Reserve Text: Cedric Robinson, Black Nationalism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Press, 1983.
Chapter 3: Socialist Theory and Nationalism
Scientific socialists have become accustomed to locating the source of their observational point on the modern era in the 19th Century. But in truth it is the scientism of the 19th Century to which they refer. It was the political and intellectual critique of capitalism - the opposition to the alienation of labour and the ordering of social life according to the dictates and requirements of private property which could be traced to 19th Century sources. On the other hand, their socialism had its ideological, analytical and theoretical beginnings in even earlier times. As such, the beginnings of modern socialism, though likewise committed to the ultimate rationalization of society, were informed by a fundamentally different conception of the project than that socialism which resulted from the ideology's collision with German materialism, industrial production, and the revolutionary events of the early 19th Century.(1)
Prior to the 19th Century, what has sometimes been referred to as the socialist vision was a species of the moral and architetonie traditions which had penetrated European thought in the form of ethical systems and considerations preserved from the civilizations of Egypt, Ancient Greece and Asia Minor. Norman Cohen states:
Like the other phantasies which have gone to make up the revolutionary eschatology of Europe, egalitatian and communistic phantasies can be traced back to the ancient world.(2)
Christianity, of course, was an important conduit in the intervening ages. But interestingly enough, the growing power, wealth and human properties of the Church, an important focus of medieval socialism, did not obviate the retention and enunciation of communistic doctrine.(3) For more than a millenium and a half, often based upon specious ecclesiastical authority, it became a commonplace amongst canonists and scholastics that in the first state of society, which had also been the best state, there had been no such thing as private property because all things had belonged to all people.(4) Indeed, the communal life was taught and practiced among both the monastic
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and lay lower orders of the Church. TIm Church thus incorporated the oppositions of feudal privilege and Christian dogma. Eventually, this contradiction would erupt, informing the heresies of the 14th Century and beyond as well as the revolutionary eschatology of the numerous peasant revolts which occurred in the last Middle Ages.(5) Both the doctrine of primitive communalism and the movements of insurrection would become a part of the socialist tradition.(6) Surveying the history of feudal Europe, Marx and Engels recognized the predecessors of socialist praxis in such movements as the 16th Century Anabaptists in Germany, and in 17th Century England, the Levellers; Engels had called them forerunners of the 'modern proletariat'.(7) On their part, the historians of 19th Century socialist constructions place their points of origin quite firmly on French soil and among the sons and daughters of the most politically and intellectually mobile elements of the Third Estate: the bourgeoisie, the petit bourgeoisie and the artisans.(8) Moreover, these historians of the socialist movement unanimously assert that the French Revolution (an event upon which there is less agreement among them) was the more dramatic of the two moments which spurred the development of socialist ideas. As we have already noted, somewhat peculiarly the Industrial Revolution, that is, the appearance of a technologically vigorous and mechanically imaginative industrial capitalism as the second moment which allowed for the subsequent development of socialist thought, has been seen as an English phenomenon.
Socialist Thought: Negation of Feudalism or Capitalism?
Just as the historical character of capitalist development and the working classes associated with that development can be better understood through the medieval civilization in which they were created, a similar task applies to the history of socialism. Socialism as an articulated opposition to social inequality and poverty was first addressed to the adaptation of bourgeois society to feudal structures. Socialist critiques of society were attempts to further the bourgeois revolutions against feudalism. It possessed then a moral character:
The critique of property that arose with the liberalism of eighteenth- century France was not . . . geared to the industrial system at all. Aside from advocating that private property be eliminated, it had no economic orientation. Rather, the concern of such a characteristic communist thinker of the era as Morelly was entirely moral, and the abortion of private ownership was for him simply the focal point of a rationalized social and political structure that would then bring about the moral regeneration of man.(9)
As Marx and Engels made obvious in The Communist Manifesto (as polemicists, their intention was to emphasize their differences with those socialist traditions which had preceded them, not to identify with them), the socialism
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with which they were contemporaries was generally rounded on the attempt to distinguish and preserve the rights of property (bourgeois) from the wrongs of property (feudalism).(10) Socialism was an expression of the social and intellectual liberation and enlightenment of a strata of European societies for which the terrors of feudalism and the power of the Absolute State were no longer natural, immediate, or inevitable. As an ideology committed to the historical and providential force of science, reason and rationality, it was largely an obviation of those ideologies and structures which had served to legitimate the manifold forms of feudal and imperial authority: caste hierarchies, aristocratic privilege, the absolute power of the prince (later, the state) over the peasantry, the authority and wealth of the Church, and finally, the poverty and powerlessness of the masses? (11) The cause to which early socialism was addressed was the freeing of the secularized soul:
The highest point attained by contemplative materialism, that is, activity, is the contemplation of single individuals in 'civil society'. (12)To accept the notion, so frequently put forth, that early socialist thought was the ideological and theoretical negation of capitalist society (industrial capitalism during the stages of competitive and monopoly capitalism) is to presume an historical relationship which is not in evidence. As Schumpeter has so cleverly cautioned:
... the question arises whether the economic interpretation of history work less satisfactorily in some eases than it does in others. An obvious qualification occurs at the outset. Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not madfly melt. Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display different degrees of this ability to survive, we almost always find that actual group and national behaviour more or less departs from what we should expect it to be if we tried to infer it from the dominant forms of the productive process.... Such facts Marx did not overlook but he hardlyrealized their implications.(13)
The initial appearance of modern socialism are more closely related to feudal society than is suggested by the later shapes socialist thought would assume. Socialism began as one expression of the bourgeois society and the bourgeoisie which it came to oppose explicitly.
The materialist historicism of socialism is thus mistaken. That "nature" of socialism to which scholars like George Lichtheim (14) have devoted so much attention is a philosophical-ideological construct--an interpretation of the history of socialist thought which fixes on that variant of the tradition which was a response to the revolutionary failures of the mid-19th century. Combined with the persistent thrust of Marx's materialism toward a positive science--
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the critique of the capitalist mode of production, and the polilical- historical myths of Leninist revolution, the dominant legend of the socialist tradition replaces a history of socialism. The function of the alternative 'history' of socialism is to obscure the obvious: that the origins of socialist thought are not with the European proletariat but the middle classes.(15)
It was not the working classes in Germany who were at the origin of socialist ideas... socialist ideas were spread by a party of the intellectual elite, who saw the proletarian masses as a possible instrument of social renewal.(16)
Indeed, the history of European socialism is dotted by a consistent opposition to the practical activity and consciousness of proletarian classes. As Marx and Engels themselves declared:
The question is not what goal is envisaged for the time being by this or that member of the proletariat, or even by the proletariat as a whole. The question is what is the proletariat and what course of action will it be forced historically to take in conformity with its own nature. (17)
The intelligentsia was by far the stratum most likely to discern that course of action· Of course, Lenin, in substituting the revolutionary party for the conscious proletariat, agreed with Marx and Engels, both theoretically and programmatically.(18) Unfortunately, neither of them recalled to any significant political purpose, Marx's warning, in 1851, of the nature of their own class as it was demonstrated in Paris of 1848:
... one must not form the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions under which modern society can alone besaved and the class struggle avoided.. .. the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie, therefore a transition class, in which the interests of two classes are simultaneously deadened, imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally.(19)
As a class whose historical character included the ideological and administrative mediation of bourgeois rule and domination, the petit bourgeoisie tended to produce political and conceptual lattice-works from which its inevitably derivative authority might extend and absorb the whole of society· So as utilitarianism and functionalism had served as bases for those elements of tile petit bourgeoisie enveloped by bureaucracy, commerce, and the professions - that is, the mainstream of a capitalist social order socialism became the pennant of those members of the petit bourgeoisie appalled by the cruel lack of restraint and the chaotically foreshortened vision of the bourgeoisie
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From Babeuf to Marx: A Curious Historiography
The industrial working classes constituted a minority of the workers of England and France at the moments when modern socialism began to take form.(21) Indeed, muclt of the revolutionary agitation which marked this period was pushed forward by crowds dominated by artisans and shop-keepers. (Albert Soboul for instance, indicates that though the most powerful detnent of the Third Estate of the French Revolutionary period was bourgeois, two-thirds of the order, that is its Jacobin wing, were artisans and shop-keepers.(22) England and France (the latter as the most tndustrlalized economy in continental Europe) were still essentially agrarian societies when their working-cIass movements assumed class~pecific ideologlcal and organizational forms in the 1830s and 1840s. Even then, for example, Rude speaks of the importance of 'the survival of traditional ideas and values' in movements which were to come so close to power.(23) The relationship between the social movements of tile lower classes and the socialist intelligentsia was at leastStudents of socialism generally argue that the socialist tradition which would come to be closely identified with an industrial proletariat begins in 1795 with the Conspiracy of Equals in which Francois-Noel (Gracchus) Babeuf was so prominent.(24) G.D.H. Cole, with apparent approval, notes that:
Babeuf's Conspiracy continued to be regarded by revolutionary Socialists, and is to-day regarded by Communists, as the first plain manifestation of the proletariat in revolutionary action, proclaiming from afar the new revolution which was destined to complete the work begun in 1789.(25)
Lichtheim, quite naturally, makes an identical remark before proceeding to the declaration of a direct legacy from Babeuf to Lenin:
· . . Babeuf and his associates appear as the precursors of nineteenth- century radicals like Blanqui and, at a remove, of the Russian revolutionary Populists of the 1860's and 1870's whose heritage was subsequently assumed by the Bolsheviks.(26)
Though Lichtheim's lineage may be problematic, certain similarities are obvious belween the moments at which the Babeufists and the Bolsheviks emerged from their respective revolutionary situations· Since it is the Conspiracy of Equals which is likely to be the lesser known, some detail might be appropriate to demonstrate this apparent similarity.
By 1794, that is Year II of The French republic, the most radical of the several bourgeois-dominated governments established in Paris had been overthrown and its leading citizens (most prominently Robespierre) had been executed, exiled, or forced to flee to the countryside and beyond.(27) The reaction which followed, under the Directory, had abolished the radical
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legislation and the egalitarian policies of a directed economy decreed the year before.(28) The limitationson prices (the maximum), the taxation of the wealthy classes, national assistance to the poor, free and compulsory education, the confiscation and distribution to the poor of emigre property, were either repealed or discontinued in practice. As had been the case on several previous occasions since the aristocracy's power had been challenged, the revolutionary crowds of France's towns and cities, and the peasants in the countryside began to suspect that the Revolution was being betrayed.(29) This time the traitors were the reactionary bourgeoisie, those members of the class whose wealth and power the Revolution had already secured. The executions of the leaders of the Jacobin 'left-wing' of the Convention, removed from the Parisian sans-culottes those elements (the Montagnard) which had been most responsive to its demands. Those members of the left-wing wldch had survived its repression had gone underground, frequently organizing themselves into secret societies and clubs. One such group was the remnant of the Union du Pantheon: the Conspirators. While Babeuf and his comrades were negotiating in 1796 with the Jacobin underground, they were betrayed by a military associate, Grisel, acting as a spy for the Directory. (30) At their subsequent trial in Year V (1797), the intent of the Conspiracy of Equals was revealed for the first time:
... they had projected a seizure of power by a small revolutionary group of leaders, who were then to establish a revolutionary government based on their following among the Parisian local societies, with the intention of summoning as speedily as possible a National Assembly, to be elected under the democratic franchise of the abortive Constitution of 1793, which had never been allowed to come into force. Pending the bringing into action of this Constitution, Babeuf and his followers proposed to establish a temporary dictatorship, based mainly on the Pads workers; but they had no theory of revolutionary much less of proletarian dictatorship as more than an expedient of transition over a short period to a fully democratic Constitution based on manhood suffrage. They did, however, propose to proceed immediately... to large measures of expropriation and redistribution of property holdings on a basis of communal appropriation and enjoyment of all goods.(31)
Such were the beginnings of the notion of proletarian dictatorship in European socialism· It is a heritage which tends to confirm Marx's later characterizations of the petit bourgeoisie while suggesting some of the political forms and consequence of such presumptions· It is also useful to note that at no point had the conspiracy become a popular or mass movement. Cole observes:
·.. that Babeuf's movement [n]ever really took shape as a nationwide revolutionary campaign. It found its support, as the Jacobins had done, mainly in the larger towns and preeminently in Paris, where its following was attracted to it mainly by the conditions of scarcity and unemployment which followed upon the reluctance of emancipated peasants to
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keep the towns supplied with the necessaries of life. Nor did it ever command more than a small fraction even of the urban proletariat. It was a conspiracy of a few who aimed at drawing after them the large elements of urban discontent arising mainly out of sheer hunger.(32)
It would be another 30 years before a working-class movement gave evidence of its influence, and much longer than that before the principles of a socialist society became dominant in European social movements.(33)
Following the execution of Babeuf and his co-conspirators, it is not until almost mid-century, the years noted for the appearance of Marx and Engels, that thinkers in the socialist tradition became actively engaged in working-cIass politics. The historians of socialist thought take this period for what it was, in relationship to their subject, and unanimously commit themselves to exegeses, The literary, pamphleteering and historical works of forgotten and dimly-remembered writers, with the rare interruptions of a Buonarroti, Blanqui or Blanc, are sequenced to form the tapestry of socialist thought, it is a period dominated by eccentrics, visionaries and didacts. The wistful trails of Godwin, Paine, Fourier, Saint-Sinon, Cabet, Pecquer, lesser and grander lights, preoccupy the historians, along with the most often short-lived utopian communities associated with some of them. The agitations, rebellions, riots and struggles of artisans, wage labourers. peasants and slave labourers are largely irrelevant to the tradition in the early 19th Century and mostly constitute a background 'noise' in this the era of the socialist writer. The 'historical' issues which arise are each writer's contribution to socialist theory, and whether or not the 'systems' that were constructed should properly be categorized as 'socialist'. This is a particularly telling historical project since so many of the historians, the Coles, Lichtheims, Beers, are themselves sympathetic to the tradition they reconstruct. Their work becomes a demonstration of the independence of socialist theory and social movements from one another. When once again they collide, in the 1840's, 1870's and early 1900's, each had assumed forms and prerogatives only slightly tolerable to those of the other. While the movements of the working classes tended towards an accommodation with capitalism in the form of trade unionist demands, abandoning revolutionary initiatives to those whose social origins were, most often, the peasant and petit bourgeois classes, socialist theory became more and more dominated by the figure of the revolutionary proletariat.
Marx, under the influence both of his readings of Hegel and his intense encounters with a number of intellects of his own generation who had identified themselves as Hegelians (David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Karl Koppen, Moses Hess, Lorenz von Stein, and Ludwig Feuerbach),(34) had sought to construct an epistemological system rounded on materialism as a meta-theoretic; the currency underneath social structures and forms:
My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but
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that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life... that the anatomy of this civil society... has to be sought in political economy.(35)
History, for Marx, became the antagonistic play of the relations of living social categories whose existence was predicated on the particular characters of production and property winch had been the basis of social life .(36) Political economy was thus the most fundamental of historical inquiries. The materialist conception of history situated the objective and necessary forces of a society, distinguishing their significance from those categories of human activity which were the result of pure speculation (idealism) and ideology, As Marx's theoretical work proceeded, the progressive tendency to place the study of capitalist forms of production, exchange and distribution at the centre of his work became more and more pronounced. By 1847, capitalism had become his primary subject. His infrequent sojourns into the study of revolutions were dictated by their occurrence (he would write in 1850 articles later published as The Class Struggles in France and, in 1851, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as studies of the 1848 revolutionary movement in France, and, in 1871, The Civil War in France as a statement of the Paris Commune of the same year) and the degree to winch Marx believed them to be important testaments to the political and methodological efficacy of the materialist conception of history.(37)
Marx, Engels and Nationalism
The bulk of the almost two decades that Marx spent on his 'Economics', largely sandwiched between the revolutions of 1848 and the appearance of the rather more ambiguous International in 1864, though substantially marked by intensive research, writing, mathematical training and theoretical development, was also a period of extreme frustration. Plagued by what he constantly referred to as 'bourgeois' troubles (indebtedness, familial demands and disruptions) and debilitating illnesses (carbuncles and boils),(38) Marx's celebrated temper and sometimes mean preoccupations propelled him into drawn quarrels, some petty but no less vicious (with Karl Vogt; Ferdinand Lassaille, 'the dirty Breslaw Jew; Giuseppe Mazzini; and even one, probably the only one, with Engels following the death of Mary Burns);(39) most the result of Marx's proprietary attitude towards a 'party' (the Communist League) which he himself in 1860 had declared defunct since 1852.(40) One of these disputes, however, is particularly instructive here for it reveals in dramatic terms the ideological restraints and theoretical bounds which placed Marx and Engels al an especial disadvantage in their confrontation with the form of nationalism beginning to surface by the mid-19th Century. Because nationalism is the most important ideology of our time, its treatment by Marx and Engels and later Marxists can be informative both with respect to the essence of Marxist thought as well as the nature of ideology.
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The nationalism in question was German, a nation from which Marx and Engels had been in enforced exile for several years. Exile, however, is hardly a satisfactory defence in this instance since Marx and Engels, as leaders of the German democratic (socialist) movement, were in almost daily touch with German correspondents. It is true that as emigres from Germany, Marx and Engels can be expected to have drawn increasingly distant from the ambitions and moods of working-class organizations at home. Franz Mehring, one of Marx's most sympathetic biographers, notes that in Marx's and Engels' argument with Lassalle over the consequences for the German revolutionary struggle of a war between Germany (Prussia and the German League) and Italy (the Kingdom of Sardinia) and France, 'the two friends had to pay for having lost touch with conditions in Germany for so long'.(40) Given the world-historical scope that Marx and Engels attempted to achieve in their work, however, Mehring's intervention by interpretation appears excessively apologetic and not particularly instructive. He failed to come to terms with the political-ideological effect that Marx's notion of the logic of capitalist development would incur.
In brief, the situation was this. Neither Italy, Germany or France (and for that matter Austria) had yet achieved territorial configurations which conformed to the ambitions of their ruling and military elites, nor the natural (ethnic and linguistic) affections of their nationalistic citizenry. Cavour, the Prime Minister of the Sardiuian kingdom, had gradually been converted from a repressive anti-nationalist to an extremely skilled unificationist by the persistent development and growth of nationalist sympathy and organization both on the Italian peninsula and among the exiles his government had been so instrumental in relocating.(42) By the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, Cavour had become convinced that the French army would be the critical tool for the expulsion of Austria from central Italy and the achievement of a decisive advantage for Piedmont (continental Sardinia) over the Papal States (Cavour appears to have presumed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies beyond his reach), Carour saw to it that Sardinian troops accompanied the British and French armies when they invaded Russia in 1854. The Crixnean War ultimately resulted in the weakening of both Austria and Russia, and at the peace conference in Pads (1856), Austria's Italian possessions (Venetia and Lombardy) became a matter for discussion as a breach of the Vienna settlement (1815). It appears that diplomatic considerations and the brutal and continuing suppression of Italian rebels by Austria had joined to make Austria's position in Italy untenable. By July 1858, Napoleon III, convinced on the one hand, as a Bonaparte, that Italy was ancestral country,(43) and on the other that French power required a larger destiny than that bounded by the defeat of his imperial uncle, had met secretly with Cavour(44) and agreed on a joint venture against Austala: Piedmont was to lure Austria into a declaration of war. The French army would intervene against the aggressor Austria. France would be rewarded by the ceding of the Savoy and Nice provinces; Sardinia, by incorporating Lombardy, Venetia and the central Duchies, would become the Kingdom of North Italy. Mehring continues the story:
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On New Year's Day, 1859, Bonaparte received the Austrlan Ambassador in audience and informed him of the French intentions, whilst a few days later the King of Sardinia announced to the world that he was not deaf to the heart-rending appeals of the Italian people, These threats were perfectly understood in Vienna . . . the Austrian government was clumsy enough to let itself be manoeuvred into the role of attacker, Half-bankrupt, attacked by France and threatened by Russia, it was in a difficult position ... so it therefore sought to win the support of the German League... it tried to persuade the League that the maintenance of Austrian oppression in Italy was a matter of vitaI national importance for Germany.(45)
In order to comprehend the response of Marx and Engels to this situation it is first necessary to know more about the Germany from which riley came, and the Germany to which Austria appealed. The defeat of the Napoleonic armies and the 1815 settlement of Vienna which followed, had not resulted in the reunification of Germany. The 'Holy Alliance' of the Reich, whose most recent manifestation was an alliance between Prussia, the Confederation of the Rhine and Austria, which had been dissolved in 1806, was entirely frustrated by a statesmanship whose architect was Austria's Metternlch and which was dominated by the interests of Austria, Russia and Great Britain. Between 1815 and 1866, Germany -- the Deutscher Band -- consisted of 39 states or principalities (including the four free cities of Hamburg, Bremen. Lubeck and Frankfurt).(46)
Even during the War of liberation (1812-15), the particinarisms of the German principalities had been persistant, causing Johann Friedrich Bohmer's father to write to his son, the future historian, 'Unhappily, those fighling for the great patriotic cause are not so much Germans as Bavarians, Wurttemberger, Hessians, Saxons, Nassauer, Wurzburger and even subjects of the petty state of Ysenburg.'(47) Within the Bund (or League), Prussia emerged as the most powerful competitor to Austria on the basis of its army and its bureaucracy (a legacy of French rule).(48)
W.O. Henderson indicates that Germany, at the beginning of the I9th Century, was much less industrialized than France, The industrialization of Germany really began in file 1830's and 1840's with the introduction of steam-powered machinery and the importation of skilled artisans from England (to operate mule-jennys in tile cotton mills of Saxony, build textile machinery and steam-ships, and innaugurate power loom weaving in lower Silesia).(49) Up through the mid-19th Century, however, Germany was still overwhelmingly agricultural. And despite an estimated 38% rise in population between 1815 and 1845,
... the proportions of town and country dwellers remained virtually unchanged. Few towns had recovered from the effects of the Thirty Years War and the stagnation of the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century the total population of all the free
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cities and university towns of Germany was scarcely the equivalent of the population of Paris. Hence neither industrial capitalists nor industrial workers existed as a serious political force, and the towns were still, as in the eighteenth century, dominated by a professional and bureaucratic middle-class, which had Ijttle to gain by radical politicaJ change.(50)
Still, it was largely out of this middle class that early 19th Century liberalism and nationalism found their social base.(51) Barraclough, indeed, expressed some surprise that 'radical and national feeling' would persist so long in Germany as to achieve popular support in the German revolutions of 1848. Yet when crowds of artisans and workers rose in Vienna and Berlin in that year, the liberal elements of the nalddle classes were not enthusiastic, choosing politically to abdicate their momentary advantage rather than provide any further momentum to the revolution.(52) We shall see that Marx and Engels, as members of that generation and class which had committed themselves to the democraticization and reunification of Germany, were thus deeply impheated and consequently ambivalent towards the events which affected these interests between the liberal defection of 1849 and the assumption of power in Prussia by Bismarck in 1862. Lichthelm is quite correct to observe Neither the Marxian theory of democracy nor the Marxian view of national evolution is fully comprehensible unless it is remembered that they took shape on the morrow of the worst defeat democracy and nationalism had yet suffered in Europe.(53)
When the liberal parliamentatians abandoned the attempt at democratic reforms in May 1849, the future of German liberalism and nationalism was remanded into the hands of the Prussian Junket class. The first, liberalism, was to be destroyed as a threat to that class, the second retained as a weapon of that class aguinst Austrian ambitions:
Bismarck... realized that, despite the setback of 1848-1849, German liberalism and nationahsm supported by Austria were still a serious threat to Prussian particularism and Prussian aristocratic privilege Liberalism was fatal to tlie social order for which Bismarck stood; but nationalism, carefully handled, could be made to subserve the purposes of Prassia.... He separated German national aspirations from the liberal background which, from 1813 to 1848 and in centuries past, had given them meaning. Nationalism had grown strong as an instrument of liberal reform, as an essential means of breaking the stranglehold of particularist interest over the German people... he offered the German people unity, but at the expense of the radical reform which alone made unity worth while.(54)
Bismarck, as we know, was successful, but not on the basis of sheer energy or
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diplomatic acumen. The economic prosperity, between 1850 and 1871, of an hld ustflalizing Germany had made radical (that is liberal) reform less urgent,(55) while the ubiquitous international machinations and the persistent hostility of Napoleon Ill to German unity underscored the logic of nationalism. As we return to the first months of the war, these dynamics and their history should be kept in mind. And though the era of Bismarck takes us beyond the moment of the Italian war, some familiarity with these later events is useful since they indicate the momentum of certain social processes more clearly evident to Lassalle than to Marx or Engels.
Engels' reaction to the outbreak of war in 1859 between Austria, Sardinia and France, and to the German nationalist movement which had artended the prelude of war, was to publish a pamphlet entitled Po und Rhein .(56)
Lassalle acted for Engels as his German agent with Franz Duncker, while Marx gave ins entbusiastic support to the project. In his pamphlet, Engels argued that though the Po river boundary was of no military significance to Germany (in these terms, Engels added, France's clamis were more defensible), politically, tile French encroachment on the Po was the beginning of an attempt to recapture the Rhine frontier. On this basis, Engels insisted, the Po was where Gertnany must make its stand with Austria. The pamphlet was published in Germany, anonymously, on the advice of Marx so as to give the impression that the author was probably a Prussian general-- a strategem which was apparently quite successful, to Marx's great satisfaction. He wrote to Engels, congratulating him on the fact that in his induced identity he was now being celebrated in their homeland as a military expert .(57) The intent of Marx and Engels, their 'ulterior motive' as they put it, has been reconstructed by Mehring:
First of all both Marx and Engels believed that the national movement in Germany was a really genuine one . . . . The instinct of the people demanded a war against Louis Bonaparte as the representative of the traditions of the First French Empire, and this instinct was right. Secondly, they assumed that Germany was really seriously threatened by the Franco-Russian alliance ....
And finally . . . . In their opinion the German governments needed goading on by the national movement, and what they then expected was described by Engels in a passage of a letter to Lassalle...: 'Long live a war in which we are attacked simultaneously by the French and the Russians, for in such a desperate situation with disaster immediately threatening, all parties, from those which are now ruling to Zitz and Blum, would exhaust themselves, and the nation would then finally turn to the mos energetic party to save itself.(58)
But what Mehring did not recognize as an imporlant element of both Engels' and Marx's position was a fundamental Historicism. Engels had made clear in Po und Rhein that the logic of capitalist development supported German nationalism but not Italian nationalism:
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All changes (in the map of Europe), if they are to last, must in general start from the effort to give the large and viable European nations more and more their true national boundaries, which are determined by language and sympathies, while at the same time the ruins of peoples, which are still found here and there and which are no longer capable of a national existence, are absorbed by the larger nations and either become a part of them or maintain themselves as ethnographic monuments without political significance.(59)
We shall return to the implications of this theme more than once. Lassalle, we know already, disagreed with Marx and Engels. He quickly responded to Engels' essay by writing a pamphlet of his own, The Italian War and Prussia's Task. In it he urged the Prussian government to side with France and Italy against Austria on the grounds that 'the complete destruction of Austria was the preliminary condition of German unity'.(60) As he would inform Marx by letter, he wrote in this way so as to appeal to a public mentality (which he believed Marx and Engels to be unaware of) in order to discredit a policy (Prussian defence of Austria) which he believed inevitable:
My dear Marx, You simply cannot conceive the idiocy of opinion here, which is all for war with France, and which threatens to sweep away in its current even those democrats who are not thoroughly independent. I should regard the popularity of the war as a much greater misfortune than the war itself and there can be no doubt that at the present moment a war would be extremely popular.
... I have pointed out to the government an extremely national and popular way, which in abstracto it could very well follow, but which in concreto would prove utterly impracticable· For the very reason that the government will not take this course, it seems to me that I have found a means of making it fundamentally unpopular. I do not know whether you have read enough of the German newspapers to be well informed
concerning the popular mood. The press is in full blast for the devouring of all Frenchmen and voices an unqualified Gallophobia. (Napoleon is a mere pretext; the underlying ground is the revolutionary development of France·)... a war supported by a blind uprush of popular feeling would be most prejudicial to our democratic development.(61)Lassalle, whose pamphlet was described by Marx as 'an enormous blunder'(62) and 'monstrously false(63) prompting Marx to observe to Engels that 'we must now absolutely insist on party discipline or everything will be in the soup',(64) was decidedly more insightful as to the nature of German nationalism than either Marx or Engels.(65) Mehring, largely free of the restraints which bound Lassalle to a solicitous concern for Marx's feelings, presented Lassalle's thesis with less discretion than Lassalle and in language much more appropriate:
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In his eyes a Franco-German war in which the two greatest Continental peoples would rend each other for mere nationalist delusions, a really popular war against France not prompted by any vital national interest, but nourished by pathologically irritated nationalism, high-flown patriotism and childish anti-Gallicism, was a tremendous danger to European culture and to all reully national and revolutionary interests...
Thus the dispute between Lassalle, Marx and Engels had not merely raised questions as to the nature of the political relationship between them (that is whether Lassalle had the right to disagree publicly with an anonymously authored position) or the extent to which Marx and Engels were themselves victims of a Germanic chauvinism.(66)
Certainly these were important issues, but they could just as well be understood as the inevitable excesses of personality and political ambition to which intellectuals such as Marx and Engels hi the midst of a workers' movement fall prey.(67) More important, however, is the effect that political economy, the central analytical tool of their materialist conception of history, had on their ability to conceptualize correctly the ideological character of industrial social movements. In Marx's historical view, the 'genesis of the industrial capitalist' was inextricably tied to the development of the State. It was by means of the State that the proletariat came into being, transformed as producers from peasants to wage labourers, Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system and as consumers into the home market.
The many scattered customers, whom stray artisans until now had found in the numerous small producers working on their own account, concentrate themselves now into one great market provided for by industrial capital. Thus, hand in hand with the expropriation of the self-supporting peasants, with their separation from their means of production, goes the destruction of rural domestic industry, the process of separation between manufacture and agriculture. And only the destruction of rural domestic industry can give the internal market of a country that extension and consisttrice which the capitalist mode of production requires?
Having secured the home market, the further expansion of capitalism required of the State that it assume new forms and additional functions. 'National debts, i.e. the alienation of the state -- whether despotic, constitutional or republican -- marked with its stamp the capitalistic era.(71) First in Holland, and
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subsequently in England (but with precedents in Genoa, Venice, Spain and Portugal), the primitive accumulation of capital which was the basis for manufacturing had been accomplished through the agencies of a 'colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc.(72) all the attributes of State structures, Marx conceived the triumph of bourgeois society over feudalism as a victory won by the most extraordinary instrument of class struggle: the State. He was inclined, then, as we have already noted in Engels,(73) to see the nation (the manifest form of the State in the 19th Century) as a sine qua non of bourgeois rule.(74) In turn, bourgeois rule and capitalist production were necessary for the development of the sociailzed production which the immanent society required.(75)
The development of the industrial proletariat is, in general, conditiongd by the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. Only under its rule does the proletariat gain that extensive national existence which can raise its revolution to a national one, and only thus does the proletariat itself create the modern means of production, which becomes just so many means of its revolutionary emancipation. Only bourgeois rule tears up the material roots of feudal society and levels the ground on which alone a proletarian revolution is possible.(76)
Marx had initially presumed (with an ethusiasm of youth, according to Lichtheim) that the bourgeoisie would reproduce itself everywhere, 'In one word, it creates a world after its own badge.(77) However, while Marx clearly envisioned the historical role of the bourgeoisie in world -historical terms(78) he also maintained the contradictory view of its historical development as occurring in national terms(79) The expansion of the bourgeoisie meant the extension of the nation-state:
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.... 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.(80)
It may be that at this stage of Marx's development, his universe consisting of western Europe might dissolve this contradiction through the vision of an immanent pan-European formation. It may be that his ideas demonstrated an unresolved strain between his predilection as an idealist-trained philosopher- theorist and his processes of inquiry as a social and historical analyst. Further, Marx may have already begun the tendency, much more obvious in his later work, to confuse and confound his theory of historical change by extrapolating from French social history a sense of the ultimate character of
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class struggle in capitalist society (in spite of the rather primitive development of industrial capitalism in France, The dominance of a maritime bourgeoisie, the presence of a capitalist aristocracy, and a working class more peasant and artisan than industrial proletariat) while determining the nature of capitalism from the more industrially developed England.(79) Lastly, as a propagandist, he may simply have been more concerned with the political impact of rhetoric on his audience than with analytical precision. Whichever of these explanations one chooses, none really reconciles tile existence in the early work of two opposing views of the nature and character of bourgeois society. In time Marx would relinquish one for the other.
lnterestingly enough, Marx's disavowal of tile genesis of capitalism in western Europe as a general 'historico-philosophic theory' is best illustrated by letters written to Russia Marxists who, from the 1870's on, became engaged in controversies concerning the process of industrialization and social develop- ment that Russia should assume in order to achieve a social revolution. In November 1877, Marx drafted a letter (never sent) to the editors of the Russian socialist journal, Otechestvenniye Zapiski. tie meant to object to the use a Narodnik author, N .K . Mikhadovsky, had made of his work in an attack on Marx's sympathizers in Russia. Marx wrote:
The chapter on primitive accumulation does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy .... That is all. But that is too little for my critic. He feels he absolutely must metamorphose my Hstorical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which ensures, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.(82)
Four years later, in a letter written to Vera Zusulich, the Russia revolutionary who would later work with Lenin in London, Marx would quote from the French edition of Capital as a response to her inquiries on 'the agrarian question' in Russia: 'The "historical necessity" of this movement is thus explicitly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. The reason for this restriction is indicated ,.. in Chapter XXXII.(83)
Yet the historical figure of the nation, conceived in terms of its historic role in the development of capitalist production, remained an aspect of the acceptance or rejection of nationalist movements by Marx and Engels, Nationalism was acceptable if its success resulted in the construction of a 'viable' industrial nation. In the same vein, it was unacceptable 'nonsense', 'impracticable', 'fanatical') for nationalist movements to tbreaten what Engels had termed 'true [i.e. productive] national boundaries' in Po und Rhein.(84) As late
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as 1888, Engels was still giving his blessing to German nationalism on this basis:
One can see from all tins that the desire for a united 'Fatherland' had a very material foundation. It was no longer the dim impulse of the students of the Wartburg days, when 'strength and courage burned in German souls'... neither was it any longer the much more down-to-earth call for unity advanced by the lawyers and other bourgeois ideologists of the Hambach Festival ,.. no, it was the demand arising from the immediate commercial needs of practical businessmen and industrialists for the elimination of all the historically out-dated rubbish which obstructed the free development of trade and industry, for the removal of all the unnecessary irritations, which all ins competitors had overcome, and which the German businessman had to put an end to at home if he wished to play a part on the world markets.(85)
Though Marx and Engels substantially agreed about the historical elements and characteristics of European nations extant in the mid-19th Century, there were some differences between them respecting the nationalism, or what they came to call the national question (the difference was linked in all probability with whatever it was behind Engels' contempt for the Slavs).(86) In The Communist Manifesto and The German Ideology, Marx had stressed proletarian internationalism over nationalism, observing, as we have seen, that it was in the nature of the bourgeoisie to have national interests and retain them, but in the nature of capitalism to dissolve national interests both politically (through the formation of an international class: the proletariat) and economically (through the creation of a world system). Later on, as noted, paxticularly in hjs considerations of Ireland.(87) Marx began to deal with the question of national liberation more deliberately, and, perhaps, realistically.
Here Marx came to insist that national liberation was the precondition for proletarian internationalism and simultaneously the destruction of bourgeois economic, political, military and ideological he emony.ss tie did not, however, extend this analysis to India, Mexico or Italy.(88) Engels, on the other hand, innded to recognize and emphasize a counter-revolutionary tendency of national liberation movements, which he had sensed since observing the social upheavals of 1848-9. Including the Scots, Bretons and Basques with the Southern Slavs, Engels had declared these peoples 'non-historic nations', remnants of a nation, mercilessly crushed, as Hegel said, by the course of history, this national refuse, is always the fanatical representative of counter- revolution and remains so until it is completely exterminated or de-nationalized, as its whole existence is in itself a protest against a great historical revolution.(90)
Micbael Lowy's observation that Marx's treatment of national liberation tended towards economism,(91) while Engels' was legalistic (92) is a bit simplistic,
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if not entirely incorrect. Their habits of thougilt tended towards the recognition of different forces if not configurations in human experience. The familiar, in the instance of Marx, was of things philosophically dialectical and reflective, with Engels it was the mundane and the practical instincts of the market place. While Marx tended, at the level of the historical epic, to discover the forces of the new world disguised in epiphenomenal forms, Engels' commitment to the revolutionary vision determined for him ultimately, the uses of history (and science). With respect to nationalism, Marx was the more likely to recognize that as an ideology its historical significance was anthiguous at worst, and Engels that such ambiguity constituted an unacceptable threat.
As analysts of nationalism, their legacy then was ambiguous. It appears that with respect to the actual nationalist movements of their time, in Germany, Poland, eastem or southern Europe, neither Marx nor Engels achieved an extraordinary comprehension or fully escaped the parochiatisms of the day. Rather, their historical method provided them with a means of supporting their predispositions on the historical worth of peoples and the varying capacities of the several European national movements. Their own nationalism whether 'unconscious or subconscious', as Davis is forced to concede,(93) or otherwise, made them generally unsympathetic to the national liberation movements of peoples (e.g. the Russians and other Slavs) which historically threatened what Marx and Engals believed to be the national interests of the German people. An opposition to movements such as these could be rationalized by their failure to accord with the practical requirements of a viable political economy. On the other hand, certain European peoples were destined to be unified by the State and capitalist development. For the time being, in the interests of socialism, the proletariat of such societies were best advised to support their bourgeoisie. Germany, they argued, fitted that circumstance:
For some other countries, nationalism still meant struggling for national unification, as with the East European countries from Poland to the Balkans; or fighting for national independence against the imperialist powers, as with the Irish, the Czechoslovaks, and the oriental and African peoples. Marxism had still to answer the questions of how far these nationalist movements were justified, how far they were a legitimate concern of the working class, and what attitude the proletariat of all countries should take to them, Was there a general principle involved? If so, Marx and Engels had not clearly enunciated it.(94)
Marxism and Nationalism
After Marx and Engels, the most significant contributors to The national question were the Bolsheviks, the Radical Left (Luxernburg, Pannekoek, Sirasset and Trotsky), and the Austro-Marxists (Karl Renner and Otto Bauer). Luxemburg attacked the notion of the right of self-determination as abstract,[78]
metaphysical, bourgeois and utopian .(95) Her argument was based largely on both the economistic strain in Marx's thought, which underscored the cultural element ofnatkinal divisions, and on Engels' characterization of 'non-historic nations'. Both Anton Pannekoek and Josef Sirasset (96) saw the nation as an ideology comparable to religion, which disappears with the advent of socialism. Opposing Otto Bauer's position, which identified the national question in psycho-eultural terms, (97) Pannekoek and Strasser rejected the theory of a national culture which could be appropriated for its own interest
by the working class.The permutations were (and are) seemingly endless, each evidently possessing its own rationales. In the characterization of nationalism by Marxist theorists, presumably general principles of historical or objective nature were opposed to factors of special and short-term significance; but every debate responded to contemporary events by attempting to encompass the evidences of new sciences, new events, and the effects of immediate political and ideological struggles. And the antagonists often reversed their opinions with the appropriate shows of 'new understanding'. Unfortunately, the relegation of consciousness in the Marxian logic to a reflex of the relations of production and the frequent preoccupation with capitalism as a system determined by its own objective laws and the motivating force of historical change, most consistently led to the conclusion that nationalism among working classes was contrary to the historical movement of modern societies. In this sense, nationalism was a backward ideology, often a means of deflecting the class struggle into imperialist wars, and in any case not a fit subject for serious study in its own right since it was merely a politically convertlent conduit of other forces and interests. Franz Borkenau would rejoin:
In the political field, nationalism is the fact against which the Marxist theory breaks itself. Here is a force which has proved definitely stronger in the modern world than the class struggle which for orthodox Marxists makes the essence of history. The natural result was that the Marxists constantly tended to underestimate a force which did not easily fit into thehr ideas, and which at the same time was clearly contrasted with the ideals of the class-struggle. It became almost a mark of an orthodox Marxist to despise every nationalist feeling...(98)
The dismissal of culture, that is a transmitted historical consciousness, as an aspect of class consciousness, did not equip the Marxian movement for the political forces which would not only erupt in Europe and the Third World but within the movement itself. For many Marxists il would be left to the new ideological and political order instituted by the Bolshevik triumph in the Russian Revolution, and not received theory, to sort out a Marxist orthodoxy on the national question. Ultimately ale resolution was a political one clothed only partially by theory. Here we need only to sketch its politically authoritative form since we will return to more closely inspect its development in Part III.
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Trotsky, though early on committed to the idea that nations had the right to self-determination(99) was also of the opinion that the 'centralizing needs of economic development' would ultimately lead to the dissolution of the nation-state. 'The nation, divorced from the economy and freed from the old framework of the state, would have the right to self-determination... in the sphere of "cultural development".'(100) Trotsky's formulations seemed to be entirely borrowed first from Marx and later from Lenin.
Lenin, indeed, seems to have done most to extend Marxist theory on the national question. Lowy writes: ·.. Lenin understood better than his comrades of the revolutionary left the dialectical relationship between internationalism and the right of national self-determination. He understood, firstly, that only the freedom to secede makes possible free and voluntary union.... Secondly, that only the recognition by the workers' movement in the oppressor nation of the right of the oppressed nation to self-determination can help to eliminate the hostility and suspicion of the oppressed, and unite the proletariat of both nations in the international struggle against the bourgeoisie.(101)
Of course, Lenin's prominence as an architect of the October Revolution, as leader of the Soviet State and a founder of the Third International, gave his opinions the requisite authority to become dogma. Nevertheless, the complex and rather voluminous character of his writings on the national question left his ideas vulnerable to simplification. In the course of things, it was Lenin's successor, Stalin, who would supply the most shnple and authoritative proclamations on the national question· In 1913, with the instruction of Lenin, Stalin wrote his now famous pamphlet, Marxism and the National Question. In his article, Stalin took it upon himself to define a nation ('A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.... it is only when all these characteristics are present that we have a nation.(102) He also declared his support for the right of nationalist determination ("The right of self-determination means that a nation can arrange its life according to its own will. It has the right to arrange its hfe on the basis of autonomy· It has the right to enter into federal relations with other nations. It has the right to complete secession. Nations are sovereign and all nations are equal.')(103) It was Stalin's formulae which would dominate discourse on the national question for at least three decades after Lenin's death. This is particularly unfortunate since it was precisely during this period that socialist organization and thought came to the most persistent encounters with the ideology of nationalism. What the Marxists did not understand about the political and ideological phenomenon of nationahsm is that it was not (and is not) an historical aberration (of proletarian internationalism). Nor is it necessarily the contrary: a developmental stage of internationalism.
Nationalism defeated the Marxism
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of the Second International (World War I), but ironically, was a basis of the Marxism of the Third International (The Russian revolutions; Stalin's socialism in one country; the conditions for membership in the Comintern), yet primary world-historical significance was denied. It remained for most northern Marxists a secondary phenomenon (to the class struggle). As I have indicated, Lenin saw its character as principally political, Luxemburg as principally cultural. The error resided less in the mythic, analytic or theoretical treatments of nationalism, than in 'a defective grasp of the overall nature and depth of capitalist development' .(104)
The unforeseeable, antagonistic reality of capitalism's growth into the world is what the general title 'uneven development' refers to . . . In the traditional philosophical terminology, this amounts of course to a 'contradiction'. The contradiction here is that capitalism, even as it spread remorselessly over the world to unite human society into one more or less connected story for the first time, also engendered a perilous and convulsive new fragmentation of that society. The socio-historical cost of this rapid iraplantation of capitalism into world society was 'nationalism' ....
The world market, world industries and world literature predicted with such exultation in The Communist Manifesto all conducted, in fact, to the world of nationalism.(105)
The consequence of the hegemony of capitalism, i.e, the social and political reactions to capitalism, have seldom held to those conjectured by a logic bound by the 'laws of capitalism'. It is not that those reactions have been illogical, but that they have failed to conform to the political economic code emergent from capitalist society. It is this same code which still influences maintains, as it were the epistemological boundaries of radical social theory.
It generalizes the economic mode of rationality over the entire expanse of human history, as the generic mode of human becoming. It circumscribes the entire history of man in a gigantic simulation model, It tries somehow to turn against the order of capital by using as an analytic instrument the most subtle ideological phantasm that capital has itself elaborated.(106) It is in no way unusual for Marxian thinkers to declare, as Alex Callinicos did recently: 'The role of philosophy is tllat of the theoretical reflection of proletarian class positions.'(107) It does not seem to matter that this tradition placed Trotsky and Bukharin in Brooklyn only weeks before the revolution against Tsarist Russia.(108) We are again reminded of Engels' warning to the Marxist generation of his last years:
Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to
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it. ,.. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have mastered its main principles, and even those not always correctly.(109)
This criteria might well have been extended to the more mature, and ultimately more responsible, members of later generations of Marxists. It would have to be deepened, however, to fathom the structure of Marxian With respect to Marxism's failure in determining The historical force and character of ideology as nationalism, another of Engels' remarks is appropos:·.. once an historic element has been brought into the world by other, ultimately econondc causes, it reacts, can react on its environment and even on the causes that have given rise to it.(110)
Just as the expansion of capitalism has resulted in the preservation of certain aspects of non- (pre-') capitalist modes of production, there is also evidence that nationalism in many places has assumed forms largely organized through ideational systems indigenous to those peoples exploited by the world market. It is not entirely accurate to argue as Tom Naim has recently that:
Nationalism defeated sociallsm in the zone of high development, forcing it outwards into successive areas of backwardness where it was bound to become part of their great compensatory drive to catch up --an ideology of development or industriahzation, rather than one of postcapitalist society .(111)
Naim suggests the transfer of a socialism bred in the historical conditions at the centre of industrial capitalism. Tlris is a socialism capable of changing place without changing character! However, no single model of socialist induslfialization or development has resulted from tire revolutionary social borders of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Cuba, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Mozambique or Angola. That is because each of these revolutionary orders is informed by political, moral and ideological presumptions with priorities which precede their envelopment into the modern world system. Again, it may not be the case that we have seen 'the full historical potential of "nationalism" .' (112)
Conclusion
Among the several curious and unhappy legacies in Western civilizations of those centuries nearest to us are the system of capitalism and the beliefs in rationalism and science But perhaps in some sense the term legacy is inappropriate, not the least for its suggestions of fatality, for none of these[82]
has passed away. Capitalism, rationalism and scientism are not merely forms of activity (production) and reflexives of that activity. Each became a momentous historical force, providing substantially the character of the present industrial world its character, but not necessarily its historical direction. This has been, of course, a frustrating disappointment to some - particularly those who believed that through the movement of capitalism they had discovered the nature, that is, the basis for historical change. For them, perhaps, the most disturbing social phenomenon of our time has been the 're-emergence' of ideology - what Marx called partial consciousness - to its pre-scientific, pre-rafional prominence in the affairs of humankind. Ideology, especially in the 20th Century, has come to play a discordant role within the body of modern social thought, somewhat akin to that which slavery assumed among the rationalistic analytical frameworks concomitant to the rise of capitalism. Ideology, simply. is a negation of those strains of contemporary social inquiry which have become dominant. Its "Intrusions' in our century and the one which preceded it have helped to abort those social and historical processes believed to be necessary and inevitable; have catalysed rebellions and revolutions in often unlikely circumstances and among unlikely peoples; and have assisted in extraordinary historical achievement where failure was 'objectively' immanent. As an ally of historical forces only poorly understood. ideology has exposed Western thought both in its form as mechanical Marxism for its reductionism,(113) and, in an entirely different way, liberal thought for its reifications.(114)
The limits of Western radicalism as demonstrated in Marxist theory, the most sustained critique of the modern era, are endemic to Western civilization. Those limitations relate directly to the 'understanding' of consciousness, and the persistance of racialism in Western thought was of primary importance. It would have been exceedingly difficult and most unlikely that such a civilization in its ascendancy as a significant power in the world would produce a tradition of self-examination sufficiently critical to expose one of its most profound terms of order. Racialism, as I have tried to show, ran deep in the bowels of Western culture. negating its varying social relations of production and distorting their inherent contradictions. The comprehension of the particular configuration of racist ideology and Western culture has to be pursued historically through successive eras of violent domination and social extraction which directly involved European peoples during the better part of two millenia. Racialism insinuated not only medieval, feudal and capitalist social structures, forms of property, and modes of production, but as well the very values and traditions of consciousness through which the peoples of these ages came to understand their worlds and their experiences. Western culture, constitution the structure from which European consciousness was appropriated, the structure in which social identities and perceptions were grounded in the past, transmitted a racialism which adapted to the political and material exigencies of the moment. In the medieval and feudal social orders of the European hinterland and the Mediterranean, racialism was substantiated by specific sets of exploitation through which particular caste or classes exploited and expropriated different peoples.
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At the very beginnings of European civilization (meaning literally the reappearance of urban life at the end of the first Christian millenium), the integration of the Germanic migrants with older European peoples resulted in a social order of domination from which a racial theory of order emerged; one from which the medieval nobilities would immerse themselves and their power in fictional histories, positing distinct racial origins for rulers and she dominated. The extension of slavery and the application of racism to non-European peoples as an organizing structure by first the ruling feudal strata and then the bourgeoisies of the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries retained this practical habit, this social convention. And as we shall soon see in Part II, from the 17th Century on, English merchant capital (to cite an important example) appropriated African labor in precisely these terms, that is the same terms through which it had earlier absorbed Irish labour. Moreover, European raciaIism was to undergo a kind of doubling onto itself, for in between the era of intra-European racism which characterized the first appearance of European consciousness and the predatory era of African enslavement, is the almost entirely exogenous phenomenon of Islamic domination of the Mediterranean--the eventual fount of European revitalization and re-civilization. Independent of the historical meshings of European development but profoundly restricting that development - first in literally retarding European social development by isolating it from civil life, science, speculative thought, etc., and then, after four centuries, by accelerating its recovery from the 12th Century onwards - Musilm civilization mapped the contours of the European cultural renaissance. These events were to leave tell-tale marks on Western consciousness: the fear and hatred of 'blackamoores'; the demonization of Islam; she transfiguration of Muharnmad the Prophet into the anti-Christ. Not surprisingly Europeans, shat is 'Christendom', still apprehended in experience recurrences of antipathy towards what became their shared phantasmagora.
In short, there were at least four distinct moments which must be apprehended in European racialism; two whose origins are to be found within the dialictic of European development, and two which are not:
1. the racial ordering of European society from its formative period which extends into the medieval and feudal ages as 'blood' and racial beliefs and
2. the Islamic, i.e. Arab, Persian, Turkish and African, domination of Mediterranean civilization and the consequent retarding of European social and cultural life: the Dark Ages.
3. the incorporation of African, Asian and peoples of the New World into the world system emerging from late feudalism and merchant capitalism.
4. the dialectic of colonialism, plantocratic slavery and resistance from the 16th Century forwards, and she formations of industrial labour and labour reserves
It is now a convention to begin the analysis of racism in Western societies
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with the third moment; entirely ignoring the first and second and only partially coming to terms with the fourth. As we shall observe in the next section of this study, the results have been rather bizarre: some students of racism have happily reiterated the premise of a sort of mass psychology of chsomatic trauma in which European reactions to darker-skinned peoples are seen as natural, others, including Marxists. have argued for a simplistic 'empiricism' where the inevitable consequences of slavery and domination are the rationalizations of racial superiority and inferiority. In each instance, the root of the methodological and conceptual flaws is the same: the presumption that the social and historical processes which matter, which are determinative, are European. All else, it seems, is derivative, (On thjs score the preoccupation of Western radicalism with capitalism as a system has served the same purpose. Marxists have often argued that national liberation movements in the Third World are secondary to the interests of the industrial proletariat in the capitalist metropoles, or that they need to be understood only as the social effiux of world capitalism. Such movements require fitting in at the margins of the model for socialist revolution,) What is least defensible though, is how scant the attention paid to intra- European racialism has been.
We have now given consideration to the first moment of European racialism; it is time to explore the other three. This we shall do, but with a difference. History will no longer be left to revolve around European peoples or to originate from Europe as its centre. In Part II, in particular respecting African peoples and the African Diaspora, we will explore the foundations of the modern era as they were forged or enhanced by the activities of other peoples, In focusing on the history of the struggles of Black peoples for a different social order, we will of course, be reminded again of the limitations of Western radicalism, but more importantly we shall be preparing ourselves for a more profound understanding of the Black radical tradition. When in turn we have concluded that preparation, we shall then examine the pioneerinS efforts of Black radical theorists. This, too, will provide us with some insight into the problems of Western radicalism. The basis of Part Ill will be the thought of three Black ideologists, DuBois, James and Wright. who became conscious of their own positions and that of Black struggles in Western civilization and thought. Their attempts to reconcile their social consciousness to the priorities of 'historical materialism' led to a critique of the very tradition in which they sought relief, and finally to a radical Black consciousness. Most important, however, is their eventual encounter with the Black radical tradition. The result was the first theoretical articulation of a revolutionary tradition whose nature was founder on a very different historical role for consciousness than was anticipated in Western radicalism. The object informing this study is to synthesize the elements of that emergent Black tradition into a coherent schema so that its remarkable insights and its historical project might assume their most authentic significance.
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Notes
1. Norman MacKenzie, Socialism: A Short History, liarper Colophon, New York 1969, p,20;and COle, A History of Socialist Thought, Vol.l, op. dt., pp.8-9. Lichtheinl would have us begin (as he does) the history of socialism with the appearance of the word 'around 1830', for one, because 'in dealing with a major political ~nd ideological current one cannot disregard the manner in which it has defined itself.' (p.3) But one must remember that he is of that school of scholars that can write of socialist history that 'it is in part the story of a movement which had to emancipate itself from inherited illusions before it could attain a consciousness of its true nature.' (p.vii) Certain habits of mind presumably from the Hegelian legacy here betray the best intentions. George Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism, Praeger, New York, 1969.2. NormanCuhn, lheFursuito. ftheMtIlenfum, op. cit.,p.187.
3. Fold., pp.198-280; and Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany in Leonard Krigger (ed .), The Get?nan Revolutions. University Chicago Press, Chicago, 1967, pp,35-52.
See Cole,op. cit, pp.14-16 for Rousseau as one instance, and The German Ideology
(op. cit,) by Marx and Engels as another, for the appearance of the historical category
'primitive communism '.7. Engels, 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific', in Robert lucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, op.alt., p,607; see also Karl Marx, ~n the Jewish Question', lbld., p.49.Engels declared that: 'The revolutionary opposition to feudalism was alive through-out all the Middle Ages. According to conditions of the time, it appeared either in the form of mysticism, as open heresy, or of armed insurrection. As mysticism, it is web known how indispensable it was for the reformers of the Sixteenth Century.
· . , In the other two forms of medieval heresy, we find as early as the Twelfth Century the precursors of the great division between the middle class and the peasant plebeian opposition which caused the collapse of the peasant war. This division is manifest throughout the later Middle Ages.' The Peasant War in Germany,
8. See for example, EJ. Hobsbawm, 'Trends int he British Labour Movement since 1850', in Labouring Men, op. cit., especielly pp.323-5; T.J. Nossiter, 'Shopkeeper Radicalism in the 19th Century', in T.J. Nossiter, A,H, Hanson, Stein Rokkan (eds.), Imagination and Precision in the Social Sacnoes, Faber & Faber, London, 1972, pp.407-8; Albert Soboul, The French Revolution: 1 787-1799, Random House, New York, 1974, pp. 3-31; and E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, Mentor, New York, 1962, pp.285-90, 357-8.9. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders (eds.), Socialist Thought, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1964, pp. 15-16. Morelly, an 18th Century writer of obscure origins, greatly influenced Bahcur, the French radical discussed in the text below·
10. The last two phrases are lhose of G.D.il. Cole, op.cit., p.14 ; see also Marx and Engels, TIle Commlmist Manifesto, op,cit., p.346.
11, SeelterbertMarcuse, ReasonandRevoluaon,BeaconPrcss, Boston, 1968, pp323-8.
12. KarlMarx,'ThesesonFeuerbach',inTucker(ed.),TheMarx-EngelsReader, op. cit., p. 109; and also John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, Duckworth, London,
13. J A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, SocialismandDernocracy, Unwin, Londoa, 1965,
15. David McLellan, for example, indicates that 'in general the membership of the International tended to be composed more of artisans than of the industrial
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proletariat'. KarlMarx.' His Life and 171ought, liarper Colophon, New York, 1973, p.387.
16. David McLellan, Marx Before Marxism, Macmillan, London, 1970, p13.
17. Karl Marx, The Holy Family, as quoted by Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1968, p.46.
18. Leninwrotein1901/2:~wehavesaidthattherecouldnotha~beenSocial' Democratic consciousness among the workers, It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the phdosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social stalus the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.' Lenin, What Is To Be Done? in Lenin, Selected Works, Vol.l, International Publishers, New York, 1967, p.122. Marx acknowledged his class origins in The Communist Manifesto: 'Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour,., a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in parlicular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.' Tucker (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader, op.eit., p.343. Sometime later, in 1867. Marx made perfectly clear his perception of his role in the wolrkets' movement In a letter to Engels: 'And in the
next revolution, which is perhaps nearer than it appears, we (i.e., you and 1) wgl }lave this powerful engine [the International] in our hands' (as opposed to being in !he.hands of 'these fools of Ptoudhonists' or the 'swine among the English Trade untorests)'." Quoted by William Lazonick, 'The Subjection of Labour to Capital: The Ri~e of the Capitalist System ', in TIe Review of Radical PoliHcal Economics. Vol 10, No. 1, Spring 1978, p,23 (for a more complete version of the letter, see McLellan Karl Marx op. cit., p.378).19. KarlMarx, TheEighteenthBrumaireofLoui~Bonaparte,inTueker(ed.),TIe Marx.Engels Reader. op. cit., pp.462,464.
20. Kaxl Marx, The Comrnunist Manifesto, ibid., p.34 5.
21. For England, seeThompson, The Malang of the English Working Class. op. cit., p .213, and Rude, op.cit., p.84; for Franc~, see Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, op. cit., p .515, Rude, op.cit,, pp. 164 ,l 76, and G.D.H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, Vol. I, op. at. , p.1 g. 25.
G.D.H. Cole,oP.cit., P.20. Lichtheim states that 'The extreme wing of the French Revolution may thus be said to have given birth to a set of notions which, while never successfully pursued in France, were destined to become politically effective in Russia. The crucial factor is the belief that the abolition of poverty demands a temporary dictatorship which will dispossess the rich, wllo are also the effective
holders of power. The dictatorship will be exercised in the name of the people (or the proletarial), and it will come to an end when its enemies have been forcibly removed or otherwise rendered harmless.'op, cit. (p.22), See also David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1914-1960, Macro illan, New York, 1964, pp. 13,286,290.28, SeeCauimoP. cit,,p292;andSoboul,op. cit.,pp.410_38.
29 Soboul,op.cit.,p,438.
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32. Ibid.,p.18. Soboul comments: 'The political organization of tlle Conspiracy marked a break with the methods used till that time by the popular movement~ At the centre of the organization stood the leading group, hacked by a small number of hardened militants; then there came the fringe of sympathizers, comprising patriots and democrats (in the Year I1 sense of the word), who were not involved in the secrecy, and who seem not to have shared the new revolutionary ideal; Iinally, there wele the masses themselves, who were to be coaxed into participation, In sum, Babeuf's was an organizational conspiracy Far excellence, but one in which the problem of the necessaxy links with the masses seems to have been largely
33. David Caute,op. cit., p. 290.
34. Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971, pp. 73-105; Franz Mehring, Karl Marx, The Story of His Life, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1969, pp. 15-57; and David McLellan, Karl Marx, op,cit., pp. 16-77.
35. Karl Marx (Maurice Dobb, ed.), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, International Publishers, New York, 1970, p.20.
37. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German ldeology, in R. Tucker (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader, op. cit., pp. 113-57.
37, See Marx's letters to Kugelmann, 12 and 16 April 1871, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. l, International Publishers, New York, 1972, pp.679-81; and Engels' 'Introduction to Karl Marx's Work The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850', lbid. , p.651; and Mehring op. cit, pp. 156-9,215,447-54, McLellan, KarlMarx,op. cit., pp. 290-359; and Mehring, op.cit., pp. 208-24.
For the quarrel with Vogt, see McLellan.lbid.,pp.310-15and Mehring, op. cit., pp.280-97;fot Lassnile, McLellan, lb/d.,pp.315-25, and Mehring, ibid., pp.265-78; for Mazznii, McLellan, ibid., pp.258-61, and Mehrnig, ibid., pp.24 1-2; for Engels, see McLellan, ibid., pp.278-80,331-2, and Mehsing, ibld,, pp.303-5.
In a letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath, Marx wrote: 'After the "League" 'sas dissoIved in November 1852 on my proposition, I no longer belonged to any Society whether (orign. 1932), pp.3-31.
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