The Mariátegui Project

The Crisis of Socialism

The experience of the Russian Revolution offered socialists the world over ample material to study and learn from, experience which would be synthesized into Marxism-Leninism, the dominant guiding ideology of 20th century proletarian revolution. Some of Marxism-Leninism’s key tenets, such as the need to smash the bourgeois state and replace it with a workers’ state, the nature of imperialism in the current stage of capitalist development, etc., would form the ideological foundations — at least nominally — for subsequent revolutions across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

However, in Europe, the parliamentary road of constructing socialism peacefully through the channels and mechanisms of the bourgeois state, remained in vogue. With the collapse of the Second International some years prior, and the establishment of the Third (Communist) International, the debate over the correct road to socialism was at one of its heated peaks.

In these texts, Mariátegui takes a look at the parliamentary socialist movements in Europe and diagnoses their failures in offering viable solutions to the pressing questions of the global proletariat of the day.