16th Seminar: Stathis Kouvelakis / Politics of Liberation

“Have Marx – and Engels – something to say on the national question (and internationalism)?”

The common wisdom on the relation between the “founding fathers” of historical materialism and the nation is that they have little to say on the subject. “Little” doesn’t mean here quantitatively little, since it is acknowledged that many of their writings include lengthy discussions of those “national questions” that were of primary importance at their time – Poland, Italy, Ireland, German unity, the ‘Eastern question’, colonial expansion to name just the most prominent ones. The claim is rather that in all those texts there is little, if anything, that is properly original and specific, i.e. integrated to their broader theoretical framework.

A more emphatic version of this claim is that even if we admit that Marx and Engels have something specific to say on the national phenomenon, their contribution just misses the point, by reducing the question to a by-product of the development of productive forces combined with references to a Hegel-inspired philosophy of history, according to which only some peoples are entitled to a distinct national-state existence.

In both cases, the nation appears as the blindspot of Marx and Engels’s theory, a source of constant and serious trouble for all those who tried to build on their intellectual and political legacy. Ultimately, we are told, the reasons of this deficiency is Marx’s and Engels’s internationalism. Based on the assumption of transnational interests that are common to the exploited classes, internationalism lies unquestionably at the heart of their politics and their vision of history. However, according to this perspective, internationalism and attention to the specifics of national question are viewed as incompatible; hence the failure of Marxism as a political project since modern history has shown that nations are a much stronger form of collective existence than class-based movements.

Without denying the problematic and unstable aspects of Marx’s and Engels’s elaboration on the national question, we want to challenge these views by developing the following six points:

Marx and Engels do have a theory of the nation as a modern phenomenon, inherent to the worldwide expansion of a new mode of production, capitalism, and the emergence of “bourgeois society” (a concept to be analytically distinguished from capitalism although belonging to the same historical formation).
At the core of this theory lies the concept of the nation as the necessary framework through which the fundamental classes of modern society (first the bourgeoisie, then the proletariat) build their (revolutionary) capacity to lead a broader bloc of social forces to a higher level of historical existence (in Gramscian terms, their hegemony). The nation thus appears as the expression of the unity of politics and economics, of an enlarged vision of class struggle, within a revolutionary process oriented towards human emancipation.
This vision is indeed, in its initial formulation (around the 1848 revolutionary moment), heavily loaded by Euro- and western-centric biases, typical of the time and largely derived from the position of its authors at the centre of the world’s major industrial and colonial empire.
The evolution of Marx’s (and, to a more limited extent, Engels’s) views on colonialism and the multiple paths of development of European and Western societies lead them to overcome to a significant degree (but not fully) those biases.
The internationalism of the exploited and oppressed groups wasn’t understood by Marx and Engels as a negation of national realities but rather as a constitutive dimension of new, class-based, historical bloc which has to affirm its strategic capacity to lead society (and seize political power) at a national level.
This vision of internationalism wasn’t an abstract vision but an outlook concretely and systematically worked out in Marx’s and Engels’s interventions in the worker’s movement, first and foremost in the debates and practices of the International Workingmen’s Association (known as “the 1st International”).