Marx vs. Anderson vs. Calhoun

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Jeffrey Hao Hu 1

Marx v. Benedict Anderson and Craig Calhoun on Nationalism

Perhaps Karl Marx was not entirely wrong about the decline of capitalism and the

ascent of communism. There have been multiple cases of communist revolutions, and

there are strong socialist parties in many of the major countries. What Marx really failed

to see was the dominance of nationalism. The working men and women of the world

never had the chance to unite. In contrast, there have been an increasing number of

nation-states as revolutionary movements struggle against the old regimes not based on

the principal of class interest but based on the principal of national self-determination.

The recent war in South-Sudan and the secessionist movements in Catalonia all further

reinforce the theme of nationalism as the driving force of modern history.

Although it may be unfair to compare Marx’s views on Nationalism with two

present-day authors, Benedict Anderson and Craig Calhoun, as Anderson and Calhoun

undoubtedly have the benefit of hindsight, a comparison of their philosophies

nevertheless gives us invaluable insight on why Marx neglected nationalism as a

historically significant force and how nationalism has come to dominate our present-day

consciousness.

It is useful to first compare the basic tenets of Marx and the two present-day

authors’ philosophical worldview, because their views on nationalism are for most parts

informed by their particular philosophies on what divides people and what binds people

together. Marx is famous for his doctrine, as written in the Communist Manifesto, that “in

every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and

social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up,



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and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that

epoch.”1 Marx believed that any social organization, including the state, the nation, and

the government, is a construct based on that society’s economic stage of development. In

other words, the interpersonal economic interactions between individuals dictated the

way in which political power would be distributed, whether in a feudal manor or in a

nation. It is a one-way cause and effect principal, the cause being social economic

relations and the effect being social organizations. Friedrich Engels nicely sums up this

view by saying that “it is not the state which conditions and regulates civil society, but

civil society which conditions and regulates the state, consequently, that policy and its

history are to be explained from the economic relations and their development and not

vice-versa.”2 Consequently, since economic interactions serve as the basis for society and

politics, what divides people and unites people is also determined by their relative

economic position. From this emphasis on economic interpersonal interaction derives

Marx and Engels’ argument that “the whole history of mankind... has been a history of

class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes.”3

Marx’s argument makes a lot of sense. With regards to nationalism, it would be

impossible for nationalism to develop without a certain level of economic and

technological progress. If people did not have any means of learning about people who

lived outside their immediate surrounding and did not produce any materials to have the

incentive for interactions with outsiders, then it would be difficult for people to identify

with these strangers. Calhoun confirms that improvements in transportation,

1 Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 5.2 Roman Szporluk, Communist and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich List (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1988), 303 Marx, Communist Manifesto.



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between the newspaper, as a form of book, and the market.....The book was the firstmodern mass- produced industrial commodity.” 9

The newspaper enabled the readers to think in simultaneous time. Reading the same

text, sharing the same information, and taking in the news in a same language had a

transformative effect on the readers because they could now imagine other people just

like themselves doing the same activity in simultaneity. Although they “had no necessary

reason to know of one another’s existence... they did come to visualize in a general way

the existence of thousands and thousands like themselves through print-language.”10

On

this point, Anderson is perhaps most aligned with Marxist thinking by saying that “thus

in historical terms bourgeoisies were the first classes to achieve solidarities on an

essentially imagined basis.”11

However, for Marx, capitalism was not only a prerequisite for nationalism, it was

also the sole reason for nationalism’s existence. To Marx, nationalism was not, as some

people mistakenly argue, a contradictory force to communism. Nationalism was a

machination, a kind of invention that came along with the Bourgeoisie revolution.

Nationalism was a necessary stage in historical evolution that originated directly from the

rise of the bourgeoisie. The Bourgeoisie wants to exploit the proletarians in his own

country, “but he wants also not to be exploited outside the country... [thus] he puffs

himself up into being the nation in relation to foreign countries and says: I do not submit

to the laws of competition, this is contrary to my national dignity.”12

The exploitative

instincts of the Bourgeoisie class produced competition, which in turn took the shape of

nationalism. Marx emphasizes that “the conjunction between the rise of capitalism and

9 Ibid. 1510 Ibid., 4611 Ibid.12 Szporluk, Communist and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich List , 49.



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the absolutist state system produced a system of nation-states that ... is integral to the

world capitalist economy.”13

To Marx, nationalism was not a driving-force of history in

itself, but an expression of the capitalist Bourgeoisie movement that was about to be

superseded by a Proletariat revolution.

Marx is only able to see nationalism as a by-product of the Bourgeoisie movement

because his theory that all social organizations derive from interpersonal economic

interactions critically limit Marx’s ability to see the reverse side of the cause-and-effect

relationship – political and administrative developments can influence individuals just as

interpersonal relationship shape societies. Craig Calhoun points out that it would be “a

mistake to regard national economies as primary [determinant of nations]; economies are

not national in some autonomous way.”14

In certain circumstances in fact, economic

developments are the direct result, not the cause, of political reformations. Improvements

in tax collection, monopoly on violence, political and administrative and political

integration allowed for the emergence of national economies. In other words, nations

began to take shape before factory-owning bourgeoisies began to worry about

competition in national terms. Calhoun makes it plenty clear that “nations are made by

internal processes of struggle, communication, political participation, road building,

education, history writing, and economic development.”15

Furthermore, Calhoun warns

that “the process of consolidating states and nations was long and far from automatic. It

was historically conflict-ridden in states we now think of as stable democracies, just as it

is conflict-ridden in emerging states.”16

Indeed, if nationalism arose solely as a product of

13 Ibid., 73.14 Calhoun, Nationalism, 68.15 Ibid., 79.16 Ibid., 85.



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capitalism, then the nationalist revolutions would follow much more closely with the

development of industry in different countries. Yet, as Calhoun notes, national

movements are unique in time and process for different cases.

The most salient example is the emergence of national movements in South

America. Anderson points out that these national movements predate European ones even

though “middle classes were still insignificant at the end of the 18th century [in Latin-

America]. Nor was there much in the way of an intelligentsia....Yet they were national

independence movements.”17

Bolivar famously decreed in 1821 that: “in the future the

aborigines shall not be called Indians or Natives; they are children and citizens of Peru

and they shall be known as Peruvians.”18

In Latin America, political and administrative

integration, or rather the lack-of-integration played the crucial role in forming a national

consciousness amongst the Creoles, the American born Spaniards. That the new nations

ended up with roughly the same boundaries as the colonial divisions was no mere

coincidence. Although the “original shaping of the American administrative unit was

arbitrary and fortuitous...over time they developed a firmer reality under the influence of

geographic, political and economic factors.”19

Because the economic and industrial

development in Latin America was so backward, the “immense difficulty of

communications in a pre-industrial age tended to give these units a self-contained

character.”20

Furthermore, for the Creoles, their sphere of activity was limited to the

administrative unit since the “the apex of his looping climb, the highest administrative

centre to which he could be assigned, was the capital of the imperial administrative unit

17 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 31.18 Ibid., 32.19 Ibid., 33.20 Ibid., 33.



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in which he found himself.”21

Thus, in this case, the arbitrary administrative unit has

meaning in real terms, because a Creole’s career and social interactions would be limited

to the administrative unit. The meaning is created through the journey, or pilgrimage as

Anderson calls it, of the local Creoles in trying to attain a higher social and economic

status.

“On this cramped pilgrimage he found traveling-companions, who came to sense that theirfellowship was based not only on that pilgrimage’s particular stretch, but on the shared

fatality of the trans-Atlantic birth... born in the Americas, he could not be a true Spaniard;ergo, born in Spain, the peninsular could not be a true American.”

22

The Latin American nationalist movement shows that Marx’s limited interpretation

of nationalism severely limits his ability to see any other motivating factor for people to

unite other than individual economic interest. Marx believes in a purely economically

motivated model of individual attachment to communities, which argues that individual

and interpersonal economic relations are the basis for determining social structures. For

Marx, the bourgeoisie can never transcend nationality because they are divided by

competing economic interests. In contrast, the “proletarians in all countries have one and

the same interests, one and the same enemy, and one and the same struggle,” and thus the

proletarians must inevitably unite to fulfill their collective economic interest.23

A united

proletariat means that they are “free from national prejudices and their whole

disposition.... Only the proletarians can destroy nationality.”24

According to Marx, the

Bourgeoisie are divided due to economic interests and the proletariats are united due to

economic interest. Consequently, the only way “for the peoples to be able to truly unite,

21 Ibid.22 Ibid., 3523 Szporluk, Communist and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich List, 59.24 Ibid.



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they must have common [economic] interests.”25

If Marx argues that societies and communities form based on real economic

positions, then Anderson’s theory on formation of communities runs in direct opposition.

Anderson proposed that a nation “is an imagined political community – and imagined as

both inherently limited and sovereign.”26

The nation is imagined because “members of

even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members... yet the minds

of each lives the image of their communion..... Communities are to be distinguished not

by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”27

Furthermore,

Anderson clarifies that “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may

prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”28

In

simpler terms, there does not need to be an alignment of economic interests for people to

feel attached to each other. Of course, it helps that members of a community are mutually

beneficial economically, but it is a supporting not necessary condition for a community.

Perhaps, Calhoun puts this concept more bluntly: “Marx and Engels did not give

adequate recognition to the fact that these other identities not only existed but could

shape the way people responded to global capitalism.”29

Indeed, people would often

identify themselves as father, students, Americans, or liberals before they identify

themselves as workers or business-owners.

However, the national identity is different from the other traditional identities as

well. Calhoun argues that “nationalism is not just a doctrine, however, but a more basic

25 Ibid., 60.26 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7.27 Ibid.28 Ibid., 8.29 Calhoun, Nationalism, 27.



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way of talking, thinking and acting.”30

To be more specific, nationalism is not just an

identity alone, but rather an entire construct that includes the government, the language,

and very importantly, the public schooling system. The public schooling system is a

testament to the ability of national movements to create nations. Quite contrary to Marx’s

idea that nations are by-products of another history-driving force of capitalism, the fact

that nationalism can change the way people thinking means nationalism has immense

power and control of its own. Germans did not think of themselves as Germans, but

rather as Bavarians or Prussians, before the unification of Germany; Indonesians right

across the border from Malaysians did not think of themselves as Indonesians as opposed

to Malaysians before the establishment of Indonesia and its public schooling system.

Anderson points out that “in complete contrast to traditional, indigenous schools, which

were always local and personal enterprises... government schools formed a colossal,

highly rationalized, tightly centralized hierarchy, structurally analogous to the state

bureaucracy itself.”31

The introduction of “uniform textbooks, standardized diplomas and

teaching certificates, a strictly regulated gradation of age groups, classes and instructional

materials” created a national consciousness as kids learnt about national heroes and

national wars as if the whole of history was a march towards national formation.

Furthermore, it was not only the content of education systems, which built national

consciousness, but also the system and the journey of education itself. For Anderson, “the

20th century colonial school systems brought into being pilgrimages which paralleled

longer-established functionary journeys. The Rome of these pilgrimages was Batvia: not

Singapore, not Manila, not even the old Javanese royal capitals of Jogjakarta and

30 Ibid., 6.31 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 70.



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Kurakarta.”32

The destination of the people’s academic and working careers was the

capital of the new nations due to the political, educational, and administrative integration

of these new regimes. Thus, this mutual experience as fellow travelers, who have lived

through the same path to get to where they are, provided the possibility for an imagined

community even if these travelers have never met each other.

For Anderson and Calhoun, the advent of the public education system played an

incredible role in helping political elites exercise control and build national sentiment.

Perhaps in a negative sense, one could say that national public education brainwashed

kids since an early age to force identification with a national language, national culture,

national history, and even national hatred. Certainly, Hitler, Stalin and Mao have all

provided extreme examples for how to use public education in instilling national

sentiments. For Marx, unfortunately, there was no way he could see the transformative

effects of a compulsory education system because public education began in United

States only in 1830s, in England in the 1870s, and in France in 1880s. However, for

modern-day writers Calhoun and Anderson, they grew up in an environment where one

cannot imagine how to think of us without identifying with a certain nationality. As

Calhoun says, “nationalism has emotional power partly because it helps to make us who

we are, because it inspires artists and composers, because it gives us a link with history

(and thus with immortality).”33

For Anderson, in an age of religious decline, only

nationalism can make sense of the arbitrariness and inescapability of men’s death by

tying men to something larger and more powerful than himself.

“Why was I born blind? ... The great weakness of all evolutionary/progressive styles ofthought, not excluding Marxism, is that such questions are answered with impatient

32 Ibid.33 Calhoun, Nationalism, 3.



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uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding this topic, at least we know that in the near future,

nationalism is not going anywhere else.



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Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

Calhoun, Craig J. Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1967.

Szporluk, Roman. Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List . New

York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Marx vs. Anderson vs. Calhoun

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