The Politics of the Powerless

“The working men have no country,” reads a famous passage in The Communist Manifesto. “We cannot take from them what they have not got.” Marx and Engels add that with its penetration of world markets, the bourgeoisie was universalizing capitalist relations of production, and in consequence, “National differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing daily more and more…”

With the hindsight of 130 years, it is difficult not to recognize nationalism as one of the specters that are perennially haunting Marxism. Most “orthodox” Marxists, in the wake of Marx’s and Engels’s pronouncements, embraced a universalism that rejected national aspirations as ends i...