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

Abstract

This article seeks to restore the influential role of the Chartist activist, writer and poet, Ernest Jones (1819–1869), on Marx’s shift toward a multilinear conception of history in the early 1850s. Living in exile in London, Marx developed a close and long-lasting friendship and intellectual partnership with Jones, and actively contributed to his Chartist weeklies, Notes to the People (1851–1852) and the People’s Paper (1852–1858), during which he was directly exposed to, and thus influenced by, Jones’ anti-colonialist outlook. Based on circumstantial and cross-textual evidence, this article shows that starting in 1853 Marx appears to have drawn insights from Jones’ writings as he was changing his views on the progressiveness of Western colonialism, particularly the British kind in India. Seemingly imbued with the radical intellectual environment in which he gravitated in London, Marx followed his Chartist comrade and converged increasingly toward a similar anti-colonialist position, thus breaking with the Eurocentric, unilinear framework of historical development that characterized The Communist Manifesto (1848). Recovering the impact that Jones had on Marx’s intellectual trajectory in the 1850s brings to the fore the contribution of English radical politics in the early development of Marxism, especially as regard to the nexus between anti-colonialism and world revolution.