LeftWord Classics

On the National and Colonial Questions MARX & ENGELS

Edited, with an Introduction, by Aijaz Ahmad

Selected Writings

On the National and Colonial Questions

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

On the National and Colonial Questions Selected Writings Edited, with an Introduction, by

Aijaz Ahmad

First published February 2001 Reprinted July 2011 Digital print edition, February 2022 LeftWord Books 2254/2A, Shadi Khampur New Ranjit Nagar New Delhi 110008 INDIA LeftWord Books and Vaam Prakashan are imprints of Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt. Ltd. Introduction by Aijaz Ahmad © 2001, LeftWord Books This selection © 2001, LeftWord Books ISBN

978-81-87496-15-1

Contents

Note on the Selections

8

Introduction Aijaz Ahmad

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I 1 [On the Decline of Feudalism and the Emergence of National States] Frederick Engels

37

2 From The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

50

3 From ‘Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist’ Karl Marx

57

4 The Movements of 1847 Frederick Engels

64

5 From England in 1845 and 1885 Frederick Engels

78

6 Engels to Karl Kautsky February 7, 1882

79

7 Engels to Herrmann Schlüter March 30, 1892

80

8 Marx to Engels October 8, 1858

82

II 9 The British Rule in India Karl Marx

85

10 India Karl Marx

93

11 The Future Results of the British Rule in India Karl Marx

97

12 The Revolt in the Indian Army Karl Marx

104

13 The Revolt in India Karl Marx

108

14 The Indian Revolt Karl Marx

112

15 Investigation of Tortures in India Karl Marx

117

16 British Incomes in India Karl Marx

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CONTENTS

17 Details of the Attack on Lucknow Frederick Engels

129

18 The British Army in India Frederick Engels

136

19 Marx to N.F. Danielson February 19, 1881

141

20 From Persia and China Frederick Engels

142

21 The Opium Trade [1] Karl Marx

145

22 The Opium Trade [2] Karl Marx

150

III 23 [On Poland] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

157

24 [On the Polish Question] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

161

25 What Have the Working Classes to Do with Poland? Frederick Engels

170

26 From The Frankfurt Assembly Debates the Polish Question Frederick Engels

183

27 The State of Germany Frederick Engels

204

28 The Prussian Constitution Frederick Engels

228

29 From [The Constitutional Question in Germany] Frederick Engels

236

30 From ‘The Berlin Debate on the Revolution’ Frederick Engels

257

IV 31 Engels to Marx May 23, 1856

263

32 From ‘The Crisis in England’ Karl Marx

266

33 Record of a Speech on the Irish Question Karl Marx

268

34 From Lord John Russell Karl Marx

272

35 Marx to Engels November 30, 1867

277

36 From Confidential Communication Karl Marx

280

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CONTENTS

37 From ‘The English Government and the Fenian Prisoners’ Karl Marx

284

38 Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann November 29, 1869

288

39 Marx to Engels December 10, 1869

290

40 Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt April 9, 1870

292

41 Engels to Eduard Bernstein June 26, 1882

295

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Note on the Selections

The sources from which the individual texts of the present volume are drawn are as follows: Selection 1: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, volume 26, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1990. Selections 2, 4, 23, 24, 27, 28 and 29: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, volume 6, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976. Selections 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Colonialism, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978. Selections 6, 7, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 and 41: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986. Selection 25: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, volume 20, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982. Selections 26 and 30: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, volume 7, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977.

Wherever extracts have been taken from longer texts, this is indicated by the italicized ‘From’ in the title; the exceptions being passages from letters, which are excerpts in all instances barring one (Selection 31).

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AIJAZ AHMAD

Introduction

The bourgeoisie turns everything into a commodity, hence also the writing of history. Frederick Engels, History of Ireland (1870) THE SELECTIONS

This very short selection of writings by Marx and Engels on the national and colonial questions is conceived as part of a series intended to issue some classical works of socialist thought in moderately priced and attractively printed editions. The Communist Manifesto, with some fresh essays, and Lenin’s Imperialism, with a new introduction, have already appeared in this series,1 and the present volume is itself the first of projected three volumes of some of the seminal writings on this subject from the Marxist tradition. In conventional interpretations, Marx and Engels are said to have written rather little on the national and colonial questions. They are said to have been quite dismissive of nations and national liberation movements, viewing them as mere distractions from classes and class struggles. They are said also to have welcomed colonialism as a modernizing force.2 In most such interpretations, 1

2

Prakash Karat (ed.), A World to Win: Essays on The Communist Manifesto, Delhi, LeftWord Books, 1999; V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, with an Introduction by Prabhat Patnaik, Delhi, LeftWord Books, 2000. This view is held by a wide variety of authors, some applauding Marx for holding such a ‘forward-looking’ view, others castigating him for his ‘orientalist’ views. See, for instance: Shlomo Avinery (ed.) Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, New York, Doubleday, 1968; Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, London, New Left Books, 1980; and

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ON THE NATIONAL AND COLONIAL QUESTIONS

issues of nation and colony are said to have been very marginal to their real interests, their writings therefore not going beyond generalizations or merely occasional or anecdotal remarks.3 Finally, it is also assumed, even in some of the most indispensable collections of their writings on these subjects, that what they had to say on the theme of colonial subjection, notably in Ireland and the major Asian countries, was discrete and unrelated to their extensive writings on the issue of national formation and nationalism on the European continent.4 The present volume dissents from these views in some respects. Although Marx and Engels produced no monograph on either subject, they seem to have been concerned with issues of nationalism and colonialism throughout their working lives, from the 1840s onward, producing voluminous writings on these subjects. It also seems quite clear that they (a) tended to view various geographical areas of the world, Europe and Asia notably, in the perspective of a common world history and (b) that much of what appears in these writings reappears in altered form in better-known classics of their political writing.5 Making a selection of this kind is problematical on several counts. There is, first, the sheer range and quantity; we were, however, determined to have a very short book. Second, Marx and 3

4

5

Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon, 1979, pp. 153–57. See, for instance, Karl Marx, Political Writings (3 volumes), selected with an Introduction by David Fernbach, London, Penguin Classics in association with New Left Books, 1973–74. In an otherwise admirable selection spread over some 1,200 pages, Ireland, India and China together get less than 40 pages, which is all there is in the volumes on colonialism. Extremely useful editions of their selected writings on India, China, Ireland and the Irish Question, Colonialism in general, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany and several such topics have been issued in the past from Progress Publishers in Moscow, International Publishers in New York and Lawrence and Wishart in London. These selections illustrate the voluminous range of their writings on these subjects but the very method of selection and commentary suggests that, with the exception of what they said on the Irish question, what Marx and Engels thought of European nationalisms was unrelated to their views on India or China. A careful reading of the writings of Engels on Germany which we have included in this volume suggests that Marx was to re-work many of these ideas in such later classics as his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Civil War in France.

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INTRODUCTION

Engels wrote extensively on the two key British colonies, Ireland and India, as well as about virtually every nation and nationality in all parts of Europe; we were forced to focus, for reasons of economy, on a very small number of countries while omitting all the rest. Some of their most important writings on nation and nationalism are related to the many nationalities of south and southeastern regions of the Habsburg empire and equally seminal reflections are laced through their voluminous writings on the Crimean War; all that we were forced to ignore.6 Knowing that our selections would offer a rather limited view of the overall vision of Marx and Engels on these issues, we decided to try and clarify the kernel of their arguments and leave the rest to the diligence of others who can find all the rest elsewhere, most notably in the Collected Works (even those are not complete; but there’s a sufficient amount). All this is made very complicated by the sheer depth of erudition on the part of Marx and Engels themselves and the specific nature of their political writings where the theoretical formulation is often so deeply embedded in the analyses of the concrete events of the day that it becomes difficult to separate the broad theory from the actual historical detail without doing violence to the argument itself. Commentaries on parliamentary debates, on speeches and writings of others, on political tendencies which they opposed, and on official and unofficial reports was a favourite method of theirs in expounding their own interpretations of immediate facts from which then emerged the broad theoretical sweep. Their 6

Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Glasgow, Critique Books, 1986. This is a highly useful commentary on Engels’ views on the smaller, mostly Slavic nationalities. The Habsburg empire was a patchwork of numerous and sometimes very small national groups, all of which could possibly not have gained sovereign states of their own. Engels attempted to draw a distinction between what he called ‘historic nations’ (mainly those which had had an independent national state of some size in the past or at least had achieved a high degree of national consolidation, such as Poland or Italy) and the ‘non-historic’ ones (such as southern Slavs) whose claim to nationhood was not based on such consolidation, past or present. Rosdolsky demonstrates with great care how Engels made highly useful and perceptive distinctions in a very difficult situation, even though his actual judgement with respect to some particular national groups, such as the Czechs or Lithuanians, were obviously erroneous.

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ON THE NATIONAL AND COLONIAL QUESTIONS

contemporaries of course knew the details so that the grandeur of theoretical formulation would have been grasped all the more easily thanks to the detail. For a non-specialist, non-academic reader of today, the opposite is the problem. The detail has now become for the majority of us remote and inaccessible. The tendency therefore is to ignore the detail which prompted the generalization in the first place and to simply emphasize the generalization itself, to either accept or reject it more or less abstractly. Much of what has gone wrong in subsequent Marxology, as regards their political writings, stems from the failure to distinguish between two types of general-izations. There are generalizations in Marx and Engels which indeed do refer to the broadest movements in history, but most generalizations in their political writings refer to quite specific historical structures and ought not be applied to other structures too carelessly. If there is a point this book makes which is altogether different from all the other extant selections and commentaries, it is that our understanding of these subjects can be very much richer if we do not detach their thinking on nations and national movements in Europe from their thinking on colony and nation in the Asian context. At the most mundane level, one could say that we would not take so much offence when they use the word ‘barbarian’ for China if we kept in mind that this same word is frequently applied not only to some people in Asia or some smaller Slavic nationalities but also to Germans in general and Austrians in particular, even to some sections of the Irish whose cause they supported so passionately all their lives.7 In stead of consigning them quickly to the world of European racism and ‘orientalism’, it is perhaps more useful to ask what this word, ‘barbarian’, means to them so that it can be used 7

Marx and Engels actually reserved their choicest abuses not for India or China or Algeria or any other people outside Europe, but for Germany. Thus, for instance, in ‘The State of Germany’ (included in this volume) we read: ‘ the German middle classes . . . knew Germany to be nothing but a dungheap, but they were comfortable in the dung because they were dung themselves, and were kept warm by the dung about them. . . . Germany toward the end of the last century . . . was all over one living mass of putrefaction and repulsive decay . . . a mean, sneaking, miserable shopkeeping spirit pervading the whole people.’ The language on the Indian caste system is in fact less vehement.

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INTRODUCTION

in such diverse contexts, Asian as well as European. Those are of course polemical issues, in their own writings and in writings— especially hostile writings—about them. What is the most striking for an attentive reader, however, is that there is a very singular and singularly powerful mental structure at work here which tries to think of Poland one day and India the next day, Germany one day and Ireland the next day, a speech in some parliament one day and modes of production on another, and so on. They try to render intelligible a shared human history that is nevertheless lived differently in diffe-rent historical contexts. II “WITH THE GLOBE FOR A THEATRE . . . ”

Our selections are divided into four sections. Thanks to the fact that among all the thousands of pages that Marx and Engels wrote on issues of nation, nation-states and colonization we find not a single monograph or even a reasonably long text, we are left to reconstruct their thoughts on these subjects from very diverse and scattered materials. The first section, which attempts to capture these issues on the most general level, is also (almost deliberately) the most fragmentary, bringing together various strains in their thought. The section begins with a brief, late text of Engels, much of which has been superceded by later research and which he himself probably intended to revise. Here, he traces in broad strokes how nationalities and nation-states initially emerged in Europe in the course of the prolonged transition from feudalism to capitalism and the role that colonization and absolutism played in the latter phases of this process. The earliest evolution of what he calls ‘the new nationalities’ he traces to the early Middle Ages, when firm linguistic differentiations first begin to emerge along territorial lines. This was to gradually become one of the prime bases for the differentiation among national groups but only after much had changed in the material structures. He points out that the emergence of money economies in Europe provided the first impetus for the desperate search for gold and thus laid the initial foundation of the colonial project, providing in the process great impetus to the European 13

ON THE NATIONAL AND COLONIAL QUESTIONS

bid to dominate foreign trade which for the first time began to take international proportions well beyond the European waters. One might add that organization of foreign conquests beyond the seas played a key role in the consolidation of major states within Europe, since that enterprise was inconceivable without concentration of power and resources while the wealth that was obtained through colonial conquests in turn played a key role in stabilizing new types of courts, armies, bureaucracies and an altogether new kind of bourgeoisie, eventually contri-buting to the Industrial Revolution itself. That same process also provided the impetus for enclosing specific territories into consolidated monarchical realms, often through brutal warfare. The foundations for the modern nation-state in Europe were thus laid in the period of absolutism, and Engels greatly emphasizes the historically necessary role that monarchy played in guaranteeing the rise of the burghers against the feudal classes and in obtaining stable territorial states. He perceptively remarks that the first victory over the feudal classes was secured not so much by the bourgeoisie as by the monarchy. This provides us with a perspective on the state in the transition to capitalism which later Marxists were to develop fruitfully. In India and many other parts of Asia and Africa, where colonialism largely destroyed the classic precapitalist formations, it was precisely the colonial structure itself which prevented the rise of fully-fledged, authentic bourgeois class of the sort that arose in the core countries of what then became advanced capitalism. Conversely, however, Germany and Italy were peculiar among the ‘historic nations’ of Europe not to develop a unified nation-state under their own monarchies, so that the issue of their national unification was to be settled only in the latter half of the 19th century. In all phases of this evolution, establishment of national legal regimes and develop-ments in language, literature and the arts greatly helped the emergence of stable national identities in the cultural sphere as well. This is followed then by a famous extract from Marx, Capital volume 1, on the genesis of the industrial capitalist which again emphasizes the centrality of colonialism in the phase of primary capital accumulation within Europe. ‘In England at the end of the 14

INTRODUCTION

17 century,’ Marx says, ‘they arrive at a systematic combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the State.’ He illustrates ‘the preponderant role that colonialism plays at the time’ with some specific examples of the transfer of wealth from India to Britain, as well as of the brutalities of murder and extortion in the Americas. But an almost equal centrality is accorded to the state protectionist policies, taxation systems and legal structures deemed necessary for ‘manufacturing the manufacturers’ and for ‘capitalizing the national means of production.’ It is through these economic structures and political processes that territorial nations become nation-states. That centrality of the state in the transition to industrial society has become much clearer in the century and a half since those words were first written. The case of countries which adopted the non-capitalist path to industrialization, such as the USSR or China, is obvious enough. There is also, however, no instance among the late-industrializing countries, be they Germany and Japan in the somewhat earlier phase or South Korea and Taiwan more recently, where the breakthrough has been possible without the state playing the pivotal role. Even in India, a very partially industrialized country so far, it was the state which, in the years immediately after Independence, did so much to ‘manu-facture the manufacturers’ through such mechanisms as protectionism, import substitution, central planning, proliferation of state-sponsored credit, large-scale investments in the public sector to sustain and subsidize the private sector, and so on. ‘The Movements of 1847’ by Engels, drafted barely a month after Marx had finished the final draft of the Manifesto, addresses more recent developments and introduces a theme that remained constant in all their very copious writings on the 1848 revolution: that Europe was witnessing not a proletarian revolution but an immense upsurge of the national question and a series of popular revolts against absolutism. The immediate task for communists, therefore, was to struggle for the abolition of monarchical absolutism, for the victory th

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“Any nation that oppresses another forges its own chains.” Marx and Engels were first drawn into political militancy on issue of the national unification of their native land, Germany, and the creation of a democratic republic there in stead of monarchical autocracy. They had begun studying the colonial question in diverse countries from Ireland to India and China, as well as the national question in several European countries such as Poland, in their youth. Then, the decade which followed the publication of the Communist Manifesto witnessed the national-democratic revolutions of 1848 all across Europe and the country-wide uprisings in India during 1857–59. They participated actively in the European revolutions and thought deeply about British colonialism in India, writing thousands of pages on these developments across continents. Their reflections on India and China were crucial in Marx’s later and more mature work, notably Capital, where colonialism is seen as a fundamental element in the primary accumulation of capital within Europe. Similarly, the German experience made them deeply aware of the frequent counter-revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie even in the national-democratic revolutions. Their analysis of European nationalisms on the one hand, and of the colonial experience in Asia on the other, are usually seen as totally separate bodies of writing. This selection, put together by eminent Marxist scholar Aijaz Ahmad, is unique in that it tries to see all of that work as part of a single political and theoretical project. AIJAZ AHMAD has taught and lectured at many universities across the world. He is the author of several books, including Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of Our Time (2004), Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (1995), and In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992).

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