To reject or not to reject nationalism: debating Marx and Engels' struggles with nationalism, 1840s–1880s

Abstract

The relationship between Marxism and nationalism has been tumultuous. While theoretically attempting to reject nationalism as a transient product of capitalism, Marxism has in practice oftentimes exploited its appeal and utilized its extensive institutional repertoire. To a large extent, the difficult dialogue between the two ideological constellations can be traced back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who neglected to leave a definitive statement on the nationality question. The article traces the evolution of Marxism's conceptualization of the nationality question – a slow shift from an outright rejection of nationalism to an acceptance of its progressive features, complexity, varieties and influences. It re-evaluates Marx and Engels' views on the nationality question, from its outright denial to limited acceptance and application. After identifying factors that shaped their perception of the nationality question, the study offers an analysis of the evolution of these attitudes from the 1840s to the 1860s. The objective is to show how Marx and Engels' theoretical dogmatism was tainted by their desire for activism. Their views were not inflexible but rather evolved in response to changing circumstances in the mid 19th century.

Keywords:

• Marxism
• nationalism
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• historiography

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Piotr Wróbel and Robert Johnson for their invaluable comments on this topic. The funding for the article was provided by the Anne Anne Tanenbaum Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto.

Notes

Following the same line, Bertram Wolfe concludes that Marx and Engels were mere revolutionary nationalists. Bertram Wolfe Marxism.

A great majority of scholars writing on the relationship between Marxism and nationalism opt for a thematic approach, usually examining distinct features or ideological consistencies. For instance, Ephraim Nimni looks at the role of language and terminological ambiguity. Those who follow a more chronological approach (including, for instance, Michael Löwy and Ronaldo Munck), simply identify specific turning points (such as 1848 and the Irish Question) as watershed events that initiated certain changes in Marx's thinking. Nonetheless, the periodization of Marx and Engels' ideas on nationalism has been attempted before. For example, Shlomo Avineri defined two periods: the pre-modern paradigm (before 1848), and the post 1848 bourgeois paradigm (Munck; Löwy Fatherland or Mother Earth?; Nimni; Avineri).

Such a position has been advocated by Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and especially Roman Szporluk (Gellner; Hobsbawm; Szporluk).

A few examples are warranted: both were rooted in the post-Enlightenment discourse of “progress”; both were responding to the social transformations of the 19th century, giving displaced people a sense of identity and continuity; both shared a sense of essentialism (albeit with different emphasis: nationalist spiritual versus economic); both utilized the universalist rhetoric of freedom, emancipation and political rights (including political participation); and both appealed to the marginalized and overeducated intellectual.

No single (and comprehensive) historiography of Marxist thought on nationalism has been written.

For instance, some interesting insights on Marx and Engels' ideas on nationalism have emerged from studies on the following: national groups including the Irish, Polish or Jewish questions; the Habsburg and Russian Empires in late 19th and early 20th centuries; Communist nationalism (or national Communism); and post-colonial studies on national liberation. See, for example Traverso; the debates on the impact of Marx on the nationality question in late Habsburg Empire in Swoboda; and Zwick.

See, for example Pipes.

See, for example Walicki; Lovell; or Conquest.

Nimni claims that “The Marxist fetish of making sense of every significant social phenomenon by subsuming it within the logic of the universal development of the forces of production, was the blueprint for ingenious but ultimately inapplicable theories [my emphasis] of the national question.” Moreover, he concludes: “it has been argued that the work of Marx and Engels on the national question can be understood as a coherent corpus of literature, even if the theoretical arguments which sustain their analysis have not been explicitly conceptualized” (Nimni 3, 41–42).

She is not alone in her conclusions. In the same vein, Wolfe maintains that “neither in 1848, nor in 1870, nor at any time in their lives, were Marx and Engels antinationalist or ‘defeatist’ for their native land” (Wolfe 24).

One needs to look no further than some of Marx's writings on the Franco-Prussian War.

See also chapter nine. This is more comprehensively explained in his article (Felix “The Dialectic”).

See especially chapters 8 and 14.

This point of view is further explained in Löwy's most recent work, Fatherland or Mother Earth?

Jie-Hyun Lim has attempted to combine the two approaches into a unified framework that would emphasize both political pragmatism and theoretical underpinnings of Marxist thinking. See “Marx's Theory of Imperialism and the Irish National Question.”

To a large extent, Erica Benner is able to achieve this by formulating Marx and Engels' conceptions of the nationality question in terms of class interests.

Benner explains: “the institutions and workings of the state arise from, and are in effect controlled by, relationships formed in civil society. Marx regarded the modern state as the product of a rift between the individual's essentially social nature and his monadic life within civil society, not as its antidote. It was not the state which gave society the cohesive character Hegel wanted it to acquire, but the particularism and conflict endemic in civil society that were reflected in the state” (Benner 27).

John Hoffman and Nxumalo Mzala explain: “Nations are superstructural in character because they cannot be understood in their own terms: they express the form of class struggle but not the content. This means they are part and parcel of the cultural and political superstructure, and cannot be understood except as part of the wider analysis of the state” (Hoffman and Mzala 415).

Perhaps Walicki's argument has validity in that Marx's fundamental premise was democratic (eventually Communist) liberation.

Marek Waldenberg provides a somewhat balanced perspective by highlighting Marx's pro-German motivations (Waldenberg 207; Furet 7).

Gellner provides a very interesting appraisal of Szporluk's work in the first chapter of his Encounters with Nationalism.

It is important to once again acknowledge that for the rest of his life, Marx believed in the German revolutionary superiority – that the true calling of the German proletariat was to lead a continent-wide revolution. This was evident, for instance, in his work for the First International.

In essence, as Paul G. Mitchison concludes: “socialism and nationalism become alternative world views answering many of the same questions with different responses” (Mitchison 229).

In essence, Marx was “trying to construct a theory of politics primarily as the emergence of modern alienation” (Furet 26).

See, for instance, Marx's “The First Address”.

Many scholars, such as Munck or Connor, see 1848 as a turning point, when Marx and Engels had to face nationalism within and outside of the theoretical realm (Connor).

Marx maintained the latter belief until his death. He continuously sought out signs of the coming of the worldwide revolution.

Szporluk claims that for Marx everything national was premodern and therefore was destined for the dustbin of history (Szporluk 62, 66).

Benner's interpretation should not be confused with some historiographical debates on the notion of “national class.” I would agree with the consensus that Marx and Engels certainly did not call for national classes.

Marx explained: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible” (Marx “Manifesto of the Communist Party”).

See also Wetherly's Marxism and the State: An Analytical Approach 13–14, which offers an instrumentalist approach to Marx's understanding of the state.

Although Engels borrowed from Hegel's conceptual framework, he was not an advocate of the historical principle. Firstly, he considered both the present and the past as key to understanding the future. Secondly, along with Marx, he believed that progress would lead to the abolition of particularism as peoples organized into ever larger units or communities (Rosdolsky 129–31). Nonetheless, some scholars argue that Engels did freely borrow from Hegelian idealism (See, for example Ritter 144).

This should not be confused with self-determination. Nations had to prove their right to exist. There was no absolute right to self-determination as espoused by late Marxists (Munck 12). Harry R. Ritter shows that “nationality was not an abstract right, but the product of a dialectical historical process in which certain cultural traditions emerge better suited than others for life” (Ritter 142). Marian Bębenek argues that contemporary historians still utilize Engels' notions of historical and non-historical labels using different terminology of “nation-state” and “ethnic community” (Bębenek 26).

See, for example, Marx's writings on Poland: “Communism, Revolution and a Free Poland” 545–59.

Ironically, “Magyar nationalism, despite its strong aristocratic and chauvinistic character, was aggressively championed by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. […] Engels defended the Magyars as a nation of ‘historic initiative,’ vital in extending western culture into the east and the southeast, and strove mightily to prove that Magyar society – though in some respects hardly more advanced than that of the subject nationalities of Hungary – was both durable and flexible enough to adjust to the requirement of modern capitalism” (Ritter 139). Ritter as well asserts that Engels, “a self-styled military expert, was chiefly interested in the tactical significance of the national movements.” At the expense of objectivity, accuracy and ideological purity, Engels interpreted national aspirations predominantly in terms of their contribution to the revolutionary cause (Ibid 137).

He explains: “The Slavs of Austria had no right to national existence because they sided with the counter-revolution in 1848; and they necessarily sided with the counter-revolution because they had already proven themselves incapable of national existence in the past and only the reaction left them any hope of preserving their ‘imaginary Slav nationality’. Thus the past history of the Austrian Slavs had already ridden roughshod over their present and future” (110).

Rosdolsky see Chapter 10 on the peasant question.

Benner, on the other hand, insinuates that they were aware of how closely tied the national and social questions were (91). Others, like Herod for example, have shown that Marx and Engels misread the circumstances in East Central Europe (Herod 14). Löwy argues that “Engels did not try to grasp the social causes of the ‘Vendean’ role played by these national movements in 1848, but simply deduced it from their supposed ‘counter-revolutionary’ nature” (Löwy 25).

A strong Russian Empire seemed to prevent not only the spread of democratic revolutions and ideals but also the national unifications of Germany and Poland. Moreover, Pan-Slavism, which Marx and Engels believed would emerge from the unity of the desperate small Slav nations seeking assistance to preserve their national goals, could create a distraction from the wider revolutionary endeavors across Europe. Directed from Russia, Pan-Slavism could serve as a promoter of Russian absolutism across East Central Europe. That is why Engels consistently rejected Pan-Slavism as Russia's Trojan horse into European democracy (Engels Revolution and Counter-Revolution 46–50).

Swoboda explains that, for instance, “the Hungarian [or Polish] revolt need not even have been progressive internally to have contributed significantly to the more general revolutionary movement. Any furtherance at all of the general revolution seemed implicitly to bear the stamp of progress” (Swoboda 10–11).

Benner explains: “Nations were not seen as the product of impersonal economic forces, or as weapons wielded exclusively by the bourgeoisie in ideological battle. The prescriptive concept implies that the elements of territory, history, culture, and statehood which come to embody a nation's distinctiveness are reworked and ascribed a certain significance by people, not by the inexorable logic of capitalist development” (95–96).

Connor, however, sees this emphasis on strategy emerging only after the 1848 Revolutions.

Benner (to an extent) follows Pelczynski's argument that Marx and Engels' interest in nationalism was much more practical than theoretical (Pelczynski 277). Similarly, Ritter suggests that Engels' preoccupation with East Central European national movements stemmed chiefly from his interest in their tactical significance (Ritter 138).

“By applying a strategic, politically discriminating analysis to nationalist movements and ideologies,” Benner contends, “Marx (and sometimes Engels) sought to provide action-guiding maps that would help democrats and revolutionaries to decide when to support or oppose a particular national movement.” For Marx and Engels, the decisive factors were class identity and political intentions of the nationalists. Later Marxists like Miroslav Hroch or John Breuilly picked up on this theme (Benner 113, 139).

Decades later, Rosa Luxemburg would point out this erroneous thinking (113–14).

See, for instance Engels “The Movements of 1847”; Engels “Democratic Panslavism”; Marx “The British Rule in India”.

See the collection: Karl Marx, Ireland and the Irish Question. Especially revealing, for example, is a letter from Engels to Marx after his travels through Ireland in 1856.

This is an important dimension of the historiographical debates on Marx and Engels' views on nationalism. Nimni claims that these views were drawn from their economic determinism, dismissing any subjective criterions. Yet, it seems that their writings on Poland and Ireland, and their support of national aspirations were derived from political assessments of international relations rather than any intrinsic economic factors. As Traverso and Löwy explain: “In this case, the concept of nation was not defined according to objective criteria (economy, language, territory, etc.), but rather was founded on a subjective element: the will of the Irish to liberate themselves from British rule” (137).

Again, it is important to emphasize that although Engels in the late stages of his life seemingly acknowledged the power of nationalism, he never supported the notion of the self-determination of nations. Only Marx and Engels' followers began to define and utilize the concept as encompassing a socialist ideal.

Marx explained this in a letter to Engels (in the late 1860s): “[It] is in the direct and absolute interests of the English working class to get rid of their present [connection] with Ireland. I am fully convinced of this, for reasons that, in part, I cannot tell the English workers themselves. 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 has 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” (Marx Ireland and the Irish Question).

Once again, the economic-political dichotomy reemerges. Löwy and Traverso see this change as emerging from political (not economic) foundations while Lim argues that such political pragmatism could not emerge without theoretical (i.e. economic materialist) underpinnings.

Several historians, including Adam Ciołkosz, postulate that Marx and Engels had distinguished between oppressed and oppressor nations already during the 1848 Revolutions, when they adhered to German oppression over Poles, arguing that “the creation of a democratic Poland was a first condition for the development of a democratic Germany” (Ciołkosz 13). However, though traces were noticeable in the earlier period, it was not until the 1860s that these ideas matured (See Löwy “Marxists and the National Question”).

Benner explains: “If the working classes in the dominant countries were unwilling to liberate themselves by opposing foreign oppression, then the revolutionary impulse had to come from the oppressed nations themselves. In such circumstances, Marx came to argue, the achievement of national independence might be a prior condition for social reform and progressive international alliances, not just a means of pursuing these broader objectives.”

See, for instance, a speech by Marx in 1867 to the International Workingmen's Association: “Poland and the Russian Menace”.

Felix explains: “Within two years more than a hundred societies, including many associations besides trade unions, such as mutual aid groups, freethinkers, language reformers, and artisanal guilds, had affiliated themselves to the International” (“The Dialectic of the First International and Nationalism” 29).

For signs of this flexible approach, one needs to look no further than the minutes of the General Council of the First International from the mid-1860s (The General Council of the First International, 1864–1866).

Kofman argues that the “Proudhonian federalism was to provide a basis for reconciling the absolute claim to sovereignty of the nation-state and to the rival imperialisms of the nation-states. Proudhon sought, not to destroy national communities, but to integrate them in a hierarchy of free groups, so that national egoism would find no scope for expression” (Novack 38).

The same conclusions are reached by Gerhard Fischer (Fischer).

Bakunin believed that Marx's socialism had lost its authenticity by focusing too much on those workers that were relatively well off. He believed that socialists should garner support amongst the poorest workers who had nothing to lose and would therefore join any revolutionary cause. Worse yet in Bakunin's eyes was Marx's overreliance on applying scientific socialism to transform the state. Workers could never simply take over the existing state apparatus. The state destroyed whatever genuine aspects of society remained under capitalism through domination and by upholding privileges. Since there was absolutely nothing redeemable about the state, its only fate was complete destruction (Kołakowski 246–52; Morris 96–104, 117–35).

This is clearly revealed in his early correspondence and eventually in Marx The Civil War in France.

Bakunin saw patriotism as a “passion of group solidarity” which capitalism was slowly eradicating through the establishment of large states. In its basic natural form, it promoted cooperation between people (Marx was not fully convinced of this). Yet, when utilized by the contemporary bourgeoisie, it justified destruction and domination. Hence, in Bakunin's time, patriotism had come to represent group interests of the privileged classes. “Patriotism which aims toward unity that is not based upon freedom is bad patriotism,” Bakunin would write in “Class Interests in Modern Patriotism,” “it is blameful from the point of view of the real interests of the people and of the country which it pretends to exalt and serve. Such patriotism becomes, very often against its will, a friend of reaction, an enemy of revolution,—that is, of the emancipation of nations and men.” After a revolution, state patriotism would wither away and would be replaced by proletarian patriotism (Bakunin “Class Interests in Modern Patriotism,” “Patriotism's Part in Man's Struggle,” and “Fatherland and Nationality” 232–33, 225–36, 324–26; Morris 103–04).

Fisher correctly argues that the key “is the description and obvious approval of both Marx and Bakunin of the constitutional theory and practice of the Commune, culminating in the idea of the people governing themselves in a process of direct, participatory democracy in a federation of communal councils.” The two men had a fairly similar vision of what would happen to the state (Fischer 32).

Ironically, Bakunin struggled with the same problem, albeit in a different context and in different ways. He kept highlighting the courage and brevity of the Slavs (such as Poles), pointing out the strength of their patriotism.

Two groups comprised what would in the mid 1870s become the SPD. The first to be created in 1863 was Lassalle's General German Workers' Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV). The second to emerge, in 1869, was the Social Democratic Workers' Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP), which was founded in the city of Eisenach (hence the label of Eisenachs). The Lassaleans included, for example, Carl Wilhelm Tölcke, August Perl, and Fritz Mende. The Eisenachs included August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht.