Critics of Marxism claim that it is incapable of recognizing forms of oppression that aren’t linked to a narrow understanding of class. They also accuse Karl Marx and those who followed in his footsteps of trying to fit the whole of human history into a rigid, unilinear model based on the experience of Western Europe.

Kevin B. Anderson challenged this view in his book Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. Based on a careful reading of Marx’s full body of work, including many neglected or unpublished texts, it shows that Marx was far more attuned to questions of race and national liberation than has been commonly suggested.