With a New Preface 344 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2010, 2016 In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Through highly informed readings of work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. For this expanded edition, Anderson has written a new preface that discusses the additional 1879–82 notebook material, as well as the influence of the Russian-American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya on his thinking.
“[Concerning] Edward Said’s infamous bracketing of Marx as merely a left-wing manifestation of nineteenth-century Orientalistm…..: The claims that Marxism is Eurocentric, Orientalist, deterministic, and teleological have not gone unanswered…. Marx at the Margins may not be the first to take on this task, but will doubtless be considered a touchstone of discussions on this subject, if not the definitive defense of Marxism for years to come.”
— Nagesh Rao, International Socialist Review
In his recent path-breaking work, Kevin Anderson demonstrates how Marx’s inquiries into the race/class dialectic, both in the US civil war and in Ireland’s struggle against British colonialism, led him to change his earlier hypothesis of society’s unilinear development and the progressive aspect of British colonialism. …Especially in his studies of Russia and non-western formations (from 1857 to his 1879–1882 notes on indigenous peoples), Marx formulated a multilinear and non-reductionist theory of social change that did not focus exclusively on economic relations of production. Anderson concludes that Marx’s mature social theory “revolved around a concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference but also on occasion made those particulars – race, ethnicity, or nationality – determinants for the totality.”
– E. San Juan, Jr., author of Beyond Postcolonial Theory
Marx at the Margins is a book of tremendous scope, filled with important scholarly contributions, including Anderson’s highly original reading of Marx’s theory of history. In this truly ground-breaking work, Kevin Anderson analyzes Marx’s journalism and various unpublished writings on European colonialism and the developing countries for the first time, breaking the long-held stereotype that Marx was an incorrigible class and economic reductionist. Well-written in clear and accessible prose, Marx at the Margins proves that Anderson has mastered his material and that Marx himself is the sophisticated and original theorist of history some might not have ever expected him to be.”
– Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles and author of Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity
Anderson makes the case that Marx’s theory of revolution began over time to concentrate more on the intersectionality of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and class. This contribution enhances the role that a Marxist analysis of class can play in contemporary discussions of critical race theory, theories of interculturality, and multicultural education.
– Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo, authors of Pedagogy and praxis in the age of empire.
“Anderson may just have provided the burgeoning Marx industry with another major focus for its research and debates. Marx at the Margins reveals a dimension of Marx that is very little known and even less understood. Anderson makes an overwhelming case for the importance of Marx’s views on non-Western societies, ethnicity, nationalism, and race to our interpretations of his thinking over a wide range of topics. This is an incredibly innovative, interesting, and terribly important book-one that will greatly benefit any of its readers.”
-Bertell Ollman, New York University, author of Alienation
Introduction
Acknowledgments Abbreviations Chapter 1: Colonial Encounters in the 1850s: The European Impact on India, Indonesia, and China
Chapter 2: Russia and Poland: The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution
Chapter 3: Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution
Chapter 4: Ireland: Nationalism, Class, and the Labor Movement
Chapter 5: From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes
Chapter 6: Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies
Conclusion Appendix: The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), from the 1920s to Today
References Index
