José Mariátegui, "Internationalism and Nationalism"

Peter Waterman writes:

"Internationalism and Nationalism"
José Carlos Mariátegui

[José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) was a journalist, editor, poet, popular educator, political and social analyst, party and union organiser, who laid the foundations of the modern Peruvian labour and socialist movement. He identified with the Russian Revolution and Communism but resisted the imposition in Latin America of certain Comintern policies, and developed original ideas on the revolutionary role of the peasantry and indigenous peoples. He was exiled in Europe in the turbulent period following World War I and the Russian Revolution, and combined a fervent nationalism with a just as fervent internationalism. He put his internationalist convictions into practice in his union newspaper, Labor, that appeared for one year in 1928–29. One-third of its coverage was devoted to international developments, largely to labour issues. This article is a classical internationalist statement from a socialist in a peripheral capitalist country. It was originally presented as a lecture, on November 2, 1923, in the office of the Student Federation, Lima, Peru. The text is taken from Mariátegui (1973a). The English text was originally published as Mariátegui (1986). The translation was by Peter Waterman and Carlos Betancourt. It was scanned and marginally corrected August 2005.]

In various of my lectures I have explained how the life of humanity has been brought together, connected, internationalised. More exactly, the life of humanity in the West. There have been established links and ties, new to human history, between all nations incorporated into European civilisation, Western civilisation.

Internationalism exists as an ideal because it is the new reality, the nascent reality. It is not an arbitrary ideal, it is not the absurd ideal of a few dreamers or utopians. It is the sort of ideal that Hegel and Marx define as a new and superior historical stage, which, organically enclosed within the present, struggles to realise itself and which, until it is realised, whilst it is being realised, appears as an ideal before an aging and decadent reality. A great human ideal, a great human aspiration, does not spring or emerge from the imagination of a more or less brilliant person. It springs from life. It emerges from historical reality. It is the present historical reality.Humanity does not pursue nonsensical or unrealisable mirages: humanity follows those ideals whose realisation appears near, appears ripe, appears possible. As it is with humanity, so it is with the individual. The individual does not enthuse over impossibilities. He enthuses only over something relatively possible, relatively achievable, A humble villager, except for a madman, never dreams of the love of a princess, nor of a distant and unknown multi-millionairess, he dreams instead of the love of a village girl with whom he can talk, who is within reach. It can occur to a child who is chasing a butterfly that he will never catch it: but for him to run after it it is essential that he believes or feels that it is within his reach. If the butterfly flies too far, if its flight is too rapid, the child will give up its impossible chase. With respect to an ideal it is the same for humanity. A capricious ideal, an impossible utopia, however beautiful it may be, will not move crowds in the least. Crowds are moved and impassioned by a theory which offers a near goal, a probable goal; by that doctrine which reveals nothing other than a new reality in formation, a new reality en route. Let us consider, for example, how socialist ideas appear and what it is that impassions crowds. Kautsky, when he was still a revolutionary socialist, taught, in accordance with history, that the desire to realise socialism was born of the creation of big industry. When small industry prevails, the ideal of the dispossessed is not the socialisation of property but the acquisition of a little personal property. Small industry always generates the desire to preserve private ownership of the means of production, and not the desire to socialise property, to institute socialism. This desire sprung up where big industry developed, where return to small industry would have been a step backward, would have been socially and economically retrogressive. The development of heavy industry, the emergence of big factories, destroys small industry, ruins the small artisan; but it at the same time creates the material possibility for the realisation of socialism and creates, above all, the will to bring this to realisation. The factory unites a great mass of workers; five hundred, a thousand, two thousand workers; and generates in this mass not the desire for individual and solitary work, but desire for the collective and associated exploitation of this means of wealth. Consider how a factory worker understands and feels about the union idea, the collectivist idea; and consider, in contrast, how difficult it is for the isolated worker of the little workshop to comprehend the same idea. Class consciousness germinates easily amongst the great masses of the factories and giant companies; it germinates with difficulty amongst the dispersed masses of the workshops and small industry. The large industrial estate [latifundio – PW] and agricultural estate lead the worker first to the organisation of his class interests and then to the desire to expropriate the estate and to its collective exploitation. Socialism, trade unionism, did not thus spring from some work of genius. They sprang from the new social reality, the new economic reality. And the same is true of internationalism.

For many decades, for approximately one century, European civilisation has given evidence of the tendency to create an international organisation of Western nations. This tendency does not have only proletarian forms, it also has bourgeois forms. Well then. None of these forms have been arbitrary, nor have they been produced by chance, on the contrary there has always been an instinctive recognition of a new, latent, state of affairs. The reign of the bourgeoisie, the reign of individualism, liberates economic interests from all bonds. Capitalism, under the reign of the bourgeoisie, does not produce for the national market, it produces for the international market. Its necessity to daily increase production forces it to the conquest of new markets. Its product, its merchandise, recognise no frontiers; it struggles to surpass and subjugate political restrictions. Conflict and competition between industrialists is international. In addition to markets, industrialists struggle over raw materials. The industry of a country is supplied with the coal, petrol, minerals, of diverse and distant countries. In consequence of this international web of economic interests, the big European and United States banks become completely international and cosmopolitan entities. These banks invest capital in Australia, in India, in China, in the Transvaal. The circulation of capital, through the banks, is an international circulation. The English rentier who deposits his money in a London bank is perhaps ignorant about where his capital is being invested, from whence comes his return, his dividend. He does not know, for example, if his bank is going to commit his capital to the purchase of shares in the Peruvian Corporation: in this case the English rentier becomes, without knowing it, co-proprietor of the Peruvian railways. The strike of the Central Railways can affect, can diminish, his dividends. The English rentier does not know this. Similarly the railwayman and the Peruvian engine-driver are ignorant of the existence of the English rentier, in whose wallet a part of their work is going to end up. This example, this case, serves to explain the economic linkages, the economic solidarity, of the international life of our epoch. And it serves as an explanation of the origin of bourgeois internationalism and the origin of proletarian internationalism, which is at the same time a common and opposed origin. The owner of a textile mill in Britain is interested in paying his workers less wages than the proprietor of a textile mill in the United States, so that his merchandise can be sold more cheaply, more advantageously and abundantly. And this causes the North American textile worker to interest himself in the non-reduction of wages of the British textile worker. A fall of wages in the British textile industry is a threat to the worker of Vitarte, to the worker of Santa Catalina. In virtue of these facts, the workers have declared their solidarity and their fraternity over frontiers and despite nationalities. The workers have seen that when they fight a battle it is not only against the capitalist class of their own country but against the international capitalist class. When the European workers fought for the conquest of the eight-hour day, they fought not only for the European proletariat but for the world proletariat. For you, workers of Peru, it was easier to obtain the eight-hour law because the eight-hour law was already in existence in Europe. Peruvian capitalism ceded your demand because it knew that European capitalism had also ceded this. And, in the same way, of course, the battles presently being carried out by European workers are not without significance for your fate. Each of the workers who is falling at this moment in the streets of Berlin or on the barricades of Hamburg falls not only for the cause of the German proletariat. He falls for your cause also, comrades of Peru.

It is because of this, it is because of this demonstration of a historical fact, that for more than a half century, since Marx and Engels founded the First International, the working classes of the world have tended to create organisations of international solidarity which link their actions and unify their ideal. But the opposed camp, capitalist politics, is not insensitive to the same effect of modern economic life. Bourgeois liberalism, the economic liberalism which allowed the capitalist interests to expand, connect and associate despite states and frontiers, was forced to include free exchange in its programme. Free exchange, the free-trade theory, corresponds to a profound and concrete need of a period of capitalist production. What is free exchange? Free exchange, free trade, means the free exchange of goods across all frontiers and all countries. There exist between nations not only political frontiers, geographical frontiers. There also exist economic frontiers. These are the customs. The customs which, on entry into a country, burden them with duties. Free trade seeks to demolish these economic frontiers, to abolish the customs, to clear the way for the free passage of goods to all countries. And in the peak period of free-trade theory the bourgeoisie was, in sum, especially internationalist. What was the origin of its free-trade-ism, what was the origin of its internationalism? It was economic necessity, the commercial necessity for industry to expand freely throughout the world. The capitalism of some economically highly-developed countries met, in economic frontiers, an obstacle to its expansion and wished to demolish them. And this free-trade capitalism, which does not of course embrace the whole capitalist world but only part of it, was also pacifist. It preached peace and preached disarmament because it saw war as a disturbance to and disruption of production. Free trade was an offensive of British capitalism, the most advanced in the world, the best prepared for competition with capitalist rivals. In reality, capitalism could not fail to be internationalist because capitalism is by nature and necessity imperialist. Capitalism created a new class of historical conflicts and military conflicts. Conflicts not between nations, not between races, not between opposed nationalities, but conflicts between blocs, between conglomerates of economic and industrial interests. This conflict between conflicting capitalisms, British and German, led the world to the last great war. And, as I have had occasion to explain, bourgeois society has come out of this profoundly undermined and weakened. Precisely because of the contrast between the nationalist passions of the peoples, which antagonise and separate them, and the necessity for collaboration, solidarity and reciprocal amnesty between them, the sole means for common reconstruction. The capitalist crisis, in one of its principle aspects, is to be found just in this: the contradiction between the politics of capitalist society and the economics of capitalist society. In present-day society politics and economics have ceased to coincide, have ceased to agree. The politics of present-day society are nationalist; its economics are internationalist. The bourgeois state is constructed on a national base; the bourgeois economy must rest on an international base. The bourgeois state has educated man in the cult of nationalism, it has infected him with ill will and suspicion and even with hatred of other nationalities; the bourgeois economy needs, on the other hand, agreements and understandings between distinct and even opposed nationalities. The traditionally nationalist teaching of the bourgeois state, excited and stimulated during the wartime period, has created, above all in the middle class, an intensely nationalistic attitude. And it is now this attitude which prevents European nationalities from cooperating and coordinating a common programme for the reconstruction of the capitalist economy. This contradiction between the political structure of the capitalist system and its economic structure is the most profound, most eloquent, symptom of the decadence and dissolution of this social order. It is, furthermore, the revelation, the confirmation rather, that the old political organisation of society cannot continue because within its mould, within its rigidly nationalist form, there could not develop the new international economic and productive tendencies, the characteristic of which is their internationalism. The social order is declining and expiring because it cannot allow for the international economic and productive forces. These economic and productive forces require international organisation that allows their development, their circulation and growth. Such international organisation cannot be capitalist because the capitalist state, without renouncing its structure, without renouncing its origin, cannot but be a nationalist state.

But this incapacity of individualist and capitalist society to transform itself in accordance with international economic necessities does not prevent the appearance within it of the first signs of an international organisation of humanity. Within the nationalist and chauvinist bourgeois system which separates and opposes peoples, there is woven a dense network of international solidarity that is preparing the future of humanity. The bourgeoisie itself can [not - PW] abstain from forging with its hands international organisations and institutions that reduce the rigidity of its nationalist theory and practice. We have thus seen the League of Nations appear. The League of Nations, as I have said in a lecture about it [Mariátegui 1973b– PW], is fundamentally the homage of bourgeois ideology to internationalist ideology. The League of Nations is an illusion because no human power can prevent the reproduction within it of the conflicts, enmities and imbalances inherent in a capitalist and nationalist organisation of society. Supposing that the League of Nations managed to include all the nations of the world, it would still be unable to be effectively pacifist or to regulate conflicts and contrasts between nations efficiently, because humanity, reflected and synthesised in its assembly, would be simply the same nationalist humanity as before. The League of Nations brings together the delegates of peoples; but it would not bring together the peoples themselves. It would not eliminate the bases of difference between them. The same divisions, the same rivalries that bring together or antagonise nations in geography and in history, would bring them together or oppose them within the League of Nations. The alliances, the compromises, the ententes, which bring peoples together in opposed and enemy blocs, would continue. The League of Nations, finally, would be a class international, an international of states; but not an international of peoples. The League of Nations would be an internationalism only in name, in appearance. It would be a League of Nations if it brought together within itself all governments, all states. And in the present case, in which it brings together only a part of the governments and a part of the states, the League of Nations is still much less than this. It is a court without authority, without legitimacy and without power, at the edge of which nations contract and litigate, negotiate and attack each other.

But, nonetheless, the appearance, the existence of the idea of the League of Nations, the attempt to realise it, is a recognition, is a declaration of the evident truth of the internationalism of contemporary life, of the international necessities of the life of our times. In this century everything tends to link, everything tends to connect, peoples and individuals. In other times the setting for a civilisation was limited, small; in our epoch it is almost the whole world. The British coloniser who settles in a primitive corner of Africa brings to this corner the telephone, the wireless telegraph, the automobile. In this corner there resounds the echo of Poincaré's latest harangue, Lloyd George's latest speech. The progress of communications has to an in- credible extent mutually bound the activity and history of nations. It is thus that the punch that felled Firpo in a New York ring was known of in Lima, in this little South American capital, within two minutes of having been seen by the spectators of the match. Two minutes after having excited the spectators in the North American stadium, the punch was agitating the good people at the doors of the Lima newspapers. I recall this example in order to give you the precise sensation of the intense communication that exists between the nations of the Western world, due to the birth and improvement of communications. Communications are the nervous system of this internationalism and human solidarity. One of the characteristics of our epoch is the rapidity, the velocity, with which ideas spread, with which currents of thought and culture are transmitted. A new idea that blossoms in Britain is not a British idea except for the time that it takes for it to be printed. Once launched into space by the press, this idea, if it expresses some universal truth, can also be instantaneously transformed into an internationalist idea. How long would Einstein have waited in another period in order to become popular internationally? In these times the theory of relativity, regardless of its complexity and technicality, has circled the earth in a few years. All these facts are so many more signs of the internationalism and solidarity of contemporary life.

One notes in all intellectual, artistic, philanthropic, moral, etc., activities, the tendency to create international organisations of communication and coordination. In Switzerland can be found the seats of more than 80 international associations. There is an international of teachers, an international of journalists, a feminist international, a student international. Even chess players, if I am not mistaken, have international offices or something similar. Music teachers have held an international congress in Paris in which they discussed the value of keeping the foxtrot in fashion or reviving the pavana. There has thus been laid the basis for an international of dancers. Still further. Amongst the internationalist tendencies, amongst the internationalist movements, there is taking shape one more curious and paradoxical than any other. I am referring to the fascist international. Fascist movements are, as you know, rabidly chauvinist, violently patriotic. It happens, nonetheless, that they stimulate and ally with each other. The Italian fascists, it is said, are aiding the Hungarian fascists. Mussolini was at one time invited by the German fascists to Munich. The fascist government in Italy has responded to the rise of a pro-fascist government in Spain with explicit sympathy and enthusiasm. Even nationalism, then, cannot do without a certain internationalist appearance.

Mariátegui, José Carlos. 1973a. ‘15ª Conferencia: Internacionalismo y nacionalismo’, Historia de la crisis mundial (Conferencias años 1923 y 1924). [Ediciones populares de las obras completas de José Carlos Mariátegui. Toma 8]. Lima: Amauta. Pp. 156-65.

Mariátegui, José Carlos. 1973b. ‘9ª Conferencia: La paz de Versalles y la Socieded de las Naciones’, Historia de la crisis mundial ( Conferencias años 1923 y 1924). [Ediciones populares de las obras completas de José Carlos Mariátegui. Toma 8]. Lima: Amauta. Pp. 106-18.

Mariátegui, José Carlos. 1986. ‘Internationalism and Nationalism’, Newsletter of International Labour Studies (The Hague), Nos. 30-31:3-8)."