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In the absence of any systematic exposition of these ideas, the place to look is in a group of articles, originally published between 1923 and 1930, which Mariátegui compiled into a volume shortly before his death. The resulting book, beautifully titled El alma matinal y otras estaciones del hombre de hoy (The Morning Soul and Other Seasons of the Man of Today, 1950), weaves a fascinating picture of his times in which the concepts of epoch, art, and revolution appear intricately connected; the vision that it proclaims is one in which the dawn – the “morning soul” of the title – condenses the meaning of the new times.

The book's early sections are devoted to analyzing the problems and prospects of modern life.¹ The focus here is on the worldwide expansion of communications technology. Fascinated by the powers of the telegraph (less so by those of the factory), Mariátegui argues that modern technology is propelling new ways of experiencing time and space: “Every day the speed with which currents of thought and culture disseminate is greater. Civilization has given the world a new nervous system” (1959b, p. 51; 1994, Vol. I, p. 512). Modern life, he says, “has physical elements that are absolutely new. One of them is speed. The old man marched slowly, which, according to Ruskin, is how God wants man to march. The modern man travels by car and airplane” (1959c, p. 62; 1994, Vol. I, p. 571). Technological progress has allowed changes to occur in increasingly shorter intervals; the modern age is one in which the new takes place faster. But modern technology not only accelerates time – it also shortens distance. One salient consequence of this newly pervasive sense of proximity in time and space is the rise of internationalism – what we might now call “globalization” – a series of networks that facilitate the free movement of capital but also connect workers and artists, however far apart they may be, in their common pursuit of emancipatory ends. “All these phenomena are absolutely and unmistakably new. They belong exclusively to our civilization, which, from this point of view, is unlike any previous civilizations” (1959b, p. 52; 1994, Vol. I, p. 512). This new “nervous system” appears to have given the masses, regardless of their nationality, the opportunity to stay attuned to each other, thus reaching unprecedented levels of self‐consciousness. As if a hidden logic connected the crisis of parliamentary socialism in Germany and Italy with the October Revolution, or the Mexican Revolution with the birth of the national liberation movement in India, Mariátegui claims that the new era belongs to the organized masses; they, in his eyes, appear to be on the cusp of becoming the protagonists of history.

What seems odd about this account is that Mariátegui, a “convicted and confessed Marxist” in his own words, fails to hail the Bolshevik Revolution as the milestone of the new era. For him, World War I is the key event in recent history; the Great War, he says, has marked the beginning of a period of turbulence that confirms the obsolescence of bourgeois values: “Europe, burned and lacerated, shed its mentality and psychology. All the romantic energy of Western man, anesthetized by the long decades of easy and unctuous peace, was reborn, tempestuous and powerful” (1959b, p. 15; 1994, Vol. I, p. 496; 1996, p. 140).

The clue to this unorthodox vision is given by the Nietzschean strain that runs through Mariátegui's thought. What Mariátegui learns from Nietzsche is the celebration of violence – not violence understood as blind and brutal aggression but rather as a passionate faith that pushes men to “live dangerously” (1959b, p. 17; 1994, Vol. I, p. 497).² War is thus symbolic of that process of spiritual renewal to which Nietzsche refers as the “transvaluation of all values” – one that roughly consists in overcoming the old bourgeois ethos, dominated by both profit calculation and the search for an uneventful, pleasant life. The image of the “morning soul,” which Mariátegui borrows from Nietzsche's The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880), makes direct allusion to this newly risen self. Within this framework, revolution emerges as a transformative process, the significance of which stretches far beyond the field of political struggle. Although Mariátegui does not neglect the practical issue of how to seize state power, revolution, in his eyes, is ultimately about the birth of the new. The meaning of revolution – its “truth,” if you will – cannot be reduced to either armed insurrection or the overthrowing of the ruling class, as neither, on its own, triggers social change. The taking over of government, Mariátegui thinks, does not signal the arrival of the new; it is rather a formal, conventional act that confirms the death of an already exhausted social order. It follows, then, that political regimes and forms of government change because (and when) the conditions for that change have already been incubated within their respective societies. One can speak of “revolution” only when a culture has fulfilled its life cycle, that is, when it has already exhausted its powers and possibilities of development.

Evidently, Marx's historical teleology plays a significant part in this argument, but Mariátegui here is drawing inspiration from another passionate reader of Nietzsche: Oswald Spengler, whose theory of history, collected in the two volumes of The Decline of the West (1918, 1922), resonated widely within the generation of interwar intellectuals. Spengler, like Marx, argued for an understanding of history as divided into neatly differentiated stages that progress dialectically; but some important differences lurk behind this basic agreement. Whereas Marx proposed a universally valid scheme by which to understand the history of mankind, Spengler spoke of a plurality of histories, each of which evolves following its own laws and asks to be judged accordingly. A relativist, Spengler likewise rejected the notion of absolute historical progress, thus questioning the concept of “one linear history, which can only be kept up by shutting one's eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts” (1932, Vol. I, p. 21). As an alternative to “mechanical” visions of historical progress, he interpreted world history via the ruling principles of “everything organic – the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime” (1932, Vol. I, p. 3). Within this cyclical view, progress – always relative – is a cultural phenomenon that occurs as a result of ruptures caused by human action, not impersonal, “objective” forces like nature, technology, or the economy.

That Mariátegui filters his understanding of Marx through the ideas of Nietzsche and Spengler is quite crucial. In fact, this twofold influence explains why he grants human will a historical role that Marx himself was not always keen to accept and that his followers (Althusser, for example) have often rejected as an “idealist” fantasy. Without discounting the importance of social conditions, Mariátegui asserts that social transformations are ultimately caused by the actions of human beings or, in Spengler's words, by a “new generation that is born with the ability to do it” (1932, Vol. I, p. xiii).

If an epoch is made of objective conditions, then, according to this view, we must also accept that it comes with obligations. To be attuned to the times is not to be the puppet of vast impersonal forces. Rather, it entails acting in accordance with the demands of the epoch, and what every epoch demands, especially in situations of crisis, is doing away with the old conceptual schemes in preparation for the new. The awareness of crisis – of the sterility and exhaustion of the old – is what leads us to intervene in history, what allows us to make epoch. Insurgency – revolution in its narrowest sense – is then a willful response to crisis. Like a challenge, every crisis is a call to action that puts the moral responsibility to act on the table. Mariátegui thus reintroduces human agency into the dynamics of history. In giving an absolute primacy to praxis, he expects that we, persuaded that every “new day is the final day” (1959b, p. 21; 1994, Vol. I, p. 500), would take our destiny into our own hands.

It is in virtue of the centrality he gives to human will that Mariátegui places art at the vanguard of revolution. Yet, unlike other Marxist theorists, he refrains from equating the revolutionary quality of art with its ideological commitments. What makes an art worthy of being called revolutionary is the creative force it embodies, rather than just its defense of the proletariat or even its condemnation of injustice. Mariátegui thus dismisses the proposition of putting art at the service of revolution, as such an imperative would make sense only if art and revolution were understood to be two different things, that is, if one forgot that “the power of creation is one alone” and that “a revolutionary epoch is, par excellence, one that creates” (1959f, p. 85; 1994, Vol. I, p. 451). Following this clue, he goes as far as to argue that, ultimately, the difference between revolutionaries and conservatives lies not in the political doctrines they profess or the ideals they defend, but in the power of their imagination: “To be revolutionary or reformist is, from this point of view, a consequence of being more or less imaginative” (1959b, p. 36; 1994, Vol. I, p. 506). A revolutionary is the one who, thanks to his imaginative powers, “reacts against contingent reality” and “struggles to change what he sees and what he feels,” whereas the conservative, led by the force of habit, “rejects any idea of change due to a mental inability to conceive of and accept it” (1959b, p. 36; 1994, Vol. I, p. 506).

In the light of this idea, Mariátegui identifies three main currents within modern art. The first is populism. Represented by some late emulators of the novelist Émile Zola, its exploration of the living conditions of the poor might give the impression of revolutionary commitment, but its attachment to the timeworn principles of bourgeois naturalism unequivocally reveals its conservative colors: “populism … is nothing but the most specious maneuver to reconcile bourgeois letters with a substantial clientele of little people” (1959c, p. 33; 1994, Vol. I, p. 560). The second current takes aim at the spiritual emptiness of the bourgeoisie. This category includes artists like George Grosz, whose drawings depict the loneliness of big cities, but also writers like Ernest Glaeser, Luigi Pirandello, and Paul Morand. All these men, Mariátegui claims, are representatives of an art of decadence or dissolution – artists that bear an “empty soul” because they live in a civilization with no faith and no absolute (1959c, p. 19; 1994, Vol. I, p. 553; 2011, p. 424). To the third group belong those artists who, in accepting crisis as a challenge, seek to destroy the formal conventions of bourgeois art. Early futurism had embraced such an imperative; the endeavors of Dada and surrealism seemed now most up to the task. Mariátegui hails these two movements as harbingers of the future: André Breton and his associates appear to be expanding our concept of reality toward new realms of human experience, realms like dreams and the unconscious unknown to the bourgeois mind.

In what we have seen so far, Mariátegui's idea of revolution can be defined as the birth of a new subjectivity that strives to create a compatible, similarly new institutional order. If in politics, a revolutionary devotes herself to implementing new forms of government, then in the arts, she seeks to create new forms of expression. There is, however, a major requirement that all those attempts to bring about the new must fulfill: they cannot be utopian. As strange as it may seem, Mariátegui is an enemy of utopia. He finds the ambition to replace the imperfections of the real world with an ideal of harmony and perfection that some single individual has worked out to be irredeemably shortsighted.³ Against José Vasconcelos, the Mexican theorist of the “cosmic race,” he writes: “In Vasconcelos's fervent prophecy, the tropics and the mestizo are the setting and the protagonist of a new civilization. But Vasconcelos's thesis, which outlines a utopia – in the positive and philosophical meaning of this word – to the same extent that it attempts to predict the future, suppresses and ignores the present” (1959a, pp. 295–296; 1994, Vol. I, p. 152). “Being so invested in sounding out the future,” Mariátegui concludes, Vasconcelos has lost “the habit of looking at the present” (1959f, p. 81; 1994, Vol. I, p. 450).

The present is key: if a revolutionary movement is to succeed or to be considered legitimate at all, Mariátegui thinks, it will be because it encapsulates the moods and, above all, the collective myths born within each society. It is here that the influence of the French syndicalist Georges Sorel – the third major influence in his personal pantheon, alongside Nietzsche and Spengler – becomes evident. For he is persuaded that every mass movement, as Sorel wrote, requires the assistance of myths, “which enclose within them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life” (Sorel 1999, p. 142). Myth, says Mariátegui, “moves man in history. Without myth, man's existence has no historical meaning. History is made by people possessed and enlightened by a higher belief, by a superhuman hope” (1959b, p. 19; 1994, Vol. I, p. 497; 1996, pp. 142–143).

For Mariátegui, revolution is not the sort of foundational act that entails an absolute break with society in its present form. The attitude of the revolutionary is not to be one of celebrating radicalism and novelty for their own sake but rather of giving to each epoch what it asks for and what it needs. And the twentieth century, according to him, demanded that one take the side of the masses.