Since 1958, Chile has been ruled by four administrations (three elected, the fourth and longest imposed by a military coup), profoundly different in their ideologies and political aims, social basis and economic policies. The government of Jorge Alessandri, elected in 1958, was conservative and pro-business. Its support came from the private sector of the economy, from landowners (and the substantial peasant vote they still controlled), from sectors of the urban poor still ignored by the Marxist parties (Socialist and Communist) and by the Christian Democrats, and from the urban middle class, disillusioned with the Radicals, who had dominated political life from the Popular Front of 1938 to the election of Ibá¯nez in 1952, and not yet won over to the Christian Democrats. Alessandri proved incapable of dealing with Chile's persistent and increasing economic and social problems, and in 1964 Eduardo Frei, a Christian Democrat, was elected president.

Promising a ‘revolution in liberty’ the Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC) offered economic modernization combined with social justice and reform and the pursuit of class harmony. Even though the PDC enjoyed almost unprecedented electoral and congressional support (though without a majority in the Senate), the contradictions produced by trying to secure all those objectives, coupled with increasing ideological conflict and political strife, proved too much even for the able technocrats brought into the state apparatus. The threat of further reform and the electoral collapse of the Right in 1965 pushed the divided right-wing parties, Liberals and Conservatives, into the new and influential National Party.

In this chapter we shall be exploring one of Marx's most important concepts, that of reproduction. We shall look at the ways in which he did use it and also consider the reasons why he did not use it in some other ways. It may seem strange to spend so much time on what Marx (and Engels) did not do, but considering this omission and the reasons for it may throw light on some fundamental features of Marx's method. In particular, it should help us understand what underlies his materialist conception of history and assess the feminists' basic criticism: that its concentration on production rather than human reproduction means that it is not adequate to the task of explaining gender differences in society and understanding the history of struggle over them.

The plan of the chapter is as follows: First we shall examine Marx's use of the term reproduction to refer to the reproduction of whole social systems, in particular, their class structure. Then we shall consider whether accounts of how social systems reproduce themselves are complete if they do not include human reproduction, the way that people within such systems are born and raised to occupy particular class and gender positions. After this, we shall look at what Marx and Engels had to say about human reproduction and what significance they gave to the consideration of its social forms in their historical analysis. We shall find that their record on this matter is ambivalent - they seem to give human reproduction more importance in describing their historical method than in their actual analyses - and we shall explore why this should have happened. Finally, we shall look at some directions in which work that stays within the Marxist tradition but accords human reproduction more importance might go.

Some conjunctions - like Marx and the critique of political economy - are entirely natural ones. They emerge, that is, quite naturally in the course of reading Marx's works and following his own stated agenda. Marx wrote, repeatedly and at great length, about what he explicitly called “the critique of political economy” Not only did he offer to his reading public A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, but he also used similar terms to characterize a great deal of his published and unpublished work. No history of political economy would be complete without considerable attention to Marx and his works.

Other conjunctions - like Marx and the philosophy of science - border on the entirely artificial. They emerge, that is, rather artificially in the course of reconstructing Marx's works and pursuing questions that he raised only marginally. Not only did Marx never write a work on “the philosophy of science,” he never even used the phrase (which, in any case, was not popularized until after his death). More importantly, Marx wrote only two short tracts - the introduction to the Grundhsse and the Notes on Wagner (collected in Carver, 1975) - that sustained any sort of attention to topics that these days constitute the philosophy of science. Even then Marx did not complete these tracts or prepare them for publication. In this, Marx stands in stark contrast with many other theorists of the nineteenth century, including Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. Marx did, to be sure, make a number of important asides about science and its methods, for example, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, The Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology, Grundhsse, and Capital, especially its various prefaces and afterwords.

ARGENTINA, I93O-46

Still among the best and liveliest introductions to Argentina in the period between the revolution of 1930 and the rise of Peron (1943—6) are three English-language books published in the early 1940s: John W. White, Argentina, the Life Story of a Nation (New York, 1942), which aptly captures the puzzled response among North Americans to the apparently hostile attitudes of Argentines during the late 1930s until 1942; Ysabel Rennie, The Argentine Republic (New York, 1945), which remains one of the best general introductions to Argentine history and offers an excellent analysis of the years 1943-5; and Felix Weil, Argentine Riddle (New York, 1944). Weil, a member of one of the 'Big Four' grain-exporting families, argued for the type of future association between Argentina and the United States that Pinedo and the liberals had aspired to in 1940, in which the United States would take charge of industrializing Argentina. If the book contains this thread of wishful thinking, it also shows an extremely well informed knowledge of Argentine society and the issues facing the country at this critical juncture. A more recent general introduction, containing several excellent essays, is Mark Falcoff and Ronald H. Dolkart (eds.), Prologue to Peron: Argentina in Depression and War (Berkeley, Calif, 1975). See also David Rock, Argentina, 1516-1987 (Berkeley, Calif, 1987), chap. 6, and for a reinterpretation of the 1940s, Carlos H. Waisman, The Reversal of Development in Argentina (Princeton, N.J., 1987).

During the three decades after 1930 — and indeed until the coup which brought down the government of Salvador Allende in 1973 — Chilean politics were unique in Latin America. Only Chile sustained in this period an electoral democracy including major Marxist parties. And for almost fifteen years, between 1938 and 1952, Radical presidents held power through the support, erratic but persistent, of both the Socialists and the Communists, with lasting consequences for the nation's political development. These multi-party governments based on multi-class alliances simultaneously pursued industrial growth and social reform. They failed, however, to attack the roots of Chilean underdevelopment in either the latifundia-dominated rural sector or the United States-dominated external sector.

From the 1930s Chilean reformers criticized the excessive national dependence on the foreign sector that had been highlighted by the world depression. After that crisis, Chile gradually achieved greater self-sufficiency: between the 1920s and the 1940s the estimated share of gross domestic product (GDP) being sold abroad declined from approximately 40 to 20 per cent, as did foreign capital as a proportion of the total capital in Chile. By contrast, direct U.S. investments grew by 80 per cent from 1940 to 1960, the vast majority of this foreign capital going to the mining sector. Overwhelmingly controlled by U.S. companies from the 1920s to the 1960s, copper came to account for some 50 per cent of Chilean exports, copper and nitrates nearly 80 per cent. Not only was the United States the leading foreign investor in Chile; it also regained its position as Chile's premier trading partner after a spurt of German competition in the 1930s.

It is often asserted that for Marx, and for the overwhelming majority of Marxists, economic class is the supreme category, whereas gender has been subject to relative neglect. In most interpretations of Marx's writing, the prime role in analysis, history, and political action is awarded to class, just as within that class analysis, the working class assumes its own prime role and revolutionary potential. These are undoubtedly the dominant themes of Marx's writing.

Marx did not write extensively on gender, and so in the indexes of most of his major works you will find no references to sex, gender, sexuality, women, or men. Marx did, however, make a number ofimportant, though relatively brief, explicit statements about gender, including those in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx, 1975: 279-400) and Capital, volume 1 (Marx, 1977) and those written with Engels in the Communist Manifesto (Marx, 1974b: 62- 98) and The German Ideology (Marx and Engels, 5/1976). In addition, Engels (1972) wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Drawing particularly on anthropological evidence contained in Lewis Henry Morgan's (1963) Ancient Society, first published in 1876, and Marx's critical notebooks on this and other material, Engels gave a more extended materialist account of these questions, particularly for prehistorical times.

One need not be a Marxist to appreciate the breadth and depth of Marx's learning and the important legacy that he left to philosophy and the social sciences. Marxian concepts and categories are today employed even by non-Marxist anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists. And yet Marx's legacy has, on the whole, been an ambiguous one. His works - like those of Scripture or literature or the law - are open to different, and sometimes quite divergent, interpretations. Despite their differences, however, readers of Marx are apt to agree on at least one point: His philosophy of history, his account of how historical change comes about, occupies a pivotal place in his overall outlook.

The phrase philosophy of history was coined by Voltaire in the eighteenth century to refer to any grand philosophical system that purports to divine the direction and destination of history. Such allencompassing schemes are to be found, for example, in Giambattista Vico's New Science (1725) and in the Marquis de Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794). Marx was exceedingly critical of the “air castles” constructed by his predecessors, and he was particularly critical of the speculative philosophy of history constructed by G. W. R Hegel. And yet Marx's philosophy of history evolved mainly from his own critical confrontation with Hegel's speculative system. I propose to begin, therefore, with a brief account of Hegel's philosophy of history, followed by a more extended account of Marx's appropriation and critique of Hegel. This done, I shall consider several controversies that have arisen over what Marx meant. And finally, I shall conclude with some speculations about the directions in which Marx's view of history appear to point.

In 1930 Paraguay, despite the appearance of calm, was on the verge of a major upheaval. In 1928 the governing Liberal Party had won the right to rule in the first freely contested election in the country's history, and after years of sullen abstentionism the opposition Colorado Party had been induced to accept minority status in Congress. Moreover, political progress was matched by relative economic stability. Outside Asunción, the nation's capital and only real city, the effects of the world depression were little felt by the predominantly self-sufficient agrarian population of some 750,000. Beneath the surface, however, lay explosive tensions.

Popular discontent with President José P. Guggiari stemmed from a growing impatience with his failure to take a firm stand against Bolivia over conflicting claims to the Chaco, a large wasteland of desert and jungle lying between the Andes Mountains and the Paraguay River. Despite his efforts to lead an honest and progressive administration, Guggiari was to leave office in 1932 a very unpopular man. His government was most severely damaged by a notorious incident on 23 October 1931, in which his guards attacked a student rally protesting his apparent weakness in the face of Bolivian aggression. Eleven people were killed and many more wounded. Although Guggiari was later exonerated by a congressional investigation, the Colorados resigned their legislative seats and Paraguay's young intellectuals turned away from Liberalism to embrace new movements such as the Liga Nacional Independiente, which called for massive war preparations. The election in 1932 of a new Liberal president, Eusebio Ayala, in a one-man race, did little to reverse the party's growing political isolation.

The consolidation of Colombia as a nation-state has faced a major obstacle in the country's geography, the main topographical feature of which is the Andean mountain range. The central Cordillera of the Andes is separated from the western Cordillera by the Río Magdalena and the Río Cauca. The Pacific coastal plain that extends from Panama to the Ecuadorian frontier is covered by dense jungle, which has prevented the completion of the Pan-American Highway connection between Panama and Colombia. (In contrast, the Caribbean littoral to the north is more open and climatically better favoured.) The eastern plains - the Llanos Orientales - stretch from the foot of the eastern Cordillera south and east to the frontiers with Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. This fragmented landscape contains a wide diversity of altitude and relief, and since temperature depends on altitude rather than season, Colombia is, by convention, divided into ‘hot country’ (below 3,500 feet above sea-level), ‘temperate country’ (between 3,500 and 6,500 feet) and ‘cold country’ (above 6,500 feet).

The obstacles to economic development caused by poor communications can hardly be overestimated. Engineering difficulties and the high cost of construction and maintenance caused by the mountainous terrain impeded the establishment of more than a limited railway network before 1930. Indeed, Bogotá and Medellín had no direct rail connection with the Caribbean coast till the late 1950s. Thus, navigation along the Magdalena remained vital to the country's prosperity. (President Mariano Ospina Pérez in the late 1940s included the level of the Magdalena waters among the daily information that he required.)

‘In no other country do people live as we do … no other people on earth currently enjoy achievements such as ours’. Thus, in the course of a speech in 1949, did President Luis Batlle Berres express euphoric sentiments of satisfaction with the state of the Uruguayan nation. They were not necessarily shared by all his listeners, but during the following decade the notion that ‘como el Uruguay no hay’ (there's nowhere like Uruguay) was quickly absorbed into national mythology. As late as the mid-1960s Uruguayans might still cling to the belief that they were citizens of an exceptional country, blessed (unlike their neighbours) with the capacity to achieve political stability, as well as prosperity and social justice. Such an optimistic and complacent view was generally shared by external observers. But in reality Batlle Berres' statement had lost all meaning, except perhaps in an ironic sense. At mid-century Uruguay had fully recovered from the authoritarianism of Gabriel Terra in the 1930s and was now engaged, in the new age of import-substitution industrialization, in an attempt to re-establish and extend the political and social institutions of the batllista system of the pre-1930 period. The nation turned inwards, as if it preferred to live on the strength of a legend, choosing to enjoy a comfortable present rather than to contemplate an uncertain future. The consolidation of the new ideology, neo- batllismo, was facilitated by international changes of which Uruguay was a passive and, in the short term, favoured beneficiary.

The primary tradition in European philosophy since antiquity has been Aristotelianism. Most philosophers have worked within some version of it, and it would be no more exaggerated than most slogans to say that philosophy has been a series of footnotes to Aristotle and in particular to his metaphysical doctrine of substance. The tradition is not an unchanging monolith, of course, but a diversity with a unity and continuity given by shared metaphysical principles. It runs from Aristotle and the Peripatetics through the Arabs, Al Farabi, and Averroes, to St. Thomas Aquinas and the medieval philosophers, and on to Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, G. W. F. Hegel, and Marx.

Marx was an Aristotelian in metaphysics, and unless we keep this in mind we cannot appreciate his work. This has been lost sight of since Marx's time because scholarship and thought in this century, especially in English-speaking countries, have been deeply affected by the legacy of the empiricist philosophers, especially David Hume. For several decades it was de rigeur to reinterpret writers of the older tradition according to the principles of empiricist metaphysics. Aristotle and Marx are only two of the more prominent authors to have received such treatment, and to understand them it is necessary to stand back from much of the recent writing.

There are several good reasons to pause before wading into Karl Marx's philosophy of art, but surely the most worrisome is that there is nothing there to wade into, at least not in the deep and systematic sense that the word philosophy usually and properly entails. Marx was a remarkably well educated and broadly read man, and one can find in his works an impressive range of scattered references to a variety of aesthetic phenomena, from specific works of art to the most general aspects of artistic production. But there is nothing even approaching a systematic aesthetic theory in all of this. Judging strictly from the written record, it appears that Marx was after bigger, or at least very different, fish.

Such a conclusion has political as well as textual punch. Marx was, after all, a revolutionary: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways.” As the last and most famous of the Theses on Feuerbach has it, “the point is to change it” (Marx, 1975: 423; italics in original).

With a growth in population from 17.5 million in 1964 to 22.3 million in 1973 and 28.6 million in 1985, Colombia was expected to overtake Argentina in the 1990s and resume its nineteenth-century position as the most populous Latin American country after Brazil and Mexico. Between 1951 and 1964 the country had one of the world's highest rates of demographic increase — 3.5 per cent per annum. From 1965 the rate of growth decelerated — in substantial part as a result of a sharp decline in birth-rates (from 40 per thousand in 1960 to 20 per thousand in 1974). By the early 1980s the annual rate had fallen to less than 2 per cent.

This reduced rate of population growth can be associated with urbanization and improved literacy. By the 1980s urban fecundity had fallen to only 55 per cent of the level in the countryside and was in part attributable to explicit policies of birth control, which, despite the power of the Church, had been adopted since the late 1960s. Between 1973 and 1985 the proportion of Colombians under fifteen years of age fell from 43 to 33 per cent. Nevertheless, growth in the under-five age group of 4 per cent per annum, combined with a 4.4 per cent annual increase among five- to fourteen-year-olds, imposed heavy pressures on health, education and housing services during the 1960s and 1970s.

Peru after 1960 experienced significant changes in its social structure, a notable expansion and intensification of political participation and important advances in the national integration of the peasants, as well as the urban middle and working classes, which were traditionally characterized by fragmentation and a marginal political status. At the same time, Peru underwent a series of changes in its political regime, shifting from an oligarchic system to a relatively broad-based democratic polity. Yet the relations between state and society acquired a conflictive character in so far as political ‘inclusion’ was accompanied by ‘exclusionary’ policies in the socio-economic arena which impeded the democratization and nationalization of Peruvian society and politics. The resulting tension produced a high level of political conflict and violence, contributing to the disintegration of the state.

After the Second World War, Peru had experienced a short period of democratic transition that ended in 1948 with a military coup headed by General Manuel A. Odría. The Odría dictatorship (1948–56) paved the way for increased participation by U.S. capital in the economy as a result of which traditional exports expanded and high rates of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) were achieved. (During the period from 1950 to 1967, exports grew 7 per cent annually — as against 4 per cent in Latin America as a whole — and GDP rose 6 per cent annually. In 1965, 47 per cent of the country's exports were produced by U.S. corporations, and 62 per cent of the financial capital was controlled by U.S. banks.)

The year 1930 opens the gateway into modern Argentina. The military coup of September 1930 brought the collapse of constitutional government and initiated the long sequence of weak democracies, punctuated by coups d'état and military dictatorships, that remained the cardinal feature of Argentine politics into the 1980s. The plunge into depression in 1930 permanently shifted the path of economic development. Hitherto Argentina had subsisted as an informal dependency of Great Britain, supplying Britain with meats and grains and serving as a leading British market for coal, manufactured goods and, at least till 1914, capital exports. Beginning in 1930 the Victorian structure, already under growing pressure since the outbreak of the First World War, began to totter. From the depression came a decline of agrarian exports and an expansion of manufacturing – conditions that impaired the stability of the Anglo-Argentine relationship as they transformed the components of the Argentine economy. Social change of equal magnitude, and with the same enduring consequences, paralleled the economic shifts. The population of Argentina grew from 11.8 million in 1930 to 15.3 million in 1946, but the rate of growth declined. Falling rates of growth were a consequence of a substantial decline in the birth-rate, from 31.5 per thousand in 1920 to 24.7 per thousand in 1935, which contemporaries conventionally blamed on the depression. (In contrast death-rates fell only slightly, from 14.7 per thousand in 1920 to 12.5 per thousand in 1935.) Declining population growth was also a result of the end of mass European immigration.

At first glance Karl Marx's reception seems to pose few real problems. Marxism, the doctrine he inspired, has, on any reckoning, been enormously influential. If today, in E. J. Hobsbawm's words, “the shadow of Karl Marx presides over a third of the human race” this is surely no mean accomplishment for a theorist who died in relative obscurity in 1883 (Hobsbawm, 1987: 336). Marx's legacy is, in any case, intellectual as well as political, rather as he himself might have expected. “Over the whole range of the social sciences” says David McLellan in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, “Marx has proved probably the most influential figure of the twentieth century”(Miller et al., 1987: 322). There is no reason to regard this claim as exaggerated. Ever since its inception, Marxism has stimulated debate across the social sciences. But it did so in an unprecedented way, which was both advantageous and disadvantageous to its reception. We have only to contrast the scholars who have tackled Marxism but have not lent their names to political movements at the same time.

Venezuela's political, economic and social development in the twentieth century has been unique in Latin America. In 1900, Venezuela was a poor and caudillo-dominated Caribbean country. Export agriculture based on coffee and cacao produced some modest wealth for the planter class, but neither the Andean nor the coastal hacendados could be said to constitute a national modernizing elite. Poor communications and regionally based rural economies meant that national loyalties remained weak. Moreover, the nineteenth-century civil wars had played havoc with hopes for economic prosperity, national integration and even political stability as successive regional politico-military cliques came to power in Caracas.

Economic growth accelerated around the turn of the century. Under the dictatorship of the Táchira caudillo Cipriano Castro (1899–1908) foreign companies intensified asphalt exploitation; and from 1914, under the dictatorship of another Tachira caudillo, Juan Vicente Gomez (1908–1935), Venezuela's economy began to undergo a singular transformation with the discovery of rich oil fields in the western province of Zulia and in the eastern coastal region. However, the impact of the oil industry upon Venezuela would not be fully evident until after Gómez's death. Moreover, political life changed little before 1936, except for an expansion of government jobs and a very modest strengthening of central government. Economic patterns and class structure also registered only slight shifts. Many of Gómez's cronies entered the elite by selling concessions to foreign oil companies, and a larger and more affluent middle class arose as Venezuelans found professional employment with the oil companies and in the growing public sector.