Much more on the Ford Foundation funded Proyecto Marginalidad. "US Foundations, Cultural Imperialism and Transnational Misunderstandings: The Case of the Marginality Project," Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 47, No. 1 (February 2015), pp. 65-92. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/24544247.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3Ac9bf2dc2903a49078a3194b2dbfa8593&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1 , https://www.jstor.org/stable/i24544243 .
Footnote #19 Other researchers involved in the project also had a trajectory of political activism: they included Ernesto Laclau, director of La Lucha Obrera, a journal published by the Socialist Party of the National Left; Beba Balve, a militant of the Argentine Socialist Vanguard Party; and Marcelo Nowerstein, a leader of the Student Revolutionary Socialist Tendency and militant of a Trotskyist party, Politica Obrera..." "In 1968 the situation became even more complicated when a nationalist student group from the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras (School of Philosophy and Literature) at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), where the project's researchers held teaching positions, denounced the Marginality Project as a form of espionage and a direct continuation of the Camelot Project. This report, the content of which will be outlined below, was simply the initial spark that detonated an explosion, as the uproar from different sectors of the Left - both those linked to the traditional left-wing parties and to the newer independent ones - multiplied. It also became internationalised. Two Cuban periodicals, Granma and Casa de las Americas, as well as Marcha, a weekly magazine published in Uruguay, echoed a polemical debate that was becoming increasingly virulent and in which ideological questioning became mixed up with ad hominem accusations...." Pg. 75. The Case of the Marginality Project pg. 79 The criticisms of the Marginality Project that came from both nationalists and leftists must be understood in this context. Furthermore, within these criticisms there were constant tensions surrounding the different ways of understanding the legitimacy of the social sciences and their internal mechanisms of validation. These peculiarities of the Argentine intellectual arena sometimes gave rise to curious, specific and generally short-lasting alliances, such as the one that developed in this case between the nationalists and the leftists who opposed the Marginality Project. As Juan Marsal, a Catalan sociologist who was then living in Buenos Aires, pointed out in 1969, on many occasions 'traditional "national" knowledge [became joined] together with the radical left wing, populists and revolutionary fascist youth. They were all united together, somewhat uncomfortably and rather briefly, against foreign and "imperialist" cientificismo.'45 The major criticism focused on the position of the Latin American intellectual in the face of the advance of imperialism, which manifested itself, in the case of the social sciences, in the foundations' grant policies. These seemed to be designed to recruit local social scientists, who, acting as spies, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, would provide the imperial power with the information it needed to be able to take political action. In the best-case scenario, the imperial power would use this to promote reformist policies of integration; in the worst, it would employ the information in support of repressive policies. Thus, in the case of the Marginality Project, the Marxist credentials that Nun and his team members boasted seemed of little importance. In response to an open letter from Jose Nun to the sociology students at UBA, which will be discussed again below, two sociologists and left-wing militants, Daniel Hopen and Carlos Bastianes, wrote a long and apparently unpublished document which nonetheless circulated widely in university circles.46 They argued that it was essential to differentiate the Marxism of those who 'take genuine anti-imperialist revolutionary positions' from that proclaimed by those who, 'whether invoking the name of Marxism or not, objectively act in the interests of the system'. It suited imperialism to conceal itself behind 'progressive' institutions and individuals so as to awaken less suspicion in its potential victims, above all in the wake of Camelot. 'Let us make it clear', Hopen and Bastianes continued, 'that in our opinion, the grants policy is a component of the global strategy of imperialism, and its primary function lies in reinforcing the scientific and technological dependency of our 45 Juan Marsal, Sobre la investigación social institucional en las actuales circunstancias de America Latina (Santiago: CLACSO, 1969), quoted in Gil, Las sombras del Camelot, p. 112. 46 Hopen was also a leader of the Frente de Trabajadores Antiimperialista de la Cultura (Anti Imperialist Cultural Workers' Front, FATRAC). (Continued, pg. 80) countries.'47 In this context it was clear that the Marginality Project should be rejected outright, given that it, in their words, i) forms part of the type of research project planned and financed by imperialist organisations ... in order to collect data about dependent countries which North America [«'f] requires for its political and military strategy in the continent; [and] 2.) forms part of a system that imperialism is establishing with increasing efficiency ... to attract and make use of political cadres, workers and intellectuals, enticing them with a vast system of grants.48 From this perspective, the kind of information collected by the project was more important than the methodology used for it or even the ideology of the researchers. For this reason, the part of the project that they questioned most was the survey, which, according to the critics, would be used for the same purposes as the survey carried out by the Camelot project years before. 'What we maintain is that the character of the "Marginality Project" is determined not by its theoretical framework (Marxism), but by the survey', wrote Hopen and Bastianes.49 Opponents thus argued that imperialism considered the researchers' ideology to be of little significance, given that the important point was not the methodology but rather the data that the survey provided. After reproducing some of the questions included in the questionnaire, a biologist, Daniel Goldstein, writing in Marcha, stated that it was odd that the questionnaire had been compiled not by the police but by a group of supposedly leftist Argentine intellectuals. Goldstein went on to emphasise his point further: 'The Ford Foundation has actually become a new intelligence agency dedicated to the social problems of neocolonial populations, with the mission of collecting information and proposing counter-revolutionary lines of action.'50 Goldstein's article provoked a strong reaction from Nun, which in turn sparked a heated debate in Marcha, involving Antonio Morel and a group of sociologists led by a prestigious leftist intellectual, Ismael Vinas. Granma, which accused the Ford Foundation of being an accomplice of the US government, and Casa de las Americas echoed the debate a short time later. The Sociedad Argentina de Artistas Plasticos (Argentine Society of Plastic Artists, SAAP), the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional (National Liberation Movement, MLN) political party and other left-wing organisations also participated in the polemic. All coincided in denouncing the Marginality Project and its participants. 47 Hopen and Bastianes, 'Replica'. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Daniel Goldstein, 'Sociologos argentinos aceitan el engranaje', Marcha, io Jan. 1969. (Continued, pg. 81) "Non-Marxist nationalist groups criticised the project on similar grounds, but from a different angle. If, for Goldstein, the Marxist credentials that Nun and his team pompously claimed were not enough to prevent them from turning into agents of imperialism (whether voluntarily or not), for the group of students belonging to the Fuerza Nacionalista Revolucionaria (Nationalist Revolutionary Force, FNR), who had started the debate with a document that circulated amongst students at UBA, it was precisely those Marxist credentials that confirmed the alliance that Nun and his team had formed with imperialism. Both Nun and the members of his team belonged to the 'imperialist Left', which, since the time when the Left had united with the Union Democratica (Democratic Union, UD) to oppose Peron in 1945, had remained constandy linked to imperialism in order to consolidate its own anti-national plans.51 At the same time, Gonzalo Cardenas, who together with the priest and sociologist Justino O'Farrell had created the catedras nacionales (national chairs), established after General Juan Carlos Ongania's coup in 1966, concluded categorically in a 1968 article entitled 'Imperialist Penetration of the Social Sciences' that 'one is either with the people or against them. To make it clearer: either on the side of neo-imperialism or on that of the Argentine people.'51 The catedras nacionales were closely linked to Peronism, and promoted a 'national sociology' in response to that characterised as cientificista. The lines of political debate became clearly defined; the denunciations coming from the Left and from revolutionary nationalism at times converged. One might say, again following Angenot, that despite the ideological differences which in many cases ended in outbreaks of extreme violence, the Left and the nationalists shared a series of assumptions of 'what was considered to be socially plausible', a common conceptual ground that was also expressed through a common language. In a careful reading of the texts, however, one encounters other motives for attack. The institutionalisation of sociology had generated new systems of hierarchy and methods of validation within the discipline, and this had created systems of inclusion and exclusion. Therefore, it is perhaps not by chance that the criticisms that came from nationalist students included one which questioned the fact that the team in charge of the project comprised 'the cream of official sociology, a true academy that manages more funds than public 51 FNR, 'Espionaje yanqui', undated, Dossier Marginalidad, CEDINCI archive. 52 Gonzalo Cardenas, 'La penetration imperialista en las ciencias sociales', unpubl. document, undated, Dossier Marginalidad, CEDINCI archive. Extracts from this document can be found at www.filosofia.org/hem/196/968 iopgi.htm. (Continued, pg. 82) research institutes and which, above all, influences the greater part of the [academic] job market and sociological prestige'.53 Jose Nun, in search of lost legitimacy In response to the denunciations arriving simultaneously from the nationalists and Marxists, Nun wrote several articles in Marcha and, most importantly, an extensive 'Open Letter' directed at sociology students after he was stopped from speaking at a student conference in November 1968 which he had attended in order to clarify the nature of the Marginality Project and his own role. It became evident that Nun felt forced to resort to multiple ways of legitimising his project and his position: he justified it in terms of the procedures of modern social science on the one hand, and its political and ideological purity on the other. In effect, in one way the project was legitimised by its total scientific and academic autonomy with regards to the funding body; in other words, by one of the basic characteristics of modern science. However, Nun also recognised other forms of legitimisation for his project that ought to have dissipated the doubts of his critics. First, there was his own Marxist conceptual framework. In opposition to the ideas about marginality associated with DESAL's 'paternalistic culturalism' or CEPAL's 'developmen talist economicism', both of which viewed policies for the 'inclusion' of marginalised people as their practical corollary, Nun proposed a concept of marginality with Marxist roots. For him, it was a phenomenon inherent in the double system of exploitation imposed by the capitalist system and the dependent nature of Latin American countries. In Nun's vision, marginalised people were 'unemployed and underemployed workers in the countryside and in the city, and their respective family units, victims of the double exploitation resulting from a capitalist and dependent system, in the context of chronic stagnation ... which provides evidence of the distortions of a stagnation ... which provides evidence of the distortions of a neocolonial labour market that marginalises ever larger sectors of the population'.54 According to Nun, therefore, marginality was a structural component of the dependent economies of Latin America.55 Up to this point, it was Nun the Marxist (although heterodox) social scientist who was speaking. However, the criticisms he received forced him 53 FNR, 'Espionaje yanqui'. 54 Nun, 'Carta abierta'. The debates between Nun and Cardoso can be found in Nun, Marginalidad y exclusion social (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Economica, zooi). 55 It is worth noting that when the project passed to the Instituto Di Telia, Enrique Oteiza, its director, appeared to use, in his letter of intent to the Ford Foundation, a conceptual framework that was closer to the functional developmentalism that the Ford Foundation officially promoted. For him, marginality referred mainly to 'those urban and rural sectors for which the traditional communities are losing their meaning, but which do not yet belong to the modern society': Enrique Oteiza to John Nagel, 30 Nov. 1967, FFA. (Continued, pg. 83) also to resort to other arguments for its legitimacy. Thus, besides his discussion of methodological issues, Nun also had to clarify that the project was receiving support not only from academic groups that had openly opposed the Camelot Project, but also from many Dominican comandos civiles that had resisted the US invasion of 1965, from trade unions, and from 'the boards of many popular political groups that [had been] consulted'. The fact that Nun claimed to have carried out these so-called 'consultations' illustrates the existence of a circuit of legitimacy for the project that was very different from that of the academic world in the United States which the Ford Foundation supported. However, perhaps more significant in terms of the ideological complexities that existed amongst the criteria being used to justify the project was the fact that Nun also felt obliged to mention that he had personally interviewed General Juan Domingo Peron in Madrid, and had explained the project to him in great detail. The veteran leader, who by then had been converted (at least in the collective imagination of many sectors of the Left) into a revolutionary leader, had given the project his full approval. Tactically using some of the arguments of his nationalist critics against those from the Left, Nun argued that the 'so-called Left' that was opposing him was the heir to the 'sepoy Left' of the dogmatic Marxists who had always been on the opposite side to the people, as the Fuerza de Orientacion Radical de la Joven Argentina (Force for the Radical Orientation of Young Argentina, FORJA) movement and intellectuals like Raul Scalabrini Ortiz had claimed in the 1930s. This appeal to a nationalist and populist non-Marxist tradition is very revealing of the complex paths that Nun had to negotiate in order to legitimise his project. However, as if the double (political and scientific) forms of legitimisation did not suffice, Nun also represented himself as a hero-victim or, in any event, an outsider in the face of the Ford Foundation's supposedly shady manoeuvres. In fact, according to Nun's version of the story, when ILPES and DESAL withdrew from the project, apparently due to the theoretical-ideological leanings that Nun and his team were intending to impose upon it, the Foundation, through Kalman Silvert, offered to bring the project to an end in exchange for 'very generous personal compensation including two years' worth of salary payments plus travel and subsistence expenses for wherever each researcher chose to go'. Of course, Nun had angrily rejected this offer just as he later continued to reject offers from the Ford Foundation's official in Buenos Aires to receive money from the Foundation 'informally and discreetly'. At the same time, in 1969 Nun suggested to one of the Foundation's officials that he and his colleagues could live for a year taking on small editing and translating jobs, pointing out that 'after all, the pioneers in the social sciences never received salaries for their work'.56 56 Nun, 'Carta abierta'. (Continued, pg. 84) According to Nun, the anger of the critics was caused not only by ideological motives but also by 'subaltern grudges held by those who were not hired for the project'. As we have seen, the nationalist students had referred to the funds managed by the members of the project, who, furthermore, made up a 'professional aristocracy'. In the document, Nun reminded his readers (and he did so again in a personal interview with the author decades later) that one of his major critics, the prestigious left-wing intellectual Ismael Vinas, had initially asked him for a position in the project for one of his proteges. Moreover, Nun was obliged to defend the political credentials of his close collaborators, pointing out that Miguel Murmis, who had also been a target for the critics' anger, was one of the few professors at the University of Buenos Aires who in 1964 paid homage to the guerrillas who died in the north of the country, was expelled from the Faculty of Arts (UBA) in 1966 ... and, at the request of the Confederation General del Trabajo (Paseo Colon) [General Labour Confederation, CGT] he has just produced a brave report about the situation of the sugar plantation workers in Tucuman.57 If the tone of the 'Open Letter' was highly defensive, then in the article published in March a Nun seems to have decided to double the stakes by attacking his critics from the left. While his opponents claimed that the US government would use the results of the project to carry out 'aid programmes' and social reintegration with the aim of avoiding the creation of revolutionary situations, Nun rebuked them because they not only distrust the revolutionary capacity of Latin America's exploited classes, but also belong to the increasingly small number of those who still believe (both here and in the United States) in the efficiency of the operations of US aid ... They overestimate imperialism's capacity for integration while they underestimate the growing power of the popular movement and all this comes with the speculative calm of the petit bourgeois, who calls himself left-wing, and while he takes his hot baths, believes that the workers will become corrupted if they have water to wash their hands.58 In reality, according to Nun, 'the Marginality Project's unforgivable sin is that it sets out to reveal the internal mechanisms through which neocolonialism operates'.59 In Nun's responses, therefore, the validity of the project depended as much on its scientific-conceptual grounds and the renewed system of hierarchies established within the field of social sciences as it did on its ideological grounds, which had received important recognition through the support of certain individuals and organisations that were perceived as 'legitimisers'. This is why the diatribes that Nun launched against his opponents went in both 57 Ibid. 58 'La polemica sobre el Proyecto Marginalidad', Marcha, i8 Feb. 1969, pp. 18-12. 59 Nun, 'Carta abierta'. (Continued, pg. 85) directions, for he accused them of being 'active accomplices of imperialism' at the same time as remembering that some of them, although of good faith, listened to the critics as a result of their 'weak sociological training'. According to Nun, the critics had not found a single argument to 'question even one of our hypotheses or theoretical propositions'. Throughout Nun's line of thinking, therefore, we see the staging of a double mechanism of legitimisation connected to his personal position both as a left-wing intellectual and as a transnational academic. One might say that Nun acted as a 'hinge' between two apparently incompatible systems of legitimisation that had developed simultaneously in the Argentine social science arena; that is to say, in Bourdieu's terms, two different forms of symbolic capital accumulation.60 The Ford Foundation and 'academic progressivism' in the 1960s <SNIP> I have unlimited access to download articles via the Los Angeles Public Library. Check to see if you do through your local public library. If not, register for a free account, for article downloads. Register for a free account https://www.jstor.org/ Free online reading for over 10 million articles Save and organize content with Workspace Link account to institutional access -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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