On Szporluk's Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List
I've been hearing List's name recently amongst some left-sovereigntist/productivist post-neoliberal types, and this title promised me an appealing point of entry to List's ideas in historical perspective. I've been reading a lot around nationalism recently, and so these topics are going to be a bit of a staple on the blog for the time being.
Szporluk's titular opposition is set up under the aegis of the Hobsbawmian dual revolution: French and Industrial. His thesis is that Marx and List gave different but related analyses of the state of affairs ensuing from that dual revolution, as they stood some fifty years on from it. Whither and wherewith was that world to go?
Lichtheim had classified responses to this question under the threefold of: liberal integration (embodied intellectually in the likes of Smith, and paradigmatically in the class fraction of factory owners), Marxism (championed by radical intelligentsia and the urban industrial working class), and conservatism (say, along Burkean lines, represented by landlords, aristocrats, and traditionalist peasantry). Szporluk argues that this leaves aside nationalism as a distinctive fourth strain, usually swept under the rug as too protean and lacking canonical thinkers. Yet in Friedrich List, Szporluk finds the thinker par excellence of a distinctive and influential strain of nationalism.
Marx and Engels had famously measured the winds of change as prone to blow away the nation. List, on the other hand, took the dual revolution to be intensifying national differences and exacerbating conflicts, and correspondingly sought to make explicit what he saw to be the nation-state's politico-economic raison d'etre. List was rather influential in his day, and the target of an unpublished article that Marx penned in 1845 — when Marx was yet to make his name — in response to List's Das nationale System der politischen Ökonomie. Bringing this List Critique to light, and re-examining the Marx-List relation on its basis, is one of the key motivations behind Szporluk's book.
List's nationalism is not the romantic, völkisch, cultural nationalism of Herder. List in fact joins Marx and Engels in holding small nations in contempt. List's outlook is, rather, a modernizing, economic creed that posits nations as the fundamental drivers of industrialization and economic development. Nations are that essential third term that stand between the individual and mankind, in the process of development. In Szporluk's view, this is a distinctive, intellectually serious mode of nationalism, far from the craven amalgam of ethnic identity plus flag-waving.
List's central dogma revolves around an economic-stage theory of the nation, passing from "savagery" up to a harmonious combination of "agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce". The world as it stood in the 1840s exhibited the full gamut of this development, with its pinnacle in England. List's distinctive prescription, in the face of this, was to argue for stage-appropriate, and hence differential, economic strategy. In particular, he argued that relatively backward countries — paradigmatically Germany vis-a-vis Britain — should exercise measures of trade protection such as tariffs. Against Smith, List saw the dogma of free trade as a slavery sentence for less developed countries, condemning them to lag in perpetuity. Instead, the state must impose certain restrictions on private industry, and compel certain developments that of themselves would not arise from private interests, including industry itself. Productive powers — List's term for the likes of education, justice, defense, institutions — trump wealth. Private interest ought to be subordinate to public interest, that is, national interest; although as Szporluk points out, the precise form that this subordination should take, remained in List rather underspecified. Of course, this view has Marxist affinities, and ones which became more explicit in later national articulations of Marxism.
Against this, Marx's List Critique holds little surprise for a seasoned Marxist. List's "national system," Marx argues, is ideological cover for the German bourgeoisie: a high-minded patriotic dressing-up of its desire for exactly what its English and French counterparts already enjoy: capitalist exploitation of wage labor under tariff protection. The doctrine of "productive powers" is, on this reading, a fetish: it mystifies industry by detaching it from its real basis in the worker reduced to a productive force under capital, letting the German burgher pose as steward of the nation's spiritual mission while pursuing the most ordinary bourgeois material interests.
In his final chapter, Szporluk, following Meyer, argues that in Leninism we find a partial synthesis of Marx and List (indirectly, via the "Russian Listianism" of Witte and Struve in late-imperial Russia). That is, contra the Mensheviks and liberals, who held that Russia's "backwardness" must be overcome by repeating the Western path (capitalist industrialization plus post-1789 style liberal-democratic political order), Lenin held that backward countries could and must industrialize without duplicating the Western capitalist-liberal sequence. Instead of bourgeoisie versus proletariat within a maturing capitalism, the opposition became advanced versus backward in a world of nations.
The central role given by Lenin to the conflict between backward and advanced societies, with different development prescriptions for each, is essentially Listian, according to Szporluk. Clearly such a typology is also Marxian, but it is the centering of nations rather than classes as the primary axis of revolutionary conflict, and backwardness considered as an engine of revolution, that is essentially Listian developmental geopolitics. Szporluk argues that one politics took a national form, it became necessary that communism became articulated in national terms. I think this is debatable in theory, but it is in practice what happened in the 19th century.
With the exhaustion of neoliberalism, it is little wonder that we are seeing a return to List. Yet as we have noted, the precise content of such a politics is underdetermined by the content of List's writings themselves. Rearmament in Europe, tariffs and NATO retreat in Washington, virtually the whole of China's development policy — all bear List's fingerprints. And they all, seemingly, add up to a powder keg.
As such, I remain sceptical towards Listianism per-se, for many reasons, but I will briefly touch upon a few. Firstly, what is the teleology of Listianism? Rhetorically, it was the universal brotherhood of mankind, as in Marx. Szporluk takes this to be a sentiment tacked onto List's worldview, whose actual mechanics would generate rivalry without end: with constant progression of the leading edge, the line between advanced and backward has unlimited capacity to be redrawn, and cosmopolitan unity no more than a regulative ideal. This does appear to be the content of world history from 1789 up to the present day.
Secondaly, the leap from "there must be a term that stands between the individual and mankind" to "that term is the [extant system of] nation states" is contingent, and probably overdetermined by the German question of the 1840s. Perhaps one productive way that I can "think with" List, is to ask: what are the formal requirements of this term that must mediate the individual and the global aspects of modernity? While we're at it, what is the global? Isn't this the most crucial question today? It seems to me that, with the failure of globalizaton, contemporary Listians across the political spectrum have decided to forgo the question of the global entirely. Once this element is implicit, it is anarchic. The international is no more than a residual, a sea for national vessels to violently abut, regulative, but without ideation — an unposited point at infinity. At the same time, the global cannot be thought apart from the local. There remains much work to be done in making explicit the space of modernity such that we might navigate it more successfully.