The course focuses on the encounter between the communist doctrine of politics and anti-colonial theory in the first three decades of the twentieth century. There is a firm belief that Karl Marx and the first generation of 19th century Marxists conferred to Europe a historical and political primacy that failed to properly incorporate the centrality of colonialism, thus remaining trapped within a provincial Eurocentric framework that has since then plagued Western Marxism. Against this background, the course examines how a new communist approach broke away from orthodox understandings of socialism to put forward a radical vision of the capitalist world system that eventually culminated in a profound and comprehensive reformulation of Marxism based on a systematic and explicit anti-colonial logic. We will revisit this formative, initial encounter of Marxism and the colonial question in order to inquire how, on the one hand, it radically transformed Marxism by decolonizing it and how, on the other hand, it inaugurated a global anti-colonial revolutionary vision, the first ever to blend into a unified discourse capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and communism. Readings will include texts from Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin, Vladimir Lenin, and selections from the first six congresses of the Communist International (1919-1928), the congresses of the Peoples of the East in Baku (1920) and of the Toilers of the Far East (1922), the World Congress Against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism (1927), The League Against Imperialism (1928), and the first Latin American Communist Conference (June 1929).