Let me start with some explanations concerning the title of my paper.[1] There is a commonly shared opinion on the relation between the “founding fathers” of historical materialism and the nation. Shared by non- or anti-Marxists and by most Marxists alike, this claims that Marx and Engels have little to say on the subject. “Little” does not mean here quantitatively little, since it is acknowledged that their writings include lengthy discussions of those “national questions” that were of primary importance at their time – Poland, Italy, Ireland, German unity, the “Eastern question”, colonial expansion, to name just the most prominent ones. The claim is, rather, that, in all those texts, there is little, if anything, that is properly original and specific, that is, integrated to their broader theoretical framework.
A more emphatic version of this claim is that, even if we admit that Marx and Engels have something specific to say on the national phenomenon, they nevertheless miss the point. Their theory reduces the nation to a mere by-product of the development of productive forces. Following this economistic version of an allegedly Hegel-inspired philosophy of history, the emergence of nations is seen as an element of progress, both a result of and a stimulus for capitalist development. The nation appears thus as historically justified only to the extent that it serves this purpose. In other terms, only peoples and social formations displaying an endogenous capacity to access capitalist modernity are entitled to a distinct nation-state existence. The nation remains, however, a secondary aspect of the broader historical process, the motor of which is class struggle. According to this view, class and nation are two mutually exclusive realities in a zero-sum game. Marx, Engels and their followers opted for the primacy of class, hence their failure to capture the dynamics of the national phenomenon.
Whether we adopt the weak or the emphatic version of the argument, the nation appears as the blind spot in Marx and Engels’s theory, the source of a constant and serious trouble for those who tried to build on their intellectual and political legacy. Ultimately, we are told, the reason for this deficiency lies Marx and Engels’s internationalism. Based on the assumption of transnational interests that are common to the exploited classes, internationalism is indissociable from the primacy attributed to class conflict. It thus lies at the heart of their politics and their vision of history. From this follows, once again, the failure of Marxism as a political project, since modern history has shown that nations are a much stronger form of collective existence than class-based movements.
Four theses
I now want to challenge the commonly held position on Marx and Engels’s approach on the national question, as briefly sketched at the start of my talk by developing the following four theses:
- Marx and Engels do have a theory of the nation as a modern phenomenon, inherent to the worldwide expansion of a new mode of production, capitalism, and the emergence of “bourgeois society” – a concept to be analytically distinguished from “capitalism” as a mode of production although belonging to the same historical constellation.
- At the core of this theory lies the concept of the nation as the necessary framework through which the fundamental classes of modern society (first the bourgeoisie, then the proletariat) build up their capacity to lead a broad bloc of social forces to a higher level of historical existence – in Gramscian terms, to exercise their hegemony. The nation thus appears as the expression of the unity of politics and economics, of an enlarged vision of class struggle, within a revolutionary process oriented towards human emancipation.
- The internationalism of the exploited and oppressed groups was not understood by Marx and Engels as a negation of national realities but, rather, as a political struggle constitutive of a new, class-based, historical bloc which has to affirm its capacity to seize political power at a national level and thus kick-start a revolutionary process able to expand beyond its initial boundaries and challenge the world domination of capitalism.
- Marx and Engels’ vision of the nation is indeed, in its initial formulation (around the 1848 revolutionary moment), heavily loaded with Euro- and Western-centric biases, typical of the time and largely derived from the subjective position of its authors at the centre of the world’s major industrial and colonial empire. The evolution of Marx’s (and, to a more limited extent, Engels’s) views on colonialism and the multiple paths of development of European and Western societies led them to overcome to a significant degree (but not fully) those biases.
Thesis 1: The nation as a modern phenomenon
My main textual reference for these theses, with the exception of the last one, will be the Communist Manifesto.[2] The obvious reason is that the Manifesto is not simply a conjunctural piece of writing but a major theoretical text of the Marxian-Engelsian corpus, the first and possibly the only of that sort providing a comprehensive overview of their political thought at the eve of the 1848 revolutionary sequence.
Summed up schematically, the argument of this ultra-famous but often theoretically underestimated text, and particularly of its first part, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, is to assess the radical break in human history brought by the emergence of a new mode of production, dominated by capital and typical of modern bourgeois society. This social form opens up an unprecedented historical possibility, that of abolition of private property and, with it, the abolition of a class-divided society.
The major novelty of these new social relations lies in their unlimited expansive character. Contrary to all premodern forms of territorial expansion, which only scratched the surface of social relations, the era of capital ruthlessly destroys all previously existing forms of production. It is the first to be able to expand at a global level, and thus the first form of concrete universality to appear in human history. To quote a key passage:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations … In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.[3]
This is one side of the process. Before moving to its obverse side, let us underline the main points of this more complex than it might initially appear argument.
At first, the emphasis is put on the unifying dimension of the process of world capitalist expansion. “Cosmopolitanism” appears here as the characteristic of capital, and refers to its capacity to cross national boundaries, to constitute a world market, and radically reshape the social fabric of every national formation. However, if frontiers are relativised, they are not abolished. Affirming the universal interdependence of nations is not the same as saying that nations disappear. It means that they are integrated in the same temporality, and belong to the same world, a world created “after the image” of the bourgeois mode of production.
The reference to Goethe’s idea of “world literature” should not be misunderstood. For Goethe, Weltliteratur did not mean abandoning the national specificities of each corpus. On the contrary, by becoming accessible to all, each literature would be “appreciated for its distinctiveness and difference, for the instrumental colour it brings to the symphony of universal literature”, to quote S. Solomon Prawer,[4] the author of a classical study on the subject. “World literature” is not some kind of globalised Esperanto but the novel possibility of communication and interaction between languages and cultures.
The second point I will only briefly mention here, since I will return to it later. The process of capitalist expansion is explicitly considered as an expansion of civilisation, of “civilised” nations at the expense of the “barbarian” ones. In previously cited passage, the term civilisation is put at a distance (“what the bourgeoisie calls civilisation”) but, in all the rest of the text, it is used without quotation marks, and the same goes for its Other, the “barbarians”. The passage immediately following the previous one is telling:
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.[5]
“Civilisation” appears thus as the attribute the bourgeois, urbanised, Western world versus the nations of peasants, the colonies and the Eastern world, respectively assimilated to “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries”. The process of universalisation is clearly centred around one single civilisation, which is presented as the only one able to “rescue from the idiocy of rural life”. The peasantry as a social group, and, even more so, as a possible revolutionary force, is entirely absent from the Manifesto, which reduces it to a remnant of the premodern past. Needless to say, this vision will entail dramatic consequences for the way the national question is posed in those areas for Marx and Engels.
Thesis 2: The nation as the product of “bourgeois revolutions”
Let us now move to the second thesis: contrary to what is often said, the Manifesto does not restrict the dynamics of capitalist expansion to the unifying and homogenising effects of the mode of production. The development of this mode of production goes hand in hand with the development of a new class structure, more precisely with the rise of a new class, which draws its power from the market, colonial trade and the control over new productive forces. But, as Marx and Engels emphasise:
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class … the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.[6]
Clearly, the bourgeoisie needs the state, and this state, as explained in the Manifesto, has three characteristics: in its substance, it is class state, its executive branch assimilated to a “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”; in its form, it is the liberal, or the “modern representative State”, to be distinguished from the democratic state form, even in the limited sense of contemporary parliamentary democracy. Lastly, it also a centralised state, a state that unifies pre-existing local or regional entities and interests.
It is precisely at this point that its national character appears:
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.[7]
It is crucial here to distinguish the two dimensions of the process: the accumulation of capital needs a homogenised space, breaking with the feudal forms of fragmentation, a space which lays down the legal and economic conditions of accumulation: unified regulations, monetary circulation, an internal market itself connected to the world market. The creation of such a space is a pressing demand of the rising bourgeoisie in its internal struggle against the feudal conditions of production and the obstacles posed by the absolutist state. This internal struggle is also a struggle externally oriented against the bourgeoisies of other countries. For Marx and Engels, the cosmopolitan character of capitalist production is not accompanied by the rise of a global dominant class but, on the contrary, by relations of ruthless rivalry between competing bourgeoisies, each linked to a distinct national state. However, the rise the class interest of this new dominant group to a “national class-interest” – the combination of the terms is an indication of a more complex process, mediated by a series of political factors and historical events.
The key notion here is that of “bourgeois revolutions”, the models of which are the 17th-century English civil war and, even more so, the French Revolution, the matrix of all revolutionary events for the generation of Marx and Engels. As demonstrated by the French case, it is through a revolutionary process mobilising all the oppressed classes and groups of society that a particular class can win supremacy by presenting itself as its “general representative” and this is how the revolutionary nation, the nation as the outcome of such a revolutionary process, emerges. Let us quote at this point an extract from an earlier Marxian text, his 1844 Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – an article which can be considered as his first political manifesto:
No class of civil society can play this role [emancipating the whole of society] without arousing a moment of enthusiasm in itself and in the masses, a moment in which it fraternizes and merges with society in general, becomes confused with it and is perceived and acknowledged as its general representative, a moment in which its claims and rights are truly the claims and rights of society itself, a moment in which it is truly the social head and the social heart … For the revolution of a nation and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the estate of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class … so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation. For one estate to be par excellence the estate of liberation, another estate must conversely be the obvious estate of oppression. The negative general significance of the French nobility and the French clergy determined the positive general significance of the nearest neighbouring and opposed class of the bourgeoisie.[8]
In the course of bourgeois revolutions, such a moment of fraternity is both illusory and real. It is illusory because its final point is the coming of a new form of class domination, of a new particularism practically contradicting the universalist claims of the revolution. But it is also real, in the sense formulated by Marx in his 1843-1844 text On the Jewish Question: “Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward. True, it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order”.[9]
To mobilise around itself a broader spectrum of dominated social groups in the struggle against its adversaries, the bourgeoisie creates a space in which their presence as subaltern but constitutive, active components of the new social and political order is acknowledged. In this process, the dominated classes win material advantages (for instance, land in the case of the French peasantry), political rights (general male franchise) and, more broadly, they gain their political education as autonomous actors in the great stage of history.
Therefore, bourgeois revolutions, and their outcome, modern bourgeois society (in German the term bürgerliche means both “bourgeois” and “civil” society) and the modern nation, mean something more than the domination of new class or of a new mode of production. They are the starting point of process in which the active role of the popular masses is recognised and inscribed, albeit only within certain unsurpassable limits, in the material and institutional organisation of society. Their role is not restricted to a fleeting founding moment; it becomes a permanent characteristic of modern politics, which appear therefore as constitutively national. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels clearly see the autonomous movement of proletariat as the heir and continuator of this process, which it returns against its initiators:
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.[10]
Before examining in more detail the relation between the workers’ movement and the nation, let me situate briefly Marx and Engels in the contemporary debate on the relation between the state and the nation. This question usually boils down to a kind of chicken and egg dilemma on which of the two terms holds the primacy, that is, whether the (modern) state “makes” the nation or whether the second exists before the coming into existence of the first. I think that Marx and Engels’s position would be a sort of “third option” in the sense that that both dimensions are internally linked; in other terms, they constitute the two faces of a single process of “bourgeois revolutions”. The nation appears thus as the “constituent power”, the subjective side of the process: the “people” as the founding subject of a new political order, and the state as its institutionalised form, which of course, once stabilised, reshapes drastically the configuration of the national body politic.
This conception of the nation combines dialectically elements of historical necessity and of contingency. Nations are not natural, spontaneous or eternal, transhistorical, realities but neither are they arbitrary constructions. Their emergence draws from a whole range of pre-existing processes: economic, such as the development of capitalism; social, such as the rise of a new class structure; political, such as the centralising function of some premodern states; and cultural, such as the diffusion of certain languages. But these are just conditions for the emergence of the nation, they constitute the “prehistory of the nation”, to quote a formulation by Étienne Balibar.[11] The nation is not the spontaneous outcome of the development of capitalism – although we can find some formulations, particularly in Engels, suggesting such a teleological conception. However, the guiding line of their thinking on the nation is that it emerges in the process of construction of the hegemony of a new class, the bourgeoisie, and, for them, at least in the 1848 sequence, this process takes a revolutionary character. The anachronistic use of the term hegemony is here deliberate. It refers to the capacity of the bourgeoisie to establish itself as the general representative of the nation, as the class leading society to a new and higher form of historical existence, and this key notion is clearly developed by Marx and Engels through the notion of leadership attributed to a social actor emerging as the fundamental class of a new mode of production.
This conception of course raises the question of what is happening when the bourgeoisie does not play that role, which is precisely what happened in their own country, Germany. This is how Marx analyses the attitude of the German bourgeoisie in the 1848 revolution in his famous Neue Rheinische Zeitung article “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution”:
The revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not English and French revolutions, they were revolutions in the European fashion. They did not represent the victory of a particular social class over the old political system; they proclaimed the political system of the new European society. The bourgeoisie was victorious in these revolutions, but the victory of the bourgeoisie was at that time the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal ownership, of nationality over provincialism …
Unlike the French bourgeoisie of 1789, the Prussian bourgeoisie, when it confronted monarchy and aristocracy, the representatives of the old society, was not a class speaking for the whole of modern society. It had been reduced to a kind of estate (Stand) as clearly distinct from the Crown as it was from the people, with a strong bend to oppose both adversaries and irresolute towards each of them individually because it always saw both of them either in front of it or behind it.[12]
Germany did not follow the French, or even the English road, and its unification as a nation happened much later in the 19th century though of Bismarck’s “iron and blood” policy. This opens up the question of the Sonderweg, the specificity of Germany’s political development compared to that of the other great European powers.[13] But the same could be said more generally about all major capitalist countries where the mode of production rose without going through some bourgeois revolution, for instance Meiji Japan or pre-1917 Russia. At this point, I leave open the question of how much this makes the Marxian and Engelsian conception of the revolutionary nation obsolete. What it clear, however, is that what Marx and Engels considered as the “normal” road to nation-formation ultimately proved to be rather exceptional. Or perhaps it was just one possibility among others, indicating that no single national path should be considered as the norm. As for the French revolutionary road, it was followed where Marx and Engels expected the least to happen, that is in the peripheries of Europe and in the colonial world, where struggles for national liberation and independence can legitimately be considered as standing for bourgeois-democratic revolutions.
Thesis 3: On working-class internationalism as a political strategy
Internationalism as an idea (since the term itself does not appear before the 1870s) is not specific to Marx and Engels’s political thinking, or even to the socialist and communist movement. In the 19th century, the vast majority of revolutionary democrats and of the workers’ movement shared some kind of internationalist vision, essentially based on moral values: fraternity between peoples, a common love for freedom, the rejection of national oppression. That internationalism should be distinguished from 18th century “cosmopolitanism” since it recognises the nation as a necessary mediation between the citizenry and the universalist horizon of a human species unified by those values. Marx and Engels’s conception of internationalism innovates in two aspects: first, their internationalism is not dictated by a moral ideal but conceived as a necessary dimension of the struggle to overthrow capitalism, a struggle in which the role of the working class is central. In the course of this struggle, the working class has to become itself the nation in the sense of becoming the leading class, the general representative of society overcoming the limited and contradictory character of emancipation brought by the bourgeois revolutions. Secondly, their vision of international politics is based on a realist vision of interstate relations seen from the perspective of a revolution which, as we will see in a moment, cannot remain confined within national borders.
I will focus here on the first aspect, that is, on the specificity of working-class internationalism and its relation to the national role of the working class. The first and fundamental point to be made is that this internationalism is the necessary response to the cosmopolitan character of capitalism. In a world unified by this mode of production, a claim that was of course a bold anticipation at the time the Manifesto was written, there is a fundamental common interest among the new exploited class, which is to overthrow this system. Therefore, the unity of this class beyond national borders is necessary to defeat a system which is itself irresistibly expanding at a global scale.
For Marx and Engels, this point is of paramount importance. In the Communist Manifesto they raise it to the first point which distinguishes the communists from the other currents of the workers’ movement: “In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they [the communists] point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality”.[14]
Nevertheless, as clarified in the first part of the sentence, the struggle of the proletarians remains a “national struggle” since their class adversary, the bourgeoisie, is organised at that level, and its strategic aim is to seize control of the nation-state. A strategic consequence follows from this: the terrain of class struggle, and of its climactic moment, the conquest of political power, remains national although, from the standpoint of the proletariat, the interest at stake goes beyond national borders. This idea is formulated in the Manifesto as follows: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie”.[15]
The importance of this statement appears more clearly if we take into account that it represents a major revision of the position formulated by Engels in the text which served as a draft for the Manifesto within the ranks of the League of Communists, the Principles of Communism. In that text, written in the form of Q and A, Engels answers negatively the question of the possibility of a communist revolution taking place in one country. He goes on as follows:
By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others … It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries … It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.[16]
This position leads quite logically to another one, claiming that that nationalities will cease to exist as such under communism. Here, Engels leaves unchanged a formulation of another preceding draft of the Manifesto entitled Communist Profession of Faith:
The nationalities of the peoples who join together according to the principle of community will be just as much compelled by this union to merge with one another and thereby supersede themselves as the various differences between estates and classes disappear through the superseding of their basis – private property.[17]
The Manifesto, most likely at Marx’s initiative, marks a clear break with this kind cosmopolitan idealism. Its references to the relation of the workers and their struggle to the nation are well-known but usually quoted only in a fragmentary way.
It is therefore worth looking at the full passage:
The working men have no fatherland [Vaterland]. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation [sich zur nationalen Klasse erheben: rise to the level of national class], must constitute itself as nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National separations [Absonderungen] and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owingto the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, touniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.[18]
Let us start with the first sentence: “The working men have no fatherland [Vaterland]. We cannot take from them what they have not got.” It is often quoted to prove the alleged rejection of any positive reference to the nation by Marx and Engels. But, if we accept this reading, then the following sentence, explicitly calling the proletariat to become the nation and even the leading class of the nation, looks incomprehensible. How can we explain this apparent gap? Let us start with the term Vaterland. Its usage was anything but anodyne or neutral in the 1848 context. In the whole period between the anti-Napoleonic wars and 1848 it was waved as the banner of the reactionary current of German nationalism. As stressed by Erica Benner, at the time, Vaterland had “already [become] a shibboleth of both conservatives and Romantics” who “show[ed] a preference for [this] good Germanic [word] whenever [it] could fill in for the Latin-derived ‘nation’ or ‘patria’”, two key-notions of the discourse of the French Revolution.[19] Its usage by any democratic and socialist force had become impossible.
However, putting this reference aside, we are still left with the puzzling next sentence: “We cannot take from them [from the proletarians] what they have not got.” The idea here points to a previous passage of the Manifesto, where it is fully developed:
In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.[20]
The same idea is to be found in many of the writings of Marx and Engels of the previous years: the proletariat is seen as a force wholly external to bourgeois society. It appears both as the living negation of the material foundation of bourgeois society, private property, but also as immune to the whole bourgeois ideology, law morality, religion, national character, assimilated to “as many bourgeois prejudices”. Needless to say, this is a blatantly idealised image of the proletariat, presented as spontaneously revolutionary, or at least entirely ready to adopt a revolutionary position. This view will be contradicted by the developments of the 1848 revolutions, in which the attitudes of the workers will vary considerably from one moment or place and country to another. Confronted to the reality of the workers’ movement in post-1848 Europe, Marx and Engels will have to revise drastically their vision of the revolutionary subject.
Notwithstanding the uncertainty of its status, the fact remains that the Manifesto explicitly states that, to become a protagonist in class struggle, the proletariat needs to constitute itself as the nation. Winning political supremacy, that is, seizing state power, implies becoming the leading class of the nation, thus occupying the place held by the bourgeoisie during the French and English revolutions. Marx and Engels will stick to this idea in their later interventions, particularly during the moments of revolutionary uprising.
Let me just refer to two cases. In June 1848, as soon as the news of the bloody suppression of the revolt of Parisian workers reach Germany, Marx writes in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:
The momentary triumph of brute force has been purchased with the destruction of all the delusions and illusions of the February revolution, the dissolution of the entire moderate republican party and the division of the French nation into two nations, the nation of property-owners and the nation of workers.[21]
So, the climactic moment of a revolutionary break, that is civil war, is not seen simply as the end of nation but rather as its limit case. The nation undergoes an internal split into two antagonistic camps, each one claiming to be the “real nation”. Marx will reiterate this position in the Civil War in France, commenting on the Paris Commune, which as we know started as patriotic uprising of the Parisian workers against a government leading the country to defeat and capitulation in the war against Prussia. In a single sentence, he will combine the “truly national” character of the commune, as the “true representative” of the French nation facing the parasites and exploiters regrouped in Versailles, and its class and internationalist dimension:
If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men’s government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labour, emphatically international. Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world.[22]
As suggested before, we find here emerging in Marx and Engels the notion of hegemony later developed by the Russian Marxists and systematised by Gramsci.[23] However, there remains an internal tension in the Manifesto between, one the hand, a proletariat allegedly denationalised by the sheer movement of world capitalist expansion, and, on the other, the nationalisation of this class, seen as the necessary step towards the conquest of leadership and of political power.
To clarify somewhat the issue, let us go back one last time to the previously quoted key passage of the Manifesto: two further ideas are developed. The first reiterates the meaning of internationalism: it is the united action of the proletariat made both possible and necessary by the world expansion of capitalism and its homogenising effects at the economic level. Its goal is not the abolition of nations, or of nationalities, but, more realistically, the abolition of the sources of conflict or hostility between nations. We could object that even this vision looks excessively optimistic since it appears as a simple acceleration of an already ongoing process: the political supremacy of the proletariat, it is said, “will cause them [national separations and antagonisms] to vanish still faster”. But the two final sentences bring a rectification: for this to happen, it is necessary to bring an end to the exploitation of one nation by another. And this, in its turn, presupposes the end of the exploitation of one individual by another and it will go ahead only “in proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes”.[24]
It has to be underlined that Marx and Engels see the exploitation of one nation by another and class exploitation as going hand in hand. However, and this is also valid in their later work, they did not develop a proper theory of the first type of exploitation, whereas they provided an original and systematic theory for the second. As is well-known, in Capital, Marx left unfinished the parts on the world market and on the world trade. This left a huge gap, which the Marxist followers tried to fill with the theories of imperialism, of unequal exchange or of “absolute productive advantage”.[25]
Secondly, if we follow the strategic implications of this passage, the centre of gravity of the movement leading to the end of “the exploitation of some nations by others” lies in the so-called “civilised” countries, since it is only there, and not in the exploited nations themselves, that the revolutionary action of the working class can take place.
The consequence of this position becomes clear in the position developed by Marx is his support of a national cause that was dear to him, and to Engels, as it was for all the socialists and revolutionary democrats of their time, the cause of Poland. In his 1847 speech at a meeting of solidarity with the Polish people held in London, Marx addressed a mainly English audience of supporters of Chartism in these terms:
Of all countries, England is the one where the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is 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.[26]
We see here how Marx mixes up two quite different positions: at first, the realistic and theoretically grounded insistence on the primacy of the national form of the workers’ struggle if moralising impotence is to be avoided: the first task of any internationalist is to defeat the enemy within their own country. But he adds to this something much more problematic: because of the central position of England in the world capitalist economy, the liberation of Poland has to pass first through London, not Warsaw.
Thesis 4: On the limitations of Marx and Engels’s approach of the nation and of internationalism
This brings us to the crucial point: the Euro- and Western-centric vision of the world heavily loading the writings Marx and Engels on the nation and the international action of the working class. What Marx and, even more so, Engels saw as valid for Ireland and Poland, that is, the task of national liberation, was not valid for Mexico, Eastern Europe and the colonised world, at least not in the texts of the 1840s. Western European “great nations” (old ones, such as France or England, or ones in the process of unification, such as Germany or Italy) are seen as the model for viable state entities, thus introducing a normative bias in the analysis of the processes of national emergence. In some articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 1848-49, Engels developed at length considerations on the Eastern European “peoples without history” (geschichtslose Völker), such as the Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, etc., which he considered as by nature counterrevolutionary. In these texts we can find essentialised formulations and others indicating the elimination of these peoples, as distinct collective entities, as a desirable outcome for the progress of “civilisation” and of the revolutionary cause in Europe. The Ukrainian heterodox Marxist scholar Roman Rosdolsky has written the definitive study of this dark side of Marx’s lifelong companion.[27]
Certainly, Engels’s highly derogatory and aggressive writings on Slavic peoples (except the Poles), among whom he also listed the Greeks, as did Marx,[28] are dictated by his despair following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, a defeat to which the emerging national movements of some of these peoples also contributed. But the problem goes deeper: Marx and Engels’s refusal to explore the possibility of an equivalent of bourgeois revolutions in the Eastern Europe cannot be understood without taking into account the extent to which they have accepted the dividing line between “East” and “West” as one separating “civilisation” from “barbarism” or “semi-barbarism”, to use one of their favourite terms. This also explains their somewhat pathological Russophobia and their firm belief that behind every national aspiration of the Slavs lies the hand of the tsar, as if these peoples, being without history, were also deprived of any capacity for autonomous action. There is little originality at stake here: Marx and Engels recycle widespread cultural stereotypes and discursive patterns of their time. This is, ultimately, why they thought that sacrificing the national aspirations of these people was an acceptable, and even a necessary, position to be held by West European revolutionaries.
The late Engels expressed his views clearly in a February 1882 letter to Eduard Bernstein:
We must co-operate in the work of setting the West European proletariat free and subordinate everything else to that goal. No matter how interesting the Balkan Slavs, etc., might be, the moment their desire for liberation clashes with the interests of the proletariat they can go hang themselves for all I care … Surely you [Balkan Slavs] can have as much patience as the European proletariat. When they have liberated themselves, you will automatically be free; but till then, we shall not allow you to put a spoke in the wheel of the militant proletariat. The same applies to the Slavs. The victory of the proletariat will liberate them in reality and of necessity and not, like the Tsar, apparently and temporarily. And that’s why they, who have hitherto not only failed to contribute anything to Europe and European progress, but have actually retarded it, should have at least as much patience as our proletarians.[29]
There is, however, a case that deserves a particular discussion due to its role in the evolution of Marx and Engels’s thought on the national question.[30] It is Ireland, the prototype of a colonial situation within Europe, just next to the main imperial centre of the time, Britain. Contrary to Eastern Europe, Marx undertook, with Engels, an in-depth study of the history of the island, and in particular of the agrarian and land question. He understood that such a study was necessary to analyse the interweaving of the national struggle and class relations. He then arrived at a new position, to which he managed, at the cost of often stormy debates, to gradually rally the majority of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA, eventually known as “the First International”).
This new position can be stated as follows: in the oppressed nation, the struggle for independence cannot be dissociated from social revolution. In Ireland, this operation is “a hundred times easier”, says Marx in a March 1870 memorandum sent on behalf of the General Council of the IWMA to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland, and eventually to the Committee of the German Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, because “the economic struggle there is concentrated there exclusively on landed property, because this struggle is at the same time national, and because the people are more revolutionary and more exasperated than in England”.[31] In the oppressed nation, the exploiter is simultaneously the colonial oppressor, whose economic and moral function is to “represent the domination of England over Ireland”.[32] This is why the question of land is they key for the Irish struggle and its solution amounts to a radical transformation of the class structure of the colonised society. It means concretely the elimination of the class of big landowners and the comprador strata whose existence depend on the persistence of the colonial bond with Britain. In a letter to German members of the IMWA based in the United States Marx writes: “in Ireland the land question has been up to now the exclusive form of the social question because it is a question of existence, of life and death, for the immense majority of the Irish people, and because it is at the same time inseparable from the national question”.[33] In a colonial situation, there is no “social question” separated from the “national question” which is also why the struggle for national liberation takes the form of a social revolution – albeit not necessarily (or straightforwardly) socialist since it takes place in the countryside. In the same letter, Marx talks of the inevitability of an “agrarian revolution … if the English army and police withdrew from Ireland tomorrow”.[34]
The novel and decisive point that emerges from these elaborations is that the national liberation of an oppressed people can only come from its own action, and not from a prior victory of the working class of the dominant nation as Marx and Engels previously thought. The order is now reversed: as stated in the same document of the IWMA, written by Marx, the task is to “transform the present forced Union – i.e., the enslavement of Ireland – into equal and free confederation if possible, into complete separation if need be” is “the precondition to the emancipation of the English working class”.[35]
In a letter to Engels in December 1869, Marx is even more explicit about his own evolution:
For a long time I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy … Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.[36]
The reason for this shift is thus twofold: on the one hand, the liberation of the oppressed people undermines the economic, political, military and ideological base of the ruling class in the metropolis, while, on the other, only unequivocal support for the struggle of the oppressed nation can end the internal division of the British proletariat between Irish immigrants and English workers, a “split [which] is the real secret of the maintenance of its [the English landlords’ and bourgeoisie’s] power”. It is in the above-mentioned circular of the International that the famous formulation “the people who subjugate another people forge their own chains” appears. But this principle is no longer based on a moral norm but on a strategic vision of class struggle: “The lever must be applied in Ireland” radically reformulates the conception of revolutionary political strategy to be followed in the colonial metropolis. The internal split and ideological subordination of the working class of the imperial centre have to be broken for a revolutionary perspective to emerge and the “lever” to fulfil this task is in the hands of the oppressed people in the colony. We have here the first glimpse of an international(ist) process articulating the intensification of class struggle in the imperial centre(s) with the struggle for national liberation in the periphery, a struggle in which the colonised people and, within it, the peasantry appear as the decisive protagonist.
Conclusion
Marx and Engels’ thinking on the national question and on the meaning of internationalism underwent a significant evolution significantly as a result of their confrontation with the international situation and of their intervention in the workers’ movement. Gradually, an enlarged conception of the nation and of internationalism emerges, which (particularly in the case of Marx) leads to distance themselves from the European and Western-centric schemas. Social revolution, internationalist commitment and the struggle for national liberation need to be thought as distinct but always-already intertwined struggles. They are integral components of a multifaceted revolutionary process directed against the fundamental relations of coercion and exploitation which constitute the capitalist system as a whole. Although analytically distinct, these relations do not exist, in the concrete historical totality, separately from each other. They constitute a “complex whole [that] has the unity of a structure articulated in dominance”, to borrow a famous formulation by Louis Althusser.[37]
This is why, as we have seen with the case of Ireland, the struggle for national emancipation is itself a form of social revolution, although not directly a socialist one, and a revolution whose main actor is the peasantry. But this struggle appears also as the precondition for overcoming the divide created by colonial ideology and racism within the working class of the dominant nation, and thus for autonomous class politics within it. It is from an anti-colonial uprising in Ireland that Marx expects the decisive impulse that would allow the radicalisation of an English working class largely subordinated politically to bourgeois liberalism: “After studying the Irish question for years I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the ruling classes in England (and this is decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world) cannot be struck in England, but only in Ireland”.[38]
The strategic implications of this position for the struggle of the subaltern classes are decisive. The national question and class internationalism are neither disconnected variables nor a zero-sum game. An internationalism that does not take into account the national dimension, and, more particularly the fundamental distinction between dominant nation and oppressed nation, is doomed to remain politically impotent. It can even to turn into its opposite, by repressing the reality of the oppression exercised by the oppressor nation, as we have seen happening so many times in the workers’ movement of the great colonial and imperial powers.
But we must go even further and draw the ultimate conclusion: any victorious struggle against the domination of capital is irreducible to a moment of “pure” class antagonism. It is, rather, to use once again a category elaborated by Althusser, a struggle for the fusion of the contradictions which overdetermine class antagonism: national oppression, to which we must add other forms, such as racial oppression which is directly linked to colonial realities and their enduring consequences. Such a fusion requires a hegemonic strategy capable of rising the subaltern classes to the position of leading society, of “becoming nation” themselves. It is only by fully taking over this task that they can also play oppose the internationalism of capital and build forms of coordinated action at an international level.
At a moment when the contradictions of a system leading humanity to its ruin are being exacerbated, I think it is fair to say that such a position provides food for thought for all those who are striving to rebuild a revolutionary perspective adequate for our times.
References
Althusser, L. (1965/2005). For Marx. London & New York: Verso.
Anderson, K. (2016). Marx at the margins: On nationalism, ethnicity, and non-western societies. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Anderson, P. (2017). The H word: The peripeteia of hegemony. London & New York: Verso.
Amin, S. (2010). The law of worldwide value (2d ed.). New York: Monthly Review Press.
Balibar, É. & Wallerstein, I (1991). Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities. London & New York: Verso.
Benner, E. (1995/2018). Really existing nationalisms: A post-communist view from Marx and Engels. London & New York: Verso.
Blackbourn, D. & Eley, G.(1984). The peculiarities of German history: Bourgeois society and politics in nineteenth-century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ganguli, B. N. (1965). Marx’s theory of trade policy. Economic and Political Weekly, 17(5–7), 217-224.
Kondylis, P. (1985). Καρλ Μαρξ, Φρίντριχ Ενγκελς: Η Ελλάδα, η Τουρκία και το Ανατολικό Ζήτημα [Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Greece, Turkey and the Eastern Question], Athens: Gnossi.
Lenin, V. I. (1916/1964). Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism (1916). In V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Vol. 22) (pp. 185-303). Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Prawer, S. S. (1976/2011), Karl Marx and world literature (2d ed.). London & New York: Verso.
Rosdolsky, R. (1987). Engels and the “nonhistoric” peoples: The national question in the revolution of 1848. Glasgow: Critique.
Shaikh, A. (1979). “Foreign trade and the law of value”, part I. Science & Society, 43 (3), 281-302.
Shaikh, A. (1980). “Foreign trade and the law of value”, part II. Science & Society, 44 (1), 27-57.
[1] This is an edited version of a talk I gave in Athens on May 5 2023 at the “Politics of Liberation” seminar series organized by George Souvlis and Rosa Vassilaki hosted at the Athens Office of the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation. Many thanks to George and Rosa for their help.
[2] This text, as well as all other texts by Marx and Engels, will be quoted according to the Marx Engels Collected Works, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975-2004), henceforth mentioned as MECW, followed by volume and page number.
[3] MECW 6, p. 488.
[4] Prawer 1976/2011.
[5] MECW 6, p. 488.
[6] MECW 6, p. 488.
[7] MECW 6, pp. 488-489.
[8] MECW 3, pp. 184-185.
[9] MECW 3, p. 155.
[10] MECW 6, p. 493.
[11] Balibar & Wallerstein 1991, p. 88.
[12] MECW 8, p. 162.
[13] On this debate, see Blackbourn and Eley 1984.
[14] MECW 6, p. 497.
[15] MECW 6, p. 495.
[16] MECW 6, pp. 351-352.
[17] MECW 6, p. 103.
[18] MECW 6, pp. 502-503; translation modified.
[19] Benner 1995/2018, p. 20.
[20] MECW 6, pp. 494-495.
[21] MECW 7, p. 144.
[22] MECW 22 p. 338.
[23] Anderson 2017.
[24] MECW 6, pp. 502-503.
[25] Amin 2010; Ganguli 1965; Lenin 1916/1964; Shaikh 1979; Shaikh 1980.
[26] MECW 6, p. 389.
[27] Rosdolsky 1987.
[28] Kondylis 1985.
[29] MECW 46, p. 205.
[30] For a broader discussion of the issue the indispensable reference is Anderson 2016.
[31] MECW 21, p. 119.
[32] MECW 21, p. 120.
[33] MECW 43, p. 474.
[34] MECW 43, p. 474.
[35] MECW 21, p. 121.
[36] MECW 43, p. 398.
[37] Althusser 1965/2005, p. 202.
[38] MECW 43, p. 473.
