To discuss the Marxist perspectives 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 identify the presence (often overlooked, sometimes simply ignored) of the entire colonial, semi-colonial, peripheral, and dependent world—a space within 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, we aim to orient our research 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 the Latin American and Caribbean region, 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 reach our present. Along this path, the emergence of communist parties in the Latin American and Caribbean 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 acronyms, books, walls, and university curricula. 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 the left 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 transformation of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as 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 in 1998, 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. This approach enriches the discussion while simultaneously broadening the scope of our theoretical object of study to include the equally peripheral intellectual production of Asian and African Marxisms, as well as 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.

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 scientist Marx" (an artificial dichotomy proposed by Louis Althusser, although he later disavowed it). 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 Grundrisse of 1857-1858). This concept disrupts, modifies, and expands his earlier conception of universal history. Later, he continues with the central theoretical role he assigns to the genocide of the European conquest of the Americas and the enslavement of Africa in his exposition of primitive accumulation in Chapter 24 of Volume I of Capital [1867]. Two years later, in 1869, he delves deeper into this with the inversion of the metropolis-colony equation linked to Ireland and the English proletariat, as well as in his 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, it extends to the corrections he incorporates into the French edition of Capital (where he restricts the regularities of capitalist private appropriation of land exclusively to Western Europe, leaving the questions open for non-European societies), it 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], his correspondence with Vera Zasulich [1881] and, finally, his anti-colonialist correspondence - practically unknown - sent from his stay in Africa (1882).

This "mature" and "late" Marx has generally been unknown, ignored, and scarcely 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.

The post-Marx 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 Van Kol, the Belgian Emile Vandervelde, and extended later by the discussions of 1913-1914 between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin on the self-determination of nations, and was provisionally closed in December 1922 with Lenin's Political Testament, in which he recovered and systematized 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.

Within the Bolshevik political and cultural world, and also within the Communist International, the most original supporter of this systematization formulated by Lenin is probably Sultan Galiev, who promotes the creation of a Communist International of the colonial peoples, proposing a change in the world strategy of Marxism to stop waiting for the eternally postponed Western "messiah" and to put all energies into the rebellions of the 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 the nations oppressed by great powers. Following this same line of anti-colonial thought, other Marxist thinkers from the Global South emerged in the geographical North, such as Gramsci, who from prison elaborated his analysis of 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 the processes of liberation for which he used the (less studied) concept of integral autonomy.

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 González Casanova and Stavenhagen (who adopted it from C. Wright Mills), which complements and enriches the Marxist theory of dependency.

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 Vietnamese independence and the Chinese Revolution. Some of their principal theoretical exponents included Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Mao Zedong.

-Following the Second World War, an anti-colonial Marxism emerged within both Francophone and Anglophone Africa and the Caribbean, challenging the culture of the colonial metropolis while appropriating its Marxist culture and reinterpreting it from a Third World perspective. This is exemplified by figures such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, António Agostinho Neto, Thomas Sankara, and Nelson Mandela, among many others. Their contributions revolved around the defense of Black identity, the program of national liberation, and "African socialism," influencing the Black Panthers, the African American community, and American communism, where prominent figures included Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and Stokely Carmichael, among others.

-The “postcolonial” theories (born in American and French academies during the last decades) and their “decolonial” substitutes do not discover a new problem nor do they overcome the Marxist paradigm.

-The emancipatory social processes of the last decades, 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.