The Left and Anti-Imperialism

Here's Frederick Engels, in a 1882 letter to Karl Kautsky, being rather ambiguous about 'de-colonisation':

As I see it ... countries that are merely ruled [by Europeans, rather than settled]  and are inhabited by natives, such as India, Algeria and the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, will have to be temporarily taken over by the proletariat [of the colonising country] and guided as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India may, indeed very probably will, start a revolution and, since a proletariat that is effecting its own emancipation cannot wage a colonial war, it would have to be given its head, which would obviously entail a great deal of destruction, but after all that sort of thing is inseparable from any revolution. The same thing could also happen elsewhere, say in Algeria or Egypt, and would certainly suit us best. We shall have enough on our hands at home. ... Only one thing is certain, namely that a victorious proletariat cannot forcibly confer any boon whatever on another country without undermining its own victory in the process. [My emphasis]

[I owe this quote to Neil Davidson's, How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (2012), p. 177.]

In practise, socialist parties of the Second International really only had a negative programme. They condemned  colonisation, but they didn't positively have much faith in 'native self-determination'. Modern constitutionalism, still less democracy, just didn't seem plausible in the backward, still 'semi-civilised' world.

When the empires did finally disintegrate, from the late 1940 to the 1960s, imperial rule very often did indeed give way to tyranny rather than constitutionalism. How did the Left deal with this unwelcome outcome?

The old veteran anti-imperialist Labour MP, Fenner Brockway, in the early 1970s, discussed the view that decolonisation had been too precipitous, and so had rarely led to stable constitutional government. In the end, he returned to “the moral and philosophical view … that no people has the right to rule another people, with [the] logical consequence that even bad self-government is better than good imposed government.”

[Fenner Brockway, The Colonial Revolution (London: Hart-Davis, 1973), pp. 575 – 6.]

That's probably still the view of most of the Left, and indeed of western society in general. With added Leninism, and by believing in something called 'neo-colonialism', it leads to pretty strange conclusions. In the view of John Rees, the Left should support any son-of-a-bitch, just so long as he's not a pro-American son-of-a-bitch:

If the anti-colonial movements or states that are opposed to the major powers defeat the imperial powers it weakens the whole imperial system. This is true whether or not those who lead such struggles or stand at the head of such states have this outcome as their conscious aim. Lenin argued that the political complexion of the leaders of small nations – be they nationalist, fundamentalist, dictators or democrats – should not determine whether socialists in the major imperialist countries oppose their own governments in time of war. It is enough that the defeat of the major imperial powers would advance the cause of oppressed people everywhere for socialists to commit themselves to the principle of self-determination for small nations. [My emphasis]

[John Rees, Imperialism and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 231.]