Marxism, Zionism and the National Question
The Abstract Right of Nations To Self-Determination (4/4)
To summarise, then, for capital to develop, a large market, for at least some industrial commodities, must exist, so that it justifies production on a larger scale. Without this larger scale production, capitalist production cannot undercut independent handicraft production. Capitalism itself, as a mode of production, cannot become established, and become dominant, without the development of a large single market, for all commodities, in which there are common laws, currency, tariffs, taxes and so on, and this means the formation of a nation state, as the minimum size required for such development.
In Capital I, Marx, in discussing the development of the Factory Acts, even in the 19th century, makes this point that, in different localities, where local capitalists also comprised the magistrates, they would interpret the laws so as to benefit themselves. Eventually, the capitalists had to recognise that this situation could not continue, because it undermines the foundations of a single market with common rules.
“Some of the masters themselves murmured:
“On account of the contradictory decisions of the magistrates, a condition of things altogether abnormal and anarchical obtains. One law holds in Yorkshire, another in Lancashire, one law in one parish of Lancashire, another in its immediate neighbourhood. The manufacturer in large towns could evade the law, the manufacturer in country districts could not find the people necessary for the relay system, still less for the shifting of hands from one factory to another,” &c.
And the first birthright of capital is equal exploitation of labour-power by all capitalists.”
Its also why petty-bourgeois policies such as the introduction of Enterprise Zones, or Free Ports always collapse. The basic requirement of the capitalists, Marx notes, and the same refrain is made today, in relation to the EU, is the existence of a level playing field. But, after 1860, the development of capital on a huge scale means that this level playing field, based upon minimum conditions for workers, enforced by the capitalist state, itself favours the interests of this large-scale capital, as against the small capitalists.
“However, the principle had triumphed with its victory in those great branches of industry which form the most characteristic creation of the modern mode of production. Their wonderful development from 1853 to 1860, hand-in-hand with the physical and moral regeneration of the factory workers, struck the most purblind. The masters from whom the legal limitation and regulation had been wrung step by step after a civil war of half a century, themselves referred ostentatiously to the contrast with the branches of exploitation still “free.” The Pharisees of “Political Economy” now proclaimed the discernment of the necessity of a legally fixed working-day as a characteristic new discovery of their “science.””
(ibid)
It became, another means of enhancing the concentration and centralisation of capital. As Engels put it,
“The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites.”
The nation state, therefore, arises as a direct consequence of this requirement to organise capitalist production on a large scale, within a single market, in which these common rules and standards are applied. To say, therefore, that every nation has a right to create its own nation state, to exercise self-determination, is simply to express this right as nothing more than an abstract right, in pretty much the same way as we might express the abstract right to free speech, and so on, or other bourgeois rights and freedoms. We can say that these rights exist, even that they are consistent with the interests of the bourgeoisie – certainly in its struggle against feudal absolutism – but the declaration of the existence of these rights is, essentially, nothing more than Kantian moralism. They are rights that remain purely abstract in nature, unless they can be enforced. The truth is always concrete, and whether these abstract rights can be enforced, in any particular case, is constrained by material conditions.
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