Mountain Marxism

 “In the Red Corner- the Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui,” by Mike Gonzalez, 2019

This is an excellent exegesis of the thought of Mariátegui, a Peruvian Marxist active in the teens and 1920s and probably the most creative in Latin America. He grew up in poverty with an indigenous mother, was sick for 4 years, then lost a leg to gangrene as an adult, dying at 36 in 1930. Yet he educated himself as an anti-academic auto-didact, became a journalist, organized meetings of the indigenous, labor and socialists, traveled to France and especially Italy where he met Marixists like Gramsci and Togliatti. He edited the Marxist journals Amauta and Labor, wrote the Constitution for the first General Confederation of Peruvian Workers, and was in touch with the Comintern as it was becoming Stalinized during its “third period” sectarianism. He founded the Peruvian Socialist Party with a group of comrades as a revolutionary nucleus within a united front. He was not fond of instant 'vanguardism' as he thought a real proletarian vanguard must emerge organically out of the revolutionary movement.

Mariátegui was an organizer, an editor, a theorist and a cultural thinker. His main theoretical points were to focus on the massive indigenous population in Peru. In the early 1900s the Quechua and Amari formed the great majority in the country and were forced to work in the mines or plantations as they lost land through the 'enganche' system. He was the first to do a detailed historical materialist analysis of all levels of Peruvian society and history – a method relevant to other Latin American countries. He called parts of the economy 'semi-feudal' due to the forced labor used by the gamonales (rural bosses). His analysis included Peru's origins in the Incan empire, which was authoritarian at the top and communal at the root; its beginnings as a colonial outpost of guano, saltpeter and debt and the early rebellion of Túpac Amaru.

Another theoretical point was to build a proletarian united front of workers, peasants, indigenous communities, students and dissident middle-class artists and intellectuals. He opposed a reformist, popular front bloc with the local 'patriotic' capitalist class, which was the strategy of his main opponents, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA). The petit-bourgeois APRA attempted to rope all class forces into a reformist 'anti-imperialist' front. The economy of Peru in the teens and 1920s was dominated by foreign capital in the mining, textile, agriculture and other export sectors, receiving manufactured products in return. Mariátegui considered the local capitalists to be craven and unable to bring even democracy to Peru. They collaborated with imperialist firms and the neo-feudal latifundistas and would not change their spots. APRA tried to appeal to dissident capitalists, along with young military officers, the middle-class and small businessmen in its election work. This reformist popular front strategy was Mariátegui's main target after the decline of the anarchists. APRA eventually attained political power in Peru in the 1980s as a corrupt populist entity, an event familiar in Latin American history.

The Comintern at the time recommended APRA join the Comintern, as they did in China with the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang ended that bloc by slaughtering communists in Shanghai and Canton in 1927. The Comintern then junked that strategy and chose sectarianism, only to return to the popular front after disastrous CP policies led to the victory of the Nazis in Germany. Mariátegui never read Gramsci's Prison Notebooks on praxis, hegemony and culture or Trotsky's position on the United Front, though he was familiar with the idea of permanent revolution - but his ideas closely paralleled them.

Mariátegui believed that the 'myth of the revolution' was a necessary ingredient in any popular uprising against capital. This myth – 'mistica' - provided an overarching narrative and goal for those not theoretically inclined or bureaucratically-minded. It also motivated activists as a dream, as a calling, as an emotional passion. He considered the religiosity of the majority of poor Peruvians to be a reflection of their need for a heaven on earth, not in the bye and bye. He proposed that socialism fill the bill instead. Some consider him a source for Liberation Theology due to this position on proletarian religion. He anticipated Latin American 'magical realism' as a literary style, a current that still exists. He had a deep concern around culture, having first worked with dissident bohemians, poets and surrealist artists in Lima as a young man. He saw all art as an 'engagement with history.'

Mariategui (center) in Italy

These subtleties and leftist positions were lost on the post-Lenin Comintern and he was harshly attacked as a nationalist and romantic. Within Peru he and his comrades had been arrested, jailed or exiled a number of times and their newspapers shut down. They were accused of both a “Jewish” plot and a communist conspiracy by the local ruling class. In 1919 the first large miners' strike shook Peru, in which his group participated. This spurred his trip to Europe in 1921 at the time of the mass factory occupations and workers' councils in Turin and Italy, which opened his eyes to the Marxist movement, along with his conversations with Gramsci, Croce and Togliatti. He attended their meetings and learned of the struggles between Left and Right within the Italian socialists, between supporters of the Bolsheviks and those of the Social Democrats. He was a hard supporter of the 1917 Revolution, internationalism and Lenin, while the founder of APRA, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, drifted away from it. Haya was mostly inspired by the radical bourgeois revolution in Mexico instead, where he lived most of his life, favoring a form of state capitalism. Mariátegui saw the quick rise of fascist forces under Mussolini, but optimistically predicted that the workers would turn away from Mussolini. They did not – and later could not.

The journal's name “Amauta” is a Quechua / Incan word for a group of wise men. It was conceived as the Peruvian movement version of Iskra. It published indigenous authors and artists among others. Mariátegui always wrote how the oppression of the Quechua and others was linked to the capitalist economic system in Peru. Organizers from the Andes mountain areas regularly visited the office of Amuata in Lima. Like Marx's view of the collective character of the mir or obshchina - Russian peasant communes - so Mariátegui saw the same communality in native Andean practices of collective territoria and the old Incan 'ayllu' which survived the destruction of the empire. Marx's point was that the reformist idea of always going 'through capitalism' was not accurate. Mariátegui agreed. Socialized land was the main demand of the indigenista movement, along with relief from the sugar and textile latifundistas and the mining conglomerates. Mariátegui saw this reflected in the Bolshevik demand for land in Russia.

Peruvian indigenous ayllu

His vision was to unite the indigenous with the small working-class movement in the fight for socialism. The Comintern in 1928 insisted instead that the indigenous should form isolated mountain 'republics,' similar to the abandoned 'black belt' theory in the U.S. This would have split a united movement to overthrow capital in Peru and would terminally isolate the highlands. With Mariátegui's death and the formation of a reformist, dogmatic CP that took its views from Moscow, it did for many years.

Theoretically Mariátegui believed that all human knowledge derived from 'praxis' – essentially human experience, knowledge, history and work. This included the growth of revolutionary individuals, movements, parties and theory. This is why he opposed simple-minded dogmatism, mechanical Marxism, sectarianism, liberalism and populism, which were the main theoretical problems he dealt with. This led to his opposition to creating an instant Communist Party with no roots in the proletariat. Marxism grasps totalities – integrating various strands of reality into a multi-dimensional view, where culture and ideas are not mere reflections of reality, as Lukács posited, but directly interact with the material world. In this sense, ideas become a material force. He might have gone too far in this direction, advocating “materialist idealism” and initially embracing Sorel, a varied syndicalist thinker, but I think this is not a terminal issue.

Haya accused Mariátegui of 'Eurocentrism' because he paid attention to European Marxists. This is a typical nationalist dodge, heard many times from anti-socialists. This is similar to feminists who denounce the work of all male scientists or black nationalists who claim Marxism is 'white.' Since Marx, Marxism has spread to every country in the world, which is the practical fact that refutes such nonsense. Class and capital occur everywhere, capital intrudes everywhere, workers occur everywhere, and so Marxism will occur everywhere too. Capital crosses national borders! Mariátegui used the Marxist method and applied it to Peru, which is what Haya really disliked. Mariátegui understood that the proletarian and insurgent forces in Peru incorporated huge diversity, much like the present U.S. They were not one simple, monochrome 'working-class.' The great trial was to unite these disparate layers, especially early on when disunity and sectarianism could hurt the small revolutionary forces. As he said 'We are too few to divide.” Nevertheless in 1928 he denounced Haya when Haya formed APRA as a nationalist electoral party, so he was not for ties at all costs.

This is a very informative book about an important Marxist who has lessons for revolutionaries in the U.S. and other countries. In fact his points are eerily relevant.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive using these terms: “An Anthology of the Writings of Jose Carlos Mariategui,” “Washington Bullets,” “The Dream of the Celt” (Vargas); “Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age,” “Scorched Earth,” “Marx on Religion,” “Blood Lake.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 22, 2023 - Happy Solstice!