Anti-Bolshevism in the Andes: José Carlos Mariátegui’s Political Thought in Context, 1917–30

This paper situates José Carlos Mariátegui’s Marxism in the context of emergent anti-Bolshevism in interwar Perú and Latin America. In doing so, the paper locates a moment of overlooked coherence between Mariátegui’s vernacular and universalist interpretations of Marxism during the 1920s in the pragmatic dimension of political meaning. Both Mariátegui’s conceptually national and global uses of Marxism were, in part, responding to the same, hostile context of anti-Bolshevik Othering in Perú, and they were both intended to undermine that project in order to effect the globalisation of Marxism from Europe to Latin America. The paper therefore bridges the gap between the Latin Americanist reading of Mariátegui’s thought and the more recent, global turn in scholarship, by suggesting a way to understand the different scales of Mariátegui’s Marxism holistically.