Free retamar caliban by Unknown Author Page B

forged here. There is also the culture of anti-America, that of the oppressors, of those who tried (or are trying) to impose on these lands metropolitan schemes, or simply, tamely to reproduce in a provincial fashion what might have authenticity in other countries. In the best of cases, to repeat, it is a question of the influence of
    those who have worked, in some cases patriotically, to shape social life in accordance with models of other highly developed countries, whose practices are the result of an organic process over the course of centuries [and thus] have betrayed the cause of the true emancipation of Latin America. 76
    This anti-America culture is still very visible. It is still proclaimed and perpetuated in structures, works, ephemerides. But without a doubt, it is suffering the pangs of death, just like the system upon which it is based. We can and must contribute to a true assessment of the history of the oppressors and that of the oppressed. But of course, the triumph of the latter will be the work, above all, of those for whom history is a function not of erudition but of deeds. It is they who will achieve the definitive triumph of the true America, reestablishing—this time in a different light—the unity of our immense continent. “Spanish America, Latin America—call it what you wish,“wrote Mariategui,
    will not find its unity in the bourgeois order. That order divides us, perforce, into petty nationalisms. It is for Anglo-Saxon North America to consummate and draw to a close capitalist civilization. The future of Latin America is socialist. 77
    Such a future, which has already begun, will end by rendering incomprehensible the idle question about our existence.
    And Ariel Now?
    The Ariel of Shakespeare’s great myth, which we have been following in these notes, is, as has been said, the intellectual from the same island as Caliban. 78 He can choose between serving Prospero—the case with intellectuals of the anti-American persuasion—at which he is apparently unusually adept but for whom he is nothing more than a timorous slave, or allying himself with Caliban in his struggle for true freedom. It could be said that I am thinking, in Gramscian terms, above all of the “traditional" intellectuals: those whom the proletariat, even during the period of transition, must assimilate in the greatest possible number while it generates its own “organic" intellectuals.
    It is common knowledge, of course, that a more or less important segment of intellectuals at the service of the exploited classes usually conies from the exploiting classes, with which they have broken radically. This is the classic, to say the least, case of such supreme figures as Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The fact had been observed already in The Communist Manifesto (1848) itself, where Marx and Engels wrote:
    In times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact, within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its bands . . . [S]o now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat and, in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. 79
    If this is obviously valid with regard to the most highly developed capitalist nations—the ones Marx and Engels had in mind in the Manifesto —something more must be added in the case of our countries. Here that “portion of the bourgeois ideologists” to which Marx and Engels refer experiences a second form of rupture: except for that sector proceeding organically from the exploited classes, the intelligentsia that considers itself revolutionary must break all ties with its class of origin (frequently the petite bourgeoisie) and must besides