Marx: the radical critique of capitalist modernity versus the inconsistencies of Decolonial and Postdevelopment studies.

Abstract

This article aims to reveal the fallacies of the challenges about the supposed Eurocentric character of Marx's thought., carried out by theorists enrolled in the decolonial and Post-development perspectives. Thus, a review of Marx's writings is carried out, both by those that make up his central work and by those more unknown notes about non-European societies, which show the development of his ideas until the full understanding of the unequal and multilinear deployment of societies, the colonial problem and the struggles of oppressed peoples. In these studies of Marx, there is not a finished theory, but the epistemological bases that warn of the unequal deployment of capitalism as a world system. In other words, there are elements that open up fruitful lines of research to understand: a) the subordination of pre-capitalist social formations, firstly, to the original accumulation of capital in Western Europe and, secondly, to imperialism and its international division of labour, b) the necessarily expansive tendencies of capitalism, "the tendency to create the world market", based on the very social laws that govern its behavior, c) the multilinear, unequal, asymmetrical and polarizing development between imperialist centers and dependent peripheries and d) the multiple resistances to the advance of colonialism and imperialism. Marx and, also, Engels lay the foundations for the most radical critique of bourgeois society, of its colonialism, even of imperialism, and of its inherent beliefs in the superiority of Western European culture and its civilizing mission.