ni de aquí, ni de allá

Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to achieve the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-operation of these nations toward common aims

I have my doubts on where this idea comes from and what precisely it is getting at. My first thought was that it's related to the idea held by Marxists in the first period of the permanent revolution, the need to push with the bourgeois revolutions of the time and to immediately after follow through with a proletarian revolution, like the Manifesto said, the bourgeoisie has its executioner waiting at the door. So then this idea becomes an expression of that need to support bourgeoisie revolutions, in this case manifested in the nation state. Engels also says in the 1893 preface that "But in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible without national independence".

But then isn't this also, in a way, an approach to the national liberation idea in countries under the boot of an imperialist power? to me this is supported by the fact that it's only so explicitly expressed in the early 1890s, when imperialism as a system was already crystallizing. It'd make sense for Poland, especially Congress Poland, where Engels points out the rapid outpacing of the polish bourgeoisie against the Russian bourgeoisie via the concentration of industry. But it wouldn't make sense for Italy would it? especially since in the preface Engels says it was the first capitalist "country".

Maybe this is a very tenuous connection I'm making and I'm more sure about the first interpretation related to the permanent revolution, especially because Engels places a lot of emphasis on the development that is yet to be had by these bourgeoisies, mostly their national independence. Apart from your explanations which are always in depth, I would really appreciate if you pointed me to works where Engels and Marx wrote about this. Thanks in advance!

Marx and Engels came from a background in radical republicanism and democracy, and they generally thought about national independence and unity in terms of the tasks of democratic-republicanism. Erica Brenner discusses this pretty well in Really Existing Nationalisms, although I think she exaggerates the extent to which Marx at least saw himself as aiming at the realization of democracy. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx mocks those who see “the millennium in the democratic republic.” Democracy was a means, which already had something revolutionary in it (mass proletarian self-organization), but was revolutionary in exceeding mere democratic republicanism.

Marx and Engels generally tied national unity to the bourgeois tasks of establishing the democratic republic. But for them the proletariat aspiring to this by the means available to them, that is, by their activity independent of bourgeois leadership, is the proletarian revolution already showing up in the bourgeois revolution. In other words it’s not that there’s two stages, but that the permanent revolution is carrying through this embryonic class independence that already shows up in democratic struggles.

For Marx this goes back to his 1843 critique of Hegel, he believed that democracy places society on its own political basis, but that this illusion of a unitary society (as created by the idea of the national “people”) has to be broken by class struggle, which is a contradiction built into democratic society itself. By 1875, in the CGP he came back to this to say that the significance of democratic republicanism is that “it is precisely in this last form of state of bourgeois society that the class struggle has to be fought out to a conclusion.”

In the context of the 1848 national democratic rebellions and the work of the Communist League, this line of thought had been tied to the aim of national unity as a means to forge the conditions for the class struggle to be fought to a decisive point. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels put it this way: “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.” For them, the fact that “every class struggle is a political struggle” meant that in the context of democratic struggles for national unity, the proletariat could give a universal content to these particular struggles. They could make them many fronts in a single cosmopolitan struggler. The line that the proletarians have no fatherland is famously, but the full section goes this way:

The working men have no country [Vaterland]. 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.

On the basis of this, Marx and Engels supported German unification as part of their work in the Communist League. Later, in the International, they supported Italian unification (they also personally knew Giuseppe Garibaldi). However they knew that the political content of these national movements, the class dynamics of them, were very significant. They were critical of those who subordinated democratic self-determination and class struggle to the nation, rather than the nation to democratic self-determination and class struggle. When German unity was being realized in 1870-1871, but under the conditions of Prussian autocracy, Marx and Engels wrote this about it to the early Social-Democrats:

That she finds her unity at first in the Prussian barracks is a punishment she has amply merited. But even under these circumstances one result has been immediately achieved. Such trifling matters as for instance the conflict between the National-Liberal North Germans and the People’s Party South Germans will no longer uselessly obstruct the way. Relations will develop on a grand scale and become simpler. If the German working class does not then play the historical role it is entitled to it will be its own fault. This war has shifted the centre of gravity of the working-class movement on the Continent from France to Germany. This places greater responsibility upon the German working class...

This skepticism and analysis were what influenced their internationalist support for Polish, Irish, and later Chinese, Indian, and Algerian independence. They were focused on the significance of these struggles for self-determination to the global class struggle. After the 1850s, they realized that colonialism could directly impede class struggle, and this is where they developed an early version of the labor aristocrat thesis in their analysis of the relationship of the British working class to colonialism in Ireland and India. Their considerations were blending democratic self-determination, class struggle, and cosmopolitanism into a single perspective.

This is all pretty well documented for the case of Poland. Marx summed up he and Engels’ position in favor of Polish independence in a way that brought all these things together, and where you can see how they applied these principles to other cases of self-determination struggles:

First of all, of course, sympathy for a subjugated people which, with its incessant and heroic struggle against its oppressors, has proven its historic right to national autonomy and self-determination. It is not in the least a contradiction that the international workers' party strives for the creation of the Polish nation. On the contrary; only after Poland has won its independence again, only after it is able to govern itself again as a free people, only then can its inner development begin again and can it cooperate as an independent force in the social transformation of Europe. As long as the independent life of a nation is suppressed by a foreign conqueror it inevitably directs all its strength, all its efforts and all its energy against the external enemy; during this time, therefore, its inner life remains paralysed; it is incapable of working for social emancipation. Ireland, and Russia under Mongol rule, provide striking proof of this.

'Another reason for the sympathy felt by the workers' party for the Polish uprising is its particular geographic, military and historical position. The partition of Poland is the cement which holds together the three great military despots: Russia, Prussia and Austria. Only the rebirth of Poland can tear these bonds apart and thereby remove the greatest obstacle in the way to the social emancipation of the European peoples.

'The main reason for the sympathy felt by the working class for Poland is, however, this: Poland is not only the only Slav race which has fought and is fighting as a cosmopolitan soldier of the revolution. Poland spilt its blood in the American War of Independence; its legions fought under the banner of the first French republic; with its revolution of 1830 it prevented the invasion of France, which had been decided upon by the partitioners of Poland; in 1846 in Cracow it was the first to plant the banner of revolution in Europe, in 1848 it had a glorious share in the revolutionary struggles in Hungary, Germany and Italy; finally, in 1871 it provided the Paris Commune with the best generals and the most heroic soldiers.

Saw this book recommended, so I'm passing it on!

Racial Innocence will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism.

As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism. Basing her work on interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, Hernández reveals Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, the criminal justice system, and Latino families.

By focusing on racism perpetrated by communities outside those of White non-Latino people, Racial Innocence brings to light the many Afro-Latino and African American victims of anti-Blackness at the hands of other people of color. Through exploring the interwoven fabric of discrimination and examining the cause of these issues, we can begin to move toward a more egalitarian society.

The painting depicts Mary Magdalene as a penitent, a popular theme in religious art. She is often depicted with a skull, a book, and a jar of ointment, symbols of her former life and her quest for redemption.

The work was created by El Greco, a 16th-century Greek painter known for his mannerist and expressive style. The composition and color palette are characteristic of his work, with elongated figures, vibrant colors and a mystical atmosphere.

The painting is part of a series of works by El Greco about Mary Magdalene, each with its own interpretation of the character and the theme of penance.

I should preface this by saying I’m mostly familiar with Mexican Marxism.

Ricardo Flores Magón and Enrique Flores Magón (extremely influential, communists in the rest of Latin America basically saw them as the ideologues of the Mexican Revolution),

César Vallejo (poet and associate of Mariátegui, his political writings are neglected),

M.N. Roy (very influential for the development of international communist anticolonial strategy),

Tristán Marof (was cooking some kind of insane things about Tawantinsuyu but interesting because of that),

Aníbal Ponce (historian and critic of education, a big missing piece if people only look at European critical theory and some of his takes on it precede Paulo Freire),

Aimé Césaire (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is one of the greatest poems about the Caribbean)

José Revueltas (great analysis of the world significance of the Mexican Revolution and the repression of the social revolutionary elements of it),

Che Guevara of course (you’d be surprised how little Anglophone people actually read anything by him),

Walter Rodney (Groundings with my Brothers is a great book)

Pablo González Casanova (great sociologist, a lot of what he wrote goes well with Henri Lefebvre, influenced the EZLN),

Ruy Mauro Marini (one of the greatest dependency theorists, does a lot of interesting things with Marx’s Capital),

Beatriz Nascimento (one of the main theorists of the Movimiento Negro in Brazil and influenced a lot of the reassessment of maroons),

Michael Löwy (great for connecting critical theory, Latin American Marxism, and the concept of utopia),

Gustavo Esteva (critic of developmentalism and one of the better radical democracy theorists), René Zavaleta Mercado (also a great theorist of radical democracy),

Andaiye (formerly worked with Walter Rodney and influential for the development of feminist social reproduction theory),

Álvaro García Linera (one of the theorists who I think is the most consistent defending Lenin’s position on governance, for better or worse, and a meeting point between autonomist Marxism and indianismo), and

Aníbal Quijano (great work on the world historical significance of colonialism and imperialism in the Americas)

Not really, this preserves the same problem of methodological nationalism except it expands it to the Americas south of the Río Grande writ large. Whatever we might identify as an economic experience of “latinidad” is directly tied to the “latinos” in the U.S. through migration circuits and the dependency of many families (and tbh, full on national economies) south of the Río on their relatives to the north sending money and resources. This is also after all a phenomenon that is reinforced by and continues to reinforce the hegemony of the dollar in this hemisphere, and along with it the push and pull factors of migration like hyperinflation of home currencies versus the outsized purchasing power of wages paid in the dollar.

If we go back to actual intelligent theorists of the economics of imperialism in the Americas, like Ruy Mauro Marini for example, many of them understood that the politics of the Monroe Doctrine is meant to preserve Latin America as a labor pool for the North and the West as a whole, which means that immigrants are part of that phenomenon even when they move. This is a necessary framework for understanding the actual motives of the deportation regime for example, which isn’t meant to actually eliminate all latinos but serves as a form of brute force labor arbitrage especially bc once deported the migrant workers often enter the worst and most precarious pools of labor in whatever country they’re sent to (think the maquiladoras).

I think the ethnonationalism of the latter countries (WASP and anyone assimilated into that form of whiteness for U.S./Canada/Australia, Jewish for Israel) is what sets them apart from the coloniality of Latin American countries. The independence revolutions of the U.S. and Israel were accomplished by local elites for the sake of winning substantial democratic rights, but for colonists alone—in particular, the right of slave holding and maximum imperial expansion.

Latin American independence has always been an incomplete decolonial revolution, accomplished largely for the benefit of colonist elites before later revolutions filled them in with substantial democratic content. In most Latin American countries their democratic revolutions have always encompassed mass revolts of Natives, Black people, and mestizos against racial domination, colonial dispossession, and capitalist exploitation. The Mexican Revolution is the paradigmatic example but you can also see it in pretty much every major left populist upsurge in Latin America from the 19th century Paraguayan Revolution to the 20th century Popular Unity movement in Chile to the 21st century Bolivarian Revolution. In each case, while the popular democratic movements of course always had to confront their own internal divisions, it was possible to both fight for the democratization of the existing state and against colonial and racial domination. This is not to say that every racial liberation movement should’ve just assimilated into a one-dimensional national movement—there’s a clear justification for movements like the Indianistas, Kataristas, Movimento Negro, Zapatistas, and others fighting for autonomy, and they ultimately strengthen the democratic revolution by challenging its deepest pitfalls.

What’s distinct about the U.S. and similar countries is that they are foundationally and fundamentally ethnonationalist, and their institutional ethnonational compact between classes is the pitfall of every democratic revolution they have ever seen. Even at their most radical points. The U.S. Civil War was this country’s greatest upsurge against racial capitalism, to the point of abolishing the entire property form of chattel enslavement, but it ultimately coincided with the organization of genocidal wars against Native peoples like the Lakota and it was concluded on terms that demanded the assimilation of freedpeople into capitalist wage labor—which was the condition that allowed the plantocracy to return to power in full force with the rise of the post-Reconstruction Redemptionist Jim Crow regime. It’s not that there’s never been anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements in the U.S., but that they’ve always had to challenge the sovereignty of the existing democratic state (from the Mexican-American War to the Vietnam War) rather than trying to reinforce it against foreign enemies and exploiters.

This map contains something of a misrepresentation because national U.S. leaders like Thomas Jefferson actually encouraged a specific form of interracial marriage as part of their colonial strategy—marriage between white male citizens and Native women, which was designed to facilitate the destruction and assimilation of Indigenous peoples. Similarly, the earliest anti-miscegenation and segregation laws in North American history were meant to restrict the undercurrent of mestizaje between cooperating Euroamerican indentured servants and slaves and control the plantocracy’s mass rape of enslaved people for the purposes of keeping the optimal labor arrangement for their regime of capital accumulation. While the legal and political strategy of a multiclass democratic republican WASP nationalism distinguished the U.S. from any Latin American country, the undercurrents of the hemispheric imperial and racial project were the same. This is covered well in the historical works of Jack D. Forbes, Michael Witgen, and Laura Gómez.

What politically distinguishes the universalist (and assimilationist) mestizo republicanism of countries like Mexico (after Benito Juárez and his followers) and Argentina (after Juan Bautista Alberdi and his followers) is not that it eliminates racism, but that it embraces the kind of pro-integration “colorblind” racism that we in the U.S. only knew from the 1970s to the 2010s. Of course, we all know that it isn’t really “colorblind” and the norms of mejorar la raza and blanqueamiento continue. But the point stands that this is not the absence of racism but a less brutal, more subtle compromise regime that preserves the basic global structure of racial domination that was birthed in this hemisphere after 1492.

The 20th century multiracial populism of figures like Lázaro Cárdenas and Juan Perón simultaneously served as a vehicle for indigenous and mestizo working class masses to challenge racial domination and for further political assimilation. Our closest equivalent in the U.S., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, was ultimately just the expansion of white Anglo nationalism to white ethnics (Jews, Slavs, Germans etc) and tentatively to middle class people of color (insofar as they fulfilled the role of domesticating and controlling the racialized proletariat). While these left populisms are always going to be the vehicles for multiracial democracy, there is always still value to independent affirmations of communities against the world of 1492 as represented by the continental trends of Black Power and Red Power. These are not racist for looking on integration with suspicion, because integration in this hemisphere has so far has only been accomplished on capitalist, bureaucratic, assimilationist terms.

Commodity production is not separate from private control over the commanding heights of the economy—after all, what is capital but command over society’s labor through ownership of exchangeable wealth (whether in the form of cash or assets)? Capitalist society is a totality formed by the intimate link of production and consumption alike in the circulation process. Even the production of surplus-value is founded in the productive consumption of workers who use up raw materials in their transformation, with the use of tools and machines, into finished consumer products to be sold. And the workers are compensated with wages which are to be spent on whatever produced commodities are made available to consumers of their means.

Objecting to the aesthetics of consumer society just as easily carries over into political resistance to the power of capitalists to organize public space. For example, the earliest participants in art nouveau (mostly coming out of the socialist Arts and Crafts movement) were trying to provide an alternative and dignified form of mass, public art to the manipulative slop of the rising advertising industry. Communists like Giancarlo De Carlo historically considered architecture, as an art of public space, to be an extremely important site for class struggle and collaborated with working class militants to create designs that would encourage the participation of residents in organizing the shared spaces of their own everyday lives. Even aesthetically-motivated resistance against the destruction of ecosystems for the construction of Walmarts or suburbias is also already a political campaign to limit the power of capital to command society’s appropriation of space.

Yeah Lenin oversaw the consolidation of the state but he was the Bolshevik most realistic and conscious of it. In that way he was tragic, and split between being a revolutionary communist and the necessities of a statesman who knew he was becoming the personification of a “bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without a bourgeoisie!”

Even before the New Economic Policy, he had also predicted that a strategy dependent on state power would require a consolidation of state capitalism. I think his great error was to think that this could carry over into a specifically “proletarian” form of the state, which laid the basis theoretically for Stalin’s “mightiest and strongest state power that has ever existed” and practically for the political state’s substitution for the republic of councils.

But even this he noticed to some degree, like in the 1920-1921 trade union debates when he called Trotsky’s advocacy for militarization of labor “bureaucratic harassment of the trade unions. .” He thought Trotsky conflated the class-as-state with the class’s organs of self-governance. Lenin thought the distinction was extremely important, because the role of the professional state could only be to prepare the way for its withering away by allocating the resources for workers and peasants to learn self-governance and self-planning.

Even though I think Lenin overestimated the positive content of the revolutionary political state by considering it already the class-as-state, I think he already understood many of the basic dynamics that would lead to the class and the party being collapsed into the administration of the “bourgeois state” and accumulation of the total national capital managed by the state. At one point he went as far as to say this:

“If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed.”

This is why his final articles were almost entirely about how to prevent bureaucratization and total professionalization of governance. What he didn’t realize is that one of the things that led to the party dissolving into the administration of the state was that the party had already been constructed as a “state within a state” along Social-Democratic lines. So there was a built in justification for expediency in the name of the self-preservation and a substitutionist logic towards the class that was later transferred from party to state.

But the fact that he knew very clearly that there was a mortal problem is extremely historically significant. He was the model for very future head of state for the “socialist republics,” but unlike almost any of them apart from Mao, Che, Ben Bella etc he understood the difficulty of his position as a communist. This is how I think about Lenin’s own actions in Kronstadt and elsewhere. He didn’t gloat over Kronstadt, it was the first great tragedy of the revolution. But the logic of necessity and self-preservation of society that he had invoked as the statesman leading its repression ended up becoming an end in itself as the revolutionary content slowly withered. It became a question of the self-preservation of the political state and the national capital, which is what’s going on later in Stalin’s concept of overwhelming necessity.