Marx and Engels celebrated colonial resistance with revolutionary pathos

Evidence

That is a wonderfully contemptuous word for the colonizers: ‘civilization-mongers’! What one wishes to emphasize here is that the writings of Marx and Engels are indeed contaminated in several places with the usual banalities of nineteenth-century Eurocentrism, and the general prognosis they offered about the social stagnation of our societies was often based on unexamined staples of conventional European histories. Despite such inaccuracies, however, neither of them portrayed resistance to colonialism as misdirected; the resistance of the ‘Chinese coolie’ was celebrated in the same lyrical cadences as they would deploy in celebrating the Parisian communard. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 447

Categorization

• XREF: Directly complicates Said’s Orientalism reading in the reader’s library via this encounter with the primary documents.

Related

• Marx absolved England’s crimes as history’s unconscious colonial tool (similarity 0.79)
• Marx saw British colonial destruction as enabling Asia’s social revolution (similarity 0.78)