Karl Marx Looked Forward to Revolt Against Europe’s Empires
Some critics have accused Karl Marx of forcing world history into a narrow framework that presented European capitalism as a universal development model. A closer look at Marx’s late writings show how far removed that stereotype is from the truth.
You might think there’s nothing new left to uncover in the work of Karl Marx. But Marx scholarship is just beginning to uncover the remarkable insights from his study of non-European societies and the new perspective on history he developed as a result. (Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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.
A Multilinear Marx
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.”
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