PDF-Version: Programme Communiste – The Question of Self-Determination in the Classics of Marxism – Part I

Introduction

Our party was born and is developing in the hard struggle to restore the Marxist revolutionary tradition destroyed by the Stalinist counter-revolution or better by the counter-revolution of the era of imperialist decay of capitalist society.

We have witnessed and continue to witness the most gigantic attempt to remove the spectre of proletarian revolution. This work of reactionary prevention finds its expression in the mass of opportunist theorisations that have shaken up the principles, programme and tactics of the communist movement. But the counter-revolutionary ideology, like the tip of an iceberg, represents only the tiny visible part of a much more massive work of erosion of the foundations of the proletarian struggle, its organisations, the gains already won and the very living conditions of the wage masses. And, to reconstitute the movement thus destroyed, it is necessary to have an organisation that knows, when conditions permit, how to organically merge the immediate pressures of the class with the revolutionary programme and that prepares itself in advance, fighting against the current.

This preparation cannot be reduced to a simple task of systematising doctrine within cenacles, nor to the activism of small groups whose sole objective is to expose the most combative workers, very few in number today, to repression during immediate struggles. The Revolutionary Party, in order to pose itself as such, must intervene, within the limits agreed by the objective situation, in all the struggles of the proletariat, even the most limited, to encourage them to overcome them in political struggle, by re-proposing all the fundamental principles of the revolutionary programme to the proletariat. The Party must also cement its own organisation in the perspective of the general tasks that the revolution will have to face.

In a 1965 party text entitled “Considerations on the organic activity of the party when the situation is unfavourable“, we wrote:

“Given that the degeneration of the social whole is reflected in and concentrated in the falsification and destruction of the theory and correct doctrine, the small party of today must essentially be devoted to restoring the doctrinal principles, even though the favourable conditions under which Lenin accomplished this task after the disaster of the first world war are lacking today. However, we have no reason to raise a barrier between theory and practice on that account because beyond a certain limit, this would be tantamount to destroying ourselves and our principled basis. We therefore lay claim all forms of activity characteristic of favourable periods to the extent that the real relationship of forces permits”.

This claim to forms of activity specific to favourable moments has nothing in common, it should be pointed out, with theories that have proved fatal for the workers movement, such as the theory of the offensive, which made it an obligation for the party to have an insurrectional attitude in all its historical phases. Our thesis is very different. For us, even at times when the grip of counter-revolution on the masses is the most total, the Party has a duty to draw the attention of the most perceptible segments of the class – their proportion in relation to all workers being a secondary problem – to the fact that, behind the character of the boss, the cop, the priest, the mayor, the monk, hides the real enemy that must be attacked and defeated and that must be sought in the complex mechanism of the capitalist system of reproduction and the instruments used to keep the productive forces under the yoke of the state machine, the indirect apparatus of repression, the corruption of the middle classes hatchet men, the legions of lackey civil servants, opportunists, religious and racial divisions, the corruption of the workers aristocracy, the turf of sub-proletarians and bandits of all kinds, not to mention the network that subordinates the world’s productive forces to the will of the great powers.

Only by denouncing all aspects of capitalist domination can the Party be in a position to materially combat the counter-revolutionary cancer that has penetrated deeply into the cells of the working class by extirpating it and destroying it tomorrow in the final assault.

This is why the party now has a duty to re-propose to the class, for them to re-appropriate, these principles and programmatic guidelines that it would be premature to translate into immediate tasks.

One of these fundamental issues is the claim of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination. We do not claim to treat it in all its aspects, both political-economic and historical, not even by referring to all Marxist texts, but to restore it, in the face of the confusion that, directly or indirectly, counter-revolution has also spread in this field.

Marx and Engels in the Face of “Democratic Pan-Slavism”

According to Marx and Engels, the correct imposition of the question of self-determination was the test bed of the revolutionary militant and made it possible to verify whether the materialist method and revolutionary theory had been assimilated. The accuracy of this assessment is demonstrated by the fact that whenever Marxism had to engage in decisive struggles against opponents who disputed its influence within the proletariat, the question came back on the table, and irreconcilable differences between Marxists and opportunists and pseudo-revolutionary petty bourgeois had arisen.

In the First International, Marx and Engels, while fighting anarchist idealism that rejected any authority of any kind in the name of the materialist analysis of the state, also had to fight against the pan-Slavist nationalism of Netchaev, Bakunin and company, in the name of a truly dialectical imposition of the national question, by demonstrating that the distinctive characteristics of national unity lie not in abstract biological criteria, but in specific historical and geographical situations.

In February 1849, Engels (“Democratic Pan-Slavism“) wrote:

“A single courageous attempt at a democratic revolution, even if it were crushed, extinguishes in the memory of the peoples whole centuries of infamy and cowardice, and at once rehabilitates a nation, however deeply it had been despised. That was the experience of the Germans last year. But whereas the French, Germans, Italians, Poles and Magyars raised high the banner of the revolution, the Slavs one and all put themselves under the banner of the counter-revolution. In the forefront were the Southern Slavs, who had already for many years upheld their counter-revolutionary separatist aims against the Magyars; then came the Czechs, and behind them — the Russians, armed for battle and ready to appear on the battlefield at the decisive moment.

…Among all the pan-Slavists, nationality, i.e. imaginary common Slav nationality, takes precedence over the revolution. The pan-Slavists want to join the revolution on condition that they will be allowed to constitute all Slavs without exception, regardless of material necessities, into independent Slav states. If we Germans had wanted to lay down the same fantastic conditions, we would have got a long way in March! But the revolution does not allow of any conditions being imposed on it. Either one is a revolutionary and accepts the consequences of the revolution, whatever they are, or one is driven into the arms of the counter-revolution and one day finds oneself, perhaps without knowing or desiring it, arm in arm with Nicholas and Windischgrätz.

We and the Magyars should guarantee the Austrian Slavs their independence — that is what Bakunin demands, and people of the calibre of Ruge are capable of having actually made such promises to him in secret. The demand is put to us and the other revolutionary nations of Europe that the hotbeds of counter-revolution at our very door should be guaranteed an unhindered existence and the free right to conspire and take up arms against the revolution; it is demanded that we should establish a counter-revolutionary Czech state in the very heart of Germany, and break the strength of the German, Polish and Magyar revolutions by interposing between them Russian outposts at the Elbe, the Carpathians and the Danube!

We have no intention of doing that. To the sentimental phrases about brotherhood which we are being offered here on behalf of the most counter-revolutionary nations of Europe, we reply that hatred of Russians was and still is the primary revolutionary passion among Germans; that since the revolution hatred of Czechs and Croats has been added, and that only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution. We know where the enemies of the revolution are concentrated, viz. in Russia and the Slav regions of Austria, and no fine phrases, no allusions to an undefined democratic future for these countries can deter us from treating our enemies as enemies.

And if Bakunin finally exclaims:

‘Truly, the Slav should not lose anything, he should win! Truly, he should live! And we shall live. As long as the smallest part of our rights is contested, as long as a single member is cut off from our whole body, so long will we fight to the end, inexorably wage a life-and-death struggle, until the Slavs have their place in the world, great and free and independent’, if revolutionary pan-Slavism means this passage to be taken seriously, and in its concern for the imaginary Slav nationality leaves the revolution entirely out of account, then we too know what we have to do.

Then there will be a struggle, an ‘inexorable life-and-death struggle’, against those Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating fight and ruthless terror — not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution!”

In 1849, Engels thus had to fight pan-Slavic and Great Russian nationalism doubly linked to the Tsarist reaction, in the name of the revolutionary development of European nations afflicted by reactionary Slavic minorities.

The First International and the Irish Question

It is always in the context of the struggle against anarchism that denies the national state in the abstract and, ironically, is always nationalist in practice, that is, on the side of the oppressors, despite its well-known phrases and rantings, that the focus on the attitude of the workers movement towards national movements in Poland and Ireland is inserted. In particular, it is worth recalling Marx’s magnificent circular (“The General Council to the Federal Council of French Switzerland“), on the Irish question approved in January 1870 and intended to refute the criticism of the Bakuninists in their campaign to support the Fenian amnesty movement imprisoned by the Gladstone government. Indeed, the same idealistic criteria that pushed Bakunin and his followers to exalt the Slavic racial myth, prevented them from seeing the essential historical function of the national state. This led them to deny the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, that is, to political separation from the oppressing nation in the name of the historical extinction of the state.

Marx writes:

“In the first place, Ireland is the bulwark of English landlordism. If it collapsed in Ireland, it would collapse in England. The whole operation is a hundred times easier in Ireland, because there the economic struggle is concentrated exclusively on landed property, because that struggle is at the same time a national one, and because the people have reached a more revolutionary and exasperated pitch there than in England. Landlordism in Ireland is kept in being solely by the English army. If the enforced union between the two countries were to cease, a social revolution would immediately break out in Ireland — even if of a somewhat backward kind. English landlordism would lose not only a major source of its wealth, but also its greatest moral force — the fact of representing England’s domination over Ireland. On the other hand, by preserving the power of its landlords in Ireland, the English proletariat makes them invulnerable in England itself.

In the second place, in dragging down the working class in England still further by the forced immigration of poor Irish people, the English bourgeoisie has not merely exploited Irish poverty. It has also divided the proletariat into two hostile camps. The fiery rebelliousness of the Celtic worker does not mingle well with the steady slow nature of the Anglo-Saxon; in fact in all the major industrial centres of England there is a profound antagonism between the Irish and the English proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who brings down his wages and standard of living. He also feels national and religious antipathies for him; it is rather the same attitude that the poor whites of the Southern states of North America had for the Negro slaves. This antagonism between the two groups of proletarians within England itself is artificially kept in being and fostered by the bourgeoisie, who know well that this split is the real secret of preserving their own power.

This antagonism is reproduced once again on the other side of the Atlantic. The Irish, driven from their native soil by cattle and sheep, have landed in North America where they form a considerable, and increasing, proportion of the population. Their sole thought, their sole passion, is their hatred for England. The English and American governments (in other words, the classes they represent) nourish that passion so as to keep permanently alive the underground struggle between the United States and England; in that way they can prevent the sincere and worthwhile alliance between the working Classes on the two sides of the Atlantic which would lead to their emancipation.

Furthermore, Ireland is the only excuse the English government has for keeping up a large regular army which can, as we have seen, in case of need attack the English workers after having done its basic training in Ireland.

Finally, what ancient Rome demonstrated on a gigantic scale can be seen — in the England of today. A people which subjugates another people forges its own chains.

Therefore the International Association’s attitude to the Irish question is absolutely clear. Its first need is to press on with the social revolution in England, and to that end, the major blow must be struck in Ireland.

The General Council’s resolutions on the Irish Amnesty are designed simply to lead into other resolutions which win declare that, quite apart from the demands of international justice, it is an essential precondition for the emancipation of the English working class to transform the present enforced union (in other words, the enslavement of Ireland) into a free and equal confederation, if possible, and into a total separation, if necessary.”

Engels, National Unity and German State Centralisation

This dialectical view of the national question can be complemented, again by way of example, by the imposition of the problem of the revolution in Germany given by Engels in his “Critique of the Erfurt Programme Project” (1891). This text concerns a phase after the German bourgeoisie’s conquest of power, but before the complete completion of bourgeois revolutionary tasks. Faced with the retreat of the bourgeois movement, Engels puts on the agenda the proletariat’s taking charge of the radical objectives abandoned by the bourgeoisie itself, and underlines the necessity, in order to achieve them, of achieving national unity and state centralisation, even if there are no further self-determination problems:

“The political demands of the draft have one great fault. It lacks precisely what should have been said. If all the 10 demands were granted we should indeed have more diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no wise have been achieved. As regards the rights being granted to the people and their representatives, the imperial constitution is, strictly speaking, a copy of the Prussian constitution of 1850, a constitution whose articles are extremely reactionary and give the government all the real power, while the chambers are not even allowed to reject taxes; a constitution, which proved during the period of the conflict that the government could do anything it liked with it. The rights of the Reichstag are the same as those of the Prussian chamber and this is why Liebknecht called this Reichstag the fig-leaf of absolutism. It is an obvious absurdity to wish ‘to transform all the instruments of labour into common property’ on the basis of this constitution and the system of small states sanctioned by it, on the basis of the ‘union’ between Prussia and Reuss-Greiz-Schleiz-Lobenstein, in which one has as many square miles as the other has square inches.

To touch on that is dangerous, however. Nevertheless, somehow or other, the thing has to be attacked. How necessary this is is shown precisely at the present time by opportunism, which is gaining ground in a large section of the Social-Democratic press. Fearing a renewal of the Anti-Socialist Law, or recalling all manner of over-hasty pronouncements made during the reign of that law, they now want the party to find the present legal order in Germany adequate for putting through all party demands by peaceful means. These are attempts to convince oneself and the party that ‘present-day society is developing towards socialism’ without asking oneself whether it does not thereby just as necessarily outgrow the old social order and whether it will not have to burst this old shell by force, as a crab breaks its shell, and also whether in Germany, in addition, it will not have to smash the fetters of the still semi-absolutist, and moreover indescribably confused political order. One can conceive [Editor – “concieve”, but not to admit!!] that the old society may develop peacefully into the new one in countries where the representatives of the people concentrate all power in their hands, where, if one has the support of the majority of the people, one can do as one sees fit in a constitutional way: in democratic republics such as France and the U.S.A., in monarchies such as Britain, where the imminent abdication of the dynasty in return for financial compensation is discussed in the press daily and where this dynasty is powerless against the people. But in Germany where the government is almost omnipotent and the Reichstag and all other representative bodies have no real power, to advocate such a thing in Germany, when, moreover, there is no need to do so, means removing the fig-leaf from absolutism and becoming oneself a screen for its nakedness.

In the long run such a policy can only lead one’s own party astray. They push general, abstract political questions into the foreground, thereby concealing the immediate concrete questions, which at the moment of the first great events, the first political crisis automatically pose themselves. What can result from this except that at the decisive moment the party suddenly proves helpless and that uncertainty and discord on the most decisive issues reign in it because these issues have never been discussed? Must there be a repetition of what happened with protective tariffs, which were declared to be a matter of concern only to the bourgeoisie, not affecting the interests of the workers in the least, that is, a matter on which everyone could vote as he wished? Are not many people now going to the opposite extreme and are they not, in contrast to the bourgeoisie, who have become addicted to protective tariffs, rehashing the economic distortions of Cobden and Bright and preaching them as the purest socialism — the purest Manchesterism? This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present, may be ‘honestly’ meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and ‘honest’ opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all!”

It is clear from the previous quotations that the discriminating element in the national question is, for Marxists, the creation of a situation more favourable to the development of the general class struggle of the proletariat.

A few years after Engels’ criticism of German social democracy, a period which saw, alongside the relative success of Marxist revolutionary politics, German bourgeois society reaching the full maturity of its production relations, a wave of opportunism struck the workers movement.

We cannot examine in detail the aspects of this degeneration, which is not limited to Germany alone; however, we can argue that it is precisely the gradual shift of social democracy into opportunism that prevented the German proletariat from directly connecting to proletarian revolution, following the position developed by Engels in the quoted text and in many others, the struggle for the realisation of conditions for the free development of class confrontation. What we are interested in is examining the assumptions of this opportunism and their impact on the national issue. According to Bernstein, who is, in a sense, the spokesman for this opportunist trend, capitalism, through the development of democratic institutions and the permeability of the state machine to the interests of the popular masses, can gradually be transformed into socialism. Consequently, the national question disappears in this watered-down vision of social development: the misdeeds of colonial policy and national oppression are obviously condemned, but overseas conquests and the subjugation of national minorities are justified and supported in the name of maintaining international balance, which is seen as the premise of the peaceful transition to socialism. Thereafter, Bernstein and with him Van Kol, Van Der Velde, Jaurès, David, etc… will end up identifying purely and simply imperialism and “civilisation”, and on this basis, supporting in some cases the necessity of colonies under a socialist regime!!!!

No one hears Rosa Luxembourg’s cries of alarm, warning against the dangerous anti-revolutionary significance of the reformist positions, and it should also be noted that she herself does not draw all the consequences from her lucid analysis, and that the official left wing of the Second International is sinning, with the exception of the Bolsheviks, by taking a too general position in her opposition to the “positive colonial policy” of the reformists.

“… for Bernstein, the transformation of the state into society is a condition for the gradual advent of socialism,” she wrote in “Social Reform or Revolution?” (1899).

“Konrad Schmidt declares that the conquest of a social-democratic majority in Parliament leads directly to the gradual ‘socialisation’ of society. Now, the democratic forms of political life are without a question a phenomenon expressing clearly the evolution of the State in society. They constitute, to that extent, a move toward a socialist transformation. But the conflict within the capitalist State, described above, manifests itself even more emphatically in modern parliamentarism. Indeed, in accordance with its form, parliamentarism serves to express, within the organisation of the State, the interests of the whole society. But what parliamentarism expresses here is capitalist society, that is to say, a society in which capitalist interests predominate. In this society, the representative institutions, democratic in form, are in content the instruments of the interests of the ruling class. This manifests itself in a tangible fashion in the fact that as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the real interests of the population, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie, and by its State representatives. That is why the idea of the conquest of a parliamentary reformist majority is a calculation which, entirely in the spirit of bourgeois liberalism, pre-occupies itself only with one side – the formal side – of democracy, but does not take into account the other side, its real content. All in all, parliamentarism is not a directly socialist element impregnating gradually the whole capitalist society. It is, on the contrary, a specific form of the bourgeois class State, helping to ripen and develop the existing antagonisms of capitalism…

Fourier’s scheme of changing, by means of a system of phalansteries, the water of all the seas into tasty lemonade was surely a fantastic idea. But Bernstein, proposing to change the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness, by progressively pouring into it bottles of social reformist lemonade, presents an idea that is merely more insipid but no less fantastic.

The production relations of capitalist society approach more and more the production relations of socialist society. But on the other hand, its political and juridical relations established between capitalist society and socialist society a steadily rising wall. This wall is not overthrown, but is on the contrary strengthened and consolidated by the development of social reforms and the course of democracy. Only the hammer blow of revolution, that is to day, the conquest of political power by the proletariat can break down this wall.”

Bernstein’s positions, more than a simple deviation, heralded the process of degeneration that was to swallow up German social democracy and with it the whole of the Second International. They were, in fact, pushed back on the theoretical level, but readmitted surreptitiously as “tactical” possibilities: the overthrow of the Marxist conception of the State, of the national struggle and of the proletarian class struggle carried out by revisionism, could obviously only reach the maximum of its destructive power with the unconditional support of the various sections of the International towards their own imperialist State involved in the war, as it happened in 1914. Kautskyism is the most classic example of the falsification of Marxism on the national question: instead of national independence serving proletarian revolution, it is the proletariat of the whole world that must pay for the pseudo-national defence of the interests of capitalism that has reached the imperialist phase.

The Question of Self-Determination in the 20th Century

After 1900, the picture of the European situation appears to be a dialectical reversal of that of 1848: at that time, faced with revolutionary Europe, the counter-revolutionary fortress of Tsarist Russia stood; from then on, all the states of Central Europe were drawn into the whirlwind of bourgeois conservation in the face of the awakening of the revolutionary movement in Russia and in the East.

In 1900, Russia was still only an amalgam of peoples subjected to Tsarist yoke by the myth of pan-Slavism. Many of these oppressed nationalities, such as Poland, are shared, groaning on the one hand under the heel of imperialism, on the other under that of the Tsarist reaction and the Black Hundred. The picture is complicated by the presence of racial minorities deprived of a defined territory and scattered throughout the Tsarist Empire, such as Jews.

Lenin’s clarification on this complex issue is exemplary:

A) For Oppressed Nationalities defined by a Territorial Facility

1) Recognition by the Great Russian proletariat of the right to self-determination, which is equivalent to fighting so that these peoples can escape the “coercive, feudal, military ties” of the Russian state, with the aim, in the first place, of weakening the repressive power of the Tsarist state to the advantage of the Great Russian proletariat itself, Secondly, to put the proletariat of the oppressed nationality in a position to better fight the classes and counter-revolutionary forces of its territory, and thirdly, to create the conditions for a unification of the struggle of the proletariat of the exploiting nation with that of the exploited nation.

2) The struggle of the proletariat of the oppressed nation against the dominant classes of the oppressed nation, not in a position subordinate to its own bourgeoisie – which in the struggle for national independence clearly shows its deceit – but in close collaboration with the proletariat of the dominant nation, subordinating to this class internationalist unity the bourgeois movement of the dominant and dominant nations still feudal.

In “On the Question of National Policy” (April 1914), Lenin writes:

“We Social-Democrats are opposed to all nationalism and advocate democratic centralism. We are opposed to particularism, and are convinced that, all other things being equal, big states can solve the problems of economic progress and of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie far more effectively than small states can. But we value only voluntary ties, never compulsory ties. Wherever we see compulsory ties between nations we, while by no means insisting that every nation must secede, do absolutely and emphatically insist on the right of every nation to political self-determination, that is, to secession.

To insist upon, to advocate, and to recognise this right is to insist on the equality of nations, to refuse to recognise compulsory ties, to oppose all state privileges for any nation whatsoever, and to cultivate a spirit of complete class solidarity in the workers of the different nations.

The class solidarity of the workers of the different nations is strengthened by the substitution of voluntary ties for compulsory, feudalist and militarist ties.

We value most of all the equality of nations in popular liberties and for socialism….

and insist on the privileges of the Great Russians. But we say: no privileges for any one nation, complete equality of nations and the unity, amalgamation of the workers of all nations.

Eighteen years ago, in 1896, the International Congress of Labour and Socialist Organisations in London adopted a resolution on the national question, which indicated the only correct way to work for both real ‘popular liberties’ and socialism. The resolution reads:

‘This Congress declares that it stands for the full right of all nations to self-determination, and expresses its sympathy for the workers of every country now suffering under the yoke of military, national or other absolutism. This Congress calls upon the workers of all these countries to join the ranks of the class-conscious workers of the whole world in order jointly to fight for the defeat of international capitalism and for the achievement of the aims of international Social-Democracy.’

And we, too, call for unity in the ranks of the workers of all nations in Russia, for only such unity can guarantee the equality of nations and popular liberties, and safeguard the interests of socialism.

The year 1905 united the workers of all nations in Russia. The reactionaries are trying to foment national enmity. The liberal bourgeoisie of all nations, first and foremost the Great-Russian bourgeoisie, is fighting for the privileges of its own nation (for example, the Polish kolo is opposed to equal rights for Jews in Poland), is fighting for national segregation, for national exclusiveness, and is thereby promoting the policy of our Ministry of the Interior.

But true democracy, headed by the working class, holds aloft the banner of complete equality of nations and of unity of the workers of all nations in their class struggle.”

B) For Dismembered Nations

The only difference with the situation in point A is that national unity poses itself as a problem of struggle in a double direction: against the imperialism of the Western powers and against Tsarist oppression, in union with the proletariat of the two sides. In the text already quoted, we find the following passage:

“Our parties of the right and our nationalists are now clamouring so vehemently against the ‘Mazeppists’[1] and our famous Bobrinsky is defending the Ukrainians from the oppression of the Austrian Government with such splendid, democratic zeal, that one would think he wanted to join the Austrian Social-Democratic Party. But if by ‘Mazeppism’ is meant gravitation towards Austria and preference for the Austrian political system, then perhaps Bobrinsky will not he one of the least prominent of the ‘Mazeppists’, for he complains and rants about the oppression of the Ukrainians in Austria! Just think how hard it must be for a Russian Ukrainian, for instance for an inhabitant of Ekaterinoslav Gubernia which I represent, to read or hear this! If Bobrinsky ‘himself’, if the nationalist Bobrinsky, if Count Bobrinsky, if squire Bobrinsky, if factory owner Bobrinsky, if Bobrinsky who has links with the highest nobility (almost with the ‘spheres’) thinks that the status of the national minorities is unjust and oppressive in Austria, where there is nothing like the disgraceful Jewish Pale of Settlement, or the despicable practice of deporting Jews at the whim of despotic governors, or the prohibition of the native language in schools, then what should be said about the Ukrainians in Russia? What should be said about the other ‘subject peoples’ in Russia?

Do not Bobrinsky and the other nationalists, as well as the Rights, realise that they are bringing home to the ‘subject peoples’ in Russia, that is, to three-fifths of the population of Russia, the fact that Russia is a backward country even compared with Austria, which is the most backward of European countries?

The whole point is that the position of Russia, which is governed by the Purishkeviches, or rather, groaning under the heel of the Purishkeviches, is so peculiar that the utterances of the nationalist Bobrinsky admirably explain and foment Social-Democratic agitation.

Keep it up, noble factory owner and landlord Bobrinsky; you will certainly help us to arouse, enlighten and stir up both the Austrian and the Russian Ukrainians!”

C) For Nationalities without a Defined Territory

There is obviously no possibility of constitution as a national state; the proletariat of the oppressed nation under consideration must refuse to carry on its national traditions which isolate it from the rest of the proletariat and place it at the mercy of the bourgeoisie of its own race and through it, of the bourgeoisie of the dominant race; the working class of the ruling class must fight against any privilege, any discrimination, for the effective realisation of democracy towards the oppressed masses, i.e. for the removal of any obstacle to the integration of the proletariat of the dominated race within the framework of the existing social situation (but not for the obligation to join it) so that it can lead, alongside the proletariat of the dominant race, the revolutionary struggle.

In his “Critical Notes on the National Question” of 1913, Lenin writes:

“The significance of the ‘national culture’ slogan is not determined by some petty intellectual’s promise, or good intention, to ‘interpret’ it as ‘meaning the development through it of an international culture’. It would be puerile subjectivism to look at it in that way. The significance of the slogan of national culture is determined by the objective alignment of all classes in a given country, and in all countries of the world. The national culture of the bourgeoisie is a fact (and, I repeat, the bourgeoisie everywhere enters into deals with the landed proprietors and the clergy). Aggressive bourgeois nationalism, which drugs the minds of the workers, stultifies and disunites them in order that the bourgeoisie may lead them by the halter—such is the fundamental fact of the times.

Those who seek to serve the proletariat must unite the workers of all nations, and unswervingly fight bourgeois nationalism, domestic and foreign. The place of those who advocate the slogan of national culture is among the nationalist petty bourgeois, not among the Marxists.

Take a concrete example. Can a Great-Russian Marxist accept the slogan of national, Great-Russian, culture? No, he cannot. Anyone who does that should stand in the ranks of the nationalists, not of the Marxists. Our task is to fight the dominant, Black-Hundred and bourgeois national culture of the Great Russians, and to develop, exclusively in the internationalist spirit and in the closest alliance with the Workers of other countries, the rudiments also existing in the history of our democratic and working-class movement. Fight your own Great-Russian landlords and bourgeoisie, fight their ‘culture’ in the name of internationalism, and, in so fighting, ‘adapt’ yourself to the special features of the Purishkeviches and Struves—that is your task, not preaching or tolerating the Slogan of national culture.

The same applies to the most oppressed and persecuted nation—the Jews. Jewish national culture is the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies. But there are other elements in Jewish culture and in Jewish history as a whole. Of the ten and a half million Jews in the world, somewhat over a half live in Galicia and Russia, backward and semi-barbarous countries, where the Jews are forcibly kept in the status of a caste. The other half lives in the civilised world, and there the Jews do not live as a segregated caste. There the great world-progressive features of Jewish culture stand clearly revealed: its internationalism, its identification with the advanced movements of the epoch (the percentage of Jews in the democratic and proletarian movements is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews among the population).

Whoever, directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of Jewish “national culture” is (whatever his good intentions may be) an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of all that is outmoded and connected with caste among the Jewish people; he is an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, those Jewish Marxists who mingle with the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other workers in international Marxist organisations, and make their contribution (both in Russian and in Yiddish) towards creating the international culture of the working-class movement—those Jews, despite the separatism of the Bund, uphold the best traditions of Jewry by fighting the slogan of ‘national culture’.

Bourgeois nationalism and proletarian internationalism—these are the two irreconcilably hostile slogans that correspond to the two great class camps throughout the capitalist world, and express the two policies (nay, the two world outlooks) in the national question. In advocating the slogan of national culture and building up on it an entire plan and practical programme of what they call ‘cultural-national autonomy’, the Bundists are in effect instruments of bourgeois nationalism among the workers.”

Similarly, in conclusion of section I: “Liberals and Democrats on the language question“, Lenin writes:

“The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language; the solution of the problem of the political self-determination of nations, that is, their separation as states by completely free, democratic methods; the promulgation of a law for the whole state by virtue of which any measure (rural, urban or communal, etc., etc.) introducing any privilege of any kind for one of the nations and militating against the equality of nations or the rights of a national minority, shall be declared illegal and ineffective, and any citizen of the state shall have the right to demand that such a measure be annulled as unconstitutional, and that those who attempt to put it into effect be punished.

Working-class democracy contraposes to the nationalist wrangling of the various bourgeois parties over questions of language, etc., the demand for the unconditional unity and complete amalgamation of workers of all nationalities in all working-class organisations—trade union, co-operative, consumers’, educational and all others—in contradistinction to any kind of bourgeois nationalism. Only this type of unity and amalgamation can uphold democracy and defend the interests of the workers against capital—which is already international and is becoming more so—and promote the development of mankind towards a new way of life that is alien to all privileges and all exploitation. “

As we have seen, for Lenin, the problem of self-determination of oppressed nations (and for these nations, the revolutionary use of their independence) is closely linked to the general revolutionary programme of the proletariat. The demand for self-determination is posed with the uncompromising force of a principle, not because it arises from an abstract ethical imperative of equality, but because it is doubly linked to the general question of proletarian revolution.

Lenin’s imposition is as follows: no constitution as a national state in the Great Slavic area, and more generally no realisation of the tasks of the democratic revolution, without the triumph of the proletarian movement; no triumph of the workers movement without the realisation of these tasks.

To understand this double equation, it is necessary to briefly summarise the whole strategic vision of Bolshevism: it consists in a dialectical coordination of all social tensions on an international scale into a single battle plan whose point of departure is the unity of objective interest of the proletariat opposite to the diversity of interests of the other classes, and the achievement, the material realisation, of this proletarian unity in the bourgeois revolution.

At the beginning of the century, the problem was as follows: for Western Europe and North America, the consolidation of bourgeois revolutions had been completed. In this area, the perspective is that of a “pure” proletarian revolution, even if the elements of the revolutionary crisis have not yet become clear.

For the area of the Tsarist Empire, we observe:

the perpetuation of a dictatorship of pre-bourgeois forces, precisely in the form of Tsarism;

the inability of this dictatorship to curb the development of bourgeois production relations;

the manifestation of this development in the tendency of productive forces to form a national state;

the oscillation of the Great Russian bourgeoisie between the rebellion against Tsarism and the need to oppress its own proletariat, to continue Russia’s counter-revolutionary role towards the European proletariat and to exploit the market in oppressed areas;

the impotence of the bourgeoisie of oppressed nationalities to pursue an anti-feudal programme and national independence because of its multiple links with the Great Russian bourgeoisie and with Tsarism itself;

finally, the development of the workers’ movement.

Thus, in Russia, any bourgeois revolution led by the bourgeoisie could only be concluded by the affirmation of a contradictory state closely associated with the residues of feudalism and unable to apply any of the bourgeois principles themselves; worse still, a revolution of this kind would have condemned to retreat and decay all the most significant forces in the struggle for the overthrow of Tsarism. If the revolution had been carried out in Russia in the way that the bourgeoisie could have carried it out if it had been left free to act as it wished, it would have pushed the proletarian movement back decades, and on the European working class would have continued to be a heavy burden, inter alia, the boot of Eastern militarism.

There was only one other possibility: that the proletariat could take over the performance of bourgeois tasks, not just by supporting and stimulating the bourgeoisie, but by taking direct control of the reins of the revolution without fear of going against the real political interests and tendencies of the bourgeoisie. It was therefore necessary for the working class to exercise power, even if in the immediate future it had to use it to carry out bourgeois democratic tasks. For the entire duration of this phase, it could therefore count on an alliance with the most radical bourgeois forces, and in particular with the poor peasants (meaning of “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants”, a formula in which the adjective democratic was not affected by any egalitarian or interclassist meaning, but served to characterise the revolutionary state as unitary and uninational because of its objective limitation to bourgeois tasks). It was understood that once these tasks had been carried out, thanks to the development of productive forces within the country or the possibility of using those that existed at the international level, the role of the proletariat would have developed on its own bases, repressing all capitalist forces and excluding, where necessary by force, farmers and their representatives from power.

It should be clear that in such a context, there is no tactical use, in the worst sense of the word, of the slogan of self-determination, which was not a means of reconciling the masses of oppressed nations to try to achieve a proletarian revolution of a voluntarist type, as some would have us believe. No, the recognition of the right to self-determination was the natural form that proletarian revolution should take as a double revolution, because it could only overcome by isolating itself, its own bourgeoisie, that of oppressed nations and all reactionary forces from each other. Similarly, the proletarian leadership of the democratic revolution was the only way to resolve the multiple national issues that arose in the Tsarist Empire.

Source: “Programme Communiste” No. 61, December 1973.

[1] Mezepa (1644-1709), hetman of the Cossacks in Ukraine, first followed Tsar Peter the Great, then allied himself with his enemy Charles XII of Sweden to serve the Ukrainian cause. He had to go into exile after Poltava’s defeats.