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Soviet Russia and the Asian revolution, 1917–1924

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Stephen White
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Extract

The founding fathers of Marxism provided an analysis of the contradictions of capitalist society and an indication of the means by which its revolutionary overthrow might be accomplished. They had less to say, however, about the colonial world into which the capitalist society of their day was rapidly expanding, and in their scattered writings on the subject they leave the clear impression that they shared the views of most of their socialist contemporaries that the colonies were the objects rather than the subjects of history, and that their destiny would be determined by the success or failure of the revolutionary movement in the major metropolitan countrieSo1 Marx and Engels were generally unsentimental about the nature of imperialist rule in the colonies, and they drew attention to the plunder, corruption and destruction by which it had usually been accompanied. They had little sympathy, however, for the ‘undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life’ in which most of the colonial peoples were believed to dwell, and they followed Hegel and much of Victorian social theory in regarding its displacement by the way of life of the major metropolitan countries as both inevitable and in accordance with a general scheme of social evolution by which ‘all, even the most barbarian nations are drawn into civilisation’, as the Communist Manifesto put it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 1984 , pp. 219 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1984

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References

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