[RG-9] Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory Pt. 3

PART TWO: The relative weight of the national factor in the various historic modes of production
Marxist interpretation of the political struggle

From race to nation

1. The transition from the ethnic group or “people” to the “nation” only takes place with the appearance of the political State, whose fundamental characteristics are the delimitation of national boundaries and organisation of the armed forces; this transition can thus only take place after the dissolution of primitive communism and the formation of social classes.

Leaving aside all literary interpretation and all idealist influences, we attribute the category of “race” to biological facts and the category of “nation” to geographical facts. However, it is necessary to make a distinction between the nation as a historical fact, and nationality, which must be understood as a grouping that is affected by two factors, racial and political, at the same time.

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

But such things also occur for people today: thus in the United States of America (apart from blacks, who in certain Confederate States are still forbidden to marry whites) you will find the U.S. citizen Primo Carnera with a mother and father from Friuli, and a whole bunch of Gennaro Espositos who have pure Neapolitan blood but are proud of their American identity cards.

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

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

The idea of a fixed territory referring to a human group implies the idea of a frontier delimiting its zone of residence and work, and ordinary historians habitually add that it implies the defence of these frontiers against other groups, and therefore a fixed organisation of guards and armies, a hierarchy, a power. In reality, the origin of hierarchies, of power, of the State comes before such time as the human population has grown to the point of disputing territories; it relates to the internal processes of social clusters which evolve from the first forms of clan and tribe, once the cultivation of the soil and agricultural production are sufficiently technologically developed to allow activity to stabilise over the seasonal cycles on the same fields and meadows.

The emergence of the State

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

We don’t need to outline the Marxist theory of the State in its entirety here, but it is of the utmost interest for establishing the structures of the historic collectivities that are indicative of the term nation. In fact, the structures have a far superior complexity to the banal criterion according to which each individual, taken alone, binds himself directly to the land of his birth, the nation being a totality of individual molecules, each similar to one another. This concept has nothing scientific in it and simply reflects the ideology of the dominant bourgeois class of the modern age.

The theory of the State not as a body of people or nation or society, but rather as the organ of power of a given class, is fundamental in Marx. Lenin restored the integrity of this theory against the systematic theoretical and practical falsification that was applied by the socialists of the Second International, relying specifically on the explanation of the emergence of the State contained in Engels’ classic work on the origins of the family and property, which has guided us in our study of the course of prehistory. During that era the ethnic element came into play in a still pure and so to speak virgin condition, in the primitive sharing of work, brotherhood and love that reigned in the ancient and noble (in the concrete sense of the word) tribes and gens. The myths of all peoples remember this as a golden age of the first men who knew nothing of crime or bloodshed.

We will therefore pick up the thread in Engels’ illuminating text that can lead us to the explanation of the struggles of nationalities, and the materialist conclusion that once again it is not an inherent factor, but a product that has certain historical beginnings and cycles, and which will draw to a conclusion and disappear under the conditions that are already largely developed in the modern world. But our original view in no way implies that our doctrine and in particular our action, which is inseparable from it, disregards this fundamental process, the national process (when we say “our” doctrine, this does not mean a doctrine that belongs to one or several individual subjects, but rather the doctrine of our present century-old and global movement). It implies still less that we are committing the enormous historical blunder of declaring this phenomenon settled in relation to the proletarian class struggle within the framework of contemporary international politics.

Engels summarises the process with regard to ancient Greece and the great historical form of Mediterranean classical antiquity that ended with the fall of the Roman Empire:

“Thus in the Greek constitution of the heroic age we see the old gentile order as still a living force. But we also see the beginnings of its disintegration: father-right, with transmission of the property to the children, by which accumulation of wealth within the family was favoured and the family itself became a power as against the gens; reaction of the inequality of wealth on the constitution by the formation of the first rudiments of hereditary nobility and monarchy; slavery, at first only of prisoners of war, but already preparing the way for the enslavement of fellow-members of the tribe and even of the gens; the old wars between tribe and tribe already degenerating into systematic pillage by land and sea for the acquisition of cattle, slaves and treasure, and becoming a regular source of wealth; in short, riches praised and respected as the highest good and the old gentile order misused to justify the violent seizure of riches. Only one thing was wanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquired riches of individuals against the communistic traditions of the gentile order”.

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

The passage continues:

“Only one thing was wanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquired riches of individuals against the communistic traditions of the gentile order, which not only sanctified the private property formerly so little valued, and declared this sanctification to be the highest purpose of all human society; but an institution which set the seal of general social recognition on each new method of acquiring property and thus amassing wealth at continually increasing speed; an institution which perpetuated, not only this growing cleavage of society into classes, but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-possessing, and the rule of the former over the latter.
“And this institution came. The State was invented”.

And it is Engels again who defines the territorial criterion: “In contrast to the old gentile organisation, the State is distinguished firstly by the grouping of its members on a territorial basis. The old gentile bodies, formed and held together by ties of blood, had, as we have seen, become inadequate largely because they presupposed that the gentile members were bound to one particular locality, whereas this had long ago ceased to be the case. The territory was still there, but the people had become mobile. The territorial division was therefore taken as the starting point and the system introduced by which citizens exercised their public rights and duties where they took up residence, without regard to gens or tribe”.

States without nation

3. In the ancient empires of the Asiatic Orient, whose political formations come prior to the Hellenic, we encounter fully developed forms of State power, corresponding to enormous concentrations of landed wealth hoarded by the lords, satraps and sometimes theocrats, and the subjugation of vast masses of prisoners, slaves, serfs and pariahs of the land. But we cannot yet speak of national formations even though characteristics of the State are already present: political territory and armed forces.

The obvious exception of the Jewish people is useful in allowing us to clarify the last step of Engels’ reasoning mentioned in the previous point. We should not confuse the territory which, in less ancient times, defines the fully developed State form, and the relationship between the gens and a given territory which is subsequently broken while the inviolable blood relationship remains.

The territory of the gens does not belong to it in the modern political sense, nor even, if you like, in the strictly economic-productive sense. Engels is saying that a gens is distinguished from others, also in name, by its territory of origin, and not by the different territories that it occupies to settle and to work collectively. The relationship between the Indian Iroquois and its original land was broken over the centuries, not only since white civilisation reduced the few survivors to abject reservations, but since the times when different tribes struggled ferociously against one another, destroying themselves but carefully avoiding any kind of fusion, resulting in their displacement by thousands of kilometres in the immense forests (largely since transformed, thanks to capitalist technology, into deserts that the bourgeois philanthropy uses for its nuclear weapons tests).

The Jewish people were the first to have a written history, but from the first it is a history of class struggle, presenting property-owners and expropriated, wealthy and servants, casually leaping from primitive communism, which is only recalled in Eden, because Cain, the founder and inventor of the class struggle, already appears in the second generation. The Jewish people thus form an organised State, expertly organised even, with clear hierarchies and rigorous constitutions. But it doesn’t become a nation, any more than its Assyrian, Mede or Egyptian barbarian enemies; and this despite the racial purity of the Jews, which was in total contrast to the indifference in this regard of the satraps and pharaohs, whose courts abounded with servants, slaves and sometimes even bureaucrats and officers of different colour and ethnic origins, and whose gynaeceums were populated with white, black and yellow concubines, all originating from military raids and the subjugation of primitive free tribes or other States that had existed before their own at the heart of Asia or Africa.

The Hebrews, divided into 12 tribes, were not assimilated by other peoples, even after their defeats. The tribes and the gens, now transformed into traditionally monogamous patriarchal families, did not lose the pure blood ties, the name of their country of origin and their boring genealogical tradition (although it should be noted that the close attachment to the paternal lineage of the Jews largely tolerates marriage with women of other races) even after territorial deportations, as with the legendary captivity in Babylon and Egypt. The mythical attachment to the promised land is a pre-national form, because even when the ethnic community, which conserved a relative purity, returned to its country of origin, its ethnological cradle, it could not give itself a historically stable political organisation, and the land continued to be crossed by armies of the most various and distant powers. The wars of the Bible are the struggles of tribes more than wars of national liberation or imperial conquest, and the region remained the theatre of historic clashes between the forces of many other peoples aspiring to hegemony in this strategic area of the ancient as well as the modern world.

Likewise the Greeks in the Trojan War did not yet constitute a nation, although they formed a federation of small States in neighbouring territories and a very vague ethnic community, given the completely different origin of the Ionians and Dorians and the confluence in the Hellenic peninsula of ancient migrations from the four points of the compass. The forms of production, the State constitutions, the customs, the languages and cultural traditions differed considerably in each of these small confederated military monarchies. Even in the historic wars against the Persians, unity was no more than circumstantial and it disappeared to give way to bitter wars for hegemony in the Peloponnese and the whole of Greece.

The Hellenic nation and culture

4. National factors appeared in an obvious manner in ancient Greece, already in the social organisation of Athens, Sparta and other cities, and even more so in the Macedonian State which not only unified the country, but also rapidly became the centre of the first imperial conquest in antiquity. The literature and ideology of this nationalism not only transferred to the Roman world, but would supply the framework for the national intoxication of modern bourgeoisies.

The Spartan State, as well as the Athenian or Theban States, were not only perfect States in the political sense of the term, with precisely delimited territories, legal institutions and a central power from which emanated civil and military hierarchies. They attained the form of nations to the extent that although their social fabric preserved the division between rich and poor classes in relation to agricultural and artisanal production and to the already well-developed domestic and foreign trade, and although it fully guaranteed the political power of economically powerful social strata, that same social fabric also acquiesced in a legal and administrative framework that applied the same formal standards to all citizens, and assured the participation of all citizens on equal terms in popular elective assemblies with voting rights. Such a legal infrastructure plays a role that is substantially similar to the one that Marxism has denounced in bourgeois parliamentary democracies, but a fundamental difference runs between the two historic modes of social organisation: today everyone is a citizen and it is stated that everyone is equal before the law; however, back then the total citizenry forming the actual nation excluded the slave class, who were nevertheless extremely numerous at certain stages of history, denying them every political and civic right.

Despite this, and despite the class antagonism between aristocrats and commoners, between rich patricians and merchants on the one hand and ordinary workers living on their wages on the other, this form of social organization was accompanied by great developments not only in work and in technology and thus in the applied sciences, but also in pure science. Participation in production on the basis of equality and freedom, despite class exploitation, translates into unprecedented prominence for language, with literature and art reaching new heights. Language reiterates the national tradition that serves the leaders of society and the State by binding all citizens to the nation’s destiny and obliging them to render military service and to make whatever sacrifice or contribution is required whenever the national organism and its essential structures are menaced.

Literature, history and poetry largely reflect the affirmation of these values, making patriotism the primary motor of every social function, exalting fraternity between each and every citizen at every step, while condemning civil wars and struggles. Despite everything, these were frequent and inevitable; they were habitually presented as conspiracies against holders of title to power by other power-hungry groups or individuals, when in reality they were born out of the opposition of interests between classes and discontent among the great mass of citizens, who were fed a lot of illusions but were tormented by poverty, even when the splendour of the polis was at its zenith.

However, this national solidarity was by no means a pure illusion, a mirage created by the powerful and privileged, but rather is determined by economic interests and the needs of the material forces of production in a given phase of history. The transition from primitive localised farming in Greece, which enjoys a favourable climate but whose soil is typically arid and rocky, and which could only feed a poor and under-developed population, would give way to the most intense commercial navigation from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, bringing products from distant countries and allowing the diffusion of the increasingly differentiated handcraft products and a genuine ancient type of industry, which led, in particular in the harbour districts, a considerable growth in population and a spectacular evolution of its way of life. This evolution could not have taken place within a closed and despotic form of State such as the great empires of the continent; it needed a democratic and open form, producing not only peasants and helots (serfs) but also artisans capable of working for large naval architects and the city workshops, as well as workers who, though certainly less numerous than today, were nevertheless necessary to the development of this early form of capitalism and its unforgettable splendours.

In its ascendant phase, each triumph, each blooming of new forms of labour, still exploitative but freed from the immobilising ties to a specific place and the fossilised ancient technologies, drove a great development in science, art and architecture in the superstructure, which was reflected in the opening of new ideological horizons for societies previously tied to closed and traditional doctrines. We will rediscover this phenomenon with the European Renaissance, as feudalism goes into decline; many argue that the golden age of Greek culture remains unsurpassed, but this is just the exercise of a literary device. We can nevertheless assert that the “bridge” thrown by the “national human community” across economic inequality at this time, when democracy excluded slaves from the human community as if they were animals, was more solid than it was during its historical reappearance 15 or 20 centuries later, which claims to have closed the social abyss separating the owners of capital from the disinherited proletariat.

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

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

None of this makes us want to join in with the ecstatic concert of admiration for the grandeur of ancient Greek art and philosophy, and not simply because these marvels were built on the backs of slaves who were twenty times more numerous than free men; before Solon, these free men were exploited by the landed plutocracy to the point that the system of mortgages could reduce the bankrupt free citizen to slavery. When Athens went into the age of decadence, not wanting to compete with the contemptible slaves (the pride of the free Athenian was so great that, rather than become a cop, he preferred that the State police be manned by hired slaves, such that a slave could arrest free men) free Athenians went on to form a veritable lumpenproletariat, a class of beggars whose revolts against the oligarchs brought ruin upon the glorious republic.

Engels makes a comparison here that says everything about Marxism’s position with respect to apologetics for the great historical civilisations. The Iroquois Indians were unable to raise themselves to the levels attained by the original Greek gens, who were quite similar to the people studied by Morgan in modern America (the newspapers have recently reported on similar primitive communities in the Andaman Islands of the Indian Ocean, people isolated from the rest of humanity until now, who have been visited by Italian explorers on behalf of the new Indian regime). The Iroquois lacked a number of material conditions of production because of geography, climate and the communications between peoples afforded by the sea, and in particular the Mediterranean. And yet, in the modest sphere of their local economy, the Iroquois communists “mastered their conditions of work and their products”, which were distributed according to human needs.

By contrast, even though the momentum behind Greek production allowed it to attain its grandiose diversity, reaching the dizzying heights of the Parthenon friezes, Phidias’ Venus, the paintings of Zeuxis and the platonic abstractions that modern thought has yet to surpass, man’s products started to become commodities that were circulated in monetary markets. Whether slave or free man according to the laws of Lycurgus or Solon, man became slave to the relations of production and to be dominated by his own product. The tremendous revolution that would free him from chains, whose strongest links were forged in the “golden” age of history, was still far off.

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

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

Roman nation and force

5. The national factor reaches its highest expression in Roman antiquity in the age of the Republic, which added the positive domains of organisation and law to the model furnished by the Greeks in the cultural domain. The Roman Empire established itself on the foundations of the Roman nation and extended to become the only organised State for all known humanity at the time. But the Empire itself could not withstand the pressure exerted by the growth of populations arriving from unknown and distant lands who, themselves driven on by material imperatives to expand the life of the species, had in their turn entered into the same great cycle of productive development that had led the Mediterranean peoples from small gens to this immense empire.

The national process in Italy differed from that in Greece to the extent that there were no longer these little city-States which, while having customs and levels of productive development that were hardly different from one another, competed to achieve hegemony over the entire peninsula. In Italy, the sun went down on civilisations preceding that of the Romans; these had reached advanced forms of production, and they undoubtedly had State powers, but they cannot be regarded as having constituted nations in the proper sense of the term. After their decline, Rome became the centre of a single State organisation with legal, political and military structures that enabled it to absorb all the others rapidly and in an increasingly vast territory, which soon extended beyond the borders of Latium to arrive at the Mediterranean and the Po. As the already very remarkable productive forces of a vast territory were coordinated with those of Roman society, Rome’s social and State organisation, along with its administrative and legal system, were applied everywhere and in an increasingly uniform manner.

A complex division of labour, with crafts, trade, navigation and industry emerged alongside the agricultural productive base less rapidly than in Greece. But soon its military conquests on the other side of the Ionian and Adriatic seas allowed Rome to absorb the knowledge of technological and cultural organisation that already existed among the Greeks and other peoples.

The social configuration was not substantially different from that of Greece, as the contribution of slave labour remained very important. But the spread of mercantilism, slower but deeper, accentuated the scale of social division within the society of free men: organisation and rights themselves rested on the census, which classified Roman citizens according to their wealth.

The Roman citizen was obliged to render military service, while the bearing of arms was rigorously denied to the slave and to the mercenary right up to the Empire’s decadence. The legionary army is a genuinely national army: this cannot be said of Greece and still less of the army of Alexander the Great. The latter advanced, however impetuously, to the frontiers of India, where death stopped the young general; but that was in fact the absolute limit that the crushing superiority of the Western form of the State could reach against the gangs of diverse Asian principalities. The attempt at a worldwide organisation soon disintegrated once it had been divided into several chunks, not because Alexander was no longer there, but because the centralised State was still in its infancy.

Roman organisation was not merely at the level of the State; it was truly national – not just because the citizen took part directly in war and the construction of a network of roadworks and fortifications in all of the occupied territories, but also because of agrarian colonisation, the allocation of land to soldiers, and thus the immediate implantation of Roman forms of production, economy and law. This was not a race to plunder the sought-after hidden treasures of legendary peoples, but rather the systematic extension of a given mode of productive organisation across an ever-expanding radius, crushing any armed resistance, but immediately accepting the conquered people’s collaboration in production.

Nonetheless, it is not easy to define the limits of the Roman nation, as they varied over time. It is even more difficult to trace its ethnographic profile. As everyone knows, from the racial point of view pre-historic Italy was not unified and could not possibly be so, as the peninsular was too open a crossroads between North and South, East and West, in the most densely populated settlements of all time. Even if we assume that the first Latins (leaving aside their mythical Trojan origins) constituted a single racial entity, they were nevertheless very different from their near neighbours: the Volsci, the Samnites, the Sabines, not to mention the mysterious Etruscans, Ligures etc.

The Roman citizen or civis romanus, with his rights and his proverbial national pride, soon extended beyond the original city (the Urbs) across all of Latium; as for the Italic people, they were organised in municipia unto which the centralist criterion of State organisation could not concede any autonomy, preferring after several centuries to confer the title of Roman citizen on any free men who lived there, along with all of the privileges and obligations this implied.

The nation as fact here achieved its most powerful expression ever in the ancient world and along with it, the greatest historical stability known up to the present day. We have thus travelled a long distance from ethnic communities based on blood-brotherhood. All of Rome’s free citizens, though divided into social classes, were united by a common economic system for the production and exchange of goods: from the great latifundian patrician, who possessed properties in the four corners of the Empire, to the small-holding peasant and the proletarian in the Urbs living, in difficult periods, on flour distributed by the State. They were likewise ruled by the same inflexible legal code, for which the State’s armed forces demanded respect without exception across the Empire’s immense territory.

The history of social struggles and civil wars within the walls of Rome itself are well known; but its vicissitudes did not diminish the solidity and the homogeneity of the superb edifice responsible for the administration of all the productive resources of the most distant countries, and which covered them with lasting monuments having the most diverse productive functions: roads, aqueducts, baths, markets, forums, theatres etc.

Nationality in decline

6. The decadence and fall of the Roman Empire brought an end to the period of history in which nationality and organisation into States represented the decisive factors directing the development of productive forces.

National solidarity, which does not exclude periods of violent class struggle between free men of varying social and economic conditions, had a clear economic basis: the development of the system of production common to all the citizens of the nation provided, at the expense of masses of slaves, a continuous supply of new resources that raised standards of living in general, such as the replacement of the simple pastoral economy by fixed arable agriculture, of extensive cultivation by horticulture with irrigation, of primitive semi-nomadism by the subdivision and commercialisation of the land as well as slaves and livestock. The economic and then urban economy of Rome also had as its starting point the primitive collectivist economy of the local gentes, which had to give way because it was no longer capable of sustaining populations that had grown rapidly thanks to the mild climate. Engels paints a quick but complete picture of its origins, showing that the first Roman laws were derived from the first gentile rules, and refuting the old theses of historians such as Mommsen (refer in this respect to the last chapter of Part 1, the refutation of a very recent author who denies that historical materialism can apply to this period).

The saleability of land and commercialisation of movable goods under Roman law represented the superstructure of force of a new productive economy, whose output was superior to that of tribal primitive community, and this fact explains the origin of the system; but other economic facts explain the political and historical events that marked its end. The growth of wealth created by trade across an immense area and the accumulation of slave labour created a deep fissure in the once solid “national front”. The small farmers who had fought for the fatherland and laboriously colonised the conquered lands saw themselves ever more expropriated and pauperised, while slaves that had been purchased with the rich landowners’ treasures (as well as herds of large and small livestock purchased under the same title) replaced them on their fertile meadows, plunging them into ruin. Maintaining the relationship between free men and slaves required a relatively low population density, which provided the slaves with the material means to live and reproduce, while allowing free men to experience the rich assortment of satisfactions of the golden age. But when the amount of land beyond the frontiers started to diminish, migrating and demographically rampant populations swelled the numbers of people aspiring to a better life, the degeneracy of farming methods confirmed itself and the inevitable crisis arrived. Agriculture regressed to the point of being able to feed neither animal nor slave, and as the disorganisation got worse the master took the initiative and freed his slaves, which only inflated the masses of miserable free men without work and without land.

The links between the regions in this mighty edifice began to loosen and it was no longer able to intervene when local shortages occurred. As demographic growth encountered famine, human groups were reduced to local, impoverished economic circles, tight circles that were no longer those of the ancient tribes: the profound changes that had occurred, the new relations between the instruments of production, goods and human needs, were not sufficient to modify the situation. The nation that had become an empire fragmented into small units lacking the connective tissue of the law, the magistracy, the armed forces, culture and proud traditions… The great and “natural” fundamental fact of nationalism and patriotism, which is claimed to be inherent in the famous “human nature”, is about to treat itself to a total historic eclipse lasting a few thousand years, to the utter confusion of the idealists.

“In earlier chapters we were standing at the cradle of ancient Greek and Roman civilization. Now we stand at its grave. Rome had driven the levelling plane of its world rule over all the countries of the Mediterranean basin, and that for centuries. Except when Greek offered resistance, all natural languages had been forced to yield to a debased Latin; there were no more national differences […] all had become Romans. Roman administration and Roman law had everywhere broken up the old kinship groups, and with them the last vestige of local and national independence. The half-baked culture of Rome provided no substitute; it expressed no nationality, only the lack of nationality […] But the strength was not there to fuse these elements into new nations”.

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

Organisation of the Germanic barbarians

7. The peoples who submerged the Roman Empire under waves of invasions also knew, in the beginning, gentile and matriarchal forms of organisation as well as the communist cultivation of the land. When they came into contact with Rome, they were transitioning from the middle to superior stages of barbarism, and they were beginning to transition from nomadism to a settled existence. Their military organisation began to give birth to a class of military chieftains who chose the king and who began to set up great properties, taking land away from the formerly free and equal members of the gens and the tribe, who had meanwhile become free peasants. In this way the State also started to appear among these people, and would slowly lay the foundations for new nationalities which, many centuries later, would lead to the renaissance of the nation in its modern form.

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

These peoples were already migrating at the time of Marius, who repelled the hordes of Cimbri and Teutones from the Italian peninsular, where they wanted to expand across the Po. They were largely present at the time of Caesar, who saw them appearing on the left bank of the Rhine. It’s only in Tacitus, writing 150 years later, that they are described as settled farmers. Evidently it was a complex process, tied mainly to the rapid growth of population, on the subject of which we totally lack original historical documentation: at the fall of the Empire they were, according to Engels, some six million in an area where there are today perhaps 150 million inhabitants.

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

This process was undoubtedly accelerated by the conquest of the now decadent Roman Empire, where the conquerors settled. Beyond importing their new organisation, the revolutionary task of these peoples thus consisted of destroying the Roman State, which by then was totally corrupt: as Engels says, they delivered Roman subjects from their parasitical State, whose economic and social foundations were collapsing, and in exchange they gained at least two thirds of the imperial territory.

Given the relatively small number of conquerors and their tradition of communist labour, the new organisation of agriculture in these lands left large areas undivided – not just forests and pastures, but also arable land, with German forms of law prevailing over Roman forms, or combining with them. This enabled the formation, among previously nomadic peoples, of a fixed territorial administration; and the birth, over the course of four or five centuries, of Germanic States, whose power extended over the former provinces of the Roman Empire and across Italy itself. The most remarkable of these was that of the Franks, who raised Europe’s bulwark against Moorish invasion and who, while giving way to the pressure of the Normans at the other extremity, allowed populations to continue to live on the territories where they had established themselves, even if this led to complex ethnic mix between Germans, Romans and, in the Frankish kingdom, aboriginal Celts. This recent jumble of ethnic peoples with heterogeneous traditions, languages and institutions meant that these Germanic States could not yet constitute nations; but they were indeed States by virtue of their solid frontiers and unified military forces.

“… however unproductive these four centuries appear, one great product they did leave: modern nationalities, the new forms and structures through which Western European humanity was to make history to come. The Germans had, in fact, given Europe new life, and therefore the break-up of the States in the Germanic period ended, not in subjugation by the Norsemen and Saracens, but in the further development of the system of benefices and protection into feudalism”.

Before we close this section by recalling the characteristics of medieval organisation, which practically excluded the “national” factor, we want to point out that the Marxist doctrine not only considers the organisation of the ancient barbarian and nomadic peoples into territorial States as a positive historic fact (a process the people of the Mediterranean peninsulas had passed through more than a millennium in advance); it also views the national nature of States positively, their coincidence with nationality, that’s to say with a community that not only rests, to some extent, on race, but also on the language, tradition and customs of all the inhabitants of a vast and stable geographical territory. Whereas the idealist historian sees in nationality a general fact, present for all time and everywhere that there is civilised life, we Marxists attribute to nationality historically determined cycles. We have already run through a first historic cycle: that of the great national democracies superimposed on the mass of slaves, but nevertheless dividing free men into social classes. The second cycle, which we will examine in Part 3, is that of the democracies of free men in which slaves have disappeared. In this second historic cycle, the national reality goes hand in hand with a new division into classes, which is specific to capitalism. The nation and its material influence will disappear at the same time as capitalism and bourgeois democracy, but not before: the formation of national States must actually be considered indispensable as this enables the advent of capitalism in different geographical areas.

Feudal society as a-national organisation

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

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

In the barbarian organisation, up until the appearance of slavery, the free member of the community worked the land, but land was not divided up into individual parcels, neither to define the work to be performed by each individual, nor for the purpose of defining the right of harvest and consumption of the products.

In the organisation of classical antiquity, the manual worker was essentially a slave, not only in agriculture but also in the production of manufactured goods, which was already developed and independent. It is therefore correct to say that the Greco-Roman world knew a certain type of industrialism and, in a sense, capitalism. However, rather than being composed of land and means of production, capital also embraced living people, just as today the capital of an agricultural enterprise embraces land, machines and working animals. This ancient capitalism did not have as its corollary generalised wage labour, because it was rare for free men to work for money.

But slaves, who represented the fundamental social labour power, were not evenly distributed as a resource (perhaps they were originally the common property of the groups of free men). This meant that free men were themselves divided into two classes: those citizens who owned slaves, and those civilians without slaves. Is it not said that the wise Socrates, in his misery as a philosopher, aspired to be able to buy at least one little slave ?

The citizen who does not own slaves cannot, for this reason, live off the product of other people’s labour, and must therefore work; not as a slave, of course, but as a free man, that’s to say without depending on a master – and this is related to the system of private land ownership. The free worker is a property-owning farmer and he does what he likes with his patch of land, which he exploits with the sweat of his own brow. Other free men who have neither wealth nor slaves are artisans or members of the liberal professions (which in some cases were open, even to slaves, at least as far as intellectual activities were concerned).

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

Under the regimes of classical antiquity, the small number of goods that were not distributed by lot and remained at the disposition of the State or local administration constituted, in contrast to allodial goods, State property, thepublic domain. The predominance of allodial title over the public domain required a medium of exchange in circulation, and therefore a general market open to all free citizens throughout the territory: this condition was met in full in ancient Greece and Rome. The type of production in classical antiquity therefore sees the first appearance of an internal national market (and even the beginnings of an international market) – in contrast to the immediate and closed circles of labour and consumption under barbarism. The territorial State is a national State not only when its power imposes itself on the territory through force of arms (which was already true of the Egyptians and the Assyrians, and will later be true for the Salian Franks and Burgundians etc) but when trade is possible in commodities and the products of labour right across the territory and even between distant points within the territory. At the level of the legal superstructure, this is expressed in the fact that citizens enjoy the same rights in all districts of the State. It’s only then that the State is a nation. From the perspective of historical materialism, the nation is thus a community organised across a territory where there is a unitary internal market. This historic outcome goes hand in hand to some extent with commonality of blood, but especially with commonality of language (you cannot do business without language!), customs and practices.

The classical economic environment gave rise, like modern capitalism, to a phenomenon of accumulation: one person has many slaves, the next has none; one person has lots of land, the other has hardly enough to break with his own hands. Concentration led to disaster and rendered slave labour, which replaced intensive parcelling out of land, uneconomical. It’s in this sense that Pliny wrote that latifundia Italiam perdidere (the landed estates destroyed Italy) and it was thus at the level of the superstructure of morals that the enslavement of man became infamous… The contemporary compilers of agrarian law have remained at this level in their understanding of technological and social development, and confuse slavery with the odious capitalist exploitation of agricultural labour. But let us return to the Middle Ages.

The whole mercantile network through which mobile wealth circulated in the empire collapsed along with the Roman property-owning economy, which had become technologically backward and unproductive. Needs of all kinds were less capable of being satisfied. But the barbarians arrived with their tradition of greater frugality; for them, after a brief interlude, during which they depleted the loot found in the cities that had by then sunk into decadence, the true wealth lay in the conquest of land. But it was too late; the social division of labour was already too far advanced to enable the land taken from the Romans, which consisted of small holdings or latifundia (landed estates), to be managed in common or even to be managed as a public domain of the new powers. A new type emerged, combining the allodia and the public domain. Part of the land would be enjoyed in common by the communities (common land rights, some of which have survived to the present day); part would be definitively divided up in the form of allodial rights (though quite precariously, with the influx of new conquerors); finally a third part would be redistributed periodically (even today, this system of redistributing land tenure survives, for example in the cadastral registers of the former Austrian provinces in Italy).

The Frankish peasants who had fallen upon this utterly desirable, fertile land and its favourable climate drew more benefit from it than was obtained by gangs of slaves. In this respect, they were part of a powerful rebirth of productive forces that arose from the coming together of all these idle arms and the rich land despised by the wealthy Romans, who had become like the mythical Croesus. But the entire trading network had been broken along with the Roman administrative network, with all its connections and transport systems, and they regressed to a type of local production with immediate consumption of goods.

This economy without trade characterised the Middle Ages. States possessed their own magistracies and territorial armies, but they did not establish a unitary territorial market, therefore they were not true nations.

If the ancient gens had already lost their social equality in the course of migrations and conquests, they should soon lose their freedom and autonomy of semi-communal, semi-allodial management of the land. The process of consolidation of landed property started again, to the profit of military chiefs, functionaries, royal courtiers and religious institutions.

The slaves of antiquity had been replaced by a new servile class that not only undertook manual labour on behalf of these new elites, and above all the extortion of free labourers. The working of the land in lots presumed social stability, and the centralised Roman State with its judges, agents and soldiers had created this stability, making it sacrosanct, but this had collapsed under the continuous invasions by new armed populaces, amplified by the struggles between chieftains and lords within the poorly centralised power structure.

The Frankish peasant needed security, the basic element of Roman law, today renewed and exalted as a reference model, more than he needed freedom. In ceding his liberty, he found security, that’s to say opportunities to cultivate the land for himself rather than for predators who would expropriate his harvest in its entirety, along with any stockpiles and implements.

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

The bases of modern revolution

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

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

The destruction of generalised trade and national and imperial markets condemned this Europe, which the ancients had made fertile and colonised, and which was now settled by peoples who began to climb the ladder of technical and cultural development inherent in the organisation of a countryside occupied by stable populations, to a very long period of molecular economic life, scattered in minuscule hamlets; the class that formed the immense majority of the population, serfs attached to the land, was denied any horizons.

But, as Fourier noticed with his genial intuition, while the slave of antiquity had never experienced any really victorious struggles for liberation, the bases were now established for a distant but formidable revolutionary uprising of the peoples of Europe against the dominant classes and institutions of the feudal age.

While the modern urban proletariat was only just making its entrance onto the stage of history, the national demand was the most powerful catalyst of this immense revolution, capable of liberating the modern citizen from the chains of serfdom and raising him up to the level of citizen of antiquity. While it is true that the modern bourgeois revolution quite literally uses and abuses memories of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome’s glories, (as Baudelaire remarked, “qui nous délivrera des Grecs et des Romains ?”) it is also certain that this was a revolutionary ferment of gigantic force.

The national revolution is not our revolution; the national demand is not our demand, and for mankind, it does not represent the conquest of a permanent and irreversible advantage. But Marxism considers it with interest, and indeed with admiration and passion; when the course of history threatens it, Marxism is ready to enter into this struggle at the decisive time and place.

What we must study is the degree of development in historic cycles, identifying the correct times and places. If a thousand years have lapsed between the development of the primitive peoples on the Mediterranean and those of continental Europe, it is perfectly possible that the modern Western cycle will have closed whilst that of people of other races, in another cycle and another continent will remain open to revolutionary potential for a long time to come.

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