up by shutting one's eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts” (1932, Vol. I, p. 21). As an alternative to “mechanical” visions of historical progress, he interpreted world history via the ruling principles of “everything organic – the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime” (1932, Vol. I, p. 3). Within this cyclical view, progress – always relative – is a cultural phenomenon that occurs as a result of ruptures caused by human action, not impersonal, “objective” forces like nature, technology, or the economy.
That Mariátegui filters his understanding of Marx through the ideas of Nietzsche and Spengler is quite crucial. In fact, this twofold influence explains why he grants human will a historical role that Marx himself was not always keen to accept and that his followers (Althusser, for example) have often rejected as an “idealist” fantasy. Without discounting the importance of social conditions, Mariátegui asserts that social transformations are ultimately caused by the actions of human beings or, in Spengler's words, by a “new generation that is born with the ability to do it” (1932, Vol. I, p. xiii).
If an epoch is made of objective conditions, then, according to this view, we must also accept that it comes with obligations. To be attuned to the times is not to be the puppet of vast impersonal forces. Rather, it entails acting in accordance with the demands of the epoch, and what every epoch demands, especially in situations of crisis, is doing away with the old conceptual schemes in preparation for the new. The awareness of crisis – of the sterility and exhaustion of the old – is what leads us to intervene in history, what allows us to make epoch. Insurgency – revolution in its narrowest sense – is then a willful response to crisis. Like a challenge, every crisis is a call to action that puts the moral responsibility to act on the table. Mariátegui thus reintroduces human agency into the dynamics of history. In giving an absolute primacy to praxis, he expects that we, persuaded that every “new day is the final day” (1959b, p. 21; 1994, Vol. I, p. 500), would take our destiny into our own hands.
It is in virtue of the centrality he gives to human will that Mariátegui places art at the vanguard of revolution. Yet, unlike other Marxist theorists, he refrains from equating the revolutionary quality of art with its ideological commitments. What makes an art worthy of being called revolutionary is the creative force it embodies, rather than just its defense of the proletariat or even its condemnation of injustice. Mariátegui thus dismisses the proposition of putting art at the service of revolution, as such an imperative would make sense only if art and revolution were understood to be two different things, that is, if one forgot that “the power of creation is one alone” and that “a revolutionary epoch is, par excellence, one that creates” (1959f, p. 85; 1994, Vol. I, p. 451). Following this clue, he goes as far as to argue that, ultimately, the difference between revolutionaries and conservatives lies not in the political doctrines they profess or the ideals they defend, but in the power of their imagination: “To be revolutionary or reformist is, from this point of view, a consequence of being more or less imaginative” (1959b, p. 36; 1994, Vol. I, p. 506). A revolutionary is the one who, thanks to his imaginative powers, “reacts against contingent reality” and “struggles to change what he sees and what he feels,” whereas the conservative, led by the force of habit, “rejects any idea of change due to a mental inability to conceive of and accept it” (1959b, p. 36; 1994, Vol. I, p. 506).
In the light of this idea, Mariátegui identifies three main currents within modern art. The first is populism. Represented by some late emulators of the novelist Émile Zola, its exploration of the living conditions of the poor might give the impression of revolutionary commitment, but its attachment to the timeworn principles of bourgeois naturalism unequivocally reveals its conservative colors: “populism … is nothing but the most specious maneuver to reconcile bourgeois letters with a substantial clientele of little people” (1959c, p. 33; 1994, Vol. I, p. 560). The second current takes aim at the spiritual emptiness of the bourgeoisie. This category includes artists like George Grosz, whose drawings depict the loneliness of big cities, but also writers like Ernest Glaeser, Luigi Pirandello, and Paul Morand. All these men, Mariátegui claims, are representatives of an art of decadence or dissolution – artists that bear an “empty soul” because they live in a civilization with no faith and no absolute (1959c, p. 19; 1994, Vol. I, p. 553; 2011, p. 424). To the third group belong those artists who, in accepting crisis as a challenge, seek to destroy the formal conventions of bourgeois art. Early futurism had embraced such an imperative; the endeavors of Dada and surrealism seemed now most up to the task. Mariátegui hails these two movements as harbingers of the future: André Breton and his associates appear to be expanding our concept of reality toward new realms of human experience, realms like dreams and the unconscious unknown to the bourgeois mind.
In what we have seen so far, Mariátegui's idea of revolution can be defined as the birth of a new subjectivity that strives to create a compatible, similarly new institutional order. If in politics, a revolutionary devotes herself to implementing new forms of government, then in the arts, she seeks to create new forms of expression. There is, however, a major requirement that all those attempts to bring about the new must fulfill: they cannot be utopian. As strange as it may seem, Mariátegui is an enemy of utopia. He finds the ambition to replace the imperfections of the real world with an ideal of harmony and perfection that some single individual has worked out to be irredeemably shortsighted.3 Against José Vasconcelos, the Mexican theorist of the “cosmic race,” he writes: “In Vasconcelos's fervent prophecy, the tropics and the mestizo are the setting and the protagonist of a new civilization. But Vasconcelos's thesis, which outlines a utopia – in the positive and philosophical meaning of this word – to the same extent that it attempts to predict the future, suppresses and ignores the present” (1959a, pp. 295–296; 1994, Vol. I, p. 152). “Being so invested in sounding out the future,” Mariátegui concludes, Vasconcelos has lost “the habit of looking at the present” (1959f, p. 81; 1994, Vol. I, p. 450).
The present is key: if a revolutionary movement is to succeed or to be considered legitimate at all, Mariátegui thinks, it will be because it encapsulates the moods and, above all, the collective myths born within each society. It is here that the influence of the French syndicalist Georges Sorel – the third major influence in his personal pantheon, alongside Nietzsche and Spengler – becomes evident. For he is persuaded that every mass movement, as Sorel wrote, requires the assistance of myths, “which enclose within them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life” (Sorel 1999, p. 142). Myth, says Mariátegui, “moves man in history. Without myth, man's existence has no historical meaning. History is made by people possessed and enlightened by a higher belief, by a superhuman hope” (1959b, p. 19; 1994, Vol. I, p. 497; 1996, pp. 142–143).
For Mariátegui, revolution is not the sort of foundational act that entails an absolute break with society in its present form. The attitude of the revolutionary is not to be one of celebrating radicalism and novelty for their own sake but rather of giving to each epoch what it asks for and what it needs. And the twentieth century, according to him, demanded that one take the side of the masses.
3.2 Socialism, Indigenism, and the Nation
Defining “indigenism” is no easy task. First, and for reasons that are not entirely clear, the use of the Spanish term (indigenismo) has become customary among English‐speaking scholars, lending indigenism a certain air of exoticism that it does not possess in its original language and further complicating what is already confused in Spanish.
If we take indigenism to mean the defense of the Indian against oppression, then it is a tradition of social criticism that dates back to the passionate preaching of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas and is, therefore, as old as the exploitation of the Indians (Marzal 1993). More narrowly, however, the label has been chiefly employed to refer to a group of artists and intellectuals that, from the late nineteenth‐ to the mid‐twentieth century and on
