The legacy of José Carlos Mariátegui

In the famous “Red Corner” in the Casa Museo José Carlos Mariátegui in the Jesús María in Lima, Peru, Jonce Palmer of Fight Back! had the pleasure of sitting beside Dr. Ricardo Felipe Portocarrero Grados, director of the museum from 2011 to 2014 and co-director of the José Carlos Mariátegui Archive.

In this interview, we discuss the life and work of José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), his impact on Peruvian history, and his current-day legacy for the Peruvian and international revolutionary left.

Fight Back!: Who was Mariátegui and how did he become an important figure in Peruvian history?

Ricardo Portocarrero: José Carlos Mariátegui was a Peruvian politician and intellectual who is considered, according to a phrase that became well known by Antonio Melis, “the first Marxist of [Latin] America”. He has been called this not because there weren’t people who declared themselves Marxists before, but because Mariátegui’s work is considered an original work of Latin American Marxism, practically founding a Marxism that was born in Europe, but seeks to interpret Peruvian reality in order to transform it.

The scope of Mariátegui’s work is fundamentally due to the Amauta magazine. It was through Amauta that Mariátegui made contact not only with intellectuals and workers’ or peasants’ leaders from almost all of Peru, but also with personalities from almost all of Latin America: Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Costa Rica and Mexico. He also had contacts in Europe, although the circulation of Amauta was smaller.

And it is this wide network of political and intellectual exchanges articulated through Amauta that produced this broad recognition – during Mariátegui’s lifetime – at the national and international level. It was also through Amauta magazine that Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality became known.

Part of Seven Interpretive Essays was published in Amauta, along with Defense of Marxism, so that upon his death, many already knew him for his writings. The impact of his death reverberated widely throughout the continent.

Fight Back!: Can you explain more about the political and theoretical work in which Mariátegui was involved?

Ricardo Portocarrero: Like all Marxist thinkers, his work is broad and diverse. Perhaps the first thing to point out is that Mariátegui was, as was Marx, Gramsci, Lenin, and Trotsky at some point, a journalist. It was part of his political activity. He began as a young journalist, from the workshop to the newsroom, and this was a task he carried out throughout his life.

Therefore, we find the first moment that has been called his “stone age” prior to his Marxist training, a predominantly literary work: there were short stories, poems, plays, chronicles of the city of Lima, equestrian writings of a very diverse sort that were typical of a young journalist in training in a still aristocratic and very conservative Lima.

It was after his trip to Europe, and particularly upon his return to Peru, that Mariátegui oriented his journalistic production towards the organization in Peru of a press union that would become the basis of what he called Peruvian socialism. The books he published during his lifetime – and others he left in progress – are the result of a revision of his own writings, which in themselves had a certain thematic organicity of certain problems of interest, for example, the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union, the crisis of European social democracy, the emergence of new artistic, literary, intellectual currents, etc.

That articulation allowed him to shape these books he published during his lifetime, which are The Contemporary Scene (1925), Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928), Defense of Marxism, which was published in its entirety in 1955 after the author’s death and during his lifetime in Amauta, and El alma matinal, which remained unfinished. [Note: only Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality has been fully translated into English.]

It is very important to understand that Mariategui’s body of work is multifaceted, written in response to the daily situation. Without losing sight of the long term, it had to be written at the rhythm of current events. That gave all the more depth to his analysis of events that would otherwise run the risk of losing its closest, daily, precise qualities. That journalistic style is what has made his work attractive because it can be read with a certain ease, a very literary style recognizable throughout his work.

Fight Back!: What were some of the problems of the Peruvian people during this time? Do the same problems still exist today? Have new problems appeared?

Ricardo Portocarrero: That is a recurring question that the Peruvian left in general, and above all, those who have declared themselves his heirs – not his followers, his heirs, who say they represent Mariátegui today with their political parties – have raised that issue at different times. For example, at the end of the 1970s, at the request of the Minerva publishing house, a set of books was published dedicated to studying the Seven Interpretive Essays in comparison with the Peru of that time.

At that time there were profound transformations, products of the reforms of a military and nationalist government. These reforms, the most important being the agrarian reform, had abolished the latifundia. The colonial presence in the countryside disappeared. So, obviously, Mariátegui’s Peru no longer existed.

Later, at the end of the 1980s, a group of leftist and Marxist intellectuals was formed and held seminars with the intention of preparing a book entitled The New Seven Essays. Unfortunately, the book did not materialize as such. At that time Peru was going through a bloody civil war that was also transforming the relations of power and class structure.

More recently, this is a pending issue for the Peruvian left. I believe that fundamentally, there are two aspects still at play as problems in the present, but they have taken on new forms. First there is the problem of dependence, of imperialism in Peru and Latin America. The case of Peru is very clear because of the current situation. We are living under a brutal and repressive neo-liberal model which in itself poses a question for us: Who are the subjects that would be interested in fighting against these relations? Obviously the ruling classes – foreign capital, the groups in power – are interested in maintaining this situation.

For those who oppose imperialist domination, this is a matter of discussion once again. Obviously the social structure is not the same; we do not even have the same working class that existed in Peru at the beginning of the 20th century. But it is also clear that capitalist relations, the contradiction between capital and wages, the penetration of capital in the countryside, in the circuits of distribution, are ever stronger.

The other fundamental issue has to do in a certain way with political power: the problem of how to create a new society in Peru. Mariátegui raised two elements that had to be taken into account in this process of transformation. One of them was the agrarian problem, which lent itself at that time to those latifundios – properties of the so-called gamonales. Today they do not exist. There are large foreign national companies that have turned the land struggle into a very important issue in Peru. It is no longer only for agro-export production; formerly we exported sugar and cotton, now we export asparagus and coffee; but also has to do with the fact that mining and oil requires expropriating and expelling the population of the villages in the Andes from their territories in order to carry out large mining projects that only leave pollution, disease and death.

The other aspect of the agrarian problem is the role of familial agrarian production in the countryside with a way of promoting an internal market that meets the needs of the majority of the population living in different regions. In other words, the problem of political centralism. Political power rests in Lima. So, the agrarian problem, of this penetration of capital in the countryside and the struggles of peasant family farms, are aspects of the problem that had already been raised almost 100 years ago. These are some ideas that need to be reexamined.

Unfortunately, within the intellectual sectors, but also in some political parties, people are thinking more in terms of public policies that the state should make an effort to improve the situation when the situation is clear. This has no solution in this economic model and under this state. So, in that sense, the more revolutionary, radical or, more consequently, Marxist left is practically non-existent. There is a strong social movement, but there is no radical left political force that can really lead this movement in order to transform the situation.

Fight Back!: How has Mariátegui’s work impacted the Marxist movement in Peru today? And where do we see this influence?

Ricardo Portocarrero: I believe that the influence of Mariátegui’s work is such that there is practically no political party that declares itself to be leftist (although they are not) that does not bless Mariátegui. It is practically part of the political identity of the Peruvian left, even that which is not Marxist. Generally, the Marxist left claims him as a revolutionary emblem, a way of saying “we are revolutionaries because we follow Mariátegui.”

There is another more progressive, moderate, reformist left that identifies Mariátegui as an example of a politician and intellectual concerned with the great national problems. But they take away a good part of the political and programmatic aspect of Mariátegui’s work. They highlight Amauta, his books, the Seven Interpretive Essays, but do not talk about the Peruvian Socialist Party or the unions he founded and supported respectively. They see him as an abstract and isolated intellectual.

​​In the case of the right wing, the conservatives and reactionaries in this country, Mariátegui receives his prestige, but they practically reduce him to silence. That is, they simply do not speak of him. At least, not publicly. That said, there is no strong campaign from today’s state or conservative political forces against Mariátegui. His work remains beyond reproach. It is an impeccable work. For example, in the last four years, we have had the commemorations of the last Wars of Independence in 2021-2024. Mariátegui was hardly mentioned, and when he was mentioned, it was quite superficial.

There are also young people who are interested in researching Mariátegui. Not long ago here in this room we gave away the prizes of an essay contest on the work of Mariátegui with reference to his lectures at the Universidad Popular [Gonzales Prada]. So there are young people in their 30s who are writing and researching on the work of Mariátegui. We hope in time to be able to bring these new works, not only more widely in Peru, but also abroad.

Fight Back!: Why read Mariátegui? Why is it important to read his work from almost a century ago? Or perhaps a better question would be, why read his work not being Peruvian or Latino, but simply being interested, an activist, or an organizer?

Ricardo Portocarrero: You ask me “why read him”, but I want to propose the idea of how to read him. We see it in almost all the work of Marx, Engels, and the most important known Marxists: their work is often subjected to an ahistorical, decontextualized reading. In a certain way, many look for an abstract method, a theoretical tool separated from history to be able to understand the present world. But it is often forgotten that all these thinkers – Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Lenin, Mariátegui – lived in a specific epoch and that they analyzed that specific reality. From there they reach their conclusion. For example, today, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has become hackneyed. It has been abstracted out of the debates of the European left in the 20th century.

In this case, to read Mariátegui, or the way in which to read him, is effectively to put a method – the Marxist method – in use, in action. That is, the method is not a mere exercise. The method has its function, its role, at the moment of being applied in the concrete world.

Fight Back!: That is, to read it through the lens of praxis, not just theory but also practice.

Ricardo Portocarrero: That’s right, and for that you have to know the epoch, what it was like to live during that time, and everything else. Everything from which he acted as a reference: what he read and understood. Here the role of the most influence is very relevant but poorly thought out. The method consists not in something abstract but a method in action.

The other fundamental aspect of Mariátegui: it is a contemporary work in the sense of an epoch in which we are still living. Some say no, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, reality has changed. What has changed are the relations of power at the global level, but capitalism as a system, as commander of the world economy, and restorer of power relations between imperialist and dependent countries, has not changed. The historical period has changed, but not the epoch. We are still living during the age of imperialism.

In that sense, it is a work that still interests people, because even these contradictions of this era, Mariátegui can be read in those terms, analyzing not only Peru, but a world that is still in motion.

And why does he have to be read by non-Peruvians and non-Latin Americans? It is a question that many ask because they do not know that most of his articles are dedicated to non-Peruvian topics. There is a large percentage of his work that has to do with the problems of Europe. He also did research on India, China and Eastern countries.

But he does not analyze them as isolated countries, but rather as countries articulated globally to shifting relations of power. When he talks about China or India, he not only talks about the anti-colonial liberation movements, but also the role of imperialist countries in it. When he talks about Europe, he talks about the role they play in other countries. He is analyzing the world. That allows people who were not born in Latin America to understand and learn from Mariátegui’s work in a global way.

Another aspect that would contribute a lot to his reading is something that Marx had already raised. For example, the relation between Ireland and England bears a colonial character. He said that the solution of the Irish problem was going to be a very important issue to strengthen the British workers’ movement. Likewise, for example in the United States, you have the problem of the African American nationality, the indigenous, and so on. They came to the United States from Africa and were spurred from Islam. There is an internal colonialism; it is not a colonialism outside the country, but inside the country. The case of the Chicanos is another example.

I believe that Mariátegui’s work, read alongside other Marxist writers of North America and the Caribbean, would also help make it clear. It would be very important for the workers’ movement in North America to understand that their own liberation is not only a national liberation but that of the proletariat around the world. I think that in that sense it would contribute in a certain way to stop being a thought that is seen from the United States but a much more comprehensive and articulated look that promotes ties of solidarity and support that is being witnessed in the world with the case of Palestine, for example. Because you have to understand that the governments of the United States and the European Union are making the problem worse. Imagine if they didn’t bring weapons into Ukraine, they didn’t bring weapons into Israel. In a way, reading Mariátegui would help to integrate international movements for liberation, not nationally, but internationally.

Jonce Palmer is a general member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and cofounder of Denver-Aurora Community Action Committee, living in Denver, Colorado. Their translation of “Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality by José Carlos Mariátegui”, the first English translation in over 50 years, is forthcoming from Foreign Languages Press.

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