Mariátegui, Race, and the Comintern’s National Question

• Author: Marc Becker,Enrique Ya-n
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221095462
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles: Maríategui

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221095462

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 245, Vol. 49 No. 4, July 2022, 126–143

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221095462

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

126

Mariátegui, Race, and the Comintern’s National Question

by

Marc Becker

José Carlos Mariátegui’s open engagement with Marxist theory and his adaptation of

its ideas to his Latin American reality brought him into conflict with other leftists. At a

continental conference of communist parties in Buenos Aires in 1929, he criticized the

Comintern’s proposal to carve up the Americas into independent African-descent and

Quechua and Aymara republics, arguing that conceptualizing the struggle in ethnic

rather than class terms was a mistake. From documents preserved in the Comintern

archives it appears that these comments had echoes in Moscow. Two newly translated

Spanish-language documents on the “national question” challenge notions that Comintern

officials were unaware of or ill-informed about developments in Latin America and are

important to understanding their responses and challenges to his ideas on race and

oppressed nationalities.

El compromiso abierto de José Carlos Mariátegui con la teoría marxista y su adaptación

de estas ideas a la realidad latinoamericana lo pusieron en conflicto con otras y otros de la

izquierda. En una conferencia continental de partidos comunistas en Buenos Aires en

1929, criticó la propuesta de la Internacional Comunista de dividir las Américas en

repúblicas independientes afrodescendientes y quechuas y aymaras, argumentando que

conceptualizar la lucha en términos étnicos en lugar de términos de clase era un error. Los

documentos conservados en los archivos de la Internacional Comunista sugieren que estos

comentarios hicieron eco en Moscú. Dos documentos en español recientemente traducidos

en torno a la “cuestión nacional” desafían las nociones de que los funcionarios de la

Internacional Comunista no estaban al tanto o estaban mal informados sobre los acontec-

imientos en América Latina, asunto que resultan importante para comprender sus respu-

estas y desafíos a las ideas de Mariátegui sobre raza y nacionalidades oprimidas.

Keywords: José Carlos Mariátegui, National question, Race, Comintern, Indigenous

peoples

José Carlos Mariátegui has justifiably gained renown for his open and

dynamic engagement with Marxist theory and his adaptation of those ideas to

his Latin American reality (Chavarría, 1979; Vanden, 1986). His heterodox

approach brought him into conflict with other leftists even as he sought to

Marc Becker is a historian of the Latin American left with a particular interest in race, class, and

gender within popular movements in the Andes and a participating editor of Latin American

Perspectives. He is the author of Contemporary Latin American Revolutions (2022), The CIA in Ecuador

(2020), and The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files (2017), editor and translator of Proceedings of

the First Latin American Communist Conference, June 1929 (forthcoming), coeditor (with Richard

Stahler-Sholk and Harry E. Vanden) of Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical Action

from Below (2015), and coeditor and translator (with Harry Vanden) of José Carlos Mariátegui: An

Anthology (2011).

1095462LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221095462Latin American PerspectivesBecker/MARIÁTEGUI, RACE, AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION

research-article2022

Becker/MARIÁTEGUI, RACE, AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION 127

bring his Peruvian socialist party in line with the Moscow-based Communist

or Third International (Comintern). These issues and debates were on full dis-

play at a continental conference of communist parties that the South American

Secretariat of the Comintern convened in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in June 1929

(SSA, 1929). In particular, fellow delegates and Comintern envoys challenged

the Peruvians on two issues: the first was Mariátegui’s determination to form

a socialist rather than a communist party as the Comintern dictated for admis-

sion into the transnational body, and the second was a direct challenge to its

proposals to create a Quechua and Aymara republic in South America (Becker,

2006).

This second issue is particularly curious both because Jules Humbert-Droz,

the head of the Comintern’s Latin American Bureau in Moscow, had deliber-

ately brought Mariátegui into the discussions on race when seemingly no one

else in its inner circles could address the topic properly (Mothes, 1992: 157) and

because Mariátegui has subsequently become closely identified with a defense

of native rights (Leibner, 1999). At the conference, he criticized the Comintern’s

proposal to carve up the Americas into independent African-descent and

Quechua and Aymara republics. From his perspective, nation-state formation

was far too advanced to think about altering colonial boundaries. Furthermore,

and more significant, he contended that conceptualizing the struggle in ethnic

rather than class terms was a fundamental mistake. Mariátegui famously wrote

in his thesis on racial problems (SSA, 1929: 288),

The constitution of the Indian race in an autonomous state would not lead to

the dictatorship of the Indian proletariat, much less to the formation of a class-

less Indian state, as some have claimed, but to the constitution of a bourgeois

Indian state with all the internal and external contradictions of the bourgeois

states. . . . Only the revolutionary class movement of the exploited Indian

masses will allow for them to give a real meaning to the liberation of their race

from exploitation.

In Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, Mariátegui (1971 [1928]: 31) had

already advanced the materialist claim that the “Indian problem” was funda-

mentally a socioeconomic problem rooted in the country’s land tenure system

and needed to be addressed on that level.

From documents preserved in the Comintern archives it appears that

Mariátegui’s comments in Buenos Aires had echoes in Moscow as others

scrambled to denounce what they saw as a heretical position on what came to

be known as “the national question” (Stalin, 1942). Furthermore, a false and

persistent stereotype has emerged of Marxists as class reductionists who privi-

lege economic issues over everything else and in particular minimize or ignore

issues of racial discrimination and gendered oppression (Wood, 1986; Reed,

2019). Rather, as debates within the Comintern make crystal clear, issues of

racial discrimination were very much at the forefront in the minds of those

leaders, although a persistent question was how to overcome what was some-

times denounced as white chauvinism and today is seen as white suprema-

cism. In a sense, these debates foreshadowed what would much later come to

be known as “intersectionality” as a way of understanding and challenging the