9. The Workers Have No Country
The emphasis placed by Marx and Engels on the national liberation movements of Germans, Poles and Magyars in the 1848 revolution has been especially confusing for both friends and foes, honest critics and dishonest ones. Why should internationalists care so passionately about these national struggles? Didn’t the Communist Manifesto itself state flat out that “the workers have no country”?
Well, actually, it didn’t. At least it didn’t in the original German edition. Part of the confusion stems from a mistranslation in the standard English version. The Manifesto actually said that the workers had no Vaterland. The resonance of that term in 1848 was not quite what it is today but it was close enough. It was not simply a narrow chauvinism that Marx and Engels rejected, however. In the Manifesto the question of nationalism, like other questions, is introduced by way of the refutation of a charge made against the communists by their opponents. The accusation in this instance is that the communists want to do away with the Vaterland and nationalities. The answer of the Manifesto is that the workers’ have no Vaterland because they do not have political power anywhere. The communists could not take from them what they did not have. In 1848 this was a pretty obvious statement of fact. The passage goes on to state that the proletariat in all the leading countries had “first of all to acquire political supremacy” it “must rise to be the leading class of the nation.” In short, the sense of this quote is almost the polar opposite of the one usually attributed to it.
The internationalism of the Manifesto lies in its assertion that the success of the coming revolution requires the victory of the working class in at least several of the leading European nations. A national victory was the first step in a European revolution. That first step could not be taken without taking into account the immediate issues facing specific national movements. It was just as obvious to Marx and Engels that a national movement that restricted itself to the first step was doomed to fail.
The Manifesto presents itself as the platform of an international revolutionary movement manifesting itself in different forms in different countries according to the different circumstances of each but still the same movement. The job of the communist vanguard is to emphasize the interdependence of the national movements and oppose the kind of national opportunism which ignores this interdependence.
The economic basis of this interdependence was most explicitly spelled out in one of Engels’ two preliminary attempts at a manifesto. The Principles of Communism43 was in the form of questions and answers which spelled out the basic principles of the communist “faith.” It was consciously modeled on the catechism which was the elementary educational-propaganda device in both the Catholic and Protestant churches. Question 11 was “What were the immediate results of the industrial revolution and the division of society into bourgeois and proletarians?” Engels answered that the first consequence was the creation of a world market. That meant that “a new machine invented in England [threw] millions of workers in China out of work within a year.” The political conclusion was that “if now in England or France the workers liberate themselves, this must lead to revolutions in all other countries, which sooner or later will also bring about the liberation of the workers in those countries.”44
The effect of the European revolution, in the view of the Manifesto would be to speed up the process already begun by the economic activity of the bourgeoisie. That process led to increasing “uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.” The “political supremacy of the proletariat”45 which, we have to remember, Marx and Engels then believed to be the inevitable and imminent consequence of a successful democratic revolution, would further accelerate this tendency to “uniformity of conditions.” That was the tendency. The starting point was a world still far from such uniformity. That is why the revolutionaries in Cracow in 1846 had to fight for what was already the conservative program in France.
The idea is presented in the Manifesto as follows:
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.46
It is worth pointing out that in this passage the word country is a translation of the German Land. The term is simply the standard German for a geographical-political fact. It does not, like the word Vaterland, also imply a state of mind or political program.
The practical consequence of this perspective was that it made it the responsibility of the communists in the various countries to subordinate the immediate concerns of the national revolution to the European one.
One of the most striking statements of this view with respect to Germany is in one of the earliest issues of the NRZ. It is an axiom of Marx studies that the unification of Germany was the demand that formed the core of Marx and Engels foreign policy in 1848. And in general that was true. Even this demand, however, was subordinated to the needs of the revolution. On June 25, 1848, Marx discussed the possibility that Prussia “the western province of Russia” would join forces with the Tsar. Marx proposes to counter the anticipated alliance between Prussia and Russia with an alliance of “Germany” and France:
If the Prussians ally themselves with the Russians, the Germans will ally themselves with the French and united they will wage the war of the West against the East, of civilization against barbarism, of the republic against autocracy.
The common portrait of Marx as a kind of pan-German patriot whose foreign policy was dominated in 1848 (and perhaps after) by a desire for a united German state hardly squares with this kind of talk. Marx had not, however, abandoned the idea of a united Germany. He continues in the next paragraph:
We want the unification of Germany. Only as the result of the disintegration of the large German monarchies, however, can the elements of this unity crystallize. They will be welded together only by the stress of war and revolution.47
The unification of Germany on a democratic basis and the maintenance of a revolutionary front of democratic nations also meant that purely German interests were sometimes secondary.
A little later in the year48 Marx summed up his attitude towards the German revolution which, in its provincial narrow-mindedness, fell so far below the demands of the international movement. Marx’s judgement of this Prussian revolution is at the same time an implicit statement of his view of what the revolution should have been:
Far from being a European Revolution it was merely the stunted after-effect of a European revolution in a backward country. Instead of being ahead of its century, [like the seventeenth century English and eighteenth century French revolutions] it was over half a century behind its time. . . . The Prussian March revolution was not even a national, German revolution; from the outset it was a provincial, Prussian revolution.49
Because the German revolutionaries in 1848 were unable to think in international terms they were unable to solve even the most pressing national problems of Germany.
* Literally, “French-eaters.” A better contemporary translation would be “French-bashers” on the analogy of “Japan-basher.”
** A caveat. Neither Marx nor Engels ever stopped using terms like “civilization,” “European civilization” or “Western civilization” interchangeably and meaning thereby bourgeois civilization.
Marx