It is a commonplace of this post-historical age that Karl Marx's materialist conception of history is a simplistic grand narrative, positing a unilinear and reductive account of historical change and expressing a Eurocentric view of the world. In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson challenges this view. Paying careful attention to what Marx actually wrote about politics at the peripheries—the margins—of Europe, especially in his more marginal journalistic writings, Anderson demonstrates the richness of Marx's understanding and the extent to which his mature thinking incorporated a nuanced appreciation of the importance of events and processes beyond the heart of Europe.

Anderson is to be commended for having come up with a terrific idea for a book, and for having written a genuinely innovative book, which may well be his best to date. The reasons for this commendation are not hard to see. Marx was, in Capital and elsewhere, at pains to insist that his life's work, the “Critique of Political Economy,” was centered on Western Europe and had application elsewhere only intermittently and/or by extension. Marx's admonition to a Russian reviewer of Capital is well known:

This seems unambiguous enough, and certainly offends against the notion of Marx as a believer in determinism and historical inevitability. Anderson calls attention on page 57 of Marx at the Margins to Marx's characterization of Poland as the “external thermometer” of revolution in Europe. Marx would not have done this if he had believed, tout simplement, that only working-class movements were worthy of the revolutionist's attention. But quite to the contrary, “Marx's support for the Polish cause was one of the great political passions of his life” (p. 56); Polish freedom was for Marx (though not for Proudhon or the residual Proudhonists in the International) the focal point of honor for all the democrats of Europe. Marx drew similar conclusions in his writings about India, China, Ireland, and the US Civil War, all of which Anderson anatomizes diligently and with care. But Marx's response to Mikhailovsky may in fact remain ambiguous in at least one crucial respect. It (and Capital at large) could still readily enough be taken to be suggesting that the royal road to social revolution runs through Western Europe, and—by extension—that to lose one's focus on this basic fact is to waste one's time.

But why should this be so? And did Marx even really believe it? As Karl Löwith observed many moons ago, “in Paris, Brussels and London, [Marx] lived on scanty honorariums, newspaper work, subsidies and credit,” (From Hegel to Nietzsche, 1964, 69), and of these four sources, newspaper work was, as a rule, the most regular and lucrative (or least penurious). It is at this point that Anderson's Marx at the Margins really kicks in. As Anderson points out, “Marx's journalism for the [New York Daily] Tribune and other newspapers has too often been dismissed as hackwork,” even though “it contained significant theoretical analyses of non-Western societies, ethnicity … race and nationalism” (p. 5). (These phenomena, contrary to received wisdom, were not exclusively twentieth-century discoveries or contributions, and Marx in particular, as Anderson shows quite convincingly, had interesting observations to advance about all four categories.) What the more comfortably situated might still feel able to dismiss as hackwork was, in large measure, how Marx made his living and supported his family, and there is no reason to suppose, prima facie, that in so doing he relaxed the high standards to which he adhered in his more academic (read “Western”) writings.

We need to take into account the fact that in writing for the Tribune (and for other, similarly oriented organs elsewhere), Marx was reaching the audience of workers—a large number of workers—with whom he most wanted to touch base. E. J. Hobsbawm has made the rather misleading point that of Marx's various writings, what was available and in print even during the later stages of Marx's career as a revolutionist was “exiguous”; I countered in “Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now,” in the Cambridge Companion to Marx (Terrell Carver, ed, 1991) with the observation, to which I still cleave, that we have no way of knowing what the effect on readers was even of major works that are now considered canonical but had fallen out of print in the course of Marx's lifetime. (This, in turn, is to say nothing of works like The German Ideology that never found a publisher, or works like The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts or the Grundrisse that Marx never wished to publish in the first place.) Anderson, for his part, thinks it is time for us to stand back and take our bearings, and I agree with him on this. The evidence is not all in, and pretty severe questions remain about what is to count as (only recently published) evidence anyway. But Marx's journalism, which was published and which circulated widely, must unquestionably count in the tally.

Consider, to begin with, a question that is not often raised in the scholarship about Marx: how important the New York Daily Tribune was in the history of nineteenth-century journalism. “With a circulation of two hundred thousand, the Tribune was unquestionably the most important US newspaper during the nineteenth century,” a paper “for which Marx served as … chief European correspondent for over a decade, from 1851–1862, the longest and most remunerative employment of his life” (p. 11)—a sobering reminder of how close to the edge Marx and his family lived before Engels was able to subsidize them from Manchester. It is indeed ridiculous, as Anderson does not flinch from pointing out, that to date “there has been no comprehensive analysis of Marx's Tribune writings” (p. 12).

The question that Anderson's fine book leaves us with may admit of no formulaic answer. It may be framed in the following way: The German Ideology lists three kinds of class societies based on three successive forms of private property, and restricted to a (broadly defined) Western Europe: ancient society, based on slavery; feudal society, based on serfdom; and capitalist society, based on formally free wage labor. Marx's Grundrisse of 1858 features not the inclusion within but the addition to this sequence of a fourth type of society, the “Asiatic” mode of production, and the 1859 Preface (to the Critique of Political Economy) follows suit, listing “the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society.” The Asiatic mode of production has a peculiar relation to the other three stages. It stands apart from them. Feudalism grows out of ancient society, capitalism grows out of feudal society, and communism will grow out of capitalist society (or its forcible overthrow). The Asiatic mode of production by contrast appears to have had no internal dynamic at all. It continuously rectifies its own status quo ante instead of generating any significant internal change. Any modification of the Asiatic mode, which is not a stage but a condition, must by extension be introduced from without, which has been held to explain (without justifying) Marx's (limited but notorious) defense of British colonialism in India. However, the notion of a (singular) Asiatic mode of production remains an indefensible one, an embarrassment to all too many modern readers.

The acid question about Marx at the Margins then becomes whether or not this same commonly expressed generalization about Marx (to which I gave voice in Political Thinkers, ed. David Boucher and Paul Kelly, 2003) should now be jettisoned in the wake of Anderson's arguments. Not all of it. Any talk of the (singular) Asiatic mode of production is and remains suspect and dated. But Anderson has persuaded me, hands down, that in view of Marx's more nuanced understandings of non-Western societies, as indicated by his various forays into journalism, the rather formulaic picture based on (and restricted to) the 1859 preface and the Grundrisse does not tell the whole story and needs to be modified along the lines Anderson suggests and convincingly proffers. In this respect, Marx at the Margins has done us all an enormous service and should serve to reground (or at the very least shift or change) discussions about the character of Marx's status not just as a theorist or theoretician, but also as an observer of what was going on around him as the nineteenth century ran its course, an observer who kept his eyes open.