Latin American Marxisms In Context

In recent decades, the global North has been engulfed by neoliberalism. Neoliberal ideas have dominated the economy and public policies, and have become deeply entrenched as “common sense.” Latin America has not been immune to this trend. However, at the same time, governments and popular mobilizations across the continent have actively resisted and challenged neoliberalism. Countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia have sometimes been grouped under the label of a “pink tide,” denoting their leftist alignment and their resistance to the Washington-led neoliberal consensus. This opposition to neoliberal development patterns in Latin America has gone beyond social-democratic reformism to a revival of Marxist theoretical perspectives and political practices. This book provides an insight into the rich diversity of Latin American Marxism, historically and contemporarily. Given the global interest in the revival of radicalism in Latin America, it will appeal to a wide audience, and should be of interest to non-Marxist as well as Marxist scholars with interests in topics from political economy to cultural theory.

This is the first new anthology of writings by Latin American Marxists to appear in over twenty years. Its purpose is to fill this vacuum and to provide a working tool for both students and activists. While including theoretical, sociological, historical, and economic writings, the majority of the documents center on political struggles throughout the continent. The anthology's method is historical, considering the evolution of Marxist thought in the context of social and political struggles during the different historical periods in Latin America, as well as in connection with developments in the international workers' movement. Of particular interest are hard-to-find documents from the early years of the Communist International; a number of important and previously untranslated texts by Jose Carlos Mariategui, widely considered the most important Marxist thinker of the Americas; documents from the 1932 revolt in El Salvador, led by Farabundo Marti; and selections from the most dynamic elements of the Latin American left, including the Central American revolutionary movements, the Brazilian Workers Party, and liberation theologists.

José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian political theorist of the 1920s, was instrumental in developing an indigenous Latin American revolutionary Marxist theory. He rejected a rigid, orthodox interpretation of Marxism and applied his own creative elements, which he believed could move a society to revolutionary action without the society having to depend upon more traditional economic factors. His interpretation of Peruvian history had a profound effect upon subsequent social movements throughout Latin America. This volume reviews the essential elements of Mariátegui's thought and important influences on his intellectual development. It demonstrates the role he played in defining a Latin american identity, the nature of his intellectual contribution to the development of indigenous revolutionary movements in Latin America, and the inflluence he had on successful revolutionary movements in Cuba and Nicaragua. An understanding of Mariátegui's thought is fundamental to understanding the nature of revolutionary changes in Latin America.

Since the 1970s, sociocultural analysis in Latin American studies has been marked by a turn away from problems of political economy. Accumulation and Subjectivity challenges this turn while reconceptualizing the relationship between political economy and the life of the subject. The fourteen essays in this volume show that, in order to understand the dynamics governing the extraction of wealth under contemporary capitalism, we also need to consider the collective subjects implied in this operation at an institutional, juridical, moral, and psychic level. More than merely setting the scene for social and political struggle, Accumulation and Subjectivity reveals Latin America to be a cauldron for thought for a critique of political economy and radical political change beyond its borders. Combining reflections on political philosophy, intellectual history, narrative, law, and film from the colonial period to the present, it provides a new conceptual vocabulary rooted in the material specificity of the region and, for this very reason, potentially translatable to other historical contexts. This collection will be of interest to scholars of Marxism, Latin American literary and cultural studies, and the intellectual history of the left.

In this exciting new study, Eugene Gogol interweaves three strands that form the intellectual bedrock for the concept of the Other in the Latin American context: Hegel's dialectic of negativity, Marx's humanism, and autochthonal emancipatory thought. From this foundation, the book explores the relation of liberatory philosophic thought to today's social and class movements. Gogol considers the logic of capitalism on Latin American soil, the ecological crisis in Latin America, and the concept and practice of self-liberation. Still one of the most contested terrains of Latin American thought, the Other has been of central concern for many luminary thinkers including Leopoldo Zea, Octavio Paz, and JosZ Carlos MariOtegui. While these writers may not garner much publicity in the world press, the highly public and ongoing struggles of the Zapatistas and Brazil's Landless Workers Movement demonstrate the continuing need to theorize the volatile nature of Latin American social reality.

In a work centred on Marx's harsh biography of Simón Bolívar, José Aricó examines why Latin America was apparently 'excluded' from Marx's thought, challenging the allegation that this expressed some 'Eurocentric' prejudice. Aricó shows how the German thinker's hostility towards the Bonapartism and authoritarianism he identified in the Liberator coloured his attitude towards the continent and the significance of its independence-processes. Whilst criticising Marx's misreading of Latin-American realities, Aricó demonstrates contemporaneous, countervailing tendencies in Marx's thought, including his appraisal of the revolutionary potentialities of other 'peripheral' extra-European societies. As such, Aricó convincingly argues that Marx's work was not a dogma of linear 'progress', but a living, contradictory body of thought constantly in development. English translation of the Marx y América Latina edition, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010.