Which Marx? On Colonialism, Uneven Development, and Gender

Sean K. Isaacs reviews Kevin B. Anderson’s new book The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads, and finds that the book makes a timely contribution to our understanding of capitalist exploitation as inseparable from colonialism, imperialism, gender oppression, and racism.

The current conjuncture of events, in which economic and political crises collide with an upsurge in political activity and struggle, appears disparate and detached, a collection of singular issues impacting specific countries and particular social groups. But to fully grasp the significance and potential global impact of events like the ongoing genocide in Palestine or the re-election of Donald Trump requires reckoning with their particular dynamics and social characteristics, without losing sight of the broader context of which they are a part. This means viewing them as interconnected moments, specific expressions of global capitalism’s tendencies.

Placing capitalism at the center of analysis should not mean reducing all its concrete manifestations to an abstract logic, however. Some orthodox Marxists have been guilty of this, raising Marx’s theories to the level of general laws that mechanically determine the course of history. This version of economic determinism, expressed most (in)famously by Josef Stalin, has loomed over Marxist theory and practice since Marx’s death, and has led to Marxism becoming synonymous with its most vulgar, mechanical, and authoritarian current for many people.

Another stream of Marxism has persisted however, opposed to Stalinism in all its forms, insisting on a humanist, internationalist, and non-determinist interpretation of Marx. Rather than viewing history as the necessary outcome of abstract laws of development, this tradition of Marxism sees it as a contradictory and uneven process, with multiple possible outcomes. From this perspective, specific crises and struggles are neither fully determined by abstract laws nor distinct and isolated events. They represent moments of a unity that can only be understood through its constitutive parts and the relationships between them. Renewing this stream of Marxism today can contribute to an understanding of current crises and struggles as parts of this totality, encouraging solidarity and internationalism across political movements.

Kevin Anderson’s new book, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads, is a contribution to this version of Marxism. Against the interpretation of Marx as a Eurocentric theorist only concerned with a narrow view of the working class, the book argues that Marx can, and should, be viewed as a multilinear thinker, one who explicitly engaged with colonialism, Indigenous and communal forms of living, and gender.

Anderson draws from Marx’s work between the years 1869 and 1882, most of which is made up of unpublished but extensive notes on colonization, Indigenous and non-Western societies, and gender relations. While unrefined, these notes represent, for Anderson, a map of Marx’s intellectual interests later in life and an indication that his thinking was still evolving and expanding.

Rather than identifying a “new” Marx, the book highlights the relationship between the late Marx and his earlier, more theoretically developed, work. It is Anderson’s contention that these more empirically grounded notebooks do not indicate a departure from Marx’s earlier work. Rather, they represent a dialectical move from the more abstract logic of Capital to the concrete level of uneven capitalist development in Ireland, India, and the United States, among other examples. These specific cases highlight the diverse forms capitalist development has taken, while remaining grounded in Marx’s general theory of capital.

Understanding Marx in this way, as a dialectical thinker moving from the abstract to the concrete, allows for new insights into Marx’s earlier works. While Capital is sometimes read as a Eurocentric account of development, in which the rise of capitalism in England is given as the model for the rest of the world, Marx explicitly states in the chapter on so-called “Primitive Accumulation” that the “history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form.” Marx’s later notes on the specific forms that colonization took in Ireland and India, and how this shaped capitalist development in those states, provides the empirical content for this passage, allowing us to read Capital as a theoretical model for understanding the diverse and uneven forms capitalism might take.

By bringing these less studied works to the forefront, Anderson encourages us to incorporate questions of colonialism and uneven development into our readings of Marx’s fully developed and published works. While he relies heavily on citations of passages that highlight Marx’s attentiveness to these issues, Anderson convincingly demonstrates that these are not merely cherry-picked examples but important reference points for development in Marx’s thought that can be traced back to his earlier work when read closely. By incorporating Marx’s notes on non-Western societies into our reading of his earlier work, a more nuanced, historically specific understanding of capitalist development emerges.

Anderson says that Revolutionary Roads is, in a way, a sequel to his previous book Marx at the Margins. Colonization in India and Ireland, communal societies in Russia and North America, and the relationship between anti-colonial struggle and communist revolution all play major roles in both books, but they are more developed and better connected to Marx’s broader work here.

Anderson contends, with strong supporting documentation, that the characterization of Marx as a Eurocentric, unilinear thinker is unfounded.This view, found in Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, maintains that Marx saw the English path of development as necessary for the entire world, leading to his justification of English colonial rule in India.

Said associated Marx with modernist theories of development, in which capitalism represents a necessary stage that all feudal societies must pass through on their way to communism. While this view has been certainly held by some proponents of orthodox Marxism, it is not accepted by many Marxists, nor, as Anderson shows, by Marx himself.

According to the orthodox reading of Marx, history is marked by distinct stages, modes of production that determine the form social relations take. E. P. Thompson writes against this interpretation of Marx in The Poverty of Theory, arguing that categorizations such as “feudalism” and “capitalism” are not static containers. Rather, they are sets of social relations expressed in a variety of historically specific ways. Capitalism can only be fully understood by examining its specific forms. But these concrete cases are moments of capitalism’s general tendency of development that Marx elaborates in Capital and can only be fully understood as part of this logic.

While Marx did develop a model of stages of development in The German Ideology, Anderson points to the fact that this could be interpreted as a model for Western Europe, not a universal one. So, while development in the West passed through a succession of stages, from communal society to Greco-Roman slave society, to Western feudalism, to capitalism, this does not mean that every society everywhere must follow this path. In fact, in the Grundrisse, Marx identifies a variety of precapitalist forms—Asiatic, Slavonic, ancient (Greco-Roman), and Germanic—that exist alongside each other, rather than as a progression of stages.

In reality, Marx acknowledged multiple possible paths of development. Since the Greco-Roman form is not higher than the other stages and only the Greco-Roman form of pre-capitalist society transitioned to Western feudalism, the other forms represent different trajectories.

Anderson highlights the passage from Capital quoted above as further evidence that Marx did not mean for the English model to be applied uncritically to every society. The specific form of development that Ireland and Russia took, where communal forms of living persisted alongside developing capitalist relations, means that societies need not necessarily pass through capitalism on their way to a socialist revolution. Instead, as Marx wrote in a letter to Russian communist Vera Zasulich in 1881, “the commune is the basis for Russia’s social regeneration,” something he also indicates in the 1882 Russian Preface to The Communist Manifesto.  

Anderson also highlights how Marx’s later notes on India show that his view on British colonialism as a necessary—however brutal—step towards socialism in India evolved. It is important to note, however, that Marx’s abhorrence of colonial violence is not isolated to his later work. In Capital, he wrote that “the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic” and that “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part” in the origins of capitalism. In his earlier writings on India, Marx refers to the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism” of British colonialism.

But Anderson shows how later in life Marx not only saw British colonialism in India as barbaric, but no longer accepted it as a necessary evil that would get rid of traditional forms of Indian life and replace them with modern industry. Marx writes with admiration for anticolonial resistance in India, both militarily and in the persistence of communal traditions.

This view of the relationship between spreading capitalist relations, colonial violence, anticolonial resistance, and communal forms of living represents a much more complex picture of development than the mechanical, linear, determinist perspective that is often foisted on Marx. By highlighting the anticolonial aspects of Marx’s work, Anderson reminds us that capitalist relations do not simply emerge—they are imposed. Marx does not forget that violence lies at the origins of capitalism and, indeed, continues to underpin it.

The greater focus on colonialism began to shift Marx’s views on anticolonial resistance and struggles for national liberation. Anderson engages with Marx’s notes on the persistence of communal lifeways and resistance to colonialism as a way of showing Marx’s trajectory regarding the revolutionary potential of non-Western societies.

Instead of either romanticizing precapitalist forms of living or viewing them as impediments to modern progress, Marx’s notes show a nuanced, dialectical understanding of communal forms and an evolution from his earlier thinking on the subject. In Marx’s notes on North American Indigenous societies, Anderson points to Marx’s use of quotations around the term “equal” in a passage in which Marx highlights the communal form hunting takes, from which everyone derives their “equal” share. For Anderson, this is an indication that Marx is “suggesting that social hierarchies may have emerged earlier than his anthropological sources are indicating,” even as he expresses admiration for these societies.

Without idealizing the non-hierarchical and democratic nature of these pre-capitalist societies, Marx began to see the revolutionary potential of anticolonial struggle. While The Communist Manifesto insists that a proletarian revolution will occur in the most developed countries first, Marx began to see countries on the periphery of Europe as agents of revolution, specifically Ireland and Russia.

In Ireland, Marx saw the struggle against capitalism and the struggle against English rule as one and the same, a fact that was recognized by Irish workers, making them “more revolutionary and more infuriated than in England,” though Marx maintained that, to be successful, an Irish revolution would need to spread to England. In Russia, the communal obshchina could serve as “the point of departure for a communist development” if combined with a proletarian revolution in Europe.

Anderson uses these examples not merely to show that Eurocentric characterizations of Marx are inaccurate, but also to highlight the consistent internationalist current in Marx’s work. To be successful, a communist revolution must be global, and this is truer than ever today. But it need not start in the most developed countries.

But while Revolutionary Roads convincingly shows that Marx can be read as a non-Eurocentric thinker critical of colonialism and supportive of anticolonial struggle, Anderson is less persuasive in showing that Marx meaningfully integrated gender into his work.

Marx at the Margins devotes a few lines to gender, mostly pointing to Marx’s notes on the matrilineal nature of some pre-capitalist societies. Revolutionary Roads, on the other hand, promises a deeper engagement with Marx’s views on gender and devotes an entire chapter to the topic. Critical of Engels’ “class/economic reductionist argument concerning both women’s oppression and how it is to be overcome,” Anderson argues that Marx held a different view. However, Marx’s notes on gender that Anderson draws from are largely just expanded sections pointing to the matrilinear tendencies of pre-capitalist societies.

In his notes on India, Marx is critical of anthropologists who portray pre-capitalist India as having a patriarchal system that was overcome through the modern expansion of women’s rights, arguing instead that patriarchy was imposed in India, undermining traditional property relations that allowed some property to be held separately by women. But while this is a valuable insight, it is less clear that these notes represent a fundamental incorporation of gender into the entirety of Marx’s thought, one that would invite a re-reading of a text like Capital in the same way that Anderson’s work on Marx’s evolving views on colonialism suggests.

Anderson points to some instances in which Marx acknowledges the importance of women in revolutionary movements, including the “self-sacrificing heroism” of women during the Paris Commune and “the heroism of the women Communards” in resistance to the French colonization of Algeria, but these do not fundamentally transform our readings of Marx or indicate a theoretical shift in how he viewed the relationship between gender and capital.

This does not, of course, mean that such a relationship does not exist. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici traces the history of capitalist accumulation to processes of colonization and the violent oppression of women. Rather than viewing these as precapitalist forms, Federici shows that they were integral to the spread of capitalist relations and continue to be so to this day.

Though she ascribes to the view that Marx was a modernist thinker who “assumed that the violence that had presided over the earliest phases of capitalist expansion would recede with the maturing of capitalist relations,” her work on the relationship between capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy pairs well with Anderson’s work on Marx’s evolving views of capitalist development and colonialism. Like the late Marx, Federici highlights the importance of communal traditions in resisting the spread of capitalism and, indeed, the way in which they continue to do so. And, like Anderson’s interpretation of Marx (and against her own), Federici sees the spread of capitalist modernity as an intensification, not an overcoming, of violent forms of patriarchal oppression. However, Anderson does not develop these connections, which would allow for the meaningful integration of an analysis of gender into Marx’s work.

While less strong on gender, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads provides a close and engaging reading of Marx’s notebooks and later works. It does important work for those of us who resist the characterization of Marxism as a Eurocentric tradition guilty of erasing the experiences of colonized and oppressed people.

Anderson not only reveals important elements of Marx’s work that have too often been ignored, he also encourages us to integrate themes of colonialism and uneven development into readings of Marx’s earlier texts, allowing for a dialectical and anticolonial thinker to emerge. The book makes a timely contribution to a stream of Marxism that sees capitalist exploitation as inseparable from its colonialist, imperialist, patriarchal, and racist elements. Perhaps most importantly, it reminds us to view specific struggles not as isolated and distinct but, like Marx did, as movements for universal freedom.

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Featured Image credit: Gaston Vuillier; modified by Tempest.