Almost nothing in this book was written as a book. The bulk of it is journalism — some sixty articles that Marx, and now and then Engels, filed in the 1850s for the New-York Daily Tribune, the largest paper in the United States, whose editor Charles Dana had met Marx in Cologne in 1848 and offered him a column. To these the Soviet editors added five extracts from Capital and a sheaf of letters, and gathered the whole under a single heading: On Colonialism, first issued in Moscow in 1959 and reprinted, in this enlarged form, from 1968. The Publishers' Note tells the reader what to find: "a strictly scientific, Marxist analysis of the economic causes behind the predatory colonial policy of the capitalist states." So the volume is two things at once. It is a genuine record of what Marx and Engels wrote about empire — India, China, Persia, Afghanistan, Algeria and Ireland, seen close up and in real time. And it is a Cold-War instrument, assembled to show that the Soviet Union stood where Marx had stood. The gap between those two purposes is the subject of this introduction.
Read as journalism, the articles are ferocious and exact. Marx follows the money behind every profession of good intent: the opium the East India Company grew in Bengal and forced on China at gunpoint, the famine and depopulation the same Company presided over in Ireland and India, the parliamentary debates in which "Ministerial and Directorial advocates" dressed plunder as trusteeship. "The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization," he writes, "lies unveiled before our eyes." And the anti-colonial fire is joined to something larger. In "Revolution in China and in Europe" Marx argues that a rising in the "Celestial Empire" might set off the next revolution in the West — the first sketch of an idea Trotsky would later systematise as permanent revolution, in which the colonial and the metropolitan struggles are one struggle.
The honest editors also let a real difficulty stand. Alongside the denunciations runs a second, colder thought: that British capital, for all its crimes, was doing history's work. "England has to fulfil a double mission in India," Marx writes, "one destructive, the other regenerating"; whatever her crimes, "she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution." This is the orientalist residue in Marx — India imagined as a changeless, "Asiatic" society, without a history of its own until the West supplies one by force. It is worth naming plainly, as later critics from Edward Said onward have named it. Yet even here Marx never makes empire benign: the Indians will reap nothing, he insists, "till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether." And in the June 1853 letters printed here he and Engels feel their way toward a category that would matter enormously — Marx locating "the absence of private property in land" as "the real key, even to the Oriental heaven," Engels answering that it is "indeed the key to the whole of the East." They were reaching for what would be called the Asiatic mode of production: a society ruled not by private landlords but by a state that owns the land and takes the surplus.
Was the state that printed this book faithful to it? The Publishers' Note leaves no doubt what it wants the reader to conclude. History, it says, has borne out the forecast that colonialism was doomed; the liberation of the colonies flows from "the world socialist system that emerged after the Second World War" and, above all, from the Soviet Union, with a growing number of peoples taking "the non-capitalist way of development." The founders are enlisted, across a century, for Moscow's foreign policy. The trouble is that the instrument turns in the hand that holds it — in two ways the editors could not have wished.
The first is theoretical. That Asiatic mode of production, glimpsed in the letters they reprint, had been effectively banned in Soviet scholarship since the early 1930s. It did not fit the official ladder of five stages through which every society was said to climb; and, more awkwardly, a mode of production in which a state bureaucracy extracts the surplus from the direct producers described something closer to home than Marxism-Leninism could afford to examine. The book hands the reader the very concept its publisher had buried.
The second is nakedly historical. This is a book that honours resistance to imperial invasion — the Irish against the landlords, the Chinese against the opium fleets, the sepoys (the Indian soldiers of the British army) in the revolt of 1857, and, in Engels's own article "Afghanistan," the Afghans who had destroyed a British army in the passes above Kabul. This eighth printing is dated 1981. By then the Soviet army had been at war in Afghanistan for two years, bogged down among a people whose earlier defiance of a great power the book celebrates. A volume against empire, reprinted by an occupying empire — and one that held, besides, its own inner empire of deported nations and Russified republics. Between the text and its 1981 imprint lies the whole distance the revolution had travelled from itself.
Taken back from that frame, On Colonialism is sharper today than the catechism allowed. Its method — follow the material interests hidden inside the language of the civilising mission — cuts through the humanitarian cover of every great power, including the one whose presses produced this book, and including the successor empires that speak of development and order while the tables of the dead grow. Read honestly, it asks to be read in both directions: against the orientalist assumption that some peoples have no history until conquest gives them one, and against the Soviet claim to be colonialism's appointed liberator while it garrisoned Kabul.
This is where the Fourth International takes up the collection. Its inheritance is not the Publishers' Note but the buried radical core: the colonial revolution as an inseparable part of the world revolution — Trotsky's permanent revolution, and his insistence in The Revolution Betrayed that the bureaucracy was a privileged caste sitting atop the workers' state, not its fulfilment; Ernest Mandel's later anatomy of imperialism as a stage of capitalism, not a policy that socialism automatically dissolves. From that standpoint the betrayals are legible — Stalin's sacrifice of the Chinese revolution in 1927, the Comintern's zig-zags, the tanks in Kabul — as departures from Marx, not applications of him. Marx and Engels wrote to strip empire of its excuses and to back the oppressed who would end it themselves. The state that canonised them made itself one more empire with excuses. To read these articles against that betrayal — keeping the anti-imperialist fire, discarding both the orientalism and the alibi — is to read them as they were written: on the side of the people throwing off the yoke.