Comrade Marxist Bro
19th July 2010, 12:30
The idea of Marx or Engels hating some particular group of people isn't one you often hear about, but some right-wingers do take advantage of any opportunity to throw mud at significant communists, fair or not. (We'll probably be seeing more of it, since many Western rightists have recently repudiated their own open racism not too long ago.)
Of course, all that goes hand-in-hand with fully ignoring the context in which Marx and Engels actually lived -- for instance, someone will point out that Marx employed the word "Nigger" at a time when most Europeans used it to refer to blacks, and ignore the fact that he jokingly used the word as a pet name for his son-law Paul Lafargue, who was part black and had gotten his permission to marry his daughter Laura. (How many racial-bigot fathers do stuff like that?)
I really don't think there is anything hateful toward Croats in those two Engels articles, both written in the 1848-49 period, a time when revolutions broke out all across Europe -- and when the Croat nationalists took the side of the Austrians against the revolution in Hungary. Although he was opposed to pan-Slavism and the independence struggles of the southern Slavs going on at the time.
Whereas Lenin created an important alliance between socialism and the various national liberation movements opposed to imperialism in the 1900s, what Marx and Engels simply polemicized in favor of during their time was the worldwide class struggles of the proletariat over and above any national or ethnic concerns regarding political independence; nevertheless, they both gave their full support to whatever national movements they saw as progressive, or simply not as reactionary than the alternative: i.e., the Irish, the Hungarians, and the Poles. The Poles were sworn opponents of the autocratic monarchy of the Russian Empire, the most despotic European government at that point in history; the other Slavs were rather sympathetic to Russia and were thus seen as a potential danger in a future European balance of power.
Your post happened to remind me of the chapter on Marxism and the national question from Russian Marxist writer Boris Kagarlitsky's 2000 book Marxism: Not Recommended for Education, which actually goes into this at some length, so I translated a bit to put up in this thread. (I'm not a professional translator, but do happen to be fluent.)
It's long, so I cut some other sections of the chapter out of the text here. Since that's kind of long as well, I highlighted the most direct parts of the remainder of it in bold-face font:
The concept of a ‘nation’ came into being in the 19th century. Starting from the end of the 19th century, school textbooks and official scholarly works began presenting their readers with a more or less developed theory on the formation of the modern states, supposedly first brought into existence according their already pre-existence status as nations.
So it came to seem that the Polish state came into existence due to the unification of the tribes of Poles; the Russian state, thanks to the joining together of the Russian tribes; the German state, due to the mutual efforts of the German people.
The existence of the nation thus apparently preceded the formation of the state, albeit in some hidden form, as some inward peculiarity, some sort of organic unity of its people – which the coming into being of the state would only make officially recognized.
This view of nations and states was worked out by the Romantic tradition in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, when, on the one side, the dynastic basis for a monarchic form of government had been shaken by revolution, and, on the other side, wars of liberation against the French occupiers had led to the accretion of nationalist feeling. The state thus came to need a new basis for its legitimacy. If it had earlier maintained this legitimacy according to the notion of the Divine Right of royal dynasties, it now came to secure this legitimacy as the embodiment of some national sentiment.
It would be correct, nonetheless, to admit that the new ideology, developed by the European intellectuals and political elites, was a potential danger to the system of European states already existing at the time. As it spread through the principal European nationalities of the time – the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Spanish, the Swedes – it also inspired the numerous little and medium-sized peoples, which until then had historically had neither their own statehood nor their own independent being (e.g., the Slovaks, the Finns, the Ukrainians, the Catalonians, the Irish, the Basques, and so forth). If every state is delineated by its own national group, it then follows that every national group should seek to acquire its own state, for only in such a state can it maximally realize its own possibilities.
Two of the larger Slavic groups of Europe – the Czechs and the Poles – neither possessing its own state at the time, thus received a powerful ideological impulse to bring one into being. On the other hand, neither the [formerly existing] medieval Bohemia nor the Rzeczpospolita had been Czech or Polish national states, respectively. Taken retrospectively, however, the Rzeczpospolita’s history was now received as a period of Polish history, while Bohemia’s as that of the Czechs.
Finally, and in a later period, this national self-consciousness was imported into the colonized territories. To take one example, India, which had never had either a single common language nor any common system of government, and whose population had always been divided into various separate ethnic groups, began to feel itself a single nation under the British yoke. It should be said that Karl Marx had foreseen this turn in works concerning the British dominance of India. It’s easy to see that the development of national self-consciousness in Europe’s colonies led to the struggles of national liberation.
In this manner, all of the European states in which the Romantic conception of the nation was born would finally come to be opposed by it. Each of the great powers of the 19th century – France, Britain, Russia, Austria, and Sweden – would come to suffer a 20th century collapse differing only in the extent of such a collapse. Germany and Italy, for whom the Romantic national ideology served as the banner of national unity, would live through the catastrophic period of fascism.
Yet the Romantic idea of the nation, though paradoxically adopted by all, offers no more than a vague outline of what the nation is. Because the idea of “the nation” appears in this theory to be entirely mythical, it presupposes a certain intuitive understanding in which a national community receives a mystical, ahistorical, and asocial depiction. Each time that those examining come to attempt a concrete formulation, the problems appear.
When Lenin, then living in emigration in Austria-Hungary, sent the “remarkable Georgian” Stalin to Vienna to have him author a work on the national question, he was effectively subjecting him to a serious tribulation. Stalin was not only a person with minimal understanding of German, in which the significant treatises on the subject were written, but also somebody educated at an Orthodox seminary, who therefore sought to write on this theme using sharp and concrete, unequivocal terms universally available when such terms were simply absent at the time.
After suffering through this task for some time, Stalin wrote down an entire catalogue of the features of nationhood (as opposed to a racial body, a tribal body, etc.): ‘a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.’ (Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’) The trouble lay in that many of the European nations – to say nothing of the non-European ones – did not possess all of these features, or, contrariwise, possessed additional features regarded as key to their nationhood.
Naturally, Stalin does not regard a common religion as an attribute of the nation, although the commonality of one particular faith was relevant to patriotic stirrings in Russia, Poland, and Ireland. Though Stalin, as a materialist, could not regard it as a central attribute of nationhood, a number of national entities became consolidated on account of a religious bond. So, for example, in northern Ireland, one associates with either the British or the Irish nation based on religious creed. The Catholics identify as Irish; the Protestants, as British – though living on the same territory. The same seems to hold true on the Balkan peninsula. The Catholic Croats, who use the Serbo-Croatian language with a Latin-based alphabet, and the Orthodox Serbs, whose writing employs both Latin and Cyrillic letters, are widely perceived as traditional enemies of one another. In Bosnia, these groups exist alongside a community of Muslims– that is, Muslims who speak Serbo-Croatian, employ a written system of Latin characters, and do not strictly observe what constitutes the major part of their Muslim religion tradition, and yet regard themselves as wholly distinct from both the Serbs and the Croats.
Contrariwise, in neighboring Albania, the religious differences between Muslims and Christians do not interfere with the Albanian-speakers’ common understanding of themselves as part of a single national group of Albanians. In Germany, the Protestants and Catholics coalesced to constitute a single nation, in spite of the long feuds once waged between the two. The Swiss communicate using four different languages, but still regard themselves as just one nation, so distinct from the rest of Europe that even the possibility of Swiss membership in the European Union is denounced there as undesirable.
In Kiev and Kharkov, the people speak Russian and perceive themselves as Ukrainians. In the Ukrainian Crimea, the locals think themselves wholly different from the Ukrainians precisely because they use the Russian tongue.
The English-speaking Canadian hates being confused with an American Yankee, despite resembling him in absolutely every way. The Francophones traditionally regard their Anglophone neighbors with less than boundless love, but for a stretch of history regarded themselves as stalwart patriots of the conquering British Empire, whose tongue they did not completely understand.
The Arabs still have not come to a conclusion as to whether they constitute a single national group or whether they belong to distinct, albeit related, nations known as the Egyptians, the Lybians, the Iraqis, etc. During the Latin American independence struggles, the rebels dreamed of independence as a single Latin American nation while fighting the Spaniards – Catholic and Spanish-speaking like themselves. And yet the break-up of the Spanish Empire in the New World was followed by the break-up of Great Colombia, as a result of which different Latin American nations – each within its own traditions, culture, and history – came into being.
It’s possible to extend the list. After all, even the common feature of language – the simplest feature, as it would seem – leaves room for argument. The boundaries between language and dialect are amorphous. The Russian Empire did not hold Ukrainian as a language with a right to its own existence and saw it as a Russian dialect. At any rate, it is quite true that differences between the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian are smaller than the differences among the dialects of German or Italian.
As the close of the 19th century saw the formation of the modern Balkan languages, the Romantic tradition moved their progenitors to come to the remotest mountain villages in order to codify in writing the “true” Serb or Bulgarian tongue. The Bulgarians did so according to the eastern variant of their language; the Serbs, according to the western. Had they done otherwise and set down the language spoken along their common boundary, the Serbs and the Bulgarians would be speaking the same language today. The Macedonian tongue, recognized as a language in Yugoslavia, is still seen as a dialect in Bulgaria.
When one prominent philologist was asked to describe the difference between a language and a dialect, he thoughtfully answered that a language is backed by an army of its own.
It’s possible that that is the answer to all the questions. A nation is not so much united by a common language, blood, or faith as by a common government.
The Formation of Nations
“The English Marxist Ben Anderson observes a remarkable contradiction in his book Imaginary Communities. The first nations to see and propose themselves as such were the Yankee Americans of what today is the United States and the Creoles of Latin America – the latter were themselves significantly influenced by the American Revolution. Neither the Yankees nor the Creoles were distinguishable from the opponents they fought in the course of their independence struggles. In both instances, a common language, a common blood, a common faith, and a common culture united both of the opposing sides. In South America, the fight against Spanish colonialism was not heavily waged by the oppressed Indians and the mestizos (and it was Simon Bolivar’s attempt to rely on the Indian masses, so alien to the prevailing colonial culture, that brought about a weakening in the level of his political influence – all his achievements notwithstanding).
The idea of independence was rather most strongly championed by the local land-owners and bourgeois elites whose interests ran counter to those of the colonial empires standing at the helm over them. Having attained a sufficient level of development, the local elites came to be weighed down by the colonial powers. The American Revolution began when the obligation to pay the British taxes began to seem too burdensome. The most important reason for anti-British sentiment was the desire of the English bourgeoisie to limit the growth of industries in the American colonies so as to prevent them from competing with the industrial enterprises of the “old country.” In Spanish America, the fight for independence was generously financed by the British and the United States – although the most far-sighted of the leading Latin American leaders (such as Bolivar) already suspected that no good would come out of friendship with their northern neighbors. When the American army, encouraged by Napoleon, rushed northward to “liberate” Canada from British rule, they found themselves face-to-face with an armed local population: at Yorktown the Yankees suffered an absolute defeat and were forced back to Detroit. The people inhabiting the then-British North America began to develop a national self-consciousness at precisely that point in time.
The ruling class organizes the state so as to best satisfy its own needs and challenges, among which is the maintenance of the perceived legitimacy of the existing order – that is, the consent of the governed to live according to the established laws. The state, in its own turn, creates the nation. If there is a kinship pre-existing between the inhabitants of the particular territory in question, the task is considerably lighter. And yet at times a nation may also be erected out of masses from distinct tribal or linguistic origins.
The Russian nation was formed out of a joined group of Finno-Ugric, Slavic, Turkic, and, to a smaller extent, Germanic elements. . . The English nation is a descendant of the mixing between Celtic and Germanic tribes, as well as Franco-Norman lineage of the knights of William the Conqueror. The part of Germany between its eastern border and the Elbe was once settled by Germanicized Slavs whose heritage remains perceptible in the toponymy of Berlin and the local surnames.
The state has an interest in promoting the unity and homogeneity of its population – and not merely because this national unity ideal facilitates the consolidation of the power of the ruling class. National homogeneity serves to make the process of governing itself easier. A document issued in the capital city in the official language ought to be equally understandable in any province and city, no matter how far-flung. Any instructions contained therein should be unswervingly obeyed without any modification on account of local peculiarities, the ethnic traditions of the place, or even a simple misunderstanding. An order given to a platoon of troops must be instantaneously carried out, without any time wasted on interpreting the command.
The development of bourgeois society in the 17th century saw the consolidation of local markets. At the earlier stages of the development of trade capitalism we see the correspondence of local and world markets. Goods are created to satisfy local demand or to be exported to neighboring countries (if the analogous product is unavailable there or costs significantly more). Yet trade between neighboring towns or provinces takes place rarely.
By the 17th century, the need for cooperation between enterprises grows, the accumulation of further capital demands a joining of efforts and mobilization of resources, manufacturing requires greater but still safe and not exceedingly distant markets. Regional markets coalesce within the boundaries prescribed by governments. The need for unification – motivated by the desire of a common currency for transactions and a common language for traders’ contracts, a single system of laws and uniform business culture to promote stable trade – once more becomes an acute need. The barriers between the provinces are annulled. Not only a single market for goods and capital, but also a single market for labor therefore arises. A person traveling from one town to another must understand the language and the customs of his destination: thus language and customs must be homogenized to facilitate labor mobility. At times this occurs of its own accord, but the ruling powers also facilitate it. Starting at the end of the 17th century, the modern state begins to create three powerful institutions – the bureaucracy, the standing army, and the school. Their sphere comes to encompass at first hundreds of thousands, then millions, of people. They mold a common culture and establish common norms of behavior. They play their part in the construction of a common national tongue. Dialects are suppressed and pushed to the periphery of public life. The languages of national minorities are either relegated to lower rungs or simply outlawed.
The struggle for an official state language appears comical in the 21st century, whenever we see some official in Ireland or Ukraine make a proposal intended to limit the sphere of the English or the Russian language respectively. Yet that is no more than the continuation of the same systematic logic which had earlier been applied by states all across Europe. A state commission was created in 17th-century France to work out the normative standards of the French language (the famous Port-Royal Grammar). Important for the standardization and the codification of the national culture was the role of the church following the severance of its links to Rome by the Reformation. The Protestants translated the Latin Bible into the vernacular language – a tongue none other than that of the state. Luther’s translation of the Bible into the German vernacular becomes the standard across German territories and is adopted by the bureaucracies of the various Germanic kingdoms, among them Prussia and Austria.
Attempts at stamping out national minorities become common practice at the end of the 18th century on account of their incompatibility with the homogenous structure of a nation-state. Until then, the existence of tribes and ethnic groups communicating in different languages was not seen as a source of trouble; more often than not, the existence of such diversity within a monarch’s realm was an object of pride. And then the requirements of modern statehood demanded to have things arranged otherwise. Ethnic minorities that had earlier done well under the rule of a foreign dynasty now began suffering sharp national oppression.
Understandably, unification has certain limits. For example, the Hungarians during the 18th-19th centuries, despite all of their efforts, failed to Magyarize their national minorities. One of the factors is fairly comical: the Romanians and Slavic communities found the Hungarian language to difficult too master. Moreover, as Hungary itself was not a fully independent state and developed at first under Austrian rule and later as part of the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy, the German language was found to be more useful as an instrument of interethnic communication. At the same time, the Viennese bureaucracy failed to Germanize the nation’s minorities on account of the resistance put up by the Hungarians. This failure of the Austrian and Hungarian elites to come to an accord among themselves factors significantly in the diversity of the map of central and eastern Europe in the present day.
In those cases where the ruling powers prove incapable of uniting the country under a single language, the status of an officially-recognized language may be permitted to the language of a national minority group. In part, this occurred in Austria-Hungary (for example, in its Croatian region). The Swedish monarchy effectively recognized the Finnish language as co-official with Swedish after the Reformation, having supported the Finnish translation of the Bible. The status quo still persisted once Finland was acquired by the Russian Empire and led to the Finns’ self-consciousness as a particular nation. . .
Empires and Nations
A radical shift in the boundaries of the northern European states occurred in the early 19th century. At Napoleon’s instigation, Russia’s Alexander I attacked Sweden and consequently took Finland away from it. Even the public attitudes in St. Petersburg were not sympathetic. When, at the Congress of Vienna, the Swedes demanded the return of their Finnish territory, St. Petersburg refused, though unable to deny the legitimacy of the Swedes’ grievances. The Swedes were compensated by being given control over Norway, which until then had belonged to the Danes. The latter were not compensated by anybody, possibly because the Danes had for too long remained on the side of Napoleon, possibly because Britain had little interest in Denmark’s development as a naval power, if only a second-rate one.
If this redivision of northern European lands had not occurred, merely two “national states” in northern Europe would exist today: Denmark and Sweden. The Norwegian language would never have been distinguished from the Danish. The Finnish language would have survived in Sweden as a recognized second language, although its speakers would consider themselves Swedes – just as today Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority considers itself Finnish.
By the finale of the 20th century, however, both Norway and Finland had become widely recognized as states with their own distinct cultures, histories, and identities. In large part, the formation of nations is an outcome of the quirks of political history. Many nations that did not have to come into being did so develop, whereas others capable of existence did not materialize. So, the centuries-long history of independent Burgundy during the Middle Ages might have continued into the present day had Charles the Bold been a tad more successful in his struggle with Louis XI. Burgundy could have existed today as a medium-sized European state with a distinct language and its own culture.
There is not anything either mystical or predetermined in any national history. And it was exactly for this reason that Marx and especially Engels regarded the national movements of the 19th century with a hefty dose of skepticism.
Naturally, both Marx and Engels supported the national-liberation struggles of the Irish and the Poles, although not because they saw either Polish or Irish self-determination as an inherent value in and of itself. Marx was sooner worried by the possibilities for imperial British or Russian development.
Rather famous are Marx’s words, which were addressed to the English: a people oppressing another people cannot be free. The crushing of the Irish liberation movement would have strengthened the reactionary hand in England. And the Irish movement itself was not only a national movement, but also a social one: the Irish Catholic peasant masses were fighting against exploitation from the English bourgeoisie and the Protestant landowners.
In regard to Russia, Marx’s position is well-known: until the 1860s he saw in St. Petersburg the center of all Europe’s reactionary forces. Consequently, he saw the resisting Poles, weakening the empire, as an ally of the revolutionary movement in France and Germany.
Engels’ reaction to the Slavs’ struggle in the Austrian Empire was entirely different. Because the southern Slavic peoples, hoping to win autonomy from the Hapsburg monarchy, supported the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution, he saw these national movements as a reactionary force. And in this connection he pronounced some famous words about the ‘non-historic nations.’
The thesis about the “historic” and “non-historic” nations would later lead to incomprehension among the politically correct Western Marxists. It was preferred to either stay mum about it or simply dismiss it as an unpleasant remark that Engels had allowed under the influence of the then-dominant imperial attitudes. But here Engels’ thesis has, rather, a deep historical-philosophical basis. One may argue with it or agree with it, but to ignore it is impermissible.
Engels was motivated by the fact that national formation reflects the historic needs of a particular period. That is the period of the coming into being of capitalism. Within the framework of that historic period, the process of nation-forming was progressive and necessary. But what to do with those peoples unable to secure their own nation state during that earlier period of the first bourgeois revolutions? From Engels’ perspective, ‘come too late and you miss out.’ Such peoples’ attempt to create a ‘full-fledged’ nation in the new era, a time when other questions have become the primary ones, becomes a reactionary struggle because it encourages adhering to outdated slogans, using methods from the distant past, and relying on social and economic interests no longer at the vanguard.
Take one instance – the 17th and 18th centuries’ struggle, when the leading bourgeoisie sought unification on a national level in order to oppose the feudal empires and the Catholic Church, organized all across Europe. A different instance – the Industrial Epoch, in which the proletariat struggles for unity of action across boundaries both national and ethnic. In the latter case, the struggle to form new boundaries and create new “identities” becomes an instrument of the reactionary forces following the principle of “divide and conquer” – an ideology suitable for backward local elites, opposing progress and wanting to rule “their own” working class. Likewise, from the economic point of view, the 17th- and 18th-century formations of nation-states signified the integration of markets, the coming down of local barriers, the liquidation of provincial boundaries, and the acceleration of development. In the second case, however, the formation of new nation-states leads to the creation of new barriers, the division of hitherto common markets – or, to apply the modern language, the break-up of an economic net.
Engels’ view is supported by a significant part of the historical experience of the 20th century. It does not appear to be a coincidence that the majority of the national movements seeking to right the historical injustice done to these “non-imperial” peoples of eastern Europe came to the side of fascism. Here are Croatia and Slovakia, who first obtained their independent statehood with the support of Hitler, as are the Estonian and Latvian legions of the SS, and, likewise, the Ukrainian SS-Halychyna.
The establishment of nation-states in the West was accompanied by the systematic absorption of minorities, repression, and ethnic cleansings. The national awakening of eastern and central Europe in the 20th century resulted in the same evils, albeit on a larger scale (higher technological capabilities and population growth taken into account). The freshest example is the bloodletting accompanying the cutting-up of Yugoslavia into separate nation-states, along with the ethnic conflict following the liquidation of the Soviet Union.
Finally, the new nationalist regimes systematically suppressed both the workers’ movement (a carrier of the idea of internationalism) and their own national minorities. The roles changed, and the formerly oppressed became the oppressors of members of the so-called “imperial” oppressor-nations –the Russians, the Germans, the Hungarians, and sometimes the Poles. In their turn, real or imagined wrongs done to the “compatriots abroad” of these groups served to nourish more nationalism from these “historic nations” and strengthen the reactionaries’ hand among them. . .
(Full text in the Russian original at http://www.eusi.ru/lib/kagarlickij_marksizm_ne_recomendovano_dlya/10.shtml)
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