[UK] Jeffrey R. Webber: A Reading Guide to Latin American Marxism
Any historical periodization of the development and evolution of Latin American Marxism will inevitably be simplified by the nature of an overview, filtering out the anomalous whirlpools that run counter to the general trends of development. Nonetheless, in order to compile such a reading guide, there is no other way.
In the long introduction to the book Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present: An Anthology, its editor Michael Löwy provides us with the most persuasive historical periodization currently available in the English-speaking world regarding the evolution of Latin American Marxist theoretical and political currents. He also provides important documents concerning various movements and parties which, while inevitably omitting some details, are broad enough in scope to reveal the key threads of 20th-century Latin American Marxism.
Next, I will provide a list of important literature addressing the various developmental stages of Latin American Marxism from a historical rather than theoretical perspective. This list, though incomplete, is distinctive and reflects clear preferences; some of these works are recognized as essential introductory guides to Latin American Marxism, while others have long remained obscure and have not yet received sufficient attention.
I. The Germinal Period: 1870 to 1910
The period from 1870 to 1910 constitutes the first stage of the development of Latin American Marxism. During this stage, the works of Marx and Engels achieved widespread circulation, and socialist programs began to be tentatively articulated in countries such as Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, and Argentina.
On the question of the relevance of Marx’s writings to understanding Latin American reality, José Aricó’s Marx and Latin America serves as one of the most influential works in Latin American academic circles. Aricó argues that Marx’s discussions regarding Latin America were rare and contained many inconsistencies. However, we should not reduce this to a Eurocentric linear development model; rather, contradictions and conflicts help to clarify the potential for Latin American revolution.
II. The Revolutionary Period: 1910 to 1932
The second stage of Latin American Marxism's development was inaugurated by the 1910 Mexican Revolution. In this stage, a series of questions surfaced in succession: the agrarian question; the liberation of indigenous peoples; how to unite the Latin American people from a new perspective advantageous to the toiling masses and oppressed groups; the role of national liberation movements and anti-imperialist struggle; and the socialist nature of the coming revolution. Under the influence of the October Revolution, the first batch of Latin American Communist Parties were established in countries such as Argentina (1918), Uruguay (1920), Chile (1922), Mexico (1919), and Brazil (1922). At the same time, this was an era that produced many giants, such as the Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, and most brilliantly, the outstanding Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui who, to this day, remains the most original theorist in Latin America. This stage concluded with the bloody suppression of the 1932 uprising led by the Communist Party of El Salvador.
José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology, edited by Harry Vanden and Marc Becker, is currently the most complete collection of Mariátegui’s works available in English. Mariátegui’s work selectively drew upon the history of Latin America's pre-capitalist indigenous peoples to form a dialectic filled with utopian and revolutionary color, thereby deepening a future-oriented socialist conception of liberation. In this view of liberation, strategical revolutionary subjects are the workers and peasants, and the objects of their revolution are not only foreign capital but also domestic class enemies. Mariátegui’s views not only struck at the core of Comintern [1] orthodoxy (for which he was denounced as a populist) but also touched upon the nationalism dominated by the ruling class within Peru, an ideology embodied in the Peruvian Aprista Party (also known as the APRA party, the most important populist party in Peru). For Mariátegui, indigenous communities were not historical relics but a living organism.
Adolfo Gilly is an Argentine who lived in long-term exile in Mexico and is one of Latin America's most creative social historians. In the late 1960s, while in Mexico’s Lecumberri prison, he wrote The Mexican Revolution. This is a "people's history" of the Mexican Revolution and has been reprinted more than 30 times in Mexico since its first publication in 1971. To better understand this book, one can read it in conjunction with other biographies of core figures of the Latin American revolution, such as Friedrich Katz’s The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, John Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, and Claudio Lomnitz’s The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón.
Jeffrey Gould and Aldo Lauria-Santiago’s To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932 illustrates the first stage of the Latin American Marxist revolution. This stage opened with the Mexican and Russian Revolutions and closed tragically with the 1932 Salvadoran massacre [2]. In January 1932, tens of thousands of indigenous people and rural laborers launched a wave of protests against electoral fraud and the suppression of strikes. This uprising was organized by Communist Party members and for a time controlled several cities in central and western El Salvador; many participants were themselves indigenous laborers and members of coffee plantation unions. The Salvadoran army and paramilitary militias quickly retook the towns and massacred tens of thousands of insurgents, primarily rural indigenous activists. Previously, the leaders of the Communist Party of El Salvador—Farabundo Martí, Alfonso Luna, Mario Zapata, and Miguel Mármol—had already been imprisoned in a preventive repression orchestrated by the government. Party documents from this period indicate that the purpose of the uprising was entirely to facilitate El Salvador's transition to socialism, and the decision to launch the uprising was made independently by the Communist Party of El Salvador, rather than coming from the Kremlin, the socialist headquarters of the time.
III. The Period of Stagnation: 1932 to 1959
In the decades following the Salvadoran massacre, the mainstream forces of Latin American Marxism lost their independence and audacity. All Communist Parties in the region were deeply influenced by Stalinism. This was the third stage in the development of Latin American Marxism—a period of painful ossification and stagnation. This situation did not change until after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Throughout most of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the Stalinist "stage theory" [3] prevailed, and all revolutions in Latin America were confined within the framework of national-democratic revolutions based on the presupposition that "the region is in a feudal stage." According to this view, what was forthcoming in Latin America would be a long period of industrial capitalist development; therefore, the working people needed to form political alliances with the progressive national bourgeoisie in the short to medium term. Only in the distant future, when the productive forces were fully developed, would a socialist revolution become possible.
The third stage of Latin American Marxism, characterized by ossification and stagnation, coincided with the period of orthodox Latin American populism, among which Argentina’s Peronism is a typical representative. Daniel James’s Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946-1976 is a landmark work in the study of orthodox Peronism, revitalizing E. P. Thompson’s social history research methods in Argentina. James argues that the success of Peronism lay in its ability to capture the demands of the working class—the social and political protagonist of Argentina's early industrialization period. Most importantly, Peronism during this period offered a contradictory expression of class consciousness. This contradiction manifested as follows: on the one hand, the Peronist movement fostered loyalty by advocating for harmonious coexistence between classes, subordinating the interests of the working class to those of the national state; on the other hand, the Peronist movement allowed for various forms of working-class counterculture and resistance to exist, which would challenge established social hierarchies and symbols of authority in many ways.
Caio Prado, Jr. was a loyal member of the Brazilian Communist Party and one of the most important Brazilian historians of the 20th century. The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil is one of his classic works; first published in Brazil in 1942, it remained for decades the only comprehensive economic history monograph researching the social and economic structures of Brazil in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
James Dunkerley’s Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952-1982, although it does not cover the earlier indigenous peasant uprisings, still provides us with the most brilliant and precise commentary on the 1952 Bolivian National-Populist Revolution and its subsequent degeneration into right-wing autocratic rule between 1964 and 1982. The question of indigenous peasant uprisings is addressed in Laura Gotkowitz’s later work, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952.
This marks a further elaboration within A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880-1952.
Greg Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War is an original masterpiece of history and anthropology. It reveals the horrors of the Cold War period in Latin America through the lens of Guatemala. Guatemala provides a paradigmatic background for narratives concerning Latin America; its October Revolution of 1944 inspired hopes among the Latin American Left for achieving social democracy through land reform and other initiatives. However, the US-backed coup of 1954 shattered this dream and inaugurated a reign of terror. After all other means of political action were frustrated, the Left eventually had to launch guerrilla warfare. Nevertheless, with the assistance of a well-trained and well-equipped US Central Intelligence Agency, the assassinations, rapes, tortures, disappearances, kidnappings, and massacres reached a crescendo in the genocide of 1981–1982. By 1996, over 200,000 people had been killed by the Guatemalan government, and a forty-year civil war ended with the suppression of the Left and the total crushing of the ideals of democratic socialism.
IV. The Period of Revolutionary Experimentation: 1959 to 1980
The fourth stage of the development of Latin American Marxism began with the Cuban Revolution, spanning Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens’s attempt at a peaceful transition to socialism in Chile and the struggle of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, finally concluding with the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the internal threads and schools of dependency theory centered on the series of intellectual and political upheavals of this stage; therefore, the internal debates within dependency theory and the controversies surrounding it are crucial for our understanding of this period.
A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War, co-edited by Gilbert Joseph and Grandin, is the finest collection of English-language works researching insurgency and repression in 20th-century Latin America. The panoramic introduction written by Grandin provides a persuasive general periodization and theoretical exposition of Latin America’s “Long Cold War.” Other outstanding writings include Katz’s comparative study of violence and terror in the Russian and Mexican Revolutions; Carlota McAllister’s research on the relationship between insurgency and repression, and between Indigenous peoples and guerrilla forces in Guatemala; Gerardo Rénique’s study of the Shining Path in Peru and state terror during the civil war; and Forrest Hylton’s research on paramilitarism in Colombia.
For a long time, the works of Samuel Farber have maintained a position of support for democratic socialism in Cuba’s revolution-from-below. In Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment, he conducts a complex and meticulous historical synthesis of the Cuban Revolution since 1959, providing an indispensable guide to the politics of this island nation which, despite its small territory, exerted a major influence on the historical development of Latin America and the trajectory of the Cold War in the second half of the 20th century. Relying on a keen grasp of historical detail and incisive analysis, Farber maps an unparalleled portrait of the Cuban Revolution through the ideological debates and political consequences surrounding Cuban economic development, foreign policy, socio-cultural changes in race and gender, and the actual conditions of workers and peasants. Farber acknowledges the achievements of the Cuban revolutionary process in education and healthcare, striving to defend Cuban sovereignty and opposing imperialist intervention in Cuba’s internal affairs under any guise, while simultaneously opposing the depiction of Cuba as an idyllic myth. Reading Farber’s work alongside that of Louis Pérez, Jr.—the most prominent historian researching Cuban issues in the English language—is highly beneficial. In works such as Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, Pérez provides us with a unique perspective and a broader interpretation of history.
Peter Winn’s Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism is a fascinating, bottom-up account of the “democratic road to socialism” in Chile under the Allende government (1970–1973). The focus of this study is the workers' management of the Yarur mill—Chile’s largest cotton textile factory—and their efforts to socialize it. Winn shows us how the workers became radicalized and how the depth of the transformation they envisioned went far beyond the vision of the Allende government, thereby triggering conflict between the two. This book can be read in tandem with Franck Gaudichaud’s Chile 1970–1973: A Thousand Days that Shook the World and Patricio Guzmán’s epic documentary, The Battle of Chile.
Matilde Zimmermann’s Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution is a biographical portrait that provides a new entry point for understanding the Nicaraguan revolutionary process. Fonseca was the primary intellectual and strategic thinker of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and died in combat in 1976, three years before the victory of the 1979 revolution. Beyond describing Fonseca’s life, Zimmermann delves deeply into the FSLN’s complex internal disputes and ideological shifts across various periods.
Mention must also be made here of Timothy Wickham-Crowley’s Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes Since 1956. While this book might not be termed a Marxist work, it is perhaps the most systematic and serious English-language comparative study of rural guerrilla insurgencies in 20th-century Latin America. The history of Latin American Marxism after 1959 is often reduced to waves of rural—and later urban—guerrilla warfare. James Brennan’s The Labor Wars in Córdoba, 1955-1976: Ideology, Work, and Labor Politics in an Argentine Industrial City serves as a correction to this narrative. Brennan examines how Córdoba, Argentina’s second-largest city, witnessed the most explosive working-class uprising in post-war Latin American history, the 1969 Cordobazo [4]. For European readers, the interactions during that period with France and Italy are particularly interesting.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America is perhaps the most influential work within Latin American dependency theory, and one of the few works to have English or French editions upon its initial publication (1969), with drafts having circulated widely in Latin America two years prior to publication. Cardoso is perhaps best known for his later apostasy; he was elected President of Brazil in 1993 and 1998, yet in 2016 became a staunch supporter of the parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff. Nevertheless, this work, which belongs to the moderate wing of dependency theory, remains essential reading.
Furthermore, essential works include Ernesto Laclau’s “Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America” (New Left Review, 1/67, 1971), Steve Stern’s “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean” (The American Historical Review, 4/93, 1988), and Immanuel Wallerstein’s “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean: Comments on Stern’s Critical Tests” (The American Historical Review, 4/93, 1988).
These three articles, along with Cardozo and Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America, provide the best introduction to the series of debates triggered in Latin America during this period due to the divergences between dependency theory and classical Marxist perspectives. These debates encompassed the mode of production and its transition, property relations, labor systems, and the world system.
V. The Period of Abandoning Revolutionary Strategy: 1980–2000
In the fifth stage of the development of Latin American Marxism, neoliberalism dominated the entire region. It is not at all surprising that while Latin American Marxism underwent some marginal innovations, it was generally characterized by retreat, defeat, and self-criticism. This was an era in which the Latin American left abandoned revolutionary strategy, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe underwent upheaval, China implemented reforms, the Cuban Revolution faced isolation, and the Nicaraguan Revolution moved toward failure. Many Latin American Marxist intellectuals turned toward post-Marxism or moved directly toward liberalism.
In the article "Post-Marxism: The Retreat from Class in Latin America" (Latin American Perspectives, 2/17, 1990), Ronald Chilcote examines the global crisis encountered by Marxism in the early 1990s and the specific significance of its drivers for Latin America.
Enrique Dussel’s Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861–1863 was first published in Spanish in 1988. In this work, Dussel returns from "post-Marxism" to Marx's own writings, providing a highly innovative theoretical contribution to our understanding of Marx, not only from a Latin American perspective but in a global sense.
René Zavaleta Mercado was undoubtedly the most important social and political theorist in 20th-century Bolivia. Regrettably, however, until the publication of the English version of Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia, very little of his work had been translated into English, with only one comprehensive analytical article appearing in New Left Review. Fortunately, as Zavaleta's most significant work, it is now available in English, though it was published posthumously in 1984. In this highly innovative book, Zavaleta develops a series of theories and concepts centered on key moments in Bolivian history—the persistent struggles of the commoners, indigenous peoples, and the working class from below, as well as the restorationist activities from above that attempted to reinstate the rule of feudal lords.
Roberto Schwarz is arguably Latin America's most famous Marxist cultural critic. His Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture collects his articles spanning film, the novel, theater, and music. These are both saturated with Brazil's unique history, ideology, and culture, while also serving as a microcosm of Europe and the entire world.
William Robinson’s Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective provides the most comprehensive account of the political and economic shifts in Latin America in recent decades. One does not need to be persuaded by the theoretical tools employed in the book—such as the "transnational capitalist class" or the "transnational state"—to learn a great deal from Robinson's detailed description of the changes in Latin American social structure during the neoliberal period. This is the most comprehensive account of the region's political and economic changes in recent decades.
Chile was the earliest, and perhaps the most radical, laboratory for neoliberalism in Latin America. The collection edited by Winn, Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002, is the finest volume demonstrating the dynamics of class struggle and the fate of the working class across different industries during this period.
In general, although the 1990s was a low point for the Latin American left, there were still some "counter-current" pioneers [5] worthy of remembrance within various forms of leftist activity such as social movements, trade unions, peasant associations, and political parties. These include the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil and the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico. Leandro Vergara-Camus’s Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism masterfully demonstrates the historical value of these activities.
VI. The Period of Transformation and Resurgence: 2000 to the Present
At the beginning of the 21st century, the development of Latin American Marxism entered its sixth stage. The frequent outbreaks of extra-parliamentary leftist struggles and the contradictions and conflicts faced by leftist governments after taking power accelerated the arrival of this new stage in Latin American Marxism. While it might be incautious to make definitive judgments on the key theoretical and practical characteristics of Latin American Marxism since the start of the 21st century, it would certainly be premature to conclude that the new stage of Latin American Marxism is nearing its end along with the recent conclusion of the "pink tide" political cycle. However, we can still attempt a preliminary conclusion: the latest stage of development in Latin American Marxism possesses both the originality and profundity of the fourth stage, as well as signs of the rigidity and dogma seen in the third stage. Within the recent leftist wave in the Latin American region, the winds of transformation and resurgence are intertwined and in contention, full of uncertainty.
A series of protest activities launched by leftist indigenous and potential insurgents in Bolivia between 2000 and 2005 were at the forefront of the wave of extra-parliamentary struggles in early 21st-century Latin America. Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics, co-authored by two of the country's prominent historians, Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, provides the best contextual literature to date for this period of history.
Raquel Gutiérrez, author of Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia, is one of the most important social movement theorists in Latin America. Although she is Mexican, she spent over 20 years in militant activity in Bolivia (including five years as a political prisoner); few observers or participants understand better than she how the series of protests that occurred in Bolivia between 2000 and 2005 began.
Before becoming the Vice President of Bolivia in 2006, Álvaro García Linera was already one of the most outstanding Marxist theorists in Bolivia and even Latin America. His collection Plebeian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, Working-Class and Popular Identities in Bolivia brings together decades of his research, showcasing the liberty and creativity born out of the series of uprisings in the 1990s and early 21st century, as well as the suffocating consequences of subsequent state managerialism.
George Ciccariello-Maher’s We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution was written at the height of the exciting Bolivarian process led by Chávez, and thus failed to anticipate the severe crisis that would erupt in Venezuela in the following years and continue to this day. Nevertheless, this book remains arguably the best English-language chronicle of the various popular movements that "created Chávez."
Franck Gaudichaud’s Amérique latine: émancipations en construction is an excellent French-language collection studying the issues of the Latin American left. It covers a vast geographical range, involving numerous Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, and Mexico; it also discusses a wide range of themes, including indigenous uprisings, participatory democracy, ecosocialism, worker control and self-management, urban struggles, and feminism.