Kevin B. Anderson describes The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads as a “sequel” to his earlier book, Marx at the Margins, except that where the latter discusses Marx’s writings on non-Western societies before 1867, the former explores Marx’s post-1868 research program, a period that many scholars, such as Gareth Stedman-Jones, wrongly dismiss.[1] Against such dismissals, Anderson persuasively demonstrates that Marx’s final years were his most effervescent, and that Marx not only revised his understandings of communism, revolution, and the social, but also his ideas about race and gender. To reconstruct this late signal change, Anderson exhumes Marx’s terminal notebooks––some of which have been published only in 2024!––such as Marx’s notes on Roman slave uprisings and South Asian property forms: antipodes Marx examines in the same notebook (B156/140), “suggesting a connection” between these “two agrarian societies,” as well as an analysis of capitalism’s global expansion and aleatory origin.

Anderson’s book makes necessary corrections to previous studies on the “late-Marx,” such as: Teodor Shanin’s Late Marx and the Russian Road (the text which coined the literal term “late-Marx”); articles and books by Haruki Wada, Tomonaga Tairako, and, most importantly, Kohei Saito; as well as Raya Dunayevskaya’s neglected and tantalizing chapters.[2] Anderson’s contribution to this storied array is broken down into six chapters with a lengthy introduction and organized thematically; it excludes Marx’s voluminous notes on world history, math, and ecology––the latter of which has been analyzed already by Saito.[3] Anderson’s basic takeaway is that the late/post-Capital Marx reconstructed his theory of revolution thanks to new insights gleaned from researching non-Western societies, and that this late turn clarifies previously published writings from this misunderstood period, such as the 1882 Preface to the Manifesto, Zasulich correspondence, as well as Marx’s critiques of the Gotha Program and Paris Commune.

Throughout, Anderson consistently invokes the concept of the “dialectic,” especially when contrasting Marx’s approach to non-Western societies with Lewis H. Morgan, John Budd Phear, Maksim Kovalevsky, and even Engels: all of whom epitomize a unilineal and teleological commitment to European civilization. In contrast to these vulgar empiricists, Anderson explains that Marx’s ethnographic turn was moored to “his intellectual mentor, Hegel,” whose dialectical method Marx imbibed. For example, unlike Morgan and Kovalevsky, who blame the advent of systematic agriculture for social inequality, Marx observes “incipient” class relations in archaic and ancient social forms. Such forms are preserved through their destruction, “a social fact that contributes to the possibility of revolt,” as the Sepoy Uprising exemplified. Marx concludes that colonialism not only prepares capitalism, but also loads the chamber for anti-colonial revolt––this dual character is why Anderson refers to Marx’s ethnography as “dialectical.”

With Marx’s late notebooks, Anderson casts new light on old sources, such as the 1870 “Confidential Communication,” which, as Anderson wields, evidences “a complex dialectic of revolution [that] is truly international.” In the subsequent discussion, Anderson explains why Marx reversed his position on the Irish national question, identifying Ireland as the “lever” of international communist revolution. By comparing Marx’s notes on non-Western societies in light of this critical reversal vis-à-vis the national question, Anderson advances beyond previous assessments of Marx on nationalism, such as Erica Benner’s Really Existing Nationalisms,[4] a canonical text that overlooks Marx’s late notebooks and, thus, erases Marx’s dialectical reversal and, crucially, why this matters for colonized peoples even today. The late-Marx provincializes the communist revolution, no longer locating its epicenter in Western Europe or England, but on the peripheries, margins, and interstices of Ireland and Russia: rumps that are underdeveloped industrially yet overexploited collaterally.

Still, this dialectical recalibration precipitates a vital question Anderson does not address. Anderson persuasively demonstrates how the late-Marx reversed his 1848 thesis, predicting that the communist revolution would begin outside the West but then converge at the industrial core. Although Marx provincializes the communist revolution, what does it mean that he still identifies the industrial West as its gravitational center? Would Marx have reached different conclusions if he had read Indigenous or non-Western self-interpreters rather than scientific outsiders?

Building upon previous analyses of Marx on intersectionality, such as Ashley J. Bohrer’s eponymous text,[5] Anderson evidences how Marx proto-theorized intersectionality by recognizing racism as inhibiting class solidarity and the imbrication of patriarchy with private property.

In his second chapter, “Temporalities of Gender, Kinship, and Women’s Empowerment,” Anderson rehabilitates Marx’s views on gender, as informed by his late notebooks, and then usefully separates those views from Engels, who claimed (wrongly––as it turns out) to have felicitously shared those views in his Origin of the Family. Indeed, this opening chapter stakes one of Anderson’s most important claims, a claim not only about Engel’s editorializations, but the dominant ‘state-socialist’ reading of Marx criticized by ‘independent Marxists,’ such as Lukács, Sartre, and most importantly for this conversation, Beauvoir. Anderson confirms the suspicions of Engels’ critics, such as Raya Dunayevskaya and Michael Heinrich, who identify a scientistic wrong turn “beginning with Engels himself.” Nevertheless, Anderson does not dismiss Engels wholesale; instead, he meticulously reconstructs Engels’ thesis about the ‘world historic defeat of the female sex,’ contrasts it against Marx’s notes on matrilineal First Nations, and then shows how scientific ethnography informed the latter’s nascent intersectionality.

Marx underscores how capital not only exports private property but also patriarchy. For example, in 1879, Marx observes how France took a much more hostile approach to settler colonialism in Algeria in the wake of the Paris Commune and, most importantly, how attacking Indigenous-Algerian clans empowered a new patriarchal elite of landowners: a Faustian misalliance of property and patriarchy.

In the lengthy penultimate chapter––“Rome, India, and Russia: Three Agrarian Societies in Flux”––Anderson explores Marx’s departure from the “teleological framework” of the 1848 Manifesto and his arrival at an intersectional analysis of race and class informed by comparing plebeian revolts in ancient Rome and the US Civil War. According to Anderson, “Marx appears to view the slave-plebian relationship from a different angle, one that targets something akin to racism.” Fascinatingly, Marx explains the lack of revolution in ancient Rome in terms of a social cause––a point he reiterates concerning British working-class antagonism towards their Irish comrades as well as antipathy between ‘poor whites’ and enslaved persons in the US.

Unlike Engels and subsequent ‘orthodox Marxists,’ “Marx recognizes gender and family relations as structures operating with a degree of independence and autonomy from the economic ‘base.’” This is not a new question for Marx. What is new is how he reapproaches it. Unlike his 1859 “Preface,” where he provides a determining primacy to the economic base, the late-Marx recognizes modes of social difference, especially race and gender. Marx’s question is not whether the economic base determines the social superstructure but how; after 1868, Marx re-addresses this question from a perspective that is both international and intersectional.

Chapter three, “Multilinear Concepts of Historical and Social Development,” reinforces Anderson’s thesis in Marx at the Margins, proving that Marx’s multilinearity deepens with his age and study of ethnography. In his book’s most exciting sequence of pages, Anderson responds directly to those who attribute Marx with a deterministic and unilinear understanding of history, typified by David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.[6] Anderson charges Graeber and Wengrow with “hyper-subjectivism,” claiming, “they view the issue of power, of the political, as paramount, almost foundational.”[7] While I agree with the thrust of Anderson’s rebuttal, I do not believe he fully appreciates Graeber and Wengrow’s critique, thus leaving Marx open to their attack and further misunderstanding.

Actually, Graeber and Wengrow arrive at a position remarkably similar to the late-Marx. In “The Problem with ‘Modes of Production,’” Graeber and Wengrow write, pace Anderson: “The fact that these arrangements became subjects of political contestations does not mean they were political in origin […]. Hierarchy and equality tend to emerge together.”[8] They propose that private property is holding us back; furthermore, that private property can be reduced neither to a historical stage, mode of production, nor origin story, since history is multilinear, not stadial. For this reason, Graeber and Wengrow attack thinkers, like Marx, who depend on origin stories and transcendental mechanisms to explain what went wrong and what to do about it.

Graeber and Wengrow’s problem isn’t that they view power as foundational (they don’t); it’s that they contradict themselves in ways the late-Marx takes pains to avoid. Throughout The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow dismiss “origin stories” for being ahistorical; yet they themselves posit an ahistorical and transcendental engine for social development––namely: schismogenesis. Graeber and Wengrow rely on a transcendental mechanism even though they claim to do the opposite.

Anderson attempts to exonerate Marx with a different and, I think, harder approach. He acknowledges that Marx subscribed to a teleological schema comprised of four “progressive Epochen” in his 1859 “Preface,” but then rehearses his claim from Marx at the Margins that,[9] “By the time of Capital, the language about progressive Epochen disappears.”

But I’m not convinced. In fact, the 1872-75 French edition of Capital––the edition Anderson esteems––endorses European civilization rather baldly. As Amy Allen and Anderson himself observe,[10] Marx credits European progress in his prophetic chapter on the “Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation.” In this French edition, Marx cites the political economist Constantin Pecqueur when he claims that allowing feudalism to persist is “to decree universal mediocrity.”[11] However, in the earlier, second German edition, namely, the 1872 edition upon which Paul North and Paul Reitter’s recent English translation is based, Marx skips the questionable paraphrase, writing: “In the realms of both production and society, this mode of industry is compatible only with narrow, spontaneously arising limits [Pecqueur is omitted here – WW]. Once it reaches a certain level, it brings into being the material means of its own destruction.”[12] Marx completed the second German edition in 1872 after the Paris Commune but before finishing Le Capital. In 1875, he inserted the additional paraphrase, invoking Pecqueur and the language of “progressive Epochen,” now displaced by universal declarations of pre-capitalist mediocrity. The Marx of Le Capital, but not Das Kapital, seems to champion both multilinearity and European civilization. Perhaps the question is not whether Marx was unilineal or multilinear but, instead, as I have said elsewhere, whether we should even think of his late turn as “historical” in the first place.[13]

Despite this qualm, Anderson’s book is a lucid and necessary resource for scholars, teachers, and organizers inspired by Marx. It helpfully clears the deadwood, describing and settling exasperating and inflammatory debates about Marx’s views on non-Western society, world history, and private property. Most importantly, though, Anderson demonstrates that Marx was a tenacious reviser who never gave up on rethinking his views and imaginatively remapped different roads to communism, even as his days were numbered. The revolution is provincial yet eternal.

References

[1] Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, First Harvard University Press edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).

[2] Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 2. ed (Urbana: University Press of Illinois, 1991).

[3] Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933544.

[4] Erica Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels, Paperback edition, Radical Thinkers (London, UK ; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018).

[5] Ashley J. Bohrer, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism, Philosophy (Bielefeld: transcript, 2019), https://doi.org/10.14361/978-3-8394-4160-2.

[6] David Graeber and D. Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Toronto: Signal, 2021).

[7] Kevin Anderson, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (London ; New York: Verso, 2025), 118.

[8] Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, 208. Emphasis mine.

[9] Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, 2nd edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 190.

[10] A point I share with Amy Allen in, Amy Allen, “Universality, Necessity, and Progress: Marx and the Problem of History,” Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis 3, no. 3 (n.d.).

[11] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1990), 928. The French reads, “L’éterniser, ce serait, comme le dit pertinemment Pecqueur, ‘décréter la médiocrité en tout.’”

[12] Karl Marx et al., Capital: Critique of Political Economy (Princeton (N.J.): Princeton University press, 2024), 690.

[13] Wayne Wapeemukwa, “Primitive Speculation: Marx on Precapitalism, Social Relations to Land, and Indigenous Dispossession,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 38, no. 3 (July 22, 2024): 359–70, https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.38.3.0359.