Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality

A collection of seven essays, published in Lima in 1928 by the founder of the journal Amauta and of the Peruvian Socialist Party, which applies Marxist analysis to a society he saw as only partly capitalist. The essays treat Peru's economic history, the problem of the Indian, the problem of land, public education, the religious factor, regionalism and centralism, and finally Peruvian literature. The central claim is that the 'Indian problem' is not racial, moral or educational but economic: it is rooted in land tenure and in gamonalismo, the power of the large landowners. Mariátegui praises the communal traditions of the ayllu and what he calls Inca agrarian communism, and argues that these could feed a socialism suited to Peru rather than one imported whole from Europe. The long last essay reads Peruvian writing as a struggle between colonial, cosmopolitan and national voices. Critics on the left and right have questioned his romantic picture of the Inca past.

It is the classic attempt to adapt Marxism to Latin American and Indigenous realities, and it still frames debates about land, race and development in the Andes.