Abstract

The concept of “revolutionary myth” is the idea of Georges Sorel most influential in the thinking of José Carlos Mariátegui. However, this concept does not work the same way in both authors, mainly because it is applied in each case on markedly different national situations, such as France and Peru in the early twentieth century. For this reason it is important, regardless of the theoretical similarities, expressed as the difference between a general strike myth, linked to European industrial proletariat, and another characterized around the social revolution, linked to the masses of the indigenous peasantry. In both cases we see that such concepts are functional to an extension of the limits of Marxism beyond Stalinism and the III International.