Kevin B. Anderson, "The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism" (Verso, 2025)

Jun 9, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Kevin Anderson, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology, dives into his latest work, exploring the lesser-known late writings of Karl Marx. He reveals how Marx's ethnological notebooks shed light on colonialism, gender dynamics, and the revolutionary potential of Indigenous societies. Anderson highlights Marx's significant shift from Eurocentrism to a broader understanding of global struggles, emphasizing the interconnectedness of oppressed groups and communal resistance. Listeners will gain fresh insights into how these themes resonate with contemporary social movements.

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INSIGHT

Marx's Late Ethnological Focus

Marx's Ethnological Notebooks reveal his late intellectual focus beyond capitalism, including colonialism, gender, and indigenous communal societies.
These notebooks show Marx's exploratory method and challenge Eurocentric development assumptions.

INSIGHT

Communal Formations as Revolutionary Basis

The late Marx saw communal social formations as potential revolutionary bases, opposing previous Eurocentric views.
He believed these formations, often with notable gender equality, could ally with modern proletariat movements.

INSIGHT

Marx's Dialectical Gender Analysis

Marx adopts a dialectical approach to gender, analyzing transformation and resistance across societies.
His writings link communal societies with possibilities for gender equality but don't fully unify gender with resistance themes yet.

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Kevin Anderson’s The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso, 2025) encourages to look again at the intellectual and political work of a figure some may assume has been exhausted: Karl Marx. Following on from his earlier landmark study Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016), this volume turns specifically to the ‘late Marx’. In this period (1869-82), Marx spent much of his time engrossed in the study of colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies, and gender among many other less known topics of his interest. His notes, especially what come to be known as The Ethnological Notebooks, along with letters, essays and a scattering of published texts remain only poorly known (and in some cases unpublished or not yet fully translated into English) and form the backbone of Anderson’s study. They evidence a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. Anderson shows 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.

In our discussion, we highlight some of the key themes in the late Marx, bringing out the ways in which Marx is making connections across his writings, how colonial subjects in Ireland and India share commonalities and what can be seen when we look at communal social forms in Russia and among Native Americans. We also discuss why Marx can be seen as a decolonial thinker, consider what he might have produced had he lived longer and the ways in which the late Marx can be presented to students to complement his central themes of class and capitalism.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), along with other texts.

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