The issue of the masses has been addressed in modern social thought, both in the “North” and the “South”, as a problem of dual nature: political and theoretical. In the late 19th century, the French theorist Le Bon and the Argentine Ramos Mejía formulated theories about which attempted to provide a comprehensive framework to explore their mechanisms of control and potential for action. From the 1930s onwards, this treatment was reconsidered in the context of the emergence of “mass society” (e.g., the analyses of David Riesman and Gino Germani). By the 1960s, with the unfolding of political revolts and anti-colonial struggles, the question of the masses -to certain analytical perspectives- appeared more as a presupposition for political action than as a category of analysis in itself. In this context, in 1968, the Argentine sociologist Roberto Carri published
Isidro Velázquez: formas prerrevolucionarias de la violencia, in which he based on the theoretical analysis of the Martinican Frantz Fanon (
Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961) and discussed some conceptualizations of the British historian Eric Hobsbawm (
Primitive Rebels, 1959).
Based on the analysis of these three works, we propose, through a “simultaneous approach”, to compare the productions from the “North” and the “South” concerning the problems of the “rural”, “peasant”, and “primitive” masses, exploring their political dimension, spontaneity, marginality, oppression, and resistance. This approach will allow us to examine the relationship between the masses and social struggles in various socio-historical and geographical contexts, within the framework of the political and social transformations of capitalism. Furthermore, we will seek to determine whether the problem of the masses and their relationship with capitalism, as it was framed in the 1960s, still provides us with conceptual tools to understand the “theoretical and epochal crossroads” of the present or if they have become obsolete.
