if not explicitly in terms of its theoretical concept – Mariátegui projected the actual combination of national and socialist tasks demanded by a racialized class struggle.
This qualification of Peru’s class struggle exhibited gamonalismo and imperialism as
49 This is the most general reading of Mariátegui’s remarks in Essays’ ‘Author’s Note’: “I intended to include in this collection an essay on the political and ideological evolution of Peru. But as I advance in it, I realize that I must develop it separately in another book.”
(1974: xxxiii)
50 I owe the notion of ‘racialized class struggle’ to Jeffery Webber (cf. 2011: 29fn; 2015:
310).
51 Although stated in several documents, Mariátegui wrote in 1926 an important article for Mundial (‘The Future of Cooperatives’) where the focus is put precisely on these affinities. He explains that cooperatives take place only when first a capitalist and then a syndicalist/union basis have been established; consequently, the cooperatives’ development in Peru must be subordinated to those processes. “And yet”, Mariátegui asserts, “Peru is one of the Latin American countries where cooperation finds more ingrained spontaneous and peculiar elements […] in the indigenous peasant centres, the communitarian traditions offer elements of an integral cooperativism.” (1987: 195–96)
89 partaking of the dominant bloc, while the proletariat and the indigenous peasants stand on the subaltern side. The stress put on the colour line was – if my reading is correct – a consequence of his understanding of imperialism as the superstructure of capitalism in its contemporary stage, and of the affinities between it and the post-colonial tendencies of the country. Conversely, the confluence of anti-feudal and socialist tasks is the dialectical entanglement in which Lenin envisaged the potential
‘acceleration’ (at the economic as well as the ideological levels) of revolutionary processes in the so-called colonial and semi-colonial world (cf. Lukàcs, 1972: 45).
In a similar vein, Trotsky (1967, I: 23; cf. Davidson, 2006: 21) referred to this acceleration as “the privilege of the historically backward” under conditions of uneven and combined development. In Mariátegui’s account, in turn, the consideration of the Indian as an object of socialism because of his alleged backwardness is transformed into a viewpoint in which the ‘backward’ element itself displays an anticipatory momentum for a socialist project. Considered as both remaining of past modes of productions and present-day factors in the country’s class struggle, the features of the Andean indigenous traditions, ways of worlding, and forms of resistance to capital are expressive of a form of communism that is contemporaneous with modern socialism. It is therefore the very nature of Peru’s socio-economic structure – and not any abstract, mechanical dictum of fate – which lays down the material basis for the alliance of workers and peasants set out by the tactics of the united front. Yet in order to achieve this conclusion, Mariátegui ought to locate his reflection in what György Lukàcs considers to be the core of Lenin’s theoretical achievement: the ‘actuality of the revolution’ under imperialist capitalism.
As Lenin understood it, imperialism corresponds to the epoch in which the bourgeoisie overtly renounces to its progressive, revolutionary character at the global scale. The bourgeoisie becomes reactionary, which implies that the progressive character of world history passes thereby to the other, antagonistic world power: the proletariat. In the identification of this “dialectical transformation of the bourgeois revolution into the proletarian revolution” Lukács (1972: 48–9) situated Lenin’s genius. And it is arguably a similar consideration that led Mariátegui to consider that the revolutionary epoch opened up by the world crisis drifts into one of these paths: ‘passive revolution’ or ‘socialist revolution’. During
90 Leguía’s time in office, the strengthening of economic bonds with North American capitals seemed to lay the foundations for a process of capitalist modernization by means of ‘passive revolution’, with only rhetorical or patronizing roots in popular groups and demands. Similarly, a middle-class overthrown of the ‘oligarchic republic’ as envisaged by Haya’s APRA was also considered by Mariátegui as devoid of the decisive initiative of subaltern groups. Its ambiguous opposition to imperialism, added to Haya’s inclinations to an authoritarian leadership, portrayed a mirror-like image of Leguía’s project.
To put it otherwise: is not that ‘national’ and ‘socialist’ revolutionary struggles simply look alike, nor that certain elements of the former might just opportunistically be taken up for the prosecution of the latter. On the contrary, the revolutionary content of the national question displayed in ‘colonial and semi-colonial’ countries (that is, in the Global South understood as the location of different temporalities) finds its truth, so to speak, in socialist revolution, in a revolution of proletariat hegemony capable of accomplishing the non- or ill-resolved bourgeois-democratic tasks. Otherwise, it will become another passive revolution. Dialectically, the proletariat envisages its own very potential as a progressive hegemonic force in the demands of the other subaltern classes, notably the peasants, as a living image of its own historical composition. Insofar as the
‘Indian problem’ weights thoroughly upon Peru’s social structure, such a ‘national deficit’ exerts a material and symbolic influence upon subaltern classes as a whole, affecting its ideological configuration. For, if Marx’s claim that any nation that
“oppresses another people forges its own chains” (2010: 120) is generally valid, it is so first and foremost when this occurs within a determined ‘national’ conjuncture.
Accordingly, Mariátegui expressed in the Essays that “Peru has to choose between the gamonal and the Indian; it has no other alternative.” (1974: 171)
This is the ‘national’ departure point acknowledged by Gramsci, who nonetheless advises that ‘the perspective is international and cannot be otherwise’.
Mariátegui understands the consequences of this dialectic in terms similar to Gramsci, who also points out that “the leading class is in fact only such if it accurately interprets this combination, of which is itself a component and precisely as such is able to give the movement a certain direction…” (2003: 240, emphasis added) This historical fact presents the need to dialectically relate the indigenous conditions
91 (their alleged ‘out of sync’ with the capitalist ‘now’) and potentialities (to become synchronized to the proletariat) to the international setting in which ‘race’ plays an important role in the colonial enterprises of imperial powers; and then to bring it back to the national conjuncture characterized by a colonial history. From a
‘national’ (i.e. indigenous-based) departure point, and through ‘international’
(proletarian) perspectives, Mariátegui’s analysis brings to the forefront a particular sort of encounter envisaging the potential synchronicity between the old communist spirit and modern socialism.
In Mariátegui’s reading of the national question from the standpoint of the subalterns, I find a strong indication of the subalternist hypothesis. The crisscrossed roads of imperialist racism and local colonialism, on the one hand, and of international socialism and autochthonous communism, on the other, opened in his Marxism a pathway to coming to terms with a materialist dialectics of a very specific kind. In it, the temporal dimension (past and present) overlaps with the geographical one (international and national) at the eve of the actuality of revolution. The Indians’ potential inclination to communist worldviews and collective practices (‘elements of practical socialism’, that is) demands an approach capable to take up the Inka image of the Pachakuteq – the restoration of Tawantinsuyu – not as any dream of restoration of the past; rather, it ought to be
‘translated back’ to present demands imposed by worldwide contemporary tendencies. The manner in which this translation was outlined within Mariátegui’s Marxism is the subject of Chapter III.
To recapitulate, Mariátegui understood the entanglement of non-contemporaneous elements under capital’s rule, accompanied by conflicts and forms of struggle never seen before, as part of the processes intensified by the uneven imperialist expansion in both its economic (capital and commodity exports) and non-economic (wars, annexations) roads. One of the outcomes of this process was, in Peru, the so-called ‘resurrection’ of the indigenous race, which I prefer to call emergent indigeneity.52 The re-appearance of the colour line under imperialism
52 I draw here upon Harris, Carlson and Poata-Smith’s definition: “Indigenous identities are emergent; a process of becoming rather than being. Indigenous identities not only develop from the constant ebb and flow of interactions between individuals and others, those interactions are frequently sites of contestation.”(2013: 5)
92 signalled a sort of re-ethnicization of class struggle that, for Mariátegui, was visible all over the non-Western world. Of course, one might add to this that class struggle was already racialized, in Latin America as elsewhere. And this is why the Peruvian Marxist constitutes a key strand of the integration into Marxism of a non-Eurocentric and hence deprovincializing perspective.
93 III. The Work of Myth and Memory in Mariátegui’s Marxism
‘Socialist materialism embraces all possibilities for spiritual, ethical, and philosophical ascent. And we never feel ourselves more fiercely, effectively, and religiously idealistic than when putting our ideas and our feet on the ground.’
José Carlos Mariátegui, Revista Amauta’s 17th editorial, 1928.