José Carlos Mariátegui on the Destiny of North America
Ibero-Americanism and Pan-Americanism
Published in Mundial: Lima, 8 May 1925. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.filosofia.org/hem/192/9250508.htm>.
I
Ibero-Americanism reappears spontaneously in the debates of Spain and Spanish América. It is an ideal or a theme that, from time to time, occupies the dialogue of the intellectuals of the language. (It seems to me that one cannot really call them the intellectuals of the race.)
But now, the discussion has more extension and more intensity. In the press of Madrid, the topics of Ibero-Americanism are acquiring, currently, a conspicuous interest. The movement of rapprochement or coordination of the Ibero-American intellectual forces, negotiated and advocated by some nuclei of writers from our América [nuestra América], gives these topics a concrete value and new prominence in these days.
This time the discussion is repudiated in many cases. It ignores, at least in others, the Ibero-Americanism of protocol. (The official Ibero-Americanism of Don Alfonso [XIII] is embodied in the Bourbon and decorative stupidity of an infant, in the courtly mediocrity of a Frank Rodriguez.) Ibero-Americanism is stripped naked in the dialogue of free intellectuals, of all diplomatic ornament. It thus reveals its reality to us as the ideal of the majority of representatives of the intelligence and culture of Spain and Indo-Iberian America.
Pan-Americanism, meanwhile, does not enjoy the favor of intellectuals. It does not have, in this abstract and inorganic category, estimable and sensitive adhesions. It has only a few larval sympathies. Its existence is exclusively diplomatic. The merest insight easily discovers in pan-Americanism a robe of North American imperialism. Pan-Americanism does not manifest itself as an ideal of the Continent; it manifests itself, rather, unequivocally, as a natural ideal of the Yankee Empire. (Before a great Democracy, as its apologists in these latitudes like to call them, the United States constitutes a great Empire.) But pan-Americanism exerts—in spite of all this or, better, precisely because of all this—a vigorous influence on Indo-Iberian America. The American politician is not too concerned with passing off the ideal of Empire as an ideal of the Continent. He does not need the consensus of the intellectuals very much either. Pan-Americanism embroiders its propaganda on a solid mesh of interests. Yankee capital invades Indo-Iberian America. The Pan-American commercial traffic routes are the routes of this expansion. Day by day, American currency, technology, machines and goods are becoming more and more predominant in the economy of the Central and Southern nations. The Empire of the North may well smile at the theoretical independence of the intelligence and spirit of Indo-Spanish America. Economic and political interests will gradually ensure the adherence, or at least the submission, of most intellectuals. In the meantime, the teachers and the civil servants that mobilize for the Pan-American Union of Mr. [Leo Stanton] Rowe will be enough for the parades of pan-Americanism.
II
Nothing is more useless, therefore, than to entertain oneself in Platonic confrontations between the Iberian-American ideal and the pan-American ideal. Ibero-Americanism is of little use to the number and quality of intellectual accessions. Of even less use to it is the eloquence of its literati. While Ibero-Americanism is based on sentiments and traditions, pan-Americanism is based on interests and business. The Ibero-American bourgeoisie has much more to learn in the school of the new Yankee Empire than in the school of the old Spanish nation. The Yankee model, the Yankee style, are spreading in Indo-Iberian America, while the Spanish heritage is consumed and lost.
The landowner, the banker, the rentier of Spanish América look much more attentively to New York than to Madrid. The course of the dollar interests them a thousand times more than [Miguel de] Unamuno's thought and [José] Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente. These people who govern the economy and, therefore, the politics of Central and South America, care very little about the Ibero-Americanist ideal. In the best of cases they feel ready to marry it together with the pan-Americanist ideal. The traveling agents of Pan–Americanism, on the other hand, seem to them more effective, although less picturesque, than the traveling agents—academic infants—of official Ibero-Americanism, which is the only one that a prudent bourgeois can take seriously.
III
The new Hispanic-American generation must clearly and accurately define the meaning of its opposition to the United States. She must declare herself an adversary of the Empire of [Charles G.] Dawes and [J. P.] Morgan; not of the North American people or man. The history of American culture offers us many noble cases of independence of the intelligence of the spirit: Roosevelt is the depositary of the spirit of Empire; but Thoreau is the depositary of the spirit of humanity. Henry Thoreau, who at this time receives the homage of the revolutionaries of Europe, also has the right to the devotion of the revolutionaries of our America. Is it the fault of the United States if we Ibero-Americans know Theodore Roosevelt's thought more than Henry Thoreau's? The United States is certainly the homeland of Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford; but it is also the homeland of Ralph-Waldo Emerson, Williams James and Walt Whitman. The nation that has produced the greatest captains of industrialism has also produced the strongest masters of continental idealism. And today the same restlessness that agitates the vanguard of Spanish América moves the vanguard of North America. The problems of the new Hispanic-American generation are, with variation of place and nuance, the same problems of the new North American generation. Waldo Frank, one of the new men of the North, in his studies on Our America, says things that are valid for the people of his America and ours.
The new men of Indo-Iberian América can and should have an understanding with the new men of Waldo Frank's America. The work of the new Ibero-American generation can and should be articulated and solidarized with the work of the new Yankee generation. Both generations coincide. They are differentiated by language and race; but they communicate and join in the same historical emotion. Waldo Frank's America is also, like our América, an adversary of Pierpont Morgan's Empire and of Oil.
On the other hand, the same historical emotion that brings us closer to this revolutionary America separates us from the reactionary Spain of the Bourbons and [Miguel] Primo de Rivera. What can the Spain of [Juan] Vásquez de Mella and [Antonio] Maura, the Spain of [Juan Víctor] Pradera and [José] Francos Rodríguez teach us? Nothing; not even the method of a big industrialist and capitalist state. The civilization of Power does not have its headquarters in Madrid or in Barcelona; it has it in New York, in London, in Berlin. The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs does not interest us at all. Señor Pradera, Señor Francos Rodríguez, stay completely with her.
IV
Ibero-Americanism needs a little more idealism and a little more realism. It needs to be consubstantiated with the new ideals of Indo-Iberian America. It needs to be inserted into the new historical reality of these peoples. Pan-Americanism relies on the interests of the bourgeois order; Ibero-Americanism must rely on the multitudes who are working to create a new order. The official Ibero-Americanism will always be an academic, bureaucratic, impotent ideal, without roots in life. As an ideal of the renewing nuclei, it will become, instead, a belligerent, active, multitudinous ideal.
Waldo Frank
First and second parts published in Boletín Bibliográfico: Lima, September 1925, third part published in Variedades: Lima, 4 December 1929. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/waldo%20frank.htm>.
I
Of the three great contemporary Franks, Ralph Waldo Frank is the one closest to the consciousness and problems of the new Hispanic-American generation. Henri Frank, the author of La Danse devant L'Arche [The Dance in Front of the Ark], who died a few years ago, whom all men today consider, however, so much ours and so current, belongs too much to France. This writer, admirable for his spirit and his sensitivity, felt the human crisis in the French crisis. Leonhard Frank, the author of Das Menchs is gut (Man is Good), writes, in an expressionistic language, for a spiritually distant and different world. Waldo Frank, on the other hand, is a man of America.
Only an elite knew (in 1925) the books of Waldo Frank. The Hispanic-American public knew almost nothing about their author. La Revista de Occidente had published an essay by this great contemporary. A year earlier, Valoraciones, the excellent magazine of the group "Renovación" of La Plata, and other organs of the continent had revealed Frank to their readers by publishing the simple and beautiful message to the Spanish-American intellectuals that in 1924 the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes was the bearer of. In short, just a few fragments and a few notices of an already illustrious and copious work that has given its author deserved renown in Europe.
It is true that the literature and thought of the United States, in general, do not reach Spanish América except with a long delay and through few specimens. Even the great figures are not familiar to us. Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, already translated into many languages, are still waiting for their turn in Spanish. Henry Thoreau, the Puritan of Walden, the friend of [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, remains ignored in this America. The same must be said of [Josiah] Royce, [Horatio] Dresser and other philosophers. Hispanic América does not read them. Read, instead, grass-fed, Mr. [Orison Swett] Marden, whose cheap pragmatism, of easy and vast consumption in the middle class, constitutes one of the best known products of North American manufacturing.
But Waldo Frank is getting closer to Spanish-América every day. The appearance of his beautiful book Virgin Spain, in the editions of Revista de Occidente; the publication of recent essays in Spanish-American magazines, among which I will point out with special sympathy the Cuadernos de Oriente y Occidente that, by the intelligent and fervent effort of Samuel Glusberg, have begun to be published in Buenos Aires; the announcement of his next visit to Buenos Aires, invited by the University to sustain in its lecture hall a series of lectures; here are some facts that give the clear and strong figure of Waldo Frank the most interesting continental currency. With the translation of his other two books, Our America and Holiday, the Hispanic public will have a more or less accurate knowledge of the work of this great American, which I am pleased to have been perhaps the first to comment on among us. The suggestive series of articles that, with the title of "The Rediscovery of America" is currently being published by WaIdo Frank in The New Republic—one of the highest forums of American thought—persuades us, in short, that the spiritual and intellectual life of the continent has events much more transcendent for its destiny than the Fourth Pan-American Conference. In this remarkable work Waldo Frank sketches a magnificent prophecy of the future of America.
Waldo Frank can and should be an exception in the delay with which American ideas and emotions—when they are not Mr. Rowe's—arrive in this América "that still speaks in Spanish.” There is a reason for this exception; Waldo Frank—who in his penetrating essay "The Spaniard," a chapter of his book Virgin Spain, demonstrates such a genius aptitude for penetrating into the soul and history of a people and such a deep knowledge of Spanish psychology and sociology—, is the author of a book that contains in its pages the most original and intelligent interpretation of the United States, Our America. And it seems to me impossible to doubt that the attitude of the Hispanic-American peoples towards the United States should be based on an accurate study and assessment of the Yankee phenomenon.
On the other hand, Waldo Frank is a representative of the American intelligence and spirit who speaks thus to the intellectuals of Hispanic America: "We must be friends. Not friends of the official ceremonial class, but friends in ideas, friends in acts, friends in a common and creative intelligence. We are committed to carrying out a solemn and magnificent undertaking. We have the same ideal: to justify América, by creating in América a spiritual culture. And we have the same enemy: materialism, imperialism, the sterile pragmatism of the modern world. If the forces of creative life are to prevail against them, they must also unite. This is the bloody problem of our centuries and it is a problem as old as history."
In one of my articles on Ibero-Americanism, I have already repudiated the simplistic conception of those who see in the United States only a manufacturing, materialistic and utilitarian nation. I have maintained the thesis that Ibero-Americanism should not ignore or underestimate the magnificent forces of idealism that have operated in Yankee history. The leaven of the United States has been its Puritans, its Jews, its mystics. The emigrants, the exiles, the persecuted of Europe. That same mysticism of action that is recognizable in the great captains of American industry, does it not perhaps descend from the ideological mysticism of their ancestors?
And well: Waldo Frank feels himself—and is—"a bearer of the true American tradition." It is not true that this tradition is represented, in our century, by [Herbert] Hoover, [J.P.] Morgan and [Henry] Ford. In the pages of Our America, Waldo Frank teaches us where and in whom the spiritual strength of the United States is. In his message to the Ibero-American intelligentsia he claims for his generation the honor and responsibility of this historical heritage: "We, the minority of the United States, who are dedicated to the task of endowing our country with a spirit worthy of his magnificent body, feel that we are the true American tradition. In a simpler generation, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Lincoln, represented that tradition; in a more complex and difficult to manage medium, our generation embodies the Word. We are still scattered in small groups in a thousand cities, we still have little influence in political and authority matters; but we are growing enormously; we are taking over the youth of the country; we have the persuasive power of religious faith; we have the energy; we have, so to speak, the future."
Our America is not a history book in the common meaning of this word; but it is in its profound meaning. It is not chronicling or analysis; it is theory and synthesis. In a sketch of few and sober strokes, Waldo Frank offers us a finished spiritual image of the United States. More than explaining, his book wants to suggest. And he does it admirably. "I'm not writing a history of customs, much less a history of letters," Frank says in his foreword. “If I have dwelt at length on certain writers and certain artists, I have done so just as the playwright chooses, among the words of his characters, the most salient and the most significant to make his piece. I have chosen, I have omitted, with the view of suggesting a vast movement along some lines that may grasp and retain something of the solidity of life." Waldo Frank is concerned only with fundamental truths. With them he composes an interpretation of the entire American phenomenon.
This book also has, moreover, the merit of not being a laboratory product. Its genesis is suggestive. Waldo Frank dedicates it in the prologue to Jacques Copeau and Gaston Gallimard who, on a visit to the United States, aroused in his spirit the desire and the need to find an answer to the questions of an intelligent and acerbic curiosity Copeau and Gallimard posed to Waldo Frank with their questioning "the enormous problem of bringing the light to the vital and hidden depths in order to bring out in its energy and its truth the play of an articulated life." In the course of his conversations with his French friends, Waldo Frank saw that "America was a concept to be created."
Waldo Frank points to the pioneer, the Puritan and the Jew as the primary elements of the formation of North America. The pioneer, above all, is the one who gives his tonality to the people, to society, to Yankee life. The spirit of the United States is defined, throughout its history, as a pioneer spirit. The pioneer was assimilated to the Puritan. "Under the pressure of the needs of the pioneer," Frank writes, "all human energy was absorbed by empiricism, religion materialized. The mystical words remained. But in fact, the question of living was the biggest problem. Religion had to help solve it. In this field of action and utility, the Puritan spirit and the Jewish spirit were combined and understood each other easily.” Waldo Frank follows the trajectory of this agreement, which did not first reveal itself to him. In Europe as well the concomitance of these two spirits in the development of Western civilization has been noticed. Frank certainly thinks that in the background of the Puritan's religious protest, his will to power was stirring. An Italian Israelite writer defines in this single sentence the whole philosophy of Judaism: "L'uomo conosce Dio operando [Man knows God by working]." The cooperation of the Jew and the Puritan in the process of creating capitalism and industrialism is thus perfectly and clearly explained. The pragmatism, the utilitarianism of the gregarious of two religions, severely moralistic, is born of their will to action and power. The Jew and the Puritan, on the other hand, are individualists. They appear, therefore, as the natural architects of a civilization whose political thought is liberalism and whose economic praxis is freedom of trade and industry.
Waldo Frank's thesis on the United States reveals one of the virtues, one of the qualities of the new spirit. Frank, in method and in concept, in research and in result, is at once very idealistic and very realistic. The sense of reality does not harm his lyricism. This exalter of the power of the spirit knows how to firmly set his feet on matter. His work proves concretely and eloquently the possibility of reconciling historical materialism with a revolutionary idealism. Waldo Frank uses the positivist method, but, in his hands, the method is nothing but an instrument. Do not be surprised that in a criticism of [William Jennings] Bryan's idealism he reasons as a perfect Marxist and that on the cover of Our America he places these words of Walt Whitman: "The real and lasting greatness of our States will be their Religion. There is no other lasting or real greatness. There is no life and no character that deserves this name, outside of religion."
In Waldo Frank, as in every great interpreter of history, intuition and method collaborate. This association produces a superior aptitude for penetrating into the deep reality of the facts. [Miguel de] Unamuno would probably modify his judgment on Marxism if he studied the Marxist spirit—not the letter—in writers like the author of Our America. Waldo Frank declares in his book: "We believe ourselves to be the true realists, we who insist that the ideal is the essence of all reality." But this idealism does not cloud his gaze with any metaphysical or rhetorical haze when he scrutinizes the panorama of the history of the United States. "The history of colonization," he writes, "is the result of economic movements in the metropolises. There is nothing, not even this chaste gesture, in Puritanism, that was not born of the restlessness into which the agrarian and industrial situation threw England. If America was colonized, it is because England was the commercial rival of Spain, Holland and France. If America was colonized, it is, first of all, because the spiritualistic fervor of the Middle Ages had passed the time of its flourishing and by reaction was transformed into a desire for material greatness. The dream of gold, the passion of silk, the need to find a route that would lead sooner to the riches of India, all the appetites of overpopulated nations poured men and energies on the soil of America. The first colonies established on the eastern coast had by charter the acquisition of wealth. Its revolt against England, in 1775, initiated one of the first open struggles between bourgeois capitalism and the old feudalism. The triumph of the colonies, from which the United States was born, marked the triumph of the capitalist regime. And since then America has had neither tradition nor means of expression that has been free of this industrial revolution to which it owes its existence."
These are some foreshortenings of the thinker. The personality of Waldo Frank is barely sketched from one point of view. The critic, the essayist, the historian—historian yes, even if he has not written what is ordinarily called history— is also a novelist. Her novel Rahab is one of the most exquisite novels I have read this year. A psychological novel without the morbid procrastination of [Marcel] Proust. A passionately human and poetic novel. And very modern and very new. The drama of Our America is complete in its conflict and in its protagonists. The religious, idealistic inspiration does not vary. Only the form of expression changes. The thinker achieves a work of art; the artist achieves a work of thought.
II
A Spanish writer can express Spain; but it is almost impossible for him to understand and interpret it. The Spaniard, moreover, will express one of the voices, one of the gestures of Spain; not the sum of its voices, its gestures and its colors. Only Unamuno, among contemporary Spaniards, achieves this profound, essential, intimate expression, in which the genius of Spain is not repeated but recreated. It is necessary to come from far away, from a new world discovered by the adventurous and enlightened spirit of Spain, from an old, wandering race, bearer of a universal message, owner of the gift of prophecy, from a childlike, hallucinated and gigantic, sporty and mechanical people, to understand and discover this nation in whose past such different people and cultures are mixed and that, nevertheless, reaches a finished and original unity. Waldo Frank brings together all these qualities. A Jew from the United States, his sensitivity tuned in a time of change and secession, he links and surpasses the Western experience and the Eastern experience. He is the man who feels, at the same time, further and beyond European culture and its jealous Saxon and Latin superstitions. And so, by this, he can understand Spain copies a finished work, not failed or decadent but, on the contrary, finished and complete.
Maurice Barrés gave us, at the end of an era, a version of excellent French style, balanced even in its excesses, wisely dosed; a version of the provincial bourgeoisie, although refined, of aristocratic, traditionalist, rationalist, gently Pascalian education; an ordered, 18th century version, which stopped at reality, with an indecisive, elegant and unsatisfied longing to overflow it. Waldo Frank, meanwhile, gives us a reckless, adventurous, supra-realistic version, which does not recoil from any hypothesis or any conjecture; a version of a nomadic spirit—Barrés' was a sedentary and peasant spirit—, messianic and ecumenical, that goes beyond reality at every moment to discover its extreme contours and its immaterial dimensions.
Waldo Frank's journey begins in Africa. To conquer Spain, follow the route of the Moor, of the Berber. His first station is the oasis; his first question is to Islam. Whoever enters Spain through Barcelona or San Sebastian will be on the wrong path. Catalonia is a fissure, a crack, in the body of Spain. Frank perceives—listening to the millenary songs, warm and vehement as the breath of the desert—the limitations of the Mohammedan religion. The psychology of the religions engendered by the desert and the exodus is familiar to him. He too comes from a people whose spirit was formed by the march and hope. The peoples of the desert live with their soul and their gaze on the horizon. The greatness of its conquest and the magnitude of its message depend on the remoteness of its goal.
Islam stopped in Spain. Spain conquered it, by being conquered by it. In the loving climate of Spain, the Arab's warlike impulses slackened. For an expansive and walking people, rest is defeat. To stop is to touch one's own limit. Spain appropriated the energy, the will of Islam. This energy, this will, turned against the people of Muhammad. Catholic Spain, medieval Spain, the Spain of Isabella, [Christopher] Columbus and the conquistadores, represents the transfusion of that uncompromising and conquering energy and will into the body of the Roman Church. Isabel created, with them, the Spanish unity. With the motley historical elements deposited by the centuries in the Iberian Peninsula, Isabel composed a Spain of a single block. Spain expelled the Moor, the Jew. It closed its doors to reform. It remained uncompromising, inquisitorial and dogmatically Catholic. It affirmed the counter-reformation with the bonfires of the Inquisition. It absorbed everything that was different or diverse from the soul that had been infused into it by its Queen Isabella the Catholic. It is the moment of the supreme Spanish exaltation. "The will of Spain," Frank writes, "manifests itself, brings forth a brilliant set of individual forces so various and great that they magnify it. [Hernán] Cortés and [Francisco] Pizarro, anarchic gold seekers, collaborate with [Ignatius of] Loyola, hunter of souls and with [Francisco de] Vitoria, founder of international law; together collaborate Santa Teresa [de Ávila], San Juan de la Cruz, la Celestina, immortal madam, the lover don Juan, with Fray Luis de León; Christopher Columbus with Don Quixote; [Luis de] Góngora with [Diego] Velásquez. They are the whole of Spain; the impulses that they symbolize have been pointing to the very nature of Spain. But at that moment the will of Spain condenses them and gives body to each one. The saint, the rogue, the discoverer and the poet appear as stratifications of the soul of Spain; and they are great and magnify Spain because in each of them lives the entire will of Spain, its full vital force. Isabel can rest."
But to reach one's goal, to fulfill one's destiny is to conclude. Spain wanted to be the maximum and last expression of the Middle Ages. It achieved it, when the world was already starting to stop being medieval. The discovery and conquest of América broke the unity, fractured the spirit that Spain wanted to keep intact. The mission of Spain was ending. "The Spaniard," Frank thinks, "chose a form of purpose and a form of truth that he could achieve; and so he reached it, he stopped moving. His truth became the Church of Rome. The Spaniard got that truth and discarded the others. His ideal of unity was homogeneous; the simple fusion in each Spaniard of thought and faith according to a concrete ideal. To this end, the Spaniard reduced the elements of his psychic world to sharp antitheses that he contrasted with each other; the result was, really, simplicity and homogeneity, that is, a neutralization of contrary psychic pressures that added up to zero."
Waldo Frank's book is full of suggestions. Exciting, inciting, it mobilizes all our intellectual energies towards the goal of a personal and new conquest of Spain.
III
What has brought me closer to Waldo Frank is a certain similarity of trajectory and experience. The intimate, personal reason for my sympathy for Waldo Frank lies in the fact that, in part, we have followed the same path. In this part, I will not talk about our disagreements. His spontaneous and sincere subject is our affinity. I will say in what way Waldo Frank is an older brother to me.
Like him, I didn't feel American except in Europe. Along the roads of Europe, I found the country of América that I had left and in which I had lived almost strange and absent. Europe revealed to me to what extent I belonged to a primitive and chaotic world; and at the same time it imposed on me, clarified for me the duty of an American task. But of this, some time after my return, I had a clear consciousness, a sharp notion. I knew that Europe, when it seemed to have completely conquered me, had restored me to Peru and to America; but I had not stopped to analyze the process of this reintegration. It was while reading in August 1926, in Europe, the beautiful pages in which Waldo Frank explained the function of his European experience in his discovery of the New World, that I meditated on my own case.
Waldo Frank's adolescence was spent in New York in an enchanted nostalgia for Europe. The mother of the future writer loved music. [Ludwig von] Beethoven, [Richard] Wagner, [Franz] Schubert, [Hugo] Wolf, etc., were the familiar geniuses of his evenings. From this musical version of the world that he sensed and loved, perhaps Frank had the pleasure of conceiving and feeling his work as a symphony. The paternal library was another stage of this escape. Frank, a teenager, questioned the philosophers of Germany and Athens with more curiosity than the poets of England. When he visited Europe, he was still very young, still a child, all its landscapes were familiar to him. The opposition of an older brother frustrated his hope of studying at Heidelberg and condemned him to the Yale courses and climate. Later, emancipated by journalism, Frank finally found in Paris everything that Europe could offer him. He not only felt satisfied but fulfilled. Paris "a huge city, full of happy people, trees and gardens, a city indulgent to all moods, all freedoms." For the American journalist who exchanged his dollars into francs, life in Paris was placid and comfortable. For the young artist of cosmopolitan culture, Paris was the refined metropolis where all his artistic hobbies found satisfaction.
But the sap of América was intact in Waldo Frank. The easy enjoyment of Europe was not enough for his creative force, his sentimental balance. "I was happy”—Frank wrote—; "I was not necessary. I was nourished by what others, over the centuries, had created. I was living in parasitism; this is at least the effect I was having on myself." In this profound, exact, terribly true phrase: "I was not needed," Frank expresses the intimate feeling of the emigrant, which Europe cannot retain. Man needs, for the joyful use of his energies, to reach his fullness, to feel necessary. The American to whom the refinement and culture of Europe are not spiritually sufficient, will recognize himself, in Paris, Berlin, Rome, as strange, diverse, unfinished. The more intensely he possesses Europe, the more subtly he assimilates it, the more imperiously he will feel his duty, his destiny, his vocation to fulfill in the chaos, in the germination of the New World, the task that the Europeans of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Modernity invite and teach us to perform. Europe itself rejects the foreign creator, the disciplinarian, and instructs him for his work. Today, decadent and fatigued, it is still rigorous enough to demand of each stranger their own task. It was fed up with the rhapsodies of its thought and its art. It wants from us, first of all, the expression of ourselves.
Returning to New York at the age of twenty-three, Waldo Frank began, under the fruitful influence of these experiences, his real work. "With all my heart," he says, "I gave myself up to the task of making a place for myself in a world that seemed to be going very well without me." When, years later, he returned to Europe, América had already been born in him. He was already strong enough for the daring days of his journey from Spain. Europe greeted in him the author of Our America, the poet of Psalms, the novelist of Rahab, City Block, etc. He was in love with a difficult undertaking, thinking about which he exclaimed with magnificent enthusiasm: "We may fail, but perhaps we will succeed!” When he re-embarked for New York, this time Europe was "behind him.”
It is not possible to understand the full value of this experience, except for the one who has partially or totally done it. Europe, for the American—as for the Asian—is not only a danger of denationalization and uprooting, it is also the best possibility of recovery and discovery of one's own world and one's own destiny. The emigrant is not always a possible deraciné. For a long time, the discovery of the new world is a journey for which you will have to leave a port of the old continent. Waldo Frank has the drive, the vitality of the American; but in Europe he has done, as I say of myself, in the preface to my book on Peru, his best learning. Their sensibility, their culture, would not be so finely modern if they were not European. Weren't, Frank wondered in his youth, Walt Whitman and Edgar Poe, who were the representative men of the United States, better understood in Paris than in New York? French Unanimism lovingly attended the Walt Whitman school, at a time when North America still had to win, to conquer its great poet.
In Frank's training, my experience helps me to appreciate one element: his journalist station. Journalism can be a healthy training for the thinker and the artist. Someone has already said that more than one of those novelists or poets who look at the newspaper writer with the same fatuity with which the theater looked at the cinema before, denying its artistic quality, would unfortunately fail in reportage. For an artist who knows how to emancipate himself from it in time, journalism is a stage and a laboratory in which he will develop critical faculties that, otherwise, would perhaps remain blunted. Journalism is a test of speed.
I will finish this disordered and subjective impression, with a journalist's question: Just as only a Jew, [Benjamin] Disraeli, came to feel in all his magnificence, with oriental luxury and fantasy, the imperial role of England, in the Victorian era, will not the ambitious enterprise of formulating the hope and ideal of America, in this cosmopolitan age, be reserved to a Jew, rather than to a Puritan?
The Destiny of North America
Published in Variedades: Lima, 17 December 1927. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/defensa_del_marxismo/paginas/iiia.htm#1a>.
Every quarrel between French neo-Thomists and German racists about whether the defense of Western civilization belongs to the Latin and Roman spirit, or to the German and Protestant spirit, finds its vanity incontestably documented in the Dawes plan. The payment of the German indemnity and of the Allied debt has placed in the hands of the United States the fate of the economy and, therefore, of the politics of Europe. The financial recovery of the European states is not possible without Yankee credit. The spirit of Locarno, the security pacts, etc., are the names used to designate the guarantees required by North American finance for its large investments in the public finances and industry of European States. Fascist Italy, which so arrogantly announces the restoration of Rome's power, forgets that its commitments to the United States place its value at the mercy of this creditor.
Capitalism, which in Europe shows itself to be distrustful of its own forces, in North America shows itself to be hopelessly optimistic about its destiny. And this optimism rests, simply, on good health. It is the biological optimism of youth that, noting its excellent appetite, does not worry that the time for arteriosclerosis will come. In North America capitalism still has the possibilities of growth that in Europe the war destruction left irreparably spoiled. The British Empire still retains a formidable financial organization; but, as the problem of coal mines proves, its industry has lost the technical level that previously ensured its primacy. The war has turned it from a creditor to a debtor of North America.
All these facts indicate that the headquarters, the axis, the center of capitalist society is now located in North America. Yankee industry is the best equipped for large-scale production, at the lowest cost; the banks, to whose coffers flows the gold hoarded by North America, in war and post-war business, guarantee with their capitals, at the same time as the incessant improvement of industrial aptitude, the conquest of the markets that must absorb their manufactures. There is still, if not the reality, the illusion of a regime of free competition. The State, education, and laws conform to the principles of an individualistic democracy, within which every citizen can freely aspire to the possession of one hundred million dollars. While in Europe working-class and middle-class individuals feel more and more enclosed within their class borders, in the United States they believe that fortune and power are still accessible to anyone who has the aptitude to conquer them. And this is the measure of the subsistence, within a capitalist society, of the psychological factors that determine its development.
The North American phenomenon, on the other hand, has nothing arbitrary about it. North America appears, from its origin, predestined for the maximum capitalist realization. In England capitalist development has not achieved, despite its extraordinary power, the extirpation of all feudal lags. The aristocratic codes of law have not ceased to weigh on their politics and their economy. The English bourgeoisie, content to concentrate its energies on industry and commerce, did not bother to dispute the land from the aristocracy. The domain of the land should be taxed on the exploitation of the subsoil. But the English bourgeoisie did not want to sacrifice its landlords, destined to maintain an exquisitely refined and decorative lineage. That is why it seems to have discovered its agrarian problem only now. Only now, as its industry declines, it misses a prosperous and productive agriculture, in the lands where the aristocracy has its hunting grounds. North American capitalism, meanwhile, has not had to pay any feudality any pecuniary or spiritual royalties. On the contrary, it proceeds freely and vigorously from the first intellectual and moral germs of the capitalist revolution. The pioneer of New England was the Puritan expelled from the European homeland by a religious revolt, which constituted the first bourgeois affirmation. The United States thus emerged from a manifestation of the Protestant Reformation, considered as the purest and most original spiritual manifestation of the bourgeoisie, that is, of capitalism. The founding of the North American Republic meant, in its time, the definitive consecration of this fact and its consequences. "The first colonies established on the eastern coast”—writes Waldo Frank—”had by charter the acquisition of wealth. Its revolt against England, in 1775, initiated one of the first open struggles between bourgeois capitalism and the old feudalism. The triumph of the colonies, from which the United States was born, marked the triumph of the capitalist regime. And since then America has had neither tradition nor means of expression that has been free of this industrial revolution to which it owes its existence." And Frank himself recalls the famous and concise judgment of Charles A. Beard, on the charter of 1789: "The Constitution was essentially an economic act, based on the notion that the fundamental rights of private property are prior to all government and are morally out of reach of the popular majorities."
For its energetic and free flourishing, no material or moral obstacle has hindered North American capitalism, the only one in the world that originally brought together all the historical factors of the perfect bourgeois state, without embarrassing aristocratic and monarchical traditions. On the virgin land of América, from which they erased every indigenous trace, the Anglo-Saxon colonizers laid from their arrival the foundations of the capitalist order.
The Civil War also constituted a necessary capitalist affirmation, which freed the Yankee economy from the only blemish of its childhood: slavery. Once slavery was abolished, the capitalist phenomenon found its way absolutely free. The Jew—so closely linked to the development of capitalism, as Werner Sombart studies it, not only by the spontaneous utilitarian application of his expansive and imperialist individualism, but above all by his radical exclusion from all "noble" activity, to which the Middle Ages condemned him—associated himself with the Puritan in the enterprise of building the most powerful industrial state, the most robust bourgeois democracy.
Ramiro de Maeztu—who occupies a much more solid ideological position than the neo-Thomist philosophers of reaction in France and Italy, when he recognizes in New York the true antithesis of Moscow, thus assigning to the United States the function of defending and continuing Western civilization as a capitalist civilization—discerns very well, in general, within his bourgeois apologetics, the moral elements of wealth and power in North America. But he reduces them almost completely to the Puritan or Protestant elements. Puritan morality, which sanctifies wealth, esteeming it as a sign of divine favor, is basically Jewish morality, the principles of which the Puritans assimilated from the Old Testament. The kinship of Puritanism has been established doctrinally a long time ago with the Jew; and Anglo-Saxon capitalist experience serves only to confirm it. But Maeztu, a fervent panelist of industrial "Fordism," needs to avoid the Jew, as much from deference to the requirement of Mr. [Henry] Ford against the "international Jew,” as from adherence to the sneer with which all the "nationalist" and reactionary movements of the world look at the Jewish spirit, suspected of terrible concomitance with the socialist spirit because of their common ideal of universalism.
The Rome or Moscow dilemma, with the role of the United States as the entrepreneur of the capitalist—fascist or parliamentary—stabilization of Europe becomes clearer, giving way to the New York or Moscow dilemma. The two poles of contemporary history are Russia and North America: capitalism and communism, both universalist although very diversely and oppositely. Russia and the United States: the two peoples who are most opposed doctrinally and politically and, at the same time, the two closest peoples, as the supreme and maximum expression of Western activism and dynamism. Already Bertrand Russell remarked, several years ago, the strange resemblance that exists between the captains of Yankee industry and the officials of the Russian Marxist economy. And a poet, tragically Slavic, Alexander Blok greeted the dawn of the Revolution with these words: "Behold the star of the new America."
The Case and the Theory of Ford
Published in Variedades: Lima, 24 December 1927. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/defensa_del_marxismo/paginas/iva.htm>.
A good part of [Ramiro de] Maeztu's confidence in the future of North American capitalism, and in its resources against socialism, rests on the experiment of Mr. [Henry] Ford and in the results that this famous automobile manufacturer has obtained in one branch of the industry, in the sense of "rationalizing" production. This indicates, among other things, that without Ford's practice Maeztu's theory would not have been possible. We have already seen that the same thing happens to Maeztu with [Miguel] Primo de Rivera. But it is not worth insisting on this fact, because after all it only confirms the Marxist concept of the work of intellectuals, who are so prone to assume that they are more or less independent of history.
Ford, on the other hand, is much more important and substantive than Maeztu for capitalism and, consequently, also for socialism. Not, certainly, because Ford has written two books (My Life and My Work and The International Jew) that are undoubtedly inferior to any of Maeztu's books in literature, but because, as a captain of industry, he represents in a much more specific and considerable way the genius of capitalism. While Ford's action can inspire the principles of many Maeztus, the principles of the illustrious author of The Crisis of Humanism cannot inspire the action of any Ford.
Ford's experiment shows, among other things, that Maeztu is seriously mistaken when, taking the thesis of the German revisionists as proven, he claims that Marx was deceived in predicting the concentration of capital. The thesis of the revisionists has, in turn, undergone a much more serious revision than that which they imposed on Marxism at the time. Some time after [Eduard] Bernstein and his minions considered Marx to have been disproved by anonymous companies and other systems of associating an increasingly numerous social mass with capital, Hilferding analyzed the character and function of "finance capital," fatally destined to subjugate all other forms of capitalism to its rule. Rudolf Hilferding is practically no less a reformist than Bernstein. Like Bernstein he was a member of the Independent Socialist Party, reabsorbed, after the German revolution, by the old and fat social-democracy. But his thesis, set out in an already famous book Das Finanzkapital [Finance Capital], besides being a good arsenal of revolutionary socialism, interests economists today much more than Bernstein's outdated thesis, by which Don Ramiro de Maeztu is still supplied, with considerable delay. It is no longer necessary to be an economist, and not even to have read Hilferding, to be aware that trusts, cartels, consortium, constitute the characteristic expression of contemporary capitalism. And that, consequently, the essential of Marx's foresight—the concentration of capital and industry—has been fulfilled. Capitalism finds only through cartelization, through trustification, that is, through monopoly, the means of organizing or "rationalizing," as they say now, production. But it matters, therefore, that a part of the capital of companies is held by small and medium-sized rentiers. The essence lies in the fact that cartelization places the management of the main branches of production in a few hands. Financial capital, in this period—you realize that, with the ruin of the principle of free competition, it is defined as a period of capitalist decadence—dominates and subjugates industrial capital, transferring the command of production to the bankers, with the inevitable consequence of a return of the economy to usurious forms, opposed to the law that, condemning all parasitism, demands that production be governed by its own factors.
In a nation of still vigorous and progressive capitalism, like the United States, Ford represents precisely industrial capitalism, still strong in the face of financial capital. But, although Ford does not depend on the Wall Street banks, before which he remains in a certain state of tacit rebellion, and despite the fact that he continues to be the absolute boss of his company, it appears emptied in the molds of the trust, by its methods of large-scale production. Ford, who is a vehement proponent of the unity of command, not only considers exclusive to big industry the ability to subordinate production itself, but openly speaks out against the spirit of competition. One of his principles is the following: "To disdain the spirit of competition. Whoever does a thing better than others should be the only one who does it."
The methods that have allowed Ford the colossal development of his company are two: standardization and Taylorism. And both are applicable only by big industry, by the cartels or trusts, whose irresistible and overwhelming strength comes from its aptitude for mass production, which allows industry to perfect its technical means to the extreme, to achieve the maximum economy of time and labor, to have the teams of workers capable of the highest yields, to offer them the highest salaries and guarantees and get the best prices in the supply of raw materials. Ford announces the acquisition, in Brazil, of land that will be dedicated to the cultivation of rubber, to shake off an onerous dependence on the English tycoons who dominate the trade of this product. This new expansion of his company indicates his tendency to assume the most advanced character of the large industry: that of the vertical trust.
Ford attacks, in the name of industrial capital, financial capital. His anti-Semitism comes, fundamentally, from an empirical current of identification of the banker and the Jew. But he has already announced his retraction of the attacks on the "international Jew" written in his latest book, the one of the same name. And this attitude is possible only in countries such as North America where capitalism, having not yet completed its growth process, has not yet reached the period of absolute and absorbing predominance of banking capital. Yankee banking, moreover, has had a different formation from European banking: the financial type appears less differentiated from the industrial type.
The success of Ford, from which the record-keeper of automobile manufacturing imagines himself to deduce general principles of happiness and organization of society, based simply on standardization, Taylorism, etc., is explained, as penetrating economists observe, by the fact of Ford having effected his experiment in a nascent branch of industry, intended for the production of an ordinary consumer item, every day more widespread. The democratization of the automobile, that is the secret of his fortune and his work.
Yankeeland and Socialism
Published in Variedades: Lima, 31 December 1927. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/defensa_del_marxismo/paginas/va.htm>.
The spectacle of North American power seems, in an impressionistic and superficial criticism, to accord the most unlimited credit to hope in a Yankee formula of capitalist rebirth, which cancels forever the suggestion of Marxism about the working masses. It is common that, after reading Henry Ford's book, a writer, copiously supplied with literature and philosophy, but little knowledgeable in economic matters, affirms on the front page of a large newspaper that socialism constitutes a school or doctrine already surpassed by the amazing experiments of North American capitalism. [Pierre] Drieu La Rochelle, for example, who is a talented artist, when he ventures into a review of the contemporary scene, writes things like these: "The theories that are still being talked about in the socialist and communist media have come out of the England of 1780, the France of 1830, the Germany of 1850, countries that saw the invasion of machines coming like the Russia of today. But through these romantic theories, the Russians know how to go to the great North American capitalism, which, in turn, knows that it is but a stage towards something else. Ford and Lenin are two powers that are approaching each other, by blows of the pickaxe, in the same dark gallery." The author of Mesure de la France [Measure of France], as a good Frenchman and European, does not believe that the defense of Western civilization touches the United States. He conceives it, on the contrary, as a mission of a European confederation presided over by France. But he puts much more trust, for the moment, in Mr. Ford, than in [Raymond] Poincaré and Henri Massis, as the captain of the bourgeoisie and strategist of capitalism.
The study of the effective factors of North American prosperity, meanwhile, shows that Yankee capitalism has not yet faced the crisis that European capitalism is going through, so it is premature to talk about its ability to overcome it victoriously.
Until some time ago, North American industry drew the elements of its growth from the very vitality of the United States. But since its production has excessively surpassed the needs of Yankee consumption, the conquest of foreign markets has begun to be the inescapable condition of that process. The accumulation of most of the world's gold in the Yankee coffers has created the problem of capital export. It is no longer enough for the United States to put out its excess production; it also needs to put out its excess gold. The country's industrial development cannot absorb its financial resources. Before the war, the Yankee industry was a good investment for European money. The profits of the war, as is well known, allowed Yankee industry to become totally independent of European banking. From a debtor nation, the United States became a creditor nation. During the period of post-war economic crisis and revolutionary upheaval. The United States had to refrain from any new loans. The European countries had to systematize the situation of their debt to North America, before demanding any credit from the the Banks of New York. In the same investments in private companies, the threat of the communist revolution, towards which Europe seemed to be driven by misery, recommended the greatest parsimony to the North American capitalists. The United States, therefore, used all its influence in leading Europe to the Dawes plan. It did not achieve this until after Poincaré's policy suffered, in 1923, the failure of the Ruhr. From then to today, having thus agreed on the terms of payment of the German indemnity as well as of the allied debt to the Yankee treasury, Yankeeland has opened numerous loans to Europe. It has lent to the States for the stabilization of their exchange; it has lent to private industry for the reorganization of its plants and businesses. A good amount of European shares and securities have passed into Yankee hands. But these investments have their limits. North American capital cannot devote itself to supplying European industry with funds without the danger that its production will challenge that of the United States in the markets in which it dominates. On the other hand, these investments link the Yankee economy to the fate of the European economy. The Dawes plan and its effects of financial arrangements or conventions, have inaugurated in Europe a period of extreme capitalist—and democratic—stabilization which the apologists of reaction take the trouble to describe as an exclusively fascist work; but Europe, as evidenced by the last Economic Conference, has not yet found its equilibrium.
[Leon] Trotsky has made a singularly penetrating and objective examination of the situation of Yankee capitalism. "The inflation of gold,”—observes the Russian leader—"is as dangerous for the economy as fiat inflation. You can die from plethora just the same as from cachexia. If gold exists in too large a quantity, it does not produce new profits, it reduces the interest of capital and thus makes the increase in production irrational. Producing and exporting to store the gold in the cellars is equivalent to throwing the goods into the sea. That is why America has needed a bigger and bigger expansion, that is, to invest the excess of its resources in Latin America, in Europe, in Asia, in Australia, in Africa. But, in this way, the economy of Europe and of the other parts of the world becomes more and more an integral part of the economy of the United States."
If it were enough for the United States to solve the internal problems of its production by ensuring the indefinite growth of its capitalism, the golden forecasts, the rosy hopes of Henri Ford could, perhaps, constitute a serious probability of dismissing the Marxist thesis. North America, by the action of historical forces superior to the will of its own men, has embarked on a vast imperialist adventure, which it cannot renounce. [Oswald] Spengler, in his famous book on the decline of the West, argued, some years ago, that the last stage of a civilization is a stage of imperialism. His patriotism as a German made him hope that this imperialist mission would be Germany’s turn. [Vladimir] Lenin, some years earlier, in perhaps the most fundamental of his books, went ahead of Spengler in considering Cecil Rhodes as a representative man of the imperialist spirit, also giving us a Marxist definition of the phenomenon, understood and put into focus as an economic phenomenon. "What is essential economically in this process”—as he wrote with his brilliant conciseness—”is the substitution of capitalist monopolies for free competition. Free competition is the primary quality of capitalism and, in a general way, of commodity production; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition; but we have seen it transform under our eyes into a monopoly, creating the big industry, eliminating the small one, replacing the big one with a bigger one, driving the concentration of production and capital to such a degree that monopoly is its forced corollary: cartels, unions, trusts and, merging with them, the power of a dozen banks that manipulate, thousands of millions. At the same time, the monopoly arising from free competition does not rule it out, but coexists with it, thus engendering various very deep and very serious contradictions, provoking conflicts and frictions. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher order. If it were necessary to give the shortest possible definition of imperialism, it would have to be said that it is the phase of capitalist monopoly. This definition would embrace the essential, because, on the one hand, financial capital is nothing more than the banking capital of a small number of large monopolizing banks, merged with the capital of the monopolizing industrial groups; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is nothing more than the transition from an incessantly extended colonial policy, without encountering obstacles, over regions that had not yet been appropriated by any capitalist power, to the colonial policy of monopolized territorial possession, because the partition of the world has already been completed."
The Empire of the United States assumes, by virtue of this policy, all the responsibilities of capitalism. And, at the same time, it inherits its contradictions. And it is precisely from these things that socialism draws its strength. The fate of North America can only be seen on a global level. And on this level, North American capitalism, which is still vigorous and prosperous internally, ceases to be a national and autonomous phenomenon, to become the culmination of a worldwide phenomenon, subordinated to an inescapable historical fate.