“Discipline, Programs, and Systems”: The Limits of Heterodoxy in the Thought of José Carlos Mariátegui, 1917–1930

This article argues that, despite his reputation for intellectual heterodoxy, the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) actually set a high value on the political discipline of theoretical activity, and that some of his most creative thought was on that theme. In doing so, the article questions the prevailing assumption about the heterodoxy of Mariátegui’s Marxism. By reading Mariátegui in terms of discipline as much as heterodoxy, the article also unsettles historiographical conventions about Mariátegui’s attitude to various political practices and ideas, including cosmopolitanism and the politics of exile. The article proceeds by first contextualizing Mariátegui’s adoption of Marxism as a means of greater discipline in Peruvian intellectual life. It then traces the main lines of Mariátegui’s critique of politically ill-disciplined intellectualism during the interwar period, before reconstructing his positive models of a balance between intellectual discipline and innovation, understood as a necessary condition of genuine revolutionary thinking.