Viewing Africa with Marx: Remarks on Marx's Fragmented Engagement with the African Continent

Abstract

Marx's utterings on Africa are but dots and sprinkles across his entire oeuvre. Retracing them reveals changes in Marx's view on non-European societies. The early Marx praises the modernizing force of capital, while in his ethnological notebooks on Algeria there are critical perspectives on colonial policy. Marx's fragmented comments on Africa can only be understood in the context of colonialism and the integration of non-European societies into the web of bourgeois relations of production, world-wide capital expansion and the dynamics of non-capitalist societies.