Marcello Musto’s The AntiColonialist published in The Statesman (30 October 2023) ignores the fact that Marx’s views on the non-European world, like his overall political theorizing, flowed from Hegelian prescriptions. Musto’s conclusion that Marx was always on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor misses the fact that Marx considered imperialist rule as being simultaneously destructive and constructive.

It was degenerative, as it destroyed indigenous institutions and practices; but it was also regenerative, as it created the modern techniques of production which brought political unity and social changes. The author ignores Marx’s writings on British rule in India, an important aspect of his writings on the non-European world. The European interest in the non-European world began during the Enlightenment to underline the qualitative and marked distinction between the advanced European cultures and the backward non-European civilizations. Montesquieu was the pioneer of this perception.

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Using climatic conditions as the yardstick, he noted that tropical climates were unsuited for democracies and individual freedom. Adam Smith clubbed China, Egypt and India together for the special attention irrigation received in these societies. James Mill observed the difference between European feudalism and governmental arrangements in Asiatic societies.

Richard Jones used the phrase “Asiatic society” and J.S. Mill used the term “Eastern society” in 1848. Others, like Spencer, Pareto and Durkheim, analysed Asiatic societies from a comparative perspective highlighting their relative backwardness. Hegel was the most influential among these thinkers, whose philosophy of history not only concurred with this prevailing European perception of the East, but also influenced – to a very large extent – the left Hegelians with respect to perceiving colonization as a modernizing force. For Hegel, with his clear Eurocentrism, India and China did not have any history as these were “stationery and fixed”.

This was true of all Asiatic societies. Hegel’s point that the East lacked history influenced Marx. Interestingly, Marx accepted Hegel’s notion of the unchanging and static nature of the non-European world uncritically while he dismissed Hegel’s analysis of Germany as having realized the universal criterion. His interest in the non-European world began in 1852 when he had to pen a series of articles for the New York Daily Tribune for a period of 10 years, until 1862. Marx coined the phrase ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ to describe the non-European world. In exploring the possibilities of a world proletarian revolution, Marx and Engels began to show interest in the non-European world. They described the oriental societies of India and China as lacking in history, incapable of changing from within, and essentially stagnant.

Since, by themselves, they would block historical progress, the industrialized West, when it became socialist, would be the agent of liberation in the less developed areas. In other words, European socialism would have to precede national liberation movements in Asian societies. Marx and Engels identified Europe with progress, and the Orient with stagnation. Marx and Engels concluded that the chief characteristic of Asiatic societies was the absence of private property, particularly private ownership of land.

In contrast to the state in the European context, which was an instrument of class domination and exploitation, the state in Asiatic societies controlled all classes. It did not belong to the superstructure, but was decisive in the entire economic arena, building and managing water supply which was the life breath of agriculture in arid areas. It performed economic and social functions for the whole of society. Social privileges emanated from service to the state, and not from the institution of private property, as was the case in Europe.

Asiatic societies had an overdeveloped state, and an underdeveloped civil society. Military conquests and dynastic tussles ushered in changes periodically, without affecting the economic organization, for the state continued to be the real landlord. The unchanging nature of Asiatic societies was also buttressed by self-sufficient autarchic villages, which sustained themselves through agriculture and handicrafts. In the Grundrisse (1857-58), Marx and Engels developed these preliminary sketches of Asiatic societies to highlight the key differences in the urban history of the West and that of the East.

In the West, the existence of politically independent cities conducive to growth of the production of exchange values determined the development of a bourgeois class and industrial capitalism, whereas in the East, the city was artificially created by the state, and remained a “princely camp” subordinated to the countryside. The city was imposed on the economic structure of society. Social unity represented by the state lay in the autarchic self-sufficient villages where land was communally owned.

Stability was ensured by simplicity of production. The state appropriated the surplus in the form of taxes. Factors like free markets, private property, guilds and bourgeois law, that led to the rise of the capitalist class in the West, were absent in Asiatic societies due to a centralized state that dominated and controlled civil society. For Marx, imperialism would act as a catalyst of change since these societies lacked the mechanisms for change.

The concept of the Asiatic Mode has had a chequered history. In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx considered the Asiatic Mode as one of the “epochs marking progress in the economic development of society”. Engels did not refer to the Asiatic Mode in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). It was in the context of discussions on revolutionary struggles in Russia, that the concept figured once again. Different political strategies were devised in view of Russia being feudal, semicapitalist, authoritarian and partly Asiatic.

In 1853, Marx and Engels characterized Tsarist Russia as “Semi-Asiatic”. In the Anti Duhring, Engels viewed the Russia commune as the basis of oriental despotism. Between 1877 and 1882, Marx, in his letters to Vera Zaulich (1852–1919) and Engels, as a member of the editorial board of Otechestvenniye Zapiski, examined the prospects of revolution in Russia and whether in such an eventuality the commune could provide the foundations of socialism. They pointed out that if a revolution would break out in Tsarist Russia it would complement the efforts of the proletariat in the advanced West. However, they continued to uphold their analysis that the proletarian revolution would occur only in the advanced industrialised societies as socialism represented the zenith of capitalism.

Analysing India within the framework of the Asiatic Mode, Marx was convinced that Imperial Britain would establish the foundations of Western society in India, as English imperialism represented the only social revolution in Asia. This belief rested on the logic that though colonialism was brutal, it was dialectically reformative for the world proletarian revolution. Colonialism would unleash forces of modernization which would eventually lead to the emancipation of these areas. Marx’s account of British imperialism, according to Avineri, led to the proposition that the more extensive the forms of imperialism, the more profound would be the consequences for modernization.

Marx and Engels favoured colonialism, as it was a catalyst for modernization, though they hardly took note of the regressive and exploitative side of it. Marx noted that in India, England had a dual function, one destructive and the other regenerative. Colonization as a regenerative force brought about political unification, introduced railways, a free press, a trained army, Western education, rational ways of thinking, and abolished common land tenures. As for its being destructive, British colonisation destroyed indigenous industries and handicrafts. Marx mentioned the exploitative role played by the East India Company, and the increasing resentment English capitalists had against its monopoly, preventing the transfer of surplus British capital to India.

All these changes profoundly affected the static nature of Indian society. In this context, he mentioned superstition and narrow-mindedness, which reinforced animal worship, preventing development. In spite of these insights, the fact remained that like the Conservatives, Marx and Engels favoured colonialism. In the fierce controversy between Marx and Bakunin, the question of the right of self-determination was one of the major issues of their disagreement. Bakunin in particular and the Anarchists in general defended the right of nations (including the predominantly peasant Eastern nations) to self-determination.

The West was based on slavery, and did not prove that it was superior to the “barbarians of (the) Orient”. He asserted that all states were constituted by their nature and the conditions of the purpose for which they existed, namely the absolute negation of human justice, freedom and morality. By this logic, he did not distinguish between the uncouth Tsarist Russia and the advanced countries of North Europe, for the former did the same thing as the latter, with a mask of hypocrisy.

The Asiatic Mode paradigm undermined Marx’s universalistic presumption that a ruling class could only be a proprietary class, i.e., a class that owned the means of production. The primary paradigm in the Manifesto (1848) and other writings did not focus on the class character of the state bureaucracy, which could be one of the reasons, according to Gouldner, as to why the Asiatic Mode in particular and the theory of the state in general, remained so sketchy in the works of Marx and Engels. Moreover, the Marxist view of the non-European world and the dominant streams of twentieth-century nationalist thought did not vindicate the Marxist thesis. Amilcar Cabral (1924–1973) rightly rejected this entire postulate of history, starting with the emergence of class struggle and the consequent thesis that the continents of Africa, Asia and native America did not have any history before the colonial period.

The factor of nationalism that contributed to the liberation of the colonies was completely ignored by Marx. In spite of his erudite scholarship Marx was a child of his times. He viewed the non-European world through the European perspective. His observations, however profound, reflected a great deal of prevailing Hegelian prejudices and Eurocentrism. Many of the Indian Marxists justifiably did not accept Marx’s formulations on the Asiatic Mode, or his observations on British imperialism in India.

(The writer is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Jesus and Mary College, New Delhi.)