The revival of past hopes: Marxism, revolution and tradition in José Carlos Mariátegui

Abstract

Inspired by the reflections of José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), this article seeks to analyze, from a Marxist perspective, the relationship between the concept of revolution, with its temporal orientation toward a future that is different from the present, and the concept of tradition. A native-born Peruvian intellectual, Mariátegui energized Marxism by dialectically confronting it with the singularities of the concrete reality of his country and, consequently, of the entire Latin American region. He established an original conceptualization of the relationship between the revolution, projected into the future, and the revival and updating of past hopes linked to the traditions of resistance of history’s vanquished.