The Right of Nations to Self-Determination
8. Karl Marx the Utopian and Rosa Luxemburg the Practical
Section summary
Answering Luxemburg’s jibe about Irish independence, Lenin traces Marx’s changing view of Ireland. Marx and Engels were critical of national movements, yet backed Poland and, from 1867, the separation of Ireland, because English reaction rested on Ireland’s subjugation and the English workers could not free themselves while it lasted. Marx’s Irish policy is the model for how socialists of an oppressing nation must treat the national movements of the oppressed.
Declaring the independence of Poland a “utopia”, and repeating this ad nauseam, Rosa Luxemburg exclaims ironically: why not put forward the demand for the independence of Ireland?
Evidently the “practical” Rosa Luxemburg does not know what K. Marx’s attitude was to the question of the independence of Ireland. It is worth dwelling on this, in order to show an analysis of a concrete demand for national independence from a genuinely Marxist, and not an opportunist, standpoint.
Marx was in the habit of “sounding the teeth”, as he put it, of the socialists he knew, testing their understanding and convictions. Having made the acquaintance of Lopatin, Marx writes to Engels on 5 July 1870 a highly flattering opinion of the young Russian socialist, but adds:
“… Weak point: Poland. On this point Lopatin speaks exactly like an Englishman, say an English Chartist of the old school, about Ireland.”
Marx questions a socialist belonging to an oppressing nation about his attitude to an oppressed nation, and at once reveals a defect common to the socialists of the dominant nations (English and Russian): a failure to understand their socialist duties towards oppressed nations, a rehashing of prejudices taken over from the “great-power” bourgeoisie.
Before passing on to Marx’s positive statements about Ireland, it must be noted that Marx and Engels took a strictly critical attitude to the national question in general, assessing its historically conditional importance. Thus Engels wrote to Marx on 23 May 1851 that the study of history was leading him to pessimistic conclusions about Poland, that the importance of Poland was temporary, lasting only until the agrarian revolution in Russia. The role of the Poles in history had been one of “brave follies”. “Not for a moment can it be supposed that Poland, even against Russia alone, successfully represents progress or has any historical importance.” Russia contains more elements of civilisation, education, industry and bourgeoisie than “gentry-ridden, sleepy Poland”. “What are Warsaw and Cracow compared with Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa!” Engels has no faith in the success of the risings of the Polish nobles.
But all these thoughts, with so much that is brilliantly far-sighted in them, did not in the least prevent Engels and Marx, twelve years later, when Russia was still asleep and Poland was seething, from treating the Polish movement with the deepest and warmest sympathy.
In 1864, while drawing up the Address of the International, Marx writes to Engels (4 November 1864) that he has to fight Mazzini’s nationalism. “In so far as international politics come into the Address, I speak of countries, not of nationalities, and denounce Russia, not the minor states,” Marx writes. For Marx the subordinate importance of the national question compared with the “labour question” is beyond doubt. But his theory is as far from ignoring national movements as heaven is from earth.
Then comes 1866. Marx writes to Engels about the “Proudhonist clique” in Paris, which “declares nationalities to be nonsense and attacks Bismarck and Garibaldi. As polemics against chauvinism their tactics are useful and explicable. But when the believers in Proudhon (my good friends here, Lafargue and Longuet, are among them) think that all Europe can and should sit quietly on its backside until the gentlemen in France abolish poverty and ignorance … they are ridiculous” (letter of 7 June 1866).
“Yesterday,” Marx writes on 20 June 1866, “there was a discussion in the Council of the International on the present war… The discussion turned, as was to be expected, on the question of ‘nationalities’ and our attitude to it… The representatives of ‘Young France’ (non-workers) came out with the view that every nationality and the nation itself are antiquated prejudices. Proudhonised Stirnerism… The whole world must wait until the French are ripe for making a social revolution… The English laughed very much when I began my speech by saying that our friend Lafargue and others, who had done away with nationalities, were addressing us in French, that is, in a language incomprehensible to nine-tenths of the meeting. I went on to hint that by the negation of nationalities he seemed, quite unconsciously, to understand their absorption by the model French nation.”
The conclusion from all these critical remarks of Marx’s is clear: the working class is the last to make a fetish of the national question, since the development of capitalism does not necessarily awaken all nations to independent life. But once mass national movements have arisen, to brush them aside, to refuse to support what is progressive in them, means in fact yielding to nationalist prejudices, namely, recognising “one’s own” nation as the “model nation” (or, we would add, as a nation possessing the exclusive privilege of forming a state).
Marx’s position on this question is most clearly expressed in the following extracts from his letters:
“I have tried by every means to provoke this demonstration of the English workers in favour of Fenianism… I used to think the separation of Ireland from England impossible. Now I think it inevitable, although after the separation there may come federation.” So Marx wrote in a letter to Engels of 2 November 1867.
“What shall we advise the English workers? In my opinion they must make the Repeal of the Union” (of Ireland with England, that is, the separation of Ireland from England) “an article of their programme; in short, the demand of 1783, only democratised and adapted to the conditions of the time. This is the only legal form of Irish emancipation and therefore the only one admissible into the programme of an English party. Experience must show later whether a mere personal union can continue to exist between the two countries…
Attaching enormous importance to the Irish question, Marx gave lectures of an hour and a half on the subject to the German Workers’ Society (letter of 17 December 1867).
Engels notes in a letter of 20 November 1868 “the hatred of the Irish among the English workers”, and almost a year later (24 October 1869), returning to the subject, he writes:
“From Ireland to Russia il n’y a qu’un pas (there is but one step)… Irish history shows what a misfortune it is for a nation to have subjugated another nation. All the abominations of the English have their origin in the Irish Pale. I have still to work through the Cromwellian period, but this much seems certain to me, that things would have taken another turn in England, too, but for the necessity of military rule in Ireland and the creation of a new aristocracy there.”
“In Posen the Polish workers have brought a strike to a victorious end with the help of their colleagues in Berlin. This struggle against ‘Monsieur le Capital’, even in its lowest form, the strike, will do away with national prejudices more seriously than the declamations about peace in the mouths of the bourgeois gentlemen.”
The policy on the Irish question that Marx pursued in the International can be seen from the following:
On 18 November 1869 Marx writes to Engels that he spoke for an hour and a quarter in the Council of the International on the attitude of the British Ministry to the Irish amnesty, and proposed the following resolution:
that in his reply to the Irish demands for the release of the Irish patriots Mr. Gladstone deliberately insults the Irish nation;
that he clogs political amnesty with conditions alike degrading to the victims of misgovernment and to the people they belong to;
that Gladstone, having, in spite of his responsible position, publicly and enthusiastically cheered on the American slaveholders’ rebellion, now steps in to preach to the Irish people the doctrine of passive obedience;
that his whole policy with regard to the Irish amnesty is the true and genuine offspring of that “policy of conquest” by the fiery denunciation of which Mr. Gladstone ousted his Tory rivals from office;
that the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association express their admiration of the spirited, firm and high-souled manner in which the Irish people carry on their amnesty movement;
that this resolution be communicated to all branches of, and working men’s bodies connected with, the International Working Men’s Association in Europe and America.”
On 10 December 1869 Marx writes that his report on the Irish question to the Council of the International will be framed as follows:
“… Quite apart from all ‘international’ and ‘humane’ phrases about ‘justice for Ireland’, which are taken for granted in the Council of the International, it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland. And this is my most complete conviction, and for reasons which in part I cannot tell the English workers themselves. For a long time I believed that it was possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy. I always took this point of view in the New York Tribune” (an American newspaper to which Marx long contributed). “Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland… English reaction in England has its roots in the subjugation of Ireland” (Marx’s italics).
The “utopian” Marx is so “unpractical” that he stands for the separation of Ireland, which half a century later has still not been achieved.
At first Marx thought that Ireland would be liberated not by the national movement of the oppressed nation but by the working-class movement within the oppressing nation. Marx makes no absolute of national movements, knowing that only the victory of the working class can bring about the complete liberation of all nationalities. It is impossible to foresee in advance all the possible relations between the bourgeois liberation movements of oppressed nations and the proletarian liberation movement within the oppressing nation (this is precisely the problem that makes the national question in present-day Russia so difficult).
But circumstances so turned out that the English working class fell for a fairly long time under the influence of the liberals, became their tail, and beheaded itself by a liberal labour policy. The bourgeois liberation movement in Ireland grew stronger and assumed revolutionary forms. Marx reconsiders his view and corrects it. “What a misfortune it is for a nation to have subjugated another.” The working class in England cannot free itself until Ireland is freed from the English yoke. Reaction in England is strengthened and fed by the enslavement of Ireland (just as reaction in Russia is fed by its enslavement of a number of nations!).
And Marx, carrying through the International a resolution of sympathy with the “Irish nation”, the “Irish people” (the clever L. Vl. would probably have torn poor Marx to pieces for forgetting the class struggle!), advocates the separation of Ireland from England, “although after the separation there may come federation”.
What are the theoretical premises of this conclusion of Marx’s? In England the bourgeois revolution had long since been completed. But in Ireland it had not been completed; it is only now, half a century later, being completed by the reforms of the English liberals. If capitalism in England had been overthrown as quickly as Marx at first expected, there would have been no room for a bourgeois-democratic, nation-wide movement in Ireland. But once it had arisen, Marx advises the English workers to support it, to give it a revolutionary impetus and carry it through to the end in the interests of their own freedom.
The economic ties between Ireland and England in the sixties of the last century were, of course, even closer than the ties between Russia and Poland, Ukraine and so on. The “unpracticality” and “impracticability” of the separation of Ireland (if only owing to geographical conditions and England’s immense colonial power) were obvious. While an opponent of federalism in principle, Marx in this case allows even federation, so long as the emancipation of Ireland is achieved not in a reformist but in a revolutionary way, by a movement of the masses of the people in Ireland supported by the working class of England. There can be no doubt whatever that only such a solution of the historical problem would have been most favourable to the interests of the proletariat and to the rapidity of social development.
Things turned out otherwise. Both the Irish people and the English proletariat proved weak. Only now, through the miserable deals of the English liberals with the Irish bourgeoisie, is the Irish question being settled (the example of Ulster shows with what difficulty) by a land reform (with compensation) and by Home Rule (not yet introduced). What then? Does it follow that Marx and Engels were “utopians”, that they put forward “impracticable” national demands, that they allowed themselves to be influenced by the Irish petty-bourgeois nationalists (there is no doubt about the petty-bourgeois character of the Fenian movement), and so on?
No. In the Irish question too Marx and Engels pursued a consistently proletarian policy, one that really educated the masses in the spirit of democracy and socialism. Only such a policy could have saved both Ireland and England from half a century of delay in introducing the necessary reforms, and from having these reforms mutilated by the liberals to please reaction.
The policy of Marx and Engels on the Irish question provided a splendid example, which retains immense practical importance to this day, of the attitude the proletariat of oppressing nations should adopt towards national movements; it served as a warning against that “servile haste” with which the philistines of all countries, colours and languages hurry to label as “utopian” any change in the frontiers of states established by the violence and privileges of the landlords and bourgeoisie of one nation.
If the Irish and English proletariat had not accepted Marx’s policy and had not made the separation of Ireland their slogan, this would have been the worst kind of opportunism on their part, a neglect of their duties as democrats and socialists, a concession to English reaction and the English bourgeoisie.