Book, Jose Carlos Mariategui: An Anthology by Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker

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Jose Carlos Mariategui: An Anthology 
by Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker

José Carlos Mariátegui is one of Latin America’s most profound but overlooked thinkers. A self-taught journalist, social scientist, and activist from Peru, he was the first to emphasize that those fighting for the revolutionary transformation of society must adapt classical Marxist theory to the particular conditions of Latin American. He also stressed that indigenous peoples must take an active, if not leading, role in any revolutionary struggle.

Today Latin America is the scene of great social upheaval. More progressive governments are in power than ever before, and grassroots movements of indigenous peoples, workers, and peasants are increasingly shaping the political landscape. The time is perfect for a rediscovery of Mariátegui, who is considered an intellectual precursor of today’s struggles in Latin America but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. This volume collects his essential writings, including many that have never been translated and some that have never been published. The scope of this collection, masterful translation, and thoughtful commentary make it an essential book for scholars of Latin America and all of those fighting for a new world, waiting to be born.

Thanks to Monthly Review Press, a fully representative anthology of José Carlos Mariátegui is finally available to the English-speaking public. It will now be possible to discover a thinker who not only was the pioneer of Marxist analysis of Peru and Latin America, and the dreamer of an Indo-American Socialism as the only real alternative to imperialist domination, but one of the great universal Marxist authors of the twentieth century, comparable, by the originality of his heterodox revolutionary writings, to the contemporary (i.e. 1920s) works of Lukács and Gramsci.

—Michael Löwy, editor of José Carlos Mariategui’s Por un socialismo indoamericano  

Monthly Review Press, available here.

Paperback: 464 pages

Publisher: Monthly Review Press; 2011

ISBN-13: 978-1583672457