Marx And Latin America

This book assesses the untimely relevance of Marx and Freud for Latin America, thinkers alien to the region who became an inspiration to its beleaguered activists, intellectuals, writers and artists during times of political and cultural oppression. Bruno Bosteels presents ten case studies arguing that art and literature—the novel, poetry, theatre, film—more than any militant tract or theoretical essay, can give us a glimpse into Marxism and psychoanalysis, not so much as sciences of history or of the unconscious, respectively, but rather as two intricately related modes of understanding the formation of subjectivity.

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.

Since the late-1990s much of Latin America has experienced an uneven and contradictory turn to the Left in the electoral arena. At the same time, there has been a rejuvenation of Marxist critiques of political economy. Drawing on the expertise of Latin American, North American, and European scholars, this volume offers cutting-edge theoretical explorations of trends in the region, as well as in-depth case studies of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela. Essays in the volume focus on changes to class formation in Latin America and offer new insights into the state-form, exploring the complex relationship between state and market in contexts of late capitalist development, particularly in countries endowed with incredible natural resource wealth. Contributors are: Dario Azzellini, Emilia Castorina, Mariano Féliz, Juan Grigera, Nicolas Grinberg, Gabriel Hetland, Claudio Katz, Thomas Purcell, Ben Selwyn, Susan J. Spronk, Guido Starosta, Leandro Vergara-Camus, and Jeffery R. Webber.

In Translating Marx, Martín Cortés ponders José Aricó’s contributions towards the constitution of Latin American Marxism. Accordingly, he studies Aricó in terms of his trajectory as a publisher and translator, while considering his thoughts on Marxism’s fundamental theoretical problems.

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.

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 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.