Marta Harnecker


Marta Harnecker was a Chilean journalist, author, psychologist, sociologist and Marxist intellectual. She worked in the analysis of the labor movement and elaborated a lot of formative documentation. She was also an advisor to the socialist Marxist government of Cuba, as well as a collaborator with left-wing political movements in Latin America. She was active in the government of Salvador Allende between 1970 and 1973, and a counselor of Hugo Chávez between 2004 and 2011.
She married Canadian economist Michael A. Lebowitz.

Early life

Harnecker's family had Austrian roots. She studied psychology at the Catholic University of Chile in 1962, and did postgraduate studies in Paris with Paul Ricoeur and Louis Althusser. Upon her return to Chile in 1968, she taught Historical Materialism and Political Economy in Sociology at the University of Chile and was director of the political weekly Chile Hoy.
In 1968 she joined the Socialist Party of Chile. In 1973, she got caught up in the fall of president Salvador Allende and the coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet and was forced into exile in Cuba. There, she founded the research institute Memoria Popular Latinoamerica and continued to write.

Publications

Harnecker wrote over 80 books including The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism and The Left after Seattle. Recent books include Hugo Chávez Frias: un hombre, un pueblo, Venezuela: Militares junto al pueblo and Venezuela: una revolución sui generis which reflect her support of the Bolivarian revolution.. Her latest book is entitled A World to Build and it was published in English in January 2015. On 15 August 2014, Marta Harnecker accepted the 2013 Liberator's Prize for Critical Thought, awarded for this book.