Mapping the Late Marx: Gender, Race, Colonialism, Indigeneity, and Revolution

• In Event: Marxism and Anti-Colonialism (Co-sponsored by Marxist Sociology Section)

Abstract

During Marx’s last years, 1869-82 he examined colonialism and resistance in a number of settings, especially Ireland, India, and Algeria. He also examined communal social formations and gender/social change in these societies as well as Indigenous America, the Paris Commune of 1871, and ancient Greece/Rome. Here one can discern differences with Engels’s more reductionist view of property forms and gender. Finally, Marx’s research was tied to revolutionary prospects in all these societies, in the face of the general weakening of socialist and labor movements in Western Europe after the suppression of the Paris Commune and the end of Reconstruction. These writings also exhibit clear changes from Marx’s earlier more “Eurocentric” ones: (1) change in the directionality of revolution, now seen as emanating from periphery to center, (2) focus anew on gender, linking it to communism in living whether in Indigenous America or the Paris Commune; (3) precapitalist communal forms no longer seen as conservative and backward, but as sources of resistance and even communism, the latter the highest praise he could have given; (4) moved toward notion of abolition rather than taking over the state. In conclusion, look at these newly unearthed and sometimes well-known texts, but avoiding one-sided views.

Author

• Kevin B. Anderson, University of California-Santa Barbara