Addressing Marxism’s greatest failure: towards the world without nations

Introduction

Everyone having studied Marx will be aware of the general postulate he provided regarding the origins of human consciousness:

“The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

One could not freely accuse the famous scholar, or his companion Engels, for failing to actually demonstrate to his readers the connections between a phenomenon in the material world and the resulting thoughts in the minds of men and women. One example could be religion, which is rather easily explained by the inability of mankind to grasp certain aspects of the surrounding world, whether it is a mere thunder or lighting in the Roman period, or the gap between the wealthy and the poor in our modern days. Theology may appear as the area of strength as far as the founders of dialectic materialism are concerned, since the suggestion that the emergence of reformation in early modern Europe was a mental rebellion by the urban dwellers does make sense, even though a more detailed exposition would be appreciated. Things get a bit more complicated outside the realm of religious matters. The following is an attempt by Engels to explain the demise of the religion – in the political sphere, it must be noted - and the emergence of the idea of a completely different sovereignty which led to the demise of the Ancien Regime:

“It was a secularization of the theological outlook. Human right took the place of dogma, of divine right, the state took the place of the church. The economic and social conditions, which had formerly been imagined to have been created by the Church and dogma because they were sanctioned by the Church, were now considered as founded on right and created by the state. Because commodity exchange on a social scale and in its full development, particularly through advance and credit, produces complicated mutual contract relations and therefore demands generally applicable rules that can be given only by the community — state-determined standards of right — it was imagined that these standards of right arose not from the economic facts but from formal establishment by the state. And because competition, the basic form of trade of free commodity producers, is the greatest equalizer, equality before the law became the main battle-cry of the bourgeoisie. The fact that this newly aspiring class’s struggle against the feudal lords and the absolute monarchy then protecting them, like every class struggle, had to be a political struggle, a struggle for the mastery of the state, and had to be fought on juridical demands contributed to strengthen the juristic outlook.”

Whether such proposed connection is satisfactory remains to be seen, and it will be questioned later on in this text. However, very interestingly, few years later Engels himself was lamenting their ‘sin’ of neglecting the formal side of actually showing ‘the way in which these ideas, etc., arose, for the sake of the content’. It must be noted, again, that it would be unfair to reproach these scholars for leaving us nothing at all to follow up. Yet, despite all the frequent reminders of the false consciousness as well as the inability of the ordinary mind to grasp the true causes of his or her worldviews, both Marx and Engels arguably have fallen prey to the ideology that will be the key subject of analysis in this work – nationalism. Without spending too much time on the terms and definitions that will be employed here, only the general meaning of the concept of ‘nationalism’ throughout this whole text must be stated. Nationalism for our purposes will simply denote the conception, or ideology if one prefers, that the whole global human society consists of nations, as if pre-determined by nature. And nationalism, of course, implies the nations of the modern ages.

In the 2003 movie Timeline, part of which is set in the 14th century France whereas the other part in our contemporary times, there is a peculiar dialogue between two characters representing the medieval (Lady Claire) and our modern (Marek) worlds. The key theme of the dialogue, at least on behalf of Marek, concerns the relationship between man and woman, yet he fails initially to deliver his questions due to the English language barrier that is portrayed to exist between these different historical epochs. For example, after asking ‘are you with someone’, Marek receives a reply ‘I’m with you’, due to them two drifting alone on the same boat. After trying to remake the question into the lines of ‘are you seeing someone’, Lady Claire once again misunderstands and replies: “Uh, nobody… It is possible they are hiding on the shore or… in the woods.” While cinema is not the best place to study the past, yet this excerpt is very relevant here. If time travel existed, and someone from our modern society would say to a medieval person that he or she was German, Mexican, Taiwanese or Spanish, this individual would likewise be misunderstood. And not merely due to the fact that these respective nation states did not exist at that time.

The difficulties of navigating through the Medieval Latin concepts such as gents or natio, aside from all the issues related to translation, have been well demonstrated by Robert Bartlett. In relation to this, Hobsbawn’s reminder that at least in the Iberian world the pre-modern nacion ‘simply meant “the aggregate of the inhabitants of a province, a county or a kingdom”’ is also valuable. Therefore, while the medieval populations could have been subdivided into nations - whether we deal with the Latin term natio itself, or that is the preferable translation of the word gens - by now one should be certain that these carried a greatly different connotation, and possibly more than one, from what is meant by the word nation today. Feudal nobles of the 15th century, as an example, might also have contained ‘nationalism’ in the sense that they also believed the world population (at least the Christian part of it) to consist of nations. But these nobles more than likely would have thought of the nations in the sense of Natio Hungarica, for instance, and not as our modern counterparts. This notion of the nation, whereby ethnic Slovaks (from our modern perspective) were part of the Magyar natio on the basis of being noble, while the ‘native’ Hungarian peasants themselves were excluded, is incompatible with the world of modern nations. This is why the following wording by Susan Reynolds taken by itself is very problematic and necessitates a lot of clarification:

“For those who believe, as I do, that there were nations in medieval Europe – that is, political units that people thought of very much as they now think of nations – the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire may be seen as the time of ›ethnogenesis‹ – the origin of the nations of modern Europe.”

Most importantly, the origins of modern European nations definitely should not be searched for in the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire. Likewise, when Rees Davies – who very much laments the exclusion of medievalists from academic inquiries into nationalism – provides a quote from medieval documents regarding the Welsh nation in the 12th century, one is tempted to ask whether the peasantry was also included in this natio. Bartlett also mentions – as does Davies - the case of John of Fordun, who apparently regarded the 14th century Scots as a single nation, yet composed of two races, namely the ‘highlanders’ and the ‘lowlanders’ with their particular languages. Above all, the central issue is whether the peasants from within these respective groups would have consider themselves to be part of the nation of the Scots, in the same way as the Flemish and Walloons today would considers themselves to be part of the Belgian nation? The following is Galbraith’s evaluation of the national feeling at that historical moment:

“The social and educational gap between the noble and the peasant counted for more than the bond of a common tongue, and more forceful ties were found in their joint interest in the land and their common loyalty to the king. The rustic’s England was hardly larger than his native Hundred, and his politics reached no further than the local manor house. […] It is, I think, a modern anachronism to imagine in the twelfth century an ‘English’ nation under the heel of a foreign dynasty and its foreign barons.”

Moreover, it appears much more likely that the medieval village, as the basic unit of agrarian community, was for the local inhabitants the equivalent of our modern national community. Finally, if the Middle Ages already had relatively clear boundaries of Welsh-ness or Scottish-ness, how come the peasants in 19th century France still had to be installed with French-ness, or those within the ‘unified’ Italy - with Italian-ness? Moreover, while Davies may have ‘no reservations about referring to medieval England as a nation’, British or English nationalists of today would certainly have reservations about having a Frenchmen, a Dutch or a German as their king. Galbraith also concedes that at least until the 14th century – whereas arguably not until the days of Johann Herder – ‘the use of the mother tongue was not yet a criterion of national feeling’. That is why it could be troublesome to approach ‘past societies on their own terms and through their own language’, for a scholar working on the growth of apples might find out that in the medieval period this word would denote something that did not even grow on trees. As suggested by Reynolds, it is necessary to look hard at the concepts we are dealing with in order to distinguish the true meanings behind the medieval words.

The exhaustive study of what exactly the terms gens and nation could have denoted in particular situations, and whether these would have been utilised in a consistent manner, is beyond the scope if this text. However, the following must be stated. Different linguistic features, skin colour, or other physiological aspects among people have been constant features throughout the ages. The question is whether the medieval societies would turn these differences into any groupings aside from the feudal political communities. Even if the answer is yes, the key distinguishing aspect of our modern nations is that they now constitute the body politic, whereas we could still imagine that in some contexts the medieval gens or natio could have had the same significance as the ethnicities of our days. In this case, to say Flemish, Bavarian or Welsh in the medieval period would have had the same political importance as to say Asian, Afro-American or Turkic today. And it is a completely different thing today to say German, Norwegian, Chilean, Indonesian, or Algerian. If the answer is no, then the medieval nations were simply limited to the royals and the nobility, and had very little to do with ethnicities or languages. The definite conclusion, therefore, is that modern nations did not exist prior to the modern period itself, and the nationalist consciousness itself is merely (con)temporary.

Discussions of Marxism’s relation to the question of nationalism often quote Tom Nairn’s evaluation of this phenomenon being the former’s greatest theoretical failure. This study intervenes with the argument that this is due to the naturalisation of nationalism that was almost inevitable at the time Marx and Engels were writing. In other words, one of the prerequisites for solving the riddle is abandoning the notion of some sort of ‘awakening’ of the nations, and grasping the fact that these have simply been rather recently invented. To use Bartlett’s words in a different context, biological differences as well as linguistic and cultural varieties – and even socio-economic position - were merely the raw materials on the basis of which the modern nations were constructed. And these were bound to be constructed as a consequence of specific changes starting to take place in the economic realm in the second half of the 18th century.

The point of departure in this study will be the exposition of the imagined content of the modern nations. This critical ‘discovery’ allows us to see through the ephemeral essence of nationalism as an ideology, something that – it is claimed here – was beyond the reach of Marx and Engels themselves. The second part will constitute the attempt to establish the connection between the nationalist conception of the world and the material social relations that gave rise to it. Finally, in the last part the key arguments of this analysis will be squared against some of the central notions upheld by Marx and Engels, as well against alternative explanations of nationalism within the scholarly world.

Imagined Communities

Already in 2005 Jeremy King had noted that a new consensus within the scholarly world had emerged regarding the arbitrary content of the modern nations. Subsequently we may note Benedict Anderson’s claim that these are nothing but ‘imagined communities’, whereas Tomas Perez Vejo’s definition of a nation as a ‘faith in a narrative’ is also extremely illuminating. Eric Hobsbawn and Ernest Gellner also enter the list. Finally, it seems, we are free from all the fantasies that the nations of today have always existed, or have been on a path of development, to proclaim that they have been simply created, and are still being created and re-created. In fact, already in 1941 there were writers capable of making this critical observation. Unfortunately, these scientific notions appear to have eluded both Marx, as well as his contemporaries. It can be a truly unpleasant task to try to decipher Marx’s lines and words, especially regarding a subject or a phenomenon he never discussed systematically. Yet, by the sporadic references he would leave in relation to nations, it can be argued that he also considered them to be organic units. We may begin with the Communist Manifesto itself, where nations appear as having existed since long before our modern era:

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. […] It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production;”

In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a text very relevant for our task here, Marx writes:

“It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised and delivered without resistance into captivity by three knights of industry.”

Hence, in 1852, whereas quite a significant part of the population within the territory belonging to the French state would as yet hardly have considered themselves to be French, they had already been baptized as such by Marx. But there are even more telling examples. Ephraim Nimni provides a great exposition of the negative attitudes that Marx and Engels held in relation to the smaller national identities aiming at their own sovereign states: the so-called Southern Slavs in the Habsburg realm were ‘nothing but residual fragments of peoples, resulting from an extremely confused thousand years development’, while the Serbs, Bulgarians and the Greeks are described as ‘miserable remnant of former nations’.

By no means were Marx and Engels alone among the great minds to have this almost ahistorical notion of the nations. Another example is provided by Otto Bauer, who even acknowledged that in the age of tribes and clans the latter ‘did not have association that bound them together. They were independent political units, independently waging war and forming alliances or feuding with one another like independent states.’ Yet, he still managed to find the German nation within these Germanic clans through the ‘common descent’. This is what happens when one projects his own consciousness, or simply the mindset prevalent in one’s era, onto the past: those Germanic clans, or the dispersed peasants of the middle ages to give another example, constituted the German nation, even though they themselves were not aware of such. As Bauer would argue, ‘national consciousness can be understood only on the basis of national being and not the other way around’.

Unfortunately for Bauer, national consciousness is merely a false consciousness of an imagined identity, which is the result of a particular social and economic reality that has been forcing this mindset onto the global populations ever since the second part of the 18th century. After the end of World War I the majority of citizens of Austria identified themselves with the Germans, yet post-World War II they suddenly became Austrians. Hence, ironically, the descendants of Bauer’s Tyrolean peasant today consider themselves to be Austrian and not German, or perhaps even Tyrolean in the first place. Interestingly, Engels himself treated the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866 as a civil war. And the existence of the Austrian national identity is just one of the more obvious and striking cases. In an equal manner, while Marx or Engels accepted that Germans of Switzerland or Alsace, as well as the French living in Belgium did not wish to be reunited with their ‘mother nations’, the key factor, however, is which nations would those peoples themselves have assigned to. Namely, did they consider themselves Swiss or German; French or Belgian? Going further, by the standards of the European nations, what kind of a nation are Americans? And why are Australians not English? What kind of a nation are Peruvians, given that the name Peru itself was given by the Spanish in the early modern period of our history? Skin colour is a natural feature, while linguistic differentials are indeed historically configured through social interactions. However, the modern nations are neither natural, nor are they historically configured in the sense of being the heirs to some pre-modern ethnic groups. An anecdotal hypothesis could be provided here: it would only be necessary today to find an empty island, to bring some Japanese, some Mexicans, some Algerians and some Italians to live on it, and to call it Banana Island – in a few generations the new Bananian (modern) nation will quite likely have ‘emerged’. And it is also important to add, that this type of body politic would not emerge if this Banana Island was at the same time transferred, for instance, to the 13th or to the 17th century.

Of course, it would be all too easy to attack Marx for his error. If Marx had the chance to live today, in a world where all these inconsistencies of nationalism are abundant, he arguably would have little choice but to drop his 19th century consciousness. Nations exist not as objective reality, but as a subjective belief shared by distinct groups of people. While language, ethnicity, and, indeed, even common territory are very strong elements within the process of the ‘emergence’ of a nation, yet the so-called shared, and more than often falsified, history is the key driver towards this faith in shared exclusiveness. Otherwise, how can people of Berber descent with their Tamazight languages share their belief in one Moroccan nation with Arab people? And how come Czechs and Slovaks are separate nations, despite basically sharing both the language and ethnicity?

Since we now know that nationalism is a historical phenomenon and that (modern) nations did not exist prior to the end of the 18th century, then there is absolutely no reason to assume that these will stay with us forever. The fact that the material foundations of this false nationalist consciousness only emerged at this specified moment in human history also opens up the possibility that at some point these will have disappeared. Or, according to the argument of this text, we can also say – will be abolished. The supposition that the division of the world into nations will cease to exist is nothing new. However, the direction of the spotlight towards the essential aspect, which is required to achieve this, is novel. In a parallel manner to religion, it will be suggested in the next section of this work that nationalism is the reflection in the human mind of the necessity to compete on the (global) market. And once this market is abolished, we can expect this idea - that each one of us belongs to an exclusive nation – to fade away, despite of all the linguistic, ethnic, or cultural differences that will persist within the global community.

The material basis for nationalism

This section is dedicated to the exposition of the underlying social relations that uphold the nationalist conception in the human brain. It is generally agreed that this age of modern nations saw its beginnings at the end of the 18th century, and this so-falsely-called ‘awaking of the nations’ is also widely connected to the French Revolution. Defining and identifying the causes is what proves to be much harder – not surprisingly - to agree upon. And the diverging positions, regarding whether nations should be considered as ‘natural’ or not, may not necessarily determine the differences in explaining the basis of nationalism. For instance, Ernest Gellner simply considers nationalism to be the reflection of the compulsion of the industrial society towards cultural and linguistic uniformity. Bauer could also be placed among those who point to the modernization and the development of social interaction, as a result of capitalist development, as contributing to this phenomenon, despite defending the existence of ‘national cultures’ since very old days. To name a contrasting view, James M. Blaut would hardly agree that the Puerto Ricans constitute a fictional national entity, and subsequently, in a Marxist spirit, locates nationalism within the class struggle for state power without any critical inquiry into the very national consciousness. Benedict Anderson’s peculiar exposition of the origins of nationalism, with a focus on cultural roots, could also be placed among the proponents of modernization theory despite occasionally flirting with the idealist school. As far as the latter is concerned, Michael Thurman, who also stands among the writers that correctly see the nation as something imaginative, claims that the Dutch – whose birth as a modern nation he locates in 1781 - simply imported nationalism as a remedy for the deficiencies of the old system. If one was to ask for the very origins of the phenomenon itself, Thurman’s reference is Liah Greenfeld:

“She argues that national identity was invented in England during the course of the 16th century. The development was wholly English and thus wholly contingent. Again, no structural causes are possible. “

While any attempts to recreate the modern nationalities of our days within the early modern European world are unsustainable, it is the explicit demonstration of the idealist world vision that is the most problematic. The following part of this study will deal with the alternative explanations of nationalism. Here the aim is the exposition of the central thesis of this study, and, quite ironically, the above mentioned Thurman will provide the starting point. In opposition to any idealist notions, it will be asked here, what changes occurred in the material world, and above all within the realm of economy, at that particular historical moment that suddenly pushed the European people, and later on the rest of the world, into thinking about themselves in a wholly different way.

Contrary to the notion that usually runs through Marx’s, as well as many of his followers’ works, nationalism and the national question are only indirectly connected to the ongoing class struggle. One could feel sorry for writers such as Blaut, who, with references to Marxist tenets, defended so passionately his position that the Puerto Rican national movement was progressive and constituted part of the ongoing class-struggle on behalf of the workers. This aspect, however, will also be dealt with in the next part of this study. This part will focus on the need for a new mode of communal identification – which turned out to be the multiplicity of modern nations – which arose when the members of the societies at large (European societies at first), after centuries of isolation within their local markets, were exposed to the full workings of the global market. The world of small scale production, in which guilds and cottage industries prevail, and the individual producer commands only a very limited market, this world creates city-states and rural communal identities within the feudal kingdoms. The world of industrialised capitalism, on the other hand, where an advanced single unit of production is capable of supplying a seemingly unlimited demand and is subsequently dependent upon access to this wider market for survival, creates nations and nation states. As a result, the transition from feudal to modern national identities is closely bound up with the historic subordination of the merchant capital to the supremacy of the producers. The first country which saw the splendor of the capitalist economy was England, and this above mentioned subordination ran parallel to the English overtaking the Dutch in terms of economic supremacy. As of necessity then, the inquiry into the issue of national identity must begin with the controversy regarding the Dutch history and the position of the United Provinces within the evolution towards capitalist development.

Interestingly, the above quoted Thurman, while making his focus the United Provinces, raises some very important questions and objections against the exponents of the modernization theories, such as the already mentioned Ernest Gellner or Benedict Anderson. Whether we compare the levels of urbanization, or of literacy, between the early modern Dutch Republic and its contemporary rivals France and England, ‘it appears the Republic was not only a good candidate for developing national identity according to modernization theory, it was a better candidate than widely cited examples of England and France’. Moreover, as far as Marx’s general interpretation of the basis of the early modern Dutch economy is concerned, the much more recent scholarship has made an attempt to refute its identification solely with the trading merchants, and has provided evidence to the fact that production itself was a very integral part of the economy. On the political side, what appears more or less certain is that the Dutch Revolt was considered by Marx and Engels as the very first bourgeois revolution. All of this deserves some clarification.

Now, just on the surface of it one should be extremely critical of any claims that any state, be it the United Provinces, the Kingdom of England or the Kingdom of Sweden - as these existed at the end of the 16th century - could have found themselves on the same level of social development as the absolutist French state two centuries later. This is important, since the French Revolution is usually considered as the classic example of a bourgeois revolution. Without a doubt, questions could be raised regarding how a particular historical moment or event qualifies as such a revolution. While there is no purpose to expand here on this matter, the following are some facts related to the Dutch gaining their ‘independence’ from the Spanish Crown. First of all, the initial intention of the revolutionary movement – the only one among the three to succeed - was not to overthrow the institution of the king itself, for other potential options were sought until the circumstances had finally forced the protagonists to remain without a royal sovereign. Secondly, the so-called Dutch East Indies Company, which received its charter in 1602, suggests that in the realm of international trade the very alike feudal institutions as in England or in France still reigned. Finally, the feudal guilds of the Dutch cities were abolished only at the same historic moment as in France, while Thurman himself mentions the ‘cities’ stubborn adherence to medieval charters which guaranteed outmoded municipal rights at the expense of the collective good’ at the end of the 18th century. As a result, Brandon’s claim that in the late medieval period Holland saw a complete erosion of local feudal institutions is more than questionable. Also, these observations seem to confirm Van Dillen’s suggestion that Marx did not sketch the earlier periods ‘with the same painstaking care’ as in the case of the political economy of capitalism. If one is not careful enough, the tribal revolts of the Rif Berbers against the Spanish rule in the first half of the 20th century could also be mistakenly subsumed under the heading of modern nationalism, whereas the Moroccan national identity itself was yet to emerge.

After having firmly established that the Dutch United Provinces of the 16th, 17th and at least of the first half of the 18th century constituted a feudal state-federation, despite any superficial appearances, it must also be stated, that the rest of Europe was likewise immersed in feudal relations. Karen J. Friedmann has described in great detail the feudal specifics of the city of Copenhagen that survived almost to the middle of the so-called ‘age of nations’, for instance the pricing of such products as bread or meat. 1859 is also the year when guild restrictions were removed in the lands of Central Europe controlled by the Habsburgs, with the same decade taking away all ‘internal’ tariffs. The connection between the emergence of nationalist consciousness and the withering away of the feudal localized institutions is undisputable. But there is more to that. As noted by Prak, in the early modern period the United Provinces were a federation not only of seven independent provinces, but likewise of over fifty independent ‘city-states’. Even this term implies that from our perspective we identify those towns as having specific features which we are accustomed to find today in the modern nation states. For example, the defensive walls and protective tariffs today are the tools of the sovereign national states. Moreover, even parades of civil militias representing the town communities would also be called out on special occasions. One may also add the disputes with the Church over the rights to a particular piece of urban territory, as these would take place in medieval and early modern England, as clear indications that we are dealing with a feudal equivalent of the modern national sovereignty. But such political units as well as such localized identities – by our standards of today – were the creations of the relatively undeveloped productive forces of feudal society.

As far as these medieval urban communities are concerned, the artisans and craftsmen were the key socio-economic cells, and the scope of their potential market determined the boundaries of their ‘imagined communities’. As an example, 18th century Kingdom of France was still dominated by small-scale establishments that would employ only a few workmen, which fits quite well with the emergence of the modern idea of the French nation only towards the end of the century when the changes in the social organization of production were more pronounced. A single unit of production had only the capacity to supply a much localized market, whereby its monopolization via guild organizations was a life and death question for these petty commodity producers. This relation of dependency on the local market for survival and economic wellbeing was unconsciously reflected in the minds of the contemporary feudal men and women as the urban identities, in the same manner as the socio-economic relations among the royals and nobility, based largely upon titles to land, engendered their own particular elite communities. The result was the world of many ‘city-states’, with more than often antagonistic relations vis-à-vis the rural hinterland as well as the nobles and kings:

“At the pinnacle of their power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these cities also tried to dominate the surrounding countryside both economically and politically, with the county of Flanders for instance subdivided into ‘Quarters’ dominated by the large cities.”

Moreover, it was not quantity but quality of the material base that determined the resultant conscious reflections. In other words, the size of the individual town, as well as the share of the population within a specific territory residing in these urban communities, made no difference at all. That is why Ghent with a population of 64 000 or Bruges with 45 000 in pre-modern period did not produce the modern Dutch nation, while Ceske Budejovice of the 19th century with a mere 15 000 had begun its voyage towards the nationalistic divide between the newly created Czechs and German identities. Likewise, the fact that a city could have been exporting a lot of its produce to foreign markets also did not influence the parameters of feudal identities. The putting-out system and cottage industries may have produced respectable amounts of goods within a feudal town of within a larger province, yet as far as the individual producers were concerned, they were subordinate to the merchant. Even if aware of the final and very distant destination of the fruits of their labour, the narrow scope of the market they had the potential to satisfy meant that shipping their commodities outside of their town or county was the equivalent of what we today identify as exports. And the fact that the merchants - who could have been in control of the entire chains of production – could have concentrated in their hands the whole produce created within an entire kingdom would not have turned it into a ‘national’ product. Rather, these should simply be considered as masses of commodities produced within numerous urban and rural ‘nations’ and concentrated in the hands of the merchants. The connections and links of the latter, no matter how far reaching, did not impose the idea of the modern nation on the society of petty-commodity producers. As long as the merchants and other wealthy individuals were not directly involved in the process of production, with a fixed investment in a manufacturing plant with a concentrated and fully proletarian workforce, the society would remain unexposed to the compulsion of the wider markets beyond their feudal boundaries. Henri See reminds us that ‘for the rise of an industry on a large scale and the transformation of the merchant-manufacturer into a captain of industry, it was necessary that the trades be concentrated in factories’. Once this qualitative next step in the development of the material means of production had been made, and the ‘general’ interest of the society to survive on this wider market emerged, this new socio-economic reality necessitated the emergence of a novel identity on the basis of which this competition on the global market was to be waged. The modern nation was born.

Before turning to the defense of this thesis against other proposed scholarly explanations of the origins of nationalist consciousness, a clarification of what has been stated above is compulsory. The idea of the wider national community, as opposed to the narrow feudal communities, should not be grasped as a direct reflection of the material interests of the capitalist enterprises, namely the need to carve out and conquer markets. In the same way, the urban communal identities should not be treated as representing the direct material interests of the above mentioned craftsmen. Rather, these modern capitalist units of production have radically altered the level of exposure of the society at large to the competitive market pressures, and this posed the question for the Europeans at that time (and still is posing for the global population of today): on what basis are we going to compete in this global market? And the unconscious answer was (and still is) – on the basis of nations. To give an example, an Austrian hair-dresser might consciously choose an item Made in Poland over Made in Austria due to the lower price. But this he or she does contrary to the imagined collective material interests of the Austrian nation, for fewer taxes are to accrue to the Austrian state, and therefore to the Austrian nation. This contradiction does not prevent the idea of such ‘belonging’ to unconsciously reflect the competition on the global market. The purpose of the next section is to locate this argument within the dialectical materialist thought, as well as to test it against the wider bibliography regarding the origins of nationalism.

Nationalism and the World Market

Before looking at alternative explanations of the origins of nationalism, the accounts must be settled in terms of the relation of the key argument within this text to the materialist notions expounded by Marx and Engels. As has been suggested above, the modern nationalist consciousness has emerged as a mental reflection of the qualitative change in the exposure against the pressures of the global market, which was conditioned by the upgrade of the material forces of production that began in the second half of the 18th century. Hence, as in the case of religion, it is a general idea of a particular epoch that has no direct link to the (dominant) classes that constitute the particular society. So how should the following well-known Marx’s quote be treated?

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

While it has been argued that Marx himself failed to grasp that nationalism, as well as the modern nation, is merely an idea of our modern epoch, is this idea, nevertheless, the idea of the capitalist class? The first problem with such a claim would seem to be the fact, which unfortunately is only very slowly coming into full appreciation, that neither of the classes within our modern society is conscious of the class struggle itself, as well as of their particular roles in this struggle. Therefore, all conspiracy theories related to the class-conscious bourgeoisie trying to cheat the workers out of resistance by selling them the idea of national unity should be outright dismissed. Of course, Marx’s quote above does not necessarily strictly imply this class-consciousness on the part of the ruling class. As suggested by Bloch:

“Marx used the idea of a conscious, directive ruling class as a polemical shorthand for an elaboration of the structural mechanisms through which control over the means of production leads to control over other aspects of society.”

Whereas in the afterword to his volume one of Capital Marx literary mentions the class-consciousness of the mid-19th century German workers, the most renowned Marx’s work in terms of the materialist school of thought, namely the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, would seem to support Bloch’s argument. In any case, what is important for us here is not whether Bloch’s quote above regarding Marx’s method is correct, but that he has provided the correct diagnosis that class-struggle takes place ‘behind the backs’ of the members of society. It must also be noted here that nationalism as a general social consciousness is above the distinct ideologies that may reflect the particular forms of property - be it the finance capital, the petty-shopkeepers or the wage-labourers - which are dealt with in the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Nevertheless, at this point one still should not rule out the possibility that nationalism could be the idea of the capitalist class. One may assume that nationalism springs unconsciously from the direct material interests of the various groupings of individual members of the bourgeoisie, namely to carve out and to conquer the (domestic) markets. Quite rightly, however, the notion that capitalists should organize themselves on a ‘national’ basis has been questioned, for the practical world has shown on numerous occasions the divergent interests among individual capitals. There are importers and exporters, wholesalers fighting the retailers, as well as banks trying to take advantage of their own clients from the capitalist ranks. The industrial producer who demands protection for his own commodities will not necessarily be extremely happy about the import tariffs that his fellow national also desires, for this could increase the price for the raw materials he requires. Of course, these conflicts are not limited merely to the bourgeoisie, but are general within the market-based society. According to the thesis defended here, the nationalist consciousness emerges unconsciously despite these individual particular material interests in conflict with one another. Yet, while the capitalists are the agents representing the means of production that, in the final instance, lead to nationalism, the question remains why this phenomenon should be regarded as the idea of the former, and not as a general social consciousness of our epoch. In other words, how does nationalism represent the ‘dominant material relationships’?

Moving forward, if the emerging capitalists of the 19th century required the protection of domestic markets to grow, and were eager to carve out the territories they could dominate, this is no longer valid after so many decades of growth in size of individual corporations in relation to the state. To paraphrase the often cited words regarding the relationship between General Motors and the US economy, what is good today for Renault is, more than often, bad for France. The question could be raised over why the nationalist consciousness is as strong today as ever, if the feature that supposedly brought it into existence no longer operates. Where do the cases of Kosovo or Catalonia stand as far as the argument in question is concerned? One could easily suggest here that once ideas are brought to life, they subsequently take on an independent existence. Yet, the feudal conceptions of the society do not seem to have survived. All in all, while there are many nation states today whose economic survival to a very great extent depends on foreign investments, the fact that some nations had been referred to by Marx and Engels themselves as ‘peasant nations’ – namely, at that time lacking their indigenous capitalist class - seems to deal a final blow to the argument that nationalism is a ruling class idea.

While the above discussed proposition regarding the origins of nationalism has been discarded as erroneous, at least it carried within itself a potential to explain - on the basis of competition for market shares among different capitals - the plurality of the nation states. This is very important, for Brenner’s statement that ‘a single state governing global capital is perfectly conceivable and probably most appropriate from the standpoint of capital’ appears correct. Ephraim Nimni adds some more content into the role Marx and Engels considered nationalism to be playing:

“For Marx and Engels, the modern nation was the direct result of a process whereby the capitalist mode of production superseded feudalism, causing concomitant dramatic changes in the process of social organization. The transition to a capitalist economy impelled a number of Western European social formations to evolve into a more linguistically cohesive and politically centralized units. […] The destruction of local differences followed, initiating the process whereby each population became uniform, which was considered an important condition for the formation of a market economy.”

Here we encounter a suggestion that nationalism also serves the purpose of perfecting the market conditions under which capitalism could flourish. Unfortunately, Kautsky’s vision of the world unification into ‘one language and one nationality’ as the global market becomes ever more integrated is unlikely to materialize. It is a pity that he is not able to observe today the tendency towards ever new sovereign nation states being created by distinct nationalities, instead of national consolidation and unification. Kautsky, who due to his modernity-based argument could be placed alongside Gellner, considered nationalism to be facilitating the creation of a sufficient market via linguistic uniformity. Very well, but why are nationalist movements not happy with merely spreading the language deemed to be the dominant on the national basis, and tend to suppress all the regional and peripheral ones, whether in 19th century France, Franco’s Spain, or the post-independence Morocco? Is bilingualism an obstacle to the creation of a functioning market? If we look today at the cases of Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, or even Canada, the answer is: clearly not. And even regarding the 19th century itself, who would argue that the international market had difficulties in functioning due to the mere technicality of numerous linguistic divisions? All obstacles back then, as well as in our days, stem from the political-national divisions. The supporters of this technical explanation of the role of nationalism fail to grasp the political aspect of the question, namely that the language is utilized as a political tool to promote national loyalty to the sovereign state.

A very apt comparison is provided by the early modern Alsace. Property of the French crown since the middle of the 17th century, even in 1789 the region still contained a largely Swabian German-speaking population, for ‘in the last years of the ancien regime, the concept of “nationality” did not yet possess the sharp , unambiguous meaning it would acquire in next century’. The following is a good example of the already discussed nature of the feudal body politic:

“Even the language of the royal administrators, at first sight so strikingly ‘nationalist’ and modern, justified itself not by appeal to a French nation state, but to the person of the absolute monarch…”

As the concept of sovereignty made a radical change, the question of political loyalty also made a qualitative leap. As the sovereignty now stood with the nation, the modern nationalist movements – once in control of political power - began their quests of eradicating minority languages. And this they did (and still do) not in order to perfect the functioning of the domestic market, but to safeguard themselves against any potential threat of secession. Therefore, one can agree with Nimni to a certain degree, that the way Marx and Engels treated the so-called ‘nations without history’ is quite embarrassing. Liberalism and nationalism were still walking hand in hand at that time, as noted by Davis, and this Darwinist struggle among the pretending ‘emerging’ sovereign nations and nationalities for survival – by cutting themselves out a sovereign part of the global market - was taken by these men as a symptom of the rise of the capitalist class to political power, without which the development of the capitalist mode of production towards its conclusion would be obstructed. This explains why the founding fathers of dialectical materialism were slightly puzzled by the fact that one of their supposed aims of the Revolution of 1848, namely the unification of Germany, was being completed via ‘revolution from above’ by Bismarck, without the expected democratization of politics. Again we seem to encounter the problematic idea that it is the bourgeoisie who comes to ‘rule’ after the abolition of the feudal estates, instead of the sovereign nation. While today we are aware that capitalist imperatives and nationalism are compatible not only with the so-called ‘liberal democracies’, the following is Joseph A. Petrus’ take on Marx’s perspective:

“Only if a revolutionary class development within the nationality propels a class-conscious bourgeois towards the establishment of an independent nation state will that nationality be considered politically significant.”

If today the bourgeoisie seems to have undoubtedly conquered the state power - by the standards of the 19th century - again the question must be posed why nationalism is as fervent in our times as in 1848. Moreover, while Kautsky’s position could imply that nations only emerged adjacently to the rise of the capitalist mode of production, in the case of Marx and Engels the concept of the history-less nations proves what has already been noted – that they took these for granted.

This notion, which considers nationalism as an instrument with the help of which capitalism constructs for itself the highway of linguistic uniformity, to a large extent reminds us of Engels’ proposal regarding the overthrow of the feudal sovereignties, quoted in the very beginning of this study. There the technical need for equality against the law - as a result of competition, commodity exchange and credit relations - is assumed to have given way to the very idea of political equality among the members of society. Again, all of these features of economy could have been found as early as, for instance, in the 15th century - even though, of course, on a smaller scale. Feudal rules were also ‘generally applicable’, hence one may question the claim that the rules under which the contract relations would from now on have to operate could ‘be given only by the community — state-determined standards of right’. Similarly to the linguistic arguments in relation to nationalism above, the political aspect of the matter is ignored or downplayed. Arguably, the emergence of nationalism and of the nation necessitated a new form of sovereignty, namely the sovereignty of the nation. It was this development that created the ‘battle-cry’ of equality against the law, and not the technical needs stemming from economic relations. If both Marx and Engels failed to grasp the essence of nationalist consciousness, they also appear to have misread the essence of the emancipation of the so-called Third Estate.

To return to the question of the multiplicity of national sovereignties, it seems academics have made it look much more complicated than it really is. A good example of this is found in the exchange of letters between Justin Rosenberg and Alex Callinicos on this topic. A much more acceptable attempt has been provided by Benno Teschke, according to whom ‘capitalism was “born into” a system of dynastic polities that had consolidated their territories during the absolutist period’. Indeed, an observation difficult to argue against, and on the whole, Teschke does quite well - as far as the geopolitics of feudal period is concerned – at least by quoting Gilpin:

“A fundamental feature of the era of empires was the relatively static nature of wealth. […] Thus, when agriculture was the basis of wealth and power, growth in power and wealth was nearly synonymous with conquest of territory.”

However, the author of the Myth of 1648 misses the point by saying that ‘if capitalism had developed within the framework of a universal empire, it is hard to see why it would have caused its break-up into multiple territorial units’. In essence, to answer correctly the question regarding the plurality of sovereignties during the feudal period is also to provide the explanation for the existence of the multitude of the modern nation states. This becomes visible when one realizes that the competitiveness among feudal lords for land and territories has been successfully replaced by the competition among sovereign nations – whose representatives are the respective nation states – for capital accumulation. At the same time, taxation on behalf of a royal sovereign has been replaced by taxation on behalf of the sovereign state. The exposition of geopolitics under the capitalist mode of production has been provided elsewhere, so here it will suffice to merely reiterate that capitalist imperialism consists of ‘the interstate competition for a share of the global capitalist accumulation’. Such an insight, it must be noted, is not as novel as the argument regarding the material basis of nationalist consciousness. Therefore, it is quite disappointing to find that this competitive aspect of modern geopolitics is largely downplayed by Teschke:

“It follows that the key idea of modern international relations is no longer the war-assisted accumulation of territories, but the multilateral political management of global capital’s crisis-potential and the regulation of the world-economy by the leading capitalist states.”

In this manner, as if via backdoor, the other side of the coin we are dealing with is uncovered. Nationalism is the ideological slogan of the compulsion of the global market, whereas the multi-state international arena is its practical outcome. The development of the means of production, which introduced the capitalist production relations into Europe in the second half of the 18th century, widened and deepened the market, and the feudal societies responded by revolutionizing the political identities. The intensified (economic) competition was to be waged on the basis of imagined, yet sovereign nations, whose political form was to be the nation state we are so familiar with. While nationalism, as well as the nation state, do not stem directly from the capitalist production relations, namely capital versus wage-labour, the general socio-economic relations – the level of exposure against market forces – under which this false consciousness has emerged have been provided by capitalism.

Conclusion

Let us imagine the following. Let us say that a family of ten goes to the lake every day to catch fish. The rule is that each member of this family participates in this economic activity on an individual basis, but afterwards their individual catches are collected and subsequently each person is entitled to an equal portion of food during the dinner. If we introduce the eldest son as the one who catches the most fish, or at least he believes it to be so, what are the odds that he would not eventually try to break away from this family system and to keep all of his fishes caught for himself? As we have seen throughout this study, in theory both the feudal and our modern capitalist worlds have no systemically intrinsic imperatives to be subdivided into the numerous separate sovereignties. However, in practice the competitive nature of each of these economic systems means that at almost every opportunity a feudal lord would attempt to better his economic standing by becoming a king in order to avoid paying any tribute to anyone above him. Likewise, why should not a particular nationality, imagined as they are all, strive at establishing a new nation state or at least a greater autonomy, if this would mean that the taxes collected in that region would stay there instead of being filtered through the budget of a greater sovereign entity? One might gain by this, another effort might turn out to be unsuccessful, but the mere possibility of greater economic well-being opens the door for the existence of multiple rivaling kingdoms or, respectively, nation states:

“…militant nationalism is not the result of abject deprivation, but is the result of the disparity that exists between what people have and what people believe they could/should have in a different arrangement with the state.”

Of course, the economic relations of either feudalism or capitalism are much more complicated than in the case of the fishing family described above. The important questions to ask are the following: what purpose the medieval feuds over territories would have served had there been no surplus-product accruing from the labour of the peasants/serfs? And subsequently, what role would the nation state play in a world where the economic life is fully planned and there is no longer any world market where competitive success would guarantee larger revenues? As the argument here goes, abolishing the market – which naturally implies the end of capitalist production relations – will not only do away with the nation state. While the diversity of linguistic, ethnic or even cultural heritage will without a doubt continue, the body politic of the modern nation will also disappear.

The final issue to be noted here concerns the relation between nationalism and the secular sovereignty. A detailed examination of the emergence of the latter has been beyond the scope of this work, despite the fact that both are children of the same historical moment. The assumption running underneath this study has been that the birth of the idea of the nation has led to the conception that the members of these nations have a natural right to sovereignty. While further inquiry and thought into the changes within the material world that gave birth to the notion of a secular sovereign nation is more than desirable, all propositions would have to take into account the material foundations of nationalist consciousness. To show why the royal blood and divine ordinance no longer mattered would not in itself account for the emergence of a novel imagined collective identity. For even if we were to accept Engels’ exposition – which has been dismissed here – of this radical change, based upon the necessity for equality against the law, the question regarding the origins of a new body politic in the form of ‘nations’ would still lead us to the central role played by the market.