Abstract
With his belief in the progressive nature of history in terms of social, economic and technological development, Marx is perhaps the quintessential modernist. Thus, it is not surprising that Edward Said (1979) would find that Marx made a sharp distinction between the progressive West and the stagnant, ahistorical “Orient.” While Marx certainly made a number of disparaging comments on non-European societies, his work on non-Western societies was not as consistently Orientalist as Said suggests. Instead, Marx’s work illustrates a growing understanding of non-European societies and their relationship to colonizing powers. At least in later writings, Marx moved away from his unilinear view of history and argued that social change could begin in less developed societies. These writings illustrate that Marx did not make a strict separation between the socially and technologically progressive West and the stagnant ahistorical “Orient”; instead the two can be seen as dialectically related moments of the whole.
