José Carlos Mariátegui

Following a meeting with the national executive in Lima, I was put in touch with districts in Iquitos in the north of the country and Arequipa in the south.

Founded in nineteen twenty-seven, SUTEP is the largest union representing education workers in Peru and a membership of around three hundred and seventy thousand teachers and fourteen thousand support staff SUTEP is a class conscious union heavily influenced by Peruvian Marxist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui.

He viewed teachers not just as passive state employees, but as intellectuals of the working class.

Mariátegui was anti-Stalinist in the late 1920s and resisted Comintern pressure to rename the Partido Socialists Peruano as the Communist Party.

Maybe

... perhaps, we will have to talk of course about the man who influenced this Guzmán guy, who goes by the name José Carlos Mariátegui.

So let's, let's...

Before we do anything, let's place ourselves in Peru, uh, in Lima, and we're gonna talk about a document firstly called Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality.

Yeah.

So first of all, I mean, I started with kind of this concept, this term, vulgar Marxism, trying to find where it was, and I just f- this is where it appears in all these various different f-figures, in Mariátegui, in de Man, in Korsch, in, um, uh, Lukács.

Um, and so that was interesting.

And then when you, as I said, when you look into how they use it, you realize that they use it related to education, and then you realize that they're all involved in education.

Gramsci is doing this lecture course.

Education in Central Theory is doing.

Mariátegui is going out in Peru into the outskirts of Lima and teaching in, in empty cinemas, workers and, and, and, uh, indigenous peasants about, you know, Marxist ideas.

So you realize that that links them together.