The Irish Mistake: Marx, Ireland, and Non-European Societies

Matthieu de Nanteuil examines Marx’s relationship with Ireland. He shows that the Irish case enabled Marx to develop his dual critique of capitalism and colonialism. While Marx’s analysis of Irish class relations is not entirely convincing, his description of a society emptied of its own forces under the impact of colonialism – literally “depopulated” – is visionary. In this respect, Marx develops a narrative that links economic critique to the symbolic sphere. There is, however, a flaw in this approach. By attempting to show that colonialism was simply the extension of capitalism beyond national borders, and by equating colonial practices with the domination of one mode of production over another, Marx overlooks a dimension that is essential to understanding colonial brutality in Ireland: the religious dimension, which consisted of subjecting a Catholic population (the Irish) to Protestant tutelage (the English). This flaw is the reason why Marx underestimated the cultural component of colonialism, as well as the diversity of cultural traditions as a means of resistance to colonization. This limitation should not, however, lead us to believe that Marx ignored non-European societies. His attention to detail, visible in many places in his analysis of the Irish case, testifies to a rare sensitivity to geographical and cultural differences. Marx was looking for a “general principle” that would enable him to analyse colonialism in the age of the Industrial Revolution, without seeing that this concern for the “general” was at the same time an obstacle to the full recognition of non-European singularities.