Charles Reitz, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

Karl Marx’s very last socio-political investigations are the central subject of Kevin B. Anderson’s new book exploring the issues Marx was contemplating during the last working period of his life. In the years just before his death in 1883, Marx continued to use the vast resources of the British Museum to study in depth the work of an international grouping of selected scholars who were publishing on themes of the utmost apparent urgency to him. Between 1879 and 1882, Marx undertook a wide-reaching inspection of the latest research and writing on the history and anthropology of communal clan-based social formations around the globe, focusing on the changing nature of land ownership and gender and family relations within these societies. Anderson wants to discern what insights Marx might have drawn from the research publications he was consulting regarding possibilities for a transition to a classless society and in terms of new understandings of possible forms of resistance, rebellion, socialist revolution and social transformation.

Anderson acquits himself well given the formidable task of making sense of Marx’s notes and excerpts from a multiplicity of seemingly disparate sources and authors. The identification of Marx’s central and intertwined research concerns requires an experienced critical sense like Anderson’s, deeply steeped in the trajectory of Marx’s and Marxist thought. Anderson thus has been able to extrapolate several discoveries from the detailed journals Marx kept during his last productive years. These journals in booklet form are made up of lengthy hand-copied excerpts from the reference materials he was studying with brief appended commentaries of his own. These booklets are preserved in the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. Because of Marx’s idiosyncratic penmanship, these are largely illegible except to the trained eye. It has taken over a decade for them to be worked out by experts in Marx’s writing habits at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Anderson has been partnering with the team of editors who have in 2024 published these materials as MEGA² IV-27. The now readable yet fragmentary transcripts are available (in German) from the International Marx-Engels Foundation and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences; not in print, but accessible online. Anderson is working with a team of translators and editors to publish these materials in English as a volume for scholars.

Anderson’s extensive earlier publications and scholarly familiarity with the works Marx, Engels, Lenin and Raya Dunayevskaya equip him to furnish also a fulsome discussion of classic and supplemental sources as context for understanding, that is, Capital, The Critique of the Gotha Program, writings on Ireland, 1869-70, 1844 Manuscripts, German Ideology, etc.). Anderson drew upon the new notebook materials ahead of their publication due to his close working association with the Berlin editors. In this volume, he supplements these sources with English translations of notebook excerpts that have been included in earlier studies of the late Marx by Lawrence Krader and Hans-Peter Harstick. Anderson’s overarching analysis is organized by means of six skillfully structured chapters: 1) Marx’s study of the history and anthropology of indigenous communal social formations in the Americas and in Rome; 2) Marx’s attention to altered gender relations as these relate to changing property and land ownership schemes; 3) Marx’s consideration of historical reasons for multiple pathways to a socialist political future; 4) Marx’s abhorrence of colonialism’s destruction of communal social formations by French and British imperialists and his praise for the indigenous resistance against external oppression; 5) Marx’s condemnation of slavery in ancient Rome and his criticism of the reactionary beliefs in racial or caste superiority held by patrician and plebian enslavers as well as American ‘poor whites’; 6) Marx’s expressions of an essentially humanist need to overcome racial and ethnic prejudice, recognize nations, ethnic sectors of society, and move toward the abolition of the state. Anderson’s book is thus a guide to the reading of MEGA² IV-27 as having relevance to our political challenges today.

On the first point above, Anderson probes Marx’s lengthy transcriptions from two primary sources in then-current anthropology that documented changes to communal indigenous relationships with regard to shifting patterns of land ownership. The first of these is Henry Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society. Morgan’s study looked at a) classless clan societies in the Americas (the Iroquois, Dakota, Aztecs, Incas) and b) pre-class clan societies in Greece and Rome. The second is Maksim Kovalevsky’s book on communal land ownership in the Americas, India and Algeria. In both Morgan and Kovalevsky, the study of Iroquois customs and relationships becomes key to understanding other early clan-based societies. ‘Morgan and Marx find numerous affinities between these early European societies and Native American ones, especially the Iroquois, in this sense reading or re-reading very early Greco-Roman institutions through the lens of Iroquois ones’ (32). Marx viewed Morgan’s work in this regard as a major innovation. Marx was attuned to the transition from clan to class structures and the changes from egalitarian norms to political economic hierarchies and gender changes. Kovalevsky’s work stressed the persistence of highly inclusive communal social formations in India as well as the changes in land ownership over time as these communal forms came under the rule of the Brahmins and the state. Due to Kovalevsky’s work ‘Marx saw the Russian commune’s future prospects and its relation to a wider European revolution that he also was conceptualizing right up to the end of his life’ (70-71).

For the second point, Engels had also consulted these late journals when studying the work of Morgan for his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. This ‘forms an important milestone in Marxist thought, as it places women’s oppression at the center of the whole structure of class society’ (76). Engels’ treatment of Marx’s notes on Morgan is, however, weak in Anderson’s estimation, with Engels having adopted Rousseau’s idealization of indigenous communism and having constructed a specious version of Marx’s materialism. Anderson focuses on a larger problem as well: Engels’ assertion of ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex’ (78). Anderson sees this as undercutting an independent women’s movement struggling against sexism in a capitalist society (79). Anderson stresses that Raya Dunayevskaya years ago ‘put forth the first feminist critique of Origin that contrasted this work to Marx’s own findings and methodology’ (83). Anderson supplies his own lengthy interpretation of Morgan on family and gender relations in the indigenous communal formations of both Native American and in Greco-Roman societies. This is augmented with an interpretation of Marx’s late period notes and excerpts from Ludwig Lange’s 1856 Ancient Rome. Anderson develops a richly detailed analysis of these materials with the assistance of the contemporary feminist perspectives of Adrienne Rich and Heather Brown.

For the third point, Anderson discusses the trajectory of change in Marx’s understanding of developmental stages in the emergence of different modes of the family as well as stages in modes of production. He highlights that in 1859 Marx wrote: ‘In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production [Produktionsweisen] may be designated as progressive epochs [progressive Epochen] in the economic development of society’ (126). Anderson finds much evidence that Marx’s perspective changed in his last years from a unilinear conception to a multilinear account of social development. Anderson emphasizes that it is ‘hard to see the transition from the ancient to the feudal mode as progressive in technological or other substantive ways’ (128). Further, ‘Marx’s notes on Kovalevsky (1879), Morgan (1880-81), Phear (1880-81), and Maine (1881)’ (134) reject seeing all societies that have given rise to capitalism as having been feudal in form. Anderson emphasizes that the later Marx considered the classic shift from feudalism to capitalism to be the case only in Western societies, ‘with England exhibiting the “classic form” of the process’ (144). The 1872-75 French edition of Capital is described as having demonstrated ‘Marx’s increasingly multilinear approach to social development’ (142). Likewise, correspondence (and drafts of letters) between Marx and revolutionary Russian intellectual Vera Zasulich in 1881 discuss ‘Indigenous, agrarian communism as a source of future positive development that could allow Russia to bypass the primitive accumulation of capital and develop “in a socialist direction”’ (148). Marx is held here to suggest that ‘a socialist future can emerge from the village communes if the influences bearing down on them from capitalist encroachment can somehow be overcome’ (150). Thus, Marx is seen as having clearly moved away from earlier unilinear formulations.

On point four, Anderson further finds evidence that the late Marx held that communal land ownership could contribute to the possibility of revolt (186). Marx’s study of the writings of Kovalevsky (a well as Robert Sewell and John Phear) – on the colonial policies of the French in Algeria, the British in India and the Spanish in Latin America – elicited both a respect for the stubborn persistence of indigenous communal formations in the face of imperial political forces as well as regret for the tendencies toward the destruction of collective property and its replacement by private property relations in land ownership.

For point five, Rome, India and Russia were studied by Marx with regard to intensifying tendencies toward political inequality and social polarization. He made extensive notes in this regard from a reading of four additional texts on Rome (Bücher, Friedländer, Jhering and Lange) during his final period of research. These authors investigated historical patterns of social change toward hierarchy. Communal and kinship forms of clan-based societies morphed into male dominated class social formations characterized by private property and slave labor. ‘[T]he patricians emerged from the chiefs of the original clan that came together to found the city of Rome’ (192). Prisoners of war are ‘booty’ of the state and enslaved; some remained in service to the state, others sold. Marx understandably also studied the patterns of rebellion of the oppressed. ‘In the Sicilian slave war some 70,000 slaves recently imported from Syria and destitute local peasants rose up’ (204). Still Roman patricians and plebians were conditioned to feel superior to the ethnically diverse enslaved persons, a situation which Marx recognized as analogous to the racism of  the ‘poor whites’ of the America south. Yet ‘Marx never stopped hoping for an alliance of Black and white labor in the United States or of Irish and English workers on the other side of the Atlantic’ (212). India is also at the center of Marx’s last notebooks where Kovalevsky and Sewell recount details of the Sepoy Uprising and the Maratha resistance. The late Marx, Anderson concludes, was preoccupied with indigenous communal forms, like the Maratha, as possessing real possibilities for emancipatory change.

Lastly, on point six, Marx’s novel treatments of Ireland and Russia, each having social movements that might spark revolution, stand at both the very start and the very conclusion of Anderson’s book. The Irish revolution is seen as having the potential to pry open English revolution; so too, Russian communal villages may link up with a communist movement in Western Europe with the two mutually supporting one another. These assessments may be seen as harbingers of revolutionary possibilities from which the working class is de-centered (though not displaced). At the same time, new alternatives to capitalism are envisioned in the wake of the Paris Commune, which seek ‘anti-statist revolution alongside the anti-capitalist revolution’ (246). Anderson poses the question: ‘How would Marx have further modified his vision of communism, of abolition of the state as well as capital, in light of his research on Indigenous communism and communal villages in his last years?’ (252). In three letters of this period ‘Marx sees the revolution breaking out first in Russia’ (254). ‘In this case, Russia’s Indigenous form of rural communism would be the spark’ (256). Anderson concludes that Marx ‘sees the communal forms within these societies as taking on especially revolutionary dimensions in times of social stress and conflict’ (265).

A massive amount of careful intellectual labor has gone into this illuminating volume, both on the part of Kevin Anderson and the Marx scholars in Amsterdam and Berlin. These research records and Anderson’s commentary upon them open up an exciting new resource from the literary estate of Karl Marx for revolutionary theory and politics.

15 May 2025

 

Ciarán O’Rourke, Rundale

Close-reading Karl Marx’s late journals and correspondence, Kevin B. Anderson new book reaffirms the role of Marxism as a vital theory of political action: resilient and combative enough to meet the complex challenges we face today – a fighting philosophy.

For socialists dismayed by the current toxicity and rabidity of the world’s expropriators-in-chief, Kevin B. Anderson’s timely new study is recommended reading. Parsing the eminent radical’s notebooks, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads (Verso, 2025) offers a portrait of an omnivorous, questioning mind at work, demonstrating how historical patterns of gendered labour, “indigenous communism” and anti-colonial struggle preoccupied the author of Capital in approximately the decade and a half before his death in 1883. Accenting these aspects of Marx’s mature thought, Anderson posits a revised and resonant understanding of Marxism as such, reaffirming its role as a vital theory of political action: resilient and combative enough to meet the formidably complex challenges we face today – a fighting philosophy.

Throughout, Anderson remains alert to what he terms Marx’s “dialectical sensitivity to social contradictions”, a sensitivity that enabled him, for instance, to admire the substantially democratic character of traditional Iroquois society, while also acknowledging some of its patriarchal customs and internal hierarchies, which he refused to romanticize. The brazen violence of European colonialism also emerges as a motif in Marx’s writings in this period. In 1879, he was struck by “the fact that the fullest attempt by French colonialism to destroy the Indigenous communal social forms” in Algeria, the object of French imperial ambitions since 1830, “came in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871”. The Conservative National Assembly, which had ordered themassacre of the Communards, passed a series of “laws designed to hasten the break-up and privatization of the land” in the colony – measures that amounted to “gangsterism” by another name. As for the civilized parliamentarians themselves, Marx said, their goal was simply the “destruction of collective property” in Algeria: their “debate revolved only around the method, how to kill it off.” He went on:

The expropriation of the Arabs was intended by law: 1) in order to furnish the French colonists with the greatest possible land; 2) by tearing the Arabs away from their natural connection to the soil and thus to crush the remaining power of the already disintegrating clan associations, and thereby any danger of rebellion.

Such observations, Anderson contends, are indicative of a decisive shift in Marx’s thinking, which led him to view “the modern state alongside capitalism itself as the enemy of human liberation”, and to reverse an assumption encoded in his earlier writings: that revolutionary change would (and could only) emanate from the industrial centres of Western Europe outwards. Instead, he came to believe that the imperial-capitalist apparatus could be scuppered and derailed even in its non-industrialized zones of operation – as suggested by the burgeoning mass movements and proto-revolutionary agitation in Ireland, which held clear implications for class politics in England’s manufacturing hubs. “For a long time I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy”, he wrote to Engels in December 1869: “Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite [….] The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.”

To the schematically minded – self-described Marxists whose vision of socialism centres on an all-powerful super-state and expanded industrial potentialities –  Anderson’s interpretation will seem controversial. To most thoughtful anti-capitalists, however, his thesis will be like light in a dark time:  a welcome affirmation of Marx’s work in an embattled and beleaguered age, when engineered climate catastrophe is considered profitable and genocide a routine means of state-building and consolidation. As Anderson’s methodical, scholastically precise commentary implies, even apparently unprecedented crises in the capitalist system have causes, and historical origins, which “relentless criticism” of the kind championed by Marx himself can name and accuse.

Our understanding of the breadth and richness of Marx’s thinking is only enhanced by Anderson’s attentive close-reading of the available archival materials, as well as his fluent engagement with a range of subsequent figures, from Leon Trotsky and Raya Dunayevskaya to Peter Hudis and Kohei Saito. Anderson is deft and magnanimous in embedding his own (highly original) investigations in the fertile commoning-ground of Marxist historiography, a planet-wide and multi-generational field. Indeed, his book at times resembles a primer on contemporary Marxist research (in particular, those initiatives with a humanist or eco-socialist inflection) – and in that sense will be a must-read for budding historical materialists.

Although Anderson parses Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks in detail, one author who does not appear in his otherwise extensive bibliography is the Surrealist and IWW historian Franklin Rosemont, whose superb and inspiring essay on the same late text is a masterpiece in revivification, creative reading, and critical provocatio . In some ways, Rosemont’s rousing commentary would be the ideal supplement to Anderon’s more punctilious study. In the spirit of communality and comradely goodwill that Anderson himself frequently exemplifies, I should say that Rosemont’s work was first recommended to me by an exuberant socialist book-cataloguer named John Flynn, who at the time was burrowing away, like Marx’s “old mole”, in the windowless vaults of a rather dreary copyright-library in Dublin, spending seditious hours poring over first-hand accounts of the “Wobblies”, when he should have been filing business textbooks in the lower decks. We might wonder whether the enthused, lovingly poetic appreciations of Marx that prevail among the Flynns and Rosemonts of the world may eventually prove more valuable than the disputes and deliberations of the academic Left, which – it must be admitted – consume most of Anderson’s focus.

This last feature is not inconsequential. There’s an oddly hermetic texture to Anderson’s analysis, which has a great deal to offer in the way of refined commentary on Marx’s multi-faceted theorisations, but conveys little sense of history as a process that actual people might create, resist, redirect, or incite. Such remarks may seem pedantic – or even unjust – but they are, I think, valid. One reason why the prison memoirs of Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist prince, retain their verve today is his energetic identification with the plight (and testimonies) of other incarcerated activists around the globe – as when he includes, for example, in his critique of the social stratifications and many regressive elements of Tsarist rule in Russia, a passing salute to Michael Davitt, whose later land agitation he also followed with interest. Similarly, Kropotkin’s history of the French Revolution – like Marx’s Capital, researched and largely written in the British Museum Library – swells with personal feeling for the enragés and hungry peasantry, whose audacity and instinctive radicalism, he suggested, proved an instruction-manual for the so-called leading men in Paris as to what was possible and necessary, in the historic re-set they were presuming to effect. Marx was more imperious in his style (Bakunin accused him of having an authoritarian, over-intellectualized temperament); he was fuelled as much by a contempt for “block-headed” English historians, and for populist rhetoricians of the Left, as by the undoubtedly fierce sympathy he held for the masses of brutalized and exploited workers. Cleaving as it does so closely to the grain of Marx’s correspondence and journals, Anderson’s book is studious and carefully argued, but may in the end lack the human heat that makes history-making (feel) possible.

Tantalizingly, Anderson records near the close that from 1877 onwards “Marx had many ties both to intellectuals and to the People’s Will” organization in Russia, which he describes (somewhat sweepingly) as being “at that time the world’s most active revolutionary movement.” It’s lamentable that such connections are not integrated more fully into Anderson’s prior discussion. It also seems indicative that a study contextualizing Marx by reference to “indigenous” land practices and political formations in the same period should overlook the Zulus’ heroic trouncing of British Imperial forces at Isandlwana in 1879, or indeed the resounding defeat of the U.S. cavalry by Sioux-led tribes at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Anderson is an eloquent advocate for a progressively “multilinear” conception of historical development – a paradigm open to, and shaped by, supposedly “peripheral” varieties of anti-colonial and anti-extractivist resistance – but still seems at times to be writing from the vantage-point of the metropole, where existing indigenous practices are studied rather than lived, and only certain bodies (and intellects) are deemed to be historical agents. (Incidentally, America’s railroad strikers of 1877, whom Marx viewed as a potentially revolutionary force, are also omitted from Anderson’s commentary, despite their robust proletarian credentials).

Anderson’s great strength is his infectious and driving certainty that Marx’s work still contains, if not exactly the answers we need, at least a model for how we might conceptualise, absorb, and implement them – in our own barbarously modern century. He is an exemplary scholar, proceeding with rigour, clarity, and an open mind, in an effort to re-think and re-examine a political paradigm that many on the Left are wary of questioning (and all on the Right would like to see condemned to the ash-heap of history). The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads marks a vital contribution to this project. Radicals everywhere should read it and make it their own – before the new authoritarians ban it from the bookshelves, or bar our library doors for good.

24 April 2025

 

Sean K. Isaacs, Tempest

The current conjuncture of events, in which economic and political crises collide with an upsurge in political activity and struggle, appears disparate and detached, a collection of singular issues impacting specific countries and particular social groups. But to fully grasp the significance and potential global impact of events like the ongoing genocide in Palestine or the re-election of Donald Trump requires reckoning with their particular dynamics and social characteristics, without losing sight of the broader context of which they are a part. This means viewing them as interconnected moments, specific expressions of global capitalism’s tendencies.

Placing capitalism at the center of analysis should not mean reducing all its concrete manifestations to an abstract logic, however. Some orthodox Marxists have been guilty of this, raising Marx’s theories to the level of general laws that mechanically determine the course of history. This version of economic determinism, expressed most (in)famously by Josef Stalin, has loomed over Marxist theory and practice since Marx’s death, and has led to Marxism becoming synonymous with its most vulgar, mechanical, and authoritarian current for many people.

Another stream of Marxism has persisted however, opposed to Stalinism in all its forms, insisting on a humanist, internationalist, and non-determinist interpretation of Marx. Rather than viewing history as the necessary outcome of abstract laws of development, this tradition of Marxism sees it as a contradictory and uneven process, with multiple possible outcomes. From this perspective, specific crises and struggles are neither fully determined by abstract laws nor distinct and isolated events. They represent moments of a unity that can only be understood through its constitutive parts and the relationships between them. Renewing this stream of Marxism today can contribute to an understanding of current crises and struggles as parts of this totality, encouraging solidarity and internationalism across political movements.

Kevin Anderson’s new book, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads, is a contribution to this version of Marxism. Against the interpretation of Marx as a Eurocentric theorist only concerned with a narrow view of the working class, the book argues that Marx can, and should, be viewed as a multilinear thinker, one who explicitly engaged with colonialism, Indigenous and communal forms of living, and gender.

Anderson draws from Marx’s work between the years 1869 and 1882, most of which is made up of unpublished but extensive notes on colonization, Indigenous and non-Western societies, and gender relations. While unrefined, these notes represent, for Anderson, a map of Marx’s intellectual interests later in life and an indication that his thinking was still evolving and expanding.

Rather than identifying a “new” Marx, the book highlights the relationship between the late Marx and his earlier, more theoretically developed, work. It is Anderson’s contention that these more empirically grounded notebooks do not indicate a departure from Marx’s earlier work. Rather, they represent a dialectical move from the more abstract logic of Capital to the concrete level of uneven capitalist development in Ireland, India, and the United States, among other examples. These specific cases highlight the diverse forms capitalist development has taken, while remaining grounded in Marx’s general theory of capital.

Understanding Marx in this way, as a dialectical thinker moving from the abstract to the concrete, allows for new insights into Marx’s earlier works. While Capital is sometimes read as a Eurocentric account of development, in which the rise of capitalism in England is given as the model for the rest of the world, Marx explicitly states in the chapter on so-called “Primitive Accumulation” that the “history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form.” Marx’s later notes on the specific forms that colonization took in Ireland and India, and how this shaped capitalist development in those states, provides the empirical content for this passage, allowing us to read Capital as a theoretical model for understanding the diverse and uneven forms capitalism might take.

By bringing these less studied works to the forefront, Anderson encourages us to incorporate questions of colonialism and uneven development into our readings of Marx’s fully developed and published works. While he relies heavily on citations of passages that highlight Marx’s attentiveness to these issues, Anderson convincingly demonstrates that these are not merely cherry-picked examples but important reference points for development in Marx’s thought that can be traced back to his earlier work when read closely. By incorporating Marx’s notes on non-Western societies into our reading of his earlier work, a more nuanced, historically specific understanding of capitalist development emerges.

Anderson says that Revolutionary Roads is, in a way, a sequel to his previous book Marx at the Margins. Colonization in India and Ireland, communal societies in Russia and North America, and the relationship between anti-colonial struggle and communist revolution all play major roles in both books, but they are more developed and better connected to Marx’s broader work here.

Anderson contends, with strong supporting documentation, that the characterization of Marx as a Eurocentric, unilinear thinker is unfounded.This view, found in Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, maintains that Marx saw the English path of development as necessary for the entire world, leading to his justification of English colonial rule in India.

Said associated Marx with modernist theories of development, in which capitalism represents a necessary stage that all feudal societies must pass through on their way to communism. While this view has been certainly held by some proponents of orthodox Marxism, it is not accepted by many Marxists, nor, as Anderson shows, by Marx himself.

According to the orthodox reading of Marx, history is marked by distinct stages, modes of production that determine the form social relations take. E. P. Thompson writes against this interpretation of Marx in The Poverty of Theory, arguing that categorizations such as “feudalism” and “capitalism” are not static containers. Rather, they are sets of social relations expressed in a variety of historically specific ways. Capitalism can only be fully understood by examining its specific forms. But these concrete cases are moments of capitalism’s general tendency of development that Marx elaborates in Capital and can only be fully understood as part of this logic.

While Marx did develop a model of stages of development in The German Ideology, Anderson points to the fact that this could be interpreted as a model for Western Europe, not a universal one. So, while development in the West passed through a succession of stages, from communal society to Greco-Roman slave society, to Western feudalism, to capitalism, this does not mean that every society everywhere must follow this path. In fact, in the Grundrisse, Marx identifies a variety of precapitalist forms—Asiatic, Slavonic, ancient (Greco-Roman), and Germanic—that exist alongside each other, rather than as a progression of stages.

In reality, Marx acknowledged multiple possible paths of development. Since the Greco-Roman form is not higher than the other stages and only the Greco-Roman form of pre-capitalist society transitioned to Western feudalism, the other forms represent different trajectories.

Anderson highlights the passage from Capital quoted above as further evidence that Marx did not mean for the English model to be applied uncritically to every society. The specific form of development that Ireland and Russia took, where communal forms of living persisted alongside developing capitalist relations, means that societies need not necessarily pass through capitalism on their way to a socialist revolution. Instead, as Marx wrote in a letter to Russian communist Vera Zasulich in 1881, “the commune is the basis for Russia’s social regeneration,” something he also indicates in the 1882 Russian Preface to The Communist Manifesto.

Anderson also highlights how Marx’s later notes on India show that his view on British colonialism as a necessary—however brutal—step towards socialism in India evolved. It is important to note, however, that Marx’s abhorrence of colonial violence is not isolated to his later work. In Capital, he wrote that “the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic” and that “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part” in the origins of capitalism. In his earlier writings on India, Marx refers to the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism” of British colonialism.

But Anderson shows how later in life Marx not only saw British colonialism in India as barbaric, but no longer accepted it as a necessary evil that would get rid of traditional forms of Indian life and replace them with modern industry. Marx writes with admiration for anticolonial resistance in India, both militarily and in the persistence of communal traditions.

This view of the relationship between spreading capitalist relations, colonial violence, anticolonial resistance, and communal forms of living represents a much more complex picture of development than the mechanical, linear, determinist perspective that is often foisted on Marx. By highlighting the anticolonial aspects of Marx’s work, Anderson reminds us that capitalist relations do not simply emerge—they are imposed. Marx does not forget that violence lies at the origins of capitalism and, indeed, continues to underpin it.

The greater focus on colonialism began to shift Marx’s views on anticolonial resistance and struggles for national liberation. Anderson engages with Marx’s notes on the persistence of communal lifeways and resistance to colonialism as a way of showing Marx’s trajectory regarding the revolutionary potential of non-Western societies.

Instead of either romanticizing precapitalist forms of living or viewing them as impediments to modern progress, Marx’s notes show a nuanced, dialectical understanding of communal forms and an evolution from his earlier thinking on the subject. In Marx’s notes on North American Indigenous societies, Anderson points to Marx’s use of quotations around the term “equal” in a passage in which Marx highlights the communal form hunting takes, from which everyone derives their “equal” share. For Anderson, this is an indication that Marx is “suggesting that social hierarchies may have emerged earlier than his anthropological sources are indicating,” even as he expresses admiration for these societies.

Without idealizing the non-hierarchical and democratic nature of these pre-capitalist societies, Marx began to see the revolutionary potential of anticolonial struggle. While The Communist Manifesto insists that a proletarian revolution will occur in the most developed countries first, Marx began to see countries on the periphery of Europe as agents of revolution, specifically Ireland and Russia.

In Ireland, Marx saw the struggle against capitalism and the struggle against English rule as one and the same, a fact that was recognized by Irish workers, making them “more revolutionary and more infuriated than in England,” though Marx maintained that, to be successful, an Irish revolution would need to spread to England. In Russia, the communal obshchina could serve as “the point of departure for a communist development” if combined with a proletarian revolution in Europe.

Anderson uses these examples not merely to show that Eurocentric characterizations of Marx are inaccurate, but also to highlight the consistent internationalist current in Marx’s work. To be successful, a communist revolution must be global, and this is truer than ever today. But it need not start in the most developed countries.

But while Revolutionary Roads convincingly shows that Marx can be read as a non-Eurocentric thinker critical of colonialism and supportive of anticolonial struggle, Anderson is less persuasive in showing that Marx meaningfully integrated gender into his work.

Marx at the Margins devotes a few lines to gender, mostly pointing to Marx’s notes on the matrilineal nature of some pre-capitalist societies. Revolutionary Roads, on the other hand, promises a deeper engagement with Marx’s views on gender and devotes an entire chapter to the topic. Critical of Engels’ “class/economic reductionist argument concerning both women’s oppression and how it is to be overcome,” Anderson argues that Marx held a different view. However, Marx’s notes on gender that Anderson draws from are largely just expanded sections pointing to the matrilinear tendencies of pre-capitalist societies.

In his notes on India, Marx is critical of anthropologists who portray pre-capitalist India as having a patriarchal system that was overcome through the modern expansion of women’s rights, arguing instead that patriarchy was imposed in India, undermining traditional property relations that allowed some property to be held separately by women. But while this is a valuable insight, it is less clear that these notes represent a fundamental incorporation of gender into the entirety of Marx’s thought, one that would invite a re-reading of a text like Capital in the same way that Anderson’s work on Marx’s evolving views on colonialism suggests.

Anderson points to some instances in which Marx acknowledges the importance of women in revolutionary movements, including the “self-sacrificing heroism” of women during the Paris Commune and “the heroism of the women Communards” in resistance to the French colonization of Algeria, but these do not fundamentally transform our readings of Marx or indicate a theoretical shift in how he viewed the relationship between gender and capital.

This does not, of course, mean that such a relationship does not exist. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici traces the history of capitalist accumulation to processes of colonization and the violent oppression of women. Rather than viewing these as precapitalist forms, Federici shows that they were integral to the spread of capitalist relations and continue to be so to this day.

Though she ascribes to the view that Marx was a modernist thinker who “assumed that the violence that had presided over the earliest phases of capitalist expansion would recede with the maturing of capitalist relations,” her work on the relationship between capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy pairs well with Anderson’s work on Marx’s evolving views of capitalist development and colonialism. Like the late Marx, Federici highlights the importance of communal traditions in resisting the spread of capitalism and, indeed, the way in which they continue to do so. And, like Anderson’s interpretation of Marx (and against her own), Federici sees the spread of capitalist modernity as an intensification, not an overcoming, of violent forms of patriarchal oppression. However, Anderson does not develop these connections, which would allow for the meaningful integration of an analysis of gender into Marx’s work.

While less strong on gender, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads provides a close and engaging reading of Marx’s notebooks and later works. It does important work for those of us who resist the characterization of Marxism as a Eurocentric tradition guilty of erasing the experiences of colonized and oppressed people.

Anderson not only reveals important elements of Marx’s work that have too often been ignored, he also encourages us to integrate themes of colonialism and uneven development into readings of Marx’s earlier texts, allowing for a dialectical and anticolonial thinker to emerge. The book makes a timely contribution to a stream of Marxism that sees capitalist exploitation as inseparable from its colonialist, imperialist, patriarchal, and racist elements. Perhaps most importantly, it reminds us to view specific struggles not as isolated and distinct but, like Marx did, as movements for universal freedom.