The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online IX

The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online 16/2003 36
national sections was constantly changing on the basis of this experiment with many errors just as was
happening within the other international bodies of the Executive Committee of the Third International in
Moscow. The bodies dealing with Latin American Communism were reorganized several times during the 1920s
and 1930s. However, the Comintern, while delegating to its regional bodies a part of authority, reserved to
itself the right to determine the »political line«, the final strategy. Whereas the character of mutual relations
between parties and the International in the first years of their existence was not an absolute dictatorship
coordinated from the very center, at the end of its existence, the World Communist Party had reached this
stage.
Gerardo Leibner, Tel Aviv University: The Myth of the World Revolution and the Destruction of the
Mariátegui’s Project in Peru
José Carlos Mariátegui, the founder of Peruvian Marxism, had drawn out an original political and cultural
project based in re-foundation and re-formulation of Marxism from the Peruvian and heterodox perspective. At
the center of his proposal was the idea about the existence of the particular socialist potential among the
Andean Indians which was possible from their own peculiar historical development. This attitude and also his
flexibility in theoretical issues and political initiative clashed, at the end of 1920s with the tendency of the
Communist International and its emissaries to organize and discipline the Latin American Communism and its
national Communist Parties on a more or less uniform ideological and organizational basis. This tendency
which appears clearly in the Trade Unions Conference in Montevideo and in the First Latin American
Communist Conference in Buenos Aires in May-June of 1929, was a consequence of the new orthodoxy which
was crystallizing in Moscow and the efforts to carry it out. Supposedly the pressure exercised over the Peruvian
delegation in the conferences in 1929, the pressure made by the South American Bureau of the Comintern (in
Buenos Aires) and Eudocio Ravines’ arrival to Lima who had already aligned with the »correct« ideological line,
determined that immediately after the death of Mariátegui the Peruvian Socialist Party changed its name to
Communist Party (April-May of 1930) and rapidly abandoned all the original ideas of their theoretical founder
with a purpose to assume the Comintern’s ones. However, some letters found in Lima, apart from some
internal polemics, show to scholars that the attitudes of Mariátegui were in reality questioned by some of his
principal fellows inside Peru; and that took place before the forum in Buenos Aires. In practice, the tendency to
align in accord with what was considered to be the carrying out of the directives of the Comintern even before
they were received in an explicit form demonstrates the power of seduction exercised by the myth of
revolution directed internationally as a founding myth for the identity of the Peruvian Communists; this myth
was able to destroy their own vision, which they had been developing. Alberto Flores Galindo had already
described the political and ideological isolation suffered by Mariátegui during the last months of his life. Our
studies confirm this development deepening and extending towards the previous period. Our interpretation is