Intro­duc­tion: Marx­ism and Nation­al­ism Revisited

In The Wretched of the Earth, from 1961, Frantz Fanon argued that

Marx­ist analy­ses should always be slightly stretched every time we have to con­front the colo­nial prob­lem.¹

This notion is an excel­lent start­ing point for reex­am­in­ing the post­colo­nial prob­lem­atic of what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “provin­cial­iz­ing” of Europe. Within sub­al­tern, post­colo­nial, and decolo­nial stud­ies, there are two het­ero­ge­neous and com­pet­ing con­cep­tions of this provin­cial­iza­tion of Europe, whose entan­gle­ment remains a source of ambi­gu­i­ties. There is, on the one hand, a con­cep­tion that holds provin­cial­iza­tion to be syn­ony­mous with the par­tic­u­lar­iza­tion, and thus rel­a­tiviza­tion, of “Eurocentric-European thought,” and Marx­ist thought in par­tic­u­lar. There is, on the other hand, an under­stand­ing of provin­cial­iza­tion as a stretch­ing that under­lines the need for an exten­sion and dis­place­ment of the bor­ders of the­ory beyond Europe, as a con­di­tion of pos­si­bil­ity of an authen­tic uni­ver­sal­iza­tion. The oppo­nents of post­colo­nial cri­tique have until now almost exclu­sively seemed to resist the first of these two forms of provin­cial­iza­tion, rel­a­tiviza­tion, in that they really per­ceived it to be a break with anti-colonial thought and strug­gles for emancipation. But they seemed to be a bit less atten­tive to the sec­ond form–stretch­ing or exten­sion–where they would have seen that this indeed draws on deep roots in anti-colonial thought, and anti-colonial Marx­ism in particular.

There are many ways to retrace this geneal­ogy, that is, to elu­ci­date the con­ti­nu­ities as well as the rup­tures that are foun­da­tional to the historical-epistemological tran­si­tion and divi­sion from anti-colonialism to post­colo­nial cri­tique. I look to con­sider here the prob­lem of the nation­al­iza­tion of Marx­ism. Usu­ally, this is under­stood as a sim­ple ques­tion of the “adap­ta­tion of Marx­ism to sin­gu­lar con­di­tions”; this does not account for the com­plex­ity of the way in which, as Gram­sci and C.L.R. James have shown, such a nation­al­iza­tion engages in a process of the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal trans­la­tions. The most famous exam­ple remains the “sini­fi­ca­tion” of Marx­ism led by Mao Zedong. As Arif Dir­lik writes, in what is oth­er­wise an unre­lent­ing cri­tique of post­colo­nial stud­ies: “One of Mao’s great­est strengths as a leader was his abil­ity to trans­late Marx­ist con­cepts into a Chi­nese idiom”; in other words, he artic­u­lated a “ver­nac­u­lar­iza­tion of Marx­ism.”² Here, one can already see that the process of the nation­al­iza­tion of Marx­ism is not reducible to Stalin’s for­mula of “national in form, social­ist in con­tent.”³

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