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Communism and Religion: José Carlos Mariátegui's Revolutionary Mysticism

Michael Löwy
Latin American Perspectives 2008 35: 71
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X07313751

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 Communism and Religion
José Carlos Mariátegui’s Revolutionary Mysticism
by
Michael Löwy
Translated by Mariana Ortega Breña

Modern communism is traditionally understood as an atheist, secular, and profane

movement, actively opposed to religion as well as any form of “idealism.” The thought of
José Carlos Mariátegui, one of the main founders of Latin American communism, has
very little in common with this conventional image. Mariátegui had a heterodox attitude
toward religion, as well as other subjects. Mariátegui does not venture a new definition
of religion. However, it can be inferred from his writings that his is an ethical-political
and spiritual concept, one related to “all the need of the infinite that exists in man” (of
which he wrote in 1925) and the quest for a heroic myth that could restore sense and
enchantment to life. The word “mystical,” which appears very often in Mariátegui’s
work, is evidently religious in origin but has a broader meaning: it refers to the spiritual
and ethical dimension of socialism, as well as faith in the revolutionary struggle, absolute
commitment to the emancipatory cause, and the heroic willingness to risk life itself.

Keywords: Religion, Mysticism, Romanticism, Marxism, Socialism

Modern communism is traditionally understood as an atheist, secular, and

profane movement, actively opposed to religion as well as any form of ideal-
ism. The thought of José Carlos Mariátegui, one of the main founders of Latin
American communism, has very little in common with this conventional
image. Mariátegui had a heterodox attitude toward religion as well as other
subjects. At the heart of his Marxist heterodoxy and the singularities of his
philosophical and political discourse we find an irreducibly Romantic drive.
Romanticism is not a literary school but a cultural movement born toward
the end of the eighteenth century as a protest against the advent of modern
capitalist civilization. It was a rebellion against the irruption of an industrial
and bourgeois society—a society founded upon bureaucratic rationality, mer-
cantile reification, the quantification of social life, and, as Max Weber
famously put it, disenchantment of the world. Born with Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, William Blake, and the German Frühromantik, Romanticism has
never disappeared from modern culture. Even now, it stands as one of our
main contemporary constructs of sensibility. Romanticism criticizes capitalist
modernity in the name of precapitalist social, ethical, cultural, or religious values,
undertaking what is ultimately a desperate attempt to “reenchant the world.”

Michael Löwy was born in Brazil and has lived in Paris since 1969. He is currently sociology
research director at the National Center for Scientific Research. His most recent publication is
The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (1998). Mariana Ortega Breña is a freelance
translator based in Canberra, Australia.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 159, Vol. 35 No. 2, March 2008 71-79
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X07313751
© 2008 Latin American Perspectives

71
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72 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

It can take regressive and reactionary shapes but also utopic and revolutionary
ones, as in the case of the Marxist current exemplified by William Morris, E. P.
Thompson, the young Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and
Herbert Marcuse.
José Carlos Mariátegui belongs to this current, albeit in an original way and
in a Latin American context quite different from those of England and Central
Europe. His Romantic-revolutionary view of the world, exemplified by his
famous 1925 essay “Two Conceptions of Life” (in fact the matrix of all his sub-
sequent work), rejects “evolutionist, historicist, and rationalist philosophy”
and its “superstitious respect for the idea of Progress” and calls for a return to
the heroic myths, Romanticism, and what Miguel de Unamuno called “quixo-
tism.” Two Romantic currents that are equally opposed to the flat and com-
fortable ideology of inevitable progress face each other in a deadly struggle:
right-wing fascist Romanticism seeks a return to the Middle Ages, while left-
wing Bolshevik Romanticism yearns for a utopia. “All the romantic energy of
Western man,” writes Mariátegui, found expression in the Russian Revolution,
which “filled socialist theory with a warlike and mystical spirit” (1996 [1925a]:
139–140).
The word “mystical” appears quite often in Mariátegui’s work. Its origin is
evidently religious, but he gives it a broader meaning—something like that of
Charles Péguy, whose work he apparently had not read when he counter-
posed the mysticism of Dreyfusism with its political degradation. Mariátegui
uses the word to address the spiritual and ethical dimensions of socialism,
faith in the revolutionary struggle, absolute commitment to the emancipatory
cause, and the heroic willingness to risk life itself. For him the revolutionary
struggle or, to use Unamuno’s term, the revolutionary agony is a form of reen-
chantment of the world. However, at the same time that the struggle is “mys-
tical” and religious, it is also profane and secular: Mariátegui’s dialectic seeks
to overcome the habitual opposition between faith and atheism, materialism
and idealism. In “Gandhi,” we find the following argument (1996 [1924]: 49):

Socialism and syndicalism, despite their materialist conception of history, are

less materialist than they appear. They base themselves on the interests of the
majority, but they tend to ennoble and dignify life. Westerners are mystical and
religious in their own way. Isn’t the revolutionary spirit a religious spirit? It is
said in the West that religiosity has been displaced from heaven to earth. Its
motives are human and social, not divine. They belong to terrestrial, not celestial
existence.

The simultaneously religious and secular, “mystical” and “terrestrial” char-

acter of socialism is also mentioned in other texts.1 It is obviously heresy as far
as the dominant Marxist tradition is concerned, but we can find contemporary
European equivalents in the works of Georges Sorel, Ernst Bloch, and the
young Antonio Gramsci. In his well-known 1925 “programmatic” essay “Man
and Myth,” Mariátegui does not oppose reason and science but claims that
“neither . . . can satisfy all the need of the infinite that exists in man” (1996
[1925b]: 142). Having rejected the “mediocre positivist edifice” along with José
Ortega y Gasset’s “disenchanted soul,” which he ascribes to bourgeois civi-
lization, Mariátegui embraces Romain Rolland’s “enchanted soul,” that of the
creators of a new civilization (1996 [1925b]: 144).2 In this same text we find a
surprising and original definition of socialism’s human and spiritual meaning,

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 Löwy / COMMUNISM AND RELIGION 73

charged with Romantic exaltation insofar as it concerns the “enchanted soul”

(polemic irony is, in turn, directed at positivistic and scientificist interpretations):

The bourgeois mind amuses itself with a rationalist critique of the methods, the
theories, the technique of the revolutionaries. What incomprehension! The revo-
lutionaries’ power is not in their science but in their faith, their passion, their will.
It is a religious, mystical, spiritual power. It is the power of myth. Revolutionary
emotion, as I wrote in the article on Gandhi, is a religious emotion.3

What is the source of this heretical idea? As did European revolutionaries

such as Lukacs, Gramsci, and the 1917–1920 Benjamin, all of whom sought to
break away from the asphyxiating grip of the Second International’s Marxist
positivism, Mariátegui found Sorel fascinating. Despite his ambiguities and
ideological regressions, Sorel was the Romantic socialist par excellence.4 In
“Man and Myth,” Mariátegui portrays him as the initiator of the hypothetical
correspondence between religion and socialism (1996 [1925b]: 145):

The religious, mystical, metaphysical character of socialism has been established

for some time now. Georges Sorel . . . said in his Reflections on Violence: “An
analogy has been found between religion and revolutionary socialism, both of
which propose the preparation and even the reconstruction of the individual for
a gigantic task. But Bergson has taught us that not only religion can fill the region
of the deepest self. Revolutionary myths can also fulfill the same purpose.”
Renan, as Sorel himself recalls, notes the religious faith of the socialists, showing
their resistance to all discouragement.

However, if we compare Mariátegui’s commentary with Sorel’s text, we can

see that neither he nor Ernest Renan clearly supported this thesis. What Sorel
wrote was that revolutionary myths and religion occupied the same place in
the human conscience (“the deepest self”). Moreover, as his use of the con-
junction “but” indicates, he seems to disagree with a proposed analogy. His is
a psychological argument, not a historical or philosophical parallel. According
to Sorel, Renan considered socialism a utopia. From his point of view, this
served as a “superficial explanation” of socialist obstinacy. The word “reli-
gion” never appears in this context (Sorel, 1990 [1908]: 32). In fact, the notion
of socialism’s “religious, mystical, metaphysical character” belongs to neither
Sorel nor Renan but to Mariátegui.
In some of Friedrich Engels’s writings we find comparisons between origi-
nal Christianity and modern socialism, but for the author of Anti-Dühring this
established a historical analogy between two mass movements persecuted by
the authorities rather than a substantial affinity between socialism and religion.
Mariátegui’s most like-minded Marxist colleague was probably the young
Gramsci, who, in a 1916 article on Péguy, rendered homage to the “mystical
religious sentiment of socialism . . . that invades everything and takes us
beyond the ordinary and miserable polemics of small and vulgar materialistic
politicians” (Gramsci, 1958 [1916]: 33–34).5
Along with Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, Unamuno’s The Agony of Christianity
is Mariátegui’s main source when discussing the affinities between politics
and religion. In his 1926 review of the book, he decides to interpret Marxism
in terms of agonic spirituality in Unamuno’s sense of the word: “Unamuno

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74 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

writes: ‘I simultaneously feel politics elevated to the height of religion and

religion elevated to the height of politics.’ Marxists, revolutionaries speak and
feel with the same passion: those in whom Marxism is spirit, word and verb;
those in whom Marxism is struggle, agony.” From this reasoning, Mariátegui
develops a surprising comparison between Marx and Dostoyevsky: like the
Russian writer, modern socialism’s founder becomes “a Christian, an agonic
soul, a polemic spirit.” In other words (those of José Vasconcelos), ”the belea-
guered Marx is closer to Christ than to Aquinas” (1975 [1926a]: 120). This is an
unconventional argument, but it is somehow incorporated into the Marxist
tradition that, from Engels’s later writings to the work of Karl Kautsky and
Rosa Luxemburg, seeks to interpret Christ and primitive Christianity as pre-
cursors of modern socialism. Obviously, Mariátegui goes even farther: he is
not as interested in historical affiliations as he is in the spiritual kinship
between the agonic souls of Christ and Marx.6
In fact, and aside from Marx, the Romantic, “quixotic” theme of agony has
much to do with Mariátegui’s political and religious identity. It relates to his
Sitz-im-Leben, his personal view of revolutionary commitment: “I’ve found a
particular faith on my journey. Therein lies everything. But I have found it
because my soul had long been searching for God. I am an agonic soul, as
Unamuno would say (agony, as Unamuno so rightly points out, is not death
but struggle; he who struggles agonizes)” (Mariátegui, 1976 [1926b]: 154).
Other references to Unamuno’s work during these years frequently address
the idea of a dialectic interaction between religion and politics. Mariátegui is
nevertheless mainly interested in the first part of the Spanish thinker’s assertion:
the spiritual elevation of politics as opposed to its wretched administrative
downgrading (1971 [1926c]: 171).

Since politics for Huidobro is exclusively that of the Palais Bourbon, we can
grant his art all the autonomy he desires. But the truth is that, as Unamuno says,
for those of us who raise it to the category of a religion, politics is the very plot
of History. In a classical era, or at the height of any order, politics can be simply an
administration and a parliament. In romantic eras, or in those of crisis, politics
occupies the foreground of life.
Louis Aragón, André Breton, and their comrades of La Révolution Surréaliste—the
greatest spirits of the French vanguard—proclaim this with their actions on their
march toward communism.

Surrealism, a movement of spiritual revolution, fascinated Mariátegui, and

he wrote several articles about it. Here his mention of it is interesting insofar
as the movement embodied a Romantic/revolutionary current seeking a reen-
chantment of the world along with a complete rejection of traditional Christian
religion. Does this not appear to contradict the image of Christ and the quote
from Unamuno? I think that what attracts Mariátegui to both Unamuno and
the surrealists is the enchanted soul, mysticism, and agony, the risky struggle
for supreme values, a heroic quest for sense—something ultimately quite
different from institutional religion, with its dogmas and clergy.
This institutional aspect can be found—reversed—at the center of “The
Religious Factor,” in Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1976 [1928b]):
here, Mariátegui sets aside the mystical reflections that characterize his
1924–1926 essays and examines religion from a scientific and social point of
view, that is, adopting a historical, sociological, or anthropological approach.

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 Löwy / COMMUNISM AND RELIGION 75

Even so, the introductory chapter evidences his desire to avoid any kind of
reductionism in approaching religious phenomena and to distance himself from
liberal or enlightened critiques of “clerical obscurantism” (1976 [1928b]: 162):

The days of anticlerical apriorism are clearly over. . . . The concept of religion has
increased in size and depth. It is no longer reduced to a single church and a single
rite. It also credits institutions and religious sentiments with a meaning quite
different from the one naively attributed to them by those who, with incandes-
cent radicalism, identified religiosity with “obscurantism.”
Revolutionary criticism no longer quibbles about or disputes the bequests
and historical importance of religions or even churches.

The first section of the chapter addresses “the religion of Tawantinsuyo,”

the pre-Columbian Inca civilization. As Antonio Melis has recently observed,
Mariátegui’s major strength is the contraposition of official Inca religion and
popular religion, the first being an instrument of power attached to the orga-
nization of the Andean state while the second has animistic traces and deep
cultural roots (1994: 15). According to Mariátegui, the “theocratic collectivism”
of the Incas had temporal rather than spiritual goals and disappeared with the
destruction of the Inca state. This was not the case with the popular religion
of the ancient Peruvians, which survived the conquest and colonization.
Using anthropological concepts developed by James Frazer in his classic The
Golden Bough, Mariátegui identifies this popular religion as a form of animism
based on totemic magic and taboos, “instinctive elements of a primitive
religiosity” (1976 [1928b]: 164–167).7
Mariátegui’s analysis is evocative, but one is under the impression that his
chosen conceptual apparatus stops him from fully depicting the wealth of the
religious Andean imaginary. In fact, he himself points out the limitations of an
attempt at this kind of “scientific” interpretation (1975 [1925c]: 64):

If Valcarcel were a rationalist and a positivist . . . he would talk . . . about

indigenous “animism” and “totemism.” . . . But then, Valcarcel would probably
not have written “Los hombres de piedra.” Neither would he have singled out—
with such religious conviction—the Franciscan element of the Quechua as one of
the essential characteristics of indigenous sentiment. His version of the spirit of
the Tawantinsuyu would therefore be incomplete.
But science kills legend; it destroys the symbol. And while science, by categoriz-
ing the myth of the “men of stone” as a simple case of animism, does not effectively
help us understand the Tawantinsuyu, legend and poetry present its cosmic
sentiment congealed in symbol.

The second section deals with “the Catholic conquest”—the “active, direct,
militant part” played by the Church in the Spanish Conquest as well as in the
establishment of a “new theocracy” that supplanted old Inca power. Mariátegui
analyzes the colonial Catholicism that ruled the Andes for centuries and char-
acterizes it as a bureaucratic and parasitic system in which “the religious element
was absorbed and dominated by the ecclesiastic element.” At the same time,
he acknowledges the positive role played by large factions of the clergy who
supported indigenous rights: “The Indians, exploited in the mines, obrajes,
and missions, found their most efficacious defenders in convents and even
parishes. Father de Las Casas, in whom the better virtues of the missionary
and the evangelist flowered, had precursors and heirs” (Mariátegui, 1976
[1928b]: 170–172).

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76 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

The most original part of this segment is the comparison between

Protestantism and Catholicism, between the Anglo-Saxon colonization of North
America and the Hispanic one in South America. Quoting Engels, Mariátegui
observes that Calvin’s religious reform responded to the needs of the most
developed contemporary bourgeoisie. His personal interpretation goes even
farther: in his opinion, “Protestanism makes its entrance into history as the spir-
itual leaven of the capitalist process.” In other words, “the Reformation forged
the moral weapons of the bourgeois revolution, opening the road to capitalism.”
This hypothesis is closer to Max Weber’s writings on the sociology of religion
than to Marx or Engels. When speaking of the “consanguinity between the two
phenomena”—capitalism and Protestantism—Mariátegui uses the term that
Weber uses in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Wahlverwandtschaft,
or elective affinity. Nevertheless, no reference to Weber or his thesis can be
found in the Seven Essays. There is only a secondhand quotation taken from the
Spanish writer Ramiro de Maeztu: in Calvinism, salvation lies in the fulfillment
of an individual’s professional duty, “which implies a moralization of ways of
spending money” (Mariátegui, 1976 [1928b]: 177–180). Like Gramsci, Mariátegui
is interested in Protestantism as a modern and dynamic form of religion. He
does not believe, however, in the possibility of its development in Latin
America: its expansion there has been countered by the development of the anti-
imperialist movement, which sees Protestant missions as implied advances of
Anglo-Saxon capitalism, whether British or North American (Mariátegui, 1976
[1928b]: 192).8
The third section of the chapter, “Independence and the Church,” examines
how the failure to break with the colonial past eventually turned the inde-
pendent Peruvian state into a semifeudal Catholic system in which “the per-
sistence of feudal privileges was logically accompanied by ecclesiastical
privileges.” Mariátegui points to the inefficacy of the radical or anarchic-
unionist current (which he refers to as “gonzález-pradista”), arguing that its
anticlerical revolt was unsuccessful because it lacked a social-economic
program (Mariátegui, 1976 [1928b]: 185–191).
In the last pages of the chapter Mariátegui develops two general conclusions
that attempt to synthesize what he considers the Marxist view of religion. The
first one is based on historical materialism (Mariátegui, 1976 [1928b]: 192):

In accordance with the conclusions of historical materialism (which must not be

confused with philosophical materialism), socialism considers ecclesiastical
forms and religious doctrines peculiar to the economic and social regime that sus-
tains them. It is therefore concerned with changing the latter rather than the for-
mer. Socialism views mere anticlerical agitation as a liberal bourgeois diversion.

The second reiterates the thesis proposed by Sorel in his 1925–1926 articles, this
time in a manner that is more congenial to the French socialist’s psychological—
possibly Freudian—orientation: “As Sorel declared, recent historical experience
has proved that revolutionary or social myths can occupy man’s deepest con-
sciousness as profoundly as old religious myths” (Mariátegui, 1976 [1928b]: 193).
It is apparent that Mariátegui’s notion of religion goes beyond traditional
concepts. This is explicitly stated in a passage about Manuel González Prada
in the section “Literature on Trial” of the Seven Essays (1976 [1928b]: 263–264):

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 Löwy / COMMUNISM AND RELIGION 77

González Prada was wrong . . . to preach antireligiosity. Nowadays we know

more about religion. . . . We know that a revolution is always religious. The word
“religion” has a new value, a new sense. It is more than a mere designation for a
rite or a church. It matters little that the Soviets write in their propaganda,
“Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Communism is essentially religious. The
remaining cause of misunderstanding is the old connotation of the word.

Mariátegui does not venture a new definition of religion, one that goes
beyond “the old connotation” and explains its “new sense.” It can be inferred
that it is perhaps an ethical, political, and spiritual concept related to “the need
of the infinite that exists in man” and the quest for a heroic myth that might
provide meaning and “enchantment” to life.
In his last important text, Defensa del Marxismo, he comes back to Sorelian
themes and the comparison between revolutionary and religious myths. In
this particular, Mariátegui differs from other Bergsonian and Sorelian Marxists
of the 1917–1923 period who, with Lukacs, Gramsci, Bloch, and Benjamin,
drew away from Sorel as they came closer to official communism in the 1920s.
The Peruvian Marxist is the only one who, despite his devotion to the Third
International, continues to employ Sorelian themes (1976 [1930]: 22):

Sorel moves beyond the rationalist and positivist foundations of the socialism of
his age. In Bergson and the pragmatists, he finds ideas that reinvigorate socialist
thought, restoring it to the revolutionary mission from which it had gradually
distanced itself because of the increasingly bourgeois intellectual and spiritual
approach of parties and their parliamentarians, who were philosophically satis-
fied with the flattest historicism and the most timorous evolutionism. The theory
of revolutionary myths, which applies the experience of religious movements to
the socialist movement, lays the foundations of a philosophy of revolution.

In contrast to Lukacs and Gramsci, Mariátegui insists on the “religious

ascendancy of Marxism” and the “idealist/religious” vocation of socialist
materialism: “If the materialist religiously professes and serves his faith, only
a language convention can define him as different from or opposed to the
idealist” (Mariátegui, 1976 [1930]: 59–60). The surprising dialectic between
materialism and idealism (the latter identified with ethics and religion) is one
of the most original themes in his thought. In another “programmatic” text,
the famous editorial “Anniversary and Balance Sheet” for Amauta magazine,
Mariátegui addresses it in a deliberately paradoxical and provocative manner:
“Socialist materialism embraces all possibilities for spiritual, ethical, and
philosophical ascent. And we never feel ourselves more fiercely, effectively,
and religiously idealistic than when putting our ideas and our feet on the
ground” (Mariátegui, 1996 [1928a]: 90). The positivist interpretation of the
socialist doctrine (valid for a substantial part of official Second and Third
International Marxism, on its way to Stalinization by 1928) cannot account for
its moral and political signification: “As long as it plays a historical role as
scripture and method of a mass movement, any attempt to categorize it as a
simple scientific theory is futile” (Mariátegui, 1976 [1930]: 41). Starting with
the fundamental presupposition that “every act of Marxism has an accent of
faith, of willpower, of heroic and creative conviction,” Mariátegui proposes an
ethical and political comparison between revolutionary and Christian mysti-
cism. He also compares the assemblies of the Third International with the
mysticism of catacomb Christianity (an analogy already suggested by Engels,

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78 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

although Mariátegui does not quote him), Rosa Luxemburg with Teresa of
Avila,9 and, generally speaking, the heroes of socialism with those of religion:
“As far as moral beauty and the full affirmation of the spirit are concerned, the
biographies of Marx, Sorel, Lenin, and of a thousand other agonists of socialism
have nothing to begrudge the biographies of heroes and ascetics who, in the
past, acted in accordance with spiritual or religious concepts (in the classic
sense of the terms)” (Mariátegui, 1976 [1930]: 103).
Besides his interesting socio-historical observations regarding the “religious
factor” in Peru, Mariátegui’s most original and innovative contribution to
Marxist reflections on religion is his hypothesis regarding the religious dimen-
sion of socialism—his analysis of the elective affinities (to use Weber’s term)
between revolutionary mysticism and Christian faith. It is true, however, that
this is not a systematic formulation but a series of fragments strewn with bril-
liant insights.10 It is probably no coincidence that the founder of liberation the-
ology, the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, once taught a course “on
Mariátegui’s ideas” at the University of Lima. His founding work, A Theology
of Liberation (1973), has various references to the author of the Seven Essays.11
In fact, Mariátegui’s hypotheses play a substantial role in an understanding of
Camilo Torres, liberation theology, the participation of Christians in Latin
American revolutionary movements (such as Nicaraguan Sandinismo), and the
“revolutionary mysticism” of social or sociopolitical movements such as the
Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Rural
Workers’ Movement—MST) or the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional
(Zapatista Army of National Liberation—EZLN) in Chiapas.12

NOTES

1. From his youth, Mariátegui had harbored a religious attitude, a quest for faith. This can
be seen, for example, in his article “La procesión tradicional,” which he wrote under the pseu-
donym of Juan Croniqueur, in La Prensa, October 20, 1914 (a reference for which I am indebted
to Gerardo Leibner). On religion in Mariátegui’s work, see Alfonso Ibañez (1978: 74–78) and
Flores Galindo (1982: 175–181).
2. Rolland is an important referent for Mariátegui given the religious and humanistic dimen-
sion of his “enchanted soul”: “The spirit of Romain Rolland is fundamentally religious. . . . He
ignores and despises politics, so it is not his political thought that can bind us to him. It is his
great soul. . . . It is his human faith, the religiosity of his acts and thoughts” (1971 [1926d]: 135).
3. The following paragraph repeats the phrase quoted in the Gandhi article: “Religious motives
have been displaced form the heavens to the earth. They are not divine; they are human, social.”
4. Robert Paris (1978a; 1978b) provides the best analysis of Mariátegui’s use of Sorel.
5. It is probable that Mariátegui did not know this or other similar articles by the young
Gramsci. On the affinities between Mariátegui and Gramsci, see Guibal and Ibañez (1987: 133–145).
6. It appears that Mariátegui was able to persuade Unamuno. In a letter to him, Unamuno
admitted that “Marx was not professor but prophet” (Mariátegui, 1976 [1930]: 56).
7. Regarding Mariátegui’s free use of Frazer, see Melis (1982).
8. Mariátegui’s conjecture was effective for half a century, but in the past 20 years the
Pentecostal variation of Protestantism has developed spectacularly, despite anti-imperialist feelings.
9. “A time will come when [Rosa Luxemburg], the amazing woman who wrote those mar-
velous letters to Luisa Kautsky while in prison, will awaken the same devotion and find the
same recognition as Teresa de Ávila” (Mariátegui, 1976 [1930]: 44).
10. A comparison with analogous ideas (but quite diverse implications) in the work of Ernst
Bloch, Walter Benjamin, or Lucien is beyond the scope of this essay.

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 Löwy / COMMUNISM AND RELIGION 79

11. See Gutiérrez (1980: 115). Gutierrez never quotes directly any of Mariátegui’s passages
regarding the “religious ascendancy of Marxism.”
12. I have studied these movements and their socio-religious roots in “liberation Christianity”
in The War of Gods (1998).

REFERENCES

Flores Galindo, Alberto

1982 La agonia de Mariátegui: La polémica con la Komintern. Lima: Desco.
Gramsci, Antonio
1958 [1916] “Carlo Péguy ed Ernesto Psichari,” in Scritti giovanili. Torino: Einaudi.
Guibal, Francis and Alfonso Ibañez
1987 Mariategui hoy. Lima: Tarea.
Gutiérrez, Gonzalo
1973 A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Trans. Sister Caridad, Inda and
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