Populist Intellectuals in Latin America. Some Perspectives

For much of academic and liberal opinion, populism is a term as vague as derogatory. Populism is gregarious, moralistic, clientelistic, charismatic, cathartic, and irrational, and it pursues a short-term, purely conjunctural, redistributive economic agenda. As a movement, it is nostalgic for small ownership and abhors both bureaucratic centralisation and division of labour. Its demographic base tends to be pre-modern groups such as peasantry and artisans —or else the lumpenproletariat. Quite often, populism is seen as the breeding ground for authoritarian political currents. Thus stated, stigma can easily become anathema: populism eventually represents the unconcious avatar of fascism. 

No wonder, populism constitutes a promiscuous label, which characterises very different phenomena, and whose taxonomic function is to extend a cordon sanitaire around a suspicious, rebellious entity. However, the rhetorical construction of populism by academic orthodoxy betrays the very fears of liberal urbanites and mainstream scholars, who look askance at the emergence of unmediated politics, direct action and plebiscitarian democracy. Accordingly, populism and intellectuals have always seemed at odds, since the former proclaims the futility —or even the perniciousness— of a clerical class.

Nevertheless, populism is in itself a respectable intellectual tradition, whose advocates engaged since early in controversial dialogue with political rationalism in both its liberal and Marxist versions —and decidedly influenced the latter! Admittedly, the Russian Narodniks of the late 19th century were the very pioneers of populism and agrarian socialism, and the first to elaborate a sound criticism of liberal and Marxist teleologies, defying the idea of progress both in its lineal and dialectical forms.

Russian populism scandalised bourgeois rationality because it aimed at suspending the works of capital and retrograding economy towards communal farming and pastoralism. In this sense, populism was non-teleological and non-universalistic, stressing the exceptionality of Russian peripheral development. Nevertheless, the rejection of capitalist modernity by populists was far from being a romantic negative utopia. Vasily Vorontsov, a populist economist, deemed Russia, a latecomer modernising nation, uncapable to catch up with mature capitalist countries, considering Russia’s restricted access to international markets and technologies. Indeed, populism had a keener, more sophisticated and less mechanical, vision of core-periphery relations than vulgarised Marxism. Interestingly, Narodnik writers explored the contexts of dependency in world capitalism, and thus anticipated the theory of uneven and combined developement —notion misatributted to Trotsky.

Admittedly, canonical Marxism lacked even a theory of imperialism, which Lenin improvised after tinkerig with Hobson’s Imperialism minus the antisemitic overtones. Marx himself mitigitated his naïvely progressive, Whiggish view of capitalism thanks to Kovalevsky’s studies on the obschina and the agrarian question (1879). Also, populist Tkachev influenced Lenin on tactical matters. Furthermore, Podolinsky advanced energy and ecological calculations, in order to finessing the metabolic analysis of capitalism. After the Red October, agrarian sociologist Chayanov designed a rigourous model of peasant domestic economies. Meanwhile, Kondratieff —member of Social Revolutionary Party, a version of parlamentary populism— charted long-term cycles of technological and financial expansion since the 1750s, doubtless a genial attainment.

II

Towards the 1900s Latin America resembled Russia in several aspects. Both regions languished in relative backwardness, inertia intermitently dinamised by windfalls of commodity exports. Though enlightened autocracy was an especial feature in Russia (and also in Brazil until 1889), the rest of Latin America abounded in shallow Potemkin-style republics dominated by mercantile cliques. Demographically, peasants and former serfs populated the vast spaces of both continental blocs, whereas illiteracy and chaotic urbanisation brought forth an uprooted, inorganic intelligentsia.

Russian bohemians and South American rastaquoères converged at the parisian crossroads of the Belle Époque, sensing their own estrangeness at the gates of metropolitan culture. Hence a common feeling of alienation. Hence also the rush to overhaul and bring up to date their own societies. Yet was it possible? Was it even desirable? The zeal for aggiornamento of Russians and Latins very soon waned and evolved into frustration. Material progress seemed an ever receding horizon —and, if finally reachable, its grim consequences discouraged emulation. Such was, for example, Herzen’s attitude after long stays in the West — Herzen himself a repented liberal who became the dean and mentor of narodnischestvo. The provincials hesitated to embrace fully the project of universal modernity and its fugue towards the future.

In parallel, Latin American response to the modern Angst was Arielismo, the poetisation of economic backwardness as a fortress against Anglo-Saxon industrialism and pragmatism. Ariel was the spirit of lightness opposing the earthly genius Caliban, Shakespeare’s antagonising characters in the eeire setting of The Tempest. Ariel incarnated most of the allegedly Latin virtues of honour and religion, whereas Caliban was a telluric daimon whose unleashing would precipitate the world into base materialism. Clearly, this discourse was merely an aesthetical consolation, though it reveals a certain inferiority complex. Thus far, Arielismo was a nice, harmless topic for after-dinner conversation during oligarchic liberal régimes. It was not until the 1910s, especially with the outbreak of Mexican Revolution, that public opinion experienced a sea change. Rural masses started to revolt.

III

Ironically, who is often aknowledged as the first Marxist in Latin America is in reality its first theoretical populist. Writer and activist Juan Carlos Mariátegui authored the Seven Interpretative Thesis on the Peruvian Reality (1928), essay vindicating the preeminence of local, national contexts over passively applied eurocentric social thought. He criticised the formulaic positivism of the Second International, as well as the nascent Soviet scholasticism. He pleaded for a contextual, organical, in situ interpretation of social realities, avoiding abstract doctrinarism.

At the same time, he assimilated voluntarist themes previously posited by revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel, particularly General Strike, wherefrom it stemmed a new mythic élan for popular struggles. Whilst exiled in Italy during the 1920s, Mariátegui witnessed the twofold, mirroring ascent of communism and fascism, inheritors to the decomposition of revisionist Social Democracy, process that intrigued him. On that account, he adopted an indigenist outlook regarding Peru’s autochtonous population, approach reminiscent of old populism. Although a comitted socialist, Mariátegui subtly nuanced the protagonism of modern proletariat. In hindsight, voluntarism and indigenism —let alone the analysis of colonial dependency— may bring Mariategui closer to the populist matrix than to official Marxism. 

In fact, indigenism remains a strong element of Latin American populism, especially in Mexico and Andean countries. Its major eclosion occurred in the wake of Mexican Revolution, which cristallysed in a corporatist legislation protecting indian collective land holdings (ejidos) and therefore subsistence agriculture. Anyhow, full-fledged institutionalistation of the Mexican Revolution only took place during the Lázaro Cárdenas government (1934-1940), notorious for both petroleum nationalisation and deepening of agrarian reform. Key figure of this whole period is José Vasconcelos, educator, eclectic polymath, and apologist for the cultural and racial synthesis of Mexican people.

Vasconcelos’ essay The Cosmic Race (1925) conveys a rare blend of optimistic Social Darwinism and secular messianism. Put humourously, Vasconcelos is some sort of Spengler in reverse, since the Mexican author exalts interbreeding and postulates an extatic future in the offing, where all human differences might find final reconciliation. Unexpectedly, his reputation as humanist suffered a serious setback after supporting the Axis powers. He admired the fascist experiments for their mobilising zest during turbulent vicissitudes, a situation resembling Mexican scenario by then. Though an accomplished anti-racist, Vasconcelos still professed a quaint metaphysical patriotism —thence the tension between his universalism and his nativism. Throughout, Vasconcelos was an intense detractor of the Atlantic powers.  

Standing astride the Pacific, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre was an important figure both in Peru and Mexico, where he took sanctuary once expelled from his own country for political reasons. Born in Peru in 1895, Haya de la Torre founded perhaps the only national party in Latin America with genuine continental projections. He fathered by 1924 the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), a formally social-democrat movement with strong populist tropisms, which eventually degenerated into demagoguery, parlamentary corruption and rampant clientelism. Even so, APRA’s beginnings were promising. APRA inspired the formation of the Socialist Party of Chile by 1933, which adhered to an antiimperialist and antioligarchic agenda, paying only lip service to Marxist pieties. Around that time, internecine purges because Stalinist and Trotskyist rivalries hindered political action in local communist parties, leaving a vaccuum soon filled by the this new populist socialism.

IV

Received wisdom maintains that Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Gétulio Vargas in Brazil, and José Domingo Perón in Argentina epitomised the adventures of populism through the continent. The last of them is likely the most studied case of all three, being also the most dramatic and prominent in modelling the Argentinian political system until now. Chamaleonic and mercurial, Peronism garnered a disparate range of tendencies: Maurrasian integralism, syndicalism, fascism, cooperativism, and even Trotskyism. Though the pro-labour stance appeared early in Perón’s days, the antiimperialist fervour was really ignited after the Cuban Revolution (1959), episode unchaining the emergence of urban guerrillas during Perón’s ostracism in Franco’s Spain. Originally, the obvious archetype for Peronism was Italian fascism, wherefrom the Argentinian General copied both policy and style. Logically, social legislation elicited vehement support from working class, especially labourers from the mestizo hinterland, the so-called cabecitas negras —“little black heads”, an ornitological simile rather than a racist one.

Strangely enough, a group of disenchanted former social-liberal intellectuals prepared the way for Peronism as ideology. They formed an outspoken conclave of revisionist historians, who judged critically liberal truisms about Argentina’s republican past, itself marked by colonial dependency towards Britain —being so, the advent of modernity for Argentina was not a political liberation but simply imperial subservience. The group’s name FORJA (forge, crucible) purported to convey a sense of virile rectificacion through effort and endurance, as well as an insinuation of industrial rebirth. FORJA spanned officialy a whole decade (1935-1945), though its proselitysing echoes still reverberate today. Its most prolific members were Arturo Jauretche and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, urgent propagandists of a leftish nationalist gospel.

Incendiary muckraker of rustic Basque originis, Jauretche denounced the Central Bank system and the entrance of Argentina to the IMF (Prebisch Plan, 1956) as mechanisms of dependency set by the Atlantic imperialism. He aligned himself heartully with Perón, whose first administration (1946-1955) succeded in insulating Argentina from the demands of international finance. Similarly, Jauretche was a relevant figure of Latin American historical revisionism, thus contravening the conventional myths of liberal dogma since Independence (1810). He anticipated most of dependency theory findings, though he expressed these with an idiosyncratic, volatile journalistic flair. All in all, he was the poor man’s economist, serving as bank director during early Peronism. Anecdotally, Jauretche himself had a certain impact on young Ernesto Laclau, the latter’s father being on friendly terms with the former — Laclau’s On Populist Reason (2005) has lately renewed scholarship about our subject from the post-Marxist trench.

In retrospect, one might assert that 1910, 1929 and 1959 marked the axial itineraries of populism for Latin America. Mexican Revolution furnished the agrarian and indigenist themes, whereas the Wall Street Crash shocked Latin American export-oriented economies, provoking protectionist and developmentalist responses from a shattered hemisphere. Three decades later, Cuban Revolution electrised new generations and pushed plebeian nationalism into an overt anti-imperialistic stance. Incidentally, there emerged another interesting juncture for populist efervescence with Catholic Church’s leftwards turn. This was eloquently embodied in both the Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979) bishopric conferences. As a result, Theology of Liberation reinvigorated the missionary traditions of Counter-Reformation, and catalysed a mushrooming wave of militant peasant communities notably in Nicaragua and Brazil, where Sandinismo and MST (Movement of the Landless) are currently major players in the political arena.