ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well.

Marx at the Margins ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi-layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Kevin B. Anderson is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California–Santa Barbara and most recently, with Janet Afary, the coauthor of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

REVIEWS

"Marxist scholar Kevin Anderson has undertaken an exhaustive reading of some of Marx's lesser-known writings. He explores how Marx developed and changed his ideas about societies that, in the 19th century, were still peripheral to capitalism. . . . This whole book is fascinating."

— Colin Barker, Socialist Review

“Anderson may just have provided the burgeoning Marx industry with another major focus for its research and debates. Marx at the Margins reveals a dimension of Marx that is very little known and even less understood. Anderson makes an overwhelming case for the importance of Marx’s views on non-Western societies, ethnicity, nationalism, and race to our interpretations of his thinking over a wide range of topics. This is an incredibly innovative, interesting, and terribly important book that will greatly benefit any of its readers.”

— Bertell Ollman, New York University

“Marx at the Margins is a book of tremendous scope, filled with important scholarly contributions, including Anderson’s highly original reading of Marx’s theory of history. In this truly ground-breaking work, Kevin Anderson analyzes Marx’s journalism and various unpublished writings on European colonialism and the developing countries for the first time, breaking the long-held stereotype that Marx was an incorrigible class and economic reductionist. Well-written in clear and accessible prose, Marx at the Margins proves that Marx is the sophisticated and original theorist of history some might not have ever expected him to be.”

— Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles

“Anderson’s survey of a large swathe of Marx’s writings illustrates the volution of Marx’s thinking and the breadth of vision. This is major work which will influence debate and thinking for a long time to come.”

— Barry Healy, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

“Marx at the Margins is essential reading for anyone seeking to explore the sophistication and complexity of Marx and Engels’s writings on race, nationalism, ethnicity, and the historical development of non-Western societies.”

— Nagesh Rao, International Socialist Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Colonial Encounters in the 1850s: The European Impact on India, Indonesia, and China

2. Russia and Poland: The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution

3. Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution

4. Ireland: Nationalism, Class, and the Labor Movement

5. From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes

6. Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies

Conclusion

Appendix. The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to Today

Notes

References

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