"We can only wonder what Marx might have thought or said to Jones. Four years earlier in the Manifesto, he and Engels had considered Western imperialism as a progressive and beneficial force drawing underdeveloped societies into bourgeois civilization. He was now collaborating with someone who held the opposite opinion, a situation that pulled him toward what his Hegelian training would have recognized as a position of immanent criticism — that is, criticism that submits to and appropriates the very premises of a competing standpoint in order to transcend it dialectically."

The evolution of Marx's thinking on colonialism

Further reading
Marxism Orientalism Cosmopolitanism by Gilbert Achcar