Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels

by Erica Benner

This is an impressive re-examination of the theories of Marx and Engels on nationalism. The author challenges the conventional view that Marx and Engels lacked the theoretical resources needed to understand nationalism. It argues that the two men had a much better explanatory grasp of national phenomena than is usually supposed, and that the reasoning behind their policy towards specific national movements was often subtle and sensitive to the ethical issues at stake. Instead of offering an insular 'Marxian' account of nationalism, the book identifies arguments in Marx and Engels' writings that can help us to think more clearly about national identity and conflict today. These arguments are located in a distinctive theory of politics, which enabled the authors to analyse the relations between nationalism and other social movements and to discriminate between democratic, outward-looking national programmes and authoritarian, ethnocentric nationalism. The book suggest that this approach improves on accounts which stress the 'independent' force of nationality over other concerns, and on thos that fail to analyse the complex motives of nationalist actors. It concludes by criticizing these 'methodological nationalist' assumptions and 'post-nationalist' views about the future role of nationalism, showing how some of marx and Engles' arguments can yield a better understanding of the national movements that have emerged in the wake of 'really existing socialism'.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Theory

276 pages, ebook

First published February 1, 1995

Reviews

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a detailed trip “through the weeds” to identify a better sense of how Marx and Engels handled questions, concerns, and events associated with ideas of “nationalism”. These paucity of ideas around nationalism has been seen as a shortcoming in traditional views of Marx and Engels. Not surprisingly, Marx and Engels have much more to say about nationalism than conventional accounts suggest. It turns out that they were not strict Marxists after all and that their analysis of nationalist issues was thoughtful and even practical in understanding 19th century history. At least that is the claim. Given the importance of and destruction wrought by unchecked nationalism into the mid-20th and even early 21st century, that makes for an interesting book. It is a bit of a slog, as you might expect from this sort of reinterpretation exercise, but the book is worth reading.

More to come ...

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-structured and very clear, with some startlingly relevant insights for today.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

It should be noted from the outset that while this is a book concerned primarily with Marx’s reporting on 19th century national movements, both reactionary and emancipatory, the author is a political philosopher and not a historian. The source material examined is thus the journalistic and epistolary writings of Marx, and not to a significant extent any other documentary material on the independence and unification movements of Germany, Poland, the Balkan countries, India, and Ireland, to name the primary examples cited. In her examination of Marx’s writing against facile, reductive, and likely bad-faith interpretations of his theories by mid-20th century Western political scholars, Erica Benner surely played an important role in rescuing Marx’s actual ideas in the 1990s from the rubble of authoritarian projects superficially undertaken in his name in the decades prior. In these sections, which make up the bulk of Really Existing Nationalisms’ middle, Benner is at her strongest, displaying an expansive familiarity with Marx’s less examined works, which she deftly shows are overlooked at our peril in preference for his more abstract, declarative earlier writing like the Manifesto. But in her reliance on Marx, she also runs into the same roadblocks as the 19th century scholar, defending his thin pronouncements on Indian anti-colonialism where Kevin B. Anderson, in his wonderful Marx at the Margins, is less afraid to call out remnants of counterproductive Orientalism. Passages like these are mercifully infrequent however, though the same can hardly be said for the at-times tedious exposition of what Benner calls ‘methodological nationalism,’ which eat up the first half of many of the book’s sections only to be subsequently bowled over by Marx’s wrecking ball. I get the sense that these parts of the book are the result of at least one overweening advisor or reviewer, as this is after all a dissertation made into a book at a time when positively reassessing Marx was hardly in vogue, and positing alternatives to capitalism was reflexively conflated with purges and the gulag. The final chapter, The Revenge of Nations, with its nearly quotation-free examination of ‘liberal post-nationalism,’ is especially painful in this regard, going to great lengths to avoid mention of class or socialism, which of course in the conclusion of a book about Marx comes across as hopelessly tortured. And the sudden turn to current events, with audacious claims like “fears that populist nationalism was the wave of central Europe’s future proved premature,” is as confusing from an editorial standpoint as it is dated. In short: come for the beautifully curated passages from Marx’s lesser-known and incredibly prescient writing on nationalism (and as a bonus, see Engels faltering before complex geopolitical dynamics time and again), but spare yourself when the urge to skim arises. You won’t regret skipping repetitive explanations of the book’s thesis or its overly generous description of negative theoretical examples.

[Yugotrash · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rather good analysis of Marx and Engels' thought with respect to issues of nationalism and nationality. Particularly good for its contextualisation of their thought, as well as debunking commonplace prejudices about the thinkers' approach to this topic. Marx and Engels are revealed to be both more subtle and more naive at times, resisting the crude images held up both by their uncritical adherents and uncritical detractors.

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really existing and not just imagined. A must read.

[R · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s ok but I don’t really like analysis like this that is constrained to contemporary facts from Marx’s, it just feels like historiography