Race and Class in Historical Materialism: Notes about Latin America

Abstract

This article examines the problematic of the relation between race and class as it has been developed in the tradition of Latin American Marxism. Our goal is to show the capacity of historical materialism to think about and explain categories and problems outside the European context of its birth, based on its confrontation with other historical and geographical realities. For this we have made a critical review of canonical texts of Latin American Marxism, especially José Carlos Mariátegui’s, in order to offer an alternative interpretation to the one that today maintains that Marxism cannot take care of the problem of race in our region. Our interpretation starts from the hypothesis that historical materialism must be situated, both in Europe and in Latin America, in the historical coordinates in which it emerged, as a theory that places social problems and conflicts in the field of history, in contrast with supposedly scientific explanations that found in the racial question the interpretative key for the analysis of social reality. In this way, our work shows how Marxism, by approaching the category of race as a historical and social problem linked to the concrete organization of the capitalist social order, interwoven with another key sociohistorical category such as class, and not as a mere notion of identity, manages to give it due importance and adequately explain the racial problem that characterizes Latin American history. We conclude that the simultaneous rigor and flexibility of the materialist theory of history makes it valid and very necessary to rethink the current debates on the (post)colonial condition of the region.