In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui by Mike Gonzalez (review)

Mike Gonzalez's book brings to the English-speaking world an interesting overview of the life, thought and political praxis of José Carlos Mariátegui La Chira, a Peruvian Marxist who is considered one of the greatest thinkers in Latin America. In simple prose, without the intention of delving deeply into the debates he explores, Gonzalez fluently presents, in just over 200 pages, the Andean author's historical context and intellectual development, tracing a succinct and introductory description of his life and work.

In the opening chapters, he explores Mariátegui's personal and cultural background, sketching the steps of his trajectory towards Marxism: his activities as an activist journalist; his exile and eventual embrace of communism and other contemporary thinking in Europe; his work with the magazine Amauta (a term that would become his nickname, whose meaning in Quechua is "wise"), an editorial project that was proposed not only as a "group," but as a "movement" of "organic" intellectuals (in the concept of Gramsci), and that would be the basis of the construction of its "revolutionary nucleus." Later, the book approaches his classic work, Seven Tests of Interpretation of the Peruvian Reality; deals with the issues that involved the founding of the Socialist Party in Peru, linked to the Third International; and points out elements of his dialectical conception of history, in addition to his main historiographical, political, and philosophical contributions.

If it is true that the Marxism of Mariátegui, a thinker from the periphery of the peripheral Latin American world, may be contrasted with the little that has been researched and written about him – especially in comparison to other great Marxists, such as Gramsci, Lukács, or Benjamin – it is also certain that this gap is even more unequal when it comes to works written in the English language. It could not be otherwise; the dominant discourse, which delimits and legitimizes what is and what is not known, is mostly expressed in English, a hegemonic language since the last century. Works written outside this standard tend, therefore, to go unnoticed – at least in the face of researchers with less capacity for otherness, whose reading is reduced to the repertoire of the great English-speaking centers.

Gonzalez, on the contrary, avoids this intellectual restriction. He shows himself to be an essayist open to new times, determined to meet the other, crossing the restricted linguistic and cognitive walls. Thus, the English author listens not only to the thinker in question, but to several Latin American scholars who have dealt with the topic, breaking with the rigid tradition of modern-bourgeois anglophone dominance – still so self-centered and monolingual – whose process of overcoming is advancing, but is far from achieving a healthy diversity. Emeritus Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Glasgow, Gonzalez has the merit of knowing how to look – with sensitivity and breadth – at Latin American Marxism, offering with his work a didactic space so that the interested reader can approach the Marxist current that, for some decades, has been termed mariateguismo.

However, if In the Red Corner stands out positively for this look at the other – a gesture that in itself already denotes a refusal of the ethnocentrism in force (above all, anglophone) – the book nevertheless lacks a certain Eurocentric rancidity, which is perceived in the course of reading. A minor mistake, but visible from the first pages, is that of presenting Mariátegui as if he were a "rediscovery"; a brilliant thinker, who had been a kind of hostage to deviant spirits for 60 years, that is, until his centenary, in 1994 (a date shown as a cabalistic number) who made him "suffer" by the obscure way they claimed his political heritage. That is, they silenced what would be, as Gonzalez suggests, true Mariateguian ideas.

In this sentence, the English academic demonstrates some ignorance of crucial authors on Latin American Marxism who took up and spread the thought of Amauta throughout the 20th...