Volume 7, No. 2, February 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
Chris Harman
Marx and Engels were part of the revolutionary movement of the 1840s. They began their political life on its extreme liberal democratic wing, but came to realise very quickly that human emancipation could only be achieved by a movement that went further and looked to working class revolution. Such a revolution would end “national differences and antagonisms among peoples”: “In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is 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.” [17]
This did not mean, however, that they abstained from the struggle of bourgeois democratic forces against absolutism. They threw themselves into the revolutionary upheaval of 1848-9, criticising from the left the attempts of the bourgeois democrats to conciliate the old order. A key role in the upheaval was played by the four major national movements: the struggles to unite Germany and Italy as bourgeois national states in place of the various monarchies that divided them, the struggle to free Hungary from the Habsburg dynasty based in Vienna, and the struggle to free Poland from Tsarism, the gendarme of reaction right across Europe. A success for any one of these movements was, in the context of 1848-9, a gain for the revolution as a whole, and a defeat for them was a victory for the counter-revolution. Marx and Engels therefore looked to revolutionary war to establish new national states in Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland, and to inflict a final defeat on the last remnants of feudalism in Europe. Among the enemies who would have to be fought in this war were those Slav politicians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire who used the phraseology of nationalism to justify their support for absolutism. Their defeat would be part of the process of clearing the ground for the full development of bourgeois democracy and so for the struggle of the working class against the system.
Marx and Engels did not require any particularly sophisticated analysis of nationalism to see what needed to be done in such a situation. And their time was absorbed, remember, not only in engaging in revolutionary agitation, but also in elaborating a completely new view of history and society. So Engels, in particular, simply took over the terminology of Hegel’s philosophy of history and distinguished between different national movements on the basis of whether they represented “historic peoples” who had a long and dynamic history, or “non-historic peoples” who were doomed to be marginalised by historical development. At this stage neither Marx nor Engels seem to have grasped what a new historical phenomenon the nation was [18], how it differed from previous states or ethnic groupings, and how distant most of the movements they condemned were from sharing the characteristics of modern national movements. [19] They began to shift their position on national movements in the 1860s, faced with a renewal of the agitation against British rule in Ireland. Previously they had opposed British repression in Ireland, but had looked to revolutionary change in Britain to bring it to an end. They now changed their views. Marx wrote to Engels: “I have done my best to bring about a demonstration of the English workers in favour of Fenianism…I used to think the separation of Ireland from England was impossible. Now I think it is inevitable, although after separation there may come federation.” [20] “What the Irish need is…self government and independence from England…Agrarian revolution…Protective tariffs against England.” [21] And to Kugelmann: “The English working class…will never be able to do anything decisive here in England before they separate their attitude towards Ireland quite definitely from that of the ruling classes, and not only make common cause with the Irish, but even take the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 1801. And this must be done not out of sympathy with the Irish, but as a demand based on the interests of the English proletariat. If not the English proletariat will forever remain bound to the leading strings of the ruling classes, because they will be forced to make a common front with them against Ireland…”[22]
In his approach to the Irish issue, Marx was making a very important point: the nationalism of workers belonging to an oppressor nation binds them to their rulers and only does harm to themselves, while the nationalism of an oppressed nation can lead them to fight back against those rulers. What is more, he was supporting the struggle of a nationality that could never be included in the list of “the great historic nations of Europe”. However, it was not until after Marx’s death that Engels began to present a new, historical materialist account of nations. An unfulfilled plan to rewrite The Peasant War in Germany – about popular unrest during the Reformation – led him to study the transformation of society at the end of the Middle Ages and to see material factors as giving rise to the beginnings of the nation state as a new historical phenomenon. He stressed that as the towns grew in prominence and allied with the monarchy against the rest of the feudal ruling class, “Out of the confusions of people that characterised the early middle ages, there gradually developed the new nationalisms.” But this was in a manuscript that remained unpublished until 1935. [23]
Deeper historical materialist analysis of nationalism did not begin until the end of the 19th century, when new political developments suddenly made it an urgent issue. The growth of the socialist movement in the German empire was followed by a similar growth in Austria (which then included the present day Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, and present day Slovenia), and many of the best known German language Marxists came from there: Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding were Austrians, and Karl Kautsky a Czech. But just as the Austrian party was enjoying its first real successes in the 1890s it was plunged into bitter arguments by the growing nationalist agitation among Austria’s Slavs. Otto Bauer tried to resolve the disputes by making a new analysis of nationalism. He argued that the nation is “a community of culture” or “a community of destiny”, which causes all those who belong to it to experience things differently to those who belong to a different nation. [24] The nation gives all its members certain character features in common, so that an English person and a German, making, for instance, the same journey would experience it differently. This diversity of culture meant that even when people spoke the same language, as with the Danes and Norwegians or the Serbs and Croats, they remained separate nations. [25] “It is the diversity of culture which rigorously separates nations, despite the mixing of blood.” [26]
Bauer argued that national culture went through three historic stages. It began with the period of primitive communism, when “all the compatriots are related as much by community of blood as by culture”, then went through a period of class society, in which it was bound together by the culture of the ruling class, and finally would be “represented by the socialist society of the future”. [27] So the “nation” can be seen in terms of the development of the productive forces, as constituting “what is historical in us” [28], as a “condensation of history”. [29] He went on to attack, in the most forthright terms, those who did not see the value of the nation and instead opted for “proletarian cosmopolitanism”, “the most primitive taking of position by the working class as against the national strife of the bourgeois world”, for instance talking of “Czech and German speaking comrades” rather than “Czech and German comrades”. They were falling into the trap of “rationalist, enlightenment” thinking, of “an atomistic-individualistic conception of society” that failed to see that “the individual man is himself a product of the nation”. Bauer’s conclusion was that socialists should embrace the idea of nation as an important social and historical factor in human existence, and tell the different nationalities that only under socialism would national culture reach its full development. “Socialism announces to all nations the realisation of their aspiration to political unity and freedom. It does the same for the German nation.” [30] Such support for cultural nationalism, he argued, would enable socialists to prevent the fragmentation of the large states which were, in his view, necessary for economic development.
The Austrian socialists drew up an elaborate programme, based in part upon Bauer’s views [31], which promised all the different peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire their own national institutions within the existing imperial state structure. A national grouping in any particular locality would be given autonomy over educational and cultural affairs, and then would federate with groupings in other localities so as to form a single “autonomous” structure right across the empire. There would be no official language, although “whether a common language is required, a federal parliament can decide”. The whole structure was intended to encourage “the nurturing and development of the national peculiarities of all the peoples of Austria”. [32] The practical outcome of such a scheme was to encourage the members of the socialist movement to make continual concessions to those who stressed cultural differences within the working class, until first the socialist party and then the unions split into different national organisations – something that must have been rather gratifying to those employers, whether German or Czech speaking, who exploited linguistically mixed workforces.
The first theoretical onslaught against Bauer’s position was led by Karl Kautsky. He had already begun to deepen the materialist analysis of the origins of modern nationality in the late 1880s, and went on to write numerous articles dealing in one way or another with the same issue. These were the starting point for other Marxists like Lenin. As George Haupt has noted, “Kautsky, who formulated theories, opened parentheses and made distinctions, without engaging in systematisation, remained the indispensable reference point for a long time.” [33] His disagreement with Bauer was “the confrontation between two conceptions of nations, to be labelled by Lenin the ‘psychological-cultural’ and the ‘historical-economic’.” [34] Kautsky recognised the virtual impossibility of defining what a nation is: “‘Nation’ is a social formation difficult to apprehend, a product of social development, that rules have never been able to transform into a precisely defined social organism. Nationality is a social relation that transforms itself ceaselessly, which has a different signification in different conditions…”[35] But he nevertheless insisted it could be understood in relation to economic development. “The concentration and separation of societies into nation states was one of the most powerful levers of economic development.” [36] This alone, he argued, explained why German speakers in, say, northern Bohemia regarded themselves as part of the German nation, while those in Switzerland did not. [37] Because of its role in economic development, “The classical form of the modern state is the nation state. But classical forms exist in general only as a tendency. It is rare that they are developed in a perfectly typical fashion.” [38] What is more: “To the extent that economic antagonisms deepen, each economic region tries to develop its own urban and rural industry, but can do this less and less without hurting the industry of its neighbours. The different Austrian regions tend to separate, and the ‘reconciliation’ of nations becomes more difficult.”[39]
He criticised Bauer for downplaying the importance of language. There was, he said, only one example of a nation that included more than one “linguistic community”, the Swiss. As for the cases where different nationalities shared the same language – he mentions the English and the Irish, the Danes and Norwegians, the Serbs and Croats – “this does not prove that each national community is a linguistic community it simply proves that sometimes a linguistic community can comprise two nations, that linguistic community, is not the sole distinctive sign of a nation.” [40] In fact, “The powerful role of language in social life can make us understand a good part of the force of national sentiment.” [41]
He went on to ascribe the rise of the national state to a series of factors. First, the bourgeoisie’s desire to provide itself with a market for its own commodities, free from the hindrance of feudal territorial divisions or from interference by old state structures. Second, the growing importance of administration in modern society, which gives unprecedented importance to the language question: “The bureaucracy is a structure that finds it difficult to function without a single language.” Third, the way in which the “commercialisation of society” laid the ground for linguistic unification by increasing the frequency of intercourse between people in different localities and produced a more uniform language: “Uniformisation rarely succeeded just through the channel of education, but through the development of commercial relations at the interior of the state.” [42]
It was this, finally, which explained the rise of rival nationalities within a single state. Where the economic forces were not powerful enough to get the speakers of different tongues to learn the national language, government attempts to enforce uniformity increased the divisions between different linguistic groups. Some gained material advantages from the official status given to their language: it gave them preferential chances of promotion into and up the ranks of the state bureaucracy. But others suffered and tended to turn to national identities of their own in opposition to the official one: When, in professional life or in front of a tribunal, the dominant language was spoken, the members of the other nations were at a disadvantage…Promotion of the children of artisans and peasants into the bureaucracy was made very difficult for nations which did not speak the official language. [43]
Kautsky thus provided an account of the rise of rival nationalisms that was more historical and more materialist than Bauer’s – which is perhaps why Bauer receives the praise today from those who damn Marxism for being “reductionist” and not taking account of “ethnicity” and “gender”. [44] But there was an unresolved problem with Kautsky’s own analysis. He saw capitalist economic development as leading to a withering away of national struggles, despite his insights into how minority groups could turn to new nationalisms. In his early writings he argued that capitalist development doomed the Czech nation to disappear. And even after he had dropped this view he still saw national conflicts as dying away as capitalist commerce became increasingly international: “As [social] intercourse grows with economic development, so the circle of people using the same language must grow as well. From this arises the tendency of unified languages to expand, to swallow up other nations, which lose their language and adopt the language of the dominant nation or a mixture…The joining of nations to the international cultural community will be reflected in the growth of universal languages among merchants and educated people…” [45]
There was an important insight here which led him to denounce Bauer for encouraging national antagonisms among socialists: “Never was a purely national culture less possible. Therefore it strikes us as very strange when people talk always of only a national culture, and when the goal of socialism is considered to be the endowing of the masses with national culture…When socialist society provides the masses with an education, it also gives them the ability to speak several languages, the universal languages, and therefore to take part in the entire international civilisation and not only in the separate culture of a certain linguistic community.” [46] But the insight was buried within a wider analysis which vastly underrated the way in which capitalism provokes national antagonism at the same time as creating the possibilities of overcoming it.
Luxemburg and Lenin
Rosa Luxemburg began from a different starting point to Bauer and Kautsky. She was trying to build a revolutionary party in Poland, where the socialist movement split in the 1890s between those – like the future Polish dictator Pilsudski – who were moving increasingly in a nationalist direction and those who stood resolutely for internationalism. Yet when her party attended the congress of the International in the 1890s and of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, it found the majority of delegates embracing the right of Poland to independence in a way which seemed to her to give solace to her nationalist opponents at home. Right up to her death in 1918 she was to argue vehemently against any “right” of nations to self-determination and against any involvement of socialists in national uprisings.
She backed up this position with arguments that combined elements of Kautsky’s view with elements of Bauer’s. She located the origins of nationalism squarely in economics – in the economic needs of this or that ruling class. Her interpretation of Kautsky’s account of the rise of nationalism in countries like Germany and Italy puts all the stress on the role of the big bourgeoisie. [47] She argues that its desire for domestic markets led it to promote the national movement, and gave this a realistic character. She then goes on to use this “economistic” analysis to tear late 19th and early 20th century Polish nationalism apart: “The material base of Polish national aspirations (in the first half of the 19th century) was determined not as in central Europe by modern capitalist development, but on the contrary by the nobility’s idea of its social standing, rooted in the natural feudal economy. The national movements in Poland vanished with these feudal relations, whereas the bourgeoisie, as the historical spokesman of capitalist development, was with us, from the beginning, a clearly anti-national factor. This was due, not only to the specific origin of the 19th century bourgeoisie, alien and heterogeneous, a product of colonisation, an alien body transplanted on to Polish soil. Also decisive was the fact that Polish industry was from its beginning an export industry…Export to Russia…became the basis for the existence of and development of Polish capitalism…and the basis of the Polish bourgeoisie. As a consequence, our bourgeoisie showed political leanings…towards Russia…The class rule of the bourgeoisie in Poland not only did not demand the creation of a united nation state, but, on the contrary, it arose on the foundations of the conquest and division of Poland. The idea of unification and national independence did not draw its vital juices from capitalism: on the contrary, as capitalism developed this idea became historically outlived…In Poland there arose an opposition between the national idea and the bourgeois development, which gave the former not only a Utopian but also a reactionary character.” [48]
For her, if the bourgeoisie did not want a nation state somewhere, since that state was part of capitalist development, the idea was both doomed and reactionary. Her argument arose out of the Polish context. But she extended it further. She argued, correctly, that Kautsky was wrong to see the needs of capitalism for international trade leading to a peaceful growing together of national states. Instead, she insisted, there would be increasing conflict between states, and these states would increasingly not be states with a homogeneous national population, but rather states which forcibly annexed whole peoples against their will: “Historical development…lies…not in the tendency toward the idea of a ‘national state’ but rather in the deadly struggle among nations, in the tendency to create great capitalist states…The form that best serves the interests of exploitation in the contemporary world is not the ‘national’ state as Kautsky thinks, but a state bent on conquest. When we compare the different states from the point of view of the degree to which they approach this ideal…we look to the British and German states as models, for they are based on national oppression in Europe and the world at large – and to the United States, a state which keeps in its bosom like a gaping wound the oppression of the Negro people and seeks to conquer the Asiatic people.”
This, she concluded, destroyed any possibility of a new, viable national movement emerging: “The development of world powers, a characteristic feature of our times growing in importance along with the progress of capitalism, from the very outset condemns all small nations to political impotence…’Self-determination’, the independent existence of smaller and petty nations, is an illusion, and will become even more so…Can one speak with any seriousness of the ‘self-determination’ of peoples which are formally independent, such as the Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Romanians, the Serbs, the Greeks…?” From this point of view, the idea of “insuring all the nations the possibility of self determination is the equivalent of reverting from great capitalist development to the small medieval states, far earlier than the 15th and 16th centuries.” [49]
The characteristic feature of this part of her argument is the way in which she moves from a brilliant, dialectical account of the economic and military trends in capitalism to a completely mechanical view of the political consequences – big capital does not want national struggles and national insurrections, therefore these count for nothing. This did not mean that her position was one of simple opposition to nationalism. For she combined her ultra-Kautskyite analysis of the roots of the nation state with a Bauerite attitude to cultural nationalism. She praised the Austrian party’s Brno programme, with its scheme to divide the population into autonomous national groupings. She referred to “national sentiments” as among “the higher forms of psychic phenomena”, and foresaw the survival of “Polish national identity” as socialism led to “the opening up of new vistas for the deliverance of Polish national culture”. [50] She claimed that “the cause of nationalism in Poland is not alien to the working class – nor can it be”, on the grounds that “the working class cannot be indifferent to the most intolerable barbaric oppression, directed as it is against the intellectual and cultural heritage of society”. [51] She believed, “The proletariat can and must fight for the defence of national identity as a cultural legacy, that has its own right to exist and flourish”, but the “national identity cannot be defended by national separatism”. [52]
By far the most theoretically sophisticated of the classic Marxist theorists of nationalism was Lenin. [53] The analysis of the new nationalisms being thrown up by the continued development of capitalism was not, for him, some academic exercise. The Russian Empire was an even more ethnically mixed state than Austro-Hungary and it was a much more explosive mixture. The revolution of 1905 was to be as much a revolution of the national minorities as of the workers, the peasants and the liberal bourgeoisie. If his party got the national question wrong its whole revolutionary strategy would be in tatters. This led him to a sharp conflict with the positions of both Bauer and Rosa Luxemburg.
Lenin’s analysis of the rise of nations is based on Kautsky’s materialist interpretation. Writing early in 1914, Lenin argues: “Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically unified territories whose population speak a single language, with all the obstacles to the development of that language and its consolidation in literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national movements. Language is the most important means of human intercourse. Unity and unimpeded development of language are the most important conditions for genuinely free and extensive commerce on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its various classes as, lastly, for the establishment of a close connection between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, and between seller and buyer. Therefore the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied…Therefore, for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilised world, the national state is typical and normal for the capitalist period.” [54] The spread of capitalist relations internationally would mean the throwing up of more and more national movements: “The greater part of Asia…consists either of colonies of the Great Powers or of states that are extremely dependent and oppressed as nations. But does this shake the undoubted fact that in Asia itself the conditions for the most complete development of commodity production and the speediest growth of capitalism have been created in Japan, i.e. only in an independent national state?…It remains an undoubted fact that capitalism, having awakened Asia, has called forth national movements everywhere in that continent too; the tendency of these movements is towards the creation of national states in Asia; that it is these states that ensure the best conditions for the development of capitalism…The national state is the rule and the norm of capitalism…From the standpoint of national relations the best conditions for the development of capitalism are created by the national state. This does not mean, of course, that such a state, which is based on bourgeois relations, can eliminate the exploitation and oppression of nations. It only means that Marxists cannot lose sight of the powerful economic factors that give rise to the urge to create national states.”
By 1916 he was developing the analysis to attack those who, in the manner of Rosa Luxemburg [55], used the argument about the connection between the development of capitalism and the growth of the national state to draw the conclusion that national demands were “Utopian” and “reactionary” once the most advanced capitalisms began to spread beyond their old national boundaries. This, he said, was to fall into “imperialist economism”, to try to reduce politics to a direct mechanical product of economics. Economism, he said, is the argument: “Capitalism is victorious, therefore political questions are a waste of time”, the new theory was that “Imperialism is victorious, therefore political questions are a waste of time. Such an apolitical theory is extremely harmful to Marxism.”
What is more, he no longer maintained the old, Kautskyist view that the proponents of national capitalist development had to be the capitalists. He noted that the Irish uprising of 1916 had involved “street fighting conducted by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a section of the workers…” He drew the conclusion that: “To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by sections of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc. – to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution.”
He drew sharp practical conclusions from his analysis. He defended the slogan of the right of self-determination against Rosa Luxemburg and those with similar views, like Karl Radek and Nicolai Bukharin. And he rejected the Bauerite programme of “cultural national autonomy”. There were two components to his defence of the self-determination slogan. The first was concerned with the political consciousness of workers having the same nationality as those who ran the oppressing state: “If, in our political agitation, we fail to advance and advocate the right to secession, we shall play into the hands, not only of the bourgeoisie, but also of the feudal landlords and the absolutism of the oppressor nation…When, in her anxiety not to ‘assist’ the nationalist bourgeoisie in Poland, Rosa Luxemburg rejects the right to secession in the programme of the Marxists in Russia, she is in fact assisting the Great Russian Black Hundreds. She is in fact assisting the opportunist tolerance of the privileges of the Great Russians…The interests of the freedom of the Great Russian population require a long struggle against such oppression…The long centuries old history of the suppression of the movements of the oppressed nations and the systematic propaganda in favour of such suppression coming from the upper classes have created enormous obstacles to the cause of freedom of the Great Russian people itself, in the form of prejudice…The Great Russian proletariat cannot achieve its own aims or clear the road to its freedom without systematically countering these prejudices…In Russia, the creation of an independent national state remains, for the time being, the privilege of the Great Russian nation alone. We, the Great Russian proletarians, who defend no privilege whatever, do not defend this privilege either.” [56]
Against the claim that this encouraged a split in the workers’ movement along national lines, Lenin replied insistently that it did the opposite. So long as the workers in the oppressed nation could see no one defending their right to national equality among the people of the oppressing nation, they would fall for the nationalist demagogy of their own bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. But if they found the workers’ party in the oppressing nation standing full square for the right to self-determination, then they would see it as standing for their interests and turn their back on their own bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. He used the example of Norway’s secession from Sweden in 1905 to back up his argument. Rosa Luxemburg had argued the secession was reactionary, simply replacing one monarchy by another. Lenin acknowledged that the outcome was no great step forward for the workers. But he insisted that the attitude of the Swedish socialists, who had supported the Norwegian right to secede, ensured it was not a step backwards either: “The close alliance between the Norwegian and Swedish workers, their complete fraternal class solidarity, gained from the Swedish workers’ recognition of the right of the Norwegians to secede. This convinced the Norwegian workers that the Swedish workers were not infected with Swedish nationalism, and that they placed fraternity with the Norwegian workers above the privileges of the Swedish bourgeoisie and aristocracy.” [57] By standing by the right of self-determination, socialists in the oppressor country encouraged internationalism among both their own working class and that in the oppressed country: “In reality, the recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination implies the maximum of democracy and the minimum of nationalism.” [58]
Lenin’s first reason for advancing the slogan of the right to self-determination was, then, to do with the principle of fighting against reactionary ideas within the working class of the oppressing country. This did not mean he ruled out exceptional situations. He admitted there were situations in which the slogan could be misused (as Marx claimed the Czechs and South Slavs had misused it in 1848): “There is not one of these (democratic) demands which could not serve and has not served, under certain circumstances, as an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie for deceiving the workers…In practice the proletariat can retain its independence only by subordinating its struggle for all democratic demands to the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie…On the other hand Marx…put the fundamental principle of internationalism and socialism in the foreground – no nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.”
So Lenin’s first argument was of a general, if not completely unconditional, character. But he combined with it a second argument, about the impact of the fight for self-determination by the oppressed nation in certain concrete situations. This was an argument about revolutionary strategy and tactics rather than principle. Supporting the right to self-determination was not inevitably to favour the secession of a particular nation from the state. The socialists in the oppressor country could fight for the right for secession as a way of fighting against reactionary ideology, while the socialists in the oppressed country could argue for workers to oppose the practice of secession – just as the right of divorce leaves it open to the married couple to decide freely that they want to stay together: “This demand [for the right of self-determination] is not the equivalent of demand for separation, fragmentation and the formation of small states…The closer a democratic state system is to complete freedom to secede, the less frequent and the less ardent will the demand for separation be in practice…” [59]
But there were situations in which the fight of the national movement of an oppressed nation aided the international working class struggle, even if the national movement was under bourgeois or petty bourgeois leadership. For it weakened the dominant states and their ruling classes. This, Lenin believed, was the case with the Irish uprising of 1916 and with the risings among the various other peoples oppressed by the Tsarist regime and the Western imperialisms which he rightly expected the impact of world war to bring about. For this reason not only should socialists in the oppressing countries support the right to self-determination in these cases, but socialists in the oppressed countries should be part of the struggle for secession. “If we do not want to betray socialism, we must support every revolt against our chief enemy, the bourgeoisie of the big states, provided it is not the revolt of a reactionary class.” [60] However, there were situations when socialists had to oppose nationalist agitation – as with the Polish national movement in the concrete circumstances of the First World War, when it became intricately connected with the struggle of German imperialism against British, French and Tsarist imperialism.
“The bourgeoisie, which naturally assumes the leadership at the start of every national movement, says that support for all national aspirations is practical. However, the proletariat’s policy in the national question (as in all others) only supports the bourgeoisie in a certain direction, but never coincides with the bourgeoisie’s policy…The demand for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ reply to the question of secession in the case of every nation may seem a very ‘practical’ one. In reality it is absurd…in practice it leads to subordinating the proletariat to the bourgeoisie’s policy. The proletariat…assesses any national demand, any national separation, from the angle of the workers’ class struggle.” [61] It is impossible to estimate beforehand all the possible relations between the bourgeois liberation movements of the oppressed nations and the proletarian emancipation movement of the oppressor nation.” [62]
This point leads on to the other central feature of Lenin’s position on the national question – the one which has often been forgotten by supporters of national movements who have quoted him at length in defence of the right to self-determination. He condemns Otto Bauer’s scheme for “national cultural autonomy” – and Rosa Luxemburg in so far as she is favourable to it – for making concessions to bourgeois nationalism.
The argument had first arisen in the Russian socialist movement at the time of the Second (effectively the foundation) Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903. At that point the socialist movement was still more advanced among the pockets of Jewish workers in the western Russian Empire than among the mass of other workers. Some of those involved in organising the Jewish workers had founded an exclusively Jewish socialist party, the Bund, which argued that Jewish workers had to have their own separate organisations and concentrate on agitating for separate Jewish schools and cultural organisations. They were opposed, not just by Marxists of Russian nationality, like Lenin and Plekhanov, but by many of the best known Jewish Marxists such as Martov and Trotsky. Martov, for instance, argued that to accede to the Bund’s demands would be to weaken socialist organisation in every workplace and locality: “We cannot allow that any section of the party can represent the group, trade or national interests of any section of the proletariat. National differences play a subordinate role in relation to common class interests. What sort of organisation would we have if, for instance, in one and the same workshop workers of different nationalities thought first and foremost of the representation of their national interests.” [63]
Lenin extended these arguments into a challenge to the whole Bauerite approach, by making a sharp distinction between the fight against every element of discrimination against any group on the basis of their language or culture, and exaltation of particular national cultures. The opposition to discrimination against and oppression of those with particular national cultures meant that socialists had to fight for the children of every group to be taught in their own language, for courts and other tribunals to hear cases in that language, and to reject any idea of the dominant language being the “official language” to which others should bow down. “Whoever does not recognise and champion the equality of nations and languages, and does not fight against all national oppression and inequality, is not a Marxist; he is not even a democrat.” [64]
This meant that socialists should be for any measure that would guarantee equality. They should be for “the hiring at state expense of special teachers of Hebrew, Jewish history and the like, of the provisions of state owned premises for lectures for Jewish, Armenian, or Romanian children, or even for the one Georgian child (in one area of St Petersburg).” [65] At the same time socialists should not identify with any national culture, even that of the oppressed: “To throw off the feudal yoke, all national oppression and all privileges enjoyed by any particular nation or language, is the imperative duty of the proletariat as a democratic force, and is certainly in the interests of the proletarian struggle which is obscured and retarded by bickering on the national question. But to go beyond these strictly limited and definite historical limits in helping bourgeois nationalism means betraying the proletariat and siding with the bourgeoisie. There is a border line here which the Bundists and the Ukrainian nationalist-socialists often completely lose sight of. Combat all national oppression? Yes, of course! Fight for any kind of national development, for ‘national culture’ in general? Of course not! The development of nationality in general is the principle of bourgeois nationalism; hence the exclusiveness of bourgeois nationalism, hence the endless national bickerings. The proletariat, far from undertaking to uphold the national development of every nation, on the contrary, warns the masses against such illusions, stands for the fullest development of capitalist intercourse and welcomes every kind of assimilation of nations, except that which is founded on force or privilege. [66] There are two nations within every modern nation – we say to all nationalist socialists. There are two national cultures within every national culture…If the Ukrainian Marxist allows himself to be swayed by his quite legitimate and natural hatred of the Great Russian oppressors to such a degree that he transfers even a particle of this hatred…to the proletarian culture and proletarian cause of the Great Russian workers, then such a Marxist will get bogged down in bourgeois nationalism. The Great Russian and Ukrainian workers must work together…towards a common or international culture of the proletarian movement, displaying absolute tolerance in question of language in which propaganda is conducted…All advocacy of the segregation of the workers of one nation from those of another, all attacks upon Marxist ‘assimilation’, or attempts where the proletariat is concerned to counterpose one national culture as a whole to another allegedly integral national culture and so forth is bourgeois nationalism, against which it is necessary to wage a ruthless struggle. [67] The slogan of working class democracy is not ‘national culture’, but the international culture of democracy and the world wide working class movement. [68] The elements of democratic and socialist culture are present, if only in rudimentary form, in every national culture, since in every nation there are toiling masses whose conditions of life inevitably give rise to the ideology of democracy and socialism. But every nation also possesses a bourgeois culture (and most nations a reactionary and clerical culture as well) in the form not merely of ‘elements’, but of the dominant culture. In advancing the slogan of the ‘international culture of democracy and of the world wide working class movement’, we take from each national culture only its democratic and socialist elements; we take them only and absolutely in opposition to the bourgeois culture and the bourgeois nationalism of each nation.” [69]
Lenin pointed out that the socialist in an oppressor country had to be very careful how he or she saw the issue of ‘assimilation’: “If a social democrat from a great, oppressing, annexing nation, while advocating the amalgamation of nations in general, were for one moment to forget that ‘his’ Nicholas II, ‘his’ Wilhelm, ‘his’ George, etc. also stands for amalgamation by means of annexation – such a social democrat would be a ridiculous doctrinaire in theory and an aider of imperialism in practice…It is our duty to teach the workers to be ‘indifferent’ to national distinctions…But it must not be the indifference of the annexationists.” [70]
It was precisely to hammer this point home that Lenin was so insistent on defending the right of self-determination and secession. At the same time, however, he insisted, “A social democrat from a small nation must emphasise in his agitation…‘voluntary integration’ of nations. He may, without failing in his duties as an internationalist, be in favour of both the political independence of his nation and its integration with the neighbouring state of X, Y, Z etc. But he must in all cases fight against small nation narrow mindedness, seclusion and isolation…” [71]
These considerations led Lenin to bitterly oppose talk of “national cultural autonomy”. He argued that separate school systems for each national group would split workers one from another: “On the boards of joint stock companies we find capitalists of different nations sitting together in complete harmony. At factories workers of different nations work side by side. In any really serious and profound political issue sides are taken according to classes, not nations. Withdrawing school education and the like from state controls and placing it under the control of the nations is in effect to attempt to separate from economics, which unites the nations, the most highly ideological sphere of social life, the sphere in which ‘pure’ national culture or the nationalist cultivation of clericalism and chauvinism has the freest play.” [72]
Notes
(To be continued)