Marx saw colonialism as freeing non-Western societies from confining arrangements

Evidence

Thus for Marx, as for Auguste Comte, it is not that “backwar d societies” racially conceived are inherently irrational and so naturally incapable of self-development and progressive governance. Rather, it is that they have languished in “primitive” and confining social arrangements that have undermined their capacity for evolution . If there is a virtue to colonialism for Marx ~ the preference of British over Turkish or Persian or Russian conquest (Marx 1973: 320) ~ it was that it stripped away those confining limits to rational administrative conditions of modernization. Colonialism thus enabled, in Marx’s mind, the sort of productive capacity necessary for the historical “destiny” of socialist revolution — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the addendum on sacrifice and colonial rationalization, and echoes the reader’s work on how progress narratives license violence. — connects to: Colonialism brought material progress to the Third World. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1767; Early neoliberal development theory echoed colonial assumptions about non-Western peoples — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1290; Marx’s pro-colonial remarks were of a piece with pro-capitalist progressivism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 981
• SEED: Angle: ‘How even radicals rationalized empire’ — Marx’s and Comte’s shared colonialist blindness is a cautionary tale about theory-driven justifications of violence.

Related

• Marx’s pro-colonial remarks were of a piece with pro-capitalist progressivism. (similarity 0.89)
• Classical Marxism treated capitalist colonialism as historically necessary for non-Western development (similarity 0.85)
• Colonialism brought material progress to the Third World. (similarity 0.82)
• Marx saw British colonial destruction as enabling Asia’s social revolution (similarity 0.82)
• Early neoliberal development theory echoed colonial assumptions about non-Western peoples (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial revolution disproved that bourgeois ideas catalyze revolutionary consciousness (similarity 0.80)
• Colonialism advanced state formation by racially ordering the colonized exterior (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalist expansion did not reduce colonized nations to Marx’s two-class bourgeois model (similarity 0.79)
• European racialism justified colonial expansion and rule (similarity 0.78)
• Capitalism conserving non-capitalist modes produces racial and colonial ideologies. (similarity 0.78)
• Marxism succeeded only where non-Western elites used it to resist the West. (similarity 0.78)
• Western colonization conserved rather than destroyed precapitalist barriers to development (similarity 0.78)