ABSTRACT
The process of adapting Marxist thought and the lessons from past attempts at socialist transformation to a specific reality involves the modification of both these sources of knowledge. The Latin American and Caribbean experience confirms the proposition that there are no universal models for Marxist revolutionaries to follow in constructing socialism. The founders of Marxism created a conceptual framework for critically analyzing and interpreting complex, changing reality of each capitalist society. The coupling of democracy with socialism is a logical solution to continuing social and economic problems of peripheral capitalism. The current crisis of Marxism and Left in Latin America can also be traced to the failure of the revolutionary armed movements established in many parts of the region during the sixties and seventies. The difficulties in the Latin American context of staying within the boundaries of a limited bourgeois democratic regime while still struggling for socialism are brought out clearly by the plight of the Left in contemporary Peru.
