NATION-STATES: CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMPETITION by Neil Davidson

(excerpts from and paraphrasing of)

Chapter One: The Trouble with “Ethnicity”

I want to argue that we need to go beyond opposition to “ethnic cleansing”…and question the validity of the term “ethnicity” itself.

Lenin: “Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected—unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic [i.e. revolutionary socialist] point of view and no other.”

KINSHIP, OCCUPATION, AND IDENTITY: “Ethnicity” has been defined in three ways: first, where members of a group have a common line of descent and consequently a shared kinship; second, where they have a common position within the international division of labor and consequently a shared occupation; and third, where they have one or more cultural attributes in common and consequently a shared identity. The first and second reasons assume that ethnicity can be defined objectively, the third that it can be defined subjectively. As we shall see, it is the subjective definition that is currently dominant.

KINSHIP
Once we move onto the terrain of recorded history, the multiple genetic inheritance of the global population is indisputable—a fact that also makes the existence of the different “races” a fiction impossible to sustain.

OCCUPATION
Like the modern notion of “race,” the origins of the occupational definition of ethnicity lie in the colonial expansion of capitalism outside of its European heartland.

At first, during the process of primitive accumulation, racism was used to justify the assignment of specific roles within the system (for instance the role of slave), but later on it was used to consign members of “races” who had migrated to metropolitan centers either to the reserve army of labor or to the group of workers with the worst pay and conditions in the labor force.

Example: the Hutus farmed, the Tutsi reared cattle, and the Twa hunted. Rwanda shows how existing occupational roles in existing populations can become the basis of new ethnicities imposed by colonialism.

IDENTITY
Like all classificatory lists, its elements are somewhat arbitrary. Perhaps in realization of this, some writers have abandoned any attempts at precise definition.

In 1953 David Reisman became the first person to use the term “ethnicity” to mean identity and he was quickly followed by other North American sociologists.

Ethnicity, in short, becomes a way of labeling people through the use of an ideological supercategory that includes virtually any characteristic they might conceivably possess.

THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF CAPITAL, CRISIS, AND IDENTITY POLITICS
Why has the upsurge of “ethnic” identification taken place now? The first condition is the need to distinguish one group from another. The second condition is rapid social change. Where that change is destructive of established ways of life, and in some cases whole societies, and class politics does not offer an alternative, then distinguishing oneself as part of a specific group in order to struggle over resources, or scavenge what you can from the rubble left by the onward march of international capital, may appear to be the only available option—even where group membership may previously have meant little or nothing to the people concerned…The left should be at the forefront of opposition to this, reasserting the realities of class struggle against the myths of ethnicity…The other road, the road more frequently traveled, is not to struggle for redistribution from the capitalist class to the working class, but to struggle—or more precisely, to lobby—for resources to be redistributed from one section of the working class to another, or from one region to another, or…from one “ethnic” group to another.

“ETHNICITY’ AND THE NEW RACISM
The problem is that the notion of ethnicity is all too often used to invoke precisely the qualities that used to be invoked under the now discredited notion of “race.”

As Neville Alexander points out, quoting one of the American sociologists responsible for popularizing the term during the 1940s, “ethnicity” is useful “as a means for avoiding the word [race], yet retaining its meaning.”

Alex Callinicos rightly argues that the “new” racism has arisen as result of the discredit into which the notion of biologically distinct races has fallen—partly as a result of advances in knowledge that have undermined any scientific basis for such beliefs, partly (and one suspects far more) as a result of the use to which such beliefs were put during the Holocaust. (Hence modern convention, which I have followed here, of placing the word “race” in quotes, indicating that the concept is wholly ideological and has no referent to the world.)

There are reasons to believe that the dominant form of racist ideology is taking a new form in which questions of “ethnicity” are central. First, the emphasis on culture is not related to biology in the sense of indicating that some human beings are genetically superior or inferior to others, but in the sense that human beings are naturally hostile to those with different cultures (a far right talking point)…Second, and more importantly, we are seeing the naturalization of “ethnic” characteristics. Attributes or properties like religion or language that were once regarded as socially acquired and consequently amenable to change are increasingly being treated as if they were naturally occurring and permanent.

It is necessary to remind ourselves that there are no nations on earth, be their nationalisms ever so “civic,” where “ethnic” divisions could not be invented and “cleansing” imposed if the material conditions were right.

CONCLUSION
As the Russian Marxist Valentin Voloshinov wrote, “the word is the most sensitive index of social changes,” and if, as Voloshov also suggests, the word is “the arena of class struggle,” then it is high time that we began to wage it over the word “ethnicity.”

Kuper: “If I am to regard myself only as a cultural being, I allow myself very little room to maneuver, or to question the world in which I find myself...It tends to draw attention away from what we have in common instead of encouraging us to communicate across national, ethnic, and religious boundaries, and to venture between them.”

[TO BE CONSIDERED IN CONJUNCTION WITH BARBARA SMITH AND THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE]

CHAPTER TWO: WHAT IS NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS?

DEFINING A NATION
”Nation” will be used to describe a human community that has acquired national consciousness. National consciousness is different from other forms of collective consciousness, but in what way?

NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
Classic statement of the Marxist position on class, Geoffrey de Ste Croix writes: “A class (a particular class) is a group of persons in a community identified by their position in the whole system of social production, defined above all according to their relationship (primarily in terms of the degree of ownership or control) to their conditions of production (that is to say, the means and labor of production) and to the other classes.”

Class consciousness arises through a process of recognizing real common interests, a recognition that is only possible as a result of social changes having a material reality prior to consciousness. National consciousness arises through a process of constructing imaginary common interests, a construction that can result in the establishment of a territorial nation-state, but only at that point will the nation have a material reality outside of consciousness. The resulting difference in aspiration may be summed up schematically by saying that a member of a social class may achieve class consciousness (bring their consciousness in line with reality), while a group with national consciousness may achieve statehood (bring reality in line with their consciousness)

NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND NATIONALISM
It is perfectly possible for a people to develop national consciousness without subsequently becoming nationalists…it is not possible to build a nationalist movement without (at least a minority of) a people previously developing national consciousness. The two have also been known to develop simultaneously, but for the purposes of clarity I will treat national consciousness as a more or less passive expression of collective identification among a social group, and nationalism as a more or less active participation in the political mobilization of a social group for the construction or defense of a state.

WHAT NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT
I want to distinguish between four related concepts - national identity, banal nationalism, patriotism, and cultural nationalism—to which it bears a superficial resemblance and with which it is often used interchangeably.

National Identity
Billig: “Not all identities should be considered as equivalent and interchangeable.”
Identities are an ensemble of all the external signs through which people show both to themselves and to other people that they have chosen to be identified in that particular way…most often they are simply the ways in which people respond to being addressed in a particular way.
As Billig notes: “National identities are forms of social life, rather than internal psychological states; as such, they are ideological creations, caught up in the historical processes of nationhood…A ‘national identity’ is not a thing; it is a short-hand description for ways of talking about self and community.” National consciousness, however, is precisely the “internal psychological state” that then seeks expression in the outward signs of identity.

“Banal nationalism”
Billig: “The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not the flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building.” Banal nationalism is an expression of loyalty to the nation as a state, as the image of the flag employed by Billig makes clear, whereas national consciousness is an expression of identification with the nation as a social group who may not have attained statehood and may not even aspire to do so.

Patriotism
During the eighteenth century the term “patriotism” was a precursor to “nationalism,” because the latter term was not yet available. During the twentieth century is was used as an alternative to “nationalism” because of the disgrace into which the latter had fallen. In both cases it is a thoroughly political concept.

Cultural Nationalism
There are two reasons for doubting the assimilation of national consciousness to cultural nationalism. The first is the assumption that culture by definition is unpolitical. The second is that certain forms of consciousness only became possible when the historical conditions are ready for their appearance. (Example: Of what nation, territory, or country was Ptolemy king? The answer is that he was not king “of” anywhere, neither in his titulary nor on his coins nor in any official documents, whether edicts, letters, or treaties. He was just “King Ptolemy” of wherever his writ ran at any moment.) When were the conditions ready for the appearance of national consciousness? How did it then become transformed into nationalism?

CHAPTER THREE: FROM NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS TO NATION-STATES

The word “nation” as an index of social changes.
A kingdom was never thought of merely as the territory which happened to be ruled by a king. It comprised and corresponded to a “people” (gens, natio, populus), which was assumed to be a natural, inherited community of tradition, custom, law, and descent.
”Peoples” were defined by two characteristics which Susan Reynolds calls “common biological ascent” and “common culture.”
The most significant aspects of the “common culture” were language and law. More precisely if the feudal idea of the nation was defined racially, then the feudal idea of race was itself defined linguistically. “Language makes race,” wrote medieval writer Claudius Marius Victor.

Because the capitalist mode dominated some areas long before industrialization proper, national consciousness—and in some cases a fully formed nationalism—existed in those places before the second half of the eighteenth century.

National consciousness developed in three stages:
Psychological formation (c. 1450 -1688)
Geographical extension (1688-1789)
Social diffusion (1789-1848)

PSYCHOLOGICAL FORMATION
Four main elements combined at the origin of national consciousness: all reflect to a greater or lesser extent the impact of capitalism on feudal society.

1. The formation of externally demarcated and internally connected areas of economic activity, ie trade markets.

2. The adoption of a common language by the communities that were being connected to each other at the economic level. Michael Billig has suggested that the concept of “a language” is an invention of the epoch of the nation-state, and “if this is the case, then language does not create nationalism, so much as nationalism creates language; our rather nationalism creates “our” common-sense, unquestioned view that there are, “naturally” and unproblematically, things called different “languages” which we speak.” See also the invention of printing and the codification of language in mass-produced works.

3. The character of the new absolutist states. Absolutism was the form taken by the feudal state during the economic transition from feudalism to capitalism…Both the effective pursuit of external military aggression and the suppression of internal revolt required the agency of a centralized, coercive state power greater than the territorially dispersed structures typical of the first period of feudalism (c. 1000-1450)…By 1688 (in England, France, Spain, Prussia, and Sweden) the responsibility for extracting surplus from the peasantry has been assumed by the central state, and the mechanism of surplus extraction changed from rent to tax: the local autonomy of the nobles was therefore greatly reduced. Also, one characteristic of the new absolutist state was the hegemony that the absolutist state exercised over the class that would eventually overthrow them—the bourgeoisie…The arrival of nationhood coincided not with the establishment of the absolutist states but with their overthrow.

4. “Proto-national consciousness” - types of collective belonging the most relevant to this discussion being the “supralocal forms of popular identification which go beyond those circumscribing the actual spaces in which people passed most of their lives” (Hobsbawm). Example: Wherever Protestantism became the dominant religion within in a given territory after 1517, it contributed to the formation of national consciousness by allowing communities of belief to define themselves against the intra-territorial institutions of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire.

GEOGRAPHICAL EXTENSION
What precipitated the formation of national consciousness out of these four different elements? It was was bourgeois revolutions that effected the final transformation of the term “nation” from one that signified “a people” as a race group to one that stood for “the people” as a community—although one of the most divisive issues within all bourgeois revolutionary movements was precisely how “the people” should be defined…Whatever limits was set on membership, the struggle against absolutism required the mobilization of at least a large minority of “the people” to achieve the expulsion or destruction of the royal dynasty…Nationalism provided this identity.

“Bourgeoisie” - This term changed over time. By the time Marx used the term in the 1840s, it stood, in relation to town-dwellers, both for something shallower than previously (because it excluded the new class of industrial laborers) and for something wider (because it included rural capitalists). In short, it meant capitalists, both rural and urban, in the literal sense of those who owned or controlled capital, but also a larger social group over which capitalists were hegemonic…

National consciousness could not flourish, or even take root, where the conditions for capitalist development were no longer present, and for it to be consolidated across Europe, even if only among the bourgeoisie, there has to be at least one case where it successfully made the transition to nationalism and the became embodied in the nation-state…Nationalism can only ever be a vehicle by which “other” interests are advanced; to believe otherwise is to accept the myth of nationalism itself.

After 1848 all ruling classes intent on creating states on the British or French models were forced to embrace nationalism, not only because they personally were capitalists, or even, more broadly, members of the bourgeoisie, but because all of them—Prussian Junkers, Japanese samurai, Italian monarchists, and eventually Stalinist bureaucrats—were engaged in building industrial societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production.

SOCIAL DIFFUSION
Ralph Miliband has argued that class consciousness at the individual level operates as a series of four distinct and ascending levels:
1. The perception of class membership.
2. A perception of the immediate interests of the class.
3. Possessing the will to advance the interests of the class.
4. A perception of what the advancement of the class interests requires, not simply in immediate terms, but in more general, global terms.

Milibrand rightly says that the degree to which classes become conscious of their position varies according to what class they are. Exploiting classes have always displayed a far greater awareness of their position than the majority of those whom they exploit—indeed, this is a precondition of their continuing to exploit them…There is an intermediate form of class consciousness where one accepts the system as an unchanging feature of human society but rejects the way in which specific aspects of it negatively impact the lives of working-class people—that is, a state in between failing to recognize oneself as a member of the working class at all and fully recognizing the revolutionary role of the working class.

The ascent to revolutionary class consciousness occurs when workers see that the negative aspects of their lives are not accidental but direct effects of how the system operates, and that it is possible to replace the system in its totality.

Reformist consciousness vs. revolutionary consciousness. The origins of reformist consciousness are found in the following four developments early in the history of the British working class:
1. Once the initial shock of industrialization passed, workers came to accept that capitalism was not a passing aberration but a new form of society that might have many year of vitality ahead of it. The apparent permanence of the system forced accommodation and adaptation, however grudgingly, from the new exploited class, whose horizons were anyway limited by the “dull compulsion” to work, raise families, and recover from the savage exertions that the factory system demanded.
2. Although these conditions provoked resistance, the fact that the new system generated its own defensive illusions made it less likely that a generalized revolutionary class consciousness would emerge out of such resistance. Under slavery, feudalism, or any other class society before capitalism, exploiters used physical force or the threat of it to make direct producers hand over the surplus they produced. Under early capitalism, they relied instead on a kind of economic discipline: workers feared the poverty that would result from being sacked. It could be argued that this tactic, or at least the hunger and deprivation that resulted from it, was also a form of violence, but the impact on consciousness was different, at least partly because workers appeared to engage in a fair exchange with the capitalist: they contracted to work for a certain number of hours and were paid accordingly. The actual process of exploitation, the fact that the worker produced more than that for which she or he was rewarded, was hidden from view. As a result, although workers were usually hostile to their own particular boss, this did not necessarily generalize into opposition to the system as a whole, since meanness or ill treatment of the workforce could be put down to his personal qualities (or the lack of them), rather than to the necessities of exploitation.
3. Since workers would nevertheless not come to a conditional acceptance of capitalism based purely on the illusions thrown up by the economic operation of the system, both the capitalist state and individual capitalists made a conscious effort to persuade workers of the virtues of the system, a project rehearsed in church sermons and classroom lessons well before the advent of the mass media to whom such instruction is left today.
4. Although trade unions grew out of worker resistance, the goal of these new organizations, whatever rhetoric was employed about the (invariably distant) overturning of the system, was improving the condition of the working class within the system itself.

What is the relationship between national consciousness and reformist consciousness? Workers are confronted by two materially conditioned allegiances: on the one hand, nationalism, reflecting the social position of the individual caught in the allegiances of civil society and its exterior state, and on the other, proletarian internationalism, reflecting the class position of the worker and the kernal of the socialist mode of production developing within capitalism.

Workers remain nationalist to the extent that they remain reformist. And from the point of view of the capitalist class in individual nations, it is absolutely necessary that they do so, or the danger is always that workers will identify not with the “national” interest of the state in which they happen to be situated but with that of the class to which they are condemned to belong, regardless of the accident of geographical location. Nationalism should not therefore be seen as something that only “happens” during separatist movements on the one hand, or during Fascist and imperialist manifestations on the other: the capitalist system generates nationalism was a necessary, everyday condition of its continued existence…nationalism answers particular social needs that are produced by the atomized nature of the capitalist society.

Alexander Luria argues that changes to the socioeconomic system results in people becoming acquainted not only with new fields of knowledge but also with new motives for action:
“Sociohistorical shifts not only introduce new content into the mental world of human beings; they also create new forms of activity and new structures of cognitive functioning. They advance human consciousness to new levels. We now see the inaccuracy of the centuries-old notions in accordance with which the basic structures of perception, representation, reasoning, deduction, imagination, and self-awareness are fixed forms of spiritual life and remain unchanged under different social conditions. The basic categories of human mental life can be understood as products of social history—they are subject to change when they basic forms of social practice are altered and are thus social in nature.”

It is the need for some collective sense of belonging with which to overcome the effects of alienation, the need for psychic compensation for the injuries sustained at the hands of capitalist society, that nationalism fulfills, in the absence of revolutionary class consciousness but in conjunction with reformist class consciousness.

The ideological role played by the ruling class in reinforcing nationalism is therefore only possible because nationalism already provides one possible means of meeting the psychic needs created by capitalism…Once a capitalist nation-state has been established, those who control the apparatus always seek to consolidate the hold of nationalism among the people who inhabit its territory. States need conscripts for their armies, citizens to pay taxes, workers who accept that they have more in common with those who exploit them at home than they do with their fellow-exploited abroad.