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

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which 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 our 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.

Marx’s critique of capital was far broader than is usually supposed. To be sure, he concentrated on the labor-capital relation within Western Europe and North America. But at the same time, he expended considerable time and energy on the analysis of non-Western societies, as well as race, ethnicity, and nationalism. While some of these writings show a problematically unilinear perspective and, on occasion, traces of ethnocentrism, the overall trajectory of Marx’s writings was toward a critique of national, ethnic, and colonial oppression and toward an appreciation of resistance movements in these spheres.

In 1848, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels espoused an implicitly and problematically unilinear concept of social progress. Precapitalist societies, especially China, which they characterized in ethnocentric terms as a “most barbarian” society, were destined to be forcibly penetrated and modernized by this new and dynamic social system. In his 1853 articles for the New York Tribune, Marx extended these perspectives to India, while viewing the communal social relations and communal property of the Indian village as a solid foundation for “Oriental despotism.” Postcolonial and postmodern thinkers, most notably Edward Said, have criticized the Communist Manifesto and the 1853 India writings as a form of Orientalist knowledge fundamentally similar to the colonialist mindset.

By 1856-57, the anti-colonialist side of Marx’s thought became more pronounced, as he supported, also in the Tribune, the Chinese resistance to the British during the Second Opium War and the Sepoy Uprising in India. During this period, he began to incorporate some of his new thinking about India into one of his greatest theoretical works, the Grundrisse (1857-58). In this germinal treatise on the critique of political economy, he launched into a truly multilinear theory of history, wherein Asian societies were seen to have developed along a different pathway than that of the successive modes of production he had delineated for Western Europe.

During the 1860s, Marx concentrated on Europe and North America, writing little on Asia. It was in this period that he completed the first version of Capital, Vol. I, as well as most of the drafts of what became Vols. II and III of that work. But he also concerned himself with the dialectics of race and class during the long years of the American Civil War, 1861-65. Although the North was a capitalist society, Marx threw himself into the anti-slavery cause, critically supporting the Lincoln government against the Confederacy within the British and European labor and socialist movements. In his Civil War writings, he argued that white racism had held back labor as a whole, later writing in Capital that “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where in a black skin it is branded.”

Marx also supported the Polish uprising of 1863, which sought to restore national independence to that long-suffering country. He and his generation of leftists viewed Russia as a malevolent, reactionary power, a form of “Oriental despotism” based in the communal social forms and property relations that predominated in the Russian village. It constituted the biggest threat to Europe’s democratic and socialist movements. Since Russian-occupied Poland stood between Russia proper and Western Europe, Poland’s revolutionary movement represented a deep contradiction within the Russian Empire, one that had hampered its efforts to intervene against the European revolutions of 1830 and initially, those in 1848 as well. As with India and China, by 1858 Marx also began to shift his view of Russia, taking note of the looming emancipation of the serfs and the possibility of an agrarian revolution, as seen in several of his articles on Russia for the Tribune.

The labor and socialist networks that Marx helped to form in Western Europe in support of the U.S. and Poland were crucial to the founding of the First International in 1864. During his years of involvement with the First International Marx focused to a great extent on Ireland. His theorization of Ireland marked the culmination of his writings on ethnicity, race, and nationalism. British workers, he held, were so greatly imbued with nationalist pride and great power arrogance toward the Irish that they had developed a false consciousness, binding them to the dominant classes of Britain, and thus attenuating class conflict within British society. This impasse could be broken only by direct support for Irish national independence on the part of the revolutionary elements within British labor, something that would also serve to reunite labor within Britain, where Irish immigrant labor formed a subproletariat. On more than one occasion, Marx linked his conceptualization of class, ethnicity, and nationalism for the British and the Irish to race relations in the U.S., where he compared the situation of the Irish to the African-Americans. He also compared the attitudes of the British workers toward the Irish to those of the poor whites of the American South, who had too often united with the white planters against their fellow Black workers. In this sense, he was creating a broad dialectical concept of class, race, and ethnicity.

By the 1870s, Marx returned to his earlier preoccupation with Asia, while also deepening his studies of Russia. Whereas he had previously concentrated on Russian foreign policy, he now began to learn Russian in order to study that country’s internal social structure. Marx’s interest in Russia increased with the publication of Capital in Russian in 1872, especially after the book generated more debate there than it had in Germany. Some of the changes Marx introduced into the 1872-75 French edition of Capital concerned the dialectic of capitalist development out of Western feudalism that was at the heart of the book’s part eight, “The Primitive Accumulation of Capital.” In direct and clear language, Marx now stated that the transition outlined in the part on primitive accumulation applied only to Western Europe. In this sense, the future of Russia was open, was not predetermined by that of Western Europe.

During the years 1879-82, Marx embarked upon a series of excerpt notebooks on scholarly studies on a multifaceted group of non-Western and non-European societies, among them contemporary India, Indonesia (Java), Russia, Algeria, and Latin America. He also made notes on studies of indigenous peoples, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. One core theme of these excerpt notebooks was the communal social relations and property forms found in so many of these societies. In his studies of India, for example, two issues emerged. First, his notes indicated a new appreciation of historical development in India, as against his earlier view of that country as a society without history. Although he still saw the communal forms of India’s villages as relatively continuous over the centuries, he now noted a series of important changes within those communal forms. Second, these notes show his preoccupation, not with Indian passivity as in 1853, but with conflict and resistance in the face of foreign conquest, whether against the Muslim conquerors of the medieval period or the British colonialists of his own time. Some of that resistance was, he argued, based upon indigenous communal forms.

If Marx’s theorization of nationalism, ethnicity, and class culminated in his 1869-70 writings on Ireland, those on non-Western societies reached their high point in his 1877-82 reflections on Russia. In a series of letters and their drafts, as well as the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto he co-authored with Engels, Marx began to sketch a multilinear theory of social development and of revolution for Russia. Russia’s communal villages were contemporaneous with industrial capitalism in the West. If a village-based social revolution in Russia could draw upon the resources of Western modernity by linking up with a revolution on the part of the Western labor and socialist movements, Russia might be able to modernize in a manner far different from capitalist development, he wrote. Moreover, a revolution in rural Russia could be the “starting point” for such an international revolutionary outbreak, he concluded.

In sum, I argue in this study that Marx developed a dialectical theory of social change that was neither unilinear nor exclusively class-based. Just as his theory of social development evolved in a more multilinear direction, so his theory of revolution began over time to concentrate more on the intersectionality of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and class. To be sure, Marx was not a philosopher of difference in the postmodernist sense, for the critique of a single overarching entity, capital, was at the center of his entire intellectual enterprise. But centrality did not mean univocality or exclusivity. 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.

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

Book Reviews: English

 

"[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

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