Nation and International

I.

While the spectre of communism today terrifies to death the capitalist class of all countries and forces it to permanently mobilize against the international proletariat fighting under the banner of socialism, while the heroic resistance of Soviet Russia against the White Guard mercenary armies set in motion again and again by world capital challenges the international mass solidarity of the revolutionary proletariat of all countries, while, in a word, the final struggle between capital and labor has created a gigantic front which, regardless of national barriers and accidental national borders, is tearing humanity more and more apart into two hostile camps, which are grouping themselves ever more decisively and consciously around the two poles of exploiters and exploited, while the greatest class struggle in world history, the struggle for socialism, is in full swing across all countries, peoples and states, the communist vanguard of the struggling proletariat has the task not only of fighting in the front line, but also of advancing the ideology of the international class struggle and keeping class consciousness alive in the broad masses of the proletariat that follow, thus increasing their will to fight.

In other words: In a situation where the social revolution has reached its decisive stage and in a country like Germany, which forms the focal point of world revolutionary development, everything depends on formulating the idea of the international class struggle as sharply as possible and making it the leitmotif of proletarian world politics. A truly proletarian Communist Party, such as the Communist Workers' Party of Germany, must not content itself with the fundamental rejection of any kind of “National Bolshevism”; it must also fight the first signs of tendencies which, on the surface, appear to move in the haze of, let us say, a purified nationalism. We want to say it openly: The ideology of the so-called Hamburg Tendency is not and cannot be the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat, because the starting point and the goal in both cases are fundamentally different from each other. If we still have cause to examine the relationship between nation and class struggle, it is not because new historical experiences demand a revision of basic socialist knowledge, but because the recent publications of comrades Laufenberg and Wolffheim make a critical examination of Hamburg Communism unavoidable. If we want to do justice to this strange phenomenon, we should actually try to expose its psychological roots. But that is not the point. Our interest concentrates on grasping the basic problem of Hamburg Communism, i.e. determining its theoretical starting point, and then examining whether or not the historical method of Laufenberg and Wolffheim can be reconciled with the principles of the materialist conception of history. To put it more clearly: do the basic tendencies of Hamburg Communism not lie in the direction of what has become the intellectual common property of the revolutionary proletariat of all countries under the guiding star of scientific socialism?

II.

Hamburg Communism is not an accidental product of today and yesterday. It is naturally rooted in its immediate homeland, in the history of the Hamburg labor movement. Just as pre-war German imperialism was able to force the entire German labor movement under its spell, which can be clearly seen in the ever-increasing growth of reformist tendencies, it is not surprising that Hamburg, the great gateway of German imperialism, seemed particularly suited to prepare the ground for certain currents in the local labor movement. Modern imperialism is not merely a political affair, born of the compulsion of historical-economic laws, which places exclusively political problems on the agenda of history. Above every political sphere in which modern imperialism has an effect, there is another sphere which, in organic connection with it, simultaneously brings the world of thought of nationalism to fruition in such a way that imperialism in its full bloom allows the corresponding nationalism to appear in all its glory. The contradiction between imperialism and nationalism, in so far as the latter breaks out in the overcoming of national ideas, in the suppression of national independence, in the supranational organization of whole systems of states, is only apparent. The subjugation of foreign communities to the English empire means not only the economic exploitation of those communities but also the triumph of English nationalism. It is the victory of the English capitalist class as a nation over politically and economically less developed nations. It is the victory of the Anglo-Saxon idea, the victory of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Did German imperialism, crushed on the battlefields of Flanders and northern France, perhaps have a significantly different ideology? Were not the theoreticians of German imperialism also the bearers of the “German idea in the world”? And what about Russian imperialism with its specifically pan-Slavist ideology?

As you can see, imperialism in its rise is also nationalism in its historical perfection. And so it is no coincidence that today's Hamburg Communism has taken on a form that, in its basic direction, represents a concession to bourgeois nationalist ideology.

III.

Even the most vehement criticism of the basic tendency of Hamburg Communism will be forced to recognize that, thanks to Laufenberg and Wolffheim, the problem of the Versailles peace treaty has been grasped for the first time in its full significance and scope for the German proletariat and for the entire world revolutionary development. In other words, the realization is breaking through in the proletarian camp that it is not possible to deal with world political problems by ignoring them or by trying to brush them aside with empty ways of life. The fact of the Versailles peace is in fact such a bulwark of world capital against the progress of the world revolution that the Spartacist League's lame statement on the Versailles peace problem takes on symptomatic significance in relation to the interruption of further world revolutionary development by the reformism of the Spartacists. It is to the credit of comrades Laufenberg and Wolffheim that they have opened up a historical perspective with which the German proletariat must familiarize itself under all circumstances. The political error committed by the Hamburgers consists in the fact that they consider only this single historical possibility of development, and that they regard the war with Entente capital, which they consider inevitable, as necessary today in the center of proletarian-communist politics. The decisive point, however, is under what conditions the future war with the Entente is to take place. Anticipating that such a war could perhaps present the German proletariat with an insoluble task in view of the Entente's enormous technical and industrial superiority, they come to the conclusion that a proletarian Germany would only be able to wage a war externally with any prospect of success if the counter-revolution did not simultaneously shake its head internally. In other words: in the interest of a successful war against the Entente bourgeoisie, we must not allow civil war to break out in Germany after the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship. To put it another way: we must try to engage the recently defeated German bourgeoisie and its satellites by making certain political concessions for the war against their class comrades and capitalist friends in the Entente countries, so that we can first deal a death blow to Entente capital. By no means civil war at home (that would be counter-revolutionary in this situation), but the full force of the “people's whole” reunited in the “revolutionary truce” against the capitalist-ruled peoples of the Entente is the so-called “revolutionary people's war” that forms the leitmotif of Hamburg Communism.

First of all, what would such a “revolutionary people's war” have to look like in reality? Assuming that the German bourgeoisie could find itself ready for this “revolutionary truce”, it would certainly only do so on one condition: Maintaining the capitalist mode of production in Germany. For it is absolutely impossible to see what interest it would have in a war that pursued the political goal of bringing down capitalism in the Entente countries as well as establishing socialism in Germany. And to expect the German business community to want nothing more than to cooperate in the destruction of the capitalist system throughout the world would be – to put it mildly – naivety.

The German bourgeoisie would therefore have to make the renunciation of socialism the conditio sine qua non. It is self-evident that no council government could agree to this, and because socialism is the conditio sine qua non for a council Germany, in the event of a war with Entente capital civil war within Germany would also have to be reckoned with, because in this case the solidarity of capitalist interests between the German and Entente bourgeoisie would become fully apparent. Therefore, if civil war is to be avoided at all costs, it will be necessary to abandon the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship altogether, since the dictatorship of the proletariat and the hated civil war are one and the same thing. The day after the social revolution does not bring the end, but the beginning of the civil war, because it can bring about an end to the “expropriation of the expropriators, the struggle with each individual entrepreneur, i.e. the struggle along the whole line. The realization of socialism – that is civil war in its most terrible form and on its most violent scale. That is why there can only be one alternative: “civil war or renunciation of socialism”. Whether or not one considers civil war to be harmful in a particular situation is irrelevant. The question can only be: Can we achieve socialism without civil war? But one could just as well ask: Can we achieve victory without fighting? The speculation on the stupidity or self-denial of the bourgeoisie is far more deserving of the label: counter-revolutionary. The reason is that by playing with the idea of a revolutionary truce in the ranks of the proletariat determined to fight, extremely harmful confusion is created, from which the counter-revolution draws the best advantage.

IV.

Without going any further into the question of the possibility or necessity of “revolutionary truce”, we would rather try to uncover the root from which such dreams of truce must quite naturally sprout. One need only look at the statement of comrades Laufenberg and Wolffheim on the World War and one immediately knows what ultimate motives helped the idea of truce with the bourgeoisie to come into being. In the pamphlet “Communism against Spartacism”, which in our view represents a complete capitulation of scientific socialism to the most popular nationalism, the two authors quote from a pamphlet they wrote at the beginning of the war entitled “Democracy and Organization”. It reads:

“The proletariat has a natural interest in the preservation of the social economy, not in so far as it is the exploitative function of the minority, but in so far as it is the vital function of the whole. It must oppose the tearing apart of uniform economic areas, the bringing of more highly developed economies under the domination of lower ones. It must defend itself against the right to national independence, which it accords to all nations, being violated in its own nation. In cases of war, which threaten the economy in its vital function, this results in the military subordination of the proletariat to the given military leadership.”

In other words: the German proletariat places itself under the black-white-red banner of Hindenburg, Ludendorff and Tirpitz, since they are only waging war for the German economy, which is formally the function of the minority, but for the social economy, insofar as it is a vital function of society as a whole. Scheidemann, David and Heine used the same arguments to justify their war policy, as did the French, English and other social patriots. And if comrades Laufenberg and Wolffheim believe that they have to invoke Lenin to prove the correctness of their view by quoting a paragraph from his treatise “The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution”, the evidence of which is supposed to coincide with their arguments on the point of national defence, then we have to conclude that Lenin's view is quite different, that Lenin speaks of national defense in quite a different sense from that of his Hamburg comrades, that his recognition of national defense refers to national uprisings of tribes which have not yet passed through the stage of capitalism, and that furthermore he speaks of the national defense of the victorious proletariat, a view which every Marxist will probably accept. But we must also note that Lenin's conception of national defense, as far as the imperialist war of 1914-18 is concerned, is polar different from the Hamburg position. In the essay “Principles of Socialism” and “The War of 1914-15”, Lenin, in full agreement with Rosa Luxemburg, provides concise proof that for this imperialist war the recognition of national defense by the proletariat would be tantamount to the bankruptcy of the international class struggle. At one point it says: “Whoever now refers to Marx's relation to the wars in the epoch of bourgeois progress, and forgets Marx's words: ‘The workers have no fatherland’, the words which refer especially to the reactionary epoch of the surviving bourgeoisie, to the epoch of the social revolution, is shamelessly falsifying Marx, and substituting the bourgeois conception for the socialist one.” Since we have started with Lenin, let us not let the opportunity pass by without examining the available documents on the association of the reference to such an outstanding Marxist. Look up, for example, the chapter “What is Internationalism?” from Lenin's “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and you will immediately realize that Lenin's strongest criticism is directed precisely at Kautsky's “internationalism”. Lenin writes: “All recognition of the defense of the fatherland is, from the standpoint of the proletariat, the justification of the given war, the recognition of its legality. But since the war remains an imperialist war - regardless of where the enemy troops are at a given moment - in its own country or in a foreign country - the recognition of the defense of the fatherland means in reality the support of the imperialist, predatory bourgeoisie, the complete betrayal of socialism [...]. Lenin, by the way, also polemicized his particular opinion on the “military subordination to the given army command” recommended by the Hamburg comrades against Kautsky's criticism of the attitude of the Bolsheviks who, under the Kerensky government, i.e. after the fall of tsardom, pursued the “disorganization” of the army. But let Lenin speak: “Without the ‘disorganization’ of the army, no great revolution has taken place and none can take place. For the army is the most ossified instrument of support for the old regime, the firmest stronghold of bourgeois discipline, the maintenance of the rule of capital, the preservation and education of slavish devotion and servility of the working masses to capital”. And further:

“If a German under Wilhelm or a Frenchman under Clemenceau had to say that I, as a socialist, have the right and the duty to protect my homeland when the enemy invades my country, that would not be the statement of a socialist, an internationalist, not the statement of a revolutionary proletarian, but of a philistine and nationalist. If in such a statement there is no reference to the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat, the class fighter, the worker against capital, the assessment of the whole war as an overall phenomenon from the standpoint of the world bourgeoisie and the world proletariat; internationalism is missing and all that remains is a miserable, ossified nationalism.”

That is probably enough for now. The above quotations also suffice to illustrate the equally erroneous and misleading assertion that Lenin proceeded “from the fundamental concept of the nation”. If he did, he would rightly deserve the title of “national communist”, and it is precisely in the admission of the Hamburg comrades that their socialist orientation is based on the “fundamental concept of the nation”, i.e. that for them the fact of the nation forms the starting point for their position on world revolutionary development, that the explanation for the unproletarian character of their war policy lies. This is also the psychological explanation for the possibility of the equally unproletarian idea of “revolutionary truce”, but it is also the explanation for the absolutely anti-proletarian and anti-socialist conception of the International as a “federation of free nations”. Here we come up against the basic problem of Hamburg Communism, i.e., here we come to the point where Hamburg Communism itself becomes problematic, where the big question mark appears: Is Hamburg ideology still moving in the line of scientific socialism or has the materialist-dialectical method already been abandoned? In other words, what is the regulative principle of scientific socialism according to the materialist conception of history?

V.

That in Marxism the “basic concept of the nation” should form the starting point of the historical-materialist approach contradicts the basic elements of the very first communist address, which found unconditional recognition within the revolutionary proletariat of all countries under the name “Communist Manifesto”. The starting point there is really not the “basic concept of the nation”. Rather, it consists in the recognition of the importance of class struggles as the main factor of historical development. One could perhaps interject: Didn't Marx and Engels also make the “fundamental concept of the nation” the starting point of their political orientation? Did they not see a historically progressive moment in national wars and were they not passionately committed to German, Italian, Polish and other unification efforts? They certainly did! And as historians, they had very important reasons for doing so. They saw national unification as a historical necessity for the full development of the capitalist mode of production. But they would have declared it utter nonsense if socialists in the era of imperialism, i.e., in the era of the destruction of nations, had wanted to elevate the idea of the nation to the starting point of their politics. To speak of national wars in the age of imperialism is not an absurdity only for petty-bourgeois ideology. But one should not use the examples of India and Egypt, since a comparison between these and capitalistically developed countries is not historically appropriate. What is certain is that in today's Europe, in Europe after the imperialist world war, the time of national wars is definitely over. Thus, for the socialist, the question of the nation is not a question of actuality. This is not to say that anyone wants to deny the existence of nations, nor is it to say that the importance of the nation as a problem of racial biology deserves to be underestimated in any way. But the socialist who starts from the “basic concept of the nation” is no longer a Marxist. Even the reference to the misunderstood Lenin cannot change this. Lenin said, among other things: “The idea of the legal separation of nationalities from one another (the so-called national cultural autonomy of Otto Bauer and Renner) is a reactionary idea.”

In any case, the foundation of the Marxist conception of history does not lie in the idea of the nation, but in the basic realization that “all history up to now has been a history of class struggles.” Class struggle is the regulative principle of world history. Bourgeois ideology may beat itself over the head with this iron fact, it may try to spread the fog of nationalist phrases over the abyss of class antagonisms, but it will never succeed in getting rid of the fact itself. History will always prove it wrong. The most miserable wage struggle will establish the historical facts again and again. The phrase “the people as a whole” is the embarrassing babble of the bourgeois world, which is too inherited with its political Latin. The world-historical fact of the class struggle in permanence is the negation of the “people as a whole” or the nation. The argument that the fact of class division presupposes the existence of the nation, since the disintegration into individual parts requires the prior existence of the whole, says nothing at all, since it asserts something that no one disputes. What matters is the realization that the fact of class antagonisms explodes the “national whole” and moves beyond the alleged commonality of “national” interests to the order of the day. In the final analysis, economics always triumphs over ideology, including national ideology. And since the class struggles of the present no longer aim to raise the position of the working class within the capitalist system, but to smash international supranational capitalism itself, the necessity arises to organize the struggle against this world system of exploitation exclusively from an economic point of view. We warn against any misunderstanding here, as if the use of exclusively economic means of struggle were being proposed. The demand that the struggle against world capital should be based on nothing but economic considerations is rooted in the basic fact that in the epoch of imperialism national religious or cultural peculiarities of any kind have at the moment been reduced to such insignificance (which is of course not the case in itself) that the ideological process is becoming more and more uniform and clear in its direction: World capital and the world proletariat are the two essential poles around which humanity is grouped. Any other orientation is relatively meaningless for the present epoch. This orientation, which is based on the – incidentally – increasingly problematic “basic concept of the nation”, is necessarily counter-revolutionary today.

The theoretical starting point of Hamburg's ideology logically implies a corresponding view of the nature of the International. According to Laufenberg and Wolffheim, the International is identical with the “federation of nations”. Here, personal desire seems to have taken precedence over historical insight into the laws of the proletarian revolution. The fact that personal desire dominates over objective recognition is clearly shown in the open recognition, where there is talk of the subordination of the class organizations of the proletariat to the “unity and freedom of the nation”. (See the May newspaper of the K.A.Z.). But without dwelling on the question of whether will or knowledge determines the ideologue here – this much is certain: neither socialist will nor Marxist knowledge can ever make such a monstrous historical somersault possible. The explanation is perhaps to be found in the strange Hamburg theory of history, that the proletarian revolution would have to take up where the failed bourgeois revolution left off, which is an interested view of history, since historical development has in fact already taken other paths. The idea of the nation, which could not be realized by the bourgeois revolution, is unfortunately definitely shelved, since imperialism is thoroughly pursuing the denationalization of humanity and socialism may not have much left to realize the “unity and freedom of the nation”. Since the bourgeois-capitalist world is obviously no longer interested in realizing the tendencies of 1848 because it necessarily had to outgrow them under the signature of imperialism, any possibility of connecting with them would be a historical absurdity.

But apart from that, there is no obligation for socialism to bring its historical future into organic connection with the carcass of bourgeois society. Socialism is the antipode of bourgeois society, it is not only the antipode of bourgeois thought, it can only be realized – on the grave of the bourgeois world. Socialism is the construction of an absolutely new world with an absolutely new ideology. That is why the bourgeois concept of the nation loses all meaning and content in a socialist world. Socialism only begins where the nation ends, i.e. it moves beyond what is still understood by nation today.

VI.

Thus, in conclusion, we are faced with the question of how the construction of the nascent International must take place from the standpoint of scientific socialism if the term “International” is to represent more than just an empty shell of words. What does the revolutionary proletariat understand by the nascent International? Certainly not what Laufenberg and Wolffheim understand by it. In their view, the essence of the international is limited to: “The working masses of the German people, constituted as a ruling class, that is the free German nation, which will extend its hand to the free people of Russia in order to lay the foundation stone for the federation of nations, for the union of free peoples, for the freedom of the world”. (May Appeal of the K.A.Z.)

It is obvious that such a perspective on history runs counter to the basic idea of scientific socialism. Where on earth has the Marxist conception of history, whose theoretical point of departure is not based on the “fundamental concept of the nation”, ever proclaimed the federation of nations as the ultimate goal of socialism? Nationalism is a matter of the bourgeois world. The establishment of nation states was the purpose of all bourgeois revolutions. Historical development has not followed this path to the end. The national tendencies characteristic of the birth pangs of modern capitalism turn into the opposite at a certain stage of historical development. Imperialism, as a supranational and international system of world exploitation, passes over the “unity and freedom of the nation” to the agenda without sentimental sighs. The world war and its “conclusion under international law” in Versailles provide tangible arguments. The unity of the nation has been shattered into atoms in the wheels of history. Socialism will have other things to do than to patch up an organism that now only vegetates ideologically as a historical atavism and, through its apparent existence, irritates the proletariat's world of thought to a dangerous degree. The union of free peoples or the “federation of nations” – this Wilsonian idea – was bound to emerge at the starting point of an epoch in which the destruction of nations had become an unstoppable fact of human history. Once again, a confusing ideology tried to hold on to what the crumbling wheel of economics had already consigned to destruction. Historically, the world of nationalism is definitely finished. Socialism is entering the arena of world history.

Socialism is different from the bourgeois-capitalist world in its innermost dimensions. It does not overlook the existence of nations or their miserable remnants, but it ignores a fact that does not interest it at the moment, i.e. must not interest it. Socialism in the decisive stage after the conquest of political power knows only one goal: overcoming capitalism. Capitalism as an organized state power can only be broken by the organized state power of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the capitalist class is necessarily opposed by the dictatorship of the proletariat. But in view of the fact that the capitalism of each individual country can only be regarded as the goal of the world capitalist system, the victory of the proletariat in the individual country means nothing other than the partial success of the world proletariat united in solidarity against capitalism as a whole. Thus it would be a phenomenal thoughtlessness to claim that the victory of the Russian proletariat over its capitalist class would be synonymous with its constitution as a Russian nation. The victory of the Russian proletariat is the elimination of the power of world capital over the means of production, formally the Russian economic area in question. It has never occurred to the Russian proletariat to constitute itself as a nation, but it regards itself as the champion of the world proletariat, to whose international solidarity it is compelled to appeal at every moment. If the proletarian revolution in Germany and Poland is victorious, there will be a socialist economic bloc stretching from the Rhine to the Urals. The signature of such an international economic alliance lies precisely in the fact that the class organizations of the proletariat realize socialism outside the framework of nations. And since socialism means the fundamental upheaval of all previous economics and ideology, the highest potency of socialism can only be founded in the internationalism of economics and ideology. In our opinion, this alone can be seen as the historical meaning of the International. But to reduce the essence of the International to the “federation of nations” is in fact to carry nationalism to extremes. Bourgeois nationalism was still relatively modest. It was limited to the propaganda of the national idea in relation to one's own country, which was tantamount to the deliberate destruction of all hostile nationalisms. Laufenberg and Wolffheim, however, preached the federation of nations, i.e. the sum of all existing or conceivable nationalisms. That would be nationalism thought to its final consequence. In reality, the final consequence has not yet been drawn. Hamburg Communism has so far failed to do one thing: define what it actually understands by nation. This final consequence is necessary in the interest of general clarification. And we have no doubt that the next and final step will lead to the problematic field of racial-biological hypotheses, because the historical retreat into the bourgeois world is identical with the retreat to the “foundations of the XIXth century”. One step further and we will see capitalism degraded to a racial problem. Once you enter the slippery slope of nationalism, you are hopelessly lost. We say it openly: Hamburg nationalism is a danger to the proletarian revolution. The German Communist Workers' Party must face up to this danger. The arguments of the Spartacus League, dictated by party egoism, cannot make an impression on us, nor will consideration for the “authorities” of the Third International to transform the struggle against the Hamburg direction into a struggle against individuals. A polemic with Laufenberg and Wolffheim does not apply to them as persons: rather, the necessary confrontation with them is a struggle for the fundamental idea of communism.

This alone is the point of this polemic. The object of dispute is not Laufenberg and Wolffheim, but the ideology they have developed. It is our fight against this ideology, which shimmers in all the colors of the rainbow of nationalism, that we formulate the idea of international class solidarity in the sharpest possible terms. It is the leitmotif of the proletarian revolution. It alone is also the leitmotif of proletarian world politics. Whoever subordinates the idea of international class solidarity to the “basic concept of the nation” denies socialism and the proletarian revolution. Either one commits oneself to the idea of socialism or to that of nationalism. The Second International fell apart because of the impossible compromise between these two mutually exclusive fundamental directions of history. May the Third International learn the right lesson from this.