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The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism
By Kevin B Anderson
London: Verso Press, 2025

�鶹��ý’s Federico Fuentes spoke with Marxist sociologist Kevin B Anderson about his latest book, , which delves into Karl Marx’s final writings to unearth key ideas of critical importance for socialists today.

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Why the specific interest in late Marx?

Similar to those decades ago on the “early Marx”, discussions of the “late Marx” have been going on for some time, though they have only really crystallised in the past five years.

In my opinion, we cannot reject the late Marx any more than the early Marx: both are Marx and both say a lot of interesting things.

Also, I do not think we can point to some kind of break between the “mature” Marx of Capital and Grundrisse and either of these periods.

What I wanted to do with this book was to specify the late Marx as a distinct period in his writings.

You note some Marxist scholars have narrowly focused on Marx’s writings on “capital and class to the exclusion of other issues”. What are these other issues?

While several others have done work on the late Marx’s ideas regarding ecology, I have focused my attention on his notes regarding race, gender and colonialism.

These issues are present throughout Marx’s writings, including in his earliest stages. But some aspects become more pronounced over time, both quantitatively and in terms of new positions he adopted.

That is what I seek to draw out.

Why are these issues important for understanding Marx’s critique of capitalism?

If you look at the penultimate chapter of Capital Volume I, Marx talks about the forces of production becoming more and more concentrated — which in turn leads to growth and concentration of the working class as a social force.

Marx outlines how capital develops over time, explaining that the time for revolutionary transition will come and that capital will have to be overthrown to overcome capitalism’s contradictions.

But there is no mention of race, gender or the state. What Marx presents is an abstract model — abstract in a good sense, but it means his explanation remains at a very general level.

It was towards the end of his life that Marx started focusing a lot more on these other issues. For example, Marx looked at interactions between colonised sectors and the so-called core capitalist countries, such as between Ireland and England.

But he also looked at the relationship between the English and Irish inside England, which he viewed as similar in some ways to the racialised relationship between white and Black workers in the United States.

That is very interesting because the two are both directly connected to colonialism: on one hand, you have the Irish colonial factor and national movement (which he supports), and its impacts on British capitalism.

On the other, you have this proletariat of Irish immigrants inside England who have been forced to migrate, largely due to British colonialism. So, he is looking at this issue from various angles.

Unfortunately, some Marxists today consider such complexities and issues particular to different capitalist societies as extraneous, when in fact they are very important.

Did his evolving views affect the way he envisioned revolutions?

Marx’s abstract model led him to initially believe that England, given its large industries and proletariat, was the only country with the economic conditions for an anti-capitalist revolution.

But by the late 1860s, his thinking started to change. Marx still viewed British workers as having a lot of revolutionary potential, but he started to see that the revolutionary energy might come from outside the most advanced industrial sectors of the English working class.

Marx instead started to see that an agrarian uprising in Ireland could be the spark to shake up Britain and push it in a revolutionary direction.

Something else emerges in Marx’s writings in the late 1870s and early ’80s. He starts to see these revolts in the periphery not only as politically important for chipping away at the strength of core capitalist countries, but also as containing communist possibilities.

He really zeroes in on Russia, which he starts to view as the new centre of revolutionary energy on the continent.

In his last writing — ���ٴ�  — Marx asks the question: “Can the Russian obshchina [peasant commune], though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership?”

His response is that “if the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development”.

This represents a huge reversal from the language of The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Back then, Marx argued that old agrarian relations had to be uprooted and destroyed.

Now Marx was saying that elements within these pre-capitalist social structures — so-called primitive communism — could be the basis of a revolutionary movement.

How did Marx viewed gender and capitalism in his later writings?

Marx looks at gender quite extensively towards the end of his life. Friedrich Engels’ book,  was largely based on notes Marx took during the last three years of his life.

But the issue of gender was one of the most difficult parts of my book.

One of the difficulties was that while Marx’s writings on indigenous societies (mainly in the Americas) and on Ancient Greece and Rome are full of discussion on gender, this issue is not directly connected to revolutionary movements and challenges to the system.

His writings seem to go a bit against what Engels wrote later, however. Engels said that because patriarchy and gender relations were tied to private property and the state, by targeting those one would be targeting patriarchy and gender relations.

This view led Engels to write, adapting a phrase from Hegel: “The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex.”

However, when Marx looked at gender relations among the Greeks and Romans, he did not view it as one of unbroken domination. Marx pointed out that in some ways Roman women had more freedom than Athenian women.

This seems to indicate that he saw ups and downs in gender relations, rather than an undifferentiated world historical defeat.

If you think about an unbroken world-historical defeat of women, two problems emerge:

First, this tends to deny the agency of women over the millennia, as Marx notes in Rome or could be mentioned in many other contexts.

Second, it means that under modern capitalism we can attack patriarchy most effectively by targeting capitalist private property as the economic foundation of both patriarchy and the state.

It therefore follows that women’s movements should be auxiliaries of the socialist left, not autonomous and free-standing.

How did all these evolving views affect Marx’s revolutionary activities?

Let’s take Ireland: Marx and Engels, while always supporting Ireland versus Britain, were initially very hostile to bourgeois Irish nationalists.

But by 1869–70, you had a progressive nationalist movement in Ireland, the Fenian Brotherhood, which was a plebeian movement just as interested in lowering rents as in kicking out the foreign occupier.

It was not a socialist movement, but a class conscious one. Nevertheless, Marx came to salute the Fenian Brotherhood and their agrarian program.

Marx also concluded that hard work was needed to gain the trust of Irish workers in England.

He said they needed to let Irish workers know they supported Irish self-determination to split those workers away from the bourgeois nationalists and recruit them to the International Workingmen’s Association.

What implications do you see in these writings for the left today in terms of revolutionary subjectivity?

Today, there are dozens of different viewpoints within the global left.

Certain slightly more reformist forces with large levels of support tend to focus on class, capital, economic inequality, the plight of the working class and the need for left-of-centre parties to connect more with the trade union movement.

Some will explicitly say that we need to get away from issues of identity, such as race, gender and sexuality; that the left talks too much about them and this turns off the white working class, or do not target capital enough.

Then you have the left that emerged from the Black Lives Matter and Palestine solidarity movement, as well as much of the student left, who tend to prioritise identity.

Marx was clearly aware of race, gender and colonialism, but for him these issues were always connected to capital and class — that is what is so often lacking today.

Marx’s writings can help us realise that we need to merge these two lefts. I do not mean in a populist, uncritical way, but neither side can simply dismiss the other as there is much radical energy in both. We have to find ways to have real dialogue and unity.