Classical Marxism taught that workers “of the world” were supposed to unite in mutual identification with each other based on economic class. But workers everywhere found their national identity much stronger than their class identity. What then were Marxists to do with this nationalist sentiment? This is my summary of Chapters 7 and 8.
Chapter 7- The National Question and Marxist Orthodoxy
Marx proposed that history was explicitly the struggle of class conflict. That theory was rigorously materialist and determinist, stating unequivocally that revolution would inevitably occur and that morality was driven by mechanistic forces apart from human will. Socialism would occur when capitalism reached its peak and collapsed under the weight of its own rules. Marx saw socialism as destined to unite the proletariat of the world. Nationalism was a sentiment useful only to the bourgeois, and had no place in socialism.
But many Marxist theoreticians recognized that determinism couldn’t account for all human action, that morality arose before there were classes, and that humans organized themselves into groups other than class with much greater affinity. Woltmann saw race as a unifying group dynamic, and Mussolini saw nationality as a unifying dynamic. Lenin noted that among the backward Russian proletariat, nationalist, and even tribalist sentiment was the unifying dynamic. The Russian workers could not identify with international proletarians, but they could think in terms of nationality.
Otto Bauer argued that nationalism was so pervasive and insistent that its existence could not be the simple consequence of bourgeois inspiration. It was rooted in the Darwinian history of humankind. Bauer also recognized the capitalism had introduced public education that taught history of local and national communities. National sentiment had become so ingrained that it was foolish to think the proletariat would drop it for naïve internationalism that recognized no distinctions between communities. Bauer argued that the proletarian struggle in the service of nationality was profoundly revolutionary. Furthermore, only socialism could create the conditions in which each individual could become fully human and identify with his community of destiny. He argued that capitalists had distorted this by introducing classes that marginalized the proletariat. Given that proletarians were not devoid of national pride, he opposed the classical Marxist attempt to amalgamate them into one centralized international group.
Marxist saw history leading to a final struggle between workers and capitalists, which workers would win, and after which peace would reign. Ludwig Gumplowicz thought that was naïve, utopian wishful thinking. He understood that national differences would not disappear.
Lenin and Stalin acknowledged nationalist sentiment, but insisted it was merely transitory. Woltmann and Mussolini saw it as more integral. For Woltmann, race was the biological basis by which groups organized themselves. For Mussolini and the syndicalists, it was nation.
Chapter 8- Revolutionary Syndicalism and Nationalism
Roberto Michels maintains that the revolutionary party, by dint of socialism’s unique scientistic qualifications, was uniquely the party of truth. Members would be expected to submit totally to the party’s enlightened leadership. He was one of the first to anticipate totalitarian rule.
While he felt science must provide factual guidance for the movement, inspiration must come from moral incentive. He too was unconvinced that economic factors alone would do so.
Marxists had always been quick to connect their ideas with Darwinism. While they would accept that class wasn’t the only group distinction, they still insisted it was the most important one at that time.
But the very admission acknowledged Marx was wrong, and what followed was fascism.
Michels was attempting to answer why Marx would ever have thought that history was the exclusive product of class struggle. He argued that the same psychological qualifications that made humans class creatures, also made them tribal, local, state and national creatures too.