‘A Strange Mixture of Guevara and Togliatti’

Abstract

This article analyses the intellectual and political trajectory of the Pasado y Presente group in Argentina, focusing on its main representative, José María Aricó (1931–91). Although usually described as ‘the Argentine Gramscians’, the ‘Gramscianism’ of the Pasado y Presente group was actually little more than a theoretical cover for its erratic political behaviour, which led them from Stalinism to Guevarism, from Guevarism to Maoism, from Maoism to Montoneros’s branch of Peronism, and from Peronism to Alfonsín’s Radicalism. Politically, their weakest point was that they distanced themselves from Stalinism empirically, because of the popularity of foquism, without undertaking a thorough critique of Stalinism. This made them vulnerable to the subsequent crisis of Stalinism, which they identified with a ‘crisis of Marxism’ sans phrase. What made them historically significant was that they articulated the radicalisation of a whole social layer in Latin America under the impact of the Cuban Revolution, as well as its subsequent deradicalisation and adaptation to bourgeois parliamentary democracy. The article closes with an analysis of Aricó’s intellectual legacy, particularly his well-known book Marx y América Latina (1980).