Unfortunately, Professor Baines, in his zeal to write what would appear to be a clever exercise in debunking, has been careless not only of his facts but of his handling of the material on which he bases his judgments.Īs a biographer, the author does not bother either to avail himself of the revised data on Mariátegui’s birthplace and date of birth or to check the circumstances of the operation that left Mariátegui a helpless cripple for the last five years of his life. Furthermore, his Seven Essays, in which he examines and analyzes his country’s social, economic, and political “realities” within a Marxist framework, has served as a model throughout Latin America for the application of revolutionary Marxism to local conditions.

In his own country he is revered as the father of socialism and his program for social change-land reform, vindication of the Indian, and Peruvianization of the national economy-has since been adopted, at least nominally, by every political group up to and including the present military regime. Some forty years after his premature death at the age of thirty-five, José Carlos Mariátegui is finally being brought to the attention of the North American public, first through the translation into English of his master-work, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, and subsequently through the book under review.

Mariategui seven essays