Archaic Developmentalism: A Conceptualization

Scholarship in political theory has increasingly taken temporality as its object of study to investigate how it impacts and is molded by politics, with a subset challenging the idea of unitary time in favor of theorizations of plural temporalities, which capture the simultaneity of different temporalities at a given chronological moment (e.g., see Goetz Reference Goetz2024, pt. 4; Lazar Reference Lazar2019; Robertson Reference Robertson2023; Suell Reference Suell2022; Tomba Reference Tomba2019b). Among studies of Mariátegui, works on plural temporalities have opened new lines of inquiry due to his interpretation of Peruvian reality as the coexistence of three modes of production; however, it has also generated debate regarding the particular model of plural temporalities through which his thought should be read. On the one hand, Harry Harootunian (Reference Harootunian2015, 143, 139, 141) analyzes Mariátegui through the metaphor of a “stratigraphic history” to grapple with the ways in which “capitalism is configured when it encounters different historical times,” and he argues that the Peruvian counseled a “strategy of temporal reversal” that would appeal to the Incan communist past to enliven the struggle for “a socialism that was yet to come in his own time” (see also Tomba Reference Tomba2017). On the other hand, Stark (Reference Stark2022, 63) pushes against Harootunian’s geological reading and theorization of temporal reversal for “imply[ing] that Mariátegui’s historical method presupposes a ‘cyclical’ conception of historical time.” In response, he offers an interpretation that foregrounds Einsteinian relativity to understand Mariátegui’s “plural spatiotemporal conception of historical time” and insistence on “historical relativism” (40, 49). Building on Stark’s account, Gordy (Reference Gordy2025, 90) explores how a historical relativist approach to the comparison of Incan communism and modern communism allowed Mariátegui to establish commonalities between the two and jump “between multiple temporalities in response to pressing political problems.”

Considering these previous readings of Mariátegui, my own charts an alternative path between Harootunian and Stark/Gordy. Starting from Mariátegui’s own use of telluric language to describe the composition of Peruvian reality, I, like Harootunian, examine his political thought as a stratigraphic history, with the distinct aim of illuminating how his theorization of the coexistence and convergence of plural temporalities opened a new developmental trajectory along which Peru could skip the historical stage of bourgeois capitalism and transition directly to modern communism. However, motivated by Mariátegui’s own distinction between Incan communism and modern communism, I, like Stark/Gordy, am convinced that it is incorrect to suggest, as Harootunian does, that Mariátegui held a cyclical understanding of time. Given this, my own stratigraphic reading differs from Harootunian’s in that it emphasizes that Mariátegui did not champion a cyclical reversal to Incan communism but instead theorized modern communism as a distinct and progressive historical stage that would bear a strong resemblance to, but not replicate, the Incan past.

Thus situated, my conceptualization of archaic developmentalism captures the superimposition and tension that arise from the convergence of archaic and developmental temporalities. Rather than understand time as linear, as is often the case, I conceptualize it as interweaving and stratigraphic layers.Footnote ⁴ This is to say that time is modeled as a series of geological strata in which “many forms of time [are] superimposed upon one another” (Koselleck Reference Koselleck and Tribe2004, 2) and “refer to each other in a reciprocal way, though without being wholly dependent on each other” (Koselleck Reference Koselleck, Franzel and Hoffmann2018, 6). Put simply, “a theory of sedimentations of time” represents time vertically (6), like a palimpsest, in which deposited sediments overlay, but are also marbled by, other geological deposits (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2015, 21). Importantly, turning to geological metaphors reveals “that it is only meaningful to speak of historical times in the plural” (Koselleck Reference Koselleck and Presner2002, 114). There exist many coexisting times, rather than a singular unitary time, which allows us to appreciate what Reinhart Koselleck (Reference Koselleck and Presner2002, 168), taking from Ernst Bloch (Reference Bloch1977), calls “the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.” That is, we can grasp that the present is defined by the coexistence of various nonsimultaneous temporalities—including the past—rather than a single temporality alone.

The sedimented model of temporality is particularly useful when thinking about capitalist modernity, which is not defined by a single temporality—that of the capitalist mode of production—but is marked by a “heterogenous mix” of temporalities (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2015, 206) in which archaic temporality and developmental temporality coexist as “shifting time plates” (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2007, 472). On the one hand, the archaic denotes stayovers from “outmoded modes of production” and its “train of anachronistic social and political relations” that survive into the present and are coeval with developmental temporality (Marx Reference Marx and Fowkes1976, 91). On the other hand, developmental temporality supposes the linearity, emptiness, and homogeneity of time, and it “singularize[s] time into a coherent narrative or story line” in which all societies progressively move through “a single historical path that leads to the development of the capitalist mode of production or, in the Marxist variant, to socialism—but only after having passed through the capitalist stage” (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2015, 24; see also Tomba Reference Tomba2017). As a result of its singularization of history, developmental temporality allows for what Johannes Fabian (Reference Fabian1983) calls the “denial of coevalness,” or the ranking of different societies according to their progress, or lack thereof, along history’s grand evolutionary ladder.

Given the coexistence of archaic and developmental temporalities, we must attend to their interaction, which is marked by tension, or what Massimiliano Tomba (Reference Tomba2019b, 10) calls chronotones, because the latter aims at the “violent synchronisation” of “[v]arious non-synchronous temporalities” (Tomba Reference Tomba, Farris and Thomas2013, 161, 3). The synchronization of nonsimultaneous temporalities has its own history, which can be traced to the twinned birth of capitalism and the nation-state. As Tomba (Reference Tomba, Harcourt and Fassin2019a, 118) points out, with capitalism’s consolidation, “states synchronized clocks in accordance with the new requirements of measuring labor time and the circulation of commodities,” and as the nation-state came into existence, “empty and homogenous time also work[ed] in the violent processes of construction and reproduction of national homogeneity,” eventually coming to regulate “the rhythms of life.” As developmental temporality spreads, “smoothing over the roughness of [history’s] caesurae” (Tomba Reference Tomba, Farris and Thomas2013, 4), it attempts to violently subsume archaic temporality to “produce differentials of surplus-values” (Tomba Reference Tomba2009, 56). Like a reverse optical prism, developmental temporality “merges a multiplicity of colors to bring out the white light of the progress of humanity” (Tomba Reference Tomba2019b, 23). In absorbing alternative temporalities, all that remains is a straight line, and developmental temporality’s historical development is made to appear inevitable.

While developmental temporality oftentimes successfully incorporates archaic temporality for the generation of surplus value, it is sometimes the case that this clash between temporal-historical layers generates friction that can open a field of possibilities in which archaic socioeconomic forms may be unearthed and theorized as the basis for different developmental futures that skip mature capitalism altogether and make way for a new communal order (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2007, 475). For instance, in his 1881 draft letters and correspondence with the Russian populist Vera Zasulich, Karl Marx maintained that the Russian commune, “an archaic form” that was frictionally sedimented underneath and “contemporaneous with capitalist production,” was neither bound to be fully subsumed by capitalism nor was it an obstacle to progress. Rather, he argued that in the convergence of archaic and developmental temporalities, “the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.” That is, the commune was Russia’s “direct starting-point” for a developmental pathway different from that of Western Europe, which would leap over the historical stage of bourgeois capitalism and directly proceed to socialism (Marx and Zasulich [1955] Reference Marx, Zasulich and Shanin1983). What this example elucidates is that the clash of archaic and developmental temporalities may result in “possibilities for the re-orientation of the trajectories of modernity” (Tomba Reference Tomba2017), in which archaic socioeconomic forms resurface as “an arsenal of futures” (Tomba Reference Tomba2019b, 13). This can be compared to the geological process of subduction, in which two tectonic plates converge, increasing both temperature and pressure, causing one geological layer to sink below the other, and producing volcanic and mountainous formations (Tomba Reference Tomba, Harcourt and Fassin2019a, 114, 119). Like subduction, the convergence of archaic and developmental temporalities gives rise to new developmental pathways in which archaic social and economic forms are excavated and reactivated as contemporary political alternatives, though in new forms and different guises.

It is noteworthy that no romanticism pervades my conceptualization of archaic developmentalism. This is to say that the sliding of archaic and developmental tectonic plates does not abandon modernity to nostalgically return to the past’s socioeconomic arrangements; rather, it entails a critical recovery of the archaic. By this, I mean that the archaic serves as a model for the creation of communal futures that integrate modernity’s achievements—namely, its technological advances—thereby creating a new social and economic order that resembles, but does not recreate, the past. Continuing with the previous example, instead of calling for a nostalgic return to Russia’s archaic communalism, Marx advocated in favor of its critical recovery. Citing the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan ([1877] Reference Morgan and White1964), whose Ancient Society he had read throughout late 1880 and early 1881, Marx contended that Russia’s straightaway transition to socialism “‘will be a revival, in a superior form, of an archaic social type.’” To be sure, Russia’s modern-day socialism would resemble the archaic in its “communal control” of property and its “economic and social equality,” but it would not identically replicate the archaic because it was necessary to incorporate modernity’s “positive achievements” that increased productivity—especially the technology that enabled “large-scale, machine-assisted agriculture” (Marx and Zasulich [1955] Reference Marx, Zasulich and Shanin1983). As a result, Marx emphasized that Russia’s contemporary socialism would be a progressive, superior, and critical recovery of the archaic, rather than a nostalgic return to it.

Curiously, my understanding of archaic developmentalism has perverse resonance with conservative views of development, like W. W. Rostow’s ([1960] Reference Rostow1990) modernization theory. This is because archaic developmentalism, in acknowledging the coexistence of archaic and developmental temporalities, rather than the singularity of developmental temporality, seemingly affirms a lack of development that is evidenced by the past’s persistence into the present. Despite this, archaic developmentalism does not endorse the same conclusions as conservative theorizations of development, for which anachronisms are perceived as primitive residuals that must be eliminated to jumpstart development along a linear, upward, and progressive course. Rather than doing away with temporal asynchronies, my theorization of archaic developmentalism embraces them as active seismic zones that can open new developmental trajectories in which past socioeconomic forms may reemerge as contemporary political alternatives. Considering my conceptualization of archaic developmentalism, as we shall see below after a brief biographical sketch, Mariátegui theorized that the friction from the convergence of archaic and developmental temporalities generated a rupture by which Peru could construct modern communism through the revitalization of the ayllu, skipping the historical stage of advanced capitalism altogether.

Mariátegui and the Utopian Reimagination of the Incan Empire

Mariátegui was born in 1894 to a mestiza mother and a creole father. As a teenager, in 1914 he became involved in journalism, first working for La Prensa. During his early years as a journalist, Mariátegui began to report on Peru’s Indigenous peasantry. In fact, as early as 1917, under the pseudonym Juan Croniqueur, he wrote a series of articles for El Tiempo on the Rumi Maqui uprising, an Indigenous rebellion in Puno that was led by Major Teodomiro Gutiérrez Cuevas, an army officer originally sent to the region to investigate the mistreatment of Indigenous people (Flores Galindo Reference Flores Galindo1980, 41).Footnote ⁵ Eventually, Mariátegui would found two pro-labor newspapers—Nuestra Epoca (1918) and La Razón (1919). Because of his pro-labor views, Mariátegui was exiled to Europe in 1919 by Augusto Leguía’s increasingly repressive government. In Europe, Mariátegui was exposed to a variety of thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, Romain Rolland, Benedetto Croce, Miguel de Unamuno, and most importantly Karl Marx (Vanden Reference Vanden1975). He also witnessed the reception and aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Turin Factory Council Movement, and the Italian Left’s split into the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party; PCI) and the Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party; PSI) at the Livorno Conference, following disagreement over the expulsion of reformists and the implementation of Vladimir Lenin’s (Reference Lenin and Katzer1965) 21 conditions of membership to join the Comintern. In 1923, he returned to Peru as “a convinced and declared Marxist” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 42). Shortly thereafter, he began teaching at the Universidad Popular González Prada—founded as a byproduct of Peru’s university reform movement—at the invitation of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. He also founded two Marxist journals: Amauta (1926) and Labor (1928). In 1928, Mariátegui publicly broke with Haya de la Torre’s Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance; APRA) and founded the Partido Socialista Peruano (Peruvian Socialist Party; PSP).Footnote ⁶ Today, Mariátegui is lauded as offering an original Latin American Marxism, and he is increasingly making headway into political theory’s canon (Drinot Reference Drinot2024; P. Morgan Reference Morgan2026).

Throughout his work, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 74) explicitly denoted the period of Incan rule as one of “Incan communism.” This is to say that Mariátegui recounted the Incan Empire as a communist civilization in which individuals worked collectively, goods were distributed communally, and the population lived in tranquility, and this utopian idealization of the empire was fundamental to his theorization that Peru could reanimate the ayllu in the process of directly creating modern communism, skipping over the developmental stage of bourgeois capitalism that was required by Soviet orthodoxy (Flores Galindo Reference Flores Galindo, Aguirre, Walker and Hiatt2010, chap. 8; Grijalva Reference Grijalva2010).Footnote ⁷ In terms of social organization, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 3) believed that the Incan Empire was characterized by “a grouping of agricultural and sedentary communities,” with each being collectively organized and composed of related Indigenous families. To substantiate these views, he turned to the works of the Peruvian archaeologist Luis Valcárcel, which chronicled the Incan Empire’s origins and described its agrarianism, as well as the work of the Peruvian historian and economist César Ugarte. Directly citing Ugarte’s (Reference Ugarte1926) Bosquejo de la historia económica del Perú , Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 35) affirmed that Incan communism was defined by the “[c]ollective ownership of farmland by the ayllu or group of related families … collective ownership of waters, pasture, and woodlands by the marca or tribe … cooperative labor … [and] individual allotment of harvests and produce.” In Mariátegui’s view, the Incan Empire privileged “a socialist ownership of property” (76) through the ayllu over and above private property ownership, which he thought “was unknown” throughout the empire’s domain (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1971a). In addition to its socialist property regime, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 4) believed that the Incan Empire was defined by collective “work and common effort,” which “were employed fruitfully for social purposes,” including infrastructure construction, military conquests, and agricultural cultivation. Although Incan communism curbed “individual initiative,” a quality that Mariátegui associated most with advanced capitalism, he believed that it was ultimately beneficial because it instilled a disposition of “social duty” favorable to the common good and yielded sufficient products so that the entire population lived in “material comfort” (3).

Regarding the Incan Empire’s political organization, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c) acknowledged that it “was unquestionably theocratic and despotic,” ruled by an emperor, or the Sapa Inca. Like “all regimes of antiquity,” Mariátegui maintained that the Incan Empire represented “an absolutist and theocratic regime” in which the Sapa Inca alone controlled temporal and spiritual power. Despite this, Mariátegui argued that it was incorrect to classify the empire as a “tyranny,” which in his view could not be spoken of abstractly and denoted a regime that “represses the will of the people and oppresses and stifles their life force.” With this understanding of tyranny, he insisted that the empire’s theocratic monarchy embodied the people’s will and force (75). Others, however, did not share Mariátegui’s favorable opinion of the empire’s political system. As he noted, the “‘despotism’ of the Incas … has offended the scruples of some of our present-day liberals” (74), such as Augusto Aguirre Morales (Reference Morales1927), who, in El pueblo del sol , conjectured that the Incan people “were enslaved and miserable because they lacked liberty” and that theocratic monarchy and communism were irreconcilable. In response to these claims, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 75) advanced two arguments. First, given that individual liberty “is an aspect of the complex liberal philosophy” and “the legal basis of capitalist civilization,” Mariátegui considered it anachronistic to judge the Incan Empire by such a standard. “In no case,” he wrote, “did this liberty fit into Inca life. The man of Tawantinsuy[u] felt absolutely no need of individual liberty—any more than he felt the need for a free press.” Second, because Mariátegui theorized that the ayllu, not the Incan monarchy, “was the nucleus of the empire,” he opposed the view that the Incan political system disqualified it from being understood as communist. In putting forward this argument, Mariátegui echoed Valcárcel’s (Reference Valcárcel1925b, 19, 165–66) analysis from Del ayllu al imperio , in which it was established that agrarian communism through tribal groupings antedated the Incan Empire; that the empire’s origin could be traced back to “a true tribal confederation” among these communal groupings; and that Incan rule did not invent Indigenous communism but merely “promoted, perfected, and brought the primitive organization to its apogee.” Put another way, for Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 75), while the “Incas unified and created the empire,” they “did not create its nucleus”—that is, the ayllu—which “had operated since ancient times throughout the territory of the Empire” and had practiced agricultural collectivism since “primitive tribes passed from nomadism to permanent residence on the land” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1971a). Therefore, as Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 75–76) pointed out, the empire generally, and the Sapa Inca specifically, did not oppress the Incan population but basically “reproduced the natural pre-existing state” of the ayllu that dated to time immemorial, leading him to dismiss worries regarding the despotism of Incan rule.

While he reconciled theocratic monarchy and Indigenous communism to foster a utopian image of the Incan Empire, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 75) held that, at the present conjuncture, “autocracy and communism are now incompatible” because of the “moral gains of modern society,” which flowed from the ascendance of modern liberalism and could not be rejected. “Contemporary socialism,” he wrote,

Put simply, because certain features of liberalism, such as individual liberty, were progressive and represented “gain[s] made by the human spirit in modern times,” contemporary socialism could not wholly repudiate it but instead had to acclimate its positive elements (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 75). This illuminates that Mariátegui did not think that modernity could be totally abjured but rather contained progressive elements that had to be incorporated into contemporary socialism. As Gordy (Reference Gordy2025, 77) rightly notes, Mariátegui “insisted upon a ‘certain historical relativism’ when comparing Inca and modern communism,” which is to say that he established the commonalities of essence between the two forms of communism while acknowledging their differences, given their respective historical contexts. Ultimately, this perspective allowed him to excavate and reimagine archaic temporality “to create a new context for political action … where those whom socialism claims to benefit are its main protagonists and creators” (78–79).

In this section, I have detailed how Mariátegui actively remembered the Incan past as a communist utopia in which private property was unknown, collective ownership and work predominated, and the population had all of its needs met, and as I show below, this was integral to his theorization that the convergence of archaic and developmental temporalities would open a field of political possibility in which the ayllu would be excavated and reconfigured as a stage in Peru’s straightaway transition to socialism. However, when compared with the historical record, Mariátegui’s insistence that the Incas were communist does not withstand scrutiny because it mischaracterizes the empire’s role as a welfare provider; neglects that the Sapa Inca was the proprietor of everything under the empire’s domain; and overlooks that private property ownership was rising toward the end of the empire’s history (D’Altroy Reference D’Altroy, Alconini and Covey2018, 214; McEwan Reference McEwan2008, 103; Murra Reference Murra1980, 31–32, 131). While this may be the case, it is noteworthy that Mariátegui’s utopian account of the Incas falls within an Andean genealogy that dates back to the period immediately following the Spanish Conquest in which thinkers fabulated the pre-Hispanic past to contest hegemonic histories and conceptualize alternative futures (Gordy Reference Gordy2025, 98–102). For example, in The First New Chronicle and Good Government, the Indigenous chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala (Reference Guaman Poma de Ayala and Frye2006, 297, 325–326) traced Christianity’s origin in the Andes to the pre-Incan period, and based on this reimagination, he undermined prevailing historical narratives that rendered the Spanish as evangelical saviors and petitioned King Philip III to rearrange the Spanish Empire into a multicultural monarchy that would maximize “Indian autonomy under royal—but not colonial—rule” (Frye Reference Frye and Frye2006, xxv; see also Burga Reference Burga1988, 242–70). Thus, what is important, both politically and theoretically, is how Mariátegui’s utopian reimagination of the pre-Hispanic past allowed him to interrupt dominant Eurocentric historiographical narratives, castigate domestic and international political arrangements, and theorize Peru’s direct transition to socialism based on the ayllu’s material continuity from the pre-Columbian past to the compromised present.

Mariátegui’s Critique of Spanish Colonialism and Postindependence Domestic Arrangements

With the arrival of the Spanish in Tawantinsuyu, the territory of the Incan Empire, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 4) thought that “indigenous society and the Inca economy were wholly disrupted and annihilated by the shock of the Conquest.” The conquest, led by conquistadors who were “mainly concerned with wrangling over their rich booty,” broke down the bonds uniting the empire, precipitating its collapse (4). While the conquest destroyed the Incan state, it however did not fully eliminate Incan communism, which, as Mariátegui pointed out, persisted among Indigenous people as “scattered remains of the Inca economy and society” (81). In the wake of the Incan Empire’s fall, the Spanish instituted its viceroyalty system “to organize its immense colony politically and economically” (4). In Peru, “Spanish feudalism was superimposed on Indigenous agrarianism”—that is, on “the ruins and remnants of a socialist economy” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1971a)—which resulted in the “persecution of the Indian” and the failure to replace Incan communism “with an economy of higher yields” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 4, 36–37). This is to say that Spanish colonialism “brought no superior substitutes” to replace Incan communism, as its feudalism failed to increase Peru’s agricultural productivity, robbed Indigenous people of their lands, and forced them to labor for large landowners, or gamonales , in a condition akin to that of serfs (36). Rather than creating a productive agricultural economy that would have suited the Andes, given that the “indigenous race is a race of farmers,” Spanish colonialism primarily devoted its efforts to “the mining of Peruvian gold and silver” for which the American Indian was “uprooted from his soil,” subjected to “a system of forced labor,” and turned “into a slave” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 34, 5, 37).

For Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 80), Spain’s implantation of feudalism in the Americas reflected the fact that it “never emerged from the Middle Ages and joined the march of capitalism.” Having “never had a liberal-bourgeois revolution with a victorious third estate,” Spain did not assimilate bourgeois capitalism, and its New World colonies were bound to suffer the same “aristocratic and feudal regime” as the mother country (80–81). In large part, this was because Spanish colonists were “indolent, feckless, dreamy, and completely unfit for industrial and capitalist enterprise”—that is, they were focused on the extraction of mineral riches rather than the creation of wealth (82, 41). In contrast to Spanish colonialism, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 81–82, 124–125) referenced Waldo Frank’s (Reference Frank1919) Our America to argue that British colonies in North America “received the spiritual and material energies of a society at its zenith” and were colonized by “the pioneer, the puritan, the Jew, all men of strong will who directed their energies toward utilitarian and practical ends.” Ascribing to typical settler-colonial views of Indigenous North Americans, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 125) thought that the “Anglo-Saxon colonizer did not find in North America an advanced culture or a powerful population,” which allowed for capitalism’s unfettered development. Instead of stimulating progress, as British colonialism did in North America, Spanish colonialism—with its feudalism and greed for mineral riches—stifled it, leading Mariátegui to “decry not our Spanish but our feudal legacy” (34).

Although Spanish colonialism led to the Incan Empire’s fall and gave rise to oppressive feudalism, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 42) noted that the Spanish Crown enacted various pieces of legislation, like the 1542 and 1543 New Laws of the Indies (Charles V [1893] Reference Charles, Stevens and Lucas1971), which “protected indigenous property and recognized its communist organization.” Since Indigenous communalism was compatible with both “the religious spirit and the political character of colonialism,” Spanish legislation protected it and incorporated it into the colonial apparatus “for the greater glory and profit of the king and church” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 42–43). Even though legislation protecting Indigenous communism was enacted, Mariátegui, directly citing Ugarte, insisted that it remained “mostly on paper,” as large quantities of Indigenous land fell “legally or illegally into the hands of Spaniards or criollos” (43), who formed large feudal landholdings that increasingly subjected Indigenous people to servitude through the “ encomiendas , mitas , and ponguaje ” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1971a). Incorporated into the feudal latifundia, the ayllu continued to exist, albeit “in a condition of servitude” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 45). Put another way, if under the Incan Empire the ayllu “formed the substratum of the Inca collectivity” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1971a), Spanish colonialism “petrified it within the great property that supported a new state” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 45). Even so, it is noteworthy that under Spanish colonialism the ayllu was neither eliminated nor superseded but was contemporarily nonsynchronous with feudalism, which attests to the fact that Spanish colonial-era protections, like the New Laws, were important to the persistence of nominal forms of Incan archaism.

The colonial period ended in 1821 when Peru declared independence from Spain. However, because independence “found Peru to be backward in the formation of its bourgeoisie” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 45), it did not culminate in a liberal-bourgeois revolution that gave way to advanced capitalism but merely occasioned a “simple class shift” in which rule by “the Spanish nobility was replaced by the rule of landowners, encomenderos , and Creole professionals” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1971a). In ordinary circumstances, Peru’s independence movement would have failed because its weak bourgeoisie derived from the gamonales and “did not lose its colonial and aristocratic vices and prejudices,” but it succeeded due to intracontinental unity and favorable global political and economic conditions (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 46, 52). Even though postindependence policies abolished forms of Indigenous servitude, such as the mita and encomienda , it also fortified the gamonales ’ privileges and attacked Indigenous communalism “in the name of liberal precepts” that aimed to promote small private property ownership (48). Put simply, because creole republican legislation made it easier for latifundistas to steal Indigenous land and “chain the Indian to the latifundium,” Mariátegui concluded that independence ultimately “made the condition of the Indian to some extent worse instead of better” (48, 53).

Subject to increasing attacks by postindependence legislation—which served “an antisocial function” because it attempted to eliminate Indigenous communalism and transform Indigenous people into small landholders—the ayllu was further incorporated into feudalism, sinking the American Indian “into deeper servitude” and eroding “the economic and legal institution that helped to safeguard the spirit and substance of his ancient civilization” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 55). Although feudalism dominated the ayllu in the Peruvian highlands, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1971a) held that it persisted “within and against antagonistic socio-economic structures” and “shows unmistakable potentialities for evolution and development” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 56). In other words, in the sierra, Incan archaism existed in friction with feudalism and “conserved its natural idiosyncrasy” to evolve in the face of liberal land reform (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1971a). Turning to Hildebrando Castro Pozo’s (Reference Castro Pozo1924) Nuestra comunidad indígena , Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 57) argued that “as a result of the expropriation of communal lands for the latifundium,” the ayllu assumed four forms in the postindependence period that prevailed in the sierra in tension with feudalism: (1) “agricultural communities,” (2) “agricultural and livestock communities,” (3) “communities of pasture lands and watering places,” and (4) “communities that have the use of the land.”Footnote ⁸ Numerically speaking, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1971a) reported that there were “close to 1,500 communities” in Peru, composed of “approximately 1,500,000 community members” who cultivated 30 million hectares of land. In Mariátegui’s (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 58) view, the ayllu’s “hardy and stubborn habits of cooperation and solidarity” affirmed that when “expropriation and redistribution seem about to liquidate the ‘community,’ indigenous socialism always finds a way to reject, resist, or evade this incursion.” After “one hundred years of republican legislation,” he maintained that Indigenous communalism had not vanished (57). Instead, as “a living organism” defined by “vigorous and always-young bodies” (56–57), Mariátegui contended that the ayllu converged with feudalism in the Peruvian highlands, avoided extinction in the wake of postindependence legislation, and “continued to be the Indian’s only defense” when faced with land expropriation (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1971a). Even Indigenous people outside the ayllu, Mariátegui thought, exhibited a cooperative spirit. For instance, take the minka, a custom throughout Andes in which small proprietors help neighboring smallholders unable to work their land “due to lack of helpers, illness, or other similar reasons,” in exchange for a portion of the harvest or manual labor. Therefore, not only did Indigenous communalism persist within the ayllu itself but it also manifested in “a cooperative spirit that exists outside the communities” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1971a).

Despite the fact that “feudalism has remained all-powerful” in the sierra in the postindependence period, its agricultural productivity was mediocre when compared with that of the ayllu (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 64). Solely accounting for the “land and the Indian,” Mariátegui argued that the feudal latifundista “does not care about the productivity of his land, only about the income he receives from it” (66–67). Employing outmoded labor practices, such as “tenant farming and sharecropping,” Indigenous people first worked the land held by the gamonales, which was the best in terms of fertility, and only afterward did they communally work the land that they had been allotted, which was the least fertile and the basis for their subsistence (67). Notwithstanding these obstacles, as “a system of production,” the ayllu produced equivalent crop yields to that of the feudal latifundium (61). On the one hand, Mariátegui thought that this comparison evidenced the ayllu’s efficiency and agreeable atmosphere for collective work, and on the other, it demonstrated that Peruvian feudalism was “incapable of technical progress” (58–61).

Considering that the Peruvian sierra retained “its feudal character” after more than a century of independence (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 55), Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui, Becker and Vanden2011a, 69) insisted that Indigenous oppression was “a fundamentally economic problem.” Rejecting “administrative, legal, ethnic, moral, educational, and ecclesiastic” explanations for the maltreatment of Indigenous people, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 159) argued that “the ‘problem of the Indian’ and the ‘problem of land’ … are one and the same.” In other words, Mariátegui analyzed Peruvian reality as a “socialist critic” and concluded that Indigenous exploitation was a direct result of feudal land ownership and its associated labor practices (22, 24). To resolve both problems, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui, Becker and Vanden2011a, 69) advanced a single solution: he categorically demanded Indigenous peoples’ “right to land.”

While feudalism and Indigenous communalism frictionally coexisted in the Peruvian highlands, the remnants of Incan communism had disappeared along the coast, which was defined by nascent capitalism. Peru was a latecomer to international trade, since its location along the Pacific Ocean increased shipping costs, making it less profitable for European and American traders. Peru’s coastal capitalism began to develop from the 1840s onward, in large part due to the investment of foreign capital—first British, then American—which was used for the extraction of nitrates, as well as the cultivation and export of sugar and cotton. Since Peru’s bourgeoisie was content being “absolutely dependent” on extractivism financed from abroad, rather than developing domestic industry based on its own initiative, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 68–70) lambasted it as a class of “intermediaries or agents of foreign capitalism.” Because Mariátegui analyzed Peru’s subservience to foreign capital, Alberto Acosta and John Cajas-Guijarro (Reference Acosta and Cajas-Guijarro2022, 205) argue that he ought to be considered “as one of the first amautas [the Quechua term for philosophers in the Incan Empire] of dependency theory.”

Despite the fact that coastal agriculture “evolved rather rapidly toward a capitalist procedure in farming and in the processing and sale of crops,” Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 62, 55) argued that “its exploitation still rests on feudal practices and principles.” This is to say that although coastal agriculture employed modern technology and was integrated into the capitalist world system, Peru’s bourgeoisie retained a “colonial mentality” that it inherited from its gamonal ancestors (62). More specifically, the national bourgeoisie perpetuated the “feudal treatment of the worker” through labor practices like indenture and yanaconazgo , which meant that the coastal capitalist hacienda was “run like a baronial fief” (62–63). Because the Peruvian bourgeoisie wholly disregarded “the civil rights of the people who live within his property” in its labor practices, coastal agriculture was prevented from instituting “free-wage contracting,” a central feature of mature capitalism (63). “Capitalist exploitation and industrialization of the land,” Mariátegui wrote, “cannot develop fully and freely unless all feudal privileges are abolished; therefore, it has made very little progress in our country” (71). Feudalism’s persistence in the postindependence period, both in the sierra, where it was the dominant mode of production in tension with Indigenous communalism, and on the coast, where it survived as outdated labor practices within capitalist agriculture, impeded the full consolidation of advanced capitalism in Peru.

“Our Agrarian Problem Has a Special Character”: The Archaic and Peruvian Socialism

Peru’s incomplete transition to capitalism, its ongoing exploitation by Anglo-American neocolonialism, and the ayllu’s persistence despite its subjection to feudalism generated debate among the Peruvian Left regarding the country’s developmental pathway to socialism. On the one hand, there was Haya de la Torre, the founder of APRA, who, while initially fond of the Bolshevik Revolution, came to believe that Peru, unlike Russia, was ill suited for socialist revolution and a direct transition to socialism. As Haya de la Torre ([1936] Reference Haya de la Torre2010) conjectured in El antiimperialismo y el APRA, originally written in 1928 but first published in 1936, Peru had to first pass through the developmental stage of bourgeois capitalism, which would strengthen the Peruvian proletariat and help Peru to overcome its political and economic backwardness, before reaching socialism. Unlike states marked by advanced capitalism, in which imperialism constituted capitalism’s final stage before socialism, Haya de la Torre ([1936] Reference Haya de la Torre2010, 34) posited that “for countries with primitive or backward economies, where capitalism arrives in its imperialist form,” like Peru, “this is ‘its first stage.’” Because Haya de la Torre accepted capitalism as a necessary developmental stage, he counseled a nationalist and anti-imperialist agenda that would unite Peru’s national bourgeoisie with the peasantry and the nascent proletariat to combat neocolonialism and develop domestic capitalism, which he surmised would eventually fortify the proletariat and clear the way for Peruvian socialism.

On the other hand, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 33) insisted that Peru’s “agrarian problem has a special character,” defined by the persistence of Incan archaism and the clash between archaic and developmental temporal-historical layers, which generated friction that could spark revolutionary struggle, foment Indigenous resurgence, and open a developmental pathway along which the ayllu would be renewed in the sierra for the larger project of building modern communism, thus enabling Peru to jump over the historical stage of advanced capitalism and transition directly to socialism. In large part, this can be attributed to Mariátegui’s (Reference Mariátegui, Becker and Vanden2011e, 182) understanding of Marxism, which he maintained was not a body of abstract principles to be mechanically applied to all historical contexts but rather was a universal method of historical analysis “that is completely based in reality.” As he understood it, Marxism was universal because it could function as a method of historical analysis within any particular and concrete conjecture, but it was not “abstractly universal” ( abstractamente universal ) since it offered historically rooted theorizations instead of a predetermined philosophy of history (Arnall Reference Arnall2017, 64). Because of this, Gavin Arnall presents Mariátegui’s Marxism as “a method of theoretical translation” in which immanent critique functions as a compass, defined by universal cardinal points, that guides revolutionary theory and praxis through terrain that “is always particular and concrete” (62–64; emphasis in original). Put simply, for Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui, Becker and Vanden2011c), Marxism was a universal and dialectical method of historical analysis in which particular conclusions and particular political actions, or effects, were determined based on the particular context being studied, and given this, he concluded that “Marxism, where it has shown itself to be revolutionary … has never obeyed a passive and rigid determinism” (208; see also Gordy Reference Gordy, Kapust and Kinsella2017, 132; Reference Gordy, Jenco, Idris and Thomas2020). Such a sensibility grounded Mariátegui’s opposition to orthodox Marxism and aprismo, both of which required Peru’s passage through advanced capitalism, as well as his vision of socialism’s organization in Peru (Flores Galindo Reference Flores Galindo1980, chap. 1).Footnote ⁹

Applied to the Peruvian context, Marxism had to account for the Indigenous population, which, as Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui, Becker and Vanden2011f, 316) noted, “makes up four-fifths of the total population.” “Our socialism,” he wrote, “would not be Peruvian—nor would it even be socialism—if it did not solidarize itself, first and foremost, with Indigenous demands” (Reference Mariátegui1971b). In Peru, discourses and political movements focused on Indigenous people can be traced to the period following the War of the Pacific (1879–83), during which indigenismo—a political, aesthetic, and cultural movement that revitalized Indigenous symbols, condemned the exploitation of Indigenous people, and attempted to politically mobilize the Indigenous—gained prominence (Cornejo Polar Reference Cornejo Polar1978; Coronado Reference Coronado2009; Flores Galindo Reference Flores Galindo1978). In the wake of Peru’s defeat to Chile, various efforts studied Indigenous reality, probed the maltreatment of Indigenous people, and set out to improve their standard of living in practical ways. For example, consider Manuel González Prada’s (Reference González Prada, Sobrevilla and Fornoff2003, 49) “Speech at the Politeama Theater” in 1888, which argued that “the nation is made up of the masses of Indians living on the eastern slopes of the mountains” and advocated for the education of Indigenous people (Leibner Reference Leibner1997). This early manifestation of indigenismo, as well as the rise of indigenista literature by Clorinda Matto de Turner, César Vallejo, and Valcárcel, among others, were important precursors to Mariátegui’s Marxism, which centered Indigenous history, reality, and agency (Grijalva Reference Grijalva2010, 326).

Considering the Incan communal past, the endurance of archaic communal institutions and practices, and the intense exploitation that Indigenous people faced, Mariátegui maintained that Indigenous people would play a central role as revolutionary subjects in Peru’s struggle for socialism. More specifically, he believed that the idea of socialist revolution would function as a Sorelian myth—that is, as “images of battle” and “expressions of a will to act” (Sorel Reference Sorel and Jennings1999, 20, 28)—that would mobilize Peru’s Indigenous population and galvanize them to partake in the struggle for modern communism (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui, Becker and Vanden2011b, 384).Footnote ¹⁰ “The soul of the Indian,” he wrote,

Neither education nor philanthropy would improve the miserable condition in which Indigenous people lived; instead, only revolutionary political action—driven by the myth of socialist revolution and nurtured by Indigenous people’s ongoing communalism—would put an end to Indigenous oppression. Given that Peruvian capitalism was patchy and that its working class was “too limited for us to think of fractionizing it and splitting it” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui, Becker and Vanden2011d, 342), Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1971a) recommended a united front between the incipient proletariat and the Indigenous peasantry to achieve socialism in practice. Joined together, he reasoned, the working class and the Indigenous peasantry could conduct a more effective revolutionary politics and catalyze Peru’s direct transition to socialism, skipping the developmental stage of advanced capitalism.

If Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality primarily offered a sketch of Peru’s converging plural temporalities, Mariátegui’s (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, xxxv) theorization of how this would make way for socialism and how it would be organized was contained in a subsequent book—meant to be published by Historia Nueva in Spain, run by his friend César Falcón—which has been lost to posterity (Flores Galindo Reference Flores Galindo1980, 104). Nonetheless, I contend that fragments of his view are articulated in “The Problem of Race in Latin America,” which was delivered at the 1929 Latin American Communist Conference, the first and only conference of its kind in Latin America that was sponsored by the Comintern. Up to 1928, with its Sixth Congress, the Comintern paid scant attention to Latin America, despite the existence of communist parties in various Latin American states like Argentina and Chile. This is further evidenced by the fact that Mariátegui did not formally establish contact with the Comintern until mid-1927 at the earliest (Flores Galindo Reference Flores Galindo1980, 20). The conference, therefore, exemplifies the Comintern’s brief but increased attention to Latin America in the late 1920s, a period in which it was “anticipating a new revolutionary conjecture” and “was proposing the extreme and accelerated proletarianization of its cadres” (Flores Galindo Reference Flores Galindo1980, 28; see also Clark Reference Clark, Naimark, Pons and Quinn-Judge2017; Massó and Quiroga Reference Massó and Quiroga2022). Mariátegui did not personally attend the conference due to medical reasons, but he did contribute three papers: “Antecedents and Development of Class Action in Peru,” “Anti-Imperialist Point of View,” and “The Problem of Race in Latin America.” In his place, Mariátegui sent Julio Portocarrero and Hugo Pesce.Footnote ¹¹ Ultimately, Mariátegui’s “The Problem of Race in Latin America” reveals that the Peruvian delegation—unlike others—refused to toe the orthodox Marxist line, which required that Peru pass through the developmental stage of bourgeois capitalism, and instead opted for an alternative Marxist developmental trajectory that took Peru’s national situation into account.Footnote ¹²

Mariátegui wrote “The Problem of Race in Latin America” at the request of Victorio Codovilla, an Italian migrant to Argentina who was the founder and head of the Comintern’s Secretariado Sudamericano (South American Secretariat; SSA), the central bureaucratic organ between Moscow and Latin American communism. In late March 1929, Codovilla sent Mariátegui a letter asking that he “prepare a document on the Indians’ struggle for emancipation from their current state of slavery” for the conference (Becker Reference Becker2006, 460). More specifically, inspired by the Comintern’s 1928 endorsement of Black people’s self-determination in the US and South Africa to address racial discrimination in the larger context of Marxist struggle, Codovilla asked Mariátegui to assess the possibility of founding independent American Indian republics in Latin America—particularly in the Andes, which could be the site of two Indigenous republics, one Aymara and one Quechua. Mariátegui obliged with Codovilla’s request (Wood Reference Wood2026, chaps. 4–5).

In the paper, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1971a) vehemently denied that Indigenous oppression could be explained by racial arguments, or views that “explain the condition of the Indigenous races with arguments based on their inferiority or primitivism.” Racial arguments that sustained Indigenous inferiority, he maintained, were put forward by bourgeois intellectuals to “cover up or ignore the true problems of the continent,” and they were used from the time of the conquest “to carry out intense exploitation” of Indigenous people (Reference Mariátegui1971a). Instead, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1971a), attending to the intersection of race and class, argued that Indigenous oppression was the consequence of “the exploitation and absolute domination” of feudal landholders. Thus, in his view, the problem of Indigenous oppression was “not racial but social and economic” (Reference Mariátegui1971a). Having rejected racial arguments to explain the maltreatment of Indigenous people, Mariátegui denounced the possible creation of Indigenous republics, which he thought centered Indigenous peoples’ race but failed to account for their respective class position. In his view, the foundation of independent American Indian republics in the Andes “would not lead at the present time to the dictatorship of the Indian proletariat, much less to the formation of a classless Indian state … but to the constitution of a bourgeois Indian state with all the internal and external contradictions of bourgeois states” (Reference Mariátegui1971a).Footnote ¹³ In light of this, he acknowledged that only revolutionary struggle—bringing together “the Indians, proletarians, and peasants, in close alliance with the mestizo and white proletariat”—could result in meaningful social and economic transformation (Reference Mariátegui1971a).

Importantly, in his analysis of Indigenous oppression, Mariátegui did not lapse into reverse-racist arguments that endowed Indigeneity—or one’s social, cultural, and racial identity as an Indigenous person—with inherently revolutionary potential.Footnote ¹⁴ To ascribe to such a position, he thought, was “to fall into the most naïve and absurd mysticism,” and he believed that such positions were as foolish as those that equated Indigeneity with primitivism (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui1971a). This is to say that Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1971a) rejected all arguments that advanced racial essentialism—both those that denigrated Indigenous identity as inferior and those that bestowed Indigenous identity “with messianic faith”—and he insisted that racial oppression could only be meaningfully analyzed and solved by foregrounding the intersection of Indigenous people’s racial identity and socioeconomic position.

Keeping in mind his rejection of founding independent American Indian republics in the Andes, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1971a) attended to the coexistence of Peru’s nonsynchronous temporalities and argued that the ayllu represented “a natural factor for the socialization of the land” because of its dynamism and socioeconomic centrality to Indigenous people, and he posited that it would play a political and organizational role in the process of creating modern communism in Peru. In the Peruvian sierra, where Indigenous communalism coexisted alongside but was subjugated by feudalism, Mariátegui argued that Indigenous exploitation and feudal domination could be rectified by liquidating large feudal landholdings and “[a]warding large land estates to the communities.” With feudal estates broken up, their land would be granted to and managed by the ayllu, which, with “minimal effort … can become a cooperative” that would control and distribute the land and its products. In this sense, in the Peruvian highlands, Mariátegui found “the solution to the agrarian problem” (Reference Mariátegui1971a)—that is, both the problem of the land and the problem of the Indian, as he called it—“in the livelihoods of communities” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui, Becker and Vanden2011e, 239). In the convergence of Peru’s plural temporalities, the ayllu, a remnant of Incan archaism, was neither bound to disappear nor did it obstruct development; rather, the friction generated in the collision of archaic and developmental temporalities opened an alternative developmental trajectory in which it could be revitalized to serve as the primary organizational unit for the transition to modern communism in the Peruvian highlands. Put simply, as Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1971a) affirmed, the Indigenous communalism that persisted in the sierra among the Indigenous population “in concrete structures and a deep collectivist spirit” could be “one of the most solid foundations of the collectivist society advocated by Marxist communism.” It is significant, however, that the ayllu would only fulfill such a function in the Peruvian highlands and not on the coast, where “communal landownership has disappeared” and capitalist agriculture was more developed. Because of this, Mariátegui conjectured that coastal laborers must struggle in favor of various demands, such as “wage increases, the eight-hour day, and [the] enforcement of laws protecting labor,” which would do away with feudal stayovers in capitalist agriculture and culminate in “the individualization of land ownership.” Despite the different dynamics of struggle in the sierra and on the coast, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1971a) insisted that these efforts had to cultivate “fraternal solidarity,” and he advocated that Indigenous members of the labor movement play a central role in the “ideological education of the Indigenous masses,” since their “language skills allow them to carry out an effective mission as instructors of their racial and class brothers.”

It is noteworthy, however, that Mariátegui did not advocate for a nostalgic return to Incan communism—that is, he did not call for Peru’s wholesale repudiation of modernity and a complete return to Incan society as it was during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, before the arrival of the Spanish—which is reflective of his conceptualization of Marxism as a method of translation that scientifically explains concrete historical reality and supplies the principles for modern communist revolutionary struggle in particular historical conditions (Arnall Reference Arnall2017, 57). As Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui, Becker and Vanden2011h, 176) proclaimed in his polemic with Luis Alberto Sánchez, a prominent APRA intellectual, “[m]y ideal is not a colonial Peru or Inca Peru, but an integrated Peru.” In fact, throughout his work, he explicitly defended himself from charges of nostalgia. In “Programmatic Principles of the Socialist Party,” he wrote that his views did “not mean at all a romantic and antihistorical trend of reconstructing or resurrecting Inca socialism, which corresponded to historical traditions completely bypassed” (Mariátegui Reference Mariátegui, Becker and Vanden2011g, 239). Echoing the historical relativism with which he analyzed Incan and modern communism, Mariátegui maintained that a full, romantic, and nostalgic return to the former was impossible because of the historical and technological changes associated with modernity. This is to say that Mariátegui accepted modernity’s advances in Peru and thought it necessary that they be incorporated into modern communism, which distinguished it from Incan communism despite the core similarities between the two communisms. For example, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1971a) affirmingly cited the Japanese example to show that non-Europeans could successfully “appropriate Western science” in their economic development, and he contended that increased automobile traffic in Peru would allow for the spread of socialist propaganda to haciendas that were previously out of reach, thus contributing to the class struggle. Such technological innovations could not be rejected, which prevented any nostalgic return to the Incan past.

Truth be told, Mariátegui criticized other Peruvian intellectuals for their nostalgia, which is best seen in his review of Valcárcel’s (Reference Valcárcel1925a) De la vida inkaica . While Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1972a) praised Valcárcel’s book for “contain[ing] the elements of a total interpretation of the spirit of the Incan civilization,” he also disapproved of the author’s view “that we repudiate the corrupted, decadent Western civilization” ( civilización occidental ). Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1972a) advanced two objections to Valcárcel’s conclusion. On the one hand, Mariátegui claimed that Western civilization was not “as exhausted and putrid” as Valcárcel depicted, and on the other hand, Mariátegui argued that Valcárcel incorrectly supposed that Peru could abandon Western civilization’s “experience, technology [ técnica ], and ideas … to return, with harsh intransigence, to its ancient agrarian myths.” Valcárcel’s view, Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui1972a) thought, was “excessively romantic” and ignored that the conquest, colonization, and the postindependence periods all represent “a historical fact” ( un hecho histórico ), which inaugurated “a new reality” that could not be rejected. For Mariátegui, modernity could not be abandoned to wholly revert to Incan society, as some intellectuals, like Valcárcel, counseled. Instead, I suggest that we interpret Mariátegui’s excavation of Incan communism as a critical recovery. While Mariátegui (Reference Mariátegui and Urquidi1971c, 74) insisted that “[m]odern communism is different from Inca communism,” he argued that the two communisms could be compared in terms of “their essential and material likeness,” which could elucidate commonalities despite the fact that they correspond to “different human experiences,” refer to “different historical epochs,” and belong to “dissimilar civilizations.” Surely, because of these differences—including technological and industrial advances—nostalgically returning to Incan society was out of the question, but due to the persistence, evolution, and potency of Incan archaism, modern communism would strongly resemble the past in its communalism.