Historical Relativism as Historical Materialism

• In Event: Imagining Past and Future: Myth, Metaphor, Utopia

Abstract

In the chapter “The Problem of the Land," in his 1928 Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui calls for a certain “historical relativism” when comparing Incan and Modern Communism. Direct comparison of their "forms and institutions,” he argues, is not possible because the former is agrarian, where nature dominates man, and the latter is industrial, where man dominates nature. Nonetheless, he argues that what can be compared is “their essential and material likeness, within the essential and material difference of time and space.” This comparison is also possible because indigenous communal structures, practices, and subjectivities have survived into the present as a bulwark against latifundismo, dependent capitalism and a liberalism that can find no roots in Peruvian soil. This material survival, rather than naïve romanticism (or cultural relativism), attests to their value. In calling for historical relativism, Mariátegui refuses to dismiss the vestiges of Incan Communism as remnants of the past so that he may assert their value in the present. Ultimately, however, he privileges Modern Communism over other forms as the ideal towards which Peruvian socialists should be striving and around which they should organize. This paper uses Mariátegui’s “historical relativism” to analyze his own work as well as its contribution to Marxist theories of history. Specifically, the paper argues that while Mariátegui risks instrumentalizing Incan Communism in the name of a socialist populism, the concept captures an approach to historical materialism found in the work of Walter Benjamin and Marx himself. A Mariáteguian reading of Marx and Benjamin highlights twists and turns in their dialectic that are more overt in his own. Moreover, this “historical relativism” approach is valuable in Latin American where pre-Colombian histories and practices (and the facts “of them”) are erased and hidden and the present becomes clearer through myth, metaphor and comparison and where there is a need to think about the relationship between indigenous politics, decolonization, and socialism. 

Author

• Katherine Adams Gordy, San Francisco State University