Marta Harnecker

Marta Harnecker (Santiago, 1937 – Vancouver, 2019) was a Chilean journalist, sociologist and writer, and one of the most widely read Marxist authors in Spanish. Working within the Latin American Marxist tradition of the second half of the twentieth century, she aimed to bring social theory to readers without academic training, and her textbooks reached militants and students across the Spanish-speaking world.

Raised in a family of Austrian descent and initially committed to Catholic activism, she visited Cuba in 1960, and the Cuban Revolution pushed her away from religion. After winning a scholarship to study in France under Louis Althusser in 1962, she turned toward what she saw as a scientific socialism. Back in Chile in 1968, she joined the student movement and the Socialist Party, and during Salvador Allende's government she devoted herself to political training for workers and peasants. Her popular education booklets, published between 1971 and 1973, were banned after the 1973 coup. In exile she lived in Cuba, where she founded the MEPLA research centre, and later advised Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

Her best-known book, The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism, offers a concise account of Marxist fundamentals: productive forces, relations of production and class struggle as the engine of history. Her influence lies largely in the training of generations of militants and in making Marxist vocabulary accessible across Latin America.