Between gauchos and European migrants. The Socialist Party of Argentina in the years of the Second International, 1890-1914

LUCAS POY

Leipzig

Workshop; Transnational Approaches to the History of Socialism before World War One; 2018

EUROSOC Normandie (U Rouen-Normandie) & SFB 1199 (Leipzig U)

The Socialist Party is one of Argentina?s oldest political formations and played a key role in the national political scene since its foundation in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, during the years of the Second International (1889-1914), the Argentine party was the most important socialist organization in Latin America, closely related to the development of socialism in Europe and the United States. As a matter of fact, the history of socialism in Argentina cannot be written but as a chapter of the transnational history of social democracy. The history of the first socialist groups in Argentina goes back to the 1870s, with the activity of French communards, and the early 1880s, when exiled members of the German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands created the first permanent organization, called Verein Vorwärts. Small and isolated in the beginning, in the last years of the 1880s these small groups found a bigger audience and recruited new followers. In the following decade, they started a process of unification and growth that led to the foundation of the Socialist Party in June, 1896.Between 1896 and 1914, the Socialist Party of Argentina increased its size and experienced a process of growth, although it remained a relatively small organization when compared to other socialist parties of the time. Its oscillating membership was a consequence of the ups and downs of labor unrest in the country and also an outcome of internal tensions that often led to organizational crises and splits. Moreover, it was related to the local labor market?s characteristics, constituted as it was by an extremely volatile migrant (mostly European) workforce. Under the leadership of the physician Juan Bautista Justo (the first translator of Karl Marx?s Capital volume 1 into Spanish), the party developed a political stance that called workers to organize themselves in an independent organization along clear class lines. At the same time, the activity of the party was definitely reformist and strongly oriented towards the ?political struggle??that is, the participation in elections in order to get parliamentary representation. Drawing upon more than five years of research in Argentine archives and the International Institute of Social History, in Amsterdam, in this proposal I?d like to assess both the organizational and political characteristics of the Argentine Socialist Party, against the context of its international links with European social democracy, in the period before the First World War. In so doing, I intend to contribute to a global conversation about the ?international history of socialism?, in Georges Haupt?s words, in which the early experiences of the so-called ?Global South? are properly incorporated to the picture.