The Final Struggle | José Mariátegui

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Original in Spanish: “La lucha final.” In: El alma matinal y otras estaciones del hombre de hoy. (Obras Completas, 10th ed.). Lima: Biblioteca Amauta, 1987, 3:29–33.

English edition (translated by the editors): VANDEN, Harry E.; BECKER, Marc B. (Eds.). José Carlos Mariátegui: an anthology. New York: NYU Press, 2011, 389-395. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, July 2021. Available as a pdf here.

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The Final Struggle¹

José Carlos Mariátegui

I.

Madeleine Marx, one of the most restless women of letters and most modern in contemporary France, has gathered her impressions of Russia in a book bearing this title: C’est la lutte finale… .² The sentence of singer Eugene Pottier³ acquires a historical highlight. “It is the final struggle!”

The proletarian revolution in Russia welcomes this cry—the ecumenical cry of the worldwide proletariat. The massive battle cry and hope that Madeleine Marx heard in the streets of Moscow, I have also heard in the streets of Rome, Milan, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, and Lima. It embodies all of the excitement of an era. Revolutionary crowds believe in engaging in the final struggle.

Is the final struggle truly engaged? For those sceptical creatures of the old order this final struggle is just an illusion. For the ardent fighters of the new order it is a reality. Au-dessus la Melée,⁴ a new and enlightened philosophy of history, suggests otherwise: illusion and reality. The final struggle of Eugene Pottier‘s stanza is both a reality and an illusion.

Man and Myth | José Mariátegui

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Original in Spanish, “El hombre y el mito,” (El alma matinal y otras estaciones del hombre de hoy). In: Obras Completas, 10th ed. (Lima: Biblioteca Amauta, 1987), 3:23–28.

From: VANDEN, Harry E.; BECKER, Marc (ed.). José Carlos Mariátegui: an anthology. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011, pp. 383-388. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, June 2020, with minor corrections. Available here as a pdf.

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I.

All modern intellectual investigations on the global crisis lead to a unanimous conclusion: bourgeois civilization suffers from a lack of myth, of faith, of hope. Missing is the expression of its material bankruptcy. The rationalist experience has had the paradoxical effect of leading humanity to the disconsolate conviction that reason cannot offer a way forward. Rationalism has only served to discredit reason. Mussolini has said that demagogues killed the idea of freedom. More accurate, undoubtedly, is that rationalists killed the idea of reason. Reason has eradicated the residue of old myths from the soul of bourgeois civilization. Western man for some time has placed Reason and Science at the altar of dead gods. But neither Reason nor Science can be a myth. Neither Reason nor Science can meet the need of the infinite that exists in man. Reason itself has been challenged, demonstrating to humanity that it is not enough. Only Myth possesses the precious virtue of satisfying its deepest self.

Art, Revolution and Decadence | José Mariátegui

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From: DANCHEV, Alex. 100 Artists’ Manifestos. London: Penguin Books, pp. 294-298. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, May 2020.

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3 November 1926, Lima, Peru.

José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) was a Peruvian journalist, activist, theorist and influential socialist. His most famous work, Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928), is still widely read as a pioneer materialist analysis of Latin American society. At the time he wrote this manifesto he also founded the journal Amauta to serve as a forum for discussion of socialism, art and culture in Peru, and in all of Latin America. Two years later, in 1928, he was instrumental in establishing the Socialist Party of Peru (subsequently the Communist Party); he became its Secretary-General. Mariátegui was also responsible for coining the phrase sendero luminoso al futuro (‘the shining path to the future’), in reference to Marxism, later adopted by the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru (a Maoist group).

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It is important to dispel with the utmost speed a misleading idea which is confusing some young artists. We must correct certain hasty definitions, and establish that not all new art is revolutionary, nor is it really new. Two spirits coexist in the world at present, that of revolution and that of decadence. Only the former confers on a poem or painting the title new art.