Reading group: Mariátegui’s Seven Essays, starting with ‘The Problem of the Indian’

José Carlos Mariátegui published Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality in 1928, two years before he died at thirty-five. Every Peruvian student meets it, usually in a hurry and usually in a summary. I would like to read the first three essays slowly, one a week.

Plan:

• Week 1: "Outline of the Economic Evolution". Peru's history told as a sequence of economies, from the Inca to the colonial to the export economy of his own day.
• Week 2: "The Problem of the Indian". His central claim is that the problem is not racial, moral, educational or administrative, but economic. It is rooted in the land tenure system and in what he calls gamonalismo, the power of the great landowners.
• Week 3: "The Problem of Land". Here he argues that the Andean community, the ayllu, carries elements of a socialism that does not need to be imported from Europe.

Translation: Marjory Urquidi's English translation is the standard one. Our page: Seven Interpretive Essays.

A question for the group: Mariátegui famously wrote that socialism in America should be neither copy nor imitation, but heroic creation. When he reads the Andean community through Marx, does he honour it, or translate it into someone else's categories?

My grandmother would have had an opinion. I will try to bring it.