István Mészáros
1. The persistent neglect of
the national question.
ONE of the greatest
impediments to the development of the much needed radical mass movement of the
future is the persistent neglect of the national question in socialist
ideology.
The reasons for this neglect
had arisen both from some contingent but far-reaching historical determinations
and from the complicated theoretical legacy of the past. Moreover, given the
nature of the issues involved, the two happen to be closely intertwined.
As regards the practical/historical determinations, we
must remember first of all that the formation of modern nations has been
accomplished under the class leadership of the bourgeoisie. This development took
place in accord with the socioeconomic imperatives inherent in the
self-expansionary drive of the multiplicity of capitals from their originally
very limited local settings toward ever greater territorial control, in
ever-intensifying conflicts with one another, culminating in two devastating
world wars in the twentieth century and in the potential annihilation of
humankind in our own time.
A great thinker of the
enlightened bourgeoisie, like Kant, perceived at a very early stage of the
system’s unfolding the immense danger of such conflicts and violent
confrontations. He postulated the ideal solution of a coming “perpetual peace” among the rivals,
within the framework of a universally beneficial “cosmopolitan order” and its
“League of Nations”. However, the solution stipulated by this great figure of
the German Enlightenment was a noble illusion: a pure “ought to be”. For Kant
hypostatised that his “perpetual peace” was bound to prevail thanks to the
“commercial spirit” – a concept he adopted from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In reality, though,
it was precisely the ultimately destructive and monopoly-producing struggle for
economic and political domination, begotten by the idealized “commercial
spirit”, which necessarily resulted in the ravages of imperialism.
At a more advanced stage of
capitalistic developments, when the bourgeois order was firmly consolidated in
Europe and in North America, and at the same time most active in subjugating
the rest of the world to the expanding empires of the dominant nations, Hegel
offered an incomparably more realistic conception of the ongoing
transformations than Kant, fully in tune with his war-torn age. But the philosophical
justification offered by him for the prevailing and progressively more
antagonistic state of affairs on an ever-extended scale was no less idealizing
than the wishfully postulated solution of his philosophical ancestor. For Hegel
had no theoretical difficulty, nor moral qualms at all, about accepting the
complete domination of smaller nations by the “world historical nations”. Nor
indeed did Hegel concern himself with the tenability (or ultimately suicidal
untenability) of the endless succession of wars in the future, with their
increasingly more destructive modern weaponry “invented by thought and the
universal” [1] which he considered both necessary and morally commendable [2].
All of that could be readily subsumed under the lofty concept of the
self-realizing “world spirit”, thereby removing all theoretical obstacles from
categorically decreeing that “The nation
state is mind in its substantive rationality and immediate actuality and is
therefore the absolute power on earth.”
[3]
The system of inter-state relations constituted under
the self-expansionary imperatives of capital could only be incurably
iniquitous. It had to enforce and constantly reinforce the highly privileged
position of the imperialistically poised handful of nations, and in complete
contrast, it had to impose at the same time, with all available means,
including the most violent “systematically invented” ones, a structurally
subordinate predicament on all of the other nations. This way of articulating
the international order prevailed not only against smaller nations but even
when the countries concerned had incomparably larger populations than their
foreign oppressors, as for instance India under the British Empire. As regards
the colonized nations, their conditions of economic and political dependency
were ruthlessly enforced upon them by the dominant imperialist powers, thanks
also to the subservient complicity of their indigenous ruling classes.
Characteristically, therefore, the “postcolonial” changes had no difficulty
whatsoever in reproducing, in all substantive relations, the earlier modes of
domination, even if in a formally somewhat modified way, thereby perpetuating
the long-established system of structural domination and dependency all the way
down to the present. As the major Filipino historian and political thinker,
Renato Constatino pointed out about his country’s experience:
“When the American forces invaded our infant
Republic, unspeakable atrocities were committed to quell our forebears’ fierce
resistance. In a sense, it was easier to fight the enemy at that time because
it was a clear presence, with a visible cruel and malevolent face. … The formal
hoisting of the Philippine flag in 1946 did not really change things. The age
of direct colonialisms was immediately followed by the period of neo-colonial
control, when the North, through its ideology of free trade, continued to hold
(as it still does) the levers of power.” [4]
This is why Constantino –
reminiscent of Lenin’s assertion of the legitimate self-defensive nationalism
of the oppressed nations [5] - stressed in an interview given to Le Monde that “Nationalism remains today
an imperative for the peoples of the South. It is a protection in that it allows to assert one’s sovereign rights, and
it is a framework to defend oneself
against the practices of the North for dominance. Nationalism does not mean
withdrawal into oneself: it has to be open; but for that it must presuppose a new world order which – in contrast to
what we see today – does not consist in the hegemony of a super-power and its
allies, without respect for the young nations.” [6]
Only through the force of a monumental miracle could
have capitalistic inter-state relations of structural domination and
subordination become significantly different from the way in which they
actually turned out to be in the course of historical development. For capital,
as the controlling force of the economic and social reproduction process,
cannot be other than strictly hierarchical and authoritarian in its innermost
determinations even in the most privileged imperialist countries. How could
therefore a social and political system – characterized in its capitalist
variety by the “authoritarianism of the workshop and the tyranny of the market”
(Marx) – be equitable on the international plane? Capital’s absolute necessity
to dominate internally its own labour force may well be compatible with
granting some limited privileges to its indigenous working population, for the
purpose of chauvinistic mystification, from the extra margin of exploitative
advantage derived from imperialist domination. But such practices do not
introduce even the smallest degree of equality into the capital/labour
relationship of the privileged imperialist country in which capital fully
retains, and must always retain, the power of decision making on all
substantive issues. To suggest, therefore, that despite such unalterable
internal structural determinations the external – inter-state – relations of
the system could be other than wholly iniquitous would be quite absurd. For it
would be tantamount to pretending that what is by its very nature deeply
iniquitous produces genuine equality under the further aggravating conditions
of necessarily enforced foreign domination.
Understandably, therefore,
the socialist response to such a system had to be spelled out in terms of a
most radical negation, stressing the need for a qualitatively different
relationship among the great variety of nations, large and small, on the basis
of the supersession of the prevailing antagonisms within the framework of a
genuinely co-operative international order. The matter was, however, greatly
complicated – and in reality gravely affected in the twentieth century – by the
tragic circumstance that the first successful revolution which projected the
socialist transformation of society broke out in tsarist Russia. For this
country happened to be an oppressive multinational empire: a fact that
significantly contributed to its characterization by Lenin as “the weakest link
of the chain of imperialism”, and as such a positive asset to the potential
outbreak of the revolution: an assessment in which he has been proved
completely right. But the other side of the same coin was that not only the
grave socio-economic backwardness represented immense problems for the future
but also the terrible legacy of the oppressive multinational empire.
The failure to properly
address the potentially explosive contradictions of national iniquity after
Lenin’s death carried with it devastating consequences for the future,
ultimately resulting in the break-up of the Soviet Union. The contrast between
Lenin’s and Stalin’s approach to these problems could not have been greater.
Lenin always advocated the right of the various national minorities to full
autonomy, “to the point of secession”, whereas Stalin degraded them to nothing
more than “border regions”, to be retained at all cost, in strictest
subordination to the interests of Russia. This is why Lenin condemned him in no
uncertain terms, insisting that if the views advocated by Stalin prevailed, in
that case “the ‘freedom to secede from
the union’ by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper,
unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian
man, the Great-Russian chauvinist” [7]. He underlined the gravity of the damage
caused by the policies pursued and clearly named the culprits: “The political
responsibility for all this truly Great-Russian nationalist campaign must, of
course, be laid on Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.” [8]
Lenin never ceased to
emphasise the importance of the full, not only formal but substantive, equality
of all national groups. He repeatedly stressed not only the seriousness of the
ongoing violations of proletarian international solidarity but also kept
reiterating the Marxian point about the need to make “equality unequal” in
favour of those who are disadvantaged and oppressed:
“The Georgian [Stalin] who
is neglectful of this aspect of the question, or who carelessly flings about
accusations of ‘nationalist socialism’ (whereas he himself is a real and true
‘national socialist’, and even a vulgar Great-Russian bully), violates, in
substance, the interests of proletarian class solidarity; for nothing holds up
the development and strengthening of proletarian class solidarity so much as national
injustice. […] internationalism on the part of oppressors or ‘great’ nations,
as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as
bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of
nations but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation,
that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice. Anybody
who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to
the national question.” [9]
Reading these lines no one
can be surprised to learn that Lenin’s sharply critical document, written in
December 1922 when he was seriously ill, was suppressed by Stalin and published
only after Khroushchev’s secret speech in 1956.
After Lenin’s death in
January 1924, following his long-time incapacitating illness, all of his recommendations
on the national question were nullified and Stalin’s “Great-Russian” policies –
which treated the other nationalities as iniquitously subordinate “border
regions” – fully implemented, contributing greatly to the blocked development that subsequently characterized Soviet society.
Nor were the underlying problems resolved by post-Stalin changes, despite the
prominence given to the publication of Lenin’s damning comments in 1956. For
Khroushchev himself, after castigating Stalin in early 1956, reverted to his
methods by the autumn of the same year, repressing the Hungarian popular uprising
of October by the force of arms. Later on the “Brezhnev doctrine” tried to legitimate explicitly and permanently
the same untenable policies of reducing the occupied East European countries to
the status of border regions of Soviet “actually existing socialism”. Moreover,
even the approach of Gorbachev and his followers was characterized by the same
sense of tendentious unreality as the post-Lenin theorizations and practices,
as I tried to stress well before the implosion of the Soviet Union [10]. They
maintained the fiction of the “Soviet nation”, with its allegedly “unified self-awareness”, naively or wantonly
ignoring the explosive problems of the Russian domination of the “unified
Soviet nation”, notwithstanding the clear signs of a gathering storm which soon
enough resulted in the break-up of the far from unified Soviet Union. At the
same time they tried to justify the reduction of various national communities,
including the Baltic, Byelorussian and Ukrainian, to the status of “ethnic
groups”. The total unreality of this approach could not have been more
graphically encapsulated than what we find in the words of one of Gorbachev’s
closest collaborators, the principal officially annointed authority in the
field, Julian Bromlei:
“the Soviet people is a natural phenomenon which differs from
similar societies mainly in its Socialist parameters and corresponding
spiritual values. Clearly, we should bear in mind that the Soviet nation consists of a variety of ethnic groups.” [11]
Under Stalin’s rule, the
acceptance of such wanton unreality could be imposed with the help of authoritarian
repressive measures, going as far as even the deportation of entire national
minorities. Once, however, that road had to be abandoned, nothing could make
the terrible legacy of the oppressive tsarist multinational empire and the
subsequent preservation of its antagonisms prevail. It was, therefore, only a
question of time when and in what particular form the post-revolutionary Soviet
state had to disintegrate under the intolerable weight of its manifold
contradictions.
2. Crisis in the Western
socialist movement.
THE persistent neglect of
the national question was, to be sure, not confined to the vicissitudes of the
Soviet failure to face up to its dilemmas, even if the direct consequences of
such failure were far-reaching in the international socialist movement in
that, for many decades, the adoption of a wholly uncritical attitude to the
“Soviet model” was compulsory among the parties of the Third International,
carrying with it theoretical confusion and strategic disorientation.
Characteristically, in this respect, the Stalinist leader of the Party in
Hungary, Mathias Rákosi, declared that “the criterion of Hungarian patriotism
today, by which we must judge it, is our love for the Soviet Union”. One can
imagine the response generated by such remarks.
Nevertheless, the tendency
in the West European socialist movement to move in the direction of a blind
alley, as regards the national question and the closely associated issue of
internationalism, appeared well before the Russian October Revolution. In fact
Engels bitterly complained forty two years earlier, at the time of the
discussion of the Gotha Programme in Germany, that in the document preparing
the unification “the principle that the workers’ movement is an international movement is, to all
intents and purposes, completely
disavowed.” [12] The necessary radical
negation of capital’s existing order from a socialist perspective was
inconceivable without the adoption of a consistent and in reality fully sustainable
international position. However, the opportunistic manoeuvre aimed at securing
the unification of the political forces involved in approving the Gotha
Programme carried with it serious nationalistic concessions for which a very
high price had to be paid in the future. The total capitulation of German
Social Democracy to the forces of aggressive bourgeois chauvinism at the outbreak
of the first world war was only the logical culmination of that dangerous turn
in German political development, sealing thereby also the fate of the Second
International itself.
It is important to remember here that none of the four
internationals founded with the expectation to make the power of international
solidarity prevail against capital’s hierarchical structural domination of
labour have succeeded in fulfilling the hope attached to them. The First
International foundered already in Marx’s lifetime, as a result of the
derailment of the workers’ movement as an international movement towards the
end of the 1870s, sharply criticized by Engels as we have just seen. The Second
International carried within itself the seeds of this contradiction and turned
them into inexorably growing plants, however small at first, waiting only for
the historical opportunity – provided by the first world war – before the
members of the International sided with the rival warring parties, thereby
fatefully discrediting the whole organization. This badly discredited “Workers’
International”, whose constituent national members throughout the war continued
to identify themselves with their own bourgeoisie and thereby ceased to have
anything at all to do with the vital requirements of socialist
internationalism, was later re-established as an organ of socio-economic
accommodation and the institutionalised denial of the class struggle. Rosa
Luxemburg’s judgement summed up with great clarity the meaning of these
developments by stressing that “in refuting the existence of the class
struggle, the Social Democracy has denied the very basis of its own existence.”
[13] It was, therefore, only a question of time before the Social Democratic
parties all over the world went on adopting a position openly in defence of the
established order.
Against
the background of the Second International’s ignominious failure, the Third
International was founded in the aftermath of the October Revolution. However,
as a result of the progressive imposition of Stalin’s authoritarian policies,
which treated international matters, including the relationship with the
parties of the Third International itself, in strict subordination to Soviet
state interests, also this organization failed to fulfil the role of developing
genuine socialist internationalism. Its dissolution as the Communist
International (the Comintern), and its metamorphosis into the Cominform – i.e.
an international organization of information – did not solve anything. For even
the Cominform was a one-way street. This was because any critique of the Soviet
system remained an absolute taboo during Stalin’s lifetime. And even after he
died, Khroushchev’s severe critique of his “personality cult” and of its
negative consequences failed to address the fundamental issues of Soviet type
society as a mode of social metabolic reproduction, despite its ever
intensifying crisis symptoms.
By the time the gravity of
the crisis itself was acknowledged, under Gorbachev’s “glasnost and perestroika”,
the envisaged corrective efforts were conceived in a way which was inseparable
from embarking on the road for the restoration of capitalism. As to the Fourth
International, founded by Trotsky, soon to be assassinated on Stalin’s orders,
it could never attain the status of an international organization with mass influence, despite the intentions
of its founder. Yet, if the envisaged strategic vision cannot “grip the
masses”, in Marx’s words, in that case the task of developing the necessary
socialist internationalism and the appropriate “communist mass consciousness” (Marx again) cannot be accomplished.
Given this unfulfilled history of labour’s attempts to
produce an adequate organizational framework for asserting its vital interests
in its international confrontations with capital, as the hegemonic alternative
to the latter, we cannot turn away from the difficult question of why all this
happened. After all Marx characterized capitalistic developments a very long
time ago, already in his share of The
German Ideology, in this way:
“Generally speaking, large-scale industry created
everywhere the same relations between the classes of society, and thus
destroyed the peculiar features of the various nationalities. And while the
bourgeoisie of each nation still retained separate national interests,
large-scale industry created a class
which in all nations has the same interest and for which nationality is already
dead.” [14]
However, twelve years later
he had to acknowledge that the prospects for a socialist revolution had been
greatly complicated by the fact that in the world as a whole the development of
bourgeois society was still in the ascendant [15]. Moreover, further developments
made these matters even more difficult and disappointing. The aggressive
imperialist drive of the dominant capitalist countries became visible only
decades later – in its full extent well after Marx’s death –, bringing with it
grave implications for the working class and for the hoped for “development of
communist mass consciousness”. This was dramatically highlighted right at the
beginning of the war when countless numbers of workers, and not only their
social democratic leaders, sided with their national bourgeoisie, instead of
turning their weapons against their ruling class, as revolutionary socialists
like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg wanted them to do.
The national question inevitably assumed the form of
polarization between the handful of oppressor states and the overwhelming
majority of imperialistically oppressed nations: a most iniquitous relationship
in which the working classes of the imperialist countries were deeply
implicated. Nor was this relationship confined to direct military domination.
The purpose of the latter – whenever it was brought into play either through
some major military operations or through the exercise of “gunboat diplomacy” –
was to secure the maximum feasible exploitation of labour in the conquered
countries on a continuing basis, imposing thereby the characteristic mode of
capital’s social metabolic control ultimately in the entire world. This is why
in the course of post-second world war “decolonisation” it was quite possible
to abandon the direct military/political control of the former empires without
changing the substance of the established relationship of structural domination
and subordination, as befits the capital system.
The
United States were the pioneers in this respect. They exercised direct military
domination in some countries, whenever it suited their design, wedded to
socio-economic supremacy over the populations involved, like the Philippines,
for instance. At the same time they secured the massive domination of the whole
of Latin America in the form of imposing on the countries of the continent
structural dependency without necessarily intervening militarily. But, of
course, they unhesitatingly resorted to open or covert military interventions
in their proclaimed “backyard” whenever the maintenance of their exploitative
domination was put into question. One of their preferred ways of imposing their
rule was the “indigenous” military overthrow of elected governments and the
establishment of “friendly” dictatorships, with the most cynical and
hypocritical justification for such acts on numerous occasions, from Brazil’s
military dictatorship to Pinochet’s Chile. Nevertheless, for a long time their
principal strategy for asserting their exploitative interests in the
post-second world war period was through the exercise of economic domination,
wedded to the deceitful ideology of “democracy and liberty”. This was well in
tune with a determinate phase of capital’s historical development, when the
political/military shackles of the old empires proved to be rather
anachronistic for realizing the potentialities of capital-expansion better
suited at the time to neo-colonial practices. The United States were in a
nearly ideal position in this regard, both as the most dynamic constituent of
global capital in its drive to productive expansion, and as a country which
could claim to have no need for a direct political/military domination of colonies,
unlike the British and French Empires. It is therefore highly significant – and
in its implications for the survival of humanity most dangerous – that in our
time this “democratic” superpower had to revert to the most wasteful and brutal
form of military interventions and occupations, in response to capital’s
structural crisis, in a vain attempt to resolve that crisis by imposing itself
on the rest of the world as the master of global hegemonic imperialism.
3.
Patriotism and internationalism.
In the light of these
developments we can clearly see that the potentiality of international
solidarity put into relief by Marx, with reference to “a class which in all nations has the same interest and for which
nationality is already dead”, not only did not come close to its
realization but actually suffered a major setback through the successful
unfolding of modern imperialism and of its subsequent transformation into a
system of neo-colonial and neo-imperialist structural dependency after the
second world war. This newer version of imperialism was (and remains) a form of
domination no less iniquitous for the great masses of the working people than
its predecessor. Accordingly, it is inconceivable to realize true
internationalism without the radical emancipation of the many oppressed
nations, not least in Latin America, from their continued domination by the
oppressor nations. This is the meaning of legitimate defensive nationalism
today as stressed from the very beginning by Lenin. A defensive nationalism
which must be complemented by the positive dimension of internationalism in
order to succeed.
International solidarity is
a positive potential of capital’s
structural antagonist only. It is in harmony with patriotism which is habitually confused in theoretical discussions
even on the left with bourgeois chauvinism.
This confusion happens to be quite often a more or less conscious excuse for
denying the necessity for breaking the chains of exploitative structural
dependency of which even the workers of “advanced capitalism” are undeniable
beneficiaries, even if to a much more limited degree than their class
antagonists. But patriotism does not mean identifying oneself exclusively with
the legitimate national interests of one’s own country, when it is threatened
by a foreign power, or indeed by the capitulatory behaviour of one’s own ruling
class for which Lenin and Luxemburg rightly advocated turning the weapons of
war against the internal class exploiters. It also means full solidarity with
the genuine patriotism of the oppressed peoples.
The condition of realization
of such patriotism is not simply a change in the prevailing inter-state relations,
countering thereby to some extent the foreign dictates of the established
political, or military/political, dependency. Far from it. For the condition of
lasting success can only be a sustained struggle against capital’s hierarchical
structural domination, for as long as it takes, all over the world. Without it
also the now and then successful casting off of the earlier political/military
supremacy of the foreign power can be re-established, in the old form or in a
new one, at the next turn of events. International solidarity of the oppressed,
therefore, requires the full awareness and the consistent practical observance
of these vital strategic orienting principles.
It is not accidental that
the bourgeois form of nationalism can only be chauvinistic, which means simultaneously the necessary exclusion of the legitimate patriotism
of the other nations. For capital either succeeds in dominating – both internally, its own labour force, and externally, the other nations with which
it must periodically enter into major conflict – or it fails in exercising its
indivisible control over the social metabolism as strictly defined by its own
systemic imperatives. To share capital’s control over societal reproduction
with labour is just as absurd a notion (of Thatcherite conservative “people’s
capitalism” or, for that matter, of the fully accommodatory “third way” fantasy
of social democracy) as the constantly promoted idea of a harmoniously
functioning future world government, under the actually existing conditions of
global hegemonic imperialism.
As a matter of innermost
historical and structural determinations, all-round beneficial internationalism is totally incompatible
with capital’s necessary mode of operation, developed in the course of history
as a multiplicity of particular capitals bent on conflictual exclusiveness and
on grabbing the maximum feasible advantage to themselves. The material ground
of this incompatibility on the international plane is the radical impossibility
of introducing substantive equality
into the capital system. Only the formal
camouflage of inequality as equality is acceptable. To give a
characteristic example, on December 13, 2003, the discussion of the projected
“European Constitution” in Brussels ended in complete disarray. The issue at
stake was both mystificatory and farcical. Attempts were made to dress it up as
a matter of high principle concerned with the noble observance of equality.
In reality the utterly
hypocritical advocacy of the so-called “proportionality
of voting” by the member states, as the proof of equitable intentions, had
nothing whatsoever to do with genuine equality; only with the vacuous formal transfiguration of its
diametrical opposite. For if in reality the question of equality could be taken
seriously, in that case every member nation of the far from united European
Union should be given one vote only,
instead of allocating the disputed “27 or 29” votes to a few of them and much
less to the others. Thus the pretended equality in terms of the “proportionality of voting rights” is
nothing more than a masquerade for the maintenance of the existing gross disproportionality of economic and
social/political powers among the member states. These powers, which are
the embodiments of deeply entrenched substantive
inequality, are decidedly not going to change within the established
framework of the “Union”, whatever mystificatory compromises are going to be
reached in the end, as no doubt there will be, on the debated “European
Constitution”. And while the practice of managing society’s problems on the
basis of vacuous formal equality is noisily pursued as the proclaimed objective
of constitutional propriety, the institutional practice of outlawing solidarity strikes – a blatantly authoritarian measure of
outrageous inequality, enacted in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and retained
by her “New Labour” successors –, together with the continued attacks in
several countries on the workers’ hard-won pension rights and on their
shrinking social security benefits, is considered perfectly acceptable to the
rulers of the European “democratic community”.
Socialist
internationalism is inconceivable without full respect for the aspirations of
the working people of other nations. Only that respect can create the objective
possibility of positive co-operative interchanges. Ever since its first
formulation, Marxist theory insisted that a nation which dominates other
nations deprives itself of its own freedom: a dictum which Lenin never ceased
to reiterate. It is not difficult to see why this should be so. For any form of
inter-state domination presupposes a strictly regulated framework of social
interchange in which the exercise of control is expropriated by the relatively
few. A national state which is constituted in such a way that it should be able
to dominate other nationalities, or the so-called “peripheral” and “border
regions”, presupposes the complicity of its politically active citizenry in the
exercise of domination, thus mystifying and weakening the working masses in
their aspiration to emancipate themselves.
Thus the radical negation of
the long prevailing system of most iniquitous inter-state relations is an absolutely
unavoidable requirement of socialist theory. It provides the conceptual basis
of defensive nationalism. However,
the necessary positive alternative to capital’s social order cannot be a
defensive one. For all defensive positions suffer from being ultimately
unstable, in that even the best defences can be overrun under concentrated
fire, given the suitably changed relation of forces in favour of the adversary.
What is needed in this respect, in response to capital’s perverse
globalisation, is the articulation of a viable positive alternative. That is:
an international social reproductive order instituted and managed on the basis
of the genuine equality of its manifold constituents, defined not in formal but
in materially and culturally identifiable substantive terms. Thus, the strategy
of positive internationalism means replacing the absolutely iniquitous – and
insuperably conflictual – structuring principle of capital’s reproductive
“microcosms” (the particular productive and distributive enterprises which
constitute the comprehensive “macrocosm” of the system) by a fully co-operative
alternative.
The destructive drive of
transnational capital cannot be even alleviated, let alone positively overcome,
at the international level only, through the action of particular national
governments. For the continued existence of the antagonistic “microcosms”, and
their subsumption under increasingly larger structures of the same conflictual
type (like the giant transnational corporations, as they arise through the
concentration and centralization of capital today), of necessity reproduces the
temporarily placated conflicts sooner or later. Thus positive internationalism
defines itself as the strategy to go beyond capital as a mode of social
metabolic control by helping to articulate and comprehensively coordinate a
non-hierarchical form of decision making at the material reproductive as well
as the cultural/political plane. In other words, by a qualitatively different
form of decision making in which the vital controlling functions of societal
reproduction can be positively devolved
to the members of the “microcosms”, and at the same time, the activities of the
latter can be appropriately coordinated all the way to embrace the most
comprehensive levels, because they are not torn apart by irreconcilable
antagonisms.
The point to stress here is
that so long as “activity is not voluntarily
divided”, [16] but regulated, instead, by some kind of unconscious
quasi-natural process (theorized by the uncritical champions of the bourgeois
order as a natural system, in a
literal sense of the word, and thus forever insurmountable), in the form of
international competition and confrontation, there must be in existence social
structures capable of imposing on the individuals a structural/hierarchical
(and not simply a functional) division of labour. (The fundamental structures
of such an enforced hierarchical division of labour are, of course, the
antagonistically competing social classes.) And conversely, even the
potentially most destructive antagonisms are always reproduced on the broadest
international plane, because capital cannot operate the reproductive
“microcosms” of the social metabolism without submitting them to its strict
vertical/hierarchical structuring principle of control.
Naturally, the same
correlation remains valid for the positive alternative as well. Accordingly,
the necessary condition for the genuine resolution (and not temporary
postponement and manipulation) of conflicts and antagonisms, through socialist
internationalism, is the adoption of a truly democratic/co-operative
structuring principle in the social reproductive microcosms themselves. The
positive self-management and “lateral coordination” of the associated
producers on a global scale – as opposed to their now prevailing vertical
subordination to an alien controlling force – first becomes possible only on
such a basis. [17]
In this sense, the question
of realizing the positive potentiality of socialist internationalism – beyond
all chauvinistic/nationalist antagonisms, the way in which it was anticipated
by Marx one hundred and fifty eight years ago – cannot be raised without
reference to the reproductive conditions of a radically different social order.
We have to remind ourselves, again, of the relationship between potentiality
and actuality. For the common interests of all working people can be
practically realized when following the road toward a new social order becomes
both necessary and viable in their attempt to extricate themselves from the
perilous contradictions of their present-day predicament. Success depends on
the maturation of certain conditions which turn a vital need – and its
justifiable ideological advocacy, which could be legitimately indicated in that
form many decades ago – into the objective
possibility of a sustainable social development.
What is at stake, then, is
not an abstract theoretical principle, and not even a positive desideratum, however desirable. What
decides the issue in the final analysis is the fundamental difference between abstract possibilities (rightly
condemned by Hegel as “bad infinity”), whose number can be multiplied no end
without getting one step nearer to the desired aim, and the objective possibility of actual development
in the advocated direction.
The ground for the feasible
realization of the objective possibilities of socialist strategy, with its sustainable
internationalist aspirations, cannot be other than the historically unfolding
dynamics of the capital system’s global transformations. This is significantly
different today from its phase prior to the second world war, and much more so
in comparison to Marx’s lifetime. We are certainly contemporaries to the
system’s transnational “globalisation”, although our view of what is actually
evolving could not be more different from that of the uncritical defenders of
the established order [18]. The latter must always find an “eternalising”
explanation for everything, also when some major crisis symptoms are undeniable
even by them.
Characteristically, this is the way in which they
interpret the already mentioned grave problem of chronic structural
unemployment in evidence in all parts of the world. They cannot say that it
does not exist, but they must turn it into a fictitiously positive asset. This
they do by twisting the concept of structural unemployment to mean that it is
unproblematically permanent because it is “only structural”, in the sense of
being an unavoidable consequence of universally beneficial “advanced technology”.
As such, it is not the inhuman and destructive manifestation of capital
expansion at their system’s present phase of unsustainable development, to be
remedied by the institution of a viable alternative social reproductive order.
It is simply a feature of the unalterable (“natural”) reproductive structure in
existence, to be dealt with by the appropriate neutral technical/economic
devices of expansionary “flexible casualisation”.
It
is equally characteristic that when it comes to the question of actual
historical developments on a global scale, which could in principle
significantly change the existing conditions and relation of forces, the same
people speak like the cunning horse-trader in a Hungarian adage: “Ha akarom vemhes, ha akarom nem vemhes”.
That is, “if it suits me, the mare is pregnant, if it doesn’t, she is not”. In
the same way, the propagandists of the system suddenly forget their favourite
fairy tale of all-justifying “globalization” whenever it happens to be
inconvenient. Ignoring the precarious predicament of the overwhelming majority
of humankind, as arising from the untenable domination of the rest of the world
by a handful of “advanced capitalist” countries, they arbitrarily decree that
the workers of the “advanced” countries shall never assume a radical critical
position in relation to their own system. Thus, in this regard there can be no
change through globalisation. Social democratic accommodation is supposed to
remain with us to the end of time, even though the privileges sustaining it in
a few countries are categorically denied to the billions of the “wretched of
the earth”.
In reality nothing could be more fallacious and
crudely biased in its pretences to ideological neutrality than arguing the
proverbial horse trader’s way. For the radical potentiality of labour, as the
hegemonic alternative to capital – also as regards its objectively feasible
power for instituting a qualitatively different system of inter-state relations
– “can only be judged in terms of its proper frame of reference – i.e. the
fully developed global system of capital – and not on the limited ground of a
few privileged and exploitative ‘advanced capitalist societies’.” [19]
Consequently, one should either openly admit that the much propagandised
process of “globalisation” is a tendentious conservative fiction: a concept
used only when it suits one’s retrograde ideological convenience (as happens to
be the case today on countless occasions); or one would have to leave open the
question of prospective historical developments on the issue of labour’s
hegemonic alternative to capital’s social metabolic order. For it is just as grotesque
to project the universal diffusion of the favourable material conditions of the
handful of highly privileged capitalist countries – which in reality must
greatly rely for their privileges on the continued structural dependency and
misery of the others, secured to them through the now prevailing differential
rate of exploitation – as it is to suggest that potential changes negatively
affecting labour in the dominant capitalist countries cannot happen at all, or
if they do, they do not matter. It is quite absurd to say, or to quietly imply,
that whatever happens to the standard of living of labour in the
capitalistically advanced countries, under the conditions of capital’s
structural crisis and the resulting attacks on that standard – through the
necessity of a downward equalization of the differential rate of exploitation
on a global scale –, that is not going to alter in the slightest the attitude
of capital’s hegemonic antagonist from its present position of resignation or
accommodation to one characterized by a potentially assertive combativeness.
International solidarity
through which the required changes can be realized is not an abstract
ideological postulate. It is materially grounded in the unfolding conditions –
and contradictions – of actual historical development which deeply affect the
totality of labour, even in the capitalistically most privileged countries.
Raising the issue of international solidarity today cannot be seen as an
idealistic moral imperative addressed to politically alert groups of workers.
“It could not be defined simply as ‘the work of consciousness upon
consciousness’, even if the appropriate reconstitution of social consciousness
is, of course, an integral part of the overall process. It is the necessary
response to the objective challenge posed by the global articulation and
integration of capital that in the course of twentieth-century developments
(and particularly in the last few decades) acquired a most effective
transnational dimension against its workforce. At the same time, it is a
response made not only necessary but also materially feasible by the selfsame
material structures of capital’s transnational articulation which – in the
absence of international solidarity – can be easily and with great efficacy
used against the workers. […] To be sure, what we can clearly identify here is
a potentiality that cannot be turned
into actuality without the development
of the necessary organizational framework
of international working class solidarity. Nevertheless, this is a potentiality
sustained by the material structures
themselves which objectively facilitate
the necessary countermoves to the ‘carefully controlled and coordinated’ [20]
domination of labour by capital at the present juncture of history.” [21]
This
is how the national and the international dimensions of emancipation come
together. Capital, under the pressure of its structural crisis, is now forced
to take back even those concessions which it could confer in the postwar
decades of Keynesian expansion on limited sections of labour. It is not
possible to reverse these developments by a nostalgic advocacy of the
particular privileges acquired in North America and in Western Europe in the
“golden age” of postwar development; capital simply cannot afford them. It
needs all the available resources for ever more absurd and potentially
catastrophic military adventures and for maintaining its system of increasingly
wasteful production dominating society. Today not even the achievement of the
most limited demands of labour can be assumed, given their unaffordable impact
on the structurally troubled global system. The local/national is becoming
inseparable in our time from the global/international: in a sense of ultimately
weakening, and not strengthening, capital’s domination of labour, contrary to
the self-serving propaganda of capitalist globalisation. Under these
circumstances, the failure to realise even some modest progressive objectives
(not only in the economic field but also in politics, as shown, for instance,
by the authoritarian measures of British “New Labour”), and the continued
erosion of what was once taken for granted as the self-proclaimed “raison
d’être” of the capital system, call for the institution of a radically
different social order.
Footnotes
1. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Translated by T. M. Knox, Clarendon
Press, Oxford 1942, p. 212
2. In a biting
comment on Kant’s views Hegel insisted that “Corruption in nations would be the
product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual’ peace.” Ibid., p. 210.
3. Ibid. p.212.
4. Renato
Constantino, “Time Warp”, Manila Bulletin,
June 16, 1996.
5 “an abstract presentation of
the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must
be necessarily made between the
nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation”. In
“The question of nationalities or ‘autonomization’.”, Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 36, p. 607.
Moreover, Lenin adopted the
general principle spelled out by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, according to which the only way to
redress the violations of equality is to make “equality unequal”, that is:
favouring the disadvantaged. As Lenin had put it: “it is better to overdo
rather than underdo the concessions and leniency towards the national
minorities. That is why, in this case, the fundamental interest of proletarian
solidarity, and consequently of the proletarian class struggle, requires that
we never adopt a formal attitude to the national question, but always take into
account the specific attitude of the proletarian of the oppressed (or small)
nations towards the oppressor (or great) nation.” Ibid., p. 609.
6. “Un entretien avec Renato
Constantino”, Le Monde, February 8,
1994.
7. Lenin, op. cit.,
p. 606.
8. Ibid., p. 610.
9.Ibid., p. 608.
10. See my discussion
of these problems in “The dramatic reappearance of the national question”, part
of an article entitled “Socialismo hoy dia”, written in December 1989—January
1990 for an inquest of the Venezuelan quarterly periodical El ojo del huracán and published in its February/March/April 1990
issue. Republished in English in Part iv of Beyond
Capital, pp. 965-976.
11. Julian V.
Bromlei, “Ethnic Relations and Perestroika”, Perestroika Annual,
Futura/Macdonald London 1989, vol.2., p. 119. Julian Bromlei was at the time
“Chairman of the Inter-Departmental Scientific Council on the Studies of Ethnic
Processes of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences”.
12. Engels, Letter to August Bebel, 18-28 March
1875.
13. Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet, A Young Socialist
Publication, Colombo 1967, p. 54.
14. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5., p. 73.
15. See Marx, Letter to Engels, October 8, 1858.
16. The German Ideology, MECW, vol. 5., p. 45.
17. For a fuller
discussion of these problems see Beyond
Capital, Chapter 5.1: “Transnational Capital and National States”, pp.
152-170
18. Readers of The Power of Ideology will find the
differences indicated throughout the book
19. First edition of The Power of Ideology,
Harvester/Wheatsheaf, London, and New York University Press, New York, 1989, p.
373.
20. Reference to the
words of a former head of General Motors, quoted in Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the
Present, Monthly Review Press, New York 1978, p. 180.
21. The Power of Ideology, pp. 376 and 380.