THE PERONISTA DECADE, 1946–55

On 24 February 1946 General Juan Domingo Perón was elected president of Argentina in an open poll. This victory was the culmination of his dizzying political rise, which had begun a few years earlier when the military revolution of June 1943 put an end to a decade of conservative governments and brought to power a clique of army colonels with fascist sympathies. The emerging military regime had been groping its way between the hostility that its authoritarian and clerical tendencies had awakened in the middle and upper classes and the diplomatic quarantine organized by the United States in reprisal for Argentina's neutral position in the Second World War. Through clever palace manoeuvring Perón became the regime's dominant figure and ended the political isolation of the military elite by launching a set of labour reforms that had a powerful impact on the working class, whose numbers had swelled with industrialization and urbanization since the mid-1930s. In Perón's vision, the function of these reforms was to prevent the radicalization of conflicts and the spread of Communism. But the Argentine bourgeoisie did not fear an imminent social revolution, a fear which, at other times and in other places, had facilitated the acceptance of similar reforms. As a result, they joined the anti-fascist front organized by the middle class, imbuing political cleavages with a visible class bias.

The history of Bolivia could be viewed as the history of a rather small elite (or cluster of political, economic and bureaucratic elites) whose members were frequently on first-name terms with one another and whose alliances and divisions often had as much to do with private as with public life. Membership might be achieved through family background, education or success in one of a limited range of (essentially urban) careers, but the qualifications did not have to be particularly high to exclude the great majority of the population. Fluency in spoken and written Spanish, access to a town and a means of livelihood sufficiently secure to leave a margin above individual subsistence disqualified the great majority of adult males, at least until well into the second half of the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, the internal affairs of these elites could be highly complex and arouse great passion, and their divisions could have important consequences for the population as a whole (as in the Federal Revolution of 1898, when an armed conflict between Conservatives and Liberals – or perhaps between the elites of La Paz and Sucre – raised the peasant masses of the altiplano into collective action on a massive scale). The Bolivian elites were by no means homogeneous, or even coherent. The country's geography, the centripetal tendencies of its pattern of economic development (aptly symbolized by the external orientation of its railway system) and the colonial character of its social structure conspired against the emergence of a socially unified elite and contributed to the complexity and instability of its ‘traditional’ history.

“Religion . . . is the opium of the people ” (Marx, 1975: 244). That is probably Marx's best-known remark about religion; indeed, perhaps it is the best-known statement of all. In the popular reception of Marx this observation is supposed to embody all that is known of his unremitting hostility to religion, especially to Christianity. Yet even taken on its own and out of context, it is a decidedly ambiguous remark, full of hidden complexities. I doubt if anything much is known about Marx's attitude toward the widespread habit of opium taking in his day, but if the practice of religion is meant to be analogous to drug taking, it is likely that he at least thought that both practices needed to be explained and not merely explained away.

Presumably Marx thought that drugs were taken as a source of illusions and hallucinations and also as a palliative, a form of consolatory flight from the harshness of the real world. Religion, he points out in the same passage, is the “illusory happiness of the people.” So if we are to explain the practice, we need to know not just why partakers personally like drug-induced illusions but also, and more fundamentally, why in the first place, users perceive the need to fly from the real world into illusions. For “religious suffering,” Marx continues, “is the expression of real suffering.“ That being the case, we should explain what it is about the real world itself that provokes the need to flee from it into religious illusions.

During the period from 1890 to 1930 Peru had been characterized by an export-led economy, a strong oligarchy-dominated state known as the Aristocratic Republic, and a hierarchical social order with strong roots in agrarian institutions – the hacienda in the Sierra and the plantation on the Coast. After 1960 the country entered into a crisis of political hegemony (with the military playing an increasingly important role), a belated quest for industrialization and economic autonomy, and a struggle to come to terms with the breakdown of the old mechanisms of social control, manifest in the collapse of the hacienda and the emergence of a political Left. The thirty years from 1930 to 1960 were a period of transition, with a ramshackle ancien regime surviving almost by default as the country drifted with the tides of history. Economic development was dominated by spurts of activity within the old framework of laissez-faire export-led growth. In contrast to several other Latin American countries, Peru undertook no new departures such as a deliberate shift to protected industrialization or an attempt to construct state capitalism. The social and economic predominance of the country's established ruling class (commonly described as the ‘oligarchy’ or ‘grand bourgeoisie’) was not challenged or even much diluted by any rising new national bourgeoisie. Equally, no organized challenge to oligarchic hegemony was mounted by the working class (still weak and divided, and with most of its leadership co-opted into the status quo), or by the peasantry (whose concerns remained focussed at the local level, in a successful struggle with the hacienda and a debilitating process of intra-class division), or by the middle class (although the professional stratum occasionally stumbled onto the political stage, more by accident than by design).

Why read Marx at all? Why take any notice of his biographical circumstances? Why read his works in historical context? Why should it matter reading one edition or translation rather than another?

In order to answer these questions we must first address some general issues about reading. The terms that characterize biographical narrative and bibliographical advice are all too familiar, and this is particularly so in the case of Marx, as the story of his life is well established and the list of standard works very well known. Familiarity is no excuse for leaving these terms unexamined, however, and I shall put my own discussion of Marx into perspective.

Seeking enlightenment from the texts of the past is an apparently paradoxical exercise. After all, the events and ideas of the past are no longer, by definition, literally in the present. “Living in the past” is generally no compliment, and taking advice from those unacquainted with present circumstances does not sound like a good idea. Indeed, it might seem that Marx is now particularly discredited as an inspiration, since nearly all the Marxist regimes of Eastern Europe have collapsed from within, and reformist Marxism seems to take its cue from contemporary economic and political liberalism. Perhaps an examination of thoughts from the past is a bad habit, and we should keep our minds on current affairs.

Marx's writings include over a thousand pages of theories, explanations, and arguments concerning capitalist societies, some brief but intriguing discussions of precapitalist societies, and at most ten pages of general statements about all (or all class-divided) societies. The meaning of the general statements, important though they are, can be discovered only by understanding how they are used in his historically specific inquiries. So no matter how abstract one's favorite questions about Marx's social and political theories may be, it is helpful to begin with his favorite specific target, capitalist society.

CAPITALISM AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM

A society is capitalist, in Marx's way of thinking, if the production of material goods is dominated by the use of wage labor, that is, the use of labor power sold, to make a living, by people controlling no significant means of production and bought by other people who do have significant control over means of production and mostly gain their income from profits on the sale of the results of combining bought labor power with those productive means. The proletariat are, roughly, the first group - in the Communist Manifesto's slightly flamboyant description - “a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital” (Marx, 1974b: 73). The bourgeoisie are, roughly, the second group, whose income mainly derives from the sale of commodities produced with bought labor power. Marx thinks that these relations of control in the process of production have a pervasive influence on politics, culture, and society.

For many contemporary liberals, Anglo-American democracy seems unimpeachably the best political form. In contrast, most Marxian regimes and perhaps Marx himself seem deficient in defending democracy. Further, Marxian theory identifies oppressive ruling classes in all capitalist societies and calls for class struggle and violent revolution to achieve a more cooperative regime - theses that liberal social theories tend peremptorily to dismiss.

Yet Marxian theory also affirms ethical claims about the benefits of mutual recognition of persons and self-respect, realizing a general human capacity for moral personality and individuality, which are at the heart of liberalism. Thus the Communist Manifesto envisions a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” In addition, Marx began his career as a radical democrat, seeking to spur a democratic revolution in Germany in 1848 as a prelude to "an immediately following proletarian one." His insights traced a path later to be followed by many Russian radical democrats, Chinese “new democrats,” and participants in the 1960s American Students for a Democratic Society. Marx's political theory aims to realize democracy's promise of equal liberty, now corrupted by the severe impact of capitalist wealth. His democratic insights shine through his political activity, his strategic and historical writings, and, even with attention to context, his economic theory.

The consolidation of a nation-state in Ecuador began at the end of the nineteenth century, more than half a century after it won independence from Spain, when an expansion of foreign trade, particularly the export of cacao, accelerated the accumulation of capital and strengthened the country's links with the international market. There emerged within the coastal oligarchy a group of financiers and merchants distinct from the landowners and able to impose its political leadership. This commercial bourgeoisie oversaw the liberal transformation of the country in which the support of the popular sectors was at times of critical importance. Through occasional uprisings the coastal peasantry had for some time challenged the old oligarchic regime. Urban labour and the middle class were also integral to the liberal triumph and responsible for the intermittent emergence of radical ideas. On 5 June 1895, following a popular uprising in Guayaquil, General Eloy Alfaro, the Liberal-radical leader, was appointed jefe supremo of the republic. This was the beginning of the Liberal Revolution.

Liberalism was based upon Ecuador's integration into the international economy, national economic integration, most notably by means of the Quito—Guayaquil railway, and the restoration of state authority over the Church. Church and state were separated, the clergy were forcibly deprived of many of their functions and privileges and the Church lost much of its land through expropriation under the so-called Ley de Manos Muertas — measures which constituted a major political and ideological challenge to the traditional order.

ORIGINS AND FRONTIER EXPERIENCES

The year 1688 has recently found acceptance as that of Nādir's birth, but one of the best Iranian authorities for his time, the Jahān-gushā-yi Nādirī of Mīrzā Mahdī Khān Astarābādī, spells out a.h. 1110 as the year, and 28 Muharram as the day, which gives us 6 August A.D. 1698. A Bombay lithographed edition of Mīrzā Mahdī Khān's Jahān-gushā has a.h. 1100, but this date is not supported by manuscripts and the Tehran edition of the early nineteen sixties prefers the 1110 a.h. date. Other dates are given in other sources and are discussed by Dr Lockhart in his Nadir Shah, but it so happens that another contemporary source, the ‘Ālam-ārā-yi Nādirī of Muhammad Kāzim, the “Vazīr of Marv”, gives a.h. 1109 as the year of conception and, although he does not give the precise date of birth, this date corroborates 1110 as the year of delivery. It took place in the Darra Gaz, where a first-born and for some time only son was brought into the world for Imām Qulī, Nādir's father, in the fortress at Dastgird, a refuge for Nādir's people against the border raids from which the northern Khurāsān uplands frequently suffered.

Dastgird was in the winter quarters, where Nādir's father might have lingered on account of the expected birth. The summer-grazing was near Kupkān or Kubkān, thirty-eight kilometres southwest of the Dastgird-Chāpshalā winter-grounds in the low-lying, milder Darra Gaz, “Valley of Manna”. Further to the east, on the margin of the Marv desert, lay Abīvard, the metropolis of this region and in Nādir's youth the seat of the Safavid agent or district governor.

The heading for this chapter is deliberately imprecise. It refers to urban life in the period immediately preceding that when the many changes occurred which thrust Iran into the 20th century: large-scale importation of European goods; the development of an export market for some indigenous commodities; the increasing effect upon the economy of foreign banks and currencies; and, at a humbler level, the appearance of the kerosene lamp and cooking-stove, the sewing-machine and, later, the typewriter, the bicycle and radio. There are no dates to mark the passing of the traditional Iranian city, but what this chapter endeavours to present is a portrait, along the lines of Peter Laslett's enquiry into the social conditions of pre-industrial England, of the world that the Iranians lost in that transition. Such an undertaking is fraught with problems of description, analysis and interpretation. The documentation which served as the starting-point for the researches into medieval and early modern France of the Annales School, so influential in the development of the “new” social history, is almost wholly lacking for 19th century Iran. Statistical data is scarce. Surviving records, personal memoirs and correspondence from Qājār times, while attracting increased attention from historians, have survived haphazardly. The researcher remains dangerously dependent upon the subjective accounts of European diplomats, travellers and missionaries. Thus the chapter which follows, focusing mainly upon the reigns of Āghā Muhammad Khān, Fath ‘Alī Shāh and, to a lesser extent, Muhammad Shāh, is based upon an amorphous body of random facts and personal observations.

The kingdom which Fath ‘Alī Shāh inherited in 1797 resembled an estate long neglected by successive owners. Indeed it had been for the best part of a century. Had Fath ‘Alī Shah wondered, as he presided over the first New Year festival of a long reign of thirty-seven years, what were the resources of his inheritance in manpower or revenues, it is doubtful whether anyone near him could have provided the requisite information, or even delineated the frontiers of his kingdom. The claim or aspiration was that his domain equalled that of his Safavid predecessors in the days of their greatness; certainly it exceeded the bounds of present-day Iran. In reality, however, the royal writ ran far from smoothly, authority emanating from Tehran but repeatedly interrupted. In much of Khurāsān, or the more remote marches of the Lur, Türkmen or Balūch country, the Shah was scarcely even nominal ruler. Yet in spite of the practical constraints upon his exercise of power and the humiliation of two defeats suffered at the hands of Russia which entailed a loss of territory, the close of Fath ‘Alī Shāh's reign did see the definitive re-establishment of a “Royaume de Perse”.

Early 19th-century European observers of Iran doubted whether the Shah's government had the will or the means to refurbish this derelict estate; it is unlikely that either the Shah or his kinsmen thought in terms of “improving” the kingdom's resources as a contemporary English Whig landowner would have done.

The European power geographically closest to Iran was Russia. Peter the Great had brought the two countries into conflict as a result of his ambitions in the Caspian and the Caucasus regions, thereby threatening Iran's northwestern provinces. Extended into Central Asia these Russian ambitions set a pattern which lasted long beyond the 18th century, although Peter's death in 1725 and Nādir Shāh's campaigns temporarily halted Russia's advance. In the distracted decades later in the century Iran's position in the Caucasus grew steadily weaker, and when it attempted to re-establish relationships as they had existed under the Safavids, Georgia sought the protection of Catherine the Great.

In 1795 the urge to recover one of the Safavid kingdom's richest provinces prompted Āghā Muhammad Khān's march into Georgia. Catherine responded by sending a Russian expedition (1796) under Count Valerian Zubov, and the Qājār Shah was again on his way to Georgia when he was murdered in 1797. The problem of the northwest frontier and Iran's relations with Russia were among the most difficult his nephew and successor, Fath ‘Alī Shāh, had to face. To obtain help in this problem was the main objective of Iranian statecraft in the complicated negotiations conducted throughout the Napoleonic period, but neither France nor Britain could provide the kind of support Iran needed.

Britain's diplomatic and strategic interest in Iran arose initially not from the perception of a Russian, but a French threat. In 1796, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the East India Company, Stephen Lushington, was in correspondence with Henry Dundas, President of the Board of Control, regarding the French menace to India through Egypt.

“A barbarous nation, called Afghans … rushed like a torrent into Persia, and took Ispahan, after a violent siege.” This was the way in which Sir William Jones described the ascendancy which the Ghilzai Afghan leader, Mahmūd Shāh, achieved in Iran in 1722. The Afghan occupation lasted for eight years and precipitated the end of Safavid rule. Not until the establishment of the Qājārs by Āghā Muhammad Khān in 1794 did Iran know another period of relative overall stability.

In 1722 the East India Company represented the principal British interest in Iran. The Company had begun trading in the Persian Gulf in 1616 when the James was sent from Surat to Jask with seven factors bound for Iran. By the summer of 1617 they had taken up residence in Shīrāz and the Safavid capital, Isfahān. The expulsion of the Portuguese in 1622 from Hurmuz left Bandar ‘Abbās (Gombroon) the former's replacement as the Gulf's major trading port while, from 1623 till 1765, the Dutch East India Company became Britain's chief commercial rival in Iran. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries British trade prospered. British factors reached the western coast of the Caspian “where they sold great quantities of the woollen manufactures of Great Britain”, and British and Dutch traders in Isfahān braved the Afghan invasion in 1722. The French, with consular representation there, made better terms than their rivals, although the terms involved religious orders more than trade. The French East India Company was established by Colbert in 1664, but, to a greater extent than the Dutch or British companies, it was seen, in the context on India, as a means of French national expansion and rivalry with Britain.

THE IRANIAN ECONOMY IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE CENTURY

Economic conditions in Iran before 1912, when commercial oil exports were first made, were perceived by foreign travellers to be deteriorating. Curzon's sweeping conclusions on the state of manufacturing industry in Iran, that “factories, as the term is understood in Europe, do not exist in Persia; and the multiplication and economy of labour-force, by the employment of steam-power, or even water-power, is hardly known” and that “there was a decadence of native ingenuity, consequent upon the importation of cheap European substitutes,” were found to hold true in the early years of the twentieth century. Issawi noted that “Iran … was relatively little affected by the [economic] changes taking place in the world until the exploitation of oil.” Even as late as 1934, European assessment of the Iranian economy stressed the lack of discernible development of a modern economy, while there is evidence that the oil industry operated as an economic enclave with few linkages created into other domestic activities.Agriculture, too, while not lacking entirely its own dynamic of change arising from natural events such as occurrence of good and bad crop years, or political interventions for reasons of taxation and competition for land ownership, was for the most part unaffected by systematic improvements in production and yields. Not until 1937 was there an attempt to provide a new basis for modernization, a move that came to nothing as a result of Rizā Shāh's lack of conviction in the need for agricultural change and, later, the difficult position of the government after his abdication in 1941.