The Marxist Approach to the National Question: A Critique of Nimni's Interpretation

HISTORIANS (MARXIST OR NOT) emphasize the incompleteness and limitations of Marx' and Engels' • writings on the national question. The critique of Engels' theory of nations without formulated for the first time at the beginning of this century by Otto Bauer in his monumental Die Nationalitatenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (1907) and developed in a more systematic and rigorous by the Ukrainian Marxist historian Roman Rosdolsky after the Second World War has became today a solid acquisition of the contemporary Marxist literature on the national question. In general, Marxist historians are inclined to consider the national problem one of the main gaps in the theoretical elaboration of and Engels. In particular, they have analyzed the category of the non-historical peoples (geschichtlosen Volker) basically contradictory to the premises of Marxism. Ephraim Nimni, however, in a dissenting view, thinks that Marx and Engels have a coherent view of the national question, even if there is no single corpus of literature that directly presents their theories in an explicit way (Nimni, 1989). In his opinion, the coherence of this conception is based on three fundamental paradigms of historical materialism: a) a theory of evolution, i.e. a vision of history as a progressive series of changes through universal and hierarchically defined stages; b) a deterministic theory which analyzes through a form of economic reductionism all social changes the automatic result of the growth of the forces of production; c) at last, a Eurocentric world view, that would represent the necessary and inevitable consequence of