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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
Downloaded from lap.sagepub.com by Tin Bergel on October 15, 2010
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):
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
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.
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 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).
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):
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.
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.
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