Presentation to translation: “Argentina: The imperialist strategy and the May crisis”

Abstract

We present here a text by Ernesto Laclau –unpublished in Spanish-, originally published in the number 62 (July / August 1970) in English on New Left Review, while studying at St. Anthony College in Oxford –where it had been recommended for a scholarship by Eric Hobsbawm in 1969–, years before the landing in Essex, university to which he will remain linked until his last days. Of great theoretical consistency and fine historical analysis, these are also the flashing observations of a political militant of the national left –who is taking his first theoretical steps of great relevance in England-, without reaching the material that gives the proximity (it is the Laclau regret at the end of the writing, barely produced the scratch), but with the lucidity that sometimes brings a certain distance from the omnipresent object in his thoughts: the Argentine reality transformed by the historical structure of Peronism and the dictatorial attempt underway to close it.