Mariátegui and the Search for the Latin American Proletariat

The Political Dimension

In an emblematic paragraph, Mariátegui presented a challenge of remarkable relevance that summarized his political philosophy (Mariátegui, 2011e: 130, quoted by Löwy, 2007: 28): “We certainly do not want socialism in Latin America to be a copy or imitation. It should be a heroic creation. We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.” Bypassing orthodoxy, ² he maintained, in his writings and his life, that the construction of popular power and the overcoming of capitalism was a labor of heroic creativity (Paris, 1980: 309). This creativity was one of the foundations for the originality of his proposal. His was not a carbon copy but something personal and his own, and it was anchored in a core to which he remained deeply faithful. For him, revolutionary praxis was the popular praxis of the struggle for life. It encompassed both expressly politicized expressions and each family and community’s daily struggle (Munck, 2017: 99; Melis, 2013; Mazzeo, 2009: 94). Praxis was “the ultimate and irreducible reality of social existence,” the “foundation of all knowledge and of any possibility of radically transforming social reality” (Germaná, 1995: 183). This key principle was both epistemic and political. ³

The praxis of struggle was linked not only to his thought but also to the meaning of his life. The renowned Mariátegui scholar Alberto Flores Galindo (2008) says that he saw himself as “a combatant, an agonist” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 244), suffering being “not death but struggle, the combatant suffers” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 312). In the end, this concept expresses the practice of vital struggle and the constant risk taking of the popular majorities and especially of revolutionary practice.

According to Mariátegui, this was the creative subsoil of an Indo-American socialism and had existed in Peru and Latin America as regional popular and ancestral strife. Indigenous peoples had been “heroically creating” an ancestral “practical socialism” that was alive and part of the complex structure of Peru at the time. Thus, “indigenous reality” became “the core of his reflection” (Melis, 1996: 7) and these remaining “elements of practical socialism” (Mariátegui, 2011f: 71) became a factor viewed as fundamental for Peruvian socialism. Indigenous praxis then became a “starting point” (Löwy, 2007: 25) for socialist construction. “Our socialism would not be Peruvian—nor would it be socialism—if it did not establish its solidarity principally with the Indian’s demands” (Mariátegui, 2010b, quoted in Vanden and Becker, 2011: 52). Socialism, even in the form of a party, was to be built “from the communal traditions of the indigenous world” (Melis, 1996: 24).

Mariátegui thus established the indigenous world as the protagonist in the understanding of class struggle and revolutionary praxis. The identification of the capitalist context with the colonial one involved the “ethnic”-“national” problematic (Aricó, 2017: 609–610). Revolutionary praxis was addressed from the viewpoint of class struggle, and the incorporation of these elements was fundamental to their understanding in that their validity lay in their capacity to inspire masses of people and be embodied in them (Flores Galindo, 2008, Vol. 5: 357–392); Peru’s majority was and is indigenous.

The other original creative point of this Ibero-American socialism was communal socialism (Mazzeo, 2009: 96–97):

“The agrarian communism of the ayllu” is, for Mariátegui, the blueprint for a non-state-based socialism. . . . It does not reduce socialism to state ownership of the means of production. . . . The communities provided an example of socialization conceived as social (collective) ownership and usufruct of the means of production by the direct producers, which also included the socialization of power.

Taking the popular and indigenous tradition as a socialist tradition, Mariátegui (2011e: 129–130) boldly asserted that “socialism, finally, is in the American tradition” and that the “most advanced primitive communist organization that history records is that of the Inca.” Indigenous communities represented the “continuation of a primitive communist economy” (Vanden, 2014: 27) and were the “basis” of an Indo-American socialism (Becker, 1993: 48). This emphasis on the communal, with the “ayllu as the seed of an indigenous socialist economy,” put Mariátegui in conflict with “Soviet orthodoxy” even after his death, when he was accused of being a populist and taking “the Narodnik position regarding the Russian peasant community” (Kaysel, 2014: 232–233). Communities were the “instrument” of what Mariátegui (1971: 58) called “the communist spirit” of the indigenous, which was expressed in the “elements of practical socialism” that were a “fundamental factor” of political construction.

The dynamic sense of communal socialism as practiced in the indigenous world was highlighted in his presentation at the first Latin American Communist Conference, held in Buenos Aires in June 1929: ⁴ “What ensures emancipation on this issue is the dynamism of an economy and culture that carries the seeds of socialism in its midst” (Mariátegui, 2011h: 313). Álvaro García Linera applied this in present-day Bolivia. ⁵ Mariátegui expressed this dynamism (of the economy and culture) via his interpretation of myth as inspired by Sorel, ⁶ to whom he ascribed the “true revision of Marxism, in the sense of the renovation and continuation of the work of Marx” (Mariátegui, 2011i: 189). This provided the basis for conceptualizing the “heroic creativity” that the idea of myth contained. He associated this idea with the self-determining quality of the process toward socialism, since it was the indigenous movement itself that had to find its own myth, its “collective passion,” to serve as a mobilizing element. This was consistent with the idea that “socialism existed and developed only within the mass movement” (Flores Galindo, 2008, Vol. 6: 27).

The Epistemic Dimension

The second dimension of Mariátegui’s heroic creation was the epistemic construction that accompanied and nourished the political construct. A few years ago, indigenous movements themselves stressed that a political reconstruction from a popular perspective had to be linked to an epistemic reconstruction (Macas, 2005). Likewise, and with great originality, Mariátegui maintained that the vindication of the indigenous popular tradition was a key revolutionary element. In his 1927 paper “La tradición nacional” he criticized the “colonialist mentality” of those who praised, in a conservative sense, an elitist tradition and recognized as revolutionary the tradition of indigenous popular praxis: “The Inca past has entered our history recognized not by traditionalists but by revolutionaries. . . . The revolution has vindicated our oldest tradition”—a living and dynamic popular tradition “because tradition is always expanding before our eyes, which so often insist on keeping it static and closed.” He emphasized: “This is the defeat of colonialism” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 343–345). This cultural and economic dynamism, the “seeds of socialism,” opened the possibility of the “creation of a new American culture” (Mariátegui, 2011h: 313). Mariátegui, who understood “creation” as the political and epistemic task, saw the poet César Vallejo as the prototype of the “creator,” for whom “the Indian influence is the defining characteristic of his art,” making him capable of “a genuine and essential Americanism” (Mariátegui, 2006: 211–212). He insisted on this to Pedro Henríquez Ureña, for whom “native energy” was “the primary factor of all American creation” (Mariátegui, 2006: 257). ⁷

His will and creativity were expressed very strongly in connection with his relationship with Marxism. For him, it was not “a body of principles with rigid consequences” and therefore did not apply “the same for all historical climates and all social latitudes.” It had to be completed and expanded to provoke “a rebirth of the revolutionary spirit,” as with Sorel (Mariátegui, 2011c: 182). There could be no Marxism that did not correspond “directly and exactly to reality” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 403). Its epistemic place was the same as that of political construction: the praxis of the popular struggle for life. There, “all knowledge appears as an inseparable element of man’s activity in the effort to transform his own reality” (Germaná, 1995: 25). Praxis was constantly accompanied by a reflection that generated and enriched a wisdom, a popular production of knowledge, and this wisdom questioned the kind of evolutionary and positivist science usually associated with Marxism. Mariátegui thought that the scientific nature of Marxism could only be built from popular struggle and questioned the “scientific politics” monopolized by “the party” to raise consciousness among the “backward” (Mazzeo, 2009: 170–171). He rejected the possibility of understanding socialism as a “scientific conception of history” emerging from “rationalist thought” (Flores Galindo, 2008, Vol. 5: 392) and thereby avoided the kind of reductionism that eschewed the social practice of the popular majorities (Germaná, 1995: 183). In this rethinking of knowledge, he considered socialist creation (both politically and epistemically) as bringing forth a creativity deeply rooted in the historical, political, and epistemic subsoil (Melis, 1996: 15; Fernández Díaz, 2013: 17) of Latin America, which conditioned its growth and fecundity. The “Andean culture” became the “true foundation of his reflections and vital orientations” (Germaná, 1995: 7).

Indigenous praxis, as in the political sphere, became a mobilizing element of the heroic creation of knowledge that had to accompany revolutionary praxis. One of the options was to “install in the theory of revolutionary myths the foundations of a revolutionary philosophy” (Terán, 2008: 182). It is important to highlight the relationship between Mariátegui’s conviction of the need for organizational autonomy of the popular forces and the idea of the revolutionary myth (Aricó, 2017: 316):

We see here an unprecedented attempt to turn socialism into the personal and original expression of the subaltern classes in the struggle to conquer their historical autonomy. Hope for a revolutionary transformation, which in the indigenous world appeared as the extension of a great past, synthesized in the idea of socialism, could become the myth without which the creation of the great popular movements becomes impossible.

This creative path was present in the use of dialectics. Hugo Pesce (2010: 48) says that Mariátegui offers a “singular example of creative dialectic” via a “process that starts from concrete reality to elaborate the theory of Peruvian social phenomena and then translate its postulates in the course of practice.” Mazzeo (2009: 151–152) speaks of “a creative dialectization” centered on the introduction of “the notion of elements of practical socialism.” The introduction of this “particularity” indicates that “it is not subordinated to a preestablished objectivity” typical of the “diamat” [dialectical materialism] of the times.

One aspect of this creative dialectic was the view of temporality underlined by Florestan Fernandes (1995: 20), who maintained that Mariátegui “dialectically link[ed] past, present, and future” and from that position managed to intertwine “colonization and decolonization, social revolution and being Peruvian and Latin American.” Oscar Terán (2008: 186) states that Mariátegui undertook “this movement of going backwards to jump forward as a prodigious capacity of a type of marginality . . . as a return to the indigenous community and the Inca world to jump into socialism.” He rethought “the avant-garde and the revolution in Peru” from a “pre-bourgeois and pre-modern tradition,” an idea that had a certain “positivity,” a “plus.” In this peculiar dynamism of temporalities, he adopted a perspective that approached the indigenous one and assigned a revolutionary role to popular tradition and myth: “the tradition . . . is alive because it lies in a time that is the eternal present of myth—that is, in an absolutely novel fact that nevertheless communicates with an original time” (Terán, 2008: 176). A “revolutionary conception” was built from here (Mariátegui, 2011i: 190). Terán relates this contribution to Sorel’s antiprogressism, which was capable of questioning both “liberal temporality (cumulative, quantitative, homogeneous)” and that of “Second Internationalist stageism.” With this, “the revolution could become the event that pierced uniform time and communicated a utopian future (socialism) with a mythical past (the indigenous world) via a gesture that delinked the temporality of cumulative progress” (Terán, 2008: 181).

Another aspect of the creative dialectic, related to the above, was orthodoxy/heterodoxy or dogma/heresy. In “Defensa del marxismo” Mariátegui (2017: 28) called heresy “indispensable to check the health of dogma” in that it stimulated “the intellectual activity of socialism.” In turn, “dogma . . . understood as a doctrine of historical change” was “not filed away in an archive or . . . an ideological law of the past; there is nothing like dogma to guarantee creative liberty, the germinative function of thought” (Mariátegui, 2011g: 179). The vindication of the indigenous popular tradition as revolutionary introduced a mobilizing element that should guide political practice and the construction of knowledge. This energized Marxism in a revolutionary way to “constantly review itself” toward “permanent self-critical control,” a “situation of constant mobility” (Fernández Díaz, 1991: 137) that allowed dogma to fulfill the function Mariátegui assigned it as a “compass on the journey” (Mariátegui, 2011g: 180).

A third aspect was the crucial importance of subjectivity, specifically spirituality (something unusual in Marxism [Vanden, 2008: 20]). His was “a Marxism that had a spiritual dimension . . . He believed that religion [could] have a revolutionary influence, although such an analysis did not perfectly coincide with the point of view of Marx and the more orthodox Marxists” (Vanden, 2014: 28). Mariátegui linked spirituality and materialism. For example, in “Defensa del marxismo” he quoted Gobetti as saying that “our philosophy sanctifies the value of practice” (Mariátegui, 2011k: 225–226). This aspect deepened and enriched the centrality of the praxis of revolutionary struggle. For one thing, objectivity was tied to an evolutionary and mechanistic view of the historical gaze, and much of orthodox Marxism shared this view with most defenders of capitalism. The amauta was aware that this was a hindrance to revolutionary praxis and its reflection (Mariátegui, 2017 [1934]: 65–66). He thought that it was necessary for the construction of the knowledge of the proletariat to have a “realist sense of history, a heroic will for creation and implementation” (Mariátegui, 2011c: 185). The clearest sign of this one-sided sense of objectivity was that it was accompanied by a pretended neutrality, but Mariátegui had an “invincible distrust of seditious neutral intellectuals.” For him, this category did not exist because “in the conflict between exploiters and the exploited, in the struggle between socialists and capitalists, intellectual neutrality is impossible” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 354).

On the contrary, he thought it essential that committed intellectuals show “sympathy,” as highlighted when he discussed Reyna’s work on Amauta Atusparia. He understood this as a “solidarity” that enabled the author to “situate himself historically and emotionally” and praised him for feeling in the flesh the lashes inflicted on the Indians, an “emotional identification” that enabled him to fill his work with “life” and “feeling” (Mariátegui. 2010b: 214). The struggle for life that was revolutionary praxis required passionate conviction: “There is no dogmatism in me. What there is, is conviction, passion, fervor. . . . My spirit is not dogmatic but affirmative. I believe that constructive spirits are those who rely on a statement, without exaggerated fear of their responsibility and its consequences. . . . I am a fighter, an agonist” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 244). In a way, he anticipated Orlando Fals Borda’s concept of sentipensamiento, in which judgments were nourished by feelings; Fals Borda (2008: 20–21) sees himself continuing on the path of Mariátegui and José María Arguedas.

Mariátegui resignified the political role of the imagination from this integration of subjectivity with being revolutionary. It was not enough to think of a knowledge of reality based on “reason”; imagination was indispensable for apprehending “the richest aspects of human experience.” Knowledge of social praxis could not be divided into rational and nonrational aspects (Germaná, 1995: 28). The key was to be “creative imagination,” consistent with its central political-epistemic premise. This had “amazing advantages for the discovery of reality” in contrast with “the flatness of realistic orthodoxy” (Mariátegui, 2010c: 394). The objective-subjective dialectic can be seen in the fact that the revolutionary imagination, albeit “the most indeterminate aspect of the human spirit, is seen by Mariátegui as a result of history,” which marks the strong link between imagination and reality (Germaná, 1995: 25).

From Certainty to Doubt

Marxist orthodoxy clearly established who the revolutionary subject was: the proletariat, understood almost mechanically and exclusively as the urban worker. There was a “gap between the Marxist assumption that an industrial proletariat was necessary to carry out a revolutionary struggle and the rural and peasant reality of Latin America” ( Becker, 2002: 194). It was understood as a historical law that socialism would come from the action of this subject within capitalism Mariátegui’s achievement was to transform this into an issue rooted in history and political praxis. Having presented the challenge to create an Indo-American socialism, he went on to seek its historical and political subject. He suggested an Indo-American “proletariat” that was situated, historical, and contextualized and therefore enriched and empowered. Can an urban proletariat, a minority among the working majorities of Peru and Latin America, be expected to play a central role? Flores Galindo (2008, Vol. 5: 371) speaks of Mariátegui’s “search for the proletariat” as “a problem, a question” that meant “redefining workers’ hegemony.” Introducing the indigenous dimension both raised issues and offered a key part of the answer about the specific composition of the Latin American proletariat—the central reference in the search for the revolutionary subject. The other part of the answer was envisioning how to build upon this base—to bring together all those who could contribute to a revolutionary process.

Characteristics of the Proletariat

Mariátegui’s political construction of the proletariat had the following features:

There is not, then, effective difficulty in understanding about the program of worker organization. All the Byzantine arguments about remote goals are not needed. The vanguard proletariat has, right before it, concrete questions of national working-class organization, class solidarity with indigenous demands, the defense and foment of institutions of popular culture, the operation with the daily laborers and yanaconas in the haciendas, development of a working class press, etc., etc.

These are questions that should principally concern us. Those that provoke schisms and dissidents, in the name of abstract principles, do not bring anything to the study and solution of these concrete problems. They consciously or unconsciously betray the proletarian cause.

As for the organization’s internal practice, “Each group or party would guide and educate the workers, but they would retain their autonomy and decide to take into account whatever reasons best expressed their interests and needs.” He also foresaw and proposed a criterion for settling difficulties later: “the ideological or political current that best translated the demands of the workers.” The ideological basis for this was the primacy and autonomy of the workers: “Mariátegui did not doubt their ability to choose what best suited their interests” (Germaná, 1995: 161).

He had already proposed a political praxis in his argument with the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA). ⁸ Instead of turning into a party, it was supposed to be “an alliance, a single front” with “a program of common and immediate action” that did not eliminate “differences or nuances of class and doctrine” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 404). When the Peruvian Socialist Party joined the Third International, it had the possibility of participating in “alliances of a revolutionary nature” while maintaining the autonomy of the proletariat (Mariátegui, 2010b: 409).

The unifying element of all these characteristics was how they could contribute to revolutionary praxis in our region.

The Subject Articulated on the Basis of Popular Praxis

In the light of Latin America’s current need for the “heroic creation” of an alternative project that can overcome capitalism’s neoliberal offensive, Mariátegui’s contribution is key for its relevance, originality, and strength (Löwy, 2007: 25; Munck, 2017: 98). It can consolidate the key referentialities of the revolutionary subject and construct it as an articulation of different revolutionary tendencies based on praxis. We must take into account the long history of fragmentation of the popular sector in our region and the need to break the “catastrophic stalemate” ¹⁰ in which it is locked.

Popular praxis, especially indigenous practice, becomes the key reference because in Mariátegui’s structural view it has the capacity for bringing groups together. Mariátegui’s crucial merit is to have sought and found answers in something that was despised in his country and region, considered “backward” and something that had to be overcome: the ancestral praxis of indigenous struggle. This understanding reversed the developmentalist interpretation of structural heterogeneity. Aníbal Quijano (2014: 288) says that the embryo of the concept of “historical-structural heterogeneity” was already present in Mariátegui’s questioning of the Eurocentric and evolutionary dualism ¹¹ shared (at least partially) by both the right and the left, but his richest contribution lay in finding and presenting the revolutionary potential of the disparaged “backward” element. Where others saw an obstacle to the “Latin American leap forward,” he saw the deepest, most radical and hopeful answer. In the personal and familial social relations and the collective work of the allegedly archaic and backward indigenous communities (Stavenhagen, 1996: 174) that were blamed by many proponents of modernization for regional underdevelopment he found a powerful answer that opened the way for Indo-American socialism. We could say that he advocated a “subverted” historical/structural heterogeneity: “Mariátegui transforms what from the Eurocentric viewpoint, infected with positivism, appeared as a vestige, an element of ‘backwardness,’ into the ‘presupposition’ for a ‘position,’ assumed history, something self-foundational or, in other words, into a fully functional element of the self-emancipated society, the future society. The presumed defects become stimuli. The ‘residual’ classes become historical subjects” (Mazzeo, 2009: 178).

Enrique Dussel (1977: 69) contributes other important elements drawn from liberation philosophy: the people have a “positive cultural exteriority” to the capitalist system (an affirmation best expressed in the indigenous world) and this exteriority enables creativity, alternative approaches, and revolutionary potential in the so-called backward world identified by dualistic views of Latin America.

This central referentiality provides an element of originality to the construction of a revolutionary subject. Both for his history of political struggle and his open and creative thinking, Mariátegui can be seen as the “common denominator” of all the Latin American currents that consider themselves revolutionary. The role he tried to play in the Peru of his time can be fulfilled today in the pursuit of paths to political understanding and practice by all these currents. His conviction that the diversity of forms of political struggle and knowledge-building should be articulated in popular praxis may point in the right direction.

Mariátegui and Latin American Popular Currents

A brief discussion here of some elements of Mariátegui’s relationships with currents that consider themselves revolutionary in Latin American liberation struggles today is important because, as Vanden (2014: 28) puts it, “the best way to remember the work of the Peruvian Amauta . . . is . . . to use it in the construction of a Latin American world socialism that is valid and applicable to the conditions emerging from the socialist crisis and the crisis of neoliberal capitalism in the early twenty-first century, in both [the region] and other areas.”

The first link is with Marxism, with which he identified. Noting his open and creative but firmly revolutionary attitude, I address only two aspects. His agreement with the “late Marx” (especially regarding Russian populism) is noteworthy, opening the fertile possibility of a path to socialism from within peasant communities. Although Mariátegui was unaware of Marx’s correspondence with Vera Zasulich, ¹² he would have affirmed, as did Marx, that this path did not have to go through the maturation of capitalism and was “the best opportunity that history has ever offered to a nation” (Marx, 1877: cf. Becker, 2002: 205). Mariátegui’s greatest accomplishment regarding the Latin Americanization of Marxism was connecting it to the indigenous world. Especially in recent decades, ideas related to indigenous movements have expanded and won wide acceptance while becoming more systematic. Mariátegui’s work can make an invaluable contribution to Latin American theory and political praxis. A “revolutionary Marxism can be developed based on Latin American reality” (Vanden, 2008: 13).

A second relationship can be established with anarchism and syndicalism. Mariátegui had been involved with anarchism since his youth: he respected González Prada ¹³ (Chang Rodríguez, 1984) and was a political activist alongside fellow libertarians, but in Europe Georges Sorel’s writings became one of the main lenses through which he interpreted Marxism. He was critical of its individualist, “egotist” tendency, which he considered “the exacerbation and degeneration of the old bourgeois liberalism” (Mariátegui, 2011c: 184) and some of its practice as “explosive and intermittent utopianism” that sought to lead the masses toward a new order “with the sole virtue of rejection and protest” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 146). ¹⁴ He criticized the anarcho-unionists for not realizing, during their persecution by the Leguía government, ¹⁵ in an illegal context of which the bourgeoisie and the state skillfully took advantage” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 151). In acknowledging the anarcho-syndicalist leader Adalberto Fonkén, ¹⁶ he praised him as “an organizing spirit, affirmative and concrete,” and “diametrically opposed to that cheap and frequent type of occasional agitator . . . a negative and egocentric protester who undermines his own class, much more than an adversary of the bourgeoisie” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 327). Several writers also talk about Mariátegui’s critical stance toward the statism (Munck 2017: 99; Mazzeo, 2009: 190; Aricó, 2017: 609) that is associated with traditional anarchism.

Regarding what we might call revolutionary populism and anti-imperialist nationalism, we must remember Mariátegui’s changing relationship with the APRA. His participation in it was linked to the strong relationship he initially saw between nationalism and revolution (Aricó, 2017: 287) and another, no less powerful, between radical nationalism and Latin American unity (Germaná, 1995: 143) and to his close friendship with Haya de la Torre and many aspects of his ideas regarding nationhood and anti-imperialism. It is true that the two had their differences with regard to the indissoluble unity between anti-imperialism and anticapitalism (Germaná, 1995: 118), but when these stances are combined with what he called “semicolonialism” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 117) their common ground on a popular nationalism becomes apparent. He insisted on “the creation of a Peruvian nationalism” (Mariátegui, 2010b: 244) that was revolutionary in its opposition to colonialism and “end[ed] in socialism” (Mariátegui, 2011d: 175). These political stances had in common a strongly antioligarchic discourse that was not restricted to the economic aspect but also encompassed the cultural (Fernández Díaz, 1991: 136): “This is a moment in our history when it is impossible to be really nationalist and revolutionary without being a Socialist” (Mariátegui, 1971: 30).

Mariátegui’s influence on liberation theology has been emphasized by Michel Löwy (2005). In the first pages of the seminal book Teología de la liberación, Gustavo Gutiérrez (1972: 35) quotes Mariátegui, one of his recurring references. There are great similarities between them regarding knowledge’s arising from popular praxis, the importance of autonomy in popular organization, and the inclusion of the poorest and their struggle as an alternative, revolutionary political and epistemic space. His other link, both deep and very powerful, is with the proposals of indigenous movements often referred to by the umbrella term “buen vivir.” “Practical socialism” in Mariátegui and a working definition of buen vivir both designate “the acting reality of the peasant-indigenous community and its historical social ties, its habits of cooperation and the ways human beings relate to each other and to nature (societal components and radically new relationships of metabolic exchange within society as well as between society and nature)” (Mazzeo, 2009: 64–65). Robert Paris (1996: 99), who has studied the International’s debate on the formation of ethnic states, recalls that Mariátegui argued that the indigenous world should become a fundamental protagonist on the road to socialism. A very similar debate took place among the indigenous movements of our region, and the final decision was close to Mariátegui: rather than form new states, they chose to fight to reestablish existing ones. The Ecuadorian, Bolivian, and Mexican cases are clear in this regard.

Returning to the issue of the articulation of the Latin American proletariat and its base in a worker/peasant alliance, some relatively consolidated current trends can help us understand the potential of this view: (1) traditional unions have been weakened by unemployment and underemployment; (2) unemployment and underemployment have led to the creation of many social movements; (3) several union confederations and entities understand that it is not enough to represent formally unionized workers—that cooperation with movements representing unemployed, underemployed, and unregistered workers is necessary; (4) unions, although weak, in contrast to the social movements have solid structures and logistics, and putting them at the service of social movements is very important for mobilization; (5) mobilization capacity is enriched by the combination of logistical/structural capacity provided by the unions and the organizational/motivational capacity of the movements; (6) the centrality of the worker/peasant articulation ensures the popular and antibourgeois character of the articulation; (7) the indigenous contribution brings creativity and originality to the Eurocentric schemes of traditional unionism and provides the “leftist” intelligentsia an epistemic base that it often lacks; and (8) while one questionable theoretical element is hierarchization among the different articulated popular sectors, identifying those most capable of being protagonists should not be a matter of theory but depend on objective and subjective conditions and their capacity for creating linkages and revolutionary praxis.