Marx and Latin America

In a work centered 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. While criticizing 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

The Latin-American Marxism of Aricó: the Search for the Autonomy of Politics in Marx’s Fallacy, Horacio Crespo

Introduction, Carlos Franco
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Edition

1. An Evaded Reality
2. The Growth of the Movement and the Crisis of Theory
3. The Reality and Fallacy of Marx’s ‘Eurocentrism’
4. De Te Fabula Narratur?
5. The Theoretical and Political Presuppositions of National ‘Autonomy’
6. Hegel Redivivus
7. The Political Reasons for a Disconnect
8. Marx’s Bolívar

Appendix 1. Rosa Luxemburg and the ‘Crisis’ of Marxism
Appendix 2. Hegel and Latin America
Appendix 3. Marx and the Prospects of Russian Society
Appendix 4. Marx’s Shift of Attention Towards Agrarian Communities
Appendix 5. On the Social-Democratic Leaders’ August 1914 ‘Betrayal’
Appendix 6. Marx and the Spanish Revolution
Appendix 7. Aníbal Ponce’s ‘Marginal Notes’
Appendix 8. On the Effect of British Hegemony in Latin America
Appendix 9. ‘Bolivar y Ponte’, by Karl Marx

Epilogue to the Second Edition

Bibliography
Index