José Carlos Mariátegui and Twenty-first-Century Socialism: Recovery and Renewal

• Author: Ronaldo Munck
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221095465
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles: Maríategui

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221095465

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 245, Vol. 49 No. 4, July 2022, 13–30

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221095465

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

13

José Carlos Mariátegui and Twenty-first-Century Socialism

Recovery and Renewal

by

Ronaldo Munck

As Latin America entered the turn to the left, there was a recovery and renewal of the

work of José Carlos Mariátegui. The “practical socialism” that he advocated and led in the

course of a short but brilliant political career (basically, the 1920s) has much to teach us

today if set in its proper historical context and not reduced to catchphrases. Mariátegui

was, arguably, the first Marxist in Latin America, and his open, imaginative, transgres-

sive, and energizing writings may well illuminate our paths in the 2020s. His was not a

Marxist catechism but a living Marxism. What we can take from Mariátegui is a grounded

Marxism—devoid of all theoreticisms—that, understood in its historical context, may

point toward a period of renewal after the seeming collapse of the left project to build a

twenty-first-century socialism.

A medida que América Latina dio un giro izquierdista se produjo una recuperación y

renovación de la obra de José Carlos Mariátegui. El “socialismo práctico” que él defendió

y dirigió durante su corta pero brillante carrera política (básicamente, la década de 1920)

tiene mucho que enseñarnos hoy si se mira en su contexto histórico adecuado y no se

reduce a frases hechas. Mariátegui fue, posiblemente, el primer marxista latinoamericano

y sus escritos abiertos, imaginativos, transgresores y llenos de energía bien pueden ilumi-

nar nuestro camino en la década de 2020. El suyo no era un catecismo marxista sino un

marxismo vivo. Lo que podemos tomar de Mariátegui es un marxismo fundamentado,

desprovisto de todo teoricismo que, entendido en su contexto histórico, puede apuntar

hacia un período de renovación después del aparente colapso del proyecto de izquierda para

construir un socialismo del siglo XXI.

Keywords: Mariátegui, Marxism, Indigenous politics, Cultural politics, Twenty-first-

century socialism

Mariátegui was born in the southern Peruvian town of Moquegua in 1894.

He left school at the age of 15 and began working in 1911 for La Prensa, a leading

Lima newspaper, moving quickly into an editing role. He tried to set up his

own paper, Nuestra Época, and then La Razón, with his friend César Falcón, but

these efforts failed. Mariátegui, perhaps somewhat harshly, called this early

phase of his career his edad de piedra (Stone Age) and placed his development as

a Marxist during his time in Europe, after 1919. The period of world history that

marked his political development included the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the

Ronaldo Munck, a participating editor of Latin American Perspectives, is a professor of sociology at

Dublin City University. His most recent book is Social Movements in Latin America: Mapping the

Mosaic (2020).

1095465LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221095465Latin American PerspectivesMunck/MARIÁTEGUI AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SOCIALISM

research-article2022

14 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Russian Revolution of 1917, the formation of the Kuomintang in China, and

then the university reform movement that began in Córdoba (Argentina) in

1919. In Peru this was a period of increased indigenous mobilization, with the

movement to restore the Tahuantinsuyo or Inca Empire based on Túpac Amaru

II in 1915 followed by the indigenous revolt in Huancané in 1917.

Mariátegui was forced to leave Peru in 1919 for a period of exile in Europe,

though his exit was an arranged one, as it were. He was to spend some time in

Germany, where he began to learn German and became familiar with the work

of Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1990), which had just been pub-

lished. This was to have considerable influence in Latin American cultural cir-

cles throughout the 1920s: in its own way it “provincialized” Europe, placing it

in the context of the rise and decline of other civilizations. In France he got to

know the influential Clarté group, founded by Henri Barbusse (who had

recently joined the communist movement), which promoted a model intellec-

tual political intervention that broke with the idea that intellectuals could be

divorced from social processes and tensions (see Racine, 1967). World War I

was to mark the end of a certain vision of Europe in Latin America. Mariátegui

also engaged with the contemporary psychoanalytical movement in Vienna

and was most enthusiastic about the council movement in Hungary. His was a

vanguardist form of thinking—the new, the iconoclastic, and the modern

appealed to him.

It was in Italy that Mariátegui ended up and was shaped both philosophi-

cally and politically during his sojourn from 1919 to 1922. This was a revolu-

tionary period in all regards. Here Mariátegui imbibed the idealist,

antipositivist, and anti-evolutionist concepts of Benedetto Croce and Antonio

Labriola that marked his distinctly idealist reception of Marxism. He also

engaged passionately with the praxis of Georges Sorel, the driver of revolution-

ary syndicalism, creator of the notion of “myth,” and supposed champion of

violence. Above all, Mariátegui engaged with the Antonio Gramsci of the

Ordine Nuovo and the Turin factory occupations period. From L’Ordine Nuovo

he took the model of a workers’ periodical as organizer. He participated in the

seventeenth congress of the Italian Socialist Party in 1921, when the breakaway

Italian Communist Party was formed, and may have met Gramsci there. Their

thinking was to show some striking parallels, though, of course, Gramsci’s

Prison Notebooks would appear long after Mariátegui died. His basic ideological

coordinates were now established.

When Mariátegui returned to Peru in 1923 it was a case of “a theory in search

of a subject,” as Oscar Terán (1985: 79) put it. His recently acquired Marxist

theoretical frame was still quite orthodox and Eurocentric, since he had not yet

engaged closely with Peruvian reality to any great extent. He was basically

operating within a workerist, unionist, and classist paradigm. In the period

1923–1924, he began to teach at the Universidad Popular Gonzalez Prada, an

adult-education workers’ college. This resulted in a course on current affairs

published as Historia de la crisis mundial (Mariátegui, 1980a) as he renewed his

journalistic calling at the request of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who asked

him to edit the journal Claridad (Clarity). He went on to become a member of

Haya de la Torre’s nationalist Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana

(American Popular Revolutionary Alliance—APRA) when it was formed in