José Carlos Mariátegui’s Archaic Developmentalism: Utopia, the Incan Empire, and Peruvian Reality

Abstract

“Developmentalism” refers to the idea that human societies progress through a series of historical stages, along one path or multiple paths, which allows for the comparison and hierarchization of different populations. As numerous works have shown, developmentalism was often called upon to justify Europe’s domination of non-European populations, which were figured as backward or barbaric. To complicate the commonplace equation of developmentalism and empire, I analyze José Carlos Mariátegui’s political thought as a stratigraphic history in which different temporalities—especially archaic temporality, or the remnants of Incan communalism, and developmental temporality—were vertically stacked and in tension, and I elaborate a conception of what I call “archaic developmentalism.” For Mariátegui, while the past temporality, institutions, and practices of the Incan Empire persisted into the present, he did not perceive them as hurdles to be cleared on the upward march of progress. Rather, as I argue, Mariátegui recognized the political potency of Incan communalism’s remnants—particularly, the ayllu , or Incan communal form—and he conjectured that the collision of temporal-historical layers could open an alternative developmental trajectory by which the ayllu would be reactivated as a stage in the process of creating modern communism, skipping over the developmental stage of mature capitalism that was required by Soviet orthodoxy. In other words, Mariátegui thought that the friction generated by the convergence of Peru’s different telluric strata opened a new developmental trajectory in which remnants of Incan archaism could spark socialist struggle and be reconfigured as an arsenal of possibilities in the present.