Redeemers (15 page)

 

Moreover, without the Indian, the country cannot advance. He is the producer, the true element of progress. There can be no
peruanidad
without him. But Mariátegui is not proposing the folkloric, kitsch indigenism commonly substituted for reality in Latin America and which is really a kind of empty condescension, relegating the Indian to the level of quaint entertainment and permanent tutelage. He wants intellectual, spiritual, and material progress for all:

 

Those who say that Peru, and America in general, live at a great distance from the European revolution . . . have no comprehension, even approximate, of history. They are surprised that the most advanced ideals of Europe reach Peru, but they are not surprised that the airplane, the transatlantic steamer, the wireless telegraph, the radio have come to us . . . It would make as much sense to ignore the socialist movement as to dismiss . . . Einstein's theory of relativity.

 

It will take a few more years for him to fully articulate his ideas and his project. But the structure is already here. The sickly boy, fascinated by electric light and streetcars, has been transformed into a formidable intellectual whose health remains precarious but who retains his excitement over airplanes and streetcars and the radio and now the theory of relativity. (Might he have known that Einstein's critical insight came to him while he was riding in a streetcar?) The heroes of his childhood reading have now changed into the Peruvian Indian and the revolutionary masses. His enthusiasm is totally intact, despite the pain, the adversity, the uncertainty of his life. And in his rehabilitation of the Indian, perhaps a subtle personal theme enters as well: the vindication of his mother, the abandoned
curaca
.

 

VII

The students at the People's University were so moved and illuminated by Mariátegui's lectures that a group of them went to the rector and asked that he be given a professorship. The rector refused. After all, Mariátegui had no academic credentials. From then on he would never have an assured income and would live on the proceeds of his writing. Finding steady employment was not easy and his independence was part of his nature. And within that nature a central idea was production and ownership of the means of production. It was natural then to become a businessman and be master of his own fate. He started Minerva Publishers, with the intention of issuing a series of Peruvian and foreign books, designed to expand the intellectual and psychic ambience of the country. His ultimate aim was to break through the ideological influences of the Peruvian oligarchy that weighed heavily on the new generation of intellectuals and artists. And he looked ahead to publishing a number of books on economics, a subject that had become fundamental in Europe as a basic discipline for making accurate decisions and eliminating financial carelessness vis-à-vis social issues. (With this same idea ten years later Daniel Cosío Villegas would create the Fondo de Cultura Económica, which for decades would disseminate its publications throughout Latin America.)

The first book he published, in 1925, was Mariátegui's own
La escena contemporánea
(The Contemporary Scene), which contained his first formal studies of fascism, the crisis of democracy and of socialism, the Russian Revolution, the relation between revolution and intelligence, essays on the East and (in a striking anticipation of what would later become, through the horrors of Nazism, a pervasive European issue) Jews and anti-Semitism. The authors he discusses, with critical independence and in sober prose that is both spare and precise, are not those admired by an earlier generation but rather a panoply of living men. “Everything human is ours,” Mariátegui will say a few months later, as if anticipating the future goal of Octavio Paz for the Mexican people, to be “contemporary with all men.”

In February 1926, Minerva Publishing launched a new journal,
Libros y Revistas
(Books and Reviews), with modest format and production values. To fund it, he solicited advertisements. Ads for automobiles, banks, other publishing houses, even millineries appear among the reviews and articles in carefully done, clear, and readable typography. A worthy achievement for someone who had spent so much time in his early adolescence around Linotype machines and their operators. But this editor was only beginning his work of production.

“I came back from Europe with the idea of starting a journal,” Mariátegui had once said, And now, in September 1926, the first issue of
Amauta
(Quechua for “teacher” or “sage”) appeared. It would become near legendary, in the first (and most immediate) place for the beauty of its production. Its large format, extremely readable typography, photographs, and woodcuts of high quality—all of it made the magazine instantly attractive. In its first editorial, Mariátegui wrote: “This journal, in the intellectual field, does not represent a group. It represents, more precisely, a movement, a spirit,” full of differences and disagreements but beyond these, a shared will “to create a new Peru within a new world.”

And in effect, everything was there, though suffused with a socialist perspective: avant-garde literature, revolutionary outcries; careful, measured criticism and militant texts of ideology; sweeping cosmopolitan viewpoints and indigenist perspectives (what Mariátegui called
inkaismo
); historical consciousness and the consciousness of making history; the freshness of antiquity and the universality of the local. All of it was elegantly packaged, the typography a pleasure in itself, and as you moved through the variegated writing and illustrations, you might come upon a sudden surprising gem, like a musical partitura or a modernist drawing followed by the woodcut of an Andean face with thick, powerful lines like the work some German artists were doing during the rich and soon-to-be tragic flowering of the Weimar Republic.

There were two sections: one for articles, essays and poems, sometimes translations (for instance the first translations of Freud into Spanish), the second for book reviews. No distinction was made between culture and politics. They followed each other in the natural order of creative thought, which abhors rigid separations. At the time it was a highly innovative decision. Journals were always published with a separate cultural section (sometimes even with a further subdivision of articles only “for young ladies”). This breaking with convention mirrored one of Mariátegui's major assertions. Revolutionary action (and the arguments for it) could not be treated as distinct from art and culture. Nor was one subordinate to the other. Their expression might differ in form but not in spirit. Ever since his book
The Contemporary Scene
, Mariátegui had been explicitly defending the centrality of the imagination as an integral part of politics and even revolution.
Amauta
was the culturally innovative, visually stunning, politically inclusive embodiment of this idea.

For Mariátegui, the journal became his mooring in the world. In large part through the journal, he could support his family, focus his thinking and his action, and be free to further ripen his ideas. And though Mariátegui saw his publishing work, his writing, and his political action as a single, ongoing impulse, there were of course, in practice, different components to his public life. On the one hand, he had begun to diffuse his theories on the union of
inkaismo
(he always preferred the
k
) and communism, both pervaded by a spiritual Marxism. But he was also a left-wing activist, in workers' organizations, in communist cells, and in A.P.R.A.

 

VIII

The entrance of
Amauta
into the political life of Peru was not welcomed by the Leguía dictatorship. In June 1927, the government denounced the existence of a supposed communist plot and began a crackdown against workers' organizations and intellectuals. Mariátegui was arrested and confined to the Military Hospital of San Bartolomé.
Amauta
was shut down, as was Minerva Publishers. He seriously considered emigrating to Montevideo or Buenos Aires. But he chose to stay in Peru because of his dual but for him unified commitment: to his Indianist philosophy and to Peruvian socialism. The “moderate” Leguía dictatorship would release him. In December, he succeeded in lifting the ban and
Amauta
appeared again.

In 1926, Mariátegui had joined in the necessarily clandestine formation of the first A.P.R.A. cell under the leadership of Haya de la Torre, who had returned from exile. Haya de la Torre, after breaking with the Third Communist International in 1927, had begun designing a plan to convert A.P.R.A. into a political party that would integrate the upper and lower middle classes, abandon revolutionary socialism, and vie for power through the electoral process. His intention was accelerated by a new Peruvian law barring the political activity of any group that was not exclusively national.

Mariátegui was opposed. For him, turning the A.P.R.A. into a political party (to be known as APRA) was to accept the rules of “decadent bourgeois democracy.” The two of them argued, not publicly but through an exchange of letters. Later, writing to another friend, Mariátegui would say: “Haya stubbornly insisted on imposing his dominating leadership [
caudillaje
] . . . I had opened up to Haya, accepting his claim to be a revolutionary Marxist—I would later discover that, as far as Marxism went, he had learned nothing. Perhaps I had too much confidence.”

They had seemed to share deep convictions. Both felt strongly anti-imperialist. Both had their visions of an archaic Inca communism. “The most advanced primitive communism that history has registered,” wrote Mariátegui, and Haya de la Torre would define the Incas as “the civilizing power of the most advanced Communist State of antiquity.” But Haya's ideology showed some strange admixtures. His interest in the racial issue was real but complicated with metaphysical rhetoric and the elitist authoritarianism of Vasconcelos, with his “cosmic race” fantasies. And the class difference (and conflicts) between Mariátegui and Haya was now apparent. Irredeemably aristocratic, Haya may well have perceived Mariátegui as ungrateful for the assistance he had received, instead of recognizing the resolute independence of a man who had overcome poverty, physical weakness and pain, the complete lack of a university education, and a working-class origin within Peru's grossly stratified society.

Mariátegui's break with Haya de la Torre over the “bourgeois” and authoritarian future he saw, in large part correctly, for APRA never lessened his dislike for the vulgar applications of Marxism and the rigidities of Soviet-sanctioned orthodoxy. For the defenders of communist purity, he was far too independent, “unscientific,” far too concerned with the inspirational power of myth:

 

. . . neither Reason nor Science can satisfy all the need for the infinite there is in man. Reason itself accepts the responsibility of showing men that it is not enough. That only the Myth possesses the precious virtue of filling the deep sense of self . . . The strength of revolutionaries is not in their science, it is in their faith, in their passion, in their will. It is a religious force, mystical, spiritual, it is the force of the Myth.

 

At the heart of his ideas and his conception of reality there beats a strong but in no way conventional religious impulse. The force of it may owe something to the orthodox religion of his childhood and his pious Catholic mother. But it had become far larger and broader for him. When he criticized his mentor González Prada for his antireligious convictions (in line not only with communism but with the anti-clerical positions of many nineteenth-century liberals), he would offer his key and concise opinion: “Let the Soviets write on their propaganda posters ‘Religion is the opiate of the people.' Communism is essentially religious.”

His most influential work, 7 Essays on the Interpretation of Peruvian Reality (
Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana
) was his final testament, though published in 1928, when he had two more years to live (and his ideas would still be expounded in later essays). He discounts and attacks conventional prejudices, argues for the preeminent importance of the problem of the land, and expands on his interpretation of socialism, aesthetic and moral, mythically Indianist and economically analytical, practical and spiritual.

He brands as racist and imperialist any idea that the Peruvian Indian must, before anything else, elevate himself morally, and be “educated” into emerging from his subjugated, impoverished condition. The first issue that has to be faced is not education but the ownership of the land. Nor does the Indian, or Latin Americans in general, need the mystifications of “a race destined to triumph. Forget
Ariel
, forget the pontifications like Vasconcelos's ‘cosmic race.' ” Mariátegui sees the model to follow in his idealized vision of “Inca communism,” a return to communal roots. But he does not call for the impossible reconstruction of an ancient agrarian society. We must live in the modern industrialized world. It is more a value he tries to summon from the past, that of communal responsibility and the end of
gamonalista
tyranny.

And as for the giant to the far north, the United States of America, here and elsewhere he insists that the enemy is American imperialism, not the individual American or the American people or the best of American culture: “Roosevelt protected the empire, Thoreau the spirit of Humanity.” Worldwide socialism is the absolutely necessary future. Otherwise, for Latin America, the prognosis would be grim: “The destiny of these countries, within the capitalist order, is that of mere colonies.” And art and literature, freely explored, are “not a diversion . . . of pure intellectuals” but the assertion of “an historical idea.”

 

IX

Mariátegui's mythical duality of indigenism and socialism, with all its immense seductive power, with all its moral beauty, with all its utopian nobility, has been refuted by history, most of all in its first element, indigenism. Luis Alberto Sánchez, in a written debate with Mariátegui, would ask prophetically: