Navigating the twilight of cosmopolitan Marxism: José Carlos Mariátegui on Trotskyism and Zionism in 1928–1929

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This article explores the generative, and sometimes contradictory, tensions between the national and the cosmopolitan in José Carlos Mariátegui’s political thought at the end of the 1920s. In doing so, it recasts Mariátegui’s Indigenous Marxism, in part, as an artefact of political retreat from his original, world-making ambition during the earlier 1920s. The article explores Mariátegui’s later writings on Trotskyism and Zionism, and the conceptual and political connections between them. These texts were sites where the contradictions in Mariátegui’s mature political theory played out in comparable ways. In his response to the marginalisation and exile of Trotsky in the Soviet Union, Mariátegui grappled with the turn away from world revolution by Stalin’s regime, attempting to reconcile this change through the hopeful prediction that Trotskyism would become a tolerated opposition within the communist movement. And in his critique of Zionism, Mariátegui theorised nationalism as a less developed form of social organisation than the cosmopolitan model which he identified with diasporic and non-Zionist Jewish peoplehood.