Nonhistoric peoples
역사 없는 민족
The concept Engels applied in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 1848–1849 to the small peoples, Czechs, Croats, Serbs, Romanians and others, who sided with the counter-revolution. He saw them as residual fragments of former peoples overwhelmed by stronger neighbours, prone to become "fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution", and called them Völkerabfälle. Borrowed from Hegel, the concept became a starting point of the Marxist debate on the national question.
In depth
Citing the Gaels of Scotland, the Bretons of France and the Basques of Spain, Engels was aiming at the Serb uprising in Vojvodina against the Hungarian revolution of 1848–1849. In the light of Croatian and Prague counter-revolutionary troops helping to crush the Vienna October Uprising, he wrote that the next world war would wipe out "not only reactionary classes and dynasties, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward." In the same period he hailed Kossuth as "Danton and Carnot in one person".
Karl Kautsky wrote in 1915 that the later development of the Czechs and South Slavs had refuted this view in practice. Roman Rosdolsky, building on his doctoral thesis of 1929, published Friedrich Engels und das Problem der "geschichtslosen" Völker in 1964, arguing that the concept came from Hegel and that it missed the class contradiction between the Slav peasants and the German burghers and Polish and Hungarian nobles who oppressed them. In his account Marx and Engels began distinguishing oppressor from oppressed nations from about 1867. George Watson, for his part, rendered the term as "racial trash" and went so far as to conclude that Hitler was a Marxist, a reading criticised as an ideological distortion.