The most influential Latin American Marxist thinker, at least until Che Guevara came along
just 35, disabled for his last six years by the amputation of a leg. But in his short life José Carlos Mariátegui managed to become Latin America’s most influential Marxist thinker, at least until Che Guevara came along. Barely known today outside Peru, he also played a significant role in Latin American culture in the late 1920s, a period when artists and writers were trying to establish national identities based on the recognition of and of workers and peasants.
This romantic view set him on a collision course with the apparatchiks from Moscow, who took over Latin American communist parties shortly after his death. But Mariátegui was right in stressing indigenous peoples, popular religiosity and culture in Latin America’s political identity. He was unusual, too, in counting many women among his collaborators.Amauta
belonged. It includes art by Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists. But the visual highlight is the work of Peruvian “indigenist” artists, such as Sabogal and Julia Codesido, who painted portraits of Amerindian elders and scenes of Andean community life. Indigenism was seen as archaic compared with the revolutionary commitment of Rivera. But it endowed its subjects with dignity, and Mariátegui defended it.
Mariátegui was wrong about big things. It is capitalism, not communism, that has freed billions from poverty. But in the aftermath of the first world war and of the Russian and Mexican revolutions, and having seen the failure of liberalism to prevent Italian fascism, he was not to know that. What he saw was that in Peru a century of political independence and creole capitalism had not freed the Indian from near-serfdom.
Mariátegui was a committed socialist who also managed to be a free thinker. That makes him valuable today. Much of the Latin American left is blindly obedient to the failed models of Cuba and Venezuela, or still beguiled by populist. It desperately needs some of the original thinking of the 1920s. For the right, “Gramscian cultural Marxism” is a new bugbear. They should recognise that Latin America suffers unacceptable inequalities based on sex and race, and needs more tolerance.
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