Karl Marx, Friedrich List, and Revolution in the 20th Century - Part 1
The following first appeared on ‘Howard’s Substack’ and is syndicated with the permission of the author.
The first instalment of an essay on Friedrich List and Karl Marx, which views their work in light of the revolutionary tumult of the 20th century
"If Mr. Griffith, quoting List, saw humanity's hope in the cultivation of the individual nations, Connolly, analogously, saw it in the individual nation's liberation: the Protectionist and the Socialist being of closer accord than labels might suggest. Connolly saw in the Irish Rising the first spark of the Apocalyptic revolution that should free the world, and showed by his action that a good internationalist could be a patriot." - Aodh De Blacam, What Sinn Féin Stands For
In Über Friedrich Lists Buch 'Das nationale System der politischen Ökonomie, hereafter the List Critique, Karl Marx articulates his position on the 19th century economic nationalist Friedrich List - the figure hailed by Arthur Griffith as the true progenitor of the Zollverein (the 19th century German Customs union which preceded the unification of Germany).
Along with the Austrian school's Carl Menger, Karl Marx and Friedrich List are undoubtedly Germany's foremost - in terms of influence, at the very least - economists. Their scholarship, prognostications, and practical instruction continue to influence states, movements, and personages to this day.
List's influence spans from Griffith's Sinn Féin to, more recently, the economic model adopted by the East Asian tiger economies. Marx, meanwhile, is the inspiration behind the USSR and the People's Republic of China, as well as more minute states and statelets, past and present. It may be accurately submitted that Marx is the most important inspiration for revolution in the modern era.
Marx's Critique of Nationalism - the Missing Piece?
"The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward" - Friedrich Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 222
For decades, scholars, votaries, and critics, concerned with Marx's view of nationalism were compelled to adduce broad-stroke statements from the Communist Manifesto - Roman Szporluk:
"Conventional Marxian scholarship usually begins the review of Marx's stand on nation and nationalism with the position he and Engels formulated in 1848-1849. The scholar normally proceeds with an initial, brief, and somewhat embarrassed reference to The Communist Manifesto and its various statements—that national differences were disappearing, that one world literature was emerging, that the world market was subjecting back-ward nations to the rule of those more advanced, and, of course, that the workers 'have no country'"
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany by Marx's associate Friedrich Engels - somewhat controversially when considered via a strict anti-fascist prism - delineated historical (at this time, Germans, Poles, and Hungarians) and non-historical peoples (Czechs, Croats, and other East Europeans). The latter serving no purpose within the Marxist schema of history - a mere vestige destined to be scattered by history's tumultuous course.
Marxists since at least Vladimir Lenin have tended to ignore Engel's pronouncements, or invert them - Marx's thoughts on the Asiatic Mode of Production have similarly been memory holed. The former approach corresponds to Marx's position in the Manifesto. Lenin, with his emphasis on Imperialism as a facet of then-contemporary capitalism, placed an emphasis on retrograde nationalities, rather than more powerful ones like Engels had, allotting them a significant place in the world revolution.
The world would have to wait until 1971 for the re-emergence of the text wherein Marx's caustically critical perspective on nationalism reached its zenith. That year a Soviet Historical Journal - Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 12 - published Marx's unfished 24 page critique of Friedrich List's programme and, more broadly, the protectionist aspirations of the German bourgeoisie; a version in the original German would follow a year later as an appendix to a 1982 edition of List's National System of Political Economy. Later, for the first time, it was translated into English, and may be found in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4.
The List Critique - Against Nationalism and Protectionism
"The German bourgeois is the knight of the rueful countenance, who wanted to introduce knight-errantry just when the police and money had come to the fore." - Karl Marx, Über Friedrich Lists Buch 'Das nationale System der politischen Ökonomie
Marx levels a number of arguments against List: the imperative of class struggle; a rejection of a national path toward capitalism; hostility to protectionism; critique of the German bourgeoisie's false consciousness; nationalism as a veil for class interest.
Each of the foregoing arguments is united insofar as it derives from Marx's conception of capitalism as a global, border defying process. Hence, Marx treated the idea of a national capitalism, or any measure which sought to reduce capitalism's gestation to a geographically delimited area, as an aberration which was destined, at best, to temporarily hinder its march. The nation state, being a product of capitalist development from Marx's perspective, was merely a fickle epiphenomena. Thus, the notion of making it the centrepiece of one's analysis, as List had done, was absurd.
The struggle of class and against class was accorded a privileged position in the historical process. If the nation was destined to die, if capitalism is a global process, the ill-effects of which were bore chiefly by the urban proletariat then coming into fruition, it would follow from said premises that class struggle, not the struggle betwixt nations, is what carries weight in historical terms.
Here, it's important to introduce Marx and Engel's idea of ideology. Not merely a term to denote political belief systems, in the Germany Ideology this term is employed to describe beliefs which deviate from material reality; ideas, often flowery and connotative of justice, which are, in reality, rationalisations of the status quo - the following, extracted from the aforesaid work, are emblematic of Marx and Engel's perspective.
"The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas."
"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."
Returning to the List critique, Marx argues that the German bourgeoisie had, in advocating for tariffs and nationalism, bought into an ideology by which nakedly egoistic aims are veiled via the high-minded rhetoric of national unity and pride.
"A great inconvenience affecting the German bourgeois in his striving for industrial wealth is his idealism professed hitherto. How is it that this nation of the 'spirit' suddenly comes to find the supreme blessings of mankind in calico, knitting yarn, the self-acting mule, in a mass of factory slaves, in the materialism of machinery, in the full money-bags of Messrs. the factory-owners? The empty, shallow, sentimental idealism of the German bourgeois, beneath which lies hidden (is concealed) the pettiest, dirtiest and most cowardly shopkeeper’s spirit (soul), has arrived ‘at the epoch when this bourgeois is inevitably compelled to divulge his secret. But again he divulges it in a truly German, high-flown manner. He divulges it with an idealistic-Christian sense of shame. He disavows wealth while striving for it. He clothes spiritless materialism in an idealistic disguise and only then ventures to pursue it."
Though I do not wish to conjecture too greatly, Marx's criticism bespeaks of a hostility to a broader, supra-ideological tendency - that being the application of humanism, or in this instance, nationalistic sentimentality, to the domain which warrants dispassionate scholarship by political economists. On this point, Marx differentiated himself from earlier socialists like Owen and Fourier, and continues to differentiate himself from the moralistic hysterics that deface his legacy with their self-identification. Humanism proves to be the prevailing tendency of Marx's epigones.
This tendency afflicts trade unionism: the first world labour aristocracy produced thereby stymies the productive capacities of industry; the motor of history is sacrificed at humanity's alter. So much for treating the cause of labour as an antipode of bourgeois nationalist industry, in a world of globalisation the impulse undergirding tariffs dovetails with the covetousness of first world trade unionism. Opposed is international capital, with its insistence on the abrogation of borders, and states like China which stand to gain, geopolitically and economically, from the transposition of formerly-western technics to their shores. In such a context, the old dream -"The Internationale unites the human race" - becomes farcical fanfiction.
Against anthropocentric socialism, with its concern for human welfare, Marx casts a dialectician's eye - hence his support for Free Trade. In 1848 before the Brussels Democratic Association, he declaimed:
“But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade.”
The alienation produced, the dislocation and enmity, such were of concern insofar as they fruitfully made tangible and palpable the crisis of the capitalist system - a positive development, per the purview of Marx. Free trade, an accelerator of the free circulation of monies and goods, hastened the spread of capitalism across the globe - the result being greater interconnection between the populaces of our planet and, as a corollary, an attenuation of the false consciousness of nationality. That industry, competing on a global rather than national stage, would improve and centralise, was taken to be a further positive.
"The essential characteristic of the modern epoch is that the productive forces have been developed in the most advanced countries to such a degree that they can no longer be restricted to the boundaries of any one country."
The next instalment to this piece will examine the crisis of Marxism in the late 19th and early 20th century, and how said crisis theoretically widened the scope of legitimacy afforded to revolutionary subjects.