These days many key struggles against imperialism—and certainly the most intense ones—are not carried out under the auspices of Marxism but rather another revolutionary tradition, such as a religious or national one. China and Cuba are important exceptions.1 However, Marxism in each of those countries is articulated with local traditions, either as the doctrine of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” in the former case, or, in the latter, a Marxism heavily influenced by the multifaceted legacy of José Martí. The centrality of such local traditions in almost all successful revolutions raises the question of how we should conceive Marxism’s relationship to them, and how to correct past and present errors in how the relationship is conceived.
This is a crucial question in our time, connecting to issues of active versus contemplative Marxism, and to the many-sided, material and structural problem of Eurocentrism. Above all, the question is important because any mistakes in the way this relationship is conceived will hinder revolutionary projects today and also cause us to undervalue the really existing use of Marxism where it is most active: in Global South contexts.
For all of these reasons, this article attempts to address and rectify widespread misunderstandings regarding the relationship between Marxist theory, on the one hand, and local realities and traditions of struggle, on the other. The topic has already been valuably explored by authors such as Teodor Shanin and John Bellamy Foster, who use the term “vernacular revolutionary traditions” to refer to roughly this same constellation of issues.2 Here, I center on the example of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, arguing that the sophisticated, dialectical understanding of the relationship between local components and Marxist ones embodied in Mariátegui’s work is essential for grasping not only how Marxism actually operates in many non-European contexts, but also how it might contribute more successfully there. My central claim is that it is only through a thoroughly dialectical and praxis-based understanding of this relationship that we can see why Marxism in the Global South is far from being a mere “little sibling” of the Marxism that operates in the Global North. Quite the opposite: while what might be called “Northern Marxism” often takes on highly parochial forms, Global South Marxism is usually a more vital and more universal form of the revolutionary theory initiated by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
An Active Reception of Marxism’s First Victory
Born in Moquegua in 1894, Mariátegui lived through a crucial historical moment when the ideas of Marx and Engels—previously filtered into Latin America in partial and uneven ways—began to take genuine root in the region. This occurred as the shockwaves of the October Revolution reached Latin America and communist parties were first being formed there. Alongside Cuban organizer and theorist Julio Antonio Mella, Mariátegui stands out as Marxism’s most authentic Latin American adherent, interpreter, and promoter during this formative period. Like V. I. Lenin—and like Antonio Gramsci, with whom he shares an uncanny synchronicity—Mariátegui is also celebrated for bringing Marxism into integral contact with a concrete national situation (and, we would add, with an endogenous civilizational project). Mariátegui was short-lived, dying at age 35. However, he wrote prolifically, producing major works such as Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928), developing multiple journals, and helping to found both the Communist Party and the General Confederation of Workers in Peru.3
The central question explored here is Marxism’s relationship with local concrete situations and traditions of struggle. Nevertheless, before turning to Mariátegui’s profoundly dialectical conception of this relationship, it is worth highlighting a key feature of Marxist intellectual practice that he emphasized and defended—one that helps explain the enduring vitality of Marxism in the Global South. Mariátegui insisted that intellectuals, like all revolutionaries, could not remain “isolated, individual, dispersed,” but had to “accept their place within collective action.”4 Intellectual labor, in Mariátegui’s view, was inseparable from struggle and revolutionary practice. He expressed this principle succinctly by saying that he put his “lifeblood” into his ideas.5 This orientation was not unique to Mariátegui but recurs throughout Global South Marxism—precisely because it is there that revolutionary activity has taken place most intensely—from Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh to Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Amílcar Cabral.
Of course, Marx and Engels did the same thing in their own time. They were simultaneously theorists and active revolutionaries. However, since revolutionary struggle over the past one hundred or more years has existed primarily in the Global South, intellectual engagement with revolutionary struggle has likewise occurred chiefly in that context, giving what we could call Marxism’s “South Face” its exceptional dynamism, both intellectually and practically. In this respect, Global South Marxism stands in sharp contrast to what Perry Anderson famously termed “Western Marxism,” characterized as “having a structural divorce” from practice.6 Once we recognize that the historical dynamics of capitalist development (especially the structural and subjective transformations associated with imperialist value transfer) have generally dampened revolutionary activity in the North while fomenting it in the Global South, then we can better understand why Marxism in much of the Global North has tended toward stagnation, scholasticism, and idealism.7
Dialectical Engagement, Not Compromise
Now we return to the main question: Why is Mariátegui’s approach to the relationship between Marxism and local traditions and contexts so crucial, not only for understanding Latin American Marxism, but for understanding Marxism itself? The answer is that Mariátegui’s work offers one of the clearest and most rigorous embodiments of this relationship, one that breaks decisively with the antidialectical approaches of the past and present. Such nondialectical approaches were already widespread in his time—they dominated both the powerful APRA party (Peruvian American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) and the South American Secretariat of the Communist International at the time—and they continue to shape much contemporary Marxist and postcolonial or decolonial thought today.
Let us paint the picture in its broadest strokes. The most common conception of Marxism’s relationship to local, non-European realities and traditions of struggle follows a deeply antidialectical logic. First, Marxism is understood as a more or less fixed body of ideas originating in Europe (thus it is often hastily and unfairly accused of being inherently “Eurocentric”).8 Second, these ideas encounter regional or national realities and traditions of thought that are considered external to Marxism.
Third, the two are supposedly “adapted” to one another, producing various heterodoxies or syncretisms. This conception imagines Marxism and local practices or theories of struggle as two relatively static substances that must be mixed, inevitably diluting each other in the process: Marxism becomes less Marxist, while the local elements become, in turn, less rooted and less authentic.
What all of this leaves aside, by placing too much emphasis on the substance of each doctrine or tradition and too little on process and method, is how Marxism and local traditions of struggle (whatever the roots and figures associated with each) are often responding, in both thought and practice, to the same problems and striving toward the same emancipatory goals. This means that if our materialism becomes less focused on formal contents and more dialectical by centering goal-driven praxis, Marxism can be connected with local traditions of struggle on a more dynamic basis. Neither Marxism nor the endogenous tradition will then be perceived as a static set of utterances or proclamations to be either preserved or sacrificed. In both Marxism and the local tradition, complete human beings are pursuing an end or telos that is conditioned by problems of domination, oppression, and exploitation. Revolutionary praxis, therefore, allows for a connection between Marxism and local tradition that is grounded not in eclecticism, but in projects that are oriented toward the ends being pursued, whether these are anticolonial, anti-imperialist, or anticapitalist ones, and mutually nourishing one another in the course of that ends-oriented endeavor.
It is worth highlighting that the anticolonial and anti-imperialist objective is especially strong in forming revolutionary traditions in the Global South. Its populations have experienced centuries of foreign oppression and imposition, and it would be absurd to imagine that they would not develop valuable theories and practices of struggle that precede their knowledge of Marxism or are limited to it. For this reason, a Marxism that aims to carry the chalice of purity at all costs and rejects “contamination” with local traditions, such as the Bolivarian and Martiano ones in Latin America or Islamic ones in West Asia, will almost always be found deficient in its anti-imperialism. The reason is obvious: it becomes a form of Marxism separated from what Marx called the “real movement” of the struggling masses around the globe who are attempting to abolish the existing order of things.
Mariátegui: “Practical Socialism” Meets Scientific Socialism
For Mariátegui, the question of Marxism’s relationship with local traditions was not an abstract problem, but instead a concrete historical and political one. In the Peru of the 1920s, scientific socialism, on the one hand, and Indigenous traditions, on the other, were widely seen as incompatible. Andean Indigenous people in Peru, Bolivia, and northern Chile had preserved the ayllu, a social formation that was communal in essence, but was subordinated in most instances to settler landlords. Despite diverse political orientations, progressive intellectuals were almost unanimous in dismissing these ayllu communities as backward or feudal—typically as relics of the past in need of capitalist development. Conversely, socialism was just as consistently understood as an external project, derived from Europe, that could only take root under conditions of developed capitalism and wage labor.
Mariátegui rejected these metaphysical, rigid viewpoints, which had become a kind of ideological common currency. His position was shaped both by the existence of contemporary Indigenous movements in Peru that had been penetrated by explicitly socialist ideas and by his deepening understanding of Andean peoples’ culture, particularly their communal forms of life.9 The result was an approach that radically overturned prevailing assumptions. Rather than viewing Marxism and Indigenous movements as external and opposed to one another—as either an “outside” versus an “inside,” or in terms of the “imposed” versus the “authentic”—Mariátegui grasped both as living projects in motion. In doing so, he recovered the most essential and orthodox Marxist approach in a way that closely paralleled Marx’s highly dialectical reflections on the Russian peasant commune’s potential relation to modern socialism, even if he did not have access to those writings.10
Mariátegui laid out this conception most famously in Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, written between 1926 and 1928, while he was already seriously ill. At the time, it was common to frame a central aspect of Peruvian reality as the “problem of the Indian.” Indigenous peoples constituted roughly four-fifths of Peru’s population and most lived in extreme poverty, following centuries of mass murder and dispossession since the European invasion. The so-called “Indigenous problem” elicited a wide range of responses. Bourgeois reformers proposed solutions ranging from education and legal reform to administrative intervention, while protofascist currents on the continent—embodied most emblematically by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento—advocated “whitening” through European migration and even outright genocidal extermination.
Mariátegui was light years away from all of these approaches. The Indigenous question, he argued, is not primarily a matter of education, administration, or “race.” It was fundamentally an economic question centered on land and land tenure—that is, on property as the set of social relations central to the Indigenous mode of production and civilizational project. In this spirit, he wrote: “Any treatment of the problem of the Indian…that fails or refuses to recognize it as a socio-economic problem is but a sterile, theoretical exercise destined to be completely discredited.…Socialist critique exposes and defines the problem [which is] rooted in the land tenure system of our economy.”11
These lines clearly illustrate Mariátegui’s methodological rigor. Rather than focusing on surface phenomena—culture, race, or administration—he identified the essential category organizing Peruvian reality at the time: land as a means of production and the struggle of Indigenous peoples to maintain their own communal forms. That struggle was of two kinds: both centuries-old forms of resistance and a land-back movement that had erupted in northern Peru in 1910 and would continue through the remaining decades of Mariátegui’s life.12 In adopting this approach, which went to the essence of the situation and the key object of struggle, Mariátegui demonstrated what it means to practice Marxism as a living method rather than as an identity or a set of quotations. As explained in Marx’s 1857 Einleitung, that method consists in moving from confused and chaotic representations of reality to the essential abstractions governing the mode of production, and then reconstructing the concrete totality by adding determinations. It was a process that Marx famously described as “rising from the abstract to the concrete.”13
By centering the land question and the ongoing struggle surrounding it, Mariátegui was able not only to explain the material roots of Indigenous oppression, but also to identify the socialist potential embedded within Indigenous resistance through the maintenance of communal practices, particularly as expressed in the resilient ayllu communities that had held out and continued developing, despite colonization and oppression. These communal practices, which he described as “practical socialism,” offered a foundation for modern socialism in Latin America—with some of its roots in an endogenous development. Mariátegui thus revealed how socialist potential can emerge not exclusively from the outside, but from within a struggle already underway in endogenous and ongoing practices of resistance.
Marxism as Facilitating Deeper Local Engagement
This well-known example from Seven Essays illustrates Mariátegui’s typical method of engaging with his context. His most famous maxim—”Socialism in Latin America should be neither a copy nor imitation, but a heroic creation”—should be understood in light of this dialectical approach. Mariátegui believed that his embrace of orthodox Marxism (he was a “convinced and confessed Marxist” by his own account) did not make his engagement with local reality less Indigenous or less Peruvian; rather, it made it more so. The richness of his work demonstrates that Marxism and local traditions of struggle are not competing frameworks, but mutually reinforcing ones. Against the still widespread notion that Marxism and local traditions of struggle vie for the same space in a zero-sum game, Mariátegui showed that each can gain vitality through the other.
Mariátegui was aware that this claim was polemical. In the “Author’s Note” that opens Seven Essays, he addressed critics who accused him of being overly European: “There are many who think that I am tied to European culture and alien to the facts and issues of my country,” Mariátegui wrote.14 Yet, while acknowledging his intellectual formation abroad and his complete commitment to Marxism, he insisted that this very framework enabled him to understand Peru more deeply: “There is no way of saving Indo-America, without the science and thought of Europe and the West.”15 This statement encapsulates Mariátegui’s epoch-making insight: Marxism does not suppress or compete with the local or national; it reveals, revitalizes, and redeems them. At the same time, Marxism itself becomes living, concrete, and effective—that is, truly Marxist—only through engagement with particular realities and struggles.
This dialectical viewpoint was alien both to the perspective of Peru’s nationalist APRA party, led by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre at the time, and to the approach of Victorio Codovilla, which became dominant in the contemporary Latin American apparatus of the Third International. The former defended the national against international socialism, while the latter opposed socialism to the endogenous elements in Latin American countries. Though competing, each of these tendencies operated within an imposed-versus-authentic dichotomy. Such antidialectical frameworks are not relics of the past but remain pervasive today. Academic Marxology often treats Marxism as an external doctrine that is simply applied to peripheral realities—at best filtered through local intermediaries—while postcolonial and decolonial approaches systematically assume that emancipation requires distance from, or mitigation of, foreign influences, including that of Marxism.
These positions are in many ways mirror images of one another, with both being governed by an undialectical viewpoint. That viewpoint is vividly on display whenever fundamentalist and Eurocentric Marxists (those who deviate from Marx and Engels by treating Marxism’s focus and claims as static and situated only in the historical reality of the West) find themselves, even in time of mortal anti-imperialist struggle, wishing that movements such as Hamas in Palestine or Chavismo in Venezuela were either less Islamic or less Bolivarian-nationalist and “more Marxist.” Conversely, the same flawed viewpoint is operating whenever postcolonial or decolonial thinkers insinuate that Indigenous struggles would do well to eschew the external and supposedly contaminating influence of Marxism (which they claim to be inherently Eurocentric). Mariátegui’s work exposes the fallacy of both positions. Marxism and non-European traditions, he demonstrated, are neither ratified nor honored through detached contemplation, but through struggle and engagement. They come to life when employed in what Walter Benjamin would later call the “moment of danger”—that is, in a context of an epic struggle for the existence of an oppressed people or nation. Needless to say, the nations of the Global South, which are structurally in contradiction to imperialism and its colonial projects (such as Zionism), are crucibles in which such “moments of danger” frequently emerge.16
Mariátegui’s work was born in one such crucible. The explicitly imperialist aggressions in Nicaragua in the 1920s, the urgency of the Indigenous question throughout the region, and the example of a successful Marxist-inspired revolution in Russia elicited a potent theoretical and practical response from him. Ultimately, Mariátegui’s positioning of his project as engaged and revolutionary rather than academic—and his having a profound commitment both to Marxism and the local reality in which he worked—allowed him to overcome the false opposition between the foreign and the endogenous in favor of a dialectical approach. Whether addressing endogenous religion, education, literature, or the Indigenous question, he showed that conceiving a local tradition as fundamentally separate from the Marxist project ultimately betrays both.
Two Validations of Mariátegui’s Approach: Liberation Theology and Chávez’s Leninism
We need not look very far to see validations of this thesis in our time. One example is liberation theology. Without wanting to reduce the latter to a Christian phenomenon (since anti-imperialist emancipatory currents within Islam are just as important), one can see how the progressive elements of Christianity—particularly as articulated by grassroots movements throughout Latin America—have often deepened and radicalized Marxist politics in the region. This is because, among Latin Americans, as among most peoples of the world, the impulse toward emancipation is frequently expressed in religious terms. Allowing these aspirations to flourish within revolutionary movements strengthens them both materially and intellectually.
There is much concrete proof of this in struggles around the world. In Latin America, figures such as Camilo Torres, Manuel Pérez, Gaspar García Laviana, and organizations like Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN) demonstrate how religious militants have often displayed unparalleled commitment and resilience despite repression and hardship. In Cuba, the Christian-inspired project of the Centro Memorial Dr. Martin Luther King represents a pillar and vanguard of Cuba’s socialist revolution in our time. These diverse examples show how Marxism can become stronger and more orthodox—in almost every meaningful sense—when it gives space to Christian-inspired revolutionary subjectivity in the Latin American context.17 Though it is controversial to say so, I would argue that, in Latin America, communism has in some respects been made more communist because of the platform that Christian culture has provided for it.18
The converse is also true. Endogenous struggles and lifeways (culture, languages, religions, and modes of production) can gain space to flourish and become more powerful through a connection with Marxism. For example, the Soviet Union, which emerged from the first successful Marxist-inspired revolution, also became the first truly plurinational state, allowing national languages and cultures to flourish in an unprecedented way. Terry Martin’s study, Affirmative Action Empire, describes the Soviet Union’s policies of decolonization in the non-Russian republics and autonomous regions. These policies, which implied “favoring indigenous peoples over newly arrived elements,” were an important achievement and a powerful historical example of this dynamic.19
A contemporary example is the way that Hugo Chávez’s “Leninist” strategy of seizing and repurposing state power in Venezuela, especially as exemplified in the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, has empowered Venezuela’s Indigenous peoples more fully and authentically than in periods of the country’s history when such Marxist methods had not been pursued. I have been able to confirm this personally through research trips and interviews with Indigenous people in the Venezuelan Amazon and Delta Amacuro regions. Spokespeople from Indigenous communities consistently point out that, in contrast to every previous political order, the project inaugurated by Chávez’s anti-imperialist and socialist revolution has provided powerful support for Indigenous rights and for the ongoing, future-oriented projects of Indigenous peoples.20
Both examples show how we should conceive living Marxism: whether Bolivarian socialism, Cuba’s amalgamation of Marx and Martí, or “socialism with Chinese Characteristics” in contemporary China.21 These are not so much cases of syncretism or heterodoxy—in the sense of mixing foreign and endogenous elements—but rather continuations of Marxism’s most revolutionary and praxis-based essence. In Mariátegui’s words, this is about putting lifeblood into ideas; it is something Marx and Engels did in their time, and we should pursue in ours.
Excursus on Rationality
An issue that inevitably arises in discussions of Marxism’s engagement with local traditions, especially religious ones, is the question of rationality. Mariátegui himself granted myth an important role in his understanding of revolutionary subjectivity, and he engaged with certain irrationalist thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel. More broadly, the concern about rationality emerges because many local or Indigenous traditions include folk beliefs, myths, allegorical narratives, or religious components, which are often associated—too quickly, in fact—with unreason.
There is a legitimate concern here: Marxism must not surrender rationality, which is especially critical in the present historical moment in which fascism has reemerged. The connection between fascism and irrationality is twofold. On the one hand, movements such as MAGA-style neofascism are saturated with irrational elements: racist myths, supremacist fantasies, and conspiracy thinking. On the other hand, they mobilize the masses in support of projects that ultimately serve only a handful of monopolies. Fascism is therefore irrational not merely in its beliefs, but in its contradictory social function: it organizes mass consent for outcomes that contradict the material interests—and even the survival—of the majority. More broadly, contemporary imperialist capitalism, whether fascist or not, itself increasingly reveals its structural irrationality. A system that is incapable of meeting basic human needs, accelerates ecological collapse, and threatens to destroy the conditions of life for billions cannot be regarded as rational, regardless of its technical sophistication.22
In an epoch marked by fascism and imperialism, defending rationality therefore becomes an urgent political task. However, rationality as a fundamental determinant must not be understood, in the first instance—or even in its essence—as merely technical calculation or scientific formalism. Nor should it be presented, in accordance with a longstanding colonialist tendency, as necessarily opposed to Indigenous traditions or religious worldviews. Rather, according to the still-valid perspective that Marxism inherits from classical German philosophy, we should understand reason to be integrally connected to all parts of the human endeavor and practice, and as realized within the developing historical totality.23 Therefore, the touchstones of rationality are the positions that thought assumes in relation to the key questions posed by historical unfolding, which today centrally include defeating U.S. imperialism, ending fascist genocides such as the ongoing Zionist assault on the Palestinian people, and generating multipolar and sustainable planetary development. Because it is rooted in practice, and because reason’s central challenge is to grasp the historically unfolding totality, rationality necessarily has material, social, and ecological dimensions. It is not about building internally perfect systems on the brink of the abyss. Rather, reason is only truly “rational” when it is oriented toward human development for global majorities, toward defeating imperialism, and toward the viable stewardship of the earth.
The reference above to thinking taking place “on the brink of the abyss” comes from Georg Lukács’s book The Destruction of Reason, which compared philosophies that irrationally ignore real life problems to living in “a modern luxury hotel on the brink of the abyss.” It is a hotel where “the daily sight of the abyss, between leisurely enjoyment of meals or works of art, can only enhance one’s pleasure in this elegant comfort.”24 In an epilogue to that book written during the Cold War, when the “abyss” had come to include the threat of nuclear annihilation, Lukács argued that the struggle between reason and unreason was most essentially expressed in the peace and nuclear disarmament movement. The latter, which he described as “the defense of reason as a mass movement,” crossed political, philosophical, and religious boundaries: “Christian and Moslem priests, Quakers and pacifists, liberals and neutrals, etc., are working hand in hand with socialists and communists.” Precisely because the peace movement united people with profoundly different worldviews around a common historical task, “its mere existence, its growth and its increasingly concrete outlines imply a raising and answering of the great philosophical question: for or against reason.”25
Viewed in this light, and considering the abyss facing us in the twenty-first century, the dividing line between those “for or against reason” in our historical moment is likewise not between religion and science, nor between traditional and more cosmopolitan forms of knowledge. Rather, it is the dividing line between those who promote imperialist capitalism and the majority of humanity who resist it. Whatever religious commitments, mythic beliefs, or cultural traditions the latter may hold are secondary to their practical orientation toward a rationality centered on the defense and flourishing of human life against war, exploitation, and domination. Conversely, whatever forms of technical expertise or instrumental rationality today’s advocates and collaborators of imperialism may display, the destructive logic of their project places them on the side of modern barbarism and, therefore, on the side of unreason in its most developed form.
From this dialectical perspective—which centers the main issues brought up by historical unfolding and refuses the separation of reason from practice—engagement and interchange with local traditions should be seen as a continuation of Marxism’s active and rational essence. That is because most such traditions pursue profoundly rational aims: collective survival, social justice, self-determination, dignity, and resistance to foreign domination, positioning themselves rationally in relation to the historical totality. That these aims may be articulated through religious language, mythic narratives, or non-modern symbolic frameworks does not negate their rationality. What matters is not the discursive format, but the essential orientation and historical function of these traditions. It follows that, when Marxism engages with such traditions on the terrain of praxis, the result is not contamination but reinforcement—a deepening of Marxism’s core rationality. It is also important to keep in mind that reason, if conceived dialectically, realizes itself over time as a historical unfolding or process. This should be borne in mind when evaluating Mariátegui’s engagement with Nietzsche, Sorel, vitalism, or pragmatism. The Peruvian Marxist typically draws on irrationalist philosophies only to explore particular dimensions of social reality or subjectivity that acquire provisional autonomy within a broader dialectical process. In this respect, his method resembles that of Frantz Fanon, whose apparently existentialist or relativist moments are best understood not as philosophical endpoints but as part of a dialectical process, a path by which Marxism extends itself to new realities.26
Conclusion: Priorities in Global South Struggles
As the previous section indicated, the question of Marxism’s relation to local and national traditions must be posed today with an awareness of the most urgent tasks of our time and the set of priorities they call for. That will, in turn, shape the relative emphasis given either to an explicitly Marxist conceptual apparatus, on the one hand, or to the local traditions, on the other. This awareness is called for because an evaluation of the current historical conjuncture cannot avoid confronting the immense civilizational destruction wrought by imperialism (and ongoing colonialism) over the past century. Imperialism has advanced this civilizational destruction through its ongoing wars, sanctions, resource and value drain, and the cultural domination it exerts. It is a result of extractive and exterminist processes characteristic of the four centuries of capitalism but significantly accelerated under neoliberal “globalization”—in fact, an imperialist counterrevolution that has taken place since roughly the mid-1970s.27
What is especially evident in the current conjuncture is how imperialism has advanced very far with its processes of culturicide and ethnocide, even when falling short of its often-preferred modality of genocide.28 This points to the need, in any hypothetical encounter between Marxism and a Global South civilizational context, to put the stronger accent on the role of local traditions and the civilizational projects they represent in the current moment.29 In fact, an examination of successful contemporary revolutionary processes and efforts shows how they systematically prioritize the endogenous civilizational project. We can see this in the way that Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the Palestinian resistance assign such a central role to Islam and the social values it embodies, even if Marxist teachings (especially those about imperialism) have been adopted and operate on a de facto level in both those contexts, as in all processes of anticolonial liberation over the last hundred years.30
It can also be seen in the essential role of Martí’s reflections, culture, and ethics within the Cuban Revolution, and in the centrality of Bolivarianism (with a Christian-liberational register added to it) in the Venezuelan Revolution. That revolution’s main leader, commander Chávez, tirelessly defended and promoted Latin American memory, history, and culture before every audience he addressed. His last words were not “Commune or nothing!” but “Now we have a patria (homeland).” The force of these revolutions (Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela) teaches us that, if a guiding slogan were required for us today, it would not be so much “Socialism or Barbarism,” but rather “Multipolar Civilizations versus Imperialist Barbarism,” though always maintaining the aim of grafting socialism onto the former wherever possible.31 The analytical priority, in other words, is the preservation and recovery of the civilizational substrate—understood, of course, as an ongoing, modernizing, open-ended, and processual construction—as a precondition for the socialist project.
Notes
- ↩ There are other important Asian Marxisms that have accompanied and guided successful revolutions and projects of socialist state building, in each of which the same principle applies. That is to say, the Marxism that operates in North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam is also, as in China, shaped by national characteristics. For an interesting article on the role of Buddhism in Laotian socialism, see Yumeng Liu, “Lao Socialism with Buddhist Characteristics,” Monthly Review 76, no. 11 (April 2025): 42–56.
- ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Foreword to the Summer Issue,” Monthly Review 62, no. 3 (July–August 2010): i–xviii; Teodor Shanin, “Marxism and the Vernacular Revolutionary Traditions,” in Late Marx and the Russian Road, ed. Teodor Shanin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 243–79. For an examination of socialism with Chinese characteristics, especially as it relates to ecological issues, see John Bellamy Foster, “Marxian Ecology, East and West: Joseph Needham and a Non-Eurocentric View of the Origins of China’s Ecological Civilization,” Monthly Review 75, no. 5 (October 2023): 1–12.
- ↩ Mariátegui founded the Socialist Party of Peru in 1928 as a Marxist-Leninist party aligned with the Communist International; after his death, it was renamed the Communist Party of Peru.
- ↩ José Carlos Mariátegui, “El Grupo Clarté,” in Mariátegui: Política revolucionaria, contribución a la crítica socialista, vol. 1: La escena contemporánea y otros escritos (Caracas: Fundación Editorial El Perro y la Rana, 2010), 278.
- ↩ José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, trans. Marjory Urquidi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 25. The English translation in this edition is at times problematic. Here it renders Mariátegui’s phrase “meter toda mi sangre en mis ideas” as “I have written with my blood” but it would be better translated as “putting all my lifeblood into my ideas.”
- ↩ Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976), 29.
- ↩ The transfer of the Global South’s resources and produced value to the core capitalist countries under capitalism’s imperialist stage generates a double effect. On the one hand, a social democratic-leaning labor aristocracy emerges in the Global North. On the other hand, the working masses in the Global South incline toward revolutionary solutions in response to the harsher forms of exploitation, expropriation, and assaults on their dignity that they experience.
- ↩ Given the vital development of Marxism in the Global South, Simin Fadaee is right to conclude that “it is in fact Eurocentric to claim that Marxism is Eurocentric.” Simin Fadaee, Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 22–23. This form of Eurocentrism with regard to Marxism is exhibited by both postcolonial and decolonial intellectuals. Whereas postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak explicitly characterize Marxism as Eurocentric, the decolonial tendency tends to couch the claim more subtly. For example, Aníbal Quijano repeatedly claims that, not Marx, but historical materialism is Eurocentric, while Enrique Dussel typically maintains that it is only a “previously unknown” or very late Marx that escapes Eurocentrism.
- ↩ José Carlos Mariátegui, “El problema de las razas en la América Latina,” Mariátegui: Política revolucionaria, contribución a la crítica socialista, vol. 5: Ideología y política y otros escritos (Caracas: Fundación Editorial El Perro y la Rana, 2010), 79. Originally presented at the First Latin American Communist Conference in Buenos Aires, June 1929.
- ↩ See Marcello Musto, The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2020).
- ↩ Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 43.
- ↩ On Indigenous movements in Peru during Mariátegui’s lifetime, see Aníbal Quijano, “José Carlos Mariátegui: reencuentro y debate,” in 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2007), xxvi–xxvii.
- ↩ Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 101.
- ↩ Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 25.
- ↩ Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 25. Translation modified.
- ↩ Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Thesis VI, in Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, eds., Selected Writings, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006), 391.
- ↩ Domenico Losurdo argues that the influence of Christian messianism has led Marxists in the West to collapse time frames and therefore undervalue the extended processes of state building and economic development that could actually result in sovereign socialist states. The point is well taken, but it applies more to Western Marxism than to Christian-influenced revolutionary Third World Marxism. Moreover, actually existing Christianity and its legacy is complex: an important part of that tradition locates the messianic element as a regulative principle while simultaneously recognizing the indispensable role of concrete daily activity and work in the pursuit of any prophetic ideal. Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn (New York: Monthly Review Press), 232–33.
- ↩ In Latin America’s culture wars, which pit evangelical Christianity against an often-syncretic Catholicism, the former generally—though not invariably—represents a conservative, counterrevolutionary, and pro-imperialist force, which often aligns with Zionism as well.
- ↩ See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend (Chicago: Iskra Books, 2020).
- ↩ Chris Gilbert and Cira Pascual Marquina, Resistencia Comunal book series (Caracas: Observatorio Antibloqueo, 2020–2026).
- ↩ Foster, “Foreword to the Summer Issue”; Foster, “Marxian Ecology, East and West”; Armando Hart, “Una introducción necesaria,” in Marx, Engels y la condición humana: Una visión desde Latinoamérica (Melbourne: Ocean Sur, 2005), 28–42.
- ↩ Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, “The Destruction of Reason and the Rise of Ecofascism in the United States,” Monthly Review 78, no. 2 (June 2026): 1–16.
- ↩ Classical German philosophy from Immanuel Kant to G. W. F. Hegel saw reason not as mere technique, but as intimately related to questions of what human beings, according to Kant’s renowned formulation, should do and what they can hope for, not only what they can know. (Reason’s purview, for Kant, included the questions of “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?”) It was therefore not separate from the broader ongoing human project or what Marxists call praxis.
- ↩ The focus of Lukács’s critique here is the irrationalist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Later, he would extend the same critique to the Frankfurt School. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1980), 243. See Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 22.
- ↩ Lukács goes on to write that “the great common principle behind [the movement’s diverse currents] is no less than the defense of human reason, and not merely its existence in general, but its actual influence and impact on human history in which we are all more or less active participants.” Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 849.
- ↩ Here I am following the reading of Fanon by Ato Sekyi-Otu, who contends that certain formulations in his work must be understood as part of a larger dialectical movement of reason: a “pathway [or] cheminement laborieux vers la connaissance rationnelle.” Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996), 26. This is the model of reason embodied in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which was written in the wake of the French and Haitian revolutions and which Lukács himself pointed out was less “resigned” than the later Hegel. It is a work that aims to grasp a totality that is still unfolding. See Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 163.
- ↩ Jason Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, and Intan Suwandi, “Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy: Drain from the Global South through Unequal Exchange, 1990–2015,” LSE Research Online Documents on Economics, no. 113823, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2022).
- ↩ Imperialist capitalism also generates civilizational crises in the core countries, though they are of a different kind: an internal decay rather than an externally driven destruction. In that spirit, Marxist philosopher Helena Sheehan has recently pointed to rising rates of mental illness, suicides, murderous gaming, and extreme individualism in the imperial core, arguing that these “are symptoms of civilizational decay.” Importantly, the effects of such decay in the core countries are ambivalent in relation to the global class struggle, in as much as they possibly contribute to the weakening of imperialism. By contrast, the effects of the imperialist destruction of civilizations in Global South countries are invariably counterproductive. Helena Sheehan, “Capitalism and the Crisis of Meaning in Our Times,” Monthly Review 78, no. 2 (June 2026): 54–65.
- ↩ Vijay Prashad writes: “It is difficult for those who do not come from colonised societies to understand the power of such statements as ‘defense of the homeland’ and of the idea of civilisational inheritance.” Vijay Prashad, “A Dialogue Across Civilisations, for Now: The Seventeenth Newsletter,” The Tricontinental, April 23, 2026, tricontinental.com.
- ↩ Alexandre A. Bennigen and S. Enders Wimbush argue that socialist ideas entered very early into the conceptual toolbox of the Muslim peoples of the Russian empire, contributing to the “blueprint for national liberation.” They also point out, correctly, that Marxist theory was incorporated into national liberation processes all around the world. Alexandre A. Bennigen and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), xx.
- ↩ Colonial and imperialist discourses have often portrayed the civilizations and cultures of the Global South—especially those of Latin America—as barbarisms rather than as civilizations. This ideological distortion is addressed and refuted in Roberto Fernández Retamar’s brilliant Todo Caliban (Buenos Aires: Cooperativa Editorial Viandante, 2019).
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About the author:
Chris Gilbert is a professor of political studies in the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, cohost of the Marxist educational podcast Escuela de Cuadros, and a contributing editor at Monthly Review. He is the author of Commune or Nothing!: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project (Monthly Review Press, 2023).
Source: Monthly Review
Issue: Vol. 78, No. 04 (September 2026)
url: José Carlos Mariátegui and Local Traditions of Struggle – Monthly Review
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The opinions and views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Kana’an’s Editorial Board.