The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism

by Kevin B. Anderson

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

In his late writings, Marx went beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts. Kevin Anderson carries out a systematic analysis of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and related texts on Russia, India, Ireland, Algeria, Latin America, and ancient Rome. These texts, some of them only now being published, provide evidence for a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. As Anderson shows, the late Marx elaborated a truly global, multilinear theory of modern society and its revolutionary possibilities.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Theory, Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, Ecology

288 pages, Paperback

Published March 18, 2025

About the author

Kevin B. Anderson is 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 Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995), Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (with Janet Afary, 2005), and Marx at the Margins (2010/2016). Among his edited volumes are the Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with Peter Hudis, 2004) and the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell, 2012). He writes regularly for New Politics, The International Marxist-Humanist, and Jacobin on Marxism and on international politics and radical movements in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley]

Always a bit unsure about this sort of thing, for two reasons: one is the fragmentary nature of the subject, the big man's notes and very occasionally very very brief commentaries on the things he was reading; Anderson chides Engels' actual book about the same subject here but who's to say if Marx had actually written an actual book on pre-capitalist social formations, colonialism, communal societies and the oppression of women it wouldn't have been equally questionable? We'll never know, because he left us only these notes while he spent his actual time writing a book on Herr Vogt being a dick. The second worry is a slightly different one - to prove that Marx believed in the ability of communal rural societies to transition into socialism without going through capitalism (and on this evidence, he really did) is one thing, but is it actually historically true and accurate (ie, how many people today working on, say, the Russian village commune in the 19th century, might agree; and can the actual experience of countries trying to do this, like, say, China, 1949-1976, tell us anything useful?)? All this aside, a good book, and the evidence of Marx's thought maturing and developing and radicalising on the subject of colonialism and 'progress' is welcome and timely. It's just a shame he himself never did anything much with it, so we have to have slightly Talmudic projects of reconstruction instead.

[Andrew]

Placing this along with some of Kohei Saito’s work, where it’s sold as perhaps an expansion of Marxism as an analytical framework based on previously unknown/unpublished/ignored fragments or notes from Karl, and instead turns out to be very much a contribution to a functionally biographical Marxology. As building blocks, finding out where Marx was increasingly interested in topics he supposedly “ignored,” like gender, race, indigineity, are important, and Anderson is doing important work in providing those building blocks, but this is not a work that does any particular analysis with what that might mean to build a more expansive Marxism, either politically or analytically (the final chapter does at least gesture toward some things, to be fair).

Also a feeling I had with Saito, at some point I feel some discomfort about Marxology. What would Marx have thought about a whole field of basically inside baseball dedicated to parsing out what his passing remarks in notebooks were referring to? Marxism/Marx’s thought feels more necessary than ever, but with the vital caveat that it should be in the service of new analysis and new action.

[Charles H]

The "sequel" to Marx at the Margins is a bit of a slower burn, but full of exciting bits on Marx's later thoughts and research and ideas that take surprising turns and maybe move, or mark, transformations in his theories re colonialism, gender, and revolution. "Marx seems to," writes Anderson repeatedly throughout, which is annoying and refreshing--annoying because we don't know and refreshing because Anderson isn't saying he does. He instead reads, interprets, and himself theorizes from what he does know in a thoughtful, humble, surprisingly compelling book largely based on notebooks of annotations Marx made of other people's work.

5/5 recommend if you're down for reading a reading of Marx's readings in research notebooks engaging studies of the margins, on the margins, well beyond the margins.

[Emmy]

This was an Important Book, giving a much clearer insight into the development of Marx's thoughts after the publication of Capital volume I. Rather than spinning his wheels for the remainder of his life, as many once assumed, Anderson instead shows that Marx was feverishly working towards a solution to the intractable problems for his thought opened up in Capital.

Anderson focuses his writing on Marx's anthropological notebooks, illustrating some really crucial changes between the Marx who wrote dismissively of precolonial societies and the late Marx. The key change is in Marx's theory of revolution. Where the mature Marx argued in Capital that proletarian revolution would spread from the developed core to the underdeveloped periphery, the late Marx draws on practical experience of Irish oppression and decolonisl resistance to reconsider. The late Marx argues that revolution will develop in the periphery of the world system, in the underdeveloped colonies and semi-colonies, and reverberate into the core. The experiences of Russia and China vindicate Marx's argument here.

The developments in Marx's thinking have profound implications for Marxists thinking and organising (as we obviously all are, right?) today. Primarily, if Anderson is correct, both Indigenous modes of life and actually-existing anti-imperialist struggles must play a larger role in our politics than they presently do. Anderson has set us up for a renewed Marxist position within Indigenous Studies as a field, and challenges us as Marxists to deepen our engagement with and understanding of non-Western societies. Like Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene (alongside which this book must be read), The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads is the opening of something rather than a conclusion.

[Rhys]

An interesting discussion on communal formations and their influence on more modern social forms - "elements of revolutionary energy and renewal of society on a totally new basis."

"As the Commune practiced it, a modern social republic of the working class needed to abolish the standing army, the police, and other organs of state repression, substituting a direct proletarian democracy based upon an armed citizenry. Thus, Marx advocates not the destruction of all state functions, which could result in a reactionary outcome like warlordism, but its positive abolition and replacement by a social republic dominated by a revolutionary working class. Marx extolls “the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity [of] the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence” (MECW 22: 332) and writes further that the Commune “breaks with the modern state power” (MECW 22: 333). This formed the basis for the takeover of some factories by workers committees, a precursor of what would emerge later in the Russian revolution as soviet power" (p.251).

[Michael]

We read the first half for theory reading group and decided it wasn’t worth continuing.

[Jack Fredericks]

Anderson makes the case for a dynamism in Marx’s thought that has been obscured by a more linear logic promoted by some of the cruder Marxists to come in the 20th century. Good stuff. I buy the argument. Five stars.

[Gabriel]

Fantastic book that breaks with stupid ideas from "pseudo-radical theories" (decolonial, identity or post-structuralist thinking) by looking at how:
1) Marx was never a eurocentric
2) Marx was never against anticolonial resistance
3) Marx was never antifeminist
3) Marx defended multilinear trayectories towards communism and was open to contingencies to overcome colonialism, capitalism and all forms of social obstacles of human flourishing and realisation in different societies whilst also sparking a social revolution in europe and loci where the working class was bigger and more developed.

It's incredible how close the book resembles what Alvaro García Linera already said in 2018 about Marx's texts on other forms of indigenous communal forms and the potentialities these offered to militants in the global south and the periphery to theorise and act with and beyond these social forms to overcome domination and exploitation that sorrounded them alongside other forms of resistance and social emancipatory movements.

One cannot stress how important this book is. It is a must for every radical thinker. The best part is that there is more to come this year with new texts being edited, some re-edited and republished by the late Marx.

[ernst]

Interessant. Die Bedeutung, die man dem Buch zurechnet, wird sehr davon abhängen, wie dogmatisch der eigene Marxismus-Begriff ist. Wenn Marxismus im wesentlichen mit dem Wort Marxens identifiziert wird, dann ist das hier sicherlich ein Knaller-Text. Wenn dem nicht so ist und man von einem marxistischen Buch zudem mehr als Textexegese erwartet, ist es ein interessantes Buch, bei dem sich zeigt, dass der alte Marx in seinen letzten Jahren einige Gedanken entwickelt hat, wie sie später Luxemburg und andere auch entwickelten. Nur fehlte denen der Name Karl Marx, so dass es dann doch im größtenteils dogmatischen Milieu des Marxismus (ist dabei auch egal, ob akademisch oder nicht) eines solchen Buches bedürfen wird, damit diesen Themen mehr Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt wird.

[ReadingMeister]

Kevin B. Anderson delivers a highly insightful and beautifully written book analyzing the notes and writings of Marx's last period on subjects that are more studied today (colonialism, Indigenous communities, women). There is not much I can write that wouldn't be repeating the book itself, but Anderson elaborately shows that Marx was more nuanced (in this period at least) in these subjects than what more people would think. Areas of interest include the demonstration that Engels was the lesser thinker of the two, the commonalities of clan societies from ancient Greeks to pre-columbian North American Indigenous communities, and the theories of revolution. I highly recommend it to anyone that wants a better understanding on Marx.

[Martin Leonard]

I would say this is a solid 3.5. Some quite remarkable analysis and sections within the book which takes as it's object Marx's 1869-1882 notebooks including the Ethnological Notebooks. It strays into Marxology territory at times and it's strong on the Western Marxist conceit of an almost apriori anti-Engelsian which can feel incredibly strained in the analysis. I think ultimately if this aspect was paired back (not to say completely eliminated where a case might be made in a slight difference in emphasis between the two, if your that way inclined) and some editing down to a slimmer work this would have made the book stronger.

[Matthew Streitz]

This is a great book that demonstrates the ways in which Marx was a dynamic and prescient thinker who was constantly challenges his own thought and the thoughts of those around him. Anyone interested in Marx, or anyone who thinks Marx had a singular, linear theory of historical development would find this book well worth the read.