“El bacilo de Carlos Marx,” or, Roberto Arlt, the Leninist

Resumen

The reception histories of Argentine authors Roberto Arlt and Roberto Mariani are characterized by distancing them from the literary left of the 1920s and 30s. In the case of Arlt, his recuperation dates back to the early 1950s, while Mariani has been salvaged more recently. In contrast to this critical trend, the following essay places the work of Arlt and Mariani in context of 1920s and 30s literary radicalism in Argentina and beyond. Against the post-structuralist and post-Marxist appropriation of Arlt, and by extension Mariani, this essay argues that the portrayal of petit-bourgeois salaried employees one finds in Arlt and Mariani’s works from the 1920s and early 30s, is consistent with old left workerism. In the context of interwar leftism, there is nothing unconventional in Arlt and Mariani’s treatment of the salaried masses as the bearers of false-consciousness who cannot achieve revolutionary consciousness as a class in and for itself. In short, Arlt and Mariani’s works of this period are best understood in terms of the search for a class conscious agent among the masses of Buenos Aires, who were at this time composed of proletarianized white collar office workers and abject surplus populations.