The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

letter to Paul Lafargue (20 th June 1893), the same Engels wrote that “unless autonomy and unity are granted to
each nation, then neither the international union of the proletariat, nor the peaceful and intelligent co-operation
between nations for common ends will be possible.” 250 This latter position, which somewhat contradicted that of
1848, was to become the position of the 2 nd International.
It fell to Rosa Luxemburg to call into question this final schema of 1896, over the Polish question. She felt it
necessary to “re-evaluate Marx’s old ideas on the national question”. Rejecting Polish independence as contrary
to proletarian aims, she still agreed with the ‘national liberation’ of the Christian peoples ruled by the Turkish
Empire. However, in her 1908 text ‘The national question and autonomy’, she definitively rejected any
reconciliation between ‘national liberation’ and the proletarian class struggle.
The concept of the ‘nation’ had to be rejected, as a bearer of bourgeois ideology and as destructive of class
consciousness: “... a concept such as ‘the nation’ is in fact one of those categories of bourgeois ideology which
Marxist theory has subjected to a radical review, showing that behind the mysterious veil of concepts like
‘bourgeois liberty’, ‘equality before the law’, etc., there is always hidden a precise historical content. In class
society, a ‘nation’, as a homogeneous socio-political entity, does not exist; by contrast, in each nation there are
classes with antagonistic interests and ‘rights’.” 251
Rosa Luxemburg’s theoretical and political position was a world away from those defended by the
International’s principal ‘tenors’, who allowed a patriotic and nationalist ideology to develop within the ranks of
the workers’ movement. Jaurès, for example, declared that socialism would be “the universal fatherland of
independent and friendly nations”. Kautsky, already a ‘centrist’, wrote in 1909 that “We are not anti-national,
any more than we are hostile or indifferent to the personality”. And he reproached Bauer, the specialist on the
national question in the Austro-Hungarian party, for failing to carry out a “fundamental synthesis between
252 253
nationalism and internationalism”.
In 1912, Pannekoek intervened on the national question with a pamphlet titled Class struggle and nation,
published in Reichenberg (Liberec), an industrial town in Bohemia. It argued in the same sense as Josef Strasser,
a member of the Austrian ultra-left. The Worker and the Nation, which Strasser published simultaneously in the
same place, complemented Pannekoek’s pamphlet, and at times took its arguments further, and in a more radical
direction. 254 Their intervention was an overall attack on the positions of the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer, and
thence against the penetration of Austro-Hungarian Social-Democratic Party by nationalist ideology. This party
was a federation of six national parties; it was divided, not into sections but into nations. The most virulent
nationalists within the “Gesamtpartei” (the ‘Overall Party’) were the Czech separatists, who in 1906 seceded
with the Czech trade unions. Simultaneously, a nationalist tendency developed within the Austrian party, which
was in favour of a greater German imperialism.
There is no doubt that Otto Bauer’s book The question of nationalities and the social democracy (1907) served
as a theoretical cover for the nationalist tendencies within the social democracy. 255 Defining the ‘nation’ as a
community of language, character and destiny, Bauer defended the idea of a specific ‘national individuality’. His
viewpoint was in fact close to that of Kautsky and other theoreticians of the International, when he maintained
that the socialist project would be characterised not by the destruction of nations to form a world human
community, but by a federation of nations: “international unity within national diversity”. 256
250 Pannekoek, Divergences tactiques [...], op. cit., in Bricianer, p. 93.
251 See the introduction by Georges Haupt in the book by G. Haupt, M. Löwy, Cl. Weill: Les marxistes et la question
nationale 1848-1914 (études et textes) (Paris: Maspéro, 1974).
252 Luxemburg, in: G. Haupt, op. cit., “The national question and autonomy”, pp. 184-203.
253 Kautsky, in: G. Haupt, op. cit., p. 147.
254 J. Strasser, A. Pannekoek, Nation et lutte de classe (Paris: ed. 10/18, 1977) [with an introduction by Claudie Weill].
Contains Strasser’s ‘On internationalism. The Worker and the Nation’, and Pannekoek’s ‘Class struggle and Nation’.
[Reprint in German of the J. Strasser’s pamphlet: Der Arbeiter und die Nation (Vienna: Junius, 1982).]
255 Extracts available in: G. Haupt, op. cit., pp. 233-272.
256 The Pannekoek’s quotations that follow are translated from the French version of the text already cited, “Class struggle
and Nation”.
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