When he states that true indigenous art is (or will be) an art made by Indians themselves, he is not claiming that only indigenous people have the ability (or the right) to tackle indigenous themes. His point, rather, is that artistic creation is key to human emancipation. The Indians of Peru ought to be freed from exploitation so that they could have the chance to access the spheres of artistic production and consumption. They ought to be given the opportunity to create and be recognized as creators. What Mariátegui sets out to defend here is not primarily the expression of racial or cultural identity but a right to which he accords the highest importance: the right to self‐development. No other, to his mind, would allow the Indians to fully become agents – masters of their own destiny.
Be that as it may, Mariátegui's argument for constructing the future of the Peruvian nation on an indigenous foundation did not go unchallenged. Perhaps his most biting critic was Luis Alberto Sánchez, who found it unfair to define “Peruvian‐ness” solely on the basis of its indigeneity. Although Creole traditions, he remarked, had been introduced by the Spaniards, over the course of four centuries they had taken roots in the country and had the right to be called “Peruvian” as well. Sánchez, in other words, accused Mariátegui of clinging to an overly narrow idea of Peru that not only discounted the country's enormous cultural diversity but also revived the “archaic dilemma” that opposed the highlands and the coast (Mariátegui and Sánchez 1976, p. 70). It should be noted, however, that Mariátegui was not advocating for the withering away of all nonindigenous elements in Peruvian society, nor did he believe in the racial or cultural superiority of the indigenous population. In fact, he considered any kind of sociopolitical analysis supported by racial or cultural categories (the language of the time made no consistent distinctions between race and ethnicity) to be little more than pseudoscientific mystification:
From the prejudice of the inferiority of the Indigenous race, one begins to pass to the opposite extreme: that the creation of a new American culture will be essentially the work of autochthonous racial forces. To subscribe to this thesis is to fall into the most naïve and absurd mysticism. It would be foolish and dangerous to oppose the racism of those who despise Indians because they believe in the absolute and permanent superiority of the white race with a racism that overestimates Indians with a messianic faith in their mission as a race in the American renaissance.
(1969, p. 30; 1994, Vol. I, p. 171; 2011, p. 313)
If Peruvians were obliged to recognize the indigenous population as the cornerstone of their nation, Mariátegui believed, it was because of a long‐overdue historical debt but also because no people or nation could possibly aspire to produce a plausible picture of itself by ignoring its majorities.
The search for national autonomy did not, then, entail the elimination of all external influences. Defending the autochthonous did not mean rejecting all things Western, only those ideas and values of the West that supported the systems of feudality and dependence (Rochabrún 2007, pp. 549–550). Non‐Western peoples seeking a legitimate political option should not be wary of embracing socialism: “Socialism is certainly not an Indo‐American theory. But no theory, no contemporary system, is or could be. And socialism, although born in Europe as was capitalism, is neither specifically nor particularly European. It is a worldwide movement from which none of the countries that move in the orbit of Western civilization can escape” (1969, p. 248; 1994, Vol. I, p. 261; 1996, p. 89).
3.3 Conclusion: Mariátegui, His Times and Beyond
As discussed previously, two ideas lie at the heart of Mariátegui's thought. First, the idea that every epoch, as it develops, unfolds a concept that configures its historical identity, and second, the idea that revolutions are pivotal junctures that mark the transition from one epoch to another – critical circumstances that engender new forms of individuality and collectivity. What emerges out of these two notions is a concept of revolutionary epochs as periods marked by formidable explosions of creative energy that eventually crystallize in new institutional frameworks.
Revolutions, for Mariátegui, occur before any armed action or effective transformation of the institutional order. A major consequence of this account is that, in order to forge a new sensibility, one need not wait for the organized masses to seize power or for the means of production to be socialized. It is rather the opposite: revolution – the dawn of a new subjectivity – is the engine that drives the renewal of political structures. Another important implication is that art, in this view, acquires a unique status among all human activities as well as a space of relative autonomy with respect to the orders of politics and economics. This argument, however, is not one that seeks to isolate art from the workings of external forces. Mariátegui's point, rather, is that true art escapes the realm of ideology because its mission is not to impose truths but to question the established order. If ideology is oppressive because it defends the status quo, art is emancipatory because it awakens our creative powers. It follows, then, that the sole idea of putting art at the service of the revolution is absurd: “artists and technicians are much more useful and valuable to revolution the more artists and technicians they remain” (1959b, p. 200; 1994, Vol. I, p. 725). And, by the same token, it is similarly absurd to propose, even as a provisional measure, that artistic and creative freedoms be suspended in order to support revolutionary objectives.
These particular reflections suggest that Mariátegui would not have understood the verses that Bertolt Brecht wrote in defense of his generation: “Ah, we/Who desired to prepare the soil for kindness/Could not ourselves be kind” (Brecht 1962, p. 231). Nor would have he understood how Louis Aragon, having become estranged from his surrealist comrades, could have gone so far as to praise the rule book prepared by the Union of Soviet Writers: “Missing just one of the elements required of the writer by socialist realism is enough for the work to lose its socialist realist nature, to become reduced to naturalism, to populism, to sociological vulgarization – to ruin, ultimately, its nature as a work of art” (Aragon 1952, p. 409). Rather, it is reasonable to assume that Mariátegui would have applauded the famous formula laid out in the manifesto “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” (1938), as it appears in the version revised by Trotsky:
In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must under no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula complete freedom for art. (Trotsky et al. 1992, p. 126)6
From Mariátegui's perspective, art is politically relevant as long as it preserves its creative independence. When art is no longer an end and rather becomes an instrument, it abandons its core mission: challenging the conventional wisdom of the establishment.
It might be observed, in hindsight, that Mariátegui's firm belief in the sovereignty of art bears the mark of a long‐gone, more innocent era, one in which the communist revolution existed in a kind of eternal dawn: more than a fait accompli, revolution was in fact a hope, and more than a reality to protect, it was a goal to achieve. Here we are talking about a time when the tradition of revolutionary Marxism had not yet succumbed to the fetish of armed struggle, a time before the Soviet Union had polarized intellectuals across the globe, becoming the ultimate litmus test for determining who was for and who was against the revolution. Against this backdrop one could say – if Mariátegui is read with the characteristic hardheadedness of the apparatchik – that his passionate plea for artistic creativity was a luxury that only those far from the centers of power and free from political responsibilities can afford. Harsh as it may be, there is some truth to this claim; Mariátegui's Marxism, as Michael Löwy (1998) has acutely observed, is a romantic one – a Marxism whose search for transcendence infuses it with distinctly mystical and religious overtones. “Neither Reason nor Science,” writes Mariátegui, “can satisfy all the need of the infinite that exists in man” (1959b, p. 18; 1994, Vol. I, p. 497; 1996, p. 142).
At the same time, however, this mystic was not easily swayed by illusions. Let us recall, for instance, his trenchant observations