what nationalism is ?
by Fredy Perlman
An excellent analysis by the late Fredy Perlman of the enduring appeal of nationalism to statist rulers of both left and right.
This essay originally appeared in the Winter, 1984 Fifth Estate, and is also available as a pamphlet published by Black & Red.
The establishment of nation-states was greeted with euphoric enthusiasm by poets as well as peasants who thought their muses or their gods had at last descended to earth. The main wet blankets amidst the waving banners and flying confetti were the former rulers, the colonized, and the disciples of Karl Marx.
The overthrown and the colonized were unenthusiastic for obvious reasons.
The disciples of Marx were unenthusiastic because they had learned from the master that national liberation meant national exploitation, that the national government was the executive committee of the national capitalist class, that the nation had nothing for workingmen but chains. These strategists for the workingmen, who were not themselves workingmen but were as bourgeois as the ruling capitalists, proclaimed that the workingmen had no country and organized themselves into an International. This International split into three, and each International moved increasingly into the field of Marx’s blind spot.
The First International was carried off by Marx’s one-time Russian translator and then antagonist Bakunin, an inveterate rebel who had been a fervent nationalist until he’d learned about exploitation from Marx. Bakunin and his companions, rebels against all authorities, also rebelled against the authority of Marx ; they suspected Marx of trying to turn the International into a state as repressive as the feudal and national combined. Bakunin and his followers were unambiguous in their rejection of all states, but they were ambiguous about capitalist enterprise. Even more than Marx, they glorified science, celebrated material progress and hailed industrialization. Being rebels, they considered every fight a good fight, but the best of all was the fight against the bourgeoisie’s former enemies, the fight against feudal landlords and the Catholic Church. Thus the Bakuninist International flourished in places like Spain, where the bourgeoisie had not completed its struggle for independence but had, instead, allied itself with feudal barons and the Church for protection from insurgent workers and peasants. The Bakuninists fought to complete the bourgeois revolution without and against the bourgeoisie. They called themselves anarchists and disdained all states, but did not begin to explain how they would procure the preliminary or the subsequent industry, progress and science, namely the capital, without an army and a police. They were never given a real chance to resolve their contradiction in practice, and present day Bakuninists have still not resolved it, have not even become aware that there is a contradiction between anarchy and industry.
The Second International, less rebellious than the first, quickly came to terms with capital as well as the state. Solidly entrenched in Marx’s blind spot, the professors of this organization did not become enmeshed in any Bakuninist contradiction. It was obvious to them that the exploitation and the plunder were necessary conditions for the material progress, and they realistically reconciled themselves to what could not be helped. All they asked for was a greater share of the benefits for the workingmen, and offices in the political establishment for themselves, as the workingmen’s representatives. Like the good unionists who preceded and followed them, the socialist professors were embarrassed by "the colonial question", but their embarrassment, like Philip Hapsburg’s, merely gave them bad consciences. In time, imperial German socialists, royal Danish socialists and republican French socialists even ceased to be internationalists.
The Third International did not only come to terms with capital and the state ; it made them its goal. This international was not formed by rebellious or dissenting intellectuals ; it was created by a state, the Russian state, after the Bolshevik Party installed itself in that state’s offices. The main activity of this international was to advertise the feats of the revamped Russian state, of its ruling party, and of the party’s founder, a man who called himself Lenin. The feats of that party and founder were indeed momentous, but the advertisers did their best to hide what was most momentous about them.
Black & Red Books
Notes
1. The subtitle of the first volume of Capital is A Critique of Political Economy : The Process of Capitalist Production (published by Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906 ; republished by Random House, New York).
2. In Ibid., pages 784-850 : Part VIII : "The So-Called Primitive Accumulation."
3. E. Preobrazhensky, The New Economics (Moscow, 1926 ; English translation published by Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965), a book which announced the fateful "law of primitive socialist accumulation."
4. See V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1964 ; first published in 1899). I quote from page 599 : "if...we compare the present rapidity of development with that which could be achieved with the general level of technique and culture as it is today, the present rate of development of capitalism in Russia really must be considered as slow. And it cannot but be slow, for in no single capitalist country has there been such an abundant survival of ancient institutions that are incompatible with capitalism, retard its development, and immeasurably worsen the condition of the producers..."
5. Or the liberation of the state : "Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation" ; "It is the state which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity" ; "Always the maximum of liberty coincides with the maximum force of the state" ; "Everything for the state ; nothing against the state ; nothing outside the state." From Che cosa A il fascismo and La dottrina del fascismo, quoted by G.H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York, 1955), pp. 872-878.
6. "...the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire ; both being beast of prey, tho’ they differ in shape" (G. Washington in 1783). "...if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond..." (T. Jefferson in 1807). "...the cruel massacres they have committed on the women and children of our frontiers taken by surprise, will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach" (T. Jefferson in 1813). Quoted by Richard Drinnon in Facing West : The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (New York : New American Library, 1980), pp. 65, 96, 98.
7. Readily available in paper back as Quotations from Chairman Mao (Peking : Political Department of the people’s Liberation Army, 1966).
8. Black & Red tried to satirize this situation over ten years ago with the publication of a fake Manual for Revolutionary Leaders, a "how-to-do-it guide" whose author, Michael Velli, offered to do for the modern revolutionary prince what Machiavelli had offered the feudal prince. This phoney "Manual" fused Mao-Zedong-Thought with the Thought of Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and their modern followers, and offered grizzly recipes for the preparation of revolutionary organizations and the seizure of total power. Disconcertingly, at least half of the requests for this "Manual" came from aspiring national liberators, and it is possible that some of the current versions of the nationalist metaphysic contain recipes offered by Michael Velli.
9. I am not exaggerating. I have before me a book-length pamphlet titled The Mythology of the White Proletariat : A Short Course for Understanding Babylon by J. Sakai (Chicago : Morningstar Press, 1983). As an application of Mao-Zedong-Thought to American history, it is the most sensitive Maoist work I’ve seen. The author documents and describes, sometimes vividly, the oppression of America’s enslaved Africans, the deportations and exterminations of the American continent’s indigenous inhabitants, the racist exploitation of Chinese, the incarceration of Japanese- Americans in concentration camps. The author mobilizes all these experiences of unmitigated terror, not to look for ways to supersede the system that perpetrated them, but to urge the victims to reproduce the same system among themselves. Sprinkled with pictures and quotations of chairmen Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong and Ho-chi Minh, this work makes no attempt to hide or disguise its repressive aims ; it urges Africans as well as Navahos, Apaches as well as Palestinians, to organize a party, seize state power, and liquidate parasites.
___
The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism, Fredy Perlman, 1984)
Vos commentaires
Espace réservé
Seules les personnes inscrites peuvent accéder aux commentaires.
un "portail" d’information (vulgaire "agrégateur informe de textes radicaux sans cohérence aucune") qui regroupe des informations issues des collectifs et organisations libertaires et anarcho-syndicalistes, ainsi qu’une actualité alternative issue de sites progressistes et anti-capitalistes ;