Research

Archaic Developmentalism: 20th-Century Andean Marxism and the Invocation of the Incan Empire

Developmentalism refers to the idea that human societies progress through a series of historical stages, along one path or multiple paths, which allows for the comparison and hierarchization of different populations. Political theory has scrupulously documented how developmentalism, in its various guises, was called upon to justify Europe’s domination of non-European societies. More recently, however, there has been a reappraisal of developmentalism, which has analyzed how non-European political thinkers took up developmental ideas, such as liberalism and Darwinism, in order to achieve various, contextually specific political ends.

With this in mind, my dissertation examines how three 20th-Century Andean Marxists – José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), Tristán Marof (1898-1979), and Fausto Reinaga (1906-1994) – engaged with Marxist developmentalism. I argue that these three thinkers remained wedded to, but reworked, Marxist developmentalism through a reimagination of the Incan Empire’s archaic social and economic forms. Through their engagement with the archaic, Mariátegui, Marof, and Reinaga theorized that the Andes could proceed directly to communism, skipping a mature capitalist stage of history, and were able to challenge the dogmatic, economically deterministic strand of orthodox Marxism championed by the Soviet Union. Interestingly, in doing so, these three thinkers theorized progress as the critical restoration of a past political and economic order.

To advance these claims, I develop a conception of archaic developmentalism, which can be productively disaggregated into three components: (1) a utopian remembering of the Incan Empire; (2) a condemnation of Spanish colonialism, oppressive domestic institutions, and neocolonialism; and (3) the modelling of modern, communist institutions on archaic, Incan institutions.

Works in Progress

"Creolizing Marxism: José Carlos Mariátegui, Peruvian Reality, and 'the Indian'"

"Criticism Beyond Critique: Antonio Gramsci's Organic Intellectuals as Radical Visionaries"

"Protagonistic Democracy: Hugo Chávez, El Pueblo, and the Bolivarian Revolution"