Essays on the Theme of Technics and Civilization by José Carlos Mariátegui
On the antithesis of town and country, domestication and colonialism, the autonomy of art, and the concept of modernity.
The Twilight of the Civilization
Published in Variedades: Lima, 16 December 1922. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/signos_y_obras/paginas/el%20crepusculo%20de%20la%20civilizacion.htm>.
Maxim Gorky, in an exciting article, recently told us a bit about the "end of Europe.” And this is not a literary phrase. It is a historical reality. We are truly witnessing the end of this civilization. And, since this civilization is essentially European, its end is, in a way, the end of Europe.
Our generation, still impregnated with the idea of an ever-ascending progress, without the solutions of continuity, cannot easily perceive or understand this historical reality. It cannot be realized that this civilization, so powerful and so wonderful, is not also infinite and imperishable. For her, this civilization is not "a civilization,” it is "Civilization" with a capital letter.
But contemporary philosophy actively gnaws at that mirage. Oswald Spengler, one of the most original and solid thinkers of today's Germany, in a remarkable book [The Decline of the West], develops the thesis that "the most important phenomenon in human history is the birth, flourishing, decline and death of Cultures.” (Spengler does not say civilizations but Cultures). Every culture has had its economic, political, aesthetic and moral characteristics that are absolutely its own. Every culture has been fed by its own thought and its own fantasy. Every culture, after a period of apogee, having fulfilled its mission, has decayed and perished. And yet every culture, like ours, has had the illusion of its eternity. This illusion, on the other hand, has always constituted an indispensable moral element of its development and vitality. And, if it begins to falter in our Civilization, undermined by relativistic thinking, it is because our civilization is approaching its twilight.
That is, precisely, one of the symptoms of the decline of this culture. A subtle, but transcendental symptom. A symptom expressive of nothing less than the crisis of the philosophical conceptions on which this civilization rests. Other symptoms, more noticeable and more immediate, are the economic crisis and the political crisis.
Politically and economically, European society offers the spectacle of a society in decline. In the four years following the armistice, a more optimistic atmosphere was breathed in Europe than now, instead of contributing to the solution of the problems of peace. There is no European State, winner or vanquished, for which the situation is not worse today than it was four years ago.
The defeated countries have fallen into ruin, into prostration, into the disorder that everyone contemplates. Austria, as a result of the vivisection of the former Austrian Empire, mutilated, impoverished, bled to death, has no means of livelihood. Its annexation to a bordering state is its only hope, its only path. An apocalyptic misery reigns in Vienna. People are dying of hunger in the streets. I have seen a consumed, spectral woman fall from starvation. Hungary and Bulgaria have more resources than Austria to feed their population, but they have ruined their economy and depreciated their currency. In Budapest itself, where one does not feel but the same misery as that in Vienna, I have been told that there are people who do not eat but twice a week. And Germany, finally, seems threatened with an analogous misery. The German population sees its way of life getting poorer every day. The budget of the families of the middle class and the proletarian class is a budget of hunger. German industries work, produce and export abundantly at the expense of the misery of their employees and workers. And the situation of the victorious countries, if it is not equally desperate, does not tend to normalize itself either. England has paralyzed a part of its industrial activity. The number of unemployed is almost two million. The Irish question remains practically without solution. The victory of the Turks over the Greeks has dealt a blow to British domination in the East. And the threat of an Islamic insurrection has increased. France is burdened by the deficit of its budget that exceeds fifteen million francs. As this deficit is covered with treasury bonds, that is, with domestic credits, the French public debt grows fantastically. The servicing of this debt will require ever-increasing sums that will maintain the budget imbalance. And, within this tax chaos, France is requested by England to start paying the interest on its war debts. France intends to extract from Germany the billions necessary for the reconstruction of the devastated provinces and the recovery of its finances. But Germany is insolvent. Their insolvency will increase as the depreciation of the framework increases. Italy is also economically unbalanced. Its deficit, despite the inaugurated economies, is five billion lira and there is no prospect of it decreasing. On the contrary, there are prospects of a new tax burden: the servicing of British and American war debts. In addition, Italy is devoured by the civil war. Fascists and socialists are reviving the medieval struggles of Guelphs and Ghibellines in Italian cities. Fascism has replaced the state, in the counter-revolutionary action, and has thus accelerated the discrediting and the decline of the latter. The old democratic parties talk about reorganizing and restoring the battered authority of the state. But fascism claims the government for itself. And the old democracy cannot do without its services. The demobilization, the disarmament of fascism, would bring an immediate revolutionary counteroffensive.
On the other hand, the situation of the victorious countries is linked to the situation of the defeated countries. The experience of the last four years proves that the coexistence of a normalized and restored Western Europe and an oppressed and starving central Europe is not possible. The economic unity of Europe is opposed to the synchronistic existence of normality and chaos. The danger of German bankruptcy is, therefore, a danger of European bankruptcy.
Some statesmen of the victorious Europe understand this truth. These statesmen, [Francesco Saverio] Nitti, [Joseph] Caillaux, [John Maynard] Keynes—in whom the politician prevails over the man of study—naturally believe that there is still a remedy for this crisis. But, while their pages describing the crisis are of maximum clairvoyance and robustness, their pages pointing out the solutions are the least certain and persuasive. Their books leave the impression that they touch reality in its critical part, but not in its constructive part.
There is a European reconstruction program. It is a program of collaboration and compromise, on the one hand between the victorious States and the defeated States and, on the other hand, between the antagonistic social classes. It tends, in short, to establish a transaction between the old order of things and the nascent order of things. And, in the intention of some of its sponsors, it tends to prevent an abrupt transition from one regime to another from destroying the material wealth, the technical progress, created by capitalist society. To such a program adhere not only the most enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie but also the most temperate elements of socialism, whose governmental collaboration would be necessary for actuation.
But only in England, which is par excellence the country of gradual and peaceful transformations, is this program likely to be acted on. France is still a long way from it. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the politician who advocates it, Caillaux, is still a politician exiled from politics and even from French territory. Italy is closer to that policy. Nitti retains some influence in the Italian parliament. The popular and the right-wing socialists could unite around a government of his. But a government of this nature would have to be an anti-fascist government. A government that would provoke the insurrection of fascism. And that, therefore, it is not a probable government. For the moment, the fascists have the best chance of influencing the government, whose predominance in Italian politics would obviously multiply the germs of war and disorder in Europe. Fascism, which aspires to take over the government of Italy, is an ultranationalist movement. Its political doctrine differs from the old liberal doctrine only by its delirious nationalist literature.
And above all, something more serious happens. That France, made to choose between a hypothetical European ruin and a safe German reconstruction, opts for the former. And, as I wrote in a recent article, French statesmen have too reactionary a mentality to accept that, because of their politics, capitalist civilization is in mortal danger.
And, deep down, they are right. It is not French imperialism that is making Europe hesitate. French imperialism is generated by European decadence. It is a symptom of the crisis. And so is the impossibility for the victorious powers to agree on a common program. Considering these difficulties isolated and superficially, it is thought that eliminating them would solve the crisis easily. But, experimentally it is found that it is not possible to eliminate it because they are the expressions, the effects of the world crisis and not the causes of it.
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.)
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.
The City and the Countryside
Published in Mundial: Lima, 3 October 1924. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/la%20urbe%20y%20el%20campo.htm>.
All the episodes of the contemporary crisis report the spread, within Western society, of a mood contrary to living together and collaboration. Through these episodes we see that the organism of civilization fractures and disintegrates. The various interests and passions that give life to a social form cease to tolerate each other. They move, with their own impulse, towards their own goal.
The class struggle fills the foreground of the world crisis; but it also contains, in addition, other contrasts and other conflicts. Growing, for example, is the disagreement between the city and the province, between the city and the countryside. There are numerous signs of a bitter discrepancy between the urban spirit and the peasant spirit. Men in the countryside nowadays tend to isolate themselves, to differentiate themselves. They come together in parties and factions that oppose industrial policy to an agrarian policy. In some countries—Hungary, Romania—governments sprout from almost exclusively rural roots and consciousness. Italian fascism is pleased to recognize itself as and feel provincial. Mussolini has greeted the delegates of the last Fascist National Council as men of the province, "of the good, the solid, the square province." He has invited them to bring to the cities "too populous and often lacking in marrow," their agrarian rudeness, rusticity, effluvia and energies. "Fascism must be made”—he has said—”a predominantly rural phenomenon. At the foundation of the cities are the remains of the old parties, the old sects, the old institutions." The captains of the reaction thus try to utilize in their favor the scowl of the province against the city.
The peasant tide seems, in truth, to be driven by a reactionary will towards reactionary ends. The country loves tradition too much. It is conservative and superstitious. Antipathy and resistance to the heretical and iconoclastic spirit of progress easily conquer its mood. German nationalism, like Italian fascism, supplies itself with men in the province, in the countryside. The communist revolution, meanwhile, has still not penetrated deeply into the agrarian strata of Russia. The peasants support it because they owe it the possession of the lands; but the communist doctrine is still unintelligible to their mentality and irreconcilable with their covetousness. 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. [Joseph] Caillaux, for his part, is alarmed by the tendency of the peasants of Central Europe to boycott urban industry and to reconstruct a medieval economy. A man of the metropolis, without poetic nostalgias, he fears the rebirth of the times of the spindle and the spinning wheel.
Of course, this is not the whole agrarian political panorama. In other countries, in Bulgaria, for example, agrarians and communists are mixed up in the same revolutionary crowd. [Stjepan] Radich, the leader of the Yugoslav peasants, has just visited Russia, attracted by its men and its methods. The latest organization of a Peasant International or Green International is progressing.
But the revolutionary spirit always resides in the city. And this fact has clear historical reasons. It is in the city where capitalism has reached its fullness and where the current battle between the individualist order and the socialist idea is fought. Berlin, in the last elections, has given half a million votes to the Communists; Paris, three hundred thousand. Milan continues to be the stronghold of the proletariat of Italy. The theory and practice of socialism are an urban product. The aspiration of the collective society is born spontaneously in the factory, in the mill; not in the farm. The peasant and the artisan have ambitions of acquiring a small individual property. While the city educates man to collectivism, the countryside excites his individualism. In the countryside one lives too dispersed and individually; it is not easy, therefore, to feel a great, intense and generous social emotion. The city, on the other hand, has perennially housed a strong desire for creation. The present political currents have been incubated in its heat. Fascism itself was born in Milan, in an industrial and opulent city. Its roots later found a more conducive soil in the province; but its germ was genuinely the citizen.
To speak of a revolutionary city and a reactionary province would, however, be to accept a classification that is too simplistic to be exact. In the city and in the countryside, society is divided into two classes. The belligerence between the two classes is usually less in the province; but their reciprocal opposition is identical with that in the city. If there is not much solidarity between the demands of the agrarian workers and the urban workers, it is partly because socialism has neglected the conquest of the countryside. Finally, in some countries, capitalism has not put up an uncompromising resistance to the demands of the peasants. It has abandoned the ownership of the land. The possession of the city, the banks, the factories and the markets is enough for capitalism to dominate the entire economy of a country. It may well, then, leave to the peasants the illusion of owning the countryside.
What distinguishes and separates the city from the countryside is therefore neither revolution nor reaction. It is, above all, a difference of mentality and spirit that emanates from a difference of function. In the panorama of a society, the city is the peak and the countryside is the plain. The city is the seat of civilization. As civilization perfects itself, the spiritual and psychological distances between the urban man and the agricultural man are accentuated. The man from the city lives fast. (Speed is an urban invention, a modern thing). The peasant lives monotonously and slowly. His work and his production are governed by the seasons. Ploughed by the ox or the machine, the land gives its ears of corn at the same time and in the same season. The city and the countryside produce two different psychologies, two different moods.
According to [Oswald] Spengler—who cannot be forgotten today in any attempt to interpret history—the last stage of a culture is urban and cosmopolitan. "The world city," says Spengler, "means cosmopolitanism taking the place of the ‘homeland,' the cold sense of facts replacing the veneration of the traditional; it means scientific irreligion as the petrification of the former religion of the soul, 'society' in place of the state, natural rights instead of acquired ones."
The city has been unfairly treated and poorly understood by romantic or neo-romantic literati. All of us who have breathed intensely and avidly the atmosphere of the city have perhaps read The City and the Mountains of Eça de Queiroz; but it is difficult for anyone to sympathize, at this time, with his naive tendency. Eça de Queiroz, in that novel, did not feel or understand the city. His character, his Jacinto, is a provincial gentleman unable to assimilate to the true urban spirit. His life and that of the other dramatis personae is nothing but an idle, boring, elegant, superfluous life. And that is not the life of the city. Of the city poor Jacinto saw nothing but the nonchalance, the pleasure, the annoyance, the comfort and the splendor. It was only natural, therefore, that he should find, afterwards, much more poetic and better the fresh cheese and the candid bread of the village. Neither Hugo Stinnes, nor Pierpont Morgan, would have had the same thing happen to them.
To what extent can the future of the city be predicted? There are some harbingers of its decadence. Anatole France foresees a displacement of men to the countryside. The gigantic city is, in his opinion, a consequence of the capitalist order. The advent of collectivism, which will distribute functions and things more equitably over the earth's surface, will stop the massive growth of cities. Other omens are more pessimistic. They implicitly announce that the city will be reabsorbed by the innumerable and anonymous countryside.
But these omens are undoubtedly exaggerated. The city that adapts people to living together and solidarity cannot die. It will continue to feed on the rich rural sap. The countryside, in turn, will continue to find in it its forum, its aim and its market.
And the ideal for men will be, for a long time, a slightly urban and a slightly peasant type of life.
Civilization and Hair
Published in Mundial: Lima, 7 November 1925. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/la_novela_y_la_vida/paginas/la%20civilizacion%20a%20caballo%202.htm>.
The type of life that civilization produces is necessarily a refined, polished, artificial type of life. Civilization stylizes, chisels and burnishes men and things. It is natural, therefore, that Western civilization does not love beards and hair. The man of this civilization has evolved from the most primitive exuberance of hair to an almost absolute shaving. Beards and hair are currently in decline.
The man of Western civilization was originally bearded and hairy. Charlemagne, the emperor with the flowery beard, genuinely represents the Middle Ages from this and other points of view. Merovingians and Carolingians wore, like Charlemagne, leafy beards. Mysticism and martiality were, in the Middle Ages, two great generators of beards and hair. Neither the Anchorites nor the Crusaders had a spiritual or physical disposition to shave.
The Renaissance had a great influence on the hairstyle. Western humanity returned to pagan ideals and tastes. After some centuries of gloomy mysticism, it rectified its attitude towards perishable beauty. Leonardo de Vinci passed down to posterity with a long and flowing astrologer's beard and Pope Julius II did not think about cutting his own before posing for the famous portrait of Raphael. But with its vindication of Greco-Roman aesthetics, the Renaissance caused a crisis of medieval beards. Michelangelo could not help but imagine Moses bearded, solemn and thaumaturgical; but, by contrast, he conceived David Hellenically naked and bearded. In this, the Renaissance was consistent with its origins and its directions. Greek and Roman sculpture and painting did not totally disqualify the beard. They attributed it to Jupiter, Hercules and other characters from mythology and history. But, in Athens and in Rome, the beard had discreet limits. It never reached the length of a Carolingian beard. And it was more of a human attribute than a divine one. Polykletus, Phidias, Praxiteles, etc., dreamed a totally hairless beauty for the gentlest gods. Apollo, Mercury, Dionysius, no one has ever imagined them bearded. The Belvedere Apollo with whiskers and sideburns would have been, in truth, an absurd Apollo.
The Baroque era did not lead humanity to a restoration of the beards mowed down by the Renaissance; but it showed a marked favor to the capillary excesses. Everything was exuberant and mannered in the Baroque aesthetic: the decoration, the architecture and the hair. This aesthetic led people to the use of the longest manes recorded in the history of the hairstyles.
The Rococo aesthetic signaled a new reaction against the beard. It imposed the fashion of powdered wigs. The Revolution, later, left few wigs intact. And the Directory, very sober speaking in terms of hair, tolerated the prudent and moderate fashion of the sideburn, the sideburns of Napoleon [Bonaparte], [Simón] Bolívar and [José de] San Martín. belong to that period of the evolution of the hairstyle.
The Romantic phenomenon gave rise to an attempt to restore the most archaic and excessive use of manes and beards. Romantic artists behaved very reactionary. Who has not seen in some engraving, the hairy and bearded head of Théophile Gautier? And where hasn't a photograph of [Henri] Fantin-Latour's painting of a literary cenacle of his time reached? Parnassianism should have induced men of letters to a certain atticism in their hairstyles; but it seems that this did not happen. Until our time, Anatole France, a literati of Parnassian genealogy, preserved and cultivated a somewhat patriarchal beard.
But all these restorations of mustaches, beards and hair were partial, transient, interim. Capitalist civilization did not accept them. It treated them as reactionary attempts. The development of hygiene and positivism also created an atmosphere adverse to these restorations. The bourgeoisie felt a growing need to exempt themselves from beards and hair. The Yankees shaved radically. And the Germans did not completely renounce the mustache, but, instead, respectful of progress and its laws, they decided to shave their heads, integrally. The guillet spread all over the world. This tendency of the bourgeoisie to wax caused a romantic protest of many revolutionaries who, in order to affirm their opposition to capitalism, decided to let their beards and hair grow excessively. The glorious beards of Karl Marx and Leo Tolstoy probably influenced this aesthetic attitude, supported by their example by Jean Jaurès and other leaders of the Revolution. The straight wig of the ex-socialist [Aristide] Briand, the aristocratic hairstyle of [Ramsay] MacDonald, and the rough and shifty beard of [Filippo] Turati come from those times, from the capillary Romanticism of the men of the Revolution.
The female wig is the last chapter of this process of the decay of hair. Women cut their hair for the same historical reasons as men. They acquire this progress with delay. But with delay, other substantive progress has also been made. Western civilization, after having physically modified the man, could not leave the woman intact. This is probably another aspect of the fate of cultures. We have already seen how the ancient civilization did not tolerate too many beards and excessive hair either. The goddesses of Olympus did not wear their hair loose, flowing, or long. The hairstyle of the Venus de Milo and of all the other Venuses was, without a doubt, the ideal and perfect hairstyle of antiquity. Someone will observe, malevolently, that Venus was a not very austere and not very chaste lady. But no one will doubt the honesty of Juno who, in her hairstyle, did not differ from Venus.
Western fashion has stylized, with a cubist and synthesist taste, man’s garb. The silhouette of the metropolitan man is sober, simple, geometric like that of a skyscraper. His aesthetic rejects, for this reason, beards and forest hair. He barely accepts a meager and discreet mustache. The style of women's fashion, spoiled by some fleeting deviations, has followed the same direction. The fashion process has been, in short, a process of the simplification of the costume and the hairstyle. The suit has become more and more useful and summary. It has been thus that the crinolines, the buckets, the tails, the past foliage have died, so as not to be reborn. All attempts to restore the Rococo style have failed. Women's fashion is inspired by more remote aesthetics than Rococo aesthetics or Baroque aesthetics. It adopts Egyptian or Greek tastes. It tends towards simplicity. The wig was born from this trend. It is an effort to totally standardize the female hairstyle, the new style of the costume and the female form.
Georg Simmel, in an original essay, argued the thesis of the more or less absolute arbitrariness of fashion. "Almost never," he wrote, "can we discover a material, aesthetic or other reason that explains its creations. Thus, for example, practically, our costumes are, in general, adapted to our needs; but it is not possible to find the slightest trace of utility in the decisions with which fashion intervenes to give them this or that shape.” It seems to me that the only blatant arbitrariness is, in this case, the arbitrariness of the thesis of the original German philosopher and essayist. The creations of fashion are unstable and changeable; but a lasting line, a persistent plot, always reappears in them. Contrary to what Georg Simmel asserted, it is possible to discover a material, aesthetic or other reason that explains them.
The modern man's suit is a utilitarian and practical creation. It is subject to reasons of utility and comfort, fashion has adapted the suit to the new kind of life. Their motives have not been disinterested. They have not been strangers, much less superior, to the prosaic human reality. And it is precisely for this reason that the male costume suffers from the romantic rant and disdain of many artists. Women's fashion has had a development freer from the pressure of reality. The woman's costume can afford to be more ornamental, more decorative, more arbitrary than the man's costume. Man has accepted the prose of life; woman has generally preferred poetry. Their fashions, therefore, have often sacrificed utility to coquetry. But, as the woman has become an office worker, an elector, a politician, etc., she has begun to depend on the same prosaic reality as the man. This change had to be reflected in fashion. A woman journalist, for example, cannot wear a suit that is too mundane and frivolous. But it is not indispensable that she renounce beauty, grace or coquetry. I met an English journalist at the Genoa Conference who had managed to combine and coordinate her tailored suit, felt hat and tortoiseshell glasses with the style of her beauty. Even in the moments when she was taking notes for her newspaper she did not lose anything of her superior, original rare beauty. She did not lack elegance. And hers was a personal elegance, new, unusual.
The customs, functions and rights of the modern woman inevitably codify her fashion and aesthetics. The wig, objectively considered, appears as a spontaneous phenomenon, as a logical product of civilization. To many people the wig seems almost an attack on nature. But civilization is nothing but artifice. Civilization is a permanent attack on nature, a continuous effort to correct it. The romantic adversaries of the wig have wasted their energies. The wig is not a fleeting creation of fashion. It is more than just a station on its itinerary. The wig will not conquer everyone; but, it will acclimatize extensively in the cities. And it will not be fatal to beauty or aesthetics. Aesthetics and beauty are mobile and unstable, like life. And, in any case, they are independent of the length of the hair. Fashion, finally, will not impose on women too abrupt of transitions. It is unlikely, for example, that women will decide to shave their heads like the Germans. Women, after all, are more reasonable than it seems. And they know that a pool of hair will always be very decorative, even if it is not strictly necessary.
On the Día de la Raza
Published in Variedades: Lima, 13 October 1928. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/la_novela_y_la_vida/paginas/el%20dia%20de%20la%20raza.htm>.
Mariátegui’s response to a Variedades survey which asked the following questions: "What is your concept of the figure of Columbus? And of the significance of the discovery of América? What should be the ideals of the race and the most effective means to link the Hispanic American peoples?”
Columbus is one of the great protagonists of Western civilization. More than five years ago, reported by Variedades, for one of its Snapshots, I indicated him as the historical or past hero of my predilection. I think about him every time the idea of writing an apology for the adventurer comes to me. Because we have to vindicate the adventurer, the great adventurer. The police chronicles, the bourgeois lexicon, have discredited this country. Columbus is the type of the great adventurer: pioneer of pioneers. América is his creation. Recently, in the book of a petty bourgeois of France, it has been intended to diminish his enterprise, to lower his figure. As if it could matter that before Columbus other navigators had already known the Continent! América entered world history when Columbus revealed it to Europe. It is impossible to say exactly to what extent the capitalist civilization—Anglo-Saxon and Protestant—is the work of this Mediterranean navigator and Catholic. Catholic?
The 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. It is impossible to judge it in one chapter, no matter how tight and dense it is! The Reformation, the Renaissance, the liberal Revolution—how many things there would be to talk about! Even the last great intellectual speculation of the Middle Ages, The City of the Sun, the communist utopia of Tommaso Campanella, appears influenced by the discovery of America. Some of his biographers claim that Campanella knew and admired, through the first chronicles, the Inca civilization. At any rate, the New World evidently acted upon his imagination.
Hispanic-America, Latin-America, as it were, will not find its unity in the bourgeois order. This order necessarily divides us into small nationalisms. The only ones who work for the community of these peoples are, in truth, the socialists, the revolutionaries. What could bring us closer to the Spain of [Miguel] Primo de Rivera? On the other hand, how close we will always be to the Spain of [Miguel de] Unamuno, to the revolutionary, agonized, eternally young and new Spain! It is up to Saxon North America to crown and close capitalist civilization. The future of Latin America is socialist.
For the record, I am not speaking in homage to the Fiesta de la Raza. I do not adhere to municipal celebrations or to the very concept of our latinidad. Latinos, us!
Civilization and the Horse
Published in Mundial: Lima, 11 November 1927. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/la_novela_y_la_vida/paginas/la%20civilizacion%20a%20caballo%201.htm>.
The Indian horseman is one of the living testimonies on which Luis E. Valcárcel supports, in his book Tempest in the Andes, his gospel—yes, gospel: good news—of the "new Indian." The Indian on horseback constitutes, for Valcárcel, a symbol of flesh. "The Indian on horseback," Valcárcel writes, "is a new Indian, haughty, free, proprietary, proud of his race, who disdains the white and the mestizo. Where the Indian has broken the Spanish ban on riding, he has also broken the chains." The Cuzco writer starts from an exact assessment of the role of the horse in the Conquest. The horse, as is well established, intervened mainly and decisively to give the Spaniard, in the eyes of the Indian, a supernatural power. To subdue the aborigine, the Spaniards brought, as material weapons, iron, gunpowder and the horse. It has been said that the fundamental weakness of the autochthonous civilization was its ignorance of iron. But, in truth, it is not correct to attribute to a single superiority the victory of Western culture over the indigenous cultures of América. This victory has its integral explanation in a set of superiorities, in which, for certain, the physical ones do not prevail. And among these, it is necessary to recognize the priority to the zoological ones. First, the creature; then the created, the artificial, the technical. This is apart from the fact that the domestication of the animal, its application to human purposes and work, represents perhaps the most ancient of technics.
Rather than being subdued by iron and gunpowder, we prefer to imagine the Indian subdued not precisely by the horse but by the knight. In the knight is resurrected, embellished, spiritualized, humanized the pagan myth of the centaur. The knight, archetype of the Middle Ages—who has maintained his spiritual dominion over modernity, until now, because the bourgeois has been psychologically capable of nothing more than imitating and supplanting the noble—is the hero of the Conquest. And the conquest of América, the last crusade, appears as the most historic, the most enlightened, the most transcendent feat of chivalry. A typically chivalric feat, even because chivalry had to die from it, as the Middle Ages—tragically, Christianly and grandly—died.
The colonial era divined and vindicated the part of the horse in the Conquest to such an extent that—by its ordinances forbidding the Indian this riding—the merit of the epic seems to belong more to the horse than to the man. The horse, under the Spanish, was taboo for the Indian. This could be understood as a consequence of his condition as a servant, if it is remembered that Cervantes, attentive to the sense of chivalry, did not conceive Sancho Panza, like Don Quixote, as a rider of a horse but of an ass. But, given that in the Conquest hidalgos and villains were confused, it must be assumed that the intention was to reserve to the Spaniard the instruments—that is, the secret—of the Conquest. Because the rigor of this taboo led the Spaniard to demonstrate to us the generosity of his love for his horses. The Indian had the knight before him riding the horse.
The most poetic intuition of [José Santos] Chocano's, although, as his own, he dresses it rhetorically and pompously, is perhaps what elegy to The Horses of the Conquistadores. To sing the Conquest in this way is to feel it, first of all, as the epic of the horse, without which Spain would not have imposed its law on the New World.
The Creole imagination retained this medieval sense of horse riding after the colonial era. All the metaphors of his political language reveal horsemen's hangovers and prejudices. The characteristic expression of the ambitions of the caudillo is in the common place of "the reins of power.” And "mounting a horse" always referred to the insurgent action of wielding them. The government that faltered was "on a bad horse."
The pedestrian Indian, and, even more so, the melancholy couple of the Indian and the llama, is the allegory of a servitude. Valcárcel is right. The gaucho owes half of his being to the pampa and the horse. Without the horse, how space and distance would have weighed on the Argentine Creole! Just as they weigh so far, on the backs of the Indian chasqui. [Maxim] Gorky introduces us to the muzhik, overwhelmed by the boundless steppe: The fatalism, the resignation of the muzhik, come from this loneliness and this impotence before nature. The drama of the Indian is no different: the drama of servitude to man and servitude to nature. To resist it better, the muzhik had their tradition of nomadism and the tanned and rural Tatar horses, which should look so much like those of Chumbivilcas.
But Valcárcel owes us another stamp, another symbol: the Indian chauffeur, as he saw it in Puno, this year, in which the pages of Tempest in the Andes have already been written.
The bourgeois industrial epoch of Western civilization remained, for many reasons, linked to the horse. Not only because compliance with the modules and style of equestrian nobility persisted in its spirit, but because the horse has, for a long time, continued to be an indispensable helper of man. The machine displaced, little by little, the horse from many of his trades. But man, grateful, forever incorporated the horse into the new civilization, calling the unit of motive power "horsepower."
England, which maintained a large part of its aristocratic style and taste under capitalism, stylized and quintessentialized the horse by inventing the racing pur sang. That is to say, the horse emancipated from the servile tradition of the draft animal and the pack animal. The pure horse that, although it seems irreverent, would theoretically represent, on its plane, something like, for its own, pure poetry. The horse ends in this, with which the knight disappears to be replaced by the jockey. The gentleman stays on foot.
Moreover, this seems to be the last tribute of Western civilization to the equine species. With the shift of the axis of capitalism from England to the United States, the equestrian has lost its chivalric sense. North America prefers boxing to racing. They prohibit the game—betting—, equestrian sports have been reduced to horseback riding. The machine cancels out the horse more and more every day. This, no doubt, has moved [Hermann von] Keyserling to suppose that the chauffeur succeeds as a symbol for the gentleman. But the type, the specimen towards which we are approaching, is rather that of the worker. Already the intellectual accepts this title that sums up and surpasses all. The horse, on the other hand, as a transport, is too individualistic. And steam, the train, social and modern par excellence, do not notice it even as a competitor. The last war experience marks, in short, the definitive decline of chivalry.
And here I conclude. The subject of a decline suits, more than me, any of the disciples of Don José Ortega y Gasset.
Outline of an Explanation of Chaplin
Published in Variedades: Lima, 6 and 13 October 1928. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/esquema%20de%20una%20explicacion.htm>.
The theme of [Charlie] Chaplin seems to me, within any explanation of our time, no less considerable than the [David] Lloyd George theme or the [Ramsay] MacDonald theme (if we are looking for equivalents only in Great Britain): Many have found excessive Henri Poulaille's assertion that The Gold Rush (In Pursuit of Gold, The Chimera of Gold are barely approximate translations of that title), is the best contemporary novel. But—always locating Chaplin in his country—I think that, in any case, the human resonance of The Gold Rush far surpasses that of the Outline of History of Mr. H.G. Wells and that of [George] Bernard Shaw's theatre. This is a fact that Wells and Shaw would surely be the first to recognize. (Shaw exaggerating it bizarrely and extremely, and Wells attributing it somewhat melancholically to the deficiency of secondary instruction).
The imagination of Chaplin chooses, for his works, subjects of no lower category than the return of Methuselah or the vindication of Joan of Arc: Gold, the Circus. And, moreover, he realizes his ideas with greater artistic efficiency: the regulatory intellectualism of the guardians of the aesthetic order will be scandalized by this proposition. Chaplin's success can be explained, according to his mental formulas, in the same way as that of Alexandre Dumas or Eugene Sue. But, without resorting to [Massimo] Bontempelli's reasonings about the novel of intrigue, nor subscribing to his reappraisal of Alexandre Dumas, this simplistic judgment is disqualified as soon as it is remembered that Chaplin's art is liked, with the same fruition, by learned and illiterate, by literati and boxers. When one speaks of the universality of Chaplin one does not appeal to the proof of his popularity. Chaplin has all the votes: those of the majority and those of the minorities. His fame is at once rigorously aristocratic and democratic. Chaplin is a true type of elite, for all of us who do not forget that elite means elected.
The search, the conquest of gold, the gold rush has been the romantic chapter, the bohemian phase of the capitalist epic. The capitalist epoch begins at the moment when Europe renounces finding the theory of gold in order to search only for real gold, physical gold. This is why the discovery of America is, above all, so intimately and fundamentally linked to its history. (Canada and California: great stations on its itinerary). Undoubtedly, the capitalist revolution was, above all, a technological revolution: its first great victory is the machine; his greatest invention, financial capital. But capitalism has never managed to emancipate itself from gold, despite the tendency of the productive forces to reduce it to a symbol. Gold has not ceased to haunt its body and soul. Bourgeois literature has, however, almost entirely neglected this subject. Not in its tenth century, only [Richard] Wagner feels it and expresses it in his grandiose and allegorical way. The novel of gold appears in our days: L'Or by Blaise Cendrars, Tripes d'Or by [Fernand] Crommelynk, are two different but related specimens of this literature. The Gold Rush belongs, also, rightfully, to her. On this side, the thought of Chaplin and the images into which it is poured, are born from a great current intuition. The creation of a great satire against gold is imminent. We already have its anticipations. Chaplin's work apprehends something that stirs vividly in the subconscious of the world.
Chaplin embodies, in the cinema, the bohemian. Whatever his costume, we always imagine Chaplin in the tramp mark of Charlot. In order to reach the deepest and most naked humanity, the purest and most silent drama, Chaplin absolutely needs the poverty and hunger of Charlot, the bohemia of Charlot, the romanticism and insolvency of Charllot. It is difficult to define the bohemian exactly. Navarro Monzó—for whom Saint Francis of Assisi, Diogenes and Jesus himself would be the sublimation of this spiritual lineage—says that the bohemian is the antithesis of the bourgeois. Charlot is anti-bourgeois par excellence. He is always ready for adventure, for change, for departure. No one conceives of him as in possession of a savings book. He is a little Don Quixote, a minstrel of God, humorist and wanderer.
It was logical, therefore, that Chaplin was only able to be interested in the bohemian, romantic enterprise of capitalism: that of the gold diggers. Charlot could leave for Alaska, enrolled in the greedy and miserable phalanx that went out to discover gold with its hands in the abrupt and snowy mountain. He could not stay to obtain it, with capitalist art, from commerce, from industry, from the stock market. The only way to imagine a rich Charlot was this. The ending of The Gold Rush—which some find vulgar, because they would rather Charlot returned to his shirtless bohemia—is absolutely fair and accurate. It does not obey minimally to the reasons of Yankee technique.
The whole work is unsurpassably constructed. The sentimental, erotic element intervenes in its development as a mathematical measure, with rigorous artistic and biological necessity. Jim McKay finds Charlot, his former companion of hardship and wandering, at the exact moment when Charlot, in loving tension, will take with maximum energy the resolution to accompany him in the search for the tremendous lost mine. Chaplin, an author, knows that erotic exaltation is a state conducive to creation, to discovery. Like Don Quixote, Charlot has to fall in love before embarking on his daring journey. In love, vehemently and bizarrely in love, it is impossible for Charlot not to find the mine. No force, no accident, can stop him. It wouldn't matter if the mine didn't exist. It would not matter if Jim McKay, his brain darkened by the blow that erased his memory and misled his way, was deceived. Charlot would find the fabulous mine anyways. His pathos gives him a suprarreal strength. The avalanche, the gale, are powerless to defeat him. On the edge of a cliff, he would have plenty of energy to reject death and take a tumble over it. He has to come back from this trip a millionaire. And who could be, within the contradiction of life, the logical companion of his victorious adventure? Who, if not this Jim McKay, this fierce, brutal, absolute, gold-digging fellow who, desperate with hunger in the mountains, wanted one day to murder Charlot in order to eat him? McKay has rigorously, completely, the constitution of the perfect gold digger. The ferocity that Chaplin attributes to him, famished, desperate, is neither excessive nor fantastic. McKay could not be the complete hero of this novel if Chaplin had not conceived him resolved, in the extreme case, to devour a companion. The first obligation of the gold prospector is to live. His reason is Darwinian and ruthlessly individualistic.
In this work, therefore, Chaplin has not only brilliantly seized an artistic idea of his time, but has expressed it in terms of strict scientific psychology. The Gold Rush confirms Freud. It descends, as for the myth, from the Wagnerian tetralogy. Artistically, spiritually, it exceeds, today, the theater of [Luigi] Pirandello and the novel of [Marcel] Proust and [James] Joyce.
The circus is a bohemian spectacle, a bohemian art par excellence. On this side, it has its first and most endearing affinity with Chaplin. The circus and the cinema, on the other hand, have a visible kinship, within their autonomy of technique and of essence. The circus, although in a different way and with a different style, is a movement of images like the cinema. Pantomime is the origin of cinematographic art, silent par excellence, despite the effort to make it talk. Chaplin, precisely, comes from the pantomime, that is, from the circus. Cinema has murdered the theater, as bourgeois theater. It couldn't do anything against the circus. It has taken from Chaplin, a cinema artist, the circus spirit, in which everything lives that is bohemian, romantic, nomadic as in the circus. Bontempelli has dismissed the old bourgeois, literary, talkative theater without compliments. The old circus, meanwhile, is alive, agile, identical. While the theater needs to be reformed, remade, returning to the medieval "mystery," to the plastic spectacle, to the agonal or circus technique, or approaching the cinema with the synthetic act of the mobile scene, the circus needs only to continue: in its tradition it finds all its elements of development and pursuit.
The latest film of Chapllin is, subconsciously, a sentimental return to the circus, to pantomime. It has, spiritually, much evasion of Hollywood. It is significant that this has not hindered but favored a finished cinematographic realization. I have found in a seasoned vanguard magazine reservations about The Circus as an artistic work. I think entirely the opposite. If the artistic, in cinema, is above all the cinematographic, with The Circus Chaplin has hit the mark like never before. The Circus is purely and absolutely cinematic. Chaplin has managed, in this work, to express himself only in images. The letters are reduced to the minimum. And they could have been completely suppressed, without the viewer having the comedy explained any less.
Chaplin comes, according to a fact that his biography always insists on, from a family of clowns, circus artists. In any case, he has been a clown himself in his youth. What force has been able to subtract him from this art, so consonant with his bohemian spirit? The attraction of the cinema, of Hollywood, does not seem to me the only one and not even the most decisive. I have a taste for historical, economic and political explanations and, even in this case, I think it is possible to try one, perhaps more serious than humorous.
The English clown represents the highest degree of the evolution of the clown. It is as far as possible from those very vicious, excessive, strident, Mediterranean clowns, which we are used to finding in traveling, wandering circuses. He is an elegant, measured, mathematical mime, who exercises his art with a perfectly Anglican dignity. Great Britain has arrived at the production of this human type—like that of the racing or hunting pur sang—in accordance with a Darwinian and rigorous principle of selection. The laughter and gesture of the clown are an essential, classic note of British life; a wheel and a movement of the magnificent machine of the Empire. The art of the clown is a rite; its comicality, absolutely serious. Bernard Shaw, a metaphysician and a religious man, is in his country, nothing but a clown who writes. The clown does not constitute a type, but rather an institution, as respectable as the House of Lords. The art of the clown means the taming of the wild and nomadic buffoonery of the bohemian, according to the taste and needs of a refined capitalist society. Great Britain has done with the laughter of the circus clown the same as with the Arabian horse: to educate it with capitalist and zootechnical art, for the puritanical pleasure of its Manchester and London bourgeoisie. The clown illustrates notably the evolution of the species.
Appearing in an epoch of exact and regular British apogee, no clown, not even the most brilliant Chaplin, could have deserted his art. The discipline of tradition, the mechanics of custom, undisturbed and unshaken, would have sufficed to check automatically any impulse of evasion. The spirit of stern corporate England was enough in a period of normal British evolution, to maintain fidelity to the craft, to the guild. But Chaplin has entered history at a time when the axis of capitalism was shifting deafly from Great Britain to North America. The disequilibrium of the British machinery registered early by his ultra-sensitive spirit, has operated on its centrifugal and secessionist impulses. His genius has felt the attraction of the new metropolis of capitalism. The British pound under the dollar, the crisis of the coal industry, the shutdown of the Manchester looms, the autonomist agitation of the colonies, Eugene Chen's note on Hankow [Hankou, Hubei], all these symptoms of a loosening of the British power, had been sensed by Chaplin —alert recipient of the most secret messages of the time—, when a rupture of the internal balance of the clown, was born. Charlot, the cinema artist. The gravity of the United States, in rapid capitalist growth, could not fail to pull Chaplin to a fate of the clown that would normally have been fulfilled to the end, without a series of failures in the high-tension currents of British history. How different Chaplin's fate would have been in the Victorian era, even if the cinema and Hollywood had already turned on their spotlights!
But the United States has not spiritually assimilated Chaplin. The tragedy of Chaplin, the humor of Chaplin, derive their intensity from an intimate conflict between the artist and North America. The health, the energy, the élan of North America hold and excite the artist; but its bourgeois childishness, its careerist prosaism, disgust the bohemian, the romantic at bottom. North America, in turn, does not love Chaplin. Hollywood managers, as is well known, consider him subversive, antagonistic. North America feels that there is something in Chaplin that escapes it. Chaplin will always be associated with Bolshevism, among the neo-Quakers of Yankee finance and industry.
This contradiction, this contrast, feeds one of the greatest and purest contemporary artistic phenomena. Cinema allows Chaplin to assist humanity in its struggle against pain with an extension and simultaneity that no artist has ever achieved. The image of this tragically comic bohemian is an everyday travel allowance of joy for the five continents. Art achieves, with Chaplin, the maximum of its hedonistic and liberating function. Chaplin relieves, with his pained smile and look, the sadness of the world. And he concurs with the miserable happiness of men, more than any of their statesmen, philosophers, industrialists and artists.