Carlos Herrera's insightful book offers a thorough study of the Argentine Socialist Party under the Peronist administrations of 1946–55. His multi-layered analysis revolves around a central theme: how the Socialist Party, which had played an important role in Argentine politics, culture and labour movements before 1945, was transformed by the Peronist experience, emerging in 1955 as a pale shadow of its former self, divided and, more notably, without major contact with and influence on its natural base, the working class. As Herrera seeks to address this theme, it additionally provides important perspectives on the profound changes unleashed by Peronism in Argentine society as well as on the historiography of Argentine political parties.
The book's first section, comprising five chapters, explains how Socialists came to identify Peronism with totalitarianism and addresses the ideas and strategies developed around that interpretation. The first chapter explores the ideological formulations of Américo Ghioldi, the Socialist leader who played an influential role in the Party's adoption of the Peronism-as-totalitarianism official line. The second chapter then focuses on the actions of Socialist labour unions and leaders. Socialist criticisms of Peronist economic planning and models are addressed in Chapter 3, followed up in Chapter 4 by the strategies devised around cooperativism. Chapter 5, on the Socialist Party's weakened position in the final years of the Peronist regime, rounds up this section. The second section's five chapters expand the analysis and reconstruct the Party's history by looking at internal dissidence. Some leaders and factions – as was the case with Julio V. González, treated in Chapter 6 – challenged the official line from within the Party. Other groups, which either were expelled or just left the Party, supported or joined Peronism (Chapters 7 and 8) or just sought to find a Socialist alternative between Peronism and the Party (Chapter 9). The final chapter reflects on the fate of the Socialist Party after Perón's overthrow in 1955, as it faced its new diminished standing and experienced further divisions.
Based on solid research on a large number of primary and secondary sources, the book also benefits from Herrera's mastery of the historiography on the Socialist Party. He is able to provide a rich narrative that takes into account subtle changes according to shifting historical circumstances. For example, Ghioldi's well-known anti-Peronist position is explained not as a monolithic whole but as evolving over the years, and a similarly careful approach is taken when explaining the different ideological and political trends involved in the dissident Partido Socialista – Revolución Nacional. The inclusion of dissident voices and groups as inherent to the Party's decisions and evolution offers a fuller understanding of its internal dynamics and history. Rather than a simplistic image of a static party merely overshadowed by the Peronist state, the picture that emerges is of a dynamic party full of contradictions and internal factions and disputes as it tried to address its position in Perón's New Argentina.
Herrera's analysis also contributes to the growing scholarship that provides a more nuanced view of the continuities and ruptures that Peronism brought to Argentine society. Herrera convincingly proves that the Party's weakening situation during the Peronist decade was not just the result of a combination of repression and erosion of working-class support, attracted away from the Socialist Party since 1943 by Peronist social, economic and labour policies. Rather, the problems were rooted in the Party's structure and political strategies adopted in the 1930s. They include the increasing adoption of antifascism as orienting political action, a rigid party leadership, and a clear separation between the Party's political work, to be developed through legislative action, and activity regarding labour unions, understood as different spheres. The long-term consequences of these developments became increasingly clear as Peronism emerged and consolidated after 1943. The Socialist Party now found itself deprived of its traditional venue of political action because of lack of congressional representation, repression and co-optation by the state, and with its influence in the labour movement seriously curtailed. The crisis would only worsen in the years immediately after Perón's fall in 1955, climaxing in the Party's rancorous division into two factions in 1958.
Herrera's book also connects with recent historiography on Argentine socialism and political parties – especially leftist ideologies and parties – by Maria Cristina Tortti (El ‘viejo’ partido socialista y los orígenes de la ‘nueva’ izquierda socialista (Prometeo, 2009)), Marcela García Sebastiani (Los antiperonistas en la Argentina peronista. Radicales y socialistas en la política argentina entre 1943 y 1951 (Prometeo, 2005)), Horacio Tarcus (Marx en la Argentina. Sus primeros lectores obreros, intelectuales y científicos (Siglo XXI, 2002)), Alexia Massholder (El Partido Comunista y sus intelectuales. Pensamiento y acción de Héctor P. Agosti (Ediciones Luxemburg, 2014)) and Roberto Pittaluga (Soviets en Buenos Aires. La izquierda de la Argentina ante la revolución en Rusia (Prometeo, 2016)), among others. Herrera's detailed focus on the Party's dynamics and ideas is certainly very fruitful, and Herrera is candid about other topics he does not address but that merit further work, such as the role of female leadership in the Party. Still, where other new works have expanded the meanings and boundaries of political history, Herrera's approach to political history does leave some areas rather unexplored. Indeed, there are studies on Peronism that have been at the forefront of a renewed political history that takes into account, for example, cultural history as a nexus of traditional political approaches with new concerns about gender, culture and race.
Herrera also touches in several passages on the transnational dimensions of Socialist ideas and actions. This aspect merits further exploration and integration into the story, as explored, for example, by Andrés Bisso (Acción Argentina. Un antifascismo nacional en tiempos de guerra mundial (Prometeo, 2005)) for Socialism and Nerina Visacovsky (Argentinos, judíos y camaradas. Tras la utopía socialista (Biblos, 2015)) for Jewish Communist women. Other topics of the Socialist transnational connection addressed by Herrera, such as the Cold War international relations of the Socialist labour unions and leaders with the Confederación Internacional de Organizaciones Sindicales Libres (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, CIOSL), also open exciting possibilities for future research.
On the other hand, it is unquestionable that Herrera provides a solid analysis of the Socialist party grounded on meticulous research informed by his previous work on the topic. The book is not only a significant addition to the literature on Argentine Socialism but will also be of relevance to those interested in the sinuous evolution of the Argentine Left and its interaction with Peronism, and it offers compelling comparative possibilities with other Socialist parties in Latin America and elsewhere.
