José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology

Harry E. E. Vanden Vanden, Marc Becker Becker

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781583672761
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

José Carlos Mariátegui is one of Latin America's most profound but overlooked thinkers. A self-taught journalist, social scientist, and activist from Peru, he was the first to emphasize that those fighting for the revolutionary transformation of society must adapt classical Marxist theory to the particular conditions of Latin American. He also stressed that indigenous peoples must take an active, if not leading, role in any revolutionary struggle.

Today Latin America is the scene of great social upheaval. More progressive governments are in power than ever before, and grassroots movements of indigenous peoples, workers, and peasants are increasingly shaping the political landscape. The time is perfect for a rediscovery of Mariátegui, who is considered an intellectual precursor of today's struggles in Latin America but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. This volume collects his essential writings, including many that have never been translated and some that have never been published. The scope of this collection, masterful translation, and thoughtful commentary make it an essential book for scholars of Latin America and all of those fighting for a new world, waiting to be born.

PART I

On Studying the Peruvian and Indo-American Reality

…

IN THIS SECTION, José Carlos Mariátegui breaks from more impressionistic quasi-historical studies of Peru to bring his well-honed Marxist analysis to bear on careful, empirically based studies of the problems plaguing the Peruvian and Latin American reality. These selections come primarily from the collection of essays published as Peruanicemos al Peru, volume 11 in the Obras Completas. We also include in this section “The Land Problem,” a key chapter from Seven Essays in which Mariátegui builds a strong argument that persistent problems of Indigenous marginalization will not be solved through liberal reforms, but only through profound structural changes in the land.

1—Toward a Study of Peruvian Problems

Among the attributes of our generation, one can and should note a certain virtuous and meritorious attitude: a growing interest in things Peruvian. The Peruvians of today are showing themselves to be more attuned to their own people and their own history than the Peruvians of yesterday. But this is not a consequence of their spirit being closed or confined within our borders. It is precisely the contrary. The contemporary Peruvians have more contact with global ideas and emotions. Little by little humanity’s desire for renovation is taking charge of its new men. And an urgent, diffuse aspiration to understand Peruvian reality is born of this desire for renovation.

Past generations are not only characterized by a scant understanding of our problems, but also by a weak connection to their own historical epoch. As it ends, we note a fact: the epoch was different. After a long revolutionary period, a regime and an order that then seemed more or less definitive were established and developed in the West. On the other hand, the world was not so articulated as now. Peru did not seem as incorporated in history or as much in the orbit of Western civilization as it is today.

The greater part of the intellectuals constitutes an obedient clientele of heirs or descendants of colonial feudalism. This caste’s interests do not allow it to descend from its disdainful and frivolous Parnassus to the deep reality of Peru. Nor do those who rebel instinctively and consciously against these class interests, immerse their view in social and economic realities either. Their ideology—or their phraseology—is nourished by the abstract literature of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

Radicalism, for example, ends in a pamphleteering verbalism, not without merit, but condemned to sterility. Pierolism,¹ which arrived to power supported by the masses, showed itself to be even less solid in its doctrine. Piérola, on the other hand, constructed a civilian-oriented [civilista]² government in his four years of being the constitutional president. His party, because of this commitment, spiritually separated from the class that it seemed to represent in its first days.

In Le Péru Contemporain, Francisco García Calderón studied Peru with a more realistic criterion than that of previous intellectual generations. But García Calderón avoided all bold research, all audacious examination. His book limited itself to noting, with civilista optimism, the existence of progressive forces in Peru. The conclusion of this study did not take into account what I insist on calling Peru’s deep reality. In 1906 García Calderón was happy to prescribe government by an enlightened, practical oligarchy, and in proposing that we prepare ourselves to accustom our life to the advantages of a Pan-American railroad that his foresight then judged would soon connect the continent from north to south, and that twenty years later still seems like a far-off vision. Before the Pan-American railroad other avalanches had to pass through Peru’s history.

Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, in his youth, reacted a little against the mediocrity of the university, and reclaimed a more realistic and more Peruvian orientation in higher education. But Balaúnde did not persevere on this path. After some skirmishes, he desisted in this belligerent attitude. Today the Mercurio Peruano³ does not say any of the things about the university that Belaúnde said in his youth. Moreover, he felt obliged to say in the margin of an article of mine that one should not suppose he was supportive of a phrase about San Marcos. (A superfluous declaration since it did not occur to the public to suspect in Mercurio Peruano concurrence or solidarity with my ideas. The public knows well that the responsibility for my ideas is totally mine. This responsibility does not compromise in any way the magazines that graciously and courteously count me among their collaborators.)

The tendency to penetrate things and problems Peruvian, with greater élan, belongs to our epoch. This movement is covered first in literature. Valdelomar,⁴ his literary elitism and aristocratism notwithstanding, extracts his most delicate themes and emotions from the humble and rustic native land. Unlike the prudish literary figures of yesteryear, in his literature he does not ignore plebeians or things that come from them. On the contrary, he looks for them and he loves them in spite of his decadent inspiration and a tinge of D’Annunzio.⁵

One day the Plaza of the Market was the theme of his humor and literature. Later, in his Plantel de Inválidos, César Falcón gathered various delightful sketches of Peruvian life. And, like Valdelomar, he knew how to show a happy disdain for “distinguished” themes. In this way literature acquires even more of a focus on Indigenous peoples. The books of López Abujar, of Luis E. Valcárcel and Augusto Aguirre Morales, about which I plan to soon write, equally document this interesting phenomenon.

In scientific research, in theoretical speculation, the same tendency is seen. César Ugate, with his sagacity and intelligence, is preoccupied with the agrarian problem. Julio Tello penetratingly studies race. Honorio Delgado, according to my information, has proposed undertaking a methodical study of Indigenous psychology. Jorge Basadre and Luis Alberto Sánchez have abandoned the routine use of anecdote and chronicle in their historical studies. They are concerned with the interpretation of the facts, not their purposeless relating. Jorge Basadre is author of a study about road gang conscription that shows a way and a method to his comrades in the university vanguard. And recently a course in the Social History of Peru was inaugurated in the Popular University; it is an original course, a new course, in which an aptitude for research and interpretation will be put to the test. And in regard to the Popular University, it should not be forgotten that Haya de la Torre, one of our new men, has given the greatest service to the study of “Peru’s deep reality” in creating this cultural center. The internationalist feels, more than many nationalists, the Indigenous, the Peruvian; that the things Indigenous, Peruvian are not the esprit of the Jirón de la Unión or the Lima soireés, rather something much deeper and more transcendent.

—Mundial, Lima, 10 July 1925

NOTES

Source: “Hacia el estudio de los problemas peruanos,” in Peruanicemos al Péru, in Obras Completas, 11th ed. (Lima: Biblioteca Amauta, 1988), 11:69–73.

1. From José Nicolás de Piérola y Villena who was a prominent Peruvian politician, finance minister, and twice (from 1879 to 1881 and 1895 to 1899) president of the republic.

2. Civilista refers to a Peruvian political movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that opposed military control of the government.

3. Mercurio Peruano was a Peruvian intellectual magazine that Víctor Andrés Belaunde founded in 1918.

4. Abraham Valdelomar, vanguardist Peruvian poet and writer.

5. Gabriele D’Annunzio (March 12, 1863–March 1, 1938) was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, dramatist, and adventurer whose political activism influenced Italian politics in the 1920s.

2—The Land Problem

The Agrarian Problem and the Indian Problem

For those of us who study and identify the problem of the Indian from a socialist point of view, we began by declaring humanitarian or philanthropic views that, as an extension of the apostolic battle of Father Bartolomé de las Casas, supported old pro-Indigenous campaigns as absolutely outdated. Our first effort is to establish its character as a fundamentally economic problem. First, we protest against the instinctive and defensive tendency of the creole or mestizo to reduce it to a purely administrative, pedagogical, ethnic, or moral problem in order to avoid at all costs its economic aspects. Therefore, it would be absurd to accuse us of being romantic or literary. We assume the least romantic and literary position possible by identifying it primarily as a socioeconomic problem. We are not content with demanding the Indians’ right to education, culture, progress, love, and heaven. We start by categorically demanding their right to land. This thoroughly materialistic demand should be enough for us not to be confused with the heirs or imitators of the evangelical language of the great Spanish friar, who, on the other hand, our materialism does not prevent us from fervently admiring and esteeming.

And this problem of the land, whose solidarity with the problem of the Indian is overly evident, does not allow us to mitigate or diminish it opportunistically. Quite the contrary. For my part, I will try to present it in absolutely uncertain and clear terms.

The agrarian problem is first and foremost the problem of the liquidation of feudalism in Peru. This liquidation should have already been done by the democratic bourgeois regime that was formally established by the independence revolution. But in Peru, we have not had in one hundred years as a republic a true bourgeois class, a true capitalist class. The old feudal class, camouflaged or disguised as a republican bourgeoisie, has kept their positions. The policy of confiscation of agricultural property, initiated by the independence revolution as a logical consequence of its ideology, did not lead to the development of small properties. The old landowning class had not lost its dominance. The survival of a large landholder regime led, in practice, to the maintenance of large estates. It is well known that the confiscation of agricultural property attacked communities instead. And the fact is that during a century of republican rule, the large agrarian properties have been strengthened and enlarged in spite of the liberal theory of our constitution and the practical necessities of the development of our capitalist economy.

There are two expressions of feudalism that survive: large estates and servitude. They are inseparable and the same expressions whose analysis leads us to the conclusion that one cannot eliminate the servitude that weighs on the Indigenous race without eliminating the large estates.

When the agrarian problem in Peru is presented this way it is not easily distorted. It appears in its full magnitude as a socioeconomic, and therefore political, problem under the domain of men who work on this level of facts and ideas. And it is useless to convert it, for example, into a technical-agrarian problem for agronomists.

Everyone knows that the liberal solution to this problem would be, according to the individualist ideology, breaking up the large landholdings to create small properties. But there is so much ignorance of the principal elements of socialism everywhere around us that it is worthwhile repeating that this formula of breaking up large estates in favor of small properties is neither utopian, nor heretical, nor revolutionary, nor Bolshevik, nor vanguardist, but orthodox, constitutional, democratic, capitalist and bourgeois. It has its origins in the liberal ideals that inspired the constitutional laws of all democratic bourgeois states. And the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, etc.), have enacted agrarian laws that restrict, in principle, land ownership, to a maximum of 500 hectares. This is where the crisis of the war led to the pulling down of the last ramparts of feudalism. Since then, Western capitalism used precisely this group of countries to oppose Russia in an anti-Bolshevik bloc of countries.

In keeping with my ideological position, I think that the time to attempt the liberal method, the individualistic formula, in Peru has already passed. Aside from doctrinal reasons, I believe that our agrarian problem has a fundamental indisputable and concrete factor that gives it a special character: the survival of the community and elements of practical socialism in Indigenous agriculture and life.

But those who remain within the democratic-liberal doctrine, if they are truly looking for a solution to the problem of the Indian, which will above all redeem them from servitude, can turn their gaze to the Czech or Romanian experience, since the Mexican example seems dangerous as an inspiration and as a process. For them it is still time to advocate the liberal formula. If they did, they would at least ensure that the discussion of the agrarian problem pushed by the new generation would not entirely lack the liberal thinking that, according to written history, governs the life of Peru since the founding of the republic.

Colonialism-Feudalism

The land problem clarifies the vanguard or socialist attitude toward the remains of the viceroyalty. The literary perricholismo¹ does not interest us except as a sign or reflection of economic colonialism. The colonial legacy we want to eliminate is not, fundamentally, one of veils and lattices, but that of the feudal economic regime, whose expressions are those of gamonalismo, large estates, and servitude. The colonial literature, nostalgic evocation of the viceroyalty and its splendor, for me is only the product of a mediocre spirit engendered and nourished by that regime. The viceroyalty does not survive in the perricholismo of some troubadours and chroniclers. It survives in a feudalism that contains, even without imposing its own law, a latent and incipient capitalism. We do not so much reject the Spanish legacy as the feudal legacy.

Spain brought us the Medieval Ages: the Inquisition, feudalism, etc. Later it brought the Counter-Reformation: a reactionary spirit, a Jesuit method, a scholastic casuistry. We have painfully freed ourselves from most of these things through the assimilation of Western culture, sometimes obtained from Spain itself. But we are still not freed from its economic foundations, which are rooted in the interests of a class whose hegemony was not destroyed by the independence revolution. The roots of feudalism are intact. Their livelihood is responsible, for example, for the delay of our capitalist development.

The ownership of land determines the political and administrative system of any nation. The agrarian problem, which the republic has not yet been able to resolve, dominates all of our problems. Democratic and liberal institutions cannot prosper nor function in a semi-feudal economy.

For special reasons, the subordination of the Indigenous problem to the land problem is even more absolute. The Indigenous race is a race of farmers. The Inca people were a rural people, normally devoted to agriculture and pasturing animals. Industries and the arts had a domestic and rural character. The principle that “life comes from the earth” was truer in the Peru of the Incas than anywhere else. The most admirable public works and collective works of Tawantinsuyu had a military, religious, or agricultural purpose. The highland and coastal irrigation channels, and the agricultural terraces in the Andes, are the best evidence of the degree of economic organization reached by Inca Peru. All of the dominant features characterize their civilization as an agricultural civilization. “The land,” Valcárcel writes in his study of the economic life of Tawantinsuyu,

in native tradition, is the common mother: not only food but man himself comes from her womb. Land provides all wealth. The cult of the Mama Pacha, Mother Earth, is on par with the worship of the sun, and such as the sun does not belong to anyone in particular, neither does the planet. Agrarianism was born from the twin concepts of aboriginal ideology of communal ownership of land and the universal religion of the sun.²

Inca communism, which cannot be denied or disparaged, developed under the autocratic rule of the Incas, is therefore designated as an agrarian communism. The fundamental characteristics of the Inca economy, according to César Ugarte, who carefully defines the general features of our development, were:

Collective ownership of cultivatable land by the ayllu or set of related families, although it was divided into individual and non-transferable lots; collective ownership of water, pasture land, and forests by the marka or tribe (the federation of ayllus settled around the same village); coopera...