Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Expanded Edition

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    OVERVIEW

    With a New Preface
    344 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2010, 2016

    In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that 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 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. Through highly informed readings of work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision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. For this expanded edition, Anderson has written a new preface that discusses the additional 1879–82 notebook material, as well as the influence of the Russian-American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya on his thinking.

    Table Of Contents

    Introduction

    A Note on Marx’s Relationship to Engels

    A Note on Sources

    Acknowledgments

    Abbreviations

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

    The 1853 Writings on India: Qualified Support for Colonialism

    Marx, Goethe, and Edward Said’s Critique of Eurocentrism

    Resistance and Regeneration in the 1853 Writings

    The 1853 Notes on Indonesia

    On China: The Taiping Rebellion and the Opium Wars

    “India Is Now Our Best Ally”: The 1857 Sepoy Rebellion

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

    Russia as a Counterrevolutionary Threat

    On the Chechens and the “Jewish Question”

    The Turning Point of 1857-58: “In Russia the Movement Is Progressing Better Than Anywhere Else”

    Poland as “External Thermometer” of the European Revolution

    The Polish Uprising of 1863: “The Era of Revolution Has Opened in Europe Once More”

    Debates Over Poland and France within the International

    Dispute with the Proudhonists over Poland

    Last Writings on Poland

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

    “The Signal Has Now Been Given”: The Civil War as a Turning Point

    The Civil War and Class Cleavage in Britain: The Movement against Intervention

    “A War of This Kind Must Be Conducted in a Revolutionary Way”

    Continuing Disagreements with Engels, Even as the Tide Turns

    Toward the First International

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

    Engels and Marx on Ireland, 1843-59: “Give Me Two Hundred Thousand Irishmen and I Will Overthrow the Entire British Monarchy”

    Marx on Ireland During the Crucial Year 1867: “I Once Believed the Separation of Ireland from England to Be Impossible. I Now Regard It as Inevitable”

    Theorizing Ireland after the Upheavals of 1867

    Notes on Irish Anthropology and History

    A Change of Position in 1869-70: Ireland as the “Lever” of the Revolution

    The Controversy with Bakunin and After

    Ireland and the Wider European Revolution

    Chapter 5: From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes

    The Grundrisse: A Multilinear Perspective

    Non-Western Societies, Especially India, in the 1861-63 Economic Manuscripts

    The Narrative Structure of Capital, Vol. I, Especially the French Edition

    Subtexts of Capital, Vol. I

    Chapter 6: Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies

    Gender and Social Hierarchy Among the Iroquois, the Homeric Greeks, and Other Preliterate Societies

    India’s Communal Social Forms under the Impact of Muslim and European Conquest

    Colonialism in Indonesia, Algeria, and Latin America

    Russia: Communal Forms as the “Point of Departure for a Communist Development”

    Conclusion

    Appendix: The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), from the 1920s to Today

    Riazanov and the First Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe

    The Collected Works of Marx and Engels

    Marx’s Oeuvres, as Edited by Rubel

    The Second Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe, Before and After 1989

    References

    Index

    Reviews

    Editorial Reviews

    A valuable contribution to a rather neglected area of study in Marx’s corpus. . . . In offering an empirically grounded picture of Marx as a ‘global thinker,’ alert to the political import of nationalism, race, and ethnicity, this book forcefully challenges deterministic and Eurocentric representations of Marx and Marxist class analysis.”    (Political Studies Review 2015-07-15)

    Anderson’s exceptional book makes the case for Marxism’s relevance with patience, clarity, and rigor, as well as decisiveness. He leaves us convinced that a politics determined to ally class with race, nationality, and ethnicity in the struggle against imperialism would do well to look again at the work of the founder of this immensely rich intellectual and political tradition. Read this; and then read Capital.”   (Journal of Postcolonial Writing 2015-07-15)

    It is a commonplace that Marx’s materialist conception of history is a simplistic grand narrative, positing a reductive account of historical change and expressing a Eurocentric view of the world. . . . Anderson challenges this view. Paying careful attention to what Marx actually wrote about politics at the peripheries—the margins—of Europe, . . . Anderson demonstrates the richness of Marx’s understanding and the extent to which his mature thinking incorporated a nuanced appreciation of the importance of events and processes beyond the heart of Europe. [Marx at the Margins is] a genuinely innovative book.”   (Perspectives on Politics 2015-07-15)

    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.”   (Marx and Philosophy Review of Books 2015-07-15)

    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.”   (International Socialist Review 2015-07-15)
    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 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)

    Book Reviews: English

    Book Reviews: Other Languages

     

    “This truly path-breaking book goes against the grain of the conventional wisdom which reduces Marx to an Eurocentric and economistic thinker…  Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including his journalistic work written for the New York Daily Tribune as well as unpublished material on non-European societies, it brings to the fore a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the various forms of social oppression and struggle”

    — MIchael Löwy, CNRS-Paris, author of The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    “[Concerning] Edward Said’s infamous bracketing of Marx as merely a left-wing manifestation of nineteenth-century Orientalistm…..: The claims that Marxism is Eurocentric, Orientalist, deterministic, and teleological have not gone unanswered…. Marx at the Margins may not be the first to take on this task, but will doubtless be considered a touchstone of discussions on this subject, if not the definitive defense of Marxism for years to come.”

    — Nagesh Rao, International Socialist Review

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    In his recent path-breaking work, Kevin Anderson demonstrates how Marx’s inquiries into the race/class dialectic, both in the US civil war and in Ireland’s struggle against British colonialism, led him to change his earlier hypothesis of society’s unilinear development and the progressive aspect of British colonialism. …Especially in his studies of Russia and non-western formations (from 1857 to his 1879–1882 notes on indigenous peoples), Marx formulated a multilinear and non-reductionist theory of social change that did not focus exclusively on economic relations of production. Anderson concludes that Marx’s mature social theory “revolved around a concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference but also on occasion made those particulars – race, ethnicity, or nationality – determinants for the totality.”

    E. San Juan, Jr., author of Beyond Postcolonial Theory

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    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 Anderson has mastered his material and that Marx himself is the sophisticated and original theorist of history some might not have ever expected him to be.”

    Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles and author of Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Anderson makes the case that Marx’s theory of revolution began over time to concentrate more on the intersectionality of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and class. This contribution enhances the role that a Marxist analysis of class can play in contemporary discussions of critical race theory, theories of interculturality, and multicultural education.

    Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo, authors of Pedagogy and praxis in the age of empire.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    “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-one that will greatly benefit any of its readers.”

    -Bertell Ollman, New York University, author of Alienation

    Translations

    Tamil Nadu, India: New Century Book House, 2022

     

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