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José Carlos Mariátegui |
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Parte 2
020707 -
International Socialism - José Carlos Mariátegui: Latin
America’s forgotten Marxist - Mike
Gonzalez
José Carlos Mariátegui was born into a society in crisis, a Peru
deeply divided between a coastal sector where most of Peru’s
capitalist class was concentrated, an emerging mining industry
in the central valley between Lima and Huancavelica, and a
mountain region which Mariátegui described as “semi-feudal”.
Here 40 percent of the population lived in small, isolated
communities, eking a precarious living on the high Andean slopes.
They were forced to give their labour to the powerful local
landowning class which administered the region without any real
influence from Lima, the capital of a weak state.
A brief period of prosperity in the mid-19th century was based
on the export of the natural fertiliser guano and the extraction
of nitrates, with British capital entirely controlling trade in
both commodities. During the 300 years of colonial rule mining
had been the central source of wealth in the region. With the
rise of guano and nitrates the focus of the economy shifted
towards the coast and foreign trade. Peru’s small, emerging
bourgeoisie grew in the shadow of the foreign capital on which
it was wholly dependent. In the sierra the century saw an
expansion of often huge landholdings (or latifundia) into what
had been communal, indigenously owned lands.
The emerging state, therefore, was an expression of the
symbiosis of the interests of these large and medium landowners,
for whom the institutions of the state served the principal
function of legitimising the pillage of the small producers and
the definition of the peasant masses as a source of labour,
taxes and cannon fodder.1
The growing costs of public administration were met by borrowing
from European banks, while imports grew to four times the value
of exports. At the same time, foreign capital was also
sustaining the growth of coastal export agriculture,
particularly sugar and later cotton. In the sierra the
latifundios’ expansion occurred in order to cover local demand
as well as to provide a steady stream of cheap and exploited
indigenous labour. As the century advanced Peru was entering
into a relationship with the global economy, which only
emphasised and deepened the already enormous gulf between the
modern coast and a mountain world of non-Spanish speaking and
racially oppressed indigenous peoples. Where they fought back,
they were repressed with exemplary brutality.2
The so-called Pacific War of 1879-84 was catastrophic for the
Peruvian bourgeoisie. It lost the port of Tacna and most of the
nitrate-producing areas to Chile, and the resulting economic
collapse left it, as Mariátegui put it, “bleeding and mutilated”,
and with no resources with which to resist the effective
transfer of the economy into foreign hands. The contract for the
Central Valley Railway, for example, went to the British based
Grace Corporation, and mining came under the direct control of
the Peruvian Corporation and the Cerro del Paso Corporation. The
main banks were British owned, and foreign interests like the
Gildemeisters or Peruvian capital working in combination with
external investors such as the Larcos assumed control over
agriculture. In the cities, and in particular in Lima and Cuzco,
the ancient Inca capital, new industries were emerging as a
result of this new economic activity—in particular textiles.
Yet the original inhabitants of Peru experienced increasingly
exploitative conditions, which were unmitigated by the
developments taking place on the coast. On the contrary, their
exploitation intensified as the modern sector of the Peruvian
economy developed. It was one of Mariátegui’s important insights
that these two phenomena were interdependent: that modernisation
not only could, but actually needed to, maintain the
backwardness of the sierra and the forms of servile labour that
persisted there—like the enganche, obligatory labour, and
yanaconazgo, a form of debt peonage.
There was resistance, of course. Indigenous rebellions and
anarchist led trade unions were two forms of it. There was also
a middle class movement, directed against the old landed
aristocracy and their control and manipulation of the state,
which found political expression in civilismo, founded in the
mid-1870s by Manuel Pardo. This was a movement seeking to create
a strong state committed to modernisation. But by the beginning
of the 20th century it had split into two wings, one compromised
with the old elite and committed to the continuation of economic
growth based on foreign investment, the other more committed to
modernisation, an end to corruption and a strategy of national
growth. The individual who came to represent this more radical
wing was Augusto Bernardino Leguía y Salcedo, though Leguía
never questioned the central role of foreign capital in the
process.3 He was elected to the presidency for the first time in
1908 and would return to power again in the momentous year of
1919.
In fact the most trenchant critique of the old order came from
the poet Manuel González Prada. He exposed the moral
degeneration of the old ruling class and set it against a
picture of “Indian Peru”, which was both romantic and idealised.
Yet for a new generation his work turned their attention to the
hitherto silent and invisible native Peruvian peoples—and laid
the groundwork for Mariátegui and his generation. Despite his
reputation as a defender of the indigenous population, however,
González Prada clearly saw the decay of Peruvian society as
corrupting both rulers and ruled; though he laid the
responsibility firmly with the powerful, he never saw the
indigenous people as potential subjects of history, capable of
bringing about change through their own actions.
It was into this society that Mariátegui was born, in Moquegua
in 1894. Growing up in Lima, Mariátegui found himself drawn to
artistic and cultural forms of dissent. In 1909, at the age of
15, he became a printer’s apprentice; within five years he was
writing regular columns of social commentary in the newspaper La
Prensa under the pseudonym Juan Croniqueur. He was also
associated with the group of artists around Abraham Valdelomar
and the magazine Colónida, whose influence was far greater than
its four issues would suggest. There is no sign yet that
Mariátegui’s radicalism was political. He did not associate
himself, for example, with the anarchist organisations that led
the nascent urban working class movement.
It was essentially an artistic dissidence that drew Mariátegui
towards the Bohemians who “strolled” along Lima’s avenue of
artists, the Jirón de la Unión, just as Baudelaire had strolled
along the streets of Paris—”flaneurs” without direction driven
by a world weariness that the great French poet had called “spleen”.
Mariátegui’s writings on artistic modernism found there the
scepticism of an avant_garde pressing against received wisdoms.
But while many of his Bohemian colleagues remained buried in an
aesthetic twilight, Mariátegui began to seek out the links
between the artistic and the political vanguard.
By 1916 Peru was changing. In Lima the new factories, most
importantly in textiles, were creating a permanent labour force,
which was forging trade unions under the influence of anarchism.4
The first general strike, in support of the workers of the
important Vitarte textile plant, took place in April 1911.
Although it failed, a new law relating to accidents at work was
passed in the same year, the right to strike (though under
limited circumstances) conceded in 1913 and the eight-hour day
won by the workers of the port of Callao a year later. Attacks
on living standards in 1915 and 1916, as raw materials were
exported rather than finished goods and profits fell, produced
new waves of strikes and demands for a shorter working day.
At the same time new struggles were developing in the
countryside. The expansion of the export sector in agriculture
displaced the peasantry and increased the rapacious search for
labour.5 The risings that culminated in Puno (the Rumi Maqui
revolt) in 1915-6 showed a different aspect of the indigenous
communities—as collective fighters against the brutal mode of
production prevailing in the Andean mountains. And Puno was not
the only rising. In the central Mantaro valley there were
repeated confrontations, drawing Mariátegui and one of his
colleagues to the area in 1918.
That year Mariátegui founded a new journal, Nuestra Epoca, which
expressed his movement from the artistic avant-garde towards a
growing political radicalism. The name of the journal, “Our
Times”, referred to more than a spirit of the age; it was a
historical moment of change and struggle. “Nuestra Epoca did not
have a socialist programme, but it must be seen as a move in
that direction, both ideologically and in propaganda terms”.6
Significantly, it lasted only two issues; it was banned after
publishing an article by Mariátegui criticising the armed forces.
Early the following year Mariátegui set up La Razón, a newspaper
whose unambiguous purpose was to support people in struggle. It
was the first major watershed in his development as a Marxist
and a working class leader.
The year 1919 was a turning point. The cost of living for
workers had almost doubled since 1913, and the previous two
years had seen a series of strikes in Lima and elsewhere for
wage rises and a shorter working day. The first general union,
the Federación Local Obrera de Lima, was formed in 1918, and the
premature creation of an organising committee for a Socialist
Party reflected the generally militant atmosphere rather than
any serious political advance. The year began with a strike of
bakers, which rapidly became general, under the leadership of
anarcho_syndicalists. The government conceded the eight-hour day,
but refused wage rises. The Comité Pro-Abaratamiento (for a
lowering of prices of basic goods) formed in April, bringing
together a wide range of organisations in a series of protests,
and in May new strikes paralysed the city, leading to the arrest
of three union leaders. The declaration of a state of emergency
and the arrest of the movement’s leaders did nothing to lessen
the level of popular protest, which now coalesced around support
for the return of former president Leguía, in the belief that he
would challenge the old ruling class and introduce measures to
modernise the Peruvian state.
Leguía took power on 4 July and immediately released the
imprisoned workers’ leaders. The triumphant demonstration that
paraded them through the streets stopped outside the offices of
Mariátegui’s La Razón and invited him to join the head of the
march. The Leguía honeymoon, however, was brief. By August
Leguía was already repressing working class action. La Razón was
suppressed, and Mariátegui and his co-editor, César Falcón, were
“invited to leave the country” with a grant to study abroad. In
October they left for Europe. Later Mariátegui would be accused
of taking the king’s shilling, of surrendering to Leguía. His
own explanation is that his activity was restricted as Leguía
assumed increasingly dictatorial powers, and that the working
class movement was still too weak and disoriented for him to
operate successfully within Peru. Leguía offered him the
alternative of exile and Mariátegui accepted.
The protests that returned Leguía to power were joined by a
growing student movement based mainly in the southern city of
Cuzco. This was a pale reflection of the hugely important
university reform movement that had begun in Córdoba, Argentina,
in 1918. While Mariátegui’s activities were restricted to the
workers’ movement in Lima, his contemporary Victor Raúl Haya de
la Torre was emerging as the leader of the student movement.
Haya would come to represent an alternative political direction
in Peru, and indeed throughout Latin America, enshrined in Apra,
the organisation he later founded.7 While at this stage Haya
claimed to be a Marxist, and criticised Mariátegui for leaving
Peru, it would become clear that his project for modernisation
involved an alliance with “progressive” sections of both the
national and the international bourgeoisie, led by the middle
class. Thus there was no contradiction for him in working with
Leguía in setting up the Universidades Populares, a programme
for the education of workers, in 1920. Three years later,
however, Haya too would be sent into exile by the increasingly
dictatorial Peruvian president. While today Apra is identified
with corrupt regimes pressing for neoliberal strategies, in the
1920s Haya’s claim that it was a new revolutionary creed did win
him some adherents, though its philosophy, with its mix of
Marxism, indigenism and an intense personalism around the figure
of Haya, in fact made its programme very difficult to follow.
Yet at this early stage Mariátegui continued to work with Haya’s
supporters in common projects, and continued to do so until
Haya, from Mexico, announced the formation of his Peruvian
Nationalist Party, which later became Apra.
The road to Europe and back
Mariátegui had left Peru with an established reputation within
the country’s working class movement, an important body of
journalistic work and some knowledge of Marxism.8 His trip to
Europe clearly had as one purpose the development and deepening
of that understanding. Having spent a little time in France, he
went to Italy where, as he later put it, he “acquired a wife and
some ideas”.9 He was present at the founding conference of the
Italian Communist Party at Livorno in 1921 and learned much of
his Marxism during this period.10 Arriving after the Italian
factory occupations, his articles and essays reflect his
immersion in the debates around the issue of hegemony. More
importantly, Mariátegui saw at first hand how the political
weakness of the bourgeoisie and the vacillations of reformism
could permit the emergence of fascism—and these would be the
central themes in his lectures and classes on the world
situation which he gave at the Universidad Populares after his
return to Peru,11 and in a subsequent series of articles in
various newspapers in 1923-4, published later under the title
“Figures and Aspects of International Life”.12
A great deal has been written about the various influences on
Mariátegui’s Marxism, and his voracious reading and reviewing of
a wide range of European writers has encouraged that. The key
point, however, is that his contemporary writings show a very
clear recognition of the world_historical significance of the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and a consistent admiration for
Lenin; a dedicated reading of current Marxist debates; and at
the same time a consistent reflection on his own reality from
the perspective not so much of Europe as of the international
situation:
Mariátegui’s insistence on the need for an internationalist
perspective is not the negation of nationalism so much as its
supersession… It is a dialectical negation but not in the sense
that he condemns or disqualifies nationalism as a historical
necessity at a given moment in time.13
He returned from Europe in 1923 a “convinced and committed
Marxist” (“Marxista convicto y confeso”) with a developed
critique of the Second International’s version of Marxism, which
waited passively for the development of capitalism automatically
to open the way to socialism.14 What this meant for him was
demonstrated in the activities that would absorb the remaining
six and half years of his life. First, the publication of
Amauta, a magazine that would provide a platform for political
debate between all the currents of thought within the socialist
movement in Peru and beyond, and second the working out of the
key ideas that would inform his work as a trade union and party
organiser in the late 1920s.
 Seven
Essays
Published in several stages in his magazine Amauta, Mariátegui’s
key work is his Seven Essays.15 The central themes of his
analysis of Peruvian history and society are developed in a
pathbreaking materialist account that goes beyond any previous
historical work, while setting out the framework of his activism
and the political work that would absorb the last two years of
his life. It is a book drawing on the work of several years,
which confirms that economics must provide the foundation of a
Marxist understanding, but also develops the concerns and
questions that Mariátegui has identified as central to
understanding the specificities of Peruvian history. These will
shape his organisational methods, his exploration of the class
struggle and his definition of the national reality. For some
commentators, hostile in principle to his dialectical method,
this definition consigns Mariátegui to the camp of revolutionary
nationalism at best. For others, he remains locked in a kind of
irrationalism which belies his insistence on locating the
development of class consciousness in particular material
circumstances. And for the functionaries of the late 1920s
Comintern pursuing Stalin’s ultra_left “class against class
strategy”, it suggested that Mariátegui was guilty of heterodoxy
and indiscipline. Yet none of these judgments are justified by
his work, either his theoretical writing or his practical
engagement with the organs of class struggle.
The seven essays of the title cover religion, education,
regionalism and (the longest essay) the development of Peruvian
literature. The three key pieces, however, which open the work,
provide a historical narrative that informs and explains his
political strategy. For Mariátegui was always, first and
foremost, a strategist of revolution—and his writings the
foundation and explanation of that strategy. Analysing the
Peruvian economy, he contrasts the colonial economic system with
what went before. Under Spanish imperial rule Peru was a source
of mineral wealth, its population locked in a system of ruthless
exploitation within a structure of authoritarian control centred
on the dominant colonial class. Its religious and secular
institutions were informed and sustained by an ideology of
racial superiority (“pura sangre”—pure blood) which legitimated
that exploitation. It was central to Mariátegui’s vision that
this contrasted dramatically with the pre-colonial, Inca,
society structured around the ayllu system of kinship based
collectives. Critics have been quick to point out that these
communal organisations functioned within a centralised theocracy
that was also highly repressive. Mariátegui acknowledges as much
in an extensive footnote in the essay on “The Problem of the
Indian”16—and he admits that those traditions have suffered
disruptions and transformations through three centuries of
colonial rule.
His argument, however, is that there is a cultural continuity
and an ideological one which has ensured the maintenance of a
collective consciousness in the indigenous communities of Peru.
For Mariátegui that tradition of collective solidarity resonates
with socialist ideas, and it is the task of socialists in that
society to build on that synthesis. The importance of that
“natural socialism” as Mariátegui himself described it, however,
is not because of some romantic nativism, some sense on
Mariátegui’s part that socialism was the result of cultural
processes. He insisted over and over again that ethnic
characteristics were inextricably interwoven with class—and that
the indigenous community was defined by its economic
relationships with the ruling class.
When Peru won its independence from Spain that structure was
maintained—and indeed reinforced—as he describes in the opening
essay, “The Structure and Evolution of the Economy”. The
struggle for independence was led by a nascent bourgeoisie
anxious to break the Spanish trading monopoly rather than
challenge economic dependence on foreign trade altogether. The
ruling class that emerged from the independence wars built the
new economy around guano, the natural fertiliser deposited by
seabirds on the coastal islands, which was exported exclusively
to Britain. And the colonial system of exploitation,
particularly in the mountain regions, far from being challenged
by the new dispositions, was reinforced and later exploited as a
source of cheap and pliant labour. This socio_economic structure
is defined in the essays that follow—”The Problem of the Indian”
and “The Problem of the land”—as gamonalismo:
[The term gamonalismo] designates a whole phenomenon. It
encompasses a far-reaching hierarchy of officials,
intermediaries, agents, parasites. Even the assimilated Indian
is transformed into an exploiter of his own race when he places
himself in its service. The central factor of the phenomenon is
the hegemony of the large estate in the politics and mechanism
of the state.17
It is based on forms of servitude and debt peonage, explained by
racist stereotyping—a clear example of the interweaving of race
and class. The critical consequence of this analysis was that
the post-independence economy developed in subordination to
external interests, and maintained the forms and structures of
colonial exploitation. The Peruvian bourgeoisie, in the age of
guano, and later when the dynamic sector of the economy moved to
the mines and the coastal agricultural estates after the the
Pacific War, remained dependent upon foreign capital. It had no
independent national project of its own. And in his exploration
of education, religion and culture Mariátegui found the same
characteristic parasitism and lack of independence—though he
also identified the points of resistance and struggle, whether
in the history of indigenous rebellion or in the echoes in Peru
(faint though they were) of the university reform movement that
had begun in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1918.
Although the Seven Essays offered a fairly comprehensive
analysis, each of them was clearly intended as the foundation
for a deeper and more extensive exploration, which was precluded
by Mariátegui’s early death. But they were part of a political
project, rather than a theoretical one, in the sense that
conclusions were drawn from them in revolutionary practice.
His call to the workers on 1 May 1924 is a key to understanding
his strategy.18 Calling for a “united front” he emphasised that
“we are still too few to split into different parts”. In the
working class movement the influence of a declining anarchism
was still significant, generating a suspicion of revolutionary
parties; among the students and the social movements, the
influence of Haya’s democratic nationalism was still
considerable; and in the world of the sierra, where resistance
was the stuff of everyday life, other, more local, traditions
provided the points of reference. And yet, as Mariátegui would
increasingly emphasise in his studies of Peruvian reality, and
in particular in his Seven Essays, that ideological separation
belied the role that each played in a unified economic structure
integrated into the international market.
The working class movement in this country is still too young
for us to contemplate dividing or splitting it. Before the time
of division comes, and I suppose it is inevitable, we have a
great deal of common work to do, in a spirit of solidarity. We
have to awaken in the Peruvian proletariat a class consciousness
and a feeling for their class; and that is a task for socialists
and communists, communists and libertarians equally. It is up to
all of us to win workers away from their “official
representatives” and to struggle together against repression. It
is up to all of us to defend the workers’ press and workers’
organisation. It is up to all of us to support the demands of
the oppressed and enslaved indigenous race. And as we fulfil
these historic responsibilities, we shall be doing our basic
duty, our roads will merge and run together whatever our final
objectives.19
Any socialist strategy must of necessity build a united front of
forces, while within that unity political debate should continue
to develop and advance the centrality of Marxist ideas. But it
was clear that Mariátegui was extremely anxious to avoid
sectarian splits. In fact he was operating consistently with the
positions adopted at this stage by the international Communist
movement, although, as Messeguer suggests, he may not have been
aware of the discussions taking place in the Comintern. This
drive for unity explains too his continuing relationship with
Haya de la Torre and his newly formed Peruvian Nationalist
Party, later to morph into Apra. It was an alliance that
continued with the founding of Amauta in 1926 and lasted until
the definitive break with Haya’s group in 1928.
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