Throughout the history of Marxist theory and practice in Latin America, certain questions recur. What is the relationship between political and social revolution? How can state institutions serve as tools for political change? What is the basis for mass collective political agency? And how can intellectual work contribute to broader emancipatory political movements? Through textual and historical analysis, this dissertation examines how Latin American intellectuals and political actors have reframed and answered these questions in changing historical circumstances. Four episodes in this history are examined: debates between José Carlos Mariátegui and Raúl Haya de la Torre in the late 1920s; the trajectory of the publication Pasado y Presente in Argentina from the 1960s to the 1980s; the uneven path from nationalism to Marxism in the work of Bolivian theorist René Zavaleta Mercado between the 1950s and 1980s; and, most recently, the theoretical efforts of activist-intellectuals in the Comuna group during the last two decades of political change in Bolivia. By examining these episodes in both their theoretical content and historical context, the dissertation argues that the modern concept of constituent power plays a central if sometimes obscure role in theorists’ approaches, while the theory of hegemony, drawn from the work of Antonio Gramsci, informs their strategic perspectives. It also shows, however, how different thinkers have run up against the limitations of these frameworks; mass political events have effects that exceed the dominant conceptual understandings of constituent power and hegemony, and reach beyond the scope of the state, demanding new explanations. The resulting tensions, revealed here by extensively analyzing the case of Comuna in Bolivia during the Pink Tide, have compelled Latin American theorists to recover elided indigenous histories, to forge materialist conceptions of culture and knowledge, to explore aleatory notions of political organization, and to reimagine the political role of intellectuals as that of weaving together, rather than leading, disparate tendencies of political innovation.