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

Since its initial publication, Marx at the Margins has succeeded in establishing that Marx as a thinker was 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. Kevin Anderson’s book, winner of the Marxist Sociology Book Award and now available in five languages in six editions, 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 gender, as well. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that has provoked lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. This edition contains a new preface by the author that discusses the book’s reception, as well as the influence of the Russian-American Marxist-Humanist philosopher, Raya Dunayevskaya, on his thinking.