Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-Western Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity by Kevin B. Anderson

This article by Kevin B. Anderson covers some of the same ground as his excellent book, Marx at the margins which focused on Marx's writings about non-metropolitan areas and their importance in his writing as a whole. It targets the allegation that Marx pursued a unilinear model of development. Any serious and in depth analysis of Marx would show that this isn't true. As does Anderson.

Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-Western Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity

Socialism and Democracy

Kevin B. Anderson

 

Despite the revival of interest in Marx since the economic crisis hit, some important ideological and conceptual barriers continue to block what would be a very positive step, returning to Marx as the primary source of leftist critique of capitalist modernity as a whole, and as providing the theoretical ground for its overcoming [Aufhebung].
In recent decades, Marx’s critics have fallen into two large groups, sometimes overlapping of course. In neoliberal ideology, Marx is considered a dead dog because he tried to take us beyond capitalism, to which there is supposedly no alternative. Along similar lines, it is also claimed the Soviet collapse invalidates empirically Marx’s allegedly impractical and utopian schemes.
In left and progressive academic circles, however, the critique of Marx has usually taken a different direction. In these quarters it is often said that the problem with Marx is not that he was too radical, as the neoliberals say, but that he was not radical enough. Some add that the truly radical thinkers are people like Foucault, Deleuze, even Nietzsche. These critics – most famously Edward Said – attack Marx for adopting what they see as a unilinear model of development in the modernist mode. (Postmodernists term this a grand narrative.) Here, much of the debate has revolved around Marx’s 1853 articles on India and a passage in the Communist Manifesto (1848) on China. At a more general level, it is said even more often among progressives that Marx informs us on class and economic structures but that his theoretical model does not incorporate race, ethnicity, gender, or nationalism at all, or at least not very much.
I think responding to these critiques – especially the ones from the progressive left – is as important as the earlier effort to separate Marx’s original vision from Stalinism and totalitarianism, an effort that still remains necessary today. That link of Marx to Stalinism – although in my view invalid – is part of what has fostered the growth anarchism among so many younger radicals today.
In this article, I will respond to the kinds of criticisms of Marx that have been coming from parts of the progressive left and which center on charges of unilinearism and grand narrative, ethnocentrism, and lack of concern with race, ethnicity, gender, and nationalism[1]. At the outset, it should be noted that Marx himself lived at the margins, where his thought is still relegated to this day. The deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida captures well Marx’s marginality as a political refugee in Victorian London, linking it to his equally marginal position within the Western intellectual tradition: “Marx remains an immigrant among us, a glorious, sacred, accursed but still clandestine immigrant as he was all his life” (1994: 174).