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Spartacist South Africa No. 13 |
Spring 2015 |
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Engels on Colonialism and National Independence
The following letter, from Engels to Karl Kautsky, was
written in September 1882.
…You ask me what the English workers think about colonial
policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the
same as the bourgeois think. There is no workers' party here, there are only
Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers are cheerfully consuming
their share of England's monopoly of the world market and the colonies. In my
opinion the colonies proper, i.e., the countries occupied by a European
population—Canada, the Cape, Australia—will all become independent; on the
other hand, the countries inhabited by a native population, which are simply subjugated—India,
Algeria, the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions—must be taken over for
the time being by the proletariat and led as rapidly as possible towards independence.
How this process will develop is difficult to say. India will perhaps, indeed
very probably, make a revolution, and as a proletariat in process of self-emancipation
cannot conduct any colonial wars, India would have to be given a free hand;
things would, of course, not pass off without all sorts of destruction, but
that sort of thing is inseparable from all revolutions. The same might also
happen elsewhere, e.g., in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly be the best
thing for us. We shall have enough to do at home. A reorganised
Europe and North America will have such colossal power and provide such an
example that the semi-civilised countries will automatically follow in their
wake; they will be pushed in that direction even by economic needs alone. It
seems to me that we can only make rather futile hypotheses about the social and
political phases that these countries will then have to pass through before
they likewise arrive at socialist organisation. One thing alone is certain: the
victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign
nation without undermining its own victory by so doing. This does not of course
exclude defensive wars of various kinds...
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