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

Sociologist Anderson (Marx at the Margins) offers a striking reappraisal of Karl Marx, drawing on the voluminous unpublished writings the thinker produced in his final 15 years of life. Anderson aims to correct the “dominant interpretation” that Marx “produced nothing of value” in his old age. Instead, Anderson argues that 20th-century scholars willfully ignored Marx’s late work because it consisted of research on “the Global South,” Indigenous peoples, and gender. The societies Marx studied in this period ranged from precolonial North America, where “the Iroquois shared all but the most personal property” and engaged in collective decision-making that included “women’s voices,” to South America, India, and Algeria. Anderson argues that Marx’s “vision of Communism” was “expanded and deepened” by his investigations into non-Western “communal structures.” Comparing the earlier “crude versions of Marxism,” in which social progress is understood as “a rigid series of historical modes... into which various societies around the world can be slotted,” with Marx’s later insistence that a coherent “philosophy of history [of] the whole world” cannot be based solely on “Western Europe,” Anderson makes a strong case that, late in life, Marx was developing a global “theory of... resistance” that synthesized organized labor with “older communal formations” and the perspectives of women and oppressed minorities. A startlingly contemporary Marx emerges from this erudite reassessment. (Mar.)