Did Karl Marx endorse imperialism?

Colonel Blimp

There’s an article today on the Guardian newspaper’s “Comment is free” blog by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a Thatcherite journalist who has remained somewhat critical of the war in Iraq but not the right of great powers to dominate weaker ones, as demonstrated by article’s title: “They should come out as imperialist and proud of it.” Wheatcroft is referring to a certain diffidence on the part of the Euston Manifesto’s drafters to proclaim their incipient imperialist yearnings. Of course, there is also the possibility that Wheatcroft is employing Swiftian irony, but since he was called upon by the NY Times Book Review to pen a hatchet job on Robert Fisk’s “The Conquest of the Middle East,” that seems a bit remote.

Since Wheatcroft’s article portrays Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as defenders of imperialism, a reply might be in order. As is commonly understood, there is a long-standing tradition on the British left to try to make an amalgam between socialism and the foreign policy imperatives of the British Empire. Indeed, two different and very useful blog contributions have connected the Euston Manifesto to this tradition.

From Histomat, a group blog based in Great Britain, there’s an entry titled “Euston, we have a problem” that examines the Coefficient Club of the Fabian Society as a precedent to Norm Geras and company’s project: “Basically, the Fabians wanted a new world imperial order spreading out from a militarised and newly efficient British state that would spread universal suffrage internationally. While the bit about ‘universal suffrage’ was not accepted by the non-socialist members of the Coefficients Club, these conservative and liberals who attended saluted the idea of remilitarising British society as they felt British parliamentarism had gone soft.”

From Reading the Maps, another excellent group blog based in New Zealand, there’s a complementary article titled “The Peculiarities of the Pro-war Left” that complements Histomat’s:

“To many intellectuals in nineteenth century Britain, the first section of the Manifesto read less like history than prophecy. The first British Marxist organisation of any size and durability, the Social Democratic Federation, was led by a man who can rightly be called a forebear of today’s pro-war left. Described by Eric Hobsbawm as a ‘gentleman, cricketer, and stockbroker leading the masses toward revolution in a top hat and frock-coat’, Henry Hyndman worried the working class rank and file of the SDF by using the Communist Manifesto to make pseudo-Marxist defences of the British Empire, arguing that Britain’s colonies were the ‘just desserts’ of the British working class. Hyndman’s views found an echo amongst the so-called socialist imperialists of the early Fabian Society.”

It should be understood that these Fabians were capable of quoting Marx as well as the devil cites scripture. Although Wheatcroft is a Thatcherite with zero sympathies for socialism, he seems to have absorbed much of the mischievousness of people like Hyndman.

He writes:

In the next century Mill, Macaulay and even Marx made approving noises about British rule in India. Macaulay thought it proper to elevate the Indians by teaching them Shakespeare and the doctrines of the Glorious Revolution. Early on, Marx believed “the English were the first conquerors superior, and therefore inaccessible, to Hindu civilisation”; for much the same reason Engels approved initially of France’s conquest of Algeria.

While it is true that Marx and Engels held such attitudes early in their career, it is important to understand that they eventually discarded them. Marx wrote his articles on India in the early 1850s, but even if he gave critical support to Great Britain, there was no mistaking his analysis for those of the Fabians or Norm Geras. Even at this early date, Marx believed that “The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether.”

(The Future Results of British Rule in India, July 22, 1853)

Furthermore, even if Marx offered the barest concession to British capitalism as a force that could create the conditions for the future emancipation of India, there were clear indications that by the end of his life, he no longer held such beliefs. In his correspondence with the Russian populists, he characterized English rule in India as a “bleeding process with a vengeance” and advised the populists to reject the idea that a capitalist stage was necessary precondition for Russia to make the socialist revolution.

Continuing along in his bumbling manner, Wheatcroft opines:

According to Marxist doctrine, socialism could arrive only after bourgeois capitalism. A comparable outlook was found on the left well beyond the Marxists. Europeans instinctively believed that Europe “had achieved the highest form of civilisation ever known”, which was its duty to export throughout the world, AJP Taylor wrote. He added, only part playfully, that “these were radical beliefs”: that was why the Fabians supported the Boer war and championed the British empire.

Contrary to Wheatcroft, Marxists came to understand that the main obstacle to the historic goals of the bourgeois revolution in places such as India, Algeria and elsewhere was colonial rule itself. For example, one of the cornerstones of a modern capitalist society is a land reform that will hasten the development of commodity production in the countryside, a precondition for future capitalist growth. However, the colonists preferred to utilize the plantation system and forced labor as a way to guarantee a steady supply of cheap agricultural goods and superprofits. It would take socialist and anti-imperialist struggles to uproot the plantation system, not the beneficence of the mother country which fought such changes till the very end.