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As discussed previously, two ideas lie at the heart of Mariátegui's thought. First, the idea that every epoch, as it develops, unfolds a concept that configures its historical identity, and second, the idea that revolutions are pivotal junctures that mark the transition from one epoch to another – critical circumstances that engender new forms of individuality and collectivity. What emerges out of these two notions is a concept of revolutionary epochs as periods marked by formidable explosions of creative energy that eventually crystallize in new institutional frameworks.

Revolutions, for Mariátegui, occur before any armed action or effective transformation of the institutional order. A major consequence of this account is that, in order to forge a new sensibility, one need not wait for the organized masses to seize power or for the means of production to be socialized. It is rather the opposite: revolution – the dawn of a new subjectivity – is the engine that drives the renewal of political structures. Another important implication is that art, in this view, acquires a unique status among all human activities as well as a space of relative autonomy with respect to the orders of politics and economics. This argument, however, is not one that seeks to isolate art from the workings of external forces. Mariátegui's point, rather, is that true art escapes the realm of ideology because its mission is not to impose truths but to question the established order. If ideology is oppressive because it defends the status quo, art is emancipatory because it awakens our creative powers. It follows, then, that the sole idea of putting art at the service of the revolution is absurd: “artists and technicians are much more useful and valuable to revolution the more artists and technicians they remain” (1959b, p. 200; 1994, Vol. I, p. 725). And, by the same token, it is similarly absurd to propose, even as a provisional measure, that artistic and creative freedoms be suspended in order to support revolutionary objectives.

These particular reflections suggest that Mariátegui would not have understood the verses that Bertolt Brecht wrote in defense of his generation: “Ah, we/Who desired to prepare the soil for kindness/Could not ourselves be kind” (Brecht 1962, p. 231). Nor would have he understood how Louis Aragon, having become estranged from his surrealist comrades, could have gone so far as to praise the rule book prepared by the Union of Soviet Writers: “Missing just one of the elements required of the writer by socialist realism is enough for the work to lose its socialist realist nature, to become reduced to naturalism, to populism, to sociological vulgarization – to ruin, ultimately, its nature as a work of art” (Aragon 1952, p. 409). Rather, it is reasonable to assume that Mariátegui would have applauded the famous formula laid out in the manifesto “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” (1938), as it appears in the version revised by Trotsky:

In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must under no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula complete freedom for art. (Trotsky et al. 1992, p. 126)⁶

From Mariátegui's perspective, art is politically relevant as long as it preserves its creative independence. When art is no longer an end and rather becomes an instrument, it abandons its core mission: challenging the conventional wisdom of the establishment.

It might be observed, in hindsight, that Mariátegui's firm belief in the sovereignty of art bears the mark of a long‐gone, more innocent era, one in which the communist revolution existed in a kind of eternal dawn: more than a fait accompli, revolution was in fact a hope, and more than a reality to protect, it was a goal to achieve. Here we are talking about a time when the tradition of revolutionary Marxism had not yet succumbed to the fetish of armed struggle, a time before the Soviet Union had polarized intellectuals across the globe, becoming the ultimate litmus test for determining who was for and who was against the revolution. Against this backdrop one could say – if Mariátegui is read with the characteristic hardheadedness of the apparatchik – that his passionate plea for artistic creativity was a luxury that only those far from the centers of power and free from political responsibilities can afford. Harsh as it may be, there is some truth to this claim; Mariátegui's Marxism, as Michael Löwy (1998) has acutely observed, is a romantic one – a Marxism whose search for transcendence infuses it with distinctly mystical and religious overtones. “Neither Reason nor Science,” writes Mariátegui, “can satisfy all the need of the infinite that exists in man” (1959b, p. 18; 1994, Vol. I, p. 497; 1996, p. 142).

At the same time, however, this mystic was not easily swayed by illusions. Let us recall, for instance, his trenchant observations about the peasant mentality:

The peasant tide indeed seems driven by a reactionary will toward reactionary ends. The countryside loves tradition too much. It is conservative and superstitious. Its mind is too easily conquered by antipathy and resistance to the heretical and iconoclastic spirit of progress. German nationalism, like Italian fascism, does its recruiting in the provinces, in the countryside.

(1959b, p. 46; 1994, Vol. I, p. 509)

The city, he concludes, prepares “man for collectivism, [whereas] the countryside excites his individualism” and his desire to own land (1959b, p. 47; 1994, Vol. I, p. 510). A further indication of Mariátegui's sound pragmatism is that his own defense of the autonomy of art, regardless of its optimistic tones, is not blind to the fact that art is both an economic activity and an institutional practice. There exists, he says, an essential connection between art centers and power centers:

Art, of course, cannot escape the influence of these historical forces. In medieval society, artists thrived and flourished around powerful courts; in bourgeois society, they feel fatally attracted to the great capitalist and industrial centers. A flourishing artistic scene is, in many respects, a matter of clientele, environment, wealth. Rome, a mediocre art market [when compared to Milan], cannot, therefore, be but a mediocre center of artistic creation.

(1959b, p. 81; 1994, Vol. I, p. 526)

This most unusual combination of mysticism and materialism, of romanticism and pragmatism, leads one to wonder how Mariátegui's thought would have evolved in the years following his untimely death.

The writings that we have discussed thus far provide us with some ground for speculation. First of all, it seems likely that Mariátegui would have adopted, sooner than later, a critical stance with regard to the Soviet regime, especially after the latter abandoned the project of world revolution. We might also suspect that he would have seen a reflection of his own ideas in Antonio Gramsci's meditations on the national‐popular as well as in the messianism of Walter Benjamin. Insofar as they elevate the ideal of the new to the rank of moral imperative, the philosophies of Ernst Bloch and Cornelius Castoriadis might have similarly drawn his attention.

With respect to art, an issue that would have surely preoccupied Mariátegui is the crisis of the ideal of originality, the result of both the emergence of culture industries and the impact of technology on the production and consumption of art. How would he have reacted to the increasing reproduction of art on a massive scale and the resulting death of the artwork as a unique and unrepeatable object? Would he have welcomed these phenomena, as Benjamin did, because of their democratizing potential? Or would he have declared art obsolete in agreement with Theodor Adorno's pessimistic account?

We cannot know precisely what solutions he would have offered, but by way of conclusion, we might speculate that Mariátegui would likely have been puzzled by the narrow chauvinism that underlies much “postcolonial” thinking today. Cultural difference, he believed, was not a matter of metaphysical essences or self‐enclosed identities, but of styles and individualities. His own indigenism, as we have seen, was not grounded on racial or ethnic utopias, but rather on a sense of historical justice that, anticipating Benjamin, demanded that we read history against the grain and take the side of the victims. The notion that cultures are fixed signs of identity, that they set insurmountable boundaries between that which is one's own and that which is foreign, would have made little sense to him. Although he considered himself an Indian (which he was not), he felt Gothic art to be his own. What is ours, he believed, is that which we find intelligible and valuable (1959b, pp. 73–78; 1994, Vol. I, pp. 523–525). As if it were a matter of inverting that old, worn‐out cliché according to which one can only attain universality by adhering to the particular, he was convinced that the particular could only be reached by way of the universal – that only “the universal, ecumenical roads we have chosen to travel, and for which we are reproached, take us ever closer to ourselves” (1959a, p. 305; 1971, p. 287; 1994, Vol. I, p. 157).