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

KEVIN B. ANDERSON is professor of sociology, political science, and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2010, 2016 by The University of Chicago.

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34567-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34570-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226345703.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anderson, Kevin, 1948– author.

Marx at the margins : on nationalism, ethnicity, and non-Western societies, with a new preface / Kevin B. Anderson. — 2nd edition.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-34567-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-34570-3 (ebook)

1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883—Political and social views.   2. Nationalism.   3. Ethnicity.   I. Title.

JC233.M299A544 2016

320.54—dc23

2015017199

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Marx at the Margins

ON NATIONALISM, ETHNICITY, AND NON-WESTERN SOCIETIES

With a New Preface

Kevin B. Anderson

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Colonial Encounters in the 1850s: The European Impact on India, Indonesia, and China

2. Russia and Poland: The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution

3. Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution

4. Ireland: Nationalism, Class, and the Labor Movement

5. From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes

6. Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies

Conclusion

Appendix. The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to Today

Notes

References

Index

PREFACE, 2016

In the six years since this book appeared, its reception in many quarters suggests that it may have succeeded in at least one of its original aims: to present Marx as a thinker deeply concerned with non-Western and precapitalist societies in their own right, rather than as a mere adjunct to his theorization of modern Western capitalist societies. In this sense, the book may also have undercut the fashionable argument that Marx was fundamentally a Eurocentric thinker trapped in the narrow frameworks of his time, the mid-nineteenth century, and thus largely impervious to contemporary issues like race, gender, and colonialism. I refer here not only to arguments like those of Edward Said’s celebrated Orientalism, but also to more broadly philosophical ones like those of Michel Foucault, for whom Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water; that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else ([1970] 1966, p. 262).

In responding to such arguments in Marx at the Margins, I readily acknowledged that some of Marx’s writings in the 1840s and early 1850s did exhibit forms of Orientalism and Eurocentrism, at times implicitly supporting British colonialism in the name of progress. However, I also noted that even in the 1853 India writings, which have drawn the most attention from those seeking to portray Marx in this light, there are also dialectical countercurrents, as, for example, in his 1853 description of British colonialism in India as barbaric or his evocation that same year of Indian independence as the solution to that land’s social oppression and stagnation. Even more importantly, I noted that Marx had already shifted to a more anticolonialist position by the time of his 1856–58 writings on India and China, during the same period that he discussed Asian modes of production in the Grundrisse.

To a great extent, however, these arguments and texts were already known to Marx specialists, especially since the 1980s, when the entirety of his New York Tribune writings were reprinted in their original English in widely accessible form in the Marx-Engels Collected Works. Therefore, many reviewers and readers have commented upon the fact that Marx at the Margins also bases its argument on little-known notebooks on non-Western and precapitalist societies that Marx composed during last years, 1879–82. These notebooks, some of which have not yet been published, are part of a vast corpus of Marx writings that will comprise 32 volumes in the ongoing Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2). For the most part, they consist of excerpts from other authors, with occasional commentary by Marx.

Marx’s excerpt notebooks are already known to scholars via a few examples that have been published more widely, among them the 1881 notes on Adolph Wagner’s book on political economy and the 1874–75 marginal notes on a book by Mikhail Bakunin on the state. But most of the contents of Marx’s excerpt notebooks are not well known, even to specialist scholars, and to date only about a dozen of the thirty-two MEGA volumes devoted to them have appeared in print.

Some of the 1879–82 excerpt notebooks on non-Western and precapitalist societies have been published prior to MEGA2, and all will eventually appear in MEGA IV/27, now being edited by Jürgen Rojahn, and of which I have been one of the editors as well, particularly for the English edition. These can be divided into three areas: (1) A good number of the 1879–82 notebooks on non-Western and precapitalist societies address India and South Asia, North Africa, colonial and precolonial Latin America, and a variety of preliterate societies, from the Native Americans of North America to the Homeric Greeks. All of this material has been previously published, and it forms an important part of my discussion of the late Marx in chapter 6. (2) A second group of excerpt notes deals with Russian history and with Indonesia, and these have not yet been published in any language. These were discussed briefly in Marx at the Margins. (3) A third group of notes deals with ancient Rome and medieval Europe, which I have not taken up because they fell outside this book’s scope. However, they are important for grasping Marx’s overall project in this period.

A study of this 1879–82 notebook material as a whole, along with Marx’s letters and other writings on Russia during his last years, suggests that he was at this point in his intellectual career concerned greatly with agrarian societies in transition, some of which may have been heading toward capitalism. However, he was very firm about one point in these late writings: Not all noncapitalist societies were inevitably heading toward capitalism. As discussed in chapter 6, at one point in an 1877 letter to Russian friends, Marx moves from a discussion of the possibilities of an evolution toward capitalism in their country in the coming period, to one of the non-development of capitalism in ancient Rome. In Rome, even though (1) the peasants lost their land and were thus separated from their means of production, (2) large landed property was formed, held by a slave-owning aristocracy, and (3) money capital was established on a significant scale, Marx notes that capitalism never developed: "What happened? The Roman proletarians became not wage-laborers, but an idle ‘mob’ more abject than those who used to be called poor whites of the southern United States; and what unfolded alongside them was not a capitalist but a slave mode of production" (228). Of course, Marx was probably less concerned with transitions from one mode of production in a purely sociohistorical sense than with the possibilities of revolution in his own time, with whether a Russian agrarian revolution might lead to a non-capitalist form of development if, as he and Engels wrote in their 1882 preface to a new Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, it could link up with the revolutionary labor movement of Western Europe.

What we have, therefore, in 1877–82 are three sets of non-capitalist agrarian societies in transition that were studied in depth by Marx: (1) Russia, with its communal villages increasingly penetrated by capitalist social relations, which were undermining the older agrarian collectivism, and where new revolutionary movements had grown; (2) India, where British colonialism had uprooted much of the precapitalist village structure and where many forms of revolt had emerged; (3) ancient Rome in transition from an agricultural system based upon a free peasantry to one based upon slave labor, and the failure there of both plebeian resistance and slave uprisings.

Since only the first two of these were covered in chapter 6 of this book, I would like to say something about the Rome notes, which have not been to my knowledge published in any language and are slated to appear eventually in MEGA IV/27. Marx’s approximately thirty thousand–word notes on Rome are thought to have been set down around 1879. They are in the same physical notebook as, and in fact interspersed with, his notes on Kovalevsky on the Indian village and on Sewell’s history of India, the latter two sets of notes discussed in some detail in chapter 6. The notes on Rome take up the German social historians Karl Bücher, Ludwig Friedländer, Ludwig Lange, and Rudolf Jhering, and cover issues like class, status, and gender from earliest times through the late empire.

Marx’s brief two thousand–word notes on Bücher’s Die Aufstände der unfreien Arbeiter 143–129 v. Chr. (The uprisings of unfreelabor, 143–129 BCE) (1874), the first of those on Rome, came closest to the themes of the 1877 letter to his Russian readers. Here, Marx devoted particular attention to the social transformations resulting from the emergent system of large-scale slave-based agriculture and the concomitant rise of a money oligarchy, alongside the older patrician order. He looked closely at the interaction among the various social groups—slaves, freedmen, poor plebeians, rich plebeians, equestrians, and patricians—and specifically addressed the separation of the plebeians from their former means of production, such as farms or workshops. He also noted the antipathy toward the slaves on the part of the Roman proletarians, whom he compared to the poor whites of the US South. These notes take up briefly the slave and plebeian revolts of the late second century BCE, especially the slave uprising in Asia Minor.

Next, Marx recorded material from Ludwig Friedländer’s Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms in der Zeit v. August bis zum Ausgang der Antonine (Representations of the history of Roman customs, from the age of Augustus to the close of the Antonine Era), which covers the period of the Pax Romana (27 BCE–192 CE). Marx’s relatively brief notes, which totaled about three thousand words, concentrated on Roman luxury, especially that afforded by slavery, as well as fine arts and advances in Roman technology. Marx gave surprisingly little space here to the proletariat and the slaves, perhaps because he had covered those issues in his notes on Bücher. Instead, he focused on material on the nouveau riche freedmen and on the increasingly penurious and humiliating situation of the clients, a non-slave social stratum dependent upon the aristocracy.

Marx also took notes on Rudolf Jhering’s celebrated three-volume study, Geist des römischen Rechts in den verschiedenen Stadien seiner Entwicklung (The spirit of Roman law in the various stages of its development). In his relatively brief notes of about four thousand words on Jhering’s book, Marx concentrated not on the law as such, but on the underlying social and economic changes that shaped it. He began by focusing on the gens or clan and on how commercial activity broke down these primordial ties. The rest of Marx’s notes on Jhering covered the evolution of Roman social classes and status groups, especially as a result of distant wars, the transformation of part of the old landed aristocracy into a new money aristocracy, and the growth of the patron-client relationship. To an even greater extent than in the Bücher notes, he also concentrated on the lack of solidarity between free proletarians and slaves.

Marx took the longest of his notes on Rome, over twenty thousand words, on Römische Alterthümer (ancient Rome) a three-volume political, social, and legal history by Ludwig Lange. Here, he honed in on the origins of the Roman state out of preliterate clan society, with a particular focus on gender and the family. Topics included the power of the Roman paterfamilias over his wife, his children and grandchildren, his slaves, and those adult women or minors placed under his guardianship. Marx noted that as Roman civilization developed, marriage came increasingly under the jurisdiction of state-based secular law rather than traditional clan law. This led to a weakening of the power of the paterfamilias and a concomitant rise in the power of women, at least within the aristocracy. Similar to the notes on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, discussed in some detail in chapter 6, Marx’s Lange notes tend to undercut Engels’s view of a world-historic defeat of the female sex with the rise of class society out of earlier clan structures, at least insofar as it represented Marx’s postion, which was, as often, considerably more nuanced than that of his friend. (See also Brown 2012, which takes up the Morgan and Lange notebooks with respect to gender.)

The textual evidence from Marx’s notebooks on Rome, as well as his other writings on non-Western and precapitalist societies during this same period, suggest a broad concern with noncapitalist societies of his own time and in the past. Centering to a great extent on Russia, India, and ancient Rome, these notes and writings exhibit a preoccupation with transition, especially a possible transition to capitalism. They also point to how wrenching changes in class and property relations offer possibilities for social revolution on the part of subordinated classes and, conversely, for the diversion of their resistance into channels harmless to the dominant classes. Most importantly, these late writings and notes on Russia, India, and ancient Rome show that Marx was interested in a deep and specific analysis of each society in its own right, rather than any general formulas applicable to all societies across the globe, regardless of sociohistorical specificity. Thus, as he wrote in his letters to his Russian interlocutors and in the French edition of Capital itself (as discussed in chapter 5), his sketch of the primitive accumulation of capital in early modern Europe was not a general model for all societies across the world that were beginning to be impacted by capitalist social relations, but a sketch limited to Britain and those countries already on the road of capitalist industrialization.

In this light, I would also like to reiterate that my treatment in chapter 5 of alternate texts in the French edition of Capital, volume 1, is not a quarrel over the translation into French by Joseph Roy, especially its literary quality. It is about the fact that the French edition of 1872–75 contained several important formulations added by Marx himself and not found, unfortunately even to this day, in German editions besides the MEGA or those translations derived from Engels’s supposedly authoritative German edition of 1890. This includes both existing English translations. Some of these passages contain formulations that limit the scope of the analysis of primitive accumulation to Western Europe, thus leaving to one side Russia, India, and other noncapitalist societies of the time. These passages are very important to the overall argument of Marx at the Margins, which upholds a view of Marx as a multilinear, non-determinist thinker who over time became increasingly sensitive to the need for a variety of pathways of development and toward revolution for societies outside Western Europe and North America.

I would also like to say something about the overall theoretical tradition in which I have worked, and which underlies this book. While I have in the course of many years been influenced strongly by the Frankfurt School, by Georg Lukács, and by Lenin in terms of dialectic, my principle inspiration here has come from a slightly different quarter, that of the Russian-American Marxist-Humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya. Similarly, while I have been influenced strongly by the writings on race, colonialism, and revolution of Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, and C. L. R. James, here as well I am indebted most of all to Dunayevskaya. Having worked in the tradition of her form of Marxist-Humanism for most of my adult life, I therefore think it would be helpful if I said bit more about Dunayevskaya’s work insofar as it pertains to Marx at the Margins.

I will therefore comment briefly on (1) Dunayevskaya’s contribution to our understanding of Hegel, Marx, and dialectics, and (2) her work on what is today termed the intersectionality of race, class, and the struggle against capital.

From the 1940s onward, Dunayevskaya concerned herself with the recovery of Hegel’s dialectic as such for later generations of Marxists. When she began this work, at first alongside the Afro-Caribbean Marxist and cultural theorist C. L. R. James, the notion of a Hegelian Marxism was at best the position of a tiny minority. From the academic left (this was before McCarthyism) to the Trotskyist parties in which she worked, dialectics was for the most part just a slogan, and a kind of Darwinian positivism reigned. Philosophical ideas were a reflection of material reality, it was said, and any form of idealism ran the danger of taking us back to religious obscurantism or, worse, fascism.

But with the end of the Second World War, and the revelations about the Nazi death camps and the Stalinist forced labor camps, as well as the toll visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by US nuclear weapons, new types of radical thought came to the fore. Alongside the long-standing concern with class struggle and economic development, more interest grew on the Left concerning the dignity of the human person or, as the young Marx put had put it, the social individual. French existentialists—albeit in a one-sidedly subjectivist fashion—extolled a radical humanism and attacked the determinism of orthodox Marxism. The Frankfurt School put forth anti-technocratic interpretations of Marxism, albeit in a form that had little to say to the working class and other oppressed groups. For her part, Dunayevskaya as an incipient Marxist-Humanist put forth a form of Hegelian Marxism that challenged technocratic state-capitalism, East and West, and which also sought to address rank-and-file workers in Detroit, both Black and white.

Over the next four decades, Dunayevskaya developed a distinctive concept of dialectic. First, she made the first English translation of Lenin’s 1914–15 Hegel Notebooks, initially for a small circle within US Trotskyism that included C. L. R. James and Grace Lee Boggs. (I discuss this at length in Anderson 1995.) And although the academic left blocked publication in the US, she used Lenin’s revolutionary take on Hegel as a springboard into Hegel’s Science of Logic and Phenomenology of Mind. By 1953, she had penned her Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, where she added into the mix Hegel’s little discussed (even to this day), Philosophy of Mind. These 1953 Letters challenged previous interpretations—from Engels onward—of Hegel’s Absolute as a closed totality with conservative implications. (They are reprinted in Dunayevskaya 2002, which contains an introduction to Dunayevskaya’s work by Peter Hudis and me.) Dunayevskaya broke completely with the Engelsian distinction between system and method in Hegel’s thought, arguing that Marx had critically appropriated Hegel’s dialectic as a whole. She concluded these letters with her own critical appropriation—here directly against Engels—of the final paragraphs of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, which are also the end of his system as elaborated in the three-volume Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

Hegel ends his system with three syllogisms about Logic, Nature, and Mind, which bring in categories like the self-thinking idea and the self-knowing idea, this in the chapter on absolute mind. To Dunayevskaya, these kinds of Hegelian concepts spoke to the new social consciousness that had emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, wherein rank and file workers, Blacks and other ethnic minorities, youth, and women were no longer letting others decide for them the pathway of their liberation.

At the same time, other aspects of Hegel’s absolutes spoke to something else, the absolute development of capitalism in the twentieth century into what she considered to be a form of totalitarian state-capitalism, imbued with the stench of death and destructiveness everywhere it went. This picked up a thread from Marx’s concept of the absolute in Capital, where he had referred, in a discussion of the Absolute General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, to class polarization amid brutal exploitation. But Hegel’s absolutes—as Dunayevskaya stressed in her reading of the Science of Logic—also contained the deepest contradictions rather than a closure. All of this led her to write in the original introduction to her first book, Marxism and Freedom that we live in an age of absolutes—on the threshold of absolute freedom out of the struggle against absolute tyranny ([1958] 2000, pp. 23–24). This evoked not only the antifascist resistance movements, but also the new social consciousness that had emerged in the US and elsewhere by the 1940s.

To be sure, Dunayevskaya as a Marxist rejected more conservative later Hegelian texts like the Philosophy of Right, but she saw in Hegel’s more abstract earlier works the root of all dialectic in the sense of revolutionary dialectics. Initially, she developed these ideas in a dialogue with Herbert Marcuse (Anderson and Rockwell 2012). As she wrote in Philosophy and Revolution (1973), referring to works like Hegel’s Science of Logic, Phenomenology of Spirit, and Philosophy of Mind: "Precisely where Hegel sounds most abstract, seems to close the shutters tight against the whole movement of history, there he lets the lifeblood of the dialectic—absolute negativity—pour in. It is true Hegel writes as if the resolution of opposing live forces can be overcome by a mere thought transcendence. But he has, by bringing oppositions to their most logical extreme, opened new paths, a new relationship of theory to practice, which Marx worked out as a totally new relationship of philosophy to revolution. Today’s revolutionaries turn their backs on this at their peril" ([1973] 1989, pp. 31–32).

This, I believe, remains a legacy for us today, at a time when so many different radical thinkers—from Negri to Habermas and from Foucault to Said, not to speak of older Althusserian currents or even older mechanical materialist or positivist ones—are all united in telling us to avoid at all costs the revolutionary dialectic of Hegel.

A further aspect of Dunayevskaya’s concept of dialectic offers a direct bridge to the themes of Marx at the Margins. Unlike some versions of totality or universality within Hegelian Marxism, Dunayevskaya insisted that the universal needs to particularize itself to become a truly emancipatory rather than an abstract universal: The movement from abstract through concrete through particularization necessitates a double negation. Hegel leaves no room for forgetfulness of this absolute creativity, the motive force that it is for the whole development, for its creative power ([1973] 1989, p. 25). Taking this type of dialectic into the sphere of Marxist politics and sociology, she held that contemporary concerns around race, colonialism, or gender, while related to the overarching framework of capitalism, could not be subsumed under an analysis of capital and class, but had a particularity and a dynamic of their own.

Again from the 1940s onward, and again initially alongside C. L. R. James, Dunayevskaya explored the specifically US class system, which had always functioned along with the additive of race. In her American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard ([1963] 2003) and other works, Dunayevskaya showed how racism had undermined progressive class-based movements again and again in US history, from the leftwing Populists of a century ago to their contemporaries in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). At same time, and here in contradistinction to Whiteness Studies and other similar academic perspectives, she also pointed to crucial junctures at which white labor, under the impact of the Black struggle, began to overcome the racism it drew from the larger society. Such examples occurred during some phases of the Populist movement of the 1890s or the later Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which arose during the 1930s as a counterweight to the skilled-worker-dominated AFL. At every stage of her life, from her teenage years in the 1920s working with the Communist Party’s weekly paper in Chicago, the Negro Champion, to the year before her death, 1986, when she wrote a new introduction to a Marxist-Humanist study of Frantz Fanon, she stressed that in US history, one constant was Black masses as vanguard in terms of social progress. This led her to examine movements not always considered to be connected to socialism and Marxism, like the Abolitionists of the nineteenth century or the Black Nationalist Garvey movement of the 1920s. Always, however, she was interested in the possibility of coalescence between Black and white labor, both industrial and agricultural, but never on the basis of putting aside the struggle against racism in order to forge a superficial and false form of class unity.

This dimension of Dunayevskaya’s thought is also seen in her interpretation of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Fanon, and other thinkers in the Marxian tradition. She stressed again and again the central importance of Marx’s writings on the US Civil War, where he critically supported the North, castigating those who saw no difference between the North and the South while also attacking Lincoln’s failure to conduct the war as a revolutionary struggle against slavery. Not only that. She wrote as well of how the Civil War in the US impacted the structure of Capital, volume 1, inspiring Marx to add a chapter on the working day, the one in which he wrote in ringing tones that labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a Black skin (cited in Dunayevskaya [1958] 2000, p. 84).

Then, at the end of her life, Dunayevskaya delved into Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks, those studies at the end of his life on gender, colonialism, and clan or tribal social forms and their displacement by class structures. These notebooks, first published by the formidable Marx scholar Lawrence Krader in 1972, constitute a major part of Marx’s 1879–82 notes on non-Western and precapitalist societies. She placed these late writings of Marx at the center of her Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution ([1982] 1991), not in order to create an Althusserian type of division between the late and early Marx, but in order to illuminate Marx’s lifelong concern with gender and with the impact of capitalist penetration upon noncapitalist lands and on the ensuing new forms of resistance to capital and colonialism. She did so on the basis of the notes by Marx on Morgan that formed a major part of what are today known as Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks. In so doing, Dunayevskaya elaborated the first feminist critique of Engels’s Origin of the Family based upon differences between Marx and Engels in their reading of Morgan. As Dunayevskaya put it in the Rosa Luxemburg book: Marx’s hostility to capitalism’s colonialism was intensifying. The question was how total must be the uprooting of existing society and how new the relationship of theory to practice. The studies enabled Marx (Marx, not Engels) to see the possibility of new human relations, not as they might come through a mere ‘updating’ of primitive communism’s equality of the sexes, as among the Iroquois, but as Marx sensed they would burst forth from a new type of revolution ([1982] 1991, p. 190). These late writings of Dunayevskaya on the late Marx were of particular importance for chapter 6 of Marx at the Margins.

Thus, Dunayevskaya’s work has impacted my book in a double sense, at a general level in terms of the dialectic, and a more specific level in terms of her direct treatment of some of the issues discussed here.

Overall, I regard Marx at the Margins as a contribution to the debates of our time over Marx and his legacy. In a period when many reject Marx as hopelessly Eurocentric, as possessed of a form of dialectic drawn from Hegel that crowds out particulars like race, gender, and colonialism in favor of homogenizing grand narratives of globalization, capital, and class, I have tried to argue that Marx is a thinker of our times. His critique of capital, nuanced and dialectical as it was, and rooted as it was in specific sociohistorical studies of the actual circumstances confronting various societies around the world, is as much of our time as his own.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During the decade and more I have worked on this project, I have received generous assistance in numerous ways from scholars in Marxist studies and other fields. Through these years, my understanding of the issues at stake in this book has benefited immensely from my association with the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, in particular from interactions with Jürgen Rojahn, David Norman Smith, Charles Reitz, Lars Lih, Georgi Bagaturia, the late Norair Ter-Akopian, and Rolf Hecker, as well as Jürgen Herres, Malcolm Sylvers, Gerald Hubmann, Gerd Callesen, Regina Roth, and Carl-Erich Vollgraf. I also benefited from an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1996–97), a travel grant from the American Philosophical Society (1996), and a Center for Humanistic Studies Fellowship at Purdue University (2004). Bert Rockman of the Department of Political Science at Purdue University and Verta Taylor of the Department of Sociology at University of California–Santa Barbara also allowed some release time from teaching, in 2007 and 2009, respectively.

Douglas Kellner, Bertell Ollman, and Frieda Afary each read and commented in important ways upon the entire manuscript. So did my partner, Janet Afary, who provided immense support and encouragement, both personal and intellectual, as she followed and encouraged this project at every step of the way. Over the years, I have also discussed this project frequently—and always fruitfully—with Peter Hudis. Louis Dupré, Donald N. Levine, and William McBride offered encouragement and suggestions at crucial junctures. The following people read and gave good suggestions on significant parts of the manuscript: David Black, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Richard Hogan, Lars Lih, Albert Resis, Arthur Rolston, Jack Rhoads, David Roediger, Jürgen Rojahn, and Eamonn Slater. Others offered comments in response to papers on it presented at various conferences or in other settings, especially Robert Antonio, Colin Barker, Franklin Bell, Roslyn Bologh, Jordan Camp, Norman Fischer, Chris Ford, Andrew Kliman, Lauren Langman, David Mayer, Ted McGlone, David McNally, Hal Orbach, Michael Perelman, Annette Rubinstein, Lawrence Scaff, and Suzi Weissman. I would also like to thank Heather Brown, Alexander Hanna, Lisa Lubow, C. J. Pereira di Salvo, Michelle Sierzega, Rebekah Sterling, and Mir Yarfitz for research assistance. At Purdue University, Michelle Conwell provided lots of technical and secretarial support.

Over the years I worked at the following libraries, where I received particular help from several individuals: Northern Illinois University (Robert Ridinger), University of Chicago (Frank Conaway), and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam (Mieke Ijzermans). I also received other help with source material from Vinay Bahl, David Black, Sebastian Budgen, Paul Buhle, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Rolf Dlubek, Carl Estabrook, Eric Foner, Urszula Frydman, Rolf Hecker, Robert Hill, William McBride, Jim Obst, David Roediger, Jürgen Rojahn, David Norman Smith, and Danga Vileisis.

Earlier versions of parts this book have been presented to meetings of numerous scholarly associations, including the American Sociological Association, the Historical Materialism conferences (London and Toronto), the Socialist Scholars conferences (New York), the Left Forum conferences (New York), the Rethinking Marxism conferences (Amherst), and the Midwest Sociological Association. In addition, I would like to single out four occasions that were particularly important in the thinking through of this book in response to serious interlocutors: a colloquium at the Department of Sociology of University of Illinois at the invitation of John Lie in 1996; a talk at the Brecht Forum in New York at the invitation of Liz Mestres and Eli Messinger in 2000; a stint as a visiting scholar at the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at University of California–Los Angeles at the invitation of Robert Brenner and Thomas Mertes in the winter and spring of 2007; and a stint as a visiting scholar at Wuhan University at the invitation of He Ping in fall 2007.

I would also like to thank John Tryneski and Rodney Powell, as well as Mary Gehl and Kristi McGuire, at the University of Chicago Press for their hard work and support through the process of publication.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of two outstanding thinkers who paved the way: my intellectual mentor Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–1987), a Marxist humanist philosopher who developed original insights into Marx’s writings on non-Western and precapitalist societies in her Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1982); and Lawrence Krader (1919–1998), the indefatigable Marx scholar who brought Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks to light in 1972.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

In 1849, Marx was forced to move to London, where he was to dwell as a political exile until his death in 1883. Having experienced the defeat of the 1848 revolutions on the Continent, he sensed that a period of retrogression was at hand. This was confirmed by the December 1851 Bonapartist coup in France, which signaled the end of the revolutionary wave of 1848–49. If these political setbacks narrowed his horizons somewhat, his relocation to London widened them in other ways. It placed Marx at the center of the world’s only truly industrial capitalist economy as he labored in the British Museum on what was to become his masterwork, Capital. The move to London also put him at the center of the world’s largest empire, which led him to take greater account of non-Western societies and colonialism.

The deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida captures well Marx’s marginality as a political refugee in Victorian London, linking it to his equally marginal position within the Western intellectual tradition: Marx remains an immigrant among us, a glorious, sacred, accursed but still clandestine immigrant as he was all his life (1994, 174). In Britain, one of his main sources of income was his work as the chief European correspondent of the New York Tribune. Another was the financial support he received from his friend Friedrich Engels, also a veteran of 1848, who became a partner in his family’s very successful manufacturing firm in Manchester. Frequently writing in English and French as well as his native German, Marx was a trilingual, cosmopolitan intellectual.

This book brings together two sets of writings from Marx’s vast corpus, almost all of them written in London. (1) It examines his theorization of a number of non-Western societies of his day—from India to Russia and from Algeria to China—and their relation to capitalism and colonialism. (2) It also takes up his writings on movements for national emancipation, especially in Poland and Ireland, and their relation to the democratic and socialist movements of the time. Connected to the latter was his theorization of race and ethnicity in relation to class, with respect to both Black labor in America during the Civil War and Irish labor in Britain.¹

The present study concentrates on Marx’s writings on societies that were for the most part peripheral to capitalism during his lifetime. In particular, I will take up lesser-known Marx writings, like his journalism for the New York Tribune. I will also examine his extensive but little-known 1879–82 notebooks on non-Western and precapitalist societies, some of which are yet to be published in any language, but will be made available in the coming years through the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (hereafter referred to as MEGA² and discussed in the appendix). A number of these non-Western and precapitalist societies Marx studied, like India, Indonesia, and Algeria, had been partially incorporated into capitalist modernity via colonization. Others, like Poland, Russia, and China, still stood largely outside the global capitalist system. Still others, like the United States and Ireland, were part of global capitalism, albeit at its perimeters, with Ireland relegated mainly to agriculture. Whether within the globalized capitalism of the nineteenth century but at its far edge (Ireland, the United States), or partly incorporated within global capitalism (India, Algeria, Indonesia), or just beyond it (Russia, China, Poland), all of these societies were in one way or another at the margins. Hence the title, Marx at the Margins.

The two major themes mentioned above stood out within Marx’s writings on the above societies. (1) He emphasized that those like Russia, India, China, Algeria, and Indonesia possessed social structures markedly different from those of Western Europe. Throughout his writings, he grappled with the question of the future development of these non-Western societies. More specifically, he examined their prospects for revolution and as sites for resistance to capital. Over the years, I will argue, his perspectives on these societies evolved.² In the 1840s, he held to an implicitly unilinear perspective, sometimes tinged with ethnocentrism, according to which non-Western societies would necessarily be absorbed into capitalism and then modernized via colonialism and the world market. But over time, his perspective evolved toward one that was more multilinear, leaving the future development of these societies as an open question. By 1881–82, he was envisioning the possibility that Russia could modernize in a progressive noncapitalist manner, if its peasant-based revolutionary movement could link up with the working-class movements of Western Europe. I trace the evolution in his thought on this theme mainly in chapters 1, 6, and parts of 5. In a partially chronological framework, I take up the implicit unilinearism of The Communist Manifesto (1848) and the Tribune writings of the early 1850s, the multilinear theory of history carved out in the Grundrisse (1857–58) and the French edition of Capital (1872–75), and finally, through the multilinear late writings of 1879–82 on non-Western societies, among them Russia, India, and Latin America.

(2) Marx’s writings on oppressed nationalities and ethnic groups—Poland, Ireland, Irish workers in Britain, and Blacks in the United States, and their relationship to the democratic and labor movements in the major capitalist countries—are the second major focus of this book. Marx discussed these issues in the Tribune and other newspapers, in the debates within the International Working Men’s Association of the 1860s, and in Capital. From the 1840s onward, he consistently supported movements for the independence of Poland and Ireland, as well as the antislavery cause in the United States. But by the 1860s, with the emergence of the Civil War in America, the 1863 Polish uprising, and the Fenian movement in Ireland, his treatment of these issues took on a new urgency and underwent some alterations. They are the main focus of chapters 2, 3, 4, and parts of 5. During the 1860s, these issues became central to Marx’s assessment of the working class movements of the two most powerful capitalist societies, Britain and the United States. He concluded that labor movements in core capitalist countries that failed to support adequately progressive nationalist movements on the part of those affected by their governments, or failed to combat racism toward ethnic minorities within their own societies, ran the danger of retarding or even cutting short their own development.

I will argue further that these two themes, which are at the center of this study, were not incidental to Marx’s theorization of capitalism, but part of a complex analysis of the global social order of his time. Marx’s proletariat was not only white and European, but also encompassed Black labor in America, as well as the Irish, not considered white at the time either by the dominant cultures of Britain and North America. Moreover, as capitalist modernity penetrated into Russia and Asia, undermining the precapitalist social orders of these societies, new possibilities for revolutionary change would, he held, emerge from these new locations. Here, his hopes centered on the communal social forms of the villages of India and Russia, which he saw as possible new loci of resistance to capital. Whether it concerned the Indian peasant or the Russian villager, the Irish tenant farmer or immigrant worker in Britain, or the Black former slave in the southern United States, Marx kept searching for new allies of the Western working class in its struggle against capital.

Marx’s positionality takes on some importance in yet another respect. While he was in a certain sense marginalized in Britain, from the beginning he refused to isolate himself within the German exile community. Instead, Marx became part of British society, keeping in contact with Chartists and other labor activists. He not only wrote in English for the Tribune but was also the author of a number of manifestos and addresses on the part of the International by the 1860s. Marx’s life exemplified his ideal of internationalism, for by the end he was neither