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Sociology Annual Lecture

The annual lecture is a key event for the Department of Sociology. This yearly address offers faculty, staff and students a unique opportunity to meet prominent leaders in the field.

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Marx’s Late Writings: Theories of Revolutionary Change and of Alternatives to Capitalism


Date: March 12, 2025
Time: 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
Location: Harry Crowe Room, 109 Atkinson

Late Marxs Revolutionary Roads Book Cover

Distinguished Lecturer: Kevin B. Anderson

In his late writings, Marx ventured beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts, turning his attention to colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies and gender. Guest Lecturer and author, Kevin B. Anderson, joins us to discuss the findings from his new book, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads, which analyzes the late writings of Marx covering topics such as Indigenous communism, gender and anti-colonialism as well as a broader perspective on a global, multilinear theory of modern society and its revolutionary possibilities.

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Learn more about Kevin B. Anderson

Kevin B. Anderson is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara, with courtesy appointments in Feminist Studies and Political Science. He is the author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism; Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (with Janet Afary); Marx at the Margins; and The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads. Among his co-edited volumes are The Rosa Luxemburg Reader and Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism. He is also an editor of the forthcoming English edition of the late Marx’s notebooks on non-Western and precapitalist societies.

We would like to acknowledge the Resource Centre for Public Sociology’s financial support of the Annual Sociology Lecture.
We appreciate that they contributed a substantial part of their budget to support the lecture.

Abstract

In his last years, Karl Marx (1818-83) sketches three types of revolutionary change, each of them different from the united working class uprising that forms the conclusion of the first volume of Capital. Important as that rigorously dialectical, though abstract model is, it does not deal with race, colonialism, gender, the state, or other concrete factors discussed in some of his other writings, especially his late – largely unpublished – writings. (1) In 1869-70, Marx speculated that a British workers uprising might be sparked by one in Ireland led by the peasant-based Fenian nationalist movement. Inside Britain, English chauvinism and prejudice towards the Irish blunted working class solidarity and retarded formation of class consciousness. (These Marx writings build upon those of the 1860s on race, class, and revolution during the US Civil War.)  (2) During the 1870s, Marx clarifies and deepens his concept of communism in the German and French editions of Capital (1867-75), in the Civil War in France (1871), and especially in the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), where he sketches non-statist forms of free and associated labor that go far beyond the more centralist and statist notions put forward in the Communist Manifesto. (3) In his 1877-82 writings on Russia, Marx suggests that resistance in its communal villages against capitalist encroachments could lead to a form of modern communism, if this resistance could link up with the Western European labor movement.  On Algeria, India, and Latin America, his notes on communal village structures and anti-colonial resistance imply something similar, and also take up gender in a serious way.