MARXIST THEORIES

Examining Post Marxist Theories: Is there a future for Marxism

Post Marxist Theories: Is there a future for Marxism

Introduction

In the spring of 1845, a young German philosopher and journalist scribbled eleven epigrams on the back of a piece of paper. They were published some forty years later by the executor of his estate. The last of these pithy comments has become one of the world's best known one-liners: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it." With uncharacteristic clarity, Karl Marx (1818-1883) had set the agenda for thousands of his contemporaries and hundreds of millions of people in subsequent generations.

Changing the world is what Marxism is all about, and yet neither Karl Marx nor his life-long colleague and executor Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) ever developed a theory of imperialism. Instead, their theoretical work focused on explaining how capitalism's complex development creates the necessary preconditions for socialism. As young revolutionaries they were committed to the radical wing of a largely liberal-nationalist reform movement that would rise up to challenge the legitimacy of governments from London to Vienna in the spring and summer of 1848. In this context, Marx and Engels considered the most urgent question to be the struggle of the emerging working class against the industrial bourgeoisie. In contrast, imperialism, by then centuries old, appeared outmoded and in decline. After all, just in their short lifetimes, all the mainland Spanish colonies in America achieved independence, while the only new empire had resulted from the French conquest of Algeria.

In the wake of the defeat of the revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels emigrated to England, where from 1852 to 1863 they regularly wrote articles on world affairs for the New York Daily Tribune. These commentaries on current events cover a remarkably wide range of topics and include their only published work that directly relates to imperialism. These articles are critical syntheses of European press coverage of the major issues of the day, supplemented by their own background reading and research. The main imperial topics treated include Ireland, the renewal of the Honourable East India Company's charter in 1853, the "Eastern Question" as it degenerated into the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Anglo-Persian War of 1856, the Second Opium War (1856-1860), the Indian "Mutiny" of 1857 to 1858, and the Spanish invasion of Morocco (1858-1860).

At best, these articles offer occasional theoretical insights scattered amidst denunciations of "Oriental despotism" fueled by an abidingly Eurocentric humanist questioning: "Can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?" (Marx 1853/1979, vol. 12, p. 132). On the whole, the image conveyed is how the destructive creativity of capitalism forces needed change, but for the wrong reasons. The historical significance of this for their primary concern of revolutionary action in Europe was summarized in a letter that Engels sent Marx in October 1858: "the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the ...