Kevin B. Anderson, "The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism" (Verso, 2025)
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So hello and welcome to New Books and Sociology, a podcast on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Matt Dawson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow, and today I'm delighted to have as my guest Kevin Anderson.

Kevin is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And today we're discussing his newest book, The Late Marxist Revolutionary Roads, Colonialism, Gender and Indigenous Communism, published by Verzo. So, Kevin, welcome to the show. Thank you, Matt. I'm very happy to be here. We're very happy to have you here as well. So can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to write this book?

I'll keep it short, but I actually started on this probably 40 years ago because my mentor, Raya Denevzkaya, was working on the late Marx, which can be seen in her book on Rosa Lassenberg. And that inspired me to do some work on the French edition of Capital, which we'll probably talk about later, 1983. And so I'd kind of been thinking about something like this for a long time.

and i've worked on various aspects of off and on for about 40 years yeah and i think what you've produced and perhaps it's not surprising to listeners that it's that amount of work is you produced a really wonderful book from here that i know picks up on a book you published a number of years ago called marks at the margin which sort of began to sketch this out and has pushed it even further and i think

As we're going to see from our discussion, it's really important recounting of what the late Marx had to say about revolution and I think often goes against what is sometimes assumed to be what Marx had to say about a variety of different topics.

So let's get into it. A lot of what you talk about in this book is based around Marx's notes. As you mentioned, there's other sources such as French Dictionary Capital we'll talk about later on. But a lot of it is based around Marx's notes, most notably what have been called the ethnological notebooks. And these notebooks are either not available in English or perhaps some of them are just starting to become available. So perhaps a good place to start is if you can tell listeners a bit about these notebooks, particularly ethnological notebooks.

What were they made of and what was Marx trying to do intellectually when compiling these notes? Yeah, well, throughout his life, Marx makes notebooks on various sources. Some of his early ones are on the political economists. He reads Adam Smith and these people. And at that point in the early 1840s, his English isn't that good. So he actually reads them in French. So we have these notes.

where he's recording passages and making remarks sometimes. So he continues this throughout his life. And of course, a lot of it goes into his published work, such as the Critique of Political Economy and Capital and all those places. But some of it doesn't.

But whenever he writes on something, say in the early 1850s, he writes on India and China and in articles for the New York Tribune, we can also find alongside that notebooks. But at the end of his life, from the last decade or so, he published very little. The French edition of Capital finishes in 1875.

The Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875. We don't have any substantial publications after that. The Preface to the 1882 Edition of the Communist Manifesto. I mean, these are like short things, though. So in the last decade of his life, we have this notebook material that kind of

presumably he was going to work into his publications, but we don't have the result. And they range across a lot of things, what's called the ethnological notebooks, and then related materials on India, Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. We have that. We have notes on other pre-capitalist societies like ancient Rome. We have notes on a

Native American societies and other indigenous societies, the latter are the best known because Frederick Engels had access to those notes. And on the basis of them, some of them wrote up Origin of the Family, that famous book. But Engels didn't look at the whole, I don't believe,

And then, so we have this set of, we call it sometimes writings on non-Western pre-capitalist societies and gender. That's a title, a working title for a volume of these that may appear. But there's other things too. I don't mean to suggest that this is the only thing Marx is working on at the end of his life.

He does do notebooks on mathematics, on natural science, European history. He does a long set of notes, equivalent in length to his treatment of India and the things I'm interested in.

on European history from the earliest time, or European, Middle Eastern, so-called Western history, up to 1648, the Peace of Westphalia. So we do have a lot of things, but people have for years focused on this part because he talks about gender and he talks about societies outside Europe in this set of notes that I build around for my book.

Yeah, and as you say, this is sort of the last decade of Marx's life, and these notebooks and the various other texts you cite, some of which we've already discussed, form the late Marx of your title. And as you note in your introduction, this late Marx has sometimes in the literature been dismissed, even sometimes in very polite ways by Engels himself, for sort of wasting his time on follies rather than doing the hard graft of completing the various volumes of Capital,

But your book is part of a broader attempt in the literature, I think, and in this I'd include not only your earlier text, Marx and the Margins, but also Marcelo Musto's wonderful book, The Last Years of Karl Marx, an intellectual biography to sort of reassess this late Marx and sort of talk about his value and what he was doing. So I guess an obvious question is,

What was different? What was different for the late Marx in comparison to the Marx that came before? Right. Yeah, that's what makes it important to talk about. Well, there's a lot of concern with gender. And, you know, it was fundamental to the most important early Marxist study of gender, Engels' book. But Marx ranges more widely than Engels does in his book. And I think we can see

a different interpretation, at least slightly there. There's a certain romanticization of pre-modern societies and Engels. I don't think we find that in Marx, but more significantly, Engels has this notion of the world historical defeat of the female sex that occurred around the time that private property in the state arose.

So these are intertwined in a kind of seamless way by Engels that it's unclear if Marx would have done that. So you can kind of separate out gender a little bit more easily through Marx's notes, which are more exploratory. Other things that come out are continuing and deepening concern with colonialism and resistance to colonialism, including

because he has notes in Algeria, on India, on Latin America, but particularly in India and Algeria, he talks about resistance. He had talked about some of this in the late 1850s, but he returns to it now.

The third element, and there may be more, but these are the three, I think three of the biggest ones, is it's well known that at the end of his life, Marx got interested in communal social formations and communal property in the Russian village. And then that famous preface to the Communist Manifesto, Letters to Zerzulich and other elated writings.

he talked about the communal village as a possible starting point for socialism. Now, this is very new because if you go back to the 1850s, he looks at these formations, like in his 1853 writings on India and related Russian writings on Russia at that time. He says, this is the source of

the reactionary quality, the changeless, all these kind of tropes that have been attacked. But now he ships around and these become loci of communism, not modern communism, but he says in alliance with the modern communist movement in the West.

For example, you don't have to go through the stages of the expropriation of the peasantry, agricultural revolution, then capitalism, then socialism. You can move more directly to socialism on the basis of these early communal systems. And of course, those are also the ones that have greater gender equality, as pointed already by Engels and in Marx's notes on that. So,

yeah, there's a real departure there in terms of where revolutionary change might be coming from. And not only was it, and not just in the generic sense that, well, a revolt in Russia or India might destabilize the system and therefore lead to a working class revolution in the West, but that there actually are communist, indigenous communist formations and impulses that

will actually be a positive alternative to colonialism and imperialism and capitalism. Yeah, and what your book does in many ways is it talks about those various different things you've just discussed in terms of colonialism, gender, communal social formations, etc., and discusses them in depth in the different areas that Mark spoke about. So I want to turn to those now. And one thing you mentioned there was communal social formations that really concern Marx, and that's both

communal social formations both in the past and in Marx's own time when he's writing. So why was Marx so interested in these? And you discuss lots of different communal social formations in the book, so perhaps to

allow you, Kevin, not to have to feel like you have to discuss everything. Perhaps you can discuss Marxist writing on Native American societies as an example. Well, he got, he was always following anthropology and the other social sciences, particularly, of course, political economy.

So he got hold of Morgan's book on Native American societies, Ancient Society was the title, published in 1877. About a year later, Marx gets a hold of this through a Russian friend, Maxim Kovalevsky, who's a young guy, not too radical, I mean, compared to someone like Marx or Engels,

But still, you know, progressive and wanting to be in contact with the Marxists, he gets a copy of the book through him. Kovalevsky is, of course, interested in all these kinds of things in Russia, too, but it's a big debate there with the populists wanting to make a revolution based on the village and so on. So I think it has to do with Russia, probably.

because Russia was the place where his workers were being discussed most widely, where he was getting the most responses from intellectuals,

where there was a revolutionary movement brewing in the 1870s at a time when in the rest of the world, certainly Western Europe, the United States, there wasn't much going on. The Paris Commune had been crushed. Reconstruction was ending in the United States. So I think looking outside for casting about for alliances was part of it.

And then maybe a third element was he was trying to finish up volumes or became volumes two and three of Capital. Should he cast the net more widely in terms of the societies that he looked at? It's been speculated for decades and decades that maybe Russia and the United States would be a

really significant in any kind of further development of the book capital and i think now on the basis of these notes we could add india perhaps um yeah as you say it's charting out on new roads uh that are very interesting and one of the things we've already mentioned as hugely significant to the late marx is this question of gender and this obviously takes up a lot of what you discuss in the book and i was really struck when reading your discussion of marx on gender by the

appropriately very dialectical approach Marx adopts to gender where it's a discussion of how gender relations were transformed and at the same time how forms of resistance or possibilities of resistance emerged to these very transformations by women and again you discuss a lot of different cases there too in particular these Native American communal forms and also ancient Greece so

What are the similarities and differences in how Marx conceives of gender across the spaces that he discusses?

You mean in the early versus the late Marx? Or just in the late Marx in terms of his discussion of gender. Well, it's a little bit hard to pin down because in the writings that are the most on gender, these notes based on Morgan's book, which is mainly about Native American societies and the ancient Greco-Roman society, there isn't a lot of discussion about

these revolutionary forces and so on as there is on the other writings these are communal societies too

It's when he talks about India and Algeria where he doesn't talk as much about gender that he talks about and Russia, that he talks about these communal social formations as basis of resistance. So how that would all come together is unclear. Ireland is the case where there's a lot of discussion of resistance on Marcia's part going back way before this period that we're concentrating on this book.

And he does talk about the peasantry, but he hasn't figured out yet, because most of those writings on Ireland are a little bit earlier than these final notebooks. So around 1870 is the last one of those. But then in 1881, after all these other things, he writes a set of notes, mainly on Ireland, based on Henry Sunderland's book,

And there he talks a lot about gender in Ireland. And there are indications that he thinks that in the Rundale, this communal form in the villages that existed until modern times, and maybe still remnants of it even today, that there's gender equality involved in that. But we don't have an actual writing where, because we have the writings on the Russian villages,

where he suggests this is a basis of resistance and a basis also of communism, but he doesn't mention gender. And we have these very interesting writings on gender across centuries and millennia, across all different kinds of societies. But resistance to capitalism, colonialism, is not a direct theme of the writings on gender. So you don't know exactly how he would have put all this together, all of them.

Yeah, and to say it's so copious in terms of different areas is disgusting, but very interesting in terms of not brought together in that way. So we've mentioned Marx's notebooks. Another text has also been discussed, which is the French edition of Capital.

So the French Dictionary of Capital, as you mentioned, is the major, the last major publication Marx is directly involved in. And it has some changes from the German versions, which become the basis of later translations, especially into English. And as you note in the book, the French version of Capital has not been directly in whole yet translated into English. So what were the key differences in this French volume of Capital that

And why are they important for understanding the late Marx? Well, I don't know if you can see down in the lower corner there, but that's the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe. And they have a volume, which I think it has 300 pages or more of textual differences between the French edition and the last German edition that preceded it. Of course, some of them are just, you know, a comma was inserted here, but some of them are more than that.

i don't think anyone to this day has really analyzed the whole thing that having been said there are a number of changes some of them are already incorporated by engels because engels looked at all these editions he seemed to prefer the german editions but he did include certain things from the french edition he includes two very important things

One is the ordering of the chapters and sections. Primitive accumulation, so-called, becomes a separate section for the first time in the French edition. It had been collapsed into this earlier chapter, so it stands out more.

Second thing that stands out more in the table of contents is the fetishism section, which in the last German edition of 1873, 273, is just a subsection of a subsection of a subsection of a subsection. That's reproduced in that form in the new Princeton edition of Capital. Okay.

So Engels changes on that. There's one, a number of passages, but a major passage that Engels incorporates, it's toward the end of the accumulation section, I believe it is, what's chapter 15 in the English edition, the older English edition from Penguin New Life Review. There's this statement there that as capitalism, capital concentrates and centralizes

it could evolve into a single capitalist corporation or entity. So Engels includes that. That was important already in the 1940s when people like C.L.R. James and Rodney E.S. Kaya and others were writing about state capitalism because if it would be centralized to that point, then it would just be the state capitalism possibly.

But then there's other important changes that Engels did not introduce that kind of remain outside any of the visions published in English. One of the most striking one is of this well-known statement in the preface, I think it's pretty much an exact quote, the country that is the more developed industrially shows to

shows to other countries the image of their own future. Okay. Marx adds a clause to that in the French edition. For those countries that have begun to ascend the industrial ladder, that's a big, big qualifier because that had been read. If you look at a book like Mars and the Russian Road, edited by Theodore Chanin, a couple of the essays in there slam Marx

or is determinism and global grand narrative, as the postmodernists were later to call it, imposing that on...

It's very clear in the French edition that that was not, it clarifies, if you will, in the French edition, that that was not his intention. There's another similar passage, you know, the primitive accumulation section, which I'm not going to quote out, but that's important because in the letter to Veres that Zulich and several other letters, he actually quotes that and says, you know,

He denies, he's in the process of denying that he's making a fixed prediction that Russia is going to have to have its villages uprooted and become capitalist the way all the rest of the world did. I had sitting on my...

in my life i mean you can maybe even see it there uh david mcclellan's uh one volume edition of mars a lot okay you go through that volume you find the passages from capital from the existing english editions then you find mark's quoting capital later on because he incorporates some of that correspondence with the russians there are two different versions in the same volume it

People aren't aware that there's a difference there and a development in Larson's text. So both of these, the ones I'm most interested in are those ones that suggest there's going to be an alternate pathway of development in societies that aren't yet even in the process of becoming industrial capital.

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Yeah, and I think it's really striking, particularly for

Those of us, and I'm sure listeners who have been taught Marx, have come across the same thing where we're taught that Marx predicts this is how things are going to happen. There's this path that you go through all these different societies and this is universal. And as you say, the French edition has a very important caveat that shows perhaps it isn't as universal as many of us were taught what Marx had to say. So another thing that's in your title, I've already mentioned is hugely significant in the book, is colonialism.

And I was struck when you noted in there that Marx produced 86,000 words of notes on India alone. And you highlight in these notes, he's not producing a theory of communism as such, but you do highlight how, and I'm going to quote you here, Kevin, the very success of the British in disrupting and undermining the communal forms does not produce stability, but instead new forms of subjectivity and resistance.

It is in this sense that the colonial success is main, and main is the author Marx has taken notes on, who's extolling colonialism,

The colonial successors' main extols are in fact, as Marx writes, a danger for that colonial domination and therefore for global capitalism because of the social tensions they were setting in motion. So why was this so for India, for Marx? Yeah, well, the most radical transformation of the village starts

And the village starts in the 1790s under Lord Cornwallis, who was defeated in the United States, but went on to have a second life, disrupting society in India. And so the land tenure becomes essentially privatized in the villages. This creates huge social disruption, poverty, people thrown off their land to some extent, and so on.

And this he sees as part of why, if you look across the entire 19th century, you have the Taiping Rebellion in China. It's true. That's the largest mass uprising in what we call today the Global South, our third world, as it was once called.

but that's not primarily anti-colonial. The Indian uprising of 1857 to 59, the Great Rebellion, the Sepoy uprising of

There's different names for it. This is the most significant anti-colonial uprising anywhere in the world during the 19th century, except perhaps the Haitian Revolution, but certainly in the later period after the Haitian Revolution, the most significant. Marx sees that as connected, it seems, to these disruptions because...

Marx, as with so many other things with Marx, it's when people are driven into the cities and become workers or when peasants are kicked off the land. That's the point where the revolutionary energy becomes strongest or can become. So, yeah, and Russia, too.

The Russian communal village had existed for a long time, but when it starts to come under market pressures and other kinds of pressures in the 1860s, 70s, that's where you start to see social ferment, both from the villagers and also from the intellectuals who get interested in society and its problems.

So it's at the point of crisis and disruption of people's lives where new ideas and new social movements develop.

I just want to underline that because I don't think there's any strong evidence that Marx favored simply like kicking out Western influences and going back to a pre-colonial society in some kind of idealized form. I don't... He's very aware of the limitations. He maybe no longer is using words like Oriental despotism for India, but he hasn't like...

turned around the way he thinks, oh, these Indian villages, they were like really great. We need to just recover that and defend that. That's not his position either. Yeah, and I think as you mentioned at the start of our conversation, someone like Engels is at points guilty of that sort of idealization of these early communal social forms. So it's interesting to see that Marx doesn't do that. And

On the note of colonialism, one thing that really struck me when reading your book, and particularly when you quote from Marx, is how often he engages in what we would now call an almost sort of decolonial critique of many of these writers. He will sort of critique the assumptions of people like Main and the other scholars he's citing and the way in which they're carrying ideas.

assumptions about what progress and civilization means when talking about these other nations. So I guess, is there, do you think there is a sort of, for want of a better term, a sort of decolonial Marx emerging in this late period? Oh, definitely. I mean, Marx is

It's decolonial in the sense of supporting the movements, critiquing colonialism, supporting the movements against it, also critiquing colonialist thought and conceptualization. As you mentioned, Henry Sumner Mayne, I mean, he goes about it a little differently, perhaps, than some of the ones today that are more culturalist. But he says, you know, Henry Sumner Mayne

writes about how the Indian villages, you know, they have some positive things, but with the historical changes that are going on, it's just being swept away, kind of as if, you know, the tides are turning, the moon, whatever. He says, you're not mentioning the fact that you were a colonial official implementing

these changes. He also gets really pissed off about the use of the Aryan race and all this. Because this was a big... And Gareth Stedman Jones was the only Marx biographer, a biographer of the whole of Marx's life. We mentioned Marcelo Musto's very good book just on the late Marxist biography.

But that's the only biography that actually devotes anything to the late Marx. The others just don't even talk about it. But Stedman Jones says, oh yeah, there was all this romanticizing, like Aryan stuff and so on. And Marx fell into that. He was getting old. He really wasn't up to the level of where he was earlier. So yeah, you get that. So yeah, there's a lot of that

kind of thing. But he cuts across East versus West in ways that I don't think is done as much as that. He might say in one sentence, the Irish villager and the Indian villager. He might have in the same paragraph. And also what he does with the Paris Commune is really interesting because

They really tried to give the final blow, if you will, to what they don't succeed in doing, to the communal village systems in Algeria. At the same time, this is right after the Paris Commune, when the bourgeois assembly that was based on their Versailles assembly that crushed the Paris Commune, they want to be rooting out communism and any traces of it in France at the same time.

They said, we've got to root this out in Algeria. So he notes that these are happening at the same time. Also, not all the writers he reads are pro-colonialist. Morgan is slightly anti-colonial. Kovalevsky, this Russian anthropologist, is very anti-colonial in the way that he portrays

India and Algeria. So yeah, there are some that they're more anti-colonial, but most are not. And Morgan, if I can just add one thing, Morgan, he does talk about how the Spanish basically destroyed the culture of Mexico, built their churches on top of the, destroyed and then built their own churches on the top of the ruins of the ancient temples in Mexico.

But he's not really an anti-colonialist. He's kind of a cultural preservationist. So he has this amazing sentence where he says, doesn't refer to all the lives destroyed and stuff, which is what Kovalevsky does and Marxist. He says, all this data was destroyed and it was a real tragedy for we anthropologists. Yes. Yeah.

yeah and i mean one thing you mentioned there kevin that i was really struck by when reading your book is the way in which marx is engaging in that comparison you know the as you say it's same paragraph there's reference to the indian worker and the irish work of the peasants and and a really just amazing discussion and something that i don't think he's really done and also again is one of those things that goes against how marx is remembered now as sometimes these lazy

These lazy claims about Marx as a sort of supporter of colonialism come out sometimes on his earlier writings, even then perhaps the selective readings of the early writings. So it's really important to have that discussion. You also have the discussion in your book in a chapter entitled Uyghur Societies in Flux, which covers Rome, India and Russia.

We've already mentioned Russia, but I wanted to pick on it a bit more because it's hugely significant. There's the famed discussion of the Russian road. You mentioned the text that that sort of emerges from the Russian road to communism in Marx's writing. And as you highlight, Marx was incredibly interested in Russia. He learns Russian. He starts writing about it significantly. As you've mentioned, he's engaged with Russian activists and scholars everywhere.

So why? Why was he so interested in Russia? And what does what he has to say about Russia tell us about how he theorized revolutionary potential in this period? Yeah, I don't cover it in this book, but I cover it in Mars at the Margins. People are to some extent aware that Mars shifted his position on India already in 1857 with the outbreak of the uprising at Heath and Ingalls Bolt in the Tribune.

And their letters are hammering away at the fact that, you know, India is now, you know, resisting the British and we support this movement, that the British are the real barbarians. And they have similar language with the second Opium War, whereas the first Opium War is implicitly supported in the Communist Manifesto. So, yeah.

But what people are unaware of is there's a lot of peasant unrest in Russia in the late 1850s after the defeat in the Crimean War. And so they write about that, Mark Senegal's in the Tribune, scheming articles where they predict a revolution that's going to make the French Revolution look like a tea party in this kind of language.

And then the agrarian reform happens in the early 1860s. So Marx's eyes are already on Russia in the sense he no longer sees it as he had with India as just this utterly reactionary society that had no revolution in 1848. That's the gendarmerie of Europe in the sense of going in with its army and suppressing the revolutions.

So, um, Joseph Conrad cap is captured so well in this secret agent. Russia is like, you see, influence. Um, so yeah, he, he starts thinking about that, uh, in the 1860s. And then by the eight, 1872, as you mentioned to his shock, uh,

Russian is the first language in which capital appears. It's around that time or just before that he starts learning Russian. He's about 50 years old, so he starts learning Russian. His Russian becomes good enough that he reads Kovalevsky's Anthropological Study in Russian and makes notes on that in a combination of German and a little bit of Russian words he records.

There's the populist movement, as I was mentioning, which is growing and getting larger. Both intellectuals who aren't like super radical or professors at universities, they're writing to him, they're reviewing his books. And there's a long response to some of them in the second preface to Capital One.

But the revolutionaries are also writing to him. So he studies Russia. Those notebooks have not been published yet. And in his writings on Russia, he makes this remark that, well, we have these agrarian societies. We had what happened in Western Europe with feudalism collapsing. We had the crisis in ancient Rome, which gave us a proletariat that had no relationship anymore to production anymore.

And then the slaves were doing most of the production. And then he says, we have Russia. We don't know. Just because certain things are happening in the villages doesn't mean it's going to go toward the same development as the West any more than Rome did in its time.

What we know now is that in addition to looking at Russia, Marx was making all these notes on India and other places at the end of his life. All these societies that, similar to Russia, were being penetrated by capitalism, but they hadn't gone over fully toward capitalist social relations. And then this third one, Rome, which nobody knew about until...

well, it started to become part of the table of kindness with the Monsignor Kazamka Skava 30, 40 years ago. So those writings have just been published like last summer in German. He looks at four

four or five social histories of ancient Rome and looks at the agrarian relations, looks at the relation with the proletarian uprisings to the slave uprisings and all this kind of thing. Chang is in the class and social structure as basically what happens is a free peasantry is expropriated, giant farms form, and that proletariat ends up going into the cities and into the army.

but it doesn't result in capitalism. So he, this is a substantial, I don't know how many pages it is, but it's maybe a couple hundred pages of typescript when you put all these notes together. Oh, and one of them is on gender too. A history of the family and gender in ancient Rome that Engels didn't apparently have access to. Yeah, and as you say, it's the ways in which

you know, he's drawing upon Rome and Russia at the same time and thinking of similar things at work. It's an amazing mind at work in many ways. It's one of the things you get from reading a book is just seeing an amazing mind at work, which is, aside from anything else, a wonderful thing to read about.

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by discussing how the late Marx is developing new concepts of revolutionary change and also alternatives to capitalism. And there's a brilliant discussion in here concerning the role of the state after capitalism, which draws in particularly on two of Marx's published texts that have been available for a long time now, Civil War in France, which of course is about the Paris Commune, and a Critique of the Gulf program, which you already mentioned, which is hugely interesting. I'd encourage people to read it, but I wanted to

on one of the things we mentioned earlier, but we haven't probably discussed in enough, which is Ireland. And as you discussed in the book, Ireland is one of the topics where Marx does explicitly change his mind from this, not just a change of topic, it's a changing of his mind,

So what led Marx to change his mind earlier? He saw Ireland and colonialism in Ireland as a sort of hurdle to revolutionary change in Britain. As you discussed, the late Marx not only sees Ireland perhaps as a spark to revolution in Britain, but perhaps further afield. So what is the change in how Marx talks about Ireland? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it isn't a change as, it isn't a reversal as with India and Russia. He never saw Irish village society as utterly reactionary. He never saw English colonialism as positive.

positive. His earliest writings in the 1840s, their support for the Irish nationalist cause. But what changes by the 1860s and early 1870s is the nature of the anti-colonial movement in Ireland. In the 1840s, Marx and Engels spend a lot of time attacking the British. I don't know if it's equal time, but these guys are real polemicists. They don't

They don't believe in the old French saying no enemies on the left. Definitely not. Yeah.

So there's this guy, Daniel O'Connell, who was the leader of the Irish nationalist movement. In their eyes, he's a moderate, he's a bourgeois. They're just castigating him. And the movement is in the control of these kinds of elites. By the 1860s, you get the Fenian Brotherhood forming, which is better known by its later name, the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

they're forming, they are based in the peasantry. They target even like Catholic landowners. Irish-identified landowners are also come under attack. They keep their distance from the church too, unlike that earlier movement. So they get very excited about this. There's also crossovers. There are people in this thing that are involved in the international. Engels knows some of them personally.

And so they get marks managed. Oh, and they they stage armed attacks both in Ireland and inside Britain. And then people are just rounded up. They're the so-called Manchester martyrs. We probably didn't have that much to do with these armed attacks, all of them.

but they're about to face the death penalty. Marx gets Marx and Engels and their allies mainly in the Western, because the international has like, it doesn't have like a British branch in the way we think of the socialist movement of the 20th century.

The International has a general council in London, which has Poles and Germans and French. They push the British who are reluctant. They say, look, you're going every day like crying about Poland and Russian occupation there. Be consistent. Support Ireland just as much. They get the British, the International, including these British trainings to support clemency.

for these Irish that are facing execution. This was a pretty hard thing to do. And they even hold a rally with tens of thousands of people, mainly Irish, but the British trade unions and those kind of people have their representation there as well.

So they're working on that. And so in this period, this is when Marx, for the first time, starts talking about how the English workers have a condescending, we can call it quasi-racist attitude toward the Irish. We're talking now about the Irish immigration inside Britain, working in London.

low-level jobs in Manchester and places like that. They left down on the Irish. They refused to solidarize with them. This is the biggest obstacle to really developing a labor movement, a revolutionary labor movement in Britain. And the impulse is going to have to come from Ireland. It's going to shake up the British. And there's this wonderful letter at the end of his life. This is a little bit later that he writes to...

You'll get it. Let me see if I can just take a minute to... Yeah. It's just a couple of sentences I would like to read out. I'm convinced that the explosion of the revolution will begin this time, not in the West, but in the Orient, in Russia. It is the highest importance at the moment that we find the French proletariat already having been organized into a workers' party and ready to play its role.

As to England, the material elements for its social transformation are superabundant, but a driving spirit is lacking. It will not form up. The English working class accepts them to the impact of the explosion of events on the continent. The greater part of the English working class takes part to a certain extent in the British Empire's domination of the world market, or what is even worse, imagines itself.

be taking part in it, you could just substitute the word Ireland for Russia. And you have what he says in these earlier writings, that it's going to start in Ireland. But France is always there too. I mean, don't forget, this is like in his time, I mean, all those revolutions, especially the Paris Commune, which is looming, or had taken place by this time. So France is obviously kind of the center of revolutions in a certain sense. But coming from the periphery, either from Ireland or later from Russia,

But what's really significant to me anyway, is this seamless way in which Mars talks about, well, you know, the movement's going to spread from Russia to Germany and Austria and then into France and then maybe on the other side of Ireland coming in. And yeah, of course it would. Whereas we had just like a big shock when the Arab uprisings happened in 2011. And then people in Wall Street say, you know, we were inspired by that. This would be like a normal. Come on.

that these movements would interconnect. Yeah, I think the thing that... More than that, I think. Yeah, actually do the same movement in a sense. Sorry. No, indeed. Yeah, you're right. It is the same movement. And the thing you really bring out as well, and your answer brings out in the book, and sometimes we forget, is how much Marx is not just an intellectual, he's an activist, right? He's involved in this. He's part of these movements. And they're not... What he's writing and thinking is not just of an academic interest. It's an immediate political concern and the ways in which

he's both reporting on and shaping these events, I think comes over very clearly in what you talk about.

So I want to end by posing you two questions based upon your book, Kevin. The first is a hypothetical that you take up to some extent at the end of the book, but which I want to push you on a little bit, which is we imagine Marx had lived on. Imagine he lives on into the 1890s. He lived as long as Engels. Based around the direction that the late Marx was setting out, what do you think he would have produced in the years to come?

Yeah. Well, as I said before,

I think the book Capital would have been much more wide-ranging in its second, or what became its second and third volumes in terms of the different parts of the world that it took off. But I don't think, I think it's really important, and I stress this already in Marx at the Margins, Capital is not the, Capital and Capital in Class even are not the only things that Marx writes about.

in his life. You think of a book like the 18th premier of Louis Bonaparte. It's not... Yes, he talks about the stage of capitalism in France at that time, but it's not what a lot of people would think of

that he might do in the way that he would approach them. I think it's clear that he says it in the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto. He says, two countries we didn't look at at the time and that we'd have to incorporate now would be Russia and the United States. And of course, that's the other one, the huge changes. That's a really interesting paragraph

In the beginning of that 1882 preface, we mentioned before that talk about the Russian communal village as the starting point for a communist development that helped spread into Western Europe and alive with the Western proletariat.

But he also talks there about the United States. Now Marx, as people know, had devoted a lot of attention to the United States at the time of the Civil War. And one of the things that Marx always kind of viewed the United States as a society which didn't have the exact...

class relations as Western Europe did. For example, there was the independent farmer who had some land maybe originally stolen from Native Americans. But across the Midwest and other parts of the United States, there

This polity that's based on the small family farm, he already points out in 1882 that that's disappearing under the impact of what later came to be called monopoly capitalism, the railroads, and

He's already talking about that kind of thing. He talks about the whole constitution of the United States disappearing and a more hierarchical society forming. But that connects to all this other stuff too, because there's this really distinctive phrase that he uses in several contexts for whites. How

talks about the poor whites in the U.S. South who didn't want to solidarize with the slaves and then later on with the newly freed blacks are not enough to really result in a radical transformation in the United States in the period during and after the Civil War. He writes the same thing. He actually uses the phrase poor whites to describe the English workers and their attitude toward the Irish, which is why we can call it his attitude that it's a quasi-racism.

or the ars and thirdly ancient rome this phrase creeps in where he says the free proletariat these poor whites despise the slaves and so

When the enslaved population is rising up and the proletarians and plebeians are rising up, they don't come together. But it's not a both sides-ism. He puts the onus on the poor whites, if you will. So I think he would have... Because another thing we have to think about is... I mentioned seaport uprising as the biggest anti-colonial uprising.

But the biggest social revolution of the 19th century was the U.S. Civil War in Marx's eyes. People, I think, finally starting to see this because this was not simply a political revolution that resulted in civil rights protections that then were taken away for many decades. But there was a social aspect too, in the sense that unlike the British emancipation and so many others,

There was no compensation. This is a larger expropriation of private property quantitatively than the French Revolution. You'd have to go up to the Russian Revolution to find something on that scale. Marx was aware of this as a kind of a social revolution manquette because...

He says in the first crevice, the capital, he says great changes are taking place on the other side of the Atlantic and distribution of landed property is on the agenda.

And what he's talking about is the failed attempt, which failed just by one vote to redistribute land to the formerly enslaved. So he's very interested in that. So I think the United States, Russia and India, I think he would have engaged in political writings on that, on those, and they would have come into capital. And I think he would have written about gender in ways that, I think that's harder to predict what, you

or even think about what he would have said, but I think it's very clear that at the end of his life, he's viewing gender relations and gender oppression as really central to understanding all forms of oppression and class domination. Yeah, we wouldn't have had Origin of the Family, Private Property, and Estate, which of course was Engels, but we would have had a different book from Marx, which might have been more sophisticated both around what you've depicted here.

The second question I want to ask is about teaching. Departments of sociology and other disciplines are all teaching marks and perhaps thinking about how they're going to be teaching marks, particularly for the academic year coming ahead. Actually,

I finished reading your book, Kevin, and I thought the questions and then between my thinking of the questions and today, I've been told I'm teaching marks to our first years next year. So this question is particularly on my mind. How do you think we should have been cooperating the late marks into our teacher to marks to speak to the concerns of our contemporary students? Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, at least in the US, one of the

problems we face approaching Marx is that I have a lot of students who think that Marx is a fairly conservative guy. We have the same here as well, yeah. Talk about race and gender and so on. So I bring some of that in, but I also tell them, I ask them things like, can we abolish racism without abolishing capitalism? Can we abolish sexism without abolishing capitalism and really all forms of class society? Because

These grow up in a certain context. I mean, Engels kind of implied, and this is, I think, a flaw in his book, that because they're so intertwined that we abolish sexism by abolishing the state and capitalism, and it kind of undercuts the idea of an independent movement of

of women's rights because, well, it's so tied to class and capitalism. We can just concentrate on that. So I think also if we look at some of Marx's political writings, in addition to the great works like Grundrisse and Capital and Communist Manifesto, we can see some of that. I mean, the letter Severus Azulich and the preface to the Communist Manifesto of 1882 are pretty accessible to read

So I assign those. But I think it's really important. I'm not trying to suggest that Marx stop thinking about the kinds of things he talks about in Kappa, Volumon, and Gundrisse in his late writings. There's some people who

who tend in that direction. I'm not a Monan. So I think we have to, especially now with what's happening with economic inequality and all, I mean, that part of Marx does attract people. We can't, we have to make that central. But I do, because I don't want to give the impression from my books, these two books now,

this is like the main thing Marx was writing about. I'm not suggesting that. And when I have, whether it's a grad course or an undergrad course, Capital and Grand Rissa, 1844- which I build most of my courses around those kinds of tips. I think you have to. Yeah, I agree. And obviously, you know, you shouldn't, as you say, you don't want to sort of

do a drastic rewriting where the core issues actually get replaced by something else but it does provide a a good sort of response to as you say that the idea of marx almost becoming a conservative and the easy sort of criticisms that are offered we can perhaps respond to those a bit more so the book's now done kevin as you say what are you working on now

The main thing I'm working on is we're publishing David, well, David Smith, who's been working on it for years, is going to publish an all-English version of these ethnological notebooks. These have been available for 50 years, but in a mixture of German and English. Other languages too, but half, you know, the sentences are all mixed together exactly the way Marx wrote it. And then these writings on colonialism in India,

of north africa of the writings on ancient rome uh where uh when we have a that was published in the marx english example discover last summer and we have an all english version of that that's in preparation so that'll be an edited volume

of a lot of the writings that are the basis for my recent book. And that's with David Smith, Charles Wright, Andres Schutter, and me. We've worked on this for decades, actually. We're going to finally publish it. You have to await the journal edition. I should also mention, it's sad and also funny, this work to transcribe Marx, which now became part of the Marx and Glossophe

volume published last summer, which includes all these notes that I've referred to, that was underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a U.S. government agency that funds primary academic research and it funded papers by George Washington and so on. But there was that one time they gave

a decent amount of money to Marx, Marx Research. That agency, normally when you publish a book, you write to the agency and you say, yeah, you know, we finally published it. Do you want a copy? They don't exist. They've been destroyed by Doge, among so many other groups.

Yeah, as you say, a very sad coda to obviously what's a broad thing happening in the US in terms of the various things being destroyed, but particularly given the important work that they're funding. And it will be very important to have all those texts available in English when they finally are. So as a reminder, my guest today has been Kevin Anderson, and we've been discussing his book, The Late Marxist Revolutionary Road to Colonialism, Gender and Indigenous Communism. And I think as this conversation has hopefully continued,

demonstrated to listeners marx is one of those figures about whom people might have felt before they started listening to data so they knew they know what marx had to say is sort of well known etc is there really anything new to say about marx but i think kevin what you've managed in this book is is to present a really vital and important account of marx which as you say doesn't override the the issues that we know marx was long concerned with questions of class and capitalism etc but

but also really expands upon that and speaks to contemporary political and sociological concerns, I think, in a really important way around questions of gender, colonialism, race, the type of things we spoke about. And also, you know, one of the things that I was really struck by was just

an insight into an amazing scholar just the sort of the way of seeing what this person was spending their time doing it's an amazing insight which I really valued it was a delight to read I'd recommend everyone listening to the podcast that goes out and reads the book especially since there's loads of stuff that we haven't even had the time to discuss in the book so Kevin thanks very much for joining us

I'm very glad to be here. I know I found it very stimulating, not just for today, but for my next work. Oh, pretty. Thanks.