[Marxism] Jim Blaut on Tom Nairn

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(This is chapter 3 of Jim Blaut's "The National Question", an
out-of-print Zed Book that I will be scanning in over the next few
weeks. For newcomers to Marxmail, Jim was a valued contributor to
Marxmail until his death at the age of 71 from pancreatic cancer four
years ago. I have created an archive of his online articles at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/blaut)

3. Diffusionism and the National Question
'The theory of nationalism represents Marxism's great historical
failure.' With this stern indictment, Tom Nairn begins his essay 'The
Modern Janus', an essay designed to explain this failure (which was
'inevitable', he says, but 'can now be understood') and to provide us at
last with a truly adequate theory of nationalism.1 But the essay itself
is a failure. The theory of nationalism which it attacks has not been
widely held by Marxists since 1914. And Nairn's theory is anything but
adequate. It is an attempt to construct a Marxist version of what is
today the typical mainstream position: national struggles are not class
struggles but are effects of an autonomous ideological force,
nationalism, which diffused from Europe to the darker corners of the
earth.2 Nairn's theory is diffusionist and idealist. But it has become
very influential as a Marxist theory of nationalism, and as a theory
which explains Third World liberation movements in terms of the ideology
of diffusing capitalism (mislabelled 'uneven development'). For these
reasons it warrants a detailed critique. The critique can also be
generalized to most other theories of nationalism as an autonomous
ideological force. And, as I will suggest in the concluding section of
this chapter, it raises questions about a peculiarly elitist sector of
neo-Marxist thought.

'The task of a theory of nationalism', according to Nairn, is 'to see
the phenomenon as a whole'.3 Everything should be seen as a whole, of
course, looked at from all points of view, and so on, but Nairn means to
be taken literally. Nationalism for him is a whole phenomenon, a
discrete process, a separate and autonomous force in history. Like the
two-faced Roman god Janus, it has two aspects, one progressive and one
reactionary, but these are merely facets of a single indivisible entity.
This entity, nationalism, is not a form or part of class struggle nor
even an outcome of class struggle, and viewing it as such has been the
undoing of the Marxist theory of nationalism, the reason why it is
'Marxism's great historical failure' .4 Marxism, says Nairn quite
correctly, remains wedded to the view that class struggle is the motor
of history. Not so. says Nairn. Nationalism does not emerge from class
struggle: it is an autonomous force. Nationalism and class struggle have
jointly fashioned the modern world and. of the two. nationalism has been
the more important factor. It has been, says Nairn, 'the dominant
contradiction'.5

Class struggle is also, as it happens, two-sided (or, if you prefer,
Janus-faced); and we can usually tell roughly who are the exploiters and
who the exploited. But for Nairn the two faces of nationalism have
nothing much to do with exploitation or contending classes. One face
points forwards to an ill-defined sort of'liberation', something
consisting mainly in freedom from 'domination'. The other points
backwards to fascism.

Fascism, says Nairn, is one of the two faces of Janus. Nationalism is a
single, whole phenomenon, and fascism is part of its very nature.
Fascism is in fact the 'archetype' of nationalism.6 It is 'a central
sector of the phenomenon'.7 It is therefore in some sense present in
every national movement, every liberation struggle. It is literally part
of the struggle.

No Vietnamese, Cuban, or indeed anyone else who has fought in or
supported a national liberation struggle is likely to take kindly to a
theory which brackets such struggles with Nazism and fascism, and which
moreover insists that the class enemy is not the political enemy unless
it is so by accident. And few Marxists anywhere will take kindly to a
theory which relegates class struggle to a secondary role, which denies,
as Nairn's does, that class struggle is the motor of historical change.
Still, views of this sort are common in various sectors of progressive
thought, even in certain corners of Marxist thought - in the advanced
capitalist countries if nowhere else - and they cannot be dismissed out
of hand and without comment. Nairn in fact defends his view with a
reasoned, though faulty, argument, and it is important to examine that
argument and refute it. I will try to do so in the following pages. Most
of the attention will be devoted to the essay 'The Modern Janus'. This
essay later reappeared as a chapter in Nairn's book TheBreak-Up of
Britain, where it supplied theoretical ammunition for an argument to the
effects that nationalist forces in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland
(among Protestants) are rising to success: are breaking up Britain.8
Some of our attention will also be devoted to other chapters of Nairn's
book, not for the purpose of commenting on the national question in any
part of the British Isles - that is not our concern in the present book
- but because Nairn's theoretical position is elaborated in various
parts of The Break-Up of Britain.

full: http://www.marxmail.org/BlautChapter3.htm

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