Growing up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Hodges returned to the USA in 1941. He was a student of James Burnham, the author of "The Managerial Revolution," which argued that both in the Communist and the capitalist world the managers "rule the world." Hodges was a devoted Marxist and an organizer for the Communist Party and labor organizations as a young man. He inspired a local Students for a Democratic Society chapter in Florida.[3]
According to one of his students Hodges "would track down original sources to see for himself if they were being cited correctly or taken out of their proper context."[3] Some of the known contributions of Hodges to Marxist philosophy include his assertion that "the young Marx has become the hero of Marx scholarship and the late Engels its villain",[6] and that Mikhail Bakunin was "the first anarcho-Marxist".[7] He also extensively wrote on Marx's humanism, writing that Marxist contribution to humanism was "its addition of a material, bodily, passionate and sensuous content to traditional humanism and the elevation of this content to the status of liberal activity” and “its development of the social and humanitarian elements of traditional humanism”.[8] He also postulated the existence of a "fourth major class" that he called "technocracy", which he defined as workers with organizational and technical expertise. He argued that this class was not exploited and therefore not proletarian.[9]
Hodges also analyzed and defended movements and revolutions such as Peronism, the Mexican Revolution and the Sandinistas. He wrote that Peronism under Juan D. Perón was a "Christian and humanist version of socialism".[10] He criticized "the conceptual rigidity" of most Marxist interpretations of the Mexican Revolution, while also dismissing non-Marxist interpretations of it as "vague and primitive". He argues that the Mexican Revolution was not a bourgeois revolution given that the revolutionary struggle also included "the peasantry, the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie, the rural and urban proletariat, and even the country's lumpenproletariat"; because of this, he recommends that it should be viewed as a "bureaucratic political revolution combined with an abortive peasant revolution".[11] He concluded that the revolution resulted in a "Bonapartist" state, in which "the bourgeoisie remained the economically dominant class, but in order to save its purse it gave up the crown."[12]
Selected works
Bakunin's Controversy with Marx: An Analysis of the Tensions within Modern Socialism (1960)
Philosophy of Labor (1961)
The Dual Character of Marxian Social Science (1962)
Engels' Contribution to Marxism (1965)
Marx's Concept of Value and Critique of Value Fetishism (1970)
NLF: National Liberation Fronts, 1960–1970 (1972)[13]
The Latin American Revolution: Politics and Strategy from Apro-Marxism to Guevarism. W. Morrow, 1974, ISBN0-688-00315-X
Socialist Humanism: The Outcome of Classical European Morality (1974)
The Legacy of Che Guevara: A Documentary Study. Thames and Hudson, 1977, ISBN0-500-25056-1
The Bureaucratization of Socialism (1981)
Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1986)
Argentina, 1943-1987: The National Revolution and Resistance. University of New Mexico Press, 1988.
The Literate Communist: 150 Years of the Communist Manifesto. (Major Concepts in Politics and Political Theory) (1991)
Argentina's 'Dirty War': An Intellectual Biography (1991)
Sandino's Communism: Spiritual Politics for the Twenty-First Century (1992)
Mexican Anarchism After the Revolution (1995). University of Texas Press. p. 101. ISBN0-292-73097-7.
^Saha, Aishik (2021). "Engels's Theory of Social Murder and the Spectacle of Fascism: A Critical Enquiry into Digital Labour and its Alienation". TripleC. 19 (1): 56.
^Hodges, Donald (1991). Argentina's "Dirty War": An Intellectual Biography. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. p. 56. ISBN978-0-292-77689-0. Consequently, Peron settled for the term 'justicialism.' The odds clearly favored his Christian and humanist version of socialism.