The capital of Karl Marx, Marxism and the Latin American intellectuals: the cases of Mexico and Colombia

Abstract

In the present article we will examine the characteristics of the reading of Karl Marx's The Capital in Latin America, focusing specially in the cases of Mexico and Colombia. Initially, we will study the conditions under which the circulation of the concepts of socialism and communism took place in the middle of the 19th century and how that was followed, decades later, by one of the first translations of the first volume of The Capital to Castilian. Despite these two circumstances, the appropriation of Karl Marx's thinking had serious limitations due to the predominance of conservative and even overtly anti-communist conceptions. Later, due to diverse factors, among which we must mention the Spanish exile, it was possible to translate the three volumes of The Capital, which gave rise to a great variety of readings of this work generating a multitude of debates that stimulated the development of the social sciences and the humanities.