10 - Marx and Engels, Marxism and the Nation

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I describe briefly Marx and Engels's account of nations and nationalism, starting with some statements in the Manifesto and moving on to a more general account. I then introduce some of the ways subsequent Marxists have attempted to tackle the issue, stressing the continuing relevance of past debates in the context of a developing European Union. I end with a cursory reference to a controversy about Northern Ireland which has been very important in the United Kingdom since about 1970.

NATIONS IN THE MANIFESTO

For a modern reader one of the most startling passages in the Manifesto is that on the question of nations:

Communists have been further criticised for wanting to abolish the nation and nationalities.

Workers have no nation of their own. We cannot take from them what they do not have. Since the proletariat must first of all take political control, raise itself up to be the class of the nation, must constitute the nation itself, it is still nationalistic, even if not at all in the bourgeois sense of the term.

National divisions and conflicts between peoples increasingly disappear with the development of the bourgeoisie, with free trade and the world market, with the uniform character of industrial production and the corresponding circumstances of modern life.

The rule of the proletariat will make them disappear even faster. United action, at least in the civilised countries, is one of the first conditions for freeing the proletariat.

To the degree that the exploitation of one individual by another is transformed, so will the exploitation of one nation by another.

As internal class conflict within a nation declines, so does the hostility of one nation to another.

For us this passage contains a series of surprises, including at least the three following. The claim that ‘workers have no nation of their own’ is in stark contrast with what we know happened at the beginning of the First World War, when the workers of the leading capitalist nations largely marched off enthusiastically to fight each other, to the disgust of Lenin and in apparent contrast to the pledges of their leaders in the Second International. The Second World War, too, had a strong nationalistic dimension. More recently we in Britain have seen upsurges of nationalistic feeling during the Falklands War and the Gulf War of 1991.