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Latin American Perspectives
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Marxism and Romanticism
in the Work of Jose Carlos Mariategui
by
Michael Lowy
Translated by Penelope Duggan
Jose Carlos Mariaitegui is not only the most important and most inventive
of the Latin American Marxists but a thinker whose work, in its power and
originality, is of universal significance. His heretical Marxism has deep af-
finities with that of such important Western Marxist writers as Antonio
Gramsci, Gyorgy Lukaics, and Walter Benjamin. At the heart of Mariateguist
heterodoxy-of the specificity of his Marxist philosophical and political dis-
course-we find an irreducibly romantic kernel. In a celebrated 1941 article,
V. M. Miroshevsky, the eminent Soviet specialist and adviser of the Latin
American Bureau of the Comintern, denounced Mariategui's populism and
romanticism, and for the advocates of (Stalinist) orthodoxy to accuse him of
this mortal sin was sufficient to expose his thought as definitively and irre-
futably foreign to Marxism.1 However, it is time we recognized-and the ex-
ample of Mariaitegui is an admirable illustration of this-that, far from being
contradictory, romanticism and Marxism are perfectly compatible and can be
mutually enriching.
Romanticism is a cultural movement originating at the end of the eigh-
teenth century as a protest against the development of modern capitalist civi-
lization and industrial bourgeois society, which are based on bureaucratic ra-
tionality, market reification, the quantification of social life, and the "disen-
chantment of the world" (in the famous phrase of Max Weber). Once it had
emerged with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German Friihromantik, roman-
ticism never vanished from modern culture and remains one of the main
structures of sensibility of our epoch. Nothing is more wrong and superficial
than to reduce romanticism to a literary style. As a worldview in the fullest
sense of the term, romanticism emerges in all aspects of cultural life: the arts,
literature, religion, politics, social science, historiography, philosophy. Its
Michael L6wy is a Brazilian-born sociologist and research director at the National Center for
Scientific Research in Paris and the author of, among other things, The Marxism of Che Guevara
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973) and Marxism in Latin Americafrom 1909 to the Pre-
sent (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992). Penelope Duggan is a British-born teacher of
English and women's history living in Paris.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 101, Vol. 25 No. 4, July 1998 76-88
? 1998 Latin American Perspectives
76
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Lowy / MARIATEGUI 77
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78 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
for example, from William Morris to today's British Marxists (E. P. Thomp-
son, Raymond Williams) and from Lukaics and Bloch to Walter Benjamin and
Herbert Marcuse. Jose Carlos Mariategui belongs, in an original way and in a
Latin American context far removed from that of Britain or central Europe, to
this current. During his stay in Europe, Mariategui simultaneously assimi-
lated Marxism and certain aspects of contemporary romantic thought: Nietz-
sche, Bergson, Miguel de Unamuno, Sorel, surrealism.
Mariategui's romantic/revolutionary worldview, as he formulated it in his
1925 essay "Two Conceptions of Life," counterposed what he called "evolu-
tionist, historicist, and rationalist philosophy" and its "superstitious respect
for the idea of Progress" (1996: 349) with the aspiration to return to the spirit
of adventure, to heroic myths, romanticism, and quixotism (a term that he
borrowed from Miguel de Unamuno). In this approach he identified with
various socialist thinkers who, like Georges Sorel, exposed the illusion of
progress. Two romantic currents, both rejecting the "easy and unctuous"
positivist ideology, confronted each other in a struggle to the death: the ro-
manticism of the right, fascist, which sought to return to the Middle Ages,
and the romanticism of the left, communist, which sought to advance to
utopia (1996: 141). Awakened by the war, "the romantic energies of Western
man" found their expression in the Russian Revolution, which gave socialist
theory "a warlike and mythic spirit" (1996: 140).
In another programmatic article of the same period, "Man and Myth,"
Mariategui rejoiced in the crisis of rationalism and the collapse of the "me-
diocre positivist edifice." Faced with what Ortega y Gasset called the "disen-
chanted soul" of bourgeois civilization, he adopted as his own the "enchanted
soul" (Romain Rolland) of the creators of a new civilization. In a striking pas-
sage full of romantic exaltation that seems to prefigure liberation theology,
myth, in Sorel's sense, is Mariategui's response to the Entzauberung der Welt
(Weber) and the loss of meaning:
The bourgeois mind amuses itself with a romantic critique of the methods, the
theories, the technique of the revolutionaries. What incomprehension! The
revolutionaries' power is not in their science; it is in their faith, their passion,
their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual power. It is the power of myth.
Revolutionary emotion ... is a religious emotion. Religious motives have been
displaced from the heavens to earth. They are not divine but human and social.
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Lowy / MARIATEGUI 79
Man's enslavement by the machine and the destruction of his crafts by industri-
alization have distorted the meaning and purpose of work. From John Ruskin
to Rabindranath Tagore, reformers have denounced capitalism for its brutaliz-
ing use of the machine. Work has become odious because mechanization and
especially Taylorism have degraded it by robbing it of its creativity.
Whereas Ruskin dreamt of the artisanal work of the time of the building of ca-
thedrals, Mariaitegui celebrated Incan society, in which work "perfomed with
devotion" was the highest virtue (1971[1928]: 118).
It goes without saying that, for Mariategui, romanticism was not simply
philosophical, political, and social but also cultural and literary. These two
aspects seemed to him linked. He distinguished between the "classical or
calm periods" and the "romantic or revolutionary periods,"4 but the romantic
cultural field was for him sharply divided between the old romanticism and
the new. The old romanticism, uncompromisingly individualist, was a prod-
uct of the liberalism of the nineteenth century. One of its last representatives
in our period was Rainer Maria Rilke, whose extreme subjectivism and pure
lyricism were content with contemplation. The new romanticism was "no
longer the romanticism that feeds on the liberal revolution. It has another
driving force, another content. For this reason we call it neo-Romanticism"
(1983a: 123). This new, postliberal and collectivist romanticism was, accord-
ing to Mariaitegui, closely linked to social revolution.
In the literary chapters of the Seven Interpretative Essays the counterposi-
tion of the two forms of romanticism occupies an important place in the criti-
cism of Peruvian writers and poets. For example, writing of Cesar Vallejo,
Mariaitegui noted: "The romanticism of the nineteenth century was basically
individualistic; the romanticism of the 1900s is, in contrast, spontaneously
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80 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
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Lowy / MARIATEGUI 81
Through Sorel, Marxism assimilates the substantial elements and gains of the
philosophical currents since Marx. Going beyond the rationalist and positivist
bases of the socialism of his period, Sorel finds in Bergson and the pragmatists
ideas that reinvigorate socialist thought by reestablishing the revolutionary
mission from which it had gradually been distanced by the intellectual and
spiritual bourgeoisification of its parties and parliamentary representatives.
These latter, on the philosophical plane, content themselves with the easiest
historicism and the most timid evolutionism. The theory of revolutionary
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82 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
It goes without saying that what Mariaitegui was trying to do was not to
make socialism a church or a religious sect but to bring out the spiritual and
ethical dimension of the revolutionary struggle: the faith ("mystical"), the
solidarity, the moral indignation, the total commitment ("heroic"), including
risk and danger to one's own life. Socialism, according to Mariategui, lay at
the heart of an attempt at the reenchantment of the world through revolution-
ary action.
Despite his admiration for Sorel, this was only a theoretical reference for
Mariaitegui. From the point of view of political practice it was Bolshevism
that brought "romantic energy" to the proletariat's struggle (1996: 140).
Sorelism and Bolshevism seemed to him linked by their revolutionary re-
formism, their rejection of parliamentary reformism, and their romantic vol-
untarism. As an example of the counterposition of the authentic Marxism of
the Bolsheviks and the positivist determinism of social democracy,
Mariategui wrote in "En defensa del Marxismo" (1996: 153-154):
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Lowy / MARIATEGUI 83
domination, mainly because he believed that this socialist solution could take
as its starting point the communitarian traditions of the Andean peasants, the
vestiges of "Inca communism." Miroshevsky considered this to be the posi-
tion of the Russian populists (1978 [1941]: 65-70).
Charles Peguy, the eminent socialist "mystic" and romantic, wrote: "A
revolution is an appeal from a less perfect tradition to a more perfect tradition,
an appeal from a less deep tradition to a deeper tradition, a deepening of tradi-
tion, a going beyond, a search for deeper sources, in the literal sense a re-
source" (1959: 1377). This remark applies word for word to Mariategui:
against the conservative traditionalism of the oligarchy, the retrograde ro-
manticism of the elite, and nostalgia for the colonial period he called on an
older and deeper tradition, that of the indigenous pre-Columbian civiliza-
tions. "The Incan past has entered our history as a demand not of the tradi-
tionalists but of the revolutionaries. In this sense it is a defeat of colonial-
ism.... The revolution is claiming our oldest tradition" (1983b: 168).
Mariategui called this tradition "Inca communism' but this expression is
open to question (see Paris, 1966). We should recall, however, that a Marxist
as little suspect of "populism" and "romantic nationalism" as Rosa Luxem-
burg also identified the socioeconomic regime of the Incas as "communist."
In her Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, published in Ger-
many in 1925 (a work that it is unlikely that Mariategui knew), she described
the Inca empire as composed of two social communist formations, one of
which was an agrarian society exploited by the other. Celebrating the
"communist-democratic institutions" of the Peruvian marca (1975[1925]:
658), she rejoiced in the "fantastic tenacity of the Indian people and the co-
operative [markgenossenschaftlichen] institutions," which had survived "up
to the nineteenth century" (1975[1925]: 673). Mariategui said the same ex-
cept for believing that these communities persisted up to the twentieth.
His analysis was based on the 1926 work of the Peruvian historian Cesar
Ugarte, for whom the foundations of the Incan economy were the ayllu, a set
of families linked by blood ties that held the land collectively, and the marca,
a federation of ayllus that held water, pasture land, and woods collectively.
Mariategui introduced a distinction between the ayllu, created by the anony-
mous masses over the millennia, and the unitary economic system founded
by the Incan emperors. Insisting on the economic efficiency of this collectiv-
ist agriculture and the material well-being of the population, he concluded in
his Seven Interpretative Essays: "Inca communism, which cannot be denied
or disparaged for having developed under the autocratic regime of the Incas,
is therefore designated as agrarian communism" (1971[1928]: 35). Rejecting
the linear and Eurocentric conception of history imposed by the conquerors,
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84 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
he asserted that "the colonial conquest disrupted and disorganized the Inca
agrarian economy without replacing it with an economy of higher yields"
(1971[1928]: 36).8
Romantic idealization of the past? Perhaps. In any case, Mariategui made
a categorical distinction between the agrarian and despotic communism of
the pre-Columbian civilizations and the communism of our epoch. In a long
footnote that is in fact one of the highlights of the book (1971[1928]: 74-75),
he contributes the following clarification, which has lost nothing of its topi-
cality 70 years later:
It was for this reason that Mariategui criticized and rejected "romantic" (in
the reactionary sense of the word) attempts to return to the Incan empire. His
concrete dialectic between the present, the past, and the future made it possi-
ble for him to avoid both the evolutionist dogma of progress and the naive and
backward-looking illusions of a certain indigenism.
Like most romantic revolutionaries, Mariategui integrated into his social-
ist utopia the human gains of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution
and the most positive aspects of scientific and technical progress. Opposing
the dreams of restoration of the Tawantinsuyo (Incan empire), he wrote in the
program of the Peruvian Socialist party that he created in 1928 (1996: 92):
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Lowy / MARIATEGUI 85
Expressed in the concrete terms of the agrarian reform in Peru, this strategy
means the expropriation of the latifundia for the benefit of the indigenous
communities (1981b: 81-82):
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86 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
The generation that placed its stamp on Latin American communism af-
ter the death of Mariategui chose instead to imitate and copy. Will
Mariategui's romantic call to "heroic creation" at last be heard at the dawn of
the twenty-first century?
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Lbwy / MARIATEGUI 87
NOTES
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