Volume 8, No. 4, April 2026
Editor: Rashed Rahman
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Marx was led to conclude that there was no potential for autonomous development within societies based on the Asiatic Mode of Production. Asiatic society was to receive the requisite stimulus from European colonialism. Marx makes this point quite plainly. Only British colonialism had managed to end the age-old stagnation of Asiatic society, whose two outstanding features were near-total stability at the base, where the various village communities reproduced themselves in ever-changing form as though by a law of nature, and periodic bursts of renewal at the summit in the airy realm of politics, which likewise ultimately served to perpetuate the system. Marx underlined the impact of British colonialism on the Subcontinent: “England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one…separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain…from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.”(1)
England had succeeded where all previous conquerors of the country had failed by virtue of her different, more developed mode of production. As Marx explains: “England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating – the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western (i.e. Capitalist – Ed.) society in Asia. Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Mongols, who had successively overrun India soon became Hindooised, the barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior civilisation of their subjects. The British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore, inaccessible to Hindoo civilisation. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society. The historic pages of their rule in India report hardly anything beyond that destruction. The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins. Nevertheless it has begun. The political unity of India, more consolidated, and extending further than it ever did under the Great Moguls, was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army, organised and trained by the British drill-sergeant, was the sine qua non of Indian self-emancipation, and of India ceasing to be the prey of the first foreign intruder. The free press, introduced for the first time into Asiatic society, and managed principally by the common offspring of Hindoo and Europeans, is a new and powerful agent of reconstruction. The Zemindari and Ryotwar* themselves, abominable as they are, involve two forms of private property in land – the great desideratum of Asiatic society. From the Indian natives, reluctantly and sparingly educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up, endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science. Steam has brought India into regular and rapid communication with Europe, has connected its chief ports with those of the whole south-eastern ocean, and has revindicated it from the isolated position which was the prime law of its stagnation.”(2)
Certainly in predicting these developments Marx was carried away by excessive optimism. In his later years, confronted with the catastrophes caused by the tremendous capacity for destruction that capitalism demonstrated in the colonies, where, “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumed respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked”(3), Marx was forced to modify his judgement. Thus, for instance, in 1881, contradicting his previously stated attitude on the subject, he did not hesitate to call the abolition of common ownership of land an English act of pure vandalism which had caused the people to go back, not forward. For Marx, “…European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism” formed “a more monstrous combination than any of the divine monsters startling us in the Temple of Salsette**.”(4) Marx writes: “One of the material bases of the power of the State over the small disconnected producing organisms in India was the regulation of the water supply. The Mahometan rulers of India understood this better than their English successors. It is enough to recall to mind the famine of 1866, which cost the lives of more than a million Hindoos in the district of Orissa, in the Bengal presidency.”(5) Similarly Engels elucidates: “Every one of the despotic governments which rose and fell in India and Persia was fully aware that its first duty was the general maintenance of irrigation throughout the valleys, without which no agriculture was possible. It was reserved for the enlightened English to lose sight of this in India; they let the irrigation channels and sluices fall into decay, and are now at last discerning through the regular recurrent famines that they have neglected the one activity which might have made their rule in India at least as legitimate as that of their predecessors.”(6)
But in spite of all the misery, starvation and famines the British colonialists visited upon their hapless Subcontinental conquered people, Marx nevertheless argued that by destroying the foundations of the Asiatic system, the British were causing the greatest and only social revolution ever heard of in Asia till then. It was quite clear to Marx though that one should expect no more of the British or any other bourgeoisie than the material prerequisites of real development: “All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and peoples through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?”(7)
It was the conceptual framework gleaned from Hegel that enabled Marx to distinguish between the subjective and objective aspects of historical events. In particular, the idea of the ‘cunning of reason’, duly set ‘right way up’, enabled him to condemn capitalism and colonialism from the perspective of those who suffer them, and at the same time to consider them as important forces of progress from the point of view of objective historical movements. This ability to simultaneously grasp two coexisting but contradictory elements of a historical event is the very essence of Marxist dialectics. It never stops at mere monolithic condemnation of the profound barbarism of bourgeois civilisation, which it takes for granted. Instead, it goes beyond the terrible vicissitudes with which the whole prehistory of man is studded, bourgeois as well as every other class-based society, and seizes on those forces, the unconscious instrument of history, that are generated, nurtured and increased to gigantic size by history itself. Marx thereby gives new life to another Hegelian concept: the irony of history. The Marxist dialectic is based on complete acceptance of the contradiction, at least within the phase of human prehistory, wherein growth towards maturity keeps pace with the reality of class divisions. Only at the end of that process, with the abolition of classes which marks the beginnings of the real history of man, will these contradictions cease to exist. In the light of these theoretical considerations, one can better understand how Marx can brand with infamy the vilest of interests that caused England to subjugate India, the idiotic way in which she enforced these interests and the intrinsic barbarism of bourgeois civilisation which goes unveiled in the colonies, and can at the same time see the conquest of India as ‘necessary’, progressive and productive of revolutionary effects of the greatest importance for world history.
Marx foresaw that India, colonised by the major capitalist power of the time, would be sucked into the western stream of historical development, but he did not in any way idealise the probable consequences. As noted above, Marx saw the British abolition of communal landholding in favour of private property in land as a retrograde measure for the local population. He had also pointed out the serious decline in the well-being of the people in such forms as shortages, hunger, famines, poverty, unemployment, disease, etc, brought about by colonialism. He had underlined the harmful structural consequences of British rule such as the abandonment of water control, the replacement of subsistence farming by cash crops for export, the tendency towards monoculture, and the way that dependence had been institutionalised. In addition, he thought that colonialism was one of the prime instruments of ‘primitive accumulation’ and the ensuing development of capitalism. Although therefore, Marx always maintained that the British conquest of India was ultimately progressive, he went against the stream of uncritical optimism from bourgeois social-democratic unilinearists and anticipated the concept that capitalism generates development in the homelands and underdevelopment in colonial countries. This has in recent years come to be dubbed ‘the theory of the development of underdevelopment’.(8) This theoretical concept argues that Marx was fully aware of the causal relationship between the development of capitalism in the west and the development of underdevelopment in the rest of the world. “There is no doubt that Marx was fully aware of the causal relationship between the development of capitalism in Europe and the development of underdevelopment in the rest of the world. He had the basic elements of a theory of capitalism as a global system and the pity is that his followers did not see this in good time and understand the importance of extending and developing his ideas. If they had they surely could not have believed that the colonies and dependencies of the capital empires were in a state of ‘feudalism’ or that their crippled and dependent economies could produce other than a crippled and dependent bourgeoisie.”(9)
This opens the gate to a discussion on the results and consequences of today’s neocolonialism, to which we shall venture anon.
*The Zamindari and Ryotwari were two systems of land taxation introduced by the British colonialists. The Zamindari system was first introduced in Bengal and then in other provinces as they came under British control in North-Eastern and Central India at the end of the 18th century. The Ryotwari system was established in the Madras Presidency (from 1792 to 1818-23) and Bombay Presidency (1818-28). In both cases the colonial power was recognised as the supreme owner of the land. Zamindars, hereditary tax-collectors, collected tax from the peasants in return for a certain share. They thus formed a new stratum of feudal ‘landowners’, who enlisted the services of agricultural middlemen of lower rank to help them perform this function. The ryots (peasants) were totally dependent on the British colonialists, to whom they paid tax directly.
**The island of Salsette, north of Bombay, was/is famous for its 109 Buddhist cave temples.
Notes:
(Concluded)