Difficult Dialogue: Marxism and Nation

For many writers, accounting for nationalism has been marxism’s great historical failure. This chapter seeks to examine why that might have been the case. It starts, predictably, with the engagements of Marx and Engels with the pressing national questions of their day. This is followed by a cursory account of the communist movement’s interaction with nationalism. These were, after all, competing political movements and the heated debates between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg on the ‘national question’ were no mere pedantic or esoteric terminological squabbles. Antonio Gramsci, as we saw in relation to marxist treatments of culture, was also an innovator in terms of nationalism. But our emphasis here lies in the partial, important yet neglected, break in marxist orthodoxy on the national question effected by the Austrian marxist Otto Bauer at the turn of the last century. Finally, we turn to certain crucial postmodern questionings of the whole marxist tradition’s limitations regarding the national. Firstly, we examine the deep Eurocentrism in the marxist, as well as liberal, views of the national question. Secondly, we sketch in the necessary engendering of the national question, so long subsumed under an implicit, if not explicit, androcentrism.