José Carlos Mariátegui: History of the World Crisis

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The World Crisis and the Peruvian Proletariat

In this lecture—let us call it conversation rather than lecture—I will limit myself to laying out the course’s program, as well as some thoughts on the need to spread knowledge of world crisis among the proletariat. Unfortunately, in Peru there is a lack of an educating press which will follow the development of this great crisis with attentiveness, intelligence, and an ideological filiation; likewise, there is a lack of university professors, of José Ingenieros’ kind, capable of being passionate about the ideas of renovation which are currently changing the world, and of freeing themselves from the influence and prejudices of a conservative and bourgeois culture and education; there is a lack of socialist and syndicalist groups, in possession of their own instruments of popular culture, and thus capable of making the people interested in studying the crisis. The only popular educational institution, with a revolutionary...