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.
Nationalism was so perfectly suited to its double task, the domestication of workers and the despoliation of aliens, that it appealed to everyone - everyone, that is, who wielded or aspired to wield a portion of capital.
During the nineteenth century, especially during its second half, every owner of investable capital discovered that he had roots among the mobilizable countryfolk who spoke his mother’s tongue and worshipped his father’s gods. The fervor of such a nationalist was transparently cynical, since he was the countryman who no longer had roots among his mother’s or father’s kin : he found his salvation in his savings, prayed to his investments and spoke the language of cost accounting. But he had learned, from Americans and Frenchmen, that although he could not mobilize the countryfolk as loyal servants, clients and customers, he could mobilize them as loyal fellow-Catholics, Orthodox or Protestants. Languages, religions and customs became welding materials for the construction of nation-states.
The welding materials were means, not ends. The purpose of the national entities was not to develop languages, religions or customs, but to develop national economies, to turn the countryfolk into workers and soldiers, to turn the motherland into mines and factories, to turn dynastic estates into capitalist enterprises. Without the capital, there could be no munitions or supplies, no national army, no nation.
Savings and investments, market research and cost accounting, the obsessions of the rationalistic former middle classes, became the ruling obsessions. These rationalistic obsessions became not only sovereign but also exclusive. Individuals who enacted other obsessions, irrational ones, were put away in madhouses, asylums.
The nations usually were but need no longer have been monotheistic ; the former god or gods had lost their importance except as welding materials. The nations were mono-obsessive, and if monotheism served the ruling obsession, then it too was mobilized.
World War I marked the end of one phase of the nationalizing process, the phase that had begun with the American and French revolutions, the phase that had been announced much earlier by the declaration of Aguirre and the revolt of the Dutch grandees. The conflicting claims of old and newly-constituted nations were in fact the causes of that war. Germany, Italy and Japan, as well as Greece, Serbia and colonial Latin America, had already taken on most of the attributes of their nationalistic predecessors, had become national empires, monarchies and republics, and the more powerful of the new arrivals aspired to take on the main missing attribute, the colonial empire. During that war, all the mobilizable components of the two remaining dynastic empires, the Ottoman and the Hapsburg, constituted themselves into nations. When bourgeoisies with different languages and religions, such as Turks and Armenians, claimed the same territory, the weaker were treated like so-called American Indians ; they were exterminated. National Sovereignty and Genocide were - and still are - corollaries.
Common language and religion appear to be corollaries of nationhood, but only because of an optical illusion. As welding materials, languages and religions were used when they served their purpose, discarded when they did not. Neither multi-lingual Switzerland nor multi-religious Yugoslavia were banned from the family of nations. The shapes of noses and the color of hair could also have been used to mobilize patriots - and later were. The shared heritages, roots and commonalities had to satisfy only one criterion, the criterion of American-style pragmatic reason : did they work ? Whatever worked was used. The shared traits were important, not because of their cultural, historical or philosophical content, but because they were useful for organizing a police to protect the national property and for mobilizing an army to plunder the colonies.
Once a nation was constituted, human beings who lived on the national territory but did not possess the national traits could be transformed into internal colonies, namely into sources of preliminary capital. Without preliminary capital, no nation could become a great nation, and nations that aspired to greatness but lacked adequate overseas colonies could resort to plundering, exterminating and expropriating those of their countrymen who did not possess the national traits.
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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