A Selection of Articles by José Carlos Mariátegui on Decolonial Revolution
José Carlos Mariátegui on Tawantinsuyu, the Chinese Revolution, José Vasconcelos, pan-hispanidad, the Mexican Republic, and other subjects.
Indología by José Vasconcelos
Published in Variedades: Lima, 22 October 1922. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_nuestra_america/paginas/indologia.htm>
No one has imagined the fate of America with such great ambition or such vehement hope, as José Vasconcelos in the preface of La Raza Cósmica [The Cosmic Race], whose essential thesis finds admirable explanation and development in Indología [Indology], the latest book of the Mexican thinker. The object of the New World, according to this thesis that aspires rather to be a prophecy, is the creation of a universal culture. On the soil of America all the races will be mixed, to produce the cosmic race. Western culture, which is already characterized by its expansive force and its ecumenical ideal, concludes with the age of particular cultures. The mission of America is the birth of the first cosmopolitan civilization. Universality, says Vasconcelos, should be our motto.
Indología thereby overflows the limits of an "interpretation of the Ibero-American culture," which is how it is presented to us, to touch those of a utopia in the purest meaning of the word. And for this reason it is not the book of a sociologist, nor of a historian, nor of a politician, yet it is at the same time history, sociology, politics, because it is the book of a philosopher. Philosophy here recovers its classic function of universal science, which dominates and contains all the sciences and which feels destined, not only to explain and illuminate life, but to create it, proposing to it the goals of an incessant improvement. The philosopher returns to a tradition in which we find Plato and his Republic, to apply all the conquests of knowledge to the conception of an archetype or higher plan of society and civilization.
This conception, by the freedom and boldness with which it moves in time, is placed beyond the reach of criticism, forced to content itself with the analysis of its historical and scientific materials. The secret of the architecture imagined with these materials is delivered only partially or fragmentarily. It is a secret of the creative spirit.
Vasconcelos constructs his thesis without taking care to systematize it with rigorous and pedantic logic. Its procedure does not lead to rigid formalization. And his work, for this reason, has, as he longs for, something more of a musical than an architectural one. The thought of Vasconcelos, faces the risks of the most intrepid flights; but he is always pleased to return to nature and life, from which he draws his energy. The concept is mixed in his works with storytelling, printing, poetry. His prose has a contagious lyrical warmth. Every idea in Vasconcelos immediately reveals to us its root, its process—I am almost going to say its biography. For this reason, the great Mexican never offers us cold theses, frozen ideas, but a mobile, warm living thought, expressed with his fluency and his movement. And for this reason, too, his work partly has a markedly autobiographical character—as happens in the prologue of Indología and the travel chronicles of La Raza Cósmica— which comes from a deep adherence, more than the concept itself, to the perceptions that nourish it, to the nature that lends it nuance and emotion, to the fact that it communicates dynamism and attributes the object to it.
How does Vasconcelos arrive at his theory of the mission of America: universal culture and cosmic race? To understand this conception well, one must know its laws, its theoretical scaffolding. Vasconcelos explains them as follows: "The first hypothesis that I take to organize the concept of our collective ideals, and that serves me as a propeller in the flight of thought towards the future, is my theory of the three states of civilization. I see the problem of the world, no longer subdivided into partial missions that each race and each historical period has had to develop, but encompassed in three great cycles, towards which history has been converging and whose achievement we have not yet managed to see. These three great cycles are: the materialist, the intellectualist and the aesthetic. I will not insist on the development of this thesis, which I have already tried to outline and define several times. I insist only on establishing it and I add that the history of each of the great civilizations could show us the successive appearance of each of these epochs that are characterized by the predominance of either one or another of the factors that serve as the basis for differentiation. The military period, which corresponds to the tribal regime; the period of exchange, conventions and intelligent arrangements, which corresponds to the development of institutions and civilization, and, finally, the aesthetic period that corresponds to the emotional, religious and artistic conception of life. The third period has been a goal for all the great cultures. However, all of them, until today, have decayed before reaching it. They have declined because of internal corruption, by betraying the higher norms, which once again placed them at the mercy of appetite and disbelief in the ideal."
According to Vasconcelos, our civilization has not yet fulfilled its intellectual cycle, divided by the author of Indología into three periods: that of the lawyer, that of the economist and that of the engineer. The first corresponds to that of the elaboration of law and the subjection to its laws of the relations of individuals as that of peoples. The second must lead to the subjection of capital to collective ends; to the triumph of the technicians of the economy over the captains of private industry; that is to say, to the realization of socialism. The third will be the period of technique, of engineering, of the mastery of all the forces and resistances of nature, by applied science. (Vasconcelos would do Lenin justice, if he recognized the brilliant revolutionary the glory of having dreamed, as no one before him, at this stage, when he was planning with enlightened determination the electrification of Russia).
But these periods undoubtedly progress in parallel. More optimistic than Vasconcelos, I think that of the last two—that of the economist and that of the engineer—the contemporary world presents us with already achieved anticipations. Although Vasconcelos, with a lack of justice and lucidity that dismays one in a mind like his, was inclined to deny it, the work of the Russian Revolution represents a gigantic effort to rationalize the economy. And the progress heroically won by Russia towards socialism—in the midst of a hostile world, within which even the most daring philosophers in their foresight of the future are not able to look at it without prejudice—indicates to us that it will not be up to the United States, but to the Soviet Union, to realize the subjection of money and production to the principles of economy and social justice.
The lack that the spirits of the new generation have to note, with a little sadness and disappointment, in Vasconcelos' work is the lack of a more acute and awakened sense of the present. The epoch demands a more practical idealism, a more belligerent attitude. Vasconcelos easily and generously accompanies us to condemn the present, but not to understand or use it. Our destiny is struggle rather than contemplation. This may be a limitation of our time, but we do not have time to discuss it, but barely enough to accept it. Vasconcelos places his utopia too far away from us. By dint of probing into the future, he loses the habit of looking into the present. We know and admire his formula: "Pessimism of reality; optimism of the ideal." But observing the position to which it leads the one who professes it too absolutely, we prefer to replace it with this other one: "Pessimism of reality; optimism of action." It is not enough for us to condemn reality, we want to transform it. Perhaps this will force us to reduce our ideal; but it will teach us, in any case, the only way to realize it. Marxism satisfies us for that reason: because it is not a rigid program but a dialectical method.
These observations do not deny or diminish the value of Vasconcelos' work as a contribution to a revolutionary revision of history. Vasconcelos has as a historian and sociologist magisterial judgments. It is impossible, for example, not to subscribe to the following: "If there were not so many other causes of a moral and physical order that perfectly explain the apparently desperate spectacle of the enormous progress of the Saxons in the North and the slow disoriented passage of the Latins in the South, only the comparison of the two systems of property regimes would suffice to explain the reasons for the contrast: In the North there were no kings who were disposing of other people's land as their own. Without much ‘grace’ on the part of their monarchs and rather in a certain state of moral rebellion against the English monarch, the colonizers of the North were developing a system of private property, in which everyone paid the price of his land and occupied only the area he could cultivate. So it was that instead of encomiendas there were crops and instead of a warrior and agricultural aristocracy, with the stamps of a shady royal heritage, courtly abolition of abjection and homicide, an aristocracy of aptitude developed in the North, which is what is called democracy, a democracy that in its beginnings, did not recognize more precepts than those of the French motto: ‘liberty, equality, fraternity.’”
I think, however, that Vasconcelos' judgment on the essential difference between the society founded in the North by the Saxons and that founded in the Center and South by the Iberians, is not without a certain romanticism. What fundamentally distinguishes the two societies is not a different race or tradition. It is rather the fact that with the Saxons came the Reformation, that is the spiritual revolution from which the whole capitalist and industrialist phenomenon was to be born, while with the Spaniards came the Middle Ages, that is the subsistence of a spirit incompatible with a new principle of property, freedom and progress. The Middle Ages had already given all its spiritual and material fruits. The conquest was the last crusade. With the conquistadores the Spanish greatness ended. Afterwards only in its mysticism did some great religious souls shine forth. I agree with Vasconcelos in the estimation of the civilizing work of the missions of the colonization. I recognized some time ago the purpose of the function of some congregations in agriculture and the practical education of indigenous people, in an essay on the evolution of the Peruvian economy. But I deduce all the factors of Latin American stagnation from Spanish medievalism. Spain is a nation lagging behind in capitalist progress. So far, Spain has not yet been able to emancipate itself from the medieval environment. While in Central and Eastern Europe the last bastions of feudalism have been destroyed as a result of the war, in Spain they are still standing, defended by the monarchy. Those who delve into the history of Spain today discover that this country has lacked a complete liberal and bourgeois revolution. In Spain the third estate has never achieved a definitive victory. Capitalism appears more and more clearly as a phenomenon consubstantial and in solidarity with liberalism and Protestantism. This is not properly a principle or a theory but rather an experimental or empirical observation. It is noted that the peoples in which capitalism—industrialism and mechanism—has reached its full development are the Anglo-Saxon, liberal and Protestant peoples. Only in these countries has capitalist civilization fully developed.
Spain is, among the Latin nations, the one that has least known how to adapt to capitalism and liberalism. The famous Spanish decadence, to which romantic interpreters attribute the most diverse and strange origins, consists simply in this incapacity. The cry for the Europeanization of Spain has been a cry for its democratic-bourgeois and capitalist assimilation. Logically, the colonies formed by Spain in America had to suffer the same weakness. It is perfectly explained why the colonies of England, a nation destined for hegemony in the capitalist age, received the ferments and spiritual and material energies of an apogee, while the colonies of Spain, a nation chained to the tradition of an aristocratic age, received the germs and defects of a decadence.
Vasconcelos is right when he denounces the thesis of the absolute superiority of the white race as an imperialist prejudice of the Anglo-Saxons. Latin America needs to overcome this prejudice, which also includes the prejudice of the inferiority of all miscegenation. Vasconcelos puts in miscegenation his hope of a cosmic race. But he exaggerates when he attributes to the spirit of Spanish colonization the crossing of Iberian blood with Indian blood. The Saxon settlers came to North America with their families. They also did not find a people with tradition and culture. The Spanish conquistador had to take as his wife the Indian woman. And he found in America two advanced and respectable cultures: to the North, the Aztec; to the South, the Quechua.
The Chinese Revolution
Published in Variedades: Lima, 4 October 1924. Available online in Spanish at <https://archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/la-revolucion-china>
Let us attempt a summary interpretation of Chinese current affairs. Of the fate of a nation that occupies such a leading position in time and space it is not possible for me to be disinterested. China weighs too heavily on human history for us not to be attracted by its deeds and its men.
The subject is extensive and labyrinthine. Events are crowding, in that vast scene, tumultuously and confusingly. The elements of study and judgment [that we have here] are scarce, partial and, at times, unintelligible. [This cavalier] country, so little studious and attentive, knows almost nothing about China except the coolie, some herbs, some manufactures and some superstitions. (Our only case of sinophilia is, perhaps, Don Alberto Carranza.) However, spiritually and physically, China is much closer to us than Europe. The psychology of our people is more Asian than Western.
Another of the great contemporary revolutions is taking place in China. For thirteen years, this old and skeptical empire has been shaken by a powerful desire for renewal. The revolution does not have the same [goal] or the same program in China as in the West. It is a bourgeois and liberal revolution. Through it, China is moving, with agile steps, towards democracy. Thirteen years are a very small thing. For more than a century, capitalist and democratic institutions have been needed in Europe to reach its fullness.
Until its first contacts with Western civilization, China retained its ancient political and social forms. The Chinese civilization, one of the greatest civilizations in history, had already reached the end point of its trajectory. It was an exhausted, mummified, paralyzed civilization. The Chinese spirit, more practical than religious, distilled skepticism. The contact with the West was, rather than a contact, a shock. The Europeans entered China with a brutal and rapacious spirit of predation and conquest. For the Chinese this was an invasion of barbarians. The plunderings aroused in the Chinese soul a bitter and fierce reaction against Western civilization and its greedy agents. They provoked a xenophobic feeling in which the “boxer” movement was incubated, which attracted a punitive European martial expedition to China. This belligerence maintained and stimulated mutual misunderstanding. China was visited by very few Westerners of the category of Bertrand Russell and many of the category of General Waldersee.
But the Western invasion not only brought to China its machine guns and its merchants but also its machines, its technique and other instruments of its civilization. Industrialism has penetrated China. With its influence, the Chinese economy and mentality began to change. A loom, a locomotive, a bank, implicitly contain all the germs of democracy and its consequences. At the same time, thousands of Chinese were leaving their formerly closed and secretive country to study at European and American universities. There they acquired ideas, concerns and emotions that permanently took over their intelligence and psychology.
The revolution thus appears as a work of adapting Chinese politics to a new economy and a new consciousness. The old institutions had not corresponded, for a long time, to the new methods of production and the new forms of coexistence. China is already quite populated with factories, banks, machines, things and ideas that do not fit with a patriarchally primitive regime. Industry and finance need to develop a liberal and even demagogic atmosphere. Their interests cannot depend on Asiatic despotism or on the Buddhist, Taoist or Confucianist ethics of a Mandarin. The economy and politics of a people have to work in solidarity.
Currently, the democratic currents in China are fighting against the absolutist sediments. They oppose the interests of the big and small bourgeoisie against the interests of the feudal class. The actors of this duel are military leaders, "tuchuns" [dujun], like Chang So Lin [Zhang Zuolin] or Wu Pei Fu [Wu Peifu] himself, but they are, in truth, simple instruments of superior historical forces. The Chinese writer F.H. Djen remarks in this regard: "It can be said that the manifestation of popular spirit has only had a relative value up to the present, because its lieutenants, its champions have constantly been military chiefs in whom one can always suspect ambition and dreams of personal glory. But it should not be forgotten that the time is not far away when the same thing was happening in the great Western states. The personality of the political actors, the intrigues woven by this or that foreign power should not prevent us from seeing the decisive political force that is the popular will.”
Let us use a bit of chronology to illustrate these concepts.
The Chinese revolution formally began in October 1911, in Hu Pei [Hubei] Province. The Manchu dynasty was undermined by the liberal ideals of the new generation and disqualified - by its conduct in the face of the European repression of the boxer revolt - to continue representing the national sentiment. It could not, therefore, put up a serious resistance to the insurrectionary wave. In 1912 the republic was proclaimed. But the republican tendency was vigorous only in the population of the south, where the conditions of property and industry favored the spread of the liberal ideas sown by Dr. Sun Yat Sen [Sun Zhongshan] and the Kuo-ming-tang [Guomindang] party. In the north the forces of feudalism and Mandarinism prevailed. The government of Yuan Shi Kay [Yuan Shikai] emerged from this situation, republican in its form, monarchical and ”tuchun" in its essence. Yuan Shi Kay and his henchmen came from the old dynastic clientele. His policy tended towards reactionary ends. There came a period of extreme tension between the two sides. Yuan Shi Kay eventually proclaimed himself emperor. But his empire turned out to be very fleeting. The people revolted against his ambition and forced him to abdicate.
The history of the Chinese Republic was, after this episode, a succession of reactionary attempts, promptly fought by the revolution. Attempts at restoration were invariably frustrated by the persistence of the revolutionary spirit. Various “tuchuns,” Chang Huin [Zhang Xun], Tuan Ki Chui [Duan Qirui], etc. passed through the Beijing government.
During this period, the opposition between the North and the South grew. Finally, a complete secession was achieved. The South separated from the rest of the empire in 1920; and in Canton [Guangzhou], its main metropolis, a former focal point of revolutionary ideas, a republican government was constituted, presided over by Sun Yat Sen. Canton, the antithesis of Peking [Beijing], and where economic life had acquired a style analogous to that of the West, housed the most advanced ideas and the most advanced men. Some of its labor unions remained under the influence of the Kuo-ming-tang party; but others adopted the socialist ideology.
The war of factions continued in the North. Liberalism remained in arms against every attempt at restoration of the past. General Wu Pei Fu, a cultured warlord, became the interpreter and the depositary of the vigilant republican and nationalist sentiment of the people. Chang So Lin, military governor of Manchuria, chieftain and ”tuchun" of the old style, set out to conquer Peking, in whose government he wanted to place Liang Shi Y. But Wu Pei Fu stopped him and inflicted, in the surroundings of Peking, in May 1922, a tremendous defeat. This event, followed by the proclamation of the independence of Manchuria, assured him the dominion of most of China. A proponent of the unity of China, Wu Pei Fu then worked to realize this idea, making relations with one of the leaders of the south, Chen Chiung Ming [Chen Jiongming]. Meanwhile Sun Yat Sen, accused of ambitious plans and whose liberalism, in any case, seems rather diminished, flirts with Chang So Lin.
Today, Chang So Lin and Wu Pei Fu are fighting again. Japan, which aspires to hegemony over a government docile to its suggestions, favors Chang. In the gloom of Chinese events the Japanese play a primary role. Japan has always relied on the Anfu party and feudal interests. The popular and revolutionary current has been adverse to it. Therefore, Chang So Lin's victory would be nothing but a new reactionary episode that another episode would soon cancel out. The revolutionary impulse cannot decline except with the realization of its ends. The military leaders move on the surface of the process of the Revolution. They are the external symptom of a situation striving to produce a form of its own. Pushing or opposing them, the forces of history act. Thousands of intellectuals and students are spreading a new ideal in China. Students, agitators par excellence, are the yeast of the nascent China.
The process of the Chinese revolution, finally, is linked to the fluctuating direction of Western politics. In order to organize and develop, China needs a minimum of international freedom. It needs to own its ports, its customs, its wealth, its administration. To this day it depends too much on foreign powers. The West subjugates and oppresses her. The Washington pact, for example, has been nothing but an effort to establish the boundaries of the influence and dominance of each power in China.
Bertrand Russell, in his “The China Problem,” says that the Chinese situation has two solutions: the transformation of China into an efficient military power to impose itself in respect to foreigners or the inauguration in the world of a socialist era. The first solution is not only detestable, but absurd. Military power is not improvised in these times. It is a consequence of economic power. The second solution, on the other hand, seems [much] less distant today than in the days of acrid reactionarism when Bertrand Russell wrote his book. The ”chance" of socialism has improved from then to today. It is enough to remember that the friends and co-religionists of Bertrand Russell are in the government of England. Although really, they have not come to rule it yet.
The Unity of Indo-Spanish América
Published in Variedades: Lima, 6 December 1924. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_nuestra_america/paginas/unidad.htm>
The peoples of Spanish America are moving in the same direction. The solidarity of their historical destinies is not an illusion of Americanist literature. These peoples, in fact, are not only brothers in rhetoric but also in history. They come from a single matrix. The Spanish conquest, destroying the indigenous cultures and groups, uniformized the ethnic, political and moral physiognomy of Hispanic America, the colonization methods of the Spaniards solidarized the fate of their colonies. The conquistadores imposed their religion and feudalism on the indigenous populations. Spanish blood was mixed with Indian blood. Thus, creole population centers were created, germs of future nationalities. Then, identical ideas and emotions stirred the colonies against Spain. The process of formation of the Indo-Spanish peoples had, in short, a uniform trajectory.
The liberating generation intensely felt South American unity. It opposed to Spain a continental united front. Its leaders obeyed not a nationalist ideal, but an Americanist ideal. This attitude corresponded to a historical necessity. Moreover, there could be no nationalism where there were no nationalities yet. The revolution was not a movement of the indigenous peoples. It was a movement of the creole populations, in which the reflections of the French Revolution had generated a revolutionary mood.
But the following generations did not continue along the same path. Emancipated from Spain, the former colonies came under the pressure of the needs of a task of national formation. The Americanist ideal, superior to the contingent reality, was abandoned. The revolution of independence had been a great romantic act; its drivers and animators, men of exception. The idealism of that deed and of those men had been able to rise to a height inaccessible to less romantic deeds and men. Absurd lawsuits and criminal wars tore apart the unity of Indo-Spanish America. It happened, at the same time, that some peoples were developing with more security and speed than others. Those closest to Europe were fertilized by their immigration. They benefited from greater contact with Western civilization. The Hispanic-American countries thus began to differentiate themselves.
Currently, while some nations have solved their elementary problems, others have not made much progress in solving them. While some nations have filled a regular democratic organization, in others dense residues of feudalism still remain. The process of development of all these nations follows the same direction; but in some it is fulfilled more quickly than in others.
But what separates and isolates the Hispanic-American countries is not this diversity of political schedule. It is the impossibility that among incompletely formed nations, among nations barely sketched out for the most part, a system or an international conglomerate can be concerted and articulated. In history, the commune precedes the nation. The nation precedes every league of nations.
The insignificance of Hispanic-American economic ties appears as a specific cause of dispersion. There is almost no trade between these countries, there is almost no exchange. All of them are, more or less, producers of raw materials and foodstuffs that they send to Europe and the United States, from where they receive, instead, machines, manufactures, etc. They all have a similar economy, analogous traffic. They are agricultural countries. Therefore, they trade with industrial countries. There is no cooperation among the Hispanic-American peoples; sometimes, on the contrary, there is coincidence. They don't need each other, they don't complement each other, they don't look for each other. They function economically as colonies of European and North American industry and finance.
No matter how little credit is given to the materialist conception of history, it cannot be ignored that economic relations are the main agent of communication and the articulation of peoples. It may be that the economic fact is not prior or superior to the political fact. But, at least, both are consubstantial and supportive. Moderna history teaches it at every step. (German unity was reached through the zollverein. The customs system, which canceled the boundaries between the German states, was the engine of that unity that the defeat, the post-war and the maneuvers of Poincarism have not managed to fracture. Austria-Hungary, despite the heterogeneity of its ethnic content, also constituted, in its last years, an economic organism. The nations that the peace treaty has divided from Austria-Hungary turn out to be a little artificial, spoiling the obvious autonomy of their ethnic and historical roots. Within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, coexistence had ended by economically welding them together. The peace treaty has given them political autonomy but has not been able to give them economic autonomy. These nations have had to seek, through customs pacts, a partial restoration of their unitary functioning. Finally, the policy of international cooperation and assistance, which is intended to be implemented in Europe, is born from the realization of the economic interdependence of European nations. This policy is not driven by an abstract pacifist ideal, but by a concrete economic interest. The problems of peace have demonstrated the economic unity of Europe. The moral unity, the cultural unity of Europe are no less evident; but they are less valid to induce Europe to pacify itself).
It is true that these young national formations are scattered over an immense continent. But, the economy is, in our time, more powerful than space, its threads, its nerves, suppress or cancel distances. The scarcity of communications and transport in Indo-Spanish America is a consequence of the scarcity of economic relations. A railway is not built to satisfy a need of the spirit and culture.
Spanish America is at present practically fractionated, split, Balkanized. However, its unity is not a utopia, it is not an abstraction. The men who make up Hispanic-American history are not diverse. There is no noticeable difference between Peruvian Creole and Argentine Creole. The Argentine is more optimistic, more affirmative than the Peruvian, but both are irreligious and sensual. There are, between one and the other, differences of hue more than of color.
Things vary from one region of Spanish America to another, the landscape varies, but man hardly varies. And the subject of history is, first of all, man. Economics, politics, religion are forms of human reality. Its history is, in its essence, the history of man.
The identity of the Hispanic-American man finds an expression in intellectual life. The same ideas, the same feelings circulate throughout Indo-Spanish America. Every strong intellectual personality influences continental culture. Sarmiento, Martí, Montalvo do not belong exclusively to their respective homelands; they belong to Hispanic-America. The same thing that can be said about these thinkers can be said about Darío, Lugones, Silva, Nervo, Chocano and other poets. Rubén Darío is present in all Spanish-American literature: Currently, the thought of Vasconcelos and Ingenerios has a continental repercussion. Vasconcelos and Ingenerios are the teachers of an entire generation of our America. They are two directors of its mentality.
It is absurd and presumptuous to speak of a culture of its own and genuinely American in germination, in elaboration. The only obvious thing is that a vigorous literature already reflects the Hispanic-American mentality and humor. This literature—poetry, novel, criticism, sociology, history, philosophy—does not yet link peoples; but it does link, albeit only partially and weakly, intellectual categories.
Our time, finally, has created a more lively and more extensive communication: the one that has established among the Hispanic-American youth revolutionary emotion. Rather spiritual than intellectual, this communication recalls the one that brought together the generation of independence. Now as then, revolutionary emotion gives unity to Indo-Spanish America. Bourgeois interests coincide or rival; the interests of the masses do not. With the Mexican Revolution, with its luck, with its ideology, with its men, all the new men of America feel solidarity. The pacified toasts of diplomacy will not unite these peoples. They will be united, in the future, by the historical votes of the crowds.
Does a Hispanic-American Thinking Exist?
Published in Mundial: Lima, 19 May 1925. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_nuestra_america/paginas/existe.htm>
I
Four months ago, in an article about the idea of a congress of Ibero-American intellectuals, I posed this interrogation. The idea of the congress has come a long way in four months. It now appears as an idea that, vaguely but simultaneously, was beating in several intellectual nuclei of Indo-Iberian America. It appears as an idea that was germinating at the same time in various nerve centers of the continent. Schematic and embryonic still, it begins today to acquire development and corporeality.
In Argentina, an energetic and strong-willed group intends to take on the role of encouraging and carrying it out. The work of this group tends to be linked with that of other related Ibero-American groups. Some questionnaires are circulating among these groups that raise or hint at the issues that the congress should discuss. The Argentine group has outlined the program of a "Latin-American Union." In short, there are the preparatory elements of a debate, in the discourse of which the purposes and bases of this movement of coordination or organization of Hispanic-American thought will be elaborated and specified, as, somewhat abstractly still, its initiators usually define it.
II
It seems to me, therefore, that it is time to consider and clarify the issue raised in my aforementioned article. Is there already a characteristically Hispanic-American way of thinking? I think that, in this regard, the statements of the supporters of their organization go too far. Certain concepts in a message by Alfredo Palacios to the university youth of Ibero-America have induced some excessive and tropical temperaments to an exorbitant estimate of the value and power of Hispanic-American thought. The message of Palacios, enthusiastic and optimistic in his assertions and in his phrases, as befitted their character of a harangue or proclamation, has engendered a series of exaggerations. Therefore, a correction of these overly categorical concepts is indispensable.
"Our America," Palacios writes, "has lived from Europe until today, taking it as a guide. Her culture has nurtured and guided her. But the last war has made evident what was already guessed: that at the heart of that culture became the germs of its own dissolution." It is not possible to be surprised that these phrases have stimulated a wrong interpretation of the thesis of the decline of the West. Palacios seems to announce a radical independence of our America from European culture. The tense of the verb lends itself to equivocation. The judgment of the simplistic reader deduces from Palacios' phrase that "until now European culture has nourished and oriented" America; but that since today it no longer nourishes or orients it. He resolves, at least, that as of today Europe has lost the right and the ability to influence our young America spiritually and intellectually. And this judgment is inevitably accentuated and exacerbated when, a few lines later, Palacios adds that "the ways of Europe and the old cultures do not serve us" and that he wants us to emancipate ourselves from the European past and example.
Our America, according to Palacios, feels the imminence of giving birth to a new culture. Taking this opinion or this omen to the extreme, the magazine Valoraciones talks about "settling accounts with the usual topics, the agonizing expressions of the decrepit soul of Europe.”
Should we see in this optimism a sign and a fact of the affirmative spirit and of the creative will of the new Hispanic-American generation? I think I recognize, first of all, a feature of the old and incurable verbal exaltation of our America. America's faith in its future does not need to be fed by an artificial and rhetorical exaggeration of its present. It is well that America believes itself predestined to be the home of the future civilization. It is right for me to say, "The spirit will speak for my race” [José Vasconcelos]. It is good that she considers herself chosen to teach the world a new truth. But not that it is supposed to be on the eve of replacing Europe or that it declares the intellectual hegemony of the European people to be over and set up.
Western civilization is in crisis; but there is no indication yet that it is close to falling into definitive collapse. Europe is not, as it is absurdly said, exhausted and paralyzed. The war and the post-war period retains its power of creation. Our America continues to import ideas, books, machines, fashions from Europe. What ends, what declines, is the cycle of capitalist civilization. The new social form, the new political order, is taking shape within Europe. The theory of the decline of the West, a product of the Western laboratory, does not foresee the death of Europe but of the culture that is based there. This European culture, which [Oswald] Spengler judged to be in decline, without predicting an immediate demise for it, succeeded the Greco-Roman culture, also European. No one is ruling out, no one is excluding the possibility of Europe renewing and transforming itself once again. In the historical panorama that dominates our gaze, Europe is presented as the continent of the maximum palingenesis. Aren't the greatest artists, the greatest contemporary thinkers still European? Europe is nourished by the universal sap. European thought is immersed in the most distant mysteries, in the oldest civilizations. But this also shows its possibility of convalescence and rebirth.
III
Let us return to our question. Is there a characteristically Hispanic-American way of thinking?
It seems obvious to me the existence of a French thought, a German thought, etc., in the culture of the West. It does not seem equally obvious to me, in the same sense, that there is the existence of a Hispanic-American thought. All the thinkers of our America have been educated in a European school. The spirit of the race is not felt in its work. The intellectual production of the continent lacks its own features. It has no original contours. Hispanic-American thought is generally nothing more than a rhapsody composed of motifs and elements of European thought. To prove it, it is enough to review the work of the highest representatives of Indo-Iberian intelligence.
The Hispanic-American spirit is in the making. The continent, the race, are in formation as well. The Western floods in which the embryos of the Hispanic or Latin American culture develop—in Argentina, in Uruguay, one can speak of latinidad—have not managed to consubstantiate or solidarize with the soil on which the colonization of America has deposited them.
In a large part of Our America [Nuestra América] they constitute a superficial and independent stratum to which the indigenous soul does not emerge, depressed and sullen, because of the brutality of a conquest that in some Hispanic-American peoples has still not changed its methods. Palacios says: "We are nascent peoples, free of ties and atavisms, with immense possibilities and vast horizons before us. The crossing of races has given us a new soul. Humanity camps within our borders. We and our children are a synthesis of races." In Argentina it is possible to think like this; for Peru and other Hispanic-American peoples, no. The synthesis does not exist here yet. The elements of the nationality under development have not yet been able to be fused or welded together. The dense indigenous layer remains almost totally alien to the process of formation of that peruanidad that is usually exalted and inflated by our so-called nationalists, preachers of a nationalism without roots in the Peruvian soil, learned in the imperialist gospels of Europe, and which, as I have already had the opportunity to remark, is the most foreign and false feeling that exists in Peru.
IV
The debate that is beginning must, precisely, clarify all these issues. It should not prefer the comfortable fiction of declaring them solved. The idea of a congress of Ibero-American intellectuals will be valid and effective, first of all, to the extent that it manages to raise them. The value of the idea is almost entirely in the debate it raises.
The program of the Argentine section of the outlined Latin American Union, the questionnaire of the magazine Repertorio Americano de Costa Rica and the questionnaire of the group that works here for the congress, invite the intellectuals of our America to meditate and opine on many fundamental problems of this continent in formation. The program of the Argentine section has the tone of a declaration of principles. It is certainly premature. At the moment, it is only a question of drawing up a work plan, a discussion plan. But the works of the Argentine section are encouraged by a modern spirit and a renewing will. This spirit, this will, confer on them the right to direct the movement. Because the congress, if it does not represent and organize the new Hispanic-American generation, will not represent or organize absolutely anything.
The Face and the Soul of Tawantinsuyu
Published in Mundial: Lima, 11 September 1925. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/peruanicemos_al_peru/paginas/rostro.htm>
I
In the various writings that make up his recent book De la Vida Inkaica [Of Inca Life], Luis E. Valcárcel offers us, in distinctly carved pieces,—legend, novel, essay—a single and complete image of Tawantinsuyu. Valcárcel's book is not a monolithic portal. Valcárcel has lovingly carved stones of different sizes. But then he has managed to combine and adjust them into a single block. The technique of his architecture is the same as that of the Quechuas. Who says that the indigenous secret of welding and putting the stones together in a granite monument has been lost? Valcárcel keeps it in the depths of his subconscious and uses it with aboriginal stealth in his literature.
This book, in which a persistent and identical emotion beats, both when its prose is poetic and when it is critical, contains the elements of a total interpretation of the spirit of the Inca civilization. Valcárcel imaginatively reconstructs Tawantinsuyu into a majestic stone mass. Therein are all the faces, all the profiles, all the contours of the Empire. Valcárcel suppresses from his work the wasted detail and the disappearing meticulousness. His vision is a synthesis. And, as in Inca art, in his book, the image of the Empire is schematic and geometric.
In the pages of the Cuzco writer, one feels, first of all, a deep indigenous lyricism. This lyricism of Valcárcel, in the opinion of other commentators, will perhaps harm the interpretative value of his book. In my opinion, no. Not only because the thesis of the objectivity of historians seems to me despicable, artificial and ridiculous, but also because I consider the lyricism of all the most brilliant historical reconstructions to be obvious. History, to a large extent, is pure subjectivism and, in some cases, it is almost pure poetry. The so-called objective historians serve only to patiently accumulate, expurgating their sheets and manuscripts, the data and the elements that later, the lyrical genius of the reconstructor will use, or disdain in the elaboration of his synthesis, of his epic.
About the Inca people, for example, chroniclers and their commentators have written many fragmentary things. But they have not given us a true theory, a complete conception of the Inca civilization. And in reality, we are no longer too concerned about the problem of knowing how many the Incas were or which was the favorite wife of Huayna Capac, whose erotic romance interests us only very relatively. Rather, we are concerned with the problem of comprehensively covering, even at the cost of secondary nuances, the panorama of Quechua life. For this reason, the essays of interpretation that Valcárcel defines and presents as "some catchings of the spirit that animated it," have a strong and noble interest.
Valcárcel, filled with Quechua emotion, seems destined to write the poem of the people of the sun more than their history. His book is by no means a criticism. It is always an apology. He has a constant singing intonation. His prose and thought are dominated by the desire to poetize the history of Tawantinsuyu and the life of the Indian. But this lyrical exaltation manages to bring us closer to the intimate indigenous truth much more than the cold criticism of the equanimous observer. Valcárcel interprets his people with the same passion that the Jewish poets interpret the Lord's People.
II
If Valcárcel were a rationalist and a positivist, one of those who exasperate the irony of Bernard Shaw, he would talk to us, after putting his thick nineteenth-century glasses on, about indigenous "animism" and "totemism." His erudite research would have been, in that case, a solid contribution to the scientific study of the religion and myths of the ancient Peruvians. But then Valcárcel has not written, probably, "The Men of Stone." Nor would he have pointed out with such religious conviction, as one of the essential features of indigenous sentiment, the Franciscanism of Quechua. And, therefore, his version of the spirit of Tawantinsuyu would not be total.
The theory of "animism" teaches us that the Indians, like other primitive men, felt instinctively inclined to attribute a soul to stones. This is certainly a very respectable hypothesis of contemporary science. But science kills the legend, destroys the symbol. And, while science, by classifying the myth of the "stone men" as a simple case of animism, does not effectively help us to understand Tawantinsuyu, legend or poetry presents us, curdled in that symbol, its cosmic feeling.
This symbol is pregnant with rich suggestions. Not only because, as Valcárcel says, this symbol expresses that the Indian does not feel made of vile mud but of evergreen stone, but above all because it shows that the spirit of the Inca civilization is a product of the Andes.
The Indian's cosmic feeling is entirely composed of Andean emotions. The Andean landscape explains the Indian and explains Tawantinsuyu. The Inca civilization did not develop in the highlands or on the summits. It was developed in the temperate valleys of the sierra—Valcárcel, accurately, remarks—. It was a civilization grown in the steep lap of the Andes. The Inca Empire, seen from our time, appears in the historical distance as a granite monument. The Indian himself has something of the stone. His face is as hard as that of a basalt statue. And, for this, he is also enigmatic. The enigma of Tawantinsuyu is not to be found in the Indian. One has to look for it in the stone. In Tawantinsuyu, life springs from the Andes.
Science itself, if explored a little, coincides with poetry regarding the remote origins of Peru. According to the word of science, the Andes predates the forest and the coast. The Andean avalanches have formed the lowland. Stone and clay have descended from the Andes in centuries-old avalanches, on which men, plants and cities are now bearing fruit.
And the duality of Peruvian history and soul, in our time, is also necessary as a conflict between the historical form that is elaborated on the coast and the indigenous feeling that survives in the mountains deeply rooted in nature. The current Peru is a coastal formation. The new peruanidad [Peruanity] has settled in the lowland. Neither the Spanish nor the Creole knew or could conquer the Andes. In the Andes, the Spaniard was never anything but a pioneer [in English in the original] or a missionary. The Creole is also so until the Andean environment extinguishes the conqueror in him and creates, little by little, an indigenous man. This is the drama of contemporary Peru. A drama that is born, as I wrote recently, from the sin of Conquest. Of the original sin transmitted to the Republic, of wanting to constitute a Peruvian society and economy "without the Indian and against the Indian."
III
But these findings should not lead us to the same conclusion as Valcárcel. In one page of his book, Valcárcel wants us to repudiate the corrupt, decadent Western civilization. This is a legitimate conclusion in a poet's lyric book. I understand, perfectly, the exaltation of Valcárcel. Having set out on the path of allegory and symbol, as a means of understanding and translating the past, it is natural to seek the future by the same path. But, in this direction, realist men have to be a little wary of pure poetry.
Valcárcel goes too far, as almost always when one gives free rein to the imagination. Not even Western civilization is as exhausted and putrefied as Valcárcel puts it, and once it has acquired its experience, its technique and its ideas, Peru cannot mystically renounce such valid and precious instruments of human power to return, with harsh intransigence, to its ancient agrarian myths. The Conquest, the bad and everything, has become a historical event. The Republic, as it exists, is another historical fact. Abstract speculations of the intellect and pure conceptions of the mind can do little or nothing against historical facts. The history of Peru is but a fragment of human history. In four centuries a new reality has been formed. It has been created by the floods of the West. It is a weak reality. But it is, by any means, a reality. It would be excessively romantic to decide to ignore it today.
On the Sidelines of the New Course of Mexican Politics
Published in Variedades: Lima, 19 March 1930. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_nuestra_america/paginas/margen.htm>
The attentive observation of the events in Mexico is destined to clarify, for theorists and practitioners of Latin American socialism, the questions that so often confuse and disfigure the dilettante interpretation of the tropical superamericanists. Both in times of revolutionary flux and reactionary reflux, and perhaps more precisely and clearly in the these than in others, the historical experience initiated in Mexico by the insurrection of Madero and the overthrow of Porfirio Díaz, provides the observer with a precious and unique set of proofs of the ineluctable capitalist and bourgeois gravitation of every political movement led by the petty bourgeoisie, with the ideological confusion that is its own.
Mexico made hasty and excessive apologists conceive the tacit hope that its revolution would provide Latin America with the pattern and method of a socialist revolution, governed by essentially Latin American factors, with the maximum reduction of Europeanizing theorizing. The facts have been responsible for putting an end to this tropical and messianic hope. And no circumspect critic today would risk subscribing to the hypothesis that the caudillos and plans of the Mexican Revolution will lead the Aztec people to socialism.
Luis Araquistain, in a book written with obvious sympathy for the work of the political regime he met and studied in Mexico two years ago, feels so compelled by nothing but the most elementary duty of objectivity to dispel the legend of the "socialist revolution." This is, more specifically and systematically, the object of a series of articles by the young Peruvian writer Esteban Pavletich, who has been in direct contact with the men and things of Mexico since 1926. The writers themselves, addicted or allied to the regime, admit that it is not, for the moment, a socialist state that the policy of this regime tends to create. Froylán C. Manjarrez, in a study published in the magazine Crisol, claims that, for the stage of gradual transition from capitalism to socialism, life "now offers us this solution: between the capitalist state and the socialist state there is an intermediate state: the state as regulator of the national economy, whose mission corresponds to the Christian concept of property, triumphant today, which assigns to it social functions…” Far from all finalism and all determinism, the fascists in Italy attribute to themselves the function of creating precisely this type of national and unitary state. The class State is condemned in the name of the state superior to the interests of the classes, conciliator and arbitrator, as the case may be, of those interests. Eminently petty-bourgeois, it is not uncommon that this idea, affirmed above all by fascism, in the process of an unequivocally and unmistakably counterrevolutionary action, now appears incorporated into the ideology of a political regime, emerged from a revolutionary tidal wave. The petty-bourgeois of the whole world look alike, although some turn back, following Machiavelli, to the Middle Ages and the Roman Empire and others dream in Christianly a concept of property that assigns social functions to it. The regulatory state of Froylán C. Manjarrez is none other than the fascist state. It doesn't matter that Manjarrez prefers to recognize it in the German state, as presented in the Weimar Constitution.
Neither the Weimar Charter nor the presence of the Socialist Party in the government has taken away from the German state the character of a class state, of a democratic-bourgeois state. The German socialists, who retreated in 1918 before the revolution—an attitude that precisely has its formal expression in the Weimar Constitution—propose nothing more than the slow, prudent transformation of this state, which they know is dominated by the interests of capitalism. Ministerial collaboration is imposed, according to reformist leaders such as the Belgian Vandervelde, by the need to defend the interests of the working class in government, against the arrogance of capitalism, and by the amount and responsibility of socialist parliamentary representation. Incidents such as the exclusion from the government of the Social-Democrat Hilferding, Minister of Finance, as a result of his conflict with Schacht, dictator of the Reichbank and trustee of the big financial bourgeoisie, suffice, on the other hand, to remind German socialists of the real power of capitalist interests in government and the practical conditions of Social-Democratic collaboration.
What categorizes and classifies the German state is the degree to which it realizes bourgeois democracy. The political evolution of Germany is not measured by the vague purposes of nationalization of the economy of the Weimar Charter, but by the effectiveness achieved by the democratic-bourgeois institutions: universal suffrage, parliamentarism, the right of all parties to legal existence and to the propaganda of their doctrine, etc.
The regression of Mexico, in the period following the death of Obregón, the march to the right of the regime of Portes Gil and Ortiz Rubio, are also notable for the suspension of the democratic rights previously recognized for the extreme left elements. By persecuting the militants of the United Mexican Trade Union Confederation, the Communist Party, the Workers Relief, the Anti-Imperialist League, for their criticism of the abdications to imperialism and for their propaganda of the proletarian program, the Mexican government denies the true mission of the Mexican Revolution: the replacement of the despotic and semi-feudal Porfirist regime by a bourgeois democratic regime.
The regulatory state, the intermediate state, defined as the organ of the transition from capitalism to socialism, appears concretely as a regression. Not only is it not capable of guaranteeing the political and economic organization of the proletariat the guarantees of democratic-bourgeois legality, but it assumes the function of attacking and destroying it, it is hardly disturbed by its most elementary protests. It proclaims itself the absolute and infallible depositary of the ideals of the Revolution. It is a patriarchal-minded state that, without professing socialism, opposes the proletariat—that is, the class to which the function of actuary historically belongs—from asserting and exercising its right to fight for it, independently of any bourgeois or petty-bourgeois influence.
None of these observations disputes the Mexican Revolution's social background, nor does it diminish its historical significance. The political movement that in Mexico brought down Porfirismo has been nourished, advanced everything that has mattered and the victory over feudalism and its oligarchies, of the feeling of the masses, it has been supported by their forces and has been driven by an indisputable revolutionary spirit. It is, under all these aspects, an extraordinary and sobering experience. But the character and the objectives of this revolution, by the men who led it, by the economic factors to which it obeyed and by the nature of its process, are those of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. Socialism can only be actuated by a class party; it can only be the result of a socialist theory and practice. The intellectual adherents to the regime, grouped in the magazine Crisol, take on the task of "defining and clarifying the ideology of the Revolution." It is recognized, therefore, that it was not defined or clarified. The latest acts of repression, directed primarily against foreign political refugees, Cubans, Venezuelans, etc., indicate that this clarification is going to come with delay. The politicians of the Mexican Revolution, quite far apart from each other on the other hand, are showing themselves less and less willing to continue it as a bourgeois-democratic revolution. They have already turned the machine back. And its theorists serve us, meanwhile, with Latin American eloquence, a thesis of the regulatory state, of the intermediate state, which resembles like a drop of water to another drop the thesis of the fascist State.