But sometimes communal societies become progressive forces of emancipation. In his letters on Russian agrarian communes, Marx sees them as crucial vectors of postcapitalist resistance. Studying these local histories reveals how different the terrain for class struggle is from region to region.7/7

How contingent and conflictual social development. Communal social formations are no steady state and class societies still possess moments of friction with ancient communal life-forms. How class society and social inequality comes about differs from region to region. 6/7

Social contradictions internal to Iroquois society are hence bound to produce inegalitarian social relations. Marx repeats this kind of detailed analysis for other societies as well. His point is not to discover general laws of historical development (like Morgan did) but to show … 5/7

Thanks to communal ownership of the means of production, but outside pressure from colonial powers and the inability to integrate conquered tribes into their own society, foster concentrations of powers and social divisions that will birth class conflict. 4/7

He studies, for example, the living conditions of the native American Iroquois via Henry Morgan’s anthropological research. While Morgan presents them as an idyllic haven of equality doomed to be overrun by modernity, Marx is more dialectical. Yes, the Iroquois are more egalitarian … 3/7

Before 1870 Marx tended to view agrarian communal forms of living room as relics of the ancient past that would inevitably be swepped away by capitalist progress. But in his notebooks between 1869 and 1882, Marx changes his views via detailed case studies. 2/7

Here we go:
bsky.app/profile/timc...

But Anderson acknowledges that Marx's notebooks have a style difficult to interpret. Rarely speaking in his own voice, Marx quotes extensively from other works and adds little annotations and comments. That makes for a difficult read, but it's a challenge Anderson confronts throughout this book. 6/6

Marx might have wanted to refocus his historical analysis of capitalism away from the English case study of Capital Volume 1 to include appreciations of the United States and its racial tensions, the Indian (anti-)colonial struggles, and the Russian agrarian communes. 5/6

Anderson, Kohei Saito, Marcello Musto, etc. have castigated these Eurocentric readings. They argue that Marx considerably revised some of his theories about history, revolution, and colonialism through detailed case studies. Maybe Marx even stopped work on Capital to refocus the project entirely.4/6

David Riazanov, the first editor of the collected works of Marx and Engels in Moscow, would repeat this judgement and Marx' first biographer, Franz Mehring, would qualify these years as "little more than a slow death". However, more recent interpretations have reappraised these notebooks. 3/6

Instead, he filled notebook upon notebook with annotations and quotations about anthropology and case studies for Ireland, India, Russia, ancient Rome, etc. When editing Marx' posthumous works, Engels would quickly discard these notebooks and focus on the remaining volumes of Capital. 2/6

Anderson opens the book with a common misconception about Marx: that the period between 1869 and 1882, the last years of his intellectual life, were theoretically unproductive. Marx had just finished Capital Vol. 1 and had started work on volumes 2 and 3, which he never finished. 1/6

To be honest, I didn’t read Marx at the margins but I would like to do so soon now. The book does tend to devolve into a sum of annotations to Marx’s already chaotic notebooks. But overall, there’s an interesting argument in the book + some brilliant quotes here and there.

It's a useful reminder that sometimes tech can make a task more efficient for one side (applying for jobs), and more efficient for the other side (writing job adverts), and yet make the system as a whole completely inefficient.