V. G. Kiernan Marxism and Imperialism 1975

To
John Saville
in gratitude for much stimulating encouragement, and as a
small tribute to his long years of service to socialism.
MARXISM A D
IMPERIALISM
studies by
V. G. Kiernan
Edward Arnold
iSTANBUL BiLGi
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
V. G. Kiernan 1974-
First published I071 by
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Contents
Foreword
Vll
The Marxist theory of Imperialism and its
historical formation I
2 Farewells to Empire: some recent studies
of imperialism
6g
3
Imperialism, American and European:
some historical contrasts
95
4
The Peasant Revolution: some questions
132
5
Marx and India
165
6 Marx, Engels, and the Indian Mutiny
203
7
India and the Labour Party
238
Index
255
Foreword
Imperialism is a major theme of world history, and one that
offers more glimpses than almost any other of the nature of man
and of human society; that is, of the hierarchies of unequal
classes that have made up all human societies but the most
primitive. It has gone through Protean shapes and variations,
in some of which it persists today, openly as in Portuguese
Africa or clandestinely as in the countless spheres of influence
of the United States. Questions relating to it and its history arc
therefore far from being merely academic. Strictly academic
history-writing, indeed, has shown a disposition of late to edge
the subject out of court; to put imperialism in inverted commas
in its examination-papers, as if it were some quaint fallacy or
old wives' tale. At this rate we might before long, with the aiel
of the philosophers, put most of history in inverted commas,
and allow ourselves to forget most of its unpleasantnesses.
My own interest in the s u ~ j e c t began many years ago, when
the British, French and other empires were still intact and
seemingly unshakable. It was in my student clays in the 1930s
that I first made the acquaintance of nationalist Indians,
Chinese, Africans, among my fellow-students at Cambridge,
and that I first struggled with the works of Lenin and Bukharin
on imperialism: works then even younger than myself, far off in
the past as they may seem to lie today. In the first study in this
collection, written by way of introduction to it, I have tried to
survey some leading strands in the development of the theory
associated with Lenin; really a cumulative body of ideas to
which a whole generation of thinkers contributed, not all of
them socialists, and some of them British. Whatever its short-
comings, it is virtually the only serious theory of imperialism
Vlll MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
ever put forward. My aim has been to try to distinguish what
may be of permanent value in it from what was ephemeral, or
has been discounted by later history.
When we look back from today, Leninist theory may seem
to take too little account of change, and to confound distinct
epochs, one of armed competition for colonies, and a later, less
warlike overflowing of political boundaries by m.igrant capital.
Its strength lay in economic analysis; in its more specifically
Marxist forms it is most vulnerable to criticism through its
comparative neglect of other motive forces, political or psycho-
logical. In this preoccupation Marxism continued Marx's own
turning away (in his finished, published work at any rate) from
a many-sided approach to history and society towards a
narrower concentration on their economic structure. Non-
Marxist writings on empire, on the other hand, have often
displayed a still more restricted and abstract concern with
political factors of one sort or other, to the neglect of economic.
Marxism is faced with the task of broadening its perceptions
by taking stock more fully of the diverse forces at work. Some
small attempt in this direction is made in the other six essays
collected here, all written during the past ten years, and all
from what I may venture to call an independent Marxist
standpoint. 1
The earliest of these, Farewells to Empire, contrasts the views
of a number of writers, each in his own way an authority, and
nearly all of them influenced more or less strongly, either by
attraction or by repulsion, by the Leninist or Hobson-Lenin
theory. In the writings here considered they were looking back
on imperialism, and the British empire in particular, about the
time when this empire was being, in a fairly orderly way,
wound up. Britain had a unique and extraordinary record as a
colonial power, which ought not to be hastily forgotten, or
left to melt into myth, if only because Britain is still far fl.om
having disentangled itself from nco-colonialism, that alter ego
of imperialism; and because Britain now has racial problems
to solve which are legacies from its clays of dominion over palm
and pine.
1
I have tried to sum up briefly my impressions of the character and
consequences of empire in the preface to the 1972 (Pelican) ccln. of my
book The Lords !?f Human Kind (pp. xxiv If.).
FOREWORD lX
How little the meaning of imperialism can be confined to
direct colonial rule is most forcibly evident {iom the annals of
the United States; and the next study seeks to explore some
causes of the divergence between modern European empire-
building and the obstinate rejection of direct colonialism by
America's corporate digestion. This rejection has been ac-
companied by a quickening advance towards an ascendancy,
more oblique and disguised, over a greater part of the globe
than any other land has ever exercised, and more often than
not at least as malignant as any other in its effects. The counter-
revolution of September I973 in Chile is only the latest in a
long series of similar events up and clown Latin America and
the world, highly gratifying to the interests that have most
weight in determining American policy. However much or
little these may have clone to bring about each successive
defeat of a people's struggle to throw off the chains of poverty
and reaction, can only be guessed; but the observer may well
say to himself, like Banquo contemplating Macbeth and his
crown, 'I fear thou playclst most foully for it.'
The Peasant Revolution is an approach from the point of view
of the undeveloped world and its mostly peasant peoples, and
of the guerrilla movements through which many of them in our
time have attempted to emancipate themselves. It was written
in the hope of adding a little to the interest aroused by the
resistance movements in Portuguese Africa in particular. Basil
Davidson's reports from Guinea, and then the few but pregnant
writings of its leader Amilcar Cabral, made me an admirer of
that great African. Cabral was murdered early this year, but
he left his achievement behind him in the form not only of his
ideas but of a free nation, a l r ~ a d y recognized by many govern-
ments. By now, also, revolt in the two much bigger Portuguese
territories, Angola and Mozambique, has made very consider-
able progress.
2
It has seemed to many socialists in recent years
that the working classes of the advanced countries have let the
time go by when they might have overthrown class rule, as
Lenin in I 9 I 7 feared that the Russian workers might miss a
unique chance; that their mission has passed to a successor, the
colonial peasant mass. If so, the mandate can be at best only
2
See especially on this Basil Davidson. In the E;;'e of the Storm. Angola's
PeofJle (London, 1972).
X MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
partially fulfilled: the 'third world' may liberate itself, but it
cannot liberate all humanity, as early Marxism too hopefully
counted on the proletariat single-handed to do.
The thcee other studies relate to India, a country of primary
importance in the story of the British and European empires,
and of special interest to me because I lived there for some
years, in the last epoch of British rule, and was able to see
something of the Ra:i and of the national movement against it.
About the relevance of Marxism to India I learned much from
my old friend P. C. Joshi, then general secretary of the Com-
munist Party, for whom many years later the essay on A!Jarx,
Engels and the Indian A!Jutill:)' was written. This and the preceding
one, written in the centenary year of Marx's CajJital, are con-
cerned with the interest that he and Engels themselves took in
India. That region may be said to have done more than any-
thing else to stimulate their-very tentative-thinking about
imperialism. But it contributed also in a good many, sometimes
roundabout, ways to the development of their general thinking,
especially on world history.
In I 907 when a new governor of Egypt was wanted, that
left-wing trade-union stalwart J olm Burns said to an aristo-
cratic acquaintance: 'Appoint me, I will rule Egypt like a
Pharaoh! You will not be disappointed.' His hearer was quite
ready to believe him.J In 1908 the fiery socialist Keir Hardie
visited India. Lady Minto, the Viceroy's wife, was indignant:
'It is monstrous these men coming out and trying to create
further agitation ... .' To the relief and amusement of official-
dom, Hardie's incendiarism did not go beyond suggesting in
the Labour Leader, when he got home, that a Viceroy who had
'won golden opinions' might win India's still fuller confidence
by appointing 'an educated Indian gentleman' as one of his
private secretaries.4 The evolution, or failure to evolve, of
Labour Party attitudes to British rule in India was surveyed a
few years ago in a masterly and very detailed manner by
Georges Fischer. It was his book that suggested my final
article. On such imperial issues the outlook of the non-Marxist
Left in Britain and elsewhere, after the split in the Socialist
3 Lord Hardinge ofPenshurst, Old DijJlomacy (London, 194.7), p. q.2.
4 1\!I. Gilbert, Serva11t of India ... Sir }ames DunlofJ Smith, Private Secretary to
the Viceri!Y (London, 1966, p. 130). The book covers 1905-10.
FOREWORD XI
International, was more sharply divided from the Communist
than on almost anything else. To its opponents 'reformism'
seemed to mean, for the colonies at least, leaving things as they
were. Those old issues survive in new shapes, for the Labour
Party has often seemed nearly as insensitive as Britain at large
to the risks of involvement in neo-colonialism, or of serving as
camp-follower to American ambition.
Of the six essays previously published, the first four (those
numbered 2 to 5) appeared in The Socialist Register, which this
year reaches its tenth annual number; an occasion when its
editors, Professor R. Miliband and Professor J. Saville, may be
thanked for the labour they have devoted to establishing this
forum of socialist discussion. No. 6 was a contribution to a
volume published in India to mark the hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of Marx's birth.s No. 7 appeared in New Lift
Review, 42 (I g67). Acknowledgments are offered to all the
editors and publishers concerned. I have revised the text
throughout; one or two pages formerly omitted have been
inserted, and some passages left out, chiefly to avoid repetition.
Edinburgh,
7 November 1973
s Homage to Karllvlarx. A S_ymjJosium, ed. P. C. Joshi (Delhi, 1969).
I
The Marxist theory of
Imperialism and its
historical formation
THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM
Every type of society in history has had its characteristic
pattern of aggressiveness, and civilization and empire-building
were twin brethren. From the sixteenth century Europe was
going through a series of expansionist phases; not until the 'age
of Imperialism' of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries did this name come to be attached to one of them, and
the meaning it then took on was not, and has never become,
very clear-cut. To countries like Britain with many overseas
possessions it meant most naturally the ambition of adding
field to field, colony to colony. To other Europeans it was
likely to signify something more general: power-politics,
Weltpolitik, any use or threat of force to achieve national
objects, including such objects as the defeat of trade rivals.
With this 'new imperialism' came a luxuriant advertising
or mythologizing which moved a German statesman to compli-
ment Britain, France, Russia-the three biggest colony-owners
-on their skill at 'cloaking practical motives and instincts in
high sounding words which make them seem beautiful'.
1
What
was really happening was tumultuous and hard to decipher,
but some relevant features of the situation stood out. One was
the 'second industrial revolution'
2
: higher technology, new
industries drawing on it, piling up of capital into larger and
larger units under the direction of fewer and more powerful
1
Prince von Biilow, Imperial Germany (English edn., London, 1916), p. 320.
2
H. Gollwitzer, Europe in the Age of Imperialism r88o--rgr4 (London, rg6g),
p. 73; cf. H. Magdoff, The Age of Imj;erialism (New York, 1969), p. 28.
MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
individuals. Another was foreign investment, or export of
capital, as the German economist Rodbertus noted before his
death in I875.
3
Britain and France went in for it well before
that date, Germany started later; but in the years before I9I4
there was an astonishing acceleration of the outflow of funds,
carrying the British total to something like 4000 million, the
German to about I200 million.4 It was not hard to see that
money placed abroad like this would often be desirous of
support from its government. In some episodes like the seizure
of Tunis or the Transvaal it was transparently plain that
financial interests 'hauled the political and military power of
their governments behind them' .s
On their side statesmen readily found reasons for joining in
imperialistic courses. Bismarck for instance can be convincingly
represented as a 'Bonapartist' ruler launching his Germany
into world politics in order to cement its new-found unity and
disguise its still archaic political structure.6 With motives har-
monizing so well, finance and government were coming
together in a marriage as close as that of Church and State in
former days. Their leaders shared 'a common attitude of mind
and spirit' .7 V cry often capital operating abroad was doing so
in unconcealed unison with designs of State. Either partner
might take the lead, the other sometimes hanging back.
German businessmen helped to push Bismarck into the colonial
hunt: in William II's reign 'the banks often drew back from
the impetuosity of official purposes'. s It was the same in
Britain, where Grey as Foreign Secretary might take steps to
ginger up British commercial activity in Turkey.9 Military men
with their own swords to grind often furnished a catalyst;
armies like industries were swelling in size and influence.
3
Sec H. B. Davis, Nationalism and Socialism. lvfarxist and Labor Theories of
Nationalism to 1917 (New York, 1967), pp. 99-100.
1
See figures in E. Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory (trans. B. Pearce,
London, 1968), Vol. 2, p. 450.
5 H. Feis, Europe the World's Banker i8JO-I9I4 (Yale, 1930), p. 467.
6
H.-U. Wehler, 'Bismarck's Imperialism 1862-1890' (Past and Present,
No. 48, August 1970), p. 153, etc.
7
Gollwitzer, op. cit., p. 8o. Cf. A. S. J. Baster, The International Banks
(London, 1935), p. 236, on 'the close personal connection between banking
a n ~ po_litical I?ersonages in the England of the 19th century'.
Fe1s, op. czt., p. 167.
9 Feis, op. cit., p. 331.
THE MARXIST THEORY OF IMPERIALISM
3
2 SOME BRITISH REACTIONS
Watching big business assume the port of Mars, many wondered
uneasily whether all this was going to end in war. If England
always had the biggest empire, it was the least militarized
among the big nations, and for a long time its faith was pinned
to free trade and peace. To this faith the imperialist creed
came as a painful challenge, a relapse into the mentality of
bygone days. In the years before I9J4 many of the realities of
the new age were explored by a number of British radicals,
whose attempts to elucidate them remain valuable both on
their own account and by way of comparison with the Marxist
ideas emerging in the same period and interacting with them.
J. A. Hobson's Imperialism was in advance, in I902, of any
comprehensive socialist treatment. It portrayed capitalism as
led astray by the self-interest of dealers in arms, war con-
tractors, financiers and stock-jobbers. He laid great, very likely
too great, stress on export of capital. Investments in weak,
backward countries required political control as an insurance,
and they knew how to inveigle politicians into backing them.
Hobson attributed the exodus of capital to lack of investment
opportunity at home, due to low wages and inadequate
purchasing power. His remedy was to improve living stan-
dards. This was to be the favourite prescription of liberals; its
impossibility, under capitalism, became one of the leading
tenets of Marxism. It was repudiated as firmly, if less out-
spokenly, by businessmen and most economists, who agreed
with Marxists that the masses could never be anything but
poor; also that world trade was too limited for all countries to
prosper, so that there too some must be poor in order that
others might be rich. These two convictions had a kindred
character, and each tended to reinforce the other. Together
with the rapid strides of technology and output, they were
bound to make the problem of markets an urgent one.
Hobson's book made little impression on British socialists or
Fabians, who had no objection to the empire in principlc.
10
On
the continent it helped to give currency to the word 'imperi-
alism', which often served as an abusive description of British
10
R. Kocbncr and H. D. Schmidt, Imperialism. The St01)' and Significance
t!f a Political Word, IB4o-Ig6o (Cambridge, 1965), p. 262.
4
doings.
11
By the time Norman Angell published the first
version of his magnum opus The Great Illusion, in rgog, Britain
was deep in [()reign political entanglements, with an uneasy
alliance with Japan and a veiled alliance with France and
Russia. It was with imperialism in the sense of great-power
rivalries and the search for wealth through armed might, not
with colonial issues, that he was preoccupied. What appalled
him was the habit, very marked in Britain among the advocates
of protectionism in place of free trade, of picturing commerce
as a species of warfare, 'an unending duel for raw materials',
with armies and navies as the weapons and a warlike vocabulary
of markets invaded, supplies captured, competition killed.
1
z
Apologists for capitalism might defend it against socialist
strictures as everything rational and sensible, but they depicted
all capitalists except their own as embodiments of ferocity and
guile.
Angell filled a chapter with an anthology of bellicose
declarations of faith in armaments as the keystone of the wealth
of nations, by men in uniform and leaders of opinion, mostly
British and German. Later on he was to find fault with
Marxists for swallowing all this stuff and taking as gospel the
fantasy of a world doomed to cut-throat competition. He him-
self dismissed it as out of date. 'Wealth in the modern world is
not a limited stock of goods, any part of which if taken by one
is lost to others ... .'
13
Nowadays the commercial interests of
all nations were interdependent, and none could attack
another without injuring itself. No war, even if victorious,
could be economically profitable.
These arguments were widely discussed, on the whole with
incredulity, as akin to the ingenious paradoxes of W. S.
Gilbert. Today many of them seem very hard to controvert;
but as Croce was to say of them, such novelties often fail to
carry conviction until harsh experience has cleared the way.
1
4
Two serious deficiencies in Angell's case helped to make it
n R. Kocbner and H. D. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 256.
12
B. Semmel, ImjJerialism and Social Riform. b"nglish Social-Imperial Thought
1895-1914 (London, 196o), p. 153.
1
3 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion 1933 (London, 1933; expanded
edition), p. 137.
1
4 B. Croce, His tO!)' qf Europe in the Nineteenth Century (English edn., London,
1932), Chap. X.
5
unconvincing to left-wing opponents. He was at pains to
demolish, as 'completely false', the thought of 'nations as rival
units competing against one another' .rs Here he was influenced
by his British background, still largely one of small-scale
competitive enterprise, and took too little heed of the agglom-
erations of capital, closely linked with the apparatus of State,
that were increasingly typical of the age. Secondly he displayed,
and never lost, a remarkable myopia about the seamier sides
of colonialism, refusing even to consider any hypothesis of
colonies being exploited: they were only being administered, for
their own and the common good-best when administered by
Britain, which derived no private advantage from performing
the service. This complacency was sure to strike many, in as
well as out of Europe, as British smugness and hypocrisy.
There were enough gaps in his logic to weaken the force of his
assertion: 'it can be shown, quite indubitably, that capitalism
is not the cause of war' .
16
Capitalists, he would have admitted,
may be the cause. His pronouncement is still repeated in varying
guise today, as is the Marxist countcrstatcment. If either
could really be demonstrated so plainly, by now after three
quarters of a century ofpolemics the truth, it may be supposed,
would be known.
Writing in rgr4 on the verge of the war which he tried to
believe was not coming, H. N. Brailsford in Tlze War qf Steel
and Gold paid tribute to both Hobson and Angell; he dissented
from the latter on the colonial issue, agreeing rather with
Angell's Marxist critic Kautsky.I7 He was acutely aware of the
international anarchy that socialists were complaining of.
'Europe is in perpetual flux, and peace is preserved only by a
constant readjustment of the strains and tensions which hold it
togcthcr.'
18
He had no doubt that economic appetites were at
the bottom of the malady; and like Hobson he held that
imperialism benefited only a minority, though he extended
this from sectional interests to the plutocracy as a whole.
'Regarded as a national undertaking Imperialism does not pay.
Regarded as a means of assuring unearned income to the
governing class, it emphatically docs pay.'
1
9 Like Hobson too
IS Angell, op. cit., pp. 171-2. 16 Ibid., p. 252.
1
' H. N. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold (London, 1914.), p. 164.
1
s Ibid., p. 22
1
9 Ibid., p. 78.
6 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
he singled out excessive investment of capital overseas as the
root of the mischief, and proposed the same cure. 'Raise
wages, raise with them the standard of comfort, and this
restless capital need no longer wander abroad.'zo
3 EARLY MARXIST THINKING
Marx and Engels were deeply interested in some aspects of
imperialism, mainly in Ireland and in India. It cannot be said
that they arrived at anything like a systematic view of im.peri-
alism, or that such a view can be derived in any straightforward
way from Marx's dissection of capitalism. In their later years
they felt with regret that capitalism was gaining a new lease of
life by spreading outward over the world. But Marx died in
I 883 when the scramble for colonies was only reaching its
climax, and Engels in I 895 before its consequences were fully
unfolded; and many of their ideas were left buried in heaps of
old articles or letters. They may be said to have left a loophole
for an indulgent attitude to colonialism, because in their eyes,
although colonial rule was bad the old feudal stagnation it
broke into was worse still. A rude, painful jerking awake of the
other continents by European technology might indeed be
called their version of the 'civilising mission' that Europe
credited itself with.
The big carve-up of the late nineteenth century dealt
primarily with the most backward continent, Africa, while in
Asia a nationalist protest was only dawning. As regards the
menace of war, for a good many years the search for colonies
could be thought a usdl.1l safety-valve for European tensions.
It was a striking contrast with the many colonial wars of earlier
epochs that partition of the earth was being completed now
without giving rise to any major war, except the remote
Russo-Japanese war in I 904. Meanwhile to ardent socialists,
as to early Christians, the end of an old bad world was so close
at hand that it might appear a waste of time to pore over
minutiae of what imperialism was doing far away. How much
harm it might be doing psychologically, by infecting common
people with the ideology of their rulers, left-wing socialism with
2o H. N. Brailsford, of;. cit., p. 8x.
THE MARXIST THEORY OF IMPERIALISM 7
its incorruptible class and irreconcilable class struggle
was slow to perceive.
Bri:ain France, with the largest empires, had few
Marxist thmkers, and their socialists were mixed and divided.
It was big,. well-organized German party that presided
over mternatt?nal movement and over socialist speculation,
and tillS w:xs to giVe of imperialism as it took shape
a heavy hst to the sid_e of the schematizing, universalizing
tende?-cy of German plulosophy. In a country with negligible
but the dynamic_ industrial machine in Europe,
and wtth an regtme, Germans found it easy to
template ...
They were accustomed to having their
____ ... instead of making it themselves.
Enghshmenby companson had more of an instinctive sense of
how economic imperatives may be modified by political inter-
ferences. They had a long familiarity with the detail of colonial
events, even if their multiplicity of colonies of everv sort and
size sometimes made it hard for them to see the wo'od for the
trees. They lacked the guiding thread of theory that Marxism
supply, but they had more freedom, if at times an
erratic freedom, to hit on insights of their own. A blend of
English pragmatism and German doctrine was to be desired
as i_t w_as the two things remained far apart. Russian Marxism:
wh1le mdebted to Hobson, was to borrow too heavily from the
Germans. It imbibed a habit of abstracti.!:!g_ the economic too

reilance on the experience of more advai1ced countries further
west made it prone to jumble together f<':atures specific to
Britain or France or Germany.
In England there was a 'Fabian imperialism' which saw no
!n Europe bestowing its civilization on tropical lands and
receivmg their products in return: a fair exchange of glass
beads for gold could not be called robbery. To Fabians like
'there :-vas something terribly impressive about imperi-
alism, about Its power, its science, its ideal of a world subdued
and organized .... '
21
But an Englishman, Belfort Bax, made an
energetic protest against the willingness of some of his fellow-
21
A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (London, xg6g cdn.), p. 24.0.
socialists to regard the new capitalism and the new colonialism
as progressive. 'Caj;italist-national imperialism', he declared with
great prescience, 'is capitalism's reply to international Social-
Democracy .... World history is now at the crossroads.'
22
And
it was not in unphilosophical England alone that the heresies
he attacked were finding a footing. In Germany Bernstein had
lately started his campaign for 'revision' of Marxism by
recommending a parliamentary instead of revolutionary
approach to socialism. Whether his main thesis was convincing
or not, most of his book was a reasoned plea for taking note of
con temporary changes and moving with the times. It was when he
came to colonialism that he showed the cloven hoof, by wanting
socialists to accept it as part of the age they were now living in.
By entering the race for colonies Germany was only taking 'its
honourable share in the civilizing work of the world', and
socialists could not but wish to sec their country 'represented
in the council of nations'. Bernstein saw nothing wrong with
the recent German seizure of the Chinese harbour of Kiaochow,
and no reason to suppose that European rule need do any
harm to native peoples.
2
3 On this the Herrero war in south-
west Africa six years later failed to open his eyes.
In I goo the Boer war was raging, and a combined invasion-
force drowned the Boxer rebellion in blood and sacked Peking.
It was about this time that German socialists entered on serious
consideration of imperialism, with the struggle against revision-
ism to whet their concern. Some of the main lines of subsequent
Marxist thinking were already roughly anticipated. A socialist
organ was stating what was to be Lenin's basic principle when
it declared: 'The man or party who talks of opposing imperi-
alism and expansion without attacking capitalism is so
manifestly insincere or ignorant as to be unworthy of consider-
ation.' l)hrascs were heard about imperialism as 'the policy of
a dying capitalism', 'a phenomenon inherent in the highest
stage of capitalism'.
2
4 In 1904 a French writer said, much as
Bax had done, that 'imperialism and socialism to a very large
zz Cited in V. I. Lenin, Notebooks on lmjJerialism (Collected Works, English
cdn., Vol. 39; Moscow, 1968, ) p. 590.
2
3 E. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism. A Criticism and Affirmation (1899;
English edn., New York, 1961), pp. 170, 174, 178.
Zf From an editorial in Intemational Socialist Review, October 1900, cited
in Monthfy Revimv (New York), April I96,J., p. 650.
9
extent form the fundamental contradiction of our age', and
that for capitalism the former was 'its last card', 'last refuge'
against the collapse threatening it.
2
S
Left-wing German socialists were taking the lead. Lcbcdour
censured Bernstein's defence of colonialism, and identified
Weltj;olitik with capitalist acquisitivcness.
2
6 In 1907 Karl
Lieblmecht touched on imperialism in a book denouncing the
reign of militarism and armaments. He had no faith in any
safety-valve for Europe in the search for colonies. He thought,
as did Brailsford seven years later, that while some lessening of
threats to peace was discernible within the continent, over
trouble-spots like Alsace-Lorrainc, there were 'new and highly
dangerous sources of tension' in rivalries overscas.
2
7 He glanced
at the notion which Hobson helped to set afloat, and which had
a good deal of attraction in these years for European and
American liberals, that the Powers might come together and
agree to pool their overseas holdings. Realistically Liebknccht
treated 'the formation of a trust governing all possible colonial
possessions by the colony-owning states' as only a very distant
possibility, and disarmament as no bettcr.zs
4 KAUTSKY ON IMPERIALISM (1909)
A good many Marxist ideas on the subject were already
floating in the air, but the task of working them out and fitting
them together was taken up slowly-and never completed
before rgq., thanks to the widening rift within socialism even
before it was struck down by the Great War. Its foremost
thinker, Karl Kautsky, could claim to have been first in the
field as a student of the 'new imperialism', and to have drawn
attention to the significance of capital export as early as I8g8.
2
9
In a work of I 902 he predicted that a major war would mean
revolution, but hoped that war could be avoided and a better
2
5 P. Louis, cited in Notebooks on bnjJerialism, pp. 250-51.
26
Sec L. Basso, 'An Analysis of Classical Theories of Imperialism', in a
symposium on the Age of Imperialism: The SjJokesman (Nottingham, Nos.
24.-5, Winter 1973-4), p. 115.
27
Karl Liebknecht, Militarism and Anti-ll1ilitarism ( 1907; trans. G. Lock,
Cambridge, 1973), p. 18.
zB Ibid., p. 19; cf. pp. !!4-15.
zq See .Notebooks on Imperialism, p. 267.
IO MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
way to socialism found.3 He left some room for hope by under-
lining discords within capitalism, between high finance, which
could pull the strings of political influence, and industry, for
which its reign meant only armament-taxes and risks of war.
'Where the financier is rash, extravagant and violent the
industrial manager is frugal, timid and peace-loving', well-
disposed to parliamentarism and prepared to make some
concessions to his workmen.3
1
Kautsky was conscious however
that the gap between the two was narrowing.
He was still very much a pillar of the left in I gog when he
wrote his short book T/ze Road to Power: it grew out of polemics
against reformist hopes of a peaceful transition to socialism. He
gave imperialism a leading place, and had much in common
with Hobson and Brailsford so far as diagnosis of the disease
was concerned, though not over its cure. Why, he asked, had
Europe's chronic political upheavals, lasting until r87r, been
replaced in recent years by tranquillity, even torpor? His chief
answer was that after r887 a long economic depression gave
way to an epoch of industrial expansion and prosperity. This he
attributed to a huge extension of railways, and with them of
trade, bringing colonial policies and the world market to the
front.3
2
We may ask how closely this economic growth and
imperialism really went together. Germans and others were
drawn into the scramble for central Africa by dreams of a rich
market to be found there, as in eastern Asia.JJ But this was a
will-o'-the-wisp, and Kautsky conceded that not much
railway-building was going on in Africa. Indeed his railway
statistics for I886-rgo6 show that vastly the biggest extension
was in the U.S., with Russia far behind in second place and
India third: all the rest, including all the newer colonial
territories, totalled a relatively insignificant figure.
Still, Kautsky was undoubtedly right in saying that the bulk
of the middle-class public everywhere believed in a connection
between imperialism and the return of prosperity, and also
that from early in the recovery the ruling classes were learning
3 Karl Kautsky, The Social Revolution (rgo2; trans. A. M. and M. W.
Simons, Chicago, rgr6), p. 97
3' Ibid., PP
5
6-8.
3
2
See French edition, Le Chemin du Pouvoir (Paris, 1g6g?), pp. 101-2,
106-8.
33 Wehler, loc. cit., p. 137
THE MARXIST THEORY OF IMPERIALSIM I I
to set up imperialism as an ideology, a countcrblast to the
socialism whose progress in the previous lean years alarmed
them so dccply.34 Once started, the jingo hubbub of tub-
thumping or drum-beating could not easily be halted; and
rulers could feel no assurance that trade improvement would
go on, so that this psychological distraction was not lightly to
be discarded. There were vested interests besides to make sure
that it was not abandoned. Collectively the propertied classes
must have come to be carried away by their own rhetoric. No
dominant group can make successful use of any creed,
religious or other, to bemuse its subjects, without catching some
of the contagion itself.
Imperialism took for granted, and so did some socialists,
Kautsky went on, that all the other races were and would
always be mere children; whereas in fact their backwardness
was not clue to any innate inferiority, and they could and would
acquire the white man's skills. They would do so all the quicker,
he believed, because industrial countries were now exporting
to the backlands not merely their commodities, but their
means of production and transport; their own flourishing
industry was bound up with this, although it meant turning
the other races into competitors as well as enemics.Js As far
too often in Marxist writings, not in that period alone, what
particular regions arc contemplated here is left very hazy.
Kautsky refers to Japan leading the field and all Asia following
it into revolt against Western dominion.J6 It is true that free
Japan was building a capitalist economy of its own, and also
that its progress was lending wings to nationalist aspirations in
other lands. But none of these, whether nominally free or under
foreign rule, were being industrialized, with the very imperfect
exception of India; least of all the Muslim lands whose rebel-
lious mood Kautsky alludes to, but whose outlook remained
religious and atavistic.
In various corners of Europe itself, like Spain and Portugal,
where also modern industry was planted by foreign capital, it
was growing very slowly. Further afield it was and is a basic
trait of imperialism that the capital it has invested in retarded
areas develops them only in a very lop-sided and inadequate
34 Kautsky, Le Chemin du Pouvoir, p. r ro.
35 Ibid., pp. 155-7. 36 Ibid., p. 158.
fashion. They have for the most part lingered in a broken-
backed condition, a limbo between old and new, with a money
economy but not an industrial one, and forming a passive
appendage to the advanced countries. Imperialism bdore I ~ ) I 4
has even been credited with a primary purpose of holding back
industrialization overseas, in order to preserve the industrial
monopoly of the West.37 On this view Britain might be said to
have used its empire to keep some part of the industrial mon-
opoly it enjoyed not many years before. It must be added that
Britain was setting the pace in financing the industrialization
of Europe's grand competitor the U.S.; but the multitude of
British investors were not all of one mind, and their money was
not shepherded as carefully as that of some other countries,
either by big financial corporations or by political guidance.
Kautsky judged India closest to revolt, and was convinced
that its loss would bankrupt Britain. He was agreeing too com-
pletely with British empire-men on India's indispensability;
and he must have been over-impressed by the agitation then in
progress, over the partition of Bengal. Indian nationalism was
still in a very early stage, and Kautsky's vision of most of Asia
and Afi'ica sliding into a state of chronic resistance that would
end by shaking off foreign rule3
8
was more accurate as a fore-
cast than in actuality. It may have owed something to his being
an Austrian by birth, familiar with the discontents of national-
ities that were threatening to disrupt the Hapsburg empire.
Uncornfortably aware, as he could not help but be, that some
revolutionary virtue was going out of the working class and the
International, he was in effect looking for a fresh reservoir of
revolution outside Europe, as socialists have been doing again
of late years.
Tumult in Asia would help to dislocate the precarious
equilibrium of Europe ;J<J the burden of armaments would
mount towards the point of exhaustion; imperialism would be
deadlocked, yet it could not be given up because there was no
other alternative to socialism.4 To make things worse there was
corruption and irresponsibility in high places, part of which he
37 Mandel, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 479; and see pp. 459 fi: on the raggedness of
colonial economic development.
38 Kautsky, Le Chemin du Pouvoir, p. 159.
39 Ibid., p. 162. 4 Ibid., pp. 149-so, I54
1\
put down to capitalists being too busy, unlike earlier ruling
classes, to run the State themsclves.4
1
This may appear to
underrate the intimate links between them and the men in
office, yet many of these really were stragglers from earlier
times, blinking in the daylight of the twentieth century. Here
again Kautsky as an Austrian, brought up under the dawdling
Hapsburg aristocracy, might well be impressed by this anomaly.
There had just been an Austro-Russian crisis over the Balkans.
Such a line of thought left on one side the crucial question
of whether capitalism as such had an inbred and ineradicable
urge towards conflict. He was expecting war very largely as a
consequence of imperialism, but he often seemed to be thinking
of it more as a political than an economic necessity. War would
not be inspired by rational aims of getting a better share of
world markets, it would come about haphazardly, as Europe
sank deeper into hysteria, through some act of folly, some
sudden provocation, by scatterbrained ministers.4
2
July rgr4
does look very much like this, whatever deeper calculations may
have lurked under its surface. After the War when Kautc;ky
was commissioned to inspect the German records of rgr4. he
fotind weighty reason to blame Europe's governors, the Kaiser
most of all ;43 by that time he was predisposed to put the
responsibility more on them than on capitalism.
In rgog he was still positive that war would mean revolution,
and that it would have come long since if the rulers had not
been held back by fear of the workers.44 This was no new
thought with him. In 1902 he was even prepared to reproach
the old regimes for shelving problems and leaving Europe
cluttered with anachronisms, because they nervously shrank
from any resolute policies that might embroil them in a war.
Only countries free of revolutionary mass movements, he wrote
then-Britain, the U.S., Japan-felt confident enough to go in
for buccanecring, under the control of 'an unscrupulous,
brutal clique of men of the "high finance'".4s In this phrase
4
1
Ibid., pp. 165-7. On this question of ruling class and governing class
cf. his The Social Revolution, pp. 25 ff.
4
2
Le Chemin du Pouvoir, pp. 168-9.
43 See Kautsky, The Guilt of William Hohenzollem (English ccln., London,
1920).
44 Le Chemin du Pouvoir, p. 1 54
45 The Social Revolution., pp. 95-6.
I4
too was the implication that the spirit of conquest was not
engendered by capitalism as a whole, but by vicious elements
in it. All the same he held that imperialism, after giving the
capitalist order a long respite, would end by helping to drive
it to suicide. Of the Hapsburg empire, which started the war
in 1!)14., it was literally true that war meant revolution, and
therefore suicide. But this would come about through national-
ist, not socialist revolt, and only after defeat of the Hapsburg
armies. The Russo-Japanese war might have warned Marxists
that revolt is caused not by war, but by military failure.
'Defeat in war is almost certain to cause revolution of one sort
or another', as Angell was to say after 1918,46 and it was a
lesson that sober capitalists would ponder in their hearts.
5 IMPERIALISM AND THE SOCIALIST RIFT
Kautsky was firmly orthodox in holding that the only cure for
the world's feverish condition was abolition of capitalism. Amid
many uncertainties the one thing certain, he concluded his
book in I gog by saying, was that Europe was entering a period
of upheaval which could only end with the working class in
power. With the spectre of war more and more the leading
participant at socialist conferences, it was an urgent task to
thrash out the alternatives that Kautsky's presentation left
open. Socialists might, like the English radicals, treat imperial-
ism as a siren luring mankind on to r e e C ~ where neither it nor
capitalism was obliged to follow. Or they might make up their
mind that no accidental morbidities were driving it on, but its
own intrinsic nature. Socialists of the more moderate file were
instinctively drawn to the more hopeful answer, that capitalism
under pressure of public remonstrance, and through recog-
nition of its own longer-range interests, was capable of growing
more pacific. Kautsky himself was very soon to be found on
this side of the fence.
Fresh fuel for the debate, which also could be made usc of on
either side, was furnished in 1910 by another Austrian,
Hilicrding, in his book Finance-capital, the latest stage of capitalist
development. His term 'finance-capital' was coined to denote a
46 N. Angell, Must Britain Travel the Moscow Road? (London, 1926),
p. 34- He was replying to Trotsky's book on Britain.
convergence of the two wings of capitalism that for Kautsky in
1902 were so widely separate. He associated it with the spread
of cartels, and regarded finance as acquiring the superior
position: 'industry becomes more and more dependent on
the banks', whose money is invested in it. Dominance of
finance, and intensified tariff contests, promoted export of
capital, and thereby were responsible for 'spreading the
capitalist system throughout the world'. Capital export in turn
stimulated industrial production, because it meant export of
goods on credit, which then created fresh markets abroad; the
result was fuller employment and better wages, and appeared
to demonstrate at last how 'the tendency to create poverty,
immanent in capitalism', could be overcome. The price of this
prosperity was a violently competitive and rapacious spirit in
foreign trade, a thirst for unlimited domination, accompanied
by racialist and authoritarian leanings. Hilferding was clear-
sighted too about the price paid by colonial peoples expro-
priated from their land and subjected to forccdlabour.47
Historically the primacy of the big banks was to prove only
a passing phasc,4B like sundry other phenomena that successive
thinkers picked out as the master-key to their epoch. Quite
apart fiom this, there arc several links in Hilfcrding's reasoning
where the ambiguities of meaning of the word 'imperialism'
arc visible. So far as the colonial side was concerned, Germany
had very little part in it, though it might desire a bigger one.
Financial ascendancy over industry he saw had less application
to Britain. Tariffs had less still. Capital was not being exported
from Britain and France in the form of goods on credit nearly
as much as from Germany, and therefore could not have the
same stimulating effect on production, since to a great extent
they were only re-investing abroad their income from earlier
loans. In short, like other theorizing of that time Hilfcrding's
exposition brought out very well certain important things, but
failed to take account of national divergences or to provide a
framework for judging European 'imperialism' as a whole.
In the more speculative domain of future prospects, Hilfcr-
47 See the extracts from Hilferding's book in the anthology edited by
D. K. Fieldhouse, Tlze Theory of Capitalist Imperialism (London, 1967),
pp. 74- ff.
48 P. M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (London, 194-9),
p. 268.
ding saw possibilities of capitalism attammg an equilibrium,
both at home and internationally, and he himselfwas moving
towards the reformist camp.49 So were other socialists in in-
creasing numbers, and in the anti-war movement left-wing
resolutions were matched with right-wing tactics. At the
Chemnitz conference of the German party in September 1912
the leading ideas of the anti-imperialist left, by now fairly
familiar, were all endorsed, and capital export, competition
for fields of investment, designs of economic hegemony,
denounced. But on the right wing willingness to compromise
with the expansionists, and defend Germany's colonial record
and rights, was going very far.so Much was made too of the
prospect, or mirage, of an arrangement for some kind of
condominium over the backlands. To welcome this as a safe-
guard against war was a long step towards reformism. If
capitalism's title to rule the backlands were legitimized, its
divine right to rule at home would be harder to challenge.
After successive international crises were surmounted during
19II-13 optimism burgeoned, and Marxists vied in proving
'the impossibility of a world war' .51 German socialists were
hopeful of big business exercising restraint over the govern-
ment.sz In tsarist Russia there was less room for comfortable
illusions. As a militant of the left in the International, Lenin
was bound to follow closely the controversies over imperialism.
It was in 1912 that he began filling the bulky series of note-
books on the subject that he worked diligently at for the next
four years. They contain extracts from q.8 books and 232
articles in four languages, German heavily preponderating.sJ
Notes on Hobson run to thirty-two printed pages, on Brailsford
to fifteen. Among Lenin's few marginalia on the latter is an
endorsement of Brailsford's critique of Angell for underrating
the clash of colonial cupidities;s4 and this is virtually Angell's
49 Sec E. M. Winslow, The Pattern qf Imf;erialism. A Study in the Theories
of Power (New York, 194.8), p. 164.; cf. G. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War.
The CollafJsc qf the Second International (revised English cdn., Oxford, 1972),
p. 149
so SeeP. Frolich, Rasa Luxemburg. Her Life and Work (trans. E. Fitzgerald,
London, 1940), Chap. 9: 'The Struggle against Imperialism'.
5
1
Haupt, op. cit., p. 107; cf. p. 123.
sz Ibid., p. 43
53 Notebooks on Imf;erialism, p. 20.
54 Ibid., p. 646.
THE MARXIST THEORY OF IMPERIALISM I7
only appearance in the whole collection. Lenin of course knew
about him, but must have felt there was nothing in him to take
seriously-which can only be regretted. He was not making
any such detailed study of a colonial area as Marx made of
India, but he read about India, Persia, Egypt, Russian
Turkestan. In most of these places nationalist unrest was astir,
and for him as for Kautsky in 1909 could help to buttress
confidence in the coming revolution of Europe. He was far
from realizing, and could not have allowed as conceivable, that
... .... than
... ................ :. ............................................ P ................. , ................. "' ... _
6 ROSA LUXEMBURG'S STUDY (1913)
Not Lenin, but Rosa Luxemburg, a participant in both the
Russian and the German spheres of socialism, and the most
remarkable woman perhaps of this century, was the next
Marxist to attempt a searching enquiry into imperialism. Her
book The Accumulation rif Capital, a contribution to the economic
elucidation of imperialism,ss was published early in 1913 as an
instalment of the current debate. Its intention was to confute
reformist illusions, and at the same time to settle an abstruse
but fundamental crux of Marxist economics: the problem of
how the surplus could be consumed and converted into profit,
in Marx's schematic universe, 'a society consisting exclusively
of workers and capitalists' .s6 She put forward as the 'solution
envisaged by Marx himself' that capitalism could not in
reality function as a closed system, but only through inter-
action with a realm outside itself. It was compelled to gain
control of primitive lands, 'non-capitalist social organizations',
and to subvert these in order to supply itself with fresh
markets.s7 (An example might be Britain conquering India
and crippling native handicrafts so as to be able to sell there
manufactures which could not be sold at home.) Two clear
implications were that imperialistic expansion was not some-
thing a capitalist economy could indulge in or throw aside at
55 See the English translation by A. Schwarzschild, London, I 963
edition.
56 Ibid., p. 337
57 Ibid., p. 366.
will; and that before very long the process would reach its
limits, and capitalism cease to be viable.
Rosa Luxemburg's theory has the great merit of emphasizing
that capitalism has never existed in isolation; and that 'the
extension of capitalism into new territories was the mainspring
of ... the "vast secular boom" of the last two hundred years.' ss
Or, as English children were taught to lisp in honour of their
empire, turning economics into song-'Widcr yet and wider
shall thy bounds be set': a_l undisguised warning to all and
sundry that British annexations were not yet at an end.
Capitalism as seen by Rosa Luxemburg had no choice but to
stretch out and ransack the g1obe.s9 Germany was selling half
its indigo in undeveloped countries.6o Inevitably though con-
tradictorily, 'the old capitalist countries provide ever larger
markets for, and become increasingly dependent upon, one
another, yet on the other hand compete ever more ruthlessly
for trade relations with non-capitalist countries.'6
1
In outline if not in detail, the theory is lucid and elegant.
Its agreement with the tangible stuff of history is always so
clear. Among countries reduced to colonial status India and
Algeria are discussed in detail, a welcome new departure, and
often illuminatingly, but placed overmuch side by side, so that
the basic contrast of Algeria unlike India being a cdony of
white settlement is obscured. With British-Indian circum-
stances Rosa Luxemburg does not always show sufficient
acquaintance. She traces the same subversion of an old natural
economy in the penetration of the U.S. and Canadian country-
side by mill products as ir,. possessions like India. It ought to
have struck her that the outcome in the two cases was totlly
different, because social and political conditions were different.
Elsewhere too, variability of human factors, including the
cultural and psychological, was bringing about varying results
from similar economic starting-points.
Like Marx and Kautsky, she thought of the irruption of
capital into the stagnant backlands as causing capitalist
production to sprout there. Imperialism had for outcome 'the
industrialization and capitalist ema1.cipation of the hinter-
ss Joan Robinson, Introduction to The Accumulation ofCajJital, p. 28.
59 The Accumulation a.( Capital, pp. 357-8.
6o Ibid., p. 362. 6x Ibid., p. 367.
62
Ibid., pp. 395 ff.
land' .
6
3 It was obliged to seek a 'rapid change-over to capitalism
of the pre-capitalist civilisations', 64 yet the operation was self-
cancelling, since it sterilized the former virgin lands as markets.
Experience seems rather to indicate that imperialism or neo-
colonialism may be quite content to leave the backlands
indefinitely in an intermediate condition. The Third Inter-
national put forward a convincingly uncomplicated definition
in 1922-applicablc to both 'colonialism' and 'impcrialism'-
by saying that 'the essence of imperialism consists i?- {
the stages of development of the l?roductlve forces m !
the drfferent areas of world economy to gam monopoly super- J
profits.' 6s I
Where capitalism was being superimposed on-rather than
replacing-pre-capitalist society, the resulting exploitation
might often be worse, Rosa Luxemburg knew, than anything
to be found in the industrial countrics.66 To think of an 'in-
creasing misery' of the colonial world, or of semi-colonial
regions like Latin America, might not be unrealistic; and it
might be taken to explain at least as well as her more recondite
logic the poor markets they offered, and the continual need for
fresh ones. Where a transition to modernism did take place, its
mechanics arc hinted at, more than described, in her survey.
The book, it should be kept in mind, was written in {(mr
months;
67
there was no time now for Marx's leisurely medita-
tions. But she was well aware that modernization could not
occur automatically or smoothly. Export of capital to un-
developed countries promoted development, but also held it
back. 'Though foreign loans arc indispensable for the emancipa-
tion of the rising capitalist states, they arc yet the surest tics
by which the old capitalist states maintain their influence,
exercise financial control and exert prcssure'68_or, as we
should say, bolster a nco-colonial tutelage. Better than Kautsky
she understood how much must change inside a newly develop-
63 Ibid., p. 4'9
64
Ibid., p. 446.
6
S Theses of the 4th Congress on the Eastern Question, November 1922;
text in J. Degras, The Communist Intemational 1919-1943. Documents (London,
1956), Vol. r, p. 384 ..
66
The Accumulation of Capital, p. 365.
67 FrO!ich, op. cit., p. 186.
6
B The Accumulation of CajJital, p. 421.
QO MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
ing region before modern industries could :1p. It was not
a mere matter of ability to learn techmcal skills; 'obsolete
political organisations' must be replaced by 'a ,modern. stat.e
machinery'. This could not happen peacefully. RevolutiOn IS
an essential lor the process of capitalist emancipation.'
6
'> She
instanced the recent upheavals, all inadequate, in Russia
( Igor:) Turkey (rgo8), and China (I9II), and might have
lookgd' back to the civil broils in Japan during its first modern-
izing phase. . .
All these examples were of countnes winch
lost their independence, and indeed were all unpenahst on
their own account. It was to countries like them that her
remark about foreign loans was relevant. The revolutions she
was considering, as the inclusion of Russia stresses, were internal
events even if all of them were ignited in one way or other by
contact. She went on to say that 'A y.om:g state will
usually sever the leading strings of older capitalist states by
wars'.7o Direct illustrations of this do not come readily to mind,
but she was right at any rate in saying that military reorganiza-
tion was a further condition of economic autonomy. Japan had
proved the point, Turkey and China were trying. to. N.onc .or
this had much bearing on the colonies, and their desire for
freedom drew her attention less than Kautsky's earlier or
Lenin's now. So far as legal or institutional conditions
for capitalism arc concerned, it might fairly be said that !ncha
under British rule had for a long time been better eqmpped
than any of the free nations she mentioned. Yet industry was
blossoming in India very slowly. How things went in any such
case dcpcndect very much on non-economic factors, first and
foremost the complex of things making up 'national character'.
Overlooking it may be some complications of this
Rosa Luxemburrr sketched a world where centres of capitahsm
were and its horizons shrinkin.g. frcnzie?
behaviour in international affairs marked an mtmt10n that It
was approaching the end ofits tether, where n1.ust.co.me
ll 'inevitably, as an objective historical necessity'. Impenahsm
was 'the final stage of its historical career'.
71
It was at once (as
with Kautsky, t.hough not for the same reasons) an effort to
69 The Accumulation of Capital, p. 419.
7 Ibid., p. 419. 7
1
Ibid., p. 41 7
QI
its existence and 'a sure means of bringing it to a swift
though capitalism might never actually reach its
smce the catastrophes it was breeding might destroy
It first.n
It might be war that would write itsjinis. Years earlier Rosa
Luxemburg like many socialists thought of militarism as an
'a capitalist disease', which would produce war
111 spite of the complete inconclusiveness of the objectives and
motiVes of the confhct'.73 Now she devoted a long section of her
boo!.;, armaments,. in a new light as underpinning
capitalism by prov1dmg It With a special, artificial market.
!-:I:re was a1: recognition of something that has since
e,amed 111 She was thus integrating the
of armamen_ts. With the capitalist system, and making
It, With the burdens It Imposed and the tensions it inflamed one
of the that must eventually destroy the sy;tem.
Imp.en.ahsm she warned her readers, under stress of these con-
ti:adictiOns, was turning more and more to 'lawlessness and
VIolence'. 74
However, it was impo:re:ishment that she thought, or
h?ped, would socialist revolution. She was con-
vmced that .capitalism was spreading mass misery in Europe as
as It may be noted that she (like most Marxists)
not en9mre how the surplus-value of the colonial world was
bemg or who, if not the ordinary man in Europe, was
consummg the wealth extracted from it, largelv in the form of
commodities. 'The .more ruthlessly', she wrote,
capital about destructiOn c non-capitalist strata at
and 111 the outside world, the more it lowers the standard
of bvmg for the <:s a whole.'7s By including peasants,
still bemg pressed down by machine com-
petitiOn, she g.av: tJ:is assertion more persuasiveness. With
many other 111 years she was impressed by rising
taxes, rents, pnces, all swellmg the cost of living. Even so there
was a touch of the doctrinaire in her insistence on the
n Ibid., p. 446.
73
An article of 899, cite? by Sweezy, op. cit., p.
310
.
74 The Accumulatzon of p. 446.
7s Ib.d r '

1
., cf. Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet of 1906 Tlze Mass
Strzke, the Polzttcal Party and tlze Trade Unions (trans p L ' L d
edn., n.d.), p. a
2
. avm, 1925; on on
B
22
ishment of the European masses, the more so as she made no
exception, as Lenin was to do, for any favoured minority
among them. She was reading into s?me .of the
effects of her anticipated future of capitalist decl111e, 111 her
eagerness to block every way out, except for what temporary
relief one power-group might win by snatching colonies from
another.
The practical moral stood out: th_e 'necessity for the
national working class to revolt aga111st the rule of capital ,7
before it collapsed and buried mankind under its ruins. On
the level of theorv the upshot was equally unmistakable:
imperialism belonged inseparably to capitalism, and th:re
could be no getting rid of one without the other, as English
liberals and reformist socialists dreamed of doing. The book
came in for hot discussion, and met with censure both from
moderates who did not want to be made to face a capitalist
dragon breathing fire and smoke, and from _some on the
Among these was Lenin, who found with he1:
analyses as she did, on several pages, with some oi Ius. What
was to become his most salient disagreement was with her
restriction of annexationist appetites to undeveloped areas
alone.
7 THE COMING OF THE GREAT WAR
Prodigious research into the summer crisis of 1914 has done
little to clarify the 'vital interests' that made
from the Hapsburg in his palace to the huckster m Ius count111g-
house, think the gamble of war worth trying. After all these
years the Great War looks less like an act of men a.moment
in a vast chaotic change, as elemental as the smk111g of a
mountain range or the drying up of a sea. No big war mani-
festly economic in its motives had been fought the advent
of industrial capitalism, and businessmen were 111 no better
position than military men to tell what the balance-sheet
would be at the end. War aims could only be sketchy; govern-
ments had to start working out lists of objectives, with finance
and industry throwing in their advice or instructions. In
Germany there was much talk of expansion and 'autarchy', the
76 The Accumulation of Capital, p. 4.67.
creation of 'a large self-sufficient whole' as Sombart put it.77
'Mittel-Europa' would be such a whole. Its prophet Naumann
painted its inspiration as political, federative, idealistic, not
economic or imperialist, 'although'-he admitted to a critic-
'in the present age all historical facts automatically assume an
industrial and capitalist character'. 78 Bethmann-Hollweg the
chancellor was under opposite pressure from annexationists and
socialists, and in sum the colloquy about what Germany was
fighting for was muddled, often indiscreet. This did not escape
the astute Dr Goebbels, and led him during the Second World
War to prohibit public canvassing of war aims except in the
most glowingly non-committal language.79 In 1914-I8 the
Allies were keeping most of theirs shut up in secret treaties.
When hostilities began the Bureau of the International was
busy organizing a conference to be held at Vienna which would
go intensively into the problems of imperialism. so Caught
unawares by the crisis, in the dark about what was going on,
socialist leaders called for peace until the last moment, when
most of them, more or less gloomily, espoused the cause of
patriotism, like the lady who swearing she would ne'er consent
consented. Even at the outset a small minority refused. The
dividing line was very much as it had been in recent years over
imperialism and its connections with capitalism. Those who
condoned the war as a defensive one for their own countries
were free to blane foreign capitalists, but could not blame
capitalism at la ge, and preferred not to say too much about
it. For some of their opponents the issues were perplexed by the
ostensible causes at least of the war having nothing to do with
any colonies.
Friction over colonies and spheres of influence had indeed
seemed to be abating, and Britain and Germany not unwilling
to end it by compromise. Kautsky had just been writing about
77 Nicolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Econonry (English edn.,
London, n.d.), p. 38. On war-time discussions in Germany on war aims,
see H. W. Gatzke, Germany's Drive to the West (Baltimore, 1950), and
F. Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (English edn., London,
1967).
78 Prince Lichnowsky, Heading for the Abyss (English edn., London, 1928),
p. 132
79 See W. A. Boelcke, The Secret Conferences of Dr Goebbels I9J9-,J3 (English
edn., London, n.d.), pp. 38, 41, etc.
so Haupt, op. cit., pp. 136-8.
iSTANBUL BiLGi
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
this in an article which he humourlessly published with few
alterations in September rgr4, when Lenin read it with a
sardonic eye.8
1
It forecast a happy concord among colonial
powers, which Kautsky was christening 'ultra-imperialism'.
One good reason he could give for them to close their ranks was
colonial resistance. But he went on to traverse the whole left-
wing Marxist conception of imperialism which had been taking
shape, and which departed from his I gog guidelines by ident-
ifying it with cartels, tariffs, all the paraphernalia of up-to-date
capitalism. This approach was mere tautology, he complained:
imperialism required more specific definition, such as English
writers gave it. By narrowing the subject to colonialism he was
evading the broader economic feuds that paved the way for
the war. There was substance nevertheless in his charge that
imperialism was being treated too largely and loosely, and too
much as one and the same thing with capitalism. He was
giving his answer in advance to Lenin, who on his side could
feel only contemptuous indignation at Kautsky's nostalgia for
'a cleanish, sleek, moderate and genteel capitalism' .
82
Lenin too must have been taken by surprise by the war. In
an often-quoted letter shortly before it he was lamenting with
gloomy humour that the Tsar and the rest were not likely to
play into socialist hands by falling out with one another. Yet in
October rg14., in a statement drafted for his party committee,
he accused the rulers of going to war partly in order to distract
the minds of the workers from their cliscontents.
8
3 This suspicion
was not a socialist invention; the German fire-eater General
Bernhardi had warned his countrymen that Russia, 'deeply
tainted with revolutionary and moral infection', might seek
relief before long by going to war, either in the Far East again
or in Europe.B4 In the October document Lenin found plenty
of room for political motivations, so as to put all Europe's
ruling groups in the clock together. He was bracketing 'the
81 Notebooks on Imperialism, pp. 264-6.
82 Ibid., p. I I6.
83 Lenin, C. W. (Collected Works; English cdn., Moscow, I964.), Vol. 21,
p. 27.
B.; Gen. F. von Bcrnhardi, Germany and the Next JiVar (I9I I; trans. A. H.
Powles, London, I9I4 cdn.), p. 93 On how far fear of mass unrest was a
motive for the war, sec Haupt, op. cit., pp. 24.3 ff.; he docs not reach a
definite answer.
struggle for markets, in the epoch of the latest, the imperialist,
stage in the development of capitalism in the foremost countries,
the dynastic interests of the most backward East European
monarchies ... .' In other pronouncements too he s h ~ w e c l
awareness that the world crisis was a highly complex thing.
'There are no "pure" phenomena, and there can be none,
either in nature or in society .... There is no "pure" capitalism
in the world, nor can there be .... '
85
There can then it would
seem be no 'pure' or solitary explanation of any big war.
Russia and Austria-Hungary were following Serbia before
long into the background; this war, unlike its successor, was
decided on the western front, where the antagonists all fitted
far better into Marxist formulae. Lenin's own bent of mind
carried him to the economic bedrock that these formulae were
mainly concerned with. He took far less interest than Marx or
Engels in international politics. To him diplomats were no more
than heralds in fine costumes blowing flourishes on their
trumpets before the battle. Conundrums about ministries and
their mental workings intrigued him not much more. This as
well as an agitator's tactics made for some over-simplifying,
and failure to eliminate lurking inconsistencies-a defect
possibly not unconnected with the difficulties he was to run
into late in rg 7 when writing The State and Revolution. In the
October 1g14 :statement, for instance, the German bourgeoisie
was placed 'at the head' of one of the coalitions, not merely
welcoming the war but choosing the moment for it; yet in the
same breath it was described as 'servilely cringing' to Kaiser
and Junkers.B6
We might say either that he and his few allies on the left
blamed capitalism, not this government or that, for the war,
and therefore wanted war to be transformed into social
revolution-or that they wanted revolution and therefore
blamed capitalism. Over niceties of this kind they were in no
mood to split hairs. The stock of ideas already built up about
imperialism came in pat to their purpose, even if they may have
ss Lenin, The Collapse qfthe Second International (May-June I9I5), in C. W.,
Vol. 2I, p. 236.
86 C. W., Vol. 2I, pp. 27-8. Seven years later, the Allies having won the
war, Lenin in his preface to the I92 I edition of his Imperialism rather
capriciously fixed on Britain as the chief villain, with only a casual mention
of Germany among the other criminals.
over-estimated the effectiveness for popular propaganda of
what had hitherto been intellectual disputation. A conference
of Russian socialists abroad in March I9I5 denounced all
belligerents impartially as aggressors, spoke of imperialism as
the latest phase of capitalist evolution, and went on to capital-
export and to war as a struggle for the repartition of the colonial
world.B7 Abstract and incomplete as this was, it must be said to
compare well for realism with most non-socialist explanations.
The official British historian of the peace conference started by
defining the war as 'a conflict between the principles of free-
dom and of autocracy, between the principle of moral influence
and of material force, of government by consent and of govern-
ment by compulsion.'BS Hilaire Belloc managed still more
heroically to present it as a duel between the Catholic faith and
its opponents. In either case it would be hard to guess unaided
which side was which.
Disputes about the nature of imperialism were wrapped up
with the burning question of what to do about the war.
Kautsky and Bernstein were at one now in recommending a
peace without annexations, to be agreed on by all govern-
ments. Hilferding developed the more optimistic side of his study
of capitalism, urging that world trade ought to draw nations
together, not set them at odds; he pointed out (like Angell) that
British colonies could be sources of profit to Germany too.89
Lenin demanded revolutionary defeatism. Just as for capitalism
war was the only way out, social revolution was the only way
out for humanity. To throw away this opportunity, and be
content with a mere peaceful return to peace, would only mean
another conflagration before long, and so on and on until
capitalism was demolished. Early in I9I5 he disagreed with
the slogan of 'united Europe', on the ground that it would
only be a union of capitalist countries to exploit colonies
jointly, or to prop up obsolete monarchies; and that in this
'epoch of the highest development of capitalism' Europe would
in reality be coming together to protect its loot against an
envious and more quickly growing Japan and U.S.9o
87 C. W., Vol. 21, pp. 159 ff.
ss H. V. Temperlcy, cited ironically by Angell in Tlze Great Illusio11,
p. I57 n.
89 An article of 1916; see abstract in Notebooks on Imperialism.
9o C. W., Vol. 21, p. 339
Even on the left, others including Rosa Luxemburg,
Bukharin, and Trotsky found Lenin's attitude too rigid. As war
dragged on he himself must have had some misgivings, and
there are signs that by I 9 I 6 he was beginning to modify an
ali-or-nothing stand for revolution at once that was in danger
of becoming negative and sterile.9
1
If he miscalculated the
practical chances, one main cause was his incomprehension of
nationalism as a mass sentiment. It was deepened by his
isolation during the war years in Switzerland, most of the time
shut up in libraries, which fostered a certain dogged one-
sidedness. He persisted with what must seem a touch of the
spirit of a flat-earth fanaticism in declaring the 'fundamental
truth' of the Communist Manifesto that 'the workingmen have
no country' ;9
2
shutting his eyes to the complex and tenacious
web of links that history had woven between citizen and State.
They were entwined with national feelings far older than
monopoly capitalism, and easily perverted into the jingo mood
they were never very distinct from. To Lenin the break-up of
the international socialist movement that was his country of
adoption was a traumatic blow, more appalling than the war
itself; it infused into his nature an embitterment not character-
istic of it in earlier days. Despite his preoccupation with econ-
omics he could speak of capitalism's hopes of super-profit from
the war as less important than its 'political advantages in that
it has split and corrupted the proletariat'.93 Struggling to
unravel what black magic was enabling Europe's rulers to
drug the workers into obedience, he was turning to imperialism
for an answer to this riddle too, and putting his voluminous
jottings on it to account in a series of shorter or longer writings,
culminating in I9I6 in lmjmialism.
8 BUKHARIN ON IMPERIALISM AND WAR (I9I5)
Lenin left it to his ally Bukharin, a rising intellectual among
the Bolsheviks, who was in Switzerland in I9I4-I5, to essay
first the task of synthesizing afresh the floating ideas of Marxism
9
1
See an illuminating article by B. Pearce, 'Lenin and Trotsky on
Pacifism and Defeatism', in Labour Review (London), Vol. 6 No. I, 1961.
92 C. W., Vol. 21, p. 32.
93 The CollajJSe of tlw Second International, C. W., Vol. 2 1, p. 233
about imperialism, and of proving that the war now raging was
the one that its teaching had foreshadowed. Bukharin did so in
1915 by expanding an article he had written into a treatise,
Imperialism and World Economy. It was intended for publication
in Russia, where it failed to pass the censor, and was not
printed until after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Lenin wrote
a preface to it, and evidently approved its leading arguments.
Bukharin was primarily an economist, and not always as
much at home on other ground. It was as an economist that
Lenin esteemed him; politically, in the contentions about the
correct line of anti-war agitation, he judged him 'devilishly
unstable.'94 So far as a theory of imperialism was concerned
the two men could sec more or less eye to eye, and their
ability to agree about basic economic factors may have helped
to confine each of them to a somewhat narrowly economic
approach.
Bukharin's title announced his firm association of imperialism
with capitalism. Unlike Rosa Luxemburg he was not bringing
forward any novel reason for capitalism having to resort to
aggrcssion.95 War was natural to it in this epoch of concen-
tration and m_onopoly. Contemporary imperialism was quite
distinct, he laid down, from all earlier forms of expansion and
conquest; though at one point he admitted a likeness by
referring to it as a 'new mercantilism'96-an analogy that had
struck other writers, Thorold Rogers in England among the
first.97
Asking why colonialism had 'become a veritable mania of
all modern capitalist states', Bukharin drew both on Hobson's
capital export and Hilfcrding's finance-capital. In doing so he
neglected some incongruities, because he put all types of
foreign investment into one and the same category, from
German industrial goods exported on credit to Anglo-French
re-investment of interest. Britain had a net inflow of capital in
94T/ze Letters of Lenin (trans. E. Hill and D. Mudie, London, 1937), p. 388.
The letters give other hints of disagreement; e.g. pp. 395-6, on the national
question, and p. 4.1 I.
95 Basso, Zoe. cit., p. 123, remarks that he gives three explanations, without
linking them together.
96 Bukharin, op. cit., p. 125.
97 See M. Dobb, Political Economy and Caj1italism (London, 1937), p. 223
(in Chap. VII, 'Imperialism').
almost every year between 1875 and 1907.98 Re-invested funds,
floating free above the productive process, had a kinship with
the usurer capital of old days, or of Asia. Loans to profligate
Oriental despots, followed by an occupation of Egypt or some
other mortgaged estate-the sort of transaction Hobson was
most concerned to censure-were more congenial to it than
to 'finance-capital' in Hilferding's sense of bank money
invested in industry. Not all British investments took this
direction, of course. To clinch the connection between capital
export and imperialism, Bukharin cited figures showing half
Britain's overseas investment to be within the empirc.99 But
he like Rosa Luxemburg was drawing no distinction between
areas like India and areas like Canada; it was one that foreign
observers often missed, Russians maybe more easily because in
their own empire native peoples and Russian settlers were
mixed up together. British investment was healthily drawn
away from the carcasses of tropical kingdoms by the lure of vast
Engiish-spcaking regions scattered over the globe, all hungry
for development capital.
In white settlement areas of the British empire political
control from London was disappearing, while in the U.S., or
anywhere under the Monroe Doctrine, it could not be aspired
to. The sudden pre-1914 flood of British investment went
largely to the U.S., and the amount invested there and in
Latin America became almost as large as in the whole empire
including Canada.
100
Altogether a far higher proportion of the
British than of the French total was playing a constructive
rather than a parasitic role. It might even be said that just as
many of the more enterprising Britons emigrated to newer, less
cramped countries, British capitalism was putting forth vigorous
new shoots abroad, while at home it was rapidly being left
behind by the Germans.
No doubt by helping to build American and Japanese
capitalism, already displaying bellicose tendencies, it was
helping to generate fresh imperialist tensions of the future. But
for the time being a great deal of surplus European capital, not
98
For detail see C. K. Hobson, The Export of Capital (London, 1914),
p. 204.
99 Bukharin, ojJ. cit., pp. 42-3.
100
See figures in Feis, op. cit., Chap. I.
British alone, was being drawn off, and this was relieving its
congestions and reducing its readi1:ess to resort to 'imperi-
alistic' activities in the Hobsoman-or common-sense-
meaning of the word. Nearly a quarter of German investment
in 1914 was in the U.S. and Canada, or in
Britain.ror Of the remainder a large part was m netghbourmg
territories of Austria which Pan-Germans could look upon much
, I'
as Britons looked on their white dominions. Another Eng tsh
liberal, writing in I9I4, admitted that capital export had
often been used to 'drain countries of their resources', but on
balance he was convinced that it functioned constructively and
added to the world's wealth.
102
Bukharin's conviction was that
any good it did--if deserving to be recognized at. all-was
merely marginal. He may be excused for not foreseemg a
when capitalist States would invest huge amounts of capttal
in a socialist Russia that he helped to build.
What imperialism was doing in the colonies he was not
studying in any detail; he referred summarily to
destructive wasteful activities'.
10
3 He felt no mcons1stency
between and the mistaken estimate he shared with the
Kautsky of 1909 of the rate at which backward lands under
Western rule were being inducted into capitalism. Nowadays
'the industrialization of the agrarian and semi-agrarian
countries proceeds at an unbelievably quick tempo', !1e
wrote I04 which led him to another fallacy, that all socml
everywhere were being transposed into one
pattern a confrontation of capitalist and workman.
105
He drd
not Kautsky's book, or Rosa Luxemburg's which
ought to have enlightened him about obstacles in the way of
industry in retarded societies. . . .
Inside national limits Bukhann ad1mtted that the commg
of trusts and cartels represented a kind of 'organization
process', but internationally there was still cl:aos. 'This anarchic
structure of world capitalism is expressed 111 two facts: world
industrial crises on the one hand, war on the other.'
106
We
101 See figures in Fcis, ojJ. cit., p .. 74 . . . .
102 c. K. Hobson, ojJ. cit., pp. xrx-xx; cl. Fc1s, op. clt., IntroductiOn to
Part III.
1o3 Bukharin, op. cit., p. 167.
1os Bukharin, ojJ. cit., p. 27.
1oo1 Bukharin, op. cit., p. 39
106 Bukharin, ojJ. cit., p. 53
might find an analogy in political history in the discipline
imposed on disorderly feudalism by the absolute monarchies of
the sixteenth century, and the diversion of its restless energies
outward into dynastic wars. Economic life was taking on a more
and more international character, but this instead of bringing
the nations closer-as Kautsky and Hilferding now thought it
should-only sharpened competition among national groups of
capitalists. Tariff policies, formerly defensive, were now
weapons of offence, and 'tariff wars' were preliminary skir-
mishes leading to wars of gunpowder.
107
Bukharin noted that
(then as today) exported capital could overleap customs
barricrs,xos but this too he regarded as a kind of invasion: 'it
subjugates new territories with the greatest case', intensifying
rivalries to an extreme where they can be settled only 'by fire
and sword'.
10
9 Here reasoning seems to lose itself in rhetoric,
or to waver between consideration of foreign capital invested
in an industrial country, and of capital from two industrial
countries disputing control over a colony. As in a number of
other places, a concrete example of what Bukharin is aiming at
would be welcome.
He allowed too that numerous international combines or
agreements had been taking place, but he reckoned them,
correctly enough, as very unstable, and derided the hopes built
on them as remedies for the world anarchy. He made the
general charge against reformists of blinking the contradictions
of capitalism and exaggerating its adaptability;uo a valid
criticism, but Marxism must be said to have erred as far in the
opposite direction. He agreed with the Hilferding of 1910 that
in pure theory the tendency towards amalgamation of capital
might continue until a single universal cartel bestrode the
planet, but that in practical terms this was not feasible.m 'A
series of wars is unavoidable', therefore. World capitalism
would move towards a single domination, but this would be
brought about through the stronger aspirants crushing the
weaker by forcc.Il
2
European union would not be a step
towards peace, he added, following the lead given by Lenin,
but rather 'a colossal struggle between Europe on the one
1o7 Bukharin, ojJ. cit., pp. 74, 8g.
1o9 Bukharin, op. cit., p. 103.
m Bukharin, op. cit., pp. 135-6.
10
8 13ukharin, ojJ. cit., p. 97
"
0
Bukharin, op. cit., p. 143.
II2 Bukharin, op. cit., pp. 136-7, 139.
3'2
hand, America and Asia on the other'. m Today it can hardly
be denied that such a struggle, commercial if not military, is
very much in the offing.
Capitalism by its nature must at all costs expand, or go to the
wall. 'Imperialist annexation is only a case of the general
capitalist tendency towards centralisation of capital. ... '
11
4
Now that earth's disposable areas were pre-empted, nothing
could be got except at someone else's expense. Bukharin
quoted Marx's adage about all economic history turning on
the antithesis of town and countryside, and observed truly that
this was being reproduced on a vaster scale between industrial
and undeveloped regions.m Spread of industrialism must
mean a relative falling off of agricultural resources, and there-
fore an impetus towards acquisition of agrarian regions to
provide industrial economies with an 'economic supple-
ment'.II6 (In fact in recent decades the opening up ofnew land
in autonomous countries like Canada and Argentina had given
rise to an embarrassing flood of cheap grain.) But to suppose
that agrarian appendages alone were needful to capitalism, as
Kautsky was saying (and as Rosa Luxemburg's theory im-
plied), would be half way to accepting the contention that this
war was unnecessary, and that imperialism was a menace only
to the backlands. Bukharin accused it of seeking with omnivor-
ous greed to engulf and absorb indiscriminately. Its appetite
was not confined to overseas territories (among which he
unreasonably rejected any distinction between 'tropical' and
'settlement' colonies) :mit commenced with these because they
were the most accessible, but the time had come for 'a funda-
mental revision', or tearing up of frontier lines. Germany's
seizure ofBelgium was on a par with Britain's of Egypt, except
that the former was an instance of 'horizontal' expansion, the
latter of 'vertical' .IIB Bukharin expected the war, if not ended
II3 Bukharin, ojJ. cit., p. 120. II4 Bukharin, oj1. cit., p. 120.
ns Bukharin, ojJ. cit., pp. 20-21.
116 Bukharin, ojJ. cit., p. 105 and Chap. VIII.
n7 Bukharin, ojJ. cit., pp. 107-8. .
ns Bukharin, ojJ. cit., p. 121. Among later Marxists, Sweezy (ojJ. czt.,
p. 320) writes that 'the anncxatio_nist .of imp<:;rial(st nations is by no
means confined to backward non-mdustnahzcd rcgwns ; M. Dobb, on the
other hand, in Capitalism YesterdaJ> and Today (London, 1958), p. 30,
of 'that economic and political penetration ... of undeveloped countnes
which goes by the name of modern imperialism.'
I
33
by revolutions, to wipe the slate clean of smaller states;II9
instead it was to have the opposite effect of bringing a number
of them back into existence, a development continued after the
Second World War in other continents; few of them it is true
have been genuinely independent. He was astray again in ex-
pecting the British empire to fuse into one economic entity, a
parallel to Mittel-Europa.12o
For him each nation at any rate was evolving into one great
capitalist corporation, 'an entrepreneurs' company of tremen-
dous power'.
121
With the war, the bonds between State and
finance and industry were everywhere drawn closer still;
bureaucratic capital might be said to be joining banking and
industrial capital as a third partner. But the inclination to
over-schematic thinking, and to 'reductionism', or neglect of
all but directly material causation, which Gramsci was to \
stigmatize in his later work on Marxist philosophy,
122
is \
visible in his treatment of the State; though it stands to his
credit that he was not leaving it out of his equation, as Marxists
have too often done.I23 'State power has become the domain
of a financial oligarchy ... an exact expression of the interests
of finance capital.'
An inexact expression, rather; fortunately

for mankind its overlords have never succeeded in devising
methods of government entirely and exclusively satisfactory to
themselves. Directing a State is a different matter from directing
a bank or brewery, on whatever scale; and besides the many
alien incrustations, whether represented by Kaiser or by
Demos, that clog the 'pure reason' of capitalism, there is the
fact that it docs not always know, any more than its simpler-
minded forerunners, what is best for it. It may have to be
saved from itself. A state run wholly by and for big business
would not be long in capsizing.
Overlooking all this, Bukharin thought that democracy and
II9 Bukharin, ojJ. cit., p. 144
120 Bukharin, ojJ. cit., p. 8o.
121 Bukharin, ojJ. cit., p. 155
122
See Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith, Selections fi"om the Prison Notebooks of
Antonio Gramsci (London, 1971), pp. '1!.9 ff.
12
3 Basso, one of the few recent commentators on Bukharin's book,
commends him for giving fuller weight than either Rosa Luxemburg or
Lenin to the role of the State in economic affairs (loc. cit., p. 122). He
considers the book richer in ideas than Lenin's Imperialism (p. 125.)
34
parliamentary life would soon be things of the past: their
function of providing for adjustments between diverse proper-
tied interests was coming to an end, as all property converged
in one mass, and what imperialism required was some type of
dictatorship.rzs He was again echoing Hilferding, and hitting
the mark in so far as dictatorship was to prove the norm in
capitalist societies in crisis; yet formal democracy has survived,
and best in the most advanced countries, where parliaments
have not served as camouflage alone but have adapted their
old function to smoothing out dissensions among capital and
labour and the middle classes.
Bukharin did Angell an injustice when he taxed him (at
second hand) with forgetting that nations are made up of
groups, and that policies harmful to the whole may benefit
sectional interests.
126
He was losing moreover somt. 'lf the force
of his own case, for on his showing each national complex was
now so closely welded that there were no longer any significant
sectional interests, unless those of the man in the street might
be reckoned such. But the man in the street too was being
drawn into the amalgam represented by what we might call
'national capitalism', and was soon to disguise itself as 'National
Socialism'. It is to Bukharin's credit once more that he was
alive to this, even if he failed to throw much light on it. Skilled
and well-paid workers like Ford's, he wrote, were apt to
identify their own and their bosses' interests, as craftsmen did
in the patriarchal days of manufacture. He threw out an
allusion to America and Australia, not of much relevance to
European history, but went on to argue that by the end of the
nineteenth century capitalist encroachment had 'to a large
degree destroyed the bond of unity between capitalists and
workers': it had not however yet broken the bond 'between the
working class and the great organization of the bourgeoisie, the
capitalist state.'
127
Here is another proposition much in want
of illustration, to clarify how and when workers who in the
Communist Manifesto had no fatherland came to acquire one.
Their link with the State was a new one still being forged, as
12s Bukharin, op. cit., p. 128.
126
Bukharin, op. cit., p. 61. Bukharin, like Lenin, virtually ignored
Angell's case.
121 Bukharin, op. cit., p. p162-4.
THE MARXIST THEORY 01' IMPERIALISM
35
well as an old one not yet worn out. With the war it was being
reinforced by cooperation between trade union leaders and
governments.
Bukharin was close to an important part of the truth, of
which Lenin took less notice, when he dwelt on the 'grandiose
ideological formulation' that accompanied imperialism, and
how it was instilled into the masses.rzs Speaking of the flood of
propaganda about the war as a conflict of races, he commented
with much insight that such fantasies were meat and drink to
ruling classes 'directly interested in utilising the remnants of
old psychological stratifications' for their own advantage.rz9
Every age is swaddled in left-overs from the past, and it is out
of these draperies, the mental stuff of former days, that the
illusions necessary for the business of government are chiefly
woven.
So far as colonies or semi-colonies were prized as markets,
the 'mania' for grabbing them might be regarded as a desperate
effort to put off the evil day when capitalism would have to
make a better market for itself at home by allowing wages to
rise, as the English liberals proposed. Bukharin was positive
that this would never come to pass; a belief central to the left-
wing Marxist philosophy, and in the light of later history one
of its most vulnerable joints. He declared that capitalism would
no more think of such a programme than of trying to drag
itself out of a swamp by its own hair.l3 Any trifling improve-
ment there might be in the workers' lot he put down to their
being granted a small portion of imperial profit. He had con-
sequently to attack any suggestions of colonies being not worth
having. 'The colonial policy yields a colossal income to the
great powers, i.e. to their ruling classes', out of which some-
thing could be bestowed on the workers, or some sections of
them, chiefly the more skilled.l3I He was harking back to
Kautsky's summary ofrecent history in rgog, but forcing it into
a narrower mould, when he asserted that 'All the relative
"prosperity" of the European-American industry was con-
ditioned by nothing but the fact that a safety-valve was
opened in the form of colonial policy.'l32 As Marxists too
128 Bukharin, op. cit., p. wg.
1
3 Bukharin, op. cit., p. 79
1
29 Bukharin, oj;. cit., pp. I IO-II.
131 Bukharin, ojJ. cit., p. 165.
habitually did, he was lumping together as 'colonial' profit each
and every gain from the proliferation of world trade anywhere
and everywhere. Years later he repeated, just as sweepingly,
that capitalism survived and flourished through its ability to
disarm working-class hostility, 'paying higher wages to labour
by plundering and mercilessly exploiting the colonies', and
thereby fostering a sense of community between workers and
capitalist State.l33
It might sound doubtful wisdom for Marxism to tell the
workers, exactly as conservatism was elling them, that if they
wanted anything better than a bare subsistence they could only
get it, short of revolution, by backing the imperialist struggle
for existence. On the morrow of the war there were 'National
Bolsheviks' in Germany. Bukharin hugged the hope that harsh
war-time experience was delivering the working class from its
delusions, by revealing the cost of imperialism as far higher
than its reward-for the workers, that is, not for their employers,
for otherwise he would be agreeing with Angell that no nation
at war could be gainfully employed. Hitherto imperialism
confined its barbarities mostly to 'savages' in the backlands;
'now it thrusts itself upon the toilers of Europe .... The war
severs the last chain that binds the workers to the masters,
their slavish submission to the imperialist state.'
1
34 No doubt it
ought to have been doing this. Bukharin rubbed the lesson in
by saying, as Rosa Luxemburg did, that the future of capitalism
must in any case be a gloomy one, with 'A deep-going tendency
towards decreasing real wages ... not a relative, but also an
absolute worsening of the situation of the working class.'
1
3s
Impoverishment in other words had only artificially and tem-
porarily been interrupted by imperial profiteering.
Whether much or little gain awaited the winners in this war,
he could not admit any option for capitalism of altering its
fated course. There could be no further evolution for it on any
new lines. Imperialism was its final, full-blown phase, beyond
which could lie only the worsening delirium of a sick world, or
socialism. He ended with the vision of the Communist Mani-
festo, the expropriation of the expropriators.
133 N. Bukharin, Historical Materialism (English edn., London, 1925),
p. 256.
134 Bukharin, lmjJerialism and World Economy, p. 167.
1
35 Ibid., p. 159.
37
9 LENIN'S 'IMPERIALISM' (1916)
Soon after completing his book Bukharin found himself serving
a prison sentence in Sweden, after which he shook the dust of
Europe off his feet and withdrew, as Trotsky and others had
done, to America, until the fall of the Tsar summoned him
back to Russia. All this time Lenin was wrestling with the same
problems. Some of his thoughts took shape in a pamphlet, The
War and the Second International, written in the summer of 1915
while Bukharin was still at work. Early next year, with
Bukharin off the scene and his book gone aground in Russia,
Lenin felt called on to provide a substitute for it, and the out-
come was his longer pamphlet or short book Imperialism,
repeating or improving his previous arguments. While busy
with it he moved in February 1916 from Berne to Zurich in
search of better libraries;
136
by early August he was trying to
arrange for the sheets to be smuggled to Russia, hidden inside
book-bindings.l37 They did not get into print until the following
April, when the Tsar had fallen and it was Lenin who was
being smuggled into Russia.
In both these compositions he was seeking to test what was
true in the heap of ideas current, as he said in his foreword
to Imperialism, since the beginning of the century: he singled out
Hobson and Hilferding as having given the best lead, but as
suffering from political errors. He himself as a Marxist
tl1inker was not a great originator, but rather a great system-
atizer: one of those minds, also indispensable, that deepen and
consolidate a body of thought and give it firmer anchorage. It
was a talent that went with his genius for practical organization.
Since the catastrophe of 1914 he was being forced back on
fundamentals, retreating to Marxist philosophy as an impreg-
nable line of defence, as he had done after the failure of the
first Russian revolution when he composed his attack on
Empirio-criticism. His notebooks show how wide-ranging his
intellectual curiosity was, in certain directions, when he felt
free to indulge it. He made notes on Lassalle on Heraclitus the
Obscure,I3S to whom can be traced the dialectical concept of
136
The Letters of Lenin, pp. 384-5.
137
Ibid., pp. 398-9.
1
38 See Lenin, Plzilosoplzical Notebooks (Collected Works, English edn., Vol.
38; Moscow, 1961), pp. 341 ff.
contradiction which must have had a special meaning for
Lenin in this dark hour. All his chief undertakings in the field
of theory belonged indeed to intervals of defeat or solitude.
Each was a justification of what Lenin took to be the true
Marxist position, rather than an attempt at innovation. The
last two, Imperialism and The State and Revolution, were addressed
to immediate problems of action, and this was bound to in-
fluence their character, in some ways crampingly.
In his preface to Bukharin's book Lenin recorded again his
awareness that a serious analysis of the war required 'a full
understanding of imperialism, both from its economic and
political aspects'.I39 He reiterated that one must look at things
all round; social life being so complex, 'it is always possible to
select any number of examples or separate data to prove any
proposition one desires.'
1
4 He admonished himself and his
readers of the merely 'conditional and relative value of all
definitions'.
1
41 He noticed briefly how factors belonging to a
'non-economic superstructure' could intensify imperialist
quarrels; he even quoted from a French author the remark
that modern life generates psychological irritations that may
find an outlet in war.l4
2
He had to keep off various subjects
because he wanted Imperialism to circulate legally in Russia,
and tsarist censors, although he must have thought them
remarkably broad-minded or slack, would have to draw the
line somewhere. How many of these other topics he would
have liked to explore, or how successfully he would have done
so, can only be conjectured. History meant much less to him
than to Marx, and in spite of his self-warnings he shared in
some degree Bukharin's tendency to isolate economic factors.
An ascetic self-restraint, besides, made him want to put before
readers the plainest and most convincing case, and make sure
of capitalism being brought once for all to the gallows by
saddling it, as the Allies at Versailles were to saddle their
defeated foes, with the entire load of war-guilt.
All this brought him to invest capitalism with too universal
and omnipotent a direction of events, to make it too un-
139 Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, p. g.
14o Preface to 1920 edn. of Imperialism; C. W., Vol. 22, p. I go.
141 ImjJerialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. 266.
Ibid., pp. 262-3.
39
questionably the All-Highest of the age, dominating men and
things like the Immanent Spirit in Hardy's Dynasts. On his
stage many other factors in dis:-
ambitions of soldiers, momenturn. of
e.a:.r:lier conquest-were relegated so far into the background as
to almost out of sight. Capitalist purposes themselves did
not all spring so directly as he was ready to assume from the
pure intrinsic nature of capitalism, and they were modified in
their turn by many other impulses at work. Economic history
.. be .. 3: .. self-contained process.
of its owri ... Capitalist soCiety was . still. in the
makil1g, and had needs not reckonable in cashbooks and ledgers.
It suffered from instability at the apex, where diverse social
groups were coalescing into a plutocracy, as well as at the
bottom. Of this coming together too imperialism was a
necessary part.
Imperialism had for sub-title 'The Highest Stage of Capital-
ism', implying also its .final stage. Lenin followed Hilferding in
giving prominence to the trend of capital towards concentration
and monopoly, which he could claim for Marx the credit of
having foreseen.
1
43 He was carrying to its furthest limit,
complete integration of capital of all types, a progress that
Marxists had been observing for years. Kautsky left a wide
though diminishing gap between two principal types, banking
and industrial capital; Hilferding narrowed it by putting the
first in command; Lenin abolished it. He made frequent use
of the phrase 'finance-capital', but he was altering its import,
compressing its content, so much that he would have done
better to find a new one. I44 His monist conception of capitalism
did away with any question of different sections of it having
different outlooks and modes of behaviour; there was only one
capitalism, which could have only one criminal career, and one
fitting punishment. Its connection with war, fortuitous in Rosa
Luxemburg's early thinking, semi-accidental in Kautsky's in
I gog, was now a marriage that no man could put asunder.
It was common sense, if not strict logic, to postulate a
relationship between monopoly capitalism and imperialism as
'beyond doubt', on the ground that they were manifesting
143 Ibid., pp. Ig8-200.
144 Sweezy, ojJ. cit., p. 26g.
themselves at the same time. I4s Yet objections arc not hard to
find, and Lenin himself did not succeed in excluding dis-
crepancies from his argument. His picture of a trustified,
monopolistic economy derived chiefly fl:om Germany and the
U.S., and was much less f ~ t i t h f u l to realities in Britain, where he
admitted that concentration began later than in the protec-
tionist countries, but only he thought a little later: he considered
it as having achieved 'complete supremacy' everywhere by
about Igoo,
146
the date which he took as inaugurating the
world-reign of monopoly capitalism.I47 It might be argued on
the contrary that Britain's unique array of colonial possessions,
mostly acquired long before that date, furnished it with an
alternative to concentration of capital, and hindered its
arrival at the 'highest stage'. If so, here is one of those variations
or mutations, instances of the adaptability of an economic
system to its environment, which Lenin could not disregard
altogether but wanted to allow no more than a nominal place.
In another way too British capitalism did not fit very well into
his scheme. City bankers were content with the pickings of
their long-established international business, and had little
desire to turn aside into new paths of industrial financing.
1
4B
Lenin introduced a second dichotomy when he spoke of
heavy industry's ability to 'exact tribute' from all other
branches of the economy.l49 Yet further on he declared that
French colonial expansion since 188o stemmed from a weaken-
ing of industrial capital, and commented: 'The characteristic
feature of imperialism is not industrial but finance capital.'Iso
In the context he could only be thinking of banking, or money-
lending, capital, certainly hypertrophied in France at the
expense of industrial. This means that he like Bukharin was
unconsciously juggling with the two senses of Hilferding's
term. France was the usurer of Europe, he wrote.
1
S
1
But usury
is not the highest stage of capitalism, whatever else may be. We
must suppose a regression of French capitalism, under the
spell of colonial tribute, and France's empire like Britain's may
be classed as a divagation, an alternative to the logical progress
1
45 Imperialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. 255
111 Ibid., pp. 200-201.
1
49 ImjJCJialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. 217.
lSI Ibid., p. 233
I4
6
Ibid., pp. 298-g.
I4
8
Semmel, oj; cit., p. 145.
ISO Ibid., p. 268.
of capitalism towards ils finishing-point that Lenin was
impatient to find everywhere.
'The old capitalism has had its day. The new capitalism
represents a transition to something.'
1
5
2
Towards what, he
described bourgeois economists as uneasily asking? Towards its
supplanting by socialism, was of course his own reply. In fact
the transition was to be a very halting, groping one, by way
of two world wars, towards welfare- or prosperity-capitalism;
a mediocre prospect happily hidden from Lenin. For him the
capitalism of his day was 'highly developed, mature, and over-
ripe',1S3 ready in short to give up the ghost, though he was in
far less haste than his later disciples to dismiss it as techno-
logically exhausted. !54 What he was most positive of was that
the new capitalism was a far worse master than the old; its
oppression was 'a hundred times heavier, more burdensome
and intolerable'.
1
ss Did he ask himself whether anything could
be a hundred times worse than the capitalism branded by
Karl Marx? He dwelt as Bukharin had done on the lagging of
agriculture behind industry
1
s6, and fully endorsed the opinion
common in the International for several years before the war
that things were getting worse for the workers. It was not at
that date absurd for Lenin to reaffirm that so long as capitalism
lasted the poverty of the masses, or the great bulk of them, was
irremediable. Socialism had always drawn much of its vitality
from this simple conviction, and when men like Bernstein
began to leave it behind they were, unwittingly, beginning to
leave their socialism behind too. Now more than ever Lenin
was bent on guarding it firmly. A man of action must have
some unarguable axioms to sustain him. That of working-class
solidarity was proving not unshakable; but if workers were less
virtuous than Lenin had believed them, capitalists could not
be allowed to be less wicked.
He seems as a rule to be arguing from the poverty of the
masses, and consequent anaemia of the home market and
investment incentives, to the flow of capital abroad, very much
as Hobson did. A later Marxist has sought to absolve him of
I52 Ibid., p. 225; cf. p. 219.
t53 Preface to Bukharin's lrnf;erialism, p. g.
ISl See e.g. lrnf;erialism, C. f11., Vol. 22, p. 204.
ISS Ibid., P 205. !56 Ibid., P 2 I 7
anything so crude as under-consumptionism, and to show him
as relying instead on finance-capital as the driving force
behind expansionism.
1
57 This sounds a little abstract, the more
so as the term finance-capital is in some respects equivocal. At
any rate Lenin was always eager to discredit the panacea put
forward by Hobson and Brailsford of a raising of living
standards to induce capital to stay at home. Against the relevant
extract from Hobson in his notebooks he scribbled: 'ha-ha!!
the essence of philistine criticism of imperialism'; he was
derisive too of Hobson's related wish for democratic social
planning.
1
5B On Kautsky's patronage of the proposed higher
wages he wrote now that it was nothing more than 'a very
fitting topic for a churchman to preach on to the financiers' ,
1
59
Lenin was no church-goer, or he would have known better
than to suspect clergymen of being so tactless. Another later
Marxist will not allow the proposal to be feasible even in
theory, because any attempt to regulate investment merely
'sets off a series of new dislocations' .
160
This objection scarcely
puts out of court a gradual long-term change, such as we have
actually witnessed. Lenin in any case appears to throw out
the liberal remedy as politically, more than economically,
impracticable.
IO CAPITAL-EXPORT IN LENIN'S THEORY
He devoted five pages of Imperialism to capital export, some-
what schematic, as well as brief, to bear the weight of the book's
entire thesis. That Britain and France in this period were
mostly re-exporting old investment income did not strike him
as calling for notice,
161
though it might be said to cast doubt on
the congestion he took for granted in the home market, where
newly-formed capital apparently continued to find scope. Or
1
57 G. Lichthcim, Imperialism (London, 1971), p. 117. For a Marxist
critique of Hobson's undcr-consumptionism, see Dobb, Political Economy
and Capitalism, pp. 268 ff.
ISS Notebooks on Imperialism, pp. 414, 432.
I59 The CollajJse riftlze Second International, C. JiV., Vol. 21, p. 230.
16o Magdoff, ojJ. cit., p. 24. For an opposite view, that Lenin was wrong to
dismiss the possibility of wages being raised, sec J. Stracl1cy, The End of
Emj;ire (London, 1961), pp. 109-12.
161 Lenin's Notebooks show that he knew of C. K. Hobson's book, but he
docs not seem to have read it.
43
we may conjecture a double flow of funds, with older, mellower
investors turning into contented clippers of colonial coupons,
as the rich merchant of English tradition turned into an case-
loving landowner, while newer, sharper-toothed men gathered
money and sent it abroad. Holdings of foreign and colonial
stocks by the advanced countries were in any case accumu-
lating, as Lenin said. He adhered to his monist system by
making as little distinction as Bukharin between investment in
areas sociologically the most heterogeneous. He referred to
shares in U.S. railways held by English millionaires as an
instance of 'concentration of finance capital' .
162
Wherever
capital flowed, the aggressive instincts of monopoly capitalism
were at work, and the revenue it brought in was the solid basis
for imperialist oppression by 'a handful of the wealthiest
states'.163 Present-day capitalism was not merely the cause of,
it was identical with, imperialism. 'Call it what you will, it
makes no difference.'
1
64 It was this kind of definition that
Kautsky understandably objected to, as going round in a
circle.
Capital was attracted most compellingly, in Lenin's opinion,
to backward regions like Turkey, with untapped resources and
unprotected labour, where 'the financier reaps a triple profit'
as compared with what he could look for in developed countries
like the U.S. r65 Yet nearly a quarter of British overseas invest-
ment was in the U.S., while high profits in the backlands often
went with high risks. True, investors were always eager to
reduce these risks, while keeping up the profits, by enlisting
official aid. This might come from the local government, if
there was one capable of upholding what financiers call
Order. Where none such existed, the investor would importune
his own government to step in.
Several peculiarities helped to make France both an adven-
turous foreign lender and a restless forager for colonies, though
very little of French investment went into French colonies. On
the other hand colonies might be coveted by countries with
little or no capital to export. Lenin specified as three new baits
x6z Imperialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. 257
I63 Ibid., p. 243 . .
164 Ibid., p. 270. Cf. p. 202: 'Caprtahsm has been transformed into
imperialism.'
16s The Collapse rifthe Second International, C. W., Vol. 21, p. 230.
added to the "'old" motives of colonial policy', fields of
investment and markets and raw materials.
1
66 None of these
was new in kind, though all were taking on fresh significance.
If congestion of capital and falling profit-rates at home may
be called the economic cause of colonialism, then need
of raw materials from outside and markets in which to earn
money to pay for them can be dubbed causes: they
must affect every industrial economy, capitalist or not. Lenin
and later Marxism were not always careful enough to see
where one began and the other ended. Poor, vigorous countries
wanting to stake a claim to their share of what was going
might well see in colonies a short cut to prosperity. Japan was
the typical nation here, with its annexation of Taiwan in I895
and Korea in I9IO. In anv such case forces other than strictlv
economic would exert a leverage, as the Japanese army
did. Tsarist Russia was another such anomaly. In an article
written about this time Lenin pigeon-holed its expansionism
as 'milita7J'-feudal "imperialism"'
167
, a label which betrays
some uncertainty, like the special category of Aryan that
Nazi savants had to invent for Dr Goebbels to fit into. The
Russo-Japanese war in I 904 was a quarrel over colonial spoils,
but decisive among these was the Yalu River timber on which
the Tsar's private investment was staked, and which made him
deaf to his ministers' remonstrances.I68
Portugal, to consider one further exception, stood at the
opposite pole from Japan, both as an ancient intruder into
other continents and as now socially and economically derelict,
though they were alike in suffering from no plethora of capital.
In the course of the scramble for Africa its sphere was greatly
enlarged, army officers and other sectional interests dragging
the country into what was really a reduction to absurdity of
imperialism. Portuguese life perpetuated much of an old
feudal climate, its habits of wasteful display and prodigal
16
6 Imj;erialism, C. vV., Vol. 22, p. 299.
16
7 G. vV., Vol. 21, p. 420. Rosa Luxemburg thought Russia was acting
more from needs of State than of economy (sec Lenin's Notebooks on Imperi-
alism, p. 309). In his History qf the Russian Revolution (London cdn., 1967),
Vol. I, p. 190, Trotsky took the opposite view; but on p. 33 he wavered, and
in his Stalin (London edn., 1969), Vol. I, p. 24.3, he returned to the view that
Russia went to war to stifle working-class unrest.
168
Brailsford, oj;. cit., p. 51. Sec further A. Malozcmoff, Russian Far
Eastern Policy, r88r-r9o1 (California, 1958).
45
spending, its blend of liberality and rapacity, readily trans-
lated into a 'civilising mission'. Something of this pre-industrial
mentality may have lingered among ordinary folk in the
industrial countries too, and coloured their hazy feelings about
empire. But with every allowance for all this 'quixotry', a
recent historian goes much too far when he says that Portuguese
empire-building made 'nonsense of the Hobson-Lenin theory
of economic imperialism before that theory could even he
propounded.'I69 How great Powers act cannot be judged by
any dwarfish a pings of them. Besides, considerable amounts of
foreign capital were being invested in Portuguese Africa, as
well as in Portugal itself, largely by its old bear-leader England.
A direct take-over of the colonies by England and Germany
was more than once in prospect; an example of how economic
penetration might lead towards political ascendancy. A Foreign
Office memorandum in I 9 I 9 remarked that 'The policy
pursued by the Germans in Turkey, Russia and elsewhere before
the war has shown how it is possible for a foreign people to
exploit the resources of a country of which they have not the
political control'; but it went on to express suspicion of Japan's
motives for acquiring property in India.I7
That most capital exported was not invested in colonies
could not be gainsaid, but Lenin saw no proof here that
colonies were a superfluity. There were all kinds of auxiliary
purposes for them to serve, for instance as places where surplus
goods could be dumped.
171
The world he looked out on
appeared to him, as to most businessmen-in spite of Angell-,
one of limited resources and openings, where each competing
nation must perforce grab as much as it could and fence it off
with tariffs or boundary lines. He wrote of the scramble all
over the globe by big corporations anxious to make sure of
their supplies. He was by no means alone in surmising that
some raw materials, oil among them, might be nearing
exhaustion.J7z Even the most unattractive territory was worth
snapping up, because it might turn out later on to contain
169 R. J. Hammond, Portugal and Africa rBrs-rgro. A Study in Uneconomic
Imperialism (Stanford, 1966), p. ;x; cf. PP ,7?' .
110 D. Dignan, New PersjJectwes on Brz.tlsh Iar Eastern PolzC)
1
I9I3-I9I9
(University of Queensland, 1969), pp. 295-6.
171 Notebooks on Imperialism, pp. 195-6.
17
2
Imjmialism, C. T11., Vol. 22, pp. 24.8-9.
valuables.m Gambling is part of all business activity, it has
been remarked.
1
74 Over and above this, Lenin could have
argued against Angell that buying raw materials from someone
else was less profitable than cornering one's own sources, as
capitalists were learning to do inside their national limits by
the practice of 'vertical integration'.
Altogether, Lenin can be said to have had firm ground
under his feet when he linked colonialism with the appetites of
big business, even without the aid of a capital-export theory
which in a good many ways hampered rather than assisted him.
To Kautsky's cavil that Germany's trade was growing faster
than Britain's with some British colonies, Lenin retorted that
'German imperialism is younger, stronger, and better organ-
ized'.I75 'Imperialism' seems to signify no more here than
business efliciency; and a Hamburg trader forging ahead of
his Liverpool competitor might agree with Kautsky that
Britain's empire was not doing it much good. But he might be
likelier to conclude, with Lenin, that it would be better trans-
ferred to his own custody, since he would know how to make
more usc of it. Almost any fact of the times could lend itself
to opposite interpretations, and businessmen were as prone to
fashionable crazes or dreams of Eldorado as anyone else.
We may regret Lenin's omission from his treatise of any
detailed discussion of colonial areas that had come into his
reading. In the heat of wartime neither he nor his readers
could have much thought to spare for such matters, and later
on he never had occasion to come back to them. Like Bukharin
he took for granted that imperialism must have a blighting
effect on native peoples, just as the 'new capitalism' was having
on the majority at home. The imperial relationship was essen-
tially predatory, its purpose the extraction of tribute or loot;
railways were the 'summation' of capitalism by virtue of
serving as its instrument for plundering the continents.
176
But
173 ItnjJerialism, C. W., Vol 22, p. 261.
I74 From one point of view imperialism may be thought of as an outlet for
a gambler's instinct that is one of the psycl:ology ?f
capitalism. Scott, who shared this mstmct, descnbed It graphically m
Chap. 1 of Rob Roy picture ?f. the hero's father, great
whose 'health and spints and actiVIty seemed ever to mcrease With the
animating hazards on which he staked his wealth ... .'
175 Imperialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. 290.
116 Preface to 1920 edn. of lrnjJerialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. Igo.
this was only one side of the story. Just as Marx thought of
capitalist industrialization as a painful but necessary stage of
progress, Lenin thought the same of capital injected into back-
ward regions. Export of capital might retard industrial growth
at home, but would initiate or accelerate it in the areas of
investment.
Marx seems to have expected the capitalist mode of pro-
duction to spread like a germ-culture wherever introduced, and
his successors, independently of him, were of the same mind.
Visualizing an irresistible outflow of capital from the industrial
countries, they were in a way leaving themselves no choice.
Once an adequate infrastructure of railway stations and police
stations was in being in any colonial area, there could be little
further employment for capital except in creating industry.
After saying that the extension of railways had been quickest
in the colonies and other undeveloped lands of Asia and the
Americas, Lenin continued, as if no more evidence were
requisite: 'Capitalism is growing with the greatest rapidity in
the colonies and in overseas countries.'
1
77 The only one he
mentioned, under this omnibus heading, was the highly
atypical Japan, and apart from japan it was only to countries
like the U.S. or Canada that his dictum properly applied.
Once again he was ignoring the potent influence of each
region's local character and history, and crediting capitalism
with too sovereign a sway.
To the extent that new industrial raw materials like rubber
and oil were being tapped, they might be supposed to stimulate
industry at home in the advanced countries. Lenin's emphasis
was on the opposite tendency of imperial tribute to promote
the rise of a 'rentier stratum' divorced from production, and
with it a drift of whole countries towards a parasitic style of
'living on the exploitation of the labour of several overseas
countries and colonies'. He quoted a description of Holland as
'the model "rentier state'", already in the condition towards
which England and France were moving.
1
7
8
But Holland never
was a hearth of modern industry, and the empire that must
have been partly the cause of this was an inheritance from the
seventeenth century. France was industrializing slowly, grudg-
177 Imjmialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. 274
1
78 Ibid., pp. 277-8.
ingly. Whether a country once fully in the grip of modern
industrialism could relapse into a more primitive condition
must appear far more doubtful than Lenin thought it. Many
social impediments would hold up the free readjustment of
capitalism, even assuming that this was its natural direction.
So would the need for heavy industries to keep up armed
strength, on Lenin's other assumption of a perpetual war to the
knife among all capitalist countries, to say nothing of the
maintenance of Order in colonies.
Furthermore, decline into parasitism would seem to negate
the dynamic, aggressive marriage of 'finance-capital', and to
represent a later, if not a higher, phase of capitalist evolution.
Active, industrializing capital would be banished to newly-
emerging lands, which could scarcely then be regarded as
hapless victims of exploitation. Lenin was trying to have it
both ways when he took up Hobson's speculation about a
happily united Europe of the future living on the toil of a
subject China. Hobson was careful to add, and Lenin to
repeat, that the future is always too incalculably complex for
safe prediction 179-a caution that Marxists as well as others
have too often forgotten. History is strewn with unrealized
might-have-been's, often worth making cautious use of as
magnifying-glasses. Lenin would not in any case anticipate
that colonial regions could be kept in chains for long: once
industrialized by foreign masters they would soon become
ungovernable from outside. This amounted to something very
like the 'decolonization' theory debated (and repudiated) by
the Third International in the 1920s. It could find warrant
both in Kautsky's Road to Power and in Hilferding, from whom
Lenin borrowed the aphorism: 'Capitalism itself gradually
provides the subjugated with the means and resources for their
emancipation.'
180
But to wait for capitalism to generate
liberation movements would mean waiting a very long time.
India was virtually the only big colony to be led to freedom by
a national bourgeoisie; none was led by an industrial working
class. Pre-capitalist forces-peasants, intellectuals-rejuvenated
I79 Ibid., pp. 27g-8o. Strachey (ajJ. cit., pp. 101-2) points out that Lenin
had far more awareness than Hobson of colonial nationalism as a limiting
factor, especially in China.
rso ImjJerialism, C. T'V., Vol. 22, p. 297
4-9
by modern ideas would provide most of the recruits to the cause
of colonial revolt. Lenin was relying overmuch on the auto-
matic play of economic forces, with too little allowance for the
play of ideas, which-whether progressive or reactionary-can
be hatched only in a very specific environment but can then
spread to many others.
I I LENIN ON CAPITALISM AND THE WAR
To pine with Kautsky for a peaceful stay-at-home capitalism
was to ask, Lenin repeated, for a return from monopoly to the
stage of small-scale competition, which even if feasible would
mean going backward.
181
He rejected as equally false, but more
plausible and therefore more harmful, the notion of a peaceful
accommodation among capitalist nations. 'The most subtle
theory of social-chauvinism, one that has been most skilfully
touched up to look scientific and international, is the theory of
"ultra-imperialism" advanced by Kautsky.' This was un-
deniably an ill-chosen term, as Lenin said, but what enraged
him was Kautsky's deduction that 'ultra-imperialism' might be
in a position to create 'an era of new hopes and expectations
within the framework of capitalism.'
1
8
2
Any dreams of a tranquil
tomorrow could only distract socialists from wrestling with the
hideous realities of today. There could be no lessening of
contradictions within the new capitalism; uncontrollable
pressures drove it towards violence and conquest.
1
83 Ultra-
imperialism in short was 'ultra-nonsense'. I84 A well-regulated
world laid out among a few law-abiding empires was 'the cant
of English parsons'
1
8
5
-a class of individuals for whom Lenin
must have had for some reason a particular disrelish.
He ridiculed a French economist for fancying that the net-
work of international investment would prevent war.I86
Concentration of capital only made international relations more
unbalanced and explosive. By stifling at home competitiveness
inherent in capitalism, monopoly fostered in it a morbid
aggressiveness which had to find vent externally, by way of
ISI Ibid., p. 28g.
tsz The CollajJse of the Second Intematianal, C. JiV., Vol. 2 I, pp. 223-4
183 Ibid., p. 226. I84 ImjJerialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. 271.
185 Ibid., p. 284. I86 Ibid., p. 288.
50
imperialism.IB7 With the world already carved up, great-power
greeds could only be satisfied by a forcible redivision of the
spoils. Hence the Great War. For some years after 1871
capitalism was in a relatively pacific mood, though tyrannous
in its rule over the masses, especially in the colonies.
1
ss Capi-
talists then had no need to fight one another, because there was
room for all. If we apply Lenin's criteria rigorously, the
partition of the world was not really 'imperialism', because
finance-capital or monopoly capitalism was not fully in the
saddle before about Igoo, when most of it was complete.
Imperialism properly so-called began when the earlier col-
onialism ended, and its business was to re-partition the world.
As to whether this could be repeated indefinitely, as Lenin
assumed, one doubt is suggested by his own belief that colonial
resistance movements would soon be entering the arena in
greater force. It lends more weight than he was willing to grant
them to some other words he quoted from Kautsky: 'India may
cease to be a British possession, but as an integral empire it
will never fall under the sway of another foreign power.'
1
B9
Kautsky-that 'beastly, rotten, smug hypocrite'
1
9-was now
for Lenin the arch-forger of spurious Marxism, and here Lenin
was repelling the prediction that nations would give up the
struggle for colonies, as not worth the candle. Also, as at many
other points, he did not feel impelled to explore far-off vistas,
because all his hopes and resolves were fixed on the destruction
of Western capitalism here and now. All the same, he was
leaving something out when he pictured the Great Powers
fighting war after war to divide and re-divide the world, with
colonies passively changing hands among them like provinces
of Europe in the clays of Napoleon or the Congress of Vienna.
Meanwhile Europe found itselt condemned to spend four
years partitioning and re-partitioning a few square miles of its
own familiar Flanders mud. Lenin was still going on the
dubious presumption that in any major conflict one side would
start with a sufficient superiority to achieve its aim at a not
prohibitive cost. As to what these aims were, Lenin even more
187 Imperialism, C. W., Vol. 22, pp. 265-6.
188 Preface to Bukharin's Imperialism, p. ro.
189 The CollajJSe of the Second International, C. W., Vol. 21, p. 229.
19o The Letters of Lenin, p. 34.2.
firmly than Bukharin was convinced that they were not
limited, as Kautsky would have it, to annexation of agrarian
or undeveloped regions. To him it was as patent as to Angell
nonsensical that French capitalism should strive to regain
Alsace-Lorraine, or German capitalism to swallow Belgium.
How the inhabitants of an industrial country like Belgium
would be handled if annexed, he did not speculate. Alsace-
Lorraine offered the nearest precedent; its people were
politically in some degree of subjection, but as wage-earners
they could scarcely be said to fare worse than ordinary Germans.
In the British empire Lenin might have taken note that white
settlers (even Boers) and native inhabitants were on a very
unequal footing, and wondered whether conquered Europeans
could in practice be treated, and exploited, like Asians or
Africans. True, Poles in Russia, Slovaks in Hungary, and other
minorities eastward were on something like a colonial level, and
Nazism was to demonstrate how much further this could be
carried, how completely the equality of the white race
abrogated. But all this related to an agrarian, not an industrial
setting.
Lenin's reply would probably be that a strongly unified
German capitalism benefited by having Alsace-Lorraine, and
would benefit by having Belgium, incorporated in its structure;
this would be another step in the process by which capital was
piling up into bigger agglomerations. Presumably this would
mean that Belgian capitalists rather than workmen would be
the losers; also that only colonial tribute, not the gains of
imperialism in the larger sense, had the effect of reducing
capitalism to a parasitic condition (and otherwise Kautsky
would be right to say that capitalism was healthier without
imperialism). Some equivocations creep in, nevertheless, when
Lenin touches on particulars. A country may wish to annex
territory, either industrial or undeveloped, less for its own
advantage than to injure a rival; thus Germany wants Belgium
as a 'base' against England, England wants Baghdad as a base
against Germany.I9I It is easier to equate these two calculations
in strategic than in economic terms, and the argument seems
to stray bewilderingly to and fro across the borderline. All
sorts of considerations jostled in the minds of those who took
1
9
1
Imjmialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. 26g.
decisions, but the historian has to try to disentangle them.
Lenin was using the butt-end of his economic pistol when he
quoted the verdict of a German business expert that the
grandiose Berlin-Baghdad railway project was a huge blunder,
due to the vainglorious Kaiser's trip to Palestine.l92 If so it was
a consequence of Germany having a stupidly archaic govern-
ment, not of the basic requirements of its capitalists. These
might indeed come to believe that they needed a Berlin-
Baghdad railway, if rosy enough images of it were dangled
before them. Between the authentic and the fancied require-
ments of any dominant group the line must often be nebulous.
At bottom Lenin held that whatever other things helped to
fix the shape of the struggle for world power, its essential
content was the drive of monopoly capitalism. Here lay the
decisive force in all economic and international relations.I93
(Capitalism once out of the way, he reckoned on socialism
being able to transform any country much faster than it has
proved able to do; on this side too inertias from the past were
heavier than he bargained for.) He sometimes, though not
always, forgot that financial and military strength may be very
uneven; and he often spoke as if international relations were
far more plastic, more readily moulded by the master-hand of
finance, than history shows them. Just as no amount of invest-
ment in the U.S. could give Britain political control there,
neither could French investment in Russia, except that it
might bind wayward Russia more closely to the French
alliance. Britain and France had the biggest investments in
Turkey, but in 1914 this helped to push Turkey, in search of
escape from the stranglehold, onto Germany's side.I94 As a
crucial test we may take the opposing coalitions that were
fighting the Great War. Lenin thought of international cartels
giving way to quarrels, as the participants' financial strength
fluctuated and the stronger demanded a bigger share, and he
referred casually to State alliances running 'parallel with this
and in connection with it.'
1
9s But only an endless series of
'diplomatic revolutions' could have kept the two in step. His-
192 Imj1erialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. 237
1
93 Ibid., p. 259; cf. p. 253
1
94 Sec W. W. Gottlieb, Studies in Secret Diplomacy during the First World
War (London, 1957), Part r.
195 Imperialism, C. W., Vol. 22, p. 253
torically it was the politico-military combinations, like the
Triple Alliance of r 883, that came first, and once in being they
became far too fixed and rigid, thanks in part to the elaboration
of armies and of strategies like the Schlieffen Plan, to be altered
and reshuffled from year to year as the shifting inclinations of
financial centres might dictate.
If Germany was fighting for 'Mittel-Europa', it was, para-
doxically, fighting to subjugate mainly its own allies, Austria-
Hungary and Turkey. German enterprise had been encouraged
by the alliance to flow into the Hapsburg empire, but it would
have been nearly as ready to flow into the tsarist empire, and
the choice was made not by the bankers but by Bismarck and
the generals. It would besides often be quite awkward for the
most powerful interests in one country to agree on which other
country was the 'enemy'. Among Lenin's own illustrations we
find that in electricity Germany and the U.S. were hand in
glove, and together supreme, while in oil Germans had been
defeated by Americans and their associates.
1
96 This, as well as
necessities of war planning, must compel each set of capitalists
to hand over a good deal of the responsibility for decisions to
their political heads and military advisers. From the standpoint
of public relations this had at least to seem to be happening.
Ordinary Germans might fight for Kaiser or Fuhrer, but they
would not be fired by a clarion call of 'Your Krupp and
country need you!'
Altogether, so far as economic interests were concerned a
large-scale war could only be a clumsy, confused melee, not a
neatly scientific operation to register changes of strength like
the mimic battles of the Stock Exchange. What it might
accomplish was to register now and then in a rough and ready
way a general alteration of military and economic power, and
award the lion's share of markets and investment-fields to those
with the most leonine appetite for them. From this angle it
might not matter too much what enemies were being over-
thrown, so long as the right lion came out on top and there was
plenty of game to gorge him. In some such way as this both
Lenin and capitalism, in its corporate self, may be supposed to
have thought about the Great War-both heavily under-
estimating its costs.
1
ol> Ibid., pp. 247 fT.
c
54
I 2 LENIN ON IMPERIALISM AND THE WORKING CLASS
In Igi6 Lenin was no nearer to comprehending the passions of
nationalism, and was still obsessed by the need to explain what
had gone wrong with the working class. He might be suspected
of inventing a riddle for himself, where for most spectators none
existed. But the scheme of salvation that he inherited from
Marx depended on the revolutionary mission of the working
class. He was capable of invoking the spirit of class loyalty in
passionately idealistic or ethical terms; but as a good materialist
he must attach it to economics, and he was not always circum-
spect enough when it came to reconciling the two. He was
trying to fit into a unified materialistic pattern a bundle of
impulses, some of which derived from class relations or the
mode of production only at several removes. For him the spirit
he admired in the working class sprang from its being doomed,
under capitalism, to be always poor and miserable; which was
a little too much like saying that any workers not poor and
miserable must have come by something discreditably, or sold
their souls to the devil. Their falling off could be rationally
explained, Lenin had been saying since the war began, by
capitalist bribery, which could only come out of the extra
profits of imperialism. And a second material pressure, the
hardships of the war, would remedy things by disillusioning the
workers and bringing them back to the right path.
It was a mountainous slice of modern history that Lenin was
trying to squeeze into the four corners of a theory of imperialism
restricted to the past two or three decades. Some uncertainty
is revealed by the fact that when, in lmjJerialism, he set himself
to work out his solution in more detail than Bukharin had
ventured on, he did so chiefly with reference to the workers
of Britain, the country which had the biggest colonial empire
but was by no means the most amenable to his definition of
imperialism. He could not fail to sec that the 'corruption' of the
English workers went back to the mid-nineteenth century, when
Britain had already plenty of colonies and foreign trade and
investments, but no monopoly capitalism, or true :mperialism.
It might seem to follow that parasitism, proletarian as well as
bourgeois, had its essential roots in colonial policies; yet
Germany had next to no colonies, and German workers, if less
55
parasitic, were no less patriotic. We are brought back to the
dilemma that if there was a net inflow of capital, as into
Britain, foreign investment was not relieving capital congestion:
if a net outflow, as from Germany, it was not producing an
unearned income out of which the workers could be bribed.
Hilfercling's claim for capital export of the credit for stimu-
lating German industry and creating more jobs was very
reasonable, but could scarcely be twisted into bribery and
corruption. As regards Britain, Lenin might have reflected that
much of its comparative comfort could be clue to its having got
through industrialization gradually, over a long period.
Angell remarked that in France, with little of Germany's
febrile industrial expansion, the common man lived more com-
fortably than the common German.l97 A Britain that was
neither investing heavily at home nor adding much on balance,
in most years, to its investment abroad, could afford some
limited concessions to its workers, besides supporting its
pampered rulers in more than oriental luxury.
In I 8g2 Engels ascribed the feebleness of socialism in
Britain to the benefits of an industrial monopoly enjoyed by the
country until not long before, benefits shared to a certain
extent by the workers.
1
98 Whether the natural monopoly that
accrued to England from its being the first industrial country
can be equated with the monopoly any industrial country
might now aspire to by crushing its rivals, and both called
'imperialist', seems questionable. Ten years later Kautsky, who
had lived in Britain, gave an exceedingly gloomy account of a
British working class completely sunk in torpor and ignoble
content, lost to anything higher than football or betting on
horses.
1
99 Lenin could not have brought himself to write off a
whole national working class like this, and Kautsky's disgust
with it foreshadowed a later disenchantment with the revol-
utionary proletariat at large, and with it virtual abandonment
of socialism.
Patriotism as well as industrialism was older in Britain than
1
97 Angell, The Great Illusion, pp. 223-4
1
9a Engels, Preface to the 1892 English edition of The Condition of the
T1lorking-Class in England in r844 (reprint, London, 1936), p. xvii.
1
99 Kautsky, The Social Revolution, pp. 100-102. He had written sadly
about the demoralisation of the British workers in 1899; see Koebner and
Schmidt, op. cit., p. 24.6.
anywhere else, and when labour unrest was stirring in the later
nineteenth century jingo propaganda was an antidote ready to
hand. A satire of I 88 r, 'Demoralising Effects of Modern
Liberalism', accused Tories of fomenting imperialism and
militarism in order to confuse class feeling and have an excuse
for a bigger army to protect them. A large standing army 'is,
after all, the only protection which the few possess against the
many' .
200
How far the working class did succumb to the spell
of empire is exceedingly hard to make out. On the whole it
would seem that it let itself be persuaded that the empire was
somehow a good thing for it, without troubling its head much
about the matter or sharing the positive enthusiasm of the
small middle classes. Amid the hysteria of the Boer War no
anti-war speakers in working men's clubs were howled clown,
as they were outside.
201
But workers with no ballast of socialism
might ordinarily, in foreign concerns outside their ken, tail
behind the social groups just above them.
Imputing the disease to too many fleshpots, Lenin was
making his task harder by painting the new capitalism as
vastly more oppressive than the old; this might seem to prove
the workers vastly more foolish than their fathers in submitting
to it. When the left wing asserted in the pre-war years that
working-class conditions were everywhere worsening they put
a great part of the blame on the cost of imperialism, and with
this was bound up their confidence that when imperialism
brought war, war would bring revolt. In rgog Kautsky con-
sidered that most of the burden of armaments in Germany was
being foisted onto the workers.
202
In rgq. C. K. Hobson was
puzzled to decide whether export of capital from Britain
improved things on balance for labour, or the reverse; he came
to the conclusion that over the course of a century it had been
beneficial, but during the last dozen years its short-term effects
might have been adverse.
20
3 Both a desire to make the most of
zoo Anon. (London, 1B8I), p. 10.
201
R. Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class. Working-Class
Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War I8gg-1go2 (London, 1972), p. g6.
zoz Le Chemin du Pouvoir, p. 150.
203 c. K. Hobson, OjJ. cit., pp. xiii Jf., 66-7. cr. s. B. Saul, The Myth qf the
Great DejJression I873-r8g6 (London, 1g6g), p. 53: 'The effect upon invest-
ment of changes in consumption at home is unfortunately a completely
open question. Indeed we know far too little about the forces affecting the
supply and remuneration of labour.' Dobb, Political EconomJ a111l Capitalism,
57
the harm clone by imperialism to the workers, and his trust in
the soundness at heart of the majority of them, compelled
Lenin to restrict the moral corrosion to a minority, which for
the time being was in the lead with renegade socialists or
'opportunists' for spokesmen.
When Engels talked of workers and fleshpots in r8g2 his
opinion was that 'the privileged minority pocketed most, but
even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and
then'.
20
4 This was more than Lenin could bring himself to
admit. Nor was he willing to think of the 'crumbs of imperial-
ism' being partaken of (and magnified in their imagination,
very likely) by all workers at least in special industries, such as
armaments, steel mills supplying rails, cotton-mills exporting
to India. Instead he preferred to spread them over the top layer
of the working class at large. What precisely constituted this
top layer is not made entirely clear. At one moment he seems
to cast the net very wide, by including the bulk of membership
of cooperative societies and trade unions and chapels, all he
remarks citizens with votes
20
S-but all Englishmen had votes.
Elsewhere he includes shopkeepers, white-collar workers, and
the like. But he dwells chiefly on the scarcity of the sharers, or
black sheep. 'Morsels of the loot ... fall to the share of certain
sections of the petty bourgeoisie and to the working-class
aristocracy and bureaucracy ... an insignificant minority of
the proletariat and of the toiling masses.' zo6
Kautsky in I 902-even when writing off the whole British
working class as politically moribund-inferred from official
statistics that only one fifth of it the amelioration about
which there was so much complacent talk.
20
7 If we make a very
rough guess at the total number of beneficiaries as a million
pp. 232-3, discusses good and bad effects of foreign investment and imperi-
alism for the working class. Sweezy (ojJ. cit., p. 315) thinks of it benefiting
in the nineteenth century generally from the expansion both of England's
trade and of its foreign investments. E. Varga, Twentieth Century CajJitalism
(London, n.d.), p. 32, supports Lenin by arguing that real wages were
falling in Britain before 1914 because of rising prices.

Engels, Preface to the 1892 English edition of The Condition of the
T11orking-Class in England in r844, p. xvii.
zos lrnjJerialism, C. T11., Vol. 22, p. 2B2.
zo6 The CollajJse qfthe Second International, C. W., Vol. 21, p. 223. Basso (loc.
cit., pp. 12B-g) finds this explanation unconvincing: 'the roots of oppor-
tunism are more general and deeper' ;-a comment with which one must
agree.
20
7 Kautsky, The Social Reuolution, p. 40.
sB
families, or something like one ninth of Britain's population,
how much was there for distribution among them? Giffen's
well-known estimate in rBgg of the country's annual receipts
from foreign and colonial investment put them at go to roo
million. Lenin took the same figure in I 9 I 6, zos when it was far
too low. A later calculation brought it up to 200 million for
rgq., a rate of growth vastly quicker than that of the national
income.
20
9 If we take this sum, and-again very roughly-
suppose one quarter of it to have been converted into 'crumbs',
then each of one million families would get an extra so a
year; and this at a time when a solicitor's clerk might start
work in the Temple at seven shillings a week. A boy on a
Suffolk farm might start at half a crown a week; yet farm
labourers were highly patriotic,
210
evidently not from any
material inducement, but through careful conditioning by their
temporal and spiritual betters. For those who got it, an extra
pound a week deserved to be called a substantial loaf, instead
of a few crumbs.
Colonial profits, it has been said, do much to strengthen a
ruling class at home,
211
and it may be that we ought to look for
the political effects of the enormous investment-income (all of
it in Lenin's eyes ill-gotten gain, wherever it came from) first
and foremost on those who put most of it in their own pockets.
They gained not only in opulence but in self-confidence,
bringing with it a degree of flexibility, willingness to make
concessions here and there. Lenin was not unreasonable
however in thinking that Britain's imperial prosperity enabled,
or assisted, the luckier wage-earners to better their condition.
This category did include the opinion-forming or guiding
sections of the working mass, and its relative well-being did
give it a more favourable attitude towards its superiors and
their State, and their gospel of empire; a feeling that it was
after all a passable world they were living in. No Chinese wall,
Lenin commented. divided workers from bosses.
212
As regards
2oB Imperialism, C. W .. Vol. 22, p. 277.
20
'> Fcis, ojJ. cit., pp. 23, 27. Brailsford (ojJ. cit., pp. 77-8) thought Sir
George Paish's estimate of 11.0 million in 1907-8 reasonable.
210
Sec R. Blythe, Akcr1field (Penguin cdn., 1972), pp. 39, 4.1-2.
2
u B. Lasker, Human Bondage in Southeast Asia (Institute of Pacific Rela-
tions, 1950), p. 265.
212
Imperialism, C. T1'., Vol. 22, p. 285.
59
the working class proper, wage differentials were rising before
I 8go, and perhaps later, though the social prestige of the
'aristocracy of labour' was diminishing with the rise of other
groups such as white-collar workers or local government
employees.
2
IJ All these more comfortable sections together
would be able to set a 'patriotic' tone for the working population
at large, if they knew, or if they only fancied, that their blessings
were coming out of imperial profit of one sort or other. They
would conclude with Lenin that to be on the losing side in this
war would 'deprive the petty bourgeoisie of their dominant-
nation privileges and additional incomes' zr4-though they
would certainly not put it to themselves in any such language.
As a further link in the chain of influence we may reckon the
small middle-class investors whom Lenin had in mind when he
quoted a statement made in the Rcichstag in I goo: 'the one
pound share is the basis of British imperialism' .zrs
All this might go far towards explaining a heady Britannia-
mood, proof against disagreeable evidence of the high price
paid even before I9I4 in the way of taxation, rising costs, and
in most countries compulsory service. If Lenin's allusions to
the 'privileges' enjoyed by the great Powers in world commerce
sometimes sound hazy, the public mind was (as Angell found)
hazier still. He himself wrote that the Boer War left both middle
and lower classes in Britain in need of consolation for higher
taxes and lost rclatives.zr6 Colonies might be profitable-to
more than capitalists-when they only required a small effort
against weak native peoples, but not at the cost of an arms race
or a serious conflict. When these were involved, Lenin can be
understood to mean, imperialist policies good for bosses and
better-off workers were bad for everyone else.
Crumbs were not being bestowed in the straightforward
fashion of the corn dole in imperial Rome. Their most direct
recipients were the legion of domestic servants, or the more
dignified ranks among them; these were far removed from the
'aristocracy of labour', though their social influence may not
21
3 Sec E . .J. Hobsbawm, 'The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-century
Britain', in his Labouring A1cn. Studies in the Histor_y rif Labour (London, 1964.),
pp. 272fT.
Z14 The CollajJSC of the Second International, c. r'v., Vol. 21, p. 229.
z1s Imperialism, C. vV., Vol. 22, p. 228.
216 Ibid., p. 294
6o MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
have been negligible. Lenin did not enter into the devious
channels through which a proportion of remittances from
plantations in Assam or railways in Argentina found its way
into in Birmingham or Glasgow. He had to rule
out firmly any appreciable rise of earnings from the proceeds
of legitimate trade or industry-if he can be said to have
recognized any such thing. He is never explicit about why
capitalism should be able or willing to pay its workers a bonus
from its income, but not from any other
source. He had much to say about high profits derived from
monopoly, for instance by German cement syndicates.211
Employers preferred, one may surmise, to let their workers
think that trade unions and agitation would do them no good:
perquisites would only be forthcoming if the country could,
with their loyal support, enlarge its place in the sun: 'Little
England', or 'Little Germany', could afford them only the
meagerest living. Here again capitalism and Marxism were
looking through the same spectacles.
13 MARXIST THEORY AND HISTORY
Lenin was buoyed up by a too hopeful faith that nowhere else
could 'opportunism'-the working class whoring after the
strange gods of plutocracy-be so widespread and tenacious
as in Britain. He ended his book on the same sanguine note as
Bukharin. It would be instructive to know the response of the
Russian readers it was designed for to this work, austerely
academic in plan yet highly charged with emotion. It was
Lenin's stand in defence of the principles of
cilability and revolution that he had been preaching since rgq ..
After this there was nothing left for him but to return to
Russia and vindicate his thesis in another way, by making a
revolution.
The theory of imperialism enshrined in his book, even if
here and there in this rgr6 version it may wear a look of
improvisation, was a slow growth of two decades, in many
minds. In the history of ideas it is a good specimen ofhow large,
complex hypotheses come into being. It illustrates too the
working of the Marxist rule that theory and practice should go
2
1
7 Impaialism, C. vV., Vol. 22, pp. 207-8.
hand in hand. Demands of political strategy may well invigorate
theory, but will often compel it to take second place to them;
and amid the welter of controversy within a political movement
rating ideas so highly, any theory risks being squeezed too much
into the polemics of opposite factions. Meanwhile the rapid
unfolding of events taught many lessons, but each in turn
tended to overshadow the learners. Hobson wrote too much
under the vivid impression of the Boer War, Lenin's
tation was forged on the anvil of the Great War.
The theory developed into a penetrating commentary on
capitalism in our century, its reckless pursuit of profit, its
perilous ascendancy over governments and armies and men's
minds. On the other hand it was neither an survey
nor a fully integrated one, and it is far from easy to extricate its
living ideas from their confinement in the desperate
stances of rgr6. War was for Lenin the hallmark of the
talism of his day. Yet in every phase of its long march since the
late middle ages capitalism has pushed or helped to push
peoples into strife, and it is not that Lenin's
generation was entitled to appropriate such a term as
ism' to its behaviour in one epoch. Now that we look back on
it from a distance, the imperialism of that day may seem the
outcome less of capitalism's own inner structure, as it was then,
than of a peculiar, unique amalgam in Europe and Japan of
elements still strong and industrial
talism young and ambitious but still unsure of itself, because
only in two countries had its coming to power been inaugurated
by the overthrow of an older regime. Curiously enough, also,
in those more purely 'bourgeois' countries, Britain and France,
capitalism was less advanced in size and in structural evolution
than in politically retarded Germany. Seen in this way
Lenin's 'highest stage' was not the last, but only last but one,
or more, and our imperialism, with the U.S. as its
exemplar, falls into a different category.
America was already looming up. Marxist theory took too
little note of novel features there or in Japan; it was too
Eurocentric, its horizons failing to match those of an expanding
world. One symptom of this was its preoccupation with export
of capital from Europe, along with inadequate enquiry into
the impact on particular regions outside. Foreign investment
was, no doubt, playing a large part in world affairs, but in very
heterogeneous ways, and a great deal of its activity lay outside
what the analysts of imperialism were trying to elucidate. This
goes with the most pervasive weakness of the whole body of
theory, its uncertainty of focus, always shifting and wavering
between the narrower field of colonialism and the far broader
one of 'imperialism'. This latter has to be understood as
embracing the sum total of all aggressive impulses directed to
the winning of abnormal profit beyond national frontiers by
exertion of superior strength, economic or political or, in the
last resort, military. Such a conception suffers by its subject-
matter being neither readily demarcated nor readily correlated
with the plainer subject of colony-hunting. Much misunder-
standing might be avoided if two separate words were available
to distinguish the two themes.
Two main streams of experience and reflection converged to
form the Marxist theory, colonizing activity outside Europe
and industrial growth inside. They never dovetailed very
smoothly. Something more coherent might have emerged if
Marxism had incorporated more of the socio-political lessons of
colonialism, to be found in writers like Hobson, instead of taking
from them little but the capital-export thesis. As it was, the
theory left itself too open to the kind of criticism, already
sketched by Kautsky, that Schumpeter was maturing during
the Great War and published in rgrg.ziS For him capitalism
could rret on perfectly well without imperialism, whose roots
were t; be found rather, where Angell was looking for them, in
social psychology. There was no lack of objections for him to
raise about individual colonies like Morocco and how they
came to be taken, in contrast with the Rhodes-and-Chamber-
lain land-grabbing in southern Africa, which Hobson and the
Marxists treated too much as a standard pattern. Against such
criticism it has been urged that cavillings about this colony or
21B Sec J. A. Schumpctcr, Caj;italism, Socialism, and Democracy. (3rd English.
ccln., 1950), pp. 49-55 Schumpcter thought ?f the Marxist c;
imperialism as the work mostly 'Neo-Marx1sts' after rgo.o with
centre at Vienna. His critique of it IS trenchant, but far too bncf; and he IS
himself at least equally open to objection when he writes that the causes of
imperialism have had nothing to do with cla.ss slru[!gle or class stmcture
(p. 54.), or that 'very little influence on fore1gn po!tcy has been exerted
by big business' (p. 55).
that only cover odd corners of the subject, whereas the Marxist
conception 'views history as a unitary whole, without separating
either economic or political, much less ideological, motives.'2I9
But any conception or definition, if sufficiently broad, can be
made like a Tudor treason statute to cover almost anything.
As applied by Marxist writers then and later, the theory was
couched almost exclusively in economic terms ;
220
and it has
seldom carried conviction except to those predisposed on other
grounds to accept it. To the student of empires and their rise
and fall it must appear that Lenin docs not really offer him a
theory of imperialism at all; or only one about as helpful for
study of a specific colonial case as Newton's law of gravity for
shooting an arrow through an apple.
What Lenin modestly called a 'popular outline' was stamped
by the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution, along with the rest
of his writings, as the legitimate continuation of Marxism. In
its own province Imperialism stood out all the more in solitary
splendour because Kautsky and Hilferding lay under the black
cloud of apostasy; Rosa Luxemburg's memory was tarnished by
her disapproval of Leninist tactics in the revolution; Bukharin
was eliminated before long from the Soviet pantheon, and his
book, the precursor of Lenin's, ignored or crudely falsified.
2
2l
Elevated thus to the level of a canonical text containing all
needful or admissible truth on the for a good many
years Lenin's essay did more to restrict than to foster research,
and lingered on in a state of artificial preservation like Lenin's
body in its mausoleum. Meanwhile imperialism formed a
chronic topic of controversy between the old Second and the
new Third Internationals, but chiefly in a style which elicited
little fresh thinking, communist denunciation of right-wing
socialists for not condemning colonial regimes or for giving no
more than verbal support to freedom movements.
To this failure of theory to go on developing and keeping up
21> Basso, loc. cit., p. I 12.
220
An example of this economic approach will be found in .J. Eaton,
Marx against Keynes (London, 1951 ). For a criticism of the wholesale usc of
'imperialism' by Marxists, sec Strachey, ojJ. cit., pp. 191, 278 N.
221
The editorial notes to Lenin's lmj;crialism in the Little Lenin Library
series (London, 1934), evidently taken from a recent Russian editiori,
invest the work with a shining halo, while Bukharin's (though he is still
'Comrade Bukharin') is very cavalierly and misleadingly treated.
with the times, as it had before I914-, many communist mis-
calculations and practical errors can be traced. By 1922 the
Third International was pronouncing a new world war, to be
fought out in the Pacific, unavoidable unless forestalled by
world revolution.
222
Trotsky was counting on America to go
to war with Britain, in order to preserve its 'economic domi-
nation' as British and German capitalists thought of
going to war with each other before I914-, Angell commented.
223
This was looking to history to repeat itself with a woodenness
in line with the marked infusion of economic determinism in
Leninist teaching; it presupposed that capitalism was governed
not at all by fi:ee will but wholly by blind necessity. War
preparations undeniably continued, and
suppression of colonial revolt had to be pmd for. Marxism
hesitated between contemplating colonies (as in duty bound)
as purveyors of tainted crumbs. to the masses,. or as a
weight on their backs; it sometimes took one hne, sometunes
the other, occasionally both in the same breath. By and
it may be said to have laid stress on the crumbs when theonzmg,
on the drawbacks when haranguing. Sectarianism was stiffened
by the intransigence of a Leninist doctri:1e which began
as a political manifesto. Lenin treated It as petty-bourgms
reformism and illusion to condemn only particular imperialistic
actions like the seizure of the Philippines, without condemning
capitalism root and branch; the Third Internatio_nal wer:t on
too long repeating that there could be no genume anti-war
movement which was not also anti-capitalist. Deficiencies in
the theory of imperialism also stood in the way of an all-round
appraisal of fascism, which might be called a higher, if not the
highest, stage of imperialism. To this failure Hilferding's death
in a Gestapo prison added a grim footnote.
While Marxism floundered, so did the capitalist camp,
victors and vanquished of the Great War alike. Had Germany
won, there would have been a re-ordering of Europe and the
world on a far grander scale, the repartition that Lenin wrote
of how German enterprise would have fared in digesting its
would be a question wort:I: into. As. things it
was open to Angell to claim stnkmg confirmatiOn of Ins case:
222 Sec Degras, ofJ. cit., Vol. I, p. 391.
223 Angell, ;11ust Britai11 Travel the N!oscow Road? p. 176 n.
the winning side was making very little out of its success, and
whatever satisfaction it felt at crippling German competition
was quickly damped by discovery that it needed a recovering
Germany to trade with; also that German capitalism had to be
rescued and brought back into the family, to prevent Germany
from going the same way as Russia.
It may be permissible to look back on the Great War as a
monument to a frantic adherence to instincts and habits of the
past, a convulsive refusal to face an unescapa?Ie of
society, in one way or another, to enable It to contam
demonic energies released by science. A system, or class, hke
an individual, learns, if it learns at all, by trial and error. Even
if capitalism was reponsible for 1914-, it might not be in haste
to try the same gamble again. But any real turning over of a
new leaf meant acquiescence in the two highly unpalatable
recipes that liberals had long been advocating: welfare instead
of scarcity at home, reciprocal enrichment instead of beggar-
my-neighbour abroad. In 1926 Angell joyfully announced
'something like a revolution in the employer mind', starting in
America, a recognition for the first time of 'high wages
generally as an indispensable element in the maintenance of
the market'.
22
4 In 1927 an English Marxist could see no sign
of any such change of mind.zzs If there was any, it was feeble
and fitful; and the interwar years as an epoch have the air of a
twilight zone in the evolution of capitalism, a time of doubt
when old maxims were discredited but new ones given only a
jaundiced welcome. A fumbling League of Nations presided
over it, advertising the admission by the capitalist States of
some need for reform, along with their apparent inability to
achieve even the harmonv of 'ultra-imperialism'.
In its conduct fascism was more open to Marxist
scrutiny than in its social composition. In face of its challenge
capitalism of the more moderate or responsible type showed a
heartfelt conversion to the creed of pre-1914 Marxism, that
war meant revolution. Whereas in 1914. both sides went to war
le coeur gai, now one entered the lists with extreme reluctance.
It was defeated Germany, baulked as yet of a chance to see
what it could make of an empire, that clung to the old philos-
224 Ibid., p. 46.
22s Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism, p. 268.
ophy and behaved as Marxism predicted. With all the three
aggressor states motives of a 'political' order were at work
besides the purely economic. All the same, events fiom the
occupation of Manchuria in I 93 I to the end of the Second
World War can be presented not unconvincingly as the second
grand conflict for the repartition of the world.zz6
After I 945 there was acceptance by capitalism, less grudging
at least than before, of the twin principles that classes at home
and nations abroad ought to pursue mutual affluence. It began
to look as if the class conflicts and wars of the twentieth century
were the after all not to social revolution but to a new-
model capitalist society. In somewhat the same manner long
ago the wars and civil broils of the late middle ages brought
popular revolution in sight, but ended instead in an overhaul
and consolidation of the old order by the new monarchies. For
its part however Marxist theory, awakening from its state of
suspended animation, was also turning over a new leaf: Of late
years it has been re-examining its ideas about imperialism, if
not as yet thoroughly enough. It is not ill-equipped to deal with
the neo-colonialism which since 1945 has replaced direct
colonial rule over vast areas. In terms of the concentration of
capital, the influence of huge monopolistic corporations over
governments, the contemporary scene fits into Leninist cate-
gories even better than that of the earlier part of the century
did, because capital in all the advanced countries is now more
nearly of one kind than when Lenin tried to force conflicting
species of it into one mould. Export of capital is on a still bigger
scale; Marxism has not yet learned to distinguish adequately
between its effects on undeveloped regions and on the industrial
countries to which most of it flows, and is still too apt to think
of it all as 'imperialistic' -a label very intelligible to workers in
Chile, but baffling to workers in Scotland. It may be remarked
in passing that capital export, as export of goods on credit, has
found an analogue in the domestic market in hire-purchase,
which started tentatively in the interwar years and now
marches in seven-league boots.
226
Sweezy, ojJ. cit., pp. 323-4 . He defends in general 'the consistency and
appropriateness of Lenin's conception of imperialism' (p. 308). Cf. Dobb,
Political Economy and CajJitalism, p. 26 I : 'the economic policy of Fascist
States represents the essence of Imperialism'.
Most of the flow of capital is from the U.S., and all per-
plexities about it and about the nature of today's 'new
capitalism' find their summing up in the grand problem of
America and where it is going. There a driving energy and a
concentration of economic power reminiscent of Lenin's
Germany is combined with a. political structure still more free
than those of his France or Britain from relics of a pre-capitalist
past. Yet the old question still remains, whether America's
behaviour in the world is dictated by basic requirements of
American capitalism as a whole, or by sectional interests able
to manipulate irrational factors, from private corruption to
public hysteria.
None of Europe's problems was solved in any fundamental
way by the new monarchies of the sixteenth century. We can-
not yet sec how radically our newest capitalism has been
overcoming those of today. Imperialism is very far from having
come to the end of its protean transformations. In relations
among capitalist States it may have reached some kind of
stable 'ultra-imperialism'; even this is not beyond doubt, if
only because the prospect of a grave shortage of the raw
materials vital to our very artificial civilization, a bugbear in
Lenin's clay, now grows threateningly real. Cut-throat compe-
tition for dwindling resources may before long be anything but
a figure of speech.
Modern imperialism has been an accretion of clements, not
all of equal weight, that can be traced back through every
epoch of history. Perhaps its ultimate causes, with those of war,
arc to be found less in tangible material wants than in the
uneasy tensions of societies distorted by class division, with
their reflection in distorted ideas in men's minds. Capitalism is
at bottom a relationship among human beings, and no human
relationship, or its consequences, can have the logic of
geometry. Lenin tried to draw out the consequences of capital-
ism too symmetrically. Still, his argument was built on the
bedrock of what was happening in his clay, which was our
yesterday. Its belittlers have found no better interpretation,
and some have wanted to save trouble and embarrassment by
banishing the term 'imperialism' from use, as meaningless.
Marxist usage has given some colour for this, by making one
word-as it has done with the term 'feudalism' also-cover
such a multitude of sins. But to pretend that there is no such
thing as imperialism in modern history is mere obfuscation;
while any attempt at explaining it without recourse to Lenin
must be more incomplete than his own.
22
7 He himself pointed
to a wide range of cognate questions that he could not follow
up, and that his disciples ignored. And the more attentively we
study his commentaries the more other queries start up under
our feet. when all these have been gone into, and answers
synthesized with what is valid in Lenin's, we shall have a
more comprehensive picture; not a final one, for the suqject
exemplifies only too well the immense complexity of history,
the labyrinth of accident or coincidence through which
historical necessity must make its way.
2
2
7 D. C. M. Platt, in 'Economic Factors in British Policy during the
"New Imperialism" ' (Past and Present, No. 39, 1968, pp. 120 ff.), sensibly
concludes that the Hobson-Lenin emphasis on capital-export was overdone,
but that imperialism is much more satisfactorily explained in economic
terms than in the merely political terms to which it has been fashionable of
late to reduce it. A similar conclusion is suggested by T. Lloyd's article
'Afi'iea and Hobson's Imperialism.' (Past and Present, No. 55, 1972, pp. 130 fl:).
2
Farewells to Empire
Some recent studies of hnperialism
Imperialism has already begun to be thought of as a thing of
the past, with not much relevance to the present day. It appears
in this light in some, though not all, of the books that have
come out in this country in the last few years, in which the
modern empires, chiefly the British, are weighed up and their
epitaphs variously written. The Imperial Idea and its Enemies, by
A. P. Thornton ( 1959), stands out as more than an epitaph,
almost a requiem. If it is in the end a disappointing book, it
disappoints because it is in various ways exceptionally good,
not least in vivacity of style. Its best feature is a lucid and sus-
tained criticism of the political errors, malpractices, or extrava-
gances of imperialism; so much so that it only gradually dawns
on the reader that this is the work not of one of the enemies of
imperialism but of a convinced imperialist-in the unashamed
sense that the word enjoyed sixty or seventy years ago, when
empire-builders in their primitive Edens had not yet felt the
need to sew together fig-leaves and make themselves breeches.
It would not be doing him justice to say that his head is
screwed on properly but his heart is in the wrong place. What
is wrong is outside him: it is the Idea he comes both to bury
and to praise. What this Idea really is, or was, or whence it
arose, he never explains; and as with nostalgic regret he traces
its long decline there is a constant blurring between two quite
distinct British empires, those of the white settlements and of
the black or brown colonies. Or rather it might be said that
Thornton's is an empire never built at all, and therefore-for
purposes of academic romanticism-built for ever.
Because the Idea is so unsubstantial, the book lacks unity,
and large sections of it wander into general European politics
and the international power-struggle, or party attitudes to the
League of Nations. But the guiding light, when it peeps out
now and then fiom under its bushel, proves to be a belief in an
English mission: a duty imposed by some Providence on
Englishmen to usc their power in the world as a power for good,
without asking anyone else whether they wanted to have good
done to them or not. It was 'an immense responsibility for
human welfare and the opportunity for human betterment that
it represented' (p. 305); it belonged to Britain as 'chief
exponent of the cultures and values of Western civilization' (p.
313). But by 'Britain' we must understand a select few, not a
whole nation. H Thornton believes that colonial peoples have
been in need of firm handling for their own good, it may be
because he seems disposed to believe much the same about the
mass of people at home in England. Looking backward he sees
generations of the best upper- or upper-middle-class clements
devoting themselves with a noble disinterestedness to the task
of guiding and rescuing from their own base instincts the un-
clothed native abroad and the unwashed native at home. True
imperialists and true socialists (respectable Fabian socialists
from the same seminaries) he feels to have had much in com-
mon; the concern of both has been caring for the masses of
mankind, helpless to care for themselves.
Indian nationalists used to calculate that at the rate the
British Raj was going it would give the whole co4lntry literacy
within another 8oo years. British socialists may sometimes have
wondered whether the Labour Party was likely to give this
country socialism quite so quickly. To Thornton any such
impatience would be distasteful. The advent of nationalism in
the colonies and of democracy at home both strike him as
nuisances, witless forces getting in the way of wise and benev-
olent purposes; 'noisy jingoism' as a morbid symptom that came
in with democracy, to the distress of all 'true workers' in the
vineyard of empire (p. 268). But this is treating democracy as
an abstraction, something learned at school from Plato. Of
capitalist democracy, as a phenomenon of modern times, and
the powerful interests bent on controlling and perverting it by
every device of propaganda, Thornton seems to know nothing.
He Hmcies that the ruling class was dislodged from power when
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE
the Liberals won the general election of 1906 and embarked on
their trifling social reforms (p. I 32). Academic unrealism could
not go much further than his dictum on the 'thirties: 'No one
led the democracy because no one knew where the democracy
wanted to go' (p. 307).
Thornton is less urbane than usual when he talks of the Left
in the 'thirties (who wanted socialism in less than 8oo years),
and their 'confused battle in Spain,' and their 'tastes and
emotions ... expertly catered for and formed' by the Left
Book Club (p. 294). Books like his own, with their dream-world
distortion of how history has been made and progress won,
tnight with at least as much truth be said to cater to the taste
of a new middle class of technocrats, not unwilling to sec them-
selves as heirs of a fine old middle class once the backbone of
England, and to be flattered with the notion that tlu;y are now
in power, keeping troublesome millionaire and troublesome
shop steward well in hand. There is an old joke about laboratory
rats successfully training their professor to ring a bell whenever
they want food.
Thornton's fundamental weakness is his neglect of the whole
economic meaning of empire; it remains for him an 'idea,' or at
most an ideal of sound administration. Thus he recognizes no
such thing as an American imperialism, because the U.S. 'had
no tradition of any imperial idea' (p. 327). No blood-relation-
ship between imperialism and capitalism comes into his mind
at all. Lenin is only once mentioned; Hobson oftener, but no
serious attention is paid to his economic analysis; or to that of
H. N. Brailsford, whose War ofSteel and Gold (1914.) is given a
paragraph. There is only one casual reference to the opium
trade and the century-long campaign against it in Britain (pp.
97-8) ; yet the opium trade was a keystone of the structure of
British power in Asia. There is the same failure to understand
that an empire marches on its stomach in most of what he says
about India-where Ernest.Jones, haifa century before Lenin,
would have been well worth a place among the 'enemies'
1
-
and Egypt, whose cotton, flourishing since Mehcmet Ali,
helped to prolong the British occupation if not to start it. In a
detailed survey of British and French activities in the Middle
r Sec J. Saville, Ernest }ones, Chartist (1952), pp. 65-6, 211-r3; P. C.
Joshi (ed.), Rebellion, r857 (Delhi, 1957), pp. 302 ff.
aft:er I 9 I 8 virtually nothing is said about filthy lucre. Oil
1s mentiOned; but about the fact that British oil interests were
planning to achieve a world monopoly and hold the U.S. to
ransom-with the result that war between the two countries
was a possibility seriously thought about-there is silence.
The utmost Thornton can admit is that there was in the
.of.the,;,mpire one bad phase, of exploiting
. 1mpenahsm (p. 299). When and why tlus began or ended
1s not made clear, but the Boer War was its central episode,
and the revulsion of feeling afterwards left good and bad
(white magic and black magic, as it were) equally
chscrechtcd and out of fashion; for opponents of the Boer War
were as 'emotional' and 'irrational' as its supporters (p. IO I).
The 'proconsular idea' (p. 135) may indeed have gone out of
fashion with the public, but the taste for high colonial dividends
was very far from having evaporated. Thornton writes cxccl-
of the betrayal of the Africans in 1906 when South
Afnca was handed over to Boer management (pp. 135 ff.).
But .he docs so only in terms of political justice, and the anti-
thesis of good government against self-government; not in
terms of the partnership that was being struck up, and that has
subsisted ever since, between London capitalists and white
settlers acting as their overscerild and policemen. Capitalist
democr.acy was aware that its dirtiest work was best clone by
delegatiOn, and by not letting its left hand know what its right
hand was doing.
One docs not gather from this book much impression of the
ever watched the workings of British imperialism
w1th Ius own eyes. His notion of enlightened officials in India
protecting the weak against the strong is to a great extent
mythical. In order to keep itself afloat the Raj was obliged from
first to last to join hands with reactionary interests inside
It provided law and order (not always even this at
v:Hage lev.el), and so protected the poor man against open
vwlence of the old feudal sort; but law and order included those
laws whereby the rich hold the poor at their mercy
.any need of cudgel or club. Some Englishmen in
Indm might cl?plore the fact, but their machinery protected
the strong agamst the weak, the boss against the worker the
zemindar against the ryot, the man of caste ao-ainst th; un-
o '
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE
73
touchable. To say that by giving India independence Britain
'handed over the masses to the classes' is unqualified nonsense.
'An Indian bureaucracy that was the enemy of the princely
houses did not promise well for the future of democracy ... '
(p. 329). The reader who knows his Indian princes will smile
at this, or charitably blame a sleepy printer. Intellectually
Thornton recognizes that independence had become inevitable
his emotional reluctance to do so comes out in his
on it, and it is at these moments when Thornton is brought to
put his own cards on the table that one sees what a very poor
hand of cards he holds.
Down to I 940 the imperial idea was drooping: no new
'crusader' came forward to revive it (p. 203). (Poor Lord
Beaver brook! never even mentioned.) Then it was splendidly
revived by national crisis. Was it? After 1945 the Middle East
was the only big stage left for a resuscitated Pax Britannica.
Thornton thinks it had to be protected against Russian
meddling (pp. 338-9): in point of fact the U.S.S.R. left it
for an astonishingly long time, and only began 'meddling'
m self-defence when hostile capitalist manoeuvring there on
the Russian doorstep, had gone on for years.
2
Coming to' the
Persian oil dispute, he complains that Britain seemed to lack
'the nerve and the power to defend her own legitimate oil
interests' (p. 349); a remark which shows how little in practice
his 'true imperialism' differed from the 'exploiting "imperi-
alism"' he supposes to have vanished years before. Anyone
curious about these 'legitimate interests' should turn to L. P.
Elwell-Sutton's Persian Oil, a Study in Power Politics ( r 955)-a
very. stu.dy of imperialism in horny-handed practice,
as d1stmct from clmstered theory.
It all ends with the Suez adventure of 1956 (pp. 350-51).
One would wish to feel more certain that Thornton considers
the adventure not only idiotic, because England was going to
war with 'wooden guns,' but flagrantly immoral as well. This
dismal finis leaves him still hankering for some new version of
the imperial Idea to replace the old, some new mission or
function to win back England's status in the world. He toys
2
W. Z. Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism in the Aiiddle East (London,
1956), p. 260, remarks on the 'great measure of caution' shown by Russia in
making no moves here until 1955
with the thought of England playing the part of a 'moral
leader.' 'Not all imperialism is power-imperialism-religions
and ideologies arc but part of an imperial process' (p. 355).
Haziness has grown hazier. Imagination conjures up a latter-
clay Don Quixote sighing like Alexander for new windmills to
conquer, a Union .Jack on his shield and a sluttish Dulcinea of
Thrcaclneedle Street in his dreams; or a Sancho Panza jogging
about on his donkey in search of an island somewhere to
govern; or a new Tory premier fidgeting about in a fancy-dress
establishment, trying to decide what costume might go well
with his figure. Moral leadership is not likely to; but as
Thornton has remarked earlier (p. 325), 'another kind of
imperial idea' is a private stock of nuclear bombs.
To R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, authors of Aj/ica and the
Victorians (rg6r),J imperialism is 'one of the most evocative
myths of our time.'4 What is 'mythical' is not that empires
have recently existed-this has not'''yet been doubted even in
academic circles-but any explanation of them in terms of
economic greed. Hobson and Lenin are singled out for dis-
paragement, though no attempt is made to meet them fairly on
their own ground. A long note (p. 15) rebuts them by appealing
to business scepticism about trade potentialities in Africa at
the time of the partition. But the capital-export theory is not
concerned with trade in the old-fashioned sense. There was no
knowing in advance what raw materials any unexplored area
might turn out to contain; the Sahara itself has turned out to
contain undreamed-of riches. In any case a study confined to
Africa, and which labours to prove that Africa was a backwater,
a mere sideline, can provide no firm basis for conclusions about
imperialism in general.
Territorial acquisitions in tropical Africa, we arc told, were
'little more than by-products' of something quite different, a
3
Various of this work's shortcomings are pointed out in an excellent
review by G. Shepperson in the Revue bclge de jJ/dlologie et d'histoire, Vol. XL,
I No. 4; others in a review of it and other books on Africa by .J. D. Har-
greaves in Victorian Studies, September rg62. l\1ore recently it has been
criticized in the]ournal of African Hi.rtmy, Vol. III, rg6g, No. 3. by .J. Stengcrs
(pp. 4.69 ff.) and by C. W. Newbury (pp. 4-93 ff.), who likewise pay tribute
to its striking qualities but find very serious faults in its arguments.
4 Foreword.
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE 7 5
search for strategic security in quite different regions (p. 4.63).
They were touched off by the British occupation of Egypt in
r882, whose consequences governed the whole subsequent
partition. It was all a game of diplomatic chess with the French.
Egypt itself was not occupied for any motives of sordid gain;
nor, twenty years later, were the Boer republics. The reasons
lay in local crises. African regimes were weakening or collapsing,
and thus jeopardizing Britain's two routes to India: the one
via the Suez Canal, the other via the Cape.
There is an elegant symmetry about this theorem, but some
of the logic it involves is as artificial as the frontiers that were
being ruled in straight lines on the map of Africa by statesmen
far away. The Khedive's rule in Egypt collapsed under the
weight of its debts to bloodsucking Anglo-French bondholders.
To say that the British occupation went on and on 'because the
internal crisis remained unsolved' (p. 4.63) seems an odd way
of saying that with a foreign army in possession the Egyptians
could not organize a new political system. In the case of
southern Africa the local crisis has to be understood as the
growing inferiority of the British colonies to the gold-rich
Transvaal, which endangered Britain's 'influence' or 'para-
mountcy.' Here is a sort of Morton's fork, on one of whose
prongs or the other any independent part of Africa could be
impaled. Egypt had to be taken over because it was too weak.
The Transvaal had to be taken into custody because it was too
strong. The former situation was the commoner; and we can
of course say if we choose that Catherine and Frederick the
Great partitioned Poland because Poland was weak and might
grow anarchical. That is what they said themselves.
Even with respect to areas like Nigeria, depreciation of
commercial ambitions may have been pushed a good deal too
far in this book.s Still, that particular territories were taken
largely or even exclusively for strategic instead of
economic reasons is very likely, indeed certain. By stressmg
this point, and corroborating it with copious usc of unpublished
official papers, the book performs a useful service, besides
s Both Stcngers and Newbury (sec n. 3) arc convinced that the partiti?n
of tropical Africa would have come about in any through commercml
pressures, and was not a consequence of the occupatwn of Egypt. Cj. J. S.
Keltic, The Partition of Africa (London, 1893); he was reasonably though not
wildly hopeful about commercial prospects.
being very readable. What is to be regretted is that so much
more is bundled and stuffed into the theory than it has any
room for. To spin strategic hypotheses out to this length, while
overlooking or denying the great tidal force of capitalism, leads
to the kind of dilemma that the philosophic Lord Mon bod do
landed himself in when, Newton's force of gravity, he
had to station celestial intelligences on each planet to keep it
on its course.
The title of the book is greatly at variance with its sub-title,
Tlze Official Mind of Imperialism. It is the latter that forms the
real subject; which implies a marked narrowing-down, and an
assumption implausible on the face of it that the official mind
was the true source of policy. This is to invite Seeley's comment
on the type ofhistorian who 'seems always to watch proceedings
from the reporter's gallery in the House of Commons,' instead
of opening his eyes to the grand march of events.
6
For the
enquiring student of the partition, our authors hold, 'all roads
lead ineluctably to Downing Street' (p. Ig). Lenin thought
they all led to Lombard Street. It is in any case a delusion of
archive-searchers, who inhale a subtly intoxicating atmosphere
and need its stimulus to keep them going, to suppose that
ministers and under-secretaries are careful to leave behind
them all the documents required for a verdict on their actions.
They arc at least as likely to be careful not to do so. That no
record of discussions be put on paper was the strictest rule of
cabinet meetings. Even if all such discussions had been written
clown, a great deal that we need to know would still be missing.
A kindred fallacy is the treatment of the governing class as
a separate caste of mandarins, aloof from the vulgar pre-
occupations of mere businessmen and absorbed in their 'high
calling' (p. 20). They were usually aristocrats, it is true, with
inherited reflexes or 'codes of honour' of their own. Chamber-
lain on the other hand emphatically was not, and the latitude
allowed to him as Colonial Secretary by his Tory colleagues is
recognized (p. 425). What mattered more, and what the book
fails to reckon with, just as it turns a blind eye to the trans-
formation of capitalism in that epoch, was the development of
a consolidated plutocracy in Britain and in Europe: a social
stratum within which Scottish earls and Prussian junkers
6 J. R. Seeley, The Exjmnsion Q[ England (r88g), Chap. 8.
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE
77
married .J cwish heiresses, and politicians collected director-
ships in the City, and old-fashioned notions of gentility
survived with less and less distinct meaning. William II in 1914
was we1y fierce about his honour and that of his senile ally at
Vienna, but when the smoke cleared away in 1918 he was
discovered in Holland in the comfortable enjoyment of a
fortune that he had been up to date enough, with the advice
of his banking friends, to salt away abroad. Without reference
to this process of fusion at the top of society, this mixing of the
cream, the new imperialism cannot be comprehended.
Ministers mostly belonged to the plutocracy, and the func-
tionaries who mostly formulated their opinions for them lived
on its fringes and were steadily impregnated with its mentality.
The changing outlook would not be reflected at all adequately
in Whitehall minutes and memoranda. A department of
State, as a collective brain, docs not exist for the sake of
thinking, but of directing action, and it exhibits still more than
an individual mind the blockages that allow new volitions to
gain access only along well-worn tracks, by translating them-
selves into terms already familiar. Time-honoured phrases,
cliches, maxims continued to be repeated in that epoch, while
their substance altered; novel ambitions expressed themselves
to conservative minds like Gladstone's or Salisbury's in old
symbols like the route to India, which those who wished to
influence such men had to know how to manipulate. Talk of
'a hardening of arteries and a hardening of hearts' in high
quarters (p. 4-70) is no substitute for recognition of all this.
The narrative constructed here, from official sources, of
ministerial shuffiings and waillings before the occupation of
Egypt is in many ways illuminating; its fatal drawback is that
ministers arc treated purely as political computers, and the
influence on policy of the bondholders is left out. The assertion
that the British Government did not desire to occupy Egypt
only amounts to saying that it would have preferred to go on
with the cheaper and discreeter method of letting Egypt be
exploited through a native puppet; just as U.S. marines are
only sent into a banana-republic when the local dictator fails
to deliver the bananas. Business interests wanting intervention
could always provoke a situation, or help a situation to take
shape, where ministers would have no choice about inter-
vening, and could do so with a good or at least a brave con-
science. In 1882 it was provided by the riots at Alexandria,
which came about much in the same way as the Boxer rebellion
in China in I goo, likewise provoked by a long course of
meddling and bullying by Western hucksters and likewise
followed by Western military action and improved business
prospects.?
By the time of the British bombardment of Alexandria,
wrote Lord Cromer, 'the question of protecting European
financial interests in Egypt had fallen completely into the back-
grouncl.'8 That was just where the financial interests wanted
it to be, well hidden under official jargon about 'pacifying'
Egypt and protecting the Canal. True, as Robinson and
Gallagher admit, Bright's objection that to intervene was
precisely the way to endanger the Canal was 'sane and simple'
(pp. I IO-I I), and it was verified by events. Lord Randolph
Churchill showed equal perspicacity (being then in opposition,
instead of at the India Office) in a speech at Edinburgh the
following year. 'You will be told that Egypt is the high-road
to India, and that Britain must hold it at all costs. This is a
terrible and a widespread illusion .... The Suez Canal is a
commercial route to India ... but it never was, and never
could be, a military route for Great Britain in time of war.'9 A
few years later Robinson and Gallagher show us Chamberlain
taking this for granted and using it to defend his forward policy
in South Africa as necessary to keep the Cape route open (p.
4I6 n.). Here is a good sample of the versatility with which
imperialists could jump from one rationalization of whatever
they wanted to an opposite one.
In short this study of ministerial head-scratchings is more
significant psychologically than politically. W. S. Blunt (whose
indispensable Secret Hist01]1 is barely mentioned) had a talk with
Gladstone before the crisis and found him willing to take an
interest 'as far as a man can who is totally ignorant of the ABC
of a question,' but concluded: 'He has evidently made up his
mind about nothing, and will let himself drift on till the smash
' See on this an important recent work by V. Purcell, The Boxer Uprising
(Cambridge, 1963).
s lvfodern Egy{1t (London, rgo8), Vo.l I, p. 282.
9 W. S. Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill (new edn., London, I95I), pp.
219-20.
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE
79
comes.'Io Robinson and Gallagher unwittinglysupplyaneatcon-
firmation when they sum up their narrative by saying that the
Cabinet 'muddled and drifted with events' (p. I 20). It could
hardly have been otherwise when the trio chiefly involved were
Gladstone, old and preoccupied with Ireland; Granville at the
Foreign Office, old and deaf, idle and amiable; and Hartington
at the India Office, a stable-boy in ermine. 'They say there's
but five upon this isle; we are three of them; if the other two
be brained like us, the State totters.' The State did totter.
In southern Africa credulity is strained even more than in
Egypt by the assertion that policies were 'inspired by concepts
peculiar to the official mind,' not by money pressures (pp.
73-4.). Wavering between objective and subjective-between
what ministers were really doing or allowing to be done, and
what they liked to think, or wanted others to think, they were
doing-grows more pronounced. Conquest of the Sudan and
the Transvaal 'at first sight,' it is allowed, 'might suggest a full-
blooded drive for empire': but our gift of second-sight rescues
us from any such misapprehension; 'this was not how ministers
saw their onslaughts' (p. 4.Io). Finally we see another old
premier, sick and sorry, brought face to face with realization
that the jingo party had rigged things in such a way that he
and Britain must go to war-'and all for people whom we
despise, and for territory which will bring no profit and no
power to England' (pp. 453-4). In other words Lord Salisbury
simply did not know why the Boer War was about to be fought.
Historians content to look through his spectacles will know as
little as he did.
Of how things were really happening in those years a great
deal may be gleaned from the diaries ofW. S. Blunt, who knew
the presiding figures as they were off-stage. One clay in I 893
Harcourt, then Chancellor, was grumbling to him about 'the
brutality of the British public,' 'the slaughter of the Matabeles'
for the sake of new markets, the Press in the hands of the
financiers. Blunt asked why he did not make a stand against
it all. '"Oh,'' he said, "we are all burglars now,"' and relapsed
intohiscigar.
11
Nogovernmentorrulingclass is likely to acknowl-
Io Secret History of the English OccujJation of Egypt (London, I 907), p. 89.
" A1y Diaries, 1888-1911 (2nd edn., London, I932), p. I IS (g November
I8gg).
8o MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
edge such things in public documents. We may be sure that the
imperialists of Athens did not actually say, even if they thought,
what they arc made by Thucydidcs to say in the Melian
dialogue. If Lenin deals out too summary a drumhead justice
to capitalism, Robinson and Gallagher go to the opposite
extreme. On their rules of evidence no conviction could ever
be secured against any business lobby. Capitalism to be found
guilty would have to be caught in flagrante delicto with a signed
confession in its pocket properly witnessed by three ministers
of the Crown.
For some years now a New Cambridge A1odern History has been
heaping itself up on library shelves. By a gradual filtration of
ideas through school and college teaching, it will exert a wide-
spread influence. It was to be expected that a compendium on
this massive scale, in Britain of all countries, would be planned
with very special attention to the subject of imperialism.
Instead it suffers on exactly this subject from a vast lapse of
vision or memory. This applies generally to the three concluding
volumes, X to XII. No. XII has some excuse in having to cope
hurriedly with everything from 1898 to 1945 It tends to show
more awareness of French or Dutch than of British colonial
short-comings; and its conception of British imperialism fading
away through self-criticism or change of heart-of the public
having grown 'anxious' to give up India (pp. 532, 554.)-is an
over-indulgent one. It took the hammer-blows of the Second
World War to loosen the imperial grasp. But it is in Vol. XI,
last of the three to appear (I 962), that sins of omission are most
glaring, for this deals with the climactic period 1870-98. The
editor's introduction notices imperialism in a perfunctory page
or so (pp. 4.5-6). In later chapters there is too little about
Ireland, too little about Burma, Malaya, and other British
colonies, and about other empires altogether. Of the causes of
imperialism there is far too little discussion; of the evolution
of capitalism in relation to seizure of colonies, practically none.
Hobson is not mentioned; Lenin's Imperialism only to be brushed
aside.
A. P. Thornton reappears in this volume, with a chapter on
Mediterranean and middle-eastern rivalries; but on the empire
question it is Messrs Rohinson and Gallagher who are called
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE 81
on to do most of the bowling for Cambridge. As before, they
bowl very fast, and with great subtlety of flight and spin, but
so wide of the wicket that they arc bound to give away a lot
of byes. In fact their Chapter XXII on 'The Partition of
Africa,' the longest in the volume apart from the introduction
and the only one buttressed with references to original sources,
is essentially a synopsis of their book. Forty out of the forty-
eight pages are devoted to northern and tropical Africa, six to
the south; then at the end come a number of sweeping state-
ments (p. 64.0) offered as though logical deductions from the
evidence. The new imperialisms of that age, 'the gaudy
empires spatchcockcd together in Asia and Africa,' are held up
to derision. But we need not trouble about them; they had no
organic connection with Britain or the British economy; they
were mere freakish echoes or imitations of the true empire-
building, in Canada or New Zealand, that had gone before.
Only the 'gullible' could mistake them either for 'necessary
functions of the balance of power,' or for Lenin's 'highest stage
of capitalism'.
To have these empires so forcibly censured is most welcome,
even if the censure comes on p. 639 of the volume instead of in
its proper place on page 1. It is quite true also that imperialism
was in one aspect a vast Gilbertian extravaganza, or soap-
bubble Ruritania, or mad-hatter's tea-party. Still, it was a
frolic into which a grand army of politicians, parsons and
professors threw themselves heart and soul, in full bark and cry;
and if some were, in Lenin's phrase, 'hired coolies of the pcn,'
12
many others really believed what they said, or a good part of it.
Imperialism in England became as a French observer said an
obsession.
1
3 Colonial governors, like the field-marshals of 1914.-
r8, really existed, with all the preposterous plumes on their
hats. They were not bad dreams ready to vanish at cockcrow.
And if investigation in Africa yields only such negative
results, why docs Volume XI devote fifty pages to it, to the
neglect of so many other colonial regions? That much of
Africa was sand or swamp, unlikely to set bankers' mouths
watering, is as true as it is obvious. But why docs Cambridge
1
2 Imperialism, preface to French and German editions.
1
3 V. Berard, British ImjJerialism and Commercial SujncmaC)' (English edn.,
London, Igo6), p. 44
have it so much at heart to impress the point on us? The
explanation can only lie in that unconscious conservatism, that
predisposition to give bankers the benefit of the doubt, that
scholars in our snugger academies suck in with their alma
mater's port. It is easier to acquit nineteenth-century bankers
of unlawful desires in the Sahara than anywhere else except at
the North and South Pole. And one acquittal leads easily to
another. Capitalism did not really covet its neighbour's sand.
Therefore capitalism cannot really have coveted its neigh-
bour's oil, or his coal, or his rubber, or his ox, or his ass, or his
man-servant, or his maid-servant, or anything that was his.
Henry VIII did not chop off the head of his last wife. There-
fore Henry VIII cannot have chopped off the heads of any
of his wives. Twice two is not five. Therefore twice three cannot
be six.
A price has to be paid for this reassuring triumph over
Lenin, whose bones are thus left bleaching in the Sahara.
Before the last war the )oily old empire' was very much a part
of Cambridge orthodoxy, and students who declined to take
it at its face value were regarded by their seniors as very
abandoned characters. (This fact of modern history is recorded
here because it has failed to find its way into Volume XII of
the New C.M.H.) Now all that has to be written off. But
capitalism, or jolly old free enterprise, is still very much a part
of orthodoxy, and its youthful wild oats, its unsavoury con-
nections of former days, are best forgotten. Imperialism was
bad, but capitalism had nothing to do with it. This quiet
disengagement, or British compromise, has a not very distant
relative in West Germany, where it is agreed that Hitler was
a bad man, but that Krupp and the rest only joined him in a
fit of absence of mind.
In Volume XI the strategic interpretation is endorsed and
expanded. What brought Mr Gladstone into Egypt, an incon-
gruous Mark Antony, to tumble on the bed of Ptolem;)'? The Canal.
Why was the Canal so electrical? Because of India. Salus
lndiae suprema lex: here Cambridge finds its guiding thread
through the whole diplomatic labyrinth. What it overlooks is
that the cry of 'India in danger' was a convenient one for
financiers and concession-hunters, as well as historians; for
anyone with an eye on Burmese timber, Yunnan railways,
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE
Malayan rubber, or Persian oil. It was a plausible excuse for all
businessmen found in compromising situations, an unanswer-
able claim for official backing. If there had been space-travellers
in those days India would have been a compulsory reason for
Britain to take part in the race to the moon-which after all is
actually within sight of Simla. It was a plausible excuse besides
for charging the cost of military operations up and down Asia
and Africa to the Indian taxpayer. The hard-up Indian Govern-
nl.ent itself, to do it justice, regularly protested against the fraud,
and pointed out that the benefit to Indian security from most
of these campaigns abroad was nil. I+
British Africa was not much more than 'a gigantic footnote
to the Indian empire,' Robinson and Gallagher repeat (p.
6 I 6). Whatever truth the epigram may possess, it merely
throws the question of the real motives of empire one stage
further back. And obviously, by adopting the thesis of these
two writers and giving it a startling prominence, Cambridge
History assumes the obligation to answer the question at this
further remove. The duty stares it in the face to explain wiry
India was of such enormous consequence to Britain. Un-
doubtedly most British statesmen did believe that it was; the
word 'India' might have been found engraven on their hearts.
Some of their enemies believed it equally. 'If we are to bleed
to death,' the Kaiser wrote in his most hysterical note of July
I914, 'England shall at least lose India.'
1
s But how much was
the Indian empire really worth, and how were its dividends
appropriated? In Africa and the Victorians two or three very
instructive pages (pp. IO-Ig) are devoted to the problem, and
economic as well as other assets are noticed. Cambridge on
the contrary does not try to answer the question; it does not
raise the question; it does not perceive the question. This
inmost arcanum imperii remains an official secret.
Chapter XV on India, by P. Spear, covers I84.0-I905, in
twenty-eight pages: India in other words is given four or five
times less coverage than despised Africa. It is not backward in
recognizing Indian aspirations, and some Indian grievances,
H See Hira La! Singh, Problems and Policies qf t/ze British in India, r885-1898
(Bombay, 1963), pp. 191 ff.
s See K. Kautsky, The Guilt of William Hohenzollern (English edn.,
London, 1920), p. 178.
even if here and there a more archaic stratum of thought peeps
out. The accepted or acceptable point of view about all this has
changed a great deal in Cambridge since before the last war,
when India was still struggling for independence. But no real
consideration is given to the poverty of India and the extent to
which it was man-made. Famines arc treated as random acts
of God, owing nothing to excessive rents and land-taxes and
the usury that went with them. Anti-famine measures, belatedly
developed, arc given somewhat more credit than they deserve,
and we are told on p. 4.28 (also on p. 22) that there were no
deaths from starvation after I 88o. The unregenerate Cambridge
HislOr:J' of India of thirty years ago recorded an 'excess mortality'
in rgoo of 75o,ooo, including deaths fiom epidemics aided by
hunger, in British India alone.
1
6 And while this chapter
includes a short passage on British economic interests in India
(pp. 428-30), it asks no more than the old Cambridge India asked
whether there was a link between the comparative prosperity
of Britain and the abysmal misery of India; how far the rela-
tionship between Dives and Lazarus was one of parasitism, like
the vampire colonial rule of old Spain or of Portugal today.
Dadabhai Naoroji was expressing a growing conviction of
many Indians when he maintained that India was paying
annually to Britain, through all kinds of direct or devious
channels, a ruinously heavy tribute. He estimated that by
1870 it had risen to over 27 million, and that altogether
Britain had used its political power to drain India of something
like soo million.I7
Atrocities committed on both sides during the Indian Mutiny
are only fleetingly mentioned. Imperial history altogether was
a vastly more painful business than a reader would gain any
inkling of from New Cambridge. The atrocities in the Belgian
Congo, which even Abdul the Damned of Turkey humorously
joined in a protest against, are passed over with the same
reticence. So are the brutalities of the American conquest of
the Philippines, rhe death-rate in the British concentration-
camps for Boer women and children, and the savagery of the
intervention in north China after the Boxer rising.
1
B How this
Hi Vol. VI, p. 308.
1
7 Poverfy and Un-British Rule in India (London, 1901 ), p. 34
xs Vol. XII, pp. 228-9, makes some amends as to this.
l'AREWELLS TO EMPIRE 8s
is remembered by the Chinese the reader may discover by
turning to pp. 270-I of the Outline History of China published
at Peking in r 958; and it might be prudence as well as virtue
in the vVest to remember its misdeeds at least as long as their
victims do. More philosophically, it may be unwisdom for us
all to put too easily out of our minds those high crimes and mis-
demeanours that call heaven and earth to record them against
mankind and its rulers, whether Cambridge History records
them or not; they are part of what has made our world and the
human race what thev are. In this volume our attention is
guided rather towards 'pleasanter topics like the increased use
of soap in England.
1
9 History itself is being given a good wash,
or undergoing a process of saponification; now and then as the
reader turns the pages he may seem to catch a glimpse of
Soapy Sam, the well-known Bishop of Oxford of those days, or
even of Lady Macbeth washing her hands.
John Strachey was one of the few theoreticians of empire
who have been involved in the business of running one, as his
Anglo-Indian ancestors, all the way back to Clive's time, had
been. It may be regretted of him, as of John Morley before
him, that imperial office subdued him more than he succeeded
in subduing it. He had the ill-luck to be Secretary for War in
the first stages of the guerrilla campaign in Malaya, and during
the Persian oil crisis. In The End of Empire (I g6 I) he defends the
Malayan repression on much the same ground that Tories
argued for keeping India: it was not our duty to hand over
power to a small active minority (p. 256). About the Persian
affair, which ended so gruesomely for the Persian patriots, his
only remark is that he and his Labour colleagues were very
badly informed by their expert advisers (p. r 6 I). He was more
at home in the theory of empire than in its operation, and this
last book of his deserves careful study as his last word on a
subject he had thought about all his life.
Imperialism is not of merely historical interest, Strachey
19 P. 4 The editor, F. H. Hinsley, has since published a work called
Power a11d the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge, 1963). One of john Strachey's
last writings was a of it in the Observer, 23]u?e 1963, which ende.d:
'I am frankly aghast at the complacency of Mr. I-Imsley ....
will miss its last chance if it listens to the Dr. Panglosses, such as Mr. Hmsley,
who tell it that all is for the best in the best possible of nuclear worlds.'
D
emphasizes; over the past four and a half centuries it has
largely moulded world conditions (p. I I). But he views Britain
today (Lenin needless to say would not) as having 'suddenly'
become 'a post-imperial society' (p. 7), and he asks the country
to recognize and accept this novel position and set about
facing life without colonial flannel next to its skin. His con-
tention is that the empire was at no time really vital to Britain,
though it was often highly profitable to sectional interests. He
produces a table showing annual changes in export-import
prices from 1854 onwards, and argues from it that imperial
power conferred no ability to dictate the terms of trade, which
have been more favourable to Britain since 1945 than they ever
were in the heyday of imperialism, and were never better than
in the dismal year I933 (pp. q.8-52). This is a weighty
argument; it does not, all the same, rule out the possibility that
imperialism was at various stages vital to Britain's continued
advance along its own peculiar road towards its own peculiar
form of capitalist democracy.
Stracl1ey reviews the Hobson-Lenin theory sympathetically
though critically in chapters VI and VII. Hobson's book he
takes as 'the starting-point of any rational explanation' of
imperialism (p. 98); and it fits in well with his own line of
thought. He praises Hobson for seeing that there was an
alternative to imperialism, in social reform and redistribution of
income at home, to prevent the piling up of masses of surplus
capital that could only be put to use by being exported (p.
I IS) Conversely he feels that Lenin's basic error was to dismiss
this alternative as a mere mirage. Holding strictly to the doc-
trine of the increasing misery of the workers under capitalism,
Lenin 'overlooked the economic consequences of democracy,'
the effect on social injustice of 'an all-pervasive democratic
political environment' (pp. 109-I 2).
Here is one of the passages where Strachey-as a good (or
fairly good) Labour Party man-may be suspected of taking
democracy too much ior granted. Certainly he is stressing a
primary truth when he says that capitalism. is not, as its un-
critical admirers have always supposed, a self-righting mech-
anism, which will always find the best way to function if left
to itself (pp. I I3-q.). It will only work better, or less badly,
under vigorous pressure from outside. There had to be enough
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE
'democracy' to allow of organized pressure from labour. But
again, this would have been necessary for any concessions to be
extracted, whatever funds they were to come out of. An
employer rich enough to raise wages because he enjoyed an
unearned income from the Kaffir Circus would not raise wages
unless he was forced to. Strachcy may be brushing Lenin's
crumbs off the table too hastily when he maintains that
during the days when Britain had an empire a real redistri-
bution of income was taking place, and not a hand-out of
colonial surplus profit.
To the other (or capital-export) side of the classical theory,
in broad outline, Strad1cy remains faithful. Even if Lenin
failed to sec that the capitalist leopard could have some of its
spots scrubbed off by the democratic brush, he was right in
much of his analysis of his own epoch. His approach was 'by
no means unrealistic for the Britain of I900-q.' (p. II7); and
Strachey considers that but for imperialism there might have
been a capitalist collapse in r900 similar to that of 1929 (p.
I 12). He shares Lenin's common-sense conviction that the
vast scale of overseas investment is proof by itself of some link
between it and imperialism: to refuse to recognize such a
'prime mover' as the leading force of an epoch is to reduce
history to 'an unaccountable jumble of facts and dates' (p. I 23).
Strad1ey's ancestry lends a special interest to what he has to
say about India, and his two opening chapters, a factual
study of the conquest of Bengal, give the book a refresl_1ingly
realistic start. Chapter IV is an interesting re-examinatiOn of
the old question of whether, or how far, the plunder of Bengal
assisted the industrial revolution in England. Plundering a
colony is a wasteful way of exploiting it, as he points out, and
the profit that reached England from the ruination of Bengal
seems to have been 'modest, though not insignificant' (p. 6g).
His conclusion may be as fair a one as the problem admits of:
that this profit was far from. being the prime cause of the
industrial revolution, but played a rcai part none the less in
helping it to get 'off the ground,' or 'over the hump' (p. 68).
He does not fail to notice Britain's inherited obligation today
to give far more help than it has done so far towards getting an
industrial revolution launched in India.
On the British Raj, after its infamous beginnings, his
summing-up could scarcely be bettered. It was 'selfish and
selfless, ruinous and constructive, glorious and monstrous' (p.
13). Urging how much the old India stood in need of a drastic
shake-up, which it had no energy to achieve for itself, he is in
step with Karl Marx as much as with Sir Richard Stracl1cy.
But as he comes closer to the present he is apt to overstate the
civilizing influence of democracy on imperial rule as well as on
capitalism at home, and to view the Raj with a somewhat too
indulgent eye; he is too ready to sec it floating smoothly to-
wards its splendid harbour, and the Labour Party's finest hour,
the grant of Indian independence. Thus he sees the Morley-
Minto reforms of 1909 as a 'genuinely voluntary' first step
towards 'democracy and independence' (p. I30).zo And he
goes much too far when he says that no one can accuse England
in the twentieth century, as in earlier days, of direct, barefaced
exploitation oflnclia by the exercise of political power (p. I 4 7).
He thinks of economic relations between the two countries as
governed by the terms of trade, "\<Vhich were outside the
authority of the Raj. These mysterious entities scarcely explain
such items as the charging of British military expenditure
outside India to the Indian revenue, a matter on which the
Whitehall attitude was, an Indian historian has lately written,
'most arbitrary and unsympathetic' and revealed 'a petti-
fogging and huckstering mentality.'
21
An English historian has
lately said of another item, the handicapping of Indian cloth
manufacture for the benefit of Lancashire: 'A more unsvm-
pathetic and selfish act of policy it would be hard to

Stracl1ey finds some good words to say of British adminis-
tration in Egypt also. Cromer, greatest of the proconsuls,
made the country at least semi-modern, reduced taxes, abolished
the corvec (pp. 86-9). If in spite of this the fellah showed few
signs of growing prosperity, Strachey blames over-growth of
population: as in all such cases, an inadequate excuse by itself.
As to the reasons for the occupation in I882, he rightly puts the
pressure of the bonclholding interests first, and all other
20
Here the New C.Jvf.H., Vol. XII, pp. 214-15, is more realistic.
21 Hira La! Singh, ojJ. cit., p. 197.
22 S. B. Saul, Studies British Overseas Trade r87o-rgr4 (Liverpool, 1g6o),
p. Ig8. Chap. VIII oft111Swork, on trade with India, supplies much material
for an estimate of India's value to Britain, though it is not concerned to
explore the imperial relationship.
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE
89
motivations well behind (pp. 8I ff.). He gives strategic factors
their clue weight in particular contexts; he makes room also,
as it is indispensable to do, for motives of an irrational or
psychological order, including eagerness to take part in colony-
hunting simply because others are hunting for colonies (pp.
89-90, 96-7). Similar instincts can be seen at work on the
world stage today, and in the nursery among any set of children;
imperialists were in many ways child-like, if not childish.
Strachey points out how contradictory, even muddle-headed,
imperial thinking in men like Milner was (pp. 94-6). All these
other incentives could come into play once economic rivalries
created a congenial environment for them; in themselves they
were all, as Strachey sees clearly, secondary.
He describes the Boer War accordingly as a struggle to
decide whether the cheap labour of conquered Africans was to
be exploited on farms, for the benefit of Boer settlers, or in
mines, for the benefit of British capitalists (pp. 9I-2). One
might add that the final outcome was a compromise by which
cheap African labour would be exploited both on farms and
in mines. Oddly, Stracl1cy thinks this settlement the best then
possible, on the ground that the evils of ajJartlleid could not be
foreseen by the Liberals of I906 (p. 95). South Africa's future
ought really to have been easy enough to foresee without
recourse to any patent double million magnifyin' gas micro-
scopes of hcxtra power.
One need not share all M. Barratt Brown's opinions, or the
robust philanthropy that allows him to contemplate a rise of
world population to I o,ooo million as a prospect to 'en-
courage the humanist' (p. I), in order to be edified by his
After Imperialism (I963). It is a big book that brings in many of
our biggest problems, and has important things to say about
them. Despite its title the first two-fifths of the book, which
concern us here, arc devoted to the part that imperialism has
played in the past century or so. An initial sketch of its pre-
history is necessarily rapid, and there arc patches of slippery
ground got over with a hop, skip and jump; but it is always
suggestive, and has the great merit of linking the origins of
modern imperialism firmly with those of modern capitalism.
It thus serves to introduce the book's main theme: the series of
go MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
relationships set up by capitalism, reaching out from western
Europe, between the developed and undeveloped regions of
the world, and what is likely to take their place in the coming
epoch.
Like Hobson and Strachey, Brown believes that since at any
rate the early nineteenth century Britain's prosperity, as dis-
tinct from that of sectional interests, has not been built on the
profits of empire. His grand tenet is that prosperity is indi-
visible; no country can expect to advantage itself in the long
run by retarding or depressing any other. In the long run what
is good for our neighbour is good for us. Foreign tariffs in
the later nineteenth centurv im1)eclecl British exports but bv
' ' '
enabling other lands to industrialize they raised up better,
because richer, customers for Britain later on (p. 8r).
In his laudable desire to satisfv us that we can face the future
without colonies, Brown like may sometimes make too
little of the advantages of imperialism in the past, notably its
political or 'psychological' advantages.
2
3 He does well to remind
us, as Strachey does over Bengal, that a colony may suffer
catastrophically from exploitation only marginally profitable
to the metropolis (p. I sB). And undeniably the philosophy of
do-it-yourself is the one that pays best in the encl. Even the
Netherlands, which may have been drawing a sixth of its
national income from Indonesia (p. 173), has grown more
prosperous, because more energetic, since losing its ill-gotten
gains. The trouble is that in ordinary circumstances a country
is not in a position to turn over a clean sheet and choose a mode
of life rationally and dispassionately. 'National' and 'sectional'
interests are therefore easier to separate in theory than in the
hurly-burly of existence. Without empire Britain might have
evolved along healthier lines, like Norway; or along more
morbid lines, like Spain after the loss of empire; but in either
case it would not have been growing into the Britain whose
actual structure and character we arc confronted with.
Brown never loses sight of the special significance of India.
He too considers the economic effect on England of the plunder
of Bengal, which he thinks may have clone rather more to
accelerate the agricultural revolution than the industrial. Later,
2
3 Barratt Brown has expressed himself 'happy to accept' this comment;
sec the long and valuable Preface to the new edition of his book ( 1970), p. ix.
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE
9I
in the nineteenth century, he allows the value of India to
British investors and exporters of capital goods, but attributes
the chief development, the railway programme, to 'a succession
of rather exceptional events' (pp. 64--5). Among these was the
Mutiny; but strategic railways for the control of India and
movement of troops to the frontiers would surely have been
required before long even without the Mutiny. It belongs to
Brown's case to maintain that India never became indispensable
to British capitalism as a whole. Nevertheless, with the em-
phasis he lays on India's vast importance to the British balance
of payments, we come at last to a realistic view of why the British
ruling classes were so passionate about the 'defence of India'.
He differs too from both Strachey and Cambridge in refusing
any special praise to Britain for 'giving up' India in the encl.
There was no longer a choice. In Malaya, where there was still
a choice, Britain was prepared to fight 'a major colonial war'
(p. rgr).
Brown's picture of the effects of British rule on India forms
a good corrective to the bedside cheeriness of the C.M.H. He
is aware for instance of the connection between the recurrent
famines and the growth of the area devoted to cash crops for
export, which, along with the crippling of native handicrafts,
worsened pressure on the land (e.g. p. 59). In some details
outside the economic sphere his picture may be too gloomy, or
not factually accurate. He may underrate the good that
imperialism did to India and other colonies (as Napoleon's army
did to Italy and Germany) by jerking them, however rudely
and painfully, out of stagnation into change. British rule did
play upon communal division between Hindu and Muslim,
but the charge that it conjured up communal bitterness in a
land where this had been 'almost non-existent' (p. I 8 I) can be
too easily challenged. No landlords were set up by Britain in
the eighteenth-century Punjab; and the Muslim League was
not primarily 'landlord-based,' but urban and petty-bourgeois
(p. 209).
Brown's specific criticisms of Hobson (pp. 92-5) and Lenin
(pp. 95- I o I) are rational, if unavoidably too brief to take up
many of the controversial points. He finds it over-simple to
explain British imperial growth in terms of protection of
investors, but he seems less on his guard in some other directions.
92
Thus he says 'it is clear from Cromer's account' that Egypt was
occupied for strategic, not pecuniary reasons (p. 88). It is
really far from clear, even taking Cromer's evidence without
the plentiful pinch of salt it calls for. Curiously, Blunt's evidence
is not referred to. Brown rejects the idea of men like Rhodes
genuinely believing in new colonies as the antidote to social
revolt at home; yet he admits that the fear of population
growth, and the need for new markets, were genuine enough
(pp. 90-1). His conclusion that the real utility of empire lay in
'the strategic position it conferred in world power-politics' (p.
107) is a little indefinite.
Writing in I902 at the end of the Boer War, Hobson was he
thinks 'blinded by the single glaring case of Rhodes and South
Africa to make a general analysis that did not apply elsewhere'
(p. 95). Comparatively little of the massive overseas investment
was going into newly annexed colonies, while two-thirds,
between I900 and I9I3, went into the Americas (pp. 92-5).
He reckons that in 1913 nearly one-tenth of Britain's national
income came from abroad, but only one-sixth of this from
India and the other non-white dependencies (pp. 98-9). Still,
even though I5 per cent of the national income may not
sound much, one-sixth of an overseas income vital to the
balance of payments and, in many ways, to the comforts of the
ruling classes in particular, was not a trifle. Be all this as it may,
Brown has good ground for stressing the factor of chauvinism,
of the tradition of imperial power among all Britons including
the workers, and for saying that with this, and a general econ-
omic improvement assisted by cheaper food imports, 'it was
hardly necessary to offer bribes' (pp. I oo-I) ; Lenin's theory of
crumbs, in the special application he was making of it, was
redundant.
If Brown docs anything less than justice to Lenin's work as
a commentary on Europe before 1914, he treats it as a brilliant
prophecy of Europe as it was to become after I9I8. Lenin was
reasoning very largely, he points out, from a German economy
concentrated and monopolistic in a degree that British industry
was far from having reached, but was destined to reach in the
following decades (p. 97). In the I920s the dividing up of the
world among giant corporations went on exactly as Lenin had
predicted (pp. I25-6). In the 'thirties possession of empire
FAREWELLS TO EMPIRE
93
assisted Britain's recovery from the Slump (p. I 35). Brown has
an interesting discussion of the balance of advantages and dis-
advantages at this elate of imperial tribute, and the relevance
of the 'crumbs' (pp. I42-7). The balance is not easy to strike,
but evidently the biggest gain went to the monopolies, whose
strength was reinforced, while whatever gains any one else
made were far more than outweighed by the economic
stagnation that empire helped to prolong.
Colonial profits to big business were so lavish that Brown is
willing to take seriously Hitler's complaints on behalf of
German monopoly capitalism of its being cut off from raw
materials by lack of colonies; and to blame 'the narrow and
restrictive policies' of the 'Haves' for driving German, Italian
and Japanese capitalists-the 'Have-Nots'-into fascism and
then into war (pp. I 29-3 I, I 4.8). Here he may be accused of
following Lenin (rather than Marx, who made very full
allowance for the 'political' clements in any situation) almost
too closely. It is salutary for us to be reminded in season and
out of season that Krupp and the rest were at any rate eager
accessories after the fact, willing receivers of stolen property.
But to see the Second World War, as Lenin saw the first, as
springing from a simple clash of rival monopolists, is to forget
the whole business of appeasement, the climax of a long Western
diplomatic effort beginning long before Hitler to keep Germany
solidly in the capitalist camp against the U.S.S.R. Appeasement
failed, Lord Home said not long ago, because Hitler turned out
to be a madman. So, from the standpoint of world capitalism,
he was. Brown himself assumes that the great cartels on both
sides in I 938-39 were working for peace. Also questionable is
the view that fascism originated 'in the outward pressures of
monopoly capitalism' (p. I 50). Fascism might be said to
originate, most visibly in Japan, in those older tracts of national
life and emotion that capitalism had only half assimilated. It
was taken up by capitalism primarily from fear of internal
collapse. For Mammon, after all, survival must come before
expansion.
As between Hobson, who saw in imperialism a defect of
capitalism that could in principle be corrected, and Lenin, who
saw in it the revelation of capitalism's total and incorrigible
depravity, the conclusions of our two recent socialist critics
94- MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
tend to agree with the former more than the latter. The world
has not yet moved far enough or decisively enough away from
imperialism for experience to have demonstrated which opinion
is nearer the truth. As between the whole trend of thought
represented by these two critics and their forerunners, and that
represented by the non-socialists who sec in the empires no
evidence at all as to the nature of capitalism, the weight of
argument and probability is heavily in favour of the former. It
is to be hoped that the controversy will not end here. Too often
before now a great historical question has been quietly buried
in an empty coffin, and forgotten.
3
Imperialism, American
and European
Some historical contrasts
'American imperialism' is a thing we hear about continually.
To conservatives, with their blind eye staunchly to the tele-
scope, it is only a pair of words, a nonentity, as unreal as the
unicorn. To liberals it is a chronic embarrassment; to many
further left it is-to borrow the title of Felix Greene's new book
-T!ze Enemy,I the adversary of the human race. We see it
stirring in Latin America, in the Middle East, in the Far East;
we guess at its secret burrowings in other regions, including the
British Isles. Its character and direction are of vital concern to
the whole world, yet to see them in a clear focus is puzzlingly
difficult. A frequent allegation is that American prosperity has
come to be dependent on huge armaments production and the
aggressive policies required to justify it. Many Americans have
their own motives for encouraging such a belief; left-wing
critics who endorse it may be unwittingly playing into their
opponents' hands. A less irrational look is given to aggressive
policies by the contention that the U.S. must increasingly get
raw materials from outside, and must have access to them, and
for secure access and cheaper procurement must have political
control, and without this the economy and the living standards
of the people will crumble. Here too critics eager to convict
the U.S. of economic imperialism may show a perilous readiness
to accept the assertions of the monopolists. Capitalists over the
years, we may recall, have assured us that national prosperity
must collapse if child labour is stopped, or trade unions started,
or tariffs reduced, or wages raised, or India lost.
Even the inhabitants of Utopia sent out colonists to seize
1
F. Greene, The Enemy. Notes on Imperialism and Revolution (N.Y., 1970).
gG MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
land from their neighbours. Imperialism of one sort or another
has run through all world history; but we have no general
theory capable of embracing or classifying its multifarious
doings. Marxists have curiously seldom tried to look outside
the framework of Lenin's theory. It may be of some use then
to look back over the story of American expansionism, com-
paring its motive forces and lines of development with modern
Europe's, and noticing that at every stage there have been
analogies but also significant divergences which call for ex-
planation in terms of contrasting social and mental patterns.
An enquiry into them cannot by itself answer the question
of what American imperialism is today, or what can be ex-
pected from it tomorrow. But besides offering something
towards the general theory of imperialism that we lack, it may
in some degree help us to form a clearer view of America as
the biggest practical problem of our time.
By the late nineteenth century Europe and the U.S. were
both ruled by plutocracies, but in one case with tenacious
survivals from an older feudal society, in the other with a still
active leaven of democracy. In Europe empire and war, before
becoming useful to influence the working class, were of essential
service in bringing together aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Tory
and Liberal in Britain, royalist and republican in France,
Junker and chimney-baron in Germany, all found in expan-
sionism and militarism a common ground that allowed them
to combine into solid modern ruling classes. Blue-blooded
landowners and their younger sons were to the fore in all
the Continental (and Japanese) armies and the British navy,
and in the running of colonies, particularly the British:
Radicals could allege with some reason that the colonies existed
largely to provide them with employment. To a nobleman
accustomed to the management-sometimes intelligent, some-
times even benevolent-of large estates, that of an Indian
province came naturally. To the son of a Lincolnshire squire,
accustomed to run his own parish and jail his own poachers, it
came naturally to run a district in Ceylon, where the natives
could not be much further beneath him on the human ladder
then the degraded race of farm-labourers at home. Empire and
war gave these men moreover a sense of function, of being
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN
97
needed by their countries, such as any upper class requires to
keep it in good heart. The rich cannot live by cake alone, any
more than the poor by bread.
In Europe higher government service was a dignified calling,
being in form or in fact service to the Sovereign, most markedly
in the departments reserved for 'good' families, the diplomatic
and military and imperial. America had no notion of official
employment being more reputable than commerce, and it was
unquestionably less lucrative. There was no old landowning
class conditioned to prefer such employment. There were no
ready-made colonial administrators, eager for colonies to
manage, or officers to the manner born, eager for an army.
Nothing has so clearly marked America off from Europe, or
revealed the tenacity of its early ways of thinking, as its lack of
interest in the glorious trappings of war. Even Britain, in this
as in many things the stepping-stone between the two conti-
nents, loved to admire uniforms, if not to wear them, and loved
its navy, if not its army. America inherited from it the old Whig
conviction that a standing army was dangerous to liberty; and
in spite of periodic fits of alarm it suffered far less from the
corroding anxiety about social anarchy that did so much to
reconcile middle-class Europe to its aristocratic armies. Only
one war has ever faced Americans with what a European
would think a real casualty-list, and that was a civil war, less
likely than any other to kindle a taste for martial glory. At the
end of it the victorious army went quietly home, instead of
marching off to conquest abroad like the army of the French
Revolution.
To Europe with its numberless battlefields, where every
State was forged by ages of war, expansion has meant first and
foremost conquest by the sword. To America it has meant
profit, influence, even power, to be acquired by trade and
technology, with war only as a last resort and then fought if
possible with machines in place of flesh and blood. Even the
gadgetry of war America, today loaded down with it like the
medieval knight in his cumbrous armour, was remarkably
slow to accumulate. Navy as well as army grew sluggishly until
well on in this century. A steel magnate like Carnegie was all
against warships, when his compeers across the Atlantic were
clamouring for them to fill order-books. To them this 'staunch
pacifist'
2
must have sounded like Lucifer denouncing sulphur.
Many European countries came by colonies long before
modern political consciousness dawned, and Demos took them
over as he took much else from the past. In Britain most of all
he grew up familiar with the romantic trappings of empire, the
governors in plumed hats or princes in jewelled turbans
wending their way to Buckingham Palace, regimental banners
inscribed with names of battles far away, echoes of bugles from
the Khyber Pass. Misgivings about whether this was doing any
good, on either side, were slow to stir, and down to the end
seldom if ever seriously troubled the working classes of western
Europe. By contrast the U.S. came into existence through
rebellion against an empire, and started with a disposition-
which has never been consciously cast off-to regard all
empires as wicked, like the depraved monarchies that begot
them.
At the outset the instinct of the State in Europe, as in Asia,
was to expand within its own continent, to stretch its frontiers
to include adjacent areas. Such growth has more chance of
permanence than seizure of colonies far away. It is thanks to
geography as well as to socialism that of all Europe's empires
(except Portugal's) only the Russian has, much transformed,
survived. Russia had next door to it the vast vacancies of
Siberia, readily occupied though not readily developed.
America combined this asset of immense contiguous territory
with the British asset of advanced political institutions for
colonists to carry with them. Like the settlement of the white
British Dominions its westward march was at the same time a
'people's imperialism' 3 of free settlers and an operation of
modern capitalism. If the U.S. was born in revolt against
British control, this very revolt was partly inspired by a nascent
expansionism of its own. Franklin and Washington were,
besides high-souled patriots, participants in companies formed
to grab new lands to the west, beyond the line drawn by
London, fiom their native owners.4 One is reminded of how
two centuries earlier the Dutch, heroically fighting for their
2
0. J. Clinard, ]aj1an's Influence on American Naual Power r897-19I7 (Uni-
versity of California, 194.7), p. 145.
J A phrase used by W. Kolarz, Russia and her Colonies (London, 1952), p. 3
4 J. Hardy, The First A111crican Reuolution (London, 1937), p. 37
99
independence from Spain, simultaneously embarked on their
long career of rapine in Indonesia.
On a map, Massachusetts is a tiny dot, and the whole of New
England northward from Virginia, the nucleus of the entire
trans-continental expansion, is a mere strip some 750 miles
long, scarcely bigger than Old England. The opening of the
prairies by pioneers and homesteaders was followed up and
taken toll of by the big-scale capitalism growing concurrently
in New England, by means of loans, investments, railway con-
cessions. Plundering of the public domain and its resources
went on in a style that must be supposed to have given some
hints to European financiers on the prowl for concessions in
Turkey or China. All this represented for American capitalism
its stage of primitive accumulation. Westerners often grumbled
about the behaviour of Eastern bankers, and might go through
moods of something very close to anti-imperialism. Bryan's
words about mankind being crucified upon a cross of gold
would serve very well today to describe U.S. capitalism in
Asia or Latin America. But within the U.S. the framework of
a democratic constitution and State rights kept such tensions
from going too far, and brought about a commonwealth
instead of an empire, with a capitalism of a new, buoyant kind
such as Europe with its social and mental rigidities could never
have hit upon for itself; a signal example of how economic sys-
tems arc modified as they evolve by their social and economic
environments. Without America, Marx's forecast of the future
of capitalism would have been much more nearly accurate.
Most of the European States that colonized outside Europe
were, like Japan, small countries with resources too limited to
support their ambitions. America by contrast was rather a
Common Market than a single nation, big and varied enough
to go on enriching itself without much need to suck nourishment
out of colonies. If a certain commodity was lacking, its absence
would be felt by one industry or group of interests rather than
by the entire economy. In any case the old simple urge of a
Portugal or a Holland to get hold of the sources of commodities
like silver, spices, sugar, and monopolize the profit of retailing
them to the rest of Europe-an urge with which national
feeling was quick to identify itself-was out of date by now.
True, the old situation might recur with the discovery of new
IOO MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
materials, notably oil, which British capitalism after the first
World War had a brief rosy dream of cornering. In general, by
the time the U.S. came of age the business of tapping colonial
products and bringing them into a world market had been
done: many of them could be found inside the U.S., the rest
it could easily buy.
Curiously free as it was from the sabre-rattling jingoism of
Europe, the U.S. in the course of its gigantic growth was
bound to come by a national conceit of its own. For any
country the sensation of being in the van of progress, of having
something to teach all the rest, is likely to prove a strong
intoxicant. The Melville of White Jacket, even cooped up in the
beastliness of an American man-o' -war, was heartened by a
glowing conviction of belonging to a new civilization, whose
advent was a stride forward in human history. Bret Harte saw
the 'bland, indolent autumn of Spanish rule' in California
followed by 'the wintry storms of J\!Iexican independence' and
then by 'the reviving spring of American conquest'. s Walt
Whitman felt the West wind prevailing over the East, American
might overflowing across the Pacific, when he wrote, on the
arrival of the first envoy from Japan,
'I chant the new empire ...
'I chant America the new mistress ... .'6
These may seem literary daydreams. But empires must first
have a mould of ideas or conditioned reflexes to flow into, and
youthful nations dream of a great place in the world as young
men dream of fame and fortune. In our day it is the un-
questioning assumption of a diplomatic historian like Kennan,
one of the most enlightened of his kind, that his country may
often have been foolish, but is incapable of wickedness, because
Democracy, virtuous itself, only wants all mankind to be
virtuous. He complains of a 'mystical, Messianic' streak in
Soviet Russia, and in the same breath speaks of the un-
mistakable summons of 'history' to America.?
The planting of the new civilization across the prairies
s 'The Right Eye of the Commander', in The Luck of Roaring Camj1 (1868).
6 'A Broadway Pageant' (c. 186o). I owe this reference to my colleague
Dr. R. Jeffreys-Jones.
7 G. F. Kennan, American Dij1lomacy 1900-1950 (N.Y., 1951), pp. 120-21
(Mentor Books edn.).
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN IOI
included the pushing out (or flus !zing out, as operators in
Vietnam would call it nowadays) of their scanty Red Indian
population. This could be set down as part of the necessary cost
of progress, and to Americans did not feel at all like the brutal
aggression that Europeans overseas were always committing.
Like Australians cleansing the territory God had given them of
its blackfellows, they kept a good conscience, but were none
the less imbibing a belief that this was how all creatures
recalcitrant to the American way of life must if necessary be
dealt with. Protests were occasionally heard, as they were in
European countries, about such treatment of natives; but one
fact that stands out is America's inability to produce a decent
type of public servant for handling native questions. It was
misconduct by Indian Agents that provoked the Apache
trouble in 1882. 'As one reads of the outrages perpetrated by
these savages', says an American army historian, 'one can
hardly believe them to be the work of white men.' s He was
poorly informed about white men and their history, to be sure;
but there is a striking hint in this record (or in that of the
occupation of the South after the Civil War) of what the
administration of an American colonial empire would have
been like.
Red Indians could be killed, but not turned into helots. A
worse incitement to moods favourable to imperialism came
from the South. New England's linkage with the slave-owning
South was as if Old England and South Africa had been joined
together geographically as well as politically. In economic
terms the South, like the West, was in some degree a colony of
the North-cast, which drew profit from loans to the plantations.9
But the Southern States before the Civil War had (like the
South Africa of Cecil Rhodes) a private imperialism of their
own. With their soil-exhausting agriculture they needed more
land, and looked greedily towards the Caribbean. Their
ambitions descended directly from the eighteenth-century
wars of European merchant-capital over West Indian islands
and slave-plantations; a 'Southern' empire would have been
regressive and barbarous even by comparison with the not too
s Col. W. A. Ganoe, The History of the United States Amry (revised ecln.,
N.Y., 1943), p. 358.
9 J. E. Cairns, The Slave Power (London, 1863), p. 76.
elevated standards that European colonialism was now
attaining.
But Southern society had closer affinities than the North
with that of Europe, and would have found it easier to provide
administrative cadres, if at a very low level; also to provide
an army of conquest and occupation, out of the mass of poor
whites who were to provide the Confederate soldiery, men with
resemblances to the dispossessed Irish and Highland peasantry
that provided Britain with a great part of its colonial army.
There were dreams of a Latin-American empire, including all
Mexico.
10
Walker's 'government' in Nicaragua in the 185os
was an unofficial experiment; it was recognized by Washington,
where Southern politicians and wirepullers were always active.
Cuba was the grand objective. Devious methods and contra-
dictory aims have been characteristic all along of America,
that large, variegated, changeful country and elastic govern-
ment; they showed themselves freakishly in the doings of
Soule as U.S. envoy at Madrid in r854., and in the 'Ostend
Conference' of U.S. representatives in western Europe in
October of the same year, in furtherance of 'the "Young
America" programme of Cuban annexation through revolu-
tionary machinations in Europe.'
11
Washington rejected this scheme, and the defeat of the South
in the Civil War scotched its ambitions, though not without
some germs surviving to infect the national life. Southern
police brutalism against Negroes finds a counterpart in the
violence that has marked many American interventions in
other countries, very much as massacres of workers in Paris in
184.8 or 1871 went with similar treatment of rebels in French
colonies. Ideas such as were current by the end of the nineteenth
century of an 'Anglo-Saxon' or a British-German-American
bloc, and pointed forward to later Herrenvolk theories, could
find nourishment in Southern racialism. One Southerner
talked of 'the noble Gothic race' destined to rule America and
the whole earth.
12
When the Filipinos, America's first victims
in Asia, were being conquered in 1 8gg they complained that
10
J. E. Cairns, The Slave Power (J!J63), p. 204 ..
n A. A. Ettinger, The Mission to Sj1ain of Pierre Soule (18.53-18.55) (London,
1932), p. 335; and sec Ch. X generally.
12
Quoted by J. M. McPherson, The Struggle ji1r Equality (Princeton,
1964.), p. 423.
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN 103
even the highly educated among them were called, by their
not very well educated assailants, 'niggers' .13 Kipling's call to
America to take up its share of the white man's burden was
falling on sympathetic ears.
It was also unhealthy for the U.S. that (apart from Canada)
it had no neighbours on anything like its own level. European
nations often fought, but they were always aware of one
another as sharers of common standards. In the New World
the Latin countries, which had started their independent lives
not long after the U.S., lagged very far behind it, and the con-
trast between their prevailing backwardness and its own dizzy
advance was bound to stimulate a Yankee vanity already too
cockahoop. German aggressiveness in the modern world has
rested on similar foundations laid long ago, before the first
industrial capitalist was born, in the predominance of German
feudalists over Slav peoples and primitive tribes south and
east, and of German traders over Scandinavia and the Baltic.
To a U.S. infected with racialism the Amerindian and African
infusions in nearly all the Latin-American States-some of
them like Ecuador with scarcely any 'pure' white blood-were
likely to deepen other unfavourable impressions. But even
without this, a country worshipping efficiency was sure to feel
impatient at their sloth and shiftlessness. English businessmen,
who were first in the field, felt the same impatience; and in
lands where even a tourist is almost compelled to grease
official palms or brandish a stick, a foreign corporation will
soon slide into the same practices. Righteous indignation in the
U.S. today about communism in Latin America has been
superimposed on an older feeling of much the same kind about
muddle or anarchy there.
Little as the Monroe Doctrine might often seem to mean in
practice, it did at least mean that from early days the U.S. saw
its interests and rights not as confined to its own territories,
themselves ill-defined, but as spreading out in some nebulous
fashion over an entire continent. European meddlings helped
to foster the hazy feeling of a 'special relationship' between the
U.S. and its 'sister-republics'; and it has been a constant part
of the pattern of U.S. expansionism to be drawn into regions
where older empires have misgoverned or interfered. In 1815
1
3 R. B. Sheridan, The Filipino kfarfyrs (London, 1900), p. I 53
a patriot argued that the U.S. ought to assist the cause of
emancipation from Spain, and make an alliance with Mexico,
thus striking a blow at Britain which battened on the wealth
of Spain and Spanish America and meant to use it for an
onslaught on its own lost colonies.
1
4 Three decades later the
U.S. was fighting Mexico instead of allying with it. But this
early piece of jingoism was, very typically, seen by most
Americans as liberation of worthy settlers in Texas oppressed
by a barbarous government, very much as Britons tried to see
their South Africa war half a century later as a deliverance of
Uitlandcrs or settlers from oppression by the Boers. When
Napoleon III and his Hapsburg puppet threatened Mexican
independence not much later the American army, formidable
at the close of the Civil War, provided a strong deterrent.
Had Europe secured Mexico it might have gone on to spread
its tentacles into other parts of southern America. That U.S.
protection was sometimes genuinely needed there made it
insidiously easy for thoughts of U.S. domination to sprout.
After Chile's victory over Bolivia and Peru in the War of the
Pacific in 1879, which many saw as really a victory for Britain,
the U.S. representative at Lima suggested a protectorate over
Peru. He thought the downtrodden masses would be happy to
be governed from Washington, and within ten years Peru
could be thoroughly Americanized and then become a member-
state of the Union and ensure for it a commanding position in
all South America.
15
About this time Blaine as State Secretary
was emphasizing earlier loose claims to a 'paramount interest'
in the New World, which sound as if they may have owed
something to the precedent of British claims to paramountcy
in India and its borderlands; the Pan-American ideals that he
sponsored lent it a more inoffensive colouring. In r879 President
Hayes confided to his diary that it must be part of the nation's
destiny, though not one to be unduly hastened, to annex all
the neighbouring lands, including Canada. I6 In r 88o he talked
of control over a future Canal in 'language which implies the
reduction of the Central American republics to a position of
1
'1 W. D. Robertson, A Cursory View qfSouth America (Georgetown, I8I5).
IS Christiancy to Blaine, 4 May I88I, Conf.
16
Cited in P. 13clmont, An American Democrat (2nd edn., N.Y., I94I),
p. 378.
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN ros
virtual vassalage to the United States.'
17
In Europe no Great
Power talked openly in this style about its smaller neighbours,
even in the Balkans. One reason for this difference was that the
U.S. had no diplomatic service worth the name, again partly
because it had no aristocracy. It could be friendly or un-
friendly, but found it hard to be civil.
To these vaulting ambitions, all the same, public feeling
remained apathetic, as it had been during the 'shoddy episode'
of Grant's scheme to grab the Dominican Republic in r86g-
70;1B and this at a time when Europe was ntoving towards its
noisiest frenzy of imperial expansion. Private American enter-
prise, it is true, was pioneering the routes that Dollar Diplomacy
would follow along. Until national resistance began to be
provoked, individual adventurers could get their way as a rule
by bribing local bosses as they were accustomed to do at home.
Henry Meiggs building railways and a financial empire in
Peru and Chile during the r 86os and I 87os was a buccaneer of
this sort, but American also in having a genuine passion for
construction.
1
9 C. R. Flint, international dealer in guns and
warships, was another.
20
Railway speculations and plunderings
in the U.S. spilled over into Mexico ;
21
and struggles for control
of railways at home fought out among men like Gould and Fisk
with the aid of armed gangs were a realistic rehearsal for
Caribbean operations by the Marines.
American mercenaries in China took part in the suppression
of the great Taiping Rebellion, and were suspected of wanting
to carve out a principality for themselves. About 1853 a notion
was afloat that America had designs on Burma, and this served
as a further pretext for the British war on Burma in that year
and the annexation of Pegu. Karl Marx, who welcomed signs
of American interest in the Old World because America was
'the youngest and most vigorous representative of the West',
derided the notion.zz If there really was any inclination about
17 J. L. Latanc, The DijJlomatic Relations of the United States and South
America (Baltimore, Igoo), p. I77
IB D. Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine r867-I.907 (Baltimore, I937), pp. I 5-19.
I9 Sec W. Stewart, Henry A1c(<J,r;s-Ymzkee Pizarro (Duke Univ., 194.6).
zo Sec C. R. Flint, Memories rif an Active Lffe (N.Y., 1923).
21 L. Corey, The House of A1organ (N.Y., 1930), p. 223.
22 The Eastern Qpestion, eel. Eleanor Marx and E. Ave ling (London, I 897),
pp. 8o-8 I (I 2 Aug. I 853); Marx and Engels On Colonialism (Moscow
anthology, 1960), p. 70 (30 July I853).
I06
this time to join in the European game in Further Asia its one
?istinct emergence was C?mmodore Perry's arrival
Japan
m 1853 to demand a tradmg treaty. Americans and Victorian
Britons shared the same mystic faith in the life-giving virtues
of it was typical of the ambiguous processes of
Amencan offictal thought that while Perry was sent with a
squadron, and was himself convinced that it would be an error
to be 'over-conciliatory',
23
he was forbidden to use it; and
Harris, the first American envoy, got his treaty by
the (truthfully enough) that if they did not
giVe way Bntish bombard them. On his way out he
had been mstructed to Impress on the Siamese the contrast be-
tween British greed and American disinterestedness; his gifts to
the royal family included electrical gadgets and other novelties
symbolic of the new era that America was ushering in.24 '
. From the Far .E.ast as from the Caribbean energy was
diVerted by the CIVIl War and then the great industrial leap
fon:ard. For the most part America was content to straggle
behmd European Powers, critical of their high-handed methods
but happy to share in resulting gains to trade. How this am-
bivalent attitude was developing can be gauged from decade
to decade by th: .way Americans reacted to the grand empire of
the age, the Bnttsh. Decadent and vicious as Europeans were
A. ' I' I '
sta s. ru c asses were undeniably far worse; and to
Amencans-msular and shut up in their own habits and
opinions even by comparison with Britons-all Asiatics looked
and unprepossessing. When the zoologist Hornaday
Smgapore c:nd Malaya in the 187os the snobbery of
society struck him as contemptible, its harcl-
habits Yet some good was coming out of
It. It the Bnttsh Government to rule such places and make
them habitable for producers, and worth something to the
world.'
25
being too civilized to do this rough work
ought m ?ther words to welcome its being clone by
others. When ex-Prestclent Grant toured Asia and hobnobbed
with its mona:chs, whose descendants were to be the camp-
followers of his successors, he also was in two minds about
:: A. L. Sadler, J! Short History of}aj;an (Sydney, 1963) p. 239.
C. 9row, Harrts 1939), pp. 6o-6r,g

5
,
24
.
7
-8.
W. r. Hornaday, Two 1 earsm tlze]ungle (London, r885),pp. 295-6,330.
imperialism. He told the Mikado that he considered British
rule in India a good thing on the whole, but was indignant at
the way Europeans were behaving in many other parts of Asia.26
Europeans frequently felt the same irritation at American
sermonizing and moralizing as Charles Surface at his brother
Joseph's fine sentiments. The average American out in the
East was less pernickety, being there frankly, like other mortals,
to make money. In early clays in China he was often an
opium-dealer. At Canton, Hickey tells us, Americans were
known to the Chinese by 'the expressive title of second chop
Englishmen.'
2
7 'The presence of foreigners is a protection and
a blessing to the people', the American community in Shanghai
declared in r86g. ' ... The withdrawal of pressure would be
dangerous to native and foreign interests.' The English com-
munity added that the policy being adopted by both their
governments of treating China as an equal was a huge blunder.
The Hon . .J. Ross Browne, retiring U.S. minister, perfectly
agreecl.
28
Practical attitudes towards China went on con-
verging, until in rgoo American troops were fighting side by
side with Europeans and Japanese, under a German com-
mander, to put down the Boxer rebellion.
In the uncharted Pacific the advance-guard of American
civilization was more unsavoury than in either Latin America
or Asia. It was made up of men like the whaling-crews who, as
R. L. Stevenson learned when he lived in the Pacific, stopped
at the Marquesan Islands to carry off by force a stock of their
beautiful women.
2
9 Perry had been sent to Japan primarily to
secure a better footing for American ships and crews, whose
chief concern there was to obtain supplies of women and
liquor, by fair means or foul.
At the end of the century Captain Mahan could speak of an
'extraordinary change of sentiment on the subject of expan-
sion', a 'revolution' in American opinion.J
0
This burst of im-
26
J. R. Young, Around the T11orld with General Grant (N.Y., r88o), Vol. 2,
pp. 543-6.
27
MemoirsqfWilliamHickr.y, eel. A. Spencer (9thedn., London, n.d.), Vol.
r, p. 202.
28
Addresses to the retiring U.S. envoy, and his reply, June r869.
2
9 R. L. Stevenson, In the South Stws ( 1896), p. 50.
3
Capt. A. T. Mahan, Lessons qf the War with Spain (2nd edn., London,
1899), p. ix.
I08 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
perial enthusiasm, not quite so sudden or unheralded as he
thought it, was evidently in many ways an echo of Europe's.
It was the climax of a phase in America's evolution-the
epoch, among other phenomena, of Henry James-that
brought it closer in various ways to Europe and European ideas
than ever before or since. In economic history it was the time
when the U.S. established itself as the world's biggest industrial
State. By r8go it was overtaking Britain in iron and steel
production; in the r8gos it was going on to pile up a very large
export surplus. With this came a novel sensation of dependence
on foreign markets; a fever of high tariffs on both sides of the
Atlantic was erupting in trade wars, and the U.S. had a fit of
alarm about a shortage of customers. It was an irrational fear,
in view of the bounding population that supplied a growing
internal market. But capitalists are often as irrational as other
folk, and many Americans had too little purchasing power as
yet to be of much value to them as customers: Negroes, in
particular, and the mass of recent immigrants.
Immigration was bringing fresh problems with it. The new-
comers pouring across the Atlantic were Europeanizing their
new home at least as fast as it was Americanizing them. Their
numbers were swelling, and most of them were now coming
from less developed parts of Europe: more than three millions
from eastern Europe, the same total from Italy and Iberia, and
so on. An influx of old-fashioned peasants on this scale,
together with the growth and concentration of capital that
their labour made possible, could not but mean a heavy
dilution, over a fairly long period, of America's hopeful new
way of life. There was of course no ingrained inferiority in
them, and they had talents and qualities of their own to enrich
their adopted land. But they were for the time being ignorant
of many things, hampered by difficulties of language, often
superstitious and priest-ridden, sometimes demoralized by
suffering. They provided therefore a mass of labour easily
exploited by employers, and of voters easily duped by politicians.
It was an irresistible temptation to the voracious elements of
the older American society, and brought these forward rapidly
at the expense of the more idealistic. Already in 1847 when
Sarmiento the exiled democrat from Argentina visited the
promised land he was painfully struck by symptoms of degen-
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN JOg
eracy.JI The great experiment in democracy was beginning to
sink (never quite completely or finally) into Tammany Hall
demagogy, the labyrinth of corruption and manipulation that
Ostrogorski described in 1902.3
2
By 1871 even Whitman's faith
was being staggered by the 'hollowness of heart' all round him,
despite the 'hectic glow and these melo-dramatic screamings'
(essential ingredients of imperialism, he might have addecl)-
by the 'depravity of the business classes', by public life 'saturated
in corruption, bribery, falsehood', by the 'almost maniacal
appetite for wealth.' 33
These business classes for their part were soon as deeply
alarmed, in a different way. With the strikes of 1885 the reality
of class struggle, the possibility of social explosion, broke on
them suddenly and frighteningly-to the delight of Engels,
who visited America and kept a watchful eye on it.34 In the
following decade troops were called out on 328 occasions to
deal with disturbances in forty-nine States or Territories. 1893
was a particularly bad year. Fear of socialism, or of social
disorder, could be expected to inspire, as in Europe, thoughts
of adventure abroad to distract popular attention, and also to
weld a heterogeneous population into an American nation.
Hearst and his yellow press combined demagogic agitation
with jingoism, and did much in r8g8 to whip up feeling against
Spain. Behind this was the calculation which the English
observer E. Dicey read correctly when the Spanish war came:
America was going in for expansionism for the same reason as
Britain, recognition that 'democratic institutions are no longer
a panacea for the cure of social discontcnts'.
3
s Meanwhile the
long struggle of respectable America to lick masses of raw
immigrants into shape-with the Gatling-gun as one instru-
ment-was itself a sort of domestic experiment in colonial
administration.
One trait that immigrants were likely to pick up quickly and
31 Sec D. F. Sarmiento, Viajes jJor EurojJa, Afi'ica, i Anufrica ( I849), pp. 4I I,
484., 504.-5 (Paris edn., I909).
32 M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (London,
1902), Vol. 2.
33 Democratic Vistas, and Other PajJers (London edn., I888), pp. I I-1 2, 29 n.
34 Marx and Engels, Letters to Americarzs r848-r8gs, ed. A. Trachtenberg
(1953), p. 286.
35 Sec R. H. Hcinrlcl, The American lmjJact on Great Britain r8g8-I9I4
(University of Pennsylvania, 194.0), p. 6g.
I IO MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
to deepen was the racialism already in the air of America. To
poor whites from Europe, as to poor whites in Alabama, it was
a consolation to find someone to look down on, and against
whmn they could feel at one with the respectable folk who
looked down on them. A common prc;judice against the black
man helped the melting-pot of white nations to do its work;
American nationalism itself was thus tinged with racial
arrogance. Asians were another element too alien to be
absorbed.Jf> They were coming to undercut the white man and
&teal his job; and it it not hard to trace an emotional connection
between the massacre of Chinese at Wyoming in r885, and the
more wholesale massacre of Vietnamese eighty years later for
the crime of wanting to steal Asia from free enterprise.
From the time when America's westward-facing frontier
reached the Pacific a mood could be felt like Alexander's,
pining for fresh worlds. An expanding territory had come to be
part of American life, an end in itself, difficult to renounce.
Born with more of an instinct ofprogress than Europe possessed,
the country wavered between progress in terms of quality or
of mere size, as it still wavers today between the choice of being
a 'Great Society' or the Greatest Power. There may have been
a lurking wish to put off the day when America, having
reached its natural fi:ontiers, would have to stop walking and
sit down to look at itself: to take stock of what had become of its
soul.
As the largest of oceans the Pacific had a fascination of its
own for the richest of nations. On its further shores were some
of the few materials America lacked, among them tungsten
and manganese, in demand because of the growth of steel
production.37 On those shores lay also, dragons guarding a
golden fleece, two peoples who were taking shape in American
imagination as two grand forces of evil. Tsarist Russia was an
unrepentant despotism, as loudly condemned as Soviet Russia
later. A Russian ascendancy would inaugurate a new Dark Age,
ten times worse than the old one, wrote an alarmist.38 Japan
3
6
Sec I. Black, 'American Labour and Chinese Immigration', in Past
and Present, No. 25 (1963).
37 Clinard, ojJ. cit., p. 6.
38 W. D. Foulke, Slav or Saxon (2nd edn., N.Y., 1899), p. 139. There is a
note of Social Darwinism in the book; Russia is 'semi-barbarous', but sur-
vival of the .fittest may not be that of the highest (pp. 2-3).
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN III
was 'yellow', and Japanese settlement in California was a
chronic cause of irritation. Fears of Japan striding across the
Pacific by way of Hawaii were easily conjured up, and ensured
official backing for the settlers and traders in Hawaii who were
taking over power step by step from the native government,
until in 1893 Queen Liliuokalani was deposed, and in r8g8 the
islands annexed.
When the Senate Foreign Committee, approving the annex-
ation, talked of Japan affronting the 'national honour', it was
falling into one of the cliches that Europe had inherited from
its old monarchies and their dynastic squabbles. In the mind
of this fledgeling nation a crowd of antiquated ideas jostled, as
Engels again noticed.39 It was a blend of atavism or nostalgia
with a groping effort to express new sensations in old images, in
a land whose religion, philosophy, literature, had nearly all
grown in alien soil under far-off skies. American trade unionists
called themselves 'Knights of Labour', mothers christened their
urchins 'Marquis' or 'Duke'.
In the Old World that America was still tied to, the fresh
outburst of imperialism beginning about r88o may have
received further stimulus Iiom fear of America's industrial
supremacy, every year more unchallengeable. In turn it
incited Americans to follow suit-as earlier when Perry crossed
the Pacific-by arousing an uneasy sense of being left out of
something good, a kind of new gold rush, or of something
grand, that a high-principled nation ought not to stand aside
from. All imperialism in history has been largely imitative; it
has seldom or never grown spontaneously out of the needs or
impulsions of a single State. Greece caught the contagion from
Persia, Rome from Carthage, Islam from Byzantium, Holland
and England from Spain and Portugal. European States them-
selves were now to a great extent rushing after one another in
search of colonies because they saw their neighbours doing so.
Witte observed that the Russian generals who were so anxious
to lay hands on Manchuria were quite unable to explain what
they wanted to do with it. He was struck also, when in America,
by the dense ignorance of the world displayed even by
responsible men. 10
39 Marx and Engels, Letters to Americans, p. 269.
4 The lvfemoirs qfCount Witte (English edn., London, 1921), pp. 107, 162.
I T 2 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
A special factor was that among the old colonial Powers one,
and that one Britain, was eager to draw America into the
stampede. 4
1
It would be a splendid vindication of British
colonialism to be emulated by the great Democracy: this would
go far to disarm the protests inside Britain that had never
ceased to be heard. British investors in America could look for
a share in any profits that might accrue. Most important,
Britain's strength was over-extended, it was isolated, its rivals
were clamorous and pressing. It was time to bring in the New
World again to redress the balance of the Old, like Canning
in 1823. America's advent on the scene was 'the most hopeful
and the most surprising feature of the Far East problem', wrote
a traveller in I8gg.4
2
It was heartening in the Boer War which
began that year that America had just fought a war of empire
under cover of very similar watchwords. During these contests
the two countries were each other's only sympathizers-and
Germany was the most hostile critic of both.
In American eyes British colonialism usually appeared less
disreputable than others, and as a French cynic pointed out
Liberal scholars like Fronde and Seeley had been making it
look so progressive that 'Imperialism became the latest
philosophy of history and almost the last dogma of religion.'43
Mahan, the apostle of American sea-power, was also a very
uncritical admirer of the British empire. It had taken to heart,
he believed, the lessons of the American Revolution and the
Indian Mutiny, and given its allegiance thenceforward to the
purest ideals of enlightenment.44 Tempered by justice and
conscience 'and the loving voice of charity', the British sword
had clone wonders for India. 4
5
Englishmen frequently felt
themselves to be doing the Roman empire's work over again,
with improvements; to Americans like Mahan the British
empire offered similar inspiration. Another thought sedulously
41 Sec Heindel, ojJ. cit., Ch. IV, on the Anglo-American rapprochement
of 18g8, and its greater warmth on the British side. On European attitudes
to the war of 18g8 cf. L. Y. Slezkin, hpano-Amcrikanskaya voina 18g8 gada
(19:-)6), Ch. 3
42 A. Reid, From Peking to Petashurg (London, 18gg), Ch. 21.
43 V. Berard, British ImjJerialism and Commercial SujJremacy (English ecln.,
1906), p. 44
H Mahan, ojJ. cit., pp. 24<{, 250, etc.
45 Ibid., p. 23 1.
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN I I 3
encouraged by Britons was that if the crown of India ever fell
from Britannia's head it would be picked up by the Tsar.46
When Kipling was crossing the Pacific in I 888 his American
companions were full of laments over the sad state of their
country, its rotten politics and so on, and one of them wound up
with the remark that what they needed was a war. 'A war
outside our borders would make us all pull together.'47 Britons
all pulled together, and Bismarck had shown how blood and
iron could unite Germans. America had only fought a civil war,
whose morbid echoes still lingered, and uneasiness about the
nation's solidarity was being worsened by the undigested mass
of immigrants and the spectacle of foreign Powers with restless
ambitions and new designs of warships. There was too an
undercurrent of an impulse to show the world that America
knew how to fight. Europe had been impressed more by the
bungling of the Civil War, on the winning side especially, than
by its heroism. In this land without an army many an ordinary
citizen owned a gun as a sort of badge of free citizenship, much
as Europeans had worn swords as a badge of gentility. Again an
antique convention was perpetuating itself in a novel social
and material context. Warlike prowess was Europe's loudest
boast, soon to be put, in I9I4, to its supreme test. Japan won
genuine recognition at last by defeating China in I8gs. Only
through the same ordeal could America shake off the reproach
of being a mere nation of shopkeepers, preferring filthy lucre
to 'honour'.
The war of I 8g8 with Spain, conducted with the dash of a
Wild West film, satisfied these cravings; it yielded, like any of
the small colonial campaigns that Queen Victoria and her
subjects delighted in, a crop of what could pass for 'glory'.
Among its immediate motives economic aims played only a
secondary or indirect part. Norman Angell, arguing his life-long
thesis that capitalism has nothing to gain by war, would be able
to portray not unconvincingly a reluctant U.S. government
pushed into war by popular frenzy, against the inclinations of
big business.4B Unlike the Transvaal with its gold, Cuba con-
46 Sec e.g. Foulke, op. cit., pp. 41, 53
47 R. Kipling, From Sea to Sea (London, 1900), Vol. I, p. 4.6g, and Ch.
XXII in general.
48 Sir N. Angell, From Chaos to Control (London, 1933), pp. 121-2.
tained little but sugar, and over this American interests were
divided: the 'Sugar Trust' or big refiners were ready to welcome
an extra source of supply, the growers of cane-sugar or beet at
home wanted no extra competition from outside. Planters and
settlers in Cuba who wanted to get things into their own hands
made the most, as in Hawaii, of its alleged importance to
strategic security. This chimed in with a spirit of national self-
assertiveness, made up of diverse clements. Jingoism was most
rampant in the South, and in the West where Indian skirmishes
and Buffalo Bill had engendered something of the same
mentality as Negro-baiting and Jim Crow. From these two
regions also came the bulk of the volunteers, many of whom
must have been poor whites with visions of high pay or plunder.
Paradoxically the rallying-cry that brought Americans of
very different sorts together was sympathy for the unfortunate
Cubans, in revolt as they had often been before against a senile
and vicious Spanish rule. That the struggle would be against
one of the reprobate European monarchies, a contest between
New World and Old, lent it a further appeal, and might be
expected to impress immigrants with memories of heartless
treatment in their native lands. This unconventional republic
was breaking into one of the old colonial empires, towards
which, as towards that of Portugal, the greedy Powers of
Europe had exercised a curious self-restraint, as if from respect
for the sacred rights of property. In the nineteenth century
indeed, in strong contrast with the seventeenth or eighteenth,
Europeans never directly fought one another over colonies,
even if they frequently quarrelled.
At opposite poles in so many ways, America and Russia yet
had moral as well as physical resemblances. For both of them,
with their huge resources, any new enlargement was in a special
sense irrational, and in need of the camouflage of irrational
sentiment. Among Russians it was always the summons to
march into the Balkans and liberate fellow-Slavs and Christians
from Turkey's barbarous grasp that stirred popular enthusi-
asm; and while material interests were not lacking, increasingly
the chief end in view was to refurbish the Tsar by giving his
discontented subjects something to admire him for. Likewise in
I 8gg it was 'borne in upon the moral consciousness of a mighty
nation'--as Mahan put it-that Cuba was lying at its door like
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN I 15
Lazarus at the door of Dives.4
9
It is noticeable that Mahan
repeatedly drew an analogy between the compulsion of con-
science that good Americans used to feel to aid runaway slaves,
and the compulsion they ought now to feel to aiel down-
trodden peoples.
50
Because America had lately emancipated
its slaves, Russia its serfs, each felt morally fitter to emancipate
other nations. Perhaps each felt all the more ardour because
they had to smother an uneasy recognition that their work of
liberation at home had been done very imperfectly, that
neither mottiik nor Negro was much better off than he had
been before.
Puerto Rico was annexed: it was small enough to be viewed
as, like Hawaii, a strategic outpost rather than a colony. Since
competition from its sugar was not wanted it could not be given
equal status within the Union, and an exercise in casuistry by
the Supreme Court was required to square democratic prin-
ciples with 'the doctrine of inferior races' .5l But thanks to its
Negro minority the U.S. was already familiar in practice if not
in theory with the distinction between first- and second-class
citizenship, which in European empires was as obvious and
natural as, until recently, restriction of voting rights to men of
property had been. In America in other words race-conscious-
ness was in some ways the equivalent of class-consciousness in
Europe.
As to Cuba, whatever patriots there might feel, the U.S. felt
entitled to stand astonished, like Clive, at its own moderation.
By the Platt Amendment of r go I it insisted on no more than
naval bases and (like Austria in its treaty of r815 with the
Bourbons after helping to restore them in Naples) on a right of
intervention whenever dissatisfied with the way the country
was managing its affairs; and Cuba's affairs included those of
American planters, bankers, and merchants. This amounted to
a stranglehold on Cuban independence; but the dismal record
of most independent Latin American countries could make it
seem good for Cuba as well as for the U.S., and European
practice outside Europe supplied ready models: the Capitula-
tions imposed on Turkey or Morocco, extraterritorial rights in
49 JVIahan, ojJ. cit., p. 226. so Ibid., p. 227, etc.
SI J. I-I. Latanc, America as a World Power r897-I907 (N.Y., 1907), pp.
151-2.
II6 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
China, the Unequal Treaties with Japan. 'Neo-colonialism' of
this kind might just as well in fact be called 'proto-colonialism':
it had grown up side by side with full occupation of colonies
from the beginning. The novelty was that the U.S. was doing
spontaneously what Europeans had done where a country's
size or remoteness, or their own mutual jealousies, prevented
them from taking it over completely.
Besides Puerto Rico the Philippines were annexed, also at
some expense of moral and verbaljugglery. Thoughts ofkeeping
these islands only came uppermost after war broke out, and
were again very mixed. So were the imperial motives trumpeted
in jingo newspapers in Europe: the di1Terence was merely that
American statesmen, to the amusement of educated Europe,
solemnly repeated the rhapsodies that elsewhere were left to
journalists. It was a fresh manifestation of America's more
democratic spirit. President McKinley's reasons for taking the
Philippines sounded as if some malicious caricaturist had made
them up. 'The march of events rules and overrules human
action', imposing il:esh duties on 'a great nation on whose
growth and career from the beginning the Ruler of Nations
has plainly written the high command and pledge of civiliz-
ation. Incidental to our tenure in the Philippines is the
commercial opportunity to which American statesmanship
cannot be indilferent ... .'5
2
Boswell was always seeking scriptural warrant for polygamy,
and his Bible was always falling open at the history of King
Solomon. But America could truthfully deny cupidity about
the Philippines themselves. Commercial opportunity meant
China; the islands were only a convenient pied r} terre close by.
America's presence might be reckoned good for China as well.
In r8g8 the other Powers were closing in on it, and a partition
was threatening. America with its superior competitive power,
like Britain with its established position in all Far Eastern
markets, felt no need of a private share of China, and only
wanted an Open Door.
Yet though America was not being led into temptation by
Filipino sugar, it found itself immediately committed in these
islands to a naked war of conquest; an abrupt transition
prefiguring on a small scale the course of American imperialism
sz Instructions to the U.S. peace commissioners, Sept. 18g8.
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN I I 7
after 194-5 Ostensibly it had come here to assist another revolt
against Spain, but it was easy to argue that the Philippines
were not a nation like Cuba. Rather they could be looked upon
as a miniature India, illiterate in fifty languages, where
American sway could promise the same beneficial results as
British sway in India. America in short was coming as liberator
and remaining as master, like Prospera releasing Ariel from the
cleft tree-trunk and keeping him as a bond-servant. But it was
embarking on empire in an Asia where, thanks to what its
predecessors had done, colonial nationalism was already
smouldering. l<'acecl with mass resistance Americans sank at
once to the same level as Europeans before them or Japanese
after them. No ideology, anti-Communist or any other, is
needed to brutalize soldiers fighting such a war. Spain's
attempt to break the resistance of the Cubans by herding them
into concentration-areas, which America had denounced, was
now repeated against the Filipinos, as in later clays against the
Vietnamese; it made a good symbol of the chaining up of
colonial peoples by their white conquerors. Memories of Red
Indian wars stirred again; Filipino guerrillas seemed 'even
more perfidious' than the redmen of Arizona,53 and General
MacArthur like many commanders on the Western frontier
quickly grasped 'the profitlessness of treating the captured
insurgents with consideration'. His methods yielded results,
even if they 'did not please some American ethicists 6ooo
miles away'.54
It was, a British businessman on the spot wrote, a scene of
chaos and massacre, 'one of the blackest records which has ever
stained the pages of history'.ss There is another reminder of
the Vietnam war in the gloomy words of an American officer
to another Englishman-'We know we have got into a dreadful
mess, but how are we to get out of it?'s
6
Then as now it was
not every Englishman that welcomed America's plunge into
imperialism; this one wrote of what was happening, as a friend
and admirer, in sorrow more than in anger. America's own
'ethicists' agreed with him, and three thousand pages of an
53 Ganoe, op. cit., p. 406.
54 Ibid., p. 4.11.
55 J.D. Ross, .S'ixty Years in the Far East (London, 1911), Vol. 2, Ch. 37
5
6
Sheridan, oj;. cit., pp. 14.3-4; cf. p. 103: most of the Volunteers were
'men from the Western states, without character and without principle'.
E
II8 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
enquiry into the army's behaviour piled up. It must have done
sOinething to turn America away from such adventures for a
long time, like the revulsion of feeling in Britain after the Boer
War with its 'methods of barbarism'.
In the I goo election a remarkable number of parties took the
field, some of them anti-imperialistic, and some more or less
socialist. Home politics and foreign policy were both at the
same time in a state of flux. Yet the outcome in both was anti-
climax: the old two-party system reasserted itself, imperialism-
in the sense of a popular cult of the establishment of direct
American rule abroad-went off the boil. Once the war with
Spain was over there was a precipitate retreat from glory:
volunteers were eager to be home again, war-fever was for-
gotten like any other craze, the later craze of sending Americans
to the moon for instance. Mahan saw with regret a public
'gorged and surfeited with war literature' swept back into
indifference by 'an immense wave of national prosperity' .57
More philosophically Dr Johnson might have said of nations,
as of individuals, that they are never more harmlessly employed
than when they are making money. This little war had been a
tonic to national unity and self-respect, easily translated into
a mood of business confidence. Negatively this was strengthened
by a gradual discovery that polyglot immigrant masses were a
handicap to socialism more than a menace to law and order.
But a more positive development was under way. Under pres-
sure of a vigorous labour movement American capitalists,
reluctantly but less so on the whole than their European rivals,
were learning the lesson that higher wages mean better
customers and bigger profits. They learned it more willingly
because they had no alternative customers in the shape of a big
army and navy. Capitalism was taking on a qualitatively new
character; God, the Great Salesman, was revealing America
as his chosen land.
There were still ups and downs, as always: employment
sagged in Igo4., Igo8, Igi2. But the general trend was of rapid
expansion, and conditions of life acceptable especially to new-
comers from Europe helped to quench any desire for radical
change. Correspondingly the ruling groups were less tempted
than those of Europe to look for further diversions in the style
57 Mahan, op. cit., p. 19.
II9
of I 8g8. One leading attraction of empire to crowded Europe
was in any case missing here. Britons found room in their
Dominions to make new homes; Frenchmen could settle in
Algeria; Germans and Italians were at least tutored to think
of colonies as areas where surplus population could be settled
under the national flag. Export of men and women, irrelevant
as it might be to capitalist interests, was as important to
imperialism, by strengthening its popular appeal, as export of
capital. Still half empty and receiving millions of foreigners-
whose loss European nationalism increasingly grudged-
America could not think of it as a passport to prosperity.
It was from the Philippines, America's new base in the Far
East, that troops were sent to China in I goo to take part in the
bloodthirsty suppression of the Boxers. But in I goo, as again in
the intervention in Russia two decades later, for which it
provided a rehearsal, there is some substance in the contention
that America was going in with the others in order to restrain
them. Unable to restrain them from further pressure on China,
it was soon drawing back. It was turning away too from the
cordial relationship with Britain that an American had seen as
'the protection of our common civilization',sB and that the
l<'rench cynic saw (like De Gaulle in our clay) as threatening
the world with a hegemony of 'Pan-britainism' ,s9 Nothing is
more striking than the divergent paths taken by the two
'Anglo-Saxon' countries from this point: the U.S. returning on
the whole to industrial expansion, or contenting itself with
unadventurous sallies into its own Caribbean backyard,
Britain by comparison neglecting its industry and reposing on
its imperial couch.
After I goo the next event in the Far East was the Russo-
Japanese war of Igo4-05, the first serious war for many years
and the first of a new and warlike century. It gave a vivid
demonstration of the price in blood to be paid for power in
this climactic epoch of mass armies and mass slaughter; a price
America was sensibly reluctant to pay. When it was over the
belligerents soon came together, drawing with them their allies,
France and Britain. In face of this combination any active
American policy beyond the Pacific was impossible, a fact
which healthily reinforced the tendency to give priority to
5B Foulke, op. cit., Prcf. 59 Berard, op. cit., p. 42.
development at home. The Great War split the Old World, but
along lines little desired by the U.S., which would have pre-
fencd a European grouping against tsarist Russia and Japan,
as a quarter-century later it would have preferred one against
Soviet Russia. Powerful American interests came it is true, for
adventitious reasons, to favour entry into the war; all the same,
the government drifted into it very hesitantly, and the country
took only a trivial share in the fighting, at a time when the
romantic glow of 1914 had long since faded in the morass of the
western front. Still more disillusioning, the war ended with a
Bolshevik revolution and Japan poised for further conquest.
Economically and financially, it is again true, America came
out on top. But the next twenty years were to show how little
economic strength not backed by military strength could
guarantee political influence in a militarized world.
'Few Americans have ever taken any interest in their insular
possessions', one of them wrote in I 92 I.
60
Englishmen took
equally little interest in their colonies, so far as any intelligent
knowledge of them went, but were immensely conscious of
possessing them, as a Victorian husband was of his wife and
children. If there was in I8g8 a touch of impatience to prove
that whatever the European could do, even running colonies,
the Yankee could do better, as soon as he had his Philippine toy
he was tired of it. As a basis of power in the Far East the islands
were soon coming to seem futile. Their sugar was not wanted;
immigrants from them still less. An exodus of Negroes from the
South into the big cities was already causing grave race riots
in the early years of the century: the prospect of another
coloured influx was another reason for not wanting colonies.
Remarkably soon there was talk of giving the Philippines
complete independence.
In Europe the prime Hmction of government, inherited from
a feudal past, was to discipline the rude masses; similarly in
colonies the grand gift it professed to bring was Order. In
British or French colonies, as compared with Portuguese or
Russian, this came to be tinged with the newer ideal of Progress.
America was in duty bound to put Progress first. But the
flo S. Greenbie, The Pacific Triangle (London, 1921), p. 316. Cf. p. 319:
'We have recently been on the very verge of granting independence, but un-
fortunately, oil has been discovered by the Standard Oil Company .... '
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN I2I
medley of peoples and languages in the Philippines was a
formidable obstacle, and there was a very wide gap, material
and cultural, between Americans and the mass of any 'native'
race. They stood at the opposite pole from the Spanish and
Portuguese pioneers who set out from Europe with a material
equipment little more elaborate than that of some of the
peoples they subdued. And America, lacking a true civil service
even at home, had no administrators to take the place of the
Spanish friars in whose lethargically greedy hands the running
of the islands had always largely been. On the other hand it
found it natural-as Britain did by comparison with France,
Spain, or Russia-to allow a good deal of local autonomy. Its
businessmen were accustomed to control their own city govern-
ments and State legislatures through local bosses and lobby
influence; to control a colony through its own politicians would
be a logical extension of this.
Older and more static empires too were making usc of puppet
rulers, always men of feudal stamp, relics of a moribund past:
Indian princes, Javanese rajas, Emirs of Bokhara. In the
Philippines after three centuries of Spanish rule no such genuine
feudal antiques survived. A partner more congenial to American
taste was ready to hand in the form of an upper class long semi-
Europeanized and now willing enough to adopt American ways,
especially of making money. Its better element had come to the
front in the revolt against Spain, but was easily split off from
the rebel peasantry; there was no socialism yet in Asia to lend
ballast to nationalism. At bottom the mass rising against Spain
was an agrarian rising,6
1
as all later anti-imperialist movements
in S.E. Asia were to be (and as most Balkan risings against the
Turks had been). To the extent that American policy steered
investment away from land, into sugar mills as against sugar
plantations,6z it represented evolution along bourgeois lines
instead of feudal stagnation.
But the relationship corrupted the colonial elite very much
as big- business had corrupted American politics; it turned it
into something very much like the comjJrador bourgeoisie of
China, out of which was to come the Kuomintang and America's
most disastrous alliance in Asia. Even more than the British
6I E. H. Jacoby, Agrarian Utzrest in Southeast Asia (N.Y., 1949), p. 192.
62 Ibid., Ch. 6.
or Dutch, the Americans made contact only with the upper
stratum they worked through, and knew nothing of the masses
below. When the Philippines were finally granted independence
after the Second World War they were a country tied to U.S.
capitalism and run by the class of collaborators who had
battened on 'an economy in which the rich grew richer and the
poor poorer'. 63
Virtually shut out for many years from the big world beyond
the Pacific, the U.S. was the more disposed to make itself felt
in Latin America. It could still believe that it was acting
defensively, to ensure its own security, or protectively, to save
its weaker neighbours from molestation. During the Spanish
war there was some panic fear of enemy warships bombarding
America's open coasts, and this lent colour to defence argu-
ments which to foreigners might appear disingenuous. In 1903
came the seizure of the Panama Canal zone from Colombia. It
was the kind of coup that the Goulds and Rockcfellers had
practised inside the U.S., and that public opinion on the whole
acquiesced in as a short cut to material progress, with the
impatience of a nation of technicians. Theodore Roosevelt was
anxious to follow this up by getting the Danish West Indies.
'They were, he said, the key to the Panama Canal.'64 Every
'key' in this game requires another key to make it safe. But
though the Canal Zone might come to be part of an empire's
infrastructure, its seizure contrasted with Britain's conduct two
decades earlier in making the security of the Suez Canal the
pretext for occupying all Egypt and turning it into a lucrative
colony. And newspaper prophecies in England after the
Spanish War that the U.S. would go on to annex Mexico and
Nicaragua6s were not being fulfilled. It was intervening forcibly
only in civil broils, or what could be made to appear such, as
in Colombia in 1903, or in San Domingo in 1904- when debts
to Europe might have invited European meddling, or in Cuba,
under treaty right, in 1906. When General Pershing-a
graduate of both Red Indian and Philippines campaigns-was
sent into Mexico in 1916 the invasion was a reprisal for what all
6:1 W. M. Ball, Nationalism and Communism in East Asia (Melbourne, 1952),
p. 8s.
6
-< M. F. Egan, Recollections of a H a j J j ~ l ' Lile (N.Y., 1924.), p. 224.
65 Heindel, ojJ. cit., p. 81.
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN 123
foreign interests agreed in regarding as outrageous conduct by
revolutionaries. It was reminiscent of the Austrian reprisal two
years before against Serbia, but very unlike this it amounted in
the end to little more than a gesture. Mexico was one of the
bigger countries, where intervention could not be passed off
as a mere police action; more important, it was united against
the intruder as Latin American countries seldom were. 'The
whole Mexican nation was actively hostile to our troops.'
66
However, while British Toryism had failed to inveigle the
U.S. into adopting its own type of imperialism, the U.S. was
fast developing another of its own, less extreme but often highly
irritating to both victims and rivals. British Liberals who hoped
to see it setting a new standard of international conduct were
disappointed. Lord Bryce was exhorting Washington to treat
the other American nations with great tact, to be 'the dis-
interested, absolutely disinterested and unselfish advocate of
peace and good will'.
6
7 Instead it was giving more and more
backing to businessmen who had an instinctive sense of being
entitled to something better than fair play anywhere in the
New World. A British competitor complained of being squeezed
out of Colombia by 'that economic penetration which is thought
in the United States to be the proper accompaniment of
the Monroe doctrine'.
6
8 A traveller more concerned with
Latin American feelings reported them in the I9IOS to be
embittered by 'high-handed aggression, disguised under the
name of progress and regard for liberty'.69 'To save themselves
from Yankee imperialism', wrote a Peruvian, 'the American
democracies would almost accept a German alliance or the aid
of Japanese anns ... .'7 As now interpreted, the Monroe
Doctrine was defeating its own ostensible purpose. 'Dollar
Diplomacy', that Caribbean forerunner of American world
policy after r 945, was by this time a familiar phenomenon. Yet
even at this stage it marks a significant difference, not of
66
Ganoe, oj1. cit., p. 455
67 Lord Bryce, South America. Observations and lmj;rcssions ... (London,
1912), p. 509.
68 J. A. Spender, Weetman Pearson, First Viscount Cowdrqy r850-I927 (London,
1930), p. 210; c[ Perkins, op. cit., pp. 102-3.
69 R. B. Cunninghame-Graham, Jose Antonio Pdez (London, 1929), p. 293
7 F. Garcia Calderon, in A. Alvarez, Thr i\1onroe Doctrine (\A/ashington.
1924.), pp. 257 fl'.
psychology alone, from European precedent, that such inter-
ventions were hole-and-corner affairs, furtively carried on at
the bidding of one lobby or another, not in the open with fire
and enthusiasm.
In the rest of the world, still largely composed of empires,
the unique industrial strength of the U.S. allowed it to buy
whatever it wanted from them, and in some ways become a
participant in their habits of mind as well as their profits.
South-cast Asia was producing tin and rubber very largely for
the British, French and Dutch to sell to America, in return for
American goods for their own consumption in Europe.
71
Here
was a trade triangle not unlike the older one of Indian opium
paying for China tea to be drunk in Britain, in which too the
U.S. had come to be involved. In a sense it was employing the
old empire-builders as managers, to spare itself the embarras-
sing task of running colonies on its own. Even if the price ofraw
materials from Asia had to include the commission paid to them,
it was still low, because they helped to keep Asian earnings low.
Altogether the situation lent some meaning to Kautsky's
prediction of a 'super-imperialism' uniting all capitalist
interests. An idealized version of this may be detected in Colonel
House's scheme of early rgq. to avert a European war by
getting all the big States to cooperate in a grandiose develop-
ment of the backward world.n
American feelings about the old empires still wavered.
Increasing investment in the countries owning them gave U.S.
capital a sort of sleeping partnership. It was an ill omen that
the first big American investment in Europe consisted of loans
to Britain for the Boer War.73 Liberal objections to imperialism
were still alive, on the other hand, and some unflattering pictures
of colonial conditions were drawn. One observer in the Ig2os
described an Indochina run by bored Frenchmen only longing
to get home to Paris, while behind a civilized fa<;:ade oriental
oppression still flourished.74 Britons in India were frequently
11 Jacoby, op. cit., p. 6.
7
2
The Intimate Pajms qf Colonel House, eel. C. Seymour (London, 1926),
Vol. I, pp. 24.7-9, 253, 271. The U.S. was able to export capital before 1914.
because still getting capital from Europe: C. K. Hobson, The Exj;ort of
Caj;ital (London, 1914.), p. 29.
73 Corey, ojJ. cit., op. 227.
71 H. A. Frank, East q[Siam (1926), pp. 223, H:3
125
nettled by American failure to appreciate their work. A book
like Mother India made amends. It depicted India as incapable
of looking after itself, an attitude clearly linked with the
racialism in American thinking; it was full of indignation (often
well warranted) about the way Hindus treated their women,
and full of admiration for British efforts to improve things.7s
These efforts could be put in the same category with America's
periodical descent on some disorderly Central American
republic under colour of straightening out its affairs.
On balance the U.S. was moving towards a solidarity of
feeling with the old empires, at any rate the British which it
heard most about. Much of the style and matter of American
apologetics of world power today can be traced back to British
imperialism in its later, defensive days; to such windy rhetoric
as Younghusband's, with an obbligato accompaniment of
religious phrases, about the high moral purposes of the British
invasion of Tibet in I904-,7
6
-or Zimmern's eulogy of British
imperial history with the navy invariably 'the champion of
common human rights', almost too eager to go 'crusading' in
defence of right against wrong.n Britannia must rule the waves,
not for any selfish ends but for the good of all. In the same vein
an American expert on China wrote a book in I 904- to convince
his countrymen that they must secure the mastery of the
Pacific ;
78
'mastery', he explained, not implying ill will to anyone
else. If British imperialism failed after rgoo to secure the U.S.
as partner, it was destined to have the U.S. as heir. In recent
years indeed America has looked like a provincial actor jumping
on the stage to repeat the same catch-phrases and claptrap that
Britain won applause with, now when they have grown stale
and silly; an illustration of Marx's dictum about history doing
things twice, the second time as a farce.
Only in the past twenty years has opportunity come to
America to add political power to economic. In the interwar
years, when Red peril andY ell ow peril were so evenly balanced,
nothing could be done beyond the Pacific (in the Manchurian
crisis, for instance) without worsening one or the other. The
75 Katherine Mayo, A1other India (1927).
76 Sir F. E. Younghusband, India and Tibet (1910).
77 A. Zimmcrn, The Third British Emjiire (1926), pp. !.lo, 102.
78 T. R. Jernigan, China's Business Methods and Policy ( 1904), p. 2gB.
Slump, which turned Germany and Italy back to imperialism,
pushed America further into withdrawal. While Europeans had
alternatives to look to, socialist or fascist, America had none,
and the breakdown of the 'way of life' that all classes had come
to identify themselves with had all the more prostrating an
effect. Even Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean flagged during
the I 930s, as much from this paralysis of the nation's belief in
itself as from New Deal enlightenment. This was the gloom
from which the public was rescued, psychologically as well as
materially, by Pearl Harbour. Victory over Japan, and posses-
sion of the atom bomb, raised relief to exaltation. It was the
first, and the only, clear-cut victory in a big war that America
has ever won; everyone else was crippled; an 'American
century' seemed to be dawning.
It was America's turn to be carried up to the mountain-top
and shown the kingdoms of the earth. Y ct it could not, without
loss of faith in itself as well as of others' faith in it, annex any of
them, even a Guatemala. Instead it wanted to play once more,
on the grandest scale, what history and national character had
made its favourite role, that of Perseus or St. George slaying
monsters and throwing a shield over life, liberty, and the pursuit
of profit. Hollywood has reflected this fantasy among the rest
of America's daydreams. Just as all the Kaiser's army
manoeuvres ended with a triumphant cavalry charge, every
American adventure-film had to end with a hero galloping or
driving at full speed to rescue some unfortunate in the nick of
time; in Griffith's classic Intolerance, for example, made in 1916
just before the U.S. sprang (or more accurately, shuffled) to the
rescue of European democracy.
Japan between 194-1 and 194-5 professed, not altogether
groundlessly, to be liberating South-cast Asia from its Western
oppressors. America in turn, in its grand irruption into Asia,
was coming to liberate it from Japan, as in 1898 it came to save
the Philippines from Spain. And however much it had been
already flowing, financially and spiritually, into the mould of
the European empires, taking their shape and ready to replace
them when they crumbled, its outlook and tactics were still,
until a few years ago, more modern and adaptable than theirs.
It was Europe's obstinate clinging to power after 1945 that
drew America on, creating situations that it could scarcely help
taking advantage of or, as in Vietnam, being sucked into. Thus
in Iran the U.S. stepped in to assist a royalist counter-
revolution and win a big share in the oil-fields when Britain's
foolish obstinacy had pushed one wing of a divided ruling class
into a programme of nationalization. By and large America in
contrast with its predecessors was buying its way into the
Middle East by offering higher royalties. Its 'imperialistic'
backing of Zionism has only hampered it, and helped Russia.
But every onward step in regions where colonialist practices had
long been habitual made them more a part of American habit
too, and enabled a hydra-headed CIA to multiply its activities.
One legacy from the old empires was a besetting fear of Red
plots up and down the planet. Britain, France, Holland, from
1917 on were anxious to make it appear that all nationalist
movements against their rule were instigated by agents of
Moscow. To some extent their governments really believed
this, being now shaky and uncertain, and not wanting to admit
to themselves that they were really disliked by their subjects;
but they had in addition to disarm liberal criticism at home,
and also in America where there was for instance an 'American
League for India's Freedom'. Japan's profession of defending
Asia against communism, as well as Western greed, and Hitler's
of defending Europe, was something else that America could
take over from its defeated opponents. It was shouldering now
the responsibility that haunted Wilson when he tried to keep
out of the Great War because only a U.S. with intact strength
could shore up '"white civilization" and its domination over
the world'.79 His academic phrase meant, in the vernacular,
defence of capitalism. But this could still masquerade as
defence of freedom against its arch-enemies, communist Russia
and China. Unhappily the character of the Stalinist regime
made it easier for old American dislike of European monarchies
and their colonialism to be turned into condemnation of Stalin
and his 'Soviet empire', or Mao the 'Red emperor'. It was
helpful too, so far as Western opinion was concerned, that
China was the old 'Yellow peril' in new guise, neatly filling the
blank left by Japan, while the U.S.S.R. could be viewed as a
half-Asian country under a barbarous Asiatic despotism.
Instead of a Doctrine protecting the New World against the
79 Clinard, ofJ. cit., p. I 7 I.
MARXIS!\! AND IMPERIALISM
Old, we now have one to protect all the old world of class
society against socialism. In effect the Platt Amendment
imposed on Cuba has been generalized to cover all countries
under the American umbrella, with even the small fry being
left under their own, however dubiously independent govern-
ments. There was a precedent in the Mandate system invented
as a concession to the spirit of the age by the victorious Allies
in rgrg, and operated in countries like Iraq through client
rulers who remained clients when the Mandate nominally
ended. A working model was provided by the Philippines, where
a reliable governing class had been successfully fostered, and
was tied to America by common interests and by fear of its
own discontented poor. The islands could now be given
independence, and were a showpiece highly attractive to other
propertied groups in eastern Asia.
King George had plenty of friends in America, and President
Nixon has plenty of friends in Asia. The more fiercely national-
ism flares up in Asia, becoming at the same time a mass
movement for social reform, the more class interests it neces-
sarily antagonizes, and all these are eager allies of America. It
does not take much shrewdness for them to see that the way
to get money or guns is to discover a Red plot, as Titus Oates
discovered Popish plots, or as a quack doctor might scare a
rich old patient. In America itself there are always interested
parties to lend them a hand, and to palm off the most un-
savoury characters as so many William Tells resolved to sell
their lives dearly against communist aggression. In the
meantime they sell their services dearly to America. Tory
England after all had no difficulty in seeing Southern Seces-
sionists as men rightly struggling to be free, and even had
thoughts of intervening in the Civil War on their side.
It is an instance of the fine distinctions that a national
conscience often draws that the U.S. even now feels a little
uncomfortable with monarchs, but is quite at home with
dictators, military or civilian. Bao Dai was less congenial to it
than the much more tyrannical Ngo Dinh Diem. An implicit
assumption is indulged in-a capitalist version of the withering
away of the State-that authoritarian government backed by
an American-trained army and police will establish conditions
for 'free enterprise' to flourish in: a modern middle class will
then grow up, and the country will become safe for something
like America's own mode of guided democracy. In most social
contexts this prospect is quite chimerical; and from the point
of view of mass welfare indirect rule may be even worse than
actual colonialism. It has occurred to visitors in Latin America
that if Washington were directly responsible for things there,
roads and hospitals and schools could not be quite so scarce.
It is America now that sets out to police the world, while
European and Japanese capitalism calmly looks on and shares
in the proceeds. Yet America is in various ways less well
equipped for the task. In Latin America and some parts of
Asia it has had on the whole a deceptively easy time in asserting
its suzerainty. It is the l<'ar East that has proved baffling.
Militarily the old empires, set up before Asian nationalism
took form, relied heavily on native troops. America has
endeavoured to follow suit. Eisenhower talked hopefully of
'setting Asians to fight Asians', and may have thought with
Pompey that he had only to stamp his foot and the legions
would spring up. In South Korea it would seem for the time
being that a useful recruiting-ground has been discovered.
Elsewhere, and especially in South Vietnam, things have not
gone so \Yell. One awkwardness is that for the sake of appear-
ances local troops have to be left to fight, or run away, under
their own leaders. In any case there is nothing in their make-up
to qualify Americans to officer native armies as Europeans used
to do, any more than to administer colonies themselves.
They have it may be said a species of 'native troops' of their
own, Negroes whom army service has offered some oppor-
tunities denied to them_ in other fields.so But after years of war
the American people at large seems-to its credit-scarcely less
un-military than it was before. No officer-caste has grown up
in the image of the Junker or the Samurai; even now 'officer-
ship is a low-status proiCssion'.sr A Vietnam war has no cavalry
charges and little glamour. Instead we see increased reliance
on scientific methods of destruction, that can lead to nothing
better than a grotesque future of government from the air, of
peoples condemned to live a nocturnal existence while in the
80
M. Janowitz and Lt. Col. R. Little, Sociology and the 111ilitary Establish-
ment (revised edn., N.Y., 1965), pp. 51-52.
~ ~ Ibid., p. 39
daytime American planes fly about distributing good-will
leaflets and napalm. We sec, too, increased reliance in client
countries like Brazil on scientific methods of police terror,
borrowed by the CIA from the Gestapo and the SS.
The CIA would look the most un-American of all things,
were it not able to claim ancestry in the private detective
agencies like Pinkerton's that throve by supplying employers
with spies and gunmen to keep their workers down. Today the
morbid police mentality that it embodies, with its doctrinaire
ban on any popular change anywhere in the world, suggests an
ideology stiffened into dogma, floating free of any base in
rational calculation. Something like this may have occurred
towards the end of other epochs, as in the last phase of the
Holy Alliance when the Tsar Nicholas I was the policeman of
the continent, wielding his power in some ways quixotically, in
a spirit of infatuated devotion to an order of things that no
one else any longer took so literally for gospel. It is only
Russia and America, the two nations which could be seen
more than a century ago as the two great ones of the earth,sz
born alike to extraordinary if conflicting destinies, that have
been able in modern times to preside by turns over the last
stand of an epoch or the inauguration of a new one. They have
been the two extensions or amplifiers of western Europe,
inventor of almost everything that has made the modern
world, but too small and too divided to work out its conceptions
on a grand scale, or doing so only in botched forms by fighting
wars and making empires. In the ancient world Greece lay in
something like the same position between Persia to the east and
Rome to the west.
Whatever its bosses may desire, America is the last country
to be easily kept immobile for very long. More than any other
it has been a bundle of contradictions, jungle economics and
Puritan conscience, generosity and greed, jostling together,
and has swung to and fio more widely. It lost interest over-
night in its first flutter in colonialism, in a volatile fashion
impossible to a Europe rancid with hereditary ambitions and
vendettas. Ability to forget is one part of learning. Engels
thought of America as likely to 'travel in tremendous zigzags', 83
82
Pierre Soule, quoted in Ettinger, ojJ. cit., p. 216.
BJ Marx and Engels, op. cit., p. 190.
IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN I3I
but to progress towards socialism faster than Europe once it
began.
8
4 There is more than mere hypochondria in the nervous
anxiety of conservatives ever since I 9 I 7 to seal it off hermetically
against socialism, to keep 'dangerous thoughts' out of its head.
American imperialism, by origin a racket, an outgrowth of big-
business racketeering at home, now has this obsession added to
it. In eastern Asia it has landed the country in 'one of those
dreadful, tragic, hopeless situations which seem to mark the
decline or exhaustion of a colonial relationship': 8s-the words
arc Kennan's, describing Spain's final efforts to hold Cuba,
and written a few years before America's efforts to hold South
Vietnam began. Vietnam may turn out to have saved not only
itself but also America, by tearing the web of deception and
self-deception that Americans have been weaving round
themselves.
The hopeful view that they are still economically and
morally capable of changing course, and prospering without
either arms-race or colonialism, was stated again not long ago,
with clue caution, by the American Marxist Perlo.8
6
Progress
has always been halting and imperfect, and whatever its
shortcomings a country can only be measured by comparison
with others. Peace and fraternity, America's early watchwords,
have never lost all their virtue. If they do, if there is to be an
ultimate failure of democracy in its first homeland, it will be a
misfortune for the world only less great than an ultimate
failure of the first homeland of socialism.
B4 Ibid., pp. 225, 237, 243
ss Kennan, op. cit., p. 13.
8
6
V. Pcrlo, in .Nforning Star (London), 7 June 1968. I have benefited by
discussion of this point with Dr David Horowitz, and by his trenchant
criticisms of the first draft of this article throughout.
4
The Peasant Revolution
Some Questions
A few years ago there began to be great hopes of a new wind of
change blowing through the Third World, a fresh impetus to
socialism from the backlands. They were inspired by the Cuban
success, following on the Chinese, and by Maoist revolutionary
preaching; together these seemed to constitute a still more
potent version, a New Testament, of Marxism, which having
lost its way in Europe was having a rebirth outside.
But no Marxism can work magic; and in some hopes of these
last few years there was a flavouring of the miraculous. Many
western socialists were the more easily impressed by these
prospects because of frustration in their own countries, where
labour movements have fallen into narrow parochialism and the
left wing has been as much in a blind alley politically as the
backward lands economically. It has at times, as a result,
seemed inclined to wait for political salvation to come from the
wilderness, from eruption of volcanoes that in the West seem
extinct. It was almost a new stirring of the old European dream
of the noble savage: humanity uncorrupted by the fleshpots of
Egypt was to arise from the Andes or the Mountains of the
Moon (even, it appeared at times, from Harlem) to accomplish
what a degenerate western working class no longer cared to
attempt. Blueprints could be got from China for revolution in
any social conditions from Stone Age onward. Wishfulness of
this kind had shown itself, in fact, even before Maoist doctrine
came to endorse it. One foretaste can be recognized in the
counsel of despair that made the Indian Communists defeated
in I 94.8 in their strongholds look to border hillmen for new
recruits. Today the Naxalite sect of the fragmented CPI is
THE PEASANT REVOLUTION I 33
reported to be, with a stiffening now of advice from Peking,
seeking support afresh in remote tribal fringes.
Revolution was made in China, and is being made in
Vietnam, by a peasantry in the true sense, a solid, settled,
dose-packed mass of cultivators; a peasantry which is not so
often met with outside Asia. Border hillmen, tribal minorities,
are as different from it as peasants are from townsmen (and
often, as in Vietnam before socialism. came, on as bad terms
with it), and there has been too much tendency to lump them
all together in a common primitiveness. The day of the true
primitive, the Mongol or Berber nomad who used to overturn
effete kingdoms, has long gone by. In remote jungles of the
Amazon or Congo it may be fairly easy to start a fight which
could smoulder for years without presenting any serious
challenge to a government. Elsewhere there is every gradation
between the 'true' or Asian peasantry and the primitive tribe.
But most peasants of all sorts are miserably poor, and there arc
vastly more of them than there were industrial workers in the
West when these could be thought of as the grand revolutionary
force. Daydreams and extravagances apart, many found it easy
to believe that the tale of the civil war in China was going to
be repeated in the whole backward world: revolution in-
filtrating and then inundating the countryside, until the towns
and industrial centres were isolated and at last swallowed up
in the flood.
Y ct tangible results have been meagre. Here and there, in
Tanzania for instance, there has been modest progress of a less
explosive character. Actual peasant revolt, like working-class
revolt before it, has often not come when it might have been
expected, and when it has come has most often failed, as the
Hukbalahap rising in the Philippines did. Much of the globe,
including large areas of Africa and Latin America, has
remained as barren of general progress as the developed
countries-those of Communist Europe among them-of
political progress.
A glance back at earlier history shows us the peasantry of
some European and Asian countries, like France or Russia or
China, in a state of insurrection against monarchy and land-
owners for centuries on end: that is, there was nearly always an
I 34 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
outbreak bigger or smaller in one province or another. None
of these was successful by itself; the biggest, like the German
peasant war of I 524.-25 or the Taiping rebellion in China in
the mid-nineteenth century, had some urban affiliations,
though they too failed. Real success came when peasant revolt
coincided with (and did not collide with) movements of other
class forces, which did not exist outside Europe before our day.
Bourgeois revolution was scarcely possible without peasant
backing as in France in I 789. It might be said that the German
peasants failed in I524-25 because the middle class in the field
at the same time was too weak; and, conversely, that the German
middle class failed in I 84.8 because the peasant movement then
in the field was too weak. It might further be conjectured that
socialist revolution, in turn, failed to come about in the
western countries for lack of a big, mutinous peasantry to
reinforce the working class; in Germany for example in I9I9.
At any rate there has been no successful socialist revolution
without a massive peasant revolution running alongside working-
class militancy, as in Russia in I9I7 (just as in I789 it ran
parallel with bourgeois ambitions). In China, peasant revolt
guided by socialist ideas and cadres actually superseded the
working class. But there was a very special combination of
factors in China, too easily overlooked: a peasantry accustomed
for ages to anti-feudal revolt, a national spirit, a foreign in-
vasion, and finally a world war that brought the revolution to
the brink of success. The Russian revolution had been made
possible by the First Worlcl War, and the Cuban almost caused
a third.
A mass outbreak must either propel the mass forward, or
push it mentally, historically, back; and in the past the effect
was oftener retrograde than not. Resistance to revolutionary
France and Napoleon pushed the peasants of south Italy and
Spain further back towards the middle ages; the great Indian
uprising against European domination, the Mutiny of the
peasant soldiery in I857, was in many ways atavistic, and so
was its Chinese parallel, the Boxer Rebellion of I900. Like the
Boxers, Burmese peasant rebels three decades later pinned their
faith to magic charms and bullet-proof talismans,r and some
of the M au-mau insurgents in Kenya even more recently must
I Sec M. Collis, Trials in Burma (London, 1938), Chap. 7, Section 7
THE PEASANT REVOLUTION I 35
have belonged equally to the past. This mental blindness has
gone with the style of peasant fighting, which has not often been
a modern guerrilla style. The Spanish peasants of 18o8-q., who
fought on guerrilla lines, only fought in their own districts,
and were effective chiefly as auxiliaries to a foreign regular
army, Wellington's. Rustics fighting on their own in small
bands have been apt to deteriorate and become hardly dis-
tinguishable from brigands, which some of their members may
indeed have been. But as a rule, the instinct of peasants defying
authoritv has been either to make a sudden brief local tumult,
as in Fr;nce in I 789 or Russia in I 905, or else flock together
in unwieldy masses, imitation armies, as in Germany in I 524.
or China in I900. Numbers promoted confidence, a delusive
confidence that expressed itself aptly enough in faith in divine
protection or magic charms. Small groups need more positive
ideas, to keep on fighting and not lose sight of their purpose, as
much as they need adequate weapons. Not only political ideas,
but proper organization and tactics, must be brought from
outside to a peasantry, by men with a better knowledge of the
enemy's strength and how it can be combated. True guerrilla
warfare is a quite recent and sophisticated development,
dovetailing old feeling with new thinking. Recent history
shows that the combination is possible, but very far from easy.
A complicating factor is that peasant populations have
normally been stratified, in one degree or another, and in
many areas, notably in parts of India, this is now deepening.
Under older feudal conditions the better-off peasant was often
the most rebellious, as in England in I38I, Germany in I524,
France in I 789. Long after hatred grew between richer and
poorer peasant, as m tsarist Russia, the countryside as a whole
might continue rebellious. But most old-time outbreaks were
fairly brief, sudden flockings together of rioters into bands that
any peasant might join in, with one motive or another, in-
cluding plunder.
2
A modern guerrilla struggle, carefully
organized and long sustained, is a very different thing, and may
require more united sympathy than can be expected from a
peasantry divided into strata or classes, the richer ones well
aware of the menace of communism to them as well as to the
2
Sec S. M. Dubrovsky, K1est';yanskoc dvizlzenic v rcvoliutsii I905-I907 gg.
(Moscow, rgs6).
rulers. It was a vital factor in China and Yugoslavia that there
was foreign invasion to draw them together.
In the theory of peasant revolution Latin America has had
a prominent place. Cuba's leaders have seemed at times to
value their own achievement only as the spark to kindle a
continental blaze; like Lenin making his seizure of power in
1917 with Europe, rather than Russia, as his hoped-for prize.
Wiele areas of Latin America may well be thought as incapable
as any in the world of any peaceful reform, because of the semi-
feudal modes of exploitation that have come clown from the
past, no longer historically 'necessary' or rational, but very
hard to shake off. Their vested interests arc part and parcel of
a ramshackle social structure that its custodians, including
those in Wall Street and the White House, arc afraid of
tampering with for fear of the whole thing collapsing. On the
other hand the same state of affairs may have the same
paralysing effect on socialist reform or revolution.
As against any more cautious forecasts, the revolutionary
thesis, or messianic vision, has been that devoted bands of
volunteers should start armed struggle at once, in the backlancls
where authority is feeblest, confident that once the fight
begins and the sound of guns is heard the population will be
drawn in, first the few and then the many, until the people's
army becomes irresistible. Impatience with anything less bold
is understandable after caution has so often ended in failure,
an abrupt snuffing out of reform either by the local army with
its equipment from the U.S. or by the U.S. itself, the policeman
of the New World as the tsars once were of Europe. It was to
prove this vision that Guevara made his heroic but tragic
attempt in Bolivia.
Guevara seems to have thought in terms of a Cuban situation
repeated everywhere, a people nearly unanimous against a
discredited dictatorship and only waiting for a bold lead. But
every revolution is likely to hinder repetition of itself elsewhere
by putting the other side on its guard. Besides, Cuba was a very
special case, like China, as in fact every country capable of
revolutionary pioneering must be. It was small and compact;
a plantation economy had produced a semi-proletarianized
peasantry; and there were old ingrained habits of resistance.
THE PEASANT REVOLUTION
137
Except in the superficial form of upper-class faction-fighting,
these habits have never had much hold on Latin America
either on the national or on the agrarian level. Under Spanish
and Portuguese rule the continent was curiously quiescent,
thanks partly to the conquered and conquering races each
serving as a check on the other. It got its independence in the
end too easily. Against Spain indeed sanguinary wars had to
be fought, but mostly by a landowning elite making use of a
cannon-fodder of half-wild gauchos and llaneros, half-Indian
horsemen of the plains, to which they then returned. The U.S.
had to do its own fighting for independence, and it was the
British who employed alien-German-soldiery against it. Of
later times it must be said that there has been more grumbling
and oratory about Yankee overlorclship than real effort to throw
it off. Cuba had the great, if painful, advantage of being kept
under Spanish rule to the end of the nineteenth century, and
going through a long series of slave revolts and then of battles
for independence; altogether a toughening education.
On the agrarian plane likewise Latin America's record is not
striking; and other things being equal, villages like nations
arc likelier to be ready for revolt today if they have been long
familiar with revolt in the past-as Russian or Chinese
peasants were, German peasants after r 525 were not. One
grand cause of rustic passivity in Latin America has been,
again, the mixture of discordant races. In many regions,
particularly some of those like Bolivia where hill and jungle
favour guerrilla operations, the peasantry is closer historically
to the African level than the European. It is still mainly or
largely Indian, of many diverse stocks, with the addition of
mixed groups that may be on bad terms with both the 'pure'
races. In the stagnation of most of the South American interior
racial blending or integration has gone on slowly, as in India
where millennia after the Aryan occupation there are still big
pockets of unassimilatecl aborigines, as well as the vast number
of those whose ancestors were turned into 'untouchable' helots.
A kind of passive resistance by the Amerindians to plantation
and urban labour led to their replacement in the developing
coastal areas by African, Chinese, East Indian coolies; active
struggle by such a population, sullenly withdrawn or relegated
(again as in India) to the wilds, is another matter. Its fore-
fathers had little share in the wars of independence, except to
some extent in Mexico where their involvement was the
starting-point of a long-drawn social revolution that has put
Mexico ahead ofmost of the other republics. In other countries
they were often drawn, or rather dragged, into inter-state wars,
and displayed, in Paraguay above all, some of the military
virtues in an astonishing degree. But they were only conscripts,
made usc of by ruling elites as gauchos and llaneros had been;
and it may be questioned whether 'martial races' moulded by
organized, disciplined warfare, like the Germans or modern
Turks, arc (whether as peasants or as workers) good material
for rebellion. The well-drilled serf conscript of the old Prussian
army had qualities the opposite, except for courage, of what
guerrilla warfare calls for.
Compared with most Africans it is a handicap of the Amer-
indians that they have been for centuries under White
domination, physical and-through the Church, so far as it
reached them-mental. By contrast with the Cubans, face to
face with a foreign-backed ruling clique before their revolution,
these Amerindians, whose linguistic boundaries do not coincide
with existing political frontiers, have no country, and only form
the bottom layer of a society meaningless to them. They can
neither strike out a path of their own nor identify themselves
with any 'national' feelings, even with the anti-U.S. feeling so
strong in the towns. Bolivia has been through innumerable
'revolutions', that Indians did well to keep clear of for fear of
being-quite literally-roped in to fight for one faction or the
other. To this clay a backwoods Indian seeing a white man firing
his gun, even if it happens to be a Guevara, must be expected
to react in the same way. One may, in short, be left wondering
whether the leaders Amcrinclia needs today are not men of the
school of Gandhi, or Ambeclkar, or Danilo Dolce, instead of
the school of Guevara.
How explosive peasant discontents may be depends a good
deal on the political cauldron that holds them. In the old
imperial territories this has grown in recent years much less
rigid, and its elasticity has helped to reduce the internal
pressures. Except in a few African areas direct colonial rule has
almost disappeared; imperialism has handed over ad minis-
139
tration to the most conservative local leadership available.
Nothing need be lost by such handing over except the salaries
of colonial administrators, formerly in British India and
French Africa and so on a very important consideration, and
to the Portuguese middle class, it may be, even now, but in
general nowadays a triviality. In return for this small sacrifice
the foreign capitalist is able to withdraw safely out of sight, and
the most tangible incentive to unrest is removed. Rebels, un-
lettered ones especially, need a vivid, personal image of what
they are to fight against. To rise against an invisible overlord
might be like rebelling against the law of gravity.
To depict the change as merely formal, or a mere conjuring
trick, as communistsJ and nationalists have often done, is too
simple. Easy optimism about the capitalist leopard changing
its spots is wrong, but so is the dogma of Lenin or Mao that it
can never change, except in outward disguise. Socialists
underrated for too long after the last World War the imm_ense
resilience of capitalism, when faced by stiff competition from
socialism, as a productive system; and it would be another
mistake to ignore its mental or political adaptability-no
doubt much smaller, but still appreciable. It has changed, and
under sufficient prodding and pushing can change further.
'Neo-colonialism', its present phase in relation to the undevel-
oped regions, has all kinds of shades, depending on the energy
of local leaders, the extent of foreign interest in local resources,
and other factors. At the lowest it must be regarded as an
advance on the old colonial methods; it loosens things up,
makes further advance possible, though far from certain. It
might be compared with the emancipation of the serf.o;; in
Russia in r86r, which solved nothing permanently, but did
signalize a new epoch in Russian history; most obviously it
brought a lull of some decades in agrarian conflict.
Portugal is a very backward corner of western Europe, and
its empire an anachronism, a clinging to methods that others
have been leaving behind. It was the first western empire to
begin, prcm_ature and therefore more parasitical than most,
and it is the last to end. In its early years it sprinkled Africans
with baptismal water, in its last it sprinkles them with napalm;
3 This is a blemish in the otherwise valuable Introduction to .Neo-Colonialism
by J. Woddis (London, 1967); see e.g. p. 50.
q.o MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
in between it has bestowed very little else on them. By keeping
them backward and illiterate it avoided any serious opposition
from them until a few years ago; and at home it has been
strengthened by a dictatorship of many years' standing, which
has prevented any loud criticism such as all the other colonial
powers, and now the U.S., have had to face. The dictatorship
has made life worse for its s u ~ j e c t s both at home and in Africa.
Y ct without some outside agency to serve as a link, any com-
bination of the two against it is hard to foresee. No such com-
bination ever emerged effectively in any of the other empires,
even where, as in Britain or France, there was freedom of
speech in the ruling country. It is enough to recall the lament-
able record of the British Labour Party on India. The British
people had been for too long tutored into a belief that its
prosperity depended on India; the Portuguese people has been
taught that its prosperity (such as it is) depends on the African
possessions being kept.
There is also, as influential and less vulnerable to calcula-
tions of profit and loss, national pride. Portugal's explorations
and conquests of bygone days were remarkable, even if their
results fell before long into miserable decay; Portuguese ships
were harvesting the wealth of Asia when English seamen were
content to haul a few fish out of the North Sea. Memories of
that past have been cherished, and remnants of empire hung
on to, because in modern times Portugal has had too little to
feed its self-respect. Spain hung on to Cuba and the Philippines
to the last gasp for the same reason, as well as for the revenue
they brought in. France fought to keep its empire after I945
partly to wipe out the ignominy of German occupation, while
victorious Britain could afford to show more sense and liberality.
Cuba as the first American country to reach socialism owes
much to its having been the last to escape from European
imperialism; one of the last African countries to escape from it
may prove the first to reach full socialism. This is Portuguese
Guinea, a mere dot on the atlas, but one that deserves very
close attention because it concentrates in its narrow limits
many problems to be seen elsewhere on a bigger, more
amorphous scale. It deserves attention also because its struggle
is led by one of the most remarkable men that modern Africa has
THE PEASANT REVOLUTION J4.I
produced; and because there is a remarkable book about it,
written from first-hand knowledge gained by painful tramping
and canoeing through jungle and swamp, and in the light of
wide knowledge of Africa's past and present and its place in
the world: T/ze Liberation if Guine, by Basil Davidson. 4
'Violence is the essential means of imperialist domination',
writes Cabral, and therefore any serious resistance to it must
include willingness to resort to force.s Guerrilla fighting has
been going on since rg62, and a large proportion of the interior
has been cleared, or nearly cleared, of the Portuguese. This
has been accomplished with means as scanty, from a starting-
point as humble, as could be found almost anywhere in today's
Dark Continents. Guine has under a million inhabitants, with
no genuinely urban clement, half a dozen languages, and a
range of social systems from the primitive democracy of the
village to a semi-feudalism that some areas (typical it may be
of Africa as a whole) have been moving into in recent times.
Some of the Fula tribal chiefs or petty feudalists aided the
Portuguese conquest, while the free villages resisted it; and
today it is these villages that supply the readiest recruits for the
struggle, while the chiefs arc again on the Portuguese side, as
the Indian princes were on the British, and try to hold their
people back. It was only in the late nineteenth century that
most of the interior was conquered, and it would be instructive
to know how many stories of the resistance have lingered in
popular memory, and helped to inspire that of today/'
Davidson's account makes it clear, and this is one of its most
important points, that the rebellion was anything but spon-
taneous. Resentment and hatred of the foreigner were strong,
but they were not dry tinder to blaze up into revolt as soon as
a single spark fell on it. 'The terrors of guerrilla warfare can be
accepted, can be justified', Davidson writes, 'only when they
are suffered as part of a necessary self-defence. This is a hard
lesson that has nothing to do with revolutionarv verbalism.'
7
That resistance was a'- necessity was something 'that villagers
4 Penguin African Library, rg6g.
s A. Cabral, Foreword to B. Davidson, The Liberation f!f Guine.
6 A Nigerian writer has stressed the continuing psychological importance
of the fact that Africa die! resist conquest; sec B. Davidson, Which vVay
Africa? (revised edn., Penguin Afiican Library, rg67), p. 50.
7
The Liberation f!l Guine, pp. 20-I.
J4.2 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
could only be convinced of, first in one district, then in another,
by slow, patient political preparation, long discussion carried
on through supporters native to each area. The guiding party
(PAIGC) was founded in 1959 by Cabral and five others; it
was three years before it felt able to start armed action. In this
sense the Portuguese might well repeat the stock complaint of
conservatives, that all the trouble has been due to a few
'agitators', the handful of educated Afiicans who took the lead.
Between a man like Cabral and his peasant followers the
cultural gap must be about the same as between Guevara and
an Aymara Indian of Bolivia. Cabral had, as Davidson says,
to re-Africanizc himself before he could comprehend and be
comprehended by the villagers. Guevara could scarcely
Indianizc himself; and that revolutionaries of his school have
failed even to grasp the need to get inside the skin of the peasant,
especially the Indian, in order to win his confidence, is a
criticism that Cabral (who has visited Cuba and talked with
Cubans in Africa) seems inclined to stress. There is indeed a
startling contrast between the years of patient preparation in
Guinc and the Gucvarist vision of South American peasants
flocking to the sound of guns in the hands of liberators whose
language, even, they might not understand. A shade of
difference may be perceptible even in Cabral's and Guevara's
conception of the proper relation between guerrilla bands and
peasantry. Cuba had from the first some non-peasant clements
ready to begin a fight and carry it on, seeking and winning
peasant recruits but retaining a certain separateness from the
peasant mass, as of Crusaders from ordinary Christians.s
Guinc had scarcely anything to count on except its peasantry;
guerrilla bands could emerge only from within it, and have
remained an organic part of it, responsible to democratic
criticism.9
There could be no clearer demonstration than Guinc provides
of the importance of the idea. In such a situation also the man
who brings the idea has exceptional freedom to lead in one
direction or another. Instead of seeking reassurance from old-
world magic, like so many peasant rebels before them, these in
Guinc, to all appearances as deeply buried in the past as any
8 See Che Guevara, Guerrilla Wwfare (Penguin edn., I<j6<J).
9 The Liberation qf Guine, p. I I 3
I43
of them, are being guided by civilized leadership towards
modernity and rationality. Given this orientation, stress of
conflict makes the process a rapid one. Davidson quotes a
remark of Cabral that the villagers arc losing their old dread
of the forests, those haunts of demons and evil spirits, because
today these forests are their shelter from Portuguese bombing
raids.
10
Guerrilla warfare-of the modern species-means
continual movement, as Davidson says, 'movement in the
mind even when you arc sitting still'.II
In all this the question arises of whether Guinc must be
looked on as a brilliant exception, or whether it can serve as
a model for other regions in or outside Africa; beginning
naturally with the other Portuguese colonies where revolts
arc going on, Angola and Mozambique. The most obvious
discrepancy is of size. It remains to be seen whether a move-
ment like GuinC's, based on very close-knit, intimate contact
between leaders and local cadres and ordinary men and
women, can be reproduced in a territory of much greater
extent. A similar question is whether Guinc may be better able
than the other two colonies (and many other African countries)
to acquire a sense of national unity, as the PAIGC leadership
hopes it will. Hitherto Guinc has never been anything remotely
like a nation, that odd entity which, with all its defects, was
indispensable to modern Europe's progress and seems indis-
pensable to progress in newly-developing regions now. All the
triumphs of socialism have been nourished and sustained by
patriotism. Bolshevik power was consolidated by the Allied
intervention; the Chinese revolution drew as much on anti-
Japanese as on anti-Kuomintang or anti-landlord feeling;
Yugoslavia came to socialism by fighting Nazi invasion, Cuba
came to it more quickly under threat of Y ankec invasion;
Vietnam is continuing a millennium of struggle for inde-
pendence.
For Guinc to dream of nationhood might seem preposterous,
even by comparison with some other African countries. Still,
it has never been easy to say precisely what a nation is, except
by reference to what it docs. If most African countries have
come by their frontiers accidentally, there has been more
accident and less destiny in the history of all nations than their
IO Ibid., p. I3. II Ibid., p. I7.
I44
historians like to admit; and history may now, aided by con-
scious intention, be able to recapitulate in a few decades what
formerly took centuries of blind evolution. To fuse GuinC's
peoples there is the presence of the white man, the foreign
enemy, on their soil. They may be supposed to share a common
philosophy of life, and mode of living, as those of India did
before they became a nation. Guine like India got from foreign
rule a small intelligentsia of modern outlook, and a lingua
franca, though Guine got not much else. Like Cuba it is small
enough to see itself easily in the mirror of today's events.
Its first national institution is a party, its second a miniature
army. It was a landmark in the struggle when the leadership
was able to form a mobile force willing to fight anywhere, as
distinct from the local militias willing to defend their own
homes. This has been a difficult stage in other revolutions too.
The parliamentary army in the English civil war was such a
mobile force, detached from local allegiances; a fact that must
have assisted its later drift into a professional army divorced
from, and disliked by, the public. There must be some risk of
this happening in any rising now; it may have happened in
some measure in Algeria. China has taken precautions against
it, part of Mao's all-round purpose of keeping the revolution,
and making the nation, totally democratic (or, what may not
be quite the same thing, egalitarian). Guine too is making a
democratic society its goal, the virtues of the old rural fraternity
combined with those of modernity. Its leaders are aiming, in
other words, at something very different from the condition of
those many other African lands where there was no long,
transforming struggle for freedom, and power was transferred
to a small elite class. Here again no doubt vigilance will be
required, and the principles of the 'cultural revolution' in China
will be relevant. Yugoslavia is a warning that even a wartime
leadership of the most genuinely popular origin can to some
extent harden in peacetime into an elite.
If this can be avoided, so simple a society, purged by the war
of its feudal ingredients, should be free to organize itself almost
as if making a social contract in the style of the old philosophers.
Cabral and his fiiends, already thinking of problems of recon-
struction, view agricultural growth as the chief objective, with
radical decentralization to release local initiative, even
abolition of anything like central ministries.
12
Ministries and
their sweets of office are the honeypots in which once progres-
sive politicians in many new countries have stuck fast; and real
democracy may be impossible without real decentralization.
Sheltered by friendly neighbours, Guine might actually be said
to be embarking on a direct transition from primitivism not
only to socialism, but to anarchism, or the withering away of
the State-or rather, it will never have known the State,
except as an alien imposition. Even as a nation, it will have
been formed by consent, instead of by the slow work of time,
and should be able to avoid the excessive nationalism so
dangerously mixed with the socialism of Russia or China.
Orthodox Marxism would query whether such a community,
a federation ofhamlets, could properly be called socialist, when
it would have no heavy industry, no big towns, little of a
working class. It might also ask whether rural communes left
to their own devices will not stagnate, as they arc apt to in
India under the plan of leaving many things to the jJanchayats
or local councils. Guine will be relying on momentum gained
in the war, and on the activity of individuals thrown up every-
where by it. With these assets, and luck, it may not be too
sanguine to think of Guine growing into an African Denmark,
instead of a new Liberia, with a more strongly cooperative
economy, profiting from agricultural science and making
arrangements with other African countries for some of its
industrial needs. Iceland lives well, with nothing to sell but
fish. Aldous Huxley speculated years ago about a Utopia where
every household would have a gadget on the roof to provide
solar power, and all the Birminghams and Pittsburgs would
have faded into bad dreams. Big industry is, after all, in-
creasingly engaged in producing useless or noxious things that
nations and private consumers have to be hypnotized into
thinking they want.
Here we stray into the realm of fancy, and it may be well to
recall that Guine is not yet fully liberated: further, that it is not
clear how it can be expected to complete its liberation, by its
own efforts alone. Portugal is a relatively weak opponent; but
any occupying force with modern weapons may be able to
hold on to positions like the coastal settlements of Guine
1
2 The Liberation of Gui111f, p. I 37.
indefinitely. The Vietnamese can raid big American bases, but
scarcely capture them; in Saigon the population has not risen
against the occupying forces, and it docs not seem to be antici-
pated that the population of Bissau, the Guine capital, will.
Anachronistic rule like Portugal's infects, rather than trans-
forms, the urban section of a subject people, the one most in
contact with it; and every long conflict corrupts and demoralizes
some sections, while it purifies others. Guerrillas have seemed
at times-often in Algeria, occasionally in south Vietnam-to
be resorting to indiscriminate terrorism against towns, as if
indulging peasant rancour against townsmen, or trying to
coerce the town into joining the countryside. That townsman
and rustic have been natural enemies all through history is a
fact with an important bearing on all peasant-revolution
prospects. Guevara condemned indiscriminate terrorism,
restricting it to punishment ofpromincnt enemies of the people,
and Cabral's principle seems to be the same.I3 But this leaves
the Portuguese still in Bissau.
In Guine Davidson saw 'Soviet artillery, Czechoslovak auto-
matics, Cuban-made uniforms of Chinese cotton.'H Britain
could have been helping the cause of freedom there in other
ways, and ought to help, but has not helped. It is not for want
of asking: Cabral came to London in I g6o and I g65 to put his
country's case, and his party asks for political support from any
country, African or other. He complains with good reason of
a 'wall rif siltmce built around our peoples by Portuguese
colonialism', IS which has close links with other western capitalist
interests, and whose forces are free to use NATO military
supplies in Africa. Morally its African wars arc a joint west-
European and American responsibility. Britain has had the
closest and oldest links with Portugal, and by its conduct over
Rhodesia it has incurred lately a ficsh debt to Afiica.
Contrary to all socialist prophecy, the capitalist world camp
has come to be more united and harmonious than the socialist
camp. It confronts the backward regions in the shape of vast
corporations, acquiring a steadily more 'multi-national charac-
1
3 Guevara, ojJ. cit., pp. 26, 97; The Liberation qfGuine, pp. 6o-1, 133.
1
4 Ibid., p. 88.
15 Ibid., Foreword.
ter' ;
16
it has arrived, in other words, at a stage not unlike the
'ultra-imperialism' that Kautsky foretold long ago, and Lenin
ruled out. Further expansion of socialism in either the advanced
or the undeveloped regions seems to depend on the emergence
of a combination of forces, an intercontinental united front to
challenge that of capitalism. It docs not seem likely to be
brought about by the peasantry alone, any more than bv the
working class alone, to say nothing of any of the lesser forces
that have been hopefully thought of, like the intelligentsia or
the student movement. Any single class by itself has limited
horizons and ambitions. Progress in Europe was always
brought about by a combination of classes. But today, thanks
to the world market and its division of labour, some regions
have a working class with hardly any peasantry, others a
peasantry with hardly any working class; while various groups,
like the Negroes in the U.S., stand outside the main class
structure of their countries.
For progressive forces to join hands round the globe is
harder than for coupon-clippers. Intransigent Maoism rejects
any cooperation, either with Russia or with Western progres-
sive opinion. And this opinion, in relation to the obscure
wrestlings in the backlands, often seems scarcely to exist,
except as a figure of speech. It has clone about as little for the
black inhabitants of southern Africa as the white man's
liberalism for Negroes in the U.S. By contrast aiel from the
socialist countries looks prompt and vigorous.
The comparison is not in reality altogether so much in favour
of the socialist countries, quite apart from the deplorable
dissensions among them. It is an unlucky fact that socialism
could only gain a foothold in the world, and survive, by
winning control of one or two States big enough to defend
themselves against capitalist aggression; but any big State is
compelled to think of its frontiers and strategic concerns in
ways that have nothing to do with any ideology. This is as true
of China as of Russia. Maoist revolutionism, besides defects
due to Peking's ignorance of the outside world, has been
blended all along with Chinese interests, real or imaginary
16
G. Arrighi and.J. S. Saul, 'Nationalism and Revolution in Sub-Saharan
Africa', in Socialist Register, eel. R. Milibancl anci.J. Saville (London, 1g6g),
p. 145
J4.8 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
interests have always been a bizarre mixture of
the two), the result being at times a foreign policy of trans-
parent opportunism. A right-wing military government in
Pakistan has received fraternal embraces, rebels in Guine have
been cold-shouldered because they were receiving help fiom
Russia.I7
It may be naive to fancy that aiel programmes enjoy much
backing of public good will in any ofthe communist countries.
Demonstrations in Peking of sympathy with suffering peoples
far away are really anti-American demonstrations; it is,
unfortunately, much easier to hate foreigners than to sympathize
with them. Both in China and in Russia the sensation of being
looked up to by weak peoples as patrons and protectors is
liable to feed a national self-complacency already far too
strong in each of them. Russia's satellite-states have not even
this satisfaction, in return for what they have to spend. There
cannot have been systematic debate in any of them about the
principles at stake. But in Czechoslovakia, and no doubt in
the rest, and probably in the U.S.S.R. there have been
two currents of dissent. One was a feeling among many Party
intellectuals that it was wrong to supply aiel, especially arms,
to regimes like those of Egypt or Iraq which kept their own
socialists in jail. The other was a general impatience among
workers and ordinary men and women at being made to give
so much, out of scanty resources, to far-away people whom
they knew nothing about. If Yugoslavs of the industrial north
grumble at their government for investing capital to develop
the backward south, it is not surprising to find a joke current
in Poland that the average Polish worker has five dependents
to maintain: one wife, two children, one Arab, and one
Vietnamese. Cynicism like this can hardly be good for the
prospects of socialism in eastern Europe.
The alternative argument, that socialist countries can do
most for socialism by building it successfully at home, looks
egotistic, and is denounced by Peking as 'goulash socialism'.
Building socialism however does not mean only providing more
pudding, but a new civilization, a new kind of humanity.
Police socialism can make no appeal to prosperous countries,
and realists may be mistaken (as they so often are) in assuming
1
7 The Liberation of Guiwf, p. 88.
I
.I
149
that poor countries do not care about such matters as civil
rights. Russia may indeed have something to learn about grass-
roots democracy from Africa. But as things are, with the working
class reduced to the same political indifference by communist
rule as by capitalist affluence, aiel depends on government
decision; it is one more aspect of communist bureaucracy, and
gives it one more pretext for continuing, and for suppressing
criticism. This applies above all to the most expensive form of
aid, military supplies in large quantities not to rebels but to
governments, such as Sockarno's in Indonesia, most of which
has been either a clcaclloss, or worse.
Where rebels are in action arms are the prime requisite, and
these can only come from the 'East', but they will seldom be
enough by themselves. What progressive westerners can do to
help is far less clear, even nebulous. Broad support can be
gathered only for limited, reformist aims, which the aU-or-
nothing philosophy of Maoism repudiates; it has to be sought
from a medley of liberals, wanting to bring capitalism under
decent control, and socialists, wanting to get riel of it. But what
they can do, although inadequate, has the merit of being
voluntary instead of bureaucratic, inspired by true civic sense,
by recognition that the world cannot be healthy while large
parts of it, with which the advanced countries have multiple
tics-economic, historical, moral-are left unhealthy.
Being voluntary it is harder to mobilize, as well as more
heterogeneous. Even communists in the west have been inclined
to think of colonial issues as marginal, and belonging to the
sphere of philanthropy; whereas what has to be learned now
is that they are vital to all our own chances of progress-that
only by involvement in events and movements outside our own
frontiers can we hope to get on the move once more, whether
as socialists or as liberals, against the juggernaut of monopoly
capitalism. In a way this is harder to grasp now than earlier,
because of the abandonment by Britain and most others of
direct colonial rule. By turning itself into an anonymous net-
work of cosmopolitan corporations, exchanging the plumed
helmet of the governor for the bowler hat of the stockbroker-
by reverting, so to speak, from Empress of India to John
Company-imperialism has lost its glamour, its romantic
attraction; but it has also blunted the sense of responsibility for
F
colonial welfare that a minority formerly felt, while sales of
stocks and shares swell the number of its campfollowers.
Nevertheless, today's new generation has a strong bent towards
internationalism, and could find a better outlet for it outside
Europe than in the Common Market, which has made some
appeal to it. There is a growing intelligentsia that could find
many points of contact, more freely than any political party,
between the west and the 'third world'. There arc smaller
countries aptcr to give a lead than unwieldy Britain; in Sweden
the Socialist Party has given money to rebels in Portuguese
Africa, and a long campaign has been waged to prevent a big
company from taking part in the construction of a dam for the
Portuguese in Mozambique.
Hitherto only sensational happenings, at Suez or in Vietnam
or Ulster, have been able to rouse the same widespread interest
that floods or earthquakes do. A dull steady grind of injustice
far away in South Africa or Bolivia, or even as close at hand as
northern Ireland, has touched only a few consciences. It
seems a necessary preliminary to any real change that some
heads should be broken, as in Ulster in I g6g. By itself violence
may accomplish much, or little, or nothing, according to
circumstances; but it may have the effect, as we have seen
student demonstrations do, of galvanizing outside interests in
favour of reform, and frightening authority into accepting it.
General Booth's maxim was that sinners would not repent until
hell fire was flashed before their eyes, and it is much the same
with sinful governments and respectable newspaper-readers.
But a fright, by itself, is more likely to throw them into a fit
of reactionary hysteria. It is here that enlightened opinion can
play its vital part, by persuading the public at large to draw
the right moral, to move forward instead of back. The bigger
and more permanent the volume of opinion that can be
mobilized, the less violence will be needed as a spur to change.
It is in Africa that hopes of revolution and of more peaceful
progress confront each other most distinctly, and yet may prove
to be each necessary to the other's success. There are three
Africas, besides colonial territories; one of these, the Muslim
north, is likely to go its own way, increasingly preoccupied with
the Middle Eastern conflict and drifting in Egypt's wake
towards a military-bureaucratic socialism. All Islam has lived
ever since it began under what might be called army rule; and
the primacy of the soldier is bolstered today by the feuds with
outsiders in which most Muslim countries are involved: Arabs
with Israel, Pakistan with India, Turkey with Russia. At the
opposite point of the compass South Africa has been taking
shape as a State unique in the modern age, something like
what the southern Confederation would have been if it had
won the American civil war, but with far more modern dyna-
mism, a capitalist edifice reared on a primitive base of racial
domination. It is the 'black Africa' in between whose nature
and future arc most enigmatic. An impressive recent study
depicts it as on the whole inert, now that the glow of indepen-
dence has faded, and in danger of remaining stagnant and
subservient to the West, because it lacks the driving force of any
sufficient class division and tension, within the peasantry or
between it and any other class.
1
s To gain ground economically
it needs joint planning; but this calls for a high measure of
political agreement, still more elusive.
On this view, the sole force capable of setting black Africa
in motion might be common hostility to South Africa. This
was already strongly expressed in the 'Charter of Unity'
signed at Addis Ababa in I 963 by thirty governments, with
several northern ones as wcll;
1
9 fortunately we have an opposite
alignment here from the one in Latin America, where nearly
all governments fawn on the United States. Hitherto most of
those of black Africa have been too busy with their own
doings, or with doing nothing, to take very much notice of the
fiecdom struggles against Portugal. They will all be faced with
an inescapable challenge if, as many predict, South Africa
moves further out from its own limits and draws Portugal and
Rhodesia into an aggressive alliancc.
20
Those who welcome the
prospect will trust to a rallying against the white front to give a
fi:esh, more urgent meaning to the old gospel of African unity.
It would be a recapitulation on a vaster scale of the coming
together of scattered tribes against the white man in Guinc.
IB Arrighi and Saul, loc. cit., p. 172.
1
9 Text of Charter in Davidson, vVhich vV(lY pp. 185-20!.
2o Davidson and other speakers at the Anti-Apartheid movement confer-
ence in London, 6 July, 1 g6g, dwelt on how the various liberation struggles
in southern Africa were now converging.
Intelligent observers have for several years warned western
conservatism of such a prospect, with the unwelcome addition
of a great expansion of Chinese influence. 'The Chinese are
gambling heavily on the correctness of their analysis that
Africa is ripe for revolution', a journalist wrote in I 964., and
he thought that before long they might be proved right.
21
Five
years later another drew an alarming picture of guerrilla
training by the Chinese, soon to be followed by an influx of
munitions along the Tanzania-Zambia railway they are
building, to feed a war against white rulers all over southern
Africa.
22
Peking may be assumed to regard this confrontation
as the best thing that could happen to speed Africa's slow
evolution, and, of course, to strengthen its own position. One
may wonder how far it would really achieve either of these
results. There would be a situation, with China taking the
place of Russia, like that of the Middle East, the Arab countries
confronting Israel. This has gone on for a long time now, and
while it has stirred up a vast amount of excitement among the
Arabs, it might not be easy to say what good it has done them
otherwise. The binding force of a common hatred can be
stimulating, but, like other drugs, also stupefying. In Africa,
where race would be the substitute for the shared language and
religion of the Arabs, black racialism would be lamentably
deepened, as religious fanaticism has been among the Arabs.
Israelis and South African whites are both small intrusive
elements, but both firmly established and far more efficiently
organized than their opponents can be for a long time to come.
Russia all this time has been making an immense investment in
the Middle East in the form of arms, for very precarious
political returns, and China might fare no better in Africa.
South Africa compared with Israel has the asset of a large
territory, the drawback of a large hostile population within
its own borders. The flash point might come with a rising of the
black proletariat there; and this too is a thing that some
progressives have looked forward to because of the absence of
a big proletariat anywhere else in the continent.
2
3 It requires
21 C. Legum, The Observer, 27 September, 1964.
22 P. Keatley, Guardian, 16july, 1969, in one of a series of articles on 'The
Battle for Africa'.
23 E.g. Arrighi and Saul, lac. cit., pp. 174-5.
strong nerves to hope for a rising that the whites would meet
with all the courage, and all the ferocity, of the British suppres-
sing the Indian Mutiny, or of the Nazi armies in eastern
Europe. There are degrees of brutality among reactionary
regimes and their troops, as Guevara observed;
2
4 racial in-
doctrination carries it to its worst extreme. If things do come
to this, enlightened opinion will not be altogether unprepared.
A consultation of the World Council of Churches on 24 May,
rg6g, endorsed economic sanctions against racialist rule, and
support for armed revolt when all else failed. But western
enlightenment is still very limited. In a full-scale war of race
the bulk of British and American sympathy would be with the
whites, and there would be reactions against coloured minorities
at home. It would be so all the more if there were any direct
Chinese participation. Without this it is hard to see the war
ending in victory; with it, hard to see how it could end without
destroying the country, and with it the continent's biggest
industrial base. After all, somehow it must be made possible
for both black and white to live in South Africa.
Slow, piecemeal reform of the prison-fortress of South
Africa is an unheroic choice compared with revolution, yet one
to be preferred if there is any ray of hope for it to be brought
about by gradual sapping and mining, by a combination of
pressures internal and external. In this theatre conservative
interests arc not all united. For world capitalism the big settler
population makes South Africa a profitable but perilous salient;
Boer racialism is to it a silly nuisance, like the same aberration
in Alabama; the industries its investments are creating will
require markets all over Africa. In the sight of Mammon, as of
God, skin colour does not count. Inside South Africa there is a
pallidly liberalizing, conciliatory tendency, diverging from the
high and dry doctrine of the race maniacs.zs World capitalism
can be induced to back and strengthen this faintly better
tendency; but not by the light of reason alone. There must be
something to scare it into a sense of urgency; this something
can only be an imminent danger to its large investments-a
realistic threat, if not the actuality, of revolution within and
war from without, assisted by foreign arms on a grand scale.
z.f Op. cit., p. 8o.
2s See Arrighi and Saul, lac. cit., pp. 149-51.
154
Already the threat is near enough to make some far-sighted
westerners lament their governments' failure to offer Africa
any alternative.z6
Western progressives ought to be able to profit by this
impending crisis to put much heavier pressure on these
governments. Here would be a specimen of the only kind of
collaboration now practicable between them and the 'East'-
activity parallel bnt separate, uncoordinated, and perhaps the
more effective for being so. Given a spreading sense of urgency,
behaviour such as the sending of English cricket teams to South
Africa, which give aid and comfort to the white diehards there,
would come to be recognized as not merely callous or frivolous,
but in the fullest sense criminal. We live in a world where sport
is an important matter, and an initiative like that of the
American Negro athletes in threatening to boycott com-
petitions where British athletes appear, so long as they refuse
to boycott South Africa, may lead quite far. In much wider
ways, participation in these issues might have a significance for
American Negroes in their own struggle, and be a fresh basis
ior cooperation between them and white liberals, which both
may find easier at present abroad than at home. Brazil, under
any less reactionary government than it has now, could be
expected to take a hand in southern African affairs. India has
a minority of its own in South Africa; and having entered
various corners of the continent in former times as Britain's
jackal, it owes Africa something, as some Indians arc aware.
Even without race war as a tonic, it is open to us to take a less
pessimistic view of possibilities of progress in the middle Africa
between north and south. 'Everything of importance in Africa
has changed', Davidson wrote not long ago, ' ... so far that
everything now seems possible where little or nothing seemed
possible before.'
27
In his more hopeful picture of the scene a
ferment of ideas, a crescendo of discussion not only among the
literate but in village and marketplace, takes a prominent
place. This is a phenomenon of our modern world, where ideas
can travel at a hundred times their former speed, like bullets
outstripping arrows, and can overflow from one material level
z6 E.g. P. Keatley, in the last of the articles cited above, 21 July, rg6g.
27 Which Way Africa? p. I I.
155
to another. Labourers in Andalusia learn from the cinema to
envy Americans with refrigerators, and to feel that they ought
to have better wages, and if these are not forthcoming may go
and work abroad, leaving their masters to get on without them.
Educated Russians before the Revolution used to suffer from
the contrast between their country and Europe, the sensation
of being, or being thought by others, a 'dark people'. In our day
awareness of such contrasts can spread far down.
Cabral is evidently interested in Marxist theory as well as
practice, and one of his observations is that if we think of history
in terms of class conflict, many parts of Africa must be said to
have no history. He suggests that the driving force there, but
not only there, has been 'the level of productive forces at any
given place and time.'
2
s It is a suggestion that calls for further
elaboration. But, looking from Africa's present to its past, we
can find many evidences of how lofty a superstructure of social
organization or cultural achievement may rise upon a scanty
material base. Davidson has remarked on its elevated philo-
sophical-religious conceptions,
2
9 such as ancient India too
produced out of very simple materials. Or one may recall the
high praise bestowed by a contemporary European expert on
the Zulu military organization, even though 'the Zulu weapons
were those of savages' .3 But if old Africa had a history with
only an invertebrate class structure, new Africa may make
history likewise. Decaying ideas have often kept their hold for
ages after losing any real validity; what Mao and his revolution
have shown is that, conversely, progressive ideas can take hold
of men's minds even before the material situation is ripe for
them. In Africa there should he fewer harriers to overcome, in
the absence of rigid ideologies such as highly organized religions
represent, and the complex social structures that have grown
up with them, rather than give birth to them.
Clearly however the obstacles are many and great. One is
that most of the mass media in the 'third world' are controlled
os The Liberation qf Guinc, pp. 75-6.
2
9 Which WaJ> pp. 77--So.
3 Col. C. E. Callwell, Small Wars. Their Princiflles and Practice (grcl ccln.,
'!\Tar Office, London, rgo6), p. go. Empire-builders were studying guerrilla
warfare, and how to counter it, long before anyone on the other side did so.
Engels, the military expert of Marxism, had thought of well-drilled regular
armies as the only useful forces.
1\IARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
by anti-progressive interests, native or foreign.3I Hence
GuinC's demonstration of how lVIarxism can lend guidance to
elemental discontents may have a significance far wider than
its own borders. As Davidson says, nearly all progressive move-
ments nowadays in backward regions (or movements that want
to be thought progressive) label themselves 'Marxist', but their
Marxism acquires vitality only to the degree to which it can
adapt itself to new conditions and grapple with new problems.
In Guinc there has been a reshuHling of orthodox conceptions
of the classes and their roles, with increased emphasis on those
that are, more than others, the bearers and propagators of
ideas. The party has owed much to what it calls a 'petty-
bourgeoisie' ofliterate, declassed individuals,3
2
-preciscly those
whom Marxism has been too apt to belittle, as 'waverers', by
contrast with the solid proletariat.
This party is well aware that peasants do not go to war for
the sake of ideas in any abstract sense. But the word idea has
manifold meanings; and the methods learned in Guine of
arousing mass feeling, bringing it to consciousness, through
intensive village discussion and the forming of finn local
groups, ought to be more readily applicable to the politics of
reform and progress than to insurrection. It may be doubted
whether in the vast area of Africa already independent, in-
surrection can be the normal remedy for unsatisfactory
government. Single-minded Maoists sometimes appear to see
it as the cure for every political ailment, much as the old
Spanish doctor in Gil Blas treated every bodily ailment with
bleeding and hot water; or to welcome any and every break-
clown of government, as giving socialist forces a chance to
seize power. But too frequent internal conflict would give the
world, and Africa itself, an image of Africa as incapable of
orderly self-rule. The troubles in Chad, leading to French
intervention, in I g6g are an example. Something similar might
be said of the problem of getting rid of an entrenched Com-
munist bureaucracy without shaking things to pieces. In
Africa, where existing regimes are less deeply entrenched, it
may prove easier to get riel of unsatisfactory ones, by means of
new-style political parties with, as in Guine, realistic pro-
3' Woddis, ojJ. cit., p. 83.
3
2
The Liberation of Gui11e, pp. 32-3, 48-52.
I 57
grammes and close-knit local organizations. They are needed
equally as props to progressive governments. For want of such
a party to support him-and to criticize him-Nkrumah fell.
The T.A.N.U. party in Tanzania may be learning to fulfil the
need.
Maoism is biassed towards the same belief in an inevitably
increasing misery of the world's peasants, as older Marxism had
in that of the proletariat. One may tentatively ask whether the
new belief may not in the long run prove as fallible as the old
one has clone; or whether, in areas where misery does increase,
it may not be chiefly clue to population increasing. It has often
been a conservative subterfuge to say that peasants like India's
are poor because they are foolish enough to have too many
children; still, even Communist China has reluctantly had to
recognize the force of the argument. Many conservative
governments can now claim to be doing their best, by spreading
birth-control, to rescue the poor from their own folly; whereas
in past times ruling groups and their ideologists-Hindu,
Confucian, and so on-recklessly egged the poor on to increase
and multiply, and so supply the rich with cheap labour.
Governments are not unaware that unchecked population
growth can be a menace to order, largely because it leads to a
drift from the countryside to the towns and the piling up there
of a pauperized class difficult to control-though also difficult
for any opposition to organize. This has been happening on a
massive scale in South America, and tilting the ratio of numbers
against the peasantry to an extent that casts one more doubt
on the possibility of a seizure of power by a peasant movement
alone.
With regard to poverty caused by exploitation, classes whose
wealth is drawn increasingly from industrial investment may
scarcely need to squeeze agricultural producers more than now,
or as much as now. Old-time governments in Asia all rested
primarily on land-tax, but this has been coming to represent,
in India for instance, a diminishing section of a revenue drawn
from diverse sources. Important groups still depend on owning
land and squeezing peasants, and it is these groups that have
done most to cause agrarian unrest in Asia and Latin America.
But nowadays even landlords, of the brighter or bigger sort,
are feeling the superior attractions of commercial investment,
and governments like those of Pakistan or Iran have . been
helping to shepherd them away from share-cropping into stocks
and shares. Even the Ranas and princes of Nepal have lately
been bought out of their feudal estates, and are running luxury
hotels in Katmandu for American tourists.JJ Foreign investment
is largely relied on in these cases to get industry going. Para-
doxically, a socialist regime trying to build industry quickly
out of its own resources might have more need to squeeze its
peasants, as happened in Russia, by way of primary accumula-
tion. This would be unavoidable if there were a landslide to
socialism over a large part of the 'third world', since it would be
beyond the economic resources of the Communist countries to
give adequate aiel.
As for imperialism, it too, with efficient food production at
home and synthetic substitutes for various raw materials, may
have only a dwindling need to exploit backward villagers, to
wring from the hard hands of peasants their vile trash. Politic-
ally, it has had plenty of time in places like Vietnam to discover
what dubious allies feudal landlords make. In Japan the
American occupation carried out from special motives a land
reform, non-socialist but far from meaningless; it appears that
something on the same lines may have been done in Taiwan.
Modern capitalism has been learning to make life acceptable
to its industrial workers and also to its own farmers; it may
learn as time goes on to make life bearable for cultivators of the
backlancls as well, by promoting reformist measures, and
selling or giving them the benefits of its formidable agricultural
science, or by simply leaving them. alone. For ideology, ac-
companied by welfare services, it can offer Christianity, as an
army of American missionaries in Africa arc doing.
Altogether, a competition has begun, and will spread further
and further in the 'third world', for the peasant's allegiance.
We have often heard of the 'two souls' of the peasantry, with
its pre-bourgeois instincts of private property mixed in varying
proportions with instincts of mutual aiel and solidarity. This
duality (which it shares with other groups of pre-industrial
origin, notably youth) makes it a class that can be steered in
3:l I owe this information to my IHend Dr Harka B. Gurung, a member
of the N a tiona! Planning Commission of N epa I.
159
either direction. Socialism can steer it, but to do so needs
clearer thinking than it has often shown, about what the
peasant wants, and what a socialist society wants from the
peasant.
For both capitalism and socialism there is what may be called
a maximal programme for the land, and also a range of com-
promise settlements where the two arc less far apart. For
capitalism the maximal programme is a fully capitalist agricul-
ture. It was carried out only in a single country, the pioneer,
Britain.34 In later cases capitalism, recognizing it to be politically
risky and economically not essential, was content in general to
leave the cultivator with his own farm-or even give him one-
while quietly using the mechanism of the market to make it a
fief or appendage of big business. This strategy, which has a
clear resemblance to the later one of neo-colonialism, may be
said to have started in r 789. The French bourgeoisie then
made use of the peasant as an auxiliary, promising him his
land free from feudal exactions, with the tacit design of sub-
sequently depriving him of it and turning him into a wage-
labourer. But he proved so recalcitrant that this design was
quicldy dropped; the peasantry, or a great many peasants,
were left with their holdings. Satisfied, though mostly still very
poor, they turned abruptly into safe conservatives, clinging to
patrimonial scraps of land, however harsh the toil or wretched
the yield, with a tenacity rooted in old ancestral feeling and in
ignorant fear of life anywhere outside the native village.
Socialism has approached peasants with the same ambiguity
of purpose. As Che Guevara stressed, they fight in order to get
land: he regarded this as the mainspring of 'third world'
revolutionism.Js (Yet the Bolivia that he chose to fight in was
one of the few Latin American countries where a substantial
land reform had already taken place,3
6
) Having been aroused
by this bait, they arc then to be guided towards something
34 The uniqueness of English capitalist farming is well brought out in
'Primitive Accumulation and Early Industrialization in Britain', by
J. Saville, in Socialist Register, Ig6g.
35 Oj1. cit., p. I 6, etc.
36 As Guevara himself observed: ibid., p. 130. See also on this A. Hen-
nessy, 'Latin America', in Populism, eel. G. loncscu and E. Gellner (London,
1g6g), p. 46. The whole essay is illuminating, e.g. on the Populist tendency
to idealize the peasantry, as Maoism too has done.
1Go MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
quite different. Mao's revolution was, from this point of view,
a gigantic feat of sleight of hand. With socialism the 'maximal
programme' for agriculture is full collectivization. This again
was applied in the pioneer country, Russia; unlike the capitalist
model it has been repeated in others. Everywhere it has had
some unfortunate consequences. In terms of production it has
shown (in Europe, if not in China) only mediocre results,
whereas capitalist fanning in Britain has been progressive at
least technically, though socially the reverse. In political
terms, to collectivize a peasant requires about as severe
pressure as to reduce him to a wage-labourer; either must rest
for a long time on coercion, and rule out government by con-
sent. Between cultivator and soil there is an altogether different
relationship, psychologically if not economically, from that
between worker and machine. One benefit that l\!Iaoism counts
on from armed struggle in the countryside is that it will generate
sufficient heat to fuse the stubborn individualism of the peasant
into the mould of collectivism. But if twenty years of revolu-
tionary war in Vietnam have not done this, nothing will. And
it seems they have not done so completely. Resentment at
forced collectivization caused a crisis in 1956; in rg6g the Party
chief."> were debating once more whether socialism could
survive if full collectivization was not restored, in place of the
actual system of cooperatives.37
The argument of the extremists or maximalists presupposes
that so long as the peasant is left with any vestige of his two
souls, the egotistic one that affiliates him to capitalism will
inevitably triumph over the good one that relates him to
socialism. This means in effect that he can only be tricked or
bullied into socialism; which in turn might be said to make
nonsense of the whole idea of peasant revolution. But the
assumption is surely too gloomy. Individualism is not identical
with capitalism, whether in a cultivator or in an intellectual.
In fact it has impelled the peasantry in western countries to
strive, with more success than most groups of small producers
or small businessmen, aganst capitalism-that is, against being
steam-rollered by big business. The modern peasant, evolving
into the farmer, grows aware of how he has been daily, in-
visibly, robbed by the market (as the undeveloped countries
37 Sec articles by V. Zorza in Guardian, ro-r I September, 1969.
also are), and learns to protect himself and secure a share of
the wealth that either capitalist or socialist industry can provide.
He protects himself by organizing, as the workman does with
his trade union, and by cooperative methods, or marketing and
so on. How much real independence he can keep or win
depends largely on his energy and his willingness to combine
with his neighbours; much as an undeveloped country's
freedom from nco-colonialism depends on its own deter-
mination to be free.
Of course the cultivator must be infected to a great extent
by the mentality of a capitalist society round him. But he should
be equally open to the influence of a socialist society, through
education and diffusion of ideas, if it too is content with partial
or indirect control over the land. Between the two systems
there stretches a continuous band of possible forms, with greater
or less emphasis on cooperation. Africa has often been thought
of as ready to step straight into agrarian socialism. It would
not be safe to trust too much to this; for if Africa has really been
changing rapidly, whatever there was of primitive communism
must also have changed, and may have become-as some tell
us-a thing of the past.J
8
Nonetheless it is reasonable to expect
there and in other parts of the 'third world' a less rigidly
individualistic temper than some European cultivators long
since acquired, and fuller acceptance of cooperation.
Everything in Africa's future, where influences and inter-
ventions from outside must count heavily, looks highly specula-
tive. 'The possible permutations and combinations of events
and their likely timing arc vast in number.'
39
Africa does not
stand alone; the whole world outlook appears very obscure,
38 J. Saul, 'Africa', in Pojmlism, p. Lt6.
39 Arrighi and Saul, lac. cit., p. I 77
Refercr1ce may be made generally to three important works that have
appeared since this essay was written: Amilcar Cabral, Revofution in Guinea.
An Afi-ican PcojJle's Struggle (London, 1969); D. M. Abslure and M .. J:
Samuels (editors), Portuguese Africa. A Handbook (London, 1969); Pluhp
Mason, Patterns ofDominarzce (OUP., 1970).
To these may be added the articles in the Socialist Register ( ed. R. Miliband
and J. Saville) for 1970 by B. Davidson on 'The African Prospect', and by
E. J. I-Iobsbawm on 'Guerillas in Latin America'; and the very interesting
work by J. P. Harrison, The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions. A Study
in the Rewriting of Chinese History (London, 1970).
more than for a long time past, and Marxism, along with all
other convictions that have given modern man a sense of being
able to forecast and direct his future, has run into more com-
plexities and perplexities than it bargained for. It is gazing into
no crystal ball, but a muddy pool. One moral may be that it
will be wise for some time to come to content itself with practical
experiments here and there, like those of Cuba or Guine, and
not try to magnify any of them into universal programmes of
action. In the meantime theory, analysis of past and present
societies and their trends, which Marxism has largely neglected,
may be able to catch up with experience.
We cannot put off trying to descry at least dimly the long-
term prospects that may lie ahead, the lines of possibility of the
coming decades. A great deal of active struggling against
imperialism in one or other of its shapes remains to be done,
and this cannot exclude struggle by force of arms. Acceptance
of force as the last resort leaves it to be decided when this last
resort has come, or in other words the speed with which action
should be embarked on. Marx and Engels fixed their eyes on
distant goals, and Lenin turned away from the short-cut tactics
of Nihilism to those of gradual, long-term preparation. These
men were not in a hurry, because they could think of socialism
as bound to come, though not effortlessly, and were joining
hands with a class they believed to have a natural, organic
affinity with socialism.
Few can now think of anything as so certain to happen, and
Maoism cannot think of its chosen ally, the peasantry, as
naturally socialist. Consequently it is more apt to think in
terms of the tactics of surprise, afforcing gates open by attacking
weak points here or there, of gaining power first and talking
of socialism afterwards. Some uncomfortable doubts may creep
in here about whether socialism is being thought of for the sake
of progress, or progress for the sake of socialism; both these
ideals must suffer if they arc too far detached from each other.
Apart from this, it may be the case that the phase of modern
history that made socialism through peasant revolution pure
and simple a possibility, is a limited phase only, and confined
to special areas-just as the period of possible working-class
revolution pure and simple was a limited one. It may follow
that whatever opportunity there is must be seized while it is
'THE PEASANT REVOLUTION
still with us; that Maoism is right to advocate audacity, to
gamble on any chance, because there may be no other chance.
Maoism does not of course admit that the time for peasant
revolution may be brief, any more than Leninism recognized
that the time for proletarian revolution was brief; but it has
often argued as if this fear were in its mind.
For a long time to come there is going to be a capitalist and
a socialist camp in the world, and the hopeful eye must search
for what benefits can be found in this division. Each must be
said to need the stimulus of criticism and rivalry from the other.
It may even be that the historical transition away from the
worst of our present bad world will be brought about by their
competition, more than by either one of them; though the
opposite prospect of their rivalry blowing the world to pieces
is at least equally obvious. In the undeveloped continents they
have a vast field for competition, which may be peaceful or
violent. In some areas, beginning with the Middle East, there
might even be agreement on cooperation as an alternative to
violence, on programmes of joint aid. Togliatti talked of some
such possibility at the Italian Party congress in December Ig62.
It was, needless to say, denounced by the Chinese as a fresh
disguise for nco-colonialism-all aid except from China is
tainted; and Wall Street would be as prompt to see in it a new
communist trick. Yet each camp genuinely believes in the
superiority of its own social-economic system, and ought to be
prepared to let new countries have the material means to make
a choice for themselves, or to work out new amalgams of the
two. It is any rate something that progressive opinion in the
West might usefully advocate, on the ground that rich countries
can grow richer by themselves, but the world can only grow
more civilized-whether on a capitalist or a socialist foundation
or on both-by moving forward together. Russia and America
have not yet been able to agree even on a partnership to explore
the moon. But that may come, and one kind of partnership
might lead to the other.
Marx and Engels attached great importance to the solution
of national problems like those ofltalian or German unification,
not because these had anything to do with socialism, but
because they had to be got riel of in order to clear the way for
socialism. Something like this might be said of many problems
I 64. MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
of the 'third world' and of the kind of solutions that can be
envisaged for them. These will not always, or even often
perhaps, be revolutionary. But revolution itself is a word of
manifold meanings, as the 'cultural revolution' in China
reminds us. Any historical process that rescues the peasant
majority of mankind from ignorance and misery will be
revolutionary. Its immediate outcome in the 'third world'
might be more to the benefit ofliberalism than of socialism; in
the West too, for wide feeling can only be mobilized against
imperialism (as exhibited in Latin America, or southern
Africa) if it is shown to be unnecessalJ', and if it is unnecessary
its abandonment will not (as Lenin could hope) bring capitalism
to the end of its tether. But fresh possibilities will come in sight
for socialists. In the backlands they will have more freedom of
action, at home they will have helped to discredit capitalism
by showing what it has been doing abroad. Both should have
a better chance to lead their countries in the direction of a goal
deserving the name of socialism, if the magnetic attraction of
socialism--both its ideals and its performance-is strong
enough. The broader the front of advance, the more likelihood
of socialism being established by majority consent instead of by
dictation, and growing truly into what the Webbs thought
they recognized in Russia thirty years ago, a New Civilization.
5
Marx and India
The life-work of a genius like Marx is always unfinished, and
for the most part unplanned, but no philosopher ever gave his
system to the world in so unsystematic a fashion as he did.
Much of his writing was governed by accidents of the historical
tides swirling round him. Even his work on economics was left
incomplete; on history and politics the bulk of his ideas arc
scattered about in his three or four pamphlets on contemporary
events, in numberless letters, and most of all in the great mass
of articles he wrote, primarily to earn his daily bread, for the
New York Tribune. Marx complained of 'this wretched paper',
1
though no journal has ever deserved better of posterity, and of
the 'very great interruption' to his studies caused by his
journalistic work
2
; but if he had not been compelled to under-
take it both he and we would have been much the poorer.
Each main section arose from happenings somewhere abroad,
which stimulated him to explore their historical background.
It was for him a means of catching at ideas, indulging his
insatiable curiosity, and working off nervous pressures in a
flow of satire, wit, eloquence: Marx was one of the great
Romantic writers, and a stylist to his finger-tips. For us, it is an
immense chaotic contribution to a way oflooking at the human
universe which had begun taking shape before Marx, and is
still taking shape. Only a man so phenomenally endowed
could have afforded such magnificent prodigality. But every-
I Letter to Engels, 17.12.1858, cited in A1arx on China, a collection of
articles, ed. Dona Torr (London, 1951), p. 66 n.
2
Preface to Critique of Political Economy (1859).
thing here is necessarily hasty, improvised, one-sided; at times
the words even have an oddly un-Marxist ring. We know from
his other writings how Marx looked at very broad ranges of
history, and from his journalism we learn in microscopic detail
his reactions to passing events. What we lack is a considered,
all-round summing up of things of the middle order of magni-
tude: the English Civil Wars as a whole, the French Revolution,
the Crimean War.
In his early years Marx was occupied with philosophy and
the idea of socialism. In 184.8 he and Engels wrote the Com-
munist Manifesto, and felt that they and their friends were ready
for the arena. Revolutions were just about to break out over
much of Europe; but they ended in defeat, partial or tem-
pontry for the bourgeois liberals, more crushing for their
unsolicited ally the working class. Subsequently old autocracies
or ruling classes and new bourgeois groups drifted together,
and against this combination Marx's hopes of a speedy over-
throw of all ruling classes by the proletariat gradually dimmed.
We can watch these hopes fixing themselves on upheavals, one
after another, further and further away from the Lancashire
where the world's biggest concentration of working-class
strength lay. In 1854 a revolution in backward Spain fired
Marx's mind and set him to studying Spanish history. In the
same year the Crimean War started, and Marx caught avidly
at the prospect of a serious defeat of the tsarist army that had
helped to beat Europe down in 1849 His articles between 1853
and 1856 on the 'Eastern Question' fill a volume of over 6oo
pages, nearly as big as the first volume of Capita/.3
This war ended in 1856 with tsmism weakened, but not
decisively. Before the end of the year, British imperialism
embarked on the second Opium War with China, and Marx
had some hopes of crisis spreading from the Far East to
Western Europe. A year later, Britain faced a more serious
crisis, in the form of colonial revolution, or the Indian Mutiny.
It was with a note of Isaiah as well as dialectic that Marx
contemplated the revolt of the sepoy army. 'There is some-
thing in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of
historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the
3 The Eastern QJlcstion, eel. Eleanor Marx and E. Avcling (London, 1897).
MARX AND INDIA
offended, but by the offender himself'4-just as, he may have
reflected, capitalism was fated to be overthrown by its own
creation the proletariat. But India was reconquered; in r86g
a new Polish rebellion against the Tsar was quelled; the Civil
War in the U.S. from r86r to r865, presided over by an
Abraham Lincoln perpetually afraid of frightening the enemy
by showing too much sympathy with Negroes, brought them
only a first instalment of freedom.
It was thus Marx's fate to have to put what faith he could, in
default of the working-class seizure of power he had dreamed
of, in a long series of dubious representatives of progress: a
Spanish general, a Light Brigade, an octogenarian Mogul
emperor, an American president. While disappointments
multiplied, he took refuge in the grand task he had set himself
of writing Capital, of tracking capitalism to the inmost recesses
of its labyrinth. Strong emotional compulsions must have been
required to keep him for so many years at his subterranean toil,
like Shelley's trolls quaffing quicksilver at their labour-
Pledging the clemons of the earthquake, who
Reply to them with lava-.
It was partly the scholar's impulse to sink the mineshaft of
knowledge deeper and deeper from a hole in the British
Museum reading-room towards the centre of the earth;
partly an inveterate search for the only revenge that could be
taken on a bourgeoisie equally repulsive in triumph, in
England, or in capitulation, in Germany. There was too some
lingering of a German academician's over-valuation of pure
logical thought and its power to convince. Outside physical
science no force of logic can be conclusive; and while learned
argument has gone on and on, the plain workman has always
known without aid of syllogisms that his employer lives by
exploiting him; the Marxian mineshaft has meant little more
to him than the Mohorovicic discontinuity.
In addition, the tangible eifects and historical meaning
whether of capitalism or of feudalism or slavery depend less
4 Article of 49 1857. Sec the collection of articles and letters by Marx and
Engels, under the title The First Indian war of Independence 1857-1859 (Mos-
cow, 1959), p. gr. This is referred to below as H'ar of IndejJeJu!ence. Some
other articles and letters on India are included in an anthology of l\!Iarx and
Engels On Colonialism (Moscow, 1960).
on the common irreducible quintessence of each than on the
range of variations that makes each of them so heterogeneous.
For the zoologist, mouse and elephant are both mammalian
quadrupeds, but for most purposes their diversities matter
more. The mutant forms of capitalism that were taking their
rise in Germany and the U.S. were to affect mankind differ-
ently in many ways from the earlier British species examined
by Marx. His intellectual achievement as an economist was
no doubt great; none the less the historian or sociologist may be
forgiven for wishing that instead of grappling with other
problems only here and there he had made the past and
present of human society his chief field. He would then have
enriched 'Marxism' with a greater wealth of more fully devel-
oped ideas, and have become even more unquestionably for
our age what Aristotle was for Dante's, 'the master of them who
know'.
Europe's closest neighbour and oldest acquaintance in Asia
was Turkey, about which Marx was writing pretty often
during the Crimean War years. He was inclined to generalize
from Turkey to Islam as a whole, occasionally from Islam to
Asia. India was comparatively well-known by the mid-
nineteenth century; China far less so, Japan very little.s Marx
not seldom oilers generalizations about Asia that would be
more convincing if restricted to India.
He came to be seriously interested in India about 1853; his
first articles on it were concerned with the Parliamentary
debates of that year on renewal of the East India Company
charter. India was much in his mind when in 1857-58, the
Mutiny years, he wrote the remarkable manuscript on Pre-
CajJitalist Economic Formations, where he sought tentatively to
arrange world history in a series-logical rather than chrono-
logical, as his editor E. J. Hobsbawm points out6-of modes of
production, or states of society, one of them the 'Asiatic'. This
manuscript may be regarded as a part of the buried foundations
6
Marx's notebooks on Indian history have been published in English as
Notes on Indian Histor)' (Moscow, rg6o). For a survey of his
reading on Asia sec E. J. Hobsbawm, Introduction to Marx, Pre-Caj1italist
Economic Formations, trans. J. Cohen ( 1964), pp. 20 ff. This work is referred
to below as Formations; references to Hobsbawm are to his Introduction.
6 Ibid., pp. rg-20.
MARX AND INDIA
of Capital: Asia therefore as well as Europe made its contri-
bution to the magnum opus.
At the outset Marx was disposed to classify Asian society as
one knowing no private property in land, on the hypothesis
(which appealed for obvious reasons to the British conquerors)
that all right to land was vested in the ruler.
7
This conjecture
he coupled with that of a special 'Asiatic State', whose primary
function was to provide for irrigation works on a scale beyond
the resources of private or local entcrprise.
8
In point of fact,
water-control would seem to have played a bigger part in
China, where private ownership by peasant and landlord was
well-established, than in India; and in India a bigger part in
the south than in the north where political power always had
its strongest bases. In any case Marx did not speculate much
further about the Asiatic State, which was really not his own
idea but a suggestion borrowed from Engels.9 Compared with
his solid German friend, Marx was more a citizen of the world,
and less interested by temperament in institutions such as
states and armies. It was the problem of ownership ofland that
continued to preoccupy him, though by 1858 he had modified
his first impression. Events of the Mutiny revived controversy
about land-rights in India, and he leaned now towards the
opinion that any traditional ownership of all land by the
sovereign was, as in feudal Europe, no more than a legal fiction;
and that the true owner had been neither ruler nor landlord,
but 'village corporation'. ro
From now on he was to use the term 'Asiatic' or 'oriental' as
a synonym for primitive, for some ancient and unchanging
social organization, II without much regard for what kind of
political superstructure this might support. His picture was of
a village whose households owned or occupied their plots by
7 On Colonialism, p. 277. The idea came to him from Bernier, the
seventeenth-century French traveller in India.
s l1Tar of IndejJendence, p. r6.
9 The passage in lVIarx's article (n. 8) was taken more or less verbatim
from a letter just received from Engels (text in On Colonialism, p. 278).
10
Warqf/ndejJendcnce, pp. I57-r6o; cf. Formations, p. 70. Modern opinion
broadly is that the village community possessed a territory occupied in
hereditary, unequal holdings by the members. Of actual collective owner-
ship there is no sign; sec Irfan Habib, The Agrarian SJstem of lYfughalb
India (Aligarh, 1963), Chap. V, e.g. pp. I r8-rg, 123.
II Hobsbawm, p. s8.
virtue of their membership of the commune; an entity isolated,
self-perpetuating, and self-sufficient because based on a close
integration of agriculture with handicrafts, especially weaving.
It had to pay a land-tax, by handing over or selling a propor-
tion of its harvest, but inside it a 'natural economy' prevailed,
potter and blacksmith and leather-worker receiving their
income in the form of a share of the crop.I
2
So far, Marx's
picture was realistic and valuable. It seems open to the objection
that the village was a less homogeneous unit than he sometimes
supposed: instead of a simple division of labour it was rather
a small collective lordship, a microcosm of feudal India, a
'brotherhood' of land-holding peasants collectively employing
a group of menials whose lowly caste sometimes marked them
as descendants of an inferior race subjugated in past times.
Caste itself implied an elaborate ideology. Again, the manor
in Europe was in a great measure self-sufficient, and it too held
its land in a semi-communal fashion. If it could evolve or
disintegrate, why not the Indian village?
Altogether, Marx's scheme of a Robinson Crusoe village in a
changeless countryside, above which dynasties rose and fell
unmeaningly and unheeded, appears too stationary. Coherent
evolution may have been impeded by too much movement,
not too little. Beneath the level of political events can be
glimpsed a great deal of restlessness, of tribes or clans moving
about, pre-empting untaken territory or ousting occupants,
and claiming superiority over weaker neighbours. It seems
curious that while Marx repeatedly treats growth of population
as the prime mover of, for instance, early Roman history,
driving the simple clan community to war in quest of more
land and of slaves, I3 he seems to neglect population as a factor
in India. In all ages war and famine, besides, uprooted many;
and in the final pre-British period Marx may have under-
estimated the disruptive effect of the eighteenth-century
anarchy, even if British writers were apt to make too much of it.
Marx at any rate thought of the net result of the old order as
stagnation: Asia had exhausted its capacity for progress. Of
even the better features of any such vegetative state of existence
Marx was, at this time of his life, intolerant. If he sometimes
12
JiVar of lndejJendence, pp. I 7-20; the same material reappears in a letter
to Engels (On Colonialism, pp. 279-28I), and in Capital (Kerr edn.), Vol. I,
pp. 392-4.
13
Formations, e.g. pp. 92-3.
MARX AND INDIA
spoke with esteem of the craftsman's pride in his skilled work,X4
he also condemned the 'contented, slavish relationship'
imposed on the craftsman by this very pride: the modern
wage-earner, indifferent to his work, is free, though bored.IS
The rights of man included, for Marx, no right to be stupid.
A passage on the barbarous torpor of the Indian countryside
unites, like all his most dramatic outbursts, passion with acute
reasoning: it links the tiny mindless insulated village with, as
its opposite pole, the irresponsible Oriental despotism it
supported.Jf> Elsewhere he notes how the dualism of society
was reflected in that of the Hindu religion, and luxury and
misery in its medley of 'sensual exuberance' and 'self-torturing
asceticism' .J7 Born in a Germany only lately beginning to
emerge from two centuries of paralysis, and chafing at all
Europe's slowness, he must have felt the vast immobility of
Asia as a giant cloud-shadow of Europe's own. l\1arx's imagery
has not been studied as it deserves to be; there might be found
in it, as in Shakespeare's, a recurrent association between the
bad old world he wanted to sweep away and dirt, stench,
impurity. Only through revolution could the working class
'succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages'. IS At times
there is only one step between Marx's revulsion from the moral
filth of class society and the obsessive longing of Pietist Germany
and Bach's music to be liberated or cleansed from sin, to be
washed clean in blood.
In Asia the hated Tsar himself could represent progress.I9
A modern Indian, or Uzbeg, reader may feel that Marx did
less than justice to some Asian dynasties of bygone days, and
their services to the arts, education, commerce. He may feel
that Marx's horizon was too Eurocentric; just as within Europe,
after the experiences of I 84-8-49, he seemed to deny any inde-
pendent future for small nationalities like the Slavs.
20
But his
14 Hobsbawm., p. 4-7 n.
ts l\1arx and Engels, The German Ideology, I84-5-6 (English edn. by R.
Pascal, London, I938), p. 47
16
liVar of bzdcjJcndence, p. 20.
11 Ibid., p. IS
1
8 The German Ideolop,y, p. 69.
1
9 The Eastern QJiestion, p. 54.6. Cf. Engels, 235 I 851, in l\1arx-Engels
letters ed. Dona Torr, 1934, p. 37 Brian Pearce, who reminds me of this
passage, has shown me an exchange of views between himself and Soviet
historians in I955 on their attitude to Russian imperialism in Asia.
zo The Eastern Qjzestion, pp. 54-5 ff.
concern was not with one nation or continent or another, but
with the uneven, straggling advance of humanity as a whole.
Unlike his shimmeringly idealistic contemporary Mazzini, who
had eyes for Europe alone, Marx envisaged a common destiny
for West and East. The finest ideals of Greece or Rome, he
wrote in an eloquent though unpolished passage in the manu-
script of r857-58, look 'childlike' in their narrow, limited
perfection, today when mankind stands on the threshold of
full self-realization for every individual.
21
Beside this shining
vision of the future, every civilization of the past must pale its
ineffectual fires. And if Marx felt little respect for Indian
history, he had no contempt for Indians, believing them
perfectly able to learn to run their own country, and finding
in their character subtlety, courage, 'a certain calm nobility'
or gentleness.
22
It was seldom indeed that he paid any such
tribute to any Western people.
Britain's conquest of India had a twofold 'mission', destruc-
tive and constructive: 'the annihilation of old Asiatic society,
and the laying of the material foundations of Western socictv
in Asia'.
23
Mission may sound somewhat teleological; and
is an example here of Marx's readiness to jump from India to
all Asia. So far there had been chieflv destruction conquest
' ' '
brutal and greedy, had made 'a heap of ruins'. British rule had
inflicted more hardship on India than any previous domina-
tion.24 Bankruptcy, chronic war, no public works, perversion
of taxation and justice, were 'the five points of the East India
Chartcr'.
25
Underlying all this was the subversion of the old
village, painful yet necessary for future progress, in two ways:
the ruin of hand-weaving by British machine competition, and
the alterations in land-tenure. Of these two processes the ruin
ofhanclicrafts, though not the first to start, was the more purely
destructive. Because it disrupted the village economy and its
close-knit combination of agriculture with weaving, it repre-
sented 'the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia' .z6
21
Formations, pp. 84.-5.
22
On Colonialism, p. 68; J11ar rif IndejJCiulencc, p. 37
23
Ibid., p. :!3
2
4 Ibid.; cf. p. 15.
2
5 On Colonialism, p. 57
J11ar rif IndcjJCiu!ence, p. rg. CC Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of

Cajntal _cdn., r_g63), pp. 37I ff., on the disruption of the rural
commune m Bnt1sh Indm and French Algeria.
MARX AND INDIA
It was crucial to all Marx's thinking that the new forces of
production released by science were, in capitalist hands, for
the most part destructivc.
2
7 Machine industry carved out its
market by eliminating handicrafts, and having accomplished
this in Britain it was drawing the trail of devastation across
Europe and Asia. It would be interesting, if it were possible,
to determine whether machinery up to a certain date did
indeed reduce by this cannibalism, instead of expanding, men's
total of consumable wealth. But there is good ground for
thinking that Marx overrated the impact of machine com-
petition on handicrafts in India. It was habitual to him, with
the impatience of genius, to pull out the thread of history
faster than the Three Sisters were spinning it. Even before the
unsuccessful revolutions of I 848 he was writing as if the
bourgeoisie were already firmly in the saddle in Europe at
large.
2
8 He remembered the blight that had fallen on the hand-
weavers of England, he watched English manufactures creating
a 'latent proletariat' in backward Gcrmany,
2
9 and in his mind's
eye, rather than in any statistical mirror, he saw the same
process not merely at work, but completed, in India.
How could this have happened 'over the whole surface of
Hindustan', as he wrote in 1853-much of it only occupied
within the past few years? Marx's own figures seem to contra-
dict him. If Indians were so poor that they could afford to
spend no more than nincpencc a year each on all British
goods,3o they could be wearing very little of even the cheapest
Lancashire cloth. Had they then, profiting by the absence as
yet of the British missionary and his wife, all taken to going
naked? The 64. million yards of muslin imported into India in
18373
1
would not have given the population British India
one yard each.32 If 15o,ooo people at Dacca m cast Bengal
were supported in 1824. by wcaving,
33
their disappearance since
21 E.g. T'Var q( Inrlcjmzrlcnce, p. :;8.
zs Th-e German Idcologr, e.g. pp. 57, 59
2
? Ibid., pp. 73-4.
3o War ofindej;endcnce, p. :;o. 3I Ibid., p. rB.
32 A sari is 5 or 6 yards long. Two Indian friends agree that a family of five
today in modest comfort, would usc no less than So yards of cloth a year.
33 As n. :; 1. V.I. Pavlov, The Indian CajJitalistClass, a historical study (English
cdn., Delhi, rg6..j.), p. rzo, refers to this passage, but points out that most of
Dacca's cloth had gone to the court or army, or been exported. Marx had
used the Dacca weavers as an example in his lecture on Free Trade at
Brussels, g. I r. I 848.
then had no bearing on the fate of the village artisans with
whom Marx's argument is concerned: the towns of old India
he regarded-too sweepingly, it may be-as only marginal to
its economy. Lancashire cloth could only have made its way
in coastal areas close to the ports, or where rivers gave admission
to bulk commodities. India's extreme dearth of means of
transport throughout the first half of the century was itself a
dyke against the inundation of manufactures that Marx
imagined. In the whole of the south, there was scarcely a road
worth the name, even for military purposes, and many districts
found it impossible to fetch even salt from the coast.H In later
years it was reported, very likely with truth, that numbers of
weavers and other rural craftsmen-menials, not partners, of
the farming fraternity-shook the village dust off their feet,
not because they were forced out of work but because railway
and other construction jobs offered them a better life.Js Handi-
crafts rural or urban have often died out very recently, or are
still struggling.36 At this day in all kinds of places in India and
Pakistan the traveller hears of artisans just being overtaken by
their slow but relentless pursuer, the machine.37
The other force that Marx saw operating on the old village
was in his view not less cruel, but less blankly negative, for it
was setting up private ownership of land, and this appeared to
him in r853 'the great desideratum of Asiatic society'. It was
emerging in two forms, each so far as the masses were concerned
'abominable': 38 the zemindari system of big landed estates, and
the ryotwari under which land-tax was collected from cultivators
each treated as individual proprietors, or at least, on the theory
of the government being universal landlord, as individual
tenants. On this theory the government was free to demand
rent as well as tax, and shear them doubly close to the skin.
3
+ First Rej1ort ... [on] Public Works in the A!fadras Presidency, in Parlia-
mentary Papers, 1852-53, Vol. LXXIV, p. 181; cf. pp. 7, 284.
35 L. C. A. Knowles, The Economic Develojmwnt of tlze British Overseas
EmjJire (London, I 924)' p. 289. cr. pp. 309, 318, on the weavers' resistance
to imported cloth.
3
6
Statistics have been very imperfect. See S. Kuzncts, etc., eel., Economic
Growth: Brazil, India, ]a{Jan (Durham, N.C .. 1955), chap. 4.: 'Long-Term
Trends in Output in India', by D. Thorner.
37 A fricnclrccalls that a generation ago in his village in Bihar there were
a dozen weavers; now there arc none.
38 H
1
ar qf IndcjJcl/(!cnce, p. 20.
MARX AND INDIA
1'75
When the issue came up again for debate as a result of the
Mutiny, Marx (reluctantly agreeing for once with Bright,
though finding fault with his reasoning) wrote of the ryots as
suffering from grinding over-taxation.39 On the big estates,
especially in Bengal, the peasantry suffered from rack-renting
and sheer robbery.4 Marx could fittingly describe the zemindar
as a caricature of an English landlord, the ryot as a caricature
of a French peasant. 4
1
What sort of private landowning he thought desirable and
feasible is never made clear; presumably, capitalist farming.
And if the only way forward for India was indeed, as he as-
sumed, through capitalism, countryside as well as town would
have to come under its control; and all the exploitation that
was going on under British auspices could be reckoned another
part of the necessary price of progress, since it would accumulate
capital and drive the peasantry into wage-labour on the land
or in industry. The Marx of the r85os judged any price worth
paying to get rid of Asia's senseless torpor, even the brutal
surgery of imperialism. In later, less sanguine years, he showed
signs of drawing back from this ruthless logic. When he returned
to general history after the years of struggle with Caj;ital, the
great work he lacked energy or confidence in the end to com-
plete, 42 primitive communism engaged his thoughts a good deal.
He may have experienced a need of reassurance that man really
was socialist by nature, by heredity. His sympathy with the
Narodnik dream of a direct transition from mir or village
community in Russia to socialism can be interpreted, as
Hobsbawm suggests, as a shrinking from the price in human
suffering implied in any overwhelming of an old rural society
by capitalism.43 The spectacle of India, as well as of Russia,
may have influenced him.
From another and less clouded point of view, the constructive
mission ascribed to British power by Marx began with the
country's political unification. That the old India was incapable
of uniting and defending itself was to him self-evident. Its
39 Ibid., pp. 169-74.
+o See, e.g. Anon., The :(emindal) Settlement of Bengal (Calcutta, 1879).
4I On Colonialism, pp. 73-4 ..
42 As H. Collins and C. Abramsky observe: Karl Marx and tlze British
Labour Movement (London, 1965), pp. 296-8.
43 Hobsbawm, p. so.
equilibrium had rested on mutual repulsion of all its parts (one
may fancy the Holy Roman Empire floating in his mind),
so that it became 'the predestined prey of conquest', and its
history if it had any was a history of being overrun. Some foreign
rule being at present inescapable, British was better than
Persian or Russian, for it rested on a higher level of material
achievement than India's, and hence could not be simply
engulied.44 At the same time Marx equally took it for granted
that India was a single country, and potentially a single
nation; the more readily-or even uncritically-because for
him nations and nationalism were merelv parts of historv's
scaffolding, used and then dismantled. His own native
was awaiting unification; so was Italy, with which he once
compared India. 4
5
Britain was transforming India from a
geographical expression into a reality, capable in r857 of
waging its first national struggle.
Thus Marx was prepared to welcome the annexation of
Sinde (r843) and conquest of the Punjab (r84g),46 as com-
pleting the expansion of British power in India and closing
the old gateway of invasion, the north-west frontier. This time
it was being bolted and barred against Russia, and even though
Marx sometimes derided the Russian menace to India as a
bogy,47 it is hard to believe that his hatred of tsarism did
nothing to reconcile him to the presence in India of Russia's
grand enemy. The Afghan war of 184.1-42 on the contrary he
considered 'infamous', 48 the Burmese war of r 852 'senseless'. 49
Burma (but not Afghanistan) lay outside the ancient limits of
India, and there was no Russian threat on that side. Nor was
there in Oudh, annexed in r8s6; and Marx, who ought
logically to have welcomed annexation of all surviving princi-
palities inside India, and usually did so, was at some not very
useful pains to prove that its seizure was illega[.so He blamed it
and the Afghan affair on the machinations of his b!Jte noire
Lord Palmerston, whom he persisted in viewing as a Muscovite
secret agent and author of practically all evil. Oudh apart,
H fVar qfinrlejmulence, pp. 32--3. 45 Ibid., p. q.. 46 Ibid., pp. 26-7.
47 The Eastern Qpestion, p. 533 4
8
Ibid., p. 573
49 T17ar qf InrlejJendence, p. 3 I _; cf. On Colonialism, pp. 70-7 I.
so J:Var of PP 150-56. cr. On Colonialism, pp. G;), 67, where
he reproaches Enghsh hberals for regretting the elimination of Indian
princes.
)
.I
MARX AND INDIA
177
Marx found another reason for welcoming the completion of
conquest: hitherto the British had been able to divide and rule,
to play off one Indian state against another, but now that game
had come to an end. He often underestimated the tenacity of
religion-one of the great powers of history, its Hapsburg
empire so to speak; he did not foresee that the old form of
divide and rule would be replaced by a more insidious one, the
playing off of Hindu against Muslim.
Having arrived at this point, the constructive mission was
about to unfold its next chapter, the economic and social
regeneration of India. This would be set in motion by John
Bull's own requirements. India had become indispensable as a
market, notably for the cotton industry. But a colony ruined
by plundering and neglect made a poor customer. Its nine-
pence a head spent on British goods was a sorry figure compared
with the fourteen shillings a head of the West Indies. Hence the
'industrial interest' in England felt 'the necessity of creating
fresh productive powers' in India; of making canals to facilitate
the growing of cotton and other commercial crops, and railways
to lower the cost of transporting them. In short, the time had
come to commence 'the transformation of India into a repro-
ductive country' .5I
Far from looking upon capitalism as beneficial at first,
baneful later, Marx thought of it as doing nothing but harm in
the first place, at home and abroad, and now at a later stage as
preparing to do some good at least abroad. Be that as it may,
he certainly explained the whole wrangle over renewal of the
East India Company charter in 1853 as a tug-of-war between
the 'millocracy' or industrial bourgeoisie and the obstructive
'moneyocracy and oligarchy', or the City and landed gentry.sz
There was doubtless a great deal in this view. It may have left
out some factors of a less immediately economic sort. Marx
thought of all Britons in the East as so many Clives or free-
booters, still greedily cramming their swag into capacious
knapsacks. But a gradual change had been stealing over the
Company's servants, moulded for a generation now by Evangel-
icalism and Utilitarianism and the rest of the ideology that
capitalism had acquired since its caveman days, and some of
st JiVar of IndejJel!dence, pp. 34.-6.
sz Ibid., pp. 30-31; cf. On Colonialism, pp. 24-5.
them were carrying out intentionally, not as mere tools of
history, a sort of bourgeois-revolutionary, anti-feudal policy.
Like any such large establishment, the administrative corps
could not but develop a certain momentum of its own.53
While there were provinces still to be snapped up, the old
predatory habit of advancing the frontier in a vain effort to get
rid of financial deficits kept the ascendant; now, newer ideas
and men could begin coming to the front. They had on their
side the growing interest in technology, stimulated by the
advent of the railway age which opened horizons as fascinating
as the atomic age a century later. A separate Public works
Department was being organized, to take development out of
the palsied hands of the Military Board which had hitherto
made nonsense of it. vVork started on the Ganges Canal, of
which the Roorkee engineering college in I847 was an out-
growth. Lord Dufferin as governor-general wrote rhapsodically
of what railways could mean for India. Here, as much as in the
narrow minds and counting-houses of Lancashire, may be
recognized the springs of a new programme.
Part of what aroused Marx's interest in India was the out-
burst of discussion, about the mid-century, on economic
development there. Change was very much in the air. Nearly
a century after Plassey, the country depicted in the reports and
plans of the reformers was amazingly undeveloped; now,
ironically just before its past sins of omission and commission
were overtaken by the retribution of r857, British rule was
turning over a new leaf. What Marx seems to have been
expecting was methodical development of a plantation-
economy of the kind the Dutch were to create in Java (though
Holland was of course not like Britain an industrial country),
supplying cotton and other raw materials, with coal-mines, to
fuel locomotives, thrown in. About the coming railways he was
as enthusiastic as Dufferin. They would enable food to be
moved from surplus to needy provinces, they would make the
army more mobile and enable it to be reduced (this has an
odd sound, just before the Mutiny). Marx did not count on all
this leading to industrialization of India by the British; but he
was hopeful of something even better, industrialization by
SJ Marx did stress the power, but only of inertia, of the large India
House bureaucracy in London: On Colonialism, pp. 62-63.
MARX AND INDIA
179
Indian enterprise. Once railways started, and railway work-
shops were set up, in a country endowed with coal and iron,
it would be impossible to prevent technology from sprouting
further, and industry making its appearance. Indians would be
perfectly equal to the technical requirements; they had
revealed 'particular aptitude', for example as engineers at the
Calcutta mint.s4 And in the long run this, he clearly thought,
was what would get India moving once more, and would pave
a highway towards both economic and political independence.
Marx's vision, then, was not of an effete Asiatic society
changing, adapting itself, evolving into a modern one-as
Japan was about to do. He was thinking in catastrophic terms,
of a new Deluge followed by the building of a new world. He
had full confidence in the ability of Indians to learn, but to
learn Western science; he complained of their being supplied
with education by the British 'reluctantly and sparingly' ,55
Macaulay's dismissal of Hindu learning, of geography made
up of 'seas of treacle and seas of butter' ,5
6
was not much more
peremptory. For several decades now Ram Mohun Roy and his
followers had been endeavouring to put India's intellectual
house in order, while making room in it for Western knowledge.
But of this aspect of the 'Bengal renaissance' Marx seems to
have had no inkling.
His notion of the Indian slate being wiped clean and
promptly covered with fresh writing-
as if the world were now but to begin,
Antiquity not known, custom forgot
had too close an affinity with the tabula rasa thinking of I 789.
Burke had seen one halfofthe truth when he argued against the
National Assembly that men and nations cannot, for good or evil,
be so transmogrified. An exile fiom an abandoned religion and a
country not yet united, brooding between the British Museum
and Hampstead Heath with only family, Engels, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, for constant companions, Marx contemplated his
world from above oftener than from within. Bigotries of cult
or nationality belonged for him, like dynasties or Horse Guards,
to the realm of Maya. In some ways it came more naturally
54 As n. 51. 55 War of Independence, p. 33
56 Minute on Indian Education ( 1835).
r8o
to him to think of society as a machine, in a universe governed
by than as, in .Burke's sense, an organism. Bourgeois
:ule m the he believed had 'destroyed as far as possible
Ideology, rehgwn, morality, etc.', or reduced them to 'a
palpable lie'.
57
But the past is never mere dead rubble to be
carted away; it has living and multiplying cells, among which
any potent new contact stimulates reactions. Romanticism
Evangelicalism, were two of the antibodies generated b;
capitalist industry.
the Communist lvfanifesto its authors light-heartedly laughed
rehgwn out of court, as no longer capable of throwing dust in
the wo:kers' such abstract, unreal teachings, Marx
had wnttcn still earher, had been thrown off, or never seriously
'the mass of men', and for the proletariat
natwnahty IS already dead'.ss In fact, the workers evervwhere
carried over with them from their past many shreds or' habits
of feeling, . nationalistic. in particular, that would gradually
enable ,their .rulers to mtegrate them into a new bourgeois
order. 1 here IS a close parallel between the wav Marx had been
thinking of the proletariat in the West and the' wav he was now
of masses in the East. The juggernaut of
capitahsm had rolled over them both. Antiquated
habits and the outlook on life that went with them might still
linger, but only by inertia, and would vanish with little further
delay. Here too Marx was travelling too fast. On the one hand
he was overestimating Britannia's efficacy as a new Kali o;.
goddess of destruction. Grinding taxation was in a measure
balanc.ed cessation of internal strife; the hum of machinery
still famt. On the other hand the subtler influences by
the .west corrodes the mental furnishings of an old
society-cmema, radw, gadgetry-were missing. Marx counted
on factories dissolve caste prejudices, 'those
?eciSive Impediments .to Indian progress',s9 and railways were
mdeed to be lauded m days to come as bringing an 'electric
slw.ck' to India.
60
this was a comparatively mild shock;
trams could not reach mto the recesses of the countryside as the
67
The German Ideology, p. 57.
58
Ibid., pp. 32, 57; cf. p. 67.
."n War C!( Independence, p. 36. In r88r we find him complaining of the
rmlways bemg 'useless to the Hindus' (On Colonialism, p. 304.).
6
Knowles, p. 322.
MARX AND INDIA
bus does nowadays. Caste was to wane very slowly, even
sometimes to grow afresh, not only because technology
slowly but also because in the social dislocations
it men would cling to whatever forms of mutual md and com-
fort they could find shelter in. . .
Marx was not aware that one effect of the Bntish presence
had been to invigorate a Muslim religious revival _which
one of the powder-trains leading towards the Mutmy. In his
gloomiest mood he would not have guessed that India's
towards independence would take the form very .largely of a]
Hindu and Muslim communal excitement. In his own fmmhar
Europe, he was painfully conscious at times of the
of archaic ideas. 'The tradition of all the dead gcneratwns
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,' he wrote
bitterly in 1852 of the rise to power of Napoleon IIL
61
Far awa.y
in Asia things of this type did not :hems?lves on his
attention in the same way. As a result, mlus for th.e
new broom and the fresh start, he did not see how Important It
was that the better, healthier ideas of an old society should be
preserved as binding links epoch and another.
Remarkably enough he could find It 111 Ius heart to declare that
it would be less damaging to India's self-respect for a worthless
feudal aristocracy to survive than for there to be n?. class of
eminent Indians at al1.6:z But it might even more humiliate and
demoralize India if no Indian ideas were to survive, and
wisdom to be a foreign gift. When the better side of the IS
written off, the worse is promoted. English and Engl.Ish
education meant for India a break, an interruptiOn, that Chum
and Japan did not undergo; past and present .never
dovetailed as men like Ram Mohun Roy hoped, but he side by
side today, amid a chaos of castes and railway-carriages, sacred
cows and chemical works, nonsense and sense, more separate
and incongruous than anywhere else in the world. .
The proletariat, and now in another the colm:nal
peoples, were the new forc?s .that would liberate
from the series of class societies that had enslaved. It, hke
Buddha bringing emancipation from the cycle of birth
death and rebirth. Each seems at times in Marx's conceptiOn
G
6x The Eighteenth Brumaire rif Louis Bonaparte, p. I.
6z On Colonialism, p. 68.
to lack inner strength or volition, to be an inert battering-ram
for History to knock down the walls of the capitalist Bastille
with. Because Marx was in such haste to turn his back on the
past he saw his progressive forces, sometimes at any rate, too
mechanistically; because of this, in turn, he had to deny his
own finer intuitions, to copy Bentham's clockwork psychology
and 'springs of action', and to think of working-class and Asia as
kept in motion only by the crude pressure of increasing misery.
In 1853 Marx had drawn up an orderly chart of British
India, and was looking forward to its regeneration 'at a more
or less remote period'.
6
3 In 1857, the Mutiny broke out. He
could be excused for not foreseeing this, because hardly any of
those who knew India foresaw it, though there had been many
uneasy premonitions. All the same, in some ways the outbreak
went against the grain of his preconceived notion of a society
paralysed, if not actually pulverized, by the British steamroller.
In the political sphere he had written of a 'levelling of all that
was great and elevated in the native society',
6
4 yet the leader-
ship, such as it was, in r 85 7 was that of princes and aristocrats
new or old, under the banner of the descendant of Akbar and
Tamberlane-that 'little shrivelled yellow old man' on whom
Marx had poured scorn as symbol of the dead past.
6
s
Under the surface agitation over things like greased car-
tridges, Marx discerned significant currents; and it is a notable
fact that he viewed the Mutiny as in some sense a 'national'
rising. He thus anticipated the present-day Indian view of it
as the starting-point of the independence movement. But he
laid less stress on this aspect of it than Indian Marxists have
sometimes done,6
6
and his caution was reasonable; 1857 may
be said to have been nationalistic in the same rudimentary way
that the Taiping rebellion was socialistic, and the starting-
point of the modern Chinese revolution. It was the army alone
that Marx recognized as a new, coherent force, 'the first
general centre of resistance' of modern India;
6
7 and this
mercenary army was to be quickly reconstructed afterwards,
63
War qf Independence, p. 37
6
4 Ibid., p. 33
6s On Colonialism, pp. 68-g.
66 Sec the centenary volume of studies, Rebellion r8..?7, ed. P. C. Joshi
(Delhi, I957).
67 J!Var l!f IndefJendence, p. 40.
MARX AND INDIA
and to serve the British Raj faithfully down to almost the very
end. Even at the time, he was struck by the sepoys' lack of
solidarity, and ascribed their defeat at Delhi to dissensions
between regiments, and between Hindu and Muslim, as well
as between the soldiery and the traders whom they looted.
68
Marx was aware of an agrarian as well as national flavour
in the Mutiny, but, again realistically, he did not credit the
peasantry with a line of action of its own. In spite of the huge
Taiping revolt, it was not to peasant movements that he was
looking for progress in Asia, and he did not guess their coming
importance. It should be recalled that in western Europe the
most active peasant movements of recent times had been of a
reactionary clerical-feudal or monarchist complexion, as in the
Vendee, Calabria, and Carlist Spain; while in central Europe
in 1848-49, though peasants had sometimes risen against feudal
burdens, some had been mobilized in the service of Hapsburg
reaction. This record must have helped to concentrate Marx's
hopes on the new class, the proletariat.
Marx found no time during the rush of events to ponder the
fact that the scene of most widespread resistance to the British
was the province of Oudh, round Lucknow, which they had
only just taken over, and where, under a feeble local monarchy,
the taluqdars or revenue-collectors had been lately turning
themselves into big landlords. These men had no place in
Marx's earlier scheme of things, in which all the soil belonged
to State or rural commune. Before the end of the conflict he
was recognizing them as mushroom feudalists who had risen
by encroaching on both the peasantry and the King of Oudh,
and who had joined the sepoys out of fear of the British
trespassing on their 'rights'. There had been talk of sweeping
these usurpers away altogether: it was encouraged by the new
reforming mood at Calcutta as well as by desire for more
revenue, and Marx felt constrained to admit that the argu-
ments in favour of it were 'very plausible'.
6
9 He would have
been entitled to conclude that Oudh in 1857 bore some
resemblance to the Vendee. As to Engels, he was always
68 Ibid., p. I I 2.
69Ibid., p. I6o. SeeJagdish Raj, 'Introduction of the Taluqdari System in
Oudh', in Contributions to Indian Economic History, I, ed. T. Raychaudhuri
(Calcutta, Ig6o), pp. 46 ff.
inclined to button himself up in his Prussian uniform when he
wrote on military matters, but he may only have been saying
bluntly what his friend was surmising when he dismissed the
resistance in Oudh as 'a miscellaneous rabble, collected bv
insurgent zemindars' .7o '
Their was monopolized by the fighting areas, most
of them httle touched by modernity, along the Gangetic valley
from Delhi to Bihar. About Bengal Marx was curiously silent.
Engels remarked disparagingly that 'Bengal proper is easily
held, because its people have fallen terribly' .n Militarily they
had, long before Plassey, and they had been a long time under
British rule. But this meant too that there had been time for
closer ties t? form .between some Bengalis and the ruling power,
and to enhst the1r sympathy in 1857 (no doubt with manv
misgivings) on the British side.n Landowners were content
'
and relied on British protection. Of more moment for the
future, here alone was there a numerous intelligentsia-partly
of the same social stratum as the landowners-permeated by
Western education. It believed far more deeply in Britain's
?ivilizing mission than Marx himself, or most Englishmen, and
It was the only class capable of leading India into the modern
age as he desired.
. In the excitement of the contest an instinctive fellow-feeling
With the rebels checked for the time being any sober estimate
of what India stood to gain or lose. After it was over, unluckily,
he was not at leisure to draw lessons from the Mutiny or decide
how it fitted into his previous picture of India. He had an
occasion to begin a reconsideration when writing his final
Indian article in 1858, about the debate on the India Bill
transferring authority from the Company to the Crown. But
the dust had not yet settled, and as often he was unable to
banish his King Charles's head; he gave too much of his
energy to detecting in the Bill another sinister design on the
part of that fiend in human shape and mutton-chop whiskers,
Lord Palmerston.
It may seem however to follow from the logic of Marx's
70
War of Independence, p. I go. This estimate is in line with that of J agdish
op. cit., pp. 55-6.
7' War of lndepmdence, p. 203.
72
See Benoy Ghose, 'The Bengali Intelligentsia and the Revolt', in
Rebellion r857, pp. 103 ff.
MARX AND INDIA 185
thinking about India that the Mutiny was a premature
explosion of feeling, provoked so far as the masses were con-
cerned by the harshness of British rule, colliding with and
frustrating its more beneficial tendencies. If a mode of pro-
duction and its ruling class cannot be dislodged before they
have exhausted whatever development they are capable of, 73
the same may be true of a colonial regime like the British in
India. On Marx's analysis its potential development, so far
from being exhausted, was only just starting. He was, it may
be added, prepared to acknowledge in war, as its 'redeeming
feature', the ultimate test of peoples and societies.7
4
The
Mutiny failed; but it brought about a new alignment in India,
not in all ways favourable to progress. After 1848 in Europe,
autocracy was obliged to take into partnership the defeated
bourgeoisie: conversely after I 85 7 viceregal autocracy had to
take into partnership, as less dangerous than the masses, the de-
feated feudal interests. The Oudh taluqdars in particular were to
remain a cancer ofindia down to the close of the British epoch.
Misgivings about the future he had lately been so hopeful
of must have cast shadows across Marx's mind while the news
came in during 1857. Quite early in the struggle he saw with
foreboding the approach of 'a most terrible tragedy'; 75 meaning
thereby, perhaps, a contest that, whatever the fortunes of war,
India could not win.
Marx's prediction of an industrialized India, and its very
lagging fulfilment, has a bearing both on his understanding of
India and on his doctrine of how industrial capitalism came
into being in its original habitat, England. These themes were
in his mind in the same years, and here as in other ways his
thoughts about East and West intertwined. He did not enquire
why industrial capital had not developed in India spontan-
eously, and to Asian society as he saw it the question could have
little relevance. Yet of the three necessary conditions that he
listed in r857-s8-labour made available by detachment of
peasants from the soil; specialized craft skills; accumulation of
money from trade and usury'6-the second and third were
undeniably present in old India, while as to labour there were
73 As n. 2.
75 War of Independence, p. 43
74 The Eastern Qpestion, p. 576.
76 Hobsbawm, p. 4.6.
r86 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
at any rate numerous urban craftsmen, village artisans, and a
large vagrant population. Clearly also there was a connexion
of the 'putting-out' type, between merchant capital ancl
handicraft production.77 We talk of the world market that
made Britain's industrial revolution possible, but Indian cloth
had something like a world market long before: it sold in
Persia, in east Africa, in Inclonesia.78
Eight or nine years later, when he finished the first volume
of Capi:tal,. Marx had worked out a fuller account of the genesis
of capttahsm.7
9
To have labour available is not the same thing
as to know what to do with it. All sixteenth-century Europe
teemed with vagaboncls-clisbanclecl retainers or dispossessed
peasar:ts-, only Tudor England, with its flogging-ancl-
brandmg magistrates and its Puritan discipline, kneaded the
loose mass into a useful labour force. Marx sometimes seems to
run the two stages together causally, as if Ancient Pistol was
dismissed and Hodge evicted in order that capitalism might
not lack hands. It would be more accurate to say that capitalism
was starting in order to cope with a social problem that had
arisen independently of it: it was the reaction of a whole society
in other words, rather than the initiative of a single class.
did quite say this, and may have come closer to saying it
m Ius early sketches than in his mature statement.Bo State
to be a crucial factor through the Mer-
cantilist penocl, m France and, more bureaucratically further
east, and again later by fresh methods in Japan and tsarist
Russia. Capitalism did not grow, it was made. Only a modern
mixture of deception and self-deception allows it to fancy its
ancestors a line of sturdy free enterprisers harassed by official
meddling like Hitler's generals by their commander-in-chief.
In old India the military-bureaucratic State, alien by origin
and least Indian when most powerful, had no tendency
of tlus kind. It had no interest in the sea, or in naval power to
and enlarge India's foreign markets. It guaranteed the
of the. towns by squeezing food out of the country-
Side by means oftts land-tax, but kept them parasitic on itself:
77 Sec e.g. Pavlov, ojJ. cit., chap. I.
78
See Bal Krishna, Commercial Relations between India and England r6or to
1757 (London, I924), chap. I. '
79 CafJital, Vol. r, Part viii.
80
'The Gennan Ideology, pp. 50 ff.; Formations, pp. I I I ff.
MARX AND INDIA
the town was under no compulsion to sell to the village, while
the village, drained by taxation, could not afford to buy from
urban craft industry more than a trickle of things, chiefly silver
ornaments for hoarding. In this situation the business com-
munity remained separate from the rest of society; the same
phenomenon that Marx in old Europe,. where pursuit
of wealth was left to 'a few tradmg peoples ... m the pores of
the ancient world like the Jews in medieval society'.
81
Special-
ized groups-Jain, Marwari, ?hetty-were the men,
or Armenians and other foretgners.
82
It was the same m the
Ottoman empire, and even in China a prevalence of leading
merchants from one or two provinces can be observed.
83
If Marx tacitly assumed that British enterprise would not
industrialize India, he was to prove quite right, in the face of
what might at the time have seemed reasonable anticipation.
Mills in India would have some patent advantages, and the
country's strangeness and remoteness were not likely to daunt
British businessmen or engineers, who were hurrying on the
industrial revolution all over Europe, and running cotton-mills
from Malaga to St. Petersburg. Dispersal of energy and skilled
man-power over Europe, and then u:ay ha_ve
helped to divert attention from Incha.
might be more daunting to new-fledged Incltan busmessmen,
and fear after 1857 of another upheaval would discourage
investment by them at least as much as by British capitalists.
Politicians at Westminster, still mostly drawn from the landed
class with its paternalistic attitudes, might be reluctant to see
unemployment increased in Bolton by increased employment
in Bombay. To have this brought about by an openmg of
Indian mills, instead of British, would be still more objection-
able. Cotton textiles were the obvious thing for India to begin
industrialization with, as Britain had clone; Lancashire's
reluctance to be supplanted in the Indian market was the most
tangible obstacle in the way.
81 Formations, p. 84.; there is a similar phrase in CajJital, Vol. I, p. 91, and
again in Vol. III, p. 388. . . . .
82 See the early chapters of L. C. Jain, Indzgenous Bankwg l1l Indza (London,
1926). . . .
83 See a valuable discussion of the failure of true eapxtahsm to emerge m
old China, in L. Dermigny, La Chine et !'Occident. Le commerce a Canton au
xviii" siecle, qrg-1833 (Paris, 1964), pp. 58 ff., 321 ff., 8I7 ff., I,434 ff.
188
Marx could argue that India would be starting from the level
of the locomotive instead of the spinning-jenny; industrial
technology once in being, new countries could adopt it ready-
made. He was studying Spain, where liberals after the revolu-
tion of 1854 were hopefully expecting their country to be
hauled non-stop into the future by steam traction;B4 and he
may have transferred some of this hopefulness to India. Both
he and the Spaniards were crediting railways with a bigger
horse-power than they really possessed. In 1857 Engels wrote
an article on the theme of how a genuine modern army must
be a slow growth in any Asiatic country, demanding moral
equipment as well as uniforms and rifles.ss Marx might have
been expected to reckon similarly with the manifold social,
cultural, psychological adjustments necessary for a real
transition to industrial societv
prime requisite for was a corps of inclus-
tn.a:Jsts. Marx seemed take it granted. By defeating the
m1htary powers of Inclia-Mushm, Maratha, Sikh-Britain
had, it is true, cleared the way for commercial elements to come
to. the fl:ont. But _for the traditional money-spinning groups,
Jam and Manvan and so on, this onlv meant a return after
. 1 ' '
an of disorder, to business as usual, the old grooves of
speculatiOn. They had been used ever since the Muslim
conquest of India, or from earlier still, to living as camp-
of an a.lien government, keeping in the background,
practlsmg esotenc arts by which they could become opulent,
though never secure. Banking in their hands continued in
British times to be not much more than money-lencling.s6 The
flocked into Bombay were exceptional. Still only
half-Indmn after a thousand years in India, these descendants
of r.efugees from Persia had not previously been a specialized
busmess group, and now, as if wakened by the British touch
from a refreshing slumber of centuries thev showed extra-
ordinary readiness for experiment; the British
into the opium. trade with China as as Bengalis
followed them mto English literature and political theory, and
84
V. G. Kiernan, The Revolution qf r854 in Sj1anish History (London, 1966),
pp. 154> 195
85
In on China, pp. 45 ff. As with India, some other articles and
letters on Chma are to be found in On Colonialism
86
Jain, oj1. tit., p. r85.
MARX AND INDIA I8g
eventuallv it was a Parsec firm that founded Indian steel. But
the more'westernizecl they grew, the less Indian they were.
The more truly Indian and hidebound had as a rule mediocre
success when they ventured out of old lanes, starting tea-
plantations or coal-mines for instance in the wake of the
British. Emancipation from the past proceeded much more
slowly than Marx expected. Religion of a specific minority
type had been one ingredient in the crucible where Western
capitalism was first formed; in India religion and the social
habits that went with it were, as Catholicism had been in
Europe, a dead weight on change, an incubus from which China
and Japan were comparatively free. An analogous question
arises in the same epoch in Ireland, where the Protestant
trader often seemed able to thrive under the same conditions as
the Catholic who could only sigh and blame the government.
Meanwhile, industrialization in Japan and Germany (as in
socialist Russia and China in later years) was being accelerated
by a strong national afflatus, an impulse to make up for lost
time, to cast off the reproach of barbarous backwardness-of
being 'a dark people', as Russians used to call themselves. A
genuine entrepreneur cannot, any more than a statesman, be
reared on narrow self-regarding calculations alone. He too is a
social animal; he needs a fostering climate, the oxygen of
public approval; he must have his admiring audience, like an
actor or artist. Absurd as the modern company-director's cant
of 'service' often sounds, a historical reality underlies it. Urges
and incitements from his environment arc as much required
to make a man toil at building a factory as at building a pyra-
mid, a party, or a Grand Army.
Since there was no Indian State, there was no tariff policy to
protect Indian industry.87 Several independent countries shared
the same disability. Turkey was shackled by the Capitulations,
and Japan had a long struggle to throw off the 'Unequal
Treaties' imposed on it in its clays of weakness. Japan made
headway in spite of the handicap. For one thing, it could
indulge in imperialistic forays abroad which, profitable or not,
helped to draw the jarring classes together. Indian soldiers
fought abroad far oftener, up and down Asia and Africa, but
87 Sec R. Dutt, The Economic rif India in the Victorian Age (7th edn.,
London, 1950), chap. xii, 'History of Tariffs'.
the glow and glory were Britain's, India only paid the bill.
Unlike India, Japan enjoyed political autonomy: unlike
Turkey it had a ruling class bent on industrialization, both for
public and for private advantage, and an active merchantry,
with a long and close connexion with the ruling class, and
Japanese in a sense in which no comparable group was either
Turkish or Indian. And far more than either of the others,
Japan was already a nation. Here again the national State
appears as the parent or guardian of capitalism, its creator
much more than its creation.
One other area where these factors counted was that of
labour recruitment and discipline. Marx leaves it to be sup-
posed that he thought the disintegration of the village commune
would release the necessary labour. But surplus labour-power
might easily form a stagnant pool in the countryside instead of
flowing to distant mills. For construction work on roads and
railways, local resources usually sufficed; for one purpose vital
to British investment, manning the Assam tea-plantations, a
new labour force had to be got together by hook or by crook.
Here the State power was fully exercised, and helped the
planters to construct an elaborate recruiting organization with
agencies all over India, drawing to a considerable extent on the
aboriginal tribal reservoir; it also enabled them, especially in
the earlier decades, to treat their coolies virtually as serfs.ss
Mining was unimportant from the British point of view, so no
such effort was applied to recruiting miners,89 or would have
been made in favour of any primarily Indian industry. In
Japan regimentation of labour was comprehensive; employers
backed by law and police could shut up workers from the
villages, many of them women, in company barracks, and at
the same time indoctrinate them with willingness to work for
company and fatherland.
Bengal, whose first generation of technicians had caught
Marx's eye, kept the lead intellectually, but showed small
taste for industry. It might have been different if British capital
had been setting a more spirited pace, or even if British
capitalism had been more dynamic at home, and Oxford and
88
On the early stages sec W. N. Lees, Tea Cultivation ... in India (London,
186g).
B" Sec e.g. G. M. Broughton, Labour in Iudianbulustries (London, If)24), p. 75
MARX AND INDIA
Cambridge had fed Indian students on applied science instead
of Cicero. It would be interesting to know how an India run
by Germans or Yankees would have turned out, and some
computer may one clay tell us. As things were, other openings
had superior attractions for educated Bengalis. Their province,
which had been racked to pay for Britain's conquest of the rest
of India, was now getting something in return, in the form of a
junior partnership; whatever government posts were not
monopolized by Britons were likely to go to them. Britain,
like the Bourbon monarchy, allowed the middle-class man to
buy his way into its service, or if not his own way, then his
son's, by investing his savings in the young :n:an's education.
Other savings must have gone on being drawn mto government
loans, as those of the old French rentier were.
Worst of all, a vast deal of money that might have fermented
into industrial capital was sucked into the land, like a river of
central Asia seeping away among desert sands. The estates
erected by the British in Bengal were being let and sub-let and
sub-let again by their owners; the failure of British-sponsored
landlordism to evolve into rational agrarian capitalism, as
expected by the makers of the Permanent Settlement, fore-
the failure of industrial capitalism to spring up, as
expected by Marx. Not only the right oflandlord,
right kind of man to serve as wage-paymg farmer,. rr;-1ssmg
in the countryside, as the entrepreneur was mtssmg m the
towns. There was the same story, the same clinging to habits
of usury and extortion and absenteeism, in the Spanish
countryside, where the selling off (to itself) by the Liberal
bourgeoisie of Church estates and village commons had results
parallel with those of the zemindari in. Bengal.
might have been forewarned by Spamsh expenence ever smce
I 833 that a half-baked middle class in a
will not put its money into industry so long as It remams free
to buy land and rack-rent tenants. . .
The longer industry hung fire, the more problematical It
became, because technology was growing more complex and
costly. Japan had started just in time. By 1914 Indi<: was the
world's fourth biggest manufacturer of cotton textiles, and
mining and heavy industry had made a start, but this meant
little when set beside the huge and increasing population. In
1928 the Comintern in its colonial thesis was proposing to miss
out the stage of capitalism in such lagging areas, by dint of an
alliance of progressive forces there and socialist parties in the
metropolitan countries. Independence when it came at last in
I 94-7 brought to power in India a bourgeoisie still, like that of
Spain, bearing strong marks of its past.9 The pace of industrial-
ization became more brisk, but only as a trot is brisker than a
walk; the 'private sector' of industry was to devote less energy
to expansion than to preventing the 'public sector' from
expanding.
Marx had no time to speculate about how Indian capitalism
would behave, or how it would benefit the Indian masses;
possibly also no inclination, fron1 an unconscious desire to get
technology in India without paying the price in capitalist
misery. The nobility or gentleness he found in the Indian
character had no place among the satanic virtues he held to be
the stamp of a successful bourgeoisie. In one enigmatic allusion,
he wrote that the new technology would do the Indian people
no good until India became independent, or Britain socialist.9
1
What a socialist Britain should do with India, he did not
specify; why capitalism should be any less villainous in an
independent India than in independent Britain or France, he
did not explain. If he really expected it to be less villainous,
he was sadly astray.
It would not be easy to extract from Marx's comments on
India a socialist doctrine on imperialism. Clearly they do not
point towards Hobson's idea of Britain evolving into a 'rentier-
State', living off the profits of colonial factories and workers; 9
2
nor towards the theory of 'clecolonization' discussed among
Marxists in the I 92o's, although they might be said to look
forward to the same result by a different route. Marx's silences
are at times as striking as his utterances. There is copious detail
on New Zealand, nothing on India, in the final section of
Volume I of CajJital, 'The Modern Theory of Colonization'. It
was the nature of the capitalist relationship that he was con-
cerned to elucidate here. But his analysis of capitalism in
90 Sec e.g. V. Anstey, The Economic Deuelojmwnt of India (4.th cdn., London,
1952), Introd., and pp. 272 ff.
11 f11ar ofbulejJendence, p. 37
n .J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (London, 1902), part II, chap. V, section IV.
MARX AND INDIA 193
Britain might seem to stand in nee.cl further
the colonial empire and its contnbutwn, clearer hght on his
epigram that 'to be free at home, John Bull must enslave
abroad' .9
3
In a less explicit yet deeper fashion, may
helped to mould Marx's philosophy of capitalism: A
class often recapitulates in its colonies the more episodes
of its early career. The suppression of peasant or tnbal
in Bengal had something in common. the of
peasant revolts in Tudor England, hke":'Ise with the mel_ of
foreign mercenary troops; the mass executiOns the
were akin to the Cromwellian reprisals after the Insh Rebelhon.
The spectacle of Western capitalism in Asia, reel and
claw must have helped to inspire in Marx a convictiOn of the
absoiute, incorrigible badness of capitalism altogether. _One of
his articles has a peroration on 'The profound hypocnsy and
inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization', displayed more
nakedlv in colonies than at home. Imperial exploitation writes
large 'he declared 'the inherent organic laws of political
' ' I .
economy now at work'.94 His mind may have been worong
from imperialism to these laws, as well as ccm.IO-
mics to empire. Emotionally at any rate, Bnt1sh India supplied
him with a magnified illustration of man's inhumanity to man
in class society. Increasing misery there may have helped to
convince him that the masses at home too were doomed
irrevocably under capitalism to grow poorer. To suggest. this
is to attribute to Marx some thinking of a not cxcltlS!vely
logical character; but this great thinker not always,_ as
Nietzsche advises philosophers to do, keep h1s thoughts on Ice.
How much of a motive Lancashire's voracious need of
markets supplied for the continuing subjugation of India in
the first halfofthe nineteenth century, is a question Marx docs
not clearly pose. It would be about as easy or as hard to prove
that Napoleon conquered Europe to oblige French manu-
facturers (a proposition Marx would ccrtamly not
have enclorsccl9s). The disorder prevailing before the arnval of
93 On Colonialism, p. 202.
9} War qf Independence, pp. 37-8. . .
95 See Marx and Engels, The Holy Fmmly (1844; English edn., Moscow,
1956), pp. 166-7.
I 94 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
ti:e Union Jack can scarcely, it might be thought have
hmdered reception of British goods more than the of
roads which the EIC did so little to remedy. John Bull looked
on at the process of conquest complacently. From time to time
he was called on to pay some expenses, but that could be treated
as of the of beating the French, or the
and patnot1c pnde was already to him what family
pndc_ to Pooh-Bah. As a rule the campaigns were self-
were paid for by Indian peasants, or loans from
Indian finanCiers, and most of the casualties were borne by
sepoys, who could well be spared, or by Irishmen, Highlanders,
and younger sons, who would never be missed.
Of more practical significance for the time when Marx was
writing is the question whether India, if it had ever been
necessary to was still a necessity, or only
a luxury. Marx g1ves no categonc answer, such as Adam Smith
had_ given to the same kind of question, but Smith's con-
clusiOns were of a piece with his more tentative ones there is
often a straight line between Marxism and the early,
phase of bourgeois economics. 'Dreadful misfortunes' were
what Smith, as much as Marx, saw as the result of contact with
Europe for the native peoples of Asia and the Americas.96 He
was arguing chiefly from the case of theN orth American colonies
then just breaking into revolt, as Marx was concerned chieflv
with the Indian Mutiny. Smith argued that Britain's
trade pattern had been distorted by the selfish interests of
groups of traders, to whom the wider interests of Britain as well
as of the colonies were sacrificcd.97 Several scattered obser-
by Marx arc in the same vein, and suggest that he was
Willmg to think of imperialism as a morbid excrescence on
_than (as _Lenin-of course at a later stage-
considered It) _an mtegral, mescapable part of capitalism.
, Marx ':as nnp_resscd the first by India's precarious
Its deficits only bndged by the opium profits from
Chma. When the Mutmy came he was convinced a trifle
hastily it may be, that all the immense cost of its
would have to be met by the British taxpaycr.98 He noted with
Wealth qf Nations (1776; World's Classic edn., 1904), Vol. 2, p. 236.
Ilnd., pp. 184.-5, 202-
5
.
98
f!Var of Independence, pp. 31, 47
MARX AND INDIA 195
gloomy relish that Indian bankers would lend no more to the
Company (they were also extremely reluctant to lend to the
rebels99), and that loans were having to be floated in London,
which would be the starting-point of a heavy 'Anglo-Indian
Home Debt'.Ioo It might have struck him that this would create
a fresh vested interest in favour of India being held on to. For
the British public, however, it seemed quite clear to him now
that India was a dead loss. Moreover it was dragging Britain
into expensive quarrels with neighbouring countries. Who then
gained? Marx reckoned some ro,ooo officials or officers-about
6,ooo planters or men of affairs in India-pensioners-and
EIC stockholders drawing a guaranteed IOl per cent profit.
101
He found room too for the English aristocracy, who kept
British India involved in wars 'in order to find employment
for their younger sons'.
102
As to Lancashire, its Indian market
was costing John Bull 'a damned high pricc'.xoJ 'India is now
our best ally', he could even write to Engcls-not thinking
of the Indian masses as an ally of the working-class at home,
but of the Indian empire as a millstone round the neck of the
bourgcoisic.
10
4
V csted interests, Adam Smith complained, conjured up a
myth of America's indispensability to England.
10
s The fiction
that loss of control of America must mean irretrievable ruin
for the British people had quickly turned out, in the light of
experience, to be the merest moonshine; but the habit of living
on a myth is not easily shaken off, and the blank space left in
popular emotion was soon filled by India. In point of fact, the
U.S. Civil War was to reveal that the cotton industry had made
Britain perilously dependent, not on India, but on America.
Many countries offered markets, one country alone an adequate
supply of raw cotton. But the lesson was a few years too late.
The Mutiny had come to the help of the vested interests, by
plunging the whole question in hysteria. If taxpayers had begun
to ask themselves, like Marx, what they were getting out of
99 N. K. Nigam, Delhi in r857 (Delhi, 1957), pp. 82, 95
100
War of ImlejJendence, pp. I 24. ff.; On Colonialism, pp. I4.5-8.
101 War of Independence, pp. 86-90.
102 On Colonialism, pp. 63, 70.
103 War of Independence, p. 209 (941859).
104 Ibid., p. 208 (14.1.I858).
ros Vol. 2, pp. 210-1 I.
India, the passions let loose, the tales of sepoy atrocities,
the murders of Enghsh women, the frenzied howls for revenge,
put an abrupt end to any cool discussion for many decades to
come. From now on, holding India at all costs was a national
dogma, to as little rational scrutiny as the annual
of .st Januarius's blood at Naples. Unluckily, the
JUSt after the Crimean War had whipped up
Jmgo excitement, and it coincided with wars with Persia and
China; these made India necessary at least as Britain's base of
operations in Asia, and as the bulwark ofBritish prestige without
which John Bull's customers everywhere would no doubt throw
his piece-goods back in his face.
C:arrying Marx's train of thought a step further, one might
conJecture that possession of India and similar captive markets
was Lancashire more and more a superfluity, a feather-
and that this retarded the flow of capital and invention
mto newer, more advanced industries such as Germanv was
) I
soon developmg, and thus held Britain back at a less advanced
stage. Venturing one step further still, one might
conJecture that all the later stampede of colony-grabbing up
to rgq., for which the Indian empire supplied the malign
model to Britain and its rivals alike, was a fit of atavism
rather than a logical dictate of the pure thing-in-itself of
capitalism.
What might prove less difficult to demonstrate is that some
sparks from the explosion of 1857 fell into a magazine of
patriotic powder in Britain, whose existence in the working-
class as well as middle-class consciousness Marx had not
suspected; and that the lingering spirit of Chartism, if it had
not been put to flight by the charge of the Light Brigade, was
fin.ally routed now. In that case, instead of the bourgeoisie
bemg weakened by any drain of Indian costs, it was being
strengthened, and the way prepared for class collabor-
atiOn The half-truth, or quarter-truth, that the
Lancashire mill-hand had the same interest as the master in
upholding Britain's civilizing mission in India, may have done
as much as anything else to make revolutionary socialism in
this country impossible.
these points of view the storm and sack of Delhi by
the Bnt1sh army on r8 September, 1858, which may have
MARX AND INDIA
197
been a painful blessing for India, was a disastrous triumph for
England.
Marx's jottings on China offer some sidelights on what he
was thinking about India. Here too his interest first displayed
itself in 1853, in a long article followed a few years later by a
running commentary on the second Opium War where some
of his views emerge more maturely.
In China he observed, and found detestable, the same
stagnation, immobility, as in pre-British India, made ridiculous
by Chinese self-satisfaction, 'delusions of Celestial perfection'.
106
Here if not in India, he noted from the first the factor of over-
population. This he thought must have been the prime cause
of the unrest flaring up in the Taiping rebellion, but he
assumed at the same time that foreign imports must have
worsened the situation by crippling hand-spinning and
weaving as in India and western Asia.
10
7 By 1859 he had
revised this judgment, and was impressed by China's im-
perviousness to Western competition: it made its own rough
cloth cheaper than Lancashire could under-sell it, because each
household produced its own supply in its spare time, at no
labour cost at all.xos This concept of 'Asiatic society' in China
'depending upon the combination of minute agriculture with
domestic industry'
10
9 invites comparison with Marx's picture
of India. He equated the two economics when he spoke of
China having the 'same combination of husbandry with
manufacturing industry' as India. He spoke of this also as an
impediment to imports of foreign cloth in both countries, and
gave a new turn to his theory of the disruption of rural India by
adding that there the British, having seized political power,
were able to undermine a 'peculiar constitution' of landed
property, and to turn part of the soil into plantations growing
opium, indigo, and so on.no
In 1853 Marx was indulging both the hasty optimism he
sometimes gave way to, and his taste for epigram, when he
declared that Chinese events would do more than any nearer
home to quicken revolution in Europe.m He was expecting not
xo6 Marx on China, p. 55 Io7 On Colonialism, p. 13.
xos Marx on China, pp. 90-91. '
0
9 Ibid., p. 87.
no Ibid., pp. 91-2. This anticipates a passage in Capital, Vol. III, pp.
391-3. III Ibid., pp. I ff.
socialist revolution but fresh democratic nsmgs of the 1848
pattern, provoked by economic hardship: turmoil in China
meant loss of customers for Western industry, already suffering
as it was from over-production. This was giving far too much
importance to the China market, whose capacity he soon, and
rightly, came to think overrated.m He was pointing to a more
serious danger for Britain when he said China was likely to
grow its own opium, to avoid silver payments to India, and
this would put a further strain on Indian finance.m
On a larger view, Marx was very conscious during these
years that his world was expanding, acquiring new dimen-
sions-California, Australia, the Far East-, as if, he remarked,
the sixteenth-century age of exploration and discovery were
happening over again.II4 The old China was collapsing, he
wrote in 1857, under Anglo-French pressure and internal
revolt, and this meant 'the opening day of a new era for all
Asia' ;m but by next year he was afraid that 'bourgeois
society' was going to strengthen and consolidate itself by
extension into new regions of the earth, leaving socialism
suffocated in its narrow Western cradle.II
6
So far as can be
seen, what he had in mind was not a further spread of Western
imperialism but a proliferation of autonomous capitalism, such
as he expected in India and did witness in north America.
This would mark a new enough era {or Asia, if not a socialist
one. In 1894 Engels was to rejoice in the thought that defeat
in the war with Japan must finally shake to pieces the old
China and 'the old economic system of small peasant agricul-
ture, where the family also made its industrial products itself',-
and that industrialization must follow. With unquenchable
optimism, forty years after he and Marx had first thought of it,
he prophesied once more the ruin of Western capitalism, but
now in a new way: Chinese industrial competition would be so
overwhelming that Europe would be submerged by the deluge
of Chinese goods.m It was a bugbear of many Westerners by
then, a new spectre haunting Europe. Like Marx earlier with
India, Engels took for granted that China once forcibly prised
112 A1arx on China, p. 87. 113 Ibid., pp. g, 66.
II4 On Colonialism, p. 286 (to Engels, 8.10.I858).
liS Marx on China, p. SI. II6 As n. I I4
11
7 On Colonialism, p. 3 I 3; cf. p. 3 I r.
MARX AND INDIA 199
loose from its past could perfectly well industrialize itself. But
capitalism was to prove even more stunted there than in India.
Like Marx's doctrine of imperialism, his conception of
historical change, in the glimpses we have of it in these writings,
has some ambiguous features. These are not cleared up by the
Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations written at the same period. In
this rough scheme of universal history, Marx was working, as
Hobsbawm says, 'in highly abstract terms', and was more
concerned with 'long-term transformation' than with minutiae
of transition from one stage to another,
118
such as India was
undergoing. To relate his general hypotheses to the concrete
detail of the articles on India, or of Indian history as we know
it, is far from easy.
Marxists are accustomed to look on every system as con-
taining inner contradictions, and as changing primarily in
response to these tensions. Marx's writings on Asia reveal that
he conceived of much, or most, of human history as escaping
from any iron law of change, into a timeless vegetative con-
dition. It was the discontinuity, the jerkiness, of social evolution
that impressed him, its lack of momentum, its habit of running
down. Mankind was advancing only in sporadic rushes here
or there, and Marx, who called on philosophy to change the
world, gave his interest to these active sectors, or to the
reasons that kept the others immobile.
A philosopher of a different order, writing on southern
Africa, is likewise struck by finding history not in steady
motion but 'subject to only partially explicable and almost
invariably violent mutations'. He thinks of societies like the
Bantu accumulating over long ages, like clouds, 'great in-
visible charges' of electricity, suddenly discharged.
11
9 Marx
might have accepted this as a picturesque summary of a French
or an Industrial Revolution. But he recognized no similar
accumulation of energy in societies, like those of Asia, apparently
quiescent.
About one of these at least, Japan, it may be a permissible
speculation that the country was on the brink of some radical
IIS Hobsbawm, pp. II, I3.
ll9 L. van dcr Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari (Penguin ccln., Ig62),
p. 6g.
transformation when foreign guns, by toppling the old regime,
a new ord:r to take shape more rapidly. External force
n:1ght then be smd to have played the part of 'midwife of
history' that Marx assigned to revolutions like I 789. In India
there had been at any rate sufficient ferment to call forth
taler:ts that t.he old society had no tasks for, aptitudes that would
quahfy Indians when the time came to assimilate modern
modes in .law, administration, if not in industry.
Every society, and the oldest the most, heaps up a surplus of
a.nd ment.al endowments beyond what its practical
reqmres. Marx might be said to have implied
someti:mg the sort when he praised Bengalis for their facility
at engmeermg. Yet no such thought seems to be in his mind
!1e as Hobsbawm says, of Asiatic society resisting
until wreck;d by the external force of capitalism' .rzo Certainly,
he was not unpressed by the claim the British had been fond
of making, that th.ey liberated the Hindu majority, among
whom modern aptitudes were most evident from the dead
hand. of Muslim rule. India had to be by Britain-
Russia needed to be defeated by western Europe-in order to
be d:agged out of the quagmire on to the highroad of history,
not m order that pent-up energies within them might be set
at large.
At times J\;farx:s ?agerness for a clean sweep is strikingly
to Mamsm I.n latest (autumn Ig66) phase, its indis-
c.nmmate denunciatiOn of everything traditional in Chinese
hfe. Anyone turnin? his eyes today from China to India might
well conclude that It would have been better for India to have
all blotted out. 'Every imprint of the past find and
anmlulate.!' the great Indian poet of this century made God
say to His angels.rzr But no-one has discovered how such
blottin!S ?ut be done. The Africans dragged across the
Atlantic m chams-the most drastic experiment in collective
amnesia ever tried-carried Africa with them nothing could
be more Chinese than Maoism. '
Tl.lC Christian cannot be awakened from sin by any effort
of Ius own, but only by Grace; Marx's Asia could only be
roused from stupor by the intervention of Europe. What then
120
Hobsbawm, p. 38.
121
Poems from Iqbal, trans. V. G. Kiernan (London, 1955), p. 43
MARX AND INDIA 20I
is to be said of former, unavailing revolts there? In medieval
Europe, Marx had written earlier, risings against oppression
were peasant risings, and 'totally ineffective because of the
isolation and consequent crudity of the peasants'.
122
If so, this
must have been still more true in Asia. Marx might then have
concluded that the Chinese or Japanese peasant, who rebelled
often, was less sensible than the Indian who more often took
refuge in religion. But a remote consequence is perhaps seen in
our day in the slow, hesitant adoption of progress by India,
compared with the Far East. Risings like those of medieval
Europe may not have been barren; they shook the fabric of
government, forced rulers to seek new methods, kept history
moving. Cumulatively they altered social psychology and
prepared for a new society at some time in the future. In Marx,
and often in Marxist historians after him, there can be felt an
unreconciled dualism between a historical scheme which made
nearly all revolts useless or (as impeding the advent of new,
more advanced regimes) worse than useless, and an impulse to
applaud every struggle against oppression, as Marx did in I857
The Mutiny itself was something round which patriotic
feeling could grow in years to come, and its memory helped
India to gain independence in 1947. But at the time and for
long afterwards its failure, and the extreme British reprisals,
pushed many Indians back into their past, as the beaten sepoys
drew off sullenly into their jungles. Westernizers and Western
ideas were compromised by their association with the foreign
despotism. The afrancesados of a generation or two earlier,
Spaniards in love with French enlightenment, had been dis-
credited in the same way by the brutal Napoleonic occupation
of Spain. This ominous precedent might have led Marx to
wonder whether one country really can be kicked or dragged
forward by another. In Asia, the two countries that have
progressed most, on divergent lines, are two that managed to
preserve their independence. But China and Japan, like Spain,
were nations already; India, to its misfortune, was not.
Marx's writings on Asia may often seem to throw more light
on him than on it. But he was, after all, a pioneer in trying to
look at Indian history scientifically; almost the first man to
foretell an independent India, the first to see that its real
122
The German Ideology, p. 4.G.
emancipation must come from industry. Indian socialists in our
day have been inspired by the recollection that Marx tried so
earnestly to understand their country. They have still far to
go in developing or correcting his rough ideas, and the divisions
and crises that have been overtaking them are not unconnected
with a failure to strengthen their armoury sufficiently in this
way. Some of them, fortunately, have been growing aware of
the need for a fresh and more thorough exploration.
6
Marx, Engels, and the
Indian Mutiny
Englishmen of the Mutiny years came to very diverse con-
clusions about what had caused the sudden eruption, and
Indian historians differ as widely among themselves now. In
the period of the national movement stories of the Mutiny
helped to rouse patriotic emotion, and for this purpose it was
all the better for being a mysterious event into which anyone
was free to read whatever he wanted. Patriotism, itself in many
ways an illusion, has often fed on myths. Socialism, having
more ambitious aims for the future, requires a more exact
understanding of the past; in modern Asia where it interacts
with the naive nationalism that peasants easily come to feel,
though not to originate, it has to make a special effort to achieve
this.
Briefly the choice among presentday views of the Mutiny lies
between seeing it as on the whole feudalistic and retrogressive,
or popular and forward-looking. Of the first R. C. Majumdar
may be taken as an accredited exponent, of the second S. B.
Chaudhuri.
1
Marx and Engels arrived at no clear-cut diagnosis.
They saw of course, as everyone saw, that the rebellion revealed
very strong anti-British feelings, not confined to the sepoy army,
though also far from universal; but on balance their opinions or
conjectures fit more readily into the first of the two hypotheses.
Clearly the annexation of Oudh in early February 1856, in
Lord Dalhousie's eyes his crowning service to India one month
before he laid down office as governor-general, had a crucial
1
R. C. Majumdar, The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of r857 (Calcutta,
1957); S. B. Chaudhuri, Theories qf the Indian A1utiny r857-59 (Calcutta,
1965).
importance. From this old British protectorate or vassal
kingdom a great number of sepoys had always been recruited,
and it was to be the biggest storm-centre of the rebellion.
Marx found reasons of his own for disapproving of the
annexation,
2
but of local conditions and of how the people
would be affected he could form only a rough idea. Rumours
of the coming event had been causing excitement in Oudh for
months beforehand. Dalhousie was convinced that the ordinary
people were bound to welcome it. Empire-builders have
always been able to convince themselves that the people they
meant to annex were thirsting to come under their enlightened
rule; and Dalhousie was a religious man with a great deal of
Curzon's self-righteousness and autocratic temper, as well as
his energy and sense of duty.
He had not been to see Oudh himself, but he came from a
Scotland still crammed with the mouldering castles where men
like his own ancestors lived with their bands of retainers and
kept the country in turmoil. That was precisely the condition
of Ouclh now, full of strongholds occupied by feudal magnates
each with his miniature court and army, a small replica of the
parasitic court at Lucknow. The ramshackle monarchy kept
a disorderly army of 6o,ooo men, an enormous burden for so
limited a territory, whose sole function was the collection by
force of arms of revenue to be spent on pomp and luxury at the
capital. All this double load fell, Dalhousie correctly saw, on
the peasantry, whom he sincerely pitied.J What he did not see
was that, since the Company was always hard up and its land-
taxes consequently were far too high, its rule might be only an
exchange of evils.
The preliminary revenue settlement made in Oudh in I856
was less sweepingly anti-feudal than the progressive party
among the British would have liked, and left a good half of
the province still under the taluqdars, or feudal lords. 4 But it
2
'The Annexation of Oudh' (May 1858), in Marx and Engels, The
First Indian War qf Independence r857-r859 (Moscow, 1959).
3 See his letter of 5 February 1859, in Private Letters qf the Marquess of
Dalhousie, cd. J. G. A. Baird (Edinburgh, 1910), p. 399
4 For a detailed account of how the annexation affected the taluqdars and
peasants, see Jagdish Raj, 'The Introduction of the Taluqdari System in
Ondh', in Contributions to Indian Economic History, eeL T. Raychaudhuri
(Calcutta, Ig6o), pp. 46 n:
MARX, ENGELS, AND THE INDIAN MUTINY
was enough to alarm them, especially as revenue clue from them
would now have to be paid in full instead of being dodged as it
had been before. Anything that could upset or dislocate the new
government would be welcome to them; it would give them a
breathing-space if no more, and a hope of being able to get
better terms. Nothing could be more convenient to them than
trouble in the sepoy army. There had often been mutinies
before; the difference in I 85 7 was that the trouble was far
bigger and was not due to the usual matter-of-fact griev-
ances, but was instigated by whatever agency set afloat the
rumour that the British meant to deprive the soldiers of their
religion.
They were in a generally restless mood, ready to believe any
ill of their foreign masters, even a story as absurd as this. No
one was in a better position to set the story afloat than the
taluqdars, on whose estates a great many of the sepoys' families
lived. Other feudal interests, lords and princes outside Oudh,
andjehaclists of Muslim revivalism, joined in, either by previous
arrangement or to profit by a situation they saw developing.
Many of the big landowners may have been astonished and
frightened by the violence of the army's explosion, and the
possibility of its getting ideas into its head that would be bad
for them as well as for the British. As a class their tactics were
to make themselves as powerful as they could during the
breakdown of order, until the British in their death-struggle
with the army were compelled to think of buying them off, and
then make haste to change sides. In the end they emerged with
nearly all Ouclh more firmly in their clutches than before. Of
all concerned in the conflict, they alone, the most selfish and
reactionary, did well out of it.
The villagers they preyed on were then left with no better
protection than a few pious phrases from ministers far away in
London. What their feelings were during I857-8 is less easy to
make out. They had long been engaged in a running struggle
to defend themselves against the encroachments of the taluqdars;
but the British in I 856, while doing enough to antagonize the
lords, did too little to win the confidence of the peasants.
Ignorance and conservatism, if nothing more rational, might
make them prefer the evil they knew to the one they did not.
And the sepoys were their relatives or neighbours. But situated
as they were, they really had little choice; the taluqdars held
the whip hand.s
In all that we see of martial preparations in Oudh during
the struggle, it is the taluqdars and rajas collecting forces and
guns and strengthening their forts. Similarly in numerous cases
we see dispossessed landowners recovering their estates from
new men, but scarcely ever lands being taken over by their
actual cultivators. India compared with China had a less
mature tradition of peasant revolt, though peasants had often
in old days too been drawn into risings started by their superiors
-particularly in this same Gangetic region in the time of the
Sultans of Delhi, when the villager must have felt anti-Muslim,
or anti-Turk, much as in 1857 he felt anti-Christian, or anti-
British. The contrast between India and China is heightened
by the fact that the Mutiny came towards the end of the Taiping
Rebellion, an upheaval on a vaster scale and one definitely of
peasants and artisans with a crude social programme. It is
open to speculation that if the British army (one of whose
officers eventually helped to suppress the Taipings) had been
as feeble as the Chinese army, the Mutiny likewise might have
spread wider and deeper and developed a more distinct social
and agrarian character.
In the Communist Party of India's important commemo-
ration volume of 1957, its editor seems closer to the mark when
he rejects any conception that 'the Indian peasantry during
this struggle decisively burst through the feudal bonds', than
when he speaks of class strife being 'subordinated to the broad
need of national unity against the foreign usurper'.6 A reader
familiar with the party's history may detect some traces or
echoes of its own past in its interpretation of the national past;
and in its language of 1942-7 the word 'patriotic' and the
watchword of 'national unity' were very much to the fore. At
odd moments in r857 the thought of an Indian nation can be
glimpsed, but only as socialism can be glimpsed in the class
struggles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in central
Europe.
What stands out is that those provinces which had a strongly
marked local nationality of their own, and had been free to
s Raychaudhuri, oj1. cit., pp. 56-7.
6
Rebellion 1857, eel. P. C. Joshi (Delhi, 1957), pp. 200-201.
assert it since the breakup of the Mogul empire-Bengal, the
Punjab, Rajputana, Maharashtra, the South-were from the
point of view of a united India non-national, or even anti-
national, because 'India' had always meant an empire imposed
on them by force. During the rebellion they were all either
neutral or even pro-British. Only 'Hindostan', the Hindi-
speaking region or Gangetic valley that had been the platform
of the old empires, wanted an 'India', but could visualize it
in no other form than as the resurrection of a buried past
whose fitting symbol was the decrepit Bahadur Shah, descend-
ant of the Moguls. Hindostan was populous, and held the
strategic central position; but almost alone of the main regions
of the subcontinent it had no sense or tradition of unity of its
own, because it was too big and sprawling, and too mixed in
religion and culture, with cities partly Muslim in a mostly
Hindu countryside, and because its memories were of empire
more than of national revolt against empire.
Martial spirit and absence of national cohesion made
Hindostan a prime recruiting-ground for mercenary soldiers,
somewhat as Germany had been for early modern Europe when
the sole German 'national' framework was that vaguely
splendid relic, the Holy Roman Empire. By supplying troops
to the Company, as it had formerly done to the Moguls,
Hindostan was in a certain sense rebuilding its empire; and
the Sikh attitude in 1857-8, far more anti-sepoy than anti-
British, showed how violently one of the other provinces might
react to this kind of sub-imperialism. Judging by the much
better showing of the sepoys at Delhi than at Luclmow, they
found more inspiration in the capital of the old empire than
in the capital of the kingdom to which many of them belonged
by birth. Oudh as a state was a meaningless abortion, an
accidental fragment of Hindostan to which no loyalty could
be felt.
All India's growing-points now were on the coasts, in contact
with the outer world that all its emperors had neglected:
Hindostan lay inland, land-locked, deaf to the stirrings of the
age. Not until the days of Nehru and the Congress would it find
its historic role again, as the hub of an Indian wheel, and then
in a new style. In 1857 Bengalis reading their Shakespeare and
thinking of their investments in Company loans must have
contemplated the Mutineers much as Englishmen in I745, with
no great love for George II, contemplated the wild Highlanders
pouring down from their northern fastnesses to dethrone him
and bring back a banished dynasty. A good many affinities
might be discovered between the last outburst of the old feudal
Scotland in 174.5 and that of the old feudal India in 1857; and
the brutalities of the repression in r857-8 can be better compre-
hended when the atrocious treatment of the Highland wounded,
prisoners, non-combatants by the English army after the battle
of Culloden in r 7 46 is remembered.
7
'Nowhere', Marx wrote to Engels during I857, 'is the
relationship between factors of production and the structure
of society more clearly illustrated than in the history of the
army.'
8
It is remarkable that although old India was perpetu-
ally at war, in the end its level of military proficiency was
scarcely higher than that of pacific China. This went with a
stagnant society neither truly feudal, in the European sense, nor
modern; its soldiers were a floating mass of professionals,
without even the loyalty of the employee to his paymaster,
since they were paid so irregularly. Company wages were very
low, but they were regular, and there were pensions; they gave
India its first taste of an impersonal, methodical relationship
of capital and labour. It was the bourgeois and unwarlike
British who organized the first effective army in modern Asia.
Their own army designed for service in Europe provided a
model; it too was one of mercenaries, recruited largely from the
conquered Highlands and Ireland. Recruitment from foreign
sources had always been commonplace in Asian armies.
Equipment in the sepoy army was poor enough, and the men
were badly feel, housed in unsanitary quarters, dressed up
under the tropical sun in preposterous uniforms, heavily over-
loaded on the march; they had low-grade, often absentee
British officers.9 Yet they, along with British troops in no
better condition, conquered India. In military history there
arc only sluides and degrees of stupidity and inefficiency.
Marx and Engels were aware that the 'Bengal Army' was
7
See J. Prebblc, Culloden (London, 1961).
8
W. H. Chaloner and W. 0. Henderson, Engels as A1ilitary Critic (collec-
ted articles; Ivfanehester, 1959), Introd.
9 Sec Amiya 13mat, The Bengal Native Infantry (Calcutta, 1962), pp. 72 ff.,
166-7, 171.
composed mainly of high-caste Hindus from outside Bcngal.
10
These were peasants, serving as infantry, like the rank and file in
all European armies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;
this made them amenable to a grind of drill and discipline
unknown to India's old-style armies, mostly made up of
horsemen who liked to think of themselves as gentlemen of
fortune, a mob of individuals instead of an integrated mass.
This class shift gave the sepoy army a more 'popular' character;
it may in a dim fashion have felt a kind of anti-feudal class-
consciousness as it helped a Company of merchants to trample
on rajas and overturn thrones, as if taking an oblique revenge
for the way its fellow-peasants in Oudh were trampled on by
the taluqclars. On the other hand, as Brahmins and Rajputs
who took service partly because they thought it derogatory to
their caste dignity to handle the plough and till the field them-
selves, II these men were tiny landowners rather than actual
cultivators. This fostered their martial spirit and self-esteem,
but it must also have rendered their attitude towards feudal
rulers and landlords an ambivalent one: they had something
in common with the aristocracy, and might the more easily be
got to follow its lead in a crisis like I857.
There was the same ambivalence in the army's attitude
towards its British employers, who paid it faithfully and led it
to victory, but treated it with contempt and often injustice. It
was true, as Marx wrote, that in this army the British created
India's 'first general centre of resistance' to them,I
2
but only
in a certain sense. Like the western-educated elite in Bengal,
then and much later, it was ready and eager to help the British
to run India, if they would only behave reasonably and give
it the status of a junior partner. It had no experience like the
War of Independence of r8o8-q. which Marx spoke of as
having 'transformed and revolutionised' the Spanish army.
1
3
On the contrary its latest exploits had been attacks on the
independence of three peoples each with a strong identity, the
Sikhs and Afghans and Burmese. It may have learned some-
10 TtVar of Independence, p. 45
n M. R. Gubbins, An Account of the Mutinies in Oudh (London, 1858),
p. 432.
xz War of IndejJendence, p. 40.
1
3 Marx and Engels, Revolution in Sjmin (collected articles; New York,
1939), p. 81 (x854).
thing from contact with them; but what it learned may have
been not so much 'patriotism' as an aspiration towards some-
thing like the privileges of a military aristocracy, or praetorian
force, that the Khalsa army had won for itself in the Punjab.
It may have had some knowledge of the similar privileges
enjoyed by the janissaries in Turkey, until their destruction by
the Sultan in I 826.
All the limited mutinies before 1857 had been over profes-
sional grievances, though misconduct by British officers might
give resentments a racial (rather than 'national') colour.
These officers had at times set the example by going on strike
for better pay and conditions, and there was a moment in I 767
when European privates in Bengal sharing their officers'
discontent had to be held in check by loyal sepoy units.I4 Here
was another variant of the politics of divide-and-rule. European
privates were paid scarcely better by the Company than the
sepoys,I
5
and must have suffered still more from the climate and
hardships of this alien land from which few returned home.
A united front between Indian and European rank-and-file
would have been a portent indeed, though probably not a
happy one for the rest of the country. In early days they were
closer together, and in I 764 did show symptoms of combining;
at any rate they were both grumbling together. But as soon as
the white soldiers were bribed with a bigger share of a donation,
they were glad to display loyalty by turning against their
Indian fellow-suflerers.16
Many later struggles gave the sepoy army a strong trade-
union spirit, and an experience of secret combination, which
might turn into patriotism, but only in an altering national
environment. It had also the esprit de corps of the camp and
the battlefield, and a professional pride in its victories-nearly
all of them over fellow-Indians. All this helped to make the
army an entity with a consciousness of its own, strengthened
by the fact that men joined it, in order to gain the modest rank
open to them, and the pension, for very long terms of years. It
was the family in which a sepoy's whole active life was passed.
Its hold on him was the firmer because all India's own insti-
1
4 A. Barat, op. cit., p. 33
1
5 A. Barat, op. cit., p. I38.
16
A. Barat, op. cit., pp. r6, r8.
MARX, ENGELS, AND THE INDIAN MUTINY 2II
tutions above the level of caste or village had crumbled away,
leaving a vacuum.
When 1857 came an Englishman in Oudh heard of sepoys
saying that they must do what the army did. 'The feeling of the
authority of the "Fouj ki Bheera", or "general will of the army",
was to individual men, or regiments, almost irresistible.'I7 Its
unity and cohesion in the hour of trial were impressive; and it
was a democracy, for there were no longer, as there had been
in early British days, any Indian officers above the lowest
grade. But in Hindostan, unlike the Presidency towns, there
was no background of public controversy, debate on 'national'
issues, to give it the kind of political consciousness that inspired
Cromwell's army in the English civil war. Hence it could
hardly do otherwise than trail behind the feudal interests, the
only powerful voice to be heard. Princes and taluqdars stepped
into the position that the Company was losing. Hence also the
loudest slogan was that of 'Religion in danger', an unreal one
because in fact religion was the one thing in India not in danger
from the British, who were there to pick their subjects' pockets,
not their souls.
Some ideas of a more rational sort were canvassed among
the rebels, and some of their proclamations included public
grievances against the government, but even these set religion
in the forefront.
1
8 The feudalists could make no more valid
appeal to the soldiers, and the soldiers no more valid appeal
to the masses. After all, if British taxation was too heavy, a
large part of the proceeds went to paying sepoy wages and
pensions: the army had no wish to lose these, and must have
been fearing that with the completion of the conquest of India
there would be reductions in its strength for the sake of economy,
as had happened before in intervals of peace. Even the Crom-
wellian army with its high political consciousness fell foul of the
public over the question of taxation for army pay. Defence of
Indian religion might be said to represent a defence of India,
though against an imaginary danger, but only in an atavistic
form; and it was a poor guarantee even of unity of action, since
there were two religions, and any excitement might set them
I7 M. R. Gubbins, op. cit., p. I I I.
IB Sec texts in N. K. Nigam, Delhi in 1857 (Delhi, I957), pp. 83-4, 86-
7
2I2 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
against each other. There had been serious communal clashes
in Oudh itself as lately as 1855.
As a fighting force the sepoy army had been criticized not
long since by an unconventional English officer as too slavishly
an imitation of European annies.
1
9 This made for weaknesses
which in 1857 turned to Britain's advantage. It was too much
in the habit of fighting in large masses, too little accustomed to
11exible tactics and initiative. Asia, especially India, had always
been accustomed to vast cumbrous armies, and there was
something like herd instinct in the 11ocking together of the
rebel regiments at Delhi. Discipline and combination had
enabled the sepoys to defeat other Indian armies, but against
a European opponent made them rigid and immobile. Such
regular officers as they had were oldish men promoted by
seniority, the least fit of all to work out new tactics for a novel
war, or to take independent charge of small combat groups. A
later British military commentator noted that the sepoys
scarcely ever tried a night attack.
20
'The Indian Mutiny was
remarkable for the readiness displayed by the enemy in
accepting battle; had it been otherwise its final suppression
would have been far more arduous.'
21
The sepoys 'often fought
with desperation', but it was their opponents who kept the
initiative and took the offensive 'almost as a matter of course' .zz
In retreat they were relentlessly pursued, and heavy toll was
taken of them by quite small numbers of assailants.
2
3
If they had marched on Calcutta instead of shutting them-
selves up in Delhi, things might have turned out differently. As
it was, the war became very much a matter of siege and defence
of fortified towns. The Turkish soldier's preference for fighting
in defensive positions had a similar cause, shortage of com-
petent officers, other than foreigners. But the sepoys had not
been trained for this kind of warfare: India had been conquered
by long marches and pitched battles. Still less had they been
trained for any kind of improvised fighting; and they were all
the less able to turn to guerrilla tactics now, after their main
forces were crippled, because of their caste rituals, the lumber
19
H. T. Lambrick, Jolm Jacob rif Jacobabad (London, 1g6o), p. 358, etc.
2
Col. C. E. Callwell, Small Wars. Their PrincijJles and Practico (War
Office, London, 3rd edn., 1906), p. 444
21
Ibid., p. 104.
22
Ibid., pp. 154, 405.
23
Ibid., pp. 174, 209, 21 I.
213
of separate cooking-pots that each man had to carry, the taboos
that had made them so unwilling to serve overseas. The rigid
British army framework made it possible for men so handi-
capped to function as efficient regulars; nothing could turn
them into effective guerrillas. Ironically it was the more
individualistic British who were able to adapt themselves to
local scattered fighting. Hodson and John Nicholson deserved
Dalhousie's praise of them as splendid 'guerrilla chiefs'. . ~
Another paradoxical reminder of how Europe and Asia have
changed places with each other since then is that the British
were able to operate a good intelligence service, the sepoys had
none.zs Altogether, considering their advantages, the sepoys
made a poorer fight of it than the Sikhs had clone a few years
before; but all their disadvantages must be kept in view if
Engels' hard verdict on them is to be understood.
Marxists in Europe are growing more aware than they used
to be of their need to know something about history outside
Europe; Marxists in Asia have at least an equal need to know
more than they have usually done about history in Europe.
It may therefore be worth while to look at Marx's comments
on the Mutiny in the context of what he was saying about
events elsewhere, chiefly in Europe, in that decade. For Marx
himself India was not an isolated problem, but part of a
complicated world-pattern. Asia and Europe he was coming
to think of, it is true, as contrasted regions, the outcome of
distinct lines of evolution. Still, they were two aspects of one
universal problem, and human beings were members of one
race with one destiny. That the 'Asiatic cholera' sweeping
Europe in that epoch originated as he believed in India, and
was the result of imperialist exploitation and poverty there,
seemed to Marx 'a striking and severe example of the solidarity
ofhuman woes and wants'.z6
Marx studied current events most intensively in this decade
of the r85os, the middle or pivotal one of his intellectual life.
He was concerned with them partly as a journalist earning his
bread, partly as a revolutionary trying to plot the tides of
2
} Private Letters, p. 414.
zs This is emphasised by N. K. Nigam, of;. cit., pp. 14.2, 144, etc.
26 On Colonialism, p. 75 (1853).
H
2 I 4 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
history. His philosophy of history, never completed or half-
completed, was taking shape as he pored over his newspapers;
happenings of the moment and long-term trends jostled
together in his mind, and he like all lesser Marxists often found
it hard to keep them apart. His topical writings, hasty articles
or letters or jottings, are full of suggestive hints and speculations,
but there are no worked-out doctrines in them.
In the years just before the Mutiny the European happenings
that he and Engels were chiefly concerned to study were the
revolutions of 184.8-g, with the consequent rise to power of
Napoleon III in France; the Liberal revolution of 1854. in
Spain; and the Crimean War of r 8 54.-6, an affair of Asia as
well as of Europe, with Turkey as the bridge (or handcuff)
between the two. India had begun to occupy Marx in r853,
when the Charter of the Company came up again for renewal
and debate. China entered his vision with the second Opium
War which began in 1856, and Persia to a smaller degree with
the Anglo-Persian war of 1856-7. In each case he went to
great pains to study the historical background, if it was not
already, like that of France or Germany, fairly familiar to him.
Spain in Europe and India in Asia were the two countries
he delved into most thoroughly, and just about the same
time.
Modern Spanish history began with the long struggle, from.
1808 to r8q., against Napoleon's attempt to add Spain to his
empire; and between this and the Mutiny it is not hard to find
similarities. Spain unlike India was old as a united nation, but
it was by west-European standards a very backward one. It led
the way in the turning of the peoples of Europe against the
French domination established by the armies of the Revolution,
and then of its heir Napoleon, as they marched across the conti-
nent overthrowing worm-eaten monarchies and opening the
way to progress, but antagonizing by brutality and arrogance
the peoples they professed to be liberating. In the end these
peoples rallied round their old tyrants to get rid of the new ones;
rather as Hinclostan turned against the British conquest in
1857 The Spanish resistance was heroic, but it was also un-
compromisingly reactionary; it was royalist and clerical,
fanned by benighted priests and their feudal patrons. 'Religion
in danger' was its grand rallying-cry. At the end Spain was
MARX, ENGELS, AND TI-IE INDIAN MUTINY 2 I 5
rewarded for six years of sacrifice by the restoration, to the
great delight of the illiterate majority, of the Inquisition, the
power of the big landowners, and the decadent monarchy
which lasted until the civil war of the I83os.
'The absolute monarchy in Spain,' Marx wrote in I854 as he
looked back over these years, 'bearing but a superficial resem-
blance to the absolute monarchies of Europe in general, is
rather to be ranged in a class with Asiatic forms of govern-
ment.'z7 Questions about how State and society in Asia and
Europe differed were already much in mind. I? the .anti-
French ranks he noted, peasants and pnests and mhabitants
of small inland towns, 'all of them deeply imbued with religious
and political prejudices, formed the great ;
28
upper-
class conservatives kept the lead. Most of the fightmg was clone
by guerrilla bands in the countryside (guerrilla, war'.' and
Liberal, were two Spanish contributions of that penocl to mter-
national speech). It is very noticeable that Marx's estin:-ate of
guerrillas as a political factor was by no means flattermg. It
seemed to him self:.eviclent that after having for years 'freely
indulged all their passions of hatred, revenge, and love of
plunder, they must, in times of peace, form a m?st
mob'. 29 The romantic aura that invests the guernlla today cl1cl
not exist for Marx. In his age politically progressive struggles
were fought by organized, disciplined bands, whose exemplar
was the new-model army of the French Revolution, or by urban
workingmen at their barricades. !rregular armed mov_ements
were for the most part, as in Spam, popular but reactwnary;
movements of peasants, who in western Europe were, by and
large (and in France itself once the Rev?lution of I 789 was
over), an anti-progressive force. No guernlla struggle can last
long without a potent ideology, and .the only to
these peasants was the ultra-conservative Catholic rehgwn ..
In the War of Independence there was a small active
minority of 'Liberals', middle-class urban progressives,.
got another chance after I 8 14 the army was ?nftmg
awav from reaction. In 1854 the Liberal revolutiOn wluch first
set Marx studying Spain was initiated by a section of the army,
27 Revolution in Sj1ain, p. 26.
2s Ibid., p. 32.
29 Ibid., p. 55
led by the pseudo-progressive general O'Donnell.Jo In such a
retarded country soldiers might take the lead, for want of
anyone better, as they do in sundry parts of the world today.
If the army could give the signal to the country in Spain, why
not in India? On the other side it must not be forgotten that
the counter-revolution of July r8s6 was also the work of the
army, led by the selfsame general O'Donnell.
In 1848-g the restless forces clamped down after r8IS by the
Holy Alliance exploded in a confused medley of revolutions
over half Europe. Some of these cancelled each other out. In the
multinational Hapsburg empire, especially, reaction was able
to make use of backward Slav minorities to defeat the Austrian
and Magyar progressive movements. This was something that
Marx and Engels and many other Germans could not forgive
the Slavs for. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this contro-
versy, Marx obviously had no belief in a divine right of all
nationalities to go their own way at all times. His instinct was
to judge a national struggle, either in Europe or in Asia, on its
merits as a contribution or a hindrance to general progress.
(It is by this criterion that he would have judged the Kashmir
dispute of today.) In Europe the I8sos and r86os were a time
of agitation and wars for national independence or union,
which Marx welcomed when they seemed likely to break clown
obstacles to progress, but did not rhapsodize about in themselves.
Would a restored Poland last long, he asked? 'One thing is
certain: it would put an end to what is hollow in the enthusiasm
lor Poland, which for the last forty years has been affected by
everybody and anybody calling himself liberal or progres-
sive.'Jr Free Poland would be run by serf-owning noblemen.
Ram Mohun Roy had taught the new class of Indians with
modern education to keep a close eye on western politics.
Watching European events in 1848-g a reader at Calcutta
could not fail to be impressed by two things-the solid stability
of British institutions, and the tangle of contradictory forces on
the continent that ended, in the Hapsburg empire above all.
30
I first read Marx's writings on Spain in the inspiring atmosphere of the
'commune' of the CPI at Bombay, about 1944 .. I have since tried to re-
examine the events he was observing in my book The Revolution of r854 in
S'jJanish History ( r g66).
31
Marx, The Eastem QJiestion (collected articles, eel. Eleanor l'vfarx
Aveling and Edward Aveling; London, r8g7), p. 505.
in the failure of them all and the triumph of the old regime.
Between British India and the Hapsburg empire a number of
resemblances might be pointed out; and it can be supposed
that in 1857 recollections of I848-g helped to encourage
Englishmen, and to discourage educated Indians from siding
with the rebels. It was the salient difference between the two
upheavals that in Austria-Hungary the most progressive
clements were in the vanguard, in India they stayed at
home.
Of all Marx's writings the most bewildering are the vast
heap of articles written between the spring of 1853 and that of
I 856 on the 'Eastern Question', the rival interests of European
powers in the decaying Ottoman empire. In 1853 Turkey and
Russia engaged in another of their recurrent wars, and next
year Britain and France joined in to prevent a Russian victory.
The Crimean War dragged on until 1856. Marx looked on
tsarist Russia, which had helped to suppress the revolutions of
184.8-g, as the bulwark of all European reaction, and was
passionately eager to see it defeated. What he hoped ior at
bottom was that the war would turn into a revolutionary
struggle involving the whole continent. But it was a confused,
tortuous business, and even Mane could not make very much
sense ofit.
Part of its topsyturviness was that despotic Russia, instead of
the liberal West, stood for liberation from Turkey of oppressed
Balkan nationalities. Marx showed as little sentimental concern
for these Balkan peoples as in I 848-g for the Slavs; and equally
little for the Armenians under Turkish rule, for he was eager
to see Turkey driving the Russians back in Asia Minor too.J
2
Yet Marx did not share the official Western faith that the
Turkish empire was capable of being revived and modernized.
At the outset in I853, before a general war was in prospect, he
gave what may be taken as his authentic opinion of Ottoman
rule in Europe. He saw it then as hopelessly rotten, and any
Western talk of maintaining it as absurd. This had nothing to
do with the Turks being aliens, intruders in Europe. 'This
splendid territory', he wrote of the Balkans, 'has the mis-
fortune to be inhabited by a conglomerate of different races and
nationalities, of which it is hard to say which is the least fit for
3Z Ibid., pp. 592, 6! I ff.
progress and civilization.' Hence the Turks, though a small
minority, might have seemed the best able to give the peninsula
the order and the unified control that Marx felt it needed. But
by now they had proved themselves quite inadequate for the
task, and become merely a hindrance.JJ It was from the point
of view of the collective European interest, which for Marx
overrode that of any local nationality, that he thought it still
worse to have the Tsar at Constantinople than the Sultan.
He looked upon Ottoman administration as by origin an
amalgam. of 'eastern barbarism' with 'western civilization'34;
as such it had started with certain potentialities, though these
turned out to be defective. If the Balkan peninsula and its
jarring peoples offered a 'mission' to some ruling power from
outside to set them in order, the same might manifestly be said
of India. Marx's logic would lead him to see Turks in medieval
India, or Moguls in modern India, performing the same
function. But if the Ottoman empire, with the benefit of close
proximity to 'Western civilization', was a failure, there must
be a strong presumption that any similar empire of Asian
conquerors far away in India had been capable of only a still
more limited and temporary success. Nor did Marx when he
looked at Asiatic Turkey and saw revolt breaking out there in
r8s4., as well as in the Balkans, feel hopeful of its leading to
anything better than anarchy. 'The rebels ... constantly
descend from the mountains, invade the villages ... plunder
the inhabitants and caravans, violate the women, and murder
every one that resists.' JS This was exactly what Englishmen
always said would happen in India if they were not there to
prevent it.
If Marx saw nothing objectionable in principle to law and
order being imposed on a region of Europe like the Balkans by
an Asiatic government, he could have no reason to object in
principle to law and order being imposed on a region of Asia
like India by a European government. Except in the excite-
ment of a Crimean War, he in fact regarded even tsarist rule
as a step forward for Asia, or for those parts of western and
middle Asia where it was spreading in the nineteenth century.
33 Ibid., pp. 2-4 ..
34 Ibid., p. 81.
35 Ibid., p. 4.68.
MARX, ENGELS, AND THE INDIAN MUTINY 219
It does not follow that he would have considered Russian rule
in India as good as, or no worse than, British. How he viewed
the chronic scare in Britain about a Russian threat to India is
doubtful. Late in I853 he like official London saw both the
Persian move against Herat and the Russian move towards
Khiva as endangering the Punjab.
36
In 1854 he discounted
such alarmism: 'There arc always some vague and alarming
rumours afloat about Russian progress in Central Asia, got up
by interested Indian politicians or terrified visionaries.'
3
7 Even
if he (correctly on the whole) thought the Russian threat to
British power in India a bogy, things would be different if the
British were driven out by a revolt, and India then fell back
into its old political condition. A Russian entry, sooner or
later, would then be not at all improbable.
In I8o8-I4 the Spanish people fought the l ~ r e n c h with the
aiel of a British army, commanded by a general who had
learned his trade in India. It would have been a neat retort
if a French army had gone to aid the Indian rising, or had
attacked England, in 1857 If Napoleon III had not so very
recently been Queen Victoria's partner in the Crimea, he could
scarcely have resisted the temptation to settle accounts for his
uncle and for France's old friend Tipu Sahib. Barely a year
after the Mutiny was over Britain was forming a Volunteer
Corps to resist an expected French invasion. Had the sepoys
waited until then, they would have had fewer reinforcements
from Britain to cope with.JS Or had they started their rising
eighteen months earlier, while the Crimean War was still
going on, Russia must have seized the chance to strike at
Britain from the rear by giving them support. It was possibly
the most important consequence of the Crimean War, which
settled nothing in Europe, that in I857 France was neutralized
and Russia crippled, and India fought alone. Persia and China
were not more then trivial embarrassments for Britain. The
rebellion could scarcely have been worse timed; whoever
chose the moment for it can have known little about world
politics.
36 Ibid., p. 158.
37
Ibid., p. 533
38 As it was, in 1857 Marx noticed and shared a feeling that Britain
might find itself dangerously denuded of troops, in view of the precarious
European situation ( vVar of Independence, pp. 6g-7o).
Yet in India the Crimean War aroused keen interest. Marx
might have been expected to ponder this aspect of it; Dalhousie
could not help doing so. He had hoped for the sake of tran-
quillity in India that war would be avoicled,J9 and when it
came he was very reluctant to let any of his European troops be
removecl.
40
(At the beginning of 1857 there were fewer than
30,000 in all India, an extraordinarily small total.) At first
he found comfort in the thought that Indian Muslims were
'ii?mensely pleased at our taking the part of the Sultan', 4r but
this ceased to comfort him as the stalemate in the Crimea went
on and British prestige dropped. There were rumours that the
queen had been forced to flee from England and was hiding
in India, and Dalhousie felt 'more and more the need of
great success'. 4
2
It came at last with the fall of Sevastopol in
Septen:ber 1855, and he hastened to circulate a jubilant pro-
clamatiOn ?fth.e news to every town and village in the country:JJ
But the mischief had been done. Britain with two allies was
beinl:? forced to long and hard against a single opponent,
and m the end for rmrly small rewards; and it could not be
kept a secret that the war-effort was hampered by a vast
amount of bungling. No legend of invincibility could survive
this.
Marx is not to be taken quite literally when he speaks of the
Mutiny being 'intimately connected' with Britain's Chinese
and Persian wars of 1856, as part of a 'general disaffection' of

His disapproval of these wars does however emphasize

how httle he wanted to see any further expansion of British
imperialism. He had nothing good and much bad to sav about
the Opium Wars with China. If Britain or Europe I{acl any
Fa: 'I?ission' in his eyes, it was simply that of a gadfly,
to 1:r:tate that had fallen asleep and sting them awake.
Poht1cally Chma, by contrast with India or the Balkan
39
Private Letters, p. 304. (12june 1854).
4o Ibid., p. 355 (23 Sep. !855).
41
Ibid., p. 313 (r2 Aug. 1854).
.
42
p. 357 (6 Oct. 1855). Cf. Sir J. W. Kaye, I-listol')' of the Sepoy War
m Indw (London, 1865), Vol. 1, p. 342, on the current rumours of British
collapse and Russian invasion.
43 Private Letters, p. 362 (15 Dec. 1855).
44 War ofindej;ell(/encc, p. 40; cf. p. 153.
MARX, ENGELS, AND THE INDIAN MUTINY 22 I
peninsula, stooclm no need of unification. It did no doubt at
present stand in need of order, being in the grip of an immense
internal convulsion. Marx's curiosity was aroused by the
Taiping rebellion, and at first along with many westerners he
thought it held a promise of progress. Certainly he had no
wish to see western conservatism intervening against it. But he
could form no very clear view of it, and by this time it was past
its best days.
His approval-tacit or implied-of colonial wars was
restricted to those by which Britain brought India under a
single control. For him as for the world, India was a unique
case. There was no other big British possession as yet in Asia.
Bv the time he came to take an interest in it the conquest was
nearlv an accomplished fact that he seems to have assumed
that it as well be completed quickly. For the achievement
it represented he was not without respect. He admired the
eccentric genius of Sir Charles Napier, who added Sincl.4
5
Pining in 1854 for sterner action against Russia, and lamenting
that decadent Europe had ceased to be equal to 'a decent,
hearty, hard-fought war', he contrasted the deeds of Europeans
in colonial campaigns with their present torpor. 'The troops
that have conquered Algeria ... one of the most difficult
theatres in existence, the soldiers who fought the Sikhs on the
sands of the Indus, and the Kaffirs in the thorny bush of South
Mrica ... there they are, helpless and useless .... '4
6
Implicit in Marx's approval was the conception of 'India' as
in some sense a logical unit, a nation potentially if not actually.
He may have overestimated the degree of moral unity it
possessed already, or the speed with which this could be
engendered by political unity imposed from outside. Marx
was apt to underrate the force of religious divisions, whether
of Muslim against Christian in the Balkans or of Muslim against
Hindu in India. He made too little allowance for the strength
of local feelings and feuds within India. In I 85 7-8 the Niazis,
a tribe of the north-west, were to aiel the British, grateful to
these new rulers for having 'emancipated them from the
thraldom of the Sikh' ;47 while the Sikhs aided them against the
45 The Eastem Qpestion, pp. 573-74
46 Ibid., p. 452; cf. p. 506.
47 w. P ll.ndrew, Our Scientific Frontier (London, 188o), pp. 84-6.
222
Hindostanis, as the Hindostanis had formerlv served them
against t!1e Bengalis. For the game of playing off one
commumty or people agamst another would have far more
damaging results than the older one of manipulating princes.
general feeling about India was a compound of two
opposites. One was respect for Indians, as a civilized race with
1;5reat accomplishments in antiquity and a capacity for new ones
m the future. He had been reading about the links between
Sanskrit and the European language family, and could even
refer to ancient India as 'the source of our languages our
rcligions'.
48
He believed that modern Indians were to
and a new class _could and should be given appropriate
trammg and brought mto the administration-not the futile
old gentry, whose. exclusion .from it was deplored by British
conservat1ves.
49
With everytlung Indian between antiquity and
future, on the contrary, Marx felt only impatience. Growth
had be_en by caste divisions, and also by division into
a mynad VIllages, each a tiny self-suflicient commonwealth
uniting agriculture with handicrafts, deaf and blind to all
outside its own narrow limits.
There were English oflicials of the newer, anti-feudal school
who wanted to preserve, in Oudh for instance the joint or
'coparcenary' village holding of land, by ridding it of the
encroachments of feudal landlords. This did not appeal to
a v::ay forward. thought of the village commune
India as Engels spoke of It many years later in Java, where
It was preserved by the Dutch and made the basis of their
'Culture system', or centralized extraction of wealth from the
peasantry. Engels argued that 'primitive communism furnishes
there as well as in India and Russia the finest and broadest
?asis of and despotism' .so India in short had got
a blmd from which it had no strength to extricate
so that it was worth while to be dragged out
ot It even through blood and dirt, through miserv and de-
gradation', by capitalism and foreign rule.sr '
48
War qflndejJemlence, p. 37
49 On Colonialism, pp. 66-g ( r853).
50
See two I;tters to in. r884.: On Colonialism, pp. 309-10. Marx
had .wavered for some time on thrs point, when studying the Russian mir
or vrllage commune.
5
' T11m of Indejmufence, p. 37
Marx could acknowledge some negative benefits of foreign
rule in India of a less painful kind. 'A general war was declared
against dacoil)', thuggee, iJ?fanticide, human sacrifice, suttee, etc.', we
read in his Notes on Indian history, for 1849-5I.
52
But in 1853
India stood, he was convinced, on the threshold of a more
constructive epoch, because British capitalism itself was entering
a more mature phase. This was being inaugurated by Dalhousie,
who worked himself nearly to death over his projects of im-
provement. His health never recovered, and he died in r86o;
it would not be too much to say that, after his own fashion, he
died for India. In his Notes Marx made a derisory reference to
the list of achievements Dalhousie drew up as his farewell
message :-'Answer to this rodonwntade, the sepoy revolution.' 5
3
But
in his articles of 1853 Marx took the new programme seriously,
and in the next two or three years it was showing some remark-
able results. In April I854 the Ganges Canal was opened at
Roorkie, and Dalhousie could boast that it was far the longest
main channel in the world, both for irrigation and for navi-
gation. In February 1855 the new telegraph lines from Calcutta
to Madras, Bombay and Attock were thrown open to the
public, and the first stretch of railway, 122 miles long, was
inaugurated. Bengalis thronged to enjoy the thrill of a ride.
In all these fields India was ahead, in irrigation far ahead,
of a backward western country like Spain.
It is much to be deplored that as 1853 went on Marx's
attention was jerked away from India and modern imperialism
to the far less profitable conundrums of the Eastern Question,
on which he wrote in the next three years nearly three times as
much as he wrote altogether on India. His newspaper-readers
in New York wanted news piping hot, and Marx himself was
always torn between the talk of the hour and the riddle of the
ages. It was the Mutiny that brought him back to India-in a
particularly bad temper with Britain for fighting, as he saw it,
only a phoney war against tsarist Russia in the Crimea.
He was as much taken by surprise as anyone else, and found
no short cut to an explanation. The Mutiny was an event, as
British India was a possession, unique in the history of im-
5
2
Notes on Indian History (664:-rBsB) (Moscow, n.d.). This is a mainly
chronological outline made by Marx for his own use.
5
3
Ibid., pp. 176-7.
224. MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
perialism. Nothing like it occurred in the long history of Dutch
Indonesia, where local troops had been enlisted since very
early days, though for some years after 1857 there were fears
of a similar explosion in Java.s4 Clearly Marx was drawing on
fresh recollections of the Crimea when he wrote now of 'the
desperate obstinacy with which Mussulmans are accustomed
to :fight behind walls' .ss To him as to most Europeans, Turk and
Muslim meant much the same thing. He compared the British
holding on to isolated points in India with the French reduced
to the same straits in Spain during the Peninsular War. Having
so lately been writing about a Spanish revolution, he spoke of
sepoy regiments 'pronouncing',s6 i.e. making a pronunciamiento.
The Mutiny has often been reproached with being too much
an insurrection of soldiers, too little one of a nation. But to
Marx it was in a sense a reassuring feature that an army, a
coherent and disciplined force, was in the vanguard. Watching
Spanish events in 1854 he had welcomed symptoms of 'whole-
some anarchy' in the provinces, as tending to save the revolution
from being sabotaged by the politicians at MadridP But
'anarchy' in relatively orderly Spain meant peasants refusing
to pay rents, not a descent into blind social chaos; whereas in
Asia (as in Asiatic Turkey lately) he may have thought such
chaos a likely result of any breakdown of authoritv. His
allusion in the .Notes to the Santhal rising of 1856-]-the
precursor of the l\1utiny, at least in its total unexpectedness-
as an affair of 'a half-savage tribe ... put clown, after seven
months' guerrilla waifare',sB scarcely suggests that he placed much
hope in rebellion of so primitive a type.
In retrospect Marx seems to have thought of the Bengal
Army primarily as a professional organization on bad terms
with its employer. Relations had been bad for years, he wrote
in his .Notes: the men were 'bound together by caste and
nationality; one common pulse in army ... officers powerless;
54
'l\1ultatuli' wrote his novel 1l1ax Havelaar (186o; trans. vV. Siebenhaar,
N.Y., 1927), an exposure of Dutch exploitation of Java, with the aim of
averting a conflict there like that of 1857 in India (pp. 202-4.).
ss vVar rif Independence, p. 107.
s6 Ibid., p. 4.6.
57 Revolution in Spain, p. 119.
58
Notes, p. 176; c: the reference to the Santhals in !Var of Independence,
p. 109.
laxity of discipline .... 's9 In his :first article on the Mutiny,
in June 1857, he mentioned the famous greased cartridges, and
sepoy fears about religion, as the reported cause of the trouble;
60
he did so without comment or query. He was soon convinced
that there had been conspiracy in the army on 'an immense
scale', and also that anti-British feeling was widespread among
the masses. How things would now develop he did not profess
to know. An Indian rebellion he remarked could not be expected
to follow the same lines as one in Europe.
61
He must have been relying on Engels, always his military
guide, when he wrote in July 1857 that it would be 'pre-
posterous' to imagine the rebels holding Delhi for long, and
disparagingly called them 'a motley crew of mutineering
soldiers who have murdered their own officers' .
62
By the end
of that month he was writing in a diflcrent strain. It had always
been said that 3,000 English troops could at any time beat
30,000 Indians, and now their failure to take Delhi was helping
the rebellion to spread. It was no mere mutiny, as the British
public was trying to believe, but 'a national revolt' .6
3
This was
much nearer to his own bent of mind than his previous words;
still, the passage stands alone in his articles, and cannot safely
be taken to represent his considered judgment. Allowance
must be made for the fact that emotionally Marx responded to
any revolt against any of the governments he detested; and
also, here and throughout his many series of articles for the
New York Daily Tribune, for the fact that he was writing for a
remote American public with no responsibility for what was
being done or might be clone, and therefore could indulge his
natural love of epigram and rhetoric more freely. He was, as
it were, communing with himself, sometimes experimenting
with theories, sometimes blowing off steam.
His mind came back to Spain when he met the clamour of
the British press about Indian atrocities by pointing out that the
British public applauded similar atrocities committed against
the French by its Spanish guerrilla allies in the Peninsular
War.64 In September, two years after the fall of Sevastopol,
59 Notes, p. 176; he adds that 'fakirs' told the men that the new cartridges
were a design against their religion. ,
6o War qf Indejmzdence, PP. 4.0-4.1. :' Ib:d., p. 65.
6z Ibid., p. 44 63 lind., pp. 54-57 4 lind., p. 91.
Delhi was stormed by the British. Marx surmised that the rebel
fi1ilurc had been clue to dissensions between regiments, between
Hindus and Muslims, and between the scpoys and the trading
class of Delhi which they were forced to lay under contribution
now that they were without regular pay.6s Here he seemed to
be taking a narrower view of the rebellion, as essentially an
army affair, but he was still eager to find symptoms of other
regions joining in, 6
6
and hopeful of a better leader coming
forward. For a while he had his eye on Sindhia-'young,
popular, full of firc'-as the natural leader for all Marathas.67
In other words he had more hope of leadership being provided
by one of the old ruling families than emerging from the ranks
of the sepoys. His Notes reveal his disillusionment: Sindhia
figures there as an 'English dog-man', together with the
maharaja of Patiala whom Marx likewise despised for standing
by the British.
68
At the same time he docs not appear to have
formed a much higher opinion of any rulers or ex-rulers who
took part in the rebellion, and in the Notes, where he goes into
detail about the motives of Nana Sahib and the Rani of
Jhansi, he treats them in both cases as merely personal and
selfish.69
After all, the most remarkable thing about what Marx said
of the Mutiny is that-although intensely absorbed in it-he
said so little. It Inight well baflle him and throw him into a
painihl dilemma. He could feel enthusiasm for what was heroic
in it, but to lit it into a rational historical pattern was another
matter. On its constructive side the British mission that he
thought so indispensable to Indian progress had only just
begun. Spain won its struggle in 181L1 only to sink back into
the past. This was not fatal, because Spain however backward
was part of western Europe, and could not be kept sealed off
for long against modern ideas. It would take much longer for
these ideas to find their way into a remote India free of western
control.
At any rate, of Marx's thirty-three articles on India, twelve
belong to 1853; four of the fifteen written in 1857, and all six
6
5 War qf Indejmzdence, p. I 12. N. K. Nigam, op. cit., pp. 66 ff., confirms
the forcible raising of money from traders.
66 T11ar qf IndejJenrlence, p. 114. 67 Ibid., p. 71.
68 Notes, pp. 180, 185. 69 Ibid., p. 176.
of those written in 1858, deal with the general background of
Indian affairs; and among the remaining eleven on the Mutiny
itself several are only fragmentary comments on current news.
All the eight articles on the course of the Mutiny from
November 1857 to September 1858 arc by Engels. Marx, it
would seem, was giving up the problem in despair, and leaving
it to his friend to follow events on the military level. He was
turning away from it as if he felt that he had lost the clue and
must go back into the past to recover it. He plunged into a
study of fundamentals of economic theory, far removed from
the hurlyburly at Delhi or Lucknow. Of the resulting treatise,
composed in 1857-8 but never published by him, one section
consisted of a highly abstract analysis of world history and its
socio-economic phascs.
70
Here he had much to say about
'Asiatic society', on the lines of the conclusions he had already
been coming to about the old Indian society and its static
nature, its incapacity for further evolution.
Engels had a considerable reputation as a military critic, and
among his many hobbies the study of war was perhaps the
favourite. He revelled in military technicalities and terms of
art like Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet. 'A11, the immortal passado!
the pun to rcverso! the hai !' In the Marx family circle he was
niclmamcd 'The General'. All his thinking was in terms of
regular warfare practised by well-trained modern armies: the
guerrilla style of our day lay beyond his horizon. In this he
was a man of his time. It was the experience of nineteenth-
century Europe, as it marched over Asia and Africa, that
irregular opponents were seldom formidable against disciplined
troops and flexible coordination of all arms by a unified com-
mand. Not only was this more efficient, but it generated more
courage, or a steadier type of courage, than the most warlike
of wild enemies, men like the Bedouin or the Pathan, could
mustcr.7
1
Europe's most dangerous antagonists were not
guerrillas but the elaborately organized Sikhs in Asia and
Zulus in Africa.
7 First English edition: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, ed. E. J. Hobs-
bawm (trans. J. Cohen, London, 1964.).
7
1
On the erratic quality of Bedouin courage see Sir R. F. Burton, A
Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855), Vol. 2, pp. 87-8 (Bohn Library
ed.); cf. on Highland fighting Prebble, op. cit., p. I!O.
Engels had done a spell in the Prussian army, the best
trained in Europe, though he had his baptism of fire in the
insurrectionary movement of 1849 in western Germany, which
the Prussian army helped to put down. He was now a mill-
owner, and running a mill must remind even a socialist daily
and hourly of the importance of order and method. It is a
striking testimony to his orthodoxy as a military man that when
serving in the Volunteer Corps, formed in Britain in r859
during the French scare, he was entirely in favour of its being
a well-drilled replica of the regular army, nothing in the least
like a democratic, decentralized force of skirmishers. His call
to the nation was exactly the same as Lord Tennyson, the Poet
Laureate's-'Form, riflemen, form!' Yet this meant sub-
ordinating the volunteers to the generalship that (besides being
politically reactionary) had proved itself so ludicrously incom-
petent in the Crimea, and its fossilized headquarters the Horse
Guards. W c in the north of England, he wrote in one of his
enthusiastic articles on the movement, unlike the carping
Londoners 'have always been on capital terms with our
natural military superiors'. n
The fate of the popular militia formed in Spain in 1854
might have cautioned him. It was crushed in July 1856 in a
two-clay battle against the regular army in Madrid, largely
because it had imitated the army too closely in organization
and training. When the big socialist parties of the Second
International came to be formed, the faith in disciplined mass
strength, firmest of all among the Germans, was carried over
from military into political_ thinking, and helped to make
parties too heavy and rigid to retain their revolutionary fire.
At the other extreme the Spanish anarchists who rejected all
party organization whatever were translating into political
terms the guerrilla tactics that modern Spain had found most
congenial in time of war.
Turkey in the Crimean War, and then the Persian and
Chinese wars of 1856, drew Engels' expert eye towards Asia.
He took for granted that the way for Asia to learn to defend
itself was to scrap its old-style armies and build new ones on
the western model, trained to begin with by European officers;
just as Marx wanted to sec Asia scrapping its past and building
n E11gels as lvlilitary Critic, p. 10.
a new society on western technology. He recognized that to
form a reliable army was a slow, difficult task, in the swamp
of corruption and obscurantism that was 'Asiatic barbarity'.
73
This struck him forcibly in the spring of 1856 when 6oo Indian
cavalry of the Bombay Army, whom he thought very poorly of,
routed IO,ooo modern-trained Persians. The spectacle neither
induced him to dismiss Persians as 'a nation of cowards', nor
to despair of western training in Asia. He recalled that the new
Turkish army had clone poorly in its earlier stages of modern-
ization, yet had fought well against the Russians in the war just
finished. In another twenty years a Persian army might be as
efficient as the Turkish now was.74 In reality the Turks, as
later wars were to show, never made more than very limited
progress. Engels looked on an efficient cadre of officers and
NCOs as the vital factor;?S he did not raise the more funda-
mental question, whether an Asiatic state could have a modern
army without a political and social revolution first.
Japan was about to embark on such a revolution; no other
free Asian country did, and no other made any serious military
progress in the nineteenth century. Engels did make a shrewd
prophecy when he recognized in the war of 1856 the quickness
of ordinary Chinese to learn. Their gunnery on the Canton
river was astonishingly improved since the last time the British
tested it, he wrote. 'In everything practical, and war is emi-
nently practical, the Chinese far surpass all the Orientals, and
there is no doubt that in military matters the English will find
them apt soldiers.'7
6
His political comment on this contest
could serve either as epilogue to the Spanish War of Inde-
pendence or as prologue to the Indian Mutiny: these Chinese
were fighting a national, popular war in defence of a traditional
society steeped in 'overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned
ignorance and pedantic barbarism'. 77
Engels was a revolutionary, but a mutineer went against the
grain with him. Moreover the opinion he had formed of the
sepoy army before the Mutiny was not flattering. Indian troops
he thought-underrating a good deal the part they had played
73 On Colonialism, p. I I I, This article on 'Persia and China', of May I857,
is printed also in the collection of articles Marx on Chi11a rB5s-rB6o, ed. Dona
Torr (London, I95I), pp. 45 ff.
74 On Colonialism, pp. r I2-q ..
76 Ibid., p. I 10.
75 Ibid., pp. I I2-II4.
77 Ibid., p. I 15.
in the conquest of India-were useful to the British chiefly by
their ability to march faster in hot weather and on poorer food
than European troops could.7B Indian soldiers of the old un-
drilled type he regarded as beneath contempt. 'An army of
5,ooo-7,ooo Englishmen has always been thought fully
sufficient to go anywhere and do anything in the open field in
India. That stamps the opponents at once.'79 It should be
added that Engels thought poorly enough of the British army
and most others. Englishmen and Russians were 'the worst
light infantry in Europe'.
80
Presumably Frenchmen or Germans
would have made even shorter work of India. As for general-
ship, he admired Sir Colin Campbell and praised Sir Charles
Napier very highly, but derided others like Windham, one of
the Crimean blockheads.
During the Mutiny Engels must often have looked back on
his own experience in the armed uprising of 1849 In his
articles on that episode, written in I851-2, he had laid it down
that 'insurrection is an art quite as much as war', and that once
started it must be pushed on boldly and rapidly. 'The defensive
is the death of any armed rising', while aggressive action wins
the support of 'those vacillating clements ... which always
look out for the safer side'.sx When he saw the bulk of the rebel
army shutting itself up in Delhi he must have felt that it was
committing a cardinal error. He was convinced on the other
hand that the British committed a blunder by tying up their
forces round Delhi, for political reasons of prestige, while
disaster threatened their rear in the Ganges valley. Delhi he
considered of no strategic importance, and the attempt to take
it by siege foolish.s
2
It is then a trifle surprising to find him in
his first article reporting its capture as quite an easy feat. He
credited the sepoys with individual bravery, but held them
'utterly without leadership' above the company level, destitute
7B War of Independence, pp. 162-63; cf. p. 178, and p. 202 where Engels
tells Marx that the Madras Army was 'recruited exclusively from riffraff'.
Engels laboured under the extraordinary delusion that sepoys could march
40 or even 6o miles a day. In fact 10 miles a day over a long distance might
be beyond them (A. Barat, op. cit., p. 230).
79 War of Independence, p. 207.
80
Ibid., p. 207.
81
Germany: R11Volution arzd Counter-Revolution (London edn., 1933), p. 100.
8z War of Independence, p. 101; cf. the letter of Engels, 24 Sept. 1857,
which Marx was following in this article: pp. 201 ff.
of 'the scientific element without which any army is nowadays
hopeless'. SJ
Scientific principles of warfare were the speciality of his
native Prussia, inventor of the General Staff, and the sepoys'
total lack of them made it harder for Engels to sympathize
with them. Of course he had to depend on the newspaper reports
slowly trickling into England, often garbled, or distorted by the
anti-Indian hysteria. He was far more scathing about the fall
of Lucknow to the British in March 1858 than about that of
Delhi. The rebel force there had been growing demoralized,
he thought, with some of the sepoys slipping away and raw
recruits taking their place.B+ This combination might well
accentuate the weaknesses of both elements. Engels had seen
the same thing in I 84.9, when the army of one small German
state, Baden, joined the rising. 'As in every insurrectionary
war', he had written about this, 'where armies are mixed of
well-drilled soldiers and raw levies, there was plenty of heroism,
and plenty of unsoldierlike, often inconceivable panic,'Bs
Some of the new faces in the ranks at Lucknow must have
belonged to men of the royal army of Oudh, disbanded by the
British in 1856, one of the worst collections of riff-raff in Asia.
Some of the others may not have been there of their own free
will. 'The great Talookhdars had sent in their contingents',
writes Kaye;86 and all the village levies in the province seem
to have been got together by the feudal chiefs.S7 When the
feudal chiefs of the Highlands raised their clansmen for the
rebellion of I 7 45, they made sure of every man volunteering by
threatening to burn his house over his head if he did not. If a
good many of the defenders of Luclmow were there under
similar pressure, their disposition to run away when the crisis
came is understandable.
Engels demonstrated with a wealth of the technical detail he
loved that the defenders of Luclmow were utterly ignorant of
83 Ibid., pp. I I 7 ff.
84 Ibid., p. 139. Engels surmised that the sepoys had been given a plan of
defence, which they could not properly execute, by Europeans in Delhi:
ibid., p. 123.
8s Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, p. 107.
86 Sir J. W. Kaye, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 529.
87 Cf. S. B. Chaudhuri, oj1. cit., pp. 156 ff., which scarcely bears out the
idea that the villagers were volunteering.
how to construct and defend fortified positions. Worst of all,
he thought that unlike the sepoys at.Delhi they let their courage
ooze away, until in the end 'there was but one grand and
unanimous act of bolting'. He went on to generalize about the
triumphs of the bayonet in Asia.ss This too belonged to accepted
military doctrine. The bayonet was the weapon that required
most training and steadiness; these were Europe's strongest
points, and it was not by superiority in long-range weapons
alone that it was winning its empires.
But Engels was also a military man of his time in cherishing
an ideal of civilized, as well as scientific, warfare. He con-
demned the sack of Lucknow in very strong language, as 'an
everlasting disgrace' to the British army, the only army he
pointed out that still clung to the 'time-honoured privilege' of
freedom to loot a captured city.S9 It was the only army that did
most of its fighting outside Europe. About this same time he
wrote an encyclopaedia article on Badajoz, the Spanish town
stormed by Wellington's forces in 181 I and given up to
military execution. There the victors, he said, perpetrated
horrors 'which might well make the angels weep, and which
obscured, if they could not efface, the glory of their wonderful
achievement'.9 Badajoz and Lucknow must have been in his
mind together.
After Lucknow fell Engels predicted a long, toilsome effort
by the British to wear down scattered resistance. 'The whole
Kingdom of Oudh bristles with fortresses.'9
1
But these were as
he saw feudal strongholds, rallying-points for the zemindars
and their ragtag and bob-tail.9z He does not seem to have
expected much in the way of a genuine guerrilla struggle: on
the contrary he expected the beaten sepoys to degenerate into
bandits, with the people against them.93 He pictured 'Oudhians'
rather vaguely as a 'warlike tribe', brave but capable only of
ragged fighting 'in the normal Asiatic manner'. In his eyes even
an irregular force ought to have some definite shape and
leadership, and, as he had written to Marx, 'we have not
heard in a single instance that any insurrectionary army in
88 War of Indllj;endtmce, pp. 143 ff.
8
9 Ibid., pp. 146-7.
90 Published in 1858; text in Revolution in Spain, pp. 161 ff.
91 War rif Independence, pp. 149, 161.
92
Ibid., p. 130.
93 Ibid., p. 136.
233
India had been properly instituted under a recognized chief' .
9
4
Engels still thought the end far off until he heard of places
like Bareilly being surrendered without a fight, but by Septem-
ber I858 he felt that the heart had gone out of the resistance.
He saw three factors at work to weaken it. Too many sepoys
were content to levy contributions from the areas they con-
trolled, instead of harassing the British and cutting off food
supplies from their urban bases. Secondly the 'chiefs' or 'land-
holders' were going over to the government, which was now
ready to compromise with them. Thirdly he believed that the
British reign of terror was intimidating, though further embit-
tering, the country.95 Altogether, Engels seems to have
concluded by this stage that the sooner things were brought
to an end, the better.
The next colonial campaign he had occasion to study was the
fumbling Spanish invasion of Morocco in 185g-6o. In his
essays on it, while not referring to the Mutiny specifically, he
compared the mobility and energy displayed by the British in
India and the French in Algeria with Spanish sluggishness.
But he found fresh evidence to prove that a disciplined modern
army with its screen of skirmishers was more than a match for
any number of irregular attackers on any ground.9
6
Two years
later he and Marx were watching the Civil War in America,
where two improvised regular armies were in conflict. In one
of their articles they wrote that if the South resorted to 'guerrilla
warfare and brigandage' (two things always associated in their
minds) it would be the doing of the poor whites, and would
only alarm their superiors, the rich southern planters, who
would then be glad to see them suppressed by the North.
97
In
the same way they may have supposed, and with good reason,
that real peasant militancy in Oudh would have frightened (or
did help to frighten) the taluqdars into the arms of the British.
On the U.S. war the opinions of the two friends soon
diverged. Engels never failed to be impressed by good soldier-
ing, whatever politics it went with, and he felt sure that the
half-hearted North must be defeated by the southerners. These
94 Ibid., p. 207.
95 Ibid., pp. 186-90.
96 Revolution in Spain, pp. 193-4.
97 Article of 30 May 1862, in the collection The Civil War in the United
States (N.Y., 1940).
men might slave-owners, but they were in 'bloody
earnest. ... Besides, they fight quite famously.'9B Marx de-
murred. 'It seems to me that you let yourself be swayed a little
too much by the military aspect of things.'99 He might have
said the same in I857, but he did not. In America wanted
the North to win, and believed it would. In India he might
want to see the British beaten, but he could not expect, and
perhaps could not hope, that lhe rebels would win.
all the thinking of Marx and Engels, as they groped
their way press of nineteenth-century events,
explorers makmg their own maps as they went along, was
provisional and speculative. Sometimes ambiguities in it stand
out more noticeably when we see them theorizing about the
new political arena of Asia. There was an unresolved discord
in Marx's thinking about empire, between the idea of a
western 'mission', and hatred of conquest as a reinforcement
of class power abroad and at home. At times, particularly
about I853, and particularly in India, he was prepared to
think of a 'civilizing mission' not much different from the one
that Win wood Reade had in mind when he declared: 'Asia is
possessed by a few lungs and by their soldiers ... the masses of
the people are invariably slaves.'
100
Even if Marx found it
harder later on to believe that Asia would be anv better off
under western rule, western interference might be better for it
than to be left in the coma it had been sunk in for ages. Engels
lived to welcome the effect, as he forecast it, of Japan's attack
on China in I894, the final disintegration of the old immobile
Chinese society.ror
Marx did not overcome the contradiction in his thinking
.(or his thinlci.ng and his feeling, as in I 85 7) on
nnpenahsm, and turned away from the problem of its con-
sequences both for Asia and for Europe, the effect of India on
as .well as of Britain on India. He went on reading about
India at mtervals, and may have intended to write about it
9
8
Letter of 30 July 1862, ibid., pp. 1,123-4.
99 Letter of 10 Sept. 1862, ibid., p. 1,127.
10
" W. Reade, The A1arvrdom of A1an (1872), p. 415 (Thinker's Libraty
ccln.). He censures 'the sickly school of politicians' who say that everv
country ought to be left to itself; for Asia conquest means emancipation'.
101
Letter to Sorge, IO November 1894: On Colonialism, p. 313.
235
again some time or other.
102
But in the end he and Engels
bequeathed to the socialist parties only a puzzlingly uncertain
guidance here-especially when we recall that their writings
on Asia were fugitive pieces which have only in recent years
been salvaged from oblivion, and which they themselves did
not think mature enough to be worth collecting. It is possible
that they thought of imperialism after I857 as a process that
had more or less reached its limits, as something rooted in an
earlier phase of history, and of less significance for the future.
If so, they were to be contradicted by the lessons of the decades
before I9I4 when imperialism became the burning issue, and
the worst impediment to the international socialist movement.
Before this happened, there was a lull of a quarter-century
in imperial expansion. It can be explained (as by Lenin) in
terms of the inner laws of capitalist evolution, or (more simply)
in terms of political and 'accidental' factors. One of these was
the Mutiny itself. Had it succeeded, whatever the result might
have been for India the effect on the world would have been
great. Europe might have lost its taste-shared so far by only
a few nations-for empire-building; all the more if the spirit
of revolt had spread, as it might, from India to the next most
profitable colony in Asia, Indonesia. Even as a failure the
Mutiny must rank as an event of world history, for it must
have had some damping influence on all expansionists in the
West, including the U.S. Engels wound up his commentary on
it by predicting a general clash of British and Russian interests
across Asia, with battles in Central Asia in which Britain
would be hamstrung by India's hatred.
10
3 The clash of interests
did develop, but less immediately than he expected; and the
battles were never fought, partly because the British in India
were very conscious of the danger of a rebellion in their rear.
They were occupied for a good many years after I857 with
rebuilding their political position in India, and with forging a
new northern army. India was to Britain what the Illyrian
provinces of the Balkans were to Rome, and without this
reservoir of cheap soldiery, added to that of Ireland, its huge
102 The Notes are stated by their editor (pp. g- I I) to belong to 'the last
years of his life'. They include minutiae of names, titles, etc., which could
scarcely have been of value to Marx unless he had in mind some plan of
publication.
10
3 War of IndejJelulence, p. 190.
empire would have been an impossibility. In the first Opium
War nearly the whole of the Madras Army had been employed.
Indian troops were again indispensable when expansion was
resumed in Malaya in the late I 87os and then Egypt in I 882
and Upper Burma in I885. By that time a political movement
of modern type was under way in India: the new sepoys had
nothing to do with it-and were only occasionally required to
take action against it.
Other western countries too were inactive in Asia during
the post-Mutiny years, partly because Britain was inactive:
governments always watched and imitated each other, and
when one moved the rest flocked after it like fierce sheep. In
addition they each had preoccupations of their own. There was
a series of wars inside Europe until I 878. The France of the
Second Empire sought to regain hegemony over its own conti-
nent. Russia was temporarily knocked out by the Crimean War
and then absorbed in internal problems of reconstruction.
Britain itself was for several years in fear of French invasion. In
the I86os the U.S. was busy with its civil war, and its first
intervention in Asia, the forcible opening of Japan to trade in
r853-4., was not followed up until the end of the century with
the seizure of the Philippines.
All this gave Asia a breathing-space after 1857, which it
ought to have profited by. Its failure to do so lends weight to
Marx's hypothesis that the old order in Asia had reached a
dead encl. Only Japan seized the opportunity, after change was
forced on it by first American and then British and French
warships in the r8sos-that decade so rich both in great events
in the East and in studies of world affairs by Marx and Engels.
Between then and the start of a new phase of imperialism about
r88o, Japan got through the critical stages of modernization.
In a very roundabout way the Indian Mutiny may be said to
have helped to make Japan's survival possible. It is a great
pity that Marx's full attention was never drawn to the rise of
this new power, far more meaningful in the long run than the
decline of the Ottoman empire, at the other end of Asia, on
which he lavished so much thought and ink.
If there was a discord or doubt in Marx's mind about
empire in India, it was an extension into Asia of one that beset
him at home in Europe. Mankind, the family of human beings,
237
was like Asiatic society too inert to move forward spontaneously.
It could only be dragged forward, by the dominion of a capital-
ist class; and capital could only be accumulated, as empires
could only be nourished, by the exploitation and misery of the
masses. The panorama of history unrolling itself before him
was a harsh one, something like the Calvinist theologian's grim
scheme of eternity. Even then there still remained the problem
of how capitalism, having clone its work, was to be got rid of.
Considering the high respect Engels always showed for the power
of modern standing armies, one is compelled to wonder how he
and Marx ever expected them to be overcome by revolutions,
unless first disrupted (as the tsarist army was in 1917) by
foreign war. The relatively easy suppression of the Mutiny, in
spite of the rebels having superiority of numbers, and fighting
on their own ground, and being so far away from Britain,
might well discourage them about the prospects of any future
revolts in Europe, whether national or proletarian.
Later generations of Europeans hankered for an easier,
smoother road than the one charted by Marx. He himself, as
youthful excitement and hopefulness wore off (when the
Mutiny ended he was a man of 4.0), must have had moods of
dejection. If he felt a growing doubt about human beings, their
readiness to revolt against tyranny, their ability to revolt
successfully-and about whether revolts might be premature
and self-defeating-it is less strange that in his later years he
turned from scrutiny of actual history to analysis of capital as
a thing in itself. Capitalism was a complex machinery made
by men but independent of men's wills; its internal contra-
dictions would, like a lurking death-wish, ensure its destruction,
or compel its makers to destroy it, at the hour when humanity
was ready to dispense with it.
7
India and the Labour
Party
Many questions suggest themselves about the influence that
India may have had on the Labour Party, a good deal stronger
in all probability than the party's on ab?ut
India as one of the taproots of the pecuhar Bntish social-
democratic mentality. It could be argued that the Labour
Party talked nonsense from the cradle, but there is a sense in
which it can be said to have fuddled its wits by thinking about
India and then to have become unable to think realistically
abou; anything. There was genuine anti-imperialism in the
early movement, just as there was anti-war feeling, and both
helped to get it going. But just as men like Ramsay MacDonald
hated the thought of war but were little concerned to explore
the causes of it, so they were sorry to sec anyone in the empire
ill-used, but had little interest in imperialism, in what made
empires and kept them at work. Hence it came about that
while they day-dreamed of transforming the empire into a true
federation, in reality the empire was transforming them. They
were soon growing content to change it by giving it a new look,
contemplating it in a new light, as Hegel did with Pn:ssian
autocracy. From this point it was natural to go on to thmk of
revolutionizing British society in the same painless way, of
dealing with capitalism by altering the colour of the spot-
light.
Effective contact with the Indian masses was impossible, and
confronted with their vast bewildering misery Labour might
well come to think of humanity at large as an amorphous,
incalculable mass, at best a crowd of children, at worst a
bloodthirsty mob. This was already how too many Labour men,
INDIA AND THE LABOUR PARTY 239
really Liberals with an interest in social welfare, instinctively
viewed the masses at home, and the Indian myriads, chronically
haunting their thoughts, deepened their mistrust. In India,
again, to work for progress with and through the people was
impossible; they could only think of working through the
existing bureaucracy, in its way a respectable and efficient one.
The Labour Party had no difficulty in crediting it with other
virtues-neutrality between government and people, willing-
ness to be used as an instrument of radical change-which it
did not possess. From this illusion it was a short step to en-
dowing the civil service at home with similar virtues, and to
believing that all the changes Britain required could be carried
out by merely pressing the right civil service buttons. A purely
bureaucratic approach to India reinforced a bureaucratic
approach to Britain. Labour has always disliked any kind of
mass struggle, at home as in the colonies; it thought suffragettes
very undesirable people, as it did the agitators in Bengal and
Maharashtra.
Meanwhile the tendency engendered by British history to
think in spacious terms, of decades instead of years and centuries
instead of decades, to be unwilling to recognize that history
now was speeding up, was deepened by contact with India,
which seemed to think in aeons, or rather to be above thinking
of time at all. India's problems were extremely complex; pre-
occupation with them helped to make Britain's too look
intricate beyond the wit of man, and to slow clown still further
Labour's habitual mode ofprogression, eachfootheld cautiously
poised in the air for ten minutes before being brought back to
the ground. If the Indian people had to be matured so very
gradually for independence, the British people must be ripened
slowly for socialism. Any fretful impatience was to be checked.
Tories could justify their repressive policies in India by pointing
to Labour's-to which Labour could only fatuously reply that
though the method might be the same when it was in office,
the spirit was different. Even this difference was not always
claimed; W edgwood might be heard consoling a political
prisoner in India by telling him that his Tory jailers had the
best of intentions at heart. More frankly Labour took refuge
in the formula that a government must govern, i.e. that
Labour in office must rule India on Tory lines, and could
indulge the luxury of thinking about reform only when in
opposition. 'Realism' swathed in mental fuddle at the India
Office easily spilled over into realism in other departments of
State. Today the Labour Government's stock excuse for its
Tory policies is that it has, after all, to govern.
Bureaucratism screened itself behind an exaggerated rever-
ence for Parliament. Parliament's awe-inspiring authority over
a world-wide empire helped to foster a kind of mystical respect
for this inmost repository of power-not to mention that MPs
touring India were always treated, though seldom regarded,
with profound respect by officialdom. In their conviction that
debates in the hall at Westminster represented the omnipotent
tide of history, these men resembled a child holding a sea-shell
to its ear and thinking that it was listening to the ocean. If this
oracle could answer the riddle of India, it could surely cope
with Britain's miniature puzzles, such as how socialism was to
be inaugurated. But for Parliament to bring its full wisdom and
benignity to bear on India, it was clearly to be desired that all
parties should speak with the same voice. It would be unjust
to India to treat it as a party issue .... This specious bi-
partisanship, steadily adhered to, was bound to spread into a
similar approach to home affairs. From telling Indians that
Tories were not such bad fellows as they looked, Labour began
telling itself or its voters the same thing. When MacDonald
deserted the party and formed a 'National Government' (one
of whose chief items of business would be India), he might be
said to have simply carried this train of thought to its logical
conclusion.
Britons took very little interest in India while it was their
responsibility, and have taken still less interest since. It may
be wondered how many of them will want to read a precise
survey, or obituary, of Labour Party policy towards India
before independence and partition came about in I 94 7; a
study as it might be called of the dead bones of something that
was never very much alive. All the same, anyone to whom
socialism or the Labour movement are a concern ought to read
such an account of the meanderings of Labour thinking,
because the Labour Party, though not India, is still with us,
and still meandering.
INDIA AND THE LABOUR PARTY
Labour leaders and spokesmen did little about India, but
talked and wrote a great deal, and there is a ponderous
literature of books, pamphlets, memoirs, by them or about
them and the Indian leaders they were in contact with. All
this, and a vast quantity of files and journals and conference
reports, M. Georges Fischer in his Le parti travailliste et la
dtfcolonisation de l' Inde (Paris, I 966) has painstakingly sifted, and
he has made use too of some unpublished materials from India
Office records. He displays a thorough command of the British
political scene and its ins and outs, never an easy thing to
acquire about any foreign country. He has written a similar
study of the 'decolonization' of the Philippines by the U.S.,
and draws our attention briefly at a good many points to
developments there and elsewhere in the world that had some
relevance to India. He notes for example that the anarchical
condition of China in the I920s and I930s lent weight to gloomy
predictions of what would happen if the British left India. He
writes with a judicial detachment almost too complete, com-
menting now and again on the inconsistencies or fallacies of
Labour reasoning, but on the whole perhaps appearing to take
it too seriously, too much at its face value.
The work is arranged chronologically, with the First World
War as the main dividing-line; the epoch before 19I4, when
the Labour Party was comparatively youthful and elastic, is in a
way the most interesting, but the years between I9I8 and 1939
arc the most important and occupy the biggest share of space.
An introductory survey reminds us that few Liberals wanted
to give India up; and the Labour Party separating itself off
from Liberalism-even then the ailing offspring of an elderly
parent-started with the idea not of breaking up the empire
but of transforming it, socializing it, from within. There was
discussion of a federation of working-class movements in all the
empire countries, to be led by the British: an attractive vision,
but too much akin to Labour illusions today of a Common
Market of monopoly capitalists magically transformed by the
presence in it of a Britain occasionally run by a government
whose members occasionally make speeches about socialism.
After the Great War, with the prevailing sensation of ship-
wreck and collapse, there was a more convulsive clinging to
empire. It was the time of the Waste Land, and colonies, all
Europe felt, were convenient fragments to shore against its
ruins. Businessmen felt this in one way; Labour leaders,
groping for something solid, and never conscious of socialism as
a solid, in another. Spiritually the contrast between Tory
greed and Labour idealism was doubtless strong; materially
it was too slight for India to be much aware of. In I925 the
TUG struck a more radical note on colonialism, but the
General Strike of the following year seems to have clone
nothing to make Labour sec class conflict in Britain and India
in the same perspective. Economic relations, Indian markets
and Lancashire jobs arc not Fischer's subject, but the con-
sequences of the Slump starting in 1929, for any chance of
concessions to Indian nationalism, deserve more prominence.
Another landmark that might have been made to stand out
is the Labour schism of 193I, when its leading group headed by
Ramsay MacDonald went over divested of disguise to the
capitalist camp. The rest of the party might have been expected
to be stung into some show of fighting spirit; instead it seemed
cowed by electoral defeat, bewildered by economic crisis, less
able than ever to think radically about India. It had been
taught, after all, to think of capitalism not as the enemy but as
a sometimes annoying neighbour.
The event that does stand out in this main section of the
book is the Simon Commission of 1928. One of the things that
strained Indian trust in Labour's goodwill, a trust quite lively
before 1914. but steadily curdling into scepticism, was Labour's
willingness to join in a Commission to pronounce on India's
destiny, made up of Englishmen alone and universally repu-
diated and boycotted by Indians. This did not prevent the
seven members from being a very happy family, the two
Labour men collaborating cordially with the rest, whose chief,
Simon, had been one of the arch-enemies of the General Strike.
One of these two worthies was Attlee. Of the few actors of that
day still on the stage now he comes out of the record badly
enough (one who comes out better is Fenner Brockway). Attlee
found only one or two trifling points to differ from his Tory
colleagues on. It was much the same when their report came
before Parliament. There were shades of opinion on the Labour
benches, but no more than on the Conservative side, where men
243
like Hoare stood apart from. the wild men like Salisbury (a
familiar name on such occasions of imperial history) and
Churchill. Even a Tory must take some twinge of comfort from
being able to feel that he is not as other Tories are-not one of
the worst of them, not a real malignant. Compromise as
Fischer remarks is the essence of the parliamentary method;
at Westminster it usually meant Labour giving up its principles
and Conservatism giving up a few commas or semicolons-
though Labour might have defended itself as to India by saying
that it had no principles to abandon. Moderate Tories exerting
themselves against Tory extremists had an excuse for not being
as progressive as they might have liked to be, and sensible
Labour MPs could feel that it was right to go along with them.
These players in the Westminster comedy were so much
accustomed to being taken seriously in Britain that they were
always surprised when their performance failed to convince
Indian spectators equally.
With the Second World War, Indian disillusionment with
Labour became complete. Britain's governing class, Tory or
Labour, was still determined to hang on to India as long as
India could possibly be hung on to. As late as the election of
1945 only 8 per cent of Labour candidates thought India
worth a mention. Bevin was promising no more than that India
should be transferred to the Commonwealth Office-and this
was the man who as Foreign Secretary was soon to show his
true colours by helping to restore French imperialism in
Indochina and Dutch in Indonesia, and using Indian troops
for the purpose. When Labour took office in 1945 many of its
leading spirits were still convinced that Dominion Status
could not be conferred on India hastily. They had to change
their minds before long, simply because it became obvious that
the only alternative to getting out was to be thrown out.
Brailsford, recognizing the inevitable, breathed a sigh at
Labour's having to renounce the hope of leading India and
Burma and Ceylon to socialism-as if this had been the party's
dearest, most cherished wish, when in half a century it had not
'led' India or Burma or Ceylon half an inch towards socialism,
and twenty years later has scarcely begun to lead its own
countrv there! Yet the man who heaved this flatulent sigh was
I
one of the best men in the movement. Labour had not given
India socialism; it was to take great pride, instead, in having
helped to bestow-or impose-on India a parliamentary
system which had nothing to do with socialism, and which as
Fischer says in an alien environment was often to be a mere
sham. With it went a bureaucracy carefully chosen and trained
by Toryism, which has been a further obstacle to social
progress. By its strategic retreat from those colonies Labour
was helping to check the spread of communism there: the boast
was Attlee's. In other words, since communism was in Asia the
only kind of socialism, Labour's last thought was not to aid
socialism, but to trip it up.
Fischer's concentration throughout is on the leaders; he is
satisfied that they alone really counted, because the rank and
file were indifferent. Whether he is right or not, a parallel study
of the rank and file is to be desired, along with the question of
how far apathy was the fault of the leadership. He reminds us
that the party's working machinery, and the influences and
impulses activating it, were complex, and that it is over-
simple to explain everything in terms of manipulation by a
group of managers. Managers do manipulate, nevertheless, in
every party, and moments did occur when the membership
showed signs of discontent with official policy on India, and
leaders had to stand by with soft soap-very much as in later
clays over Vietnam.
In his ordinary mood, it may be allowed, the British workman
did display a massive, good-humoured indifference to the plight
of his Indian brethren. If in some ways the British ruling class
can be said to have behaved towards India less badly than it
might have done, the British working class behaved far worse,
judged by the standard of the old ideal of international frater-
nity, than it ought to have done. We are at liberty to think of
the demoralization in the movement as a reciprocal effect, the
stolid mass dragging clown the leadership as well as the other
way round. In any case this leadership was not one that would
have challenged the apathy of its supporters, or blown bugle-
blasts, or even penny-whistles, for the sake of India. The
Liberal party in its best days did challenge imperialism over
Ireland, and if it had perished finally in the crusade would have
perished gloriously. Unhappily it was brought back to life by
INDIA AND THE LABOUR PARTY 245
the undertakers and set marching somnambulistically towards
Flanders.
It would have been useful, as a check on Labour Party
attitudes, to consider the Communist Party as well. Back in
rgoo the old undivided International was calling for socialist
organizations to be set up in colonial regions. Little pressure
was put on the Labour Party by the International to take a
more strenuous line on India, but it had some healthy effect on
the party to belong to a dynamic international movement.
After the post-war split this stimulus was lost: the Second
International was now tame and merely European, while the
workers' movements growing up in the colonies were com-
munist, and therefore anathema to the Labour Party. British
Communism recognized in principle a duty to assist the workers
in India, and in practice did in some measure assist them.
Whether it could have done more for them, or to enlighten
British workers, are points for investigation.
The ILP was distinctly better on India than the Labour
Party, trying at times to act as a ginger group. As between the
trade union bosses and the more literate or bourgeois spokes-
men, the comparison is often in favour of the latter, who were
multiplied in the rg2os by the influx of former Liberals. Lord
Olivier, Secretary for India in the first Labour cabinet, had been
governor of Jamaica, and looked like a Spanish grandee; he
had been at least a benevolent autocrat to his subjects. There is
another distinction to be drawn between those of the middle-
class group who were principally intellectuals and publicists,
like Cole or Laski, and the whole-time politicians like
MacDonald or Attlee, and the comparison here favours the
intellectuals, though not by a wide margin considering their
greater freedom of speech. The men from mine or bench
mostly had less knowledge of India, less interest, fewer mis-
givings, a more naive egotism, all helping to draw them towards
the point of view summed up in Bevin's 'jolly old empire'. The
others could not be so light-hearted, even if their subtler
formulae varied from Bevin's by shades often too fine for
common perception.
Altogether, the broad impression left by hundreds of
quotations of Labour Party utterances is a depressing one of
24-6 MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
wishful thinking, unrealism, poverty. The reader who can
remember listening impatiently to some of these utterances
before I947, and now with this book in hand can look back
over the full record, meticulously put together and not un-
sympathetically presented by Fischer, may feel some touches of
regret for some sectarian intolerance of his own-but he is
likely to see in the record as a whole very much what he saw
at . time:. a long cloud-procession of platitude and pre-
vancatwn, finn-flam and flapdoodle, humbug and hot-air.
It might then be concluded that the record was not worth
all this detail, that the history of the Labour Party
IS simply urelevant to the history of British India. Fischer
makes the reasonable, though negative, claim on behalf of the
party that when withdrawal was unavoidable it had the sense
to withdraw more promptly than a Tory Government would
ha_ve done. It might also be maintained that the party's
eXIstence put some restraint on British behaviour in India
which might otherwise have been more rough and ready.
much shooting would have disturbed too many illusions, too
many of those delicate psychological checks and balances on
which depended the ability of Labour men to believe in, and
therefore to keep their followers believing in, the British Raj.
In fact the real subject of interest is the Labour Party much
more than India, and political history much less than political
psychology.
It deserves to be taken into account, of course, that Indian
affairs were complicated and awkward; sheer size made them
seem, more than those of any country in the world, insoluble.
It is true also that Indian spokesmen advanced very slowly
towards a for anything like complete independence,
a.nd that India was, by and large, very poorly led. Fischer is
nght to regard the communal issue as a real one even if it was
. '
explmted at times by the ruling power. Yet on the one hand
Labour's nervous fancy was apt to inflate difficulties and
I:azards, to people Indian jungles with every species of paper
tiger and serpent; and on the other hand these men very seldom
suffered, at any rate in public, from any sense of being unequal
to their mission of showing India the way forward. Laski in a
n_10od of exaspera:ion might talk of India as an impossible
ncldle, and Cole might suggest, as ought to have been suggested
INDIA AND THE LABOUR PARTY 24-7
far ?ftener, that aid should be sought from the League of
Natwns; as a rule Labour suffered rather from a too com-
estimate of its qualifications for acting as guide and
guardmn, or Moral Tutor as teachers call themselves at
Oxford, or some such place, to 3oo,ooo,ooo Indians. It might
not be able to convince many Englishmen that it knew what
was good for them, but it knew what was good for Hindus.
There was some profundity here of conceit, if not of thought.
In the early years quite a number of builders of the Labour
Party saw India with their own eyes. Hyndman came of a
fat;nily with Indian connections, and had himself worked in a
prmccly territory. He was more forward-looking than most of
othe.rs,. though erratic on this as on other topics, but he and
his .socmhst Democratic Federation really belonged to an
earher stage. Ramsay MacDonald visited India wrote two
books on .it, p:ided himself on his special knowledg:. How much
an mqmrer really learned one is left speculating. British
was a country where it was deceptively easy for a British
VISitor to suppose that he was getting the hang of things,
because was a small educated class everywhere which
spoke difficult for him really to get
the hang of anythmg, Without the channel of communication
Co?Imu?ism later on did something to provide. We have
a diVertmg picture of Keir Hardie (another Scot, by the way,
and the who had staggered Westminster by turning up at
the House m a cl.oth cap, as if on immediate red revolution)
gravely conversmg With a magistrate at Benares on the im-
portance of encouraging landowners and others with a stake
in the country, as a moderating influence. Benares with its
thousand temples, swarming beggars and naked fakirs is a
place where a Briton might well forget any distinction between
cloth cap and top hat, and feel all the value of the grand
British virtue, respectability.
Moreover these Labour tourists were going out with fixed
preconceptions, with a ready-made hold-all of ideas which
they were confident would hold India too. On fundamentals
it never dawned on them that they had anything fresh to learn.
This made it easier for them to squeeze what began as genuine
sympathy for Indian toilers into a very British mould. The
conclusion they quickly arrived at was that it would never do
to give India independence prematurely, and so leave defence-
less workers at the mercy of their hard-hearted employers. As
the national movement grew, and its demands stiffened,
Labour's reaction was to shuffle backward. It became a stock
argument against the Congress that it was financed and con-
trolled by big businessmen; an argument that Tories, from
motives of delicacy, could scarcely resort to, but were glad to
have put forward by the Labour Party in their stead. Labour
was coming down to spinning socialistic costumes as disguises
for imperialism. It felt entitled to set up as a better friend and
truer representative of the Indian masses than their own selfish
bourgeoisie. It could appeal to them therefore to be patient,
to wait until Labour should be in power at Westminster with
a sufficient majority and sufficient leisure-then something
could be done. If they must do something on their own account
in the meantime, let them stick to trade union activitv or even
,,
start a party of their own, but not be misled into supporting
the national movement and its self-interested demagogues.
It struck Indians, however, that while Labour was so indig-
nant about exploitation of workers by Indian capitalists, it had
much less to say about exploitation by British capitalists in India.
Another little inconsistency can be detected in the 'British
Committee on Indian Affairs' of the I92os, made up mostly
of Labour men but relying for its expenses chiefly, as Fischer
tells us, on Indian Liberals and capitalists; to say nothing of
the remarkable meanness of taking money from India for
working or pretending to work for India. An excuse could be
found on similar lines for reluctance to grant even tariff
autonomy. The real objection to this was that by sheltering
India's young industries it would mean stronger competition
for Britain's; the alleged reason was that it would mean
stronger exploitation of workers by Indian millowners. Even
Brockway could lean to the convenient view that India would
do better to remain an agricultural country. Conservatives like
Churchill and Halifax were happy to agree that it would be
very wrong to abandon India to its capitalists, and almost at
the very end of the Raj we find Attlee quite of one mind with
Churchill that Congress was too much dominated by financial
249
and industrial interests. The Westminster charade could
hardly become more farcical; it reminds one of Cicero's
question, how any two of Rome's official soothsayers could
catch each other's eye in the street without bursting out
laughing.
In I9I r, in the hopeful days before the first War, the Labour
Party and TUG discussed a scheme for a sort of grand national
consolidated trade union organization in India, to be got going
by British unionists. Nothing, it scarcely needs to be said, was
done. Later on as well Labour often talked of helping trade
unionism in India, by sending advisers, giving money, and so
on, but there always happened to be a reason why the would-be
good Samaritan was obliged to pass by on the other side of the
street. More urgency came into the plans when Indian union-
ism was seen to be coming under Communist direction, but
even then it stuck at the level of urgent talk. Everything Indian
was perpetually in a state of being under active consideration
by the Labour Party. What the party did do was to co-operate
heartily, when in office, in jailing Indian trade union organ-
izers, who either were Communists, or-merely as energetic
unionists-laid themselves open to suspicion of being such. The
notorious Meerut Conspiracy trial was the grand demon-
stration of this. When Brockway at the Labour Party conference
in 1930 hoped for a mass struggle in India against capitalists
and millowners, the Labour Government spokesman was
deeply shocked. It was proper that Indian workers should not
be duped by the patriotic claptrap of their bosses, but highly
improper that they should think of doing anything against
these bosses. The Indian working class was to be encouraged
to stand on its own feet, so long as it stood perfectly still.
In the same way, on the political front Brockway was pre-
pared to welcome Gandhi's non-violent civil disobedience-a
harmless safety-valve for national agitation if ever one was
invented-but most of his colleagues, Ramsay MacDonald in
particular, recoiled from it in horror, as something in-
describablv subversive and sinister. For these men Order was
coming to' be as sovereign a virtue as for Metternich, and
statesmanship the purging of public life from any taint of the
old Adam, its refining by bleedings and exorcisms to the pure
innocence of a Sunday-school picnic. Meanwhile, as Nehru
complained, the conduct of the British authorities in India
grew considerably more brutal, a fact that Labour failed to
observe, or blamed on the Congress. It is not the school-
master's fault if his pupils compel him to use the birch. To
this quietist philosophy, no news from India was good news.
Labour's faith was pinned, for India as for Britain, to the
parliamentary method. Parliament always had the great
double advantage of explaining both why peaceful socialism
was bound to come in the future, and why it was out of the
question just now. With the same neatness it disposed of
Indian independence; and just as this could come about only
by the fiat of the British parliament, so India could only be
given freedom to run itself by means of a parliament of its
own, the one instrument of salvation. That parliamentarianism
might not necessarily be the best system for a country with
totally different traditions was a thought that seldom obtruded
itself. Toryism had never believed in parliamentary (or any
other) self-rule for India; nor did most Liberals, John Morley
for instance, before the Government of India Act of 1919,
when the Liberal party was at its last gasp. Men of the older
British parties, more firmly linked with the old governing
classes, had less superstitious reverence for Parliament than
Labour newcomers felt; for them it was a convenient method
'
not the Ark of a Covenant. One or two Labour men were able
to grasp that for India it might be desirable to think on new
lines-Lord Strabolgi, for instance, and Cole, but the thought
scarcely ever entered the minds of the practising politicians.
When would India be given a real parliament of its own?
When British capitalism was ready to give India up, a vulgarian
might have replied. But in that political fourth dimension
where so much Labour thinking was carried on, the right way
to look at it-especially for Indians to look at it-was that it
would happen as soon as India could prove itself fit and ready
for self-government. Hence the doctrine of criteria, the tests of
fitness and maturity, and the perennial Labour recipe of a fresh
commission of inquiry to go out with tape-measure and
stethoscope and see how much progress towards fitness had
been made since last time. Tests were various, though the
essential one was always respect for Order, the patient's ability
to maintain a fixed immobility like that of the fakir gazing at
eternity. Clearly, for one thing, India would have to be able to
undertake its own defence. In 1930 only roo out of 3,ooo
officers were Indian, and the Labour Government envisaged
a programme of training twenty or twenty-five new ones
annually (pp. 202-4). This would produce the requisite number
in little more than a century. Another cardinal test was educa-
tion; here such a rapid advance could not be expected, and at
the actual rate of progress it would take nearer a millennium
than a century to abolish illiteracy. Meanwhile the Labour
Party could be trusted to keep matters, as before, under active
consideration. Again this approach opened up a broad field of
agreement between sensible Labour men and moderate
Tories. When Edgar Snow interviewed the Viceroy at Delhi
during the Second World War, while the Japanese were
approaching India and the national leaders lay in jail, he found
Lord Linlithgow regretfully convinced that Indians were not
yet ripe for freedom-not yet ripe for this, that, and the other-
not ripe yet (when the visitor as a last resort suggested this) for
running co-operatives.
1
Ripeness is all. Labour ministers could feel that they were
bringing maturity nearer by keeping agitators in jail, where
they could mature their opinions in peace and quiet. They
themselves must have felt extraordinarily mature, too ripely
developed almost to be capable of doing anything but lament
the imperfections of their fellow-men. Fischer looks upon the
'doctrine of criteria' of a people's fitness for freedom as pecu-
liarly Anglo-Saxon (pp. I 99-200); but it has a close resemblance
to the tests devised by De Gaulle of Britain's fitness for entry
into the Common Market-'the general's technique', in the
words of the Economist, 'of asking Britain to give constantly
changing proofs of its "Europeanness" ', for him as examiner
to mark at his own discretion. Exactly so did the Labour
party examine India for evidence of a satisfactory degree of
Englishness.
On issues like extensions of the franchise Labour's view were,
Fischer writes, so full of contradictions and ambiguities as to
x See Edgar Snow's account of his visit to war-time India in Glory and
Bondage (London, 1946).
invite ridicule (p. 2 q.). Labour reasoning altogether had a
tendency to revolve in circles. Few of the leaders believed in
universal suffrage; the poor were not ripe, of course. Surely
then they ought to be left to defend themselves by other means
-but that meant unconstitutional action, which was absolutely
ruled out even if the heavens fell-so the poor must rely on
strictly legal methods-but this meant having votes ....
India was being trained for nationhood, or r ~ f i n e d for it like
a barrel of crude spirit slowly purifying in the cellar of British
administration-but to Labour's adult eye all nationalist
feeling was really infantile, anachronistic, out of harmony with
an age when world federation was the goal to aim at. Labour
was not proposing any surrender of Britain's own sovereignty,
and its habit of preaching against nicotine with a cigar in its
mouth was one of the things that irritated its audience.
Nationalism in India moreover, Labour could not help feeling,
was unpleasantly mixed up with religion. One really could not
talk to a Hindu mystic like Gandhi-any more than one could
talk to an atheistical communist, or a soulless capitalist, or an
ignorant coolie. Labour was always looking for someone it
could talk to, someone like the Respectable Working-man it
got on so well with at home. Unluckily there were no respectable
working-men in India; everyone was too rich or too poor, too
extremist or too apathetic, too tall or too short. In the end one
could really only talk to oneself. Labour's dialogue with India
did often sound like an old man's monologue, or the armchair
reverie of a good man after a good dinner wishing, like the king
in Tlze Gondoliers, that all men could be as rich (or as ripe) as
he.
One third of India was composed of Native States, ruled by
princes whom the British had relied on increasingly since the
Congress movement grew troublesome. It might have been
expected that Labour would not take kindly to these irrespon-
sible despots, or would wish to devise some suitability-tests for
them. Its spokesmen were so scrupulous in their respect for
constitutional freedom that they could never bear the thought
of how it was being curtailed in the U.S.S.R. Yet it scarcely
occurred to them that these Indian potentates could stand in
need of any ripening or maturing. K.eir Hardie had given them
a good certificate, on the strength of progress-reports from two
253
of them, Mysore and Baroda. There were always a few repu-
table rulers; at the other end of the scale there were some who,
had they given a truthful account of themselves and asked
Malcolm's question-
If such a one be fit to govern, speak,
would have invited Macduff's answer-
Fit to govern!
No, not to live.
In between, most of the princelings and their feudal hangers-on
were a gaudy mob of boobies or blackguards. It would have
been a miracle if they were anything else, considering their
temptations and lack of restraints. Tories have always warned
socialists against expecting too much from weak human nature.
Long after K.eir Hardie, when some in the Labour movement
had misgivings, Lord Strabolgi was ready to defend the princes,
and Attlee in the Simon Commission to uphold the sanctity of
moth-eaten treaties with them. As prime minister presiding
over the Round Table Conference in I 930 Ramsay MacDonald
thanked Their Highnesses in a gush of lyrical rigmarole for
their kindness in agreeing to join a Federation with British
India, and so opening the way to progress-orderly enough
progress to satisfy the Tories.
2
One trade union boss of that
time, J. H. Thomas, flattered by being allowed to hobnob with
George V, is said to have chivalrously assured him that he was
ready to stand or fall with the monarchy. Such a man might be
dazzled even by the feeble and distant glitter of India's petty
coronets. Thomas was in any case a strong empire man; and
it would be instructive to examine how regularly the worst
elements in the Labour movement were the most imperialistic.
To the end, Fischer points out, Labour leaders failed to com-
prehend that the princes had become mere meaningless relics
(p. 313). He adds the illuminating remark that they thought
the British public took these absurd survivals far more seriously
than it really did; and that politicians often go on repeating a
thing even when they know it to be a myth, but mistakenly
suppose that the public cannot bear to be told it is a myth.
All in all, India fostered in the Labour party the habit of
z Sec Proceedings rif the Round Table Conference for Nov. 1930, 'The General
Discussion'.
mistaking pious aspiration for fulfilment, promise for per-
formance, fantasy for reality; of thinking a thing as good as
done when it has only been talked about. Communism's
besetting vice has been to keep theory and practice united by
arbitrary shackles; Labour has avoided this by leaving theory
and practice to go each its separate way, and has kept its ideals
unsullied by treating them as abstractions laid up in heaven,
too good for this world. With Bertie Wooster to think was to
act; with the Labour party very often to act was to think. I
think, therefore I am .... It was a philosophy India was well
qualified to teach.
Index
Abdul Hamid II, 84
Afghanistan, r 76, 209
Africa, 6, ro, 12, 44, 74, 8r, 83, 133,
139, 140, 143, 14-4, 149 150-56,
158, !6!, 199 200
Southern Africa, 2, 8, 62, 72, 75, 78,
79, 84, 89, 92, IOI, II3, 15054,
t64, 221
Algeria, r8, II9, 144, 146, 172n, 221,
233
Alsacc-Lorrainc, 9, 51
Amerindians, ror, II7, !22, 137, rs8,
142
Angell, Norman, 4-5, 14, r6, 26, 34, 36,
45, 46, 51, 55, 59, 62, 64, 65, I 13
Angola, ix, 143
Argentina, 32, ro8
Armaments, 2, ro, 12, 2I, 48, 56, 59
64, 95, r88
Asia, 6, ro-12, 29, 32, 47, 71, 8r, 83, 98,
99. ros, ro6, 117, 12!, !279, 157
r68-73, 175, r8r-s, r85, 194, 197-
2or, 203, 215, 218, 220, 227-9,
232, 2347, 244
Central Asia, 219, 235
S. E. Asia, 124, 126
Far East, 24, 95, ro6, I 12, I r6, I 19,
120, 128, 129, 131, r66, 189, 198,
20!
Assam, rgo
Attlcc, Clement, 24.2, 244, 245, 248,
253
Australia, ror, rg8
Badajoz, 232
Bahadur Shah II, 182, 207
Balkans, 13, 114, 121,217,218,220
Bao Dai, 128
Basso, L., 28n, 33n, 57n
Bax, Bclfort, 7, 8
Belgium, 32, 51
Belloc, Hilaire, 26
Benares, 237
Bengal, 12, 87, go, 173, 179, 184, rgo,
rgr, rgs, 200, 207, 2og, 210, 222,
239
Bentham, Jeremy, 182
Berard, V., 8r, rrg
Berlin-Baghdad Railway, 52
Bernhardi, Gen. F. von, 24
Bernier, F., r69
Bernstein, E., 8, 26, 41
Bethmann Hollweg, T. von, 23
Bevin, Ernest, 243, 245
Bihar, 174n, 184
Bismarck, 0. von, 2, 53, I 13
Blaine, J. G., 104
Blunt, W. S., 78, 79, 92
Boer War, 8, 56, 59, 6r, 72, 79, 84, 8g,
92, 104, 112, rr8, 124
Bokhara, 121
Bolivia, 104, 136-8, 150, 159
Boxer Rebellion, 8, 78, 84, 107, I ro, I 34
Brailsford, H. N., 5. 6, 10, r6, 42, 58n,
71, 243. 244
Brazil, 130, 154.
Bright, John, 78, I 75
Britain, I, s, 4, 7> 13, 15, 18, 23, 25n,
so, 32, 40, 42, 45, 47 51, 52, 54>
55, 57, 6o, 6r, 64, 67, 70, 71, 76,
8o, 8r, 87, go, 93, 95, 97, g8, roo,
104, ro6, ro8, rog, III, 112, II6,
I tg, 124, 127, 128, 140, 146, 150,
153, 154, 159, x67, 173, 178, 186,
194, 195, 216, 217, 234, 238, 239
British empire, vii, viii, x, 12, 26, 29,
33, 40, 51, 59, 6g, 72, 73. 75. 79,
8o, 83, 86-8, 92, 93, 102, ro6, r2o,
121, 125, 139, r66, 172, 176, r8r,
r8fu 1 9 ~ rgr, 1 9 ~ 1 9 ~ 2 0 ~ 2 1 ~
236, 240, 241
Brockway, Fenner, 242, 248, 24.g
Brown, M. Barratt, go-g2, 93
Browne, Hon. J. R., 107
Bryan, W . .J., 99
Bryce, Lord, 123
25G MARXISM AND IMPERIALISM
Bukharin, N., vii, 27-9, 31-8, 40, 41,
43, 46, so, Go, 63
Bulow, Prince von, 1
Burke, Edmund, I 79
Burma, 8o, 105, I 34., I 76, 209, 236
John, x
Cabral, Amilcar, ix, I40-44, I4.6, I55
California, 100, II I, I g8
History qf India, 84
Campbell, Sir Colin, 230
Canada, 18, 29, 30, 32, 47, 81, 103, 104
Caj;ital, 167, 16g, I 75, 186, 192
Capitalism, I, 2, 4-6,8-10, 13-28,
35
, :16, :.J8-
4
I,
4
.
3
,
4
6-8, 51-3, s6,
Go, 61, 64.-7, 80-82, 86, 88, 89, 9I,
93-5, 99, 108, JOg, I I3, I I9, I28,
129, 139, I46, J4.], 149, I5I, 153,
11)8-GI, I67, I68, 173, 175, 177,
Ill5, I86, Illg, 190, 192-4, 196, 198,
200, 222, 223, 235. 237. 238, 242,
24B-so
Capital export, 2, 6, 9, II, 12, 15,
Ig, 26, 28-31, 41-3, 46, 47, 52, 55,
56, sB, Go-62, 66-Bn, 74, 87, gi, 92,
!12, 124, ISB, 187, I90
Caribbean, JOI, 105, JOG, IIg, 123, 126
Carnegie, Andrew, 97
Cartels, I 5, 24, 30, 3 I, 33, 52
Central Intelligence Agency, 127, 130
Ceylon, 96
Chad, 156
Chamberlain, Joseph, 62, 76, 78
Chaudhuri, S. B., 203
Chile, ix, J04., 105
China, 20, 4.8, 7B, B4, 99, ros, 107, I 13,
I I6, I Ig, 121, 125, 135, 136, 115>
1GB, 16g, 181, IB2, 187, 188, 194,
I 96-8, 200, 206, 20B, 2J4., 2 I g,
219-21, 22B, 229, 234., 241
Communist China, 127, 133, 143-5,
I4.B, 152, 153, 157, 1Go, 163, 164,
rB9
Churchill, Lord Randolph, 7B
Churchill, "'inston, 24.3, 24B
Cole, G. D. H., 24.5, 24.6, 250
Colombia, I 22, 123
Colonialism, 5, 6, 8, 10, 15, 17, 19, 23,
24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 35, 36, 4.3-6, 4B,
so, 54 59, 62-4, 8!, 87, 8g, g6-8,
101, 107, I 12, I q., 127, 129, 138,
177, 192, 196
Common Market, 150, 241, 251
Communism, 27, 28, 103, 127, 132, 135,
14.8, 149. 154 !56, 158, 206, 245.
247. 249 254
Communist International, xg, 48, 63,
64., 192
Commmzist A1anifesto, 27, 34, 36, 166, r8o
Crimean War, 166, 168, rg6, 2I4, 2I7-
22 I, 223-5, 228, 236
Croce, B., 4
Cromer, Lord, 78, 88, 92
'Crumbs', theory of, 35, 54, 57, 58, 87,
92, 93
Cuba, 102, I 13-15, I 17, 122, 128, 131,
132, 134 I3G-B, 140, 143 144 I62
Curzon, Lord, 204
Czechoslovakia, 14.8
Dalhousie, Lord, 203, 204., 213,220,223
Davidson, Basil, ix, 14I, 143, I46, 151,
154-6
'Decolonization', 48, 192
Delhi, IB3, !84, Ig6, 207,212,225,226,
230-32, 251
Democracy, 33, 34., 42, 70, 71, 87, 88,
g6, g8, 100, wg, 112, I I6, I26, I2g,
I41, I4g
Dermigny, L., 187n
Dicey, E., JOg
Dictatorship, 34., I28, I40
Dollar Diplomacy, 105, I23, I24, I26
Dominican Republic, 105
Dufferin, Lord, I 7B
East India Company, I68, 172, I77,
184, Ig4., Ig5, 204., 207-II, 2I4
Eastern Question, 217, 233
Eaton, J., 5, 63n
Ecuador, I03
Egypt, x, 17, 2g, 32, 7 I, 75, 77-g, 82, 88,
g2, I22, qB, I50, 236
Eisenhower, President, I 29
Elwell-Sutton, L. P., 73
Engels, Friedrich, G, 25, 55, Iog, I I I,
130, I55n, I62, I63, 166, I6g, I7g,
IB3, IB4., !88, Ig8, 203-8, 2I3, 214,
216, 222, 225, 227-37
Europe, 12-I4, I7, 2I,26,3I,36,48,5o,
GI, 76, go, g2, g6-8, 100, I03, J05,
Io6, I08, I IO, I I3, I IS, I I6, I Ig,
124, 130-32, I34, I47, I6o, I68, 17I,
IBI, 185, Ig8, 20I, 2I4, 2I8, 221,
232
Fabians, 3, 7, 70
Fascism, 34, 36, 51, 64, 65, g3, 153
Finance, 15, 40, 43, 77, 82, I77, I87,
I88
'Finance-capital', I4, 33, 40, 42, 44, 48,
so
l"ischer, Georges, x, 24I-4, 246, 248,
251, 253
Flint, C. R., IOS
Ford, Henry, 34
France, 4 I5, 30, 4.0, 42, 43, 47, 52, 55,
6I, 67, 75 I02, 124, 127, I335,
139, 140, 159, 186, 192, 193, 217,
219, 236
French empire, 1, 7, 43, 71, 8o, 102,
11921, 156, 243
Franklin, Benjamin, g8
Gallagher,J., 74, 78, 8o, 83
Gandhi, Mahatma, 138, 24.9, 252
Ganoe, Col. W. A., 101
Gaulle, Gen. De, 119, 251
Germany, 2, 4, 7-10, 15, 16, 1B, 22,
25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 36, 40, 45 46,
51-5, Go, 61, 64, 65, 67, 82, 92, 93,
g6, J03, 107, 112, 113, 119, 123,
126, 135, 138, 167, r68, 171, I 73,
1Bg, xg6, 207, 208, 231
Gladstone, W. E., 77-9, B2
Goebbels, J.P., 23, 44
Gramsei, Antonio, 33
Grant, President, 105, 106
Granville, Lord, 79
Greece (ancient), 130, 172
Grey, Sir Edward, 2
Guerrilla warfare, 134, I4.I-3, 155n,
212, 2I3, 215, 227, 232
Guevara, Che, I36, 138, I42, 146, I53,
1
59
Gurung, Dr. H. B., I58n
Halifax, Lord, 248
Handicrafts, I70-74, 185, 186, 197,206,
222
Hapsburg empire, I2-14, 25, 51, 53, I23,
I83, 2I6, 2I7
Harcourt, Sir W. Vernon, 79
Hardie, Keir, x, 247, 252, 253
Hargreaves, J. D., 74.n
Harris, Townsend, Io6
Harte, Bret, I oo
Hartington, Lord, 79
Hawaii, II I, I q., 115
Hayes, President, I04
Hilferding, R., 14, IS, 26, 28, 29, 3I,
34, 37, 39, 40, 4B, 55, 63, 64
Hindostan, 207, 2II, 214, 222
Hinsley, F. H., 8sn
Hira La! Singh, 88
History, theory of, I9920I, 2I4
Hitler, Adolf, 82, 93, 127, I86
Hoare, Sir S., 242
Hobsbawm, E. J., 168, I75, Igg, 200
Hobson, C. K., 42, 56
Hobson,J. A., viii, 3, 5, 7, g, w, I6, 28-
30,
3
7, 4I, 42, 48, 61, 62, 68n, 7I,
74, 8o, 86, 90-93, 192
'Hobson-Lenin theory', 45, Go-62, 68n,
86
Holland and its colonies, 47, 8o, go, I I I,
I2I, 127, I78, 222, 224, 235. 243
Hornaday, W. T., I06
INDEX 257
Horowitz, D., 13111
Huxley, Aldous, I45
Hyndman, H. M., 247
Ideology, 35, 4g, 67, 70, 74, 81, II7,
I42, I54-8, IG7, 170, 177, x8o, 181,
IBg, 2IO, 2I4 . 2I5
Imperialism, 1, 3-6, g, I 1, 12, I4, 15,
I8-2o, 22-4, 26-8, 30, 32, 34-G, 38-
4.0, 43, 46, so, 51, 51 sG-B, 61-3,
66-g, 71-4, 76, 77, Bo-B2, 85, 8g, go,
g3-6, IOI, 107-g, III, II2, II6-Ig,
I23-6, I3I, I38, I4g, I58, I8g, Ig2-
Ig4, Ig8, Ig9, 204., 220, 223-8, 248
'Increasing misery', 36, 4I, 86, I57
Independent Labour Party, 24.5
India, x, 6, JO-I2, I 7, 1B, 20, 29, 45, 48,
so, 57, 70-73, 77, 7B, Bo, 83-5, B7,
88, go-g2, g6, g8, I04., 107, I I2, I I3,
II7, I24, 125, I27, 132, I35, 137,
140, 141, 114. 115 I5I, I54. ISS.
157. I67, I6g, 170-202, 206, 20B,
2og, 21 I-13, 2I6, 2I7, 2Ig-22, 234,
235. 238-53
Agrarian issues, 169, 170, I72, I74,
I75, 183, I84, I87, I9I, I97, 205,
206, 209, 232, 233
Bureacracy, 239, 240, 244
Communal friction, IBI, I83, 206,
207
Indian Mutiny, 84., gi, I I2, I34, I 53,
I66, I68, I6g, 175, 182-5, 1!l7, I93-
Ig6, 201, 203, 205, 206, 208, 20g,
212,213, 2I4, 21g, 220,223-7, 22g-
237 1 c 8
Indian Nationa ongress, 207, 24 ,
250, 252
Indian Princes, 73, I 2 I, I 76, 252, 253
Sepoy army, 1B2, I83, I94, 203-5,
207, 208, 2I0-13, 224-G, 22g-33,
236, 251
Industry, I I, I 2, I 5, 20, 30, 32, 35, 40,
4
I,
47
,
4
u, S5, 62, 87, go, 108, I I l,
I2I, 145, I53, I57, I5B, I6I, 173-5,
178-8o, 185-g2, IgG, Ig8, 202, 248
Intelligentsia, 144 147, 150, 1Go, 184,
209, 245
Iqbal, Mohamed, 200
Iraq, I28, 148
Ireland, 6, 7g, 8o, I02, ISO, 1Bg, 1g3,
I g4, 208, 235, 244
Israel, 151, I52
Italy, 93, 108, II9, I26, I34, I76
Japan, 4, II, I3, 20, 26, 29, 44, 45, 47
6I, g3, g6, 99, 100, 106, 107, I 10,
III, II3, 116, II7, 120, I23, I26,
I27, 15B, 168, I7g, I8I, 186, Igo,
199, 22g, 234, 236
Jingoism, II, 56, 59, 70, 79, 92, 100,
104, 109, 114., I I6, I94, Ig6
Jones, Ernest, 71
Joshi, P. C., x, 206
Kautsky, Karl, 5, g-15, 17-20, 23, 24,
26, 30-32, 35, 39, 42, 13 4.6, 4l,
so, 51, 557, 62, 63, I24, 117
Kaye, Sir John, 23I
Keltic, J. S., 75n
Kennan, G. wo, I3I
Kiaochow, 8
Kipling, Rudyard, 103, 1 I3
Korea, 41., 129
Kuomintang, 121, 14.3
Labour Party, x, xi, 70, 85, 88, 140,
23853
Lambrick, H. T., 212
Lacqueur, W. Z., 73
Lancashire, 88, 166, I 73, ! 74., I 78, I87,
I93, I957, 24.2
Laski, Harold, 245, 246
Latin America, ix, Ig, 29, 95, gg, 102-4,
IIS, I22, I23, I25, I2g, 133, I36,
137, 14.2, ISI, 157. 159 164
League of Nations, 65, 6g, 247
Lenin, V. I., vii-ix, 8, 16, 17, 20, 22,
24-8, 31, 33n, 35, 37-44, 4.6, 48-so,
52-6I, 63, 64, 66-8,,71, 71 80-82,
86, 87,91-3, g6, 136, 139, 147, !62,
164, I94, 235
Liberal Party, 7I, 24I, 244., 245, 250
Lichtheim, G., 42
Liebknccht, Karl, 9
Lincoln, Abraham, I67
Linlithgow, Lord, 25I
Lloyd, T., 68n
Luclmow, I83, 204, 207, 23I, 232
Luxemburg, Rosa, I7-2I, 27-30, 32,
33n, 36, 39, 41 63, 1 7 ~ m
MacArthur, Gen. A., I I 7
Macaulay, T. B., I 79
MacDonald, .J. H .. , 238, 24.0, 24.2, 245,
217 249. 253
'McKinley, President, I I6
Magdo!f, H., 4.2
Mahan, Capt. A. T., 107, I I2, I I4, I IS,
118 .
Majumdar, R. C., 203
Malaya, 8o, 85, gi, w6, 236
Manchuria, 66, I I I, I25
Mao Tsc-tung, I39, I44 I 55, I6o
Maoism, I32, I47, I49, I57, I59, 162,
I63, 200
Marx, Karl, viii, x, 6, I7-I9, 25, 32, 38,
39, 41, 47, 54 88, 93, gg, !05, I25,
z62, I63, I65, I66, I68-2o4, 208,
!:lOg, 213, 2I5I8, 22028, 2337
l'viarxism, viii, x, 4, 6-g, II, I7, 2I,
31, 33, 35-8, 44, 4.8, so, Go-63, 6s,
66, g6, I32, 145, I557, !62, I68,
182, 192, I94 Igg, 2I3, 214
Mazzini, G., I72
Meerut Conspiracy trial, 249
Mehemet Ali, 7I
Mciggs, Henry, 105
l'vielvillc, Herman, I oo
Mexico, Ioo, I02, Io4, IOS, I22, I23,
I38
Middle East, 7I, 73, 8o, 95, I27, 150,
I52, I63
Miliband, R., xi
Milner, Lord, 89
Minto, Lord and Lady, x
Mittel-Europa, 23, 33, 53
Monarchy, 25, 31, 61, 66, 67, g8, III,
I I4, I83, 215
Monopoly, 39, 40, 44., 49, 50, 52, 54,
55, Go, 66, 72, 93, 95, I49
Monroe Doctrine, 29, 103, I23, I27
Morley, John, 85, 250
Morley-Minto Reforms, 88
Morocco, 62, I IS, 233
Mozambique, ix, I43, ISO
'Multatuli', 224n
Muslims, I 1, I I I, I 50-52, 168, I8I, I88,
200, 224
Muslim League, gi
Nana Sahib, 226
Naoroji, Dadabh<.>.i, 84
Napier, Sir Charles, 221, 230
Napoleon, I, 91, 134, 193, 201, 214
Napoleon III, 104, IBI, 214, 2I9
Nationalism, I7, 27, 54, 55, 119, 12I,
I40, q.8, I 76, I 79, I Uo, 18g, 207,
2I6
Colonial nationalism, I2, 49, so, 70,
I I 7, 129, I43> I8I, I82, 20I, 203,
206, 210, 225, 229, 242, 248, 252
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 207, 250
Nco-colonialism, xi, 19, 66, I 16, 139,
I59, I6I
New England, gg, 101
New York Tribune, 165, 223, 225
New Zealand, 8I, 192
Newbury, C. W., 74n, 75n
Ngo Dinh Diem, 128
Nicaragua, 102, 122
Nicholas I, 130
Nicholas II, 44
Nicholson, John, 2 I 3
Nigam, N. K., 226
Nigeria, 75
Nixon, President, 128
Nkrumah, Kwame, 157
O'Donnell, Gen. L., 216
Olivier, Lord, 245
Opium trade, 7I, I88, I94, I97, Ig8
Opium wars, I66 214, 220, 230
Ostrogorsky, M., 109
Oudh, I76, I83, 184., 185, 203-7, 209,
2II, 2I2, 222, 23I, 232
Oudh taluqdars, 204-6, 209, 21 I, 231
Paish, Sir G., s8n
Pakistan, 148, 151, 158, 174
Palmerston, Lord, 176, 184
Panama Canal, 104, 122
Paraguay, 138
Parliamentarism, 240, 243, 244, 24.9,
250
Parsecs, 188, 189
Patiala, maharaja of, 226
Pearce, Brian, 171
Peasants, ix, 21, 132-6, 138, 142, q.6,
147, 156-Go, 162, 170, 183, 185,
I93> 201, 203, 205, 206, 209, 231
Perlo, V., 131
Perry, Commodore 0. H., 106, 107,
III
Pershing, Gen. J. J., 122
Persia, I 7, 73, 85, 127, 158, 196, 214,
219, 220, 228, 229
Peru, 104, 105
Philippines, 64, 84, 102, !16-22, I26,
I33, I40, 236, 241
Platt, D. C. M., 68n
Poland, I48, 167, 216
Population, 88, 89, 92, 108, 157, I70,
Igr, 197
Portugal and its colonies, vii, 11, 41., 45,
84, 98, 108, III, 114, I20, I2I,
I37> I39, I40, I42, 145> I46, 150,
ISI
Portuguese Guinea, ix, I40-46, q8,
ISI, Is6, I62
'Primitive Communism', I75, 222
Puerto Rico, II4, u6
Punjab, 9I, 207, 210, 2I9
Race, I I, IS, 35, 51, I02, 103, rio, I s,
I20, I25, I38, ISI-3, 2IO
Railways, IO, 46, 47, 9I, I74, I78-8I,
I88, I90, 223
Raw materials, 44-7, 67, 72, 73, 82, 95,
99. IOO, 110, I20, I24., I27, IS8,
I 78, I 79, I95
Reade, Winwood, 234
Revolution, 13, I4, I7, 20, 26, 27, 36,
38, 6o, 66, 97, 120, 132-4, I36, I43,
146, ISO, I52, 153> I55 IS6, I59>
I6o, I62-4, I66, I72, 196-2oi, 214.-
17, 224, 229, 230, 237, 238
Rhodes, Cecil, 62, 92, IOI
Rhodesia, I46, ISI
Robinson, R., 74, 78-Bo, 83
INDEX
259
Rogers, Thorold, 28
Rome (ancient), I II, II2, I30, 170,
172, 235
Roosevelt, Theodore, 122
Roy, Ram Mohun, I79, IBI, 2I6
Ruling classes, I3, s8, 76, 77> 96, 97,
I66, I82, 185, 190, 195
Russia, ix, 4, 10, 16, 20, 24, 25, 28, 29,
37, 38, 44, 45, 51, 52, 60, 98, IOO,
III, 11
3
, 11
4
, 119, 120, 129, 133-5,
139, lSI, 155> !66, 171, 175, 176,
!86,200,21719,221,222,235>236
U.S.S.R., 30, 65, 73, 93, 120, 127,
143, 145, I48, 149 I52, 158, 16o,
163, I64, 189, 252
Russo-Japanese War, 6, I4, 44, II9
Salisbury, 3rd marquis of, 77, 79
Salisbury, 4.th marquis of, 243
San Domingo, 122
Santl1al rebellion, 224
Sarmiento, D. F., 108
Saul, S. B., 56, 88
Saville, John, xi, 159
Schumpeter, .J. A., 62
Scotland,204,208
Highlands, I02, 194, 208, 227n, 23I
Scott, Walter, 46n
Seeley, J. R., 76, I I2
Shepperson, G. A., 74n
Sheridan, R. B., I I 7
Sikhs, 207, 209, 210, 213, 22I, 227
Simon, Sir John, 242
Simon Commission, 24.2, 253
Sind, 176, 221
Sindhia, maharf\ia, 226
Smith, Adam, I95
Smith, Sir J. Dunlop, I94
Snow, Edgar, 251
Socialism, 8, IOI2, 14, I7, 4I, 52, 55,
s6, 109, riB, I2I, I28, 13I, 136,
139. 143> I45 147 ISO, ISI, 156,
158-63, I66, I75, 192, 1gB, 202,
206, 238, 24I4 250
Socialist (Second) International, x,
xi, I2, x6, 23, 27, 4I, 63, 235, 245
Sombart, W., 23
Soule, Pierre, I02, 226
Spain, 1 I, 7I, 84, go, gg, 102, 104, 108,
109, III, I13, I2I, 126, I3I, 134,
I35, I37, 140, 166, I83, 188, rgi,
192, 20I, 209, 214.-I6, 2Ig, 2235,
228, 22g, 233
Spanish-American War, 114, 115, II7,
118, I22
Spear, P., 83
State, the, 33, 34., 36, 58, 77, g8, I45,
I47 I6g, r86, 190, 215, 229
Stengcrs, J., 74n, 75n
Stevenson, R. L., 107
Strabolgi, Lord, 250, 253
Strachey, John, {2, 6gn, S5-91
Suez Canal, 73, 7S, S2, 122, 150
Sweden, 37, 150
Sweezy, P. M., 32n, 57n, 66n
Taiping Rebellion, 105, 134 1S2, rSg,
197 206, 221
Tanzania, 133, 152, 157
Tarim, 15, 24, :31, go, wS, rSg, 24S
Temperley, H. V., 26
'Third World', 132, rsg, I6I, 164
Thornton, A. P., 69-72, H, So
Tipu Sahib, 219
Togliatti, P., 163
Toryism and India, 239, 240, 242-4,
246, 24.8, 250, 25 I, 253
Trotsky, Leon, 27, 37, 44, 64.
Tudor England, I S6, I 93
Turkey, 2, 20, 43, 45, 52, 53, S4, gg, I 14,
115, 121, rgS, 151, r6S, 1S7, 1Sg,
xgo, 210, 212, 214, 217, 21S, 220,
22S, 229, 236
'Ultra-imperialism', 24, 4.9, 65, 67, 124.,
147
United States, vii, ix, g, ro, 12, 13, xS,
26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 4.0, 44, 47>
52, 53, 6r, 64., 65, 67, 71, 72, 77,
S4, 95101, !039, Ill-31, 136-S,
140, 14.6, 151, 153, rsS, 163, r6S,
194 235 241
American Civil War, 97, 101, 104,
106, Il3, I2S, 151, 167, 195, 233,
234> 236
Immigrants, IOS, IIO, IIg, IIS
Negroes, 102, roS, rog, I 14., 120, 129,
147 154
The South, ror, 102, IIo, II'b 120,
I5I, 233
Varga, E., 5711
Victoria, Queen, li3, 219
Vietnam, IOI, IIO, Il7, I27, 133, 143
q6, I 50, I 5S, I60, 244
South Vietnam, I2S, 129, Igi, 14.6
Walker, William, 102
War, 4, 6, g, 10, 13, I4, 16, 21, 25, 26,
2S, go, 31, 36, gS, 39, 41, 49 50,
53, 56, 61, 6<j., 72, gg, g6, 97, II3,
rgS, 155, rSs, 20S, 2og, 2I2, 224,
225, 2273I, 233 23fu 237
Washington, President, gS
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 164
Wcdgwood, J., 239
Wellington, duke of, 134, 232
Wells, H. G., 7
West Indies, IOI, 122, 177, 232
Whitman, Walt, 100, 109
Wilberforce, Bishop S., Ss
William II, Kaiser, 2, 13, 52, 77, Sg,
I26
Wilson, President, I27
Witte, S. I I 1
Working class, 27, 34, g6, 4.1, 4S, 51, 54,
5
6-g, S7,
9
2, g6, xIS, 147, I49,
I56-S, I66, 167, 171, rSo-Sg, xg6,
215, 244 24S, 249
World War, first, g, 13, 22, 26, 2S, 32,
35, 3S, 4I' so, 524, 59. 6I' 62, 64,
6
5
, 77, IOO, I IO, 12
4
., 127, I34> 24I
World War, second, 23, 33, 66, So, S2,
93, I22, I26, ij4, 139, 243, 251
Younghusband, Sir F., 125
Yugoslavia, 136, 144 14S
Zimmern, Sir A., I25
Zionism, 127
Zulus, I55, 227
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An inexact expression, rather; fortunately

C. 9row, Harrts 1939), pp. 6o-6r,g

J11ar rif IndcjJCiu!ence, p. rg. CC Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of

His disapproval of these wars does however emphasize

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