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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MARX’S LAST STUDIES  
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Charles Reitz
May 15, 2025
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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_ Between 1879 and 1882, Marx the studied latest research and writing
on communal clan-based social formations around the globe, focusing on
the changing nature of land ownership and gender and family relations
within these societies. _

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The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and
Indigenous Communism
Kevin B Anderson
Verso
ISBN: 9781804296875

Karl Marx’s very last socio-political investigations are the central
subject of Kevin B. Anderson’s new book exploring the issues Marx
was contemplating during the last working period of his life. In the
years just before his death in 1883, Marx continued to use the vast
resources of the British Museum to study in depth the work of an
international grouping of selected scholars who were publishing on
themes of the utmost apparent urgency to him. Between 1879 and 1882,
Marx undertook a wide-reaching inspection of the latest research and
writing on the history and anthropology of communal clan-based social
formations around the globe, focusing on the changing nature of land
ownership and gender and family relations within these societies.
Anderson wants to discern what insights Marx might have drawn from the
research publications he was consulting regarding possibilities for a
transition to a classless society and in terms of new understandings
of possible forms of resistance, rebellion, socialist revolution and
social transformation.

Anderson acquits himself well given the formidable task of making
sense of Marx’s notes and excerpts from a multiplicity of seemingly
disparate sources and authors. The identification of Marx’s central
and intertwined research concerns requires an experienced critical
sense like Anderson’s, deeply steeped in the trajectory of Marx’s
and Marxist thought. Anderson thus has been able to extrapolate
several discoveries from the detailed journals Marx kept during his
last productive years. These journals in booklet form are made up of
lengthy hand-copied excerpts from the reference materials he was
studying with brief appended commentaries of his own. These booklets
are preserved in the International Institute for Social History in
Amsterdam. Because of Marx’s idiosyncratic penmanship, these are
largely illegible except to the trained eye. It has taken over a
decade for them to be worked out by experts in Marx’s writing habits
at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Anderson has been
partnering with the team of editors who have in 2024 published these
materials as _MEGA2_ _IV-27_. The now readable yet fragmentary
transcripts are available (in German) from the International
Marx-Engels Foundation and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences;
not in print, but accessible online. Anderson is working with a team
of translators and editors to publish these materials in English as a
volume for scholars.

Anderson’s extensive earlier publications and scholarly familiarity
with the works Marx, Engels, Lenin and Raya Dunayevskaya equip him to
furnish also a fulsome discussion of classic and supplemental sources
as context for understanding, that is, _Capital, The Critique of the
Gotha Program_, writings on Ireland, 1869-70, _1844 Manuscripts_,
_German Ideology_, etc.). Anderson drew upon the new notebook
materials ahead of their publication due to his close working
association with the Berlin editors. In this volume, he supplements
these sources with English translations of notebook excerpts that have
been included in earlier studies of the late Marx by Lawrence Krader
and Hans-Peter Harstick. Anderson’s overarching analysis is
organized by means of six skillfully structured chapters: 1) Marx’s
study of the history and anthropology of indigenous communal social
formations in the Americas and in Rome; 2) Marx’s attention to
altered gender relations as these relate to changing property and land
ownership schemes; 3) Marx’s consideration of historical reasons for
multiple pathways to a socialist political future; 4) Marx’s
abhorrence of colonialism’s destruction of communal social
formations by French and British imperialists and his praise for the
indigenous resistance against external oppression; 5) Marx’s
condemnation of slavery in ancient Rome and his criticism of the
reactionary beliefs in racial or caste superiority held by patrician
and plebian enslavers as well as American ‘poor whites’; 6)
Marx’s expressions of an essentially humanist need to overcome
racial and ethnic prejudice, recognize nations, ethnic sectors of
society, and move toward the abolition of the state. Anderson’s book
is thus a guide to the reading of _MEGA2 IV-27_ as having relevance to
our political challenges today.

On the first point above, Anderson probes Marx’s lengthy
transcriptions from two primary sources in then-current anthropology
that documented changes to communal indigenous relationships with
regard to shifting patterns of land ownership. The first of these is
Henry Lewis Morgan’s _Ancient Society_. Morgan’s study looked at
a) classless clan societies in the Americas (the Iroquois, Dakota,
Aztecs, Incas) and b) pre-class clan societies in Greece and Rome. The
second is Maksim Kovalevsky’s book on communal land ownership in the
Americas, India and Algeria. In both Morgan and Kovalevsky, the study
of Iroquois customs and relationships becomes key to understanding
other early clan-based societies. ‘Morgan and Marx find numerous
affinities between these early European societies and Native American
ones, especially the Iroquois, in this sense reading or re-reading
very early Greco-Roman institutions through the lens of Iroquois
ones’ (32). Marx viewed Morgan’s work in this regard as a major
innovation. Marx was attuned to the transition from clan to class
structures and the changes from egalitarian norms to political
economic hierarchies and gender changes. Kovalevsky’s work stressed
the persistence of highly inclusive communal social formations in
India as well as the changes in land ownership over time as these
communal forms came under the rule of the Brahmins and the state. Due
to Kovalevsky’s work ‘Marx saw the Russian commune’s future
prospects and its relation to a wider European revolution that he also
was conceptualizing right up to the end of his life’ (70-71).

For the second point, Engels had also consulted these late journals
when studying the work of Morgan for his _Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State_. This ‘forms an important milestone
in Marxist thought, as it places women’s oppression at the center of
the whole structure of class society’ (76). Engels’ treatment of
Marx’s notes on Morgan is, however, weak in Anderson’s estimation,
with Engels having adopted Rousseau’s idealization of indigenous
communism and having constructed a specious version of Marx’s
materialism. Anderson focuses on a larger problem as well: Engels’
assertion of ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex’ (78).
Anderson sees this as undercutting an independent women’s movement
struggling against sexism in a capitalist society (79). Anderson
stresses that Raya Dunayevskaya years ago ‘put forth the first
feminist critique of _Origin _that contrasted this work to Marx’s
own findings and methodology’ (83). Anderson supplies his own
lengthy interpretation of Morgan on family and gender relations in the
indigenous communal formations of both Native American and in
Greco-Roman societies. This is augmented with an interpretation of
Marx’s late period notes and excerpts from Ludwig Lange’s 1856
_Ancient Rome_. Anderson develops a richly detailed analysis of these
materials with the assistance of the contemporary feminist
perspectives of Adrienne Rich and Heather Brown.

For the third point, Anderson discusses the trajectory of change in
Marx’s understanding of developmental stages in the emergence of
different modes of the family as well as stages in modes of
production. He highlights that in 1859 Marx wrote: ‘In broad
outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of
production may be designated as progressive epochs [_progressive
Epochen_] in the economic development of society’ (126). Anderson
finds much evidence that Marx’s perspective changed in his last
years from a unilinear conception to a multilinear account of social
development. Anderson emphasizes that it is ‘hard to see the
transition from the ancient to the feudal mode as progressive in
technological or other substantive ways’ (128). Further, ‘Marx’s
notes on Kovalevsky (1879), Morgan (1880-81), Phear (1880-81), and
Maine (1881)’ (134) reject seeing all societies that have given rise
to capitalism as having been feudal in form. Anderson emphasizes that
the later Marx considered the classic shift from feudalism to
capitalism to be the case only in Western societies, ‘with England
exhibiting the “classic form” of the process’ (144). The 1872-75
French edition of _Capital_ is described as having demonstrated
‘Marx’s increasingly multilinear approach to social development’
(142). Likewise, correspondence (and drafts of letters) between Marx
and revolutionary Russian intellectual Vera Zasulich in 1881 discuss
‘Indigenous, agrarian communism as a source of future positive
development that could allow Russia to bypass the primitive
accumulation of capital and develop “in a socialist direction”’
(148). Marx is held here to suggest that ‘a socialist future can
emerge from the village communes if the influences bearing down on
them from capitalist encroachment can somehow be overcome’ (150).
Thus, Marx is seen as having clearly moved away from earlier unilinear
formulations.

On point four, Anderson further finds evidence that the late Marx held
that communal land ownership could contribute to the possibility of
revolt (186). Marx’s study of the writings of Kovalevsky (a well as
Robert Sewell and John Phear) – on the colonial policies of the
French in Algeria, the British in India and the Spanish in Latin
America – elicited both a respect for the stubborn persistence of
indigenous communal formations in the face of imperial political
forces as well as regret for the tendencies toward the destruction of
collective property and its replacement by private property relations
in land ownership.

For point five, Rome, India and Russia were studied by Marx with
regard to intensifying tendencies toward political inequality and
social polarization. He made extensive notes in this regard from a
reading of four additional texts on Rome (Bücher, Friedländer,
Jhering and Lange) during his final period of research. These authors
investigated historical patterns of social change toward hierarchy.
Communal and kinship forms of clan-based societies morphed into male
dominated class social formations characterized by private property
and slave labor. ‘he patricians emerged from the chiefs of the
original clan that came together to found the city of Rome’ (192).
Prisoners of war are ‘booty’ of the state and enslaved; some
remained in service to the state, others sold. Marx understandably
also studied the patterns of rebellion of the oppressed. ‘In the
Sicilian slave war some 70,000 slaves recently imported from Syria and
destitute local peasants rose up’ (204). Still Roman patricians and
plebians were conditioned to feel superior to the ethnically diverse
enslaved persons, a situation which Marx recognized as analogous to
the racism of  the ‘poor whites’ of the America south. Yet
‘Marx never stopped hoping for an alliance of Black and white labor
in the United States or of Irish and English workers on the other side
of the Atlantic’ (212). India is also at the center of Marx’s last
notebooks where Kovalevsky and Sewell recount details of the Sepoy
Uprising and the Maratha resistance. The late Marx, Anderson
concludes, was preoccupied with indigenous communal forms, like the
Maratha, as possessing real possibilities for emancipatory change.

Lastly, on point six, Marx’s novel treatments of Ireland and Russia,
each having social movements that might spark revolution, stand at
both the very start and the very conclusion of Anderson’s book. The
Irish revolution is seen as having the potential to pry open English
revolution; so too, Russian communal villages may link up with a
communist movement in Western Europe with the two mutually supporting
one another. These assessments may be seen as harbingers of
revolutionary possibilities from which the working class is
de-centered (though not displaced). At the same time, new alternatives
to capitalism are envisioned in the wake of the Paris Commune, which
seek ‘anti-statist revolution alongside the anti-capitalist
revolution’ (246)_. _Anderson poses the question: ‘How would Marx
have further modified his vision of communism, of abolition of the
state as well as capital, in light of his research on Indigenous
communism and communal villages in his last years?’ (252). In three
letters of this period ‘Marx sees the revolution breaking out first
in Russia’ (254). ‘In this case, Russia’s Indigenous form of
rural communism would be the spark’ (256). Anderson concludes that
Marx ‘sees the communal forms within these societies as taking on
especially revolutionary dimensions in times of social stress and
conflict’ (265).

A massive amount of careful intellectual labor has gone into this
illuminating volume, both on the part of Kevin Anderson and the Marx
scholars in Amsterdam and Berlin. These research records and
Anderson’s commentary upon them open up an exciting new resource
from the literary estate of Karl Marx for revolutionary theory and
politics.

Charles Reitz is the author most recently of _Herbert Marcuse as
Social Justice Educator_ (New York and London: Routledge, 2025).

* Karl Marx
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* anti-colonialism
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* socialism
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* communalism
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* gender relations
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