If I had to choose a handful of books that made a particular impression, there would be André Breton’s L’amour fou, which I read in 1949, and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, which I read in French on a train to Bolivia in the late 1950s, as well as his study of Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. Curiously, when reading Moby Dick some fifteen years earlier I had been struck by the very same sentence from which James took his title. Melville and James are marked by the same refusal of injustice I mentioned earlier. I also found it in José María Arguedas, a Peruvian who wrote an extraordinary autobiographical novel called Los ríos profundos, and in the poetry of another Peruvian, César Vallejo. And of course it’s present in Frantz Fanon. I recall buying Les damnés de la terre in Rome, in a bookshop on the via Veneto on 4 December 1961—I remember the day exactly because I read the book in one sitting, and it made a big impact on me. I discovered Gramsci around the same time, during a stay in Italy. I also read the work of Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and the group around Quaderni rossi, and of course the writings of Rossana Rossanda, Pietro Ingrao and the leftist tendencies inside the Italian Communist Party.5 I became familiar with Subaltern Studies and the work of Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee in the late 1980s. I only really read Edward Thompson in the 1990s. His Making of the English Working Class and Customs in Common lay a lot of emphasis on the category of experience, which in my view is extremely important to Marxist thought.

Taken together, all of these works have in common a concern with the preoccupations of the people, based on the impulse to understand their world and what motivates them. The reasons why people rise up in revolution are not incidental, they are substantive. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky writes that the masses didn’t rise up because they were thinking of the future, but because what they were experiencing in the present was intolerable. Walter Benjamin expresses a similar thought in his theses on history. When Guha writes of the ‘autonomous domain’ of the subaltern, and of ways of conducting politics ‘below’ official politics, it comes from his experience as a communist militant in India. In a way, when I wrote on the Mexican Revolution I was concerned with the same phenomena of social life as in Guha’s work, though mine took a more elemental form. Many look at the support for Perón or Cárdenas and say they were Peronists, or Cardenistas. But the parties in question were just the epiphenomenal form taken by the desires of all these people. Parties often think they are the ones organizing and instructing the people on how to mobilize, but that’s not the case—they were the best institutional form for securing particular ends, and the impulse comes from elsewhere, from long years of suffering, from an intolerable reality.