José Revueltas and Peripheral Marxism: Nation, Alienation, and Critique of the Party in Latin America

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of the essayistic and narrative work of José Revueltas as an intervention in the debates of Latin American Marxism, focused on the relationship between alienation, nation, and party form. Against interpretations that reduce him to a committed writer or a dissident of Mexican communism, it argues that his thought articulates these three dimensions as constitutive mediations of the crisis of Marxism in peripheral contexts. Through an analysis of his political essays and narrative works, the article shows that alienation operates in Revueltas as a form of social mediation that traverses not only the economy, but also ideology, political organization, and everyday experience. Within this framework, the nation appears as a field of hegemonic struggle, while the party is critically examined in its historical forms of bureaucratization and dogmatism. Finally, it is argued that literature does not function as an illustration of these problematics, but as a space of knowledge production in which these tensions are embodied in bodies, subjectivities, and narrative conflicts. From this perspective, Revueltas’s work makes it possible to rethink the historical mediations of revolutionary consciousness in Latin America and offers conceptual tools to understand its contemporary crises.