The Other Marx

Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies is a path-breaking book dealing with the understanding of non-Western societies and their historical dynamics. This work was first published in 2010, and has been brought out again in 2016 as an expanded edition. For India in particular and South Asia in general, this book is of critical importance since a large part of it deals with Karl Marx’s painstaking analysis of the Indian subcontinent. In a certain way, it is a response to Edward Said’s presentation of Karl Marx as a “Romantic Orientalist” (Anderson 2010a: 17–20; Leonard 2012).

The book has six chapters, where the following themes are broadly outlined: the colonial encounters in the 1850s; the relation of national emancipation to revolution where the relation between Czarist Russia and Poland is studied; the interlinking of race, class and slavery where the Civil War in the United States is noted as the “Second American Revolution;” the case of Ireland where Irish nationalism and the class question are discussed; the epistemological movement from Grundrisse to Capital; and ­finally, Marx’s “late writings” on non-Western and pre-capitalist societies.