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At the end of summer during 1891, Europe witnessed two world-historical events. The socialist parties of the Second International assembled in Brussels , celebrating labor’s mobilization against capital. Shortly thereafter, the French fleet visited Kronstadt, consolidating France’s rapprochement with imperial Russia. Contemporaries noted this conjunction. The liberal publicist Jules Simon, for one, complained that the Brussels assembly had “substituted the class patriotism” of labor for the Baltic naval demonstration’s “patriotism of peoples.” If socialism prevailed, he warned, “the French” would disappear, displaced by “the proletariat.”1 Simon’s forebodings have not been realized. The workers of the world have not united into the universal “genre humain” promised by the Internationale . The nineteenth century gave way, not to the radiant socialist world order anticipated by Marx, but to a “world of nations”2 imperiously commanded by nationalists, and sometimes brutally ruled by national socialists. How have Marxism’s class warriors understood their struggle against nationhood , and their defeat? Badly, according to most accounts. Historians have identified Marxism’s interpellation of nationalism as its “great historical failure ,” social scientists have condemned Marxist theorizations of national identity as mere evasion, and a particularly scathing account has even contemptuously suggested that there has been no such a thing as a genuine “Marxist theory of nationalism.”3 Marxists, their critics affirm, have championed a cosmopolitan humanism that has blinded them to the inevitability, and certainly to the desirability, of nationalist particularism. No wonder, then, that Marxism ’s militants have self-confessedly misunderstood and mishandled national identity.4 Much of this critical scholarship has fixed repetitively on Marx himself. Studies comment caustically on the master’s indifference to nationality. Marx may have planned to write a book on the national question, but no more than 2 or 3 percent of his actual work, allegedly, even touches on the issue.5 His critics suggest that Marx’s overwhelming preoccupation with “world history” undermined his every engagement with that potent particularism, the nation. This charge, however, has been challenged. Marx’s defenders contend that his vast corpus manifests profound, if ambiguous, insight into nationhood and nationalism.6 But whatever the master’s own success or failure, Marxism 1 Introduction should not be judged primarily against Marx’s work, but against the practice of Marxists, as the doctrine has lived and died only as incarnate in its militants . Their commitment and striving accorded Marxism its vast historical vitality, while their defeats and retreats have led inexorably toward today’s “death of Marxism.” Certainly the best analyses of Marxism’s entanglement with nationalism situate the doctrine in milieus of militancy. The Soviet experience has undergone particularly intense study, if only because of the USSR’s final nationalist implosion. The sanguinary war between Communism and fascism left one of the great sites of scholarly exhumation: a mass grave in which lie entombed some the past century’s most inspiring visionaries and most ghastly despots. And Marxism’s starring role in the drama of twentiethcentury anti-imperialism has received due attention, despite Marx’s own Eurocentric indifference toward peripheral “nations without history.”7 But the doctrine’s “golden age” during the Second International, Marxist socialism’s own belle epoque, remains the locus classicus of Marxism ’s engagement with nationhood. Lenin and Stalin’s opportunistic construction of a “nationalities policy” for newborn Bolshevism, Rosa Luxemburg ’s quixotic forays against Polish “socialist nationalism,” Otto Bauer’s inspired disassociation of statehood from nationhood—all have undergone skillful scholarly dissection.8 Yet scholars’ assessments of the Second International echo their critiques of Marx. Fin de siècle Marxists stand accused of promoting a “utopian cosmopolitanism”9 that disabled their socialism. After all, the International never once placed the “national question” on its agenda. Ignorant obliviousness? Irresponsible neglect? Embarrassed avoidance ? Perhaps nationalism during the belle epoque indeed constituted Marxism’s “Achilles heel,”10 its self-engulfing “black hole.”11 “Post-Marxists ” have certainly highlighted this supposed lacuna in their former devotions . According to Régis Debray, a cosmopolitan revolutionary turned Gaullist ideologue: The “national question” is the critical gap in Marxist theory. In this small gap, everything not said in Marxism is concentrated and crystallized. And when the unsaid is said, it explodes all the rest. In this sense . . . the nation is like the atomic nucleus in a general conflagration of Marxism as theory and socialism as practice.12 “Black holes,” “nuclear explosions,” “general conflagrations”—confronted by the collision between Marxism and nationalism, critique waxes apocalyptic. This rhetoric is overblown. Marx’s work on...

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