Marxism Has Been No Deliverer from Ethnic Strife

“Any utopian project that tolerates humanity’s diverse values and identities only to the extent that they help advance a narrowly defined vision of progress can only end in indiscriminate violence.”

Marxism, as it was originally conceived by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, rejected the nation-state as deserving of its citizens’ allegiance. Section II of The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1848, stated that the proletariat was, “reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.” Nationalism was anachronistic since, “national differences, and antagonisms between peoples, are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production.”

If a homogenization of the global economy along capitalist lines had already diluted national identification, the “workers of the world” needed only to strike the death blow. They must abandon any attachment to their respective nations, uniting as one to overthrow the global bourgeoisie. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” Marx wrote. He continued: “They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!”

But despite his internationalist outlook, Marx never disavowed nationalism as long as it was understood in terms of self-determination. He supported Polish independence from the Russian Empire, likening the cause to an “‘external’ thermometer” that could measure “the intensity and viability of all revolutions since 1789.” A free Poland would weaken the Tsarist regime, a reactionary behemoth that devoted its forces to putting down numerous European revolutions in 1848, and bring about, in the words of Hal Draper and Stephen F. Diamond, an “agrarian movement which would transform the tribute-paying peasants into free property-owners.”

Poland was proof that ethnic nationalism was, in fact, compatible with class struggle. The two reinforced each other and shared a common goal: the creation of an egalitarian new order. Marx affirmed this intersection in his 1864 inaugural address to the International Working Men’s Association. Referring to Polish independence, he said, “the fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes.”