The Human Tradition in Latin America (Biography Report)

Ofelia Dominguea Navarro

Latin America has produced some well-known Marxist academic philosophers, including the Heideggerian Marxist Carlos Astrada (1894-1970) and the Marxist aesthetician Adolfo Vázquez (1915-), it is José Carlos, a self-educated working class mestizo intellectual, and to whom most contemporary scholars turn when the subject of inquiry involves the articulation of a specifically regional that is Latin American, Marxism. Carlos departed from a 'scientific' dialectical materialist account of social change by representing the proletariat, or working class, as an affirmative rather than a negative, social and political force. In his early writings Carlos argued that the characteristic gesture of the bourgeoisie was to negate, while that of the working class was to affirm. He counterpoised bourgeois nihilism and decadence with working class optimism and confidence. In the Hegelian version of the dialectic, negation (rather than affirmation) was the process which moved history forward. This led Marxism to emphasize revolution as the negation of a previously established political order. However, in his account of Peruvian history, Carlos argued for socialism on positive grounds. Peruvian capitalism was described as weak and unable to undo the power of the rural conservative sectors, which retarded economic development. Socialism was depicted as the one solution that would incorporate the benefits of capitalism (creativity, discipline, productiveness) while accommodating the communitarian interests of the indigenous population (Debray, 5).

Patrica Galvao

Carlos united his defense of Indo-Hispanic Peruvian socialism with a strong Marxist anti-imperialist statement. He argued that as long as imperialism exists, a Latin American society cannot be nationalist unless it is socialist. The economic and political structure of imperialism prevents the full realization of nationality in countries whose economic development is locked into a weak and backward capitalist structure controlled by foreign economic interests. He noted that imperialism implies racism in that the cultural values imposed by an imperialist north-over-south continental order were the values of a white bourgeois class, imported into the south by the white privileged classes of Latin America. The latter, he claimed, failed to question their involvement in an exploitative and racist system. Carlos challenged capitalism in terms that emphasized class, race and a nation's dependent status on the world market without promoting divisiveness or separatism (Dussel, 53).

Miguel Rostaing

In the light of Carlos's portrayal of the workers and indigenous peasants as positive social forces, it could be argued that his concept of ethics, with its connection to socialism, was as close to Nietzsche's idea of a superior morality as to Marx's concept of social revolution. Carlos saw the advent of socialism as resulting from its own vigorous and undisputed success, not as a result of a class war. The work ethic he advocated contained a forceful and explicit rejection of what Nietzsche called a 'slave morality', a moral system which was reactive rather than self-initiated in its positing of moral principles and/or practices (see Nietzsche, F. §8). Carlos also rejected the notion of a teleological end-state after the achievement of which history would end and all oppression would ...