Looking Back at Marx Looking Forward

Michael Principe

The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads:
Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism
By Kevin B. Anderson
Verso 2025, 280 pages, $29.95 paperback.

THE LATE MARX’S Revolutionary Roads is, as Kevin Anderson tells us, a kind of sequel to his 2010 book Marx at the Margins. Both books focus, for the most part, on the “late Marx” and his increasing focus on race, gender, colonialism, and non-Western societies.

The book contributes to foregrounding a distinct “late Marx” as a readily available signifier, to be employed much like the familiar “early Marx.” Anderson argues that while Marx’s works of 1869-82 have historically received much less attention than earlier ones, this scholarship began to change in the 1980s.

Anderson reviews this rise in attention, beginning with the appearance of the last chapter of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation,and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1982), titled “The Last Writings of Marx Point a Trail to the 1980s,” followed the next year by Teodor Shanin’s collection, Late Marx and the Russian Road.

Helpfully cataloging much of this literature, Anderson concludes that a real marker of change is that general accounts of Marx’s life and work have started to include substantial discussions of Marx’s last period, citing Gareth Stedman Jones’s general biography and Ryuji Sasaki’s short introductory text which “devotes an unprecedented one-third of its space to the late Marx.” (13)

While some writings from this period like “The Civil Wars in France” and “Critique of the Gotha Program” are very well-known, much of Marx’s late work is contained in voluminous less well known or unpublished notebooks, showing the course of Marx’s studies at the time.

These are chiefly Anderson’s concern, and he shows how this material contextualizes the better-known works. (Also among the last works are Marx’s mathematical notebooks which Anderson sets aside as irrelevant to his project.)

Anderson suggests that with so many of Marx’s writings never having been prepared for publication, his early editors from Engels onward have seen their meaning and import through their own lenses. Engels mostly ignored them, focusing almost entirely on what he could piece together of what he perceived as the unpublished parts of Capital. The emphasis here is on his “perception.”

In contrast, Anderson notes that Dunayevskaya claims, “It is clear that Russia and America were to play the role in Vols. II and III that England played in Volume I.” (7) Engels, of course, did attend to Marx’s study of anthropologist Henry Louis Morgan, which Engels employs in his own The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

While the Marxists of the Second International did little to publish the unpublished Marx, focusing on popularizing Marxist ideas, Russian revolutionaries founded the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute charged with editing and publishing Marx’s work. However, chief editor David Riazanov (later a victim of Stalin) viewed many of the notebooks analyzed by Anderson as “inexcusable pedantry” and they were never scheduled for publication. (5)

Anderson suggests that initial dismissal of most of these late writings by early interpreters and editors “appear more like expressions of the Eurocentrism of these authors than persuasive arguments about limitations in Marx’s own research…” (7)

Recovering the Late Marx

A scholar in the “Marxist-Humanist” tradition, Anderson regularly cites Dunayevskaya, one of the founders, along with C.L.R. James and Grace Lee Boggs of the Johnson-Forrest Tendency (she was Freddie Forrest), as well as the founder of News and Letters Committees. Anderson refers to Dunayevskaya as his “mentor” and he served as her estate’s literary agent.

The book can be seen as roughly in the tradition of those groups, omitting any distinct analysis of the status of the Soviet Union, espousing a Marxism embodying dialectics, feminism, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism. Hence, Anderson argues for the contemporary relevance of the late Marx.

Large parts of Marx’s notebooks consist of passages copied from the books he was studying, a habit of his since some of his earliest writings. Considering this work thematically, rather than chronologically, Anderson closely examines these texts, noting places where Marx alters the language, adds punctuation, or offers brief commentary.

The largest part of the book, about 200 of its 270 pages consists of this very focused, densely packed scholarly work, requiring substantial quotations from Marx’s notebooks, which in turn are often quotations from other authors. In this way, Anderson reveals patterns in Marx’s thinking, which he shows to be consistent with later published texts.

Anderson begins with consideration of Marx’s study of communal social relations in pre-literate and pre-capitalist societies, ultimately asserting that Marx adopts a new position in the late work. He initially notes that Marx has received criticism from Edward Said and others for remarks like this regarding India from the New York Tribune June 25, 1853:

“We must not forget that these idyllic village communities inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.” (19)

In contrast, in the late writings, Anderson argues that Marx, instead of dismissing these early communal formations, looks to their positive aspects and considers the underlying persistence of these forms into his own time. This, Anderson will argue, is important to Marx’s new, more optimistic assessment of their revolutionary possibilities.

Included are studies of Native Americans, Greco-Roman clan society, Indian communes, precolonial Algeria, ancient German and precolonial Irish communal social organization, as well as the Russian communal village.

For Anderson, this context also displays Marx’s increasing antipathy to the state, which is similarly exhibited in his better-known analysis of the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France.

For example, in Marx’s notes on Morgan’s study of the Iroquois and their introduction of a supreme and permanent war chief, instead of copying out Morgan’s text — “The introduction of this office as a permanent feature in the government was a great event in the history of human progress” — Marx alters it, pointing to disaster, rather than great progress, writing, “The introduction of this office as a permanent feature [is a] disastrous event in human history.” (28)

Anderson interprets Marx’s published works of the period as fully anti-statist, reading, for example, even the first stage of communism mentioned in the Critique of the Gotha Program, contra Lenin and others, as stateless. Ultimately, Anderson maintains that an anti-statist “revolutionary road” is enunciated in Marx’s last period.

Gender and Patriarchy

Next, Anderson considers issues of gender and women’s empowerment across the same range of cultures. He begins by considering weaknesses of Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. He argues that Engels engages with Marx’s notebooks in a way that mistakenly has Marx appropriate Morgan’s work, for the most part, uncritically.

For Engels, following Morgan, human society begins with a near idyllic communal and matriarchal society, which is disrupted with the onset of class division. Patriarchy then stems from this development. Hence, Engels famous remark regarding “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”

No such black and white thinking is found in Marx’s notebooks. In contrast, they show significant interest in complex and changing gender roles across different societies, including instances of gender equality, women’s loss of power, but also instance of women regaining it.

Anderson also shows that Marx had considerable interest in women’s roles in liberatory struggles. This includes the role of women in resistance to British colonialism in India as well as the special attention paid to the heroism of the women of the Paris Commune.

In addition, on Engels’ analysis, following Morgan, all societies travel distinct and uniform stages — hence, no avoiding industrial capitalism. For Engels, since class division is the cause of patriarchy, the way to end patriarchy is to win the class struggle; that is, with socialism, women’s oppression automatically comes to an end.

In contrast, Anderson approvingly cites Dunayevskaya on these issues. She suggests that Engels’s analysis has allowed Marxists, insofar as women are concerned “to conveniently put off freedom until the millennium.” (84)

She writes as well that:

“As against Marx’s multilinear view which kept Marx from attempting any blueprints for future generations, Engels’s unilinear view led him to mechanical positivism…Engels had confined Marx’s revolutionary dialectics and historical materialism to hardly more than Morgan’s ‘materialism’.” (85).

Anderson argues that Marx’s later work clearly theorizes social development as multi­linear. Regarding earlier accounts of modes of production, especially in The German Ideology, Anderson writes:

“In 1845-46, did Marx see these … stages — early stateless societies based upon tribe and family, Greco-Roman societies based upon slave labor, and feudalism based upon serfdom, and by implication, a fourth stage, bourgeois capitalism based upon wage labor — as universal, global stages? We cannot know.” (125)

While Anderson recognizes that Marx may have seen these stages as global at the time, and that many have interpreted him this way, the later work is unambiguous in rejecting this model. Marx’s later notebooks are filled with criticisms of those who label a wide range of pre-capitalist modes of production as feudal.

Anderson argues with substantial textual evidence that feudalism as a universal category “is alien to Marx’s perspective after 1858.” (134) He shows that Marx explicitly rejects the feudal categorization of Indigenous America, the Indian subcontinent, and Algeria, though he accepts it for Ireland:

“At the very least, this shows that Marx espouses a multilinear concept of historical change and development through successive modes of production, wherein the Marxist model of primitive, feudal, and bourgeois capitalist modes of production succeeding one another is restricted to Western Europe.” (138)

Examining Capital

More evidence for Marx’s multilinear approach is found in the often-disparaged French edition of Capital, the last version compiled by Marx himself. One example (Anderson provides others) is a significant change Marx made to the 1867 preface.

The standard English and German editions give us the following frequently cited remark: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, the less developed, the image of its own future.” This might suggest unilinear, deterministic development. However, Marx’s later French version reads as follows: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows to those that follow it up the industrial ladder, the image of its own future.” (142)

With this change, Anderson writes:

“…[Marx] has essentially bracketed out the vast parts of the world that in the 1870s were not yet beginning to industrialize. Thus, whatever ‘laws’ and tendencies Marx elaborates in Capital would seem to apply only to societies where industrial capitalism either dominated the economy or was in the process of doing so…” (142)

The importance of these changes for Marx is shown by his self-quotation of the French edition in his correspondence with Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries. Among the examples given by Anderson is Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich in 1881, who, in contrast to some Russian Marxists, sees revolutionary possibilities in the Russian commune, Marx writes:

“In analyzing the genesis of capitalist production, I say: ‘Underneath the appearance of the capitalist system is therefore the separation of the producer from the means of production… the basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the cultivators. So far, it has been carried out in a radical manner in England… But all the countries of Western Europe are going through the same development.’” (Capital, French edition, 315).

Anderson concludes then that “The ‘historical inevitability’ of this course is therefore explicitly restricted to the countries of Western Europe.” (149)

Marx adds that nothing in Capital counts for or against the viability of the Russian commune. This, along with the better known 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto where Marx writes that under the right circumstances, “…the present Russian communal landownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development.” (255), show Marx’s view that socialist transformation could emerge from the communal social relations.

Anderson also considers Marx’s attempt to understand colonialism and resistance in the context of capitalism and the possibilities for revolution. Anderson agrees with Gilbert Achcar that this represents in Achcar’s words, a “reversal of perspective” concerning “the idea of colonialism as a factor in economic progress.” (155)

Colonialism and Revolution

Anderson shows Marx’s interest in Latin America and the Indian subcontinent is focused on the way local resistance to colonizers helps preserve communal social relations, even up to his own time. Marx thereby indicates that these relations are not necessarily destroyed through the course of unilinear economic development.

Marx, Anderson suggests, employs a dialectical analysis, wherein the disruption of communal relations by, for example, the British in India and the subsequent resistance brings about “new types of thinking and organization that can form the basis of a new type of subjectivity.” (172)

Marx is aware that the colonizers also recognize the radical possibilities of existing communal social relations. Anderson writes that Marx notes that the French government’s position on Algerian indigenous communism is that it is dangerous “not only for the colony but also for metropolitan France.” He quotes from debates in the French National Assembly two years after the suppression of the Paris Commune, that maintaining communal property even at a distance “supports communistic tendencies in people’s minds.” (178, 179)

Through his work in the International, Marx was also directly involved in the anti-colonial struggle in Ireland. Anderson shows in letters to Engels and comrades in the United States that he regards the struggle in Ireland which is both nationalist and anti-(largely British) landlord to be central to revolutionary aims elsewhere.

As early as 1869, he writes to Engels:

“For a long time, I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy…. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.” (241)

Three New Revolutionary Roads

Anderson cites evidence from Marx of a complex dialectic of revolution. Marx sees revolutionary struggle breaking out first in France, though the lack of a large enough working class will be insufficient against the power of capital. From there, the struggles of Irish peasants against landlordism and colonialism will weaken the British ruling class who constitute most of the exploiting class in Ireland.

British workers could seize the opportunity to engage in their own struggle. Because of changed circumstance, and the agitation of the International, what amounts to racial division between British and Irish workers in England can be overcome.

Whatever the merits of his theorization, Marx clearly sees revolutionary struggle as potentially emanating from the periphery of the capitalist world.

Anderson concludes that in the late Marx, we find a multilinear view of historical development, with emphasis on three new “revolutionary roads”: 1) beginning from existing communal social and property relations, such as in Russia; 2) beginning from colonies, such as in Ireland; and 3) by way of a revolution against the joint regime of capital and the state.

Anderson successfully makes the case for the first two. This last is the least developed. While Marx clearly offers a more radical critique of the bourgeois state in his later work, it is less clear that Anderson succeeds in uncovering a fully anti-statist Marx. Furthermore, even if Anderson is correct, this seems less like a new revolutionary road and more a deepening of earlier revolutionary thinking.

Overall, Kevin Anderson with this work, continues to make important contributions to understanding the nuances of Marx’s evolving thought, helpfully undermining the cartoonish versions of Marx attacked by so many critics and sometimes promoted by his friends.

Just as important, Anderson shows Marx to practice the best sort of Marxism, one which is self-critical, engaged with changing material circumstances, and open to new possibilities for revolutionary change — a method as relevant today as in Marx’s own time.

Finally, If the reader is one to appreciate insights drawn from careful and often very subtle analyses of texts, Anderson’s book is a treasure trove guaranteed to provide many appreciative nods.

November-December 2025, ATC 239