Marx for Poles

Abstract

There is no denying the fact that much has been written on Marx! In the view of the fact that Kevin B. Anderson has already contributed significantly to this literature, one could have expected that his new book might repeat some of his arguments or cast them in just yet another fashion. The continuity of his interest in the intellectual production of Marx and Engels is undoubtedly visible, and among the impressively numerous other works, he refers also to his own previous publications. However, in this book, Anderson focuses on two major issues viewed from Marx’s own nineteenth century London perspective: first, on regions/societies/countries significantly different from the European ones, such as China, India, Russia or Algeria, considered to be ‘non-Western precapitalist societies’ and second, on countries functioning in nineteenth century at the peripheries of the core capitalist system, such as the USA, Ireland, Russia and Poland. All of them can be also grouped according to the degree they were integrated into the global capitalist order and, often concurrently, the colonial arrangement. Two major topics are followed in the book. The first is the problem of whether the evolution of the European or non-European societies was multilinear and unilinear, especially the question of if, whether and how capitalism should modernize the latter before they could become sites of resistance to the capital. The second is the emancipation of nations, nationalities and ethnic groups in different regions of the world, but especially in Poland, Ireland and the USA. Only on the surface do these two topics seem to be loosely related. As Anderson convincingly shows, the question of national and social liberation is closely intertwined in Marx’s