by SIYA MORITA
“The Roots of Karl Marx’s Anti-Colonialism“[1] by Thierry Drapeau in Jacobin examines the influence of the Chartist Leftist Ernest Jones on the development of Marx’s anti-colonialist thinking in the 1850s. Drapeau’s analysis is enlightening, but raises some questions.
Drapeau writes that the Communist Manifesto “considered Western imperialism as a progressive and beneficial force drawing underdeveloped societies into bourgeois civilization”. But the Manifesto made no such simple claim. Instead, it revealed the dynamism of the bourgeoisie taking root all over the world and remaking the world in its own image. It did not so simply express a naive view of imperialism (even if this term did not exist at the time) as a “progressive and beneficial force”.
Drapeau thinks that Marx took on an anti-colonialist stance after 1850 when he began to interact with Ernest Jones. But even reading just Marx’s and Engels’ famous speeches on Poland in November 1847, we see that Marx spoke of the need for the liberation of oppressed nations as a precondition for the struggles of the working class, and Engels advocated the famous proposition, later frequently used by Lenin, that “a nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations” [2]. In The Condition of the Working-Class in England, Engels further makes a case for the important role that the Irish have played (or could play) in the British labour movement, and that the racial and ethnic diversity of the working class is a positive rather than a negative for the movement.[3] Furthermore, in his 1847 book The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx said that slavery and the colonies are an integral part of modern capitalism, and went so far as to say that “direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc.”[4].
Drapeau’s claim that Marx’s views of colonialism turned 180-degrees after 1850 when he became anti-colonialist is misleading. It is true that, after 1850, especially from the middle of the 1850s, Marx denounced more strongly and more concretely the criminality of British imperialism. And perhaps it is also true that there was some influence of Ernest Jones on Marx’s thinking on this point. But Marx never lost sight of the perspective that the global spread of capitalism as a world system would create the material preconditions for communism as another world system.
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