Sergio Bagú and the latin american marxisms of the twentieth century

Abstract

This work focuses on the characteristics of the Marxist thought of Sergio Bagú (1911-2002), inscribing it, as a contextualization, in the history of the receptions of Marx and Engels ideas on Latin America during the twentieth century. According to our hypothesis, Bagú’s Marxism can be characterized as heterodox and anti-dogmatic, considering the dominant currents within the historical moment in which he developed his research, particularly those focused on Latin American colonial society, published between the end of the forties and early fifties, and his later essay on the fundamental concepts of Marx and Engels from the early seventies. Thus, this work illuminates a significant dimension not only of the history of Marxisms in Latin America but also of Latin American sociohistorical thought in general, which, as we will see, was crossed by an intimate connection between, on the one hand, historiographic diagnoses and, on the other, positions taken in relation to current problems of each period, without each being able to be understood in a disconnected way, always with the political and social conflicts of each moment as a backdrop to the discussions and intellectual productions.