Selected Works of José Carlos Mariátegui

by Christian Noakes (Editor)

José Carlos Mariátegui was born in Moquegua, Peru, to a poor mestizo family on July 14, 1894. Considered by many to be the father of Latin American Communism, he is celebrated for being the first person to utilize Marxist methods of analysis in order to better understand concrete reality in Peru and for carving a path to revolution based off of these particular historical conditions. As such, he was one of the first Latin American socialists to acknowledge the revolutionary potential of the peasantry and Indigenous peoples. Rather than take a paternalistic or humanitarian position, Mariátegui believed that these overlapping groups needed to be the architects of their own liberation and to do so using their own cultural knowledge, experience, and language.

Genres: Theory

154 pages, Paperback

Published February 20, 2021

Reviews

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

"True revolutionaries never act as if history begins with them. They know that they represent historical forces whose existence does not allow them to indulge in the ultraistic fable of inaugurating all things."

Jose Mariátegui was born to a poor mestizo family and only lived to 35, (in 1930!) but so much in his work anticipates figures as far in time and place as Amilcar Cabral, or Mao. His prolific historical materialism seems to anticipate post-war decolonial theory decades in advance.

The world crisis is thus an economic crisis and a political crisis. And, above all, it is an ideological crisis. The affirmative, positivist philosophies of bourgeois society have long been undermined by a current of skepticism, of relativism. Rationalism, historicism, and positivism are declining irremediably. This is undoubtedly the most profound, most severe symptom of the crisis.

Here, he puts his finger on the irrationalist lament for the evaporation of the old order. Doubtless informed by his experience in Italy during the "Red Years", however brief, Mariátegui does what's been on my mind a lot lately---he finds a way to incorporate critiques of rationalism into a revolutionary tract.

The proletariat was destined to create a new type of civilization and culture. The economic ruin of the bourgeoisie was to be at the same time the ruin of the bourgeois civilization. And socialism was going to find that it had to govern not in a time of plenty, wealth, and abundance, but in a time of poverty, misery, and scarcity. Reformist socialists, accustomed to the idea that the socialist regime is more a regime of distribution than a regime of production, believe they see in this the symptom that the historical mission of the bourgeoisie is not yet finished and that the moment is not yet ripe to achieve socialism.

Taking an explicitly Marxist-Leninist position, Mariátegui here rejects the early "vulgar" mechanistic doctrine that essentializes a particular path of revolutionary development. It's fairly commonplace now, but we forget in the 1920s how controversial the idea of such a revolution in the most backward section of the world system coming to form a vanguard really was. Further on this:

The voluntarist character of socialism is, in truth, no less evident—despite the fact that it is less understood by its critics—than its deterministic background. In this process, every word, every Marxist act, resounds with faith, will, heroic and creative conviction, whose impulse it would be absurd to seek in a mediocre and passive determinist sentiment.

Being of mestizo background, Mariátegui of course incorporates that perspective--not as "identity politics", no, but in exploring the revolutionary potential and positioning of Indigenous communities in the Latin America of his day (of the Monroe, not as yet Truman, doctrine).

There is, therefore, an instinctive and profound Indigenous demand: the demand for land. Giving an organized, systematic, defined character to this demand is the task that we have the duty to actively carry out.

I find the contrast with something like the Hayekian concept of culture here fascinating. It's a sort of exposé of the colonial presumptions, behind the liberal, about which culture 'counts':

Only class consciousness, only the revolutionary "myth" with its deep economic roots, and not an infectious anti-clerical propaganda, will be able to replace the artificial myths imposed by the "civilization" of the invaders and maintained by the bourgeois classes—the heirs of their power.

Only knowledge of concrete reality, acquired through work and the development of all Communist parties, can enable us to draw directives based off of existing conditions. Our historical research is useful, but most of all we must control the current state and sentiment, probe the orientation of its collective thinking, evaluate its forces of expansion and resistance.

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Whether or not one concurs with the Fanonian 'stretching of Marxism' which claims that, “In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure,” the colonial project's relation to and impacts on class struggle must be strategically accounted for in concrete practice.

Years before Mao conceptualized "New Democracy", Mariategui wrote:

The colonial fate of the country determines its process. The emancipation of the country's economy is possible only by the action of the proletarian masses in solidarity with the global anti-imperialist struggle. Only proletarian action can first stimulate and then carry out the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, which the bourgeois regime is incapable of developing and delivering.

The class struggle—a fundamental reality that our parties recognize—undoubtedly has special characteristics when the vast majority of the exploited are constituted by one race, and the exploiters belong almost exclusively to another...The hardest economic oppression weighs on the shoulders of the producing class and is compounded by racial contempt and hatred. A simple and clear understanding of such situations is needed so that this mass may rise as one being and throw off all forms of exploitation.

Years before Amilcar Cabral made essentially the same point about pan-African cultural reclamation in 1973's Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amílcar Cabral:

This Indigenismo does not indulge in fantasies of utopian restorations. It sees the past as a foundation, not a program.

Because

A nation lives more so in the precursors of its future than in the survivors of its past.

Tradition should not be identified with traditionalists. Traditionalism—not in the sense of a philosophical doctrine, but a political or sentimental attitude that invariably resolves itself into mere conservatism —is truly the greatest enemy of tradition. This is because it is obstinately focused on defining tradition as a set of inert relics and extinct symbols, and to summarize it in a concise and particular recipe.

Still having Wendy Brown's work on neoliberalism in the back of my mind (In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West),

On free education:

Catholics of this time do not demand the freedom of education except where they are locked in the fight against secularism. Where teaching is not secular but Catholic, the Church categorically declares it to be freedom of education.

Again, 'Freedom' is reconceptualized as the victory of essentialized hegemonic ideas. Freedom is the trojan horse for structured hierarchy. Ironically, counter-hegemony is presented as if pathogenic next to organic, naturalized 'tradition'. If 'free education' means the Bible must be allowed in schools, free speech means hate speech must be allowed unrestrained, parallel to the deregulation of 'free enterprise'...no matter that the de facto consequence reproduces structured privileges. Those consequences, in the reactionary mind, only re-validate old values in the face of modernity.

Only in the periods in which the ends of the State and the School are intimately and regularly agreed upon, is the illusion of autonomy, spiritually and intellectually at least, of education possible.

Thus the illusion of "voluntary conformity" in the context of structured hegemony, which essentializes the orthodox as if it occurs on its own and only what challenges it is projects of rationalistic hubris.

Finally, words for the "post-Left":

Among intellectuals, it is not uncommon that a simulated nihilism serves as a philosophical pretext to avoid their cooperation with any major renovation ef- fort or to explain their disdain for any mass work. But the fictional nihilism of this type of intellectual is not even a philosophical attitude. It is reduced to a hidden and artificial disdain for great human myths. It is an unacknowledged nihilism that does not dare to appear on the surface of the work or the life of the negative intellectual who gives himself to this theoretical exercise as a solitary vice. The intellectual, nihilistic in private, is usually in public a member of an temperance league or an animal protection society. Their nihilism is only intended to guard and protect them- selves from great passions. In the face of petty ideals, the false nihilist behaves with the most vulgar idealism.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mariategui's work itself is good, and Noakes' introduction serves a good purpose in putting forward an argument against the sharp separation between Mariategui, Marxism-Leninism, and the Third International that is often present in left-liberal scholarship. However, Noakes does not devote enough space to the issue. It is simply asserted rather than argued, in an introduction as short as some of the short essays collected here. The point needs to be fought out by ideologically-committed Marxists to settle the question. We know that Mariategui was a Marxist-Leninist, a partisan of non-deterministic Marxism-Leninism, but we also know that he was rejected and vilified by Soviet academics in the 1940s, and that in the immediate period after his death his legacy was invoked to attack his own ideological aims. We need to come to terms with this, to explain it as a result of the mechanistic and 2nd International-inherited determinism of the majority of the Latin American Marxists of Mariategui's time, as well as the Comintern's confused positions and poor knowledge of Latin American conditions. Ideologically, yes, the contradiction between Mariategui and "official" Marxism-Leninism is overblown and largely untrue, but politically the disconnect existed.

Much of the collection here has been translated and collected in other places, so that only three essays were unknown to me. English-language Mariategui scholars must cease this constant repackaging of various essays after this collection. Further translation and collection needs to be done on the Collected Works, especially a complete translation of Defense of Marxism rather than excerpts and small chapters on de Man.

[Roysten Smit]

Works as an accessible little introduction to Mariátegui through some of his shorter essays, but if you want something meatier I'm guessing Harry E. Vanden's and Marc Becker's ‘José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology’ or just the ‘Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality’ are much more informative. But even if not everything in here is absolutely groundbreaking, and some of it even a little dry, Mariátegui's keen eye for contemporary world developments and his creative application of Marxist-Leninist theory to the socio-economic situation in Peru — and, by extension, Latin America — never fails to excite. Particularly strong is his analysis of the Indigenous masses, the semi-feudal character of the economy (gamonalismo, latifundismo), the semi-colonial status under American and British imperialism, the inability of the national bourgeoisie to play a progressive revolutionary role because of the perseverance of the old feudal landowning class, and the impossibility of collaboration between the proletariat and the bourgeois/feudal class in the anti-imperialist struggle because of the deeply embedded racial caste system in Latin America (as opposed to other semi-colonial countries such as China, where Sun Yat-sen's adoption of the principle of Zhonghua minzu detached ethnicity from Chinese nationalism).

[Lilé · Rating 4 out of 5]

1/16

interesting reading of futurism

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharp thinker, clear writer. This is a great short sampled plate with several brilliant essays. “Heterodoxy of Tradition” snapped some things into place for me. His distinction between tradition and traditionalism is so useful. The careful attention to the question of peasant and indigenous perspective in the struggle against capitalism is also wonderfully fresh even now a hundred years later, a lesson some on the Left need better to learn (while of course affirming that those in the center and on the right are in various stages of denial or active resistance against those perspectives mattering at all).

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like it deserves more than 4 stars, but not quite 5 since it wasn't one of those life-changing books. However, I'm very pleased to have been introduced to the works of José Mariátegui. The topics he covers resonate with me, as a USian and fellow American, more than the things I've read from European/Russian thinkers. Important to read for any American who identifies as left on the political spectrum.

[Steven R]

Some interesting ideas in it, particularly around nationalism and decolonization. Worth a read, though a bit dry in writing style in places