The Many Tasks of The Marxist Translator

Historical Materialism 30.
1 (2022) 99–132
brill.com/hima
The Many Tasks of the Marxist Translator

Approaching Marxism as/in/with Translation from Antonio Gramsci
to the Zapatistas
Gavin Arnall
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
garnall@umich.edu
Abstract
This article examines numerous conceptions of translation within the Marxist tra-
dition. It begins with Antonio Gramsci’s theorisation of the concept before turning
to the problem of Marxism in Latin America and how the Zapatistas have dealt with
this problem. The aim is to shed light on a critical school of Marxist thinking, which
requires that Marxism’s universalist claims be translated in response to changing his-
torical conditions so that they may become concrete formulations capable of speaking
to and intervening in concrete situations. Yet the Zapatistas go further by maintain-
ing that translation must also occur between the universalist claims of Marxist theory
and the competing universalist claims of indigenous Maya cosmology. The article
thus underscores what can be gleaned from different modes of translation in terms
of Marxism’s future and its capacity to enter into mutually beneficial alliances with
distinct worldviews and ongoing social movements.
Keywords
Antonio Gramsci – indigenous cosmologies – Marxism – José Carlos Mariátegui –

translation – universality – the Zapatista movement
…
Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had dis-
proved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this
were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to
accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss
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100 ARNALL
all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy

for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the
uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not
the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the
contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.
georg lukács, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’1
…
The Bolshevik revolution […] is a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital.
[…The Bolsheviks] are not ‘Marxists’; they have not used the Master’s
works to compile a rigid doctrine, made up of dogmatic and unquestion-
able claims. They are living out Marxist thought.
antonio gramsci, ‘The Revolution Against Capital’2
∵
Since the 2008 world economic crash, communism has experienced a major
comeback in contemporary theoretical debates.3 To mention just a few exam-
ples from a growing list of publications on the topic, we could recall Alain
Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis, Jodi Dean’s The Communist Horizon,
Bruno Bosteels’s The Actuality of Communism, and the three edited volumes
on ‘The Idea of Communism’, compiling the papers from conferences held in
London, New York, and Seoul.4 Over the past decade, socialism has likewise
enjoyed a surge in popularity, even to the extent of becoming a buzzword in
mainstream electoral politics in the United States through figures like Bernie
Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.5 And yet
the third ‘ism’ of this series, Marxism, is still regarded by many as naming
1 Lukács 1971, p. 1; original emphasis.

2 Gramsci 1994, pp. 39, 40; original emphasis.
3 Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the University of Southern California (2016),
the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (2016), and the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2019). I thank Erin Graff Zivin, Brenno
Kaneyasu, Alessandro Fornazzari, and Gary Wilder for their generous invitations to present
my work and for their contributions, along with the other participants and attendees, to my
thinking about Marxism and translation.
4 Badiou 2010; Bosteels 2011; Dean 2012; Douzinas and Žižek (eds.) 2010; Žižek (ed.) 2013;
Taek-Gwang Lee and Žižek (eds.) 2016.
5 See, among other possible titles, Sunkara 2020.
Historical Materialism 30.1 (2022) 99–132

THE MANY TASKS OF THE MARXIST TRANSLATOR 101
something irredeemably outdated, passé, archaic. As Bosteels rightly observes

in the Introduction to his book on Marx and Freud in Latin America, ‘The
least that may be said today about Marxism is that […] its mere mention has
become an unmistakable sign of obsolescence.’6 This sentiment gets expressed
in various ways among contemporary theorists, including calls on the Left to
read ‘Marx beyond Marxism’7 and to secure a future for communism ‘by break-
ing with its Marxist interpretation’.8 The irony of this rather widespread sen-
timent, which has gained particular traction within certain academic circles,
is that it hinges on a misunderstanding of what Marxism is at its core, as if it
were a doctrinaire school of thought, with a set of rigid beliefs inherited from a
distant time in the past, and not an open and experimental form of theory and
practice that has inscribed in itself a conception of its own continual transfor-
mation in response to the emergence of new historical conditions.
Despite their various differences, Lukács and Gramsci agree on this aspect
of Marxism’s nature. The kind of Marxism that treats Marx’s theses as sacred
and timeless axioms, as ‘a dogmatic system of eternal and absolute truths’, is
not really Marxism at all.9 Marxism, on the contrary, entails living out Marxist
thought, contributing to an inner revolution in Marxism itself as part of a
broader movement aimed at transforming the world. Marxists thus repeat
Marx, not by rehearsing the same arguments or by ardently defending the the-
ses of Capital but by practising the same method, what Lenin called ‘the living
soul’ of Marxism, the ‘concrete analysis of a concrete situation’.10 It follows that
the true Marxist is not a Marxist and that orthodox Marxism is not orthodox –
at least not in the narrow way that such labels are typically construed – since,
as historical conditions change, it becomes necessary to diverge from Marx
and even in some instances to carry out a revolution against his writings in
order to remain faithful to Marxism.
In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci would continue to meditate on this idea
and reframe it as a matter of translation, stating that it is the task of the Marxist
theoretician to ‘“translate” into theoretical language [“tradurre” in linguaggio
6 Bosteels 2012, p. 1.
7 Mezzadra 2018, pp. 1–7. While I am not convinced by Mezzadra’s formulation, this does
not detract from his moving and original reading of Marx.
8 Christian Laval as cited in Bosteels 2011, p. 10, n. 10. For Laval’s original text, see Laval 2009,
pp. 48–53.
9 Gramsci 2001, Q11, §62, p. 1489; Gramsci 2005, p. 407. All citations of Gramsci’s Prison
Notebooks refer to Valentino Gerratana’s Italian critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere
(Gramsci 2001) and existing English translations of these texts. When citing Gerratana’s
edition, I follow the standard citation of notebook number (Q), note number (§), page
number (p).
10 Lenin 1965c, p. 166. On the notion of repetition as it is deployed here, see Žižek 2004, p. 11.
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102 ARNALL
teorico] the elements of historical life. It is not reality which should be expected
to conform to the abstract schema.’11 The theoretical claims of Marxism, in
other words, are to be understood as historically determinate translations of
concrete situations and not as eternal formulas that can be applied to any and
every historical context: hence, Marxism as translation, as a method of trans-
lating elements of historical life into theoretical language.12 In contrast, what is
often mistaken for Marxism – the conversion of Marx’s theses into an abstract
schema and the reduction of disparate concrete situations into mere exem-
plifications of that schema – is better understood as ‘Byzantinism’ or ‘scho-
lasticism’, which Gramsci defines as the ‘regressive tendency to treat so-called
theoretical questions as if they had a value in themselves, independently of
any specific practice’.13 Indeed, Marx warns against this very tendency in the
Grundrisse and maintains that ‘even the most abstract categories [… are] a
product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within
these relations.’14
This emphasis on the historicity or historical determinateness of Marxist
theory, on the ‘practical origins’ of Marxism’s theoretical claims and on the
‘provisional’ rather than absolute value of its categories, nevertheless comes
with a certain risk: such a view could be misconstrued as confining the results
of Marx’s investigations to the specific historical conditions of which they
are the product, as if his writings had nothing to teach other times and other
places and could not meaningfully contribute to the interpretation and trans-
formation of new conjunctures.15 Gramsci explains, however, that the theo-
retical claims of Marx and all subsequent Marxists must endure another kind
of translation if they are to speak to historical contexts other than their own,
if they are to remain living formulations that can illuminate and intervene in
new situations. Gramsci develops this point in a brief but important note on
the politics of translation, maintaining that Lenin, ‘in dealing with organiza-
tional questions, wrote and said (more or less) this: we have not been able to
“translate” our language into those of Europe [“tradurre” nelle lingue europee
11 Gramsci 2001, Q3, §48, p. 332; Gramsci 2005, p. 200.

12 Here much of the existing scholarship on Gramsci turns to his discussion of common
sense, speculative philosophy, bourgeois political economy, spontaneous movements,
and other elements of historical life as the ‘original’ texts that the philosophy of praxis
renovates, organises, makes more critical and coherent – in short, translates. For this
dimension of Gramsci’s thinking, I have found particularly helpful Peter D. Thomas’s
trailblazing study, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Thomas
2010).
14 Marx 1993, p. 105. See, relatedly, Ryan 2016, pp. 105–29.
15 Gramsci 2001, Q11, §62, p. 1489; Gramsci 2005, p. 406. For more on this point, see Thomas
2010, pp. 252–3, 297–300, 361–2, 431–3.

la nostra lingua].’16 As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have pointed out,
Gramsci is alluding to and paraphrasing – we could even say ‘translating’ –
Lenin’s speech at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, which
was titled, ‘Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World
Revolution’.17 During this speech, Lenin self-critically reflects on a resolution
that was adopted at the previous congress concerning the organisational
structure of the communist party.18 He notes that the great strength of the
resolution – but also its great weakness – is that ‘everything in it is based on
Russian conditions’.19 The resolution is a prime example of what it means to
concretely analyse a concrete situation, yet it remains confined to that situ-
ation, even as it attempts to develop broader guidelines for ‘the organization
of the communist parties of all countries’.20 Lenin doubts that the resolution
will be intelligible to anyone outside of Russia and, even if some exceptional
comrades were to come along and decipher its more obscure references, the
resolution would not give them any indication of how to implement its guide-
lines when facing vastly different circumstances. Lenin thus concludes: ‘We
have not learnt to present our Russian experience to foreigners. All that was
said in the resolution has remained a dead letter.’21
For Gramsci, Lenin’s self-critical observations revolve around a problem
of translation, not in the narrowly linguistic sense of the term, since the
Comintern had many competent translators of Russian, but rather in the sense
of carrying theoretical claims across distinct historical contexts so that the les-
sons of the Russian experience might have an impact elsewhere and ultimately
contribute to raising the prospects of world revolution. For this to occur, the
lessons would need to be translated into other languages, which means that
the Comintern’s resolution concerning the party form, as a product of the
Russian experience, would have to be rethought and reformulated to address
the specific historical conditions of other countries.22 What Gramsci takes
away from Lenin’s speech, in sum, is the importance of translation for a truly

17 Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 270. See also Arnall 2020a, pp. 9–10; Lichtner 2010,
pp. 197–8; Ives 2004, pp. 100–1.
18 See Communist International 1988.
19 Lenin 1965b, p. 430.
20 Communist International 1988, p. 25.
21 Lenin 1965b, p. 25.
22 As Nergis Ertürk and Özge Serin have pointed out, Lenin explicitly conceived of trans-
lation in this way, writing that ‘the task’ facing communist organisations of the East
was ‘to translate [perevesti] the true communist doctrine, which was intended for the
Communists of the more advanced countries, into the language of every people.’ (Lenin
as cited in Ertürk and Serin 2016, p. 23.) For the source of this passage, see Lenin 1965a, pp.
151–62.

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internationalist mode of politics, a politics that would oppose both dogmatism

and provincialism, both imposing the untranslated Russian experience on all
other countries and insisting on the absolutely unique and strictly national
implications of the communist party’s development in Russia.
At this point, we can appreciate how the two modes of translation that
Gramsci describes are actually intertwined. If Marxist translators convert ele-
ments of historical life into theoretical language, if they produce a linguag-
gio teorico out of said elements, they necessarily do so in the languages or
tongues, the specific lingue, that correspond to a specific concrete situation.23
The Comintern’s resolution is one such example of translating an element of
historical life into theoretical language, but this translation occurs in a Russian
tongue, for the resolution’s claims about organisational structures in general
are based on the specific historical conditions of the Russian experience. If
these claims are to travel outside of Russia in a nondogmatic way, if they are
not to be grafted onto another context in a readymade fashion, then they will
need to be translated into other tongues, then they will need to be thoroughly
reformulated in accordance with different historical conditions. Gramsci’s
reflections on Lenin and translation ought therefore to be read as a call to rei-
magine the vanguard party form in Europe, to reinvent the party based on the
specificity of the European – and more specifically Italian – milieu. But such
an interpretation should not overshadow the broader theoretical implications
of Gramsci’s notes, for he is also developing a meditation on Marxism in trans-
lation, which is to say, a meditation on the possible afterlives of Marxism’s
theoretical claims once they travel beyond the concrete situations in which
they were produced.24
These reflections nevertheless beg the question: Are all elements of Marxist
theory equally translatable? And what does the answer to this question imply
about the relationship, in a given historical moment, between Russia and the
world, a specific context and a general condition, the particular and the uni-
versal? In another passage from his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci gestures toward
a response to these questions. He writes:
23 This is not to say that throughout the Prison Notebooks Gramsci consistently maintains
this distinction between linguaggio and lingue. For a discussion of the different ways in
which he deploys these keywords, see Carlucci 2014, p. 24, n. 16. See also Ives and Lacorte
2010, p. 12; Boothman 2010, pp. 107–33.
24 On the ‘continued life’ or ‘afterlife’ of the ‘original’, see Benjamin 1996, pp. 253–63; Derrida
1985, pp. 93–162; Thomas 2020a, pp. 5–30. On travelling theory, see Said 1983, pp. 226–47;
Said 1999, pp. 197–214.

The problem arises of whether a theoretical truth, whose discovery cor-

responded to a specific practice, can be generalized and considered as
universal for a historical epoch. The proof of its universality consists pre-
cisely 1. in its becoming a stimulus to know better the reality of a situa-
tion that is different from that in which it was discovered […]; 2. when
it has stimulated and helped this better understanding of the effectual
reality, in its capacity to incorporate itself in that same reality as if it were
originally an expression of it. It is in this incorporation that its concrete
universality lies [. …] In short, the principle must always rule that ideas
are not born of other ideas, philosophies of other philosophies; they are
a continually renewed expression of real historical development. […] It
can further be deduced that every truth, even if it is universal, and even
if it can be expressed by an abstract formula of a mathematical kind
(for the sake of the theoreticians), owes its effectiveness to its being
expressed in the languages [linguaggi] appropriate to particular concrete
situations. If it cannot be expressed in specific terms [lingue particolari],
it is a byzantine and scholastic abstraction, good only for phrasemongers
to toy with.25
To unpack this rich and complicated passage, we can begin with Gramsci’s
assertion that every theoretical truth corresponds to a specific practice occur-
ring in a particular concrete situation. Such a truth may be articulated as uni-
versal, but it only becomes concretely universal once it is incorporated into a
new situation as if it had always been an expression of that situation. To say
this is to challenge a long, metaphysical tradition of thinking that approaches
universality as a static and invariable condition that can be posited in advance
(e.g. philosophical axioms, first principles, eternal forms). Gramsci instead
works within a dialectical tradition of thinking that insists on the historical
movement of universality, its passage from the abstract to the concrete. He
speaks of theoretical claims as ‘historically true’ rather than invariably true,
and he maintains that such claims demonstrate their validity ‘to the extent
that they become concretely – i.e. historically and socially – universal’.26 For
a theoretical claim to pass through such a process of becoming, it must be
25 Gramsci 2001, Q9, §63, p. 1134; Gramsci 2005, p. 201, translation modified. Note that the
English translation renders realtà effettuale as ‘concrete reality’ and concreta universalità
as ‘real universality’, which makes Gramsci’s allusions to Machiavelli (on ‘effectual truth’)
and Hegel (on ‘concrete universality’) difficult to recognise for the Anglophone reader. On
Gramsci’s ‘re-writing’ or translation of effectual truth into effectual reality, see Godorecci
1993, pp. 133–5.
26 Gramsci 2001, Q10II, §44, p. 1330; Gramsci 2005, p. 348.

106 ARNALL
translated into the specific terms – the particular tongue or tongues – of a

concrete situation other than the one in which it was discovered. If it cannot
be expressed in such specific terms, on the other hand, it reveals itself to be
a byzantine abstraction, the kind of one-sided abstraction that has no rela-
tion to (or bearing on) practice. This distinction clarifies what is at stake in
Gramsci’s reflections on the lessons of the Russian Revolution. He is ultimately
concerned with the translatability of Marxism as a theoretical language; his
aim is to decipher which of its theoretical claims can stimulate a better under-
standing of the effectual reality of Italy and, in that way, contribute to Italy’s
transformation.
Indeed, much of Gramsci’s thinking about translation revolves around the
question of the relationship between theory and practice, interpreting a given
historical reality and changing said reality. He develops this line of inquiry
in various notes that return again and again to a moment in The Holy Family
where Marx and Engels, in critical dialogue with Edgar Bauer, underscore the
elective affinity between the political thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and
the philosophical musings of Bruno Bauer.27 The key passage reads: ‘If Herr
Edgar compares French equality with German “self-consciousness” for an
instant, he will see that the latter principle expresses in German, i.e., in abstract
thought, what the former says in French, that is, in the language of politics and
of thoughtful observation.’28 This comparison between the language of French
politics and that of German philosophy fascinates Gramsci in part because it
is not an entirely original idea but rather a translation; Marx and Engels bor-
row the idea from Hegel and reformulate it in and for their own context. It was
Hegel, after all, who made the following observation during his discussion of
the Kantian notion of Freedom: ‘Among the Germans this view assumed no
other form than that of tranquil theory; but the French wished to give it practi-
cal effect.’29
Beyond the purely philological interest of this reference for Marxologists,
Gramsci suggests that it has a greater theoretical significance when read as
‘the “source” of the thought expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach that “the phi-
losophers have explained the world and the point is now to change it”; that is
to say, that philosophy must become politics in order to realize itself.’30 The
inverted commas over the word ‘source [fonte]’ make clear what Gramsci is
27 See, for example, the notes Boothman organised under the title, ‘The Translatability of
Scientific and Philosophical Languages’, in Gramsci 1995, pp. 306–25.
28 Marx and Engels 1975, p. 39, original emphasis.
29 Hegel 1991, p. 443.

not suggesting: that Hegel invented the Marxist theory of the unity of theory
and practice.31 But Hegel did provide an ‘element’ for the elaboration of that
theory, an element of historical life that Marx translated into a different theo-
retical language.32 As a result of this translation process, Gramsci also suggests,
Marx can account for the dialectical movement whereby philosophy, ‘in order
to go on being philosophy’, gets translated into politics.33
It would be misleading to read this latter form of translation as entailing a
unidirectional movement from theory to practice. For Gramsci, on the con-
trary, the comparison between ‘a politico-juridical language [linguaggio] in
France’ and ‘a philosophical, doctrinal and theoretical one in Germany’ dem-
onstrates that they are ‘mutually translatable [traducibili reciprocamente]’.34
Gramsci’s theorisation of mutual translatability, in other words, posits a rela-
tionship of reciprocal movement between languages rather than a relation-
ship of origin and telos, source language and target language.35 This implies, in
turn, that practice cannot be reduced to the mechanical application of theory
but rather that both form – at least within the Marxist tradition – an ongoing
dynamic of mutual translation. The efforts of the Marxist translator discussed
thus far are meant to contribute to this dynamic, to setting theory and prac-
tice in dialectical motion so that they can reciprocally enhance each other. Or,
to borrow a formulation from Peter Thomas, the Marxist translator seeks to
find, ‘on the one hand, the adequate theoretical form of a practice, capable of
increasing its capacity to act, [and], on the other hand, the adequate practical
form of a theory, capable of increasing its capacity to know’.36
…
I began this essay by discussing a trend among contemporary theorists to
dismiss Marxism as irredeemably outdated. I would insist, however, that
this occurs in very particular settings, such as within the confines of certain
byzantine debates in North American academia. In other locations, like the
Lacandon Jungle of Southeastern Mexico or the Andean Sierra of Bolivia,
Marxism remains a guiding light for some of today’s most significant, complex,

34 Gramsci 2001, Q11, §48, p. 1470; Gramsci 1995, p. 309, translation modified.
35 On this point, see Thomas 2020a, pp. 23–4; Frosini 2010, p. 180.
36 Thomas 2010, p. 383.

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and inspiring political experiments.37 It is within this context that the age-old
problem of Marxism in Latin America regains its significance and vitality.
Gramsci’s ideas about translation, although an ‘outgrowth’ of his own histori-
cal time and place, can serve as a point of departure for further research into
this problem.38 Indeed, in my view, at the centre of any such inquiry should
be a focus on the task of translating universality, which is to say, on efforts to
transform Marxism’s universalist claims – about historical change, about the
revolutionary subject or agent of change, about political forms and organisa-
tional structures, and about Marxism itself – so that these claims may become
concrete when grappling with and attempting to intervene in new and unfore-
seen problems and conjunctures. This is perhaps the most pressing task of the
politically engaged theoretician concerned with Marxism in translation.
My emphasis on this task diverges from two popular tendencies that have
emerged in response to the problem of Marxism in Latin America ever since
Marx’s originary (missed) encounter with the region.39 The reader will recall
that I gestured toward both of these tendencies previously in my discussion of
Lenin’s internationalism. The first tendency, that of dogmatism, assumes that
Marxism’s scope is universal from the start and consequently does not require
any form of theoretical translation. This tendency has historically materialised
itself in the uncritical reception and application of Marxist theory throughout
Latin America, from Victorio Codovilla’s blanket enforcement of Stalinism in
the late 1920s to the rigid, pseudo-Maoism of Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, who
led the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) from the 1970s to the early 1990s.40
Such an outlook toward Marxist theory, to reiterate, misconstrues the nature
of its claims as timeless truths rather than continually renewed expressions of
historical development that change and take shape over time. To dogmatically
37 I would maintain that this is true of Bolivia even after the November 2019 coup that sent
President Evo Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera into exile for a year. The
significance and impact of Marxism in Bolivia cannot be reduced to the country’s former
leadership. For a long view of the history of Left politics in Bolivia, see Webber 2012. See,
relatedly, Gutiérrez Aguilar 2014.
38 Marx and Engels 1976, p. 501. To pursue this line of research is to build off of the tremen-
dous work that has already been done around the translatability of Gramsci’s thought in
Latin America. For some of the most important references, see Aricó 2005; Portantiero
1981; Coutinho 2012; Sánchez Vázquez 1977; Zavaleta Mercado 2018.
39 On the question of Marx’s missed encounter with Latin America, see Aricó 2014; García
Linera 1991; Bosteels 2012, pp. 5–9.
40 For an excellent summary of Codovilla’s views and their impact on the region, see Kohan
2008, pp. 116–28. For the pseudo-Maoism of the Shining Path, see, especially, Guzmán
Reynoso 1989.

apply the theses of Marx, Lenin, Mao, or any other Marxist figure to diverse
historical contexts – in Latin America or elsewhere – is tantamount to no lon-
ger practising Marxism, to abandoning the dialectical method of analysis and
replacing it with metaphysics, with ‘a historico-philosophical theory of the
general development, imposed by fate on all peoples, whatever the historical
circumstances in which they are placed’.41
The second tendency that has emerged in response to the problem of
Marxism in Latin America can be read as a critical rejoinder to the first ten-
dency that nevertheless reproduces its core limitations. This tendency aims to
provincialise Marxism, to reveal how its universalist language erases cultural
difference by generalising what only holds true for certain European countries.
From this perspective, Marxism is ultimately an inadequate theory for com-
prehending the irreducible heterogeneity of non-European realities, which
always escape its narrow and inevitably Eurocentric worldview.42 Versions of
this argument can be found throughout the history of modern Latin America,
from José Martí’s moralist rejection of Marx to the identitarian formulations
of some of today’s decolonial theorists.43 There is a rational kernel to this ten-
dency insofar as it rightly insists that an unmodified theoretical claim derived
from a European context, no matter if it is articulated as universal, will be to
a greater or lesser extent ‘misplaced’ in Latin America and out of touch with
the region’s historical specificity.44 And yet, the major limitation of this school
of thought is that it tends to foreclose in advance the possibility of Marxism’s
reinvention on the basis of Latin America’s own historical contradictions.45
The provincialist tendency thus begins to resemble the prior, dogmatic ten-
dency insofar as it subscribes to the same conception of universality, a con-
ception devoid of temporality and becoming. It is in fact the negative mirror
image of the dogmatic tendency, for it denies as false the timeless universals
41 Marx 1989, p. 200.

42 For the most well-known example of this tendency outside of the Latin American con-
text, see Chakrabarty 2008. For an excellent rejoinder, which reflects on Chakrabarty’s
problematic reading of Marx, see Chaudhary 2012, pp. 166–71.
43 On Martí’s moralist reading of Marx, see Bosteels 2012, pp. 29–49. On the identitarianism
(and Nuestroamericanismo à la Martí) of decolonial theory, see Williams 2016.
44 See Schwarz 1992.
45 Consider Schwarz on this point: ‘Ideas are in place when they represent abstractions of
the process they refer to, and it is a fatal consequence of our cultural dependency [in
Brazil] that we are always interpreting our reality with conceptual systems created some-
where else, whose basis lies in other social processes. In this sense, libertarian ideologies
themselves are often ideas out of place, and they only stop being so when they are recon-
structed on the basis of local contradictions.’ Schwarz 1992, p. 39.

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that the dogmatic tendency upholds as invariably true. It could accordingly

be said that these two tendencies, although opposed in many respects, form
a certain dialectical unity; they are symptoms of the same underlying cause,
a ‘union of bad opposites’.46 As a result, the critique of dogmatism, when pre-
mised on a static notion of universality, guarantees the restoration rather than
overcoming of dogmatism.
Drawing inspiration from Gramsci, I want to propose an altogether differ-
ent approach by arguing that Marxism begins rather than ends with recog-
nising the provinciality of its universalist claims. More precisely, Marxism’s
starting point is to acknowledge the historically determinate character of its
theses as well as the abstract form of their universality. Yet this is only the
beginning, since Marxist theory is constantly moving toward deprovincialis-
ing itself through the renewed concretisation of its universalist claims.47 This
approach also has a place in the history of modern Latin America, with José
Carlos Mariátegui as one of its earliest proponents. After studying in the same
intellectual and political milieu as Gramsci, Mariátegui returned to his native
country of Peru in 1923 to develop his own conceptualisation of Marxism as
a dialectical method of theoretical translation that would contribute to the
production of a new form of socialism in and for Latin America.48 One of his
most well-known formulations announced such a project: ‘We certainly do not
want socialism in Latin America to be a copy or imitation. It should be a heroic
creation. We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality,
in our own language.’49
The task of translating universality is just as urgent for today’s political
experiments as it was in Mariátegui’s time. However, these experiments have
acquired a further dimension of complexity and point to yet another task of
translation. While grappling with the historical specificity of concrete situa-
tions in Latin America, ensuring that the particularity of these situations is not
subsumed under the abstract universality of Marxist theory but rather trans-
forms the very substance of the latter,50 Marxist theoreticians have become
46 Jameson 2010, p. 28. See, relatedly, Michael Löwy’s discussion of ‘Indo-American excep-
tionalism and Eurocentrism’ as ‘two opposing tendencies’ that ‘paradoxically lead to a
common conclusion’ in his Introduction to Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the
Present (Löwy 1992, p. xiv). See also Cortés 2020; Arnall 2021, pp. 489–99.
47 On deprovincialisation, see Harootunian 2015, pp. 1–20; Mbembe 2017, p. 8; Wilder 2015,
pp. 9–10, 258. Kevin Anderson shows how the late Marx might be read as deprovincialis-
ing his earlier claims in Anderson 2016.
48 On the relationship between Gramsci and Mariátegui, see Aricó 1978, pp. xi–lv; Arnall,
Draper and Sabau 2015, pp. 141–70; Beigel 2003; Gonzalez 2019.
49 Mariátegui 2011, p. 130, my emphasis. See also Mariátegui 1971.
50 On this point, see Žižek 2000, pp. 99–101; Žižek 2007, pp. 1–5.

increasingly aware that they can no longer ignore indigenous belief systems
that contain their own, sometimes competing notions of universality. It is no
longer sufficient – in fact, it never was sufficient – to translate Marxism’s univer-
salist claims so that they can become concrete formulations in Latin America.
Translation must also occur between competing universalities, between the dis-
tinct and sometimes conflicting universalist horizons that pertain to Marxist
and indigenous worldviews. This is what it would mean to approach Marxism
with translation, where translation, in this instance, would be understood as a
practice that negotiates Marxism’s sometimes tense but not necessarily antag-
onistic relationship with other universalist modes of theory and practice so as
to discover how they might mutually enhance each other.
This is not something that Mariátegui ever explicitly dealt with in his writ-
ings; it represents a lacuna in his conception of Indo-American socialism.
Here I diverge from some canonical readings of Mariátegui that attempt to
construe him as a kind of border thinker: ‘It was from that very border between
Western and Ameridian cosmologies that Mariátegui’s work emerged.’51 In this
view, the creation of a socialism ‘in our own language’ would be a multilin-
gual endeavour; Indo-American socialism would emerge from Western and
Ameridian theoretical languages, from the Marxisms of Europe and the indig-
enous worldviews of Abya Yala. This is misleading, however, since Mariátegui’s
writings do not assign an identical role to Marxist and indigenous conceptions
of the world. Consider this programmatic statement made at the opening of
Mariátegui’s magnum opus, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality: ‘I
have served my best apprenticeship in Europe and I believe the only salvation
for Indo-America lies in European and Western science and thought.’52 For
Mariátegui, European and Western science and thought – and more specifically
their Marxist instantiations – make possible an interpretation of Peruvian real-
ity, including of the peoples and cultures indigenous to that reality. Indigenous
cultures, in other words, are to be interpreted by Marxism, translated into its
theoretical language as elements of historical life, but do not provide inter-
pretive tools of their own, alternative theoretical languages that might equally
contribute to the salvation of Indo-America and beyond.53
51 Mignolo 2000, p. 140. Aníbal Quijano, whom Mignolo cites just before making this claim,
advances a similar reading of Mariátegui, arguing that the latter fuses the rationality of
Marxism with the irrationality of (indigenous) myth. See Quijano 1991, pp. vii–xvi.
52 Mariátegui 1971, p. xxxiv.
53 As Jorge Coronado puts it, ‘Mariátegui tends to evade the possibility that the indio himself
might have, within his own culture and through the tools it provides, a valid and useful
way of criticising imperial structures.’ See Coronado 2009, p. 37.

112 ARNALL
To be clear, this does not mean that Mariátegui’s approach to ‘the problem of
the Indian’ was not very radical for its time. Unlike many of his contemporaries,
he insisted that the suffering and poverty of indigenous peoples could not be
overcome through education, religious conversion, administrative reform, or
racial mixing with white immigrants but only through a revolutionary move-
ment that would expropriate the expropriators and redistribute land to the
ayllus or indigenous communities.54 However, Mariátegui never explicitly rec-
ognised that another apprenticeship might be necessary upon his return from
Europe, one that would allow him to approach indigenous cultures not only
as the particular content of his theoretical elaborations but also as a source of
universalist cosmologies with their own visions of and for the world.
If Mariátegui cannot help us here, can Gramsci? Yes and no. In his Prison
Notebooks, Gramsci acknowledges that ‘various philosophies or conceptions
of the world exist’ and often reflects upon the relationship between Marxism
(as a philosophy of praxis) and other philosophies or worldviews.55 He is
particularly concerned with how Marxism might relate to the ‘spontaneous
philosophy’ of ‘common sense’, which he also describes as ‘the traditional
popular conception of the world’.56 Whereas dogmatists oppose the truth of
Marxism to the false consciousness of common sense, Gramsci maintains that
‘[b]etween the two there is a “quantitative” difference of degree, not one of
quality. A reciprocal “reduction” so to speak, a passage from one to the other
and vice versa, must be possible. (Recall […] Marx’s assertion in The Holy
Family that the political formulae of the French Revolution can be reduced
to the principles of classical German philosophy).’57 By quantitative differ-
ence, Gramsci means a greater or lesser degree of coherence, such that a given
philosophy could be regarded as more or less critical, more or less conscious,
than another. With respect to the philosophy of praxis, he maintains that it
is more coherent than common sense and therefore ‘must be a criticism of
“common sense,” basing itself initially, however, on common sense in order
to demonstrate that […] it is not a question of introducing from scratch a sci-
entific form of thought […] but of renovating and making “critical” an already
existing activity.’58 Gramsci is thus describing a form of reciprocal movement,
a dynamic, back-and-forth exchange between different conceptions of the
world. Drawing once again from his favourite passage in The Holy Family, he
54 See Mariátegui 1971, pp. 22–30.

58 Gramsci 2001, Q11, §12, p. 1383; Gramsci 2005, pp. 330–1.

suggests that the relationship between the philosophy of praxis and common
sense, like the relationship between French politics and German philosophy,
consists in the mutual translatability of distinct theoretical languages, their
reciprocal ‘reducibility’ or indebtedness to each other. In this instance, how-
ever, the relationship is also conceived as ‘vertical and pedagogical’ in nature, a
relationship that is meant to elevate common sense into ‘good sense’.59
Applying this kind of thinking to the relationship between Marxism and
indigenous cosmologies would at best produce a missed encounter between
them, though that certainly has not stopped some Marxists in Latin America
from trying.60 And yet, Gramsci’s position on the mutual translatability of the-
ory and practice could point to a different kind of relationship between Marxist
and indigenous conceptions of the world, one that would be horizontal rather
than vertical in nature, one that would entail not only reciprocal movement
but also reciprocal enhancement.61 In this scenario, a quantitative difference
would not be found between Marxism and indigenous cosmologies but rather
within each of them, a difference setting them apart from their prior iterations.
Their respective conceptions of the world, in other words, would mutually
elevate each other as a result of their relationship. This is what I have in mind
when referring to the task of translation between competing universalities.
Here I am indebted to Judith Butler, who theorises this mode of transla-
tion during her critical exchange with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek in
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left.62
In her second essay for the volume, ‘Competing Universalities’, Butler reflects
upon Laclau’s theorisation of hegemony as the capacity of a given social sec-
tor or movement to present its particular needs and aspirations as univer-
sal in scope, as coinciding with the general interests of the community at
large.63 This understanding of hegemony, which should not be conflated with
Gramsci’s theorisation of the concept,64 leads Laclau to focus on the problem
of the articulation between particularity and universality, on the struggle to
59 See Thomas 2010, pp. 372–4.

60 On this point, see Arnall 2020a, pp. 1–16. See, relatedly, García Linera 2008, pp. 373–92;
García Linera 2015, pp. 305–21.
61 Gramsci’s theorisation of the non-vertical yet still-dialectical relationship between theory
and practice is somewhat at odds with other notes in the Prison Notebooks that seek to
establish the primacy of practice over theory so as to distinguish the philosophy of praxis
from speculative philosophy. For a discussion of this tension in Gramsci’s thinking, see
Frosini 2010, pp. 179–80.
62 See, relatedly, Balibar 2002, pp. 146–76; Balibar 2020; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, pp.
277–312.
63 See, among other possible references, Laclau 2000, pp. 44–89.
64 On this point, see Thomas 2020b.

114 ARNALL
achieve a hegemonic relation whereby the particular becomes representative

of or stands in for – while remaining incommensurable with – the universal.
According to Butler, such a focus obscures another, perhaps more politically
salient problem: how to negotiate between the competing universalities that
emerge from within distinct social movements. She develops this point in the
following extended passage:
[I]f the ‘particular’ is actually studied in its particularity, it may be that

a certain competing version of universality is intrinsic to the particu-
lar movement itself. It may be that feminism, for instance, maintains a
view of universality that implies forms of sexual egalitarianism, which
figure women within a new conception of universalization. Or it may be
that struggles for racial equality have within them from the start a con-
ception of universal enfranchisement that is inextricable from a strong
conception of multicultural community. Or that struggles against sexual
and gender discrimination involve promoting new notions of freedom of
assembly or freedom of association that are universal in character even
as they, by implication, seek to throw off some of the specific shackles
under which sexual minorities live, and could, by extension, question the
exclusive lock on legitimacy that conventional family structures main-
tain. Thus, the question for such movements will not be how to relate
a particular claim to one that is universal[. …] It may be, rather, one of
establishing practices of translation among competing notions of univer-
sality which, despite any apparent logical incompatibility, may neverthe-
less belong to an overlapping set of social and political aims.65
Butler thus invites her readers to imagine the formation of an alliance or coali-
tion between distinct social movements, which would require as its precon-
dition that these movements engage in a practice of mutual translation. The
purpose of this practice would not be to determine which movement should
become the hegemonic one (as Laclau might argue), nor would it be to deter-
mine which movement is the most coherent and which is in need of renova-
tion (as Gramsci might propose). The purpose, rather, would be to constellate
the universalist formulations intrinsic to many different movements by con-
structing a space of compossibility between them, a space that would allow
these movements to jointly pursue their overlapping social and political aims
and thus reciprocally enhance each other.
65 Butler 2000, pp. 166–7, emphasis in original.

When read from within the context of recent social movements in Latin
America, Butler’s reflections gesture toward the possibility of a new kind of
relationship between Marxist and indigenous worldviews that would not
simply reproduce the missed encounters of the past. However, as I will soon
demonstrate, this is not a purely speculative matter. Experimentation with the
construction of such a relationship has already taken place and continues to
take place as the result of an ongoing process of negotiation – one not without
its own contradictions and tensions – between Marxism and the indigenous
Maya belief system at the heart of the Zapatista movement.
…
Perhaps more than anyone else in the region, the Zapatistas have insisted on
the importance of translating between the competing universalities of their
movement, and they have done so while also participating in the long and
still vibrant tradition of translating Marxist theory in and for Latin America.
To substantiate this claim, I will draw primarily from El sueño zapatista [The
Zapatista Dream], a book-length conversation published in 1997 between
French sociologist Yvon Le Bot and Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the
nom de guerre of the former spokesperson of the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or ezln), who stepped
out of this role in 2013 and, since May 25, 2014, has gone by the name of
Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano to honour a fallen Zapatista community
member and teacher.66 El sueño zapatista offers one of the most theoretically
sophisticated first-hand accounts of the prehistory of the Zapatista movement,
its clandestine formation in the mountains of Southeastern Mexico prior to the
armed uprising of January 1, 1994, and includes some particularly illuminating
reflections on the ezln’s first encounters with the indigenous communities of
Chiapas.67 But, to be clear, my intention is not to offer a general overview of the
movement, nor is it to survey the debates that surround the Zapatistas because
of their critical stance on the taking of state power or their strategic refusal to
66 Maurice Najman, Comandante Tacho, and Major Moisés (who is now known as
Subcomandante Moisés) make brief appearances in El sueño zapatista as well. On Marcos
‘ceasing to exist’ and becoming Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano, see Marcos 2018a,
pp. 211–29.
67 Other useful first-hand accounts of the prehistory and formation of the Zapatista move-
ment available in English include: Marcos 2007b, pp. 199–239; Marcos 2018b, pp. 111–22.
See also Marcos 1995a, pp. 104–9; Marcos 1997, pp. 319–24; Marcos 2003.

116 ARNALL
support ‘progressive’ candidates in Mexico’s national elections.68 Rather, as I

have already signalled, my approach is more targeted in focus and has to do
with the movement’s multifaceted theorisation and practice of translation.
According to El sueño zapatista, Marcos and a small group of urban-trained
militants head toward the mountains of Southeastern Mexico in the mid-1980s
with a rather traditional, vanguardist conception of their historic purpose.
They seek to enlighten the exploited masses of the region and lead them in
guerrilla warfare so as to trigger a national liberation movement and institute
a new, socialist form of government. As one might expect, this self-imposed
mission does not go according to plan and results in the ezln’s ‘first defeat’.69
In Marcos’s words, the militant group, ‘still within the Marxist-Leninist tra-
dition, suddenly finds itself before a reality that it cannot explain; it cannot
account for this reality yet has to work with it.’70 Marcos and his comrades
realise that their previous training in Marxism-Leninism has not sufficiently
prepared them to face such different and unfamiliar circumstances. Like many
vanguardist groups and organisations before them, the militants of the ezln
fall into the trap of dogmatism by assuming that their political programme is
universally applicable, that it can be put into practice without translation in
their new site of struggle.71 As a result, what had been a living and vibrant doc-
trine in the urban university culture of Mexico City – where Marcos studied
and worked – becomes a dead letter in the Lacandon Jungle.72
The ezln comes to this realisation thanks to the efforts of an indigenous
community leader that Marcos fondly refers to as ‘the translator, old Antonio’.73
Translating between Spanish and Tojolabal, one of many indigenous languages
in the region, Antonio enables the militant group,
68 For the reader interested in these debates, some of the best references include: Holloway
2005; Hearse (ed.) 2007; Zibechi 2010; Sader 2011; Williams 2011.
69 Marcos and Le Bot 1997, p. 131. All citations of this text that appear in English are my
translations.
70 Ibid.
71 The most well-known example of this approach in Latin American history is perhaps
Che’s unsuccessful attempt to export foquismo to Bolivia. See Guevara 2006. See, relat-
edly, Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer 1978.
72 On Marcos’s exploration of different currents of Marxism from within Mexico City’s
university culture, see Henck 2016. Henck contests the relevance of Gramsci’s work for
Marcos’s formation yet never discusses their elective affinities concerning the problem
of translation. While I would not go so far as to suggest that Gramsci directly influenced
Marcos in this regard, it may be worth noting that Marcos explicitly mentions Gramscian
Marxism as one of the many schools of Marxist theory and practice that converged within
the ezln. See Marcos and Le Bot 1997, p. 172.
73 Marcos and Le Bot 1997, p. 130.

to learn about [the indigenous peoples’] history of political formation,

their consciousness, their historical consciousness. And it becomes clear
that we are not speaking with an indigenous movement that was wait-
ing for a savior but rather with an indigenous movement with a long
tradition of struggle, with a lot of experience, a resistant – and also
intelligent – indigenous movement for which we functioned simply as
its armed branch.74
As this passage suggests, Antonio acts as a translator in a double sense. While

translating between very different languages, he also engages in a form of theo-
retical translation, a practice of interpretation and instruction that helps the
ezln begin to comprehend the ideas and demands of the indigenous com-
munities, their tradition of resistance, and their vision for the future.75 This
is why Marcos describes Antonio as ‘the bridge that permits the guerrillas of
the mountains to reach the communities. In the end, his fundamental contri-
bution is making the Zapatistas understand the specificity of the indigenous
question in the mountains of Southeastern Mexico.’76
With a bit of self-deprecating humour, Marcos goes on to state that he is
nothing but a ‘plagiarist’ of Antonio, someone who translates Antonio’s trans-
lations for the rest of the world.77 In this way, he depicts himself as another
bridge, across which the ideas and demands of the indigenous communities
may travel in order to reach a global audience. Le Bot seems sceptical and asks
if the metaphor of the bridge does not circumscribe the translator to a pas-
sive rather than active or creative role, as though the interpretive practice of
translation could be reduced to the simple transposition of meaning from one
place to another. Marcos hesitates to respond at first and does not really offer
a direct answer to the question, but he does implicitly circle back to the issue
later in the conversation to revise his initial depiction of himself and Antonio
as translators. In this new account, the emphasis is placed on a verb rather
than a noun, on what the translator does rather than what the translator is.
Instead of comparing the translator to a bridge or puente, Marcos considers
how translators adapt and transform the basic ideas and symbols of a given
belief system so as to ‘puentear’ or bridge the gap separating very different cul-
tures.78 In this way, Marcos provides the key to deciphering his own writings
74 Ibid.
75 For a brief introduction to some of the key moments of this centuries-long struggle, see
Khasnabish 2010, pp. 21–61. For a more in-depth introduction, see Womack Jr. 1999.

118 ARNALL
as works that creatively translate rather than merely plagiarise the lessons that
he has learned in the Lacandon Jungle. At the same time, Marcos nuances his
account of Antonio’s fundamental contribution to the Zapatista movement,
the active labour of translation that Antonio pursues so that the militants can
grasp the specificity of the new conjuncture in which they find themselves.
Indeed, when Antonio engages in this labour of translation, he produces a
dialectical tension between the abstract universality of the ezln’s programme
and the particularity of the ‘indigenous question’, which sets in motion a pro-
cess of transformation that completely refashions the urban-trained militants
and their organisational structure. Antonio’s lessons in translation thus func-
tion as the catalyst for further translation among Marcos and his comrades.
The teachers of Marxism-Leninism become students of their environment,
and the vanguardist group transforms into the armed branch of a longstand-
ing indigenous movement. Throughout this process, the ezln’s former train-
ing is not so much abandoned as it is deprovincialised. The universalist claims
of Marxism-Leninism – in this case, concerning revolutionary strategy and
organisational structure – are reinvented and made concrete so that they can
speak to and intervene in a new set of circumstances, a new ‘question’ with
its own historical specificity. It follows that Marcos and his comrades share
far greater affinity with Gramsci and Mariátegui than with the provincialist
tendency that runs from Martí to today’s decolonialists. This is the case even
if their respective translations of the Russian experience result in conflicting
positions on issues like the vanguard party form or the role of the State in the
transformation of society.79 It could be argued, in fact, that some divergence
on these matters would be necessary insofar as these figures seek to intervene
in very different effectual realities and must base their concrete analyses on
said realities, lest they lapse (back) into dogmatism. Yet, to reiterate, underly-
ing this divergence is a more significant convergence, a shared commitment
between Gramsci, Mariátegui, and the Zapatistas to what I have called the task
of translating universality.80
At another point in the conversation with Le Bot, however, Marcos offers
further details on his earliest interactions with Antonio and complicates their
significance for the formation of the Zapatista movement. ‘The dream of a guer-
rilla’, Marcos recalls, ‘was to encounter a peasant, explain politics to him, and
79 For a discussion of Gramsci and Mariátegui on the party form, see Aricó 1980, pp. 139–67;
Arnall, Draper and Sabau 2015, pp. 153–61. For Marcos on the party form, see, among other
possible references, Marcos 1995b.
80 This deeper convergence goes overlooked in the existing research that seeks to oppose
Gramsci and the Zapatistas based on their (inevitable) differences. See, for example,
Henck 2016, pp. 217–41; Sader 2011, pp. 122–6.

win him over. So I begin to speak with [Antonio] about the history of Mexico,
about zapatismo, and he responds to me with the history of [the Maya gods]
Votan and Ik’al.’81 In this brief but telling remembrance of the past, Marcos
gestures toward a ‘clash’ or ‘collision’ (un choque) between two fundamentally
different worldviews.82 To Marcos’s Marxist-Leninist explanation of society,
Antonio responds with his own explanation of Maya cosmology. What is at
stake here, I want to propose, is not simply a dialectical tension between the
abstract universality of certain claims and the particularity of a concrete situ-
ation. This clash between alterative worldviews also points to a tension, even a
kind of splintering, at the level of the universal itself. When Antonio explains
Maya cosmology to Marcos, he is effectively translating a distinct notion of
universality, which is to say, elaborating upon an alternative set of universal-
ist claims that are irreducible to the guerrilla organisation’s Marxist-Leninist
universalism. Antonio is tapping into what Marcos refers to as an ‘indigenous
sentiment that does not even pass through the local or the national: it imme-
diately begins to summon the universal, as the indigenous peoples understand
it.’83 Put another way, Antonio is not advancing a claim about his part of the
world but about his world, a world fundamentally different from that of Marcos
and his counterparts.84 The question that this encounter with Antonio raises,
which is also Butler’s question, is to what extent some form of translation is
possible between these worlds, between their competing universalities.
Along these lines, it will be helpful to turn to ‘The Story of the Questions’,
in which Marcos offers an extended literary retelling of the aforementioned
conversation with Antonio.85 According to this text, at the centre of the clash

83 Marcos and Le Bot 1997, p. 175. Given his tendency to equate all forms of universalism
with imperialism and Eurocentrism, Walter Mignolo’s analysis of El sueño zapatista can-
not sufficiently grapple with its discussion of indigenous universalisms. See Mignolo 2011,
pp. 213–51. Other commentators are more attuned to this aspect of the Zapatista move-
ment and its theoretical and political implications. See, especially, Rabasa 2010. See also
Gilly 1998, pp. 261–333; González Casanova 2005, pp. 79–92; Tomba 2019, pp. 186–222.
84 As Marcos relates, it is through Antonio that the ezln comes into contact ‘with the com-
munities, with their world’. Marcos and Le Bot 1997, p. 130, my emphasis. For related dis-
cussions of this idea as it pertains to different historical contexts, see Viveiros de Castro
2015, pp. 55–74; de la Cadena 2010, pp. 334–70.
85 This literary retelling of a conversation with Antonio – one of many in Marcos’s
oeuvre – ought to be understood as yet another instance of translation, of Marcos trans-
lating Antonio’s ‘original’ translation of indigenous Maya cosmology for a broader audi-
ence. Speaking in the third person, Marcos explains: ‘What old Antonio did, translating
the indigenous world for Marcos, Marcos did for [those external to the movement], using
the same resources.’ Marcos and Le Bot 1997, p. 307.

120 ARNALL
between Marcos and Antonio is a dispute concerning the origin and signifi-
cance of Emiliano Zapata. After Marcos offers a conventional account of this
historical figure and his role in the Mexican Revolution, Antonio responds: ‘It
wasn’t like that.’86 He then launches into the myth of Votan and Ik’al, two oppos-
ing yet interconnected gods associated with light and darkness, who, unhappy
with their immobile and unchanging existence, came to the realisation that
they could not move without first asking questions. This led them to ask the
question, ‘How do we move?’ and to discover that the answer was, ‘Together but
separately and in agreement.’87 As a result, like two legs on a single body, they
began to walk together in an uncertain direction. When Marcos asks what all
of this has to do with Zapata, Antonio smiles and replies, ‘You’ve learned now
that in order to know and walk, you have to ask questions.’88 Antonio then con-
tinues along the trajectory of his story, relating how Votan and Ik’al combined
to form Zapata and that, as Zapata, the two gods who were one ‘finally learned
where the long road went’.89 Antonio thus inscribes Zapata’s struggle for an
agrarian form of socialism within a broader cosmological view, marking it as
an important moment in the path that Votan and Ik’al have travelled together.
If Antonio’s story provides a conflicting answer to the question of Zapata’s ori-
gin and significance, it also invites Marcos (and the readers of the text) to ask
further questions: How might the ezln and the indigenous communities, like
Votan and Ik’al, move together? How might they combine to form the Zapatista
movement? Antonio’s story suggests that their shared movement will depend
on asking questions rather than insisting – as dogmatists are wont to do – that
they already have all of the answers. It would seem that their shared move-
ment will also depend on refusing to erase the differences that separate these
two groups while at the same time working to discover or construct a point of
agreement, a common ground on which to walk.90
It would be up to an ‘intermediate group’ to construct this common ground
between the ezln and the indigenous communities.91 In El sueño zapatista,
Marcos describes this group as ‘an indigenous element within the guer-
rilla organization that performs the role of translator’ by discussing the key
86 Marcos 2001b, p. 414. For a helpful discussion of this story that has influenced my own
reading of it, see Conant 2010, pp. 86–92.
87 Marcos 2001b, p. 414.
88 Marcos 2001b, p. 415.
89 Ibid.
90 Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena relatedly theorise the commons as ‘a continuous
achievement’ rather than a starting point in their Introduction to A World of Many Worlds.
Blaser and de la Cadena 2018, pp. 1–22.

concepts of Marxism-Leninism with the local indigenous communities while

also explaining the ideas and demands of these communities to the nonindige-
nous comrades of the ezln.92 The primary activity of this intermediate group,
in other words, is that of mutual translation between different theoretical lan-
guages. This is why Marcos describes the intermediate group as yet another
‘bridge’,93 one that can be crossed from either direction and thus facilitates
reciprocal movement and exchange between Marxist and indigenous world-
views, ‘a passage from one to the other and vice versa’.94 Emphasising once
more the active and creative role that such bridging entails, Marcos maintains
that the translators, as a result of their efforts, ‘produced something new. That
new thing is what allows for […] the pact of coexistence, that give and take, to
turn into a political relationship.’95
When pressed on what exactly constitutes this new thing, on what func-
tions as the common ground of the ezln and the indigenous communities,
Marcos responds:
It is a kind of enriched translation of the perspective of political tran-

sition. The idea of a more just world, all that socialism was at bottom,
but digested, enriched[. …] More than the redistribution of wealth or the
expropriation of the means of production, the revolution becomes the
possibility for human beings to have a space of dignity. Dignity starts to
become a very powerful word. It is not a contribution of ours, a contribu-
tion of the urban element, but rather a contribution of the communi-
ties, such that revolution is the guarantee that dignity is fulfilled, that it
is respected.96
Notice how Marcos evokes a metaphorics of cultural cannibalism to portray

the digestion process of translation, the way the intermediate group breaks
down yet enriches the standard Marxist-Leninist perspective on political tran-
sition with an indigenous notion of dignity to create a new understanding of
revolution.97 This new understanding of revolution is the point of agreement
that allows the ezln and the indigenous communities to form a political rela-
tionship; it is the common ground upon which these groups can walk together
and become the Zapatista movement. It would be tempting to construe this

96 Ibid.
97 For the paradigmatic text on cultural cannibalism, see de Andrade 1991, pp. 38–47.

122 ARNALL
process as another instance of translating universality, of Marxism-Leninism’s

universalist claims about political transition becoming concrete in the
Lacandon Jungle after colliding with the particularity of the local indigenous
communities. Yet Marcos unequivocally states that the particular notion of dig-
nity in question extends not only to the indigenous peoples of the region but
to all human beings.98 In other words, to understand the ‘indigenous question’
in its specificity is to grapple with a universalist conception of dignity stemming
from a particular indigenous belief system, a notion of universality intrinsic to
the region’s tradition of indigenous resistance. The task of the translators who
form the intermediate group is therefore not (only) to concretise the universal-
ist claims of Marxism-Leninism but (also) to negotiate between its claims and
the universalist claims of the indigenous communities. A new understanding
of revolution, as the product of this translation practice, constitutes the space
of compossibility between these competing universalities.
Toward the end of his conversation with Le Bot, Marcos returns to many
of the issues discussed thus far and alludes to their implications beyond the
Zapatista movement. This is how I would like to conclude my discussion of
these issues as well, by underscoring what is at stake for contemporary Left
politics in general – and for Marxist theory and practice in particular – in how
the Zapatistas conceive of and experiment with translation. I have in mind
Marcos’s reply to the observation that the Zapatistas regularly deploy concepts
and terms that stray from traditional Marxism:
Yes, what I’m telling you is that began a long time ago, in the process of
translating Marxist-Leninist university culture into indigenous culture.
That translation was actually a transformation. I remember reading that
whoever translates poetry is in reality a poet. In this case, the true creators
of zapatismo were the translators, the theorists of zapatismo, people like
Major Mario, Major Moisés, Major Ana María, all the people who had to
translate in dialects, Tacho, David, Zevedeo, they are really the theorists
of zapatismo … they constructed a new way of seeing the world.99
98 On the Zapatista’s notion of dignity, see especially Marcos 2007a, pp. 93–100. See also
Holloway 1998, pp. 159–98.
99 Marcos and Le Bot 1997, p. 292. Although Marcos focuses on the Marxist and indigenous
elements of zapatismo while speaking with Le Bot, it is worth underscoring that this is
by no means a complete list of zapatismo’s major influences. Michael Löwy, for exam-
ple, would add the legacy of Zapata, liberation theology, and the demands of Mexican
civil society to this list. See his ‘Sources and Resources of Zapatism’ (Löwy 1998, pp. 1–4).
Indigenous and nonindigenous forms of feminism ought to be recognised as important
influences as well. On this point, see Klein 2015.

It would be a mistake to interpret this new way of seeing the world as a

replacement for the old worldviews of Marxism-Leninism and Maya cosmol-
ogy, as a new universalism to supplant prior universalisms. Marcos is actually
gesturing at something more obscure but also more profound. In the ‘Fourth
Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle’, which was released around the same time
as when Le Bot met with Marcos, it states: ‘In the world we want, many worlds
fit [El mundo que queremos es uno donde quepan muchos mundos].’100 With this
highly suggestive formulation, the Zapatistas attempt yet again to theorise a
space of compossibility between competing universalities.101 In this instance,
however, such a space would extend beyond the worlds of Marxism-Leninism
and Maya cosmology to include many other worlds, what the ‘Sixth Declaration
of the Lacandon Jungle’ describes as ‘all those worlds that are resisting because
they want to destroy the neoliberals and because they simply cannot stop fight-
ing for humanity.’102 Among other possibilities, here we could mention the
worlds of revolutionary feminism, Black radicalism, anarchism, communism,
and socialism, the worlds stemming from lgbtq struggles, and, of course, the
worlds pertaining to other currents of Marxism and indigenous resistance that
do not figure prominently in the Lacandon Jungle. The wager of the Zapatistas
is that these worlds can and ought to become a world, not by obliterating
their differences or by establishing the dominion of one world over and above
the rest but rather by forging a horizontal network between these worlds, a
political relationship of ‘mutual respect and support’.103 This is the new way of
100 ezln 1997, p. 89, my translation. For a popular English translation, see Marcos 2001a, pp.
78–81.
101 A common misreading of the Zapatistas’ call for a world of many worlds is that it implies
a rejection of any claim to universality. Major decolonial theorists have popularised this
misreading by treating their notion of pluriversality as synonymous and interchangeable
with the notion of a world of many worlds. But these two notions are in fact very differ-
ent. Whereas a world of many worlds names an encounter between multiple claims to
universality, pluriversality is theorised as an alternative to the very concept of universal-
ity as such. By blurring this distinction, the decolonial appropriation of the Zapatistas’
discourse obscures far more than it reveals. To make matters worse, in some instances,
pluriversality is defined in opposition to the ‘abstract universality’ of Marxism. This con-
tributes to making illegible a long and rich tradition of thinkers and militants who have
theorised and participated in the movement of concrete universality internal to Marxism.
At the same time, it creates a rather awkward tension in the overall argument, given the
centrality of Marxism for the Zapatistas, who are celebrated as having ‘announced the
pluriverse’. See Mignolo 2018, p. ix. See also Mignolo 2011, pp. 213–51; Mignolo and Walsh
2018; Escobar 2020.
102 Marcos 2007c, p. 279.
103 Marcos 2007c, p. 281. The Zapatistas have contributed in various ways to building such a
horizontal network of worlds. See, for example, the numerous communiqués, statements,

124 ARNALL
seeing the world created by the indigenous guerrilla translators, this paradoxi-
cal worldview in which many worldviews fit.
Mutual translation between these worldviews will need to occur if such a
network is to be created. This is one of the most politically salient lessons that
can be gleaned from the ezln’s first encounters with the indigenous com-
munities of Chiapas. What’s more, the future of Marxism is bound up in this
lesson from the not-so-distant past. If Marxism is to remain a guiding light
for the political experiments of today and tomorrow, if its mere mention is
not to become – as many of today’s critics have prematurely declared – an
unmistakable sign of obsolescence, then theorists and militants will need to
attend to the translation of Marxism’s universalist claims as historical condi-
tions change while also translating new elements of historical life into its theo-
retical language. But, as the Zapatistas demonstrate, this is not all that needs
to be accomplished for Marxism to avoid becoming a dead letter. Wherever
Marxists find themselves in the world, they will also need to embrace learning
from and negotiating with the universalist claims of other belief systems and
social movements in an effort to build some common ground on which to walk
toward a new world, a better world, a world of many worlds, a world of all the
worlds that struggle against neoliberalism and for humanity.104
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Historical Materialism 30.

The Many Tasks of the Marxist Translator

Antonio Gramsci – indigenous cosmologies – Marxism – José Carlos Mariátegui –

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-12342037

all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy

1 Lukács 1971, p. 1; original emphasis.

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something irredeemably outdated, passé, archaic. As Bosteels rightly observes

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11 Gramsci 2001, Q3, §48, p. 332; Gramsci 2005, p. 200.

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16 Gramsci 2001, Q11, §46, p. 1468; Gramsci 1995, p. 306.

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internationalist mode of politics, a politics that would oppose both dogmatism

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The problem arises of whether a theoretical truth, whose discovery cor-

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translated into the specific terms – the particular tongue or tongues – of a

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31 Gramsci 2001, Q11, §49, p. 1472; Gramsci 1995, p. 311.

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41 Marx 1989, p. 200.

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that the dogmatic tendency upholds as invariably true. It could accordingly

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54 See Mariátegui 1971, pp. 22–30.

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59 See Thomas 2010, pp. 372–4.

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achieve a hegemonic relation whereby the particular becomes representative

[I]f the ‘particular’ is actually studied in its particularity, it may be that

65 Butler 2000, pp. 166–7, emphasis in original.

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support ‘progressive’ candidates in Mexico’s national elections.68 Rather, as I

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to learn about [the indigenous peoples’] history of political formation,

As this passage suggests, Antonio acts as a translator in a double sense. While

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81 Marcos and Le Bot 1997, p. 136.

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concepts of Marxism-Leninism with the local indigenous communities while

It is a kind of enriched translation of the perspective of political tran-

Notice how Marcos evokes a metaphorics of cultural cannibalism to portray

92 Marcos and Le Bot 1997, p. 128.

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process as another instance of translating universality, of Marxism-Leninism’s

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It would be a mistake to interpret this new way of seeing the world as a

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Carlucci, Alessandro 2014, Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony,

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