A Cosmopolitan History

It is not surprising that the May Day meeting of 1890 has acquired an almost mythological status in accounts of the history of the labor movement and the Left in Argentina, both among those who wish to emphasize that their movement was part of the vanguard of international socialism, and among those who despise the local left as a “foreign” import, alien to patriotic traditions.

Whatever the appreciation may be, the fact remains that the Argentine left, which has had and continues to have a significant influence on the country’s history, boasts a long and notably cosmopolitan history. A crucial episode in this history took place between 1890 and 1914, when a local socialist party emerged as one of the few non-European members of the Second International, arguably competing with socialist organizations in the United States as the main representatives of social democracy on the American continent.

Revisiting the early stages of Argentine socialism is important for contemporary scholars and activists because it offers the chance to reconstruct the first attempt by the local working class to build an independent political party and to examine the history of the Second International from a broader, global perspective.

The connections between European socialism and Argentina began during the final years of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) in the early 1870s. After the downfall of the Paris Commune, a group of exiled communards established a French branch of the IWMA in Buenos Aires. Following the Hague Congress in September 1872, Karl Marx and the General Council resolved to dispatch a delegate — a young Belgian named Raymond Wilmart — to counter the potential expansion of their anarchist rivals in the region. However, Wilmart was unsuccessful, and by mid-1873 the Argentine section was in terminal crisis.

A new era began in 1882 when German socialist militants, fleeing Otto von Bismarck’s repressive laws, formed an association called Verein Vorwärts. After a few years of isolation, they became involved in a wave of labor unrest by the end of the decade, publishing a newspaper in Spanish and recruiting new followers. The organization of the public event to celebrate May Day in 1890 was the main milestone of this first generation of socialist activists.

After a brief period of crisis and disarray, new groups emerged and made progress from 1894, amid a fresh wave of labor unrest. These included groups of French and Italian socialists who formed their own associations and published newspapers in their own languages.

Additionally, a new Spanish-language organ, La Vanguardia, managed to galvanize the different groups into a single organization. This period of centralization and consolidation culminated in a congress held in June 1896 that formally created the Argentine Socialist Party (Partido Socialista, hereafter PS).

Bringing Socialism Into Parliament

Despite several crises and the departure of a Sorelian syndicalist faction in the 1900s, the PS managed to remain a united organization until a major pro-Bolshevik split in 1917, a feat that eluded other social democratic parties of the time. At the time of its founding congress in 1896, the party had around three to four hundred members and grew slowly over the next few decades.

By the early 1910s, it claimed 1,200 card-carrying members, not only in Buenos Aires but also in several other parts of the country. Although the leadership remained overwhelmingly male, the party created several women’s organizations, such as the Centro Socialista Femenino, and a number of female socialists played a crucial role in the early feminist movement and in the struggle for women’s suffrage.

The main leader of the PS was Juan Bautista Justo, an Argentine-born physician who abandoned his medical career in the early 1890s to devote himself full time to socialist politics until his death in 1928. Under his leadership, the PS developed a moderate, evolutionary, and positivist perspective, committed to parliamentary practices, supporting the development of consumer cooperatives, and increasingly apprehensive toward industrial action.

Confidence in science and the “laws of evolution” led to an interpretation of history that viewed the civilizing process, progress, and ultimately socialism as complementary and necessary stages in the development of societies. A marked and proud ideological syncretism, combining the ideas of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, was one of the most characteristic elements of this worldview.

The insistence on the need for “political action” served to differentiate the party from their anarchist and syndicalist adversaries, which were much more radical and stronger in trade unions, at a time when Buenos Aires was arguably the second capital of anarchism in the world, after Barcelona. Political action meant building a party to spread socialist ideas, organizing and educating the workers, and participating in elections to get parliamentary representation.

Although Argentina did not have a system of restricted suffrage or a property-based franchise for men, by 1909, only 15 percent of the country’s total population had the right to vote. The reason was that, as well as women and children under eighteen, foreigners were excluded from participation. In a country that relied on a large migrant labor force, this meant that a sizable portion of the working class remained disenfranchised.

In this context, and with limited success, the PS urged immigrants to become Argentine citizens so they could gain the right to vote. This was combined with an openly pro-European stance, which asserted that migrants were bound to play a decisive role in the struggle against a fraudulent and oligarchic electoral system, dominated by corrupt native politicians.

The election of the young lawyer Alfredo Palacios as a member of the Chamber of Deputies for the years between 1904 and 1908 played a key role in the early development of the party, reinforcing the moderate and reformist line. Between 1904 and 1908, Palacios, who was widely acclaimed as “the first socialist deputy of the Americas,” took part energetically in the life of the chamber, preparing a lengthy list of bills, which laid the foundations of protective labor legislation.

Argentina and the Socialist International

As the 1890 May Day rally shows, the socialist groups active in Argentina closely followed the activities of European socialists and saw themselves as pioneers of this movement in a remote corner of the world. From the late 1880s, vague references to “the International” were a constant feature of the local socialist press. By the mid-1890s, when La Vanguardia centralized Argentine socialist activity, the influence of international socialism was evident in the constant publication of foreign material and the circulation of European literature.

As both the party and the Second International grew and became more stable, their mutual relationship became more organic. The local German-speaking groups had been formally represented by Wilhelm Liebknecht at the founding meeting of the Second International in 1889, but in the first congresses of the International, the Argentine presence was mainly symbolic. All the meetings of the International were held in Europe, and sending a delegate to those events was beyond the young party’s means, due to the long distances and high cost of travel.

By the early twentieth century, however, the PS began to have more presence and influence, thanks to the active engagement of Manuel Ugarte, an Argentine socialist intellectual living in Paris, and Achille Cambier, a French socialist who had lived in Buenos Aires. Both represented the party in the meetings of the International Socialist Bureau throughout the decade.

The 1904 Amsterdam congress of the Second International included on its agenda a proposal sent by the Argentine party to discuss a position on the “question of migration.” This discussion was postponed to the next congress, in Stuttgart in 1907, where it promoted a broad and fascinating debate that included a standoff between the proponents of restrictions on Asian immigrants and the advocates of an internationalist stance.

At the 1910 congress held in Copenhagen, Argentine prominence was even greater. For the first time, the party sent a delegate from Argentina — Juan B. Justo himself — and the meeting approved a specific declaration about the country, condemning the government’s repression of a general strike.

Overall the party used the International as a platform to promote various campaigns, notably the denunciation of the repressive practices of the local bourgeoisie. As one of the few non-European groups that actively participated in the International, paying regular dues and having a seat in the International Socialist Bureau, this membership was a source of pride and a way to accumulate political capital and legitimacy. Such legitimacy was both external, in relation to the transnational social democratic community, and internal, in relation to other political and intellectual groups within Argentina.

Argentine Socialism

The Argentine PS has the honor of being the first organized party of the socialist tradition in Latin America and, along with the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialist Party of America, one of the few official representatives of the American continent in the Second International. The first generation of socialists active in Argentina were primarily European immigrants who had often become acquainted with radical ideas before arriving in the country.

By the 1890s, as socialist organizations grew and became more stable, forming a centralized party, the movement began to take on a more distinctly “Argentine” character. This shift was marked by the emergence of a new generation of leaders born in Argentina, with Spanish as their undisputed lingua franca.

However, this new generation was also of European descent and continued to look to European socialism as a primary reference and source of inspiration. They perceived themselves as trailblazers of a movement centered in Europe that was struggling against a capitalist regime also rooted in Europe. In this early period, Argentine socialists paid more attention to events in Europe, the United States, and the white-settler colonies than to developments elsewhere in South America, although they proudly presented themselves within the International as the vanguard of socialism in the region.

As the party consolidated and grew in the 1900s, it developed a more “mature” relationship with European socialists. While it always remained a loyal and proud member of the International, it gained self-confidence and began to put forward its own economic and social interpretations and appreciations of the party’s main tasks. Those interpretations were always tinged with a moderate, gradualist, and evolutionist character, but became more aware of the peculiarities of the country’s traditions and political circumstances.