrine, Karl Marx, taught us that ‘a people that oppresses other peoples can never be free,’ and that, therefore, the rebellion against national oppression, to free the country from under a foreign yoke, is the sacred duty of every communist and every patriot.”4 To some extent, this shift implied a return to the main premises of the popular-front approach, although with a clear emphasis on the subordination of class interests to the Allied war effort and the drive to create what was first called the Frente Democrático Nacional (National Democratic Front) and later Unidad Nacional (National Unity). Most of the communist parties in Latin America aligned themselves with the “patriotic, Americanist, and conciliatory” approach developed by the general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States, Earl Browder, who proposed initiating an era of friendship and collaboration, that was to continue even after the war, between the socialist bloc and its neighbor to the north.5 Most Latin American communists supported the theory that the new scenario of international cooperation would play a progressive role in the region’s economic, political, and social development, contributing to its economic independence by eliminating the historical reasons for its underdevelopment. As soon as the war was over, this approach was denounced as “liquidationist” and abandoned, although in some countries it maintained its validity through the slogan of “national unity” against the “fascist incarnations” represented by the emerging populist governments of the region.6 In Argentina, the culmination of this policy was represented by the participation of the communists in the Unión Democrática (Democratic Union), an alliance organized to face off against Juan Domingo Perón in the elections he ended up winning in

4 Victorio Codovilla, “¡Listos para defender la patria! Informe rendido ante el X Congreso del Partido Comunista, realizado en Córdoba los días 15, 16 y 17 de noviembre de 1941,” Buenos Aires, Partido Comunista, Comité Central, 1941, p. 19. Fragments of this pamphlet were reproduced in Orientación under the title “El patriotismo de los comunistas” in the May 22, 1945 issue. 5 Gerardo Leibner, Camaradas y compañeros: Una historia política y social de los comunistas del Uruguay, Montevideo, Trilce, 2011, pp. 65 and ss. 6 Michael Löwy, El marxismo en América Latina (de 1909 a nuestros días): Antología, Mexico, Era, 1980, pp. 33 and 34. [An English translation is available: Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present: An Anthology, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press International, 1992].

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February 1946, and which had the enthusiastic support of the American ambassador, Spruille Braden.7 From the establishment of the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform, for its Russian name) in 1948, the new Soviet approach was based on setting aside the frontist tactics applied during the war and moving toward “organic unity” and a “united front from below.” In Europe, this meant a struggle against the socialists and social democrats, who were now seen as complicit in the expansionist plans of the United States. As Gerardo Leibner has explained, the Soviet assessment of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to defend the banners of nation and democracy, a task that must be taken up by the communists, in Latin America involved leaving behind expectations regarding the progressive role of the so-called national bourgeoisie and breaking alliances with the traditional parties. But this was more of a rhetorical than a programmatic change, since it was not accompanied by any alternative analysis that would justify it in terms of a Marxist consideration of the Latin American context, just as the question of imperialism was not the object of a measured study that went beyond slogans on the defense of the USSR and alignment with Soviet

7 At the Fourth National Conference of the Communist Party of Argentina (PCA), held in December 1945, Victorio Codovilla explained: “La preocupación constante de nuestro partido ha sido y es la de unir en un poderoso frente de lucha a todas las fuerzas democráticas y progresistas del país, sin distinciones de ideología política ni de sector social. Unirlas para liquidar la forma criolla del fascismo y las causas económicas y sociales que la han hecho posible” [Our party’s constant concern has been and continues to be to unite all the democratic and progressive forces of the country in a powerful front, without distinctions of political ideology or social sector. Unite them to eliminate local fascism and the economic and social causes that have facilitated it] (cited in Oscar Arévalo, El Partido Comunista, Buenos Aires, Centro Editor de América Latina, 1983, p. 68). With the participation of the Partido Socialista (Socialist Party or PS, for its Spanish acronym), the Unión Cívica Radical (Radical Civic Union or UCR), the PCA, and the Partido Demócrata Progresista (Progressive Democratic Party or PDP), it was in this spirit that a coalition called the Unión Democrática (Democratic Union) was formed, which led the Tamborini-Mosca formula (both from the faction of the Unión Cívica Radical loyal to former president Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear) to dispute the presidency with the “incumbent candidate” in the February 1946 elections. Most of the democratic and liberal forces, students, the middle classes, intellectuals, and eventually businessmen rallied behind it. The conservatives, rejected by the intransigent radicals, supported it from the outside, although more than a few of those who were slighted joined Perón’s ranks.

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foreign policy.8 Once again, the same concepts began to define new realities. While “Nazi-fascism” and its “local manifestations” were the main enemy, the communist policy of alliances was based on a discourse that supported maintaining a democratic system that would ensure civil rights and provide a legal framework to move forward with social gains. The new postwar international alignment, they now claimed, manifested itself in Latin America in attempts to create a continental bloc under the economic hegemony of the United States, which required eliminating the surviving remnants of democracy in the subcontinent and snuffing it out where it was nascent. For this reason, the struggle for national sovereignty was presented as deeply intertwined with the “agrarian and anti-imperialist revolution,” and the struggle for democracy took on new meaning in the form of a “national and social liberation front.” For the communists, if up to that moment nations had been confronting fascism in the name of democracy and liberty, the new international order had changed things to such an extent that now, appealing to those values, the Greek people were being crushed and the dictator Francisco Franco remained in power. For that reason, the old denominations were useless in defining the true substance of the forces in conflict and the nature of the enemies: the aggressor imperialism and the national oligarchy. It was thus that Latin American communists once again recovered the anti-imperialist motives they had abandoned in 1935, albeit with new coordinates and ideological impulses, though not always precise or well positioned. In this chapter, we will examine the impact that a global phenomenon, the political-ideological scenario of the second postwar period, had on a small scale, with respect to a minority party, persecuted but nevertheless significant in the context of Latin American communism. Argentine communists, including intellectuals, had to process the key issues of the Cold War world at a moment that would prove crucial for their future history: the moment in which they were confronted with the fact that a member of the military who emerged from a coup with “fascist overtones” would organize a political movement that would wrest from them the support of the working class and popular sectors in a manner that would later turn out to be definitive. This process, which did not lack dramatic overtones, can be viewed from several angles. To begin with, we will look at the repercussions within the cultural sector of the

8 Gerardo Leibner, Camaradas y compañeros, op. cit., p. 142.

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drastic change of course that the party underwent for a short time at the end of 1952, when the then Secretary of Organization, Juan José Real, embarked on a policy of collaboration with the Peronist government. This decision had an impact on the organizational and institutional structures of the cultural space and caused the first major break in the anti-Peronist intellectual front, whose most distinguished representatives accused the communists of collaborationism, while they confirmed that in that categorical condemnation there was a contempt for the working-class world that they owed to the liberalism in which they had been cultivated. Secondly, we will observe the readings formulated by Argentine and Latin American communists on the question of imperialism in the cultural domain and the way in which the condemnation of “cosmopolitanism” alternated between caricature-like admonishments and appeals to an autochthonous socialist realism, on the one hand, and on the other, admonitions that the issue of national culture must be considered in a scenario that was undergoing profound change, outside and inside the borders of each country. During these years, Latin American communists sought to foster specifically intellectual national and supranational organizations—the Congreso Continental de la Cultura (Continental Congress of Culture) and its local replica, the Congreso Argentino de la Cultura (Argentine Congress of Culture) and the Casa de la Cultura Argentina (House of Argentine Culture)—the limited success of which did not impede the strengthening of networks on a national, continental, and global scale, coalescing around pacifist and anti-imperialist concerns. Finally, we will analyze how, as nationalist topics imposed themselves on communist cultural policy, issues such as language, territory, and the existence of a national literature became the subject of reflection for some of its intellectuals, in a process that had to merge Soviet codifications with the need to see themselves reflected in a literary tradition organized by the elite.

1 The Rift with the Liberal Space: The “Real Crisis” and Intellectuals One of the least elucidated episodes in the history of Argentine communism, the attempt led by Juan José Real to bring the party closer to the governing Peronism, was a fatal blow to its cultural space, since it ended up splitting apart the already fragile communist zone of contact with

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the liberal intelligentsia.9 In May 1952, while Victorio Codovilla participated in the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in Moscow, the PCA was immersed in an intense internal debate that culminated in support for Perón’s call to form a united popular front to oppose a planned coup which, according to the president, was organized by “Yankee imperialism” and the local oligarchy. The party’s Executive Committee then issued a public statement in which it called on the communists to form unitary committees in every factory, workplace, and house of study or culture with the aim of facilitating united actions with the Peronist workers and popular sectors.10 At that point, a “self-critical” discussion was initiated at all levels regarding the “errors” that had been committed in applying the political policy sanctioned at the 11th Congress in August 1946 and ratified at the 6th National Conference in November 1950. On both occasions, the party had rejected the characterization of Peronism as local fascism or “Nazi-Peronism” and adopted the tactic of rejecting the negative and supporting the positive. The fundamental contradiction within Peronism, it was said at the time, was between the leadership and the workers

9 Known as the “Real crisis,” the brief attempt of a rapprochement with Peronism that lasted for several months during 1952 was led by the secretary of Organization, leading the party while Victorio Codovilla was in Moscow participating in the 19th Congress of the CPSU. Although this episode is still shrouded in an air of confusion, everything seems to indicate, as Isidoro Gilbert has suggested, that it was a change of course propitiated by the Soviets, interested in finding a path for diplomatic collaboration with the Argentine government and improving its geopolitical position on the continent, a goal in contradiction with the anti-Peronism that prevailed among the communist leadership. Gilbert cites Soviet authorities who support the idea that it was an attempt to destabilize Codovilla and reverse the anti-Peronist course adopted by the PCA, since it was unlikely that a leader would have made a decision of this magnitude on his own. Other testimonies suggest that Codovilla himself endorsed the move. When Codovilla returned to Argentina, he ended the affair and Juan José Real was expelled from the party in February 1953, accused of heading a “nationalist-bourgeois” faction. See Isidoro Gilbert, El oro de Moscú: Historia secreta de la diplomacia, el comercio y la Inteligencia soviética en la Argentina, Buenos Aires, Planeta, 1994, pp. 179–184; Aníbal Jáuregui, “El peronismo en los debates del Partido Comunista Argentino: 1945–1953,” in A Contracorriente, vol. 9, no. 3, 2012, pp. 22–40, and Juan José Real’s testimony, Treinta años de historia argentina: Acción política y experiencia histórica, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, n.d., 1962. 10 “Declaración del PC a propósito del discurso del Gral. Perón invitando a los trabajadores a formar un ‘frente popular unido’ para desbaratar los planes de la conspiración oligárquico-imperialista,” Buenos Aires, May 5, 1952.

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and popular sectors that were under their influence. For the communists, Perón’s triumph had placed the party under pressure from two sides: from Peronism, on the one hand, where it tended to be in tow of the government, and the “systematic opposition”, on the other, which tended to isolate it from the Peronist masses, inciting it to pursue a policy of opposition for opposition’s sake, and even seeking to involve it in attempted coups. Faced with this scenario, it was decided that the party should maintain an independent position advocating for the creation of a National Liberation Front and fighting against the “landowningreactionary oligarchy, the imperialist monopolies, the remnants of fascism, and the political forces representing those sectors,” particularly the reactionary and pro-fascist clerical groups, the main forces behind the anti-communist and anti-Soviet campaign. On the cultural level, therefore, the task of the communists was to fight against the advance of “obscurantism and Rosism” and to defend the “scientific, democratic, and liberal” aspects of culture, through the struggle for the reestablishment of secular education, which the government had eliminated, and the defense of the principles of the University Reform.11 The crucial moment in the communists’ tactical shift was the “Guión para la discusión sobre los resultados de la aplicación de la línea política sancionada por el XI Congreso” [Outline for the discussion of the 11 “11º Congreso. Periódico de preparación del 11º Congreso Nacional del Partido Comunista Argentino,” Buenos Aires, June 28, 1946. “Rosism”: relating to Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877). He was a military man, rancher, and politician who governed the province of Buenos Aires from 1829 to 1832 and from 1835 to 1852. During the latter period, he wielded a de facto hegemony over the Argentine Confederation, until his defeat in the Battle of Caseros, an event that put an end to the civil war that following the independence of the territories that formed the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata pitted the so-called unitarios (advocates of a national centralized government based in Buenos Aires) against the “federales” (supporters of a federal or confederate system). Juan Manuel de Rosas is considered one of the most important federal “caudillos” and his government was characterized by a strong predominance of the interests of the Buenos Aires region over the rest of the territories that integrated the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, the extreme concentration of power, and its authoritarian methods. At the same time, it attracted the support of the popular sectors, particularly in the extensive rural territories. Rosas and his government, as well as all federal caudillos, have been the subject of numerous political and historiographical debates. One of the most enduring and powerful contemporary readings was that of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who characterized the period as a confrontation between civilization and barbarism. During Juan Domingo Perón’s government, opposition sectors drew many parallels between Rosism and Peronism. See Tulio Halperin Donghi, De la revolución de independencia a la Confederación Rosista, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1993.

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results of the application of the political approach sanctioned by the 11th Congress] from September 1952, presumably drafted by Juan José Real. According to this document, the party had been successful and consistent in fighting against the “capitulationist tendency”—as the expulsion of Puiggrós and his followers had demonstrated—but not very active in the fight against “sectarianism,” where reservations regarding the “audacious application” of the approach toward unity with Peronism were now evident even among members of the Central Committee. Along with the heads of many governing bodies, they also suffered from excessive personalism and an authoritarian tendency that had led them to privilege personal orders over internal democracy, work with men over work with organizations. The extraordinary persistence of these “sectarian tendencies” was explained, however, by certain objective causes, including the persecution the party and its members were subjected to and the complicit silence that the Peronist working class and popular leadership maintained in this respect. This had had a particular effect on those sectors of the party “insufficiently” linked to the Peronist masses and, most especially, members of the intelligentsia. While the party made an effort and achieved success with the unitary policy in trade unions, factories, and working-class neighborhoods, intellectuals and journalists reflected the harmful influence of the systematic opposition, to the point of publishing a periodical that hardly differed from the reactionary language of the right-wing opposition.12 This attitude adopted by the intelligentsia, the text continued, was also based on serious analytical errors. To begin with, they had taken for granted that most of the petit-bourgeois strata—especially the intellectuals—were anti-Peronist and that they were, moreover, the majority. Hence, the communists did nothing but reflect the opinion of these sectors, in reality a minority and resentful of Peronist politics, accompanying them in their contempt for the Peronist-influenced intelligentsia, which was contemptuously judged as the most backward sector of national culture. In addition to the false assessment of the numerical importance and cultural hierarchy of the intellectual opposition, the 12 “Guión para la discusión sobre los resultados de la aplicación de la línea política sancionada por el XI Congreso,” Partido Comunista, Comité Ejecutivo, September 1952, Fondo Héctor Pablo Agosti/ Héctor Pablo Agosti Collection, Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas en Argentina (CeDInCI)/Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM); FHPA/CeDInCI, folder Debates Crisis Real, pp. 2 and ss., and in the same file, “Partido Comunista: Comité Ejecutivo, Nuestras tareas inmediatas,” c. 1952.

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diagnosis of their political positions was also erroneous. The emphasis on formal questions, such as socio-historical ones, and not on immediate issues, had drawn a fallacious dividing line through the intellectual world. Instead of establishing a polarization between those who were for or against imperialism, for or against national sovereignty, peace, or a genuine popular culture, aparecía como cuestión fundamental que dividía a la intelectualidad el problema del rosismo o antirrosismo, sin comprender que nosotros estamos más cerca de un rosista antiimperialista que de un antirrosista proimperialista. Como es natural, esto tuvo repercusión en el movimiento estudiantil. Allí la línea divisoria no pasaba entre pro-imperialistas y anti-imperialistas, sino entre reformistas y anti-reformistas. No se comprendía que el problema del reformismo es un problema superado ya por el desarrollo del movimiento, de que las nuevas generaciones estudiantiles buscan otros caminos, otras formas de lucha.13 [the problem of Rosism or anti-Rosism appeared as the fundamental issue dividing the intelligentsia, without the understanding that we are closer to an anti-imperialist Rosism than to a pro-imperialist anti-Rosism. Naturally, this had a repercussion on the student movement. There the dividing line was not between pro-imperialists and anti-imperialists, but between reformists and anti-reformists. They did not understand that the issue of reformism had already been overcome in the development of the movement and that new generations of students are looking for other paths, other forms of struggle.]

The mechanisms of political obedience were immediately and enthusiastically activated, despite the flagrant contradiction of the new analysis with respect to the previously held position. An example of how any critical judgment of the works in seeking their subalternization to political needs was suspended can be found in the review of Berta Perelstein’s book, Positivismo y antipositivismo en la Argentina, which had been published that same year by Procyon, an imprint of the Lautaro publishing house, signed by an unknown F. A. and printed in Nuestra Palabra. In the context of the party’s change of direction, the book was criticized precisely because it gave rise to one of the central political theses 13 “Guión para la discusión sobre los resultados de la aplicación de la línea política sancionada por el XI Congreso,” op. cit., pp. 7 and 8.

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of communist historiography: the defense of the thinking underlying the May Revolution as the main task of Argentine culture.14 Creemos que no. Que el deber superior de la cultura argentina, hoy, es combatir la influencia deletérea de la “cultura” del imperialismo yanqui y desarrollar lo nacional en la línea de esa ideología [el marxismo-leninismoestalinismo] en cuyo nombre la autora dice se debe combatir. […] El mérito del pensamiento progresista de Mayo es haber asimilado las ideas nuevas de su época que, interpretando las exigencias del desarrollo de la vida material de la sociedad, facilitaban la lucha por la independencia nacional. [...] Pero de aquí no se desprende que el pensamiento progresista de Mayo sea la ideología que responda con exactitud a las exigencias del desarrollo de la vida material de nuestra sociedad de hoy. En Mayo de 1810 las tareas planteadas a nuestra sociedad no eran las de hoy, no existía, por ejemplo, el imperialismo yanqui.15 [We do not believe this. That the superior duty of Argentine culture, today, is to combat the deleterious influence of American imperialist “culture” and develop the nation in line with the ideology [Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism] that the author says it should be fought in the name of. [...] The merit of the progressive “May thinking” is that it assimilated the new ideas of the times which, interpreting demands for the improvement of society’s material conditions, facilitated the struggle for national independence. [...] But that does not necessarily mean that this progressive thinking is the ideology that corresponds to the demands for the improvement of material conditions in today’s society. In May of 1810 the tasks facing our society were not the same as they are today; there was no American imperialism, for instance.]

The new situation had an immediate and complex impact on cultural work. In October 1952, a Comisión de Asuntos Culturales (Commission for Cultural Affairs) was created, which for the first time recognized the importance of the work in the cultural sector at the level of party structures. This commission was headed by essayist and literary critic Julio Notta, with an important role played by his wife, visual artist 14 The expression “May thinking” refers to the set of ideas that accompanied the May Revolution of 1810, when the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata proposed the establishment of a new center of autonomous power within the context of the crisis of the Spanish monarchy. 15 “Vida cultural”, in Nuestra Palabra, September 9, 1952.

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Nelly Dobranich. Héctor P. Agosti, in charge at the time of the Central Committee of the Casa de la Cultura Argentina (House of Argentine Culture), member of the Writers’ Commission and co-director of Cuadernos de Cultura, was not even summoned as an “auditor,” according to his own testimony. A few days after the Commission for Cultural Affairs was created, it organized the first in a series of discussions that lasted throughout the month of November. Thanks to the notes Agosti kept in his personal archive, the central topics of these discussions can be reconstructed, providing a clearer view of the positions that were at stake. In the meetings, Agosti made an effort to discuss the specific problem of the intellectual front. He began by accepting his own responsibility for the alleged failure to apply the party line despite attempts at unity with the Peronists, with the last episode taking place during the Congreso Argentino de la Cultura (Argentine Congress of Culture, CAC), to which the government cultural organizations had been invited. For Agosti, however, this had nothing to do with the crux of the matter, which was, in short, the “ideologically reactionary” nature of Peronism in the cultural domain. Though accepting the obvious rifts with the liberal world was possible, it was not as easy to renounce a tradition that the communists formed part of. Debo acusarme de haber abrigado demasiadas ilusiones sobre las posibilidades de los llamados liberales argentinos. Fui inconsecuente conmigo mismo, y con las tesis de mi “Echeverría”, acerca de la deformación oligárquica de la cultura: más de una vez percibí este fenómeno, pero es indudable que gravitaban en mí demasiadas ilusiones acerca de la posibilidad de reacción de algunos de estos liberales. No podríamos decir sin embargo, como se ha dicho con ligereza, que perdimos nuestras viejas vinculaciones con los intelectuales peronistas: con los nuevos, salvo alguna excepción personal, nunca los tuvimos, y los viejos eran, en su mayor parte, los mismos con quienes habíamos peleado muchos años por su condición de redactores de “El Pampero”. Esto no es un justificativo. Teníamos, a mi juicio, lo principal, lo que hace más complicada nuestra política en este terreno: el carácter ideológicamente reaccionario de la actividad oficial en el dominio de la cultura, sometido en buena parte a la influencia clerical. “Nueva Era” calificó de fascista la discusión del Congreso Filosófico de Mendoza (nº 2) y en buena parte tiene razón. […] Yo sé que ese no es, desde luego, el pensamiento íntimo de los escritores

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peronistas (por lo menos de los pocos que yo conozco), pero es una circunstancia que debemos tener en cuenta para comprender los problemas de un acercamiento entre peronistas y no peronistas.16 [I must admit that I have harbored too many illusions regarding the potential of the so-called Argentine liberals. I was inconsistent with myself, and with the thesis of my “Echeverría,” about the oligarchic deformation of culture: I have perceived this phenomenon more than once, but I undoubtedly had too many illusions regarding the reactionary potential of some of these liberals. However, we cannot say, as has been remarked lightly, that we lost our long-standing ties with the Peronist intellectuals: with the new ones, save for a few personal exceptions, they never existed, and the old ones were for the most part the same we had fought with for many years in their role as editors of “El Pampero”.17 * This is not a justification. We had, in my opinion, the most essential thing which makes our policy in this area more complicated: the ideologically reactionary nature of government activities in the cultural area, in large part under clerical influence. “Nueva Era” characterized the discussion at the 2nd Philosophical Congress of Mendoza as fascist and, to a large extent, it is right. [...] I know that this is not, of course, the personal view of Peronist writers (at least of the few I know), but it is a situation we must take into account in order to understand the problems involved in a rapprochement between Peronists and non-Peronists.]

There was, therefore, a fundamental ideological problem and not merely a formal question, as the “Guión” suggested, in the same way that the question of “Rosism” was far from constituting a secondary issue, since the abolition of the May tradition that was fostered in the official circles (Ricardo Levene’s theses, Agosti argued, were not fortuitous, but rather formed part of educational programs) had a reactionary significance with consequences for practical politics. Hence the misguided

16 Héctor P. Agosti, “Discusiones de octubre de 1952,” in FHPA/CeDInCI, box 4, folder Papeles de Archivo, p. 2 (the italics are from the original). In reference to Berta Perelstein’s article on the National Congress of Philosophy held in Mendoza March 30 to April 9, 1949, with support from the national government. See “El Congreso de Mendoza y la filosofía del peronismo,” in Nueva Era, no. 2, May 1949, pp. 159–167. On Agosti, see Chapter 6. 17 * El Pampero was a nationalist and anti-Semitic publication directed by Enrique Osés and published between 1939 and 1944.

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nature of the critique of Berta Perelstein’s book, since the defense of May did not represent a regression, but instead the recovery of the limited national emancipatory tradition that the bourgeoisie had abandoned. For Agosti, in the specific area of culture, the essential problem was a different one: the insensitivity of the intelligentsia to the social phenomenon of the Peronist masses. This was due to a variety of factors, but in no way entailed classifying all writers as “oligarchs.” In the more general intellectual field, the causes were to be found in the aristocratic tendencies which permeated Argentine culture, including its well-meaning representatives, and which were accentuated by government persecution. In the case of communist intellectuals, the causes were related to a certain degree of detachment from the party base and the working-class milieu, with the most obvious consequences being a lack of ideological struggle and weak doctrinal training. But the fact is that the intellectual movement as a whole was against Peronism, unlike the working masses, which did not prevent it from turning down a joint action based on an ideological definition that opposed both imperialism and, he stressed, the clerical reaction. In reality, Agosti concluded, the issue was to determine whether the party should modify its characterization of Peronism and, as a result, eliminate any joint action with the old parties, which had to be clearly formulated, since it implied a revision of the position of the 11th Congress and of Victorio Codovilla’s political reports. In any case, the alliance with the Peronists did not necessarily imply an alliance with Perón, since for Agosti the distinction between the push of the masses for social justice and the leadership constituted as inescapable a terrain as the fact that the vanguard party could not place itself at the level of the “low degree of awareness” of the masses who had supported Peronism. It is worth noting the force with which the statements in the “Guión” attacked the certainties of some intellectuals who had based their cultural identity on the defense of liberal traditions and who, despite difficulties, had rooted their actions, their sociability, and their discourse in what had been since the 1930s the “democratic” camp of the Argentine intelligentsia. Spaces that the communists regularly frequented and even ones they had helped create or had directed, such as the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores (Free College of Higher Education, or CLES) and the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (Argentine Society of Writers, or SADE), came to be considered “cuevas de agentes del imperialismo, de elementos golpistas y reaccionarios y de provocadores policiales” [havens of imperialist agents, pro-coup and reactionary elements, and

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police provocateurs]. Additionally, the professional organizations they had entered through considerable effort, such as the Centro Argentino de Ingenieros (Argentine Center of Engineers), the Confederación MédicoGremial (Medical Confederation), and the Asociación de Abogados (Association of Lawyers), were designated as “historically dissolved” for harboring anti-popular, oligarchic, and imperialist elements. The spectacular rift with their sphere of political-intellectual affinities and with a shared culture forced communist intellectuals to expose themselves to repudiation and to an even greater erosion of the prestige that some of them had achieved in their respective fields. Under the new circumstances, they were being asked to understand that if the masses had turned their backs on the liberal-bourgeois political groups, the communists could not remain tied to that past identified with failure, ineffectiveness, and complicity. Esto significa que nuestro partido, en la lucha por fundirse con las masas, no debe fijarse si en su camino deja alguna figura del “pasado”, por muy simpática que sea. Una política consecuente de unidad con las masas peronistas entraña esa posibilidad. El partido debe marchar hacia delante, sin tener en cuenta esos “peligros”. Los hechos convencerán a aquellos aliados que no comprendan aún a las masas peronistas que no hay otro camino para la solución del país. Los anquilosados, allá ellos. Nuestro partido sigue adelante con las masas, que es el camino de la solución de la independencia, de la democracia y de la paz.18 [This means that our party, in its struggle to merge with the masses, should not be concerned if in its path it leaves behind a figure from the “past,” no matter how endearing. A consistent policy of unity with the Peronist masses includes this possibility. The party must move forward, regardless of these “dangers.” The facts will convince those allies who do not yet understand the Peronist masses that there is no other possible path to a solution for the country. For those who are paralyzed, so be it. Our party will continue forward with the masses, which is the only way towards independence, democracy, and peace.]

During this brief period, the communists intensified their crusade against “imperialist penetration” in culture. The certainty that Latin 18 “Guión para la discusión sobre los resultados de la aplicación de la línea política sancionada por el XI Congreso,” op. cit.

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American countries should defend themselves from cosmopolitanism, which constituted the basis of “American ideology” and its attempts at cultural disintegration for the region, led them to support the Second Five Year Plan’s ambition of “shaping” a “popular and humanist” national culture. In September 1952, for example, in the pages of Propósitos, Raúl Larra enthusiastically urged writers to support Peronist congressman Juan José Gobello’s bill, which stipulated that periodical publications should devote at least 75% of the space in each issue to national literary, informative, graphic, or advertising material, that is, produced by Argentines or resident foreigners. In Larra’s view, Gobello’s initiative was aimed at defending the “producción intelectual autóctona” [autochthonous intellectual production] in a double sense: safeguarding it from American penetration and enabling the creation of jobs for writers who, given the conditions of Argentine culture, survived on their contributions to journals.19 The reference to publications consisting almost entirely of translations was, of course, a less than subtle allusion to the journal Sur, although the communists’ own cultural journal, Cuadernos de Cultura, was made up entirely of translations of Soviet and French publications, at least until Agosti’s arrival in July of that year. Es una iniciativa plausible —se afirmaba también desde Nuestra Palabra— y puede ser una herramienta para controlar la infiltración de la ideología yanqui y un freno a sus pretensiones de hegemonía. Lo yanqui tiende siempre al cosmopolitismo como una manera de disgregar la conciencia nacional. Y en cambio los argentinos y los latinoamericanos necesitamos muy especialmente apoyarnos en una literatura, en un arte, en una información que ayuden a consolidar el espíritu nacional, a desbaratar esos preconceptos de nuestra menor valía, falta de tradición, etc., que son leit motiv en boca de los mercenarios norteamericanos.20 [This is a plausible initiative —as affirmed in Nuestra Palabra— and it could be a tool to control the infiltration of the Yankee ideology and to curb its hegemonic aspirations. What is Yankee always tends towards cosmopolitanism as a way of disintegrating the national consciousness. On the other hand, as Argentines and Latin Americans, we need to rely on literature, art, and information to help consolidate the national spirit, to 19 Raúl Larra, “Una iniciativa que deben apoyar nuestros escritores,” in Propósitos, September 5, 1952. 20 “Vida cultural,” in Nuestra Palabra, September 23, 1952, p. 7.

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dismantle preconceptions of our lesser worth, our lack of tradition, etc., which are a leitmotiv in the mouths of the North American mercenaries.]

A month after this article was published, while heated meetings were taking place within the party, a group of communist writers headed by Álvaro Yunque signed a document destined to cause controversy. Entitled “A los escritores argentinos,” it called for the creation of a single union of intellectuals by merging the SADE with the Asociación de Escritores Argentinos (Association of Argentine Writers, or ADEA) and the Sindicato Argentino de Escritores (Union of Argentine Writers, or SAE), Peronist intellectual organizations. In June of that year, the same communists had unsuccessfully called for a National Assembly of Intellectuals aimed at ending the dispersion of the various branches of scientific and cultural activity and channeling the creativity of intellectual workers toward an encounter with the popular masses.21 This move toward fusion was, predictably, read by the entire opposition as a move toward capitulation and defection. The socialist newspaper Nuevas Bases immediately spoke of a “crisis” in the intellectual sector of local communism, following the fracture caused by the disciplinary sanctions imposed on the leaders Rodolfo Ghioldi and Alcira de la Peña for their reluctance to accept the political change of direction promoted by the secretary of Organization. Bástenos señalar —afirmaban los socialistas— que sus manifestaciones [de la crisis] en este país y en este medio no son más que la consecuencia previsible de una política totalmente desvinculada de las realidades y problemas argentinos a la vez que subordinada a propósitos de hegemonía en el orden internacional, todo lo cual explica que las autoridades del partido Comunista hayan podido caer de rodillas ante sus propios torturadores y agresores y expulsar a sus camaradas conspicuos de la víspera, aun convalecientes.22 [Suffice it to say —stated the socialists— that the manifestations [of the crisis] in this country and this milieu are merely the foreseeable consequence of a policy that is completely detached from Argentine reality and 21 The Asamblea Nacional de Intelectuales (National Assembly of Intellectuals) to be held on June 27, 1952 in the city of Buenos Aires. Call, Fondo Juan Antonio Salceda/ Juan Antonio Salceda Collection, family archive; FJAS. 22 “Las disidencias en el comunismo criollo,” in Nuevas Bases, Buenos Aires, November 30, 1952.

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problems and at the same time subordinated to the goals of hegemony within the international order, all of which explains why the authorities of the Communist Party have fallen to their knees before their own torturers and aggressors and expelled their eminent comrades of the previous day, even when convalescent.]

The communists’ call for a trade union was poorly received on all sides, and, with the exception of the communists themselves, it was widely repudiated, albeit not by everyone.23 The proposal—debatable, but with contents that were more inopportune than scandalous—was organized around twenty points aimed at achieving improvements in the literary profession through State intervention in the regulation of the market and editorial production, tariff policies, exports, distribution and sponsorship, and the promotion of Argentine authors. The articles stipulated that 30% of the output of publishing houses had to be produced by “living Argentine authors,” a figure that rose to 50% for the exhibition of works in bookstores and 65% for periodical publications. It advocated for the creation of a national office to collect writers’ royalties, the obligation to print inexpensive editions “for the people and the working class,” the dissemination of national literary productions through private and especially government radio stations, price reductions in newspaper advertising, and the creation of a system of contests and prizes for new writers and those “who address national concerns in their work.” It called for the creation of a social welfare system for writers and for the State to recognize “responsible literary work” as a qualification for teaching in secondary and university education. Although at no time did it reveal an explicit preference for genres and styles, there were two articles aimed at facilitating transportation and credit so that writers could travel and get to know the country better in order to “reflect it more accurately in their output,” indicating an inclination toward realist representation and regional accents, poetics that both Peronists and communists cultivated with distinction. 23 The document was signed by Álvaro Yunque, Miguel Ángel Speroni, Alfredo Varela, Raúl González Tuñón, Lila Guerrero, Julio Galer, Fina Warschaver, Bernardo Kordon, Raúl Larra, Héctor P. Agosti, Carlos Ruiz Daudet, Héctor Yánover, Juan Enrique Acuña, Juan José Manauta, Juan Antonio Salceda, Juan L. Ortiz, Amaro Villanueva, and Nicandro Pereyra. Communist writers or well-known “fellow travelers” such as Leónidas Barletta, José Portogalo, Gerardo Pisarello, Enrique Wernicke, and María Rosa Oliver did not accompany the call for a union.

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Headed by poet, essayist, and playwright Álvaro Yunque, the manifesto was signed by writers who were somewhat well-known in literary circles, although none of them belonged to the established intellectual elite, held academic positions, or appeared in the most prestigious publications. Yunque was not only the oldest, but also the only one with extensive published work, prior to joining the PCA, which positioned him as one of the most tenacious exponents of social literature and the Boedo tradition. He was the first among communist intellectuals to reclaim gaucho literature for the communist tradition and repeatedly defended, in the pages of party publications, the idea that “directed literature,” as a creation placed at the service of the economic and social liberation of the dispossessed, was an essential part of Argentina’s literary history and of the patriotic and nationalizing spirit of its best governments. However, and although most of the signatories engaged in some form of realist poetics, it cannot be said that all of them adhered to that formula, as evidenced by the quiet but by then prolific work of the poet from Entre Ríos, Juan L. Ortiz, and even the civil poetry practiced by Raúl González Tuñón since the mid1930s. Alfredo Varela, Raúl Larra, Carlos Ruiz Daudet, and the Entre Ríos poet Juan José Manauta had all published works inspired by a very powerful “leftist regionalism” in the 1940s and 50s.24 Beyond the fact that they belonged to different literary generations, most of the signatories had actively participated in the anti-fascist movement, and more than a few had begun their political and literary life in organizations such as the Asociación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores (Association of Intellectuals, Artists, Journalists, and Writers, or AIAPE). This was the case of Ruiz Daudet, a traveling salesman whose work as a cultural promoter went beyond the narrowness of his literary naturalism, and of writers from the provinces, such as Juan Antonio Salceda from Tandil, a grocer by profession, and Amaro Villanueva from Entre Ríos, a teacher and journalist who devoted himself to ethnographic and folkloric studies. With the exception of lawyer Miguel Ángel Speroni and public accountant Nicandro Pereyra, none of the signatories had managed to finish their university studies, and their literary activities included journalism, translation, and publishing. Fina Warschaver, Ernesto Giudici’s wife, was a history teacher and author of two books that 24 See Eduardo Romano, “Culminación y crisis del regionalismo narrativo,” in Sylvia Saítta (ed.), Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, vol. 9: El oficio se afirma, Buenos Aires, Emecé, 2004, pp. 602–610.

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were as highly praised by the critics as they were reviled by the communist leadership (El retorno de la primavera and La casa Modesa), while the poet of Russian descent Lila Guerrero (pseudonym of Lilia Iakovlev) had already begun working on translations, including Gorky, Tolstoy, and Mayakovsky. Juan Enrique Acuña, from Misiones province, alternated his poetic work with journalism and theater, to which he ended up dedicating himself entirely. The young Héctor Yánover from Córdoba province worked in a bookstore and had just published his first book of poems. Héctor P. Agosti was the only one on the list who was fully dedicated to essay writing and who held an important position in the party’s cultural apparatus, so his signature, although somewhat lost among the others, should not leave any doubt as to his role in generating the controversial declaration. The relationship between the communists and SADE was fluid. From the beginning, the writers’ organization had their support. On the occasion of the I Congreso Gremial de Escritores (First Writers’ Congress) held in 1936, the AIAPE sent a letter of support, signed by Emilio Troise, in which it expressed its solidarity with the objectives of the meeting and predicted that it would be useful in achieving the desired unity of intellectual workers.25 From that point on, writers affiliated or close to communism were present at each of the conferences, and they also frequently disputed the leadership. In the 1946 elections in which Leónidas Barletta won the presidency, the communists presented candidates in the two opposing lists. Barletta was a fellow traveler who, as such, did not always see eye to eye with the party’s cultural strategies. During his tenure, the SADE maintained a program that focused on defending the union interests of writers. As Flavia Fiorucci has explained, the interests of this “eclectic communist” were revealed in his eagerness to bring writers closer to the popular classes through the democratizing drive of literary culture, but he was kept in check with regard to general political issues, which was the hallmark of the institution during the Peronist decade.26 The communists were also part of the list that in 1948 made 25 “Carta al señor secretario del Primer Congreso Gremial de Escritores y por su intermedio a todos los congresales,” Buenos Aires, November 12, 1936, Fondo Cayetano Córdova Iturburu/ Cayetano Córdova Iturburu Collection; FCCI/CeDInCI, folder SADE. 26 Flavia Fiorucci, Intelectuales y peronismo: 1945–1955, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2011, p. 73.

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Carlos Alberto Erro president of the organization, a period during which Héctor P. Agosti, in his position as secretary, presented a draft resolution proposing a Congreso de Cultura Nacional (Congress on National Culture) aimed at achieving “the unity of all of the country’s cultural entities from an intellectual point of view for the development of a unique Argentine culture within the characteristics of our country and the Americas, and to consider the issues involved in the economic defense of each concurrent activity.”27 Just a few months before his signature appeared endorsing the merger of SADE with the Peronist intellectual organizations, Agosti repeated his call for the creation of a national organization of intellectuals before a hundred writers who honored him for the publication of his Echeverría, including old friends such as Erro himself, Bernardo Canal Feijóo, Samuel Eichelbaum, and Roberto Giusti…28 From the beginning, “A los escritores argentinos” revisited a topic dear to the leftist tradition in relation to writers as a social group: the unusual circumstance of constituting a “trade union” in which “none of its members can make a living from practicing the profession they have chosen.”29 Quienes suscribimos estas páginas hemos manifestado ya en múltiples instancias —en el libro, en la prensa, en la tribuna y en la actividad gremial— nuestra preocupación por los problemas del país y por la condición social del escritor. No es la primera vez que hablamos acerca de las necesidades morales y materiales de este gremio caracterizado por la circunstancia original de que ninguno de sus componentes puede vivir del ejercicio de la profesión que ha elegido. Queremos, por lo mismo, sustentarnos en aquella conducta para hacer escuchar nuestras sugestiones acerca de la imprescindible unidad de acción de los escritores argentinos.30

27 Héctor P. Agosti, “Proyecto de resolución,” March 27, 1950, FHPA/CeDInCI, folder SADE. Agosti presented two new proposals that same month. One established the formation of a Comisión Central de Homenaje a Esteban Echeverría (Central Committee for the Homage of Esteban Echeverría) on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death, and the other promoted the establishment of an editorial department for the SADE. 28 “Sustancia actual de Echeverría: Discursos pronunciados en el homenaje al escritor Héctor P. Agosti con motivo de la aparición de su libro Echeverría,” Buenos Aires, 1952. 29 “A los escritores argentinos,” Buenos Aires, October 1952, FHPA/CeDInCI, folder SADE. 30 Ibid., p. 1.

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[The undersigned have already expressed on many occasions —in books, the press, forums, and trade-union activities— our concern for the country’s problems and for the social condition of the writer. This is not the first time we have spoken about the moral and material needs of this union characterized by the unusual circumstance that none of its members can make a living from practicing the profession they have chosen. We would like, therefore, to build on that past conduct to make our suggestions heard about the indispensable unity of action of Argentine writers.]

In fact, the communists had written extensively on the economic hardships that Argentine writers—especially those of working-class background—endured and stressed both the need for their union and the intervention of the State in the areas of labor, legal rights, and cultural promotion. It is no coincidence that someone as fervently enthusiastic about the Soviet cultural experience as Elías Castelnuovo was involved in the initiative whereby several intellectuals managed to interest Perón in the creation of a Board of Intellectuals in 1948. Although the programmatic points of the manifesto were focused on measures aimed at solving this long-standing problem, the bulk of the foundation was, of course, more political than union-related. For the communists, the SADE had deserted its original “anti-imperialist and pro-social justice” inspiration, abandoning the spirit of the resolutions of its trade union congresses and coinciding, either through omission or silence, with the advocates of “imperialist interference,” the “military adventure,” and the “anti-popular coup d’état.” The refusal of the Board of Directors, which Jorge Luis Borges presided over, to hold the longed-for Congreso de la Cultura Nacional (Congress of National Culture), as an initial step toward a permanent and unitary organization of Argentine intellectuals, was part of an attitude that reduced the political union problem to the defense of an abstract freedom, disconnected from the country’s reality. “De esta manera, sutilmente ganada por una actitud aristocrática, la institución se ha ido divorciando de las aspiraciones y sentimientos del conjunto del pueblo, cuyas vivencias y esencias el escritor es llamado a interpretar y estimular.” [In this way, subtly won over by an aristocratic attitude, the institution has become divorced from the aspirations and feelings of the people as a whole, whose experiences and essences the writer is called upon to interpret and stimulate.]31 This attitude, they claimed, 31 “A los escritores argentinos,” op. cit.

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was at odds with the wishes of “most of the affiliates” of the SADE, many independent writers, and members of the Peronist organizations ADEA and SAE. For all of them, the division of writers was harmful for the defense of their interests and, above all, it sowed discord and discontent (fostered, it was suggested, by the government’s own actions) which facilitated reactionary tendencies and the cultural interference of American imperialism. Far from pondering an “anti-oligarchic Rosism,” the appeal invoked the example of Sarmiento, Gutiérrez, Echeverría, and Hernández, situating itself in a tradition that had made literary pursuits a mission tied to the progressive development of society and the development of a national consciousness. Thus, under the political imperatives of the time, communist intellectuals were only partially able to redefine their insertion in the liberal cultural space in order to adopt a discourse in which the anti-imperialist definition had to subsume the Peronist-antiPeronist antinomy. However, it would be mistaken to think that all the signatories experienced that distancing as an exercise in pure obedience. Some of them, such as Amaro Villanueva from Entre Ríos, had already developed a historical interpretation and a sensitivity toward the popular world that distanced them from the most staunchly liberal facets of the canonical communist narrative. Without being a Peronist, Villanueva was a regular contributor, along with Enrique Wernicke and Juan L. Ortiz, to the literary supplement of the newspaper La Prensa, expropriated by the government in 1951 and directed by writer and journalist César Tiempo (pseudonym of Israel Zeitlin). Agosti himself, since the publication of his book Echeverría in 1951, began to explore the path of reinterpreting liberalism in Argentine history. In an intellectual milieu sharply divided between Peronists and antiPeronists, however, it was one thing to reflect on the causes that had led the intelligentsia to a historical separation from the popular masses, and quite another to suggest that the SADE should relinquish its autonomy in order to fraternize with the discredited Peronist intellectuals. It would still be some years before the “Peronist phenomenon” would constitute a system with the crisis of the liberal intelligentsia. Given the conditions of 1952, the unitary policy promoted by the communist leadership could not be anything but a resounding failure and a total discredit for those who, like Agosti, had earned the recognition and respect of their peers. In a country where being a communist intellectual has never brought prestige, Agosti had achieved it in spite of being a communist.

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Although certain communist intellectuals, especially writers from the country’s interior and those not integrated into established intellectual circles outside the party itself, welcomed the criticism launched at the SADE and even suggested “setting it ablaze,”32 the truth is that, officially, intellectual communism had systematically opposed all government initiatives to organize intellectual activity—from the Junta de Intelectuales (Board of Intellectuals) to the Instituto Nacional de Folclore (National Institute of Folklore)—branding them as Falangist, clerical, Hispanophile, obscurantist, antidemocratic, and all similar epithets imaginable. Agosti himself, in a letter addressed to his comrades with the aim of establishing his position on Perón’s call for the creation of the Junta Nacional de Intelectuales, affirmed that in no way could communist intellectuals accept a proposal that clearly reflected attempts at the complete corporatization of Argentine life. De manera, pues, que resulta ridículo reivindicar la reposición de los profesores y el levantamiento de la clausura de algún periódico partidario como condiciones para una probable colaboración con el plan de gobierno. El problema es más de fondo, porque aquí se trata de la estructuración de una ideología antiargentina en nombre de la argentinidad (cuyos atributos no están solamente en los ciudadanos que puedan contar con muchos antepasados, como el representante de la SADE, que al mismo tiempo se permite la impudicia de afirmar que en la Comisión Nacional de Cultura no ha encontrado diferencias ideológicas), de una virtual ofensiva contra el espíritu permanente y creador de la Revolución de Mayo.33 [So therefore it is ridiculous to demand the reinstatement of teachers and the end of the closure of a party newspaper as conditions for a potential collaboration with the government’s plan. The problem is more fundamental, because here we are dealing with the structuring of an anti-Argentine ideology in the name of Argentine identity (which does not apply only to citizens with many Argentine ancestors, such as the SADE representative who at the same time allows himself the impudence of affirming that he has not found any ideological differences with the National Commission on Culture), essentially an attack on the lasting and creative spirit of the May Revolution.]

32 Letter from Santos Aguilera to Héctor P. Agosti, Buenos Aires, October 26, 1952, FHPA/CeDInCI, folder SADE. 33 Letter from Héctor P. Agosti, December 19, 1947, FHPA/CeDInCI, folder SADE.

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Against this backdrop, for some “loyal friends” of the liberal intelligentsia this new position was disconcerting and even dramatic. The political timing was not the most favorable, either. In 1952, the government shifted toward a decisive interventionism in cultural matters and intensified the censorship and persecution of the opposition (aimed directly at the communists). According to Fiorucci, at least until 1950, Peronism’s cultural project was presented as a continuation of the policies of regulation and state support for culture that had been implemented since the 1930s, in Argentina as in various countries around the world.34 Indeed, through the creation of various state agencies, such as the Subsecretaría de Cultura (Subsecretariat of Culture), and the promotion of cultural organizations and activities, the Peronist government attempted to stimulate an active cultural policy that was accompanied by significant investments in cultural production and consumption, particularly for lowincome sectors. However, all of these projects were ultimately thwarted, at least as far as the support of the intellectual sectors and the attempts to create opportunities for their organization and participation in the State structure were concerned, as evidenced by the demise of the Junta de Intelectuales (Board of Intellectuals) and the Estatuto del trabajador intelectual (Statute of the intellectual worker), which the communist press described as an attempt to “intimidar el espíritu creador del intelectual argentino y uniformar el pensamiento dentro de los moldes de la concepción clerical-falangista” [intimidate the creative spirit of the Argentine intellectual and standardize thought within the parameters of a clericalFalangist conception].35 In 1950, with the appointment of Armando Méndez de San Martín as the new Minister of Education, the Department of Culture was downgraded to a Directorate and its budget was reduced significantly, although governmental attempts to intervene in the cultural sector did not cease, even if they did change course. One of the most controversial measures was the law regulating the Academias Nacionales (National Academies) which placed them under the supervision of the National Executive Power. It was strongly rejected by the academicians 34 Flavia Fiorucci, “Reflexiones sobre la gestión cultural bajo el peronismo,” in Nuevo Mundo: Mundos Nuevos, 2008, available online: http://journals.openedition.org/ nuevomundo/24372; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.24372 (Last access November 2021). 35 “El estatuto de los intelectuales tiene la marca de Hugo Wast,” in Orientación, June 22, 1949.

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themselves, who resigned en masse and paralyzed the functioning of these institutions. In 1952, in the context of the Second Five-Year Plan, the government’s interventionist and off-putting approach to cultural matters was exacerbated with the designation of Raúl de Oromi in charge of the area. Up to that point, Oromi had been Raúl Alejandro Apold’s right-hand man in the infamous National Department of Intelligence. A partir de 1952, la gestión de la nueva burocracia estatal languideció por completo y el estado pasó a convertirse en un verdadero desorganizador del mundo letrado mostrando sus aristas más censuradoras. Varias instituciones de la cultura local tales como la Sociedad Argentina de Escritores, el Museo Social o el Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores experimentaron a partir de 1952 diversos episodios de censura.36 [Beginning in 1952, the management of the new state bureaucracy deteriorated considerably and the State became a veritable disorganizer of the literary world, revealing its most censorious aspects. Several local cultural institutions such as the Argentine Society of Writers, the Social Museum, and the Free College of Higher Education experienced various episodes of censorship from that year onwards.]

In fact, there could hardly be a more unfortunate context in which to encourage the SADE to take up the banners of social justice in order to fraternize with the ruling party. In August, a police order led to the cessation of its public activities. The same happened with the CLES and the Sociedad Científica Argentina (Argentine Scientific Society), and with other cultural institutions judged to be “oppositional.”37 Despite the sincere refusal of the communists to accept that the call for unity had any relationship with the police operation, the fact that both events had happened in quick succession made the distinction difficult. Thus, their “formidable about-face” had serious repercussions and gave rise to a heated polemic between Agosti, then director of Cuadernos de Cultura, 36 Flavia Fiorucci, “Reflexiones sobre la gestión cultural bajo el peronismo,” op. cit. 37 This situation lasted for a year. On August 19, 1953, a SADE delegation consisting of

Manuel Mujica Láinez, Romualdo Brughetti, José Luis Lanuza, Roberto Giusti, and Julio Rinaldini met with Perón in order to explain the purely cultural and “apolitical” nature of their activities and their intention to support the objectives of peaceful coexistence expressed by the government. Perón responded favorably and the SADE was able to hold its assembly to renew its authorities and carry on with its activities until July 1954, when they were once again ordered to shut down by the police.

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and writer Roberto Giusti, who unceremoniously condemned what was widely perceived as an attempt to “surrender” the best Argentine cultural traditions “to the dictatorship.” Others, less scandalized by the sudden change of course, which they supported, also noted the inconsistency of demonizing an institution that they had endorsed until very recently, even serving as members on its governing bodies. This was the case of writer Alicia Ortiz, the wife of Carlos Dujovne, a fervent communist militant and cultural promoter who left the party in 1947 over differences regarding the characterization of Peronism, and as was usual in such cases, was consequently forgotten and silenced. In a letter addressed to Agosti, the writer welcomed the position taken, although she considered the accusations made against the SADE unjust given that it had never played a sufficiently explicit role in the “fight against imperialism” so as to justify the accusation it had ceased to do so. Besides, she pointed out, communist intellectuals had so much explaining to do regarding their own mistakes in recent political events that the pontificating and last-minute change in position was, to say the least, disconcerting. No defenderé a la SADE. Ya sabemos que se había transformado en un centro elegante en donde lucían sus toilettes más de una dama con tres apellidos. Y los programas de trabajo de los últimos años han sido lamentables. Hace tiempo que no paso siquiera por la acera de enfrente. También era un nido de opositores a la violeta. Pero no puede negarse que, en gran medida, esta actitud se debía a una posición democrática cegatona, que repudiaba en el peronismo lo que cada uno de nosotros repudia también: es decir, su falta de democracia, su demagogia, sus actitudes carnavalescas. No han visto más. A algunos de estos demócratas no les interesarían, muy probablemente, las ventajas logradas por la clase obrera, la liberación económica y antiimperialista. Pero otros estaban sinceramente creídos —y la propaganda de todos los partidos políticos de la oposición los afirmaba en su creencia— de que íbamos al fascismo. ¿Cómo es posible que no se indignen ahora del vuelco fundamental que uds. han dado y, por añadidura, de que los hagan cargar a ellos con la culpa de viejas posiciones bastante parecidas? […] En fin, a la larga, y como sea, estoy convencida de que esta política será efectiva, pues ahora están en lo justo, siempre que no pasen al otro lado, pues todas las exageraciones son malas. Yo, por mi parte, no me afiliaría a ninguna agrupación peronista y francamente, aquí

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entre nosotros, te digo que confraternizar con el Sindicato de Escritores Peronistas me sería, por lo menos, ligeramente difícil.38 [I will not defend the SADE. We already knew it had become an elegant center where more than one lady with three surnames flaunted their fancy outfits. And the working agendas of the last few years have been disgraceful. For some time now, I have not even walked past it. It was also a hotbed of false opponents. But it is undeniable that, for the most part, this attitude was due to a shortsighted democratic position, which repudiated in Peronism what each and every one of us also repudiates: that is, its lack of democracy, its demagogy, its carnivalesque attitudes. They have not seen beyond that. Some of these democrats would probably not be interested in the advantages achieved by the working class, economic and anti-imperialist liberation. But others genuinely believed —and the propaganda of all the opposing political parties affirmed them in this belief— that we were headed towards fascism. How is it possible that they are not indignant now about the fundamental volte-face you have taken and, moreover, that they are being blamed for very similar former positions? [...] In brief, in the long run, in any case, I am convinced that this policy will be effective, because now you are in the right, as long as you do not go overboard, because all exaggerations are harmful. For my part, I will not join any Peronist group, and frankly, between the two of us, I can tell you that fraternizing with the Peronist Writers’ Union will be at least slightly difficult for me.]

2

The Giusti-Agosti Controversy

One of the most categorical voices in the rejection of the communist proposal was that of socialist writer Roberto Giusti, director of the long-running journal Nosotros. Giusti was an old acquaintance of the communist writers, with whom he had shared many political and cultural initiatives. As Leónidas Barletta would later recall, the editorial staff of Nosotros was for many young aspiring revolutionaries an inspiration, an education, and a step toward achieving recognition, and Giusti—the “enérgico crítico del mechón lacio sobre la frente, de la voz metálica, diputado en ciernes, profesor conspicuo, jefe de familia” [energetic critic with the tuft of straight hair on his forehead, the metallic voice, fledgling 38 Letter from Alicia Ortiz to Héctor P. Agosti, Buenos Aires, November 1952, FHPA/CeDInCI, folder SADE.

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congressman, conspicuous teacher, family man]—was a generous man who made way for newcomers and encouraged them to study and engage in debate.39 With Agosti he shared an intellectual friendship, the last chapter of which was the joint direction of the journal Expresión, printed by the publishing house Problemas. Although the friendship between the two men stood the test of this exchange of mutual accusations and denigrations, the communists’ call sparked the polemicist fury of the old socialist, who, with a certain perspicacity, recognized that Agosti was the only one capable of gauging the dimension of what was at stake, for, he lamented, in the name of obedience to party mysticism, he was throwing his own prestige overboard: “Me da mucha pena ver a lo que obliga la profesión de comunista. Perinde ac cadaver” [It makes me very sad to see what the communist profession leads to. Perinde ac cadaver].40 First in a private letter and then in a mimeographed pamphlet that he himself distributed, he told him, not without malicious irony: La unidad de los escritores argentinos (naturalmente con agremiación obligatoria y afiliación a la CGT) propiciada sin éxito por el Presidente de la República años atrás en reuniones convocadas por él, e intentada con éxito escaso por el sindicato existente, artificialmente organizado en las esferas periodísticas oficiales, ahora se la brindan uds. al gobierno apuñalando a la SADE por la espalda en complicidad con la policía, que prohíbe, con burla de todas las disposiciones legales, nuestra asamblea. Después de haber traicionado a los estudiantes libres, el comunismo traiciona ahora a los escritores no sometidos. Desaparecerá la SADE, tan débil —oh, no lo dudo!— para alcanzar para los escritores los beneficios de Jauja; integrarán todos en rigurosa formación el Sindicato; iremos del brazo (son uds. los que así lo indican) con el o tales de ADEA, cuyos nombres sonroja estampar, a tanto ha llegado su inverosímil servilismo; y, previo el cumplimiento de todos los requisitos de fichaje, prontuariaje y obsecuencia exigidos por la sindicación, con las obligaciones implícitas y colaterales de cantar y danzar y llorar al son que les toque, les será otorgado por favor de lo alto, entre otras cosas. […]

39 Leónidas Barletta, “Film retrospectivo,” in Propósitos, January 20, 1955, cited in Raúl Larra, Leónidas Barletta: El hombre de la campana, Buenos Aires, Conducta, 1978, p. 40. 40 Letter from Roberto Giusti to Héctor P. Agosti, Martínez, October 23, 1952, FHPA, CeDInCI, folder SADE, p. 1.

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De mí puedo asegurarle que al precio que adivino y sobre el cual uds. parecen ciegos, pasan indiferentes, antes que sindicarme por fuerza no publicaré una línea. Me dedicaré a escribir mis memorias, en las que no faltará un capítulo sobre la mística política, tan parecida a la religiosa (¿recuerda ud. el artículo de Mauriac que le remití hace algunos meses?) y tan peligrosa para la personalidad humana cuando el hombre se somete al dogma de la obediencia (¿verdad, mi admirado intérprete de Ingenieros?).41 [The unity of Argentine writers (naturally with compulsory membership and affiliation with the CGT), unsuccessfully promoted by the President of the Republic years ago in meetings he himself convened, and attempted with little success by the existing union, artificially organized in official journalism circles, is what you now offer the government by stabbing the SADE in the back in complicity with the police, which, making a mockery of all legal provisions, prohibit our assembly. After having betrayed the free students, communism now betrays the non-subjugated writers. The SADE will disappear, too weak —I have no doubt!— to achieve the benefits of Cockaigne for the writers; they will all join the Union in strict formation; we will go arm in arm (it is you who demand this) with those from the ADEA, whose names are embarrassing to print given the degree of their unbelievable servility; and, before fulfilling all the requirements of registration, antecedents, and obsequiousness demanded by the union, with the implicit and collateral obligations of singing and dancing and crying to whatever tune, they will be granted by favor from on high, among other things […]. As for me, I can assure you that at the price that I am guessing and which you, seemingly blind, are indifferent to, rather than forcibly unionize myself I will not publish a single line. I will devote myself to writing my memoirs, which will include a chapter on political mysticism, so similar to religious mysticism (do you remember the article by Mauriac that I sent you a few months ago?) and so dangerous for the human personality when man submits himself to the dogma of obedience (do you not agree, oh admired interpreter of Ingenieros?).]

Predictably annoyed, Agosti replied a few days later with an eight-page letter, the main sections of which were later published in Propósitos. At the very moment that he had to give explanations to party authorities for his lack of Peronism, he also had to defend himself before his friends for being too Peronist. In the letter, he takes pains to point out that many 41 Ibid., pp. 1 and 4.

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of the demands of the communist platform for the SADE had been taken from the organization’s own historical resolutions and reflected old union aspirations, supported or promoted by Giusti himself during his tenure as president. This situation, and the weak repudiation that the SADE had expressed in response to the coups that led to the Justo and Ramírez governments, prompted him to conclude that it was not State support or regulation of culture that was being rejected, nor even the fact that the president of the nation could be accused of having little affection for democracy, but rather the attitude of “inoperative oppositionism” that the writers’ union had adopted. Y aquí está evidentemente el fondo del problema, estimado Giusti. En mi libro sobre Echeverría (perdóneme esta flaqueza de la propia cita) he tratado de indagar ciertas razones de la crisis cultural argentina: en el capítulo sobre la cultura militante he aludido al proceso de “aristocratización” de la cultura y de la distorsión de sus líneas de desarrollo nacional-popular como consecuencia de una doble incidencia oligárquicoimperialista. Permítame, entonces, ahorrarme la explicación y decirle que, a mi juicio, el fondo del problema suscitado en la SADE es simplemente la afloración de ese estado en un instante de crisis general del país y del mundo. ¿Por qué la SADE ha abandonado todo aquel programa que era legítimamente suyo? [...] A mi modo de ver —y necesito hablarle con toda franqueza— porque la entidad ha sido embarcada en una actitud de oposición por la oposición misma, sin advertir que la historia no es anécdota, y que debajo de la anécdota subyacen graves problemas irresueltos.42 [And here is the crux of the problem, dear Giusti. In my book on Echeverría (forgive me the weakness of self citation) I have tried to explore certain reasons for the Argentine cultural crisis: in the chapter on militant culture I have alluded to the process of the “aristocratization” of culture and the distortion of its national-popular development as a result of the double oligarchic-imperialist influence. Allow me, then, to save myself the explanation and tell you that, in my opinion, the essence of the problem in the SADE is simply the emergence of this state at a moment of general crisis in the country and in the world. Why has the SADE abandoned its legitimate program?

42 Letter from Héctor P. Agosti to Roberto Giusti, Buenos Aires, November 7, 1952, FHPA/CeDInCI, folder SADE, p. 4.

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[...] In my opinion —and I need to speak frankly— it is because the organization has engaged in an attitude of opposition for opposition’s sake, without realizing that history is not an anecdote, and that beneath the anecdote there are serious unresolved issues.]

For Agosti, who until then had not hesitated for a minute to condemn the Peronist government’s initiatives in cultural matters as clerical, Hispanist, and Falangist, mere “anti-Peronist” credentials had to arouse suspicion, since some of its most recalcitrant members were moved by “reactionary sentiments” and a deep contempt for the masses: “Se oponen al régimen porque lo consideran algo así como la forma de un pro-comunismo caracterizado por la ascensión de la chusma a la superficie” [They oppose the regime because they consider it a form of pro-communism characterized by the rise of the rabble to the surface].43 This hidden aspect of anti-Peronism was revealed when disgust turned into applause before a measure of submission to imperialism, such as the signing of the Pact of Rio de Janeiro. El gobierno peronista tenía entonces los mismos defectos que pueden caracterizarlo ahora. Pero entonces había comenzado la aventura bélica de MacArthur en Corea (no soy quien, pobre comunista obediente, quien la califica duramente, sino Jean-Paul Sartre, campeón de la libertad del espíritu), y no parecía mal coincidir con un gobierno cargado de lacras si se le podía inducir a que mandase jóvenes argentinos a desangrarse en Asia para mayor gloria de los banqueros de Wall Street.44 [The Peronist government then had the same defects that characterize it now. But then MacArthur’s military adventure in Korea had begun (it is not I, a poor, obedient communist, who describes it so harshly, but JeanPaul Sartre, a champion of the freedom of the spirit), and it did not seem wrong to agree with a government full of scoundrels if it could be induced to send young Argentines to bleed to death in Asia for the greater glory of Wall Street bankers.]

This reference alone seems to be enough for Agosti to justify a disconcerting change of position in a context he himself disapproved of, although it does reveal the weight international politics could have in the 43 Letter from Héctor P. Agosti to Roberto Giusti, op. cit., p. 5. 44 Ibid.

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realignment of communist loyalties. The needs arising from the struggle for peace and against imperialist aggressions, established as a priority at the VI Conferencia Nacional del Partido (6th National Conference of the Party) in November 1950, formed the backdrop for the organization of the cultural front during the first years of the Cold War. In fact, Perón’s backtracking on sending Argentine troops to Korea, due largely to the popular mobilization against the initiative, which the communists claimed to be leading, but also given that it was inopportune in an election year, soured the government’s relations with Washington. The intensification of State authoritarianism, and particularly the crackdown on the press, was the other element that contributed to the cooling of bilateral relations, accelerating both American distrust of the Peronist government’s democratic intentions and the latter’s nationalist rhetoric.45 In this climate, the attitude of the communists with respect to Perón’s international policy decisions became nuanced. In the winter of 1951, the city of Mendoza would be the setting for the first meeting of the Consejo Argentino por la Paz (Argentine Council for Peace), held legally. A few months later, instead of dealing with the usual visa problems, the intellectuals and communist leaders who traveled to Vienna to participate in the World Congress of the Peoples for Peace were accompanied by John William Cooke, official representative of the Argentine government. Agosti’s argument in defending the writers’ union initiative was, therefore, to back the necessary realignments in the context of the defense of peace, part of the “process of world revolution against imperialism” that the planet was undergoing, and which did not allow for “nostalgic evocations” of the symbols of the past, respectable but “instrumentally invalid” for the transformations that Argentine society needed. It was not, of course, a simple option, nor was it an ideological alignment with revisionism, which it had opposed up to that point. It was not, by any means, “a walk in the park.” Nos mueve la preocupación fundamental de poner al país al resguardo de compromisos con el imperialismo que menoscaban su soberanía, y bien sabe usted que no son las etiquetas partidarias las que sirven para definir este punto. Nosotros andaremos en este camino (que no es un camino

45 José Paradiso, “Vicisitudes de una política exterior independiente,” in Juan Carlos Torre (ed.), Nueva historia argentina: Los años peronistas (1943–1955), Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 2002, pp. 525–571.

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de rosas, puedo asegurárselo) con todos cuantos coincidan en esta preocupación fundamental y evidentemente patriótica, sin renunciar a ninguno de nuestros objetivos de fondo. Esto lo hemos hecho siempre, Giusti.46 We are motivated by the basic concern of protecting the country from any commitments with imperialism that undermine its sovereignty, and you well know that party labels are useless in defining this point. We will take this path (which, I can assure you, is not a walk in the park) along with all those who coincide in this basic and clearly patriotic concern, without renouncing any of our fundamental objectives. This is what we have always done, Giusti.

In his second and extensive response—which Agosti received while in Chile participating in the Congreso Continental de la Cultura (Continental Congress of Culture)—Giusti remarked that the errors and complicities that were now being blamed on him would perhaps have been forgiven if he had accepted the invitation of Ernesto Giudici and Joliot-Curie himself to participate in the congresses for peace organized by the communists. Pienso que lo que más interesa en la hora actual a Moscú y por consiguiente al Partido Comunista argentino es atizar el fuego antiimperialista por antonomasia antiyanqui, que el peronismo mantiene encendido. He aquí el punto de coincidencia que explica la facilidad con que lograron los pasaportes, previo certificado de buena conducta, los viajeros que concurrieron al Congreso por la Paz de Viena, al cual también asistió como observador, leí que delegado por el presidente de la Nación, el ex diputado Cooke. Usted, de deducción en deducción, llega a sostener en su carta que el antiperonismo de muchos cedería si cediera la oposición del peronismo a los Estados Unidos (suposición que pretende documentar con un episodio parlamentario de la época en que la mayoría peronista votó los pactos de Río de Janeiro), a contrario sensu, debe leerse que el antiperonismo es una cara local del imperialismo yanqui. ¿Y qué tiene que ver la SADE con todo ello?.47 I think that what interests Moscow and consequently the Argentine Communist Party most at the moment is to stoke the anti-imperialist 46 Letter from Héctor P. Agosti to Roberto Giusti, op. cit. p. 6. 47 Roberto Giusti, “Conducta de los escritores (carta abierta a Héctor P. Agosti),”

Buenos Aires, 1953, p. 19.

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anti-American fire, which Peronism maintains ignited. Now here is the coincidence that explains the ease with which the travelers who attended the Congreso por la Paz in Vienna, following a certificate of good conduct, were able to obtain their passports. I read that former Congressman Cooke also attended the Congress as an observer, as a delegate of the President of the Nation. From one inference to the next, you go so far as to argue in your letter that many would yield in their anti-Peronism if Peronism’s opposition to the United States were to yield (an assumption that you intend to document with a parliamentary episode from the time when the Peronist majority voted for the Rio Pact), on the contrary, it should be understood that anti-Peronism is a local manifestation of American imperialism. And what does the SADE have to do with all of this?

For Giusti, Agosti’s response failed to explain the essential, namely, the reasons why the communist writers had “backstabbed” the SADE by promoting its merger with the Peronist trade unions, in “complicity” with the police, who had prevented its assembly and the continuity of its activities. But furthermore, Giusti’s response dwelt on thorny issues that the communist writers’ appeal presumed were supported by broad consensus: the intervention of the State in cultural matters and cultural nationalism. In effect, the project to dilute the SADE into a trade union organization with the presence of the government trade unions was bound to generate the rejection of an intellectual sector that had proved successful in rebuffing and weakening any interventionist attempt, turning the defense of its autonomy into a question of identity and a tool to coordinate dissidence against the regime. However, it should be noted that this did not imply an outright rejection of the potential of the State’s involvement in culture in the form of support, promotion, and protection of cultural producers. Agosti was right when he recalled that the SADE itself had fought for many of the demands it now rejected. What he could not admit in public was that the problem was not necessarily with the State, but with Peronism. Its practices in educational matters, predilection for leaders with few credentials and less prestige, and policing attitude in dealing with cultural matters were hardly attractive elements for Agosti’s colleagues to entrust it with the future of national literary life. In that context, presenting cultural problems in strictly trade union terms, relying on the figure of the writer as a worker who was able to improve his poor living conditions thanks to protectionism and state patronage, was, at the very least, insufficient to attract broad support. Even Agosti himself—echoing a marginality he himself had not experienced—had to

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publicly concede that the errors of the project could be due to the fact that its proponents did not belong “to any of the circles that consider themselves the intellectual elite of the Republic,” a marginality that Giusti confirmed when he joked that some of the “unjustly ignored” communist writers who had signed the manifesto could perhaps benefit from the achievements of the new union they were promoting. Giusti’s repudiation of the project presented by the communists focused precisely on the “statist nationalism” it was based on. For the author of Siglos, escuelas, autores, while State interventionism in most economic and social activities was usually harmful and dangerous, in culture it led directly to “dirigisme.” Nada más perjudicial para la cultura de un país que este proteccionismo localista. La obra de arte no interesa mayormente; solo preocupan los intereses del artesano, así sea él un chapucero. Lo sé, lo sé: somos “trabajadores intelectuales”. Pues yo, sin sentirme siquiera lejanamente un aristócrata de la pluma y sin menospreciar mínimamente al obrero manual, de lo que da fe mi vida entera, me resisto a ser incorporado, en cuanto a escritor, aunque modesto, en las filas de la producción industrial y en serie. Esta incorporación resulta inevitable cuando el escritor es puesto al servicio de una doctrina política o de una particular concepción de la vida social sin ofrecerle otra vía de salida. Como yo pienso diversamente […] se comprenderá mi repugnancia a alistarme en las filas del trabajo intelectual dirigido por el Estado.48 [Nothing is more detrimental to a country’s culture than this localist protectionism. Works of art are of little interest; only the interests of artisans are considered, even if they produce slipshod work. I know, I know: we are “intellectual workers.” But personally, without feeling even remotely like an aristocrat with my pen, and without in the least despising the manual worker, as my whole life attests, I resist, as a writer, albeit a modest one, joining the ranks of industrial and serial production. This incorporation is inevitable when the writer is placed at the service of a political doctrine or a particular conception of social life without offering him any other way out. As I think differently [...] it is easy to understand my reluctance to enlist myself in the ranks of intellectual labor directed by the State.]

48 Ibid., p. 9.

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At a time when the USSR and, along with it, all of the Western communist parties were embarked on an authoritarian and censorious policy toward intellectuals, while at the same time promoting an antiimperialist discourse that often resulted in nationalist content that was narrow-minded, defensive, and at odds with any internationalist tradition, it was easy to point out the contradiction between the universalist humanism that communist intellectuals claimed to defend and the cultural nationalism that they were actually beginning to practice. Giusti was quick to highlight the “esprit de clocher” and Soviet-style “intellectual parochialism” and he extended this to the implicit support for realist literature and regional elements that the communist appeal advocated. Is it true—he wondered—that the specific role of the writer is to know his country better and to reflect it more accurately in his production? The answer is no; narrative regionalism, although meritorious, was not for everyone, nor did it set the tone of national literature. It had been cultivated by great writers, from Esteban Echeverría to Roberto Payró, including Baldomero Fernández Moreno and Evaristo Carriego’s suburban poetry, but in doing so they had not needed to travel anywhere or required official assistance or followed a program “drawn up on railway timetables.”49 In essence, what Giusti is challenging Agosti on is the diagnosis that the author of Echeverría presented in his highly praised book: that Argentine culture was undergoing a process of “aristocratization” at the hands of imperialism and oligarchy, the result of which was a distortion of its national-popular development. For Giusti, this reading of the Argentine cultural process was part of a tendency toward retrospective criticism shared by “historical possibilists,” “political hardliners,” and “communist historical revisionists,” a denomination with which Agosti himself eventually came to identify. In his eyes, national culture, far from becoming aristocratic, had “involuted” due to Peronism and its notion of policing culture. Intellectual anti-Peronism was, therefore, justified for political and ethical reasons, rather than material ones. Culture could not be analyzed from a narrow materialistic position. As Fernando Nadra pointed out, once Victorio Codovilla put an end to Real’s adventure, Peronization advanced significantly on the cultural front. Undoubtedly, the one who suffered the most from that excess was Agosti, since he was forced to zealously defend a position that only a

49 Roberto Giusti, “Conducta de los escritores…,” op. cit., p. 14.

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few months later the party judged to be typical of the factionalist activities of a renegade. As will occur on other occasions and had already occurred in the past, the party’s interference in cultural affairs and its complete lack of understanding of how the intellectual space worked destroyed the positions and achievements of many of its intellectuals and, not infrequently, undermined their prestige and jeopardized their credibility. Agosti, in the space of a few months, went from being applauded, honored, and considered one of the highest cultural authorities in the country to becoming an obsequious executor of highly treacherous political maneuvers. However, it is also true that other intellectuals and writers equally committed to the party did not put in an appearance to support the call and thus avoided the public exposure he had to endure. The resistance of “elements of the intelligentsia” to the shift promoted by Real was significant, although limited by the logic of party discipline. If Rodolfo Ghioldi himself could not do much to prevent Real’s move and ended up sanctioned, people like Agosti, always suspected of inconsistency, found themselves in a difficult situation. In the meeting in which Codovilla, following his return to Argentina, had put an end to the progovernment shift, Agosti demanded that the collective responsibilities of the party leadership be clarified since the rank and file had responded to the directives given out of a “healthy feeling” of compliance, a quality which, he emphasized, should not prevent a serious reflection on the difference between “conscious discipline” and pure obedience. Me niego a la solución fácil de buscar un responsable individual, mientras no se demuestre la falsedad de las resoluciones superiores invocadas (Porque ésa era la situación de los compañeros que tenían dudas: verse en la obligación de enfrentar a la dirección. No lo digo como justificación). [I refuse to take the easy way out by looking for an individual to blame, while the falsity of the resolutions taken has not been demonstrated. (Because that was the situation of the comrades who had doubts: they found themselves forced to confront the leadership. I am not saying this as a justification).]50

50 Héctor P. Agosti, “Intervención de H.A. el 21-2-53,” FHPA/CeDInCI, folder Papeles Personales.

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In short, this episode clearly reveals the contradictions between the party logic Agosti answered to, despite his reservations, and the logic of the intellectual wing that criticized him for the same reason. However, it should be noted that Agosti’s intervention cannot be read only as an act of submission to party authority, because while, on the one hand, he managed to prevent the public debate from completely succumbing to the Peronist tone that the situation might have led to, on the other it was part of a process of intellectual reflection characterized by a still discrete break with the liberal intelligentsia, which had begun with Echeverría. That was the intellectual context of his criticism of the SADE, its political tepidity and its lack of enthusiasm for the idea of a militant culture capable of building a bridge to the working-class world that, in spite of itself, had chosen Peronism. Several years later, when evoking that moment, he presented it as a personal battle, costly but efficient: Ese duro año [1952], en que me debatía como ser solitario entre la desconfianza de los amigos y las lápidas de silencio de los adversarios, fue sin embargo beneficioso y clarificador porque, si no totalmente, alcanzó a resguardarnos contra el relativo sectarismo político que pudo producirse como rechazo a las torpes maniobras de Real y sus secuaces.51 That difficult year [1952], in which I was struggling as a solitary being between the distrust of friends and the silence of my adversaries, was nevertheless beneficial and clarifying because it managed to shield us, albeit not completely, from the relative political sectarianism that emerged as a rejection of the clumsy maneuvers of Real and his henchmen.

During the sessions of the Comité Central Ampliado (Extended Central Committee) in September 1954, the question of intellectuals was raised for the first time in explicit terms. Amidst the echoes of the crisis, Rodolfo Ghioldi’s report stressed that in the area of culture the setbacks had been enormous, since not only the tasks of the party but also, more importantly, the prestige of many comrades had been compromised. However, he added, no one should be surprised if they kept in mind that the problem was still the constant resistance of intellectuals to assimilating the “party line,” which they despised. Under the new conditions

51 Héctor P. Agosti, Los infortunios de la realidad: En torno a la correspondencia con Enrique Amorim, Buenos Aires, n.d., p. 80.

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imposed by the struggle against imperialism and oligarchy, which now assumed the political form of a National Democratic Front, intellectuals had to combat both “critical sectarianism” and its tendency for avantgardism, but also accept that resistance to “cosmopolitanism” compelled them to consider that in the realm of culture there were “two worlds” and that this division would not disappear no matter how significant the amplitude and search for allies might be.52 In short, the Juan José Real episode had the paradoxical effect of accelerating the process for communism of increased autonomy from the liberal intellectual sphere, at both the level of structures and ideological content. Agosti was an essential figure in both dimensions and his place in the party was consolidated from that moment on. In the following decade, he would serve as head of the cultural front, director of Cuadernos de Cultura, director of the weekly Nuestra Palabra, and, above all, the only public figure with a continental impact that Argentine communism had after Aníbal Ponce.

3 Facing the Imperial Threat: Readings and Cultural Organizations In the first years of the Cold War, Argentine communists organized their anti-imperialist discourse around the extension of anti-fascist topics. In the field of culture, they decided—in a confused and forced but predictable manner—that the main enemy was clericalism, affirming that this was the ideological form adopted in the country by American imperialism, which, lacking a philosophy of its own, had to rely on ideas from the Vatican, in this case intrinsically tied to Hispanic regression. This was what had happened with Nazism, they argued, whose local ideological counterpart had been the fascist and Hispanist sector of the Church, as had always been the case in the history of reactionary advances that sought to combat secular and progressive traditions. In terms of the formation of a new “totalitarianism,” this time American, the situation was repeated, although in a unique context: that of the irruption of the masses into political life—Peronism—where ultramontane Catholics also

52 “Se realizó un importante Comité Central Ampliado del Partido Comunista,” in Nuestra Palabra, September 21, 1954, p. 3.

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found their place and the Hispanic legacy was, at least for some years, officially reclaimed.53 This characterization had consequences for the actions of intellectuals because an attitude of narrow opposition was no longer acceptable. According to Ernesto Giudici, there was a need to encourage the creation of a progressive intellectual front with the May tradition as a point of confluence and take on continental content and form. Intellectuals, on their part, had to fight for their freedom from imperialism by giving their creation national emphasis.54 The idea that Hispanism, as an official policy of the Peronist government, was offered as a foundation for imperialism made it possible to oppose the restoration of the casteist topics (race, language, religion) to the “legitimate May tradition” and focus the rejection of American Cold War policies on this point. The pedagogue Berta Perelstein explained it this way: Asistimos a la resurrección del “hispanismo” en el orden de las ideas, justamente cuando se produce en el de los hechos un proceso similar al que tuvo lugar en la época de auge del imperio hispánico. Así como Felipe II dominó a todo el mundo con la potencia de su imperio militar-feudal, se produce ahora la concentración de todo el poderío del capitalismo en el imperialismo norteamericano, e igual que Felipe lo hacía desde su celda en El Escorial, aspiran ahora los poderosos de Wall Street a envolver el planeta entre sus brazos. […] El papel que juega la ideología “hispánica” en nuestro país es fácilmente comprensible a la luz del que pasa a jugar España en la política de dominación mundial del imperialismo yanqui. Diversos antecedentes prueban que el Departamento de Estado de Washington se propone utilizar a dicho país en sus planes de “unificar” a América Latina según el Plan Truman, y que esa es la condición para las negociaciones de préstamos de Estados Unidos a la Península.55 [We are witnessing the resurrection of “Hispanism” in the realm of ideas, precisely when a process similar to the one that took place at the height of

53 On clericalism, Hispanism and revisionism as the organizing themes behind the thesis

of the “two Argentinas” during Peronism, see Carlos Altamirano, Peronismo y cultura de izquierda, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2011, pp. 35–47. 54 Ernesto Giudici, “Frente ideológico y tareas culturales,” in Orientación, March 19, 1947. 55 Berta Perelstein de Braslavsky, “Hispanismo e imperialismo,” in Orientación, December 11, 1948.

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the Hispanic empire is taking place in the realm of events. Just as Philip II dominated the entire world with the strength of his military-feudal empire, we are now witnessing the concentration of all of capitalism’s power in American imperialism, and just as Philip did from his cell in El Escorial, the powerful of Wall Street now aspire to engulf the planet. [...] The role “Hispanic” ideology plays in our country is easily understandable in light of the role Spain is playing in American imperialism’s policy of world domination. Various precedents show that the State Department in Washington intends to use said country in its plans to “unify” Latin America according to the Truman Plan, and that this is the condition for the negotiations of loans from the United States to the Peninsula.]

Faced with the probable “annihilation” of Argentine culture at the hands of government Hispanism, Héctor P. Agosti stated in the months prior to the 1948 legislative elections: “La respuesta no puede ser una vaga reivindicación de la democracia sino una reafirmación de la condición militante de la inteligencia argentina: antihispanista, antimonástica y antiimperial” [The response cannot be a vague defense of democracy but a reaffirmation of the militant condition of the Argentine intelligentsia: anti-Hispanic, anti-monastic, and anti-imperial].56 As the 1950s progressed, anti-imperialist discourse in the cultural realm focused on the definition of “cosmopolitanism” as the main enemy, albeit without abandoning the positions that regarded the Church as the intellectual agent of the reaction. In most Western communist parties, “cosmopolitanism,” a topic that had long formed part of discussions on nationality, became the term of choice to describe the dangers of the “Americanization of the world” and the ideology of “bourgeois nationalism.” In the USSR, it also had an anti-Semitic dimension, which reached its most shameful levels with the Prague trials and the so-called “Doctors’ Plot,” between 1952 and 1953.57 According to the Diccionario soviético de filosofía, cosmopolitanism is a theory of bourgeois origin which expresses imperialism’s drive 56 Héctor P. Agosti, “La cultura militante,” in Orientación, January 6, 1948. 57 Both events resulted in a deep schism within the Argentine Jewish community.

In 1952, the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations, or DAIA) issued a declaration demanding that all Argentine Jewish organizations support the condemnation of the anti-Semitic persecutions in the USSR and its orbit. Since any opposing stance was considered a denial of basic Jewish solidarity and implied an automatic self-exclusion from Judaism, the Idisher Cultur Farband (ICUF), the Jewish branch of the PCA, representative of a very significant part of the country’s Jewish community, was in practice excluded from the main Jewish community organizations, the

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for domination through a universalist and humanist rhetoric, since it urges people to deepen their patriotic feelings, their culture, and their national traditions. These are values that proletarian internationalism, on the other hand, aligns with the fundamental interests of the workers and which are therefore imbued with an authentically popular patriotism.58 In Latin America, the specifically anti-American aspect of communist anti-cosmopolitanism established ties with the school of thought that, since the publication of Ariel by the Uruguayan author José Enrique Rodó in the early twentieth century, had reserved the task of unifying the spirit to defend “Latin American values” against the expansionist drive of the United States for the cultivated elite.59 Del mismo modo que Hitler en su tiempo advirtió que la conquista política de Francia era imposible mientras permaneciera viva la tradición del pensamiento francés, la oligarquía financiera que monopoliza el poder norteamericano comprende que su ambición criminal hacia la hegemonía sobre el mundo supone como prerrequisito la destrucción implacable de los valores de las culturas nacionales. Este empeño requiere una teoría y el imperialismo la posee. Consiste ella en negar, como anacrónica y decrépita, la noción de la soberanía nacional, y desde luego que allí donde esta soberanía está de más, sobre con mayor motivo la cultura nacional. Esta es la base de la ponzoñosa concepción del cosmopolitismo cultural, que implica el nihilismo absoluto en cuanto a las culturas nacionales.60 [Just as Hitler in his time warned that the political conquest of France was impossible as long as the tradition of French thought remained alive, the financial oligarchy that monopolizes American power understands that its criminal ambition for hegemony over the world holds the ruthless destruction of the values of national cultures as a prerequisite. This endeavor DAIA and the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, or AMIA). See Nerina Visacovsky, Argentinos, judíos y camaradas tras la utopía socialista, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2015. 58 Mark Rosental and Pavel Iudin, Diccionario soviético de filosofía, Montevideo, Pueblos Unidos, 1965, p. 89 [An English translation is available: A Dictionary of Philosophy, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1967]. 59 See Oscar Terán, “El espiritualismo y la creación del anti-imperialismo latinoamericano,” in Ricardo Salvatore (comp.), Culturas imperiales: Experiencia y representación en América, Asia y África, Buenos Aires, Beatriz Viterbo, 2005, pp. 303–314. 60 “El imperialismo yanqui enemigo de nuestra cultura,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 7, July 1952.

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requires a theory and imperialism possesses it. It consists in denying the notion of national sovereignty as anachronistic and decrepit, and indeed where sovereignty is superfluous, national culture is all the more so. This is the basis of the poisonous conception of cultural cosmopolitanism, which leads to absolute nihilism in terms of national cultures.]

Since the American offensive was articulated both through the violent form of political, economic, and military interventions and under the peaceful guise of “cultural penetration,” intellectuals had the duty of resisting by contributing to the development of a culture alternately designated as national and popular, democratic, progressive, or patriotic. At the same time, the national form that the cultural struggle had to take on served to reject the idea of a struggle between East and West, a false antinomy that, as Jorge Amado said, prevented the acknowledgment of the intention to replace a human culture made up of diverse national cultures with an ersatz culture devoid of roots. An “cultura internacionalista al servicio de los intereses imperialistas” [internationalist culture at the service of imperialist interests], he warned, was especially dangerous for the young Latin American countries.61 The idea that Latin American cultures, due to “their recent historical roots,” were more susceptible to the “cosmopolitan danger” than European ones, owners of a rich and varied multi-secular heritage, reinforced the task of preservation and defense that intellectuals were to carry out. Several years before the speeches against cultural imperialism that would become frequent in the 1960s, the communists pointed out that one of the preferred means of cultural penetration was the philanthropic foundations and university programs focused on area studies, since they were aimed at forming herds of “intellectual spies” dedicated to undermining the progressive values of their countries’ culture. Based on the assumption that intellectuals were narcissistic individuals prone to flattery and of rather weak convictions, communists claimed that imperialism devoted particular attention to them, organizing a process of “co-optation” which, although described with the linearity and lack of nuances that characterized the harsh rhetoric of some leaders when dealing with cultural issues, nevertheless indicated a new strategy in international relations in that area. Victorio Codovilla wrote about this, describing a process that he may well have found familiar: 61 Jorge Amado, “Lecciones, experiencias y tareas,” in Orientación, October 13, 1948.

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Esta “atención” asume diversas formas. En general, el agregado cultural de las embajadas se encarga de “tantear” los lados flacos de ciertos intelectuales propensos al halago. Elogia desmesuradamente sus producciones literarias, artísticas, científicas, etc.; les pide artículos para revistas norteamericanas; les hace traducir algunas de sus obras al inglés y les asegura la publicación y la venta. Luego, los invita a visitar los Estados Unidos, donde se les da la posibilidad de hablar desde diversas tribunas para exaltar la “amistad interamericana” y poner de relieve aspectos culturales y científicos “comunes” entre las dos Américas. A su vuelta al país de origen son agasajados por los amigos de Norteamérica y “cultivados” por el encargado cultural yanqui, y, de ese modo, consciente o inconscientemente, la mayoría de ellos se transforman en panegiristas de la cultura, del arte, de la pedagogía, de la ciencia norteamericana, sin discriminación de ninguna especie.62 [This “attention” takes on various forms. Generally speaking, the cultural attaché of the embassies is tasked with “probing” the weaknesses of certain intellectuals who are prone to flattery. He lavishes excessive praise on their literary, artistic, scientific, etc. productions; he asks them for articles for American magazines; he has them translate some of their work into English and assures them publication and sales. Then, he invites them to visit the United States, where they are given the opportunity to speak in different settings to celebrate “inter-American friendship” and to highlight the cultural and scientific aspects the two Americas “have in common”. Upon returning to their country of origin, they are entertained by friends of North America and “groomed” by an American cultural advisor. As a result, consciously or unconsciously, most of them become panegyrists of American culture, art, pedagogy, and science, without discernment of any kind.]

Latin American intellectuals, therefore, had to operate in a terrain where imperialism exerted its domination using more subtle but no less harmful means. And although it was noted that this offensive, a new “barbarism,” was developing in all areas of culture (medicine, psychology, sociology, pedagogy, and philosophy), for “obvious reasons” it was particularly active in the “sphere of literature, art, and music,” where it could even be associated with specific names.

62 Victorio Codovilla, ¿Será América Latina una colonia yanqui?, Buenos Aires, Anteo, 1947, p. 7.

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Es preciso acorazar al lector y al escritor, al espectador y al plástico, al aficionado y al compositor contra la barbarie artística norteamericana. Repúdiese la novela que exalta la fuerza bruta y la inhumanidad, la narración policial, el cuento pornográfico. Dígase que se niega, como falsa, malsana y corruptora, una pseudo ciencia que permite la institución de un fondo de 100.000 dólares para que los sabios investiguen el siguiente punto: “Es verdad que los hombres las prefieren rubias” (Es lo que ha hecho, en diciembre de 1951, la Universidad de Michigan). Nueva York es actualmente el mostrador mundial del abstraccionismo, y Nelson Rockefeller el dueño del arte moderno.63 [The reader and the writer, the spectator and the visual artist, the amateur and the composer must steel themselves against American artistic barbarism. Repudiate the novel that exalts brute force and inhumanity, the detective story, the pornographic tale. Decry as false, unhealthy, and corrupting, a pseudo-science that enables the establishment of a $100,000 fund for scholars to investigate the following point: “It is true that men prefer blondes.” (This is what the University of Michigan did in December 1951.) New York is currently the world’s showcase for abstractionism, and Nelson Rockefeller the owner of modern art.]

For the communists, the imperial ambitions of the United States had established a clear circuit of the circulation and legitimization of institutions, aesthetics, and discourses, which had the effect of fragmenting Latin American progressive intellectuals and causing them to abandon their national obligations. In 1952, in the context of a special session of the World Peace Council (or World Council of Partisans for Peace), convened to deal with the issue of German rearmament and the difficulties in achieving a ceasefire in Korea, Pablo Neruda, the greatest poet of Latin American communism, added hyperbolic accents to the program that, under his public impetus, would lead to the first communistinspired organization of Latin American intellectuals, conceived as a formal alternative to the United States’ cultural policy for the region: A los escritores y artistas latinoamericanos que han mostrado independencia hacia las acometidas del imperialismo se ostentan en forma tentadora oportunidades de viajes y becas en los Estados Unidos mientras la entrada es rehusada a la mayor parte y a lo mejor de nuestros intelectuales. Mientras

63 “El imperialismo yanqui enemigo de nuestra cultura,” op. cit.

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tanto el continente latinoamericano se inunda de literatura pornográfica, falsas revistas de divulgación y novelas policiales importadas de los Estados Unidos. No hay dudas de que todas estas acciones forman parte de un plan premeditado. Es deliberado el propósito de negarnos tribuna, de aislarnos, arrinconarnos, dividirnos. Este es el programa de la política intelectual de los agresores. A este plan debemos oponernos.64 [Latin American writers and artists who have shown signs of independence in the face of imperialist attacks are offered enticing travel opportunities and scholarships in the United States while entry is denied to the majority and the best of our intellectuals. Meanwhile, the Latin American continent is flooded with pornographic literature, phony magazines, and detective novels imported from the United States. There is no doubt that all of these actions are part of a premeditated plan. The attempt to deny us a platform, to isolate, corner, and divide us is deliberate. This is the intellectual policy agenda of the aggressors. We must oppose this plan.]

The Congreso Continental de la Cultura (Continental Congress of Culture) was the initiative of several Latin American members of the World Peace Council, although it was deliberately not presented under its aegis, and was held following the endless legal difficulties encountered by the American Continental Peace Conference, which had to be held clandestinely in basements, bars, and private homes in Montevideo in March 1952.65 After some organizational difficulties with no shortage of personal quarrels and public denunciations within the small 64 Pablo Neruda, “Se pretende detener con el terror la marcha del pensamiento,” in Democracia, Santiago, July 23, 1952, cited in David Schidlowsky, Pablo Neruda y su tiempo: Las furias y las penas, vol. 2, Santiago, RIL, 2008, p. 850. 65 The Intercontinental Peace Congress was to be held in Rio de Janeiro on January 20–27, 1952, but was banned by the Getúlio Vargas government. With the presence of delegates from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Paraguay, and Bolivia, the conference was finally held in Montevideo from March 12 to 16 clandestinely, as it was also banned there. Several delegates were delayed at airports and many others were denied visas. See “Se constituyó la comisión argentina de patrocinio de la Conferencia Continental Americana por la Paz,” in Nuestra Palabra, February 19, 1952, p. 5; “Viva la Conferencia Continental por la Paz”, in Nuestra Palabra, March 11, 1952, p. 1; “Pese a todas las trabas la Conferencia Continental por la Paz se realizó con éxito,” in Nuestra Palabra, March 25, 1952, p. 5, and “Resoluciones de la Conferencia Continental por la Paz,” in Nuestra Palabra, April 2, 1952, p. 5.

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but intense Latin American progressive community, the Conference was held in Santiago de Chile between April 26 and May 3, 1953—barely a month after Stalin’s death, which provoked a bewilderment that Neruda himself expressed in verses he later wished to forget—with the presence of two hundred writers, journalists, artists, and publishers from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the United States. Under Neruda’s leadership, with vital assistance from his friend Jorge Amado and, above all, the tireless María Rosa Oliver, the movement for the organization of the Congress began with an appeal to Latin American intellectuals featuring the signature of poet Gabriela Mistral, with her backing handled personally by the Cuban Juan Marinello, who demanded, as a condition for her support, that she be accompanied by Colombian writer Baldomero Sanín Cano and the Costa Rican editor Joaquín García Monge.66 The event’s success was recognized even by its detractors and direct competitors, who at that very moment were founding, in the Chilean capital, the first Latin American headquarters of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization created with the explicit purpose of combating the Soviet offensive in the area of culture and whose later history was closely tied to the fact that a significant part of its funding came from the American Intelligence Agency. Although it was not the first time that communist intellectuals had gathered at a continental Congress, what was new and remarkable was that this time they were the only protagonists. Constituting a veritable constellation of distinguished figures in spite of last-minute desertions, the sessions held at the Teatro Municipal de Santiago were attended by René Depestre, Jorge Icaza, José Asunción Flores, Alberto Romero, Alfonso Reyes, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Nicolás Guillén, Betty Sanders, Gabriel Bracho, Joaquín Gutiérrez, Efraín Morel, Marcelo Sanjinés, José Mancisidor, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and many others, including Salvador Allende. The Argentine delegation was comprised of María Rosa Oliver, Jorge Thénon, Héctor P. Agosti, Zulma Núñez, V. Melgarejo Muñoz, Joaquín Gómez

66 Gabriela Mistral’s support for the Continental Congress proved somewhat ambiguous, as the writer retracted it before the international press when it became clear that the event was organized by the World Peace Council. See Germán Alburquerque, La trinchera letrada: Intelectuales latinoamericanos y Guerra Fría, Santiago, Ariadna, 2011, p. 52.

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Bas, Raúl González Tuñón, Leónidas Barletta, Raúl Klappenbach, Carlos Ruiz Daudet, and Omar Estrella.67 After three days of deliberations, the Congress issued a proclamation calling for the defense of Latin American national cultures against imperialism, increased cultural exchange, and the promotion of the free circulation of cultural goods both within the continent and abroad, the protection of creative liberties, assistance with the material difficulties facing writers and artists, and, ultimately, the preservation of world peace. In his keynote address, entitled “A la paz por la poesía,” Neruda spoke at length of the danger that Hollywood movies, detective novels, magazines, and comic books posed for Latin American popular culture and called on writers to rediscover the continent and express it through simple, optimistic, and uplifting literature that focused on the appreciation of autochthonous and indigenous cultures. “La suprema prueba de una raza es su propia poesía” [The ultimate test of a race is its own poetry], he said, evoking Walt Whitman, so if the physiognomy of the continent is the work of miners and engineers, peasants and fishermen, guerrillas and partisans, only poets can give it its true face.68 In Argentina, the echoes of the great Congress were few and rather negative. Despite the fact that, as usual, the organizers extended the invitation to a broad group of intellectuals that included institutions such as the Asociación Cultural Argentina para la Defensa y Superación de Mayo (Argentine Cultural Association for the Defense and Improvement of May, or ASCUA), the SADE, and the ADEA, they did not attend the event, largely because both Peronists and anti-Peronists had barely had time to recover from the controversial flirtation of the communists with the government. On the other hand, the liberals denounced the organizers’ lack of democratic commitment, arguing that in Chile the preparatory commission had refused to discuss the recent attacks on the Jockey Club and the restrictions imposed on the SADE and other cultural institutions. The communists, for their part, denounced the boycott of the liberals

67 Those who were unable to attend because they were not granted visas include the members of the Soviet delegation headed by Ehrenburg and the American writer Michael Gold. During the days that the Congress was in session, the communist newspaper El Siglo was shut down and the event was completely ignored by the mainstream press. See “Personalidades de fama mundial asisten en Chile al Congreso Continental de la Cultural,” in Nuestra Palabra, May 5, 1952, and issue no. 12 of Cuadernos de Cultura, July 1953. 68 “A la paz por la poesía”, in El Siglo, Santiago, May 31, 1953, p. 1.

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involved in “systematic opposition,” as well as the “esoteric silence” of the Peronists. Domestic issues dampened the coordinating capacity and good press of the Argentine communists, since, while the Congress was taking place in Chile, in Buenos Aires Roberto Giusti launched his second “Carta Abierta a Héctor Agosti” accusing him of delivering the SADE to the “Peronist tyranny.” One of the results of the Chilean encounter was the impulse it gave the communists to create unified national cultural organizations in each country.69 In this context, in August 1953 a call was launched in Buenos Aires for an Argentine Congress of Culture, with more than a hundred signatures, headed by Agosti and the poet Juan Enrique Acuña.70 Although it positioned itself under an anti-imperialist impetus that warned of the pernicious effects of an “equivocal cosmopolitan universality,” the text of the call largely avoided more strictly localist topics and nationalist tendencies, perhaps thanks to Agosti’s input. The cultural task at hand, he explained, was not to undertake a suicidal retreat within the borders, but to preserve the democratic, anti-colonial, and popular origins of Argentina’s historical tradition through its insertion in a greater, Latin American, but also international, context. The struggle for peace, understood as the precondition for the freedom of creation and the circulation of ideas and cultural forms, provided the framework for a new cultural internationalism that, contrary to imperialist cosmopolitanism, did not negate reflection on the national question and local cultures.71 This heightened interest in the national question and its insertion in a Latin American context did not represent a complete novelty for the communist intellectual tradition, although it was by no means its dominant tone, which explains the persistence of topics associated with Argentine “exceptionality” like the absence of the indigenous problem and the highly valued pro-European affiliation of its revolutionary elites. 69 One of the first responses to the Chilean appeal took place in Brazil, where the Congresso Nacional De Intelectuais (National Congress of Intellectuals) was organized in Goiania from February 14 to 21, 1954 by Jorge Amado. 70 “Convocatoria al Congreso Argentino de la Cultura,” Buenos Aires, August 1953, FJAS. 71 Ibid., p. 2, and “Vida cultural,” in Nuestra Palabra, October 27, 1953, p. 7. Citing logistical issues and a lack of time, the Congress was suspended until May 1954. During this period, the writers circulated a survey on the problems of cultural life and the conditions of intellectual work (“Vida cultural,” in Nuestra Palabra, January 26, 1954, p. 7).

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The Congreso Argentino de la Cultura was to be held on May 13, 1954, but was banned by the police. Following unsuccessful efforts to obtain authorization and considering that many delegates were already in Buenos Aires, its Executive Board decided to hold a clandestine assembly in a country house in the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires. Under the patronage of scientist and naturalist Florentino Ameghino and poet Almafuerte (pseudonym of Pedro Bonifacio Palacios), the 75 delegates in attendance formally constituted the Congress, ratifying the presidency of Nicolás Besio Moreno, a civil engineer, university teacher, and fine arts enthusiast, accompanied in the vice-presidency by pianist and composer Gilardo Gilardi, visual artist and educator Miguel Carlos Victorica, and teacher Juan Francisco Jáuregui. As was customary in the frontist organizations, the strategic Secretary-General’s office was given to a loyal comrade like Agosti.72 The improvised assembly resolved that the foundations of national culture were inseparable from its historical origin—which was characterized as democratic and popular, of rational and free principles, and contrary to all forms of colonialism—and that the duty of intellectuals was to participate in contributing to national progress by raising the cultural level of the country’s inhabitants. In order to accomplish this pedagogical mission, admittedly less radical than the combative discourses that called for molding a new indigenous and campesino face for America, men and women in the cultural sphere were called on to make rational use of their abilities by properly valuing their technical and creative knowledge, satisfying their material needs, and freely exercising their right to opinion and discussion.73 Based on this assessment, a commission was appointed to draw up a “Cartilla de los derechos de la intelectualidad” (Charter of the Rights of Intellectuals), a draft of which was presented in July 1955 and approved at the second and last assembly of the CAC held on December 8 and 9 of that year in the presence of 72 The other members of the Executive Board were: Eduardo Pettoruti (Secretary of Minutes), Juan E. Acuña (Secretary of the Interior), Pablo Rojas Paz (Secretary of Foreign Affairs), Zulma Núñez (Press Secretary), Julio Luis Peluffo (Secretary of External Relations), Fernando Groisman (Secretary of Finance), Ernesto Valor, Osvaldo Pugliese, Luis Ricardo Casnati, W. Melgarejo Muñoz, Augusto Armada, Raúl González Tuñón, Oscar Ferrigno, Gregorio Bermann, Julián Freaza, Luis Gudiño Kramer, Juan Ehlert, Patricio Canto, Amaro Villanueva, A. Escovich, Mario Villanueva, Emilio E. Sánchez, and Alfredo N. V. Martínez (Spokesmen). 73 Congreso Argentino de la Cultura, “Resolución de la Asamblea Nacional de Delegados,” Buenos Aires, May 15, 1954, FJAS.

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150 delegates from throughout the country.74 By then, Perón had been ousted and the anti-imperialist tone had practically disappeared, giving way to an ascetic enumeration of professional demands in the name of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.75 One of the most remarkable aspects of the short and unsuccessful life of the CAC was the attention that the communists gave to working-class cultural organizations, particularly those located in towns and provinces. In addition to the overall diagnosis of a lack of communication between Latin American cultures, the Argentine communists added the typical allusion to the “two Argentinas”: the national specificity, they would say, was due to the separation between the different regions of the country and the gap between the intelligentsia and the cultural needs of the people, which this division served to exacerbate.76 They assumed that community cultural organizations (athenaeums, libraries, peñas or folk music gatherings, independent theaters, neighborhood clubs) could act as a vehicle for meetings between intellectuals and the people, and the Congress offered itself as an institution capable of guaranteeing and organizing such encounters. With this plan in mind, invitations were extended to more than a thousand cultural entities throughout the country and branches were quickly organized in Santa Fe, Rosario, Mendoza, Córdoba, Posadas, Tandil, Dolores, San Rafael, Lobería, Tres Arroyos, Necochea, San José de la Esquina, and Ciudad Eva Perón. As Ricardo Pasolini has pointed out, the CAC reactivated the personal networks and organizational base that had led to the creation of the AIAPE two decades earlier.77 The “new intellectuals” that communist anti-fascism propagated in the towns of the interior were the most enthusiastic supporters of the new unitary initiative and helped give it a notable federalist physiognomy, although when its authorities were formally constituted, people from the provinces did not occupy important positions. Of the 383 individual signatories of the appeal issued in June 74 Fernando Groisman, “La segunda asamblea del Congreso Argentino de la Cultura,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 14, January 1954, pp. 116–118. 75 Congreso Argentino de la Cultura, draft of “Cartilla de derechos de la intelectualidad argentina,” Buenos Aires, July 26, 1955, FHPA/CeDInCI. 76 “Convocatoria al Congreso Argentino de la Cultura,” op. cit., p. 1. 77 Ricardo Pasolini, “El nacimiento de una sensibilidad política: Cultura antifascista,

comunismo y nación en la Argentina: entre la AIAPE y el Congreso Argentino de la Cultura, 1935–1955,” in Desarrollo Económico, vol. 45, no. 179, 2005, p. 405.

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1954, 274 were from the interior of the country, as well as 70% of the cultural entities. The social composition of the list of signatories supports the hypothesis advanced by Pasolini. While the signatories from the City of Buenos Aires were painters, writers, musicians, or educators, provincial supporters were mostly divided among those who did not specify a trade or profession and those who indicated that they were dentists, pharmacists, accountants, or veterinarians.78

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The Casa de la Cultura Argentina

In September 1952, while essayist Carlos Alberto Erro, philosopher Francisco Romero and journalist and writer José Barreiro were founding the ASCUA with the objective of defending the Argentine democratic tradition born in May of 1810, Agosti, Jorge Thénon, and Ricardo Ortiz, within the context of the Peronist reversal that precipitated their break with the liberal cultural institutions, promoted the creation of a space to defend that national origin from an anti-imperialist perspective with a commitment to the “pacifist” discourse of the USSR. In its declaration of principles, the Casa de la Cultura Argentina (House of Argentine Culture, or CCA) revived the idea that Argentina’s “cultural backwardness” was due to its defective and anachronistic economic structure, a result of the continued existence of the landowning oligarchy and imperialist oppression. Considera, por lo tanto, que el único remedio para conjurar esta crisis consiste en la recuperación del sentido nacional y popular de la cultura, lo que obliga al sostenimiento y a la continuidad de la tradición progresiva de nuestra cultura democrática, de origen esencialmente revolucionario. Pero cree que, en los tiempos que vivimos, la reivindicación de ese origen nacional y revolucionario es inseparable de toda forma de sumisión política, y por lo tanto cultural, que impiden la libre expresión independiente de las culturas de América, lo que impone revivir los más firmes principios antiimperialistas de la intelectualidad argentina. Ello

78 Boletín del Congreso Argentino de la Cultura, Buenos Aires, June 1954, no. 3, p. 4.

For example, at a meeting held by the Tandil branch to approve the presentations for the national congress and appoint delegates, participants included: a journalist, an office worker, a teacher, a lawyer, a shopkeeper, an eye doctor, a doctor of Letters, a writer, a medical doctor, a visual artist, and an engineer. See “Comité Pro Congreso Argentino de la Cultura: Filial Tandil,” regional meeting, April 18, 1954, FJAS.

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mismo obliga a oponerse decididamente a todas las fuerzas y corrientes que tienden a deformar o mutilar el contenido de una cultura nacional de carácter democrático con limitaciones o imposiciones dogmáticas y sectarias, puesto que la libertad de investigación y creación constituye el único medio adecuado para esclarecer los grandes problemas culturales del país y para desbaratar las tentativas extrañas de anulación del espíritu nacional.79 [Thus, it considers the only way to avert this crisis is to restore the national and popular significance of culture. This requires the preservation and continuity of the progressive tradition of our democratic culture, essentially revolutionary in origin. However, it believes that at times like these, the defense of this national and revolutionary origin is inseparable from all forms of political, and therefore cultural, submission which prevent the free and independent expression of the cultures of the Americas, leading to the need to rekindle the most firm anti-imperialist principles of the Argentine intelligentsia. This also means resolutely opposing all forces and currents that tend to distort or mutilate the contents of a national democratic culture with dogmatic and sectarian limitations or dictates, since the freedom of research and creation is the only suitable means to clarify the great cultural problems of the country and to frustrate foreign attempts to suppress the national spirit.]

In its first two years of existence, the CCA was unable to carry out almost any activity, limiting itself to a few art exhibits that were banned by the police. Nevertheless, groups of writers and artists, some of them newcomers to the party, such as Juan Carlos Portantiero, who would soon have a place at the table in the meetings organized by Agosti to discuss the issues of Cuadernos de Cultura, gathered in its large house

79 “La Casa de la Cultura Argentina,” Buenos Aires, c. 1952, p. 2, FJAS, and “Casa de la Cultura Argentina: Declaración de Principios,” Buenos Aires, c. 1953, FJAS. In December 1952, at the height of the Peronist reversal, the new Cultural Affairs Commission headed by Julio Notta introduced a series of modifications to the draft Declaration of Principles of the CCA: starting from the same analysis which saw Argentina’s cultural crisis as a product of feudal persistence and imperialist interference, the new text called on intellectuals to support the government and join forces with the working class through the Confederación General del Trabajo (General Confederation of Labor, or CGT) (“Casa de la Cultura Argentina: Declaración de Principios,” December 1952, Fondo Archivo Histórico del Partido Comunista Argentino “Enrique Israel”/“Enrique Israel” Historical Archive of the Communist Party of Argentina; FPCA.

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located on the north side of Buenos Aires. It was not until after the Peronist government was overthrown that a program was established which included courses, seminars, exhibitions, and a prolific effort to support and advise neighborhood organizations and those in the interior of the country. The CCA sought to offer a “constructive” program through which intellectuals, professionals, and artists could orient their activities in terms of the “interests of the country.” This objective was strongly reminiscent of that of the CLES, particularly during the period before Perón’s victory. As Federico Neiburg has explained, from that date onwards the functioning of the CLES changed dramatically. From an institution dedicated to discussing the country’s problems and designing future projects with an openly political proselytism, it began to prioritize its own institutional survival and that of its members, turning increasingly toward the implementation of a university-style structure (some members even proposed converting it into a private university) while at the same time emphasizing its outreach activities. The system of collective courses that had been promoted between 1940 and 1945 gave way to a series of activities that were less political and more scholarly.80 This new orientation—prompted both by the political context, which forced a good part of the cultural institutions to withdraw from active politics, and by a change in the social composition of its governing bodies, that now included a strong presence of foreigners and university graduates—caused serious discomfort among some members, especially the communists. Thus, in October 1952, in the context of the communist change of course and with the activities at the CLES suspended by the police, psychiatrist Jorge Thénon, engineer Ricardo M. Ortiz, and economist Homero Baptista de Magalhães resigned from their positions on the institution’s Board of Directors. Accused by the authorities of responding to the “spurious directives” of international communism, the resigning members cited their disagreement with the cultural policy that in recent years had led the CLES to become a “forum of vulgarization” and a “professional university,” in explicit contradiction with its declaration of principles. Victim of the omnivorous powers of the secretariat (a position permanently held by Julio Herrera y Reissig), a market-driven orientation focused on accumulation, and an apprehensive attitude that

80 Federico Neiburg, Los intelectuales y la invención del peronismo, Buenos Aires, Alianza, 1988, pp. 166–175.

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rejected any attempt to address issues pertaining to the national situation, the CLES, they claimed, had abandoned its original impulse, a fact confirmed by the deliberate concealment of the figure of Aníbal Ponce. Thus, although the latter had been able to coexist with the likes of Ibarguren and others who were not known for the audacity of their political convictions, inasmuch as he believed that participation in the enterprise of social progress was measured by the quality of men of science and culture rather than their political preferences, the “faction” that took control of the CLES dismissed Héctor Agosti and Álvaro Yunque due to their condition as “communists” and allowed the professorship of Economics to languish given the impossibility of addressing practically any subject.81 Ricardo M. Ortiz and Jorge Thénon were to become central figures in the CCA project. Having participated in the CLES for more than fifteen years, they brought their institutional experience to this initiative and sought to create a space for continuing their previously interrupted work. Ortiz was president twice and Jorge Thénon served first as secretary of Courses and Conferences and then as vice president, in addition to heading the Psychology Department, one of the most dynamic and best organized. Over the course of six years, the CCA had three governing boards. The first was chaired by Ortiz. The second was appointed in 1955, once the activities could be carried out legally, and was formed by the economist and congressman of Radical origin José V. Liceaga as president, Ricardo M. Ortiz and Amaro Villanueva as vice presidents, and the labor lawyer Aarón Birgin as general secretary. Finances were in the hands of Miguel Lamota, son of the millionaire owner of the Casa Lamota costume store, while Gerardo Pisarello, a writer from Corrientes, was appointed secretary of Publications, the psychiatrist Raúl Pérez Anaya, secretary of Cultural Relations, and Thénon, secretary of Courses and Conferences. Heraldo Antón, Antonio Berni, Estela Canto, and playwright Agustín Cuzzani were also members of the Board.82 In December

81 See “Carta de Homero Magalhaes, Ricardo M. Ortiz y Jorge Thénon al Sr. secretario del Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores,” Buenos Aires, October 18, 1952, and “Carta de Homero Magalhaes, Ricardo M. Ortiz y Jorge Thénon al secretario del Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores,” Buenos Aires, January 1953, FHPA/CeDInCI, folder SADE. On the Department of Economics, see Federico Neiburg, Los intelectuales y la invención del peronismo, op. cit., p. 174. 82 Boletín de la Casa de la Cultura Argentina, no. 2, August 1955, p. 6.

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1958, a few days before the police shutdown that would become definitive, the Board of Directors was renewed and the statutes were modified. Ortiz returned to the presidency and held it even when he took over as rector of the Universidad Nacional del Sur. Thénon and sculptor Luis Falcini were appointed vice presidents. Leonardo Paso assumed the General Secretariat, seconded by physician Isaac Noviski as deputy secretary. In the Secretariat of Finance, Miguel Lamota continued on strategically, together with Eva Kochane. The remaining eleven members of the Board of Directors consisted of two architects (Carlos Maquiavelo and Marcos Winograd), a writer (Héctor Bustingorri), a writer of children’s stories (José Murillo), an art critic (Hilda Beatriz Grand Ruiz), a visual artist (Cecilia Marcovich), a lawyer (Aarón Birgin), a theater actor (Jaime Rybak), and the three young poets José Rodríguez Itoz, Carlos Santos, and Julio César Silvain, member of the group El Pan Duro, which also included Juan Gelman, Hugo Ditaranto, Héctor Negro, Juana Bignozzi, Juan Hierba, Rosario Mase, Luis Navalesi, and Alberto Wainer.83 The CCA proposed an organization based on sections or departments divided by specialty. They each had their own administration and were intended to be spaces for intellectuals and professionals to work and conduct research, as well as pedagogical and outreach centers. In August 1955, by then settled into its premises at 125 Ayacucho Street, it declared it had ten departments: Puppetry, Theater, Medicine, Youth, Psychopedagogy, Cinema, Music, Literature, Engineering, and Economics.84 A year later, however, many were still in the planning stages while others had been added, such as Visual Arts, Philosophy, and History, and later, Science, Poetry, Psychology, and Teaching.85 The turbulent institutional life of the CCA certainly did not foster the solidity and continuity of some of its initiatives, which never progressed beyond announcements. In other cases they prospered, such as the areas of Psychology, Literature, and Cinema, either because they became meeting places for young 83 Noticias de la Casa de la Cultura Argentina, Buenos Aires, December 1958, p. 9.

For a personal account of the group El Pan Duro, see Héctor Negro’s book, La verdad sobre El Pan Duro: Grupo de poesía (1955–1964), Buenos Aires, Marcelo Héctor Oliveri Editor, 2007. 84 Boletín de la Casa de la Cultura Argentina, op. cit., pp. 4 and 5. 85 Noticias de la Casa de la Cultura Argentina, Buenos Aires, no. 4, August 1956,

pp. 5–7.

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people eager for commitment or platforms for the involvement of specialists who, like Thénon, had not managed to have their exclusion from university positions overturned. Between 1955 and 1958, almost 70 lectures were given at the CCA, and 14 courses, 17 mini-courses, and 3 seminars were held, in addition to several round tables on contemporary issues.86 Although its founders had expressed their desire to prioritize the seminar format, this objective barely materialized, and the CCA functioned much more as a cultural center than as a teaching and research institution. In the conference series, priority was given to topics of general interest and contemporary issues: 19 were devoted to public education, 14 to literature, 11 to cultural issues and prominent figures, 9 to economic issues, 7 to history, 5 to music and folklore, 3 to science, 2 to painting, 2 to Latin American issues, and 1 to cinema and theater. From 1958 onwards, the number of lectures decreased and priority was given to courses, mini-courses, and seminars, possibly with the intention of modifying the institution’s profile. The CLES-style model of collective courses was adopted, with courses dedicated to philosophy, political economy, dialectical materialism, and psychology. The CCA’s trajectory can be divided into three stages. The first was from its creation to 1955, when the conditions of illegality forced it and other institutions to prioritize the relationship with neighborhood organizations, clubs, and community libraries, a task that was conducted by the paleontologist Osvaldo Reig and Albertina Gerchunoff. By 1956, over two hundred institutions were said to have received help from the CCA in the form of advice, lectures, or artistic performances. After September 1955, and until its definitive closure in late 1958, the CCA actually functioned as a cultural institution with a certain ambition for excellence. It offered courses and seminars aimed at complementing or filling the gaps in formal education and also provided a public forum to discuss issues of common interest. For the group of communist intellectuals who created it, the CCA represented significant generational renewal, particularly visible in the field of literature, but also in others such as psychology, philosophy, and history. One of the most enthusiastic groups was that 86 This information has been reconstructed based on newsletters and the list of courses and conferences that the CCA submitted to government authorities when its activities were suspended in early 1957 (“Declaración de la Casa de la Cultura Argentina,” Buenos Aires, January 1957, FJAS).

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of the young poets and writers that formed around the Revista Oral and later created the Poetry Department. Both the magazine and the monthly cycle Panorama de la Poesía Argentina brought the young people grouped around the journals Ventana de Buenos Aires and Polémica Literaria onto the scene and introduced the poets of the groups El Pan Duro and Lanús to society. During this period, canonical figures such as Enrique Wernicke, Carlos Ruiz Daudet, Amaro Villanueva, and Blas Raúl Gallo shared conference tables with Ismael Viñas, Marcelo Ravoni, Raúl Sciarretta, Santiago Bullrich, and Carlos Alberto Brocato. At the same time, there was a shift from talks on prominent figures in universal culture or classic authors of progressive literature, such as Maxim Gorky and Bernard Shaw, to topics such as the presence of Peronism in American poetry or the relationship between aesthetics and Marxism.87 Although it experienced remarkable growth, the CCA was not immune to persecution during these years. In September 1956, its activities were banned by order of the Ministry of the Interior, and a month later, its headquarters were raided by the police, resulting in destruction and the seizure of its library, part of which had been donated to the institution by the family of José Ingenieros.88 In 1957, accused of being a front for crypto-communist activities with the support of the Law for the Defense of Democracy, the house hardly functioned at all.89 It was finally shut down definitively by Arturo Frondizi’s government, in whose favor the communists had urged their supporters to vote. Although its board remained in place and it published a series of booklets bearing the name of the institution until 1961, it did not reopen its doors to public activity. The relationship between the CCA and party leadership was distant. The institution’s economic constraints support this impression, since it never managed to secure stable headquarters or issue a publication that went beyond the modest mimeographed newsletter, which also often contained advertisements requesting the help of draftsmen, diagrammers, editors, and, in particular, financial assistance. To a large extent, the CCA was sustained thanks to contributions from members and income from courses and seminars. The secretary of Finance’s good relations with the

87 Noticias de la Casa de la Cultura Argentina, no. 10, October 1958, p. 3. 88 Noticias de la Casa de la Cultura Argentina, no. 6, October 1956, p. 1. 89 “La Casa de la Cultura responde a la ‘Mala Junta’,” in Nuestra Palabra, January 16,

1957.

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world of commerce and industry could occasionally result in a contribution that sustained activities for several months. Once it was closed, the CCA’s finances entered a critical period: without any income from activities, only the membership fees—which were barely enough to pay the rent, administrative expenses, and the publication of booklets—remained. The experience of the CCA is a good example of the difficulties that communist intellectuals encountered in institutionalizing spaces for public involvement in culture. On the one hand, the party had an ambivalent attitude that ranged from purely political and administrative intervention (as happened with the modification of the declaration of principles during the Peronist affair) to complete disengagement. On the other hand, constant State intervention made the continuity of any cultural project associated with the specter of communism impossible.

5 Literature and Nation: The Question of the Gaucho Genre Like many sectors of the traditional Argentine left (with the exception of a few anarchist writers such as Alberto Ghiraldo), Argentine communism was not particularly inclined to the gaucho tradition. Aníbal Ponce thought that the gaucho was a remnant of colonial feudalism of dubious merits in the history of national independence, and its posthumous literary glorification, the work of conservative sectors cornered by immigration and European enlightenment.90 Una literatura copiosísima empezó a fructificar en torno suyo, y satisfacía de tal modo los apetitos colectivos que casi convirtió en semidiós a un delincuente vulgar, fullero y asesino. La ausencia poco menos que absoluta del elemento indígena, dominante en otras nacionalidades de América, favoreció la consagración del gaucho como representante genuino de la patria vieja. El poema, la novela y el teatro contribuyeron con eficacia innegable a esa curiosa formación de la leyenda, pero en el verso doliente

90 The author has explored this subject in greater detail in “Cosmopolitismo y nación: Los intelectuales comunistas argentinos en tiempos de la Guerra Fría (1947–1956),” in Contemporánea: Historia y problemas del siglo XX, vol. I, no. 1, October 2010, pp. 51–74.

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o en la narración pintoresca continuaba vibrando el alma derrotada de la Colonia, el encono no disimulado del mestizo frente a Europa.91 [A copious literature began to flourish around him, and he satisfied collective appetites to such a degree that a vulgar, deceitful, and murderous delinquent became nearly a demigod. The almost complete absence of the indigenous element, dominant in other nationalities of the Americas, favored the enshrinement of the gaucho as a genuine representative of the fatherland. The poem, the novel, and theater contributed in an undeniably effective way to this curious creation of the legend, but in the mournful verse and the picturesque narration the defeated soul of the Colony, the undisguised bitterness of the mestizo towards Europe continued resonating.]

The social writers associated with the leftist journals of the 1920s did not show any sympathy either for the figure of the gaucho or for the extremely popular criollista literature initiated by Eduardo Gutiérrez and later developed through theater, the circus, and carnival iconography. However, when the martinfierrista vanguard turned their “legitimate use” of “criollismo”92 —recovered from the urban version created by Borges—into an argument to question their literature, linguistically and in class terms, they reacted by claiming their genealogical rights over José Hernández’s magnum opus.93 It is not incidental that a writer of anarchist origins such as Álvaro Yunque was the first to reclaim that work

91 Aníbal Ponce, “Examen de conciencia,” lecture delivered at the Universidad de La Plata on May 19, 1928, in El viento en el mundo: Conferencias a los estudiantes y los obreros [1933], Buenos Aires, Futuro, 1963, p. 19. 92 The term refers to the literary journal Martín Fierro, published between 1924 and 1927 under the direction of Evar Méndez and to which Oliverio Girondo and Jorge Luis Borges, among others, contributed. Criollismo refers to a type of literature that became widespread after 1880. In its popular versions, criollismo depicted the figure of the gaucho and his misfortunes as an embodiment of the lower classes and the genuine essence of Argentine identity. See Adolfo Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 1998. 93 See Beatriz Sarlo, “Vanguardia y criollismo: La aventura de Martín Fierro,” in Beatriz

Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano, Ensayos argentinos: De Sarmiento a la vanguardia, Buenos Aires, Ariel, 1997, pp. 211–260, and Alberto Giordano and Alejandro Eujanián, “Las revistas de izquierda y la función de la literatura: Enseñanzas y propaganda,” in María Teresa Gramuglio (dir.), Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, vol. 6: El imperio realista, Buenos Aires, Emecé, 2002, pp. 395–415.

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for the communist movement. In 1937, in the pages of the journal Claridad, he had already proclaimed that the Martin Fierro was “a bible of gaucho misery.” Resorting to topics that would become common among supporters of popular nationalism, Yunque saw the gaucho as an epic character rising up against the enlightened and bourgeois power of the Buenos Aires metropolis: Las grandes palabras, las sutiles teorías; se hallaban a disposición de la pluma y de la voz de los ideólogos oligárquicos de Buenos Aires. Y éstos proclamaron que la lucha de los opresores contra el gaucho hambriento era la “civilización contra la barbarie”, “lo europeo contra lo colonial”, “la ciudad contra el desierto”. Y la insurrección del gaucho fue solo una protesta de la clase utilizada y olvidada.94 [Great words, subtle theories; they were at the disposal of the pen and the voice of the oligarchic ideologues of Buenos Aires. And they proclaimed that the struggle of the oppressors against the starving gaucho was “civilization against barbarism,” “the European against the colonial,” “the city against the desert.” And the gaucho’s insurrection was merely the protest of a used and forgotten class.]

The defense of gaucho literature by the author of La Literatura Social en la Argentina not only represented a disruptive act with respect to the prevailing views in the communist cultural space, but also introduced a more enduring gesture: the idea that the Martin Fierro had founded a veristic literary tradition that should establish the agenda for revolutionary writers. By using Hernández’s poem to argue that realism as a proletarian art should be above all effective, freed from any avant-garde pretension that would tarnish its ability to communicate with the people, Yunque offered a concept of literature and of the writer’s task that remained relevant throughout the following decades whenever it became necessary to contrast “socialist realism” with the perpetually dangerous “formalist” inclinations of writers seduced by “cosmopolitanism.”95 94 Álvaro Yunque, “El gauchismo de Martín Fierro” (lecture delivered between 1940 and 1943), unpublished, available online: https://www.folkloretradiciones.com.ar/fol klorecientifico/documentos/EL%20GAUCHISMO%20DE%20MARTIN%20FIERRO.pdf (Last access July 2021). 95 See Álvaro Yunque, “El ‘arte dirigido’ en la Argentina,” in Orientación, November 13, 1940.

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Toward the early 1940s, gaucho symbology, representations of the campesino world, and folkloric themes slowly gained a foothold in the party press, and would become more pronounced from 1947 onwards. From that moment on, regionalist and campesino-themed stories and tales began to appear quite frequently, as some communist writers had been experimenting with them since the beginning of the decade, including Luis Gudiño Kramer, Carlos Ruiz Daudet, Amaro Villanueva, Gerardo Pisarello, Enrique Wernicke, and Alfredo Varela.96 In addition, the incorporation of popular musicians such as Atahualpa Yupanqui into the party opened up the potential for incorporating folk music into party gatherings and functions, a trend that grew considerably in the years following, giving rise to a large group of singers and composers of popular music linked to the PCA. It would not be accurate to attribute this increased interest only to the Soviet patriotic revival that the leadership of the Argentine party felt compelled to emulate. Beyond the characterizations that the party offered of the process Perón was leading, it was indisputable that the Peronist system of representations of national identity was successful with the popular classes and that this inevitably represented a challenge for the communist universe, whose system of values and cultural consumption, however, collided with the Hispanism, nativism, and the outpouring of nationalist folklore that defined, although not exclusively, the government’s cultural policy. Among the educated sectors, the question of the gaucho, and above all of Martín Fierro, was once again revisited to reflect on the problem of nationality, its origins, and its future. In 1948, Carlos Astrada, through El mito gaucho, would give the Peronist State a philosophical foundation by rethinking the “gaucho cosmogony” to place it at the service of its political projection among the Peronist masses.97 The same year, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada would undertake a monumental critical task with Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro aimed at unveiling the mythifications that had made Hernández’s character the object of an exalted nationalist and 96 Returning to the pedagogical reformism that guided the social literature of the 1920s, and integrating naturalistic procedures into the aesthetic models of American narrative and Italian literary and cinematographic neorealism, communist narrators paid special attention to the littoral region and produced a series of works that were widely published in the party’s journals and publishing houses. See Eduardo Romano, “Culminación y crisis del regionalismo narrativo,” op. cit. 97 See Guillermo David, Carlos Astrada: La filosofía argentina, Buenos Aires, El Cielo por Asalto, 2004.

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patriotic cult. With these interpretations and those of Jorge Luis Borges, the socialist and communist left had nothing quite as convincing to add.98 However, the question was of such obvious and immediate political interest that it was hard to avoid. Several years later, referring to the enormous success of the edition of Hernández’s poem illustrated by Juan Carlos Castagnino, Juan Carlos Portantiero posed the problem in his own Gramscian terms: Martin Fierro had been a moment of maximum fusion between elite culture and popular culture, a paradigmatic case of a dialogue between an Argentine intellectual and the national-popular demands that Agosti’s young disciple considered worth repeating.99 It was precisely Agosti who thought it timely to take up a position on the issue of national literature, initiating a reflection that only a decade later would take shape in the books Nación y cultura and El mito liberal. He did so in a lecture given in Montevideo entitled “La expresión de los argentinos,” which would later serve as the opening essay in his book Cuaderno de bitácora, published in 1949. Drawing on a central issue in any discussion of cultural tradition—the relationship between language and nation—Agosti attempted a theory of Argentine language which he argued was intended as an outline for a theory of nationality capable of overcoming the “naive liberalism” that assimilated the nation (a historical occurrence) with the State (a political occurrence). For this ambitious project, he used a formula developed by Ponce following in the steps of José Ingenieros: the country’s history was the dramatic struggle between two civilizations that were constituted at the very moment of Independence: on the one hand, Spanish feudalism with its “maneuvering mass” of gauchos and Indians and, on the other, the nascent bourgeoisies of the cities that embraced the revolutionary winds of Europe with meticulous synchronicity. Once the feudal return was defeated with the fall of the Rosas government, progressive forces resumed their advance through the renewed influence of two converging perspectives with the common objective of burying the Spanish past: the thinking behind the

98 Jorge Abelardo Ramos, one of the most important references on the “national left,” also explored the topic of the gaucho in América Latina: un país. Su historia, su economía, su revolución, Buenos Aires, Octubre, 1949. For more on the topic, see Martín Ribadero, Tiempo de profetas: Ideas, debates y labor cultural de la izquierda nacional de Jorge Abelardo Ramos (1945–1962), Bernal, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2017. 99 Juan Carlos Portantiero, “Una novedad centenaria,” in Hoy en la Cultura, Buenos Aires, no. 7, November 1962, p. 2.

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1848 French Revolution and the arrival of immigrants. France, two-time liberator of America, will constitute the necessary contact with the cultivated world, and the minorities leading the revolution will unite their destiny to it; immigration, the “definitive and genuine colonization of the Republic,” will, through the predominance of its blood, accomplish the task of extinguishing the gaucho element, the natural ally of the Colony, first and foremost, and then the barbaric base of its continuation through caudillismo and tyranny.100 Within this process, Agosti found it necessary to explain why the language of the gauchos—“popular speech,” he would say, citing a recently discovered Ferdinand de Saussure—had ended up forming part of a national literary language or, in other words, why the language of civilization had been forced to absorb the expression of barbarism. In the battle between romanticism and neoclassicism, he responded, the Generation of ‘37 approved the use of gauchesque language in order to assist with the task of decasticization; in other words, it opposed a lively but vulgar language to the culteranismo of the academies and the rigidities of Hispanic grammar. With this, he also offered a model of “militant culture” that was destined to last, since he incorporated the social world of the campesino expressed in its popular language into his creation. However, since literary language had aesthetic aspirations that popular language lacked, the Argentine literati completed their task of nationalization through other means, by frequent reference to non-Spanish, especially French, literature. In this way, the writers of 1880, most notably Sarmiento, played a fundamental role in the liberation of the language, contributing elevated and progressive forms of thought which henceforth became a part of “good Argentine culture.” The adoption of the European model was, therefore, established as a necessary universalist impulse that acquired doctrinal traits and found its opposition in localism and the folkloric motifs of the Hispanic decline. En los orígenes de nuestra cultura autónoma esa doctrina queda inscripta con inequívoco sentido: al “localismo” opónese allí el “universalismo”. Dicho de otra manera: esta conciencia nacional, por lo mismo que aspira a ultimar el feudalismo criollo, procura vitalizarse con las normas de pensamiento que condujeron al esplendor de las burguesías europeas.101 100 Aníbal Ponce, “Examen de conciencia,” op. cit., pp. 16–24. 101 Héctor P. Agosti, Cuaderno de bitácora [1949], Buenos Aires, Lautaro, 1965, p. 30.

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[In the origins of our autonomous culture this doctrine is inscribed with unequivocal meaning: “localism” is opposed to “universalism.” To put it another way: just as this national awareness aims to put an end to local feudalism, it also seeks to vitalize itself with the ways of thinking that led to the splendor of the European bourgeoisies.]

From Echeverría to Leopoldo Lugones and the modernists, Argentine literature was shaped by this shift that over time, he noted, ended up reduced to a mere formalism, producing a “deconceptualized” literature, unrelated to the popular essence once offered by the authentic language of the barbarian campaigns. But on what social essence could this intelligentsia, in which Agosti already detected the motives for its desertion, have founded a truly national literature? The answer would be the rioplatense Spanish of the port cities, in which the epic mark of the immigrants was superior to any rhetorical condemnation, nationalist nostalgia, or illusion of campesino roots. Esas otras formas verbales rioplatenses son las que van prevaleciendo en el país argentino a fuerza de ser difundidas por la gravitación de la metrópoli y por los poderosos medios de divulgación con que la metrópoli ejercita su dominio sobre las provincias, no obstante el federalismo y otras retóricas. El viejo tema cultural de las ciudades y los campos vuelve a suscitarse ahora en estas condiciones singulares. Para decirlo más derechamente: ¿es Buenos Aires, son los núcleos urbanos que giran en la órbita rioplatense, quienes impondrán al país la secuencia de esta habla popular redimida de su posible hispanidad absoluta? Pienso que tal como los sucesos se presentan (y esta conclusión mía tiene un signo de provisionalidad bastante definitivo), la preeminencia de este lenguaje popular nacido en Buenos Aires tórnase indudable.102 [Those other rioplatense verbal forms are the ones prevailing in Argentina by dint of being spread through the gravitation of the metropolis and by the powerful means of dissemination with which the metropolis exercises its dominion over the provinces, notwithstanding federalism and other rhetorics. The old cultural theme of the cities and the countryside is once again revived in these unique conditions. To put it more bluntly: is it Buenos Aires, is it the rioplatense urban centers that will impose

102 Ibid., p. 46.

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the sequence of this popular speech redeemed from its potentially absolute Hispanicity on the rest of the country? I believe that as things stand (and this conclusion of mine is quite provisional), the preeminence of this popular language born in Buenos Aires is unquestionable.]

Therefore, he concluded, any exploration of the “language of the Argentines” should begin by considering the “cultural function of the gringo” in the definitive modification of popular urban speech and in the equally important alteration of campesino usage. The defense of the process of immigration as a constitutive element of Argentine nationality characterized all of Agosti’s later reflections, in the same way that the question of language and literature remained a central axis in thinking about the possibility of an “authentic Argentine culture,” after what he would define in the following decade as the historical misunderstanding between intellectuals and the people-nation had been overcome. Just as it was for Ponce twenty years earlier, for Agosti the postulation of Buenos Aires as the core of nationality ‘at the expense of the elision of an interior identified with the remnants of the past is a logical operation within a rationale closely tied to the Sarmientine matrices. In the context of the late 1940s, however, it came to imply the reaffirmation of the rights of the “gringo metropolis,” once again beset by the “shallow motives of localism and folkloric slavery,” more than the metaphorization of a model of development that continued to be successful. In the threat once again hanging over “the least American of American cities,” it is not hard to detect the allusion to the topics of literary nationalism, which Agosti defined as a dangerous aberration that, in the name of the total condemnation of cosmopolitanism, sought to deny the universalism of the original cultural doctrine to promulgate a xenophobia which, according to him, has always been an indication of a bad thing in America: “No la padecieron los fundadores de nuestras nacionalidades, pero no la escatimaron en cambio ninguno de los tiranuelos encaramados en la aventura del poder” [The founders of our nationalities did not suffer from it, yet none of the tyrants who have risen to power have spared it].103 The allusion to Perón and the cultural policy of Peronism is so obvious that one could forget that, by that time, Agosti had already begun to face a traditionalist onslaught within the PCA that in many ways coincided with the criticism of the liberal cultural heritage by the intelligentsia aligned with Peronism. The 103 Héctor P. Agosti, Cuaderno de bitácora, op. cit., p. 70.

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controversy surrounding Don Segundo Sombra, which erupted a few years later, can be considered the point of maximum tension between the two tendencies. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada had a friendship with Agosti in which the communist’s admiration for this man of tireless writing and a passion for large volumes was not lacking. Before publishing Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro, Martínez Estrada had anticipated some of his most audacious theses in the first issue of the journal Realidad, directed by philosopher Francisco Romero.104 Gaucho literature as a completely national literature ended—he would say then—with the Martín Fierro. From that point on, the gaucho and the gaucho milieu would live on at the cost of its suppression and replacement with a myth: the ragged singer of the truths of an abominable social state would be transformed into a hero to compensate for the wounded patriotism of the educated classes. A few weeks later, the newspaper Orientación published the first of four installments of a “Carta abierta a Martínez Estrada” signed by Amaro Villanueva, a teacher from Entre Ríos.105 The author of Crítica y pico, the only enduring book on the Martin Fierro written by a communist, he affirmed that there was no division between popular poets and cultivated poets in Argentine national literature, which was literature that focused on the campesino question and the epic spirit of nationality embodied in the campaigns, but rather a single democratic and popular literature regardless of the expressive forms or aesthetic achievements of its authors, from Bartolomé Hidalgo to the communist writers, including the Generation of ‘37, José Hernández, Rafael Obligado, Eduardo Gutiérrez, and Ricardo Güiraldes. It was not the educated men of nationalist bent who knew how to express the campesino structure of a “country of shepherds” through literature who were responsible for reducing the specific characteristics of the best national literary tradition to a qualifier, as Martínez Estrada thought, but rather the cattle-ranching and commercial oligarchy of Buenos Aires. The Martín Fierro was a foundational myth for national identity because it expressed the ideals of the May Revolution rejected by the porteños and constituted the literary formulation of a popular essence 104 Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, “Sobre lo gauchesco,” in Realidad, vol. 1, no. 1, Buenos Aires, January/February 1947, pp. 28–48. 105 Villanueva’s essay was published under the title “Carta abierta a Martínez Estrada: Sobre lo gauchesco y algo más” in issues 409 (September 17, 1947), 410 (September 24, 1949), 411 (October 1, 1947), and 412 (October 8, 1947).

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with rural roots. Hence, where others like Agosti saw an exhaustive formulation of the liberal program in Sarmiento’s ideas, it only revealed a contrived explanation that barely concealed a profound ignorance of the nature of power and of the economic causes that formed the foundation for the opposition between the supposed lack of culture of the rural masses and the civilization found in Buenos Aires. The very process of our political emancipation, Villanueva would say, was not exclusively the result of “influential progressive ideas,” but also of the interests of modern Europe.106 Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the few voices of recognition that praised Amaro Villanueva after his death in 1967 was that of José María Aricó, a fractious disciple of Agosti. In his book La cola del diablo, he defined him as “un ensayista sagaz y excepcionalmente perceptivo de los fenómenos del mundo popular subalterno” [a shrewd essayist, exceptionally perceptive of the phenomena of the subaltern popular world], who had “profundas diferencias con una visión de la historia nacional que despreciaba tradiciones que un modelo civilizatorio no popular pretendió extirpar aún con la violencia estatal” [profound differences with a vision of national history that scorned traditions which a civilizing non-popular model tried to extirpate even by means of State violence].107 For the author of Marx y América Latina, Villanueva would have represented, together with other intellectuals from the interior, a “tendency” within the party that would have always remained marginal or silent due to its disagreement with the predominant cultural line. Just a few days before the coup d’état that ousted Juan Domingo Perón from power in June 1955, Agosti noted in his personal diary that during those days of revolution he was immersed in the pleasure of rereading Don Segundo Sombra, which had at that time been subjected to some forgettable “sociological criticism” by his comrades Aristóbulo Echegaray and Roberto Salama. The former was a poet and editor whom Agosti had known since the 1930s, when he printed communist newspapers clandestinely in his workshops; the latter was a young critic for whom he harbored a poorly disguised contempt. The previous year, Echegaray had published Don Segundo Sombra: Reminiscencia infantil de 106 Amaro Villanueva, “Federalismo y autonomía provinciales: En torno a una conferencia de Américo Ghioldi,” in Orientación, February 5, 1947. 107 José María Aricó, La cola del diablo: Itinerario de Gramsci en América Latina, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2005, p. 189.

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Ricardo Güiraldes, a study that sought to demonstrate that the herdsman described by Güiraldes was not Segundo Ramírez, but rather the product of the sublimation of the novelist’s frustrated dreams, elevated to the category of myth. The challenge, Echegaray said, was to consider the book fairly, since both those with nostalgia for the rancho and the chiripá and “foreign-inclined literati” had situated it, for opposite reasons, at undeserved heights, omitting the essential: its nature as working-class literature. Güiraldes had observed the rural world with the eyes of an estanciero and combined the language of the gauchos with “affected European trends,” creating nothing less than an anti-national aberration which Agosti had unsurprisingly celebrated as one of its greatest merits. It was an idyllic vision of the countryside which, as Salama would later demonstrate when he contrasted the novel with the Esbozo de historia del Partido Comunista, said nothing about the predominance of the latifundia and the persistence of semi-feudal social relations, let alone the campesino struggles, the Grito de Alcorta agrarian rebellion, the railroad strikes of 1917 and 1919, etc. This led him to conclude that it was neither realist literature nor was it patriotic or popular, but rather the product of a liberal aristocrat who, if he did not oppress anyone directly, “did so in his work through mediated projection.”108 For Salama, the modes of representing “the popular” in literature should be opposed to any form of experimentalism, resulting in a work of art that would be more authentic and true the more it was based on expressive conservatism, the populist criteria of simplicity and the comprehensibility for the masses, and the defense of a cultural tradition that, opposing “cosmopolitanism” and “xenophile forms,” led to an “obtuse nationalism with its back to the river,” as Juan Carlos Portantiero and Juan Gelman would define it a short time later.109 By excluding Don Segundo Sombra from a tradition of “popular literature” because of its “non-realistic” quality, the class origin of its author, and the establishment of a direct homologation between cultural and literary elements and the economic structure, Salama not only attempted to set the terms of an aesthetic program adapted to party standards and expectations of a

108 Ibid., p. 45. 109 Juan Carlos Portantiero and Juan Gelman, “Sobre el terrorismo crítico,” in

Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 35, May 1958, p. 124.

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politically militant literature, but also intervened once again in the classifications system of the cultural tradition that a good part of communist intellectuals had been forging since the 1930s. In the increasingly complex space reserved for communism, trying to sustain a sort of middle ground between “traditionalism” and “cosmopolitanism” as cultural nationalism gained a space directly proportional to the growing distrust that liberal intellectuals expressed regarding their attempts at unity, the sectarianism endorsed by party leadership turned the “Güiraldes question” into the touchstone of a controversy of unanticipated consequences. Agosti warned about this when, under the unusual heading “Polémica,” he decided to open a debate around Salama’s article which, he specified, was the expression of a criterion, and not mere circumstance.110 In light of the friendship he had maintained with Güiraldes since the days of the journal Martín Fierro, Raúl González Tuñón occasionally joined Agosti to redeem Don Segundo Sombra for the history of Argentine literature, to emphasize—not without caveats— the realistic character of the novel, and to denounce the low intellectual caliber of the occasional censor, whose ideas “del tiempo de ñaupa” [from the remote past] and mentality of a “viejo preboste de la época en que las hogueras devoraban los libros herejes” [an old provost from back when bonfires devoured heretical books] he found aesthetically and politically lethal: “A través de su artículo y otros de la misma índole, se llega a esta conclusión: su sensibilidad no capta el denso y múltiple mensaje de nuestro tiempo, a no ser la mera copia de la realidad, el sonsonete en poesía, el realismo primario, proclive a un trasnochado naturalismo, en novela.” [Through his article and others of the same nature, one reaches the following conclusion: his sensibility does not capture the dense and manifold message of our time, unless it is the mere copy of reality, the singsong in poetry, primitive realism, prone to an outdated naturalism, in novel form.]111 Although he had quickly expressed his relief at the definitive death of the gaucho song and condemned the “nativist plague,” for Tuñón to accept the expulsion of Güiraldes from a literary genealogy that communist writers could claim as an aesthetic precursor meant supporting

110 Introduction to “Inconsistencia y extremismo de una crítica sectaria,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 23, December 1955, p. 179. 111 Raúl González Tuñón, “Inconsistencia y extremismo de una crítica sectaria,” op. cit., p. 180.

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the movement that transcended it, that is, a criterion that regarded “progressive literature” (“a word he was abusing,” he added) as a mere vehicle for propaganda, an underestimation of the form, and bad writing. On the other hand, to argue, together with Elías Castelnuovo and nationalists Ramón Doll and Juan José Hernández Arregui, that Güiraldes’ work was “oligarchic literature” was an attack on the often evoked “unity of writers” because it meant entering into dispute with those who “without any political or aesthetic distinction” could be counted on for a joint action against “the real enemy,” which was not in fact an “illustrious dead man” like Güiraldes, but rather “imperialism, its henchmen, and agents.”112 Gaucho literature functioned in the communist cultural space as an aesthetic and literary phenomenon at the cost of establishing a consensus on certain issues: its realistic quality and the vocation of the gaucho poets for using literature as a political instrument were two features that the communists had to postulate and defend, even when, as in the case of Don Segundo Sombra, this forced them to leave aside everything about the reparative message of the conscience of the dominant classes in the novel, as Beatriz Sarlo has explained, which even the most dogmatic sectors noted at some level.113 As a component of a narrative about the national past, gaucho literature and the figure of the gaucho itself proved more controversial and unstable. On the one hand, adherence to a deterministic approach to historical evolution made it difficult to consider the gaucho in terms that were not associated with the feudalism that, according to the communists, had characterized the Argentine campaigns since colonial times and which the absence of a “bourgeois-democratic revolution” had made difficult to eliminate. On the other hand, the morphological changes and the progressive nationalization of the workers and popular sectors raised the question of their engagement in more sensitive and effective terms than evocations of the founding fathers, resulting in the discovery of the identifying power that the gaucho past and the criollo motifs could offer. In this chapter, we have seen that Latin American communist writers and artists undertook the process of “rediscovering” the national cultures 112 Ibid. 113 See Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930, Buenos

Aires, Nueva Visión, 2007, pp. 31–43, and Eduardo Romano, “Hacia un perfil de la poética nativista argentina,” in Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, no. 27, 1988, pp. 335–340.

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of the Americas in the period that opened with the beginning of the Cold War. In cases like Argentina’s, this brought with it a reconsideration of the liberal historical and cultural traditions defended since the mid1930s in the context of the anti-fascist struggle. The defense of national sovereignty against the onslaught of American imperialism translated, in cultural terms, into the organization of a discourse which, by condemning “cosmopolitanism,” sought to defend and reassess “national cultures” and, at the same time, define what was specifically popular within that national space. This was a process that was manifested in various ways and not without contradictions. In the field of artistic creation and cultural criticism, a condemnation of cultural forms and products identified with “imperialist penetration” and “bourgeois degeneration” was undertaken, from existentialist philosophy to abstract art, from sociology and psychoanalysis to comics and detective novels, leading to the establishment of an intellectual discourse that, even with nuances, was politically defensive and aesthetically conservative. In organizational terms, the aim was to provide intellectuals with national and continental structures of participation capable of articulating anti-imperialist and pacifist mandates with sectoral and trade union demands that had long been deferred. These structures also sought to consolidate an alternative circuit for the production and circulation of cultural products and producers at a time when American intellectual and artistic policy toward the region was adopting a very clear “internationalist” discourse in fields such as the visual arts and the social sciences. Several years before the encounters between Latin American writers delineated the physiognomy of intellectual commitment within the structure of a family united through the Cuban appeal,114 the communists had resolved to overcome the “lack of communication” between the artists and intellectuals of the continent in order to “work towards peace” and confront American imperialism on their own terms. These processes were read at the crossroads of profound political and cultural changes that emerged not only from the new world born from the defeat of Nazism and the beginning of a long confrontation between antagonistic powers, but also those that in Argentina were the product of the rise of a political movement that has since then, and in spite of its surprising metamorphoses, claimed the representation of the working class and popular sectors with a degree of success that the political left 114 See Claudia Gilman, Entre la pluma y el fusil: Debates y dilemas del escritor revolucionario en América Latina, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2003, p. 103.

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has still not managed to process. The Peronist question was critical for communism in general, but here it has been examined within the strict space of culture and intellectuals, who since that moment have had to occupy a “space-in-between” that is more dramatic than productive. For if the liberal-democratic space did not forgive it for its flirtations with Peronism nor for what was for them an incomprehensible partisanship, the Peronist masses did not support it either and turned nowhere but toward the radicalization of their own identity.

CHAPTER 5

Communists and Peace: Figures and Problems in a Global Movement

In 1945, everything appeared idyllic on the outside. Like God on the first day of Creation, light had been separated from darkness, but dry land had yet to be divided from the mud. With this image, Ilya Ehrenburg, a leading figure in the intellectual battles of the Cold War, evoked the days when General Charles de Gaulle and Maurice Thorez sat side by side on the benches of the French Constituent Assembly, when a young King Michael strolled through a Bucharest park with a Soviet victory order pinned to his chest, and when Americans toasted to eternal friendship in Belgrade. A couple of years later, everything fell into place. In September 1947, the Soviets officially announced to the world the collapse of the great alliance created by the war. What would later become known as the “Zhdanov report”—an essential document in Cold War communist ideology—explained that the world would henceforth be divided into two blocs: on the one side, the imperialist and antidemocratic camp dominated by the United States; on the other, the anti-imperialist, democratic, and peace-loving camp, hegemonized by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). For Moscow, the Truman Doctrine and the implementation of the Marshall Plan were proof that the United States harbored an expansionist, aggressive, and bellicose drive that threatened the existence of the USSR, and through the complicity of the local social democracies,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2_5

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that of the workers’ movement of all countries, particularly the old European powers that had been formerly allied with and were now subject to American policy. On the other hand, the USSR, by embodying a new and superior social system, reflected through its foreign policy “las esperanzas de toda la humanidad progresista que aspira a una paz durable” [the hopes of all of progressive humanity that aspires to a lasting peace].1 Europe was divided into homogeneous pro- and anti-communist regimes. Communists were expelled from the governments wherever they had any involvement, such as in France and Italy, to become, as Hobsbawm put it, “permanent political outcasts.” In popular democracies, the process was the opposite: allies were separated and soon became States subject to the dictatorship of the communist parties. The Communist International (CI) was dissolved and replaced with the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform, for its Russian name), a “limited and Eurocentric” body in charge of circulating information among the communist parties in power, the Communist Party of France (PCF) and the Communist Party of Italy (PCI).2 The Cominform established, with complete orthodoxy, the guidelines for the strategy, activity, reflection, and propaganda of international communism until its dissolution in April 1956. Its press organ, For a Lasting Peace, for a People’s Democracy!, had a permanent editorial office based first in Belgrade and then in Bucharest. It was published in several languages, including Spanish, and served as the only international forum for the communist movement and the only platform for the liaison of the communist parties, which is the reason it was essentially ideological and political in nature. At its third meeting held in Mátra, Hungary, in November 1949, the Cominform established that the “struggle for peace” would be the dominant political strategy of the international communist movement. It also set out to extend its sphere of influence to large sectors of public opinion, in a dual effort to emerge from its isolation and regain an ascendancy in the mass organizations created during the immediate postwar period and to whose mobilizing capacity it appealed, such as the Women’s International

1 Stéphane Courtois and Marc Lazar, Histoire du Parti Communiste français, Paris, PUF, 2000, p. 268. 2 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, New York, Pantheon Books, 1994, p. 238.

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Democratic Federation, the World Federation of Scientific Workers, and the World Federation of Democratic Youth.3 The first step had been taken in August 1948, when the Polish city of Wrocław, still in ruins, welcomed hundreds of intellectuals from 45 countries to hold the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace. In the months that followed, the multitudinous encounters occurred one after the other and the battered capitals of popular democracies served as a stage for thousands of visitors to observe a heartbreaking yet productive contrast: the ravages of war and the rebuilding capabilities that the Soviet system offered the populations under its orbit. These events were the first steps in a broad and far-reaching movement that united men and women from around the world under the banners of the defense of peace and culture in the face of the threat of American “new fascism.” In April 1949, the First World Peace Congress was held in the Salle Pleyel in Paris and in Prague, where those who could not obtain visas gathered. It was attended by 2,500 delegates from around the world who arrived in the French capital holding up placards with the dove drawn for the occasion by Pablo Picasso, which became a symbol the world over. That multitudinous meeting—a veritable “tower of Babel,” as the communists referred to it—led to the official creation of the World Committee of The Defenders of Peace—later World Peace Council—whose first president was Frédéric Joliot-Curie, an active member of the PCF, a hero of the Resistance, a member of a family of eminent scientists, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1935 for his research in nuclear physics, and a member of the first postwar French government in charge of the development of atomic energy. It is hard to imagine a more qualified leader to head a peace movement at a moment when the world was witnessing the possibility of a bloody and prolonged conflict involving nations armed with atomic bombs for the first time, which would mean, as Georgy Malenkov openly acknowledged, “the end of world civilization.”4 The cause for 3 See Lilly Marcou, La Kominform, Madrid, Villarar, 1978 [Le Kominform: Le communisme de guerre froide, Paris, Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1977] and El movimiento comunista internacional desde 1945, Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1981 [Le mouvement communiste international depuis 1945, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1980]. See also Fernando Claudín, La crisis del movimiento comunista: De la Kominterm al Kominform, Barcelona, Ruedo Ibérico, 1977. 4 See John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, New York, Penguin Press, 2005, p. 65 The bibliography on the cultural Cold War is ample; regarding the issues discussed in this chapter, the book by Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The

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peace, on the other hand, was not a new topic in communist activism; suffice it to recall that the most important communist parties were born in the heat of discussions on the nature of the Great War and that the anti-war movements that proliferated during the 1920s and 1930s, as we saw in the first chapter, included intellectuals among their most fervent promoters. From its beginnings, and not without reason, the World Peace Council or, simply, Peace Movement was suspected of being a “communist front” ready to exploit the good intentions of unwary intellectuals, which did not prevent it from attracting the support of prestigious writers, scientists, and artists, many of whom believed, as did Sartre, that it was no longer possible to be neutral. Until Soviet troops invaded rebellious Hungary and the anti-war discourse became unsustainable for many supporters and more than a few steadfast devotees, the Peace Movement was the most successful cultural initiative promoted by the USSR during the Cold War years. Its repercussions forced intellectuals not aligned with the Soviet bloc to create a series of similar institutions almost always as a reaction as well as movements that set out to defend the values of freedom and democracy against all “totalitarianisms,” whether on the left or the right. The Atlanticist movement had mixed results and, at least during its initial years, had to contend with the stigma of anti-communism in intellectual circles. As with its opponent, it is difficult to reduce its history solely to the proven ties with American intelligentsia that sustained its institutions, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This organization succeeded in expanding globally and achieved considerable success in the Spanishspeaking world. Far from consisting solely of Catholics and ultramontane nationalists, it established its prestige among both well-known liberal figures and left-wing intellectuals and activists whose anti-communism had more of an anti-Stalinist profile than a reactionary one, as was the case of the former member of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), Julián Gorkin, a key figure in the organization’s growth in Latin America during the 1950s. The World Peace Council created national councils on five continents. In Europe, it was successful where there were strong communist parties, such as in France and Italy, and much less so where communists barely achieved votes or any mass influence, such as in Great Britain or the Cultural War in Latin America, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2015, is highly recommended.

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Scandinavian countries. From the mid-1950s, African and especially Asian countries took on an increasing importance. The Bandung Conference in April 1955, barely ten months after the coup that overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, witnessed the materialization of the Third World, which in its very name challenged the idea of a confrontation between two compact blocs, and of the emergence of the colonial question as a central problem in international politics. Following this, the Soviets were ready to concede that nationalist and anti-imperialist movements offered a wide range of possibilities and that encouraging collaboration would be an effective contrast to the intransigence of the United States, whose reaction was increasingly reduced to military interventionism and fierce anti-communism. Faced with the challenge and freed from the rhetoric of late Stalinism, Khrushchev argued that the Third World countries could, with support from the USSR for their bourgeois nationalist governments, gradually and peacefully join the socialist world, without violence, revolutions, or class struggle.5 This discourse worked until the break with China in the late 1950s revived radicalism and offered the Third World a source of revolutionary energy that the unimaginative speeches on peaceful coexistence were far from emanating. As expected, the Peace Movement followed the vicissitudes of Soviet foreign policy, and in the agenda of its priorities and concerns, Europe, both Central and Eastern, gradually gave way to the Orient. Latin America occupied a marginal space in this new geography, to the mapping and knowledge of which the pacifist movement contributed in a way that has yet to be fully explored, at least until the missile crisis placed the Cuban issue front and center and defined the role that the island would play in the national liberation movements from the mid-1960s onwards. However, and despite countless problems of their own, Latin American intellectuals became part of the pacifist crusade—in some cases, quite prominently—and promoted campaigns and organizations that sought to translate the languages of the Cold War into a scenario where the confrontation with the United States had already been represented with its own actors. In this chapter, we will review the main topics of the Soviet pacifist discourse on culture, its structure, and the role that Latin America and its intellectuals played in its configuration as a global movement. We will reconstruct the creation of the Argentine Council for Peace 5 See David Priestland, The Red Flag. Communism and the making of the Modern World, London, Penguin Books, 2009, pp. 373 and ss.

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and, through the trajectory of some of its main cultural figures, we will observe the way in which the pacifist appeal organized a type of intellectual engagement with communism that mixed old and new imaginaries and political and geo-cultural traditions.

1

Latin Americans in a New Geography

By the end of the 1940s, communism had a long history of organizing frontist initiatives in the cultural sphere. Throughout the world, the anti-fascist movement was the gateway to communism for hundreds of intellectuals and the source of an enduring reminder of their duty in critical times. The struggle for peace revived those years by appealing to their responsibility in defending culture, once again threatened by the dark forces of a resurrected “fascism” in the form of imperialist degeneration and warmongering. Few could doubt that the presence in Wrocław of an octogenarian Julien Benda—who was impelled to applaud Stalin’s name every time it was mentioned, and this happened every few minutes—could have been reduced to a simple deception or ignorance of the tactical reasons that led the Soviets to again summon the support of Western intellectuals and revitalize the role of fellow travelers under a morally irreproachable advocation.6 The authoritative word and legitimizing capacity of cultural “celebrities” were endowed with a strong symbolic value, and although the Peace Movement was not exclusively made up of intellectuals, they were at the forefront. The idea that culture was “in danger” defined the crucial place it was attributed in communist discourse, based on the certainty that the ultimate battle would take place on the “ideological front,” for although the enemies appeared in new and subtle disguises, in essence they were the same ones that had only recently martyred the world: fascism and war. The conviction that the United States represented a new type of fascism was a determining factor, since it made it possible to operate on a pre-existing sensibility which, at the same time, had to be reexamined whenever the meaning of words previously part of a common struggle— peace, democracy, freedom, culture—became an object of dispute. This was why communist intellectuals had to become, to use the poet Louis Aragon’s expression, “médicos de las palabras” [word doctors]. 6 David Caute, The Fellow-travellers. A Postscript to the Enlightenment, New York, Macmillan, 1973, p. 290.

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El enemigo común de nuestras patrias ha sido abatido, pero su patrimonio no se ha perdido para todo el mundo. Ya no tiene la traza despreciable de los ejércitos alemanes, no se presenta más con el franco rostro del racismo hitleriano, aun no tiene hornos crematorios. Hay que saber reconocerlo, sé que vosotros lo reconocéis. Pero, como en 1935, no faltarán personas que nos digan que exageramos, que inventamos peligros imaginarios, y que la cultura no está en peligro. […] La cultura está en peligro, porque si por el momento no son los nazis de ayer quienes la atacan, estos han encontrado un relevo entre aquellos que ayer los combatían, hombres que han convertido en realidad el sueño monstruoso de volver las armas de la libertad contra los combatientes de la libertad. Para esto, para esta inversión de los valores, para hacer aceptar a los pueblos esta negación injusta de la gran fraternidad antifascista, no bastan la bomba atómica y la opresión de clase, necesitan inventar nuevos pretextos, mitos renovados, y enmascarar su propaganda con grandes principios que desvían a los pueblos. Necesitan la confusión del lenguaje y la perversión de las palabras. Para ello, para hacer posible la guerra, deben librar un combate decisivo contra el plan de la cultura. Por ello ponen la cultura en peligro. […] Hemos aprendido en la hora de peligro a manejar las palabras para ser entendidos por todos, y para el bien y exaltación de la patria. Debemos vigilar que no lleguen a ser las armas de los charlatanes, cuyos juegos solo pueden facilitar la confusión del pensamiento y agravar el peligro que se cierne sobre la cultura, facilitando así el asesinato de la paz. […] Nuestros pueblos y los hombres que son sus representantes en la cultura tienen el deber de exaltar los valores nacionales de nuestros pueblos, de levantar la barrera al monstruo que renace, cuyas dos cabezas son el fascismo y la guerra, hoy como ayer.7 [The common enemy of our nations has been defeated, but its legacy has not been completely lost. It no longer has the despicable appearance of the German armies, it no longer presents itself with the frank face of Hitlerian racism, it no longer has crematoriums. We must acknowledge this, and I know that you do. But, as in 1935, there will be no shortage of people who tell us we are exaggerating, that we are inventing imaginary dangers, and that culture is not in danger. […] Culture is in danger, because even if it is not yesterday’s Nazis who are currently attacking it, they have found a replacement among those who fought them only recently, men who have made a reality of the monstrous dream of turning the arms of liberty against the combatants of liberty. In this regard, for this reversal of values, to make the people accept this 7 Louis Aragon, “La cultura en peligro,” in Orientación, July 28, 1948.

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unjust denial of the great anti-fascist fraternity, the atomic bomb and class oppression are not enough, they need to invent new pretexts, renewed myths, and to mask their propaganda with grand principles that mislead the people. They need the confusion of language and the perversion of words. To this end, to make war possible, they must wage decisive combat against the cultural agenda. That is why culture is in danger. […] We have learned in the hour of danger how to handle words in order to be understood by all, and for the benefit and the glorification of the nation. We must watch that they do not become the weapons of charlatans, whose games can only encourage confused thought and aggravate the danger that threatens culture, facilitating the elimination of peace. [...] Our populations and the men who are their cultural representatives have the duty to exalt the national values of our peoples, to erect a barricade against the monster that is reborn, whose two heads are fascism and war, now as in the past.]

The Latin Americans were ready to battle the two-headed monster from the early hours as Juan Marinello, Nicolás Guillén, Jorge Amado, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, and many others sat in the hall of the beautiful art deco Salle Pleyel. Pablo Neruda, secretly in Paris, burst in on the last day with a grandiloquence that surprised even his hosts. While some believed him dead, others claimed that he had crossed the Andes on foot, escaping from the dictator who had exiled him. “Allí, frente a ellos, había un poeta y un héroe” [There, before them, was a poet and a hero].8 From that point on, the figure of Neruda placed his remote country and the continent that sheltered him on a higher plane of visibility than anything the persecuted and minority communist parties could have achieved. In fact, the small Latin American community in Paris, which also included Jorge Amado and Nicolás Guillén, was what placed Latin America on the horizon of a movement that poorly and belatedly understood the particular impact its anti-American crusade could have there. Invited to the table of Louis Aragon, mandarin of the communist elite in Paris, Neruda and Amado sold books by the millions in the famous Battles of the Book that Elsa Triolet, the Russian wife of the surrealist poet, promoted to counteract what she perceived as a conspiracy of silence and sabotage of progressive literature and which the Cominform 8 Ilya Ehrenburg, Gente, años, vida (Memorias, 1891-1967), Barcelona, Acantilado, 2014, p. 1608 [Liudi, gody, zhizn. Moscow, Sovietsky Pisatiel, 1990]. On Neruda’s exile, see David Schidlowsky, Pablo Neruda y su tiempo: Las furias y las penas, vol. 2, Santiago, RIL, 2008.

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made official when it called on all parties to intensify the publication of literature denouncing American preparations for a new war, which, of course, meant adopting some variant of socialist realism.9 This was, as is often the case when it comes to intellectuals, a mutually beneficial relationship. Marcelo Ridenti has insightfully drawn attention to how his participation in the Peace Movement allowed Jorge Amado to establish and deepen the international contacts that helped him become the best known and most published Brazilian author in the world.10 Exiled in Paris by the Eurico Dutra government, Amado, along with Neruda, Marinello, Lázaro Cárdenas, Lombardo Toledano, the Uruguayan Julia Arévalo, and the Argentines Julio Luis Peluffo and Gerarda Scolamieri, was a member of the first permanent committee of the movement representing Latin America. He was also the secretary of the propaganda section that the Cominform created at the time for the subcontinent, whose first task was the inauguration of a Latin American Association with its headquarters at 5 rue de l’Observatoire.11 Once again, as the anti-fascist networks had done and in keeping with the tradition of the cultural elites which the communists were also a part of, Paris was the meeting place for the Latin American networks that would carry out the cultural crusades of the Cold War. This is how it was perceived by the Chilean ambassador in Paris, who informed González Videla that the objective of this association was to: Incrementar la propaganda comunista en América Latina, aprovechando la influencia que la cultura francesa ejerce en esa parte de nuestro continente. Su acción deberá desarrollarse especialmente en los medios más cultos, utilizando a los intelectuales como fuerza de choque. […] El primer resultado de este plan fue la inauguración de la “Asociación de la América Latina” que tratará de agrupar numerosos estudiantes e intelectuales latinoamericanos residentes aquí. Esta institución […] será presidida por el escritor venezolano Roberto Gango [sic] y actuará como secretario el brasileño Israel Pedraza. Inauguró sus labores el 28 de abril con una velada

9 Marcelo Ridenti, “Jorge Amado e seus camaradas no círculo comunista internacional,” in Sociologia & Antropologia, vol. I, no. 2, 2011, p. 169, and Jean-François Sirinelli and Pascal Ory, Los intelectuales en Francia: Del caso Dreyfus a nuestros días, Valencia, PUV, 2007, p. 196 [Les intellectuels en France, de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, Paris, Armand Colin, 1986]. 10 Marcelo Ridenti, “Jorge Amado e seus camaradas no círculo comunista internacional,” op. cit., pp. 165–194. 11 “El congreso de París,” in Orientación, May 4, 1949.

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literaria en que hicieron uso de la palabra: Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, Nicolás Guillén y Juan Marinello. Este último anunció que un Congreso latinoamericano de la Paz se celebrará en México el 1 de agosto próximo. Se acordó, asimismo, que los delegados latinoamericanos al Congreso de la Paz dirigieran un mensaje a sus pueblos “para celebrar la victoria del Congreso sobre los causantes de la Guerra”.12 [Increase communist propaganda in Latin America, taking advantage of the influence of French culture on that part of our continent. Actions should be carried out especially in the most educated circles, using intellectuals as a strike force. [...] The first step in this plan was the inauguration of the “Latin American Association” which will attempt to gather the numerous Latin American students and intellectuals residing here. This institution [...] will be headed by the Venezuelan writer Roberto Gango [sic], and Israel Pedraza from Brazil will act as secretary. It began its work on April 28 with a literary evening at which Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, Nicolás Guillén, and Juan Marinello spoke. Marinello announced that a Latin American Peace Congress will be held in Mexico on August 1. It was also agreed that the Latin American delegates to the Peace Congress would direct a message to their peoples “to celebrate the victory of the Congress over the causes of war”.]

With the objective of bringing the Paris appeal to Latin American countries, and convinced that the conversion of the United States into a world power represented a danger to the national sovereignty of the States of the subcontinent and, by extension, their cultures, Latin American intellectuals promoted the American Continental Congress for Peace, which was held from September 5 to 11 at the Arena México, known as the “temple” of wrestling, in the popular Colonia Doctores neighborhood. The organizing committee was headed by poet Enrique González Martínez, seconded by Alfonso Caro and the trade unionist Vicente Lombardo Toledano, and among the sponsors were some of the most important Latin American intellectuals and artists: Arthur Ramos, Oscar Niemeyer, Cándido Portinari, Jorge Amado, Caio Prado Jr., Graciliano Ramos, Edison Carneiro (Brazil); Pablo Neruda (Chile); Joaquín García Monge (Costa Rica); Fernando Ortiz, Juan Marinello, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Nicolás Guillén (Cuba); Ismael Cosío

12 Comunismo en Europa, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile, Archivo General Histórico de Chile, vol. 2528, 1947, cited in David Schidlowsky, Pablo Neruda y su tiempo, op. cit., p. 786.

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Villegas, Alfonso Reyes, María Félix, Diego Rivera, Jesús Silva Herzog, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Luis Garrido (Mexico); Rogelio Sinán (Panama); Miguel Otero Silva (Venezuela), and José Luis Massera (Uruguay), among others.13 The Argentine supporting group consisted of Alejandro Ceballos (university professor), Antonio Berni (artist), Francisco Petrone (actor), Telma Reca (physician), Rodolfo Ghioldi (journalist), Ernesto Morales (writer), Gerarda Scolamieri (educator), Horacio Dobranich (magistrate), Rubens Iscaro (union leader), Ernesto Giudici (writer), Carlos Fernández Ordóñez (lawyer), Margarita de Ponce (educator), Jorge Romero Brest (writer), Alcira de la Peña (women’s rights leader), and Emilio Troise (physician).14 Communist newspapers reported that 1,500 delegates from 19 countries were in attendance and they described an audience of over 7,000 people who sang each of the national anthems with devotion and enthusiasm, in an openly anti-American tone that was not surprising in a country whose relations with its neighbor to the north have always been fraught with complexity. In fact, the Mexican pacifist movement did not find it difficult, at least in the early days, to attract the attention of nationalist sectors willing to make Soviet analyses coincide with the struggle for independence and sovereignty, which they saw as threatened by military and trade pacts and agreements such as the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, signed in Rio de Janeiro in September 1947. Retrieving the threads of an anti-imperialism that had been buried by World War II, the communists called for the need to prevent warmongers from taking Latin Americans “por la vía de la miseria, la servidumbre y la muerte” [down the path of misery, servitude, and death].15 It was thus that Ernesto Giudici, the first secretary of the Argentine Council for Peace, upon seeing the procession of indigenous women dressed in their typical red ponchos, was able to wistfully evoke his participation in the 1933 Montevideo Antiwar Congress to describe with Arielist emphases the profile of that which once again appeared to require urgent opposition: 13 “Personalidades que auspician el congreso de México,” in Orientación, August 18, 1949. 14 See “Patrocinantes del Congreso de México,” in Orientación, August 24, 1949. 15 Jorge Octavio Fernández Montes, “Voces y llamamientos de la cultura por la paz:

Génesis del pacifismo prosoviético de México en los albores de la Guerra Fría,” in Política y Cultura, no. 41, Spring 2014, p. 17.

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Los que hasta en Francia lo “americanizan” todo no iban a disimular, en América, su mal gusto y grosería. Ausente el hombre de la concepción “americana” de la existencia, muerto el arte en medio de los hierros de una estructura metálica sin alma, destácase el yanqui en medio de los demás por su frialdad utilitaria y sus corbatas provocativas. Cree que basta el dinero para poseer una obra de arte. Se lleva las cosas hechas por los indígenas y por una artesanía que conserva todavía la unidad entre el trabajo y el arte, la utilidad y la belleza, pero en su concepto ambas cosas siguen disociadas. Lo útil es una barra cromada, o es material plástico, lo bello es mero adorno que está afuera de las cosas útiles. Y quiere el yanqui uniformar la vida con su industria, sus diarios y su cine matando todo germen autóctono, que nosotros defendemos no para mantenerlo en su primitivismo sino para desarrollarlo en sus rasgos propios en lo general. No vamos a oponer lo indígena estancado a lo industrial progresista, como es falso oponer lo gauchesco a las nuevas expresiones sociales del progreso, pero queremos que ese cambio se haga por el desarrollo mismo de las cosas sin matarlas desde afuera. No queremos desarrollo técnico en contra del hombre y la integridad de su pensamiento sino para servir al hombre en la plenitud de sus posibilidades.16 [Those who “Americanize” everything even in France were not going to conceal their bad taste and coarseness in America. Man is missing from the “American” conception of existence, art is dead in the midst of the steel bars of a soulless metallic structure, the Yankee stands out from the rest for his utilitarian coldness and his provocative cravats. He believes that money is enough to possess a work of art. He takes the things made by the natives with a craftsmanship that still preserves the unity between work and art, utility and beauty, but in his view both things remain dissociated. For him, useful is a chromium-plated bar or plastic, beautiful is a mere adornment separate from useful things. And the Yankee wants to standardize life with his industry, his newspapers, and his cinema, killing all autochthonous roots, which we defend not to maintain their primitivism but to develop them in their own traits. We will not pit the stagnant indigenous against the progressive industrial, just as it is false to pit the gaucho against the new social expressions of progress, but we want that change to take place through the very development of things without killing them from the outside. We do not want technical development set against man and the integrity of his thought, but rather to serve man in the plenitude of his potential].

16 Ernesto Giudici, “Realidades americanas en el Congreso de México,” in Orientación, November 2, 1949.

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This Cold War discourse hit close to home with many intellectuals because, as Eduardo Rey Tristán has pointed out, it was the renewed expression of an old conflict.17 However, Soviet interest in the decolonization process along with the emergence of China as an actor that would eventually end up competing with Moscow in the task of winning over the hearts of the cultural elites configured a new geography, that of the global south. Here, the communists were able to observe a new reality but one with which they would soon discover surprising historical affinities. “Es necesario interesar a la opinión pública latinoamericana en que se percate de que sus tradiciones e intereses están estrechamente vinculados a los principios de Bandung” [We must encourage Latin American public opinion to recognize that its traditions and interests are closely linked to the Bandung principles], wrote the Colombian Jorge Zalamea in 1957 from his office at the Secretariat of the World Peace Council.18 María Rosa Oliver would go even further when attempting to explain to the Europeans the reasons for their orientalist enthusiasm: Así como los asiáticos rechazan el régimen capitalista bajo el cual han padecido, así los pueblos de la América Hispana rechazamos el régimen caduco de la monarquía y adoptamos el gobierno republicano, basado en los nuevos y revolucionarios derechos del hombre. Más si me siento tan cerca de mí a los chinos, coreanos y vietnamitas por saber que están viviendo una gesta igual a aquella que sobre mi patria aprendí en los textos escolares ni porque han padecido, y algunos padecen aún, la misma miseria de los más pobres trabajadores de nuestros suelos, sino también porque en sus ojos oblicuos, en sus pómulos altos, en sus manos menudas de dedos afilados y en el porte digno que confiere estatura a sus cuerpos pequeños reconozco los rasgos, y a través de ellos la idiosincrasia del indio de mi América. El que he visto en la meseta mexicana, en los valles andinos, en la ribera de los ríos Paraná y Uruguay.19 17 Eduardo Rey Tristán, “Estados Unidos y América Latina durante la Guerra Fría: La dimensión cultural,” in Benedetta Calandra and Marina Franco (eds.), La Guerra Fría cultural en América Latina: Desafíos y límites para una nueva mirada de las relaciones interamericanas, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2012, p. 53. 18 Letter from Jorge Zalamea to María Rosa Oliver, Vienna, February 18, 1957, Fondo María Rosa Oliver/ María Rosa Oliver Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; FMRO/Princeton University Library, box 7, folder 13. 19 World Peace Council, handwritten notes on the 2nd World Congress of The Defenders of Peace in Warsaw, FMRO/Princeton University Library, box 1, folder 51.

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[Just as the Asians reject the capitalist regime under which they have suffered, we, the peoples of Hispanic America, reject the outmoded monarchical regime and instead adopt a republican government, based on the new and revolutionary rights of man. All the more since I feel the Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese so close to me because I know that they are living through a feat like that which I learned about my homeland in school textbooks, not only because they have suffered, and some still suffer, the same misery of the poorest workers of our lands, but also because in their oblique eyes, high cheekbones, small hands with slender fingers, and in the dignified bearing that confers stature to their small bodies, I recognize the features, and through them the idiosyncrasy of the Indian of my America. The one I have seen in the Mexican plateau, in the Andean valleys, on the banks of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers].

At one of the most critical moments of the Korean War, hundreds of Western intellectuals attended the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference, which began in Beijing on October 2, 1952, paving the way for a pilgrimage that resulted in dozens of books and hundreds of chronicles and reports, and which in many cases, as in Oliver’s, eventually led to their break with the Soviet world.20 The networks and structures organized around the Peace Movement played a central role in establishing a broadened anti-imperialist sentiment and a new utopian horizon for intellectual communism. This was not, of course, a strictly new phenomenon, since, as Martín Bergel has insightfully demonstrated, the attraction to models and figures from the Orient emerged as a global phenomenon in the 1920s, configuring a sort of Third Worldism avant la lettre. Therefore, although this notion became popularized in the 1950s, it was in the period following the great crisis initiated by World War I, cuando por primera vez adviene la característica que, al menos desde nuestra región, reluciría en la idea tercermundista: la de la creencia en una comunidad de intereses —con visos de realidad o puramente imaginada— entre América Latina y los países asiáticos y africanos. Es entonces cuando un conjunto significativo de intelectuales y espacios culturales argentinos puede dar muestras de simpatía o aún de identificación con fenómenos emblemáticos de una nueva era de luchas anticoloniales, como Gandhi, el

20 On leftist fellow travelers, see the book by Sylvia Saítta, Hacia la revolución: Viajeros argentinos de izquierda, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007.

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rifeño Abd-el-Krim o el Kuomintang chino. El Oriente, contramodelo civilizatorio para las elites letradas en el siglo XIX, pasaba a ser ahora incluido junto a los referentes del antiimperialismo norteamericano en una serie común.21 [that for the first time the characteristic which, at least for our region, would stand out within the Third Worldist concept emerges: the belief in a community of interests —whether real or purely imagined— shared by Latin America and by Asian and African countries. It is then that a significant number of Argentine intellectuals and cultural spaces show expressions of sympathy for or even identification with the emblematic phenomena of a new era of anti-colonial struggles, such as Gandhi, the Rifian Abd-el-Krim, or the Chinese Kuomintang. The Orient, civilizing counter-model for the educated elites in the nineteenth century, was now included alongside the referents of North American anti-imperialism in a common series.]

After the congress in Mexico, the activities of the Peace Movement in Latin America proceeded albeit with certain difficulties, some stemming from the censorship and persecution to which the communists were subjected while others were due to organizational difficulties, personal misgivings, leadership struggles, and, perhaps most especially, the fact that the subcontinent was for many years the “Cinderella” of the movement. As Jorge Regueros Peralta from Colombia argued, the World Council did not fully understand the importance of the region as “retaguardia del enemigo y acervo de materias primas vitales para él” [the enemy’s rearguard and a source of critical raw materials].22 Despite these obstacles, national councils were created in almost every country and gradually a network of publications united by the call for pacifism was formed: the journal Para Todos, directed by Jorge Amado in Brazil; the Colombian Paz y Democracia, promoted by Diego Montaña Cuéllar; the monthly Paz, directed in Mexico by General Heriberto Jara Corona with Teresa Proenza as managing editor; Masses and Mainstream, published in New York by Samuel Sillen; Por la Paz, which was promoted by María Rosa Oliver in Argentina, and as a focal point, the French Defense de la Paix (later Horizons ), directed in Paris by Pierre Cot with Pierre Morgan as managing editor and published in 13 languages and 20 countries. 21 Martín Bergel, El Oriente desplazado: Los intelectuales y los orígenes del tercermundismo en la Argentina, Bernal, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2015. 22 Letter from Jorge Regueros Peralta to María Rosa Oliver, Bogota, May 3, 1952, FMRO/Princeton University Library, box 5, folder 53.

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In 1952, Latin American intellectuals organized a new continental encounter. It was initially to be held in Chile but it was banned; then, in Rio de Janeiro, the Getulio Vargas government changed its mind about the date, so it was finally held in Montevideo. As discussed in the previous chapter, several months later, in June 1953, the Continental Congress of Culture was held in Chile, the first and last in a short series. Nevertheless, Latin Americans continued to participate in world meetings: Warsaw in 1950, Vienna in 1952, Helsinki in 1955, Moscow in 1962, etc. Outstanding or timely figures were awarded the Stalin Prize, a kind of Soviet Nobel Prize, “for the consolidation of peace among peoples,” later conveniently renamed the Lenin Prize. Mexican politician and military officer Heriberto Jara Corona received it in 1950, Jorge Amado in 1951, Eliza Branco Batista in 1952, Pablo Neruda in 1953, Baldomero Sanín Cano and Nicolás Guillén in 1954, Lázaro Cárdenas in 1955, María Rosa Oliver in 1958, Fidel Castro in 1961, Oscar Niemeyer in 1963, Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1965, David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1966, Jorge Zalamea in 1967, and Alfredo Varela in 1971.

2 Argentine Pacifists: The Argentine Council for Peace The Argentine Council for Peace began its work in March 1949 with a manifesto in support of the call for a World Congress of The Defenders of Peace, signed by more than 120 “celebrities” and headed by the writer Leónidas Barletta, a dedicated communist fellow traveler. The text was published on the cover of Orientación on March 30, the same day that President Juan Domingo Perón inaugurated the First National Congress of Philosophy in Mendoza, which the communists described as a concrete act on an Argentine scale of the regression of imperialist decadence through the imposition of an “anti-May Revolution” ideology.23 Compartiendo los profundos anhelos de paz expresados en el llamado de los organizadores del Congreso Mundial de Partidarios de la Paz y considerando que la lucha contra los provocadores de la guerra se

23 The expression “May thinking” refers to the set of ideas that accompanied the May Revolution of 1810, when the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata proposed the establishment of a new center of autonomous power within the context of the crisis of the Spanish monarchy.

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convierte hoy en la tarea central de todos los hombres y mujeres amantes del progreso, la democracia y la libertad e independencia de sus países, nosotros, en nombre propio, y haciéndonos intérpretes de los mejores sentimientos y tradiciones del pueblo argentino, hacemos llegar nuestra adhesión a los organizadores de ese congreso a celebrarse el próximo mes de abril, siendo también nuestro propósito constituir una comisión nacional que, además del envío de delegados a dicho congreso, trabaje en forma permanente a favor de un amplio movimiento de esa naturaleza en la Argentina.24 [Sharing the deep yearning for peace expressed in the call of the organizers of the World Congress of The Defenders of Peace and considering that the struggle against the provocateurs of war has now become the central task of all men and women who love progress, democracy, and the freedom and independence of their countries, we, speaking on our own behalf and representing the best sentiments and traditions of the Argentine people, express our support to the organizers of the congress to be held next April. We also intend to form a national commission which, in addition to sending delegates to the congress, will also undertake the ongoing task of working towards the creation of a broad movement of this nature in Argentina].

The first five signatories of the “Manifesto for Peace” included Alejandro Ceballos, a prestigious physician and university professor who would replace José Luis Romero as rector of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) a few years later, judge and writer Horacio Dobranich, painter Juan Carlos Castagnino, and the president of the Federación Universitaria Argentina (Argentine University Federation), Wolfram Luthy.25 Although it was not strictly speaking a manifesto of intellectuals, they were clearly overrepresented in comparison with student leaders, politicians, and workers, according to the classification that preceded the list of signatories. Resorting to the “celebrity effect” used by the left since the Dreyfus case, the Peace Movement bolstered its legitimacy by accompanying, whenever necessary, the names of members and sympathizers with the mention of their profession or degree. It was not by chance that the leading figures of the partisans of peace

24 “En defensa de la paz: Importantes personalidades y organizaciones de nuestro país apoyan el Congreso de París,” in Orientación, March 30, 1949. 25 “En defensa de la paz,” in Orientación, April 30, 1949.

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were eminent scientists like Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Aimé Cotton— two “sages”, as the communist newspapers liked to call them—and great artists like Pablo Picasso and Paul Éluard. As a way of mobilizing intellectuals with regard to an event, and the events themselves, manifestos and petitions are useful tools for outlining a “social portrait” of the various factions of the intellectual field at any given time.26 In the case of the “Manifesto for Peace,” the social and professional composition of the list of supporters may be an indication of the geography of the intellectual commitment to communism in those years. As previously mentioned, the hierarchy given to the intellectual professions in the order of presentation clearly reflects the importance that the organizers assigned to this social group in the legitimization of their pacifist crusade, although it could also indicate that it was the intellectuals, and not the workers, who responded to the call of the Parisian scholars and artists. Of the 120 signatories that Orientación chose to publish on its cover, 92.2% belonged to intellectual categories in a general sense, and only 3.3% were labor leaders. Within the intellectual categories, the literary and artistic professions clearly stood out (writers, 18%; visual artists, 13%) as well as doctors and dentists (18%), followed by journalists (11%), student leaders (9%), legal professionals (7%), and scientists (chemists, biochemists, pharmacists, 6%). In last place were teachers, engineers, and notaries, who together represented no more than 3% of the signatories. Professional groups were barely represented, with the exception of the Confederación Farmacéutica y Bioquímica Argentina (Argentine Pharmaceutical and Biochemical Federation) and the Asociación Argentina de Actores (Argentine Actors Association). Neither the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (Argentine Society of Writers, or SADE), the Sociedad Argentina de Artistas Plásticos (Argentine Society of Visual Artists, or SAAP), nor the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores (Free College of Higher Education, or CLES), organizations in which the communists had a certain level of involvement, lent their support to the initiative, at least not on this occasion, although many of their members and leaders participated as individuals. A significant proportion of the intellectual elite refused to lend their names to the pacifist call, which they labeled the “Soviet peace” or the “communist 26 See Christophe Charle, El nacimiento de los “intelectuales,” Buenos Aires, Nueva Visión, 2009, p. 125. [Naissance des “intellectuels”: 1880–1900, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1990].

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peace,” in line with the mainstream press. The case of CLES was especially uncomfortable for the communists, who accused the authorities of betraying the memory of Aníbal Ponce and pushing the institution into decline.27 The Argentine Council for Peace formed its first Board of Directors with a structure that would later become classic: legislators, Radical leaders, professionals, and writers, whether communists or sympathizers.28 A non-party member served as president and a communist filled the role of General Secretary, a position that would be awarded to Ernesto Giudici during the successive presidencies of Carlos Fernández Ordóñez (a lawyer from Córdoba of Radical background), Emilio García Iturraspe, Norberto Frontini (lawyer and writer), Eduardo Aleman, and Alberto Casella (engineer).29 Although María Rosa Oliver came to represent the model of the public intellectual commitment that the communists wished to convey (someone capable of overcoming her class background and even abandoning her old friendships in the name of a higher cause), it was the work of an old comrade educated in the spirit of the anti-imperialist reformism of the 1920s that endowed the Peace Movement with its lasting organization. Indeed, Ernesto Giudici was the communist intellectual perhaps best equipped to articulate the emotional force of the anti-war call with a properly anti-imperialist, anti-American discourse. A leading figure of the anti-imperialist wing of the reformist movement, Giudici trained under the intellectual tutelage of José Carlos Mariátegui, José Vasconcelos, and José Ingenieros, developing a Latin Americanist political stance and a humanist interpretation of Marxism from his youth. Like many other Argentine communist intellectuals, Giudici’s university career was cut short due to his political involvement. In 1932, a few months before he was to receive his medical degree, he was expelled from the UBA for his protests against José Félix Uriburu’s dictatorship. As a result,

27 “Esto sucedió,” in Orientación, April 6, 1949. 28 “Radical leaders” refer to members of the Unión Cívica Radical, a political party that

had a moderate centrist orientation at the time. 29 The provisional Board of Directors consisted of Romeo Bonazzola (national congressman), Manuel Armengol (lawyer), Norberto Frontini (lawyer), Ernesto Giudici (writer), C. Rodríguez Otaño (writer), Gregorio Bermann (university professor), Wolfram Luthy (president of the University Federation of Buenos Aires, or FUBA), Jorge Thénon (physician), and Tomás Ide (congressman for the province of Buenos Aires).

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he devoted himself more intensely to journalism and political activism. After four years in the Socialist Party, he joined the Communist Party of Argentina (PCA) in 1934. A year later, he founded the Liga del Pensamiento Materialista (League of Materialist Thought) and embarked on intense activism in anti-fascist circles, which provided him with significant skill in the formation of frontist organizations.30 Until 1973, when he resigned from the party during Héctor Cámpora’s Peronist government, Giudici was a staunch militant, although not necessarily an obedient one. He served as editor-in-chief of the party newspaper La Hora, was director of the newspaper Orientación, and later directed El Popular. He was the party’s proxy and was responsible for the university front. Due to his Marxist background, a rare quality among his comrades, he took part in heated debates on various aspects of dialectical materialism and on several occasions defended relatively “heterodox” positions, compared to the theoretical narrowness and conceptual rigidity of the party institution. For Giudici, the discourse linking the expansionist drive of the United States to the rebirth of fascism was not new. As early as 1940, in Imperialismo inglés y liberación nacional, he had argued that solidarity with the USSR should not overshadow the fact that in Argentina and Latin America the fight against imperialism was the priority, a statement that earned him the praise of the nationalist writer of Radical origins Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz and his comrade historian Rodolfo Puiggrós, expelled from the party in 1946 for his Peronist sympathies. Giudici called on intellectuals to fight for peace within the “specific field of ideas,” which in those initial stages meant, on the one hand, fighting and denouncing “irrationalism” in the form of existentialist philosophy and “decadent” art and, on the other, reflecting the reality of the backwardness and dependence of the Latin American peoples in “el repudio a un modo de vida norteamericano que reedita el mito nazi de la superioridad racial y de la violencia, con una gran dosis de envilecimiento mercantil. Es la mecanización brutalizada unida al estancamiento feudal” [the repudiation of an American way of life that repeats the Nazi myth of racial superiority

30 On Giudici, see the entry “Ernesto Giudici” in Horacio Tarcus, Diccionario biográfico de la izquierda argentina: De los anarquistas a la “nueva izquierda” (1870–1976), Buenos Aires, Emecé, 2007, pp. 253–265, and Néstor Kohan, “Ernesto Giudici, herejes y heterodoxos en el comunismo argentino,” in De Ingenieros al Che: Ensayos sobre el marxismo argentino y latinoamericano, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2000, pp. 113–171.

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and violence, with a large dose of mercantile debasement. It is brutalized mechanization combined with feudal stagnation].31 The Peace Movement brought together the work of several organizations promoted by the communists. The Unión Argentina de Mujeres (Argentine Women’s Union) and the Agrupación Cultural Femenina (Women’s Cultural Association) were the principal architects of the campaign to collect signatures and of the organization of the National Congress through the Comisión Central Pro Congreso de la Paz (Central Commission for the Pro Peace Congress). The Liga Argentina por los Derechos del Hombre (Argentine League for the Rights of Man) and the Unión de Jóvenes Patriotas Argentinos (Union of Young Argentine Patriots) also participated, as well as other ad hoc organizations, such as the Movimiento Antiimperialista por la Paz y la Democracia (Anti-imperialist Movement for Peace and Democracy), the Amigas de la Paz (Friends of Peace), the Comisión Nacional Obrera por la Paz (National Workers’ Commission for Peace), the Movimiento Juvenil por la Paz (Youth Movement for Peace), Universitarios por la Paz (University Students for Peace), and so on. In July and August 1949, writers and visual artists issued their own manifestos in support of the Congreso Nacional por la Paz (National Congress for Peace) that had been launched. The artists’ manifesto featured the signatures of Juan Bonome, president of the SAAP, Antonio Berni, Abraham Vigo, Enrique Policastro, Luis Falcini, Carlos Giambiaggi, and Medardo Pantoja. The writers’ manifesto was headed by José P. Barreiro, José Pedroni, Ernesto Castro, Elías Castelnuovo, Jacinto Grau, Carlos Ruiz Daudet, Ernesto Morales, Álvaro Yunque, Max Dickman, and Lázaro Liacho, among others.32 At the same time, the SAAP, the Asociación de Estímulo de Bellas Artes (Association for the Encouragement of Fine Arts), the Agrupación Cultural Femenina (Women’s Cultural Association), the Consejo Argentino por la Paz (Argentine Council for Peace), and the Centro de Estudiantes de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Student Center) organized a poster and vignette contest and the first prize was the engraving Levantando anclas, donated by Benito Quinquela Martín. A jury consisting of Antonio Berni, Enrique 31 Ernesto Giudici, “Los intelectuales por la paz, el progreso y la cultura,” in Orientación, April 30, 1949. 32 “Manifiesto de los artistas plásticos,” in Orientación, August 10, 1949, and “Manifiesto de los escritores argentinos por la Paz”, in Orientación, July 13 and 27, 1949.

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Policastro, Demetrio Urruchúa, Carlos Giambiaggi, Bartolomé Mirabelli, and Marina Bengoechea granted awards to the works of Luis Pellegrini (posters) and Raúl Monsegur (vignettes), which were exhibited at the headquarters of the Argentine Council for Peace, located at 1147 Cerrito Street.33 Inspired by the Paris meeting, the 1ra Congreso Nacional por la Paz (1st National Peace Congress) was held in the city of La Plata on August 18 and 19, with 1,200 delegates from around the country in attendance, although it was far from the atmosphere of camaraderie that had engulfed the Parisian attendees in the streets of the Quartier Latin. The function was prohibited, the Teatro Coliseo was shut down, and nearly two hundred delegates were detained by the police, the beginning of an ongoing persecution that, although particularly virulent and systematic in Argentina, also became commonplace in other Western countries.34 Within this context, the congress met, established its authorities, and issued a statement in which it declared its opposition to the Atlantic Pact and the Rio de Janeiro and Bogota Pacts, denounced the attempts to sabotage the United Nations Organization, and condemned colonialism, arms stockpiling, coups d’état, and the economic aid plans promoted by the United States for the region. At the meeting, a “permanent committee” was formed, with Carlos Fernández Ordóñez (who at that time was imprisoned in Córdoba) as honorary president, Emilio García Iturraspe as president, and 31 members representing the various pacifist organizations, professions, and trades, and the various provinces present. Juan Jacobo Bajarlía represented the writers, Antonio Berni the painters, Julio Peluffo the doctors, Felipe Freyre the engineers, Daniel Vila the economists, Manuel Armengol the lawyers, Francisco Petrone the actors, Urbano Rodríguez the teachers, Isidro Maiztegui the musicians, Luis Falcini the sculptors, and José P. Barreiro the journalists. The actual direction of the movement was undertaken by an Advisory Board consisting of the

33 For more on the contest, see Orientación, July 20, 1949 and August 16, 1949. 34 Reports of arrests and harassment, particularly of women, by the police and the

Special Division were common in the communist press. In other countries, harassment tended to be less explicit and often manifested as obstacles placed in the way of congresses and meetings or bans on entry to foreign delegates when an international meeting was being held. This was the tactic of the British government in 1950, when it blocked the entry of most of the delegates arriving for the 3rd World Congress of the Supporters of Peace to be held in Sheffield, forcing the organizers to move the event to Warsaw.

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members of the Committee who resided in the city of Buenos Aires, with Norberto Frontini as President and Ernesto Giudici as Secretary.35 The vicissitudes of the Peace Movement were, in Argentina and the rest of the world, a mirror of the political imperatives of the Cold War. The struggle for peace was, they asserted, the main motive of combat and the standard by which to measure allies and enemies. For Argentine communists, the culmination of this manner of conceiving unified policies was the shift in Peronist foreign policy around 1952, when the government’s relations with the United States entered a deep crisis and the party characterization of its anti-imperialist stance opted for contentious support. Thus, whereas in 1950 the “third position” was defined as a “smokescreen” that sought to hide from the people the capitulation of the government to imperialist monopolies, in 1952 the young Peronist leader John William Cooke explained the original third position of his government in Vienna.36 With regard to the World Council, it no longer invited the liberal Roberto Giusti to its congresses, opting instead for the nationalist Catholic priest Leonardo Castellani.37 Over the years, the pacifist agenda would be organized through a combination of the domestic situation and the course of international politics: the Korean War, the intervention in Guatemala, the condemnation of Perón’s oil policy, the Suez Canal, the South Atlantic Pact, the colonial issue, support for national liberation movements, the US intervention in Cuba in 1962, among others. That same year, within the context of the alleged Peronist “shift to the left,” the Peace Movement would abandon its strategy of legitimization through intellectuals to adopt a more political-unionist profile. The signatures accompanying the declaration of support for the World Congress for Disarmament and Peace were mostly from political and trade union leaders, although prestigious figures such as the writer and essayist Bernardo Canal Feijóo from Santiago del Estero and popular artists such as Horacio Guarany also

35 “Declaración y llamamiento del Congreso Argentino de Partidarios de la Paz”, in Orientación, August 24, 1949. 36 “J. Cooke, Frontini y Esquivel, delegados argentinos, proclamaron en Viena la pasión antiimperialista de nuestro pueblo y sus deseos de paz,” in Nuestra Palabra, December 23, 1952. The “third position” is a central concept of the Peronist government’s foreign policy within the context of the Cold War. 37 See “Los pueblos esperan del Congreso de Viena un renovado impulso en defensa de la paz,” in Nuestra Palabra, December 9, 1952.

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expressed their support.38 The Argentine communists were represented in the various congresses that were held around the world in the name of peace. Alfredo Varela attended Wrocław as a member of the editorial board of the newspaper La Hora and as a prominent writer. He published an extensive article on that experience in Orientación detailing his fraternization with Pudovkin, Picasso, Fadeyev, the Dean of Canterbury, and Michel Prenant. Fanny Edelman did the same in reference to the 2nd Congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation as did the musician Atahualpa Yupanqui, a member of the delegation of 22 young people who paraded through the streets of Budapest during the Congress of the World Federation of Democratic Youth held in September 1949.39 Once the movement was formed in Argentina, the delegations became more numerous. The World Congress of The Defenders of Peace, held in Prague and Paris in April 1949, was attended by 14 delegates representing different sectors and social or professional organizations, all of them, with the exception of Fernández Ordóñez, affiliated with the party, including members of the Central Committee.40 In a practice that was common within the system of compensation that characterized party intellectual life, being designated as a delegate to attend a congress where it was possible to socialize, as was the case in Paris, with a brilliant constellation of artists, writers, and scientists was often seen as a reward for adherence to party discipline. Rarely were the fractious bestowed such awards, as

38 “Auspicio argentino al Congreso Mundial por el Desarme y la Paz,” in Nuestra Palabra, May 29, 1962. 39 Alfredo Varela, “La fraternidad de los intelectuales,” in Orientación, November 17, 1948; Atahualpa Yupanqui, “Budapest, la ciudad donde se encontró la juventud,” in Orientación, September 14, 1949, and Fanny Edelman, “El Segundo Congreso Mundial de Mujeres,” in Nueva Era, no. 1, Buenos Aires, April 1949. 40 The Argentine delegation consisted of Carlos Fernández Ordoñez, Irma Othar (labor leader), Gerarda Scolamieri (teacher), Benito Marianetti (lawyer and member of the Central Committee), Alicia Pérez Penalba (artist), Rubens Iscaro (labor leader), Julio Peluffo (physician), Pedro Fontana (engineer), Sara Raier, Jorge Viaggio (physician), Mauricio Birgin (lawyer), and Electra Luppi. Some delegates were unable to leave the country due to visa problems or because they were denied passports, including Juan Carlos Castagnino, Eter Giolito, Rodolfo Aráoz Alfaro, Wolfram Luthy, and Yuqueri Rojas. See “Delegados argentinos al congreso de París,” in Orientación, April 27, 1949. According to the communist press, the Argentine delegation delivered 250,000 membership cards to the Peace Movement for the occasion. See Benito Marianetti, “Al luchar por la paz continuamos las mejores tradiciones nacionales,” in Orientación, May 4, 1949.

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evidenced by the absence of those writers who had been reprimanded in the anti-avant-garde purges analyzed in chapter two.41

3 María Rosa Oliver: On the Utility of the Bourgeois French historian Pascal Ory has stated that particularly in its early years, when it was most successful in attracting prominent figures from outside the communist milieu, the Peace Movement was an organization based on “la amplitud, la fe vibrante y la rigidez de la ciudadela comunista” [the breadth, vibrant faith, and rigidity of the communist citadel], in stark contrast with the dispersion of non-communist intellectuals, whose Atlanticism was never able to take a stand against it and was limited to a particularly negative logic: that of the rejection of the Stalinist Soviet model.42 In Argentina this observation must be qualified, since the success of communist pacifism was not as great, nor was the failure of the Western frontist organizations as resounding. Although it managed to promote some actions that had a good impact on the public, such as the campaign against bacteriological warfare launched by doctors and scientists in 1956, in general its activism was confined to the party’s sphere of influence, with a few exceptions, such as that of the philosopher Carlos Astrada. The latter, within the context of the rapprochement with Peronism in 1952, lent his support to the pacifist call of the communists and remained a “fellow traveler” until the late 1950s. Astrada’s admission into the family of communist fellow travelers put an end to the furious attacks against him in the preceding years, in a move that replicated “Sartre’s case” and that the Argentines took care to emphasize, seeking added prestige through the double accumulation of names. Creemos que en ese rumbo puede encontrarse, efectivamente, la única salvación, la única vitalización de la cultura argentina, y creemos también

41 Raúl Larra later recalled that his name was withdrawn from the previously mentioned 1949 “Manifiesto por la paz” by order of Juan José Real. According to Larra, when he found out about this, he went to ask for an explanation from Real, who suggested that if he were to fall in line with the party’s directives on cultural issues he could travel to the Paris congress, something that did not happen (interview with Raúl Larra, 1990, courtesy of Alicia García Gilabert). 42 Jean-François Sirinelli and Pascal Ory, Los intelectuales en Francia, op. cit., p. 205.

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que dicho gesto del profesor Astrada no puede ser computado como una actitud exclusivamente personal. Por sobre los valores individuales de quien lo asume gravita un proceso de polarización mundial de la conciencia que la política prepotente del imperialismo yanqui está generando en todo el mundo. El caso Sartre ha dado a dicho proceso una calidad internacional. El caso Astrada le asigna una resonancia local que lo esclarece y lo estimula. En este rumbo político nos parece que puede —y debe— establecerse una acción común entre todos cuantos aspiran a preservar la paz del mundo y la soberanía de los pueblos.43 [We believe that this path effectively leads to the only salvation, the only vitalization of Argentine culture, and we also believe that Professor Astrada’s gesture cannot be considered an exclusively personal attitude. Beyond the individual values of those involved, there is a process of world polarization through the awareness that the tyrannical policy of American imperialism is generating around the world. Sartre’s case has given this process an international quality. Astrada’s case gives it a local resonance that clarifies and reinvigorates it. We feel that on this political path there are common actions that can —and must— be taken by all those who aspire to preserve world peace and the sovereignty of the peoples].

The Argentine “democratic intelligentsia” did not heed the call and, in fact, shifted its attention to the positions of the Western cultural front, supporting the constitution of a local chapter of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization of non-communist and anti-communist intellectuals created in Berlin in June 1950 under the auspices of Arthur Koestler, Denis de Rougemont, Ignazio Silone, James Burnham, Germán Arciniegas, Guido Piovene, Arthur Schlesinger, Upton Sinclair, and Tennessee Williams, among others. Under the unifying umbrella of antitotalitarianism, the Argentine headquarters of the Congress, founded in December 1955, welcomed some of the country’s most prestigious intellectuals, important figures of the post-Peronist era university, as well as politicians from different “progressive” parties, particularly the socialists, but also the Radicals, the progressive democrats and the Christian democrats. With the key support of Victoria Ocampo and the journal Sur, a dense network of journals, editorials, and meetings was created around this space on a Latin American scale, which included the participation of personalities of great prestige and influence who on many 43 “El caso Astrada,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 9/10, January 1953. See also the report on Carlos Astrada published in Propósitos, Buenos Aires, December 11, 1952.

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occasions dwarfed the dwindling contingents of peace-loving communist intellectuals. The fact that it was an organization financed by American intelligence, as was finally proven, hindered the libertarian preaching of the Congress to some extent, although it had the advantage of being supported by the dominant factions of the Argentine intellectual sphere, a space nevertheless submerged in a metamorphosis ideologically and generationally deep enough that its struggles did not generate enthusiasm in those who could have prevented its total decline. This situation contributed strategic importance to the figure of María Rosa Oliver, a key player in the Argentine Peace Movement. For the communists, she represented a double achievement: she was a “bourgeois” intellectual who, abandoning her class commitments, placed her prestige at the service of a universal and humanitarian cause and, at the same time, she was an effective cultural organizer capable of establishing a vast network of relations for the creation of frontist initiatives on a continental scale. The party never ceased to court her and to publicly exploit her support at every national or international meeting that took place, making up for the increasing uneasiness these communist companions caused among her old friends and liberal colleagues. “He sido presentada como un écrivain de la bourgeoisie argentine — le escribía con ironía a su sobrina nieta María Teresa Bortagaray desde el hotel parisino donde esperaba viajar al fallido Congreso Mundial de Sheffield—, debo disfrazarme de tal, imposible hacerlo sin sombrero.” [I have been presented as an écrivain de la bourgeoisie argentine—she wrote with irony to her great-niece María Teresa Bortagaray from the Parisian hotel where she expected to travel to the unsuccessful World Congress in Sheffield—I must disguise myself as such, impossible to do so without a hat].44 María Rosa Oliver came from a traditional family of the Buenos Aires haute bourgeoisie, with a lineage that extended back to José de San Martín. At age 10, polio left her permanently debilitated and thereafter dependent on a wheelchair for mobility.45 This physical disability was 44 Letter from María Rosa Oliver to María Teresa Bortagaray, Paris, November 9, 1950, FMRO/Princeton University Library, box 7, folder 28. 45 On María Rosa Oliver, see Hebe Clementi, María Rosa Oliver, Buenos Aires, Planeta, 1992; Horacio Tarcus, Diccionario biográfico de la izquierda argentina, op. cit., pp. 464 and 465, and Álvaro Fernández Bravo, “Introducción,” in María Rosa Oliver, Mi fe es el hombre, Buenos Aires, Biblioteca Nacional, 2008.

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never an impediment for the woman who, over the years and much to her family’s chagrin, would sign her Christmas cards as “Rosita, la roja” [Rosita, the Red]. Moreover, the enormous will she displayed in ensuring that her physical difficulties did not prevent her from fulfilling the cultural diplomacy for which she seemed naturally gifted was a complement to the freedom of movement granted her by the fact that she had no children and no domestic life to compete with her public life and her passion for travel. Even before the creation of the journal Sur, on whose editorial committee she would serve from its first issue until 1958, she had become friends with three men who would be decisive in the development of an “Americanist consciousness” in which culture functioned as a synthesizing element of the region’s inherent heterogeneity and its multiple traditions: Alfonso Reyes from Mexico, Pedro Henríquez Ureña from the Dominican Republic, and Waldo Frank from the United States. Like Pedro Henríquez Ureña, with whom she forged a great friendship that lasted throughout the Caribbean writer’s long exile in Argentina, Oliver united humanism with anti-imperialism and the latter with sympathy for socialism and the USSR, perhaps because, like him, she knew the United States firsthand and had herself experienced the narrow confines of the policy of “good neighborliness” that preceded the Cold War confrontation. Along with Ureña and one of her most renowned disciples, Alfonso Reyes, she shared tremendous confidence in the capabilities of the Latin American intelligentsia and, like them, she devoted herself conscientiously to the construction of intellectual networks and played the role of mediator between diverse cultural and political spaces. Contempt for intellectuals who adopted a contemplative attitude and disregarded the civic responsibility that their status as members of a spiritual elite required of them accompanied her at different moments in her trajectory, even when it meant turning against very close friends in some cases who did not support her in her crusade for communist peace or, later on, in her commitment to Maoism and the Cuban Revolution. This combination of political and cultural elements shaped a vision of herself and of her role as a writer that the close bond with Waldo Frank reinforced through an even greater commitment to the Soviet cause, although this support eventually took a divergent path. Indeed, while Frank took distance from the USSR and American communism after the Moscow trials, the Argentine writer became increasingly involved in the Soviet cause towards the end of the following decade.

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As it was for almost a whole generation of Argentine intellectuals, the Spanish Civil War had been the catalyzing event for her engagement in political life. From her participation in anti-fascist organizations (Unión Argentina de Mujeres or the Argentine Women’s Union and Comisión Argentina de Ayuda a los Intelectuales Españoles or the Argentine Committee to Aid Spanish Intellectuals) and aid organizations (Junta por la Victoria or Victory Council), she gained important organizational experience following the German invasion of the USSR and, of course, a network of lasting intellectual and political ties.46 By that time, however, her relationship with communism was distant, mainly because of the aesthetic and intellectual distaste she felt for the “aridity of spirit” of her local comrades, whom she said she could not listen to without experiencing the irremediable sensation of “chewing on cork.”47 Between 1942 and 1945, Oliver worked as an advisor to the Cultural Affairs Department of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, created in 1940 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “good neighbor” policy. This agency—which to a large extent represented the zenith of the regional cultural diplomacy policies that the United States had implemented two decades earlier—was directed by Nelson Rockefeller, with whom Oliver had a personal friendship, and she worked under the orbit of the nation’s vice president, Henry Wallace.48 Once again, her talent for public relations broadened her scope of action and led to lasting friendships, starting with Wallace himself, a farmer from Iowa

46 On women’s organizations and the relationship between gender and class in communism, see Adriana Valobra in “Formación de cuadros y frentes populares: Relaciones de clase y género en el Partido Comunista de Argentina, 1935-1951,” in Izquierdas, no. 23, April 2015, pp. 127–156. See also the classic study by Sandra McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880-1955, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010. 47 María Rosa Oliver, Mi fe es el hombre, op. cit., p. 68. 48 According to Eduardo Rey Tristán, Nelson Rockefeller “había iniciado, sin saberlo, y

desde luego antes de que se declarase, su particular guerra fría cultural en América Latina, si bien no en el sentido que tendría posteriormente en el marco del conflicto de bloques, sino de la utilización de la proyección cultural exterior en apoyo de la diplomacia pública de su país” [had initiated, without knowing it, and certainly before it was declared, his own particular cultural Cold War in Latin America, although not in the sense it would later acquire within the context of the conflict between blocs, but in the use of foreign cultural projection to support his own country’s public diplomacy] (Eduardo Rey Tristán, “Estados Unidos y América Latina durante la Guerra Fría: La dimensión cultural,” op. cit., p. 57).

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who, as vice president of the United States, became the most important and most visible fellow traveler for the USSR. But what was decisive about this experience was that it became clear to her that American foreign policy was far from the altruistic and disinterested aims she had imagined. She would later recall in her memoirs that for the first time she became aware that the causes she championed might not be “chemically pure,” a realization that was not enough to deter her in her determination to support them: Sé también que en las causas más dignas de ser defendidas se infiltran elementos espurios y que en las guerras más que en las revoluciones gravitan factores innominables. Aceptar la existencia de esos elementos no significa ponerse a su servicio, siempre que admitamos el deber de combatirlos luego y estemos dispuestos a cumplir esa etapa después de la cual se iniciará otra. Y después otra y así sucesivamente e infinitamente. Porque cada etapa es un paso adelante que el hombre da en su lucha por sobrevivir y realizarse. Detener esa marcha es retroceder o sucumbir. Me es imprescindible recordar estos lugares comunes ante cada evidencia de que la causa que defiendo no es químicamente pura.49 [I also know that spurious elements infiltrate the causes most worthy of defense and that in wars more than in revolutions there are unmentionable factors at work. Accepting the existence of these elements does not mean placing ourselves at their service, as long as we admit the duty of fighting them later and are willing to complete that stage after which another will begin. And then another and so on and so on infinitely. Because each stage is another step forward that man takes in his struggle for survival and fulfillment. To halt that progress is to go backwards or to succumb. It is essential I remember these commonplaces in the face of every indication that the cause I defend is not chemically pure].

Ten years later, when she was already a public figure in the Peace Movement and the FBI had declared her an “international agitator” and banned her from entering the United States, she wrote to her old friend, making the certainties that those intuitions had by then turned into explicit: Fui a Washington en la creencia de que terminada la guerra y vencido Hitler, los países victoriosos, unidos en la paz como estuvieron en la guerra,

49 María Rosa Oliver, Mi fe es el hombre, op. cit., p. 323.

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darían a la humanidad un mundo mejor. Esto fue lo que me indujo a prestar mi modesta colaboración al gobierno de los Estados Unidos, y no la defensa de ningún régimen político o económico dado […] debo decirle ahora que si milito en las filas de la paz es porque estoy en completo desacuerdo con la política internacional del departamento de Estado y que por lo tanto si algo ha cambiado no es mi línea moral ni de conducta sino la línea moral y de conducta de la política externa norteamericana.50 [I went to Washington in the belief that once the war was over and Hitler defeated, the victorious countries, united in peace as they were in war, would provide a better world for humanity. This was what prompted me to collaborate in my modest way with the government of the United States, rather than the defense of any given political or economic regime [...] I must tell you now that if I have joined the ranks of the peace movement it is because I am in complete disagreement with the international policy of the State Department and that if anything has changed, therefore, it is not my moral position or behavior but the moral position and behavior of U.S. foreign policy].

On returning to Buenos Aires, she participated in Nueva Gaceta in 1948, serving on its editorial board, and a year later her signature appeared in Orientación to lend support, through her participation in the association Amigas de la Paz (Friends of Peace), to the constitution of the Consejo Argentino por la Paz (Argentine Council for Peace), whose secretariat would begin to meet at her house on Guido Street, in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Following this, she attended the successive pacifist congresses as a delegate of Argentine intellectuals and, due to her decisive participation in organizing the Conferencia Continental Americana por la Paz (American Continental Peace Conference) in Montevideo in 1952 and the Congreso Continental de la Cultura (Continental Congress of Culture) in Chile the following year, she was chosen by her peers for a position in the Latin American secretariat of the World Council, which was finally given to Alfredo Varela. The impressions of these meetings and trips were expressed in hopeful articles that Oliver published in the weekly Propósitos, directed by Leónidas Barletta. She was a member of the board of directors of the Argentine Council for Peace and directed their first press organ, Por la Paz (later replaced by Vocero de la Paz), from its inception in 1951. 50 Letter from María Rosa Oliver to Nelson Rockefeller, Buenos Aires, April 9, 1952, FMRO/Princeton University Library, box 5, folder 57.

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While participating in the Congress of the Peoples for Peace held in Vienna in December 1952—which she helped organize especially by getting her American friends involved—Oliver was invited by the Soviet authorities to tour the communist world. She celebrated Christmas in Moscow and then left for her next stop, China. The impact of this visit would be decisive and would, in a way, mark her later departure from the Soviet world. The liaison passionelle that would connect her to the socialist homeland for more than twenty years began with her discovery of China, as happened with many fellow travelers around the world. The testimony of that trip was captured in the book Lo que sabemos hablamos…, which she wrote with her friend, lawyer Norberto Frontini. It was published in 1955 by Botella al Mar, a small Buenos Aires publishing house founded by Luis Seoane and Arturo Cuadrado. In November 1956, María Rosa Oliver spoke at the meeting of the Bureau of the World Peace Council which marked the beginning of the decline of the Soviet Peace Movement. Originally convened to deal with the Suez Canal issue, two successive postponements made it evident that the Hungarian problem was acquiring scandalous dimensions, to the point that the Swedish government would not allow the meeting to be held in Stockholm as planned, and it had to be transferred to Helsinki at the last minute. Still confused by the impact of the declarations of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)—which among other things had claimed the life of one of the leading Soviet figures of the movement, writer and chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers Alexander Fadeyev, who committed suicide in June—some of the delegates arriving in the Finnish capital had abandoned the usual camaraderie for open hostility and distrust. The atmosphere was tense, even tragic, Oliver later recalled. The Italian socialists were determined to leave the movement and did so, while the French socialists declared themselves in a terminal crisis after figures such as Édouard Herriot, Mauriac, and, above all, Sartre abjured their sympathies with the communist organizations. Throughout the world, demonstrations against the entry of Soviet troops into Hungary multiplied and, in some cases, as in England, were equal to or greater than the protests against Western intervention in Egypt. In Buenos Aires, as Oliver recalled in her brief presentation, there were demonstrations in defense of a “Free Hungary” which, she clarified, were openly reactionary in tone. Nevertheless, she added that pointing this out did not counteract the need to acknowledge the problem that the Soviet intervention brought to light for those who were willing to accept

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it: the defense of the principle of non-interference, one of the pillars of the movement that mobilized them, was especially important for the Latin American people so at risk of having their protests repressed by “American bombardments” requested in a timely manner by their governments. En realidad, en la reunión de Helsinki, en la conciencia de todos los presentes se libraba una lucha entre defender desde un punto de vista moral el principio de no injerencia y el de tener que admitir la razón política que se nos daba para su violación. Por eso […] nuestra reunión fue trágica, y quien no advierta la tremenda tragedia moral de Hungría no merece militar en nuestro movimiento, ni en ningún partido político responsable.51 [In reality, all of those present at the Helsinki meeting were struggling between defending the principle of non-interference from a moral standpoint and having to accept the political reason given for its violation. That is why [...] our meeting was tragic, and whoever does not see the tremendous moral tragedy of Hungary does not deserve to be a member of our movement, nor of any responsible political party].

The World Peace Council issued a statement that preserved a certain image of independence and autonomy by admitting the internal contradictions that had prevented it from formulating a common assessment of the Hungarian events beyond unanimously deploring a bloodshed only explicable through long years of hatred and mistrust, although that was not enough to prevent a long list of former allies, fellow travelers, and sympathizers from finding sufficient reason to end their commitments to Soviet pacifism. The launching of Sputnik in October 1957 had a positive effect on the international image of the USSR, since it could be presented as evidence that the communist regimes had not only achieved superior scientifictechnical development, but also placed them at the service of a conquest for humankind. However, while the world was witnessing the spectacle of that feat, in the USSR, via Khrushchev himself, Stalin’s name was once again the object of praise, casting doubts on the liberalizing effect that many communists believed they had observed in his denunciations a year earlier. While this was happening, in Buenos Aires María Rosa Oliver received the news that she had been awarded the 1958 Lenin Peace 51 World Peace Council, “Memoirs,” handwritten notes on the meeting of the Bureau of the World Peace Council in Helsinki in 1956, FMRO/Princeton University Library, box 1, folder 52.

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Prize. On the tenth anniversary of her joining the movement that she would soon end up leaving, hundreds of people filled the halls of the city’s Hotel Savoy to pay tribute to her. Eduardo Aleman, Rafael Alberti, and Miguel Ángel Asturias gave heartfelt speeches, and the Soviet writer Boris Polevoy personally presented her with the award he had traveled across the ocean with. This demonstration surely must have compensated for the ironies that her friends at Sur lavished on her when referring to the generous amount ($25,000) of a prize that nevertheless failed to hide the incoherence of the Soviet methods for achieving the pacifist goals they claimed to defend.52 Shortly thereafter, following a bitter epistolary debate with Victoria Ocampo, she left the journal she had been a member of for almost thirty years. María Rosa Oliver left the Peace Movement in 1962, after fourteen years of intense activism without which, as her own comrades recognized, Latin America would have occupied an even more insignificant place than it did at the time. However, she was a writer “without a book” at least until she decided to write her memoirs some time later, which is why she was not recognized for her role as some of her loyal friends were—or rather was, but in the devalued albeit consolingly indispensable space reserved for organizational tasks. Convinced, as she would say in later years, that the dual battle against the incomprehension of her opponents and the bureaucratic and sectarian mentality of her comrades was 52 “Premios literarios argentinos, el Premio Lenin,” in Sur, no. 250, Buenos Aires, January and February 1958, p. 104. The Stalin Prize “for the consolidation of peace among peoples” (later renamed the Lenin Prize) was instituted by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in December 1949 on the occasion of Stalin’s 70th birthday. Awards were given annually in two categories: for citizens of the USSR (technicians, scientists, writers, and artists) and for intellectual figures from around the world. The jury for this prize consisted of an international committee chaired by Dimitrij Skobelzin (Moscow University), with the Chinese writer Kuo Mojo and the French poet and writer Louis Aragon as vice presidents. The other members were: Martin Andersen Nexo (Danish writer), John Bernal (professor at the University of London), Jan Dembrowski (professor at the University of Lodz), Bernhard Kellerman (East German writer), Luneheto Marguesti (professor at the University of Padua), Mihail Sadoveanu (Romanian writer), Alexander Fadeyev (writer and secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers), Ilya Ehrenburg, and Pablo Neruda. There was also an International Peace Prize, awarded by the World Peace Council to outstanding individuals in the struggle for peace, instituted in 1950. It stipulated two million French francs (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and the first to receive it were Pablo Neruda (for his poem “Que despierte el leñador”), Pablo Picasso (for his peace dove), and the American singer Paul Robeson. See David Schidlowsky, Pablo Neruda y su tiempo, op. cit., p. 808.

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greater than the forces she had at her disposal, she ended the cycle of a public commitment that nevertheless soon gave way to a close collaboration with Cuban cultural organizations, in particular Casa de las Américas, and a fondness for the processes that seemed to restore a lost radicalism to communism, starting with China. Several unfinished fragments of the memoirs she wrote about those years illustrate the dilemma that through the figure of the “fellow traveler” permeated one of the forms of intellectual commitment to communism during this period: it was easier to defend oneself, or in any case fight the accusations of acting as the Soviets’ “useful idiot,” than to effectively feel like one before leaders always ready to measure intellectuals with the yardstick of petit-bourgeois inconsequentiality, although they themselves were officials of a party that had abandoned the revolution for a bureaucracy not exempt from a subtle aristocratism. Si fuera de mis actividades políticas me tenía sin cuidado que me consideraran “idiota útil”, no admitía que intentaran tratarme como tal los “responsables” del movimiento. Siempre me consideré tan responsable como el que más y por eso mismo nunca callé mi desacuerdo respecto a ciertas tácticas o procederes. Particularmente no aceptaba, por decirlo así, tragarme los platos cocinados a espaldas de los no afiliados o no incondicionales. Tampoco aceptaba que se abultaran cifras o se exageraran con el fin de prestigiar el movimiento o, peor aún, para hacer méritos ante algún comité central, lejano o cercano. Indudablemente solo los funcionarios del PC podían dedicarse de lleno al movimiento, al contrario de los profesionales que vivían de otra actividad o de los obreros atados más de mitad del día a su trabajo. Pero esta total dedicación de los funcionarios a las tareas que les eran asignadas los aislaba del resto de la vida del país, confinándolos, tal como el claustro a los monjes, entre los que pensaban y reaccionaban como ellos. De ahí la actitud de iniciados y el espíritu de secta que impiden a ciertos movimientos populares ampliarse y tener arrastre. Y, más grave aún, los [somete en los límites] de una burocracia que a la larga, frena o mata el impulso renovador y revolucionario. Al igual que los atados a sus privilegios, el burócrata enquistado en su función cierra los ojos a la realidad ambiente cuando esta le es adversa, cuando recurre al método de la autosugestión, confiado en que con negarla sistemáticamente la anulará. Las consignas, las frases hechas, se vuelven entonces el equivalente de las oraciones y las plegarias que, según ciertos religiosos anacrónicos, a fue de repetidas traían la fe. […] Solo por señalar, a veces por aludir, esta realidad, fui tildada de tibia, de derrotista o de “falta de contacto con el pueblo”. No lo tenía mucho, verdad, pero posiblemente más que quienes

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me hacían tal reproche: nunca hablé a una persona trabajadora de maestro a alumno, escuché con respeto sus opiniones aunque fueran contrarias a las mías y creo no haberle dado la impresión —ajena a mi índole— de que era “una más” utilizable. Comprendí siempre cabalmente las causas de su inicial desconfianza hacia mí, aunque en verdad demasiadas pocas veces me la hicieron sentir. Quizás porque veían —y magnificaban— el lastre que a mí también me había tocado llevar en la vida o porque no los abordaba con esa cordialidad tan poco natural como oportunista, que me abochornaba presenciar. Me molestaba sentir ese bochorno y por ello me puse a analizarlo. ¿Se debería acaso a una falla mía, a uno de los tantos condicionamientos de clase? Pero burgueses eran también los funcionarios que en los picnics populares y en las reuniones con obreros adoptaban sonrisas tan estereotipadas como las que salen en ciertas fotografías y distribuían a diestra y siniestra sonoros palmoteos de espaldas [inconcluso].53 [Although outside of my political activities I did not care if I was considered a “useful idiot,” I did not allow myself to be treated as such by those “in charge” of the movement. I have always considered myself as responsible as anyone else and that is why I was never silent about my disagreement on certain tactics or procedures. I particularly rejected, so to speak, eating the dishes prepared behind the backs of the non-affiliated or those who were not unconditional supporters. Nor did I allow figures to be inflated or exaggerated in order to lend prestige to the movement or, even worse, to earn merit before some central committee, near or far. Undoubtedly, only CP officials could fully dedicate themselves to the movement, as opposed to professionals who made a living from another activity or workers who spent more than half of their day at work. But this total dedication of the officials to the tasks they were assigned isolated them from the life of the rest of the country, confining them, like monks to a cloister, to the company of those who thought and reacted like they did. Hence the attitude of initiates and the sect-like spirit that prevent certain popular movements from expanding and gaining traction. And, more seriously still, it [subjects them to the constraints] of a bureaucracy that in the long run curbs or kills the impulse for renewal and revolution. Like those tied to their privileges, the bureaucrat entrenched in his role closes his eyes to the reality around him when it is adverse, resorting to the method of autosuggestion, confident that by systematically denying it he will annul it. The slogans, the set phrases, then become the equivalent of the prayers and supplications that, according to certain anachronistic religious people, if 53 María Rosa Oliver, “Pax,” original incomplete manuscript on the Peace Movement, FMRO/Princeton University Library, box 1, folder 52.

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repeated, bring faith. [...] Simply for pointing out, sometimes for alluding to this reality, I was branded as half-hearted, defeatist, and “out of touch with the people.” It is true that I did not have much contact with them, but it was possibly more than those who reproached me for it: I never spoke to a worker as a teacher to a student, I listened to their opinions respectfully, even if they were contrary to mine, and I don’t think I gave them the impression —alien to my nature— that they were “just another” useful cog. I always completely understood the reasons they initially distrusted me, although in truth they rarely let me feel it. Perhaps because they saw —and magnified— the burden I also bear in life, or because I did not approach them with that unnatural and opportunistic cordiality I found so embarrassing to witness. It bothered me to feel this embarrassment and so I began to analyze it. Was it perhaps due to a fault of mine, to one of so many aspects of class conditioning? But the officials who, at popular picnics and meetings with workers, wore smiles as stereotypical as those shown in certain photographs and distributed loud back slaps left and right, were also bourgeois [incomplete].

4

Cinematographic Epilogue: The Case of Alfredo Varela

The constant persecution of the Peace Movement in Argentina became a source of heroes and martyrs for the communists. The endless denunciations of imprisonments, abuse, and humiliation of the “combatants for peace” filled countless pages of the communist press, including crimes such as those of student Jorge Calvo and metalworker Ángel Zelli at the hands of the Sección Especial de Represión al Comunismo (Special Section for the Repression of Communism), which forcibly entered a house in the province of Buenos Aires where a march against sending Argentine troops to Korea was being organized.54 The brutal assassination of Calvo and Zelli immediately made them “heroes of peace” and they were paid countless tributes, including Alfredo Varela’s book Jorge Calvo: Una juventud heroica, published in 1952 almost at the

54 See Isidoro Gilbert, La Fede: Alistándose para la revolución: La Federación Juvenil Comunista 1921–2005, Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 2009, pp. 306–312.

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same time that he himself was arrested on charges of participating in the organization of the January 1951 railroad strike.55 The detention of Varela, a committed writer and emerging figure in a global movement, had international repercussions. Demonstrating that solidarity among peers prevails over political differences, the signatures that the communists had not managed to muster for their pacifist proclamations were achieved in demanding Varela’s freedom. Born in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Caballito in September 1914, Varela was the author of the only “socialist realist” book by an Argentine communist.56 El río oscuro, published by Lautaro in 1943, was a success due to both its theme and narrative force and its innovative formal structure. Through a plot divided into three different periods and inspired by American narratives, Varela told the story of Ramón Moreira, a man who was recruited to work in the virgin yerba plantations of the Alto Paraná and subjected to an inhumane regime of violence and exploitation. Ramón gradually became aware of his situation and came to see political struggle as the only dignified manner of freeing himself from that hellish situation. The novel was translated into 15 languages and its author became a kind of social literature legend. Sobre la gloria de la infinita riqueza del Alto Paraná —escribió sobre el final de la novela— el material humano sigue arrastrándose pobre, enfermo, oprimido. Pero las nuevas condiciones, al aproximar físicamente a las grandes peonadas sometiéndolas a la misma explotación exhaustiva, favorecen su agrupamiento y organización. […] Sobre las cenizas del antiguo mensú, del arriero, comienza a levantarse el peón organizado, consciente, del porvenir. Su camino de espinas ha de tener en lo sucesivo una luz: la del farol de ese humilde rancho del sindicato obrero…57

55 Varela had already been sentenced for contempt of court after publishing a denunciation in La Hora against the Chief of Police for the assault on an event commemorating the 32nd anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which ended in hundreds of arrests and beatings. Although the sentence was suspended, he was arrested again, this time for a period of twenty days, along with the folklorist Atahualpa Yupanqui, after they were both intercepted at the door of the Soviet Embassy. 56 See Adolfo Pietro, Diccionario básico de la literatura argentina, Buenos Aires, Centro Editor de América Latina, 1968, p. 154. 57 Alfredo Varela, El río oscuro: La aventura de los yerbales vírgenes [1943], Buenos Aires, Capital Intelectual, 2008, pp. 254 and 255.

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[Over the glory of the infinite bounty of the Alto Paraná —he wrote at the end of the novel— human matter continues to crawl poor, sick, oppressed. But the new conditions, by bringing large numbers of workers in closer physical proximity and subjecting them to the same exhaustive exploitation, favor their grouping and organization. […] Out of the ashes of the ancient mensú, of the muleteer, the organized, conscious peon of the future begins to rise. His path of thorns must henceforth have a source of light: that of the streetlamp of the humble ranch of the workers’ union…]

Like other writers of his generation, such as Raúl Larra and Bernardo Kordon, Varela began his political activism in the Asociación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores (AIAPE), where he was a member of the Asociación de Jóvenes Escritores (Young Writers’ Association). It was in AIAPE’s journal, Nueva Gaceta, that he also began his writing career, publishing poems and short stories. Coming from a modest background, he was unable to pursue university studies and, before becoming a journalist and prominent member of the party, he worked at various jobs, including as a credit report broker. In 1941, he joined the recently created newspaper La Hora, where he became a member of the editorial board. His journalistic work, as also happened to poet Raúl González Tuñón, brought him into contact with the most diverse realities throughout the country. Before becoming a book, El río oscuro was an extensive series of articles that were published in the journal Ahora under the title “Así viven los esclavos blancos.” In 1948, Varela was sent by the party to the congresses of the Polish and Hungarian communist parties and, as a delegate of the Argentine communist writers, he participated in the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Wrocław. After several months in the USSR—an experience which he wrote about in the book Un periodista argentino en la URSS—he traveled to Paris to join the Argentine delegation that participated in the founding meeting of the Peace Movement. Following that, he devoted “la mayor parte de sus energías creadoras” [most of his creative energies], in the words of Raúl Larra, to the cause for peace.58 He was vice president of the Consejo Argentino por la Paz and a member of the Secretariat of the World Peace Council, living for many years between Prague and Vienna. At the time of his arrest, he had been promoted to substitute member of the Central Committee of the PCA. 58 Raúl Larra, Con pelos y señales, Buenos Aires, Futuro, 1986, p. 34.

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The communist press presented Varela’s arrest as a consequence of his work as a communist writer, highlighting both his political commitment and the “documentary” value of his literature. In response to the question “Why is Varela imprisoned?,” Nuestra Palabra wrote: Porque como escritor ha defendido desde el diario y desde el libro a los humildes. Él estuvo con los trabajadores de la Alpargatera señalando en notas inolvidables la justicia de los 10.000 obreros expoliados por patrones extranjeros, ingleses. Él estuvo con los hacheros y cosecheros del algodón del Chaco y Corrientes, él denunció la miseria impuesta por los terratenientes en el sur argentino. Él mostró, a través de ojos argentinos, la limpia, la hermosa verdad de un país maravilloso donde triunfa el socialismo: la Unión Soviética. Él estuvo en el Paraguay, en lo más rudo de la lucha al lado de un pueblo tradicionalmente expoliado por el imperialismo, cantando sus esperanzas, nombrando su [sic] dolores, señalando su [sic] próximas y seguras victorias.59 [Because as a writer he has defended the poor through the newspaper and his book. He was with the workers of Alpargatera demanding justice, in unforgettable articles, for the 10,000 workers exploited by foreign and British bosses. He was with the lumberjacks and cotton harvesters of Chaco and Corrientes; he denounced the misery caused by the landowners in Argentina’s south. He showed, through Argentine eyes, the clean, beautiful truth of a wonderful country where socialism triumphs: the Soviet Union. He was in Paraguay, in the harshest moments of the struggle side by side with a people historically pillaged by imperialism, singing their hopes, naming their sorrows, announcing their assured triumphs of the future].

The campaign for Varela’s freedom received endorsements from all over the world, including the usual signatures of the authorities of the World Peace Council, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, Claude Morgan, Georg Lukács, Arnold Zweig, Emilio Sereni, among others. The note sent to the judge requesting the urgent resolution of the case and the immediate freedom of their “very distinguished” colleague was signed by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and Jorge Luis Borges.60 Varela was finally sentenced to a year in Villa Devoto prison, which led to the creation

59 “Libertad para A. Varela,” in Nuestra Palabra, Buenos Aires, September 3, 1951. 60 “La libertad de A. Varela solicitan destacados escritores,” in Nuestra Palabra, Buenos

Aires, September 18, 1951.

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of a committee for his freedom, presided over by Leónidas Barletta and backed by communist writers.61 He was released in May 1952, in what was presented as a “triunfo de la movilización popular por la democracia y la paz” [triumph of the popular mobilization for democracy and peace], all the more significant and sobering for having been obtained within the context of “una opresión política cada día más dura” [an increasingly harsh political oppression]. As we saw in the third chapter, that same month the party publicly supported Perón’s call to form a united popular front to oppose a coup conspiracy which, the government affirmed, was organized by American imperialism and the local oligarchy. The case of Varela’s arrest is symptomatic of the vicissitudes and difficulties the Peace Movement encountered in its development in Argentina, since the wagers made in the political arena could hardly be transferred to the intellectual space that the pacifist appeal sought to mobilize, given that it was much less prone to the abrupt modification of the characterizations of a government that had earned the almost unanimous repudiation of the intellectual world. When Varela was released, he expressed his gratitude for the national and international campaign carried out to demand his freedom in the pages of Nuestra Palabra, although he made no mention of the reasons why the Peronist government had imprisoned him and was now releasing him. Barely five months later, on October 9, the film Las aguas bajan turbias, an adaptation of El río oscuro, directed by and starring the Peronist singer Hugo del Carril, premiered at the Gran Rex theater on Corrientes Street. Although Varela had assisted in adapting the script from inside the Devoto prison, he did not appear in the credits and his book was never mentioned in any of the reviews, since that— along with the clarification that the infamous system of exploitation of the yerba mate plantations was part of a remote past—was a condition for the project’s authorization by the government’s Department of Propaganda. This was noted by the communist press in April 1952 when it declared that while the slave-driving companies denounced by Varela had not only persisted, but had also earned millions under the Peronist regime, the man who had denounced their crimes was imprisoned. However, once the film premiered, the same press applauded it and agreed that this “period of horror” had largely been overcome through the efforts of the working class. 61 “Se constituyó un comité por la libertad de Alfredo Varela,” in Nuestra Palabra, Buenos Aires, January 29, 1952.

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As a sign of the paradoxical position that communist intellectuals occupied in a cultural space divided by the support for or rejection of Peronism, while communists engaged in supporting the government hailed the film and conveniently forgot Varela’s imprisonment for which they had mobilized all the resources of intellectual activism, the opposition—and with it many of those who had signed the petitions—judged the film to be a display of Peronist propaganda. During its premiere, when at the end of the film the protagonist and his wife escape from the plantation as the culmination of their love story (rather than embark on the path of politics and unionization), the spectators applauded with cries of “Long live Perón!”.62 Shortly after his release, Varela was sent to Vienna to work as an official for the World Peace Council. There he settled with his family for several years, practically abandoning writing to devote himself to bureaucratic and organizational work. The letters he sent to his Argentine correspondents, in which he declared himself “desesperado por la falta de noticias” [desperate about the lack of news], indicate the enormous difficulties and the shortage of resources and coordination that the Peace Movement faced in the country, to the point that, with the exception of María Rosa Oliver, nobody answered his letters or was interested in the activities that the World Council organized for Latin Americans. Nor was he successful in the other sense since his efforts to get an Argentine writer— including himself—invited to the 2nd Congress of Soviet Writers held in 1954, where Neruda and Jorge Amado were featured, were not fruitful.. However, thanks to his ties to writers and intellectuals around the world, Varela was attentive to the shifts in ideas that slowly began to emerge after Stalin’s death in 1953. It was on his recommendation that The Thaw— the most representative work of a time in which, as its author would say, everyone had hopes, only some relegated them to memory and others to oblivion—was published in Buenos Aires. The novel by Ilya Ehrenburg was translated and published by Futuro in 1954, just two months after the Soviet writer arrived in Buenos Aires to lecture at the SADE and be honored at the Casa de la Cultura Argentina with a circumspect speech by Emilio Troise.63 Two years later, the second part of the book was 62 Claudio España, “Las aguas bajan turbias: Una denuncia contra toda esclavitud,” in Eduardo Borrás, Las aguas bajan turbias, Buenos Aires, Biblos y Argentores, 2006, p. 9. 63 Ehrenburg arrived in Buenos Aires after an eventful visit to Chile, where he was to present Pablo Neruda with his Stalin Prize for fostering peace among the peoples. Instead,

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published, accompanied by a jacket where its editor took a clear stand on the accusations of anti-Sovietism leveled against the author of The Tempest: Ehrenburg narra en esta continuación siempre a través de los mismos personajes, otros aspectos del “deshielo” soviético, en particular la vida artística, todas las trabas que aún pesan para el florecimiento pleno del trabajo creador, y cómo es necesario aún luchar contra la rutina, la mediocridad, la burocracia y también contra la cortesanía encaramada y complaciente.64 [Ehrenburg, in this sequel, narrates other aspects of the Soviet “thaw” through the same characters, specifically artistic life, the obstacles that still hinder the full flourishing of creative work, and the need to struggle against routine, mediocrity, bureaucracy, and also against ingrained and complacent politesse].

The Consejo Argentino por la Paz was one of Argentine communism’s most important frontist organizations and also the longest-lived, as it continued to function until the 1980s. With the dissolution of the Cominform after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the Peace Movement fell into an organizational crisis directly linked to Soviet needs. After the events in Hungary, it lost all credibility, to the point that in many countries, as in France, its national organizations collapsed. Over time, the growing differences between the Chinese and the Soviets turned the organization’s meetings into pitched battles, as some of its attendees would later recall, until the People’s Republic of China withdrew definitively in 1967. In the Argentine case, as in other national spaces, domestic political issues as well as the particular configuration of the local intellectual space were decisive for the development of a movement that largely depended on its success among the cultural elites. For this reason, the he was detained by police in the Chilean airport on charges of carrying secret messages on phonographic records. The author of The Fall of Paris was in Buenos Aires for five days in August 1954 and was received by the press not without some degree of indifference, tempered only by the protest of a group of Jewish writers who published an open letter in La Nación complaining about his complacent attitude towards Soviet anti-Semitism. See “Ehrenburg en Buenos Aires,” in Nuestra Palabra, August 17, 1954, p. 3, and “Ilia Ehrenburg, durante su estadía en Buenos Aires fue entrevistado por escritores, periodistas y entidades populares,” in Nuestra Palabra, August 24, 1954, p. 7. 64 The text of the book jacket of the edition of the second volume by Ilya Ehrenburg, El deshielo [The Thaw], Buenos Aires, Futuro, 1956.

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vagaries in the characterization of Peronism contributed to the limited success of the pacifist appeal among the liberal sectors, whose sympathies for the local communist groups never went beyond the tolerance of some isolated figures. However, they were also unable to find an echo among the nationalists, despite the anti-imperialist discourse which in other countries was effective in putting anti-communism on hold. It is also worth recalling the permanent persecution to which any activity linked to communism was subjected, first during Peronism and then during successive governments, whether constitutional or de facto. For example, in May 1959 during the government of Arturo Frondizi, whose candidacy the communists had supported, the Consejo Argentino por la Paz was outlawed, its premises were closed and its publications—at the time, Queremos Vivir and Entendimiento—were banned. This ban was not lifted until 1964, after considerable legal action. But even in this turbulent panorama, it cannot be denied that the issue of peace and the dangers of an atomic war dominated communist discourse for many years and that, under the protection of a structure spread over the five continents, some Argentine intellectuals formed an active part of the communist world’s system of cultural diplomacy, weaving networks, promoting organizations, and contributing to the emergence of topics, such as Third Worldism, that would achieve their own popularity outside the strictly Soviet imaginary in the following decades. The Peace Movement is also a chapter in the history of transnational intellectual activism in the twentieth century in which some of the most influential scientists, writers, and artists participated and from which the aporias and dilemmas of intellectual commitment were not absent. It is for this reason that the study of the structures and agents of Soviet pacifism in the 1950s and 1960s has begun to represent a chapter in the history of Latin American intellectuals.

CHAPTER 6

The Communist Decade: Héctor P. Agosti and the Debates of the 1950s

In the early morning of February 25, 1956, a small group of party leaders witnessed a statement made by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Nikita Khrushchev, that would soon have a definitive impact on communists around the world: Joseph Stalin, the wise man, the strategist, the father of the socialist homeland, was a criminal mind who had constructed a regime of terror and arbitrariness. People fainted. The general secretary of the Polish Communist Party, Bolesław Beirut, died of a heart attack, French novelist Roger Vailland contemplated suicide, and Fadeyev, steward of cultural Stalinism for more than twenty years, went through with it. Initial confusion gave way to serious trauma. The process of “de-Stalinization,” which had already begun with the death of the dictator in 1953, accelerated, albeit with varying degrees of commitment and intensity. The Western communist parties acted predictably. The French Communist Party (PCF), under the command of a loyal Stalinist like Maurice Thorez, contained dissent and displayed an unwavering orthodoxy. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) pursued an independent path, and its top leader, Palmiro Togliatti dared as early as June 1956 to suggest that perhaps the condemnation of the so-called cult of personality hid the degeneration of the whole system. He proposed that communism begin exploring other directions or paths forward that were national in nature, abandoning any attempt at total unification. The weakest and most marginal parties lost members © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2_6

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and fractured into groups. In Latin America, party leaders were elusive and restrained when evaluating the scope of Khrushchev’s denunciations, and if there were shifts and modifications, they were more due to internal circumstances, as in the case of Uruguay. However, they willingly accepted the theses on the peaceful path to socialism and determined that the main contradiction in dependent countries was the assumption that the totality of the people was against American imperialism and its internal agents, responsible for the survival of feudalism and economic backwardness. Anti-imperialism flourished in the context of decisive support for the foreign policy promoted by Moscow.1 In April 1956, the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform, for its Russian name) was dissolved and international communism faced the unprecedented situation of lacking an organic and permanent central structure, which the Soviets sought to remedy through a series of Communist Party conferences held very sporadically starting in 1957. Attempts to return to centralism collided with a scene dominated by the rifts that the 20th CPSU Congress itself had opened and that would only be further deepened by the positions adopted in response to the revolts in Poland and Hungary. The Communist Party of China, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, initially adhered to the parricide practiced by Khrushchev and qualified it as a “liberation” from Soviet paternalism, but very quickly realized that the renunciation of the class struggle, the coexistence between systems, and the promotion of a peaceful path to socialism did not correspond to its own project of rectifying Chinese communism, which began with the proposal to cultivate as many flowers as schools of thought and ended with the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous campaign to industrialize the countryside that cost millions of lives and the retreat of Mao himself until his

1 See Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2009; Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution. A History of International Communism, 1917–1991, New York, Oxford University Press, 2014; David Priestland, The Red Flag: Communism and the making of the Modern World, London, Penguin Books, 2009, chapter 8; Paolo Spriano, Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, vol. 5, Turin, Einaudi, 1975; Michael Löwy, El marxismo en América Latina (de 1909 a nuestros días): Antología, Mexico, Era, 1980, pp. 43 and 213 [an English translation is available: Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present: An Anthology, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press International, 1992]; and Gerardo Leibner, Camaradas y compañeros: Una historia política y social de los comunistas del Uruguay, Montevideo, Trilce, 2011, pp. 227–285.

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return in the mid-1960s. Both the Chinese and the Albanians sharply criticized Soviet foreign policy, which they considered a return to socialdemocratic opportunism and a negation of Leninism. Mao described American nuclear armaments as a “paper tiger” and maintained that the communist movement should not renounce the insurrectionary struggle. From that moment until its total break with the Soviets, China was at the head of communist orthodoxy, and the communist parties behind it experienced significant divisions, including the Communist Party of Argentina (PCA), which in 1968 would see the emergence of the Maoist current which dubbed itself the Partido Comunista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Communist Party). Additionally, the Chinese experience and its revolutionary radicalism were decisive among the educated in reorganizing the cartography of intellectual commitment on the left even when, perhaps more than with the Soviets, anti-intellectualism was a central element of their ideology. Predictably, it was in the Eastern European countries that Khrushchev’s revelations and his attempts at modernization had the most drastic consequences, since strikes and workers’ protests, many of which ended in repression, had erupted as early as 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death. Reforms were initiated at all levels and were acceptable as long as they remained within the boundaries of the status quo. When this did not occur, as in Hungary, and the social movement exceeded Moscow’s expectations, the results were catastrophic and had long-term consequences on the image and policies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The entry of Soviet tanks into Budapest in November 1956 was such a powerful snapshot that it ended up becoming indelible. The reaction among Western intellectuals was almost immediate and the major names that condemned the violence against a movement that had ultimately had intellectuals as one of its main actors were substantial. Some of them could not be accused of being anti-communist; others, from that point on, became even more anti-communist. But there were also those who, after England, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal by President Gamal Abdel Nasser, realized bitterly that the bipolar world in which Western imperialism shared the planet with an inveterate Stalinism was obsolete and embarked on the path of what was later called the “new left.”2 2 Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 336.

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The Hungarian episode, in short, put an end to the liberalizing attempts that even the most thoroughly Stalinist parties had initiated in response to the 20th Congress and precipitated the discomfort of many loyal communists and the defection of prestigious fellow travelers. JeanPaul Sartre was an emblematic case. However, there were more than a few who were willing to justify an “unfortunate but necessary intervention” to prevent “fascism” from descending on the popular democracies and perhaps starting a third world war. Just as Khrushchev sacrificed Stalin to keep the Soviet edifice standing, many intellectuals drew a distinction between the greatness of the workers’ nation and the world of ideals and principles it harbored and the mistakes and excesses committed while defending it. In Argentina, as José María Aricó would admit many years later, the Hungarian events apparently did not produce any significant upheaval with respect to the characteristics of real socialism, and the fact that the party insisted on presenting them as a counterrevolution and a smear campaign by the imperialist press did not trigger defections or further questioning.3 The impact, however, could not have been more minor. Many years later, convinced that the way that criticism of Stalin and Stalinism had been carried out had only led to dissolution and disbelief, Raúl Larra—who traveled to the USSR and China just a few months after the revelations of Khrushchev’s report were made public—wrote through one of his literary characters: Mi corazón partido, yo, un hombre desdoblado. Necesita comprender, quería comprender. Intuía la imperiosa necesidad de cambio. ¿Pero se puede de la noche a la mañana arrojar a un padre de nuestro corazón? [...] Como un convaleciente fui aceptando en pequeñas dosis la amarga medicina. Uno idealiza una utopía intachable, levanta un ídolo, olvidando que en la tierra nada se da en estado de prístina pureza.4 3 Horacio Crespo (comp.), José Aricó: Entrevistas (1974–1991), Córdoba, Centro de Estudios Avanzados, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 1999, p. 69. 4 Raúl Larra, El uturunco estaba entre nosotros, Buenos Aires, Peña Lillo, 1968, p. 78. In a letter addressed to a comrade who criticized his “melancholic” reading of Stalin, Larra stated: “Mi libro lo sentí así y no podía traicionarme. Es el testimonio de la perplejidad de un intelectual ante lo complejo y contradictorio del proceso revolucionario mundial […]. Con respecto a Stalin, mi personaje o yo mismo, para abreviar, muestra el sacudón que le produjo la defenestración de Stalin, sobre todo por la forma en que se produjo […]. Vos no creés que en la propia URSS se han dado cuenta que han cometido una enormidad? Vos sacaste el retrato de Stalin de tu cabecera, pero no lo tires, guardalo, porque en una de esas tenés que volver a colocarlo. Pasaron cinco, diez años, y Stalin será reivindicado

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[My heart was broken, and I, a man divided. I needed to understand, I wanted to understand. I sensed the imperious need for change. But can you cast a father from your heart overnight? [...] Like a convalescent, I gradually accepted the bitter medicine in small doses. One idealizes an unblemished utopia, elevates an idol, forgetting that nothing on earth exists in a state of pristine purity.]

At the time, however, the relative liberalization of cultural life that took place in the USSR fed the idea of a system that was reinvigorating itself in this area as well. Hundreds of writers and artists were released from labor camps, books and authors were rehabilitated, and State utility was no longer the sole criterion for evaluating creative activity. The hope that the most opprobrious forms of cultural Stalinism—sectarianism, dogmatism, chauvinism, persecution, bureaucratism—would be definitively abandoned led to readjustments in almost all of the parties and made room for more heterodox positions. However, as early as 1957, the process began to reveal its limitations, and Khrushchev himself publicly admonished the writer Vladimir Dudintsev because he had taken his criticism of Stalin too far in his novel Not By Bread Alone. In some parties, such as in Argentina, the most immediate effect of the 1956 episodes was outwards, since it had a serious impact on the credibility, the communist intellectuals urgently needed to broaden their frontist organizations and play a role in the national unity policy the party

porque fue grande por encima de todas las cosas […] mi personaje —yo— reconoce que era necesario criticar a Stalin y al stalinismo, pero era necesario hacerlo así, como se hizo? La forma en que se hizo trajo la disolución, el descreimiento. Para mí, la última secuela de ese error es el caso de Checoslovaquía” [My book reflects the way I felt and I did not want to be disloyal to myself. It testifies to the perplexity of an intellectual in the face of the complex and contradictory nature of the world revolutionary process […]. With respect to Stalin, my character —in short, I myself—reveals the shock the defenestration of Stalin caused him, especially due to the way in whichit happened […]. Do you not think that in the USSR they have realized they committed an enormity? You took Stalin’s portrait down, but do not throw it away. Keep it, because one day you will need to put it up again. Five, ten years passed, and Stalin will be vindicated because, above all things, he was great […] my character—me—recognizes that it was necessary to criticize Stalin and Stalinism, but did it have to be done this way? The way it was done brought with it dissolution, disbelief. For me, the latest consequence of that error is the case of Czechoslovakia] (Letter from Raúl Larra to Pedro [n/d], Buenos Aires, February 28, 1969, Fondo Raúl Larra/Raúl Larra Collection/Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas en Argentina (CeDInCI)/Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM); FRL/CeDInCI; emphasis and errata in original.

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had once again embarked on. Indeed, the invasion of Hungary did not go unnoticed in Buenos Aires. Intellectuals issued pronouncements, the major newspapers devoted headlines to it and several hundred people mobilized behind the slogan “Free Hungary.” A mass was held in the Metropolitan Cathedral and groups of nationalist youths threw stones at the Soviet consulate. The Argentine party leadership received the news of Khrushchev’s secret report with great discretion and poorly concealed discomfort. Augusto Piemonte has reconstructed the public positions that the party assayed in the months following the 20th Congress, concluding that their reading of the situation was “lineal, desproblematizada e incluso más simplificada que la propia crítica soviética hacia el culto de Stalin” [linear, de-problematized, and simplified even beyond the Soviet critique itself of Stalin’s cult of personality].5 The first mention of the topic was made by the Extended Central Committee in June through Victorio Codovilla, who wrote an extensive report. Enthusiastic about the promising future envisaged in the 6th Five Year Plan, he barely mentioned the issue referred to in the title “La lucha victoriosa contra el culto a la personalidad y sus consecuencias” [The victorious struggle against the cult of personality and its consequences], a topic he at all times interpreted through the lens provided by the Soviets: Stalin was the only one responsible for the terror, personalism, and breakdown of socialist legality, and this methodology had come to an end with his death. The reasons for denouncing him were based on loyalty to the principles of the October Revolution and on Marxism-Leninism, which they should now return to. In later interventions, he emphasized the importance of a peaceful coexistence between the blocs and the new potential for colonial and dependent countries to confront imperialist oppression—which in any event was in decline—and to form a “zone of peace” under the protection of the Soviet Union. Provided that democratic and legal order were assured, this new international situation, he stressed, would open up the possibility of embarking on a peaceful path toward socialism through parliamentary means. While it is true that, as Piemonte states, the PCA did not venture into a serious and detailed analysis of the so-called cult of personality

5 Augusto Piemonte, “El Informe Secreto al XX Congreso del Partido Comunista de la Unión Soviética en la perspectiva oficial del Partido Comunista Argentino: Recepción y primeras repercusiones,” in Anuario del Centro de Estudios Históricos “Prof. Carlos S. A. Segreti,” Córdoba, year 13, no. 13, 2013, p. 226.

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and was not able to undertake the policy of a “national path to socialism” beyond rhetorical appeals, it is less accurate to conclude that the intellectual space associated with the party remained confounded when confronted with the aforementioned events. From that point on, and for at least another decade, by more or less indirect means, communist intellectuals embarked on a process of reconsidering their roles, traditions, and structures which, although ultimately unsuccessful, was no less significant. Moreover, within the context of a virtually inescapable international panorama, Argentine communists had to face an additional trauma that was exclusively theirs: Peronism. If the “convergent tragedies” of Hungary and Budapest paved the way for the birth of a “new left” in Europe, in Argentina it was the interaction between the formidable rereading of Peronism that began after 1955 and the change of revolutionary outlook caused by the Cuban Revolution a short time later. These would constitute the two principal lines of generalized questioning of the organizations on the traditional left that would adopt the same name. In the Argentine context, the demand for an “open Marxism” that emerged worldwide after the 20th Congress was coupled with the unprecedented irruption of the national problem in the leftist agenda. Once the anti-Peronist intellectual front fractured after 1955, what followed was a veritable trial of the liberal elites, marking Argentine intellectual life for the next two decades. The dispute over the correct interpretation of Peronism and the fate of the masses that had supported it found new actors, and the old ones were progressively marginalized, including intellectuals of the socialist and communist left. The only exceptions were the Peronist intellectuals who came from popular nationalism, such as Arturo Jauretche and Juan José Hernández Arregui, and the leftist intellectuals who had supported Peronism early on, such as Rodolfo Puiggrós and Jorge Abelardo Ramos.6 The nationalpopulist space of the intellectual sphere was consolidated and acquired a notable effectiveness in the construction of anti-liberalism as a political category that soon became the contact point with areas of the intellectual left that approached Marxism through existentialism and nationalism, as was the case of the group linked to the journal Contorno. Anti-liberalism, explained Oscar Terán, became “uno de los dispositivos teóricos mediante los cuales algunos sectores de la izquierda intelectual organizaron su 6 Carlos Altamirano, Peronismo y cultura de izquierda, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2011, pp. 73 and ss.

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visión de la realidad y, dentro de ella, la percepción de sí mismos” [one of the theoretical devices through which some sectors of the intellectual left organized their vision of reality and, within it, their perception of themselves].7 The trial of liberalism spread to the left-wing parties through the pens of Rodolfo Puiggrós and Silvio Frondizi who published Historia crítica de los partidos políticos and La realidad argentina in 1956, respectively. In these books, they harshly criticized communist activity, among other things, because of the “liberal” character of their politics and their historical imagination. Even so, the fact itself that all of the political forces had to debate the communist positions indicates the centrality that the party would continue to maintain throughout the 1950s within the left and, above all, within its culture. This extensive introduction is intended to serve as a framework in interpreting the space occupied by Héctor P. Agosti during those years, since it is not so much the originality or exceptionality of his thought that must be stressed, but the magnitude of the crisis he perceived with singular acuity and the repertoire of responses he promoted within the context of a party culture particularly prone to dogmatism and normativity. It was this context that determined the conditions of production and the intelligibility of his interventions regarding intellectuals, culture, and the problem of nationhood, as well as the way in which he found a model in the work of Antonio Gramsci for embarking on a renewal from within communist culture itself and the political problems that emerged from it, which he felt could not be postponed.

1

Disconformities

At the height of the consolidation of his party ascendancy, Agosti’s political activism had already spanned three decades since 1927, when, after a youthful affinity with anarchism, he joined the Federación Juvenil Comunista (Communist Youth Federation).8 In an unfinished autobiographical

7 Oscar Terán, En busca de la ideología argentina, Buenos Aires, Catálogos, 1986, p. 216. 8 On Agosti, see Samuel Schneider, Héctor P. Agosti: Creación y milicia, Buenos Aires, Grupo de Amigos de Héctor P. Agosti, 1994; Arturo Zamudio Barrios, Las prisiones de Héctor P. Agosti, Buenos Aires, Centro Editor de América Latina, 1992; Alexia Massholder, El Partido Comunista y sus intelectuales: Pensamiento y acción de Héctor P. Agosti, Buenos Aires, Luxemburg, 2014 and Laura Prado Acosta, Los intelectuales del Partido

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novel he wrote around 1954 entitled A veces lloro sin querer: Diálogos con Hugo Lamel, he recalled his early days: his childhood in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Balvanera, between the economic hardships of a working-class family and his first contact with political life through the involvement of his father Rómulo, a worker, painter, and lyricist in the Radical Party; his childhood wanderings in the city; his early encounters with the world of books during his visits to the National Library on Mexico Street and films, which he was able to attend by handing out flyers and sweeping for the neighborhood’s biographer. These notes have a definitive tone, both in terms of the “porteño subtlety,” that would define his style as an essayist and writer and the pride in his plebeian origins, which to a large extent would mark his later political and intellectual positions. Over time, that shy and reserved child would become a young man imbued with a “transcendental idealism” who viewed politics as an “exercise in morality.” Thus his disdain for the meekness and ossification of Argentine intellectual life, where “para ser escritor de importancia hace falta regresar de Europa, en primera clase naturalmente, y decir cuatro pavadas engoladas a los cronistas que esperan en el puerto” [to be an important writer you have to return from Europe, in first class of course, and spout four pompous words to the reporters waiting at the port], and his fascination with the pathos of characters such as Augusto César Sandino and the Cuban Antonio Mella, from whose surname he derived the anagram Lamel, the pseudonym he most often used.9 Taking stock of his past, Agosti would narrate his own politicalintellectual autobiography by starting with the painful abandonment of an “idealistic” and “moralizing” conception of American politics and reality that began to crumble in a concatenation of foundational events: his participation in the demonstrations protesting the visit of American President Herbert Hoover to Buenos Aires; his attendance at a joint conference organized by Rodolfo Ghioldi and the Brazilian leader Carlos Prestes at the Teatro Nuevo (the same place where in 1918 José Ingenieros had praised the Russian Revolution); his support for the AntiImperialist League of the Americas; and above all the assassination of Comunista: Itinerario de Héctor Agosti (1930–1963), North Carolina, A Contracorriente, 2015. 9 Héctor P. Agosti, “A veces lloro sin querer (diálogos con Hugo Lamel),” unpublished document, Fondo Héctor Pablo Agosti/Héctor Pablo Agosti Collection; FHPA/CeDInCI, p. 60.

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Mella in Mexico in January 1929. “El infausto suceso conmovió hondamente al joven argentino que recién se incorporaba al combate por los mismos ideales revolucionarios. Sentía gran admiración por su camarada cubano, a quien lo unía una profunda hermandad espiritual.” [The tragic event deeply moved the young Argentine who had just joined the struggle for the same revolutionary ideals. He held great admiration for his Cuban comrade, with whom he was united in a deep spiritual brotherhood.]10 This early affinity is interesting when considered in conjunction with Agosti’s insistence on pondering the “moral reasons” and nonconformism that led an intellectual to become more aware of social processes as a first step in future politicization. Both this topic and the lament for a society that displayed a profound disregard for its intellectuals, even within the leftist parties, remained constants in his later reflections. Pero insisto en la tonalidad moral porque es esa, evidentemente, la insatisfacción de Hugo tomada aquí como signo de una conciencia colectiva; esa insatisfacción es el primer signo hacia una rebeldía que acaso pueda llegar a ser revolución. Sé muy bien qué clase de objeciones se levantarán a esta altura de la crónica. Algunos dueños de recetas dirán, seguramente, que esa insatisfacción es inexplicable existiendo en el país un partido de la clase obrera. Yo no quiero discutir ahora ese simplismo, bien que yo mismo lo practicara en mis réplicas a Hugo. Pero algo debía existir sin duda en la trama de nuestros datos sociales para que el partido de la clase obrera no alcanzara a convertirse todavía en el centro inspirador de la vida nacional. Se puede decir (y en cierta medida es justo decirlo) que algunas manifestaciones de la insatisfacción, el surrealismo pongo por caso, constituyen derivativos del mismo orden social que determina la insatisfacción. Pero lo son en el conjunto del proceso histórico general y no en la actuación individual (por lo menos en los instantes iniciales), a menos de pensar que la humanidad está constituida por farsantes que voluntariamente se cubren de ignominia. Esta insatisfacción es la condición dramática de la inteligencia: cuando Neruda escribe Residencia en la tierra está mostrando al desnudo, dolorosamente, las raíces de su perplejidad insatisfecha; solo la estupidez crítica podría ver allí la cima de una podredumbre existencialista en lugar de ver el padecimiento de una existencia desgarrada por un medio social colmado de mezquindad. No quiero hacer comparaciones infelices; no quiero establecer paralelos. Anoto, simplemente, ese hecho 10 Agosti wrote a heartfelt profile of Antonio Mella under the title “Mella o la voz de América” and included it in his first book El hombre prisionero, Buenos Aires, Claridad, 1938.

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de la insatisfacción, episodio primero de la rebeldía intelectual, que suele mirarse con suficiente simpleza. Hugo fue un ejemplo típico de semejante insatisfacción.11 [But I insist on the moral tone because that is evidently Hugo’s dissatisfaction taken here as an indication of a collective conscience; that dissatisfaction is the first sign of a rebelliousness that could perhaps become a revolution. I know very well what kind of objections will be raised at this point in the account. Some will say, undoubtedly, that this dissatisfaction is inexplicable when there is a working class party in the country. I do not want to discuss this simplism now, even though I myself engaged in it in my replies to Hugo. But there must undoubtedly have been something in the fabric of our social reality for the working-class party not to have become the inspirational center of national life. It can be said (and to a certain extent it is fair to say) that some expressions of dissatisfaction, surrealism for example, derive from the same social order that determines dissatisfaction. But they do so in the general historical process as a whole rather than in the actions of individuals (at least in the initial stages), unless we believe that humanity consists of imposters who voluntarily cloak themselves in ignominy. This dissatisfaction is the dramatic condition of intelligence: when Neruda writes Residencia en la tierra he is painfully exposing the roots of his unsatisfied perplexity; only critical stupidity could possibly see in that the height of an existentialist decay rather than the suffering of an existence torn asunder by a social milieu filled with pettiness. I do not wish to make unfavorable comparisons; I do not wish to draw parallels. I am simply taking note of that dissatisfaction, the first phase of intellectual rebelliousness, which is usually regarded with great simplicity. Hugo was a typical example of this dissatisfaction.]

In 1929, Agosti attended the First Latin American Communist Conference as Victorio Codovilla’s secretary and that same year he enrolled in studies at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), which he abandoned some time later without submitting his thesis on the contradictions of idealist ethics. By that time, he already formed part of the circle of young people associated with Aníbal Ponce. He considered himself Ponce’s main disciple and would adopt the most salient features of the latter’s interpretation of the Argentine past and, above all, of the role the intelligentsia played in the processes of social emancipation. Before leaving the college, Agosti was 11 Héctor P. Agosti, “A veces lloro sin querer,” op. cit., pp. 27 and 28.

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elected president of the Federación Universitaria Argentina and participated in founding the university group Insurrexit, the left wing of the reformist movement. His first significant work, Crítica de la Reforma Universitaria, was announced by Aníbal Ponce in the pages of Dialéctica and finally published in Cursos y Conferencias, the journal of the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores (CLES). In 1930, when he was only 19, he joined the Central Committee of the PCA, which he was removed from some time later, accused of not presenting firm enough opposition to the socialists and Radicals, at that time considered “social-fascists.” A year later, he experienced the first in a series of arrests that saw him move back and forth between exile in Montevideo and prison until 1937, when he was released after an extensive public campaign involving the most prominent intellectuals in the country. Between 1938 and 1940, he edited the literary page of the party newspaper, Orientación, and published his first book, El hombre prisionero. Agosti actively participated in the Asociación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores (AIAPE) until it was shut down following the military coup of 1943. Through his work in the anti-fascist movement, he became the most prominent and sought-after public intellectual in the party, initiating a long tour of lectures and presentations in the country’s interior. After the coup in June, he went into exile in Montevideo along with other communist leaders, including Rodolfo Ghioldi, with whom he edited the newspaper Pueblo Argentino. Through the Uruguayan communist publishing house Pueblos Unidos, he published Defensa del realismo, one of his most important books and the first that earned him international recognition from the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who praised it vehemently. When, in 1958, Lefebvre was expelled from the PCF, Agosti removed his remarks from the prologue of subsequent editions of his book and began to refer to him as a neo-Marxist theoretician of anti-communist inspiration.12 12 Agosti’s book was brought to the attention of the French philosopher by Antonio Berni, with whom he shared a friendship dating back to the 1930s, from the Argentine painter’s second trip to Paris. Lefebvre, whose Revue Marxiste had just been suppressed by the PCF, sent a eulogistic letter to Agosti, and the latter included it as a prologue to the second edition of Defensa del realismo, published by the Quetzal imprint in 1955: “Pocos textos —afirmaba Lefebvre— se han escrito más serios, más profundos que esas líneas. Le confesaré que se adelantaban a casi todo cuanto se escribía en Francia por esa época (1949–1950) y que estaba impregnado de una especie de subjetivismo vulgarmente sociológico: un subjetivismo de clase. De esa manera hemos conducido, usted y

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Between 1946 and 1947, Agosti would direct, the journal Expresión, along with the Uruguayan Enrique Amorim, Roberto Giusti, Leopoldo Hurtado, and Emilio Troise. With a clear continental scope and Americanist vocation, Expresión’s intellectual program was summarized in a formulation that Agosti would henceforth seek to defend and substantiate: the connection between local realities and European thought. His next book, dedicated to José Ingenieros, presented this program in a dramatic way: the only possible “Argentinism” for an intellectual was to appeal to foreign ideas in order to think through domestic issues.13 In 1948, he joined the Board of Directors of the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (SADE) headed by the liberal Carlos Alberto Erro, and at the same time confronted the internal debate that resulted in the expulsion of Cayetano Córdova Iturburu and the group of Concrete artists. On that and other occasions, his commitment to the juste milieu and his misgivings regarding “los desaforados” [the unruly] saved him from expulsion and, to a large extent, strengthened his positions within the party structure, as evidenced in the publication of Nueva Gaceta in 1949, an acclaimed cultural journal he edited with Enrique Policastro and Roger Pla whose contents paid little heed to the Zhdanovist dictates in vogue at the time.14

2

Echeverría: Between Gramsci and Ingenieros

The collaboration between communists, socialists, and liberals in the anti-Peronist intellectual front reached its height with the campaign to commemorate the centennial of Esteban Echeverría’s death.15 Promoted

yo, conociéndonos muy poco, y de manera independiente, la misma lucha por la objetividad profundizada del arte nuevo” [Few texts—claimed Lefebvre—have been written more seriously, more profoundly than these lines. I will confess that they were ahead of almost everything being written in France at the time (1949–1950) and were imbued with a subjectivism that was vulgarly sociological, a class subjectivism. That is how you and I, with very little knowledge of each other, and independently, have undertaken the same struggle for the in-depth objectivity of the new art]. 13 Héctor P. Agosti, José Ingenieros: Ciudadano de la juventud, Buenos Aires, Futuro, 1945. 14 See Chapter 3. 15 Esteban Echeverría, along with Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Juan Bautista

Alberdi, was one of the leading exponents of the so-called Generation of 1837, a group of writers, publicists, and statesmen established in the 1830s. It was the first intellectual

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by Agosti from his position in the SADE secretariat, the homage to the poet and mentor of the Generation of ‘37 brought together a broad spectrum of intellectuals from diverse political backgrounds and served as an opportunity to renew the bonds of anti-fascist sociability in open challenge to Perón’s government, which had just commemorated with great pomp and circumstance the centennial of José de San Martín’s death. The Comisión de Homenaje a Esteban Echeverría (Commission for the Homage to Esteban Echeverría) was chaired by Carlos Alberto Erro, seconded by the philologist Jorge Furt and writer and historian Julio Aramburu, and consisted of a group of writers and intellectuals including María Rosa Oliver, Raúl Soldi, Roberto Giusti, and Arturo Capdevilla. Several books were published as a result of that commemoration, among them Agosti’s Echeverría. Its central argument revived an idea already in circulation, enriching it with what would be the first systematic appropriation of Antonio Gramsci’s work in Argentina: the Argentine historical process should be characterized as an “interrupted revolution” given the inability of the bourgeoisie to respond to the land problem and thereby integrate the rural masses into a national project.16 Drawing on Gramsci’s reflections on the Italian Risorgimento, Agosti argued that the Argentine bourgeoisie suffered from a “half-hearted Jacobinism” that prevented it from completing a national unification program that would overcome feudal disintegration, establish a capitalist economy, and place society as a whole on a progressive path. Weak and fearful of the popular masses, the incipient mercantile bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires

movement in the Río de la Plata region that embraced the ideas of romanticism and focused its reflections on the questions of the nation, national identity, and state-building. Formed by some of the most influential writers of nineteenth-century Argentina, it was characterized by the attention it paid to the circulation of ideas in Europe (particularly France) and the United States. During the government of federalist caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, most of its representatives were forced into exile. See Jorge Myers, “Ideas moduladas: lecturas argentinas del pensamiento político europeo,” in Estudios Sociales, Year XIV, no. 26, Santa Fe, Argentina, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, first semester 2004, pp. 161–174. 16 The books published were as follows: Pedro Barreiro, El espíritu de Mayo y el revisionismo histórico: La visión política y social de Echeverría, Buenos Aires, Antonio Zamora, 1951; Benito Marianetti, Esteban Echeverría: Glosas de un ideario socialista, Mendoza, n.d., 1951; Alfredo Palacios, Esteban Echeverría: Albacea del pensamiento de Mayo, Buenos Aires, Claridad, 1951; Delio Panizza, A Esteban Echeverría, n.d., Montiel, 1951; Tulio Halperin Donghi, El pensamiento de Echeverría, Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1951, and Nydia Lamarque, Echeverría, el poeta, Buenos Aires, n.d., 1951.

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ended up defeated by the caudillos because it was incapable of rising up as the ruling class of the national social order and consummating a modern state. This failure carried in its wake the intellectual groups that were tied to it, including the only political-intellectual development that was capable of analyzing the question of the formation of a modern nation following Independence: the Generation of ‘37 and, in particular, Esteban Echeverría. Unable to generate a political party of their own that would programmatically articulate their equidistance from the contending factions, the problem of this generation of intellectuals was not in their ideas, Agosti would say, but the historical suicide of the class they were trying to instruct.17 In one of the most recognized interpretations of Agosti’s politicalintellectual program within Argentine communism, José María Aricó will define this reading as an exercise in “erroneous translation” inasmuch as it was based on the establishment of an “analogy” between the historical processes analyzed by Gramsci in Italy and the Argentine situation.18 Gramsci, according to the author of Marx y América Latina, did not set out to assimilate the Italian case with the model of the French Revolution, but rather, to determine the particular conditions that made Jacobin audacity impossible among the political forces that disputed the leadership of the unification process. Agosti, however, had transferred Gramscian concepts to a reality that lacked the elements from which those concepts had been drawn, postulating classes and social forces (the bourgeoisie, the peasantry) that in reality did not exist and, as a result, offering a highly ideological reading of Argentina’s past that turned out to be politically impotent and historically false. Moreover, for Aricó, Agosti’s insistence on the “lack of Jacobinism” of the supposed Argentine bourgeoisie was not only an anachronism aimed at justifying the political position of the communists (the bourgeois-democratic revolution of an agrarian and antiimperialist nature), but also the tribute that his former mentor was paying to an evolutionist and determinist philosophy of history that believed that the European experience could be replicated in other geographical and historical circumstances.

17 Héctor P. Agosti, Echeverría, Buenos Aires, Futuro, 1951, p. 18. 18 José María Aricó, La cola del diablo: Itinerario de Gramsci en América Latina,

Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2005, pp. 49 and ss.

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The idea that the objectives of the May Revolution remained in force as an unfulfilled mandate was present in the communist historical imagination since at least the 1930s, when, forced by the political needs of the popular-front strategy, the party began to construct a narrative about the historical past that would base its roots and identity on the revolution and the cultural heroes of liberalism. The figure of José Ingenieros occupied a fundamental place in this process of inventing a tradition for local communism and was the starting point for a particular interpretation of the Argentine past that was very powerful among intellectuals with a strong anti-fascist sensibility. From Aníbal Ponce to Agosti, including Gregorio Bermann, Sergio Bagú, Raúl Larra, Emilio Troise, and José P. Barreiro, la noción ingenieriana de que el mandato revolucionario de Mayo había abortado en el proceso histórico argentino, y de que era necesario construir una nueva elite que lo llevara a destino, se volvía una potente ficción orientadora para quienes veían en el fascismo criollo al enemigo que nuevamente frustraba la concreción de ese ideal.19 [the notion based on Ingenieros’ thinking that the revolutionary mandate of the May Revolution had been aborted in the Argentine historical process, and that a new elite that would bring it to fruition must be constructed, became a powerful guiding fiction for those who saw in local fascism the enemy that would once again thwart the realization of that ideal.]

In fact, with La evolución de las ideas argentinas, Ingenieros had proposed a periodization of Argentine history that established a clear parallelism with European history as well as a liberal-reformist ideological lens that articulated a path of historical continuity between the ideals of the May Revolution and the present. Thus, in his analysis of the Argentine historical process, Agosti was not only a victim, as Aricó suggests, of the “espejismo de la revolución agraria que desde los treinta obsesionaba a los comunistas” [mirage of the agrarian revolution which has obsessed

19 Ricardo Pasolini, “Crítica erudita y exaltación antifascista: Acerca de la obra de José Ingenieros ‘historiador,’” in Prismas, no. 11, 2007, pp. 87 and 88 (emphasis in original).

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the communists since the 1930s], but he also inscribed himself in an intellectual tradition which extended beyond the boundaries of the theoretical limitations of his party.20 Within this intellectual genealogy that connected his mentor Aníbal Ponce with José Ingenieros, and the latter with Echeverría and the Generation of ‘37, Agosti added a vantage point from which to evaluate the way in which Marxism had to confront a reality different from the one it was aimed at interpreting, which we would now call the problem of “reception.” Michael Löwy has noted that the course of Marxism in Latin America was threatened by two opposing inclinations: on the one hand, Indo-American exoticism, which tended to absolutize the specificity of the subcontinent to the point of judging Marxism for being too European; on the other, Europeanism, which merely transplanted the models of historical development of the European societies studied by Marx and Engels to the analysis of Latin American realities, continually seeking equivalents that would sustain the theoretical hypotheses and deny any local particularity. The entire period of Stalinist hegemony was dominated, according to Löwy, by this second approach, which is the starting point for the feudal characterization of Latin American economic formations and, consequently, for the stagism that dominated communist policy.21 Through the figure of Esteban Echeverría, Agosti introduced an inflection on this Europeanist model in which the ideological dimension and, therefore, the problem of the role of intellectuals took on particular relevance. For Agosti, the universal character of European thought and, consequently, of the processes of social transformation was unquestionable, and its influence on underdeveloped regions was inescapable, although subject to particular vicissitudes. For this reason, the theory of “historical parallelism,” first declared by the author of El dogma socialista and replicated by José Ingenieros a hundred years later, constituted a specific political-intellectual program: since thought originating in Europe must necessarily produce a “chaotic” action in underdeveloped countries,

20 José M. Aricó, La cola del diablo, op. cit., p. 57. This interpretation of Latin American historical processes exceeds even national boundaries, as Rafael Rojas has shown in analyzing the “myth of the unfinished revolution” that ran through Cuban political thought, including the Marxist left. See Rafael Rojas, Tumbas sin sosiego: Revolución, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2006. 21 Michael Löwy, El marxismo en América Latina, op. cit., p. 12.

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the role of the enlightened elites was to establish in each national territory the concrete causes that determined its “anomaly” with respect to the “logical” lines of historical development and, on that basis, articulate the guiding principles of the “desire” for its transformation based on both an ideological and political battle. Echeverría enseña la verdad de esta conexión universal de los sucesos revolucionarios, y frente a ciertas meditaciones ilusorias de la historia va a probarnos que las ideas no viven en compartimentos clausurados por fronteras nacionales, y que reproducen sus mismos efectos a poco que sus mismas causas originarias reaparezcan sobre otras latitudes. Más aún: va a probarnos que el pensamiento es en sí mismo “engendrador de la revolución”, en tanto “no es un pensamiento aislado, parto solitario de la razón, sino una concepción racional deducida del conocimiento de la historia, y del organismo animado de la sociedad”.22 [Echeverría teaches the truth of this universal connection of revolutionary events, and in the face of certain illusory historical reflections he proves to us that ideas do not live in compartments enclosed by national borders, and that they reproduce the same effects as soon as their originating causes reappear in other latitudes. Furthermore: it will prove to us that thought in itself “engenders revolution” inasmuch as “it is not an isolated thought, a solitary delivery of reason, but a rational conception deduced from the knowledge of history and the animated organism of society”.]

This is why the irreducibility of the Argentine problem to the dynamics of European theoretical models took on a dramatic character in Agosti. While the dire condition of the country responded to concrete historical causes—the abandonment of the principles of May by a bourgeoisie in decline incapable of fulfilling its historical mission—the accurate diagnosis of those causes was the first step toward its solution and demonstrated that the drama was neither ineluctable nor metaphysical. Unlike the essay of national interpretation that since the 1930s had read the Argentine process through the fateful lens of “psychological invariants” and led to a nationalism of essentialist characteristics, Echeverría’s program allowed Agosti to appeal to a “realistic” interpretation of the national problem that did not reject the universal character of the processes of social transformation, but recognized in them local specificities. This act 22 Héctor P. Agosti, Echeverría, op. cit., p. 13.

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of seeing the specifics in a universal process was what, in his opinion, avoided mere plagiarism or transplantation, since it forced one to observe reality in order to deduce from it the objective conditions that would serve as the basis for the desire to transform it. He thereby presented a diagnosis of the question of nationhood which, although it formulated the moment of economic determination (the bourgeois revolution dismantling the colonial architecture and founding another type of social relations), it conceived its solution above all in ideological terms or, more precisely, as an ideological struggle aimed at unifying the nation based on a revolutionary tradition opposed to the “counterrevolution” and ready to replace the forms of feudal civilization in all areas of national life, that is, the struggle between two principles. The importance assigned to intellectuals and culture in this process is what distinguishes Agosti from other communist interpretations of the Argentine past and constitutes the point of greatest operability of Gramscian voluntarism. “Toda revolución o transformación necesita principios y no admitir esto equivale a negar al hombre como sujeto activo de la historia y mantener residuos de fatalidad o mecanicismo en la maduración espontánea de las condiciones objetivas.” [Every revolution or transformation needs principles. Not admitting this is tantamount to negating man as an active subject of history and retaining traces of fatality or mechanicism in the spontaneous maturing of objective conditions.]23 In the constant dialectic between ideas and reality, the intellectual operates by introducing history into science; this is what Agosti called “critical realism.” It is a doctrinaire realism opposed to “pure demagogy” or “mere eclecticism,” because it operates through the knowledge of the laws of social evolution with the intention of influencing the masses to raise their awareness of those very laws and, at the same time, it is constantly measured against reality, which imposes stimuli and corrections on that doctrine. But the intellectual who is a “critical realist,” insofar as he becomes a revolutionary, is the bearer of an “ethical ideal” which is reflected in the ability to anticipate and a desire for transformation, and in this sense he is, as Echeverría was, a romantic. As he explained when defining the writer’s mission in his 1945 lecture Defensa del realismo, for Agosti intellectuals fulfilled a role in accelerating

23 Héctor P. Agosti, Echeverría, op. cit., pp. 18 and 19.

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objective conditions as long as they were capable of presenting a vision of the potential future for the awareness of the masses.24 Entre escribir la historia y hacer la historia sin duda es preferible hacerla. Echeverría es, por esencia, el hombre que pugna por hacer la historia. Pero todo hombre que se empeña en hacer la historia es necesariamente alguien que se desvela por injertar en la realidad concreta esa partícula de sueño que la torna transformable. Soñar en las realidades ¿no era para Lenin el atributo de un revolucionario verdadero? Echeverría se nos muestra así como un soñador de realidades, como un recomponedor y transformador de realidades: como un hombre de este tiempo ardientemente volcado hacia el futuro y prohibido por lo mismo para todas las afrentas de la reconstitución imposible del pasado.25 [Between writing history and making history, it is undoubtedly preferable to make it. Echeverría is, in essence, a man who strives to make history. But any man who endeavors to make history is by definition someone who seeks to graft onto concrete reality that particle of a dream that makes it transformable. For Lenin, was it not the attribute of a true revolutionary to dream in realities? Echeverría thus reveals himself to us as a dreamer of realities, as a “recomposer” and transformer of realities: as a man of these times ardently turned towards the future and prevented by that from the affronts of the impossible reconstruction of the past.]

In short, for Agosti, the interrupted revolution manifested in the cultural order in the form of a hiatus between the intelligentsia and the concrete reality of the country, because the counterrevolution injected the remnants of the Colony into all aspects of national life and obstructed the potential dialectic between theory and history or the “critical realism” through which the obstacles that prevent the inevitable universalization of the processes of social transformation are cleared away. The Argentine intelligentsia experienced the drama of being united with a class incapable of fulfilling its historical function and fell prey to the cultural hegemony of the oligarchy, abandoning its militant tradition and moving toward a growing aristocratization. The problem of the ideological function of the intellectuals in the context of a bourgeois revolution that had to take place despite the existing bourgeoisie would henceforth constitute a focal point 24 Héctor P. Agosti, Defensa del realismo, Montevideo, Pueblos Unidos, 1945. 25 Héctor P. Agosti, Echeverría, op. cit., pp. 20 and 21 (emphasis in original).

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of Agosti’s analysis, since progressive distancing from the liberal tradition would lead him to reconsider the very nature of the revolution as well as the relationship between popular culture and the educated world.

3

Betrayals and Revolutions

After actively participating in the Continental Congress of Culture, which brought together a constellation of great Latin American writers and artists in Santiago de Chile in June 1953, Agosti traveled for the first time, at the age of 42, to the USSR. On that same trip he visited China, which had an enormous impact on him, later intensified by the new cultural policy that Chinese communism developed after the 20th Congress of the CPSU. This policy encouraged a diversity of aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical currents as well as freedom of expression and creation in a gesture toward breaking with Zhdanovism, which, however, would rapidly be brought to a halt.26 In September 1956, while the world was taking stock of the crimes of Stalinism and the cult of personality denounced by Khrushchev, Agosti presented the main report of the First Meeting of Communist Intellectuals, where for the first time he offered a reasoned and systematic approach to an issue that, nevertheless, was not new to him: the role of intellectuals in party strategy and the function of culture in the processes of social emancipation. Meanwhile, he ran as a candidate for national congressman on two occasions, with no better luck than to end up in jail again, which did not prevent him from sustaining a rigorous program of political and, above all, literary readings. The difficult task of combining the demands of political activism and his passion for books, together with the need to earn a living as a translator, journalist, and secondary school teacher, was the subject of bitter assessments, especially in view of the productivity of some of his close friends, such as Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. The political context, moreover, was not very conducive to writerly concentration. Following the events in Hungary, not only did

26 The “outburst of Chinese enthusiasm” that Agosti declared in his 1956 report on

intellectuals was also evident in the pages of Cuadernos de Cultura, which closely followed the new cultural policy through the translation of several texts on the subject, including a dossier entitled “¡Que cien flores se abran de una vez!” that brought together the main contributions to the debate on literature and art of the period. See Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 33, December 1957.

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he have to publicly defend the Soviet invasion, but he also had to take charge of the home front, teaching various courses to intellectuals and party professionals in order to “reinforce the ideological struggle.” In 1958, he traveled to Democratic Germany to celebrate its tenth anniversary and visited the USSR for the second time. After this trip, he was in close contact with the Soviet cultural world, which resulted in collaborations with publications in Berlin, Prague, and Moscow. In the elections in which Arturo Frondizi won the presidency, he was a candidate for national congressman. That same year, on the eve of the 12th Congress of the PCA to be held in June, there were rumors he would be promoted to the “highest positions” as a result of an internal renewal that had compelled the party to support Frondizi’s candidacy in the face of its “potential demise.”27 The Congress never took place and was postponed for five years, but Agosti saw the electoral triumph of the candidate of the Unión Cívica Radical Intransigente (Intransigent Radical Civic Union, or UCRI) as the beginning of a new course for the history of the country and, on a personal level, the potential for unprecedented influence: Para nosotros, para quienes subimos a la hombridad [sic] en 1930, esto no deja de ser emocionante. Tiene alguna emoción saber que podrán forjarse planes sin temor de deshacerlos al día siguiente. ¡Planes sin temor! Toda mi vida se ha consumido realmente en esta incertidumbre. […] Pienso que pueden acercarse para nosotros momentos decisivos, si sabemos movernos con soltura en ese mar de contradicciones abierto en el país. [Adolfo] Canitrot me decía anteayer: harán muchas cosas si han aprendido verdaderamente el 20º congreso, si no lo repiten simplemente como una composición escolar de sexto grado. ¿Lo hemos aprendido? A veces pienso que no. Veo aún dureza en los planteos, sectarismo, estrechez mental y pienso que esto ya no es simplemente una cosa teórica para nosotros. Es algo vital, nos va en ello nuestro mismo existir, pues ya vamos rondando los cincuenta años y no podemos estar equivocándonos nunca, sin llegar nunca, empezando siempre.28 [For us, for those of us who came of age in 1930, this is still exciting. There is some thrill in knowing that plans can be made without the fear

27 “¿Renovación comunista?,” in Qué Sucedió en Siete Días, year IV, no. 180, Buenos Aires, May 6, 1958. The article was refuted by the communist press: “Qué maledicencia de poca monta,” in Nuestra Palabra, May 8, 1958, p. 5. 28 Héctor P. Agosti, Unpublished personal diary, FHPA/CeDInCI, pp. 222 and 223.

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they will be unmade the next day. Plans without fear! My whole life has been consumed by this uncertainty. [...] I think that decisive moments may be approaching, if we know how to move smoothly in this sea of contradictions that has opened up in the country. [Adolfo] Canitrot told me the day before yesterday: you will do many things if you have truly learned the 20th Congress, if you do not simply repeat it like a sixth grade school composition. Have we learned it? Sometimes I feel that we have not. I still see obstinacy in the proposals, sectarianism, narrow-mindedness, and I think that this is no longer simply theoretical for us. It is something vital, our very existence is at stake, since we are already in our fifties and we cannot be making mistakes and never arriving at anything, always beginning.]

His enthusiasm was very short-lived. Frondizi’s “ignominious betrayal” somberly put an end to the hopeful cycle that Agosti envisioned at the very moment when Nación y cultura and El mito liberal were published.29 From that point on, with the party once again banned and persecuted, he focused his attention on what David Viñas called the “betrayed generation” and keenly followed the emergence of leftist formations that were expanding outside and against communism and socialism. In 1961, he participated as the head of the communist group that joined the journal Che, which included Juan Carlos Portantiero and Isidoro Gilbert. That publication, originally promoted by young members of the Partido Socialista Argentino (Argentine Socialist Party, or PSA), was proposed as a vehicle for political coordination between Peronism and the left from a revolutionary perspective with a markedly anti-imperialist tone and support for the Cuban process.30 The irruption of the Cuban Revolution onto the Latin American scene added a new element to the molecular rearrangements that were taking place on the left, since it put into question the very essence of the communist characterizations of the Latin American Revolution. Although from the very beginning the party had hailed the movement that overthrew 29 Arturo Frondizi’s government generated great expectations among progressive sectors. However, his economic policy aimed at facilitating the investment of foreign companies in the oil and gas industry, the approval of a law allowing private university education, the promulgation of laws permitting repression and other measures detrimental to the workers and the social sectors that had supported him unleashed a wave of criticism and protests and fueled the image of “betrayal.” His government was overthrown by a military coup in March 1962. 30 See María Cristina Tortti, Che: Una revista de la nueva izquierda, Buenos Aires, CeDInCI, 2013.

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dictator Fulgencio Batista and expressed its solidarity with the “heroic Cuban people,” it nevertheless always maintained significant disagreement on the question of the armed struggle, even after 1961, when Cuba declared its revolution was socialist and took refuge in Marxism-Leninism. However, the rapprochement of Cuba to the USSR represented the possibility of appropriating an experience that sparked the enthusiasm of broad progressive and leftist sectors for the communists, since it confirmed that although a revolution could be carried out without communists, it could not be sustained without them. Perhaps because of his youthful affinity for Mella and his friendship with Cuban intellectuals, such as Juan Marinello and Nicolás Guillén, Agosti celebrated the Cuban process from the beginning and wrote several laudatory articles in Cuadernos de Cultura, where he defined it as a model for other Latin American peoples and called on Argentine intellectuals to assist in shedding light on the attacks that the island was receiving from the Western front.31 For Agosti, however, the Cuban process also had a testimonial value within the specific realm of culture, since it was a revolution that finally demonstrated that nationalism and Marxism could merge and that intellectuals were capable of playing a fundamental role in the task of providing the State with a program that would conjure up cultural democratization and ideological guidance. As Rafael Rojas has pointed out, the incorporation of communist intellectuals into Fidel Castro’s government showed that the communists, of all the groups in the broad spectrum of opposition to Batista, were the only ones capable of offering a consolidated cultural, economic, and ideological project. At the same time, first generation communists such as Juan Marinello, Nicolás Guillén, Alejo Carpentier, and Regino Pedroso interpreted the revolution as “el desenlace político del movimiento cultural vanguardista que ellos habían protagonizado tres décadas atrás” [the political outcome of the avant-garde cultural movement they had led three decades earlier] and in many cases coincided with Agosti’s concerns about the irreverence of the new generations.32 “He leído con la mayor atención lo que dices sobre esa actitud de gallarda irreverencia de los muchachos argentinos —le escribía Marinello en 1961—. Lo que aquí es, naturalmente, más intenso, ya que fueron los

31 Héctor P. Agosti, “Nuestro deber hacia Cuba,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 49, September/October 1959, pp. 1–4. 32 Rafael Rojas, Tumbas sin sosiego, op. cit., p. 171.

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jóvenes los que hicieron la revolución.” [I have read with great interest your remarks on the attitude of gallant irreverence of the Argentine lads— Marinello wrote him in 1961. It is naturally more intense here since it was the young people who produced the revolution.]33 Additionally, the image of a revolution that “pampered” its intellectuals and at the same time eliminated illiteracy in a hitherto underdeveloped country could only excite a man like Agosti, convinced that no process of social transformation could take place without a cultural reform that would provide it with principles and guidance.

4

Communism After Peronism

The First Meeting of Communist Intellectuals was the most important event in the communist cultural world after the 1952 crisis and the culmination of a climate of confrontation, discomfort, and suspicion that had begun with the anti-avant-garde purges of 1948.34 The dramatic break with the system of loyalties that the communists had built based on an anti-fascist identity led to a redefinition of the mainsprings of cultural work, which precipitated an internal tendency toward the professionalization of intellectual labor and the breakdown of the already conflictual ties they had established with liberal intellectuals based on their shared anti-Peronism. Indeed, it was during the turbulent months of the progovernment shift that the communists witnessed the emergence of the cultural institutions that would shield them from exclusion from the liberal space and would be the starting point for an organization and a hierarchization of the intellectual front that would from that point on seek to achieve greater ideological cohesion. As a symptom of the greater attention the party leadership was beginning to pay to the question of intellectuals, the Central Committee issued a specific resolution on the subject in September 1954 for the first time within the framework of the ongoing evaluation of the experience

33 Letter from Juan Marinello to Héctor P. Agosti, Havana, December 25, 1961, Fondo Héctor Pablo Agosti/Héctor Pablo Agosti Collection, Centro de Estudios y Formación Marxista “Héctor P. Agosti” (CEFMA); FHPA/CEFMA. 34 See Chapters 3 and 4.

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of rapprochement with Peronism.35 It noted that communist intellectuals had managed to overcome the “deviations” of the party line and contribute to forming a National Democratic Front, although the task had its flaws. Having once again embarked on a policy of alliances with the recently vilified liberal sectors, the party leadership emphasized the need to unite the “immense majority of intellectual workers” who opposed the reactionary tendency of the Peronist government, whose anti-laical policies in educational affairs, impulse toward historical revisionism, and Hispanist predilection were interpreted, without much discussion, as factors aimed at facilitating the interference of American imperialism. The text emphasized that the organization of the scattered but broad intellectual reserves that the party sought to convene for its anti-oligarchic and anti-imperialist policy would only be successful if the communist intellectuals were capable of putting the party line into practice within their own ambit: from the creation of ad hoc commissions based on specialization to the trade union entities or institutions such as the Casa de la Cultura and the Congreso Argentino de la Cultura. These structures were to serve to strengthen the “ideological militancy,” that is, the fulfillment of the party line through intellectual labor, which involved an effort to assimilate Marxism-Leninism that intellectuals were not always willing to make. This evasive attitude was in many ways risky, particularly because it easily led to ideological renunciation when faced with unified work with non-communist intellectuals, as demonstrated by the Real episode.36 Although the wording of the resolution did not grant intellectuals more than a role as recruiters and conveyors of the policy of alliances and made unified work conditional on a rather formal appeal to anti-sectarianism, it was received by a segment of the communist intelligentsia as an encouraging sign. Its importance was emphasized in the pages of Cuadernos de Cultura with the argument that it prioritized unified action on the part of intellectuals over differences in opinion, aesthetic or otherwise, and this could be read as the end of a stage characterized by the virulence, critical reductionism, and aesthetic populism typical of the Zhdanovist moment. The cultural front, however, continued to be a source of problems for the party institution, which in any case could not ignore the fact 35 “Resoluciones del Comité Central Ampliado del Partido Comunista que se reunió los días 10, 11 y 12 de septiembre de 1954,” Buenos Aires, c. September 1954, pp. 1–3 (booklet without cover or indication of publisher). 36 Ibid.

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that it was a space that had expanded considerably, especially in the last years of the Peronist government. From 1956 onwards, communist cultural activities were revived, thanks in part to the legality briefly enjoyed by the party. The Casa de la Cultura Argentina was reorganized and for the first time it functioned regularly. Several departments were created and courses and conferences were held. The intellectual labor was organized by specialization, and in 1956, in the city of Buenos Aires alone, there were 13 commissions, including economics, theater, literature, medicine, and dentistry. From 1962 onwards, the Economic Studies Commission published the journal Problemas de Economía, directed by Héctor Amadeo, Ricardo Olivari, and Rufino Godoy. Trade union activity also intensified, especially in the sectors most inclined toward professional organization, such as doctors, but also in the artistic fields, such as musicians. In the provinces, cultural fronts were organized, thanks in good part to Agosti, who was in close contact with several young people like José María Aricó and Héctor Schmucler in Córdoba and Amílcar Santucho in Santiago del Estero. By late 1954, Cuadernos de Cultura had already considerably increased local collaboration, displacing Soviet authors and incorporating new names in the literary criticism and film sections, among them Roberto Raschella, Marcela Sola, Rodolfo Gabriel Rago, Juan José Manauta, and Margarita Aguirre. In the university environment, despite the fact that the communist presence remained weak, there was a similar movement of renewal and expansion, of which the journal Mar Dulce was its most successful example. Launched by the law student Manuel Mora y Araujo, contributors to the publication included Ezequiel Gallo, Francis Korn, Alberto Ciria, and Antonio Caparrós, some of whom went on to become members of the Federación Juvenil Comunista (Communist Youth Federation).37 The opening up of the cultural scene and simultaneous crisis set off by the end of the Peronist experience resulted in a proliferation of cultural journals that, in the case of the communist world, coincided with the liberalizing effects precipitated by the 20th Congress of the CPSU. As in the 1920s, several publications led by young people suddenly appeared in the cultural field, expressing diverse currents within the shared space of party commitment. In March 1956, Gaceta Literaria appeared, under the direction of Pedro Orgambide and Roberto 37 See Isidoro Gilbert, La Fede: Alistándose para la revolución. La Federación Juvenil Comunista 1921–2005, Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 2009, pp. 348 and ss.

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Hosne and with a team of collaborators that included León Pomer, Simón Feldman, José Barcia, Bernardo Verbitsky, Francisco J. Solero, Fernando Birri, Osvaldo Seiguerman, José Carlos Chiaramonte, Roberto Cossa, Juan José Manauta, Humberto Costantini, and Juan Carlos Portantiero. Two years later, José Luis Mangieri, Floreal Mazía, and Roberto Salama (who had left Cuadernos de Cultura in 1957, where Agosti remained as sole director) released Por: Revista Mensual de Cultura. That same year, Juan Carlos Portantiero, Mario Jorge de Lellis, and Héctor Bustingorri published Nueva Expresión, which featured Juan Gelman, Andrés Rivera, and Roberto Cossa. Nuestra Palabra, which for a brief time in 1958 became an “ideological and cultural” weekly under the direction of Agosti, brought together many of these young people in its pages. In 1961, when Gaceta Literaria had already disappeared, Pedro Orgambide returned with Hoy en la Cultura, accompanied by a Board of Directors that combined comrades and non-party members, including Raúl Larra, David Viñas, Rubén Benítez, María Fux, Francisco J. Herrera, Luis Ordaz, Fernando Birri, Juan José Manauta, and Javier Villafañe. Starting with issue 13 from March to April 1964, the journal was directed by writer from Entre Ríos and author of the celebrated novel Las tierras blancas, Juan José Manauta, who would remain in that position until its last issue in July 1966. In addition to this group of journals, there were also the official publications of the Information Section of the Embassy of the USSR in Argentina, such as Novedades de la Unión Soviética, which appeared regularly starting in August 1954, Problemas de la Paz y el Socialismo (1958–1961), and later on the Revista Internacional, an Argentine reprint published by Anteo of the theoretical journal of the Conference of Socialist and Workers’ Parties, Literatura Soviética, published by Ediciones Cultura starting in 1958, and the editions of the Instituto de Relaciones Culturales Argentina-URSS. The greater dynamism of cultural activity and the broadening of the base of party members and sympathizers could be seen as an auspicious sign of the new period beginning with the end of the Peronist experience. The party could even boast of not having suffered significant losses after the 20th Congress and the Hungarian crisis. However, the greater recruitment in sectors of the intellectual middle class was bound to raise the alarm of an institution whose greatest desire was to capture the masses of Peronist workers, supposedly “available” once the “corporativefascist” experience, as Perón’s government was once again deemed to be, had been overcome. Moreover, it was clear that Marxism had gone

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beyond party boundaries to become the patrimony of new sectors of the political-intellectual world whose modulations found greater support in existentialism, nationalism, and so-called critical Marxism than in Sovietstyle Marxism. Faced with this, the “ideological strengthening” of the intellectual sectors was imposed as a peremptory necessity as the debates around literary, aesthetic, and historical issues gained ground in the pages of party publications, thereby making public the differences that were taking place behind closed doors. The ideological enlightenment of the intellectuals was concomitant with the problem of organizing a sector in which the party admittedly lacked experience. The channeling of the labor of intellectuals into specialized organizations that would facilitate the control and ideological and political cohesion that the institution demanded and combat “individualistic tendencies,” indiscipline, and the impulse to separate ideological work from concrete activity which, according to the party’s diagnosis, were characteristics of the intelligentsia, would serve to confirm the new policy that communism had adopted toward culture following World War II. This had two consequences: while on the one hand communism became the only left-wing party to have a specific policy for intellectuals and to integrate them into its own relatively autonomous structures, it also sought to ensure that this structure was capable of combating their resistance to the party’s desire to legislate on issues that pertained to them. The First Meeting of Communist Intellectuals was called for in March 1956 and organized while the 20th Congress of the CPSU was taking place in the USSR. Eventually held in September for “security reasons,” it represented the acknowledgement by party leadership of a new situation within a context of enormous sensitivity and confusion. Perhaps for this reason it was regarded with suspicion from the outset. The objective of the meeting, as the theoretical journal Nueva Era explained, was to. establecer las formas orgánicas del trabajo militante de los intelectuales comunistas y tratar de esclarecer algunas discrepancias ideológicas que, a pretexto de diferencias sobre la apreciación de nuestra herencia cultural, encubren en realidad insuficiencias de apreciación teórica sobre la etapa revolucionaria argentina.38

38 Nueva Era, year 8, no. 3, p. 14.

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[establish the organic forms of party militancy for communist intellectuals and to clarify certain ideological discrepancies which cover up the insufficiencies of the theoretical assessment of Argentina’s revolutionary stage under the pretext of differences on the appreciation of our cultural heritage.]

The text of the Boletín preparatorio (Preparatory Bulletin) which circulated before the meeting emphasized the ideological tone that was expected in the discussion of two fundamental issues: the nature of cultural criticism and the attitude to be taken toward cultural heritage. It was clarified that these issues concerned “all communist intellectuals,” including professionals, since contrary to “certain opinions” the party felt that they were also intellectuals and should therefore fulfill an ideological purpose in their activity: Claro está que no se trata de un debate ideológico abstracto, sino conectado con las necesidades de la lucha política del partido y con las grandes perspectivas de la revolución democrática. Quiere decir que nuestro debate tiene que enseñarnos a determinar también en el terreno de la ideología, cuál es el enemigo principal y cuáles, en consecuencia, los aliados transitorios o permanentes.39 [It is clear that this is not an abstract ideological debate, but rather one that is connected to the needs of the party’s political struggle and the great prospects of the democratic revolution. It means that our debate must also teach us to determine, on ideological terrain, who the main enemy is and who, as a consequence, are our temporary or permanent allies.]

In the first case, the report prepared by Agosti, “Los problemas de la cultura argentina y la posición ideológica de los intelectuales comunistas,” was recommended as a starting point, where it was noted that the main defect of the communists’ cultural work was sectarianism, a procedure whereby the criticism of principles was replaced with indiscriminate verbal aggression with no particular guidance. As for the second point, the matter was clear-cut. What the communist intellectuals had to determine was whether the liberal-democratic tradition which until then had constituted a central element in their vision of the past should remain in 39 Boletín preparatorio de la Primera Asamblea Nacional de Intelectuales Comunistas, mimeo, FHPA/CeDInCI, c. 1956, p. 1.

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place given the new conditions of the country and the world. The direction determining the alliances that the party should undertake on both the political and cultural fronts depended on this diagnosis. La Asamblea no es una reunión de historiadores, ni está destinada a examinar en detalle todos los problemas de la historia argentina, ni a pronunciar veredictos sobre ellos. De lo que se trata es de apreciar juiciosamente la etapa de la revolución democrática argentina desde el punto de vista de las relaciones concretas de clase y determinar si la herencia cultural argentina es inválida para nosotros por su origen burgués.40 [The Assembly is not a meeting of historians, nor does it aim to examine all of the problems of Argentine history in detail or pronounce verdicts on them. Rather, it is a matter of judiciously appreciating the stage of the Argentine democratic revolution from the point of view of concrete class relations and of determining whether Argentine cultural heritage is rendered invalid for us due to its bourgeois origin.]

Although the document made it clear that this was not essential, the mere fact of raising the possibility of breaking with the established reading of cultural traditions that since the mid-1930s had governed communist interpretations of the national past, reveals the scope and reception of the Soviet codifications of the Cold War—whose most virulent phase had already ended with the death of Stalin—in the context of a political and cultural field profoundly transformed by the Peronist experience. Nevertheless, the unanimous support the liberal legacy had among communist intellectuals should be questioned. The fact that on the cultural front the “Peronization” promoted by Juan José Real had gone too far, as Fernando Nadra claimed, enables the consideration of the sensitivity that a sector of the communist intelligentsia expressed toward certain aspects of the national-popular critique of the liberal tradition. As analyzed in the third chapter, Zhdanovism postulated a class criterion for evaluating cultural phenomena that identified bourgeois culture as decadent and placed value on working-class products. In the particular conditions of the Argentine intellectual field, chauvinism, which was the main characteristic of postwar Soviet cultural policy, could easily converge with certain classic topics of populist cultural nationalism: the rejection of “foreign

40 Ibid., p. 1.

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forms,” the tendency to read cultural facts as mere epiphenomena of economic structures, and the defense of naturalistic aesthetics and traditionalist content. Anti-imperialism, moreover, connected the communists to an area of ideological preoccupations that did not concern the liberal factions. In short, Zhdanovism and the geopolitical realignments of Cold War communism, strictly speaking, led to a departure from the liberal tradition and ultimately forced a complete revision of certain central elements of communist political culture. Juan José Real expressed it well when, having to justify his actions in late 1952, he enumerated the consequences of the liberal-bourgeois influence to which the party’s intellectuals fell prey: Formular que el marxismo en nuestro país es la “continuación” de las ideas progresivas burguesas, violando así lo que nos enseña el camarada Zhdánov sobre el significado del marxismo-leninismo como un salto cualitativo en relación con las anteriores ideologías progresivas. La tendencia a hacer de Aníbal Ponce un maestro, un teórico del marxismo, cuando en realidad no lo ha sido, porque Aníbal Ponce no tenía fe en las masas y no conocía profundamente al marxismo-leninismo y, en especial modo, al estalinismo, el marxismo de hoy. La penetración de tendencias a las novelas decadentes y desesperadas, que se expresan en el libro de Fina Warschaver y en levantar a Roberto Arlt.41 [To formulate that Marxism in our country is the “continuation” of progressive bourgeois ideas, violating what Comrade Zhdanov teaches us about the meaning of Marxism-Leninism as a qualitative leap in relation to previous progressive ideologies. The tendency to make Aníbal Ponce a master, a theoretician of Marxism, when in fact he was not, because Aníbal Ponce did not have faith in the masses and did not possess a profound knowledge of Marxism-Leninism and, especially, of Stalinism, today’s Marxism. The infiltration of tendencies into decadent and desperate novels, which are expressed in Fina Warschaver’s book and in the elevation of Roberto Arlt.]

Of course, cultural Zhdanovism in an Argentine context did not always imply a tacit rapprochement with the Peronist sectors of the intellectual field let alone support for the government experience led by Perón, but

41 Letter from Juan José Real to party leadership, Buenos Aires, January 12, 1953, FPCA.

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rather an expression of loyalty for Soviet prescriptions over and above any consideration of the context in which that expression was enunciated and affected the specific field of intellectual labor. This was the case of Rodolfo Ghioldi, who was far from being suspected of having an affinity with Peronism, and who supported minor figures such as Roberto Salama in his crusade against bourgeois literature and decadent writers, thus contributing to widening the gap with the factions of cultural liberalism which he nevertheless sought to convene for unified work. In any case, stripped of its cruder forms, certain dimensions of Soviet communist Cold War rhetoric could be connected with elements of the Argentine post-Peronist intellectual climate and even with previous traditions that the pro-Allied policy of international communism during World War II had left aside: anti-bourgeois critique and anti-imperialist discourse were the most important. Writers coming from social realism, such as Álvaro Yunque, could easily express their support for certain aspects of the critique of liberal culture and even openly celebrate Peronist cultural policy, as Larra did, without adhering to the parameters of a literature defined in class terms that rejected authors that a rather lax concept of realism defended for the progressive and revolutionary forces, as we have already seen in relation to Güiraldes and Roberto Arlt.42 Essayists committed to the world of the working class and the campesinos, such as Amaro Villanueva, could seemingly coincide with the workerism and critical reductionism of Zhdanovism, as young writers such as José Luis Mangieri also did, although their vision of Argentine cultural traditions involved a less simplistic reflection on the classificatory schemes which, starting with Sarmiento, contrasted the supposed lack of culture of the rural masses to the civilization found in Buenos Aires. Agosti himself based a good part of his later intellectual program on the acknowledgment of the merits of the nationalist critique of the liberal tradition. Ultimately, the confrontation with the liberal tradition that constituted a central element of the intellectual climate after 1955 involved communist intellectuals who were far from holding positions that were homogeneous or simply reducible to the opposition between a Zhdanovist and sectarian position and an open-minded and anti-dogmatic one, exemplified by Agosti. Between the complicated decoding of the Soviet cultural

42 See Chapter 4.

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guidelines that combined a residual Zhdanovism with a cautious openness, the persistence of anti-fascist platitudes about the national past, the need to provide a response to the problem of nationhood, and the various ways of conceiving the role of intellectuals and partisan cultural work at a time of profound crisis in the intellectual field, the communist space was closer to chaos than to monolithism. This situation was keenly noted by party leadership, when they insisted on pointing out the “ideological weakness” of their intellectuals and the lack of cohesion and direction in the work they were doing. Putting an end to these vagaries and discrepancies, as well as to a model of intellectual commitment that could be maintained at a political and generalist level without organic links to the party became an inevitable objective that was addressed both in ideological and organizational terms.

5

The Intellectuals: Definitions and Roles

The First Meeting of Communist Intellectuals was organized based on the aforementioned text by Agosti and another by historian Leonardo Paso. The first document was initially published in the 25th issue of Cuadernos de Cultura in May 1956 and later became the main essay of Agosti’s book Para una política de la cultura, where he brought together speeches and short essays on historical and cultural issues. Although the question of intellectuals had formed part of Agosti’s reflections since the writing of El hombre prisionero, here for the first time he proposed a systematic approach to the problem of communist intellectuals in the context of the debate initiated by the Peronist question, but also of certain liberalizing signs that had been observed in the area of culture since the 2nd Congress of Soviet Writers, held in Moscow in December 1954. In this document, as in subsequent ones, the national question was the main subject where the rest of his concerns converged. The problem was not only how communists should incorporate themselves into the discourses that circulated on the interpretation of the Peronist experience, but particularly the way in which they conceived cultural work and the role they envisioned for it in future political struggles. For this reason, within the framework of the discussion and when it came to defending himself against his adversaries within the party, he focused his arguments on why critics like Roberto Salama and, through him, those who supported him, were the “typical example” of sectarianism and the most rudimentary forms of “sociologism” used to interpret cultural products. As is clear

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from his own notes, Agosti used the observations of Italian communist critics such as Carlo Salinari, as well as the accusations of the “fideism” of French communist intellectuals leveled by Jean T. Desanti in La Nouvelle Critique, to lash out against what he defined as a simplifying vision of the world that attributed a “messianic” role to the working class and the party. ¿Por qué digo que R. S. [Roberto Salama] es la expresión típica del “sectarismo” que en el terreno de la crítica se manifiesta con formas “dogmáticas”? Sencillamente por R. S. ve en todas las cosas literarias simplemente “etiquetas”, productos terminados, ciudadanos que son reaccionarios o progresistas, clases sociales que se mueven antagónicamente sin conflictos interiores: la oligarquía, la burguesía, el proletariado, a veces los campesinos… ¿Y el movimiento dialéctico de interpretación de las cosas? Eso no existe para Salama. Arlt es fascista, Güiraldes representa la oligarquía, Kafka es intrascendente, Fulano es realista crítico, [Juan José] Manauta es realista socialista… Y va pegando etiquetas sucesivas. Yo diría que R. S. confunde la crítica literaria con el Expreso Villalonga. […] Él toma el bosquejo de historia del partido, mira lo que en ese bosquejo se dice a propósito de determinado período y si el producto literario que examina no coincide con esa descripción le adosa en seguida alguna etiqueta fulminante. […] Desde luego que semejante dogmatismo (cada cosa en su casillero) nada tiene que ver con el marxismo, nada tiene que ver tampoco con la doctrina leninista de la herencia cultural, nada tiene que ver con la crítica literaria que no mira solamente contenidos…43 [Why do I say that R. S. [Roberto Salama] is the typical example of the “sectarianism” which in terms of criticism manifests itself in “dogmatic” forms? Quite simply because in all things literary R. S. sees simply “labels,” finished products, citizens who are reactionary or progressive, social classes that move antagonistically without inner conflicts: the oligarchy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, sometimes the campesinos... And the dialectical movement of the interpretation of things? That, for Salama, does not exist. Arlt is fascist, Güiraldes represents the oligarchy, Kafka is inconsequential, so-and-so is a critical realist, [Juan José] Manauta is a socialist realist… And so on with successive labels. I would say that R. S. confuses literary criticism with the Villalonga Express. […] He takes the outline of the party’s history, looks at what is said in that outline about a certain

43 “Apuntes para una reunión,” FHPA/CeDInCI.

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period and if the literary product he examines does not match that description, he immediately applies some withering label to it. […] Of course, such dogmatism (everything in its own compartment) has nothing to do with Marxism, nothing to do either with the Leninist doctrine of cultural heritage, nothing to do with literary criticism that looks beyond content…]

Though focused on a minor interlocutor such as Roberto Salama, Agosti’s remarks were aimed at refuting a mode of conceiving culture that was supported by the party leadership, particularly Rodolfo Ghioldi, who publicly declared himself a “Salamist,” a unsurprising confession but one that was no doubt at the root of the party’s negative assessment of those discussions.44 Agosti’s initiative was, however, successful in many ways, since it not only made way for the beginning of a brief, limited, and ultimately unsuccessful turn toward new intellectual perspectives inspired by Gramsci, but also positioned him as the only communist intellectual able to articulate a response to the demands of the new political and intellectual climate, which, although it distanced itself from liberal cultural heritage, did not condemn it en bloc. Faithful to the legacy of his teacher Aníbal Ponce, and with him the conceptions of Lenin—at a time when a return to Leninism was the order of the day—Agosti was successful in rejecting any attempt at a radical break with the past that would bring about a proletarian or revolutionary art in an artificial manner or based on administrative decrees. Furthermore, Agosti’s text had unprecedented repercussions abroad, where it was translated and discussed as a “lucid reflection” on the problem of ideological allies and a model for combating “all forms of sectarianism.”45 The Revista Brasiliense, directed by Caio Prado Jr., published an extensive and laudatory commentary, and the text was part of the discussions initiated in the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) following the 20th Congress. “El libro —le escribía a Agosti el

44 In several unpublished notes by José María Aricó, taken from an interview he conducted with Roberto Salama in 1987, he states that after the meeting of intellectuals, the Central Committee conducted a very critical assessment of the experience. According to Aricó, Codovilla likely stated that the objective of the conference had been distorted, since it was not about creating a situation that would force people to come out for or against Salama, but rather about moving forward with the unity of intellectuals (José María Aricó, unpublished notes, Fondo José María Aricó/José María Aricó Collection, Biblioteca José María Aricó/Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC); FJMA/UNC). 45 Letter from Vicente Parrini to Héctor P. Agosti, Santiago, January 25, 1957, FHPA/CeDInCI, Correspondencia series.

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poeta Elvio Romero refiriéndose a Para una política de la cultura— ha tenido trascendencia en las mismas cúspides. Tanto es así que uno de los de nuestra familia te visitará para recoger de ti mucho de lo que debemos todavía aprender.” [The book—wrote poet Elvio Romero to Agosti in reference to Para una política de la cultura—has had an impact at the highest levels. So much so that a member of our family will visit you to garner from you much of what we have yet to learn.]46 The document situated itself in the context of the intellectuals that had undertaken an interpretation of Peronism which sought to overcome the typically liberal thesis that reduced the whole movement to the demagogic gifts of a leader capable of seducing the uneducated masses. Without distancing himself from the official view that Peronism had constituted a “corporative-fascist” experiment, he affirmed that the argument of demagogy could be accepted as long as it was noted that it had flourished thanks to pre-existing sentiments such as social justice and anti-imperialism in the consciousness of the masses: “To simply abhor demagogy is not enough, at least in those who presume to practice the profession of thinking.”47 In a tone that associated him with those who sought to examine Peronism beyond the “pathological vision,” as Mariano Plotkin defined it, organized by the journal Sur, Agosti was, however, less sympathetic with respect to the disruptive aspects of the deposed regime and regarded it only as a terminus which, in the form of a “monstrous tyranny,” had merely extended the period that began with the 1930 coup and which was now continuing with the government of the so-called Revolución Libertadora (Liberating Revolution).48 Committed to the characterization that for almost thirty years had dominated the communist analysis of Argentine reality, Agosti affirmed that if the same oligarchical elites succeeded each other under different forms, the reasons were to be found in the country’s structural crisis, which could only be overcome through the bourgeois-democratic revolution led by the working class and its vanguard party. However, he continued, given the critical circumstances the country was undergoing, the communists 46 Letter from Elvio Romero to Héctor P. Agosti, São Paulo, June 6, 1956, FHPA/CeDInCI, Correspondencia series. 47 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, Buenos Aires, Procyon, 1956, p. 10. 48 Revolución Libertadora refers to the civil-military dictatorship that ruled Argentina following the coup d’état ousting Juan Domingo Perón in September 1955.

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had to be ready to support any attempt by the government to overcome the chaos and return to the path of democratic coexistence, which in the communist jargon of the time took on the form of the Frente Democrático Nacional (National Democratic Front). For Agosti, this was the context in which to consider the role that men of culture could play in the establishment of a correlation of forces favorable to the transformations needed by the country. With this objective in mind, the text can be analyzed on the basis of its desire to respond to three fundamental questions: (a) what is an intellectual?; (b) what was the specific nature of the Argentine cultural crisis?; (c) what policy of alliances should the party establish in accordance with both this characterization and the way of conceiving previous cultural traditions? Regarding the first point, Agosti appealed to familiar jargon by defining the intellectual using the substantialist terms of the Diccionario soviético de Filosofía: intellectuals constitute an intermediate social stratum consisting of people dedicated to intellectual labor. It includes everything from engineers and technicians to doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, and scientists. This social stratum, inasmuch as it cannot constitute a class because it lacks an independent position in the system of social production, does not possess its own ideology, and its political involvement is defined by the interests of the classes it serves. Because of their imprecise placement in the system of social production, intellectuals belong to the middle classes and share their ambivalence.49 This definition, he clarified, must be accompanied by a specification of what distinctively characterized intellectual labor, that is, its individual nature and its lack of integration in the system of capitalist production. It is this particularity that enables distinctions to be made within that conglomeration which might otherwise be seen as erroneously homogeneous, for this contradiction is only expressed with great clarity in certain categories of intellectuals, as in the case of writers and artists (it is less evident in the case of lawyers and even less so among doctors and engineers, he clarified). This is important, however, since it is in the realm of creation that the issue of ideology becomes the most pressing. Capitalism, he explained, tends to present this particular situation in the sublimated form of a spiritual elite, fostering the feelings of autonomy and superiority that prevent intellectuals from accepting their condition as wage earners and, above all, overcoming the “false

49 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., p. 14.

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consciousness” that leads them to believe that the ideas they work with have nothing to do with concrete social and economic processes. Indeed, as Marx had observed in his Theories of Surplus Value, the process of capitalist production is not a simple production of commodities, but a process that absorbs living (unpaid) labor, converting the means of production into the means of absorbing unpaid labor.50 From this point of view, that is, from the dependence on surplus value as a source of wages, Agosti explained that intellectual labor represents productivity for the “capitalist” (from the owner of a laboratory to a marchand or a publisher) and converts the intellectual into a wage earner from whom profits are obtained. These benefits are, as we shall see below, both economic and ideological. Regarding their place in the social structure, in Agosti’s view intellectuals are part of the middle strata and are characterized by a growing proletarianization of their work, a point that Marxists had noted since the Second International and the debate on revisionism. The awareness of this situation, he continued, leads intellectuals, and above all certain categories of them, to trade unionism and integrates them into the broader struggles for general demands, albeit maintaining them on an economistic plane that detaches them from politics. For this reason, the problem of intellectuals had to be approached through a lens different from that of the trade unions, just as their place in the social structure acquired a particular inflection in dependent societies such as Argentina’s, where social antagonism did not develop between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but rather between the people and those who did not form a part of it.51

50 In 1920, the Austro-Marxist Max Adler had appealed to the same texts by Marx to reflect on the question of intellectuals in the context of his theoretical reflections on the debate on revisionism. Rejecting a purely sociological approach to the problem and posing the relationship between intellectuals and the workers’ movement in specifically cultural terms, Adler claimed that the fact that only labor that yields profit is considered productive in capitalist society dramatically affects cultural and scientific activity. Capitalism’s denial of the creativity of human labor joined intellectuals with other social strata and was a fundamental factor in their political integration and in the role that theory should play in the strategy of the social-democratic parties. See Leonardo Paggi, “Intelectuales, teoría y partido en el marxismo de la Segunda Internacional: Aspectos y problemas,” in Max Adler, El socialismo y los intelectuales, Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1980, pp. 108 and ss. 51 For more on the concept of “people” in Agosti, see Guillermina Georgieff, Nación y revolución: Itinerarios de una controversia en Argentina (1960–1970), Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2008, pp. 255–259.

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Si, en efecto, los intelectuales constituyen una capa social intermedia, esto quiere decir que en los países dependientes, y por lo tanto en el nuestro, la mayoría de los intelectuales forman parte del pueblo, entendiendo por “pueblo” las fuerzas objetivamente opuestas a la negación nacional y representada por la presencia del imperialismo y la persistencia de remanentes feudales. Acaba de decir Prestes que en la palabra “pueblo” incluye “desde obreros y campesinos hasta vastos sectores de la burguesía brasileña”, precisando así la inteligencia de una política que presupone necesariamente la reunión de todos los factores objetivamente concurrentes al proceso de liberación nacional.52 [If, in fact, intellectuals constitute an intermediate social stratum, this means that in dependent countries, and therefore in ours, the majority of intellectuals are part of the people,where “people” means the forces objectively opposed to national denial and represented by the presence of imperialism and the persistence of feudal remnants. Prestes has just stated that in the word “people” he includes everyone “from workers and campesinos to vast sectors of the Brazilian bourgeoisie,” thus indicating the intelligence of a policy that necessarily presupposes the gathering of all of the factors objectively concurrent to the process of national liberation.]

As part of the “people,” intellectuals should objectively be considered part of the forces destined to transform society in a national and anti-imperialist, that is, bourgeois-democratic direction. But this, Agosti continued, was insufficient in analyzing the specific way in which the intelligentsia should be integrated into the national struggles, since what defined its social function was not the productivity of its work, but its “unproductive facet.” In this dimension, intellectuals could be

52 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., p. 17 (emphasis in original). The reference to Prestes is not an innocent one. As Gerardo Leibner has pointed out: “In the early fifties the Communist Party of Brazil, and Prestes in particular, had acquired the position of regional communist leader, semi-officially recognized in various ways by the Soviet authorities. […] In those years, Latin American communists were advised to study the PCB’s program, drafted in 1952, as an exemplary text, adapted to the new continental situation (especially as it considered American imperialist domination and penetration as the main contradiction to be overcome by communists in Latin America). The PCB had displaced, to use a somewhat simplistic term, the Communist Party of Argentina in the role of exemplary or leading Latin American Communist Party” (Gerardo Leibner, Camaradas y compañeros, op. cit., p. 209).

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defined under a Gramscian lens as “forgers —or at least transmitters— of ideology.”53 But what ideology? To a large extent, that of the ruling classes, since they are the ones that exert the greatest pressure on the literate and educated sectors and use culture as a tool for their hegemony. This means that capitalism obtains a double benefit from the intellectual, since economic coercion is accompanied by a “moral” subjugation in which intellectuals are forced to degrade their production to adjust it to the exigencies of the capitalist enterprise or to waste their talent on the demands of a “second trade,” as was the case particularly among writers. This is the “drama” of the intellectual understood not as a mere wage earner, but as a “creator.” But intellectuals, he continued, were not always able to observe the connections that existed between their problems qua intellectuals and the structural phenomena causing them, particularly because they were burdened by all the prejudices of the middle class. However, when faced with a situation of total crisis, as was the case in Argentina, the economic awareness of their condition was more easily connected to a reflection on the general problems of society, which could be seen, he noted, in the proliferation of intellectual contributions that in recent years had set out to address national problems and the country’s future. This heightened awareness, although potentially fertile ground for trade union action, should be considered by the party as a fundamentally ideological problem: Somos el partido de la clase obrera, y en las actuales condiciones del país y del mundo el partido de la clase obrera representa el partido de la “síntesis nacional”, el partido que define, con su teoría y con su práctica, la necesaria integración de todas las fuerzas nacionales capaces de realizar la revolución democrática. La condición “improductiva” del trabajo intelectual (aquella que el joven Marx subraya intencionalmente al escribir que: “La primera libertad para la prensa consiste en no ser una industria”) se realza en la medida misma en que resulta necesario acentuar —en medio de los debates actuales sobre la calidad del país y su cultura— el papel de la voluntad consciente, o sea el papel de la ideología. Sin voluntad consciente de transformar la naturaleza concreta de la sociedad argentina es imposible que dicha transformación se realice coherentemente. Esta premisa fue siempre válida, pero esta premisa resulta impostergable ahora precisamente porque

53 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., p. 19.

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ahora asistimos al crecimiento de las fuerzas materiales objetivas capaces de accionar aquella voluntad consciente.54 [We are the party of the working class, and given the current conditions of the country and the world, the party of the working class represents the party of “national synthesis,” the party that defines, through its theory and practice, the necessary integration of all of the national forces capable of carrying out the democratic revolution. The “unproductive” condition of intellectual labor (which the young Marx deliberately emphasizes when he writes that “the primary freedom of the press lies in not being a trade”) is highlighted to the very extent that it proves necessary to stress —in the midst of current debates on the quality of the country and its culture— the role of conscious volition, that is to say, the role of ideology. Without a conscious will to transform the concrete nature of Argentine society, it is impossible for such a transformation to take place coherently. This premise has always been valid, but it is now urgent precisely because we are now witnessing the growth of the objective material forces capable of activating that conscious volition.]

Confronting the usual economistic interpretations, Agosti granted intellectuals a decisive role in the acceleration of mass consciousness and, with it, culture as an essential dimension of the political-ideological battle, without distancing himself from the vanguardism that, from Kautsky and Bernstein to Lenin, conceived the role of intellectuals as systematizers of an awareness that the masses must receive from the outside. But above all, Agosti completely ignored the fact that in Argentina these popular masses had built their political and social identity around Peronism and that communism was far from constituting a force of significant weight for workers. However, viewed from the perspective of the internal debate he faced, his reasoning constituted a Copernican turn with respect to the usual reductionism in communist analyses of culture and its relationship with economic phenomena. Las leyes del desarrollo histórico son leyes objetivas que la voluntad de los hombres no podrá alterar; pero el conocimiento de esas leyes objetivas permite utilizarlas para acelerar el proceso social, que no es una sucesión —gris sobre gris— de transformaciones económicas y cambios ideológicos que las sigan como la sombra al cuerpo. Por eso representa una ingenuidad

54 Ibid., p. 21.

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afirmar, por ejemplo, que “no habrá buenas novelas mientras no se haga la reforma agraria”, porque ese vulgar sociologismo implica, evidentemente, abolir el papel de la ideología y suponer que el intelectual no es un elaborador de la cultura, y por lo tanto un posible elaborador de la cultura de avanzada, sino un mero papel carbónico que registra acontecimientos de la sociedad una vez que estos acontecimientos ya se han instalado en la naturaleza económica de la sociedad. No necesito decir que semejante simplismo contraría la calidad del marxismo-leninismo hasta rebajarlo a la impotencia de cualquier determinismo más o menos positivista.55 [The laws of historical development are objective laws that cannot be altered by the will of man; but knowledge of these objective laws makes it possible to use them to accelerate the social process, which is not a succession —gray on gray— of economic transformations and ideological changes that simply follow them like a shadow follows a body. That is why it is naive to affirm, for example, that “there will be no good novels as long as there is no agrarian reform,” because such vulgar sociologism obviously implies abolishing the role of ideology and assuming that the intellectual is not a creator of culture, and therefore a potential creator of avant-garde culture, but simply a carbon paper that records events in society once they have already been embedded in the economic nature of society. Needless to say, such simplism subverts the quality of Marxism-Leninism by reducing it to the impotence of a more or less positivist determinism.]

In Agosti’s view, intellectuals were called upon to play a significant role as the vanguard in the ideological battle for “national liberation,” conceiving the problem of the nation in the statist terms of the construction of a modern nation on the consummation of the program of bourgeois democracy. This means that the ideological development of nationhood had to be based on a feudal understanding of Latin American economic and social formations and on the assumption that the independent development of the country could only be achieved in terms of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. Seen from this perspective and translated into cultural terms, the historical understanding of the national problem should not, as was the case in certain sectors of communist criticism, be analyzed under a “workerist” lens that attacked certain political experiences of the past for their bourgeois nature without understanding that therein lay their merit and not their defect, just as communists could 55 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., pp. 21 and 22.

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be neither unitarios nor federales, neither porteños nor provincianos, since such dichotomies concealed the true nature of national dependence.56 According to this logic, the problem of the ideological role of intellectuals was related to an accurate characterization of the country’s cultural crisis, which was the second aspect of Agosti’s report. To begin with, it was important not to fall into the “clumsy and sectarian” standpoint of justifying that crisis solely on the basis of the presence of imperialism and its influence on cultural forces. Following a logic whereby the problem of culture was approached from a dual perspective that oscillated between the postulation of a relative autonomy of cultural processes and the analysis of it in terms of its correlation with economic structures, Agosti returned to the argument, already advanced at the 1945 Conferencia Nacional del Partido (National Conference of the Party), according to which the problem of intellectuals was the lack of balance between their technical conditions and the impossibility of a practical application of their efforts. The ideological “translation” of this situation was the mismatch between culture and nation, which could be dated from the period following the National Organization. This, on the one hand, condemned intellectuals to public marginalization and economic hardship and, on the other, deprived society of a culture capable of responding to its needs. “En pocos países —anotaba Agosti— ha sido menos evidente el peso de la intelectualidad en la vida pública.” [In few countries— noted Agosti—has the weight of the intelligentsia in public life been less evident.]57 The reasons for this discrepancy were to be sought in the disruption of the “historical continuity” that the landowning oligarchy, the “most powerful in Latin America,” had generated as a unique feature of the Argentine cultural phenomenon. The “pastoral vision” of the oligarchy dominated cultural life through a mechanism of the distortion of national and popular sentiment which imperialism exacerbated thanks to the influence of cosmopolitanism. As intellectuals coming from popular nationalism and Marxist nationalism would also end up doing, Agosti contrasted the cultural complex of the oligarchy with the image 56 In the civil war that following the independence of the territories that formed the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata pitted the so-called unitarios (advocates of a national centralized government based in Buenos Aires) against the “federales” (supporters of a federal or confederate system). 57 Ibid., p. 24.

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of the people as the repository of an “independent national tendency.” However, unlike the former, he included intellectuals in this dimension, since he explained the conditions of their “separation” from the people in structural rather than subjective terms. If for Ramos, Puiggrós, and Hernández Arregui intellectuals were part of the system of cultural colonialism that maintained the country under the influence of the oligarchy and imperialism, for Agosti intellectuals, a group in which he only vaguely differentiated the “pinnacles” seduced by cosmopolitanism, were characterized by their democratic tone. Far from condemning the liberal elite, a practice that defined the dominant tone of the reflections on Peronism and to which he would soon contribute, he defended them because of and in spite of their liberalism: La nutrición liberal de la intelectualidad argentina es su virtud y su defecto. Su virtud porque la ha resguardado de buena parte de las seducciones de la demagogia corporativo-fascista; su defecto, porque le acorta la visión de las cosas, la mantiene en la superficie de los fenómenos y la encandila (generosamente en tantos casos) con la demagogia de la libertad. Pero este complejo ideológico-político es lo característico de nuestro medio. En él, y no en ningún otro debemos situarnos, porque dentro de este complejo de relaciones económico-ideológicas es donde han trabajado los intelectuales argentinos.58 [The liberal diet of the Argentine intelligentsia is both its strength and its weakness. Its strength because it has shielded it from being seduced by corporative-fascist demagogy; its weakness, because it has made it shortsighted, kept it on the surface of phenomena, and dazzled it (generously in so many cases) with the demagogy of freedom. But this ideologicalpolitical complex is typical of our milieu. It is here, rather than anywhere else, that we must situate ourselves, because it is within this complex set of economic-ideological relations that Argentine intellectuals have operated.]

Understanding this particularity, he explained, is fundamental for the party’s policy because due to their nature and historical function intellectuals can never break en masse with the traditions that have shaped them,

58 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., p. 27.

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as Gramsci had warned.59 In Argentina, the fact that the majority of intellectuals come from liberalism and hold “more or less diffuse” democratic aspirations should be the starting point for a fundamentally national, rather than socialist, democratic cultural policy, with the “legacy of the May Revolution” as its cornerstone. In light of this objective, communists should defend this legacy and give it an anti-imperialist emphasis in order to differentiate themselves from purely liberal interpretations. But they must also take into account the popular world in order to draw from it those elements of novelty that would constitute the origin of a “new culture.” From a strongly educated and enlightened matrix, Agosti saw evidence of the dynamism of popular culture in the existence of numerous libraries, neighborhood clubs, and youth associations. He sought to demonstrate their attachment to democratic traditions by pointing to the fact that many of them insisted on calling themselves José Ingenieros. If they truly aspired to fulfill their role as the vanguard, communist intellectuals had to transform Marxism into a “sustancia de su propia creación” [substance of their own creation], which meant not only taking on a more precise ideological role than mere emotional attachment, personal commitment, or the repetition of dogmatic formulas, but above all understanding that Marxism “solo podrá sernos útil si adquiere una forma nacional, es decir, si se aplica al examen concreto y original de los fenómenos argentinos” [can only be useful to us if it acquires a national form, that is, if it is applied to the concrete and unique examination of the Argentine phenomena].60 This Marxism with a “national form” would only be possible by granting a relevant place to theory, an attitude lacking in some comrades who, he complained, boasted they were “practical realists.” For Agosti, the adoption of Marxism as a “creative method” to examine national life must inevitably lead to the conclusion that the greatest errors of the party came from a dogmatic and sectarian perception of the country’s cultural panorama. As a result, he argued, what prevailed was the idea that in the ideological battle it was impossible to establish alliances, or that such alliances should be merely tactical, a concept that should be contrasted with that of an “all-out war.” To consider the

59 See Antonio Gramsci, Los intelectuales y la organización de la cultura, Buenos Aires, Lautaro, 1960, pp. 11–28. 60 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., p. 31.

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cultural field as a reactionary bloc opposed to proletarian ideology was an error that ignored the fundamental fact, as Lenin pointed out in his time, that in certain historical circumstances joining forces with the non-Marxist modern sciences was a way of confronting the most reactionary sectors, as well as the obscurantism to which the popular classes remained tied. To treat the connections between the philosophical and political positions of intellectuals in a particularly complex world in a “crude and simplistic” way was tantamount to not understanding the historical process and was counterproductive to the political ends that the party itself proposed. Drawing once again on the Italian experience, whose positive reception among the communist leadership was more ambiguous than Agosti seemed to think, he asserted: Nos ha dicho Togliatti que en Italia (¿y por qué no pensamos también en la Argentina?) la corriente idealista representa una actitud moderna comparada con las tentativas de volvernos al tomismo y que en sus primeras manifestaciones sirvió para librar la cultura italiana de las groserías positivistas. Y nadie, sin duda, supondrá que Togliatti proponga amenguar el materialismo dialéctico, o sustituirlo con un eclecticismo bastardo, o levantar bandera de parlamento en la batalla ideológica que él mismo conduce con tanta agudeza crítica; simplemente trata de mostrar, en los hechos, las repercusiones ideológicas de aquella “complicadísima maraña de la lucha de clases bajo el imperialismo”.61 [Togliatti has told us that in Italy (and why not in Argentina as well?) the idealist trend represents a modern attitude compared to the attempts to return to Thomism and that in its initial stages it served to free Italian culture from positivist coarseness. And no one, of course, presumes that Togliatti proposes to threaten dialectical materialism, or to replace it with a bastard eclecticism, or to raise a flag of truce in the ideological battle that he himself leads with such critical acuity; he simply tries to demonstrate 61 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., p. 36. Just a few months earlier, the weekly Nuestra Palabra reproduced excerpts from the Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU, regarding the consequences of the cult of personality. One of the paragraphs declared that although the international communist movement had correctly understood the causes that led to Stalin’s empowerment, there were also erroneous assessments. One example was the statements made by Palmiro Togliatti in his interview with Nuovi Argomenti, in which he suggested that Soviet society as a whole had relapsed into certain forms of degeneration. The resolution described this opinion as incomprehensible and unfounded (“Sobre la lucha victoriosa del culto a la personalidad y sus consecuencias,” in Nuestra Palabra, July 18, 1956, p. 6).

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the ideological repercussions of that “very complicated web of the class struggle under imperialism” through the facts.]

Moreover, far from being a homogeneous magma, cultural life reflected social contradictions, even those of the ruling bloc, and conceiving its problems in simplified terms and appealing to infamous classifications was a way of deflecting the struggle against the main enemy, that is, “el imperialismo yanqui, la oligarquía terrateniente y todos los que desde el poder sirven sus intereses” [Yankee imperialism, the landed oligarchy and all those in power who serve their interests], and constituted the greatest obstacle to establishing a dialogue with the forces that in objective terms formed a part of the people, even when their ideological positions were at odds with those of the communists. Displaying a sensitivity to the principles of intellectual debate that many of his comrades ignored or preferred to avoid, Agosti remarked that “critical cannibalism” easily overlooked the fact that the work of honest creators deserved a respect that extended beyond mere tactical reasons: Y me permitirán, por lo mismo, que me cobije en el ejemplo de Gramsci, cuyos “cuadernos” conviene releer constantemente porque me parecen uno de los modelos más eminentes de la crítica marxista: en Gramsci, como lo destaca Togliatti, jamás encontraremos una simple negación o una oposición abstracta entre una realidad y un modelo, sino el análisis atento de todas las manifestaciones de la cultura, en conexión con el mundo real en que se desenvuelven, y no con el mundo de imaginadas cosas que a veces queremos otorgarles en nuestras críticas dogmáticas.62 [And for the same reason, allow me to take refuge in the example of Gramsci, whose “notebooks” are worth rereading constantly because they seem to me to be one of the most eminent models of Marxist criticism: in Gramsci, as Togliatti points out, we never find a simple negation or an abstract opposition between reality and a model, but rather the attentive analysis of all cultural expressions, in connection with the real world in which they unfold, and not with the world of imagined things that we sometimes want to grant them in our dogmatic critiques.]

For Agosti, the problem of “ideological allies,” an issue that from a Gramscian perspective went beyond merely assembling for circumstantial 62 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., p. 40.

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political objectives, was inseparable from the question of cultural heritage and the attitude the communists should adopt with respect to it. Flatly rejecting any hint of a radical break with the past, a move which he interpreted as the equivalent of accepting the theory of “spontaneity” in the socialist movement, and once again making use of Lenin, Agosti distinguished two planes. The first was universal and aimed at a conception typical of Aníbal Ponce: socialist humanism incarnated in the USSR embraced the values abandoned and denied by the bourgeoisie and was integrated into the universal process as a new type of culture. The second was national and based on the definition of what should be regarded as “progressive tradition,” a moment in which cultural processes were once again understood as “reflections” of economic life: Tradición progresista es todo cuanto está enderezado a prolongar la línea de la tradición de Mayo, es decir, la línea de la revolución burguesa, es decir, la línea que a su debido tiempo procuró la aceleración del desarrollo capitalista en la Argentina. […] La “tradición progresista” se interrumpe cada vez que resulta estorbado el proceso independiente de aceleración del desarrollo capitalista; esto es válido en la economía y, por consiguiente, también en sus “reflejos” culturales.63 [Progressive tradition is everything that aims to extend the spirit of the May Revolution, that is, the spirit of the bourgeois revolution, that is, the spirit which in due course brought about the acceleration of capitalist development in Argentina. [...] The “progressive tradition” is interrupted every time the independent process of accelerating capitalist development is hindered; this is applicable to the economy and, consequently, also to its cultural “reflections.”]

If this was the case, Agosti continued, then the analyses that condemned the bourgeois forces or labeled them as “foreign-inclined” must be opposed, because that was tantamount to accepting the nationalist theory of culture and, through it, getting caught up in the strange paradox whereby the condemnation of the association with advanced ideas would end up befalling the communists themselves. Therefore, it was essential to analyze the past as it had developed under its own conditions and, at the same time, perceive the line of continuity with that past

63 Ibid., p. 42.

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from the changes introduced by capitalist development itself, fundamentally based on the presence of the proletariat. As outlined in his 1948 lecture “La expresión de los argentinos,” Agosti maintained that the characteristic trait of the Argentine proletariat was its urban and immigrant origins, a factor the communists could not disregard except at the cost of surrendering to the anti-modern predication of nationalism.64 The immigrant integrated the national into economic and cultural territory, and both the “return to the gaucho” as well as the suggestion that the national proletariat consisted mainly of campesinos were erroneous perceptions: Mirar hacia la herencia cultural, que es nacional y universal al mismo tiempo, importa reconocer nacionalmente la línea de continuidad histórica de su pueblo. La revolución no significa una ruptura radical con el pasado, como si a partir de ese momento nos moviéramos en un universo sin memoria; la revolución democrática es justamente esa afirmación de la independencia nacional en todos los órdenes de los fenómenos materiales y espirituales que, en las nuevas condiciones históricas, se cumple bajo la hegemonía del proletariado, alzado por ello mismo a la condición de la más nacional de todas las clases actuantes en el país. Y nosotros, los intelectuales comunistas, en la medida en que lo somos efectivamente, somos los representantes teóricos y prácticos de la actitud histórica de la clase obrera, cualquiera sea nuestro origen social o nuestra posición en la escala del trabajo “productivo”.65 [Looking towards cultural heritage, which is at once national and universal, means recognizing the historical continuity of its people nationally. The revolution does not signify a radical rupture with the past, as if from that moment on we were in a universe without memory; the democratic revolution is precisely that affirmation of national independence in all orders of material and spiritual phenomena that, in the new historical conditions, is achieved under the hegemony of the proletariat, elevated for that very reason to the condition of the most national of all the active classes in the country. And we, communist intellectuals, to the extent that we are effectively so, are the theoretical and practical representatives of the historical attitude of the working class, whatever our social origin or our position on the scale of “productive” labor.]

64 Héctor P. Agosti, “La expresión de los argentinos,” in Cuaderno de bitácora [1949], Buenos Aires, Lautaro, 1965. 65 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., p. 48.

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Culture, Agosti concluded, was a political-ideological battlefield that the party should consider as much as the ruling classes did, and it was therefore important to understand that culture was not a matter of interest only to intellectuals, but to the people as a whole, in that they were also affected by the distortion or omission of their problems. To interest the working class in culture was tantamount to wresting it away from simple economism and increasing its class consciousness; hence the importance of winning over intellectuals, since they were the ones charged with developing the new culture that the people could not achieve on their own. This was not equivalent to the “petty bourgeois” pretension of promoting a “proletarian culture,” since there was a substantial difference between going to the people and being the people, a task he vaguely defined as the need to “elaborar los elementos de una cultura democrática que realice la integración de todos los valores del pueblo-nación en la etapa que nos toca vivir” [develop the elements of a democratic culture that integrates the values of the people-nation for the stage we are currently experiencing].66 Moving toward a distinction that would become more perceptible in Nación y cultura, Agosti appeared to be contrasting an educated conception of popular culture with the expressions of mass culture, particularly cinema and the radio, which he saw as a harmful influence that must be carefully criticized. Resorting to a common topic in essayism at the time, in addition to denouncing the cultural penetration of imperialism, he highlighted its decadence, which was expressed fundamentally in moral terms: comic books, noir fiction, and “the philosophy of Superman” “denigran la condición humana, desmoralizan al hombre y le destruyen su fe en la vida para convertirlo después en un robot pasivo y psicoanalizable” [denigrate the human condition, demoralize man, and destroy his faith in life, turning him into a passive and psychoanalysis-bound robot].67 In this regard, the communists had to find an ally in bourgeois humanism, because while concentrating their forces on their principal enemy, their truncated solutions could be contrasted with the “total solutions” of socialist humanism. What is clear is this: if this program had demonstrated its limitations in terms of attracting the support of liberal intellectuals up

66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., pp. 49 and 50.

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to that point, it was now nearly impossible within the context of the revelations of the 20th Congress, which were already known to all even more so after the Hungarian events. This battle to position the USSR as a concrete example of the achievements of socialist humanism was connected to another issue, this time posed in generational terms. Marxism, Agosti pointed out, was exerting an unusual power of attraction on the younger generation, which was experiencing an “ideological crisis.” This movement was being guided by formulas designed to hinder it; thus the idea of an “open Marxism” which, he reasoned, procura mezclar ciertas nociones del marxismo con algunos brebajes existencialistas, para exaltar al joven Marx de los primeros escritos, no liberado totalmente del hegelianismo, frente al pensador maduro que coloca sobre sus verdaderos pies a la dialéctica y eleva el socialismo a la condición de ciencia; ya estamos viendo a uno de sus profetas, el señor Merleau-Ponty, señalado como filósofo máximo de nuestro tiempo en tantos papeles que se imprimen entre nosotros.68 [seeks to merge certain notions of Marxism with a few existentialist concoctions to exalt the young Marx of his early works, not yet entirely freed from Hegelianism, as opposed to the mature thinker who sets dialectics on its feet and elevates socialism to the status of a science; we are already seeing one of its prophets, Mr. Merleau-Ponty, singled out as the greatest philosopher of our time in the many articles that are being printed in our midst.]

In conclusion, if Marxism from a national perspective, which for Agosti must constitute the crux of the ideological development of the communists, was forced to measure itself against the modern bourgeois sciences, this openness found its stumbling block in the possibility of a new left flourishing in the country. In a letter addressed a few months earlier to Gustavo Roca, a young lawyer from Córdoba, Agosti expressed it more clearly when he harshly criticized the movement of intellectuals and artists that in August 1955 had published the “Manifiesto de los ciudadanos de Córdoba,” in which, in response to the bombing of Plaza de Mayo, they

68 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., p. 51.

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denounced an attempted coup d’état by the conservative and oligarchic forces.69 Permítame decirle que en este rebrote de una acción política “independiente” de la pequeña burguesía intelectual veo un punto de retroceso en la evolución argentina. Fíjese usted que su programa no aspira simplemente a decir cosas específicas de los intereses de estos grupos “independientes” como tales, sino a incidir sobre problemas generales de la vida argentina con un signo que, en términos de política, podríamos llamar de “izquierda”. Pero hay aquí una heterogeneidad de formas vagas que habrán de llevar naturalmente (me permito preverlo) al fracaso del movimiento que uds. propician. […] ¿Cuál será el contenido real de su programa? ¿Acaso la postulación de una nouvelle gauche al modo francés, acaso sea esa nuova sinistra italiana, con mucho “marxismo abierto” que elimina del marxismo, precisamente, la idea de la existencia de un partido obrero como único propulsor de la conciencia de clase del proletariado? Si eso fuera, comprenda usted que nos veríamos forzados a combatir semejante movimiento, no en resguardo de pequeños provechos partidarios, sino en resguardo de la independencia ideológica del proletariado como clase políticamente organizada a través de su partido, función nacional y social de la que no podríamos abdicar a ningún precio.70 [Allow me to say that in this resurgence of “independent” political action by the intellectual petite bourgeoisie I see a regression in Argentina’s evolution. Note that their political program does not simply aspire to speak specifically of the interests of these “independent” groups as such, but to have an impact on the general problems of Argentine life with an approach that, in political terms, could be called “leftist.” But there is a heterogeneity of vague forms here which will naturally lead (I take the liberty of predicting it) to the failure of the movement you are promoting. […] What will the real content of your program be? Perhaps it is the postulation of a French-style nouvelle gauche, perhaps it is that Italian nuova sinistra, with a lot of “open Marxism” that eliminates from Marxism the very idea of the existence of a workers’ party as the sole proponent of 69 The document was signed by Gustavo Roca, Gregorio Bermann, Horacio Miravet, Lucio Garzón Maceda, and over forty intellectuals and artists and was published August 7, 1945, in the newspaper Córdoba. In June 1955, a group of civilians and members of the Armed Forces attempted to overthrow Juan Domingo Perón’s government by bombing the Casa Rosada and its surroundings, resulting in hundreds of dead and wounded. 70 Letter from Héctor P. Agosti to Gustavo Roca, Buenos Aires, August 29, 1955, FHPA/CEFMA.

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the class consciousness of the proletariat? If that were the case, you must understand we would be forced to combat such a movement, not for the sake of petty party gains, but for the sake of the ideological independence of the proletariat as a class organized politically through its party, a national and social role which we could not at any cost afford to abdicate.]

At the end of his report, Agosti returned to internal issues by discussing the significance the meeting should have for considering, specifically, the relationship between the party and its intellectuals. To begin with, there was a need to take into account that although the party could easily be considered the only political organization in the country that had addressed the specific problems of intellectual labor, this work lacked coordination, which such a meeting should help resolve. This coordination did not imply an interference of the organization in specific matters of intellectual activity, because, he affirmed sophistically, this would be tantamount to considering that intellectuals did not participate in the party’s political decisions. While intellectuals, he reasoned, contributed to developing the policy line that they then executed, the leading role of the party consisted only in defining a “uniformity of tendency,” which did not correspond to a “uniformity of expression,” as his critics pointed out. Given this objective, although there was no statutory obligation for communists to study Marxism, the party asked its intellectuals to integrate Marxism (the party’s philosophy and therefore the philosophy of the working class, it was said) into their work. Therefore, the role of communist intellectuals as vanguard intellectuals was to provide the ideological elements required for the agitation of the party’s agenda.71 In short, Agosti’s approach aimed to bring about what we have dubbed the “process of professionalization of communist intellectual labor” by assigning it a different orientation from that of Zhdanovist workerism. This involved the rejection of certain forms of criticism, particularly in the field of literature and art, as well as conceptions close to nationalist essayism. Aware of the need for a revision of the cultural traditions inherited from liberalism, but conscious that this reconsideration might lead to a rupture, Agosti pursued a move in two directions. On the one hand, he argued that intellectuals, because they belonged to the middle classes, should objectively be considered part of the people, the core of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. This conclusion pushed the 71 Héctor P. Agosti, Para una política de la cultura, op. cit., p. 54.

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party to adopt a policy of co-optation which, given the conditions of the growing proletarianization of intellectual labor in capitalist societies, could assume the form of unionism and corporatist demands. On the other hand, he differentiated intellectuals from the conglomerate of the middle classes and the people because of the specifically ideological function they performed. Viewed from this perspective, the problem was no longer reduced to a narrow economism and acquired its full significance: as communicators—and even creators—of the ideology of the competing classes or social groups in society, intellectuals played a major role in the process of transforming the consciousness of the masses. Therefore, the party needed to address them in terms of their ideological role and not merely as a particular type of productive worker. This objective could not be achieved if a reductionist and sectarian conception of cultural phenomena was sustained, since such a stance prevented an accurate characterization of the intellectual world and the establishment of a policy of alliances with the liberal and democratic sectors, which were not only the overwhelming majority, but also indispensable elements in the fight against obscurantism, Hispanism, cosmopolitanism, and mass culture, all manifestations of the enemy within the realm of culture. However, since those same liberal sectors had proven incapable of fulfilling their historical duties and had progressively distanced themselves from the people, reproducing on an ideological level what a lagging economic structure dictated in the concrete field of cultural organization, the communists had to establish a degree of distance, incorporating a popular and democratic significance into the “legacy of the May Revolution” under the impetus of Echeverría and the Generation of ‘37. The question of intellectuals, then, was closely tied to the question of liberal cultural heritage and the scope of its revision. Agosti distanced himself from the anti-intellectualism that dominated the discourse of some of his contemporaries and which reached its peak in the nationalpopulist essay, perhaps because he owed his reasoning to an enlightenment and rationalist matrix in whose sediment he also anchored his image of the popular world. For Agosti, as for many other communist intellectuals educated in the anti-fascist sensibility, Oscar Terán’s comment on the liberal intelligentsia holds true: “El antiintelectualismo lucía excesivamente comprometido con las barbaries nazifascistas como para resultar

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atractivo…” [Anti-intellectualism seemed too committed to the Nazifascist barbarities to be attractive…].72 This is a substantial difference in marking the boundaries of the permeability of populist pressures on the discourse of the author of El mito liberal, while at the same time pointing out the unlikelihood of his formula in an intellectual context increasingly dominated by anti-liberalism.

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The “Argentine Path” to Socialism and an Ambiguous Balance

If Agosti’s report specified the ideological contours of a party policy for intellectuals, the text of historian Leonardo Paso (pseudonym of Leonardo Voronovitsky) did the same with the organizational aspects, although from a perspective that largely contradicted Agosti’s own.73 A dentist by trade, Paso’s career as a communist historian began at the request of Victorio Codovilla, who, dissatisfied with Rodolfo Puiggrós’ criticism of Bernardino Rivadavia and the value attributed to the caudillos in his book Los caudillos de la Revolución de Mayo (1942), tasked him with writing a response.74 Following the expulsion of Puiggrós’ group and, later on, of Juan José Real, the author of Manual de historia argentina (1951), the first communist incursion into the genre, Paso became the central figure of the communist historiographic space. His lack of devotion to the methods and rigors of the trade, however, relegated him to the margins of the professional field and academic life. He was still a respected figure and enjoyed the trust of the leadership, which explains the centrality of his participation in the meeting of the intellectuals, as well as in the following one, held in 1958, where he debated with the young historian José Carlos Chiaramonte.75

72 Oscar Terán, En busca de la ideología argentina, op. cit., p. 232. 73 Leonardo Paso, “Informe sobre algunos problemas de organización de los intelec-

tuales comunistas, con motivo de la conferencia nacional de intelectuales por el compañero Leonardo Paso,” n.d. (c. 1956), Fondo Archivo Histórico del Partido Comunista Argentino “Enrique Israel”/“Enrique Israel” Historical Archive of the Communist Party of Argentina; FPCA. 74 See Omar Acha, Historia crítica de la historiografía argentina, vol. I: Las izquierdas en el siglo XX, Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2009, p. 160. 75 The Second Meeting of Communist Intellectuals was held on December 13 and 14, 1958, and was attended by representatives from the City of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires

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For the author of Rivadavia y la línea de Mayo (1960), the labor of intellectuals in the party was completely insufficient. Up until that moment, culture had been the concern of a few comrades and not a collective effort by the entire party, which highlighted an ideological weakness in confronting political-cultural debates and the lack of organization of the intellectual groups themselves, with little capacity for recruitment. However, he pointed out, the growth of the intellectual sectors was the most significant in the history of the party. In addition, although the creation of commissions for each specialization had succeeded in partially combating the individualism that was the first obstacle to intellectual labor, these had mainly focused on union work, neglecting ideological aspects and operating without any clear direction. With the exception of the physicians, who had managed to connect union demands with ideological work in their specific field (such as Pavlovism and reflexology), the poor performance of the commissions stemmed from the contempt the intellectuals showed for both union work and the need to learn and assimilate Marxism and the party line. More comfortable in their position as “free-riders,” they resisted participating in the commissions in the same way they participated in the party’s cellular organization, irregularly and reluctantly. Writers were, par excellence, the best example of this inconsistency. Finally, intellectuals tended to consider the intellectual front as something that concerned them directly and in which the party should not intervene. Such resistance, which Paso saw as typical of the petit-bourgeois resentments that dominated the intellectuals, had to be countered with a well-known formula:

Province, Córdoba, Santiago del Estero, Santa Fe, and Mendoza. Although chaired by Agosti, the main report was prepared by Paso and had a marked anti-Peronist tone. Cuadernos de Cultura reproduced part of this report in its issue no. 40 in March 1959, along with the contributions of the representatives of Córdoba and Santa Fe, Héctor Schmucler and José Carlos Chiaramonte. The latter focused his remarks on a number of important historiographical questions, including the need for a more systematic critique of liberalism. Additionally, he argued with Paso about the characterization of the “main enemy” in the field of culture, since, he claimed, focusing the problem only on clericalism constituted a mechanistic and unilateral reduction of a political thesis and was inefficient for dialectically evaluating the main and secondary contradictions, losing sight of other variants that were equally functional to imperialism and oligarchy, such as economic liberalism, philosophical irrationalism, or “national Marxism.” See “Los intelectuales comunistas y sus tareas,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 40, March 1959, pp. 127–129.

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Los intelectuales comunistas, como en todos los otros aspectos, necesitamos también ser los mejores intelectuales. Pero esto no se consigue simplemente por el camino de la capacitación especializada. Nadie la niega ni la subestima; por el contrario, debe ser alentada pero al mismo tiempo debemos esforzarnos por capacitarnos ideológica y políticamente, si es que queremos ser realmente los mejores. Esto se logra estudiando y militando.76 [Communist intellectuals, as in all other aspects, must also be the best intellectuals. But this is not achieved simply through specialized training. No one rejects or underestimates it; on the contrary, it should be encouraged, but at the same time we must strive to educate ourselves ideologically and politically if we really want to be the best. This is achieved through study and political activism.]

When these two conditions were disconnected, he continued, serious mistakes were made, such as judging the content of a work separately from the political conduct of its author or attending a scientific congress and discussing the academic quality of the papers presented and not the bourgeois-democratic revolution. “La realidad era que los camaradas consideraban que el frente científico no era un frente ideológico y político. Esta tendencia a separar lo ideológico de su propia actividad específica es una debilidad que debemos ir venciendo, y creo que debe ser una de las conclusiones de esta conferencia.” [The reality was that the comrades did not regard the scientific front as an ideological and political one. This tendency to separate the ideological from its own specific activity is a weakness that we must overcome, and I believe it should be one of the conclusions of this conference.]77 This disregard for the rules of academic debate will henceforth constitute a turning point in the relationship that new generations of communists who received a university education in the midst of a process of modernization will establish with the party leadership. The persistence of this manner of conceiving intellectual labor and, in particular, of working with Marxist theory will be conclusive evidence of the failure of Agosti’s program or of the limitations of his own proposal. Because if his entire argument relied on the 76 Leonardo Paso, “Informe sobre algunos problemas de organización de los intelectuales comunistas, con motivo de la conferencia nacional de intelectuales por el compañero Leonardo Paso,”op. cit., p. 11. 77 Ibid., p. 12.

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party understanding that the work with intellectuals should go far beyond a challenge in trade union terms and that the problems of culture could not be reduced to a simple adaptation of economic and political formulas under binary schemes and with little nuance, Paso’s report constituted a perfect counterpoint guaranteed to endure, as demonstrated by his intervention at the party’s 12th Congress in 1963.78 For Paso, the function of communist intellectuals was reduced to a catechism of Talmudic truths and, ultimately, to unionism for recruitment purposes. That is why the conclusions of his report make reference to a few formulas related to the creation of new commissions, the establishment of groups specifically dedicated to the work of ideological education, or the establishment of collective methods of intellectual labor, but never advance toward a way of conceiving the organizational structures of intellectual labor other than as being subordinate and lateral. Although party authorities concluded that the meeting of intellectuals had been distorted with respect to its original objectives, they accepted the thrust of Agosti’s proposal and indicated that this was the direction that cultural organizations should take. Agosti himself participated in drafting a resolution that exuded a tone of optimism and also included some innovative aspects.79 Returning to the theses of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, which was mentioned for the first time in the context of this debate although without any reference to the thorny issue of the “cult of personality,” the document situated the Argentine problem within the scope of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, the success of which depended on its alignment with the socialist world, the only real guarantor of peace and the independence of nations. In this context, he explained, anti-imperialism penetrated Argentine political and cultural life, allowing for a reconsideration of the problems of national culture and a constant affirmation of the “national conscience” in all areas of creative activity. This process unfolded in contradiction with the attitude taken in official circles, which, on the one hand, yielded to imperialist pressures by promoting “enseñanza libre” (or “free education,” equated with religious education) and, on the other, extended the basic policies of the Peronist government under a rhetoric of liberation. In other words, if

78 Leonardo Paso, “El XII Congreso del Partido Comunista y la tarea de los intelectuales,” in Nueva Era, no. 3, May 1963, pp. 28–41. 79 “Proyecto de resolución,” September 9, 1956, FPCA.

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Peronism had artificially divided the working class and the intellectuals, the government created by the coup was now punishing the people for their support of the deposed regime. The intellectuals had to resist this “encouraged separation,” preventing the dissolution of the popular forces and remaining aware of the unifying nature of the anti-imperialist motives. This also meant being alert to operations that promoted anti-communism using anti-Peronist rhetoric, “ideological blackmail” which the “arrogant mandarins” of Argentine culture were fond of, in a bid to replace the demagogy of social justice with that of freedom. While admitting that intellectuals were particularly sensitive to issues related to freedom, it was noted that the majority had not yet yielded or succumbed to disappointment, making it clear that the conditions were in place for communists to undertake their task of enlightenment, particularly among the new generations interested in Marxism, without forgetting that ideological criticism had to be adapted to the fundamental objective of establishing a dialogue with progressive sectors. The document also put forward several specific questions on the contents of a unified cultural policy, including a correct characterization of Argentina’s cultural dissolution as a result of “metropolitan overdevelopment,” which was considered fundamental. Typical of the essayism of national interpretation, the opposition between Buenos Aires and the country’s interior, expressed in terms of the existence of “regional diversities” and “cultural centers,” appeared as a central element in the task of building an “Argentine road” to socialism. This commitment to an “Argentine-style polycentrism” involved the intellectuals as the main protagonists and required political-ideological improvement on their part based on the study of the “party line” and “Marxism-Leninism,” terms that tended to merge into one and the same thing. They had to integrate Marxism into their own creative activities on the basis of a “concrete” analysis of the national reality. Para los intelectuales comunistas el marxismo-leninismo debe representar una actitud creadora en el dominio de su propia especialidad, no simplemente el conocimiento dogmático de las líneas generales de la teoría. Ya Engels recordaba en su tiempo que conocer los principios del materialismo histórico no eximía de la investigación histórica concreta.80

80 “Proyecto de resolución”, op. cit., p. 13.

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[For communist intellectuals, Marxism-Leninism must represent a creative attitude in the realm of their own specialty and not merely dogmatic knowledge of the general lines of the theory. Engels in his time had already remarked that knowing the principles of historical materialism did not exempt one from concrete historical research.]

This function required flexible organizational structures on a national scale, with the strong presence of provincial committees. Furthermore, the resolution acknowledged that the greater diversification and specialization of the organizational structures that had been achieved through the creation of commissions for each professional activity were not the most suitable for ideological work even though they made the union and organizational work more efficient because there were forms of specialized struggle that did not correspond to clear professional boundaries and, consequently, were left up to individual initiative. For this reason, it was recommended that commissions exclusively dedicated to ideological work in “sensitive” areas such as philosophy, Argentine history, and artistic-literary theory be created. This organization also sought to overcome the ideological discrepancies that the meeting had been designed to resolve, since it required intellectuals to collectively discuss the issues of their respective professions until a unified position was reached. In statutory terms, the document explained, intellectuals, like any other member, were expected to adhere to the party’s political platform and participate in its basic and mass political organizations. But since they were more than just a special type of salaried workers due to the particular characteristics of their work, the party assigned them a role in the ideological battle, providing them with specific structures of participation and demanding they make a commitment that extended beyond themselves and involved their artistic work. It is worth citing the text of the resolution at length, since it eloquently expresses the problematic and somewhat confused way in which the party confronted the question of intellectuals and also demonstrates the limitations and contradictions that a positivist conception of the relationship between theory and politics imposed on even the most liberalizing tendencies: El partido no impone una forma de expresión determinada a sus intelectuales, no les impone siquiera una filosofía; les reclama, eso sí, la adhesión a su programa político, tal como surge de prescripciones estatutarias que todos sus afiliados han aceptado y están obligados a cumplir y hacer

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cumplir, en la medida misma en que ellos también contribuyen a elaborar, responsable y soberanamente, el programa político. Pero el partido —que no es una entidad extratemporal sino un cuerpo vivo que todos nosotros constituimos y animamos— no practica la neutralidad ideológica puesto que su propio programa político está decidido según los métodos de análisis del marxismo-leninismo. En este sentido, al reiterar su empeño a favor de la educación de sus miembros en los principios de la filosofía materialista dialéctica, la Primera Conferencia Nacional de Intelectuales Comunistas los exhorta a cumplir, como miembros responsables del partido de la clase obrera, la función dirigente que les corresponde en la gran batalla por los ideales del socialismo. Ello equivale al ejercicio de la función dirigente de la clase obrera, continuadora de las altas tradiciones democráticas del pueblo argentino, en el gran proceso de la reconstrucción nacional.81 [The party does not impose a particular form of expression on its intellectuals. It does not even impose a philosophy on them. It does, however, demand that they adhere to its political platform, as it stems from statutory prescriptions that all of its members have accepted and are bound to comply with and enforce, to the same extent that they also contribute to the responsible and sovereign development of the political program. But the party —which is not an atemporal entity but a living body that we all form and inspire— does not practice ideological neutrality since its own political program is decided according to Marxist-Leninist methods of analysis. In this sense, by reiterating its commitment to the education of its members in the principles of dialectical materialist philosophy, the First National Conference of Communist Intellectuals exhorts them as responsible members of the party of the working class to carry out the leading role that corresponds to them in the great battle for socialist ideals. This means performing the leading role for the working class, continuation of the highest democratic traditions of the Argentine people, in the great process of national reconstruction.]

In conclusion, given that the function of intellectuals was mainly in terms of the ideological battle and that in this battle communist intellectuals were called upon to play the role of vanguard, there was an urgent need to overcome a model of commitment posed in purely political terms and to integrate Marxism-Leninism into creative activity. The mere repetition of stereotypical formulas that dominated an important 81 Ibid., p. 14.

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part of communist criticism would only be left behind when Marxism was nationalized or, in other words, “applied” to the examination of national problems. Agosti’s remarkable effort to endow intellectual labor with the importance it lacked in party strategy and to develop a critique of the mechanistic and positive conceptions of Marxism, which disregarded any appreciation of the role of ideas in the processes of social change, was a heterodox response to a most orthodox problem: to get communist intellectuals to go beyond a form of party affiliation that remained in the realm of personal political commitment and advance toward a greater integration of Marxism-Leninism in their professional and creative work. In this sense, relying on the Gramscian figure of the “organic intellectual,” Agosti offered a thoughtful response to the struggle against workerism, although he did not deem it necessary to revise the scholastic forms of Marxism that sustained the communist culture he defended.

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Nation and Culture

It is widely recognized that with Nación y cultura and El mito liberal, both published in 1959, Agosti’s essays turned decisively toward the thematization of the national and the break with the liberal tradition. One of the first to perceive this was the Peronist writer Juan José Hernández Arregui, who, with a certain sarcastic complacency, typified in the person of Agosti the revision that the “liberal left” had been forced to undergo when faced with the pressures of national and popular thinking.82 For the author of La formación de la conciencia nacional, Nación y cultura represented such a formidable turning point that he felt it necessary to devote several pages to pointing out the positive aspects of ideas “that had never before been argued” but whose debt to nationalist writers he found clear. In reality, Hernández Arregui was exaggerating his influence, since not all of the themes addressed therein were strictly new, though they were now observed through displaced concerns. It was a costly attempt to identify changes in the popular world and its culture when it already seemed evident that Peronism had left an indelible mark. It was also an attempt to define the contours of a new intellectual elite capable of understanding those changes and of connecting with the people when it

82 Juan José Hernández Arregui, La formación de la conciencia nacional [1960], Buenos Aires, Plus Ultra, 1973, pp. 454 and ss.

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was clear that the cultural leadership of the liberal factions was undergoing a fundamental crisis. The book formed part of a discursive universe dominated by national themes and imperialist motives, whose filiation should also be sought in the ideological realignments of the Cold War. Although exaggerating the Muscovite motivations he always detected in the communists, Hernández Arregui also felt that this context explained the reasons why Agosti had begun to criticize former allies: “Esa misma intelectualidad liberal que ahora en la línea de Occidente determina, por exigencias de las consignas mundiales, el ataque de Agosti al liberalismo”. [It is that same liberal intelligentsia that now aligned with the West defines Agosti’s attack on liberalism in response to the demands of world slogans.]83 The separation of the elite and the people was one of the “shared topics” on which the divergences of the political-intellectual discourses that set out to explore the Peronist phenomenon after 1955 were articulated.84 Due to its social relevance and longevity, one of the most successful positions associated this distance with the elitism and the foreign obsession of the Argentine intellectual minorities, which, wedded to foreign paradigms and fashions, had been unable to understand the social phenomenon of Peronism, whose plebeian nature, on the other hand, they despised. Originating with nationalist writers and reappropriated by the national left, this interpretation, was united with another equally effective one which included intellectuals in the political and the moral condemnation that corresponded to the middle classes, or “moral classes” as the journal Contorno phrased it. This gave rise to a literature of mortification and atonement, as Carlos Altamirano defined it, which achieved enormous resonance, particularly among the left.85 In Nación y cultura, Agosti offered perhaps the most systematic and well-thought-out attempt in Argentine communist culture to understand this phenomenon in view of imperialism’s dissatisfaction with simply denouncing the decadence and degeneration of its cultural products. In Agosti’s opinion, the defection of Argentine intellectuals from their leadership roles and their progressive “aristocratization” said less about the intellectuals themselves than about the structural conditions

83 Ibid., p. 456. 84 Beatriz Sarlo, La batalla de las ideas (1943–1973), Buenos Aires, Ariel, 2001, p. 24. 85 Carlos Altamirano, Peronismo y cultura de izquierda, op. cit., p. 107.

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of a dependent cultural formation. The fundamental crisis of Argentine culture lay in the incongruence between the development of new productive forces and the survival of underdeveloped relations of production as a consequence of the failure of the bourgeoisie to consolidate a modern nation. Imperialism, he explained, while deforming the “logical course” of national development, introduced capitalist relations into certain geographical and productive zones. As a result, a highly concentrated urban proletariat took form in the metropolitan area, which over time acquired more homogeneous features from an ethnic and economic point of view, modifying the alluvial nature of its beginnings through internal migrations and the increased presence of the campesino element. This nationalized working class constituted an unavoidable cultural phenomenon when viewed alongside the inability of the bourgeoisie to impose a cultural agenda that would break with the pastoralist imaginary of the oligarchic elites. The Argentine particularity, then, was that the cultural crisis was not the logical result of the limitations that a society divided into classes imposes on cultural democratization and pedagogical idealism, but the product of the survival of cultural instruments (schools, universities, the various manifestations of literature and art) that corresponded to outdated social forms and which proved incapable of responding to the needs of a society profoundly modified by the presence of the proletariat. In short, in Gramscian terms it was a crisis of hegemony. This was evident in both the decline of the fundamental elements of culture (such as art and literature) and in its legal and moral elements. La quiebra actual de las normas jurídicas tradicionales del país (y sus revueltas costumbres, como dicen los editorialistas serios) implica la exteriorización más visible, y al mismo tiempo más profunda, de la llamada crisis cultural, puesto que indica hasta qué punto los antiguos mecanismos del poder resultan ya inservibles para ordenar la opinión pública de manera homogénea.86 [The current breakdown of the country’s traditional legal norms (and its turbulent customs, as serious editorialists say) is the most visible and at the same time the most profound externalization of the so-called cultural crisis, since it indicates the extent to which the old mechanisms of power are no longer useful in ordering public opinion in a homogeneous way.]

86 Héctor P. Agosti, Nación y cultura, Buenos Aires, Procyon, 1959, p. 138.

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The specifically ideological form of this crisis manifested itself in the separation between the intellectual minorities and the people, and imperialism also played a major role there as a permanent factor in the denationalization of the elites. For Agosti, the “false consciousness” that characterized intellectual labor in the capitalist mode of production was duplicated under the conditions of a dependent country, since it prevented an understanding of the link between the world of ideas and a concrete system of economic relations while fostering the belief that the reasons for national underdevelopment were due to an innate incapacity for self-government, on the other. This doubly false—or doubly alienated—consciousness required a nationalist inflection so that the intellectual could reconnect with the people and undertake an organizing role in the new culture that was already manifesting itself among the moribund contortions of the old cultural structure. La falsa conciencia duplica de esta manera la apostasía porque traslada al plano de lo nacional lo que intrínsecamente venía desbaratándola en el abrupto territorio de lo social. Podría decirse que esas realidades disminuidas representan, lo queramos o no, nuestra cuota gentilicia intransferible, y si bien es cierto que a la historia no podemos recibirla con beneficio de inventario, no es menos cierto que el nacionalismo que aquí se reclama nada tiene que ver con la mención abundante de los símbolos o con la restauración cultural que quisiera cerrarse ante los avances del mundo social. Muchas de estas pregonadas restauraciones, por otra parte, se colocan en el nivel limitado de la evocación folclórica y si acaso censuran a los actores locales de la dimisión nacional, lo es más por la forma de los episodios culturales que por el contenido mismo de la sociedad donde tales episodios se originan. […] Porque quienes mantienen el deslumbramiento ante las potencias imperiales y los persistentes mitos de nuestra inferioridad, tanto como los que hablan a veces de restaurar una cultura en naftalina, conservan inalterada la condición del campo argentino y hablan acaso contra los inmigrantes, aunque nunca (o pocas veces) contra los barones de la banca extranjera. Las viejas estructuras siguen imponiéndoles sus marcas mentales.87 [False consciousness thus duplicates apostasy because it transfers to the national level what had intrinsically been disrupting it in the abrupt territory of the social. It could be said that these diminished realities represent

87 Ibid., pp. 192 and 193.

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our non-transferable national quota whether or not we want it to, and although it is true that we cannot receive history with the benefit of inventory, it is no less true that the nationalism that is claimed here has nothing to do with the abundant mention of symbols or with the cultural restoration that seeks to close itself off in the face of the advances of the social world. Many of these touted restorations, on the other hand, are situated at the limited level of folkloric evocation and if they censure the local actors of the national resignation, it is more for the form of cultural episodes than for the content itself of the society where such episodes originate. [...] Because those who retain their fascination with the imperial powers and the persistent myths of our inferiority and those who sometimes speak of restoring an outdated culture preserve unaltered the condition of the Argentine countryside and perhaps speak out against immigrants, although never (or rarely) against the barons of the foreign banks. The old structures continue to impose their mental trademarks on them.]

The “snobbery”—or rather “cosmopolitanism,” a term dear to Soviet cultural chauvinism and its Western counterparts—of the cultivated elites was a crude reflection of a structural problem, but its meaning had to be considered historically. According to Agosti, during the struggle against feudalism, cosmopolitanism expressed the ideas of progress and was synonymous with bourgeois open-mindedness and the ideological expansion of the world, but with the advent of imperialism it came to constitute a form of annihilation of the national individuality of the people. For this reason, the relationship with the ideas of the world that for the Generation of ‘37 constituted the formula of a culture with its own modalities, as he himself had emphasized in his previous works, later became a denationalizing element and marked an escape from reality of the elites starting in the late nineteenth century: Los instrumentos que inicialmente celebraron la grandeza de la burguesía en ascenso resultan entre nosotros temibles boomerangs de una oligarquía dimitente. […] En la declinación de nuestras fuentes culturales vino a introducírsenos, hacia fines de siglo, la fuga de la realidad concreta bajo los aparatos retóricos del cosmopolitismo. Esta tendencia culmina en nuestros días como fórmula de supeditación ideológica a quienes desde afuera creen necesario manejar nuestro pensamiento para dominar nuestra economía.88

88 Héctor P. Agosti, Nación y cultura, op. cit., pp. 52 and 53.

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[The instruments that initially celebrated the greatness of the rising bourgeoisie have now become the fearsome boomerangs of a departing oligarchy. [...] In the decline of our cultural sources, towards the end of the century, we were invaded by the escape from concrete reality under the rhetorical apparatus of cosmopolitanism. This tendency culminates in the present as a formula of ideological submission to those who, from abroad, believe it necessary to control our thinking in order to dominate our economy.]

This cosmopolitan mentality added to a “physical cosmopolitanism,” Agosti argued, which was established in the country through massive immigration. For the first time, he acknowledged that the lack of emotional ties with the nation’s history of the initial “waves of gringos” may have presented an obstacle in establishing a shared sense of belonging, which in other Latin American countries was articulated around the indigenous past. But he immediately corrected himself, warning that this “de-Americanization” was as much a hardship as an advantage, because through the reciprocal influence between gringos and criollos a new, fully integrated society was formed and, at the same time, completely modified by the uses and customs of the immigrants. Any cultural policy therefore had to acknowledge the alluvial nature of Argentine society, as well as the fact that during the first half of the twentieth century the popular sectors had become naturalized, incorporating new contents and demands. The “anational” groups to whom the bourgeoisie had entrusted the reins of Argentine culture—the journal Sur, the newspaper La Nación—were not in a position to notice or respond to these changes. In the new conditions of the country and the world, he concluded, the solution to this process would adopt a socialist form and not necessarily a bourgeois-democratic one. La paradoja del proceso argentino consiste en que las formas históricas de la civilización burguesa habrán de ser establecidas inicialmente por el proletariado al frente de la nación entera. Pero esta civilización burguesa no será la clásica que pudieron soñar los hombres de nuestra emancipación americana. Por la presencia activa de la clase obrera es ya una civilización burguesa a medias, prólogo de la civilización socialista. La comunidad de cultura no es ajena a esta divergencia ni a esta integración.89

89 Ibid., p. 131.

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[The paradox of the Argentine process lies in the fact that the historical forms of bourgeois civilization must initially be established by the proletariat leading the entire nation. But this bourgeois civilization will not be the classical one that the men of our American emancipation may have dreamed. Because of the active presence of the working class it is already a half-bourgeois civilization, a prologue to socialist civilization. The cultural community is no stranger to this divergence or to this integration.]

The nation, said Agosti, following Stalin’s definition, is a cultural community, although within it there are contradictions or, in other words, contradictory cultures that are dialectically related in a complex historical process. To reach this opposition between two cultural orders, Agosti first had to establish a broad conception of culture, close to cultural anthropology. Culture, he said, is not limited to intellectual manifestations in various specialized areas such as art, literature, or philosophy, but expresses the totality of the material and spiritual goods created by humanity in the course of its existence, that is, the history of its working practices. In this sense, it expresses the level of development and technical achievements attained by a society at a given moment in its history and constitutes a common heritage of the nation as a whole. However, despite the fact that there is no manual labor completely devoid of thought, intellectual labor plays a specific hierarchical role in the struggle against the spontaneity of social practice, which without it would be scattered, haphazard, and lacking a precise direction, and therefore enjoys a relative privilege over men who, as Gramsci warned, move according to the plans that others have devised.90 This makes culture a complex phenomenon because while technical conquests belong to the people as historical achievements, theoretical reflections in the fields of art, philosophy, or religion reveal the existence of social contradictions, since they are ideological expressions of the predominance of one class over another. Following Lenin, he affirmed that within each historical society there are contradictory cultures and “seeds of a new culture that develops

90 See Antonio Gramsci, Los intelectuales y la organización de la cultura, op. cit., p. 14, and Notas sobre Maquiavelo, sobre la política y sobre el Estado moderno, México, José Pablos, 1986, pp. 281 and ss.

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within the old.”91 Viewed from this perspective, the crisis of contemporary culture lies in the incapacity of the dominant ideological apparatus to satisfy the new social demands resulting from the access of the masses to political life, a distinctive feature of the times. In dependent societies, this process takes on specific forms, given that it is tied to an anomalous national formation resulting from an incomplete break with the feudal past and the denationalizing pressures of imperialism. For this reason, in the historical situation of Latin American countries, cultural antagonism must be attenuated, even if only temporarily, in the face of the extranational forces that seek to prevent the emergence of a new national consciousness. The masses, Agosti reflected, burst onto the social scene in a turbulent way, often adopting political forms that are disconcerting to intellectuals and politicians alike, who grow impatient with the slow and confused nature of the process. However, although they express themselves in rudimentary and technically deficient ways, they nevertheless possess a national content that the intellectual elites, seduced by the emanations of cosmopolitanism, lack. Faced with imperialist pressures that seek to intensify denationalization with the imposition of degraded cultural forms, the people in dependent countries, he argued, react and resist with greater alacrity than the educated classes, and this explains their predilection for folklore, whose resurgence may be reprehensible from the point of view of aesthetic falsification and the political uses attributed to it, but which indicates a new collective state that must be socially integrated and aesthetically rehabilitated. Now, since the proletariat must take on the national endeavors left vacant by the bourgeoisie, a relatively unified content between the elites and the masses—the distinction of which becomes purely technical rather than aesthetic or moral—is necessary for the purposes of hegemony. But these elites are not, or can no longer be, the liberal factions on which until recently certain hopes could be pinned, but rather new intellectuals who emerge into public life in a manner as haphazard as the very masses from which they come. Mientras los viejos mandarines (cuya calidad no siempre es discutible en el terreno de la creación) se obstinan en permanecer como elite apartada de 91 See Vladímir I. Lenin, “Notas críticas sobre el problema nacional” [Critical notes on the national problem], in Obras completas, vol. XX, Buenos Aires, Cartago, 1960, pp. 9–42.

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la intimidad del pueblo-nación, las nuevas elites surgen a veces desmañadamente, despreciadas con frecuencia a causa de la tumultuosidad que su propio origen denuncia.92 [While the old mandarins (whose quality is not always debatable in the creative realm) obstinately remain as an elite removed from the intimacy of the people-nation, the new elites sometimes emerge clumsily, often scorned because of the tumultuousness that their very origin reveals.]

Who are the members of this new elite? Agosti did not elaborate on the subject, although he mentioned some names, including the intellectuals of Contorno. Nor did he go into a more exhaustive analysis of the manifestations of popular culture he recovered, beyond mentioning a folkloric revival among the urban working-class sectors. In any case, what is interesting is the new point of view he adopted regarding the problem of the intellectuals, whom he now considered formed part of a cultural complex marked by changes in popular sensibility. Interest shifted from the elites toward culture, understood in a broad sense, and was at the same time caught between the class determinations that surfaced more clearly and the interests of the bourgeois-democratic revolution that required unity in a national sense. The fundamental problem then was how to reconcile two cultural orders originating from the depths of social antagonism in a manner capable of assuming the problem of the nation as an unfinished task. For Agosti, the crisis of Argentine culture, understood in its ideological form as the separation between intellectuals and the people, acquired a new significance when it came to explaining the reasons that led people to reject the forms of high culture and to prefer, almost instinctively, “disdained and minor” forms such as the “sainete,” “tango,” or folk music, where they saw their most authentic idiosyncrasy reflected. This phenomenon must be understood, he argued, by avoiding reasoning based on the “lack of culture” of the popular classes or the undervaluation of their artistic expressions or preferences, and rather identifying the causes that led to the lack of communication between the people and the cultural products perceived as superior. The answer could not be based solely on the widespread phenomenon of the growing fragmentation of the social world, typical of capitalist societies, but also on the specific

92 Héctor P. Agosti, Nación y cultura, op. cit., p. 147.

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denationalizing process that the country’s dependent nature had imposed on the cultural process, both materially and spiritually. El problema esencial reside entonces en esta nueva vida de los sentimientos populares, irrupción proveniente desde el fondo que empieza a ser ya la nota característica de la nueva condición argentina. Llega un instante en que el divorcio no puede prolongarse indefinidamente sin riesgo de convertirse en negligente deserción ante el hecho nacional, momentos en que la falsa conciencia dispone ya de todos los datos requeridos para su esclarecimiento, a tal punto que seguir arguyéndola en calidad de descargo aparece como pretexto despreciable. Y si es cierto que toda modificación en el contenido de la cultura importa resonantes modificaciones en la sociedad misma —lo que explica que el pueblo por instinto ha sido siempre “contenidista”— no es menos cierto también que nuevas formas vienen a recoger los datos indispensables para que el contenido renovado pueda circular fluidamente y a sus anchas. La voluntad “contenidista” del pueblo, si así puede llamársela, significa en los hechos un ensanchamiento democrático porque implica la aspiración a una nueva cultura no siempre presentida en sus líneas más sagaces.93 [The essential problem then lies in these renewed popular sentiments, an irruption from below that is already beginning to become a characteristic feature of the new Argentine condition. There comes a moment in which the separation can no longer be prolonged indefinitely without the risk of becoming a negligent desertion before the national reality, moments in which the false consciousness already has all the information required for its clarification, to such an extent that to continue using it as a defense becomes a despicable pretext. And if it is true that every modification in cultural content leads to significant changes in society itself —which explains why the people have always instinctively been “contentist”— it is no less true that new forms appear to collect indispensable information so that the renewed content can circulate fluidly and at ease. The “contentist” desire of the people, if it can be called this, means in practice a democratic expansion because it involves the desire for a new culture that is not always anticipated in its most sagacious aspects.]

The correct perception of this situation constituted for Agosti a fundamental element of any national cultural policy since it was precisely the

93 Héctor P. Agosti, Nación y cultura, op. cit., p. 207.

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national condition that must render the expression “popular culture” ineffective as a space separated from intellectual developments. A national culture was, he argued, always popular and massive, because it was based on the sentiments shared by the producer of culture and the people, which constituted the opposite attitude to populism, a form of “bourgeois mystification” of culture on which the defenders of a supposed “proletarian culture” relied, and whose anathema remained a constant feature throughout the book. A national and popular culture could not therefore be based on the inferiorization of the mentality of the people, who were judged incapable of processing products other than those made “for the masses.” On the contrary, an authentic national culture always expressed itself in novel forms, which did not necessarily mean it was an ex novo creation, the other side of “proletkultism.” Revisiting his reflections on cultural heritage, Agosti once again rejected any radical break with the past and its cultural traditions, although he now situated the problem within the context of a greater antagonism in which popular expressions acquired a meaning they had lacked in his previous works. Though this emphasis on contradictions prevented him from fully identifying with the heritage of liberal culture, it also marked a point of distance from so-called bourgeois nationalism which, he argued, promoted the cultural community as a way of masking the ideological domination of the exploiting classes and at the same time once again placed tension on the discourse between the bourgeois-democratic or socialist tendency of the national liberation process: Si es cierto entonces que el pasado constituye nuestra conservación y nuestra revolución en la continuidad que nos corresponde como nación independiente, eso obliga a mirar el tema cultural como problema de estructura, hurgando más en el contenido intrínseco que en sus formas aparentes. Las modificaciones en el proceso histórico —derivadas principalmente del desarrollo imperialista y el fortalecimiento de las revoluciones proletarias— otorgan decididamente un nuevo carácter a lo nacional. Hace un siglo era la burguesía punto de arranque de lo nacional, ahora puede ser aliada eficaz en los países dependientes, pero la gravitación de lo nacionalpopular se ha desplazado hacia nuevas formaciones sociales que determinan una fisonomía igualmente inédita para los componentes orgánicos de nuestra población. Ningún contenido nuevo de la cultura argentina podría

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prescindir de dicha circunstancia, a menos que quisiéramos prolongar nocivamente una relativa ahistoricidad, un estar fuera de la historia concreta y mensurable.94 [If it is true then that the past constitutes our preservation and our revolution in the continuity that corresponds to us as an independent nation, this forces us to look at the cultural issue as a structural problem, delving deeper into the intrinsic content than into its apparent forms. Modifications in the historical process —derived mainly from imperialist development and the strengthening of proletarian revolutions— have decidedly given the national a new character. A century ago the bourgeoisie was the starting point of the national, now it can be an effective ally in dependent countries, but the gravitation of the national-popular has shifted towards new social formations that define an equally unprecedented physiognomy for the organic components of our population. No new content of Argentine culture could do without this circumstance, unless we wanted to harmfully prolong a relative ahistoricity, a being outside of concrete and measurable history.]

The “national” content of this new culture was different from nationalism and, for this reason, Agosti argued, it was important to make distinctions. In the periodization he proposed of the history of Argentine ideas, the 1930 coup represented a fundamental and lasting fracture, since it was at that moment that the Argentine intelligentsia again approached national events as a reaction to the cosmopolitanism of the liberal elites and imperialist asphyxiation. A generation of nationalist “ideologues” entered intellectual life announcing the bankruptcy of the liberal State and the limitations of vernacular liberalism, but cloaked in oligarchic, anti-worker, and anti-communist origins that would become its defining characteristic. Unlike the Generation of ‘37, which they disdained, the nationalists of 1930 opted for a metaphysical and telluric explanation of national problems, a point on which—he enumerated—everyone from a liberal like Mallea to an epigonal nationalist like Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, as well as Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and Héctor Murena, coincided. The “tellurization” of history took root as an aspect of the intellectual “false consciousness” that emerged with the crisis, but for Agosti it acquired the value of a symptom: it was evidence that intellectuals were abandoning the

94 Ibid., pp. 213 and 214.

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most aggravated cosmopolitanism and were turning their eyes to national problems. Therefore, Argentine nationalism as constituted in the 1930s had its share of truth when it reacted against the “double suffocation of oligarchy and imperialism,” but, as Juan José Hernández Arregui had noted, its oligarchic detachment determined the reactionary form it adopted, quite different from the anti-imperialist nationalisms of other Latin American countries. It was its anti-popular character which revealed the “falseness” of Argentine nationalism, and within this matrix the operation which concealed a condemnation en bloc of the revolutionary and democratic tradition under a critique of liberalism was also defined. As he explained at length in El mito liberal, the homologation between democracy and liberalism was part of a reactionary reading of the Argentine past to which liberals conformed in order to claim ownership of progressivism. But, in addition, this “supposed nationalism” encouraged the ideological forms of the disarticulation of the popular under the binary models that opposed the countryside to the city, the gringo to the criollo or, more precisely, the myth of the “two Argentinas,” within which even a supposed indigenist nationalism was developed that, incited by the provincial oligarchies, attracted the attention of reputable intellectuals, as occurred in certain circles of Santiago de Estero and Tucumán.95 This scenario, however, was changing. Agosti pointed out the emergence of a new form of national thought that manifested itself in various ways, including in literature, an essential “seismograph” for evaluating the transformations of the national conscience. Albeit in a confusing and contradictory way, there was the formation of a “literary nationalism” that departed from the metaphysical aspects of its predecessors in order to confront the national problem. There were two models that required differentiation: “bourgeois nationalism,” which questioned cosmopolitanism but was satisfied with a skin-deep gloss of the national, and “proletarian nationalism,” which was inspired by the politics of the working class and was essentially anti-imperialist, the only form in which “true” nationalism was acceptable. Therefore, the national, which was never a fixed entity but rather a complex and contradictory process, meant a departure from liberalism, understood as cosmopolitan disintegration, and from nationalism, understood as blind nostalgia for our 95 In the case of Santiago del Estero, it appears he is referring to the group organized around the journal Dimensión, which Agosti had discovered through Amílcar Santucho.

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remote Hispanic origins. The resolution of the Argentine cultural crisis and the elimination of its root causes depended on the political orientation of an intellectual faction positioned between these two forces. After all, he reasoned, socialism was an “anticipation” in the realm of culture as well, even if it was not an anticipation of the “people as a whole,” but rather of its “social vanguard.” As Guillermina Georgieff has pointed out, with Nación y cultura and El mito liberal, Agosti joined the ranks of political intellectuals who, starting in the 1950s, embarked on an examination of the national question from a Marxist perspective, which constituted one of the most salient features of the intellectual field of the time.96 However, despite the novelties that Agosti’s analysis contributed to communist critical thinking and beyond, it was received with more indifference than acclaim. One of the few critiques that seriously addressed Nación y cultura, published by Francisco J. Solero in the pages of La Nación, concluded that despite the Gramscian rhetoric and his efforts to approach cultural problems in a more complex way, Agosti continued to adhere to a reductionist matrix that saw culture as a mere epiphenomenon of economic structures.

8 The Third Front: The Neo-left and Neo-marxism In his bid for theoretical renewal, Agosti could not count on his old friends and comrades, who due to their educational background—in some cases inadequate, in others unrelated to his intellectual concerns—could contribute little in defining a theoretical-political direction that would allow the communists to establish themselves as a differentiated space within the Argentine cultural field. For this reason, he surrounded himself with the younger generation and especially those who displayed a keen interest in certain theoretical and disciplinary areas, such as history and literature, which he saw as explicit opportunities for communist Marxism, including Juan Carlos Portantiero and José María Aricó and Héctor Schmucler, both from Córdoba. However, when his two most important books came out, the crisis that would lead to the expulsion of his disciples and the administrative shutdown of all debates based on the theoretical rift he had opened was already underway.

96 Guillermina Georgieff, Nación y revolución, op. cit., pp. 13 and ss.

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The subsequent unfolding of the Cuban Revolution, which had begun on the island just two months earlier, contributed to reducing the space of intellection that its program aspired to fulfill within local communism. This called into question the stagism that had structured communist politics for more than thirty years, shifting focus to the possibility which would soon become a reality: that revolutionary changes would only be achieved through arms and violence. Much has been written about the fabulous readjustment produced by that “revolución intrusa” [intrusive revolution], as José María Aricó defined it, among the Argentine intellectual and progressive left and about the crucial role that the Cuban model played in the formation of a new left that emerged from the break with the communist and socialist parties. What is of interest to us now is the way in which intellectual communism theoretically and politically handled the advent of a sector of the left that not only did not rely on the “party of the working class” to envision its insertion in the processes of social change, but also questioned it with a virulence that, while exceeding the classic arguments of the Trotskyist and nationalist critique, was also sustained by them. Agosti was the communist intellectual who devoted the most attention to this rearrangement of the ideological and political field and the one who was most conscious of the potential fate of the party if it was unable to articulate a response that was not simply condemnation or indifference. As part of the ideological battle, he proposed to wage, the author of Echeverría organized a special issue of Cuadernos de Cultura dedicated to what was then known as the neo-left, which not long before had been the subject of a volume compiled by Carlos Strasser in which the actions of the PCA were harshly criticized.97 Under the title ¿Qué es la izquierda?, the 50th issue of the communists’ cultural journal announced its decision to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution by taking up the challenge of confronting the “living Marxism” embodied by the USSR with the various manifestations of that neoleft whose appreciation of the socialist world was dubious when not

97 Carlos Strasser, Las izquierdas en el proceso político argentino, Buenos Aires, Palestra, 1959. The book included contributions from Silvio Frondizi, Rodolfo Ghioldi, Ángel Mariano Hurtado de Mendoza, Abel Alexis Latendorf, Nahuel Moreno, Rodolfo Puiggrós, Liborio Justo, Jorge Abelardo Ramos, Esteban Rey and Ismael Viñas.

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directly negative.98 Several established communists like Giudici, Samuel Schneider, and Agosti himself, as well as younger members like Juan Carlos Portantiero and Mauricio Lebedinsky, participated in the initiative. The prescriptive intention in the title was explicit, since the aim was to clarify that what was presented was a confusing amalgam whose only point in common appeared to be the desire to isolate the communists and, as a result, to deny the hegemony of the proletariat in the historical process. Within that urban middle class “conglomerate” formed largely by intellectual sectors, as Ernesto Giudici pointed out in one of his articles, it was important to make distinctions. The most significant one overall was the separation between those who “honestly” sought to replace a poorly educated working class and those who deliberately distorted Marxism in order to deny the PCA its role as the organized vanguard of the class. The intervention also had a second objective: to discuss the “sectarianism” that led the new left to judge the non-proletarian sectors as a reactionary mass that could not play any role in the processes of social transformation. Guided by a “rigid demarcation” between left and right, the groups of the new left objectively favored the right, since they prevented the unity of the popular forces necessary for the reestablishment of democratic norms, the principal task at hand. In short, as described in the articles by Giudici and Portantiero, the aim was to defend the communist characterization of the revolutionary process as bourgeois-democratic in contrast to those who proposed a directly socialist definition. The repercussions were immediate and the responses did not take long to arrive, both from the national left of Jorge Abelardo Ramos and from the group associated with the journal El Grillo de Papel, directed by Abelardo Castillo. In other parties in Latin America, such as in Uruguay, the issue was the subject of consultation and debate. Each of the interventions sought to shed light on particular aspects of the neo-left phenomenon based on consensus regarding the following: that it was a political-ideological expression of the urban middle classes with a significant intellectual presence; that for the most part it lacked a political-party organization; that it was fed by certain characterizations of the nationalist left and Trotskyism; that it had a propensity to evaluate the Peronist experience favorably; that it was anti-liberal and had 98 Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 50: ¿Qué es la izquierda?, November/December 1960, pp. 1–99. The dossier was later published in book form under the same title by the publishing house Documentos in 1961.

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anti-imperialist overtones; and that, fundamentally, it was critical of the Communist Party both in its theoretical and political aspects. Viewed through this lens, analyses became more nuanced. Ernesto Giudici chose to interpret it within the context of postwar ideological reconfigurations. While a neocapitalism with Keynesian emphases and a Bernsteinianinspired neo-social democracy emerged from the right, he explained, there was a regrouping of splinter groups from the bourgeois and socialist parties on the left.99 Both tendencies, however, shared an opposition to Marxism and sought to establish themselves politically as a third position between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and philosophically as a mediation between materialism and idealism. In this context, both sides evaluated the role of the middle classes on the basis of a false antinomy: while neoliberals and reformist socialists placed the theorization of the independent role of the middle classes at the center of their specialization to conceal their support for the big bourgeoisie, the ultra-leftists emphasized their fatal proletarianization to deny them any role in the framework of the policy of allies of the proletariat. Some on the right and others on the left, Giudici concluded, rejected the Marxist-Leninist position that the proletariat could neither conquer power nor retain it without the support of the middle strata. This general truth took on particular significance in the case of dependent countries subjected to imperialism, where the national bourgeoisie or certain sectors of it played a key role as allies of the proletariat in the struggle against the landowning class and imperialism. For this reason, a proper Marxist evaluation of the neo-left should start from the way in which it theoretically defined the problem of revolution. By denying or obstructing the process of the bourgeois-democratic revolution—that is, the objective laws of historical progress and the role of the Communist Party—these groups positioned themselves in the counterrevolutionary camp and were to be considered reactionary elements. If, in addition, they spoke out against the USSR, they were directly fascist. In the Argentine case, he pointed out, the neo-left consisted of a splinter group of the Unión Cívica Radical Intransigente (Intransigent Radical Civic Union) which was divided into several groups: the Frondizist ideologues who remained in the government to pursue far-right policies beneath a leftist rhetoric, the disillusioned Frondizists who suffered from a fatal “petit-bourgeois leftism,” those who 99 Ernesto Giudici, “Neocapitalismo, neosocialismo y neomarxismo,” in ¿Qué es la izquierda?, op. cit., p. 9.

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aspired to remain in Radicalism from a progressive stance and, finally, those who no longer wanted to be members of the Radical Party and sought to create a political force to dispute the revolutionary hegemony of the working class. The latter, identified with the national left, were characterized by a “reactionary” policy that combined the idealization of Peronism with an anti-liberal nationalism that adopted the classic features of clerical-fascist-Falangist ideology. Like Giudici, Juan Carlos Portantiero proposed a political interpretation of the birth of the new left, although not through the anti-fascist lens that characterized the author of Ideología de la traición y la entrega, but rather from a perspective closer to that of Agosti’s Nación y cultura, although more audacious. Neo-leftism, he said, should be defined as a mindset of the urban middle classes that from the final years of Peronism had become more aware of national and Latin American problems.100 This “sentimental” adherence to the left had been absorbed, with the exception of the Trotskyists, by Frondizismo, which represented a political outlet for middle-class sectors that emerged from the country’s limited industrial development (intellectuals, students, technicians, small and medium-sized industrialists, and merchants), since it allowed them to differentiate themselves both from Peronism and from a simple return to pre-1943 conditions. Given that Frondizism, he continued, was both the cause and effect of the existence of these radicalized intermediate sectors, its failure did not mean the end of neo-leftist sentimentality, which the Cuban Revolution—supported by the USSR, he reiterated—continued to sustain, just as it did not render the possibility of a bourgeois-democratic revolution obsolete. It merely demonstrated that the petite bourgeoisie could not lead it. The neo-left was, in short, a positive factor for Argentine political life, and its negative aspects were the same that had prompted Frondizi’s experience: the ambiguity of the middle-class sectors and the aspiration of the groups of petit-bourgeois intellectuals to lead the “available” mass of Peronist workers. This was, moreover, what prevented it from defining its political stance by joining the PCA and kept it, in most cases, independent. Nevertheless, the new left expressed itself in ways that were far from being reactionary and could even comprise a Peronism that Perón himself began to hold in contempt. In this sense, Portantiero was particularly interested in the experience of Situación, the journal of the 100 Juan Carlos Portantiero, “Algunas variantes de la neoizquierda argentina,” in ¿Qué es la izquierda?, op. cit., p. 59.

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“left wing” of the PSA, despite the fact that he defined it as an eclectic mixture of Peronist populism and Trotskyism. He dedicated several laudatory paragraphs to John William Cooke, with whom he had shared the pages of the newspaper Soluciones and whom he described as the author of the most serious attempt to elaborate a revolutionary theory for the Peronist masses.101 Agosti’s contribution is interesting because it posed the problem from the point of view of its theoretical foundations. He warned, astutely, that the neo-left was also a neo-Marxism, with foundations that were alien, if not contrary, to Soviet Marxism-Leninism and that consequently its “riskiness” went beyond the Argentine political situation.102 The emergence of the new left should be evaluated, he explained, from the point of view of the so-called crisis of Marxism and its main intellectual support: the Sartre of Search for a Method. Taking as a starting point the same article in Les Temps Modernes that he had commented on with a sympathetic attitude in his personal diary, he deduced from it the essentially anti-communist character of the critique of orthodox Marxism.103 For Sartre, he recalled, 101 Juan Carlos Portantiero, “Algunas variantes…,” op. cit., p. 72. The weekly Soluciones Populares para los Problemas Nacionales grew out of the rapprochement between the combative Peronism led by John William Cooke, several dissidents of Frondizismo such as Ismael Viñas and Ramón Alcalde, and the PCA, through Héctor P. Agosti and Ernesto Giudici. The publication proposed casting blank ballots in the 1960 elections and advocated for the creation of a leftist front. It was directed by Ismael Viñas and published 27 issues between 1959 and 1960. 102 Héctor P. Agosti, “La ‘crisis’ del marxismo,” in ¿Qué es la izquierda?, op. cit., pp. 45 and ss. 103 In April 1956, he made the following note in reference to an article published in Les Temps Modernes where Sartre stated that the communists, despite having an incomparable instrument such as Marxism at their disposal, were incapable of generating works that would enrich French thought, offering in exchange a defensive and inquisitorial dogmatism: “Dejando aparte las exageraciones que puedan encontrarse en los juicios de Sartre, es evidentemente razonable su reclamación de obras en lugar de críticas. Eso nos cae de medida a los argentinos. Aquí debemos pasar de lo negativo a lo positivo. La historia económica de la Argentina la escribió el ingeniero Ortiz, que no pertenece al PC; la historia de la ganadería argentina la escribió el ingeniero Giberti, que no pertenece al PC; el libro más eficaz sobre petróleo lo escribió el doctor Silenzi de Stagni, que no pertenece al PC sino muy por el contrario. ¿Y nosotros? Nosotros entretanto criticamos los errores de esas obras, que sin duda los tienen, con una jactancia que no sé de dónde nos proviene, pues mientras ellos, bien o mal, hacen, nosotros nos limitamos a juzgar desde lo alto de nuestro Sinaí ideológico. ¿Qué hemos dado, entretanto, especialmente en los últimos tiempos, a la elaboración de los problemas argentinos?” [Leaving aside the exaggerations that may be found in Sartre’s judgments, his demand for works instead of

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as for certain former communists such as Lefebvre, the supposed inability of communist Marxism to generate new interpretations and to delve into particular aspects of knowledge was what accounted for its obsolescence and provided the basis for the propositions of a “true Marxism” in which existentialism could meet “phenomenology, Weberian sociologism, artistic abstractionism, and psychoanalysis.” This entire amalgam, he pointed out with perspicacity, was organized around a “humanism” that offered to take care of the people that official Marxism had abandoned.104 The result of this operation was a Marxism that he described as psychologistic and permeated with ethicality—whose most successful exponents were philosopher León Rozitchner and literary critic Noé Jitrik—which, nevertheless, had the merit of representing an advance over the individualism and ontologism of traditional philosophies. The evolution of the philosophies of existence toward Marxism, he affirmed, indicated both the death of pure philosophy and the crisis of bourgeois thought. In the context of Argentine culture, these features were also to be welcomed, since they revealed a modification of the classical intellectual models of the ruling elites, who, ranging from the right wing to liberalism, had demonstrated a total ignorance of Marxism. These new expressions of literate culture had the merit of being familiar with Marxism, albeit from a merely intellectualist stance. For the neo-leftists, he lamented, it was more important to measure Marxist philosophy against existentialism, psychoanalysis, and other variants of “intellectual blather” than the fact that militant Marxism had constructed a new system of civilization. It was, in short, a sort of redeemed “academic Marxism,” which operated by detaching Marxism from its transformative ability and justifying its anti-Leninism.

critiques is clearly reasonable. This suits us Argentines perfectly. We must move from the negative to the positive. The economic history of Argentina was written by Mr. Ortiz, who does not belong to the CP; the history of Argentine cattle breeding was written by Mr. Giberti, who does not belong to the CP; the most effective book on oil was written by Dr. Silenzi de Stagni, who does not belong to the CP, but quite the contrary. And us? All the while we criticize the errors of these works, which they undoubtedly have, with a boastfulness that comes from who knows where, because while they do, right or wrong, we limit ourselves to judging from the top of our ideological Sinai. What have we contributed, in the meantime, especially in recent times, to working through Argentine problems?], Héctor P. Agosti, Unpublished personal diary, FHPA/CeDInCI, pp. 70 and 71. 104 See Oscar Terán, Nuestros años sesentas: La formación de la nueva izquierda intelectual argentina 1956–1966, Buenos Aires, El Cielo por Asalto, 1993, p. 105.

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La teoría del partido de la clase obrera aparece suplantada por un socialismo humanitarista y por una búsqueda abstracta de la autoconciencia de ser. A veces se formula un programa (como, por ejemplo, en El Grillo de Papel ): luchar contra la ortodoxia del Partido Comunista. A veces, también, se exalta unilateralmente a un Marx joven y humanista frente a un Marx de duras sociologías posteriores, y se manejan citas aisladas, a las cuales podrían oponérseles, fundamentalmente, otras muchas citas presentadas en su contexto. Ello implicaría, según dijimos, internarnos en el juego de la intelectualización de la filosofía, cuando lo fundamental es vivir la practicidad de la filosofía. La incompatibilidad entre la ideología burguesa y la ideología socialista es, en este terreno, irreductible.105 [The theory of the working class party appears replaced by a humanitarianist socialism and by an abstract search for the self-consciousness of being. Sometimes an agenda is formulated (as, for example, in El Grillo de Papel ): to fight against the orthodoxy of the Communist Party. At times, also, a young and humanist Marx is unilaterally exalted over a later Marx of harsh sociologies, and isolated quotations are used, which could be fundamentally opposed by many other quotations presented in context. This would imply, as we said, entering into the game of the intellectualization of philosophy, when what is most important is to experience philosophy’s practicality. The incompatibility between bourgeois ideology and socialist ideology is, in this area, irreducible.]

For this reason, he concluded, in debating ideas, a reaffirmation of the Leninist nature of contemporary Marxism and, consequently, of the party’s theory was fundamental. From a philosophical point of view, this task required combating the two fundamental theses of neo-leftist humanism: the critique of the theory of reflection and the elevation of the notion of alienation as key to Marxist philosophy and the central point of its consistent development. Both aspects were related, since the postulation of the revolution as an act of consciousness was only valid if one accepted that this consciousness must be introduced to the proletariat from outside and that this task could only be carried out by socialist and revolutionary intellectuals who acquired these qualities within the party of the working class, that is, the “collective intellectual,” according to Antonio Gramsci’s definition. This evocation took on its full meaning when Agosti noted that the Italian philosopher and politician had also 105 Héctor P. Agosti, “La ‘crisis’ del marxismo,” op. cit., pp. 56 and 57.

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been invited to integrate an “open Marxism,” flexible in the face of orthodoxy. The space for culture and intellectuals that Agosti laboriously constructed within an organization that tended to evaluate those issues in a normative and instrumental way was, perhaps for that very reason, as “heterodox” as it was not in both political and intellectual terms. Analyzed from the perspective of his opposition to the party sectors more inclined toward a cultural critique that operated through a mimetic correlation with the political and economic facts, giving rise to a workerist position with clear connections to populist cultural nationalism, Agosti could be said to represent a “heterodox” position. Indeed, his Leninist stance on the need for the workers’ movement to refrain from rejecting the value of bourgeois cultural traditions, and rather to recuperate them as a legacy to overcome, in addition to the incorporation of Gramscian categories that made it possible to consider the role of intellectuals and culture beyond pure economism, are elements that allowed him to further a program aimed at providing communists with a more subtle and complex vision of cultural phenomena and the particularities of the Argentine political-intellectual field, immersed in a crisis of liberal hegemony. However, these gestures of “heterodoxy” in the face of the most reductionist political and cultural codifications coexisted with support for an “orthodoxy” that hindered the development of these intuitions to the point that, in many respects, Agosti acted as a buffer against those he referred to as “los desaforados” [the unruly]. From the anti-avant-garde purges of 1948 to the expulsion of his disciples in 1963, he showed that he was unwilling to take his questioning to the point of compromising core aspects of the political culture and the Marxist tradition which had shaped him. In fact, perhaps the very terms “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” should be reexamined, especially when they are attributed an explanatory and not merely a descriptive capacity. In most cases, these are historically adaptable concepts that only acquire meaning as elements in a relationship that must be subjected to specific contextualization. In short, in the early 1950s, Agosti undertook the task of organizing and renewing the communist cultural space that attracted the most brilliant young people of the new generation: Juan Carlos Portantiero, José María Aricó, Héctor Schmucler, Oscar del Barco, and Raúl Sciarretta. As Aníbal Ponce had done twenty years earlier, he found his interlocutors and even his disciples in that younger generation, but when in 1963 several of them edited the journal Pasado y Presente in the city of Córdoba

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and were expelled from the party under the suspicion of factionalism, the author of Nación y cultura remained faithful to the organization to which he had dedicated a good portion of his life. There may be several reasons why Agosti decided to break off all ties with the young people he had educated and encouraged, and in whom he saw the only potential for replacement and, by extension, survival of the party. One of these reasons, on a personal level, may be that for someone who was already over fifty, the possibility of severing ties with a political identity marked by personal sacrifices, prison, and the retreat into a supportive and effective party structure made it difficult to envisage a life outside that world, subjected to the sort of “civil death” reserved for reprobates. A second reason, of a political-intellectual order, is that Agosti deployed a theoretical openness that never departed from certain vital aspects of Soviet Marxism-Leninism or from the local anti-fascist tradition, establishing a protective barrier against both a revision of the Marxist heritage that necessarily led to theoretical questions of obvious political consequences and a reconsideration of the Peronism that jeopardized the party’s own identity. Finally, approaching the issue in broader cultural terms, Agosti’s attitude can be understood in the context of the difficulties and disagreements that a significant portion of intellectuals experienced in the face of the new generations entering Argentine intellectual life, endowed with knowledge, practices, and political sensibilities that were increasingly critical of the liberal and universalist vision of culture that predominated among the Argentine elites.106

106 John King has noted the difficulties that the journal Sur’s editorial group had in incorporating these new intellectual trends: “It could not alter its tone to adjust to new conditions” (John King, Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and Its Role in the Development of a Culture, 1931–1970, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 132).

CHAPTER 7

Gramsci and the New Left: The Morphology of an Intense Reception

In the years following the end of World War II, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the French Communist Party (PCF), the most prominent in the West experienced a growth, popularity, and prestige hardly anyone could have imagined only a few years earlier, under the darkness of fascism and the Nazi occupation. However, the Italian case was exceptional.1 Under the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti, and under the political-intellectual guidance of Antonio Gramsci, the PCI not only became a party of the masses with notable electoral influence and independence from the Muscovite center, but also exercised a hegemony over Italian culture unparalleled in the Western world. The contribution of communist intellectuals to the modernization and repositioning of Italy in Europe and in the rest of the world was perceptible from the moment a significant number of neorealist writers and filmmakers, one of the fundamental artistic movements of the twentieth century, was communists or sympathetic to the party, and the same was true of Marxist philosophers 1 See Nello Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, 1944–1958, Rome and Bari, Laterza, 1979, and Il lungo addio: Intellettuali e PCI dal 1958 al 1991, Rome and Bari, Laterza, 1997. For an overview of the Italian left during the 1960s from the point of view of its key figures, see Francisco Fernández Buey, Nicola Badaloni, Giuseppe Vacca et. al., El marxismo italiano de los años sesenta y la formación teórico-política de las nuevas generaciones, Barcelona, Grijalbo, 1977. An interpretation of the evolution of Italian communism can be found in Perry Anderson, “An Invertebrate Left” in London Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 5, 2009, pp. 12–18.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2_7

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and theorists. While many of the communist parties in the West debated “socialist realism” and the French gave epistemological stature to the existence of a “proletarian science,” in Italy, culture and politics were articulated within the framework of a powerful party of the masses, with the additional prestige of being a “party of intellectuals” as well. When the cultural hardening of the Cold War years and, above all, the schism of 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary made the diaspora inevitable, the party led by Togliatti embarked on a process of reconsidering the Stalinist experience and, through the theorization of polycentrism, continued for decades to be the strongest and most respectable communist party in the West. Beyond the fact that in practice, the relationship between politics and culture within the PCI was less harmonious and unconstrained than this image suggests, what is important here is precisely the power of attraction this representation held for the rest of the communist world. Studies devoted to the emergence of the “new intellectual left” have focused on highlighting the importance that Gramscian texts had in several political-cultural formations of the period, such as the group of young intellectuals from Córdoba associated with the journal Pasado y Presente. However, there have been few works devoted to the impact and role of postwar Italian culture in the Argentine cultural field, which held great potential for the dissemination of Gramsci’s works in the country. As a chronologically limited but intense cultural phenomenon, the reception of Italian literature, cinema, and Marxist theory reached broad sectors of the Argentine cultural world, although it was particularly attractive to young people who received their political education during the Peronist decade. By the 1950s, Argentine communism had already lost the workingclass base it had accumulated prior to Juan Domingo Perón’s rise to power. Despite its vicissitudes, the Communist Party of Argentina (PCA) remained committed to an anti-fascist characterization of the Peronist experience, which in cultural terms translated into a defense of the democratic and progressive values of Argentina’s liberal tradition, which was presented as threatened by clericalism, Hispanism, and reactionary forces. As analyzed in the previous chapter, within this context some communist intellectuals—Héctor P. Agosti being one of the most prominent— embarked on a process of reconsidering Argentina’s cultural heritage that sought to detach itself from the aspects most committed to and mimetic with the liberal historiographic interpretation. Appealing to the categories coined by Gramsci to reflect on the Italian problem, Agosti sought to

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explain the “Argentine cultural crisis” as the result of dual conditioning: on the material level, it was the persistence of an “anomalous” cultural education resulting from feudal encumbrances and imperialist pressures; on the ideological level, it was the separation between the people and the intellectual minorities. The introduction of Gramsci into Argentine communism’s cultural debate was one of the most important and systematic attempts at renewal that the party’s limited permissiveness allowed and, in Agosti’s case, meant the potential for communism to acquire its own interpretation of Argentine reality, of a culture capable of reflecting on the phenomena of the subaltern popular world under less reductionist schemes more sensitive to the conflicts of non-European cultural formations. But when Gramsci’s work was used to challenge the leadership on political grounds and led to explicit questioning of the theoretical core of the party program, it revealed the narrow boundaries of the potential for that renewal. The cultural significance of Pasado y Presente in Argentine culture of the 1960s has been noted on multiple occasions. One of the most successful interpretations was offered by José María Aricó in his article “Los gramscianos argentinos,” originally published in 1987 in the journal Punto de Vista and later included in the book La cola del diablo: Itinerario de Gramsci en América Latina. From that point on, and through the lens of one of the most astute intellectuals of the Latin American Marxist left, any study that aims to shed light on any aspect of the journal or the group of intellectuals surrounding it must begin by considering its relationship to the Latin American avatars of Antonio Gramsci’s thinking, sidestepping the caveats that Aricó himself raised regarding the scope and risks of his interpretative undertaking. In the works dedicated to analyzing the various aspects of the relationship between politics and culture in the 1960s, Pasado y Presente is considered one of the most representative publications of the “new intellectual left,” a series of political-intellectual groups that after the fall of the Peronist regime in 1955 entered the public debate from the fringes of the socialist and communist left, or by breaking with them, in the context of a generalized crisis of the entire intellectual field, particularly the broad spectrum of the liberal-progressive tradition dominant up to that point. In the dispute that emerged in those years over the leadership of the cultural field, the new intellectual left would be politically defined by its adherence to ideological zones that were either critical or defiant, or progressive and Marxist, and were characterized by their preference for public intervention through journals and publishing

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endeavors, although there was no shortage of those who joined political or political-military organizations.2 This area of the Argentine intellectual field developed in dialogue with an intensive process of modernization of intellectual and university life. The institutional consolidation of the social sciences and the renewal of disciplinary fields like history and literature contributed to the emergence of new intellectual profiles, new ways of using “expert knowledge,” and new relationships between “modern theory” and Marxism that profoundly modified the way culture, politics, and social knowledge interacted.3 The first part of this chapter aims to reconstruct several moments in the reception of postwar Italian culture in Argentina during the 1950s and part of the 1960s. Through the exploration of a network of actors, cultural institutions, and publications, we will seek to analyze the way in which the experience of the Italian communist left had an impact on debates in Argentine communism, introduced a new order of aesthetic and political problems, and generated a space of generational contestation. Although it was not a movement with defined contours, Italian Marxist culture, including neorealist cinema and literature, was appropriated by certain young sectors of the PCA as a means of modernizing and including new aesthetic and theoretical repertoires in party debates. Therefore, our intention is not to carry out an exegesis of the translation and/or reception of certain Italian works or authors in Argentina, but to identify certain agents, spaces of sociability, and intellectual debates that referenced the neorealist aesthetics or the tradition and developments of Italian Marxism to intervene in the local public and party space. In the second part, we attempt to analyze the creation of the journal Pasado y Presente at the intersection of these processes of political reconfiguration and cultural modernization. Our purpose is not to discuss the

2 Oscar Terán, Nuestros años sesentas: La formación de la nueva izquierda intelectual argentina 1956–1966, Buenos Aires, El Cielo por Asalto, 1993, p. 11; Beatriz Sarlo, La batalla de las ideas (1943–1973), Buenos Aires, Ariel, 2001, and Silvia Sigal, Intelectuales y poder en la Argentina: La década del sesenta, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2002, pp. 97 and ss. 3 On the modernization process in the social sciences, and particularly sociology, see Alejandro Blanco, Razón y Modernidad: Gino Germani y la sociología en la Argentina, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2006. For a general overview of literature and literary criticism, see the works collected in the compilation edited by Susana Cella (ed.), Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, vol. 10: La irrupción de la crítica, Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1999.

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existence of a group with a greater or lesser degree of coherence or continuity, nor to detect the various stages of the Gramscian spirit with which the journal identified and from which there were deviations or momentary and eclectic fascinations, nor to defend any kind of first, original, or veritable reception. We seek to analyze the emergence of Pasado y Presente as a cultural group with distinguishable characteristics in the Argentine intellectual arena of the early 1960s at the crossroads of two dimensions.4 To begin with, we will reconstruct the various stages in the reading of Gramsci’s work explored by the young writers who went on to create Pasado y Presente, in particular José María Aricó. Through his epistolary ties with Agosti, we will examine the way in which the author of Marx y América Latina was developing an autonomous reading of the Italian thinker that ended up distancing him from someone he considered an undisputed intellectual authority. This initial peninsular stage, characterized by a closeness to Agosti and openness to new readings and theoretical dimensions, will be followed by a second one, where the interest in Gramsci’s work will coexist with the exploration of new theoretical-practical hypotheses guided by “workerism.” Secondly, we will analyze the break of the group associated with Pasado y Presente with the PCA, leaving aside strictly political reasons (the crisis caused by the emergence of the Peronist question, the impact of the Cuban Revolution, and the schism in international communism following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU]), to explore it in terms of a specifically intellectual conflict between the new generations of intellectuals and the political elites who up to that point had been offering canonical interpretations of Marxism. This conflict, shared by most of the communist parties in the West, was associated with the emergence of new types of intellectuals and a process of cultural modernization that took Marxism as one of its main axes. In relation to this morphological and intellectual change, we will consider the strategies that the journal employed when legitimizing the modernizing role of Marxist culture that it set out to fulfill and which constitutes one of the central elements of its historic significance. Similarly, we will reconstruct the associative framework that the journal fostered and the way in which this confluence of itineraries 4 For a work that approaches the experience of Pasado y Presente based on the continuity of the Gramscian spirit as a factor in the cohesion of the group from 1960 to the 1980s, see the book by Raúl Burgos, Los gramscianos argentinos: Política y cultura en la experiencia de Pasado y Presente, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2004.

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with a shared modernizing and disruptive vocation favored the incorporation of a new order of topics and problems into Argentine intellectual debates, within the framework of the particular cultural configuration that encouraged university reformism in the post-Peronist period and for which Córdoba was one of the main settings.

1 Sur: An Argentine Connection to Italian Literature Critic Alejandro Patat has suggested that the historical reconstruction of the circulation of Italian literature in Argentina should be traced back to three essential publications: Nosotros, Martín Fierro, and Sur. Respectively, they marked the period that spans from the creation of a classic canon of Italian literature—Carducci, Pascoli, and D’Annunzio—the irruption of Italian and European avant-garde elements in Argentina—Marinetti—and the establishment of modern cultural models that have enjoyed considerable prestige from World War II to the present.5 In this process, the journal directed by Victoria Ocampo participated by promoting a “rediscovery” of Italian literature beginning on a precise date: the 225th issue dedicated to Italian literature, published in December 1953. Sur’s “constellation,” through its translator-intellectuals and publishing houses such as Emecé, Sudamericana, and Santiago Rueda, played a fundamental role in the diffusion of postwar Italian culture, which that issue succeeded in legitimizing thanks to Ocampo herself.6 In fact, the centrality that Sur’s director still had in the Argentine intellectual field and the legitimizing effect of the affirmation of her literary tastes, beyond endorsing the exclusivity of a discovery, indicate the degree of “extreme intelligibility” that Italian culture achieved in Argentina following the end of the Peronist government. The anthology that Sur dedicated to peninsular literature formed part of the publication’s process of modernization following the end of the

5 Alejandro Patat, Un destino sudamericano: La letteratura italiana in Argentina (1910–1970), Perugia, Guerra, 2005. 6 See Patricia Wilson, La constelación del Sur: Traductores y traducciones en la literatura argentina del siglo XX, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2006.

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war, when it was able to resume its strategy of opening up to European intellectual trends.7 Following the issues devoted to French and English literature, it was Italy’s turn through a selection that included an extensive sample of the peninsular “republic of letters,” including Antonio Gramsci, some of whose Letters from Prison were translated by Hernán Mario Cueva. Ocampo chose to accompany the selection with an editorial in which she emphasized the “dual rootedness” (“con la tierra visible y con el aire invisible” [with the visible earth and the invisible air], she metaphorized) whereby in Italian production quality literature coexisted with the writer’s ethical commitment. Shocked by the vision of Bicycle Thieves, she noted in contrast that the predilection of contemporary writers for describing “the hell” in which the modern world was immersed had made them forget that one of the main functions of art was to transmit the loftiest and finest sentiments.8 Ladrones de bicicletas, la obra maestra del cinematógrafo de estos últimos años, nos da subterráneamente el sentimiento del que hablo. Ese padre y ese niño que viven en un mundo estrecho, sórdido, inicuo —y que desearíamos instantáneamente modificar, aunque más no fuese que por ellos dos— rebosan algo que, extrañamente, se traduce por “Je sais que la joie existe”. No poseen ninguno de los halagos materiales de la vida. Sin embargo, la alegría —una alegría unida al dolor— no está ausente del film.9 [Bicycle Thieves, the cinematic masterpiece of recent years, gives us the feeling I am referring to subtextually. This father and child who live in a narrow, sordid, iniquitous world —which we instantly wish to change, if 7 John King, Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and its Role in the Development of a Culture, 1931–1970, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 132–133. 8 Regarding the film, Ocampo added: “Lástima que no podamos agregar al número

de Sur, para completarla, una exhibición de Ladrones de bicicletas, dedicada a nuestros suscriptores. Y ya que no lo podemos hacer sepan por lo menos De Sica y su fiel asociado Zavattini que ese hubiera sido nuestro deseo. Ellos han hecho por el cine italiano lo que los autores cuyos textos publicamos han hecho por la literatura italiana: colocarla en primera fila” [It is a pity that we cannot add a screening of Bicycle Thieves, dedicated to our subscribers, to the issue of Sur to complete it. And since we cannot, at least De Sica and his faithful associate Zavattini should know that this would have been our wish. They have done for Italian cinema what the authors whose texts we publish have done for Italian literature: situated it at the forefront] (Victoria Ocampo, “A los lectores,” in Sur, no. 225, November/December 1953, p. 5). 9 Ibid., pp. 5 and 6.

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only for the sake of the two of them— exude something that, strangely enough, translates as “Je sais que la joie existe.” They possess none of life’s material advantages. However, joy —a joy coupled with pain— is not absent from the film.]

The Italian experience also appeared to offer the author of De Francesca a Beatrice an alternative image to the dichotomous cultural models imposed by the Cold War. In the Italian experience, she contended, the commitment of the writer could be developed without succumbing to the facile demands imposed by the need to satisfy the tastes of a mass public, a criterion she considered dominant both in the United States and in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and which threatened to take over the world. Quien cree en el best seller ya no cree en la literatura. Yo me obstino en creer en ella. El drama del escritor, del verdadero, en el mundo moderno, este mundo de Hiroshima y fútbol, no es un secreto para nadie que haya frecuentado a grandes, buenos escritores, fieles a las consignas de su arte y de su conciencia (doble desafío).10 [Anyone who believes in the best seller no longer believes in literature. I stubbornly believe in the latter. The drama of the writer, the true writer, in the modern world, this world of Hiroshima and soccer, is no secret to anyone who has frequented great writers, faithful to the principles of their art and their conscience (a dual challenge).]

It did not take long for the controversy to erupt. In the journal of the surrealist group Letra y Línea, the poet Carlos Latorre published “Sur y la literatura italiana,” a brief text in which, after noting “el esfuerzo editorial y la dedicación responsable que esta selección supone” [the editorial effort and responsible dedication involved in this selection], lambasted Italian literature, claiming that, like Spanish literature, it lagged behind European thinking and fiction and that it only lived off the memory of the Renaissance. La sociología convencional, la literatura de “opinión”, preferentemente política, el lirismo al uso, el hermetismo escapista, deformada herencia del simbolismo; la psicología elemental, la ausencia del espíritu innovador y de audacia verdaderamente revolucionaria, constituyen las limitaciones que, 10 Ibid., p. 2.

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sumadas a las ya citadas anteriormente (realismo narrativo, servilismo hacia las viejas maneras, nostalgia de un antiguo esplendor ya remoto, cierta exuberancia estilística, patrioterismo, etc.) descalifican a la poesía y la literatura italiana para figurar en el lugar privilegiado que todos deseamos para ella. Si el espacio lo permitiera sería posible poner a salvo el mérito de algunas firmas que integran la selección […], no bastan, sin embargo, para salvar una muestra que en su conjunto da el tono exacto de una literatura que está situada a apreciable distancia de toda peripecia actual y de toda lucidez salvadora.11 [Conventional sociology, “literature of opinion,” preferably political, standard lyricism, escapist hermeticism, the deformed legacy of symbolism, elementary psychology, the absence of an innovative spirit and truly revolutionary audacity constitute the limitations which, in addition to those already mentioned above (narrative realism, servility with regards to the old ways, nostalgia for a former splendor now remote, a certain stylistic exuberance, jingoism, etc.), disqualify Italian poetry and literature from the privileged place we all wish it occupied. Space permitting, it might be possible to salvage some of the signatures that form part of the selection […], but they are not enough, however, to save a sample that, as a whole, has the precise tone of a literature that is located at a considerable distance from all current vicissitudes and all redeeming lucidity.]

The response came from journalist, writer, and translator Osiris Troiani, who published an open letter in the pages of Capricornio, a journal directed by communist Bernardo Kordon, addressed to Aldo Pellegrini, the leading figure of surrealism in the Río de la Plata region. With considerable annoyance, Troiani began by accusing the young surrealists of confusing pugnacity with “pasquinismo literario” [literary lampooning] and went on to lament that “en una ciudad con un horrible obelisco y unos cementerios sin nobleza alguna” [in a city with a horrible obelisk and cemeteries devoid of any grandeur] one must also put up with an untimely surrealism: Latorre imagina a los italianos de hoy “nutridos del esteticismo de Croce, la grandielocuencia [sic] y el decadentismo de D’Annunzio”. No podía yo suponer en nuestro vehemente amigo tamaña afición al lugar común. Solo 11 Carlos Latorre, “Sur y la literatura italiana,” in Letra y Línea, no. 3, Buenos Aires, December/January 1954, p. 36.

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a un presuntuoso gacetillero podía ocurrírsele caracterizar la moderna literatura italiana con esos dos nombres que forman parte de la erudición de mi peluquero. En Italia han pasado ya por las tres fases póstumas de la gloria literaria: aversión (excesiva) de las nuevas generaciones; olvido (primero voluntario y después sinceramente indiferente); inserción objetiva en la historia de la literatura. Ya ni siquiera se reacciona contra esos nombres, que son nombres de calles y plazas. Las letras italianas de hoy se han rebelado contra Ungaretti y Moravia, que ya habían arreglado sus cuentas con Croce y D’Annunzio cuando nosotros nacimos. Las grandes sombras que estorban hoy a los jóvenes se llaman, en filosofía, Caraballese, Varisco, Banfi, Calogero; poetas como Luzi, Montale, Gatto, Penna; críticos como Serra, Cecchi, Apolonio, Bo. Que conocieron el surrealismo en su fase activa y no, como Latorre, el que hoy sobrevive penosamente.12 [Latorre imagines today’s Italians “fueled by the aestheticism of Croce, the grandiloquence and decadence of D’Annunzio.” I could never have anticipated such fondness for the commonplace in our vehement friend. It could only occur to a presumptuous hack to characterize modern Italian literature with those two names that form part of the erudition of my hairdresser. In Italy they have already experienced the three posthumous phases of literary glory: (excessive) aversion of the new generations; oblivion (first voluntary and then sincerely indifferent); objective insertion into the history of literature. No one even reacts against these names anymore, which are names of streets and squares. Today’s Italian writers are rebelling against Ungaretti and Moravia, who had already settled their scores with Croce and D’Annunzio when we were born. The great shadows that today hinder the young are called, in philosophy, Caraballese, Varisco, Banfi, Calogero; poets like Luzi, Montale, Gatto, Penna; critics such as Serra, Cecchi, Apolonio, Bo. They knew surrealism in its active phase and not, like Latorre, the version that now survives arduously.]

After harshly criticizing André Breton’s followers in Buenos Aires, Troiani traces an analysis that again contrasts the depth of the poetic consciousness of Italian authors with the abjection of the mass culture that threatened to dominate the Argentine cultural scene, but this time from an anti-imperialist and revolutionary perspective. Va a inaugurarse la gran poesía, la que busca sus temas en la conciencia, en la vida moral del individuo, que cavila y se debate entre el bien y el

12 Osiris Troiani, “Epístola a los surrealistas,” in Capricornio, no. 5, Buenos Aires, 1954, p. 18.

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mal, que azota a los fariseos en paz consigo mismos, que no consuela sino que atormenta. Ese tormento es necesario y es precioso: aquellos a quienes toque no se sumarán al abyecto hedonismo de masas que degrada a nuestra civilización y que, desde el norte cretinizado y frenético, amenaza también a nuestro país. Ya lo ve usted, nos hace falta no solo una revolución en nuestra poesía, sino también una poesía y una revolución.13 [There is great poetry to be unveiled, poetry that seeks its themes in the conscience, in the moral life of the individual, that ponders and struggles between good and evil, that flogs the Pharisees at peace with themselves, that does not console but torments. This torment is necessary and precious: those who it affects will not join the abject hedonism of the masses that degrades our civilization and that, from the cretinized and frenzied north, also threatens our country. As you can see, what we need is not only a revolution in our poetry, but also poetry and a revolution.]

Ocampo, however, faithful to her style of presenting editorial strategies as a product of her personal taste, announced on her last trip to Italy that she herself had compiled the materials she now offered to her readers (in addition to emphasizing the ties that since then united her to Moravia, Silone, Brancati, Piovene, and Vittorini) and mentioned her old friend Attilio Dabini in her acknowledgements. In fact, it is possibly thanks to this Italian writer and translator, exiled in Argentina due to fascism, that we owe the systematic translation of the most important works of postwar Italian literature. A close friend of Elio Vittorini and a contributor to his prestigious journal Il Politecnico, Dabini, was a journalist for the newspaper La Nación, wrote for the publication Realidad and had been a member of the Sur team since the 1940s.14 He taught at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores and was a professor at the Escuela de Cine Documental (Documentary Film School) in Santa Fe, where he lived for several years.15 Between 1951 and 1969, he translated close to twenty titles by Italian authors, especially for Losada, whose collection 13 Ibid., p. 23. 14 The journal Realidad (1947–1949), directed by Francisco Romero, played a central

role in disseminating peninsular philosophical innovations, mainly through the participation of anti-fascist exiles of the likes of Rodolfo Mondolfo and Renato Treves, who were also prominent university professors. It published one of the first reports in the country on the work of Antonio Gramsci by Ernesto Sábato. See “Epistolario de Gramsci,” in Realidad, no. 6, November/December 1947. 15 On the Escuela de Cine Documental de Santa Fe, its early years and its debt to Italian neorealist cinema, see the documents and reminiscences collected in Fernando

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Novelistas de Nuestra Época (directed by Guillermo de Torre, Sur’s first managing editor) included—alongside Sartre, Camus, and Faulkner— Guido Piovene, Carlo Levi, Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, Italo Calvino, Vasco Pratolini, Ignazio Silone, and Alberto Moravia. Although he never joined the PCA, Dabini had close ties to several of its intellectuals, such as Raúl Larra and the Uruguayan Enrique Amorim, whom he translated into Italian for the Roman publishing house Edizioni di Cultura Sociale. His anti-fascist activities, which drove him from his country until his lonely death in a nursing home in Buenos Aires in the early 1980s, undoubtedly influenced his participation in various cultural undertakings promoted by the communists, such as the Consejo Argentino por la Paz (Argentine Council for Peace). Starting with the publication of an article on Cesare Pavese, Attilio Dabini had a column dedicated to Italian literature in the journal Ficción, directed by the Basque novelist Juan Goyanarte. A writer, traveler, and successful businessman, Goyanarte joined Sur in 1951 as a managing partner and, five years later, founded Ficción and the publishing house that bore his surname, where he mainly published Pavese, translated by Hernán Mario Cueva.16 Within the communist cultural world, it was undoubtedly the Lautaro publishing house, with its editions of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, which most contributed to the expansion of Italian culture within the left. The work of Héctor P. Agosti in this endeavor is widely recognized, as well as the exceptionality that Gramsci represented for the communist cultural world. In 1958, when El materialismo histórico y la filosofía de Benedetto Croce was published, the official journal Nueva Era included it in a list of books published that year by communist publishers where it

Birri, La Escuela Documental de Santa Fe, Rosario, Prohistoria e Instituto Superior de Cine y Artes Visuales de Santa Fe, 2008. 16 Of the more than twenty publishing houses dedicated to the translation and editing of contemporary Italian literature, it is worth mentioning Compañía Fabril Editora, owner of an extensive catalog that included historical studies, narrative, poetry, children’s literature, and psychology, which between 1961 and 1962 published works by filmmaker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Natalia Ginzburg. Santiago Rueda, a publishing house that released translations of an extensive list of authors of American social realism, also included Italian writers explicitly identified with that style in its catalog, such as Elio Vittorini and Italo Svevo. Another publishing house that translated and published authors, such as Pavese and Vasco Pratolini, and which also devoted particular interest to American literature, was Siglo Veinte.

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is easy to appreciate the exceptionality that Gramsci represented for the editorial policy and the militant pedagogy of Argentine communism. The fact that Gramsci was edited by Lautaro and not, for instance, by Cartago or Anteo, specifically dedicated to the dissemination of classical Marxist thinkers and official party literature, is an indication of this uniqueness. Although directed by communist militant Sara Jorge, Lautaro, since its foundation in 1942, had had ties to intellectuals beyond the party apparatus (Manuel Sadosky, Gregorio Weinberg, Adolfo Dorfman, and Pedro Henríquez Ureña were in charge of the first collections) and, even while preserving an affinity to the universe of militant readings and politicalpedagogical dissemination, it published texts unlikely to be included in the catalog of official publishing houses. Sara Jorge would also leave the PCA toward the end of 1960 in disagreement over the official position on the Soviet invasion of Hungary, on which she had already expressed her concerns in 1956.17 Lautaro was the only publishing house linked to the communist world that, in addition to Gramsci, published Italian postwar authors such as Italo Calvino and Alcides Cervi, both translated by Dabini. However, one of its most important contributions in the field of literature was the publication, in 1957, of El oficio del poeta [The Poet’s Craft ] by Cesare Pavese—a true “livre de chevet,” in the words of José María Aricó, of a whole generation of Argentine writers— translated by poets Rodolfo Alonso and Hugo Gola. Later, his complete poetry was published under the title Trabajar cansa/Vendrá la muerte y tendrá tus ojos [Hard Labor / Death Shall Come, Using Your Eyes], published in 1961 translated and with notes by Alonso and a prologue by Marcelo Ravoni. This and the fact that its main cultural organ, Cuadernos de Cultura, maintained its preference for Soviet literature and French communist authors despite Agosti’s efforts at modernization, may offer a better appreciation of the climate in which cultural debates took place during the period of the so-called de-Stalinization. If we add to this the fact that, partly due to the tangential nature of the political discussions, the new generations initiated their critiques precisely from the field of art and literature, the omission becomes even more significant.

17 See Hebe Clementi, Lautaro: Historia de una editora, Buenos Aires, Leviatán, 2004, p. 119.

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2 Fascism, Peronism, and the Generational Problem The ideological and cultural crisis that emerged in the Argentine cultural field following the defeat of Peronism took the form of a generational split that cut across different political identities. The generational question was often evoked in the 1950s to explain the emergence of a group of young writers, essayists, and critics who spearheaded a process of critical revision of Argentine culture. This generation of “parricides,” as the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal called it, emerged in association with a series of cultural and literary journals that were aimed at examining “national reality,” with the Peronist experience at the center, but also at renewing critical tools and aesthetic formulations.18 Publications, such as Contorno (1954–1959), Ciudad (1955–1956), Ventana de Buenos Aires (1952–1956), Poesía Buenos Aires (1950–1960), and the university publication Centro (1951–1959), to mention a few of the most prominent, brought together a group of particularly talented young people who were looking to “settle accounts” with the elites who at the time had taken charge of Argentina’s cultural life, then devoted to the defense of individual liberties threatened by the local version of fascism, as Peronism was widely understood to be. It was in this context and with the certainty that this political-cultural movement was taking place outside the party that Cuadernos de Cultura published an extensive essay by the writer, anti-fascist campaigner, and Italian communist leader Fabrizio Onofri in 1954. Only two years would pass before he was expelled from the PCI, accused of being a revisionist. “Examen de conciencia de un comunista” took up four issues of the publication, an unprecedented space not granted to any other author or subject.19 The publication of an article that began with the emergence of a new generation of Italian intellectuals educated in the resistance to fascism was timely in an explicit sense: it provided an explanation of

18 Emir Rodríguez Monegal, El juicio de los parricidas, Buenos Aires, Deucalión, 1956, p. 90. 19 The essay was published in issues 14 (January 1954, pp. 81–90), 15 (May 1954, pp. 64–73), 16 (June 1954, pp. 33–39), and 17 (August 1954, pp. 94–111). It reproduced substantial chapters of Esame di coscienza di un comunista, published in Milan in 1949 with a foreword by Gian Carlo Pajetta.

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the generational problem by associating it with the exceptional conditions imposed on politics and culture by an authoritarian situation and concluded that, once this experience was over, the generational discourse would come to an end in the class struggle and return to its place in communist militancy. Starting with an autobiographical account, Onofri analyzed the process of the formation of groups of young intellectuals during the clandestine struggle against fascism. Those young people who constituted the vast majority of the party by 1949, he argued, had had a very different intellectual and ideological education from that of the “old comrades” who were able to temper their cultural education in the heat of an active and visible civil life, with an organized working class, a vanguard party, and abundant and freely circulating socialist literature. On the other hand, once fascism destroyed the political and militant space, later generations were left with culture as their only site of resistance, the literary vocation as the only way to approach life. De hecho, en aquel período, para los jóvenes de corazón ardiente, que advertían la capa de plomo con la que el fascismo encerraba toda posibilidad de vida, los libros y el arte eran las únicas actividades en la cuales se podía canalizar aquella carga de Sturm und Drang y de desenfreno, de innovación y de protesta que cada nueva generación trae consigo al asomarse al proscenio. […] Los jóvenes intelectuales aspiran siempre, inconscientemente, a hacerse elementos dirigentes en la sociedad en la cual viven. La única vía que se nos ofrecía […] era entonces el camino de los libros, la vía de la cultura.20 [In fact, during that period, for young passionate people who were aware of the iron shroud which fascism cast over every aspect of life, books and art were the only activities through which they could channel that sense of Sturm und Drang and of unrestraint, innovation, and protest that each new generation brings with it as it steps onto the proscenium. […] Young intellectuals always aspire, unconsciously, to become leaders in their society. The only way open to us then […] was the path of books, the path of culture.]

That “literary anti-fascism,” Onofri continued, was very vague; an armchair anti-fascism that at its core hid a “resentimiento aristocrático 20 Fabrizio Onofri, “Examen de conciencia de un comunista,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 15, May 1954, pp. 67 and 68.

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por todo lo plebeyo” [aristocratic resentment for everything plebeian] that manifested itself in the fascist regime. (An indication of the context in which this text was received can be found in the annotation jotted by an anonymous reader in the margin next to this statement of that issue of Cuadernos de Cultura: “Igual que en el peronismo” [Just as with Peronism]).21 When, in 1940, Italy entered the war and Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, groups that had emerged through literary inspiration were pushed into revolutionary activity and encounters with the working class. At that point, the hegemonic illusion of using culture as a means of struggle against bourgeois society began to prove futile, and the contradiction between political activity and literary activity, between the desire to conquer the expressive means offered by bourgeois culture and revolutionary action within the working class, became incompatible: “Más o menos como dos haces de luz que en el punto en que se cruzan producen la oscuridad absoluta” [Almost like two beams of light that, at the point where they cross, produce absolute darkness].22 Given this dilemma, Onofri offered his own trajectory as an example of the way in which revolutionary practice had been presented to him as the only solution for resolving his cultural dilemmas, to reach a complete understanding of Marxism as a guide for action and not as a set of ideas and theories that were debated in the minds of petit-bourgeois intellectuals: Parecía milagroso, si el materialismo histórico no lo explicase, la forma que, en cierto modo, mi cerebro se despejó. No encuentro otra expresión para decir lo que me ocurrió cuando —a través de mi actividad práctica, y el estudio, la “concepción” de mi actividad— yo llegué de golpe a entender textos como Materialismo y empiriocriticismo de Lenin o Materialismo histórico y materialismo dialéctico de Stalin, con los cuales había disentido profundamente aun durante el tiempo de la ocupación alemana en Roma (1943-1944).23 [The way in which my mind, in a sense, became clear would seem miraculous if it were not for historical materialism. I can think of no 21 Annotated copy available in the periodicals archive of Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas en Argentina (CeDInCI)/ Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM); CeDInCI. 22 Fabrizio Onofri, “Examen de conciencia de un comunista,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 17, August 1954, p. 98. 23 Fabrizio Onofri, “Examen de conciencia de un comunista,” op. cit., p. 102.

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other expression to describe what happened to me when —through practical activities and study, the “conception” of my activities— I suddenly began to understand texts such as Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism or Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism, with which I had profoundly disagreed even during the time of the German occupation of Rome (1943-1944)].

Faced with the drama of the artist and the intellectual torn between pursuing their creative activity, born of bourgeois individualism, and the radical transformation their growing closeness to the people implied, the option for those young intellectuals was to abandon their professional activity and enter into the political activity of the masses, in which “un hombre es conducido muy rápidamente hacia la rotura de sus vínculos individualistas y a convertirse en hombre-masa u hombre-colectivo, pero manteniendo su fuerte personalidad y originalidad individual” [a man is very quickly led to break his individualistic bonds and become a mass-man or collective-man, while maintaining his strong personality and individual uniqueness], as Antonio Gramsci had pointed out.24 This choice, harder and more complicated for mature and consecrated intellectuals, was relatively simple for young people who had had to divert their inherently political passion to the cultural field due to the vitiated atmosphere of fascism. The cultural field appeared as the only one that allowed some degree of independence and a way of channeling hegemonic desire in the historical form of anti-fascism. He aquí cómo, entre otras cosas, yo he dejado en cierto momento de escribir novelas, de sentirme escritor. […] Dejado, no por un acto de voluntad proveniente de afuera, por auto-imposición, sino por natural rectificación de un proceso de “desviación” que las relaciones sociales existentes en el tiempo del fascismo había hecho posibles, y que las nuevas relaciones de hoy han revelado y resuelto enteramente.25 [This is how, among other things, at a certain point in time I stopped writing novels, stopped feeling like a writer. […] Stopped not due to an act of will from the outside, by self-imposition, but rather as the natural rectification of a process of “deviation” that the existing social relations during the period of fascism had enabled, and that the new relations of today’s world have revealed and entirely resolved]. 24 Ibid., p. 104. 25 Ibid., p. 106 (emphasis in original).

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After a long and complex process of transformation and intellectual exploration, Onofri chose to be a “professional revolutionary” and, as such, would no longer even accept the designation of “communist intellectual,” unnecessary from the moment he decided to devote his life to the cause of the working class and would only accept his condition of communist as a noun: just as there were no “communist bricklayers” or “communist metalworkers,” there should be no adjective for intellectuals either. In leading the journey of a generation of young people between 20 and 25 years old that succumbed to the idea that a cultural transformation that did not begin as a social transformation was possible, Onofri laid bare his own musings as a “petit-bourgeois intellectual” on his way to becoming a “Marxist,” that is, a revolutionary militant of the party of the working class: La mejor cura del individualismo y de la tradición pequeñoburguesa y anarquizante propia de casi todos los intelectuales fue para nosotros el Partido, la vida del Partido, la disciplina del Partido. No poder trabajar más según la propia fantasía personal, sino según un horario y una disciplina; no tener que responder más de las propias acciones solamente a sí mismo sino a un organismo colectivo; no pretender juzgar más las cosas y las propias ideas según la sola cabeza propia, sino habituarse a razonar “con otras cabezas”, o sea con la cabeza del Partido, a dar juicios colectivos y no solo individuales: es lo que se llama disciplina del partido, control y trabajo colectivo, organización del trabajo, conciencia de clase, sentido de la responsabilidad, crítica y autocrítica. Es cuanto hemos aprendido, también duramente, trabajando en el Partido: la primera y verdadera escuela revolucionaria, formadora del carácter de la que nos hemos beneficiado. También aquí no se debe creer que todo ha sido fácil. Ese choque que he indicado más arriba entre viejos y jóvenes a veces puso duramente a prueba nuestra capacidad y nuestro carácter. Y naturalmente, era nuestro “viejo” carácter de intelectuales burgueses lo que más nos hacía sufrir.26 [The best cure we found for individualism and the petit-bourgeois and anarchist tradition typical of almost all intellectuals was the Party, Party life, Party discipline. Not to work any longer according to one’s own personal fantasy, but rather according to a timetable and discipline; not to have to answer anymore for one’s actions only to oneself but rather to a collective organism; not to pretend anymore to judge things and one’s own ideas according to one’s own head, but to get used to thinking “with others’

26 Ibid., pp. 107 and 108.

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minds,” in other words with the Party’s mind, to make collective and not only individual judgments: this is what is called party discipline, control and collective work, organization of work, class consciousness, a sense of responsibility, criticism, and self-criticism. That is what we have learned, with great difficulty, working in the Party: the first and truly revolutionary, character-forming school we have benefited from. Here, too, one should not believe that everything has been easy. The clash I mentioned above between old and young sometimes seriously tested our abilities and our character. And naturally, it was our “old” character as bourgeois intellectuals that made us suffer the most.]

Juan Carlos Portantiero, disciple and right-hand man of Agosti, was one of the first young intellectuals of the PCA who addressed the question of his generation. In May 1957, he published the article “La joven generación literaria” in Cuadernos de Cultura, where he revisited Onofri’s argument, who by that time had already left the PCI to reflect on Argentine culture during Peronism.27 From 1950 onwards, claimed the future author of Realismo y realidad en la narrativa argentina, a series of events had prompted the Argentine middle classes, where most of the young “parricidal” intellectuals came from, to become more sensitive to the national question. The Korean War, the anti-colonialist struggles, the contradiction between Peronism and the masses that supported it, the American invasion of Guatemala, and the government’s attempt to hand over oil to imperialism all led to an added concern over the problems of independence and economic, political, and cultural sovereignty, particularly among the youth, in addition to the traditional defense of human rights to which the intellectuals had devoted themselves. Comienzan los libros y los artículos, nacen los testimonios. El ambiente lo permitía, porque, a pesar de la estolidez y la represión oficial, o por ella misma, los movimientos culturales de juventud se expresan rotundamente en cantidades inusitadas de revistas, de agrupaciones, de medios de expresión que hablaban de un interés no habitual por los problemas de la cultura.28 [The books and articles begin, the testimonies emerge. The climate allowed it, because, in spite of the official repression, or because of it, the 27 Juan Carlos Portantiero, “La joven generación literaria,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 29, May 1957. 28 Juan Carlos Portantiero, “La joven generación literaria”, op. cit., p. 31.

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cultural movements of the youth were expressed in an unusual number of journals, groups, and other means of expression that reflected an unusual interest in cultural issues.]

Drawing a comparison with Onofri’s statement on the literary and artistic restlessness of young Italian intellectuals under fascism, Portantiero reflected on the consequences of the “corporative influence” on Argentine cultural life. In an extensive footnote on the Italian writer’s article, he stated: Con todos los resguardos a que obliga una traslación histórica, cabe señalar que otro tanto sucedió entre nosotros. Una nómina de las revistas literarias piloteadas por jóvenes, aparecidas especialmente en el último lustro del peronismo, reafirmaría el aserto. Sumemos a ello el fenómeno impar de la profusión de teatros independientes, y el cuadro se completa.29 [With all of the caution that a historical comparison requires, it is worth mentioning that the same thing happened in our country. A list of the literary journals directed by young people that appeared especially during the last five years of Peronism would back this assertion. Add to this the unusual phenomenon of the profusion of independent theaters, and the scene is complete.]

After proposing a survey of the main exponents of the new generation, its organs of expression, and its teachers, focusing particularly on the journal Contorno, Portantiero reflected on the avant-gardism and the “aristocratizing tendency” he saw in these young groups, whose very intellectual condition appeared to enable them to consider the Argentine process as a question beyond the class struggle, attempting to rebuild ties with the proletariat on their own and ignoring the experience accumulated by militant Marxism. The above-mentioned generational question, he affirmed, meant little if it was not situated within the overall process of class conflict in Argentine society. Its resolution, therefore, had to go beyond the terms of a confrontation between the old and the young, to be based on the ability of the new generations to break with their class ties, to transform their subordination to the older members of their class and align themselves with the older members of the progressive class, by means of deep-rooted ties and not only literary ones, as Antonio Gramsci had warned. In this way, once again relying on Onofri’s text, Portantiero 29 Ibid.

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took the liberty of stating that “la única agrupación política capaz de eliminar naturalmente de su seno la discordia entre ‘viejos’ y ‘jóvenes’ es el Partido Comunista, del mismo modo que solo una sociedad sin clases terminará con el problema en el orden general” [the only political group capable of naturally eliminating the discord between the “old” and the “young” from within its ranks is the Communist Party, in the same way that only a classless society will put an end to the problem at the general level]. Portantiero’s attempts to associate the modernizing tendencies of Argentine culture with the process of renewal of the communist ranks was based on the recognition of the merits of those groups, but it was not always perceived that way by the “older communists” or even some of the younger members. In 1957, the hitherto unknown writer Andrés Rivera published his first novel, El precio, through the communist publishing house Platina, provoking, in his own words, “un escándalo doméstico y, tal vez, un no inusitado desvarío crítico” [a local scandal and, perhaps, an unsurprising critical absurdity].30 This was possibly one of the first Argentine novels to feature the working class as its main protagonist. El precio was clearly indebted to American social realism, in particular to John Dos Passos and William Faulkner, and sought to represent the conflict between political power and the world of the workers using veristic criteria. In Cuadernos de Cultura, essayist Samuel Schneider, author of Proyección histórica del gaucho (1962) and Agosti’s future biographer, published a commentary on the book titled “Un novelista promisorio,” where he began by taking aim at the new literary generation on the basis of a common tactic among communists: the replacement of literary criticism with ideological expurgation. Se afirma con cierta insistencia que en los últimos años ha irrumpido en nuestra literatura una “joven novelística” que se introduce audazmente en zonas más o menos inéditas, intenta el tratamiento de problemas sociales y nacionales de envergadura, otea los nuevos vientos que sacuden al país. Se dice también que un clima general de inconformismo confiere a su testimonio una beligerancia polémica desconocida hasta ahora. Algo de esto es cierto; conviene destacarlo como signo promisor de una conciencia artística en crecimiento. Algunos de los escritores jóvenes que incursionan en

30 See Susana Zanetti, Encuesta a la literatura argentina contemporánea, Buenos Aires, Centro Editor de América Latina, 1982, p. 82.

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la novela son comunistas, y esto supone además cierto grado de desarrollo de la conciencia política. Pero el camino es fácilmente transitable; hay en la literatura, sobre todo en la novela, mil escollos por salvar, acechanzas y señuelos que pueden incidir negativamente en la labor creadora. Este libro primigenio de Andrés Rivera lo revela.31 [In recent years, it has been widely affirmed that a “young novelist” has burst onto our literary scene, boldly entering more or less unpublished areas, attempting to tackle major social and national problems, and scanning the winds of change that are sweeping the country. It has also been said that a general mood of nonconformism gives his testimony a hitherto unknown controversial belligerence. There is some truth to this; it is worth noting as a promising sign of a developing artistic awareness. Some of the young writers attempting their hand at the novel are communists, and this also implies developing a political consciousness to a certain extent. But it is an easy path to set out on; in literature, especially in the novel, there are a thousand pitfalls to overcome, obstacles and pitfalls that can have a negative impact on creative work. This first book by Andrés Rivera reflects this.]

After this introduction, Schneider went on to point out the “inadequacies” and “difficulties” of Rivera’s novel, which he judged to be correct in its subject matter and content, but flawed in its form: rhetorical, psychologistic, self-effacing and, at the cost of the author’s desire to flee from “sociological simplification,” lacking in “revolutionary romanticism” and in representative types and typical circumstances. For Schneider, this scant adherence to the model of socialist realism would not have allowed the young writer, for instance, to present the “reflejo típico de un patrón pequeño-burgués” [typical reflection of a petit-bourgeois master], forcing him to fragment the vision of the national bourgeoisie in such a way that it lacked the characteristics that would have enabled “su integración en el frente democrático-nacional” [its integration into the national-democratic front]. He went on to criticize Rivera for his predilection for the “aspectos sórdidos y grises” [sordid and gray aspects] of reality and his doggedness with sexual themes, which in his opinion “obstruyen la visión de las hondas cuestiones que inquietan y agitan a nuestro pueblo” [obstruct the vision of the deep questions that trouble and agitate our people]. In Schneider’s view, the pretension of originality that characterized emerging 31 Samuel Schneider, “Un novelista promisorio,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 33, December 1957, p. 110.

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Argentine narrative was an obstacle in connecting it with models from the local literary tradition and explained its clear preference for “not entirely healthy” foreign narrative tendencies. As an example of the difficulties that many communist writers had in assimilating the new trends, regardless of how feeble or unsuccessful they were, Schneider concluded his commentary by recommending that Rivera and his contemporaries incorporate the virtues of the feuilleton into their narrative. On the same page of book reviews, the young poet and journalist José Luis Mangieri devoted a commentary to a collection of short stories by Leónidas Barletta, a longtime fellow traveler of Argentine communism. Celebrating the fact that Barletta still supported “Boedo versus Florida” despite the years that had passed,32 he commented: La aparición de este último libro de Barletta es, ante todo, prueba reconfortante y elocuente del vigoroso poder de reacción de nuestra literatura contra el intento de cosmopolitización, involuntario o no, que se refleja en muchas obras —demasiadas, quizás— de la reciente promoción literaria. A muchos “nuevos” del 57 podríamos recomendar con saludable consejo volver a este “nuevo” del año 25. Menos sexo trastornado, menos Faulkner, menos Pavese (sin que la negación explique desconocimiento); quizás más [Roberto] Payró, más [Horacio] Quiroga, más [Leónidas] Barletta.33 [The appearance of this latest book by Barletta is, above all, reassuring and eloquent evidence of the vigorous power of reaction of our literature against attempts at cosmopolitanization, involuntary or not, reflected in many works —too many, perhaps— of the latest literary generation. We could give many “new” writers of ‘57 a hearty recommendation to return to this “new” writer of ‘25. Less disturbed sex, less Faulkner, less Pavese (without denial being an explanation for ignorance); perhaps more [Roberto] Payró, more [Horacio] Quiroga, more [Leónidas] Barletta].

32 The “Boedo group” refers to the artists and writers who in the 1920s would meet on the street of the same name in a working-class neighborhood of the city of Buenos Aires, where the Claridad publishing house, owned by the socialist Antonio Zamora, was located. With a social orientation, realist aesthetics, and plebeian social origins, in Argentine literary tradition it is usually contrasted with the “Florida group” which consisted of avant-garde artists associated with the journal Martín Fierro, based on the elegant Florida Street. One of the best-known members of the Florida group was Jorge Luis Borges. 33 José Luis Mangieri, “Buenos cuentos argentinos,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 33, December 1957, p. 120.

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This entreaty was soon associated with another by nationalist Juan José Hernández Arregui, who had called for “less Pratolini and more [Manuel] Gálvez.” Juan Carlos Portantiero and Juan Gelman did just this when, under the title “Sobre el terrorismo crítico,” they attacked Schneider and Mangieri’s style of literary criticism, accusing them of being clueless and ignorant, in addition to exhibiting a coarse primitivism and a pious provincialism that hindered the party’s work in the area of culture: Si Mangieri piensa que para luchar contra el intento de cosmopolitización hay que caer en un obtuso nacionalismo de espaldas al río, se encontrará, de pronto, con compañías muy desagradables para él: aquellas que desmonetizan a Mariano Moreno por su jacobinismo y radian toda la Generación del 37 de nuestra historia “por su inspiración extranjerizante”.34 [If Mangieri believes that in order to combat attempts at cosmopolitanization one must engage in an obtuse nationalism with one’s back to the river, he will suddenly find himself in very unpleasant company among those who devalue Mariano Moreno for his Jacobinism and expunge the entire Generation of ‘37 from our history “for its foreign inspiration.”]

The comparison of communist criticism with the opinions of a conspicuous representative of cultural nationalism is not at all forced if we take into account what we have already analyzed regarding the populist tendencies of communist criticism during this period, so harshly judged by Agosti and so alien to the drive for modernization of the new generations. In strictly cultural terms, a significant portion of the young communists were closer to Contorno and Poesía Buenos Aires than to socialist realism. In the context of this dispute, Italian literature could be considered both a foreign influence and an alternative model of realistic aesthetic representation. Mangieri offered his response in the following issue, not without expressing a certain degree of astonishment at the bellicosity of the criticisms levied by his comrades, particularly with regard to the accusation of sectarianism, a concept that was already a division in the party: Nos parece que los camaradas Gelman y Portantiero, en su afán de enarbolar a todo trapo la bandera del antisectarismo —que no es reivindicación de grupo sino privilegio de todos—, se lanzan justamente a una belicosa 34 Juan Carlos Portantiero and Juan Gelman, “Sobre el terrorismo crítico,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 35, May 1958, p. 124.

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campaña, incurriendo en el peor de los terrorismos: aquel que mediante una asociación distorsiva ubica al crítico en una posición por todos repudiada.35 [It appears that comrades Gelman and Portantiero, in their eagerness to raise the flag of anti-sectarianism —which is not a group demand but rather everyone’s privilege—, are launching a bellicose campaign, incurring in the worst kind of terrorism: one that through a distorted association places the critic in a position that is repudiated by all].

The intention of his criticism, he claimed, had not been to deny the literary talent of Faulkner or Pavese, but to warn young writers of the poor results of imitating a foreign narrative technique to reflect Argentine conditions. Examples of this pernicious tendency were books such as Los años despiadados by David Viñas and Una historia sentimental by Osvaldo Seiguerman, which he regarded as influenced by “bourgeois decay” and its “degrading themes” of sex, frustration, and death, injected into Argentine literature thanks to the “clima de impotencia y mediocridad en que treinta años de fascismo militante obligó a vivir a varias generaciones” [climate of impotence and mediocrity which thirty years of militant fascism forced several generations to experience]. No pensamos, como gratuitamente afirman Gelman y Portantiero, que para luchar contra el cosmopolitismo hay que caer, de espaldas al río, en un obtuso nacionalismo. Miramos también para afuera. Hacia Gorki, hacia Shólojov, por ejemplo, pero sin olvidar que en la playa, también frente al río, aunque mirando tercamente en la dirección que les produjo la crónica tortícolis nacional que padecen, están los [Jorge Luis] Borges y las [Victoria] Ocampo.36 [We do not believe, as Gelman and Portantiero gratuitously affirm, that in order to fight against cosmopolitanism we must descend into an obtuse nationalism with our backs to the river. We also look outward. Towards Gorky, towards Sholokhov, for example, but without forgetting that on the shore, before the river, although stubbornly looking in the direction that gave them chronic national torticollis, are also the [Jorge Luis] Borgeses and the [Victoria] Ocampos.

35 José Luis Mangieri, “El terrorismo del antiterrorismo,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 36, June 1958, p. 122. 36 Ibid., p. 123.

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Less than a decade after this debate, Mangieri, Gelman, Rivera, and Portantiero will all have been expelled from the party, accused of revisionism and factionalism. Two of the journals that had encouraged and precipitated the accusations of heresy that befell them, Pasado y Presente and La Rosa Blindada, would be fueled by the airs of a Marxist renewal propelled from Italy by a new generation of intellectuals, including Fabrizio Onofri.37

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The journal Nueva Expresión—a brief editorial experience tied to the communist cultural world, particularly its young critics and writers— claimed in 1958 that “pocos fenómenos culturales han de tener, tal vez, tanta importancia para nosotros como el apogeo del realismo en la Italia de posguerra” [perhaps few cultural phenomena hold as much importance for us as the height of realism in postwar Italy].38 Several decades later, José María Aricó would briefly revisit that moment of remarkable openness to the Italian cultural world, which was the basis for the dissemination of Antonio Gramsci’s work among Argentine communist intellectuals during the 1950s.39 In fact, one need only browse through the pages of some of the many cultural publications that emerged in the last years of Peronism or immediately after 1955 to note the Italian influence that Aricó summarized in the names of Cesare Pavese, Vasco Pratolini, Guido Aristarco, and Luigi Chiarini, among the many examples that could be added to the vast undertaking of the dissemination and

37 Onofri was expelled from the PCI after a violent dispute with Palmiro Togliatti in the pages of Rinascita. The “Onofri case” was the immediate precursor of the diaspora that ensued from the Soviet invasion of Hungary, when numerous Roman intellectuals signed the “Manifesto dei 101” and left the party for good. Some of them, such as Onofri himself, Alberto Asor Rosa, Mario Tronti, and Lucio Colletti, would go on to lead the political-intellectual organizations of the new Italian left which, once again, revolved around a few key publications, such as Tempi Moderni and Quaderni Rossi. This process of separation had repercussions on the young Argentine communist intellectuals, as we shall see in the case of Pasado y Presente. 38 Nueva Expresión published only two issues in 1958. It was directed by Juan Carlos Portantiero, Héctor Bustingorri, and Mario Jorge de Lellis. 39 José María Aricó, La cola del diablo: Itinerario de Gramsci en América Latina, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2005, p. 65.

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translation of peninsular film and literature. In addition to translations, much of this exposure to the Italian cultural world was due to the fact that a wide range of books and periodicals had entered the local market, facilitated by the work of specialized bookstores. This was the case of Leonardo in Buenos Aires and Paideia in Córdoba, which provided new publications not only to individual readers, but also to university libraries. Thus, journals such as Belfagor and Aut Aut and the communist Rinascita, Società, and Il Contemporaneo became not only reference material but most importantly, a “baño de agua fresca” [breath of fresh air], as Héctor Schmucler defined it, which opened up the possibility of thinking about a renewed Marxism. Although this interest extended to the point of eliciting the admiration of Victoria Ocampo in the pages of Sur, it was within the communist world that it exerted a particular fascination, becoming a sort of talisman that, blessed by family ties, offered a response that was at the same time political, aesthetic, and generational. At a time when the question of realism, and with it the relationship between party politics and creative activity, was dominant in establishing the system of legitimacy of communist cultural criticism, the new generations of writers found both an endorsement and a model in the experience of the Italian cultural left. In the first case, because it was an aesthetic proposal that was not alien to the communist world, but instead intimately tied to a party whose cultural strength and popular support went hand in hand. In the second, because the soul of neorealism continued to be the social reality and the desire of its artists to find a language to express the human condition of the popular classes beyond its various stages and successive crises and resurrections. Gaceta Literaria was the journal that perhaps most emphatically sought a starting point in the encounter with neorealist aesthetics to question the veristic criteria of aesthetic representation promoted by the PCA leadership and, at the same time, encourages a national cinema and literature attentive to the demand for realism that the particular moment seemed to demand. It summarized this spirit in a commentary on Vittorio de Sica’s film Miracle in Milan: En toda época, en cada momento de la vida de los pueblos, hay hombres que tratan de expresarse en un lenguaje comprensible a los demás hombres, artistas que no desean reflejar esquemáticamente una realidad, sino transmitirnos su sentido de la existencia. Este hecho lo comprobamos hoy ante

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las obras del cine y la literatura italiana, que nos entregan en imagen poética —en recreación de la realidad— el acontecer de sus gentes y de su tiempo.40 [In every era, in the history of every community, there are people who seek to express themselves in a language understandable to other people, artists who do not wish to reflect a reality schematically, but to convey to us their sense of existence. We see this today in the works of Italian cinema and literature, which present us with a poetic image —a recreation of reality— of the events of their people and their time.]

In the course of its 21 issues, published between 1956 and 1960, Gaceta Literaria fought a cultural battle on two fronts. On the one hand, it disputed the space of literary criticism dominated by journals such as Contorno and Ciudad and, on the other, it attempted to generate a space for renewal within the communist cultural world, which found its most systematic source of inspiration in Italian literature, cinema, and criticism. In each of its issues, Gaceta Literaria published stories by Vasco Pratolini, Alberto Moravia, and Domenico Rea, poems by Pavese, translations of articles on art and politics by Luigi Chiarini and Antonio Gramsci, and important reviews of neorealist cinema and an analysis of the scope of its anticipated crisis by Fernando Birri. Before the appearance of specialized journals such as Cinecrítica, whose commitment to the Italian critical realism of the early 1960s provided the starting point for the analysis of the possibility of a new Argentine cinema embedded in the construction of a “new national culture,” Gaceta Literaria devoted countless pages to cinematographic questions with contributions by Hugo Panno, Alberto Nicoli, Edmundo Eichelbaum, Arnoldo Liberman, Carlos Hurtado, and Carlos Orgambide. The contributions of journalist and translator Attilio Dabini are another example of a close-knit network that included other writers and translators such as Roberto Raschella, Victorio Minardi, Osiris Troiani, Hernán Mario Cueva, and Rodolfo Alonso. More than a few of these names were associated with the PCA, although most of them, as 40 Gaceta Literaria, no. 2, March 1956, p. 18. Gaceta Literaria was directed by Pedro Orgambide and Roberto Hosne. The latter left the journal after issue 11, along with some of his collaborators who, in 1957, founded the journal El Grillo de Papel. For more on Gaceta Literaria, see Adriana Petra, “Gaceta Literaria: un artefacto editorial y una revista de pasaje en la trama de la cultura comunista latinoamericana de los años ‘50,” in Alejandra Mailhe, Verónica Delgado and Geraldine Rogers (coords.), Tramas impresas: Publicaciones periódicas argentinas (XIX–XX), La Plata, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, 2014, pp. 258–275.

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was the case with Raschella, Gola, and Ravoni, would leave the party in the early 1960s. Roberto Raschella and Rodolfo Gabriel Rago wrote the only articles on cinema in Cuadernos de Cultura, a publication of which Rago was the first manager and where he formed a group dedicated to film criticism, a genre that was minimally present in the publication through Raschella’s articles, the first of which was dedicated to Vittorio de Sica. Raschella, who joined the party in 1948 and left it in 1964 to settle in Italy, was an active contributor to the film reviews created in the early 1960s, such as Tiempo de Cine, Cinecrítica, and Cinema Nuovo, the Argentine edition of the important publication directed in Italy by Guido Aristarco. He was associated with the Taller de Cine group, in which he was very active as a screenwriter. Among other films, he produced a screenplay along with Jorge Macario Rodríguez based on the famous short story “El matadero” by Esteban Echeverría. During those same years, Raschella began his career as a translator.41 In 1963, he translated the book Rousseau y Marx by the Italian communist philosopher Galvano della Volpe for the publishing house Platina. Della Volpe’s work dedicated to aesthetics and cinema was then cited regularly and studied in some circles of young communists, who found in it an initial attempt at developing an authentic Marxist aesthetics. Prominent among those young people were Juan Carlos Portantiero, Raúl Sciarretta, and Héctor Schmucler. Galvano della Volpe occupies an exceptional place within the Western Marxist tradition because of his intellectual profile and his late conversion to Marxism, which occurred only in 1944, after two decades as a university professor and the production of a relatively important body of work in the field of the history of philosophy. Though from the same generation as Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, Della Volpe’s trajectory is atypical in comparison to theirs, but not in comparison to most university philosophers in fascist Italy, including his support for Mussolini’s regime. With no political experience other than his collaboration with a few fascist journals, Della Volpe accepted without resentment the marginal place the party reserved for him and maintained some degree of distance from party debates and controversies. This was not, however, the case with his disciples who by the end of 1950 began to identify themselves collectively as 41 In the 1970s, Raschella was an active collaborator in the translation of several titles for the Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente.

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the “Della Volpean school.” The work of Galvano della Volpe and his school, according to Perry Anderson the first “radically anti-Hegelian” school in Western Marxism, played a prominent role in the critical reflections that the young Argentine communists developed on the question of realism and, particularly, on the interpretation of Marx’s texts.42 In the following decade, as discussed below, Della Volpe’s influence would be felt by the main exponents of the first and second generations of theorists of “workerism,” one of Marxism’s most interesting intellectual adventures in the second half of the twentieth century. Although the first Argentine mentions of Della Volpe’s work date back to the late 1940s, it was during the 1960s that his main works were first translated, published, and commented on. Raúl Sciarretta, a teacher and communist epistemologist—one of the leading figures in the debate on objectivity that we will analyze below—played a key role in this endeavor, editing, translating, and commenting on the Italian philosopher’s work for the first time in Spanish. In 1964, while directing the Science and Philosophy collection for the Jorge Álvarez publishing house, he promoted the publication of Crisis de la estética romántica, translated by Roberto Raschella. In 1965, the publishing house Proteo, closely linked to the interests of the nascent intellectual new left and particularly to the range of themes and authors proposed by Pasado y Presente out of Córdoba, published Clave de la dialéctica histórica, translated by Sciarretta in collaboration with an anonymous J. A., who was almost certainly José Aricó, by then expelled from the party, to which Sciarretta would remain loyal until a short time later. When he distanced himself from communism and became involved in national leftist groups, he also abandoned his interest in Della Volpe and began to develop an interest in the work of Louis Althusser, whom he helped introduce to an Argentine public.43 In any case, it was Juan Carlos Portantiero’s incorporation of the Della Volpean theoretical proposal in his book Realismo y realidad en la

42 See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books, 1976, and Francisco Fernández Buey, Contribución a la crítica del marxismo cientificista: Una aproximación a la obra de Galvano Della Volpe, Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona, 1984. 43 On the reception of Althusser in Argentina, see Marcelo Starcembaum, “Derivas argentinas de Althusser: Marxismo, estructuralismo, comunismo,” in El Laberinto de Arena, no. 1, summer/fall 2013, pp. 133–153.

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narrativa argentina (1961) that made the author of Crítica del gusto an essential reference for a Marxist analysis of aesthetics, freed from the sociologizing reductionisms of the communist tradition. Published by the unofficial publishing house Procyon, this book was one of the first attempts to incorporate the theoretical formulations of philosopher Galvano della Volpe and new Italian Marxist criticism into the analysis of Argentine literature. Within the context of the debates on literary issues that agitated the communist cultural front, Portantiero tried to revive an explanation of realism as “método propio del arte caracterizado por su historicidad” [a method specific to art characterized by its historicity] and, above all, as a “tendencia artístico-cultural” [artisticcultural tendency] that was successively enriched by the contributions of each stage of human knowledge and that, therefore, could not refer to an ideal model established once and for all, as Lukács did with nineteenth-century realism.44 In critical dialogue with this book, perhaps one of the most important contributions of communist criticism to the discussion on realist poetics in Argentina, Héctor Schmucler published an article in the first issue of Pasado y Presente which, in conducting a Della Volpean-inspired review of Argentine testimonial literature, proposed the autonomy of aesthetic phenomena from politics. Considering that at the time Schmucler was enrolled in the University of Messina to pursue graduate studies with Della Volpe, it is not surprising that five issues later he returned to his work, this time to deliver a devastating critique of Sciarretta’s introduction to the Argentine edition of Crisis de la estética romántica. Incidentally, during those same years in El Escarabajo de Oro Enrique Revol published an erudite article on the relationship between film and literature that incorporated Della Volpean reflections.45 The most controversial repercussions of the Italian philosopher’s work, however, stemmed less from his aesthetic proposals than from his particular reading of Marx’s texts. As mentioned above, one of the most immediate consequences of his insistence that Marxism should divest itself

44 For a broader and more detailed reading of Realismo y realidad en la narrativa argentina, see Carlos Altamirano, Peronismo y cultura de izquierda, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2011, pp. 186–192. 45 Enrique Revol, “En torno a una estética del cine,” in El Escarabajo de Oro, no. 18/19, July/August 1963.

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of any speculative and generic theoretical features in order to work analytically with the formal-methodological rigor of the positive sciences was that it emphasized la inviabilidad de las concepciones dogmáticas o meramente confesionales del marxismo, en las que se supone que la cita del texto de Marx (o de algunos de sus ilustres sucesores) permite un conocimiento ajustado de cualquier faceta de la realidad, aun cuando dicho texto ni siquiera se inserte en la “lógica específica” de aquello que se quiere conocer.46 [the unfeasibility of dogmatic or merely confessional conceptions of Marxism, whereby supposedly quoting one of Marx’s texts (or of his illustrious successors) provides one with an accurate grasp of any facet of reality, even when the text quoted does not fit into the “specific logic” of whatever is to be understood.]

In 1957, following the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the schism that the Hungarian repression caused among peninsular intellectuals, Società, the main theoretical journal of Italian communism, expanded its editorial board to include Della Volpe and a considerable number of his disciples and their theoretical concerns along with him. They soon gained ground within the publication and became keen to discuss the party’s official orientation. In 1962, Società was shut down to be replaced by a new publication, Critica Marxista. In autumn of that same year, in the periodical Rinascita, Cesare Luporini published the article “Notas para una discusión entre filósofos marxistas en Italia,” a text aimed at refuting the theoretical positions of the Della Volpean school which gave rise to a famous debate involving Lucio Colletti, Galvano della Volpe, Nicola Badaloni, Enzo Paci, Luciano Gruppi, and Alessandro Natta. The culmination of a controversy that began in 1957, this debate reflected the strong political tensions underlying the theoretical discussion of Della Volpean positions, particularly among the younger members of the group, who interpreted the philosopher’s insistence on the centrality of “determinate scientific abstraction” as implying “the need for an analysis of Italian society in terms of the ‘pure’ categories of developed capitalism, with correspondingly ‘advanced’ political objectives to be pursued by the working class within it,” thereby contradicting the PCI’s characterization

46 José Jiménez, “Galvano Della Volpe, el marxismo y la estética,” in El Basilisco, no. 13, 1981/1982, p. 6.

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of the hybrid and backward temperament of Italian society and the consequent need for a democratic-reformist policy.47 This was not unrelated to the PCA’s own characterization of Argentina’s economic structure, defined since 1928 as underdeveloped and dependent, with semi-feudal overtones. A substantial part of the contributions to this debate was published by Pasado y Presente in its first issue, almost as a symptom of the delicate political balance surrounding the interpretations of Marx’s texts. Shortly, thereafter, the publishing house Proteo promised to publish the complete debate, which did not materialize until fourteen years later when Oscar del Barco, by then in exile, included it in the philosophical collection he directed for the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla under the title La dialéctica revolucionaria (1977). It is likely that the arrival of structuralism, and mainly of Althusser, displaced interest in Della Volpe’s work, with which the French philosopher had clear affinities, as Lucio Colletti pointed out in reference to the articles that constitute La revolución teórica de Marx.48 In any case, the echoes of Della Volpe’s reading of Marxism would later resurface in a new generation of Italian Marxists who in the 1960s led a widespread break with the communist and socialist parties through “workerism.” Indeed, the journal Pasado y Presente accompanied this movement until the last issue of its first phase in 1965, when José María Aricó made clear the theoretical-practical interests the proposals of the new Italian left represented, in particular those of the group linked to the Turin-based journal Quaderni Rossi.

4 The First Peninsular Moment: The Development of a Communist Gramscianism In the intellectual context of Cold War communism, the publication of Antonio Gramsci’s work, which began with his Letters from Prison in 1947, was both disruptive and paradoxical. As Guido Liguori has explained, it was the dark years of Zhdanovism, when the party led by Palmiro Togliatti faced the risk of social isolation and Stalinist involution, that formed the backdrop for the publication of the Prison Notebooks, the

47 See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, op. cit. p. 41. 48 Perry Anderson, “Una entrevista político-filosófica con Lucio Colletti,” in Cuadernos

Políticos, no. 4, 1975, pp. 61–82.

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political-cultural event with the greatest impact in shaping the modern identity of the PCI, definitively establishing genuine “diversity” in the panorama of third-internationalist parties.49 Given the context and the decisively anti-mechanistic character of Gramscian Marxism, which made it very hard to fit into the dogmatic indifference of Soviet diamat, it was also a brave choice that did not fail to cause a degree of disorientation among the communists and generate innumerable questions. Togliatti himself, aware of the problems it could create for him, arranged a “montage” of the texts that enabled a certain degree of compatibility between Soviet orthodoxy and the Gramscian legacy, guiding the reading of the latter in the direction of “national specificity” and not toward the great disputes of the international workers’ movement of the 1920s and 1930s. La tradizione italiana e il metodo di Gramsci divenivano dunque la ricerca di un terreno d’incontro con la cultura del nostro paese; ma erano anche il modo e il mezzo (e ciò spesso dimentica chi sottolinea come que’ll edizione del Quaderni li abbia declassati da strategia alternativa per tutto il movimento comunista a riflessione su una particolare realtà nazionale) per prendere le distanze dal modellio staliniano—zdanovista senza al contempo determinare una rottura aperta, politicamente insostenibile. Questi aspetti rapprasentarono in quegli anni due facce della stessa medaglia, la cui separazione non è possibile se non per mezzo di forzature polemiche che devono necessariamente rimuovere i caratteri complessi, anche se a volte contraddittori, della politica di Togliatti e dei comunisti italiani.50 [The Italian tradition and Gramsci’s method were therefore transformed into a search for common ground with our country’s culture; but they were also the method and the means (and this is often forgotten by those who argue that that edition of the Notebooks had lowered them from an alternative strategy for the entire communist movement to a reflection on a particular national reality) for taking distance from the Stalinian-Zdanovist model without proposing, at the same time, an overt, politically unsustainable break. In those years, these aspects represented two sides of the same coin, whose separation is possible only through the use of controversial constraints that must necessarily elude the complex, sometimes eve contradictory, characteristics of Togliatti’s politics and those of the Italian communists.]

49 Guido Liguori, Gramsci conteso: Interpretazioni, dibattiti e polemiche. 1922–2012, Rome, Riuniti, 2012, p. 92. 50 Guido Liguori, Gramsci conteso, op. cit., p. 96 (emphasis in original).

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The question of intellectuals was a central element of Togliatti’s program and of his efforts to build a “new party” with a democratic and national character for postwar Italy. The choice to “use” a certain Gramscian heritage was based on the need to establish a common historical tradition for the vast mass of people who had joined the party in those years and, at the same time, to find common ground with the anti-fascist intellectuals, many of whom had joined or were aligned with communist positions. For Togliatti, this task of unification could not be carried out from above or by administrative decrees or even on a formal or bureaucratic level, but rather had to be based on the interpretative tradition of the party’s history and its theoretical development supplied by Gramsci. The PCI’s cultural policy was therefore entwined with an interpretation of Gramsci in terms of the politics of unity, the national function of the working class, and the tasks of Italian reconstruction. In this context, culture and intellectuals were called upon to play a major role. This required a different kind of relationship with politics because they could no longer be conceived—as Benedetto Croce, the tutelary figure of the peninsular intelligentsia, had done—as separate moments, as two necessarily separate “attitudes,” but rather as complementary elements in the construction of an Italian national and socialist culture. Although this idea of “not separating” culture and politics was not based on the same premises as Soviet-style administrative dirigisme, it could be read as a version, perhaps a more sophisticated one, of the Zhdanovist mandate, as demonstrated by the repeated quotations in the Argentine communist press of Togliatti’s speech at the PCI’s National Commission of Intellectuals held in Rome in April 1952. There, he affirmed: En el terreno cultural falta certeza y solidez. Se ha dicho que el trabajo cultural debe ser confiado a camaradas particularmente preparados y calificados: los intelectuales. Bien, podemos estar de acuerdo. Pero que no ocurra que después de confiar el trabajo a una comisión de dos o tres camaradas, los organismos dirigentes del Partido olviden que el trabajo cultural es una parte esencial e importante de la actividad política y organizativa, y que se laven las manos. Los organismos dirigentes del Partido, en este terreno como en todos los demás, no tienen simplemente la tarea de controlar, impulsar, etc. Tienen también la tarea de elegir los objetivos a alcanzar, pues esos objetivos no pueden ser los mismos en todas partes, sino que cambian según la situación. […] Hay que exigir, pues, ante todo, que el trabajo cultural, aunque lo realicen especialistas, sea dirigido por

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los organismos dirigentes del Partido, como ocurre en todas partes, por lo demás.51 [There is a lack of conviction and robustness within the cultural domain. It has been said that cultural work should be entrusted to particularly prepared and skilled comrades: the intellectuals. We agree on this. But let’s ensure that after entrusting the work to a commission of two or three comrades, the leading bodies of the Party do not forget that cultural work is an essential and important part of political and organizational activities and wash their hands of it. The leading bodies of the Party, in this field as in all others, are not simply charged with the task of monitoring, promoting, etc. They also have the task of choosing the objectives pursued, for these objectives cannot be the same everywhere, but change according to the situation. […] We must demand, then, first of all, that cultural work, even if it is carried out by specialists, be directed by the leading bodies of the Party, as is the case everywhere, incidentally.]

The ties modeled by Togliatti between culture and politics found their basis in two core elements of Gramsci’s reflection: the questioning of the idealist philosophical tradition that conceived of intellectuals as a distinct class that embodied the rational truth of history and, secondly, the rejection of both the mechanistic interpretations of Marxism and the spontaneist and insurrectionalist theories. This led Gramsci to consider the theoretical-political importance of “superstructural” phenomena in modern capitalist societies and the role they could play in establishing a revolutionary strategy in a climate marked by the defeat and the rise of fascism. For Gramsci, intellectuals did not constitute a sector that was detached from the world of social relations. Rather, they were embedded in these relations through their work as coordinators between the structure and the superstructure, between the economy and philosophy, between theory and practice. His analysis was not based on a conception of intellectuals as a socio-professional category, nor did he consider them bearers of universal values, but rather mediators and organizers of a vision of the world (that is, of a philosophy, a culture, a religion, and even of common sense) according to the class they were tied to organically. As a strategic-political issue, he viewed the question of intellectuals as a fundamental element of a larger problem that would

51 Palmiro Togliatti, “Problemas de la cultura,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 12, July 1953, pp. 52 and 53.

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form the core of his theoretical-political work: the question of the State and its relationship to civil society in advanced capitalist societies. These considerations are important in understanding the Argentine reception of the Italian philosopher’s work undertaken by Agosti beginning in the early 1950s. Within the context of his dispute with the party sectors more strongly attached to the Stalinist codifications of cultural matters, Agosti undertook the process of renewing and expanding the party’s cultural front, based on the new generation of young intellectuals both in Buenos Aires and in the provinces, where he encouraged the organization of local fronts and cultural associations. Since he joined the party’s official publication, Cuadernos de Cultura, the translation policy aimed at disseminating Zhdanovism expanded to include the contributions of French and Italian intellectuals and communist leaders, such as Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Vilar, Palmiro Togliatti, Antonio Banfi, and others who would gradually gain prominence in the publication, particularly in the short-lived section “Marxism in the World,” dedicated almost entirely to theoretical novelties from the peninsula. But it would be the incorporation of Gramscian categories into his own cultural analyses, following the publication of Echeverría in 1951, and his work as editor and translator of the Prison Notebooks that would define Agosti’s intellectual work, as well as the key to the Argentine communist interpretation of Gramsci. Under his impetus and direction, in 1950 the publishing house Lautaro printed Letters from Prison, translated into Spanish by Gabriela Moner with a prologue by Gregorio Bermann, cultural hero of the reform and prominent fellow traveler. Eight years later, El materialismo histórico y la filosofía de Benedetto Croce was published with a prologue by Agosti, translated into Spanish by Isidoro Flaumbaum; in 1960, Los intelectuales y la organización de la cultura, translated by Raúl Sciarretta; in 1961, Literatura y vida nacional, translated and with a prologue by José María Aricó, who a year later would do the same with Notas sobre Maquiavelo, sobre la política y sobre el Estado moderno.52 The translation and editing of Gramsci’s work were a monumental effort that was not received enthusiastically, neither inside nor outside the party. However, for Agosti it represented

52 The translation produced by Lautaro and edited by Agosti was the first publication of Gramsci’s texts outside Italy. When translated into English, Gramsci’s notes were grouped according to different criteria. See Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence & Wishart and International Publishers, London and New York, 1971 (edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith).

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the possibility of establishing closer contact with the young people with whom he was involved in a bid to renew the party, an endeavor he had always faced alone. In mid-1956, the young Aricó finished what would be his first published work, a harsh critique of a classic book by the Italian Marxist Rodolfo Mondolfo, El materialismo histórico en Federico Engels y otros ensayos. His original idea was to publish it in Orientación, a Cordoban newspaper directed by the Radical intellectual Antonio Sobral and the only concrete outcome of the movement organized around the “Manifiesto de los ciudadanos de Córdoba,” much maligned by Agosti in his letter to Gustavo Roca.53 The fact that Sobral was also the owner of the publishing house (Raigal) that had published Mondolfo’s book and that the assistant director of Orientación, Roberto Bixio, had been its translator complicated the plans of the young communist, who sent his review to the party’s cultural magazine, which published it in its issue number 33 in December 1956. In the book in question, Mondolfo anticipated Lukács and the shift that “Western Marxism” would come to represent. For the first time, he distinguished Marx’s philosophy of praxis, read from a historicist perspective as Antonio Labriola and the young Croce (and years later, Gramsci) had done, from Engels’ materialistic determinism, a reading that constituted a tradition in contemporary Marxism, above all in Lenin and Soviet Bolshevism. Mondolfo added a new essay to this edition entitled “Gramsci y la filosofía de la praxis,” originally published in the Italian socialist journal Critica Sociale, where he commented on sections of the recently edited Prison Notebooks in order to establish his position on the itinerary of Marxism in Italy and to point out his affinities and differences with Gramsci. In Mondolfo’s view, Gramsci recovered a genuine Marxian reading of the philosophy of praxis, at the antipodes “de la teoría y la práctica del bolcheviquismo ruso” [of the theory and practice of Russian Bolshevism], although in certain sections of his work he moved toward them, especially in Maquiavelo, where he postulated his theory of hegemonic construction through the “modern prince,” that is, the Party. In short, the appearance of Mondolfo’s book, with his notable philosophical expertise in addition to his political authority as a longtime socialist and exiled anti-fascist, as a direct disciple of Labriola and a contemporary of Gramsci, represented a challenge to the strategy of the Argentine

53 See Chapter 5.

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communists who had been publicizing the translations of the Prison Notebooks. Aware of this trend, the future author of Marx y América Latina sought to block the possibility of an anti-Leninist reading of Gramscian Marxism that could lead to a form of social democracy, and his article was a fiery defense of the Leninist lineage of the concept of hegemony. Not surprisingly, Agosti found the article interesting and let the young man from Córdoba know that he wished to contact him through Victorio Codovilla’s private secretary, Alfredo Helman. With great enthusiasm and thinly veiled excitement, in November 1956 Aricó wrote the first in a series of letters to Agosti that would end in 1963, when, by that time at the head of the journal Pasado y Presente, he was far from being the disciplined militant whose intellectual curiosity in Gramsci’s work had attracted the attention of the latter. Although Agosti’s replies have not been preserved, a review of this correspondence allows us to observe the importance of the attempts at renewal undertaken by the author of Echeverría for a group of young communists, who accessed Gramsci through his work. Estuvo siempre en mis pensamientos —escribe Aricó— poder llegar a establecer una comunicación epistolar con Ud. ya que me siento identificado con la orientación que ha impreso a su estudio y obras. Por su intermedio, a través de Defensa del realismo, Cuaderno de Bitácora, Echeverría y Cuadernos de Cultura, llegué a conocer ese gran pensador que fue Antonio Gramsci, a quien trato de estudiar profundamente, no por el mero goce estético, sino porque entiendo —como entiende Ud.— que sus meditaciones “constituyen un aporte primordial para la elaboración de una teoría marxista de la cultura y asumen singular interés para los argentinos por la similitud de algunos problemas de la formación nacional de la cultura y de sus comunes fuentes liberales” (H.P.A.).54 [I have long thought of establishing an epistolary exchange with you —writes Aricó— since I identify with the direction you have taken in

54 Letter from José María Aricó to Héctor P. Agosti, Córdoba, November 5, 1956, Fondo Héctor Pablo Agosti/ Héctor Pablo Agosti Collection; FHPA/CeDInCI, Correspondencia series. The letters from Aricó to Agosti cited here, with the exception of the one sent on August 22, 1959, were reproduced in Políticas de la Memoria, with an introduction by Horacio Tarcus and the author of the present work, some excerpts of which are reprinted here. See Horacio Tarcus and Adriana Petra, “Descubriendo a Gramsci en Córdoba: Contribución a un epistolario de José María Aricó, 1956–1963,” in Políticas de la Memoria, no. 13, 2012/2013, pp. 267–281. The author wishes to express her gratitude to Horacio Tarcus for allowing her to reproduce fragments of this shared publication.

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your studies and your work. Through you, through Defensa del realismo, Cuaderno de Bitácora, Echeverría, and Cuadernos de Cultura, I came to know that great thinker Antonio Gramsci, whom I try to study in depth, not for mere aesthetic enjoyment, but because I understand —as I know you do— that his reflections “constitute a fundamental contribution to the development of a Marxist theory of culture and are of particular interest to Argentines due to the similarity of some issues in the national formation of culture and their shared liberal origins.” (H.P.A.)]

For Aricó, Agosti’s intervention at the First Meeting of Communist Intellectuals in 1956 was “clarifying” for his own intellectual program, and he felt an urgency to develop his main hypotheses, namely, the lack of correspondence between culture and nation as a consequence of the weight of a particularly powerful landowning oligarchy conscious of its objectives and in the face of which liberalism had proved impotent55 : Creo que a partir de dichas afirmaciones se pude hacer —y se tiene que hacer— un estudio profundo de esta quiebra de la continuidad progresista de Mayo. A mí me interesa en particular hacer el estudio desde el punto de vista de nuestro problema central: el problema de la tierra. Pero un poco me asusta la magnitud del estudio que hay que encarar, que en un principio tendrá que hacerse como dice Gramsci: “desde un punto de vista monográfico”. […] Ud. podría ayudarnos por correspondencia a superar las dificultades que surgiesen en el proceso del estudio. Podría también sugerirnos la bibliografía adecuada. Personalmente creo que el estudio de Gramsci sobre la “cuestión meridional” nos sería de suma utilidad pero hasta ahora han sido inútiles mis esfuerzos para conseguirlo.56 [I believe that using these statements as a starting point, an in-depth study on the breakdown of the progressive continuity of the May Revolution can and must be carried out. I am particularly interested in studying it from the point of view of our central problem: the question of land. But I am a little intimidated by the magnitude of the study to be undertaken, which would initially have to be done as Gramsci says: “from a monographic perspective.” […] Through correspondence, you could help us overcome the difficulties that might arise in the process of the study. You could also suggest relevant bibliography. I personally believe that Gramsci’s

55 For more on the First Meeting of Communist Intellectuals in 1956 see Chapter 5. 56 Letter from José María Aricó to Héctor P. Agosti, Córdoba, November 5, 1956,

FHPA/CeDInCI, Correspondencia series (emphasis in original).

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study of the “southern question” would be extremely useful to us, but so far my efforts to obtain a copy have been futile.]

This discipular role began to fade rapidly when Aricó took the liberty of probing Agosti about his affinities with the positions of Argentine philosopher Carlos Astrada regarding dialectics in January 1957.57 In the journal Estrategia para la Liberación Nacional y Social, directed by the then Trotskyist Milcíades Peña, the author of Hegel y la dialéctica responded to the criticisms that Ernesto Giudici had made about the aforementioned book.58 In addition to justifying the decision Cuadernos de Cultura had made not to publish Astrada’s reply because it contained inadmissible attacks on the party, Aricó posed a series of questions that reflected a familiarity with new readings. After taking distance from his Heideggerian philosophical background, in the mid-1950s Astrada had turned toward Marxism, publishing a series of books and articles of remarkable erudition on Hegel, Marx, and Lenin, with a spirit independent of any partisan orthodoxy. After a long philosophical trajectory in existentialist nationalism, which led him to politically support the Peronist experience, Astrada rediscovered Marx and Lenin through Hegel and sought to establish a certain rapprochement with the Argentine communists, who received him with reservations, although they did not hesitate to compare this move with that of Sartre, as we have seen in chapter four. As a new fellow traveler of the PCA, Astrada supported the Peace Movement, visited Moscow, Eastern Europe, and China (on a trip shared with Raúl Larra, Alfredo Varela, and other communists just a few months after the 20th Congress of the CPSU), and published El marxismo y las escatologías through the unofficial publishing house Procyon, headed by Agosti. But the encounter was brief, and what prevailed was the distrust of a man whose philosophical training

57 Letter from José María Aricó to Héctor P. Agosti, Córdoba, January 13, 1958, FHPA/CeDInCI, Correspondencia series. 58 Ernesto Giudici, “A propósito de un libro de Carlos Astrada: La teoría del reflejo y la lógica según Lenin,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 28, March 1957. Astrada’s response was published under the title “La teoría del reflejo… y el ‘reflejo’ de un sectarismo masivo,” in Estrategia para la Liberación Nacional y Social, no. 2, Buenos Aires, December 1957. For a discussion of this debate, see Horacio Tarcus, El marxismo olvidado en la Argentina: Silvio Frondizi and Milcíades Peña, Buenos Aires, El Cielo por Asalto, 1996, pp. 320 and ss.

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no communist was able to match and whose nationalist and existentialist past aroused a suspicion that soon turned into hostility. The fact is that Astrada, in the book in question, pointed out that the theory of knowledge as a “reflection,” as a “copy” of the real in the human mind, as formulated by Lenin in his work Materialism and Empirio-criticism and later converted through Soviet diamat into a “theory of the knowledge of dialectical materialism,” was in stark contrast with Marxist dialectics.59 Lenin himself, it seems, reached an understanding of this dialectic years later, during World War I, as evidenced by the notes on his reading of Hegel collected posthumously in his Philosophical Notebooks. Some excerpts from these Notebooks had been made public by Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman in 1938, already provoking uneasiness within the ranks of communist orthodoxy. In 1956, Éditions Sociales de Paris, the PCF’s publishing house, offered a French translation of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks which was widely circulated throughout the Latin world. Although it avoided any comparison with Materialism and Empirio-criticism, the old question was back on the table and became much more heated, when, from Lefebvre to Sartre, historicist and humanist readings of Marx against Soviet “materialist” orthodoxy were proliferating. It was Carlos Astrada in Buenos Aires, with his usual erudition, who hit a nerve regarding the philosophical canon of the communists, quoting Lenin’s comments on Hegel from the French edition of the Notebooks. From a position of “orthodoxy,” Ernesto Giudici responded to the heresy and, when reviewing Astrada’s book in Cuadernos de Cultura, defended the Leninist theory of “reflection” (alleging that knowledge according to this theory was not merely a passive copy of external reality, but that this first moment is followed by a second active moment) and accused Astrada of a touch of “idealism” that caused him to “ver todavía el marxismo a través de algunos elementos del existencialismo” [still view Marxism through elements of existentialism]. The latter did the same in a letter published in two parts in the journal Estrategia. In the first, he developed his critique of the mechanistic reading of the theory of reflection, relying above all on Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, in which the Russian revolutionary, based on a first-hand reading of Hegel’s Greater

59 Carlos Astrada, El marxismo y las escatologías, Buenos Aires, Procyon, 1957, p. 87.

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Logic, rectified former mechanistic materialist positions. Astrada understood the dialectic not in terms of self-movement, of the unfolding of the object that is then reflected in the subject, but in terms of a subject/object dialectic: “Vale decir que ambas actividades o movimientos suponen la unidad sujeto-objeto y el carácter procesal histórico-dialéctico de esta unidad dinámica” [That is, both activities or movements presuppose subject-object unity and the historical-dialectical procedural nature of this dynamic unity].60 In the second part, he offered a vigorous response to Giudici’s insinuations about his former political commitments. In his letter to Agosti, Aricó distanced himself from Astrada’s political “attacks” on the party. But appealing to their shared Gramscism, he had the audacity to ask Agosti whether it was fair to conclude that Astrada was right in his response to Giudici. Breaking down his questions into five points organized around the Gramscian critique of idealism, in particular the vulgar materialism of Bukharin and the German social democrats, developed in the collected notes entitled El materialismo histórico y la filosofía de Benedetto Croce, the young man from Córdoba aimed to identify the remarkable similarities between Astrada’s critiques and Gramsci’s reflections with respect to the mechanicism that dominated “orthodox” interpretations of Marxism. Did Gramsci not also propose the “inseparable unity of subject-object” from the moment he placed the historical evolution of man at the center of the philosophy of praxis? Was it not high time for a much-needed revision? Was measuring itself against and combating modern ideologies not a fundamental task for Marxism and a condition of possibility in creating its own group of intellectuals? This long series of suggestions ended with a certainty: En mi opinión la aparición de Gramsci significará un gran desarrollo de la discusión y la crítica del marxismo dentro de un vasto sector de los intelectuales. Y creo que lo recibirán, como dijera Rodolfo Ghioldi de otro libro: “Con la avidez con que se goza en una noche pesada de verano un golpe de aire fresco”. Ayudaría evidentemente a curar muchas concepciones mecanicistas que subsisten en las interpretaciones habituales del marxismo.61

60 Carlos Astrada, “La teoría del reflejo… y el ‘reflejo’ de un sectarismo masivo,” op. cit., p. 6. 61 Letter from José María Aricó to Héctor P. Agosti, January 13, 1957, op. cit.

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[In my opinion the appearance of Gramsci will represent a major development in the discussion and critique of Marxism within a vast sector of intellectuals. And I believe that they will receive it, as Rodolfo Ghioldi said of another book: “With the eagerness with which one enjoys a breath of fresh air on a heavy summer night.” It would evidently help cure many mechanistic conceptions that persist in standard interpretations of Marxism.]

All of these questions required answers that Agosti himself, Aricó suggested, was in a position to provide. We do not know what the author of Echeverría replied to the extensive letter from the young disciple who sought to take full advantage of the assistance promised by his mentor. We can confirm that the plea did not go unnoticed, at least privately. In his personal diary, dated December 29, 1957, Agosti noted that he had been informed of Astrada’s letter published in Estrategia and of the accusations of sectarianism that were directed at him because of the refusal of Cuadernos de Cultura to publish it. What could not be said, he wrote, was that it was Rodolfo Ghioldi who had made this decision. However, this was far from the most important point, for there was a more transcendent matter: Hay que afrontar un debate mundial sobre el marxismo que aquí tiene sus repercusiones. La crisis Lefebvre en Francia, las proposiciones de Sartre sobre el marxismo, el “marxismo abierto” que se pregona entre nosotros, etc., todo ello requiere evidentemente ser afrontado de manera pública, aboliendo las formas rutinarias. Puede ser —debe ser— el programa para 1958.62 [We must address a world debate on Marxism that is having repercussions here. The Lefebvre crisis in France, Sartre’s propositions on Marxism, the “open Marxism” that is being touted among us, etc., all of this obviously must be confronted in a public manner, abandoning routine forms. It can —and must— be the program for 1958.]

Following this, the relationship between Agosti and Aricó grew closer based on their shared desire to “revise” the long-standing communist cultural orthodoxy via Gramsci. Within the context of the thaw that seemed to open the Khrushchev era, a certain degree of philosophical revision was tolerated in party ranks as long as it did not transpire in the 62 Héctor P. Agosti, Unpublished personal diary, FHPA/CeDInCI, p. 221.

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political sphere. In fact, a year later, Aricó received the news from Héctor Schmucler that he would be entrusted with overseeing the subsequent Spanish editions of Gramsci’s work, which were in progress at the Lautaro publishing house. For Aricó, this assignment meant the fulfillment of a “longstanding dream,” and he was anxious to show his mentor that his lack of experience as a translator would be compensated by his thorough knowledge of the Italian intellectual’s work.63 Determined to demonstrate his erudition, he made meticulous notes of the translation errors in two of the books published, Cartas desde la cárcel and El materialismo histórico…, some of which, he claimed, were so crude that they distorted Gramsci’s thought and had him supporting things he could never have argued.64 Lautaro entrusted him with the translation of Literatura y vida nacional and the revision of Los intelectuales y la organización de la cultura, but his enthusiasm led him to plan the complete reissue in five volumes of the texts that form the Prison Notebooks. Before his expulsion, the project came to a standstill under the pretext that the publishing house directed by Sara Jorge was experiencing economic difficulties, and it was eventually abandoned, as Aricó would not make any further attempts to complete it in future. In May 1959, Agosti had not only finished writing the book he considered his, Nación y cultura, but in the space of three months he had also completed another volume, El mito liberal, concluding a cycle in which politics seemed to absorb all of his energy, at the risk of his becoming, in his own words, a “grafómano carente de interés” [uninteresting graphomaniac]. His satisfaction, however, was far from complete. A year after Arturo Frondizi’s electoral triumph, which he had welcomed with great enthusiasm, his hopes were dashed by the “más ignominiosa traición a todo cuanto se había postulado para conseguir el sufragio popular” [most ignominious betrayal of everything that had been proposed to obtain

63 From then on, translation would become a central element of Aricó’s politicalintellectual involvement. For more on the topic, see Un nuevo marxismo para América Latina: José Aricó: traductor, editor, intelectual, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2015 [An English translation is available: Translating Marx: José Aricó and the New Latin American Marxism, Leiden, Brill, 2019.]. 64 Letter from José María Aricó to Héctor P. Agosti, Córdoba, August 22, 1959, Fondo Héctor Pablo Agosti/ Héctor Pablo Agosti Collection, Centro de Estudios y Formación Marxista “Héctor P. Agosti” (CEFMA); FHPA/CEFMA.

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the popular vote].65 This had serious consequences. Among the most significant were those related to betrayal or, as David Viñas put it, the “generación traicionada” [betrayed generation]. The concept could be debated, Agosti wrote, but it referred to something very concrete, namely an attitude on the part of young people, including young communists, of breaking with earlier generations, of repudiating en bloc everything that had preceded them, the ultimate consequences of which must be analyzed. “¿Será que también ellos se sienten, frente a nosotros, una generación traicionada?” [Could it be that they also feel, with regards to us, like a betrayed generation?], he wondered.66 Amid these reflections, the talented disciple reciprocated with a laudatory commentary on El mito liberal, which he described as extraordinary, while situating it, along with Nación y cultura, as the fundamental link in an urgent reconsideration of the national history it was important to tackle under the Gramscian impetus, a very different history in form and in scope than the “limited” materials published by the party. He terminado de leer El Mito Liberal y me parece un libro extraordinario. Pienso que es el capítulo que faltaba a Nación y Cultura para convertirse —de tal manera— en el más serio esfuerzo hecho en el país por desentrañar la contradictoria realidad cultural. Nuestro partido está logrando una gran madurez en el conocimiento profundo de nuestro país y su libro (o sus libros) es una muestra clara del aporte de los comunistas a la cultura nacional. Mucho queda por recorrer pero lo ya hecho demuestra que ha quedado muy atrás la época que el marxismo estaba en pañales en la Argentina —como dijera R. Ghioldi— y que el materialismo histórico se está convirtiendo en nuestras manos (vaya lo de “nuestra” en sentido figurado sin hacer mención personal) en un precioso instrumento de conocimiento. El suyo es un libro profundamente sugerente, amplio, polémico, que ayuda a plantear los problemas desde nuevos puntos de miras. Por ejemplo, el capítulo “Formas y contenido de la cultura”, que me parece el más rico en este sentido. Creo que Ud. da el ejemplo de 65 Arturo Frondizi’s government generated great expectations among progressive sectors. However, his economic policy aimed at facilitating the investment of foreign companies in the oil and gas industry, the approval of a law allowing private university education, the promulgation of laws permitting repression and other measures detrimental to the workers and the social sectors that had supported him unleashed a wave of criticism and protests and fueled the image of “betrayal.” His government was overthrown by a military coup in March 1962. 66 Héctor P. Agosti, Unpublished personal diary, op. cit., p. 234.

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utilización creadora del marxismo en general y en ese capítulo, de las ideas de Gramsci, y nos ayudará a quienes somos simples grumetes del barco en el que Ud. es “veterano” (sin licencia) a encontrar el camino para la comprensión cabal de nuestra nación. […] La distinción que Ud. formula entre las corrientes liberales y democráticas del siglo pasado (y del presente) es extremadamente sugerente y puede permitirnos, si la aplicamos con suficiente flexibilidad y conocimiento de la historia, no extraviarnos en los contradictorios hechos del período de la Organización [Nacional], la Revolución del [18]90, etc. Su demostración clara de las deficiencias de estas corrientes y del nacionalismo nos coloca en una posición privilegiada para realizar un análisis objetivo —es decir al margen de las facciones— de nuestro pasado y los problemas irresueltos y podremos pasar a la ofensiva en un terreno en el que todavía estamos a la defensiva (y muestra de ello es la limitación de los escritos sobre historia que aparecen en nuestros materiales).67 [I have just finished reading El Mito Liberal and I consider it an extraordinary book. I believe it is the chapter that was missing from Nación y Cultura in order for it to thereby become the most serious effort undertaken in this country to unravel our contradictory cultural reality. Our party is becoming very mature in its profound knowledge of our country and your book (or books) is a clear example of the communist contribution to national culture. Much remains to be done, but what has already been done demonstrates that Marxism’s infancy —as R. Ghioldi would say— is well behind us, and that historical materialism is becoming a valuable tool for knowledge in our hands (“our” in a figurative rather than personal sense). Your book is profoundly thought-provoking, wide-ranging, polemical, and helps approach these issues from new perspectives. The chapter “Formas y contenido de la cultura,” for instance, seems to me to be the richest in this sense. I believe you give an example of the creative use of Marxism in general and, in this chapter, of Gramsci’s ideas, and that will help those of us who are simply deckhands on the ship on which you are (unofficially speaking) a “veteran” to find the path towards a full understanding of our nation. […] The distinction you make between the liberal and democratic political currents of the last century (and of the present) is extremely thought-provoking and may enable us, if we apply it with sufficient flexibility and knowledge of history, to avoid getting lost in the contradictory events of the period of the [National] Organization, the Revolution of [18]90, etc. Your clear demonstration of the shortcomings of these currents and of nationalism puts us in a privileged position to 67 Letter from José María Aricó to Héctor P. Agosti, Córdoba, September 28, 1959, FHPA/CEFMA.

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carry out an objective analysis —that is, beyond the factions— of our past and its unresolved issues, and we should be able to go on the offensive in a field in which we are still on the defensive (and proof of this is the scarcity of texts on history that appear in our materials).]

Time and again Agosti asked the young group from Córdoba to contribute to Cuadernos de Cultura. Aricó promised an article on Gramsci and insisted on the need to complete the volumes of Prison Notebooks, particularly Il Risorgimento: En mi artículo quisiera referirme un poco a este problema que se puede resumir así: El profundo crecimiento de las fuerzas populares, fundamentalmente de la clase obrera, obliga a replantearse los problemas de nuestra historia nacional por aquello de que “Si escribir historia significa hacer historia del presente, es un gran libro de historia aquel que en el presente ayuda a las fuerzas en desarrollo a devenir más conscientes de sí mismas y con ello más activas y realizadoras” (Il Risorgimento, p. 63). Esta labor la deben realizar sin desmayo nuestros investigadores y nuestros dirigentes. Le recuerdo que en la biografía realizada por Lombardo Radice y Carbone, ellos cuentan cómo planteaba la necesidad de que los dirigentes del Partido conociesen profundamente la historia de la creación del Estado Unitario Italiano y encuentro también en una nota de Problemas de la Paz que esa idea del genial pensador italiano se lleva a la práctica, ya que en los cursos anuales del P. C. Italiano se incluye como materia obligatoria la Historia de Italia. En nuestro proyecto de programa y nuestras tesis están contenidos los rasgos fundamentales de nuestra historia que pueden permitirnos realizar ese trabajo y la idea de festejar el 150 aniversario de la Revolución de Mayo puede ser un punto de arranque de una profunda labor en este sentido.68 [In my article I intend to discuss this issue to some extent, which can be summarized as follows: The profound growth of the popular forces, primarily of the working class, compels us to rethink the problems of our national history on the grounds that “If writing history means making a history of the present, it is a great history book that in the present helps the developing forces become more self-aware and thus more active and productive” (Il Risorgimento, p. 63). This task must be carried out tirelessly by our researchers and our leaders. Remember that in the biography written by Lombardo Radice and Carbone, they describe how he proposed the need for the Party’s leaders to have a profound knowledge

68 Ibid.

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of the history of the creation of the United Italian State and I have also found in a note in Problemas de la Paz that this brilliant Italian thinker’s idea is being put into practice, since in the annual courses of the C. P. of Italy the History of Italy is included as a compulsory subject. Our draft program and our theses contain the fundamental features of our history that may enable us to carry out this work, and the idea of celebrating the 150th anniversary of the May Revolution may be the starting point of a major undertaking in this sense.]

Aricó did not keep his promise, but he did intervene directly in the philosophical debate that would become the prelude to his expulsion and that of his colleagues from the party. In mid-1962, a young member of the party’s Comisión de Estudios Filosóficos (Commission on Philosophical Studies), Raúl Olivieri, published in Cuadernos de Cultura an article that, revisited the topic of the subject/object relationship to defend the preeminence of the “objectivity of the real” over consciousness (“diamat” ) under the title “El problema del determinismo en el materialismo dialéctico.”69 Just as Aricó had questioned Agosti four years earlier, the choice between the canonization of the materialist epistemology of the preeminence of the object over the subject characteristic of Materialism and Empirio-criticism, and the recovery of the Hegelian idealism that conceived the active/productive side of the reality of the knowing/acting subject for a philosophy of praxis was being posed. Oscar del Barco, encouraged by Agosti, wrote an article that implicitly judged Olivieri’s text.70 Invoking Gramscian historicism, Del Barco described the materialist objectivism of diamat as “metaphysical” and claimed that it confused the issue of the ontological pre-existence of the external world and its relationship with the knowing subject with the problem of the meaning that the subject gave to that world.71 The text sparked a heated discussion and the Comisión de Estudios Filosóficos entrusted Olivieri with the task of writing a refutation, which was published in issue 60 of Cuadernos de Cultura. After recognizing the vastness and originality of Gramsci’s work and the contribution it represented in “some respects” toward 69 Raúl Olivieri, “El problema del determinismo en el materialismo dialéctico,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 58, July/August 1962, pp. 11–30. 70 Oscar del Barco, “Notas sobre Antonio Gramsci y el problema de la ‘objetividad,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 59, September/October 1962, pp. 29–41. 71 See Néstor Kohan, De Ingenieros al Che: Ensayos sobre el marxismo argentino y latinoamericano, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2000, pp. 185 and 186.

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the renewal of Marxism, Olivieri regretted that Del Barco borrowed precisely the problem of objectivity from the Italian thinker, given that it was one of the most debatable aspects of his thinking and where he most distanced himself from Marxist-Leninist philosophy. As a result, Del Barco, following the theses put forward by Gramsci in El materialismo histórico to their ultimate consequences lapsed, like Gramsci, into a subjective idealism with clear political implications.72 In late November 1962, Oscar del Barco wrote a brief note to Agosti in which he informed him that he had decided, along with Aricó, to develop a response that would explore the issue in greater depth, but, he warned, no longer along a “simply exegetical path.” He leído la respuesta de Olivieri a mi trabajo sobre el concepto de objetividad en Gramsci. La verdad es que, mediante un tipo de polémica que necesitamos en forma imperiosa superar, se lleva un ataque en parte frontal y en parte encubierto, contra Gramsci, contra aquellos aspectos que el autor llama discutibles, los que “más se apartan de la filosofía marxistaleninista”. Y no es que no se puede discrepar con Gramsci. Al contrario, hay que impedir a toda costa la concreción de una nueva ortodoxia, gramsciana o de quien sea, pero teniendo siempre presentes las necesidades de una verdadera crítica filosófica y dejándonos de una vez para siempre de encarar como enemigo a quien no comparte nuestras ideas.73 [I have read Olivieri’s response to my work on the concept of objectivity in Gramsci. The truth is that through a type of debate that we must absolutely overcome, he carries out a partially direct and partially veiled attack against Gramsci, against those aspects that the author calls questionable, those that “most deviate from Marxist-Leninist philosophy.” And it is not that one cannot disagree with Gramsci. On the contrary, we must prevent the establishment of a new orthodoxy, Gramscian or otherwise, at all costs, but always bearing in mind the needs of a true philosophical critique, ceasing once and for all to treat those who do not share our ideas as enemies.]

Agosti lent his support, although he requested special care be taken with the tone in which the matter was presented. Del Barco’s article

72 Raúl Olivieri, “El materialismo dialéctico y la objetividad,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 60, November/December 1962, pp. 23–39. 73 Letter from Oscar del Barco to Héctor P. Agosti, Córdoba, November 25, 1962, FHPA/CEFMA.

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was published under the somewhat misleading title of “Respuesta a una crítica dogmática.” This time, not only Gramsci was invoked, but the young philosopher from Córdoba also relied on other contemporary Marxist philosophers (Luporini, Lukács, Banfi, Sartre, Geymonat, etc.), including the hitherto vilified Rodolfo Mondolfo and certain “prophets” who combined Marxism with “brebajes existencialistas” [existentialist concoctions], as Agosti himself put it, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty.74 The debate was definitively concluded in the same issue with an article written jointly by Olivieri and Raúl Sciarretta, translator of Los intelectuales y la organización de la cultura, in which Del Barco was accused not only of being an idealist, but also of being a revisionist.75 By that time, the journal Pasado y Presente had already published its first issue, and Aricó, Del Barco, and Schmucler along with Juan Carlos Portantiero in Buenos Aires were to be permanently expelled. The publication of Pasado y Presente was a process that had long been planned by the group from Córdoba, and Agosti himself was aware of the project, which he did not view entirely sympathetically.76 For the author of El mito liberal, it was important to focus efforts on Cuadernos de Cultura and not disperse the limited resources at a time when the party had once again been banned. Both Schmucler and Agosti defended the project of publishing a journal in Córdoba, primarily because of the need for a publication with a physical presence in the province that would serve to unite efforts and form teams that a long-distance collaboration could not ensure. Additionally, this “monstrosity” that they baptized Pasado y Presente was conceived as a journal with a united front and not 74 Oscar del Barco, “Respuesta a una crítica dogmática,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 63, May/June 1963, pp. 34–57. 75 Raúl Oliva [Raúl Olivieri] and Raúl Sierra [Sciarretta], “Crítica a una crítica revisionista,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 63, May/June 1963, pp. 58–62. 76 Pasado y Presente published its first issue in April 1963 in the city of Córdoba, directed by Oscar del Barco and Aníbal Arcondo and supported by the PCA, which financed the first two issues. Following this, the party expelled the journal’s participants under suspicion of factionalism. Pasado y Presente published a total of nine issues by the end of its first period in 1965 and two more in 1973. Its editorial board included, alternately: Oscar del Barco, José M. Aricó, Samuel Kieczkovsky, Juan Carlos Torre, Héctor N. Schmucler, Aníbal Arcondo, César U. Guiñazú, Carlos Assadourian, Francisco Delich, Luis J. Prieto, and Carlos R. Giordano. Among its Argentine contributors were José Carlos Chiaramonte, Gregorio Bermann, Mauricio Hesse, León Rozitchner, Noé Jitrik, Julio César Moreno, Conrado Eggers Lan, Emilio Terzaga, Emilio de Ípola, Néstor Braunstein, Eliseo Verón, Alberto Ciria, Oscar Masotta, and José Nun.

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directly identified with the party like Cuadernos de Cultura which, given the conditions in Argentina at the time, would be helpful in securing collaborations. Although, above all, as Aricó explained: No existe una publicación de este tipo, en el país. Y el hecho de que no exista hace que muchas personas que mantienen una seria posición de respeto hacia nuestra organización, y que están dentro de la izquierda pueden ser convertidas en piezas de maniobras de aventureros del tipo de los que se acaba de lanzar a la publicación de la revista de la Liberación nacional.77 Lo que en mi opinión no es más que otra de las tantas publicaciones que bajo el manto de la izquierda se dedican a hacer cada vez más duro el camino del encuentro de las fuerzas populares.78 [There is no publication of this type in the country. And the fact that there is none means that many people who maintain a serious position of respect towards our organization, and who are on the left, can be converted into pawns for adventurers like those who just launched the publication of Liberación nacional. In my view, this is just another of the many journals that, under the guise of a leftist publication, are dedicated to making the path towards the unification of popular forces increasingly difficult.]

The problem of the dispersion of efforts and the lack of commitment to Cuadernos de Cultura, Aricó concluded, did not depend, and Agosti must have known it, on the existence of a new journal, but rather on the fact that party leadership had no concept of the importance of cultural work. The publication finally appeared in April of that year, and it was Schmucler who was in charge of delivering it to Agosti. Along with recognition of the intellectual debt that he claimed the initiative owed to his guidance and his efforts to broaden the conception and scope of cultural work within the party, Schmucler warned him that, within the general conception of the ideological struggle, the journal perhaps harbored somewhat

77 He is referring to the Revista de la Liberación, which published three issues between 1963 and 1964. It was directed by José Speroni and Ricardo Piglia was a member of its editorial board. 78 Letter from José María Aricó to Héctor P. Agosti, Córdoba, January 28, 1963, FHPA/CEFMA.

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different views on “particulares aspectos de la totalidad de este combate” [particular aspects of the totality of this struggle].79 The outcome is well-known. The group tied to Pasado y Presente was expelled along with the one headed by Juan Carlos Portantiero in Buenos Aires. Agosti’s break with his disciples was absolute and he never again met with them or had any contact with them.80 Subsequently, the divisions occurred in quick succession and the cultural space that he had painstakingly sought to generate was plunged into a crisis from which it never recovered. In 1964 the editorial group of La Rosa Blindada— Carlos Brocato and José Luis Mangieri—was separated from the party, accused of supporting “foquism.”81 The same fate befell the poet Juan Gelman and sparked a wave that would later include members Marcelo Ravoni, Hugo Gola, Roberto Raschella, Raúl Sciarretta. The political reasons for these successive splits have already been analyzed by other authors, particularly with reference to the impact of the Cuban Revolution and, with it, the armed struggle among young communists who were also immersed in the theoretical-political problem posed by the persistent loyalty of the popular masses to Peronism. Based on the particular case of Pasado y Presente, we wish to emphasize another dimension, specifically cultural and not exclusively local, which we feel should be analyzed as a variable that explains the difficulties communism found in responding 79 Letter from Héctor Schmucler to Héctor P. Agosti, Córdoba, June 12, 1963, FHPA/CEFMA. 80 In the interview Portantiero gave to Edgardo Mocca in 2005, he recounts the events that led to his expulsion following his appearance at the head of a universitybased partisan faction. Portantiero recalls that a meeting was held, in which Normando Iscaro, Leonardo Paso, and Agosti participated, to judge his behavior and compel him to engage in self-criticism. It ended in expulsion despite attempts at moderation by Agosti, who, according to Portantiero, was “toda la noche tirándole sogas” [throwing lifelines to him all night], which he never seized. See Edgardo Mocca, Juan Carlos Portantiero: Un itinerario político-intelectual, Buenos Aires, Biblioteca Nacional, 2012, pp. 67 and 68. 81 The journal’s title was inspired by a book by poet Raúl González Tuñón, who helped foster the project. Its contributors included Roberto Cossa, Octavio Getino, Roberto Raschella, and Javier Villafañe. Given the distinct profile of its members with respect to Pasado y Presente, La Rosa Blindada is another interesting case of the reception of Italian Marxism. In its first issue, the journal published Galvano della Volpe’s article “Marxismo y crítica literaria” as an introduction, and the publishing house of the same name, one of the most important at the time, published the seminal work of critic Paolo Chiarini, La vanguardia y la poética del realismo. For more on the journal, see the work by Néstor Kohan (ed.), La Rosa Blindada: Una pasión de los ‘60, Buenos Aires, La Rosa Blindada, 1999.

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to the “demand for rigor” that many new intellectuals posed to a leadership that was not always able to respond. In this sense, the political radicalization that gave rise to the birth of the so-called new left must be understood in close relation to the changes that took place in the intellectual field itself especially within universities.

5

Pasado Y Presente: New Forms of the Marxist Intellectual

In April 1962, a group of university students in the Sociology Department at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) addressed a long letter to Agosti in his capacity as director of Cuadernos de Cultura. In it, they made reference to an article it had published entitled “Cosas de la sociología” by Rodolfo Ghioldi.82 Aimed at combating the interpretative space of the nascent Sociology program, which was then producing its first graduating class, Ghioldi’s article refuted “bourgeois sociology” as anti-scientific and apologetic, a mere product of capitalist degeneration, an illusion that Marxists had to combat in the name of the only possible scientific sociology, the historical materialism embodied in the praxis of the PCA. For the young communist students, Ghioldi’s remarks exemplified the way in which the communist leaders evaluated the ties between Marxism and the nascent social sciences and, in their opinion, constituted the best way to avoid studying the “national reality,” a veritable imperative of the times: the absolute lack of scientific rigor, the renunciation of any critical analysis, the simplification and even the crassest ignorance of the subject matter addressed. Por demasiado evidente solo apuntamos que el esquematismo, la violencia de los adjetivos, las contadas y parciales fuentes de información a las que se hace referencia, el uso de citas aisladas como indicadores absolutos de posiciones ideológicas, colocan la polémica en un nivel muy distante del que debe mantener una discusión científica, inutilizando el artículo como material de lucha ideológica. Estos trabajos se hacen necesarios como material de consulta y esclarecimiento, pero nosotros consideramos que sin un

82 Rodolfo Ghioldi, “Cosas de la sociología,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 53, September/October 1961, pp. 22–38.

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mínimo de rigor y elaboración no pueden cumplir satisfactoriamente ese papel.83 [As it is all quite obvious, we will only note that the schematism, the violence of the adjectives, the few and partial sources of information referred to, and the use of isolated quotations as absolute indicators of ideological positions place the debate at a level far removed from that of scientific discussion, rendering the article useless as material for the ideological struggle. These works are needed as reference material for consultation and clarification, but we believe that without a minimum of rigor and preparation they cannot fulfill this role satisfactorily.]

In pointing out as self-evident what Ghioldi seemed to overlook— that it was totally inappropriate, for example, to place authors such as Parsons and Lévi-Strauss on the same plane—the future sociologists were engaging in the unprecedented act of questioning a top party leader for lacking the minimum requirements of intellectual rigor compared to an adversary who more than fulfilled them, holding him accountable for the difficulties that Marxism-Leninism was encountering in inserting itself in the student and intellectual sectors, increasingly attracted by the “neoMarxists and revisionists.” A short time later, in Cuestiones de Filosofía—a journal with which Pasado y Presente would go on to maintain a regular exchange and an evident affinity, a young member of the emerging elite of social scientists, a product of the post-Peronist university—returned to Ghioldi’s article to affirm what the communists had already hinted at: that Marxism as understood by the PCA, and with it a good part of the partisan left, was one of the main obstacles in the development of a “Marxist perspective” in the social sciences and in determining the role of the latter in the processes of social transformation.84 For Eliseo Verón—who at the time was studying at the Collège de France under the tutelage of Lévi-Strauss—if “Marxist sociology” existed only in the minds of those who considered Marxism as a possession, as a total, abstract truth outside of history, it was up to the new generations, beginning with his

83 Unsigned letter addressed to the director of Cuadernos de Cultura Héctor P. Agosti, April 1962, FHPA/CeDInCI. 84 Cuestiones de Filosofía published three issues (the second, double) in 1962. It was directed by Marco Aurelio Galmarini, J. Arthur Giannotti, Jorge Lafforgue, León Sigal and Eliseo Verón.

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own journal, to undertake its realization as both a political and intellectual program.85 Pasado y Presente was an excellent example of the conflict that permeated the entire communist world from the 1960s onwards: the emergence of a new generation of intellectuals who set out to question the leaders in the previously reserved territory of Marxist theory. It was a dispute between two elites: one was legitimized by its position in the apparatus of political representation and the other by its emerging ascendancy in the intellectual sphere as representative of modernity within Marxism. Toward the end of 1950, the PCA still occupied a hegemonic place in the cultural world of the Argentine left. Supported by a structure of considerable proportions that included several journals, publishing houses, and frontist and cultural organizations, Argentine communist culture, however, despite Agosti’s efforts, had not developed a recognizable and differentiated position in the more general cultural field and, with a few exceptions, remained wedded to the models of liberal heritage and subject to reductionist and dogmatic conceptions of artistic creation and intellectual labor. In fact, the anti-fascist identity that had united the communist intelligentsia since 1930 and had extended throughout the Peronist decade underwent a definitive crisis as the rereading of the Peronist phenomenon became relevant and liberalism was subject to widespread questioning. Both the line of thought that tied the “defense of culture” to the recovery of a liberal tradition threatened by “fascist barbarism” as well as the figure of the intellectual who acted as a bulwark of the values of reason and humanity ceased to be valid representations for thinking about the past and the role of intellectuals in the processes of social transformation, a shift that the Cuban Revolution accelerated considerably. This ideological change was coupled with the morphological change caused by the admission of new generations of young intellectuals into the party, many of whom were receiving their education in the reformist university in the context of an unprecedented boom in Marxist culture, which became a central axis of the cultural modernization of the entire period that began in 1955. If up to that point communist intellectuals acted mainly as a badge of legitimacy for frontist initiatives but only rarely thought about or integrated Marxism into their own cultural 85 Eliseo Verón, “Sociología, ideología y subdesarrollo,” in Cuestiones de Filosofía, no. 2/3, 1962, pp. 13–40.

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productions—a task for which they had not received sufficient training, which was something party authorities noted and because of which they demanded they always adhere to authorized readings—now the problem was the opposite. The desire of the young sociologists, historians, and literary critics to understand the literature and discuss it based on a specific and erudite knowledge that the leaders barely possessed constituted a completely new situation. In dialogue with this process, and making many of the innovations that emerged from it their own, the generational situation behind the separatist impulse of Pasado y Presente acquired a more specific, though not exclusive, dimension. Like the young sociologists who recused the party’s top leader on the grounds that his ignorance of theoretical novelties was as great as it was embarrassing for them to sustain in the face of his opponents, those grouped around Pasado y Presente set out on a task of doctrinal reform centered strategically on the deployment, as Oscar Terán rightly pointed out, of everything they knew and the Communist Party did not.86 From the beginning, and unlike other publications that emerged in similar circumstances, Pasado y Presente revealed itself to be a journal of Marxist culture, given the centrality granted to the recovery and analysis of Marx’s texts and the theoretical discussions that proliferated at the time about a body of work that appeared inexhaustible. From its very first issue, the journal included a notable number of translations and showed a marked interest in theoretical and methodological aspects and theoretical and disciplinary regions that were fully within “new” territory. This avant-garde spirit that shaped the way the journal proposed to intervene in the intellectual debate is not, as we have said, the only explanation for the generational phenomenon which it claimed to form part of, although it is a determining factor in explaining the cultural significance that the publication acquired within this context. Indeed, the feeling of rupture and separation which accompanied many of the cultural and political innovations of the twentieth century did not always give rise to the birth of a generation. The emergence of a class of Marxist intellectuals, although potentially due to a group of globally recognized events or “ideological developments,” did not always take the form of a generational discourse as it did in Argentina, where the “Peronist question” was the

86 Eliseo Verón, “Sociología, ideología y subdesarrollo,” in Cuestiones de Filosofía, no. 2/3, 1962, pp. 13–40.

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catalyzing element that shaped it.87 As Carlos Altamirano has noted, politics was not the only facet of this new generation, which all identified themselves with in one way or another, but within that particular sphere Peronism and, along with it, the ideological motives of what we can call “populism,” appealed to the left-wing intelligentsia to the point of fascination.88 Pasado y Presente did not shy away from this appeal, nor from the one that the Cuban Revolution and later the figure of revolutionary Peronism would ultimately encapsulate: the armed struggle.89

6

The Fabric of the Reformist University

If opposition to the communist tradition serves as a starting point for understanding the way in which Pasado y Presente sought to position itself in the intellectual arena, a reference to the university milieu is unavoidable in order to understand its internal configuration. Not necessarily because it was an undertaking defined by its close ties to academia, as Cuestiones de Filosofía was, but because it was there that most of the members of the group established relationships whose virtuality would help give it form. With the exception of José María Aricó, all of the members of the journal’s editorial board, during its first stage, were university educated. Even more exceptional for the time, many of them had completed postgraduate studies abroad, some of them finishing their doctoral degrees before they were 35. Of its first directors, Oscar del Barco was a historian, while Aníbal Arcondo had a PhD in Economics from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC), a degree he would soon complement by defending his doctoral thesis in Economic History at the Sorbonne in 1968, supervised by Ruggiero Romano. Carlos Sempat Assadourian was also a historian. In 1964 at the Escuela de Historia de la Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades

87 See Carl Schorske, “Conflit de générations et changement culturel: Réflexions sur le cas de Vienne,” in Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, no. 26, 1979, pp. 109–116, and Jean-François Sirinelli, “Effets d’âge et phénomènes de génération dans le milieu intellectuel français,” in Les Cahiers del’IHTP, no. 6, 1987. 88 Carlos Altamirano, Peronismo y cultura de izquierda, op. cit., pp. 70 and 71. 89 Regarding the relationship of some members of Pasado y Presente with the Ejército

Guerrillero del Pueblo (People’s Guerrilla Army), a “foquista” initiative implemented in northern Argentina in the early 1960s and led by journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti, see Raúl Burgos, Los gramscianos argentinos, op. cit., pp. 83–93.

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(School of History at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities) he presented his undergraduate thesis on the slave trade in Córdoba, and it was published the following year in the Cuadernos de Historia series of the Instituto de Estudios Americanistas (Institute of Americanist Studies) directed by Ceferino Garzón Maceda, a leading figure in the historiographical renewal that took place in Argentine universities starting in the 1960s under the influence of the Escuela de los Annales (Annales School). Oscar del Barco, although he also had ties to Garzón Maceda, did not devote himself to historical studies and his participation in the journal focused on fostering the theoretical approaches that in France flourished under the constellation of structuralism and its key figures. However, in the second issue of the journal, his article “Metodología histórica y concepción del mundo” placed Pasado y Presente at the center of the new historiographic debate when he polemicized with Tulio Halperin Donghi’s paradigmatic text “Historia y larga duración: examen de un problema,” published in the second and last issue of Cuestiones de Filosofía. It was Del Barco, while on a trip to Paris, who invited Francisco Delich to participate in the journal. Delich was a former political opponent in university activism, who joined the editorial board when he returned to Córdoba after graduating from the École des Hautes Études, where he trained with Alain Touraine in the nascent sociology of labor. Delich and Juan Carlos Torre, a sociology student at the University of Buenos Aires at the time, would be key to the fieldwork that resulted in the report on the Fiat factory conflict that the journal published in its last issue in 1965, discussed below.90 The founding members of the journal included Dr. Samuel Kieczkovsky—who worked with psychiatrist Gregorio Bermann—and Héctor Schmucler, who was its first managing editor. Schmucler had a background in literature, like Carlos Rafael Giordano and César Ulises Guiñazú. The latter, in 1964, published a study on writer Alberto Vanasco with the collaboration of Noé Jitrik, a leading member of Contorno. Since 1960, he had been the chair of Argentine Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the UNC, where Carlos Giordano was an assistant professor and Héctor Schmucler an adjunct. But Jitrik was not the only member of Contorno who passed through Córdoba in the years of the post-Peronist university. The literary critic Adolfo Prieto held the 90 “Informe preliminar sobre el conflicto FIAT,” in Pasado y Presente, no. 9, April/September 1965, pp. 56–67.

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same chair in 1957, in addition to teaching Hispanic American Literature.91 Luis Prieto also participated in this renewal, joining the journal’s editorial board when it expanded for issue 5/6. The chair of General Linguistics, Prieto had recently returned from a lengthy stay in France, where he studied with the linguist André Martinet. In 1964, he published Principes de noologie in Paris and in 1966, Messages et signaux, translated into Spanish a year later by César Ulises Guiñazú for the Seix Barral publishing house in Barcelona. Prieto’s trajectory is interesting in that it reflects both the growing interest in Marxism among certain sectors of the intellectual elite and the process of politicization that in some cases this entailed. Coming from the Catholic right, at the beginning of 1960 he joined the cultural front of the PCA in Córdoba that became a broad and eclectic movement through the impetus of its young members. They were not always viewed with sympathy by the leadership, which ended up rejecting the affiliation of many would-be newcomers. This was the case of poet and essayist Enrique Luis Revol, another leading figure in the university renewal in Córdoba, when he became chair of History of French Literature and English and North American Literature in 1956. With very close ties to the liberal intellectual sectors, Revol began his collaboration with the journal Realidad in 1948, directed by philosopher Francisco Romero. That same year, along with Alfredo Juan Weiss, he founded the journal Reunión, devoted to art and literary criticism, and during this period he contributed with some assiduity to Sur and regularly to the cultural page of the newspaper La Nación. In addition to his strong ties with Buenos Aires, Revol was an active member of Córdoba’s intellectual scene, as evidenced through his participation in the circle of writers, translators, and poets who met at the café L’Aiglon, frequented by Alfredo Terzaga and the Trotskyist philosopher Héctor Raurich, among others.92 The same crowd used to frequent the basement of the Paideia bookstore, owned by Bernardo Nagelkop, linked to Pasado y Presente through joint publishing projects as well as the friendship that united the experienced bookseller with the young Aricó,

91 On Adolfo Prieto and the renewal of Argentine literary criticism, see Alejandro Blanco and Luis Carlos Jackson, “Intersecciones: Crítica literaria y sociología en la Argentina y el Brasil,” in Prismas, no. 15, 2011, pp. 31–51. 92 Luis Ignacio García García, Modernidad, cultura y crítica: La escuela de Frankfurt en la Argentina (1936–1983), Córdoba, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 2014, p. 312.

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who worked as a salesman in the Pasaje Central location in the city of Córdoba. It was within this cultural framework that the group’s first forays into the publishing world would emerge. In addition to the publications Ediciones Pasado y Presente announced, of which only the booklet Arte y partidismo with articles by Rossana Rossanda and Vittorio Strada and a foreword by Héctor Schmucler was released, in the journal’s second issue, Ediciones Paideia, which had begun publishing in 1955 with Rainer Maria Rilke’s Diario florentino, announced the forthcoming publication of four titles that reflected the involvement of the Pasado y Presente group. Of this project, the only titles actually produced were Problemas actuales del marxismo [Problèmes actuels du marxisme], the book by Henri Lefebvre that marked the French philosopher’s break with the PCF, published under the Nagelkop imprint in 1965 and translated into Spanish by César Ulises Guiñazú, and Merleau-Ponty vivo [Merleau-Ponty vivant ] by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Esteban and Elma Estrabou and edited by José María Aricó. Some of these same names also appear associated with the publishing endeavor undertaken by the Federación Universitaria de Córdoba (University Federation of Córdoba, or Eudecor) under the direction of Aricó, who, no longer a member of the party and without a professional or university position, found both an outlet for cultural intervention and a means of earning a living in publishing. The books published under the Eudecor imprint starting in 1966 reflect both the avant-garde style that was being promoted and the system of relations that made this possible: Enrique Revol would translate Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture by Theodor W. Adorno, in the wake of a concern that since the early 1960s read the works of the Frankfurt School through a Marxist matrix, as well as Herbert Read’s Beauty and the Beast; Alfredo Paiva—whose relationship with the Pasado y Presente group had also begun while at university—would do the same with Gérard Genette’s Estructuralismo y crítica literaria [Structuralisme et critique littéraire], published two years earlier in the French journal L’Arc and fated to become, in the words of Adolfo Prieto, the gospel of new criticism under the structuralist influx. Carlos Giordano would participate in the translation of Problemas del estructuralismo [Problèmes du structuralisme], with an introduction and notes by Oscar del Barco, and Giordano’s wife, professor Delia García, would do the same with one of the essays from Max Weber’s El sabio y la política [Wissenschaft als Beruf and Politik als Beruf ], with a prologue by Juan Carlos Torre. In 1968, the

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year Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente appeared, Oscar del Barco published Memoria de una aventura metafísica. His first novel and one of the high points of the aesthetic avant-garde in Córdoba, it formed part of the Signos collection and was directed by Giordano himself, while the Buenos Aires publishing house Caldén (backed by León Pomer, a member of La Rosa Blindada) published the first titles of the collection El Hombre y el Mundo, which under his direction included titles by Bataille, Artaud, Morin, Derrida, Barthes, and Hyppolite over the following decade.93 The role that university dynamics played in the establishment of this broad system of references seems unquestionable, a dynamic that enabled both an unprecedented intellectual circulation within the national university space and a well-oiled system of contacts with the outside world through scholarships, exchanges, and new scientific organizations, such as the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, or CONICET), created in 1958 by the Arturo Frondizi government. The cultural opportunities offered by the university system are also behind the particular interest of several of the members of Pasado y Presente in the intellectual novelties produced in France, where many of them did their postgraduate studies. An overview of these relations is useful in both tempering the exclusivity of the Italian influence and reflecting on the “Cordoban particularity” in the intellectual project of Pasado y Presente. When referring to this aspect, mention is often made of the tremendous change in the province’s social structure due to the growth of a new industrial working class following the establishment of metalworking plants over the preceding decade. The relationship with this process, which in cultural terms manifested as the notably dense rerun of a greater and recurrent antinomy between the principles of tradition and Modernity, would be, according to Horacio Crespo’s interpretation in the wake of Aricó’s reflections, what gave the unique Cordoban distinction to a publication that, in other senses, was part of broader political processes such as the crisis of communism and the influence of the Cuban Revolution. What this point of view seems

93 See Diego García, “Signos: Notas sobre un momento editorial,” in Políticas de la Memoria, no. 10/11/12, 2009–2011, pp. 149–155. On Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente, see Horacio Crespo, “En torno a Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente,” in Claudia Hilb (ed.), El político y el científico: Ensayos en homenaje a Juan Carlos Portantiero, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2009.

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to suggest is that the journal would have continued with a local tradition marked by the pretension of a certain independence in the field of ideas with regards to Buenos Aires or, more precisely, with regards to the porteño interpretations of European ideas. Thus, the reference to the particular ecology of Córdoba city during this period was the base on which theoretical innovations were introduced to explain it.94 There is no doubt that, in the political hypotheses proposed by the journal, the industrial dynamics in Córdoba, as well as a problematization of the “federal question”—outlined in Aricó’s editorial “Examen de conciencia”—played a significant role, and that Gramscian explanatory matrices were convened around them, which, as we will analyze below, were not exclusive of a more complex Italian Marxist tradition in those years. However, if attention is paid to the cultural framework that surrounded and shaped the emergence of Pasado y Presente, giving more explanatory weight to its specific role, the Córdoba issue becomes more historically precise. It thus enables the discovery of a very dynamic and densely interconnected intellectual space, modified by an elite revitalized by the renewal of the university system in the aftermath of Peronism (not only, as we have seen, in strictly institutional and ideological terms, but also in terms of the network of relationships that connected diverse cultural spaces) and responsive to theoretical innovations from other parts of the world. Their appropriation materialized as cultural and intellectual products and artifacts that would have a lasting effect on the constitution of new fields of knowledge and intellectual reflection.

7

The Second Peninsular Moment: From Gramsci to “Workerism”

The relationship between Marxism and modern culture served as the substratum for the incorporation of new theoretical and disciplinary regions, themes, and styles that, as is the case in peripheral cultural fields, determined the identity of the new intellectual programs of this period based on the relationship they established with the metropolitan centers.95 In this sense, as Horacio Tarcus suggests, it is possible to speak

94 See Horacio Crespo, “Córdoba, Pasado y Presente y la obra de José Aricó: Una guía de aproximación,” in Prismas, no. 1, 1997, pp. 130–146. 95 Silvia Sigal, Intelectuales y poder en la Argentina, op. cit., p. 15.

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of a Marxist corpus containing several types of Marx and Marxisms: from the Marx of the communists to the structural Marx, passing through the humanist, the nationalist, the Sartrean, and of course, the Gramscian Marx, tied to the Pasado y Presente experience.96 At this point, it is worth asking: in what way were the Argentine Gramscians Gramscian? The answer may not be straightforward. In fact, if focus is placed on the journal’s presentation of its most programmatic aspects— in the editorials of the first and subsequent issues—there is no doubt that the whole operation of positioning with respect to the political tendency it formed part of, the various groups and traditions active in post-Peronist Argentine culture, and mainly, the relationship with Marxism’s theoretical and political legacy was carried out by invoking the core aspects of the Gramscian problematic. We must therefore coincide with Aricó that Gramscism was the substratum from which the journal embarked on a form of cultural work that it was capable of incorporating the most advanced currents of European cultural thought with remarkable ease, beginning with Marxism, andconfident in its critical capacit, and the militant value of intellectual practice. “En este sentido —afirma Aricó—, y creo que solo en él, por lo menos desde una perspectiva grupal, fuimos ‘gramscianos’ y como tales reivindicamos nuestra identidad en el ámbito del debate argentino” [In this sense, and I believe only in this sense—Aricó states—at least from a group perspective, we were “Gramscians” and as such we asserted our identity in the Argentine debate.]97 From this, we can deduce that the Gramscian identity the group adopted as its main tool of distinction was more intellectual than strictly political in function and in productivity, insofar as it enabled a series of operations of cultural modernization, including a new style. But as Héctor Schmucler has suggested, while the editorials signed by Aricó reflected a political approach in constant dialogue with Gramsci, the rest of the publication followed the spirit of heterodoxy the Italian theoretician facilitated, without this implying the direct influence or systematic instruction that only Aricó could display.98 Therefore, the importance

96 Horacio Tarcus, “El corpus marxista,” in Susana Cella (dir.), Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, vol. 10: La irrupción de la crítica, op. cit., pp. 465–500. 97 José María Aricó, La cola del diablo, op. cit., p. 91. 98 Personal interview conducted by the author in September 2008.

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he played in defining the political-intellectual identity of the group in relation to Gramscian thought is neither surprising nor debatable, but it would be mistaken to consider him the variable that explains the whole experience, rather than one factor among others to be included in the analysis. “Prácticamente no existe —afirma Jacques Julliard— una revista digna de ese nombre sin que un hombre le haya consagrado sus ideas, su tiempo, su energía y a veces su dinero. Una revista puede tener una vida colectiva, pero su alma permanece siempre individual” [There is virtually no journal worthy of the name,” Jacques Julliard has stated, “without someone having devoted their ideas, their time, their energy, and sometimes their money to it. A journal may have a collective life, but its soul always remains individual].99 We can therefore affirm that the Argentine Gramscians were such insofar as Gramsci accompanied the entire intellectual trajectory of one of their most eminent members “como la sombra al cuerpo” [like a shadow follows the body]. The reliance on Gramsci allowed the group to enter the politicalintellectual debate from within communist culture itself, but taking as a starting point a tradition that in its roots had confronted the economism and determinism of vulgar Marxism. However, it was the dialogue with postwar Italian Marxist culture that helped it fulfill its intended modernizing role without renouncing the political potentiality that this same culture displayed.100 Indeed, few historians of Marxism would have disagreed with Hobsbawm when, in the early 1970s, he asserted that the PCI was “the great success story in the history of communism in the western world.”101 As we have already mentioned, the worldwide diffusion that Italian literature and cinema achieved in the 1950s through neorealism preceded the notable influence of the theoretical innovations that the second generation of intellectuals of the Italian branch of Western Marxism would offer. Perry Anderson has noted that the presence of 99 Jacques Julliard, “Le monde de revues au début du siècle”, in Mil Neuf Cent, no. 5, 1987, p. 5. 100 Italy was not only the birthplace of a generation of particularly brilliant Marxists, but also a cultural space that was especially attentive to theoretical novelties from other latitudes, as evidenced by the early translation of the works of the Frankfurt School, of the Lukács of the sociology of literature, and of English social history. Pasado y Presente was fueled by this openness, which is reflected in the quotations and the origin of many of the translations published. 101 Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays, London, Phoenix, 1994 [1973], p. 31.

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Gramsci’s thought in the Italian Marxist tradition,.as well as his posthumous canonization by the PCI, had interesting repercussions. On the one hand, it freed it from the most pernicious phenomena of the cultural repression of the period carried out by the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform, for its Russian name), thus affording a freedom of intellectual expression enjoyed by practically no other communist party in the West; on the other hand, “the mingled aromas of incense and dust surrounding the Prison Notebooks thus led to the unexpected result whereby the most important theoretical tendency that developed within Italian Marxism after the Second World War represented a reaction against the whole philosophical filiation from Labriola to Gramsci.”102 As Giuseppe Vacca remarked, it would be difficult to understand the “minority phenomenon” that affected the Italian left in 1960 and which spread through a motley array of journals and small political groups without making reference to the work undertaken by Quaderni Rossi, the journal founded in Turin by Raniero Panzieri.103 During its brief existence, six issues between 1961 and 1965, Quaderni Rossi was initially the organ of expression of a group of militants of the communist and socialist left who, in light of the profound capitalist transformations that took place in Italy during the second postwar period, demanded a radical revision of the strategy of the workers’ movement. Characterized by their defense of non-Leninist positions and closer to the political criticism of Rosa Luxemburg, highly critical of the idealist tradition of Italian Marxism and fed by a culture with a fundamentally sociological matrix, the intellectuals associated with Quaderni Rossi would embark on an experience that was closely entwined with Turin’s particular industrial dynamic.104 By the time they

102 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, op. cit., pp. 40–41. 103 Giuseppe Vacca, “Política y teoría del marxismo italiano en los años sesenta,” in

Francisco Fernández Buey, Nicola Badaloni, Giuseppe Vacca et al., El marxismo italiano de los años sesenta y la formación teórico-política de las nuevas generaciones, op. cit., p. 73. 104 As Massimo Salvatori has observed: “L’ansia sociologica del gruppo non aveva nulla di astratto: era legata all’osservazione diretta di Torino, una città-laboratorio. Da queste ‘ricerche sul campo’ discendevano le convinzioni versate nei Quaderni Rossi, così appassionate da presentarsi a volte como assiomi: la politica operaia che nasce dalla fabbrica, la fabbrica come teatro privilegiato della lotta di classe, l’idealizzazione (e quasi la santificazione) della clase operaia, nucleo ideale di uno Stato futuro; una polemica continua con i sindicati ufficiali e le loro paralizzanti alleanze partitiche.” [There was nothing

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were expelled from the party, the group had already proposed its key theoretical theses on two main ideas: that in advanced capitalism the main contradiction is the one that develops between workers and capital in the opposition between two antagonistic logics and projects, and that the integration of scientific innovations into the productive process was a key step in the reconfiguration of the power structures of capital, the logic of which (the planning principle as the hidden essence of the law of value) extended from the factory to the whole of society.105 The attention that Pasado y Presente paid to the political-theoretical movements of the Italian new left is evident if one looks at the list of publications with which it maintained a regular exchange. From its first issue, where it only mentioned the Buenos Aires-based publication Cuestiones de Filosofía, to the last of the first stage, when it announced a total of 36 publications received, the Italian presence only grew, while at the same time there was a shift in the translation policy from texts of the communist tradition to the most recent works produced by groups of the Marxist “new left.” Of these 36 publications, 25 were foreign and 13 were Italian. Of these 13, at least 9 were directly tied to the Italian new left, either from working-class perspectives or positions close to “new intellectual radicalism” (Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, Quaderni Piacentini), from the perspective of the socialist left (Rivista Storica del Socialismo, Problemi del Socialismo and the international publication directed by Lelio Basso Revue Internationale du Socialisme), from anti-imperialist tendencies (Bollettino, from the Centro di Documentazione Frantz Fanon), or directed by former communists who broke with the PCI following the events in Hungary (Azione Comunista, Tempi Moderni). This stream of contacts and interactions most certainly influenced the only systematic study that Pasado y Presente conducted on the new reality in Córdoba: the report on the labor conflicts at Fiat in July and August abstract about the sociological anxiety of the group: it was linked to the direct observation of Turin, a city-laboratory. This “fieldwork” provided a source for the convictions so passionately espoused by Quaderni Rossi that at times they were presented as axioms: the working-class politics that emerge in the factory, the factory as the privileged setting for the class struggle, the idealization (and almost sanctification) of the working class, the ideal core of the future State; an ongoing dispute with the government trade unions and their paralyzing party alliances] (cited in Nello Ajello, Il lungo addio: Intellettuali e PCI dal 1958 al 1991, op. cit., p. 39). 105 See Quaderni Rossi: Luttes ouvrières et capitalisme d’aujourd’hui, Paris, Maspero,

1968.

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(a general strike and workplace occupations following the dismissal of almost three thousand workers at the tractor and motor factory).106 The study was carried out by members of the group with specific sociological training, namely Juan Carlos Torre and Francisco Delich, who had firsthand knowledge of the research being done on the new working class in Italy thanks to a brief stay on the peninsula while studying in France with Touraine, just as he was undertaking the transition from the framework of an industrial sociology to the sociology of labor. The results were published in the last issue of 1965, along with an article by José María Aricó (“Algunas consideraciones preliminares sobre la condición obrera”), the translation, also by Aricó, of the article by Dario Lanzardo “Intervención socialista en la lucha obrera”—originally published in Quaderni Rossi—and a reproduction of “La encuesta obrera de 1880” by Karl Marx.107 The system of references which Aricó relied on in his contribution is clearly indebted to that world of ideas. Thus, the absence of direct quotations from Gramsci is less paradoxical than one might think: the Marx of the first volume of Capital, the fundamental theses of the syndicalists and intellectuals associated with Quaderni Rossi (Vittorio Foa and Mario Tronti), the sociologist Luciano Gallino, the French theoretician of the “new working class” Serge Mallet, and of Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme (1964), the controversial book by André Gorz, intellectual chef de file of the Italian tendency of the French new left. Given the particular social-political configuration of Córdoba, and the context of growing labor combativeness in the large industrial metalworking complexes, there is no doubt that the workerist proposals provided Aricó with unique tools for theoretical analysis, as well as a political-practical model of intellectual labor and of the place the publication could occupy in that scenario. What was at stake, he claimed at the time, was achieving a “nuevo tipo de acción cultural” [new type of cultural action] capable of re-establishing 106 Years later, during the publication’s second phase, some of its members, under the initiative of José María Aricó, began a study on the experience of Córdoba’s class-based trade unionism in the 1970s, with the aim of publishing the results in a special issue that never materialized. The documents and interviews that form part of this work were published in Héctor Schmucler, Sebastián Malecki, and Mónica Gordillo, El obrerismo de Pasado y Presente: Documentos para un dossier (no publicado) sobre Sitrac-Sitram, La Plata, Al Margen, 2009. 107 The theorization of Marx’s workers’ questionnaire was the central axis of the cognitive strategy that Italian theoreticians used to intervene in workers’ struggles.

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unity between intellectuals and the working class through “una vasta y sistemática actividad de estudio y de iniciativas prácticas” [a vast and systematic study and practical initiatives] that “contribuya a moldear teóricamente, mediante una crítica total y permanente de esas superestructuras, la ‘economía del trabajo’ que los trabajadores edifican prácticamente en su cotidiano enfrentamiento a las fuerzas del capital” [contributes to theoretically shaping, through a complete and ongoing critique of these superstructures, the “economy of labor” that workers construct in practice through their daily confrontation with the forces of capital].108 The political hypotheses that Aricó advanced in this text, including the new role of revolutionary intellectuals in advanced capitalism and the affirmation of the political nature of cognitive labor, were not developed in successive issues, as the journal had promised, although in its second phase, by then in Buenos Aires and in a different political-cultural context, several of its central ideas were revisited.

8

The End of an Era

The derivations of Argentine Gramscism took unexpected paths for those who in the early 1950s aspired to create under its aegis a renewed intellectual space in the heart of local communism. With the expulsion of the group associated with Pasado y Presente in Córdoba and Juan Carlos Portantiero in Buenos Aires, Agosti made a public reaffirmation of his faith in Marxism-Leninism by directing the special issue the party published in response to the appearance of the Cordoban journal. Strategically invoking Mariátegui, the editorial situated itself within the context of the declaration of a new battle that Marxism-Leninism had to wage against its enemies; however, unlike the “defense of Marxism” undertaken by the Peruvian forty years earlier, the detractors now called themselves Marxists, even when this was only the case through “pedantic armchair speculation” or “coffeehouse charlatanism.” Más aún: casi es de buen tono intelectual proclamarse marxista. Despojado de todo sentido militante, reducido a una pura filosofía universitaria, si además se tiene el cuidado de amputarle el leninismo y de decorarlo con una prudente dosis de “anticomunismo”, ese “marxismo” viste bien y 108 José Aricó, “Algunas consideraciones preliminares sobre la condición obrera,” in Pasado y Presente, no. 9, April/September 1965, p. 48 (emphasis in original).

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proporciona una apariencia de izquierda sin los riesgos de la militancia de la izquierda real. Es una explosión tardía del enfant terrible tan castamente tolerado en los salones de las buenas señoras burguesas.109 [Furthermore, it is almost in good intellectual form to proclaim oneself a Marxist. Stripped of all militant meaning, reduced to a pure university philosophy, if one is also careful to amputate Leninism and to embellish it with a prudent dose of “anti-communism,” this “Marxism” looks good and provides the appearance of leftism without the risks of real leftist militancy. It is a belated outburst of the enfant terrible so chastely tolerated in the salons of proper bourgeois ladies.]

By that time, Agosti had already been appointed to the Central Committee of the PCA during the long-delayed 12th National Congress held in February 1963. On that occasion, the characterization that had been put forth at the January 1962 meeting of the Extended Central Committee regarding the “shift to the left” of the Peronist masses was reaffirmed, which resulted in the communists supporting the Peronist candidates in the legislative elections of March of that year and in the search for greater unity in the trade union struggle.110 The triumph of Peronism in several provinces, particularly in Buenos Aires where Andrés Framini was elected, compelled Frondizi to annul the elections, ultimately leading to the coup d’état that overthrew him. Not surprisingly, the party was once again banned, and it was in that context that they held the Congress that provided them with a new statute and platform, in addition to unanimously ratifying Codovilla’s leadership.111 The party defined the results of that Congress as a program of “national salvation” which was to lead to the establishment of a Frente de Liberación Nacional y Social (National and Social Liberation Front) to achieve the democratic, agrarian, anti-imperialist revolution and, most importantly, ratified the 109 “En defensa del marxismo-leninismo,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 66, January/February 1964, p. 2. Abel García Barceló, Miguel Lombardi, Mauricio Lebedinsky, Samuel Schneider, Berta Perelstein, Fernando Nadra, and Julio L. Peluffo contributed to this issue. 110 See Victorio Codovilla, El significado del giro a la izquierda del peronismo, Buenos Aires, Anteo, 1962. 111 See “Estatuto del Partido Comunista de la Argentina: Aprobado por el XII Congreso Nacional, realizado durante los días 22 de febrero hasta el 3 de marzo de 1963,” Buenos Aires, Anteo, 1963, and “Programa del Partido Comunista de la Argentina: Aprobado por el XII Congreso Nacional, realizado durante los días 22 de febrero hasta el 3 de marzo de 1963,” Buenos Aires, Anteo, 1963.

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decision that, given the conditions in Argentina, the path to seizing power must be through non-violent means, leaving armed struggle as an option only if the ruling classes eliminated all democratic possibilities.112 In the editorial that Cuadernos de Cultura dedicated to the Congress, the cliché that associated university intellectuals with petit-bourgeois vanguardism, and therefore with anti-communism, was reaffirmed, and it was stressed that the masses would only achieve their victory through the path offered by the Marxist-Leninist party: Parece imprescindible subrayarlo enfáticamente, sobre todo si se tiene en cuenta que abundan los teóricos universitarios que no ocultan su olímpico desprecio por esta voluntad de poner en movimiento a las grandes mayorías populares. Émulos de Carlyle après la lettre suponen (queremos creer que de buena fe) que bastaría un puñado de arriesgados héroes para reemplazar ese profundo, vasto e insustituible insurgir de las masas que representa el cañamazo vivo de la Historia.113 [This must be stressed emphatically, especially if we take into account that there are many university theoreticians who do not hide their Olympian contempt for the desire to set in motion the great popular majorities. Après la lettre emulators of Carlyle assume (we would like to believe in good faith) that a handful of daring heroes would suffice to replace that profound, vast, and irreplaceable insurgence of the masses that the living canvas of History depicts.]

In the report dedicated to intellectuals, Leonardo Paso returned to the double dimension that the party used to evaluate the development of cultural work, as Agosti had stated in his speech at the First Meeting of Communist Intellectuals in 1956. That is, from the point of view of the type of productive work and its social relations, intellectuals, as members of the middle classes, were objectively interested in the agrarian and anti-imperialist revolution, and the party should play an enlightening role with respect to identifying the interests that tied them to the people in the struggle for their rights. If, as Paso said, the party had made

112 See Victorio Codovilla, “Por la acción de las masas hacia la conquista del poder: Informe rendido en nombre del Comité Central ante el XII Congreso del Partido Comunista que sesionó desde el 22 de febrero hasta el 3 de marzo de 1963,” Buenos Aires, Anteo, 1963. 113 “El programa de salvación nacional,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 62, March/April 1963, p. 6.

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some progress in integrating intellectuals into the mass struggle based on a general state of popular discontent with the economic and political situation, the same did not happen with the ideological facet of cultural work. This was because intellectuals, due to their “particular condition,” did not fully understand the processes that governed the actions of the working class and adopted erroneous positions that oscillated between support for the armed struggle and nihilism. This phenomenon was especially evident in the difficulties the party encountered in channeling the increased interest in Marxism perceived among new and older generations of intellectuals, which were quickly won over by bourgeois ideological tendencies that presented themselves as “novel” or were situated on the independent left. In any case, the historian concluded, the party should be optimistic since the fact that the ideological struggle against the communists must now be carried out from the left was a sign of revolutionary maturity and of the “shift to the left” of the Argentine people.114 This same criterion was a starting point for Agosti, who began his speech before the Congress by affirming that in addition to capitalism’s attacks on Marxism-Leninism, there were now renewed variants of the old reactionary idealism which in the words of certain “professors” illustrated the “modern,” generally American, doctrines or presented themselves as “independent Marxists” to assure that the Communist Party, due to its dogmatism, intransigence, and stagnation, did not represent a creative Marxism. This situation, Agosti affirmed, invoking Gramsci, revealed the importance of “la batalla cultural como elemento de la lucha por la hegemonía del pensamiento de la clase obrera en la sociedad civil e indica[ba] también hasta qué punto la clase obrera representa el signo más encumbrado de la dignidad nacional” [the cultural battle as an element in the struggle for the hegemony of working class thought in civil society and also indicated the extent to which the working class represents the loftiest symbol of national dignity].115 Although the political role of intellectuals was unavoidable and should result in the establishment of the aforementioned “great alliance of intellectuals” which would bring together the progressive and anti-imperialist currents of Argentine intelligence, it was their ideological function, he affirmed, which should most concern the 114 Leonardo Paso, “El XII Congreso del Partido Comunista y la tarea de los intelectuales,” in Nueva Era, no. 3, May 1963, pp. 28–41. 115 Héctor P. Agosti, “La batalla por una nueva cultura,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 62, March/April 1963, p. 12.

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party, and it was in this area that old problems persisted and must be confronted. Firstly, the remnants of “sociologism” that led to demands on intellectuals, particularly writers and artists, for immediate benefits that were not conducive to the creation of a “new culture.” Secondly, the tendency to settle disputes through administrative methods, exclusionary rulings, and authoritative arguments. Thirdly, the resistance of the intellectuals themselves to participating in party organizations and cells, a product of the “bourgeois individualism” their origins and education imbued them with. Finally, he concluded, it was necessary for both the party and the intellectuals to understand that their role would be increased as long as their work as specialists was complemented by their work as leaders, which could only be accomplished by “la elaboración de una obra propia, seria y responsable” [the development of their own serious and responsible work]. In Agosti’s view, this professionalization of intellectual labor, accompanied by the right political education and leadership capacity, constituted the “ideal situation” toward which the party should direct its efforts. This ideal situation did not, however, prove to be a simple task, since the exigencies of “critical rigor and suitability” and the freedom of creative expression that Agosti himself noted in the demands of many young communists could not be resolved within the “essential principles of Marxist-Leninist philosophy” according to his program. A symptomatic example of this situation could be found just a few pages after his own article, in the translation of a text by the secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, L. Illichov. Entitled “Crear para el pueblo,” in this text the Soviet leader vehemently defended the attacks that since late 1962 Nikita Khrushchev had launched on formalism and abstract art, calling them “pathological deformations” and imitations of the “corrupted” bourgeois art of the West. “Los principios leninistas de espíritu partidista y popular —afirmaba Illichov— han constituido y seguirán constituyendo la base de la política de nuestro partido en el desarrollo de la cultura soviética” [The partisan and popular Leninist principles—Illichov asserted—have constituted and will continue to constitute the basis of our party’s policy in developing Soviet culture].116 The defense of socialist realism, although inscribed in the ideological battle against Chinese “revisionism,” was not enough to keep Khrushchev 116 L. Illichov, “Crear para el pueblo,” in Cuadernos de Cultura, no. 62, March/April 1963, p. 26.

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in office, but it was decisive in distancing the few avant-garde artists and intellectuals who might still harbor some hope regarding the Soviet thaw. The move by the Soviet leaders was perceived as a serious regression with respect to the efforts of Marxism worldwide to get rid of the Stalinist remnants, and the way it resonated among the Argentine communists confirmed the extent of the fissure opened by Agosti. It was no coincidence that, at the same time that Cuadernos de Cultura was engaged in reproducing the justifications that extolled a new chapter of intellectual discipline that more than a few leaders looked upon favorably, the young group from Córdoba was inaugurating its publishing house with a pamphlet dedicated to defending the autonomy of culture and art from political power. Penned by Vittorio Strada, Moscow correspondent of the newspaper Rinascita at the time, and Rossana Rossanda, member of the Central Committee of the PCI, Arte y partidismo was a declaration of principles and an example of how the communists themselves might consider the problems of culture from a less crude and simplistic viewpoint. Héctor Schmucler expressed it well in his prologue: “La obra de arte, siempre histórica, siempre enmarcada en las características de la época, tiende hacia los objetivos del conjunto cuando el poder político ha conseguido su hegemonía sobre la sociedad. Pero se desarrolla con su propia autonomía. O no se desarrolla” [The work of art, always historical, always framed within the characteristics of the epoch, tends toward the objectives of the collective when political power has achieved its hegemony over society. But it develops with its own autonomy. Or it does not develop at all].117

117 Héctor Schmucler, “Prólogo,” in Vittorio Strada and Rossana Rossanda, Arte y partidismo, Córdoba, Pasado y Presente, 1963, p. 6.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusions

The commitment of intellectuals to the October Revolution and the Soviet experience, as well as the diplomatic-cultural institutions and policies that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) pursued throughout its 71 years of existence, have given rise to a growing number of books, essays, and studies in recent decades, becoming the central themes of a thriving specialization in cultural and intellectual history, especially in Europe and the United States. For this to occur, two things had to come to an end as we knew them. The USSR, of course, which collapsed in the early 1990s, dragging with it not only much of the most significant Western communist parties, but also a belief system and a culture that based its identity on the promise of justice and emancipation represented by Soviet communism, despite all of the evidence. And the intellectual as a typical figure of the public space of Modernity. Is it not paradoxical that the history of intellectuals became a specific field of research just as discourses on the end of intellectuals, revolution, and history began to circulate, once again raising the question of the political responsibility of cultural elites. The end of the revolutionary experience that began in October 1917 brought about another revolution, this time in the field of historical studies. Principally the opening of the Soviet archives, but also the opening of the archives of the communist parties that spread around the world, provided scholars with an enormous reservoir of sources and gave © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2_8

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rise to a wealth of bibliographical material that is now almost immeasurable. Furthermore, the diversification of problems and questions also encouraged interest in new genres of sources in this field: correspondence, memoirs, personal diaries, film, architecture, music, and iconography. The result is quite positive: papers and objects that were once abandoned now form part of libraries and archival collections because their value as testimonies of the past has been restored.1 The availability of a greater and more varied body of documentation was accompanied by the consolidation of new interpretative paradigms, and the world of Soviet communism ceased to be observed solely through the prism of totalitarianism or terror, which had been dominant for many years. The Italian historian Aldo Agosti described this change with clarity: Mirando bien, el muy vivaz debate que ha vuelto a encenderse en torno al comunismo, sobre todo desde la mitad de la década de 1990, ha girado en gran parte alrededor de un tema que es a la vez un error y un prejuicio, aun cuando, como es propio de los errores y los prejuicios, contiene una parte de verdad: el de la unicidad del fenómeno que ha convenido en llamar el comunismo del siglo XX. Ya se hable del “pasado de una ilusión” o de los crímenes del comunismo, lo que me parece necesario poner en discusión es el artículo en singular, y en consecuencia la voluntad de reducir el comunismo a una propiedad fundamental (el crimen de Estado, la utopía, una religión secular universal). Pero si hay un elemento que surge con claridad de la enorme masa de estudios que se han acumulado en más de cincuenta años, es que el comunismo declina en plural. Como lo han dicho en forma sintética los autores de Le siècle des communismes, es “diversidad unificada por un proyecto”.2 [All things considered, the very lively debate that has been reignited around communism, especially since the mid-1990s, has largely revolved on a theme that is both erroneous and prejudicial, even if, as is often the case with errors and prejudices, it contains a grain of truth: namely,

1 See Christophe Prochasson, “Atenção: Verdade! Arquivos Privados e Renovação das Práticas Historiográficas,” in Estudos Históricos, no. 21, 1998, pp. 105–118, and Karl Schlögel, Terror y utopía: Moscú 1937, Barcelona, Acantilado, 2014, p. 17 [Terror und Traum. Moskau 1937 , München, Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008]. 2 Aldo Agosti, “Un balance de los comunismos,” in Elvira Concheiro, Horacio Crespo, and Massimo Modonessi (eds.), El comunismo: Otras miradas desde América Latina, Mexico, UNAM-Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, 2007, p. 21.

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the uniqueness of the phenomenon that has come to be called twentieth century communism. Whether we speak of the “past of an illusion” or of the crimes of communism, what I believe should be debated is the treatment of communism in the singular, and consequently the desire to reduce it to an essential attribute (State crime, utopia, a universal secular religion). If one thing is clear from the significant body of studies that have accumulated over more than fifty years, it is that communism is actually a plural concept. As the authors of Le siècle des communismes succinctly put it, it is “diversity unified by a project.”]

The very category “communist intellectual,” which for decades was a veritable oxymoron in studies on Western cultural elites, has been recovered as an object that is open to analysis because each of its constituent terms can now be observed under new methodological and interpretative paradigms. “Communist culture,” understood in the strict sense of a world of ideas, representations, discourses, actors, artifacts, and complex and multidimensional circuits, can no longer be regarded solely as a monolithic, hierarchical, unilateral, and centralized apparatus, even when these characteristics apply. Throughout this book, we have attempted a history of Argentine communist intellectuals that locates its condition of possibility in this analytical and disciplinary context. It is a small contribution to an ambitious and stimulating program, since there are areas of the communist experience that are still completely unexplored and questions that remain to be answered and even formulated. In the years between the October Revolution and the second half of the 1930s, a series of events had a definitive impact on political and intellectual life across the globe. During this period, the relationship between intellectuals and communism was as dynamic as the world that served as its backdrop and revealed multiple facets and determinations, of which the search for an organic connection with the working class was an important ideal, although not always a practical reality. In the early 1920s, the impact of World War I, the echoes of the Bolshevik experience, and the politicized atmosphere sparked by the 1918 University Reform defined the boundaries of intellectual support for communism in Argentina. When the Communist Party of Argentina (PCA) was still a weak and inexperienced organization, the circles of sympathy with the Soviet world were expressed outside the political parties and, in particular, through politicalcultural journals. In the context of an intellectual field undergoing an

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intense process of renewal and modernization, the journals were a fundamental element in structuring the various factions and positions into which cultural life was organized and the ways in which ties between politics and culture, which during those years were fluid, broad, and tolerant, were conceived. This climate changed, in part, with the beginning of the “class against class” period in 1928. The political and doctrinal sectarianism that characterized this moment disrupted the disinterested attitude that party authorities had maintained toward intellectuals and served as a framework for the first attempts to define a cultural policy in classist terms, which implied both a way of conceiving artistic creation and a social definition of intellectuals as “petit-bourgeois” elements. Despite the climate of hostility this generated, the party did not manage to articulate a prescriptive policy on cultural works, although it did drive away some valuable sympathizers. The end of the “third period” and the beginning of the popular-front policy were crucial in generating a cultural space for the party. Although this was ultimately achieved through the creation of the Asociación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores (Association of Intellectuals, Artists, Journalists, and Writers) in 1935, the beginnings of communist anti-fascism were thanks to Aníbal Ponce, who was, in fact, not a member of the party. Destined to become the most important intellectual of the Argentine communist tradition, Ponce rejected the aesthetic radicalism and desire for a tabula rasa with regards to bourgeois culture promoted by the avant-garde. For the author of Humanismo burgués y humanismo proletario, in a world threatened by fascism, the working class and its intellectuals were to become the heirs of the values of progress and reason, abandoned by the bourgeoisie. This conception of cultural heritage formed part of a vision of the Argentine historical process which, via José Ingenieros, recovered the (civilization and barbarism) dualism of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and the Europeanist homomorphism of Echeverría, and would become a central element in many communists’ readings of the national past and the role of culture and the educated elites. During the period analyzed in the first chapter of this book, party policy toward intellectuals was labile and sporadic. Although from its inception the PCA was characterized by both its strong ties with the USSR and the lack of tolerance its leadership showed for internal differences and criticism, during its first two decades it did not succeed in imposing strict control over the cultural world and artistic creations in the

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form of an aesthetic or philosophical dogma. However, it did not refrain from establishing the political-ideological boundaries within which intellectuals were accepted, nor from stigmatizing them for their class origin, their “verbalism”, or latent factionalist spirit. With the beginning of the anti-fascist cycle, the avant-garde and anti-bourgeois model of intellectual labor that had predominated, albeit with some nuances, during the so-called third period gave way to another that assigned a specific role to intellectuals in the struggle against fascism in the cultural field: the defense of the liberal tradition in the local sphere and of the USSR as the last bastion of the values of humanity and civilization. Within the context of frontist policies, the demand for “orthodoxy” was relativized to the point that communism managed to establish itself as an important faction of the Argentine progressive intellectual field. With the beginning of the Cold War, this situation changed. On the one hand, the party set out to accentuate the professionalization of intellectual labor, which meant both recognizing and promoting specific organizational structures in the form of cultural fronts and groups based on professions and disciplines, as well as promoting greater ideological cohesion and party membership, moving beyond a type of commitment that could be maintained on a political and moral level, without involving the work itself. On the other hand, the shift in Soviet cultural policy under the tutelage of Andrei Zhdanov sparked the most systematic attempt by the Argentine communist leadership to impose an aesthetic and doctrinal dogma on artistic creations and intellectual labor. The aggiornamento of the doctrine of “socialist realism,” the nationalist revival, the general tightening of party regulations, and the desire to establish a split within the intellectual field by appealing to class criteria that reduced artistic creation and critical work to a simplified political scheme provoked arduous debate among communist intellectuals, particularly writers and artists. This group was one of the most sensitive to the consequences of the new Soviet cultural policy and the most numerous of the intellectual professions that accompanied the communist world. The local leadership, especially in the key figure of Rodolfo Ghioldi, showed a marked willingness to enforce the new directives, whether acting directly or through minor or marginal figures who quickly occupied decisive positions in the publications or organizations created at the time, such as the journals Cuadernos de Cultura and Nueva Era. From 1948 until at least 1956, the cultural space of Argentine communism was marked by intense controversies, some of which ended in sanctions and expulsions. After that point,

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the “cultural question” would continue to be a source of conflict and ongoing distrust, and internal issues arising from divergent positions on literary work and cultural criticism would surface with no lack of virulence. However, the process of constituting a cultural front within the party continued, and intellectual activities reached a growing degree of professionalization through the constitution of commissions for studies in different specializations, such as philosophy, psychiatry, and economics. Cuadernos de Cultura, a journal originally conceived as a mere instrument for the dissemination of Zhdanovism in artistic and scientific matters starting in the mid-1950s, became the scene of interesting debates among the communist intellectuals themselves. One of its directors, Héctor P. Agosti, assembled a talented group of young critics and writers who undertook a process of renewal, the abrupt end of which would be one of the reasons for the definitive decline of the cultural space of Argentine communism. The establishment of a cultural front among Argentine communists was, of course, inevitably linked to events in the exclusively political realm, as we saw in the sections dedicated to analyzing the repercussions in the intellectual field of the rapprochement with Peronism in 1952. In fact, the first formal attempt to create a specific space for intellectuals took place that same year in the context of a diagnosis that, invoking the nationalist and anti-imperialist mandate that had governed Latin American communist parties since the late 1940s, criticized in harsh terms the affiliation with the liberal heritage that communist intellectuals had developed in the heat of the anti-fascist struggle starting in the 1930s, and called for an alliance with Peronist groups. With varying degrees of enthusiasm and obedience, and more than a little heartbreak, communist intellectuals accepted the new situation and abandoned institutions, such as the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores and the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores, thus provoking the first major break in the anti-Peronist cultural field. This precipitated and consolidated the tendency to create their own spaces and institutions, such as the Casa de la Cultura Argentina, and at the same time strengthened the desire of party leaderships for cultural autarchy. At its third meeting held in Hungary in 1949, the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform) established that the “struggle for peace” would be the dominant strategy of the international communist movement, and once again called on intellectuals to launch

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a crusade against the “new fascism” of the United States and the possibility of a third world war. To this end, it encouraged and supported the development of the Movement of the Defenders of Peace, which since its inception in the summer of 1948, had brought together thousands of men and women involved in culture and the arts willing to accept that the United States was preparing an attack against the USSR and to offer their name and prestige in the service of the most important initiative of the second postwar period. In Argentina, the Peace Movement was formally organized in August 1949 at a Congress held in La Plata, with the support of a sizeable group of writers, artists, and professionals; and although there was no shortage of supporters from outside the party and some notable names, its influence never extended beyond the boundaries of communist sympathies. Unlike other national experiences, where the pacifist call achieved hitherto unimaginable support, as in the case of Jean-Paul Sartre in France, in Argentina liberal and progressive intellectuals were not enthusiastic about the communist crusade and turned their preferences toward the West, actively participating in the activities organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose Argentine branch was created in December 1955 under the tutelage of Victoria Ocampo and the journal Sur. The organization of the Peace Movement in Argentina revealed the diverse roles that the party could grant intellectuals, based on their previous trajectories and the place they occupied both within the party structure and in the more general cultural field. The case of María Rosa Oliver is paradigmatic. Although supported by an international structure of notable proportions, the Peace Movement endowed itself with a discourse of a markedly national tone that tied the pacifist struggle to the defense of the “best national traditions” and gave rise to a complex task of reassessment of local cultures and a reconsideration of the liberal heritage which, in the case of Argentine communism, had been a central element of its political culture since the mid-1930s. The anti-imperialist mandate was reflected, in cultural terms, in the formulation of a discourse that, through a condemnation of “cosmopolitanism,” rejected the forms and cultural products identified with “imperialist penetration” and “bourgeois degeneration,” from existentialist philosophy to abstract art, from sociology and psychoanalysis to comic books and detective novels. In organizational terms, structures of intellectual participation were created on a national and continental scale, articulating anti-imperialist and pacifist ideas with sectorial and trade union demands, as was the case of the

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Congreso Continental de la Cultura (Continental Congress of Culture) held in Santiago de Chile in March 1953 and the short-lived Congreso Argentino de la Cultura (Argentine Congress of Culture). Within the context of the condemnation of artistic “formalism” and the exaltation of national traditions that characterized the period, terms such as “nation” and “homeland” acquired new significance and displaced the meaning of internationalism. In that highly symbolic form of warfare characteristic of those “cold years,” culture became a prized battleground in the struggle against American imperialism and its “bourgeois degeneration.” In Argentine communism, the accusation of “cosmopolitanism” became a way of denoting the “imperialist deformation” imposed on national culture by the United States, and its anathema was a point of confluence with the discourses that, in the camp of popular and leftist nationalism, proliferated since the mid-1950s. In this intertwining of politics and aesthetic and cultural problems, communist intellectuals encouraged a series of reflections and debates on “national culture,” which addressed topics such as the appreciation of cultural traditions, the identification of popular subjects, and the role of intellectuals. Contrary to the barren image often associated with party intellectual space, an examination of these interventions and debates reveals a picture that is far from homogeneous. The revelations of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in February 1956, where the crimes of Stalinism and the so-called cult of personality were denounced, had a tremendous impact on the intellectual world, even more so after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November of that year. From that moment on, Western countries witnessed a process of successive breakdowns in the communist commitment and the formation of what became known as the “new left.” In Argentina, the “process of de-Stalinization” was weak and limited, and its impact on the intellectual world did not produce public defections or any substantial rethinking. Rather, it would be the generalized crisis in the political-cultural sphere after the overthrow of the Peronist government, in addition to the new perspective generated shortly thereafter by the Cuban Revolution and the beginnings of the armed movements, that would lead to the widespread questioning of the communist and socialist left. The demand for an “open Marxism,” which expanded worldwide following the 20th Congress, was accompanied by an unprecedented interest in the national question and by the loss of hegemony of a liberal faction in the intellectual field, which was

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subjected to a veritable “trial” that included the parties of the traditional left. Anti-liberalism became a lens for understanding national reality and the national past, and a point of convergence for political tendencies that had previously been divided by the acceptance or rejection of the Peronist experience, which underwent an intense rereading. New actors replaced the old, and the issues of debate were renewed alongside a marked modernization of cultural and university life in key areas such as literary criticism, history, and the social sciences. During these turbulent years, when the intellectual arena of Argentine communism was once again characterized by a proliferation of journalistic and publishing ventures not seen since the 1920s, Héctor P. Agosti—responsible for introducing the work of Antonio Gramsci into the narrow repertoire of Argentine communist ideas—embarked on the richest and most intense stage of his production. In the course of this book, we explored the various stages of his career and analyzed his approach to the problem of intellectuals, culture, and the nation, both through public debates as well as in books and private reflections expressed in his notes and personal papers. From his contribution to the First Meeting of Communist Intellectuals in 1956—one of the most systematic attempts of the left to reflect on the problem of the cultural elites and their relationship with politics— through his lectures on realism and national literature in the 1940s, to his most significant books, Echeverría (1951), Nación y cultura (1951), and El mito liberal (1959), we have attempted to recreate the space for culture and intellectuals that Agosti laboriously constructed within an organization that tended to evaluate these issues in a normative and instrumental manner. The consensus that the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) constituted the most brilliant chapter in the history of communism in the West, as Hobsbawm asserted in 1972, was widely shared throughout the communist world, particularly among the younger generation of political activists.3 The images of Palmiro Togliatti’s funeral in 1964 are perhaps one of the most powerful representations of the affinity between the party, intellectuals, and the popular world that the Italian left offered its contemporaries: thousands of old people, young people, workers, women, and children raised their hands, crossed themselves, and wept in disbelief and pain as the communist leader’s coffin passed by, while his guard of 3 See Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays, London, Phoenix, 1994 [1973], pp. 31–42.

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honor included the world-renowned writer Italo Calvino and Europe’s most prominent publisher, Giulio Einaudi. In Argentina, the reception of Italian leftist culture constituted a relevant cultural and intellectual phenomenon that attracted writers, political activists, translators, editors, and intellectuals of diverse ideological backgrounds and cultural preferences, although it was particularly intense among the new generations of writers associated with the PCA. Without ever constituting an identifiable branch of the Argentine cultural field, as was the case with French existentialism, Italian artistic and philosophical production functioned as a meeting point for generational nonconformism and the desire for the modernization of aesthetic languages and Marxist theory among young communists. In the critical and disconcerting context of the mid-1950s, Italian leftist culture served as a model and a refuge for resistance. At a time when the PCA was torn between the defense of hard-line positions regarding artistic creation and the modest attempts at renewal promoted by Agosti, the Italian experience served as a way of introducing modern cultural debates into local discussions without stepping outside the communist camp, appealing instead to its most inspiring experience. Far from constituting an exceptional element, the reception of Antonio Gramsci’s work in Argentina can only be understood within the framework of the widespread interest in film, literature, philosophy, and the political debates that emerged in Italy in the years following the defeat of fascism. If at first this interest was confined within the boundaries of an anti-fascist reading, and the Italian cultural renaissance was observed through a lens that homologized the Peronist years with the regime headed by Benito Mussolini, as the 1960s approached, the peninsular experience was appropriated as a critical resource to posit a new relationship between politics and culture. The expulsion of many of those who participated in that “moment of Italianity” within Argentine communism would end up revealing that such a bond was not possible within the margins imposed by the party structure, as demonstrated by the experience of the Cordoban journal Pasado y Presente. In the spirit of heterodoxy fostered by Gramsci, the publication brought together a young but exceptional group of intellectuals and social scientists whose contributions ranged from linguistics to anthropology, psychoanalysis, historiography, sociology, aesthetics, and literary analysis. The avant-garde drive that fueled the political-cultural approach of Pasado y Presente was structured around two fundamental dimensions: the conviction that Marxism should be measured against the

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most advanced elements of modern culture and the idea that the PCA was not in a position to do this. As we have attempted to demonstrate, this process should not be analyzed only in relation to obvious political phenomena—the Peronist question, the crisis of Stalinism, the Cuban Revolution—but rather within the specific context of a profound intellectual and morphological transformation of the communist intellectual space that resulted from the addition of new militant generations. The emergence of a new type of intellectual, endowed with a cultural and formative capital that his predecessors lacked, was a crucial element in the dispute between the new intellectual generations and the communist political elite, a quarrel in which Pasado y Presente played a major role. Throughout the course of this book, we have tried to offer an account of some fundamental moments in the trajectory of “intellectual communism” in Argentina during a particularly turbulent period, both in national political and cultural life as well as in the international communist movement. Although the history of Argentine intellectual life would not be complete without an analysis of the space occupied by the intellectuals who lent their support to communism, this subject has so far been afforded a limited place in the historiographical production on communism, as well as in intellectual history in general. This book hopes to contribute to overcoming this historiographical omission, despite the fact that the breadth and variety of experiences and issues involved in the very concept of “communist culture” require further research that extends well beyond the scope of the present work. The link between intellectuals and party organizations and groups is a theme that spans the entire twentieth century and crosses several political tendencies, provoking more than a few controversies even today, both within and outside Marxism and the left. If this book leads to new questions about the ever complex and tense forms of intellectual engagement with the world of politics and its logics, it will have fulfilled one of its objectives.

Sources and Bibliography

Sources

Archives Consulted Archive at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. FAY Álvaro Yunque Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. FCCI Cayetano Córdova Iturburu Collection, Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas en Argentina (CeDInCI)/Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM). FET Emilio Troise Collection, CeDInCI/UNSAM. FFN Fernando Nadra Collection, CeDInCI/UNSAM. FHPA Héctor Pablo Agosti Collection, CeDInCI, UNSAM. FHPA Héctor Pablo Agosti Collection, Centro de Estudios y Formación Marxista Héctor P. Agosti (CEFMA). FJAS Juan Antonio Salceda Collection, family archive. FJLM José Luis Mangieri Collection, CeDInCI/UNSAM. FJMA José María Aricó Collection, Biblioteca José María Aricó/Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC). FLR Raúl Larra Collection, CeDInCI/UNSAM. FMRO María Rosa Oliver Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. FPCA “Enrique Israel” Historical Archive of the Communist Party of Argentina. FSS Samuel Schmerkin Collection, CeDInCI/UNSAM. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2

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Index

A Abd-el-Krim, Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd el-Karim El-Khattabi, called, 219 Acha, Omar, 18, 304 Acuña, Juan Enrique, 148, 150, 180, 181 Adler, Max, 4, 287 Adorno, Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, 395 Agosti, Aldo, 410 Agosti, Héctor Pablo, 10, 20, 22, 37, 51, 56, 81, 86, 91, 92, 95, 96, 103, 114, 118, 119, 128, 139, 142, 143, 148, 150, 151, 154, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 168, 169, 172, 178, 186, 195, 197, 256, 257, 259, 261, 263, 266–268, 270, 272, 273, 284–286, 288, 289, 291, 293–296, 298, 300–302, 313, 315, 319, 320, 329–331, 336, 346, 373–375, 377–381, 384, 386, 387, 406, 414, 417 Agosti, Rómulo, 257

Agüero, Ana Clarisa, xv Aguilera, Santos, 154 Aguirre, Margarita, 275 Ajello, Nello, 335, 401 Akhmatova, Anna, 101 Alberti, Rafael, 50, 238 Alburquerque, Germán, 178 Alcalde, Ramón, 329 Aleman, Eduardo, 223, 238 Alicata, Mario, 104 Allende, Salvador, 178 Alonso, Rodolfo, 347, 362 Altamirano, Carlos, 15–17, 66, 171, 191, 255, 312, 365, 392 Althusser, Louis, 364, 367 Álvarez, Emiliano, xv Álvarez Murena, Héctor, 322 Amadeo, Héctor, 275 Amado, Jorge, 9, 74, 87, 115, 126, 174, 178, 180, 212–214, 219, 220, 244, 246 Amorim, Enrique, 86, 87, 118, 119, 261, 346 Andersen Nexo, Martin, 238

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98562-2

441

442

INDEX

Anderson, Perry, 12, 131, 132, 335, 364, 367, 399, 400 Angenot, Marc, 8 Antelme, Robert, 104 Antón, Heraldo, 187 Aparicio, Francisco de, 77 Apold, Raúl Alejandro, 156 Apolonio, 344 Aragon, Louis, 50, 74, 103, 111, 115, 126, 210–212, 238 Aramburu, Julio, 262 Aráoz Alfaro, Rodolfo, 32, 228 Árbenz Guzmán, Juan Jacobo, 209 Arciniegas, Germán, 230 Arcondo, Aníbal, 385, 392 Arévalo, Julia, 213 Arévalo, Oscar, 134 Aricó, José María, 19, 20, 39, 52, 199, 252, 263–265, 275, 284, 324, 325, 332, 337, 339, 347, 360, 364, 367, 371–375, 377–379, 381–386, 392, 394–398, 402, 403 Aristarco, Guido, 360, 363 Arlt, Roberto, 39–41, 52, 93, 103, 125–128, 280, 281 Armada, Augusto, 181 Armengol, Manuel, 223, 226 Arrans, Fernando, 77 Artaud, Antonin, 118, 396 Arvon, Henri, 8 Asís, Jorge, 109 Asor Rosa, Alberto, 360 Astrada, Carlos, 193, 229, 230, 375–378 Astudillo, Alberto, 27 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 220, 238 Asunción Flores, José de la, 179 Azuela de la Cueva, Alicia, 42 B Badaloni, Nicola, 335, 366, 400

Bagú, Sergio, 264 Bajarlía, Juan Jacobo, 226 Baliño, Luis, 78 Balzac, Honoré de, 110 Banfi, Antonio, 344, 371, 385 Bao, Ricardo Melgar, xiv, 33 Barbieri, Honorio, 35 Barbieri, Vicente, 42 Barbusse, Henri, 25, 30, 32, 55, 83 Barcia, José, 276 Barco, Oscar del, 332, 367, 383–385, 392, 393, 395, 396 Bardeci, Carlos, 78 Barletta, Leódinas, 39, 42, 126, 148, 150, 158, 159, 179, 220, 235, 245, 357 Barreiro, José Pedro, 183, 225, 226, 262, 264 Barthes, Roland, 396 Basso, Lelio, 401 Bataille, Georges, 396 Batista, Fulgencio, Rubén Zaldívar, called, 272 Baudin, Antoine, 71–73 Bayley, Edgard, 94 Beirut, Boleslaw, 249 Benda, Julien, 210 Bengoechea, Marina, 226 Bénichou, Paul, 7 Benítez, Rubén, 276 Bergel, Martín, 36, 218, 219 Bermann, Gregorio, 32, 44, 56, 119, 181, 223, 264, 301, 371, 385, 393 Bernal, John, 19, 36, 43, 194, 219, 238 Berni, Delesio Antonio, 42, 77, 112, 186, 215, 225, 226, 260 Bernstein, Eduard, 290 Berstein, Serge, 5 Bertolé, Emilia, 34 Besio Moreno, Nicolás, 181

INDEX

Bignozzi, Juana, 187 Birgin, Aarón, 186, 187 Birgin, Mauricio, 228 Birri, Fernando, 276, 346, 362 Bisso, Andrés, 53, 54, 99 Bixio, Roberto, 372 Blanco, Alejandro, 132, 338, 394 Bloch, Jean-Richard, 50 Blum, Léon, 56 Bo, Carlo, 344 Bogdanov, Alexander, 70 Bonazzola, Romeo, 223 Bonome, Juan, 225 Borges, Jorge Luis, 19, 41, 42, 58, 95, 118, 125, 152, 191, 194, 244, 357, 359 Borrás, Eduardo, 246 Borré, Omar, 126, 127 Bortagaray, María Teresa, 231 Boschetti, Ana, 7 Botana, Natalio, 41 Botticelli, Sandro, Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, called, 2 Bouju, Marie-Cécile, 80 Bourdieu, Pierre-Felix, 17 Bracho, Gabriel, 178 Braden, Spruille, 134 Brancati, Vitaliano, 345 Branco Batista, Eliza, 220 Brandán Caraffa, Alfredo, 41 Braskén, Kasper, 49 Braunstein, Néstor, 385 Bressano, Clara, xv Breton, André, 344 Brocato, Carlos Alberto, 189, 387 Browder, Earl, 133 Brughetti, Romualdo, 156 Bruno, Paula, 45 Buchbinder, Pablo, 29 Bukharin, Nikolái Ivánovich, 377 Bullrich, Santiago, 189

443

Bunge, Augusto, 83 Burgos, Raúl, 339, 392 Burnham, James, 230 Bustingorri, Héctor, 187, 276, 360 Butler, Horacio, 95

C Caballero, Manuel, 54 Caio Prado Jr., 87, 214, 284 Calandra, Benedetta, 217 Caldelari, María, 39 Caldwell, Erskine, 110 Calogero, Guido, 344 Calvino Mameli, Italo Giovanni, 346, 347, 418 Calvo, Jorge, 241 Calzaretto, José, 78 Camarero, Hernán, 14, 28 Campione, Daniel, 27 Cámpora, Héctor José, 224 Camus, Albert, 346 Canal Feijóo, Bernardo, 151, 227 Cane, James, 55 Canitrot, Adolfo, 271 Canto, Estela, 186 Canto, Patricio, 181 Caparrós, Antonio, 275 Capdevilla, Arturo, 262 Caraballese, Pantaleo, 344 Carbone, Giuseppe, 382 Cárdenas del Río, Lázaro, 213, 220 Carducci, Giosuè, 340 Caro, Alfonso, 214 Carpentier y Valmont, Alejo, 272 Carriego, Evaristo Francisco Estanislao, 167 Carril, Hugo del, Piero Bruno Hugo Fontana, called, 245 Casanova, Laurent, 104, 105 Casco, José, xv Casella, Alberto, 223

444

INDEX

Casnati, Luis Ricardo, 181 Castagnino, Juan Carlos, 194, 221, 228 Castellani, Leonardo, 227 Castelnuovo, Elías, 15, 19, 39–41, 57, 126, 152, 202, 225 Castillo, Abelardo, 326 Castillo, Ramón Antonio, 65, 84 Castro, Ernesto, 225 Castro Ruz, Fidel Alejandro, 220, 272 Catalano, Luciano, 77 Cattaruzza, Alejandro, 18, 19, 60 Caute, David, 129, 210 Ceballos, Alejandro, 215, 221 Cecchi, Emilio, 344 Cefaï, Daniel, 5 Cella, Susana, 338, 398 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 82 Chanussot, Pablo, 78 Charle, Chistophe, 222 Chartier, Roger, 4 Chiaramonte, José Carlos, 276, 304, 305, 385 Chiarini, Luigi, 360, 362 Chiarini, Paolo, 387 Chiesino, Bartolomé, 77 Ciria, Alberto, 275, 385 Claudín, Fernando, 207 Clementi, Hebe, 231, 347 Codovilla, Victorio, 27, 52, 66, 84, 91, 93, 118, 132–134, 137, 144, 167, 168, 174, 175, 254, 259, 284, 304, 373, 404, 405 Cogniot, George, 67 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle, 119 Colletti, Lucio, 360, 366, 367 Concheiro, Elvira, 5, 27, 410 Constantini, Humberto, 276 Cooke, John William, 163, 164, 227, 329 Córdova Iturburu, Cayetano, 42, 45, 46, 84, 103, 116, 119–123, 261

Corominas, Enrique, 76 Corretjer, Juan Antonio, 87 Cortés, Martín, xv Cosío Villegas, Ismael, 215 Cossa, Roberto, 276, 387 Cot, Pierre, 219 Cotton, Aimé, 222 Courtois, Stéphane, 64, 206 Crespo, Horacio, 5, 27, 252, 396, 397, 410 Croce, Benedetto, 344, 369, 372 Cuadrado, Arturo, 236 Cucagna, José, 81 Cueva, Hernán Mario, 341, 346, 362 Cuitiño, Vicente Martínez, 45, 56 Cuzzani, Agustín, 186

D Dabini, Attilio, 345–347, 362 Dacij, Jacobo, 88 Daix, Pierre, 124 Dalmacio, V.M., 83 David-Fox, Michel, 33 David, Guillermo, 193 De Diego, José Luis, 86 De Gaulle, Charles André Joseph Marie, 205 Delgado, Verónica, 362 Delich, Francisco, 385, 393, 402 Della Volpe, Galvano, 363–367, 387 Demare, Lucas, 77 Dembrowski, Jan, 238 Depestre, René, 178 Derrida, Jacques, 396 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 124, 283 De Sica, Vittorio Domenico Stanislao Gaetano Sorano, 341, 361, 363 Dickman, Max, 225 Dimitrov Mijáilov, Georgi, 54, 83 Ditaranto, Hugo, 187 Dobranich, Horacio, 215, 221

INDEX

Dobranich, Nelly, 142 Doll, Ramón, 202 Dos Passos, John, 355 Dosse, François, 6 Dostoievski, Fiódor Mijáilovich, 110 Dreyfus, Michel, 4, 66 Dudintsev, Vladímir Dmitriyevich, 253 Dujovne, Carlos, 15, 82, 83, 86, 87, 157 Dujovne Ortiz, Alicia, 83, 157 Dullin, Sabine, 13 Duras, Marguerite, Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, called, 104 Durvano Viau, Jorge, 86 Dutra, Eurico, 213 E Echegaray, Aristóbulo, 199, 200 Echeverría, Esteban, 151, 161, 167, 169, 196, 261–263, 265–267, 325, 363, 371, 378, 412 Edelman, Bernardo, 89, 129 Edelman, Fanny, 228 Egbert, Donald Drew, 8 Eggers Lan, Conrado, 385 Ehlert, Juan, 181 Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigorievich, 50, 67, 78, 111, 179, 205, 212, 238, 246, 247 Eichelbaum, Edmundo, 362 Eichelbaum, Samuel, 151 Einaudi, Giulio, 250, 418 Eisenstein, Serguéi Mijáilovich, 26 Eley, Geoff, 63, 251 El Lissitzky, Lázar Márkovich Lissitzky, called, 26 Éluard, Paul, 74, 222 Engels, Friedrich, 1, 83, 84, 89, 92, 121, 265, 309, 372 Erro, Carlos Alberto, 151, 183, 261, 262

445

Escovich, A., 181 España, Claudio, 246 Espinosa, Manuel, 94 Estrabou, Elma, 395 Estrella, Omar, 179 Etchebéhère, Hipólito, 27 Eujanián, Alejandro, 191

F Fadeyev, Alexander Aleksandrovich, 117, 228, 236, 238, 249 Falcini, Luis, 187, 225, 226 Faulkner, William Cuthbert, 346, 355, 357, 359 Feldman, Micaela, 27 Feldman, Simón, 276 Felipe II de España, rey, 171, 172 Félix, María, 215 Fernández Bravo, Álvaro, 231 Fernández Buey, Francisco, 335, 364, 400 Fernández Montes, Jorge Octavio, 215 Fernández Moreno, Baldomero, 167 Fernández Ordóñez, Carlos, 215, 223, 226, 228 Ferrigno, Oscar, 181 Fioravanti, José, 34 Fiorucci, Flavia, 74, 75, 150, 155, 156 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 40, 69–72 Flaumbaum, Isidoro, 93, 114, 124, 371 Foa, Vittorio, 402 Fontana, Pedro, 228 Forner, Raquel, 95 Fossa, Mateo, 27 Fossati, Florencia, 28 Fourrier, Marcel, 32 Framini, Andrés, 404 France, Anatole, 32

446

INDEX

Franco, Francisco Bahamonde, 135 Franco, Marina, 217 Frank, Waldo, 232 Freaza, Julián, 181 Freyre, Felipe, 226 Freyre, Gilberto, 124, 125 Frolin, Olivier, 104 Frondizi, Arturo, 92, 189, 248, 270, 271, 379, 380, 396 Frondizi, Silvio, 256, 325 Frontini, Norberto, 223, 227, 236 Furet, François, 4 Fux, María, 276

G Gabriel, José, 42 Gaddis, John Williams, 207 Galán, Roberto, 95 Galer, Julio, 148 Gallino, Luciano, 402 Gallo, Blas Raúl, 129, 189 Gallo, Ezequiel, 92, 275 Galmarini, Marco Aurelio, 389 Gálvez, Manuel, 358 Gandhi, Mahatma, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, called, 219 Garaudy, Roger, 97, 98, 103, 111 Garcés, Delia, 95 García Barceló, Abel, 404 García, Delia, 395 García, Diego, xv, 396 García García, Luis Ignacio, 394 García Gilabert, Alicia, 113, 115, 229 García Iturraspe, Emilio, 223, 226 García, Luciano Nicolás, xv, 7, 45 García, María Amalia, 19, 42 García Monge, Joaquín, 178, 214 Garrido, Luis, 215 Garrido, Magdalena, 34, 78 Garzón Maceda, Ceferino, 393 Garzón Maceda, Lucio, 301

Gatto, Alfonso, 344 Gelman, Juan, 79, 92, 187, 200, 276, 358, 360, 387 Genette, Gérard, 395 Georgieff, Guillermina, 287, 324 Gerchunoff, Albertina, 188 Gerchunoff, Alberto, 45, 56 Getino, Octavio, 387 Geymonat, Ludovico, 385 Ghioldi, Orestes, 28, 81, 89, 91, 92 Ghioldi, Rodolfo, 27, 28, 41, 51, 52, 81, 84, 91–93, 103, 113, 114, 119–121, 124–126, 147, 168, 169, 215, 257, 260, 281, 284, 325, 377, 378, 380, 381, 388, 389, 413 Ghiraldo, Alberto, 190 Giambiaggi, Carlos, 225, 226 Gianneo, Luis, 77 Giannotti, José Arthur, 389 Giberti, Horacio, 329, 330 Gide, André Paul Guillaume, 50 Gilardi, Gilardo, 181 Gilbert, Isidoro, 137, 241, 271, 275 Gilman, Claudia, 16, 203 Ginzburg, Natalia, 346 Giolito, Eter, 228 Giordano, Alberto, 191 Giordano, Carlos Rafael, 385, 393, 395 Girola, Claudio, 94 Girondo, Oliverio, 42, 191 Giudici, Ernesto, 18, 22, 32, 92, 98, 99, 106–108, 149, 164, 171, 215, 216, 223–225, 227, 326–329, 375–377 Giunta, Andrea, 132 Giusti, Roberto, 86, 87, 151, 156–159, 161, 162, 164–167, 180, 227, 261, 262 Gobello, Juan José, 146 Godoy, Rufino, 275

INDEX

Gola, Hugo, 127, 347, 363, 387 Gold, Michael, 179 Gómez Bas, Joaquín, 179 González Alberdi, Paulino, 34, 81, 84 González Domínguez, Alberto, 76 González, Julio Víctor, 44 González Lanuza, Eduardo, 112 González Martínez, Enrique, 214 González, Teófilo, 27 González Tuñón, Raúl, 19, 41, 84, 89, 116, 119, 125, 148, 149, 179, 181, 201, 243, 387 González Videla, Gabriel Enrique, 213 Gordillo, Mónica, 402 Gorki, Máximo, 110, 116, 189 Gorkin, Julián, 208 Gorz, André, 402 Goyanarte, Juan, 346 Gramsci, Antonio Francesco Sebastiano, 19, 22, 23, 102, 256, 262, 263, 284, 294, 296, 317, 331, 335–337, 339, 341, 345–347, 351, 354, 360, 362, 363, 367–374, 377–379, 382–385, 398–400, 402, 406, 417, 418 Gramuglio, María Teresa, 191 Grand Ruiz, Hilda Beatriz, 187 Grassi Díaz, Cirilo, 77 Grau, Jacinto, 225 Gringauz, Jacobo, 81 Groisman, Fernando, 181, 182 Groppo, Bruno, xiv, 4 Gruppi, Luciano, 366 Guarany, Horacio, Eraclio Catalín Rodríguez Cereijo, called, 227 Gudiño Kramer, Luis, 181, 193 Gueñol, Zelmar, Zelmar José Daniel Guégnolle, called, 95 Guerrero, Lila, Lila Iakovlev, called, 148, 150

447

Guibourg, Edmundo, 56 Guillén Batista, Nicolás Cristóbal, 9, 178, 212, 214, 220, 272 Guiñazú, César Ulises, 393–395 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 41, 93, 103, 126, 198, 200–202, 281, 283 Guterman, Norbert, 376 Gutiérrez, Eduardo, 191, 198 Gutiérrez, Joaquín, 178 H Halperin Donghi, Tulio, 16, 30, 55, 59, 138, 262, 393 Harrington, Horacio, 77 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 375, 376 Heinemann, Margot, 50 Heller, Leonid, 71–73 Helman, Alfredo, 373 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 232, 347 Hernández Arregui, Juan José, 202, 255, 293, 311, 312, 323, 358 Hernández, José, 60, 191–194, 198 Herrera, Francisco J., 276 Herrera y Reissig, Julio, 185 Herriot, Édouard, 236 Hervé, Pierre, 103 Hesse, Mauricio, 385 Hierba, Juan, 187 Hilb, Claudia, 396 Hitler, Adolf, 47, 52, 173, 235 Hlito, Alfredo, 94 Hobsbawm, Eric John Ernest, 52, 53, 73, 206, 399, 417 Hoover, Herbert Clark, 257 Horne, Bernardino, 77 Hosne, Roberto, 276, 362 Huber, Peter, 433 Humbert-Droz, Jules, 38 Hurtado, Carlos, 362 Hurtado de Mendoza, Ángel Mariano, 325

448

INDEX

Hurtado, Leopoldo, 86, 87, 261 Hyppolite, Jean, 396 I Ibáñez Menta, Narciso, 95 Ibarguren, Carlos, 186 Iber, Patrick, 207 Icaza, Jorge, 178 Ide, Tomás, 223 Ignatyev, Grigory, 67 Ilin, Mikhail, 84 Illichov, Leonid, 407 Ingenieros, Delia, 83 Ingenieros, José, 31, 32, 34, 35, 44, 115, 160, 189, 194, 223, 257, 261, 264, 265, 294, 412 Ingerflom, Claudio, 4 Ípola, Emilio de, 385 Iscaro, Normando, 387 Iscaro, Rubens Libertario, 215, 228 Iturraspe, Emilio García, 223, 226 Iudin, Pavel, 173 Iwaszkiewicz, Jaroslaw, 178 J Jackson, Luis Carlos, 394 Jara Corona, Heriberto, 219, 220 Jáuregui, Aníbal, 137 Jáuregui, Juan Francisco, 181 Jeifets, Lazar, 433 Jiménez, José, 366 Jitrik, Noé, 330, 385, 393 Joliot-Curie, Frédéric, 164, 207, 222 Jorge Castilla, Faustino E., 46, 87 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius, 50 Julliard, Jacques, 399 Justo, Agustín Pedro, 29, 55 Justo, Liborio, 42, 325 K Kafka, Franz, 283

Kagarlitsky, Boris Yuliyevich, 129 Kaldar, Pierre, 113 Kanapa, Jean, 106, 124 Kantor, Manuel, 94 Katz, Pinie, 82 Kautsky, Karl, 1, 4, 290 Kellerman, Bernhard, 238 Kersffeld, Daniel, 37 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergueievich, 209, 237, 249–254, 269, 378, 407 Kieczkovsky, Samuel, 385, 393 King, John, 341 Klappenbach, Raúl, 179 Kochane, Eva, 187 Koestler, Arthur, 230 Kohan, Néstor, 18, 19, 224, 383, 387 Koiffman, Luis, 27 Kordon, Bernardo, 84, 148, 243, 343 Kornblit, Isaac, 86 Korn, Francis, 275 Kostov Djunev, Traicho, 64 Kravchenko, Víctor Andreevich, 122 Kuo, Mo-jo, 238

L Labriola, Antonio, 372, 400 Lafforgue, Jorge, 389 Lamarque Bouza, Libertad, 95 Lamarque, Nydia, 42, 49, 262 Lamota, Miguel, 186 Lanaria, Alfredo, 77 Lanuza, José Luis, 156 Lanzardo, Darío, 402 Larra, Raúl; Laragione, Raúl called, 39, 41, 45, 56, 84, 103, 113–116, 119, 125–128, 146, 148, 149, 159, 229, 243, 252, 253, 264, 276, 281, 346, 375 Latendorf, Abel Alexis, 325 Latorre, Carlos, 342–344 Lazar, Marc, 5, 64, 206

INDEX

Lebedinsky, Mauricio, 129, 326, 404 Lefebvre, Henri, 260, 371, 376, 395 Lefebvre, Raymond, 32 Leibner, Gerardo, 64, 133–135, 250, 288 Lellis, Mario Jorge de, 276, 360 Lenin, Vladímir Ilich Uliánov, called, 69, 70, 73, 120, 268, 290, 318 León, María Teresa, 50 Lerner, Gregorio, 88 Levene, Ricardo, 143 Levi, Carlo, 346 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 389 Liacho, Lázaro, 225 Liberman, Arnoldo, 362 Liceaga, José V., 186 Liguori, Giudo, 367, 368 Lombardi, Miguel, 404 Lombardo Radice, Lucio, 382 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 212–214 Longoni, Ana, 104, 120, 121 Löwy, Michael, 133, 250, 265 Lucena, Daniela, 19, 34, 104, 112 Lugones, Leopoldo, 196 Luján, Daniel, 11 Lukács von Szegedin, Georg Bernhard, 244, 365, 372, 385, 399 Luporini, Cesare, 366, 385 Luppi, Electra, 228 Luthy, Wolfram, 221, 223, 228 Luz, Ada, 95 Luzi, Mario, 344 Lysenko, Trofim Denísovich, 67, 124

M MacArthur, Douglas, 162 Macchioli, Florencia Adriana, 45 Magalhães, Homero Baptista de, 185, 186

449

Magaña, Ángel, 95 Maglione de Jorge, Sara, 87 Mailhe, Alejandra, 362 Maiztegui, Isidro, 226 Maldonado, Tomás, 94, 104, 111, 112 Malecki, Sebastián, 402 Malenkov, Georgy Maksimiliánovich, 207 Malenkov, Gueorgui Maksimiliánovich, 127 Mallea, Eduardo, 93, 95, 322 Mallet, Serge, 402 Malraux, André, 50 Manauta, Juan José, 148, 149, 275, 276, 283 Mancisidor, José, 178 Mangieri, José Luis, 78, 79, 276, 281, 357–360, 387 Mao, Zedong, 250, 251 Maquiavelo, Carlos, 187 Marcou, Lilly, 207 Marcovich, Cecilia, 187 Marguesti, Luneheto, 238 Marianetti, Benito, 28, 92, 103, 113, 228, 262 Mariátegui La Chira, José Carlos, 37, 38, 223, 403 Marinello, Juan, 37, 87, 178, 212–214, 272, 273 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 340 Martinet, André, 394 Martínez, Alfredo N.V., 181 Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel, 193, 198, 244, 269, 322 Marx, Karl, 133, 402 Mascolo, Dionys, 104 Mase, Rosario, 187 Masetti Blanco, Jorge José Ricardo, 392 Masotta, Oscar Abelardo, 127, 385 Massera, José Luis, 215

450

INDEX

Massholder, Alexia, 256 Matisse, Henri Émile Benoît, 111 Matonti, Frèderique, 10, 16, 106 Maupassant, René Albert Guy de, 110 Mauriac, François, 160, 236 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 2, 26, 47, 150 Mazía, Floreal, 276 McGee Deutsch, Sandra, 233 Melgarejo Muñoz, Vladimiro, 178 Mella, Julio Antonio, 37, 257, 258, 272 Melnikov, Konstantin Stepanovich, 25 Méndez de San Martín, Armando, 155 Méndez, Evar, 41, 191 Mendoza, Angélica, 27, 51 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 300, 385 Meyerhold, Vsévolod Emílievich, 26 Michael I de Rumania, King, 205 Milesi, Pedro, 27 Minardi, Victorio, 362 Mirabelli, Bartolomé, 94, 226 Miravet, Horacio, 301 Mistral, Gabriela, Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, called, 178 Mocca, Edgardo Aldo, 92, 387 Modonessi, Massimo, 5, 27, 410 Mondolfo, Rodolfo, 345, 372, 385 Moner, Gabriela, 371 Monsegur, Raúl, 112, 226 Montale, Eugenio, 344 Montaña Cuéllar, Diego, 219 Montenegro Paz, Oscar, 35 Morales, Ernesto, 215, 225 Moravia, Alberto, Alberto Pincherle, called, 344–346, 362 Mora y Araujo, Manuel, 92, 275 Morel, Efraín, 178 Moreno, Julio César, 385 Moreno, Mariano, 358

Moreno, Nahuel, Hugo Miguel Bressano Capacete, called, 325 Morgan, Claude, 244 Morgan, Pierre, 219 Morillas, José, 91 Morin, Edgar, Edgar Nahum, called, 104, 106, 396 Mozhaysky, Alexander Fiodorovich, 67 Mujica Láinez, Manuel, 156 Münzenberg, Willi, 49 Muradeli, Vano, Ivan Ilich Muradov, called, 91 Murillo, José, 187 Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea, 363, 418 Myers, Jorge, 18, 262

N Nadra, Fernando, 167, 279, 404 Nagelkop, Bernardo, 394, 395 Nansen, Fridjof, 34 Napoleon I Bonaparte, emperor, 83 Nasser Hussein, Gamal Abdel, 251 Natta, Alessandro, 366 Navalesi, Luis, 187 Negro, Héctor, 187 Neiburg, Federico, 185, 186 Neruda, Pablo, Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, called, 9, 74, 115, 116, 176–179, 212–214, 220, 238, 244, 246, 258, 259 Nicoli, Alberto, 362 Nikolayeva, Tatiana, 78 Noble, Julio Argentino, 58 Notta, Julio, 92, 103, 109–111, 125, 141, 184 Noviski, Isaac, 187 Núñez, Zulma, 178, 181 Nun, José, 385

INDEX

O Obligado, Rafael, 198 Ocampo, Ramona Victoria Epifanía Rufina, 84, 125, 230, 238, 340, 341, 345, 359, 361, 415 Olipo, Basilio, 88 Olivari, Nicolás, 42 Olivari, Ricardo, 275 Olivera, Philippe, 103 Oliver, María Rosa, 22, 34, 148, 178, 217–220, 223, 231–238, 240, 246, 262, 415 Olivieri, Raúl, 383–385 Onganía, Juan Carlos, 81 Onofri, Fabrizio, 348–350, 352–354, 360 Onyszuk, Trofim, 88 Ordaz, Luis, 276 Orgambide, Carlos, 362 Orgambide, Pedro, 275, 276, 362 Oriolo, Cayetano, 27 Oromi, Raúl de, 156 Ortega y Gasset, José, 121 Ortiz, Fernando, 214 Ortiz, Juan Laurentino, 126, 148, 149, 153 Ortiz, Ricardo M., 185, 186 Ortiz, Roberto, 92 Ory, Pascal, 48, 63, 213, 229 Orzábal Quintana, Arturo, 34, 35, 57 Ostrovsky, Nikolai Alekseievich, 84 Otero Silva, Miguel, 215 Othar, Irma, 228 P Paci, Enzo, 366 Paggi, Leonardo, 287 Paiva, Alfredo, 395 Pajetta, Gian Carlo, 348 Palacio, Ernesto, 77 Palacios, Alfredo Lorenzo Ramón, 262

451

Palcos, Alberto, 27 Panizza, Delio, 262 Panno, Hugo, 362 Pantoja, Medardo, 225 Panzieri, Raniero, 400 Paradiso, José, 163 Parodi, Lorenzo, 77 Parrini, Vicente, 284 Parsons, Talcott, 389 Pascoli, Giovanni, 340 Paso, Leonardo, Leonardo Voronovitsky, called, 129, 187, 282, 304–307, 387, 405, 406 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 346 Pasolini, Ricardo, 10, 18, 55, 60, 61, 100, 182, 183, 264 Passano, Ricardo, 40 Patat, Alejandro, 340 Pavese, Cesare, Santo Stefano Belbo, called, 346, 347, 357, 359, 360, 362 Pavlov, Iván Petróvich, 7 Payró, Julio E., 42 Payró, Roberto Jorge, 126, 167, 357 Pedraza, Israel, 213, 214 Pedroni, José, 225 Pedroso y Aldama, Regino, 272 Pellegrini, Aldo, 343 Pellegrini, Luis, 226 Pellettieri, Osvaldo, 19 Peluffo, Julio Luis, 86, 94, 125, 128, 181, 213, 226, 228, 404 Peña, Alcira de la, 28, 147, 215 Peña, Milcíades, 66, 375 Penelón, José Fernando, 27 Penna, Sandro, 344 Perelstein de Braslavsky, Berta, 171 Pereyra, Nicandro, 148, 149 Pérez Anaya, Raúl, 186 Perón, Juan Domingo, 3, 14, 15, 20, 21, 28, 29, 54, 59, 60, 65, 84,

452

INDEX

87, 88, 95, 99, 133, 138, 197, 199, 220, 285, 301, 336 Petersson, Fredrik, 37 Petit de Murat, Ulyses, 42 Petra, Adriana, 362, 373 Petrone, Francisco, 95, 215, 226 Pettoruti, Eduardo, 181 Picasso, Pablo Ruiz, 94, 111, 112, 207, 222, 228, 238 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 2 Piemonte, Augusto, 27, 254 Pietro, Adolfo, 242 Piglia, Ricardo, 125, 386 Piovene, Guido, 230, 345, 346 Pisarello, Gerardo, 56, 148, 186, 193 Pittaluga, Roberto, 30 Pla, Roger, 118, 261 Plotkin, Mariano, 285 Poe, Edgard Allan, 118 Polevoy, Boris Nikolaevich, 78, 238 Policastro, Enrique, 118, 225, 226, 261 Pomer, León, 276, 396 Ponce, Aníbal, 18, 32, 44, 46, 47, 49–51, 55–57, 83, 97, 103, 125, 126, 170, 186, 190, 191, 195, 223, 259, 260, 264, 265, 280, 284, 297, 332, 412 Ponce, Margarita de, 78, 215 Pons, Silvio, 12, 250 Portantiero, Juan Carlos, 79, 92, 130, 184, 194, 200, 271, 276, 324, 326, 328, 329, 332, 353–355, 358–360, 363–365, 385, 387, 396, 403 Portinari, Cándido, 214 Portogalo, José, 103, 115, 116, 148 Prado Acosta, Laura, 256 Pratolini, Vasco, 346, 360, 362 Prenant, Michel, 228 Prestes, Carlos Luís, 257, 288 Priestland, David, 67, 209, 250

Prieto, Adolfo, 191, 393–395 Prieto, Luis J., 385, 394 Prior, Aldo, 94 Procacci, Giuliano, 2 Prochasson, Christophe, 410 Proenza, Teresa, 219 Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeyevich, 112, 114 Pudovkin, Vsévolod Ilariónovich, 228 Pugliese, Osvaldo, 181 Puiggrós, Rodolfo José, 15, 18, 45, 58, 83, 84, 87, 139, 224, 255, 256, 293, 304, 325 Q Quinquela Martín, Benito, 225 Quiroga, Horacio, 357 R Racine, Nicole, 32 Rago, Rodolfo Gabriel, 275, 363 Raier, Sara, 228 Rajk, Lázló, 64 Rama, Ángel, 54 Ramos, Arthur, 214 Ramos, Graciliano, 214 Ramos, Jorge Abelardo, 194, 255, 325, 326 Raschella, Roberto, 275, 362–364, 387 Ratto, Cora, 15, 95 Raurich, Héctor, 27, 394 Ravoni, Marcelo, 189, 347, 363, 387 Read, Herbert, 395 Rea, Domenico, 362 Real, Juan José, 21, 91, 92, 95, 113, 114, 136, 137, 139, 167–170, 229, 274, 279, 280, 304 Reca, Telma, 215 Regueros Peralta, Jorge, 219 Reig, Osvaldo, 188

INDEX

Reissig, Luis M., 58 Remarque, Erich Maria, Erich Paul Remark, called, 50 Renan, Ernest, 44 Revol, Enrique Luis, 365, 394, 395 Reyes, Alfonso, 178, 215, 232 Rey, Esteban, 325 Rey Tristán, Eduardo, 217, 233 Ribadero, Martín, 194 Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho, Oscar, 214, 220 Ridenti, Marcelo, 213 Riganelli, Agustín, 34 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 395 Rinaldini, Julio, 156 Rioux, Jean-Pierre, 5 Rivadavia, Bernardino de la Trinidad González de Rivadavia y Rodríguez de Rivadavia, 304 Rivera, Andrés, 92, 276, 355–357, 360 Rivera, Diego, 25, 178, 215 Robeson, Paul, 238 Robin, Régine, 8 Roca, Deodoro, 58 Roca, Gustavo, 300, 301, 372 Rockefeller, Nelson Aldrich, 176, 233, 235 Rodchenko, Alexander Mijailovich, 25 Rodó, José Enrique Camilo, 173 Rodríguez Itoz, José, 187 Rodríguez, Jorge Macario, 363 Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, 348 Rodríguez Otaño, C., 223 Rodríguez, Urbano, 226 Rogers, Geraldine, 362 Roig de Leuchsenring, Emilio, 214 Rojas Paz, Pablo, 41, 181 Rojas, Rafael, 265, 272 Rojas Vela, Enrique, 122 Rojas, Yuqueri, 228 Rolland, Romain, 18, 32, 46, 60

453

Romano, Eduardo, 149, 193, 202 Romano, Ruggiero, 392 Romero, Alberto, 178 Romero Brest, Jorge, 215 Romero, Elvio, 285 Romero, Francisco, 93, 112, 183, 198, 345, 394 Romero, José Luis, 93, 221 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 233 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 59, 138, 194, 262 Rosental, Mark, 173 Rossanda, Rossana, 395, 408 Rossi, María Cristina, 19, 42 Rougemont, Denis de, 230 Rozitchner, León, 330, 385 Ruiz Daudet, Carlos, 103, 148, 149, 179, 189, 193, 225 Rybak, Jaime, 187 S Sábato, Ernesto, 345 Saborido, Mercedes, xv Sadosky, Manuel, 15, 95, 96, 347 Sadoveanu, Mihail, 238 Saítta, Sylvia, 19, 43, 149, 218 Salama, Roberto, 89, 93, 114, 124, 127, 128, 200, 201, 276, 281–284 Salceda, Juan Antonio, 148, 149 Salinari, Carlo, 283 Salvatore, Ricardo, 173 Salvatori, Massimo, 400 Sánchez, Emilio E., 181 Sánchez Riva, Arturo, 57 Sánchez Vázquez, Adolfo, 8, 70, 101, 102 Sánchez Viamonte, Carlos, 58 Sanders, Betty, 178 Sandino, Augusto César, Augusto Nicolás Calderón Sandino, called, 257

454

INDEX

Sanín Cano, Baldomero, 178, 220 Sanjinés, Marcelo, 178 San Martín y Matorras, José Francisco de, 77 Santander, Silvano, 27 Santos, Carlos, 187 Santucho, Amílcar, 275, 323 Sapiro, Gisèle, 5, 21, 98 Sarlo, Beatriz, 19, 29, 30, 42, 191, 202, 312, 338 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 59, 89, 138, 153, 195, 199, 261, 281, 412 Sartre, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard, 7, 162, 208, 230, 236, 252, 329, 346, 375, 376, 378, 385, 395, 415 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 195 Savonarola, Girolamo Maria Francesco Matteo, 2 Scalabrini Ortiz, Raúl, 224, 322 Scheimberg, Simón, 27 Schidlowsky, David, 177, 212, 214, 238 Schlesinger, Arthur, 230 Schlögel, Karl, 410 Schmerkin, Samuel, 81, 86 Schmucler, Héctor Naúm, 275, 305, 324, 332, 361, 363, 365, 379, 385–387, 393, 395, 398, 402, 408 Schneider, Samuel, 256, 326, 355–358, 404 Schorske, Carl, 392 Sciarretta, Raúl, 189, 332, 363–365, 371, 385, 387 Scolamieri, Gerarda, 213, 215, 228 Seiguerman, Osvado, 276, 359 Sempat Assadourian, Carlos, 392 Sereni, Emilio, 244 Serra, Renato, 344 Serviddio, Luisa Fabiana, 19, 42

Shaw, George Bernard, 189 Shólojov, Mijaíl Aleksándrovich, 359 Shostakovich, Dmitri Dmitrievich, 112 Sigal, León, 389 Sigal, Silvia, 338, 397 Silenzi de Stagni, Adolfo, 329, 330 Sillen, Samuel, 219 Silone, Ignazio, Secondino Tranquilli, called, 230, 345, 346 Silva Herzog, Jesús, 215 Silvain, Julio César, 187 Sinán, Rogelio, 215 Sinclair, Upton, 230 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, José de Jesús Alfaro Siqueiros, called, 42, 87, 178, 215, 220 Sirinelli, Jean-François, 5, 12, 16, 48, 63, 213, 229, 392 Skobelzin, Dimitri, 238 Sobolev, M., 85 Sobral, Antonio, 372 Sola, Marcela, 275 Soldi, Raúl, 262 Solero, Francisco Jorge, 276, 324 Souza Carneiro, Edison de, 214 Speroni, José, 386 Speroni, Miguel Ángel, 148, 149 Spriano, Paolo, 250 Stalin, Iósif Vissariónovich Dzhugashvili, called, 49, 50, 67, 70, 77, 92, 96, 124, 127, 178, 210, 237, 238, 246, 249, 251–254, 279, 295, 317, 350, 351 Starcembaum, Marcelo, 364 Stefanoni, Pablo, 49 Stern, Ludmila, 26, 33 Strada, Vittorio, 72–74, 395, 408 Strasser, Carlos, 325 Studer, Brigitte, 13 Svevo, Italo, 346

INDEX

T Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe, 44 Talak, Ana María, 45 Tarcus, Horacio, 18, 27, 30, 36, 46, 65, 83, 120, 121, 224, 231, 373, 375, 397, 398 Tarle, Eugenio, 83 Terán, Oscar, 8, 18, 30, 45, 132, 173, 255, 256, 303, 304, 330, 338, 391 Terzaga, Alfredo, 394 Terzaga, Emilio, 385 Tetzner, Lisa, 84 Thénon, Jorge, 75, 78, 94, 114, 115, 178, 183, 185–188, 223 Thorez, Maurice, 56, 205, 249 Tiempo, César, Israel Zeitlin, called, 153 Togliatti, Palmiro, 13, 104, 249, 295, 296, 335, 336, 360, 363, 367–371, 417 Tolstoi, Lev Nikoláievich, 110 Tomalski, Isaac, 81 Torre, Guillermo de, 346 Torre, Juan Carlos, 163, 385, 393, 395, 402 Torre, Lisandro de la, 57 Tortti, María Cristina, 271 Touraine, Alain, 393, 402 Treves, Renato, 345 Triolet, Elsa, 212 Troiani, Osiris, 343, 344, 362 Troise, Emilio, 28, 32, 45, 56–58, 86, 87, 92, 94, 114, 115, 129, 150, 215, 246, 261, 264 Tronti, Mario, 360, 402

U Ulianiuk, Eustaquio, 88 Ulianova, Olga, 439 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 344, 346

455

Uriburu, José Félix Benito, 29, 55, 223 Urruchúa, Demetrio, 226

V Vacca, Giuseppe, 335, 400 Vailant-Couturier, Paul, 32 Vailland, Roger, 249 Valiente Ortega, Antonio, 86 Valobra, Adriana, 233 Valor, Ernesto, 181 Vanasco, Alberto, 393 Varela, Alfredo, 22, 77, 78, 119, 148, 149, 193, 220, 228, 235, 241–246, 375 Vargas, Getúlio Dornelles, 177, 220 Varisco, Bernardino, 344 Vasconcelos, José, 223 Verbitsky, Bernardo, 276 Verdès-Leroux, Jeannine, 10 Verón, Eliseo, 385, 389–391 Vezzetti, Hugo, 7, 119 Viaggio, Jorge, 228 Victorica, Miguel Carlos, 181 Viera, Cornelio, 77 Vigo, Abraham, 225 Vila, Daniel, 226 Vilar, Pierre, 371 Villafañe, Javier, 276, 387 Villanueva, Amaro, 103, 148, 149, 153, 181, 186, 189, 193, 198, 199, 281 Villanueva, Mario, 181 Viñas, David, 125, 128, 271, 276, 359, 380 Viñas, Ismael, 189, 325, 329 Virieux, Daniel, 100 Visacovsky, Nerina, 82, 173 Vitali, Joaquín, xv Vittorini, Elio, 104–106, 112, 345, 346

456

INDEX

W Wainer, Alberto, 187 Wallace, Henry, 233 Warschaver, Fina, 148, 149, 280 Wast, Hugo, Gustavo Adolfo Martínez Zuviría, called, 155 Weber, Max, 395 Weill Pattin, Pedro, 104 Weinberg, Gregorio, 347 Weiss, Alfredo Juan, 394 Wernicke, Enrique, 109–111, 148, 153, 189, 193 Whitman, Walt, 179 Wilde, Eduardo, 44, 45 Williams, Tennessee, 230 Wilson, Patricia, 340 Winock, Michel, 7, 49, 63 Winograd, Marcos, 187 Wolikow, Serge, 80 Worona, Miguel, 88 Wurmser, André, 119

Y Yánover, Héctor, 148, 150 Yrigoyen, Hipólito, 29, 54, 55, 75 Yunque, Álvaro, 42, 46, 76, 84, 125, 147–149, 186, 191, 192, 225, 281 Yupanqui, Atahualpa, Héctor Roberto Chavero, called, 77, 94, 103, 125, 193, 228 Z Zalamea, Jorge, 217, 220 Zamudio Barrios, Arturo, 256 Zanetti, Susana, 355 Zarowsky, Mariano, xv Zavattini, Cesare, 341 Zelli, Ángel, 241 Zhdánov, Andréi, 64, 67, 69, 101, 106, 107, 115, 124, 127, 205, 413 Zoschenko, Mikhail, 101 Zubok, Vladislav, 250 Zweig, Arnold, 244