José Carlos Mariátegui might be the most important thinker that you may never have heard of. A Peruvian socialist, a disabled autodidact, a contemporary of Antonio Gramsci—who, some say, he met at the 1921 Congress of the Italian Socialist Party—no single thinker has had a broader and more lasting impact on Latin American revolutionary thought. While not the first Marxist in Latin America, many consider Mariátegui to have been the first properly Latin American Marxist, due to the creativity and originality with which he applied Marxist analysis to the Latin American context. Rather than simply adopt and apply the formulas of European to Latin America, Mariátegui began from a close analysis “Peruvian reality” to stretch and reshape received wisdom about class structure, global capitalism, and who would lead the revolution and the development of what he described as “Indo-American Socialism.” But how, for Mariategui, do indigenous conditions and traditions shape both the development of capitalism, both locally and globally, and the resistance to it? And how, in turn, does Mariategui’s work force a reconsideration of Marxist theory more broadly? Is capitalism indeed a “necessary stage” in the development of Peru, Latin America, and beyond?
In this course, we will explore readings spanning Mariátegui’s career, and centering on his essential 1927 book, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. We will locate Mariátegui’s work both within Marxism, and as an exemplar of Third World Marxism in particular, but we will also anchor his analysis more broadly in the history of anticolonial and indigenous struggles in the Andes and across the region, asking the following questions: What does Third World Marxism mean, and what does it do? What complications emerge once we understand capitalism to be a fundamentally global system? What does revolution mean at the intersection of Marxism and decolonization? Who will lead the struggle for a new world, and what will it look like?
