Is Marxism Eurocentric? (Part I)

Many activists today first encounter Marxist ideas in and around the academy, where certain interpretations of Karl Marx and Marxism have solidified into a sort of conventional wisdom. One of these is the notion that Marxism is “Eurocentric,” and, therefore, has little to say to the mass of the world’s population in the 21^st century globalized world. In this two-part series, ISP’s Lance Selfa seeks to refute this “conventional wisdom” about Marxism. Part One considers Marx’s writings on colonialism and the development of capitalism. Part Two picks up where Marx left off, especially among his successors in the Communist International after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

The “Eurocentric” reading of Marx is virtually hegemonic in some branches of academia, including, for example, “post-colonial” studies. Post-colonial scholars María do Mar Castro Varela and Nikita Dhawan contend that Marx defended a “Eurocentric model of political emancipation that consistently ignores the experiences of colonized subjects in non-Western societies” and “failed to develop his studies of India and Africa into a fully elaborated analysis of imperialism.” To them, Marx’s analysis neglects “disenfranchised groups such as colonised subjects.” The great Palestinian scholar Edward Said contended that Marx’s earliest writings (in 1853) on the British role in India actually represent a racist view of the colonized, despite Marx’s sympathy for them. The Native American scholar Ward Churchill once said that: “Marxism, for all its possible good intentions and grandiloquent pronouncements on behalf of humanity, remains as it has always been: an ethnocentric dogma expressing eternal variations on a given theme and possessing little conceptual utility beyond its original European cultural paradigm.” We have heard echoes of these criticisms of Marxism from sections of the Black Lives Matter movement as well.

These criticisms might seem somewhat strange considering another common attack on Marxism, which goes something like this: Marx and Engels said the modern working class would lead the socialist revolution. Therefore, they assumed that the socialist revolution would break out in industrial Europe. Socialist revolution didn’t happen in the most developed capitalist countries, and Marxism found its greatest support in the less developed countries, from Russia to China to Cuba. Therefore, Marx and Engels were wrong, and Marxism is invalidated.

There are many problems with this argument, but the basic fact of mass support for various forms of Marxist politics in what used to be called the “Third World,” is indisputable. That most of these Third World political forces were what we would designate as Stalinist or “socialism-from-above” is beside the point. The main issue is that “Marxism” had support of millions of workers and peasants in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Before the 1965 military coup that led to the murder of hundreds of thousands of communists in Indonesia, the Indonesian Communist Party was the largest in the world, with more than a million members. So is Marxism wrong because it is Eurocentric and ignored the “non-West”? Or is it wrong because it was a more popular mobilizing force in the “non-West” than in the West (i.e. that it wasn’t Eurocentric enough!)? At the very least, the critics of Marxism should get on the same page!

While it might be easy to point out these logical inconsistencies in the case against Marxism, there are serious issues at stake. When someone charges Marx and Marxism with “Eurocentrism,” what do they mean?

At the crudest level, some may object to Marx and his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels for who they were. After all, Marx and Engels were 19th century white European men who bore some of the outlook of the Victorian English society in which they spent most of their active political lives. In the spirit of crude “identity politics,” one might question if Marx and Engels would have anything to say to 21st century fighters against imperialism or racism.

A more serious objection to Marxism, based on a reading of Marx and Engels’ 1847 work The Communist Manifesto—the most widely read Marxist text—and on Marx’s 1853 writings on India, is twofold. First, Marxism is said to have a deterministic view of economic and social change, where every country passes through the same stages of economic development. The highest stage of capitalist development is that of industrial capitalism that existed in a few places in Europe and North America at the time of Marx’s writing. As the Communist Manifesto puts it, capitalism “creates a world after its own image,” making “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”

Since Marx and Engels believed that socialism should harness the productive capacity of industrial society, it followed that whatever hastened the development of capitalism and its “gravedigger,” the modern working class, could be accepted, if not wholly justified. As Marx wrote in “The British Rule in India,” “England was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them,” but it nevertheless might have been “the unconscious tool of history in bringing about [a] revolution” in Indian society. Likewise, Engels initially welcomed the 1847 U.S. invasion of México because it would introduce an undeveloped rural society to the most dynamic economic and democratic political system then in existence.

Second, it’s said that Marx focuses on the European working class to the exclusion of other social forces, particularly those in the developing and/or colonized countries. In some ways, this is a different version of the old saw that “Marxism reduces everything to class,”—in this case, the white European working class. So while the Manifesto hails the modern working class as capitalism’s “gravedigger,” Marx’s earliest writings on India and China suggest that the Chinese were “timid” in the face of British imperialism, and that Indians succumbed to imperialism because India “has no history at all, at least no known history . . .[it is] an unresisting and unchanging society.”

If all that Marx wrote about capitalism, imperialism and non-Western societies was confined to his 1853 writings on India, he could justifiable be tagged a “Eurocentrist.” However, this wasn’t the case. In fact, even in these so-often criticized articles, Marx refers to the British as “barbarians” and “dogs.” One can see his dialectical method at work: capitalism may deliver modern transportation and communication, but at a cost of great human suffering. And a later article in that same year, called “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” anticipates the development of an Indian national liberation movement to “[throw] off the British yoke.” In the space of a few months in 1853, Marx moved from seeing India as a society without a history to one that would produce an anti-colonial revolt.

Four years later, Marx’s perspective on the British in India underwent a sea change, and not because of something he read in a library. It changed because of the 1857 Sepoy mutiny, an anti-colonial revolt rooted among Indian soldiers in the British colony. Marx exulted in the uprising, wanting to find out as much as he could. Although the British ultimately suppressed the uprising, Marx wrote of “a rule of historical retribution” that found opposition to the colony among the soldiers that the colonizers themselves had armed and trained. As capitalism in the industrial countries created its own gravedigger in the working class, the colonizers were also creating their gravedigger in the colonies. Marx went on to assert that, with respect to the working class in England, “India is our best ally” because the revolt in the colonies and the struggles of the working class in England had the same enemy in the British ruling class.

This internationalist idea—that the European working class must ally and solidarize with just struggles for national liberation—animated the main political activity of Marx in the 1860s, the organization of the First International of workers’ and socialist parties and groups. Although mostly based among organizations in Britain, France and Germany, the International developed largely from international solidarity campaigns with the struggle against slavery in the U.S., and with the struggles for the national independence of Poland and Ireland. In his inaugural address to the delegates that formed the international in 1864, Marx cited all of those struggles in arguing that the (European) working class had to develop its own “foreign policy.”In other words, Marx was arguing that the European working class couldn’t be “Eurocentric”. It had to support struggles of the oppressed and exploited abroad, he argued, because “such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes.”

This was a live question at the time of the International due to the American Civil War. Large sections of the British ruling class, including many leading politicians, had desired to intervene in the war on behalf of the Confederacy, with which they maintained a heavy trade in cotton. The cotton mills of Lancashire and other industrial centers—and, as a result industrial jobs—depended on imports of cotton from the South. Yet, from the start of the Civil War, Marx and Engels supported the North, and called for revolutionary measures to abolish slavery. Supporters of the First International in the U.S., especially many German immigrants, enlisted as soldiers or served as officers in the Union army.

Marx welcomed the North’s tentative steps toward emancipation and urged the arming of ex-slaves to fight for their own liberation: “… these emancipated Negroes may be militarily organized and sent into the field against the South”. In another passage, Marx wrote of the psychological effect of Black regiments to break the South’s morale. (Incidentally, in his writings on the Civil War, Marx also rejected Engels’ earlier position on México. Instead of seeing the 1830s war for Texas as an advance for capitalist progress, he saw it as part of the expansionist policy of the Southern slaveholders.)

Leading English trade unionists, who later helped to form the International, organized demonstrations that pressured the government not to intervene on the South’s side. And unions supported the North, whose blockade of cotton exports was strangling British industry, despite the cost in jobs of their members. Marx wrote, “The working class is … fully conscious that the government is only waiting for the intervention cry from below to put an end to the American blockade and the distress in England. Under these circumstances, the obstinacy with which the working class keeps silent, or breaks its silence only to raise its voice against intervention and for the United States, is admirable.”

When President Abraham Lincoln won reelection in 1864, only months before the North defeated the South, the International issued a Marx-penned congratulatory statement to the American people, reading, in part:

While the working men, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, war. The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Anti-Slavery War will do for the working classes.

Within a few short sentences, Marx had condemned racism and slavery, and showed how both had distorted the development of working-class consciousness in the U.S. And it looked forward to a renewed period of class struggle inspired by the overthrow of slavery. For those who still think that Marx had little to say about the intersections of race and class, this is just one example of the analysis that typified his mature writings and political activities.

After they had both relocated to England, the cause of the liberation of England’s oldest colony in Ireland seized hold of both. Marx and Engels spoke out in defense of the Irish struggle for freedom, both publicly, and within the First International. They also developed a sophisticated understanding of the role of Ireland in supporting the landed aristocracy of England, while providing millions of cheap and criminalized laborers to Britain’s and the U.S.’s industrial centers. Finally, Marx, in particular, analyzed the role of the Irish working class as an oppressed subsection of the English working class. English working-class racism against the Irish, Marx wrote, “is the secret of the powerlessness of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret of the capitalist class’s maintenance of its power.” Many times, Marx analogized the antagonism between English and Irish workers to that between Blacks and poor whites in the United States.

This analysis reflected Marx’s views, but, unlike his positions on Poland and the American Civil War, they were not necessarily accepted in the International, especially among some English trade union leaders. Apparently, for many of them, it was easier to denounce oppression in the U.S. and Poland than in their own country. Reflecting on this in 1869, Marx wrote to Engels,

For a long time, I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always took this viewpoint in the New York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.

This statement refutes any notion that Marx conceived of social change only as emerging from the working class of the advanced industrial countries. This didn’t mean that Marx replaced the idea of working-class revolution with that of an anti-colonial agrarian revolution, but that he saw the dialectical links between them. Marx’s insight has been demonstrated over the years, as when national liberation movements in Portugal’s African colonies provided the spark for revolution in Portugal itself in 1974-75.

What of the other element of the case against Marx’s Eurocentrism: the idea that he posited what Marxist Michael Löwy called a “unilinear” idea of historical and economic development? This view assumed that all societies would pass through similar stages on their way to attaining the highest level of development, as represented in northwestern Europe.

In fact, Marx’s political work and study had led him to different emphases in his discussion of economic and historical development. The Communist Manifesto’s praise of the all-conquering world market of the 1840s gave way to a much more critical take on the unfolding of capitalism in the world. His activism and his study convinced him that industrial capitalism was less the product of a “heroic” bourgeoisie, as it was an oppressive and exploitative system that was deeply entwined with slavery, colonialism and imperialism. And it’s important to consider that although Marx concentrated his study on the most advanced capitalist country of his time, Britain, he always considered capitalism from a global perspective. The Argentinian Marxist José Aricó, in his Marx and Latin America, asked if the England Marx studied “just the industrial centers of Manchester, Liverpool or London, or also its colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and its crushing political and economic hegemony over the formally independent nations of Latin America?”

All of his experience and reflection are incorporated in his “mature” works of political economy, including the three volumes of Capital and The Grundrisse. His famous quote from Capital, vol 1, sums this up:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all things which characterize the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Even more, Marx’s edits to the lesser-known French edition of Capital indicate that he conceived of his explanation of the development of capitalism in Western Europe as restricted to that region. It was not a general “unilinear” model applying to all societies at all times. Marx moved to develop an increasingly “multi-linear” conception that opened to many possibilities. The development of capitalism in countries as diverse as the U.S., China or Brazil should illustrate that Marx was onto something. In his reading of the Grundrisse, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm concluded that Marx conceived the different modes of production (Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist), not as stages that every society went through, but as different pathways marked by their distance from the earliest communal societies.

Marx embarked, near the end of his life, on an intensive study of peasant and rural societies—most of them non-European—to discover “communal structures” conducive to socialist transformation. Perhaps unbeknownst to many of his critics, Marx filled thousands of pages of notebooks with studies of Indonesia, India, Morocco, México and Perú, as well as First Nations in North America. At this time, Engels taught himself Persian to head historical and economic texts. Marx remarked that “the primitive communities had incomparably greater vitality than the Semitic, Greek, Roman and a fortiori the modern capitalist societies.” Most famously, Marx corresponded in 1881 with Russian socialists, speculating that a “Russian revolution” would be needed to save the communal organization of peasant society, which could then become an “element of regeneration in Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system.”Yet, anticipating what would unfold in 1917 and after, Marx asserted that an agrarian Russian revolution could only survive with an assistance of more developed technology and support of the Western European labor movement.

In Orientalism, Edward Said argued that “in article after article”, Marx “returned with increasing conviction” to the idea that even though British colonialism might destroy Asia, it was transforming society so that might be more open to revolution. The main problem with a claim like this—implying that Marx held to this view throughout his life—is that it’s not true. Marx’s political activity and his research continued on for another three decades after the 1853 essay that Said criticizes. In other words, for most of Marx’s public political career, he left behind the Eurocentric elements of his earliest writings. So which is the real Marxism? The small sample of writings on which the critics of Marx’s “Eurocentrism” build their case or the much larger body of Marx’s work that refutes it?

In the next article in this series, we turn to the Marxists who came after Marx.

Suggested readings

Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins (University of Chicago Press, 2010/2016)

José Aricó, Marx and Latin America (Haymarket, 2015)

Marx and Engels on the Civil War, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/us-civil-war/

Marx’s writings on India, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/india/index.htm

Marx and Engels on Ireland, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/ireland/index.htm