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

by Kevin B. Anderson

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.

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

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

[Charles H · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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).

[Jack Fredericks · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.