Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 15:48:12 -0800
From: Juan Fajardo <fajardos-AT-ix.netcom.com>
Subject: M-G: Re: Mariategui & Inca Empire, 1/2


Greetings, Rolf.

In Marxism-General-Digest of Saturday, January 10 1998 (Volume 01 :
Number 583) you responded to my posting concerning Jose Carlos
Mariategui in Marxism-General-Digest of  Friday, January 9 1998 (#581). 
I would like now to respond to some of the thingsyou said.  I have
organized the response according to topic and regrouped relevant
sections of your post accordingly.  I'll send the post out in two
sections.


I. MARIATEGUI AND INCAN "COMMUNISM"

1.1 Inca Society: "communist?"

Regarding following regarding Mariategui's claim that the Inca system
was "communist" and my statement that "when he spoke of the Inca's as a
com-
>munist society he was referring not to the way the empire was
>managed, but to the way that the economy was managed from a
>local level," you wrote:  

> (Dr Sendepause:)
> >"It is very clear, Mariategui called the Incan state an early
> >communist order on a higher level, an autocratic reign and
> >communism at the same time. And all I read was a very positive
> >description of this early society."
> 
> Your defence of this error of Mari=E1tegui is quite wrong, Juan,
> and of course very weak. How can you pretend - even to yourself
> perhaps? - that Mari=E1tegui "did not" mean the Incan system *as
> a whole* but "was only writing about how things were at a lower
> level in it", when he called it "communist"?> 

Later on you further added, 

> [...] Do you mean to say that when Mari=E1te-
> gui wrote about the Inca Empire, calling it a "communist" so-
> ciety, which as you've pointed out it was *not*, then he wasn't
> talking of the Incas at all, he'd plain forgotten that this
> autocratic ruling class or caste was there at all? An "Inca Em-
> pire" with no Incas, was that what he described, you say??
> 

No, Mariategui was well aware of the Incas' dictatorship, but does in
fact dismiss it somewhat, at least he did so in his Seven Interpretive
Essays on Peruvian Reality, first published in 1928, in which he refers
to an "Incan communism -which cannot be denied nor dimished for having
developed under the Incas' autocratic regime- which ... is known as
agricultural communism" (Trans. mine from the 1979 Mexican edition by
Ediciones Era)  Based on the offhand, almost second-thought reference to
the form of government of the Inca empire, compared to the discussion of
the communal land tenure forms of pre-Conquest Peru which precedes it,
and other readings and discussions I've had on Mariategui, I believe
that while he did not ignore the fact of the Inca government, he was
more interested in the Incas's economic system.  And he was interested
in it because he saw in it institutions and patterns which he felt could
help in socializing the Peruvian economy, and which could moreover
provide a pattern on how to do it, and because he identified the land
tenure system as the root of many other problems in Peruvian society of
the time.

If by "comunismo" Mariategui meant to equate the Inca system with that
specific mode of production, and the society which stems from it, which
we refer to as "communism" - then I think Mariategui was incorrect. 
However when speaking of the Marxist movement and the future society
Mariategui consisently seems to prefer to use the term "socialismo" and
thus by "comunismo" he may be in fact mean what we might call
"communalism," holding goods and resources in common.

In any case, in terms of historical analysis Mariategui reserved most
his effort toward analysing the colonial and republican periods. He
tended to mention the Incas and pre-Conquest economy mostly to point out
the colonial systems failure to substitute for Inca "communism" or
"communalism" a superior system instead of the slave system it put in
place in its failure to install a "pure feudal-type economy."  
Nonetheless, I think there can be no doubt that Mariategui tended to
view the Inca empire in a fairly positive light and superficially at
that.  He tended I think to reflect the biases of his sources on the
matter, many of whom were _indigenistas_.  It was this influence and
context that I was trying to point out in my first paragraph and the
opening line of my second paragraph ("Even if they didn't, _we_ must
avoid applying general labels from one
society and time period to another, very different, one."), in which I
should also have put emphasis on the word "they".

As an aside (which is perhaps not so far aside...), I want to mention
that Mariategu came to Marxism via Italian communists and never made it
to Russia despite a desire on his part to go. His contacts in the
European Marxist movement were thus largely in Spain and Italy, as well
as France, and materials had to come to him via those countries and in
translation, if they could make it into Peru at all under the conditions
of censorship and repression at the time.  Thus Mariategui was not aware
of a great deal of the Marxist corpus, such as it stood then before the
massive task of collecting and printing the previously unpublished
materials that went into the Marx/Engels, and Lenin collections.  While
I will not pretend to understand it in anything more than a rudimentary
fashion, I wonder if Mariategui had been aware of Marx's concept of an
Asian Despotic mode of production and his application of this category
to describe the Inca empire? And if he wasn't, would this knowledge have
affected his analysis of that society, I wonder?


1.2 Socialism is different from Inca system

You stated:
 
> [O]f course the fact that the people on these lower levels [of the Inca empire -JRF]
> had no say in it all [...] must also affect their consciousness, in a
> manner that had and has nothing to do with socialism and in fact
> is quite contrary to it.
> 
> Socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is based on the
> people's overhelming majority taking an active part in the run-
> ning of the state It can never exist under conditions of the
> masses' just passively accepting what, for reasons they know
> nothing about, a small ruling elite see fit to provide them
> with.

Here I think we agree 100%.


1.3 Regarding the Yanakuna 

You wrote:

> Where did I get that "slave-owning" from? Mainly from what I had
> read in Dr Sendepause's article (in part 1/2, appr. one fourth
> from the beginning - see my "re-fwd" to M-G on 06.01):
> >Under the Incas there was the "yanacona"-status which at
> >least resembled the slave status of the old empires in the
> >Mediterranean region.
> 

Here I made a mistake.  When I referred to mitmaqkuna I actually meant
to refer to the yanakuna (which litteraly means "helpers").  This is the
same group mentioned by Mr. Sender (is that whom you refer to as "Dr
Sendepause" or are they two different people?). He and I have cleary
been reading different books on the matter, but from his comments you
can no doubt see why I recognized the case of the yanakuna to be the
probable counter to the opinion I was stating.  (The mitmaqkuna were
people, entire populations in fact, whom the incas transferred from
place of the empire to another one either as settlers or as a punishment
[thereby breaking their ties to the land, their idols, and their
deceased]; sometimes people moved voluntarily - as much as that was
possible in their system - but most often it was forcibly done.)


1.3 About the term "ayllu"

You asked, "is that the general term for the local communities that were
under the Incas' domination?"  Actually the ayllus (in Quechua: singular
"ayllu", plural "ayllukuna") are a pan-Andean at least Quechua and
Aymara institution within communities, in which the community is divided
into two separate but equivalent and complementary parts, as an
expression of the Andean worldview of duality: high/low, light/dark,
earth/sky, male/female etc.  Each half of the community is associated
with one side of the duality, usually expressed in terms of upper/lower
and sky/earth, and is associated or represented with either a snake
(low, earth) or a hawk (upper, sky), or the color white or black, etc.
in textiles, ceramics, costumes and so on. Ayllus are non-hierarchically
related and tasks associated with their assigned "properties" are
delegated to members of each ayllu.  For example the lower ayllu might
divide the land while the upper ayllu cleans the cisterns,  the male
ayllu sponsors the feast of the male patron saint, the female ayllu that
of the Virgin Mary, and so forth, for the benefit of the community as a
whole. This it seems predates the Inca empire and even the Inca as a
tribe were divided into ayllus, with the different clans falling into
one ayllu or the other, and has survived not ony them, but the Spanish,
and mestizo and white Peruvians. Ronald Wright, in his book *Cut Stones
and Crossroads*, explains it pretty well, I recommend reading it.

(Continues in next part of post:
Mariategui & Inca Empire 2/2)
*********************************


     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---