On Borochov and Assimilation

Abstract: I address Ber Borochov’s notion of assimilation and use the example of the Roman Empire as evidence to the contrary. My argument is that Borochov misses the existential and open nature of assimilation, and falsely assumes the stability of individual states/regimes.

I quote Borochov at length:

"Here we must take account of the distinction between two cases so different from one another that the widespread failure to distinguish between them is enough to account for the current confusion concerning this matter. There can be no comparison between the position of two communities [קבוץ] that live in adjacent territories, and two communities [קבוץ] one of which lives amidst the other, in the latter’s territory. In the first instance, the stronger of the two will strive to assimilate directly the possessions of the members of the other, in the latter’s territory. In the first instance, the stronger of the two will strive to assimilate directly the possessions of the members of the other, and where possible, their functions as well. In the past this was done quite simply by wiping out the members of the second nation completely, or else by enslaving them, taking their property as a matter of course. In our time, international relations having become more complex, this method cannot be adopted. The effort is therefore made to assimilate the foreign country, and the cultural assets it has developed indirectly, by assimilating the population dwelling in it. Precisely the same objectives now being sought by German or Magyar assimilation of border areas would have been achieved in an earlier day by more simple, direct, and efficient methods….

This clearly proves that no nation is interested in assimilating another without good reason. The assimilation of foreigners is actually in itself a most unpleasant business, and hence also undesirable. New people mean new candidates for benefits from the accumulated public assets, new hands hungrily stretched out for a share of the common loaf of bread. In order for a communities [קבוץ] desire the assimilation of another communities [קבוץ] , it must first see in it something so valuable and attractive as to make it worthwhile despite all the inconvenience of including new partners in the distribution of the assets….

It should be noted that even though social groups [קבוצים חברתיים] also act on the pleasure-seeking impulse, they do not reveal very farsighted reasoning in this matter. The gratifying hope at the time of assimilation is generally something like this: one day, when we succeed in getting the owners of the desired wealth to adapt themselves to such a degree that they no longer resist the policy of conquest, we shall be able to seize this wealth by force and stop bothering with this expensive business of assimilation. The trouble is that as the process of assimilation, which was at first only a means, turns into an end in itself–since opposition intensifies the ambition–the assimilators no longer think of the ultimate benefit. Assimilation becomes a chimera that lives by its own special power, the supreme mission of the ruling groups, and gives rise to such tension and waste of energy that all the foreign wealth is not worth the effort. Therefore discernable men among cultured nations, who have not confused ends and means, have already pointed out that a policy of assimilation is unlikely to yield any benefit. It is safe to assume that as awareness of this fact spreads and the failures of this policy become more apparent, the idea of assimilation will eventually die out, and nations will renounce the ambition to control other peoples’ property."

I respond:

I think Borochov is right regarding the costs of assimilation, but for the wrong reasons. Particularly, I think he makes a material argument when the real expense is existential. The question for me comes down to two points: 1. What is being assimilated to what?; and 2. Insofar as we can answer 1, assimilation always inaugurates a crisis of representation. As to 1: it seems to me that he assumes that a state/society/community (SSC) is a preexisting unit that is fully integrated; the foreigner/other/assimilator (FOA) is thus something that syphons resources and potentially fractures coherence. But I don’t think SSC’s are ever fully integrated—this is a project that has to be refound daily, and is never complete. I would argue that SSC’s are in a permanent crisis of representation/articulation themselves; not so much a result of inherent internal fractures (though this might be the case) but as a natural condition of simply being a SSC that confronts contingencies, habitus dynamisms, external/internal stimuli of all sorts. Assimilation augments and exploits the existential conditions of an unfinished representation.

Let us take Christianity in the Roman Empire, for instance. I think here of the early rites of Numa, of Varro’s antiquities, of the early rulers—Elagabalus (c. 220 BC) and the Illyrian Aurelian (c. 272)—who tried to divinize the role of the roman rulers, but failed. The pagan pluralism of the empire had yet to be brought under the patronage of the princeps civitatis and the auspices of the pontifex maximus; Octavianus had yet to draw from Italy his fides oath, made possible only after Actium and the fall of Antony (post 32/31 BC), and Diocletian had yet to formalize the oath into the sacred rites as an institution. Rome had yet to find a way to represent itself in full, and existed as a competition among the patrician elites who used advanced gift and patronage systems not only to extend networks deep into the cities and frontiers, but also to fund and control vast armies.

Now introduce the burgeoning Christian sect, in total contrast to the ancient pagan rites (which, again, had never been fully integrated, despite the institutionalization of Roman state religion); the problem of assimilation was less material and more existential. While Galerius, Licinius and, eventually, Constantinus would all see in Christianity the eventual “out” for the political crisis of the empire’s expansion, Celsus saw the true problem as early as 180 AD: he knew very well that using Christianity to consolidate and extend the empire was self-defeating, that assimilation was impossible, as Christiniaty undermined the pluralistic basis of patrician rule and would ultimately remove the possibility of divinity from the world and move it to another noumenal plane; Origen, Ambrose, Eusebius and Augustine all fell on the opposite side, obviously, and carve out the Christian response, made especially salient post-Alaric (c. 400s AD).

The point is: Rome (as close to an integrated SSC as we probably have in the western world, save for maybe the early American republic) confronted the FOA not as a material threat, but as an existential one—the FOA undermined every representative claim to universal imperial status through the simple adjustment of the Ambrosian formula: all men under Roman rule must serve Rome; but Roman rule must serve God. This made the articulation of Rome on the original rites an impossibility, and extended the already based contradiction at the heart of Roman political theology[1] into a full-blown and explicit crisis of representation. Certainly, we know how the story ends: the Pope would never be God, but only his Vicar, and representation would always/already be a matter of conforming to the ciuitate Dei, rather than a claim emanating from a terrestrial theology and reaching out across the globe (ironically, this is the fulfillment of Thales and the Delphic inscription, gnothi seauton: “know thyself,” before its appropriation into the Socratic index, was meant primarily as: “know thyself to not be a god”[2]).

It would seem to me that the problem of assimilation can only be erased/made a problem of “policy” (rather than material or existential threat) only when a SSC has been fully integrated (an impossible, asymptotic myth), which is essentially a large part of the Platonic project: first you must create a fully-integrated individual (one who is without internal “civil war”), and only then, in the “mirror” of self-society, does something like the possibility of a fully-integrated SSC emerge. But of course this has never been realized and never will be realized for good reason.[3] Working through this logic to its conclusion, I would say that two parallel scales emerge: 1. That the more integrated an individual is/a SSC is, the less the confrontation with the FOA is perceived as laborious, a threat, a problem[4]; and 2. Insofar as 1 holds true, there is a direct ratio between the existential/representative threat posed by the FOA and the perceived material consequences. Somewhere in the background here is the problem of fear as well—less Hobbes and more Corey Robin, but I haven’t worked through this yet. The lingering question: can assimilation can ever be anything more than an existential threat to non-integrated (e.g. traditional, realized, currently existing) SSCs, or does the FOA provide a permanent point of crisis? Isn’t the material problem secondary to this existential/representative problem?

[1] See Marx here.

[2] See Foucault on this point.

[3] See Isaiah Berlin and Jacob Talmon here.

[4] Here the problem of “toleration” and its various offshoots surfaces—see John Locke, Rainer Forst.