Work · Latin American & Caribbean Philosophy
Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality
A Marxist analysis of Peru – economy, land, education, literature – in which the Indigenous question is the question of land.
Introduction
José Carlos Mariátegui, a largely self-taught journalist who had spent 1919–23 in Europe, mostly in Italy, and founded the journal Amauta in Lima in 1926, published the book in 1928. Its seven essays deal with Peru’s economic development, the problem of the Indian, the land question, public education, religion, regionalism and centralism, and literature. Mariátegui argues that the oppression of Indigenous people is not a racial, moral or educational problem but an economic one, rooted in the large estates (latifundios) inherited from colonial times. In Andean communal traditions he sees a starting point for an “Indo-American” socialism rather than a copy of European models. The book is regarded as a founding work of Latin American Marxism.
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Connections
Builds on
- Capital1867 · Karl Marx
Taken up in
- A Theology of Liberation1971 · Gustavo Gutiérrez
- Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America2000 · Aníbal Quijano
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