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New publication Fatherland or Mother Earth? by Michael Löwy The link between national and social emancipation has been one of the IIRE Notebooks for Study and Research's concerns from our inception. Over the years different titles have addressed Western domination in China and Latin America, Catalan and Basque movements, and the failure of the multi-national experiment in Yugoslavia. Michael Löwy is a prolific writer, and director of research in sociology for France's National Centre for Scientific Research. He has been one of the IIRE's closest collaborators. He has written for us on Marxism and Liberation Theology, edited our anthology on Populism in Latin America, and allowed us to publish a French version of his book The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development. Michael has been writing extensively on 'the national question' for over twenty years. But not for us. We now have the good fortune to publish in English the most complete work he has ever devoted to this subject. Fatherland or Mother Earth? is also being published in French, German, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish. It brings together years of reflection on various Marxist thinkers. It integrates such recent developments as economic globalisation; the formation or reinforcement of supranational economic units like the European Union,
NAFTA and MERCOSUR; the wave of national conflicts in the former Soviet bloc; and outbreaks of ethnic violence in many parts of the Third World. This book pleads for a new and original synthesis (new even for Löwy himself) between Lenin's programme of national self-determination and Otto Bauer's programme of national-cultural autonomy. Excerpt from the author's Introduction: One of the most surprising aspects of this fin-de-siècle is the fantastic rise of nationalism, under various guises, both in the 'North' and the 'South'. Since this coincided, historically, with the demise of so-called 'really existing socialism', it was easy to jump to the conclusion that internationalism and socialism are 'dead' and that Marxism, unable to cope with the national movements, has become obsolete. In fact this is not a new argument. It has been frequently said, by various sorts of commentators, that the Marxist tradition has ignored the national question (a so-called 'black hole' in the theory) or that national movements cannot be explained from a Marxist viewIt cannot be denied that Marxists have often underestimated the importance of national problems. But it is also true that one can find, in the Marxist literature some very significant and rich contributions. As well, of course, as lacunae, contradictions, mistakes and hasty The essays collected in this volume are of two kinds: comments on important aspects of Marxist theory in relation to the national question; and an attempt to analyse, from a Marxist perspective, some contemporary forms of nationalism and internationalism. 34 International Viewpoint #304
Fatherland or Mother Earth? has three central contentions: • Internationalism is the core of the Marxian socialist tradition and it is more relevant now than ever. • The distinction between 'oppressor' and 'oppressed' nations and the idea of national/cultural autonomy, far from being contradictory, are complementary tools for understanding and solving national conflicts. • Nationalism is on the rise everywhere, there are also signs of the emergence of a new internationalism. The first essay, 'Marx and Engels cosmopolites', deals with the philosophical background to Marxian internationalism, as the expression of a revolutionary humanist viewpoint. It seemed important to begin with a piece discussing the meaning of internationalism, because this is the strategic and methodological starting point for the Marxist approach. In a world confronted with capitalist globalisation, the Marxian revolutionary kind of cosmopolitanism seems to be an adequate The second article examines some of the shortcomings of Marx and Engels' writings on the national question, while rejecting the view (presented by the historian Ephraim Nimni) that their conception is basically evolutionist and Eurocentric. I wrote this short polemical piece with my friend Enzo Traverso, a Marxist historian who has published several remarkable pieces on the national question (including The Marxists and the Jewish Question). We argue that Marx and Engels' incomplete theory of nationalities could either be developed in a dogmatic, Eurocentric and evolutionist way (as Stalin did) or in an emancipatory and dialectical way (as Lenin, Bauer and others did). The key issue in the third essay is Lenin's classical distinc tion between oppressor and oppressed nations - still a relevant concept, even if one takes into account the various cases of rapid transformation of oppressed into oppressor - and his conception of the right to selfThe Leninist tradition (including myself has been rather harsh with the Austro-Marxist proposal for cultural autonomy. I feel that a more balanced assessment of Otto Bauer is needed, which I try to sketch in the next essay. As Georges Haupt observed, Bauer's seminal book on the national question 'was a model of concrete research and of theoretical generalisation... and remains the major reference work, indispensable for any historical and theoretical study of the national question'. Moreover, Bauer remained strongly committed to socialist internationalism. In 1924 he wrote that 'the duty of the International can and should be, not to abolish national particularities, but to promote international unity in national diversity'. Lenin himself, although quite critical of some of Bauer's political propositions, insisted that 'Otto Bauer... argues quite correctly on a large number of most important questions'. Like Bauer's conviction that only the abolition of capitalism and the introduction of socialism will make it possible to abolish national oppression. One can understand Lenin's strong reservations about Bauer's (and the Jewish Bund's) programme for separate national schools, which he compares to the system of school segregation in the Southern US. However, Lenin's general rejection of Bauer's perspective of national/cultural autonomy is questionable. As Enzo Traverso obser-
ved in his book on The Marxists and the Jewish Question, by confronting minority populations with a choice between assimilation and self-determination, the Bolshevik policy could not give a satisfactory answer to the problems of extra-territorial nations, which reject assimilation but did not dispose of the objective conditions necessary for In fact, the Bolshevik government, at least during the self-determination. first years of Soviet power, implemented, in relation to the Jewish and other national minorities, a policy very much inspired by the ideas of national/cultural autonomy proposed by Bauer and by the Bund: for instance, in developing Yiddish schools, theatres, publishing In the light of historical experience, including the recent houses, libraries, etc. catastrophic decomposition of multi-national states like the USSR and Yugoslavia, territorial self-determination and national/ cultural autonomy should be considered complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Towards a New Internationalism The last chapters relate to the contemporary rise of nationalism and possibilities for the rise of a new internationalism. These essays are an attempt to use essential Marxist categories to understand current developments related to the national question in Europe and the world, and to propose socialist, democratic and emancipatory alternatives to national exclusivism, chauvinism and xenophobia. Rereading Chapter 5, first written in 1989, I have to acknowledge that I did not foresee the explosive wave
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of internal national conflicts among the various commuemancipatory dimension of movements against national nities of the ex-socialist bloc. I mentioned only the oppression in the post-capitalist societies, neglecting the possibility that they could also become regressive, discriminatory against their own minorities, and expansionist. Chapter 6, written a few years later, strikes a better All these essays proclaim their hope for the rise of a new internationalism. This does not imply naive optimism or short-term illusions. It means rather that one puts a wager on the possibility of a different future, where universal human solidarity will again become a powerful force in the political struggle. Since I wrote these essays an important event illustrated the dialectics between national emancipation and internationalism. When it appeared in the insurrection of January 1994, the EZLN-Zapatista Army of National autonomy for indigenous communities and of Mexican Liberation-raised the demand of national/cultural national sovereignty against the US-imposed free-trade agreement. But in 1996 the Zapatistas, for the first time in Latin America, called for an internationalist meeting, not on a continental or Third-World level, but on a truly planetary scale. The 'Intergalactic' gathering in Chiapas in July 1996 was attended by intellectuals, leftist activists, trade unionists, indigenous, peasant, feminist and other social activists from Canada to Brazil, from Japan to Italy, and from France to South Africa. There is You can buy Fatherland or Mother Earth wherever Pluto books are room for hope... distributed. 1998, IN 0 7453 13434)
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No. 14 The Gulf War and the New World Order. André
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Ernest Mandel (64pp. f2, $3, 15 FF)
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$8.75) Cheques for back issues should be payable to Pierre
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35
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Synthesis/Regeneration #17
Inprecor #428
September, 1998
According to editor Don Fitz, issue brings together electoral work of five-page report on Senegal's dynamic
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PADS party - a regroupment of socialist to resist the expanding powers of multiand panafricanist currents. Maxime national corporations. There is a strong
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of sewage sludge • Al Lewis Runs for vol.2 of the works of Roman Rosdolsky.
Governor of New York: a candidate responsive to the grassroots • Paul Cienfuegos describes a ballot initiative on dismantling corporate rule in Arcata, the first US city with a Green majority
October 1998
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