Anti-imperialism is not anti-capitalism (2020)

From the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

We continue our series on the origins of the mistaken view that workers in the advanced capitalist countries share in the exploitation of those in the so-called ‘underdeveloped’ countries.

Link to Part 2 

In his 1920 Preface to Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin comments:

‘Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of “advanced” countries’.

 Colonialism is not quite the same thing as imperialism. It entails the annexation of, and direct political control over, other territories by a state which is not necessarily true of imperialism. For Lenin, political independence was indeed achievable ‘within the bounds of world imperialist relationships (A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism, 1916).The classical Marxist diffusionist view held that, with capitalism’s development and the increasing internationalisation of capital, nationalism would decline as a social force. Unfortunately that hasn’t yet happened. However, here we are focussing on what ought to be the attitude of socialists towards nationalism.

Early twentieth century Marxists, like Rosa Luxemburg, were already arguing that nationalism had become reactionary. Capitalism had outlived its usefulness to progress, having prepared the ground for socialism by raising society’s productive potential to an unparalleled degree. While that potential continues to expand with technological innovation it is increasingly being squandered in all sorts of ways.

Nationalist struggles

Lenin’s take on nationalism was different. The rise of monopoly capitalism associated with imperialism entailed the ‘super-exploitation’ by a few oppressor (imperialist) nations of the oppressed (colonised) nations on the capitalist periphery. Nationalist movements in the latter, were – allegedly – qualitatively different from those in nineteenth century Europe in an era of ascendant capitalism. As Jim Blaut summarises:

 ‘The nationalism of colonies and semi-colonies is called into being by the intensification of exploitation and oppression. In an important way, this is a new phenomenon…, it cannot be assimilated to the theory of national movements which emerge during the rise of capitalism and have as their purpose or goal the simple creation of a bourgeois state. The nature of colonialism is such that producing classes suffer along with whatever young or incipient bourgeoisie may exist. Therefore the national liberation movements in colonies and semi-colonies are profoundly different from the national movements of earlier oppressed nations such as those in non-colonial portions of the Tsarist Empire. It is not innately a bourgeois struggle against feudal forces for the creation of a classical bourgeois state. It is a multi-class struggle directed primarily against imperialism’ (The National Question: Decolonising the Theory of Nationalism, 1987).

Since imperialism and monopoly capitalism were linked, this suggested that ‘national liberation struggles’ could serve as the harbinger of ‘global proletarian revolution’ which would likely erupt first where the impact of imperialist exploitation was harshest – namely, those economically backward countries still transitioning to capitalism. That required workers there to take the lead in this struggle, so it ‘could be turned onto a socialist trajectory or a non-capitalist trajectory which would result in socialism’. National struggle was thus clothed in the rhetorical language of class struggle. Trotsky similarly opined: 

‘The sectarian simply ignores the fact that the national struggle, one of the most labyrinthine and complex but at the same time extremely important forms of the class struggle, cannot be suspended by bare references to the future world revolution’ (Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads, 1939).

For all Trotsky’s labyrinthine attempt to assimilate class struggle to national struggle, he was attempting to square the circle. ‘National struggle’ can only be advanced by watering down, and compromising, the class struggle. It is an attempt to impose from above a fake commonality of interests between classes whose own interests are diametrically opposed.

Though Lenin himself rhetorically committed himself to the concept of ‘proletarian internationalism’ and the repudiation of ‘national chauvinism’, it is difficult to see how one could ever successfully prosecute any ‘national liberation struggle’ without also fostering national chauvinism as its motivating ethos.

In any event, subsequent global developments exposed the fundamental flaws in his thinking. Particularly after the Second World War, vast swathes of the ‘developing world’ were granted political independence from their erstwhile colonial masters. Indeed, since then there have been further – successful – attempts at achieving political independence though these have tended to follow a somewhat different trajectory, resulting in the formation, along mainly ethnic lines, of new breakaway states as the product of civil war within existing states – for example, Southern Sudan. These latter developments do not fit well within the Leninist framework and its simplistic division of the world into ‘oppressor countries’ and ‘oppressed countries’.

In any case, history has emphatically vindicated Luxemburg’s repudiation of Lenin’s argument that socialists should support national liberation struggles to expedite a ‘global proletarian revolution’. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Instead, capitalist relations of production along with an accompanying capitalist mind-set has become firmly entrenched in the countries concerned. Hence the unedifying spectacle of erstwhile ‘Marxist’ guerrilla fighters transmogrified into well-heeled business people or corrupt politicians, hobnobbing with multi-nationals in a bid to pimp out the nation’s cheap labour force to overseas investors while cracking down on dissent and spiriting away a sizeable chunk of the nation’s revenue into some private offshore account. If you are going to ride the capitalist tiger don’t be surprised where it takes you.

World revolution

Yet ignorant Marx critics still routinely trot out the ridiculous refrain that Marx ‘got it all wrong’ in that the revolutions he hoped for occurred first, not in the advanced countries, but on the capitalist periphery. What these critics overlook is that these were not the revolutions Marx had in mind. Rather, they were capitalist revolutions enabling the transition to capitalism.

In the German Ideology Marx suggested the coming communist (socialist) revolution would likely be spearheaded by the advanced countries precisely because communism presupposed the advanced development of the productive forces: 

‘Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of the productive forces and world intercourse bound up with them’.

We don’t need to take the idea of instantaneous global revolution too literally. Obviously, there will be some time lags involved in the spatial transformation from global capitalism to global socialism. However, Marx insisted on the absolute necessity of majoritarian socialist consciousness before that could happen. The logic of his diffusionist model suggested that if one part of the world had a socialist majority, other parts would not be far behind.

For Lenin, the ‘law of uneven development in capitalism’ meant it was impossible to achieve socialism simultaneously across the world. But, this was a reference to the objective preconditions for socialism – not the subjective preconditions – and, if anything, it would support Marx’s contention that a socialist revolution would likely occur first in the advanced countries where the productive forces were most developed. But Lenin’s ‘law’ has long been completely irrelevant to the socialist objective, anyway. Socialism can only be a global alternative to capitalism and it is the productive potential of the world as a whole that crucially matters, not any one part of it.

Why then his obsessive preoccupation with this ‘law’? A clue can be found in his article On the Slogan for a United States of Europe (1915):

‘The victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world—the capitalist world—attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries.’

This implies not only the uneven development of the productive forces but the uneven growth of socialist consciousness itself. Lenin’s view was that workers in the advanced countries, by benefitting from imperialism, would be much more resistant to socialist thinking compared with their counterparts in the backward countries where national liberation struggle would more readily translate into ‘proletarian revolution’.

So when he spoke of organising ‘socialist production’ within a single country initially, the logic of his argument about how he saw a global proletarian revolution unfolding suggested he had in mind an economically backward country. However, it is precisely in such a country that material conditions would be least propitious for socialism. Furthermore, insofar as socialism and capitalism can no more coexist than one can mix oil and water, this would imply severing links with global capitalist supply chains exacerbating the hardships experienced there.

Lenin’s attempt to argue his way out of this impasse was disingenuous. Instead of the ‘victorious proletariat of that country’ literally ‘organising their own socialist production’ what he really had in mind was a process of ‘building socialism’ involving the implementation of state capitalism which he saw as being organically linked to socialism.

Ironically, far from advocating autarky, Lenin favoured closer integration with global capitalism and imperialist investment in the Soviet economy under his New Economic Policy his government was forced to adopt in 1921:

‘Get down to business, all of you! You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders. They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundreds per cent; they will enrich themselves, operating alongside of you. Let them. Meanwhile you will learn from them the business of running the economy’ (The New Economic Policy, 1921).

This partnership with Western capitalists continued under Stalin, the former providing much of the capital and expertise to finance Soviet industrialisation. Prominent among these was Henry Ford to whom Stalin expressed his gratitude, calling him one of the world’s greatest industrialists and obsequiously adding, ‘May God preserve him’ (history.com/this-day-in-history/ ford-signs-agreement-with-soviet-union).

Who is ‘imperialist’?

This was not just a one-way street, however. Just like the ‘Monroe doctrine’ enunciated by the American president James Monroe in the early nineteenth century, opposing further colonisation in the Americas by European powers only in order to hypocritically assert US imperialistic hegemony over the region, so the same can be said of Soviet imperialism.

The realisation that workers in the West were not going to rise up to support the Soviet regime prompted a strategic shift by that regime towards supporting nationalist struggles in developing countries as a means of undermining its Western rivals. For all its paper commitment to the principle of ‘national self-determination’, this did not stop the Soviet Union exercising its own political (and economic) muscle when it came to those countries falling within its own sphere of influence, installing puppet regimes and threatening or carrying out military intervention in countries like Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).

All this prompts the question – what exactly is meant by ‘imperialism’ – and, by extension, ‘anti-imperialism’ – today? Lenin developed his theory of imperialism in opposition to Kautsky’s ‘ultra-imperialism’ which envisaged the major imperialist powers forming a federation which would make military conflict largely redundant or irrational – a pious hope, indeed.

But Lenin’s own theory was shaped by the then existing reality of colonialism which in the post-war era has largely disappeared. At the same time we have witnessed the rise of giant multinational corporations, some with a larger revenue base than most states. If imperialism is about the conflict between nation-states how does this hold up in an era of ‘neo-liberal’ governance?

Concerning Lenin’s distinction between ‘imperialist countries’ and ‘oppressed countries’, Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi, have identified ‘10 countries at the most that fit the bill as imperialist’-– essentially the G7 countries plus one or two small states – by analysing cross-border flows of profit, interest and rent. As Roberts notes, little has changed in the century since Lenin wrote on the subject: ‘it’s still the same countries’ (bit.ly/35j9Y98).

But if being an ‘imperialist country’ means being a net ‘recipient of cross-border income flows’, then it seems improbable you will ever get rid of imperialism while capitalism (and its ‘cross-border income flows’) exists since what we are talking about here is essentially a zero sum game. Eliminating one imperialist power simply creates a vacuum into which another will inevitably step.

Thus, nationalistic ‘anti-imperialism’ has proved to be not only a fundamental distraction from the class struggle for socialism but also fundamentally futile on its terms.

Robin Cox

A socialist trip to Belfast (2001)

Party News from the September 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Inspired by our trip last year to Derry, we returned to the north of Ireland this year for an enjoyable and educational week in Belfast. No lounging on beaches for us — within hours of landing, we found ourselves at a meeting of trotskyists from Militant, where we took the opportunity to both listen and learn from their perspective and to explain our own position. They were amused — and seemed pleased — to meet the SPGB, presumably because they had only heard of us through the wrangles with us over the name of their party.

Naturally, a large proportion of the meeting was concerned with the euphemistically named “troubles” and the current political situation vis a vis the “peace process”. Militant explained that, from their perspective, they hope that the new institutions will carry on working as this will enable them to “expose Sinn Fein as anti-working class in practice”. Militant obviously hope that if this period of detente continues, young radicals will join their ranks as cultural sectarianism becomes a historical anachronism.

From the point of view of orthodox trotskyism, Militant have always been considered to be quite “wet” on Ireland as their analysis has tended towards “economistic left labourism”, therefore ignoring the “national question”. That they have not been drawn into the sectarian madness that pervades Irish politics is to their credit, but as we pointed out to them, their politics do not go beyond capitalism, nor as does the whole of the trotskyist milieu. Trotskyism is objectively anti-working class — subjective intentions notwithstanding. Indeed, even after explaining this clearly, and denouncing their state- capitalist programme, we remained on cordial terms for the rest of our week. This was probably the first time that they had heard such opinion, so hopefully, we were not the only ones to learn from the meeting.

Later on in the week, we also met up with a group of anarcho-syndicalists (Syndicalist Solidarity Network), whose meeting was based upon their live experiences from frontline duty in Genoa. This, in itself, was quite interesting, and the ensuing discussion was based on “what are we to do now that the state is shooting at us?” What indeed?

The interesting thing about some of the anarcho-syndicalists present, was that, despite appearing to be non-leftist at first glance, scratch the surface and this is what you find. This became clear when the issue of the Socialist Workers Party, and its current attempts to portray itself as anarchists (in order to hoodwink and try to control the anti-capitalist movement), was raised. One person present (a member of the IWW) argued that, although political differences existed, for now we should be on the same side as the SWP as the police and the state were the real enemy. After the acrimonious practical history between leninists and anarchists was pointed out, others present nodded in agreement that the like of the SWP could not be trusted.

As an example of the SWP”s opportunism, we were shown an SWP leaflet where the circled anarchist A symbol was used! This should leave nobody in any doubt as to the nature of such organisations. But even after this, we could not get them to draw a class line in the sand. Apparently, the anti-capitalist movement needs as many people as possible, so best not to upset the applecart, some argued. We countered that such equivocation could well prove to be their own undoing.

This said, members of the World Socialist Movement are always going to feel more at home with anarcho-syndicalists than with trotskyists, and we left having enjoyed the meeting.

One cannot visit the likes of Derry and Belfast these days without sensing the relief that the conflict is now, hopefully, in its endgame. Virtually everyone we spoke to indicated that the quality of their lives had improved dramatically in recent years and dreaded the possibility of a return to “war”. From a purely capitalist point of view, places like Belfast, with its traditional industries dying, need new investment and, indeed, due to the “peace process”, this has started to happen. However, one gets a timely reminder of the “old world" over in parts of west Belfast. While we were there, we witnessed stones being thrown over the “peace line" separating the Catholic and Protestant areas (we were reliably informed that our voices must have been heard!). During the night, petrol bombs were used instead. It was so sad to see the poorest members of the working class blaming each other for their poverty. The murals definitely become brighter and louder as the social conditions got worse.

Finally, it is 20 years since the republican hunger strikers died, and, in certain parts of Belfast and Derry, you cannot seem to escape their happy, smiling faces staring at you from murals wherever you go. Too bad, we thought, that such young men should give up their lives for the capitalist dead-end of Irish Republicanism when they may have made fine militants for the socialist movement. What a tragic waste.

Dave Flynn/Stuart Watkins

Nationalism (1999)

Book Review from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagining Nations, Geoffrey Cubitt ed., Manchester University Press.

Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question by Michael Lõwy, Pluto Press.

Two very different books on nationalism. The Cubitt volume is much more “academic”, looking at a number of different issues within the area of nationalism. The best thing that can be said about it is that most of the contributors are aware that nations are not in any way natural entities but are products of history. There are a couple of interesting papers, one on the origins of the Ordnance Survey and one on the way that banknotes are used to display patriotic messages, but most of the contents are too dry to repay the reader’s time.

Lõwy’s book, which examines the writings of Marx and others on nationalism, is more worthwhile, though it contains a number of contradictions. Lõwy is aware that Socialism means a classless, stateless society, but when it comes to the question of whether nations could have any role in Socialism, he wants to have it both ways. At one point he endorses the view that Socialism will be a world without frontiers, with no political delimitation of peoples. Yet a few pages later he seems to accept that Socialism would involve the abolition of national antagonisms but could retain nations with cultural differences. In fact, a true understanding of the implications of Socialism will reveal that the very idea of nations, a political concept, can have no part to play, though there will of course still be cultural differences among people (e.g. language).

While he pays lip service to opposing nationalism, Lõwy also advocates the “right of self-determination” of the Kurds and the Albanians of Kosovo, among others. This is largely based on the Leninist-inspired distinction between the nationalism of the oppressors (always bad) and the nationalism of the oppressed (allegedly worth supporting, even if critically). This even though he is aware that oppressed nations, once “free”, can easily become oppressors in turn. Oppression, however, has to be seen in class, not national terms. Both so-called oppressor and oppressed nations consist of oppressor and oppressed classes, and “national liberation” enables an oppressor class to consolidate and expand its power, rather than freeing all the people of a formerly oppressed nation.

It contains some interesting observations, but on the whole Lõwy’s book swallows too much leftist nonsense to be recommended.

Paul Bennett

The National Question (1969)

From the July 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx held that society evolved from lower to higher forms along with technology and social productivity. Feudalism evolved into capitalism while capitalism should in the end evolve into Socialism. Marx did not mean ‘evolve’ in any passive sense since he knew that men made their own history as members of rival classes engaged in social and political struggles. The motive force for the change from feudalism to capitalism was the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the nobility. Socialism will be the outcome of the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class (as the bourgeoisie became).

This theory is not only a view of history. It is also a guide to political action which Marx himself used. He lived from 1818 to 1883 and was politically active from the 1840s onward. During this period capitalism on the Continent was just emerging from feudalism, and on the international as well as on the national plane, the rising capitalist class was in conflict with the powers of feudalism. The most powerful anti-capitalist force was the Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, and the dominant Russia. These powers agreed to join forces to crush risings all over Europe —in Italy, in Germany, in Poland and Hungary, and even in Austria. As a result of these activities Russia earned the title of 'the gendarme of Europe’.

What, Marx asked, should socialists do in these circumstances? His answer was clear: support capitalist struggles to overcome feudal opposition to the economic and political development of capitalism. So Marx took an anti-Russia stand, even going so far as to support Britain, France, and Turkey in the Crimean War. He backed Polish nationalism as he felt an independent Poland would be a buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe. He favoured German and Italian national unity on the grounds that such unity was a precondition for capitalist development in these countries. In the American Civil War he took the side of the North.

Marx only did these things because he wanted to help capitalism triumph over feudalism. Sooner or later, he would be faced with another problem: what should socialists do after capitalism had triumphed? Marx himself never dealt with this as a practical issue, since it was only around the time of his death that capitalism could be said to have firmly established itself as the dominant world system. His successors, the Social Democrats, did not recognise that, with this change of circumstances, this new problem had arisen. They continued to think that wars and nationalism could be progressive, with disastrous results. The first world war presented the absurd and tragic situation of the German Social Democrats arguing (with quotes from Marx) for Germany as it was more progressive than Tsarist Russia and of the French Social Democrats arguing (again from Marx) for Britain and France on the grounds that democracy was more progressive than Prussian militarism. If nothing else exploded the hollowness of the theory of progressive wars the first world slaughter should have done.

One Social Democrat stands out as an honourable exception: Rosa Luxemburg. She grasped why Marx in the 19th century had supported wars and some nationalisms, but she realised that the situation had since changed and urged opposition to all wars and to nationalism except, ‘oddly enough, in the Balkans. Unfortunately, her writings on the national question are not all that well known.

Straight fight

The Socialist Party of Great Britain, set up in 1904, has always argued that the struggle is now a straight fight between capitalism and Socialism. Since capitalism became the dominant world system towards the end of the last century Socialism (which of course can only exist only a world scale) has been an immediate possibility which could become a reality as soon as a majority of workers wanted and understood it. It follows that only Socialism is progressive (in the Marxist sense), that all wars should be opposed, and that nationalism has no progressive role left. We have in' fact gone further than this and questioned the wisdom, from the point of view of the future development of the socialist movement, of Marx in going so far as he did in his support for wars and nationalism even in the conditions of his time.

The confused legacy of Social Democracy on the national question was inherited by the Bolsheviks (Lenin was an opponent of Luxemburg on this issue) and has been handed down by them to the Trotskyist and similar groups of today. In fact the national question throws these groups into utter confusion so that they argue, apparently in all seriousness, that socialists ought to support state capitalism in the less developed countries and even to support state capitalist countries in wars against others. A case in point is the group ironically called ‘International Socialism’. Arising out of a confused (to put it mildly) article in Socialist Worker on January 4 supporting ‘self-determination' for Biafra, a discussion developed in the group’s internal IS Bulletin (No. 2, March 1969). One contributor from Glasgow started off well:

Marxists realise that Nationalism is the ideology of the capitalist class. The identification of people with the Nation State and the National Interest enables the bosses to present society as a struggle between nations in the interests of the people thus obscuring the real conflict in society between the working and capitalist classes.

But, he went on:

Yet they realise that nationalism can play a progressive role but only under certain conditions. Socialists support all struggles for National Liberation in underdeveloped countries on the grounds that industrialisation and the creation of a working class is only possible with a break from imperialism. If the new Nation does not extend the National idea to property it is stuck forever in a neo-colonialist position . . . without state capitalism these countries will never break through their poverty but will remain entirely dependent on imperialism.

On the same theme another contributor, from Leeds, justifying support for the Vietcong, wrote: '

When Marx looked historically at the new classes and class forms of society, he took the side of the historically progressive new class society against the old;, for example the capitalist against the feudalist forms in Europe. He even took sides in the American Civil War supporting the North against the South

Both argue, then, like the Social Democrats, that nationalism and wars can still be progressive and deny, by implication, that looking at modern world society historically Socialism alone is progressive.

Let us analyse this view that only through national state capitalism can modem industry and a working class develop in the now backward countries. First, what do ‘neo-colonialist' and ‘imperialism' mean? These are not terms we would use ourselves because they are not precise enough. However, in the less developed countries, much of the capital comes from abroad so ‘imperialism’ means ‘foreign investors'. Naturally, such investors want their investments well-protected. At one time they favoured colonialism or their own direct political rule, but, now they have had to entrust local political leaders with this task (‘neo-colonialism').

Now that we know what we are talking about let us proceed. Arguments about the quickest way to develop capitalist industry, run by wage-labour for profit, in the backward parts of the world should only be of academic interest to socialists. Even so it is by no means proved that state capitalism is the quickest. It has its drawback such as cutting off a country from markets and denying it investment from overseas. And does investment from other state capitalist countries like Russia count as ‘imperialism' too?

Economic basis

The fact is that industrialisation under capitalist conditions (state or otherwise) is no longer necessary since the economic basis for Socialism has already been in existence for a long time now. World Socialism is possible on the basis of industry in Europe and North America and the workers of those places so that industrialisation within the quite different framework of Socialism can take place if desired.

Those who mistakenly think that socialists should support state capitalism and not Socialism in the less developed countries should consider what this means. If they have read Marx on Britain (or Cliff on Russia or Gluckstein on China) they will know that the coming of capitalism is a brutal process for the mass of the people involving the use of state power by a privileged minority to drive them off the land and into industry. As Marx put it, capital comes into the world dripping from head to foot in blood and dirt. How can socialists support this when it is not even economically necessary?

We can now see why theoretical clarity is needed so as to avoid ending up at the absurd position of saying socialists should support the coercion and oppression of workers in less developed countries by a state capitalist ruling class.

In Marx’s day the standard of historical progress suggested, at least to him, that socialists should help the capitalists overcome feudalism. Today, now that capitalism has long since done this, it shows that only Socialism is progressive. That is why Socialists everywhere should be struggling for Socialism and opposing capitalism in all its forms, including the national state capitalism favoured by Castro, Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and others.

Adam Buick

What next for Yugoslavia? (1991)

From the August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

When I was at school over forty years ago we were told in our history classes how a young South Slav nationalist, Gavrilo Princep, by assassinating Arch-Duke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, had triggered off (1 seem to remember "caused" was the word used) the entire first world war. Whilst not denying a role for such melodramatic gestures, Marxian critics of the capitalist system and its persistent drive to war were never convinced that the enormous conflict that ensued had such a Ruritanian root-cause. It was, instead, the culmination of a lengthy period of economic rivalry between, on the one hand, the established powers such as France and Britain with their imperial systems of guaranteed markets and cheap sources of labour and raw materials and, on the other, the thwarted ambitions of capitalist late-comers Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Woodrow Wilson redraws the map

Following the armistice in 1918, Americas President Wilson acted upon the new super-power status of the USA by redrawing the map of Europe consequent upon the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires. A key figure of the new pattern of states was the very Yugoslavia that Princep had heralded. The new entity cobbled together some diverse areas at highly varied levels of economic and social development which had in common that most of the kingdom's new subjects spoke one or other related Slav language. On the other hand they were divided by the fact that the Slovenes and Croats had for centuries formed part of the Catholic society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire whereas the Serbs, Kossovo Albanians, Macedonians, and the Bosnian three-way mix of Catholics, Serbian Orthodox and Moslems, reflected the five centuries of Ottoman Turkish domination that they had undergone. Even the essentially common language of the Serbs and Croats was deeply marked by the differing impacts upon it of Eastern and Western influences. In Croatia the language is written in Roman script. Serbs, Montenegrins and Macedonians write in Cyrillic derived from Greek.

The lack of a common spoken and written language was a major handicap in the development of modern state institutions and in the inter-war years the Serbs, who were the largest ethnic group, were felt by the other elements of the population to exercise far too strong an influence over the kingdom as a whole, especially as the royal family was Serbian. Tito, the post-WWII dictator, took steps to unify Serbo-Croat. This required concessions on the part of both wings of the language. The Serbs had to forgo the use of Cyrillic in those publications brought out in the unified format. However, where variations of grammar or vocabulary needed to be reconciled the Serbian form prevailed. To the more bigoted elements none of the sacrifices could be regarded as acceptable, but educational institutions budgeting for the publication of engineering or medical textbooks of limited circulation were soon to see the merits of the new approach.

Interestingly enough, our political cousins in the USA, the SLP, grappled with this problem in trying to spread the socialist message amongst Balkan immigrants whose settlement was especially concentrated in the Ohio area. Certainly it would be some time before propaganda couched in English would well be understood. But the limited funds of a working-class organisation could hardly run to printing separate publications and pamphlets in two scripts and several South Slav languages including Bulgarian. So perhaps forty-odd years before Tito’s similar efforts with all the assistance of the state-machine and paid academics, a parallel development was brought about by the voluntary efforts of mostly self-educated working men and women.

Austro-Marxism

The Allies’ Wilsonian carve-up of the former empires bore little relation to the over-riding economic practicalities. For example, Czechoslovakia which joined together in an independent republic the Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks, and Ruthenes (Ukrainians) of the old Austria was said to have inherited a railway network which went from nowhere to nowhere. The Danube basin which has its own natural unity was split between the new Austrian Republic, Czechoslovakia, Hungary. Yugoslavia, Rumania and Bulgaria.

Prior to 1914 the quasi-Marxist Austrian Social-Democrats had engaged in a decade of more of furious debate on the National Question and the socialist attitude towards it. It was evident that a situation which condemned millions of people to gaining literacy, military service and employment in a “foreign" language was cause for real dissatisfaction and resentment. It is also the case that several embryonic capitalist ruling groups in the region were eager and assiduous in fomenting and harnessing these genuine concerns, so divisive of working-class unity, to further their own class interests. In these debates the classic Austro-Marxist school of socialist thought well argued the supra-national, common interests of workers as workers, whilst at the same time accepting as valid the desire for linguistic freedom of choice.

Sadly, the outlook of the majority of Social Democrats was as backward in this regard as in most other respects and Czech, Croat, Hungarian and Rumanian sections of the movement were overwhelmingly in favour of setting up new frontiers rather than getting rid of old ones. Nor should it be thought that the bulk of German-speaking Social Democrats were any different; they too. equally sadly, proved to be imbued with nationalist ideas.

Inter-war Yugoslavia was a shaky construct, highly vulnerable to all the pressures of thrusting German and Italian capitalism and the lure of Russia's socialist pretensions to a population of workers and peasants coping with the harsh effects of the world slump, massive inflation and the rise of fascism. When the Nazis launched their “Drang nach Osten” and their quest for “Lebensraum" Yugoslavia, with all its internal strife, fell easy prey to the invaders.

The resistance movements which the German and Italian occupying armies brought into being strongly reflected the fiercely divergent elements of Yugoslav society. Tito (a Croat, it is worth remembering) led the most effective guerrilla army which, although operating under a Bolshevik ideology, was virtually the only instance in Axis-occupied East Europe of such a movement achieving victory largely without the aid of the Red Army.

In view of the relatively minor pre-war role of Belgrade’s Communist Party it is not surprising that in the early stages of the occupation the principal resistance movement, led by Draza Mihajlovic, reflected the mainstream conservative, monarchist. Serbian majority. The existence of rival underground armies posed a dilemma for Winston Churchill and the Allied strategists, so Captain Fitzroy Maclean was parachuted into the occupied country to assess the fighting potential of the separate resistance forces. With remarkable timeliness his book of wartime adventures. Eastern Approaches, has just been republished in paperback. No doubt there were quite a few true-blue British Tories who were deeply shocked when Churchill took Maclean’s advice, ceased supplying arms to Mihajlovic’s Chetniks and began aiding the "Communist” partizans instead.

The Chetniks. who had been fighting on two fronts against the Wehrmacht and the Partizans. were forced by this policy into increased collaboration with the Germans. Tito’s forces went from strength to strength. The clerical-fascist puppet state set up in Croatia drew widespread support for their militia, the feared Ustashe, but their fate was tied up with that of their Nazi masters. Another element which tended to side with the Germans were the Muslims. World War I memories of the Turkish alliance with Berlin played a part, as did fond recollections of German sponsorship of Enver Pasha's schemes for gathering together all the Turkic lands within the Russian Empire of the Tsars and joining them with Turkey in a "Pan-Turanian Empire" under German tutelage. Just as Franco’s use of Moroccan troops in the Nationalist offensive against the Republic brought out all the racist and Christian prejudices of the man in the Spanish street, Serbian Orthodox and Catholics see mirrored in every Yugoslav Moslem “five hundred years of the Turkish yoke", although by far the greater part of these are descended from Slav converts rather than from Turkish settlers

Those who have been watching blow-by-blow accounts of recent violent incidents on TV bulletins from Slovenia and Croatia might see disturbing analogies with the earlier events referred to above. A united Germany shows all the signs of re-asserting its hegemony over Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Armed thugs create mayhem amongst people of the other ethnic group. Already the Serbian irregulars are willing to be known, even proudly call themselves, Chetniks. More hesitantly, Croatian auxiliaries are accepting the label being given to them of Ustashe. However, the authorities in Zagreb are keen to maintain their democratic credentials (like Hitler they came to power through elections) as they cannot easily afford to alienate the goodwill of Common Market governments or public opinion. After all, the number of Yugoslav "guest workers” in Germany is second only to the two million Turkish workers there. A good proportion of these “Gastarbeitern" are from Croatia and their cash remittances home are no small consideration in the minds of the economic planners.

Mention of Slovenia may remind some readers of a speaker from our Hyde Park platform in the late fifties. In those days the fact that he was a Slovene was regarded as less noteworthy than that he came from Yugoslavia and wished to repudiate their false claims to being some kind of socialist society with "workers self-management". The excellence of his arguments was marred a little by his hesitant English but, on the other hand, it did wonders for our efforts to put over the World Socialist perspective of a world without states in which linguistic freedom of choice will be a matter of course

Eddie Grant

Mistaken Marx (1991)

Book Review from the October 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxism and Nationalism. By Ephraim Nimni. Pluto Press, 1991

The Socialist Party is a Marxist organisation. We accept the main points of Karl Marx's theories of history, economics and politics. But not uncritically. We differ from Marx on a number of issues, and we have made our own contributions to socialist theory. Without doubt our most serious disagreement with Marx is over nationalism.

Although Marx and Engels had declared that workers have no country and urged the workers of the world to unite, this was not their only statement on the matter. They also made a distinction between "historical nations" (such as Poland and Ireland) and "non-historical nations" (such as the Czechs, Scots and Welsh). Historical nations met with their approval because, as independent states, they could be progressive in terms of capitalist development. Non-historical nations, on the other hand, were doomed to be assimilated into the more progressive states (with "democracy as compensation", as Engels put it). Non-historical nations were not viable as independent states in a capitalist world, argued Marx and Engels, and any movement for state independence in such nations could only be reactionary. The nation is largely cultural and linguistic whereas the state and its machinery of government is a geo-political entity.

Nimni also claims that Marx and Engels got it wrong on nationalism—but from a different point of view to us. He says that socialists can legitimately be nationalists, though not necessarily statists, given the widespread concern on the issue. His book is mainly a defence of Otto Bauer on nationalism. For Bauer, a member of the Austrian Social Democratic Party in the early years of this century:

Integration of the whole people in their national cultural community, full achievement of self-determination of nations, growing spiritual differentation of nations—this is the meaning of socialism.

Which calls into question Bauer's and Nimni's understanding of capitalism and socialism. Certainly socialism will allow the fullest linguistic and cultural diversity, but to make this the basis of a political programme is something altogether different. Marxism explains how workers are exploited and unfree, not as individuals or particular nationalities, but as members of a class. From this perspective, identifying with a class provides as a rational basis for working class political action. The objective would be a stateless world community of free access. Given that nationalism does nothing to further this understanding, however, it is an obstruction to world socialism.

Lew Higgins