The "father" of Argentinian Marxism was a German immigrant: the land surveyor and mining engineer Germán Ave-Lallemant (1835-1910). Lallemant wrote in 1890 a pioneering materialist analysis of Argentine history that sought to understand the causes of Argentinian backwardness. The reasons for national stagnation would go back to the retrograde inheritance of Spanish colonization and their perpetuation in the local ruling class. This critical edition of that document, which so far remained untranslated, is intended to contribute to the overcoming of stereotyped visions of Lallemant's and the Second International's Marxism.