Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory, 1953 (2024)

Preface

Thetext we are publishing here is the written report of a meeting on thesame subject that took place on August 29-30, 1953, in Trieste, andwhich appeared in issues 16-20 of our organ at the time, Ilprogramma comunista.

At that time thedestiny of the “Free Territory” was still uncertain, one of themany political and economical monstrosities of the post-war“settlement” in Europe and the world. The Trieste drama was asmall event in the world picture, but nevertheless enormous for thosewho had to endure it. During the war, Istrian Italians had sufferedgenocide at the hands of Tito’s partisans, but this was kept out ofmain information channels by the Italian Stalinists, who did not want“communism” to be associated with the persecution of ethnicItalians. In 1953, the Trieste area was militarily occupied by theAllied Forces, and disputed by Italy and Yugoslavia, althoughinhabited by a majority of Italians. Most of Istria had already goneover to Tito: the remaining territory, with independentadministration, would eventually be partitioned in 1954 with the cityof Trieste going to Italy and the rest to present-day Slovenia. Formany it was a tragedy, since without a hinterland there was no longerwork for the port, and most of Trieste’s youth had to migrate; yetthousands of Italians were expelled from what was then Yugoslavia,making the situation in the city even worse.

These sordidcontemporary events gave the International Communist Party theopportunity to present fundamental and classical Marxist theses, in atrenchant way, directly antithetical to the deformation operated onthem by opportunism; deformations coming either from the Stalinistcounter-revolution or from false left groups; all of them unable toappreciate factors such as those of race and nation which, althoughnot belonging to the totality of directobjectives of the communist revolution, are historically present onthe path that dialecticallyleads to it. In this quality, such factors make the revolution closerand at the same time compete against it in an interplay that Marxismhas never ignored; in given times and in definite historical areasthey have their say within the frame of the proletarian strategy ofdouble revolutions.

This translationmakes a powerful Marxist text available for the first time inEnglish. At present the national issue is at the forefront ofbourgeois political discussion in the English-speaking world, notablyin the United Kingdom, with the rise of an invigorated“anti-European” British chauvinism and strong nationalistmovements in Scotland and Wales. Meanwhile the competing nationalismsin Northern Ireland (Unionist and Republican) remain unresolved.“Factorsof race and nation in Marxist theory”outlines the proletarian party’s critique of such currents in thebroadest possible historical context and therefore stands in thestarkest possible contrast to the pseudo-Marxism of various leftistfactions in the British Isles, all of which serve only todisorientate and divide the working class.

This powerful partytext is within the great Marxist tradition of “TheOrigin of the Family, Private Property and the State”and of “Anti-Dühring”,and possesses the same dialectical vigour and sharp sarcasm.

We dedicate it tothe young militants of the working class and of the communistmovement, for them to use it to sharpen the “weapons of criticism”,and hoping that the moment when these can be turned into “criticismby weapons” won’t be long to come.

INTRODUCTION
The impotence ofthetritely“negativist”attitude

1. Race, nation orclass?

1. The approachof the Italian and international communist left has never hadanything in common with the false, dogmatic, sectarian extremismwhich claims to go beyond the forces at work in real historicprocesses using a lot of verbal negations and hollow literaryformulas.

With a recent “Onthe Thread of Time”(“Racial influence in the peasantry, class influence amongcoloured people” (Pressionerazziale del contadiname, pressione classista dei popoli colorati)whichappeared in Ilprogramma comunista,n. 14, 1953) we have undertaken a series of presentations on thenational and colonial question, and on the agrarian question, that’sto say on the principal contemporary social questions bringing intoplay the most important forces other than industrial capital and thewaged proletariat. We have demonstrated, with the help of classiccitations, that perfectly orthodox and radical revolutionary Marxismrecognises the importance of these factors in the current epoch, andtherefore the necessity of taking an appropriate class and partyapproach in their regard. To this end, we have relied not just oncitations from Marx, Engels and Lenin, but also on the fundamentaltexts of the Left Opposition in the International from the years 1920to 1926 as well as the Communist Party of Italy, which was at thetime an integrative part of it.

If you are tobelieve the groundless insinuations of its adversaries, alreadycommitted at the time to the path of opportunism, which had led themto renounce the class basis of Marxism and to sink intocounter-revolutionary politics, the Italian Left would have sharedthe anti-dialectical and metaphysical error, according to which thecommunist party should never concern itself with anything other thanthe duel between the pure forces of modern capital and factoryworkers, the duel that would lead to proletarian revolution; in otherwords, it should deny and ignore the influence of every other classand every other factor on the social struggle. In our recent work ofrestoring the fundamental economic points and the revolutionaryMarxist programme, we have, on the contrary, largely demonstratedthat even today this “pure phase” does not exist anywhere, noteven in the most industrialised countries where the politicaldomination of the bourgeoisie is longest established, such asEngland, France and the United States. Moreover, we have shown thatthis pure phase will never exist, not in a single country, and thatit is not a necessary condition for the revolutionary victory of theproletariat.

It is therefore purestupidity to say that because Marxism is the theory of the modernclass struggle between capitalists and workers, and communism is themovement that directs the struggle of the proletariat, we deny thatboth the social forces of other classes (the peasantry, for example),and racial and national orientations and pressures have anyhistorical impact whatsoever, and therefore we don’t consider anyof these factors when defining our action.

2. In presentingthe course of prehistory in a new and original fashion, historicalmaterialism is not blinded to considering, studying or evaluating theprocesses by which families, groups, tribes, races and peoples areformed up to the formation of nations and political States. It alsoexplains these, showing that they are tied to productive forces andconditioned by their development, and that they therefore illustrateand confirm the theory of economic determinism.

It is true that thefamily and the horde are forms that one also meets in animal species.But even among the most evolved, those which begin to exhibitexamples of collective organisation with a view to self-preservationand common defence, and even the harvesting and storage offoodstuffs, one does not yet encounter the productive activity whichdistinguishes mankind (even the most primitive) from the animal.That’s why it would be better to say that what distinguishes thehuman species is not knowledge, or thought, or a particle of divinelight, but its capacity to produce not only objects of consumption,but also objects designed for later production, such as the firstrudimentary tools for hunting, fishing, harvesting of fruits and,later on, agricultural and artisanal production. This primary need toorganise the production of tools imposed itself – and this is whatcharacterises humankind –on the need to discipline and regulate theprocess of reproduction, substituting the occasional character ofsexual relations with more complex forms than those of the animalkingdom. Above all it is in Engels’ classic text on the origin ofthe family, to which we will largely refer, that light is shed atleast on the close connection between the evolution of familialinstitutions and the evolution of forms of production, if not ontheir common identity.

Embracing the periodpreceding the appearance of social classes (the goal of our entiretheoretical battle is to show that classes are not eternal, that theyhave a beginning and they will have an end), the Marxist vision ofthe course of history thus offers the only possible explanation,resting on material, scientific foundations, of the function ofclans, tribes and races, together with their gathering into ever morecomplex formations in consequence of the prevailing physicalconditions, the expansion of productive forces and the technology attheir collective disposal.

3. Appearing invarious guises throughout history, nations, and their great armedstruggles by and for themselves, are the decisive factor in theappearance of the bourgeois and capitalist social form and itsextension across the entire globe. In his time Marx devoted as muchattention to the struggles and wars that led to the formation ofnations as he did to socio-economic processes. Given that thedoctrine and the party of the proletariat were both in existence from1848, Marx did not simply provide a theoretical explanation of thesestruggles in accordance with economic determinism; rather, he wasanxious to establish the limits and the conditions of time and placefor supporting uprisings and wars for national independence.

As soon as organisedunities of people and of nations have broadly developed, and once thehierarchical forms of the State have come to overlay these unitiesand their social dynamism, differentiated into castes and classes,the racial and national factor follows through the historical epochs:slavery, lordship, feudalism, capitalism. In fact, as we will see inthe second part of this work, and as we have often explained, theimportance of this factor is not the same in these different epochs.In the modern epoch, which has seen the start and the continuation ofthe process whereby the feudal form, characterised by personaldependence and limited, localised exchange, has given way to thebourgeois form, characterised by economic servitude and the formationof great unitary national markets, extending to a global market, thesystematisation of nationalities according to race, language,traditions and culture constitutes a fundamental force in the dynamicof history. This is the demand that Lenin summarised in the formula,onenation, one State,explaining that it was necessary to struggle for this whileunderlining that it is not a proletarian or socialist formula, but abourgeois one. What Lenin advocated for Eastern Europe before 1917 iswhat Marx advocated, as everyone knows, for all of Western Europe(apart from England) from 1848 to 1871. This remains true todayoutside of Europe for immense inhabited parts of the world, even ifthis process is stimulated and accelerated by the power of economicand other exchanges at the global level. The problem of the positionto take vis-à-vis the irresistible orientation of “backward”people in struggling for national independence is therefore acontemporary one.

2. Opportunism in the nationalquestion

4. The dialecticnub of the question is as follows: an alliance of the working classand its party with bourgeois strata in the armed struggle foranti-feudal revolutionary goals should not be considered as arenunciation of the doctrine and the politics of class struggle;however, even in historical situations and geographical areas wheresuch an alliance is both necessary and unavoidable, it is essentialto uphold totally, and even raise to the highest degree, thetheoretical, political and programmatic critique of the objectivesand the ideologies for which bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elementsare struggling.

In the third andfinal part of this text we will show that while fully supporting (forexample) the independence of Poland or Ireland, Marx never ceased notonly to condemn, but to demolish totally, with devastating sarcasm,the idealist baggage of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois partisans ofdemocratic justice and popular liberty.

Although for us thenational market and the centralised capitalist State are no more thanan inevitable passage towards an international economy without theState and without markets, for these great priests of democracy, whomMarx ridiculed in the persons of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth,Sobieski etc, the formation of democratic nations constituted a pointof arrival that would put an end to all social struggle. What theywanted was a hom*ogenous national State where the bosses would nolonger appear as a foreign body among the exploited workers. Inreality, at this historic moment, the front bursts asunder and theworking class throws itself into the civil war against the State andits “fatherland”. It is during the revolutionary processes andthe bourgeois national wars for the formation of States in Europe(and today in Asia and Africa) that this moment comes closer and thatthese conditions mature: such is the ceaselessly changing problemthat we have to make sense of, in the context of extremely variabledevelopments.

5. Opportunism,treason, renunciation and the counter-revolutionary andpro-capitalist actions of today’s Stalinist pseudo-communists havein this domain, as well as in the more strictly economic and socialsphere of “internal” politics, a dual significance. Not only dothey put democratic demands and values back in fashion – throughopen and solid political alliances – even within the advancedcapitalist West, where such alliances ceased to have anyjustification from 1871 onwards; more than this, they also encouragethe masses’ religious respect for a popular national-patrioticideology which is identical in all respects to that of theirbourgeois allies, flattering the champions of politics which Marx andLenin had thrashed without pity, thereby dutifully performing thehard task of destroying any class consciousness among workers whohave the misfortune of following them.

Recognising thatMarxist methodology has agreed to – in a specific historical andgeographical context totally different from 20^thCentury Europe – the participation of workers in nationalrevolutionary alliances, does not in any way diminish the infamy ofparties which, under the usurped name of communist and socialistparties, today lay claim to representing workers. In the [SecondWorld] war that set the developed western countries of France,England, America, Italy, Germany and Austria against one another,when we saw the Russian State and all the parties of the former ThirdCommunist International successively ally themselves with all thebourgeois States in the struggle, the Napoleon IIIs and Nicolas IIshad long since disappeared from the scene. Making such alliancesmeant renouncing Marxist principles, pure and simple. Principles suchas were expressed on the one hand in the “Address” by the FirstInternational to the Paris Commune in 1871, on the other hand inLenin’s theses on the war of 1914 and for the foundation of theThird International. In the first case, Marx declared a period ofhistory closed and condemned for ever and a day every alliance withnational armies, “Classrule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; thenational Governments are as one against the proletariat!”.In the second, Lenin established that once the phase of generalimperialist wars had started, the politics of national States nolonger had anything to do with democratic demands and nationalindependence, and he roundly condemned all social-traitors on bothsides of the Rhine and the Vistula.

Every revision thatwould seek to extend the cut-off dates of 1871 and 1917 to the years1939 and 1953 – not to mention a prolongation adinfinitum– would be a concession to capitalism, which would come back todeny, purely and simply, the Marxist method for understanding historyin its entirety, wiping away the watershed moments in history that ithad brought to light: 1848 for Europe, 1905 for Russia. What’smore, this revisionism collides with Marxist social and economicanalysis in its entirety, because it attempts to assimilate therecent fascist totalitarianisms (and not just fascist, at the time ofthe division of Poland!) within the relics of feudalism in thecurrent epoch.

But, above all, thetreason is complete with the second aspect of the renunciations, thetotal abandonment of the critique of the “values” particular tobourgeois thought, which exalt a world without classes and composedof popular autonomous entities, free nations, independent and pacificcountries, as the final stage of the anguished path of humanity.Indeed, at the very moment when they were once again being coercedinto forming alliances with the defenders of this corrupt programme,Marx and Lenin struggled doggedly to liberate the working class fromthe cult of the fatherland, the nation, democracy, these fetishescelebrated by the high priests of bourgeois radicalism; at thedecisive moment, they knew how to break with them on the facts, andwhen the balance of forces permitted it they blocked their progresswithout mercy. Today’s renegades are the new priests of this cultand these myths: it’s not a historic pact that they would simplylike to break later than originally intended; rather it is totalenslavement to the demands of the capitalist bourgeoisie, for thegreater good of the regime which confers it privilege and power.

This confirms whatwe have already demonstrated in the economic sphere, for example inour “Dialogue with Stalin”: Russia today is a State based on anaccomplished capitalist revolution, whose patriotic flag fluttersover its social merchandise and represents the most extrememilitarism.

6. It would be avery grave error to fail to see or to deny that ethnic and nationalfactors still have a very important impact on today’s world. Amongthe tasks currently at hand is the study of the historical andgeographic limits within which rebellions for national independencetied to a social revolution against pre-capitalist forms (Asiatic,slave States, feudal) as well as the foundation of modern types ofnational State still represent a necessary condition for theprogression to socialism (for example in India, China, Egypt, Iranetc.)

The preciseevaluation of different situations is rendered difficult, on the onehand by the xenophobia engendered in these countries by the brutalnature of capitalist colonialism, on the other hand by the largediffusion around the world of productive resources and products whichreach the most remote markets; but at the global level the burningquestion of 1920 (which was even posed in the former Russian empire),the question of political and armed support for the independencemovements of oriental peoples, remains.

He who says, forexample, that the relationship between industrial capital and theworking class is the same in Belgium as it is in Siam [Thailand] andthat in the one case as in the other one can lead the strugglewithout taking account of factors of race and nation, is notdemonstrating his revolutionary extremism. He is simply proving thathe has understood nothing that Marxism has to teach.

Cutting Marxism offfrom the breadth, depth and complexity of its analysis is not the wayto win the right to denounce and one day defeat the miserable scumwho have renounced it.

PART ONE
Reproduction ofthespeciesandtheproductiveeconomy,
two aspects ofthematerial basisofthehistoricalprocess

3. Work and sex

1. Historicalmaterialism loses all sense if you regard sexual appetite asentirely unrelated to the social economy, on the basis that it isindividual in character and that it takes on forms of expressionarising outside of economic relations, ultimately spiritual andevanescent in nature.

If we wanted to direct ourpolemic on this subject against the open and direct opponents ofMarxism we would need to appeal to a much vaster scientific body ofwork, while regarding today’s venal and decadent official sciencewith the customary suspicion. But as is usually the case, we are moreconcerned about those currents of thought – counter-revolutionarycurrents – which proclaim their adherence to certain aspects ofMarxism but which, as soon as they are confronted with fundamentalquestions for the human community, claim that these are outside thescope of Marxism.

It is obvious that by settingup a hierarchy of values in their explanation of nature, thebelievers and idealists would like to put issues of sex and love on apedestal and in a sphere far above that of the economy, which must beunderstood in the vulgar sense of the satisfaction of alimentaryneeds and suchlike. If the element that raises hom*osapiensabove, and distinguishes it from, other animal species is not thephysical effect of a long evolution in a complex environment ofmaterial factors, but rather the result of an immaterial particle ofcosmic spirit, then clearly the reproduction of one being fromanother, the reproduction of a thinking brain to another, must surelyoccur on a nobler plane than filling your stomach. Without going sofar as to present this spirit-person as immaterial, if we howeverconcede that a virtue or a power is present in the dynamic of humanthought which pre-dates matter or exists outside of matter, themechanism for the generation of individuals is thus transferred tosome mysterious realm in whicheveryone has, like their procreators, immutable faculties, presumedto exist long before any contact with physical nature and anycognition.

But dialectical materialismitself has no excuse if it believes that the economic infrastructure,in whose forces and laws we look for an explanation of the politicalhistory of humanity, only covers production and consumption of themore or less vast range of goods necessary for individualsubsistence; if it believes that the domain of the economicinfrastructure is limited to material relations between individuals,the standards, rules and laws of social life being determined by theinterplay of forces between these innumerable isolated molecules,while a complete set of life’s satisfactions are excluded. For manydilettantes, these include satisfactions arising from sex appeal oraesthetic and intellectual pleasures. Such a view of Marxism isradically wrong and represents, in fact, the very worst anti-Marxistnotions currently circulating. It implicitly and inexorably fallsback not just into bourgeois idealism but even, in the crassest way,into individualism, a no less essential facet of reactionary thought,and in so doing it advances the biological or rather the psychicindividual as the basic unit.

Material factors do not“create” the legal, political or philosophical superstructure viaa process taking place at the level of each individual, nor evenacross generations of individuals, remaining then to create “norms”for the economic substructure and for its cultural crowning (thesuperstructure).Thematerial base is a system of tangible physical factors which embraceseverybody, and influences them right down to their individualbehaviour, a system which only exists to the extent that theseindividuals constitute a social species; the superstructure is theproduct of these basic conditions, a product that can be determinedand evaluated through the analysis of these conditions, independentlyof the thousand and one particular developments and minor differencesthat can exist between one person and another.

This error, to limit Marxism’sfield of application, is thus a fundamental error of principle. If,in order to examine the causes of historic processes, you resort onthe one hand to ideal factors that are alien to physical nature, andon the other hand to the pre-eminence of the derisory individualcitizen, you exclude dialectical materialism from every domain, andyou make it impossible to draw any conclusions, even at the level ofthe butcher’s or baker’s book-keeping.

2. Those whor*nounce the authority of Marxism in the domains of sexuality andreproduction, with all their multiple consequences, ignore thefundamental opposition between bourgeois and communist views of theeconomy, and thereby abandon in the same breath the mightytheoretical edifice that Marx built on the ruins of capitalistschools of thought. For the latter, the economy is a set ofrelationships based on the exchange of goods between two individualsfor their mutual benefit, including labour power; they conclude fromthis that there has never been and never could be an economy withoutexchange, without commodities and without property. For us, on thecontrary, the economy comprises all the vast complex of humanactivities, with all its influence on the natural environment;economic determinism does not pertain only to the era of privateproperty, but rather to the entire history of the species.

All Marxists consider thefollowing theses to be given: private property is not eternal; it wasunknown to the era of primitive communism and we are moving towardsthe era of social communism; the family and above all the monogamousfamily is not eternal, it appeared late in human history, and it willhave to disappear at a higher level of development; the State is noteternal, but rather appeared at a very advanced stage of“civilisation” and it will disappear along with class-dividedsociety, that is to say, with classes themselves.

Every vision of historical praxisbased on the dynamic of individuals and which makes concessions, evenif limited, to their autonomy, their initiative, liberty, conscience,free will or other such hokum, is obviously incompatible with thesetruths. But these truths can only be proved by accepting that thedetermining factor is the laborious process whereby human communitiesorganise themselves to adapt to the difficult obstacles imposed uponon them in the time and space in which they live, something that doesnot resolve itself through the billions of cases of individualadaptation, but rather through the resolution of a problem which moreand more appears in a singular fashion, that of the continuedadaptation of the species, in its entirety, to prevailing externalconditions. All of this inexorably leads to the numerical growth ofthe species and the dissolution of the barriers that separate itsmembers, the astounding expansion of the technical means at itsdisposal, the impossibility of employing these means without theorganisation of innumerable individuals into communities, etc.

For a primitive people, youcan view sociology as simply the challenges of food supply, sinceeven this minimum requirement is no longer within reach of individualeffort, as is the case for animals. But then sociology embracespublic health, reproduction, eugenics (and tomorrow, the annualplanning of births).

4. Individual and species

3. The maintenanceof the individual, this individual who is presumed to be the primarymover behind events, is nothing but a derived and secondarymanifestation of the maintenance and development of the species;contrary to traditional opinions, it owes nothing to a natural orsupernatural providence or to the effect of instinct or reason. Thisis all the more so when we consider a social species and anadvanced, complex society.

It may seem like stating theobvious to say that if the individual was immortal, everything wouldrevert to the maintenance of the individual, as the fundament andcause of every phenomenon. But being immortal means being immutable,never ageing. A living organism, on the other hand – and an animalorganism in the first instance – is host to a substantial sequenceof movements, circulations and metabolic reactions which bring aboutinexorable change. It mutates down to the minutest cell. In actualfact it is absurd to imagine a living entirety that continuallyreplaces the elements that it loses yet stays the same; as if thiscould be a crystal you plunged into a solution of its own chemicallypure solid substance, which would grow or diminish under the effectof a cyclical variation of temperature or exterior pressures. But ifsome have spoken about the lifeof crystals (and today, the atom), it is precisely because they canbe born, grow, diminish, disappear and even double and multiply.

This may seem banal but it isuseful to demonstrate that the fetishistic belief of many (alsoalleged Marxists) in the primacy of individual biology is but athrow-back to the first coarse beliefs in the immortality of thesoul. This bourgeois egoism has flagrantly grafted itself onreligions, becoming even more fiercely contemptuous of the life ofthe species and charity for the species, putting the subjectiveperson in this fantastic form at the centre of things, at the expenseof others,by asserting the immortality of the soul.

It certainly brings nopleasure to think that our poor carcases won’t be around for longon this earth; those who don’t believe in life beyond the gravethus seek an alternative solace in intellectualist illusions –today existentialist illusions – that each individual has (orbelieves he has) a unique and indelible brand-identity, even ifexpressing this only means attaching yourself passively to the latestfad in a sheep-like fashion, ever happy to ape all the other dupesand schlemiels. And so it is that the ineffable heights of emotion,sensual delight, artistic exaltation and cerebral ecstasy gush forth,all sensations that you can only hope to experience in the privacy ofyour individual cell – when in fact, the truth is the exactopposite.

Returning to the actualmaterial facts as they appear before our noses, it is clear thatevery adult individual who is of sound mind and body can produce,when he is in full possession of his faculties, what he needs fordaily subsistence (let us return to the situation in a completelyprimitive economy). But the very insecurity of “every man forhimself” would very soon bring about the end of the individual (andof the species, if it consisted of a series of individuals crushed upagainst one another in close proximity) if it were not for the ebband flow of reproduction. In an organic totality, individuals whosubsist on their own are few and far between: the old cannot producemuch and the young must be fed so that they can produce in thefuture. Every economic cycle is unimaginable, and every economicequation impossible, if you don’t introduce these essential factsinto the calculus: age, effectiveness, health.

If we wanted to be completelypedestrian, we could write the economic formula for aparthenogenetic, unisex humanity. But we are not in a position toconfirm its existence. Therefore, we have no choice but to introducethe sex factor, because reproduction is assured only by two distinctsexes, and also to consider the pauses between gestation andlactation …

It is only after we haveintegrated these factors that we can claim to have taken into accountall of the conditions which form the economic “base”, theeconomic “substructure” of society. Abandoning forever the individual,this cipher who has never worked out how to make himself immortal,nor even to reproduce on his own, and who will become less and lesscapable as humanity continues its mighty progress, we shall grasp theinfinite range of expressions made possible by the species, includingthe most elevated expressions of thought.

A very recent article (byYourgrau, of Johannesburg) expounded the theory of the General Theoryof Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who sought to bring the two opposingprinciples of vitalism and mechanism into synthesis. Recognisingthrough gritted teeth that materialism is gaining ground in biology,he remembers this paradox that is not so easy to rebut: one rabbit isnot a rabbit; only two rabbits can be a rabbit. Blessed individual,you have now been expelled from your last line of defence, that ofOnan! It is thus absurd to understand the economy without takingaccount of the reproduction of the species. We know this already fromour classic texts. From the very first lines of the preface to TheOrigin of the Family, Private Property and the State,Engels expresses one of the cornerstones of Marxism in these terms:

“According to thematerialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, inthe final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediateessentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On theone side, the production of the means of existence, of articles offood and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for thatproduction; on the other side, the production of human beingsthemselves, the propagation of the species. The social organisationunder which the people of a particular historical epoch and aparticular country live is determined by both kinds of production: bythe stage of development of labour on the one hand and of the familyon the other”.

Ever since the theory wasfirst put forward, the materialist interpretation of history hasembraced, not only the degrees of development of technology andproductive labour, but also the “production of the producers”, inother words, sexuality, and has accorded both the same level ofimportance. Marx says that the working class is the primaryproductive force. It is therefore every bit as important tounderstand how the working class reproduces itself as it is tounderstand the production and reproduction of commodities, wealth andcapital. In Rome, the wage labourer of antiquity, he who ownednothing, was officially defined not as a worker but as a proletarian,one who has no wealth other than his children (proles). Hisdistinguishing function was not to give to society and the rulingclasses the product of his manual labour, but rather to producetomorrow’s labourers, without controls or limits, in his shabbyalcove.

Today’s petty-bourgeois –in his empty-headedness – imagines that this second function mustbe as sweet as the first is bitter. The petty-bourgeois is as much aphilistine pig as the grand bourgeois; but he has no means to opposethe power of the latter except by variously giving vent to his ownimpotence.

4. In the same waythat the first communities organised themselves for productivelabour with a rudimentary technology, so too they organisedthemselves with a view to mating and procreating, as well as raisingand protecting children. The family is therefore, in its variousguises, a relationship of production, adapting according todifferent environments and the available productive forces.

We cannot recount in thispresentation each and every stage of savagery and barbarism thathumanity has travelled, each characterised by familial resources andaggregates; on this point we refer back to Engels’ brilliant studyon the matter.

Having lived in the trees andfed on fruit, man first discovered fishing and fire and learned towalk the coasts and rivers, so well that the different branches ofthe species started to meet. Then came hunting with the deployment ofthe first weapons and during the age of barbarism there firstappeared the domestication of animals, then agriculture, which markedthe passage from a nomadic to a settled life. The correspondingsexual forms were not yet monogamy nor even polygamy; these werepreceded by matriarchy, in which the mother had moral and socialprominence, and in which the males and females of the same kinsfolk (gens)coupled with each other for reproductive purposes in various ways –as Lewis H. Morgan confirmed was the case for the Indians of America(even though, when they were discovered by the whites, they hadbecome monogamous; while distinguishing between the mother and auntsthey continued to refer to fathers as their paternal uncles). Thesegroups of siblings, where there was no constituted authority, did notdivide property and land.

It is possible to say that oneof the characteristics of higher species of animals is to have anembryonic organisation for the purpose of raising and defending thenewly born, a characteristic that is born of instinct. But therational animal, man organised himself around economic technology,with instinct continuing to rule in the sphere of sexual and familialaffection. If this were true intelligence, which one usually regardsas replacing instinct and making it redundant, would have an equalshare alongside instinct. But in fact this is pure metaphysics. Youcan find a nice definition of instinct in a book by Maurice Thomaswritten in 1952 (if we refer to recent specialised studies, it isonly to demonstrate that the impressions provided by Engels orMorgan, revolutionaries who were much maligned by bourgeois pedantry,have not been “invalidated” or rendered “out of date” byrecent scientific literature): instinctis the hereditary knowledge of a plan of life of the species.In the course of evolution and natural selection, which we canacknowledge in the animal world results from a collision ofindividuals as individuals against the environment, it is only thephysical and physiological that determines a common behaviour for allmembers of a species, in particular in the reproductive domain. Allagree that such behaviour is automatic, “non-conscious” and“non-rational”. It is understandable that this behaviour istransmitted via hereditary means, like all of the morphological andstructural characteristics of the organism, and that the transmissionmechanism is fixed (this point is still somewhat unclear in science)at the level of genes (and not geniuses, gentlemen individualists!)and other reproductive and germinative cells and liquids.

This mechanism, which ispresent in each individual, only provides the minimumof elementary norms for a rudimentary lifeplan to dealwith the difficulties presented by the environment.

In the social species,collaborative work, even primitive, goes much further. It passes onmany other habits and disciplines which serve as social norms. Forthe bourgeois and the idealist, what distinguishes the human fromanimal species is reason and conscience, which are the foundation forfreedom of action. From this arises the free will of the believer,the personal liberty of the rationalist and lots more besides. Forus, by contrast, it is not a question of lending the individual asupplementary power, thought and spirit, which overturns all of thefacts, such as the purported principle of life as opposed tomechanical physics. On the other hand we do add a supplementarypower, born exclusively from the necessity for social productionwhich imposes the most complex norms and disciplines; this necessity,which drives the instinct for guiding individuals out of thetechnicalsphere, likewise drives it out of the sexual sphere.It is not the individual who has developed and ennobled the species,it is the life of the species that has developed the individual andpushed him towards new dynamics and towards more elevated spheres.

That which is primal andbestial is to be found in the individual. That which is developed,complex and orderly derives not from an automatic plan of life, butrather from one that is organised and organisable, from collectivelife, and it is first born outside of the brains of individualsbefore arriving there, via complex routes, it is something that mustbe earned. When we talk – outside of all idealism – of thought,of knowledge, of science, we understand by this the products ofsocial life: individuals, without exception, are not the donors butthe beneficiaries, and in our contemporary society, they remainparasites.

At the outset, and from theoutset, economic organisation and sexual organisation were closelytied together in the life lived by humans in association, though youread about this under the veil of all the religious myths which, forMarxism, are not gratuitous fantasies and empty nonsense that shouldbe rejected (as by the bourgeois freethinker) but rather the firstelaborations of collective knowledge to be passed down thegenerations, which we need to interpret.

In Genesis (Book II, Verses 19and 20) even before the creation of Eve and the expulsion from theGarden of Eden (where Adam and Eve could live alone, eternal even intheir physical condition, to gather effortlessly the fruits ofnourishment, but not those of science), God creates all species ofanimals from the soil and presents them to Adam, who learns to callthem by their names. The text explains this procedure: Adoevero non inveniebatur adjutor similis ejus. This means,Adam has no helper (adjutor) of the same species at this point. Eveis given to him, but not to work or to procreate. Apparently theycould make the animals their servants. But after they make theirserious error, starting with the cunning serpent, God changes thedestiny of humanity. It is only outside of Eden that Eve “knows”her companion. She bears him sons whom she brings forth undersufferance and he earns his living by the sweat of his brow. Thus,even in these age-old mythical teachings, production and reproductionare born together. Adam domesticates the animals but only with hardwork; however he gets adjutores,workers of the same species as he, similesejus.

Voilàthe immutable, timeless individual immediately fallen intonothingness; deprived of the bitter and sublime bread of knowledge heis a brute and a runt devoted to idleness, damned to a life withoutwork, love and science, yet this is the man whom today’s idioticpseudo-materialists would like to celebrate once again.

In his place is born a speciesof being who thinks because he works, alongside his adjutores, hisneighbours, his brothers.

5. Biological heredity and socialtradition

5. From theearliest human societies the behaviour of group members becameuniform across the collective practices and functions necessary toboth production and sexual reproduction; they took the form ofceremonies, festivals and rites of a religious nature. This firstmechanism of collective life followed unwritten rules that wereneither imposed nor transgressed; what made this possible was notinnate or instilled ideas about sociability or a morality particularto the animal-human, but rather the deterministic effect of theevolution of techniques for work.

The history of the firstcustoms and traditions, before written constitutions and prescriptivelaw, which has been confirmed by the life of savage tribes at thetime of their first contacts with the white man, can only beunderstood based on similar criteria. The seasonality of theirfestivals is clearly tied to the seasonality of their labour, such asploughing, sowing and harvest. In the beginning, the time for loveand conception was, for the human species, also seasonal. Laterevolution would make it, contrary to what happens in the animalkingdom, an ongoing requirement. Novelists who adopted the whiteculture have described festivals of a sexual character among thepeople of Africa. Each year, pubescent adolescents are released fromthe bondage applied to their genitals shortly after birth, and asexual orgy follows this cruel operation conducted by the priests, inthe heady atmosphere of noise and drink. But it is evident that theserites were designed to preserve the race’s fecundity in difficultconditions which, in the absence of any control, would lead todegeneration and impotence; and perhaps there are more disgustingthings in the Kinsey Report into the behaviour of the two sexes inthe age of capital.

Marxism has long-sinceaffirmed that procreation and production go together, as isdemonstrated, for example, by the lovely passage in which Engelsrecalls that Charlemagne wanted to improve agriculture, which wasthen in a completely decadent state, founding not kolkhozes but imperialfarms. Managedby the monasteries, these farms, like all other initiatives of thissort in the Middle Ages, were to fail: a unisexual andnon-procreating estate cannot meet the needs of active production.Thus, for example, the Rule of Saint Benedict reads like a communiststatute: work is severely imposed and personal appropriation of anykind of good or product is forbidden, even any consumption way fromthe communal table. But such an organisation, incapable ofreproducing its constituent membership because of its chastity andsterility, remained outside of life and of history. A comparativestudy of the early regulations of monks and nuns orders might shedlight on the problem of the feeble level of production compared toconsumption in the Middle Ages; it would explain certain daring andadmirable ideas of Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi, who didnot seek mortification to save the soul, but a social reform tobetter nourish the scrawny bodies of the disinherited classes.

6. The transfer ofthe norms of productive technology from generation to generation,becoming richer and more complex over time, in the various domainsof fishing, hunting, livestock and arable farming, norms which areadapted to the behaviour of healthy adults, the young, the old,expectant and child-rearing mothers and couples joined forprocreation, proceeds via a dual path, on the one hand organic andon the other social. On the first path hereditary aptitudes andphysical adjustments are transferred from the procreator to theprocreated, overcoming personal variations of secondary importance.On the second path, whose importance continues to grow, the group’sresources are transferred down the generations; thisextra-physiological route is no less material than the first; it isthe same for everyone and consists of all types of “equipment”and “tools” that the community has managed to provide foritself.

We have demonstrated in someof our “Thread of Time” texts that before the discovery of moreconvenient media such as writing, monuments, then print etc. it wasnecessary to exploit individual memory as much as possible, memoriesformed by the common exercises of the entire community. Starting withthe first maternal rebukes and continuing through to collectiverecitations, members of the group took part in conversations on theobligatory topics of the moment, the old folk repeating them to thepoint of boredom. Singing and music aid the memory; at first,knowledge is transferred in verse, not in prose. If we carried on inthe same manner today, a good part of modern capitalistcivilisation’s “science” could only circulate as a horriblecacophony!

The continuation of thisimpersonal and collective legacy passed on by groups of humans fromage to age would require a more systematic form of presentation. Butit was already becoming clear that the more this mechanism wasenhanced, the less it reposed in the head of an individual; allmembers of the group tended towards a common level. The great man,who is nearly always a figure of legend, became increasinglyworthless, because he became more and more incapable of wielding alarger weapon or performing a faster multiplication (and therefore arobot will soon be the most intelligent citizen of this stupidbourgeois world and, according to some, will become the rulingdictator of immense countries).

Anyway, social power gainsmore and more on organic power, which is in every instance the basisfor the power of the individual spirit. In this context, we can citea recent and interesting summary by H. Wallon, Collège de France,1953: L’organiqueet le social chez l’homme.Criticising mechanical materialism (of the bourgeois age, that’s tosay through the agency of the individual) the author describes thesystems of communication between humans in society and cites Marx, aswe will see later in this section with regard to language. In hisstudy he registers, in judicial terms, the failure of idealism, inparticular in its current form, existentialism: “Idealism has notbeen content to confine reality [or “the real”] within the limitsof representation (in our minds). It has also circ*mscribed the imageof what it considers reality [or “the real”]”. Then, havingreviewed various modern concepts, he goes on to draw this wiseconclusion:

“Solidarity andopposition co-exist simultaneously in the conscience between organicimpressions and intellectual reflections. Between the two, mutualactions and reactions never cease to pursue one another, whichdemonstrates the uselessness of the kind of distinctions made bydifferent philosophical systems between matter and thought, existenceand intelligence, body and spirit”.

Studies like this show verywell that the Marxist method has so far provided the opportunity todonate a good 100 years of work to unlabelled science, with neither aprice tag nor a contraband label.

6. Natural factors and historicaldevelopment

7. The livingconditions of the first human gentes,the communist communities, evolved very slowly, and because of thediversity of natural conditions (the type of soil and geologicalphenomena, the geographical situation, altitude, water flows,proximity or not to the sea, climatic conditions, flora, fauna etc.)the rhythm of development was not the same everywhere. Depending onvariable cycles, they progressed from the nomadic life of wanderinghordes to settlement, reducing the number of unoccupied lands,meeting and contacting tribes from other parts (sometimes evenengaging in conflict), leading to invasions and finally theenslavement of one group by another, which was one of the originalreasons for the division of ancient egalitarian societies intodifferent social classes.

Engels recalls that the first gentesallowed neither enslavement nor exogamy; the victory of one gensagainst another brought with it the pitiless and complete destructionof the conquered group. It was necessary to avoid admitting too manyworkers within a restricted area and disrupting sexual andreproductive discipline, two aspects that were constantly boundtogether in social development. Later, the relationships betweengroups became more complex, cross-breeding and fusions more frequent,especially in the fertile and temperate countries where the firstgreat settlements established themselves. But in this first part ofthe presentation, we’ll stick to the prehistoric period. Engelsunderlines the progress in the development of production that takesplace with the use of animals not just as food for humans, but alsoas labour power, emphasising the importance of the naturalenvironment in the largest sense of the term. Although every type ofanimal capable of domestication was available in Eurasia, in Americathere was practically just one, a large type of ovine, the lama (allthe other species have been introduced and acclimatised there atvarious historical epochs). As a result, the people of this continentexperienced an arrest in their social development compared to thosein the ancient continent. The faithful explain this by saying,shortly after Christopher Columbus’s discovery, that redemption hadnot been extended to this part of the planet and that the breath ofeternal spirit had not descended upon the heads of the inhabitants.Evidently, the explanation is a little different if one interpretsthings not by the absence of the Supreme Being, but rather by theabsence of a few species of very humble beasts.

However, the explanationsuited the pious Christian colonists who exterminated the aboriginalIndians as wild animals and replaced them with black Africans, whomthey had reduced to slavery, thereby achieving an ethnic revolutionwhose implications would first be understood much later.

7. Prehistoryand language

8. One can say, ina very general respect, that the transition from the racial to thenational factor corresponds with the transition from prehistory tohistory. By nation we mean a complex in which ethnicity is only oneaspect, and an aspect that is moreover rarely dominant. Beforeanalysing the historical significance of the national factor, wetherefore have to examine the other aspects that complement theracial factor, and first and foremost, language. You cannot explainthe origin of languages and speech unless you start with thematerial characteristics pertaining to the environment and theorganisation of production. The language of a human group is itselfone of the means of production.

We have seen on the one handthat there is a close relationship between the ties ofblood-brotherhood in the first tribes and the start of a socialproduction using a certain set of tools, and on the other hand thatthe relationship between the human grouping and the naturalenvironment predominates over individual initiatives and tendencies.This is the very basis of historical materialism, as is proved by twotexts written at an interval of a half century. Marx indeed wrote inhis Theses onFeuerbach(1845): “Butthe human essence is not an abstraction inherent in each singleindividual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations”.By social relations, we Marxists understand race, the physicalenvironment, tools and the organisation of the given group.

In a letter of 1894 to W.Borgius, whichwe have often already referred to in order to combat those prejudicedwith regard to the role of individual “great men” in history,Engels replied to the following question: what part does the racefactor (see Point 3), and what part does that of historic individualsplay in Marx and Engels’ materialist view of history? Engels,having dealt with his correspondent’s first point (Borgius wasclearly thinking above all of Napoleon) by knocking the individualfrom his pedestal without the slightest hesitation, needed just asingle blow of the chisel to deal with the point on race: “raceis itself an economic factor”.

The pipsqueaks of bourgeoispseudo-culture snigg*r when you retrace the immense arc that proceedsfrom first principles to final result, as when, for example thepowerful and tenacious Catholic school explains the prestigiouscourse proceeding from primordial chaos to the eternal beatitude ofnature’s creatures.

The first groups were strictlyblood-brothers and simultaneously formed family groups and workgroups. Their “economy” is a reaction by all against the naturalenvironments, and all the relations are identical: there is nopersonal property, there are no social classes, no political power,and no State.

Being neither metaphysiciansnor mystics, we accept, without sackcloth and ashes and withoutbelieving that humanity must wash away the stains on its character,that the mixing of blood, the division of labour, the division ofsociety into classes, the State and civil war all arise in a thousandways. But what lies at the end of the cycle, with a mix of races thathas become general and inextricable, with a productive technologycapable of acting in a powerful and complex way on the environment tothe point of regulating affairs on a planetary level, is the end ofall racial and social discrimination: it is a renewed communisteconomy; it is the end, on a global level, of individual propertythat has engendered transitory cults with its monstrous fetishes: theindividual person, the family, the fatherland.

But at the start, whatcharacterises a people is its economy and the degree of developmentof its productive technology, alongside its ethnicity.

The most recent researchregarding prehistory has led the science of human origins toacknowledge several points of departure in the appearance of humanbeings on earth and the evolution of other species. One can no longerspeak about a “genealogical tree” of all humanity, nor even ofdifferent branches on this “tree”. A study by Etienne Patte(Faculty of Science, Poitiers, 1953) has very effectively underlinedthe inadequacy of this traditional image. In a tree, the separationbetween two branches, large or small, is definitive, so to speak,since in general they never join together again into a single branch.By contrast, the human species is an inextricable network whosedifferent branches are constantly intertwining. In three generations,that’s to say a century, each of us has had, if not interbreedingby our parents, eight great-grand parents; but over a thousand yearsthat would make a billion ancestors, and for a duration of 600,000years, corresponding to the likely age of the species, the numberwould attain astronomical figures with thousands of zeroes. This is,therefore, a network and not a tree. And indeed, in the populationstatistics of modern people, the representatives of pure ethnic typesare very few in number. From which the neat definition of humanity as sungameion,Greek for an ensemble in which cross-fertilisation takes place inevery sense, the word gameoembracing both the sexual act and the nuptial rite. We thereforereturn to a somewhat simplistic formula: the cross-fertilisation ofspecies is sterile, that of races fecund.

The Pope’s position on thispoint is understandable. Rejecting every idea of racial minorities –which is a progressive position from a historical point of view –he affirms that you can speak about races of animals but not of men.Despite his wish to take recent scientific findings on board,findings which otherwise often converge rather nicely with Catholicdogma, he cannot abandon the genealogical tree of the Bible startingwith Adam (even if this is, in the philosophical scheme of things,more Hebrew than Catholic).

Nevertheless other authorswith a distinctly anti-materialist viewpoint can only reject the olddistinction between the anthropological and historiographicalapproaches, according to which the first would have to establish thefacts whereas the second finds them ready to hand and above allordered chronologically. Nobody can doubt that Caesar lived beforeNapoleon, but it is a little more difficult to establish the evidenceas to which appeared first, Neanderthal man or the anthropomorphicape, proconsul.

By contrast, the power of thematerialist method applied to facts proven through research easilyestablishes the synthesis between these two approaches, even if racewas effectively a more decisive economic factor among the prehistoric gentes,and the nation, a much more sophisticated entity, in the contemporaryworld.

It is only by following thismethod that you can accord language its true place and function. Inthe beginning, only small groups of blood-brothers shared the samelanguage, for collaboration among themselves and without anyconnection to other groups, except in the case of armed conflicts:today, entire populations occupying immense territories speak thesame language.

In the beginning, groups thathad the same phonetic expression also had common rules forreproduction, technology, and the capacity to produce the necessitiesfor material life.

Safe to say that the use ofsounds for communication between individuals can already be observedamong animal species. But there is a huge difference between themodulations such as are emitted by the vocal organs of animals of thesame species (organs whose structure and functioning transmit in apurely physiological manner) and the formation of a languageembracing a complete complex ensemble of words. The word did notappear to indicate the person speaking or spoken to, an individual ofthe opposite sex or a part of the body, or the light, darkness, theearth, water, food or danger. Language articulated in words was bornalongside work with tools, the production of objects for consumption,which required men to work collaboratively.

8. Socialised work andspeech

9. Every collectivehuman activity towards productive ends, in the broadest meaning ofthe term, calls for a system of communication between the workersfor successful collaboration. Starting from the simple effortrequired to catch prey or to defend oneself, which needs instinctiveincitements, a strongly motivated animal scream will suffice; whenthe choice of moment, of place and means of action (primitive tool,weapon etc.) becomes indispensable, speech is born, over a very longseries of failed attempts and corrections. The process is exactlythe opposite of what the idealists imagine: for them, an innovatorwould research in his brain a new technology, without ever havingseen it, would then explain it verbally and would then direct itsfulfilment. For them, the order is thus: thought, speech, action.For us it is the exact opposite.

A real testament to thenatural process of the intervention of language can be found in thebiblical myth, the famous tower of Babel. In this, we are already inthe presence of a real state of immense power with formidable armiesand large numbers of prisoners and forced labourers. It undertakescolossal works, particularly in its capital (the technological powerof the Babylonians, not just in construction, but in that of riverhydraulics and other domains, is attested by history). According tothe story, this great power wants to build a tower of such heightthat it could touch the sky (this is the typical classical myth abouthuman presumption knocked down by divinity, as in the myths ofPrometheus stealing fire or the flight of Daedalus, etc.) Thecountless workers, foremen and architects, being of very differentand distant origins, do not speak the same language and cannotunderstand one another. The implementation of projects and provisionsis chaotic and contradictory, and the construction, having attained acertain height, collapses as a result of errors due to the confusionof languages, so the builders are either crushed or dispersed,victims of punishment by the Gods.

The hidden meaning of thisstory is that you cannot build without a common language; the stones,arms, hammers and picks are not enough if you don’t have anothertool of production: a common language, a lexicon, an ensemble ofcommon formulas known to everyone. The same legend can be found amongthe savages of central Africa: in this case the tower was made ofwood and was intended to reach the moon. Now that we all speak“American” it is child’s play to raise skyscrapers, though theyseem rather ridiculous when compared to the ingenious towers of thebarbarians and savages.

Tithe Marxist definition oflanguage is therefore that it is one of the means of production.There is no doubt about this. In his above-cited recent study onprincipal doctrines, Wallon cannot help but refer to the one that wefollow: “Accordingto Marx, language is tied to man’s production of tools and objectswith defined properties”.The author chooses two authoritative quotes from Marx; the firstcomes from TheGerman Ideology: “[men] begin todistinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to producetheir means of subsistence”.The second is from Engels, in TheDialectics of Nature: “Firstlabour, then with it speech – these were the two most essentialstimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape graduallychanged into that of man”.When Engels was writing, he was unaware of the findings that evenentirely idealist authors refer to, despite themselves. (Cf. KarlSaller, Leitfadender Anthropologie, Universityof Munich, 1930).

Today the human brain has avolume of 1,400 cm³ (both for geniuses and for simpletons like us). Along time ago, inthe age of Peking Man (Sinanthropuspekinensis)and Java Man (Pithecanthropuserectus) thebrain was 1,000 cm³ and it appears that our ancestor already hadelementary notions aboutmagic, had his way of burying the dead (even though he was quitefrequently cannibalistic), used fire considerably earlier and madeuse of various utensils: cups for drinking, made from the skulls ofanimals, stone weapons etc. But discoveries made in southern Africain particular go much further: 600,000 years ago (this figure iscited by Wallon) another of our ancestors, who had a brain of just500 cm³, but had already used fire, hunted and ate the cooked flesh ofanimals, walked upright like us and, as a single correction to thefacts cited by Engels (in 1884), it appears that he was no longerliving in trees like his close relation Australopithecusbut rather fought courageously against ferocious animals on theground.

It is interesting that theauthor of the study that we have just cited, confounded by facts thatbatter his stronghold with the fundamental points of materialisttheory, searches in psychology for a remedy to anthropology, finallyweeping over the remains of the individual, elevated by a mysteriousextra-organic inspiration and who, in our modern epoch of excesspopulation and mechanisation, has lost himself in the mass, ceasingto be a man. But who is the more human of the two? Thesympathetic Pithecanthropuswith his brain of 500 cm³ (not to be confused with the smallutilitarian Italian car of thesame capacity, a mass-producedvehicle!) or the scientist with 1.400 cm³ who chases butterflies underthe Arch of Titus to establish thepitiful equation, official science + idealism = despair?

9. Economicsubstructure and superstructure

10. The concept ofthe “economic substructure” in a given human society thusextends significantly beyond the limits that the superficialinterpretation assigns to it, according to which this baseexclusively comprises the remuneration of work and the exchange ofcommodities. It embraces the entire range of forms of reproductionof the species – that’s to say familial institutions, but alsotechnological resources, equipment, tools of every kind, withoutforgetting, if you don’t want to limit the component technology toa simple inventory of tangible materials, all the mechanisms thatsociety uses to transfer its “technical know-how” fromgeneration to generation. In this sense, it comprises the followinggeneral networks of communications: spoken language, writing,singing, music, graphical arts, printing. All of them have beencreated as ways to transfer knowledge about productive technology.For Marxism, literature, poetry and science are themselves superiorand differentiated forms of the instruments of production and theyarise in order to respond to the same exigencies, immediate andmediated, of social life.

In this respect, somequestions of interpretation of historic materialism presentthemselves to the proletarian movement: which, in particular, are thesocial phenomena that specifically constitute the “productivebase”, or to put it another way, the economic conditions that callfor an explanation of the ideological and political superstructurescharacteristic of a given historic society?

It is well known that forMarxism, society does not evolve in a slow and gradual fashion butpasses suddenly from one period to the next, each characterised bydifferent forms of production and social relations. These mutationsmodify both the productive base and the superstructure. To explainthis idea, we frequently return to classic texts, both to putdifferent formulas and concepts in their proper context, and tospecify what changes so brusquely when a revolutionary crisis occurs.

In the aforementioned lettersclarifying things for young scholars of Marxism, Engels insists onthe reciprocal relationships between the base and the superstructure:for example, the political State of a given class is a superstructure parexcellence,but it in turn makes interventions on the economic substructure suchas protective duties, taxes, etc.

Later, at the time of Lenin,it was particularly important to clarify the process of classrevolution. The State, political power, is the superstructure whichexquisitely collapses in the most exquisitely quasi-instantaneousmanner to give way to an analogue but opposed structure. But therelationships that govern the productive economy are not transformedwith the same rapidity, even though it is precisely the contradictionbetween productive relations and the development of new productiveforces that drive the revolution in the first place. Wage labour,mercantilism, etc. do not disappear overnight. As for the otheraspects of the superstructure, some are more robust and will survivethe economic substructure (for example, capitalism) which gave birthto them: these are the traditional ideologies that are left behind,even at the heart of the victorious revolutionary class, followingthe long period of subjugation that went before. For example the lawwill be rapidly transformed both in its written form and in itsapplication, whereas a superstructure such as religious beliefs willdisappear much more slowly.

Reference has often been madeto the pithy preface to Marx’s Critiqueof Political Economy,1859. It will not hurt stop here before continuing on the issue oflanguage.

The material productiveforces ofsociety are, at different stages of development, the physical labourpower of man, the tools and instruments he makes use of in order toapply it, the fertility of cultivated land, the machines that addmechanical and physical energy to the physical power of man, inbrief, all the methods at a society’s disposition that allow it toapply manual and mechanical forces to land and materials.

The relations of productionare, in any given society, those necessary to men“in the social production of their existence”whereby “meninevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent oftheir will”. Whatdistinguishes these relations of production is, in a general sense,the freedom to, or prohibition from, occupying land to cultivate it,using tools, machines or manufactured goods, or to have the productsof labour for consumption, transportation or distribution. We cancite here particular forms of the relations of production: slavery,serfdom, wage labour, commerce, landlordism, industrial enterprise.If we put the accent on the legal aspect rather than the economic, wecan equally say that the relationsof productionare propertyrelations oragain, according to some texts, the formsof propertyas they apply to land, slavery, the product of the serf’s labour,commodities, factories and machines etc. This collection ofrelationships constitutes the economic substructure or structure ofsociety.

The essential dynamic ideahere is the contrast between the forcesof production,which have attained a certain level of evolution and development, andthe relationsof productionor property, in brief social relations (all these formulae areequivalent).

The superstructurei.e. what follows, that which superimposes itself on the underlyingeconomic structure, is for Marx fundamentally the legal or politicalsystem specific to a given society, that’s to say theconstitutional texts, laws, the magistracy, the armed forces, thecentre of power. This superstructure always has a material, concreteaspect. But Marx makes a careful distinction between the materialtransformation in the relations of production, in the juridical andproprietary relations and in the end power, and the transition in the“conscience” of the time and of the victorious class. This, up tonow, is a derivative of the derivative, a superstructure of thesuperstructure, which constitutes the changing domain of popularopinion, ideology, philosophy, art and to a certain degree (insofaras it is not a normative practice) religion.

Modes of production (itis better to reserve the term formsof production for the more restricted concept of forms of property) – Produktionsweisen– are the “consecutiveepochs marking progress in the economic development of society”,which Marxrefers to with a broad brush such as Asiatic, antique, feudal,bourgeois.

We will take an example, thatof the bourgeois revolution in France. Productiveforces:agriculture with the serfs, the artisans and their workshops in thecities, the expanding manufactories and factories and theirworkforces. Traditional relationsof production (or forms of property):serfdom of the peasants attached to the glebe, feudal lord of themanor and those who cultivate the land; corporate bondage for theartisan trades. Legaland political superstructure:the power of the nobility and the Church, absolute monarchy. Ideologicalsuperstructure: authorityby divine right, Catholicism, etc. Modeof production: feudalism.

The revolutionarytransformation presents itself immediately, as the transition ofpower from the nobles and the priests to the bourgeoisie. Electiveparliamentary democracy is the new legaland political superstructure. Relations of production thatare abolished: serfdom and the artisanal corporations; the newrelations that take over are industrial wage labour (alongside theautonomous artisan tradesmen and the smallholding peasants, whosubsist) and freedom of commerce within the national market,including land.

The productiveforce of thefactory workers grows enormously through absorption of the formerserfs and artisans. The power of the machine-tools and engines growsin the same proportion. The ideologicalsuperstructureundergoes a slow evolution which started before the revolution andcarries on afterwards: religious faith and legitimism give way tofreedom of thought, “Enlightenment”, rationalism.

The new modeof production extendingwithin France and beyond in place of feudalism is capitalism, inwhich, contrary to the “conscience that this revolution has ofitself”, political power belongs not to “the people” but to theindustrial capitalist class and the bourgeois landlords.

To distinguish between the two“layers” of the superstructure, we could adopt the termssuperstructure of force(positive law, State) and the superstructure of conscience(ideology, philosophy, religion etc.).

Marx says that material force,violence, is in its turn an economic instrument. In the texts that wehave cited and in his Feuerbach Engels saysthe same thing: the State (which is force) acts upon and influencesthe economic substructure.

The State pertaining to a newclass thus provides a powerful impetus for modifying the relations ofproduction. In France after 1789, the feudal relations of productionwere swept away quickly because of the very advanced developments ofmodern productive forces, which were exerting their pressure for along time previously. Although it gave power back to the landedaristocracy and re-established the legitimist monarchy, therestoration of 1815 did not succeed in overturning the new relationsof production and the new forms of property. It did not bring about aregression in manufacturing industry and did not revive the greatseigniorial estates. Historically, changes in power and thetransformation of the forms of production can very well go indifferent directions to one another, albeit for a limited period.

What of Russia in October1917? Political power, that’sto say the superstructure of force,which in February passed from the feudal to the bourgeois class,passed in its turn to the workers supported in struggle by poorpeasants. The statutory and legal State took proletarian forms(dictatorship and break-up of the democratic assembly). Theideological superstructures received a powerful impulse across broadstrata in the direction of the proletariat’s own ideologicalsuperstructure, amid desperate resistance from those of the oldsociety, the bourgeoisie and semi-bourgeois. The anti-feudalproductive forces gained momentum for industry and free agriculture.Can we say that in the years that followed October, the relations ofproduction became socialist? Certainly not, because in all cases,this would require a period measured in more than months. Can wetherefore say that they simply became capitalist? It would not beexact to say that they became completely and utterly capitalist,because as we know, pre-capitalist forms have survived there for along time. However, it would be insufficient to say that therelations simply received an impulse for their transformation intocapitalist relations.

In fact, since power is aneconomic agent of primary importance, the transformation of relationsof production in a democratic bourgeois State is one thing, and thetransformation of the relations of production under the dictatorshipof the proletariat quite another (we are not referring here to thefirst measures of communism, of civil war and war on profiteering:shelter, bread, transport).

The modeof productionis defined as the entire complex of relations of production andforms, political and legal. If the entire Russian cycle that hasunwound until today has resulted in a fully capitalist mode ofproduction, and there are no socialist relations of production, thisis because after the revolution of October 1917 in Russia, theproletarian revolution in the West did not take place; such arevolution would not only have shored up the power of the Russianproletariat, more importantly it would also have made productiveforces that the West had in abundance available to the Russianeconomy, which would have driven forward the relations of productionin the direction of socialism.

New relations of production donot occur instantly after political revolution takes place.

In order to achieve such adevelopment, political power in Russia was the other condition ofequal importance (Lenin); the formulation which says that the onlyhistoric task of the Bolshevik party in Russia after the Octoberrevolution was to ensure the transition from feudal social relationsto bourgeois is inexact. Until the revolutionary wave following thewar of 1914 had exhausted itself, that’s to say until roughly 1923,the task of the October power was to work for the transition from thefeudal mode of production and social relations to the proletarian.This journey was taken on the only historical path available, i.e.the high road. It is only later that we can say that Russia isneither actually, nor potentially, socialist. The relations ofproduction subsequent to October are thus partly pre-capitalist,partly capitalist, and, to a quantitatively negligible degree,post-capitalist; but the historic form, or rather the historic modeof production cannot be said to be capitalist, rather, it ispotentially proletarian and socialist. This is what matters!

It’s in this way that weaddress the dead-end formulation, “bourgeois economic substructure,proletarian and socialist superstructure” – and not by denyingthe second half of the formulation, which remained true for at leastsix years after the conquest of the dictatorship.

10. Stalin andlinguistics

[The digression that followswas not out of place in this arrangement of the material used for thereport, since we had to confront Stalin’s doctrine on linguistics,which was entirely based on inappropriate distinctions between baseand superstructure]

11. Stalin’sthesis, according to which language is not a superstructure inrelation to the economic substructure, is a false position forresolving the issue, since Stalin wants a different outcome. Everytransition from one historic mode of production to the next impliesa change, as much in the superstructure as in the economic base, achange in the power of the different classes and their respectivepositions at the heart of society. But Stalin claims that thenational language neither follows the rise of the substructure, norof the superstructure, because it does not belong to one class butrather to the entire people of a given country. Thus, to rescuelanguage and linguistics from the effects of the social revolution(and, softly-softly, to rescue national culture and the cult of thecountry), it is pulled to the banks of the churning river ofhistory, beyond the battlefield of the productive substructure andsafely out of the reach of politics and ideology.

According to Stalin (Marxismand Problems of Linguistics,1950) in the course of the past few years in Russia, “the oldcapitalist base has been liquidated and a new base has been built, asocialist base. Inparallel,the superstructure of the capitalist base has been liquidated, and anew superstructure has been created (…) Despite this the Russianlanguage has remained fundamentally what it was before the OctoberRevolution”.

These gentlemen’s only merit(we don’t know if the text was written by Stalin himself, or in hisname by secretary X or bureau Y) is that they have mastered the artof dressing up their lies in clear, accessible language, the way youwould write after a century’s immersion in bourgeois culture, andabove all in a “casually concrete” manner. Everything seems easyto grasp, and yet it is all just a scam, relapsing entirely into themost rancid bourgeois mode of thought.

The entire transition tookplace “inparallel”.It’s that easy! To which we mustn’t simply reply that such a nicetransition has not taken place, but also that if it had (or if itwill) things would have happened quite differently. Stalin’sformula is that of a country snake-oil merchant. Nothing is left ofdialectical materialism. Doesn’t the base influence thesuperstructure, doesn’t it act on the latter? And in what sensedoes this derived superstructure, which is not simply malleable andpassive, react in its turn? According to which cycles, in whatorder,at what speeddoes this historic transformation take place? Oh, all that isbyzantine distinctions. Just roll up your shirtsleeves, first theright then the left! Destruction!Creation!For God’s sake! Out with the creator, out with the destroyer. Suchmaterialism cannot function without a demiurge, an autonomouscreative force: then everything becomes conscious and voluntary,nothing is necessary or determined.

Whatever. We can confrontStalin’s reasoning with reality. The economic base and thesuperstructure, which were feudal under the Tsar, have become,through the course of complex events, fully capitalist by the end ofStalin’s life. Since the Russian language has remainedfundamentally the same, language is not part of the superstructure,nor of the base.

It appears that this wholecontroversy has been directed against a school of linguistics thathas been suddenly disavowed in high places, and whose leader is theuniversity professor, Nicolai Yakolevitch Marr, whose texts areunknown to us. Marr apparently said that the language is part of thesuperstructure. Given who is condemning him, we could considerProfessor Marr to be a good Marxist. In fact, Stalin wrote, “OnceN.Y. Marr noted that his formula ‘language is a superstructure withrespect to the base’ encountered objections, he decided to‘readjust’ his theory and announced that ‘language is aninstrument of production. Was N.Y. Marr right to classify language asone of the instruments of production? No, he was certainly wrong”.

Why? According to Stalin,there is a certain analogy between language and the means ofproduction, which can also, to some extent, be independent of classrelations. What Stalin means is that, for example, the plough or thehoe can be equally used in a feudal society as in a bourgeois orsocialist society. But the reason why Marr is wrong (and Marx andEngels too, because for them, work and the production of the means ofproduction occurs in combination with language) is that these meansof production produce material goods, whereas language doesn’t. Towhich we reply: but the means of production also do not producematerial goods! It is manwho produces them, using these instruments! Tools are the means whichhumans use to produce. When a child first picks up the hoe by theblade, his father shouts at him: no, pick it up by the handle! Thiscry – which becomes a regular instruction – is, like the hoe,used for production.

Stalin’s smart-aleckconclusion proves that he’s the one who’s got it wrong. Iflanguage, he says, produced material goods, then windbags would bethe richest men in the world! Well, isn’t that so? The labourerworks with his hands, the engineer with his language. Which of themis the better paid? The landed gentleman smokes his pipe sittinginthe shade and shouts ceaselessly at the day-labourer (who is workinghis fingers to the bone in silence): “Get on with it, dig!”fearing that the slightest pause will diminish his profit.

We are familiar neither withMarr nor with his books, but dialectics allow us to suppose thatdespite being menaced with thunderbolts from on high, he has notreally “readjusted” anything. We have ourselves said, forexample, that since the beginning of mnemonic choral singing duringthe age of magical-mystical technology, poetry has been the premiermode of social knowledge transfer, and is therefore a means ofproduction. Then, we placed poetry within the superstructures of anepoch. It is the same for language. Language in general, andversification in general, are means of production. But a givenpoetry, a given school of poetry, within a particular country andwithin a particular epoch, distinct from those that went before andthose that will follow, form part of the ideological and artisticsuperstructure of a given economic form and mode of production. ThusEngels writes that the upper stage of barbarism “begins with thesmelting of iron ore, and passes into civilization with the inventionof alphabetic writing and its use for literary records (…) We findthe upper stage of barbarism at its highest in the Homeric poems,particularly in the Iliad”. We could also cite other passages andcharacterise Dante’s Divine Comedy as a funeral lament forfeudalism, or Shakespeare’s tragedies as a prologue to capitalism.

For Marxism’s last SupremePontiff, iron ore would be a means of production characteristic of anepoch, but not alphabetic writing – because the latter does notproduce material goods! But hasn’t the use of alphabetic writingbeen indispensable, among other things, to arrive at the specialtysteels of the modern ferrous metallurgical industry?

It’s the same for language.Language is always a means of production, but taken individually,languages ​​are part of the superstructure. For example, Dantedoes not write his poem in the classical Latin of the Church butrather in the Italian vernacular; likewise the Reformation marks thefinal abandonment of the ancient Saxon in favour of modern German.

Besides, it’s the same forthe plough and the hoe. While it is true that a given tool canstraddle two great social epochs separated by a class revolution, itis also true that the complete totalityof tools of a given society “classifies” and “defines” it,and that the well-known collision of the forces of production againstthe relations of production compels them to assume the new form thatis appropriate to them. We find the wood-turning lathe in the era ofbarbarism and the precision motor lathe in the era of capitalism. Andevery now and then an old tool will disappear and become amuseum-piece, for example the spinning-wheel mentioned by Engels.

It’s the same for the ploughand the hoe. Industrial capitalist society does not have the means toeliminate gruelling small-scale agricultural cultivation, work thattwists the spine so proudly straightened by Pithecanthropuserectus. Buta communist organisation with a comprehensive industrial base wouldnot use anything other than the mechanized plough. And this societywill have overturned the language of the capitalists: we will nolonger hear the banal formulae which the Stalinists love to use whenaffecting to oppose them: moral, liberty, justice, legality, popular,progressive, democratic, constitutional, constructive, productive,humanitarian etc., i.e. all the words that form precisely the toolsetthanks to which the largest share of society’s wealth ends up inthe pockets of the braggarts, and which fulfils the same role asmaterial instruments such as foreman’s whistle or the gaoler’shandcuffs.

11. The idealist thesis of nationallanguage

12. To deny thathuman language in general arises and functions as a means ofproduction, and that particular written and spoken languages formpart of the superstructure of a class society (even if thetransformation of these superstructures cannot be immediate, butonly gradual) is to fall back entirely to idealist doctrines andpolitically embrace the bourgeois postulate that the advent ofcapitalism brings with it a linguistic revolution, which marks thetransfer of a common language to illiterates speaking differentdialects, producing cultivated people in a politically unitedcountry.

Since, according to Stalin,language is neither a superstructure of the economic base, nor is ita means of production, we should perhaps ask what it is. So, here isStalin’s definition:“Language is a medium, an instrument with the help of which peoplecommunicate with one another, exchange thoughts and understand eachother. Being directly connected with thinking, language registers andfixes in words, and in words combined into sentences, the results ofthe process of thinking and achievements of man’s cognitive activity,and thus makes possible the exchange of thoughts in human society”. Thisshouldbe the Marxist solution to the problem! It is hard to see whatorthodox and traditional ideology would refuse to subscribe to such adefinition, which clearly states that humanity progresses thanks to aresearch effort led by thought and formulated in ideas, and passesfrom the individual phase to collective application through themediation of language, which allows the inventor transmit hisachievement to other men. This conception turns material developmentcompletely on its head, such as we have previously illustrated withreference to our standard texts: from action to speech, from speechto idea; and since this process is not individual but concerns thewhole of society, it would be better to say: from collective work tolanguage, from language to science, from science to collectivethought. The function of thought is only derived and passive in theindividual. The definition offered by Stalin is therefore pureidealism. The alleged exchangeof ideas isnothing but the projection of bourgeois commodity exchange onto theimagination.

Accusing the disgraced Marr ofidealism is strange, as Stalin says he has arrived here by supportingthe thesis of mutation of languages, envisaging a decadence in thefunction of language, which will one day be replaced by other forms.Marr is reproached for having fallen into the quagmire of idealism byimagining that thought can transmit itself without language. But thepeople who presume that they know how to stay afloat on this quagmireare the most pitiful. Indeed, according to them, Marr’s thesiscontradicts Marx’s phrase: “Languageis the immediate reality of thought… Ideas do not existindependently of language”.

But isn’t this clearmaterialist thesis completely contradicted by the definitionreproduced above, which reduces language to a means of exchangingideas and thoughts?

Let us reconstruct Marr’saudacious theory in our own way (which would have to allow us to havea party theory crossing generations and frontiers). Language is –so far Stalin is in agreement – a means which allows men tocommunicate with one another. But would communication between menhave nothing to do with production? This affirms bourgeoiseconomictheory, according to which each individual produces alone and onlycomes into contact with another individual in the marketplace, inorder to swindle him. The correct Marxist formulation would not be,men communicate with one another in order to understand one another,but rather, they communicate with one another in order to produce.Thus the definition of language as a means of production is correct.As for the metaphysical “understand one another”: humanity isalready 600,000 years old and the disciples of the same teacher stillapparently do not understand one another!

So, language is atechnological means of communication. It is the first of these. Butis it the only one? Certainly not. Social evolution brings intobeinga complete raft of increasingly diversified means of communicationand Marr’s research on what could in large measure replace spokenlanguage is absolutely not irrelevant. Marr does not claim in thisrespect that thought, as the immaterial elaboration of an individualsubject, will be transmitted to others without the natural form oflanguage. With his formula on “the operation of thought” heindicates that not only individual metaphysical cogitations, but alsothe full range of technical knowledge relevant to a developed societywill develop in forms that go beyond language. Nothingmagical or eschatological here.

Let’s take a very simpleexample. The skipper of a rowing boat commands “On the stroke”.Same thing for a sail ship and the first steam ships: “Heave ho”,“Full ahead”, “Avast”. But when boats become too large, thecaptain yells his commands down a mouthpiece which communicates withthe engine room. But soon that is insufficient, and beforeloudspeakers arrive – a really retrograde invention – they use amechanical device called an engine order telegraph, later electrical,which consists of a round dial with an indicator, and which puts thecommands right in front of the chief engineer’s eyes. As for thecontrol panel of a modern aircraft, it is covered with instrumentsthat transmit indications to all the sensory organs. Thus, speechgives way to forms of communication which, though less naturalare no less material,just as modern tools are no less material than a branch ripped off atree and used as a weapon.

There is no need to discussthe full range of means of communication embracing spoken language,written language, print, algorithms, internationally agreedmathematical notation etc. In all domains, technical or otherwise,there are universally accepted standards and conventions fortransmitting precise indications (meteorological, electrical,astronomical etc.). All of the electronic applications (such asradar) and all the procedures for receiving and recording symbols arenew connections between men, made necessary by the complexity ofproduction and day-to-day life. In more than a hundred domainscommunication ignores words, grammar and syntax, in defence of whoseimmanence and timelessness Stalin breaks the back of N.Y. Marr.

How could the capitalistsystem admit that the conjugation of the verbs tohave and tocost, or theway in which the possessive adjective is declined, is anything buteternal? How could it ever renounce the use of the possessivepronounas the cornerstone of every utterance? Yet one day we’ll laugh atall that along with “your lordship”, “your humble and obedientservant” and salesmen’s expressions such as “it’s been apleasure doing business with you”.

12. References and distortions

13. One of thefundamental theses of all Marxist texts on this question is that thedemand for a national language is a historical characteristic of allanti-feudal revolutions. A national language is indispensable to theestablishment of communication and business between all the newlyestablished commercial locations within the national market, as isthe free movement of proletarians torn away from feudal bondageacross the national territory, the reduction of traditionalreligious, scholastic and cultural forms which rely on Latin as theintellectual language, and the shredding of local dialects as thepopular form of language.

To support this theory of alanguage that sits above classes, one that is completely new toMarxism, Stalin attempts to overcome the obvious objections from allsides, based on texts by Lafargue, Marx, Engels and even … Stalin.The good Lafargue is thrown overboard, to be sure. In his pamphlet Lalangue française avant et après la revolution,he spoke about the sudden linguistic revolution in France between1789 and 1794. Too short a period, retorts Stalin, and in any case itwas only a small number of words that disappeared from the languageand were replaced by new ones. Yes, but it turns out that these wordsare precisely the ones most closely tied to relations in social life.Some of these words were banned by decrees of the Convention. Let’srefer to the satirical counter-revolutionary anecdote:

“What’s your name, citizen?”
“Marquisde Saint Roiné”.
“Thereare no more marquises!”
“DeSaint Roiné”.
“Thereare no more ‘de’s’”(‘de’ was an aristocratic designation).
“SaintRoiné”.
“Thereare no more Saints!”
“Roiné”.
“Thereare no more kings!”(‘roi’ is French for king).
“Iam born!”(“Je suis né” – ‘né’ is French for born), the unhappy manyelled.

Stalin was right: theparticiple né hadn’tchanged!

In the article “Saint Max”[a chapter in TheGerman Ideology, whichwould only be translated into Italian in 1958] which we admit isunfamiliar to us, Marx writes that the bourgeois has “its own”language, which is “a product of the bourgeoisie” and thislanguage is imbued with the style of mercantilism, of buying andselling. In fact, in the Middle Ages the merchants of Antwerpcommunicated with those of Florence and this is one of the glories ofthe Italian language, the mother-language of capital. While in musicwe still say andante,allegro, pianissimoetc., many Italian words were known in European city-squares: firma,sconto, tratta, riporto(firm, discount, draft, report). As to the smelly jargon ofcommercial correspondence (“with respect to your esteemedcorrespondence of the 25^th inst.”etc.) it became the same everywhere. How does Stalin manage tocounter the incontrovertible citation? By inviting us to readanotherpassage from the same text, where Marx speaks of “theconcentration of dialects into a single national language resultingfrom economic and political concentration”. Whatof it? The linguistic superstructure follows the same process asthe State superstructure and the economic substructure. Theconcentrationof capital, the unification of the national market, politicalconcentration in the capitalist State, are not inherent anddefinitive facts but historical outcomes linked to bourgeoisdomination and cycles of accumulation. It goes the same for theprocess that ensues, the transition of local dialects to a unitarylanguage. The market, the State and power are only national becausethey are bourgeois. Language becomes the national language because itis the language of the bourgeoisie.

Stalin then cites Engels’ The Conditionof the Working Class in England: “theworking class has gradually become a race wholly apart from theEnglish bourgeoisie […] the workers speak other dialects, haveother thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, adifferent religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie”.

Here again, he is grasping atstraws: Engels is not saying that there are class languages, Stalinclaims, since he is speaking about dialect, and dialect is aderivative of the national language! But haven’t we demonstratedthat, on the contrary, the national language is a synthesis ofdialects (or the result of a struggle between different dialects) andthat this is a class process, tied to the victory of a specificclass, the bourgeoisie?

As for Lenin, he mustapologise for having said that there are two cultures undercapitalism, bourgeois and proletarian, and that the slogan ofnational culture under capitalism is a nationalist slogan. Stalinmight get away with thinking that he can emasculate the braveLafargue, but Marx, Engels and Lenin, that’s another matter.Evidently one can reply that culture and language are two differentthings. But which came first? For the idealists, who believe inabstract thought, it is culture that came before language anddominates it; but for materialists, speech coming before ideas,culture can only materialise once there is language. What Marx andLenin say is this: the bourgeoisie will never admit that its cultureis a class culture. On the contrary, the bourgeoisie affirms that itis a national culture belonging to a people. Overestimating theimportance of national language therefore acts as a brake on theformation of a proletarian and revolutionary class culture, orbetter, theory.

The fun really starts whenStalin, like Filippo Argenti in Dante’s Inferno,bites himself. At the XVI Congress of the Russian party, Stalin statedthat in the epoch ofworld socialism all the national languages would blend into one. Thisformula really seems the most radical of all, and it is not easy toreconcile with everything that was clearly stated later about thestruggle between two languages and the victory of one over the other,absorbed without trace. Stalin attempts to dig himself out of thishole by alleging that we have not understood that this involves twocompletely different historical epochs: the struggle andcross-fertilisation of languages takes place in the fully capitalistperiod, whereas the international language will take shape under fullsocialism. And so, it is “absurdto require that the era of the rule of socialism is not incontradiction with the era of the rule of capitalism, that socialismand capitalism are not mutually exclusive”.

Okay, now we are dumbfounded!Is this the full force of Stalinist propaganda stating that thedominance of socialism in Russia not only does not exclude that ofcapitalism in the West, but can peacefully co-exist with it?

Only one legitimate conclusioncan be drawn from all this mess: Russian power coexists with thewestern capitalist countries because it is also a national power, andits national language, whose integrity is so ferociously defended, isas distant from the future international language as its culture isdistant from the revolutionary theory of the global proletariat.

However, in Marxismand problems of linguistics Stalinhimself is obliged to recognise at certain moments that the nationalformation of language closely reflects the formation of States and ofnational markets, and that this is a characteristic phenomenon of thebourgeois epoch: “Later,with the appearance of capitalism, the elimination of feudal divisionand the formation of national markets, nationalities developed intonations, and the languages of nationalities into national languages”.This is well said, but less so what follows: “Historyshows that national languages are not class, but common languages,common to all the members of each nation and constituting the singlelanguage of that nation”.

History says this is whathappens precisely when capitalism establishes itself! In Italy, thelords, the priests and cultivated people spoke Latin, the peopleTuscan. In England, the nobles spoke French and the people English.In Russia, the revolutionary struggle meant that the aristocratscontinued to speak French, the socialists German, and the peasantsnot Russian but a dozen languages and scores of dialects. If themovement had continued on Lenin’s revolutionary path it would soonhave developed a language of its own. You all jabbered on in“international French” already. But Joseph Stalin didn’tunderstand that either. He only hears Georgian and Russian. This wasthe man in the new situation, a situation where one language swallowsup ten others, using as its weapon the literary tradition, asituation of utter and ruthless nationalism, whereby language andeverything else follow the law of centralisation and this language isdeclared to be the country’s intangible heritage.

It may seem strange – thoughnot if you consider that Stalinism wants to continue to exploit thesympathies and adherence of the proletariat of other countriestowards Marxist traditions – that Stalin takes up this decisivepassage from Lenin: “Languageis the most important means of human intercourse. Unity of languageand its unimpeded development form one of the most importantconditions for genuinely free and extensive commercial intercourseappropriate to modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping ofthe population in all its separate classes”. Andthus it is clearly stated that the demand for a national language isnot eternal but historical. It is – profitably – tied to theappearance of developed capitalism.

But it is also clear thateverything will be turned upside-down when capitalism, mercantilismand the division of society into classes fall apart. Along with theseinstitutions, national languages will perish. For the revolution thatmoves against these institutions, from the moment that fullcapitalism has triumphed, the demand for a national language belongsin the enemy camp.

13. Personal dependence andeconomic dependence

14. It is a radicaltheoretical perversion to limit historical materialism to epochswhere there existed directly mercantile and monetary relationsbetween the holders of products and instruments of production(including land). The materialist theory applies also to precedingepochs, where individual property did not yet exist but the firsthierarchies were starting to assert themselves on familial andsexual relations. This error, of abandoning all the phenomenatouching the sphere of reproduction and the family to“non-determinist” factors is of the same type that, at the otherextreme, excludes the linguistic factor from the class dynamic, asis always the case when you banish the laws of dialecticalmaterialism from crucial areas of social life.

A recent text aims to disprovethe Marxist interpretation of history, claiming that this is limitedto deducing historical developments from the clash of classes thathave opposed interests in economic riches and their division (which,unfortunately, is what some imprudent and naïve partisans of thecommunist movement also believe). The author gives the example ofAncient Rome, which already had a complete organisation at the levelof the State although social interaction was not based on relationsbetween classes (rich patrician landed property owners, poor andplebeian peasants or artisans, and slaves) but rather, on theauthority of the father of the family.

The author of this text (DeVisscher, Propertyand power in ancient Rome,Brussels 1952) distinguishes two phases in the history of the Romanlegal system: a more recent phase, which established the civil lawwhich the modern bourgeoisie has made its own, with the freedom totrade in objects and every type of moveable or unmoveable property,and a more ancient phase, in which law and order were differentbecause in the majority of cases transfers and sales were forbidden,or strictly subordinated to rules based on the patriarchal model offamilial organisation. One could talk of the “capitalist” and“feudal” phases with the reservation that within this feudalismand capitalism of the antique world there was a social class thatdisappeared in the Middle Ages and in the modern epoch, the slaves.The latter were excluded from the law, considered to be objectsrather than legal subjects. Limited to the sphere of free men, i.e.citizens, an order based on the family and personal dependence withinit preceded a social order based on the free transfer of goodsbetween consenting buyers and sellers.

The author therefore believeshe has refuted the “prioritythat historical materialism has long-since attributed to notions ofproperty law in the development of institutions”.He would be right if the substructure referred to by historicalmaterialism was the simple economic phenomenon of property in themodern sense of the term. But in reality this substructure embracesthe whole of the life of the species and of the group as well as allregulation of the relations arising from difficulties in theenvironment, and in particular regulation of reproduction and thefamilial organisation.

As we know – and as we willsee again in the Part 2 – private property and the institutions ofclass power had not yet appeared in the old communities and groups ofsiblings. But work and production have already appeared, and this iswhat constitutes the material base that Marxism refers to, and whichgoes way beyond the narrow legal and economic interpretation of theterm. It is this material base which, as we have shown, bindstogether the “production of the producers”, that is to say thereproduction of members of the tribe which perpetuates itself withabsolute racial purity.

Within this pure gens,there is no other dependence and no other authority than that of theadult, healthy and vigorous adult over the young ones who have to beraised and prepared for a simple and tranquil social life. The firstauthority that appeared when promiscuity of the sexes between themale and female groups started to be limited was matriarchy, wherethe materis the leader of the community; but there is not yet any division ofthe land or anything else. This division would take place based onpatriarchy, first polygamous, then monogamous: the male head of thefamily is a veritable administrative, military and political leader,who disciplines the activity of his sons and that of prisonersreduced to slavery. We are on the threshold of the formation of aclass State.

At this point it is possibleto broadly construe the old Roman order of mancipium,which is lasted a millennium (Justinian finally erased the lasttraces). People and things belonged to the paterfamilias:wife or wives, free sons, slaves and their children, all thelivestock, land and tools, products and foodstuffs. In the beginning,all these goods are inalienable except via a rare and difficultmedium which was known as emancipation, and conversely, one could notacquire them other than through mancipation,from which comes the famous distinction between resmancipii,inalienable things, and resnec mancipii,things that were marketable and formed part of a normal patrimonium,liable to grow or diminish.

Now, while in the secondstage, when there is no more mancipiires, andeverything is a free article of commerce (for non-slaves) it iseconomic value that prevailed, and everyone recognised that thestruggle for political power rested on the different interests ofopposing social classes according to the division of land and wealth,in the first stage the determining element was not economic value orproperty arising from free purchase, but the personal imperium ofthe headof the family, where the order that was in force recognised the threefaculties of the mancipium,the manus(legal power) and the patriapotestas (paternalauthority) which made it the bedrock of the society of the time.

For the Marxist itis obviously a fallacious argument to state that economic determinismdoes not apply to the first stage. The fallacy is based on thetautology according to which in the mercantile system everythingtakes place between “equals”, and that personal dependencies havedisappeared to give way to exchange between equivalents based on thefamous law of value. But Marxism demonstrates precisely that theunlimited “Justinian” commercial exchange of products andinstruments of production resulted in a new and burdensome form ofdependence for members of the labouring and exploited classes.

It is thus very easy to refutethe erroneous assertion that whenever a social relation is based on afamilial order, it must be interpreted not via the productiveeconomy, but in “emotional” terms, which would be to surrenderbefore the unfurled banner of idealism. Even the system ofrelationships based on generation and family arose in order torespond optimally to the needs of the group in its physicalenvironment and the necessities of production, and this causalrelationship also conforms to the laws of materialism which willbecome, much later, the phase of utilitarian exchanges betweenindividual holders of title to products.

A Marxist would certainly fallvictim to idealist reaction if he was incapable of seeing this and ifhe admitted, even for a moment, that alongside factors of economicinterest made concrete by the possession of private patrimony and theexchange of privately owned goods (including human labour power),factors such as sexuality, familial affection, love etc. could existin a separate manner as elements that are not driven by the samematerialist dynamic; to say nothing of the trivial position accordingto which, at certain moments, these factors blow away and overturnthe facts of the economic base under the pressure of superior forces.

On the contrary, historicalmaterialism builds its immense and difficult construction, whichembraces all manifestations of human activity up to and including themost complex and grandiose, on a single cornerstone: that of theeffort required for the immediate survival of the species, whichbrings together inseparably the provision of foodstuffs andreproduction and which, if necessary, subordinates the preservationof the individual to that of the species.

* * *

We will conclude Part 1 byquoting Engels’ Originsonce again in order to affirm our doctrinal fidelity and ourabhorrence of novelties. It is always the evolution of theinstruments of production which forms the basis of the transitionfrom patriarchal imperiumto free private property. The social division of labour betweenartisans and farmers and between the town and the countryside alreadyappeared at the upper stage of barbarism. War and slavery had alreadystarted much earlier:

“The distinction of richand poor appears beside that of freemen and slaves - with the newdivision of labour, a new cleavage of society into classes. Theinequalities of property among the individual heads of families breakup the old communal household communities wherever they had stillmanaged to survive, and with them the common cultivation of the soilby and for these communities. The cultivated land is allotted for useto single families, at first temporarily, later permanently. Thetransition to full private property is gradually accomplished,parallel with the transition of the pairing marriage into monogamy.The single family is becoming the economic unit of society”.

Once again dialectics teachesus that the single family – this clamed fundamental social valuecelebrated by bourgeois believers and rationalists, whichcharacterises private property-based societies – is itself only atransitory institution. Having no basis outside materialdetermination (including sexuality and love) it will be destroyed bythe victory of communism: materialist theory has analysed thetotality of its development and has condemned it already.

14. From race to nation

1. The transitionfrom the ethnic group or “people” to the “nation” only takesplace with the appearance of the political State, whose fundamentalcharacteristics are the delimitation of national boundaries andorganisation of the armed forces; this transition can thus only takeplace after the dissolution of primitive communism and the formationof social classes.

Leaving aside all literaryinterpretation and all idealist influences, we attribute the categoryof “race” to biological facts and the category of “nation” togeographical facts. However, it is necessary to make a distinctionbetween the nation as a historical fact, and nationality, which mustbe understood as a grouping that is affected by two factors, racialand political, at the same time.

Race is a biological fact: tofind out the race of a given animal you don’t ask where it wasborn, but rather, who were its parents; and if both (which is rare inthe contemporary world) are of the same ethnic type, then theoffspring they gave birth to belong to this type and can be classedwithin a definite race. You can find the Yorkshire, the beautifulbreed of pig also known as the English Large White, everywhere. Theyare named after the English county where they were rigorouslyselectively bred, which can only be done with animals (and here thePope is right) and not with men, short of putting the two sexes in acage like they used to do under certain forms of slavery. The sameapplies for Breton cattle, the Great Dane breed of dogs, Siamese catsand so forth: the geographical name is only indicative of a breed.

But such things also occur forpeople today: thus in the United States of America (apart fromblacks, who in certain Confederate States are still forbidden tomarry whites) you will find the U.S. citizen Primo Carnera with amother and father from Friuli, and a whole bunch of Gennaro Espositoswho have pure Neapolitan blood but are proud of their Americanidentity cards.

However, the classification ofpersons by nation is based on purely geographical rather thanbiological or ethnic facts: it depends in general on the place wherethe person was born, apart from special cases such as people born atsea. But an increasing number of nations presents a difficult tangleof several nationalities, i.e. not just races (which are becomingprogressively more or less impossible to define in biological terms)but rather groups that differ according to language, customs,traditions, culture etc.

We can still speak of a“people” to describe the mass of nomads bringing together severaltribes of kindred race who once wandered entire continents in searchof the lands that could nourish them, and who often invaded theterritories of peoples already settled there to plunder them or tosettle in their place. But before such settlement has taken place, wewould obviously have no right to call this mass of nomads a nation,since this term refers to the place of its birth, which remainsunknown and a matter of indifference to members of a horde who,having wagons and luggage as their principal habitation, forget thetopography of their itineraries.

The idea of a fixed territoryreferring to a human group implies the idea of a frontier delimitingits zone of residence and work, and ordinary historians habituallyadd that it implies the defence of these frontiers against othergroups, and therefore a fixed organisation of guards and armies, ahierarchy, a power. In reality, the origin of hierarchies, of power,of the State comes before such time as the human population has grownto the point of disputing territories; it relates to the internalprocesses of social clusters which evolve from the first forms ofclan and tribe, once the cultivation of the soil and agriculturalproduction are sufficiently technologically developed to allowactivity to stabilise over the seasonal cycles on the same fields andmeadows.

15. The emergence of the State

2. The preconditionfor the emergence of the State is the formation of social classes.Among all peoples, this formation is determined by the division ofarable land between individuals and families, and, in parallel, bythe different phases of the division of social labour and functions,which results in each of the various elements in general productiveactivity being accorded a particular position and the appearance ofdifferentiated hierarchies responsible for elementary crafts,military action and religious magic (the first form of technicalknow-how and schooling), the latter detached from the immediate lifeof the gens andthe primitive family.

We don’t need to outline theMarxist theory of the State in its entirety here, but it is of theutmost interest for establishing the structures of the historiccollectivities that are indicative of the term nation. In fact, thestructures have a far superior complexity to the banal criterionaccording to which each individual, taken alone, binds himselfdirectly to the land of his birth, the nation being a totality ofindividual molecules, each similar to one another. This concept hasnothing scientific in it and simply reflects the ideology of thedominant bourgeois class of the modern age.

The theory of the State not asa body of people or nation or society, but rather as the organ ofpower of a given class, is fundamental in Marx. Lenin restored theintegrity of this theory against the systematic theoretical andpractical falsification that was applied by the socialists of theSecond International, relying specifically on the explanation of theemergence of the State contained in Engels’ classic work on theorigins of the family and property, which has guided us in our studyof the course of prehistory. During that era the ethnic element cameinto play in a still pure and so to speak virgin condition, in theprimitive sharing of work, brotherhood and love that reigned in theancient and noble (in the concrete sense of the word) tribes and gens.The myths of all peoples remember this as a golden age of the firstmen who knew nothing of crime or bloodshed.

We will thereforepick up the thread in Engels’ illuminating text that can lead us tothe explanation of the struggles of nationalities, and thematerialist conclusion that once again it is not an inherent factor,but a product that has certain historical beginnings and cycles, andwhich will draw to a conclusion and disappear under the conditionsthat are already largely developedin the modern world. But our original view in no way implies that ourdoctrine and in particular our action, which is inseparable from it,disregards this fundamental process, the national process (when wesay “our” doctrine, this does not mean a doctrine that belongs toone or several individual subjects, but rather the doctrine of ourpresent century-old and global movement). It implies still less thatwe are committing the enormous historical blunder of declaring thisphenomenon settled in relation to the proletarian class strugglewithin the framework of contemporary international politics.

Engels summarises the processwith regard to ancient Greece and the great historical form ofMediterranean classical antiquity that ended with the fall of theRoman Empire:

“Thus in the Greekconstitution of the heroic age we see the old gentile order as stilla living force. But we also see the beginnings of its disintegration:father-right, with transmission of the property to the children, bywhich accumulation of wealth within the family was favoured and thefamily itself became a power as against the gens; reaction of theinequality of wealth on the constitution by the formation of thefirst rudiments of hereditary nobility and monarchy; slavery, atfirst only of prisoners of war, but already preparing the way for theenslavement of fellow-members of the tribe and even of the gens; theold wars between tribe and tribe already degenerating into systematicpillage by land and sea for the acquisition of cattle, slaves andtreasure, and becoming a regular source of wealth; in short, richespraised and respected as the highest good and the old gentile ordermisused to justify the violent seizure of riches. Only one thing waswanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquiredriches of individuals against the communistic traditions of thegentile order”.

(Note that we already took theopportunity that we should understand this word “gentile” in thesense of “relating to the gens”,to avoid any confusion with the less ancient concept of aristocracyas a class within the gens,which does not recognise classes, as all are of pure blood andtherefore equal: we will not adopt the term democracy for this form,as it is a spurious and historically limited word; nor will we usethe term panocracy,since if the first part of this word gives the idea of “all”, thesecond evokes “power”, something unknown at the time; nor was iteven a pananarchy,as anarchy evokes the idea of a struggle by the individual againstthe State, that’s to say between two transitory forms where,moreover, it is often the second that turns the wheel of history. The genshad a typically communist organisation, but limited to a pure racialgroup: it was thus an “ethnocommunism” while “our” communism,towards which our historic programme tends, is no longer ethnic ornational but rather the communismof the species,which the historical cycles of property, power and productive andcommercial expansion have made feasible.)

The passage continues:

“Only one thing waswanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquiredriches of individuals against the communistic traditions of thegentile order, which not only sanctified the private propertyformerly so little valued, and declared this sanctification to be thehighest purpose of all human society; but an institution which setthe seal of general social recognition on each new method ofacquiring property and thus amassing wealth at continually increasingspeed; an institution which perpetuated, not only this growingcleavage of society into classes, but also the right of thepossessing class to exploit the non-possessing, and the rule of theformer over the latter.
“And this institutioncame. The Statewas invented”.

And it is Engels again whodefines the territorial criterion: “Incontrast to the old gentile organisation, the State is distinguishedfirstly by the grouping of its members on a territorial basis. Theold gentile bodies, formed and held together by ties of blood, had,as we have seen, become inadequate largely because they presupposedthat the gentile members were bound to one particular locality,whereas this had long ago ceased to be the case. The territory wasstill there, but the people had become mobile. The territorialdivision was therefore taken as the starting point and the systemintroduced by which citizens exercised their public rights and dutieswhere they took up residence, without regard to gens or tribe”.

16. Stateswithout nation

3. In the ancientempires of the Asiatic Orient, whose political formations come priorto the Hellenic, we encounter fully developed forms of State power,corresponding to enormous concentrations of landed wealth hoarded bythe lords, satraps and sometimes theocrats, and the subjugation ofvast masses of prisoners, slaves, serfs and pariahs of the land. Butwe cannot yet speak of national formations even thoughcharacteristics of the State are already present: politicalterritory and armed forces.

The obvious exception of theJewish people is useful in allowing us to clarify the last step ofEngels’ reasoning mentioned in the previous point. We should notconfuse the territory which, inless ancient times, defines the fully developed State form, and therelationship between the gensand a given territorywhich is subsequently broken while the inviolable bloodrelationship remains.

The territory of the gensdoes not belong to it in the modern political sense, nor even, if youlike, in the strictly economic-productive sense. Engels is sayingthat a gensis distinguished from others, also in name, by its territory of origin,and not by the different territories that it occupies to settleand to workcollectively. The relationship between the Indian Iroquois and itsoriginal land was broken over the centuries, not only since whitecivilisation reduced the few survivors to abject reservations,but since the times when different tribes struggled ferociouslyagainst one another, destroying themselves but carefully avoiding anykind of fusion, resulting in their displacement by thousands ofkilometres in the immense forests (largely since transformed, thanksto capitalist technology, into deserts that the bourgeoisphilanthropy uses for its nuclear weapons tests).

The Jewish people were thefirst to have a written history, but from the first it is a historyof class struggle, presenting property-owners and expropriated,wealthy and servants, casually leaping from primitive communism,which is only recalled in Eden, because Cain, the founder andinventor of the class struggle, already appears in the secondgeneration. The Jewish people thus form an organised State, expertlyorganised even, with clear hierarchies and rigorous constitutions.But it doesn’t become a nation, any more than its Assyrian, Mede orEgyptian barbarian enemies; and this despite the racial purity of theJews, which was in total contrast to the indifference in this regardof the satraps and pharaohs, whose courts abounded with servants,slaves and sometimes even bureaucrats and officers of differentcolour and ethnic origins, and whose gynaeceumswere populated with white, black and yellow concubines, alloriginating from military raids and the subjugation of primitive freetribes or other States that had existed before their own at the heartof Asia or Africa.

The Hebrews, divided into 12tribes, were not assimilated by other peoples, even after theirdefeats. The tribes and the gens,now transformed into traditionally monogamous patriarchal families,did not lose the pure blood ties, the name of their country of originand their boring genealogical tradition (although it should be notedthat the close attachment to the paternal lineage of the Jews largelytolerates marriage with women of other races) even after territorialdeportations, as with the legendary captivity in Babylon and Egypt.The mythical attachment to the promised land is a pre-national form,because even when the ethnic community, which conserved a relativepurity, returned to its country of origin, its ethnological cradle,it could not give itself a historically stable politicalorganisation, and the land continued to be crossed by armies of themost various and distant powers. The wars of the Bible are thestruggles of tribes more than wars of national liberation or imperialconquest, and the region remained the theatre of historic clashesbetween the forces of many other peoples aspiring to hegemony in thisstrategic area of the ancient as well as the modern world.

Likewise the Greeks in theTrojan War did not yet constitute a nation, although they formed afederation of small States in neighbouring territories and a veryvague ethnic community, given the completely different origin of theIonians and Dorians and the confluence in the Hellenic peninsula ofancient migrations from the four points of the compass. The forms ofproduction, the State constitutions, the customs, the languages andcultural traditions differed considerably in each of these smallconfederated military monarchies. Even in the historic wars againstthe Persians, unity was no more than circ*mstantial and itdisappeared to give way to bitter wars for hegemony in thePeloponnese and the whole of Greece.

17. The Hellenic nation and culture

4. National factorsappeared in an obvious manner in ancient Greece, already in thesocial organisation of Athens, Sparta and other cities, and evenmore so in the Macedonian State which not only unified the country,but also rapidly became the centre of the first imperial conquest inantiquity. The literature and ideology of this nationalism not onlytransferred to the Roman world, but would supply the framework forthe national intoxication of modern bourgeoisies.

The Spartan State, as well asthe Athenian or Theban States, were not only perfect States in thepolitical sense of the term, with precisely delimited territories,legal institutions and a central power from which emanated civil andmilitary hierarchies. They attained the form of nations to the extentthat although their social fabric preserved the division between richand poor classes in relation to agricultural and artisanal productionand to the already well-developed domestic and foreign trade, andalthough it fully guaranteed the political power of economicallypowerful social strata, that same social fabric also acquiesced in alegal and administrative framework that applied the same formalstandards to all citizens, and assured the participation of allcitizens on equal terms in popular elective assemblies with votingrights. Such a legal infrastructure plays a role that issubstantially similar to the one that Marxism has denounced inbourgeois parliamentary democracies, but a fundamental differenceruns between the two historic modes of social organisation: todayeveryone is a citizen and it is stated that everyone is equal beforethe law; however, back then the total citizenry forming the actualnation excluded the slave class, who were nevertheless extremelynumerous at certain stages of history, denying them every politicaland civic right.

Despite this, and despite theclass antagonism between aristocrats and commoners, between richpatricians and merchants on the one hand and ordinary workers livingon their wages on the other, this form of social organization wasaccompanied by great developments not only in work and in technologyand thus in the applied sciences, but also in pure science.Participation in production on the basis of equality and freedom,despite class exploitation, translates into unprecedented prominencefor language, with literature and art reaching new heights. Languagereiterates the national tradition that serves the leaders of societyand the State by binding all citizens to the nation’s destiny andobliging them to render military service and to make whateversacrifice or contribution is required whenever the national organismand its essential structures are menaced.

Literature, history and poetrylargely reflect the affirmation of these values, making patriotismthe primary motor of every social function, exalting fraternitybetween each and every citizen at every step, while condemning civilwars and struggles. Despite everything, these were frequent andinevitable; they were habitually presented as conspiracies againstholders of title to power by other power-hungry groups orindividuals, when in reality they were born out of the opposition ofinterests between classes and discontent among the great mass ofcitizens, who were fed a lot of illusions but were tormented bypoverty, even when the splendour of the polis was at itszenith.

However, this nationalsolidarity was by no means a pure illusion, a mirage created by thepowerful and privileged, but rather is determined by economicinterests and the needs of the material forces of production in agiven phase of history. The transition from primitive localisedfarming in Greece, which enjoys a favourable climate but whose soilis typically arid and rocky, and which could only feed a poor andunder-developed population, would give way to the most intensecommercial navigation from one end of the Mediterranean to the other,bringing products from distant countries and allowing the diffusionof the increasingly differentiated handcraft products and a genuineancient type of industry, which led, in particular in the harbourdistricts, a considerable growth in population and a spectacularevolution of its way of life. This evolution could not have takenplace within a closed and despotic form of State such as the greatempires of the continent; it needed a democratic and open form,producing not only peasants and helots (serfs) but also artisanscapable of working for large naval architects and the city workshops,as well as workers who, though certainly less numerous than today,were nevertheless necessary to the development of this early form ofcapitalism and its unforgettable splendours.

In its ascendant phase, eachtriumph, each blooming of new forms of labour, still exploitative butfreed from the immobilising ties to a specific place and thefossilised ancient technologies, drove a great development inscience, art and architecture in the superstructure, which wasreflected in the opening of new ideological horizons for societiespreviously tied to closed and traditional doctrines. We willrediscover this phenomenon with the European Renaissance, asfeudalism goes into decline; many argue that the golden age of Greekculture remains unsurpassed, but this is just the exercise of aliterary device. We can nevertheless assert that the “bridge”thrown by the “national human community” across economicinequality at this time, when democracy excluded slaves from thehuman community as if they were animals, was more solid than it wasduring its historical reappearance 15 or 20 centuries later, whichclaims to have closed the social abyss separating the owners ofcapital from the disinherited proletariat.

Engels recalls that at themoment of its greatest splendour, Athens numbered no more than 20,000free citizens (elsewhere wrongly quoted as 90,000) as against asagainst 360,000 slaves who not only worked the land but also providedthe workforce for the aforementioned industries, together with 45,000“protected” persons, emancipated slaves or foreigners deprived ofcivic rights.

It is quite valid to say thatsuch a social structure delivered a degree of “civilisation” tothe way of life for these 20,000 elect that was qualitatively betterthan the one that present-day capitalism offers to modern “free”peoples, despite the considerably superior resources of capitalisttechnology.

None of this makes us want tojoin in with the ecstatic concert of admiration for the grandeur ofancient Greek art and philosophy, and not simply because thesemarvels were built on the backs of slaves who were twenty times morenumerous than free men; before Solon, these free men were exploitedby the landed plutocracy to the point that the system of mortgagescould reduce the bankrupt free citizen to slavery. When Athens wentinto the age of decadence, not wanting to compete with thecontemptible slaves (the pride of the free Athenian was so greatthat, rather than become a cop, he preferred that the State police bemanned by hired slaves, such that a slave could arrest free men) freeAthenians went on to form a veritable lumpenproletariat,a class of beggars whose revolts against the oligarchs brought ruinupon the glorious republic.

Engels makes a comparison herethat says everything about Marxism’s position with respect toapologetics for the great historical civilisations. The IroquoisIndians were unable to raise themselves to the levels attained by theoriginal Greek gens,who were quite similar to the people studied by Morgan in modernAmerica (the newspapers have recently reported on similar primitivecommunities in the Andaman Islands of the Indian Ocean, peopleisolated from the rest of humanity until now, who have been visitedby Italian explorers on behalf of the new Indian regime). TheIroquois lacked a number of material conditions of production becauseof geography, climate and the communications between peoples affordedby the sea, and in particular the Mediterranean. And yet, in themodest sphere of their local economy, the Iroquois communists “masteredtheir conditions of work and their products”,which were distributed according to human needs.

By contrast, even though themomentum behind Greek production allowed it to attain its grandiosediversity, reaching the dizzying heights of the Parthenon friezes,Phidias’ Venus, the paintings of Zeuxis and the platonicabstractions that modern thought has yet to surpass, man’s productsstarted to become commoditiesthat were circulated in monetary markets. Whether slave or free manaccording to the laws of Lycurgus or Solon, man became slave to therelations of production and to be dominated by his own product. Thetremendous revolution that would free him from chains, whosestrongest links were forged in the “golden” age of history, wasstill far off.

“The Iroquois were stillvery far from controlling nature, but within the limits imposed onthem by natural forces they did control their own production. […]That was the immense advantage of barbarian production, which waslost with the coming of civilization; to reconquer it, but on thebasis of the gigantic control of nature now achieved by man and ofthe free association now made possible, will be the task of the nextgenerations”.

Herein lies the cruxof Marxism, and you can understand why the Marxist smiles when somenaïve individual delights in certain stages of human evolution,attributing them to the works of great scientists, philosophers,artists and poets, who raise us, according to the stupid contemporaryformula, above class and party. We do not want to crown this“civilisation”; we want to bring it crashing to its foundations.

18. Romannation and force

5. The nationalfactor reaches its highest expression in Roman antiquity in the ageof the Republic, which added the positive domains of organisationand law to the model furnished by the Greeks in the cultural domain.The Roman Empire established itself on the foundations of the Romannation and extended to become the only organised State for all knownhumanity at the time. But the Empire itself could not withstand thepressure exerted by the growth of populations arriving from unknownand distant lands who, themselves driven on by material imperativesto expand the life of the species, had in their turn entered intothe same great cycle of productive development that had led theMediterranean peoples from small gensto this immense empire.

The national process in Italydiffered from that in Greece to the extent that there were no longerthese little city-States which, while having customs and levels ofproductive development that were hardly different from one another,competed to achieve hegemony over the entire peninsula. In Italy, thesun went down on civilisations preceding that of the Romans; thesehad reached advanced forms of production, and they undoubtedly hadState powers, but they cannot be regarded as having constitutednations in the proper sense of the term. After their decline, Romebecame the centre of a single State organisation with legal,political and military structures that enabled it to absorb all theothers rapidly and in an increasingly vast territory, which soonextended beyond the borders of Latium to arrive at the Mediterraneanand the Po. As the already very remarkable productive forces of avast territory were coordinated with those of Roman society, Rome’ssocial and State organisation, along with its administrative andlegal system, were applied everywhere and in an increasingly uniformmanner.

A complex division of labour,with crafts, trade, navigation and industry emerged alongside theagricultural productive base less rapidly than in Greece. But soonits military conquests on the other side of the Ionian and Adriaticseas allowed Rome to absorb the knowledge of technological andcultural organisation that already existed among the Greeks and otherpeoples.

The social configuration wasnot substantially different from that of Greece, as the contributionof slave labour remained very important. But the spread ofmercantilism, slower but deeper, accentuated the scale of socialdivision within the society of free men: organisation and rightsthemselves rested on the census, which classified Roman citizensaccording to their wealth.

The Roman citizen was obligedto render military service, while the bearing of arms was rigorouslydenied to the slave and to the mercenary right up to the Empire’sdecadence. The legionary army is a genuinely national army: thiscannot be said of Greece and still less of the army of Alexander theGreat. The latter advanced, however impetuously, to the frontiers ofIndia, where death stopped the young general; but that was in factthe absolute limit that the crushing superiority of the Western formof the State could reach against the gangs of diverse Asianprincipalities. The attempt at a worldwide organisation soondisintegrated once it had been divided into several chunks, notbecause Alexander was no longer there, but because the centralisedState was still in its infancy.

Roman organisation was notmerely at the level of the State; it was truly national – not justbecause the citizen took part directly in war and the construction ofa network of roadworks and fortifications in all of the occupiedterritories, but also because of agrarian colonisation, theallocation of land to soldiers, and thus the immediate implantationof Roman forms of production, economy and law. This was not a race toplunder the sought-after hidden treasures of legendary peoples, butrather the systematic extension of a given mode of productiveorganisation across an ever-expanding radius, crushing any armedresistance, but immediately accepting the conquered people’scollaboration in production.

Nonetheless, it is not easy todefine the limits of the Roman nation, as they varied over time. Itis even more difficult to trace its ethnographic profile. As everyoneknows, from the racial point of view pre-historic Italy was notunified and could not possibly be so, as the peninsular was too opena crossroads between North and South, East and West, in the mostdensely populated settlements of all time. Even if we assume that thefirst Latins (leaving aside their mythical Trojan origins)constituted a single racial entity, they were nevertheless verydifferent from their near neighbours: the Volsci, the Samnites, theSabines, not to mention the mysterious Etruscans, Ligures etc.

The Roman citizen or civisromanus,with his rights and his proverbial national pride, soon extendedbeyond the original city (the Urbs)across all of Latium; as for the Italic people, they were organisedin municipiaunto which the centralist criterion of State organisation could notconcede any autonomy, preferring after several centuries to conferthe title of Roman citizen on any free men who lived there, alongwith all of the privileges and obligations this implied.

The nation as fact hereachieved its most powerful expression ever in the ancient world andalong with it, the greatest historical stability known up to thepresent day. We have thus travelled a long distance from ethniccommunities based on blood-brotherhood. All of Rome’s freecitizens, though divided into social classes, were united by a commoneconomic system for the production and exchange of goods: from thegreat latifundian patrician, who possessed properties in the fourcorners of the Empire, to the small-holding peasant and theproletarian in the Urbsliving, in difficult periods, on flour distributed by the State.They were likewise ruled by the same inflexible legal code, for whichthe State’s armed forces demanded respect without exception acrossthe Empire’s immense territory.

The history of socialstruggles and civil wars within the walls of Rome itself are wellknown; but its vicissitudes did not diminish the solidity and thehom*ogeneity of the superb edifice responsible for the administrationof all the productive resources of the most distant countries, andwhich covered them with lasting monuments having the most diverseproductive functions: roads, aqueducts, baths, markets, forums,theatres etc.

19. Nationality in decline

6. The decadenceand fall of the Roman Empire brought an end to the period of historyin which nationality and organisation into States represented thedecisive factors directing the development of productive forces.

National solidarity, whichdoes not exclude periods of violent class struggle between free menof varying social and economic conditions, had a clear economicbasis: the development of the system of production common to all thecitizens of the nation provided, at the expense of masses of slaves,a continuous supply of new resources that raised standards of livingin general, such as the replacement of the simple pastoral economy byfixed arable agriculture, of extensive cultivation by horticulturewith irrigation, of primitive semi-nomadism by the subdivision andcommercialisation of the land as well as slaves and livestock. Theeconomic and then urban economy of Rome also had as its startingpoint the primitive collectivist economy of the local gentes,which had to give way because it was no longer capable of sustainingpopulations that had grown rapidly thanks to the mild climate. Engelspaints a quick but complete picture of its origins, showing that thefirst Roman laws were derived from the first gentile rules, andrefuting the old theses of historians such as Mommsen (refer in thisrespect to the last chapter of Part 1, the refutation of a veryrecent author who denies that historical materialism can apply tothis period).

The saleability of land andcommercialisation of movable goods under Roman law represented thesuperstructure of forceof a new productive economy, whose output was superior to that oftribal primitive community, and this fact explains the origin of thesystem; but other economic facts explain the political and historicalevents that marked its end. The growth of wealth created by tradeacross an immense area and the accumulation of slave labour created adeep fissure in the once solid “national front”. The smallfarmers who had fought forthe fatherlandand laboriously colonised the conquered lands saw themselves evermore expropriated and pauperised, while slaves that had beenpurchased with the rich landowners’ treasures (as well as herds oflarge and small livestock purchased under the same title) replacedthem on their fertile meadows, plunging them into ruin. Maintainingthe relationship between free men and slaves required a relativelylow population density, which provided the slaves with the materialmeans to live and reproduce, while allowing free men to experiencethe rich assortment of satisfactions of the golden age. But when theamount of land beyond the frontiers started to diminish, migratingand demographically rampant populations swelled the numbers of peopleaspiring to a better life, the degeneracy of farming methodsconfirmed itself and the inevitable crisis arrived. Agricultureregressed to the point of being able to feed neither animal norslave, and as the disorganisation got worse the master took theinitiative and freed his slaves, which only inflated the masses ofmiserable free men without work and without land.

The links between the regionsin this mighty edifice began to loosen and it was no longer able tointervene when local shortages occurred. As demographic growthencountered famine, human groups were reduced to local, impoverishedeconomic circles, tight circles that were no longer those of theancient tribes: the profound changes that had occurred, the newrelations between the instruments of production, goods and humanneeds, were not sufficient to modify the situation. The nation thathad become an empire fragmented into small units lacking theconnective tissue of the law, the magistracy, the armed forces,culture and proud traditions… The great and “natural”fundamental fact of nationalism and patriotism, which is claimed tobe inherent in the famous “human nature”, is about to treatit*elf to a total historic eclipse lasting a few thousand years, tothe utter confusion of the idealists.

“In earlier chapters wewere standing at the cradle of ancient Greek and Roman civilization.Now we stand at its grave. Rome had driven the levelling plane of itsworld rule over all the countries of the Mediterranean basin, andthat for centuries. Except when Greek offered resistance, all naturallanguages had been forced to yield to a debased Latin; there were nomore national differences […] all had become Romans. Romanadministration and Roman law had everywhere broken up the old kinshipgroups, and with them the last vestige of local and nationalindependence. The half-baked culture of Rome provided no substitute;it expressed no nationality, only the lack of nationality […] Butthe strength was not there to fuse these elements into newnations”.

The barbarians approach,fortified by their organisation in gens,but not yet mature enough to constitute States and to found nationsin the true sense. The shadow of the feudal Middle Ages is looming:but even here it is a determinist necessity, inherent to thedevelopment of productive forces, as Engels asserts.

20. Organisationof the Germanic barbarians

7. The peoples whosubmerged the Roman Empire under waves of invasions also knew, inthe beginning, gentile and matriarchal forms of organisation as wellas the communist cultivation of the land. When they came intocontact with Rome, they were transitioning from the middle tosuperior stages of barbarism, and they were beginning to transitionfrom nomadism to a settled existence. Their military organisationbegan to give birth to a class of military chieftains who chose theking and who began to set up great properties, taking land away fromthe formerly free and equal members of the gensand the tribe, who had meanwhile become free peasants. In this waythe State also started to appear among these people, and wouldslowly lay the foundations for new nationalities which, manycenturies later, would lead to the renaissance of the nation in itsmodern form.

What we know of the origins ofthese Germanic peoples who travelled across the whole of Europe tothe north of the Danube and to the east of the Rhine leads us toattribute to them a communal agricultural production, on the basis ofthe family, of the gens,and then of the marches (border districts), then a type of occupationwith periodic redistribution of cultivated land as well as theportion of this that was not entirely held in common and periodicallyleft fallow. At this time crafts and industry were completelyprimitive: there was neither commerce nor the circulation of money,except in the border areas close to the Roman Empire, from where thepeople imported some manufactured goods.

These peoples were alreadymigrating at the time of Marius, who repelled the hordes of Cimbriand Teutones from the Italian peninsular, where they wanted to expandacross the Po. They were largely present at the time of Caesar, whosaw them appearing on the left bank of the Rhine. It’s only inTacitus, writing 150 years later, that they are described as settledfarmers. Evidently it was a complex process, tied mainly to the rapidgrowth of population, on the subject of which we totally lackoriginal historical documentation: at the fall of the Empire theywere, according to Engels, some six million in an area where thereare today perhaps 150 million inhabitants.

The separation of classesbetween the military chiefs, who held land and power, and the mass ofpeasant-soldiers (since there were no slaves, everybody who wasunable to bear arms or was otherwise exempt from war worked the land)led to the formation of genuine States, insofar as fixed territorieswere occupied, and secure kings or emperors who were elected, forlife only and thus not hereditary by dynastic right. At this point,gentile organisation had already disappeared; the tradition of thepopular assembly of the entire community was completely distorted inthe assembly of chieftains, or electoral princes, which was the basisof true class power.

This process was undoubtedlyaccelerated by the conquest of the now decadent Roman Empire, wherethe conquerors settled. Beyond importing their new organisation, therevolutionary task of these peoples thus consisted of destroying theRoman State, which by then was totally corrupt: as Engels says, theydelivered Roman subjects from their parasitical State, whose economicand social foundations were collapsing, and in exchange they gainedat least two thirds of the imperial territory.

Given the relatively smallnumber of conquerors and their tradition of communist labour, the neworganisation of agriculture in these lands left large areas undivided– not just forests and pastures, but also arable land, with Germanforms of law prevailing over Roman forms, or combining with them.This enabled the formation, among previously nomadic peoples, of afixed territorial administration; and the birth, over the course offour or five centuries, of Germanic States, whose power extended overthe former provinces of the Roman Empire and across Italy itself. Themost remarkable of these was that of the Franks, who raised Europe’sbulwark against Moorish invasion and who, while giving way to thepressure of the Normans at the other extremity, allowed populationsto continue to live on the territories where they had establishedthemselves, even if this led to complex ethnic mix between Germans,Romans and, in the Frankish kingdom, aboriginal Celts. This recentjumble of ethnic peoples with heterogeneous traditions, languages andinstitutions meant that these Germanic States could not yetconstitute nations; but they were indeed States by virtue of theirsolid frontiers and unified military forces.

“… however unproductivethese four centuries appear, one great product they did leave: modernnationalities, thenew forms and structures through which Western European humanity wasto make history to come.The Germans had, in fact, given Europe new life, and therefore thebreak-up of the States in the Germanic period ended, not insubjugation by the Norsem*n and Saracens, but in the furtherdevelopment of the system of benefices and protection intofeudalism”.

Before we close this sectionby recalling the characteristics of medieval organisation, whichpractically excluded the “national” factor, we want to point outthat the Marxist doctrine not only considers the organisation of theancient barbarian and nomadic peoples into territorial States as apositive historic fact (a process the people of the Mediterraneanpeninsulas had passed through more than a millennium in advance); italso views the national nature of States positively, theircoincidence with nationality, that’s to say with a community thatnot only rests, to some extent, on race, but also on the language,tradition and customs of all the inhabitants of a vast and stablegeographical territory. Whereas the idealist historian sees innationality a general fact, present for all time and everywhere thatthere is civilised life, we Marxists attribute to nationalityhistorically determined cycles. We have already run through a firsthistoric cycle: that of the great national democracies superimposedon the mass of slaves, but nevertheless dividing free men into socialclasses. The second cycle, which we will examine in Part 3, is thatof the democracies of free men in which slaves have disappeared. Inthis second historic cycle, the national reality goes hand in handwith a new division into classes, which is specific to capitalism.The nation and its material influence will disappear at the same timeas capitalism and bourgeois democracy, but not before: the formationof national States must actually be considered indispensable as thisenables the advent of capitalism in different geographical areas.

21. Feudalsociety as a-national organisation

8. The economicrelations that defined the feudal order explain how the feudal typeof production gave rise to a very specific form of political State,but one without national character.

To explain how the encounterof two entirely different types of production, the agrarian communityof the barbarian people and the private land ownership of the Romans,led to the feudal system, itself based on agrarian production, and toback up the Marxist conclusion according to which the States ofclassical antiquity were, especially in their best years, national innature, a phenomenon that was unknown in the Middle Ages, we mustremind ourselves of the most notable relations of property andproduction at work in the two systems.

In the barbarian organisation,up until the appearance of slavery, the free member of the communityworked the land, but land was not divided up into individual parcels,neither to define the work to be performed by each individual, norfor the purpose of defining the right of harvest and consumption ofthe products.

In the organisation ofclassical antiquity, the manual worker was essentially a slave, notonly in agriculture but also in the production of manufactured goods,which was already developed and independent. It is therefore correctto say that the Greco-Roman world knew a certain type ofindustrialism and, in a sense, capitalism. However, rather than beingcomposed of land and means of production, capital also embracedliving people, just as today the capital of an agriculturalenterprise embraces land, machines and working animals. This ancientcapitalism did not have as its corollary generalised wage labour,because it was rare for free men to work for money.

But slaves, who representedthe fundamental social labour power, were not evenly distributed as aresource (perhaps they were originally the common property of thegroups of free men). This meant that free men were themselves dividedinto two classes: those citizens who owned slaves, and thosecivilians without slaves. Is it not said that the wise Socrates, inhis misery as a philosopher, aspired to be able to buy at least onelittle slave?

The citizen who does not ownslaves cannot, for this reason, live off the product of otherpeople’s labour, and must therefore work; not as a slave, ofcourse, but as a free man, that’s to say without depending on amaster – and this is related to the system of private landownership. The free worker is a property-owning farmer and he doeswhat he likes with his patch of land, which he exploits with thesweat of his own brow. Other free men who have neither wealth norslaves are artisans or members of the liberal professions (which insome cases were open, even to slaves, at least as far as intellectualactivities were concerned).

When this cycle is perfect,all arable land is reduced to allodial land.Allodium constitutesland that is privately owned with complete freedom of sale andpurchase. This means that as soon as new territories had beenconquered, they were immediately shared out between the conquering(Roman) soldiers, who became colonists. But for allodial rights todevelop in full, there had to be money in circulation allowing theacquisition of various goods, which could be used to trade in slavesas well as land.

Under the regimes of classicalantiquity, the small number of goods that were not distributed by lotand remained at the disposition of the State or local administrationconstituted, in contrast to allodial goods, State property, the publicdomain. The predominance of allodial title over the public domainrequired a medium of exchange in circulation, and therefore a generalmarket open to all free citizens throughout the territory: thiscondition was met in full in ancient Greece and Rome. The type ofproduction in classical antiquity therefore sees the first appearanceof an internal national market (and even the beginnings of aninternational market) – in contrast to the immediate and closedcircles of labour and consumption under barbarism. The territorialState is a national State not only when its power imposes itself onthe territory through force of arms (which was already true of theEgyptians and the Assyrians, and will later be true for the SalianFranks and Burgundians etc) but when trade is possible in commoditiesand the products of labour right across the territory and evenbetween distant points within the territory. At the level of thelegal superstructure, this is expressed in the fact that citizensenjoy the same rights in all districts of the State. It’s only thenthat the State is a nation. From the perspective of historicalmaterialism, the nation is thus a community organised across aterritory where there is a unitary internal market. This historicoutcome goes hand in hand to some extent with commonality of blood,but especially with commonality of language (you cannot do businesswithout language!), customs and practices.

The classical economicenvironment gave rise, like modern capitalism, to a phenomenon ofaccumulation: one person has many slaves, the next has none; oneperson has lots of land, the other has hardly enough to break withhis own hands. Concentration led to disaster and rendered slavelabour, which replaced intensive parcelling out of land,uneconomical. It’s in this sense that Pliny wrote that latifundiaItaliam perdidere(the landed estates destroyed Italy) and it was thus at the level ofthe superstructure of morals that the enslavement of man becameinfamous… The contemporary compilers of agrarian law have remainedat this level in their understanding of technological and socialdevelopment, and confuse slavery with the odious capitalistexploitation of agricultural labour. But let us return to the MiddleAges.

The whole mercantile networkthrough which mobile wealth circulated in the empire collapsed alongwith the Roman property-owning economy, which had becometechnologically backward and unproductive. Needs of all kinds wereless capable of being satisfied. But the barbarians arrived withtheir tradition of greater frugality; for them, after a briefinterlude, during which they depleted the loot found in the citiesthat had by then sunk into decadence, the true wealth lay in theconquest of land. But it was too late; the social division of labourwas already too far advanced to enable the land taken from theRomans, which consisted of small holdings or latifundia (landedestates), to be managed in common or even to be managed as a publicdomain of the new powers. A new type emerged, combining the allodiaand the public domain. Part of the land would be enjoyed in common bythe communities (common land rights, some of which have survived tothe present day); part would be definitively divided up in the formof allodial rights (though quite precariously, with the influx of newconquerors); finally a third part would be redistributed periodically(even today, this system of redistributing land tenure survives, forexample in the cadastral registers of the former Austrian provincesin Italy).

The Frankish peasants who hadfallen upon this utterly desirable, fertile land and its favourableclimate drew more benefit from it than was obtained by gangs ofslaves. In this respect, they were part of a powerful rebirth ofproductive forces that arose from the coming together of all theseidle arms and the rich land despised by the wealthy Romans, who hadbecome like the mythical Croesus. But the entire trading network hadbeen broken along with the Roman administrative network, with all itsconnections and transport systems, and they regressed to a type oflocal production with immediate consumption of goods.

This economy without tradecharacterised the Middle Ages. States possessed their ownmagistracies and territorial armies, but they did not establish aunitary territorial market, therefore they were not true nations.

If the ancient genshad already lost their social equality in the course of migrationsand conquests, they should soon lose their freedom and autonomy ofsemi-communal, semi-allodial management of the land. The process ofconsolidation of landed property started again, to the profit ofmilitary chiefs, functionaries, royal courtiers and religiousinstitutions.

The slaves of antiquity hadbeen replaced by a new servile class that not only undertook manuallabour on behalf of these new elites, and above all the extortion offree labourers. The working of the land in lots presumed socialstability, and the centralised Roman State with its judges, agentsand soldiers had created this stability, making it sacrosanct, butthis had collapsed under the continuous invasions by new armedpopulaces, amplified by the struggles between chieftains and lordswithin the poorly centralised power structure.

The Frankish peasant neededsecurity, the basic element of Roman law, today renewed and exaltedas a reference model, more than he needed freedom. In ceding hisliberty, he found security, that’s to say opportunities tocultivate the land for himself rather than for predators who wouldexpropriate his harvest inits entirety,along with any stockpiles and implements.

Its form was commendation,in essence a pact between the peasant who worked the land and themilitary lord of the manor. The feudal lord guaranteed the stabilityof the land worked by the peasant, and the peasant committed toprovide him with a part of his harvest or a part of his labour time(corvée or statute labour). But the guarantee of not being chasedoff his land became the obligation not to leave it. The slave whocould be bought and sold ceased to exist, but so too did the freepeasant. Instead, there was the serf.

22. The bases of modern revolution

Engels’ defence of thefeudal form compared with slavery based on the latifundiumis completely Marxist. This new form enabled, for example, thedevelopment in France, inhabited by semi-savage Celts, an exceptionalincrease in production and in the population that was not decreased,two centuries later, by periodic famines (a consequence of theabolition of trade between regions and provinces) nor by the Crusades(attempts to reopen the classical commercial trading routes).

The revolution accomplished bymigratory barbarians, which accompanied the fall of the Roman Empire,thus translated into a development of social productive forces.

The destruction of generalisedtrade and national and imperial markets condemned this Europe, whichthe ancients had made fertile and colonised, and which was nowsettled by peoples who began to climb the ladder of technical andcultural development inherent in the organisation of a countrysideoccupied by stable populations, to a very long period of moleculareconomic life, scattered in minuscule hamlets; the class that formedthe immense majority of the population, serfs attached to the land,was denied any horizons.

But, as Fourier noticed withhis genial intuition, while the slave of antiquity had neverexperienced any really victorious struggles for liberation, the baseswere now established for a distant but formidable revolutionaryuprising of the peoples of Europe against the dominant classes andinstitutions of the feudal age.

While the modern urbanproletariat was only just making its entrance onto the stage ofhistory, the national demand was the most powerful catalyst of thisimmense revolution, capable of liberating the modern citizen from thechains of serfdom and raising him up to the level of citizen ofantiquity. While it is true that the modern bourgeois revolutionquite literally uses and abuses memories of Ancient Greece andAncient Rome’s glories, (as Baudelaire remarked, “quinous délivrera des Grecs et des Romains?”)it is also certain that this was a revolutionary ferment of giganticforce.

The national revolution is notour revolution; the national demand is not our demand, and formankind, it does not represent the conquest of a permanent andirreversible advantage. But Marxism considers it with interest, andindeed with admiration and passion; when the course of historythreatens it, Marxism is ready to enter into this struggle at thedecisive time and place.

What we must study is thedegree of development in historic cycles, identifying the correcttimes and places. If a thousand years have lapsed between thedevelopment of the primitive peoples on the Mediterranean and thoseof continental Europe, it is perfectly possible that the modernWestern cycle will have closed whilst that of people of other races,in another cycle and another continent will remain open torevolutionary potential for a long time to come.

It is for this reason inparticular that it is so important to shed light, in a Marxist andrevolutionary sense, on the play of national factors.

PART THREE
The modern proletarian movement andstrugglesfortheformation andemancipation ofnations

23. Feudalobstacles to the birth of modern nations

1. The organisationof feudal society and the State, decentralised both horizontally andvertically, stood as an obstacle to the bourgeois push for theformation of the modern unitary nation. While each of the recognised“orders” had its own rights and in certain respects did not havesocial and familial relationships outside the order, almost formingautonomous nations in their own right, on the other hand the feudaldistricts had a closed economy, also with regard to human labourpower, turning groups of serfs into a multiplicity of small enslavednations.

To summarise ourconclusion to Part 2 of this report on the disappearance of thenation of classical antiquity, which followed the fall of the RomanEmpire, the barbarian invasions and the formation of medieval States,it is worth our while to list the feudal paraphernalia that inhibitedthe historical renaissance of the nation. The nation is ageographical network within which economic circulation is free,positive law is unitary and where, in general, there is a communityof race and language. In classical antiquity, the nation excluded themass of slaves, recognising only free citizens; in the modernbourgeois sense, the nation includes all who are born within it.

If we have found States that were not nations before the greathistoric Greco-Romanstep forward, and if we find such States in the period before the endof classical antiquity and the beginnings of the bourgeois stage, wenever find a nation without a State. This whole materialist reviewof the national phenomenon is entirely and consistently founded onthe Marxist theory of the State, and this is precisely what separatesus from the bourgeois view. The formation of nations is a historicalfact every bit as real and physical as others, but when the unifiednation is constituted with its State, it remains divided into socialclasses; the State is not, as the bourgeois would have it, theexpression of the totality of the nation in the sense of an aggregateof individuals, or even of districts and municipalities, but ratherthe expression and instrument of the interests of the dominanteconomic class.

Two theses aretherefore simultaneously true: first, national unity is a historicalnecessity and therefore a condition for the future advent ofcommunism; second, the realisation of this unity (with a uniqueinternal market, the abolition of feudal orders, equal positive lawfor all subjects and the centralised State) not only does notexclude, but raises to the highest degree the expression of workingclass struggle against the capitalist State and the internationalcharacter of this struggle in the context of the developed socialworld.

The feudal economy wasessentially based on land ownership. The order of the nobilitydivided possession of all the land, not just in a topographicalsense, but also and especially in the sense of personal subjugationof groups of the peasant population. As a consequence of theirprivileges, the nobility formed, in one sense, a “nation”: theydid not mix their blood with that of the serfs, artisans andbourgeois; they had their own law and judges who belonged to theirown order. Their hereditary landed property was inalienable in itspure form, resulting from a title and investiture passed down fromhigher levels in the feudal hierarchy and, in the last instance fromthe king, within certain defined limits. The bearing of arms, undercommand, was the privilege of this order; if it was necessary to formmass armies, this would be with mercenary troops, more often than notrecruited from abroad.

The serf class did notconstitute a nation: not only did it have absolutely norepresentation or centralised expression, it also reproduced onlywithin closed circles that did not communicate with one another.Legally it depended on the lord of the manor, and it was judgedaccording to legal codes that varied from one region to another orquite simply according to the lord’s arbitrary will. The frontierof the State and the legal jurisdiction of the State had no meaningfor the serf: in both cases, his world existed within the confines ofthe lord’s demesne lands or fief.

We must now turn to theecclesiastical order, which at various stages was close to power,rather similar to the nobility. But it was not a nation and was notdefined by a nation: on the one hand, because the celibacy of thepriests meant it could have no genealogical continuity, on the otherhand because its limits were extra-national.The Catholic Church, as its name implies, is international; or to bemore precise, in its doctrine and in its organisation it is bothinter-State and inter-racial. This particular superstructure was theproduct of an economy of separate, closed islands. The serf aloneprovided labour power and he consumed a part of it in the form of afraction of the products of the land. His needs were so limited thathe fashioned the manufactured goods that he needed himself, thedivision of labour being completely embryonic. The first artisanswere barely tolerated (these famous artisans who, while the peasantslived in dispersed habitations, gathered in the village below thelord’s manor, and who became the terrible, insupportable bourgeoisrevolutionaries). The lord and his hired ruffians consumed theproducts that the peasants either brought to the manor or produced inthe course of corvée work performed in the lord’s fields. It isclear that this ability to consume produce in abundance, enjoyed byonly a tiny and extremely privileged minority, expanded their wantsand little by little increased the demand for manufactured goods,even though it was still the case that princesses ate with theirhands and only changed their blouses for special occasions.

From this stems the materialopposition that would be the starting point of the immense strugglethat would invoke the resounding words Fatherland, Liberty, Reason,Critique, Ideal – a struggle between the regional fragmentationthat inhibited the circulation of people and things, and the demandfor freedom of commerce first across the territory of the State, andthen beyond. If this liberty allowed the lord to enjoy his wealth, italso accelerated the rise of the merchants and stimulated theirboldness. One day, their money would purchase the sacred, ancestralfeudal land… Thosewho deluded themselves into thinking they would gain a Fatherland,would instead obtain, within the confines of the State, a singlecurrency, a stock exchange and a unified system of tax collection,conditions that would make possible the eruption of capitalistproductive forces.

24. Feudal localism and universalchurch

2. In medievalsociety, the productive and economic base was not national, butinfra-national as far as enterprises and the market are concerned.The linguistic, cultural, scholastic and ideological superstructurewas also not national, as its centre was the Christian Church ofRome, with its universal dogma, rituals and organisation. But thepower of the Church, far from being a medium for overcoming feudalparticularism, strictly supported the interests and the organisationof the landed nobility.

The nations of classicalantiquity had already achieved unity in personal and commercial lawwithin their political frontiers, because as well as agrarianproduction, which was equally important at that time, there was thepossibility to accumulate commodities and money thanks to theexploitation of slave labour and the glaring inequality that was notonly permitted but also tolerated under Roman law with regard to thenumber of slaves that could be owned, and also with regard to the allodialpossession of land by free citizens.

After the suppression of thistype of slave-labour production, which we have explained indeterminist terms, the path towards the general circulation ofmanufactured goods took another path, the bourgeois path; theproduction of these goods would develop at first on the basis ofequality with agriculture, which it would then surpass on an enormousscale – and irrationally – in the capitalist epoch.

But with Rome the classicalnation had become more than a nation. It was a political andterritorial totality corresponding to a universal power organisedacross the entire non-barbarian world.

The fantastic accumulation ofland and slaves in the hands of a few very powerful rich individuals,favoured by the centralisation of the State and its dictatorship overthe provinces, had led to the inevitable crisis in this mode ofproduction, which made it all the easier for the barbarian invadersto smash this immense unitary organisation to pieces.

In the Middle Ages however,this universality was maintained under a very different form, in thepowerful organisation of the Christian Church of Rome. We will notoccupy ourselves here with the great historical cycle of the EasternEmpire (this can be analysed using the same social criteria) whichsurvived for centuries after that of the West. The Eastern Empirecould stem the tide of Germanic invasions from the north-east but wasunable to resist the Mongols arriving from the south-west. Itsuccumbed in ways that were essentially similar and its unity, whichin any case had become more and more symbolic, was also shattered.

In Western Europe, thepressing requirement for the development of general mercantileexchange, opposed to the characteristic territorial fragmentation offeudalism, expressed itself in the demand for a restoration ofcentralism, which had given the classical Roman world a power, wealthand wisdom that seemed to have been lost.

But the response to thisdemand could not be that of the Guelphs, who opposed the Germanicempires of the Middle Ages and their bellicose ruling class via theinternational influence of the Church, even if the confrontation ofclasses through which this opposition manifested itself in the firstcitadels of the new bourgeois class was real enough: the Italiancommunes governed by master-artisans, bankers and merchants who hadconnections across all of Europe.

In fact, the Churchconstituted, for all of the States arising from the dismemberment ofthe Empire (after the first centuries of resistance) a commonsuperstructure that supported the power of the feudal barons andtheir monarchs. It is precisely because they were not nationalsocieties that the functions we are referring to transcended nationalboundaries. There were not yet national or “vernacular”languages spoken by “the people”. The language of the priests waseverywhere Latin, while the great mass of serfs spoke dialects thatcould only be understood within a few dozen kilometres. Thissituation persisted so long as it was not permissible to travel inorder to find work or money, but only to fight – an activity thatrequires little speech. But Latin was not merely the unique languageof religious ritual, which would indeed amount to little; it was thesole vehicle of culture, practically the only language knowneverywhere by those who could read and write.

Latin, and it alone, wastaught to members of the nobility. This meant that scholarship,entrusted to the Church, remained a supra-State structure, even asother classes started to be admitted, that’s to say not just theyoung lords and future priests or monks, but some sons of urbanbourgeois, to the total exclusion of peasants scattered across thecountryside (this phenomenon has still not changed in some wretchedprovinces of countries as distinguished as Italy and Yugoslavia!)

Not only did every aspect ofhigh culture had to pass through this single sieve – the samesubjects and texts were discussed in Bologna, Salamanca, Paris andLondon – the same was also true for practical culture; ultimatelythis produced all the bureaucratic, civil, legal and military strata,an entire cultured class that only had a very vague “nationalculture”; as for “national literature”, that would have to waituntil after the year 1000 A.D. and beyond.

The bourgeois itself, as itfirst cut its teeth, paid tribute to this social connectivity, whichwas a superstructure of the dominant mode of production but also anindispensable instrument of labour: if the Florentine banker wantedto take care of some complex business affairs with Antwerp orRotterdam, he did this through the medium of commercialcorrespondence in Latin (even if it was a kind of Latin that wouldhave made Caesar and Cicero turn in their graves; but after all, thesame applied to the Latin Mass.)

Despite the grandeur of thisconstruction, which went resolutely beyond differences of blood, raceand language – and without any half-measures – the ideologicaledifice of Catholicism historically adhered to the defence andpreservation of the feudal system of serfdom. The collaborationstarted at the grass roots, between the priest and the local squire,who shared the tithes and tributes of the exploited peasant, whosesubjugation was narrowly conditioned by his ties to the land and thefiefdom where he was born. Then again, the monastic communities andthe great religious orders acquired – not without struggles againstthe baronial lords – vast proprieties on which the relations ofproduction were totally identical to those of the fiefs: like thefeudal lords, they insisted that possession of soil, body and spiritis inalienably linked to title, whether this be aristocratic or, intheir case, tied to the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

25. Universalism andpolitical centralism

3. In Italy, thefirst struggles of the bourgeoisie, organised within small communalrepublics, but still incapable of raising itself to a vision ofinter-regional economic organisation, found support in the Papacythrough the Guelph faction. Anticipating modern power structures,Dante invoked bourgeois monarchy as the first historically possibleform of centralised State, though in his Ghibelline universalism,which theorised a central European power, he was not explicitlyanticipating the demand for a nation-State.

When Dante, who came from aGuelph family, wrote his treatise DeMonarchia,he embraced Ghibelline views. The demand for a unitary, centralisingpower is fundamental to the historic theory that Dante developed,together with his aversion towards the sterile quarrels betweenfamilies in the towns and baronies. The new demand for universalismrests on the formidable tradition of the Roman Empire; it avoids andfights against the universalism of the Church of Rome. This is whyDante deplores the power and political leadership of the Papacy, andsees in the Holy Roman Emperor of the Germans a great monarch whocould unify a State centralising all of Europe: first Germany andItaly, then France and the rest.

Must we regard Dante’spolitical doctrine as specific to the Middle Ages, since it does notinclude the essential bourgeois political demand for the separationof nationalities? Or should we regard it as anticipating themodernbourgeois epoch? Evidently, the second hypothesis is the correctone.The institution of absolute monarchy arose in the Middle Ages as theonly possible form of centralised State, opposing the federalism ofthe barons and their pretensions to self-government at the periphery.On the side of the latter was the obscurantism of the clergy andRome; on the side of the former the first courts, a shining exampleof which was that of Frederick II of Swabia at Palermo, very close tothe Dante’s heart, which opened the way to new productive forces,to trade, and consequently to the encouragement of the arts and theexchange of ideas outside the scholastic dictatorship. This SwabianEmperor was certainly not a national king, but his reputation asatheist, scientist and artist is not pure legend. He was withoutdoubt the founder of the first industries and manufactories, and theprecursor of social forms that were incompatible with the retrogradeignorance of the aristocracy, whose knowledge was limited to thebearing of arms. The first form that capitalism took in opposing theold agrarian regime was monarchy, centralised in a great capital,where artisans, artists and scientists opened up new horizons tomaterial life.

The Latin treatise DeMonarchia isan early ideological manifestation of this modern demand, and in thissense it is revolutionary, anti-feudal and anti-Guelph; futureanticlericalism would furthermore draw extensively on the DivineComedy’sinvectives against the Papacy. If the national demand, in its truesense, is not made explicit by Dante, who disdains the pettybourgeoisie and envisages Italy as being politically united, but as aprovince of the Germanic empire, this is because in Italy the modernbourgeoisie was born earlier than elsewhere, with a local andcommunal character. This in no way diminishes the importance of thefirst great manifestation of the living forces of the future; but itwas destined to wither away, for reasons relating to the changes ingeographical trading routes, before rising up again in the vision ofa powerful unitary capitalist State with national frontiers. Nor doesit detract from the fact that, in this country, which would be one ofthe last in Europe to raise its claim to nationality in modernhistory, this same Dante used the Italian vernacular language in hisliterature, and gave a decisive impulse to the diffusion of theTuscan dialect as against one hundred dialects influenced by theirdistant origins, from the Lombard to the Saracen.

26. The revolutionarydemands of national bourgeoisies

4. In the Marxistanalysis of history, every transition from one mode of production toanother sees two protagonists: on the one side, the dominant class,which ferociously defends its economic privileges, employing theapparatus of power and the influence of its traditional ideologies;and on the other side, the revolutionary class that strugglesagainst these interests, institutions and ideologies, agitating atthe heart of the old society, in a more or less decisive andcomplete manner, with new ideologies that embody the consciousnessof its own achievements and future social mode of production. Themodern bourgeoisies develop, in the different nations of Europe,particularly interesting and striking systems, which are trueweapons of struggle, all of which revolve around the great demandfor unity and national independence.

According to the text books,the modern age begins, and the Middle Ages end, for some in 1492, forothers in 1305. The first date refers to the discovery of Americaand is significant in the history of the bourgeoisie – whichMarxism has tracked in the truly epic synthesis of TheManifestoand in subsequent classical descriptive texts – because itsignalled the opening of passages beyond the ocean, establishing theframework for a world market, and awakened powerful forces ofattraction in the demand for manufactured products, which was alwaysrising, pushing the advanced white race to engage in the war of“overproduction”. In parallel with this grandiose turn of events,we witness a displacement of the cradle of nascent industrialisationfrom central and northern Italy to the heart of Atlantic-facingEurope, beyond the Mediterranean, where it would make its imperiousprogress.

But 1305 was the year thatDante wrote TheDivine Comedy: atthis time the demands of the anti-feudal and anti-ecclesiasticalrevolution had already been presented in Italy, albeit within a morelimited geographical area. The forms of organisation of the Germanicpeoples met with greater resistance within the Italian peninsular,because the Roman tradition was particularly well developed there,and the feudal regime never fully developed, despite the influx ofnew barbarian blood.

The advantages of its locationin the middle of navigable seas remained unchanged; commerce andexchange quickly resumed, and the division of labour developed on newfoundations. The system of the medieval communes (free cities) brokedown, giving way to small baronies and hereditary autocraticmonarchs: but serfdom receded, and peasants and independentartisans continued to account for a significant proportion of thepopulation. For these specific reasons, the bourgeoisie did not raiseitself to the level of a national class; it could only do thisseveral centuries later, but this time on a much vaster scale.Adjourned in Italy, the capitalist revolution suffered a long delay,but in the 16^th,17^thand 18^thcenturies it would gain England, France and then central Europe.

Thus the attempt by a new modeof production to install itself within a restricted area can fail andthe defeat can force it to wait entire generations. But with itshistoric return, this mode of production will impose itself much moreextensively. We can therefore understand that the communistrevolution, crushed in France in 1871, had to wait until 1917 toattempt the conquest not just of France, but of the whole of Europe; andthat, though it is today defeated and drained of energy, just likethe narrow bourgeois revolution of the Italian municipalities was inits time, one day it will be able, after a period of severalgenerations, revive again and not just in the areas occupied andcontrolled by the white race, but on a global scale.

Between the 12^thand 15^thcenturies the demands for legal equality, political liberty,parliamentary democracy, the republic etc. might have seemed to be anillusion swept away by history, although the force of these demandscould only grow as they waited to make their impressive historicalclaim on the European stage, something we today take for granted.Likewise, in the current epoch, the claims of the modern proletariatto the violent overthrow of the democratic capitalist State, thedictatorship of the working class, the destruction of wage labour andthe moneyed economy may also seem forgotten and dormant.

Throughout this period,bourgeois classes and groups, whose influence grew with the changesbrought about by productive forces and technologies and the impetuousgrowth of commercial exchange, never stopped putting forward newdemands and struggling for them, until finally theysucceeded in formulating the global demand for the end of feudalismand the seizure of power.

The artisan and merchantrefused to see themselves as serfs, the subjects of a local squire.Despite the initial risks involved, they moved from district todistrict, travelling across the entire territory of the State,wherever their work called them, even if it was still easy for thenobles to persecute them and strip them of all they had accumulatedlittle by little, as this formed a considerable mass of wealth in thehands of people outside the traditional orders and hierarchies. Thesepioneers of a new way of life demanded the right to be citizens ofthe State and not the subjects of a noble; they finally declaredthemselves subjects of the king, even if this was an absolutemonarch. The monarch and the dynasty are the first expression of acentral power exercised on the entire people and nation. Therelationship between the State and its subjects, the lynchpin ofbourgeois law, tended to establish itself directly, without beingmediated by fragmentary feudal hierarchies.

To understand this transitionat the level of the economic base, we will refer to a film based onFlorentine folklore, entitled Ilre d’Inghilterra non paga(“The King of England does not pay”, 1941). The large bank of theBardi family, bourgeois Florentines, has advanced a colossal sum ofmoney in gold florins to fill the king’s war chest, but the king,having lost the war, does not pay interest on the loan and does notpay back the capital: the bank goes bankrupt and the Florentineeconomy suffers grave repercussions. The old banker dies of grief,having been unable to find a single court or tribunal before which hecould bring the brazenly defaulting debtor. Under the bourgeoissystem, he would have been able to cite the King of England beforeEnglish magistrates, and force him to pay.

Regarding the demand forequality before the law, we can also mention a play by Lope de Vega (Elmejor alcalde el rey)from 1635, inwhich the king makes a better impression, but where the claim isstill bourgeois. In a provincial village, a local tyrant kidnaps ayoung woman. The father, ridiculed by the seducer, travels to Madridto address the king. The latter follows him back to the villageincognito, with a weak escort and unarmed; he sits in judgment,severely condemns the lord whom he subpoenas to appear and to freethe young woman with due compensation. The idea that every citizencan get justice from the king against the abuse of local powerexpresses the bourgeois demand for centralism.

We also know the famous legendof the miller of Sanssouci, according to which Frederick the Greatwanted to expropriate the mill in order to enlarge the park at hiscastle of delights. The miller refused and left his audience with theKing, shouting “There are judges in Berlin!” A judge can condemnthe king in the name of the king: this seems to be a masterpiece ofstyle in bourgeois legal theory; but soon the bourgeoisie itself,pushed by its revolutionary needs, would be more resolute and wouldcondemn the king to have his head cut off.

To the extent that theimportance of commerce and manufactured goods increased in relationto that of rural agriculture in the old States governed by the landedaristocracy (France and England are the classic examples), and greatbanks appeared along with public debt, protectionism, a unitary andcentralised fiscal system, so the bourgeoisies demand ever-increasing powers for the king, that is to say, for the centraladministration. In the ideological superstructure and in the culturaland political agitation in favour of these new demands, all of theseunitary systems were described and exalted as being the expressionnot of a dynasty ruling by divine right and consecrated by religiouspower, but rather the expression of the people as a whole, allcitizens, in a word, the nation.Patriotism, this ideal which had been eclipsed with the passing ofclassical antiquity, once again became the subject of civicenthusiasm; born of necessity, out of the demands of salesmen andmanufacturers, it soon enflamed intellectuals, writers andphilosophers, who constructed a marvellous architecture of supremeprinciples and literary decoration on top of this ferment of newproductive forces.

27. The iridescent superstructuresof the capitalistrevolution

5. Just as theconditions of the modern proletariat’s revolutionary struggleappeared with the fully developed expansion of the capitalist modeof production, so too the doctrine and programme of theinternational communist revolution was built on its fully developedcritique of bourgeois ideologies. The latter took on differentcharacteristics in different countries, due to the very fact thatevery bourgeois revolution is a national revolution and isdistinguished by its particular way of building what Marx calls “theconscience that each epoch has of itself”.

InItaly,as we have just shown, the economic content of the bourgeois formappeared precociously, but was insufficient to assume control ofsociety; the political content, which is historically of the firstimportance, was limited to control of small artisanal, commercial ormaritime republican free cities. These forms would not succeed inprogressing to the establishment of a nationally constituted power.But, whilst this first bourgeois society would be reabsorbed byEuropean feudal society, despite its military victories against theHoly Roman Empire, its effects at the ideological level and above allthe artistic “superstructure” would make itself felt in thecourse of the centuries to follow. The citizens of the firstrepublics reclaimed with their liberties the political forms and theclassical institutions of Roman civilisation; this was reflected lessin the organisation of the States and nations than in the blossomingof new technology and the splendours of the art of the Renaissance,which rediscovered the classical ideals and gave them a new life.

At the same time, with thediscovery and renewed study of the classical texts, which providedmaterial that was revived and made relevant by the social demands ofthe time, literature and science opposed the conformist domination ofCatholic and scholastic culture. This immense movement is thus theproduct of a particular development of the clash and transitionbetween two modes of production: it is the light emitted by a newsociety exploding at the heart of the old, shaking its last defenceswith an earthquake of historic magnitude, without being able to breakthem. This is what it is! We could develop and express this betterthan we do here, but it is not the result of some strange congress ofexceptional spermatozoa in alcoves that simultaneously gave birthto a whole host of architects, painters, sculptors, musicians,philosophers, scientists etc, every one of them of the first order.

And despite the situation ofpolitical and social servitude, these artists, these poets andideologues did not fail to emphasise the idea of the Fatherland andtheir Italian nationality in their greatest masterpieces, which laterimitators, in truth often really mediocre, took up again at everypossible opportunity and repeated adnauseam.

In Germany,where the nation’s childbirth was preceded by a series ofmiscarriages that Marx and Engels often cursed, another grandiosephenomenon occurred, the Reformation, which moreover spread acrossall Europe, with varying results.

The struggle of the new socialstrata against the old domination of the feudal princes supported bythe Church was unable to materialise in political outcomes. Howeverit was not limited, in the course of this first period, to a critiqueof artistic and philosophical schools, but developed within theecclesiastical organisation itself, bearing down on the terrain ofreligious dogmas. Here we see the fragmentation of the universalChurch into diverse national churches which backed away from Rome’sauthority, not simply by more or less modifying mystic doctrine, butin particular by breaking their ties with the hierarchy of the churchand substituting new national hierarchies. If the national languageis one of the main themes of the bourgeois national State’sappearance in history, another aspect, no less important, isreligion. The German manifestation was most awe-inspiring withrespect to religion and the creation of a national church. Theunderlying cause was the turbulent appearance of new classes: thebourgeois and the master-craftsmen of German cities, along with theserfs in the countryside, saw in Luther a man who would guide them intheir struggle against the princes, the bulwarks of feudal andagrarian organisation. But Luther, not content to disavow Münzer,who led the glorious but defeated insurrection of the peasantsagainst the petty princes, would not even lead the latter tovictory against the great princes.

Thus the limits andconstraints of medieval society were not broken in Italy except inthe field of literature, and in Germany only in the field ofreligion; these expressions of revolution were immature in the firstinstance, and crushed in the second. England,by contrast, was history’s first example of a revolution thatattacked the entire social economy to its very core. In this countrywhere, for climatic and geographic reasons, agricultural productioncould not support a large population, intense manufacturing andindustrial production, hitherto unknown in other countries, developedin a dominant fashion. The farmers themselves accumulated importantfinancial capital, while an ever-increasing mass of peasants sawthemselves robbed of their land and proletarianised: all theconditions of capitalist production came together with more intensitythan elsewhere, with the manufacturing bourgeoisie assuming greatsignificance. The nobility and the ruling dynasty were defeated anddespite the short duration of the revolutionary republic and(posthumous) execution of Cromwell, the bourgeoisie soon took powerwith a new revolution and continues to rule today through the samepolitical form, parliamentary monarchy.

Unquestionably, geographical,no less than productive conditions gave the United Kingdom a verywell-defined national character, since its borders are on all sidesthe sea. But Engels rightly pointed out in criticising the Erfurtprogramme (where he proposed the demand for a singleand indivisible republicfor Germany, at the time divided into minuscule federated States)that the two British Isles included at least three nationalities,with differences of language as well as race and even religion.Eventually the Irish, of Celtic race and Catholic religion, andspeaking Gaelic, a language that had almost disappeared at the time,would detach themselves; and the Scots, who still feel very differenttoday from the English, not to mention other racial traditions,such as the Welsh, and all the effects of later invasions and migrations as different as the Romans, Saxons andNormans. The United Kingdom thus represents a mix of races,traditions, dialects and languages (including literary), of religionsand churches, but also the first manifestation of this historicalfact of the national unitary State, which corresponds with the fullarrival of the capitalist social mode of production.

Finally, in Francethe bones of the national State were formed in the course of civilwar between social classes. The geographical boundaries were alreadywell defined, apart from the historic oscillation of the Rhinefrontier, by seas and mountain ranges. A rapid process led to theformation of a unique national language and a literature thatstrictly adhered to it, absorbing the dialects of the MiddleAges while eliminating their differences. Furthermore, the same goesfor ethnological differences, which however were not negligible. Weshould not forget that this nation parexcellencetakes its name from the Franks, a Germanic people who arrived fromthe East, who drove out or subjugated the native Gauls, or Celts.Thus two peoples, of non-Latin origin, which did not prevent theFrench language growing from Latin roots.

The demand for national unitywas therefore not territorial, but social: the bourgeoisie succeededvery quickly in becoming the Third Order, recognised and representedin the Estates General, the consultative assembly supporting royalpower. When this no longer sufficed, the struggle became directlypolitical. In France there had been no industrial developmentcomparable to that of England, and this was reflected in particularin the difference between the two schools of economics: the Englishimmediately gave us the theory and advocacy of capitalist production,whereas the French transitioned form the agrarian school of thephysiocrats to that of the mercantilists, who situated value not inproductive labour but rather in the trading of products.

Politically, there was nohesitation: directly aspiring to power, the French bourgeoisiefashioned its doctrine of the State: sovereignty deriving not fromheredity and divine right but by consulting the opinion of citizens,the fall of dogma and triumph of reason, destruction of the ordersand the corporations, elective democracy, parliament and republic.The crucible of history cast this other exquisite national form ofbourgeois power in a single block.

Thus in the transition fromthe feudal mode of production to the modern, the fundamental economicbase was the contradiction between productive forces and the oldrelations of production, and the political, legal and ideologicalsuperstructures emerged out of this renewal of the economic base.

But this process cannot bereduced to a little pharmacist’s formula. The bourgeoisie did notmake a world revolution but rather an assortment of nationalrevolutions, and it cannot be said that we have seen them all.

The preceding quick and highlysummarised synthesis allows us to formulate the following sequence offundamental geographical “areas” and “historical periods” inbourgeois revolutions, with a view to correctly leading the study ofthe proletarian revolution, which does not differ according tonational colours, but whose rich dynamic nevertheless engraves itselfwithin precise limits of time and space: Italy: art; Germany:religion: England, economic science; France: politics. The entiresuperstructure of the capitalist productive base.

The bourgeoisie’s deeds inhistory are, as is obvious, at the same time economic, political,artistic and religious. But the richness of its journey cannot bebetter summed up than with the words of the Manifesto:

“The bourgeoisie findsitself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy;later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whoseinterests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; atall times with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries”.

28. Theproletariatmakesitsentry ontothestage ofhistory

6. The new class ofwage labourers emerged and took shape with capitalist manufacturingand industry. There was a historic coincidence between the formationof this class in large masses and the great effort of thebourgeoisie to take political power and organise itself intonations. After a first chaotic phase of reaction to mechanisation ina feudal and medieval direction, the proletarian masses found theirpath in the wake of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, and it was at thenational level that the proletariat attained its cohesion as aclass, though not yet its autonomy as a class.

The history of modern times isfull of these struggles, against a too decentralised nobility and atoo universal church, to found modern nations through thebourgeoisie’s victory and full accession to power. In the Marxistanalysis, the class content, and especially the overthrow of the oldmode of production, is clearly the same for all the nationalbourgeoisies; however, it is no less clear that each of the bourgeoisrevolutions, in so far as they were national revolutions, had its ownoriginality and particular profile, whose significance goes beyondthe simple difference of time and geographical location. And thishelps, in full accord with the necessary progress of capitalistdevelopment, to explain why the nations thus established were, forclass reasons, solid in their struggle against the ancienregime yetfought against one another relentlessly as nations and as States.

At the same time that the newdominant class, the bourgeois Third Estate, appeared in the firstdecades of the 18^thcentury, so too (and even earlier) did the new fundamental socialelement: the working class. The struggles for the conquest of poweragainst feudalism and its ally, the clergy, and for the establishmentof national unity, were in full swing: the workers of the town andcountry played a full part, even when they started to have classorganisations and actual political parties whose programmes announcedthe overthrow of bourgeois domination.

From its first appearance, thesocialist and communist movement did not ignore the great complexityof this process; it critically analysed it and moreover laid down theconditions, the times and places in which proletarians would givetheir total support to revolutionary bourgeois movements and tonational insurrections and wars.

In order to be perfectlyclear, and to dispel the surprised reactions from those who areobviously hearing these things for the first time, we do well torefer to the Manifesto:

“The proletariat goesthrough various stages of development. With its birth begins itsstruggle with the bourgeoisie”. AndMarx recalls here the first “reactionary” forms of struggle:burning down factories, sabotage of machines and foreign goods, thedemand for a return to the way of life of medieval artisans that hadalready disappeared.

This first transition initself is enough to ridicule simplistic and ahistorical recipes suchas: there are two classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, and thelatter only has to struggle against the former, and that’s allthere is to it. But let us continue:

“At this stage, thelabourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the wholecountry, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere theyunite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence oftheir own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, whichclass, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to setthe whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time,able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do notfight their enemies [i.e.the bourgeoisie],but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy,the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois.Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands ofthe bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for thebourgeoisie”.

Let us return to the passageon the unceasing struggles of the bourgeoisie, as well as thosebetween different national bourgeoisies. It continues thus:

“In all these battles,[the bourgeoisie] sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat,to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. Thebourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its ownelements of political and general education [i.e.training in struggle],in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons forfighting the bourgeoisie”.

But for the proletarian thereare new living conditions: “…modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, inAmerica as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of nationalcharacter”.

This last phase precedes thecelebrated passage in the second chapter, which has always been takenout of context and exploited by opportunists down the ages (and todayby the most stupid of all, those who hold up the government of Titoas a model). It corresponds to the correct historical thesis that hasguided us in all our current work on the national question: thebourgeoisieis everywhere nationalin character,and its programme is aimed at giving society a national character.Its struggle is national, and to lead this struggle it forms a unionwhich extends to the proletariat itself, insofar as it uses theproletariat as an ally. The bourgeoisie begins its political struggleby establishing itself, in each modern State, as a revolutionary nationalclass.However the proletariat is notnational in character,but international.

This does not translate intothe hypothesis that the proletariat does not participate in nationalstruggles, but rather into this other one: the revolutionaryprogramme of the bourgeoisie includes the national demand; itsvictory destroys the non-national character ofmedieval society. The programme that the proletariat willachievewith its revolution and through the conquest of political power doesnot include the national demand, which it opposes with that ofinternationalism. The expression bourgeoisnation has aspecifically Marxist sense and, during a specific historical phase,it is a revolutionary demand. The expression nation“in general” has an idealist and anti-Marxist sense. Theexpression proletariannation makesno sense whatsoever, neither Marxist nor idealist.

This puts back in contexteverything that relates both to the theory of history and to theprogrammatic content of each of the revolutionary classes thatstruggle in it.

29. Proletarian struggleandthenationalarena

7. Polemicaldeformations, old and new, have brought about a confusion betweenthe programmatic internationalist position of the communistproletariat and the formally national nature of some of the firststages of its struggle. Historically, the proletariat only became aclass and only came to have a political party within the nationalframework; likewise, it engaged in the struggle for power in anational form, to the extent that it tended to fight the State ofits own bourgeoisie. Even after the proletariat has conquered power,this power may, for a certain amount of time, remain limited to thenational arena. But none of this detracts from the essentialhistorical opposition between the bourgeoisie, which aims to set upbourgeois nations, presenting them as nations “in general”, andthe proletariat which, before it creates an international society,negates the nation “in general” and patriotic solidarity, whilefully understanding that the demand for national unity makes senseup to a certain stage, but always as a bourgeois demand.

The phases marking thetransition from the bourgeois struggle to that of the proletariat aresummarised in the passage in the second chapter of the Manifestothat we just referred to:

“Since the proletariatmust first of all acquire political power, must rise to be theleading class of the nation, must constitute itself as a nation, it isitself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of theword”.

This passage and others areaffected in all translations by incorrect gradualism in thedeployment of the terms political organisation, political force,political domination, political power, and finally dictatorship. Thispassage follows on from another, no less famous one in the series ofresponses given to bourgeois objections in the chapter, “Proletariansand Communists”:

“The Communists arefurther reproached with desiring to abolish countries andnationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take fromthem what they have not got”.

After such a radicalaffirmation of principle, there was no question of adding: theworkers have no nationality. It is a fact that workers are French,Italian, German or whatever, not just by their race and theirlanguage (we know there’s a lot we could repeat about these twofactors) but by their physical belonging to one of the territoriesgoverned by the bourgeois national State, which significantlyinfluences the vicissitudes of their class struggle, and even theinternational struggle. So much is crystal clear.

But to detach one or twophrases to make it look like Marx was saying that the workers’programme, after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, was to foundseparate proletarian nations, presenting this as an essential aspectof their revolution, is not only a falsification, but again imposeson the proletariat, which is today fully developed, the bourgeoisie’sown programme to keep it under its domination.

This becomes even more clearif you recall the logical and historical order of the precedingchapter of the Manifesto,“Bourgeois and Proletarians” beforethe passage where it states that the proletariat doesnot have a national character.

We have recalled thedescription of the first stage of the proletariat’s struggle, inwhich it attacked industrial machines, then the later stage, where itachieved a first kind of union in the wake of the bourgeoisie instruggle: it thus established, in fact, a national union of workers,for bourgeois ends.

Then comes the description ofthe clash between workers and bourgeois at the level of theenterprise and the locality. A great step forward is accomplishedwhen localstruggles are centralised as a national struggle, a class struggle.

What we must see here is not astupid isolation within the framework of a proletariannation buton the contrary the radical overcoming of localist and autonomistfederalism which Marxism has always combated in the reactionaryProudhonists and in all the similar schools of thought that followed.The struggle that takes place within the confines of John O’Groats– or even Glasgow – is not a class struggle. From the moment thatthe bourgeoisie has triumphed in its demand for national unity, ourclass struggle appears for the first time when it extends to theentire physical territory of the nation. And here are the other essential words: “Butevery class struggle is a political struggle!”Marxism throws this thesis in the face of federalists and economisticthinkers of every stripe: everyeconomic movement is a social and political movement!If we are no longer dealing with the little decentralised powers ofthe nobility, but rather with the one that the bourgeoisie hasachieved with its centralised national State, we arrive at thepolitical struggle whenever we have a unified action by proletariansat the national level. Thus in Europe and in France, whenproletarians were not yet in struggle, not even as shock troops ofthe bourgeoisie, even though in England full industrial capitalismalready set them in opposition to the bosses’ class and the BritishState.

We are not within thedomain of the proletarian struggle’s programmatic content:we are just describing the successive stages,first in the sense of time and second in the sense of space, that’sto say the internal boundaries within which the classes struggle andconfront one another (the word stage originally signified a measureof space or distance, not of time). But in its long struggle thebourgeoisie regrouped the small feudal circlesinto a single national stage,which became the inevitable arena for class struggle.

The following passage from the Manifestospells it out: “Thoughnot in substance (in the content, for other translators), yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat withthe bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle”. Why, you may wonder, “The proletariat ofeach country must, of course, first of all get rid of itsown bourgeoisie”.

From now on, the differentstages or successive phases of the struggle are perfectly clear:
– The struggle of the workeragainst his enterprise in a rudimentary, local fashion.
– The national politicalstruggle of the bourgeoisie and its victory, with the help of theworkers, at the national level.
– Workers’ struggles againstthe bourgeois at the level of locality and corporate enterprise.
– Unified struggle of theproletariat of a given national stage against the dominantbourgeoisie, which signifies the formation of the proletariat into anational class and a political party.
– Destruction of bourgeoisdomination.
– Conquest of political powerby the proletariat.
– From here onwards, and fromthe contingent and formal legal-constitutional perspective, theproletariat must establish itself in a class State(dictatorship),all transitory in nature.

But it does not follow thatthe proletariat, which did not have a national character,definitively acquires this character, as had been the case for thebourgeoisie. The character and programme of the proletariat and ofits revolution remain fully international, and the proletariat thatis the first to “free itself of its own bourgeoisie” does notconfront other countries where this has not taken place, but ratherconfronts foreign bourgeoisies by joining in common struggle with theproletarians of other nations.

Once again, we conclude: ingiven historical phases, the proletarian movement struggles for theconstitution of nations, that’s to say, it supports theconstitution of bourgeois nations. In this phase, as in the one thatfollows, in which class alliances are no longer on the agenda,Marxism openly defines the national demand as a bourgeois demand.

30. Proletarianstrategy in the Europe of 1848

8. Neither anexposition of doctrine nor a description of the historical process,but rather the political strategy of the recently founded CommunistParty, the Manifestoprescribed that in the countries under the subjugation of thereactionary Holy Alliance, the proletariat should give itsinsurrectionary support to the bourgeois parties that struggledagainst the feudal absolutism and oppression of nationalities, andthat in the event of the bourgeoisie’s victory, it shouldimmediately break its alliance and go over to the workers’revolution.

We prefer to talk aboutstrategy rather than tactics, since the white-hot historical periodin which the Manifestowas published did not involve local, circ*mstantial solutions thatwere susceptible to variations from one place to another and wouldallow subsequent modifications and alternative decisions. Just as inan army the commander must judge if a given company has the strengthto attack, or rather should hold its position, or again beat theretreat, for Marxism tactical considerations consist, for example, indeciding the best moment to trigger a local strike, or to give anarmed proletarian group from a city district or village the signal toenter the struggle. Strategy is concerned with general directives fora military campaign or revolution: there are either favourableconditions allowing you to apply it, or else there aren’t, in whichcase it is useless and even disastrous to change or reverse thestrategy in the course of action.

Without strategy there is norevolutionary party. For decades and decades, the commentators on the Manifestoand our movement’s other fundamental texts have invested a greatdeal of effort in excusingthe strategic errors that Marx supposedly committed in his projectionof future action by the communists. In reality, this exceptional textdoes not just outline, with incredible conciseness, the theory of themodern historical process and the general programme for the societythat will follow capitalism; it also gives precise directions as tothe moments and likely rhythms of class struggles and conflicts indifferent areas.

It was impossible to ignorethe overview of the totality of European social and political forces:the dominant trait of this historic period was precisely that, at themoment when the process of forming nations was in full swing, amidthe lyrical exaltations of bourgeois ideology, the movement in Parisimmediately impacted on that of Vienna, the movement in Warsaw onthat of Milan etc., despite the highly variable degrees of resistancethat the dying pre-bourgeois regimes presented in different regionsof Europe. In this heated atmosphere, everything suggested that nowwas the ultimate and decisive attack that would destroy themonarchical and imperial fortresses of the ancienregime andremove every last brake on the spread of capitalism.

But the extraordinary power ofthis text, which is our founding proclamation, is in maintaining thateven though the struggle for democratic and national liberty againstthe last vestiges of serfdom and medieval obscurantism was in theforeground, for more about a decade the fabric of the newcapitalist economy had been transformed by the clash of productiveforces against the relations of production, which were no longerthose of the landed feudalism but those of wage labour and industrialand agrarian commercialism.

The false revolutionaries, whoeven today celebrate increased rhythms of production and who join inthe choir encouraging capital to invest and produce more and more,should remember the terrible phrase which, from 1848, announced thatthe bourgeoisie would succumb because society possesses “toomuch civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry,too much commerce”.

The central thesis of the Manifesto isthus not that in its current phase, Europe was going to becomecommunist, but that every period of violent change can result in arupture in the relations of production, and that it is thereforeevident from this time hence that the capitalist type of relationswere not creating an equilibrium but ever more violent convulsions inthe productive forces that were shackled by the manacles ofcapitalist relations of production. A century later, the volume ofthese forces in the monstrous belly of global capital had increasedsignificantly, but so too had the thickness of the armour platingthat covered it. Unable to raise himself to the dialectics of theconfrontation between scientific forecast and scientific fact, neverhaving learned the lesson that hindsight is useless when you’redead, and adoring those who speak “common sense”, the pettybourgeois can only tremble in awe when he hears that we were closerto proletarian revolution in 1848 than in 1948, just as he would notunderstand that his university degree has brought him a step closerto cretinism than his elementary school certificate.

The European strategy of 1848therefore sees the working class grappling with two colossal tasks:first, helping to achieve the formation of independent bourgeoisStates, and second, trying to overthrow the bourgeoisie, in Stateswhere it already wields political power as well as those where itdoes not.

With its highs and lows, andwith the confrontation of opposing material forces, history hasprolonged the delays in this process, but has not shattered thestrategic cornerstone of 1848: you cannot win the second point if youhave not won the first; in other words, if you have not yet overcomethe last obstacles that prevent the organisation of society intonational States.

The main obstacle, in placesince 1815, was raised after the fall of Napoleon: the Holy Alliancebetween Austria, Prussia and Russia. The position of the Manifestowas that there would be no social republic in Europe so long as therewas a Holy Alliance. It was therefore essential to struggle,alongside the democratic revolutionaries of the time, against theyoke on the peoples of central Europe; but it would at the same timebe necessary to unmask these democrats to the proletarians, alreadypreparing for the time when, once the bourgeois national liberationwas assured, the crisis of the bourgeois mode of production wouldmanifest itself more profoundly than ever, with the historic clashesand explosions that this would necessarily provoke in place of theidyllic equality of citizens within the State and between the nationsof the world.

So long as you are just alittle less narrow-minded and stupid than a professional politician,who confuses the course of history with the expiry of his electoralmandate, you will see that the gigantic vision of the Manifestohas been fully confirmed by history, even if the Holy Alliance was ahard nut to crack, and even if the ever more infamous civilisation ofcapitalism which triumphed over it is even harder to break.

Dealing with strategy, thefourth chapter of the Manifesto reviews, asis well known, the tasks of the communist party in different States.A brief mention is sufficient to establish that in the USA, Englandand France, i.e. in those countries where the capitalist system hadtaken root, communists only have relations with workers’ parties,which they nevertheless criticise for harbouring demagogic illusionsor for their theoretical deficiencies. Next come the instructions (towhich we will return in detail in the final part of this analysis)concerning Poland and Germany, which were subject nations under theHoly Alliance. Here, communists should support the parties of thebourgeoisie: in Poland, the parties working for the emancipation ofthe serfs and national liberation, in Germany, bourgeois parties oncondition that they struggle against the monarchy, the aristocracyand (we are reminded of modern traitors) the pettybourgeoisie. We also know, and this is confirmed by other texts,that this proposal for joint action, weapons in hand, is inseparablefrom a merciless and ceaseless critique of bourgeois principles andcapitalist social relations, from the perspective of the bourgeoisrevolution as the immediate prelude to the proletarian revolution.History has not contradicted this schema, but left it aside: in 1848,as we have often said, both failed.

31. Revolutionary downturn and theworkers’ movement

9. The struggles of1848 did not culminate in the overall victory of the Europeanbourgeoisie against the forces of absolutist reaction, and thereforestill less to the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie,despite a unique attempt in France. During the unfavourable periodthat followed, and which lasted until 1866, the central themes ofthe Marxist position were on the one hand a merciless critique ofthe liberal, democratic and humanitarian bourgeoisie, and on theother hand support where it was needed for the unity andindependence of nationalities, led in the form of insurrections andwars between States (Poland, Germany, Italy, Ireland etc.)

When Marx and Engels drew uptheir balance sheet on this troubled period after the battles of1848-49 (which had seemed so promising, and which has retained itscolour more than the later years of fire and anguish that Europe andthe world experienced during the rest of this terrible century) theywere confident that the revolutionary phase would return, but onlysome time later. Theory, then organisation, must be put in orderbefore action leading to a general victory could be contemplated.There was time enough to do this.

In Germany and throughoutCentral Europe and Italy the outcome of the struggle was the same:the liberal bourgeois revolutionary insurgents were defeatedeverywhere, and with them the workers who had fought on thebarricades in an alliance, sharing the total weight of the debacle;therefore, the situation was not even open to a further powerstruggle between the bourgeois and workers. It was not the communistrevolution that was defeated, but the liberal revolution; workerseverywhere had struggled to try to save it from disaster, as wastheoretically expected and politically stated in the Manifesto.

England and France were theexceptions to this historical rule. In the first, feudal reaction hadbeen politically incapacitated for more than a century, and the firstconfrontations between proletariat and bourgeoisie had already takenplace. These had, for example in Chartism, already taken a firstpolitical form, although with vague and cumbersome programmes basedon democratic ideologies; the bourgeoisie did not hesitate to resortto the most violent repression, while being forced to make a fewlegislative concessions of a reformist nature, moderating the inhumanexploitation that the factory owners inflicted on the workers.

France had followed adifferent path, rich in lessons for the theory and politics ofproletarian revolution. For Marx, the defeat of Napoleon signified areal defeat for bourgeois revolutionary forces under the blows ofEuropean absolutist reaction. In response to the facile remarks onCaesarism, despotism, the dictator, the executioner of revolutionaryliberties and similar clichés, it is worth recalling Marx’s letterto Engels of 2 December 1856: “theintensity and the viability of all revolutions since 1789 may begauged with fair accuracy by their attitude towards Poland. Poland istheir ‘external’ thermometer. This is demonstrable in detail fromFrench history […] Of all the revolutionarygovernments, includingthat of Napoleon I, the Comitédu salut publicis an exception only in as much as it refused to intervene, not outof weakness, but out of ‘mistrust’”.

The Bourbons, restored to thethrone of France by Austria, Prussia and Russia after Waterloo, ruledFrance from 1815 to 1830. In 1830, the revolutionary insurrection inParis overturned the absolute monarchy and the Duc d’Orléansbecame king, with a parliamentary constitution. Thus a victory forthe bourgeoisie, supported from this moment on by the workers.

But the bourgeois monarchysided too much with the big landowners and financiers, and inFebruary 1848 a once-more insurgent Paris proclaimed the republic. AsMarx enthusiastically recalled, bourgeois, petty-bourgeois andworkers all brandished the banner of 1793: Liberté,Egalité, Fraternité– a slogan that could not have burned brighter, even if they’dhad neon lights.

This time the workers engagedin the struggle to go beyond their allies, who had betrayed them:the new republican government refused to implement immediately thesocial improvements that it had promised. Marx describes the terrificbattles of June 1848 in a book that is at once scientific and epic, TheClassStruggles in France, publishedin 1850 in four instalments in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue. Theterrible defeat suffered by the workers historically established thatthe modern republican and democratic bourgeoisie was capable of moreferocious repression than the feudal aristocracy and monarchicaldespotism. It is from this point on that we have the fullrevolutionary schema that served us in fighting the opportunist waveof the First World War, and should have served us in combating theopportunism of the Second. It is in these pages that we find thisfundamental political thesis: Destructionof the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class! Andagain: Thepermanent revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat!These are the “forgotten words of Marxism” that Lenin restored.Likewise there are forgotten words that we must restore today inconfronting the renegades who have turned against Marxism andLeninism, as Engels underlined in his 1895 preface to thisfundamental economic thesis: “thepower over capital, the appropriation of the means of production,their subjection to the associated working class and, therefore, theabolition of wage labour, of capital and of their mutual relations”.

If the State, as in Russia, takespossession of capital without abolishingcapital, ithas gone no further than a bourgeois State can go.

The State that economicallyabolishes capital, wage labour, and the exchange relation betweencapital and labour can only be the proletarian State!

From 1848 onwards the seriesof glorious revolutionary alliances with the Jacobin bourgeoisie hadbeen denounced by the workers in France, but not in the rest ofEurope, and since 1848 we have had our own model(yes our model: the revolution is the discovery of a model ofhistory) for the communist class revolution. These denunciationscannot be recanted, because they are signed with the blood of tens ofthousands of workers who fell on the barricades, among them 3,000prisoners executed in cold blood by the bourgeois republic.

Marx justifies the icyindifference of the French proletariat, which you can hardly accuseof cowardice, to the fate of the verbose democracy which succumbed toLouis Napoleon’s coupd’état, whichwas no feudal restoration, to be sure. The Italian proletariat’sreaction to the similarly banal Mussolini episode was a lot more unfortunate.

The French nation is now adefinitive outcome of history. Nothing now prevents the proletariatfrom pursuing its own goal: “getting rid of its nationalbourgeoisie”. After Babeuf’s attempt in the course of the greatrevolution itself, the workers of France buckled down to this taskwith the June insurrection and then again with the Commune. Theyinflicted setbacks on their tradition in 1914 and 1939, two gravecrises for the bourgeoisie. Here again, the words of Marx haveretained all their force: “Anew revolution is only a consequence of a new crisis. The one,however, is as sure to come as the other”.

32. Struggles fornationhood after 1848

10. The revolutionof 1848 in Germany did not end with the political victory of thebourgeoisie and its installation in power; the German proletariat,numerically few at the time, therefore did not find itselfstrategically placed to attack the bourgeoisie after pushing itforward. From this point on, the position of Marxist communists wasto support the process of establishing the German nation and theliberal revolution against the Prussian dynasty and State, as anecessary point of transition towards an open class struggle betweenthe bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Historically, the Germannational process was particularly complex. Even today, there is nounitary national German State. It also did not exist before the FirstWorld War; only Hitler achieved this through the violent annexationof Austria, which had been stripped of all its territories occupiedby other peoples and nationalities after the defeat of 1918. Afterthe Second World War, the victors divided the Germans
into three States:East Germany, West Germany and Austria. But while the various sidestalk of a possible reunification of the two Germanys, all agree toisolate the weak and small Austria.

Innumerable citations wouldserve to characterise the position of Marxism on this problem from1848. It considered the Prussian State to be feudal and reactionary,not susceptible to transformation into a bourgeois political Statewithin the confines of its territory, just as it considered theHohenzollern monarchy as the enemy of bourgeois revolution. Marxismviews the dynasty, the aristocracy, the army and the bureaucracy notas German, from the national point of view, but rather as influencedby non-national relations (Russophiles, Balts, Slavophiles). It isundeniable that antagonisms with the large bordering nationalitiesare a key aspect of the formation of political nationality during theadvent of capitalism. If this antagonism plainly existed with theFrench, the centuries-old enemy, it was totally absent on the easternborder:thus the wars of Frederick the Great, who strengthened Prussia whileturning it into a satellite-State, must be considered particularlynegative from the point of view of the national process.

As for the wars againstNapoleon, they utterly failed to provide an adequate basis for theGerman nation, since they were specifically directed against thevanguard of the new bourgeois and national society, represented bythe armies of the Convention, the Consulate and the First Empire, andthey were distorted by the alliance with the autocratic Russian andAustrian States, oppressors of nationalities. So it was not possibleto look to these wars as a way to create the German national State.

However, we must understandthat, while Marx and Engels refused to consider the Prussian Stateand territory as the basis for a modern nation, they were even moreopposed to the preservation and independence of the small States andprincipalities. Whether or not it exerted its hegemony over them,Prussia was not the German nation that had been anticipated forcenturies, but no more could Saxony or Bavaria be considered nations,and the crumbling Grand-Duchies were pure feudal detritus. Nor didMarx and Engels ever advocate a federal solution – their eyes werefixed on the neighbouring “one and indivisible” republic.

For them, the centralised anddemocratic State, in which every citizen would be legally German andsubject to central authority, would be a great step forward. Therevolutionary assault of the rapidly growing German working classwould then be directed against this unitary capitalist State.

The internal anti-feudalinsurrection having failed, in particular as a result of the completecapitulation of Germany’s weak bourgeoisie to Prussia, meant thatthe solution in 1850 could only come through wars between States, atthe root of which were national questions. Marx’s positions areparticularly interesting with regard to the war against Denmark in1849, that between Austria and France in 1859, between Austria andPrussia in 1866 and finally the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, whoseoutcome was the declaration of the German Empire; yet all of thesewars still had the Prussian and Bismarckian imprint.

In all of these wars, as wehave recalled on other occasions, Marx and Engels came down on theside of one camp or the other for precise and justified reasons, andagitated politically as a result. Naturally, their position is amillion miles from that of the radical bourgeois advocates of thenation and the revolutionary supporters of the independenceof variousnationalities roaming Europe: Marx and Engels treated them asbuffoons and bigoted zealots, even the most illustrious (Kossuth,Mazzini, Garibaldi and the like, not to mention French windbags such asLouisBlanc and Ledru-Rollin, who are of a similar political colour butlack all historical justification because they no longer have abourgeois country to found). We must constantly make this distinctionto prevent our historical reconstruction from being naively viewedas a justification of the rubbish dump of those “proletarian” parties,whichhave recently prostrated themselves, or are prostrating themselvesonce again in a nauseous manner, in order to lick the boots ofChurchill, Truman, de Gaulle, Orlando, Nitti and one hundred otherwould-be liberators and resistance fighters.

We will make do with a coupleof references and a single quote, referring the reader to thearticles published in BattagliaComunista (issues9 to 14, 1950) as part of the “Thread of Time” series on Nation,War and Revolution.

War of 1848-49 betweenPiedmont and Austria: Marx and Engels condemned Austria, even thoughattacked by Piedmont, because it was a war for the formation of theItalian nation.

War of 1849 between Prussiaand Denmark for the conquest of Schleswig-Holstein: generallycondemned as aggressive, but was on the contrary supportedby Marx and Engels and it gave the Germans a German territory.

In 1859, Napoleon III’s waragainst Austria, as ally of Piedmont, then the Italian struggles of1860. The position was clearly to favour the constitution of aunitary Italian State, and therefore supported the defeat of Austria;Engels demonstrated that German interests could not be defended onthe River Mincio [the tributary of the Po that formed the frontierbetween Italy and Austria from 1859 to 1866]. Did this mean thatBonaparte should be supported elsewhere? The same text calls onGermans to fight “sword in hand” against him on the Rhine, andeven to take up the long delayed war against Russia. The SecondEmpire was likewise reviled for having defrauded the Italian nationof Nice, Savoy and even Corsica. Marx repeated this accusation in histext on the Commune, fiercely condemning the French intervention infavour of the Papacy and against Rome as capital of Italy, just as hehad previously condemned the Second Republic for having crushed theRoman Republic in 1849.

As there is more to say on thewars of 1866 and 1870, for now we will simply provide the quote thatclarifies Marx’s thinking: the need to call for the German nationand then to wrench it from the bourgeoisie; denunciation of thecounter-revolutionary Berlin regime. In his letter to Engels of 24March 1863, he says that Bismarck accurately represents “theprinciple of the Prussian State; that the ‘State’ of Prussia (avery different creature from Germany) cannot exist either withoutRussia as she is, or with an independent Poland. The whole history ofPrussia leads one to this conclusion which was drawn long since byMessrs Hohenzollern (Frederick II included). This princelyconsciousness is infinitely superior to the limited mentality of thesubject that marks your Prussian liberal. Since,therefore, the existence of Poland is necessary to Germany andcompletely incompatible with the State of Prussia, the State ofPrussia must be erased from the map. Or the Polish question simplyprovides further occasion for proving that it is impossible toprosecute German interests so long as the Hollenzollerns’ own Statecontinues to exist”.

The constant demand istherefore as follows: Germany, German nation, German interests,that’s to say, of course, German nationalinterests. This particular case – though one of extreme importance– illustrates very well the thesis that the unitary and centralisedconstitution of the nation-State is in the interest of the bourgeois,as the form of its class power, but also in the interest of theproletarians up until the moment that it has been achieved, since itis this that gives birth to the political class alignment that willallow the proletariat to seize power in its turn from the nationalbourgeoisie.

33. The Polish question

11. Marxism’s fullsolidarity with the demand for Polish independence and liberationfrom the Tsar is of fundamental importance, since this was not justa historical judgement expressed in theoretical texts, but a case ofthe forces of the First International taking a clear position inpractice. Not only did the latter offer and provide the full supportof European workers, but it also considered the Polish revolt as apotential fulcrum for a new revolutionary upturn and for generalisedstruggle on the entire continent.

Let’s follow these positionsin detail in the texts and documents of our political current, inorder to prove the error of the thesis that says Marxist politicsmust make judgments and draw conclusions on a case-by-case basis,according to the merits of different situations and contingentevents, enabling an easy change of direction. On the contrary,political decisions are rigidly connected at each stage to the uniquevision of the historical course of the revolution in general and, inour case, to the definition given by historical materialism on thefunction of nationalities in relation to the succession of typicalmodes of production.

For more than a half century,we have seen the most diverse currents struggling to exploitfragmentary and episodic data in order to justify their incessantopportunistic and eclectic contortions, which claims to deliver a newdoctrine each day and new rules, shamelessly making demons ofyesterday’s angels and vice versa.

But the Polish question isalso interesting from another perspective. One could believe thatthis resolute sympathy for national struggles has only been platonicin scope and is limited to texts and studies of historic accounts oreven social theory, without being translated into the domain ofpolitical programmes and actions of the party, this veritableproletarian and communist party which, in the period underconsideration (1847-71), already had the struggle between theproletariat and capitalism and the destruction of this social mode ofcapitalism as its own objective. Yet we do not invoke Marx andEngels’ testaments as writers, but rather as international leadersof the communist movement. Based on a shallow and youthful reading ofEngels’ pages on ThePo and the Rhineand Savoy,Nice and the Rhineyou might get the idea that they were politico-military texts writtenduring a pause in the class revolution, abstracting from themethodology of socio-economics. A step further and you can slip intothe idea that it is alright to open parentheses and establish “freezones” in Marxist doctrine covering a succession of events, indeedany or all events. It is therefore of the utmost importance to showthat all the conclusions of these documents are perfectly inaccordance with the materialist analysis of history, including theinterpretation of humanity’s collective “journey” through time,in the light of evolving productive forces. No one should be allowedto forget this, whether they are holding a sword or a scalpel, brushchisel or bow, or indeed the hammer and sickle.

Portraying Marx and Engels as“occasionalists” might suit Cominform and other cliques, but thisis the main falsification among all the other miserable counterfeitsin circulation.

In a letter dated 13February 1863, Marx inquires of his friend Engels about the events inPoland. The news of that heroic insurrection in the cities and thecountryside, which became a real civil war waged against Russianforces, caused Marx to exclaim: “Thismuch is certain, the era of revolution has now fairly opened inEurope once more. And the general state of affairs is good”.However, the memory of the bitter defeats of 1850 was still toofresh: “Butthe comfortable delusions and almost childish[this marks the first instance of the use of this adjective that wasso frequently used by Lenin, but always in a non-disrespectful way] enthusiasmwith which we welcomed the revolutionary era before February 1848,have gone by the board…. Old comrades … are no more, others havefallen by the wayside or gone to the bad and, if there is new stock,it is, at least, not yet in evidence. Moreover, we now know what rolestupidity plays in revolutions, and how they are exploited byblackguards”.So get going, slackers, you are no longer infantile but senile. Tryto update Karl Marx on this point!

This letter paints, with a fewquick strokes that we will complement by referring to subsequentletters, a picture of all the European political forces to the Polishinsurrection. The “nationalist” Prussians, who took an autonomistposition to prevent the Emperor in Vienna from placing himself at thehead of the German Confederation, and who hypocritically proclaimedtheir solidarity with Italy and Hungary, which were demanding theirindependence, were caught red handed: shamelessly Russophile, theysided against Poland. The Russian revolutionary democrats (Herzen)were also put to the test: despite their Slavophile sentiments, theyhad to defend the Poles against official Russia (and not claim thatonce a constitution had been obtained from the Tsar, Poland remaineda Russian province). The bourgeois government in London and that of Plon-Plon(Napoleon III) hypocritically feigned support for the Polish cause inorder to defend their own interests against Russia, but both weresuspect, and the latter’s betrayal was certain: his agents were inconstant contact with the right wing of the Polish movement thatwould certainly defect, especially in the event of a setback.

European “democracy” didnot want to do anything, or anything of consequence, for insurgentPoland. Marx immediately appealed to the International Working Men’sAssociation, which had been established in London on 28 September1864, to publish a practical programme of action. Before the famousmeeting at St Martin’s Hall, Marx relied on the English Workers’Association. His plan was soon ready: a brief proclamation addressedby the English workers to the workers of all countries and a bookletwritten by himself and Engels to explain the specific points on thePolish question. And immediately after the September 1864, debates onthe actions to be taken within the General Council, which Marxpresided over morally without having accepted the chairmanship. Thisdebate gave rise to discussions of the greatest interest and enabledthe clarification of the political issues of the moment.

The action on behalf of Polandcan therefore be found in all the letters in documents emanating from theparty,from the workers’ International. Moreover, it was considered to bethe main lever for developing workers’ agitation to the maximum inEurope and hasten the opportunities for revolutionary movements.Details of principle on the historical problem of theinternationalist proletariat’s support for a national struggle thusbecome of much greater importance.

34. The International and thequestion of nationalities

12. A series ofinteresting debates within the General Council of the FirstInternational and under the personal leadership of Marx provides thefacts enabling us to correct errors of principle on the question ofthe historic struggles of nationalities. The tendency to ignore theminstead of explaining them from the materialist point of view is amanifestation of particularist and federalist positions derived fromutopian and libertarian theories that Marxism had jettisoned, ratherthan being evidence of an advanced internationalism.

Thesame founding congress of the International Workingmen’s Associationwas convoked in solidarity with the Poles (following a letter fromEnglish workers to French workers on the subject of Poland) and with the Armenians who were oppressed by Russia, and as Marxhimself recounts, was attended by many radical democrat elements, who aroused themistrust of the workers. Concerned about theoreticalclarity but also about the power of the movement at a historicalmoment when the demands for independence had a real revolutionarycontent, Marx arranged to have a badly drafted report shelved andwrote the powerful Inaugural Address, which gave the greatestemphasis to the struggle of the proletarian class in England and onthe continent.

Marx’s famousletter of 4 November 1864 explained that he was on his guard andready to take arms against any attempt by theoretical democratism toinfiltrate the workers’ ranks.

This is interestingin allowing us to correctly interpret the dignified replies he madelater to those who accused him of being, as we would say today, tothe right on the national question. A certain Major Wolff hadpresented a charter that he claimed had been adopted by Italianworkers’ societies: “[These] are essentially associatedBenefit Societies…. I saw the stuff later. It was evidently aconcoction of Mazzini’s, and that tells you in advance in whatspirit and phraseology the real question, the labour question, wasdealt with. As well as how the nationalities question intruded intoit”. When Eccarius asked him to attend the meeting of thesubcommittee, Marx heard “a fearfully cliché-ridden, badlywritten and totally unpolished preamble pretending to be adeclaration of principles, with Mazzini showing through the wholething from beneath a crust of the most insubstantial scraps of Frenchsocialism”. There was also, in theItalian charter, “somethingquite impossible, a sort of central government of the Europeanworking classes (with Mazzini in the background, of course)”.

Finally,Marx prepared the Address, reducing the charter from 40 to 10articles, and read the text that would later become historical,accepted unanimously. However, he did not openly expound upon his method.Lots of these people would understand nothing, he confided to Engels,they are the sort of people who would join meetings with liberals insupport of universal suffrage!

It is well knownthat the famous Address contains, after the social and classist part, afinal paragraph referring to international politics, where theworkers demand that the relations between States should be subject tothe same moral norms as those between men. The phrase is repeated inthe first “Address” on the war of 1870, and not only expresses ademand which, like all demands concerning the national question, is apurely bourgeois demand, but expresses it in a purely propagandisticform. Marx will be excused for having had to act fortiter in re,suaviter in modo – harshly with regard to content, but gentlywith regard to form. But the false Marxists of today have also sunkbelow the most rancid piss of the ultra-bourgeois democrats, evenwith regard to form. In this clarification, we hear the authenticvoice of Marx: “Insofar as International politics is mentionedin the ‘Address’, I refer to countries and not to nationalities,and denounce Russia, not the minores gentium [smallernations]. The Sub-Committee adopted all my proposals. I was, however,obliged to insert two sentences about ‘duty’ and ‘right’, andditto about ‘Truth, Morality and Justice’ in the preamble to therules, but these are so placed that they can do no harm”.

On10 December 1864, Marx presented the debate on Fox’s proposalconcerning the appeal on behalf of Poland. This good democrat did hisbest, forcing himself to reduce the problem to a class question. Butthere was a point that Marx could not swallow, an expression ofsympathy for French democracy, which actually extended “as far asBoustrapa [=Bonaparte]”: “Iopposed this and unfolded a historically irrefutable tableau of theconstant French betrayal of Poland from Louis XV to Bonaparte III. Atthe same time, I pointed out how thoroughly inappropriate it was thatthe Anglo-French Alliance should appear as the ‘core’ of theInternational Association, albeit in a democratic version”.

Theproposal was accepted with Marx’s revisions, but the Swiss delegateJung, representing the minority, voted against this “altogether‘bourgeois’” text.

However,to get an idea of the lively interest provoked by the Polish revolt,we can recall that the General Council not only had direct contactswith the bourgeois Poles, but that in one session it even receivedrepresentatives of the aristocracy, as part of the nationalanti-Russian union. These aristocrats assured the Council that they,too, were democrats, and that the national revolution in Poland wasonly possible with a peasant uprising. Marx simply asked himself ifthey really believed what they were saying.

Wenow come to 1866. Once again, the Polish question was “at the heartof controversies within the Association”. A certain Vésinieraccused the International, no less, of having become a committee ofnationalities in tow to Bonapartism. This ruffled Karl’s beard.“This ass” had attributed a paragraph on Poland included in theagenda of the Geneva Congress to the Parisian delegates, when quitethe contrary, they had considered it inopportune. It deplored thatquestions were being addressed “notconcerning the goal of the Association and contrary to law, justice,liberty, fraternity and the solidarity of peoples and races, such as:‘the elimination of Russian influence in Europe etc.’” Vésinier’sthesis is asfollows: it is neither class-based nor internationalist to encouragea national war by the Poles against the Russians and to becomeenemies of Russia, because we must be for peace among the peoples. Asjustification for this position he recalled the iniquities of theBonaparte regime and of the English bourgeoisie, and the emancipationof the serfs in Russia and Poland, which only recently took place,and asserted “that it was theduty of the Central Committee to proclaim solidarity and fraternityamong all peoples, and notto put one of them alone beyond the pale of Europe”.Vésinier then accused the Poles of using the Association “tohelp to restore their nationhood, without concerning themselves withthe question of the emancipation of the workers”.Marx simply mentioned the bursts of laughter that greeted these liesand falsehoods, depicting it as “theMuscovite line pursued by Proudhon and Herzen”and saying that “Vésinier isjust the fellow for the Russians. Of little merit as a writer…. Butwith talent, great rhetorical power, much energy and above allunscrupulous through and through”.

Vésinierwould be expelled from the International, and “Weare commemorating [Poland’s] revolution on 23 January”. Asfor us, we are totally of the opinion that every armedrevolution “against the existing social conditions” isworth one hundred times more than any theory of exaggerated extremismand pacifism of the people, and while believing or feigning tobelieve in a class perspective, in reality only invokes the accoladeof the Western bourgeoisie and the Tsar of all the Russias.

35. TheSlavs and Russia

13. The historicalcycle of the formation of bourgeois national States in parallel withindustrialisation and the formation of great markets, undeniablyembraced England, France, Germany and Italy; other lesser powerscould be considered to be established nations: Spain, Portugal,Belgium, Holland, Sweden and Norway. The Marxist demand applied intypical manner to Poland, and is especially valid as a declarationof war against the “Holy Alliance” of Russia, Austria andPrussia. But from the Marxist perspective this cycle would come toan end leaving the problem of the Slavs of Eastern and South-easternEurope, among others, unresolved.

Since 1856 Marx hadbeen interested in a book by the Pole Mieroslawski, openly directedagainst Russia, Germany and Pan-Slavism, in which the author proposed “afree confederation of Slavic nations with Poland as theArchimedean people”, which means the people in the vanguard onthe road to freedom. Something of this kind was to take place withthe formation of the Little Entente of the Slavic States (Bulgaria,Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland as the most important andhom*ogeneous State) after the First World War and the dissolution ofthe Austrian Empire (1918). And as we know, this situation lasted forbarely twenty years, until there was a new partition between theGermans and the Russians in 1939.

Apartfrom the reproach for having based his hopes on the English andFrench governments, what interests us here is Marx’s critique ofMieroslawsky’s attempt at social analysis. The author did notforesee the strong industrialisation of many districts and cities inPoland, and based his independent State on “democratic agrariancommunity”. Originally, Polish peasants had been united infree communes, agrarian communities, opposed to which were a dominium,or territory under the military and administrativecontrol of a baron; the nobles, in turn, elected the king. But thepeasants’ free land was soon usurped, partly by the monarchy andpartly by the aristocracy, and the peasant communities were subjectedto serfdom. Nonetheless, a class of almost free middle-peasantssurvived, with the right to form a semi-nobility, an order ofknights; but the peasants could become members of this order only ifthey participated in a war of conquest or in the colonisation ofvirgin lands; this stratum in turn was transformed into a kind of lumpenproletariatof the aristocracy, a shabby nobility: “Thiskind of development is interesting”, Marx writes, “becausehere serfdom can be shown to have arisen in a purely economic way,without the intermediate link of conquest and racial dualism”.In fact, the king, the high and low nobility, and the peasantry wereall of the same race and spoke the same language, and the nationaltradition was as old as it was strong. Marx’s thesis thereforeestablished that the class yoke appeared with the development of thetechnological means of production, even within a uniform ethnicgroup, just as in other cases it appeared as the result of a clashbetween two races and two peoples, in which case race and language,in turn, functioned as “economic agents” (cf. Engels in Part 1).

Evidently the Polishdemocrat did not foresee the entry of a real industrial bourgeoisieinto the struggle, and still less that of a powerful and gloriousproletariat, which in 1905 was going to hold Tsarist troops in check,and would even rise up during the Second World War in a desperateattempt to take power in the martyred capital against the German andRussian general staffs, before going down like the Communards ofParis, killed in the crossfire of their enemies.

Marx’sattention was not distracted from Russia for an instant, since heregarded the Tsar’s troops as the reserve army of the Europeancounter-revolution, ready to cross frontiers everywhere tore-establish “order” in central Europe, suppressing every newmovement seeking to overthrow the States of the ancienregime, cutting off allpotential sources of an upsurge in the proletarian revolution. Almostten years later, Marx took an interest in the theory of Duchinski, aRussian professor from Kiev, who was living in Paris). Duchinskistated that: “the realMuscovites, i.e., inhabitants of the former Grand Duchy of Moscow,were for the most part Mongols or Finns, etc., as was the case in theparts of Russia situated further east and in its south-eastern parts.I see from it at all events that the affair has seriously worried theSt Petersburg cabinet (since it would put an end to Panslavism in nouncertain manner). All Russian scholars were called on to giveresponses and refutations, and these in the event turned out to beterribly weak. The purity of the Great Russian dialect and itsconnection with Church Slavonic appear to lend more support to thePolish than to the Muscovite view in this debate […] It has dittobeen shown geologically and hydrographically that a great ‘Asiatic’difference occurs east of the Dnieper, compared with what lies to thewest of it, and that (as Murchison has already maintained) the Uralsby no means constitute a dividing line. Result as obtained byDuchinski: Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They are notSlavs; they do not belong to the Indo-Germanic race at all, they aredes intrus [intruders], who must be chased back across the Dnieper,etc. Panslavism in the Russian sense is a cabinet invention, etc. Iwish that Duchinski were right and at all events that this view wouldprevail among the Slavs. On the other hand, he states that some ofthe peoples in Turkey, such as Bulgars, e.g., who had previously beenregarded as Slavs, are non-Slav”.

Wedo not know if this passage from Marx’s letter was used in thebourgeoisie’s recent polemic against the Russian Revolution tosupport the current thesis that the Russian people submitted todictatorship because they are Asiatic and not European! It is clearthat the thesis Marx was alluding to, while absolutely inoffensivefor true Marxism, becomes galling to today’s Russians who follow inthe footsteps of Stalin by turning to a racial, national andlinguistic tradition rather than that of the class relationshipbetween the proletariat of all countries.

Fromthe Marxist point of view, the fact that the Great Russians should beclassified as Mongolians rather than as Aryans (we should not forgetthat famous phrase that Marx so often recalls: “Grattezle Russe, et vous trouverez le Tartare”– “scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar”) is offundamental importance with regard to the following question: must wewait for the formation of a vast capitalist Slavic nation, includingall of the Russian State, or at least as far as the Urals, in orderto conclude the cycle during which the European working class mustsubordinate its forces to the cause of forming nations, which must beclosed before the proletarian revolution is on the agenda? Marx’sresponse was that the formation of modern nation States as a premisefor the workers revolution corresponds to an area that extends in theeast as far as the eastern borders of Poland, and under certaincirc*mstances might include the Ukraine and Little Russia as far asthe Dnieper. This is the European arena of the revolution, the onethat had to be dealt with first, and the cycle that preceded the nextperiod, characterised by purely class-oriented action, came to an endin this area in 1871.

We must not forget,if we are to avoid taking ethnology to be the sole determiningfactor, that people of Mongolian race, the Finns, formed sociallyadvanced nations in Europe (Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania,Latvia) which therefore form part of the historic European area;during this period Marxism viewed favourably their attempts to winindependence from the three powers of the Holy Alliance.

36. The warsof 1866 and 1870

14. While the Polishinsurrection receded and this path to the revolution closed, as ithad done in 1848, Marx and Engels became aware that war wasapproaching between Austria and Prussia. Italy would undoubtedlybecome embroiled because of the burning issue of independence forVenice, once again under Austrian occupation; the position of Russiaand France was meanwhile ambiguous: it was clear that a new periodof upheaval was at hand. The battle of Sedan would settle allaccounts but the only enemy of the revolution that would perish wasthe French Empire.

On10 April 1866, Marx believed that it was the Russians who wanted war;they were indeed massing troops on the frontiers of Austria andPrussia, hoping to profit from the situation to occupy the two otherparts of Poland. But this would mean the end of the Hohenzollernregime, and the Russians’ true objective was to make it possible tomarch on a revolutionary Berlin in order to maintain theHohenzollerns on the throne. Marx and Engels hoped that Berlin wouldrise up at the first news of military defeat.

Itis very interesting that, even though they were against Austria onthe Venetian question, they considered that an Austrian victory wouldbe useful from the perspective of the anti-Prussian revolution.

Asfor Napoleon III, he was no less suspect than Alexander of Russiafrom the perspective of the proletarian cause, since he was stilldreaming of becoming the “fourth member of the Holy Alliance”,which was now broken.

Whenwar broke out on 19 June 1866, the Council of theInternational debated the situation, attacking the problem ofnationalities as a matter of principle.

“The French,very strongly represented, gave vent to their friendly dislike forthe Italians”. Marx referred to the fact that the French were, uncounsciously, against the Italo-Prussian alliance and would havepreferred an Austrian victory. But the theoretical question wasrather more important than taking positions in this session: “Therepresentatives of ‘jeune France’ (non-workers), by the way,trotted out their view that any nationality and even nations are des préjugéssurannés [outdated prejudices]”. Here Marxdrily commented: “Proudhonised Stirnerism”. (Stirner is theultra-individualist philosopher who, focusing entirely on the“unique” subject, on the one hand touches on the Nietzsche’stheory of the super-dictator while on the other hand on the anarchisttheory negating the State and society: both theories are thequintessentially bourgeois. In economics and sociology, Proudhonglorified small autonomous groups of producers trading with othergroups.) Marx explained what he was condemning here, a reactionaryposition masquerading as something radical. As we have alreadypointed out, this position did not go beyond the historicallybourgeois but active demand for the nation, but rather fell short ofit:

“Breakingeverything up into small groups or municipalities that in turn form aunion, but no State. And this individualisation of humanity, as wellas the ‘mutualism’ that corresponds to it will be formed in thisway, bringing history to a halt in all other countries and the wholeworld while we wait until the French are ready to carry out socialrevolution. Then they will demonstrate the experiment and the rest ofthe world, driven by the force of their example [do you not getthe impression that he could be speaking of today’s Russians?]will do the same thing. Just what Fourier expected from his phalanstèremodèle [today the Russians would say thesocialist fatherland, the country of socialism]. Yet everyone whoclutters up the ‘social’ question with the ‘superstitions’ ofthe Old World is a ‘reactionary’”.

On this occasionMarx, ordinarily so reluctant to engage in public activity, could notavoid taking sides against his future son-in-law, Lafargue. He madethe English burst out laughing when he pointed out that Lafargue,having abolished nationality, spoke in French, a language unknown to90% of those present: “I pointed out that [Lafargue]seemed to be implying that the abolition of nationalities meant theirabsorption by the model nation, the French nation”.

Butwhat was Marx’s preference in this war? First of all, defeat forPrussia. He said, not to the Council, but in his letter to Engels(let’s not forget the “internal” nature of the correspondencewe are citing): “The situationis indeed difficult at this time. On the one hand we must confrontthe stupid Italophilia of the English and on the other hand the falsepolemics of the French, in particular to prevent any demonstrationthat might channel our Association exclusively in one direction”.

Thusthere was no official taking of positions in favour of one of thebelligerents in the war of 1866 comparable to the one taken in favourof the Poles during the insurrection against the Russians.

AfterAustria’s success in Italy, Prussia triumphed at Sadowa andNapoleon III intervened as a mediator. On 7 July 1866, Marx wrote: “Besidesa great Prussiandefeat, which perhaps (oh but those Berliners!) might have led to arevolution, there could have been no better outcome than theirstupendous victory”. Marxcalculated that Bonaparte’s greatest interest lay in a swinging offortunes between Austrian and Prussian victories and defeats,preventing the emergence of a powerful Germany with a decisivecentral hegemony, allowing him, with his intact military forces, tobecome the arbiter of Europe. Marx also thought that Italy’sposition was very dangerous and that Russia stood to gain no matterwhat happened. As we know, Austria, accepting the mediation ofFrance, surrendered Venice to France: in order to get the city back,the King of Savoy had to give in once again to his French ally of1859, who opposed the occupation of Rome with his famous “jamais”.

Inthis respect, the position of the International was clear: the nextwar would be unleashed by Bonaparte, who at the time was introducingthe Dreyse needle rifle to his infantry (in his letter of 7 July,Marx treated the technical evolution of weaponry as a practicalapplication of economic determinism, “Isthere any sphere in which our theory that the organisation oflabour is determined bythe means of production is moredazzlingly vindicated than in the industry for human slaughter?”– suggesting that Engels write a study on the subject; (today itseems everything relates to the question, “who has the atomicbomb?”) And in the second place, in this war, it was essentialthatFrance and Napoleon III should be defeated.

Wehave comprehensively developed the question of proletarian politicsin regard to a domestic and revolutionary national war ofindependence, like the war in Poland in 1863 (or in Italy in 1848 andin 1860), where the alignment of forces was clear and unambiguous. Weneed not repeat everything that has extensively reported about the war of 1870between France and Prussia. The proclamations of the Internationaltotally ruled out any support for either the government of Bismarckor that of Bonaparte: on this question, there is no doubt. But theInternational resolutely wished for the defeat of the Second Empire(just as in 1815 it would have preferred victory for the First).

Infact, having applauded the French sections’ courageous oppositionto the war, the “Address” of the General Council of 23 July 1870contained the famous phrase that was exploited so much later (andlater commented upon in a historically irrevocable manner by Lenin):for the Germans, this was a defensivewar. But this was immediatelyfollowed with a sharp attack on Prussian politics, and an appeal toGerman workers to fraternise with the French: the victory ofGermany would be a disaster and would reproduce “all themiseries that befell Germany after her [so-called] wars ofindependence [against Napoleon I]”. It was necessary towait for a Lenin to come along and say: the philistinepetty-bourgeois cannot understand how one can desire the defeat ofboth belligerents! As of 1870, the general theory of proletariandefeatism was already in place.

Marxism’shistorical evaluation of 1866-70 and the balance of forces betweenthe feudal powers of the east and the bourgeois dictatorships of thewest is summed up in this phrase (although we remind any nitwittrying to become a published historian that the use of the word “if”is not advisable): “If thebattle of Sadowa had been lost instead of being won, Frenchbattalions would have overrun Germany as the allies of Prussia”.

A defensive warmeans a historically progressive war. As Lenin demonstrated, this wasthe case in Europe between 1789 and 1871, but not afterwards (and wewill never tire of throwing this in the face of the partisans in the“just war” of 1939-45). This means that if Moltke had set off oneday before Bazaine, and if the warmongers had shouted: “to Paris,to Paris!” instead of “to Berlin, to Berlin!” the Marxistanalysis would have been the same.

37. The Commune and the newhistoriccycle

15. The failedrevolution in Germany in 1848 did not break out again in 1866 and in1871 because of the sensational victories of Prussian militarism.But the terrible defeat suffered by French militarism aroused theParisian proletariat, not just against the demoralised regime, butagainst the entire bourgeois class, republicans and prone to capitulating,and against the reactionary power of Prussia. The fall of therevolutionary Communard government in no way detracted from thehistoric significance of this event, which made the dictatorship ofthe proletariat the only direct historical perspective forcommunists in Europe.

TheSecond “Address” of the International (9 September 1870) followedthe victory at Sedan, the surrender of the French army, thedeposition of Napoleon III and the proclamation of the Republic. Itwas an utter indictment of the project to annex Alsace-Lorraine underthe pretext of assuring Germany a secure military frontier. The“Address” ironically remarks that the Prussians were not soconcerned about the security of their Russian frontier, and foresees a “warof races – a war with the combined Slavonian and Roman races”.The text also says that the German working class “haveresolutely supported the war, which it was not in their power toprevent”, but that it nowdemanded peace and recognition of the Republic proclaimed in Paris.It expressed serious reservations with regard to the latter, while atthe same time advising the French proletariat not to rise up inrevolt. But it is the Third “Address”, edited by Marx in person,which not only constitutes a manifestation of proletarian politicsbut a cornerstone of the revolutionary theory and programme. AsEngels recalled in his preface, Marx delivered the Address on 30 May1871, just two days after the last combatants of the Commune hadfallen at Belleville.

Thisclassic source of revolutionary communism, upon which we drawceaselessly, goes beyond any kind of concern, such that which had suggestedto the General Council six months earlier to dissuade the Parisianproletariat from undertaking an impossible enterprise, for fear thata new catastrophe could favour further Prussian invasions andannexations, causing an immense new national problem at the veryheart of the most advanced part of Europe. The International,belonging to the workers of the entire world, aligned itself fullywith the first revolutionary working class government and acceptedthe lessons of the ferocious repression, lessons which provided theclearest battle orders to those who would write future chapters inthe history of the proletarian revolution.

Theseorders were twice disobeyed on a world scale, in 1914 and 1939, butthe goal of our patient historical reconstructions and tirelessrepetitions is to demonstrate that despite this, the lessons will betaken up again at some future turning point in history, as had beenset out in this memorable covenant.

Thealliance between the Versaillais and the Prussians to crush the redCommune, or more precisely, the fact that the former assumed, underpressure from the latter and under Bismarck’s orders, the role ofhangman of the revolution, can only lead to the following historicconclusion: “The highest heroiceffort of which old society is still capable is national war [whichwe therefore had to support]; andthis is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended todefer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as thatclass struggle bursts out into civil war”.

Itwas not Lenin who invented the formula, “transform the national warinto a civil war”; he found it written in black and white. Lenindid not say that the orders of the International were only relevantto the European parties from 1914 to 1915, and that in latersituations the instructions might be different, and that the phase ofalliances in national wars, the phase of “peace between theworkers and those who appropriate the product of their labour,” asthe text cited above added. Marx and Lenin recognised the historicallaw that, from 1871 until the destruction of capitalism in Europe,there are two alternatives: either the proletariat can applydefeatism in any war, or, as Engels wrote prophetically in hispostscript to the 1891 edition of TheCivil War in France, and as wesee today, “… is there notevery day hanging over our heads the Damocles’ sword of war, on thefirst day of which all the chartered covenants of princes will bescattered like chaff... a race war which will subject the whole ofEurope to devastation by 15 or 20 million armed men”.

First:Marxism has always foreseen war between bourgeois States; second:it has always admitted that in particular historical phases it is notpacifism but war that accelerates general social development, as wasthe case with the wars that enabled the bourgeoisie to form nationalStates; third:since 1871 Marxism has established that there is only one way thatthe revolutionary proletariat can put an end to war: with civil warand the destruction of capitalism.

38. The imperialist epoch andirredentist leftovers

16. In the epoch ofbourgeois revolutionary wars of independence and the formation ofnation States there are still many cases of lesser nationalitiesbeing subjected to States of another nationality, even in Europe;nevertheless, the proletarian International must reject everyattempt to justify wars between States for reasons of irredentism,unmasking the imperialist purposes of every bourgeois war, andcalling upon the workers to sabotage such wars from both sides. Theinability to put this into practice has brought about thedestruction of revolutionary energies under the opportunist wavesthat accompanied the two world wars; and if the masses do notabandon the opportunist leadership in time (social democratic orCominformist) it will result in another war, thus allowingcapitalism to survive its violent and bloody crises once again.

It was Lenin whoshowed that the war of 1914 broke out because of the economic rivalrybetween the major capitalist States over the division of the world’sproductive resources and especially those of the colonies in theunderdeveloped continents. He never denied the existence of seriousnational problems in various metropolitan States; the perfect exampleis the Austrian monarchy which ruled over various Slavic, Latin andMagyar regions, and even some Ottoman groups. Another example:Russia, whose feudal State straddled the border between Europe andAsia. Therefore, one cannot reach conclusions onquestions of nationality in Russia without taking into account thiscurrent analysis, as well as the one that will be presented in afuture meeting on class struggles and national struggles innon-European continents and between coloured races (the Easternquestion and the colonial question). [Editor’s note: this wascovered in a series of articles in Il programma comunista fromIssue 21/1954 to Issue 8/1955.]

Thesocialists of the Second International based their betrayal not onlyby invoking the two sophisms of supporting the nation in the event ofa defensive war or a war against a “less developed country”, but also ona third, that the war of 1914 would tend to resolve the problems of irredentism.These problems were extraordinarily tangled: France, for example,wanted to recover Alsace and Lorraine, but had no intention ofsurrendering Corsica or Nice. England lent its support, but jealouslydefended its control of Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus. As for Poland,there were three would-be liberators, each wanting to keep it unitedunder their own domination.

Welikewise know that the Italian socialist party provided a laudableexample of resistance to the seductions of irredentism; an even moreexemplary case was that of the Serbian party which, active in acountry surrounded by territories inhabited by oppressed compatriotsand, moreover, attacked by a far more powerful Austria, led avigorous struggle against the militarism of Belgrade and thepatriotic fever. We have already set out the fundamental thesesregarding these national questions in a series of “Threads of Time”published in 1950 and 1951, so we will now make do with a briefsummary:

1.Radical Marxists have rightly combated the social-democratic thesisof simple linguistic “cultural” autonomy within a unitary Statein multi-national countries, supporting total autonomy for minoritynationalities, not as a bourgeois outcome or facilitated by thebourgeoisie but as a result of the overthrow of the central Statepower with the participation of proletarians of its own dominantnationality.

2.Liberation and the equality of all nations, which are unachievableunder capitalism, are bourgeois and counter-revolutionary formulas.However, resistance mounted against the State colossi of capitalismby oppressed nationalities and small “semi-colonial” powers orsmall States under protectorates are forces that contribute to thedownfall of capitalism.

3.Even within the cycle during which the proletarianInternational refuses any support by its own organised politicalforces for wars between States, and denies that the presence on oneside of despotic feudal States (or States that are less democraticthan others) is a reason to abandon this historic internationalposition, and everywhere adopts a defeatist stance within the “own”country, it can and must however consider the different effects ofthis or that outcome of the conflict in its historical analysis.

Wehave given many examples in other texts: in the Russian-Turkish warof 1877, in which Franco-British democracy rooted for the Russians,Marx ardently sympathised with the Turks. In the Greek-Turkish war ofindependence of 1899, without going as far as to volunteer to fightlike the anarchists and republicans, left-socialists were for Greece;later, they took sides with the Young Turks’ revolution and alsofor the liberation of the Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians in theterritories under Ottoman domination in the Balkan wars of 1912. Andthe same thing could be said of the Boer War against the English, awar, like the Spanish-American War of 1898, which had extra-Europeanimpacts and was fought for imperialist purposes.

But these were onlyepisodes that punctuated the great period of calm that lasted from1871 to 1914.

Next came the worldwars: every proletarian party that supported its State or its alliesin war committed an act of treason; everywhere, the tactic ofrevolutionary defeatism had to be applied. From this crystal-clearconclusion, however, one must not deduce that the victory of one oranother side would make no difference in terms of the development ofevents from a revolutionary perspective.

Our position on thisquestion is known. The victory of the Western democracies and ofAmerica in the first and second world wars set back the possibilitiesfor the communist revolution, whereas the opposite outcome would haveaccelerated them. The same thing is true of the American capitalistmonster in a third world war, which could take place within one ortwo decades.

Thevictory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie is the preconditionfor the communist revolution, or rather, it is the revolution itself.But we can also recognise revolutionary conditions brought about bythe wars between States, which, until it can be proven otherwise,have until now mobilised more physical energies than social wars. Thetwo principal conditions are a catastrophe for Great Britain and theUnited States of America, the colossal flywheels that are responsiblefor the capitalist mode of production’s current terrible historicalmoment of inertia.

39. A formula for Trieste offeredto the“contingentists”

17. The position ofMarxist communists towards the current conflict over Trieste hasthree cornerstones: since 1911, the Italian proletariat declared itsopposition to demands for unification with Italy; in 1915, Italiansocialists refused to support the war for Trieste and Trentino, andthe groups that would later form the Communist Party at Livorno in1921 declared itself in favour of sabotage against the national war;after 1918, the proletariat of the Julian March (Venezia Giulia),of both races and languages, ranged itself massively on the side ofrevolutionary socialism and the party founded in Livorno. Thecommunist party must treat the nationalist politics of thegovernments of Rome and Belgrade with the same contempt, and evenmore so the unbelievable deceitfulness of Cominform followers.

Bya strange coincidence, our meeting was taking place at the verymoment that unexpected events brought Trieste to the foreground ofinternational politics. What do the communists say about the Triestequestion?

TheCommunist Party of Italy was founded in Livorno in 1921 out of groupswhich, not content with refusing the “sacred union” and theformula “neither support [for the war] nor sabotage”, adhered tothe Leninist position of defeatism and demanded the most resoluteopposition to the war that liberated the Julian March, Trieste andTrentino, calling in May 1915 for an indefinite strike againstmobilisation and pushing the old party to action through the courseof the war and in the period following the setback at Caporetto.

Thuswe didn’t want Trieste. But proletarian and revolutionary Triestewas with us, and the majority of political sections, the tradeunions, the cooperatives, regardless of whether they spoke Italian orSlovenian, came over to the Communist Party, as well as the gloriouseditorial board of Lavoratore, which appeared in bothlanguageswith the same articles on theory, propaganda and political andorganisational agitation. Red Trieste was in the front rank ofcommunist battalions in the struggle against fascism, which nevermanaged to impose itself without the intervention of the national carabinieri.

Nothingin common here with the attitude of today’s Italianpseudo-communists. Yesterday, they would have allowed Trieste to beswallowed up by Tito because it would be joining a socialistcountry; today they flaunt theirblatant nationalism, calling Tito a lowlife hangman.

Therivalry between Belgrade and Rome in the repugnant arena of globaldiplomacy, as well as the rivalry between the Italian parties overTrieste, is wrapped in the most rancid nationalist formulas; and thecrudest exponents of linguistic, historical and ethnic sophistry arenot the authentic bourgeois, but the pseudo-Marxists Tito andTogliatti.

Usually we areindifferent, and not just because of our numerical weakness, to theusual question: what do you propose doing in practice? But we canoffer these “Marxist” political positivists a formula that theyhave never really considered. The problem of dual nationality anddual languages is incomprehensible, and you cannot resolve it bywriting speeches for Venetians and Slovenes in English orSerbo-Croatian.

Basically, thesituation is as follows, in the cities, organised along bourgeoislines, the Latins outnumber the Slavs; in the villages scatteredacross the countryside of the interior and especially far from thecoast, it is the opposite. The merchants, industrialists, workers andmembers of the liberal professions are Italian, whereas the rurallandlords and the peasants are Slavs. In short, a socialdissimilarity presents itself as a national one: it would disappearif the workers got rid of the industrialists and the peasants hunteddown the landlords, but you cannot wipe it away by drawing newborders.

Inthe constitution of the USSR, Marxist gentlemen of the Via delleBotteghe Oscure [Editor’s note: the headquarters of the ItalianCommunist Party], which served as the model for that of thePeople’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Marxist gentlemen of Belgrade, thefoundation of the alliance between workers and peasants was thefollowing formula: one representative for every one hundred workers,one for every one thousand peasants.

Sohold this plebiscite that excites you so much (you took the formulafrom Mussolini, your common enemy) with the proviso that the vote ofa city-dweller or town (for example, those with more than tenthousand inhabitants) is worth ten, and that of the inhabitant of asmall town or the countryside is worth one. Then you will be able toextend the democratic vote to the entire area situated between theborders of 1866 and those of 1918: you can add Gorizia, Pola, Fiumeand Zara.

Butboth parties in this dispute have ingested so much disgustingbourgeois democracy that they bow down before the sacred dogma, whichhas the rich roaring with laughter, the one that says each person’svote has the same weight, anywhere.

Whoknows if, by applying the arithmetic we suggest, you wouldn’t get amajority for the thesis: a plague on both your houses!

40. Europeanrevolution

18. From the pointof view of the historical development of society’s productiveforces, Trieste is a point of convergence of economic factors thatgo far beyond the frontiers of the contesting States, a centre withmodern industrial plants and perfect communications; in any event,any separation from the hinterland would militate against theextension of trade that constituted the basis of the great movementtowards the formation of unitary nation States that came to an endin Europe in the 19^th century. In themiddle of the 20^thcentury, the only possible future for Trieste is international, afuture that cannot be usefully found in the political and economiccompromises between bourgeois forces, but only in the Europeancommunist revolution, in which the workers of Trieste and its regionwill be one of the vanguard battalions.

Inthe radiance of capitalism’s dawn in Italy, one of whose firstpolitical States was the Most Serene Republic of Venice; it isindisputable that the dependence of Trieste, the port andemporium of the Adriatic, at the heart of a feudal and semi-barbarousEurope, on Venice, was a decidedly progressive fact of history.

Withthe opening of global maritime communications, Mediterraneancapitalism was overtaken and the world market emerged, built throughthe mediation of Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England via theAtlantic trade routes; nevertheless, as a result of its geographicalsituation Trieste was always a potential point of penetration of thenew mode of production into the heart of central and eastern Europe,where the anti-industrial and reactionary landed class seemed to havebeen entrenched for centuries, erecting obstacles to the new form ofhuman organisation.

Thoughits organisation was a fragmented mosaic, the Austrian Empire, whichconnected the Adriatic port to the nascent industrial centres ofGermany, Hungary and Bohemia, was progressive compared to the moredistant barriers erected by the Russians and the Turks, whichcapitalism would break down at a later stage.

Fromthe perspective of re-establishing industrialism to the Italianpeninsula, and establishing it in the Balkans, a positive new factorwas Trieste’s connection with the powerful German economy and inthe latter’s attempt to undermine Anglo-Saxon economic hegemony inthe Mediterranean basin.

Triestehas mainteined a primary importance after the defeat of the Axis, since the cityand its territory have been placed under a state of emergency, with a viewto implementing America’s colonisation of Europe and otherrepugnant schemes all the more effectively.

Everycommunist revolutionary hails the Trieste proletariat, which has beensubjected to a succession of unhappy phases, in the course of whichits territory has been obscenely colonised by the worstrepresentatives of capitalism and of ferocious militaristnationalism, who have revelled in orgies of cruelty, corruption andexploitation.

The hooked claws of so many pimpish andbrazen colonialists are sunk so deep into thissmall area that Trieste will not find a national solution from anyside, regardless of which language it uses to invoke it.

The solution canonly be international; but just as it will not come from summitmeetings or conflicts between States, it will not come fromdemocratic fornications or from the sordid unity of a Europeanservitude, either.

We don’t want tosee a national flag fluttering from the top of the San Giusto tower:we long for the advent of the proletarian dictatorship in Europe.When the hour finally arrives it will find many of its most resolutemilitants among a proletariat that has emerged from so many, and suchpainful experiences.