José Vasconcelos for his theory of the “cosmic race,” Mariátegui seems a more elusive, if not esoteric, thinker.
Standard accounts resort to the established facts of his biography. Thus we are typically told that he was born in Peru, was a self‐taught intellectual, founded the Peruvian Socialist Party, launched one of the foremost avant‐garde reviews of the continent – the legendary Amauta – and died quite young, at the age of 35. We are also told that he devoted much of his efforts to writing about modern art, arguing for the compatibility of Marxism and nationalism, and, above all, calling for an indigenist understanding of Marxism. But what does this amount to? What, if anything, ties these strands together?
The first thing to note is that Mariátegui was fundamentally a man of letters and a man of his times. His friend, the eminent historian Jorge Basadre, once described him as a journalist, a remark that, although perhaps condescending, is not in fact unfair. For Mariátegui's oeuvre is almost entirely composed of short articles, occasional pieces of writing that allowed him to perfect a vigorous and attractively readable style (and make a living as well), but can seem too episodic and too dependent on current affairs for the present‐day reader. Even his more organic book, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 1926), lacks any grand design. But such fragmentariness does not result exclusively from the pressing conditions under which Mariátegui – always up against the clock – forged his ideas; it is the mode of thought that he consciously favored and proudly embraced, as the Nietzsche epigraph with which Seven Essays begins makes sufficiently clear: “I intend never again to read an author of whom it is apparent that he wanted to produce a book: but only those whose thoughts unintentionally became a book” (Nietzsche 1986, p. 339). Nothing was more alien to Mariátegui's mind than the desire for building systems or prescribing methods.
This rejection of stuffy academicism comes through especially strongly in his writings on artistic matters. Not only did Mariátegui favor commentary on particular works and artists instead of well‐rounded aesthetic theories, but he also discussed literature and painting, or sculpture and film, as if there were no formal or methodological distinctions to be made between those realms. It would be unwise to give the impression, however, that he was unaware of those boundaries; the point, rather, is that he regarded all those manifestations as indexes of something larger. Mariátegui's ambition was to chart the culture of his times. What mattered to him was the epoch: a complex array of objective and subjective conditions that, by configuring a social structure of consciousness, give each historical period a unique personality.
3.1 Epoch and Revolution
In the absence of any systematic exposition of these ideas, the place to look is in a group of articles, originally published between 1923 and 1930, which Mariátegui compiled into a volume shortly before his death. The resulting book, beautifully titled El alma matinal y otras estaciones del hombre de hoy (The Morning Soul and Other Seasons of the Man of Today, 1950), weaves a fascinating picture of his times in which the concepts of epoch, art, and revolution appear intricately connected; the vision that it proclaims is one in which the dawn – the “morning soul” of the title – condenses the meaning of the new times.
The book's early sections are devoted to analyzing the problems and prospects of modern life.1 The focus here is on the worldwide expansion of communications technology. Fascinated by the powers of the telegraph (less so by those of the factory), Mariátegui argues that modern technology is propelling new ways of experiencing time and space: “Every day the speed with which currents of thought and culture disseminate is greater. Civilization has given the world a new nervous system” (1959b, p. 51; 1994, Vol. I, p. 512). Modern life, he says, “has physical elements that are absolutely new. One of them is speed. The old man marched slowly, which, according to Ruskin, is how God wants man to march. The modern man travels by car and airplane” (1959c, p. 62; 1994, Vol. I, p. 571). Technological progress has allowed changes to occur in increasingly shorter intervals; the modern age is one in which the new takes place faster. But modern technology not only accelerates time – it also shortens distance. One salient consequence of this newly pervasive sense of proximity in time and space is the rise of internationalism – what we might now call “globalization” – a series of networks that facilitate the free movement of capital but also connect workers and artists, however far apart they may be, in their common pursuit of emancipatory ends. “All these phenomena are absolutely and unmistakably new. They belong exclusively to our civilization, which, from this point of view, is unlike any previous civilizations” (1959b, p. 52; 1994, Vol. I, p. 512). This new “nervous system” appears to have given the masses, regardless of their nationality, the opportunity to stay attuned to each other, thus reaching unprecedented levels of self‐consciousness. As if a hidden logic connected the crisis of parliamentary socialism in Germany and Italy with the October Revolution, or the Mexican Revolution with the birth of the national liberation movement in India, Mariátegui claims that the new era belongs to the organized masses; they, in his eyes, appear to be on the cusp of becoming the protagonists of history.
What seems odd about this account is that Mariátegui, a “convicted and confessed Marxist” in his own words, fails to hail the Bolshevik Revolution as the milestone of the new era. For him, World War I is the key event in recent history; the Great War, he says, has marked the beginning of a period of turbulence that confirms the obsolescence of bourgeois values: “Europe, burned and lacerated, shed its mentality and psychology. All the romantic energy of Western man, anesthetized by the long decades of easy and unctuous peace, was reborn, tempestuous and powerful” (1959b, p. 15; 1994, Vol. I, p. 496; 1996, p. 140).
The clue to this unorthodox vision is given by the Nietzschean strain that runs through Mariátegui's thought. What Mariátegui learns from Nietzsche is the celebration of violence – not violence understood as blind and brutal aggression but rather as a passionate faith that pushes men to “live dangerously” (1959b, p. 17; 1994, Vol. I, p. 497).2 War is thus symbolic of that process of spiritual renewal to which Nietzsche refers as the “transvaluation of all values” – one that roughly consists in overcoming the old bourgeois ethos, dominated by both profit calculation and the search for an uneventful, pleasant life. The image of the “morning soul,” which Mariátegui borrows from Nietzsche's The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880), makes direct allusion to this newly risen self. Within this framework, revolution emerges as a transformative process, the significance of which stretches far beyond the field of political struggle. Although Mariátegui does not neglect the practical issue of how to seize state power, revolution, in his eyes, is ultimately about the birth of the new. The meaning of revolution – its “truth,” if you will – cannot be reduced to either armed insurrection or the overthrowing of the ruling class, as neither, on its own, triggers social change. The taking over of government, Mariátegui thinks, does not signal the arrival of the new; it is rather a formal, conventional act that confirms the death of an already exhausted social order. It follows, then, that political regimes and forms of government change because (and when) the conditions for that change have already been incubated within their respective societies. One can speak of “revolution” only when a culture has fulfilled its life cycle, that is, when it has already exhausted its powers and possibilities of development.
Evidently, Marx's historical teleology plays a significant part in this argument, but Mariátegui here is drawing inspiration from another passionate reader of Nietzsche: Oswald Spengler, whose theory of history, collected in the two volumes of The Decline of the West (1918, 1922), resonated widely within the generation of interwar intellectuals. Spengler, like Marx, argued for an understanding of history as divided into neatly differentiated stages that progress dialectically; but some important differences lurk behind this basic agreement. Whereas Marx proposed a universally valid scheme by which to understand the history of mankind, Spengler spoke of a plurality of histories, each of which evolves following its own laws and asks to be judged accordingly. A relativist, Spengler likewise
