[Marxism] Re: Marx, Engels and the National Question

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My simple point was that if you look at the work of Marx and Engels in
order to extract a common approach to the national question what you
find is that they were inconsistent. The best of their material is that
which takes account of the corrupting effect of national oppression in
the oppressor nation - the (paraphrasing) 'a nation that oppresses
another can never be free' position. This position is that which
appreciates, in a way sufficiently complex to grasp the phenomenon's
actual complex reality, as I said in my original note, the 'nature of
the interpenetration of national states - and [...] the complex
interplay between the spheres of the social and the political'.

But in both Marx and Engels you also find material which seems to see
the world as a simple set of discrete nations, discrete social and
political units, each following their own path of historical
development. Hence the non-historic peoples stuff, the earlier Ireland
stuff, the Mexico stuff.

Now I've for a long time been of the opinion that one cannot talk about
the position of 'Marx and Engels on the national question', or 'Lenin's
position on the national question', or Trotsky's, or even Stalin's for
that matter, as if the 'national question' was a question which didn't
impinge on other 'questions'. No: what Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin,
Stalin, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all said about the national question
they said as a consequence and function of the way the conceived of the
world in general and how it worked. The shifts in, for example, Lenin's
positions on the national question - and they are indeed real and
significant - occur as a consequence of the way in which he modified his
overall thinking in a general manner: concretely, as a consequence of
the shock effected on his thinking brought about by the collapse of the
Second International in general and the German SPD in particular, and,
again, by the experience of soviet power.

Thus too with Marx and Engels: the tension in their thinking is not a
question of an inconsistency with regard to their 'theory of the
nation': they didn't have a 'theory of the nation' like they didn't have
a 'theory' of anything else - they strove to an understanding of how the
world worked, and the inconsistencies in this last reflect themselves in
how they looked at matters national as much as they looked at matters in
general, in the overall context of what they did and why they wanted to
do it.

Just as the world doesn't consist in a simple co-existence of discrete
categories, Marx and Engels (and the long etcetera) didn't pigeon-hole
their thinking into 'questions': I use the term 'national question'
because that is the current and commonly-accepted vocabulary, but that
doesn't mean that I accept that there is a national 'question' - I would
say rather that in human affairs there is a national aspect, a national
dimension, which pertains the spheres of the political and the
ideological far more than it does to deeper structures composed of
social relations, while at the same time reflecting a real disjunction
between real essence and real appearance.

Further: that the really existing 'inconsistencies' of Marx and Engels
on this dimension of human affairs - and I insist that they are both
real and inconsistent - display themselves (1) in relation to the
national question in 1848-9 and (2) in relation to Ireland, are simply
contingent on where they happened to be at the time. Marx's shifting
positions (and I really defy anyone to convince me that they were not
shifting) on Ireland were precisely not a consequence of a deepening of
his and Engels' understanding of Ireland but precisely predicated on a
deeper understanding of *England* (i.e. Britain). (Phil was absolutely
spot on in his post on this.)

I too take Lüko's point regarding the reflection of the contradiction in
reality reflecting itself in the contradiction in thought; but by the
same token I would also say that the simple reflection of the
contradiction in reality in thought indicates an absence of a *full*
theoretical appropriation of the contradiction itself: that the function
of theory is not to *replicate* the actual contradiction but to
*explain* it (and the participants in the recent discussion on the list
about religion should bear this in mind too). Capital, for example, is
the long book that it is for precisely this reason. What Lüko's
absolutely correct formulation leads to is not that Marx and Engels were
not inconsistent but precisely why they both would and could be.
'Recognizing the unity of difference and identity [...]' is a valid
proposition only insofar as we at the same time recognise the *absolute*
distinction between reality and its theoretical assimilation.

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