Critical Theory from the Andes

José Carlos Mariátegui, Amauta

Before we can even begin to think, we are already living. The question of what life is cannot be given a definitive answer. Nor can the question of how and why one should live. Life is not a simple, clear thing that we can close into a glass case or define with a sentence in the dictionary. Life is something that thought cannot take hold of, because life takes hold of thought. But by reflecting on what we sense and feel, by deriving the knowledge of experience from it, and gathering knowledge into comprehensive theories, we notice the forces that take hold of us in our habits, our mannerisms, all the things that we otherwise take for granted. Thought helps to make our life flexible. We surprise ourselves with more capabilities than we might have expected. Criticism, a negative way of thinking, aids our efforts to reach for something positive. Every criticism that we make already implies something about what we think is good.

The people who do things just because it’s how they’re done do not seem very alive. They go through life disinterestedly, fading into the background. Those who come to the forefront are those who do things because they feel that they are necessary, even necessary against the force of universally accepted habits. And at the most intense point, there are those who do things because they feel that they are good. Their intensity might burn too bright and reach for a star that is too distant, and they might fade into the contentment that this is the best of all possible worlds. Or, they might reach a higher affirmation, seeking the greatest possible good for all without believing that the limited possibilities of the day can contain it in a complete form.

Writing in 1937, in a decade defined by blind faith, Max Horkheimer drew a distinction between “Traditional and Critical Theory.” The former tends “towards a purely mathematical system of symbols,” while the latter “is, in its totality, the unfolding of a single existential judgment” of the society that it theorizes.¹

This “critical theory” was not new to the 20th century. Horkheimer did not invent it. He first encountered it in the theory of Karl Marx. Not the dead Marxist theory of the 19th century, or the gray formulas of the Communist Parties, but the Marx who had detected the pulse of the 20th century. Traditional Marxism, like liberalism, was confident that the world was unstoppably marching towards progress. Science and technology were wiping away the cobwebs of ignorance and shining the light of freedom into all the dark corners of brutality.

Marxists believed that the market would inevitably lay the basis for its own demise by putting propertyless laborers into cooperation in the factories, making all sections of society depend on the others to function, and uniting the ownership of property into fewer hands and larger scales of operation. The work of socialism would be simple. It would only take a victory in some elections here, a legal decree there, and state ownership of property to carry out the socialization of private capital. Then, the state would be able to organize society according to a rational plan. The new order would put an end to all conflicts by destroying their sources—scarcity and selfishness.

But the linear increase in wealth and knowledge did not secure an eternal peace. The rivers of blood spilled by the explosion of World War I in 1914 put the illusion of progress into question. It was not the objective, economic interests of nations which finally compelled the clashing sides to negotiate an end to the war. It was a moral intervention made against the authorities. Crowds of the propertyless spilled into the streets of the cities while the nameless soldiers on the front lines turned their guns against their superiors instead of each other. In 1917, the workers and soldiers of the Russian Empire overthrew the old autocracy, organized their own government of soviet assemblies apart from the official parliament, began to experiment in workers’ control of firms, and brought forth a new form of state called the Soviet Republic. By then a long-time socialist organizer, the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón said that the Russian Revolution was a sign “that at last the human herd decides to start walking on two feet.”² In 1918, the masses of Germany began to build a new republic with their own hands. To contain the tide of revolution, the contending powers of Europe had to put their differences aside and begin to construct a new norm.

After this revolutionary experience, it was clear that things could no longer be gambled on the old certainties. The Marxist Karl Korsch laid the foundation for a new generation of socialists when he named the target of critical theory as “a false consciousness, in particular one that mistakenly attributes an autonomous character to a partial phenomena of social life.”³ Ideology takes whatever seems simple and immediately obvious to it as the absolute, unconditional truth. Critical theory interrogates the assumptions made by Ideology. The critique of Ideology was not intended to replace action. It hoped to be a companion to a free spirited style of politics. The critical theorists did not set out to polemically justify the systems of actually existing socialism, like that of the Soviet Union after 1917. But neither did they surrender to join those who hypocritically decried socialism in the defense of capitalism. They staked out an independent position amidst the dispute of partisan ideas.

Critical theory does not oppose two principles against one another, but works at the frayed edges of what it finds in front of it. It makes an immanent critique of its subject matter, treating the process as an open-ended questioning of the world rather than a dogmatic task of closing the world into a tally of hard facts. Indulging in theoretical reflection does not have to mean abandoning politics. It can be understood as the clarification of a social terrain of possibilities, and a project which points in the directions that might unfold into new situations. Critical theory is a method of freedom.

Setting out from the coastal capital city of Lima, Peru, José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930) joined a gathering generation of critical theorists.

A Life in Many Worlds

José Carlos Mariátegui was not born as a son of the ancient and agrarian América of the Andes, or as a son of the modern and industrial Peru of the Pacific, but as someone in the middle. On June 13, 1894, he was born to the pious Catholic María Amalia La Chira Ballejos and Liberal anticlerical writer Francisco Javier Mariátegui Requejo in the city of Moquegua. The city is framed by the western slope of the Andes and opens up to the slant of the coast. In 1899, his mother moved him and his siblings to Huacho, a coastal city on the outskirts of Lima. There, after a 1902 accident which left him with ankylosis in his left leg, he would begin his lifelong work of thinking, reading, and educating himself.⁴

In the beginning of the 20th century, thought had begun to transform into a mass endeavor. This popularity simultaneously meant a profound and radical contentiousness. Mariátegui wandered into the world of Western philosophy after it had been thrown into a revolution within a revolution. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution gave global liberalism and democracy their optimistic spirit, but the experiences of war and reactionary restoration in the 19th century threw this feeling into question. The apparent consensus of philosophy, the task of modernizing the world, dispersed into the disputes of many schools about the meaning of life. Mariátegui took a little bit from each of them: French materialism and Romanticism, German idealism and life-philosophy, Spanish mysticism and existentialism, Italian rationalism and historicism, Anglo-American Transcendentalism and pragmatism, and others. But he did not do so for the sake of eclecticism; he always thought on the solid ground of his own experiences.⁵

He found work from the newspapers of Lima, initially in the manual labor of printing the papers and eventually in the intellectual work of writing them. Under the pseudonym Juan Croniqueur, he published poetry about the various aspects of his Andean life. His social criticism soon caught the attention of the Peruvian state, which sent him into exile. Mariátegui soon took the opportunity to travel to Europe to work as a journalist. He personally witnessed the revolutionary wave in Europe in 1918-1919. Witnessing this moment in Europe, interpreted through his study of Karl Marx’s Capital (1867), fully convinced Mariátegui of socialism.⁶ He offered the highest praise to the theory of Marx, saying that “Marx appears as the discoverer and, one could say, almost the inventor of the proletariat[...] [and,] one can say, the very notion, and behind the notion, the reality of the proletariat as a class essentially antithetical to the bourgeoisie, the true and only bearer of the revolutionary spirit in modern industrial society.”⁷ At the same time, Mariátegui’s socialism was not a bland copy of anyone.⁸ He drew from Jacobinism, anarchism, and Marxism rather than offering blind loyalty to any one current. He drew from the pessimistic historical theories of the Conservative Revolution, in particular the work of Oswald Spengler, at the same time that he kept up to date on the revolution in physics made by Albert Einstein’s theory of special and general relativity, and bridged optimism and pessimism through the syndicalist and workerist theories of Georges Sorel. These sources inspired his sense of socialist theory as a series of reflections on a history which is multilinear, rather than being the progressive universalization of one model of development from savagery to civilization. But this history is also cosmopolitan, rather than closing off into the mutually indifferent biographies of national identities.

Love and revolution come together in the world’s cities. In Rome, in the spring of 1920, Mariátegui met a kindred soul in Anna Chiappe.⁹ The couple soon married and had a son, Sandro Mariátegui Chiappe. They later had three more sons: Sigfrido, José Carlos, and Javier. Together, the couple was one force. Chiappe was the fiery heart of Mariátegui’s thought, and she had a vigor for life which could resurrect the dead. Mariátegui’s right leg was amputated in May of 1924. The care that Chiappe gave nursed him back to life. For the rest of his life, she was his attendant and caregiver. When the revolutionaries of Peru and the world met him, she was often the one pushing his wheelchair. They were literally joined at the hip, each enjoying the care of the other as their motive force. She was the entire world in his heart, and he was the heart of her world. Recalling when they had first met in the midst of world revolution, he wrote: “And your tonic possession, under the Latin sky, entangled a serpentine of joy in my soul.”¹⁰ In turn, she remembered him with a spirit of Romance: “He looked like a nobleman. And he had such deep-set eyes.”¹¹

In Europe, Mariátegui began to turn his journalistic efforts to the work of criticism. He was not a critic in the negative sense of a nay-sayer, but in the sense of a thinker of penetrating insight. His attitude towards criticism echoed the young Georg Lukács, who wrote in Soul and Form (1908) that poetic criticism “represents the ultimate relationships between man and destiny and world, and without doubt it has its origin in those profound regions, even if, often, it is unaware of it.”¹² Mariátegui’s criticism was affirmative, working with language to weave tapestries of concepts which express something about society as a whole. The truth or untruth of what people say is less relevant than what it shows about their sentiments. Criticism, a work of careful and rational thinking, should not tell them that they are stupid or wrong. Reflecting on his role as a critic, Mariátegui noted that “Reason itself has taken it upon itself to prove to men that it is not enough for them. That only Myth possesses the precious virtue of filling their deep ego.”¹³ The myths of a society are its hopes and fears, its sense of the world. The institutions of culture are how these myths are recorded and proliferated. For Mariátegui, this insight was weighed with a pragmatic significance. The rejection of the prevailing state of things was the first step towards a new alternative: “All the great human ideals have started from a negation; but all have also been an affirmation.”¹⁴ He spoke to the emerging public opinion of the newspapers and intervened in the public’s shaping of a person’s character.

By 1923, Mariátegui returned to Peru as a public intellectual. Educational reform was one of the first political causes in Peru for which Mariátegui employed his skills as a writer.¹⁵ The universities of the Americas had introduced the well-to-do European-American elite to French and Anglo-American manners, while the schools worked on Hispanizing and Catholicizing the masses. Neither had taught people how to think. And they certainly did not teach them how to think for themselves. Turning his skills in writing and rhetoric to politics, Mariátegui took this educational task on for himself. But he did not do so like his friend, José Vasconcelos, whom he criticized for his project of assimilationist mestizaje.¹⁶ He supported Vasconcelos’s experiments in popular education, which sent teachers to villages and brought literature to the masses. He similarly looked upon the Jacobin collectivist experiments of Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto in the Yucatán with interest.¹⁷ But he did so while criticizing projects of nationalist assimilation.¹⁸ Like the zapatista feminist Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, he opposed any education which sought to make Mexican Natives less Native and mestizos more white.¹⁹ He did not want to make Natives adhere to the cultural ideals of a national citizenship, but find a sense of themselves in a united socialist democracy. He set to work developing an Indigenist and socialist education for the Peruvian public. He founded the influential indígenista and socialist journal Amauta in 1926. In his lifetime, he published two books, The Contemporary Scene (1925), and his globally famous magnum opus, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928).²⁰ After his death in 1930, two manuscripts which had been in development were published as The Morning Soul (1950) and Defense of Marxism (1955).²¹

Mariátegui wrote as part of the tradition of the sembrador, the seeder of ideas. But he was different to the generation of sembradores that had come before him. José Martí of Cuba and Ricardo Flores Magón of Mexico had been cultivated by oppositional Liberalism, in the nationalist and democratic style of French Revolutionary Jacobinism. They looked to the Liberals in the Wars of the Reform and the Republic of Cuba in Arms’ nationalist Ten Years’ War against the Spanish Empire. Their approaches to Cuba and Puerto Rico’s struggles for independence from the Spanish Empire and to the Mexican Revolution were Jacobin in the French style. They set out to build a nation through military struggle and mass politics. Had they lived to victory over the old regimes, perhaps they would have overseen their own Reigns of Terror. Or, perhaps they would have preferred to remain in opposition to the institutionalization of their Revolution. Regardless, these post-Revolution problems of Jacobinism were left to the soil that took to the seeds instead of being the property of the seeders.

Mariátegui understood the necessities of Jacobinism, but he was already past it. Independence from Europe had been left incomplete, yes. But its tasks could not be completed by the Freedom, Equality, and Liberty of radical Liberalism alone: “Less than a century and a half has been enough for this myth to grow old.”²² The West Indian world revolutionary C.L.R. James summed up this perspective when he noted that the “cult of Reason, of the Supreme Being, or virtue, civicism, nation, all in the hands of [Maximilien] Robespierre and [Louis Antoine de] Saint-Just retained the revolutionary character against the bourgeoisie and reaction but equally served to subordinate and restrain the masses while keeping intact their revolutionary energy.”²³ If the horizons of a Jacobin revolution went no further than this popular renovation of the nation, there was nothing tethering them to formal democracy. Il Duce of Fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini, son of a socialist and a former socialist himself, was directed towards this same Jacobin tradition when his parents named him after the Mexican Liberal leader Benito Juárez. He was the personification of a new Jacobinism for the 20th century, one which struck out against the red tide. The generation of sembradores that Mariátegui and James came from can only be understood through their formative time, the 1920s. The world revolution was passing through the plantations of Mexico, the councils of the Soviet Union, the factories of Europe, the steppes of Eurasia, the deserts of the Maghreb, and the coasts of China.

The contemporary generation of critical theorists in Europe were sembradores as well, in their own way. In 1923, the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung [IfS]) established a headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. They were sponsored with a guiding spirit and a generous amount of money by Felix Weil. There was something shared between Weil and Mariátegui—a life in América. Weil was born in 1898 to a wealthy Jewish family in the grain business of Buenos Aires, Argentina as Félix José Weil. After moving to Germany, he joined the workers in the street uprisings of 1919. His earliest theoretical works touched on the same basic topics as Mariátegui. They were titled Socialization: An Attempt at a Conceptual Foundation, with a Critique of the Plans for Socialization (1921) and The Labor Movement in Argentina: A Contribution to its History (1923).²⁴

Weil analyzed the tasks of converting capitalist production into social ownership, as well as the strategic stumbling blocks along the way to this posed by the mass-cultural reproduction of capitalist attitudes.²⁵ In his earliest forays into the problem, Weil focused on the examples of both the industrializing and militarist Germany and the agricultural Argentina which depended on the industries of the West. When the conditions for the production and reproduction of life and its necessities are held in a few hands as private property, the propertyless masses are forced to learn how to listen to the commands of others to get their daily bread. They move along to get along. They adapt themselves to the situation and become used to doing and thinking what other people tell them to. Weil wanted the propertyless and oppressed to think and act for themselves, to intervene actively in their lives to take control over the means of production and organize society for the good of each and all.

Weil, unlike many of his fellow socialists, had access to millions of dollars in wealth. He was known by some as the “Salon Bolshevik.” He put his money at the disposal of his comrades by sponsoring new experiments in socialist theory. In May of 1923, Weil organized the “First Marxist Workweek,” a retreat meant for the discussion of the texts History and Class Consciousness (1923) by Georg Lukács and Marxism and Philosophy (1923) by Karl Korsch.²⁶ Present and future iconic names of German Marxism attended, including the aforementioned Korsch and Lukács, the Communist Party of Germany [Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD)] Reichstag representative Clara Zetkin, and the writers Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock. They set out together to establish a new role for critical theory in the struggle to socialize society. Their efforts would influence the thinking and practice of generations after them, all the way up to the present.

The 1910s had been a time for the heroic, concerted rise of the propertyless masses. After the revolutionary wave subsided, the 1920s were the time for the cultivation of a new generation of revolutionaries. The methods of their self-cultivation and their sembrador practices still offer lessons to us today. Their legacies are broad in socialism and modern philosophy, and yet almost no one knows their names or reads them anymore. The heroic generations were intentionally forgotten. Some even forgot themselves, in order to accommodate themselves to their harsh realities. But traces of the old generations still live. On the winds of their breath, the living speak the voices of the dead.

Today, Mariátegui is called amauta—a Quechua word for a wise instructor—by millions. The role of the amauta implies a different set of ethics than the Western teacher. The meaning of the role only becomes clear in the relationships between teacher, student, and lesson. The amauta does not pose a ready-made doctrine of truth to their students, but poetically weaves the cosmos into the knots of the khipu, the tones of speech, the grammar of language, and the labor of thought. The Quechua-Aymara father of indianismo, Fausto Reinaga, articulated the Amautic imperative as being “that man, that thinking is the most elevated form of life. That man, that thinking is life. That life is thinking. That to think is to be. That to be is life. The one who does not think, the one who does not think does not live. They are matter, an organ without life.”²⁷ The only absolute reality is the cosmos, devoid of any central point, rich with multitudinous existence. In place of the Amautic imperative, Western civilization follows the Socratic imperative. Socratic philosophy teaches that “God has created man. God is life. Philosophy is the consciousness of science. Philosophy comes from God. The truth is divine.”²⁸ Over the centuries, this will to the truth became the intolerant affirmation of unquestionable dogmas. Reinaga condemned Western civilization for having “made a world of hate and fear. Hatred and fear have engendered war. From Troy to Hiroshima war is the outbreak of hatred and fear. War has turned the Trojan Horse into the Hiroshima Bomb.”²⁹

Eurocentrism pretends as if Europe is the center of the world. It pretends as if the entire universe exists for the West to conquer it. Like the scholarly protagonist of the same name in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1790), the West has made a pact with the devil in pursuit of absolute knowledge and absolute power. The chasm of nihilism, which the West threatens to fall into in its leaps of expansion, also provokes reflection. When Europeans and North Americans recognize other thinking subjects in this world, remembering that their reality is not the only one, they return to the uniqueness of their own perspective. Mariátegui saw more in Europe and North America than Faustian imperialism.The relativist tendency has always thrived as an undercurrent of the Western world, from Nicolaus Copernicus and Michel de Montaigne to Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Einstein. Mariátegui considered Western skepticism to be the birth pangs of a new ethic: “from the crisis of this skepticism and this nihilism, there is born the rough, strong, peremptory need for a faith and a myth that moves men to live dangerously.”³⁰ Western critical theory sustained the skeptical feeling of relativism rather than justifying the new myths. The affects of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), followed this thread. By opening themselves to the freedom of others, Westerners could recover their own freedom. But Western critical theorists, thinking from the experience of the Nazi regime of Blood and Soil, disparaged the revivals of the indigenous as surrenders to barbarism. The critical theory of the Andes, on the other hand, centered the Native personality as its subject. The Vitruvian Man of the Renaissance merged with the New Man of the Russian Revolution, and the freewheeling automobiles of North America passed through the living cosmos of the Andes in the world of Mariátegui.

Faust, Siegfried, Don Quixote

There is much to learn from the tropes that stock a society’s language, the characters and scenes that it uses to interpret itself in narrative. Even when they are tragic, popular stories are affirmative. They say something about what is significant enough in life to tell a story about. Their popular reception reveals not only how the audience estimates the quality of a work of culture, but also what sentiments move the audience. A story, repeated many times and with subtle variations, can tell the critic much about what a society thinks about itself. Before he was a revolutionary, Mariátegui was a lover of literature. His close study of Western culture, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Miguel de Cervantes, helped him to make sense of the world around him. The great geniuses of culture do not draw the greatness of their work from nothing. Iconic characters are iconic in no small part because they capture something from the world and give it a face. According to Mariátegui, “man foresees and imagines only what is already germinating, maturing, in the dark bowels of history.”³¹

In the aftermath of World War I, Oswald Spengler had proclaimed The Decline of the West (1918). The soul of every life is mortal, the fully formed mold of an aged personality soon fades back into the formless and impersonal cosmos. The same truth held, Spengler taught, for continents, places, languages, traditions, cultures, and civilizations. The West was no exception, and the signs of the times told that it had already passed its peak. The Faustian imperative had lost its youthful vigor. The “Faustian man” has handed the work of dominion over nature and cosmic expansion over to the forces and efficiency of his technology, and so he “has become the slave of his creation. His number, and the arrangement of life as he lives it, have been driven by the machine on to a path where there is no standing still and no turning back.”³² The West’s machines, the externalization of its soul into the forms of titanic combinations of automatons, could be wielded by the non-Western world as a weapon against it.

The West could not overcome its mortality, but it did not have to greet this fate with resignation. The formal proceduralism of democracy could easily give way to a joyful enthusiasm for imperialist dictatorship.³³ Only the Faustian soul could create and control this planetary technology. Its phoenix-like rebirth in a “Caesarian” rebellion would make one last hurrah. The Caesarian could “hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him.”³⁴ But first, the West would have to face a struggle with the peoples it had armed with its technology for the sake of exploiting them. The public of the colonial world greeted Spengler’s thesis with interest, judging it as an accurate and insightful critique of the Western reality that they had been observing from the outside.³⁵ Mariátegui estimated that the insight of his diagnoses elevated Spengler into someone who “cannot be forgotten today in any attempt to interpret history[.]”³⁶ In 1934, Lewis Mumford articulated the problem in the succinct title Technics and Civilization.³⁷

In the 19th century, the artist Richard Wagner gave the problem his own treatment in his soundtracks of superheroes and operas of the German public. With his Romantic and moralistic perspective, from the universal love of innocent nature, he crafted an aesthetic critique of this cold and impersonal world of technics. He transformed the Middle High German Song of the Nibelungs into the operatic tetralogy of The Ring. It began in primordial times, with the disruption to universal tranquility of nature made when the lustful dwarf Alberich renounced love and stole the gold of the river Rhine from the Rhinemaidens. With the determination of rage and resentment in his heart, he organized a smelting factory forged the divine gold into a ring of power which would grant any wearer the power to control the entire world. The ring, which was crafted from stolen gold, was soon stolen again by the gods of Valhalla, setting a tragedy into motion.

Wagner’s opera gave voice, falsetto and baritone, to an entire era. He gave a narrative structure to the growing doubts about Enlightenment and Progress. The critics of the left and right alike recognized the ring of power in the Faustian politics of the day. The hand of the West, tearing riches from the breasts of Africa, Asia, and América, was wearing the ring. It was not that the inevitable march of economic development towards modernity drove imperialism. History was proving itself to be much less rational, much less mechanical than the factories of the imperialists. It was that, as the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt wrote, the planetary imperialism of the West rested on a universal foundation, the nomos, a “[Greek] word that means both ‘to divide” and ‘to pasture.’ Thus, nomos is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible—the initial measure and division of pasture­ land, i.e., the land-appropriation as well as the concrete order contained in it and following from it,” which in the West’s “discovery” of the New World appeared as “free space, as an area open to European occupation and expansion.”³⁸ Schmitt included the socialist movement of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin in the nomos of exploitation despite their criticisms of it, because they believed that “plundering should stop, but appropriation as a precondition of new distributions does not. If the essence of imperialism lies in the precedence of appropriation before distribution and production, then a doctrine such as expropriation of the expropriators is obviously the strongest imperialism, because it is the most modern.”³⁹ The struggles between capitalists and socialists were struggles for who would have the right to exploit the earth for their own ends.

The revolutionaries of the right accommodated this fact more easily than the revolutionaries of the left. The left’s revolutionaries had pegged their hopes to the industrializing and rationalizing drives of the Soviet Union, while those of the right believed that fascism represented a revolt of human nature against the reign of technology. The Conservative Revolutionaries had their own sense of the social question in this world of the ring. In The Worker: Dominion and Form (1932) Ernst Jünger, veteran of the Great War and nationalist advocate for a worker-soldier alliance, wrote that “the form of the worker is characterised not by an element of poverty, but by an element of plenitude,” for in the work of world domination “the strange additional task (Nebenaufgabe) of retrieving this dominion fell to the worker, and it is a very significant fact that he first had to bring to dominion the alien element which was mixed in with his endeavours, and thus experience that it did not belong to him.”⁴⁰ Siegfried the Worker was born of incest, and wants to dominate the strange and unfamiliar wherever he meets it. Perhaps he hopes to make himself a father through the brutality of rape.

The domination of nature leads smoothly into the domination of human beings. Mariátegui recognized this new figure as a point of transition. The “domestication of the animal, its application to human purposes and work, represents perhaps the most ancient of technics,” this was a work of a dominating humanity.⁴¹ But in this modern world of domesticated humanity, “the type, the specimen towards which we are approaching, is rather that of the worker.”⁴² While the urban and worldly Jünger saw a new dawn in the face of this Worker, hoping that its impulses to total mobilization would overcome the narrow blueprints of the technical experts, a more agrarian soul let out a sigh of pessimism. The philosopher Martin Heidegger predicted that in “the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man, the subjectivism of man attains its acme, from which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there firmly establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e., technological, rule over the earth. The modern freedom of subjectivity vanishes totally in the objectivity commensurate with it.”⁴³

Technological suffocation creates a desperate and irrepressible need for heroism. The decline of the West, Mariátegui wrote, had to be reconsidered in light of the new wave of revolutions: “In the historical panorama that dominates our gaze, Europe is presented as the continent of the maximum palingenesis.”⁴⁴ He and other revolutionaries of his day found their inspiration in the eponymous protagonist of Wagner’s opera, Siegfried (1876). Lenin never tired of seeing the opera performed. The song of Siegfried’s funeral was the soundtrack to his own state funeral in January of 1924. Mariátegui and Anna Chiappe christened their second son Sigfrido, a choice encapsulating their hopes for the future generations. The Wagnerian Siegfried, as Nietzsche wrote, “merely follows his first impulse, he overthrows everything traditional, all reverence, all fear. Whatever displeases him he stabs to death. Without the least respect, he tackles old deities.”⁴⁵ Siegfried, a demigod of scandalous birth, ascends from a humble existence as a child of the forest to a heroic slayer of dragons. The well-envied ring of world power was now guarded in the hoard of Fafnir the dragon. After killing Fafnir, Siegfried examines the ring disinterestedly—”How ye may serve know I not.”⁴⁶ He is childish and innocent—not innocent in the sense of gentle, but as a personality without cruelty or resentment.⁴⁷ He does not care about wielding the ring to command the world. He only sees it as a trinket, no different from a polished rock. While wandering, he awakens a similarly innocent, independent, and brave soul, the valkyrie Brunhild. They soon fall in love, calling each other “my wealth and world, my one and all: light of loving, laughing death!”⁴⁸ The free lovers set out in joy to annul old contracts, destroy the gods and their despotism, and redeem the world.

The post-1914 Europeans adopted Siegfried and Brunhild’s crusade as their own. Wagnerism was the music of the new winds. Seeking to become the prophet of a new age, Ernst Bloch said, with his characteristically Gnostic style, that the new culture had to reach into “the unseen Man, to the approaching figure perceived in the sound-image, of the Master, of the Servants, the eschatological ground of the soul, the restoration of Cosmic Man, of the secret, absolute figure of humanity, from the labyrinth of the world.”⁴⁹ But this was a mood provoked by the experience of a blocked situation. It was the push of an overgrown embryo against its shell, an exterior that was hardened and crusted over. It was not yet a voice of the emerging life, which is molten and fluid. Utopia did not have to be placed so far off from the world to work its magic of inspiring the masses. The basic problems in everyday life are already those of impersonal world capitalism, which at once provokes the questions of personality and socialism.⁵⁰

The new spirit spoke in the public assemblies of workers’ syndicates and councils. Mariátegui had seen these revolutionary ways of association in action while in Turin during the 1919 factory council wave. Up until then a literary Nietzschean, it inspired him to join the socialist movement.⁵¹ And rightly so. The council was the form of a rebellion against thingification, the upheaval of new life into the Old World. The revolution would redeem the West, breathing new life into the cracked clay of its body.⁵² But what directions that life would move in remained uncertain.

On the left, Georg Lukács hailed a Faustian imperative within this new force. In History and Class Consciousness (1923), he expressed the hope that it would “reconcile the dialectical conflict between immediate interests and ultimate goal,” that goal being a Good and True world.⁵³ But “only if ‘the true [were understood] not only as substance but also as subject,’ only if the subject (consciousness, thought) were both producer and product of the dialectical process, only if, as a result the subject moved in a self-created world of which it is the conscious form and only if the world imposed itself upon it in full objectivity, only then can the problem of dialectics, and with it the abolition of the antitheses of subject and object, thought and existence, freedom and necessity, be held to be solved.”⁵⁴ This realization of philosophy through a work of history would finally enact the transition from “the evolution of Greek beauty from its primitive, still natural, partially oriental beginnings” to Faustian man’s “realization, the development of all his individual possibilities, so that, by being put to the test in the world, he might penetrate, come to know, and dominate reality.”⁵⁵ The Russian Revolution marked the Westernization of the East, and the council form that the Russian workers had made their great experiment in could become the redemption of Faust.

On the right, Ernst Jünger recognized the emergence of this Siegfried of the councils as a revolutionary force. That the Russian Revolution had been accomplished by councils of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies together had profound significance. Italian fascism had come from the unification of socialist revolutionaries and the drive to imperialist warfare. Writing to his fellow National Socialists in 1926, Jünger issued his call to action: “Striving to internally strengthen organizations created with love and enthusiasm, to strengthen their positions and lessen friction, we’ll provide nationalism the greatest service. We’ll breathe in power to the organs and then the idea will be capable of utilizing them.”⁵⁶ While Lukács hoped that the councils would carry through the Reality of Reason, Jünger hoped that they would act out the Triumph of the Will.

The Nazis did not take up the power of the councils. The fascists came to power first and foremost as an anticommunist force. They reigned over the propertyless by the rule of bullets and decrees, while passing millions through the machinery of their gray bureaucracy and cold experts to be worked to death and exterminated.⁵⁷ The West’s Faustian drive killed Siegfried, converting him into an animated corpse that placed the world on an assembly line to work it through the ring. The Allied victory in the West neither laid Siegfried to rest nor resurrected him. A leveling collectivism and herd conformity prevailed in the capitalist and socialist worlds alike. But, as the Russian Siegfried, Lenin, had once said against Spengler, “this decline of the old Europe is but an episode in the history of the downfall of the world bourgeoisie, oversatiated by imperialist rapine and the oppression of the majority of the world’s population. That majority has now awakened and has begun a movement which even the ‘mightiest’ powers cannot stem.”⁵⁸

The ‘fanaticism,’ the ‘superstition’ of the colonial world was not a brand of backwardness. Their irrationality was not so unreasonable. It was the faith of personalities in divine ideals, which gave them the strength to prevail in their worldly efforts. The comically chivalric soul of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) is “the saddest story ever written; the saddest, yes, but the most consoling to those who can enjoy, through tears of delight, redemption from the wretched practicality to which our present mode of life condemns us.”⁵⁹ In the air of América, the Siegfried who battled the dragon Fafnir metamorphosed into Don Quixote charging against the windmill. According to Mariátegui, the old myths of Faustian technological subjectivism could no longer hold true: “The philosophical formula of a rationalistic age had to be: ‘I think, therefore I exist.’ But in this romantic, revolutionary and Quixotic age, the same formula no longer serves it. Life, more than thought, desires to be action today, this is combat.”⁶⁰ The spirit of the colonial world was renewing, and the new wind could breathe new life into the Faustian Worker. They had nothing to lose but the secure bondage of their chains.⁶¹

Heroism in everyday struggles dispels reification. Mass political struggle, even for unachievable goals, puts a world that seems immovable and unbudging into motion. Those with enough imagination to act for the unlikely and the unpragmatic are those who make history. The great liberators of history “rebelled against the limited reality, against the imperfect reality of their time.”⁶² It puts life into a living language; not the exacting language of science, but the passionate language of popular assemblies.⁶³ Georges Sorel, one of Mariátegui’s main inspirations, wrote in Reflections on Violence (1908) that a “myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical to the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.”⁶⁴ The heroic Don Quixotes of the colonial world did not have to accept the terms of the aged, technical Fausts. They could stretch out a hand to the young and rebellious Siegfrieds on the basis of their common struggle for freedom. Taken together, they start to bear a resemblance to the Caribbean Caliban, left behind by the other characters of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-1611) to govern his own island.⁶⁵ An independence of spirit would shake the institutions of the quotidian world, beginning the masses’ long education in the government of their own lives.

National Democracy and the World Revolution

The colonial world, outside of the rule of law and democracy, caught the sparks of the world revolution. The struggle of self-organization became a struggle for self-assertion and self-governance.

The Russian Revolution already contained this decolonial dimension within it. Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, a Muslim Tatar revolutionary who tied the Bolsheviks with Asia, advised that “the development of the international socialist revolution in the East must in no case limit itself only to the overthrow of the power of Western imperialism, but must go further.”⁶⁶ Without the force of revolution, the new nations being birthed by the natives and workers of the world might simply repeat the Faustian style of territorial sovereignty and bureaucratic governance. But with the passion of popular self-emancipation, the “unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.”⁶⁷

Only the experience of the world revolution “demonstrated the strength of civil war, it dispelled patriotic illusions, and destroyed the naïve belief in any efforts of the bourgeoisie for common national aims.”⁶⁸ Not as the rupture of a simultaneous event, like a clock’s striking of the hour, but as the unleashing of a great tide in many streams. Mariátegui held that “it is not possible to grasp the entire panorama of the contemporary world in one theory. That it is not possible, above all, to fix its movement into a theory. We have to explore it and get to know it, episode by episode, facet by facet. Our judgment and our imagination will always feel in delay with respect to the totality of the phenomenon. Therefore, the best method to explain and translate our time is, perhaps, a somewhat journalistic and a somewhat cinematic method.”⁶⁹ The united humanity struggling in world revolution could not be identified with a single theory and a single party from among the many that it took up as it swept across the world. The anticolonial revolutionaries, as Frantz Fanon would later write in those famous concluding lines of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), fought for the cause of humanity by fighting for their own humanity.⁷⁰ The world revolutionaries believed that for the sake of “Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.”⁷¹

To fight as detachments of a single world army of emancipation, the anticolonial revolutionaries did not have to—and could not—imitate their Western comrades. The protagonists of revolution must act for themselves, not according to the preconceived plan of experts and statesmen or the narrowness of sterile patriotism. Although declaring himself for national liberation, Mariátegui struck out his criticisms of the racist ‘civilizing’ projects which put their hopes in Latinity [latinidad], Hispanicity [hispanidad], and Pan-Americanism [pan-americanismo].⁷² But he did not resent Latins, Spaniards, or North Americans. In fact, his greatest intellectual inspirations were Italians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and North Americans. He stretched out to embrace his comrades in the West, advising them to hold fast to their liberatory world mission.⁷³

Though he felt a spiritual affinity with the salons of Europe and a joyful excitement for the bustling streets of the United States, Mariátegui’s home was América.⁷⁴ His América—not America. This distinction was introduced before Mariátegui by José Martí, who called out to “Our América” to save “itself from its gravest failings—the arrogance of the capital cities, the blind triumph of the scorned campesinos, the excessive importation of foreign ideas and formulas, the wicked and impolitic disdain for the native race[.]”⁷⁵ After Mariátegui, this América was elaborated by the decolonial philosopher Rodolfo Kusch, who rescued a style of thinking that “is found in the very depth of América and that maintains a certain potency among people born and rooted here.”⁷⁶

The Peruvian nation which is centered in Lima is only a geographic periphery to the Andes and a portion of the continentally singular América. Democratic struggle could only “Peruvianize Peru,” as Mariátegui’s series of articles was titled, if they Americanized América. Mariátegui held sympathy for, but could not agree with Luis Valcárcel on the superiority of Quechua culture to the ostensibly decadent West. Mariátegui defended the need for Western contributions. He reminded his friend, Valcárcel, that things were not so simple: “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.”⁷⁷ He did not see the Inka as already having given a ready-made model for the new Peruvian socialism.

Neither did he identify the modernizing state of the Soviet Union as the indisputable model of Peruvian socialism. He echoed the Bolivian socialist Tristán Marof’s rhetoric against the doctrinaires of the Comintern: “Socialism, after all, is in the American tradition. The most advanced primitive communist organization recorded in history is the Inka.”⁷⁸ The internationalism of modern socialism and the communal spirit that held Tawantinsuyu together in solidarity had to meet each other. The square rainbow of the rebel Túpac Katari’s wiphala needs the determination of the famous red triangles of the Soviet avant-garde, crossing into a star of redemption to be seen shining through the world’s stormy skies. There are both the Andes and the valleys, the inland and the coast, the Natives and the mestizos. Mariátegui did not advocate assimilationist mestizaje, but neither did he advocate racial purification. Like Kusch, the experience of imperialism led him to wonder: “Does a mestizo attitude not arise naturally from this situation, an attitude which simultaneously magnifies the ‘modern’ economy and wants to overturn it without remainder?”⁷⁹

Mariátegui’s sense of Peru’s mestizaje was not the exclusionary one of the post-Revolutionary Mexican Republic. Mexico’s narrow mestizo nationalism motivated it to carry out systematic ethnic cleansing against its Chinese residents.⁸⁰ For Mariátegui, it had to be remembered that “nationalism is valid as affirmation, but not as negation.”⁸¹ And as the critical theorist Adorno knew, the affirmation of national language necessarily touches on the relationships of everyday life: “In one’s own language, however, were one only to say something as exactly and as uncompromisingly as possible, one might also hope through such relentless effort to become understandable as well. In the domain of one’s own language, it is this very language which stands in for one’s fellow human beings.”⁸² National affirmation could not exclude the realities which inconvenienced the notion of the Peruvian nation as a homogenous, sovereign, modern, and, in short, Western state. In terms that would scandalize his more xenophobic readers, Mariátegui claimed that “spiritually and physically, China is much closer to us than Europe. The psychology of our people is more Asian than Western.”⁸³ It is not exclusion that singles out a people, but mutual comparison. The nation has to recognize its own limitations—limitations, not exclusions—to be authentically national in character.⁸⁴ And any nation in América must respect and reach out to the source of all human sociality in the continent; the original peoples of the region. The nations of América must also link arms with the anticolonial freedom struggles of Asia, Africa, and the other America. Self-determination and self-organization will take shape as an association of the free peoples in a united world community.

This world association, however, could not become a reality without working through a series of antitheses. Town and country, national and regional, international and national, cosmopolitan and rooted, worker and peasant, head and hand, spirit and matter. Within his own world, Mariátegui identified himself with the passions of the global more than with Catholic parochialism. The personal unity of the pious peasant with their land was no objection to the cosmopolitan city. He advised balance, speculating that “the ideal for men will be, for a long time, a slightly urban and a slightly peasant type of life.”⁸⁵ Oswald Spengler had disparaged the urban megalopolis and the Jews alike as detrimental to the Faustian imperative. He believed that the two marked one historical phenomenon, for the “smallest ghetto was a fragment, however miserable, of megalopolis, and its inhabitants (like those of hardened India and China) split into castes—the Rabbi is the Brahmin or Mandarin of the ghetto—and a coolie-mass characterized by civilized, cold, superior intelligence and an undeviating eye to business.”⁸⁶

Spengler saw no hope for the Jews of the city, because they had left behind their relationship to the open vistas of their Holy Lands to wander the cities of the West. Unlike Spengler, Mariátegui took this wandering habit as a compliment of the Jewish spirit. Like the Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, he considered the spirit of Judaism to be “without roots in the earth, eternal wanderers therefore, yet deeply rooted in ourselves, in our own body and blood.”⁸⁷ Mariátegui befriended many Jews, including Waldo Frank from North America, Henri Franck from France, as well as Misha Adler and Noémi Milstein from Peru.⁸⁸ Mariátegui’s close association with the Jews of Lima, to the point that he resided in the Jewish neighborhood of “Little Romania,” even led some of his detractors to mistake him for a Jew.⁸⁹

Mariátegui’s universalism, however, was no imitative and naive philosemitism. He was closer to the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s admiring estimation of Jews. Unamuno praised the philosophy of the Portuguese-Dutch Jew Baruch Spinoza for demonstrating that “the longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality, the effort whereby we tend to persist indefinitely in our own being, which is, according to the tragic Jew, our very essence, that this is the affective basis of all knowledge and the personal inward starting-point of all human philosophy, wrought by a man and for men.”⁹⁰ Unamuno wrote as a Spaniard and as a Catholic of a simultaneously ancient and modern style. In this traditional and revolutionary character, Unamuno resembled the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. But Benjamin was more Judaic and to the left than Unamuno. Benjamin believed that “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”⁹¹

Mariátegui, from his home in the Pacific Andes, hailed this Judaic universalist spirit as a necessary force for internationalism.⁹² He sympathized strongly with Jewish revivalism, but he was no Zionist. He aligned himself with the Judaic cosmopolitan socialism of the Jewish Labor Bund against Zionism and the colonization of Palestine. He considered Zionism to be a racist and reactionary movement, complicit with the colonial projects of Europe’s capitalists. Jewishness is “not a race, a nation, a state, a language, a culture; it is the overcoming of all these which poses at once as something so modern, so unknown, that it has no name yet[...],” while in the name of their imperialist enterprises against the native Palestinians, the “national bourgeoisies, the British in the first place, would like to reduce the Jews to a nation, to a state.”⁹³ The criticisms Mariátegui deployed against Zionism were later reiterated by the influential Palestinian critic of Zionist settler-colonialism, Fayez Sayegh. Sayegh said that “the core of the Zionist ideology” was constituted by “racial identification,” which “produces three corollaries: racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness, and racial supremacy.”⁹⁴ The mission of Judaism cannot be contained in Blood and Soil, or else its soul will harden into Western-Faustian imperialism and fascism. This has clearly come to pass in the modern State of Israel.

The traditions of Judaic universalism can best be revitalized in world socialism. The tasks of modern socialism were articulated in the theory of that illustrious internationalist, the Rhenish Jew Karl Marx. Marx was no ‘rootless cosmopolitan,’ as the antisemites of nationalism and nationalist socialism have claimed. Marx understood that capital’s need for the development of the means of communication and transportation to produce and circulate commodities far and wide constitutes “the annihilation of space by time[...]”⁹⁵ The relationship of humanity to the elements—the earth, water, air, and fire—cannot be enclosed within their nomos, their mode of appropriation. They constitute an entire rhythm of life. And all of human history has taken place in space, in the cosmic cycle of birth, death, and renewal. History unfolds in cyclical time, not an immortal passage towards eternity.

Rhythm is a rhythm of life and death, absence and presence. In the 20th century, through the theory of Marx, the French socialist Henri Lefebvre recognized this as what marks out a character: “Our scale determines our location, our place in the space–time of the universe: what we perceive of it and what serves as a point of departure for practice, as for theoretical knowledge[...] Our rhythms insert us into a vast and infinitely complex world, which imposes on us experience and the elements of this experience.”⁹⁶ The character of a people is not inherited from racial Blood and territorial Soil. It is acquired in the entire rhythm of its participants’ daily routines, habits of thought, language of interpretation, and ecological influence on their surroundings. And what makes a people indigenous or non-indigenous is not a question of whether they have severed the umbilical cord which links them with nature. As Luther Standing Bear (Sicangu [Sičhą́ǧu Oyáte] and Oglala Lakota [Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte]) taught, indigeneity is the unique characteristics of a place expressed in a human personality, and the indigenous “are able to divine and meet its rhythm.”⁹⁷ There is nothing about history or biology which makes re- or de-indigenization impossible. But for a settler to once again become a native, they must take on the moral imperative of de-settlerizing themselves and joining in with the other rhythm.

The rhythmic-spatial approach is one which Mariátegui learned from América. He observed that 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.”⁹⁸ This method of analysis is something which helped him further understand North America. The bourgeois worship of hard work in Protestantism and the Judaic historical universalism of the Old Testament came together in the Puritans of England, who commenced the Anglo-American project of building a New Jerusalem. He described Puritanism as “basically Jewish morality, the principles of which the Puritans assimilated from the Old Testament.”⁹⁹ The diasporic ethic of Exodus Judaism and the sense of labor as the power to make history flowed into the Puritan project of building a new society in the ‘New World.’ Like the ancient Jews, Puritans maintained the unconditional and exclusive nature of the Divine through a strict anti-idolatry and disciplinary morality. What was great in the Puritans was their sense of having a mission, of refusing compromise with what they believed to be only half-right. They did not take the half-wrong option, to settle with the reform of the Church of England, but set out for the highest good.

The Puritan ethic would not be Puritan for long. The historical significance of the Puritans was not their puritanism, for Mariátegui, but the fact that the “pioneer of New England was the Puritan expelled from the European homeland by a religious revolt, which constituted the first bourgeois affirmation. The United States thus emerged from a manifestation of the Protestant Reformation, considered as the purest and most original spiritual manifestation of the bourgeoisie, that is, of capitalism.”¹⁰⁰ The Puritans brought their highest good down to earth, giving it form as the worship of work, the sado-masochistic joy of ascetic denial, the identification of moral character and accumulated wealth. The sociologist Max Weber described this transition as having begun from the typically Puritan Richard Paxter’s belief that “the care for external goods should only lie on the soldiers of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.”¹⁰¹ The New Jerusalem became a hell of mechanical exploitation and racial slavery, and life in the ‘New World’ was rendered “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”¹⁰²

In the hopeful fantasies of the Puritans, the land of América in the North was only an empty space for utopian experimentation. Their encounter with the Natives of América shaped their settlement project. At times, they accommodated themselves to the matrices of existing alliances and balances of power among local Native nations. At other times, the Pilgrims acted more treacherously and boldly to exterminate the ‘Satanic’ Natives. But the Puritans never succeeded in establishing a totally new beginning. The bourgeois civilization of North America was not built on a virgin soil, from which all traces of the settler-native encounter disappeared. In his endorsement of the myths of Virgin Land and the Vanishing Indian, Mariátegui was dead wrong. The ambitious Pilgrim, who dealt with Natives as if they were strangers to their own land, who hoped to colonize the earth into his own private property; this gradually became the character type of the North American civilization on the world stage—from the Puritans’ day to ours.¹⁰³

That Mariátegui could not recognize this settler-colonial aspect of North American civilization, despite the perceptiveness of his vision, reveals something about his own analytical perspective. He overlooked the Natives of North America even while singing his praises for the Aztec and Inka souls. In fact, he praised these peoples at the expense of the smaller and less sedentary peoples of his América. To the implied exclusion of all others, Mariátegui said that the Spanish conquistador “found in América two advanced and respectable cultures: to the North, the Aztec; to the South, the Quechua.”¹⁰⁴ Independent peoples like the Purépecha or Mapuche could apparently not be counted in this advancement or respectability. Mariátegui was committed first and foremost to historicity for the realization of socialist promises. And history, according to him, “is duration. It does not value the isolated cry, no matter how long its echo may be; it values constant, continuous, persistent preaching.”¹⁰⁵

Mariátegui had been trained to look at the world with the tools of Spengler and Marx, who saw the gigantism of the imperial state but tended to glance over more subtle forms of social association. Their sense of the essence of humanity left the communal huts, sleek canoes, mobile camps, and seasonal nomadism of the northern Natives by the wayside. Spengler defined man as, at his most human, a beast of prey wielding “a maximum of freedom for self against others, of responsibility to self, of singleness of self, an extreme of necessity where that self can hold its own only by fighting and winning and destroying.”¹⁰⁶ On a more optimistic note, but still focusing on appropriation from nature, Marx defined the basically human activity as labor, “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power.”¹⁰⁷

Cruel warfare and toiling labor, that is the vision of humanity given by two of the most penetrating minds of Western theory. This reifies the animality of human beings into a blind necessity, one which can either override society’s history or be overcome by society in history. Though this might seem to describe the general course of world history, it participates in the erasure of more subtle things. And it is reflecting on these fragments which, as Walter Benjamin taught, reminds us that “only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.”¹⁰⁸

There is nothing more subtle in the world than air, and nothing more subtle in a person than their breath. We forget both when we set out for only the visual evidence of history. Visual reasoning searches for illuminated and ordered forms standing forwards amidst formless chaos. War and labor are visually recognizable endeavors, enclosable into clear results—corpses and crafts. But what if, instead of war or labor, what distinguishes humans is that their languages weave the cosmos into intentional relationships and beloved places? As animals, humans met each other and combined their powers together for each to survive and the species to thrive. They were joined by animals, such as canines and felines, who combined their own powers and needs with the company. The early hominids’ ape languages of teeth, hands, whoops, and chirps slowly transformed into the human instruments of crafts and songs hummed to the rhythm of the community’s daily life.¹⁰⁹ They learned to reach for what is good for them, to speak this good to others, to hold to a conviction of what is right.¹¹⁰ They began to sing the rhythm of their life to the lyrics of their own fantasy of the good.¹¹¹ This center of sociality in the open air then began to diverge into the many aspects of life as we have known it. This would have included organized warfare and disciplined labor—where necessity and usefulness compelled people to them.

The Indigenous peoples of northern América had had their great warring empires, like the solar imperialism of the Natchez’s Great Sun chieftain, and their great working bodies, like the women of the Haudenosaunee communities who processed the animals brought to them by the men. But the novel diseases and catastrophic ecological disruption brought by the Pilgrims led to the depopulation of northern América. The Natives retained the sociality of the air, but they had neither means nor reason to produce monumental architecture or gigantic bureaucratic organizations. Looking out in the 20th century, Mariátegui could recognize the stately Pyramid of the Sun of the Aztecs and the mist-shrouded Machu Picchu of the Inka, but not the ancient mountain polis of the Pueblo, the confederal democracy of the Haudenosaunee, or the skilled horsemanship of the Comanche, Lakota, and Apache. What he was looking for was a system which grows by treating its members as a means for the preservation of the whole.

The systemic society emerges with the elaboration of consistent rules of conduct for a community’s members, crafted for the greater good of the whole. The division of labor begins when a personality is recognized as the property of some cosmic force, and is then named as the face of that force. Personal property means to be one with a role. A role is transferable between people, but only on the basis of their performing the calling of its character well. The role treats the forces of nature and the will of the community as one power.

Private property begins when the people of a role try to enframe and enclose that vocation into a share of the world that is separated off from the community. Private property is the enemy of usufruct, which is the logic of the species. Private property only allows property to be transferred or shared between owners, excluding the non-owners. Private property can be exchangeable, like the title of a role, but it can be divorced from any responsibilities attached to the owned thing. Or, rather, it simplifies the role of the owner into the socially recognized representative of their enclosed lot. Private property tends to enclose life into things and to make things into people by means of the law. It encloses the commons of life into ownership by a few, while elevating the protection of ownership into the function of society. Private property dispossesses the living of their own lives, making their existence mere means for wealth. Ownership in land becomes exchangeable, money becomes the coin of this exchangeability, the propertyless are set to work for the propertied by means of wages. Life is impressed into a new role, as a toiling means to expand private property, instead of being allowed to flow freely as an end in itself.

Any project of converting the earth into exchangeable private property must externalize an owning personality into the world. This means dispossessing any personalities which already possess the land in their ownership, or are possessed by the land. North America could not afford to ignore the Natives of its share of América. It did not matter to the Pilgrims that these Natives did not exercise the gigantism and unity of Mariátegui’s América and its imperial rituals. From its very origin point in Jamestown, Anglo-America was oriented westward against the Natives. The Pilgrims were a people at war. The conformity and militarism of the settler-colony turned against itself. Accusations of sin sung out against those within the walls while a suspicious hostility to all outsiders, friendly or not, met all visitors at the gates of the settlements. This character of the settler-colony appeared again in the new Puritans of socialism, like Jack London. While he reflected on the themes of technics and civilization in his literature, and helped organize the first episode of the Mexican Revolution in the 1911 Baja Rebellion, he was also a paranoid anti-Chinese racist. The American socialist generation of the turn of the century believed that they had to draw a distinction between respectable workers and degraded Chinese plebeians. London and his fellow social-Puritans could only meet Republican imperialism with Democratic xenophobia. The new Puritans among the Pilgrims still had something too puritanical about them.

Today, the puritanical Pilgrim appears in the populist revolt of the gray suburbs and rural expanses against the cosmopolitan elitism of the city. But Anglo-America offers no deep alternative like rural América does. It is made up of isolated pockets of paranoid and dogmatic offshoots from the urban settlements. It is only a sparser, more precarious, although perhaps less impersonal suburbia. The fact that everyone knows everyone does not dispel the stagnancy, superstition, and stupidity of the Pilgrim. The revitalization of Puritanism’s missionary spirit can only be made by a wanderer, one who passes through the Pilgrim’s settlements as a stranger.

The association of Jews with wandering began in the story of the Exodus, where the new nation is made within a caravan of freedpeople in the desert. The Jews were set above all nations by leaving the idols of the earth and their dead ancestors behind in order to follow the nameless and unseen God. Christianity claimed this God for itself, now personified in the mortal and sacrificial body and blood of Jesus Christ. By the Middle Ages, gentiles turned the character of wandering into an insult. They invented the trope of the Wandering Jew, the story of a Jewish man cursed to eternally travel to the ends of the earth for taunting Jesus on the way to his crucifixion. But this wandering also allowed the Wandering Jew to pick up memories, ideas, and trinkets from all of the world. He began to create one great collection of human things, showing off his wares to the peoples of the earth and trading with them in exchange for new ones.

The Jewish diaspora carried the history of entire worlds with them. Mariátegui believed that the greatness of this universalist spirit of Judaism would have some of its greatest missions in North America. He wondered “will not the ambitious enterprise of formulating the hope and ideal of America, in this cosmopolitan age, be reserved to a Jew, rather than to a Puritan?”¹¹² He recognized this mission in the work of his friend and muse, the Jewish-American socialist writer Waldo Frank. Frank wrote, in Our America (1919), that Jews are deeply and authentically American, representing both the experience of the Old World—the “passion of pain and storm and deep repression”—and the New World’s “breaks of fire, interstices of light, America’s release. The weight of the sorrow of the Jew like a loading atmosphere around him. And the Jew’s intricate response: reasoning and wailing, the birth of faith, the tidal pour of energy in faith. New hope, new deed, new life.”¹¹³ He and Mariátegui conceived of Jews as insiders and outsiders, Eastern and Western. Frank, according to Mariátegui, exercised a “sensitivity tuned in a time of change and secession, he links and surpasses the Western experience and the Eastern experience.”¹¹⁴ The entire world was in the Jewish quarters of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities. In the revolutionaries of these megalopolises, a soul reached out to América.¹¹⁵

Mariátegui also thought of Peru’s place in the world in the terms of East and West. With great interest, he noted the affinity of China’s republican struggles with América’s revolutions.¹¹⁶ But this directional thinking also limited his perspective where he became too settled into familiar reference points. He could see the relationship between North and South in the relationship of the United States and his América, but not within North America itself. While they perceived the relationship between Anglo-America’s East and West, Frank and Mariátegui did not grant enough weight to its North and South. Mariátegui commented on the Civil War as a fait accompli, a simple matter of consummating the Independence Revolution of 1776. Taking the U.S. as the chemically pure model of capitalist society and its system of free wage labor, Mariátegui said that the Civil War “also constituted a necessary capitalist affirmation, which freed the Yankee economy from the only blemish of its childhood: slavery.”¹¹⁷ But chattel slavery and wage labor existed on a continuum, not in two succeeding stages.¹¹⁸ The abolition of slavery was not certain, and the emancipation of the enslaved did not guarantee their freedom from a personal dependency on the plantocracy.

The Civil War refounded the country on a new basis. All of the contradictions of today’s North America took shape in the Reconstruction of the country and the failures of this Reconstruction. The alliance of the Union with the cause of the abolition of slavery seemed unlikely until the 1861-1865 Civil War was already well underway. The new President, Abraham Lincoln did not set out to abolish slavery, but only to limit its extent. The South’s fear of the abolitionists, the exchange of jeers in Congress and bullets on battle fronts between anti-slavery and pro-slavery factions, and Black people’s forcible assertion of their humanity against racial domination forced the Union’s hand towards the abolition of slavery. But this abolition was carried through as the conversion of chattel into propertyless masses. The generalization of wage labor only prolonged the problem of Black oppression by maintaining Black flesh as a mark of destitution.

It is not unlikely that Mariátegui overlooked this element of North American history because his penetrating gaze was trained in the assumptions of racism. Interpreting the situation of his América for the Communists of the world, he dismissed Blackness as foreign to América, having been imported “by the colonizers to increase their power over the Native American race,” and having “passively filled its colonialist function.”¹¹⁹ Black people were marked off from América, they lacked dignity until they became proletarians, because before then they “composed the plebs that the feudal caste always more or less unconditionally disposed of.”¹²⁰ Black people were not Americanized by their struggle as racialized slaves, as defenders of Blackness, but as raceless comrades of the trade union movement. Labor “in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin,” and so the character of Blackness marked the acceptance of the inheritance of slavery.¹²¹ Like the critical theorist Theodor Adorno, Mariátegui responded to the successful mass-media images of exotic and passionate Black people, which stimulated the fantasies of the Marxist-Leninists, with the figure of “the domesticated body in bondage.”¹²²

Though he did not assume that any disposition is the permanent mold of a person’s body and soul, Mariátegui falsely painted Black Africa with the hues of cowardice and submission. Seeing with Spengler’s Nordic eyes, he recognized the ancient glory of Egypt and the heroism of bedouins, but he did not make any mental journey south of the Sahara. He had no idea how much he had overlooked. The Black people of Africa and the world had bravely contested their dehumanization time and time again. Mariátegui should have recalled the African interventions against the trans-Atlantic chattel slave trade, the resistance of the enslaved against their enslavers, and the Black faces of the abolitionist movement. In his day, the sustained intellectual defenses of Africa that were made by Black writers like Casely Hayford, W.E.B. Du Bois, and George Padmore prepared the way for the 1935 Pan-African world’s campaign in support of the Kingdom of Ethiopia against Fascist Italy’s colonial ambitions.¹²³ The trope of a defeated slave’s soul would be dispelled in Mariátegui’s América by the historical recoveries made by Aimé Césaire and C.L.R. James of the Haitian Revolution and the accompanying Black uprisings of the Caribbean world, Beatriz Nascimento of the resistance to slavery in the marronage of the Brazilian quilombos, and Carlos Moore of the politics of Pan-Africanism in the Americas.¹²⁴ And after all, the names of Black people were numbered among the heroes of Spanish-American Independence. Micaela Bastidas was a joint leader. with her husband Túpac Amaru II, of the first Peruvian independence movement, and the Haitian President Alexander Pétion offered his aid to Simón Bolívar’s project of Gran Colombia.¹²⁵

Racism is not what is characteristic of Mariátegui’s thought. It is what he borrows from the eugenicist premises of European imperialist thought, then articulated in many of the theories of vitalism and organicism. Mariátegui’s original thought, rather, drew him closer to his contemporaries in the vanguard of North America. In his affirmative portrait of the Jews of North America, he echoed the double consciousness of W.E.B. Du Bois, the strength of will of Alain LeRoy Locke, and the dignified revolt of Claude McKay.¹²⁶ What the propertyless and the Semites are to Europe, Black people are to America. The Jews of Frank and Mariátegui’s old hopes are now largely assimilated into the body of the Anglo-Pilgrims. The Jewish suburbanites of Pennsylvania invoke a single patriotism of 1776 and 1948, the United States and the State of Israel. The elites of Black Americans have been subjected to the same Pilgrim assimilation, but the masses are still insiders who feel in their soul that they are outsiders.

This insider-outsider spirit emerged among the original peoples of northern América as well. In Mariátegui’s day, it was already being articulated by Native intellectuals educated in the missionary Industrial Schools. The Indigenous have always dwelled in the continent, but the united political subject of the “Indian” was a 20th century innovation.¹²⁷ The first Pan-Indian movements, centering around the Society of American Indians founded in 1911, emerged as a vanguard of affirmative criticism. They did not wish to break off from the New World of America, but to mark their place in it, without having to give up their Indigenous sense of themselves. This vanguard touched on similar themes to Mariátegui’s Amauta—Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota [Ihaƞktoƞwaƞ Dakota Oyate]) expressed her commitment to a pagan spirit, Arthur C. Parker (Seneca [Onödowá’ga:’]) identified with cosmopolitanism in his denunciations of World War I, and Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Oneida [Onyota’a:ka]) saw a new hope for the Haudenosaunee in socialist experimentation.¹²⁸ Parker was himself interested in a Pan-American Pan-Indianism. He drew inspiration from Machu Picchu as a model for reservation Natives, pointing out that the Inka “remained in danger and were killed by their enemies until they developed brains and intelligence enough to hew out stones and lift them by their own strength and build a place of safety.”¹²⁹ Indigenous self-assertion in this era overlapped with the Mexican Revolution. Mobile and multilingual rail-working Natives became organizers in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the dispossessed Indigenous revolted against the exploiting landowners, and many became leaders in the social-revolutionary Jacobinism which stretched across the U.S. and Mexico.¹³⁰

Much of the Mexican Revolution’s political work was done in U.S. cities like Laredo, Texas and Los Angeles, California rather than within the national territory of Mexico. The Mexican Liberal Party [Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM)] associate, writer and teacher, tejana and sembradora Sara Estela Ramírez built a complex political network of revolutionary Liberals in Texas.¹³¹ This network soon linked up with the organizations created by the internationalist mexicano workers in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. In 1915, armies of Mexican and tejano seditionists [sediciosos] launched a bold, but ultimately doomed, multiracial effort to overthrow the white race and found new social republics.¹³² The confinement of the Mexican Revolution into normalization and national developmentalism isolated the militants of the U.S. They would have to wait until the Russian Revolution for another wave to ride.

The passage of the Mexican Revolution into post-Revolutionary construction did not suffocate the revolutionary spirit in the southwest. Its source was not in Mexico City. It was the other América in North America. The attempts of the Mexican embassies to enforce respectable conduct in the youth and the trade unionists of the barrios were in vain. The rise of the Zoot Suiters and pachucos in El Paso, New York, and Los Angeles frustrated the Mexican state. One of its intellectual representatives, Octavio Paz, lamented that their “attitude reveals an obstinate, almost fanatical will-to-be, but this affirms almost nothing except their determination—it is an ambiguous one, as we will see—not to be like those around them. The pachuco does not want to become a Mexican again; at the same time he does not want to blend into the life of North America. His whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma. Even his very name is enigmatic: pachuco, a word of uncertain derivation, saying nothing and saying everything.”¹³³ More and more, the youth of the barrio knew that they were ni de aquí ni de allá [neither from here nor from there]. They birthed the style of the Chicano movement, confronting Puritan America with the bombastic strut and composite spirit of América. Like Mariátegui, they loved their automobiles as works of art rather than as machines of commerce. They customized and decorated them into lowriders, crafted expressions of their own personalities.

The cosmopolitan spirit of all of these impulses found a kindred spirit in the universalist traditions of the Jews. The story of Exodus was the story of Black people’s forcible separation from Africa and diasporic passage from the segregationist South. The worldly Jesus Christ, the humble and kind Christ of the Gospels that Christianity forgot, was recognized as a kindred spirit of Natives. Revelation’s criticism of Babylon and Rome became a prophecy for Chicanos. Each met the new winds of the world revolution from the East with their own sense of life’s significance. All adopted a sense of having a spiritual mission from Anglo Puritanism at the same time that they combatted the pompous exclusivity of its White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) descendants. While they became the new Puritans, the WASP Pilgrims were busy with other concerns than spiritual renewal. They were still carrying through the expansion of their iron cage.

The American West and the Soviet East

The missionary spirit, the sense that the world had to be founded anew, was the animating force of the American and Russian Revolution alike. Mariátegui stressed the significance of these “two peoples who are most opposed doctrinally and politically and, at the same time, the two closest peoples, as the supreme and maximum expression of Western activism and dynamism. Already Bertrand Russell remarked, several years ago, the strange resemblance that exists between the captains of Yankee industry and the officials of the Russian Marxist economy. And a poet, tragically Slavic, Alexander Blok greeted the dawn of the Revolution with these words: ‘Behold the star of the new America.’”¹³⁴ As it set to work constructing the modern state in the United States and the Soviet Union, the missionary spirit had no choice but to breathe in the fumes of Faustian civilization in the technique of its work. The air which had been filled with the passionate cheers and songs in 1776 and 1917 now disciplined those passions into the harsh percussion of factories and mines.

The Pilgrim set out on a Manifest Destiny of total colonization of the continent. It spoke for this vision in the arguments of President Thomas Jefferson and journalist John O’Sullivan.¹³⁵ Many of the pioneers felt a genuine love for the land, encountering the landscapes as if they were Albert Bierstadt’s Romantic panoramas. Some realized the superiority of Native cultures to the Pilgrim republic. A handful of pioneers were captured by Natives and enslaved, deprived of their old selfhood, then adopted into new kinship roles. They later refused to leave behind their new community to rejoin the Pilgrims. Even still, the pioneers were agents of the encroaching tide of land-speculating, plantation-agricultural, industrial-capitalist imperialism. Their personal passions, hopes, and dreams had little significance for the great impersonal machinery; except as a means to oil its gears and motivate its workers to work faster and harder. Americanism in Mariátegui’s day meant Taylorism and Fordism.

Mariátegui detected a simultaneously despotic and democratizing element in monopoly power and state capitalism. On the one hand, Henry Ford, “who is a vehement proponent of the unity of command, not only considers exclusive to big industry the ability to subordinate production itself, but openly speaks out against the spirit of competition.”¹³⁶ This consciousness of the leader is a despotic consciousness.¹³⁷ In Ford’s case, the Caesarian leader’s impulses towards sovereignty over the machinery struck out with paranoid antisemitism against the impersonal and overwhelming power of finance capital. Mariátegui believes that Ford’s antisemitism “comes, fundamentally, from an empirical current of identification of the banker and the Jew.”¹³⁸ But the significance of Ford does not come from his despotic aspirations for control, but his role of personifying the standardization and rationalization of industry. Mariátegui observed that his company’s successes came “by the fact of Ford having effected his experiment in a nascent branch of industry, intended for the production of an ordinary consumer item, every day more widespread. The democratization of the automobile, that is the secret of his fortune and his work.”¹³⁹ This automobile, which Mariátegui so loved to drive, encapsulated an impulse towards the liberation of technical powers from the plans of the owners and leaders.

Socialism had its own passions of technical liberation. Orthodox Marxism’s mechanical doctrines of progress passed through the united working bodies of the factories and metamorphosed into a new religion of humanity. Anatoly Lunacharsky’s God-Building, Alexander Bogdanov’s Tektology, and Maxim Gorky’s New Man looked forward to humanity’s ascendancy to a state of Cosmic power, to be consummated by the victory and final triumph of the proletariat over the forces of capital, death, and reaction.¹⁴⁰ Mariátegui observed the tension between the city and countryside in the Russian Revolution: “The Soviets have to dose their radicalism for the backward peasant consciousness. [Maxim] Gorky sees in the peasant the enemy of the Russian revolution and of its creations.”¹⁴¹ The Bolshevik utopia’s intellectual exponents were ultimately urban in origin and spirit.

This did not mean that the urban would manage to dominate the politics of the Soviet Union forever. To Mariátegui’s estimation, it was only the Russian Civil War and War Communism that had maintained the unity of the country around the leadership of the proletariat, soldiers, and intelligentsia in the cities. Once “the stabilization and normalization work began, the discrepancies of men and tendencies could not help but manifest themselves,” and so the Revolution had begun to regress from socialist revolution into “a period of national organization. It is not a question, for the moment, of establishing socialism in the world, but of realizing it in a nation that, although it is a nation of one hundred and thirty million inhabitants that overflow over two continents, does not cease to constitute, for that reason, geographically and historically, a unity. It is logical that at this stage, the Russian Revolution is represented by the men who most deeply feel its character and its national problems. [Josef] Stalin, a pure Slav, is one of these men. He belongs to a phalanx of revolutionaries that has always remained rooted to Russian soil.”¹⁴² With Stalin’s ascendancy to its official spokesperson and leader, Soviet socialism began to take on a nationalist tone.

The Russian Revolution’s Faustian aspirations of construction overcame its Siegfriedian rebelliousness. But this did not mean that its rebellious impulses had lost their passion. In the Stalin era, the urban utopia of collective domination over nature transformed into new scientific movements of the peasants. This new form of the Faustian spirit found its intellectual voice in the anti-Mandelian agricultural theories of Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko rejected the negative tone of the theory of natural selection in favor of the claim that organisms genetically passed on acquired characteristics. Therefore, the efforts of improving the plants and animals of agriculture could rapidly and infinitely develop along an immortal path of ascendancy.¹⁴³ In his progressive optimism, Lysenko sounded almost like the North American farmers who believed that they could control the weather with home-brewed solutions.

The American West and the Soviet East were Faust and Mephistopheles’ experiments in national governance adapted for the 20th century.¹⁴⁴ In the U.S., Goethe’s pair worked through Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management and Henry Ford’s massified production and consumption. In the Soviet Union, they worked through Alexei Stakhanov’s heroic and untiring pacing of work and Trofim Lysenko’s proletarian agronomy. From both countries emerged sciences of the Faustian. But what is Western and Faustian is also a Worker. The Workers in the factories and barracks of the Soviet Union marched to the tune of Wagnerian operas. There is a potential Siegfried sleeping within every Worker, one which might explode into rebellion. Mariátegui looked to the impulses of the Worker to enliven the East. He believed that the Siegfriedian West, “in the transition from capitalism to socialism, is no longer an antagonistic and enemy form to the East, but the theory of a universal civilization.”¹⁴⁵

Mariátegui considered this nationalist-republican turn necessary for the beginning of a new age. He associated the East with stagnation and despotism, celebrating the fact that “is now imbued with Western thought. European ideology has filtered abundantly into the Eastern soul. An old oriental plant, despotism, is dying, undermined by these leaks.”¹⁴⁶ But, as in his simultaneous repetition of racist tropes and critique of racism, Mariátegui also preceded many of the critiques of orientalism made famous by academics like Edward Said and Joseph Massad.¹⁴⁷ Much of his critical commentary on the East drew from Easterners themselves, such as the Young Turks or the Chinese New Culture Movement. His analysis of Asia’s colonizability preceded the statements of Mao Zedong, Malek Bennabi, Jalal Al’i’Ahmed, and Ali Shariati on the same theme.¹⁴⁸ With Eastern intellectuals like Nishida Kitaro and Muhammad Iqbal, he believed that the renewal of the East would itself be a characteristically Eastern work.¹⁴⁹ His hope was that “in this grave and fruitful hour of human history, it comes forth that something of the Eastern soul transmigrates to the West and that something of the Western soul transmigrates to the East.”¹⁵⁰ The “Westernizing” Soviet Union could not be eliminated from any account of this Eastern wave. Even in that militant atheist country, the Byzantine Christian Nikolai Berdyaev could still detect the hope of an ancient Eastern religious passion.¹⁵¹ In the Soviet Union, the East and West converged into a united point, a power which emanated into the world revolution.

What differentiated the Soviet Union from the Faustian United States was its Siegfriedian nature as a rebellion against the power of capital. With the one society still young and vigorous, Mariátegui believed 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.”¹⁵² What was living in the people of the Soviet Union was the strength of their will. That is what gave their revolution its world significance. The world revolution did not spring from the pens of the Bolsheviks, but rather found its faces and voices in them. The revolutionaries of the world owed no personal allegiances to anyone, but only a spiritual allegiance to the revolution. What gave a nation its world significance is not its territorial sovereignty or the nobility of its blood, but its commitment to an idea.¹⁵³

Facing International Communism

Mariátegui did not hail the Soviet Union as his fatherland, a thing which commands blind allegiance, but as a fertile source of inspiration. Like the leading Soviet sembradora, Nadezhda Krupskaya, he did not wish to embalm Lenin into an eternal, dead thing. Krupskaya was the doubting conscience of Soviet leadership. She had been respected in that role while Lenin, her late husband, was alive to shield her with the height of his reputation. After he died, he had left a void. Many Bolsheviks hoped to enclose her critical voice into the silent mournfulness of this void. Krupskaya resisted them, becoming one of the early dissenters within the Bolshevik Central Committee.¹⁵⁴

Mariátegui followed the news of the ensuing wave of dissension closely. He openly expressed his interest in the leadership and theories of the oppositionist Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had begun to criticize the new Soviet state from within, arguing that “the source of bureaucratism resides in the growing concentration of the attention and the forces of the party upon governmental institutions and apparatuses, and in the slowness of the development of industry.”¹⁵⁵ Trotsky’s analysis of Soviet hyper-pragmatism as the source of a counterrevolutionary turn, and his calls for democratization to combat bureaucratization, seemed significant to Mariátegui. He agreed that democracy had to be marked as distinct from management, but thought that Trotskyism “represents, if one wants to define it in two words, Marxist orthodoxy, in the face of the overflowing and uncompromising fluency of Russian reality.”¹⁵⁶ This did not by any means motivate Mariátegui to endorse the position of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Despite the urging of the Communist International, he refused to condemn Trotsky and his followers in the Andes.¹⁵⁷ Yet he was not a Trotskyist. In fact, he was not a Marxist-Leninist either. He was only a Marxist in the sense of a participant in a historical discourse. And in Trotsksy’s case, he believed that a clear delineation of tasks had to be laid out.

Mariátegui was not a follower of any one, but an independent spirit. He wanted others to be independent as well, following the callings most appropriate to their personal tendencies and skills. He advised Trotsky and his followers that they had to recognize their need for independence rather than trying to impotently force the facts to conform to their premises. While Trotsky had associated Stalin with Napoleon Bonaparte and the Thermidorian reaction in the French Revolution, Mariátegui associated Trotsky himself with an aspect of the First French Empire: “One imagines him predestined to carry the socialist gospel in triumph, with Napoleonic energy and majesty, at the head of the Red Army, throughout Europe. He is not conceived, with the same ease, filling the modest office of minister of normal times. The NEP condemns him to return to his belligerent polemicist position.”¹⁵⁸ And, ultimately, “on the estimation of the elements that may underlie Soviet policy, neither [Josef] Stalin nor [Nikolai] Bukharin are very far from subscribing to most of the fundamental concepts of Trotsky and his adherents.”¹⁵⁹ The Bolshevik leadership were made of the same elements. Trotsky still thought like a soldier, a great leader of overflowing social momentum, one who could reshape the terrain of the world as leader of the Red Army. But this Napoleonic role was better fit for him in an oppositional and critical setting. A new War Communism would spell unbearable despotism, the Bonapartist entrenchment of bureaucratic mechanism, and possibly even the death of the Russian Revolution.

In the late 1920s, men were becoming things just as things were becoming men. The fluid debates between political factions crystallized into the confrontation of image against image. The masses found a ready-made expression of their impulses in the role of followers for popular leaders. A follower does not have to articulate what they think. They do not have to think carefully. The face of a popular leader is itself an entire Ideology. The faces distorted and morphed into something hard as steel. The leaders of the new era—Josef Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler—were known as things before they were known as men. They stamped their image into mass-produced banners, newspapers, and icons. The image-faces suffocated discontent and the democratic process by absorbing them into a blind faith. The practice of democracy was being eroded by popular impulses themselves.

The socialists in democratic politics and the democrats in socialist politics had to stand for themselves. Democratic nationalism could not substitute international socialism, nor could mass-printed pamphlets from Moscow explain everything about local realities. Democracy and socialism had to find their own paths. By accompanying intransigent anti-imperialism with his independent universalism, Mariátegui joined revolutionaries like M. N. Roy from India, who founded the Mexican Communist Party in 1917 and later moved in many of the same social circles as the critical theorists of Europe.¹⁶⁰ Speaking to the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921, Roy suggested that “until and unless the masses of the subject population take an active and conscious part in the revolutionary movement, foreign imperialism cannot and will not be overthrown only by the action of the bourgeoisie, even if it may succeed in rallying a certain section of the people behind it temporarily fired by sentimental enthusiasm.”¹⁶¹ Mariátegui echoed Roy a decade later when he offered his stance to the 1929 Latin American Communist Congress. He notified the delegates of the official parties of the Comintern of his non-nationalist position, saying “we are anti-imperialists because we are Marxists, because we are revolutionaries, because we oppose capitalism with socialism as an antagonistic system, called to succeed over it, because in the fight against the foreign imperialisms we fulfill our duties of solidarity with the revolutionary masses of Europe.”¹⁶²

Mariátegui’s sense of the tasks of socialism in his era was one which he shared with other such independent spirits as Victor Serge and Christian Rakovsky. On his terrain of decolonial struggle, he made a stand parallel to that of the Left Opposition. The Left Opposition had begun as a wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) which criticized the bureaucracy as a problem impeding the construction of socialism. The Party’s center agreed that bureaucracy was a problem, but believed it was a necessary evil for the efficient reconstruction of the economy and development of the Soviet Union’s capacities of industrial production. The leaders of the Left Opposition were suppressed and exiled, but the movement nevertheless spread through the Comintern and found new centers in European socialism.

The globalized Left Opposition struggled within and outside of the Comintern for hegemony in the global communist movement. Mariátegui maintained his independence from the Comintern with such insistence that he was excommunicated as an enemy of Marxism by orthodox Marxists.¹⁶³ But with the clarity of his thinking, he could hold such an autonomous position while stressing the need for his fellow socialists to oppose capitalist aggressions against the Soviet Union. He explained to them that the necessities of the times had compelled the Russian Revolution to limit its ambitions for socialism to the nationalist-populist tasks of carrying out rapid industrialization and waging an anti-bureaucratic struggle for the total mobilization of society.¹⁶⁴ But as a leader in international socialism, Mariátegui attacked the manifestation of this tendency even where it manifested in the critics of Bolshevik dogmatism. The anti-Stalinist Max Eastman, for instance, claimed that “the revolution does not need a philosophy, but only a very technical science,” and Mariátegui believed that “at bottom, [this] is really within its own very Anglo-Saxon tendency to reject every difficult ideological construction shocking to a pragmatist education in the name of pure ‘good sense.’”¹⁶⁵ Socialism could not do without critical theoretical reflection, inheriting the work of humanity’s many thinking traditions.

The Great Purges subordinated the dogmatic tendency of the Bolshevik leadership to the anti-bureaucratic, anti-intellectual impulses of the masses. For some, this meant the redemption of the Russian Revolution from cosmopolitan excesses. Ernst Jünger sympathized with this anti-elitist drive, hailing it as a revolt of the Worker.¹⁶⁶ He later looked on the Great Purges, which directed mass hatred and state repression against urban functionaries, as an effort to re-nationalize the Soviet Union and join the Nazis in purging rootless intellectuals from Russia.¹⁶⁷ Mariátegui, on the other hand, believed that the divergence between Soviet intellectuals and masses marked the divide between the tasks of the national people and the tasks of the proletariat. This motivated him to look deeper into the problem of Indigenous liberation. He kept his distance from the new course in Soviet politics. Both the masses of the official Communist movement and the Left Opposition seemed to have reasonable justifications for their diverging courses, because they simply did not set out for the same things. Mariátegui neither endorsed one nor condemned the other, all while keeping up to date on the debates of international communism.

The language of the day was shifting from the millenarianism of the Russian Revolution to the pragmatic talk of social necessities and the stages of political strategies. The terrain of a society’s politics is shaped by the demands of its necessities. Humanity’s task of meeting its necessities amounts to the basic foundation for society. This task allows its members to carry on with the habitual routines of their lives, and it provides words and images for its imagination. At the same time, the question of what is the right or good way to do things maintains itself amidst the necessities of toil. This questioning takes place in the realm of the political, which exercises its own autonomy from workaday necessities.

Mariátegui was not only a critical theorist, but a strategist of the political. He was a bolder type than other leaders of socialism or intellectuals of critical theory. He did not become an official mouthpiece for the Comintern, like Eugen Varga or Andrei Zhdanov. He did not strategically retreat to the defense of democracy from its worst impulses and the preservation of critical theory as a message in a bottle, like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. He was closer to Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, James and Grace Lee Boggs, Paul Mattick, and Herbert Marcuse, godparents of the New Left. He united autonomous theory and autonomous praxis in one body. His thought encompassed both the flexibility of radical democratic politics, theorized more recently by Ernesto Laclau, and the clarity of the tasks on the path of communism, more recently known in the work of José Revueltas.¹⁶⁸ He set to work laying the ground for a socialism of América.

In América, the world unfolds. For Mariátegui, Christopher Columbus’s 1492 “discovery of América is the beginning of modernity: the greatest and most fruitful of the crusades. The whole thought of modernity is influenced by this event.”¹⁶⁹ He affirmed the uniqueness of the Americas as a basic condition for his internationalism, while pointing out the global nature of the continent in his criticisms of nationalists. Mariátegui wrote that by “universal, ecumenical roads we have chosen to travel, and for which we are reproached, take us ever closer to ourselves.”¹⁷⁰ His internationalism began from the international character of his own experience.

Mariátegui’s thought bridged mestizo consciousness and Indigenous traditions through the self-emancipation of workers. In a vision of decolonial socialism, he wrote that “the national phenomenon is not differentiated or disconnected, in its spirit, from the world phenomenon. On the contrary, it receives its ferment and its impulse from it. The leaven of the new indigenous demands is the socialist idea, not as we have inherited it instinctively from the extinct Inka, but as we have learned it from Western civilization, in whose science and in whose technique only utopian romanticisms can fail to see the inalienable and magnificent acquisitions of modern man.”¹⁷¹ Mariátegui subjected the fantasies of indigenistas and Marxist-Leninists about American reality to withering criticisms.¹⁷² The Natives are not whimsical elves of the forest. Neither are they a hardened People’s Army, already preparing to storm heaven. They are simply another people—a dispossessed people. The drama of Native life is “the drama of servitude to man and servitude to nature.”¹⁷³ Dispossession leaves one at the mercy of the elements, precariously exposed to exploitation by the capital of those who command nature. And there are many who are dispossessed and exploited, in their various ways.

The Indigenous who live in the rural communities, who work on the plantations, and who prevail in the reservations cannot reclaim the inheritance of their homelands without making an alliance with the working masses in the world’s cities. Peoples’ many senses of what is good in life converge when they come together to fight for a different life. Winds from the South and winds from the West can joyfully greet each other in the struggle for a new world. It was the Neapolitan communist internationalist, Amadeo Bordiga, who wrote that the cosmovision of the Purépecha and Quechua is one that “recognised the flow of life in that same energy which the Sun radiates on the planet and which flows through the arteries of a living man, and which becomes unity and love in the whole species[...]”¹⁷⁴ The interdependent life of the cosmos finds its consciousness in a new humanism.

Western capitalism has united all peoples of the world in a mutual satisfaction of each one’s needs by another. At the same time, it has compelled them to cooperate to work for the good of the other. Though the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands can also be defended by decentralizing production and dividing workers up, capital can never overcome its need to concentrate masses of people together to concentrate itself. Private property undermines itself, but the masses must act for themselves if they wish to break the enframing of the world into private property and instead socialize their society. Above all, the social revolution’s political process must be sustained through successive acts of emancipation. Each must link arms with all, but without abandoning the tasks of their own position. They must fight for themselves to fight for each other, and fight for each other to fight for themselves.

Free Spirits

Freedom is a style. It is singular and universal at the same time. Mariátegui thought and acted with a strength of independence nourished by a deep wellspring, the profundity of his own personality. The style of liberty sweeps through all of life, not even stopping to pay its respects to the most sacred institutions. As a libertarian, he taught that those who are “sensitive to the great emotions of the time should not and cannot feel strange or indifferent to this movement [of feminism]. The woman’s question is a part of the human question.”¹⁷⁵ Mariátegui enthusiastically joined in with the libertarian and feminist challenges to the arbitrary despotism of marriage, the family, the church, the state, and patriarchy.

Emancipation is not automatically guaranteed by the progress of the times, even if that progress provides means for it. Modern representative democracy began as “an exclusively male democracy,” and “inequality disappears” only once “the historical trajectory of democracy is coming to an end.”¹⁷⁶ Feminism requires something more than democratic majoritarianism or the abstract equality of citizens. Each of these ethics are content to rest with the unofficial moral and economic hegemony of men. The socialist revolution can address the ‘private’ inequalities of gender by making the revolution a matter of reorganizing all of society’s relationships. This revolution cannot become a reality without women’s liberation. Even the worker’s struggle is also women’s struggle, because the women work and the working men depend on the care of women. And for the same reason, women’s struggle is a worker’s struggle. Mariátegui held a deep admiration for the Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai, and agreed with her on the need to “Make Way for Winged Eros.” This meant to unleash a free love involving “the recognition of the rights and integrity of the other’s personality, a steadfast mutual support and sensitive sympathy, and responsiveness to the other’s needs.”¹⁷⁷ Mariátegui followed this principle in his own life. He did not play the part of a patriarch at home, but a friend to Anna Chiappe and to their children.

The general transformation of society has to slow down and look closely at the level of the microsocial to be thorough in its work. Mariátegui asserted that “one does not study the life of a society without finding out and analyzing its basis: the organization of the family, the situation of women.”¹⁷⁸ Drawing from the classic sources of critical theory, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, he wrote that Marx’s theory of Ideology “is simply a name that serves to designate the deformations of social and political thought produced by compressed motives. This word translates the idea of the Freudians, when they talk about rationalization, substitution, transference, displacement, sublimation. The economic interpretation of history is nothing more than a generalized psychoanalysis of the social and political spirit.”¹⁷⁹ The institution of the family and the patriotic fanaticism of the nation cultivate people who are not used to freedom. When these people revolt for liberation, their imagination is limited to the old and sterile ideals of the old and sterile civilization. Mariátegui critiqued fascism as a revolt of life, but as one that was limited into these forms.¹⁸⁰ In this, he paralleled the diagnoses made of Nazism by the German-Jewish critical theorists Siegfried Kracauer, Wilhelm Reich, Franz Neumann, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse.¹⁸¹ The search for an escape from freedom and its responsibilities marks an era of decadence. The freedom and passion of the soul, the spirit of renewal, is the condition for any association of free spirits.

The spirit must work to make itself anew in all of its aspects. Mariátegui turned his attention to aesthetics, education, and politics. In his aesthetic theories, he paralleled the critical theory of the technical reproduction of images and the autonomy of art in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. He also recognized mass culture as a potential medium for the critique of modern life. He sang his praises for the comedian Charlie Chaplin. The fantastic clown “concurs with the miserable happiness of men, more than any of their statesmen, philosophers, industrialists and artists.”¹⁸² In this enthusiasm, he joined Adorno, Benjamin, C.L.R. James, and Henri Lefebvre.¹⁸³ Works of literature, music, and the visual arts were also important considerations in the work of cultivating free and reflective personalities.

People are inclined to interpret the great products of the public sphere through the concepts that they are most comfortable with the use of. Those that they first encounter in life, the most familiar notions, often seem to also be the most fundamental. In the modern world, this especially means the education people receive at school. For a revolutionary vision like Mariátegui’s, the role of teachers had to be transformed into that of seeders of freedom. The servitude of the school to bureaucracy and labor discipline “does not only weigh on the dignity of those who learn. It weighs, first of all, on the dignity of those who teach. No honest teacher, no young teacher, who meditates on this truth, can be indifferent to its suggestions. Nor can they be indifferent to the fate of ideals and of men who want to give society a more just form and civilization a more human meaning.”¹⁸⁴ Mariátegui advocated the model of a School of Labor, combining intellectual and manual labor in one practical education of self-organization. This would be “a genuine product, a fundamental conception of a civilization created by labor and for labor.”¹⁸⁵ In his theories of education and the cultivation of free personality, he preceded the critical theories of Aníbal Ponce and Paulo Freire.¹⁸⁶ Education was not, as Freire warned, a practice of “banking” where the “teacher’s task is to organise a process which already occurs spontaneously, to ‘fill’ the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge.”¹⁸⁷ It was bringing a person’s soul forth from the dead face of routine into the expressive face of thought.

Mariátegui’s thoughts on political strategy and organization were not the idle reflections of a genteel intellectual. Taking on his role as amauta, Mariátegui spoke the deepest impulses of the masses into his words. Even while battling an illness that would turn out to be fatal, he busied himself with founding the Peruvian Socialist Party [Partido Socialista Peruano (PSP)] and the Workers’ General Confederation of Peru [Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP)]. He wrote the founding documents for both, helping to organize the first national syndicates in Peru around the same time as the formation of the first Marxist political party in Peru. In theory and practice, he drew careful distinctions between the roles of political parties, class organizations, national peoples, and global masses. While evaluating Leon Trotsky’s critique of the bureaucratic streak in the Bolshevik Party, he weighed the concerns of these many elements and the contradictory forces within them:

“This question of ‘workers’ democracy,’ which has altogether dominated opinions, needs to be clarified and specified. The defense of the revolution forced the Bolshevik party to accept a military discipline. The party was governed by a hierarchy of officials chosen from the most tried and most indoctrinated elements. [Vladimir] Lenin and his general staff were invested with full powers by the masses. It was not possible in any other way to defend the work of the revolution against the assaults and the stalking of its adversaries. Admission to the party had to be severely controlled to prevent careerist and questionable people from filtering into its ranks. The Bolshevik ‘old guard,’ as the Bolsheviks of the first hour were called, directed all the functions and all the activities of the party. The communists unanimously agreed that the situation did not allow for anything else. But when the revolution reached its seventh anniversary, a movement for a regime of ‘workers’ democracy’ began to take shape in the Bolshevik party. The new elements demanded recognition of their right to an active participation in the choice of the directions and methods of Bolshevism. Seven years of the revolutionary experiment had prepared a new generation. And it did not take long for impatience to ferment in some nuclei of the communist youth.“¹⁸⁸

Mariátegui saw the reasonability of Lenin’s ban on factions in the context of the Russian Civil War, but he did not polemically justify it. The Revolution was simply in tension between old and new, ordering and transforming, Apollonian and Dionysian. He thought of the political methods of socialism in a highly flexible and adaptive way. Sounding like Ernst Bloch’s later distinction between cold and warm streams of Marxism, Mariátegui identified two religious tendencies of Marxism: “For those in whom Marxism is spirit, it is the word. For those in whom Marxism is a struggle, it is the agony.”¹⁸⁹ Each character and method of work has their own possible contributions to the movement. There is no singular model for revolutionary work, because the ideas and the movements are more significant than the leaders and the followers.

Many of Mariátegui’s comments on the relationship within socialism between the party, class organization, and the working class itself touched on the debates about party, organizations, and class held by the European left. They worked to define what made the socialists socialists, and what the role of a faction was in relation to class organs like labor unions or councils, while weighing the relationship between the decisions of formal organizations and the sentiments of the entire class of the propertyless. Some, like Otto Rühle, argued that the class organizations, united into one, amounted to the communist faction, while formal party structures would only impede the revolution.¹⁹⁰ They saw the role of the organizations as becoming the embodiment of class consciousness. Others, like Amadeo Bordiga, believed that the party was the singular embodiment of the socialist human community, a new and united organism, and that the class organs of the unions tended towards the conservatism of winning a higher share of daily bread for their own section of the class.¹⁹¹ Still others, like Herman Gorter, allowed separate, if overlapping, roles for a party and the class organs.¹⁹² They believed that socialists had to continue to write and speak their theories with some independence from the day-to-day work of organizing. The concern of delineating the relationship between these three elements was characteristic of the very Communist Workers’ Party of Germany [Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (KAPD)], Free Workers’ Union of Germany [Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (FAUD)], and General Workers’ Union of Germany [Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (AAUD)] that the new European generation of critical theory had grown out of.¹⁹³

The three-tiered debate spread out across the Western left in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Mariátegui witnessed one episode of this controversy for himself, in Rome, Italy. He followed the 1919-1920 debates about electoralism in Italian socialism with interest. Anna Chiappe and he attended the 1921 Congress of Livorno, where the Italian Communist Party [Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI)] split off from the Italian Socialist Party [Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI)]. There, they rubbed elbows with the biggest notables of 20th century Italian socialism. Chiappe recalled that she and her husband “saw Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti. Mariátegui had a friendly conversation with both of them.”¹⁹⁴

The debates on democracy and socialist strategy, which began in the PSI, continued in the PCI. The leadership, represented by Gramsci and Togliatti, sought to intervene in parliament as an opposition party. Amadeo Bordiga and his allies formed a hard opposition to electoral participation. Mariátegui understood the reasoning for Bordiga and his allies to associate elections with political collaboration. He also saw reason in the arguments of Gramsci as well, carefully delineating that faction’s stance from collaborationism and reformism. Mariátegui did not take on a staunch position either way. The problem of elections seemed strategically secondary.

For Mariátegui, the key insight of the debates was not the relationship of the party to the representative parliaments, but of the proletariat to the sovereignty of the capitalist state. The state “must be opposed by new proletarian organs—workers’ and peasants’ councils, etc.—, which, functioning for now under bourgeois domination as instruments of struggle, will tomorrow be the organs of social and economic transformation into the communist order of things. That the transitional regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat must mark the passage of power from the bourgeoisie to the workers. And that by means of this regime the historical period of social transformation may be shortened.”¹⁹⁵ He did not, like Lenin, dictate that socialists run candidates for elections in all countries with representative institutions. But neither did he discount electoral politics.¹⁹⁶ He knew that the question of elections had to be answered according to the historical and social terrain that socialists were moving on. What he sought was to forge a great unity of socialists, not to draw lines in the sand between the heirs of Marx and Lenin. What ultimately matters is little people and their relationships, not Great Men and Communist Parties. Even such despairing episodes as the marginalization of Trotsky held this positive lesson. Trotsky’s exile was “not the first time that the destiny of a revolution [wanted] to fulfill its trajectory without or against its leaders. Which proves, perhaps, that in history great men play a more modest role than great ideas.”¹⁹⁷

He was not only a communist, but a radical democrat. From a position of political autonomy, he formed alliances with Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s American Popular Revolutionary Alliance [Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA)] and other organizations of popular democratic politics. He worked with them without limiting his horizons to the sovereignty of ‘the people.’ Mariátegui clarified that the “mass is not the modern proletariat; and its generic claim is not the revolutionary and socialist claim.”¹⁹⁸ The virtue of popular democratic struggle is that, within it, people can learn to act for themselves instead of following stale truisms. Democracy is one great field for freedom struggles. In that setting, the specificity of the proletarian class struggle and the socialist ideal can make their voices heard. With his eyes on the rise of the Maximato nationalist regime in post-Revolutionary Mexico, Mariátegui wrote that socialism “can only be actuated by a class party; it can only be the result of a socialist theory and practice.”¹⁹⁹ In the party, socialist strategy must unite intellectual and manual labor, the higher principle and everyday mass politics. The party is the classroom of socialist experience. Upon mass democratic struggle opening a wide enough field for action, the “party of the proletariat, empowered by the struggle for the exercise of power and the development of its own program, carries out at this stage the tasks of organizing and defending the socialist order.”²⁰⁰ Mariátegui was no commander of forces or theologian of Marxist dogma. He was an amauta, a teacher.

The work of education towards emancipation was the content of his four-tier political strategizing. The four elements were: 1.) The party or vanguard faction of the theoretically knowledgeable socialists who intervened in the realm of ideas amidst other ideal-factions, 2.) the strategically informed working class and its formal organizations, who moved in their masses from the basic work of survival in united self-defense to the force of political conviction behind their ideas, 3.) the united people of national democracy, who strive to make the independent nation into a reality, and 4.) the revitalizing revolutions of the civilization, encompassing an entire way of life and its cosmic cycles.

The world is not itself a level in this schema, but not because cosmopolitanism is devoid of any political significance. The world, the cosmos, that is something beyond the levels, because it is life. The will to truth—to find the completely true world behind illusion, the whole truth and nothing but the truth—is itself only a relative truth.²⁰¹ This was not a doctrine of nihilist indifference to life. Mariátegui defended relativism, explaining that it “does not invite one to renounce action. It only seeks to deny the Absolute. But it recognizes, in human history, relative truth, the temporal myth of each epoch, with the same value and the same efficacy as an absolute and eternal truth.”²⁰² What gives a belief its sense of truth is that its unique sense of life chimes with the spirit of the times. This chime indicates a power to bring something forth, a power of creation which acts as the midwife of gestating forces. No one possesses all of life, but some may wield the ring of its power.

The position of the world can only manifest itself in the impulses and strategies of politics across its four levels. This does not doom each faction to the role of carrying out the blind destiny of a nation or race, acting on the sendings of Being. Civilization is “nothing but artifice.”²⁰³ But this artificiality is no objection to it. A force which wishes to return to its half-remembered origins has already begun to slow down and decay. Against Zionist imperialists, Mariátegui warned: “In Asia, after centuries of creative ostracism, the Jew is today more foreign than on these continents, if one can say that it is so.”²⁰⁴ The past does not give an answer to the questions of how and why to live: “Constructive generations think of the past as an origin, never as a program.”²⁰⁵ Inheriting a destiny is avoiding the question; Mariátegui said that there “is nothing more sterile than trying to revive an extinct myth.”²⁰⁶ The desire to return to the womb of the motherland is a nihilistic desire for the suicide of oblivion. It threatens to take the entire world down into this fate of silence and death. The leaders of the State of Israel look upon their nuclear Samson Option like Alberich’s ring.

The indirectness of the world creates the need for active and conscious moral intervention by revolutionaries. They must learn this necessity by experience. The Liberal Sara Estela Ramírez, writing for her tejano readership, advised that the movement of mutual aid societies “needs hearts that say I am for you, as I want you to be for me, mutualism needs from us workers, the humble, the small gladiators of the idea, it needs us to draw from among our egoisms, something immense, something divine, that makes us sociable, that makes us nobly human.”²⁰⁷ Mariátegui believed that, to the extent that this was the case, a dividing line had to be drawn between the propertyless and the propertied if the paternalist character of the old mutualism was not to prolong working class submission. He clarified mutualist sentiment in the terms of the class struggle, arguing that “in the most elementary practice of factory life, the workers discover for themselves that they need an organ of cohesion and defense and that this can be none other than the trade union, to which all other corporate activities must be subordinated.”²⁰⁸

The buzz of vague and ambiguous rebellious impulses among people can only be determined into a socialist form if workers learn to act independently and if the socialists learn to eloquently articulate the ideals of the workers’ struggle. The revolution is not guaranteed to be one for the freedom of each can all. Even the feeling of love amidst comrades marching side by side can be directed as a weapon of resentful exclusion and violent oppression. The revolution can be of the left or right, of the world or the nation, of the propertyless or the small propertied, of socialism and communism or nationalism and fascism. The winds of the masses may blow behind the sails of nationalism, imperialism, the rule of law, hierarchy, freedom, or dictatorship rather than identifying socialism as their final destiny. Mariátegui noted that socialist revolutionaries, “like fascists, for their part, propose to live dangerously. In revolutionaries, as in fascists, one notices an analogous romantic impulse, an analogous Quixotic humor.”²⁰⁹ This was no horseshoe theory of unavoidable convergence between extremes, but a distinction between what was living and what was dead in the politics of his day. The return to the old norms “would be the return to a quiet life, the eviction or the burial of all romanticism, all heroism, all right-wing and left-wing Quixotism. Nothing to regress, with the fascists, to the Middle Ages. Nothing to advance, with the Bolsheviks, towards Utopia.”²¹⁰

Revolutionary politics must be understood as a moral intervention. And the libertarians of the world, the partisan fighters for the socialist idea, have to understand their role as teachers of freedom. They must teach people to embrace their dissatisfaction with the stale formulas of the old world, while having a clear sense of ethics for the new world: “Those of us who are not content with mediocrity, those of us who are even less content with injustice, are often designated as pessimists. But, in truth, pessimism dominates our spirit much less than optimism. We do not believe that the world should be fatally and eternally as it is. We believe it can and should be better. The optimism we reject is the easy, lazy Panglossian optimism of those who think we live in the best of all possible worlds.”²¹¹ In the Peruvian case, Mariátegui believed that the role of the partisan teachers would be to oppose the colonial streak of the pseudo-nation that had broken off from the Spanish. The vanguard “advocates Peruvian reconstruction, on the basis of the Indian. The new generation claims our true past, our true history. Nostalgia is content, among us, with the fragile gallant memories of the viceroyalty. Vanguardism, meanwhile, looks for more genuinely Peruvian, more remotely ancient materials for its work.”²¹² This was the task that Mariátegui identified for himself and his fellow staff of Amauta, the vanguard of the new Peru.

The vanguard must commit themselves to the democratization of society without limiting themselves into mere democrats. After the Peruvian government cracked down on socialists in June of 1927, Mariátegui believed that the dividing lines between the party, the class, the people, and the masses had become clearer. Even repression could have “the effect of promoting a revision of methods and concepts and an elimination of the weak and disoriented elements in the social movement.”²¹³ The party and class organizations could take the opportunity of conflict to clarify political dividing lines. In May of 1929, Mariátegui looked to the workers of the CGTP to take note of some new developments:

“On the one hand, the tendency towards an organization, exempt from anarcho-union residues, purged of ‘subversive bohemia,’ is accentuated in Peru. On the other hand, the aprista deviation appears clear. One of the groups of Peruvian deportees, the one from Mexico, advocates the constitution of a Nationalist Liberator Party; Haya [de la Torre] defines Apra as the Latin American Kuo Min Tang [Guomindang]. A discussion takes place in which the doctrinaire socialist tendency adverse to any formula of demagogic and inconclusive populism and personalist wardlordism [caudillaje] is definitively affirmed. The attached documents illustrate the terms and results of this debate, from which the Peruvian leftist movement enters a stage of definitive orientation. ‘Amauta,’ in its N° 17, the one of its second anniversary, declares the process of ‘ideological definition’ completed, categorically affirming itself Marxist. In November 1918, ‘Labor’ appeared as an extension newspaper for the work of ‘Amauta,’ to gradually become an organ of the union reorganization.”²¹⁴

The party should not subsume the class organizations, but neither should the class organizations be taken as already beyond the need for the party. United in the struggle for revolutionary education and a democratic stage for open struggle, the party must commit itself to the long-term goals, while the unions and councils concern themselves with the short-term organization of the class’s independent political bodies. In short, Mariátegui believed that the party was “the vanguard of the proletariat, the political force that assumes the task of its orientation and leadership in the struggle for the realization of its class ideals.”²¹⁵ Language, ideas, organization, and action are dynamically mutual and united through their distinction. There is a need for different levels of discourse in socialist political strategy. A good teacher talks to different people in different ways. There are the complex levels of autonomous language, in the reflections of theory, and the multitudinous levels of autonomous praxis, in the art of politics. Ultimately, the autonomy of theory and practice from each other is what links them arm in arm.

Experience is what brings about the development of a coherent partisan perspective. Mariátegui taught that a “masterpiece can only flower in soil that has been amply fertilized by an anonymous multitude of mediocre works. The genius in art is usually not a beginning but the end result of a vast experience.”²¹⁶ With his wealth of experiences in political organization, he could clearly articulate his independent stance towards the Comintern. The Soviet Union had been constructed as a union of many republics, within which nationality was defined along racial, ethnic, and linguistic lines.²¹⁷ This repeated much of the technocratic drive of the post-Revolutionary French state, which set out on a grand project of classifying humanity. Where a Soviet republic was defined as belonging to a given ethnic group, the state was obliged to enact policies of affirmative action to put as many members of that group in leading positions as possible.²¹⁸ Many Soviet leaders sought to internationalize this ethnonational structure, through the authority of the Comintern, as the universal model for the fraternal association of peoples. In Latin América, this meant that the Comintern parties called for Black people and Natives to be broken off into ethnonational microrepublics wherever they existed in a mass.²¹⁹

Mariátegui resisted this policy as misunderstanding the reality of América.²²⁰ Against the Comintern’s position, he argued: “[...]the Indian and the Negro, they occupy a rather important position within the proletarian class. They have absolutely no social demands of their own, except to free themselves from the contempt that the white man heaps on them. Their economic demands are mixed up with those of the class to which they belong.”²²¹ His was not a class reductionist position, in which race was a distraction veiling homogenous class demands. Rather, Mariátegui believed that the unity of the proletariat could not be achieved without its basic condition as a political multitude, encompassing many peoples and senses of life into one moral force without collapsing them into the narrow homogeneity of their being those who work for a living.

Without this moral alliance, the class organs of the proletariat would fall into mere techniques of accommodation. Although the “trade union itself has its origin in the class struggle[...] the trade union maintains feelings in the worker that make him accept the workshop and work under conditions that, without the moral stimuli of the association, would end up seeming intolerable,” but at the same time “Peru is one of the Latin American countries where cooperation finds the most spontaneous and peculiar elements of support. Indigenous communities gather as many moral and material skills as possible to transform themselves into production and consumption cooperatives.”²²² In the strongest terms, Mariátegui criticized those who represented the working class in exclusionary terms, as a pure identity represented as the Platonic idea of The Working Class. Their representative thinking ignored that the propertyless class was also a class of youth, women, Natives, and immigrants:

“The problem of the creation of the Center of the Peruvian proletariat, in addition to its historical justification, has been that of the genuine representation of the exploited class of our country. It is not born by a whim of chance, it is born through the experience acquired in the past struggles and as an organic need of the exploited mass of Peru. The representation of the national worker up to the present has been hidden by false ‘representative’ groups that, such as the Universal Confederation Union of Artisans [Confederación Unión Universal de Artesanos (CAAU)], and the Assemblies of United Societies [Asambleas de Sociedades Unidas (ASU)], (formed by societies of dubious existence, and others lacking the class spirit that animates mass organizations, for the same reason that their activities are concretized into mutualist ones without worrying about economic defense because that is not their role) have attributed such representation without the consensus of those they claim to represent. The representation of the national worker corresponds to a United Center, formed from the bottom up, that is, by organisms born in the factories, workshops, branches, maritime and land enterprises, by agricultural workers and peasants, by the great masses of exploited Indians. A Center that has these elements, which houses the workers’ unions of the country, will be the only one that will have the right to speak on behalf of the workers of Peru.”²²³

The Comintern would not budge on the universality of the ethnonational republic thesis in Mariátegui’s lifetime. He remained an outsider, refusing to accept its 21 Conditions for membership, which included the supreme authority of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union over all other member parties. His was a project of independent socialism. While battling illness, he began this work in the second half 1929. He planned to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina in the following year in order to receive treatment and participate in the General Council of the Anti-Imperialist League. He wanted to carve out a path for a socialism that was authentic to its own reality. His opposition to the Comintern’s proposal of carving out Indigenous republics and description of race problems as ultimately class problems was not based on mechanical reductionism. He recognized that Indigenous struggles struck at the very basis of society in the Americas, touching on the problems of labor, land, independence, and democracy all at once. Like Lenin, he was laying out a strategy from his analysis of the entire social totality. He could have been the Lenin of América, the Marx of the 20th century.

Events are always untimely. Joy is rare in the annals of history. Just before he was to set out for Buenos Aires, in March of 1930, Mariátegui was rushed to the hospital. After a long struggle against death, he passed on April 16th. The breath of the great socialist educator and organizer, the first giant of critical theory in América, ceased. Thousands joined his funeral procession, which carried his coffin to the Presbítera Matías Maestro on the outskirts of Lima and interred his body in a mausoleum. The crowd would not forget their amauta. Anna Chiappe set to work gathering her late husband’s teachings and memories for their own children and for the youth of the future.

The Afterlives of the Amauta

When an intelligent politician sees the masses invest their passions into a face, they seek to fix the badge of that icon to their own party. Their face becomes a stamp, their name becomes a trope. It is not that a hero can redeem politics, but that politics tend to strike the redemptive expression from a hero’s face by molding it into the hardened glare of Truth and Duty. With Mariátegui’s death, his soul lost the force of its intention, The history of Peruvian politics after him would be written without the guidance of the amauta.²²⁴ Immediately after his death, Mariátegui’s legacy was divided up among his next of kin.

The Peruvian Socialist Party (PSP) became the Peruvian Communist Party [Partido Comunista Peruano (PCP)] in May of 1930. It canonized Mariátegui, its founder, as a Muscovite Marxist-Leninist. It surrendered its independence from Moscow by accepting the 21 conditions for full admission into the Comintern. At the time, this meant following the party line of the Third Period—a theory which claimed that capitalism had reached a period of final decline, that liberalism and fascism amounted to the same dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, that fascism and social democracy were therefore indistinguishable, and that the official Communist Parties should act intransigently towards all other factions and provoke open revolutionary confrontation in the streets wherever possible. This compelled the PCP to tear down the tiers of political strategy and degrees of discourse that Mariátegui had carefully constructed. They became more Muscovite in style.

The Comintern was increasingly reduced to a wing of Soviet foreign policy. What was good for the Soviets was considered to be good for the world. In the 1933 elections of Germany, after a shift from street combat to electoralism, the Nazi Party came to power. They set to work destroying the German communist movement, aggressively persecuting its militants. Soon after, Germany began its expansion to the East. The Comintern began to see fascist imperialism as a more urgent threat than liberal imperialism. The Third Period was no more. The task of the day was now a Popular Front with all “progressive” forces against fascism, the liberal bourgeoisie included. 19th century Marxism’s illusions of progress reappeared, but this time as the obligation for socialists to ensure the victories of reason over the forces of irrationality.²²⁵ The resistance of the proletariat against work appeared as irresponsible in the light of fascism.²²⁶ While experiencing an exhausting war in defense of the newly born Spanish Republic from the Spanish, Italian, and German fascists, Moscow reinforced its stance. Opposition to imperialism had to be collapsed into opposition to fascism in order to allow the Soviet Union to pursue its diplomatic alliances of defense with the liberal West. But the Popular Front failed to organize this alliance. British and U.S. capital, the leading powers of the liberal world, looked coldly to the Spanish fascists with the hopes that they would eliminate the annoyance of the Soviet Union and its allies.

In April of 1939, the Spanish Republic fell to the Nationalists. Having been abandoned by the liberals, the Soviets made another sudden shift and sought rapprochement with the fascists. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop met in August to arrange a secret pact of non-aggression, mutually beneficial trade, and limited military alliance. The Popular Front was suddenly being questioned in the statements of the Comintern’s leaders. Perhaps the true divide in politics, some suggested, was between decadent liberalism and heroic nationalism. In September of 1939, the Nazis and Soviets invaded Poland and met each other in Brest-Litovsk. Their armies held a joint parade on September 22, 1939. The celebration of the peaceful transfer of command over the city from the Nazis to the Soviets used decorations of swastikas next to hammers and sickles, now used as symbols of fraternal and amicable nationalisms.²²⁷ The tendency of the Worker forges the convergence of revolutions, right and left.

Two summers later, the Nazis initiated Operation Barbarossa and launched their invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Comintern now shifted its gears into the total defense of the Soviet Union. Once again, fascism was the enemy, not liberalism. This time, Premier Josef Stalin declared that the Nazi invaders were neither nationalists nor socialists. Because of their annexation of other nations and exploitation of the East, Stalin said in a speech to the Soviet public that the title “National Socialism” was meant “to deceive the people, to fool the simpletons and to hide under the flag of ‘nationalism’ and ‘socialism’ their piratical and imperialist nature.”²²⁸ Democracy and nationalism had to defend themselves from fascist imperialism. They had to join the Soviet Union in the struggle for the victory of enlightenment and humanity over the forces of ignorance and barbarism. The Soviets and the other Allies fought the Axis until victory in World War II. The powers immediately diverged upon setting out to answer what the post-war order would look like. Invoking the principle of peaceful coexistence, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union repurposed the Popular Front to convert Europe’s Communist Parties into advocates for diplomatic and economic alliances with their respective countries. Peace and development were the catchwords for the future of official Marxism.

The rapid and contradictory shifts of the Comintern left a legacy of confusion and blind dogmatism in the official Communist Parties. The PCP and the CGTP, now a wing of the Party, followed the class collaborationist sense of the Popular Front by critically supporting the ‘progressive’ measures carried through by the military regimes of Peru. Whatever increased the scale of capitalist production and the laborers’ share in the national wealth was ‘progressive.’ With Mariátegui’s legacy now being tied to developmentalism and nationalism, his one-time democratic allies APRA could also lay claim to him for its style of democratic populism. Even the debates between Trotskyists and Marxist-Leninists over whether he was a Trotskyist or a Marxist-Leninist obscured the independent stance he had worked to carve out for Marxism in América.

The politics of the Popular Front from the 1930s carried out the active forgetting of the 1920s. And forgetting is, as Nietzsche knew, an active work: “To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa [clean slate] of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight, premeditation (for our organism is an oligarchy)-that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.”²²⁹ Out of the necessities of self-preservation, the generations after the ‘20s had to forget. They forgot the living Mariátegui by tearing out any pieces from his mummy which might come in handy to them. The face of the man who had once so incisively described Peruvian reality was carelessly scrambled into a gray mush by his fellow Peruvians. He became an empty signifier for the inarticulate impulses of Peru’s mass.

The work of forgetfulness cannot repress the impulses of a body forever. Discontent began to bubble up to the surface under the developmentalist military dictatorships of América. The regime could not capture the general will forever. The mass body of the nation has its own impulses which might depart from the plans of its leadership. Even by holding the leaders to their promises, the masses can begin to do things for themselves. Many intellectuals of the Popular Front era began to realize this from a careful study of their reality. They began to critique developmentalism on its own premises. Well-rounded development, they argued, could not be carried out under conditions of dependency to the wealthy metropolitan countries. Mariátegui had taught much the same, but this aspect of his work had been forgotten until the writers of dependency theory remembered it.

American dependency theory’s critique of development experienced four main steps of development. It began from a moderate inquiry, in the academic historical work of Silvio Zavala and Sergio Bagú which demonstrated the capitalist nature of the colonial era.²³⁰ It soon moved to a more radical approach advocating national social revolution as the solution to underdevelopment, in the writing of Andre Gunder Frank and Paul A. Baran.²³¹ It then began to find its solution in the vision of voluntarism and a continental revolution, such as in the Cuban Great Debate on economic planning which Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Ernest Mandel participated in.²³² It finally reached a world-revolutionary apotheosis in the arguments of Immanuel Wallerstein and Ruy Mauro Marini.²³³ Intellectuals used the inquiries of dependency theory to debate the possibilities for revolutionary political strategy. Dependency theory showed the need for social revolution to make balanced and harmonized development possible, rather than development coming first and automatically creating socialism. This Copernican Revolution led to a revival of critical theory just in time for new revolutionary waves. As it had done in 1910, Mexico in 1968 gave the signal to the masses of América. The flames of a New Left spread across América. A new soul breathed life into Mariátegui’s face, restoring its color and expressiveness.

The tasks which Mariátegui had laid out for Peru acquired a new political urgency, but this time on a plane of politics where the techniques of recuperating revolutionary energies were more well-developed. General Juan Velasco Alvarado seized power in 1968 and began this work of recuperation, carrying out a moderate and gradualist land reform that captured class struggle for the sovereignty of the national state. The PCP, after a generation of repeating the mantras of the Popular Front, offered their support. The discontent within the PCP had already been growing before 1968. The leadership had acted as only a moderate opposition to the conservative President Fernando Belaúnde Terry. A break off faction had already led to an isolated attempt at a National Liberation Army [Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN)] in 1962 before being quickly destroyed by the Peruvian Army. In the 1960s, the split between the Soviet Union, which advocated peaceful coexistence in the West, and Red China, which advocated a global revolt of decolonization, had reached a high point of confrontation. This, in turn, led the admirers of Mao Zedong in Peru to split off from the PCP, followers of Soviet bureaucracy, and form the Peruvian Communist Party—Red Flag [Partido Comunista Peruano—Bandera Roja (PCP-BR)] in 1964. Yet neither episode unleashed a new tide. 1968 would be different. The rise of Velasco Alvarado inspired the PCP to once again convert into a rubber stamp for the “progressives” and quiet its oppositional stances. This made for better terrain to split autonomous politics from formalistic politics. After 1969, party members and students alike left the official PCP and formed new organizations like the Communist Party of Peru—Red Fatherland [Partido Comunista del Perú—Patria Roja (PCP-PR)] and the Shining Path [Sendero Luminoso (SL)].

The style of the time, in the wake of the 1959 victory of the Cuban Revolution, was guerrilla warfare. Rather than focusing on building the numbers of mass organizations—the prerogative of the official socialist and democratic parties—the new organizations believed that it was their imperative as radical minorities to stage armed direct actions against the state. Students, in particular, join guerrillas out of a desire to act directly and stir up the masses from the outside. They might do this as neo-Narodniki who want to go down to the countryside of the campesinos. Or, as neo-Nihilists who want to punish the singular reactionary mass of the nation with a lesson in violence, doled out for its own good. Either way, these actionists think of politics as an intervention of a moral principle into the hard mass of the old regime, instead of as a field of struggle between impulses and convictions. There was no longer any definitive Party. Much less a definitive Socialist or Communist Party. It was not that the classic force of struggle, the propertyless, had disappeared into the conformity of consumerism and the patriotism of the state. The working class, as José Revuelltas put it, had “not been beheaded, even if for the time being it is a proletariat without a head, a proletariat without its party.”²³⁴ The four-tiered strategy of the party, class, nation, and masses strategy had been muddled before finally disappearing into the chaotic turmoil of massification.

The number of guerrillas grew in increments, but the force of military violence would not succeed in sparking a social revolution. The power of the state was too subtle to be destroyed by strikes of blunt force. The guerrillas might have ranged from the fanatical Maoists of the Shining Path to the later Cuban-style Marxist-Leninists of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement [Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA)], but they all amounted in a common failure to definitively break the legitimacy of the old regime. Many began to manically draw lines between their friends and their enemies, looking with suspicion for traitors amidst whatever mass bases they had cultivated.

Ultimately, the Velasco Alvarado regime did the work for them by undermining its own legitimacy in 1975. General Francisco Morales Bermúdez overthrew its aged and ailing head and took over his position. He did much worse at managing the political arrangements that had been forged by Velasco Alvarado as head of state. Morales Bermúdez was not a charismatic personality of the same pedigree. He did not capture people’s imaginations. He abdicated and returned politics to the normal bread and circuses of civilian rule in 1980. Effectively, this meant the rule of technocrats, chosen from among academically trained and politically experienced civilians. Even José Carlos Mariátegui’s son, Sandro Mariátegui Chiappe, briefly served as President of the Senate from 1982 to 1983 and as Prime Minister for a few months in 1984. The civil democratic world’s norm was not one of total peace, but of a warming Cold War. Peru joined the Yankee age of the Wagnerian-cinematic Star Wars, and might have been put under the sights of the Reaganite Star Wars.

Not all wanted to return to normal. Especially not a Yankee imperialist normal. The peace would not last. The armed conflicts between guerrillas and the Peruvian state reached the heights of a Civil War from the Spring of 1980 to late 2000. The culminating confrontation between official politics and New Left guerrilla politics began in the 1990s, with the war between the academic President Alberto Fujimori and the bombastic Shining Path. Both the state and the guerrilla invoked Mariátegui. But only the cult of personality around Abimael “Gonzalo” Gúzman, leader of the Shining Path, claimed that it knew the absolute and exclusive heir of Mariátegui. The Shining Path had appealed to a rural and Indigenous base with radical land reforms and its attacks on the urban rich. It began to alienate them with its antagonistic politics, its strict delineations of friends and enemies in village communities. Many villages formed civilian militias, rondos, to defend themselves from the Shining Path and the Army alike. In 1983, the Shining Path had publicly tortured and executed tens of ronderos, their families, and their children in the Andean town of Lucanamarca. Their leader, the urban intellectual Gonzalo, justified their brutality as “in war the mass in combat can exceed and express all his hatred, the deep feeling of class hatred, of repudiation, of condemnation that he has, that it was the root[.]”²³⁵ He invoked Sorel and Mariátegui’s teachings on violence, but while their violence was that of an independent spirit striving for freedom, Gonzalo’s was one of a resentful and terroristic force directed against those of the poor who did not fall in line. The Shining Path were more like Puritan missionaries armed with guns, or fascists armed with Marx and Mao, than a liberating army.

However, it was the state which spilled the most blood in the conflict. Even according to the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s conclusions in 2003, the Peruvian state was responsible for the overwhelming majority of disappearances, attacks, and killings of civilians during the war.²³⁶ The state was the united force of society in its uncompromising self-preservation, while the Shining Path was only a small cultic force of self-expansion. Violence was not the only means which the state employed in its maintenance of sovereignty. The Native self-defense technique of rondos became a means for the Army to work for their integration into the national state. The state incorporated rondos into its command structure, while officers promoted nationalist myths of Inka racial revival against the decadent urban students. Counterinsurgency met with a new form of mass enthusiasm. Yet, despite their mostly urban origins, it was the Shining Path’s failure to take Lima during its siege that marked its decline. It had enjoyed successes in guerrilla warfare, but could not normalize itself into a political regime. Peru normalized without them.

The rural communities did not prefer Fujimori, so much as they preferred being left in peace. Indigenous peoples since the end of the war have been partially incorporated, but they remain independent. The decolonial movements of Indianism [indianismo] and Katarism [katarismo] continue into the 21st century. And even the strength of their vital energies gives new life to the ideologies of the national state. The nationalist, parochialist, racialist, irredentist tendencies of this movement have given rise to a new wing of Andean politics in the 21st century: ethnocacerism [etnocacerismo]. The leader of ethnocacerism, Antauro Humala, is condemned by the press for his praise of the Shining Path. As a populist, he feels that they were the last great enemy of the technocratic capital city, Lima. The wind of populism needs to pass through the passion of warfare and make a new beginning if it is not to collapse into fascism.

As Mariátegui knew, the Andes are the basis for the entire republic. Peruvian society is centered in the coastal cities. Peru is not universal to its legally recognized territory, because neither “the Spanish nor the Creole knew or could conquer the Andes. In the Andes, the Spaniard was never anything but a pioneer 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 the 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.’”²³⁷ The attempt at supersession of the fundamental Native reality cannot succeed, because that reality is the Andean reality expressed in human personality. The shifts in the Andean infrastructure reverberate throughout the urban and national superstructure. The tone of Peruvian politics today is split between the academic drone of the technocratic Fujimoris, who rule by decree, and the inarticulate populism of Pedro Castillo and others, which tends simultaneously to democracy and fascism. The game of musical chairs has left Dina Boluarte in the hot seat of the Presidency, where the entire nation vents its animus. The internet now links the nation’s rage into a sustained buzz of hatred that exceeds national boundaries. Peru, which was always centered in the cities, has become immediately global through digital technology. With the help of polyglot training and machine translation, the whole world can now intervene directly into the debates of Peruvian politics. But in the windy Andes, where the life of the ayllu is isolated from the cities, the mountains still hum to their own rhythm. América lives.

Across the Americas of today, the main political divide is between the smug faces of those in charge and the faceless rage of the masses, who issue the demands of society to the state. Critical theorists need to find their own ground if they want to begin the work of radicalizing the demands of populism into mass self-organizing politics. The masses must direct their democratic rage not only against the technocrats, but against the state and capital. After Mariátegui’s death, José Ortega y Gasset, one of his major influences, wrote that to “live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world. Not for a single moment is our activity of decision allowed to rest. Even when in desperation we abandon ourselves to whatever may happen, we have decided not to decide.”²³⁸ Decisionmaking is the beginning for self-determination, which is the condition for a mutually liberating association. If each follows the callings of their own free flourishing, they might manage to converge into the association of a new, articulate opposition party. This would bring them back to the tasks which Mariátegui had set before himself. This would begin to give a new unity to the theory of mariateguismo. And it would unite the tasks of mariateguismo from his América with those of the new generation of critical theory in the West. We will finally teach the teachers.

A revitalization does not always beget reunification. Today, Mariátegui is still divided up. This time, his spirit is distributed across the hum of currents of motion, instead of his body being quietly divided between formal, bureaucratic organizations. His political legacy has been claimed for the varieties of guerrilla strategies from Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Abimael “Gonzalo” Guzmán, Álvaro García Linera, to Subcomandante Marcos. His thought is echoed in the universities by critical theorists—Pablo González Casanova, René Zavaleta Mercado, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Aníbal Quijano, María Lugones, Michael Löwy, and others. Through their works of translation, English-speaking lips have begun to become familiar with the feeling of his name. And in the depths of the jungles and on the vistas of the Andes, many Indigenous voices still speak his name with the honorific amauta. An Indigenous spirit has offered a nod of acknowledgment towards him in the works of Fausto Reinaga, Felipe Quispe, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The kataristas of the Andes and the zapatistas of the Lacandón continue his tradition as part of their own. And in those many acts of revitalization, the spirit of the amauta carries on. Like Lenin before him, the late Mariátegui has split between the stuffed corpse hailed in the halls of national bureaucracy and the soul of a world revolution, which lives on in the breath of the millions who still struggle for new life.

1. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York, New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 190, 227.

2. Ricardo Flores Magón, “La revolución mundial [The World Revolution],” Regeneración, March 24, 1917, Archivo Digital de Ricardo Flores Magón, https://archivomagon.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/e4n255.pdf.=

3. Karl Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy [1923],” in Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Monthly Review Press, 1970), p. 83.

4. For a more comprehensive account of his life and work, see Marc Becker, Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory, Latin American Series 20 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University, 1993); and Mike Gonzalez, In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2019).

5. For more on this literary aspect of his thinking, see Juan E. De Castro, Bread and Beauty: The Cultural Politics of José Carlos Mariátegui (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2021).

6. Mario Campos, “José Carlos y yo [José Carlos and I],” Caretas, May 2, 1989, Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, https://www.mariategui.org/2020/06/18/jose-carlos-y-yo/.

7. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Sentido heroico y creador del socialismo [The Heroic and Creative Sense of Socialism],” Mundial, February 1, 1929, Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, https://archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/sentido-heroico-y-creador-del-socialismo-recorte-de-prensa.

8. “We certainly do not want socialism in América to be an imitation and a copy. It must be a heroic creation. We have to give life, with our own reality, in our own language, to Indo-American socialism. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation,” José Carlos Mariátegui, “Aniversario y balance [Anniversary and Balance],” Amauta, September 1928, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/1928/sep/aniv.htm.

9. Campos, “[José Carlos and I].”

10. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La vida que me diste [The Life That You Gave Me],” Poliedro, September 20, 1926, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/la_novela_y_la_vida/paginas/la%20vida%20que%20me%20diste.htm.

11. César Lévano, “‘…La vida que me diste’: Anna viuda de Mariátegui [‘...The Life That You Gave Me’: Anna widow of Mariátegui],” Caretas, April 14, 1969, Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, https://www.mariategui.org/2020/06/15/la-vida-que-me-diste-anna-viuda-de-mariategui/.

12. Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1974), p. 5.

13. José Carlos Mariátegui, “El hombre y el mito [Man and Myth],” Mundial, de enero de 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/el%20mito%20y%20el%20hombre.htm#2.

14. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Pesimismo del de la realidad y optimismo del ideal [Pessimism of Reality and Optimism of the Ideal],” Mundial, August 21, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/pesimismo%20de%20la%20realidad.htm.

15. “The issue of ‘secular education’ should be discussed in Our America [Nuestra América] in the light of all these antecedents. The new Ibero-American generation cannot be content with a flat and worn-out formula of liberal ideology. The “secular school”—bourgeois school—is not the ideal of youth possessed of a powerful desire for renewal. Secularism, as an end, is a poor thing. In Russia, in Mexico, in the peoples who are being transformed materially and spiritually, the renewing and creative virtue of the school does not reside in its secular character but in its revolutionary spirit. The revolution there gives to the school its myth, its emotion, its mysticism, its religiosity,” José Carlos Mariátegui, “Introducción a un estudio sobre el problema de la educación pública [Introduction to a Study About the Problem of Public Education],” Mundial, May 15, 1925, Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_educacion/paginas/introduccion%20a%20un%20estudio.htm.

16. Mariátegui, “‘Indología’ por José Vasconcelos [‘Indología’ by José Vasconcelos],” Variedades, October 22, 1922, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_nuestra_america/paginas/indologia.htm.

17. “But the most revolutionary and transcendent activity of the Obregón government has been its educational work. José Vasconcelos, one of the most historically important men in contemporary América, has led an extensive and radical reform of public education. He has used the most original methods to reduce illiteracy; he has opened the universities to the poor classes; he has spread like a gospel of the time, in all schools and in all libraries, the books of [Leo] Tolstoy and Romain Rolland; he has incorporated into the Education Law the obligation of the State to support and educate the children of the disabled and orphans; he has sown the immense and fertile Mexican land with schools, books and ideas,” José Carlos Mariátegui, “México y la revolución [Mexico and the Revolution],” Variedades, January 5, 1924, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_nuestra_america/paginas/mexico.htm.

18. “While the colonialist mentality has dominated the country, we have been a people that recognized itself as having emerged from the conquest. The Creole national conscience indolently obeyed the prejudice of the Spanish filiation. The history of Peru began with the company of [Francisco] Pizarro, founder of Lima. The Inka Empire was not felt but as prehistory. The autochthonous was outside of our history and, therefore, outside of our tradition. This traditionalism dwarfed the nation, reducing it to the Creole or mestizo population. But, powerless to remedy the latter’s numerical inferiority, it could not last long.” José Carlos Mariátegui, “La tradición nacional [National Tradition],” Mundial, December 2, 1927, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/peruanicemos_al_peru/paginas/tradicion.htm.

19. Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, ¡Por la tierra y por la raza! [For the Land and for the Race!] (Zacatecas, México: Juchipila, 1924), https://memoricamexico.gob.mx/swb/memorica/Cedula?oId=MPJ_H4QBQtMxhQCTCMJd.

20. José Carlos Mariátegui, La escena contemporanea (Lima, Perú: Editorial Minerva, 1925); José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, trans. Marjory Urquidi (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1971).

21. José Carlos Mariátegui, El alma matinal, y otras estaciones de hoy (Lima, Perú: Biblioteca Amauta, 1972); José Carlos Mariátegui, Defensa del marxismo, 4th ed. (Lima, Perú: Biblioteca Amauta, 1974).

22. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La lucha final [The Final Struggle],” Mundial, March 20, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/la%20lucha%20final.htm.

23. C. L. R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (Brooklyn, New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1981), p. 191.

24. Felix Weil, Sozialisierung: Versuch einer begrifflichen Grundlegung nebst einer Kritik der Sozialisierungspläne (Berlin-Fichtenau, Deutschland: Verlag Gesellschaft und Erziehung, 1921); Felix Weil, Die Arbeiterbewegung in Argentinien: ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte (Leipzig, Deutschland: C. L. Hirschfeld, 1923).

25. Marco A. Torres, “The Science That Wasn’t: The Orthodox Marxism of the Early Frankfurt School and the Turn to Marxist Critical Theory,” Platypus Review, July 2008.

26. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2021).

27. Fausto Reinaga, “El imperativo amáutico [The Amautic Imperative],” in Socrates y yo [Socrates and I] (La Paz, Bolivia: Comunidad Amáutica Mundial, 1983), p. 74.

28. Reinaga, “[The Amautic Imperative],” p. 72.

29. Fausto Reinaga, “Tal tronco tal astilla [Such a Log Such a Splinter],” en Socrates y yo (La Paz, Bolivia: Comunidad Amáutica Mundial, 1983), p. 59.

30. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La emoción de nuestro tiempo: Dos concepciones de la vida [The Emotion of Our Time: Two Conceptions of Life],” Mundial, January 9, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/dos%20concepciones%20de%20la%20vida.htm.

31. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La imaginación y el progreso [Imagination and Progress],” Mundial, December 12, 1924, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/la%20imaginacion%20y%20el%20progreso.htm.

32. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, vol. 1, Form and Actuality (New York, New York: Alfred A, Knopf, Inc., 1926), p. 504.

33. Jose Carlos Mariátegui noted certain parallels in Spengler to Vladimir Lenin’s analysis of imperialism. “[Oswald] Spengler, in his famous book on the decline of the West, argued, some years ago, that the last stage of a civilization is a stage of imperialism. His patriotism as a German made him hope that this imperialist mission would be Germany’s turn. [Vladimir] Lenin, some years earlier, in perhaps the most fundamental of his books, went ahead of Spengler in considering Cecil Rhodes as a representative man of the imperialist spirit, also giving us a Marxist definition of the phenomenon, understood and put into focus as an economic phenomenon,” José Carlos Mariátegui, “Yanquilandia y el socialismo [Yankeeland and Socialism],” Variedades, December 31, 1927, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/defensa_del_marxismo/paginas/va.htm.

34. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York, New York: Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 52.

35. Among others: W.E.B. Du Bois, Muhammad Iqbal, Malek Bennabi, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, C.L.R. James, and Malcolm X.

36. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La urbe y el campo [The City and the Countryside],” Mundial, October 3, 1924, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/la%20urbe%20y%20el%20campo.htm.

37. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 1934).

38. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York, New York: Telos Press, 2006), p. 70, p. 87.

39. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 334.

40. Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming, trans. Laurence Paul Hemming and Bogdan Costea (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2017), p. 9, p. 5.

41. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La civilización y el caballo [Civilization and the Horse],” Mundial, November 11, 1927, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/la_novela_y_la_vida/paginas/la%20civilizacion%20a%20caballo%201.htm.

42. Mariátegui, [“Civilization and the Horse].”

43. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Garland Publishing, 1977), pp. 152-153.

44. José Carlos Mariátegui, “¿Existe un pensamiento hispano-americano? [Does a Hispanic-American Thinking Exist?]” Mundial, May 19, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_nuestra_america/paginas/existe.htm.

45. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” in The Birth of Tragedy & The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 163.

46. Richard Wagner, Siegfried, trans. Frederick Jameson (New York, New York: G. Schirmer, 1904), p. 206.

47. José Carlos Mariátegui’s admiration and respect for the childish is a trait that he shared with his inspiration, Karl Marx. Anna Chiappe recalled of her late husband’s interactions with children: “He was very affectionate with them. Suffice it to say that when I was at home, every moment I asked where the boys were and what they were doing. Once, Carmen Saco said to him: ‘Hey, José Carlos, don’t the children bother you?’ He replied: ‘They don’t bother me. They can be sitting on top of the machine [his typewriter], and they don’t bother me,’” Lévano, “[...The Life That You Gave Me].” Eleanor Marx reminisced about her father Karl: “And how I remember his telling me the story—I do not think it could ever have been so told before or since—of the carpenter whom the rich men killed, and many and many a time saying, ‘After all we can forgive Christianity much, because it taught us the worship of the child.’” Eleanor Marx, “Karl Marx: A Few Stray Notes (1895),” in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, ed. Institute of Marxism-Leninism (Moscow, Russia: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), p. 253. In light of this comment of Karl’s, it is significant that Richard Wagner’s Siegfried was originally written as Jesus Christ. See Richard Wagner, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in Jesus of Nazareth and Other Writings, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 283–340.

48. Wagner, Siegfried, p. 337.

49. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 149.

50. Mariátegui, “[Yankeeland and Socialism].”

51. Campos, “[José Carlos and I].”

52. “The ‘end of Europe’ is inevitable. This civilization contains the embryo of a new civilization. And, like all civilizations, it is destined to become extinct. The program of the reformists— reformists of the bourgeoisie and reformists of socialism—is to stop their ruin by a compromise between the old society and the new society. (This is another manifestation of the decay and decrepitude of old filth. A regime that makes a pact with the revolution is a regime that feels defeated by it.),” José Carlos Mariátegui, “El crepúsculo de la civilización [The Twilight of the Civilization],” Variedades, December 16, 1922, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/signos_y_obras/paginas/el%20crepusculo%20de%20la%20civilizacion.htm.

53. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 97,

54. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 171.

55. Georg Lukács, Goethe and His Age, trans. Robert Anchor (London, United Kingdom: Merlin Press, 1968), p. 187, p. 204.

56. Ernst Jünger, “Unite! Final Word [22 July 1926],” in Interwar Articles (Wewelsburg Archives, 2018), p. 72.

57. Mariátegui, “[The Emotion of Our Time].”

58. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “On the Tenth Anniversary of Pravda,” trans. David Skirsky and George Hanna, May 2, 1922, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/may/02.htm.

59. Miguel de Unamuno, The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, trans. Homer P. Earle (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), p. 240.

60. Mariátegui, “[The Emotion of Our Time].”

61. “But before the new society is organized, the bankruptcy of the current society will throw humanity into a dark and chaotic era. Just as Vienna, the festive light of avant-guerre Europe, has gone out, Berlin will go out later. Milan, Paris and London will be shut down. And, the final and great focus of this civilization, New York will shut down. The torch of the Statue of Liberty will be the last light of capitalist civilization, of the civilization of skyscrapers, of power plants, of trusts, of banks, of cabarets and of the jazz band,” Mariátegui, “[The Twilight of the Civilization].”

62. Mariátegui, “[Imagination and Progress].”

63. “The professionals of intelligence will not find the way of faith; the multitudes will find it. It will be up to the philosophers, later, to codify the thought that emerges from the great multitudinous deed. Did the philosophers of Roman decadence understand the language of Christianity? The philosophy of bourgeois decadence could not have a better fate,” Mariátegui, “[Man and Myth].”

64. Georges Sorel, “Introduction: Letter to Daniel Halévy,” in Reflections on Violence, by Georges Sorel, ed. Jeremy Jennings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 29.

65. See Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

66. Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, “Appendix A - The Social Revolution and the East,” in Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World, by Alexandre A. Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 136.

67. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), p. 65.

68. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Lessons of the Commune,” trans. Bernard Isaacs, March 23, 1908, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm.

69. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Nota del autor [Note by the Author],” in La escena contemporánea (Lima, Perú: Editorial Minerva, 1925), https://www.marxists.org/espanol/////mariateg/1925/escena/00.htm.

70. Mariátegui thought much the same: “The new Hispanic-American generation salutes, in the enterprise of Abd el-Krim, the repetition of the enterprise of [José de] San Martín and [Simón] Bolívar. And it realizes that more than just Rif independence is at stake in Morocco. Abd el-Krim represents, in that conflict, the human cause,” José Carlos Mariátegui, “El imperialismo y marruecos [Imperialism and Morocco],” Variedades, August 1, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/figuras_y_aspectos_de_la_vida_i/paginas/el%20imperialismo%20y%20marruecos.htm.

71. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 316.

72. “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 América has deposited them,” Mariátegui, “¿Existe un pensamiento hispano-americano?,” and; “Ibero-Americanism needs a little more idealism and a little more realism. It needs to be consubstantiated with the new ideals of Indo-Iberian America. It needs to be inserted into the new historical reality of these peoples. Pan-Americanism relies on the interests of the bourgeois order; Ibero-Americanism must rely on the multitudes who are working to create a new order,” José Carlos Mariátegui, “El ibero-americanismo y pan-americanismo [Ibero-Americanism and Pan-Americanism],” Mundial, May 8, 1925, Proyecto filosofía, https://www.filosofia.org/hem/192/9250508.htm.

73. “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,” Mariátegui, “[Does a Hispanic-American Thinking Exist?]”

74. “Like him, I didn’t feel American except in Europe. Along the roads of Europe, I found the country of América that I had left and in which I had lived almost strange and absent. Europe revealed to me to what extent I belonged to a primitive and chaotic world; and at the same time it imposed on me, clarified for me the duty of an American task. But of this, some time after my return, I had a clear consciousness, a sharp notion. I knew that Europe, when it seemed to have completely conquered me, had restored me to Peru and to America; but I had not stopped to analyze the process of this reintegration. It was while reading in August 1926, in Europe, the beautiful pages in which Waldo Frank explained the function of his European experience in his discovery of the New World, that I meditated on my own case,” José Carlos Mariátegui, “Waldo Frank,” Boletín bibliográfico, September 1925, y Variedades, December 4, 1929, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/waldo%20frank.htm.

75. José Martí, “Our América,” trans. Centro de Estudios Martianos, El Partido Liberal, January 20, 1891, Representaciones Diplomáticas de Cuba en el Exterior, https://misiones.cubaminrex.cu/en/articulo/our-america-jose-marti.

76. Rodolfo Kusch, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, trans. María Lugones and Joshua M. Price (Durham, North Carolina; London, United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2010), p. lxxv.

77. José Carlos Mariátegui, “El rostro y el alma del Tawantinsuyu [The Face and the Soul of Tawantinsuyu],” Mundial, September 11, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/peruanicemos_al_peru/paginas/rostro.htm.

78. Mariátegui, “[Anniversary and Balance].”

79. Kusch, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, p. 101.

80. See Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

81. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Nacionalismo e internacionalismo [Nationalism and Internationalism],” Mundial, October 10, 1924, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/nacionalismo%20e%20internacionalismo.htm.

82. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Question: ‘What Is German?,’” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique, no. 36, Special Issue on Heimat (Autumn 1985): p. 130, https://doi.org/10.2307/488305.

83. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La revolución china [The Chinese Revolution],” Variedades, October 4, 1924, Marxists Internet Archive, https://archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/la-revolucion-china.

84. Mariátegui, “[National Tradition].”

85. Mariátegui, “[The City and the Countryside].”

86. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, vol. 2, Perspectives of World-History (New York, New York: Alfred A, Knopf, Inc., 1928), pp. 317-318.

87. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 324.

88. Moshe Nes-El, “Jewish Input to the Ideological Formation of the Socialist and Communist Movement in Peru,” vol. III: Modern Times, Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies, B (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1993), 340–44.

89. “Mariátegui and the Peruvian Jewish Radicals,” Radical Latin American Jews/Judí@s Radicales de Latinoamérica (blog), April 2024, http://www.radicalismojudio.org/peru.html.

90. Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J.E. Crawford Flitch (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1954), p. 36.

91. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 264.

92. “Judaism owes to Christianity the universalization of its values. Its ostracism has been the most active agent of its expansion and greatness. It is from the moment they live without a homeland that the Jews play a great role in Western civilization. With Christ and Saul, they ascend to the highest plane of history,” José Carlos Mariátegui, “La misión de Israel [The Mission of Israel],” Mundial, May 3, 1929, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/figuras_y_aspectos_de_la_vida_iii/paginas/la%20mision.htm.

93. Mariátegui, “[The Mission of Israel].”

94. Fayez Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1965), p. 22.

95. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), p. 524.

96. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 82.

97. Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Lincoln, Nebraska; London, United Kingdom: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), p. 248.

98. Mariátegui, “[The Face and the Soul of Tawantinsuyu].”

99. José Carlos Mariátegui, “El destino de norteamérica [The Destiny of North America],” Variedades, December 17, 1927, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/defensa_del_marxismo/paginas/iiia.htm#1a.

100. Mariátegui, “[The Destiny of North America].”

101. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), p. 181.

102. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Revised Student Edition, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 89.

103. See Stefan Aune, Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2023).

104. Mariátegui, “[The Face and the Soul of Tawantinsuyu].”

105. Mariátegui, “[Anniversary and Balance].”

106. Spengler, Man and Technics, p. 14.

107. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), p. 283.

108. Benjamin “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 254.

109. For an example of contemporary apes learning to participate intentionally in human language, see Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, William Mintz Fields, and Jared Taglialatela, “Ape Consciousness–Human Consciousness: A Perspective Informed by Language and Culture,” American Zoologist 40, no. 6 (December 2000): 910–21, https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/40.6.910.

110. “[Humans] begin, like every animal, by eating, drinking, etc., hence not by ‘standing’ in a relation, but by relating themselves actively, taking hold of certain things in the external world through action, and thus satisfying their need[s]. (Therefore they begin with production.) Through the repetition of this process, the property of those things, their property to ‘satisfy needs,’ is impressed upon their brains; men, like animals, also learn to distinguish ‘theoretically’ from all other things the external things which serve for the satisfaction of their needs. At a certain stage of evolution, after their needs, and the activities by which they are satisfied, have, in the meantime, increased and developed further, they will christen these things linguistically as a whole class, distinguished empirically from the rest of the external world,” Karl Marx, “‘Notes’ on Adolph Wagner,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. Terrell Carver, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 235-236.

111. George Thomson, Marxism and Poetry (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1946), pp. 25-31.

112. Mariátegui, “Waldo Frank.”

113. Waldo Frank, Our America (New York, New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), p. 187.

114. Mariátegui, “Waldo Frank.”

115. Mariátegui, “[Ibero-Americanism and Pan-Americanism].”

116. Mariátegui, “[The Chinese Revolution].”

117. Mariátegui, “[The Destiny of North America].”

118. Saidiya Hartman, “Fashioning Obligation: Indebted Servitude and the Legacy of Slavery,” in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, by Saidiya Hartman, 2nd ed. (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), pp. 221-288.

119. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Tesis ideológicas: El problema de las razas en la américa latina [Ideological Theses: The Problem of Races in Latin América]” (Secretariado Sudamericano de la Internacional Comunista, June 1929), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/ideologia_y_politica/paginas/tesis%20ideologicas.htm#1a.

120. Mariátegui, “[Ideological Theses].”

121. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 414.

122. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Jazz,” trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, Discourse 12, no. 1, A Special Issue on Music (Fall-Winter 1990-1989): p. 53.

123. Casely Hayford, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation (London, United Kingdom: C. M. Phillips, 1911); W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915); George Padmore, The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (London, United Kingdom: Red International of Labour of Unions Magazine for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 1931).

124. Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: The French Revolution and the Colonial Problem, trans. Kate Nash (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2025); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Beatriz Nascimento, The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento, ed. Christen Smith, Bethânia Gomes, and Archie Davies, trans. Christen Smith and Archie Davies (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2023); Carlos Moore, Tanya R. Sanders, and Shawna Moore, eds., African Presence in the Americas (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1995).

125. Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press, 2014), pp. 20-21; François Dalencourt and Porfirio Mamai, “Bolívar y Haití: Alexandre Pétion Frente a La Humanidad,” Guaraguao 18, no. 44 (Invierno 2013): pp. 99–122.

126. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Brent Hayes Edwards (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 8; Alain LeRoy Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain LeRoy Locke (New York, New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), pp. 3–18; Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” 1919, BlackPast, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/if-we-must-die-1919/.

127. See Hazel W. Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements, 1st ed. (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1971).

128. Zitkala-Ša, “Why I Am a Pagan,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1902, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1902/12/why-i-am-a-pagan/637906/; Arthur C. Parker, “The Editor’s Viewpoint,” The Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 3, no. 3 (September 1915): pp. 159–68.; Laura Cornelius Kellogg, “Industrial Organization for the Indian (1911),” in Laura Cornelius Kellogg: Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works, by Laura Cornelius Kellogg, ed. Kristina Ackley and Cristina Stanciu (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015), pp. 140–53.

129. Parker, “The Editor’s Viewpoint,” p. 162.

130. Devra Anne Weber, “‘Different Plans’: Indigenous Pasts, the Partido Liberal Mexicano, and Questions about Reframing Binational Social Movements of the Twentieth Century,” Social Justice 42, no. 3/4 (142) (2015): pp. 10–28.

131. Inés Hernández-Ávila, “Sara Estela Ramírez: Sembradora,” Legacy 6, no. 1, Western Women Writers (Spring 1989): pp. 13–26; Devra Anne Weber, “Wobblies of the Partido Liberal Mexicano,” Pacific Historical Review 85, no. 2 (May 2016): pp. 188–226.

132. See James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904-1923 (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022).

133. Octavio Paz, “The Pachuco and Other Extremes,” in Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York, New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 14.

134. Mariátegui, “[The Destiny of North America].”

135. Thomas Jefferson to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4523; John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 1845, pp. 5-6, 9-10.

136. José Carlos Mariátegui, “El caso y la teoría de Ford [The Case and the Theory of Ford],” Variedades, December 24, 1927, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/defensa_del_marxismo/paginas/iva.htm.

137. Mariátegui, “[Yankeeland and Socialism].”

138. Mariátegui, “[The Case and the Theory of Ford].”

139. Mariátegui, “[The Case and the Theory of Ford].”

140. Anatoly Lunacharsky, On Literature and Art, trans. Avril Pyman and Glagoleva Fainna (Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers, 1973); Alexander Bogdanov, Tektology, trans. V. N. Sadovsky et al. (Hull, United Kingdom: Centre for Systems Studies, 1996); Maxim Gorky, The Confession, trans. Rose Strunsky (New York, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1916). Mariátegui knew the type of this generation well, as he knew Gorky and Lunacharsky personally. Lévano, “[...The Life That You Gave Me].”

141. Mariátegui, “[The City and the Countryside].”

142. José Carlos Mariátegui, “El exilio de Trotsky [The Exile of Trotsky],” Variedades, February 23, 1929, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/figuras_y_aspectos_de_la_vida_iii/paginas/el%20exilio.htm.

143. Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science?: The Case of Lysenko, trans. Ben Brewster (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1977).

144. Mariátegui, “[‘Indología’ by José Vasconcelos].”

145. Mariátegui,”[The Mission of Israel].”

146. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Oriente y occidente [East and West],” in La escena contemporánea (Lima, Perú: Editorial Minerva, 1925), https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/la_escena_contemporanea/paginas/oriente%20y%20occidente.htm.

147. “Europe avidly collects Japanese paintings and Chinese sculptures, Persian colors and Hindustani rhythms. It gets drunk on the orientalism distilled by Russian art, fantasy and life. And it confesses almost a morbid desire to orientalize itself,” Mariátegui, “[East and West],” and; Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2003); Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

148. Mao Zedong, On New Democracy (Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1964); Malek Bennabi, Islam in History and Society, trans. Rashid Asma (New Delhi, India: Kitab Bhavan, 1999); Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (Westruckness), trans. John Green and Ahmad Alizadeh (Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers, 1983); Ali Shariati, On the Sociology of Islam, trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley, California: Mizan Press, 1979);

149. Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives (New Haven, Connecticut; London, United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 1990); Muhammad Iqbal, A Message from the East, trans. Muhammad Hadi Hussain, Arthur John Arberry, and Mustansir Mir (Lahore, Pakistan: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 2014).

150. Mariátegui, “[East and West].”

151. Nikolai Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, trans. Donald Attwater (New York, New York: Meridian, 1977).

152. Mariátegui, “[‘Indología’ by José Vasconcellos].”

153. Mariátegui, “[Pessimism of Reality and Optimism of the Ideal].”

154. Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 238-241.

155. Leon Trotsky, “The Social Composition of the Party,” in The New Course & The Struggle for the New Course, by Leon Trotsky and Max Schachtman, trans. Max Schachtman (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 22.

156. Mariátegui, “[The Exile of Trotsky].”

157. Peter Morgan, “Navigating the Twilight of Cosmopolitan Marxism: José Carlos Mariátegui on Trotskyism and Zionism in 1928–1929,” Radical Americas 10, no. 1 (2025), https://doi.org/Navigating the twilight of cosmopolitan Marxism: José Carlos Mariátegui on Trotskyism and Zionism in 1928–1929.

158. Mariátegui, “[The Exile of Trotsky].”

159. Mariátegui, “[The Exile of Trotsky].”

160. James Crane, “M.N. Roy’s ‘The Spiritualist West’ as Critical Theory (1936),” Substudies: Materials on Critical Theory (blog), May 24, 2025,

M.N. Roy's "The Spiritualist West" as Critical Theory (1936)

161. M. N. Roy, “Theses on the Eastern Question,” July 12, 1921, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/roy/1921/roy03.htm.

162. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Punto de vista anti-imperialista [The Anti-Imperialist Viewpoint]” (Primera Conferencia Comunista Latinoamericana, June 1929), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/ideologia_y_politica/paginas/punto%20de%20vista.htm#3a

163. Alberto Flores Galindo, “El inicio de una polémica: Buenos Aires, 1929 [The Initiation of a Polemic: Buenos Aires, 1929],” in La agonía de Mariátegui: La polémica con la Komintern [The Agony of Mariátegui: The Polemic with the Comintern] (Lima, Perú: DESCO, Centro de Estudios y Promoción del Desarrollo, 1980), pp. 15–36.

164. Mariátegui, “[The Exile of Trotsky].”

165. José Carlos Mariátegui, “‘La ciencia de la revolución’ por Max Eastman [‘The Science of Revolution’ by Max Eastman],” Variedades, June 26, 1929, Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, https://archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/la-ciencia-de-la-revolucion-por-max-eastman.

166. Ernst Jünger, The Worker, p. 29.

167. “Trotsky exists in a very well arranged and coherent kingdom, namely the realm of the intellect. There he has great significance, and his abilities are extraordinary. It stands to reason that a consciousness such as his must encounter a kind of vertigo when all of a sudden a realm following its own, different laws that cannot be captured by the tools of logic opens before him. In this case, it is the Russian realm that suddenly opens like a bottomless abyss under his feet. That is his destiny: the powers of the intellect are defeated by the powers of the soil. And this is the meaning of his book: the intellect tries to prove that the soil was wrong, yet its logic blows over the soil like smoke without leaving a trace,” Ernst Jünger, “Trotzkis Erinnerungen,” trans. Maciej Zurowski, Widerstand, February 1930, Verso, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4437-ernst-junger-on-leon-trotsky-s-my-life.

168. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2018); José Revueltas, Obras completas de José Revueltas, vol. 17, Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza [Essay on a Proletariat without a Head] (Distrito Federal, México: Ediciones Era, 1980).

169. José Carlos Mariátegui, “En el Día de la Raza [On the Day of the Race],” Variedades, October 13, 1928, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/la_novela_y_la_vida/paginas/el%20dia%20de%20la%20raza.htm.

170. Mariátegui, “Literature on Trial,” Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, p. 287.

171. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La nueva cruzada pro-indígena [The New Pro-Indigenous Crusade],” Amauta, January 1927, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/ideologia_y_politica/paginas/la%20nueva%20cruzada.htm.

172. Marc Becker, “Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America,” Science & Society 70, no. 4 (October 2006): pp. 450–79.

173. Mariátegui, “[Civilization and the Horse].”

174. Amadeo Bordiga, “In Janitzio Death Is Not Scary,” trans. Conor Murray, Il Programma Comunista, December 23, 1961, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1961/janitzio.htm.

175. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Las reivindicaciones feministas [The Feminist Demands],” Mundial, December 19, 1924, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/1924/dic/19.htm.

176. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La mujer y la política [Woman and Poitics],” Variedades, March 15, 1924, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol///mariateg/oc/temas_de_educacion/paginas/la%20mujer%20y%20la%20politica.htm.

177. Alexandra Kollontai, “Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth,” in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, ed. and trans. Alix Holt (Westport, Connecticut: Lawrence Hill Books, 1978), p. 290.

178. José Carlos Mariátegui, “El III congreso internacional de la reforma sexual [The Third International Congress of Sexual Reform],” Mundial, October 18, 1929, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_educacion/paginas/el%20iii%20congreso.htm.

179. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Freudismo y marxismo [Freudism and Marxism],” Variedades, December 29, 1928, Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, https://archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/freudismo-y-marxismo-recorte-de-prensa.

180. “Fascism, through the mouth of its theorists, attributes itself to a medieval and Catholic mentality; it believes itself to represent the spirit of the Counter-Reformation; although on the other hand, it pretends to embody the idea of the Nation, a typically liberal idea. The theorization seems to take pleasure in the invention of the most convoluted sophisms,” Mariátegui, “[Man and Myth].”

181. Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 1988); Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980); Franz Leopold Neumann, Trade Unions, Democracy, Dictatorship (London, United Kingdom: The Workers’ Educational Trade Union Committee, 1936); Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York, New York: Avon Books, 1965); Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1955).

182. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Esquema de una explicación de Chaplin [Outline of an Explanation of Chaplin],” Variedades, October 6, 1928, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/esquema%20de%20una%20explicacion.htm.

183. Theodor W. Adorno, “Chaplin Times Two,” trans. John MacKay, The Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 1 (1996): pp. 57–61; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp. 217–52; C.L.R. James, “Lecture Six: Thursday, 25th August, 1960,” in Modern Politics, by C. L. R. James (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2013), pp. 131–54; Henri Lefebvre, “Foreword to the Second Edition [Paris, December 1956 to February 1957],” in Critique of Everyday Life: Introduction, by Henri Lefebvre, trans. John Moore, vol. 1 (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 1–99.

184. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Los maestros y las nuevas corrientes [The Teachers and the New Currents],” Mundial, May 22, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_educacion/paginas/los%20maestros.htm.

185. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La enseñanza y la economía [Teaching and the Economy],” Mundial, May 29, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_educacion/paginas/la%20ensenanza%20y%20la%20economia.htm.

186. Aníbal Ponce, Educación y lucha de clases y otros escritos [Education and the Class Struggle, and Other Writings] (Buenos Aires, Argentina: UNIPE: Editorial Universitaria, 2015).

187. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Continuum, 2005), p. 76.

188. José Carlos Mariátegui, “El partido bolchevique y Trotsky [The Bolshevik Party and Trotsky],” Variedades, 31 de enero de 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/figuras_y_aspectos_de_la_vida_i/paginas/el%20partido%20bolchevique.htm.

189. José Carlos Mariátegui, “‘La agonía del cristianismo’ de Don Miguel de Unamuno [‘The Agony of Christianity’ by Don Miguel de Unamuno],” Variedades, January 2, 1926, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/signos_y_obras/paginas/la%20agonia%20del%20cristianismo.htm#5.

190. “The revolution is not a party affair. The three social-democratic parties (SPD, USPD, KPD) are so foolish as to consider the revolution as their own party affair and to proclaim the victory of the revolution as their party goal. The revolution is the political and economic affair of the totality of the proletarian class. Only the proletariat as a class can lead the revolution to victory. Everything else is superstition, demagogy and political chicanery. The proletariat must be conceived of as a class and its activity for the revolutionary struggle unleashed on the broadest possible basis and in the most extensive framework,” Otto Rühle, “The Revolution Is Not A Party Affair,” 1920, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1920/ruhle02.htm.

191. “Revolution requires an organisation of active and positive forces united by a doctrine and a final aim. Important strata and innumerable individuals will remain outside this organisation even though they materially belong to the class in whose interest the revolution will triumph. But the class lives, struggles, progresses and wins thanks to the action of the forces it has engendered from its womb in the pains of history. The class originates from an immediate homogeneity of economic conditions which appear to us as the primary motive force of the tendency to destroy and go beyond the present mode of production. But in order to assume this great task, the class must have its own thought, its own critical method, its own will bent on the precise ends defined by research and criticism, and its own organisation of struggle channelling and utilising with the utmost efficiency its collective efforts and sacrifices. All this constitutes the Party,” Amadeo Bordiga, “Partito e clase,” Rassegna Comunista, April 15, 1921, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1921/party-class.htm.

192. “Factory organisations with the union built up upon them, a party like the KAPD that is anti-parliamentarian and not dictatorial, the unity of both; and both pursuing and developing the class-dictatorship of the proletariat, by word and deed, by theory and struggle—theory and practice show clearly that this is the way to victory,” Herman Gorter, “The Organisation of the Proletariat’s Class Struggle,” trans. D.A. Smart, 1921, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1921/class-struggle.htm.

193. Philippe Bourrinet, “Gorter, the KAPD and the Foundation of the Communist Workers’ International (1921-1927),” in The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900-1968): ’Neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Stalin!—All Workers Must Think for Themselves! (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2018), pp. 226–73; Felix Baum and Jacob Blumenfeld, “The Frankfurt School and Council Communism,” in The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. Beverly Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane (London, United Kingdom; Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2018), http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526436122.n70.

194. Lévano, “[...The Life That You Gave Me].”

195. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Las fuerzas italianas socialistas [The Italian Socialist Forces],” El tiempo, 28 de julio de 1920, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/cartas_de_italia/paginas/las%20fuerzas%20socialistas%20italianas.htm.

196. See Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1970).

197. Mariátegui, “[The Exile of Trotsky].”

198. Mariátegui, “[The Heroic and Creative Sense of Socialism].”

199. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Al margen del nuevo curso de la política mexicana [On the Sidelines of the New Course of Mexican Politics],” Variedades, March 19, 1930, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_nuestra_america/paginas/margen.htm.

200. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Programa del Partido Socialista Peruano [Programme of the Peruvian Socialist Party]” (Partido Socialista Peruano, October 1928), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/1928/oct/07a.htm#topp.

201. “It is useless, according to [relativist] theories, to search for an absolute truth. The truth of today will not be the truth of tomorrow. A truth is valid only for one epoch. Let us content ourselves with a relative truth,” Mariátegui, “[Man and Myth].”

202. Mariátegui, “[Pessimism of Reality and Optimism of the Ideal].”

203. “José Carlos Mariátegui, “La civilización y el cabello [Civilization and the Wig],” Mundial, 7 de noviembre de 1924, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/la_novela_y_la_vida/paginas/la%20civilizacion%20a%20caballo%202.htm.

204. Mariátegui, “[The Mission of Israel].”

205. Mariátegui, “Literature on Trial,” Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, p. 274.

206. Mariátegui, “[Man and Myth].”

207. Sara Estela Ramírez, “Alocución: Leída por su autora en la velada con que la ‘Sociedad de Obreros’ celebró el 24 aniversario de su fundación [Address: Read by the author on the evening with which the ‘Workers’ Society’ celebrated the 24th anniversary of its foundation],” El Demócrata Fronterizo, April 17, 1909, The Portal to Texas History.

208. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Verdaderos alcances de la propaganda mutualista [The True Scope of Mutualist Propaganda],” Labor, enero de 1929, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/ideologia_y_politica/paginas/mutualistas.htm#1.

209. Mariátegui, “[The Emotion of Our Time].”

210. Mariátegui, “[The Emotion of Our Time].”

211. Mariátegui, “[Pessimism of Reality and Optimism of the Ideal].”

212. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Nacionalismo y vanguardismo en la ideología política [Nationalism and Vanguardism in Political Ideology],” Mundial, 21 de diciembre de 1925 y 4 de diciembre de 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/peruanicemos_al_peru/paginas/nacionalismo.htm.

213. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Antecedentes y desarrollo de la acción clasista [Antecedents to and the Development of Class Action]” (Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú, May 1929), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/1929/may/antece.htm.

214. Mariátegui, “[Antecedents to and the Development of Class Action].”

215. Mariátegui, “[Programme of the Peruvian Socialist Party].”

216. Mariátegui, “Literature on Trial,” Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, p. 269.

217. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Nationalism and Revolution,” The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, 2nd ed. (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 110-135.

218. For a more detailed overlook of the process the Soviets underwent to build and implement this system, and the political disputes along the way, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

219. Becker, “Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America,” pp. 454–460.

220. Not all socialists in América saw this stance of the Comintern as a harmful imposition from outside. Vladimir Lenin had exercised his authority in the Comintern to compel the early North American communist movement to focus its work on the Black sharecroppers of the Deep South. See Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions for The Second Congress Of The Communist International,” trans. Julius Katzer, June 5, 1920, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm. Through the work of Black organizers in the North American communist movement, such as Harry Haywood, the ethnonational policy was later spread to the until-then white nationalist socialist movement of South Africa as the Native Republic Thesis. Oleksa Drachewych, “Broadening the Native Republic Thesis: De-Siloing Comintern Histories,” Twentieth Century Communism, 2023. It was later adopted as the Black Belt Thesis, advocating for an independent Black republic in the southeastern U.S., by the Communist Party of the United States of America. Susan Campbell, “‘Black Bolsheviks’ and Recognition of African-America’s Right To Self-Determination by the Communist Party U.S.A.,” Science & Society 58, no. 4 (Winter 1994): pp. 440–70. Some participants in the Comintern also advocated extending the policy to the Natives of North America. Oleksa Drachewych, “Settler Colonialism and the Communist International,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, ed. Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 1–12.

221. Mariátegui, “[Ideological Theses].”

222. José Carlos Mariátegui, “El porvenir de las cooperativas [The Power of the Cooperatives],” Mundial, March 16, 1928, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/ideologia_y_politica/paginas/las%20cooperativas.htm#1.

223. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Manifiesto de la ‘Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú’ a la clase trabajadora del país [Manifesto of the ‘Worker’s General Confederation of Peru’ to the Working Class of the Country]” (Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú, May 17, 1929), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/ideologia_y_politica/paginas/manifiestode%20la%20cgtp.htm#1.

224. For an overview of modern Peruvian politics, see Harry Kantor, The Ideology and Program of the Peruvian Aprista Movement (New York, New York: Octagon Books, 1996); Philip Mauceri, State Under Siege: Development and Policy Making in Peru (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996); Linda J. Seligmann, Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969-1991 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995); Gustavo Gorriti, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru, trans. Robin Kirk (Chapel Hill, North Carolina; London, United Kingdom: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Steve J. Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995 (Durham, North Carolina; London, United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 1998).

225. For a characteristic example, see Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981).

226. Discussed in Michael Seidman, Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts (Berkeley, California; Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1991).

227. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 417-420.

228. Joseph Stalin, “Speech at Celebration Meeting of the Moscow Soviet of Working People’s Deputies and Moscow Party and Public Organizations (1941),” November 6, 1941, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1941/11/06.htm.

229. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1989), pp. 57-58.

230. Silvio Zavala, La encomienda indiana [The Indian Encomienda] (Madrid, Spain: Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1935); Sergio Bagú, Economía de la sociedad colonial: ensayos de historia comparada de américa latina [Economy of the Colonial Society: Essays in the Comparative History of Latin America] (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Librería “El Ateneo” Editorial, 1949).

231. André Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution, Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1973).

232. Bertram Silverman, ed., Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate, 1st ed. (New York, New York: Atheneum, 1971).

233. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency, ed. Amanda Latimer and Jaime Osorio, trans. Amanda Latimer (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022).

234. José Revueltas, “[Essay on a Proletariat without a Head],” p. 46.

235. Luis Arce Borja, “La entrevista del siglo: Presidente Gonzalo rompe el silencio diario [The Interview of the Century: President Gonzalo breaks The Diary’s silence],” El Diario, July 24, 1988.

236. Jaymie Heilma, “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.495.

237. Mariátegui, “[The Face and the Soul of Tawantinsuyu].”

238. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1932), p. 48.