This book assesses the untimely relevance of Marx and Freud for Latin America, thinkers alien to the region who became an inspiration to its beleaguered activists, intellectuals, writers and artists during times of political and cultural oppression. Bruno Bosteels presents ten case studies arguing that art and literature—the novel, poetry, theatre, film—more than any militant tract or theoretical essay, can give us a glimpse into Marxism and psychoanalysis, not so much as sciences of history or of the unconscious, respectively, but rather as two intricately related modes of understanding the formation of subjectivity.

Since the 1970s, sociocultural analysis in Latin American studies has been marked by a turn away from problems of political economy. Accumulation and Subjectivity challenges this turn while reconceptualizing the relationship between political economy and the life of the subject. The fourteen essays in this volume show that, in order to understand the dynamics governing the extraction of wealth under contemporary capitalism, we also need to consider the collective subjects implied in this operation at an institutional, juridical, moral, and psychic level. More than merely setting the scene for social and political struggle, Accumulation and Subjectivity reveals Latin America to be a cauldron for thought for a critique of political economy and radical political change beyond its borders. Combining reflections on political philosophy, intellectual history, narrative, law, and film from the colonial period to the present, it provides a new conceptual vocabulary rooted in the material specificity of the region and, for this very reason, potentially translatable to other historical contexts. This collection will be of interest to scholars of Marxism, Latin American literary and cultural studies, and the intellectual history of the left.

In Translating Marx, Martín Cortés ponders José Aricó's contributions towards the constitution of Latin American Marxism. Accordingly, he studies Aricó in terms of his trajectory as a publisher and translator, while considering his thoughts on Marxism's fundamental theoretical problems.

Since the late-1990s much of Latin America has experienced an uneven and contradictory turn to the Left in the electoral arena. At the same time, there has been a rejuvenation of Marxist critiques of political economy. Drawing on the expertise of Latin American, North American, and European scholars, this volume offers cutting-edge theoretical explorations of trends in the region, as well as in-depth case studies of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela. Essays in the volume focus on changes to class formation in Latin America and offer new insights into the state-form, exploring the complex relationship between state and market in contexts of late capitalist development, particularly in countries endowed with incredible natural resource wealth. Contributors are: Dario Azzellini, Emilia Castorina, Mariano Féliz, Juan Grigera, Nicolas Grinberg, Gabriel Hetland, Claudio Katz, Thomas Purcell, Ben Selwyn, Susan J. Spronk, Guido Starosta, Leandro Vergara-Camus, and Jeffery R. Webber.

In a work centred 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. Whilst criticising 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. English translation of the Marx y América Latina edition, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010.

This book examines the multiple relationships between education, pedagogy, and social change in Latin America and beyond through a discussion of critical theory in education and its uses in Latin American society today. An international group of contributors discuss both individual countries and the region as a whole.

In Critical Marxism in Mexico, Stefan Gandler, coming from the tradition of the Frankfurt School, reveals the contributions that Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and Bolívar Echeverría have made to universal thought. While in recent times Latin America has taken its distance from global power centers, and reorganised its political and economic relations, in philosophy the same tendency is barely visible. Critical Marxism in Mexico is a contribution to the reorganisation of international philosophical discussion, with Critical Theory as the point of departure. Despite having studied in Europe, where philosophical Eurocentrism remains virulent, Gandler opens his eyes to another tradition of modernity and offers an account of the life and philosophy of Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and Bolívar Echeverría, former senior faculty members at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).