Erica Benner - Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post Communist View from Marx and Engels

THE working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. For generations of Marxists this phrase, coined a century-and-a-half ago, remained the cornerstone of any acceptably revolutionary understanding of nationalism. In a postcommunist world riven by ethnic and national conflicts, Marx and Engels words are invokedif they are remembered at allonly as an epitaph on one of the socialist movements most debilitating errors.

Marx and Engels failure to develop a systematic theory of nationalism is well known. The authors of the Communist Manifesto did produce what amount to volumes of writings on the national movements of their own day; and they were acutely aware that such movements might either advance their revolutionary project or thwart it, corroborate their theory of historical change or call its deepest premisses into question. But the polemical style of many of these writings has led some commentators to dismiss them as mere hackwork infused, perhaps, with an admirable strain of political realism but stillin the words of a contemporary authordevoid of theoretical interest. Theoretical neglect appears a more damaging charge when it is linked with that of practical misjudgement. Marx and Engels expectation that nationalism would cease to exert a divisive influence in an era when the mass of people were increasingly alienated from the ruling representatives of their nation-states, and where capitalism was thought to be eroding old ethnic and national particularisms, has been confounded by events not readily explicable in terms of classical Marxist theory.

These considerations have led erstwhile socialists and their critics in the western world to reach a most unusual consensus:

This work seeks to modify that image by clarifying the theoretical basis of Marx and Engels thinking on national issues. But I should make it clear that the argument developed here is not intended to support an insular Marxist understanding of nationalism. Such an endeavour would, in all likelihood, be denied even a tepid welcome today, especially in those parts of the world where nationalism has recently helped to topple communist regimes which claimed Marx as their progenitor. My This enables me to propose a different reading of what the two men wrote on the subject, and to identify some neglected strands of thought that are less easy to dismiss than the views usually attributed to them.