Manuel, thanks to the new Bolivarian army you’ve created, the definitive independence will be possible.
Liberator,at your orders!
Marx never traveled to America. Nor did he know Bolívar personally. He had only read about him. But, because Marx was very poor, during his exile in England he studied books in public libraries. The best one at that time was the British Museum. There, he read about Bolívar, but, that library had only books written by European enemies of Bolívar. Thus, Marx wrote a very unfortunate article, titled “Bolívar and Ponte” (1858), in which he undertook a critique of the American liberator. Different from the information he used in writing “Capital” (his main work, a monument to human intelligence and a demolishing critique of capitalism), the information he had about Bolívar was too limited. However, his disciples and continuators, like Che Guevara and others, even when they pointed out these mistakes of the master, have defined themselves as Marxists and Bolivarians at the same time. Manuel Marulanda Vélez may be one of the main Bolivarian Marxists of our times.
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