José Carlos Mariátegui and Twenty-first-Century Socialism: Recovery and Renewal

Beyond Dogmatism

Mariátegui’s thought was against dogmatism. He was fervently opposed to the mechanical and evolutionist Marxism of the Second (Social Democratic) International. His Marxism was an “open” Marxism in that it rejected historical inevitabilism (and its denial of agency) and was open to other critical philosophical or theoretical systems of thought. It was not a bookish Marxism; he was no Marxologist. He had learned its basic outline in Italy, but it only became a praxis when it entered into an aleatory relation with Peruvian reality. His Marxism was opposed to determinism, economism, and the blind faith in progress characteristic of dogmatic Marxists. Mariátegui preached instead the virtues of voluntarism and understood the “advantages of backwardness” in the Latin American context, where precolonial themes could act as harbingers of a socialist future.

Mariátegui’s political philosophy had much in common with that of the pre-prison Antonio Gramsci, who welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1917 as “the revolution against ‘Capital’”: “The Bolsheviks reject Karl Marx and their explicit actions and conquests bear witness that the canons of historical materialism are not as rigid as might have been thought” (Gramsci, 1977: 341). There are also remarkable parallels with Gramsci’s (1971: 419–472) scathing critique of the mechanical Marxism of Nikolai Bukharin’s The Theory of Historical Materialism, A Manual of Popular Sociology, in which he demolished the vulgar materialism of Bukharin’s manual and showed that Marxism could not be reduced to the status of a positive science or a “sociology.” For Mariátegui, similarly, Marxism was not “a metaphysical or philosophical materialism, nor a philosophy of history. . . . Marx had no reason to create more than a method of historical interpretation of present-day society” (Mariátegui, 1987: 56).

The only book that Mariátegui organized and published other than the Siete ensayos was Defensa del marxismo (Mariátegui, 1987), a polemic against the then-current Marxism of Henri de Man in Belgium. In a chapter entitled “Marxist Determinism,” Mariátegui took to task revisionists like De Man for exaggerating Marx’s commitment to the “mechanistic mentality” of the nineteenth century and wrongly seeing Marx’s vision as incompatible with “the heroic, voluntarist conception of life” that the modern world demanded (Mariátegui, 1987: 67). He declared that “Marxism, where it has shown itself to be revolutionary—that is to say when it has been Marxist—has never observed a passive and rigid determinism.” For him, all the criticisms of the Russian Revolution as the work of “romantic, antihistorical, fanatical utopians” were due to the influence of a determinism that belonged more to the “conservative bourgeoisie” than to the insurgent proletariat.

As to Mariátegui’s own version of Marxism, he went much farther beyond orthodoxy than Gramsci did, although the latter’s concept of the “historic bloc” owed much more to Sorel than is usually recognized. With Mariátegui the influence of Sorel is much more direct and central to his Marxism, to the extent that for some commentators this disqualifies him as a Marxist. Defensa del marxismo declares that “the true revision of Marxism in the sense of renewal and continuation of the work of Marx has been carried out in theory and in practice by . . . Georges Sorel in studies that separate and distinguish what is essential and substantive in Marx from what is formal and contingent” (Mariátegui, 1987: 20). In a 1925 article entitled “Dos concepciones de vida,” Mariátegui (1959: 17–18) lays out most clearly what he sees as the opposition between “an evolutionist, historicist, and rationalist philosophy” that believes in the myth of progress and what he sees as the “peremptory need for a faith and a myth that moves people to live dangerously.” In an era like the 1920s, when “skepticism and nihilism” prevailed, it was necessary to be bold and seize the moment.

The criticisms of Mariátegui’s Sorelian and other heterodox influences have been well articulated by Robert Paris (1981), a close analyst of his thinking and practice. From Sorel Mariátegui took his concept of the revolutionary myth and a romantic drive to create a national popular will, against the mechanical and “reasonable” Marxism of the Second International. From Benedetto Croce he took, as did Gramsci of course, a certain neo-Hegelian idealism and his own version of historicism. Underlying his political philosophy was what many consider the malign influence of Nietzsche, which still makes it hard to have a proper Marxist appreciation of Foucault, for example. Paris is correct, of course, to note that Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism would appeal to the Ordine Nuovo group (and Mariátegui) while equally having a strong influence on the emergence of Mussolini’s irrationalism and the “destruction of reason” in Italy.

While cognizant of Mariátegui’s “deviation” from what passed as orthodox Marxism in the 1920s, we can also evaluate the engagement with Sorel (shorthand for a whole range of non-Marxist influences) as a positive in that it helped him (and helps us) to go beyond dogmatism. If there was something missing in classical Marxism that prevented it from becoming a guide to action in Latin America, we need to ask why it was Sorel who provided this missing ingredient. As José Aricó (2018: 313), a disseminator (from a Gramscian standpoint) of Mariátegui’s thought in Latin America in the 1970s, puts it, “from this perspective his ‘heterodoxy’ is a virtue and not a limitation, its ‘isms’ [e.g., Sorelianism] conceptual instruments of mediation to allow the capture of the morphology which the process of organization of the popular masses took in Peru.” Mariátegui’s reading of Sorel, Croce, and Nietzsche was inscribed within his revolutionary socialism and helped him articulate a path for the development of a national and popular collective will. Indeed, we could argue that Mariátegui was never more Marxist than when he was seeking to “translate” Marxism into a Peruvian idiom through Sorel, a task mediated through the cultural domain.

Centering Culture

The main reason culture was central in Mariátegui’s thought and practice was that he believed that the world crisis was “an economic crisis and a political crisis. And . . . above all, an ideological crisis” (Mariátegui, 1980a: 23). His engagement with current views in the 1920s on the “crisis of Western civilization” (e.g., Spengler) drove him to focus intensely on the cultural domain. During his early pre-Europe-trip-period—his self-denominated “Stone Age”—Mariátegui was best described as part of the bohemian movement in Peru. Sadness, loneliness, boredom, tiredness, and monotony were constant themes in his cultural commentary. His rebelliousness took the largely elitist form of épater le bourgeois, whose stultifying mediocrity drowned out all passion and ambition. Mariátegui was only later to find a resignification of his cultural practice in a popular and collectivist key.

It was during his Italian period (1919–1923) that Mariátegui engaged fully with contemporary cultural debates. This interaction with the cultural vanguard was very different in nature from that with the literary establishment in Peru, which, in ways that have continued to the present day, engaged only in the aesthetic dimension. Mariátegui’s debates with the socialist realism current were, by contrast, intensely political. He was firmly opposed to what he saw as its reductionism and its mimetic-reproduction approach to art. In Italy he also engaged closely with the futurist movement, in particular the work of Marinetti, later to be co-opted by Mussolini’s fascists. In Gabriele D’Annunzio, poet and “professional provocateur,” he found, as Melis (1999: 202) notes, “a dominance of music, rhythm, and form, a predisposition toward the new, which could also tilt toward the left.” Mariátegui recognized that fascism took on a D’Annunzian flavor but insisted that D’Annunzio was not a fascist. After Mariátegui’s death one critique leveled at him was that he was a “D’Annunzian Marxist.”

It is worth looking in some detail at the way in which Mariátegui engaged with Filippo Tomasso, Marinetti, and futurism more generally. Their emphasis was on speed, technology, youth, and violence. The main images of futurism that captivated Mariátegui were the city, the automobile, and the airplane. Mariátegui (1982: 115) argued that “futurism is not—like cubism, expressionism, and Dadaism—only an art vanguard school or tendency. . . . More than an attempt to build a new art form, it has represented an effort to destroy old art. It has aspired to be not only a movement for artistic renewal. It has tried to be practically a philosophy.” Marinetti eventually abandoned the communist future he once envisaged to embrace the fascist one. For Mariátegui the issues of culture were always political; he was a precursor of cultural politics in that sense. His engagement with the writers and artists of the 1920s shows the wide range of his interests in politics and culture, ranging from Maxim Gorki and Anatole Lunacharsky, Leon Trotsky, and George Grosz to Bernard Shaw and James Joyce, all of whom he wrote about with great insight for a Peruvian audience.

Many readers are struck by the fact that the longest essay in the Siete ensayos is on literature, but his interest in culture was very similar to that of Gramsci, who dedicated many of his Prison Notebooks to cultural themes (Gramsci, 1985), and in many ways they both prefigured the contemporary concern with cultural materialism. They both rejected the ivory-tower model of the artist and saw the deep imbrication of culture and politics. They engaged with cultural and artistic currents of the day such as futurism and surrealism, fully recognizing their relative autonomy and thus rejecting any class reductionism. As against the Soviet orthodoxies of the day, they believed in pluralism regarding art and culture and would not entertain the idea of a “party line.” For Mariátegui, art in some way prefigured the utopian element of the socialist project. After his death there was a turn toward a much more instrumental approach to art in communist ideology, with anything deemed experimental seen as against the imperatives of the political struggle.

When Mariátegui returned to Peru in 1923 he began to engage with cultural politics in a quite different way than in his pre-Europe period. He began a systematic critical review of Peruvian literature and launched the influential politico-cultural journal Amauta. Here avant- garde experimentalism was married to an ongoing engagement with the politics of Peruvian culture, not least, of course, the various indigenista currents. Writers and poets from a whole variety of perspectives contributed to Amauta, but for Mariátegui the purpose was clearly part of a conscious cultural politics, aimed toward building a counterhegemony in Peru (although he did not use Gramsci’s term). A highly revealing, aspect of Mariátegui’s engagement with popular culture was his attitude toward religion, which scandalized the traditionally atheist Marxists of his day. In his Siete ensayos he went beyond his earlier cautious critique of anticlericalism as a “liberal bourgeois deviation” to argue that it “was wrong to preach antireligiosity. Nowadays we know more about religion. . . . We know that a revolution is always religious. . . . It matters little that the Soviets wrote in their propaganda that ‘religion is the opium of the masses.’ Communism is essentially religious” (Mariátegui, 1979 [1928]: 140).

Of the many cultural engagements that Mariátegui had in the 1920s in Peru and in Latin America more broadly, the one that stands out was in relation to the struggle between “cosmopolitans” and “nativists.” Mariátegui became involved in one of its manifestations in Argentina, the debate around the literary magazine Martín Fierro (named after the national gaucho epic), which attracted contributors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Leopoldo Lugones between 1924 and 1927. Writing in 1927, Mariátegui noted a “bit of embourgeoisement” in the magazine compared with the brave note it had set at the start, “following a spiritual need of the old economic and political order to repudiate the iconoclasm of the past in the name of a reverent subservience to the present” (Mariátegui, 1980b: 115). Futurism had decayed into a complacent presentism, though overall he still believed that Martin Fierro “without doubt [fulfilled] a revolutionary function” in the literary and artistic life of Argentina and Hispanic America. He agreed with Borges, writing in the magazine, that “Madrid does not understand us. Only by breaking with the metropolis will Nuestra América begin to discover its personality and create its own destiny” (117).

Mariátegui’s centering of the cultural domain is a key to his politics, in particular his drive to build a general cultural hegemony for socialism among the broad masses. This cultural politics is of course bound by the context of the 1920s, and there is now a new context set by globalization (see García Canclini, 1999) and the debates on hybridity, etc. What the editors of Gramsci’s cultural writings say in this regard may also be seen as applicable to Mariátegui: “For socialists of his generation, culture largely meant literature and education—which the working classes were to make their own, wresting them from the hands of the bourgeoisie” (Gramsci, 1978: 13). Culture for the two activist thinkers, Gramsci and Mariátegui, acted as a bridge between the worlds of arts and politics, and they tended to operate within the restrictive Marxist vocabulary of an economic “base” and a political/cultural “superstructure” instead of seeing them as inextricably linked.

Decolonial Thinking

One of the best-known of Mariátegui’s proclamations was “We do not want American socialism to be a copy or an imitation. It should be a heroic creation. We must give life to Indo-American socialism with our own life and in our own language” (Mariátegui, 2000: 51). Does this type of statement mean that we can place Mariátegui as an early exponent of decolonial thinking? Anibal Quijano (2000), who has been a thought leader on the “coloniality of power” problematic, argues, as a presenter and popularizer of Mariátegui, that this is indeed the case (see also Germaná, 2018). For Quijano (2010: ix), Mariátegui’s epistemological perspective represents “a mode of thinking, of researching and knowing, that is constituted by the unity in tension between two paradigms that the dominant culture—the Eurocentric form of modernity—has separated and opposed to one another: the logos and the myth.” It was this outlook that allowed Mariátegui to avoid the pitfalls of both positivism and rationalism and led him toward the creation of a new paradigm.

Underlying this new paradigm were the vision and the counterpositions articulated by the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó (1900) in Ariel, which was based on Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, with its protagonists Caliban, enslaved and dispossessed, and Ariel, the spirit of light. For Rodó and the Arielist cultural current in the early 1900s, Ariel personified the spiritual and idealist aspect of Latin America, contrasted with the base Caliban, who personified the materialism and utilitarianism of the empire to the north. This was clearly a vision that could be incorporated into conservative thinking in Latin America, but it could also be interpellated by the radical currents known as “Arielist Marxism,” of which, according to Néstor Kohan (2000), Mariátegui was a prime exponent. Against all forms of determinism and economism, Arielism creates a new cultural matrix and an ethical reading of Marxism in the new world. This was, in fact, a view articulated half a century later by the Cuban poet and cultural worker Roberto Fernández Retamar (1989 [1971]). With Fernández Retamar we find Ariel firmly recovered for the progressive tradition as a Gramscian type of organic intellectual of the subaltern classes.

Mariátegui, however, was by no means a “nativist” who exalted the national to the detriment of the international cultural domain. Thus, in a critique of the call by Alfredo Palacios for a new Hispano-American knowledge paradigm, he criticized the “excessive and tropical temperaments” that place “an exorbitant value on the potential of Hispano-American thinking” (Mariátegui, 1980b: 56). For Mariátegui, Palacios had taken too literally the “decline of the West” thesis of Spengler and therefore rejected all theories or ideas derived from the old European cultures. Mariátegui, for his part, argued that, while it was correct for America to seek out and teach new truths to the world, European cultures were by no means exhausted or paralyzed and remained a fount of universal knowledge (Mariátegui, 1981). The “decline of the West” meant for him the crisis of a particular economic and political model, and even then there was an ever-present potential for renewal. Overall, we might judge that Mariátegui’s decolonial thinking was not incompatible with his cosmopolitanism. The same might be said about the interaction between nationalism and internationalism in his political philosophy.

Marxist theories of nationalism and internationalism have tended to operate as though these terms were counterposed; they are certainly seen as distinct paradigms. For Mariátegui (1959: 50), rather, “we cannot deduce mathematically where nationalism ends and internationalism begins.” Somewhat cryptically, he added, “Nationalism is valid as an affirmation but not as a negation [of internationalism]” (51). Nationalism, he argued, “has the same value as provincialism, of regionalism in previous eras. It is a regionalism of a new style.” Against a common tendency to place Mariátegui in the “national Marxism” genre, I would stress that he placed nationalism in the same category as “chauvinism, fascism, imperialism, etc.” Thus for Mariátegui “reactionaries” called internationalism a “utopia,” but for him internationalism was a more realist and far less “romantic” outlook than they portrayed it: “internationalism is not only an idea, a feeling; it is, above all, a historical fact. . . . Ideas, passions, they propagate speedily, fluidly, universally.”

When Mariátegui presented the first issue of the new cultural magazine Amauta in 1923, he stated that it would “always consider Peru within a global panorama” (Mariátegui, 1981: 99). Decolonial thinking did not mean isolationism or the exaltation of cultural nativism. It was always a dialogue of knowledges that he sought, placing indigenous American knowledge on a par with all others. He acknowledged a dual heritage from Western culture—Marx primarily but also Sorel and the futurists—and indigenous Andean culture. Mariátegui was part of—and encouraged—what he saw as the “new generation” that had emerged in Peru after World War I. This generation set itself the ambitious task of constructing the Peruvian nation, not least in a cultural sense. The recovery and transformation of precolonial cultures was seen as essential to this task, as was the incorporation of the indigenous masses.

In terms of the international debates on postcolonialism, Mariátegui is not considered a central figure, partly, we might assume, because of the generally Anglocentric nature of this discourse. One signal exception is the influential volume Postcolonialism, by Robert Young (2001: 197), which dedicates quite a few pages to Mariátegui,“one of the most nuanced and innovative Marxist political and cultural theorists of his time.” I have in fact shown that to be the case, I hope, and here I should end by stressing that Mariátegui was also an early theorist of “difference,” with his antidogmatism leading him to analyze and understand the specificity of Peru and Indo-America more broadly. Mariátegui’s critique of Western reason led him to become an early critic of Eurocentrism, including within Marxism itself. Where this approach took on life and had a profound influence was in relation to the indigenous question.

Centering the Indigenous

When Mariátegui returned to Peru from Italy in 1923, a wave of indigenous uprisings had just subsided. In 1921 the population of Tocroyoc had called for the expulsion of the hacendados and the mistis (mestizos) but also for the restoration of Tahuantinsuyu. These rebellions were part of a long cycle of sporadic indigenous resistance to colonialism and often had a messianic or millenarian character. Mariátegui attended one of the congresos de la raza (race congresses) organized by indigenous leaders on his return. There he met with one of their leaders, Ezequiel Urviola, according to Flores Galindo (1986: 45) “a true new Indian (nuevo indio), a rebel, defender of his culture but capable of assimilating the best elements of the West.” Mariátegui now began a serious research program based on official documents but also on oral testimony. A new phase in his thinking and action opened.

Mariátegui expressed his early thoughts on the “indigenous question” in the collection of articles in Peruanicemos al Perú (Mariátegui, 1981), the title of which expresses well his intention on returning to the country. Referring to the indigenous people’s congress he had attended, he declared (46) that

the indigenous congresses do not yet represent a program, but they do already represent a movement. They indicate that the Indians are beginning to acquire a collective consciousness of their situation. . . . A people of four million, conscious of its numbers, never despairs of its fate: these same four million, while they are but an inorganic mass, a dispersed multitude, are incapable of decoding their historic path.

From then on Mariátegui would work tirelessly with the indigenous movements to construct a new worker-indigenous-peasant alliance that could forge a counterhegemony while also constructing the Peruvian nation, with Inca culture and religion playing a key role in that process.

It was in the Siete ensayos that Mariátegui outlined his mature thinking on the indigenous question and set it in the context of Marxist theory. He discussed the specific nature of the Peruvian social formation through an approach that prefigured, to some extent, the dependency approach of the 1960s, especially its critique of dualism: “All the theses around the indigenous question that ignore or seek to circumvent this socioeconomic frame are condemned to absolute discredit” (Mariátegui, 1979 [1928]: 56). The indigenous question was also a land question for Mariátegui, and he castigated all the liberal, moral, and humanistic readings in the indigenist discourse. What was most original perhaps was his recovery of preconquest modes of reciprocity and mutuality in the indigenous communities that could prefigure the socialist future. Reclaiming these revolutionary traditions and translating them into the present conjuncture were key tasks for him.

In 1929 Mariátegui, by then leader of the PSP, sent to a regional Comintern congress held in Buenos Aires a document (cowritten with Hugo Pesce) entitled “El problema de las razas en América Latina” (Mariátegui, 1978). The analysis contained in these theses was a codification of the Siete ensayos approach set in a more Marxist idiom and broader in continental scope. It noted that “an indigenous revolutionary consciousness may take time to form; but once the Indians have made the socialist ideas theirs, they will serve it with a discipline, tenacity, and strength that few proletarians elsewhere could match” (Mariátegui, 1978: 46). Furthermore, “it is imperative to give the indigenous or black proletariat, be it agrarian or industrial, a clear-cut class struggle character.” These formulations fell foul of the plans of the Third International (represented by the Italian-Argentine Vittorio Codovilla), for which the very term “Peruvian reality” was anathema, focused as it was on the somewhat reductionist “semicolonial” category for the whole of Latin America and then advocating self-determination for indigenous peoples.

Mariátegui was part of an intellectual generation for which indigenism was crucial but in very different ways. Inca communism was in many ways an empty signifier onto which different classes or political currents could inscribe different meanings. There was a paternalist indigenism that preached the integration of the indigenous peoples through education, an official, rhetorical indigenism, a sentimental culturalist reading, and, finally, a radical indigenism focused on the contesting of exploitation and oppression through self-emancipation (Mazzeo, 2013: 245). Mariátegui came to his indigenism through Marxism, and, as he put it, the Inca past was “claimed not by the traditionalists but by the revolutionaries” (Mariátegui, 1978: 121). Today we see paternalist, official, sentimental, and radical indigenisms taking up political positions that can be related to Mariátegui’s thought.

Mariátegui obviously understood that the 1920s indigenous revolts could not return Peru to the days of the Inca Empire. Likewise, sumak kawsay and suma qamaña in the 2020s recognize that there will be no simple return to the agrarian communism of the Inca era, but in both cases politics and not a utopia is at the core of the debates. When Mariátegui returned to Peru in 1923 he engaged closely with leaders of the revolts and with indigenist intellectuals. He was conscious of the ongoing resistance of the indigenous communities, the longue durée of social struggles going back to the era of the conquest. In 1923 an indigenous congress was held in Lima that brought some of the concrete demands ensuing from these struggles into the open. These included defense of the community, adequate schooling, abolition of free labor, and freedom of assembly and religion, all within a strong antifeudal frame (Flores Galindo, 2010: 181). Today we can look at the programs of the various instances of buen vivir and see that the programs for action and demands for indigenous autonomy are the concrete manifestations of the ongoing indigenous resistance to colonization and exploitation.

Today, of course, the indigenous question is central to the theory and practice of Andean socialism. A link between Mariátegui and the current conjuncture is perhaps the work of Flores Galindo (1986), strongly influenced by Mariátegui. The legendary Túpac Amaru and Mariátegui were, for Flores Galindo, indispensable guides for radical transformation in the Andes and for the creation of alternative visions that looked to the future through the lens of the precolonial past. Against all forms of messianic leadership, Flores Galindo channeled Mariátegui to declare that “to avoid dictatorship, revolutions cast workers as the true protagonists. It had to spring from the interior of the country and Marxism had to find expression in Quechua” (Flores Galindo, 2010: 193). It was not the providential leader who would create a utopian future but only the creative energy and innovation of mass politics.

Beyond Jacobinism

Mariátegui has sometimes been accused on the Leninist left of not having “a strategy for power,” but what that really means is that he held a firmly anti-Jacobinist conception of the workers’ party. It was not a question of acting on behalf of the masses; they had to seize the moment themselves. In this he was more in touch with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for whom “the communists’ party will not oppose other working-class parties, but unlike them, will express the general will and defend the common interests of the world’s proletariat as a whole” (Marx and Engels, 1975: 56). While he was an admirer of Lenin and not explicitly opposed to the Leninist conception of the party as the enlightened vanguard of the proletariat, it is not clear how engaged he was in practical terms with the politics of the Comintern. As in other aspects of his political writings and actions, Mariátegui operated on the terrain of “practical socialism.” In his Defensa del marxismo, he was very clear: “We Marxists do not believe that the enterprise of creating a new social order, superior to the capitalist order, falls on an amorphous mass of pariahs and oppressed, guided by evangelical preachers of good” (Mariátegui, 1987: 60).

Mariátegui’s early formation–—his “flirtation” (although it was much more than this) with the syndicalism of Sorel and the free-thinking of the futurists—inclined him to a noncentralist view of the worker’s party. The party he founded in 1928 was self-consciously not inscribed within the logic of the Third International and the (in)famous “21 conditions” that dictated what a communist party in any part of the world should or should not do (see Claudin, 1976). It was not surprising that the 1929 conference of the Latin American communists severely criticized him for not simply signing onto the “Marxist-Leninist” principles it had established. As Antonio Melis (1999: 214) notes, it was not so much that Mariátegui’s party was called “socialist” and not “communist” as that “the South American Bureau of the Komintern realized the novelty of the Peruvian party and sought to exorcise it.” Against vanguardist or Jacobinist conceptions of the party, Mariátegui articulated what was essentially a Gramscian vision for the Andean countries of building hegemony across the broad masses.

Mariátegui’s comrades at the Buenos Aires conference insisted that conditions in Peru did not allow for the formation of a classical Leninist political party, but they were given short shrift. As José Aricó (2018: 302) notes, “the formation of communist parties of the European type was unachievable and often had a counterproductive effect.” At most, they would gather a few workers to join what was essentially an intellectual and student-based party. The demand to “proletarianize” these parties—by which the Comintern meant “Bolshevize” or bring under its rigid control—would only increase the tendency toward sectarianism. Unlike Gramsci, Mariátegui was not an active participant in the affairs of the Third International, and for him it was simply an unattractive and unrealizable project that it was proposing. Nor did Mariátegui accept the sudden change in Comintern policy from the 1924–1928 understanding of the relative stabilization of capitalism (and hence the need for a “united front”) to a “class against class” perspective in which noncommunist currents would be treated in a sectarian manner (see Ferreyra, 2005).

The second document that the Peruvian communists presented to the 1929 Buenos Aires conference was entitled “Punto de vista anti-imperialista” (Mariátegui, 1978). This was particularly significant given the defeat of the Chinese revolution in 1927 and the confidence the Comintern had placed in the nationalist Kuomintang (which some compared to the APRA). There had been a long-standing debate within the international communist movement on the alliances that their parties might build with the “national bourgeoisie” in colonial and semicolonial countries. Mariátegui, however, never managed to discern a “national bourgeoisie” committed to development and a national-democratic revolution in Peru as demanded by the increasingly dogmatic Comintern. In this second document Mariátegui and his comrades were very clear that “we are anti-imperialists because we are Marxists, because we are revolutionaries, because we oppose capitalism with socialism . . . because in our struggle against foreign imperialism we fulfill our duties of solidarity with the revolutionary masses of Europe” (Mariátegui, 1978: 95). Where the leadership of the Comintern saw the signs of deviation in this document was in its essentially “Trotskyist” critique of the national-democratic nature of the revolution in accordance with the Comintern’s rigid stages theory of history (see Caballero, 1987; Becker, 2006).

The confrontation in Buenos Aires between the Peruvian delegation and the Comintern authorities brought to the fore political differences but also signaled the independence of Mariátegui’s political orientation. It is well to remember that this was the so-called Third Period (1928–1934), in which a “class against class” politics was enforced that saw reformism as a worse enemy for communists than the bourgeoisie. This dogmatism meant that Mariátegui’s relative openness to alliances with the APRA would be condemned, along with his formation of a broad-based socialist party as against a “proletarian” communist party under orders from the Comintern. The clash over the Comintern’s call for independent Quechua and Aymará republics was due to an unthinking application of the Russian “right of nations to self-determination” policy to the very different reality of Peru, where for Mariátegui the nation was still in formation. What galled the Comintern most was the Peruvian delegation’s stance’s being based on “Peruvian reality,” the very notion of which it rejected in favor of the generic category of “semicolonial” applicable equally in Argentina and Mexico as in Peru or Bolivia. Overall, beyond the particulars of the debate, was the refusal of Mariátegui to submit to a domineering framework that was at one and the same time ultraleft in its refusal to build hegemony across the broad masses and underpinned by a continued adherence to a stages model of history that it would return to openly after 1934. Significantly, the documents presented in Buenos Aires by the Peruvian delegation did not appear in Mariátegui’s collected works until 1969, and then only in an incomplete version.

Mariátegui also had what we might call a complicated relationship with the APRA and Haya de la Torre, but essentially his differences were similar to those with the Comintern in terms of his rejection of Jacobinism, the notion of the vanguard party not tied to the masses. Mariátegui was a member of the APRA for some time and shared with its charismatic leader an understanding that the Peruvian nation was “a concept to be created,” that the indigenous peoples would be the motor of social transformation, and that the democratic revolution would not mirror European patterns. He broke with Haya de la Torre when the latter, in a typically Jacobinist measure, announced the transformation of a united front into a political party and called for immediate armed struggle. For Mariátegui, as Aricó (2018: 284) puts it, the priority had to be the construction of a “bottom-up” movement that would represent an “eruption in political life on the national scene of an autonomous social movement homogenized by a myth of regeneration of the Peruvian nation, capable of constituting a collective will and becoming a state.”

After the Buenos Aires congress of 1929, Mariátegui had only a short time to live. During that time, he continued the ideological struggle with the APRA and the Comintern but also with those within his own party who were seeking to replace him. His rejection of the Stalinist model of the proletarian party, with its rigid conformity to the international line, does not make him a “reformist” or a Eurocommunist before his time. Mariátegui’s conception of the mass party and his unwavering commitment to the united front were part of his commitment to a socially rooted or embedded socialism. At that stage (the so-called Third Period) the Comintern was favorable to armed struggle, but that struggle had to be in pursuit of Soviets to be considered valid. Mariátegui and his comrades were focused instead on “workers’ municipalities” and “popular militias” in which there was an intelligent tactical articulation between legal work (and the defense of legal space, for example, press freedom) and clandestine praxis. This last engagement by Mariátegui with the politics of political power might also be relevant today as social movements struggle with a new wave of right-wing political regimes in Latin America.

The Meaning of Mariátegui

What meaning might Mariátegui hold for us today in Latin America? When he died, his work was denounced as a deviation from true Marxism. The nationalists of the APRA and the Stalinists of the Communist Party were equally interested in diminishing him and/or co-opting him. He was deemed, among other things, a populist, messianic, proletarianist, indigenist, and a merely cultural figure. The Soviet functionaries Semionov and Shulgovski (1973: 56) extolled his faithfulness to Marxism-Leninism but lamented the fact that in the formation of the Peruvian Communist Party “an opportunist wing, against the transformation of the party into an authentic sole voice of the proletariat, abandoned the Central Committee to form its own party composed of a handful of literati” (i.e., the followers of Mariátegui). Another Soviet writer, V. Miroshevsky, wrote in the Cuban Communist Party journal in 1942 that Mariátegui was not only a “populist” and a “propagandist for petty-bourgeois socialism” but, also, significantly, had suggested that the “indigenous community” could be the starting point for a socialist reorganization of the agrarian structure (Quijano, 2007: lxxxiii).

At the same time, Mariátegui was claimed (and misrepresented) for its own project by the APRA tradition, a position well-articulated by Argentina’s izquierda nacional figure Jorge Abelardo Ramos, for whom Mariátegui was a precursor of the continental “Bolivarian” Patria Grande (today Nuestra América) project, with its emphasis on the national and democratic tasks of the revolution (Ramos, 1973). This was a position later developed by Ernesto Laclau (2014), who worked closely with Ramos in the 1960s even though this took him in a more theoretical direction. There was a more distasteful reaction by some in the APRA itself, who sought to portray Mariategui as a purely intellectual figure as against the “man of action” Haya de la Torre, making ill-disguised references to his physical disabilities (see, for these debates, the contributions gathered in Aricó, 1980). Overall, Mariátegui should probably not be considered a “national” Marxist without also stressing his firm internationalism and commitment to the continental dimension of the socialist project in Latin America.

The Soviet move to bury Mariátegui was quite successful, and it was not until the mid-1960s that his work began to circulate again in Peru as Vanguardia Revolucionaria and other smaller groups took it up. The emphasis was placed on Mariátegui’s open or creative Marxism with a view to engaging it with the current problems of the left. By the late 1960s, however, the dominant Mariátegui revival was the one operated by the Partido Comunista del Perú (Communist Party of Peru—PCP), the Maoist breakaway from the communist party that was to go on to form the Partido Comunista del Peru en el Sendero Luminoso de José Carlos Mariátegui. In Sendero Luminoso’s editions of Mariátegui’s work he became an orthodox Maoist Marxist, a fervent anti-Trotskyist (nothing was farther from the truth in fact), and a defender of the authoritarian proletarian party. As Miguel Mazzeo (2013: 183) writes, “Sendero Luminoso articulated, on the ideological plane, a messianism mixed with dogmatism and, on the political plane, elite ultra-radicalism and the spontaneity of the masses. . . . Utopia became a nightmare.”

Mariátegui’s thought and legacy could not be farther from this nightmare scenario. The main focus of his critique of Marxism was the evolutionist, mechanical, and scientistic version of the Second (Social Democratic) International. Sorel and his theory of the revolutionary “myth” served to translate Marxism into a locally relevant paradigm. What Peru needed, for Mariátegui, was not a theory but a “myth” that would energize and channel the discontent of the masses. For him Marxism was not a doctrine but a set of ideas or tools that would be reinterpreted in the light of Peruvian reality. Against the fatalism of mechanical Marxism (the unfolding of the contradictions of capitalism as an objective process), Mariátegui emphasized the importance of will, agency, and even a messianic politics. In this he was closest to Walter Benjamin, who, according to Michael Löwy (2008: 11)—also, not coincidentally, a Mariátegui scholar—promoted a “historical materialism sensitive to the magical dimension of the cultures of the past, to the ‘dark’ moment of revolt, to the lightning flash that rends the heavens of revolutionary action.”

Mariátegui’s “Peruvian” Marxism centered the indigenous question, and that is probably his main relevance to contemporary Andean politics. In his engagement with the organic intellectuals of the indigenous movements he avoided all nativist readings of the revolts of the 1920s. But against the prevailing wisdom of the Comintern he understood that there was a cultural dimension to the “indigenous question” that could not just be reduced to a “class question.” The Indian was a peasant but also, undeniably, indigenous. Socialism in Peru (and in Latin America) would be indigenous or it would not be socialism. As Miguel Mazzeo (2013: 206) puts it, “socialism, Andean utopia and myth intervene to denounce the existing order and announce a new order, emerging as dream and desire at the heart of historical conflictedness.” In this way Mariátegui is at one with contemporary moves toward prefigurative socialism based on communities and practices of reciprocity in the past.

Finally, Mariátegui was as far as he could possibly be from traditional Marxist economism; his was an Arielist Marxism (Kohan, 2000), providing a cultural matrix for transformation. This Marxism opposed to Shakespeare’s Caliban (capitalist imperialism) was based on Ariel’s spirit of the air. In the pages of Amauta Mariátegui sought to bring together artistic and political praxis. His engagement with the European cultural vanguards of the 1920s continued in Peru. Amauta was a project of accumulating cultural and political energies, and, as Flores Galindo (1880: 147) puts it, “it represented a magical movement of synthesis that has maybe not been repeated since, at that level, in the whole of Latin America.” When cultural and political vanguards are at odds, it is impossible to develop a Mariátegui-inspired socialism or build a counterhegemonic force to the dominant order of capitalism, imperialism (see Beigel, 2003, for pursuit of this argument).

In conclusion, Mariátegui’s Marxism, anything but dogmatic or a mechanical schema of historical evolution, was brought to the fore in Latin America in the mid-1990s (Fernandes, 1995; Guibal, 1995) and then became a flourishing current after 2000 (Beigel, 2003; Mazzeo, 2013) (for its reception in English, see Vanden, 1986, and Becker, 1993). He would have firmly endorsed Gramsci’s (1971) critique of Bukharin’s manual of Marxist sociology. For him, as for Georg Lukács, Marxism was not a fully formed system of thought but, as Lukács (1968: 1) wrote in 1919, “refers exclusively to method” for critical analysis. For me, anyway, the abiding thought, in Mariátegui’s own words, is that it is not the “isolated shout” or “the perfect idea, absolute, abstract, indifferent to the facts of life, changing and moving reality” that counts but “the germinal idea, concrete, dialectical, rich in power and capable of movement” (Mariátegui, 1928: 2). This is perhaps his best contribution to twenty-first-century socialism in Latin America as it seeks to reconstruct and rearm after the decline of the post-2000 progressive governments.