Marx on Nationalism versus Popular Control

• In Event: Capitalism and Self-Determination: Past, Present and Future

Abstract

Marx’s relationship to democracy is controversial. He believed that a market economy was a barrier to collective self-determination, in much the same way as religion and the state. Overcoming it would yield a sort of democratic control over economic choices, although Marx came to criticize ‘democrats’ in the 1840s who limited their demands to universal suffrage and political reforms. The key to Marx’s view is that he was not interested in answering the traditional question of the best regime. His question was different: what should the mid-nineteenth-century democratic revolution aim at in order to succeed? This revolution was already underway and what mattered was making the right case to the right people in order to rally them to victory. By the mid-1840s Marx thought the growing urban proletariat were those in a position to overpower the authoritarian state, and he thought engaging them required speaking to their immediate interest in democratic control over the economy and jobs rather than rehearsing liberal or republican theories of constitutional design or philosophies of justice.
But Marx also saw that his vision of popular control was threatened by nationalism, which sought to save domestic hierarchies by pulling urban workers into coalitions with national elites (and often with bigots). Marx did not underestimate nationalism, but fought it with a competing view of self-determination defined not by who ‘the people’ excludes but by the absence of undemocratic hierarchies among them. Nationalist populism must distract from such hierarchies because of the coalition on which it depends.

Author

• Christopher Meckstroth, University of Cambridge