Publications Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’s Internet Archive
Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 174 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
There is a persistent movement within academic circles to castigate Marxism as Eurocentric – only concerned with European culture and politics. Marx’s writings on India are used and often misquoted or misunderstood.
The most famous line used against Marx is from his writings in the New York Tribune: ‘whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution’. But if we want to understand Marx’s views we have to place the sentence in its context:
‘England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan was activated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution’.
Colonialism did not bring about a revolution in India, but it did bring a resolution to the crisis of Indian society, which was stagnant in technology and production. This backwardness, coupled with dynastic wars, had left India unable to unite against encroaching colonialism. Though Marx criticised pre-colonial society in India, he was equally critical of European feudalism. His comments on the Indian caste system restraining the human mind, making it the ‘unresisting tool of superstition’, are mirrored by Marx’s statements on the European peasantry, which he described as ‘mired in the idiocy of rural life’. Marx was commenting on how peasant life sapped human potential.
Any attempt to portray Marx as an enthusiastic colonialist would have to demonstrate that he was an ardent supporter of capitalism.
Marx’s idea that a transplanted European society could bring about a fundamental change in Indian society might appear today as strange and exaggerated, but it is worth remembering that the difference in material prosperity between India and Britain in 1835 was not that great – certainly in comparison to the gap between the two in 1947, on the eve of Indian independence.
His analysis of Indian society was to demonstrate those structures that impeded and distorted Indian development in its move towards a capitalist revolution. Uppermost in his mind was the dead weight of the baggage of Indian pre-capitalist society.
The letters to the New York Tribune were penned before either Grundrisse or Capital were written. Marx wrote in a letter in 1881:
‘In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, are in store for the British government. What these British take from them annually in the form of rent dividends, for railways useless for the Hindus, pensions for the military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc, etc – what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India – speaking only of the value of the commodities that Indians have to gratuitously and annually send over to England – it amounts to more than the total sum of the income of the 60 million of agricultural and industrial labourers of India. This is a bleeding process with a vengeance.’
Such views hardly reveal a racist attitude.
Marx also welcomed the Indian National Revolt of 1857, seeing it as part of an Asian revolt against Europe. Engels too had nothing but praise for the Chinese struggles against Europeans, accusing the Western nations of being ‘civilisation mongers who throw hot shells on defenceless cities and add rape to murder.’ Thus neither Marx nor Engels saw resistance to colonialism as misdirected.
Socialist Review Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 10 March 2017