Martí on Marx by Bruno Bosteels

If Marx doesn't hold the key to the pan-American dilemma, maybe a dusted-off, postcolonial José Martí does. - Juan Flores, Foreword to Román de la Campa, Cuba on My Mind: Journeys to a Severed Nation

However, this does not necessarily mean that we are left with purely negative, missed encounters between Marx and Latin America, or between Marx and Martí. On the contrary, as I began arguing above, the logic of the failed or missed encounter, as desencuentro, can be considered one name among others for the unequal development of capitalism in its global phase. This could even open up the space for a renewed appreciation of the idea of the encounter, not as a euphemism for the discovery and subsequent colonization of Latin America but in the sense in which the late Louis Althusser used the term to configure what he called the "underground current" of an "aleatory materialism," based on random encounters, as opposed to the supposed determinism and stagism of traditional, dogmatic, or vulgar understandings of dialectical and historical materialism.22 Marxism would then become the name for a mode of thinking of the missed encounter as such, now understood as the thought of unlinking or of the constitutive lack at the heart of the social link-that is, the structurally uneven development of society under the historical conditions of capitalism. This would enable us to imagine a posthumous dialogue between Marx and Martí.