Spanish version here

Summary: Argentinian Marxist feminist reflects on Marx on proletarianization, slavery, and praxis in light of Anderson’s, recently translated book — Editors

I began reading Kevin B. Anderson’s book Marx at the Margins without quite knowing what I was getting myself into. I tend to think of and present myself as a Marxist feminist, and people interpret that in different ways — though it seems to have made me a suitable candidate to comment on a book like the one that brings us together today. Fortunately, I found myself with a book that spoke directly to my training as a Marxist historian. A training whose main reference was the British Marxist historians, and in particular the figure of E.P. Thompson. But the book also captivated me as a Marxist plain and simple — as someone who seeks to honor that political tradition by maintaining an active commitment to the conflicts and struggles of one’s own time.

So, to begin, I want to point out why the book struck me as a precious exercise in social history. There is a fundamental lesson that those of us trained as social historians and admirers of Thompson learned: in order to do justice to the subjects whose histories we tell, we must be able to analyze them on their own terms. Not with the benefit of hindsight, not by feeding into the idea that we ourselves occupy some supposedly advanced stage in an evolutionary history of progress. Thompson said this because he was a sensitive historian, but also because he had witnessed the terrible drift of a Communist Party shaped by the most schematic vision of Stalinism — a bulletproof stagism, an atrocious insensitivity to the complexity of historical becoming, and a permanent readiness to justify its errors pragmatically and programmatically. Like 99% of his fellow historians, Thompson left the CP in 1956 following the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Why do I bring this up? Because Kevin does something wonderful in the book, which is to show us — historically, that is, with sensitivity to the way time moves through and transforms people — the political thought of Marx. And in doing so, he gives us back two things: on one hand, the movement of his ideas; his changes of mind, the deepening of his commitments, the eagerness with which he was willing to learn in order to shed certain biases and put them into tension. But secondly, Anderson brings us elements to understand Marx in context, profoundly shaped by a series of nodal processes that drew the broad strokes of Western modernity. And this, as someone who researches the history of workers in mid-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, I found captivating. Understanding Marx’s biases about China and what he found exotic there, or his views on Russian “backwardness”, or the way his interpretation of American slavery was also anchored in his situated position as a critic of industrial textile capitalism — all of this led me to approach Marx understanding him at once as a brilliant figure and as a product of his time. It led me to rethink how the world around him informed both his political concerns and his research interests. This also reminded me of a text by Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in which the author invites us to consider that Marx’s notion of the commodity may have been nourished by the Marx family’s constant practice of pawning and redeeming objects — such as Karl’s elegant coat. When he could not count on the regular financial support of his friend Friedrich Engels, pawning his coat allowed him to buy paper, quills, and ink. But recovering it was essential in order to gain entry to the London Library and polish his image as a precarious Jewish migrant in the eyes of those who decided whether or not to grant him access. That text is somewhat akin to Nancy Fraser’s exercise of thinking about the hidden abode of capitalism — the reproduction of life. We see Marx, his wife, and his daughters as people who lived by their work and whatever other means they could scrape together for subsistence in mid-nineteenth-century London.

I would like to move on to the other dimension of the book that I greatly enjoyed, which has to do with the way it contributes to our understanding of Marx’s thought and political praxis. Across its chapters, Anderson invites us to peer into three major issues that speak to the genius of this intellectual. First, because he dismantles the schematic, almost caricatured version of Marx’s thought that reached us through his detractors — but also through a consolidated version of the Prussian thinker filtered through the most rancid Stalinism (though sometimes also taken up by critics of Moscow who had no particular problem adopting that stagist, Eurocentric, and teleological outlook). I think of the many uncritical adoptions of that stagist idea supposedly representing the ABCs of Marx and Engels, and I want to share with Kevin a text by an Argentine journalist and intellectual, José Pablo Feinmann, who imagined a fictional encounter between Marx and Felipe Varela — a rural caudillo from the northwest of our country, a contemporary of Marx. In that encounter, Marx tells him that he understands his struggle against “modern progress” because it had come to destroy his regional economy, his conception of politics, and of a possible country. But it was only through that progress that the proletariat would be born — the political class that would bury the national bourgeoisie allied with England. And as much as there is something poetic in that idea of Marx, in what Feinmann imagined when he dreamed up that encounter, what Anderson shows us is that this is a very unfair way of understanding the complexity of Marxist thought.

Anderson reveals Marx’s acuity in analyzing slavery in the southern United States — not as an outdated, pre-capitalist remnant, but as a fundamental cog in capitalism, and therefore central to the interests of British textile industrialists who needed cheap cotton. It is interesting to note that only recently has North American historiography engaged in depth with analyzing these indissoluble ties between slavery and capitalism, through the works of Seth Rockman and Sven Beckert (Slavery’s Capitalism), which also reveal the capitalist rationality in the organization of enslaved labor — or Rockman’s recent book Plantation Goods, which shows that the primary destination of textile commodity production in the “free” North was to clothe the enslaved people of the South. Marx was even capable, in his analysis of mid-nineteenth-century China, of delving into the horrors of the Opium War and observing those other forms of enslaved labor within the global chains of capital that Chinese coolies in Cuba and Peru represented at the time. We thus see a Marx far removed from the stereotyped vision constructed by a postcolonialism that has been rather unrigorous in its study of his thought and political intervention — someone who, even within the interpretive coordinates of his era, understood the way in which race and class were intertwined in the organization of global capitalism.

Finally, I think the valorization of Marx as a journalist — his political analysis and intervention through the written press, which was also a source of income — is of the utmost importance. It also allows us to think about the role of the press at the time, the role of those first telegraphs in bringing distant news, and the genuine possibility that this medium of dissemination offered for conceiving of an international — and internationalist — proletariat, whose struggles were linked across the pages of a newspaper.

Beckert, Sven, and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Feinmann, José Pablo. “El día en que Marx se entrevistó con Felipe Varela” en La astucia de la razón. Buenos Aires: Norma, 2001.

Fraser, Nancy. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism.” New Left Review 86 (March–April 2014): 55–72.

Rockman, Seth. Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Stallybrass, Peter. “Marx’s Coat.” In Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, edited by Patricia Spyer, 183–207. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.

Gabriela Mitidieri is affiliated with the Instituto de Investigaciones en Estudios de Género, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Laboratório de Pesquisas em Conexões Atlânticas, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Río de Janeiro) gmitidieri@gmail.com