In the Red Corner

The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui

Mike Gonzalez

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781608469161
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930) is widely recognized across Latin America as one of the most important and innovative Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet his life and work are largely unknown to the English-speaking world. In this gripping political biography—the first written in English—Mike Gonzalez introduces readers to the inspiring life and thought of the Peruvian socialist.

Chapter One

The Resurrection of José Carlos Mariátegui

As “actually existing socialism,” which described the Soviet Union and its satellites in eastern Europe, was progressively unmasked—exposed as a cover for regimes that wore socialist clothing while pursuing capitalist ends—a new generation was confronted with a confident capitalism that drove across the planet, exposing its nature. In the face of neoliberalism, what had once seemed to be an alternative system collapsed. Capitalism now operated in a global market, driven by institutions, including the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—institutions tasked with preventing any “obstacles” like trade unions, measures to protect national economies, state subsidies, and so on from inhibiting the free movement of capital. Neoliberalism was not new, but it was a particularly ruthless form of global exploitation, as Naomi Klein’s No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs demonstrated forcefully to a generation of urban youth who had absorbed, without due scrutiny, the consumerism of the previous two decades. In the West, the protests against the system were driven by a moral outrage—a force that for Mariátegui was or could be revolutionary. In Latin America and the rest of the less developed world, it was the reality of austerity programs and structural adjustments that produced resistance. The fragile protections rarely and minimally provided by the local state left communities vulnerable in the face of the wrecking machine called multinational capital—the giant firms that dominated industries like oil, mining, and export agriculture, backed by global banks and financial agencies were hard to resist.

As this wave of anti-capitalism spread, questions were raised: What alternative to this cruel and antihuman system might there be, and how might that other possibility be attained? It was, of course, a question of vision—of the collective imagination—but it was also a question of method, of organization. The myth of progress must be replaced with the myth of revolution. 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.

The capitalist class had a range of instruments to defend and veil their class rule; these include not just the control of capital, or the deployment of armies, but ideas too—false universals (like the myth of progress itself) religion, common sense, ideology. Its favored instrument was division, a fragmentation of the working class into warring parts by gender, by race, and by belief. It was part of the revolution’s task to identify those divisions and overcome them. But that was only half the job. The other part was to create a new class identity, a unified proletariat, multiple and diverse, that would construct the new world. Of course, the bourgeoisie was divided against itself too, just as the working class, by sectarianism, racism, sexism, and all the other ways in which it could be weakened in the face of the class struggle. But when its systemwas challenged, that dominant class would find its shared commitment and work together.

Mariátegui’s resurfacing came as a consequence of an emerging new political consciousness in search of an ancestor. The fall of the Berlin Wall had left the revolution without a language, or indeed a reference point. The Russian Revolution, which had been the lodestar of revolutionary movements for two generations, now had to be rescued from the distortions to which it had been subjected. Karl Marx, in whose name so many falsehoods had been uttered, emerged apparently unscathed. A British Broadcasting Company (BBC) poll found him to be the most important figure of all time for a majority of its listeners. The problem was that the discourse of revolutionary Marxism had been so misused and discredited that it was discarded, or at the very least seriously questioned, for a time, by those resisting capitalism and its depredations. Other proposals came to fill the vacuum. Hardt and Negri’s “multitude” described the shifting and unstable world of labor in a global environment, but they did not indicate which instruments should be forged to fight that global force. Anarchism found a wide range of new enthusiasts. John Holloway generalized from the specific experience of the Zapatistas, whose rebellion ultimately expressed itself in the metaphor of the snail—enclosed within its own house. But how could coordination and solidarity—the concepts at the heart of Mariátegui’s thinking—be achieved among self-isolating units within a region or a nation, let alone within a global system? And how could unification occur, as Holloway argued it could in his widely read book Change the World without Taking Power, without addressing the issue of the state?

Marxism as it had 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. Dogmatism, a battle for the possession of the revolutionary grail, often supplanted both dialogue and common struggle.

The new movements turned away from a history and an experience that had an enormous amount to offer the renewed struggle, but that seemed unable to address the new movements’ multiple characters. Across the planet, issues of class, race, gender, and environmental destruction were addressed by activists marching together. Yet they needed to find defining ideas, identify unifying strategies, and develop common organs of struggle.

There was another facet of the new movements, beyond their specific anti-capitalist purposes that connects with Mariátegui’s writings. Global warming was entering the popular consciousness despite the enormous resources injected into climate change denial by the big corporations in oil, gas, and coal. The privatization of water launched by Margaret Thatcher in 1989 was producing a world in which over a billion people were without drinking water and over two billion were denied it for washing and sanitary purposes. Chernobyl and Bhopal had exposed the appalling dangers hidden within globalization. Desertification, drought, floods, and tsunamis were slowly beginning to be understood as man-made rather than natural phenomena—and that understanding, as Naomi Klein put it, “changed everything.¹” In Latin America, the renewed demand for minerals (especially copper), the rising price of gold, the boom in oil prices, the world demand for soy and maize for ethanol, and the exploding consumption of beef tore into the heart of the Andes mountains and the Amazon forest. Privatization drove whole populations off their lands and into the shantytowns that grew speedily around every major city in Latin America.

Mariátegui Rediscovered

Latin America has produced many original Marxist thinkers, dedicated socialists, activists, and champions of the working class. Among them are Farabundo Martí in El Salvador, Julio Antonio Mella in Cuba, Che Guevara, Luís Carlos Prestes in Brazil, and Luis Emilio Recabarren, whose suicide in 1927 robbed Chile of its leading socialist activist and organizer. Yet it is José Carlos Mariátegui whose ideas and example have survived a century of extraordinary changes and proved most meaningful for a new generation of revolutionaries.

That in itself is remarkable. Since his premature death in 1930, at the age of thiry-six, Mariátegui’s political and theoretical legacies have been claimed by many, and unfortunately, they have been distorted and misrepresented in the process. The most notorious example of misuse of his work and his writing was committed by Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist Shining Path organization (also known as the Communist Party of Peru, PCP), which appropriated Mariátegui’s work to justify a political movement exactly contrary to the project that Mariátegui had fought to build; its sectarianism against every other sector of the movement and its rigidly hierarchical structures flew in the face of Mariátegui’s conception of a united front. Mariátegui’s insistence on openness, on transparency, on a movement led from below, on the concept of a leadership following and responding to the grass roots, was caricatured in the deification of Abimael Guzmán (also known as President Gonzalo) and the ruthless internal discipline of an organization that used violence against the peasants and indigenous peoples it claimed to represent. How many times did Mariátegui rail against politicians who took power away from the people they purported to represent in the name of socialism?

But there were many others who took his name, with equally little right to represent his Marxist politics. The painful end of Mariátegui’s life was made more bitter and tragic by the sectarianism of the Communist International (Comintern), which mocked and parodied his Indoamerican communism, within weeks of his death, by creating a Communist Party forged in Moscow and led by the unscrupulous opportunist Eudocio Ravines. The dogmatism of the Comintern, and its “Third Period” politics of “class against class,” sabotaged the united front. The predictable result was that the respect for his ideas that Mariátegui had won among indigenous people was undermined. Their resistance continued in the bitter struggles in the high Andes, though they remained largely invisible to the non-Indian world. The relationship between Marxist ideas and indigenous struggle was broken, however, and it would be decades before the resulting distrust would begin to be overcome.

Perhaps the cruelest misrepresentation was the way the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance appropriated his reputation. APRA, an opportunist formation that had once claimed Marxist credentials, attempted to build a chain of connection between Mariátegui and its populist leader Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre. It was cruel because while the two men had been friends, and for a brief period in the twenties collaborated, they represented opposing strategies. Haya’s APRA looked for alliances with the bourgeoisie from an entirely electoralist perspective. By the time its then-leader Alan García ended his first presidency in the 1980s, APRA had become synonymous with betrayal, corruption, and the advocacy of neoliberal solutions. The irony of this is that Mariátegui broke with APRA definitively in 1928 on the principled basis that the movement he was dedicated to building was a class-based proletarian united front that needed to include the indigenous communities.

The Stalinist assault on his ideas, and his systematic discrediting by the Comintern, consigned Mariátegui to the shadows for a while, but in the glaring light of the collapse of “actually existing socialism,” Mariátegui has reemerged. There has been an interesting tendency among his erstwhile attackers to ride the tide of approval for their own benefit. In fact, the important rediscovery was made neither by academics nor the organizations of the Left. In Seattle in 1999, the Teamsters and the Turtles confronted the WTO, a capitalist club whose existence and whose power in the global market were virtually unknown until seventy thousand demonstrators shouted them to the world. The Zapatista communities, embattled in a corner of southern Mexico, had declared their defiance on the newly formed world wide web five years earlier. The Zapatistas’s eloquent spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, had unmasked the mechanisms of neoliberal globalization through his dispatches from the Lacandón Forest. In the period when neoliberalism was exercising its economic power to the detriment of millions across Latin America—in the form of austerity programs masked by various euphemisms—other forces were also quietly growing. The formation of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), in Ecuador, in 1990, made little impact on the world’s media at the time. A decade later it became part of a burgeoning movement that removed three presidents in that country. In Mexico, Zapatismo had awakened ancient memories and stories of rebellion and resistance. In Bolivia, the encroachments of multinational capital were meeting resistance too; it reached a new dimension with the victory over the Bechtel Corporation in Cochabamba during the so-called Water War of 2000.

The structural adjustment programs of the 1990s undermined the local state and created supranational organisms—the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) first among them—to assume control. The protections that the state could offer—subsidies, basic welfare, health systems, public education, jobs in the state sector—were systematically and rapidly compromised. Nineteen ninety-two may have been declared the year of indigenous peoples, and the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Guatemalan Maya leader Rigoberta Menchú, but for the indigenous communities of Latin America it marked the beginning of a decade of renewed oppression and impoverishment.

The multiple expressions of resistance by the First Nations of the Americas contradicted the still-dominant image of a passive and silent minority taking refuge in the remotest corners of the continent. In Mariátegui’s time, an artistic current called “Indigenismo” drew attention, often controversially, to the condition of the Indian. Mariátegui’s response to the advocates of Indigenismo was to insist and to demonstrate that the “Indian problem” was social and economic, that it had nothing to do with the character of the Indian people. The “new Indian,” for him, was exemplified by a man he met in his home in Lima, Ezequiel Urviola, from Puno, who was a fighter for the Indian, a leader in struggle. His dialogue with Mariátegui was part of the building of a united class front in which the Indian, the peasant, and the worker would not simply fight the capitalist system for the improvement of their lives, but in doing so create a new and different world without discrimination, injustice, or exploitation—a socialist world.

Mariátegui’s Marxism was heterodox, challenging, and extraordinarily creative. It is curious that the negative conditions he analyzed so insightfully in Peru—a weak and subservient bourgeoisie, a division in both economic and cultural terms that was never resolved, the consequences of an economy based wholly on the demand from the outside world—should have produced so farsighted and original a thinker. There is no single explanation. Chance and a confluence of personal circumstances—including a devastating illness—obliged him to spend his childhood and early adolescence reading. Mariátegui’s answer was to describe himself as self-taught and to argue that the revolutionary intellectual—and he was most certainly that—does not develop in isolation from the movements of the class but, on the contrary, emerges from them.

Revolutionary intellectuals, like the people who struggle on the ground, derive knowledge from experience—from reality—and that experience, that knowledge, is collective—social. The myth of the solitary thinker denies a person’s material existence and the history that, like it or not, he or she embodies and bears. That knowledge, that intelligence, however, is not enough to make the revolution. Something else is needed—feeling, passion. And both the vision and the passion are embodied, as Mariátegui controversially argued throughout his life, in el mito—the social myth.

Revolutions do not arise automatically from the battle for bread. To suggest that they might is to accept the bourgeois rationality Mariátegui contested all through his adult life: the rationality of accumulation and possession, of private property and individualism. When he arrived in Europe in 1920, as the resonances of the Russian Revolution of 1917 were spreading across the world, Mariátegui was shocked to find the extent to which the language of socialism and revolution had become a discourse of conformity, and that revolution, under the aegis of the mechanical, evolutionary Marxism of the Second International, had ceased to be the objective. On the contrary, a mechanical interpretation of Marxism had turned that end, that would be dreamed of and fought for by human beings, into the automatic consequence of material progress. It was, of course, a falsehood, but it had undermined and caricatured Marxism, the philosophy and the method of social transformation, and save for a few revolutionary Marxists—Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and of course Lenin—it had robbed it of its revolutionary impulse.

In what follows, the explanation for Mariátegui’s reemergence will become clear, I hope, against the background of the new questions the movement raised. Mariátegui would not have described himself as a theorist. He was always a man of action, an activist, an organizer, and a revolutionary intellectual, who thought and worked with and from the working class. His writings were responses to the issues that arose in the course of building a movement. He moves from one set of concerns to another over the course of his political life. That, as we will explore more fully, is part of the nature of his understanding of Marxism. This was how he presented his Marxism, in 1927, to the Second Workers’ Congress:

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 is not, 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.²

His statement contains several challenges. His Marxism was first and foremost a political method, born from a conception of Marxism as “a theory and practice of the proletarian revolution.” Its insights were weapons in the class struggle: its objective was to create the workers’ united front that could initiate a struggle for socialism. Mariátegui was a trade union organizer, in permanent contact with the leading militants of his day, and, by 1928, the founder of Peru’s first trade union congress, the Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP), and the author of its manifesto (though the first conference of the organization did not take place until September 1930, six months after Mariátegui’s death). He was a journalist and a teacher, an educator of the class, not in the conventional sense of providing what Paulo Freire called “banking education” (that is, the formal body of ideas that sustain the bourgeois order), but an education whose materials were the reality of working-class life and history, subjective and objective. Freire’s ideas about the education of the oppressed came long after Mariátegui, of course, but Mariátegui anticipated them in his own writings on education. In his statement, Mariátegui implicitly distanced himself from the increasingly dominant dogmatism of the Stalinist orthodoxy. His was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: A Revolutionary Rediscovered
• 1. The Resurrection of José Carlos Mariátegui
• 2. Learning His Trade: Mariátegui’s “Stone Age”
• 3. The Discovery of Marxism: Mariátegui in Europe
• 4. The World Crisis
• 5. Building the Movement
• 6. Amauta
• 7. Interpreting Peru: Seven Essays
• 8. Literature and Politics
• 9. The Question of the Party
• 10. Mariátegui’s Marxism
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover