Abstract

Kevin B. Anderson's The Late Marx and the Russian Road has become the canonical reference for a plural, non-Eurocentric Marx. Its archival recovery of Marx's ethnological notebooks is invaluable, yet the book's form and reception reveal a deeper process: the translation of a scientific attempt to understand social formations into a moral narrative that organizes belief. This article reconstructs that process as it occurs in Anderson's text. Drawing on Bourdieu's sociology of intellectual fields, Kuhn and Lakatos's philosophy of scientific change, and the decolonial analyses of Fanon, Wynter, Berlant, Coulthard, Simpson, and de Sousa Santos, the essay shows how Anderson's reading turns Marx's late uncertainty into evidence of virtue, transforming an unfinished research program into a story of redemption. It concludes by outlining the methodological work required to recover Anderson's materials for an empirically testable, collaborative, and decolonial social science.

The Book's Achievement and Its Double Task

Anderson's achievement is historical. By examining Marx's final notebooks -- his studies of the Russian obshchina, Indian villages, and Indigenous North American societies -- he demonstrates that Marx abandoned a single linear model of development and began to treat capitalism as one possible path among several. Anderson thus shows that Marx's later thinking was open, comparative, and far less Eurocentric than his earlier writings.

The discovery also serves another task. It reassures readers that Marxism can include the non-European world without revising its conceptual foundation. The late Marx becomes an image of moral progress: the old theory purified of its arrogance. The book therefore does two things at once -- reconstructs an archive and repairs a tradition -- and it is the tension between those tasks that reveals the shift from science to story.

How a Scientific Question Becomes a Moral Answer

Marx's late notes contain a scientific problem. He wanted to know under what material conditions communal property could resist or transform capitalist penetration. That problem could have been developed into a set of causal hypotheses: how collective tenure, reciprocity, and state taxation interact to produce or delay commodification. Anderson's book collects the data but does not pursue those hypotheses. Instead, it presents Marx's hesitation as an ethical conversion. The movement of thought -- Marx asking "might there be another path?" -- is retold as a scene of conscience.

That shift is subtle. A change of variables becomes a change of heart. The uncertainty that could have generated new experiments is domesticated as proof of empathy. The unresolved question about how societies reproduce themselves becomes an emblem of Marxism's humanity. A scientific unknown is replaced by a moral known.

Pressures That Encourage the Shift

This translation of inquiry into morality is not unique to Anderson. It follows the same pressures that shape most contemporary intellectual work.

First, the pressure of visibility

Scholars now write within overlapping publics: one academic, the other political. Each demands different satisfactions. The academic audience asks for demonstration of method; the political audience asks for assurance of solidarity. To be legible to both, the writer must turn analysis into performance -- showing concern becomes as important as testing claims.

Second, the pressure of legitimacy

After a century of accusations of Eurocentrism, Marxism seeks a story of renewal. Anderson provides that story by rediscovering a plural Marx. His philology offers the evidence; his narrative supplies the redemption. The combination stabilizes the tradition.

Third, the pressure of circulation

Concepts that can travel easily -- phrases such as "multilinear development" or "the peripheries of capital" -- are favored over those that require quantitative or comparative labor. Ideas become easier to exchange when they can be repeated without being tested.

Together these pressures make it almost inevitable that a work of recovery becomes a work of reassurance. The book's form mirrors the environment in which it circulates.

The Change in Function: From Hypothesis to Belief

When a theory is treated as a belief, its propositions no longer need to be verified; they need only to be affirmed. In Anderson's case, the claim that Marx recognized plural paths is taken not as a hypothesis about historical causation but as a moral truth about inclusivity. The reader's assent is measured by sympathy, not by evidence.

This change in function parallels what Adorno and Horkheimer (1947) described in the culture industries: the transformation of knowledge into reproducible feeling. It also echoes Debord's (1967) account of the spectacle, where representation stands in for experience, and Boltanski and Chiapello's (1999) observation that capitalism incorporates critique by aestheticizing it. The same logic appears here: critical thought becomes a style of moral comportment.

The effect is a form of governance through emotion. Readers are invited to share Marx's remorse and thereby to participate in his absolution. The difficult work of modeling, comparison, and falsification is replaced by the gentler work of identification. The community maintains its coherence not through agreement about facts but through a shared tone of redemption. Lauren Berlant (2011) would call this a structure of cruel optimism: attachment to an image of improvement that preserves the conditions that made improvement necessary.

What the Science Would Have Looked Like

To see what has been lost, it helps to imagine the path not taken. Marx's notes could be organized as a set of empirical questions:

1. Does collective tenure correlate with slower commodification of land?
2. Does the density of reciprocal obligation correlate with resistance to class polarization?
3. Do variations in state extraction and market exposure explain differences in communal persistence?

Each of these can be tested with historical and comparative data. A result, positive or negative, would contribute to a theory of how social formations reproduce themselves. Anderson's book, however, halts before such testing. His conclusion is moral rather than causal: Marx cared, therefore Marxism can continue. What could have been a program of research becomes a lesson in character.

The Broader Pattern: The Liberalization of Knowledge

This movement from inquiry to morality mirrors the broader liberalization of knowledge under late capitalism. Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) describe how capitalism absorbed the language of autonomy and creativity that once opposed it. Fisher (2009) later noted that critique itself had become a mode of maintenance: it keeps the structure in motion by giving it a conscience. Anderson's Late Marx performs the same work within Marxism. The field renews itself by narrating its repentance. What had been a materialist science of social motion becomes an ethical humanism sustained by feeling.

The shift is not merely rhetorical. It changes the economy of value within the discipline. Effort that once produced data now produces atmosphere. The reward is not refutation but moral recognition. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) would call this the substitution of cultural capital for scientific capital: prestige replaces proof.

Decolonization and the Overrepresentation of the Human

The moral frame also affects how non-European societies appear in the theory. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (1961) argued that decolonization is not the widening of Europe's humanity but the birth of a different one. Wynter (2003) later described how the figure of "Man" continues to define what counts as knowledge. Anderson's Marx, though sympathetic to Indigenous and communal forms, still speaks from that center. The peripheries he studies provide the scene of his moral growth; they do not share authorship in the discovery of law.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) calls for an "ecology of knowledges," in which epistemic authorities coexist without subordination. Anderson gestures toward such coexistence but keeps Marx as the arbiter. The science that might have emerged from multiple ontologies becomes a European self-correction. The periphery redeems the core by being recognized, not by recognizing itself.

Toward a Relational Science

Recovering the scientific impulse within Marx's late writings would mean returning to the question of relations rather than sentiments. Following Coulthard (2014) and Simpson (2017), communal economies can be treated as material systems that reproduce life through reciprocity and responsibility to land. These systems display regularities that can be observed, modeled, and compared. A relational science would analyze those regularities without translating them into the moral language of progress.

Such a project would join Lakatos's (1978) vision of progressive research programs with Santos's call for co-produced epistemologies. Its hypotheses would be open to refutation, and its methods would be co-designed with the communities whose realities they describe. In this way, decolonization would move from rhetoric to procedure.

What Would Be Required

To move from Anderson's moral reconstruction to a scientific one would require several concrete tasks:

1. Verification: Check each citation in The Late Marx against the MEGA II manuscripts, recording differences in wording and context. Link each passage to the anthropological data Marx used -- Morgan, Kovalevsky, Lubbock, Maine -- so the evidentiary chain is transparent.
2. Formalization: Express Marx's qualitative insights as variables that can be measured -- tenure, reciprocity, market exposure, taxation -- and state explicit hypotheses about their relations.
3. Historical testing: Use nineteenth-century surveys and fiscal records to evaluate those hypotheses. Report both successes and failures; both advance knowledge.
4. Collaborative fieldwork: Partner with Indigenous and communal communities to test whether similar relations hold today, ensuring data sovereignty and shared authorship.
5. Modeling and synthesis: Build dynamic models to simulate how these variables interact over time and under different pressures. Compare outputs to historical and contemporary observations.
6. Evaluation: Measure success by explanatory adequacy and community validation rather than by rhetorical or affective reach.

These steps would not only complete the research that Marx and Anderson began but also shift Marxism from confession back to investigation.

Consequences for the Field

If such work were undertaken, the internal hierarchy of Marxist scholarship would change. In Bourdieu's terms, scientific capital -- knowledge open to correction -- would once again outweigh cultural capital -- fluency in the right moral language. The field would reward collective verification over individual expression. The ethical moment would remain, but as discipline rather than display: the willingness to risk being wrong together.

For decolonial studies, this change would mark a passage from recognition to participation. Fanon's and Wynter's visions of a humanity beyond Man would become methodological commitments: theories built in relation rather than on behalf.

Conclusion

Anderson's Late Marx is both a necessary and a symptomatic book. It returns us to Marx's most open moment and shows how quickly openness can harden into virtue. The book's moral power -- its ability to comfort and to unify -- is real, but that very power displaces the scientific question that Marx's notebooks posed: how do societies reproduce themselves under unequal pressures?

To read Anderson scientifically is therefore to read him against the grain of his own success. It is to treat his materials not as proof of Marx's benevolence but as data for theories that may contradict him. Such reading does not diminish Anderson's contribution; it completes it. The work of critique becomes again the work of discovery.

Only then will Marxism move from endurance to experiment, from story to science, and from the morality of inclusion to the practice of relation.

References

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• Anderson, Kevin B. 2010. The Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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