Marxism and nationalism: A never-ending debate

By Uditha Devapriya

On December 1, 1975, the New Left Review published an essay by the Scottish historian and political theorist Tom Nairn which began with these extraordinary words: “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.” The essay came five years or so before the beginning of the global retreat of socialism, the great neoliberal revolution that would eventually deal a blow to the Left the world over. It was a broad critique of Marxism and Marxists. But rather than critiquing the Left for not being strong enough against their opponents on the economic right, it castigated them for overlooking a more formidable foe: the nationalist right. For Nairn, this was an unforgivable omission.

It has been almost half a century since Nairn’s essay was first published, and much water has flowed since then: the end of socialism, symbolised by the collapse of the Soviet Union; the all too brief rise of a unipolar order, led by the United States; the growth of resurgent, militant nationalisms, aimed against that order and country; the incredible ascent of rival powers, particularly China, and an array of “middle-powers”, including India and Brazil; and growing solidarity in the Global South. While not all these developments have borne out Nairn’s prognostications, the Marxist Left has actively tried to adapt itself to them, and has tried to tackle the issues that Nairn highlighted in his essay.

And yet, even after 50 years, we can still say that Marxism, and Marxist movements, including mainstream political parties, remain somewhat amiss when it comes to the issue of nationalism. The orthodox Marxist position – that nationalism was a remnant of some bygone, archaic past, and that the Left’s task was to undermine such remnants and pave the way for a socialist advance – has simply not stood the test of time. To this critique, orthodox Marxists give an even more predictable response: that the Left itself was hijacked by deviant elements – by which they invariably mean the petty bourgeoisie – and that these elements distorted Marxist tenets to their benefit, thereby preventing the Left from achieving its task. Such arguments are to me disingenuous, evasive, and anything but productive.

To say that is not to ignore the complex relationship between nationalism and Marxism. In fact, at times, this relationship has been more problematic, more complicated, than that between Marxism and liberalism. With its valorisation of “universal” constitutional rights, and despite its refusal to embrace material economic rights, liberalism has won sections of the Left to its cause. With its repudiation of universalism, its emphasis on the particular, by contrast, nationalism, particularly its more extremist, fringe variants, has made a foe out of Marxism. This is all the more boggling when you consider that around 75 years ago the two forces seemed aligned and united on several issues, including the key question of opposing imperialism. Anti-imperialist politics do bring them together today, but such unity seems to me facile, marginal, a pale replica of the situation before 1977.

Particularly in colonial societies like Sri Lanka, the Left had no alternative but to pursue common ground with anti-imperialist nationalism. In Sri Lanka this encouraged the Left, broadly composed of urban and suburban middle-class intellectuals who had studied in Europe and the US, at the LSE and at Cambridge, to make inroads into the country’s south-western quadrant, from Colombo, Kalutara, and Ratnapura, through the Uva and into the South. Once established there, the Left had to speak in the language of these communities. This does not mean they appropriated or embraced their rhetoric, or that they succumbed to the temptations of narrow communalism, as later Left movements did. But for a while at least, they were able to win these communities over, and to set camp in peasant heartlands, even as they mobilised working class movements in the cities.

Was it a failure on the part of the Left that it did not fully appreciate the contradictions between the secular-humanist goals they had set for the country and the communalist-exclusivist goals their nationalist allies had set for it? Perhaps. Yet to be fair by the Left, there were factors which exacerbated these tensions, among them the UNP government’s decision to deprive plantation Tamils of their citizenship – a move aimed at crippling the Left of its base in the estates – and the SLFP government’s mobilisation of Sinhala and Buddhist middle-classes, a development that not only deprived the Old Left of a progressive rural-urban nationalist base, but also converted that milieu from the ideals of a secular-humanist Marxism to an ideology based on the pursuit of exclusivism.

Perhaps it was their wholesale embracing of those ideals – of secularism and humanism, ideals which to me seem superior to those touted by nationalists – which blinded them to the appeal of their opponents, from both Sinhala and Tamil nationalist streams. This would be Tom Nairn’s argument, and it is the argument that Michael Walzer invokes in his book The Paradox of Liberation as well. Certainly, the chasm between the Left and the nationalist middle-classes in Sri Lanka indicate that the Marxists’ adherence to such ideals has made it difficult for them to forge or enter any alliance with this milieu, unless they seek an alliance with political outfits which appeal to such communities.

This is the strategy that the Old Left, in particular the Communist Party, has chosen, as witness the CPSL’s involvement in the Uttara Lanka Sabhagaya. Yet the Old Left now has a formidable opponent in the JVP-NPP, an outfit that has demonstrated again and again that, despite its liberal cosmopolitan veneer, it is not above using the same inflammatory rhetoric which upended the CPSL and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party decades ago.

In an interview years ago, Nalin de Silva, the ideological citadel of Sinhala nationalism, spoke rather frankly about his former involvement in Marxist politics. He pointed out that just as Siddhartha Gautama attempted to seek Enlightenment through Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, he had tried to learn about the world through Marxism. Yet like the soon-to-be Gautama Buddha’s encounter with Kālāma and Rāmaputta, his immersion in Marxist politics eventually disillusioned him and turned him away. Marxism had repudiated imperialism and launched a commendable assault on neoliberalism, but to Nalin, it had not fully critiqued or attacked Western hegemony, particularly hegemony over knowledge. In that respect, Nalin noted, his shift from Marxist politics to an ideological repudiation of the West had been, not a descent as Left ideologues would counter, but a progression.

There is much to disagree with this argument. But it underlies the irresistible and almost mystical appeal of nationalism. Nationalism represents itself as an alternative not so much to economic subjugation as to all forms of subjugation by the West. Not long ago, I myself flirted with it, and in its own way it has moulded me, despite my objections to it. Yet I know that for all the limitations of narrow-minded nationalism, it is much easier to mobilise the Sinhala Buddhist middle-class – which, despite what you may think of its ideals, constitutes the single biggest electorate in this country – with the rhetoric of religion and race than the cause of socialist advance. This is a gap Marxists must endeavour to fill.

And fill it they must, for in the never-ending debate between Marxists and nationalists, the latter have usually come off well, not least because of the ideological and material support they have gained, and continue to gain, from the economic right. In itself, this is a paradox: how can forces supposedly hostile to Western economic subjugation allow themselves to be captured by powerful economic forces one would normally not associate with them? But then that has always been the case. Indeed, the nationalist right’s charge that the Old Left, at the height of their power in the 1970s, connived in destroying the Sinhala businessman, that in nationalising the transport and estate sectors they crippled the Sinhala bourgeoisie, is a favourite refrain of the petty bourgeoisie coveted by the right, and it sits in well with the interests and the aims of elite sections of the Sinhala middle-classes.

In his book, Michael Walzer suggests that the Left should seriously engage with these forces and communities, rather than succumbing to or dismissing them. There is much to think about this argument. It represents a sequel of sorts to Nairn’s critique of Marxism. In the context of an ever-widening gap between Left forces and the nationalist right in Sri Lanka, I believe we should take stock of such arguments and build bridges, not with the nationalist right, but with the communities which the nationalist right targets. To do so, it is imperative that our Marxist theorists and commentators reflect on how they are seen by conservative-traditionalist elements in our society, and confront some of the more persistent stereotypes associated with the Left, such as its hostility to the past.

NB: This essay has benefitted substantially from conversations with Pasindu Nimsara Thennakoon, who provoked me to think of the ways in which the Sinhala middle-classes, particularly in rural areas, view Marxism and Marxists.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.