Ninety years ago, José Carlos Mariátegui passed away in Lima. Only thirty-five years of age at the time, his funeral procession was attended by tens of thousands of Peruvian workers whose veneration of the Amauta, or “wise one,” bordered on the religious. It was a fitting tribute to a revolutionary who had consistently likened socialism to a kind of spiritual calling.

Many decades later, Mariátegui is still one of Latin America’s most original Marxist thinkers. Some would even go so far as to say that the spirit of the regional left remains essentially Mariateguiano — a warm current of humanist Marxism singularly embodied by Mariátegui. But like Antonio Gramsci or Che Guevara, Mariátegui’s renown has also come at a cost: a few aphorisms and catchphrases are the sum of what most card-carrying leftists know today about the Latin American revolutionary.

This reduction of his legacy is all the more unfortunate since Latin America needs Mariátegui now more than ever. The ninety-year anniversary of his passing finds the region in the midst of a conservative “Blue Tide” that, when combined with the COVID-19 crisis and looming economic catastrophe, paints an overall grim picture. As ongoing commemorations are dampened by the current political and economic outlook, the Latin American left would do well to rediscover in Mariátegui’s revolutionary romanticism an antidote to the fatalism and fear that reactionary forces are peddling throughout the region.