Marxism and the peculiarities of Indo-American socialism

In the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth socialists around the world continue to benefit from his prescient analysis of the inner laws of motion of capitalism, but they also find solid intellectual inspiration in his method of politics that can be applied to the concrete realities of contemporary society in the world as whole.
The validity of Marxism, especially his Thesis Eleven on Feuerbach (The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it) obtained substantial vindication with the advent of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The contributions to theory, programme and method of politics made by Russian socialists and the Bolsheviks took Marxism to higher levels of understanding about the concreteness of the contradictions of capitalism especially in peripheral societies.
Put in a different way, Marx’s framework and method is fruitful because its point of departure is the world economy as an overriding independent reality, created by the international division of labour and the world market that generates contradictions that work themselves through in unique combinations in every individual society. In short, the Marxist or Leninist truth is always concrete.
In the centenary of the Russian Revolution and the bicentenary of Marx’s birth this article seeks to examine how the misunderstanding of the specificities of key aspects of Latin America’s socio-economic formation led to important confusion, programmatic mistakes and political errors in the design of policies by the Communist International to be applied to the continent’s reality.