Communism and Nation

 Liberation of the nation and liberation of the oppressed classes went together for the Chinese communists from the beginning. 

“There can be no salvation from this situation if China does not pick itself up into a country-wide movement for the people’s right to self-determination. ... We still hope that all revolutionary elements of our society will join the Kuomintang to accelerate the victory of the national revolutionary movement. At the same time, we hope that the Kuomintang will resolutely abandon its two previous guiding principles, trust in foreign countries and concentration on military force.... Considering the economic and political conditions at home and abroad, as well as the suffering and needs of those classes of Chinese society (workers, peasants, industrialists and merchants) who urgently need the national revolution, the Communist Party of China never forgets that it represents the interests of workers and peasants.... It is our mission to liberate the oppressed Chinese nation through a national revolution and to advance to the world revolution that will liberate the oppressed peoples and classes of the whole world. Long live China’s national revolution! Long live the liberation of the oppressed peoples of the world! Long live the liberation of the oppressed classes of the world!” (Manifesto of the Third National Congress of the CCP, June 1923)

And they saw a clear sequence in which these goals were to be achieved: They regarded the national revolution as a decisive prerequisite for being able to end the misery of the oppressed classes. In this way, the Chinese revolutionaries programmatically linked two things that have nothing to do with each other, which indeed even include a real contradiction: communism and nationalism. The liberation of China from foreign powers is a struggle for the sovereignty of a nation. The communists line up for this as Chinese patriots who, as such, band together with popular forces and the national bourgeoisie. The result of this struggle – a free and united China – is to be the first and decisive step in solving all the other issues they want to raise and tackle as communists. However, the reason for the miserable conditions of the Chinese masses, which they want to criticize and overcome in practice as a communist opposition, is not the foreign rule of external powers, but rather the relations of production to which peasants and workers are subjected and in which they are exploited: land ownership in the countryside, capitalistic production in the cities. From a standpoint of a communist movement, this property order must therefore be eliminated in order to establish a planned production for the benefit of all producers. The nationality of the landlord or owner – whether Japanese, German or Chinese – is completely irrelevant to this struggle; at best, it becomes interesting when imperialist states do not acquiesce to their citizens’ property interests being snipped off and intervene with violence. But even in this case, it would not be a nation that needs defending, but what the revolutionaries have fought for: the freedom to build a life for their benefit. 

In their “Manifesto,” the Chinese communists themselves involuntarily admit that there is a contradiction in their decision to enter a “national united front.” They explicitly affirm that they do not want to forget the interests of workers and peasants by agitating first for the national revolution. Why is this assurance necessary? Obviously, because national liberation, which is supposedly “needed” by all classes of Chinese society, does not concur with the interests of the workers and peasants or the communist critique of their past economic exploitation and oppression by the state apparatus. The slogan for the world revolutionary liberation of “all oppressed peoples” is therefore also followed by the slogan for the liberation of “all oppressed classes” – also a clear indication that these are two different pairs of shoes and that the liberation of the oppressed classes has not yet been initiated in any way when a people is “self-determining.” The Chinese communists, however, with their assertions and twists, are aiming at exactly the opposite message. They claim that there is no serious conflict between the nation’s cause and their communist program, but that, on the contrary, the two fit together and are inextricably linked. 

The Chinese CP therefore committed itself very impartially to two flags at the same time: communism and nationalism, liberation of the masses from exploitation and liberation of the nation from external and internal shackles. Theoretically, it was as unwilling to see and accept the incompatibility of the two goals as it was ready in practice to repeatedly assert this in pursuing the same. In order to make it easier to grasp the presentation of this contradictory politics and its forms in the decades of socialist construction, here are some basic remarks on the necessary incompatibility of communism and nationalism (which wants to prompt the criticism of other socialist state projects of past history as well).  

1. The “Communist Manifesto” briefly and succinctly says: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.” (Marx/Engels) Marx and Engels thus thought  that the objective of socialist or communist revolution – to abolish the rule of capitalist exploitation – does not end at any borders. Therefore, the revolutionary class struggle that they called for is international in its content, even if the revolutionaries have to first deal with their respective national state, which protects property with its force. This idea was quite self-evident to the two of them – especially in view of what they observed in the preceding pages of the “Manifesto”: how the aspiring Western European bourgeoisie is about to conquer the world and stops at nothing and nobody with its profit calculations – especially not at some outdated national habits or customs and traditions. [1]

The idea was just as self-evident to them that a revolutionary workers movement has to lead a political struggle to abolish state power in general, at least ultimately – after an intermediate stage, which they called, with no tendency to whitewash, the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the new socialist society, class antagonism is eliminated along with the class of capitalist owners who exploit the workers; the new collectively planned production is for the first time the economy of a society whose goal is to supply its members and which is also – on the basis of the level achieved by the productive forces – able to provide this; in this society, the antagonistic opposition between the classes, which was present in a variety of forms in previous stages of human history, is finally overcome – so the reason for the (continued) existence of a ruling force ceases to exist. Exclusion from wealth and the exploitation of one class by another has so far correlated with their protection by the state power; if it no longer exists, the state “withers away”; all that is left is an administration for functionally performing what the members of society want to accomplish in terms of production and supply: “The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production.” (Engels, Anti-Dühring) 

But it is not only the reasons for violence within society that disappear. The new communist community doesn’t have any economic interests or political ends for which it makes sense to deploy violence externally: It does not compete for sources of wealth or sales markets; the revolutionary will to eliminate the capitalist economy elsewhere depends on the damaged people in those places standing up against exploitation and state violence. Supporting revolutionary movements elsewhere is therefore different than conquering foreign states. The necessary force that remains serves to defend the freedom to establish a society for the benefit of the producers against economic and state interests that do not want to accept it. 

This social criticism, the party that wants to impose it, and the society that it aspires to is called “communist” because its main characteristic is that it is an association for collectively organizing the economy to maximally benefit all those involved in it. This is what distinguishes the communist community:

- that its members – at least after a transitional period – freely decide to belong and participate in it, 

- that its purpose is to organise a planned economy as rationally as possible, 

- that its members set this purpose through an objective discussion and verify the extent to which its implementation conforms with their interests; 

- that it has no “higher” value beyond the well-being of its members. 

2. “Nation” is also about community. There are various (and quite contradictory) attempts to justify it with language, history, or culture. A logical commonality becomes clear in all of these. The constituent moment of the nation is sought above all in what has been removed from the will and calculation of the individuals belonging to the nation: nation is not free will and rational decision, but – in one way or another – “the way things turned out,” tradition, fate. It is not a coincidence that it sounds hazy and rhetorical whenever nation is talked about, but inevitable. When nation is spoken of, it is not about the mean business of everyday political life, but about higher things. Here a pre-political context is postulated that makes the state and the respective government appear to be expressions of and servants to a national collective that already exists independently of it – which turns the truth upside down. 

The state’s forced association, which delimits a territory from the outside and creates its own people within it, is legitimized in this construct and exaggerated into the idea of a great whole in which rulers and ruled, above and below, are equally involved. All differences and antagonisms within a society – up to and including the class antagonism – are thus declared irrelevant to what “really” unites all statuses, strata, and classes: belonging to the national collective and the quasi-natural obligation to want its success. Nation, then, is the kind of collectivity brought on by a bourgeois society with its antagonistic opposites, which the political rule establishes and uses. 

Its truth lies in nothing other than the state’s supervision and use of the capitalistic class society. Its everyday economic life is characterized by an all-around competition in which enrichment at the expense of the other “market participants” is the declared purpose and a corresponding negative connection between the competitors is the rule. But it is precisely this point of departure – the alleged wolf’s nature of humans – that the members of a bourgeois competitive society strangely agree on: in order to protect their interests against others and to prevent the latter from attacking them and their property, they want a force that promotes and legally monitors their opposition to one another – the bourgeois state. As citizens, they really do have one thing in common: they are all subjected to a ruling power; they are thus part of a nation. The same people who, in their everyday economic competition, are negatively dependent on each other and mistrust each other, regard themselves as brothers and sisters. 

Such an event is necessarily dishonest. Its high points take place beyond bourgeois everyday life, as official state celebrations or patriotic mass events (World Cup!) where there are only Germans who hug each other full of national feeling. The nation is therefore characterized 

- by the fact that belonging to the nation is the work of the state and isn’t left up to the discretion of the individuals who belong to it [2] and that the state force is this community’s origin and permanent condition of existence; 

- by the fact that the purpose of the nation is itself – on the one hand, it can’t be justified, on the other hand, it is all about filling empty phrases with any desired content; 

- by the fact that all the actual differences and conflicts among its members are declared irrelevant, so that the national feeling of “we” can only arise if the parties involved disregard their practical interests; 

- by the fact that the respective national purpose is defined by rule and accepted and put into practice by a people willing to serve without any probing demands, 

- by the fact that it stands polemically against all individual calculations and, conversely, functions as a supreme value for all its members – a value which, in emergency cases, demands the sacrifice of the goods and lives of the entire people. 

3. The concerns of the nation and communist politics are therefore rather difficult to reconcile. This is not particularly surprising, but very logical – after all, communist criticism aims precisely at the program that is ideologically and pompously expressed in “nation.” While bourgeois-democratic states not only have few problems with the delusional irrationality of this national idea, but on the contrary have a positive and well-promoted means to give their societies the desired cohesion with a national cultural orientation, the communist movement is critical of the national ideology – it defines itself inter-nationalistically. In its history, however, it has found the national question very difficult to deal with from the beginning. [3] This needs to be explained, but it can’t be done within this framework. At this point, only a few hints can be given: 

- Marx and Engels did not provide a precise and comprehensive determination of the state and nation in the emerging capitalist societies of their time. In the “Communist Manifesto,” the phrase occurs: “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The “but” in this statement can at least be interpreted as saying that the state could actually be more than a servant of the interests of the bourgeoisie – especially since Marx and Engels emphasized that the modern bourgeoisie itself had to fight for this state against its previous feudal form of governance. The proletarian struggles that have existed since the early days of the states constituted by the market-economy, and the few practical attempts to overcome capitalism through socialist societies, have in any case been largely oriented by this notion – the idea that there could also be a state power that is better and ultimately more beneficial for the working class.

- Since the beginning of the 20th century at the latest, the workers’ movement, which until then had seen the state act as a pure enemy of its wage struggles and union organizing, took the first steps towards legal and social state supervision of the wage relation as a sign that their conerns were not completely out of place in this state. It did not grasp that legal regulations for wage labor (protection of work times, social insurance) are an expression of the fact that in capitalist production the state has to rule over the beneficiaries of this order in order to maintain the means of their profit-making in the long run – with a few elementary considerations for the survival needs of the working class. Against the conclusion that it is the state with its law and its force that establishes and keeps alive this mode of production with its anti-worker interests through the protection of property, that its order produces all the misery that it possibly then alleviates in a second step, but in any case looks after economically and for the benefit of the state, it preferred to see the relevant activities of the state as its (supposedly) better “social” side. (For more details, see Decker/Hecker Das Proletariat) Even if social democratic and radical socialist parties subsequently still had differences in that some considered the “parliamentary road” to be a possibly big enough transformation of the existing state, while others still considered a total overthrow of political conditions necessary – in one respect, “reformists” and “revolutionaries” were quite unanimous in the opinion that statehood could look quite different and better than the hitherto ruling “executive committee of the bourgeoisie.” Since then, the social democratic parties have tried to promote the interests of the workers in democratic parliaments by fighting for the rights and welfare state care of this socially disadvantaged class. Where the struggles of the socialist-communist parties were successful, they organized real socialist states in which, once the bourgeois exploiting class had been eliminated, the workers would once and for all get the justice they were entitled to. The original notion that state power becomes superfluous where there is no class antagonism that has to be contained with force, that “the state withers away” in a socialist society – this rather critical view of state power lost out more and more to praise for the services that a social state or a socialist state power provides. In the end, a misty moral idea, fervently lived out by the idealists of the party in socialist everyday life, rather opportunistically adhered to by the rest, survived: when the socialist individuals have defeated all egoistic, petty bourgeois impulses in themselves and know themselves completely at one with the concerns of the socialist community, then, when everyone has, so to speak, developed into a state on a small scale, the state can disappear.

- These consequences are not, of course, due to one short bad sentence in the “Communist Manifesto” or a missing state critique by Marx and Engels. It’s the other way around. The socialist-communist movements, despite their criticism of the capitalist economy, mostly continued to think and act politically in the categories of “good rule.” They opposed class society and its results; they called on the oppressed classes to trust in “no higher being” in their misery; and they denounced the existing anti-worker attitude of the states they had to deal with. But at the same time they could imagine the state in a different, more ideal form – a reformed welfare state or even a socialist-peoples-democratic state, but in any case one that was good to the previously mistreated people. On this point, the communist movements’ criticism has remained mostly idealistic to this day. (A laudible exception: Resultate der Arbeitskonferenz 1979) The communist opposition worked its way to this position the more it waged its struggle as an opponent against a national bourgeoise and a state whose interests it wanted to really represent.  The vast majority of the exploited and oppressed masses presented themselves as a people, i.e. as humans who are aware that they are dependent on a rule over them, who consider this force relation to be a quasi-natural condition of life, who imagine an improvement in their living conditions at best in the form of a caring rule, and who can certainly suffer their own rule better than any foreign one. This people accordingly asked the communists, who wanted to incite a struggle against the relations of rule, whether they could expect a decent order in the future and point to their patriotic feelings, which did not fit well with an unpatriotic internationalism. In the long run, the workers’ parties did not want to criticize these petitions entirely – that would have socially set them apart and marginalized their position even more – and they could not do it correctly because their own criticism of the state was, to put it euphemistically, imperfect. So the need to use the working masses with their bourgeois-patriotic ideas for their own movement strengthened the idealistic side of the communist movement even further.

In this context, there were two essential historical turning points. One was the decision by the European workers and most of their parties to fight in the first world war against their proletarian class brothers and for their nations. That brought to its bitter end the mistake of turning one’s dependence on the state in which one has ended up into advocacy for it. The Russian revolution that took place shortly afterwards, whose Bolshevik leaders had initially believed that their communist project could survive only if it was supported by a world (or at least European) revolution, was subsequently confronted by the fact that it was precisely the social democracies of Western Europe who opposed the workers willing to revolt and ensured the survival of capitalist states. The bourgeois world of states fought against the new communist entity as an unacceptable accident; the territory of the soviets (councils) was treated as if it was some kind of “rogue nation” that had to be eliminated. As in modern times, direct military intervention was used, and the young Soviet Union was attacked from all sides by American, British and German armies. And they supported everyone who, because of their feudal status, bourgeois interests or ethnic differences, was willing to work against the red power in the civil war. All residents, no matter how they stood towards the Bolshevik program and its promises of “land and peace,” were drawn into this war. However, this in turn ensured that some of those affected also migrated to the new communist government for patriotic reasons. In their need, the Bolsheviks did not want to belabor the difference between defense of their revolution and that of the Russian nation, but the opportunism of pre-revolutionary times turned into something like a deliberately used lever. This marked the beginning of the second historical turning point.

With this in mind, Lenin made policies on the peoples oppressed by czarism into a constructive element of the new constitution. These were incorporated as politically autonomous units into the “Union of Socialist Soviet Republics” (USSR). This gave them equal rights and recognition of their national particularity, which the old Russia had always denied them. Ideologically, Lenin justified this as a new kind of class struggle, which would first guide backward peoples in their national question. Stalin completed this second turning point by officially saying goodbye to revolutionary internationalism with his “socialism in one country.” Even though this was obviously an emergency program in view of the nationalism displayed by the working classes of Western Europe, Soviet politicians didn’t want to admit to this fact which it was not responsible for. Instead, the obvious defect of “socialism in one country” from a communist point of view was reinterpreted and exaggerated into the idea that the proletarians had found their homeland in the Soviet Union. On the one hand, this was the prelude to putting the internationalism of foreign communists to the test (cf. Stalin’s China Policy). On the other hand, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union made categories such as the right of peoples to self-determination, which was to be understood as a kind of class struggle under imperialist conditions, customary and socially acceptable in the world communist movement. After the second world war, no leading communist would fall prey to the idea that socialist or communist societies would unite, or that the state borders existing between them would have no place – not even in the Soviet Union itself. The USSR created a security cordon with friendly socialist states and the two communist party leaders who asserted themselves on their own in their countries – Tito and Mao – didn’t consider annexation by the homeland of all laborers for a second, given everything they knew.

4. The contradiction in the Chinese Communist Party, that it established itself as communist revolutionaries and Chinese nationalists at the same time, also shows that this party reinterpreted both its communism and its nationalism and made them compatible. These communists obviously conceived the communist part of their program, the eradication of poverty and misery, as state ideals; they understood it less as the abolition of rule than as the establishment of a social(istic) state system that would at last be truly committed to its people instead of the enrichment of the ruling class. Such an alternative state program presupposed China’s liberation from the foreign imperialists. In the view of the CP, this justified its anti-imperialist struggle for the restoration of national unity and sovereignty. The communists also conceived of this national part of their program idealistically. They did not think of the nation they were fighting for as what the nation is: the euphemistic title for a class society in which the state enforces property and the common good means nothing but the permanently secured advantage of the owners at the expense of the rest of society. The new nation, liberated from foreign influence, the socialist China they wanted to create, should be rather the condition and guarantor that all social forces unite to develop the productive forces in the backward country and thus bring about a state that is beneficial for all. In this sense, the Chinese communists filled the misty, empty phrase of nation with a new, progressive content – in other words: they wanted to take seriously the ideology of collectivity contained in nation. They assumed that landowners and factory owners as Chinese patriots must also be interested in modernizing and developing the country and wanted to commit them practically to their people-oriented interpretation. So while the ideological effect of the national idea is usually to commit the victims of a class society to sacrificing for the success of the whole, which in truth is for the benefit of the ruling class and its state, the Chinese CP turned this relationship around. They intended a state that would be beneficial for the majority, thus would compete against the beneficiaries of the previous order, and wanted to win them over as Chinese patriots to their new society. 

The Chinese communists did not take a tactical position on the national question of their country. On the contrary, this party seriously believed in its historic mission, which it saw the bourgeois government failing to accomplish on a broad front. Because the Kuomintang was committed to settling financial problems with international bonds and therefore didn’t want to risk any break with foreign countries; because its leaders came from the wealthy Chinese class, so they didn’t put the production of national wealth production strictly at the service of the country’s national and social development, but “mis”-used it for private enrichment; because the linkages between the Kuomintang and the large land-owning class also meant that land reform would be a long way off, the communists were, in their own estimation, the only ones who really wanted and were capable of fighting for national liberation – and then, on this basis, the requisite social revolution. [4]

5. In this sense, the Chinese Communist Party actually and seriously fought for the project of a national communism or a communist nation. For them, this was not a practical contradiction, but a necessary and useful link for both sides – nation and communism. The equation which the Soviet communists more or less laboriously worked their way towards after the October Revolution was thus the starting point of the Chinese communists’ policy. In the almost 30 years of the Socialist People’s Republic, however, the contradiction in this idea became more and more apparent in practice. In the end, it led to “the national” triumphing over “the communist” of the original program. 

Nation necessarily includes a relationship of demarcation and thus also of competition with the outside world – otherwise the nation would have no right to exist as a particularity. Like the nation itself, this competition can also be thought of as idealistically people-oriented, for example, in the sense that socialist states shine not with profit balances, but with the supply of their people and great literacy rates – and that is what the Chinese communists did at first. Notwithstanding, its concern in the world was to participate as a nation in a competition for recognition and positions – in the entire world of states, in the socialist federation of brother countries, among the developing countries, etc. Mao’s new China presented itself to the world from the outset as an ambitious nation which aimed with its new socialist society at quickly and impressively overcoming the years of imperialist oppression. The national ambition contained in this, however, quickly contradicted what constituted the socialistic, people’s welfare side of the project – this can be clearly seen in the individual stages of the Maoist campaigns, above all, of course, in the legendary “Great Leap Forward.” It became increasingly clear to the Chinese CP leaders that the real competition between nations, by which the Socialist People’s Republic wanted to measure itself, did not function as a struggle for the greatest possible happiness of the people, but is carried out with money and weapons. The fact that they were unable to achieve anything with their national communism in this real competition and that they had given away all their social achievements for it, caused them to think about the fact that, after less than 30 years, they preferred to throw away their communism for their national success rather than let their socialist people’s welfare be the program of a globally successful Chinese nation. 

From: Renate Dillmann, China – a lesson about the old and new imperialism, a socialist counter-project and its mistakes, the birth of a capitalist society and the rise of a new great power. 3rd ed., Hamburg 2009. 

[1] “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.” 

[2] One is normally born a member of a nation – as a subject of a state authority that counts the new people among its citizens. One cannot “become” one out of one’s own free will, but only by way of exception, on the basis of state considerations and strict conditions of access, which express mistrust in the deficient loyalty of the new citizen. Cf. Integration, GSP 4/2006. 

[3] The writings of Josef Strasser (“Der Arbeiter und die Nation,” 1912) or Anton Pannekoek (“Klassenkampf und Nation,” 1912), both of which can be read in the German edition of the Marxist Internet Archive (MIA), provide an interesting testimony to the corresponding disputes in the German-language workers movement at the beginning of the 20th century. 

[4] This view is, by the way, shared by a whole series of Western observers who, like Edgar Snow, are by no means friends of communist politics but “friends of China” and whose knowledge of Chinese conditions makes it clear that Kuomintang politicians were “no salvation for China.”