Global Capital Accumulation and the Specificity of Latin America

Abstract

This chapter addresses the theme of Latin America and its relationship with the works and ideas of Karl Marx from three different angles. First, it offers an overview of the textual evidence of the scattered passages in which Marx comments on the realities of Latin American countries. In the second place, it provides a critical review of the major controversies around Marx’s direct references to this region’s societies among Latin American Marxist scholars. Lastly, it discusses the original and creative work by Latin American authors that, taking Marx’s mature critique of political economy as presented in the Grundrisse, the 1859 Contribution and Capital as point of departure, have attempted to develop it further in order to provide a rigorous account of the specificity of capital accumulation in Latin America through the systematic categorial unfolding of the determinations of the value-form (i.e., through the worldwide uneven development of the “law of value”).