The intellectual tradition founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels featured an international horizon from the moment of its inception in the mid-nineteenth century and ultimately found resonance – in terms of followers, readers and detractors – in all corners of the globe. This short course has the twofold aim of approaching the global perspective at the root of the Marxist worldview as well as key aspects of Marxism’s own global diffusion as a revolutionary intellectual project.
In the course, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ early understanding of the world-spanning nature of the capitalist system in The Communist Manifesto and call for ‘internationalist’ revolutionary politics will be analyzed and contextualized alongside salient instances of the reception of Marxist ideas from around the globe in the twentieth century. From Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui’s search for a confluency of socialism and indigenous struggle to Cape Verdean Amílcar Cabral’s engagement with Marxist ideas in the context of decolonization; from Rosa Luxemburg’s condemnation of war and imperialism in the name of internationalism to the Cuban attempt to ‘export’ its revolutionary formula across the Southern hemisphere.
Beyond the limited, binary scope of asking if ‘Marx was a Eurocentric,’ the course ultimately raises the question of why an intellectual tradition that arose in the German lands in the middle of the nineteenth century found both orthodox and heretic readers in places like Mexico, the Balkans, and China throughout the hundred and fifty years that followed and has, especially since 2008, experienced a global comeback from North to South. The course concludes, in that regard, by asking what the revolutionary slogan of the First International – ‘Workers of all countries, unite!’ – established in 1864 might still mean in the global-yet-fractured world of today.