Interest in, and study of, José Carlos Mariátegui’s life and works has increased markedly in recent years. As we approach important centenaries – 1926, Mariátegui’s magazine Amauta begins publication; 1928, founding of Peruvian Socialist (later Communist) Party; 1930, death of Mariátegui – publications such as Deni Alfaro Rubbo’s José Carlos Mariátegui: Marxism and Critique of Eurocentrism are timely and welcome. Mariátegui is a key intellectual reference in Peru and, to a degree, in Latin America. Yet he continues to be relatively unknown outside the region, including within scholarship on the ‘global left’. Studies that draw attention to Mariátegui’s cultural and political work, particularly those that are published in English, such as this one, will hopefully introduce the man and his thought to a broader range of scholars, stimulating further study and enhancing his deserved status as a major thinker of the twentieth century.

Rubbo’s central argument is succinctly captured in Mariátegui doyen Michael Löwy’s foreword, where he observes that Mariátegui’s oeuvre demonstrates that ‘criticism of the Eurocentric point of view can perfectly be carried out, in great depth, from a Marxist perspective’, making him ‘comparable with the heretical Marxism of other great thinkers of the 1920s: Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin’ (p. xii). As Rubbo notes in the introduction, this research agenda is a response to postcolonial/decolonial/subaltern critiques of Eurocentric social science paradigms, including Marxism. Unfortunately, this positioning is only briefly sketched and Rubbo does not really engage with such critiques sufficiently. Nevertheless, Rubbo sets out to show that ‘Mariátegui’s form of criticism of Eurocentrism was carried out through Marxism. The dialectic between national and international, local and universal, tradition and modernity, crisis of Western civilisation and the Andean world, Marxism and indigenism present in his work were interpreted by Mariátegui not as unilateral choices but, on the contrary, as interdependent elements’ (p. 5).

That Mariátegui fused Marxism and indigenismo (or at least a specific strand of indigenismo – there were many) or the national and the international is not particularly novel. Recently, both Martín Bergel and Juan De Castro have revisited this notion, well established in the literature, by drawing attention to what they call, respectively, Mariátegui’s ‘cosmopolitan socialism’ and ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’. In a context in which decolonial readings of Mariátegui seek to present the Peruvian thinker as unpolluted by Eurocentric Marxism, it may indeed be worthwhile to argue that ‘operations to remove or reduce theoretical and political manifestations of Marxism impoverish research on not only the Peruvian author, but also the history of Marxism and the history of the criticism of Eurocentrism’ (p. 5). A more sustained discussion of such readings, therefore, would have clarified the book’s contribution. Apart from a brief mention of Aníbal Quijano’s often-referenced reframing of Mariátegui as a global south theorist avant la lettre, however, the book alludes to rather than systematically engages with such ‘operations’.

Instead, the book, conceived as a ‘political and intellectual biography’ (p. 174), follows a conventional chronological structure, with a first section that offers a speedy overview of Mariátegui before he left for Europe in 1919, a second section that focuses on Mariátegui’s time in Europe and a final section that explores Mariátegui’s cultural and political work after his return to Peru in 1923 until his death in 1930. Across 11 concise chapters, Rubbo covers this history ably. The most compelling sections draw on Mariátegui’s ‘minor writings’, including his extensive correspondence and his journalistic pieces in magazines such as Variedades and Mundial (the focus on minor writings, Rubbo explains, is a methodological borrowing from Gramsci). Based on an evident familiarity with the scholarship on the thinker, Rubbo reads key episodes in Mariátegui cultural and political experience and work, from his early journalism in Lima, to his time in Europe in the early 1920s, to his debates with Haya de la Torre and with the Comintern at the end of the decade, as formative of his critique of Eurocentrism.

Rubbo admits that the research underpinning his book was conducted over a decade ago and originally formed part of his 2018 doctoral dissertation. He notes that the manuscript has been updated but in places the book feels dated. Rubbo knows his ‘mariáteguiana’ but several important syntheses are absent from his study, including Servais Thissen’s biography (Mariátegui: La aventura del hombre nuevo, Editorial Horizonte, 2017), and two texts in English, Mike Gonzalez’s In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui (Haymarket, 2019) and Juan E. De Castro, Bread and Beauty: The Cultural Politics of José Carlos Mariátegui (Brill, 2021). The failure to engage with these studies, particularly the English-language ones given the intended Anglophone audience, seems like a missed opportunity. Rather than building on the more recent scholarship on Mariátegui, Rubbo revisits themes already well covered in the literature.

Although the book offers a solid introduction to Mariátegui and presents a sound general argument, it is undermined by very poor editing. The translation from Portuguese is uneven. Wallerstein gave a talk or a speech at the International Sociological Association’s conference in 1996, not a ‘discourse’ (p. 1). In addition to missing or misplaced Spanish diacritic marks, too many to list (but see, for example ‘Generacíon del centenário’ (p. 35)), various words have been given Portuguese diacritics, so we get ‘Mercurio Peruano - Revista de Ciências …’ while César Ugarte is given as the author of ‘Bosquejo de História Econômico [sic] del Perú’ (p. 126). In the same vein, Manuel González Prada becomes a ‘Dom’ (p. 47). Errors abound: Flores Galindo becomes ‘Flores Galidno’ (p. 10); the Cerro de Pasco company is rendered as ‘Centro de Pasco’ (p. 28); Jorge Guillermo Leguía is renamed ‘Horge’ (p. 32); the generación del Centenario becomes ‘the genereción [sic] centenarista’ (p. 32). Other errors include ‘Oscar Benevides’ for General Óscar Benavides (p. 40); the ‘Koumintang’ for the Kuomintang (p. 159); and ‘Tacna and Arciá’ for Tacna and Arica (p. 169). The novecentistas, or generación del novecientos, were not ‘19th centurists’, they were associated with the 1900s (p. 32); and Peru’s president between 1915 and 1919 was José Pardo y Barreda, not Jorge Pardo y Barreda (p. 51).

Rubbo is a serious scholar of Mariátegui. He has published extensively and incisively on the Peruvian thinker, including a book on the reception of his thought in Brazil (O labirinto periférico. As aventuras de Mariátegui na América Latina, Autonomia literária, 2021). While this book adds to the renewed interest in Mariátegui, its contribution is undercut by the limited development of its intended critique of the decolonial readings of the Peruvian Marxist’s works, the lack of engagement with recent scholarship and the poor editorial shortcomings, for which the press, Routledge, must bear the main responsibility.