José Mariátegui's East-South Decolonial Experiment

Abstract

Common notions of comparative philosophy tend to be strongly configured by the East-West axis. This essay suggests ways of seeing Latin American liberation philosophy as a form of comparative philosophy and an important Latin American thinker as being relevant for East-West political philosophy. The essay focuses on the Peruvian activist and intellectual, José Mariátegui, who is widely regarded to have been a leading Marxist, liberatory, and decolonial figure in 20th century Latin America. Like many “Third World” intellectuals of the interwar years, Mariátegui had an interest in decolonization struggles in Asia and wrote with some consistency on this subject and in ways that bear significantly upon key themes in his political theory. Since very little of this has received commentary, this essay begins a discussion of Mariátegui's decolonial experimentation with ideas about Asia, decolonization, and indigenous cultural forms, like those of the Incas and Confucians. After some preliminary discussion of Eurocentrism, postcolonial thought, and decolonial thought, attention is focused on Mariátegui's East-South geography of liberation, heuristic use of Chinese revolutionary politics, and Sinified hermeneutic for conceptualizing the consciousness of the Peruvian indigenous, a central element of his political theory.

keywords:

• Mariátegui
• Decolonial Thought
• Postcolonialism
• Eurocentrism
• Comparative Philosophy
• Confucianism

Notes

1 See Guttiérez 1973; Chavarría 1979; Liss 1984; Vanden 1986; Becker 1993; Quijano 1993; and Schutte 1993.

2 I would like to thank Eduardo Mendieta and Linda Martín Alcoff for positive and productive feedback so many years ago that started me on this path. I have also been helped by discussion with Christopher Connery, Arif Dirlik, Shu-Mei Shih, Coleen Lye, and Christopher J. Lee. More recently, I have been aided by the wonderful discussions and critical insights offered by Leah Kalmanson, Amy Donahue, Rohan Kalyan, and Sam Opondo. Also, the audiences at the Margins of Philosophy Conference (Mike Ryan Lecture) at Kennesaw State University and at the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle meeting offered helpful feedback on an early version of this essay. Finally, the paper has benefited from comments from two anonymous reviewers and especially from substantive and careful commentary from Manuel Vargas, to whom I extend a special note of thanks.

3 See Hobsbawm 1987 and Mills 1997. The fuller story would include Japanese and U.S. imperalisms. I discuss the latter in Kim 2004.

4 See Amin 1989; Blaut 1993; and Mignolo 2011.

5 I discuss some aspects of this issue in “What Is Asian American Philosophy?” (Kim 2007). For a deeply informed discussion of this matter see Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon (Park 2013). Note that there has even emerged an explicit kind of left-Eurocentrism: “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism’” (Žižek 1998).

6 For a sampling of this work see Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008) and Thinking from the Underside of History: Enrique Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation (Alcoff and Mendieta 2000).

7 For a sampling of earlier figures in the Latin American philosophical tradition that form the backdrop of Decolonial Thought, see Latin American Philosophy for the 21^st Century: The Human Condition, Values, and the Search for Identity (Gracia and Millán-Zaibert 2004).

8 On this theme see The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation (Dussel 1996). Also, see Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Maldonado-Torres 2008).

9 For an alternative epistemological perspective see Linda Martín Alcoff's “An Epistemology for the Next Revolution” (Alcoff 2011), which extends some themes in her book Visible Identities: Gender, Race, and the Self (Alcoff 2005).

10 The particulars of Mariátegui's remarks here require careful treatment. For insightful discussion of them and Mariátegui's political theory generally, see Katherine Gordy 2013.

11 For more on culture and philosophy see “On the Value of Philosophy: The Latin American Case” (Vargas 2010).

12 See also Mariátegui's “Prologue to Tempest in the Andes” (Mariátegui 1996 [1927]).

13 Mariátegui explains some of his account in “Marxist Determinism” (Mariátegui 1996 [1928c]) and “Materialist Idealism” (Mariátegui 1996 [1928d]). For some recent work that helpfully emphasizes the elements of myth and the impact of figures like Nietzsche, sometimes with implications that challenge a reading of Mariátegui as a Marxist, see Purcell 2012, Diaz 2013, and Rivera 2008. For a reading of Mariátegui as a more orthodox Marxist see Nuccetelli, 2002.

14 Purcell offers a Gramscian gloss on this notion in his fine essay, “Existence and Liberation: On José Mariátegui's Postcolonial Marxism” (Purcell 2012). I think the point can be made without Gramsci, but Purcell's account should be considered.

15 There is a good deal of complexity here. If the subaltern can speak, can he or she be heard? And is the subaltern concept neatly applicable to the case of indigeneity? For a classic essay see “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 1988). And should Mariátegui, or anyone for that matter, be speaking for the subaltern generally or for certain types of subalterns, such as the indigenous? For a classic essay see “The Problem of Speaking for Others” (Alcoff 1991).

16 Moreover, in an essay-like footnote, Mariátegui addressed the widely discussed “despotism” of Incan society and the claim that such a condition invalidated Incan communism. He offered a complex response. First, he contended that the despotism-critique misrepresented the oppression of the Incas by extending modern liberal categories to the earlier historical period. Second, he asserted that there is in fact no conceptual tension between autocracy and communism per se because communism is a genus and some of its early variants were in fact compatible with autocracy. Importantly, he also contended that prior even to Incan empire-building, presumably the source of the despotism, the “nucleus” of Incan society was the ayllu, the basic social structure whose communal bond generated communism. Perhaps partly conjecture, Mariátegui claimed further that the Incan empire built upon the preexisting ayllu, modifying without eliminating it (Mariátegui 1971 [1928a], 74–76).

17 The Third International was a series of forums or congresses of communist and socialist parties around the world—though particularly from Western and Eastern Europe—that was to set the agenda for international communism. One of its major debates was how to deal with anticolonialism and nationalism in the aftermath of WWI. For more details, see Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings (Carrère d'Encausse and Schram 1969).

18 The phrase “provincializing Europe” is borrowed from the title of the excellent book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Chakrabarty 2000).

19 Due to space restrictions, I cannot discuss the related issue of Mariátegui's views on India and Gandhian anticolonialism. See his “Gandhi” (Mariátegui 1996 [1925b]). His view turned out to be similar to that of Indian Marxist M. N. Roy's during roughly that same period. In my opinion, both Mariátegui and Roy misconceive Gandhi's philosophy.

20 Perhaps another angle of entry in discussing the significance of this second element of Mariátegui's East-South decoloniality is to think in terms of Dussel's feasibility principle for liberatory ethics. Very briefly, on his account a liberatory ethics must involve a material principle that lays down adequacy conditions for being alive, a formal principle that delineates criteria for legitimate consensual norm-formation, and a feasibility principle, which specifies adequacy conditions for norm implementation. As seen in the quote just presented and elsewhere, Mariátegui would surely find the feasibility condition appealing. And if my foregoing account has been plausible, then Sino-Peruvian comparative praxis is one of the ways in which Mariátegui's version of East-South decoloniality meets or begins to meet Dussel's feasibility condition. See his Twenty Theses on Politics (Dussel 2008).

21 Regarding his actual encounters see his “Prologue to Tempest in the Andes” (Mariátegui 1996 [1927]).

22 Space does not permit discussion of another area of Sino-Peruvian connections, specifically those offered in the indigenist literature review of Seven Essays. There Mariátegui invoked what he thought is the Asian psychology of skepticism or pessimism to offer a comparative base for what he described as the “pious” and protesting pessimism of the indigenous.

23 Clearly, many Asian peoples retained significant connections with their ancient indigenous traditions, but Mariátegui underestimates the impact of colonialism in generating a complex dialectic in the modern engagement with early traditions.

24 In his Seven Essays, chapter 5, “The Religious Factor,” he gives an extended discussion of the history of religion in Peru (Mariátegui 1971 [1928a]).

25 Pantheism was a matter of quite some contention during Hegel's day, which was somewhat temporally proximal to Mariátegui. According to Peter K. J. Park, this debate played a major role in Hegel's eviction of Asian philosophy from the ranks of philosophy proper (Park 2013).

26 Mariátegui seemed to endorse the thesis now common in philosophy of emotion that emotion is irreducible to mere beliefs (and desires). This thesis helps to explain why we can feel fear about something we believe not to be dangerous and why belief in something being worthy of admiration is made vibrant when we actually feel reverence for that thing. For one very helpful text see Valuing Emotions (Stocker and Hegeman, 1996). Thus, for Mariátegui, the sacrality embedded in the world, especially social relations, is primarily a feature of the Incan's emotional experience of the world.

27 Relatedly, though space does not permit discussion of it, Mariátegui's racism must also be examined. His seemed to be an interesting case that acknowledged the role of racism in colonial ideology, rejected biological essentialism, accepted a sociological imagination that stressed contingent and historical social causation, and yet maintained seriously problematic views about African- and Chinese-descended peoples in Peru (Mariátegui 1971 [1928a], 137–138 and 279–282).

28 Frazier does not discuss Confucianism in The Golden Bough, which Mariátegui discusses a couple times in Seven Essays. Given the focus on social and affective pantheism, perhaps he received his ideas from Max Weber's Confucianism and Taoism, published in German in 1915 and later published in English as The Religion of China (Weber 1951).

29 See China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Bell 2012) and Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy (Angle 2012). Other important Confucian projects in social and political philosophy include: Democracy of the Dead: Dewey, Confucius, and the Hope for Democracy in China (Hall and Ames 1999); Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation (Rosenlee 2006); and Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice (Kim 2014).