Friedrich Engels and the problem of peoples without history

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On the national question. Friedrich Engels and the problem of peoples without history is the title of an influential work by the Marxist Roman Rosdolsky . This criticism of the positions of the Marxist classics on the nationality problem is Rosdolsky's most important work after On the History of the Origin of Marx's Capital . It is dedicated to the victims of Stalinism in Ukraine , Rosdolsky's original homeland: M. Skrypnyk, A. Schumskyj, K. Maksymowytsch. The main part of the thesis was written as a doctoral thesis at the University of Vienna as early as 1929 .

Edition history of the doctoral thesis

The German-language first edition of the main part of his doctoral thesis from 1929 appeared in the Archive for Social History in 1964 as Friedrich Engels and the problem of the 'historically-less' peoples (The question of nationalities in the revolution of 1848/49 in the light of the 'Neue Rheinische Zeitung') . Rosdolsky revised this version himself. It was completed in 1948. 1979 was a new edition as a book. The translation into English is by John-Paul Himka and was first published in 1986 in Critique No. 18/19 and in 1987 by Critique Books ( Glasgow ) under the title "Engels and the 'Nonhistoric' Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848" .

Rosdolsky had originally turned to Josip Broz Tito and the Yugoslav authorities to publish the revision of his dissertation, which they sabotaged. Only after he was able to make a name for himself within the European left through his work On the History of Marx's Capital , did he manage to find a German-language publisher for his critical work on the national question in 1964 - 16 years after it was written. John-Paul Himka reports something similar about the English translation.

Marx / Engels and the national question

Rosdolsky's criticism was particularly directed against the views of the young angel. Rosdolsky examined above all articles from 1848 to 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as well as a series of articles on Pan-Slavism that Engels had published in the Neue Oder-Zeitung in 1855 . In it he characterized the Czechs , Slovenes , Croats , Serbs , Romanians , Bulgarians , Ukrainians and others as peoples without history - in contrast to the revolutionary peoples of the Germans , Poles and Magyars (Hungarians).

According to Engels, the Slavic peoples would have been doomed by the larger nations surrounding them - in this case the Magyars and the Germans. In their ( embryonic ) struggle for national independence in the revolution of 1848/49 , the majority of them supported reactionary forces and turned against the democratic movement among the Hungarians and Germans.

Engels' disparaging account was based primarily on his expectations and on his own experiences during the revolution. During the revolution of 1848/49 in the Austrian Empire , counterrevolutionary troops from Croatia and Prague helped the imperial troops to suppress the Vienna October Uprising of 1848 (also known as the Viennese "October Revolution"). The Slovak uprising from September 1848 to November 1849 was directed particularly against Hungary. Finally, Russian and Croatian troops supported the Austrian army in its offensive against Hungarian independence in April 1849.

In their assessment of the role of these ethnic groups during the revolution, Engels and Marx overlooked the Whitsun uprising in Prague in Bohemia and the Slavs Congress , both of which were anarchist in character and campaign for the unity and sovereignty of the Slav peoples . They also overlooked, as Rosdolsky explained, class contradictions between German-Austrian citizens or Polish and Hungarian aristocrats and landowners on the one hand and the broad strata of the peasant population of the Slavic peoples, who were oppressed and exploited by the former, on the other.

Rosdolsky was one of the most resolute critics of the shortened account by Marx and Engels. In his posthumously published work The Workers and the Fatherland , he declared that “the 'patriotism' of the workers, of which it [the Communist Manifesto ; Note] speaks, refers to the bourgeois nation-state, but not to the Volkstum, which refers to nationality in the ethnic sense ”.

First and foremost, Marx and Engels wanted a unified state because they felt that such a state would promote the growing together of the workers and thus the conditions for a socialist revolution. In this context Rosdolsky spoke of the idealistic , Hegelian side of Engels' position of 1849 - in contrast to its realistic, materialistic side. As Rosdolsky has shown, the concept of the 'historically less' peoples was borrowed from the phenomenology of the mind of GWF Hegel and his concept of the 'dialectic of folk spirits'. Also, Adam Smith used capitalism similar formulations in its analysis.

The fact that Marx and Engels had just left university in 1849, were at the beginning of their political careers, and that the criticized position was an expression of disappointment at the failure of the revolution, Rosdolsky hardly attached much importance to. Marx and Engels were barely thirty years old during the revolution and had little political experience. By 1867 at the latest, Marx and Engels began to systematically rethink their positions from 1849 and to distinguish between oppressive and oppressed nations.

According to traditional Marxism, it was only the epoch of imperialism and monopoly capitalism that made a well-founded socialist position on the national question possible. Lenin in particular worked intensively on such a position. Following Marx, he argued that a nation can only be free if it does not oppress another nation. At the same time, according to Lenin, the liberation of the oppressed nation is a prerequisite for the socialist revolution of the ruling nation. Rosdolsky appreciated Lenin's work, but openly sympathized with Mikhail Bakunin's nationality program . He was therefore accused of failing to recognize the historical connection between Lenin's position on the national question.

The Bolsheviks and the National Question

In the early 1950s, Rosdolsky planned a detailed analysis of Bolshevik nationality politics . This emerges from a letter to Karl Korsch dated May 10, 1952. His revision of the dissertation, which was completed in 1948 - but only published in 1964 - was to serve as the basis for this. It was strongly influenced by Rosdolsky's personal experiences with Stalinism , National Socialism and World War II . Rosdolsky stood for the "right to national self-determination without any concession to nationalism" all his life. This position was not only in stark contrast to the nationality program of National Socialism, but also to that of Stalinism.

Although the Bolsheviks had insisted on a “right of peoples to self-determination” since their existence in 1903, Josef Stalin - since 1918 People's Commissar for Nationality Issues of the Russian Soviet Republic - advocated an aggressive nationality policy, for which he had already been criticized by Lenin. In his preoccupation with the nationality policy of the Bolsheviks, Rosdolsky was able to draw on Lenin's dispute with Rosa Luxemburg and later with Stalin, as well as on Trotsky's 1939 work on Ukraine. For Lenin and Trotsky, the solution of the nationality question was a central task of the bourgeois-democratic revolution . They regarded their concession to national sentiments as a necessary compromise to solve the social question .

Although such a detachment was favored mainly among the peasantry in the Ukraine because they saw the Bolsheviks as an alien Russian power, it was only granted half-heartedly to them. After the Russian annexation of western Ukraine in 1939, Trotsky and the Fourth International dealt intensively with this question for the first time. At the end of July 1939 Trotsky wrote in his polemic against Hugo Oehler and his Revolutionary Workers League .

The only correct slogan would be a "united, free and independent Soviet Ukraine of workers and peasants" (emphasized in the original; note), Trotsky concludes, and as a result he defended this demand against possible objections:

“But the independence of a united Ukraine would mean the detachment of Soviet Ukraine from the USSR , the 'Friends' of the Kremlin will shout in unison. What's so terrible about that? - we reply. Ardent reverence for state borders is alien to us. We do not take the position of a 'united and indivisible' whole. Even the constitution of the USSR recognizes the peoples united in the federation the right to self-determination, that is, the right to detachment. "

Trotsky described the nature of this demand as follows:

“The right of nations to self-determination is of course a democratic and not a socialist principle. However, since the principles of true democracy in our epoch are only supported and realized by the revolutionary proletariat, they are closely linked to socialist tasks. "

The resemblance between Rosdolsky's position in 1948 - on the eve of the Cold War - and that of Trotsky in 1939 is no accident. The main difference is that at that time Rosdolsky also accepted Ukraine's independence under capitalist auspices. Andy Clarkson suspected this was a concession to the Ukrainian exiles in Detroit. In addition, Bakunin's anarchist influence on Rosdolsky's position finding is noticeable here. Trotsky, however, ruled out such an option, which is why he always spoke of Soviet Ukraine. In addition, Trotsky viewed the right of nations to self-determination as a transitional demand - embedded in a revolutionary socialist program. This limitation of Trotsky was due to the special situation in Ukraine, where the process of detachment of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie was well advanced.

Overall, Rosdolsky's position coincided with that of Trotsky and the Bolsheviks under Lenin, namely the admission of self-determination or detachment from the “mother nation”. Unlike Bukharin or Pyatakov, for example, the Bolsheviks under Lenin and then the Trotskyists - including Rosdolsky - did not speak of the right of the working masses to self-determination, but of the nation's right to self-determination, "that is, both the workers and the bourgeoisie together" ( Bukharin 1918).

reception

The political scientist Ephraim Nimni describes Rosdolsky's work as "the most comprehensive, detailed and scientific work on the subject of peoples without history". Nevertheless, it is problematic: Rosdolsky overlooks the fact that Marx and Engels applied their theory not only to the smaller Slavic peoples, but also elsewhere. He adopts the teleological model of social evolution that is behind Hegel's thesis of peoples without history. Finally, he overlooks the connection between Marx and Engels' description of the national question and their theory of historical evolution. The theory of the peoples without history is the result of its rigid and dogmatic formulation of the laws of social development, which precisely define the task of the modern nation (the development of the productive forces and a national bourgeoisie) and national communities that cannot achieve this goal, automatically make superfluous.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Andy Clarkson: Review: Engels and the 'Nonhistoric' Peoples . In: Revolutionary History . 3, No. 2, autumn 1990 ( online version ( Memento of the original from February 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice . ; checked on: February 17, 2015) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.revolutionary-history.co.uk
  2. ^ Marxists Internet Archive : Rosdolsky, Roman (1898–1967) (French).
  3. ^ FES : Register of volumes 1–20. 1961-1980 . In: Archives for Social History , 1980
  4. ↑ John-Paul Himka: List of Publications ( Memento of the original from May 23, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca
  5. ↑ a b Gerd Callesen: Review of MEGA, Dept. I, Volume 14 . In: Socialism and Democracy . No. 32 (Vol. 16, No. 2), summer 2002.
  6. ^ Roman Rosdolsky: The workers and the fatherland. On the interpretation of a passage in the Communist Manifesto . In: the international . No. 12, Frankfurt am Main, February 1978, pp. 101–110 (relevant point: p. 110). Quoted from Fritz Keller : Paul Lafargue (1842–1911) . In: Paul Lafargue, Fritz Keller (ed.): Gender relations . Hamburg 1995, pp. 201-259. ( Online version ; checked on: March 6, 2008)
  7. ↑ Friedrich Engels and the problem of the "historically less" peoples: (the question of nationalities in the revolution of 1848 - 1849 in the light of the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung") , p. 192 f. in the document
  8. ↑ Andreas Kloke: National question and Marxism. On the problem of theory and practice of the Marxist classics (1844–1940) and the topicality of the topic . In: Inprekorr . 335/336 and 337/338, June 1999 ( online version ; checked on: March 6, 2008)
  9. ^ Roman Rosdolsky Papers , directory at the International Institute for Social History Amsterdam (php, 141432 bytes)
  10. ↑ Peter Cardorff: Man without a rope. Roman Rosdolsky on his hundredth birthday . In: ak 416 Hamburg, July 2, 1998.
  11. ↑ Leon Trotsky : The independence of Ukraine and the sectarian tangled heads , July 30, 1939. In: Soviet society and Stalinist dictatorship 1936–1949 , Volume 1.2, pp. 1178 f.
  12. ^ Leon Trotsky : The independence of Ukraine and the sectarian tangled heads , July 30, 1939. In: Soviet society and Stalinist dictatorship 1936–1949 , Volume 1.2, p. 1239
  13. ↑ Manfred Scharinger: National question and Marxist theory. Part 2: The Soviet Experience. In: Working group Marxism (ed.): Marxism. 24, Vienna October 2004, p. 505 f.
  14. ^ Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin : The program of the communists ( Bolsheviks ) . Rote Fahne, Berlin 1919, p. 118 f. (Original: Moscow 1918)
    Cf. also Nikolai Iwanowitsch Bukharin , Evgeni Alexejewitsch Preobrazhensky : ABC of Communism. Popular explanation of the program of the Communist Party of Russia ( Bolsheviks ) . Reprint of the first edition in German, published by the Communist Party of German Austria, Vienna 1920. Manesse-Verlag, Zurich 1985 ( Manesse Library of World History ), ISBN 3-7175-8044-2 ( online version ; checked on: March 9, 2008; original: Azbuka kommunizma . Moscow 1919)
  15. ^ Marx, Engels and the National Question , Ephraim Nimni, Science & Society, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Fall, 1989), pp. 297-326; on Rosdolsky p. 319 ff.