n his final years, 1877-82, Marx studied three non-capitalist agrarian societies in great depth:
(1) Russia’s communal villages were increasingly penetrated by capitalist social relations, undermining the older agrarian collectivism, but new revolutionary movements had also grown there.
(2) In South Asia, British colonialism had uprooted much of the precapitalist village structure, with many forms of revolt along the way.
(3) Two millennia earlier, Rome had transitioned from an agrarian social order based upon a free peasantry to one based upon slave labor, amid both plebeian resistance and slave uprisings.
These writings, some of them still to be published and not taken up in Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, offer new insights into Marx’s concept of transition and of revolution.
Kevin Anderson teaches Sociology, Political Science, and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has written on Marx, Hegel, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, the Orientalism debate, and on social upheavals, particularly in the Middle East and Europe. Among his books are the Rosa Luxemburg Reader (coedited with Peter Hudis, 2004) Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (with Janet Afary, 2005) and Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (2010). He is a member of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.