Marxism in Latin America

Despite the independence of many Latin American Marxist thinkers, international developments also continued to shape Marxist ideas in Latin America. The global economic crash of 1929 reinforced the Comintern's turn toward ultraleftism, and in many countries communist parties broke with allies in reformist unions and organizations, established rival organizations, and vigorously contested the state. The resulting repression drove many of these parties into semiclandestine status; an attempted insurrection in El Salvador ended in catastrophe, with more than ten thousand killed. In 1935 the rise of fascism prompted the Comintern to call for a "popular front" of proletarian parties and the antifascist bourgeoisie. During World War II, Latin American communist parties also abandoned their earlier anti-imperialism in favor of a broad international alliance against fascism. They also built alliances with right-wing groups and local dictators such as Batista in Cuba and Somoza in Nicaragua. In Chile, the Popular Front of communist, socialist, and radical parties won the presidency in 1938 and pursued a program of moderate reform. In many other countries, however, communist parties lost ground to populist regimes or other left opposition movements.

The wholesale repression of communist parties—and the aggressive intervention of the United States—encouraged Latin American communists to continue alliances with liberal and democratic parties in the postwar years. Marxist intellectuals embraced Latin American liberals' age-old enthusiasm for national "development," combining sophisticated critiques of global political economy with vague tropes of modernity. Latin American poverty, they held, stemmed from its economic dependency on the United States, whereby Latin American economies exchanged raw materials for manufactured goods at disadvantageous terms. They tended to view the development of a capitalist industrial economy and urbanized society as a prerequisite for socialist revolution. In some instances, Marxist intellectuals revived Simón Bolívar's dream of a broad alliance of Latin American nations, which would permit the development of economies of scale and the political strength to stand up to an aggressive United States.

Other Marxist intellectuals, particularly in the Caribbean, emphasized connections with anticolonial struggles in other parts of the world as well as the struggle for racial justice in the United States. This trend was exemplified by C. L. R. James, whose work remains important in both international Marxist theory and cultural studies. Born in the then-English colony of Trinidad, C. L. R. James's initial focus was on his native Caribbean, and his early work included social-realist fiction set in West Indian slums as well as his classic study of the 1793 slave revolt in Saint Domingue (Haiti), The Black Jacobins (1938). He also wrote two key works on Marxist theory and practice, Notes on Dialectics (1948) and State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950). His Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1953) analyzed the relations among Moby Dick's narrator, the ship's captain, and its expert "Third World" crew. Mariners anticipated James's involvement in revolutionary decolonization movements in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, as well as among African Americans in the United States. It also presaged the broader internationalism of Latin-American Marxists following the Cuban Revolution.