Karl Marx thought British imperialism had brought modernity to India.

 

Marx & Engels

Many Communist regimes including the Soviet Union in Russia and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia claimed to have been inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx, but they were hardly free countries. Both countries built a society on a mountain of corpses.

Well before the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Russian socialist, Alexander Herzen, had called Communism, Russian Tsarism turned upside down. So-called freedom in capitalist societies is something of a sham. It's freedom for the pike but not for the minnows. In one sense, political equality is rather meaningless when you have economic inequality. There's not a great deal of direct democracy in the workplace, and most people are just one wage away from the gutter. But some do argue that economic inequality is of great importance and even in some respects highly desirable, because it acts as a spur to incentivise people to strive to do better. It's rather a case of sink or swim.

Soviet society was notable for a lack of incentives and the wide levels of economic equality between citizens and the political elite. I don't think that Karl Marx believed that we're all endowed with the same equal abilities because he wrote, "From each according to his ability to each according to his need." To impose equality on people of unequal abilities certainly restricts freedom and liberty and this is why they talk about "equality of opportunity" which is also rather nebulous, because our opportunities are certainly constrained by our economic circumstances and the social class that we're born into.

Marx was certainly aware that people pursuing their own personal greed had transformed the world and this is clear from reading the Communist Manifesto that he co-authored with Friedrich Engels. Marx thought that the British had brought modernity to India - printing presses, railways, telegraph, and steamship contact with other countries. Marx didn't believe that the British had done this out of the kindness of their hearts. Until 1858, British rule in India was administered by the East India Company. Marx wrote:  

“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan was actuated by the vilest interests...but that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the state of Asia.”

For Marx, conquest furnished an alternative to serfdom and stagnation. Creation could take a destructive form. In 1700, Britain banned cotton imports from India and by 1835, Lord Bentinck of the East India Company, declared: "the bones of Indian textile workers were bleaching the plains of India."

In the 1940s, when Bengal was under British colonial occupation, tens of thousands of people starved to death in areas that had overflowing granaries. It wasn't a shortage of food that led to the disaster, but a lack of information and proper administration.

Marx and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. Marx supported both Lincoln and the Union during the civil war and helped to organise a boycott of southern slave-picked cotton among British workers. Marx never called himself a Marxist, but from a Marxist point of view, revolutions were more likely to occur in countries like Britain and the USA which had attained a high level of capitalist development. They were not supposed to occur in peasant societies which has largely been the case.