4. Nationalism
 Nationalism is the essential creed of the bourgeoisie. What for this class stands above the individuality of separate man s the community indicated, with small differences of meaning, by the different names of nation, people, fatherland or State. Nation and national feeling came up and developed along with the bourgeoisie. Original peasant life knew only the community of the village and of the larger tribe or county or canton; for the rising burgher class the town was their community. Their common interests did not stretch beyond these small realms. The spoken languages varied over larger regions; their similarity over limited regions facilitated their connection under the domination of one prince. But usually such domination, by conquest and inheritance, extended over countries with entirely different speech. For the farmers it hardly mattered what prince reigned far away and over what other people. This changed with the rise of commercial, and still more with that of industrial capital. The merchant trading over wide countries and seas needs a strong Power that protects him, fights his competitors and subdues backward tribes; if this is lacking he himself founds a town federation. The industrialist needs security on the roads, unity of law, protection by a power mightier than a town. Where by insular isolation, as in England, or by conquests of princes, as with France, larger realms had been joined, they need only be consolidated and strengthened from within. In other cases, as with Italy and Germany, strong States had to built in modern times, through wars and revolutions, through the force of the nationalist feeling of the bourgeoisie. This does not mean that State and nation are identical or coincide. The State is a power structure, provided with physical means of coercion and suppression; the nation is a community bound by inner forces. So the State has the greatest inner solidity when it coincides with the nation. But States to increase their power try to include regions and peoples as much as possible, though they may belong to other nations, mixed up one with another by chance migrations in olden times. So Denmark formerly included Germans, Germany later included Danes and Poles, Hungary included Roumanians, Slavs and Germans, Roumania afterwards included Hungarians and Germans. The Austrian Monarchy comprised seven different nationalities, never grown together. In such cases the growth of national feeling, accompanying the rise of a modern bourgeoisie, acts as a destructive force. In cases of a seaport town with a hinterland of different race and language ( as Fiume or Dantzig ) the economic interests demanding political unity are impaired by national enmity. A common language, as the instrument of understanding, is the strongest force to connect people into one State and one nation. This does not mean, however that nations are simply communities of speech. The Swiss, in their majority, speak German; yet they are a separate nation, different from the Germans. The English and the American nations speak the same language. The Swiss people during five centuries already has gone its own way, different from the way of other German-speaking people. They lived under their special institutions, ruling themselves as free peasants in a primitive democracy, whilst the Germans were oppressed under the yoke of some hundred small tyrants. The Swiss all experienced the same historical happenings, that moulded their mind in the same way; in continual actual and spiritual intercourse they grew together into a similarity of character and ideas, different from those on the other side of the frontier. It is not only the passive qualities acquired in this way, but much more the active will, the mutual feeling of belonging together in a community of life, that connects and separates mankind into nations. It is the same with the English and the Americans : their separate history in different continents each following its own fate, often in sharp hostility of capitalist interests, made them different nations. And within each nation the community of fate, the subjection to the same historical influences impressed a common stamp upon all; the common fight for common interest, for common freedom, welded them into a firm unity. It produced a community of ideas embodied in and strengthened by literature, by art, by the daily papers constituting national culture, itself an important factor in developing the sense of nationality. Even the bitter struggle of the classes takes place on this common ground of common experience in the ups and downs of mutual fight as direct face-to-face opponents. So a nation is not a community of State, not a community of language, but a community of lot ( of destiny arising out of their common social-economic practice ). Of course, these different types of community are mutually strongly dependent. Language is a strong nation-building agent. Nationality is the strongest State building power. On the reverse political State power strongly reacts in making and unmaking nations, by uniting and separating the peoples, by establishing or destroying lot-community [a feeling of common destiny]. In the Middle Ages Northern and Southern France, differing in language as much as France and Spain, were united by conquest; during the rise of the bourgeoisie they formed one country, and as a unity they experienced later revolutions. Simultaneously with the Swiss mountaineers the Low Countries bordering the ocean separated politically from the large German body. A dozen of rich merchant towns, protecting themselves on the land side by a chain of allied provinces, they formed an independent State, raising the Holland dialect into a separate language with its own literature and culture; and by their special history becoming a separate nation. The Flemish, though speaking the same language as the Dutch, by their entirely separate and different history cannot be considered to belong to the same nation, whereas their political unity with the Wallons is thwarted by difference of language. Political measures, dictated by economic interests gradually melted the Scots with the English into one nation, whereas by such measures the Irish were driven into the consciousness of being a separate and hostile nation. Thus nation is a product of history. All the happenings in the past, experienced in common, determining character, feelings, culture, have settled in the form of nationality. Nationality is congealed history, perpetuated outcome of the past as a living force. National character and still more national feeling, thus spontaneously growing out of society, constitute the inner strength of national States. They are needed by the bourgeoisie, praised as patriotism, and furthered by special measures. The differences within the boundaries are effaced as much as possible, the differences with the outside world are emphasised and enhanced. One common language, necessary for intercourse, is taught all over the realm, suppressing the old dialects and even minority languages--as Gaelic in Wales, Provencal in Southern France--that only remain as curiosities and in remote villages. And a vast literature in this common language is at work, from first childhood onward, to impress identical ideas and identical feelings upon the entire population. An intentional propaganda works to intensify the mutual feelings of connection, and to render the antagonism to anything foreign more conscious. The doctrine of class struggle that draws a cleavage through national community is denounced as a danger and even persecuted as a crime against national unity. What as a spontaneous living product of society develops and changes with society itself, nationalism proclaims to be an eternal fact of nature and a duty of man. Nationality is congealed history--but history goes on, adding continuously to the former deposit. New economic developments, growth of capital, wars and conquests produce new interests, change frontiers, awaken new directions of will and feeling, combine or separate peoples, break old communities and engender new ones. So nationality, together with its deeper generating forces, is fluctuating, in extent and content, and shows a variety of aspects. Just as petty trade remains within big capitalism, provincialisms, remnants of old customs and ideas, persist, and they sometimes extend across the State frontiers. In the time of ascending capitalism with its free trade reaching all over the world, feelings of cosmopolitanism, of international brotherhood of all mankind gained ground in the bourgeoisie. Afterwards, when competition became fierce and the ensuing fight for world power deepened nationalism, this was ridiculed and suppressed as a childish illusion. In such parts of the world where capitalism is just beginning to take a footing, where it begins to undermine primitive economy and to overthrow worn-out despotisms, we see nations in the making. Besides profit-hungry business men, gambling adventurers, agents of foreign capital and rapacious politicians, forming the beginning of a bourgeoisie, it is chiefly the intellectuals, educated by European sciences and ideas, who come forward as the spokesmen of nationalism. On the Balkans the chance results of war often decided what adjacent valleys with cognate dialects would be included into the Serbian or into the Bulgarian nation. In China the class of merchants and landowners, spiritually united already by an old culture, assisted by a Western educated class of intellectuals, gradually develops into a modern bourgeoisie, animated by a growing spirit of nationalism. In India such growth, though rooted in native capitalist industry, is severely hampered by an obsolete diversity of religions. In all colonies with no bourgeoisie as yet, nationalism propagated by small groups of intellectuals, is the first theoretical form of rebellion against foreign exploitation. Where, on the other hand, in groups of a single million speaking a separate dialect nationalism arises, as wish or only whim of intellectuals it may work as a disruptive force in the coherence of greater units. In the countries of modern capitalism nationalism has gone through different forms, corresponding to the development of the bourgeoisie. When burgherdom in its first rise becomes master in its town or realm it is freedom for which it fights. It not only breaks the power of nobility, of land ownership in its domain, it has also to beat foreign powers that suppress or threaten its freedom. The rise of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class is connected with war against foreign feudal or absolutistic or previously dominant capitalistic powers. Such wars are wars of liberation, are a kind of revolution; all enthusiasm, all devotion nascent from the establishment of a higher system of production manifests itself as national passion and exalts nationalism to lofty idealism. Thus it was with Holland in the 16th century freeing itself from the Spanish King, with the English at the same time fighting against Spanish world power, with America 1776 against England, with the French in the Great Revolution against Europe led by England, with the Italians in the 19th century against Austria; and even the German war against France 1870 had some traits of it. Such wars of liberation and consolidation, establishing its independence and power, in all later years are exalted by the bourgeoisie as the sublime summits of national history. But then, gradually, the image changes. Capitalism is exploitation, is domination of an exploited class by a ruling class. The bourgeoisie, liberating itself from domination by land ownership, establishes new suppression. Throwing off the yoke of foreign oppression it soon begins to lay its yoke upon weaker peoples, adjacent or in far away colonies. Specially with the development of big capitalism. And always under the same slogans of nationalism. But now nationalism has another colour. Not the freedom but the greatness of the nation is its slogan. It appeals to the feelings of pride, to the instincts of power, in all the other classes who have to serve the bourgeoisie as its helpers and underlings, as spokesmen, as military and civil officers, and who take part in its power. Now the own people is proclaimed the chosen people, superior in force and virtue, the "grande nation," the "Herrenvolk," the "finest race among mankind," destined to lead or to dominate other nations. As the contest for world power, the fight for supremacy in the world between the capitalist classes becomes fiercer, nationalism grows into a feverish passion, often carrying away the entire population in a common struggle for existence. Nationalism is not simply an artificial doctrine imposed by the rulers upon the masses. Like every system of thoughts and feelings it arises out of the depth of society and proceeds from the economic realities and necessities. For the bourgeoisie the nation is the community to which its weal and woe is tied; so all the old instincts of community feeling are put in its service and develop to mighty forces of idealism. More than the adults the youth, not yet permeated by the spirit of selfish profit-seeking, is susceptible to enthusiastic response to the call of the community. For the working masses, as long as they have no possibility and no thought to fight for themselves against the bourgeoisie, there is no other way than to follow the bourgeoisie. Spiritually dependent on the master-class, they have to accept, more or less willingly, its ideas and its aims. All these influences work as spiritual forces in the realm of instinctive spontaneity. But then, added to it, come the deliberate efforts of the bourgeoisie to intensify the spontaneous feelings by artificial means. The entire education in the schools and the propaganda in literature and papers are directed to foster and strengthen the spirit of nationalism. Not of course by showing its connection with the profit for capital ; a clear consciousness of this connection, as in all ideologies of an exploiting class, is lacking, and must be carefully withheld from the exploited masses. So other foundations must be sought for, other usually deceptive arguments must be found, drawn mostly from existing traditions based on former social conditions. The love for the birthplace where our cradle stood, the remembrance of the world of our youth, of villages or town quarter, small communities of peasant or artisan life, must serve to fix the adherence to the nationalist State Power, where it fights foreign Powers, for the profit of capital. History is coloured and doctored to convert the strict objective truth about the past into a brilliant one-sided image of the nation's life, apt to awaken strong feelings of inter-community, of enthusiasm, of pride and admiration in young people, to elate their hearts, to strain their minds, to instigate emulation, hence to solidify the inner strength of the national community. To give a still greater solidity to the national ideology, it sometimes is founded upon a material, physical base, on consanguinity and race. The races of mankind have been formed in the many thousands of years of prehistoric times. We meet with them at the dawn of history, and afterwards in surrounding barbaric countries and continents, as groups with similar qualities. They have been shaped by migrations, conquests, exterminations and blendings of primitive groups, when in more quiet times or in isolated regions the mixture settled to specific types. The fight for living space and for possession of the sources of life continued in later civilized history. But now, by the development of new forms of production, as a fight of States and nations. Though both are communities of lot ( of common destiny ) and are designated by the same name of "people," there is a fundamental difference between the original races and the later nations. The races are groups connected by the ties of blood, by consanguinity ; the nations, formed in the ages of production of commodities, are groups connected by the spiritual ties of common consciousness, ideas, experience and culture. Written history of the great migrations in later times attests how almost all modern peoples, the nations, have been shaped by a thorough mixture of different races. And this process of mixing is going on, though in more quiet forms, under modern industrial conditions. Large numbers of people migrate from the poor agrarian regions into foreign industrial towns or districts ; such as the Irish into English towns, the Czechs into Vienna, the Poles into Rhineland, the Europeans into America. Mostly they assume language and habits from their new surroundings, as well as the ideas, and so are dissolved and assimilated into its national community. Only when the migration comprises greater connected masses, especially when touched already by the consciousness of fervid national strife, the assimilation ceases. When a modern nation is claimed to be the pure descendants of one original race, how can it be decided ? The evidence of history, usually uncertain, points to strong blending. Neither is the community of language decisive. It is true that peasant communities tenaciously stick to their language as long as their life and work is not influenced by other dominant languages. But it is know quite well how often in the mixing-up of peoples the language of the victors is assumed by the vanquished or the language of more civilized residents by less civilized intruders. Community of language later on is a strong force in the making of nations ; but it cannot make certain a community of descent. There are, further, bodily differences in colour, hair, bodily structure and form of the skull, manifest and large between the main groups, Europeans, Mongolians, Negroes. But they are small in subordinate groups. And in all modern peoples these bodily characteristics show the most embarrassing diversity. Ethnologists, especially in Germany, speak of a "Nordic" race, dolichocephalic ( with oblong skull ), blonde, and blue-eyed, of which the Teuton peoples were descendants and representatives, contrasted to the darker "alpine" race, brachycephalic ( with round skull ), living in Central Europe. But modern Europe shows dolichocephaly dominant only in Norway, North-western Germany, Holland, England, whereas the chief part of Germany is brachycephalic, increasingly so in the later centuries. The American ethnologist Dixon pointed out that the inhabitants of the then existing Austrian monarchy as to bodily characteristics and shape of the skull formed a nearly homogenous race, whereas they were divided into some seven fiercely quarrelling nations, speaking as many different languages, and brought together by different ancient wanderings and adventures. On the other hand the French, bodily showing a mixture of most different racial characteristics, feel and act as one homogenous consolidated nation. Race community as the foundation of nationality is only a phantastic theory, devised and propagated for political purposes. The strength of German nationalism is not rooted in the blood of the ancient Teutons but in the needs of modern capitalism. The strong real roots of nationalism are situated in economy, in the mode of production. So it must be different for different classes. On the working class nationalism never got much hold. In the petty-burgher and farmer classes from which it proceeded national feeling played no great role ; and its own exploitation by capital gave another direction to the ideas, not towards community, but towards fight with the bourgeoisie. They perceived nationalism to be the ideology of their exploiters, often a form of hypocrisy when the most greedy capitalists used patriotic talk to fill their own pockets. When by unemployment they were driven to wander they found in other countries other workers, comrades, exploited like themselves. Practically, by their fight, and then theoretically, in their consciousness, they drew a dividing line across the nation. Another community of lot, the class-community determined their feelings and thoughts, extending over all countries. The dividing line of the classes crosses that of the nations. To the nationalist propaganda of the bourgeoisie they opposed the reality of their life by the statement that the workers have no fatherland. Socialist propaganda fundamentally opposing capitalism proclaimed internationalism to be the principle of the working class. But beneath the conscious thoughts and avowed doctrines there was in the workers, in their sub-consciousness, still a certain national feeling, revealing itself at the outbreak of the world war. Practically they had to acquiesce in the rule of the bourgeoisie and were its subordinates ; practically their fight could do no more than ascertain their place in capitalism ; so in their ideas they could not attain complete independence. When the workers politically and socially follow the bourgeoisie they remain middle-class minded. In England they participated in the profits that world commerce, industrial monopoly and colonial exploitation bestowed upon the bourgeoisie. In Germany the energy of the bourgeoisie to win industrial world power carried them away in the vague feeling that industrial power and prosperity is a workers' interest, too. So nationalism in the working class was the companion of reformism, in England as a quiet hardly conscious conservative tradition, in Germany as an impetuous instinct driven by a turbulent economic expansion. It must be remarked that working class nationalism always was pacifistic, rooted in the tradition of petty-burgher illusions, in contrast to the aggressive violent nationalism of the bourgeoisie. When the working class takes up its revolutionary fight, nationalism is dropped entirely. In the new workers' organisation of production there is no antagonism of interests with other peoples ; it extends over the countries disregarding all former frontiers. In the reconstruction of society fight is only needed against the capitalist class ; in this fight the workers all over the world have to rely on one another as brothers in arms ; together belonging to one army. They speak different languages, certainly ; but these differences relate only to the outer forms of their thoughts. The essential contents, their ideas, their feelings, their culture, determined as they are by the same class struggle, the common fight as the chief life experience, the common lot, are identical. From having been subjected to different national influences in previous history there may remain differences in passive character and culture ; but in active character, in the direction of will, they form one unity. This new state of thought of the working class cannot well be indicated by calling it international ; it is more and higher than a peaceful collaboration of free and equal nations. It is the entire absence of nationality ; for the workers the nations do not exist, they see before them the unity of mankind all over the world, a community of production, of life, of culture. Over all diversity of bodily qualities and natural surroundings, of local speech and traditional habits stretches the interconnection of all mankind as one great community of lot. Thus nationalism disappears from the earth together with the class that was its author. This is of the future. For the time being nationalism exists as a strong power obstructing the way. For the workers it is necessary not only to destroy all nationalist tradition in themselves, but also, in order to avoid illusions, to understand its strength in the hostile class. Nationalism does not belong to the ideologies that as traditions of the past times are gradually extinguished under modern conditions. It is a living ideology, drawing its forces ever anew from a fertile economic soil, standing in the centre of fight, the flag of the foe. German history of the last quarter of a century offers an example of how after the downbreak of her State power the bourgeoisie was able to resuscitate itself by means of spiritual power, through nationalism, and thus to build up a new more powerful State. The outbreak of the first world war in 1914 was the catastrophe of social democracy and labor movement. The party and union leaders placed all the power of their organisation, its press its moral authority at the service of the Government ; in Germany considered as the foremost power and example for the working class, and in all other countries. It was the collapse of all the proud program slogans of class struggle and of internationalism. The workers having put all their confidence, their faith into their party, their organisation, now were powerless against the nationalist propaganda, against the combined pressure of the military and the party apparatus. Then came 1918 -- the downbreak of the German military power. The rebellion of the sailors, the strikes and demonstrations in the chief towns, the formation of workers' and soldiers councils carried the socialist leaders into power. They were the only men to keep the working class in check and to prevent a real workers' revolution, which they hated and feared no less than did the generals and the capitalists. The working masses found the political power fallen into their hands ; but they did not know what to do with it. Again they put their faith into the party, in their leaders and passively suffered the small advance groups of revolutionary fighters and spokesmen to be massacred by military forces at the command of the socialist rulers. They had always been taught that the party would bring them socialism. Now the party was ruling, now their leaders were in office; now socialism was to come. What they got was capitalism. The socialist leaders did not touch capitalist property, not even aristocratic land ownership. By convoking a National Assembly they immediately restored parliamentarism, which had always been their life element. So the bourgeoisie gained an official centre of organised power. It was quite content that socialist and democratic politicians, beguiling the masses with the illusion of power, occupied the upper places ; afterwards they could be turned out gradually and replaced by liberals and reactionaries. Capitalism acted as it always acts : it exploited the masses, expropriated the middle classes, aggravated the economic chaos by gambling with the means of production, bribed the officials, and threw society into ever new crises of unemployment. And all discontent and exasperation turned against the new republic and its parliamentary leaders. Now the bourgeoisie began to build up its fighting power out of all the elements that were depressed and embittered by the new conditions : the middle class youth, flung down from its high hopes for victory and future greatness ; the dismissed military officers, exasperated by defeat, entirely living in the old conceptions ; the young intellectuals, in despair at seeing the governmental offices once considered as their monopoly now occupied by despised socialists and Jews. All impoverished by the devaluation of the money, all filled with bitterness over the humiliation of their country, all driven by a fierce will to take up again the fight for world power. Their binding force was an ardent nationalism, blasted into white heat by the enforced humiliating peace conditions, animated by hatred against the slack nationality of the meek rulers no less than against the foreign victorious enemies. They stood up as the bearers of sublime national ideas, whereas the workers over against them could show no more than either contentment over the mock democracy of a worthless republic, or the sham revolutionist talk of bolshevist party dictatorship. Thus the most active elements among the upgrowing youth were assembled and drilled into fighting bands, inspired by fiery nationalist teachings. Big capital provided the means for a continuous propaganda among the population. Until the world crisis of 1930 raised them to political importance. The impotent socialist leaders did not even venture to call upon the armed workers for resistance. The "world-liberating" social democracy ignominiously went to ruin as a worm eaten wreck. Nationalism, now raised to the highest pitch, easily annihilated the parliamentary republic, and began to organize all the forces of the nation for a new war for world power. |