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José Carlos Mariátegui:1994William RowePublished online: 27 Feb 2009.

To cite this article: William Rowe (1994) José Carlos Mariátegui: 1994, Travesia:Travesia, 3:1-2, 290-298, DOI: 10.1080/13569329409361838

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The following pieces on Jose Carlos Mariategui by WilliamRowe and Patricia D'AUemand were originally given astalks at the seminar held at St. Edwards Convent, Londonon the 11th June 1994 in honour of the centenary ofMariategui's birth.

José Carlos Mariátegui: 1994

William Rowe

Ever since his death in 1930, Mariategui has been a verypowerful symbol in Peruvian politics and intellectual life,as well as in the popular consciousness of Peruvians. Nev-ertheless, he has been much less well known outside Peru.This year has been nominated by UNESCO the year ofMariategui. There are meetings currently taking place inFrance, in Spain, in Italy, in Germany and elsewhere inEurope, not to speak of Latin America, all of them tocelebrate the 100th anniversary of Mariategui's birth. Andthat is precisely what we are here for, to celebrate Mariategui,the man and his work.

1994 is a year that is perhaps in the middle of a cycle, acycle that has been dominated by Thatcherism; just asMariategui himself, perhaps, died at the end of a cycle. Andin this 20th century of ours which is now ending wewitness, I think, some of the major themes and majordebates of the 20th century returning. One of the ways theyare returning is through the figure and work of Mariategui.

Why would that be? We're still in the middle of a neo-liberal cycle, or in this country a Thatcherist cycle. In Peru,neo-liberalism has currently led to discussion about theprivatisation of education. Education was one of the funda-

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Jose Carlos Mariategui

mental concerns of Mariategui and his associates. Thateducation is to be privatized in some measure in Peru is akey event of the late 20th century, it seems to me.

Certainly, neo-liberalism dominates economic and so-cial thinking throughout most of the world, just as the ideathat democracy is the monopoly of the north and west of theglobe dominates global thinking now. I hope I make myselfclear. That there is just one form of democracy which isrespectable and discussable. Elsewhere in the world thereare other countries trying to catch up. I profoundly disa-gree; I guess I could find some support for that disagree-ment in the work of Mariategui. I guess, in fact, thinking ofmy own personal history, Mariategui taught me very manythings, and one of them was to respect the particularpolitical experiences of Peru, and not to try to fit Peru intothe more fashionable models of political experience that Ihad grown up with as a product of North-Western Europe.

The importance of Mariategui for us now is not a nostal-gic one; although it would be very easy to become nostalgicfor the 1920s. I don't think we should do that. I'm not sayingwe shouldn't have the pleasure of remembering some ofthe more attractive aspects of that period. But I think it ismore important to seek to understand the 20th century;crucially to understand Peru in the 20th century, and whythat period of approximately 1918 to 1930 is so very, veryimportant. Mariategui is the most imporatnt interpreter ofthat period in Peru.

He grew up in what was called, or still is called byhistorians, 'La Republica Aristocratica'. Which was a pe-riod in Peruvian political history dominated by a smallnumber of families with a 'name' - as they say in English- and with money, as they say in all languages. That epochalso became called by some people, those who knew French,'La Belle Epoque'. But Mariategui also lived through thekey period of the Soviet revolution and of uprisings, peas-

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ant uprisings - throughout the world. He lived, too, the timeof the Wall Steet crash, the slump in the capitalist nations,and the Stalinisation of the Soviet Union. It would bedifficult to find a more important decade, it seems to me.

The person who sought to speak for 'La Belle Epoque' inLima - and we're talking about the period from 1900 toperhaps 1917 -, the person who thought he spoke for it atant rate, was called Abraham Valdelomar, a major poet, avery interesting writer, but one who reflected a period thatMariategui was - with a number of other people - going toreplace and push into the past. One of his most famousstatements for good or for ill, because most people don'tremember his poems, was 'Peru is Lima', and, he continued'Lima is the Jiron de la Union. El Jiron de la Union is thePalais Concert. Therefore Peru is the Palais Concert'. It wasa cafe where certain young men used to gather. Mariateguiwas a member of Valdelomar's group whose name was'Colonida', the name of a magazine published in 1916.

Mariategui became though, as he said, 'un hombre deuna filiacion e una fe'. There's not a good translation for'filiacion'. 'A man with an affiliation and a faith', is the bestI can do. He founded the Peruvian Socialist Party which, insome sense or other, was the forerunner of a very greatnumber of other political left-wing parties. He was, orbecame, the most important socialist thinker in LatinAmerica.

A key part of that change from the Belle Epoque to theperiod of the founding of the Socialist Party was Mariategui'srecognition that the peasants and indians of Peru, and theirculture, were crucial to the future of Peru. He was born in1894 in Moquegua of a very poor family, his mother was aseamstress. He never knew his father, although his fatherdid come from an upper class family. He became ill at theage of eight; he became crippled in the left leg, spent twoyears in bed, which he does not seem to have wasted, he

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seems to have read an enormous amount in that time. As anadult he weighed seven stone, and he was five feet twoinches high. He began his working life, and I guess hismature education, as a journalist in La Prensa, and later ina number of other newspapers, in Lima. He only had oneyear of secondary education. He lived though, as an adoles-cent and young man, the very rapid modernisation of Peru,which led to significant labour conflicts in the northernsugar haciendas and to important peasant uprisings inPuno and elsewhere in the Andes. As everyone educated inPeru will remember, December 1918 to January 1919 wasthe period of the general strike for the 8 hour day, in whichnot only Mariategui was involved but also Victor RaulHaya de la Torre.

In 1919, Mariategui left for Europe, which was a crucialexperience for him. He was exiled by President Leguia forthe articles he was publishing which were considered to beinflammatory and disloyal to the country. Nevertheless, hewas given a kind of scholarship to go abroad, by thegovernment; first to Paris and then to Italy. I can't dwell onthese experiences because of obvious lack of time, but itdoes need saying that the period in Italy was one in whichhe met some very important influences on his future think-ing. They were members of a group in Turin who wereconcerned with the founding of the Italian communistparty. And through them he came to read and know of thework of Sorel, the French socialist thinker, of BenedettoCrocce, the Italian writer and thinker, and of AntonioGramsci, the crucial socialist thinker in modern Italy. Hewasn't a Marxist; he didn't call himself a Marxist until 1921,and if I can just quote a remark he made in a letter:

El marxismo habia sido para mi hasta esos dias, unateoria un poco confusa, pesada y frfa. En esos dfas, visu luz; vi su luz clara, y tuve una revelacion.

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(I had found Marxism up to then a cold, heavy andrather confused theory. But then I saw its clear lightand it came to me as a revelation.)

Typically of Mariategui he uses a religious word,'revelation'. I will come back to that.

In 1923 he went back to Peru and became a leading figurein the labour movement, as well as a very prolific writer andteacher. His first major political and intellectual interven-tion was a series of lectures he gave in La UniversidadPopular Gonzalez Prada (they later became the book LaEscena Contempordnea). These were an analysis of the globalsituation in which he then located Third World countrieslike Peru. So his vision was very wide, very ambitious andvery thorough. He was not willing to accept inherited,received, fashionable versions of anything. He did a thor-ough analysis of the global situation, and how he saw Perubelonging to that situation.

In 1924 he became ill again with a malignant tumour inhis right leg and he woke up after the operation to the shockof finding his leg had been amputated without his knowl-edge. One of the people who met him in the clinic the dayafter the operation describes 'a thin, small man with bril-liant eyes'. A thin, small man with brilliant eyes. He livedthe rest of his life in a wheelchair, and suffered constantrelapses about every six months and had to take to his bedand convalesce. How he managed in that period to writesomething like 14 books and a huge number of articles, toorganise various political movements and to produce twoperiodicals, I don't know. But I can say that he respondedto that brush with death with faith and self-discipline. Self-discipline to continue working, to distribute his life be-tween family, friends, writing, political activity and think-ing, in an extremely disciplined way. And faith in thesocialist revolution; that is, in a Utopian future.

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I can only summarize some of the things he did. 1926 isthe year in which he founded Atnauta, which is still prob-ably among the one or two, or perhaps three, most impor-tant Latin American journals of all time. The title refers tothose intellectual figures of the Inca system, called amauta,who I guess were the nearest thing in the pre-Columbianperiod to an intellectual. It was a very wide, open and livelyperiodical full of debate, creative work and the latest newsof artistic, intellectual and political activities. The last threeyears of his life, though, were given to, more than anything,the political struggle; that is when he founded the PartidoSocialista del Peru and, in fact, he also founded a secretcommunist cell within that Partido Socialista del Peru. Healso founded the Confederation General de TrabajadoresPeruanos, which, of course, still exists.

In 1930 he died in the midst of an acute and enormouspolitical struggle with the 3rd International, that is, theStalinist organ, which sought to control the policies andeveryday decisions of communist parties in Latin America.He died in the midst of that struggle, without it havingbeendecided. The main points of contentionbetween Mariateguiand his associates and those agents of the 3rd Internationalin a congress in Buenos Aires just before he died were two.Firstly, Mariategui's position was that the type of partyneeded in Peru was a broad alliance including the urbanworking class, Indians and peasants and the petty bour-geoisie, that is disaffected sections of the middle class,whereas the 3rd International was looking for a much morenarrowly based working-class party. Secondly, Mariateguisaw the Indians of Peru as a proletariat, and he saw theircommunal land ownership traditions as a basis for a social-ist society. He saw no need to pass through a stage ofcapitalist development and then later socialism. The 3rdInternational did not agree. A month after he died, thePeruvian Communist Party was founded and became in-

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creasingly sectarian, increasingly different from the partythat Mariategui had founded.

The confluences in Mariategui's intellectual and politi-cal work are extraordinary, maybe without parallel. I canonly mention a few. What they show I think is this extraor-dinary openness, which was not the same as simply beingadrift in a sea of fashionable ideas. Karl Marx, GeorgesSorel, Benedetto Crocce, Nietzsche, Freud, avant-gardeliterature, avant-garde art, Peruvian indigenismo. And ingeneral, a very fertile interchange between Peruvian expe-riences and the major ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries.Of indigenismo he said (and I should just explain briefly thatindigenismo had become a social and political movement bythen, placing the needs and the culture of the Andeanpeasantry as central to the identity of the Peruvian nation):

It will no doubt take time for an indigenous revolu-tionary consciousness to form. But once the Indianmakes the socialist idea his own, it will provide himwith a discipline, a tenacity and strength that fewproletariats from other areas could manage.

One of the key ideas in his mature thinking was the notionthat myth and religious experience were crucial to anypolitics of transformation. To any politics of positive change,myth or religious experience were vital:

Los actuales mitos revolucionarios o sociales puedenocupar la conciencia profunda de los hombres, con lamisma plenitud que los antiguos mitos religiosos.(The myths of the present, the revolutionary andsocialist myths can penetrate the deepest conscious-ness of human beings with the same force as the oldreligious myths).

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Jose Carlos Mariategui

His belief was that the myths of capitalism, above all that ofprogress, were exhausted or had become degraded, and I'dhere like to quote a statement from probably the best bookon Mariategui, by another Peruvian who died very young,Alberto Flores Galindo.

Unlike the Apristas or the orthodox communists, theproblem was not how to develop capitalism, whichmeant to repeat the history of Europe in Latin America.The problem was how to follow an autonomousPeruvian path.

And within that formulation and that commitment, mythoffered a bridge between indigenous culture and indig-enous politics and the great traditions of Western politics,which are traditions of secularisation and freedom, An-dean politics being religious in its language and its think-ing. It still is.

The book he wrote immediatly after recovering fromthat amputation is called El Alma Matinal and I want to referto an essay, 'El hombre y el mito'. This essay was written inJanuary 1925, and is possibly the first essay he wrote afterlosing his leg and nearly dying. The word 'mito' is usedhere in a somewhat unfamiliar way to the late 20th century,to mean a number of things which I'll enumerate briefly. Itmeans inner life, passion; it means religious experience, butreligious experience freed from dogma or institutionalchurch. It also means the experience of the popular classes,the way they experience the world. It means something thatcan cross social and ethnic divisions. In his very earlywriting he described the procession of Senor de los Milagrosin Lima as an experience that bridged upper class, middleclass, working class. This is an example of religious experi-ence having that capacity. Finally, myth means, for him, theentry of artistic experience into politics. That is, the inter-

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vention of works of art of all kinds into political perceptionand political thinking.

'La fuerza', he writes, 'de los revolucionarios no esta ensu ciencia. Esta en su fe, en su pasion, en su voluntad. Es unafuerza religiosa, mistica, espiritual. Es la fuerza del mito.Los motivos religiosos seran desplazados del cielo a latierra. No son divinos, son humanos, son sociales'. (Thestrength of the revolutionaries is not in their science, it is intheir faith, their passion, their will. It is a religious force, amystical and spiritual force. It is the force of myth. Reli-gious motives have moved, have come down from heavento earth. They are not divine, they are human, they aresocial.)

I think listening carefully to, and responding to thosewords, one can also recognise Cesar Vallejo, Jose MariaArguedas, Gustavo Gutierrez; that is, one can recognise amajor Peruvian tradition of bringing those 'motivosreligiosos a la tierra'.

What was lost when Mariategui died was not lostirrecuperably, but I guess that depends on us; that criticalopeness, that combination of analysis with passion andimagination, that 'filiacion' and that 'fe'.

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