Photo: @mbellasartes
Ethno-Marxism, as a school of critical thought in anthropology, emerged in the 1960s out of a need to revive a neglected strand of Marxism that incorporates ethnicity into the analysis of interclass contradictions in colonial and national contexts, such as those found in the complex multicultural reality of Latin America.
It draws on a specific historical practice that, through academia and political activism, supports the struggles of exploited and oppressed sectors—which differ, in their ethnic-cultural and linguistic characteristics as well as in their forms of social organization and resistance, from the nationalities that were integrated following European conquest and colonization and from the independence movements dominated primarily by oligarchic Creole groups.
It has its roots in what is known in the Marxist tradition as the colonial and national question, which takes on special relevance and development in the debates of European Marxists who, at the beginning of the 20th century, faced the problem of theorizing and fighting for socialist revolution in occupied and divided nations, such as Poland, or in multinational empires like Tsarist Russia, or the diverse tapestry of nations and nationalities that constituted the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Thus, it is no coincidence that Lenin distanced himself from Marx and Engels’ views regarding the United States’ war of conquest against Mexico from 1846 to 1848, nor did he share their harsh judgments of the various countries and peoples under colonial subjugation, or situated on the periphery of the historically advanced nations, many of them considered “peoples without history,” assuming that the development of capitalism would lift them out of their “ancestral backwardness,” and that the world economy and the interests of the proletarian revolution would benefit from these colonial and imperialist conquests. Let us also recall Marx’s controversial assessments of Bolívar, who was mistakenly characterized through the distorted mirror of Napoleon.
Marx’s early positions, held in the 1840s, attributing to capitalism the development of the countries under its rule, were years later replaced by a ruthless critique of colonialism set forth in the first volume of Capital and in his articles on India. Nevertheless, Salomón F. Bloom, a pioneering analyst of Marx’s views on the national question, considers that “while Marx’s opinion on the progressive role of imperialism underwent considerable change, his ultimate test for all political domination, whether internal or external, remained the same: economic and social progress.”
Argentine Marxist Leopoldo Mármora rightly points out that it is necessary “to place at the center of the analysis the general conception of revolution that they developed, for that—and nothing else—is the core that animates and provides the logic for all of Marx and Engels’ theoretical and practical positions regarding the national question… In any case, the world revolution—that is, the proletarian revolution in Western Europe—was and always remained the sole ‘center’ of Marx’s theory.”
Mármora highlights Marx’s corrections to his own analysis upon discovering that the development of the metropolis blocked that of the colony, which in the case of Ireland meant that under British rule it had become an underdeveloped agrarian country, while England transformed into a modern industrial power. That is, upon realizing this unequal development, Marx draws the political consequences of the situation, in light of which “in direct opposition to his original personal conviction formulated in 1848, the liberation of the colony (Ireland) now becomes a precondition for the social revolution in the metropolis.”
Lenin’s contribution to the national question, informed by the observations of the Indian scholar Roy Manabendra, was to link the socialist paradigm with the right of nations to self-determination, and to have linked the struggle of the “advanced” proletariat with the national liberation struggle of all “backward” peoples, bringing them together under the banner of a desired world revolution. At the birth of the USSR, Lenin theoretically developed and put into practice a policy of extreme respect for the rights of nations, nationalities, and ethnic and national minorities who were precisely suffering from national oppression. However, Lenin failed to recognize that the national struggle does not culminate with the formation or establishment of a politically independent state, and even in his classification of countries with national problems, he did not include those in Latin America, because for him, once political independence was achieved, the national problem was resolved.
Freedom for Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, three months after their abduction.
Original text by Gilberto López Rivas published in La Jornada on April 3rd, 2026.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.