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MARTÍ AND MARX

Martí on Marx

Neither Saint-Simon, nor Karl Marx, nor Marlo, nor Bakunin. Instead, the reforms that are best suited to our own bodies.

José Martí, La Nación, February 20, 1890

If Marx fails to see any revolutionary potential in the realities of Latin America, overshadowed as these would be by the constant temptation of despotism due to a lagging or insufficient development of civil society, we should hasten to add that the misunderstanding often turns out to be reciprocal. Think of “Honores a Karl Marx, que ha muerto” (“Tributes to Karl Marx, who has died”), a well-known but strangely under-studied chronicle by the Cuban writer and independence fighter José Martí, written when he resided in New York and worked as a foreign correspondent for, among others, the Argentine daily newspaper La Nación. This chronicle has been acknowledged as being “a first pillar in the reception of Marxism in the strict philosophical sense in Latin America.”1 In it, Martí focuses on a commemorative event that took place on March 19, 1883 in the Great Hall at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, marking the occasion of Marx’s death five days earlier.

Of this quite extraordinary chronicle, officially dated March 29, 1883 by its author and published in La Nación on May 13 and 16, 1883, I wish in the first place to single out the curious mise-en-scène. Martí, as he had done the previous year with Oscar Wilde, indeed invites his distant readers to become the virtual spectators of a scene to which he appears to have been a personal eyewitness. “Ved esta gran sala. Karl Marx ha muerto,” writes Martí—“Look at this great hall. Karl Marx has died”—repeating the visual interpellation just a few lines later: “Ved esta sala.”2 What we are invited to look at, for obvious reasons, is a velorio a cuerpo ausente—that is, a wake in the absence of the deceased’s corpse. Of that famous Karl Marx whom the resolutions of the “impassioned assembly” in the end proclaim to be “the most noble hero and the most powerful thinker of the working world,” we will have obtained only the effigy or figure, by way of a large crayon portrait standing behind the back of the speakers: “Look at this hall. Presiding over it, wreathed in green leaves, is the portrait of that ardent reformer, uniter of men of different nations, tireless and forceful organizer.”3

Around this absent corpse, not to say ghost, Martí describes how there gathers a whole collective scene of men and women who respectfully take turns to invoke and pay tribute to some aspect or other of the figure of Marx. The void of the dead man’s body thus seems to be filled, as if compensated for by a surfeit of affectivity ranging from anger to awe. Through this public display of affect, the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in New York City becomes first and foremost the stage for a concrete example of what Martí considers the true labor of the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto—namely, his role as a political organizer, rather than the pursuit of scientific ambition displayed in Capital—a project of which the Cuban writer in any event only seems to have a vague idea at best, and which would not begin to be translated into Spanish until 1895, the year of Martí’s death, when the Argentine Juan B. Justo began his version of the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital. “The International was his work, and men of all nations are coming to pay tribute to him,” writes Martí, but not without immediately offering the following judgment, adopting a slightly paternalistic, gendered tone that will come back toward the end of the chronicle: “The multitude, made up of valiant laborers the sight of whom is touching and comforting, displays more muscles than adornments, more honest faces than silken scarves.”4 All of this, incidentally, is framed in something that we might call a moral aesthetic, or an ethics of the beauty of work, based on a normative and transcendentalist idea of nature, inspired by Emerson. “Work makes men beautiful. The sight of a field hand, an ironworker, or a sailor is rejuvenating. As they grapple with nature’s forces, they come to be as fair as nature.”5

Despite this attempt at a natural-organicist aestheticization of the world of workers, Martí’s chronicle never ceases to respond adversely to the great labor of Marx as a militant political organizer. Up to half a dozen times, Martí repeats the same reproach that Marx and his followers in the first International seek to accomplish their noble ends with wrong or misguided means: “Karl Marx has died. He deserves to be honored, for he placed himself on the side of the weak. But it is not the man who points out the harm and burns with generous eagerness to remedy it who does well—it is the man who advocates a mild remedy.”6 If this first formulation remains suspiciously convoluted, to the point of blurring the line between the good and the bad ways of remedying a wrong, the following phrasing does little to clear up the confusion. “To set men against men is an appalling task,” writes Martí, without clarifying whether this is what he sees Marx and his followers as doing or whether he is merely describing the daunting aspect of what they, like any other human being for that matter, are up against: “The forced bestialization of some men for the profit of others stirs our indignation. But that indignation must be vented in such a way that the beast ceases to be, without escaping its bonds and causing fear.”7 A third phrasing seems necessary in order to dispel all doubts regarding the main thrust of Martí’s objection against Marx. This formulation, furthermore, is absolutely crucial if we keep in mind not only the Hegel­ian prejudice that, according to José Aricó, would have kept Marx from properly understanding the Latin American realities, but also a certain ideological image of women and the limited role that Martí attributes to them in the process of social transformation:

Karl Marx studied the means of establishing the world on new bases; he awoke the sleepers and showed them how to cast down the cracked pillars. But he went very fast and sometimes in darkness; he did not see that without a natural and laborious gestation, children are not born viable, from a nation in history or from a woman in the home.8

Social change, even or especially when revolutionary in nature, would thus by necessity have to follow the various stages of a seemingly natural process, without allowing it to become hurried or premature. Or, sticking to the same metaphor, we might say that the difference between Marx and Martí lies in the fact that, for the Cuban writer, the gestation and birth of a nation in history, like that of a child at home, should be able to do without the force or violence that, for the author of Das Kapital, is “the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one.”9

Martí subsequently repeats the same criticism three more times, referring not just to Marx himself but also to his acolytes, the members and sympathizers of the International Working Men’s Association whose militant activists he sees gathered in the Great Hall that Monday evening in New York City. About the fellow countrymen and women of “a certain Lecovitch,” who speaks to them with Babelic confusion in English, German, and Russian, the Cuban exile says: “But no, these impatient, generous men, defiled by wrath, will not be the ones to lay the foundations of the new world: they are the spur, and serve their purpose, like the voice of conscience that might fall asleep, but the long sharp steel of a horseman’s goad is of little use as a founding hammer.”10 About the German communist-anarchist John (Johann) Most, he says that his “right hand carries no balm with which to heal the wounds inflicted by his left.” Finally, about the meeting in general, Martí adds one last overarching note of condemnation: “Music is heard and choirs ring out, but it is not the music of peace.”11

The reasons for Martí’s missed encounter with the internationalist politics of Marx would thus seem to be clear enough. According to this hero of Cuban independence and long-time resident in the belly of the monster from the North, Marx would have been the Apostle of the religion of hatred instead of love, and of war instead of peace. In fact, here we would do well to recall that Martí frames his account of the commemorative event for Marx between two strange vignettes: he thus begins his chronicle by portraying the difference between the workers’ movements in America and in Europe, and he quickly follows his account of the Marx memorial by evaluating the possible decision of Columbia University in New York City either to open its doors to female students or else to create a separate undergraduate college for women, as would eventually come to pass in 1889 with the foundation of Barnard College.

Evidently, even though in most extant editions these parts are left out, there is a close connection between the two sections that immediately frame Martí’s chronicle and the central part about the commemorative event at the Cooper Union in honor of Marx. Indeed, in talking about the contrast between the tactics of workers from the Old and New Worlds, Martí does no more than prepare the ground in anticipation of his reproach that Marx would have fomented hatred instead of love amid the working class:

The future must be conquered with clean hands. The workmen of the United States would be more prudent if the most aggrieved and enraged workmen of Europe were not emptying the dregs of their hatred into their ears. Germans, Frenchmen, and Russians guide these discussions. The Americans tend to resolve the concrete matter at hand in their meetings, while those from abroad raise it to an abstract plane. Good sense and the fact of having been born into a free cradle make the men of this place slow to wrath. The rage of those from abroad is roiling and explosive because their prolonged enslavement has repressed and concentrated it. But the rotten apple must not be allowed to spoil the whole healthy barrel—though it could! The excrescences of monarchy, which rot and gnaw at Liberty’s bosom like a poison, cannot match Liberty’s power!12

In a number of chronicles from the same period, Martí would time and again reiterate this distinction in organizational style between the workers’ movements in Europe and in America. Still in the same letter-chronicle from March 29, 1883, in another segment 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 and stagism of traditional, dogmatic, or vulgar understandings of dialectical and historical materialism.22 Marxism would then become the name for a mode of thinking of the missed encounter as such, now understood as the thought of unlinking or of the constitutive lack at the heart of the social link—that is, the structurally uneven development of society under the historical conditions of capitalism. This would enable us to imagine a posthumous dialogue between Marx and Martí.

After all, especially starting in the 1870s, Marx also began to formulate a series of hypotheses regarding the notion of uneven development that enabled him to generalize a logic of contingency and unevenness for the entire capitalist world, and not only for the so-called peripheral, backward, semi-capitalist, or colonial countries. As we have seen, Marx never fully took advantage of these hypotheses in order to take a fresh look at Latin America. However, making up for this absence, we can find a strange set of indications that go in the same direction in the writings of Martí.

If I may be allowed a play on words, the issue before us at this point no longer concerns the absent corpse of Marx, but the absence of his corpus in Martí’s work: How much, or which parts, of Marx’s published oeuvre could Martí have read during his years in New York? What did he actually read? Did he ever consult The Communist Manifesto, perhaps in the English translation that was available as early as 1850? Or did he perhaps manage to get a hold of the cheap edition of the Manifesto that was prepared with financial contributions gathered precisely during the commemorative event of 1883 at the Cooper Union? How much did Martí know, if anything, about this text of which we recently celebrated the 160th anniversary? And how informed was he about the critique of political economy in Das Kapital, about which a number of speakers at the Cooper Union already raved so eloquently? Did he ever consult the popular summary of the book prepared by the German Johann Most with the help of Marx himself, or the English-language pamphlet version translated by Otto Weydemeyer and published in 1875 in Hoboken, New Jersey—just a stone’s throw away from Martí’s residence in New York City?23

Even Fidel Castro, in a recent autobiographical interview with Ignacio Ramonet, confesses to a certain wise ignorance in this regard. Or, at least, he cleverly transposes his own supposed ignorance by attributing it to the specialists of Martí’s work. “He had apparently read a little Marx, because in his works he talks about him. He has two or three magnificent phrases, when he mentions Marx, and one of them, I remember now, is ‘Given that he took the side of the poor, he deserves honour.’ And like that one, there are other phrases that praise Marx,” says Fidel, surreptitiously putting the “poor” back in the place of the “weak,” and ignoring the fact that almost all references to Marx in Martí’s complete works (depending on the edition used, this amounts to four or five references) are actually negative ones, similar to the one used as an epigraph to the present chapter. Promptly, though, the Cuban leader adds his doubts about the matter:

I’m not certain whether even the experts in Martí’s thought know what [Martí] knew about Marx, but he did know that Marx was a fighter on the side of the poor. Remember that Marx was fighting for the organization of workers, founding the Communist International. And Martí certainly knew that, even though those debates centred almost exclusively on Europe, and Martí of course was fighting for the independence of a colonized, slave-holding country [in another hemisphere altogether].24

In reality, no matter how much the leaders of the Cuban revolution may regret this, we have no palpable proof that Martí would have been directly familiar with any of Marx’s texts. Martí’s references not only consist of open or coded criticisms, but also speak exclusively of Marx’s work as a political organizer, without mentioning any of his publications. However, we do have at our disposal an unexpected source for comparison, this time literary in nature—namely, the only novel written by Martí, Lucía Jerez, also known by the earlier title Amistad funesta (Baneful Friendship), under which Martí, writing under the pseudonym Adelaida Ral, first published the novel in nine installments, between May 15 and September 15, 1885, in the New York biweekly El Latino-americano. In certain parts of this novel, in fact, the Cuban writer almost seems to be summarizing, word for word, the logic of revolutionary social change that we find in so many of Marx’s classical statements, which since then have been buried under a mountain of glosses both orthodox and heretical.

We can also read in the second chronicle on the trial of the Chicago anarchists, in which Martí already looked with much more sympathy upon the ideological work of Bakunin’s followers: “They do not understand that they are only a wheel in the social mechanism and that in order for them to change the whole mechanism must be changed.”25 The logic of this great mechanism or engranaje is what Martí himself, in Lucía Jerez as well as in many of his best-known chronicles and essays, including the “Prologue to Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde’s Poem of Niagara” and most famously “Our America” describes as the production of structural disjunctions, maladjustments, or dismemberments at all levels of social life—from the dress code of the youth that no longer corresponds to the distinction of their soul, all the way to the radical upset, or the sudden turnabout, caused by the lack of adaptation between the level of economic development and the attendant social, political, and cultural relations.

Here is how the narrator describes the situation in a high-sounding didactic aside in Lucía Jerez:

These times of ours are disjointed, and with the collapse of the old social barriers and the refinements of education, there has come into being a new and vast class of aristocrats of intelligence, with all the needs of appearance and rich tastes that follow from it, without there having been any time as of yet, in the rapidity of the turnabout, for the change in the organization and distribution of fortunes to correspond to the brusque alteration of social relations, produced by the political liberties and the vulgarization of knowledge.26

In Martí’s text, this logic of uneven development, based on a structural lack of correspondence, in the first place affects the life of intellectuals in Latin America:

Since with our Spanish American heads, filled with ideas from Europe and North America, we find ourselves in our countries in the manner of fruits without a market, like excrescences of the earth that weigh down on it and disturb it, and not as its natural flourishing, it so happens that those who possess intelligence, which is sterile among us due to its ill guidance, finding themselves in need of making it fertile so as simply to subsist, devote it with exclusive excess to the political battles, in the noblest of cases, thus producing an imbalance between the scarce country and the political surfeit; or else, pressured by the urgencies of life, they serve the strong man in power who pays and corrupts them, or they strive to topple him when, bothered by needy newcomers, the same strong man withdraws his abundant payment for their baneful services.27

Thus, the very “baneful” or “ill-fated” nature of the mysterious “friendship” alluded to in the novel’s original title, Amistad funesta, would somehow be related to the disastrously imbalanced outcomes of uneven development. Indeed, the only other two references in the novel to the element of lo funesto also allude to the effects of a structural maladjustment. Juan Jerez is thus said to “have given in, in his life filled with books and abstractions, to the sweet necessity, which is so often baneful, of squeezing against his heart a little pale hand, this one or that one, it mattered little to him; he saw in womanhood the symbol of ideal beauties more so than a real being.”28 And about Pedro, the dandyish figure whose physical attractiveness is matched only by his arrogance, we are told that he “saw in his own beauty, the baneful beauty of a lazy and ordinary man, a natural title, that of a lion, over all earthly goods, including the greatest among them, which are its beautiful creatures.”29 But, for the narrator, this is only another example of “that rich beauty of a man, graceful and firm, with which nature clothes a scarce soul.”30 Friendship and love, among other phenomena, become baneful or fatal in Martí’s novel precisely due to such maladjustments between the ideal and the real, between physical beauty and moral scarcity, between the life of the mind and the life of the heart, or between the paucity of bourgeois-civil society and the surfeit of politics.

Some of the fragments quoted above, in particular the first one, obviously recall the famous Preface to the 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in which Marx sums up the theoretical and methodological presuppositions of his work in preparation for Capital. Though famous to the point of saturation, this passage deserves to be quoted at length once more, if for no other reason than to highlight the striking terminological proximities and no less striking discrepancies when compared to Martí:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.31

A similar passage about methodology can already be found in The Communist Manifesto, which Martí may or may not have been able to read, or at least hear about, during his years in New York City:

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.32

Finally, toward the end of Extracts from The Capital by Karl Marx, the forty-two-page pamphlet that Martí may have read in Weydemeyer’s translation, this logic of radical social change is applied to the fate of capitalism itself:

The privileges of capital now become fetters to the mode of production which has risen with them and through them. The contradiction of the means of production and the socialization of labor arrive at a point where they become incompatible with their capitalistic frame. It will be burst. The death-knell of the capitalistic private property is sounded. The appropriators of strange property will be expropriated. Thus the individual property will be re-instated, but on the basis of the acquisition of the modern mode of production. There will arise an amalgamation of free labor, which will collectively own the earth and the means of production created by labor.33

If we limit ourselves to this conceptual juxtaposition without bringing up questions of form, there are already two important points of disagreement that immediately catch the eye. For Martí, first of all, there is no linear relation of causality between what, in light of the fragments from Marx, has come to be known as the base and the superstructure. On the contrary, political freedom and the democratization of knowledge, for example, can also come about prior to—or without—a corresponding transformation at the level of bourgeois-civil society or political economy. In fact, this is precisely the problem that besets the newly emergent nations in Latin America, where formal or political independence has not been matched by economic, social, or ideological independence. But there also appears to be a second, as yet understated or implicit disagreement in Martí’s phrasing, the consequences of which are, if possible, even more portentous for the interpretation of Marxism. This second disagreement has to do with the presupposition, which Marx and Martí at first sight would appear to share in common, that normally there exists an underlying harmony or correspondence between base and superstructure, or between the productive forces and the social relations of production with their legal, political, religious, and ideological superstructure: a correspondence interrupted only during times of revolutionary upheaval, but otherwise firmly asserted—or so it seems—as a regulative ideal by both Marx and Martí. And yet, contrary to the initial appearance of a shared presupposition, no sooner do we take a closer look at the peculiar literary-aesthetic formulation of this ideal in Lucía Jerez, as opposed to Martí’s more famous statements such as his prologue to Pérez Bonalde’s Poem of Niagara, than we have to come to the conclusion that all such presuppositions of harmony or correspondence turn out to be inoperative, if not for the capitalist world in general then at least in the specific context of Latin America.

What I wish to underscore in relation to Martí’s novel is not just the surprising proximity to certain phrasings from Marx’s canonical texts so much as the literary form and generic structure adopted therein. Lucía Jerez, or Amistad funesta, in fact constitutes a sentimental romance that ends in nothing less than the violent destruction of all the ideals of natural or harmonious development for which Martí, in his chronicle about the death of Marx, thought he could still count on the support of the feminine soul. The melodrama of ill-fated friendship and unrequited love thus ends with the brutal assassination of Sol—the adolescent orphan whose physical beauty at the same time is supposed to embody the moral ideal as well—at the hands of her friend and potential rival or lover Lucía Jerez. Juan Jerez, on the other hand, never manages to fulfill his historical role as the story’s organic intellectual, his dream of becoming a man of letters—more specifically, a lawyer—at the service of the poor indigenous peasants. To be sure, like Marx, whom Martí does praise in his chronicle as “a man consumed with the desire to do good,” and who “saw in everything what he bore within: rebellion, the high road, combat,” Juan Jerez, too, seems destined for a higher moral mission: “Juan Jerez’s was one of those unhappy souls that can only do what is grand and love what is pure.”34 And yet, in the end, his obsession with righting the wrongs of the whole universe, his nostalgia for the heroic grandeur of epic deeds, and his well-nigh masochistic sense of duty lead him to an attitude of the “beautiful soul” whose only proof of moral integrity is that it is inversely proportionate to the sordidness of the world in which, despite everything, he is forced to circulate. “Everything on this earth, in these dark times, tends to degrade the soul: everything from books and paintings to business and affects,” to the point of provoking “the luminous illness of the great souls, reduced to petty chores by their current duties or the impositions of chance.”35

Melodrama’s genre and gender conventions thus are put into play as the experimental ground for testing and interrogating the brusque alteration of social relations produced in Latin America by the newfound political liberties and the vulgarization of knowledge for which there has not been any corresponding change in the economical distribution of fortunes. “Melodrama links the crisis of modernity to desire and to the body, aside from facilitating an investigation into the processes of representation,” as Francine Masiello writes in a groundbreaking study, using Martí’s Lucía Jerez as one of her examples. “To put this still more radically, I propose that it is impossible to narrate the chaos of the fin de siècle in Latin America without melodrama.”36 The typical family romances such as Amalia by the Argentine José Mármol or María by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs that had served as “foundational fictions” for the joint construction of nation and narration in Latin America thus begin to come apart at the seams in the violent dislocations that give Lucía Jerez its melodramatic structure.

On the one hand, Martí’s novel renders explicit the presuppositions behind the shift from politics to morals, which we saw was implicitly at work in his chronicle about Marx. Using a regionally inflected metaphor for a view that we otherwise would associate with vulgar Marxism, the narrator in yet another didactic digression tells us how, just as the mind’s well-being depends on the health of the stomach, so too the secret to a happy and well-ordered nation-state is to be found in the economy of the hacienda:

A well-ordered hacienda is the base of universal happiness. In nations or in homes, it is in love—even the most unblemished and secure—that we must search for the cause of the many upheavals and disruptions that project darkness or ugliness upon them, when they are not the cause of separation, or even death, which is another form of separation: the hacienda is the stomach of happiness. Husbands, lovers, persons who still have to live and who desire to prosper: put some order in your hacienda!37

On the other hand, in the story’s actual unfolding, Lucía Jerez violently tears apart the amorous and familial bonds that the text’s numerous didactic asides place at the origins of social and political harmony. Not surprisingly, moreover, the misogyny that we found barely hidden in Martí’s chronicle in honor of Marx now comes to the foreground in the evaluation of Lucía’s potential attraction to Sol. Lesbianism indeed appears as the ultimate threat to Martí’s peculiar moralization of politics: the epitome of women’s autonomy from the constraints of family, reproduction, and heterosexuality. This is why the ultimate example of a “baneful friendship” within the fictive universe of Amistad funesta, as Lucía Jerez was first known, can be said to lie in the fatal attraction between two women or, even more forcefully, in the unrequited and ultimately murderous love of one woman for another. It is also why Lucía’s friendship seems to be driven by such a strong sense of the destructive potential of love, as even some of the earliest commentators were quick to point out.38

Finally, aside from causing major critics such as the Cuban Cintio Vitier to speak of a “case” in the clinical-pathological sense, Lucía’s desire is also a slap in the face of would-be organic intellectuals such as Juan Jerez, who is thus reduced to a state of utter inaction in which even the ideal of personal abnegation appears merely as a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to disguise powerlessness under the cloak of high-minded morality. Whence the peculiar combination of boastful martyrdom and self-sacrificing Quixotry:

There was in him a strange and violent need for martyrdom, and if, because of the superiority of his soul, he had great difficulty finding friends who would esteem and stimulate his mind, he who felt more of a need to give himself—since deep down he did not love himself at all and saw himself more as a property to others that he kept in deposit—gave himself over as a slave to anyone who seemed to love him or understood his delicate nature and wished nothing but good upon him.39

Whatever the reader makes of this strangely hysterical staging of desire in Lucía Jerez, the fact remains that the ideals of harmonious development are here allowed completely and unabashedly to fall apart. In spite of the deep reluctance about the genre to which he publicly confesses and which probably explains why he signs his “bad little novel” or noveluca under a female pseudonym, Martí almost seems to welcome the narrative constraints of the melodramatic format as a space in which he can work against the pressures put on him everywhere else by the strict normativity of his moral and political outlook.

As we will see in the following chapters, this melodramatic orientation will have great repercussions for the imagination of the political Left in Latin America throughout much of the twentieth century. In fact, together with the detective novel, melodrama seems to be one of the most tempting and recurrent forms for thinking politics today. In order to understand this, the traditional argument, according to which the melodramatic struggle over good and evil provided much-needed moral anchorage in the midst of the great social and political upheaval that shook Western Europe after the French Revolution, will have to be extended and transposed onto those more recent times of ours that are post-revolutionary in the much more radical sense of having lived through the decline and fall of the very idea of the revolution itself. “Even literature confronts the theme of the institutional revolution (for many the revolution betrayed) through melodrama or mythification,” as Carlos Monsiváis writes in an important essay, “Mexico 1890–1976: High Contrast, Still Life,” included in Mexican Postcards: “In melodrama dominant morality is extenuated and strengthened, governed by a convulsive, shuddering faith in the values of poetry.”40 On the other hand, in the pre-revolutionary context of Martí’s Lucía Jerez, as Marx and Engels also keenly intuited in their commentary from The Holy Family on The Mysteries of Paris by one of the subgenre’s most celebrated founders, Eugène Sue, and as Althusser would confirm much later in a central text in For Marx, melodrama provides an ideal speculative space in which to elaborate and experiment with the multiple effects of uneven development as the logic of the missed encounter—whereby the latter can be read not only as the result of Marx’s defective knowledge about Latin America, nor only as the tactical and strategic error for which Martí selectively yet also consistently reproaches Marx, but rather as the very structure of the capitalist mode of production.

Through a melodrama complete with a violently unhappy ending in the form of a murderous passage à l’acte, we thus arrive at the negation of all the regulative ideals of natural and harmonious development modeled upon the family or the hacienda. We could even take this argument one step further by arguing that in his only novel Martí, too, begins to catch a glimpse of the logic of the violently uneven development of modernity, just as Marx did a few years earlier in his writings on Ireland, India, or Russia. Thus, in light of Lucía Jerez, we would have to conclude that for Martí—in the realm of narrative experimentation perhaps no less than for a radical reading of Marx that could find inspiration in Freud’s and Lacan’s psychoanalysis—there is not, nor can there be in the current circumstances, any correspondence or adaptation between base and superstructure, or between the social relations of production and the economic distribution of fortunes and productive forces.

This is also, incidentally, the conclusion arrived at by someone like Slavoj Žižek, in his foundational book The Sublime Object of Ideology:

How do we define, exactly, the moment—albeit only an ideal one—at which the capitalist relation[s] of production become an obstacle to the further development of the productive forces? Or the obverse of the same question: When can we speak of an accordance between productive forces and relation[s] of production in the capitalist mode of production? Strict analysis leads to only one possible answer: never.41

A strict interpretation of psychoanalysis thus would turn a historical obstacle into an inherent one that can never be overcome. In all the hitherto existing history of humankind, then, there would be no agreement except in disagreement, no harmony except in conflict, and no encounter except in a missed encounter.

In fact, a similar conclusion had already been reached in For Marx by Althusser, for whom “the great law of unevenness suffers no exceptions,” for the simple reason that it appears to be a universal law of the development of any social formation whatsoever:

This unevenness suffers no exceptions because it is not itself an exception: not a derivative law, produced by peculiar conditions (imperialism, for example) or intervening in the interference between the developments of distinct social formations (the unevenness of economic development, for example, between “advanced” and “backward” countries, between colonizers and colonized, etc.). Quite the contrary, it is a primitive law, with priority over these peculiar cases and able to account for them precisely in so far as it does not derive from their existence.42

This primitive or originary fact of unevenness would help explain why the discoveries of Marx and Freud, even more so than with Columbus’s, have been compared with the upheavals caused by the Copernican revolution. Just as Marxism shows that “the human subject, the economic, political or philosophical ego, is not the ‘center’ of history,” so does strict analysis show that “the human subject is decentered, constituted by a structure that, too, has a ‘center’ solely in the imaginary misprision of the ‘ego,’ that is, in the ideological formations in which it ‘recognizes’ itself.”43 And yet, when the decentering effects of unevenness are thus posited as insuperable facts, as primitive laws, or as quasi-ontological conditions of being as such, do we not also lose out on the potential for change that would seem to be the outcome of uneven development for Marx and Martí? Does this potential for radical change, including a change in the mechanism of the whole existing social structure itself, necessarily depend on the positing of an ideal of natural harmony and organicity to be established or restored—with everything that such a restorative ideal entails, for example, in terms of the exorcism of violence, including domestic violence, which then always threatens to come back with a vengeance, as in Martí? Alternatively, does the potential for change depend on a humanist appeal to subjective freedom, allegedly disavowed in the structuralist account of uneven development? Is the humanism of the young Marx then necessarily the only answer to an Althusserian-inspired interpretation of Marxism? These are some of the fundamental theoretical questions—regarding the limits of nature and structure, determinism and freedom, humanism and anti-humanism—that will continue to be raised in art and literature in the form of melodramatic oppositions, as witnessed in the novel to which I turn in the next chapter.