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LATIN AMERICAN MARXIST PENSADORES: SAINTS OR “SMALL BEER?”A review of Marxist Thought in Latin America. By Sheldon B. Liss (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Pp. x, 374. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00 and $8.95.).
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
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References
1 See, for example, two superb recent studies on Peru: Stern, Steve J., Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison, 1982)Google Scholar, and Malion, Florencia E., The Defense of Community in Peru’s Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860–1940 (Princeton, 1983 CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Here are studies that do not suffer in comparison to the sophisticated, eclectic Marxist approach brought to U.S. history by a number of talented historians including Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Also fascinating and important is the Marxist perspective Taussing, Michael T. provides in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill, 1980)Google Scholar. And these studies form but a spot on the tip of the iceberg of Marxist-inspired analyses of Latin America, many of them written by scholars who did their graduate studies in the midst of the radicalism spawned by the 1960s.
2 See, for example, Bauer, P.T., Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar.
3 See Berlin, , Russian Thinkers (New York, 1978), p. 194 Google Scholar.
4 See Orwell, , Nineteen Eighty-Four (New American Library ed., New York, 1983), p. 166 Google Scholar.
5 Tucker, , Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge, Eng., 1965)Google Scholar.
6 Callinicos, , Marxism and Philosophy (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.
7 Gandy, , Marx and History: From Primitive Society to the Communist Future (Austin, 1979)Google Scholar.
8 Horkheimer, and Adorno, , Dialectics of Enlightenment (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. To this exposition of Frankfurt-school views should be added Wolin, Richard, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York, 1982)Google Scholar, and also Berman, Marshall, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1981)Google Scholar, placing Marx among many other previously misunderstood thinkers optimistic about the role that mystical experience could play in attainment of wholeness.
9 Jacoby, , Dialectics of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism (New York, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that while thinkers such as Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Rosa Luxemburg may have lost their political battles, they won the battle of the faith. See also Kolakowski, Leszek, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution, trans. Falla, P.S. 3 vols. (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, a masterful account by a Polish former Marxist that often stresses the Salvationist and mythological side of Marxism that turns the ideology into a caricature or spurious form of religion, and Levin, Michael, “Marxism and Romanticism: Marx’s Debt to German Conservatism,” Political Studies, 22 (1974), 400–413 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Monnerot, , Sociology and Psychology of Communism, trans. Degras, Jane and Rees, Richard (Boston, 1953)Google Scholar. Monnerot depicts one element of Marxism as the search for immortality by joining with the volk, i.e., the proletariat, and thereby with what is durable, ineffable and rooted in nature, so as to compensate for the loss of faith in individual immortality.
11 Talmon, , The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of the Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century (London, 1981)Google Scholar, contends that following the catastrophe of World War I, the Western world proved susceptible to messianic compensation and ready to grasp at two opposed "religions" promising secular redemption-communism and fascism.
12 Thomas, , Karl Marx and the Antichrists (London, 1980)Google Scholar, deals with Marx’s hopes for ending alienation so that humans could be restored to a “unified state” of the sort often sought by thinkers steeped in the hermetic tradition. On the esoteric origins of communism see also Billington, James H., Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York, 1980), pp. 7 Google Scholar, 252–258. Part of the extrarational element in Marxism stems, of course, from Hegelianism. On its often elusive influence on Marxism the literature is enormous, but a good starting point is provided by Toews, John Edward, Hegelianism: The Path Towards Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (New York, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Meyer Abrams, Howard, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971), esp. p. 183 Google Scholar.
13 Van Leeuwen, , Critique of Heaven (London, 1972)Google Scholar, depicts Marx largely as a romantic humanist, arguing on the basis of the poetry he wrote as a young man. See also Wessell, Leonard P. Jr., Karl Marx, Romantic Irony, and the Proletariat: The Mythopoetic Origins of Marxism (Baton Rouge, 1979)Google Scholar, a valuable study that includes translations of Marx’s poetry and an ingenious depiction of the influence of mythological archetypes in Marx’s thought.
14 Cohen, , Karl Marx’ s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, 1978)Google Scholar.
15 Shaw, , Marx’s Theory of History (Stanford, 1979)Google Scholar.
16 See Gregor, , The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics (Princeton, 1974)Google Scholar, and Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton, 1980).
17 See Larsen, , Hagvet, , and Myklebust, , eds., Who Were the Fascists? Social Roots of European Fascism (Oslo, 1980)Google Scholar.
18 Nolte, , Marxism, Fascism, Cold War (Assen, Netherlands, 1983)Google Scholar.
19 Chavarria, , José Carlos Mariátegui and the Rise of Modern Peru, 1890–1930 (Albuquerque, 1979)Google Scholar. Also perceptive on Mariátegui and advancing his claim as a precursor of liberation theology is Chang-Rodriguez, Eugenio, Poética e ideología en José Carlos Mariátegui (Madrid, 1983)Google Scholar. By ignoring French sources on Mariátegui, and others among the pensadores he had selected, Liss seriously weakens any claims he might have had to exhaustive scholarship. Probably there are also German and Russian sources with which future, more exhaustive researchers will have to grapple, although I can only guess about this.
20 See Alexander, , Communism in Latin America (New Brunswick, 1957)Google Scholar, and Trotskyism in Latin America (Stanford, 1973). In many ways also, neophytes would be well advised to begin their readings with Aguilar, Luis E. ed., Marxism in Latin America, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, 1978)Google Scholar, rather than with Marxist Thought in Latin America.