The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism by Kevin B. Anderson (Verso, 2025).
For a lot of new socialists who are just starting to read about Marxist concepts like historical materialism, Kevin B. Anderson’s book, published in 2025, covers a lot of gaps in most introductory materials. Specifically, Anderson reframes many of these core concepts outside of the western European context that is familiar for most readers. In particular, he explores three key revisions based on Marx’s later writings: divergences from Engels in his analysis of gender in early societies, a transition away from a unilinear view on the development of socialism, and an emphasis on communal property and its persistence even under colonialism.
Marx on gender
A lot of Marxist analysis regarding the origins of gender inequality comes from Engel’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In this text, Engels locates the start of women’s oppression as being coincident with class society. Anderson reveals that Marx’s late writings often differed from this interpretation, which aligns more with modern anthropological research on the subject. The author criticizes Engel’s famous statement about the “world-historical defeat of the female sex” proceeding from the advent of monogamous marriage as being undialectical. Specifically, it dismisses contradictions and resistance within this “unbroken chain of patriarchal domination” and generalizes, at once, multiple distinct historical stages of production.
One pertinent case study for this topic is Indigenous, preliterate societies and their perspective on women’s roles and rights. The author shows that Marx, in his notes, often distances himself from the idyllic view of Iroquois gender relations more popular with anthropologists of his time and Engels. He underlines how women’s rights were still restricted by men in this civilization. On the other hand, looking at ancient Greek and Roman society, Marx again differs in his interpretations by highlighting how women still resisted domination by men, as evidenced by the persistence of goddess worship and women’s participation in the agora, a form of popular assembly. He also illustrates how some positive shifts occurred for women going from Greece to the time of the Roman Empire. As such, Marx changes his viewpoint to recognize the moments of rupture and conflict amid the development of patriarchy, as opposed to a decisive, singular moment of social transformation.
Elsewhere, the author reasons that Marx took a dialectical lens in examining how male-dominated institutions sought the acquisition of property from women. For example, he mentions how ancient Brahmins in India justified the seizure of women’s property through religious traditions, while the medieval Roman Catholic Church supported women’s property rights in some ways, such as championing their right to dispose of property in their wills — often to the church rather than male relatives. This is further highlighted in Marx’s study of Algeria, where he discerns that the French colonial privatization of land undermined the clans and bolstered male domination over women. In this way, he focuses on the link between property, specifically the undermining of women’s property rights and also collective property, as a major factor in rising gender inequality across societies.
A more complex view of historical materialism
Another salient argument that Anderson makes in this book is that Marx, in his later writings, moved away from the linear, prevalent view of historical materialism that proposed that societies inevitably progressed through slave societies, feudalism, and capitalism before socialism. Rather, he takes a more multilinear approach, recognizing the revolutionary character of many colonized countries or those on the periphery of western Europe. For example, scrutinizing Marx’s notes on anthropological studies of early societies, Marx strongly rejects the idea of feudalism in Algeria and the Indian Subcontinent prior to colonization, whereas he accepts it in the case of Ireland. This evinces the multilinear notion of historical development that Marx is argued to have leaned toward eventually. In another case, Marx zeroes in on how Rome, despite having a dispossessed peasant class that created an urban working class and concentrated wealth in private enterprise and property, did not see the formation of capitalism but rather agrarian slavery.
Through this reversal of his previous position, Marx also seems to observe greater potential for working-class revolution outside of industrialized, capitalist western Europe. For example, by 1869 Marx, writing to Engels, posits Ireland as the “lever” for revolution in Britain, as opposed to an earlier belief that it would start from within Britain.
Marx on precolonial communes and revolution
This segues into the pivotal idea the book explores, which revolves around the communal clan in precolonial societies and its ability to persist under colonization, alongside its revolutionary potential. For instance, Marx records how, for the Iroquois, the formation of private property was obstructed by the clan structure, as the land was inherited through the clan and not by individual allotment. Likewise, when studying the Russian commune in 1881, Marx implies disagreement with other thinkers who believed that these communes were doomed to perish. In another 1877 letter, Marx refutes the unilinear view that Russia is destined to proceed in the same manner of development as western Europe, instead emphasizing the power of the Russian communes in resisting this. To be specific, Marx explains that the Russian commune could diverge from its primitive qualities and evolve into a national mode of collective production, escaping the need to first develop capitalism.
The book also highlights Marx’s writings about Latin America and India on this theme. In the case of Spanish colonialism, Marx held that precolonial social bonds were not so thoroughly destroyed. Rather, they endured for hundreds of years up until his own time, a fact that Marx regards with great importance for the entire continent of South America. On the other hand, in the case of British colonization of India, Marx acknowledges a stronger suppression of the native population. However, Marx focused on the fact that despite the policies that stagnated Indian agriculture and encouraged privatization of property, communal social forms persisted. Through these analyses, the author argues that Marx was developing a new dialectical understanding of the power of rural communes to rebel against class hierarchies imposed by colonialism. Marx’s interests in these social forms also arose in his analysis of the Marathas’ egalitarian clan organization, which the author believes Marx felt could have provided a progressive, communism-like base to oppose British colonialism in India.
Through his writings on the persistence of communal social structures beyond colonization and the potential for revolutions originating from non-capitalist societies like Russia (in large part due to those communal bonds), Anderson sheds light on an important gap missing from a lot of Marx’s more popular writings. Additionally, the coverage of his later writings on gender also provides an interesting rebuttal to most contemporary Marxist understandings of the origins of gender oppression and Engel’s own writings.
As such, this book is quite valuable for most Marxists, whether they are interested in reading more of Marx’s texts or just to gain a greater insight on these topics from a Marxist perspective. This book can be quite dense, at times, and sometimes the author veers a little into literary analysis in order to sift through Marx’s marginalia and letters. Additionally, there was notably less focus on gender compared to the other themes like the clan structure and colonization. With that said, it is still a valuable source and engaging read.
Author
Did you like this article? Help us produce more like it by donating $1, $2, or $5. Donate
