Jose Carlos Mariátegui was born in Moquegua, Peru, in 1894. He was a radical in his early teens, a declared socialist by his early twenties, and “a convinced and committed Marxist” by the time he returned from Italy early in 1923.
He had just under eight years of life left – which makes his contribution as a thinker and an organizer all the more remarkable. He shaped the early working class movement in Peru, created a platform for the development of the left and reinterpreted Marxism for the reality of Latin America.
He was a revolutionary who challenged both reformism and the idea of gradual change under bourgeois leadership, and the sectarianism of the Communist International (the Comintern) and its insistence on imposing on all socialist movements the model of the Russian Revolution as the only strategy worthy of the name.
