SHLOMO AVINERI
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ing about parallel structures - an official one and a multitude of unoffi–
cial ones - is a better way of looking at these societies.
A final comment about some lessons to be drawn from what has
been happening with regard to the theoretical tenets of Marxism: It will
continue to be argued - and I am not going into the argument here -
whether the collapse of Soviet-type communism proves that Marxism was
wrong as such, or whether Marxism had no chance of reaching its goals
when imposed dictatorially on premodern and pre-industrial societies like
Russia and other East European countries. But what is beyond dispute is
that on one major issue, Marx - and Marxism - were totally wrong, and
this is the issue of nationalism.
Traditional Marxism saw nationalism as either a remnant of pre–
modern eras or as a mere "building-block" of modern, industrial societies
(as in the case of Bismarckian Germany). The proletarians, according to
Marx, have no homeland, and Marxist socialists usually proceeded on the
assumption that class solidarity will eventually triumph over narrow, par–
ticularistic national interests.
It is fascinating to observe that while it appeared that after all the
proletarians did have a homeland, and were sometimes very chauvinistic
in defending and supporting it, the famous dictum that "the proletarians
have no homeland" did reflect a real cognitive situation of a certain class
of people: not the proletarians, though, but the multitude of modern,
educated deracinated Jewish intellectuals, without whom a revolutionary
movement would have been unthinkable in Central and Eastern Europe.
To what degree socialism became the New Homeland for this stratum of
secularized Jews is one of the most fascinating chapters of modern Euro–
pean - and Jewish - history, in which communism and Zionism become
the two polarized solutions to the same problems of identity and self–
consciousness.
Nothing, it appears, could be more wrong than this dismissal of the
national issue by traditional Marxism. The Austro-Marxists were to see
this fallacy, and they tried to find a solution that would combine socialist
ideology with an historical link to national and language-based culture
on the part of the working-class. Earlier, Moses Hess, in his controversy
with Marx over nationalism, tried something similar in a less theoretically
sophisticated way, and the Marxist Zionists grappled with the dilemma
and were haunted by it well into the 1960s. Be this as it may, there is
now no doubt that the major failure of communism lay in its total
disregard for the autonomy of culture - including national culture - in
the affairs of man. Lenin's feeble attempt to leave some cultural leeway
to the non-Russian nations of the Soviet Union became irrelevant when
confronted with the centralized political power emanating from
Moscow and carried out mainly by Russians or Russified wielders of
