Portside

The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism
Kevin B Anderson
Verso
ISBN: 9781804296875

Karl Marx’s very last socio-political investigations are the central subject of Kevin B. Anderson’s new book exploring the issues Marx was contemplating during the last working period of his life. In the years just before his death in 1883, Marx continued to use the vast resources of the British Museum to study in depth the work of an international grouping of selected scholars who were publishing on themes of the utmost apparent urgency to him. Between 1879 and 1882, Marx undertook a wide-reaching inspection of the latest research and writing on the history and anthropology of communal clan-based social formations around the globe, focusing on the changing nature of land ownership and gender and family relations within these societies. Anderson wants to discern what insights Marx might have drawn from the research publications he was consulting regarding possibilities for a transition to a classless society and in terms of new understandings of possible forms of resistance, rebellion, socialist revolution and social transformation.

Anderson acquits himself well given the formidable task of making sense of Marx’s notes and excerpts from a multiplicity of seemingly disparate sources and authors. The identification of Marx’s central and intertwined research concerns requires an experienced critical sense like Anderson’s, deeply steeped in the trajectory of Marx’s and Marxist thought. Anderson thus has been able to extrapolate several discoveries from the detailed journals Marx kept during his last productive years. These journals in booklet form are made up of lengthy hand-copied excerpts from the reference materials he was studying with brief appended commentaries of his own. These booklets are preserved in the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. Because of Marx’s idiosyncratic penmanship, these are largely illegible except to the trained eye. It has taken over a decade for them to be worked out by experts in Marx’s writing habits at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Anderson has been partnering with the team of editors who have in 2024 published these materials as MEGA² IV-27. The now readable yet fragmentary transcripts are available (in German) from the International Marx-Engels Foundation and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences; not in print, but accessible online. Anderson is working with a team of translators and editors to publish these materials in English as a volume for scholars.

Anderson’s extensive earlier publications and scholarly familiarity with the works Marx, Engels, Lenin and Raya Dunayevskaya equip him to furnish also a fulsome discussion of classic and supplemental sources as context for understanding, that is, Capital, The Critique of the Gotha Program, writings on Ireland, 1869-70, 1844 Manuscripts, German Ideology, etc.). Anderson drew upon the new notebook materials ahead of their publication due to his close working association with the Berlin editors. In this volume, he supplements these sources with English translations of notebook excerpts that have been included in earlier studies of the late Marx by Lawrence Krader and Hans-Peter Harstick. Anderson’s overarching analysis is organized by means of six skillfully structured chapters: 1) Marx’s study of the history and anthropology of indigenous communal social formations in the Americas and in Rome; 2) Marx’s attention to altered gender relations as these relate to changing property and land ownership schemes; 3) Marx’s consideration of historical reasons for multiple pathways to a socialist political future; 4) Marx’s abhorrence of colonialism’s destruction of communal social formations by French and British imperialists and his praise for the indigenous resistance against external oppression; 5) Marx’s condemnation of slavery in ancient Rome and his criticism of the reactionary beliefs in racial or caste superiority held by patrician and plebian enslavers as well as American ‘poor whites’; 6) Marx’s expressions of an essentially humanist need to overcome racial and ethnic prejudice, recognize nations, ethnic sectors of society, and move toward the abolition of the state. Anderson’s book is thus a guide to the reading of MEGA² IV-27 as having relevance to our political challenges today.

On the first point above, Anderson probes Marx’s lengthy transcriptions from two primary sources in then-current anthropology that documented changes to communal indigenous relationships with regard to shifting patterns of land ownership. The first of these is Henry Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society. Morgan’s study looked at a) classless clan societies in the Americas (the Iroquois, Dakota, Aztecs, Incas) and b) pre-class clan societies in Greece and Rome. The second is Maksim Kovalevsky’s book on communal land ownership in the Americas, India and Algeria. In both Morgan and Kovalevsky, the study of Iroquois customs and relationships becomes key to understanding other early clan-based societies. ‘Morgan and Marx find numerous affinities between these early European societies and Native American ones, especially the Iroquois, in this sense reading or re-reading very early Greco-Roman institutions through the lens of Iroquois ones’ (32). Marx viewed Morgan’s work in this regard as a major innovation. Marx was attuned to the transition from clan to class structures and the changes from egalitarian norms to political economic hierarchies and gender changes. Kovalevsky’s work stressed the persistence of highly inclusive communal social formations in India as well as the changes in land ownership over time as these communal forms came under the rule of the Brahmins and the state. Due to Kovalevsky’s work ‘Marx saw the Russian commune’s future prospects and its relation to a wider European revolution that he also was conceptualizing right up to the end of his life’ (70-71).

For the second point, Engels had also consulted these late journals when studying the work of Morgan for his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. This ‘forms an important milestone in Marxist thought, as it places women’s oppression at the center of the whole structure of class society’ (76). Engels’ treatment of Marx’s notes on Morgan is, however, weak in Anderson’s estimation, with Engels having adopted Rousseau’s idealization of indigenous communism and having constructed a specious version of Marx’s materialism. Anderson focuses on a larger problem as well: Engels’ assertion of ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex’ (78). Anderson sees this as undercutting an independent women’s movement struggling against sexism in a capitalist society (79). Anderson stresses that Raya Dunayevskaya years ago ‘put forth the first feminist critique of Origin that contrasted this work to Marx’s own findings and methodology’ (83). Anderson supplies his own lengthy interpretation of Morgan on family and gender relations in the indigenous communal formations of both Native American and in Greco-Roman societies. This is augmented with an interpretation of Marx’s late period notes and excerpts from Ludwig Lange’s 1856 Ancient Rome. Anderson develops a richly detailed analysis of these materials with the assistance of the contemporary feminist perspectives of Adrienne Rich and Heather Brown.

For the third point, Anderson discusses the trajectory of change in Marx’s understanding of developmental stages in the emergence of different modes of the family as well as stages in modes of production. He highlights that in 1859 Marx wrote: ‘In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as progressive epochs [progressive Epochen] in the economic development of society’ (126). Anderson finds much evidence that Marx’s perspective changed in his last years from a unilinear conception to a multilinear account of social development. Anderson emphasizes that it is ‘hard to see the transition from the ancient to the feudal mode as progressive in technological or other substantive ways’ (128). Further, ‘Marx’s notes on Kovalevsky (1879), Morgan (1880-81), Phear (1880-81), and Maine (1881)’ (134) reject seeing all societies that have given rise to capitalism as having been feudal in form. Anderson emphasizes that the later Marx considered the classic shift from feudalism to capitalism to be the case only in Western societies, ‘with England exhibiting the “classic form” of the process’ (144). The 1872-75 French edition of Capital is described as having demonstrated ‘Marx’s increasingly multilinear approach to social development’ (142). Likewise, correspondence (and drafts of letters) between Marx and revolutionary Russian intellectual Vera Zasulich in 1881 discuss ‘Indigenous, agrarian communism as a source of future positive development that could allow Russia to bypass the primitive accumulation of capital and develop “in a socialist direction”’ (148). Marx is held here to suggest that ‘a socialist future can emerge from the village communes if the influences bearing down on them from capitalist encroachment can somehow be overcome’ (150). Thus, Marx is seen as having clearly moved away from earlier unilinear formulations.

On point four, Anderson further finds evidence that the late Marx held that communal land ownership could contribute to the possibility of revolt (186). Marx’s study of the writings of Kovalevsky (a well as Robert Sewell and John Phear) – on the colonial policies of the French in Algeria, the British in India and the Spanish in Latin America – elicited both a respect for the stubborn persistence of indigenous communal formations in the face of imperial political forces as well as regret for the tendencies toward the destruction of collective property and its replacement by private property relations in land ownership.

For point five, Rome, India and Russia were studied by Marx with regard to intensifying tendencies toward political inequality and social polarization. He made extensive notes in this regard from a reading of four additional texts on Rome (Bücher, Friedländer, Jhering and Lange) during his final period of research. These authors investigated historical patterns of social change toward hierarchy. Communal and kinship forms of clan-based societies morphed into male dominated class social formations characterized by private property and slave labor. ‘he patricians emerged from the chiefs of the original clan that came together to found the city of Rome’ (192). Prisoners of war are ‘booty’ of the state and enslaved; some remained in service to the state, others sold. Marx understandably also studied the patterns of rebellion of the oppressed. ‘In the Sicilian slave war some 70,000 slaves recently imported from Syria and destitute local peasants rose up’ (204). Still Roman patricians and plebians were conditioned to feel superior to the ethnically diverse enslaved persons, a situation which Marx recognized as analogous to the racism of  the ‘poor whites’ of the America south. Yet ‘Marx never stopped hoping for an alliance of Black and white labor in the United States or of Irish and English workers on the other side of the Atlantic’ (212). India is also at the center of Marx’s last notebooks where Kovalevsky and Sewell recount details of the Sepoy Uprising and the Maratha resistance. The late Marx, Anderson concludes, was preoccupied with indigenous communal forms, like the Maratha, as possessing real possibilities for emancipatory change.

Lastly, on point six, Marx’s novel treatments of Ireland and Russia, each having social movements that might spark revolution, stand at both the very start and the very conclusion of Anderson’s book. The Irish revolution is seen as having the potential to pry open English revolution; so too, Russian communal villages may link up with a communist movement in Western Europe with the two mutually supporting one another. These assessments may be seen as harbingers of revolutionary possibilities from which the working class is de-centered (though not displaced). At the same time, new alternatives to capitalism are envisioned in the wake of the Paris Commune, which seek ‘anti-statist revolution alongside the anti-capitalist revolution’ (246). Anderson poses the question: ‘How would Marx have further modified his vision of communism, of abolition of the state as well as capital, in light of his research on Indigenous communism and communal villages in his last years?’ (252). In three letters of this period ‘Marx sees the revolution breaking out first in Russia’ (254). ‘In this case, Russia’s Indigenous form of rural communism would be the spark’ (256). Anderson concludes that Marx ‘sees the communal forms within these societies as taking on especially revolutionary dimensions in times of social stress and conflict’ (265).

A massive amount of careful intellectual labor has gone into this illuminating volume, both on the part of Kevin Anderson and the Marx scholars in Amsterdam and Berlin. These research records and Anderson’s commentary upon them open up an exciting new resource from the literary estate of Karl Marx for revolutionary theory and politics.

Charles Reitz is the author most recently of Herbert Marcuse as Social Justice Educator (New York and London: Routledge, 2025).