Marx at the Margins

ByGilberto López y Rivas

This article by Gilberto López y Rivas originally appeared in the November 14, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

The book Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies (Verso 2024, Barcelona), by Professor Kevin B. Anderson of the University of California, Santa Barbara, which was published in Spanish last year, after 14 years of publication in English, constitutes a timely, updated and profound contribution to the political and academic debates surrounding the resistance of indigenous peoples to the militarized and criminal recolonization of their territories, and to the theoretical reflections of the Marxist universe on the anti-capitalist and anti-fascist struggles that actually exist.

In his preface to this edition, the author argues that we are at a crossroads: “fascism, environmental destruction, war and imperialism, on the one hand, and new and growing prospects for true human liberation, on the other (…).

“Faced with this profoundly contradictory global reality, Marxism—and in particular, the in-depth study of Marx’s original writings—is beginning to re-emerge as an intellectual discourse but also as a guide for radical and revolutionary movements.”

In this context, Anderson’s work responds –with solid foundations, and even encyclopedic scope– to Marx’s critics who point to a supposed classist and economic reductionism in his analyses, which supposedly ignore, exclude or minimize other forms of domination and exploitation.

As Michael Löwy points out on the back cover, Anderson presents a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations, and “offers a Marx for the 21st century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not only class, but also nationalism, race and ethnicity (…) This book foregrounds a global theorist, whose social critique was sensitive to the various forms of oppression and social struggle.”

Thus, the work in question presents, in addition to two explanatory prefaces and a didactic introduction, sections on colonial encounters in the 1850s; the link between national emancipation and revolution, based on the cases of Russia and Poland; race, class and slavery, as a second American revolution; nationalism, class and the labor movement, privileging Ireland; multilinear themes from the Grundrisse to Capital; late writings on non-Western and pre-capitalist societies, culminating, in its slightly more than 400 pages, with conclusions, appendices, bibliography, and a useful thematic index.

Anderson emphasizes a very important emblematic axis for discussions on neo-Zapatismo and the contributions of the struggles of Indigenous peoples, which points out that “Marx’s evocation of the rural communes of Russia as spaces for revolution did not only refer to Russia, but also to many other societies he studied (Asia, Africa and Latin America, all imbued with communal forms of work and property (…), as well as his focus on nationalism, race and ethnicity as a lever for revolution and opposition to the domination of capital and the modern State (…), as sources of consciousness and revolutionary action.”

“These took the form of an “additive” to class consciousness; they were factors that sometimes operated alongside it, but which gained even more strength if the prejudices of workers from dominant ethnic groups began to be overcome.”

He notes that in his book he has tried to: “bridge two currents: on the one hand, those that analyze and fight against class domination, that which is exercised by capital; on the other hand, new forms of analysis and practices in the fight against oppressions rooted in race, gender, sexuality and the destruction of the environment.”

Anderson’s work strengthens the theoretical and political searches and positions that, from Latin America, have strived to overcome economic, classist, and proletarian reductionisms that, in the name of Marxism, have ignored, minimized, or denied the role of peasant and Indigenous movements in revolutionary processes.

Already in Mexico, since the 1970s, currents developed in the field of anthropology that called themselves ethnomarxist and emphasized Marx’s positions in his critique of colonialism and the Eurocentric perspectives of his thought, maintaining that the analyses of the capital-labor confrontation should be “coloured” with the contradictions that result from the cultural, ethnic-national, racial, gender and age group compositions and characteristics of capitalist societies.

In short, Anderson’s book is essential reading for times of genocide, climate crisis, risks of planetary collapse, and, at the same time, paradoxically, concrete utopias to pursue and put into practice.