Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality by José Carlos Mariátegui: Essays 1 & 2

José Carlos Mariátegui was a Peruvian communist whose magnum opus, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, marked a sea change in the Latin American intellectual field. His historical and dialectical materialist analysis of the conditions in Peru, especially on the topics of economic development and the oppression of Indigenous communities, defined the next century of communist agitation throughout the continent. The term Sendero Luminoso, used to refer to the Communist Party of Peru (though they never adopted the name themselves), comes from Mariátegui’s writings. The PCP (Partido Comunista del Perú) counts Mariátegui as one of its principal intellectual forebears, and his work continues to loom large in Latin America and throughout the diaspora. Listen to Outline of the Economic Evolution and The Problem of the Indian, the first two of the eponymous seven essays, here. For a text copy of Seven Interpretive Essays, where you can read the footnotes largely left out of this audiobook for the sake of cohesion, visit: To support me and help make more revolutionary texts accessible to all visit my Patreon page at: