Erica Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels

Erica Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels

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This book counters a range of assumptions commonly held about Marx's views of nationalism and internationalism, not least by twentieth-century marxists themselves. It shows that Marx did not envisage the abolition of national communities or nation states; that the politics of nationalism in Marx is not incompatible with a politics of class; that Marx was repeatedly critical of a "utopian" internationalism, and that the themes of nationalism and international solidarity, far from being necessarily in opposition, can be seen in many cases as mutually reinforcing. Nationalism then emerges in Marxist theory as a form of political self-identification and mobilization that can contribute to the broader project of social and political freedom.

Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

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In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well.   Marx at the Margins ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi-layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond.