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 proclaimed dead several times during the present century :
* after the first world war, when the last empires of Europe, the Austrian and the Turkish, were broken up into self-determined nations, and no deprived nationalists remained, except the Zionists ;
* after the Bolshevik coup d’etat, when it was said that the bourgeoisie’s struggles for self-determination were henceforth superseded by struggles of workingmen, who had no country ;
* after the military defeat of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, when the genocidal corollaries of nationalism had been exhibited for all to see, when it was thought that nationalism as creed and as practice was permanently discredited.
Yet forty years after the military defeat of Fascists and National Socialists, we can see that nationalism did not only survive but was born again, underwent a revival. Nationalism has been revived not only by the so-called right, but also and primarily by the so- called left. After the national socialist war, nationalism ceased to be confined to conservatives, became the creed and practice of revolutionaries, and proved itself to be the only revolutionary creed that actually worked.
Leftist or revolutionary nationalists insist that their nationalism has nothing in common with the nationalism of fascists and national socialists, that theirs is a nationalism of the oppressed, that it offers personal as well as cultural liberation. The claims of the revolutionary nationalists have been broadcast to the world by the two oldest continuing hierarchic institutions surviving into our times : the Chinese State and, more recently, the Catholic Church. Currently nationalism is being touted as a strategy, science and theology of liberation, as a fulfilment of the Enlightenment’s dictum that knowledge is power, as a proven answer to the question "What Is to be Done ?"
To challenge these claims, and to see them in a context, I have to ask what nationalism is - not only the new revolutionary nationalism but also the old conservative one. I cannot start by defining the term, because nationalism is not a word with a static definition : it is a term that covers a sequence of different historical experiences. I’ll start by giving a brief sketch of some of those experiences.
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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