Mariátegui and national question in Latin America
> X. Conclusions and fundamental tasks
> [...] Having reached this point with the findings, the fundamentally economic and social character of the racial problem in Latin America is clearly stated and the duty that all Communist Parties have to prevent the self-interested deviations that the bourgeoisies intend to bring to the solution of this problem, orienting it in an exclusively racial sense, just as they have the duty to accentuate the social economic character of the struggles of the exploited indigenous or black masses, destroying racial prejudices, giving to these same masses a clear class consciousness, directing them to their concrete and revolutionary demands, distancing them from utopian solutions and evidencing their identity with the mixed-race and white proletarians, as elements of the same producing and exploited class.
> Thus, once again, revolutionary thought is clarified in the face of the campaigns for the alleged current politics of Indians and blacks.
> The C.I. fought, as far as the black race was concerned, these campaigns that tended to the formation of “black Zionism” in Latin America.
> In the same way, the constitution of the Indian race in an autonomous State would not lead at the present time to the dictatorship of the Indian proletariat, much less to the formation of a classless Indian State, as someone has tried to affirm, but to the constitution of a bourgeois Indian State with all the internal and external contradictions of bourgeois States.
> Only the classist revolutionary movement of the exploited indigenous masses will be able to allow them to give real meaning to the liberation of their race, from exploitation, favoring the possibilities of their political self-determination.
>Mariátegui, El problema de las razas en la América Latina, 1929
I was re-reading this text by José Carlos Mariátegui, and it was a interesting read, with some very convincing explanations in a very under-researched topic. Still, at its conclusion (in my view at least, it could be terribly wrong), Mariátegui seems to prefer this line of a "popular front of all nations" (in this case, the white/mestizo oppressor nation, and the oppressed Black and Indigenous nations.) against semi-feudalism, landlordism and imperialism, rather than a line of self-determination for Black and indigenous peoples. This line of self-determination was followed by some CI parties, like the Brazilian CP, until it was abandoned in favor of a line of a anti-fascist 'popular front of all races', that ended up in failure at 1935.
In the way that I see, the white/mestizo oppressor nations in Latin America (which control the state apparatus in almost all countries, from Mexico to Argentina; excluding perhaps Haiti) are the main opponents of revolution in Latin America, since their better conditions of life are based on the oppression/exploitation of the oppressed Black and Indigenous nations, somewhat reminiscent of their North American counterparts. In my view, this would explain, in part, on why Latin America, when compared to Asia and Africa, has less ongoing liberation wars/revolutions and more reformist and revisionist parties.
Mariátegui, which died one year after writing that text, hasn't had that hindsight that we have nowadays. He might have reconsidered that text and wrote more on the topic. Still, his work came to influence very relevant organizations, like the PCP, which in turn, have influenced far-less relevant organizations, which to this day, refuse to acknowledge this national/"racial" inequalities, which in turn, produces national chauvinism.
I want to know what other people think about all of this. I treat all of this as an hypothesis, that could help me to understand Marxism, by applying it to real problems that i face (national chauvinism). As any hypothesis, it could be very incorrect and expose a very poor handling of dialectical materialism and political economy. All criticism is appreciated.