Colonialism 20

England has a double mission to fulfil in India: one destructive and one renewing – the destruction of the old Asian social order and the laying of the material foundations of a Western social order in Asia. The Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Mughals, who invaded India one by one, were quickly Hinduised (…). The British conquerors were the first to reach a higher level of development and were therefore inaccessible to Hindu civilisation.

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1960): Werke. Band 9. Berlin/DDR: Dietz, p. 221.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist and journalist, and co-founder of the First International (International Workingmen's Association). His main work Das Kapital is one of the most important books for the international labour movement.

Even Karl Marx, who fought for the liberation and empowerment of the European proletariat, submitted to the European ideology of supremacy. Nonetheless, his ideas and theories inspired movements in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America to throw off colonial or bourgeois rule, and were still prominent during the First World War (starting with the Russian October Revolution of 1917). However, the newly created systems were by no means free from domination. There were also mass communist movements in England, Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as, for a short period, Soviet republics (Räterepubliken) in Bremen, Leipzig and Munich. Many theorists and activists in Third World liberation movements referred to Marx, e.g. Walter Rodney from Guyana or Fidel Castro in Cuba and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. There was also a strong Marxist movement in India. Intellectuals still invoke Marxism today, e.g. the historian Vijay Prashad (author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2007)) or the literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Can the Subaltern Speak (1988)).

*Vijay Prashad (2007): The Darker Nations. A People‘s History of the Third World. New York: The New Press. *The Times of India (2018): “Marxism Should be Re-imagined”: Spivak.

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