The last years of Karl Marx: global perspectives and revolutionary potentials

A review of The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography by Marcello Musto (Stanford University Press, 2020), £18.89

And The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism by Kevin B. Anderson (Verso, 2025), £19.99

More than anything else, Karl Marx’s last years underline his commitment to the socialist struggle. Despite his deteriorating health, he expanded his research into the natural sciences and anthropology to equip the workers’ movement with a better understanding. In hundreds of letters and notebooks, Marx sought to analyse the mechanics of capitalism. By engaging deeply with non-Western societies—from India to Algeria and Russia—Marx forged a global and non-linear vision of revolutionary change and, on the way, addressed important other issues such as the oppression of women.

On many occasions, ranging from the social science mainstream to post-colonial studies, the writings of Marx and Friedrich Engels have been criticised as having an overly deterministic, Eurocentric perspective—one that views the transition from feudalism to socialism as inevitable, treats non-Western societies as mere footnotes to Europe’s industrial advance and ignores the fate of women. For instance, in Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty faults Marx for viewing the birth of capitalism as an almost automatic outcome, making it hard to account for “differences that exist between and within colonising and colonised regions”.1 Similarly, Silvia Federici criticises Marx for assuming that “capitalism paves the way to human liberation”, dismissing the “pre-capitalist world of the village” as “rural idiocy”.2 When scholars engage with Marx’s later writings, it is often to distance Marx from Engels, especially on the question of gender. Lise Vogel criticises Engels’s writings on women due to what she sees as his “failure to base the discussion on an adequate exposition of Marx’s theory of social development”.3

Two recently published books challenge some of these accusations based on hundreds of notebooks and letters from Marx’s final years. Previously difficult to access, they are now available in MEGA, the new historical-critical edition of Marx and Engels’s complete writings. One of the two books is Marcello Musto’s The Last Years of Karl Marx, which, as the title suggests, traces the final years of Marx, his late critiques of colonial oppression in India, Algeria and Egypt, his support for Russian socialists, and his forays into mathematics, geology and ethnology. Kevin B Anderson’s The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads also analyses Marx’s ethnological notebooks and related writings, focusing on Russia, Ireland, Latin America, Ancient Rome and “indigenous communism”. Both works dismantle accusations of Eurocentrism and recover Marx’s global, multilinear vision of revolutionary change. One of Musto’s strengths lies in providing an accessible introduction that embeds Marx’s studies in his biography. Anderson, on the other hand, succeeds in dealing with an in-depth account of some key writings. Yet, he maintains a strong distinction between Engels and Marx, making parts of his approach less convincing.

Musto’s portrait of Marx

The Last Years of Karl Marx portrays Marx as someone who “did not conceal his fragility but continued to struggle, did not evade doubt but openly confronted it”. This helps to reveal a scholar “very different from the one that numerous critics, or self-styled followers, presented for such a long time”.4

Far from applying a prefabricated, Eurocentric template, Marx immersed himself in the study of colonised societies—excoriating colonial brutality in India, Algeria, Egypt, and beyond—and treated each context on its own terms. As Musto notes early in his book, “[he] was anything but Eurocentric, economistic or fixated only on class conflict”.5 Musto weaves this argument in a compelling portrait of Marx as a tireless fighter for the emancipation of the working class—tracking political developments and corresponding with revolutionaries worldwide—while also showing him as a warm-hearted friend, loving father and devoted grandfather. Quotes from Marx’s contemporaries, including journalists and his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, make it almost feel as if the reader can look over the shoulders of an aging Marx developing his ideas.

Multilinear development and class struggle

Marx continually expanded his research during his final years. As Musto notes: “The aim of Marx’s new research was to widen his knowledge of the historical periods, geographical areas and thematic topics that he considered essential for his continuing critique of political economy”.6 To this end, Marx undertook anthropological studies to “reconstruct the most likely sequence in which different modes of production had succeeded one another over time with particular focus on the birth of capitalism”.7 His investigations into early human communities led him to argue that the patriarchal family was not humanity’s foundational social unit but a comparatively late innovation. During this period, he also compiled his ethnological notebooks, where he unequivocally rejected racist assumptions and shows his refusal of “one-way historicism”. Instead, Marx emphasised that social developments depend on their unique historical contexts, that history could have unfolded in various ways over time, and that active human agency is crucial both for shaping reality and for driving transformative change. Marx’s rejection of a “general formula” becomes obvious in the way he discussed current events.8 He emphasised: “what is to be done, and done immediately at any given, particular moment in the future, depends wholly and entirely on the actual historical circumstances in which action is to be taken”.9

Marx vehemently rejected any “schematism and new dogmatism arising in his name”, insisting that the future was not predetermined but “in the hands of the working class and depended on the capacity of its organisation and struggles to bring about profound social upheavals”.10 The ontological character of social struggles is evident in a beautifully written part in which Musto describes a visit by John Swinton, a progressive Scottish American journalist. Swinton asked Marx about the “law of being.” Marx thought for a moment and replied: “Struggle”.11

Marx on the Russian question

In a particularly detailed section, Musto turns to Marx’s correspondence and drafts on Russia to show how he revised his views on revolutionary potential there. When Russian socialist Vera Zasulich asked whether the rural commune was “capable of developing in a socialist direction” or whether it is “destined to perish”, Marx spent weeks poring over sources and writing multiple drafts.12 In his reply, he stressed that the “historic inevitability” of the transformation from feudalism to capitalism was restricted to Western Europe and continued with detailed views of the rural commune “as the germ of a future socialist society”, examining the concrete conditions under which this transformation might actually occur.13 Marx emphasised the “coexistence of the rural commune with more advanced elements” and argued that “by appropriating the positive results of this mode of production, [the commune] is thus in a position to develop and transform the still archaic form of its rural commune, instead of destroying it”.14 Marx concluded that “even the socialist transformation of the obshchina [rural commune] could happen without its being necessary to pass through capitalism”.15

Although Musto does not point this out, what Marx outlined here came very close to the idea of uneven and combined development as later formulated by Leon Trotsky. This is also discussed in some detail in Lucia Pradella’s Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy. Pradella shows that Marx’s analysis was not limited to the nation-state but incorporated imperialism and colonialism as central drivers of capitalist development. Tracing his thought from the 1840s onward, she demonstrates how Marx anticipated the law of uneven and combined development—and, over time, abandoned any notion of capital’s “civilizing effects”.16

Although Marx continued his research until his death, he left several projects unfinished, most notably the second and third volume of Capital, because his expanding perspective demanded ever more time, and his deteriorating health and family tragedies frequently interrupted his work. His daughter Eleanor recalled that, though his health worsened, he refused to rest:

If he had been more egoistic, he would have simply allowed things to take their course. But for him one thing stood above all else: devotion to the cause. He wanted to see his great work through to the end and therefore agreed once more to make a journey to recover his health.17

After the death of his wife, Jenny, Marx made his only journey outside of Europe, an extended stay in Algiers in French-occupied Algeria to restore his health. Too weak to resume his full-scale study of Arab communal ownership, he still documented French colonial violence and local class dynamics. In a letter to his daughter Laura, he observed “absolute equality” among the indigenous population that, however, “will go to rack and ruin without a revolutionary movement”.18 Once more, he affirmed that true revolution was not confined to industrialised western Europe but remained both possible and necessary in the Global South. Yet, Marx’s health never fully recovered. Following the loss of his eldest daughter, he died on 15 March 1883.

Anderson: decentering Europe

Similar to Musto, Anderson challenges prevailing readings that downplay Marx’s engagement with non-Western societies. According to him, had Marx lived longer, these societies would likely have featured centrally in subsequent volumes of Capital.19 To support his case, Anderson delivers in-depth analyses of Marx’s writings on Ireland, the United States, India, China and Germany, where industrialisation had just set in. He demonstrates that “specific forms of capitalism…exhibit important variants, in which race, gender, colonialism and other issues not directly related to the dialectics of labour and industrial capital come to the fore”.20 Instead of a more biographical approach, Anderson focuses on a selection of Marx’s writings between 1869 and 1882, placing them in conversation with other scholarship. Unfortunately, Anderson also seeks to disentangle Marx’s thought too strongly from both Engels’s interpretations and Marx’s own earlier formulations. He argues that the notebooks reveal an intellectual trajectory distinct from Engels’s influence and the deterministic strains of Marx’s youth.

Women’s oppression

Anderson starts by discussing communal social formations and the origins of property, class, race and gender. His detailed examination of ancient societies is a valuable addition to Musto’s analysis, which pays little attention to this topic. Referring to pre-colonial societies in the Global South, he traces property relations and the endurance of communal ownership. Contrary to earlier writings, Marx saw communal social formations not as a mere “barrier to human progress”, but, as exemplified by the case of Russia and in accordance with Musto, “as the social base for a modern revolution”.21

Anderson devotes considerable attention to gender, aiming to distinguish Marx’s own views from those of Engels. Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which is based on Marx’s notes on Lewis Henry Morgan, offers, according to Anderson, a schematic account of the historical subjugation of women that Marx himself never endorsed.22 Throughout his book, Anderson discusses Marx’s “Notes on Morgan” at length. Anderson refers several times to his own “mentor”, Raya Dunayevskaya, and her analysis of the oppression of women in ancient societies. Dunayevskaya highlights the dualities and contradictions in the development of communal societies, including gender relations, and their potential role in revolution. She thereby challenges a mechanical interpretation of Marx, emphasising his dialectical view of ancient societies and historical development. Unfortunately, her dismissal of Engels’s work contributes to anti-Marxist notions today.

Anderson follows Dunayevskayas argument. According to Anderson, Engels’s thesis of a “world-historical defeat of the female sex” is undialectical, treating patriarchy as a seamless, unbroken chain and suggesting that destroying private property would automatically abolish sexism—thereby negating the need for a feminist movement within capitalism.23 In this manner, Engels, he argues, also assumes that “sexism is not really a problem within the proletariat because it lacks a material foundation”.24 By contrast, Marx’s writings, according to Anderson, recognise the “permeability” of patriarchal domination and acknowledge contradictions and resistance within gender relations, underscoring his more nuanced view of women’s oppression.25

As Sheila McGregor has previously argued in this journal, Engels (and Marx) could at times be too optimistic regarding women’s oppression within the working class.26 Engels’s book certainly has limitations, not least due to the limited research on the subject at that time. However, Anderson seems to detach women’s oppression from capitalism and class relations. Marx and Engels knew that women’s oppression would not end as long as capitalism existed. Only collective class struggle, uniting people of different genders (and races) could ultimately eliminate exploitation and oppression—Engels’s work intervened precisely in this emerging movement.27

The seeds of permanent revolution

Anderson traces Marx’s abandonment of unilinear, Eurocentric views in greater detail than Musto. Both scholars show that Marx’s notebooks point towards societies being able to skip or diverge from the European capitalist experience depending on local communal structures and global power relations. Yet, Anderson takes this discussion further. According to him, not only is the idea of uneven and combined development inherent to Marx’s writings but also the potential of revolution arising from these conditions and, with that, permanent revolution. Anderson explicitly refers to the idea of permanent revolution in his final chapter, albeit—oddly—stressing the superiority of Marx’s outline as it is “richer and more complex” than Trotsky’s account.28 Marx described how British colonialism imposed capitalist relations and disrupted communal forms, bearing the “possibility of revolt”.29 Through detailed studies of anti-colonial resistance, Marx also concluded that revolutions might emanate from the periphery, in countries such as Ireland or Russia, and then move to Western Europe. In this context, Anderson discusses Marx’s writings on how the English working class struggled to build class consciousness due to prejudice towards Irish migrants.30

Continuity or rupture? Musto against Anderson

Throughout his book, Anderson repeatedly emphasises how Marx broke with earlier conceptions, such as the linear model of development supposedly outlined in the Communist Manifesto and the idea of colonialism as a “painful but necessary” step towards modernisation.31 Marx’s later writings, Anderson claims, particularly on the Russian commune, mark a clear departure from these views. This stands in contrast to Musto’s more careful approach, highlighting the continuity and gradual evolution of Marx’s thought. Musto argues that while Marx, for example, changed his position on the revolutionary potential in Russia, this did not signify a wholesale reversal of his earlier positions. He writes:

Marx had certainly not changed his complex critical judgement on the rural communes in Russia, and the importance of individual development and social production remained intact in his analysis. He did not suddenly become convinced that the archaic rural communes were a more advanced locus of emancipation for the individual than the social relations existing under capitalism. Both remained remote from how he conceived of communist society.32

Musto adds that Marx’s later writings benefited from “an ever-greater theoretical openness”, allowing him to explore new pathways to socialism that he had previously deemed implausible or out of reach.33

Yet, both books offer well-founded arguments against the frequent accusations of Eurocentrism and unilinear historical thinking in Marx’s work. Musto’s book, written in an accessible and engaging style, serves as an excellent introduction to this debate. He underscores the ongoing critical development of Marx’s thinking and sheds light on the final years of a man who, as Musto writes, until his final days, “continued to carry out his life’s purpose: to provide the workers’ movement with the theoretical basis to destroy the capitalist mode of production”.34 Anderson’s book, while providing academic depth, offers particularly rich chapters on Marx’s writings on anti-colonial resistance and revolutionary potential. Although it is not fully convincing—particularly in its treatment of women’s oppression and its tendency to overly detach the later Marx from both Engels and the young Marx—it remains a useful resource for those seriously interested in Marx’s works, (global) capitalism and revolution.

Nora Schmid is a fast food worker, community organiser and member of Sozialismus von unten in Germany.

Notes