Forking Paths of Historiography
José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) remains one of the most influential theorists in the history of Marxism. His work intervened in early twentieth-century debates about imperialism, capitalism, race, modernity, nationalism and fascism, several of which are still ongoing in some form today. Moreover, Mariátegui scholarship has reached an exciting juncture. For several decades, Mariátegui’s thought was primarily interpreted by historians as an exercise in the Latin Americanisation of Marxism: he was understood as a thinker who had transformed hitherto European ideas to become congruent with peculiarly Latin American national realities. This approach to Mariátegui – what can be called the Latin American Marxism paradigm – emerged in the context of the New Left in Latin America during the Cold War.Footnote 1 This paradigm has subsequently enjoyed lasting influence on the historical analysis of Mariátegui’s thought, extending into the post-Cold War period.Footnote 2 Since the 2010s, however, a shift has taken place in the study of Mariátegui. A small number of historians have begun to excavate the ways in which Mariátegui thought in global terms, too.
Martín Bergel has been key to the development of this new approach. He argues that Mariátegui ought to be understood as a ‘cosmopolitan’ Marxist who envisaged socialism as a worldwide process, instigated by the Bolshevik Revolution, and who understood himself as participating in a global context of debate rather than a narrowly Latin American one.Footnote 3 More recently, Paulo Drinot has suggested a similarly global framework, emphasising the diverse ways in which Mariátegui conceptualised ‘the global’, and also how Mariátegui was himself a global actor, formed by a globalised conjuncture.Footnote 4 Furthermore, the global turn in Mariátegui scholarship has also merged with work recuperating the central place of modernity as a concept in his thought, insofar as Mariátegui’s ideas of the modern and the global were co-constitutive.Footnote 5
The new global scholarship has built constructively upon the contributions of the earlier Latin American Marxism paradigm. It illuminates a dimension of Mariátegui’s thought which had been overlooked in a Cold War context when the interpretive priority of the New Left had been to stress Mariátegui’s Latin Americanising innovations, in order to articulate the idea of an originally Latin American Marxist tradition juxtaposed to the Soviet model. Now, in a very different context of compounding crises for the post-Cold War ‘liberal international order’, in which intellectual historians of diverse regions have begun to revisit anti-imperial thinkers from the Global South to recover the ‘worldmaking’ praxis developed amid twentieth-century decolonisation, our historical understanding of Mariátegui, too, is being deepened by a global approach which is not only concerned with the ways in which he Latin Americanised global Marxism, but also looks at how Mariátegui contributed to global thinking himself.Footnote 6
However, global readings of Mariátegui are missing an opportunity made possible by their own analytical innovations: to develop a holistic historical understanding of Mariátegui’s thought in both its global and national terms. Instead, without repudiating the contributions of the Latin American Marxism approach, the new global analysis tends to diverge from it. Thus, we are left with a situation of two Mariáteguis, co-existent yet somewhat incoherent – the Peruvian Mariátegui and the global Mariátegui.
In part, this situation results from contrasting (and equally valid) contextualisations of Mariátegui’s intellectual activity. Thus, Bergel, in order to interpret Mariátegui in cosmopolitan terms, focuses on the global contexts in which Mariátegui was intervening, whereas characterisations of Mariátegui as a primarily Peruvian thinker have contextualised his writing in terms of the nationalist debates within Perú during the 1920s.Footnote 7 There is one context, however, which makes sense of the different scales of Mariátegui’s thought simultaneously: the context of anti-Bolshevism in Perú and Latin America after 1917. Mariátegui’s Peruvianising and globalising articulations of Marxist theory were coherent insofar as they were both responding to anti-Bolshevism as it emerged in Latin America. Interpreting Mariátegui’s Marxism in this context offers a new, historically holistic understanding of the different ‘Mariáteguis’ which have emerged from the past half-century of historiography.
The anti-Bolshevik context of both Mariátegui’s national and global thinking discloses a form of coherence in terms of the ‘logic of question and answer’, insofar as both approaches were intended to answer the same basic ‘question’ posed by anti-Bolshevism in Perú after 1917: why ought Marxism to be introduced here?Footnote 8 The anti-Bolshevik context allows us to comprehend Mariátegui as a coherent intellectual actor after 1917 in terms of the intentional dimension of his political thought; that is, in terms of what he was ‘trying to do with words’.Footnote 9 Mariátegui was attempting with both his conceptually global and conceptually national arguments to globalise Marxism. He was doing this against anti-Bolshevik opponents in Latin America who were intent upon averting or reversing such globalisation through the ideological Othering of Marxism in the region. (Nota bene: the globalisation of Marxism in this context means legitimising the introduction of Marxist praxis from Europe to Perú; thus, the practical globalisation of Marxism could involve but was not reducible to thinking through Marxism in conceptually global terms.)
The term ‘anti-Bolshevism’ is mainly used here, rather than ‘anticommunism’, but this is not to suggest that the former was separate from the history of the latter. Rather, in Mariátegui’s case, ‘anti-Bolshevism’ better captures the historical specificity of the reaction in 1920s Perú against his particular mode of communism. On one level, this works semantically: Mariátegui sometimes referred to Peruvian communists as ‘Bolsheviks’ after 1917, and his opponents did so routinely.Footnote 10 But the point runs deeper, too. The terminology of Bolshevism captures the specific conjuncture of communism’s global history in which Mariátegui acted: in the immediate wake of the October Revolution and amid Soviet Russia’s new worldmaking project, centred on the Comintern. As will be seen, this context was formative to Mariátegui’s Marxism, especially its cosmopolitan aspects. Moreover, crucially, it was Mariátegui’s fundamental commitment to the project of Bolshevik worldmaking after 1917, based in Europe, that distinguished his understanding of Marxism from that of his anti-Bolshevik critics on the Left in Latin America, who often also used the political language of Marxism.
That being said, because anti-Bolshevism represents a particular moment within the longer history of anticommunism in Latin America, this paper also contributes to the ongoing excavation of a ‘long Cold War’ in the region, especially in terms of the dialectical development of communism and anticommunism; revolution and counterrevolution.Footnote 11 In the Brazilian and Argentine cases, Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, Ernesto Bohoslavsky and Marina Franco have recently shown how the interwar period was formative for anticommunism in the region. These scholars additionally make clear how anticommunism emerged during this period not only as a mode of counterrevolutionary discourse but also as a set of repressive state practices, which was also true of 1920s Perú.Footnote 12 However, intellectually, this work focuses on the anticommunist imagination rather than the dialectical relationship between the development of communism and of anticommunism in Latin American thought.Footnote 13 This reflects a wider tendency to silo the intellectual development of the Left and the Right in modern Latin America, which this paper tries to avoid.Footnote 14
By rereading Mariátegui’s global and Latin American articulations of Marxism in the context of anti-Bolshevism we can uncover connections between the two currents of his thought. In doing so, the two traditions of historiography about Mariátegui can be held together, yielding a new, holistic understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most innovative thinkers. Thus, this article does not pretend to uncover a new area or theme of Mariátegui’s thought. Rather, it uncovers a new relationship between two well-studied parts of it – the national and the global – which have been approached separately until now. Moreover, the article also does not pretend to offer a comprehensive treatment of Mariátegui’s work but rather an illustrative one. It presents a way to analyse the different modalities of his Marxism – a framework – which might then be taken up and used by others to study his wider body of writing. Thus, certain well-known Mariátegui texts are given light or no treatment here, including Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana.Footnote 15 That being said, the article does historicise a number of Mariátegui’s writings which have frequently been decontextualised, not least the 1928 editorial ‘Aniversario y balance’,Footnote 16 a key text in the Latin Americanist reading of Mariátegui and the source of some of his best-known, yet least understood, quotations.
Mariátegui’s Marxism
In order to grasp how Mariátegui defended and developed Marxism in Perú, his Marxism needs to first be defined; and there are various ways of going about this. We might consider Mariátegui’s Marxism in terms of a ‘political language’; that is, as a discrete conceptual language for the description and evaluation of political and social reality, similar to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of a ‘paradigm’.Footnote 17 However, the category of political language is too broad to clarify Mariátegui’s distinctive political commitments in interwar Perú. Indeed, a Pocockian ‘language’ is defined by the possibility ‘[of arguing] within it from opposed premises to diverse conclusions’.Footnote 18 Thus, Mariátegui’s principal interlocutors during the 1920s were also able to make use of the language of socialism, including even Augusto Leguía’s populist state-building project. In interwar Perú, ‘socialism’ as a language was often something to do politics with – a terrain for the struggle of opposed projects – rather than something to do politics over – an object of struggle itself. And the same was true even of specifically Marxist language, in the context of Mariátegui’s bitter struggles within the Left during the later 1920s. Thus, in order to get a clear sense of the Marxism that Mariátegui was struggling to globalise during the 1920s, we need to try to conceptualise it with more precise tools.
A definition of Mariátegui’s Marxism better able to distinguish his position within the polemical contexts of 1920s Perú can be constructed from his subjective interpretation and usages of Marxist analytical categories. Mariátegui consistently understood Marxism as integral to a positively valued concept of modernity.Footnote 19 He also comprehended Marxism in global terms: he understood Marxist theory as a globally applicable method of social analysis, and he saw the Bolshevik Revolution as a worldmaking project.Footnote 20 Moreover, Mariátegui’s global conceptualisation of Marxism was also explicitly Occidentalist; he viewed Europe and the wider political category of the West as still being the engine of world history, especially in relation to Latin America.Footnote 21 And in addition to the emphases on modernity and globality, Mariátegui also approached Marxist praxis as voluntarist rather than economically determinist.Footnote 22
Thus, Mariátegui’s Marxism was distinguished by conceptual emphases on modernity, globality and voluntarism. However, his Marxism cannot be defined entirely within the sphere of language. It also requires analysis at a closer remove between political theory and practice. Specifically, a key feature of Mariátegui’s Marxism in interwar Perú was a practical commitment to the Third International (the Comintern), seen as the trans- and inter-national political network and model for Marxist praxis after 1917.Footnote 23 This practical commitment was fundamental to Mariátegui’s conceptualisation of Marxism: involvement with the Comintern and its institutions made concrete the ‘global-ness’ of Mariátegui’s Marxist ideal.
Whereas Alberto Flores Galindo emphasised Mariátegui’s significant disagreements with Comintern officials in South America during the late 1920s, and subsequent historiography has tended to emphasise the ‘heterodoxy’ of Mariátegui’s communism, he was actually an admirer of the Bolshevik party form and saw the Third International as fundamental to the anti-imperialist potential of European socialism; Mariátegui and his Peruvian collaborators were active participants in Comintern politics as it emerged in South America after 1917.Footnote 24 This fact has been elided in recent scholarship by a binary between Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’. Indeed, while disagreeing with certain Comintern policies at the end of the decade, Mariátegui was increasingly concerned with the importance of political discipline, attributing various deviations from socialism to the incapacity of politicians and intellectuals to subordinate themselves to a party line.Footnote 25 Moreover, Mariátegui’s practical adherence to the Comintern also became the focus of his anti-Bolshevik opponents in Perú: Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) emphasised the Comintern connection in his critique of Mariátegui, as did conservative critics.Footnote 26 For both Mariátegui and his anti-Bolshevik interlocutors, his practical commitments to the Comintern defined the version of Marxism which he was trying to globalise during the 1920s.
Anti-Bolshevik Currents in Interwar Perú
Since the emergence of an urban working class in Perú during the final third of the nineteenth century, there had existed a fear among the traditional economic elites that it would become a source of social revolution.Footnote 27 Insofar as this fear had been manifest in political discourse, it had invoked older, anti-Jacobin tropes of counterrevolution traceable to the turn of the nineteenth century. These tropes included the negative description of the social claims of labour as anarchistic, and a wider, reactionary defence of a concept of ‘order’ defined by hitherto existing property relations.Footnote 28
For his part, Mariátegui was aware of the traditional antisocialism of the creole ruling class in Perú. In a 1918 article published in Lima, amid the early excitement caused by the news of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mariátegui acknowledged the habitual hostility of Peruvian elites to socialism. He observed certain continuities between traditional anti-Jacobinism and more recent reactions to socialism in Perú in a number of shared tropes, such as the imputation of atheistic freemasonry, as well as their tendency to depoliticise the claims of the working classes, rendering them instead as forms of vice and criminality, especially in relation to property (larceny, theft) and productivity (drunkenness, laziness, etc.).Footnote 29 In 1918, Mariátegui still optimistically attributed the anti-socialism of creole elites in Perú to ignorance rather than class self-interest, likening it to discredited ‘folklore’ in other areas of knowledge, such as medicine.Footnote 30 It was only after his return from Europe that Mariátegui began to recognise oligarchic anti-Bolshevism as a matter of class interest rather than naivety.
There was also a Catholic form of anti-Bolshevism in interwar Perú, situated both in the longer history of Catholic counterrevolution in Latin America, and in the wider, transnational reaction of the Catholic Church to Bolshevism after 1917.Footnote 31 Both of these anti-Bolshevik currents, of Peruvian landowners and the Catholic Church, soon coalesced around the Leguía regime after 1919. Leguía, who had originally emerged from the establishment ranks of civilismo, broke with the Partido Civil after his first presidency (1908–12).Footnote 32 He was in London when the late-1910s surge of working-class and student protest broke out in Perú. Leguía (or an idea of Leguía) was fixed upon by student leaders in Perú as a vehicle for revolutionary change, and he used this opportunity to be elected president for a second time, now as an outwardly transformative candidate, in July 1919. Shortly after Leguía’s election, he staged an internal coup in order to curtail congressional opposition to his new presidency.
Some ideologues of leguiísmo, such as Clemente Palma (1872–1946), made use of the idiom of socialism to describe the new regime, albeit in the sense of a technocratic and socially harmonising project, as opposed to proletarian class struggle. However, the functional character of Leguía’s ‘Patria Nueva’ (the term given to his regime during the 1920s) was consistently populist in the classical Latin American sense of reproducing capitalism through the state-led reconciliation of capital and labour, including the violent repression of class politics and social revolution. Thus, from the beginning of Leguía’s rule, revolutionary intellectuals including Mariátegui himself were exiled.Footnote 33 Moreover, leguiísmo, while practically anticommunist throughout the 1920s, explicitly realigned with the traditional forces of social order in Perú after 1923. This was partly a response to Indigenous rebellion in the Andean sierra as well as the opportunity for ideological support from organised Catholicism.
Leguía’s anti-Bolshevism was not reducible to the forms borrowed or inherited from Catholicism and the landowning class in Perú. Rather, the Patria Nueva embodied a positive project of social development which attributed a central role to the working class as an agent of nation-building.Footnote 34 Thus, more so than the oligarchy and the Church, leguiísmo contested the Peruvian Left for the organisational and ideological terrain of labour. Moreover, in this developmentalist frame, the posture of the Leguía state towards Peruvian workers was Janus-faced. Whereas Leguía’s positive programme was to construct an ideal working-class subject in Perú – industrially productive and politically obedient to an authoritarian capitalist state – the other side of this project was the repression of revolutionary activists intent upon working-class liberation through the overthrow of the existing political–economic regime by a class-conscious proletariat. Thus, the response of leguiísmo to the ‘social question’ in Perú was composed of an antinomy between a positive and a negative ideal of Peruvian labour. This form of anti-Bolshevism was an integral part of a wider project of right-populist nation-building and economic modernisation, inclusive of labour via social discipline and moral reformation.
Moreover, this project was also profoundly nationalist in its ideological content and strategy. Leguía’s ideologues routinely delegitimised revolutionary activism by Othering its agents as external and hostile to the Peruvian national community.Footnote 35 For example, in a 1926 speech, Pedro José Rada y Gamio, Leguía’s development minister and a fervent anti-Bolshevik, asked rhetorically:
Is it possible that the red books [i.e. socialist literature] … have produced any effect on the anaemic brains of the nation’s children? No, a thousand times no! … The worthless and useless people … are the damned souls, the ones who do not know what work really is, the ones that in their days of idleness and boredom do not appreciate the rewards of honest labour. They are capable of perpetrating crimes and disgrace, without caring about the nation and about its useful members … May retribution come soon to the unspeakable, antipatriotic and soulless people who want to disrupt Providence’s plans.Footnote 36
Here, Rada y Gamio combined usages of both Catholic anti-Bolshevik discourse, fixated on the themes of soul, damnation, conscience and Providence, and the developmentalist antinomy between ‘useful’ labour and the idleness of revolutionary labour, in an overarching framework of nationalist Othering.
If the threads of counterrevolutionary anti-Bolshevism in Perú coalesced around leguiísmo, a different anti-Bolshevism of the Left emerged during the later 1920s in the form of aprismo. In 1924, the intellectual and student leader, Haya de la Torre, established APRA while exiled in Mexico City.Footnote 37 Mariátegui had been political allies with Haya since the early 1920s, in a context of cooperative plurality on the Peruvian Left.Footnote 38 For two years after the creation of the APRA, Mariátegui, as a communist, was happy to adhere to the new organisation insofar as it operated as a united front of discrete political entities. However, during the second half of the 1920s, a split emerged between Haya’s direction of aprismo and the communist movement in Perú.Footnote 39 The proximate cause of the split was Haya’s (re)organisation of APRA: he began transforming the movement into a unitary party.Footnote 40 However, when Haya began to elaborate points of ideological difference between aprismo and Latin American communism the result was a novel, left anti-Bolshevism in Perú.
Haya’s aprista critique of Latin American communism included questions of party political organisation and tactics.Footnote 41 However, his most ideologically effective argument was the epistemological claim that Marxism, in its Bolshevik iteration of a single world revolution against capitalist imperialism organised around the Comintern, was inapplicable in Latin America due to its European provenance. Mariátegui was immediately aware of this line of attack; as he complained in 1928, ‘I believe that I am closer to reality and closer to Perú than them [the apristas], despite my presumed Europeanism [Europeísmo].’Footnote 42
In one sense, the APRA critique of Bolshevik Europeísmo in Perú was institutional. Haya argued that communism, in its commitment to the Comintern, was in fact a device of Soviet foreign policy as opposed to an autonomous internationalist movement: ‘the Communist Party … is a single worldwide party – not a federation of parties – directed absolutely and in a completely centralised way from Moscow’.Footnote 43 In this argument, communist internationalism in the (semi-)colonial world was negatively redescribed as a quasi-imperial form of subordination to Soviet Russia. This iteration of aprista anti-Bolshevism was used by Haya to elaborate the raison d’état of aprismo in a hemispheric setting where the Comintern-backed Liga Antiimperialista de las Américas (LADLA) already existed. Haya argued that, by contrast to LADLA, the APRA was an ‘autonomous movement’; it was ‘completely Latin American, without foreign intervention or influences’.Footnote 44
The aprista critique of Latin American communism’s European links also rested upon a deeper, epistemological assumption that ideological programmes and their epistemic principles ought to be qualitatively distinct – in authorship and ideational content – according to the finite, regional(ised) space in which they were being applied. In this view, the validity of a form of Marxism outside of Latin America did not imply but rather precluded its validity inside that region. Thus, Haya claimed in 1928 that, ‘on the Right and the Left, we find the same lack of creative spirit and very similar vices of a lack of adaptation and utopian foreignism. Our surroundings and our imported modern cultures have not yet emerged from the pristine stage of transplant.’Footnote 45 On this basis, aprismo rejected Mariátegui’s effort to globalise Bolshevik Marxism as a failure of intellectual creativity. Haya redescribed Mariátegui’s embrace of Bolshevik cosmopolitanism as symptomatic of the ‘mental colonialism’ of Europe in Latin/Indo America, which the apristas had supposedly left behind.Footnote 46 In this regionally compartmentalised view of world politics, Mariátegui’s cosmopolitan Marxism and its Bolshevik concept of world revolution overlooked the need for regional adaptation in revolutionary politics, instead functioning as an alibi for European imperialism.
The left anti-Bolshevism of aprismo in Perú, therefore, asserted an epistemic division between Latin American and European cultures, and used that division to Other Bolshevik-inflected Marxism in Latin America as finitely European and, thus, incapable of responding to the social and cultural needs of regions in the non-European world. Ironically, however, in reinforcing the nationalist premise of the anti-Bolshevik Right, the APRA undermined its own position in Perú. As an international party itself, albeit not a global one like the Comintern, the APRA was also Othered by the Leguía regime and later by that of Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro (1931–3) as being alien to Perú because internationalist.Footnote 47 The APRA’s Othering of communism due to its internationalism, while useful for short-term manoeuvring within the Peruvian Left, helped narrow the conditions for left politics as such in the country.
Mariátegui was thus faced by an array of anti-Bolshevisms in interwar Perú. Significant political tensions existed among them, especially between the state and aprismo. However, both leguiísta and aprista anti-Bolshevisms converged upon a nationalist logic of Othering. Leguía accused revolutionary communists of antipatriotism and Haya Othered Latin American communism as European. Analytically, ‘Othering’ in this context can be understood as a particular mode of anticommunism which was fundamentally spatial, asserting the illegitimacy of communism in terms of its inapplicability to a specified locale or overlapping locales due to the supposed Otherness of communism therein. In the global history of anticommunism since 1917, this Othering logic has been recurrent.Footnote 48 Moreover, as in 1920s Perú, it has frequently been articulated in nationalist idioms, wherein communism could be delegitimised as an antinational form of activity.
Nationalist Othering enjoyed such ideological force in 1920s Perú because Peruvian society was undergoing a moment of intensified nation- and state-building activity. In this context, the norm of nationality – as both actuality and aspiration – was continually invested with positive meaning by diverse actors, making it part of the common sense: a terrain of ideological struggle more than a contestable value. In 1920s Perú, this process of nation-building was taking place in the medium-term context of national defeat by Chile in the War of the Pacific, and the subsequent moral panic about the shallowness of patriotic sentiment in the population.Footnote 49 It was also occurring as part of a wider, regional process of state-building throughout Latin America, in response to the expansion of world capitalism since the mid-nineteenth century. In this context, state-building became financially affordable and nation-building became politically urgent, as a means to manage capitalist transformation through the construction of socially vertical national identities which could mitigate the divisive impact of the processes of class formation inherent to capitalist development.Footnote 50
Peruvian nationalism, therefore, was already a dominant discourse before the interwar period, and this made nationalist Othering a powerful discursive tool for delegitimising opponents. Thus, Mariátegui himself employed the logic of Othering, such as in his critique of conservative hispanismo for mimicking Western European models of national chauvinism which, he argued, were alien to ‘real’ Peruvianness as defined in the radical idiom of indigenismo.Footnote 51 However, Marxism – especially as articulated by Mariátegui – had a peculiar, conceptual vulnerability on the nationalist terrain, given its clear associations with the global and the European. The diasporic formation of several early Peruvian communists, including Mariátegui, was also cited by nationalist opponents to Other the movement. Mariátegui often met this criticism head on, arguing that the time he and other comrades had spent in Europe had given them a greater closeness to Peruvian reality by revealing its global dimensions.Footnote 52
Indeed, Mariátegui was acutely aware of the Othering logic of his critics. In a 1924 article, ‘Lo nacional y lo exótico’, he observed how ‘frequently one hears warnings against the assimilation of foreign ideas’. Mariátegui interpreted this discourse as ‘a simply reactionary attitude, disguised as nationalism’, which amounted to a ‘dogma’ as opposed to an intellectually considered ‘thesis’.Footnote 53 But even in this essay, where Mariátegui was at his most critical of ‘jingoism’ from the standpoint of a cosmopolitan theory of politics, he still did not dispute the positive value of nationalism per se – a sign of its social power, and of Mariátegui’s own investment in the imaginary of Peruvianness – although he did propose a more ecumenical meaning of Peruvian nationalism that rejected the reactionary variant being used by anti-Bolsheviks to Other Marxism.Footnote 54 Moreover, despite his close personal association with exile, Mariátegui also participated in nationalist critiques of diaspora in the context of his split with aprismo during the late 1920s, arguing that Haya’s ongoing exile from Perú had led to his erratic and personalist political departures.Footnote 55 Thus, as much as Peruvian communists had specific vulnerability in the nationalist context of the 1920s, that context also shaped their own polemical positions within and outside the Left.
The logic of Othering followed by the anti-Bolshevism of the Right and the Left in interwar Perú was also situated in larger and longer-term patterns in the history of Marxism. Since the early development of Marxism in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, the tradition had experienced a ‘national problem’ insofar as its basic principle of proletarian internationalism – ‘workers of the world, unite’ – was being effectively undercut by the construction of vertically coherent, imagined national communities.Footnote 56 Thus, nationalist Othering quickly became endemic to the Marxist experience. There was a certain conceptual logic to this conflict – class-based solidarity across territorial borders being undermined by the nationalist reification of those borders. However, the temptation to abstract that logic, as an explanatory framework, from the specific historical conditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ought to be resisted. The political force of this conceptual contradiction was an historical phenomenon, rooted in the fact that the emergence of Marxism coincided with the intensification of nation-building in nineteenth-century Europe, often, as in Perú, as a direct response to the threat of social revolution from below.Footnote 57 Indeed, the emergences of Marxism and modern nationalism were both responses to the expansion of capitalism during the nineteenth century: the former aimed at overthrowing the capitalist mode of production on behalf of proletarian labour, and the latter aimed at facilitating and stabilising it.
Moreover, in the new global context created by the Bolshevik rupture of 1917, this dialectic between Marxist internationalism and nationalist Othering took on new, more rabid forms, in proportion to the heightened anxiety of national ruling classes. European nationalisms were already being radicalised by the First World War before 1917, driven by the ideological imperatives of popular mobilisation and the political opportunity to found nation-states in colonised territories such as Ireland and Poland. After 1917, when the Bolshevik Revolution and its project of proletarian and peasant internationalism came into direct conflict with these intensified European nationalisms, especially on the western borders of the Russian empire, the ideological reaction by nationalists created violent new forms of anti-Bolshevik Othering.Footnote 58 It was in the context of the Polish-Soviet War (1918–21) that the antisemitic trope of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ emerged from militarised Polish nationalism.Footnote 59 The trope was invented to Other Bolshevism within Europe by characterising it as a Jewish ideology, with Jewishness interpreted through an antisemitic lens as an antinational form of cosmopolitanism. Thus, Marxism was Othered as belonging to no nation, rather than to a specified foreign nation or region.
Moreover, the antisemitic iteration of anti-Bolshevism was quickly globalised beyond Europe, through the vehicles of both the transnational Catholic Church and various nationalisms of the Right, including in Latin America. A discourse of antisemitism was employed against labour agitation in Argentina at the end of the 1910s; and Leguía’s crackdown on the Left in Perú at the end of the 1920s was justified by the myth of a Jewish communist plot against the state.Footnote 60 The anti-Bolshevism of leguiísmo cannot be made sense of outside the transatlantic context of new forms of right authoritarianism, including fascism, which had consolidated in reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution. Indeed, the Patria Nueva was routinely analogised to Miguel Primo de Rivera’s Spain and Benito Mussolini’s Italy.Footnote 61
Aprista anti-Bolshevism was also situated in a wider, global context of anti-imperialist nationalism during the early twentieth century. Numerous nationalist and regionalist movements adopted an essentialist ontology of race and semi-hermetic concepts of culture,Footnote 62 and it was no coincidence that such languages grew in the colonial world at the same moment as the Bolshevik Revolution – both were critical responses to Western imperialism and its global crisis from the mid-1910s onward. The large regionalisms – Latin Americanism, Pan-Asian and Pan-Islamist politics, Pan-Africanism – moved to contest imperialism at the supra-national level of politics which imperialism itself had done so much to forge; while anticolonial nationalisms seeking smaller nation-states proliferated in the context of the liberal ‘Wilsonian moment’ after 1917 before they did so in Leninist terms.Footnote 63 Moreover, as in the case of aprismo in Perú, these anticolonial nationalisms often competed with communism for hegemony of the anti-imperialist struggle, including by Othering it as a foreign ideology. Thus, as Mariátegui found in Latin America, revolutionary anticolonialism was not immune to the parochial, culturalist mode of anticommunism then thriving in Europe.
Mariátegui was attuned to the fact that the nationalist Othering of Marxism he encountered in Perú had an older history in the Marxist tradition. He observed how antisemitism was being used within 1920s Europe to interdict the transnational movement of Marxism, and he was an attentive analyst of the various counterrevolutionary terrors taking place in central and eastern Europe during the period of his exile and afterward, and of their use of antisemitic nationalism, specifically.Footnote 64 Moreover, Mariátegui was also aware of the structural potential for conflict between nationalist and Marxist–Leninist anti-imperialisms in the colonial world. He was a concerned observer of the Chinese Kuomintang, which he understood as analogical to the APRA, and which he interpreted as proof of the contradiction between bourgeois nationalism and communist internationalism in the colonial world, because the former inevitably betrayed cross-class coalitions against imperialism out of a prior interest in capitalism.Footnote 65
Marxist Thought in the Context of Creole Anti-Bolshevism
Mariátegui was in Perú when he developed his social and political thinking in response to anti-Bolshevism. By situating his Marxist thought during the 1920s in this context, we can appreciate how his nationalising and globalising conceptual moves were coherent, insofar as both strategies were intended to undermine the same argument put forward in Perú by anti-Bolshevik Othering: that Marxism was illegitimate there due to its foreignness. Given the strength and range of Mariátegui’s opposition, this was a difficult task, but not a forlorn one. During the 1920s, anti-Bolshevism was as ideologically incipient, unfamiliar and experimental as Mariátegui’s communist project (albeit enjoying the instruments for ‘dominance without hegemony’ in the form of Leguía’s authoritarian state). In Gramscian terms, neither side had achieved hegemony in Peruvian society, and they remained in a contentious ‘war of position’ at the time of Mariátegui’s death.Footnote 66 It was only in the 1930s, partly enabled by the self-destructive Stalinisation of the Peruvian Communist Party, that anticommunism really pulled ahead within and outside the Left.Footnote 67
Globalising ‘Perú’
The global reinterpretation of Mariátegui’s thinking in recent years has tended to focus upon his global contexts.Footnote 68 However, Mariátegui also intended his global reading of Marxism as an intervention in the Peruvian public sphere: to counteract anti-Bolshevik Othering within the national context. And yet this usage of Mariátegui’s global Marxism has also been overlooked by scholars working within the Latin American Marxism paradigm. This oversight seems partly due to an assumption that the introduction of Marxist ideas to Perú from Europe could only have been legitimised by nationalising those ideas conceptually. However, this approach forecloses the possibility of alternative strategies being used to undermine the Othering of Marxism. In fact, Mariátegui repeatedly tried to effect the practical globalisation of Marxism to Perú by the conceptual globalisation of Peruvianness.
This was especially true during the early 1920s. When Mariátegui arrived back in Perú in 1923, he was quickly invited to give a lecture series in Lima about his recent experiences in Europe. He decided to devote the series to a history of the ongoing ‘global crisis’, by which he meant the First World War and the connected crisis of world capitalism unlocked by the Bolshevik Revolution. Given the expansive theme of the series, Mariátegui delivered lectures on diverse topics. Most were centred on Europe, although a minority focused on the (semi-)colonial world, including lectures on the Mexican Revolution and anticolonial agitation in Asia.Footnote 69 However, it was the opening lecture, entitled ‘La crisis mundial y el proletariado peruano’,Footnote 70 which provided the conceptual frame for the series as a whole.
This lecture was intended to undermine the Othering of Bolshevik Marxism in Perú:
Those who say that Perú, and America in general, live very distant from the European revolution, have no notion of contemporary life … These people are surprised that Europe’s most advanced ideals should come to Perú; but, by contrast, they are not surprised that the aeroplane, the ocean liner, the wireless telegraph, the radio come; all the most advanced expressions … of Europe’s material advance. The same reason would exist for ignoring the socialist movement as for ignoring Einstein’s theory of relativity. And I am sure that it would not occur to the most reactionary of our intellectuals – almost all are intransigent reactionaries – that the study and popularisation of the new physics … ought to be banned.Footnote 71
At the outset, therefore, Mariátegui was debating the exclusion of Marxism from Perú as European. He was also confronting leguiísta anti-Bolshevism more specifically. After 1919, he remained allusive when it came to criticising the Peruvian government, in order to minimise the risk of political persecution. However, the species of anti-Bolshevik Othering which he challenged in ‘La crisis mundial’ was the one clustered around Leguía’s Patria Nueva: it shared in the normative world of European modernity, embracing its material features (aeroplanes, wireless telegraph, etc.), yet it did so with a depoliticising, technocratic approach that excluded the politically revolutionary features of modern Europe, especially Bolshevism.
Mariátegui’s response was to ridicule this understanding of European modernity as misleadingly compartmentalised. He argued instead that the material and ideal dimensions of modernity were holistic, and that this holism found its maximum expression in the worldmaking project of Bolshevik socialism. Indeed, on the prior question of defining modernity, Mariátegui insisted that Bolshevism was a constitutive component. In making this conceptual move, Mariátegui was able to conscript for Marxism the globalising telos of modernisation which was, by 1923, already widely accepted in Peruvian society, including by his leguiísta interlocutors. This move opened the way to delegitimising the Othering of Bolshevism in Perú as ‘reactionary’. Mariátegui could thus globalise Marxism on modernity’s coat tails, and undermine the question itself of whether Marxism ought to be imported into Perú by recasting it as part of an inevitable, teleological process of modernisation, not subject to political choice at all.
Mariátegui’s lecture also based the globalising telos of Bolshevism on a reconceptualisation of ‘Perú’ itself, as a globalised society that was, therefore, susceptible to the introduction of ideas from Europe:
The destinies of all the workers of the world are playing out in this European crisis. The development of the crisis should, then, interest the workers of Perú and the workers of the Far East alike. The crisis has Europe as its principal theatre; but the crisis of European institutions is the crisis of Occidental civilisation. And Perú, like the other peoples of America, moves within the orbit of this civilisation, not only because these countries are politically independent but economically colonial, hitched to the wagon of British capitalism, American capitalism, or French capitalism, but because our culture and our institutions are European. And it is precisely these democratic institutions which we copied from Europe, this culture, which we also copied from Europe, that are now in a period of definitive crisis, of total crisis, in Europe. Above all, capitalist civilisation has internationalised the life of humanity, it has created between all peoples material links that establish an inevitable solidarity. Internationalism is not only an ideal; it is an historical reality. Progress unifies and muddles the interests, ideas, customs and regimes of peoples. Perú, like the other American peoples, is not, therefore, outside of the crisis; it is within it.Footnote 72
Foregrounded here is Mariátegui’s Occidentalist conception of the world. There was a close relationship between Mariátegui’s understanding of global modernity and universality, on the one hand, and the Occident, a category which Mariátegui routinely counterposed to a negative and Orientalist idea of ‘the East’ as parochial and premodern, on the other.Footnote 73 This civilisational paradigm provided Mariátegui with a framework in which to legitimise the globalisation of ideas, including Marxism, from Europe to Latin America, on the basis of an interpretation of Latin America as a peculiarly Western region within the wider (semi-)colonial world. Thus, whereas Latin America was analogous to Asian societies in its material condition as a semi-colonial and colonial space, dominated and exploited by imperialism, it was categorically not ‘Eastern’ in terms of political institutions and culture; and, crucially, this fact imbued Marxism (and other European ideas) with a special globalising force in the Latin American part of the colonial world, where its diffusion was eased by cultural connection and, indeed, subordination to Europe. Thus, Perú and the other Latin American peoples moved ‘within the orbit of this civilisation, not only because these countries are politically independent but economically colonial … but because our culture and our institutions are European’,Footnote 74 and it was these institutions of European bourgeois democracy that were now in crisis wherever they had come to exist.
Mariátegui was not always consistent in this characterisation of (all of) Latin America as Western. In various moments during the 1920s he described Perú or Andean South America as more similar to Asia than Europe.Footnote 75 But in this 1923 instance, where Mariátegui was trying to legitimise the globalisation of Bolshevik Marxism from Europe as a European form of praxis, the interpretation of Latin America in the transatlantic civilisational frame of ‘the West’ was useful for undermining anti-Bolshevik Othering with the centripetal force of Eurocentrism. By proposing a globalised reconceptualisation of Peruvian reality within a Eurocentric conception of the global, Mariátegui could naturalise the importation of Marxist ideas there.
Moreover, Mariátegui was also globalising the idea of Perú with the categories of Marxist–Leninist political economy: ‘Above all, capitalist civilisation has internationalised the life of humanity, it has created between all peoples material links that establish an inevitable solidarity. Internationalism is not only an ideal; it is an historical reality.’Footnote 76 Influenced by Lenin, Mariátegui understood that modern capitalism had become a globalised world system: imperialism.Footnote 77 On this basis, he argued that the globalisation of Peruvian society was already an economic fact; it was, as an integral yet subordinated part of global capitalism, ‘politically independent but economically colonial’.Footnote 78 Therefore, because the ‘global crisis’ was a crisis of the capitalist system, it was a crisis internal to Peruvian social relations rather than peculiar to Europe. Moreover, inherent to Mariátegui’s characterisation of capitalist crisis was socialist revolution, functioning as both a trigger of, and response to, that crisis. In describing a global crisis of capitalism, Mariátegui was also therefore laying out a framework in which to globalise Marxist socialism; the latter was co-extensive with the former.
Included in Mariátegui’s effort to globalise the dialectic of late capitalism and socialism, too, was the conventional agent of socialist revolution: the proletariat, as a class in and for itself. Mariátegui’s lecture was explicitly addressed to the ‘Peruvian proletariat’, and he was encouraging his Lima audience to understand themselves with that class category. Mariátegui’s use of the Marxist concept of the proletariat here was another means to effect the globalisation of Marxism by globalising the idea of Perú, or of popular subjectivity within Peruvian society. Mariátegui’s concept of the proletariat was not only a class but an essentially global class; and it was essentially, rather than incidentally, global in two senses. First, transnational proletarian subjectivity took priority over national identity, hence Mariátegui’s invocation of the classic category of Marxian internationalism, ‘workers of the world’. The appropriate scale of proletarian existence was the world; specific national locations were relatively incidental. And this relates to the second sense in which Mariátegui’s proletariat was essentially global: its historical mission – the ‘workers of the world’ were to be the agent of the overthrow of capitalism at the planetary scale. Thus, Mariátegui attempted to globalise the subjectivity of Peruvian workers through a Marxist frame, redescribing them as protagonists in the present crisis of world capitalism. In this way, Peruvian workers’ identification with a vertically cohesive and hermetically sealed/sealable national community was undermined, at least insofar as the image of that community could be used to exclude Marxism. Instead, Mariátegui was trying to make Peruvian workers receptive to the introduction of Marxism as a global praxis by convincing his audience to reimagine themselves as a global agent of class struggle.
Thus, Mariátegui’s global Marxism was not only for global audiences. It cannot be made sense of outside the ideological contest within Perú between Mariátegui’s effort to practically globalise Marxism, on the one hand, and ‘reactionary’, anti-Bolshevik moves to exclude it, on the other. In ‘La crisis mundial y el proletariado peruano’, one of Mariátegui’s most emphatically cosmopolitan articulations of Marxism, his argument was developed in response to, and thus shaped by, the arguments of reactionary anti-Bolsheviks inside Perú. Mariátegui’s consequent moves to globalise Peruvian workers’ idea of Perú, as well as their subjectivity as social actors, were intended to undermine this anti-Bolshevik Othering.
Peruvianising Marxism
Mariátegui’s efforts to Peruvianise Marxism had the same intention – that of undermining anti-Bolshevik Othering – as his efforts to globalise the idea of Perú. The two strategies represent distinct responses to the same historical context and problem. In R. G. Collingwood’s logic of question and answer,Footnote 79 they were different answers to the same question: why ought Marxism be applied here, in Perú? But in the Peruvianising strategy, Mariátegui attempted to overcome the Othering of Marxism in Perú by reconceptualising Marxism itself, leaving received ideas of Peruvian reality relatively intact. In this approach, Mariátegui argued for the applicability of Marxism to ‘Perú’, recognised as a nationally peculiar social formation, and even the Peruvianness of Marxism, in order to make Marxist currents of thought seem more assimilable in nationalist terms. In this response to anti-Bolshevik Othering, Mariátegui accepted more of its terms – including the reality and value of a discrete Peruvian national community existing within historical space – but contested the negative application of these terms to Marxism.
Mariátegui’s shift of emphasis from the above, conceptually global strategy for legitimising Marxism to a more national one was a response to the intensification of anti-Bolshevism in Perú caused by the APRA turn against communism during the later 1920s.Footnote 80 The opening of a new front of anti-Bolshevik Othering inside the Peruvian Left was a threat to Mariátegui. Previously, he had been able to confront the anti-Bolshevism of the Patria Nueva from the political standpoint of a broadly united Peruvian Left, or ‘vanguard’, bound together in part by the rejection of conservative Peruvian nationalisms.Footnote 81 This coalition had created a political space for Mariátegui to reject the more fundamental assertions about Peruvian nationality made by anti-Bolshevism in the country, when that ideology could be comfortably ascribed to ‘reactionaries’, whose support was unsought on the Left. But the aprista schism from 1928 set off a contest for the hegemony of Peruvian vanguardism itself. Moreover, the anti-Bolshevik Othering by apristas was able to more effectively exploit the languages of indigenismo and anti-imperialism that enjoyed far more purchase among radical activists. Aprista Othering therefore represented a more urgent dilemma for Peruvian communism than the more conservative forms. This political difference helps to explain why Mariátegui made more concessions to nationalist premises in Perú during the later 1920s, when those premises began to be mobilised on the Left against Bolshevism.
Mariátegui elaborated several ‘Peruvianisations’ of Marxism in the context of the APRA polemic. These included his creative reinterpretation of Perú’s Indigenous peasantry as a potential agent of a modern socialist revolution; his related invocation of the communal traditions of rural property ownership in Indigenous society to argue that Perú was peculiarly apt for modern communism; and his Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928), which functioned as a practical demonstration of the explanatory power of Marxism to illuminate peculiarly Peruvian social questions, such as the debates over regionalism and agrarian reform.Footnote 82 By reinterpreting Marxism in these ways, Mariátegui innovated profoundly on both the Marxist tradition and the political idioms of interwar Perú which he sought to combine it with.
In September 1928, in the immediate context of the communists’ split with Haya’s leadership of APRA, Mariátegui published the editorial ‘Aniversario y balance’ in his journal, Amauta. The intervention was intended to reorient Amauta, which had been launched before the split, from its original ‘vanguardist’ political identity to an explicitly socialist one: ‘in the second act, it [Amauta] no longer needs to call itself a journal of the “new generation”, the “vanguard”, or the “Left”. To be faithful to the revolution, it is enough for it to be a socialist journal.’Footnote 83 In ‘Aniversario’, Mariátegui criticised aprismo for having a naively cultural interpretation of imperialism and, thereby, misunderstanding the actual situation of Latin America in the contemporary world system:
The Latin American countries came late to capitalism. The first positions had already been definitively assigned. The destiny of these countries within the capitalist order is that of simple colonies. Oppositions of language, race and spirit have no decisive meaning. It is ridiculous to still speak of the contrast between a materialist, Anglo-Saxon America and an idealist Latin America, between a blonde Rome and a pallid Greece.Footnote 84
Mariátegui was situating aprismo in the arielista current of Latin American anti-imperialism since 1900, and criticising that tradition for its failure to grasp the material reality of imperialism as a stage of capitalist development.Footnote 85 Mariátegui urged his readers to instead ‘discard all of these caricatures and semblances of ideologies, and take serious and honest account of reality’.Footnote 86
In Mariátegui’s reading, the misguided arielista concept of imperialism in Latin America, to which Haya’s APRA had approximated, was a struggle of epistemologically distinct and opposed regional cultures: a materialist, Anglo-American culture corrupting an idealist, Latin American one. Here, Mariátegui struck upon the distinctive understanding of anti-imperialism in the tradition of Ariel as the defence and reinvigoration of the cultural identity of Latin America. Mariátegui contrasted this cultural anti-imperialism with a Marxist–Leninist concept of ‘reality’ in which all of social existence was fundamentally material, however that fact was evaluated. Thus, materiality was not a peculiar feature of the imperialist United States: the entire imperialist system and its relationships were material in nature, including both imperial domination and exploitation on the one hand – world capitalism – and anti-imperialist liberation on the other – socialism. In this early section of the text, therefore, Mariátegui was still attempting to contest the epistemological foundation of anti-Bolshevik Othering in Perú and Latin America, insofar as he rejected the relevance of Latin American cultural peculiarities to the value of Marxism as a method of social analysis in Latin America.
However, at moments in ‘Aniversario’ – a complex and sometimes contradictory text – Mariátegui did accept some of the key premises of the aprista effort to Other Bolshevism in Perú, especially insofar as that effort drew from the intellectual context of indigenismo. These moments do come as a surprise because much of the initial framing of the text still used Mariátegui’s Occidentalist, global paradigm to naturalise the globalisation of European Marxism through the logic of Eurocentrism:
Socialism is certainly not an Indo-American doctrine. But no doctrine, no contemporary system, is or could be. And socialism, although born in Europe as was capitalism, is neither specifically nor particularly European. It is a global movement from which none of the countries that move in the orbit of Western civilisation can extract themselves.Footnote 87
But it is important to note in this excerpt a conceptual break with Mariátegui’s maximal Occidentalism. In the first three sentences, he steps away from legitimising the globalisation of Marxism as a European theory and instead de-territorialises its theoretical nature and value, denying the pertinence of Marxism’s Europeanness to its global purchase: ‘socialism, although born in Europe … is neither specifically nor particularly European’.
The argument that Marxism is inherently universal due to its epistemological status as ‘theory’ or ‘method’ – a heuristic, as distinct from a set of substantive policies – recurred in Mariátegui’s writing.Footnote 88 And, whereas this was not a parochially nationalist framing of Marxism, it was a de-spatialised one which, in effect, saw Mariátegui abandon the position of defending the globalisation of Marxism in terms of its European origins, in a national context where those origins were being problematised from within the Left by aprismo. Instead, Mariátegui now reconstrued the European origin of Marxism as merely incidental to the epistemological quality of Marxism as an analytical ‘method’. Thus, Mariátegui created space in his Marxism for the nationalist logic that qualitatively European thought ought not to be applied in Latin America; his response to anti-Bolshevik Othering had incorporated one of its key principles.
However, in the text of ‘Aniversario’ Mariátegui then immediately shifted back to his teleological, Occidentalist justification for the globalisation of Marxism. He described socialism as ‘a global movement from which none of the countries that move in the orbit of Western civilisation [i.e. Latin American states] can extract themselves’.Footnote 89 In one sense here, there was a contradiction between the different geographical frames – global and national – with which Mariátegui tried to effect the globalisation of Marxism, playing out within the confines of a single text. However, this usage of Occidentalism by Mariátegui, in the context of the aprista polemic, was more qualified than some of his earlier ones. Mariátegui reiterated that Western civilisation ‘moves toward universality with a force and with means that no other civilisation has ever possessed’, but he then added: ‘Indo-America, in this world order, can and must have its own individuality and style, but not its own culture or particular fate.’Footnote 90
Nestled within Mariátegui’s emphatically Occidentalist frame, therefore, was a partial acceptance of the nationalist premise that ‘Indo-America’ ought to have some form of historical originality in the wider context of interwar revolutionary politics. Moreover, Mariátegui created space for this concession by drawing a rhetorical distinction between the terms individualidad and estilo, on the one hand, and cultura and sino, on the other. The latter terms, carrying more social depth and historical weight respectively, preserved for Latin America a transatlantic and global oneness with the communist movement in Europe, as part of a shared historical project of socialist world revolution. The former terms, by contrast, allowed Mariátegui to compromise with the aprista demand for a peculiarly Latin American form of revolution in the 1920s (a demand which Mariátegui had previously dismissed as symptomatic of the region’s ‘old and incurable’ tendency to the ‘verbal exaltation’ of itself).Footnote 91 Mariátegui, in drawing this distinction now, was able to argue that the aprista call for Indo-American originality – a call that was intuitively persuasive in the context of the hegemonically Latin Americanist interwar Left – did not, as Haya was claiming, imply the rejection of the global communist movement and its European cultural setting, but could in fact be reconciled with them.
Thus, Mariátegui was accepting the normative force of the nationalist demand for Latin American ‘originality’ in revolutionary politics, but in doing so he was trying to undermine the anti-Bolshevik usage of that concept. This represented a clearly different intellectual strategy for the globalisation of Marxism: rather than urge Peruvians to globalise their subjective sense of self and society, and to abandon the consequent demand for distinctively Peruvian or Latin American ideas, Mariátegui was now trying to argue that Marxism was sufficiently flexible, or diversifiable, to meet that demand itself. Both moves were intended to counter the Othering of Marxism, but the latter accepted more of the ideological premises of Mariátegui’s nationalist interlocutors in Perú.
Moreover, in closing ‘Aniversario’ Mariátegui conceded even more ground to his nationalist critics on the Peruvian Left:
We certainly do not wish socialism in America to be an imitation and copy. It must be heroic creation. We have to give life with our own reality, in our own language, to Indo-American socialism. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.Footnote 92
While not slipping into the demand for a distinct Indo-American cultura or sino, this passage of the text does call for the creation of an ‘Indo-American socialism’, defined by the reality and discourses peculiar to the region. Mariátegui at least came very close here to contradicting his Occidentalist justification of global Marxism earlier in the same text and elsewhere in his writing. It represents a significant compromise with the aprista insistence that politics in Perú be ‘Indo-American’ and, again, it responded to the Latin Americanist demand for an original, regional contribution to world history: the creation of ‘Indo-American socialism’ would be ‘a mission [italics added] worthy of a new generation’. Mariátegui was now reinforcing the nationalist demand for Latin American originality within contemporary world history, not rejecting it, but he was suggesting that such originality ought to take the form of a regional variation on the wider, global communist movement, rather than a sui generis form of ideology. Mariátegui had therefore accepted a part of the aprista paradigm which was being used to Other Marxism. In doing so, he diluted his more emphatic cosmopolitanism in order to subvert the anti-Bolshevik usage of Latin Americanism and replace it with one more hospitable to the globalisation of Marxist praxis of the Bolshevik type.
Mariátegui’s most substantial compromise with the conceptual logic of anti-Bolshevik Othering in this text was the statement that:
socialism … is in the American tradition. The most advanced, primitive communist organisation registered by history was Incan.Footnote 93
Here, Mariátegui momentarily accepts the premise that, for political forms to be legitimate in Perú, they ought not only to be Peruvianised, but Peruvian. Mariátegui was employing his Marxist reinterpretation of the Indigenous peasantry as a potential agent of a modern socialist revolution. In response to both the sociological fact that the Peruvian proletariat during the 1920s was small, and the critical emphasis of that fact by hostile apristas, Mariátegui had reinterpreted the Andean peasantry as being capable not only of rebellion or revolution as such, but also of a specifically socialist revolution on the Bolshevik model. However, recasting the Andean peasantry as a revolutionary subject in a Marxist framework created a corollary theoretical problem for Mariátegui: the material conditions of proletarian existence were supposed to be necessary for the development of socialist consciousness. In response to this dilemma, Mariátegui invoked the communal tradition of land use among Indigenous peasants that was traceable to the pre-Columbian period. Thus, in his ‘Principios programáticos del Partido Socialista’, published one month after ‘Aniversario y balance’, Mariátegui highlighted the enduring ‘habits of cooperation and socialism’ among the Indigenous peasantry of the sierra.Footnote 94 And in a 1929 submission to the Comintern-organised Latin American Trade Union Confederation, Mariátegui justified his Marxist analysis of Indigenous subjectivity by arguing that ‘once the Indian has made the socialist ideal his own, he will serve it with a discipline, tenacity, and strength that few proletarians from other milieus will be able to surpass’.Footnote 95
In ‘Aniversario y balance’, Mariátegui’s communist reinterpretation of Andean Indigeneity created an opening for him to nationalise Marxism and, thus, to undermine anti-Bolshevik Othering in Perú on its own, most extreme terms. In one sense, Mariátegui’s reinterpretation of the Andean peasantry as a potential subject of socialist revolution Peruvianised Marxism demonstratively: it showed how the essence of Peruvian nationality as defined by the interwar Left – the Indigenous peasantry – could be made sense of by, and could fit into, the Marxist analytical framework and historical scheme. But the Inca communism thesis also allowed Marxism a cruder form of national legitimacy, as cited above in ‘Aniversario’, where Mariátegui emphasised the fact that ‘socialism …is in the American tradition. The most advanced, primitive communist organisation registered by history was Incan.’
At this point, Mariátegui allowed a tactical slippage in meaning, from the ‘primitive communist’ mode of production in pre-Columbian Perú as a normatively vacant stage of that society’s historical development, to a normatively charged national heritage which conferred legitimacy on modern communism in Perú in the present.Footnote 96 Thus, Mariátegui conceded a radically Latin Americanist premise: that the legitimacy of a form of knowledge production in Perú and Latin America derived from its origin – not just its applicability or adaptability – in the region. Conceptually, this move represented a radical and in many ways contradictory retreat from his more global framings of Marxism, and of how its globalisation ought to be understood in terms of either the insignificance of parochial origin to the geographical applicability of an analytical method or, at an even further remove, of the legitimising significance of European origin. And yet, Mariátegui’s pragmatic intention remained the same in all of these cases during the 1920s: to effect the globalisation of Marxism, by hook or by crook, through the undermining or subversion of anti-Bolshevik Othering in interwar Perú.
Conclusion
By situating Mariátegui’s conceptually diverse and, at moments, contradictory uses of Marxism in the context of the interwar anti-Bolshevism to which they were responding, it is possible to reconstruct the coherence between the national and global scales of his political thought. Both scales were, in part, doing the same thing: trying to effect the practical globalisation of Marxism from Europe to Perú by undermining the conventions and arguments of anti-Bolshevik Othering in Latin America, as those conventions related to the conceptualisation either of ‘Perú’ or of Marxism. Hitherto, this coherence between the national and the global in Mariátegui’s thought has eluded scholarship. It offers a way for the incipient, global turn in the study of Mariátegui to advance without becoming detached from the historiographical contributions of the tradition of Latin American Marxism, by recognising the pragmatic continuities between the global and the national in Mariátegui’s thought.
Reading Mariátegui in terms of an historically situated contest between the globalisation and the Othering of Marxism in Latin America after 1917 can provide a useful heuristic for his wider theoretical and practical activity, beyond just the relationship between the national and global levels of his thought. Mariátegui’s effort to reconceptualise Latin America in ‘South–South’ terms, as a part of the wider (semi-)colonial world, for instance, was also intended for use in this contest, insofar as Mariátegui pointed to the uptake of socialist revolution in semi-colonial Asian societies to normalise its presence in semi-colonial Latin America.Footnote 97 And less overtly spatial themes were also situated in this contest between globalising and Othering Marxism, including Mariátegui’s innovation with concepts about intellectual development itself, such as ‘method’, ‘dogma’, ‘tradition’, and ‘heterodoxy’.
Moreover, the development of Marxist universalism in a context of nationalist Othering was not peculiar to 1920s Perú. Indeed, we might extend Drinot’s exploration of Mariátegui’s ‘globality’ by considering how the divided context in which he elaborated his global Marxism had a wider history.Footnote 98 After the 1920s, nationalist anticommunism became more powerful and variegated in Latin America, especially during the Cold War. Even since then, it has remained an important force in right-wing politics in the region. Accordingly, the problem space in which Mariátegui used and transformed Marxist theory during the 1920s – proposing a revolutionary universalism in a context of nationalist Othering – has been a consistent part of the history of Latin American Marxism. The problem of anticommunist Othering therefore offers a new context in which to explore other thinkers in the history of that tradition, many of whom, such as José Aricó and René Zavaleta, thought about nationalism and ‘the national’ in tandem (and tension) with universalist commitments, too.
By foregrounding this context of nationalist Othering, we might qualify and enrich recent histories of Latin American Marxism as a whole. Thus, Fabián Calabuz and Tomás Torres López’s definition of a project of translating the general postulates of Marxist theory to fit distinctively Latin American social conditions might be strengthened by studying how these efforts at translation were rarely attempted by Latin American Marxists for the sake of analytical rigour alone, but were also strategic responses to nationalist assertions that Marxism was misplaced in Latin America due to its foreign origins.Footnote 99 And Carlos Aguirre’s insight that ‘Marxism was acclimatised (or not) in Latin America as part of a series of debates with other intellectual currents’ is enhanced by recognising how a logic of nationalist Othering cut across and connected multiple of these other currents during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Footnote 100 Latin American Marxism has been characterised by a tendency to vernacularisation because it has been confronted across the region by more or less violent attempts at Othering it; there has been a dialectical relationship between Latin American Marxism and anticommunist nationalism. Indeed, as Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco argues, progressive ideas from abroad have not been ‘misplaced’ per se in Latin America but rather represented as such by their conservative opponents – the mis-placing of Marxism has been an effortful project of anticommunism in modern Latin America.Footnote 101 By exploring how this project has formed an important context of Marxist thought in the region, we might better integrate the intellectual history of Latin American Marxism with the history of counterrevolution in Latin America’s long Cold War. And beyond Latin America, too, the study of Marxist intellectual history might be enriched by this paradigm of globalisation-versus-Othering. The wider history of the globalisation of Marxism across borders, both in the colonial world and the West, has been haunted everywhere by nationalist efforts at ‘counter-globalisation’ similar to those of the APRA and the Patria Nueva in Perú. Mariátegui’s predicament was not unique, and just as it prompted innovative Marxist thinking in Latin America, it likely has elsewhere, too.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the whole editorial and management team at the Journal of Latin American Studies, and the copy-editor, whose input has been crucial throughout the development of this article. I am also extremely grateful to the four peer reviewers of the manuscript, whose thoughtful comments have improved it no end. And, as ever, this work would not have been possible without the constant encouragement, support and advice of my wife, Annie. Furthermore, this was one of the first things I wrote after finishing my PhD, so I need to make special mention of my former supervisors, Nicola Miller and Angus Gowland, for getting me to the end of my doctorate in a state of mind still capable of writing anything at all (!).
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