Ciarán O'Rourke
Karl Marx, Wikimedia Commons
For socialists dismayed by the current toxicity and rabidity of the world’s expropriators-in-chief, Kevin B. Anderson’s timely new study is recommended reading. Parsing the eminent radical’s notebooks, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads (Verso, 2025) offers a portrait of an omnivorous, questioning mind at work, demonstrating how historical patterns of gendered labour, “indigenous communism” and anti-colonial struggle preoccupied the author of Capital in approximately the decade and a half before his death in 1883. Accenting these aspects of Marx’s mature thought, Anderson posits a revised and resonant understanding of Marxism as such, reaffirming its role as a vital theory of political action: resilient and combative enough to meet the formidably complex challenges we face today – a fighting philosophy.
Throughout, Anderson remains alert to what he terms Marx’s “dialectical sensitivity to social contradictions”, a sensitivity that enabled him, for instance, to admire the substantially democratic character of traditional Iroquois society, while also acknowledging some of its patriarchal customs and internal hierarchies, which he refused to romanticize. The brazen violence of European colonialism also emerges as a motif in Marx’s writings in this period. In 1879, he was struck by “the fact that the fullest attempt by French colonialism to destroy the Indigenous communal social forms” in Algeria, the object of French imperial ambitions since 1830, “came in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871”. The Conservative National Assembly, which had ordered themassacre of the Communards, passed a series of “laws designed to hasten the break-up and privatization of the land” in the colony – measures that amounted to “gangsterism” by another name. As for the civilized parliamentarians themselves, Marx said, their goal was simply the “destruction of collective property” in Algeria: their “debate revolved only around the method, how to kill it off.” He went on:
The expropriation of the Arabs was intended by law: 1) in order to furnish the French colonists with the greatest possible land; 2) by tearing the Arabs away from their natural connection to the soil and thus to crush the remaining power of the already disintegrating clan associations, and thereby any danger of rebellion.
Such observations, Anderson contends, are indicative of a decisive shift in Marx’s thinking, which led him to view “the modern state alongside capitalism itself as the enemy of human liberation”, and to reverse an assumption encoded in his earlier writings: that revolutionary change would (and could only) emanate from the industrial centres of Western Europe outwards. Instead, he came to believe that the imperial-capitalist apparatus could be scuppered and derailed even in its non-industrialized zones of operation – as suggested by the burgeoning mass movements and proto-revolutionary agitation in Ireland, which held clear implications for class politics in England’s manufacturing hubs. “For a long time I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy”, he wrote to Engels in December 1869: “Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite [….] The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.”
To the schematically minded – self-described Marxists whose vision of socialism centres on an all-powerful super-state and expanded industrial potentialities – Anderson’s interpretation will seem controversial. To most thoughtful anti-capitalists, however, his thesis will be like light in a dark time: a welcome affirmation of Marx’s work in an embattled and beleaguered age, when engineered climate catastrophe is considered profitable and genocide a routine means of state-building and consolidation. As Anderson’s methodical, scholastically precise commentary implies, even apparently unprecedented crises in the capitalist system have causes, and historical origins, which “relentless criticism” of the kind championed by Marx himself can name and accuse.
Our understanding of the breadth and richness of Marx’s thinking is only enhanced by Anderson’s attentive close-reading of the available archival materials, as well as his fluent engagement with a range of subsequent figures, from Leon Trotsky and Raya Dunayevskaya to Peter Hudis and Kohei Saito. Anderson is deft and magnanimous in embedding his own (highly original) investigations in the fertile commoning-ground of Marxist historiography, a planet-wide and multi-generational field. Indeed, his book at times resembles a primer on contemporary Marxist research (in particular, those initiatives with a humanist or eco-socialist inflection) – and in that sense will be a must-read for budding historical materialists.
Although Anderson parses Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks in detail, one author who does not appear in his otherwise extensive bibliography is the Surrealist and IWW historian Franklin Rosemont, whose superb and inspiring essay on the same late text is a masterpiece in revivification, creative reading, and critical provocatio . In some ways, Rosemont’s rousing commentary would be the ideal supplement to Anderon’s more punctilious study. In the spirit of communality and comradely goodwill that Anderson himself frequently exemplifies, I should say that Rosemont’s work was first recommended to me by an exuberant socialist book-cataloguer named John Flynn, who at the time was burrowing away, like Marx’s “old mole”, in the windowless vaults of a rather dreary copyright-library in Dublin, spending seditious hours poring over first-hand accounts of the “Wobblies”, when he should have been filing business textbooks in the lower decks. We might wonder whether the enthused, lovingly poetic appreciations of Marx that prevail among the Flynns and Rosemonts of the world may eventually prove more valuable than the disputes and deliberations of the academic Left, which – it must be admitted – consume most of Anderson’s focus.
This last feature is not inconsequential. There’s an oddly hermetic texture to Anderson’s analysis, which has a great deal to offer in the way of refined commentary on Marx’s multi-faceted theorisations, but conveys little sense of history as a process that actual people might create, resist, redirect, or incite. Such remarks may seem pedantic – or even unjust – but they are, I think, valid. One reason why the prison memoirs of Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist prince, retain their verve today is his energetic identification with the plight (and testimonies) of other incarcerated activists around the globe – as when he includes, for example, in his critique of the social stratifications and many regressive elements of Tsarist rule in Russia, a passing salute to Michael Davitt, whose later land agitation he also followed with interest. Similarly, Kropotkin’s history of the French Revolution – like Marx’s Capital, researched and largely written in the British Museum Library – swells with personal feeling for the enragés and hungry peasantry, whose audacity and instinctive radicalism, he suggested, proved an instruction-manual for the so-called leading men in Paris as to what was possible and necessary, in the historic re-set they were presuming to effect. Marx was more imperious in his style (Bakunin accused him of having an authoritarian, over-intellectualized temperament); he was fuelled as much by a contempt for “block-headed” English historians, and for populist rhetoricians of the Left, as by the undoubtedly fierce sympathy he held for the masses of brutalized and exploited workers. Cleaving as it does so closely to the grain of Marx’s correspondence and journals, Anderson’s book is studious and carefully argued, but may in the end lack the human heat that makes history-making (feel) possible.
Tantalizingly, Anderson records near the close that from 1877 onwards “Marx had many ties both to intellectuals and to the People’s Will” organization in Russia, which he describes (somewhat sweepingly) as being “at that time the world’s most active revolutionary movement.” It’s lamentable that such connections are not integrated more fully into Anderson’s prior discussion. It also seems indicative that a study contextualizing Marx by reference to “indigenous” land practices and political formations in the same period should overlook the Zulus’ heroic trouncing of British Imperial forces at Isandlwana in 1879, or indeed the resounding defeat of the U.S. cavalry by Sioux-led tribes at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Anderson is an eloquent advocate for a progressively “multilinear” conception of historical development – a paradigm open to, and shaped by, supposedly “peripheral” varieties of anti-colonial and anti-extractivist resistance – but still seems at times to be writing from the vantage-point of the metropole, where existing indigenous practices are studied rather than lived, and only certain bodies (and intellects) are deemed to be historical agents. (Incidentally, America’s railroad strikers of 1877, whom Marx viewed as a potentially revolutionary force, are also omitted from Anderson’s commentary, despite their robust proletarian credentials).
Anderson’s great strength is his infectious and driving certainty that Marx’s work still contains, if not exactly the answers we need, at least a model for how we might conceptualise, absorb, and implement them – in our own barbarously modern century. He is an exemplary scholar, proceeding with rigour, clarity, and an open mind, in an effort to re-think and re-examine a political paradigm that many on the Left are wary of questioning (and all on the Right would like to see condemned to the ash-heap of history). The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads marks a vital contribution to this project. Radicals everywhere should read it and make it their own – before the new authoritarians ban it from the bookshelves, or bar our library doors for good.
For socialists dismayed by the current toxicity and rabidity of the world’s expropriators-in-chief, Kevin B. Anderson’s timely new study is recommended reading. Parsing the eminent radical’s notebooks, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads (Verso, 2025) offers a portrait of an omnivorous, questioning mind at work, demonstrating how historical patterns of gendered labour, “indigenous communism” and anti-colonial struggle preoccupied the author of Capital in approximately the decade and a half before his death in 1883. Accenting these aspects of Marx’s mature thought, Anderson posits a revised and resonant understanding of Marxism as such, reaffirming its role as a vital theory of political action: resilient and combative enough to meet the formidably complex challenges we face today – a fighting philosophy.
Throughout, Anderson remains alert to what he terms Marx’s “dialectical sensitivity to social contradictions”, a sensitivity that enabled him, for instance, to admire the substantially democratic character of traditional Iroquois society, while also acknowledging some of its patriarchal customs and internal hierarchies, which he refused to romanticize. The brazen violence of European colonialism also emerges as a motif in Marx’s writings in this period. In 1879, he was struck by “the fact that the fullest attempt by French colonialism to destroy the Indigenous communal social forms” in Algeria, the object of French imperial ambitions since 1830, “came in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871”. The Conservative National Assembly, which had ordered themassacre of the Communards, passed a series of “laws designed to hasten the break-up and privatization of the land” in the colony – measures that amounted to “gangsterism” by another name. As for the civilized parliamentarians themselves, Marx said, their goal was simply the “destruction of collective property” in Algeria: their “debate revolved only around the method, how to kill it off.” He went on:
The expropriation of the Arabs was intended by law: 1) in order to furnish the French colonists with the greatest possible land; 2) by tearing the Arabs away from their natural connection to the soil and thus to crush the remaining power of the already disintegrating clan associations, and thereby any danger of rebellion.
Such observations, Anderson contends, are indicative of a decisive shift in Marx’s thinking, which led him to view “the modern state alongside capitalism itself as the enemy of human liberation”, and to reverse an assumption encoded in his earlier writings: that revolutionary change would (and could only) emanate from the industrial centres of Western Europe outwards. Instead, he came to believe that the imperial-capitalist apparatus could be scuppered and derailed even in its non-industrialized zones of operation – as suggested by the burgeoning mass movements and proto-revolutionary agitation in Ireland, which held clear implications for class politics in England’s manufacturing hubs. “For a long time I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy”, he wrote to Engels in December 1869: “Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite [….] The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.”
To the schematically minded – self-described Marxists whose vision of socialism centres on an all-powerful super-state and expanded industrial potentialities – Anderson’s interpretation will seem controversial. To most thoughtful anti-capitalists, however, his thesis will be like light in a dark time: a welcome affirmation of Marx’s work in an embattled and beleaguered age, when engineered climate catastrophe is considered profitable and genocide a routine means of state-building and consolidation. As Anderson’s methodical, scholastically precise commentary implies, even apparently unprecedented crises in the capitalist system have causes, and historical origins, which “relentless criticism” of the kind championed by Marx himself can name and accuse.
Our understanding of the breadth and richness of Marx’s thinking is only enhanced by Anderson’s attentive close-reading of the available archival materials, as well as his fluent engagement with a range of subsequent figures, from Leon Trotsky and Raya Dunayevskaya to Peter Hudis and Kohei Saito. Anderson is deft and magnanimous in embedding his own (highly original) investigations in the fertile commoning-ground of Marxist historiography, a planet-wide and multi-generational field. Indeed, his book at times resembles a primer on contemporary Marxist research (in particular, those initiatives with a humanist or eco-socialist inflection) – and in that sense will be a must-read for budding historical materialists.
Although Anderson parses Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks in detail, one author who does not appear in his otherwise extensive bibliography is the Surrealist and IWW historian Franklin Rosemont, whose superb and inspiring essay on the same late text is a masterpiece in revivification, creative reading, and critical provocatio . In some ways, Rosemont’s rousing commentary would be the ideal supplement to Anderon’s more punctilious study. In the spirit of communality and comradely goodwill that Anderson himself frequently exemplifies, I should say that Rosemont’s work was first recommended to me by an exuberant socialist book-cataloguer named John Flynn, who at the time was burrowing away, like Marx’s “old mole”, in the windowless vaults of a rather dreary copyright-library in Dublin, spending seditious hours poring over first-hand accounts of the “Wobblies”, when he should have been filing business textbooks in the lower decks. We might wonder whether the enthused, lovingly poetic appreciations of Marx that prevail among the Flynns and Rosemonts of the world may eventually prove more valuable than the disputes and deliberations of the academic Left, which – it must be admitted – consume most of Anderson’s focus.
This last feature is not inconsequential. There’s an oddly hermetic texture to Anderson’s analysis, which has a great deal to offer in the way of refined commentary on Marx’s multi-faceted theorisations, but conveys little sense of history as a process that actual people might create, resist, redirect, or incite. Such remarks may seem pedantic – or even unjust – but they are, I think, valid. One reason why the prison memoirs of Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist prince, retain their verve today is his energetic identification with the plight (and testimonies) of other incarcerated activists around the globe – as when he includes, for example, in his critique of the social stratifications and many regressive elements of Tsarist rule in Russia, a passing salute to Michael Davitt, whose later land agitation he also followed with interest. Similarly, Kropotkin’s history of the French Revolution – like Marx’s Capital, researched and largely written in the British Museum Library – swells with personal feeling for the enragés and hungry peasantry, whose audacity and instinctive radicalism, he suggested, proved an instruction-manual for the so-called leading men in Paris as to what was possible and necessary, in the historic re-set they were presuming to effect. Marx was more imperious in his style (Bakunin accused him of having an authoritarian, over-intellectualized temperament); he was fuelled as much by a contempt for “block-headed” English historians, and for populist rhetoricians of the Left, as by the undoubtedly fierce sympathy he held for the masses of brutalized and exploited workers. Cleaving as it does so closely to the grain of Marx’s correspondence and journals, Anderson’s book is studious and carefully argued, but may in the end lack the human heat that makes history-making (feel) possible.
Tantalizingly, Anderson records near the close that from 1877 onwards “Marx had many ties both to intellectuals and to the People’s Will” organization in Russia, which he describes (somewhat sweepingly) as being “at that time the world’s most active revolutionary movement.” It’s lamentable that such connections are not integrated more fully into Anderson’s prior discussion. It also seems indicative that a study contextualizing Marx by reference to “indigenous” land practices and political formations in the same period should overlook the Zulus’ heroic trouncing of British Imperial forces at Isandlwana in 1879, or indeed the resounding defeat of the U.S. cavalry by Sioux-led tribes at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Anderson is an eloquent advocate for a progressively “multilinear” conception of historical development – a paradigm open to, and shaped by, supposedly “peripheral” varieties of anti-colonial and anti-extractivist resistance – but still seems at times to be writing from the vantage-point of the metropole, where existing indigenous practices are studied rather than lived, and only certain bodies (and intellects) are deemed to be historical agents. (Incidentally, America’s railroad strikers of 1877, whom Marx viewed as a potentially revolutionary force, are also omitted from Anderson’s commentary, despite their robust proletarian credentials).
Anderson’s great strength is his infectious and driving certainty that Marx’s work still contains, if not exactly the answers we need, at least a model for how we might conceptualise, absorb, and implement them – in our own barbarously modern century. He is an exemplary scholar, proceeding with rigour, clarity, and an open mind, in an effort to re-think and re-examine a political paradigm that many on the Left are wary of questioning (and all on the Right would like to see condemned to the ash-heap of history). The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads marks a vital contribution to this project. Radicals everywhere should read it and make it their own – before the new authoritarians ban it from the bookshelves, or bar our library doors for good.
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