"Indigenous Marx. A Becoming-Earthling of Communism" by DALIE GIROUX (original) (raw)

Marx in Mariategui: Myth, Nation-ness, and the Indo-American Socialism

The last 10 years of Marx were not only prolific but indicatives of new challenges for historical materialism. In particular, what interests me here is the consideration of alternative, non-capitalist roads of social development which he took into account from the experiences of the Paris Commune on one hand, and boosted further through both his study of the Russian commune and his epistolary exchange with the Russian revolutionary populist movement. At the heart of this change of mind lies, in my opinion, the possibility of a better comprehension of the world capitalist system and its uneven rhythms of subsumption of labour and colonization of imaginaries and memories, which we can provisionally call "the modern/colonial" condition of the capitalist world-system. This presentation offers a read of the Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930) under the light of the notion of different temporalities and the non-synchronicity of the contemporaries in the imperialist conjuncture of capitalism. As Jaime Hanneken has argued, Mariategui's defense of a heterodox Marxism is product of the experience of uneven development, where unsynchronized and asymmetrical social formations become spaces not only of the "exhaustion of the difference" (to borrow Alberto Moreiras' term) but of struggle and conflict. Henceforth, Mariategui must be read not as a postcolonial avant la letter (as authors such as Walter Mignolo, Mabel Morana, and Robert Young do) but as an intersection between postcolonial questions and the Marxist interpretive framework (Hanneken 2012: 17).

Marx and the Indigenous

Monthly Review, 2020

The "turn toward the indigenous" in social theory in the last couple of decades, associated with the critique of white settler colonialism, has reintroduced themes long present in Marxian theory, but in ways that are often surprisingly divorced from Karl Marx's critique of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

Introduction: Indigenous Peoples, Marxism and Late Capitalism

New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and …, 2011

T he relationship between indigenous peoples and Marxism has long been ambiguous. Marx himself, as a 19 th century philosopher influenced by social Darwinism, assumed that "tribal" peoples represented simple forms of productive relations and were destined to disappear (Marx 1887:51). For him, tribal peoples represented the beginning of social evolution, as expressed in The German Ideology: "The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum] ownership. It corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture" (Marx and Engels 1965:33). Indigenous people have sometimes been equally dismissive of Marx. Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko, for example, thought that Marxism and indigenous rights were incompatible because Marxism, like capitalism, requires the exploitation of natural resources and industrial development that conflicts with indigenous ideas about the sacred nature of the Earth (Teale 1998). Undeniably, however, the result of more than four centuries of imperialism and colonialism has ensnared indigenous peoples in the traps of the capitalist world system (Bodley 2008). Around the world, indigenous lands are expropriated by states and capitalist corporations, in order to channel natural resources from above and below ground into ever-widening streams of capital accumulation. Indigenous labour is appropriated by capitalist firms in multinational systems of production that transform indigenous people into members of the

“Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Postcolonial Challenge”

A continuing challenge in the development of a postcolonial archaeology has been identifying and addressing the inequalities affecting descendant communities both in the practice of archaeology and in access to and benefits from its products. Addressing this is a central theme in Indigenous archaeology, which is informed by indigenous epistemology and values and by a variety of theoretical constructs, including Marxism, that promote praxis. Marx offers important insights into understanding how archaeologists have monopolized the means of (knowledge) production, and provides a set of critical tools for countering this. I discuss the utility of a Marxist critique within the context of Indigenous archaeology and through examples of community-based heritage research initiatives underway internationally through the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH) project.

New Marxisms in the Making: Thinking Desencuentros and Abigarramientos

Critical Reviews on Latin American Research - CROLAR, 2018

The recent translations of Aricó's Marx and Latin America and Zavaleta's Toward a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia into English come to build some bridges in this sense, alongside other recently published scholar works on Aricó (Martín Cortés' A New Marxism for Latin America) and Zavaleta (Luis Tapia's The Production of Local Knowledge). This review argues that these elaborations provide important perspectives to understand the contemporary global conjuncture. Desencuentros of Marx(ism) and Latin America Aricó is a decisive figure of socialist debates in Latin America, not only for his writings but also for his organization and editorial efforts. Tireless contributor to the diffusion of Marxism across the Spanishspeaking public, an insightful overview of his life and work can be found in Martín Cortés's article in the "Classic Revisited" section of this volume. Arguably, Aricó's paramount contribution to these debates is Marx and Latin America. Published in 1980, in Lima, and republished in 1982, in Mexico, with an important epilogue by the author, the English translation is based on FCE's 2009 Mexican edition, thus including Horacio Crespo's introductory study. The book itself comprises eight sections for the main argument and nine appendixes delving into texts and topics related to the Marxist tradition. The main purpose of this work is to explain Marxism's overlooking of Latin America's reality, as the latter has proved irreducible to the former's universal

Marx’ Research Project As a Future Science for Emancipatory Action: A Delineation

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, 2019

The paper analyses Marx’ theoretical-methodological approach emerging in the 1840s consisting of a new communist guiding idea and a new mode of critique, combining (1) a critique of theoretical and practical forms of consciousness, (2) a critique of actual exploitation and domination, (3) a critique to reveal tendencies in today’s society that point to a different future, (4) a critique as a self-reflection by emancipatory movements, and (5) the permanent criticism and self-criticism of the “enlighteners”. The critique developed into a critical materialist-dialectical concept of history, a critique of political economy as substantiation for social revolution and critical contributions to a communist worker’s movement. In a further step, Marx’s Capital is reconsidered as an intellectual drama trying to prove that the increasing maturity of “material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the processes of production” “thereby provides, along with the elements for the for...

Marxism and Social Movements (Historical Materialism Book Series Volume 46), Social Movements in Latin America, Neoliberalism and Popular Resistance

Social Movement Studies, 2014

In 2011, the great recession that had already shaken global capitalism ignited a world-wide wave of of protest. The compelling need to understand both the causes of the economic crisis and its relationship to this global wave of popular insurgency has sparked a revived interest in Marxism, not just among activists, but also among younger social movement scholars frustratedwithwhat Buechler describes as a ‘mainstream socialmovement analysis [that] has been devoid of the critique that animates the social movements it studies’ (2000, p. xii). Marxism and Social Movements is a significant expression of that revival and a demonstration of what it has to offer. The volume brings together 18 chapters by 20 social movement scholars from 7 countries working in 8 disciplines. It is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the broad theoretical questions, both critiquing mainstream academic social movement theory and interrogating what a Marxist theory of social movements might entail. The second part examines through specific concrete analyses how movements actually work, exploring the political questions that confront movement participants, and arguing for a dialectical understanding of how movements develop. The last part is a bit of a catch all, gathering together both broadly comparative historical studies and several chapters focused on more recent movements against neoliberalism. While the last two parts include several very good pieces that illustrate the power of Marxism as a framework for analyzing a wide range of contemproary and historical movements, it is the Introduction and the chapters gathered in first part that should command the attention of the field as whole.