Marxism, Zionism and the National Question
Three Time Periods (1/3)
Lenin describes the way a language of the majority nation is adopted by minority nations within a state. This shows how the reactionary nationalist interpretation of Lenin's earlier comments are clearly preposterous, i.e. the interpretation that every nation with its own language should have its own state.
Lenin quotes from the liberal Russkaye Slovo (No. 198), which reports on how hostility to Russian amongst the minority was a result of trying to force it on them.
““There is no reason to worry about the fate of the Russian language. It will itself win recognition throughout Russia,” says the newspaper. This is perfectly true, because the requirements of economic exchange will always compel the nationalities living in one state (as long as they wish to live together) to study the language of the majority. The more democratic the political system in Russia becomes, the more powerfully, rapidly and extensively capitalism will develop, the more urgently will the requirements of economic exchange impel various nationalities to study the language most convenient for general commercial relations.”
The liberals contradicted themselves, Lenin says, by going on to say that Russia should have one official language.
“Logic turned inside out! Tiny Switzerland has not lost anything, but has gained from having not one single official language, but three—German, French and Italian. In Switzerland 70 per cent of the population are Germans (in Russia 43 per cent are Great Russians), 22 per cent French (in Russia 17 per cent are Ukrainians) and 7 per cent Italians (in Russia 6 per cent are Poles and 4.5 per cent Byelorussians). If Italians in Switzerland often speak French in their common parliament they do not do so because they are menaced by some savage police law (there are none such in Switzerland), but because the civilised citizens of a democratic state themselves prefer a language that is understood by a majority. The French language does not instil hatred in Italians because it is the language of a free civilised nation, a language that is not imposed by disgusting police measures.”
(ibid)
So, it is quite clear that Lenin is not arguing that each nation, each people with its own language, should have their own nation state, as the ideal form of state for capital. How are these apparent contradictions to be reconciled? Precisely on the basis of what Lenin said in setting out those ideas as against Rosa Luxemburg, which is that it is necessary to consider the national question concretely, which means historically, from the perspective of the initial development of capitalism, on the basis of generalised commodity production and exchange; the period of the establishment of capitalism, and the existence of capitalist nation states; and finally, in conditions of imperialism, in which the nation state itself becomes an impediment to the further development of capital.
Its quite true that, in the first stage, those nations that are large, more densely populated, and so on, have advantages in establishing large markets, in towns, that makes capitalist production possible. That creates the best conditions for the more rapid development of capitalism, and the capitalist nation state. But, capitalism, for the reasons Marx sets out, in The Communist Manifesto, spreads across the globe, regardless, including to places where these conditions do not exist. Once capitalism exists, these factors of a single national language and culture, and so on, diminish in their importance. Capital requires a level playing field, but that is determined more and more in terms of a common set of laws, currency, fiscal regime, and so on. For the reasons Lenin describes, capitalism itself brings about a common commercial language, even if no single official language is imposed.
Finally, for exactly the same reasons that before capital could become established it required large single national markets, by even the end of the 19th century, that same requirement meant that any, other than the largest, nations were an inadequate basis for the continued growth of capital. The US was forced to consolidate its states, and assert the dominance of the federal state over the individual states, via the Civil War; Europe experienced repeated attempts to create a single European state, from the Napoleonic Wars to WWI and II, as its dominating powers, France and Germany, sought to challenge the hegemony of Britain, and the rising power of the US.
Ultimately, what had not been achieved by war, was achieved by peaceful negotiation, in the creation of the EEC and then EU. And that development of multinational states, itself a reflection of the development of huge multinational corporations, has been copied across the globe – MERCOSUR, ASEAN, APEC, NAFTA, ACFTA – even Stalinism attempted something similar with COMECON. Indeed, in the post-war period, an attempt to create some global level playing field and social-democratic planning and regulation of these different super-imperialisms was established in the form of global para state bodies, such as GATT (WTO), IMF, World Bank and so on.
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