Revisiting Marxism in José Carlos Mariátegui

• Author: Pascual García-Macías
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221094553
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

210 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Revisiting Marxism in José Carlos Mariátegui

by

Pascual García-Macías

Mike Gonzalez In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui. Chicago:

Haymarket Books, 2019.

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221094553

Mike Gonzalez, professor emeritus of Latin American studies at the

University of Glasgow and the author of The Ebb of the Pink Tide (2019) and Hugo

Chávez: Socialist for the Twenty-first Century (2014), takes us on a tour of Peru at

the beginning of the twentieth century through the mind and actions of José

Carlos Mariátegui. In its 10 chapters, In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos

Mariátegui delves into the life of a Latin American who is considered one of the

most original and innovative Marxists in the region and the world. Mariátegui

was an organic intellectual who found congruence and coherence in a Gramscian

(1981) philosophy of praxis of which the journal Amauta and the Frente Popular

(Popular Front) were clear examples. Despite the complexity of the events of

Mariátegui’s life, Gonzales details them simply, beginning with his early years

in Peru and continuing with his tour of Europe and finally his return. The book

introduces the Anglophone reader to the importance of the little-known

Mariátegui, exploring his ideas and his life and showing the genius with which

he read and interpreted the work of intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Georges

Sorel, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Antonio Labriola, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon

Trotsky, among others.

As John Beverley (1999) has argued in a decolonial (postcolonial) reading, Mariátegui

developed an innovative, original, heterodox Marxism. By shifting the leading figures

of orthodox Marxism, Beverley causes us to reflect on the power and validity of

Mariátegui’s breaking with the colonial pattern that considers Western thought leaders

the sole source of knowledge, a form of colonization in times of globalization. The prob-

lem of the coloniality of knowledge is the naturalization and imposition of Western

knowledge on every society, disregarding the heterogeneity of productive economies

in, among other things, productive capacity, resources, and culture (Walsh, 2012). In

fact, the reception of Gramsci’s thought in the Global South is understood by decolonial

thinkers such as Lander (2003) as part of the Eurocentric culture that has made the con-

tinuation of native culture impossible (Quijano, 1992). The question then arises, Why

import ideas when the Latin American thought—not only Marxism—offers categories

and concepts more in line with Latin American reality?

Gonzalez starts his work by pointing to the links between Mariátegui and Marx, the

importance, relevance, and validity of his thought on myth, and the move from the

myth of progress to the myth of revolution and change, stressing the way Marxist revo-

lutionary discourse fell into disuse or was discredited. He outlines Mariátegui’s idea

about myth in his “El hombre y el mito,” published in Mundial of Lima in 1925 and

reproduced in Amauta (No. 31) in 1930. Gonzalez quotes Mariátegui (1925: 2): “Man, as

philosophy defines him, is a metaphysical animal. He does not live productively with-

out a metaphysical conception of life. Myth moves man throughout history. Without

myth, the existence of man lacks historical meaning.” Here Mariátegui employs the

Pascual García-Macías is a professor of political economy and development theories at the

Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja and a postdoctoral fellow in development studies at the

Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas.