José Carlos Mariátegui on Marxism
Nationalism and Vanguardism in Political Ideology
On the relationship between nation and socialism in Peru.1
I
It is possible that some recalcitrant conservatives of unquestionable good faith are made to smile by the assertion that the most Peruvian, the most national of contemporary Peru is the feeling of the new generation. This is, however, one of the easiest truths to prove. That conservatism cannot and does not know how to understand it is one thing that is perfectly explained. But that does not diminish or obscure its evidence.
To know how the new generation feels and thinks, a loyal and serious critic will undoubtedly start by finding out what their demands are. It will be their turn to note, therefore, that the capital claim of our vanguard is the claim of the Indian. This fact does not tolerate mystifications or allow misunderstandings.
Translated into a language intelligible to everyone, including conservatives, the Indigenous problem presents itself as the problem of four million Peruvians. Exposed in nationalist terms—unforeseeable and orthodox—it is presented as the problem of the assimilation to Peruvian nationality of four-fifths of the population of Peru.
How can we deny the Peruanity [peruanidad] of an ideology and a program that proclaims its desire and its will to solve this problem with such vehement ardor?
II
The disciples of monarchist nationalism, of "L'Action Française,” probably adopt [Charles] Maurras's formula: "Everything national is ours.” But its conservatism keeps much from the definition of the national, the Peruvian. Theoretically and practically, the conservative Creole behaves as an heir of the colony and as a descendant of the conquest. The national, for all our nostalgics, begins in the colonial. Indigeneity is in its feeling, although it is not in its thesis, which is pre-national. Conservatism cannot conceive or admit anything but a Peruanity that was formed in the molds of Spain and Rome. This feeling of Peruanity has serious consequences for the theory and practice of the very nationalism it inspires and engenders. The first is that it limits the history of the Peruvian homeland to four centuries. And four centuries of tradition must seem very little to any nationalism, even to the most modest and naive. No solid nationalism appears as an elaboration of only four centuries of history in our time.
In order to feel behind its back a more respectable and illustrious antiquity, reactionary nationalism invariably resorts to the device of annexing not only the entire past and all the glory of Spain but also the entire past and the glory of Latinity [latinidad]. The roots of the nationality turn out to be Hispanic and Latin. Peru, as these people represent it to themselves, does not descend from the native Inkan; it descends from the foreign empire that four centuries ago imposed its law, its confession and its language on it.
Maurice Barrès, in a phrase that undoubtedly serves as an article of faith for our reactionaries, said that the homeland is the earth and the dead. No nationalism can do without the land. This is the drama that in Peru, besides taking in an imported ideology, represents the spirit and interests of conquest and colonialism.
III
In opposition to this spirit, 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.
And its indigenismo is neither a literary speculation nor a romantic pastime. It is not an indigenismo that, like many others, resolves and exhausts itself into an innocuous apology for the Empire of the Inkas and its magnificence. The revolutionary indigenistas, instead of a platonic love of the Inka past, manifest an active and concrete solidarity with the Indians of today.
This indigenismo does not dream of utopian restorations. It feels the past as an origin, but not as a program. Its conception of history and its phenomena is realistic and modern. It does not ignore or forget any of the historical facts that, in these four centuries, have modified, with the reality of Peru, the reality of the world.
IV
When one imagines the youths seduced by foreign mirages and by exotic doctrines, one starts, surely, from a superficial interpretation of the relations between nationalism and socialism. Socialism is not, in any country of the world, an anti-national movement. It may seem so, perhaps, in the empires. In England, France, the United States, etc., revolutionaries denounce and fight the imperialism of their own governments. But the function of the socialist idea changes in the politically or economically colonial peoples. In these peoples, socialism acquires, by the force of circumstances, without absolutely denying any of its principles, a nationalist attitude. Those who follow the process of the Rifian, Egyptian, Chinese, Hindu nationalist agitations, etc., will easily explain this completely logical aspect of revolutionary praxis. They will observe, from the first moment, the essentially popular character of such agitations. The imperialism and capitalism of the West always encounter minimal resistance, if not complete submission, in the conservative classes, in the dominant castes of the colonial peoples. The demands for national independence receive their impetus and energy from the popular masses. In Turkey, where the most vigorous and successful nationalist movement has taken place in recent years, it has been possible to study this phenomenon accurately and thoroughly. Turkey has been reborn as a nation by the merit and work of its revolutionary people, not its conservative people. The same historical impulse that drove the Greeks out of Asia Minor, inflicting a defeat on British imperialism, drove the Khilafah and its court out of Constantinople.
One of the most interesting phenomena, one of the most extensive movements of this epoch is precisely this revolutionary nationalism, this revolutionary patriotism. The idea of the nation—as an internationalist has said—is in certain historical periods the embodiment of the spirit of freedom. In the European West, where we see it more aged, it has been, in its origin and in its development, a revolutionary idea. Now it has this value in all the peoples, who, exploited by some foreign imperialism, are fighting for their national freedom.
In Peru, those who represent and interpret Peruanity are those who, conceiving of it as an affirmation and not as a denial, work to give a homeland back to those who, conquered and subdued by the Spaniards, lost it four centuries ago and have not recovered it yet.
"The Agony of Christianity" by Don Miguel de Unamuno
On the political theology of socialism.2
The first thing that this latest book by Don Miguel de Unamuno reminds us of is that its author is not only a philosopher but also a philologist. Unamuno is a master in the art of animating or reviving words. The word agonía, in the ardent and living language of Unamuno, recovers its original meaning. Agony is not a prelude to death, it is not the conclusion of life. Agonía—as Unamuno writes in the introduction of his book—means struggle. Agonizing is the one who lives fighting; fighting against life itself. And against death.
The theme of Unamuno's book is not the Christianity’s going under, but its struggle. Unamuno has an intelligence too passionate, too impetuous, to officiate hieratically the requiem Mass of a decadence, of a twilight. Unamuno will never feel like ending up in any untergang [decline]. For him, death is life and life is death. His soul, filled at the same time with hope and hopelessness, is a soul that, like that of Saint Teresa [of Ávila], "dies from not dying." It is Unamuno himself who evokes the phrase of the agonist of Ávila. The phrase, no: the agony. To die from not dying! Is not this also the anguish of our time, of our civilization? Is this not also the drama of the West? Why does this agonizing cry, this agonizing phrase, this agonizing emotion seem so terribly topical to us? A French surrealist poet—poet of the new generation—has recently written a book with this title: Mourir de ne pas mourir [Dying of Not Dying by Paul Éluard]. Another agonized soul, like Unamuno's, agitates itself in that book. But this observation moves us to another: that the wise sexagenarian of Salamanca and the surrealist poet of Paris coincide in Saint Teresa. And in this it is impossible not to see a sign. Unamuno has something enlightened, something prophetic about him. In his thought there is always some vague but certain anticipation of the future. A few years before the war, when the West was still swaying in its positivist illusions, when the spirit of Sancho [Panza] seemed to rule history, Don Miguel de Unamuno preached the gospel of Don Quixote. Then the world thought itself far from a return to donquixotismo, a return to Romanticism. And the gospel of Unamuno was not understood except by a few hallucinators, by a few believers. But today when the Knight of the Sad Figure is passing through the roads of the world again, there are many who remember that the philosopher of Salamanca announced his coming. That the master of Salamanca sensed and predicted a part of this tragedy of Europe, of this Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West], of this agony of Western civilization.
"What I am going to expose to you here, reader,"—says Unamuno in his book—"is my agony, my Christian struggle, the agony of Christianity in me, its death and its resurrection in every instant of my life." What is Christianity, according to Unamuno? Unamuno affirms that Christ came to bring us agony, struggle and not peace. And he refers us to the words of the Gospel in which Jesus tells us that he does not bring peace but the sword and the fire. An invocation in which he is not alone either. Never have these words of Christ seemed so vivid as today. Giovanni Gentile, philosopher of violence, milite of fascism, has thrown them like a torch into the battle of his homeland, in the agony of his Italy: "Non veni pacem mittere sed gladium. Ignem veni mittere in terram [I came not to bring peace, but war. I came to set fire to the earth]." Voices that come from different points of the spirit are found, without seeking out each other, without calling for each other, fighting with each other, contrasting with each other.
Unamuno thinks, as is logical, that "Christianity must be defined agonistically, polemically, in terms of struggle." (This is, without a doubt, how we must define not only Christianity but every religion, every gospel). "Christianity, Christianity”—writes Unamuno—"from the moment it was born of Saint Paul, was not a doctrine, even if it was expressed dialectically: it was life, struggle, agony. The doctrine was the Gospel, the Good News. Christianity, Christianity, was a preparation for death and resurrection, for eternal life." And, later, he adds: "Saint Paul, the Jewish Pharisee spiritualist, sought the resurrection of the flesh in Christ, he sought it in the immortality of the Christian soul, of history." And Unamuno, on this point, warns us that by historical he does not mean the real but the ideal.
Explaining to us his thought about history, which, “on the other hand, is reality, as much or more than nature,” Unamuno falls into a wrong interpretation of Marxism. "The personal doctrines of Karl Marx”—he writes— "the Sadducee Jew who believed that things make men, have produced things. Among others, the current Russian Revolution." Lenin was much closer to historical reality when, after he was observed to be moving away from reality, he replied: "So much the worse for reality!" This same notion about Marx had already surfaced in other writings of the author of The Agony of Christianity. But with less precision. In this new book it reappears in two passages. Therefore, it is urgent to answer and refute it.
Political vehemence leads Unamuno to an arbitrary and excessive assertion here. No, it is not true that Karl Marx believed that things make men. Unamuno knows Marxism badly. The true image of Marx is not that of the monotonous materialist presented to us by his disciples. Marx must be studied in Marx himself. Exegesis is generally fallacious. It is exegesis of the letter, not of the spirit. And is not Unamuno the most zealous in warning us, with regard to Christianity, against inanity and against the fallacy of the letter? In his book, one of the best chapters is perhaps the one that talks about the word and the letter. "In Saint Paul”—says Unamuno—"the Word becomes a letter, the Gospel becomes a book, it becomes a Bible.” And Protestantism commences the tyranny of the letter. "The letter”—he adds later— "is dead: one cannot look for life in the letter." Marx is not present, in spirit, in all his supposed disciples and heirs. Those who have continued him have not been the pedantic Germanic professors of the theory of surplus value, incapable of adding anything to the doctrine, dedicated only to limiting it, to stereotyping it; rather, it has been the revolutionaries, branded as heretics, like Georges Sorel—another agonizing one Unaumuno would say—who have dared to enrich and develop the consequences of the Marxist idea. "Historical materialism" is much less materialistic than is commonly thought. A liberal philosopher, an idealist philosopher, Benedetto Croce, does it full justice in this regard. "It is evident”—Croce writes—"that the ideality or absolutism of morality, in the philosophical sense of such words, is a necessary premise of socialism. The interest that moves us to build a concept of surplus value, is it not a moral or social interest, whatever you want to call it? In pure economics, can we talk about surplus value? Does not the proletarian sell their own labour-power for what it is worth, given their situation in the present society? And, without this moral premise, how would one explain, along with Marx's political action, the tone of violent indignation and bitter satire that is evident on every page of Capital?” And Adriano Tilgher, who prefaces a translation of Unamuno into Italian—La Sfinge senza Edipo [The Sphinx without Oedipus]—in his critical essays on Marxism and socialism says: "Marx is not a pure economist, nor a pure sociologist, nor a pure historicist: he is not content simply to describe social reality as it was in his time and to extract from the observation of the present the empirical laws of its transformations to come: he is essentially a revolutionary, whose gaze is stubbornly fixed on what should be." I am sure that if one meditates more deeply on Marx, they will discover in the creator of historical materialism not a Sadducee Jew, a materialist, but, rather, like a Dostoevsky, a Christian, an agonizing soul, a polemical spirit. And that perhaps they will prove Vasconcelos right when he affirms that the tormented Marx is closer to Christ than the doctor of Aquino.
In this book, as in all of his, Unamuno conceives life as struggle, as combat, as agony. This conception of life, that contains more revolutionary spirit than many tons of socialist literature, will always make us love the master of Salamanca. "I feel”—writes Unamuno—"both that politics are elevated to the height of religion and religion is elevated to the height of politics." Marxists and revolutionaries speak and feel with the same passion. For those in whom Marxism is spirit, it is the word. For those for whom Marxism is a struggle, it is the agony.
National Tradition
On the amorphousness of tradition and origins.3
For our traditionalists, tradition in Peru is, fundamentally, colonial and from Lima. Its conservatism, thus, aims to impose on us a more Spanish than national tradition. I have already pointed out in my previous article that the traditionalist always mutilates and divides tradition in Peru by the class and political interest of our feudal caste.
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.
One can say about Peru what Waldo Frank says about North America: that it is still a concept to be created. But we already know definitively, as for Peru, that this concept will not be created without the Indian. The Inka past has entered our history, claimed not by traditionalists but by revolutionaries. This consists of the defeat of colonialism, still surviving, in part, as a social state—feudalism, gamonalismo—but beaten forever as a spirit. The revolution has vindicated our most ancient tradition.
And there is nothing unusual about this, at least as something national not as a utopian ideal of romantic restoration, but as a spiritual reintegration of Peruvian history and the Peruvian homeland. It is a profoundly revolutionary reintegration in its intention and its transcendence.
To a critic familiar with the reconciliations of revolution and tradition, the indigenismo of the Peruvian vanguardists does not seem arbitrary. Commenting on the first issue of the magazine Amauta, "La Fiera Letteraria" was pleased that its vanguardism harmonized with the most ancient national tradition.
This criterion, on the other hand, does not only now appear in criticism. The post-Hegelian philosophy of history tends spontaneously and naturally to the same reconciliation. A few years ago, Mario Missiroli formulated it in absolute terms: "The revolution is already contained in tradition. Outside of tradition, there is nothing but utopia. That is why [Karl] Marx, grafting his theory onto the great trunk of modern thought, would conceive the proletariat as coming out of the lap of the bourgeoisie, and, liquidating all previous democracy, would affirm that the class struggle, instead of murdering the capitalist bourgeoisie, accelerates its development; and Georges Sorel, perfecting the doctrine of the philosopher of Trier, will advocate the same catastrophic solution."
National tradition has expanded with the reincorporation of Inkaism, but this reincorporation does not cancel, in turn, other factors or values also definitely entered into our existence and our personality as a nation. With the conquest, Spain, its language and its religion entered Peruvian history, enduringly putting it into communication with and coordinating it with Western civilization. The Gospel, as a truth or religious conception, was certainly worth more than Indigenous mythology. And later, with the Independence revolution, the Republic also forever entered our tradition.
Traditionalism, colonialism, have never forgiven the Republic its revolutionary origin and scope. Today this is already a topic completely superseded. The responsibilities of the Republic are not the responsibilities of the republican regime but of the colonial regime, which its practice—and not its doctrine—left subsisting. The Republic, contrary to what, artificially and reactionary, its backwards critics pretend, was not a romantic act. It is justified not only by a hundred years of national experience, but, above all, by the uniformity with which it imposed on the whole of América that political form, the solidarity movement of Independence, which it is absurd to judge separately from the vast and complex liberal and capitalist movement from which it received direction and impetus. The constitutional monarchy represented in Europe a formula of compromise and balance between the aristocratic tradition and the bourgeois revolution. But in Europe the aristocratic tradition and in América, since the conquest, which ostracized the autochthonous, that tradition was not indigenous but foreign.
Nothing is as sterile as the process of history, even when it is inspired by an uncompromising rationalism, as when it rests on a static traditionalism. "Indietro non si torna [There is no going back].”
When we are talking about national tradition, we need to establish beforehand which tradition it is, because we have a threefold tradition. And because tradition always has an ideal aspect—which is the fruitful central ferment or impulse of progress or improvement—and an empirical aspect, which reflects it without essentially containing it. And because tradition is always growing under our eyes, that thing which they so frequently insist on wanting to be still and finished.
Anniversary and Balance
On the political role of his magazine, Amauta.4
With this issue [the seventeenth], Amauta arrives on its second birthday. It almost went under by the ninth issue, before the first anniversary. [Miguel de] Unamuno's admonition— "the magazine that grows old, degenerates”—would have been the epitaph of a resonant but ephemeral work. But Amauta was not born to stay episodically, but to be history and to make it. To face the future with hope. Men and ideas, that is our strength.
The first obligation of every work, of the genre of which Amauta has imposed itself, is this: to last. History is duration. It does not value the isolated cry, no matter how long its echo may be; it values constant, continuous, persistent preaching. The perfect, absolute, abstract idea, indifferent to facts, to changing and moving reality, it does not value; the germinal idea, concrete, dialectical, operative, rich in power and capable of movement, it does value. Amauta is not an amusement or a game of pure intellectuals: it professes a historical idea, confesses an active and multitudinous faith, obeys a contemporary social movement. In the struggle between two systems, between two ideas, it does not occur to us to feel like spectators or to invent a third term. Extreme originality is a literary and anarchic concern. On our flag we inscribe this single, simple and big word: Socialism. (With this slogan we affirm our absolute independence from the idea of a nationalist, petty bourgeois and demagogic Party.)
We wanted Amauta to have an organic, autonomous, individual national development. For this reason, we started by looking for its title in Peruvian tradition. Amauta should not be a plagiarism, nor a translation. We were taking on an Inka word to create it anew. So that the Indian Peru, the Indigenous América, would feel that this magazine was theirs. And we present Amauta as the voice of a movement and a generation. Amauta has been, in these two years, a magazine of ideological definition, which has collected on its pages the proposals of all those with titles of sincerity and competence, who have wanted to speak on behalf of this generation and this movement.
The work of ideological definition seems to us accomplished. In any case, we have already heard the categorical and solicitous opinions expressed. Every debate is open to those who express their opinions, not to those who remain silent. The first era of Amauta has concluded. In the second era, it no longer needs to be called the magazine of the "new generation,” of the "vanguard," of the "leftists.” To be faithful to the revolution, it is enough for it to be a socialist magazine.
"New generation,” "new spirit,” "new sensibility,” all these terms have grown old. The same must be said of these other labels: "vanguard,” "left,” "renovation.” They were new and good in their time. We have used them to establish provisional demarcations, for contingent reasons of topography and orientation. Today they are already too generic and amphibological. Under these headings, mass contraband is starting to pass through. The new generation will not really be new except to the extent that it knows how to be, in short, an adult, a creator.
The very word revolution, in this América of small revolutions, lends itself quite well to misconception. We have to demand it rigorously and uncompromisingly. We have to restore it to its strict and complete sense. The Latin American revolution will be nothing more and nothing less than a stage, a phase of the world revolution. It will be simply and purely the socialist revolution. To this word add, as the case may be, all the adjectives you want: "anti-imperialist,” "agrarian,” "nationalist-revolutionary.” Socialism supposes them, precedes them, embraces them all.
To capitalist, plutocratic, imperialist North America, it is only possible to effectively oppose a socialist Latin or Iberian América. The epoch of free competition in the capitalist economy is over in all fields and all aspects. We are in the age of monopolies, that is, of empires. The Latin American countries are coming to capitalist competition with delay. The first positions are now definitely assigned. The destiny of these countries, within the capitalist order, is that of simple colonies. The opposition of languages, of races, of spirits has no decisive meaning. It is ridiculous to still talk about the contrast between a materialistic Saxon America and an idealistic Latin América, between a Blond Rome and a pale Greece. These are all irretrievably discredited topics. The myth of [José Enrique] Rodó no longer works—it has never worked—usefully and fruitfully on souls. Let us inexorably discard all these caricatures and simulacra of ideologies and let us check accounts, seriously and frankly, with reality.
Socialism is certainly not an Indo-American doctrine. But no doctrine, no contemporary system is or can be. And socialism, although it was born in Europe, like capitalism, is neither specific nor particularly European. It is a worldwide movement, from which none of the countries that move within the orbit of Western civilization escapes. This civilization leads, with a force and means that no civilization had at its disposal, to universality. Indo-América in this world order can and should have individuality and style; but not a culture or anything exceptionally particular. A hundred years ago, we owed our independence as nations to the rhythm of the history of the West, which since colonization inevitably imposed its compass on us. Freedom, Democracy, Parliament, the Sovereignty of the People, all the great words that our men uttered at that time came from the European repertoire. History, however, does not measure the greatness of these men by the originality of these ideas, but by the efficiency and genius with which they served them. And the peoples that later marched on the continent are those which took root better and sooner. The interdependence, the solidarity of peoples and continents, however, were much lesser at that time than in this one. Socialism, after all, is in the American tradition. The most advanced primitive communist organization recorded in history is the Inka.
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.
In Europe, the parliamentary and reformist degeneration of socialism has imposed, after the war, specific appointments. In the peoples where this phenomenon has not occurred, because socialism appears recently in its historical process, the old and great word retains its greatness intact. It will also keep it in history tomorrow, when the contingent and conventional needs for demarcation that distinguish practices and methods today have disappeared.
Capitalism or socialism. This is the problem of our time. We are not opposed to synthesis, to transactions, which can only take place in history. We think and feel like [Piero] Gobetti that history is a reformism but on the condition that revolutionaries operate as such. [Karl] Marx, [Georges] Sorel, [Vladimir] Lenin, these are the men who make history.
It is possible that many artists and intellectuals point out that we absolutely abide by the authority of the masters inevitably included within the process by the trahison des clercs [treason of intellectuals]. We confess without scruple that we feel ourselves in the domains of the temporal, the historical, and that we have no intention of abandoning them. Let us leave the spirits incapable of accepting and understanding the epoch, with their sterile worries and their metaphysical tears. Socialist materialism contains all the possibilities of spiritual, ethical and philosophical ascent. And we never feel more incredibly and effectively and religiously idealistic than when we secure the idea well and have our feet in matter.
Freudianism and Marxism
On the shared significance of psychoanalysis and historical materialism.5
Max Eastman's recent book, "The Science of Revolution,” which has just been translated into Spanish, coincides with Henri de Man's tendency to study Marxism with the data of the new Psychology. But Eastman, who, resenting the Bolsheviks, is not exempt from revisionist motives, starts from different viewpoints than those of the Belgian writer and, under various aspects, contributes a much more original and suggestive contribution to the critique of Marxism. Henri de Man is a heretic of reformism or social democracy; Max Eastman is a heretic of the revolution. His criticism as a super-Trotskyist intellectual divorced him from the Soviets, whose leaders, especially [Josef] Stalin, he violently attacked in his book Apres la morte de Lenin [Since Lenin Died].
Max Eastman is far from believing that contemporary psychology in general, and Freudian psychology in particular, diminishes the validity of Marxism as a practical science of revolution. Quite the opposite: he claims that they reinforce it and points out interesting affinities between the character of [Sigmund] Freud's discoveries, as well as the reactions provoked in official science by one and the other. [Karl] Marx showed that classes idealized or masked their motives and that, behind their ideologies, that is, their political, philosophical or religious principles, their economic interests and needs are in action. This assertion was formulated with the rigor and absolutism that all revolutionary theory always has in its origin, and which it stresses for polemical reasons in the debate with its contradictors, deeply wounding the idealism of intellectuals, who are reluctant to this day to admit any scientific notion that implies a denial or a reduction of the autonomy and majesty of thought, or, more precisely, of professionals or officials of thought.
Freudianism and Marxism, although the disciples of Freud and Marx are not yet the most likely to understand and notice it, are related not only because of what there was of the "humiliation,” as Freud says, in their theories for the idealistic conceptions of humanity, but because of their method in facing the problems they address. "In order to cure individual disorders”—Max Eastman observes—”psychoanalysis pays particular attention to the distortions of consciousness produced by compressed sexual motives. The Marxist, who tries to cure the disorders of society, pays particular attention to the deformations engendered by hunger and selfishness." Marx's word "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. Of these we have proof in the spasmodic and unreasonable resistance by which the patient opposes it. The Marxist diagnosis is considered an outrage rather than a scientific finding. Instead of being received with a truly sympathetic critical spirit, it encounters rationalizations and "defensive reactions" of the most violent and childish character.
Freud, examining the resistances to Psychoanalysis, has already described these reactions, which neither in doctors nor in philosophers have been due to properly scientific or philosophical reasons. Psychoanalysis was objected to, first of all, because it upset and stirred up a thick layer of feelings and superstitions. Its statements about subconsciousness, and especially about the libido, inflicted on men a humiliation as serious as that experienced with [Charles] Darwin's theory and with [Nicolaus] Copernicus' discoveries. To biological humiliation and cosmological humiliation, Freud could add a third precedent: that of ideological humiliation, caused by economic materialism on the highest peak of idealist philosophy.
The accusation of pan-sexualism that Freud's theory encounters has an exact equivalent in the accusation of pan-economism that Marx's doctrine still encounters. Apart from the fact that Marx's concept of economics is as broad and profound as Freud's concept of libido, the dialectical principle on which the entire Marxist conception is based excludes the reduction of the historical process to a pure economic mechanics. And Marxists can refute and destroy the accusation of pan-economism with the same logic with which Freud, defending Psychoanalysis, says that "it was reproached for its pansexualism, although the psychoanalytical study of instincts had always been rigorously dualistic and had never failed to recognize, next to sexual appetites, other quite powerful motives for producing the rejection of the sexual instinct." The attacks on psychoanalysis have been influenced, no more than the resistance to Marxism, antisemitic sentiments. And many of the ironies and reservations with which psychoanalysis is welcomed in France, because it comes from a German, whose nebulosity does not agree well with the clarity and moderation of Latin and French, strikingly resemble those that Marxism has always encountered, and not only among the anti-socialists of that country, where subconscious nationalism has usually inclined people to see in Marx's thought that of a dark and metaphysical boche. The Italians, for their part, have not spared him the same epithets, nor have they been less extreme and zealous in opposing, as the case may be, Latin idealism or positivism to Marx's German materialism or abstraction.
The motives of class and intellectual education that govern resistance to the Marxist method cannot escape, among men of science, as Max Eastman observes, Freud's own disciples, who are inclined to consider the revolutionary attitude as a simple neurosis. The class instinct determines this reactionary basic judgment.
The scientific, logical value of Max Eastman's book—and this is the curious conclusion reached at the end of the reading, recalling the background of his "Apres la Mort de Lenin" and his noisy excommunication by the Russian communists—ends up very debatable, unless one investigates the feelings that inevitably inspire it. Psychoanalysis, from this point, can be detrimental to Max Eastman as an element of Marxist criticism. It would be impossible for the author of "The Science of the Revolution" to prove that his neo-revisionist reasoning, his heretical position and, above all, his concepts of Bolshevism are not influenced by his personal resentments. The feeling imposes too often on the reasoning of this writer, who so passionately pretends to place himself on an objective and scientific terrain.
The Heroic and Creative Sense of Socialism
On the proletariat as an ascending class.6
All those who, like Henri de Man, preach and announce an ethical socialism, based on humanitarian principles, instead of contributing in some way to the moral upliftment of the proletariat, are unconsciously, paradoxically, working against its affirmation as a creative and heroic force, that is, against its civilizing role. By the pathway of "moral" socialism, and its anti-materialist platitudes, nothing is achieved but to relapse into the most sterile and tearful humanitarian romanticism, into the most decant apologetics of the “pariah,” into the most inept plagiarism of the evangelical phrase of the “poor in spirit.”
And this is equivalent to returning socialism to its romantic, utopian station, in which its demands were fed, in large part, by the resentment and the ramblings of that aristocracy, after having had an idyllic and eighteenth-century entertainment in disguising itself as cattlemen and shepherds and converting to the encyclopedia and liberalism, it dreamed of bizarrely and chivalrously leading a revolution of the shirtless and the helots. Obeying a tendency to the sublimation of their resentment, this genre of socialists—of whom no one thinks of denying their services, and in whom extraordinary and admirable spirits have excelled at a great height—collected from the gutter the sentimental clichés and demagogic images of an epic of “sans-culottes,” destined to establish in the world a paradisiacal Rousseauian age.
But, as we have known for a long time, that was absolutely not the path of the socialist revolution. [Karl] Marx discovered and taught that one had to begin by understanding the fatality of the capitalist phase and, above all, its value. Starting with Marx, socialism appeared as the conception of a new class, as a doctrine and a movement that had nothing in common with the romanticism of those who repudiated capitalist work as an abomination. The proletarian succeeded the bourgeoisie in the civilizing enterprise. And it assumed this mission, aware of its responsibility and its capacity—acquired in revolutionary action and in the capitalist factory—when the bourgeoisie, having fulfilled its destiny, ceased to be a force for progress and culture. For this reason, Marx's work has a certain accent of admiration for the capitalist deed, and "Capital,” at the same time as laying the bases of a socialist science, is the best version of the epic of capitalism, (something that does not escape the observation of Henri de Man outwardly, but in its profound sense)...
Ethical, pseudo-Christian, humanitarian socialism, which anachronistically tries to oppose Marxist socialism, can be a more or less lyrical and innocuous exercise of a tired and decadent bourgeoisie, but not the theory of a class that has come of age surpassing the highest objectives of the capitalist class. Marxism is totally alien and contrary to these mediocre altruistic and philanthropic speculations. Marxists do not believe that the task of creating a new social order, superior to the capitalist order, belongs to an amorphous mass of outcasts and oppressed, guided by evangelical preachers of the good. The revolutionary energy of socialism is nourished neither by compassion nor by envy. In the class struggle, where all the elements of the sublimity and the heroism of its ascension reside, the proletariat must rise to a "morality of producers,” very distant and different from the ”morality of slaves" that its free moral teachers, horrified at its materialism, informally strive to provide. A new civilization cannot emerge from a sad and humiliated world of helots and wretches, with no more title and no more aptitude than that of their helotism and their misery. The proletariat enters history, as a new class, the instant it discovers its mission to build with the elements brought together by human effort, moral or amoral, just or unjust, a higher social order. And this ability has not arrived by miracle. It acquires it by placing itself solidly in the field of economics, of production. Its class morality depends on the energy and heroism with which it operates in this field and on the extent to which it dominates and transcends bourgeois economics.
De Man sometimes touches on this truth, but in general he avoids adopting it. Thus, for example, he writes: "The essential thing in socialism is the struggle for it. According to the formula of a representative of the German ‘Socialist Youth,’ the object of our existence is not paradisiacal but heroic.” But this is not exactly the conception that inspired the thought of the Belgian revisionist who, a few pages earlier, confesses: "I feel closer to the practical reformist than to the extremist and I give more consideration to a new sewer in a working-class neighborhood or a flowery garden in front of a workers' house than a new theory of the class struggle.” De Man criticizes, in the first part of his work, the tendency to idealize the proletarian as the peasant, the primitive and simple man, was idealized in [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau's time. And this indicates that their speculation and their practice is based almost solely on the humanitarian socialism of intellectuals.
There is no doubt that this humanitarian socialism is still spreading quite a bit among the working masses. “The Internationale,” the anthem of the revolution, addresses in its first verse “the poor of the world,” a phrase of a certain evangelical reminiscence. If it is remembered that the author of these verses is a French folk poet of pure bohemian and romantic lineage [Eugène Pottier], the vein of his inspiration appears clear. The work of another Frenchman, the great Henri Barbusse, reveals itself to be impregnated with the same feeling of the idealization of the masses, of the timeless, eternal mass, which are oppressed by the glory of heroes and the burden of cultures. The mass-caryatid. But the mass is not the modern proletariat; and its generic claim is not the revolutionary and socialist claim.
Marx's exceptional merit consists in having, in this sense, discovered the proletariat. As Adriano Tilgher writes, "In the face of history, Marx appears as the discoverer and, one could say, almost the inventor of the proletariat: he, in fact, has not only given the proletarian movement the consciousness of its nature, of its legitimacy and historical necessity, of its internal law, of the ultimate end towards which it is heading and has thus instilled in the proletariat that consciousness that it lacked before, but has created; 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.”
And to this conception, to this discovery, socialism owes its political power as well as its religious emotion. And to the proletariat, the moral and intellectual capacity to which the realization of socialism is subordinated.
"The Science of Revolution" by Max Eastman
A defense of Marx’s philosophical critique of political economy.7
“The Science of Revolution” by Max Eastman—one of the resonating books of the latest political literature—is almost contracted to the assertion that [Karl] Marx, in his thought, never managed to emancipate himself from [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel. If this incurable Hegelianism had persisted only in Marx and [Friedrich] Engels, it would undoubtedly concern the author of “The Science of Revolution” very little. But since he finds it subsisting in the Marxist theorization of its successors and, above all, dogmatically professed by the ideologists of the Russian Revolution, Max Eastman considers it urgent and essential to denounce and combat it. His objections to Marx must be understood as objections to Marxism.
But what ”The Science of Revolution" demonstrates, rather than Marx's inability to emancipate himself from Hegel, is Max Eastman's inability to emancipate himself from William James. Eastman is particularly faithful to William James in his anti-Hegelianism. William James, after recognizing Hegel as one of the few thinkers who propose an overall solution of dialectical problems, hastens to add: “He wrote in such an abominable way that I have never understood it.” (”Introduction to Philosophy") Max Eastman has made no more effort to understand Hegel. In their offensive against the dialectical method, all the resistances of the North Americans—prone to a flexible and individualistic practicalism, permeated with pragmatic ideas—act against German panlogism, against the system of a unitary and dialectical conception. Apparently, the ”Americanism" of Max Eastman's thesis is in his belief that the revolution does not need a philosophy but only a very technical science; but, at bottom, he is really within its very Anglo-Saxon tendency to reject every difficult ideological construction shocking to a pragmatist education in the name of pure “good sense.”
Max Eastman, in reproaching Marx for not having freed himself from Hegel, reproaches him in general for not having freed himself of all metaphysics, all philosophy. He does not realize that if Marx had proposed and carried out only, with the thoroughness of a German technician, the scientific clarification of the problems of the revolution as they were presented empirically in his time, he would not have reached his most effective and valuable scientific conclusions, nor would he have raised socialism to the degree of ideological discipline and practical organization that have made him the constructive force of a new social order. Marx was able to become a technician of the revolution, just like Lenin, precisely because he did not stop at the elaboration of a few recipes of strictly verifiable effect. If he had refused or feared to confront the difficulties of creating a ”system" in order not to later upset the irreducible pluralism of Max Eastman, his theoretical work would not surpass in historical transcendence that of [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon or [Peter] Kropotkin.
Nor does Max Eastman notice that, without the theory of historical materialism, socialism would not have abandoned the deadlock of philosophical materialism and, in the inevitable aging of this due to its misunderstanding of the need to fix the laws of evolution and movement, it would have been more easily infected by every lineage of reactionary “idealisms.” For Max Eastman, Hegelianism is a demon that must be removed from the body of Marxism by exorcising it in the name of science. With what reasons does your thesis claim to affirm that in Marx's work he encourages, to the end, the most metaphysical and Germanic Hegelianism? It is true, Max Eastman has no more proof of this conviction than those formerly held by a believer of the presence of the devil in the body of the individual who was to be exorcised. Here is his diagnosis of the Marx case: "Cheerfully declaring that there is no such Idea, that there is no Empyrean burning at the center of the universe, that the ultimate reality is not spirit, but matter, he put aside all sentimental emotion and, in a disposition that seemed to be completely realistic, set about writing the science of the proletarian revolution. But, despite this profound emotional transformation he experienced, his writings still have a metaphysical and essentially animistic character. Marx had not examined this material world, in the same way that a craftsman examines his materials, in order to see how to get the best out of them. Marx examined the material world in the same way that a priest examines the ideal world, hoping to find in it his own creative aspirations and, if not, to see how he could transplant them into it. In its intellectual form, Marxism did not represent the passage from utopian socialism to scientific socialism; it did not represent the substitution of the impractical gospel of a better world for a practical plan, supported by a study of current society and indicating the means of replacing it with a better society. Marxism constituted the transition from utopian socialism to a socialist religion, a scheme intended to convince the believer that the universe itself automatically engenders a better society and that they, the believer, have only to follow the general movement of this universe.” The propositions that he himself copies in The Science of Revolution from the Theses on Feuerbach are not enough for Max Eastman as a guarantee of the totally new and revolutionary meaning of Marx's use of dialectics. He does not recall, at any time, this definitive statement of Marx: "My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos (creator) of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” Undoubtedly, Max Eastman will pretend that his criticism does not concern the theoretical exposition of historical materialism, but a spiritual and intellectual Hegelianism—a certain mental conformation of the professor of metaphysics—of which in his opinion Marx never knew how to detach himself despite historical materialism, and whose signs must be sought in the dominant tone of his speculation and his preaching. And here we touch on his fundamental error: his repudiation of philosophy itself, his mystical conviction that everything, absolutely everything, is reducible to science, and that the socialist revolution does not need philosophers but technicians. Emmanuel Berl makes a bitter mockery of this tendency, although without distinguishing it, as is de rigueur, from the authentic expressions of revolutionary thought. "Revolutionary agitation itself”—Berl writes—"ends up being represented as a special technique that could be taught in a Central School. The study of higher Marxism, the history of revolutions, more or less real participation in the various movements that can take place at this or that point, conclusions drawn from these examples from which an abstract formula must be extracted that can be automatically applied to any place where a revolutionary possibility appears. Next to the rubber commissioner, the propaganda commissioner, both polytechnics”"
Max Eastman's scientism is not rigorously original either. At a time when the positivists were still pontificating, Enrico Ferri, giving the term “scientific socialism” a strict and literal meaning, also thought that something like a science of revolution was possible. [Georges] Sorel had a lot of fun, on this occasion, at the expense of the wise Italian, whose contributions to socialist speculation were never taken seriously, on the other hand, by the leaders of German socialism. Today the times are less favorable than before—not from the viewpoints of the positivist school, but from those of Yankee practicalism—to renew the attempt. Max Eastman, moreover, does not outline any of the principles of a science of Revolution. In this regard, the intention of his book, which coincides with Henri de Man's in its negative character, remains in the title.
Three Books from Panait Istrati about the U.S.S.R.
On the relationship between the bureaucracy and the Communist Party in the Soviet Union.8
My admiration for the author of “Kyra Kyralina” and “Oncle Anghel” is notorious. Five years ago, months after the publication of these two books in French, I joyfully greeted the appearance of Panait Istrati as that of an extraordinary novelist. I was interested in Panait Istrati, as much as the artist, the man, although it was the suggestion of the artist—the genial power of some pages of “Oncle Anghel” above all—that revealed to me, better than any anecdote, the passionate and profound soul of the man. This article had a certain fortune. Panait Istrati, unexpectedly discovered by Romain Rolland and "Europe,” was not yet known in Latin América. When my chronicle was published in several Spanish-American newspapers, I learned that it was the first one written in these countries about Panait Istrati, to whom I have not ceased afterwards testifying to a sympathy and attention that, undoubtedly, have not gone unnoticed by my readers. The volumes of Adrian Zograffi's series of short stories that followed Kyra Kyralina and Uncle Angel fully confirm Panait Istrati's gifts as a narrator, as an Eastern storyteller.
I recall this background as a guarantee of the rigorous fairness of my judgment on the three volumes that Panait Istrati has just published in Paris on the Russia of the Soviets (Vers l'autre Flamme: “Soviets 1929,” Après seize mois dans l'U.R.S.S. [After Sixteen Months in the U.S.S.R.] and “La Russie Nue [The Naked Russia]”: Editions Rieder, 1929). The "Nouvelle Revue Francaise" gave its readers, in its October issue, a chapter of the second of these volumes, the one that best defines the spirit of Panait Istrati's unexpected requisition against the Soviet regime. In this chapter, Istrati exposes the case of the worker Rusakov whose conflict with nasty neighbors has cost his expulsion from the Union, the loss of his job, a hasty process and an unjust conviction, whose revocation has not been obtained through the efforts of Panait Istrati. Rusakov, averse to the current Soviet policy, is the father-in-law of an active and visible member of the Trotskyist opposition, the writer Victor Serge, well known in France for his work of dissemination and criticism of the new Russian literature in the pages of “Clarté” and other magazines. The hostility of his neighbors has taken advantage of this circumstance to turn all the agencies called to judge his case against him. A resolution of the Building Committee against the politician father of Victor Serge, accused of having assaulted a former militant and Party official and his family, on the occasion of a visit to Rusakovs' apartment, has been the basis of an entire judicial and political process. The relative slackness of the Rusakovs' hostel, which had a multi-room apartment at this time of housing crisis, made it envious to a neighborhood that was not forgiving of them, besides their opposition to the regime and the fact that, in any case, they were counting on exploiting the opportunity before the Soviet bureaucracy to snatch the coveted rooms. Panait Istrati, a fraternal friend of Victor Serge, has felt in his own flesh the persecution unleashed against Rusakov by the hostile declaration of his neighbors. The bureaucracy in the U.S.S.R., as in the whole world, is not distinguished by its sensitivity and vigilance. One of the campaigns of the Communist Party, read the Soviet State, is as Panait Istrati himself notes, the struggle against bureaucracy. And the case of Rusakov, as Panait Istrati puts it, is a case of bureaucratic automatism. Rusakov has been the victim of an injustice. Panait Istrati, who understands and practices friendship with the ardor that his novels translate, failed in the attempt to have this injustice amply repaired, to completely rehabilitate Rusakov, and has experienced the most violent disappointment regarding the Soviet order. And, for this case, he prosecutes the entire communist system.
His reaction is not incomprehensible to anyone who sagely weighs the data of his temperament and his intellectual and sentimental formation. Panait Istrati has a mentality and a psychology of "revolté,” of a rebel, not of a revolutionary, in an ideological and political sense of the term. His existence has been that of a vagabond, that of a bohemian, and this has left inevitable traces on his spirit. His sympathy for the "hajduk [Balkan highwayman]" is nourished by his feelings of “hors la loi [being an outlaw].” These feelings, which can produce an artistic work, are essentially negative when it comes to moving on to a political deed. The true revolutionary is, although it may seem paradoxical to some, a man of order. Lenin was to an eminent degree. He despised nothing so much as humanitarian and subversive sentimentality. Panait Istrati might have fallen in love with the Soviet order, but outside of it, under the incessant possession of the capitalist order, against which it has been and continues to be insurgent. This is clearly demonstrated by the second volume of ”Vers L'autre Flamme [To the Other Flame].”
Istrati confesses in it that his enthusiasm for Soviet work remained intact until some time after his return to Russia, following an accidental visit to Greece, from where he was expelled as an agitator. All his anti-Soviet reaction corresponds to the last months of his second stay in the U.S.S.R. If Panait Istrati had written his impressions about Russia without more documentation and experience than those of his first stay, his book would have been a fervent defense of the work of the Soviets. He himself would have been the character of his work, if his second stay had not prolonged it until making inevitable the clash of his impatient and passionate temperament of the “revolté” with the more prosaic and inferior sides of the construction of socialism.
Panait Istrati has written these books together with an anonymous collaborator, whose name is not revealed for now because he lacks the authority that Istrati’s has for getting public's attention. It is not possible to decide to what extent this collaboration, which perhaps Istrati overestimates out of a feeling of friendship, affects the unity, the organicity of this requirement. The obvious thing is that the reportage contained in these three volumes is still formally, far below the novelist's work of the author of the three stories by Adrian Zograffi. All the material that Istrati and his undercover collaborator accumulate against the Soviet regime is anecdotal material. There is no lack, in these volumes—better in the first two—of some explanations of the statements in favor of the Soviet work; but the whole, dominated by the rage of its sentimental disappointment, is absolutely identified with the puerile tendency to judge a political regime, an ideological system, by a mess of tenement houses.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “Nacionalismo y vanguardismo en la ideología política,” Mundial, November 21, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/peruanicemos_al_peru/paginas/nacionalismo.htm.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “‘La agonía del cristianismo’ de 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.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “La tradición nacional,” Mundial, December 2, 1927, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/peruanicemos_al_peru/paginas/tradicion.htm.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “Aniversario y Balance,” Amauta, September 1928, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/1928/sep/aniv.htm.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “Freudismo y marxismo,” Variedades, December 29, 1928, Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, https://archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/freudismo-y-marxismo-recorte-de-prensa.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “Sentido heroico y creador del socialismo,” Mundial, February 1, 1929, Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, https://archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/sentido-heroico-y-creador-del-socialismo-recorte-de-prensa.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “‘La ciencia de la revolución’ por Max Eastman,” Variedades, June 26, 1929, Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, https://archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/la-ciencia-de-la-revolucion-por-max-eastman.
José Carlos Mariátegui, “Tres libros de Panait Istrati sobre la U.R.S.S.,” Variedades, March 12, 1930, Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, https://archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/tres-libros-de-panait-istrati-sobre-la-u-r-s-s.