Biography Report

Augustin Marroquin: the sociopath as Rebel

If Carlos had left his native Peru in 1923 as a radicalized democrat, he returned a communist. But this new faith notwithstanding, Carlos soon accepted the invitation of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre to participate in the latter's newly founded, broad-based populist movement known as APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana). In joining APRA, Carlos found himself embroiled in the “Comintern” controversy that he had effectively escaped with his 1919 exile, but initially at least, the tone was less than confrontational as the then-moderate Third International sought to convince Haya and APRA to join up. However, after the massacre of Chinese Communists at the hands of the Kuomintang in 1927—with which Haya identified—the distance between APRA and the “Comintern”, and as a result with Carlos, grew. Carlos finally broke with APRA and Haya in 1928, founding the Peruvian Socialist Party (PSP), but he devoted the remaining two years of his short life to resisting the dogmatism of imposed “Comintern” orthodoxy (Grosfoguel, 2000).

Maia Antonia Muniz: Frontier Matriarch

The newly formed Latin American Communist parties were quickly incorporated into the nascent “Comintern”, local concerns soon took a backseat to directives issued from the Soviet Union, and these official Latin American Marxists had to contend both with their domestic struggles and with the “Comintern”'s sometimes unpredictable lurches, from initial radicalism to the conservatism of the late 1920s and, after 1929, back to an aggressive ultra-leftism. In this context—with most Communists torn between the domestic struggle against capitalism and imperialism and the imposition of an international dogma by ostensible allies—the Peruvian José Carlos Carlos intervened. A diminutive and sickly autodidact, enamored of poetry, Carlos was an unlikely candidate for the title later bestowed upon him: that of Latin America's first Marxist. While Carlos was not chronologically the first Marxist in Latin America, this is not what is meant by the phrase. Rather, by successfully charting a third way between capitalist imperialism and Communist dogma, Carlos can be seen as the first Marxist to deal with and formulate his theories on the basis of the concrete reality of Latin American life (Liss, 1984).

Carlota Lucia Brito

When the “Comintern” was forming, Carlos was scarcely 24 years old, but he had already been engaged in journalism for a decade, providing support first for the student movement and later the burgeoning labor movement. In his vociferous support for the 1919 general strike in support of the eight-hour workday, Carlos ran afoul of the Peruvian government, and tensions continued to rise until the new government of Augusto Leguía offered the young radical a stark choice: prison or voluntary exile. Carlos accepted the latter option, traveling in 1919 to Paris, before arriving in Italy less than a year later, where he was exposed to both the radical praxis of the Italian factory councils as well as such thinkers as Bendetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, and Georges Sorel. Carlos was present at the historic Livorno Congress of 1921, during which the future adherents of the Italian Communist Party—Antonio ...