[RG-9] Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory Pt. 5

PART THREE: The modern proletarian movement and struggles for the formation and emancipation of nations

The Polish question

11. Marxism’s full solidarity with the demand for Polish independence and liberation from the Tsar is of fundamental importance, since this was not just a historical judgement expressed in theoretical texts, but a case of the forces of the First International taking a clear position in practice. Not only did the latter offer and provide the full support of European workers, but it also considered the Polish revolt as a potential fulcrum for a new revolutionary upturn and for generalised struggle on the entire continent.

Let’s follow these positions in detail in the texts and documents of our political current, in order to prove the error of the thesis that says Marxist politics must make judgments and draw conclusions on a case-by-case basis, according to the merits of different situations and contingent events, enabling an easy change of direction. On the contrary, political decisions are rigidly connected at each stage to the unique vision of the historical course of the revolution in general and, in our case, to the definition given by historical materialism on the function of nationalities in relation to the succession of typical modes of production.

For more than a half century, we have seen the most diverse currents struggling to exploit fragmentary and episodic data in order to justify their incessant opportunistic and eclectic contortions, which claims to deliver a new doctrine each day and new rules, shamelessly making demons of yesterday’s angels and vice versa.

But the Polish question is also interesting from another perspective. One could believe that this resolute sympathy for national struggles has only been platonic in scope and is limited to texts and studies of historic accounts or even social theory, without being translated into the domain of political programmes and actions of the party, this veritable proletarian and communist party which, in the period under consideration (1847-71), already had the struggle between the proletariat and capitalism and the destruction of this social mode of capitalism as its own objective. Yet we do not invoke Marx and Engels’ testaments as writers, but rather as international leaders of the communist movement. Based on a shallow and youthful reading of Engels’ pages on The Po and the Rhine and Savoy, Nice and the Rhine you might get the idea that they were politico-military texts written during a pause in the class revolution, abstracting from the methodology of socio-economics. A step further and you can slip into the idea that it is alright to open parentheses and establish “free zones” in Marxist doctrine covering a succession of events, indeed any or all events. It is therefore of the utmost importance to show that all the conclusions of these documents are perfectly in accordance with the materialist analysis of history, including the interpretation of humanity’s collective “journey” through time, in the light of evolving productive forces. No one should be allowed to forget this, whether they are holding a sword or a scalpel, brush chisel or bow, or indeed the hammer and sickle.

Portraying Marx and Engels as “occasionalists” might suit Cominform and other cliques, but this is the main falsification among all the other miserable counterfeits in circulation.

In a letter dated 13 February 1863, Marx inquires of his friend Engels about the events in Poland. The news of that heroic insurrection in the cities and the countryside, which became a real civil war waged against Russian forces, caused Marx to exclaim: “This much is certain, the era of revolution has now fairly opened in Europe once more. And the general state of affairs is good”. However, the memory of the bitter defeats of 1850 was still too fresh: “But the comfortable delusions and almost childish [this marks the first instance of the use of this adjective that was so frequently used by Lenin, but always in a non-disrespectful way] enthusiasm with which we welcomed the revolutionary era before February 1848, have gone by the board…. Old comrades … are no more, others have fallen 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 role stupidity plays in revolutions, and how they are exploited by blackguards”. So get going, slackers, you are no longer infantile but senile. Try to update Karl Marx on this point!

This letter paints, with a few quick strokes that we will complement by referring to subsequent letters, a picture of all the European political forces to the Polish insurrection. The “nationalist” Prussians, who took an autonomist position to prevent the Emperor in Vienna from placing himself at the head of the German Confederation, and who hypocritically proclaimed their solidarity with Italy and Hungary, which were demanding their independence, were caught red handed: shamelessly Russophile, they sided against Poland. The Russian revolutionary democrats (Herzen) were also put to the test: despite their Slavophile sentiments, they had to defend the Poles against official Russia (and not claim that once a constitution had been obtained from the Tsar, Poland remained a Russian province). The bourgeois government in London and that of Plon-Plon (Napoleon III) hypocritically feigned support for the Polish cause in order to defend their own interests against Russia, but both were suspect, and the latter’s betrayal was certain: his agents were in constant contact with the right wing of the Polish movement that would certainly defect, especially in the event of a setback.

European “democracy” did not want to do anything, or anything of consequence, for insurgent Poland. Marx immediately appealed to the International Working Men’s Association, which had been established in London on 28 September 1864, to publish a practical programme of action. Before the famous meeting at St Martin’s Hall, Marx relied on the English Workers’ Association. His plan was soon ready: a brief proclamation addressed by the English workers to the workers of all countries and a booklet written by himself and Engels to explain the specific points on the Polish question. And immediately after the September 1864, debates on the actions to be taken within the General Council, which Marx presided over morally without having accepted the chairmanship. This debate gave rise to discussions of the greatest interest and enabled the clarification of the political issues of the moment.

The action on behalf of Poland can therefore be found in all the letters in documents emanating from the party, from the workers’ International. Moreover, it was considered to be the main lever for developing workers’ agitation to the maximum in Europe and hasten the opportunities for revolutionary movements. Details of principle on the historical problem of the internationalist proletariat’s support for a national struggle thus become of much greater importance.

The International and the question of nationalities

12. A series of interesting debates within the General Council of the First International and under the personal leadership of Marx provides the facts enabling us to correct errors of principle on the question of the historic struggles of nationalities. The tendency to ignore them instead of explaining them from the materialist point of view is a manifestation of particularist and federalist positions derived from utopian and libertarian theories that Marxism had jettisoned, rather than being evidence of an advanced internationalism.

The same founding congress of the International Workingmen’s Association was convoked in solidarity with the Poles (following a letter from English workers to French workers on the subject of Poland) and with the Armenians who were oppressed by Russia, and as Marx himself recounts, was attended by many radical democrat elements, who aroused the mistrust of the workers. Concerned about theoretical clarity but also about the power of the movement at a historical moment when the demands for independence had a real revolutionary content, Marx arranged to have a badly drafted report shelved and wrote the powerful Inaugural Address, which gave the greatest emphasis to the struggle of the proletarian class in England and on the continent.

Marx’s famous letter of 4 November 1864 explained that he was on his guard and ready to take arms against any attempt by theoretical democratism to infiltrate the workers’ ranks.

This is interesting in allowing us to correctly interpret the dignified replies he made later to those who accused him of being, as we would say today, to the right on the national question. A certain Major Wolff had presented a charter that he claimed had been adopted by Italian workers’ societies: “[These] are essentially associated Benefit Societies…. I saw the stuff later. It was evidently a concoction of Mazzini’s, and that tells you in advance in what spirit and phraseology the real question, the labour question, was dealt with. As well as how the nationalities question intruded into it”. When Eccarius asked him to attend the meeting of the subcommittee, Marx heard “a fearfully cliché-ridden, badly written and totally unpolished preamble pretending to be a declaration of principles, with Mazzini showing through the whole thing from beneath a crust of the most insubstantial scraps of French socialism”. There was also, in the Italian charter, “something quite impossible, a sort of central government of the European working classes (with Mazzini in the background, of course)”.

Finally, Marx prepared the Address, reducing the charter from 40 to 10 articles, 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 in support of universal suffrage!

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

On 10 December 1864, Marx presented the debate on Fox’s proposal concerning the appeal on behalf of Poland. This good democrat did his best, forcing himself to reduce the problem to a class question. But there was a point that Marx could not swallow, an expression of sympathy for French democracy, which actually extended “as far as Boustrapa [=Bonaparte]”: “I opposed this and unfolded a historically irrefutable tableau of the constant French betrayal of Poland from Louis XV to Bonaparte III. At the same time, I pointed out how thoroughly inappropriate it was that the Anglo-French Alliance should appear as the ‘core’ of the International Association, albeit in a democratic version”.

The proposal was accepted with Marx’s revisions, but the Swiss delegate Jung, 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 contacts with the bourgeois Poles, but that in one session it even received representatives of the aristocracy, as part of the national anti-Russian union. These aristocrats assured the Council that they, too, were democrats, and that the national revolution in Poland was only possible with a peasant uprising. Marx simply asked himself if they really believed what they were saying.

We now come to 1866. Once again, the Polish question was “at the heart of controversies within the Association”. A certain Vésinier accused the International, no less, of having become a committee of nationalities in tow to Bonapartism. This ruffled Karl’s beard. “This ass” had attributed a paragraph on Poland included in the agenda of the Geneva Congress to the Parisian delegates, when quite the contrary, they had considered it inopportune. It deplored that questions were being addressed “not concerning 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’s thesis is as follows: it is neither class-based nor internationalist to encourage a national war by the Poles against the Russians and to become enemies of Russia, because we must be for peace among the peoples. As justification for this position he recalled the iniquities of the Bonaparte regime and of the English bourgeoisie, and the emancipation of the serfs in Russia and Poland, which only recently took place, and asserted “that it was the duty of the Central Committee to proclaim solidarity and fraternity among all peoples, and not to put one of them alone beyond the pale of Europe”. Vésinier then accused the Poles of using the Association “to help to restore their nationhood, without concerning themselves with the question of the emancipation of the workers”. Marx simply mentioned the bursts of laughter that greeted these lies and falsehoods, depicting it as “the Muscovite line pursued by Proudhon and Herzen” and saying that “Vésinier is just the fellow for the Russians. Of little merit as a writer…. But with talent, great rhetorical power, much energy and above all unscrupulous through and through”.

Vésinier would be expelled from the International, and “We are commemorating [Poland’s] revolution on 23 January”. As for us, we are totally of the opinion that every armed revolution “against the existing social conditions” is worth one hundred times more than any theory of exaggerated extremism and pacifism of the people, and while believing or feigning to believe in a class perspective, in reality only invokes the accolade of the Western bourgeoisie and the Tsar of all the Russias.

The Slavs and Russia

13. The historical cycle of the formation of bourgeois national States in parallel with industrialisation and the formation of great markets, undeniably embraced England, France, Germany and Italy; other lesser powers could be considered to be established nations: Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Sweden and Norway. The Marxist demand applied in typical manner to Poland, and is especially valid as a declaration of war against the “Holy Alliance” of Russia, Austria and Prussia. But from the Marxist perspective this cycle would come to an end leaving the problem of the Slavs of Eastern and South-eastern Europe, among others, unresolved.

Since 1856 Marx had been interested in a book by the Pole Mieroslawski, openly directed against Russia, Germany and Pan-Slavism, in which the author proposed “a free confederation of Slavic nations with Poland as the Archimedean people”, which means the people in the vanguard on the road to freedom. Something of this kind was to take place with the formation of the Little Entente of the Slavic States (Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland as the most important and homogeneous State) after the First World War and the dissolution of the Austrian Empire (1918). And as we know, this situation lasted for barely twenty years, until there was a new partition between the Germans and the Russians in 1939.

Apart from the reproach for having based his hopes on the English and French governments, what interests us here is Marx’s critique of Mieroslawsky’s attempt at social analysis. The author did not foresee the strong industrialisation of many districts and cities in Poland, and based his independent State on “democratic agrarian community”. Originally, Polish peasants had been united in free communes, agrarian communities, opposed to which were a dominium, or territory under the military and administrative control of a baron; the nobles, in turn, elected the king. But the peasants’ free land was soon usurped, partly by the monarchy and partly by the aristocracy, and the peasant communities were subjected to serfdom. Nonetheless, a class of almost free middle-peasants survived, with the right to form a semi-nobility, an order of knights; but the peasants could become members of this order only if they participated in a war of conquest or in the colonisation of virgin lands; this stratum in turn was transformed into a kind of lumpenproletariat of the aristocracy, a shabby nobility: “This kind of development is interesting”, Marx writes, “because here 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 were all of the same race and spoke the same language, and the national tradition was as old as it was strong. Marx’s thesis therefore established that the class yoke appeared with the development of the technological means of production, even within a uniform ethnic group, just as in other cases it appeared as the result of a clash between two races and two peoples, in which case race and language, in turn, functioned as “economic agents” (cf. Engels in Part 1).

Evidently the Polish democrat did not foresee the entry of a real industrial bourgeoisie into the struggle, and still less that of a powerful and glorious proletariat, which in 1905 was going to hold Tsarist troops in check, and would even rise up during the Second World War in a desperate attempt to take power in the martyred capital against the German and Russian general staffs, before going down like the Communards of Paris, killed in the crossfire of their enemies.

Marx’s attention was not distracted from Russia for an instant, since he regarded the Tsar’s troops as the reserve army of the European counter-revolution, ready to cross frontiers everywhere to re-establish “order” in central Europe, suppressing every new movement seeking to overthrow the States of the ancien regime, cutting off all potential sources of an upsurge in the proletarian revolution. Almost ten years later, Marx took an interest in the theory of Duchinski, a Russian professor from Kiev, who was living in Paris). Duchinski stated that: “the real Muscovites, i.e., inhabitants of the former Grand Duchy of Moscow, were for the most part Mongols or Finns, etc., as was the case in the parts of Russia situated further east and in its south-eastern parts. I see from it at all events that the affair has seriously worried the St Petersburg cabinet (since it would put an end to Panslavism in no uncertain manner). All Russian scholars were called on to give responses and refutations, and these in the event turned out to be terribly weak. The purity of the Great Russian dialect and its connection with Church Slavonic appear to lend more support to the Polish than to the Muscovite view in this debate […] It has ditto been shown geologically and hydrographically that a great ‘Asiatic’ difference occurs east of the Dnieper, compared with what lies to the west of it, and that (as Murchison has already maintained) the Urals by no means constitute a dividing line. Result as obtained by Duchinski: Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They are not Slavs; they do not belong to the Indo-Germanic race at all, they are des intrus [intruders], who must be chased back across the Dnieper, etc. Panslavism in the Russian sense is a cabinet invention, etc. I wish that Duchinski were right and at all events that this view would prevail among the Slavs. On the other hand, he states that some of the peoples in Turkey, such as Bulgars, e.g., who had previously been regarded as Slavs, are non-Slav”.

We do not know if this passage from Marx’s letter was used in the bourgeoisie’s recent polemic against the Russian Revolution to support the current thesis that the Russian people submitted to dictatorship because they are Asiatic and not European ! It is clear that the thesis Marx was alluding to, while absolutely inoffensive for true Marxism, becomes galling to today’s Russians who follow in the footsteps of Stalin by turning to a racial, national and linguistic tradition rather than that of the class relationship between the proletariat of all countries.

From the Marxist point of view, the fact that the Great Russians should be classified as Mongolians rather than as Aryans (we should not forget that famous phrase that Marx so often recalls: “Grattez le Russe, et vous trouverez le Tartare” – “scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar”) is of fundamental importance with regard to the following question: must we wait for the formation of a vast capitalist Slavic nation, including all of the Russian State, or at least as far as the Urals, in order to conclude the cycle during which the European working class must subordinate its forces to the cause of forming nations, which must be closed before the proletarian revolution is on the agenda ? Marx’s response was that the formation of modern nation States as a premise for the workers revolution corresponds to an area that extends in the east as far as the eastern borders of Poland, and under certain circumstances might include the Ukraine and Little Russia as far as the Dnieper. This is the European arena of the revolution, the one that had to be dealt with first, and the cycle that preceded the next period, characterised by purely class-oriented action, came to an end in this area in 1871.

We must not forget, if we are to avoid taking ethnology to be the sole determining factor, that people of Mongolian race, the Finns, formed socially advanced 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 win independence from the three powers of the Holy Alliance.

The wars of 1866 and 1870

14. While the Polish insurrection receded and this path to the revolution closed, as it had done in 1848, Marx and Engels became aware that war was approaching between Austria and Prussia. Italy would undoubtedly become embroiled because of the burning issue of independence for Venice, once again under Austrian occupation; the position of Russia and France was meanwhile ambiguous: it was clear that a new period of upheaval was at hand. The battle of Sedan would settle all accounts but the only enemy of the revolution that would perish was the French Empire.

On 10 April 1866, Marx believed that it was the Russians who wanted war; they were indeed massing troops on the frontiers of Austria and Prussia, hoping to profit from the situation to occupy the two other parts of Poland. But this would mean the end of the Hohenzollern regime, and the Russians’ true objective was to make it possible to march on a revolutionary Berlin in order to maintain the Hohenzollerns on the throne. Marx and Engels hoped that Berlin would rise up at the first news of military defeat.

It is very interesting that, even though they were against Austria on the Venetian question, they considered that an Austrian victory would be useful from the perspective of the anti-Prussian revolution.

As for Napoleon III, he was no less suspect than Alexander of Russia from the perspective of the proletarian cause, since he was still dreaming of becoming the “fourth member of the Holy Alliance”, which was now broken.

When war broke out on 19 June 1866, the Council of the International debated the situation, attacking the problem of nationalities as a matter of principle.

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

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

On this occasion Marx, ordinarily so reluctant to engage in public activity, could not avoid taking sides against his future son-in-law, Lafargue. He made the English burst out laughing when he pointed out that Lafargue, having abolished nationality, spoke in French, a language unknown to 90% of those present: “I pointed out that [Lafargue] seemed to be implying that the abolition of nationalities meant their absorption by the model nation, the French nation”.

But what was Marx’s preference in this war ? First of all, defeat for Prussia. He said, not to the Council, but in his letter to Engels (let’s not forget the “internal” nature of the correspondence we are citing): “The situation is indeed difficult at this time. On the one hand we must confront the stupid Italophilia of the English and on the other hand the false polemics of the French, in particular to prevent any demonstration that might channel our Association exclusively in one direction”.

Thus there was no official taking of positions in favour of one of the belligerents in the war of 1866 comparable to the one taken in favour of the Poles during the insurrection against the Russians.

After Austria’s success in Italy, Prussia triumphed at Sadowa and Napoleon III intervened as a mediator. On 7 July 1866, Marx wrote: “Besides a great Prussian defeat, which perhaps (oh but those Berliners!) might have led to a revolution, there could have been no better outcome than their stupendous victory”. Marx calculated that Bonaparte’s greatest interest lay in a swinging of fortunes between Austrian and Prussian victories and defeats, preventing the emergence of a powerful Germany with a decisive central hegemony, allowing him, with his intact military forces, to become the arbiter of Europe. Marx also thought that Italy’s position was very dangerous and that Russia stood to gain no matter what happened. As we know, Austria, accepting the mediation of France, 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 of 1859, who opposed the occupation of Rome with his famous “jamais”.

In this respect, the position of the International was clear: the next war would be unleashed by Bonaparte, who at the time was introducing the Dreyse needle rifle to his infantry (in his letter of 7 July, Marx treated the technical evolution of weaponry as a practical application of economic determinism, “Is there any sphere in which our theory that the organisation of labour is determined by the means of production is more dazzlingly vindicated than in the industry for human slaughter ?” – suggesting that Engels write a study on the subject; (today it seems everything relates to the question, “who has the atomic bomb ?”) And in the second place, in this war, it was essential that France and Napoleon III should be defeated.

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

In fact, having applauded the French sections’ courageous opposition to the war, the “Address” of the General Council of 23 July 1870 contained the famous phrase that was exploited so much later (and later commented upon in a historically irrevocable manner by Lenin): for the Germans, this was a defensive war. But this was immediately followed with a sharp attack on Prussian politics, and an appeal to German workers to fraternise with the French: the victory of Germany would be a disaster and would reproduce “all the miseries that befell Germany after her [so-called] wars of independence [against Napoleon I]”. It was necessary to wait for a Lenin to come along and say: the philistine petty-bourgeois cannot understand how one can desire the defeat of both belligerents! As of 1870, the general theory of proletarian defeatism was already in place.

Marxism’s historical evaluation of 1866-70 and the balance of forces between the feudal powers of the east and the bourgeois dictatorships of the west is summed up in this phrase (although we remind any nitwit trying to become a published historian that the use of the word “if” is not advisable): “If the battle of Sadowa had been lost instead of being won, French battalions would have overrun Germany as the allies of Prussia”.

A defensive war means a historically progressive war. As Lenin demonstrated, this was the case in Europe between 1789 and 1871, but not afterwards (and we will 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 one day before Bazaine, and if the warmongers had shouted: “to Paris, to Paris!” instead of “to Berlin, to Berlin!” the Marxist analysis would have been the same.

The Commune and the new historic cycle

15. The failed revolution in Germany in 1848 did not break out again in 1866 and in 1871 because of the sensational victories of Prussian militarism. But the terrible defeat suffered by French militarism aroused the Parisian proletariat, not just against the demoralised regime, but against the entire bourgeois class, republicans and prone to capitulating, and against the reactionary power of Prussia. The fall of the revolutionary Communard government in no way detracted from the historic significance of this event, which made the dictatorship of the proletariat the only direct historical perspective for communists in Europe.

The Second “Address” of the International (9 September 1870) followed the victory at Sedan, the surrender of the French army, the deposition of Napoleon III and the proclamation of the Republic. It was an utter indictment of the project to annex Alsace-Lorraine under the pretext of assuring Germany a secure military frontier. The “Address” ironically remarks that the Prussians were not so concerned about the security of their Russian frontier, and foresees a “war of races – a war with the combined Slavonian and Roman races”. The text also says that the German working class “have resolutely supported the war, which it was not in their power to prevent”, but that it now demanded peace and recognition of the Republic proclaimed in Paris. It expressed serious reservations with regard to the latter, while at the same time advising the French proletariat not to rise up in revolt. But it is the Third “Address”, edited by Marx in person, which not only constitutes a manifestation of proletarian politics but a cornerstone of the revolutionary theory and programme. As Engels recalled in his preface, Marx delivered the Address on 30 May 1871, just two days after the last combatants of the Commune had fallen at Belleville.

This classic source of revolutionary communism, upon which we draw ceaselessly, goes beyond any kind of concern, such that which had suggested to the General Council six months earlier to dissuade the Parisian proletariat from undertaking an impossible enterprise, for fear that a new catastrophe could favour further Prussian invasions and annexations, causing an immense new national problem at the very heart of the most advanced part of Europe. The International, belonging to the workers of the entire world, aligned itself fully with the first revolutionary working class government and accepted the lessons of the ferocious repression, lessons which provided the clearest battle orders to those who would write future chapters in the history of the proletarian revolution.

These orders were twice disobeyed on a world scale, in 1914 and 1939, but the goal of our patient historical reconstructions and tireless repetitions is to demonstrate that despite this, the lessons will be taken up again at some future turning point in history, as had been set out in this memorable covenant.

The alliance between the Versaillais and the Prussians to crush the red Commune, or more precisely, the fact that the former assumed, under pressure from the latter and under Bismarck’s orders, the role of hangman of the revolution, can only lead to the following historic conclusion: “The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war [which we therefore had to support]; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war”.

It was not Lenin who invented the formula, “transform the national war into a civil war”; he found it written in black and white. Lenin did not say that the orders of the International were only relevant to the European parties from 1914 to 1915, and that in later situations the instructions might be different, and that the phase of alliances in national wars, the phase of “peace between the workers and those who appropriate the product of their labour,” as the text cited above added. Marx and Lenin recognised the historical law that, from 1871 until the destruction of capitalism in Europe, there are two alternatives: either the proletariat can apply defeatism in any war, or, as Engels wrote prophetically in his postscript to the 1891 edition of The Civil War in France, and as we see today, “… is there not every day hanging over our heads the Damocles’ sword of war, on the first day of which all the chartered covenants of princes will be scattered like chaff… a race war which will subject the whole of Europe 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 not pacifism but war that accelerates general social development, as was the case with the wars that enabled the bourgeoisie to form national States; third: since 1871 Marxism has established that there is only one way that the revolutionary proletariat can put an end to war: with civil war and the destruction of capitalism.

The imperialist epoch and irredentist leftovers

16. In the epoch of bourgeois revolutionary wars of independence and the formation of nation States there are still many cases of lesser nationalities being subjected to States of another nationality, even in Europe; nevertheless, the proletarian International must reject every attempt to justify wars between States for reasons of irredentism, unmasking the imperialist purposes of every bourgeois war, and calling upon the workers to sabotage such wars from both sides. The inability to put this into practice has brought about the destruction of revolutionary energies under the opportunist waves that accompanied the two world wars; and if the masses do not abandon the opportunist leadership in time (social democratic or Cominformist) it will result in another war, thus allowing capitalism to survive its violent and bloody crises once again.

It was Lenin who showed that the war of 1914 broke out because of the economic rivalry between the major capitalist States over the division of the world’s productive resources and especially those of the colonies in the underdeveloped continents. He never denied the existence of serious national problems in various metropolitan States; the perfect example is the Austrian monarchy which ruled over various Slavic, Latin and Magyar regions, and even some Ottoman groups. Another example: Russia, whose feudal State straddled the border between Europe and Asia. Therefore, one cannot reach conclusions on questions of nationality in Russia without taking into account this current analysis, as well as the one that will be presented in a future meeting on class struggles and national struggles in non-European continents and between coloured races (the Eastern question and the colonial question). [Editor’s note: this was covered in a series of articles in Il programma comunista from Issue 21/1954 to Issue 8/1955.]

The socialists of the Second International based their betrayal not only by invoking the two sophisms of supporting the nation in the event of a defensive war or a war against a “less developed country”, but also on a 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 of surrendering Corsica or Nice. England lent its support, but jealously defended its control of Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus. As for Poland, there were three would-be liberators, each wanting to keep it united under their own domination.

We likewise know that the Italian socialist party provided a laudable example of resistance to the seductions of irredentism; an even more exemplary case was that of the Serbian party which, active in a country surrounded by territories inhabited by oppressed compatriots and, moreover, attacked by a far more powerful Austria, led a vigorous struggle against the militarism of Belgrade and the patriotic fever. We have already set out the fundamental theses regarding these national questions in a series of “Threads of Time” published in 1950 and 1951, so we will now make do with a brief summary:

1. Radical Marxists have rightly combated the social-democratic thesis of simple linguistic “cultural” autonomy within a unitary State in multi-national countries, supporting total autonomy for minority nationalities, not as a bourgeois outcome or facilitated by the bourgeoisie but as a result of the overthrow of the central State power with the participation of proletarians of its own dominant nationality.

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

3. Even within the cycle during which the proletarian International refuses any support by its own organised political forces for wars between States, and denies that the presence on one side of despotic feudal States (or States that are less democratic than others) is a reason to abandon this historic international position, and everywhere adopts a defeatist stance within the “own” country, it can and must however consider the different effects of this or that outcome of the conflict in its historical analysis.

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

But these were only episodes that punctuated the great period of calm that lasted from 1871 to 1914.

Next came the world wars: every proletarian party that supported its State or its allies in war committed an act of treason; everywhere, the tactic of revolutionary defeatism had to be applied. From this crystal-clear conclusion, however, one must not deduce that the victory of one or another side would make no difference in terms of the development of events from a revolutionary perspective.

Our position on this question is known. The victory of the Western democracies and of America in the first and second world wars set back the possibilities for the communist revolution, whereas the opposite outcome would have accelerated them. The same thing is true of the American capitalist monster in a third world war, which could take place within one or two decades.

The victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie is the precondition for the communist revolution, or rather, it is the revolution itself. But we can also recognise revolutionary conditions brought about by the wars between States, which, until it can be proven otherwise, have until now mobilised more physical energies than social wars. The two principal conditions are a catastrophe for Great Britain and the United States of America, the colossal flywheels that are responsible for the capitalist mode of production’s current terrible historical moment of inertia.

A formula for Trieste offered to the “contingentists”

17. The position of Marxist communists towards the current conflict over Trieste has three cornerstones: since 1911, the Italian proletariat declared its opposition to demands for unification with Italy; in 1915, Italian socialists refused to support the war for Trieste and Trentino, and the groups that would later form the Communist Party at Livorno in 1921 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 of revolutionary socialism and the party founded in Livorno. The communist party must treat the nationalist politics of the governments of Rome and Belgrade with the same contempt, and even more so the unbelievable deceitfulness of Cominform followers.

By a strange coincidence, our meeting was taking place at the very moment that unexpected events brought Trieste to the foreground of international politics. What do the communists say about the Trieste question ?

The Communist Party of Italy was founded in Livorno in 1921 out of groups which, not content with refusing the “sacred union” and the formula “neither support [for the war] nor sabotage”, adhered to the Leninist position of defeatism and demanded the most resolute opposition to the war that liberated the Julian March, Trieste and Trentino, calling in May 1915 for an indefinite strike against mobilisation and pushing the old party to action through the course of the war and in the period following the setback at Caporetto.

Thus we didn’t want Trieste. But proletarian and revolutionary Trieste was with us, and the majority of political sections, the trade unions, the cooperatives, regardless of whether they spoke Italian or Slovenian, came over to the Communist Party, as well as the glorious editorial board of Lavoratore, which appeared in both languages with the same articles on theory, propaganda and political and organisational agitation. Red Trieste was in the front rank of communist battalions in the struggle against fascism, which never managed to impose itself without the intervention of the national carabinieri.

Nothing in common here with the attitude of today’s Italian pseudo-communists. Yesterday, they would have allowed Trieste to be swallowed up by Tito because it would be joining a socialist country; today they flaunt their blatant nationalism, calling Tito a lowlife hangman.

The rivalry between Belgrade and Rome in the repugnant arena of global diplomacy, as well as the rivalry between the Italian parties over Trieste, is wrapped in the most rancid nationalist formulas; and the crudest exponents of linguistic, historical and ethnic sophistry are not the authentic bourgeois, but the pseudo-Marxists Tito and Togliatti.

Usually we are indifferent, and not just because of our numerical weakness, to the usual question: what do you propose doing in practice ? But we can offer these “Marxist” political positivists a formula that they have never really considered. The problem of dual nationality and dual languages is incomprehensible, and you cannot resolve it by writing speeches for Venetians and Slovenes in English or Serbo-Croatian.

Basically, the situation is as follows, in the cities, organised along bourgeois lines, the Latins outnumber the Slavs; in the villages scattered across the countryside of the interior and especially far from the coast, it is the opposite. The merchants, industrialists, workers and members of the liberal professions are Italian, whereas the rural landlords and the peasants are Slavs. In short, a social dissimilarity presents itself as a national one: it would disappear if the workers got rid of the industrialists and the peasants hunted down the landlords, but you cannot wipe it away by drawing new borders.

In the constitution of the USSR, Marxist gentlemen of the Via delle Botteghe Oscure [Editor’s note: the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party], which served as the model for that of the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Marxist gentlemen of Belgrade, the foundation of the alliance between workers and peasants was the following formula: one representative for every one hundred workers, one for every one thousand peasants.

So hold this plebiscite that excites you so much (you took the formula from Mussolini, your common enemy) with the proviso that the vote of a city-dweller or town (for example, those with more than ten thousand inhabitants) is worth ten, and that of the inhabitant of a small town or the countryside is worth one. Then you will be able to extend the democratic vote to the entire area situated between the borders of 1866 and those of 1918: you can add Gorizia, Pola, Fiume and Zara.

But both parties in this dispute have ingested so much disgusting bourgeois democracy that they bow down before the sacred dogma, which has the rich roaring with laughter, the one that says each person’s vote has the same weight, anywhere.

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

European revolution

18. From the point of view of the historical development of society’s productive forces, Trieste is a point of convergence of economic factors that go far beyond the frontiers of the contesting States, a centre with modern industrial plants and perfect communications; in any event, any separation from the hinterland would militate against the extension of trade that constituted the basis of the great movement towards the formation of unitary nation States that came to an end in Europe in the 19^th century. In the middle of the 20^th century, the only possible future for Trieste is international, a future that cannot be usefully found in the political and economic compromises between bourgeois forces, but only in the European communist revolution, in which the workers of Trieste and its region will be one of the vanguard battalions.

In the radiance of capitalism’s dawn in Italy, one of whose first political States was the Most Serene Republic of Venice; it is indisputable that the dependence of Trieste, the port and emporium of the Adriatic, at the heart of a feudal and semi-barbarous Europe, on Venice, was a decidedly progressive fact of history.

With the opening of global maritime communications, Mediterranean capitalism was overtaken and the world market emerged, built through the mediation of Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England via the Atlantic trade routes; nevertheless, as a result of its geographical situation Trieste was always a potential point of penetration of the new mode of production into the heart of central and eastern Europe, where the anti-industrial and reactionary landed class seemed to have been entrenched for centuries, erecting obstacles to the new form of human organisation.

Though its organisation was a fragmented mosaic, the Austrian Empire, which connected the Adriatic port to the nascent industrial centres of Germany, Hungary and Bohemia, was progressive compared to the more distant barriers erected by the Russians and the Turks, which capitalism would break down at a later stage.

From the perspective of re-establishing industrialism to the Italian peninsula, and establishing it in the Balkans, a positive new factor was Trieste’s connection with the powerful German economy and in the latter’s attempt to undermine Anglo-Saxon economic hegemony in the Mediterranean basin.

Trieste has mainteined a primary importance after the defeat of the Axis, since the city and its territory have been placed under a state of emergency, with a view to implementing America’s colonisation of Europe and other repugnant schemes all the more effectively.

Every communist revolutionary hails the Trieste proletariat, which has been subjected to a succession of unhappy phases, in the course of which its territory has been obscenely colonised by the worst representatives of capitalism and of ferocious militarist nationalism, who have revelled in orgies of cruelty, corruption and exploitation.

The hooked claws of so many pimpish and brazen colonialists are sunk so deep into this small area that Trieste will not find a national solution from any side, regardless of which language it uses to invoke it.

The solution can only be international; but just as it will not come from summit meetings or conflicts between States, it will not come from democratic fornications or from the sordid unity of a European servitude, either.

We don’t want to see 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 resolute militants among a proletariat that has emerged from so many, and such painful experiences.