To understand the Marxisms that have fueled resistance movements in the Global South, from late Marxism to the reinterpreted Marxisms of the 21st century, it is essential to recognize that the diverse historical expressions of this paradigm have always been closely linked to the critique of colonialism (both external and internal), neocolonialism, imperialism, racism, dependency, and the domination of oppressed peoples, as well as to the legitimization of their resistance. In the work of Marx and his tradition of social thought, we trace the presence (often overlooked, sometimes simply ignored) of the entire colonial, semi-colonial, peripheral, and dependent world—a space in which Latin America and the Caribbean are situated. In this context, we include as units of analysis not only dependency and its subordinate insertion both in the economic and geopolitical sphere within the world-system, but also the specificity of the national question and internal colonialism, extending our previous studies on these topics centered on economic, sociological and geopolitical debates to encompass, from a transdisciplinary perspective, the ideological field, the sociology of culture, anthropology, political sociology and the intellectual history of peripheral Marxist productions.

At the same time, in the field of empirical studies and social, economic, and geopolitical analysis, the heterodox perspectives of this paradigm have been powerfully linked and intertwined with the first independence movements. From this perspective, we aim to orient our research to question and attempt to investigate the extent to which these productions of peripheral, Third World, and Global South Marxisms are present or have influenced the social processes of recent decades in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the heterodox perspectives of this paradigm intersect, merge, and amalgamate with ancestral popular histories and community traditions generated since the colonial era, as well as with the symbolic and political legacy of the old wars of the first independence (from Túpac Amaru, Túpac Katari, and the "Black Jacobins" of Haiti to Simón Bolívar, Artigas, San Martín, Morelos, Juana Azurduy, and Manuela Sáenz) within the long history of Latin American rebellions that extend to the present moment. Along this path, the emergence of communist parties in the Latin American region also stands out, as well as a generation of Marxists who were highly influential in the processes of political transformation, such as Julio Antonio Mella, José Carlos Mariátegui, Luis Emilio Recabarren, Farabundo Martí, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro.

When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed in 1991, Fukuyama's predictions resonated with both supporters and opponents. The global right wing felt it finally held the reins of humanity's destiny and was freed from the possibility of any system other than capitalism. Across the multifaceted spectrum of the left worldwide, Marxism and the concepts of communism, socialism, imperialism, class struggle, and the proletariat were gradually erased from slogans, books, and posters. Now it was all about democracy and social justice, on the path to achieving a supposedly humane face within capitalism. Furthermore, in Latin America, political-military insurgency disappeared from the political agenda as both a possibility and an immediate course of action, with only a few exceptions.

The initial triumphalism of the right and the programmatic shift of thes handsThese ideas were soon challenged and overtaken by reality. Marxist thought not only persisted in the analysis and interpretation of realities, but in the realm of action, in 1994, the Mexican Zapatista movement burst onto the world stage, challenging the neoliberal capitalist system and its mechanisms of power. In 1998, Hugo Chávez won the presidency of Venezuela with an anti-neoliberal Bolivarian platform and, shortly thereafter, an openly socialist one. Both processes—along with the persistence of various Marxist-inspired insurgencies in Colombia and the growth of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil, influenced by both liberation theology and Third World Marxism—have a decisive impact on the geopolitical landscape of Latin America, but also on the consolidation of spaces and forms of struggle on a global scale against neoliberal globalization. The Zapatistas charted the course for social struggles, and the Bolivarian Revolution the path of state and institutional transformation. Other resistance movements, such as those in Colombia and Brazil, also stood out in this context, as did the significant contributions of Liberation Theology in various countries of the region—processes that undoubtedly included a revitalization and reinterpretation of Latin American and Caribbean Marxism.

Thus, to understand the presence and influence of Marxisms in the Global South, it is essential to delve deeper into current political processes, such as transformative experiences in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba, as well as the wide range of social and popular struggles that showcase the diverse banners advocating for a structural modification of the capitalist system as their central focus. We find ourselves in a particularly relevant international context, in which the future of humanity hangs in the balance between the continuation of capital's hegemony, which has no other outcome than planetary collapse, and the construction, development, and/or consolidation of transformative alternatives that lead to a different societal scale. It is also necessary to delve deeper and establish contrasts in the different scenarios of the Global South, to show how theory is generated from Marxisms in other latitudes, what dynamics and scope exist of social struggles in continents such as Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and even to realize that within the North there is also its own South, or several, in which not only a theoretical perspective that questions the prevailing system is reborn, but also diverse political and social movements that propose structural alternatives.

Under this scenario, in the processes of social transformation of the last quarter of the century (from the Zapatista uprising in Mexico in 1994 or the irruption of Chavismo in Venezuela, the indigenous and popular rebellions of Bolivia, the insurgent movements in Colombia, the strong presence of grassroots liberation Christianity, heterodox Marxism in the Brazilian peasantry and the multiple anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist resistances of the Cuban people), one perceives the presence, direct or indirect, often intertwined, fused and resignified from the traditions of the historical struggle of Our America, of those heterodox expressions of peripheral Marxisms.

Given the importance of analyzing Marxisms from the Global South throughout history and their relevance to current emancipatory struggles, we propose that this framework allows us to address classic debates and new discussions related to dependency theory, ethno-Marxism, and their connection to theories of imperialism (from the classic works of Hobson, Hilferding, Bukharin, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg to the recent research and debates of David Harvey and John Smith). This framework also enriches the discussion and broadens the scope of our theoretical object of study to include the equally peripheral intellectual production of Asian and African Marxisms, and even the entire Anglo-Saxon and French debate surrounding the “postcoloniality” and “decoloniality” of knowledge and power. Therefore, we propose the following set of hypotheses that underpin the theoretical relevance of this topic.

(a) In the work of Karl Marx, a paradigm shift occurs that does not divide his work between a “young, humanist, and Hegelian Marx” and an “old, economist, and scientific Marx” (an artificial dichotomy proposed by Louis Althusser, although he later disavowed it), but rather this paradigm shift in Marx revolves around the national-colonial problem. His new paradigm of the materialist (multilinear) conception of history and society, critical of Euro-Westernism, begins with his studies of England's foreign trade, from which he derives his hypothesis and conceptualization of the “Asiatic mode of production” (used by Marx to refer to India and China in his correspondence from June 1853 onward and developed in the floorplans (of 1857-1858) which disrupts, modifies, and expands his youthful conception of universal history. Later, he continues with the central theoretical place he gives to the genocide of the European conquest of America and the enslavement of Africa in the exposition of primitive accumulation in chapter 24 of the first volume of The Capital (first edition of 1867). Two years later, in 1869, this is further developed with the inversion of the equation between metropolis and colony, linked to Ireland and the English proletariat, as well as in the defense of Polish national independence within the International Workingmen's Association (IWA). This is the same decade in which Marx defends Benito Juárez's anti-colonial struggle in Mexico against European invasions and elaborates on the link between class exploitation and racism (the much-discussed “white supremacy”) in the context of the American Civil War. Finally, he elaborates on this in the corrections he incorporates into the French edition of The Capital (where he restricts the regularities of capitalist private appropriation of land exclusively to Western Europe, leaving questions open for non-European societies), is condensed in his correspondence with the Russian populists of the newspaper Annals of the Fatherland (1877) where he criticizes the “universal philosophies of history” of Western origin, reaching its zenith with the writing of his Kovalevsky Notebook [1879], where he studies the native peoples of America and the rural communities of India and Algeria, his correspondence with Vera Zasulich [1881] and, finally, his anti-colonialist correspondence - practically unknown - sent from his stay in Africa (1882).

(B) This “mature” and “late” Marx has generally been ignored, disregarded, and rarely explored, both by critics and adversaries as well as by apologists and popularizers. During this “late” period, the most productive of his intellectual work, a sharp, lucid, impassioned, and dialectical critique emerges, both of Euro-Western modernity and of the genocidal practices of European colonialism and the supposed “white supremacy” on a global scale.

(C) The post-Marxist debate began in 1907 with the theses of the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer on "the question of nationalities," continued by the polemics of 1907-1911 surrounding the openly colonialist "socialism" of the German Eduard Bernstein, the Dutchman Hendrikus Hubertus (Henri) Van Kol, and the Belgian Emile Vandervelde, and later extended by the discussions of 1913-1914 between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin on the self-determination of nations, and provisionally closed in December 1922 with the Political Text Lenin, who recovers and systematizes with greater rigor, depth and radicalism the anti-colonialism of the "unknown Marx", elaborating an extended internationalist program, through the Communist International, for the entire peripheral, colonial and dependent world.

(D) Within the Bolshevik political and cultural world, and also within the Communist International, the most original supporter of this systematization formulated by Lenin was probably Sultan Galiev, who promoted the creation of a Communist International of colonial peoples, proposing a change in the world strategy of Marxism to stop waiting for the eternally postponed Western “messiah” (a belief common to those who attributed absolute centrality to the “civilization” of Western Europe in the face of the supposed peripheral “barbarisms”) and to bet all energies on the rebellions of colonial and peripheral peoples, as Marx had done with Ireland, China, India, Algeria and even with the Mexico of Benito Juárez against European colonial dominations, as Lenin had also formulated in defense of the right to self-determination of nations oppressed by great powers. Later, in this same line of anti-colonial thought, other Marxist thinkers from the Global South emerged in the geographical north, such as Antonio Gramsci, who from prison elaborated his analysis on "the southern question" (of Southern Italy and Europe), as well as on the social processes of domination and oppression, especially the processes of hegemony construction, a concept of enormous impact on the critical thinking of the Global South, and also on the processes of liberation for which he used the (less studied) concept of integral autonomy.

(E) The Marxist theory of dependency, four decades later, born in the heat of the Cuban Revolution and in polemic with Rostow and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), extends this extensive prior sedimentation of peripheral Marxisms, now within Latin American societies and cultures. This encompasses the works of Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotonio Dos Santos, Vania Bambirra, and Orlando Caputo, as well as the theory of internal colonialism by Pablo González Casanova and Rodolfo Stavenhagen (who in turn adopted it from C. Wright Mills), which complements and enriches the Marxist theory of dependency.

(f) In the period between the Bolshevik heterodoxies of the 20s and the emergence of the Cuban Revolution in the 60s, beyond the West, the main Asian Marxist, anti-colonialist, and Third Worldist movements took shape in the wake of the Vietnamese independence movement (in its struggle against the great powers of Japan, France, and the United States) and the Chinese Revolution (in its confrontation with the Japanese invasions). Some of their principal theoretical exponents were Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Mao Zedong.

(g) Since the second post-war period, within Africa and the French- and English-speaking Caribbean, an anti-colonial Marxism emerges that argues with the culture of the colonial metropolis, appropriating its Marxist culture, resignifying it from the Third World. Such is the case of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Patrice Émery Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah (Francis Nwia Nkrumah), Léopold Sedar Senghor, Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, António Agostinho Neto, Thomas Sankara (Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara), Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, among many others. His contributions will revolve around the defense of Blackness, the national liberation program and "African socialism", influencing the Black Panthers, the Afro-descendant community and American communism, where Angela Yvonne Davis, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and Stokely Carmichael, among others, stand out.

(H) “Postcolonial” theories (born in American and French academies during the last few decades) and their “decolonial” substitutes do not discover a new problem nor do they overcome the Marxist paradigm (although they sometimes reject it); rather, they draw on its historical accumulation and are added quite late to a problem long explored and worked on for a century and a half by said paradigm around the critique of the coloniality of knowledge, power and Euro-Western capitalist (neo)colonialism.

(i) The emancipatory social processes of the last decades in Our America, with all their variety and cultural and political heterogeneity, allow us to corroborate the ideological, political and cultural presence of peripheral Marxisms, fused and resignified from previous community traditions, whether Indianist, Afro-descendant or of anti-colonial/national liberation struggle, heirs of the first independence from Western European colonialisms.