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Written: 1993.
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The reputation of Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967) in the English-speaking world rests almost entirely upon two works: his magnum opus on the Grundrisse, The Making of Marx’s Capital, and his ground-breaking Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: the National Question in the revolution of 1848. It is therefore with great pleasure that we publish for the first time in English the following short article, which appeared in Quatrième Internationale (Third series No.1. July-August, September 1980). The editorial board is greatly indebted to Ted Crawford of Revolutionary History who, with the assistance of Robin Blick, John Sullivan and Richard Kirkwood, made the translation.
Born in the Ukrainian city of Lvov, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Rosdolsky organised an illegal socialist group during the First World War. An early supporter of the Russian Revolution, he was one of the founders and the chief theoretician of the Communist Party of the Western Ukraine, an autonomous section of the Polish Communist Party. Although he was sympathetic to Bukharin, Rosdolsky refused to condemn Trotsky and was expelled from the party in the late 1920s, having opposed Stalinist policy in the Soviet Ukraine. While living in Vienna during the early 1930s, he was a correspondent of the Marx-Engels Institute and assisted in the preparation of the Marx-Engels Collected Works. Following the defeat of the Austrian workers in 1934, Rosdolsky returned to Lvov and, reflecting on the victory of fascism, was convinced of the correctness of Trotsky’s views. He joined the Ukrainian Trotskyist group, and wrote important studies of serfdom and communal agriculture in Galicia. During the Second World War, he survived the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Oranienburg concentration camps. After the war, he emigrated to the United States where he completed Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples in 1948 and, in the 1950s and 1960s, a series of articles which culminated in The Making of Marx’s Capital.
In this latter part of his life, he devoted himself to his studies and did not take an active part in politics. Although he no longer regarded the Soviet Union as any kind of worker’ state, he continued until his death to think of himself as a student of Lenin and Trotsky. It is to be hoped that more of the writings of this outstanding Marxist will be translated into English.
The passage which is at issue here is that in which the authors of the Manifesto depict the relationship of the proletariat to the country. This is the passage:
‘The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.
United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to.’ [1]
While several pages before it is said: ‘Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.’ [2]
The above phrases have been quoted countless times in socialist literature, most often to justify through them a hostile attitude to patriotism and bourgeois chauvinism by the proletariat. But there have also been attempts to weaken the vigorous language of these phrases and to give them an opposite nationalist meaning.
The well-known German Social Democrat theoretician Cunow is an example of this. [3] In his book Marx’s Theory of History, Society and the State, he deals, among other things, with the passages quoted above. According to him, Marx and Engels wished simply to say: ‘Today the worker has no country, he does not have his own role in the nation’s life, he is still excluded from its material and spiritual goods. But the working class will one day get political power and will occupy a dominant place in the state and nation and then, inasmuch as it will itself become the nation, to some extent it will also be national and will feel itself national, even if its nationalism is of a different kind to that of the bourgeoisie.’
The interpretation of Cunow’s breaks down over two little words, two really very little words: ‘so far’ (‘Since the proletariat . . . must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national’), which in fact shows the whole world of difference between proletarian internationalism and bourgeois nationalism.
Cunow’s interpretation created a whole reformist school; but after the Second World War, it found a home in some Communist circles. Thus, in the ‘introduction’ to the edition of the Manifesto put out by the Stern-Verlag publishers of Vienna in 1946, we read: ‘As Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, “Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national”, we find ourselves today precisely at the epoch where the working class presents itself nationally as the backbone of the nation in the struggle against fascism and for democracy. The working class of Austria fights at the present time with all the working people to conquer the Austrian fatherland through the creation of an independent, free and democratic Austria.’ [4]
Clearly this interpretation is exactly the same as Cunow’s and it goes one better than his.
In total opposition to these attempts at nationalist interpretations, an explanation of the phrases mentioned in the Manifesto are found in an essay, Karl Marx, by Lenin:
‘Nations are an inevitable product, an inevitable form, in the bourgeois epoch of social development. The working class could not grow strong, become mature and take shape without “constituting itself within the nation”, without being “national”, (“though not in the bourgeois sense of the word”). The development of capitalism, however, breaks down national barriers more and more, does away with national seclusion and substitutes class antagonisms for national antagonisms. It is therefore perfectly true of the developed capitalist countries that “the workingmen have no country”, and that “united action” by the workers, of the civilised countries at least, is “one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat”.’ [5]
Even if its content is wholly in the spirit of Marxism this view of Lenin is not altogether satisfactory. One thing immediately apparent is that while, in the Manifesto, the proletariat is, even after the conquest of state power ‘still national’ in Lenin the ‘being national’ of the working class applies only at the start of the workers’ movement before the working class has entered its ‘maturity’. It is only under developed capitalism that the workers will, according to Lenin, have ‘no country’!
For the moment let us leave at that the interpretations of the phrases quoted from the Manifesto. It might not be surprising that the meaning of such phrases was sought by such interpretations. Much more surprising however is the fact that over time they have become a kind of article of faith from which flow programmatic slogans of very great significance without, in most cases, much time being spent on the true sense of these phrases. This is particularly true of the phrase according to which the workers have no country. The simpler it seemed to repeat this persistently, the more difficult it was to explain this apparently simple phrase and to co-ordinate the praxis of the Socialist parties (and later the praxis of the Communist parties). This praxis always and with great frequency seems to contradict the authors of the Manifesto.
What then is the true sense of these statements at issue in the Manifesto? Why has the working class ‘no country’ and why, in spite of that, does it provisionally continue to be ‘so far, national’ after the conquest of power? In our opinion it is necessary to examine the terminology of the Manifesto to answer these questions.
We know that the words ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ are not always and everywhere used in the same way. While for example in England and France the word nation normally means the population of a state and the word nationality is sometimes the synonym of belonging to a state, that is to say a community which possess its own state, and sometimes the designation of an ethnic-linguistic community (‘a people’), we [German speakers] apply both terms to ethnic-linguistic communities. [6]
Marx and Engels, particularly in their more youthful writings, almost always followed the French and English language usage. Most often by the term nation they seem to mean the population of a State, that is to say a community which has its own state. [7] (As an exception they apply the term to ‘historic’ peoples, for example Poland which lost its state.) ‘Nationality’ on the contrary meant for them a) belonging to a state or a people-state (Staatsvolk), the condition of a people-state or of a nation in the political sense; [8] b) an ethnic-linguistic community, that is to say belonging to such a community. That is why they use this term almost exclusively when they deal with the ‘non-historic’ peoples like the Austrian Slavs (Czechs, Croats, Ukrainians etc) or the ‘fragments of a people’ (like the Celts, the Bretons and Basques). Precisely this conception of ‘nationality’ as opposed to that of the ‘nation’ and as applied to an ‘historic’ people-state, is particularly characteristic of the terminology of Marx and Engels. Here are some examples: ‘The Highland Gaels and the Welsh’, wrote Engels in 1866 in the publication The Commonwealth, ‘are undoubtedly of different nationalities to the English although nobody will give to these remnants of peoples long gone by the title of nations, any more than to the Celtic inhabitants of France.’ [9]
But of the Austrian Slavs, he said in his article Germany and Panslavism (1855): ‘The Austrian Slavs thus fall into two categories: one part consists of the remnants of nationalities whose own history belongs to the past and whose present historical development is bound up with of nations of different race and language . . . Therefore these nationalities, though living exclusively on Austrian territory, are in no way recognised as constituting distinct nations.’ [10]
And again in another passage: ‘Neither Bohemia nor Croatia was strong to exist as a nation by itself. Their respective nationalities, gradually undermined by the action of historical causes that inevitably absorbs them into a more energetic stock, could only hope to be restored to something like independence by an alliance with other Slavonic nations.’ [11]
One can then see by the phrase quoted in Commonwealth in which he justified the difference, indeed the contradiction, between the ‘National Question’ and the ‘question of nationalities’ and the ‘national principle’ and the ‘principle of nationality’, the great weight which Engels gave to terminological definitions of ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’. The first principle he upholds, the second he resolutely rejects.
In the Communist Manifesto there are several examples of the usage that we have explained. For example, when the Manifesto talks about capitalist development cutting the ground from under the feet of ‘national industries’, it is clearly talking about industries limited to the territory of a given state. The ‘State factories’ mentioned at the end of the second part must be naturally understood in the same way. Equally, in the phrase ‘Independent, or but loosely connected, provinces with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff’, [12] the word ‘nation’ just like the word ‘national’ refers to a state, to a people-state and not to a ‘nationality’ in an ethnic-linguistic sense. So when Marx and Engels talk about the national struggle of the proletariat in the Manifesto this means something quite different from what the reformists and neo-reformists think. That already results in the following passage where the coming proletarian class struggle is described: ‘At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workplace of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them . . . It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.’ [13]
Here the ‘national’ struggle of the proletariat (the one carried on at the level of the whole state) is directly identified with the class struggle because only such a centralisation of workers’ struggles in a state-wide way enables the workers as a class to oppose the bourgeoisie as a class and to imprint on the struggles the seal of political struggle. [14] To return to the passage quoted at the beginning of this article in characterising the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie as ‘at first a national struggle’, Marx and Engels had in mind a struggle carried out in the first place within a state structure. That clearly explains the meaning of the phrase in which ‘The proletariat of each country must, of course first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.’ [15] But from this point of view the phrase ‘must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation’ equally acquires a sharply defined meaning. [16] In fact it said no more than that the proletariat had to be deployed within the frontiers of existing states, rise to be the leading class within the existing states. This is why it will be temporarily ‘so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word’ for that has as its object the political division of peoples and the exploitation of foreign nations by its own. In opposition to that, the victorious working class will try from the very beginning to eliminate national differences and conflicts between peoples and, through its rule, will create such preconditions that ‘as the antagonism between classes within the nation’ disappears, at the same time so will the ‘national differences and antagonisms between peoples’. From this point of view, and only from this point of view perhaps, the general question of the ‘abolition’ or the ‘annihilation’ of nationality must be understood, not in the elimination of the existing ethnic-linguistic formation (which would be totally stupid) but on the contrary in the political separation of peoples. [17] In a society where, according to the words in the Manifesto, ‘public power will lose its political character’, [18] in so far as the state ‘vanishes’ there can, in any case, be no place for distinct national states.
As we had thought, this confirms that an examination of the terminology of the Manifesto is fruitful. It shows us that the phrases at issue are about the ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’, above all in a political sense, and, for that reason, we cannot agree with the previous interpretations put forward. In particular, that includes the totally arbitrary and false interpretation of Cunow who wished both to deduce precisely a specific ‘proletarian nationalism’ from the Manifesto and to reduce the international nature of the workers’ movement to an aspiration to international co-operation of peoples. [19] But one can as little conclude from the Manifesto that there is a question of a ‘nihilism’ of the working class towards the national issue, as one can advocate the preaching of abstention on the national question: ‘the non-existence of a country‘ of which it speaks concerns the national bourgeois state, but not the people, the nationality in an ethnic sense. The workers have ‘no country’ because they have to think of the national bourgeois state as a machine of oppression directed against them; [20] they will have ‘no country’ (in the political sense) after they take power to the extent that, according to Marx, the distinct socialist and national states only represent a transitional stage on the road to a society without classes and without the state in the future and that the construction of such a society is only possible on an international scale. The ‘indifferent’ interpretation of the Manifesto, which is usual in orthodox Marxist circles, [21] is wholly unjustified. If, in spite of that, this interpretation, roughly speaking, adversely affected the socialist movement very little, and even advanced it, this is because it reflected ‘ perhaps in a deformed manner – the cosmopolitan tendency [22] inherent in the revolutionary workers’ movement, which dreamt of overcoming the ‘national limitations’ and the ‘national separations and opposition of peoples’. In this sense it is incomparably closer to the spirit of the Manifesto and of Marxism than the nationalist interpretation of Bernstein, Cunow and the rest.
* Translation and additional notes © Ted Crawford of Revolutionary History. Ted Crawford would like to acknowledge the help he has had from Robin Blick, John Sullivan and Richard Kirkwood in checking references and his translation. Any remaining errors and infelicities are his responsibility alone.
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