Revisiting Marxism in José Carlos Mariátegui

Mike Gonzalez, professor emeritus of Latin American studies at the University of Glasgow and the author of The Ebb of the Pink Tide (2019) and Hugo Chávez: Socialist for the Twenty-first Century (2014), takes us on a tour of Peru at the beginning of the twentieth century through the mind and actions of José Carlos Mariátegui. In its 10 chapters, In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui delves into the life of a Latin American who is considered one of the most original and innovative Marxists in the region and the world. Mariátegui was an organic intellectual who found congruence and coherence in a Gramscian (1981) philosophy of praxis of which the journal Amauta and the Frente Popular (Popular Front) were clear examples. Despite the complexity of the events of Mariátegui’s life, Gonzales details them simply, beginning with his early years in Peru and continuing with his tour of Europe and finally his return. The book introduces the Anglophone reader to the importance of the little-known Mariátegui, exploring his ideas and his life and showing the genius with which he read and interpreted the work of intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Georges Sorel, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Antonio Labriola, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky, among others.

As John Beverley (1999) has argued in a decolonial (postcolonial) reading, Mariátegui developed an innovative, original, heterodox Marxism. By shifting the leading figures of orthodox Marxism, Beverley causes us to reflect on the power and validity of Mariátegui’s breaking with the colonial pattern that considers Western thought leaders the sole source of knowledge, a form of colonization in times of globalization. The problem of the coloniality of knowledge is the naturalization and imposition of Western knowledge on every society, disregarding the heterogeneity of productive economies in, among other things, productive capacity, resources, and culture (Walsh, 2012). In fact, the reception of Gramsci’s thought in the Global South is understood by decolonial thinkers such as Lander (2003) as part of the Eurocentric culture that has made the continuation of native culture impossible (Quijano, 1992). The question then arises, Why import ideas when the Latin American thought—not only Marxism—offers categories and concepts more in line with Latin American reality?

Gonzalez starts his work by pointing to the links between Mariátegui and Marx, the importance, relevance, and validity of his thought on myth, and the move from the myth of progress to the myth of revolution and change, stressing the way Marxist revolutionary discourse fell into disuse or was discredited. He outlines Mariátegui’s idea about myth in his “El hombre y el mito,” published in Mundial of Lima in 1925 and reproduced in Amauta (No. 31) in 1930. Gonzalez quotes Mariátegui (1925: 2): “Man, as philosophy defines him, is a metaphysical animal. He does not live productively without a metaphysical conception of life. Myth moves man throughout history. Without myth, the existence of man lacks historical meaning.” Here Mariátegui employs the notion of myth to define a spiritual climate, a pathos. Myth is the space for action, for gathering the necessary force to act in favor of change. Mariátegui (1925: 4) continues: “What most clearly and truly differentiates the bourgeoisie and proletariat in this stage has to do with myth. The bourgeoisie by now is lacking in myths. It has become incredulous, skeptical, nihilistic. The liberal, renaissance myth has aged excessively. The proletariat does have a myth: that of social revolution. Regarding that myth, it moves vehemently and actively.” According to Gonzalez (7),

Marx said it very clearly: a universal future can only be forged by a universal class, a class that does not require inequality and exploitation for its very existence, a class whose consciousness is forged in collaboration and community rather than competition and individualism. This was what Marx meant by the “proletariat,” those who have nothing to lose but their chains.

Thus for Mariategui the revolution had to be significant for the different sectors of the proletariat in the context of the particular cultural history embodied in the notion of myth (14). The idea of myth, the idea that the universal future could only be forged by the universal class that Marx described, had been discredited and misused, questioned, and by some sectors of the intellectual right vilified, but resistance, questioning, and alternative proposals persisted. A century later, in relation to the myth of social transformation, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri developed the concept of the “multitude” (Negri et al., 2008), an emerging, changing and unstable class in the global environment, but they did not indicate what instruments should be forged to fight against the global force. Indeed, they argued that the industrial working class no longer played a hegemonic role in the global economy. Instead of silent oppressed masses there was a new subject that formed a spontaneous crowd capable of forging a democratic alternative.

Another example that Gonzalez links to the idea of myth in Mariátegui is the revolutionary uprising that emerged in southern Mexico under Zapatismo in Chiapas, where, in the words of John Holloway, the task was “changing the world without taking power” or “commanding by obeying,” emphasizing the thinking that Mariátegui had outlined in the 1920s. However, how could coordination and solidarity—both concepts at the heart of Mariáteguist thought—be achieved between self-isolated units within a region or nation, much less within a global system? The Zapatista movement is in fact nourished by solidarity and coordination built from below and from the community to achieve change. The idea of myth, a concept drawn from Georges Sorel, allowed Mariátegui to address the significance of ideas and cultural and historical memory in shaping the consciousness of the multitude, “the protagonist of the social revolution” (76). Different from Hardt and Negri’s idea of the multitude, Mariátegui’s term came from Marx and Engels’s concept of the masses of the proletariat.

According to Gonzalez, Mariátegui showed that Marxism, “as it evolved, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, had also enclosed itself within the universalization of the European experience, or taken refuge in a theory disengaged from practice. The different representatives of the revolutionary tradition, meanwhile, fought one another for dominance across the world and as a result weakened the movement” (7). Mariátegui had demonstrated 50 years earlier the central points of the variegated (abigarrada) society (a concept developed by the Bolivian René Zavaleta Mercado in the framework of structuralist theories of development)—the heterogeneity of the social, ethnic, economic, and cultural particularities within the same nation-state (Elbirt, 2015)— that confirmed the validity of the revolutionary myth. Who better than Mariátegui to make us understand that his Marxism was embedded in reality, dialectical and based on praxis instead of discursive monoliths? At the Second Workers’ Congress in 1927, he said, “Marxism, of which all speak but few know or above all comprehend, is a fundamentally dialectical method, a method completely based in reality, on facts. It isn’t, as some erroneously suppose, a body of principles with rigid consequences, the same for all historical climates and all social latitudes. . . . Marx extracted his method from the guts of history” (12, quoting Yepes, 1971: 41–42). Gonzalez shows us an innovative Marxist Latin American with a deep knowledge of Marxist dialectic and the possibility of revolutionary change, emphasizing that Mariátegui “resisted the idea that there was a single copy-paste model for revolution, a formula for organization that all should follow yet that had emerged out of very different economic and social conditions” (13).

Mariátegui, beyond having read some of the works of Marx, created an intellectual syncretism with one of his passions, art and literature, in what he described as his “Stone Age” (his first writings). Drawing on Marinetti’s futurism and the literary modernism of John Dos Passos and Marcel Proust, Mariátegui was undoubtedly avant-garde, and this made him a creative and original Marxist with impressive vitality and validity that sustain his relevance for students in the social sciences worldwide in the twenty-first century. Just as Rosa Luxemburg criticized the use of isolated texts of Marx to justify conjunctural political positions and understood that the development of Marxism occurred from the analysis of reality itself, Mariátegui insisted on interpreting the spirit of Marx rather than the letter (Ouviña, 2021). In his 1928 text “Esquema de una explicación de Chaplin” (Baeza, 1982: 425), in which he reflected on and celebrated cinema as an antiaesthetic and radically democratic form of art, he said that the tragicomic films of the English actor were enjoyed, “with the same relish, by learned and illiterate, by literati and boxers.” Mariátegui in Amauta also carried out a critical review of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer in which he described the growing metropolis as “the giant and cosmopolitan city, the most monumental North American creation” (Mariátegui, 1929).

In his second chapter, “Learning Is Trade: Mariátegui’s Stone Age,” Gonzalez immerses us in the remoteness of Moquegua as Juan Rulfo does in his novel Pedro Páramo, beginning the chapter with “Moquegua is 15,000 kilometers south of Lima.” By simply pronouncing the name of the town of Mariátegui’s birth, he conveys the image of an inhospitable territory like the deserts referenced by Rulfo. He goes on to reconstruct a panorama of the Peru of his time, with great inequalities between the coast and the mountains and booming foreign investment (as extractive enclaves and with a high component of semifeudal exploitation of labor) focused on mining and the export of guano and rubber. His description of the national context shows us a young Mariátegui eager to understand the reality in which his compatriots lived. He migrated to the capital and managed to become part of the Bohemian literary circles of the time. This and his work on the newspaper La Prensa (Wiesse, 1959: 12) provided him with the necessary tools for solving a mental puzzle that would crystallize years later in the Colónida group and then Amauta and the Siete ensayos.

A decisive part of Mariátegui’s “intellectual core” was his trip to Europe. Beyond his participation in the Italian workers’ debates of 1919, he was living at a peak time, with hope and revolution in the air, and undoubtedly assimilated to it (43):

He was present at the founding conference of the Italian Communist Party in Livorno in 1921 and learned much of his Marxism during this period. Through the prism of the Italy of the factory occupations as well as of Benedetto Croce and Piero Gobetti, Mariátegui participated in the great debates that absorbed the socialist movement in the wake of 1917.

This way of thinking provided the groundwork for what would later become the course on the world crisis that he taught at the Universidad Popular in his native Peru.

Mariátegui’s experience in Peruvian newspapers, Italian newspapers such as El Tiempo, magazines such as Mundial, and debates in the Colónida were fundamental to his establishment of Amauta, which became a key part of the Frente Popular—an essential tool for creating criticism and debate, providing shared ideas for a knowledge of Peruvian reality, and producing class consciousness and/or a “historical bloc” (Portelli, 1998: 12). Mariátegui was a self-taught student from a Europe (in particular an Italy) that was interested in the futurism of Tommaso Marinetti and cautious but knowledgeable about the Italian poet and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio and also a participant observer of the occupations of Italian factories under the labor movements. Gonzalez details the Europe (with special emphasis on Italy) that Mariátegui knew, contextualizing what L’Ordine Nuovo ¹ was for the labor movements in their organization and dissemination of news and ideas—which later Mariátegui, would replicate with Amauta. Always seeking to avoid reproducing in Peru a cut-and-paste copy of the European experience, Mariátegui was nonetheless aware of the potential power of an organized and militant labor movement with a revolutionary newspaper contributing to its development.

Upon returning to Peru via Guayaquil, Mariátegui was able, through Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and with the support of President Augusto Leguía, to establish the Universidad Popular Manuel González Prada, directed specifically at worker education (64). At the university an experienced and knowledgeable worker’s movement began to learn about the “history of the world crisis,” and Mariátegui had the opportunity to interact with a mainly working-class audience. Of this opportunity to put into practice the philosophy of praxis he said: “The working class is not a spectator to these events; it is an actor in them” (65). Gonzalez points out, however, that at the time the working class was not the majority, since strong semifeudal and peasant relations persisted.

Part of the debate between Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre focused on the latter’s belief that it was the middle class that was the object of revolutionary change in Peru, since its members had more to lose with imperialism than the workers and peasants, who were receiving higher wages working for the foreign companies that had settled in the countryside. In his “intuitive” analysis he overlooked the fact that 75 percent of the population in the first half of the twentieth century were indigenous (Matos, 1990) and had no voice or vote. It was Mariátegui who pointed to the fact that servile indigenous and other semifeudal forms of production persisted on the haciendas of Peru. In 1960 the latifundios (capitalist and traditional farms) owned more than half of the fertile land in Peru, with 10,402 farms, compared with 807,000 units of family exploitation (Matos, 1990). Consequently, the peasants continued to be subjected to the landowner’s law, and as indigenous peoples they were confined to free but marginalized communities. Thus, Mariátegui’s considering the peasantry and indigenous peoples as agents of change in a Peru still trapped in semifeudal conditions emerged from Haya de la Torre’s idea. Gonzalez presents a Mariátegui with a broad awareness of the reality of a world in which the problems of workers were largely shared in the North and the South.

In the three years between the founding of the Universidad Popular and the founding of Amauta, health problems did not dampen Mariátegui’s spirits; on the contrary, he seemed to be working against the clock on both Amauta and Labor and on the consolidation of a movement beyond the working class (103). Gonzalez addresses the various topics he was discussing at the time, among them mining, the Mexican Revolution, the importance of the political organization Frente Único, myth, socioeconomic issues, the structure of indigenous reality, interpreting Peru, and the use of the Marxist-dialectical method.

Gonzalez ‘s articulation of Mariátegui’s life and work offers the reader intimate knowledge of the sociopolitical processes that framed them. In addition to this, he points to parallels between important concepts such as myth and the Frente Popular, in which “supra structures” such as culture or religion played an important role. He discusses the idea of Inca socialism, reflected in the ayllu, which for some amounts to a nostalgic Inca romanticism and for others more an Asian mode of production (135). Throughout this work we see how original Mariátegui’s use of Marxism was in his interpretation of Peruvian reality.

In general, this book serves as a good introduction to one of the greatest Latin American Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, but it has its shortcomings. For example, it overlooks writings by Latin Americans who have approached Mariátegui clearly and rigorously such as Néstor Kohan (2014), Miguel Mazzeo (1995), and Fernanda Beigel (2005). Beigel unravels the role of the various “Mariáteguisms,” the institutional crystallizations of Marxism-Leninism, the secular revisions of the 1960s, and the restoration of Latin American thought in the 1990s—in short, the knots that tie together this complex theoretical and political movement. She looks to 1900–1930 for a political praxis and theory based on Mariategui’s work that offers a counterpoint to the debates Gonzalez discusses.

Finally, calling this book The Marxism of José Carlos Mariáteguí falls short, since it describes in detail Mariátegui’s personal and political lives and the influences from literature, futurism, and journalism that shaped him into a creative innovator who uniquely applied the thought of Karl Marx.