SWM Institute
About the Institute
The Southwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Hispanic History is a militant think tank committed to the cultivation of Hispanic Marxist thought and historical materialist research on Hispanic-Catholic civilization. We seek to build a bridge between the US labor movement, Chicano radicalism and the intercontinental Iberofonía, thereby articulating a universalist and civilizational-scale class consciousness. We simultaneously denounce the cultural ethnocentrism of Anglo chauvinism as well as the cultural relativism of postmodern decoloniality, proudly upholding the rich heritage of our Catholic-mestizo humanism and forcefully rejecting the Black Legend of our widely misrepresented history.
Guiding Principles
We defend the organization of Iberofonía, the community of nations, peoples and territories that throughout the five continents speak Portuguese and Spanish, the only two mutually understandable universal languages. Not in order to do away with the political nations that conform it, but to bring them together in a community organized on a universal scale, where the territorial integrity of each nation, its internal plurality and diversity, and their common cultural ties are respected. We are not enemies of Latin-Americanism, which defended a continental unity against the Monroe Doctrine. But Latin-Americanism must be overcome by a greater, inter-continental unity, with a stronger global impact: Iberofonía, which brings Ibero-America closer to Ibero-Africa, Iberoasia and Ibero-Oceania, and also to Portugal and Spain.
As marxists, we seek to overcome the conflict between capital and labor, to outlaw the capitalist extraction of surplus value and to place it under workers' control and that of the proletarian state. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, which opposes the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (whether in authoritarian or fascist regimes, or in very advanced bourgeois liberal democracies), can develop in a multitude of political models. But all of them must be republican, centralized, indivisible and patriotic. Marxism, as the communist philosopher Domenico Losurdo noted, has only triumphed where it has become clearly patriotic. The struggle for the revindication of the founding fathers of each one of our homelands, of their history, as well as the two-fold struggle against the two great black legends of our time, those which hinder the construction of our Socialist Pan-Iberianism (the Hispanophobic Black Legend, popular but widely refuted by historiography, and the Anti-communist Black Legend, also popular but not yet refuted by historiography), constitute a single ideological struggle.
We defend the cultural idiosyncrasy of each of our Hispanic nations, their languages, traditions and customs, but we will never tolerate that this cultural idiosyncrasy be used to divide our people, our working class and our Civilization. Any unity, by the mere fact of being so, is already diverse, and to reclaim diversity per se is unnecessary, reiterative and redundant. We will be fierce enemies of any culturalist claim (the myth of culture, the essentialization of a whole conception of culture as a light that guides the "folk", as a secularized version of the myth of Christian grace, which is the prelude to fascism) against our political nations, because such culturalism is an attack against our culture.
We seek to eradicate social democracy, reformism and progressivism from the heart of the workers movement. We are against the unity of the left, not only because we refuse to be part of the left wing of the bourgeoisie, but because such unity is impossible. There are many generations of the definite left in history, which have succeeded each other (jacobins, liberals, anarchists, social democrats, Bolshevik communists and Maoists), and all of them clash with the “right” and with each other, since they have incompatible projects. The call for the unity of the left only benefits the left wing of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is none other than the degenerated, anti-communist, postmodern, cosmopolitan, liberal and progressive social democracy, which derives electoral advantage from deceiving the working class while following the agenda of capital. Likewise, we oppose head-on the hegemony of the degenerations of all the definite lefts, which have given rise to what today we call the indefinite left (leftism), without a clear political project with respect to the State and relegated to defending socio-cultural issues, and which is today the dominant basket where NGOs, feminisms, ecologisms, environmentalisms, veganisms, LGBTIQ+isms, separatisms, indigenisms and indianisms, postcolonialisms and decolonialisms, etc., converge.
We support the full development of the productive forces for the benefit of the working class, so that they cease to be proletariat and laborers in the capitalist sense, and for the end of the bourgeoisie. We aim for the highest level of scientific and technological development (for the sovereignty and techno-scientific independence of our political nations) at the service to the progress of our political societies, our Civilization and universality, and not at the service of capital and particularist interests. We defend the use of science and technology for the improvement of human life, for its expansion and perfection, without falling into hegemonic liberal transhumanism or technological and scientific fundamentalism.
