Why Marx Was Right (24 page)

If Marxism has been a steadfast
champion of women's rights, it has also been the most zealous advocate of the
world's anti-colonialist movements. It fact, throughout the first half of the
twentieth century, it was the primary inspiration behind them. Marxists were
thus in the van of the three greatest political struggles of the modern age:
resistance to colonialism, the emancipation of women and the fight against
fascism. For most of the great first-generation theorists of the anticolonial
wars, Marxism provided the indispensable starting point. In the 1920s and '30s,
practically the only men and women to be found preaching racial equality were
communists. Most African nationalism after the Second World War, from Nkrumah
and Fanon onwards, relied on some version of Marxism or socialism. Most
communist parties in Asia incorporated nationalism into their agendas. As Jules
Townshend writes:

While the working classes,
with the notable exceptions of the French and Italian, seemed to be relatively
dormant in the advanced capitalist countries [in the 1960s], the peasantry,
along with the intelligentsias, of Asia, Africa and Latin America were making
revolutions, or creating societies, in the name of socialism. From Asia came
the inspiration of Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1966 in China and Ho Chi Minh's
Vietcong resistance to the Americans in Vietnam; from Africa the socialist and
emancipatory visions of Nyerere of Tanzania, Nkrumah of Ghana, Cabral of
Guinea-Bissau and Franz Fanon of Algeria; and from Latin America the Cuban
Revolution of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
⁵

From Malaysia to the
Caribbean, Ireland to Algeria, revolutionary nationalism forced Marxism to
rethink itself. At the same time, Marxism sought to offer Third World
liberation movements something rather more constructive than replacing rule by
a foreign-based capitalist class with rule by a native one. It also looked
beyond the fetish of the nation to a more internationalist vision. If Marxism
lent its support to national liberation movements in the so-called Third World,
it did so while insisting that their perspectives should be
international-socialist rather than bourgeoisnationalist. For the most part,
this insistence fell on deaf ears.

On coming to power, the
Bolsheviks proclaimed the right of self-determination for colonial peoples. The
world communist movement was to do an immense amount to translate this
sentiment into practice. Lenin, despite his critical attitude to nationalism,
had been the first major political theorist to grasp the significance of
national liberation movements. He also insisted in the teeth of Romantic
nationalism that national liberation was a question of radical democracy, not
chauvinist sentiment. In a uniquely powerful combination, Marxism thus became
both an advocate of anticolonial-ism and a critique of nationalist ideology. As
Kevin Anderson comments, ''Over three decades before India won its independence
and more than four decades before the African liberation movements came to the
fore in the early 1960s, [Lenin] was already theorizing anti-imperialist
national movements as a major factor in global politics.''
⁶
''All
Communist Parties,'' Lenin wrote in 1920, ''should render direct aid to the
revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations (for
example Ireland, the American Negroes, etc.) and in the colonies.''
⁷
He attacked what he called ''Great Russian chauvinism'' within the Soviet
Communist Party, a stance that did not prevent him from effectively endorsing
the annexation of the Ukraine and later the forcible absorption of Georgia.
Some other Bolsheviks, including Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, displayed a strong
hostility to nationalism.

Marx himself was somewhat
more ambiguous about anticolonialist politics. In his early career, he tended
to support the struggle against colonial power only if it seemed likely to
promote the goal of socialist revolution. Certain nationalities, he
scandalously declared, were ''non-historic'' and doomed to extinction. In a
single Eurocentric gesture, Czechs, Slovenes, Dalmatians, Romanians, Croats,
Serbs, Moravians, Ukrainians and others were cavalierly consigned to the ash
can of history. At one point, Engels zealously supported the colonization of
Algeria and the U.S. conquest of Mexico, while Marx himself had scant respect
for the great Latin American liberator, Simon Bolivar. India, he remarks, could
boast no history of its own, and its subjugation by the

British had unwittingly
laid down the conditions for socialist revolution in the subcontinent. It is
not the kind of talk that would land you an A in postcolonialism courses from
Canterbury to California.

If Marx can speak
positively about colonialism, it is not because he relishes the prospect of one
nation trampling upon another. It is because he sees such oppression, vile and
degrading as he judged it, as bound up with the arrival of capitalist modernity
in the ''undeveloped'' world. This in turn he saw not only as bestowing certain
benefits on that world, but also as preparing the way for socialism. We have
already discussed the pros and cons of such "teleological" thought.

The suggestion that
colonialism can have its progressive aspects tends to stick in the craw of most
Western postcolonial writers, fearful as they are that to confess anything so
politically incorrect might be to sell the pass to racism and ethno-centrism.
It is, however, something of a commonplace among, say, Indian and Irish
historians.
⁸
How could such a formidably complex phenomenon as
colonialism, stretching as it does over a range of regions and centuries, have
produced not a single positive effect? In nineteenth-century Ireland, British
rule brought famine, violence, destitution, racial supremacy and religious
oppression. It also brought in its wake much of the literacy, language,
education, limited democracy, technology, communications and civic institutions
which allowed the nationalist movement to organise and eventually seize power.
These were valuable goods in themselves, as well as promoting a worthy
political cause.

While a good many of the
Irish were keen to enter upon the modern age by learning English, some
upper-class Irish Romantics were patronizingly eager for them to speak nothing
but their native tongue. We find a similar prejudice in some postcolonial
writers today, for whom capitalist modernity would appear an unqualified disaster.
It is not an opinion shared by many of the postcolonial peoples whose cause
they champion. Of course it would have been preferable for the Irish to have
entered upon democracy (and eventually prosperity) in some less traumatic way.
The Irish should never have been reduced to the indignity of colonial subjects
in the first place. Given that they were, however, it proved possible to pluck
something of value from this condition.

Marx, then, may have
detected some ''progressive'' trends in colonialism. But this did not stop him
from denouncing the ''barbarity'' of colonial rule in India and elsewhere, or
of cheering on the great Indian Rebellion of 1857. The alleged atrocities of the
1857 insurgents, he commented, were merely a reflex of Britain's own predatory
conduct in the country. British imperialism in India, far from constituting a
benignly civilising process, was ''a bleeding process with a vengeance.''
⁹
India laid bare the ''profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois
civilisation,'' which assumed respectable guise at home but went naked abroad.
¹⁰
Indeed, Aijaz Ahmad claims that no influential nineteenth-century Indian
reformer took as clear-cut a position as Marx did on the question of Indian
national independence.
¹¹

Marx also recanted his
earlier view of the conquest of Mexico, as Engels did of the French
expropriation of Algeria. It had, the latter reflected bitterly, unleashed
nothing but bloodshed, rapine, violence and the ''barefaced arrogance'' of the
settlers on the ''lesser breed'' of natives. Only a revolutionary movement,
Engels urged, would retrieve the situation. Marx championed the Chinese
national liberation movement of his day against what he contemptuously called
the colonialist ''civilisation-mongers.'' He was, in other words, to make
amends for his earlier chauvinism, rallying behind the liberation struggles of
colonized nations whether they were ''non-historic'' or not. Assured that any
nation that oppresses another forges its own chains, he viewed Irish
independence as a precondition for socialist revolution in England. The
conflict of the working class with their masters, he writes in the
Communist
Manifesto,
at first takes the form of a national struggle.

For the tradition I have
just traced, issues of culture, gender, language, otherness, difference,
identity and ethnicity were inseparable from questions of state power, material
inequality, the exploitation of labour, imperial plunder, mass political
resistance and revolutionary transformation. If you were to subtract the latter
from the former, however, you would have something like much of today's
postcolonial theory. There is a simpleminded notion abroad that somewhere
around 1980, a discredited Marxism gave way to a more politically relevant
postcolonialism. This, in fact, involves what the philosophers call a category
mistake, rather like trying to compare a dormouse with the concept of
matrimony. Marxism is a mass political movement stretching across continents
and centuries, a creed for which countless men and women have fought and
sometimes died. Postcolonialism is an academic language largely unspoken
outside a few hundred universities, and one sometimes as unintelligible to the
average Westerner as Swahili.

As a theory,
postcolonialism sprang into existence in the late twentieth century, around the
time when the struggles for national liberation had more or less run their
course. The founding work of the current, Edward Said's
Orientalism,
appeared
in the mid-1970s, just as a severe crisis of capitalism was rolling back the
revolutionary spirit in the West. It is perhaps significant in this respect
that Said's book is quite strongly anti-Marxist. Postcolonialism, while
preserving that revolutionary legacy in one sense, represents a displacement of
it in another. It is a postrevolutionary discourse suitable to a
postrevolutionary world. At its finest, it has produced work of rare insight
and originality. At its least creditable, it represents little more than the
foreign affairs department of postmodernism.

So it is not as though
class must now give way to gender, identity and ethnicity. The conflict between
the transnational corporations and the poorly paid, ethnic, often female
labourers of the south of the globe
is
a question of class, in the
precise Marxist sense of the term. It is not that a ''Eurocentric'' focus on,
say, Western coal miners or mill workers has been now superseded by less
provincial perspectives. Class was always an international phenomenon. Marx
liked to think that it was the working class that acknowledged no homeland, but
in reality it is capitalism. In one sense of the term, globalisation is stale
news, as a glance at the
Communist Manifesto
would suggest. Women have
always formed a large part of the labour force, and racial oppression was
always hard to disentangle from economic exploitation. The so-called new social
movements are for the most part not new at all. And the notion that they have
''taken over'' from a class-obsessed, antipluralist Marxism overlooks the fact
that they and Marxism have worked in fruitful alliance for some considerable
time.

Postmodernists have
sometimes accused Marxism of being Eurocentric, seeking to impose its own
white, rationalist Western values on very different sectors of the planet. Marx
was certainly a European, as we can tell from his burning interest in political
emancipation. Emancipatory traditions of thought mark the history of Europe,
just as the practice of slavery does. Europe is the home of both democracy and
the death camps. If it includes genocide in the Congo, it also encompasses the
Paris Communards and the Suffragettes. It signifies both socialism and fascism,
Sophocles and Arnold Schwarzenegger, civil rights and Cruise missiles, a legacy
of feminism and a heritage of famine. Other parts of the globe are equally
marked by a mixture of enlightened and oppressive practices. Only those who in
their simpleminded way see Europe as wholly negative and the postcolonial
''margins'' as purely positive could overlook this fact. Some of them even call
themselves pluralists. Most of these people are guilt-stricken Europeans rather
than postcolonials with an animus against Europe. Their guilt rarely extends to
the racism implicit in their contempt for Europe as such.

There is no doubt that
Marx's work is limited by his social conditions. Indeed, if his own thought is
valid, it could scarcely be otherwise. He was a middle-class European
intellectual. But not many middle-class European intellectuals called for the
overthrow of empire or the emancipation of factory workers. Indeed, a great
many colonial intellectuals did not. Besides, it seems a touch patronizing to
suggest that the whole brave band of anticolonial leaders who took up Marx's ideas,
from James Connolly to C. L. R. James, were simply the deluded victims of
Western Enlightenment. That mighty campaign for freedom, reason and progress,
which sprang from the heart of middle-class eighteenth-century Europe, was both
an enthralling liberation from tyranny and a subtle form of despotism in
itself; and it was Marx above all who made us aware of this contradiction. He
defended the great bourgeois ideals of freedom, reason and progress, but wanted
to know why they tended to betray themselves whenever they were put into
practice. He was thus a critic of Enlightenment—but like all the most effective
forms of critique, his was from the inside. He was both its firm apologist and
ferocious antagonist.