German philosopher (1818–1883), son of a Jewish lawyer who converted to Protestantism. He completed his studies brilliantly in Berlin, already integrated into the Hegelian Left before finishing his degree. After completing his studies and his doctoral thesis on Democritus and Epicurus, he began collaborating with the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, eventually becoming its editor-in-chief.
In 1844, his first reference to the Basques appeared in the newspaper. Referring to Pan-Slavism, he wrote:
“No country in Europe lacks, in some corner, popular ruins, rejected remnants of a primitive population subdued by the nation that later became the bearer of historical evolution. These remnants, trampled mercilessly by the march of History (as Hegel says), these popular scraps, until their destruction or complete denationalization, are the fanatic bearers of counter-revolution, and their very existence already constitutes a protest against the great historical revolution. These are, in Scotland, the Highlanders defending the Stuarts from 1640 to 1745; in France, the Bretons defending the Bourbons from 1792 to 1800; in Spain, the Basques defending Don Carlos; and in Austria, the Sudeten Slavs, who are nothing other than the remnants of a convoluted millennial evolution.”
Another, later passage from the Trier philosopher, Spanish Traditionalism, published in the New York Daily Tribune in 1849, states instead:
“Carlism is not merely a dynastic and reactionary movement, as the well-paid liberal historians insisted and lied; it is a free and popular movement defending traditions far more liberal and regionalist than the all-encompassing official liberalism, filled with simpletons who copied the French Revolution. Carlist traditionalism rested on genuinely popular and national bases, consisting of peasants, small nobles, and the clergy, whereas liberalism was embodied in militarism, capitalism, the new classes of merchants and usurers, latifundist democracy, and secularized intellectuals who, in most cases, thought with a French mindset or translated, clumsily, from German.”
These texts have generally been published separately, depending on the commentator’s political preferences. But it is interesting to confront these two opinions, separated by only five years.
These five years were crucial in Marx’s life. According to scholars and Marxologists such as Mandel and Althusser, it is precisely 1847–1848 that what Althusser calls the “epistemological break of Marx” occurs, the moment marking the distinction the “young Marx” and the “old Marx,” the moment when Marx truly becomes “Marxist.” In the first paragraph, Marx still s himself a disciple of Hegel, a man who believed in the existence of a mechanistic, metaphysical rationality in the course of History, which contradicts the very essence of Marxism (Althusser, Poulantzas), consisting of the concrete study of economic and class bases operating within a concrete reality.
Thus, while the paragraph in the Rheinische Zeitung is still strongly influenced by Hegelian idealism and by political and sociological ideas drawn by Marx from German treatises on the democratic-bourgeois revolution (Von Stein especially), the 1849 paragraph corresponds instead to a historical-dialectical analysis fundamentally based on the class structure supporting the Carlist social phenomenon. The first paragraph grounds its argument on the existence of reason, a historical rationality leading history to pre-set ends, a purely idealistic context. The second is an analysis of the concrete reality of a specific social phenomenon, seeking to establish, without metaphysical a priori, the relationship ideology and the mode of production of material life. Marx’s later assessments in The Revolution in Spain confirm this interpretation.
The introduction of Marxist ideas in the Basque Country occurred through the Second International and the initial socialist group in Biscay. The first discussion of the Basque national question within socialism took place in late 1918, when the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire unleashed the almost century-old debate on nationalities. Socialist doctors Madinabeitia and Toribio Echeverría defended the “Basque nation,” and Luis Araquistain even recognized the right to secession, foreshadowing Leninist doctrines on the self-determination of peoples. This was taken up by Basques of the Third International in the 1920s and 1930s, especially under the leadership of Bullejos and the Communist Party of Euskadi, founded after the October Revolution. After the war, the Marxist debate disappeared until the generational shift of the 1960s. It reappeared from a nationalist perspective within the interior ELA-STV union in 1963. A year later, under the influence of the Spanish FLP, ETA also raised the Basque national question under a Marxist and/or Leninist perspective. With the advent of parliamentary democracy and the first non-organic elections on 15 June 1977, several groups claimed socialism and/or pure Marxism. Most of them eventually became the epigonal forms of the political movement initiated by ETA: Euskadiko Ezkerra on one hand, Herri Batasuna on the other. On the extreme left of this native Marxism would be the Communist Movement and the Revolutionary Communist League, both heirs of ETA of the 1960s–70s. For more information, see the articles dedicated to each party, group, or movement.
The Basque translation by Xabier Kintana of a Marx work titled Lan alokatua eta kapitala appeared in 1971, and the famous Communist Manifesto as Alderdi Komunistaren manifestua, Zarauz, 1980.