The Late Marxs Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism

The author of the acclaimed Marx at the Margins analyzes the late Marx on Indigenous communism, gender, and anti-colonialism

In his late writings, Marx traveled beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts. In research notebooks, letters, and brief essays during the years 1869-82, he turns his attention to colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies, and gender.

These texts, some of them only now being published, evidence a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. Anderson’s book focuses on how the late Marx sees a wider revolution that included the European proletariat being touched off by revolts by oppressed ethno-racial groups, peasant communes, and Indigenous communist groups, in many of which women held great social power.

Anderson carries out a systematic analysis of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and related texts on India, Ireland, Algeria, and Latin America. This book will appeal to those concerned with the critique of Eurocentrism, racial domination, and gender subordination, but equally to those focusing on capital and class.

For as Anderson shows, the late Marx transcended these boundaries as he elaborated a truly global, multilinear theory of modern society and its revolutionary possibilities. In all these ways, the visionary writings of the late Marx speak to us today.

Kevin B. Anderson is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with courtesy appointments in Feminist Studies and Political Science. He is the author of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (with Janet Afary) and Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. He is also an editor of the forthcoming English edition of the late Marx’s notebooks on non-Western and precapitalist societies.