José Aricó and the Concept of Socio-Economic Formation

Abstract

The interventions in the field of Marxism developed by the Argentine intellectual José Aricó in the 1960s and 1970s were conditioned by transformations that occurred within the continental and world left. The stagnation of the Soviet experience, the challenges posed by the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, the process of decolonization and the reinterpretation of the popular political traditions of the region constituted favorable elements for a critical reading of the Marxist corpus. In this sense, the work of translation and editing by Aricó of the developments and the debates around the concept of socioeconomic formation can be conceived as an effort to provide the formations of the Argentine New Left with precise tools to account for the articulation of levels of social life and delimit a political practice according to this singularity. In this paper we propose to analyze the multiple reading exercises of the concept of socioeconomic formation that are reflected in Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente. In this sense, we concentrate on the one hand on the work of addressing within the Marxian work. In this regard, we will analyze the publication of Introducción general a la crítica de la economía política (1857) and Formaciones económicas precapitalistas. On the other hand, we will focus on the dissemination of contemporary developments on the concept of socioeconomic formation and its theoretical and political effects. In this regard, we will analyze the publication of the compilations El concepto de formación económico-social and Modos de producción en América Latina as well as Hegemonía y dominación en el Estado moderno of Nicos Poulantzas.