Marxism and the Revision of Argentine History in the 1960s

Abstract

It is a commonly held opinion that whereas in Europe the Left has refrained from embracing the pursuit of a grand “national” destiny among its principal objectives, the opposite is true for most of the developing world. This also goes for Latin America. As Jorge Castañeda has argued in his widely read book about the Latin American Left, south of the Río Grande the overwhelming hegemony of the northern neighbour encouraged the Left to adopt a nationalist stance, aimed at generating a national consciousness that would lead to liberation from the imperialist yoke. According to Castañeda, the Left “has first normatively identified the ‘people’ and the ‘nation’. […] It has then bemoaned the fact that the ‘nation’ has not belonged to the people.&rdquoWhilst, arguably, such a trend can be most easily diagnosed in Central America and the Caribbean ?that is in areas where US hegemony was most tangible? it was forcefully present in Argentina, too. Especially in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, many Argentine left-wing intellectuals espoused anti-imperialism and national liberation as principal tenets and portrayed Argentina as yet another oppressed semi-colonial nation; a state of affairs which in their view should be overcome by Latin American and wider Third World solidarity.