About this event

Dr. Kevin Anderson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California Santa Barbara

Come join us for an enlightening discussion led by Dr. Kevin Anderson on his forthcoming book from Verso Press, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism. In his last years, Karl Marx (1818-83) sketches three types of revolutionary change, each of them different from the united working class uprising that forms the conclusion of the first volume of Capital. Important as that rigorously dialectical, though abstract model is, it does not deal with race, colonialism, gender, the state, or other concrete factors discussed in some of his other writings, especially his late – largely unpublished – writings.

(1) In 1869-70, Marx speculated that a British workers uprising might be sparked by one in Ireland led by the peasant-based Fenian nationalist movement. Inside Britain, English chauvinism and prejudice towards the Irish blunted working class solidarity and retarded formation of class consciousness. (These Marx writings build upon those of the 1860s on race, class, and revolution during the US Civil War.)

(2) During the 1870s, Marx clarifies and deepens his concept of communism in the German and French editions of Capital (1867-75), in the Civil War in France (1871), and especially in the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), where he sketches non-statist forms of free and associated labor that go far beyond the more centralist and statist notions put forward in the Communist Manifesto.

(3) In his 1877-82 writings on Russia, Marx suggests that resistance in its communal villages against capitalist encroachments could lead to a form of modern communism, if this resistance could link up with the Western European labor movement. On Algeria, India, and Latin America, his notes on communal village structures and anti-colonial resistance imply something similar, and also take up gender in a serious way.

Dr. Anderson is the author, co-author, or co-editor of sixteen books, many of them on the history of Marxist thought. His full bio is at https://kevin-anderson.com/.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Toronto Metropolitan University.

This in-person event will take place at Jorgenson Hall President’s Boardroom. Light refreshments will be provided. See you there!