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Navigating the twilight of cosmopolitan Marxism: José Carlos Mariátegui on Trotskyism and Zionism in 1928–1929

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  • Peter Morgan (University College London (UCL), London, UK)

Abstract

This article explores the generative, and sometimes contradictory, tensions between the national and the cosmopolitan in José Carlos Mariátegui’s political thought at the end of the 1920s. In doing so, it recasts Mariátegui’s Indigenous Marxism, in part, as an artefact of political retreat from his original, world-making ambition during the earlier 1920s. The article explores Mariátegui’s later writings on Trotskyism and Zionism, and the conceptual and political connections between them. These texts were sites where the contradictions in Mariátegui’s mature political theory played out in comparable ways. In his response to the marginalisation and exile of Trotsky in the Soviet Union, Mariátegui grappled with the turn away from world revolution by Stalin’s regime, attempting to reconcile this change through the hopeful prediction that Trotskyism would become a tolerated opposition within the communist movement. And in his critique of Zionism, Mariátegui theorised nationalism as a less developed form of social organisation than the cosmopolitan model which he identified with diasporic and non-Zionist Jewish peoplehood.

Keywords: Mariátegui, cosmopolitanism, Indigeneity, Marxism, Trotskyism, Zionism, communism, interwar

How to Cite: Morgan, P. ‘Navigating the twilight of cosmopolitan Marxism: José Carlos Mariátegui on Trotskyism and Zionism in 1928–1929’. Radical Americas 10, 1 (2025): 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2025.v10.1.004.

Rights: 2025, Peter Morgan.

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Published on
18 Jun 2025
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Introduction

Since the 1940s, when Latin American communists first began to embrace Mariátegui’s legacy,1 the dominant interpretation of his intellectual career has been the claim that he founded (or else co-founded) a distinctively Latin American Marxism.2 The adaptation of Marxism to fit peculiarly Latin American conditions has been attributed to Mariátegui as both his primary intention and principal accomplishment during the 1920s. Mariátegui’s engagement with Marxism was, in this view, a desirable interrogation of the ideology’s Eurocentric preconceptions, necessary to make Marxist theory applicable outside Europe.3

The Latin Americanist framing of Mariátegui has focused on his efforts to make Marxism compatible with Peruvian and Latin American conditions, including certain nationalist intellectual currents in the region, especially 1920s Indigenismo. Indeed, Mariátegui emerges from this interpretative tradition as a decisively national or nation-oriented thinker, consumed by a project of conciliation between Marxist theory and Latin American nationalist belief. Scholars focus here on Mariátegui’s 1928 book, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana [Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality], which in 1988 José Aricó hailed as the only authentic work of ‘Latin American Marxism’ yet produced.4 In that text, Mariátegui elaborated on a number of key concepts and arguments, such as ‘Inka communism’, which he used to undermine the claim that Marxism was incompatible with Peruvian national conditions.5

In itself, there is nothing wrong with approaching Mariátegui as an intellectual who tried to bridge conceptual gaps between European Marxism and Latin America. That was precisely what Mariátegui intended to do in several of his interventions during the 1920s. However, in focusing on Mariátegui’s efforts to ‘Peruvianise’ Marxism, scholars have misrepresented his relationship – normative, affective and theoretical – with nationalism and its alternatives. In particular, the international and cosmopolitan character of Mariátegui’s Marxism has been obscured.

Recently, there has been a welcome global turn in the study of Mariátegui. Bergel has pioneered a ‘cosmopolitan’ interpretation of Mariátegui’s thought, stressing his intellectual ‘vocation for the world’.6 Drinot has more recently reframed Mariátegui as a global actor and thinker,7 and Arnall has emphasised Mariátegui’s conception of Marxism as a universalisable method of social analysis. Arnall characterises Mariátegui as ‘an unrepentant internationalist who aims to account for, rather than obliterate or fetishise, historical and material differences’.8 Moreover, García-Liendo has argued that Mariátegui’s various publications were ‘participating in a moment of internationalisation of culture’ and that his journalistic strategy during the 1920s sought to connect nation-building efforts in Perú to a wider, internationalist worldview.9 However, this recent burst of cosmopolitan readings of Mariátegui has hitherto tended to overlook or underplay the tensions between his distinct commitments to internationalism and nationalism during the 1920s.

This article argues that Mariátegui’s intellectual compromises with nationalist ideology in Perú were made, in a sense, reluctantly. Mariátegui rued the fact that he had to concede so much to nationally oriented reasoning and feeling in Perú to emplace Marxism there during the 1920s, and especially in the late 1920s. In Mariátegui’s own changing judgement, ideological compromise with nationalism in Perú became a necessary expedient, but it was neither a desirable nor an exciting one. This was because compromise involved a retreat from the cosmopolitan ambitions of Bolshevik socialism. Thus, some of the key conceptual features of Mariátegui’s ‘Latin American Marxism’ and Indigenismo reappear as artefacts of (partial) frustration, developed to legitimise Marxism in a context where too many Peruvians were unwilling to accept an emphatically supranational ideal of socialist revolution.

Moreover, the cosmopolitan and national visions of socialism that Mariátegui articulated in Perú during the 1920s did not always go together well in conceptual terms. Whereas recent revisionist work stressing Mariátegui’s global thought has suggested that his cosmopolitanism had a harmonious or non-abrasive relationship to his nationalist writings,10 it is argued here that these two poles of Mariátegui’s intellect were often contradictory, right up until 1930. Mariátegui did not reconcile his cosmopolitan ideal of socialist modernity with nationalism, nor did he simply convert from the former to the latter.

The contradiction between these two poles of Mariátegui’s thought was also intellectually generative. It led Mariátegui to insights and claims about the transient status of nationalism in social development, the cosmopolitan telos of human social organisation and the inherently supranational character of values such as ‘modernity’ and ‘heroism’. And it was also in response to the contradictions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism at the end of the 1920s – when the global context shifted from the revolutionary world-making conjuncture of 1917 to a more ominous period of ‘capitalist stabilisation’ and nationalist reaction – that Mariátegui expressed doubts about the triumph of socialism as such.

Thus, exploring the tensions and contradictions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in Mariátegui’s writing sheds new light on his analysis of regional and global conditions at the end of the 1920s. Here, this approach will be applied to three of Mariátegui’s late interventions, made during 1928 and 1929: two of these texts concerned the exile of Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) from the Soviet Union, and the other was a critique of colonial Zionism in British-ruled Palestine.

Mariátegui’s Marxism and its ordeals in Perú

Unlike some in the semi-colonial and colonial world who became communists in response to the October Revolution in Russia, Mariátegui did not do so due to the Bolsheviks’ anti-imperialism.11 Rather, Mariátegui at first embraced Bolshevism as a form of modernity. He was ‘enthralled by modernity’, which was a norm and social objective shared across diverse and conflictive groups in Perú during the 1910s and 1920s.12 But Mariátegui was innovative in how he came to identify the norm of modernity so closely with Bolshevik socialism. Mariátegui asserted in 1918: ‘every modern man is a socialist!’13

Moreover, Mariátegui’s conception of Bolshevik modernity was also constitutively global; it fitted a politics and ethics of scale, which underpinned Mariátegui’s political thought from the late 1910s onwards. Mariátegui consistently assumed that larger geographical scales allowed for more meaningful forms of human action and that a key feature of Peruvian backwardness was the parochial outlook of Perú’s ruling classes. Thus, Mariátegui not only commended Peruvian ‘Bolsheviks’ in 1919 for focusing on social claims rather than narrowly political ones, but also for focusing on international politics more than domestic issues.14 Moreover, from the regional standpoint of Perú and Latin America, Mariátegui believed that the fulfilment of modernity required continual input from without, especially from the European world; globalisation was therefore an urgent priority for him.15 For Mariátegui, only the global scale allowed for the most exalted forms of human existence and activity, including socialism.

Mariátegui’s exile in Europe between 1919 and 1923 consolidated his existing commitment to Marxism.16 While in Europe, Mariátegui became a theoretically knowledgeable Marxist, going beyond his hitherto vague identifications with revolutionary socialism. Moreover, the fact that Mariátegui encountered Marxism while exiled in Europe helped to give his own Marxist thinking a more global scale of reference and ambition. He also witnessed the international mobility of Bolshevism in practice in Europe. In Paris, Mariátegui befriended French supporters of the Bolsheviks, and he was present at Livorno in 1921 when Italian communists broke away from the established Socialist Party to align with revolutionary Russia. Thus, it was not just the fact that Mariátegui became a Marxist in Europe that consolidated his internationalism, but the fact that he did so in Europe during the ephemeral moment when victory for Bolshevism seemed possible throughout the region.17 Mariátegui therefore experienced first hand what Manu Goswami has termed the international ‘transmissibility of communism’ during the early twentieth century, and he intended to help extend this to Latin America.18

When Mariátegui returned to Perú in March 1923, he began to promote the modernist and cosmopolitan Marxism which he had consolidated in Europe. In Mariátegui’s first major intervention after returning to Lima, he foregrounded both of these values as reasons for Peruvians to embrace socialism.19 However, Mariátegui’s post-1923 project to evangelise Marxist theory and the Bolshevik Revolution in Perú met with resistance from diverse sectors. Initially, opposition was limited to the Peruvian ruling classes, including those aligned with the ‘Patria Nueva’ of Augusto Leguía (1863–1932). Leguía had come to power in July 1919. During the initial period of his regime, he had made efforts to include certain progressive elements in his political coalition, 20 but leguísmo was profoundly anticommunist. An early instance of right-populist statecraft in Latin America, the Patria Nueva expanded the foundations of what Drinot calls the Peruvian ‘labour state’ of the interwar decades, which attempted to undermine the appeal of communism through the administrative reconciliation of capital and labour.21 Accordingly, Leguía’s supporters criticised Mariátegui’s ideological project, focusing specifically on its cosmopolitan aspects. Leguía’s adherents tried to ‘other’ Marxist socialism, characterising the ideology as foreign and therefore undesirable in Perú.22

However, acolytes of Leguía’s Patria Nueva were not the only group in interwar Perú to try to undermine Mariátegui’s Marxist project through the weaponisation of Peruvian nationalism. During the second half of the 1920s, the revolutionary left of Peruvian politics, previously held together by the usefully vague terminology of ‘vanguardism’,23 began to splinter. Most concerning for Mariátegui was the fact that Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895–1979) took his Latin Americanist group, the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), in an explicitly anticommunist direction, leading to an open schism with Mariátegui in early 1928.24

Aprista attacks on Mariátegui followed the same ‘othering’ logic as his conservative critics, arguing that Marxism was inapplicable to Perú because it was essentially European and therefore alien to Peruvian national conditions.25 Haya defined aprismo against communism as ‘an autonomous movement, completely Latin American’.26 Thus, aprismo converged with leguísmo around the ideological strategy of denouncing Marxist socialism as incompatible with Peruvian nationalism. Moreover, this approach was potent because, like modernity, the value of nationality was also shared by rival political coalitions in Perú; it was an integral part of the prevailing common sense in Gramsci’s meaning.27 In fact, largely due to the evident power of such nationalism in the colonial world during the 1920s, even the Communist International (Comintern) began advocating for a more nationally-oriented approach to political action, rather than the one that had originally attracted Mariátegui to the Russian Revolution.

In 1928, the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, which coincided with the organisation’s increased involvement in Latin America,28 saw claims that communist organisations in (semi-)colonial societies ought to give a more central role to national struggles for self-determination.29 In South America, it was argued – in the face of Mariátegui’s opposition – that communists should begin agitating for an independent Indigenous republic of Quechua and Aymara peoples in the Andean region, using the model provided by the ‘native republic’ thesis in South Africa.30 Obviously, unlike in the cases of leguísmo and aprismo, Comintern support for a more national orientation in Latin American politics was not anticommunist per se, but it was clearly at odds with the specifically cosmopolitan Marxism favoured by Mariátegui.

Mariátegui’s understanding of Marxist socialism as an ideal of cosmopolitan modernity thus became increasingly contested in Perú after 1923, including by political actors that he could not afford to ignore or alienate. Moreover, these varied critics converged around a structure of logic that tended to undermine Marxist cosmopolitanism in Latin America, by arguing instead that a more national(ist) approach was appropriate for the region.

It was primarily as a response to these diverse challenges to his cosmopolitanism and out of practical necessity that Mariátegui began to articulate points of compatibility between Bolshevik communism and Latin American nationalism. That is, Mariátegui’s nationalisation of Marxism was not, in an important sense, wilful; he was not prompted to undertake that ideological project by his own, self-motivated concerns about the insufficiency of Marxist theory. Instead, Mariátegui was faced with the political fact that his interlocutors in Perú had practically problematised the relationship between Marxist cosmopolitanism and Peruvian national reality. This objective fact was regardless of Mariátegui’s conviction that there were no grounds for such a problematic. Mariátegui thus constructed what has become known as Latin American Marxism – his reconciliations of Marxism and Indigeneity, and his insistence on the need for Latin American originality within the wider, global scheme of Marxist thought – in response to the practical needs of a struggle for ideological hegemony in Perú during the 1920s, because his initially cosmopolitan strategy was failing.

However, this article does not suggest that the existence of a pragmatic dimension in Mariátegui’s ‘Peruvianising’ Marxism means that this area of his thought was insincere. The fact that there were intellectual and affective tensions between his cosmopolitan ideal of socialist revolution and his compromises with nationalism in Perú does not mean that those compromises were superficial. Mariátegui had already made commitments to Indigenismo before the APRA split; he was, to a degree, already invested in Peruvian nationalism before 1917.31 And Mariátegui was able to identify several points of conceptual coherence between the premises of Peruvian Indigenismo and Bolshevik world revolution.

Moreover, Mariátegui also understood Marxist theorising as both requiring a unity of theory and practice – the practical embedment of the thinker in the labour movement – and as dialectical, in the sense of being capable of dynamic change in relation to the objective conditions of social life.32 Thus, Mariátegui argued in 1927 that Marxism is a

dialectical method. That is, a method that bases itself integrally in reality, on the facts. It is not, as some erroneously suppose, a body of principles with the same rigid conclusions for all historical climates and all social latitudes. Marx extracted his method from the entrails of history itself. In every country and every people Marxism operates and acts upon the environment … without neglecting any of its modalities. This is why, after more than a half-century of struggle, its strength appears greater and greater. Russian Communists, British Labourites, German socialists, etc., all make an equal claim upon Marx.33

In Mariátegui’s understanding of Marxism-as-method, therefore, the dynamism of social analysis across historical space and time was an inherent attribute. As such, when Mariátegui began to make more compromises with Peruvian nationalism during the later 1920s, he was being consistent with his theoretical understanding of Marxism: he was reconceptualising socialist revolution for a local conjuncture that appeared to lack the conditions of possibility for an explicitly cosmopolitan form of praxis to succeed politically. And yet, whereas Mariátegui’s shift from cosmopolitan to Peruvianised articulations of Marxism during the late 1920s remained theoretically consistent in this sense, the shift still caused friction with his affective relationship to Marxism as a cosmopolitan ideal. Indeed, the tensions between Mariátegui’s methodological and affective interactions with revolutionary Marxism were among his most acute during the late 1920s.

The partly forced character of Mariátegui’s conceptual articulation of Marxism and Peruvian nationalism generated contradictions between the cosmopolitan ideal of revolutionary socialism, on the one hand, and the practical imperatives of building hegemony in a Peruvian context shaped by nationalist ideology, on the other. The contradictory relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in some of Mariátegui’s final texts discloses fascinating, often forlorn, analyses of global order, human development, and the challenges to ‘modernity’ in a late 1920s context of ‘capitalist stabilisation’ – analyses absent from his better-known, Peruvianising interventions of the same period.

Thinking at the twilight of cosmopolitan Marxism: late Mariátegui on Trotskyism and Zionism, 1928–1929

Mariátegui’s commitment to Marxist revolution as a form of cosmopolitan modernity remains evident in his final published writings. This global ideal and, specifically, its tense and unsettled relationship to nationalist reasoning in Mariátegui’s work, will be analysed here in three texts from 1928 and 1929. Two essays, published in February 1928 and February 1929, comprised Mariátegui’s direct response to the exclusion of the Trotskyist opposition in Russia and the exile of Leon Trotsky himself from the Soviet Union; the third essay, published in May 1929, was Mariátegui’s critique of colonial Zionism in Palestine. The three interventions shared significant features, not least Mariátegui’s discontent with nationalism’s continuing power at the global scale at the end of the 1920s, and a corresponding concern for the future of Marxist cosmopolitanism.

Trotsky in Lima

Mariátegui admired Trotsky. As early as April 1924, he had written positively about Trotsky’s ideal of ‘proletarian culture’ and characterised the Russian as a model socialist intellectual.34 Thus, the news that Trotsky had been excluded from the Communist Party by Joseph Stalin in 1927, and then exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, unsettled Mariátegui. In his main written response to these events – essays published in February 1928 and February 1929, with the latter repeating certain passages of the former – Mariátegui expressed regret and avoided direct condemnation of Trotsky. Mariátegui began by conceding that the news of Trotsky’s exile was difficult for socialists to accustom themselves to. He also continued to describe Trotsky with the positive terms ‘vital’ and ‘heroic’.35 However, Mariátegui’s account of the Soviet decision to exile Trotsky was more explanatory than condemnatory. Rather than accuse Trotsky of ideological deviation, Mariátegui argued that the exile resulted simply from Trotsky’s failures at man-management, specifically vis-à-vis the Old Bolsheviks (except for Lenin).36 Indeed, Mariátegui described the positions for which Trotsky was excluded as defending ‘Marxist orthodoxy, in the face of the unruly flow of Russian reality’.37

Mariátegui’s most substantial explanation for Trotsky’s expulsion was that his cosmopolitanism had become incongruent with the changing imperatives of the revolutionary process in Russia; specifically, the need for reorganisation at the national level. Mariátegui argued:

Trotsky … is a man of the cosmopolis … He has … an international sense of the socialist revolution. His notable writings about the transitory stabilisation of capitalism place him among the most alert and sagacious critics of the epoch. But this same international sense of the revolution, that grants him so much prestige on the global scene, deprives Trotsky of the element currently needed in the practice of Russian politics. The Russian Revolution is in a period of national organisation. It is not, for the moment, about establishing socialism in the world, but of realising it in a single nation that, although a nation of 130 million inhabitants spread across two continents, nevertheless constitutes a unity, geographically and historically.38

Whereas Trotsky’s undenied virtue was on the transnational scale of socialist praxis, Russia was now in a process that required more nationally-minded politicians attuned to Russian peculiarities. ‘Stalin, a pure Slav, is one of these men.’39

It is important to read closely the terms with which Mariátegui described the need for a national turn in Russia in this essay: ‘modest’; ‘normal’. In the context of Mariátegui’s own conceptualisation of Marxism, this lexicon of prudence and normality was juxtaposed with what he understood as the ethical strength of Marxism. In his recent theoretical work, A Defence of Marxism, Mariátegui, drawing on his affinities for philosophical vitalism,40 had emphasised the ‘heroic and creative meaning of socialism’ and its ‘revolutionary energy’ based on proletarian class struggle.41 That is, precisely the values that Mariátegui still attributed to Trotsky while explaining the latter’s break with the Soviet government.

This is not to say that Mariátegui’s contraposition of the political idioms of heroism and pragmatism was absolute. Indeed, on his own terms, Mariátegui’s analysis of Trotsky’s split with Stalin was ambiguous. Mariátegui’s description of Trotsky in this moment, as relatively disconnected from the working classes inside Russia, bears a close, conceptual resemblance to his contemporary critique of intellectuals and intellectualism in Latin America. In line with other interwar Latin American Marxists, such as Julio Antonio Mella, Mariátegui criticised intellectuals for their tendency to either align with political reaction or to lack political discipline, due to their (normally) bourgeois class background and their isolation from organised labour.42 In this view, the only positive, revolutionary form of intellectual activity was that which resulted from the unity of theory and practice, by an intellectual embedded in the organised workers’ struggle.

By 1928, this anti-intellectualist theme in Mariátegui’s thought was focused on the problem of aprismo in Perú, which he diagnosed as the demagogic result of aprista intellectuals like Haya de la Torre becoming isolated from Peruvian labour due to their ongoing exile from Perú.43 Thus, despite Mariátegui’s own close associations with exile, he was beginning to (partially) rethink its meaning in relation to revolutionary consciousness during the late 1920s. In this context, therefore, Mariátegui’s analysis of Trotsky as less connected to peculiarly Russian social realities than Stalin appears more critical of the former, in part because of Trotsky’s cosmopolitan political formation:

It is logical that in this stage the Russian Revolution is represented by men that feel more deeply its national character and problems. Stalin, a pure Slav, is one of these men. He belongs to a phalanx of revolutionaries who were always kept rooted in Russian soil. While Trotsky, like Radek and Rakovsky, belongs to a phalanx that spent most of their life in exile.44

In this view, Trotsky’s continued commitment to world revolution appears as an instance of utopianism, negatively construed. In the conjuncture of ‘national organisation’ entered upon in late 1920s Russia, Trotsky’s ‘universalist’ and ‘ecumenical’ understanding of the socialist revolution had become untethered from the national ‘reality’ – a key concept for Mariátegui, which defined the concreteness of theoretical activity. Lenin had been able to lead the Bolshevik party because his analyses had corresponded most closely to the social ‘reality’ of the Russian Empire.45 Thus, the tensions between Mariátegui’s understanding of Marxism in methodological terms, as a heuristic device whose revolutionary force was conditional upon the unity of theory and practice, and his affective commitment to Bolshevism as a cosmopolitan ideal, were playing out in full force in his thinking about the rupture between Trotsky and Stalin’s government, with the normative valency of prudence versus heroism being ambiguous and subject to alternation.

However, whereas the idiom of ‘demagoguery’, which Mariátegui often used to critique APRA intellectualism, was clearly negative, the language with which Mariátegui chose to describe the new disjuncture between Trotsky and Soviet developmental priorities tended to valorise Trotsky even when normalising his expulsion. Trotsky was ‘an excessive figure on the plane of national realisations’ due to his cosmopolitan ambition; he was suited instead to ‘evangelising’ the Bolshevik Revolution across national borders, as Napoleon Bonaparte had done for the French Revolution. However, it was precisely this ‘Napoleonic’, cosmopolitan model of Bolshevism that Mariátegui had committed himself to in the wake of 1917. Mariátegui’s description of this project as exceeding, in its ‘majesty’, the national limits of Stalinism suggested that the latter form of socialist development was less capable of the highest ideals of the Bolshevik tradition as Mariátegui understood them. And it was to these cosmopolitan ideals that Mariátegui had attributed the world-historical meaning and force of Bolshevik modernity; for Mariátegui, the cosmopolitan scale was the necessary sphere of ‘heroic’ action, modernity and history. Moreover, in these texts on Trotsky’s exclusion, Mariátegui still made this argument explicitly: ‘The Russian Revolution owes its international and ecumenical value, its character as the precursor of the rise of a new civilisation, to the thought that Trotsky and his comrades claim in all of its vigour and consequences.’46 Thus, Trotsky represented the project of socialist world revolution for which Mariátegui had converted to Marxism and which he identified as the principal historical value of Bolshevism, and yet it was this precise fact that Mariátegui identified as the major cause of Trotsky’s exile.

Mariátegui’s response to this event thus discloses an awkward contradiction between his cosmopolitan ideal of Marxist socialism and the apparent, conjunctural imperative on socialists to focus on national development at the end of the 1920s. It is perhaps less of a theoretical or analytical contradiction than an affective, even existential, one: Mariátegui was willing to concede that cosmopolitan socialism had become imprudent and inapplicable in Russia, but he did not do so gladly. Indeed, in Mariátegui’s interpretation of Trotsky’s exile we can trace his own discontent with the changing priorities of communist doctrine in 1929. There was a clear self-identification by Mariátegui with Trotsky. As discussed, Mariátegui had already lauded Trotsky as a model socialist thinker earlier in the 1920s, and he also pointed to the fact that Trotsky had become a Bolshevik revolutionary while exiled from Russia in central and western Europe, i.e. the exact same exilic geography as Mariátegui’s own encounter with Marxism.47

Mariátegui’s response to Trotsky’s exile can therefore be read as a rumination on the eclipse of communist cosmopolitanism at the end of the 1920s. But whereas Trotsky, in Mariátegui’s analysis, was incapable of – because too ‘heroic’ for – prudential adaptation to the more ‘modest’, national scale of praxis, Mariátegui had been more disciplined, adjusting his political activity to fit the demands of nationalism and nation-building in Latin America. Yet Mariátegui remained discontented. The prudence of accommodating nationalism and national development did not idealise them for Mariátegui, and he only accepted and understood the need for a national turn in communist activity as a temporary expedient. For Mariátegui, the ideal of a world revolution had been deferred, not discarded, because it was ultimately inherent to Marxism. And this supposed temporariness of the national turn framed Mariátegui’s belief that Trotskyism would continue to play a valuable role in the communist movement even after Trotsky’s exile: ‘Trotskyist opinion has a useful function in Soviet politics. It represents, to define it in two words, Marxist orthodoxy, in the face of the unruly flow of Russian reality.’48

Mariátegui thus argued that Trotskyist polemic would continue to play a valuable role in Soviet politics as a source of vitality and as a steward of Bolshevik ‘orthodoxy’ – the orthodoxy of 1917 and world revolution – amid the practical shifts required of the Soviet government by the conjunctural project of ‘national organisation’ in relation to the ‘unruly flow of Russian reality’. Thus, Mariátegui imagined Trotskyist Marxism as having a post-exile function within a relatively plural communist movement. He concludes ‘El exilio’ by suggesting that Trotsky had resumed his ‘belligerent position as polemicist’ within the international communist movement, normalising Trotsky’s exile as part of a longer history of ‘tremendous creative tension’ inside the Bolshevik Party, which Mariátegui attributed to the positive fact that the Russian Revolution ‘is the work of heroic men’.49 Given how much Mariátegui had identified Trotsky with his own cosmopolitan ideal of Marxism during the 1920s, it was most likely impossible for him to imagine or tolerate Trotsky’s total excommunication.

Rather than a harmonious combination, therefore, Mariátegui’s cosmopolitan ideal of Marxism remained at odds with his analytical turn towards nationalism at the end of the 1920s. His response to Trotsky’s exile manifested uneasy contradictions between the national and the cosmopolitan in Mariátegui’s thought: he accepted the fact of Trotsky’s expulsion while at the same time explaining that event in terms of an excess of socialist virtue; that is, in terms of the fact that Trotsky approximated Mariátegui’s own cosmopolitan and heroic conceptualisation of a Marxist. Yet this begs the question of why Mariátegui did not simply side with Trotsky against the current Soviet government, which in turn discloses another set of contradictions between the national and the cosmopolitan in Mariátegui’s thought.

In the first instance, the Soviet state, as an empirical entity, continued to represent the ideal of world revolution for Mariátegui, as it did for many other Marxists abroad. Thus, Mariátegui’s commitment to a cosmopolitan vision of socialist revolution still bound him to Soviet policy, even as that policy shifted in an overtly national and anti-cosmopolitan direction. In Mariátegui’s imagination, the actual Soviet Union remained co-constitutive with the global ambition of 1917, however contradictory the results of that link. Mariátegui also recognised the fact that a ‘national’ focus in the Soviet Union nevertheless attended to a global, transcontinental polity.50 Moreover, Mariátegui’s response to Trotsky’s exile also expressed a contradiction between his ideal of vital action as a value of modern socialism and his increasing prioritisation of intellectual discipline in the context of party political organisation. Despite Mariátegui’s justified reputation as a heterodox Marxist thinker, he also emphasised the importance of party discipline among intellectuals, especially as he began to think more specifically about socialist political organisation in Perú after 1928.

Finally, insofar as Trotsky(ism) represented for Mariátegui the ideal of a global socialism in 1929, his combined lament for, and acceptance of, Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union expressed a growing tension in Mariátegui’s own Marxism. By the end of the 1920s, Mariátegui was trying to navigate the entangled global contexts of capitalist stabilisation and resurgent nationalism: between the cosmopolitan ideal of world revolution and a vitalist philosophy of heroic action, on the one hand, and a tactical pessimism, rooted in historical materialism, that seemed to dictate (for the time being) the confinement of various forms of socialist politics to the national scale, on the other. In Mariátegui’s essays on Trotsky, he was only able to partly resolve this contradiction through the (forlorn) hope of a vibrant Trotskyist opposition within the communist movement. And had Mariátegui not died in April 1930, it is hard to imagine that these tensions would have become any easier to manage, given Trotsky’s fate.

Mariátegui’s critique of Zionist nationalism

Just a few months after Mariátegui published his response to Trotsky’s exile, he produced a critique of Zionism in British-ruled Palestine. This text also set cosmopolitanism and nationalism against one another. ‘The mission of Israel’, published in Lima in May 1929, was Mariátegui’s philo-Semitic critique of Zionism.51 In the article, Mariátegui argued that the Jewish people collectively, on a global scale, had surpassed the ‘epoch’ of nationalism, understood as a temporary phase of human development. In Mariátegui’s interpretation, ‘Israel’ – a term that he used here to describe the Jewish people as a global and diasporic collectivity, as distinct from and opposed to the type of territorial nation-state sought by interwar Zionists – had ‘overcome’ the stage of national(ist) organisation in history to realise the next, more advanced phase of human development.

In Mariátegui’s argument, the Jewish people already represented a higher – because post-national – stage of society. ‘Israel’ existed in the world of 1929 as a ‘supranational complex, the elemental, primary, still loose plot of an ecumenical order’.52 For Mariátegui, this global form of society represented, in a conceptually similar way to his idea of Bolshevik Russia, both a model for other peoples to aspire to and the concrete embryo of a more progressive global order. Thus, the tone of Mariátegui’s essay is often one of bemusement. In Mariátegui’s view, Jewish Zionists proposed to under-develop their own people through the abandonment of a supra-national cosmopolis in favour of a relatively primitive territorial nation-state.

To a limited extent, this critique of colonial Zionism can be made sense of in the context of Mariátegui’s commitment to anti-imperialism. Indeed, Mariátegui was an important protagonist in the largely interwar process by which some Latin American thinkers ‘globalised’ the critique of imperialism in the region beyond its hitherto hemispheric limits to advocate solidarity with colonised peoples elsewhere in the world, such as in Asia and Africa.53 Mariátegui regularly expressed support for anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements in places such as China, India and Turkey.54 And Mariátegui’s critique of Zionism did contain an anti-imperialist dimension insofar as it recognised the enabling role of British imperialism in the ongoing Zionist colonisation of Palestine.55 However, this particular essay, as is evident from its title, was far more concerned with the interpretation of Jewish identity in the contemporary world than ‘South–South’ anticolonial politics. There is no mention or sense at all of Arab Palestinian peoplehood in the text, and the few references to other Arab societies, such as Egypt, are disparaging, Orientalist statements. Thus, we ought not read back too much proto-Third Worldism. The essay’s dominant theme was not anti-imperialism but rather Jewishness in the contemporary conjuncture, and for Mariátegui this meant that his intervention related more to the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism than colonisation and anticolonialism.56

In ‘La misión de Israel’, Mariátegui’s main argument was that the actual, ‘modern’ mission of the Jewish people in the 1920s, rather than creating a territorial nation-state in Palestine, was to accomplish and sustain ‘the advent of a universal civilisation’.57 In Mariátegui’s view, ‘Israel’ was capable of this project because its virtue was in being a ‘cosmopolitan people’. In Mariátegui’s anti-Zionist idealisation, Jewish peoplehood was distinctly and precociously universal, relative to other communal identities in the early twentieth century: ‘the Jewish people that I love’, he wrote, ‘does not talk exclusively Hebrew nor Yiddish; it is polyglot, wandering, supranational.’58 Mariátegui thus revalued the pejorative characterisation of Jews as cosmopolitan. Moreover, in Mariátegui’s analysis Jewish cosmopolitanism was not simply a cultural virtue but also a historically progressive force in the contemporary world: it promised the ‘advent’ of a new, universal stage of human civilisation. And Mariátegui argued that this role as an agent of progressive, revolutionary change in the global order had been recurrent in Jewish history. In his narrative, Mariátegui claimed that ‘Israel’ had been in the vanguard of capitalist development under feudalism and it was now active in the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism, too: ‘since Marx, the last of its prophets, Israel has spiritually and ideologically overcome capitalism.’59

Mariátegui attributed the global revolutionary vocation of the Jewish people to both their distinctive cosmopolitanism and constructive interactions with the West. For instance, it was the diasporic and subsequently marginalised positionality of Jewish subjects in feudal Europe that led to them playing such an active role in the gestation of capitalist society. Excluded from agriculture, soldiery and nobility, Jews in medieval Europe were obliged to focus on artisanal industry, commerce and credit in the towns, where they proved able to forge capitalism in urban enclaves, geographically inside yet socially beyond feudalism.60 Thus, Mariátegui developed a sort of standpoint epistemology to underpin his interpretation of Jewish subjectivity as a revolutionary force in global history.

Moreover, Mariátegui was also insistent that the world-historical value and mission of the Jewish people had depended on continued interaction with the Western world. For example, Mariátegui argued that it was only through contact with Eastern Christianity that Judaism had been able to achieve the ‘universalisation of its values’ and thereby enter the ‘highest plane of history’.61 Mariátegui also claimed that the people of Israel gained by the loss of their physical homeland in the Near East because this event had set the stage for their dynamic role in the history of the West.62 And it is worth noting here that the same conceptual framework that organised Mariátegui’s evaluation of Jewish peoplehood organised his evaluation of the Bolshevik Revolution. He valorised both as agents of revolutionary and world-historical progress and, therefore, as fundamentally ‘Western’ phenomena.63

Mariátegui’s argument in ‘La misión de Israel’ was underpinned by a stadial philosophy of history organised around the telos of a supra- and post-national social form. For Mariátegui, this form was already, in 1929, manifest by the diasporic Jewish people. In its pre- and anti-Zionist formulation:

Israel is not a race, a nation, a State, a language, a culture; it is the overcoming of all of these things at the same time in something so modern, so unknown, that it does not yet have a name … a supranational complex, the elemental, primary, still loose plot of an ecumenical order.64

Once again, this cosmopolitan vision of human development, here articulated through Mariátegui’s critique of Zionism, is evidence of his broader politics of scale throughout the 1920s in which superior human values and practices occurred on larger geographical scales. Thus, it was only once the Jewish people had left the Near East to embark upon a diasporic, global existence that they entered the ‘highest plane of human history’.65 And Mariátegui was clear in the text that he was thinking about global development as such – that he was not only ruminating on the Jewish people: ‘Internationalism is not, as many obtuse people imagine on the Right and the Left, the negation of nationalism, but its overcoming. It is a dialectical negation, in the sense that it contradicts nationalism.’66

Furthermore, this cosmopolitan iteration of stadial history did not displace or replace Marxism, Mariátegui’s other theory of stage-based human development.67 In fact, Mariátegui combined his analysis of Jewish peoplehood with a vision of capitalist collapse. He argued that it was due to the increasing incapacity of capitalism to organise on an international scale, as a result of the political pressures of nationalism, that the capitalist order was now doomed. Capitalism could no longer respond to and manage globalised capital.68 The main political device of ‘capitalist stabilisation’ – reactionary nationalism and fascism – was also, therefore, its undoing. By contrast, the cosmopolitan disposition of Jewish subjectivity had made possible a key role for Jewish actors in the only movement now capable of progressive organisation on a global scale: revolutionary socialism.

On the basis of this cosmopolitan theory of social development, Mariátegui interpreted Zionist nationalism as retrograde because it contradicted the globalising logic of history; to reconfine the Jewish people by a territorial nation-state in the land of Palestine would be a backward step by the most advanced society in the contemporary world, thus depriving other peoples of a key socio-political model. Mariátegui attributed this regressive project to the nationalist tendency of the European bourgeoisie being imposed upon and, in the case of a Zionist minority, taken up by, the Jewish people. Mariátegui equated the Zionist colony in Palestine to a new form of Jewish ghettoisation, noting the support for Zionism among right-wing European nationalists: ‘loyal nationalists, people of acute antisemitism, have confessed more or less explicitly their hope that the nationalism of Israel will free their homelands from the Jewish problem.’69

In calling for the Jewish people to resist the temptations of Zionism, Mariátegui wanted to defend diasporic ‘Israel’ as an ideal of post-national, cosmopolitan modernity for other peoples to aspire to, like Bolshevik Russia. Indeed, as well as interpreting Jewish peoplehood and the Bolshevik Revolution in comparable terms, Mariátegui connected the two phenomena. As mentioned, he celebrated the prominent role of Jewish actors such as Marx and Trotsky in the advent of a distinctly modern, revolutionary and cosmopolitan socialism.

Mariátegui’s posture of bemusement towards Jewish Zionists can be read as an index of his own, increasing frustration at the need to compromise with nationalism in contemporary Perú. Why would a people who had successfully transcended nationalism, and among whom cosmopolitanism was therefore already normalised and accepted, want to return to a less advanced, nationalist consciousness?

In positive terms, for Mariátegui, the defence of cosmopolitan Jewishness against Zionism might sustain the ideal of world revolution throughout the period of capitalist stabilisation and nationalist compromise at the end of the 1920s. In this sense, Mariátegui’s vision of an anti-Zionist future for the Jewish people served much the same purpose – and responded to the same anxiety – as his hopes for a Trotskyist opposition within the communist world. Both these imagined futures promised to sustain the ideal of cosmopolitan socialism during a period of prudential accommodation with nationalists. Mariátegui’s idealisation of a diasporic ‘Israel’, like his idealisation of the Bolshevik Revolution, provided him with a sense of resilient revolutionary and cosmopolitan modernity ‘from without’ during a period of intensifying nationalist hegemony, including within Latin America.

Mariátegui’s Indigenous Marxism as an artefact of retreat

This intellectual history of Mariátegui’s contradictory yet resilient commitment to cosmopolitanism at the end of the 1920s recontextualises his Peruvianisation of Marxism during the same moment. Rather than the teleological fulfilment of his ‘purpose’ as a Latin American intellectual, Mariátegui’s ‘Latin American Marxism’ appears, in the context of his cosmopolitan dilemmas, as an artefact of defeat or retreat. ‘Latin American Marxism’ was Mariátegui’s pragmatic response to the political failure of his preferred, cosmopolitan strategy in a Peruvian context dominated by nationalism, anticolonial and otherwise. In that context, Mariátegui was unable to effectively build a Marxist counter-hegemony in primarily cosmopolitan terms.

At the macro level, given this ideological context, Mariátegui’s synthesis of Marxist universalism and Peruvian nationalism was an unsurprising outcome of communists’ experience of politics in the region. Thus, comparable syntheses were attempted by Marxists in other colonial and semi-colonial settings after 1917.70 However, at the level of Mariátegui’s rational and affective self, this shift from cosmopolitan Marxism to a more Latin American and Peruvian form was experienced as a strenuous process. Thus, the late Mariátegui was less conceptually resolved, and more fissile and fragmentary, in his thinking about Marxism and nationality than the historiography has allowed for.

The reframing of Mariátegui’s Indigenous Marxism here need not leave a pessimistic image. As mentioned previously, Mariátegui’s self-consciously ‘dialectical’ understanding of Marxism meant that the concrete demands and intuitions of a labour movement ought to be given a central role in (re)theorising revolutionary practice. In this view, Mariátegui’s shift from the cosmopolitan to the national instantiated the inherent dynamism of the Marxist method. Even though it could be exploited by anticommunist demagoguery, the evident meaning and material immediacy of the Peruvian national frame to Peruvian workers made it a concrete concern for Mariátegui’s Marxism; one which could not be bypassed or marginalised by an a priori methodological cosmopolitanism. Thus, Mariátegui’s national turn at the end of the 1920s, although contradictory, can be seen as an intellectual product of the unity of theory and practice which he himself valued.

Moreover, Mariátegui’s Marxist Indigenismo at the end of the 1920s was enriched by the context of deferred cosmopolitanism in which Mariátegui theorised it. Whereas Mariátegui’s increasing focus on the Indigenista iteration of Peruvian nationalism and nation-building during the late 1920s was a response to the insufficiency of Bolshevik worldmaking in Perú, Indigenismo also functioned for Mariátegui as a vehicle with which to sustain the basic principles of world revolution at a moment when that concept was becoming more reserved in his political thought. Thus, in developing a socialist definition of Indigenismo in Perú, Mariátegui was adamant that it ought to still be conceptualised as a discrete but component part of the wider world revolution launched in 1917. As Mariátegui argued in late 1928:

The Latin American revolution will be nothing more and nothing less than a stage, a phase of the world revolution. It will be, simply and purely, the socialist revolution … Indo-America, in this world order, can and must have its own individuality and style, but not its own culture or particular fate.71

Here, Mariátegui was defining a Marxist Indigenismo against what he viewed negatively as the ‘utopian’, restorationist version on the Peruvian left which imagined revolution as a return to a pre-Columbian ideal of Inka communalism. Mariátegui critiqued that tradition as too backward-facing in time and inward-facing in space. The distinctiveness of Mariátegui’s interventions in the idiom of Indigenismo during the later 1920s came from the fact that he arrived at it from a global and modernist understanding of Marxism. In the context of Peruvian Indigenismo, no one before Mariátegui had interpreted the Indigenous peasantry as the revolutionary agent of a modernising and global project.

Thus, it was because Mariátegui’s Indigenous Marxist thought took place in the context of a deferred Marxist cosmopolitanism that he stored up such universalist potential in the Andean peasantry. He was making the same conceptual move simultaneously in relation to his ideas of ‘Israel’ and of Trotskyism. Even though he accepted the late 1920s as a moment of ‘modest’ nation-building for the socialist project, Mariátegui was intent on maintaining the groundwork for the future renewal of revolutionary worldmaking. As a result, Mariátegui’s interwar Indigenismo became imbued with a universalism both distinct from and opposed to the regionalised essentialisms of aprismo in Perú and José Vasconcelos in México. Rather than the universal meaning of Indigenous revolutionary politics being an autochthonous contribution to a global medley of hermetic, regional cultures, for Mariátegui it would still be based on the socialist world revolution.

Conclusion

Mariátegui’s 1929 responses to both Trotsky’s exile and Zionism make evident an increasing tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism shortly before his death. The two concepts no longer existed together easily in his political thought. Mariátegui’s somewhat tortured response to the news of Trotsky’s exile acknowledged a new contradiction between the imperatives of socialist nation-building and the ideal of Bolshevik world revolution. And his critique of Zionism was based on the claim that the national organisation of human society had now been superseded by a cosmopolitan form, and that these two social models stood in contradiction. Read alongside Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación, which both of these interventions post-dated, they foreground the pragmatic nature of Mariátegui’s efforts to Peruvianise Marxism during the late 1920s.

This framing undermines the traditional reading of Mariátegui’s ‘Latin American Marxism’ as the fulfilment of his intellectual career. Instead, Mariátegui remained committed to an emphatically internationalist, and often anti-nationalist, concept of revolutionary socialism until his death in 1930. Mariátegui’s efforts to Peruvianise and ‘Latin Americanise’ Marxism were in part forced by the failure of his cosmopolitan vision of socialist modernity to win enough support in 1920s Perú. That failure was not predetermined – counter-mobilisations against Mariátegui’s cosmopolitan vision by groups within and without the Latin American left played a key role – but it happened, and Mariátegui had to respond. What is now described as Latin American Marxism was the result. In this view, therefore, Mariátegui’s innovative combination of Marxism, Peruvianness and Indigeneity reappear as an artefact of failure; it belongs to the late 1920s twilight of cosmopolitanism in his political thought.

Moreover, this renarration of Mariátegui’s thinking at the end of the 1920s also casts doubt on the idea that he managed a workable combination between the national and the cosmopolitan. In fact, these concepts were becoming increasingly difficult to keep together – intellectually and politically – at the end of the decade. Mariátegui’s responses to Trotsky and Zionism highlight his concern about powerful forces opposed to cosmopolitanism on the global stage at the end of the 1920s. In particular, for Mariátegui, both capitalist stabilisation and European imperialism had a close relationship to reactionary and often fascist forms of resurgent nationalism. These global contexts combined with the anticommunist opposition of leguísmo and aprismo in Peruvian society, and the increasingly dogmatic stress on national self-determination within the Comintern, to make a synthesis of cosmopolitanism and nationalism precarious, at best. Thus, Mariátegui’s conceptualisation of these two themes became increasingly tense.

It is this tension between his national and cosmopolitan commitments that makes Mariátegui’s late work so interesting. In his simultaneous writings about Trotsky and Zionism in 1928–9, Mariátegui attempted conceptually similar resolutions: both involved the imagination of vehicles to sustain the ideal of a cosmopolitan, socialist modernity throughout a global moment of nationalist resurgence, either in the image of a legitimised Trotskyist opposition within the global communist movement, or of ‘Israel’, understood as an anti-Zionist and diasporic Jewish peoplehood. Both of these attempts to resolve the contradiction between cosmopolitanism and nationalism would prove ill-fated after Mariátegui’s death.

Moreover, there is a sense in his late writing that these hoped-for resolutions already seemed improbable, even to Mariátegui. Although he often wrote teleologically, Mariátegui could also be a critic of historical determinism. He recognised the potential of human agency in history, for better or worse, and he acknowledged the possibility that collective social agents could ‘fail’ the missions allocated to them in the Marxist historical framework. And whereas Mariátegui’s thoughts about historical indeterminacy could lead in positive directions from his socialist perspective, such as the celebration of Bolshevik voluntarism as a sort of ‘revolution against Kapital’, it could also go down more dispiriting paths. This is why Mariátegui wrote so much about the diverse forms of late-capitalist decadence during the 1920s, among which he included colonial Zionism. Mariátegui did not underestimate the survival techniques of post-1917 capitalism, not least fascism. And, if unwilling to embrace the view himself before he died, Mariátegui was also aware that some Marxists were beginning to perceive decay inside the communist world in the form of ‘Stalinist stabilisation’ and its abandonment of the world-making ambition of the Bolshevik Revolution.72

Thus, decadence for Mariátegui, in its rejection of a universalist and revolutionary socialist modernity, was historically retrograde but it was not politically weak. That is, capitalist decadence might prevail. And despite Mariátegui’s efforts to persuade his readers and himself that this prospect was unlikely – by arguing that Zionists formed a minority of the Jewish people, and Stalinist nationalism was only a temporary expedient – it evidently preoccupied Mariátegui’s political thought during the final months of his life, and it is manifest in the contradiction between his cosmopolitan and national commitments in 1928–9. Mariátegui was concerned – although never convinced – that the twilight of cosmopolitan Marxism might go on indefinitely.

Notes

  1. Sobrevilla, El marxismo de Mariátegui, 46–53. ⮭
  2. Melis, Leyendo Mariátegui, 1967–1998, 11–33; Aricó, Mariátegui; Galindo, La gonía de Mariátegui. The recent work by Calabuz and López has moved to decentre Mariátegui in the foundation and intellectual history of ‘Latin American Marxism’, portraying him as just one among several protagonists: Calabuz and López, Aproximaciones al marxismo latinoamericano. ⮭
  3. See, for example, Vanden, National Marxism; Becker, Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory. ⮭
  4. Aricó, La cola del diablo, 100. ⮭
  5. Mariátegui, Siete ensayos. ⮭
  6. Bergel, ‘José Carlos Mariátegui and the Russian Revolution’, 728. ⮭
  7. Drinot, ‘Global Mariátegui’. ⮭
  8. Arnall, ‘Translating universality’, 72. ⮭
  9. García-Liendo, ‘Networking’, 54. ⮭
  10. García-Liendo, ‘Networking’, 56. ⮭
  11. Eley, ‘Marxism and socialist revolution’, 70. ⮭
  12. Miller, Reinventing modernity, 145; Drinot, La Patria Nueva. ⮭
  13. Mariátegui, ‘“Bolchevikis, aqui”’, 97. ⮭
  14. Mariátegui, ‘El Maximalismo cunde’, 118. ⮭
  15. See, for example, Mariátegui, ‘¿Existe un pensamiento hispano-americano?’. ⮭
  16. There is a useful overview of Mariátegui’s time in Europe in Miller, Reinventing Modernity, 143–86. ⮭
  17. Newman, ‘Revolution and counterrevolution’. ⮭
  18. Goswami, ‘A communism of intelligence’. ⮭
  19. Mariátegui, ‘La crisis mundial y el proletariado peruano’. ⮭
  20. See, for example, Leguía’s engagement with the movement for Indigenous rights: Wilson, ‘Leguía y la política indigenista’. ⮭
  21. Drinot, The Allure of Labor. ⮭
  22. Drinot, The Allure of Labor, 99–105. ⮭
  23. Mariátegui, ‘Nacionalismo y vanguardismo’. ⮭
  24. On the origins of APRA, see: Dorais, ‘Coming of age in exile’; for the beginnings of Haya’s turn against the Comintern, see Kersffeld, ‘Latinoamericanos’. ⮭
  25. De la Torre, El antiimperialismo y el Apra, 196. ⮭
  26. De la Torre, El antiimperialismo y el Apra, 108. ⮭
  27. See Crehan, ‘Gramsci’s concept of common sense’; and also, for example, Dagicour, ‘Construir el Estado’. The often revolutionary discourse of Indigenismo was an especially important component of nationalism on the Peruvian left during the 1920s: Ccahuana, ‘El indigenismo peruano (1920–1930)’; Arboleyda and León, Mariátegui y el indigenismo revolucionario peruano. ⮭
  28. Caballero, Latin America and the Comintern. ⮭
  29. Drachewych, ‘Broadening the native republic thesis’. ⮭
  30. Becker, ‘Mariátegui, the Comintern’. ⮭
  31. Mariátegui, ‘Nacionalismo y vanguardismo’. ⮭
  32. See, for example, Mariátegui, ‘La Economía y Piero Gobetti’. ⮭
  33. Mariátegui, ‘Mensaje al Congreso Obrero’, 369. ⮭
  34. Mariátegui, ‘Trotsky’. ⮭
  35. Mariátegui, ‘El exilio’, 1–2; Mariátegui, ‘Trotsky y la oposición comunista’, 423. ⮭
  36. Mariátegui, ‘El exilio’; Mariátegui, ‘Trotsky y la oposición comunista’. ⮭
  37. Mariátegui, ‘El exilio’, 2. ⮭
  38. Mariátegui, ‘El exilio’, 2. ⮭
  39. Mariátegui, ‘El exilio’, 2. ⮭
  40. Schutte, ‘Nietzsche, Mariátegui’. ⮭
  41. Mariátegui, ‘Sentido heroico y creador del socialismo’, 30. ⮭
  42. See, for example, Mella, ‘Cuba: un pueblo que jamás ha sido libre’, 139; Mariátegui, ‘Prensa de Doctrina y Prensa de Información’. ⮭
  43. Mariátegui to Esteban Pavletich, 25 September 1929. ⮭
  44. Mariátegui, ‘El exilio’, 2. ⮭
  45. Mariátegui, ‘Trotsky y la oposición’; Mariátegui, ‘El exilio’. ⮭
  46. Mariátegui, ‘El exilio’, 1; emphasis added. ⮭
  47. Mariátegui, ‘Trotsky y la oposición comunista’, 426. ⮭
  48. Mariátegui, ‘El exilio’, 1. ⮭
  49. Mariátegui, ‘El exilio’, 1. ⮭
  50. Mariátegui, ‘Trotsky y la oposición comunista’, 425. ⮭
  51. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’. ⮭
  52. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 501. ⮭
  53. For a persuasive reading of Mariátegui as a ‘South–South’ thinker, especially in relation to East Asia, see Kim, ‘José Mariátegui’s East–South decolonial experiment’; for a wider account of how many Latin Americans were beginning to conceptualise the struggle against imperialism as a global project in cooperation with other regions of the (semi-)colonial world, see Lindner, ‘Tricontinentalism before the Cold War?’. ⮭
  54. See, for example: Mariátegui, ‘La revolución china’; Mariátegui, ‘La lucha de la India por la independencia nacional’. ⮭
  55. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 501. ⮭
  56. On Mariátegui’s personal and intellectual relationship with Jews and the concept of Jewishness during the 1920s, see Lomnitz, Nuestra América. ⮭
  57. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 501. ⮭
  58. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 501. ⮭
  59. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 502. ⮭
  60. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’. ⮭
  61. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 503. ⮭
  62. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’. ⮭
  63. For example, in a September 1923 essay on Vladimir Lenin, Mariátegui was insistent that the Bolshevik leader, personifying the Bolshevik revolution, was a ‘Western’ and therefore modern figure, against depictions of him as ‘Eastern’: Mariátegui, ‘Lenin’. ⮭
  64. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 501. ⮭
  65. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 503–4. ⮭
  66. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 503. ⮭
  67. Although Mariátegui has a merited reputation as a heterodox Marxist, based in significant part upon his reinterpretation of the Indigenous peasantry in the Andes as a potential subject of socialist revolution, the immediate revolution he anticipated in Andean South America would be, in terms of its social programme, initially committed to the creation of capitalism in accordance with the ‘traditional’ stage-based theory of ‘orthodox’ Marxism. The agent of this revolution – the Indigenous peasantry in alliance with a small but dynamic urban proletariat in Perú – only had to be novel, in Mariátegui’s view, because the national bourgeoisie in Perú was weakened and thus, uniquely incapable of fulfilling what ought to be a bourgeois-led project: Mariátegui, ‘Principios programáticos del Partido Socialista’. ⮭
  68. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 502. ⮭
  69. Mariátegui, ‘La misión de Israel’, 501. ⮭
  70. Eley, ‘Marxism and socialist revolution’. ⮭
  71. Mariátegui, ‘Aniversario y balance’, 451–2. ⮭
  72. Mariátegui, ‘Aspectos actuales de la crisis de democracia en Francia’. ⮭

Declarations and conflicts of interest

Research ethics statement

Not applicable to this article.

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Conflicts of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently blind the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.

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