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Rosa Luxemburg
The Problem of Nationality and Autonomy
3. Federation, Centralization, and Particularism
We must turn next to another proposed form of the
solution of the nationality question, i.e., federation. Federalism has
long been the favorite idea of revolutionaries of anarchic hue. During
the 1848 revolution Bakunin wrote in his manifesto: ”The revolution
proclaimed by its own power the dissolution of despotic states, the
dissolution of the Prussian state ... Austria ... Turkey ... the
dissolution of the last stronghold of the despots, the Russian state ...
and as a final goal – a universal federation of European Republics.”
From then on, federation has remained an ideal settlement of any
nationality difficulties in the programs of socialist parties of a more
or less utopian, petit bourgeois character; that is, parties which do
not, like Social Democracy, take a historical approach but which traffic
in subjective ”ideals.” Such, for example, is the party of Social
Revolutionaries in Russia. Such was the PPS in its transitional phase,
when it had ceased to demand the creation of a national state and was on
the way to abandoning any philosophical approach. Such, finally, are a
number of socialist groups in the Russian Empire, with which we will
become acquainted more closely at the end of the present chapter.
If we ask why the slogan of federation enjoys such wide popularity
among all revolutionaries of anarchistic coloring, the answer is not
difficult to find: “Federation” combines ‑ at least in the revolutionary
imagination of these socialists – “independence” and ”equality” of
nations with “fraternity.” Consequently, there is already a certain
concession from the standpoint of the law of nations and the
nation–state in favor of hard reality, it is a sui generis,
ideological, taking into account the circumstance, which cannot be
overlooked that nations cannot live in the vacuum of their “rights” as
separate and perfectly self–sufficient ”nation–states,” but that there
exist between them some links. Historically developed connections
between various nationalities, the material development which welded
whole areas, irrespective of national differences, the centralization of
bourgeois development – all this is reflected in the heads of those
revolutionary improvisers; in place of ”brute force” they place
“voluntarism” in relations between nations. And since republicanism is
self–evident in this because the very same “will of the people” which
restores independence and equality to all nations obviously has so much
good taste as to throw simultaneously with contempt to the dump of
history all remnants of monarchism, consequently the existing bourgeois
world is transformed at one stroke into a voluntary union of independent
republics, i.e., federation. Here we have a sample of the same
“revolutionary” historical caricature of reality by means of which the
appetite of Tsarist Russia for the southern Slays was transformed, in
Bakunin’s phraseology, into the pan–Slavic ideal of anarchism, “a
federation of Slavic Peoples.” On a smaller scale, an application of
this method of “revolutionary” alterations of reality was the program of
the PPS adopted at its Eighth Congress in 1906: a republican federation
of Poland with Russia. As long as the social–patriotic standpoint – in
the pre–revolutionary period – was maintained in all its purity and
consistency, the PPS recognized only the program of nation–states, and
rejected with contempt and hatred the idea of federation offered, for
instance, by the Russian Social Revolutionaries. When the outbreak of
revolution all at once demolished its presuppositions, and the PPS saw
itself forced to follow the road of concessions in favor of reality
which could no longer be denied, in view of the obvious fact that Poland
and Russia form one social entity, a manifestation of which was
precisely the common revolution, the program of federation of Poland
with Russia, previously held in contempt, became the form of that
concession. At the same time, the PPS, as is usual with
”revolutionaries” of this type, did not notice the following fact: when
Social Democracy took for the historical basis of its program and
tactics the joint capitalistic development of Poland and Russia, it
merely stated an objective, historical fact, not depending on the will
of the socialists. From this fact, the revolutionary conclusion should
have been drawn in the form of a united class struggle of the Polish and
Russian proletariat. The PPS, however, putting forward the program of
federation of Poland with Russia, went much further: in place of the
passive recognition of historical fate, it itself actively proposed a
union of Poland with Russia and assumed responsibility for the union,
and in lieu of the objective historical development, it placed the
subjective consent of socialists in ”revolutionary” form.
But federalism as a form of political organization has, like the
“nation–state” itself, its definite historical content, quite different
from, and independent of, the subjective ideology attached to that form.
Therefore, the idea of federation can be evaluated from the class
standpoint of the proletariat only when we examine the fate and role of
that idea in modern socialist development.
II
An outstanding tendency of capitalistic development in
all countries is indisputably an internal, economic, and capitalist
centralization, i.e., an endeavor to concentrate and weld into one
entity the state territory from the economic, legislative,
administrative, judicial, military, etc. viewpoints. In the Middle Ages,
when feudalism prevailed, the link between the parts and regions of one
and the same state was extremely loose. Thus, each major city with its
environs, itself produced the majority of objects of daily use to
satisfy its needs; it also had its own legislation, its own government,
its army; the bigger and wealthier cities in the West often waged wars
on their own and concluded treaties with foreign powers. In the same
way, bigger communities lived their own closed and isolated life, and
each area of land of a feudal lord or even each area of knightly estates
constituted in itself a small, almost independent state. The conditions
of the time were characterized by a diminution and loosening of all
state norms. Each town, each village, each region had different laws,
different taxes: one and the same state was filled with legal and
customs barriers separating one fragment of a state from another. This
decentralization was a specific feature of the natural economy and the
nascent artisan production of the time.
Within the framework of the pulverization of public life, connected
with the natural economy, and of the weak cohesion between the parts of
the state organism, territories and whole countries passed incessantly
from hand to hand in Central and Western Europe throughout the Middle
Ages. We note also the patching together of states by way of purchase,
exchange, pawnings, inheritance, and marriage; the classical example is
the Hapsburg monarchy.
The revolution in production and trade relations at the close of the
Middle Ages, the increase of goods production and moneyed economy,
together with the development of international trade and the
simultaneous revolution in the military system, the decline of
knighthood and the rise of standing armies, all these were factors that,
in political relations, brought about the increase of monarchical power
and the rise of absolutism. The main tendency of absolutism was the
creation of a centralized state apparatus. The sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries are a period of incessant struggle of the centralist tendency
of absolutism against the remnants of feudalist particularism.
Absolutism developed in two directions: absorbing the functions and
attributes of the diets and provincial assemblies as well as of the
self–governing munici palities, and standardizing administration in the
whole area of the state by creating new central authorities in the
administration and the judiciary, as well as a civil, penal, and
commercial code. In the seventeenth century, centralism triumphed fully
in Europe in the form of so–called “enlightened despotism,” which soon
passed into unenlightened, police–bureaucratic despotism.
As a result of the historical circumstance that absolutism was the
first and principal promoter of modern state centralism, a superficial
tendency developed to identify centralism in general with absolutism,
i.e., with reaction. In reality, absolutism, insofar as, at the close of
the Middle Ages, it combated feudal dispersion and particularism, was
undoubtedly a manifestation of historical progress. This was perfectly
well understood by Staszic, who pointed out that the [Polish] gentry
commonwealth could not survive “in the midst of autocracies.” On the
other hand, absolutism itself played only the role of a “stirrup drink”
[parting good wishes] with regard to the modern bourgeois society for
which, politically and socially, it paved the way by toppling feudalism
and founding a modern, uniform, great state on its ruins. Indeed,
independent of absolutism, and after its historical demise, bourgeois
society continued to carry through with undiminished force and
consistency the centralist tendency. The present centralism of France as
a political area is the work of the Great Revolution. The very name,
“Great Revolution,” exerted, everywhere its influence reached in Europe,
a centralizing influence. Such a product of the Revolution’s centralism
was the “République Helvétique,” in which, in 1798, suddenly the
previously loosely confederated Swiss cantons were compressed. The first
spontaneous action of the March [1848] revolution in Germany was the
destruction by the popular masses of the so–called customs houses
[Mauthäuser], the symbols of medieval particularism.
Capitalism, with its large–scale machine production, whose vital
principle is concentration, swept away and continues to sweep away
completely any survivals of medieval economic, political, and legal
discrimination. Big industry needs markets and freedom of untrammeled
trade in big areas. Industry and trade, geared to big areas, require
uniform administration, uniform arrangement of roads and communications,
uniform legislation and judiciary, as far as possible in the entire
international market, but above all in the whole area inside each
respective state. The abolition of the customs, and tax autonomy of the
separate municipalities and gentry holdings, as well as of their
autonomy in administering courts and law, were the first achievements of
the modern bourgeoisie. Together with this went the creation of one big
state machinery that would combine all functions: the administration in
the hands of one central government; legislation in the hands of a
legislative body – the parliament; the armed forces in the form of one
centralized army subject to a central government; customs arrangements
in the form of one tariff encompassing the entire state externally; a
uniform currency in the whole state, etc. In accordance with this, the
modern state also introduced in the area of spiritual life, as far as
possible, a uniformity in education and schools, ecclesiastical
conditions, etc., organized on the same principles in the entire state.
In a word, as comprehensive a centralization as possible in all areas of
social life is a prominent trend of capitalism. As capitalism develops,
centralization increasingly pierces all obstacles and leads to a series
of uniform institutions, not only within each major state, but in the
entire capitalistic world, by means of international legislation. Postal
and telegraphic services as well as railway communication have been for
decades the object of international conventions.
This centralist tendency of capitalistic development is one of the
main bases of the future socialist system, because through the highest
concentration of production and exchange, the ground is prepared for a
socialized economy conducted on a world–wide scale according to a
uniform plan. On the other hand, only through consolidating and
centralizing both the state power and the working class as a militant
force does it eventually become possible for the proletariat to grasp
the state power in order to introduce the dictatorship of the
proletariat, a socialist revolution.
Consequently, the proper political framework in which the modern
class struggle of the proletariat operates and can conquer is the big
capitalistic state. Usually, in the socialist ranks, especially of the
utopian trend, attention is paid only to the economic aspect of
capitalistic development, and its categories – industry, exploitation,
the proletariat, depressions – are regarded as indispensable
prerequisites for socialism. In the political sphere, usually only
democratic state institutions, parliamentarianism, and various
“freedoms” are regarded as indispensable conditions of this movement.
However, it is often overlooked that the modern big state is also an
indispensable prerequisite for the development of the modern class
struggle and a guarantee of the victory of socialism. The historical
mission of the proletariat is not ”socialism” applicable on every inch
of ground separately, not dictatorship, but world revolution, whose
point of departure is big–state development.
Therefore, the modern socialist movement, legitimate child of
capitalist development, possesses the same eminently centralist
characteristic as the bourgeois society and state. Consequently, Social
Democracy is, in all countries, a determined opponent of particularism
as well as of federalism. In Germany, Bavarian or Prussian
particularism, i.e., a tendency to preserve Bavaria’s or Prussia’s
political distinctiveness, their independence from the Reich in one
respect or another, is always a screen for gentry or petit bourgeois
reaction. German Social Democracy also combats, with full energies, the
efforts, for instance, of South German particularists to preserve a
separate railroad policy in Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg; it also
energetically combats particularism in the conquered provinces of
Alsace–Lorraine, where the petite bourgeoisie tries to separate itself,
by its French nationalism, from political and spiritual community with
the entire German Reich. Social Democracy in Germany is also a decided
opponent of those survivals of the federal relationship among the German
states inside the Reich which have still been preserved. The general
trend of capitalist development tends not only toward the political
union of the separate provinces within each state, but also toward the
abolition of any state federations and the welding of loose state
combinations into homogeneous, uniform states; or, wherever this is
impossible, to their complete break–up.
An expression of this is the modern history of the Swiss Confederacy,
as well as of the American Union; of the German Reich, as well as of
Austria–Hungary.
III
The first centralist constitution of the integrated
republic of Switzerland, created by the great revolution, was
obliterated without a trace by the time of the Restoration, and
reaction, which triumphed in Switzerland under the protection of the
Holy Alliance, quickly returned to the independence of the cantons, to
particularism and only a loose confederation. Domestically, this
implementation of the ideal “of voluntary union of independent groups
and state units” in the spirit of anarchists and other worshipers of
“federation.” involved the adoption of an aristocratic constitution
(with the exclusion of the broad working masses) as well as the rule of
Catholic clericalism.
A new opposition trend, toward the democratization and the
centralization of the Swiss federation, was born in the period of
revolutionary seething between the July [1830] and March [1848]
revolutions, which was manifested in Switzerland in the form of a
tendency to create a close state union in place of federation, and to
abolish the political rule of noble families and of the Catholic clergy.
Here, centralism and democracy initially went hand in hand, and
encountered the opposition of the reaction which fought under the slogan
of federation and particularism.
The first constitution of the present Swiss Confederation of 1848 was
born out of a bitter struggle against the so–called “Sonderbund,” i.e.,
a federation of seven Catholic cantons which, in 1847, undertook a
revolt against the general confederation in the name of saving the
independence of the cantons and their old aristocratic system, and
clericalism. Although the rebels proudly waved the banner of “freedom
and independence” of the cantons against the “despotism” of the
Confederacy, in particular of “freedom of conscience” against Protestant
intolerance (the ostensible cause of the conflict was the closing of
the convents by the Democratic Radical parties), democratic and
revolutionary Europe, undeceived by this, applauded wholeheartedly when
the Confederacy, by brutal armed force, i.e., by “violence,” forced the
advocates of federalism to bow and surrender to the Confederate
authority. And when Freiligrath, the bard of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,
triumphantly celebrated the victory of the bayonets of Swiss centralism
as a reveille to the March revolution – “In the highlands the first
shot was fired, in the highlands against the parsons” it was the
absolutist government of Germany, the pillar of Metternich’s reaction,
that took up the cause of the federalists and the defenders of the old
independence of the cantons. The later development of Switzerland up
until the present has been marked by constant, progressive, legal and
political centralization under the impact of the growth of big industry
and international trade, railroads, and European militarism. Already the
second Constitution of 1874 extended considerably the attributes of the
central legislation, the central government authority, and particularly
of a centralized judiciary in comparison with the Constitution of 1848.
Since the Constitution was thoroughly revised in 1874, centralization
has progressed continuously by the addition of ever new individual
articles, enlarging the competence of the central institutions of the
Confederacy. While the actual political life of Switzerland, with its
development toward a modern capitalist state, is increasingly
concentrated in the federal institutions, the autonomous life of the
canton declines and becomes increasingly sterile. Matters have gone even
further. When the federal organs of legislation and uniform government,
originating from direct elections by the people (the so–called
Nazionalrat and the so–called Bundesrat), assume increasingly more
prestige and power, the organ of the federal representation, i.e., of
the cantons (the so–called Ständerat), becomes more and more a survival,
a form without content, condemned by the development of life to slow
death.[1] At
the same time, this process of centralization is supplemented by another
parallel process of making the cantonal constitutions uniform by means
of constant revisions in the legislatures of the respective cantons and
the mutual imitation and borrowing among them. As a result, the former
variety of cantonal particularisms rapidly disappears. Until now, the
main safeguard of this political separateness and independence of the
cantons was their local civil and penal law which preserved the entire
medley of its historical origin, tradition, and cantonal particularism.
At present, even this stubbornly defended fortress of the cantons’
independence has had to yield under the pressure of Switzerland’s
capitalist development – industry, trade, railroads and telegraphs,
international relations – which passed like a leveling wave over the
legal conditions of the cantons. As a result, the project of one common
civil and penal code for the entire confederation has been already
elaborated, while portions of the civil code have already been approved
and implemented. These parallel currents of centralization and
standardization, working from above and below and mutually supplementing
each other, encounter, almost at every step, the opposition of the
socially and economically most backward, most petit bourgeois French and
Italian cantons. In a significant manner, the opposition of the Swiss
decentralists and federalists even assumes the forms and colors of a
nationality struggle for the French Swiss: the expansion of the power of
the Confederacy at the expense of cantonal particularism is tantamount
to the increase of the preponderance of the German element, and as such
they, the French Swiss, openly combat it. No less characteristic is
another circumstance, viz., the same French cantons which, in the name
of federation and independence, combat state centralism, have internally
the least developed communal self–government, while the most democratic
self–governing institutions, a true rule of the people, prevail in
those communes of the German cantons which advocate centralization of
the Confederation. In this way, both at the very bottom and at the top
of state institutions, both in the latest results of the development of
present–day Switzerland and at its point of departure, centralism goes
hand in hand with democracy and progress, while federalism and
particularism are linked with reaction and backwardness.
In another form the same phenomena are repeated in the history of the United States of America.
The first nucleus of the Union of the English colonies in North
America, which until then had been independent, which differed greatly
from one another socially and politically, and which in many respects
had divergent interests, was also created by revolution. The revolution
was the advocate and creator of the process of political centralization
which has never stopped up to the present day. Also, here, as in
Switzerland, the initial, most immature form of development, was the
same ”voluntary federation” which, according to the conscious and
unconscious adherents of anarchistic ideas, stands at the apex of modern
social development as the crowning summit of democracy.
In the first Constitution of the United States, elaborated in the
period 1777–1781, there triumphed completely the ”freedom and
independence of the several colonies, their complete right of
self–determination.” The union was loose and voluntary to such an extent
that it practically did not possess any central executive and made
possible, almost on the morrow of its establishment, a fratricidal
customs war among its ”free and equal” members, New York, New Jersey,
Virginia, and Maryland, while in Massachusetts, under the blessing of
complete “independence” and “self–determination,” a civil war, an
uprising of debt–encumbered farmers broke out, which aroused in the
wealthy bourgeoisie of the states a vivid yearning for a strong central
authority. This bourgeoisie was forcibly reminded that in a bourgeois
society the most beautiful ”national independence” has real substance
and “value” only when it serves the independent utilization of the
fruits of “internal order,” i.e., the undisturbed rule of private
property and exploitation.
The second Constitution of 1787 already created, in place of
federation, a unified state with a central legislative authority and a
central executive. However, centralism had still, for a long time, to
combat the separatist tendencies of the states righters which finally
erupted in the form of an open revolt of the Southern states, the famous
1861 war of secession Here we also see a striking repetition of the
1847 Swiss situation. As advocates of centralism, the Northern states
acted representing the modern, big–capital development, machine
industry, personal freedom and equality before the law, the true
corollaries of the system of hired labor, bourgeois democracy, and
bourgeois progress. On the other hand, the banner of separatism,
federation, and particularism, the banner of each hamlet’s
“independence” and “right of self–determination” was raised by the
plantation owners of the South, who represented the primitive
exploitation of slave labor. In Switzerland as in America, centralism
struggled against the separatist tendencies of federalism by means of
armed force and physical coercion, to the unanimous acclaim of all
progressive and democratic elements of Europe. It is significant that
the last manifestation of slavery in modern society tried to save
itself, as reaction always does, under the banner of particularism, and
the abolition of slavery was the obverse of the victory of centralist
capitalism. After the victorious war against the secessionists, the
Constitution of the American Union underwent a new revision in the
direction of centralism; the remainder was, from then on, achieved by
big capital, big power, imperialist development: railroads, world trade,
trusts, finally, in recent times, customs protectionism, imperialist
wars, the colonial system, and the resulting re–organization of the
military, of taxation, and so on. At present, the central executive in
the person of the President of the Union possesses more extensive power,
and the administration and judiciary are more centralized than in the
majority of the monarchies of Western Europe. While in Switzerland the
gradual expansion of the central functions at the expense of federalism
takes place by means of amendments to the constitution, in America this
takes place in a way of its own without any constitutional changes,
through a liberal interpretation of the constitution by the judicial
authorities.
The history of modern Austria presents a picture of incessant
struggle between a centralist and federalist trend. The starting point
of this history, the 1848 revolution, shows the following division of
roles: the advocates of centralism are the German liberals and
democrats, the then leaders of the revolution, while the obstruction
under the banner of federalism is represented by the Slavic
counter–revolutionary parties: the Galician nobility; the Czech,
Moravian and Dalmatian diets; the pan–Slavists and, the admirers of
Bakunin, that prophet and phrasemaker of the anarchist ”autonomy of free
peoples.” Marx characterized the policy and role of the Czech
federalists in the 1848 revolution as follows:
The Czech and Croat pan–Slavists worked, some
deliberately and some unknowingly, in accordance with the clear
interests of Russia. They betrayed the cause of revolution for the
shadow of a nationality which, in the best case, would have shared the
fate of the Polish one. The Czech, Moravian, Dalmatian, and a part of
the Polish delegates (the aristocracy) conducted a systematic struggle
against the German element. The Germans and a part of the Poles (the
impoverished gentry) were the main adherents of revolutionary progress;
fighting against them, the mass of the Slavic delegates was not content
to demonstrate in this way the reactionary tendencies of their entire
movement, but even debased itself by scheming and plotting with the very
same Austrian government which had dispersed their Prague congress.
They received a well–deserved reward for their disgraceful behavior.
They had supported the government during the October uprising, the
outcome of which finally assured a majority to the Slavs. This now
almost exclusively Slavic assembly was dispersed by the Austrian
soldiery exactly as the Prague congress had been and the pan–Slavists
were threatened with imprisonment if they dared to complain. They
achieved only this: that the Slavic nationality is now everywhere
threatened by Austrian centralism.[2]
Marx wrote this in 1852 during the revival of absolutist
rule in Austria after the final collapse of the revolution and of the
first era of constitutionalism – “a result which they owe to their own
fanaticism and blindness.”
Such was the first appearance of federalism in the modern history of Austria.
In no state did the socio–historical content of the federalist
program and the fallacy of the anarchist fantasies concerning the
democratic or even revolutionary character of that slogan appear so
emphatically also in later times, and, so to speak, symbolically, as in
Austria. The progress of political centralization can be directly
measured here by the program of the right to vote for the Vienna
parliament, which, passing successively through four phases of gradual
democratization, was increasingly becoming the main cement binding
together the state structure of the Hapsburg monarchy. The October
Patent of 1860, which inaugurated the second constitutional era in
Austria, had created in the spirit of federalism a weak central
legislative organ, and given the right of electing the delegations to it
not to the people, but to the diets of the respective crownlands.
However, already in 1873, it proved indispensable for breaking the
opposition of the Slavic federalists, to introduce voting rights not by
the diets, but by the people themselves, to the Central Parliament
[Reichsrat] – although it was a class, unequal, and indirect voting
system. Subsequently, the nationality struggle and the decentralist
opposition of the Czechs, which threatened the very existence and
integrity of the Hapsburg monarchy, forced, in 1896, the replacement of
their class voting right by a universal one, through the addition of a
fifth curia (the so–called universal election curia). Recently we
witnessed the final reform of the electoral law in Austria in the
direction of universal and equal voting rights as the only means of
consolidating the state and breaking the centrifugal tendencies of the
Slavic federalists. Especially characteristic in this respect is the
role of Galicia. Already from the first session of the Viennese
Reichsrat and the Galician Diet in April 1861, the Galician nobility
came forward as an extreme opposition against the liberal cabinet of
Schmerling, violently opposing the liberal reforms in the name of
“national autonomy” and the right of nations to “self–determination,”
i.e., in the name of the autonomous rights of the Provincial Diet.
Soon the policy became crystallized in the Stanczyk program of the
so–called Cracow party, the party of such men as Tarnowski, Popiel,
Wodzicki, and Kozmian, and found its expression in the notorious
“resolution” of the Galician Diet of September 28, 1868, which is a kind
of Magna Carta of the “separation of Galicia.” The resolution
demanded such a broadening of the competence of the Provincial Diet that
for the Central Parliament there remained only the most important
all–monarchy matters; it completely abolished the central
administration, handing it over exclusively to the crown land
authorities, and in the end completely separating also the crown land
judiciary. The state connection of Galicia with Austria was reduced here
to such a flimsy shadow that sanguine minds, who did not yet know the
flexibility of Polish nationalism, would be ready to see in this ideal
program of federalism, “almost” national independence or at least a bold
striving toward it. However, to prevent any such illusions, the
Stanczyk party had announced its political credo and begun its public
career in Austria not with the above program of federation but with the
notorious address of the Diet of December 10, 1866, in which it
proclaimed its classical formula: “Without fear of deserting the
national idea and with faith in the mission of Austria we declare from
the bottom of our hearts that we stand and wish to stand by Your
Majesty.” This was only a concise aphoristic formulation of the
sanguinary crusade which the nobility party around Przeglad Polski (Polish Review)
waged, after the January uprising, against the insurrection and the
insurgents against the “conspiracy,” “illusions,” “criminal attempts”,
“foreign revolutionary influences,” “the excesses of social anarchy,”
liquidating with cynical haste the last period of our national movements
under the slogan of “organic work” and public renunciation of any
solidarity with Russian–dominated Poland. Federalism and political
separatism were not in reality an expression of national aspirations but
were, rather, their simple negation and their public renunciation. The
other harmonious complement of the Stanczyk program of federation (read:
separation) was opposition and obstruction in coalition with Czech and
Moravian federalists and the German clerical–reactionary party against
any liberal reforms in Austria: against the liberal communal law,
against the liberal law concerning elementary schools, against the
introduction of the law concerning direct elections by the people to the
Central Parliament; on the other hand it supported the government in
all reactionary projects, e.g., support of the military laws starting
with Taaffe’s Law, etc. This development has been coupled with extreme
reaction also in provincial policies, the most glaring expression of
which is the adamant opposition against the reform of elections to the
Provincial Diet.
Finally, the third component of Galician federalism is the policy of
the Polish nobility toward the Ruthenians. Quite analogous to the French
federalists of Switzerland, the Galician advocates of a potential
decentralization of the Austrian state have been strict centralists
internally in relation to the Ruthenian population. The Galician
nobility has from the beginning stubbornly combated the demand of
autonomy for the Ruthenians, the administrative division of Galicia into
Eastern and Western, and the granting of equal status to the Ruthenian
language and script along with the Polish language. The program of
”separation” and federalism suffered a decisive defeat in Austria as
early as 1873, when direct elections to the Central Parliament were
introduced, and from then on the Stanczyk party, in keeping with its
opportunistic principles, abandoned the policy of obstruction and
acquiesced in Austrian centralism. However, Galician federalism from
then on appears on the stage if not as a program of realistic politics
then as a means of parliamentary maneuvers each time that serious
democratic reforms are considered. The last memorable appearance of the
program of ”separating” Galicia in the public arena is connected with
the struggle of the Galician nobility against the most recent electoral
reform, against the introduction of universal and equal voting rights
for the Vienna Parliament. And as if to put stronger emphasis on the
reactionary content of the federalist program, the deputies of Austrian
Social Democracy, in April 1906, voted unanimously against the motion
concerning the separation of Galicia. At their head in his character as
representative of the Austrian Workers’ Party, a representative of the
all–monarchy proletarian policy spoke and voted against the separation
of Galicia: this was Mr. Ignacy Daszynski, who, as a leader in the three
parts of the patriotic PPS, considers the separation of the Kingdom of
Poland from Russia as his political program. The Austrian Social
Democracy is a determined and open advocate of centralism, a conscious
adherent of the state consolidation of Austria and consequently a
conscious opponent of any separatist tendencies.
“The future of the Austrian state” says Kautsky – “depends on the
strength and influence of Social Democracy. Precisely because it is
revolutionary, it is in this case a party upholding the state [eine staatserltaltende Partei]
in this sense; although this sounds strange, one may apply to the Red
revolutionary Social Democracy the words which half a century ago
Grillparzer addressed to the hero of the Red Yellow reaction, General
Radetzky: ‘In your camp is Austria.’” [“In deinen Lager ist Osterreich”][3]
is just as in the matter of the “separation” of Galicia Austrian Social
Democracy decisively rejects the program of the Czech Federalists, that
is, the separation of Bohemia. Kautsky writes:
The growth of the idea of autonomy for Bohemia is only
a partial Manifestation of the general growth of reaction in all big
states of the Continent. The program of “autonomy” would not yet make
Bohemia an autonomous state. It would still remain a part of Austria.
The Central Parliament would not be abolished by this. The most
important matters (military affairs, customs, etc.) would remain in its
competence. However, the separation of Bohemia would break the power of
the Central Parliament, which today is very weak. It would break it not
only in relation to the diets of the several nations but also in
relation to the central government, on the model of the delegations.
[The reference here is to delegations of Austria and Hungary which were
elected by the Vienna and Budapest parliament and had as their task the
arrangement of the so–called Austro–Hungarian compromise, that is, the
mutual relationship or proportion contributed by both countries for the
common expenses of the state and the settlement of certain matters
affecting both.] The state council, that is, the Central Parliament of
Austria, would have to be reduced to a miserable idol nodding its head
to everything. The power of the central government in military and
customs affairs, as well as foreign policy, would then become
unrestricted. The separation of Bohemia would signify the strengthening
of the rule of bourgeois peasant clericalism in the Alpine lands of the
nobility and in Galicia; also that of the capitalist magnates in
Bohemia. As long as these three strata must exercise their authority in
the Central Parliament jointly, they cannot develop all their power
because their interests are not identical; holding them together is no
easy matter. Their strength will be increased if each of these strata
can concentrate on a certain defined area. The clericals in Innsbruck
and Linz, the Galician nobility in Cracow and Lemberg, the Bohemian
Tories in Prague are more powerful separately than all together in
Vienna. Just as in Germany, the reaction draws its strength from the
particularism and weakness of the Central Parliament; here, just as
there, giving one’s moral support to particularism means working in
favor of reaction. Here, just as there, we are obligated to resist
strongly the present current tending to the weakening of the Central
Parliament. [Kautsky ends with these words:] We must combat Bohemian
states’ rights [the program of separating off Bohemia] as a product of
reaction and a means of its support. We must combat it since it means
splitting the proletariat of Austria. The road from capitalism to
socialism does not lead through feudalism. The program of separating off
Bohemia is just as little a preliminary to the autonomy of peoples as
anti–Semitism (that is, a unilateral struggle against Jewish capital) is
a preliminary to Social Democracy.[4]
Where the remnants of feudalism have been preserved to
this day in Europe, they are everywhere a protection of monarchy. In
Germany, a striking manifestation of this is the fact that the unity of
the Reich is based on a universal equal voting right to Parliament,
while all German states taken individually have much more reactionary
state constitutions, from Prussia, with its (as Bismarck expressed it)
”most monstrous” tri–class electoral law, up to Mecklenburg, which is
still in general a medieval state with a purely class constitution.
The city of Hamburg itself is an even more striking example if we
believe that progress and democracy are connected with centralism, and
reaction with particularism and federalism. The city of Hamburg, which
forms three electoral districts of the German Reich, is represented in
Parliament on the basis of a universal voting right, exclusively by
social Democratic deputies. On the basis of the Constitution of the
Reich as a whole, the Workers’ Party is, therefore, in Hamburg, the
unique ruling party. But the very same city of Hamburg, as a separate
little state, on the basis of its distinction, separateness, introduced
for itself a new electoral law even more reactionary than the one in
force until now, which makes it almost impossible to elect Social
Democrats to the Hamburg Diet.
In Austria–Hungary we see the same. On the one hand, a federal
relationship between Hungary and Austria is an expression not of freedom
and progress but of monarchical reaction because it is known that the
Austro–Hungarian dualism is maintained only by the dynastic interest of
the Hapsburgs, and Austrian Social Democracy clearly declared itself in
favor of the complete dissolution of that federation and the complete
separation of Hungary from Austria.
However, this position resulted by no means from the inclinations of
Austrian Social Democracy for decentralization in general, but just the
reverse: it resulted from the fact that a federal connection between
Hungary and Austria is an obstacle to an even greater political
centralization inside Austria for the purpose of restoring and
consolidating the latter, and here the very same Social Democratic Party
is an advocate of as close a union of the crownlands as possible, and
an opponent of any tendencies to the separation of Galicia, Bohemia,
Trieste, the Trentino, and so on. In fact, the only center of political
and democratic progress in Austria is her central policy, a Central
Parliament in Vienna which, in its development, reached a universal
equal–voting right, while the autonomous Diets Galician, Lower Austrian,
Bohemian – are strongholds of the most savage reaction on the part of
the nobility or bourgeoisie.
Finally, the last event in the history of federal relationships, the
separation of Norway from Sweden, taken up in its time eagerly by the
Polish social–patriotic parties (see the Cracow Naprzod [Forward])
as a joyous manifestation of strength and the progressiveness of
separatist tendencies, soon changed into a new striking proof that
federalism and state separations resulting from it are by no means an
expression of progress or democracy. After the so–called Norwegian
“revolutions,” which consisted in the dethronement and the expulsion
from Norway of the King of Sweden, the Norwegians quietly elected
another king for themselves, having even formally, in a popular ballot,
rejected the project of introducing a republic. That which superficial
admirers of all national movements and all semblances of independence
proclaimed as a “revolution” was a simple manifestation of peasant and
bourgeois particularism, a desire to possess for their own money a “king
of their own” instead of one imposed by the Swedish aristocracy, and,
therefore, a movement which had nothing in common whatever with a
revolutionary spirit. At the same time, the history of the
disintegration of the Swedish–Norwegian union again proved how far, even
here, the federation had been an expression of purely dynastic
interests, that is, a form of monarchism and reaction.
IV
The idea of federalism as a solution of the nationality
question, and in general, an “ideal” of the political system in
international relations, raised sixty years ago by Bakunin and other
anarchists, finds at present refuge with a number of socialist groups in
Russia. A striking illustration of that idea, as well as of its
relation to the class struggle of the proletariat at the present time,
is given by the congress of those federalist groups of all Russia held
during the recent [1905] revolution and whose deliberations have been
published in a detailed report. [See the Proceedings of the Russian National Socialist Parties, April 16–20, 1907, Knigoi Izdatielstvo, Sejm (St. Petersburg: 1908).]
First of all, a characterization of the political complexion
and of the “socialism” of these groups is interesting. In the Congress,
there participated Georgian, Armenian, Byelo–Russian, Jewish, Polish,
and Russian federalists. The Georgian Socialist Federalist Party
operates mainly – according to its own report – not among the urban
population but in the countryside, because only there does there exist
in a compact mass the national Georgian element; these number about 1.2
million and are concentrated in the gubernias of Tiflis, Kutai, and
partially, Batum. This party is almost completely recruited from
peasants and petty gentry. “In its striving for an independent
regulation of its life” – declares the delegate of the Georgian
Socialist Federalist Party – “without counting on the centralist
bureaucracy, whether this be absolutistic or constitutional or even
social–democratic (!), the Georgian peasantry will probably find
sympathy and help on the part of that petty Georgian gentry which lives
on the land and by the size of its possessions and also its way of life
differs little from the peasantry.” Therefore, the party considers that
“even independently of considerations of a basic (!) nature, merely the
practical conditions of Georgian agriculture demand the treatment of the
agrarian question as a class question, peasant or gentry only as an
over–all national question, as a social (!) problem, as a problem of
work(!).” Starting with these assumptions, the Georgian Federalists, in
harmony with the Russian Social Revolutionaries, strive for the
“socialization of land which is to be achieved under the rule of the
capitalistic or bourgeois system.” A beautiful addition to this program
is the reservation that “socialization” cannot be extended to orchards,
vineyards and other “special cultivations,” or to farms, because these
are areas “demanding a certain contribution of work and material means
which cannot be returned in one year or in several years” and which
would be difficult for a Georgian peasant to renounce.” Consequently,
there remains private property for “cultivations” and “socialism” for
grain–planting – of which there is little in the Caucasus – as well as
for dunes, marginal lands, bogs, and forests.
The main thing on which the Socialist Federalists put emphasis is the
reservation that the agricultural question in Georgia should be decided
not in a constituent assembly nor in a central parliament, but only in
autonomous national institutions, because “however life will decide this
question, in principle, only this is unquestionable, that the land in a
Georgian territory should belong first of all to the Georgian people.”
The question, how it happens that the “socialist” party is joined, en
masse, by the petty gentry and bourgeoisie, the delegates of the
Georgian Federalists explained by saying that this happens only because
“there is no other party which would formulate the demands of these
strata.”
The Armenian Revolutionary Federation, that is, Dashnaktsutyun,
founded at the beginning of the 1890s for the purpose of liberating the
Armenians from Turkey, was exclusively concerned with “militarizing the
people,” i.e., the preparation of fighting detachments and armed
expeditions into Turkey, the import of weapons, the direction of attacks
on Turkish troops, etc. Only recently, at the beginning of the current
century, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation expanded its activity
into the Caucasus and assumed at the same time a social aspect. The
cause for the revolutionary outburst of the movement and the terroristic
action in the Caucasus was the confiscation of the estates of the
Armenian clergy for the [tsarist] treasury in 1903. Besides its main
combat” action, the party began, against the background of those events,
a propaganda among the rural population in the Caucasus as well as a
struggle against tsardom. The agrarian program of Dashnaktsutyun demands
the expropriation of gentry estates without compensation, and
surrendering there to the communes for equal distribution. This reform
is to be based on the still rather general communal property in the
central part of the Transcaucasus. Recently, there arose a “young” trend
among the Armenian Federalists maintaining that the Dashnaktsutyun
party is simply a bourgeois, nationalistic organization of a rather
doubtful socialistic aspect – an organization linking within itself
completely heterogeneous social elements, and in its activity and action
on completely heterogeneous socio–political territory, such as Turkey
on the one side and the Caucasus on the other. This party recognizes,
according to its own report, the principle of federalism both as a basis
of nation–wide relations and the basis on which should be thoroughly
reconstructed the conditions in the Caucasus, and finally, as an
organizing principle for the party.
A Byelorussian organization was formed in 1903 under the name of the
Byelorussian Revolutionary Hromada. Its cardinal programmatic demand was
separation from Russia, and in the sphere of economics, the
nationalization of the land. In 1906, this program underwent a revision
and from then on the party has been demanding a federal republic in
Russia, with territorial autonomy for Lithuania and a diet in Vilna, as
well as a non–territorial national cultural autonomy for the remaining
nationalities inhabiting Lithuania, while on the agrarian question the
following demands were adopted: lands held by the treasury, by the
church, and by the monasteries, as well as big landed property above
eighty to one hundred dessiatins are to be confiscated and turned into a
land fund out of which, first of all, the landless and small peasants
should be supplied on the basis of hereditary property, with the aim of
eliminating pauperism as well as developing the productive forces of the
country. The socialization of land cannot yet be mentioned because of
the low intellectual level of the Byelorussian peasant. Thus, the task
of the party is the creation and maintenance of a peasant farm in a
normal size of eight dessiatins, as well as the consolidation of lands.
Furthermore, forests, bodies of water, and bogs are to be nationalized.
Hronmada carries on its activity among the Byelorussian peasants who
inhabit, to the number of about seven millions, the gubernias of Vilna,
Minsk, Grodno, and part of Witebsk.
The Jewish Federalist group, “Sierp” [“The Sickle”], organized only a
few years ago by Jewish dissidents from the Russian Social
Revolutionary Party, demands non–territorial autonomy for all
nationalities in the Russian state; out of them would be created
voluntary state political associations combining together into a state
federation, in order to strive in that way for its ultimate goal,
territorial (!) autonomy for the Jews. It directs its activity mainly to
the organizing of Jewish workers in Witebsk, Ekaterinoslav, Kiev, etc.,
and it expects the implementation of its program to arise from the
victory of the socialist parties in the Russian state.
It is superfluous to characterize the remaining two organizations,
the PPS “revolutionary faction,” and the Russian Party of Social
Revolutionaries, since they are sufficiently known by origin and
character.
Thus appears that Diet of Federalists cultivating at present that
antiquated idea of federation rejected by the class movement of the
proletariat. It is a collection of only petit bourgeois parties for whom
the nationalist program is the main concern and the socialist program
an addition; it is a collection of parties mainly representing – with
the exception of the revolutionary fraction of the Polish Socialist
Party and the Jewish Federalists – the chaotic aspirations of a
peasantry in opposition, and the respective class proletarian parties
that came into being with the revolutionary storm, in clear opposition
to the bourgeois parties. In this collection of petit bourgeois
elements, the party of the Russian terrorists is a trend, not only the
oldest one, but also the one furthest left. The others manifest, much
more clearly, that they have in common with the class struggle of the
proletariat.
The only common ground which links this variegated collection of
nationalists has been the idea of federation, which all of them
recognize as a basis of state and political, as well as party,
relations. However, out of this strange harmony, antagonism arises
immediately from all sides the moment the question turns to practical
projects of realizing that common ideal. The Jewish Federalists bitterly
complain of the “haughtiness” of the nations endowed by fate with a
“territory” of their own, particularly the egoism of the Polish Social
Patriots, who presented the greatest opposition to the project of
non–territorial autonomy; at the very same time, these Jewish
nationalists questioned in a melancholy way whether the Georgian
Federalists would admit any other nationality to their territory, which
they claimed as the exclusive possession of the Georgian nationality.
The Russian Federalists, on the other hand, accuse the Jewish ones,
saying that, from the standpoint of their exceptional situation, they
want to impose on all nationalities a non–territorial autonomy. The
Caucasian, Armenian, and Georgian Federalists cannot agree concerning
the relationship of the nationalities in a future federal system,
specifically on the question of whether other nationalities are to
participate in the Georgian territorial autonomy, “or whether such
counties as Akhalkalak, inhabited mainly by Armenians, or Barchabin,
with a mixture of population, will form individual autonomous
territories, or will create an autonomy for themselves according to the
composition of their population.” The Armenian Federalists, on their
part, demand the exclusion of the city of Tiflis from the autonomous
Georgian territory, inasmuch as it is a center primarily inhabited by
Armenians. On the other hand, all the Georgian and Armenian Federalists
recognize that at present, since the Tatar–Armenian slaughter, the
Tatars must be excluded from the federation of autonomous Caucasian
peoples as “a nationality immature from the cultural point of view”!
Thus, the conglomeration of nationalists agreeing unanimously to the
idea of federation changes into as many contradictory interests and
tendencies; and the “ideal” of federalism, which constitutes in the
theoretical and super–historical abstraction of anarchism, the most
perfect solution of all nationality difficulties, on the first attempt
at its implementation appears as a source of new contradictions and
antagonisms. Here it is strikingly proved that the idea of federalism
allegedly reconciling all nationalities is only an empty phrase, and
that, among the various national groups, just because they don’t stand
on a historical basis, there is no essentially unifying idea which would
create a common ground for the settlement of contradictory interests.
But the same federalism separated from the historical background
demonstrates its absolute weakness and helplessness not only in view of
the nationality antagonisms in practice but also in view of the
nationality question in general. The Russian Congress had as its main
theme an evaluation and elucidation of the nationality question and
undertook it unrestricted by any “dogmas” or formulae of the “narrow
doctrine of Marxism.” What elucidation did it give to one of the most
burning questions of present political life? “Over the whole history of
mankind before the appearance of socialism” – proclaimed the
representative of the Social Revolutionary Party in his speech at the
opening of the Congress – “one may place as a motto the following words
from the Holy Scripture: ‘And they ordered him to say “shibboleth” and
he said ”sibboleth” and they massacred him at the ford of the river.’
Indeed, the greatest amount of blood spilled in international struggle
was spilled because of the fact that one nation pronounced ‘shibboleth’
and the other ‘sibboleth.’” After this profound introduction from the
philosophy of history, there followed a series of speeches maintained at
the same level, and the debates about the nationality questions
culminated in the memorandum of the Georgian Federalists which
proclaimed:
”in primitive times, when the main task of people was
hunting wild animals as well as creatures like themselves there were
neither masters nor slaves. Equality in social relations was not
violated; but later, when people came to know the cultivation of the
soil, rather than killing and eating their captives they began to keep
them in captivity. What, therefore, was the reason out of which slavery
arose? Obviously not only material interests as such, but also this
circumstance: that man was by his physical nature a hunter and a
warrior(!). And despite the fact that man has already long since become
an industrial animal, he is to this very day a predator, capable of
tearing apart his neighbor for minor material considerations. This is
the source of unending wars and the domination of classes. Naturally the
origin of class domination was influenced also by other causes, for
instance, man’s ability to become accustomed to dependence. But
undoubtedly if man were not a warrior, there would be no slavery.”
There follows a bloody picture of the fate of the nationalities subject to tsardom and then again a theoretical elucidation:
“Somebody may tell us that bureaucratic rule rages not
only in the borderlands but in Russia itself. From our point of view
this is completely understandable. A nation subjugating other nations
eventually falls into slavery itself. For instance, the more Rome
expanded its domination, the more the plebeians were losing their
freedom. Another example: during the great French Revolution the
military victories of the Republican Army annihilated the fruit of the
revolution – the Republic (!). The Russians themselves enjoyed
incomparably greater freedom before they united in one powerful state,
that is, at the time of the rule of die separate princes.” Thus, the
memorandum ends its historio–philosophical lecture; freedom does not
agree with the clatter of arms. Conquest was the main cause which
brought into being both slavery as well as the rule of some social
classes over others.
That is all that the Federalists of the present time are
able to say about the nationality question. It is literally the same
phraseology from the standpoint of “justice”, “fraternity”, “morality”
and similar beautiful things which already, sixty years ago, was
proclaimed by Bakunin. And just as the father of anarchism was blind to
the Revolution of 1848, its inner springs, its historical tasks, the
present last of the Mohicans of federalism in Russia stand helpless and
powerless before the revolution in the tsarist system.
The idea of federation, by its nature and historical substance
reactionary, is today a pseudo–revolutionary sign of petit bourgeois
nationalism, which constitutes a reaction against the united
revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat in the entire Empire.
Characteristic is the antipathy, general among the Swiss population,
against the Ständerat as a “do–nothing” institution. This is only a
subjective expression of the fact that this organ of federalism has been
deprived of its functions by the objective course of historical
development. Original note by R.L.
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Revolution and Konterrevolution in Deutschland (Weimar: 1949), pp.77, 78–79.
Die Neue Zeit, 1897–1898, Vol.1, p.564.
Die Neue Zeit, 1898–1899, pp.293, 296, 297, 301.
Next Chapter: Centralization and Autonomy
Last updated on: 11.12.2008
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