In early 2019 an exhibition opened at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid titled The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s. According to the exhibition website: ‘Without doubt, the Peruvian journal Amauta (1926–1930), founded and directed by José Carlos Mariátegui (Moquegua, Peru, 1894 – Lima, Peru, 1930), was one of the most influential publications in twentieth-century art.’ Curated by Beverley Adams and Natalia Majluf, the exhibition, which later travelled to the Museo de Arte de Lima, the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, succeeded in giving Amauta, and by extension, Mariátegui, the visibility that they clearly deserve.Footnote 1
As the success of, and reactions to, the exhibition revealed, Mariátegui retains a wide appeal over 90 years after his death. In this article, I discuss Mariátegui's globality. The ‘global turn’ in the social sciences and particularly in history offers a useful perspective from which to rethink Mariátegui. Attention to the different ways in which economic, social, political and cultural interconnections and interdependencies, as well as ruptures and asymmetries, have shaped the world seems salutary as a corrective both to historical diffusionism (the idea that all history is necessarily derivative of the history of the West) and methodological nationalism (the tendency to view the nation-state as the necessary unit of historical analysis).Footnote 2 Drawing on this scholarship, I argue in this article that Mariátegui's globality merits attention.Footnote 3
The concept of globality is used in somewhat different ways in different disciplines. Arturo Escobar warns of the dangers of ‘imperial globality’ – ‘this new Global Empire […] articulates the “peaceful expansion” of the free-market economy with omnipresent violence in a novel regime of economic and military globality’ – while, conversely, Denise Ferreira da Silva notes that ‘foregrounding globality can contribute to the kind of anticolonial account of global capitalism appropriate to a radical version of the critical ethnic studies project’.Footnote 4 Erin K. Wilson defines globality as ‘a social condition, potentially the end-point of globalization, whereby individual and collective consciousness is focused increasingly at the global level and away from the national level’.Footnote 5 It is a ‘figure of thought’; a ‘perspective based on the idea of globality takes as its starting point the condition of our common existence on the same globe in order to better understand the formal unity of our globe and its evident contradictions’.Footnote 6
Globality can perhaps be defined most simply in relation to its antonym: locality. If globalisation is a process marked by an increasing interconnection and interdependence on a planetary scale, then perhaps globality is a condition that expresses that process. In the analysis that follows I distinguish two forms of globality: on the one hand, the increasing global purchase of Mariátegui's ideas, as measured by the extent to which his thought is referenced at a global scale either in scholarly work or beyond in a manner that emphasises its global applicability while, often, insisting on its Latin Americanness or Andeanness. This is a globality that in some ways reflects a departure from a scholarship that anchors Mariátegui's thought to Peru or Latin America – seeing Mariátegui as the source of a specifically Latin American form of Marxism – but which retains elements of it.Footnote 7
But I am interested in examining another type of globality: while scholars have drawn attention to Mariátegui's ‘internationalism’, arguably a necessary dimension to any type of interwar Marxism in the age of the Communist International (Comintern, also known as the Third International), they have until recently tended to overlook his role as a global, as opposed to primarily local (i.e. Peruvian or, at most, Latin American), actor; as someone who was shaped by, but also helped build, global interconnections and interdependencies, and, more specifically, as someone who (i) sought to experience life globally, (ii) drew on global ideas, or ideas with globalising (or universalising) ambitions, to make sense of his own (local) context, and (iii) operated as an original interpreter of the global.
In exploring both forms of Mariátegui's globality, I note that analyses that stress or even celebrate the first form of globality often pay limited or partial attention to the second while studies of global history, particularly those that focus on the history of Marxism and the Left, have so far failed to acknowledge Mariátegui as a thinker of the global.
Mariátegui and Latin American Marxism
Viewed from Peru, or even Latin America, Mariátegui looms large – his status as a key twentieth-century thinker unquestioned and increasingly acknowledged. Although this status was established as early as the 1920s, it was reaffirmed in the 1970s and 1980s when a wave of new scholarship recast him as the pre-eminent Latin American Marxist theorist. Antonio Melis famously called Mariátegui ‘the first Marxist of America’.Footnote 8 Writing in 1978, the Argentine intellectual José Aricó argued that Mariátegui's key work, 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, ‘represents the most important contribution of Latin American Marxism to the cause of world revolution […] [It] remains, 50 years after its publication, the only major theoretical work of Latin American Marxism’.Footnote 9 More recently, the intellectual historian Nicola Miller has noted: ‘Mariátegui has been hailed, rightly, as one of the earliest Latin American thinkers to apply Marxism flexibly and creatively to a specifically Latin American context, and his resulting influence on various sectors of the region's Left has been thoroughly documented.’Footnote 10
Mariátegui's short life is compelling and, though relatively well-known, worth retelling briefly; as will become clear in the final section, his life trajectory is key to his globality. Born in the small town of Moquegua in 1894, Mariátegui never met his ‘patrician’ father (the Mariátegui family can trace its lineage at least to Francisco Javier Mariátegui, 1793–1884, a ‘prócer’ or hero of independence from Spain) and was raised by his single mother. After a childhood accident, his mother moved him (and his siblings) to Lima to access better medical treatment than was available in the city of Huacho, 50 kilometres north of Lima, where they were living. Mariátegui spent several months in hospital where he learnt to read and write. Although he recovered from the operation, he was left with a limp. His close friend, the poet Abraham Valdelomar, called him ‘el cojito genial’ (‘the lame genius’). Poor health and disability would shape Mariátegui's life.Footnote 11
Although he never attended university – he was widely praised for being an ‘autodidact’ – by his teens, while working for several of Lima's newspapers and enjoying membership of Lima's bohemian set, Mariátegui established himself as one of Peru's most influential intellectuals (he published over 2,500 articles during his lifetime). He was exiled in 1919 by President Augusto B. Leguía, who viewed his increasingly radical political journalism (in newspapers such as La Razón) and links to both the student movement and the organised working class as a threat. During this time, Mariátegui had moved towards a socialism that was ‘protest and denunciation’.Footnote 12 He spent four years in Europe, primarily in Italy, where he became acquainted with the cultural vanguard and left-wing political scene, met his wife, Anna Chiappe, and travelled to several countries, including France and Germany. He would return to Peru, as he famously put it, a ‘marxista convicto y confeso’ (a ‘convicted and confessed Marxist’).
Upon his return to Peru in 1923, Mariátegui quickly regained his status as a key intellectual figure. He developed strong links with Peru's small labour movement through his stewardship of the Universidades Populares González Prada (González Prada Popular Universities, UPGP),Footnote 13 set up a publishing house called Minerva (with his brother, Julio César), and established the journal Amauta, arguably the most important avant-garde cultural magazine in Latin America at the time. In 1924, during a particularly acute health crisis, doctors amputated his right leg. He became a wheelchair user and would experience several episodes of severe ill health in the next few years but continued his political and cultural work. The publication of his 7 ensayos in 1928 cemented his reputation as one of the most original intellectuals in Latin America but also as a Marxist innovator, owing to its focus on the revolutionary potential of Peru's Indigenous population.Footnote 14 In the late 1920s, he established the Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú (General Confederation of Peruvian Workers, CGTP) and the Peruvian Socialist (later renamed Communist) Party. Famously, he engaged in fierce polemics with Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the leader of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA – a mass-based party), and with the Comintern, which contributed to his intellectual standing.Footnote 15 He died, aged 35, on 16 April 1930.
Following his death, Mariátegui's influence on the Peruvian Left, and beyond, declined.Footnote 16 The Peruvian Communist Party that he had founded in 1928 (originally as the Peruvian Socialist Party) aligned itself closely, under the leadership of Eudocio Ravines, with the Comintern during its ‘class versus class’ phase. In this context, Mariátegui's ‘heterodox’ or ‘open’ Marxism became anathema, even counter-revolutionary, from the perspective of the Communist Party.Footnote 17 In the 1940s, Soviet scholars such as Vladimir Miroshevsky, expressing the Comintern's views, denounced Mariátegui as a populist and rejected his adaptation of Marxism to Peru.Footnote 18 At the same time, the Peruvian Communist Party, led by Jorge del Prado (an artist from the southern city of Arequipa who had been a close friend of Mariátegui), began to reclaim him as a faithful Marxist–Leninist–Stalinist, and therefore as an orthodox Marxist.Footnote 19 This coincided with the publication of Mariátegui's Complete Works, which made the two books he published during his lifetime (La escena contemporánea, 1925; 7 ensayos, 1928) and numerous other writings available to a wide readership.
Beginning in the 1960s, and more so in the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of scholars, Peruvian and foreign, many of whom met at a conference held in Culiacán, Mexico, in 1980, to mark the 50th anniversary of Mariátegui's death, began to reinterpret his work in a context shaped by the Cuban Revolution and the emergence of ‘New Lefts’ in Latin America and beyond.Footnote 20 In addition to numerous books and articles published in Peru and throughout Latin America, this new scholarship found an important outlet in the journal Anuario Mariateguiano. Eleven issues were published between 1989 and 1999. The Anuario published scholarly articles but also contributed to promoting new research on Mariátegui by including new materials, such as recently discovered correspondence or photographs, interviews with people who had known Mariátegui, reviews of new works on Mariátegui, and information on Mariátegui-related events.
The Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo's book La agonía de Mariátegui, first published in 1980, which, among other topics, examined the tensions between Mariátegui and APRA on the one hand and the Comintern on the other, arguably represents the most important contribution of this generation to rethinking Mariátegui. It offered a reading of Mariátegui's thought and political praxis influenced by debates within the Peruvian Left as the country moved from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s and 1980s (and to over a decade of armed conflict following Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path)'s decision to initiate armed struggle in 1980).Footnote 21 Mariátegui's heterodoxy now became an asset and, like Gramsci in Europe, he was claimed as the intellectual forefather of new political movements, like the Partido Unificado Mariateguista (Unified Mariateguist Party, PUM (1984–95)) led by Javier Diez Canseco, and, more problematically, Sendero Luminoso.Footnote 22
However, Mariátegui's newfound influence was not limited to Peru. Elsewhere in Latin America, from the 1970s and 1980s onwards, scholars like Oscar Terán, Florestan Fernandes and Michael Löwy, among others, (sometimes writing from exile) refocused attention on Mariátegui as part of a broader attempt to identify a specifically Latin American Marxist tradition. Mariátegui's rethinking of Marxism from a Peruvian perspective, attentive to the revolutionary potential of the Indigenous population, and his seemingly ‘open’ or non-dogmatic approach to how it might be adapted to local conditions, proved appealing as the region's Lefts sought to reinvent and reinvigorate themselves in a context shaped by military regimes, transitions to democracy and a prevailing sense that Soviet-style communism and European Marxism more broadly had little to offer them.Footnote 23
Mariátegui's status as the father of Latin America's Marxist Left, and perhaps more so, of a Latin American revolutionary tradition,Footnote 24 was illustrated in a particularly telling way in the 2004 film Motorcycle Diaries by Brazilian director Walter Salles. Based on Ernesto Guevara's famous travel diaries (and those of his companion, Alberto Granado), the film is an account of Guevara's 1952 trip across South America and combines the road movie and coming of age genres to put forward the idea that this experience of travel had a deep impact on Guevara and shaped his revolutionary outlook, in effect triggering his transformation into ‘Che’, the hero of the Cuban Revolution and the symbol of global revolution in the 1960s.
In the film, Guevara is shown in Lima meeting Hugo Pesce, a Peruvian doctor who was a close friend of Mariátegui (Pesce was a co-founder with Mariátegui of the Peruvian Socialist Party in 1928 and co-owner, with Mariátegui, of a Chrysler automobile). In a key scene, Pesce gifts Guevara a copy of Mariátegui's 7 ensayos, which the young Argentine proceeds to read. These scenes serve to suggest the key role that Mariátegui's book played in Guevara's political education. In fact, Guevara did not read Mariátegui's book until a few years later, when he received a copy in Guatemala in 1954 from Hilda Gadea, the Peruvian exile who became his first wife. More generally, whether Mariátegui had any real influence on Guevara's revolutionary thought or praxis is unclear.Footnote 25
Today, interest in Mariátegui in Latin America remains strong, as even a superficial overview of recent publications demonstrates. For example, in 2021 the Argentine press Siglo XXI published an anthology of Mariátegui's works, edited by Martín Bergel, in the Biblioteca del Pensamiento Socialista series.Footnote 26 In his 2021 survey of revolutionary thought and praxis in Latin America, El árbol de las revoluciones, the Cuban author Rafael Rojas, who resides and works in Mexico, devotes a whole chapter to Mariátegui and to the role that the Mexican Revolution played in his political thought.Footnote 27 In 2022, the sociologist Deni Alfaro Rubbo published a study of Mariátegui's influence in Latin American and particularly Brazilian social scientific thought.Footnote 28 Their publications, which are merely the most recent examples of a large body of work produced in the region, about which I will say more below, are proof of Mariátegui's enduring influence in Latin America.Footnote 29
Mariátegui beyond Latin America
By contrast to his wide appeal in the region and in Latin Americanist scholarship, Mariátegui's status in English-language interpretations of fields of knowledge and spheres of political action to which he contributed is less assured. Too often Mariátegui appears as a metaphorical or even a literal footnote in the relevant scholarship, if at all. In the 800-page Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, part of the noted Historical Materialism series published by Brill, he is mentioned once in an essay on liberation theology.Footnote 30 In the volume Marxism beyond Marxism, in which Arif Dirlik suggests that ‘Mao's Marxism should not be seen as a third world adaptation of a First World Marxism, nor yet as a local deviation from a universal standard Marxism, but rather as an intervention in Marxism itself, at once “globally” and “locally”’, Mariátegui, to whom such an approach would arguably apply, is not mentioned at all.Footnote 31 In the edited collection Twentieth-Century Marxism: A Global Introduction, Mariátegui does get a few paragraphs in the chapter on Latin America but his contributions to Marxism are not discussed in any of the other more thematic chapters.Footnote 32
Similarly, despite his centrality to the history of communism in Latin America, Mariátegui is not mentioned in either David Priestland's The Red Flag, which claims to provide ‘an original account of the Communist movement that fully explores its global impact’ or in Robert Service's Comrades: A World History of Communism.Footnote 33 In the Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism he is only mentioned in the chapter on communism in Latin America, but he is absent from the thematic discussions on ‘ideology’, ‘global moments’ or ‘communism and culture’ about which Mariátegui, and scholars of Mariátegui, would have plenty to say.Footnote 34 In the three-volume Cambridge History of Communism, Mariátegui is featured in a short vignette in Geoff Eley's early chapter – others given the vignette treatment are Zhu Zhixin, Ho Chi Minh and M. N. Roy. But he is never mentioned again in some 2,800 pages.Footnote 35 Things are not much better in the two-volume Cambridge History of Socialism, where he is only mentioned in reference to his alleged influence on Hugo Chávez.Footnote 36
Moreover, Mariátegui's key role with regard to the labour movement in Peru, and by extension, in Latin America, is ignored in major accounts of this field: he is not mentioned at all in either Jan Lucassen's ‘state of the art’ book on global labour history or in Marcel van der Linden's magnum opus on the same topic.Footnote 37 Indeed, in books with claims to global coverage of issues on which Mariátegui had much of interest to say or directly influenced, he is either absent or bundled awkwardly with others. In Brigitte Studer's ‘global history’ of the Comintern, he is not mentioned at all; though she does not mention the 1929 Comintern conference in Buenos Aires either, where Mariátegui's views were debated, so that is hardly surprising.Footnote 38 This neglect is consistent with the tendency in the field of global history to ignore Latin America.Footnote 39 As I discuss in the final section, it is particularly regrettable given that Mariátegui had so much to say about the global.
Nevertheless, in recent years ‘global’ interest in Mariátegui appears to have grown. Using English-language publications for Mariátegui as a proxy for ‘global’ interest and Spanish-language publications as a proxy for ‘local’ interest (from Peru and Latin America),Footnote 40 the Ngram visualisations (see Figures 1 and 2) provide useful if flawed data (only available up to 2019). Still, as the visualisations show, some trends can be discerned. First, interest in Mariátegui in Peru and Latin America began to decline in the 1990s and has not really recovered – in fact it has dropped quite significantly (see Figure 1). Why is unclear; it is possible that the drop is simply a reflection of the limited digitisation of recent Spanish-language books.Footnote 41 By contrast, and more important from the point of view of my argument, ‘global’ interest in Mariátegui, which declined slightly in the 1980s, has recovered and grown exponentially since the 2000s (see Figure 2).
Ngram Visualisation, Search Term ‘José Carlos Mariátegui’, Spanish-Language Books
Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer.
Ngram Visualisation, Search Term ‘José Carlos Mariátegui’, English-Language Books
Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer.
Of course, Ngram visualisations, which only capture how often a word or name is used in published books, are a poor indicator of the ‘popularity’ or ‘influence’ of Mariátegui.Footnote 42 And using English-language publications as a proxy for global interest is problematic, for sure. I share Laura Putnam's concerns about the implications of the ‘mass digitized turn’ for historical research, but my approach here is in the spirit of, as she puts it, a ‘quick eyeballing of the bigger picture or of doings next door: a sideways glance that can uncover connections or commonalities worth exploring’.Footnote 43 Indeed, this apparent growing global interest in Mariátegui beyond Latin America aligns with more impressionistic data, discussed in the next section, which points to a growing interest among scholars from outside Latin America (whose working language in not Spanish) in Mariátegui's thought as a means to make sense of Latin America and, perhaps more interestingly, parts of the world other than Latin America.
Mariátegui, the Pink Tide and the Decolonial Turn
The recent growing global interest in Mariátegui may be an effect of the wave of Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ governments, which spurred a rethinking of the history of the Latin American Left; a rethinking that accorded Mariátegui a particularly important role as the source of a specifically Latin American form of socialist thought. As Ronaldo Munck notes, ‘following Mariátegui, [the Pink Tide Left] have sought to “Latinamericanize” Marxism, giving it a new relevance for contemporary left-wing thought based on particular dynamics of economic exploitation and repression of the Amerindian peoples’.Footnote 44 In his speeches, Hugo Chávez named-checked Mariátegui regularly, something that his successor, Nicolás Maduro, continues to do: on 14 June 2021, Maduro tweeted: ‘Venezuela celebrates, together with the Peruvian people, 127 years since the birth of José Carlos Mariátegui. A man of lofty thought and revolutionary passion. Today we are called to follow his ideal, practising authenticity and building socialism from our essence and identity.’Footnote 45 This appropriation and repurposing of Mariátegui as the founder or inspiration for a new Latin American socialism by the Pink Tide governments may have brought Mariátegui to the attention of a broader, more global, audience.
In addition, the publication of an English-language anthology of key texts in 2011, framed as a response to the fact that ‘in recent years Latin America has emerged as a region that has challenged many neoliberal assumptions’, both reflected this new, Pink Tide-inspired, interest in Mariátegui and may have contributed to it by making available his writings to new, non-Spanish-speaking, audiences. The editors, Harry Vanden and Marc Becker, two scholars who have published sympathetically on Mariátegui, note in their introduction that ‘even though Mariátegui's thought has retained a central importance to ideological struggles in Latin America, in the English-speaking world few people are aware of his contributions’.Footnote 46 According to Google Scholar, the book has been cited 45 times since its publication and most of these citations are in English-language publications. Though the tide has largely receded, it nevertheless served to refocus global attention on the region as a source of radical politics and may, indirectly, have introduced Mariátegui to a global public.Footnote 47
At a more theoretical level, the growing global attention to Mariátegui may be a consequence of the influence of new readings of his works from postcolonial and, increasingly, decolonial perspectives, both in Latin America and in other parts of the ‘Global South’, and even in the ‘Global North’, in several disciplines, from cultural studies to anthropology and history to philosophy and political economy. Often, this scholarship is particularly influenced by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano's writings on coloniality which take Mariátegui as their point of departure.Footnote 48 Among such studies, one can find papers that look at Mariátegui and caste in India; Mariátegui's thought in relation to African anticolonial leaders such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah; Mariátegui as a means to make sense of the US South as represented in William Faulkner's novels; the debate between Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre (about which more below) as a source for rethinking and building a more ‘global’ field of international political economy; and Mariátegui ‘as being relevant for East–West political philosophy’.Footnote 49
This growing attention to Mariátegui beyond Latin America, and to Mariátegui as a means through which to understand places and histories other than Latin America (to reiterate, made possible at least in part by the growing availability of Mariátegui's writings in English) is arguably but the most recent ‘turn’ in Mariátegui studies. After all, as noted earlier, since his death various generations have re-discovered and re-purposed Mariátegui. What arguably distinguishes this more recent turn in Mariátegui studies from earlier ones is that he is no longer viewed primarily nor exclusively as an original interpreter of Peru or Latin America, or as a novel, heterodox, Marxist theorist from a geographical and intellectual periphery, but rather as offering an interpretative framework that exceeds Marxism (or is not constrained by its traditional Eurocentric focus) and that, in its essence, constitutes a much more radical ‘epistemology of the South’. The new allure of Mariátegui arises from the potential of his thought not only to provide insight into a variety of subjects but, more importantly, to challenge dominant Western epistemologies.Footnote 50
Mariátegui is increasingly grouped together with other major intellectual figures from the Global South like Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire or Amílcar Cabral, and celebrated in the context of a broader championing of non-Western and particularly Indigenous epistemologies.Footnote 51 As Mabel Moraña and Guido Podestá put it:
In recent decades, in the context of post-colonial theory and despite the marginal place that reflection on Latin America has occupied until now in European and North American debates and publications, Mariátegui's name has been, along with those of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, a recurring reference that draws attention to the anti-colonialist thought that has emerged in peripheral areas and to the specific themes that this thought has managed to introduce into the anti-imperialist intellectual and political agenda.Footnote 52
This scholarship, therefore, signals the (as yet incipient) unmooring of Mariátegui from Latin America while, critically, retaining his Latin Americanness, and the assumed Latin Americanness, and in some accounts the supposed Andeanness,Footnote 53 of his thought, as an essential quality. He is thus elevated to the status of a ‘grand theorist’ amenable to universalisation at the same time as he is marshalled into a broader critique of ‘grand theory’, read European theory, as a form of Western epistemological colonialism/imperialism.Footnote 54
It is interesting to note Mariátegui's shifting status as a decolonial theorist. Writing in 2007, in a journal special issue on ‘Globalization and the De-Colonial Option’, Catherine Walsh, citing the Peruvian thinker's racist writings on Afro-Peruvians, declared Mariátegui to be unsuitable for a Fanon-inspired decolonial project in Latin America for not only reproducing ‘Marxism's racial blindness but also the racist sentiments propagated by many key European thinkers’; thus echoing contemporary (to Mariátegui) dismissals of his thought as ‘europeizante’.Footnote 55 By contrast, in 2011, in an essay on Gramsci and Mariátegui, Walter Mignolo declared emphatically that not only was Mariátegui compatible with the decolonial project, but he was in fact its progenitor (and therefore a prime point of departure for a project of ‘epistemic disobedience’ or ‘epistemic delinking’, which Mignolo advocated): ‘Mariátegui’, Mignolo asserted, ‘provided the conditions for the concept of coloniality (and hence, decoloniality), introduced by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano at the end of the 1980s’.Footnote 56
By 2021, Rubbo confidently concluded that Mariátegui's espousal of Marxism was not an obstacle to gaining a status as a decolonial thinker. In fact, Mariátegui combined both Marxism and decolonial thought with optimal results: ‘José Carlos Mariátegui's work and trajectory are revealed through a wide range of political and epistemological ideas that carry out a Marxist and a decolonial reflection. The two elements of this reflection, far from being opposed, are mutually enriching in Mariátegui's thought.’Footnote 57 David Haekwon Kim goes further still, seeing Mariátegui's decoloniality as resulting from his engagement not primarily with Eurocentric Marxism but rather with Asian decolonial traditions: ‘revolutionary ferment in Asia became a liberatory inspiration for Mariátegui, as it was for many critical intellectuals of modernity's “underside” during the interwar years (and afterward) […] As an emerging Sino-Peruvian or East–South theorist, the radical political and decolonial experiments in the new Chinese republic captured [Mariátegui's] imagination.’Footnote 58
Yet while Mariátegui's globality in terms of his new status as an inspiration for the Pink Tide or as a southern epistemologist is deserving of attention, it should be considered alongside Mariátegui's globality in another sense: as an expression of the global dimension of his life experience and of his intellectual and political work. Postcolonial and decolonial scholars are contributing to the first form of globality, but they generally ignore, as do scholars of global history, the second form of globality; that is to say, with few exceptions, they seem unaware or uninterested in the fact that Mariátegui was as focused on trying to understand the rise of fascism in Europe, the disagreements between Tagore and Gandhi, or the Turkish revolution of Mustafa Kemal as in adapting Marxism to Peruvian reality or underscoring the revolutionary potential of the Indigenous population. Or, indeed, in the fact that he viewed both pursuits as one and the same.
Mariátegui's Globality
A dominant view of Mariátegui as an original thinker of the Peruvian revolutionary Left who represented an alternative to both the national populism of APRA on the one hand and the Stalinist Left on the other was gradually established as a consequence of the developments beginning in the 1960s that I sketched out above and the texts and the debates (with Haya de la Torre on the one hand and with the Comintern on the other) that these developments foregrounded.Footnote 59 At the same time, these developments contributed to privileging a certain view of Mariátegui as an interpreter of Peruvian reality (as his famous book indeed suggested) or, at most, of Latin American reality and of his writings as a framework for developing a specifically Peruvian or Latin American revolutionary praxis. In this context, the global in Mariátegui, or Mariátegui as an interpreter of, expression of, and participant in, the global, became less visible.
Recent approaches to the study of Mariátegui's life and writings have started to change this perception. This owes to the fact that scholars now place greater attention on Mariátegui's other texts, such as his early journalism, his writings on Europe and the wider world, his periodicals, particularly Amauta and Labor (the bi-weekly newspaper aimed at Peru's working class; ten issues were published between October 1928 and November 1929) and more broadly his editorial work, his correspondence with numerous interlocutors in Peru, Latin America and beyond (which was key to his editorial activities), and the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of his work (especially, but not exclusively, in Amauta). It also owes to the fact that his better-known political writings are being re-read through new lenses.Footnote 60
To be fair, this distinction is too neatly drawn. After all, much of the reinterpretation of Mariátegui from the 1960s to the 1980s owed to the repositioning of Mariátegui's thought in relation to European intellectual traditions (Sorel, Croce and Gramsci in particular).Footnote 61 This led, as Terán suggested, not to an ‘importation’ of those ideas, but rather ‘a fascinating fusion of external themes with a really peculiar Latin American particularity’.Footnote 62 It was a reinterpretation, therefore, that produced a sort of insertion of Mariátegui into a global history of left-wing and revolutionary thought (hence the occasional reference to Mariátegui as the Latin American Gramsci) as the source of a uniquely Latin American form of socialism.Footnote 63 But recent developments go beyond this repositioning by opening the door to an exploration of Mariátegui in the context of global processes (and not merely as a peripheral instantiation of heterodox Marxism).
What Bergel refers to as Mariátegui's ‘cosmopolitan socialism’ and De Castro as his ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ applies more generally to Mariátegui's engagement with the global in making sense of Peru (and, for that matter, to his engagement with Peru in making sense of the world).Footnote 64 From 1924 onwards, Mariátegui wrote a column for the periodical Mundial titled ‘Peruanicemos el Perú’, which focused on the so-called ‘Indian question’, which he famously called the ‘primary problem of Peru’, among several other topics including Peruvian poetry. But, as his column pieces show, he was equally invested in a project to globalise Peru, to make Peru intelligible through a dialogue with the wider world. As he stated in rejecting what he saw as retrograde nationalism that dismissed foreign ideas, ‘the mystified national reality is but a segment, a parcel of the vast world reality […] We have the duty not to ignore the national reality; but we also have the duty not to ignore the world reality.’Footnote 65
In what ways, then, is it useful to think of a ‘global’ Mariátegui in the sense of Mariátegui as a global actor; as someone whose life and thought was shaped by, but who also helped build, global interconnections and interdependencies? First, in terms of his life and personal experience, it is clear that Mariátegui was drawn by the ‘allure of the foreign’, and particularly by Europe, as a means of being-in-the-world ‘globally’ (i.e. of transcending the local).Footnote 66 As his biographers show, he developed a keen interest in foreign languages and foreign literature at an early age (learning rudimentary French from the other patients while convalescing in the Maison de Santé after his childhood accident) and would go on to speak and read Italian (which he spoke at home with his Italian wife) and German (though not English).Footnote 67 As a young journalist, working at La Prensa, he adopted the nom de plume Juan Croniqueur, which evoked his profession as a writer of ‘crónicas’ but also his clear identification with France. Although in this so-called ‘edad de piedra’ (‘stone age’ – the term Mariátegui used to refer to his early writings in a somewhat dismissive manner) his journalism covered a broad range of themes, from local politics to horse racing, several of his articles dealt with social and political processes abroad.
In fact, the ‘corresponsal de Madrid’ Juan Croniqueur's very first published article was a ‘crónica madrileña’. As his correspondence of the time with his platonic love Bertha Molina indicates, he hoped that he might be posted to Europe.Footnote 68 His participation in Lima's bohemian set, together with figures like Valdelomar (who had recently come back from Italy) and the Colónida group of poets and writers, involved an embodied performance of a sort of belle-époque dandyism that evoked a worldliness that stood at odds, and was intended to clash with, the conservatism of Lima's elites.Footnote 69 Mariátegui's interest in visiting theatre starlets like Tórtola Valencia and the famous scandal at Lima's cemetery with the Swiss dancer Norka Rouskaya (which resulted in Mariátegui's arrest) attest to his attraction to cultural forms that reflected the ‘allure of the foreign’.Footnote 70
As this suggests, Mariátegui's engagement with the global as Europe, or at least an idea of Europe, predated his exile. However, as several scholars have noted, his European experience was transformative. In part, it contributed to his embrace of Marxism; as already noted, he returned to Peru, by his own admission, as a ‘marxista convicto y confeso’, although his identification with socialism had begun before his exile. But it also exposed him to key political and cultural developments, such as the rise of fascism, to which he devoted much attention, and the birth of the Italian Communist Party (he attended the 1921 Livorno congress where the Communist Party split from the Socialist Party). He was also exposed to key intellectuals like Barbusse, Croce and Gramsci, as well as D'Annunzio, and to journals like Clarté and L'Ordine Nuovo, that provided models of intellectual and political engagement. More generally, he encountered avant-garde movements, such as surrealism, cubism, dadaism and psychoanalysis, which he would draw on in his own political and cultural praxis.
These European experiences, which he masterfully analysed in articles published in the Peruvian daily El Tiempo and which were later compiled in the volume Cartas de Italia (1969), would inform not only the lectures that he delivered at the UPGP upon his return to Peru, where he broached topics such as the consequences of the First World War and the Russian Revolution (later published as Historia de la crisis mundial, 1964), but also his entire political and cultural work until his death in a manner, as Bergel has suggested with respect to his treatment of the Russian Revolution, that connected the local and the global.Footnote 71 As he stated in 1929: ‘On the roads of Europe, I found the country of America that I had left and in which I had lived almost strangely and absent.’Footnote 72
Second, Mariátegui developed a universal, or global, interpretative framework to make sense of Peru through his reworking of Marxism. As his contemporary critics, like the conservative Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, recognised, in his 7 ensayos Mariátegui radically reinterpreted the character of Peruvian history by foregrounding an economic analysis of the sources of Peruvian backwardness.Footnote 73 With respect to the key ‘Indian question’, which by the 1920s Mariátegui increasingly recognised as the fundamental issue that Peru faced (having first directed his attention primarily at Peru's urban working classes), he challenged indigenista arguments about the need to morally uplift Peru's Indigenous population by identifying the problem of land (and its feudal character) as the key issue that needed to be overcome.
As numerous scholars have noted, this was not a simple application of Marxism to Peru: Mariátegui adapted Marxism in a way that incorporated Sorelian notions (about the mobilising potential of ‘myth’) but, perhaps more importantly, that recognised that socialism in Peru could not be built in the same way as in Europe (hence the often-repeated aphorism that for Mariátegui socialism in Latin America would be ‘neither trace nor copy but heroic creation’).Footnote 74 Mariátegui's ‘heterodoxy’ (which, as noted, resulted in tensions with the Comintern) consisted in recognising the revolutionary potential of Peru's Indigenous population, a potential demonstrated by the discovery of the existence of a precolonial form of communism in the Andes that needed kindling: ‘the Indian solution has to be a social solution. Its authors must be the Indians themselves.’Footnote 75
These ideas, and specifically Mariátegui's embrace of Marxism, exposed him to accusations of being a ‘europeizante’ (as he himself noted in the introduction to 7 ensayos), and therefore, by implication, of being disconnected from Peruvian (and Latin American) reality. Such accusations corresponded to a broader conflict that emerged between Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre and, by extension, between a broadly Marxist political project and APRA's national populism. Haya de la Torre had initially conceived of APRA as a project of continental emancipation that drew on Marxism and presented a clear anti-imperialist vision. But by the late 1920s, even while it retained, at least rhetorically, an internationalist dimension, it began to change into a narrower political project, which Mariátegui viewed as little different to the political parties that served as vehicles for the ‘criollo’ caudillos that had ruled Peru since the nineteenth century.
The tension between Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre, therefore, owed to several factors (some of a personal nature) but ultimately reflected different conceptions of the nature of political transformation that each believed Peru needed. In the case of Haya de la Torre, Peru would be transformed by a nationalist revolution (hence the often-mentioned inspiration of the Chinese Guomindang), whose key driving force was to be found locally. For Mariátegui, Peru needed a socialist revolution that would be part of a broader, global, process of radical change even if, he insisted, the character of the revolution in Peru would, inevitably, need to reflect specific local conditions.
Third, a global Mariátegui is discernible in how he performed a key role as a critical interpreter of the global. This interpretation of (not mere reporting on) the global is evident in his numerous writings on political developments with a global impact, from the First World War to the Russian Revolution to the rise of fascism, and in the detailed portraits that he drew of its key political and intellectual figures (Wilson, Lenin, Mussolini, Keynes, Trotsky, but also Chaplin, Dos Passos, Gorki, Rilke, Panait Istrati, Stefan Zweig, among others), most of which appeared in his regular column ‘Figuras y aspectos de la vida mundial’ (‘Figures and Aspects of World Life’) in the magazine Variedades.
It is particularly evident moreover in his writings on developments beyond Europe and the United States: he writes on Tagore, Gandhi, Sun Yat Sen, Chang Kai-shek, the Guomindang, the Young Turks, Abd-El-Krim and the Republic of the Rif, imperialism in China, Egypt, Ireland, Mongolia, and socialism in Japan, among other topics that reflected a manifest interest in colonialism and imperialism as well as nationalism. Moreover, Mariátegui had a particular interest in the ‘Jewish question’, in antisemitism, and in Palestine, perhaps because, as Claudio Lomnitz suggests, ‘for Mariátegui, there were no more cosmopolitan social subjects than the Jews’.Footnote 76
These interpretations of ‘world life’, which formed the basis of his lectures at the UPGP and of numerous articles published in the periodicals Variedades and Mundial and in other outlets, and which were later compiled in several volumes of his Complete Works, attest to a unique, possibly unmatched, and arguably still largely unappreciated, systematic survey of ‘the global’ in the early twentieth century that, as Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori have noted more generally of anticolonial nationalisms, ‘did not involve simply the modular reproduction of a Western model […] It also created rival visions of the globe with which to displace colonial and neocolonial ones.’Footnote 77
Alongside this global survey, Mariátegui produced in Amauta, and, indeed, Labor, more than avant-garde or socialist periodicals. They also represented ‘rival visions of the globe’ which brilliantly combined poetry, short stories, art, fragments of novels, travel accounts, cultural criticism (which extended to painting, dance and music), writings on philosophy, religion, education, anthropology, folklore, international relations, sociology, law, history, economics, and essays on key problems in Peru, Latin America and the wider world. The writings of Peruvians like Martín Adan, José María Eguren and César Vallejo were presented alongside those of Pablo Neruda, Mariano Azuela, André Breton or Vladimir Mayakovsky. Articles on the Chaco (by Tristán Marof) or Nicaragua (by César Sandino) could be read alongside the writings of Henri Barbusse or Rosa Luxemburg or a speech by George Bernard Shaw. Art by Peruvian artists like José Sabogal, Julia Codesido or Camilo Blas shared space with Tina Modotti's photography, Diego Rivera's drawings and paintings, and George Grosz's drawings.Footnote 78
In Amauta and Labor, Mariátegui established a truly global aesthetic, cultural and political dialogue, based on an extensive network of collaborators in Peru, Latin America and the wider world (which his correspondence clearly evidences), that made visible the interconnections and interdependencies (but also the ruptures) of the world in the 1920s.Footnote 79 In introducing Amauta, Mariátegui made this objective explicit:
The purpose of this magazine is to raise, clarify and learn about Peruvian problems from doctrinal and scientific points of view. But we always consider Peru within the panorama of the world […] This magazine will link the new men of Peru, first with those of the other countries of America, and then with those of the other countries of the world.Footnote 80
As Javier García-Liendo suggests, this amounted to a ‘socialist communication strategy’ that, I would add, was expressive of Mariátegui's globality.Footnote 81
Allow me to illustrate this point with specific examples. As noted above, in his editorial work Mariátegui employed the juxtaposition of ‘global’ and ‘local’ themes regularly. The effect was to render the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, or, if you prefer, the foreign and the national, coeval and commensurable spheres of intellectual and political ‘reality’ in a manner that evokes Sebastian Conrad's idea of global synchronicity. Thus, the reader who opened issue 24 of Amauta in June 1929 would have first read an article by Karl Marx on the Spanish military officer Domingo Espartero, followed by three essays by the Italian anti-fascist Piero Gobetti. Her attention may then have dwelt, on page 16, on a photograph of Olga Kameneva, described in the caption as the ‘director of the WOKS [the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries]’, or on the photographs on pages 17 to 20, which portray four pieces of ‘Russian art’, including a bust of Lenin by ‘Coroleff’ (Boris Koryolov).
She then might have read a section of Mariátegui's own serialised article ‘Defence of Marxism’ (his polemic with the Belgian social democrat Henri de Man), a poem by the Peruvian surrealist Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, or the article by Spanish jurist Luis Jiménez de Asúa on euthanasia. Perhaps she would have been interested in the article by the Italian architect Arturo Sartoris titled ‘International Architecture’ which discusses the ‘architectonic consequences of modern techniques’. Though prefaced by illustrations of modern architecture (the new post office in Moscow, a factory in Leningrad, designs for worker housing in Turin by Sartoris), the article is interspersed with drawings of precolonial Andean architecture (‘Millenarian Stones (Tiahuanaco)’; ‘Inca Ruins’). Thus, both across articles and within articles, the effect of this juxtaposition is to converge into a single ‘reality’ the local and the global.
That same reader would have had the same experience of switching almost imperceptibly from the global to the local when reading issue 27 of Amauta, published in November 1929, where a series of articles on industrial and agricultural production (more specifically on the five-year plan and collectivisation) and on public education in the Soviet Union are followed by reproductions of four oil paintings by the Peruvian artist Julia Codesido. And in issue 29, published in February 1930, the last issue before Mariátegui's death, the reader would have found yet another article on the Soviet five-year plan flanked by articles by Eudocio Ravines and Ricardo Martínez de la Torre (two of Mariátegui's closest collaborators) on ‘The Social Reality of Latin America’ and ‘The Historical Location of the Peruvian Proletariat’ and by a series of illustrations by the indigenista painter Camilo Blas.
Or if she had turned to the ninth issue of Labor, published in August 1929, she would have found an article on the recent strikes in Peru's Central Railway, followed by an article on labour repression in Spain under Primo de Rivera, followed, in turn, by an article on the plans to establish the CGTP. The issue further includes an article on the anniversary of the execution, in Chicago, of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, as well as an article by Felix Frankfurter (a Harvard professor) on the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, an article on an anti-war manifesto by the Confederación Sindical Latinoamericana (Latin American Trade Union Confederation), recently established in Montevideo, and an article on the growing repression of the labour movement in Germany.
These juxtapositions were surely not coincidental. Mariátegui's interest in connecting ‘national reality’ and ‘world reality’ owed to his understanding that the world was increasingly interconnected and interdependent, that it was becoming globalised, or as he termed it ‘internationalised’ by capitalism. In one of the lectures delivered at the UPGP on the world crisis caused by the First World War, he made this point explicitly:
Capitalist civilisation has internationalised the life of humanity, it has created between all peoples material ties which establish between them an inevitable solidarity. Internationalism is not only an ideal; it is a historical reality. Progress causes the interests, ideas, customs and regimes of peoples to unify and merge. Peru, like the other American peoples, is therefore not outside the crisis: it is within it.Footnote 82
Mariátegui here uses the notion of internationalism in two different but related senses: as growing connections between the peoples of the world (what we would today call globalisation) and as an ideal of international solidarity. Mariátegui's evident familiarity with Lenin's writings (specifically Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916) led him to view capital as operating on a global scale:
Capitalism, within the bourgeois regime, does not produce for the national market; it produces for the international market. Its need to increase production more and more every day drives it to conquer new markets. Its product, its merchandise, recognises no frontiers; it strives to cross and subjugate political boundaries. The competition between industrialists is international. In addition to markets, industrialists compete internationally for raw materials. A country's industry is supplied by coal, oil, ore from various distant countries. As a result of this international fabric of economic interests, the big banks of Europe and the United States are complexly international and cosmopolitan entities. They invest capital in Australia, India, China and the Transvaal. The circulation of capital through the banks is an international circulation.Footnote 83
And this internationalisation of capital meant that the fate of Peruvian workers was intimately tied to processes that transcended the local:
The English rentier who deposits his money in a London bank is perhaps unaware of where his capital is going to be invested, of where its yield, its dividend, is going to come from. He does not know whether the bank is going to allocate his capital, for example, to the acquisition of shares in the Peruvian Corporation, in which case the English rentier becomes, without knowing it, co-owner of railways in Peru. The Central Railway strike could affect him, it could reduce his dividend. The English rentier is unaware of this. In the same way, the Peruvian railwaymen and train drivers are unaware of the existence of this English rentier, into whose wallet a part of their work will go. This example, this case, serves to explain to us the economic linkage, the economic solidarity of the international life of our time. And they serve to explain to us the origin of bourgeois internationalism and the origin of workers’ internationalism, which is at the same time a common and opposite origin.Footnote 84
Mariátegui, moreover, perceived that these developments owed to the emergence of what Bergel calls a ‘globalised public opinion’ because of technological change.Footnote 85 As he noted in the already cited lecture:
Communications are the nervous tissue of this internationalised and united humanity. One of the characteristics of our age is the rapidity, the speed with which ideas spread, with which the currents of thought and culture are transmitted. A new idea, born in England, is not an English idea, but the time it takes to be printed. Once launched into space by the newspaper, that idea, if it translates some universal truth, may be instantly transformed into a universal idea also.Footnote 86
What was internationalised or globalised, Mariátegui perceived, was not only capital or labour but ideas, whether they originated in London or Lima.
Mariátegui's editorial work in Amauta and Labor, like his reports on European affairs which he mailed back from Italy and elsewhere in Europe for publication in El Tiempo, or his lectures at the UPGP on the First World War or the Russian Revolution, or the articles in Variedades on the ‘Figuras y aspectos de la vida mundial’, all served a similar purpose: to present to his readers a view of the world that connected the local and the global, that helped them understand the former in light of the latter, and vice versa, that ultimately framed the ‘Peruvian reality’ that his seven essays had brilliantly analysed in the context of a ‘global reality’ in a way that would promote the development of a revolutionary culture and socialist future for Peru in the context of global revolution. But it is important to note, even if briefly and in closing, that Mariátegui also experienced this connection of Peru and the world at a personal level.
I have discussed his youthful interest in languages and foreign literature and the importance of his travels. But it is important to recognise too how Mariátegui's personal relationships, beginning with his Italian wife, reproduced the connection between the local and global. His network of friends and collaborators included prominent Peruvian intellectuals such as the indigenista writer Luis Valcárcel and the historian Jorge Basadre, the painters José Sabogal and Julia Codesido and the poet César Vallejo, as well as union delegates from the mining centres of Morococha and Cerro de Pasco or the sharecropper leader Juan Pévez. But it also included the Bessarabian-born Argentine publisher Samuel Glusberg, the US writer Waldo Frank, the peripatetic Uruguayan poet Blanca Luz Brum, and the Argentine painter José Malanca.Footnote 87 It extended, finally, to two Rumanian Jews, Miguel Adler and Noemí Milstein, who became close friends of Mariátegui, and who worked closely and supported him, and his wife, until his death on 16 April 1930.Footnote 88
Conclusion
Mariátegui's status as a key heterodox Marxist thinker of the twentieth century is widely acknowledged, even if he remains invisible or peripheral to a certain scholarship on the history of global Left. The claiming of Mariátegui by Pink Tide governments as a source of intellectual and political inspiration is but the latest iteration of earlier attempts to claim Mariátegui as a source of political legitimation by various political actors. In contrast to earlier attempts, this latest appropriation may have contributed to extending Mariátegui's influence to new geographical and scholarly spheres. Moreover, the postcolonial and decolonial turns have sought in Mariátegui a new epistemological framework from the Global South to constitute a new canon (together with Fanon, for example) that can work to ‘provincialise Europe’, as Dipesh Chakrabarty urges us to do.
Mariátegui did indeed seek to formulate ‘rival visions of the globe’ (which global historians ought to pay more attention to), as I have suggested, though whether they amount to, or should be reduced to, a decolonial critique of Western epistemologies is less clear to me. At the very least, it may be beneficial for those invested in such projects of epistemological reckoning or redress to reflect on the two forms of Mariátegui's globality that I have drawn attention to here and the heuristic opportunities that connecting them may present.
At the time of his death, Mariátegui was preparing to move, with his wife and their three children, to Buenos Aires, where he hoped he would be able to escape the growing repression of the Leguía regime but also access better medical care and, crucially, have a prosthetic leg fitted. This, he believed, would allow him to continue his work. He had considered returning to Europe but Buenos Aires was more accessible, and his contacts there, in particular the publisher Samuel Glusberg, assured him that he would find employment and a supportive network of colleagues.Footnote 89 Mariátegui intended to continue publishing Amauta from Buenos Aires.
We cannot know what would have happened if Mariátegui had not died in April 1930. How he would have interpreted Peru under the right-wing dictatorships of Luis M. Sánchez Cerro and Óscar Benavides, or, for that matter, the world, as it moved sharply towards new, more radical, forms of authoritarianism (on the right and the left) in a context of a world economic depression that set it on a path to global conflict, is unclear. But it is likely that he would have sought to do so much in the same way as he had done in the past, considering ‘Peru within the panorama of the world’, as he had initially indicated in the first issue of Amauta, and seeking to link the men (and women) of Peru and Latin America with those of other countries of the world.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the Major Research Fellowship which has supported this research. Thanks too to everyone who commented on earlier versions of this article, including the referees and JLAS editors.
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