Marx and Freud in Latin America. Bruno Bosteels

usually not included in reproductions of his account of the Marx memorial, he restates the notion that the Europeans who arrived in New York filled the minds of workers in the United States with the morals of hatred and resentment. He does this with his usual rhetorical flair after comparing the disproportionate numbers of people in attendance at different events taking place around the time in the United States:

      Some twenty thousand people went to the funeral of the pugilist; to the ball of a Vanderbilt, who is a Rothschild in this part of America, a thousand gallant men and ladies; and ten thousand men with restless hands, coarse outfits, irreverent hats and inflamed hearts, went to applaud the fervent multilingual orators who excite the sons of labor to war, in memory of that German with the silky soul and iron fist, the most famous Karl Marx, whose recent death they honor.13

      Martí, then, can almost be said to want to take the class struggle out of Marxism. Instead of communism, he defends the common sense and calm pragmatism of the new republic’s civic tradition and representative political system. “As Rubén Darío asserted, if there was a certain peculiarity, an exceptional gift, or virtue in Martí, it expressed itself in his literary writing. His political ideas, however, remained always within the Hispanic American republican canon,” affirms Rafael Rojas, the author of a recent biography of Martí. “Brief and solemn forms, succinct and respectable republican representations: herein lies the discreet, primordial republicanism of José Martí.”14 Coming from the hand of an exiled intellectual who would die on the battlefield for the independence of Cuba, Martí’s words of condemnation for Marx sound strange only if we ignore the profound admiration that the Cuban writer feels at the same time for the political achievements made possible in the United States, his temporary homeland, through the right to vote and the freedom of expression. The Old World, by contrast, remained steeped in the century-long legacy of monarchy and despotism. Thus, in a letter to La Nación on September 5, 1884, Martí also writes: “Boats filled with hatred come from Europe: they should be covered with boats full of balsamic love.”15 Any direct transfer of political ideas and organizational tactics from the Old to the New World, therefore, must be considered at best misguided, and at worst disastrous.

      A couple of years later, in the first of two famous chronicles about the trial of the anarchists from the Haymarket incident in Chicago whose martyrdom we commemorate in all parts of the world—except, paradoxically, in the United States, where the events happened in the first place—as May Day, Martí similarly talks about those ideologues who come to the New World from Europe, “mere mouthpieces through which the feverish hatred accumulated over centuries among the working people in Europe comes to be emptied out over America,” and he compares them yet again unfavorably to the style of political association in the New World:

      They recommended barbarous remedies imagined in countries where those who suffer have neither the right to speak nor to vote, whereas here the unhappiest fellow has in his mouth the free speech that denounces evil and in his hand the vote that makes the law that shall topple it. In favor of their foreign language, and of the very same laws they blindly ignored, they managed to obtain large masses of followers in cities where lots of Germans are employed: in New York, Milwaukee, Chicago.16

      It would take another year, in a new chronicle on the trial, conviction, and execution of four of the Chicago anarchists, for Martí to change his attitude dramatically. This shift in attitude can be explained by the fact that, in the meantime, the social struggle in this great nation, between general strikes, escalating trade-unionist demands, police brutality and violent repression, had shortened the distance in style between the workers’ movements in Europe and America. “This republic, in its excessive worship of wealth, has fallen, without any of the restraints of tradition, into the inequality, injustice, and violence of the monarchies,” Martí observes on this occasion about his host country. And later, he is even more direct—“America, then, is the same as Europe!”—so that the use of violence as an inevitable last resort (what is sometimes referred to as “the red terror,” though for the period in question “the red and black terror” would have been a more appropriate appellation given the mixture of communist and anarchist ideas) might now seem justified: “Once the disease is recognized, the generous spirit goes forth in search of a remedy; once all peaceful measures have been exhausted, the generous spirit, upon which the pain of others works like a worm in an open wound, turns to the remedy of violence.”17

      With regard to the merit of giving women entrance to the university, on the other hand, the mixed feelings and doubts that Martí expresses in his letter-chronicle on the death of Marx convey the extent to which the ideal of organic social change as both harmonious and natural—born however laboriously “from the bosom of a nation in history” no less than “from the bosom of a woman in the home”—presupposes the tender collaboration of the “feminine soul” in its most retrograde and misogynistic aspect:

      No one looks askance on the toughening of the feminine soul, for that is the outcome of the virile existence to which women are led by the need to take care of themselves and defend themselves from the men who are moved by appetite. Better that the soul be toughened than that it be debased. For there is so much goodness in the souls of women that even after having been deceived, plunged into despair, and toughened, they still exude a perfume. All of life is there: in finding a good flower.18

      We could say that in Martí’s argument there occurs, first, a displacement from politics to morals, or from the struggle of the “poor” to the plight of the “weak.”19 (Incidentally, this displacement would be reversed much later, in Fidel Castro’s imprecise recollection of Martí’s chronicle on the Marx memorial.) As one Martí scholar observes, “Social conflicts are now eminently moral problems. Their solution must be sought after, not in the change of the social system but in the creation of a moral conscience, generous and just, which would harmonize, without partialities, the interests of all.”20 But then, secondly, especially through the framing vignettes, there occurs an additional reinscription of the question of moral conscience in the sentimental context of “love” and “hatred” in the bosom of the home.

      This movement from politics to morals and from the public realm to the private space of the family, of course, is the exact opposite of what happens at the start of The Communist Manifesto, where the relation between man and woman—as opposed to freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, or guild-master and journeyman—precisely does not figure among the doublets enumerated to exemplify the fact that, for Marx and Engels, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Rather, for Martí, the questions of gender and the relations among the sexes in the final instance appear to trump the issue of the class struggle in rather conventional ways. “Impurity is so terrible that it can never be voluntary,” the Cuban writer says, still with reference to what he calls the feminine soul: “An educated woman will be purer. Yet how painful it is to see how the habits of a virile life gradually change these beauteous flowers into flowers of stone! What will become of men on the day when they can no longer rest their heads on a warm, female bosom?”21 Thus, the romantic and organicist image of the reproduction of love at home reasserts its power over Martí’s attitude to what he perceives to be the problematic role of women in general in the social struggle, just as the emphasis that he puts on love prevents him from embracing the organizational methods of Marx’s followers in the New World.

      Marx in Martí

      If Marx doesn’t hold the key to the pan-American dilemma, maybe a dusted-off, postcolonial José Martí does.

      Juan Flores, Foreword to Román de la Campa, Cuba on My Mind: Journeys to a Severed Nation

      However, this does not necessarily mean that we are left with purely negative, missed encounters between Marx and Latin America, or between Marx and Martí. On the contrary, as I began arguing above, the logic of the failed or missed encounter, as desencuentro, can be considered one name among others for the unequal development of capitalism in its global phase. This could even open up the space for a renewed appreciation of the idea of the encounter, not as a euphemism for the discovery and subsequent colonization of Latin America but in the sense in which the late Louis Althusser used the term to configure what he called the “underground current” of an “aleatory materialism,” based on random encounters, as opposed to the supposed determinism