what nationalism is ?
by Fredy Perlman
An excellent analysis by the late Fredy Perlman of the enduring appeal of nationalism to statist rulers of both left and right.
This essay originally appeared in the Winter, 1984 Fifth Estate, and is also available as a pamphlet published by Black & Red.
During the following two centuries, the invasions, subjugations and expropriations initiated by the Hapsburgs were imitated by other European royal houses.
Seen through the lenses of nationalist historians, the initial colonizers as well as their later imitators look like nations : Spain, Holland, England, France. But seen from a vantage point in the past, the colonizing powers are Hapsburgs, Tudors, Stuarts, Bourbons, Oranges - namely dynasties identical to the dynastic families that had been feuding for wealth and power ever since the fall of the western Roman empire. The invaders can be seen from both vantage points because a transition was taking place. The entities were no longer mere feudal estates, but they were not yet full-fledged nations ; they already possessed some, but not yet all, the attributes of a nation-state. The most notable missing element was the national army. Tudors and Bourbons already manipulated the Englishness or Frenchness of their subjects, especially during wars against another monarch’s subjects. But neither Scots and Irishmen, not Corsicans and Provencals, were recruited to fight and die for "the love of their country". War was an onerous feudal burden, a corvée ; the only patriots were patriots of Eldorado.
The tenets of what was going to become the nationalist creed did not appeal to the ruling dynasts, who clung to their own tried and tested tenets. The new tenets appealed to the dynast’s higher servants, his money-lenders, spice-vendors, military suppliers and colony-plunderers. These people, like Lope de Aguirre and the Dutch grandees, like earlier Roman and Turkish guards, wielded key functions yet remained servants. Many if not most of them burned to shake off the indignity and the burden, to rid themselves of the parasitic overlord, to carry on the exploitation of countrymen and the plunder of colonials in their own name and for their own benefit.
Later known as the bourgeoisie or the middle class, these people had become rich and powerful since the days of the first westward- bound fleets. A portion of their wealth had come from the plundered colonies, as payment for the services they had sold to the Emperor ; this sum of wealth would later be called a primitive accumulation of capital. Another portion of their wealth had come from the plunder of their own local countrymen and neighbors by a method later known as capitalism ; the method was not altogether new, but it became very widespread after the middle classes got their hands on the New World’s silver and gold.
These middle classes wielded important powers, but they were not yet experienced in wielding the central political power. In England they overthrew a monarch and proclaimed a commonwealth but, fearing that the popular energies they had mobilized against the upper class could turn against the middle class, they soon restored another monarch of the same dynastic house.
Nationalism did not really come into its own until the late 1700s when two explosions, thirteen years apart, reversed the relative standing of the two upper classes and permanently changed the political geography of the globe. In 1776, colonial merchants and adventurers re-enacted Aguirre’s feat of proclaiming their independence from the ruling overseas dynast, outdid their predecessor by mobilizing their fellow-settlers, and succeeded in severing themselves from the Hanoverian British Empire. And in 1789, enlightened merchants and scribes outdid their Dutch forerunners by mobilizing, not a few outlying provinces, but the entire subject population, by overthrowing and slaying the ruling Bourbon monarch, and by remaking all feudal bonds into national bonds. These two events marked the end of an era. Henceforth even the surviving dynasts hastily or gradually became nationalists, and the remaining royal estates took on ever more of the attributes of nation-states.
Black & Red Books
Notes
1. The subtitle of the first volume of Capital is A Critique of Political Economy : The Process of Capitalist Production (published by Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906 ; republished by Random House, New York).
2. In Ibid., pages 784-850 : Part VIII : "The So-Called Primitive Accumulation."
3. E. Preobrazhensky, The New Economics (Moscow, 1926 ; English translation published by Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965), a book which announced the fateful "law of primitive socialist accumulation."
4. See V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1964 ; first published in 1899). I quote from page 599 : "if...we compare the present rapidity of development with that which could be achieved with the general level of technique and culture as it is today, the present rate of development of capitalism in Russia really must be considered as slow. And it cannot but be slow, for in no single capitalist country has there been such an abundant survival of ancient institutions that are incompatible with capitalism, retard its development, and immeasurably worsen the condition of the producers..."
5. Or the liberation of the state : "Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation" ; "It is the state which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity" ; "Always the maximum of liberty coincides with the maximum force of the state" ; "Everything for the state ; nothing against the state ; nothing outside the state." From Che cosa A il fascismo and La dottrina del fascismo, quoted by G.H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York, 1955), pp. 872-878.
6. "...the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire ; both being beast of prey, tho’ they differ in shape" (G. Washington in 1783). "...if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond..." (T. Jefferson in 1807). "...the cruel massacres they have committed on the women and children of our frontiers taken by surprise, will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach" (T. Jefferson in 1813). Quoted by Richard Drinnon in Facing West : The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (New York : New American Library, 1980), pp. 65, 96, 98.
7. Readily available in paper back as Quotations from Chairman Mao (Peking : Political Department of the people’s Liberation Army, 1966).
8. Black & Red tried to satirize this situation over ten years ago with the publication of a fake Manual for Revolutionary Leaders, a "how-to-do-it guide" whose author, Michael Velli, offered to do for the modern revolutionary prince what Machiavelli had offered the feudal prince. This phoney "Manual" fused Mao-Zedong-Thought with the Thought of Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and their modern followers, and offered grizzly recipes for the preparation of revolutionary organizations and the seizure of total power. Disconcertingly, at least half of the requests for this "Manual" came from aspiring national liberators, and it is possible that some of the current versions of the nationalist metaphysic contain recipes offered by Michael Velli.
9. I am not exaggerating. I have before me a book-length pamphlet titled The Mythology of the White Proletariat : A Short Course for Understanding Babylon by J. Sakai (Chicago : Morningstar Press, 1983). As an application of Mao-Zedong-Thought to American history, it is the most sensitive Maoist work I’ve seen. The author documents and describes, sometimes vividly, the oppression of America’s enslaved Africans, the deportations and exterminations of the American continent’s indigenous inhabitants, the racist exploitation of Chinese, the incarceration of Japanese- Americans in concentration camps. The author mobilizes all these experiences of unmitigated terror, not to look for ways to supersede the system that perpetrated them, but to urge the victims to reproduce the same system among themselves. Sprinkled with pictures and quotations of chairmen Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong and Ho-chi Minh, this work makes no attempt to hide or disguise its repressive aims ; it urges Africans as well as Navahos, Apaches as well as Palestinians, to organize a party, seize state power, and liquidate parasites.
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The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism, Fredy Perlman, 1984)
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