Marxism, Zionism and the National Question
The Abstract Right of Nations To Self-Determination (3/4)
Rosdolsky, in his analysis of Marx and Engels writings on The Non-Historical Peoples, cites two letters from Engels late in his life.
““That my letter does not convert you is quite understandable, since you already had certain sympathies for the ‘oppressed’ South Slavs. We all, indeed, had originally carried over such sympathies for all ‘oppressed’ nationalities, in as much as we first passed through stages of liberalism or radicalism. And I know how much time and study it has cost me to get rid of them, but I ultimately got rid of them once and for all.”
In this letter Engels also writes,
“Again, I do not propose to go into the question of how the smaller Slav nations have come to look to the Tsar as their only liberator. Let it suffice that they do so; we cannot alter the fact and it will rest at that until Tsarism has been smashed; if there’s a war, all these interesting little nations will be on the side of Tsarism, the enemy of all bourgeois progress in the West. So long as this remains the case, I can take no interest in their immediate liberation here and now; they are as much our declared enemies as their ally and patron, the Tsar.
We must co-operate in the work of setting the West European proletariat free and subordinate everything else to that goal. No matter how interesting the Balkan Slavs, etc., might be, the moment their desire for liberation clashes with the interests of the proletariat they can go hang for all I care. The Alsatians, too, are oppressed, and I shall be glad when we are once more quit of them. But if, on what is patently the very eve of a revolution, they were to try and provoke a war between France and Germany, once more goading on those two countries and thereby postponing the revolution, I should tell them: Hold hard! Surely you can have as much patience as the European proletariat. When they have liberated themselves, you will automatically be free; but till then, we shan’t allow you to put a spoke in the wheel of the militant proletariat. The same applies to the Slavs. The victory of the proletariat will liberate them in reality and of necessity and not, like the Tsar, apparently and temporarily. And that’s why they, who have hitherto not only failed to contribute anything to Europe and European progress, but have actually retarded it, should have at least as much patience as our proletarians. To stir up a general war for the sake of a few Herzegovinians, which would cost a thousand times more lives than there are inhabitants in Herzegovina, isn’t my idea of proletarian politics.”
This was also true in relation to the Falklands War. The Falkland islanders had a “right” to self-determination, and Galtieri's invasion was reactionary on a number of counts, not least being motivated by his own desire to use nationalism to distract from a rising opposition to his rule in Argentina. However, Marxists could not simply rest upon the abstract right of Falkland islanders to self-determination, when an insistence on implementing that right, in the face of Galtieri's invasion, meant war between Britain and Argentina and a loss of life, much greater than the number of Islanders themselves.
Rosdolsky, also cites this further Letter from Engels, to Kautsky, in which he is even more explicit.
““Now you could ask me whether I have, then, no sympathy at all for the small Slavic peoples and ruins of peoples who are split up from one another by the three wedges driven into Slavdom: the German, Magyar and Turkish wedges. In fact, I have damned little. The Czech-Slovak cry of distress – ‘Boze!….Ach nikdo neni na zemi, kdoby Slavum spravedlivost cinil?’ (O God, is there no one left on earth who will do the Slavs justice?) – is answered in Petersburg, and the entire Czech national movement is aimed at getting the Tsar (to do them justice) spravedlivost ciniti. It is the same with the others too: the Serbs, Bulgarians, Slovenes, and Galician Ruthenians (Ukrainians AB) [at least in part]. And this is a goal we cannot champion. Only after the collapse of Tsardom, when the national aspirations of these dwarf-peoples cease to be mixed up with pan-slavic tendencies to world domination, only then can we allow them to be free; and I am sure that six months of independence will suffice to induce most of the Austro-Hungarian Slavs to implore to be taken back once more. But in no case will one concede to these little peoples the right that they have ascribed to themselves in Serbia, Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia: to hinder the extension of the European railway network to Constantinople.”
In other words, these small nations continually look to larger states to come to their assistance, and thereby, become pawns of them. They align with the ruling classes of these larger states, and their interests and not with the workers. In Marx's day the clear example was with the Slavic peoples and their attempts to gain the support of Tsarism. An example, today is all those small groups that seek to obtain "liberal intervention" to put them in power, where their own forces would never allow it. The example of Libya was a case in point. Another example is that of the Kurds. The Kurds are a nation spread across Northern Syria, Northern Iraq, Southern Turkey, and Iran. Each of these states denies the Kurds self-determination. In recent years, when the US intervened in Iraq and Syria, the Kurds looked to US imperialism to protect them against Turkey, as well as from Baghdad and Damascus. When US imperialism as it is prone to do, threw the Kurds to the wolves, the Kurds looked to Russia, to Syria and to Iran, to protect them from Turkey. It is evidence of the old maxim that if you are not a player, you are a piece on the chess board.
Similar analysis can be put forward in relation to the Jews and the establishment of the Israeli state, as well as in relation to the Palestinians and their search after a Palestinian state.
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