New Publication: Factors of Race & Nation in Marxist Theory

We are pleased to announce the publication of a classic text of the Italian Left, Factors of Race & Nation in Marxist Theory, available for the first time in an English translation from the original Italian document, which was published in 1953.

Factors draws on the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin as well as the fundamental texts of the Left in the International from the years 1920 to 1926 to summarise the significance of race and nation in the materialist conception of history, and to demonstrate how this differs from the bourgeois idealism of those who assert that the arrival of the nation-state puts an end to social struggle – idealism that was warmly embraced by the Stalinist counter-revolution. In particular, the text illustrates how, throughout history, language, culture and the propagation of the species have all been conditioned by social relations and continue to be used as instruments of class domination.

Social classes are not eternal. The division of society into classes only appeared after tribal and clan society had reached a certain level of organisation, and one day these divisions will be extinguished once and for all. It is therefore pure stupidity to say that because Marxism is the theory of the modern class struggle between capitalists and workers, and communism is the movement that directs the struggle of the proletariat, we deny that both the social forces of other classes (the peasantry, for example), and racial and national orientations and pressures have any historical impact whatsoever, and therefore we don’t consider any of these factors when defining our action. However, our action must always correspond to the needs of the proletariat in a given historical epoch and in a given country or region.

Factors was written in the aftermath of the redrawing of national boundaries and the displacement of populations resulting from the Second World War, and in the context of our current’s ideological battle against Stalinism, which was twisting the materialist approach to nationality and language for opportunist purposes, notably in the contemporary disputes between Belgrade and Rome over the possession of Trieste: “the crudest exponents of linguistic, historical and ethnic sophistry are not the authentic bourgeois, but the pseudo-Marxists Tito and Togliatti.”

Factors of Race & Nation in Marxist Theory is already available on our party’s website and we plan to publish it as an e-book and in print in the near future.