[Marxism] Marx and Engels and the National Question

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The problem with identifying a Marxist approach to the national question
with respect to the work of Marx and Engles themselves is that this
latter is inconsistent. For example, the celebrated references to the
nation in the Communist Manifesto. In the substantive section of the
text, noting that the Communists 'have been [...] reproached for wanting
to abolish the nation and nationalities', Marx and Engels go on to
assert that:

'Workers have no nation of their own. We cannot take from them what they
do not have. [...] National divisions and conflicts between peoples
increasingly disappear with the development of the bourgeoisie, with
free trade and the world market, with the uniform character of
industrial production and the corresponding circumstances of modern
life.' ['Manifesto of the Communist Party', trans. by Terrell Carver, in
Mark Cowling (ed.) The Communist Manifesto: New Interpretations
(Edinburgh, 1998), 27.]

But it is difficult now to argue that this was right. Far from
mitigating national divisions, the extended development of global
capitalism in the century since these words were written seems to have
on the contrary intensified the political divisions between states and
peoples along national lines; and, in addition, the twentieth century
has certainly seen ever greater numbers of proletarians seemingly
inclined to sacrifice their lives in wars fought against other
proletarians for national ends. Nationalism, contrary to the best
intentions of the authors of the Manifesto, has continued to
preponderate in the sphere of politics.

Yet in terms of how Marx and Engels map out the parameters for working
class advance we find something of a problem: for, in the ellipsis in
the excerpt offered above, they argue - it would seem to the contrary of
the rest of the passage - that:

'Since the proletariat must first of all take political control, raise
itself up to be the class of the nation, must constitute itself the
nation, it is still nationalistic, even if not at all in the bourgeois
sense of the term.' [Cowling, 27.]

This message is repeated elsewhere in the 'Manifesto':

'All previous movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest
of minorities. The proletarian movement is the independent movement of
the vast majority in the interests of the vast majority. The
proletariat, the lowest stratum of present-day society, cannot lift
itself up, cannot raise itself up, without the flinging into the air the
whole superstructure of social strata which form the establishment.

'The struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is at the
outset a national one in form, although not in content. Naturally, the
proletariat of each country must finish off its own bourgeoisie.'
[Cowling, 22.]

Here we see the inconsistencies writ large: for while the first
quotation seems to offer blandishments of at least an internationalist,
if not actually nationally nihilistic, character, then the second set of
references clearly seem to suggest that, to the contrary, the road to
working-class advance in fact lies along precisely nationally delimited
lines: indeed, it is exactly to this end - to justify the notion that
the proletariat's advance to socialism is principally a national one -
that this passage has been deployed.*

It is important to keep in mind this contradictory message of the
'Manifesto' when we turn to the revolutions of 1848-49, during which
Engels in the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, developed an
analysis of the then active national liberation movements of Central and
Eastern Europe which was founded upon the concept of 'nonhistoric'
peoples: in other words, that there were, on the one hand, 'great
historic nations' - Germany, Poland, Hungary, Italy - that had won the
'right', through their previous struggles for independence and unity to
constitute themselves as viable nation-states, while on the other there
were smaller, less dynamic nationalities (peoples 'without history') -
the Slavs of Austria and Hungary, the Hungarian and Austrian
Romanians-unable to establish themselves as national states and whose
struggles were thus undeserving of support, an interpretion which the
quotation cited by Louis amplifies.**

What was Engels saying here? Clearly, the practical considerations of
the inter-state and national power politics of the mid-nineteenth
century, especially those relating to absolutist Russia, perceived as
the back-bone of European reaction, manifestly played their part in the
development of this position. But there is mopre going on here that
this. This was not just a pragmatic judgement on Engels' part, for he
elevated it to the level of a general theory of nationality. Thus:

'Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which from the
time when they achieved the first, most elementary stage of civilisation
already came under foreign sway, or which were forced to attain the
first stage of civilisation only by a foreign yoke, are not viable and
will never be able to achieve any kind of independence.' [Friedrich
Engels, 'Democratic Pan-Slavism', MECW vol. 8 (1977), 367.]

This is an idea imported directrly from Hegel, central in whose schema
of history was what he called the 'dialectic of [...] national minds' on
the goal to the 'realisation of the mind.' [G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's
Philosophy of Mind, (Oxford, 1894), 147.] For Hegel, it was only those
nations that had sufficient spiritual strength and will practically to
establish developed political systems - that is, states - that were
capable both of bearing the weight of historical progress and of driving
it forwards. Thus:

'In the existence of a nation the substantial aim is to be a state and
preserve itself as such. A nation with no state formation (a mere
nation), has strictly speaking, no history-like the nations which
existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a
condition of savagery. What happens to a nation, and takes place within
it, has as its essential significance in relation to the state [...].'
[Philosophy of Mind, 150.]

For Hegel, what lay behind this view was the aharp distinction he drew
between 'nation' and 'state': while a 'people' may exist as a 'nation',
they are unable to contribute to the unfolding of history without
constituting themselves as a state. What is clear here, I think, is
that, in the absence of a defined theoretical framework of his own with
which to work, Engels - consciously or otherwise - borrowed the Hegelian
notion of the function of the nation-state in history virtually
wholesale: discarding the 'rational kernel' and retaining the 'mystical
shell', as it were.***

Thus far this is not a happy legacy. But in the aftermath of the
revolutionary conjuncture of 1848-9, and particularly from the late
1850s, both Marx and Engels began - empirically at least - to show
greater sensitivity to actually existing national movements, a shift
most dramatically evident in Marx around the question of Ireland. From
this point, we begin to see a conception of the national question -
particularly, but not exclusively, in Marx - as not simply a question
related to socio-economic development, but one increasingly related to
politics. Thus, writing on the Irish question in 1867, Marx felt able to
express the following judgement:

'I once believed that the separation of Ireland from England to be
impossible. I now regard it as inevitable, although federation may
follow upon separation.' ['Marx to Engels' (2 November, 1867), MECW vol.
42 (1987), 460.]

This understanding was not motivated solely by a concern for freedom in
Ireland: far from it, for what Marx was moving towards was an
understanding of the political impact of colonialism on the working
class in the oppressor nation. Irish emancipation was as necessary for
the British working class movement as it was for Ireland:

'I have become more and more convinced-and the thing now is to drum this
conviction into the English [sic] working class-that they will never be
able to do anything decisive here in England before they separate their
attitude towards Ireland quite definitely from that of the ruling
classes, and not only make a common cause with the Irish, but even take
the initiative in dissolving the Union [...] and substituting a federal
relationship for it. And this must be done not out of sympathy for
Ireland, but as a demand based on the interests of the English
proletariat.' ['Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann' (29 November, 1869), MECW vol.
43 (1988), 390.]

Marx was fully aware that this aspect of the national question was, in
fact an eminently practical question for the working class movement:

'All industrial and commercial centres in England now have a working
class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish
proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a
competitor who forces down the standard of life. In relation to the
Irish worker, he feels himself to be a member of the ruling nation and,
therefore, makes himself a tool of his aristocrats and capitalists
against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. [...]
The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in
the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of English
rule in Ireland.

'[...] This antagonism is the secret of the English working class's
impotence, despite its organisation. It is the secret of power by the
capitalist class.' ['Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt' (9 April,
1870), MECW vol. 43 (1988), 474-75.]

Marx's writings on Ireland from this period thus mark a real turning
point in the outlook of both he and Engels in relation to the political
significance of nationalism, even if they do not form as yet a clear and
distinctive theory of nationalism. In addition, these writings on
Ireland do not mark the only movement or tension in Marx's thinking over
this period, although they do, I believe, indicate the general direction
in which Marx was moving in the last two decades of his life.

What lies behind these inconsistencies, shifts and developments? It is
important to grasp that for Marx and Engels the national question was
not an end in itself, but had to be understood within the general
process of the advance of the working class to socialism. But it is
equally the case that in Marx we find more than one conception - often
co-existent in single texts - of what the parameters of this process may
actually be. On the one hand, we have a model of historical development
that we can, for want of a better description, dub
'linear-evolutionist'; that model that is most succinctly encapsulated
in the Preface to Capital, when Marx observed that 'the country that is
more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image
of its own future.' ['Preface to the First German Edition' of Capital,
volume 1, MECW vol. 35 (1996), 9.] In other words, each nation is fated
by history to traverse the same developmental path, independently of one
another. This perspective of Marx's almost has the tinge of a
'Darwinist' approach to the fate of nations, in which the structure of
national development is one involving a struggle for survival of the
'fittest' peoples, with the 'losers' - peoples 'without history' -
condemned to historical oblivion. This certainly seems to be the model
guiding Engels's more developed theoretical excursions into the arena of
national politics: the duty of the 'nonhistoric' peoples is to submit to
the inevitable historical tide and abandon their national aspirations,
while the source of historical progress is to be found in those nations
exhibiting the highest degree of social and economic development.

So Marx in 1847 could note that (and compare this approach with his more
mature position on Ireland above):

'Of all countries, England is the one where the contradiction between
the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is the most highly developed. The
victory of the English proletarians over the English bourgeoisie is,
therefore, decisive for the victory of all the oppressed over their
oppressors. Hence Poland must be liberated not in Poland but in England.
So you Chartists must not simply express pious wishes for the liberation
of nations. Defeat your own internal enemies and you will then be able
to pride yourselves on having defeated the entire old society.' [Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, 'On Poland: Speeches at the International
Meeting Held in London on November 29, 1847 to Mark the 17th Anniversary
of the Polish Uprising of 1830' (Marx's Speech), MECW vol. 6 (1976)
389.]

The clear echo here is with the passage concerning the nation in the
'Communist Manifesto' that I cited earlier; that, as the development of
capitalism itself assists the mitigation of national divisions,

'The rule of the proletariat will make [national divisions and conflicts
between peoples] [...] disappear even faster. United action, at least in
the civilised countries, is one of the first conditions for freeing the
proletariat.

To the degree that the exploitation of one individual by another is
transformed, so will the exploitation of one nation by another.'
[Cowling, 27.]

In this linear and evolutionist view, even though the oppression of one
nation (or nationality) by another is to be opposed, the role of
movements for national independence is relegated to a subordinate
position in the overall movement towards socialism: it is even implied
as a possibility that a 'backward' people may be beneficially
'civilised' by a more developed nation exercising political or even
economic control over its fate.****

Yet even in the Manifesto itself we can also find a parallel analysis
incorporating a far more sophisticated account of the relation between
capitalist development and the evolution of national differences. In its
opening section, describing the world-wide rise of the bourgeoisie, Marx
and Engels present the following account:

'The need for a constantly expanding outlet for their products pursues
the bourgeoisie over the whole world. It must get a foothold everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

'Through the exploitation of the world market the bourgeoisie has made
the production and consumption of all countries cosmopolitan. It has
pulled the national basis of industry right out from under the
reactionaries, to their consternation. Long-established national
industries have been destroyed and are still being destroyed daily. They
are being displaced by new industries-the introduction of which becomes
a life and death question for all civilised nations-industries that no
longer work up indigenous raw materials but use raw materials from the
ends of the earth, industries whose products are consumed not only in
the country of origin home but in every part of the world. In place of
the old needs satisfied by home production, we have new ones which
demand the products of the most distant lands and climes for their
satisfaction. In place of the old local and national self-sufficiency
and isolation we have a universal commerce, a universal dependence of
nations on one another.' [Cowling, 16-17.]

Thus here, rather than a model which posits the independent evolution of
separate nations along the same path, separated only by differing
positions in a universal chronology, we find a picture - strikingly
resonant of our contemporary world - of a complex pattern of
intra-national socio-economic interdependence.

So the evolutionist, unilinear model of historical development is not
the only one that we find in Marx: at repeated intervals after the
defeated revolutionary conjuncture of 1848 we find references that point
to a quite different conception, one founded upon an entirely more
sophisticated understanding of the nature of the interpenetration of
national states-and of an understanding of the complex interplay between
the spheres of the social and the political. The premise for this view
was his assessment of the reasons for the defeats of 1848. Initially,
Marx and Engels foresaw the revolutionary struggles of this conjuncture
as incorporating a combined conflict with the bourgeois against the
bulwarks of European absolutism. However, over the course of the year,
as it became increasingly clear that the bourgeois-democrats were rather
more chary of the threat of plebeian revolt from below than of
aristocratic reaction from above, both Marx and Engels - especially
following the capitulation of the Frankfurt Assembly - began to address
the possibility that what was on the historical agenda was not simply
the fall of absolutism but the overthrow of the bourgeoisie as well; and
clear in this conception was a break from the view that socio-political
development in each country would necessarily follow the same set of
pre-ordained historical stages; the idea tentatively pre-figured in the
Manifesto of a capitalist equilibrium of developed and backward nations
was now bolstered by the suggestion that less developed nations could
'skip' certain of the stages of historical development that the more
advanced had of necessity experienced. Implicit in this conception is a
necessary shift in the theoretical framework within which the national
question is to be accommodated, from a 'revolutionary nation'-'peoples
without history' dualism, to an understanding of a dichotomy of dominant
and oppressed nations; to, in other words, an understanding of the
national question as also a political and not purely a socio-economic
question.

The degree to which Marx maintained this conception is indicated most
clearly by his later correspondence with the populists of Russia. The
axiomatic position of Russian Marxism as it had emerged in its break
with indigenous populism was - along the lines of the kind of
linear-evolutionist schema outlined above - that backward Russia would
by necessity have to undergo a protracted period of capitalist
development before there was any meaningful prospect of some transition
to socialism: necessary historical stages were precisely that, and the
possibility of 'skipping' over them was considered theoretically
heretical. Thus it was a matter of some embarrassment to the nascent
Russian Marxist movement that, in a polemic directed at the populist
theorist Mikhailovsky in 1877, Marx had objected to the accusation that
he wanted to transpose on Russia the process of 'primitive accumulation'
described in Capital. Marx disagreed thus:

'It is absolutely necessary for [...] [Mikhailovsky] to metamorphose my
historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a
historico-pilosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate on
all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they are
placed [...].' ['Letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski', MECW, vol. 24
(1989), 200.]

Even more suggestively, in his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx was to
argue that:

'In analysing the genesis of capitalist production [in Capital] I say:

'"At the core of the capitalist system, therefore, lies the complete
separation of the producer from the means of production ... the basis of
this whole development is the expropriation of the agricultural
producer. To date this has not been accomplished in a radical fashion
anywhere except in England... But all the other countries of Western
Europe are undergoing the same process" [...].

'Hence the historical inevitability of this process is expressly limited
to the countries of Western Europe. [...]

'Hence the analysis provided in Capital does not adduce reasons either
for or against the viability of the rural commune, but the special study
I have made of it, and the material for which I drew from original
sources, has convinced me that this commune is the fulcrum of social
regeneration in Russia, but in order that it may function as such, it is
necessary to eliminate deleterious influences which are assailing it
from all sides, and then ensure for it the normal conditions of
spontaneous development.' ['Marx to Vera Zasulich', MECW, vol. 46
(1992), 71-72; earlier drafts of this letter are to be found in Karl
Marx, 'Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich', MECW, vol. 24 (1989),
346-371.]

It is the conception implicit in these texts on Russia - that history
tends to move not in a unilinear fashion, but dialectically, through a
process of discontinuities, ruptures and sudden leaps - that is the
essential precondition for the development of an assessment of the
nation in history, and of national movements, that is fully sensitive to
their actual relation to the broader question of human progress and
historical development. Despite the fact that neither Marx nor Engels
were ever able to draw out the full implications of this view in a
systematic fashion, here, in these fragments of texts, we can indeed
find the germ of a theoretical framework that marks a genuine break with
notions of historical development of an evolutionist and economically
reductionist fashion.

This is the legacy of Marx and Engels on the question of nations and
national movements: on the one hand the contradictory blandishments of
the 'Manifesto', along with the uncritical incorporation of the Hegelian
theory of the 'peoples without history'; on the other, the shift
prompted by the period which was opened up after the
counter-revolutionary defeats of 1848-9. This shift was of a piece with
the strengthening of that trend in Marx's thought which emphasised the
dialectical interaction of nation-states and nationalities within a
single, whole international system, as well as expressing a greater deal
of sensitivity to the relationship of the political sphere to that of
the social. To only see the one side, or the other, without seeing the
tension and complexities of development of these ideas do both Marx and
Engels and ourselves a disservice.

----------

*To give but one example: the right-revisionist German social-democrat
Heinrich Cunow could write in 1921:

'Today (1848) the worker has no country, he does not take part in the
life of the nation, has no share in its material and spiritual wealth.
But one of these days the workers will win political power and take a
dominant position in state and nation and then, when so to speak they
will have constituted themselves the nation, they will also be national
and feel national [...].' [cited by Roman Rosdolsky, 'The Workers and
the Fatherland: A Note on a Passage in the "Communist Manifesto"',
International (London) 4.2 (Winter 1977), 15.]



** For the sake of completeness: 'There is no country in Europe which
does not have in some corner or other one of several ruined fragments of
peoples, the remnant of a former population that was suppressed and held
in bondage by the nation which later became the main vehicle of
historical development. The relics of a nation mercilessly trampled
under foot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual
fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of
counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or
loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in
general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.

'Such, in Scotland, are the Gaels, the supporters of the Stuarts from
1640 to 1745.

'Such, in France, are the Bretons, the supporters of the Bourbons from
1792 to 1800.

'Such, in Spain, are the Basques, the supporters of Don Carlos.

'Such, in Austria, are the pan-Slavist Southern Slavs, who are nothing
but the residual fragment of peoples [...]. That this residual fragment
[...] sees its salvation only in a reversal of the whole European
movement, which in its view ought not to go from west to east, but from
east to west, and that for it the instrument of liberation and the bond
of unity is the Russian knout-that is the most natural thing in the
world.' [Friedrich Engels, 'The Magyar Struggle', MECW vol. 8 (1977),
234-35.]



***It is important to keep in mind that the writings of
'Marx-and-Engels' on the national movements of Central and Eastern
Europe which deploy the concept of 'peoples without history', despite
the many instances of misattribution that have been made over the years,
are exclusively the work of Engels.



****Thus Engels on Mexico:

'How did it happen that over Texas a war broke out between [Mexico and
the United States] [...], which, according to the moral theory, ought to
have been "fraternally united" and "federated", and that, owing to
"geographical, commercial and strategic necessities", the "sovereign
will" of the American [sic] people, supported by the bravery of the
American volunteers, shifted the borders drawn by nature some hundreds
of miles south. And will Bakunin accuse the Americans of a "war of
conquest", which, although it deals a severe blow to his theory based on
'justice and humanity', was nevertheless waged wholly and solely in the
interest of civilisation? [...] The "independence" of a few Spanish
Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in some places
"justice" and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that
matter compared to facts of world-historic significance?' ['Democratic
Pan-Slavism', 365-66.]

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