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.]

  

Hannah Arendt on Bourgeois Society

Hannah Arendt is well known for her views on totalitarianism, which she associated with the development of atomised ‘mass society’, and the break down of the components of civil society: the nation, classes, political parties. She argued that while French and British imperialism was exteriorised, pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism exploited ‘surplus’ peoples in service of surplus capital. “The ultimate horror was achieved when leaders from the mob or the déclassé masses without real, concrete class interest mobilised their followers on the basis of extravagant, totalitarian ideologies.”

Generally, Arendt is seen as anti-Marxist. In reflecting in the 1940s on the trajectory of the bourgeoisie since the mid-nineteenth-century, however, we can see that she was steeped in Marxist-inflected debate. First, the bourgeoisie does not seek to monopolise the executive-state:

The central inner-European event of the imperialist period was the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie, which up to then had been the first class in history to achieve economic pre-eminence without aspiring to political rule. … Even when the bourgeoisie had already established itself as the ruling class, it had left all political decisions to the state.

However, she thought that the 'Imperialist era' (from about 1880) began to change this:

Only when the nation-state proved unfit to be the framework for the further growth of capitalist economy did the latent fight between state and society become openly a struggle for power.

Arendt argued that imperialism was an expression of capitalist economic interests straining at the bounds of the nations state

During the imperialist period neither the state nor the bourgeoisie won a decisive victory. National institutions resisted throughout the brutality and megalomania of imperialist aspirations, and bourgeois attempts to use the state and its instruments of violence for its own economic purposes [i.e. imperialism] were always only half successful.

Then, the fateful moment:

Then the German bourgeoisie staked everything on the Hitler movement and aspired to rule with the help of the mob, but then it turned out to be too late. The bourgeoisie succeeded in destroying the nation-state but won a Pyrrhic victory; the mob proved quite capable of taking care of politics by itself and liquidated the bourgeoisie along with all other classes and institutions.

 It's exaggerated, but there a definite truth in here, I think.

[HANNAH ARENDT, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM (1958) pp. 123-6]

Maurice Dobb on Popular Frontism

Here's British Communist intellectual Maurice Dobb in 1937 explaining the turn to the Popular Front (an alliance of the left with bourgeois parties in opposition to fascism). Popular Frontism, on the face of it, was in direct contradiction to the Leninist dictum that in advanced capitalist ('imperialist') countries, the bourgeoisie had become entirely reactionary. Dobb argued that this new turn was justified by the exacerabation of just those tendencies identified by Lenin. The bourgeoisie, bound to the imperialist state, had lost its drive towards liberalism inherent in the days of competitive capitalism (as Max Weber had also argued). The further development of aggressive protectionism and imperialism,

are already exerting an influence on the social structure in the home countries of so radical a kind as to constitute a political landmark of no small importance. I refer to the disintegrating effect of recent economic effects on the various middle strata of the metropolitan economy. The economic position of these strata has many links, direct and indirect, with the colonial system; and with any shrinkage of colonial super-profit this position, becomes immediately insecure. But it is also to a large extent these strata who are adversely affected by the new stage of intensified monopolistic development in the home country, in particular by the increasing emphasis on the purely restrictive aspect of this development, such as economic nationalism and the paralysis of foreign trade, price control by cartels and restriction-schemes, which are apt to bear with special heaviness on the small producer as well as the consumer. That the increasing radicalisation of the this so-called ‘middle class’, which we are witnessing today, and their willingness to align themselves (for the first time since 1848) with the proletariat in an organized ‘people’s front’ of ‘the left’ is connected with a fundamental modification of their economic position in contemporary society, is a suggestion to which too little attention has been paid.

[Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism: Some Essays in Economic Tradition (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1937), pp. 263-4.]

It's an interesting, if tortured attempt to explain a volte face whilst saving the phenomena.