In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Moments of Revolutionary Transformation1 in the Novels of José María Arguedas
  • Irina Alexandra Feldman

Fue leyendo a Mariátegui y después a Lenin que encontré un orden permanente en las cosas; la teoría socialista no sólo dio un cauce a todo el porvenir sino a lo que había en mí de energía, le dio un destino y lo cargó aún más de fuerza por el mismo hecho de encauzarlo. ¿Hasta dónde entendí el socialismo? No lo sé bien. Pero no mató en mí lo mágico.

(Arguedas, “No soy un aculturado” 258)

Thus spoke José María Arguedas in his discourse “No soy un aculturado” (258). It is one of the few instances when he self-identifies as a socialist. William Rowe locates Arguedas in the Peruvian socialist tradition of thought and action, referring to it as “la tradición de Mariátegui, de Vallejo, de Arguedas, de Flores Galindo” (75).

Considered within the Latin American socialist and Marixst tradition, Arguedas emerges as a visionary figure that tends a conceptual bridge between the first Latin American Marxists and the Leftist thought developed in the Andes at the beginning of the 21st century. Firstly [End Page 302] it is necessary to introduce our reflections with a disclaimer, and at the same time with a revisionist claim. As the critic Bruno Bosteels sharply indicates, “Today, the least we can say about Marxism is that, if it were not for the use of attenuating prefixes such as ‘post’ or ‘neo,’ its mere mention has become an unmistakable sign of obsolescence . . . almost nobody really seems to be referring to Marxism anymore as a vital doctrine of political or historical intervention” (3). The Marxist vocabulary, for many, becomes either a swear word or a naïve theory whose failure is made evident by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its history of human rights abuse. Bosteels, nonetheless, explains for the case of Latin America that this perception is largely due to a lack of inter-generational dialogue, as the newer generations do not know anything about the participants of the struggles for liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. “The reasons for amnesia in Latin America are complex,” Bosteels tells us: the neoliberal catastrophe and the violence of the dictatorships are two dominant reasons for this forgetfulness (5). What is more, although the concept of class struggle, for instance, seems worn out, and other concepts such as hegemony or antagonism are more current in a present theoretical dialogue, it is important to see the continuity and genealogy between these concepts that seem so new, and the Marxian concept of antagonism that still informs them. To speak of Arguedas as a Marxist thinker is to counter this forgetfulness. Significantly, as Estelle Tarica acutely showed in her recent presentation, the figure of Arguedas has acquired a renewed dimension in Peru after the decades of Shining Path violence. The intellectuals of the Peruvian left of the 2000s have mined Arguedas’ thought for readings that would “save” socialism from the contamination by violence and the deaths of 80,000 people that occurred, at least partially, under the banner of socialist struggle. In Tarica’s words, “Arguedas representa la posibilidad de encontrar una visión de la nación que no sea ni la del oficialismo ni la del Sendero, o sea, una posición que anhela la revolución pero sin dogmas, y que representaría una necesidad especialmente aguda por parte de la izquierda no-militante del Perú” (“Arguedas después de la violencia” 7). Borrowing the term from the theorization of the revolutionary process presented by the Bolivian theorist and current Vice President Álvaro García Linera, I would say that Arguedas represents the possibility of “momentos de transformación revolucionaria,” like the one lived by Bolivia in the twenty-first century. This term is key here, since Linera’s analysis is concerned with profound, revolutionary change that the Bolivian state has experienced in its juridical, institutional and economic dimensions [End Page 303] and capacities. The term does not only emphasize the violent struggle, but different methods and spheres used in the process of “medir las...

pdf

Share