Mutilation of class struggle can take another form : closing one’s eyes to the fate visited by capitalism on colonial peoples or peoples of colonial origin.
From the outset, calling attention to the ‘millions of workers’ forced to die in India, to allow capitalists to make modest concessions to British workers, Marx underlined the connection between the colonial question and the social question in the capitalist metropolis (see Chap. 2, Sect. 3). This was a demanding intellectual perspective.
In sharp contrast to Proudhon, Fourier was a champion of the cause of women’s emancipation. But it happened that, in the very years when Marx and Engels were expressing their hopes in the proletariat as the agency of universal emancipation with youthful hyperbole, followers of Fourier (and Saint-Simon) planned to construct communities of a more or less socialist kind in Algeria, on land taken from the Arabs in a brutal, sometimes genocidal war. ¹¹
Later, utopian socialism mostly viewed the abolitionist movement with condescension or suspicion. After the February 1848 revolution, Victor Schoelcher and the new government proceeded to the definitive abolition of black slavery in French colonies, almost half a century after it had been reintroduced by Napoleon, who had thereby cancelled the results of the black revolution on Santo Domingo led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and the laws emancipating blacks enacted by the Jacobin Convention.
However, Etienne Cabet, an eminent representative of French utopian socialism, criticized Schoelcher for focusing on a narrow objective—the emancipation of black slaves—rather than committing himself to the universal emancipation of labour. ¹²
On the outbreak of the Civil War in the USA, Lassalle argued similarly, judging at least from a letter to Engels of 30 July 1862 in which Marx criticized the ‘antiquated, mouldering speculative rubbish’ of Lassalle, for whom the gigantic clash underway in the USA was ‘of no interest whatever’. Rather than developing positive ‘ideas’ for transforming society, ‘the Yankees’ confined themselves to mobilizing a ‘negative idea’ like ‘the freedom of the individual’. ¹³
For the two representatives of socialism cited here, commitment to the abolition of slavery in the colonies or the North American republic distracted attention from the social question, which remained a burning issue in the capitalist metropolis.
To the American Civil War—in Marx’s view, an epic event—Lassalle made only distracted, reductive references. Because of the blockade imposed by the Union on the secessionist South, and the consequent shortage of cotton for the textile industry of Britain, and Lancashire in particular, British workers were forced into unemployment and risked having to ‘emigrate to the colonies’. It was ‘one of the most bloody and horrible wars that history has ever seen’.
What was at stake in it was not touched upon. In fact, rather than the institution of slavery, Lassalle indicted ‘federalism’ and the self-government accorded states as allegedly responsible for the ‘absorption in particular interests’ and ‘mutual hatred’ of the contending parties, which were thus put on par. ¹⁴
The economistic or corporatist limitations of representatives of the labour and socialist movement were not unconnected with the initiative of the dominant classes, whose effectiveness was in fact underestimated by Marx and Engels. Having included ‘Young England’ in the ‘spectacle’ of ‘feudal socialism’ staged by ‘aristocrats’, the Communist Manifesto concluded: ‘the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter’. ¹⁵
In fact, things turned out rather differently. The historically most important member of Young England was Disraeli. In him (as in the organization he joined) are to be found elements of the transfiguration of the ancien régime, but he may be regarded as the inventor of a ‘socialism’ more appropriately defined as ‘imperial’ than ‘feudal’. Far from meeting with derision from the popular classes, this was socialism that often enchanted and ensnared them.
In the same years as The Holy Family and The German Ideology proclaimed the irreducible antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie, Disraeli published a novel that in its own way dealt with the same themes. We find a Chartist agitator bitterly challenging the existing order and denouncing the reality of the ‘two nations’ (‘rich and poor’) into which England is divided. In the Communist Manifesto, the Chartists are included among the ‘existing working-class parties’; ¹⁶ and the agitator seems to exhibit the revolutionary consciousness attributed to the proletariat by Marx and Engels. It is interesting to observe Disraeli’s response: it made no sense to speak of ‘two nations’; a bond of ‘fraternity’ now united ‘the privileged and prosperous English people’. ¹⁷
The key word is the one emphasized by me : the English aristocracy had shelved the caste, even racial arrogance it traditionally displayed towards the popular classes ; and now it was the ‘fraternal’ national English community as a whole that adopted a pose of supreme aristocratic disdain for other nations, especially colonial populations.
In other words, rather than disappearing, the racialization traditionally suffered by the British popular classes was displaced. It is no accident if Disraeli, who subsequently became the author of the Second Reform Act (which extended political rights beyond the circle of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie), and of a series of social reforms, was simultaneously the champion of imperialism and the right of the ‘superior’ races to subjugate ‘inferior’ ones. In this way, the British statesman proposed to defuse the social question and class struggle in his own country : ‘I say with confidence that the great body of the working-class of England […] are English to the core. They are for maintaining the greatness of the Kingdom and the Empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our Sovereign and members of such an Empire.’ ¹⁸
These were the years when in France Proudhon adopted the position (according to Marx) of a ‘socialist of the Imperial period’—to be precise, the Second Empire. ¹⁹
Thus, we see a new political movement emerge. In the late nineteenth century, alluding to Napoleon III and Bismarck as well as Disraeli, a German observer spoke of an ‘imperialist social policy’ or ‘imperial socialism’ (Imperialsozialismus ). ²⁰
Already brought out by Marx, the connection between the colonial question and the social question in the capitalist metropolis was recognized and put at the centre of a new political project, which proposed a kind of quid pro quo: the popular masses and proletariat were invited to respond to the dominant classes’ limited social reforms with patriotism and support for colonial expansionism.