Review of The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism by Kevin Anderson (Verso Books, 2025)
In his new book Karl Marx in America, Andrew Hartman suggests that we are now living through the “fourth boom” of Marxism in the English-speaking world. While such an idea might seem fanciful in terms of social and political movements, if we take it as referring to intellectual engagement with Karl Marx’s thought and writings, it captures a definite truth.
Last year, Princeton University Press published the first new English translation of Capital: Volume I in decades, while Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto was published to much fanfare. In 2025, Hartman’s own book is making waves, and Kevin Anderson’s The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads now appears to demonstrate the continuing relevance and appeal of Marx and Marxism.
Revolutionary Roads takes up where Anderson’s previous book Marx at the Margins left off fifteen years ago. The publication of Marx at the Margins constituted a landmark development in Marx scholarship. Drawing on Marx’s extensive journalistic writings, letters, and late notebooks on non-European and precapitalist societies, it challenged the widespread view of Marx as a deterministic thinker with a unilinear model of history that exemplified, in the words of Edward Said, an “homogenizing view of the Third World.”
Marx’s writings, when taken in the round, do not evince a unilinear and deterministic understanding of human…
Auteur: Kieran Durkin
