Page 24 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Introduction
national question is not resolved in the industrialized West.“A dispassionate appraisal
of the contemporary nation-state suggests that, without a serious attempt to address
these issues,”Ashok Kaul warns,“the society faces the prospect of escalating levels of
factional conflict with the ‘real’catalyst being socioeconomic inequalities concealed by
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religious, cultural and ethno-nationalist modes of discourse.”
Liberal and Marxist
historiography has not explained adequately the phenomenon of nationalism and has
failed to develop a comprehensive and critical theory of nationalism. Tom Narin
points out that “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical fail-
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ure.” Marxist scholars, including Marx himself, do not have a consistent position on
nationalism. Whenever they have thought that nationalism promotes socialism, they
have supported it, and whenever they have thought that it did not promote socialism,
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they have opposed it.
Since the understanding of some Marxists has been limited by their political objec-
tives to the so-called proletariat internationalism and universalism, they have failed to
deal with the issues of the national question and multicultural democracy.Today in the
modern world system there is no proletariat internationalism, but there is bourgeois
internationalism.Fascism,racism,and discrimination prevent the working classes within
dominant ethnonational groups from supporting the struggle of the subjugated people.
Since some Marxist and liberal scholars “do converge in their negative evaluation of na-
tionalism as anti-democratic, antiprogressive, and ultimately a fundamental threat to in-
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terstate relation,” they are blinded to the struggles of the colonized ethnonations for
human liberation,social justice,and multicultural democracy.Realizing the significance
of these struggles, Crawford Young explains that “the world enters a period of excep-
tional fluidity—of the sort which historically has usually come about through the dis-
location of a major war. Nation and state, as we have known them, are interrogated by
history and alternative visions of the future. In this process, the politics of cultural plu-
ralism will influence the outcomes in many important ways. In turn, the prospective
impact of cultural pluralism beckons us to continue our quest for a more complete un-
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derstanding of its inner workings.” This work aspires to be part of this quest.
Serious scholars need to challenge the abstract assumption of modernization the-
orists and some Marxists that attempt to maintain the status quo and fail to explain
the contemporary social reality.We need to “abandon fictions like ‘Marxists as such are
not nationalists,’ or ‘nationalism is the pathology of modern developmental history,’
and, instead, do our slow best to learn the real, and imagined, experience of the
past.” 100 Revolutionary practices in the former USSR and Yugoslavia, China, former
Czechoslovakia, and other socialist-oriented countries demonstrate that “Marxists”
have been nationalists, and they used Marxism and state nationalism in combination
to advance the process of modernization and nation-building rather than promoting
socialist democracy. Benedict Anderson notes that “nationalism has proved an uncom-
fortable anomaly for Marxist theory and, precisely for that has been largely elided,
rather than confronted.” 101 Understanding the dilemma of some Marxists and mod-
ernization theorists, Edward Said suggests:
Modern thought and experiences have taught us to be sensitive to what is involved in
representation, in studying the Other, in racial thinking, in unthinking and uncritical ac-
ceptance of authority and authoritative ideas, in the sociopolitical role of intellectuals, in
the great value of skeptical critical consciousness. Perhaps if we remember that the study
of human experience usually has an ethical, to say nothing of a political, consequence in