Global History and Bicentennial. The problematic reception of Latinamerican Emancipation in Marx’s historiography

FRANCISCO NAISHTAT

Buenos Aires

Simposio; Englobe International Symposium ITN- Marie Curie “new Perspectives on Global History”; 2011

ITN- Marie Curie “new Perspectives on Global History, CIF, Universidad Di Tella

We intend here to ground Marx’s Latin-America vision. The independence of Latin-America’s nations since the beginning of the XIX century has a regional dimension which largely exceeds the history of a single nation. It fits into a global cycle which began with the independence of Haiti in 1804 and ended with the independence of Peru in 1824 with the total capitulation of the royalist Spanish armies after the battles of Junín and Ayacucho. Even if Marx and Engels referred to this Latin-America process since the late 1850s through different kind of interventions, mainly journalistic articles and letters, the authors of the Manifest were very far from attributing a revolutionary status to it. In fact the contrast between their enthusiastic vision of the independence of North America and their pessimistic and suspicious vision of the political realities of the Latin-American nations cannot be sharper. An easy and very common interpretation of this lack of political confidence of Marx and Engels towards Latin America national emancipation process was to ascribe it to the marxian Eurocentrism already considered in the Marxian theory of modernization. Nevertheless, as José Arico perfectly pointed out (Arico, 2010), the time when Marx and Engels, and specially Marx, wrote on Latin America was also the time (the late fifties) of the Marxian turn on modernization and colonization with his sharp condemnation of the British oppression of Ireland an India together with his new interest in the non western world. These facts give a particular complexity to the Marxian Latin-America issue out of any reductionism to Eurocentrism, a concept which is still appropriate for the consideration of Hegelian views on Latin America and for the first Marx, but becomes quite problematic considering the late Marx. Indeed there is a sort of Latin-America anomaly (Arico, 2010: 168) in the Marxian world vision, and even if we cannot completely exhaust the question our purpose here is to outline its principal axes.