TALKING MARXISM

Nationalism and socialism

by Abbie Bakan

The election turned all eyes on Quebec. At the centre of Quebec’s relationship to federal politics is the “national question”—the unique history, language and culture that shape the province’s relationship to English Canada. Socialists have long debated the national question, and the lessons are still being learned.

Certainly, the politics of nationalism and the politics of Marxism are not the same. Today, this is ABC. But this was not always the case. During the radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s, it was commonly thought that nationalism and Marxism were closely linked, and sometimes even equated.

The inspiring anti-imperialist movements that developed around this period were largely led by nationalist leaderships—most significantly in Vietnam. The rhetoric of these leaderships was often “socialist,” but in fact the aim was to unite all social forces against imperialism and achieve democratic sovereignty.

But this association of Marxism and nationalism has changed. One significant factor was the emergence of civil war in Europe, when the former Yugoslavia broke up. Nationalism seemed very far from a vehicle for progressive change.

Logic

Of course, the logic of nationalism as a set of ideas is very different from, and even antithetical to, Marxism, then as now. But a Marxist understanding of various forms of nationalist politics and ideologies has theoretical as well as strategic implications.

Nationalism is about the unity of the exploited and the exploiters. It projects a symbolic, common interest of a people across classes, on the basis of language, territory and cultural characteristics.

The Marxist theorist Ben Anderson has suggested that nationalism provides the basis of “imagined communities.” Nationalism is often associated with a variety of ritualistic symbols like flags that are not allowed to touch the ground, or pictures of monarchs and military figures on the currency.

Marxism is very different. For Marxism, the motor of history is not the unity of classes, but their conflict. This is a necessary starting point, but also a very abstract one. In the real world, nationalisms are not all the same.

National oppression

National identities develop on an unequal playing field, in a world divided by expansionary imperialist powers that challenge the sovereignty of colonies, former colonies and oppressed nations. Nationalist ideas and feelings interact with class in complex ways that vary greatly depending on the context and historical circumstances.

The nationalism of empire obliterates the national identities of those it oppresses. For those who experience national oppression, even the most minimal, democratic right to autonomous existence, and the freedoms associated with sovereignty, are stifled.

Vast profits and the powers of the most advanced imperialist states depend on this process. National populations that reside on lands rich in natural resources, or in zones near strategic markets, have faced violent conquest, occupation and ethnic cleansing, and the ongoing racist erasure of historic identities and cultures.

Russian Revolution

Some of the richest debates regarding nationalism and Marxism accompanied an earlier period of imperialism, coinciding with the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Tsarist Russia was an expansionist power, which forced numerous national populations into a vice grip of subordination. The question that concerned the Bolshevik Party—that came to lead the Russian Revolution and of which Lenin was a leading figure —was how to unify these oppressed peoples with the minority working class of Russia.

Lenin estimated 57 per cent of the population belonged to various oppressed peoples. He described Tsarist Russia as a prison house of nations. The goal of the revolutionary movement was to break the bars of the jail that held the workers and the oppressed peoples similarly captive.

For Lenin, the question of nationalism was linked to class, and therefore was a political question. Nationalist ideas in defense of an imperialist, oppressor nation, like a nationalist defence of Russia in World War I, served to fuel reaction and divide workers from their brothers and sisters in other countries.

But nationalist ideas emerging in an oppressed nation had a different character. Examples of the nationalism of oppressed peoples of Lenin’s time would include the case of Poland, or other nations within the Russian “prison house.”

To treat all nationalist ideology as the same politically, rather than in their varied roles in the concrete historical manifestations, was for Lenin to lapse into abstraction. He wrote:

“To the extent that the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation struggles against the oppressing one, to that extent, we are always, in every case, and more resolutely than anyone else, for it, because we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. […] The bourgeois nationalism of every oppressed nation has a general democratic content which is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we absolutely support, strictly distinguishing it from the tendency toward one’s own national exclusiveness…”

Many things have changed since the early part of the 20th century. But for socialists in Canada today, how we understand nationalism in Quebec needs to be framed in the context of the history of imperialism and conquest in the making of the Canadian state. From this starting point, solidarity and a common movement against imperialism can be advanced.