Marxism, Modernity and Marginality

Abstract

Since the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent century of revolutions in the global South, Marxism has been more at home in the margins – in what Immanuel Wallerstein described as the periphery and semi-periphery – than anywhere else. In the core capitalist countries, Marxism continues to have a great impact among intellectuals, but also often finds itself challenged by social and cultural theory grounded in a rhetoric of marginality, usually identifiable by the prefix post – poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and that bogeyman ‘postmodernism’ (see Chari and Verdery, 2009). One of the more unfortunate situations of left theory today is the mutual suspicion and even hostility sometimes found between the ‘posts’ and Marxists. Some have read poststructuralism – apparently ignorant of its political provenance – as inherently hostile to Marxism and some Marxists have mirrored this incorrect understanding, returning the unwarranted and unproductive enmity.1 In Marx at the Margins Kevin B. Anderson makes it clear that Marx himself was a theorist of the margins and that his work on the margins fundamentally shaped his theoretical masterpiece, the three volumes of Capital. One of the important achievements of Marx at the Margins is to help connect Marxist theory with the poststructuralist, deconstructionist, subaltern-studies, and postcolonial approaches with which Marxism sometimes, incorrectly, appears at odds. Anderson treats at least two types of margins. The first margin is the one indicated in the subtitle of the book, regions outside of England and north-west Europe, outside, that is, of those areas thought in modernization theory to represent the most advanced cases along a single track of development. Marx’s occasional and ephemeral writing – newspaper articles, notes, letters, and unpublished drafts – make up the second margin. The two margins are interrelated empirically, since many of Marx’s most extensive writings on the margins of capitalism occur in his marginal writings. Both of these margins can be studied now better than ever before because of the excellent work proceeding on the new Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (1972–). Anderson’s book is especially important because it not only analyzes these two marginal aspects of Marx, but because it also relates these two margins to the core of Marx’s achievement: a dialectical approach to history, and