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

Jun 8, 2025

In this engaging conversation, guest Kevin Anderson, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara, dives into his latest work, exploring the overlooked 'late Marx.' He discusses Marx's insights into colonialism, gender, and indigenous communism, highlighting how these themes reshape our understanding of revolutionary change. The dialogue also touches on the nuances of Marx's ethnological notebooks and their implications for resistance movements today. Anderson prompts a reevaluation of how Marx's ideas can inform contemporary social struggles and academic discourse.

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INSIGHT

Late Marx's Revolutionary Shift

The late Marx saw communal social formations as revolutionary bases, unlike earlier views.
He recognized indigenous communist groups and women's social power as key to global revolutionary change.

INSIGHT

Marx and Native American Societies

Marx's interest in Native American communal societies was linked to broader debates in Russia and revolutionary movements.
He sought alliances and new revolutionary paths during a lull in Western revolutionary activity.

INSIGHT

Marx's Dialectical Gender View

Marx's dialectical view linked gender relations to both transformation and resistance in different societies.
The integration of gender with anti-colonial resistance was complex and uneven in his late writings.

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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Notebooks, along with letters, essays and a scattering of published texts remain only poorly known (and in some cases unpublished or not yet fully translated into English) and form the backbone of Anderson’s study.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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