As Gospel and Method of Mass Movement. The roots of Mariátegui’s «heterodox» Marxism

Abstract

This article is a contribution to the new Latin American readings of Mariátegui and, in particular, aims to vindicate the «heterodox» character of the Marxism of the Peruvian thinker tracing some of its fundamental theoretical and vital roots: the Italian Marxism of the first years of the 1920s; the spiritual agonism of Unamuno; the reaction against the economicist and positivist interpretations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, finally, the assumption of the Sorelian defense of a «producer morality» as the foundation of a materialist ethics. We will defend that a historiographical practice which can get rid of the pernicious link between «heterodoxy» and «heresy» will find in the figure of Mariátegui a renewer of Marxist theory, but also a promoter of a political praxis that, without renouncing the universal, is founded on Latin American soil.