On the Character of Peruvian Society
This selection, composed of Mariátegui’s responses to a questionnaire in the Andean magazine La Sierra (no. 29, May 1929), provides some of his most penetrating analyses of Peru and its feudal and capitalist development. As such, it makes clear the originality of Mariátegui’s application of Marxism, and his insistence on using the journal to penetrate to the essence of national problems in such a way as to maximize the possibility of changing conditions. The manuscript that Mariátegui refers to was evidently lost and never published, but most of it was eventually included in editions of Ideología y Política. This translation is taken from a previous book, Acerca del Carácter de la Sociedad Peruana, Articulo Inédito de José Carlos Mariátegui (Lima: Editorial Popular, 1973), for which the well-known Peruvian leftist journalist and Mariátegui scholar César Lévano wrote the Preface.1
My answer to some of these questions is in Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. And I treat the purely political questions in a book on which I am now working that Historia Nueva will publish in a few months in Madrid. I believe that these types of questionnaires are not really useful unless concrete, precise, data, and fact-based research is being proposed. The general themes cannot be covered effectively in a few pages, no matter how great a study‘s power of synthesis. I am going to limit myself to a few schematic propositions that the "Seminar of Peruvian Culture" will find more fully developed in other studies.
1. What are the manifestations of the survival of feudalism?
The survival of feudalism certainly should not be looked for in political or juridical institutions and structures that persist from the feudal order. Formally, Peru is a republican and democratic-bourgeois state. Feudalism or semi-feudalism survives in the structure of our agrarian economy. And in that Peru is a principally agricultural country, the conditions of its agrarian economy, in which the colonial inheritance is still visible, are decisively reflected in its political practice and institutions. The same would certainly not occur if industry, commerce, the metropolis were stronger than agriculture. Latifundism is not the only proof of agrarian feudalism or semi-feudalism. In the sierra2 we have definitive proof of its typical economic expression: servitude. In relations of production and work, a paid salary indicates the transition to capitalism. Properly speaking, no capitalist regime exists where there is no salary regime. Capitalist concentration also creates latifundism with the absorption of the small properties by large enterprises. But the capitalist latifundio, exploited according to a principle of production and not profitability, requires salaried labor, a fact that definitively differentiates it from a feudal latifundio. In the study and the classification of the forms and variations of servitude one does find the material for a possible and practical survey. The value of the hacienda does not depend on anything more than its population, its own labor force. The latifundio has the peasant masses because it has the land. The instrument of capital is sick. The day laborer who receives a poor piece of land with the obligation to work the lord‘s land without any additional pay is nothing more than a serf. And does not servitude subsist in the crude and characteristic form of the subordinated Indian pongazo? Certainly no law authorizes servitude. But the servitude is there, evidently almost intact. Nonpaid services have been abolished many times, but nonpaid services persist, because feudalism has not been abolished economically. Señor Luis Carranza proposes a capitalist method that, strictly applied, would have ruined feudal gamonalismo: the fixing of a daily minimum salary of one sol for the highland haciendas.
The latifundio would not have been able to accept this measure. If the state were to have imposed it, the latifundio would have rebelled, claiming its absolute right to property. The landless Indians would have seen themselves compelled by the threat of hunger, to occupy the latifundios through force. We would have had our agrarian revolution. All of this is by way of hypothesis, because in this history, which of the governments in this republican century would have felt strong enough to attack gamonalismo so resolutely?
Salaried labor prevails on the coastal haciendas. Production techniques and labor systems indicate that our sugar and cotton haciendas are capitalist enterprises. But the hacendado feels no less absolute in his domain. Inside his fief, he judges, controls, and regulates commerce, governs the collective life. The population on the latifundio lacks civil rights. Socially speaking, it does not constitute a town or a community, but rather all the peon labor of the hacienda. Obedience to the laws and authority of the state is totally subordinated to the will of the hacendado. The workers do not have the right to organize as citizens in communes or municipalities; and much less do they have the right to organize proletarian unions. State authority barely reaches the latifundio. The latifundio conserves the spirit of the encomendero. Preserving its peasant masses from all contamination by doctrines or proletarian vindications, caring for the health of their souls in his own way, trafficking in provisions by means of sellers and contractors, he cares for the health of their bodies. The yanacongazo and the enganche also maintain a certain character of feudal throwback in the coastal haciendas.
2. Historically, is the establishment of a formal capitalism possible?
A formal capitalism is already established. Even though the liquidation of feudalism has not been achieved, and our incipient, mediocre bourgeoisie has shown itself incapable of achieving it, Peru is in a period of capitalist growth.
Upon politically emancipating itself from Spanish rule, Peru was a country with an agrarian, feudal economy. Its mining, to which Peru owed its fame for fabulous wealth, found itself in crisis. The Spaniards had dedicated great effort to the exploitation of the mines, but they were unable to organize them technically and financially in a way that ensured their development. They allowed centers of production that, for geographic reasons, ceased to be the easiest and most advantageous to exploit, to be extinguished. The enormous distance that separated Peru from the European markets made it difficult for the old continent to exploit other Peruvian products. England, without doubt, had already taken its first commercial and financial steps. In London, the first small loans to the republic were made. Peru‘s republican beginnings emerged in the midst of fiscal tightness. The exploitation of guano and saltpeter deposits on the southern coast quickly opened an era of abundance in midcentury. The state began to enjoy bountiful resources. But Peru did not know how to administer its treasury prudently: it felt itself rich, compromised its credit, and having no choice began to use government loans, squandered its resources, and as a result created disorder. The exploitation of guano and saltpeter enriched a number of speculators and contractors, who in part came from the old colonial caste. This group was transformed, by the addition of more than a few nouveaux riches, into a capitalist bourgeoisie. The War of the Pacific, in which Peru lost the saltpeter territory to Chile, caused a surprise for the country when, overwhelmed by the service on the public debt, which it had tried to regularize through a contract with the French firm Dreyfus, the public treasury found itself in profound crisis.
With the war, Peru‘s economy was completely prostrate. Fiscal resources were reduced to the scarce yield produced by customs and consumption taxes. The service on the public debt could not be taken care of at all; bankruptcy resulted in the loss of state credit. The foreign debt in large part ended up in the hands of English creditors, who entered into negotiations with the government to get an agreement. After these negotiations the Grace Contract was made, passing management of the state railways and guano islands to a company that held the national debt, the Peruvian Corporation. The exchequer agreed on its own to begin the service on the national debt with plated coins whose value was later fixed at 80,000 pounds sterling.
In this period, the cultivation of sugar began to acquire importance in the hot coastal valleys, which even before the war were susceptible to development. Peru had secure markets for sugar production in Chile and Bolivia, and had an extremely advantageous position for England.
The Peruvian Corporation, fulfilling its contractual obligations, completed the rail lines in the center first and in the south later, with the former favoring the explo itation of the mines in Junín. An American company, the Cerro de Pasco Mining Company, later changed to the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation, was established in Cerro de Pasco and Morococha [the two principal mining centers in the department of Junín]. With the establishment of this company and the petroleum company, a subsidy of Standard Oil and owner of the Negritos oilfield in northern Peru, the large-scale penetration by Yankee capitalism began. It was initially closely linked to the activity of English capitalism, dominant in the Peruvian economy through the Peruvian Corporation and the principal import-export houses.
At the dawn of the present century, the principal registered export products for Peru were sugar and cotton (whose cultivation was extended because of the stimulus of good prices for the coastal haciendas), copper and other minerals, petroleum and wools. Rubber had its period of prosperity at the beginning of the century, before the English developed the cultivation of rubber trees in their colonies. Extracted from forest regions that are difficult to access, Peruvian rubber was soon seen as an impractical competitor with the rubber from the English colonial plantations. Petroleum, on the other hand, continued to develop in an ascendant line. The International Petroleum Company, the principal producer, offspring of Standard Oil, had a conflict with the state because of the taxes the Brea and Pariñas oilfields paid, which for some time was improperly recorded at much less than the true value. This enterprise should have paid the exchequer a sum much greater, but with the threat of suspending the work and with the collaboration of government officials and legislators the company managed a transaction that was favorable to their interests.
The European war made Peruvian capitalism move from a moratorium on the issuing of banknotes, for which it faced some resistance because of the unpleasant memory of treasury notes, to a period of investment and excess profits. But the national bourgeois i.e., which constituted the base of an aristocracy tending toward idleness and dominated by prejudice, had always lacked a true capitalist spirit. They scorned this opportunity to use unexpected resources to ensure a more independent situation, and a more secure and stable position, and did so in the face of lenders and foreign experts and the eventual declining prices of the export products. It was thought that excess profits would not end and that cotton and sugar prices would remain at high levels indefinitely. The value of the cultivatable coastal land increased; the hacendados carelessly extended the land under cultivation; luxury and extravagance consumed a part of the excess profits. When cotton and sugar prices fell brusquely after the war, the coastal hacendados found themselves in the impossible situation of confronting the loans they had uncontrollably accumulated to expand their crops and quadruple their expenses. A great number of coastal haciendas ended up in the hands of their creditors, the export houses that had financed our coastal agriculture, and that gave it a characteristically colonial physiognomy, regulated production according to the European and North American markets. Many coastal haciendas have become property of the export firms Grace, Duncan, Fox, etc.; more than a few latifundistas ended up reduced to the condition of administrators or fiduciary officers in these haciendas. In the Chicama Valley, the powerful German landowner absorbed the national agrarian businesses and even commerce in the city of Trujillo where the Casa Grande sugar refinery processing plant developed. This business has its own port, Port Chicama, where they load and unload the ships destined to carry its imports and exports.
The exploitation of the copper and silver mines and other minerals and petroleum deposits has grown enormously. Petroleum has become the principal export product of Peru. In the department of Junín, the establishment of a large American enterprise has been announced. The Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation, owner of the processing center in La Oroya and the Cerro de Pasco, Morococha and Goyllarisquisga mines, finds itself in such a prosperous position because of the high price of copper that it has lately agreed to a 10 percent increase in wages and salaries, which will last as long as prices stay high in the New York markets. The profits from copper and petroleum enrich foreign companies, but they do not leave anything in the country except the fiscal taxes. In Talara, the International Petroleum Company, owner of its own port and ships, imports from the United States necessary consumer goods for the population that works in the petroleum region, including foodstuffs. All the economic life of the region is found in the hands of the company, an d it consequently does not drive the development of the neighboring agricultural regions.
Industry is still very small in Peru. Its possibilities for development are limited by the condition, structure, and character of the national economy, but it is even more limited by the dependency of economic life on the interests of foreign capitalism. The import firms are, in many cases, the owners or stockholders of the national factories. Logically, they are only interested in the existence of industry that because of tariffs, primary resources, or labor costs generally tends to keep Peru a consumer market for foreign manufactures or as a producer of raw materials.
Government loan policy permits the state to mitigate the effects of this situation on the general economy. The government loans are applied to the execution of some public works—to avoid a state of significant unemployment, to sustain a large bureaucracy, to balance the budget. The public works enrich a large category of speculators, who compensate the national bourgeoisie for the fall taken by the sugar and cotton latifundistas. The axis of our capitalism begins to be, by virtue of this process, the mercantile bourgeoisie. The landowning aristocracy suffers a visible displacement.
The Peruvian Corporation recently obtained a contract from the government that provides it with the trains it was administering. On the other hand, the Peruvian exchequer has been exonerated for the 80,000 pounds sterling annually it still has to cover, and has recovered control over the guano trade (receiving in the process a small indemnification for the difference), but has ceded the property of the railroads, valued at 18,000,000 pounds sterling. This has been an important concession to English capitalism during an epoch of increasing relations and commitment with United States capitalism.
3. Does the coastal economy allow for the establishment of socialist economic forms?
To the extent that it is capitalist, the economy of the coast creates the conditions f or socialist production. The sugar and cotton latifundio scannot be divided into parcels to make way for small properties—a liberal and capitalist solution of the agrarian problem—without negatively impacting yield and its profitable functioning based on the industrialization of agriculture. The collective state management of these enterprises is, however, perfectly possible. No one disagrees that we are dealing with an agriculture that prospers vigorously under private initiative and administration. It has owed its ephemeral prosperity to the fat times of the war. The sugar industry confesses it is almost bankrupt. It does not believe it has the power to confront the crisis without state subsidies.
Today, with urgent necessity, the question of the socialization or nationalization of this branch of production is introduced. The Peruvian sugar producers have lamentably failed in their private management of the Peruvian sugar industry. The biggest sugar companies are not now nationally owned.
4. Since the economic structure of the coast does not allow for the formation of a proletariat with a classist orientation, is the resurgence of a liberal economic stage possible?
These problems are not resolved in theory, but in practice. What possible liberal stage anticipates the question? If we understand the liberal stage to be the capitalist stage, we are already participating in its development. Do not expect the agreement of the researchers. Capitalist policy is irrigation policy, even for its conflict wit h the interests of the big civilista sugar landowners. Sutton represents capitalist advance, with his demagogy and bold gestures. It is probable that in Peru‘s history his significance would be analogous to that of Meiggs.3 If liberal policy is understood as assuring the formalization of the relations between capital and labor and the authority of the state in what is now a feudal context that guarantees the laboring masses their rights of association and culture, it is evident that this policy would normally lead to the formation of a proletariat with a classist orientation. The formation of this proletariat will not be produced without a capitalism that politically and administratively imports liberalism. As has been the case so far, the urban, industrial proletariat, that of the transportation sector, etc., has to realize its obligations of solidarity with the peasantry of the hacienda. This is the way it has happened so far, penetrating in spite of all the walls. The wall will be easier to penetrate than it has been, since automotive traffic opens a means of contact between the hacienda and the city. And has the proletariat of the haciendas not struggled to achieve its economic demands many times before? Is it not enough to remember the strikes of Chicama, which are among the most important manifestations of class struggle in Peru, to be convinced that the peasant proletariat has, if not class orientation, previously engaged in combat?
5. On which bases and with which socialist elements should the capitalist regime be implanted?
6. What characteristics will distinguish the capitalist movement?
Questions 5 and 6 are answered and thus taken care of by the previous response.
7. Once the liberal economic stage is achieved historically, is the advent of socialism foreordained?
The political advent of socialism does not presuppose the perfect or exact accomplishment of the liberal economic stage, according to a universal itinerary. Elsewhere, I have already said it is very possible that the destiny of socialism in Peru might be in part achieving certain tasks that are theoretically capitalist in accordance with the rhythm of history that guides us.
Notes
- A version of this interview is also found in more recent editions of Ideología y política, in Obras Completas, 3rd ed. (Lima: Biblioteca Amauta, 1971), 13: 263–274, but the actual questions are not integrated in the text. ↩
- Mariátegui divided Peru into three regions, the western coast, the highland mountainous region in the Andes, which in Peru is referred to as the sierra, and the montaña, which is the Peruvian forest on the eastern side of the Andes. Indigenous peoples and customs were strongest in the sierra, which is also where the latifundio was strongest and most traditional. ↩
- Henry Meiggs, a notorious American capitalist, was instrumental in developing Peruvian railroads. ↩