The late Marx refers to the work of Karl Marx from the late 1860s until his death in 1883. This period is characterized by a sustained engagement with topics that were less central to his earlier work, including non-Western societies, the role of colonialism, and the possibility of multiple paths of social development. Having completed the first German edition of Capital, Volume I in 1867, Marx spent much of his final decade researching and writing on Russia, anthropology, and pre-capitalist social forms. This work was conducted amidst severe ill-health and continued engagement with global political events.
Key texts from this period include Marx's writings on Ireland from 1869–70, his 1871 address on the Paris Commune (The Civil War in France), significant revisions for the 1872–1875 French edition of Capital, his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, his correspondence with Russian populists such as Vera Zasulich, and his anthropological notebooks (known as The Ethnological Notebooks). In these later works, Marx explored the potential for agrarian, non-capitalist societies like Russia to achieve a communist transformation without first undergoing the full development of industrial capitalism, provided such a revolution could link up with a proletarian revolution in Western Europe. He also gave greater attention to gender relations, colonialism as a system of domination, and forms of resistance in colonized societies such as India, Algeria, and Latin America.
Scholarly interpretation of this period is divided. Early scholars and editors of Marx's work, including Friedrich Engels and David Riazanov, tended to view his late-life focus on anthropology and non-European societies as a sign of intellectual decline, marred by digressions from his main work on political economy. However, since the late 20th century, a growing body of scholarship has argued that these late writings represent a crucial and creative development in his thought. This modern perspective sees the late Marx as offering a critique of Eurocentrism and a more nuanced understanding of global history, gender, and the complex relationship between class, race, and nationalism.
Background: Evolution of thought According to scholar Kevin B. Anderson, Karl Marx's late-period focus on non-Western societies and multilinear paths of development was the culmination of an intellectual evolution that began in the 1850s. His earlier work, most famously the 1848 The Communist Manifesto, contained what Anderson describes as a "problematically unilinear concept of social progress." The Manifesto presented Western colonial incursions into Asia as a brutal but historically progressive force that would draw "even the most barbarian, nations into civilization" and compel them to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.
This perspective was elaborated in Marx's 1853 articles on India for the New-York Tribune, in which he portrayed British colonialism as an "unconscious tool of history" that would annihilate "old Asiatic society" and lay the material foundations for Western society in Asia. At this time, Marx viewed pre-colonial Indian society as unchanging and characterized by "Oriental despotism," which he argued was based on the self-sufficient village commune. However, even in 1853, Anderson identifies a shift in Marx's thinking, as he also described British colonialism as a form of "barbarism" and looked forward to the day when "the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether."
By 1856–57, Marx's position became more strongly anti-colonialist as he supported the Chinese resistance during the Second Opium War and the Indian Sepoy Uprising. This period coincided with the writing of the Grundrisse (1857–58), where Marx first developed a "truly multilinear theory of history." He analyzed pre-capitalist social forms—delineating Asiatic, Greco-Roman, and Germanic types—and argued that Asian societies had a developmental path distinct from that of Western Europe. He also began to see the communal forms of the Indian village in a more nuanced light, suggesting they could be either democratic or despotic.
In the 1860s, while primarily focused on completing Capital, Marx's work with the International Workingmen's Association (First International) led him to engage deeply with nationalism, race, and ethnicity. His writings on the American Civil War (1861–65) analyzed the relationship between slavery and capitalism, concluding that "labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin." His analysis of the Polish uprising of 1863 reaffirmed his long-held view that Polish independence was a crucial precondition for a democratic revolution in Germany and across Europe. His intensive study of the Irish question led him to a significant theoretical shift that marked the beginning of his late period. By 1869–70, he concluded that his earlier view—that an English working-class revolution would precede and enable Irish independence—was wrong. He now argued that the "lever must be applied in Ireland"; Irish independence had become the "first condition" for the social emancipation of the English working class, as British oppression of Ireland created a crucial antagonism between English and Irish workers that bound the English proletariat to its own ruling class.
Key works and themes (1869–1883) During his final decade, Marx deepened his research into non-Western societies, anthropology, and non-capitalist social forms. Anderson argues that this work can be understood through his revisions to the French edition of Capital; his extensive research notebooks on anthropology and world history; and his writings on the revolutionary potential in Russia.
The Civil War in France and the Paris Commune
In 1871, Marx wrote The Civil War in France, an analysis of and encomium for the Paris Commune. The text, which served as an address to the General Council of the First International, was an attempt by Marx to "set the record straight" on the Commune in the face of widespread condemnation. Although he was an "anti-utopian thinker" who generally avoided speculating on the form of a future communist society, the concrete example of the Commune led him to outline his views on revolutionary government. Marx praised the Commune's democratic institutions, which he saw as the blueprint for a workers' government: the replacement of the standing army with a people's militia; the election of municipal councillors by universal manhood suffrage who were responsible to their electorate and could be recalled; the payment of all public officials, from councillors to judges, at working-class wages; and the disestablishment of the church.
French edition of Capital and multilinearity
Between 1872 and 1875, Marx dedicated significant time to preparing the French edition of Capital, the first translation of the book. He described this edition as having a "scientific value independent of the original," which he urged even German-speaking readers to consult. This task proved to be a "real slog," requiring him to rewrite large portions of the text and consuming time he had planned for other work. In this edition, Marx made several crucial revisions that limited the seemingly universal applicability of his theory of historical development.
In the preface to the first German edition (1867), a widely cited sentence stated: "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future." This was often interpreted as presenting England's path as a universal model for all societies. In the French edition, Marx altered the sentence to read: "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those that follow it up the industrial ladder, the image of its own future." This change explicitly excluded societies that had not yet embarked on a capitalist path, such as Russia and India, leaving open the possibility of alternative developmental trajectories.
A second, more explicit change was made in the chapter on "The Secret of Primitive Accumulation." In the German editions, Marx stated that the history of the expropriation of the peasantry "assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession ... Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form." In the French edition, Marx added a crucial clarification:
This revision explicitly restricted his historical sketch of the origins of capitalism to "Western Europe," a point he would later emphasize in his correspondence on Russia.
Critique of the Gotha Programme
Marx's 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, a set of marginal notes on the unity programme of the German social-democratic parties, was another key text from this period. It was published posthumously by Engels in 1891. The work contains Marx's most extensive statements on the principles of a communist society and represents a sharp critique of liberal conceptions of rights. Marx argued that liberal 'rights' were "indissolubly connected with interests construed not just individualistically but egoistically." He posited that in a communist society, the need for a separate apparatus of enforcement would decline, as cooperative production would generate a "realm of individual interests in collectively beneficial relations" where disputes could be resolved differently.
Russia and an alternate path to communism Marx's late work was deeply engaged with Russia. The 1872 Russian translation of Capital—its first translation into any language—was widely debated by Russian intellectuals, particularly the populists (Narodniki), who sought an agrarian, non-capitalist path to socialism. Marx's thinking on this subject was influenced by the work of the populist writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose analysis suggested that a given social phenomenon did not need to pass through all the same "logical moments" in every society. In 1877, Marx drafted a response to an article by the populist writer Nikolai Mikhailovsky, who had interpreted Marx's theory as a "suprahistorical" philosophy of history that mandated all nations, including Russia, must pass through the stage of capitalism. Marx strongly rejected this interpretation, citing the revised French edition of Capital to argue that his sketch of primitive accumulation was explicitly limited to Western Europe. He wrote that one could never understand social development "with the master key of a general historico-philosophical theory, whose supreme virtue consists in being suprahistorical."
The Zasulich correspondence
In February 1881, the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich wrote to Marx, asking directly if Russia's rural commune (the obshchina or mir), an ancient form of collective land tenure, could "pass directly into the higher, communist form of communal ownership" or if it was "destined to perish" as Russia underwent capitalist development. Marx composed four lengthy preparatory drafts before sending a brief reply. The drafts show him grappling with the question in depth, drawing on his extensive anthropological research.
In the drafts, Marx argued that the Russian commune had a unique vitality compared to other pre-capitalist communal forms. Its "dualism"—the combination of communal land ownership with private household farming and appropriation of produce—created potential for both individual development and collective life. Crucially, the Russian commune was not an isolated, archaic society; it was "contemporaneous with capitalist production." This allowed it the possibility of appropriating "all its positive achievements" of capitalism—such as technology and the mechanisms of a global market—"without undergoing its hideous vicissitudes."