‘Look at our Colonial Struggles’: Ernest Jones and the Anti-Colonialist Challenge to Marx’s Conception of History

Introduction

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (MECW 6: 488) considered Western imperialism in Asia as a progressive and beneficial global force that ‘batters down all Chinese walls’, drawing ‘all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization’. ¹ This much-quoted passage intervenes in the first part of the pamphlet where Marx and Engels discuss in glowing terms the social-economic revolution wrought by the rise of global capitalism. Further, they toned down their account by highlighting the destructive, endemic crises and the labor revolts produced by this development in Western Europe and North America, but remain silent about colonialism in Asia, thus implying that non-Western colonial societies were bound to follow in the developmental footsteps of the West. In this perspective, anti-colonial resistance is viewed, although implicitly, as backward-looking and ultimately misdirected, because it would run against Western capitalist progress and only delay, ‘on pain of extinction,’ non-Western societies ‘to capitulate’ and ‘become bourgeois themselves’ (MECW 6: 488). Thus, in 1848, Marx adhered to a Eurocentric, unilinear, and determinist model of historical development that made ‘barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West’ (MECW 6: 488).

When Marx arrived as political exile in London in 1849, his conception of history began to undergo a change. There, for most of the first half of the 1850s, he established friendly personal and political relations with the Chartist leader, writer, and poet, Ernest Jones (1819–1969). Marx actively supported Jones’ newspapers, Notes to the People (1851–1952) and the People’s Paper (1852–1858), contributing about 30 articles, some of them jointly written with his Chartist friend. This political and journalistic partnership placed Marx in a new intellectual context where he was directly exposed to and, as this article aims to demonstrate, influenced by Jones’ ideas and worldviews, in particular on the colonial world. Typical of an old strand of proletarian internationalism in England (Donoghue, 2013; Howe, 1993; Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000), Jones was fiercely opposed to British imperialism and expressed constant sympathy for all the oppressed peoples engaged in anti-colonial resistance abroad. While direct evidence is still limited, there is nonetheless a weight of circumstantial and some cross-textual evidence to support the claim that Jones’ anti-colonial convictions, if not decisive, were nonetheless influential in fertilizing Marx’s historical imagination, becoming more multilinear. For it was when he was closely associated with Jones that Marx began to reassess the progressiveness of Western imperialism as implied in Manifesto and, incidentally, to outline an anti-colonial pathway to revolutionary social change coming from the East.

Scholars have highlighted aspects of Marx’s multilinear shift, tracing the complex intellectual itinerary whereby his materialist conception of history evolved to encompass the particularities of nationalism, race, gender, and ethnicity, as well as the varieties of human social and historical development, from Europe to Asia and from the Americas to Africa (e.g. Anderson, 2010; Basso, 2015; Brown, 2012; Dunayevskaya, 2000 [1958]; Hudis, 2004; Jani, 2002; Nimtz, 2002; Patterson, 2009; Pradella, 2015; Shanin, 1983; Smith, 2002). While this body of scholarship has discussed Marx’s changing views in relation to their surrounding political-intellectual contexts, much of this discussion however has tended to focus on the late period spanning from the mid-1860s to early 1880s, when Marx became involved in the International Working Men’s Association (1864–1876) and, later, in debates with Russian radicals. Consequently, this literature has neglected and therefore obscured the extent to which early signs of multilinearism in the writings of the young Marx were, from the outset, shaped by the immediate political-intellectual context in which he found himself as a political refugee in early 1850s London, especially by his involvement with the left of Chartism, and particularly with Jones. Parallel to this development in the Marxian canon, biographers and literary critics of Jones have long established the intellectual ascendancy Marx had over him, but none has yet ventured to explore the plausibility of a similar outcome from the opposite direction of the friendship (e.g. Cole, 1941: 338; Hall, 2010: 45; Ledger, 2002: 38; Paul, 2001; Saville, 1952: 40; Taylor, 2003: 144; see also Janowitz, 2004; Simonet, 2003; Rennie, 2016: 128–129). This is a major shortcoming, in my view, because it casts Jones as the passive beneficiary of Marx’s knowledge, depriving the former of any influential power on the latter. In sum, while the first body of scholarship has tended to examine the beginning of Marx’s multilinear shift in a social vacuum, the second has characterized the Marx-Jones relationship as being essentially one-directional.

It is to redress these lacunas that I offer this article. I argue that it is implausible to exclude Jones from the intellectual lineages that shaped Marx’s break with the unilinearism of the Manifesto from the early 1850s onward, especially his move toward an increasingly anti-colonialist stance. As we shall see, it is useful to engage with Marx’s early shift toward a multilinear conception of historical development from its immediate, surrounding political-intellectual context in working-class London, in which Jones figured prominently. A significant proportion of Marx’s journalism for the New York Tribune in the 1850s were directly engaged with either Jones’ own writings or his political activism for the Chartist movement, testifying the esteem Marx entertained for his Chartist friend as a resourceful thinker and leader of the working-class movement. It appears that it was, in some part, from and through this political-intellectual engagement with Jones that Marx drew new inspiration and recalibrated his historical-materialist framework in a more open-ended, non-reductionist fashion. Examining the connexions with Ernest Jones thus reveals a fuller and more complex portrayal of Marx’s intellectual development in the 1850s, while challenging interpretations such as those of Gareth Stedman Jones (1984: 129), who writes that at that time ‘Marx seems to have shown little interest or even awareness of the intricacies or nuances of English working-class politics’.

I develop my argument into three parts. I begin by sketching the chronological evolution of Marx’s friendship and journalistic collaboration with Jones, which placed Marx in a new context for intellectual exchange and creativity, especially on anti-colonialism. The second part takes account of Jones’ opposition to British imperialism, and reveals his conviction that the first step toward world-revolution in the 1850s had potentially shifted from Europe to the colonies, a position, I submit, too weighty for Marx to be ignored or simply gloss over, given his involvement with Jones’s journalism and activism. In the last part of the article, I examine and compare for the first time systematically Marx’s journalistic writings on India in the New York Tribune with those of Jones on the same colony in the People’s Paper. I focus on the year 1853, when the renewal of the East India Company’s charter put the distant eastern colony at the center of their journalistic agenda. This comparative content analysis yields interesting results, which beg for more research on the Marx-Jones intellectual relationship. First, contrary to what John Saville (1952: 66) argued a while ago, there are striking argumentative and stylistic similarities between Marx’s and Jones’ articles on India, which have yet to be fully addressed and resolved. This article is meant to be a first step in that direction. Secondly, two important milestones in Marx’s multilinear trajectory in 1853 – his growing criticism of capitalist progress in India and his adoption of an anti-colonialist stance – appear to hinge on insights drawn directly from Jones’ writings. While I do not dispute that Marx’s multilinear perspectives developed, as Kevin Anderson (2010: 10) argues, as a result of ‘his intellectual efforts to the study of such non-Western societies as India, Indonesia, China, and Russia’, my contention is rather that Ernest Jones was inextricably linked to the unfolding of those efforts in the early 1850s, thus adding nuance and deeper understanding to them.

‘The Most Talented, Consistent and Energetic Representative of Chartism’

Jones and Marx were both Germans by birth. The son of a British officer serving at the Prussian royal court, Jones was born in aristocratic Berlin in 1819, just eight months after Marx’s birth in Trier in 1818. Much of their friendship later would owe to this geo-chronological coincidence, for not only had they the same age but they could converse in the same language and share aspects of a common culture. Returning to London with his family in 1838, Jones studied and practiced law while growing in parallel as a published poet and writer. He joined the Chartist movement in 1845, pushed to the radical left because of a near-bankruptcy that forced him to seek wages for the rest of his life (Taylor, 2003).

Marx first met Jones in London in 1846 during the second congress of the Communist League, which had established formal links with the Chartist movement. They met again in 1848 in Paris for another such meeting held amid the revolutionary upheaval (Saville, 1952: 27). But it is from 1850 onward that their friendship really deepened, particularly as Jones, despite his own economic hardship, joined Engels in helping the Marx family to cope with persistent financial difficulties in the metropolis (Rühle, 1929: 212).

Released from prison after a two-year sentence for sedition during the June days of 1848, Jones had resumed his activism in 1850 and was on a tour of public lectures across England and up to Scotland to remobilize the militant base of the Chartist movement. Marx, who had split with the German refugees of the Communist League and moved closer to the radical wing of Chartism, attended a few of them. In December 1850, he and his wife, Jenny, listened to Jones’ lecture on the history of papacy. Jenny described it as ‘marvellous, and, by English standards, advanced, though not quite à la hauteur for us Germans who have run the gauntlet of Hegel, Feuerbach, etc’ (MECW 39: 251). In early May 1851, Marx attended another of Jones’ lectures, this time on co-operative production, which he praised as ‘truly splendid’ (MECW 38: 346). Jones was clearly making a good impression on Marx, who quickly came to regard him as ‘the most talented, consistent and energetic representative of Chartism’ (MECW 11: 338). Thus, when Jones decided to launch his own Chartist weekly, Notes to the People, in May 1851, Marx decided to offer him his full collaboration as a contributor. Given that Jones was emerging as an important Chartist leader with a mass following, his newspaper assumed exceptional importance for Marx as a medium to disseminate the doctrine of class struggle in England.

Marx signed two articles for the Notes to the People, both on the French Revolution of 1848 and its reactionary aftermath, his privileged subject matter at that time as he was simultaneously working on drafts of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ² It is very possible, moreover, that Marx was the pen behind the series of five anonymous articles, ‘The Working Classes of Germany’, as it was said to come from ‘the hand of one of the truest and best of the expatriated democrats of that noble and misgoverned land’ (Jones, 1967: 213), a tribute that Jones could hardly have addressed to someone else than Marx. ³

But Marx’s contribution to the Notes went beyond his own individual writings. As he declared to Engels a few years later, ‘as far as the economic articles are concerned [in the Notes to the People], the main points in them had been written directly under my guidance and partly even in direct collaboration with myself’ (MECW 42: 15). Given the considerable number of economic-themed articles published in the Notes between 1851 and 1852, this assertion suggests that Marx could have been involved in one way or another in more than one-third of all pieces printed in the weekly, which denotes the intensity of their intellectual partnership. The editors of the second Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe have established that Marx co-wrote with Jones at least six articles for the Notes, including two on the co-operative movement in England, one on the Chartist program, one on the working-class movement, one on the Hungarian radical patriot, Lajos Kossuth, and one on crisis. ⁴ This writing collaboration, moreover, often entailed translating the work of one another, as Marx had not yet full command of the English language in the early 1850s and as Jones’ articles were sometimes translated and republished in German publications. ⁵

Marx had taken Jones under his intellectual wing. As he wrote to Engels on July 31, 1851, ‘Jones … is learning’ from their conversations and, as a result, ‘is making progress with his paper’ (MECW 38: 399). One area where Jones made progress was on the perspective of class struggle. In a letter to Engels dated March 5, 1852, Marx optimistically refers to an open letter that Jones wrote for publication in Die Revolution, a New York-based, German-language magazine edited by Joseph Weydemeyer, and which Jenny Marx translated into German (MECW 39: 60; MEGA² I/11: 478–479). The letter was a reply to an article by Karl Heinzen, who ‘utterly ignores the struggle of classes now pending in England’, Jones wrote critically (1952: 181). In foregrounding the perspective of class struggle, as Marx (MECW 39: 59) gladly reported to Engels, Jones ‘enlightens’ the reader on the subject. One can see in it not only the theoretical influence that Marx was having on his Chartist comrade, but also how the two men were truly engaged in an intellectual and political partnership, at least from Jones’ standpoint. To give credence to his analysis, Jones concluded his letter thus: ‘My political and [private] personal friend Dr. Marx, must be able, from his own observation, to bear witness to the truth of this’ (Jones, 1952: 183). In Jones’ mind, then, an identity of views prevailed between him and his political and private-personal friend.

In the existing published records, Marx never acknowledges Jones’ impact on his own thinking in such an unequivocal manner. Direct evidence of this impact could have been found possibly in his letters to Jones, but these have been either lost or destroyed. ⁶ Still, his close association with Jones placed Marx in a radically new intellectual context, and that context, as we shall see, was ultimately influential, especially with respect to anti-colonialism.

‘All the Oppressed on the One Side’

Despite of his aristocratic upbringing, Jones belonged by ideological conviction and militant experience to what E. P. Thompson (1960: 9) called ‘the long and tenacious revolutionary tradition of the British commoner’, linking nineteenth-century Chartists to an old strand of popular radicalism imbued with anti-imperialist sentiments, from seventeenth-century Levellers and Diggers to late-eighteenth-century Painite Jacobins. Looking back from the 1880s, one militant observer pointed out evocatively to an early political sociologist that in England ‘no one talked of the “Rights of Man” without having read Thomas Paine! Everybody who laid claim to be a radical had read Paine, had read Ernest Jones’ (Ostrogorski, 1902: 401). Like Tom Paine, Jones was fiercely opposed to colonialism. His arrest and incarceration for sedition in June 1848 resulted from a public speech urging Chartist supporters to seize upon the revolutionary moment coming from the Continent ‘to ratify the bond of union between the English and the Irish people’, and help remove the still-colonial ‘yoke which binds the one nation to the thraldom of the other’, anticipating confidently that soon ‘the green flag shall float over Downing Street’ (Leary, 1887: 12–13).

Soon after his release in July 1850, Jones wrote ‘The New World, a Democratic Poem’, which appeared as the leading text in the first issue of the Notes to the People, and became his most famous piece ever written. The poem envisions a world revolution breaking out first in India in the form of a national liberation movement, before spreading next to Africa and the Americas. As his epic reveals, Jones had come to conclude that the initiative of revolutionary transformation in the reactionary 1850s had shifted to the oppressed peoples of the British empire. In the metropolis, as he claims in the poem’s preface, the workers had ‘sunk too low to raise themselves’ and ‘capital is too far in advance’ (Jones, 1967: 2). Abroad, however, Britain’s ‘grandeur is decaying: its colonies will fall off like ripe fruits from a withering tree, to start up young forests of freedom!’ (Jones, 1967: 1). Thus, in taking the vantage point of the colonized, Jones inverted the line of march toward revolutionary social change envisioned in the Manifesto. This position, as it has been pointed out (Paul, 2001; Rennie, 2016), was unique within Chartism at the time, let alone among radical circles.

Never had Marx been closely acquainted with someone whose views questioned, let alone challenged, so directly the historical framework sketched out in the Manifesto. For Jones held a conception of class struggle that was not restricted to the factory proletariat and the bourgeoisie but embraced ‘all the oppressed on the one side, and all the oppressors on the other’ (Jones, 1967: 342). Given his level of involvement in the Notes, as discussed above, it is unlikely that Marx ignored where his Chartist friend stood politically with regard to the colonial world. In fact, Marx was not only a major contributor to Jones’ weekly. He was also an avid reader. In a letter of January 1, 1852, to Weydemeyer, he praised the Notes as ‘a veritable mine’ of information produced by ‘our friend Ernest Jones, the most important leader of the English party’ (MECW 39: 3). He reiterated his enthusiasm a month later, urging his friend in New York to read the weekly, ‘in which you will find all the day-to-day history of the English proletariat’ (MECW 39: 42). Perusing through the Notes with interest every week, Marx surely did not miss the column, ‘Our Colonies’, in which Jones condemned ‘the entire system of colonial government’ as a fundamental ‘error’, and colonialism as a ‘deep died criminality’ perpetrated ‘in the names of honour, interest, and religion’ (Jones, 1967: 135).

Jones’ anti-colonialist perspective carried over into his new Chartist weekly, the People’s Paper (PP), launched on May 8, 1852, replacing the Notes. The introductory text to the column, ‘Colonial News’, decried unequivocally the ‘slaughtering and butchering [of] our fellow-men’ in the colonies, before concluding with this appeal to his readers: ‘We have looked, and very properly, at the interests of European democracy; be it ours, to look at our colonial struggles’ (PP, 8 May 1852). Marx transferred his collaboration to the People’s Paper as soon as it was launched, and became more involved in it than in the Notes, including with respect to editorial duties and financial administration (see MECW 39: 150, 175, 193–196, 276, 325, 369). His written contribution to Jones’ new weekly would reach a total 25 articles between October 1852 and December 1856, some of them reprinted either from or for the Tribune. During this period, which corresponds to the high point of their journalistic and political collaboration, Marx referred to Jones in 24 of all his newspaper articles or, approximately, at every 10 articles that appeared in either the People’s Paper or the Tribune, a telling indicator of the prominent place Jones and the Chartist movement occupied in his intellectual itinerary at that time.

One of such articles, ‘The Chartists’, published in the Tribune on August 25, 1852, is noteworthy. In it, Marx introduces Jones and the Chartist movement to his American readers, before quoting approvingly an electoral speech in which his Chartist friend denounces colonial oppression abroad and links it to class exploitation and domination at home:

Who voted for Irish coercion, the gagging bill, and tampering with the Irish press? The Whig! There he sits! Turn him out! … Who voted against inquiry into colonial abuses and in favor of Ward and Torrington, the tyrants of Ionia and Ceylon? – The Whig – there he sits; turn him out! … Who voted against shortening the nightwork of bakers, against inquiry into the condition of frame-work knitters, against medical inspectors of workhouses, against preventing little children from working before six in the morning, against parish relief for pregnant women of the poor and against the Ten Hours Bill? The Whig – there he sits; turn him out! (MECW 11: 340)

In the above passage, Marx arguably for the first time expresses a view that did not laud the progressive effects of Western colonialism but denounced its ‘coercion’ and ‘abuses’, while implying political solidarity between colonial subjects and British workers – men, women and children alike – across the empire, regardless of what stage of development they were in respectively. This is a modest yet important shift from the overall tone of the Manifesto, and it is not insignificant that Jones – indeed, his voice – was directly implicated in it.

Within a year of that pivotal text, as I demonstrate in the next section, it appears that Marx’s deepening friendship, political collaboration, and journalistic partnership with Jones began to bear some analytical fruits. In 1853, Marx underwent a gradual but marked learning curve that approximated increasingly to the anti-colonialist view of his Chartist friend, thus breaking with the unilinearism of the Manifesto. This is clearly observable by comparing their respective articles on India.

‘Throw Off the English Yoke Altogether’

The parliamentary debates that had taken place from 1852 through 1853 over the renewal of the East India Company’s charter had incited both Jones and Marx to cast their gaze on India and provide their readers with an overview of the colonial situation there. The deliberations inside Parliament had re-actualized a pre-inherited and well-entrenched ideological divide in orientalist discourse in British intellectual circles, which opposed romantic and utilitarian attitudes toward colonialism in India. Held mostly by the first generation of scholars, missionaries, and civil servants who staffed the East India Company in India, the romantic attitude was marked by a generally pessimistic view of modern historical developments that degenerated and abased India’s so-called ‘golden age’ of wealth and cultural achievements into a state of backwardness and decline (Dobson, 2007; Kopf, 1969). By contrast, the utilitarian attitude, held predominantly by liberal political economists in the tradition of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, found no virtue whatsoever in India, let alone the East, making it necessary for the region to modernize along Western industrial lines and conform to England’s political liberal institutions and rule of law (Majeed, 2005; Stokes, 1959).

The 1853 Charter renewal debate framed this conflict of views about colonial rule in India around the issues of public works (or rather lack thereof) and form of colonial governance. Constituted of free-trading MPs tied to the Manchester cotton business, among them John Bright and Richard Cobden, the utilitarian camp opposed the renewal of the Company’s charter altogether and formed a pressure group, the India Reform Society, to advance this agenda. Critical of the British empire as it was then constituted, they denounced the Company’s failure to build the economic infrastructure necessary to stimulate the growth and export cotton back to England. They also criticized the so-called ‘double government’ in India – the combined rule of the non-accountable Company’s directors and the crony parliamentary Board of Control – which encouraged patronage, corruption, and deceit. Instead, they favored that all power over the Indian colony should be bestowed completely to Parliament in London (Moore, 1964; Taylor, 1991). Romantic orientalists, in turn, most of whom Company employees and some Christian missionaries, militated for the status quo on colonial rule in India, arguing that the dismantling of the double government system would not only infringe the principle of non-intervention in native culture, but betrayed the indigenous elite whose support was essential for the success of the colonizing project (Allbrook, 2014).

Marx and Jones paid great attention to these debates. They read the pamphlets of the India Reform Society as much as the works and colonial despatches of English orientalists tied to the romantic tradition. ⁷ As a result, their interventions overlapped with these debates and in many respects followed the ideological divide that shaped them. Jones was the first of the two to publish on India. The first of four articles, entitled ‘How Our Indian Empire is Ruled’, appeared in the People’s Paper on May 7, 1853. Largely descriptive, the article begins by offering a survey of India’s geography, demography, and natural resources, before idealizing its pre-colonial past as a ‘mighty gathering of races, spread once in unsurpassed power and splendour over this paradise of light and wealth’ (Jones, 1853a). Here, Jones subscribes to the orientalist perspective that romanticized pre-colonial India, but uses it as a rhetorical strategy to draw a stark contrast with the coming of British colonial rule, as he discusses in the following article published a week later.

In his second article, Jones (1853b) condemns the colonial conquest as a ‘legalised direct plunder’ of the native population. He quotes a tract of the India Reform Society that the ‘destruction of village societies’ following the conquest ‘has deprived the natives of their schools, and has substituted nothing in their stead’. Public works were not provided to rebuild the colonial economy, he (1853b) continues, but for the maintenance of ‘barracks and [the fulfilment of] purely military undertakings’, which was but ‘another name for plunder’. ‘So much for the educating and civilizing missions of our Indian rule’, he (1853b) added sarcastically. The conquest, moreover, had dramatically deteriorated the lot of Indian peasants, known as ryots, who were forced to submit to the exorbitant taxation imposed by the new system of landownership and tenancy, leading to mass expropriation, incarceration, beggary, famine, and other ‘terrible effects on the native population’ (Jones, 1853b).

Published on May 21, Jones’ third article continues the analysis of British colonialism’s damaging consequences in India. In it, Jones (1853c) once again cites an India Reform Society pamphlet to emphasize that it is ‘not merely cultivation that is being depressed; it is society itself that is being gradually destroyed’. The extreme starvation and epidemics that spread throughout the country after colonization had caused a situation ‘like the Irish famine’, something unheard of in ‘the old time of Indian independence and prosperity’ (Jones, 1853c). A week later, on May 28, 1853, his last article refers to India as the ‘Ireland of the East’, where ‘British barbarism’ has forcibly consigned the native population ‘to irrevocable misery’, while throwing ‘myriads into the grave by law-created famine’ (Jones, 1853d). The article concludes on an important dialectical point about British rule in the colony, one that echoes the perspective developed in ‘The New World.’ In a reference to the native troops of Indian soldiers in British service, known as sepoys, Jones (1853d) writes this with hopeful expectations: ‘It was Indian arms alone that upheld our Indian empire – it is Indian arms that preserve it now. Once let the feeling change – once let the mercenary turn into the patriot – once let merely the chain of discipline relax, and that empire vanishes like dust before the whirlwind’.

Thus, Jones drew from the utilitarian tradition skeptical of colonialism to lay out a radical analysis of the negative impacts of British colonial rule in India, but he went a step further by inverting Orientalist discourse to cast British rulers in the role of barbarians. This ideological syncretism was typical of how the Chartist press had reported the empire since the 1830s, undermining an imperial geographical imagination that insisted on the ‘otherness’ of colonized peoples while foregrounding the utilitarian critics of imperialism in light of what it meant for the workers in Britain, namely, a furthering of class exploitation and oppression (Vargo, 2002). Jones hammered this point in a subsequent article published on July 2, 1853, informing his readers that this ‘question affecting so remote a country … is a home question to themselves nevertheless. Cobden showed that the debts of India would have to be paid by Britain – that means by the working classes and retail shopkeepers of the United Kingdom’ (PP, 2 July 1853b). But while Cobden and other utilitarian critics did not go further than demanding a change in the form – not the end – of colonial rule, Jones, as noted above, pledged unqualified support to India’s independence by way of a national liberation movement led by trained sepoy soldiers cast as patriotic vanguards. Although it obscured the real plight and demands of the Indian natives, this rhetorical role reversal sought nonetheless to overcome racial and cultural chauvinism typical of Orientalist tropes, while installing a homological frame wherein the cause of the working class in England is bond to that of the oppressed of the colonies, thereby opening the door to internationalism across the empire.

Meanwhile, Marx, who had been studying the then called ‘Eastern Question’ since March previous, published his first piece on India in the Tribune on June 25, 1853, under the title ‘The British Rule in India’. Immediately, intertextual similarities with Jones’ articles stand out in both content and structure. Marx’s article, too, begins by describing pre-conquered India geographically and socio-economically, although in a much less idealized way, stating a disagreement with romantic Orientalists ‘who believe in a golden age of Hindostan’ (MECW 12: 126). While disturbing with ethnocentrism in some places, the article shifts away from the framework of the Manifesto on at least one point. It is considerably less sanguine about the progressive character of capitalist penetration in the colony. For instance, Marx claims that ‘the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before’ (MECW 12: 126). British colonial rule, he continues, ‘has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing’ (MECW 12: 126). Marx also blames the British colonizers for having ‘neglected entirely’ the reconstruction of the colony through ‘public works’, hence causing ‘the deterioration of an agriculture which is not capable of being conducted on the British principle of free competition’ (MECW 12: 127).

This growing criticism toward British imperialism was not emerging in a void. Marx, like Jones, was following the negative version of empire voiced by the utilitarian-minded India Reform Society members who blamed the monopolistic kind of mid-Victorian imperialism for having failed to deliver tangible progress in India. But it seems that he likewise took his cue from Jones in representing this very outcome. In the opening paragraphs of ‘The British Rule in India’, Marx compares India’s geographic dimensions to Italy, before noting that from ‘a social point of view’ the Indian colony has become ‘the Ireland of the East’, an analogy that Jones made verbatim just four weeks earlier, as observed above (MECW 12: 125). To be sure, comparing India’s immiseration to that of Ireland was not uncommon among British intellectual and political circles. John Bright, for instance, who helped to found the Indian Reform Society, assimilated India to ‘twenty Irelands put together’, an analogy from a speech that Jones quoted in a late March People’s Paper article (PP, 26 March 1853a). Yet it appears from the available sources surveyed by both Marx and Jones that the phrase ‘Ireland of the East’ was unique to them, hence suggesting that they were conjointly developing their views on India. Moreover, such deconstruction and denaturalization of the ‘East/West’ divide was not consistent with the utilitarian but with the Chartist view of empire. All that lends credence to the plausibility that Jones had some of his fingerprints on Marx’s re-evaluation of the progressiveness of British colonialism, which created in India a stagnate social-economic situation as devastating and miserable as in Ireland.

Yet, despite the calamities on the native population, Marx still held the prognostic that British imperialism remained progressive and beneficial overall. His August 8 article, entitled ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, reasserted this claim. ‘Has the bourgeoisie’, he asked, ‘ever effected progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?’ (MECW 12: 221). In this sense, the article is in straight continuity with the unilinear framework of Manifesto. But then comes this passage where Marx begins to deflate celebrations of capitalist progress in the colony through a new anti-colonialist rhetoric expressing notable empathy toward the predicament of the Indian people:

All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social conditions of the masses of the people. … The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. (MECW 12: 221)

The keyword in the above passage is the conjunction ‘or’ between ‘the industrial proletariat’ and ‘the Hindoos’, by way of which Marx points to two possibilities for the national liberation of India: (1) the English proletariat initiates the decolonization process in the heartland of the British empire in overthrowing the ruling class, a view consistent with the Manifesto’s grand narrative; (2) the decolonization process begins first and foremost with the colonized Indians ‘themselves’ in toppling British colonial rule prior to the emancipation of the industrial working class in England. This is a significant shift from the perspective of the Manifesto, for Marx now credits colonial peoples with a precursory role in launching revolutionary social change through a national liberation movement.

What could account for such shift in Marx’s thought at that specific moment? After all, the insurrection of the Indian people was still some years away in 1853, and while the utilitarian critics were certainly steadfast opponents of the British empire, they attacked its form not its existence. For Kevin Anderson (2010: 28), Marx’s move toward anti-colonialism in 1853 resulted from his ‘hard intellectual labor’ at the British Museum library. This undoubtedly played an important role in shaping his thought, but to the extent that it focused on pre-colonial social-economic organization and forms of property rights, Marx’s research was not directly relevant to inform and shape a new anti-colonialist stance – Jones’ writing was. For the Indian historian, Irfan Habib (2006: liv), in turn, ‘to look forward to a national liberation movement (‘throwing off the English yoke’) attained through their struggle by the Indian people, as an event that might even precede the emancipation of the European working class – such insight and vision could belong to Marx alone’, an argument that the Indian sociologist, Aijaz Ahmad (1992: 236), also shared. The evidence presented so far in this article suggest instead that Marx’s anti-colonialist perspective in 1853 did not belong to him alone, but also, and primarily, to his close friend, political ally, and journalistic partner, Ernest Jones.

Whether Jones directly influenced Marx to adopt an anti-colonialist stance we cannot know for sure, but circumstantial evidence allows some educated guesses. First, the simultaneity and similarity of their conclusion on India’s national liberation from British rule reinforces the likelihood that Jones’ anti-colonialist attitude, unparalleled among Chartists, had begun to have a cumulative effect on Marx’s thinking after two years of close collaboration. It was precisely at ‘about that time’, that is, as the assessment of the East India Company’s Charter was brought before the House of Commons, that Jones ‘paid us [the Marxes’ household] long and frequent visits’, wrote Jenny Marx in her diary (quoted in McLellan, 2006: 247). Did they discuss India?

Furthermore, and secondly, it appears that Marx, as with the Notes to the People, was somehow connected to the writing of Jones’ articles for the People’s Paper in at least three cases between February and December 1853, making it very plausible that they were likewise collaborating on the India question. Interestingly, one of those three articles, entitled ‘Secret Intrigue of Russian Tools, and Scandalous Doings of “Our” Cabinet in the East’, condemns Britain’s imperialistic intervention in Turkey and Burma (today’s Myanmar) as ‘harassing and injurious’, based on a ‘disgraceful mixture of imbecility and treachery’ that ‘impedes the liberation of the world’ (MEGA² I/12: 636). ⁸

Thirdly, and crucially, Jones did influence or at least orient Marx’s work at that very moment, although on another issue. It was Jones, as India was about to make it onto their journalistic radar, who persuaded Marx to turn his attention to Scotland, where British soldiers were then forcefully evicting hundreds of peasants and crofters from common lands to make room for deer parks and pasture (see Berlin, 1995: 150; Raddatz, 1978: 162). The effect on Marx proved to be critical and long-lasting, as his article on the Scotland evictions for the Tribune – reproduced in the People’s Paper – became the base text later for a longer chapter on the expropriation of the agricultural population in Capital. ⁹ The following year, on May 19, 1854, Marx published a second article on the forced expropriation of Scot peasants. His notebook reveals that the main source for this second text was Jones’ article, ‘Barbarians in Briton’, published a week previous in the People’s Paper (MECW 13: 196–200, 689n145). Similarly, when the Preston cotton workers went on strike after being locked-out in the fall of 1853, Marx drew largely from Jones’ journalistic accounts of the event (MECW 12: 414, 448–449, 462–463, 470, 513). All of this points up in somewhat high relief the significance, even tangential, of Jones’ impact on Marx’s intellectual activity in the early 1850s, and a similar scenario about his support of India’s national liberation in 1853 cannot be ruled out.

As Randall Collins (1998) has argued, intellectual work is always influenced by scholarly activities embedded in networks of social interaction and group solidarity, crystallizing into coalitions in the mind grounded in a common repertoire of intellectual resources – turns of phrase, vocabularies, styles of argumentation, etc. – loaded with membership significance. It may not be accidental, therefore, that immediately after the passage quoted above, where Marx supports India’s journey to self-liberation, he (MECW 12: 221) asserts for the first time in his writings on the East that British colonial rule is an example of ‘the inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization’, thus not only turning the barbarian/civilized dichotomy of the Manifesto on its head but couching it in terms that echoed the Chartist trope of empire, which Jones was then the most forthright exponent of. Thus, it is perhaps with Jones’ famous poem in mind that Marx concluded his article no longer looking at the bourgeoisie’s role as creating a world after its own image, but more somberly as bringing about ‘the material basis of the new world’ (MECW 12: 222).

The Eastern Question continued to occupy Marx’s journalistic writings for the remaining of 1853 and through 1854, as international tensions came to a boiling point with the outbreak of the Crimean War. On this event, too, Marx’s and Jones’ position continued to be in sync with one another, both describing the war as a sham concealing the true purpose of the Franco-British alliance to force the invaded Turks into conceding to Russian imperialistic demands (see Simonet, 2003: 316–318). In 1855, Jones began to envisage forming an electoral alliance with the bourgeois radicals, provided that they run for manhood suffrage. This appeal to the right disconcerted Marx, to a point that he ceased his contribution for the People’s Paper and eventually broke off political relations with Jones.

Yet, despite his split with Jones, which was only temporary, Marx was by then firmly set on an anti-colonialist path, as illustrated by his support for the Taiping rebels during the Second Opium War in China between 1856 and 1860 and for the great Indian revolt that broke out in 1857. In a letter of October 8, 1858, Marx (MECW 40: 346–347) informs Engels about Jones’ intention to form an electoral alliance with the bourgeois radicals, before submitting this new hypothesis about world revolution: ‘For us, the difficult question is this: on the [European] Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character. Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the earth, since the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant over a far greater area?’ In other words, revolution in Europe not only hinged on capitalist developments in the rest of the world, but revolutionary initiatives would have perhaps to come from there to bring about global social change. As his subsequent writings demonstrate, Marx from then on kept his gaze beyond ‘this little corner of the earth’, from serfdom Russia to the US slave South, and from Ireland to Egypt. But what or rather who contributed to push him toward that direction in the first place in the early the 1850s was unquestionably Ernest Jones.

Conclusion

It is useful to place the beginning of Marx’s multilinear shift in its immediate political-intellectual context in working-class London. In doing so, this article has sought to restore and highlight the intellectual impact of the Chartist leader and poet, Ernest Jones, on that new itinerary in Marx’s thought. Although Marx never explicitly acknowledged a debt to Jones in the published corpus of his writing, there are circumstantial and cross-textual evidence suggesting nonetheless some influence of Jones on his thinking, especially on anti-colonialism. For the first half of the 1850s, Marx was in collaboration with Jones, guiding him politically and contributing to his weeklies Notes to the People and the People’s Paper. This partnership, I have argued, placed Marx in a new intellectual environment where he was directly exposed to Jones’ anti-colonialist vision, which competed directly with the historical framework sketched out previously in the Communist Manifesto. This article has demonstrated that Jones’ anti-colonial convictions seem to have contributed to fertilize Marx’s imagination vis-à-vis the colonial world, leading him to shift the plane of reflection and ultimately articulate an anti-colonial pathway to revolutionary social change. In 1853, after two years of partnership with Jones, Marx grew increasingly critical of the progressive character of Western imperialism, as his Tribune articles on India exemplify. Consistent with the Chartist trope of empire, deployed by Jones in his weeklies, Marx cast British colonizers in the role of barbarians and underline the non-revolutionary role they played there, creating a social-economic slump as in Ireland. Moreover, and relatedly, Marx began to outline an anti-colonial pathway to a global proletarian revolution but one that could be initiated by the colonized themselves, a position that Jones defended in his pages at the same time. This alignment of views, at a time when they were closely working together and drew from the writings of one another, highly suggest that Jones was somehow connected to it. This brings to the fore the contribution of English radical politics to the early development of Marxism.

When Jones died unexpectedly on January 26, 1869, the news ‘caused a deep dismay in our household’, Marx (MECW 43: 207) wrote to Engels, ‘since he was one of our few old friends’. Engels replied to Marx pointing out that Jones’ electoral engagements with the bourgeois radicals ‘were simply hypocrisy’ after all, and that, ‘amongst the politicians, he was the only educated Englishman who was, au fond, completely on our side’ (MECW 43: 210–211). It was later that year, in early 1870, that Marx came to conclusion that the social revolution in Europe should begin first and foremost with the national liberation of Ireland, a claim that had sent Jones to jail in 1848. While, of course, he had nothing to do with Marx’s support of Irish emancipation, Jones had been present and deserves a place at the start of the intellectual trajectory that led Marx to it.