Abstract
José Carlos Mariátegui’s open engagement with Marxist theory and his adaptation of its ideas to his Latin American reality brought him into conflict with other leftists. At a continental conference of communist parties in Buenos Aires in 1929, he criticized the Comintern’s proposal to carve up the Americas into independent African-descent and Quechua and Aymara republics, arguing that conceptualizing the struggle in ethnic rather than class terms was a mistake. From documents preserved in the Comintern archives it appears that these comments had echoes in Moscow. Two newly translated Spanish-language documents on the “national question” challenge notions that Comintern officials were unaware of or ill-informed about developments in Latin America and are important to understanding their responses and challenges to his ideas on race and oppressed nationalities.
El compromiso abierto de José Carlos Mariátegui con la teoría marxista y su adaptación de estas ideas a la realidad latinoamericana lo pusieron en conflicto con otras y otros de la izquierda. En una conferencia continental de partidos comunistas en Buenos Aires en 1929, criticó la propuesta de la Internacional Comunista de dividir las Américas en repúblicas independientes afrodescendientes y quechuas y aymaras, argumentando que conceptualizar la lucha en términos étnicos en lugar de términos de clase era un error. Los documentos conservados en los archivos de la Internacional Comunista sugieren que estos comentarios hicieron eco en Moscú. Dos documentos en español recientemente traducidos en torno a la “cuestión nacional” desafían las nociones de que los funcionarios de la Internacional Comunista no estaban al tanto o estaban mal informados sobre los acontecimientos en América Latina, asunto que resultan importante para comprender sus respuestas y desafíos a las ideas de Mariátegui sobre raza y nacionalidades oprimidas.
José Carlos Mariátegui has justifiably gained renown for his open and dynamic engagement with Marxist theory and his adaptation of those ideas to his Latin American reality (Chavarría, 1979; Vanden, 1986). His heterodox approach brought him into conflict with other leftists even as he sought to bring his Peruvian socialist party in line with the Moscow-based Communist or Third International (Comintern). These issues and debates were on full display at a continental conference of communist parties that the South American Secretariat of the Comintern convened in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in June 1929 (SSA, 1929). In particular, fellow delegates and Comintern envoys challenged the Peruvians on two issues: the first was Mariátegui’s determination to form a socialist rather than a communist party as the Comintern dictated for admission into the transnational body, and the second was a direct challenge to its proposals to create a Quechua and Aymara republic in South America (Becker, 2006).
This second issue is particularly curious both because Jules Humbert-Droz, the head of the Comintern’s Latin American Bureau in Moscow, had deliberately brought Mariátegui into the discussions on race when seemingly no one else in its inner circles could address the topic properly (Mothes, 1992: 157) and because Mariátegui has subsequently become closely identified with a defense of native rights (Leibner, 1999). At the conference, he criticized the Comintern’s proposal to carve up the Americas into independent African-descent and Quechua and Aymara republics. From his perspective, nation-state formation was far too advanced to think about altering colonial boundaries. Furthermore, and more significant, he contended that conceptualizing the struggle in ethnic rather than class terms was a fundamental mistake. Mariátegui famously wrote in his thesis on racial problems (SSA, 1929: 288), The constitution of the Indian race in an autonomous state would not lead to the dictatorship of the Indian proletariat, much less to the formation of a classless Indian state, as some have claimed, but to the constitution of a bourgeois Indian state with all the internal and external contradictions of the bourgeois states. . . . Only the revolutionary class movement of the exploited Indian masses will allow for them to give a real meaning to the liberation of their race from exploitation.
In Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, Mariátegui (1971 [1928]: 31) had already advanced the materialist claim that the “Indian problem” was fundamentally a socioeconomic problem rooted in the country’s land tenure system and needed to be addressed on that level.
From documents preserved in the Comintern archives it appears that Mariátegui’s comments in Buenos Aires had echoes in Moscow as others scrambled to denounce what they saw as a heretical position on what came to be known as “the national question” (Stalin, 1942). Furthermore, a false and persistent stereotype has emerged of Marxists as class reductionists who privilege economic issues over everything else and in particular minimize or ignore issues of racial discrimination and gendered oppression (Wood, 1986; Reed, 2019). Rather, as debates within the Comintern make crystal clear, issues of racial discrimination were very much at the forefront in the minds of those leaders, although a persistent question was how to overcome what was sometimes denounced as white chauvinism and today is seen as white supremacism. In a sense, these debates foreshadowed what would much later come to be known as “intersectionality” as a way of understanding and challenging the myriad forms of inequality and injustices that pervade society (Crenshaw, 1989; Foley, 2018).
Beginning in the 1970s, activists in the Andes began to conceptualize their struggles as one of rejecting derogatory categorizations of themselves as simply representing “tribes” or “ethnic groups” and instead embraced the conceptualization of nationalities with all that that implied—as possessing their own histories, languages, cultures, and territories (Almeida, 1979). Almost half a century later, militants continue to fight for acknowledgment of their rights, including symbolic recognition such as the capitalization of what had become their preferred term of identification, “Indigenous.” What latter-day activists failed to recognize, however, is that these debates were not new but had grown out of concerns from the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, communist militants had introduced the concept and language of “indigenous nationalities” in the 1920s and kept it alive across the century, even as some leaders bristled at the notion that what had become their key political demand had Marxist roots (Becker, 2008).
These issues are not a distant memory or simply a historical curiosity. As we face a plague of the killing of unarmed black men, from George Floyd in Minneapolis to João Alberto Silveira Freitas in Porto Alegre, they are more present and pressing than ever. Turning back to the way Comintern officials responded almost a century ago to Mariátegui’s ideas on race and nationalism does not provide simple solutions or a clear model to follow, but it does indicate how activists and politically engaged intellectuals have struggled with these issues and highlight the importance of continuing to do so.
Race and Nation
The Comintern’s concern for racial issues and the importance of ethnicity in a revolutionary struggle is readily apparent in the confidential instructions for revolutionary union movements that officials drafted in 1932 for communist parties in the Americas. A lengthy introduction to the specific instructions for the parties emphasized the importance of considering issues of racial oppression in a class struggle against “the exploitation of the working class, the peasants, and oppressed nationalities.” Throughout, the document highlighted in particular the exploitation that “Indians and Negroes” faced. 1 Quite obviously the (unnamed) author(s) of this document understood issues of race and ethnicity to be central to the Comintern’s agenda.
References to “Indians and Negroes” continued throughout the document: “The national revolutionary movement of the Indians is noticeably increasing, taking on at the same time an increasingly revolutionary character in Peru, Equador [sic], to some extent in Bolivia, and recently also in Chile (Temuco district)” (5). Particularly in the preamble, it repeatedly comes back to the theme of “the national revolutionary movement of the oppressed Indian and Negro Masses” who comprise “oppressed nationalities” (8). Rather than as marginal, the communists saw these peoples and their concerns as lying at the heart of their revolutionary struggle.
The Comintern directly called out the racism of some of its cadres. It pointed to an “extreme weakness” of the revolutionary union movement, with an “almost complete absence of trade union organization among the agricultural workers” despite the fact that they made up a large part if not the majority of the working class and experienced some of the worst conditions of capitalist exploitation (35–36). This lack of attention to racial issues was in part a result “of not understanding the importance of the peasant and national question in the colonial revolution.” The Comintern also condemned a “‘superior race’ chauvinism (no matter whether conscious or unconscious)” that led to a lack of attention to work among “Indian and Negro proletarians (and in Peru among the Mulattos and Chinese)” (37). Particularly problematic were “manifestations of national chauvinism (which is not infrequently disguised in talk about race peculiarities)” that undermined the work of revolutionary unions. In sum, “The struggle of the CP [communist parties] for this turn in the work of the revolutionary TUs [trade unions] is also a struggle inside the CPs against ‘superior race’ chauvinism and a Trotsky-like misunderstanding of the importance of the national question” (38). To counter this problem, the Comintern instructed communist parties to publish “popular trade union literature in those Indian languages which have script (for example Guaraní and Kechua)” (59). It was only in breaking from this ingrained racism that the socialist struggle could advance.
Comintern officials drafted their instructions in Russian and translated them into various languages. The typed English translation includes handwritten corrections that touch on both copyediting and conceptual issues. For example, it declares, “The situation of the nationally oppressed nationalities and tribes, especially that of the Indian peasants, is particularly hard.” The instructions proceed to observe, “The white landlords (and in some countries even the half-breeds and creoles) continue to seize their land.” In this case, a reader crossed out “the half-breeds” and replaced it with “those with Indian blood” (3). As always, it is hard to know what is behind these changes, but it does reflect an awareness that language and its usage can be a semantic minefield. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which the English-speaking audience surely would have read, Mark Twain repeatedly called his character Injun Joe a “half-breed” in what many have subsequently condemned as an overtly racist depiction. While today we understand that “race” is a social construct and has nothing to do with “blood,” the editor in 1932 seemingly recognized the problematic and derogatory nature of that terminology.
“Latin America”
While the label “Latin America” for this part of the hemisphere has become a dominant categorization that many accept all too uncritically that does not hide its external, colonial, and European roots and relatively recent invention. Indications are that it was none other than Napoleon Bonaparte who popularized the term in the 1850s to justify his occupation of Mexico. In the 1920s, intellectual debates still swirled around this seemingly innocent but loaded terminology. While in exile in Berlin in the 1920s, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre of the Alianza Popular Americana Revolucionaria (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance—APRA) advocated the adoption of “Indo-America” as part of his anti-imperialist project. He specifically rejected “Hispanic America” because of its European roots and close association with Catholicism (Dorais, 2021: 3). At first the term “Indo-America” was attractive to those in Mariátegui’s circles, but its use became problematic when they broke with the APRA (Mella, 1930).
All of these terms for the hemisphere (including “New World” and “Western Hemisphere”) are European in origin and exclusionary if not inherently racist in nature. “America,” of course, derives from the sixteenth-century mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci, and even the term “Indo,” which originates from Columbus’s falsified notions of geography, is an import and a colonial imposition (no one in the hemisphere before the arrival of the Europeans would have identified as an “Indian”).
Those in the highest echelons of the Comintern were fully aware of the problematic nature of this terminology. The presidium of its executive committee, for example, approved the following resolution (1–2): The term “Latin America,” adopted by the imperialist press and subsequently penetrating into the Communist press and Communist documents, is politically absolutely incorrect. No less than half the population of the Latin American countries situated south of the United States is made up of oppressed Indians and Negroes, for whom the term “Latin” is a synonym for the oppressing white nations.
No label is perfect, and for a while the Comintern opted for “South American and the Caribbean” (abbreviated “SAC”) as a compromise even though it excluded Mexico and Central America.
These concerns never disappeared. In the 1970s, the Aymara leader Takir Mamani suggested “Abya Yala” as an alternative. The phrase means “Continent of Life” in the language of the Kuna peoples of Panama and Colombia, and the Kuna use it to denominate the hemisphere in its entirety. “Placing foreign names on our cities, towns and continents,” Mamani (quoted in Juncosa, 1987: 39) argued, “is equal to subjecting our identity to the will of our invaders and to that of their heirs.” He proposed that organizations utilize it in their documents and oral declarations. Although the term has found a favorable reception in activist circles, it has not yet received widespread popular acceptance.
The Newly Translated Comintern Documents
Following are translations—“The National Question in South American and Caribbean Countries” and “On the Issue of the Problems of Indians and Blacks in Latin American Countries”—of two Spanish-language documents dealing with these issues found in the Comintern archives that are preserved in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow. 2 The first document is not signed but was possibly written by Enrique Ya-n (Genrich Moiseevich Yakobson), who wrote the second. The latter consists of two sections (numbers 10 and 11) of an essay that Yakobson subsequently published in Russian in Mirovoie Joziaistvo y Mirovaia Politika (no. 2 [1933]) and then revised for inclusion in a book (Yakobson, 1934). The broader arguments in this essay are summarized in the first document and provide the context for the direct challenges to Mariátegui’s ideas in the second.
Yakobson is little known, but he played an important role in pushing for engagement with issues of race and nation within the communist movement. He was born to a Jewish banking family in Vitebsk in 1897 and died in Moscow in 1936. He studied chemistry and participated in the February revolution of 1917 with the Mensheviks as one of the organizers of socialist youth. He joined the Red Army to fight against the counterrevolution and was discharged after he was wounded in November 1919. He subsequently taught at the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West (KUNMZ) and later at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), which is apparently what brought him into contact with issues of colonialism and oppressed nationalities and triggered his interest in how these issues related to Latin American realities (Jeifets and Jeifets, 2017: 739–741).
By 1930, Yakobson had begun to work in the Latin American Section of the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU, also known by its Russian abbreviation Profintern and in Spanish as the Internacional Sindical Roja). The South American Bureau of the Comintern’s executive committee wanted to send him to Buenos Aires, but instead he was transferred to teach at the International Lenin School (ILS), where he worked closely with students from Latin America. He was fully engaged with discussions in Comintern meetings on Latin America and in particular weighed in on discussions related to the self-determination thesis. 3 This included participation in the Third Conference of the Communist Parties of South America and the Caribbean that the Comintern held in Moscow in October 1934.
The Comintern planned to send Yakobson to South America for six months to study racial issues as part of the national and agrarian question, but he died before it was able to do so. All indications are that he never visited Latin America but gained fluency in Spanish working in Moscow with activists and students from Latin America at the RILU and the ILS. As a result, he provided an important bridge between Mariátegui in Peru and the non-Spanish-speakers in Moscow who were interested in these discussions. His contributions challenge notions that Comintern officials were unaware of or ill-informed about developments in Latin America. By the end of the 1920s they knew a fair amount about the region and were fully engaged in relevant debates over how best to advance a socialist revolution. Many of the differences between officials in Moscow and party activists in the Americas had more to do with differences of opinion on political strategies than with a lack of knowledge per se (Wood, n.d.).
Yakobson was the first Soviet scholar to engage in a serious study of South American history. He wrote numerous articles on racial problems in Latin America, including a history of the Inkas, the roots of national liberation movements during the colonial period, the Mexican Revolution, the United Fruit Company in Colombia, the union movement in Brazil, and, more broadly, class struggle in Latin America during the first part of the twentieth century. All of these were published in Russian, however, and apparently were never translated into Spanish or distributed in the Americas. It appears from his broader scholarship that he wrote the following two pieces in Spanish, but they are preserved only as typewritten copy in the Comintern archives. By then, Mariátegui had died, and apparently either no one cared to assume a defense of his position or those who might do so were simply not aware of Yakobson’s criticisms.
Yakobson’s writings appear here for the first time in English translation and for the first time in broad distribution outside Russia. They are important for understanding how Mariátegui’s ideas reached into the heart of the Comintern and the responses and challenges that emanated from the Comintern to his ideas on race and the national question. It is now left to us to continue the debate.
Footnotes
Notes
Marc Becker is a historian of the Latin American left with a particular interest in race, class, and gender within popular movements in the Andes and a participating editor of Latin American Perspectives. He is the author of Contemporary Latin American Revolutions (2022), The CIA in Ecuador (2020), and The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files (2017), editor and translator of Proceedings of the First Latin American Communist Conference, June 1929 (forthcoming), coeditor (with Richard Stahler-Sholk and Harry E. Vanden) of Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical Action from Below (2015), and coeditor and translator (with Harry Vanden) of José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology (2011).