Marxism, Zionism and the National Question
The Truth Is Always Concrete (2/3)
Marx and Engels had believed that the small Slavic nations would not be able to establish their own nation states, but that, for example, did happen in the case of Czechoslovakia, as a result of the First World War, and the settlement arising from it. It would have been equally ludicrous to have said, Marx and Engels did not believe these small nations could form their own nation state, and so the existence of these states is unnatural. To turn the clock backwards would have been reactionary.
A similar situation exists in relation to Trotsky's argument in relation to the USSR's invasion, occupation and social transformation in Poland, in 1939 – The USSR In War. Marxists would not have proposed such a course of action, as a means of bringing about such a transformation, for the reasons Engels sets out above, although as both he and Marx, and Lenin describe, this does not at all preclude the idea of a revolutionary war, by workers' states. However, the question is not whether such a course of action was advisable or one that Marxists would pursue, but what should be the position of Marxists given the reality created by it already having occurred. Marxists, would not have called for WWI, or a United States of Europe created on that basis, but it having created a united Europe, we would not argue for it to be broken up. Marxists do not argue for capitalist monopolies to be created, but if they are, we do not argue for them to be broken up, and the situation restored to that before their creation. Nor was there any reason why Marxists would call for the situation in Poland to be restored to that prior to the Stalinist invasion, and the transformation of its economy, by the uprooting of the social base of landlordism, and capitalism.
“Our general appraisal of the Kremlin and Comintern does not, however, alter the particular fact that the statification of property in the occupied territories is in itself a progressive measure. We must recognize this openly. Were Hitler on the morrow to throw his armies against the East, to restore “law and order” in Eastern Poland, the advanced workers would defend against Hitler these new property forms established by the Bonapartist Soviet bureaucracy.”
The analysis, in each case, must be concrete, and historically determined. What was progressive at one point, becomes reactionary at another. What may have been impossible to achieve at one point, becomes achieved at another, precisely because of changed material conditions, such as the consequences of a war. If the consequences lead to a progressive outcome, then it is no point of a Marxist programme to argue for the situation to be reversed, simply because they did not conform to some preconceived schema of how historical development should proceed. And, even if the consequence is not progressive, Marxists cannot argue for a reversal where to do so would lead to reactionary consequences. The question of a Jewish nation state is a case in point.
The nation state that had been a progressive development as capitalism broke out of the shell of feudalism, even by the end of the 19th century, had become a fetter.
“Almost a hundred years ago when the national state still represented a relatively progressive factor, the Communist Manifesto proclaimed that the proletarians have no fatherland. Their only goal is the creation of the toilers’ fatherland embracing the whole world. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois state with its armies and tariff walls became the worst brake on the development of productive forces, which demand a much more extensive arena. A socialist who comes out today for the defence of the “fatherland” is playing the same reactionary role as the peasants of the Vendee, who rushed to the defence of the feudal regime, that is, of their own chains.
In recent years and even months, the world has observed with astonishment how easily states vanish from the map of Europe: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium . . . . The political map has been reshaped with equal speed in no other epoch save that of the Napoleonic wars. At that time it was a question of outlived feudal states which had to give way before the bourgeois national state. Today it is a question of outlived bourgeois states which must give way before the socialist federation of the peoples. The chain breaks as always at its weakest link. The struggle of the imperialist bandits leaves as little room for independent small states as does the vicious competition of trusts and cartels for small independent manufacturers and merchants.”
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