Marxism and Romanticism in the Work of José Carlos Mariátegui

Abstract

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 affinities 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 discourse-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 irrefutably foreign to Marxism.1 However, it is time we recognized-and the example 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 eighteenth century as a protest against the development of modern capitalist civilization and industrial bourgeois society, which are based on bureaucratic rationality, market reification, the quantification of social life, and the disenchantment of the world (in the famous phrase of Max Weber). Once it had emerged with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German Friihromantik, romanticism 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