In his final years, 1877-82, Marx studied three non-capitalist agrarian societies in great depth:

(1) Russia’s communal villages were increasingly penetrated by capitalist social relations, undermining the older agrarian collectivism, but new revolutionary movements had also grown there.

(2) In South Asia, British colonialism had uprooted much of the precapitalist village structure, with many forms of revolt along the way.

(3) Two millennia earlier, Rome had transitioned from an agrarian social order based upon a free peasantry to one based upon slave labor, amid both plebeian resistance and slave uprisings.

These writings, some of them still to be published and not taken up in Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, offer new insights into Marx’s concept of transition and of revolution.