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Fragment on War, National Questions and Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg

Translation and introduction by Rida Vaquas. Original article can be found here. 

Rosa Luxemburg died on January 15th, 1919.

Introduction 

It has long become a truism that Marxism failed to grasp the problem of nationalism, particularly as the second half of the twentieth century saw national revolutions flourish whilst socialist movements collapsed. As national identity cements itself as a political force in our times, the Communist Manifesto’s declaration that “national one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible” can strike some as impossibly glib. The globalization of capital, far from diminishing the prospects of the nation-state, has instead spawned many nationalisms and even shaken the stability of ‘settled’ nation-states. Both Britain and Spain have faced secessionist movements in recent years. In the wake of this theoretical “failure” of Marxism, the response of Marxists has too frequently been to pack up and go home, taking the failure for granted. Nowadays the claim of “the right of nations to self-determination” is the accepted solution to the national question, even when no plausible working out has been shown. The “Leninist position” has become reified as part of socialist political programmes in the 21st century, even as very little sets it apart from the principle of national self-determination advocated by the Democratic President Woodrow Wilson.

After over half of a century of socialists firmly embracing nation-states, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate this “failure”. As opposed to understanding the principle of national self-determination as necessary to fill a hole in Marxist theory, we should understand it as blasting the hole itself and calling for the bourgeoisie to fill it. It is time to shed a light on the debates that took place within socialism before the principle of national self-determination became widely accepted as a necessary part of socialist programmes, in the period of the Second Socialist International between 1890 and 1914. This means an analysis of the national question from peripheral socialist parties rather than the centers in Germany and Russia. To seriously appraise the defeated alternatives to national self-determination allows us to appreciate that the nation-state is not the final word in history.

Much of the historiographical understanding of the national question debate in this period frames it as a dispute between two of the leading personalities: Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Rosa Luxemburg, as co-founder of the Social Democratic Party of Poland and the Kingdom of Lithuania (henceforth SDKPiL), positioned her party against the social patriotism of the rival Polish Socialist Party (henceforth PPS) who demanded the restoration of Poland, which was then partitioned under Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. She fought against the Polish claim to independence at the London Congress of the Second International in 1896 and consistently argued for the Polish socialists in Prussia to be integrated into the German Social Democratic Party (henceforth SPD), rather than being a separate party. On the other hand, Vladimir Lenin, writing from the heart of the Tsarist empire, understood the right of nations to self-determination as a “special urgency” in a land where “subject peoples” were on the peripheries of Great Russia and experienced higher amounts of national oppression than they did in Europe.1

Rosa Luxemburg’s position has been recently evaluated as effectively forming a bloc with the chauvinist bureaucracy of the SPD.2 Luxemburg has further been accused of underestimating the force of national oppression and hence of “international proletariat fundamentalism”.3 By examining the debate as it took place in the Second International as a whole, we can understand these assessments of the case against national self-determination to be unsatisfactory and re-appraise the positive legacy of revolutionary internationalism.

Meanwhile, Lenin’s position has received praise in the wake of socialists relating to the national liberation movements of the 20th century, as “championing the rights of oppressed nations”.4 In this framework, the “liberation” of oppressed nations is the precondition of international working class unity and therefore national struggle clears the way for class struggle.

However, it is important to interrogate the consistency of Lenin’s position and hence dismantle the idea of a coherent Leninist position which emerges from its conclusions. The right of nations to self-determination, as Lenin took care to emphasize, could not be equated with support for secessionist movements. In 1903, as the Russian Social Democratic Party adopted the national self-determination as part of its programme, Lenin argued that “it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state” against the calls of the PPS for the restoration of Poland.5 This lack of sympathy to struggles for national independence in practice was noted by contemporary socialist supporters of nationalism, the Ukrainian socialist Yurkevych polemicized that Lenin supported the right of national self-determination “for appearances’ sake” whilst in actuality being a “fervent defender of her [Russia’s] unity”.6 If the exercise of the right of national self-determination naturally leads to the formation of an independent state, Lenin was politically opposed to it in many of the same cases as Luxemburg. This distinction may be lost upon later “Leninists”, such as the Scottish Socialist Party who assume Scottish independence to be an extension of national self-determination, but it should not be obscured from our view.

Moreover, Lenin’s position changed through the course of his political experiences. The early Soviet government’s policy on nationalities required that “we must maintain and strengthen the union of socialist republics”.7 Instead of promoting secession, the Bolsheviks pursued a policy of Korenizatsiya (nativization) in which national minorities were promoted in their local bureaucracies and administrative institutions spoke the minority language. Hence national autonomy within a larger state was seen as an adequate guarantor of national rights to oppressed nations. Far from a consistent “Leninist position” of supporting the exercise of the right of national self-determination in nearly all cases, it is raised, what emerges as Lenin’s actual position is a theoretical “right” whose use is very rarely legitimated by historical conditions and the interests of the working class in practice, even where there are popular nationalist movements. Is this “right” really so far from the metaphysical formula that Rosa Luxemburg derided the principle of self-determination as?

Having dealt with the historical misapprehensions of Lenin’s position, it is time to reappraise the perspective of Rosa Luxemburg. Whilst her position is frequently presented as a theoretical innovation on her part, Luxemburg herself noted a longer anti-national heritage. Assessing the legacy of the earlier conspiratorial Polish socialist party, the Proletariat, she argued that they “fought nationalism by all available means and invariably regarded national aspirations as something which can only distract the working class from their own goals”.8 Far from national self-determination being an accepted orthodox Marxist position, we should keep in mind that the PPS had to argue for it at multiple congresses of the Second International in the case of Poland. After the revolutionary upsurges in Russia in 1905, a considerable segment of the PPS formed the PPS-Left, which similarly disavowed national independence as an immediate goal for socialists.

There were three core strands to Luxemburg’s opposition to national self-determination. Firstly, it was materially unviable given that no new nation could achieve economic independence owing to the spread of capitalism. Secondly, pursuing national self-determination in the form of supporting independence struggles did not make strategic sense for socialists as it inhibited them from placing political demands upon existing states. Finally, and most saliently for socialists today, even if national self-determination was politically and economically more than a utopian pipe-dream, it would still be against the interests of the working class to pursue it.

These latter two strands are more decisive in understanding Rosa Luxemburg’s position and are what make it more than a miscalculation rooted in economic determinism. Luxemburg herself appreciated the separation of the “economic” from the “political” under capitalism, as she argued capitalism “annihilated Polish national independence but at the same time created modern Polish national culture”.9 Far from being a national nihilist, Luxemburg stated that the proletariat “must fight for the defense of national identity as a cultural legacy, that has its own right to exist and flourish”.10 The 20th century has proven that political independence is materially possible. It has not shown that it is a remedy for national oppression and that it is a worthy goal for socialists.

National self-determination, in Luxemburg’s words, “gives no practical guidelines for the day to day politics of the proletariat, nor any practical solution of nationality problems”.11 As we can observe from Lenin’s policies on nationalities, there is no consistent conclusion that comes from the acknowledgment of this “right”. The only real conclusion is that affairs must be settled by the relevant nationality, which is presented as a homogeneous socio-political entity, as opposed to a site of class struggle in itself. The impracticality of this formula was not only resisted by Luxemburg, but also by Fritz Rozins, a Latvian socialist. Rozins, criticizing the position of Lenin in 1902, made the argument that several nations can occupy the same territory which problematized the demand for national self-determination.12

When examining contemporary manifestations of the national problem, these issues are thrown into sharper focus. In the case of Israel and Palestine, the framework of two competing claims of national self-determination which need to be reconciled with each other ultimately leads to endorsing an indefinite political and economic subordination of one nation by another. One way some sections of the modern Left attempt to address this is by rendering one nation’s claim (Israel’s) as inherently illegitimate, on account of its annexationist political project and racist domestic policy, and hence dismissing Hebrew Jewish people as constituting a national people with particular rights. However, making the right of national self-determination contingent upon the political project of its claimants would leave very few nations, if any, with this “right” at all, as its claimants tend to be an aspirational national bourgeoisie, whose class interests are tied to the continuation of the subjugation of the working class peoples within a territory, including working-class national minorities. The best way forward is to abandon such a “right” altogether, which assumes a basic unity between the interests of the oppressor and oppressed as part of the same nation. The question should instead be examined from the perspective of the common interests of the Israeli and Palestinian working classes against the Israeli state.

Abandoning national self-determination as a democratic “right”, which socialists should cease to guarantee as a part of their programmes is often equated with opposing national struggles in all cases. Rosa Luxemburg’s attitude to Armenia at the beginning of the 20th century demonstrates this is not the case. Unlike a number of her contemporaries who were concerned that the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire would only strengthen the hand of Tsarist Russia, Luxemburg argued emphatically that “the aspirations to freedom can here make themselves felt only in a national struggle” and hence that Social Democracy must “stand for the insurgents”.13 In her reasoning, the national struggle was appropriate for Armenia in a way that it was not for Poland, as the Armenian territories lacked a working-class, and were not bound to the Ottoman Empire by capitalist economic development, but by brute force. Perhaps ironically, this put her at odds with the Armenian Social Democrat David Ananoun, who rejected national secession on the grounds that new nation-states could not guarantee the rights of national minorities within them. The Armenian Social Democrats “always subordinated the solution of the national problem to the victory of the proletarian revolution”, including rejecting the specificity of Armenian situation.14 One could say they surpassed the supposed “international proletariat fundamentalism” of Rosa Luxemburg.

Both Ananoun and Luxemburg rejected territorial national self-determination as a framework, yet drew different conclusions in the specific case of Armenia. Why is that? By moving away from the idea that national oppression can be resolved by emergent nations, settling national oppression becomes the affair of the working class. Franz Mehring, on the left-wing of the SPD, clarified this in the case of Poland: “The age when a bourgeois revolution could create a free Poland is over, today the rebirth of Poland is only possible through a social revolution in which the modern proletariat breaks its chains”.15 Supporting a nationalist movement for Luxemburg only became tenable in the absence of an organized working class, and nationalism could not be the slogan raised to lead it. For Ananoun, conscious of the lack of capacity of forming coherent territorial states along ethnic lines in heterogeneous Transcaucasia, his position was conditioned by the concern of maintaining the rights and cultures of national minorities in territories that were necessarily going to contain multiple nationalities. This reveals the national question as it should be for the socialist movement: a question of the interests and the capacities of the working classes to place their demands upon bourgeois class states, and hence, the conquest of political power by the working classes. The maintenance of nationalities, in the form of culture and language, is part of the political and social rights that the working class wins through struggle against class states, not by creating them. Rather than debating whether a nation ought to exercise a “right” of self-determination, socialists should see the nation itself as a veil, under which contending classes are hidden.

What fundamentally determined Rosa Luxemburg’s attitude was understanding that nationalism was not an empty vessel in which socialists could pour in proletarian content. The ideology of nationhood intrinsically demands temporary class collaboration, at the very least, to the advantage of the ruling classes. An article she penned in January 1918, intended as friendly criticism of the early Soviet government’s policy on nationalities, most clearly articulates this perspective:

“The “right of nations to self-determination” is a hollow phrase which in practice always delivers the masses of people to the ruling classes.

Of course, it is the task of the revolutionary proletariat to implement the most expansive political democracy and equality of nationalities, but it is the least of our concerns to delight the world with freshly baked national class states. Only the bourgeoisie in every nation is interested in the apparatus of state independence, which has nothing to do with democracy. After all, state independence itself is a dazzling thing which is often used to cover up the slaughter of people.”16

This has been vindicated by historical experience. When we look at Poland today, a right-wing government is installing “Independence Benches” that play nationalist speeches.17 The speeches were delivered by none other than Józef Piłsudski, a former leader of the PPS who later abandoned socialism altogether. The warning of the Polish Communist Party, published in 1919, a year after Polish independence, that bourgeois “independence” in reality meant “the brutal dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat” has proven more correct than any fantasy about the achievement of independence offering a permanent resolution to the national question, opening up the battlefield of class struggle.18 The formation of new class states does not resolve national oppression, so much as redistribute it.

Revolutionary internationalism, or the so-called “international proletariat fundamentalism”, stands as a rejoinder to those who seek shortcuts to social revolution by the construction of nation-states. Yet it also allows for a more positive assessment of nationalities. Rather than being bound to the political form of territorial states responsible for the oppression of millions across centuries, the traditions, institutions, and languages associated with nationalities can become part of a universal cultural legacy and human inheritance that requires neither the violence of borders nor of class rule. We can be moved by the words of the poet Adam Mickiewicz without scrambling to statehood. Capitalist development has made the endgame of the exercise of national self-determination, the nation-state, a dead-end for socialists. It is now necessary to pose the national question once more and seek different answers.

Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, built in 1926 and destroyed in 1935.

Fragment on War, National Questions and Revolution

When hatred of the proletariat and the imminent social revolution is absolutely decisive for the bourgeoisie in all their deeds and activities, in their peace programme and in their policies for the future: what is the international proletariat doing? Completely blind to the lessons of the Russian Revolution, forgetting the ABCs of socialism, it pursues the same peace programme as the bourgeoisie, it elevates it to its own programme! Hail Wilson and the League of Nations! Hail national self-determination and disarmament! This is now the banner that suddenly socialists of all countries are uniting under – together with the imperialist governments of the Entente, with the most reactionary parties, the government socialist boot-lickers, the ‘true in principle’ oppositional swamp socialists, bourgeois pacifists, petty-bourgeois utopians, nationalist upstart states, bankrupt German imperialists, the Pope, the Finnish executioners of the revolutionary proletariat, the Ukrainian sugar babies of German militarism.

In Poland the Daszyńskis are in a cosy union with the Galician slaughterers and Warsaw’s big bourgeoisie, in German Austria, Adler, Renner, Otto Bauer, and Julius Deutsch are arm-in-arm with the Christian Socials, the landowners and the German Nationals, in Bohemia the Soukup and the Nemec are in a close phalanx with all the bourgeois parties – a touching reconciliation of the classes. And everywhere the national drunkenness: the international banner of peace! The socialists are pulling the bourgeoisie’s chestnuts out of the fire. They are helping, using their ideology and their authority, to cover up the moral bankruptcy of bourgeois society and to save it. They are helping to renovate and consolidate bourgeois class rule.

And the first practical coronation of this unctuous policy – the defeat of the Russian Revolution and the partition of Russia.

It is the politics of 4th August 1914, only turned upside down in the concave mirror of peace. The capitulation of class struggle, the coalition with each national bourgeoisie for the reciprocal wartime slaughter transformed into an international world coalition for a ‘negotiated peace’. The cheapest, the corniest old wives’ tale, a movie melodrama – that’s what they’re falling for: Capital suddenly vanished, class oppositions null and void. Disarmament, peace, democracy, and harmony of nations. Power bows before justice, the weak straighten their backs up. Krupp instead of cannons will produce Christmas lights, the American city Gari [?] will be turned into a Fröbel kindergarten. Noah’s Ark, where the lamb grazes peacefully next to the wolf, the tiger purrs and blinks like a big house cat, while the antelope crawls with horns tucked behind the ear, the lions and goats play with blind cows. And all that with the help of the magic formula of Wilson, of the president of the American billionaires, all that with the help of Clemenceau, Lloyd George and the Prince Max of Baden! Disarmament, after England and America are two new military powers! Disarmament, after the technology has immeasurably advanced. After all, states sit in the pocket of arms and finance capital through national debt! After colonies – colonies remain. The ideas of class struggle formally capitulate to national ideas here. The harmony of classes in every nation appears as the condition for and expansion of the harmony of nations that should emerge out of the world war in a ‘League of Nations’. 

Nationalism is an instant trump card. From all sides, nations and nationettes stake out a claim for their right to state formation. Rotted corpses rise out of hundred-year-old graves, filled with fresh spring shoots, and “historyless” peoples, who never formed an independent state entity up until now, feel a violent urge towards state formation. Poland, Ukraine, Belarussians, Lithuanians, Czechs, Yugoslavia, ten new nations of the Caucasus. Zionists are already erecting their Palestine Ghetto, provisionally in Philadelphia. It’s Walpurgis Night at Blockula today!

Broom and pitch-fork, goat and prong… To-night who flies not, never flies.

But nationalism is only a formula. The core, the historical content that is planted in it, is as manifold and rich in connections as the formula of  ‘national self-determination’, under which it is veiled, is hollow and sparse.

As in every great revolutionary period the most varied range of old and new scores come to be settled, oppositions are brought to their conclusions: antiquated remnants of the past, the most pressing issues of the present and the barely born problems of the future whirl together. The collapse of Austria and Turkey is the final liquidation of the feudal Middle Ages, an addendum to the work of Napoleon. In this context, however, Germany’s breakdown and diminution is the bankruptcy of the most recent and newest imperialism and its plans for world mastery, first formed in war. It is equally only the bankruptcy of a specific method of imperialist rule: by East Elbian reaction and military dictatorship, by siege and extermination methods, first used against the Hereros in the Kalahari Desert, now carried over to Europe. The disintegration of Russia, outwardly and in its formal results: the formation of small nation-states, analogous to the collapse of Austria and Turkey,  poses the opposite problem: on the one hand, capitulation of proletarian politics on a national scale before imperialism, and on the other capitalist counterrevolution against the proletarian seizure of power.

A K. [Kautsky] sees in this, in his pedantic, school-masterly schematism, the triumph of ‘democracy’, whose component parts and manifestation form are simply the nation-state. The washed-out petty-bourgeois formalist naturally forget to look into the inner historical core, forgets, as an appointed temple guard of historical materialism, that the ‘nation-state’ and ‘nationalism’ are empty pods into which each historical epoch and set of class relations pour their particular material content. German and Italian ‘nation-states’ in the 1870s were the slogan and the programme of the bourgeois state, of bourgeois class rule. Its leadership was directed against medieval, feudal past, the patriarchal, bureaucratic state and the fragmentation of economic life. In Poland the ‘nation-state’ was the traditional slogan of agrarian-noble and petty-bourgeois opposition to modern capitalist development. It was a slogan whose leadership was directed against the modern phenomena of life: both bourgeois liberalism and its antipode, the socialist workers movement. In the Balkans, in Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, nationalism, the powerful outbreak of which was displayed in the two bloody Balkan wars as a prelude to the world war, was one hand an expression of aspirational capitalist development and bourgeois class rule in all these states, it was an expression of the conflicting interests of the bourgeoisie among themselves as well as the clash of their development tendency with Austrian imperialism. Simultaneously, the nationalism of these countries, although at heart only the expression of a quite young, germ-like capitalism, was and is colored in the general atmosphere of imperialist development, even with distinct imperial tendencies. In Italy, nationalism is already thoroughly and exclusively a company plaque for a purely imperialist colonial appetite. The nationalism of the Tripolitan war and the Albanian appetite has as little in common with the Italian nationalism of the 1850s and 1860s as Mr. Sonnino has with Giuseppe Garibaldi.

In Russian Ukraine, up until the October uprising in 1917, nationalism was nothing, a bubble, the arrogance of roughly a dozen professors and lawyers who mostly couldn’t speak Ukrainian themselves. Since the Bolshevik Revolution it has become the very real expression of the petty-bourgeois counterrevolution, whose head is directed against the socialist working class. In India, nationalism is the expression of an emerging domestic bourgeoisie, which aims for independent exploitation of the country on its account instead of only serving as an object for English capital to leech. This nationalism, therefore, corresponds with its social content and its historical stage like the emancipation struggles of the United States of America at the outset of the 18th century.

So nationalism reflects back all conceivable interests, nuances, historical situations. It shines in all colors. It is everything and nothing, a mere shell. Everything hangs on it to assert its own particular social core.

So the universal, immediate world explosion of nationalism brings with it the most colorful confusion of special interests and tendencies in its bosom. But there is an axis that gives all these special interests a direction, a universal interest created by the particular historical situation: the apex against the threatening world revolution of the proletariat.

The Russian Revolution, with the Bolshevik rule it brought forth, has put the problem of social revolution on the agenda of history. It has pushed the class contradictions between capital and labor to the most extreme heights. In one swoop, it has opened up a gaping chasm between both classes in which volcanic fumes boil and fierce flames blaze. Just as the June Rebellion of the Paris proletariat and the June massacres split bourgeois society into two classes for the first time between which there can only be one law: a struggle of life and death, Bolshevik rule in Russia has placed bourgeois society face to face with the final struggle of life and death. It has destroyed and blown away the fiction of the tame working class that is relatively peacefully organized by socialism, which bragged in theoretical, harmless phrases but practically worshipped the principle: live and let live – that fiction, which was what the practice of German Social Democracy and in its footsteps, the entire International, consisted of for the last thirty years. The Russian Revolution instantly destroyed the modus vivendi between socialism and capitalism, created out of the last half-century of parliamentarism, with a rough fist and transformed socialism from the harmless phrases of electoral agitation, the blue skies of the distant future, into a bloodily serious problem of the present, of today. It has brutally ripped open the old, terrible wounds of bourgeois society that had been healing since the June Days in Paris in 1848. 

All of this, of course, is initially only in the consciousness of the ruling classes. Just as the June Days, with the power of an electric shock, immediately imprinted the consciousness of an irreconcilable class opposition to the working class upon the bourgeoisie of all nations and cast a deadly hatred of the proletariat in their hearts whilst workers of all nations needed decades in order to adopt the same lessons of the June days for themselves, the consciousness of class opposition, it now repeats itself: The Russian Revolution has awakened a fuming, foaming, trembling fear and hatred of the threatening spectre of proletarian dictatorship in the entirety of the possessing classes in every single nation. It can only be compared with the sentiments of the Paris bourgeoisie during the June slaughters and the butchery of the Commune. ‘Bolshevism’ has become the catchword for practical, revolutionary socialism, for all endeavors of the working class to conquer power. In this rupturing of the social abyss within bourgeois society, in the international deepening and sharpening of class antagonism is the historical achievement of Bolshevism, and in this work – like in all great historical contexts – all errors and mistakes of Bolshevism vanish without a trace. 

These sentiments are now the deepest heart of the nationalist delirium in which the capitalist world has seemingly fallen, they are the objective historical content to which the many-colored cards of announced nationalisms are reduced. These small, young bourgeoisie that are now striving for independent existence, are not merely trembling with the desire for winning unrestricted and untrammeled class rule but also for the long-awaited delight of the single-handed strangling of their mortal enemy: the revolutionary proletariat. This is a function they had to concede up until now to the disjointed state apparatus of foreign rule. Hate, like love, is only grudgingly left to a third wheel. Mannerheim’s blood orgies, the Finnish Gallifet, show how much that the blazing heat of hate that has sprouted up in the hearts of all small nations in the last few years, all the Poles, Lithuanians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Croats, etc., only waited for the opportunity to finally disembowel the proletariat with ‘national’ means. From all these young nations, which like white and innocent lambs hopped along in the grassy meadows of world history, the carbuncle-like eyes of the grim tiger are already looking out and waiting to “settle the accounts” with the first stirrings of “Bolshevism”. Behind all of the idyllic banquets, the roaring festivals of brotherhood in Vienna, in Prague, in Zagreb, in Warsaw,  Mannerheim’s open graves are already yawning and the Red Guards have to dig them themselves! The gallows of Charkow shimmer like faint silhouettes and the Lubinskys and Holubowitsches invited the German ‘liberators’ to Ukraine for their erection.

And the same fundamental idea reigns in the entire peace programme of Wilson. The “League of Nations” in the atmosphere of Anglo-American imperialism being drunk on victory and the frightening spectre of Bolshevism traversing the world stage can only bring forth one thing: a bourgeois world alliance for the repression of the proletariat. The first blood-soaked sacrifice that the High Priest Wilson, atop his omens, will make in front of the Ark of ‘The League of Nations’ will be Bolshevik Russia. The ‘self-determined nations’, victors and vanquished together, will overthrow it.

The ruling classes once again show their unerring instinct for their class interests, their wonderfully fine sensitivity for the dangers surrounding them. Whilst on the surface, the bourgeoisie are enjoying the loveliest weather and the proletarians of all countries are getting drunk on nationalist and ‘League of Nations’ spring breezes, bourgeois society is being torn limb from limb which heralds the impending change of seasons as the historical barometer falls. Whilst socialists are foolishly eager to pull their chestnuts of peace out of the fire of world war, as ‘national ministers’, they can’t help but see the inevitable, imminent fate behind their backs: the terrible rising spectre of social world revolution that has already silently stepped onto the back of the stage.

It is the objective unsolvability of the tasks bourgeois society faces that makes socialism a historical necessity and world revolution unavoidable.

No one can predict how long this final period will last and what forms it will take. History has already left the well-trodden path and the comfortable routine. Every new step, every new turn of the road opens up new perspectives and new scenery.

What is important is to understand the real problem of the period. The problem is called: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the realization of socialism. The difficulties of the task do not lie in the strength of the opponent, the resistance of bourgeois society. Its ultima ratio: the army is useless for the suppression of the proletariat as a result of the war, it has even become revolutionary itself. Its material basis for existence: the maintenance of society has been shattered by the war. Its moral basis for existence: tradition, routine, and authority have all been blown away by the wind. The whole structure has become loosened, fluid, movable. The conditions for struggle have never been so favourable for any emergent class in world history. It can fall into the lap of the proletariat like a ripe fruit. The difficulty lies in the proletariat itself, in its lack of maturity, or rather, the immaturity of its leaders, the socialist parties. The working class balks, it recoils before the uncertain enormity of its duty again and again. But it must, it must. History takes away all of its excuses: to lead us out of the night and horror of oppressed humanity into the light of liberation.

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Reparations and Self-Determination: Loosening the Black-Belt

Renato Flores argues for self-determination and reparations for Black Americans as a key part of the revolutionary struggle in the USA. 

I

The uniqueness of the Black condition in the United States is hard to understand for anyone foreign to the Americas. Its complexity is often lost in semantic distinctions on whether Black Americans are a Nation or not. A typical first avenue to assess Nationhood is to mechanistically apply Stalin’s checklist: “common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”1 When this is applied to the Black nation, the obvious question becomes: where is the territory? 

A dismissive answer would be to say that there is no land because population migration has rendered the Black Belt thesis obsolete. This answer is not only insufficient, but it is also hardly new: it has been leveled at the Black liberation movement since its inception in different shapes. Harry Haywood, the CPUSA’s leading theoretician on the Black Nation repeatedly answered this critique in the decades between the 20s to the 60s.2 As he presciently pointed out, migratory fluxes and the passage of time had done nothing to integrate black people. Looking from the era of Trump and mass incarceration, it is clear that this point still holds: Black oppression morphs in shape, but it never disappears.

An alternative answer is the Black Belt still exists in the shape of the 60-70 counties that still have a Black population of over 50% and their surroundings. This answer is poisoned, not only because there is a limited geographical continuity between these counties, especially those outside the Mississippi basin and the plantation belt in the South, but because it implicitly accepts the settler division of this continent. It also doesn’t outline how land claims from the Black Nation are compatible with Indigenous claims. Even worse, mere accounting of people could very well be leveraged against American Indian struggles to deny their validity when they occur in territory where settlers are the majority. 

Furthermore, even if one accepts that the Black Nation has its territory in the Southern states, it is hard to outline a path to self-determination while this land is held by an intensely racist ruling class. This is barely a new objection: Cyril Briggs, who pioneered the idea of a Black Nation on North American land chose the far West for his Nation to avoid this problem. The boundaries of the Black Nation were never clearly outlined by Haywood and the CPUSA, knowing that even if a black nation-state was formed, it could end up landlocked by Jim Crow states and isolated. The CPUSA insisted on the black belt hypothesis despite its impracticality because it was necessary to check off land in Stalin’s checklist. The right to a separate state requires land, which complicated self-determination. To remain faithful to the Black Belt thesis required spending significant time addressing geographical questions.

The answer to this antinomy is to move past land. One cannot fully grasp the concept of a nation materially: the persistence of Black nationalism despite internal migration means that the “idea” of a Nation is more resilient than land. Benedict Anderson defines a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves to be part of the group. In this sense, it is hard to deny that Blacks in the United States constitute themselves as an “imagined community”. Slogans of “buy black” or “black capitalism”, as well as black separatist groups such as the Nation of Islam are very alive today, and they speak more to the Black masses than socialists do. Those who see in them petit-bourgeois deviations are behaving like their counterparts a hundred years ago, which were hit by the realities of Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” mass-movement. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association was able to temporally attract over a million black people while communists struggled to recruit blacks at all. By looking at its aftermath, Harry Haywood acknowledged the mistakes of the communist movement and formulated the first comprehensive call for self-determination in the Black Belt.3 

So what can we say about the Black nation today? And what is the minimum socialist program for Black self-determination? To begin to understand this, we must remember two things. First, that the United States was founded on (white) race solidarity, and by default excluded black self-determination. Second, that the debt of “forty acres and a mule” remains unpaid, causing a wide economic disparity between Black wealth and White wealth. Both of these problems are discussed today, but never together. Trying to answer one at a time is insufficient; we need both economic and racial justice or will end up getting neither.

II

Anti-blackness is embedded in the DNA of the United States. The exclusion of black people from the community of whiteness offers fertile ground for a Black “imagined community”. Unlike layers of Asians and Latinos, Blacks will never have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the United States. That would render the whole category of whiteness obsolete. Racial solidarity, the main stabilizer of class struggle, would disappear. The persistence of whiteness explains the persistence of Black nationalism. 

The way race is constructed in the United States has few parallels, but they exist. In Traces of History, Patrick Wolfe elaborates on the founding of the United States, drawing similarities between the use of antisemitism to forge nations in Europe in the early 1900s, and the use of anti-blackness to forge race solidarity in the US. The question of European Jewry was tragically resolved through the horrors of the Shoah and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to establish the ethnostate of Israel. Following Wolfe, we can look at the debates around the Jews in the 1900s to find ways to answer the Black question. 

In the early 1900s, the largest Jewish socialist organization was the Bund, located in Eastern Europe and comprising tens of thousands of Jewish workers willing to fight for their liberation.4 The Bund called for Jewish self-determination, but in a different shape from that associated with the Bolsheviks. Its prime theorist, Vladimir Medem, drew inspiration from the Austromarxist school of Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. Medem demanded Jewish “national and cultural” autonomy, with separate schools to preserve Jewish culture. His brand of nationalism was of “national neutrality”, and opposed both preventing and stimulating assimilation. He just refused to make any predictions on the future of Jews.

Otto Bauer’s writings on the national question and self-determination are more remembered today by Lenin’s polemics than on their own right. Lenin was correct to criticize Bauer for denying territorial self-determination to nations within the Austro-Hungarian empire, and restricting them to “national cultural autonomy”. But by throwing away the baby with the bathwater, a different definition of self-determination and approach to nationhood was damned to obscurity. Bauer’s historicist definition of a nation as “a community with a common history and a common destiny” remains underappreciated in the Marxist tradition, even if it has influenced people like Benedict Anderson.5 Medem drew from the Austromarxist school even if Bauer denied nationhood to the Jews on the grounds that they lacked a common destiny. By limiting his look to the Western European Jews, Bauer failed to see the power of his approach where it was adopted.

The Bolsheviks also failed to capture the intricacies of the Jewish nation. Lenin framed the Jews as something more akin to a caste than a nation. Stalin dedicated an entire chapter of his National Question to polemicize against the Bund and the Jewish nation. By contrasting the cultural autonomy demands of the Bund to the struggles of Poles and Finnish for territorial self-determination, Stalin found the Bund’s demands as insufficient under Tsarist authoritarianism and superfluous under democracy. He also claimed that Jews were not a nation because “there is no large and stable stratum connected with the land, which would naturally rivet the nation together, serving not only as its framework but also as a ‘national market.” Both Lenin and Stalin saw assimilation as the only solution and shut the doors on Medem’s middle way. This meant that even if the Bund started its history closer to the Bolsheviks, they were eventually repelled towards the Mensheviks who accepted their nationalist vision. 

In the aftermath of the October Revolution, the Bund would undergo several splits and realignments. Their program for Jewish self-determination never saw full and consistent implementation. In a cruel irony, both Bolsheviks and Austromarxists were proven wrong by the Jewish version of Garvey’s return to Africa: Zionism. The return to a mythical Jewish land was able to take hold among sections of Eastern European Jews, showing that they were never fully integrated. Zionism not only matched the mass appeal of Garvey, the support of Western imperialism made it achievable. When confronted with this serious ideological rival, the Bolsheviks realized their mistake and attempted to provide a “Jewish autonomous oblast,” giving a land basis to Jewish self-determination within the USSR. But that was a large failure: at its peak, only fifty thousand Jews moved to the oblast in Eastern Siberia. When offered second-rate Zionism, why not choose the original? 

III 

If we read Stalin’s original criticism of the Bund, we can find many parallels to present critiques of Black nationalism. Applying his rigid framework to black people can lead us to the absurd conclusion that the Black nation, and the impossibility of racial integration in the United States, is contingent on the continued existence of a small number of sharecroppers connected to the land. Haywood was too faithful to his party to abandon the narrow confines of Stalin’s definition of nation and adopt a different one. Thus, he was forced to repeatedly argue for the persistence of sharecropping rather than abandon the Black nation. His opponents never abandoned the same framework, and the real debate became obscured by the interpretation of geographical statistics.

We must recognize that this is an absurd either-or. We can try to rescue the idea of “national personal autonomy” as a way of granting self-determination when the land basis is not sufficiently solid, and using it as a way to “organize nations not in territorial bodies but in simple association of persons”. This provides a working program for Black self-determination which avoids the question of the land. Indeed, self-determination means nothing without the right to separate, and the right to organize blacks separately has been demanded by many revolutionaries throughout history. This includes someone like Martin Luther King, who said that “separation may serve as a temporary way-station to the ultimate goal of integration” because integration now meant that black people were integrated without power.6

Socialists should not be afraid of this: Black Nationalist associations such as the Black Panther Party or the League of Revolutionary Black Workers have been amongst the most revolutionary forces of the United States. A reason they were so successful was their ability to organize separately in their initial stages, and reach out to other movements on their own terms. But it is essential to remember that separation is being demanded by those communities, and not enforced. Separation can very well be used to enforce racial injustice as shown by the use of “separate but equal” schools.7 

However, self-determination alone does not address the wealth disparity between races. Experiments in black self-determination like those being conducted by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in Jackson, Mississippi are bound to fail due to economic constraints. Black communities lack the wealth necessary to jump-start their own structures. This is the second pillar that holds up the existence of the Negro nation: the debt owed from the legacy of slavery. When the shadow of the plantation enters, the analogy between Blacks and European Jews breaks down, and the question of reparations becomes central.

IV

The most honest case against reparations is that of Adolph Reed.8 Reed never denies that the legacy of slavery has caused Black people to be at a significant economic disadvantage. However, he denies that the demand for reparations has progressive potential, and attributes it to petit-bourgeois nationalism (sound familiar?), where the middle classes attempt to rebuild a destroyed black psyche through back-room deals, in place of mass organizing.

Reed fails to see the potential for reparations to actually coalesce in a mass revolutionary movement. But fighting white supremacy need not begin from a revolutionary point. The original demands of the Montgomery bus boycott of the 60s were as mild as first-come, first-served seating, and did not even ask for desegregated buses. But anti-racism becomes a genuinely revolutionary movement by necessity if it is to reach its endpoint. We only have to observe MLK’s slow transformation to anti-capitalism. Every revolutionary movement in the history of this country has been led by black people and anti-racist organizing, be it the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, the strikes leading to the formation of the AFL-CIO, the second Reconstruction of Civil Rights or the Black Panther Party. History tells us that any path to a radical transformation of this country must go through anti-racist, anti-imperialist organizing or it is bound to stop halfway before reaching its goals. 

Contrast reparations with Medicare for all. Medicare for all has the potential to immediately transform the lives of millions of people for the better. But Medicare for all does not fundamentally challenge capitalism. Sanders regularly points to Western Europe and other “industrialized” countries as examples that universal healthcare is possible (Cuba is a notable example he never mentions). As he accidentally shows, it is a demand that is perfectly possible to accommodate within the realms of capitalist societies. Settler-colonial states such as Canada and Australia provide universal access to healthcare for the “community of the free”. These countries are no less settler-colonial if they provide their settler-citizens with healthcare. The dispossession of indigenous people continues unabated, and Australia’s notoriously racist immigrant policy still holds. If this isn’t the definition of trade-unionist, economist demands then what is? 

Decommodification of essential commodities is just ordinary Keynesianism: a way for capitalism to manage the inherent contradiction between laissez-faire economics and the existence of the hopeless poor.9 As Keynes and other economists faced down the Great Depression, the consensus became that state would mitigate the worst excesses of capitalism to save “the thin crust of civilization”. They would create poverty with dignity, incorporating the rabble into civil society by using government programs to provide them with their basic needs. The programs of the New Deal, and the creation of the post-war European welfare system are surely the largest bribes ever given to the working class, with the bill paid by the Global South. Guillotines were avoided, Keynesianism stabilized capitalism for over three decades. The proto-revolutionary proletarian rabble was turned into the social-democratic industrialized “middle” class, one that had gained an interest in preserving the system.

In 2019, neoliberalism has recreated on a massive scale the figure of the hopeless poor. Bernie and other progressives face the Long Recession with measures like Medicare for all and $15/hour minimum wage. “Democratic socialism” is the new word, twisted and redefined to mean anything. While this term means many different things for many people, the underlying ideal for Sanders is a system where we can manage the contradictions of capitalism and give it a human face through state intervention. Sanders tries to attract Trump voters by making class-based demands around which to unite the “99%”. Many socialists are trying to take advantage of Sanders’ cross-party appeal to revitalize the forces of revolutionary socialism. But as Lenin recognized, workers will not simply become revolutionaries by fighting for economist demands. Focusing on Medicare for All fails to outline a vision for a new society, and winning it could mean instead that sections of workers become disinterested in further challenging the system. The post-war era shows the limit of economist demands. Social-democratic Sweden went as far as the Meidner plan, a vision to turn the means of production into workers’ control. The Meidner plan failed, and business began its counteroffensive. Workers were too invested in the system to significantly challenge this failure, and as of today, capital has slowly chipped away at many of the historical gains of Swedish social-democracy. As Lenin stated in Left-Wing Communism, revolutions can only triumph “when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way”.10 In this case, the “old way” was good enough, and workers did not fight to move from “social democracy” to “democratic socialism”.

In a country like the United States, revolutionaries must fundamentally look to challenge the political structure and form a broader vision of how the system should look. Sanders’ race-agnostic politics do nothing to address domestic white supremacy or the pillaging of the Global South. Sanders is right in that universalist policies such as a $15/hour minimum wage will primarily help people of color. But this does not do anything to change systemic discrimination. We have enough evidence to show that remedies in policing do not address the institutionalized white supremacy of law enforcement. Medicare for All might transform the way white supremacy is enforced in the healthcare system, but it is naive to think that it will eliminate it.

Centering race-blind social-democratic projects as a model is not enough. The Swedish social-democratic project was based around a relatively homogeneous “community of the free”. Today it shows deep cracks due to its inability to deal with the cultural and racial diversity immigration has brought in. Universal politics assume that all subjects conform to the same standards, and believe in the same project. With the racial diversity of the US, any universalist race-blind project is doomed if it does not explicitly address the faultlines of the working class. The most marginalized sections will simply not trust economist projects to include them. There is over a century of failures to attest to this, from the failure of Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party to significantly attract black members to Sanders’ inability in 2016 to compete in the Southern states. And even if we do win universalist demands, the cracks will show up later and will be used to reverse any gains. We just have to remember how Reagan leveraged the “welfare queen” that had an explicitly racist subtext.

V

Instead of a form of subjugation that can be remedied by economic means alone, we have to recognize the political character of white supremacy. The issue of slavery is at the forefront of this election cycle. A Trump presidency is the elephant in the room: the Obama presidency did not mean that we are post-racial. The 1619 project is actively shaping how people think of the United States, tying the foundation of this country to the first shipment of slaves. Led by the New York Times, it is receiving attention from the highest spheres. Some type of cosmetic reparations will feature in a 2020 Democratic platform as an attempt to attract back the black voters the Democrats desperately need. Several candidates, the most notable of which was Marianne Williamson, have proposed comprehensive platforms on the debate floor.

An electoral platform centered around destroying whiteness through indigenous justice and reparations is of paramount importance for socialists today. Some plans are simply not worthy of the name of reparations. Black self-determination plays a key role in this platform to both decide what reparations actually mean, and what to do with the money. Tax credits do nothing to address collective injustice, while the US government coming in to repair infrastructure in majority-Black neighborhoods does not address Black self-determination. 

As socialists, we should never oppose reparations, as that would mean isolating us from the Black masses. We have to remember how the Bolshevik’s refusal to address the Bundist concerns led them to the hands of the Mensheviks. A debt of forty acres and a mule is owed, and this is the whole material heart of the Black national question. We should center that it is essential for Black people to decide on what reparations mean. We should not be afraid of not having a seat at that table, because that either means that we do not have enough Black members in our parties, or that our members are not fighting for proletarian hegemony within the Black movement. A council for deciding how and where to apply reparations can be a seed to building alternative power if wielded correctly.

Reparations are not an end-goal but we can use them today to ground the fight for black self-determination and to struggle against whiteness. Ultimately, any non-reformist reform cannot remedy the US’s flaws of racism. This assumes that atonement can be reached within the confines of the current nation-state. The United States’ sins are not a choice it can reverse, they are deeply embedded in the DNA of this country. The platform to cure the character mistakes of the United States can only be fulfilled by the dismantling of the settler-colonial white supremacist structure. Even a comprehensive platform for reparations in its present state is not viable in the current political climate. The same way that “Black Lives Matter” caused a proto-fascist antithesis in the shape of “Blue Lives Matter”, a reparations movement should expect to be attacked both rhetorically and physically. 

Even the most flawed reparations platform recognizes the issues of white supremacy as central to the United States and transcends economism in a way Sanders is not able to. While Sanders just wants to make an American Sweden, our movement must go much further. We need a vision for a better world, beyond wonkiness and towards a greater inspiration if we are ever to escape the confines of capitalism. Even if the first and second Reconstructions were unfinished revolutions, they changed society much more profoundly than the New Deal ever did by destroying slavery and Jim Crow. 

At the same time, these anti-racist revolutions unleashed collectivized hatred in intense ways that contributed to their later failures. Fascism is capitalism in decay, and reactionary elements are inevitable in any pre-revolutionary situation. Socialists need a comprehensive economic program to pacify white reaction by offering to pay better than the wages of whiteness. Revolutions based on rural or marginalized people can succeed, like Cuba, fall short like Nepal, or fail completely like Peru, depending on their ability to attract the urban wavering classes. Ultimately, any successful socialist program in the United States must incorporate both racial and economic justice. In the first case, to center it politically, in a Leninist manner. In the second, to provide an incentive for the wavering classes to follow. 

 

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‘Evolution of the National Question’ and ‘The East and Revolution’ by Safarov

Translation and Introduction by Medway Baker.

Safarov (upper right) with Ural Regional Soviet, circa 1918.

Georgy Safarov was born in St. Petersburg in 1891. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1908, and from 1910 spent many years exiled in Switzerland, returning to Russia alongside Lenin in 1917. Despite spending most of his political career up until the revolution in Western Europe, he took a keen interest in the national question, especially the plight of the Muslim population of Russian Central Asia. He was sent to Soviet Turkestan in 1919 to aid in the establishment of soviet power and the fight against the counterrevolutionary Basmachi movement. The complexity of carrying out these tasks—establishing soviet power, winning over the oppressed masses, building socialism, and combatting both counterrevolutionary nationalism and Russian chauvinism—led Safarov to engage in a comprehensive study of Central Asian economic and social conditions. The two pieces we present below were written around the time that Safarov was engaged in a struggle with Mikhail Tomsky, who also had come to hold a leadership position in Soviet Turkestan. Tomsky, as Matthieu Renault elaborates in his essay Revolution Decentered: Two Studies on Lenin, wished to transplant the methods used with regard to the peasantry in the Russian core—the tax-in-kind, etc.—directly to Turkestan, without consideration for the national chauvinism and economic dominance of Russian peasants, workers, and administrators, and the resentment of the native population towards these colonisers. To this proposal, Safarov counterposed the establishment of committees of the poor peasants and distribution of the lands of the large landowners to these peasants, in order to encourage class conflict within the Muslim population, against both their own elites and the Russian colonisers. As Renault demonstrates, Lenin—eternally concerned with Great Russian chauvinism and bureaucratism—attempted to mediate between the two, but clearly sided with Safarov. This was a struggle that he and Safarov were to lose.

The first essay, The Evolution of the National Question, published in the French publication Bulletin communiste in early 1921, is a brief sketch of the development of the national question throughout the revolutionary period, and concludes with a list of problems and a set of prescriptions for the Soviet government to act upon. The style, structure, and content suggest that it was rather hastily written as a call to action, a feature that we have attempted to preserve in this translation. The second, The East and Revolution, published in Bulletin communiste a few months after (and having been published in German in late 1920), greatly elaborates on the content of the first article, with references to anthropological, economic, and historical studies, especially of the Central Asian peoples of the Russian Empire. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, Safarov examines the nature of imperialism, its effect on the economies and societies of colonised nations, the changes in the global and Russian situations since the beginning of the First World War, and the experiences of the national-democratic and proletarian revolutions occurring worldwide in the wake of the war. He then discusses solutions to the national question, in an earnest attempt to resolve the tensions inherent to the national-democratic and socialist revolutions in Russia, and by extension the world.

A key part of his solution is the soviets, which he identifies as “a class organisation borrowed from the proletariat of the advanced countries.”

But the importance of the soviets, for Safarov, is not the particularities of the soviet form as manifested in Russia in 1917 (he in fact refers also to the anjoman, a type of revolutionary council that emerged during the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-09). Rather, it is their status as popular organs of the revolutionary masses, created in the actual process of the class struggle, and as anti-agreementist organs from which the exploiting strata are excluded. For Safarov, the significance of the soviet form is not in their size, nor in their organisational norms; it is in their class composition. Only the class-independence of the labouring masses (the proletariat, the peasantry, and the petty producers alike) from their exploiters can fully carry out the project of national liberation from imperialism. The native exploiters, Safarov demonstrates, will inevitably betray the interests of the majority of the nation in favor of their own class interests, and in so doing will side with imperialist dictatorship.

It is crucial to note that Safarov does not at any point confuse national liberation with the transition to communism, nor does he advocate liquidation of the proletarian struggle against exploitation into the pure struggle for national liberation. On the contrary, he stresses that “this entire programme [for national liberation] has not a single communist element,” and insists on the necessity of “conserving at all price the independence of the workers’ movement, even in its embryonic form.” For Safarov, the struggle for national liberation is a necessary component of the progression towards communism, of the development of the exploited masses’ revolutionary consciousness — but national-democratic revolutionaries are not to be confused with communists, and it is the duty of communists to struggle against these elements in order to win over the exploited masses.

It is notable that for Safarov, the national policy he proposes “coincides with another [task]: that of winning the masses of petty producers, the middle peasants of Central Russia to soviet rule.” In effect, the alliance of the Russian workers and peasants with the toiling masses of the oppressed nations is mirrored by the alliance between the proletariat and the peasanty (the smychka). Just as the Russian proletariat was incapable of exercising power without the support and active participation of the peasantry (unless they wanted to wage a brutal war against the countryside), it was also unable to exercise power without the participation of the exploited strata of the oppressed nations. Safarov, clearly referencing the Basmachi movement, insists that attempting to exercise proletarian power over the oppressed nations, without taking into consideration their particular conditions and tasks, “can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development” — that is, a struggle against the Soviet Republic. This applies not only to the Soviet Republic internally, but also to the international revolution. Even Soviet economic policy is mirrored in Safarov’s vision for the global socialist economy: the peasant soviet republics of the once-oppressed nations, he says, will trade raw materials to the proletarian soviet socialist republics in exchange for manufactured goods and technical expertise, just as the New Economic Policy was founded upon equal exchange between the workers and the peasants. Safarov claims that this will allow the peasant soviet republics to develop at their own pace, so that they can “prepare for communism.”

The tendencies that Safarov identifies constitute an early version of a thesis later elaborated upon by postcolonial revolutionaries and scholars, such as Frantz Fanon. The thesis rejects both stageism—the idea that the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions are and must be entirely distinct events—and the notion that proletarian revolution must be directly transplanted to the colonies by the advanced proletariat of the imperial core, to the exclusion of a native, national-democratic revolution. These two stages of revolution—national and socialist—are not identical, but neither can they be isolated from each other.

We thus present these works as not only a part of the Bolsheviks’ debate on the national question, but also as a study on the dynamics of national oppression and revolution. We contend that these articles are not only a historical curiosity, but can provide insight into questions of imperialism, uneven economic development, and national oppression even today, along with the larger body of scientific study on the national question.

Bolshevik poster in Russian and Uzbek text, 1920, reads: “life of the eastern masses of the Soviet Union”

The Evolution of the National Question

Translated from “L’Évolution de la question nationale,” Bulletin communiste 2, no. 4 (January 27, 1921).

I

The experience of the revolution has not been sufficiently instructive with regard to the national question. At the beginning of the October Revolution this question had not been posed as concretely, nor with such tangible importance and keenness as today. In the first year of soviet power, the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination manifested itself above all as the liquidation of the colonial heritage of the old Russian Empire. Tsarist Russia oppressed and enslaved the “allogenous peoples” (inorodtsy). Soviet power gave them national equality, up to and including the right to create an independent state. The needs of the struggle against internal counterrevolution made this question a problem of prime urgency. Thanks to the concentration of the proletariat in the big cities and the industrial regions of Central Russia, to the favourable strategic position inhabited by this proletariat over the course of Russian history, the seizure of power could not have been easier. But these same circumstances determined in advance the historic path of the Russian counterrevolution, bourgeois and aristocratic, a path travelling from the outer provinces towards the centre. All the preceding history of Russia had been the history of Russian colonisation, and this fact distinguished itself from the moment of the proletariat’s seizure of power: it brought us face to face with the necessity of overcoming the existing antagonism between the Russian proletarian centre and the outer provinces, which are neither Russian nor proletarian; between the Russian city and the non-Russian country. The key to victory was in the resolution of the national question. But obtaining this resolution has not been easy. It has been necessary, firstly, to educate the Russian proletarian masses, infected—at least among their backwards sections—by an unconscious nationalism that makes them see the Russian cities as the focal point of the revolution, and the non-Russian villages as the focal point of the petite bourgeoisie; this leads them to apply the same methods of attack against these villages as are employed against capital. It has been necessary on the other hand to overcome the age-old distrust of the non-Russian villages towards the Russian cities and factories. The cities and the factories were developed and fortified on the immense expanses of the peasant world, as centres of Russian colonisation. The Bashkir knows this all too well, as the factories in the south Urals took away all their wealth and land; the nomadic Kirghiz knows it all too well, and looks askance at the Orenburg, Kazalinsk, Petrovsk, and Tashkent railways, which have always been nests of the scorpions called “police”; the poor Ukrainian peasant, too, knows it all too well. The assault against capital, advancing beyond the outskirts of the city, encounters an environment where the classes were not distinguished. It comes up against an impassable wall of national distrust. The primary attitude of the oppressed, non-Russian countryside was above all the desire for the Russian cities to finally cease commanding them, and to let the oppressed nations freely pursue their proper path towards national development. The poor sections of the oppressed nations considered soviet power to be a force hostile to their national character. The well-off sections and the nationalists of the intellectual stratum, having become the direct object of requisitions and confiscations, as well as of the struggle against counterrevolution, speculation, and sabotage, saw soviet power as a direct menace to their class domination or to their privileges as intellectual workers. This state of mind naturally facilitated, in a large way, the projects of the Russian counterrevolution. Crushed in the first declared encounter, they naturally seized upon the principles of separation, decentralisation, and independence. Kolchak, “Supreme Leader of the Russian Forces,” and Denikin, leader of “Russia One and Indivisible,” are figures of the second period of the Russian counterrevolution. Before selling their beloved “Fatherland” on the global market, where the demand was not yet enough, the counterrevolution first engaged in business among themselves, in the outer provinces of the old Russian Empire.

The experience of the civil war taught the labouring masses of the oppressed nations that the Ukrainian Rada led to Hetman Skoropadskyi and the German general Eichhorn, which wasn’t far from Kolchak’s Alash Orda or the Musavatist government of the English oil barons. The masses of Russian proletarians inhabiting the frontiers understood, too, that without the middle peasant it was impossible to hold firm against the aristocrats and the generals, that without the allogenous peoples it was impossible to create global proletarian power. The immediate collision of Soviet Russia with international imperialism compelled the oppressed nations to stand with the Russian proletariat against imperialist dictatorship, since the latter excluded all possibility of democracy and national liberty. The civil war was terrible, but it made the peoples of Russia pass through entire eras of history. Over the course of the civil war the possessing classes of the oppressed nations demonstrated to even the most backwards their internal, profound impotence in maintaining their positions of national independence in the struggle between capital and the soviets.

The conclusion of this experience has been clear and indubitable: all the bourgeois-national movements, led by the ruling class, have a natural tendency to adapt to imperialism, to enter into the imperialist system of the great powers, the buffer states, and the colonies. The natural tendency, unconscious from the first, of all national-revolutionary movements, is, by contrast, to draw on the revolutionary governing organisation of the proletariat of the more advanced countries, in order to obtain, by this course, their freedom to develop their nation in the global socialist economic system presently being constructed. The structure of the Federation of Soviets of Russia, the decisions of the Congress of the Peoples of the East, the existing alliance with the eastern revolutionary movements with the European revolutionary proletariat, are proof of this.

Three years of soviet power have presented the national question on a global scale, as a question of class struggle.

II

We can thus say that soviet power is the algebraic formula of revolution. The Second Congress of the Communist International recognised this, in concluding that the backwards peoples, with the aid of the proletariat of the more advanced countries, and by means of the formation of soviets, can jump over the capitalist stage to immediately prepare for communism. This is not a rationale understood by the “socialist colonisers,” who proclaim all national features to be counterrevolutionary prejudices, and who recognise nothing other than the national prejudices of the dominant nations. Our Russian colonisers in no way differentiate themselves from the bourgeois socialists of the Yellow International. To combat them is to combat bourgeois—however radical it appears—influence on the proletariat. If we transplant the communist revolution, unaltered, to the backwards countries, we can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development. In these countries all the nationalisations and socialisations have about as much a basis as the nationalisation of the small peasant’s minuscule exploitation, or that of the cobblers’ awls. But the soviets are the class organisational form which permits the smooth advancement to communism, starting from the lowest stages of historical development. The semi-proletarian Kirghiz, the poor Bashkir, the Armenian peasant, each has wealthy classes in their country. These wealthy strata take away the former’s right to freely dispose of their labour, they enslave them as agrarian serfs, they divest them of the products of their labour, which they appropriate as a usurer’s profit; they keep them in ignorance; they maintain for themselves a sort of monopoly on the national culture, supported by the Mullahs, the Ishans, and the Ulamas. For the labourers of the backwards countries, bourgeois democracy can represent nothing other than a reinforcement of traditional domination, half-feudal, half-bourgeois. The brief experience of the “Kokand Autonomy”—which had more partisans among the Russian police than among the poor Muslims—, the experience of Alash Orda, the experience of Musavatist rule in Azerbaijan and Dashnak rule in Armenia, the recent experience of the pseudo-nationalist government of the Tehran merchants, taught in the imperialist countries of Europe, can all testify to this in perfect clarity. Six years of turmoil, 1914 to 1920, have brought hardship to the labourers of the backwards countries. The Kirghiz who were mobilised in 1916 to dig trenches have even now not been able to recover their lands, once given by the tsar to the rich peasants of Russia. The name “Kolchak” is well-known to the old allogenous peoples. The economic crisis, the absence of flour and cloth, has significantly exacerbated the subjugation of the poor class among the Kirghiz, in Bashkiria, in Turkestan, etc.… The lack of land, far from being resolved, has done nothing but grow, as the shortage grows, and as the nomads are forced to become sedentary. In the countries of the East, placed between life and death by the yoke of English imperialism, the crisis clears the market of European products, but at the same time it augments the appetites of the Western generals, the adventurers and the national usurers. The only remedy to all these afflictions is the labourers’ soviets, which by grouping the exploited together must end class inequality, give the land to the poor, free the artisan from the usurious intermediaries, liberate the toilers from drudgery and taxes, begin the education of the masses and the radical betterment of their conditions of existence, all at the public expense. This entire programme has not a single communist element. It is only after its realisation that the preparation for communism can begin among the backwards peoples. Here, as everywhere, we must terminate that which has not terminated — which has been incapable of terminating — capitalism. The communist revolution, throughout its entire course, must struggle against the exploiters of all historic periods and all types. The soviets are the revolution’s primary weapon, the universal form of this struggle.

III

Soviet power has become the form by which the right of the oppressed peoples to self-determination manifests. The soviet organisation of the oppressed peoples, from the national point of view as from the political point of view, sets itself against a slew of practical barriers, arising from class inequality and from traditional injustices.

There are enormous spaces, populated by the nations formerly oppressed by tsarism, a great distance away from the railroads. A characteristic example: the Semirechye line, impossible to construct, although the remoteness of this region with respect to Turkestan proper permits the large Russian peasants to maintain an autonomous existence. The nomads fear the city, because they see it as an erstwhile nest of police.

There are no Muslim printed letters, because printing was the privilege of the dominant nation.

There is no one literate in the native language; in Turkestan the cantons are forced to lend secretaries between each other for their executive committees.

There are no specialists for intellectual labour, and intellectuals count only in the dozens. There is no one who can teach others to read and write. This summer in Turkestan we trained a thousand Muslim schoolmasters, but even in just the already-existing schools, we are still missing about 1500.

As regards Russian specialists, we can employ them in the colonial provinces only with the utmost precaution, as they were all more or less agents of the colonial yoke—the colonial plunder. Their distinctly Russian sabotage, which they decorate with bureaucratic scruples and references to decrees, carries a criminally systematic character.

Finally, white-Russian “internationalism” has not yet been completely uprooted in the Communist Party.

The application of all these measures comes up against obstacles: the absence of primers, of scholars, of native specialists, etc.

The Communist Party must clearly understand these facts. It must declare that the soviet autonomy of the oppressed nations is an urgent task for the Communist Party and for soviet power. We must concentrate the attention of the labouring masses, of the proletarian vanguard, and of the entire soviet and communist apparatus on this problem, as we have done in the past in regard to the middle peasant. The liberation of the East, where there is more national and class slavery than anywhere else, is today the centrepiece of our international policy — the international policy of the socialist proletariat. It is there that we will practically address the problem of organising the International Republic of Soviets and the global socialist economy. In three years of soviet power, the national question has undergone many changes. Declarative formulas have passed into the practical organisation of nations. From the military struggle with the national counterrevolution, we have passed to soviet autonomy. From the struggle with the internal counterrevolution we have passed to global policy. The conclusions that present themselves must be taken up by the Commissariats of Agriculture and of Procurement, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, and all the other relevant organs, so that an excessive zeal to execute our labour mobilisations, our taxes-in-kind, etc., will not generate a so-called “counterrevolution.” Our entire party must be mobilised morally to the service of the national liberation of the oppressed. 

Soviet poster from Baku, 1920, text in Azeri, reads: “Through their strong union, workers and peasants destroy oppressors.”

The East and Revolution

Translated from “L’Orient et la Révolution,” Bulletin communiste 2, no. 17 (April 28, 1921). Originally appeared in German in Die kommunistische Internationale, no. 15 (December 1920).

The Second Congress of the Communist International recognised that “the masses of the backwards countries, led by the conscious proletariat of the developed capitalist countries, will arrive at communism without passing through the different stages of capitalist development.” We came to recognise this principle through the experience of the national soviet republics in the territory of the former Russian Empire, and through the revolutionary awakening of the colonial peoples and the oppressed nationalities of the East: India, China, Persia, Turkey, etc.… These peoples were cut off from the course of their historical development by European imperialism. They found themselves excluded from the technical revolution, from the rupture with the old social forms, and from the progress of civilisation. European capitalism did not at all revolutionise the mode of production in these countries. It did nothing but erect its own superstructure—in the form of an imperialist bureaucracy, of a commercial agency of European capital and a European “importation” industry—upon the feudal-patriarchal regime which had constituted itself over the course of centuries. It reinforced the exploitation of the agrarian population, by seizing the best lands, the sources of materials and fuel, but did not eliminate the old, reactionary feudal forms of exploitation. Where it could, for example in the Indies, it destroyed the local industry of petty artisans, by saturating the native markets with items manufactured in Europe, outcompeting the locally-manufactured items. Labour, rendered unoccupied by the elimination of petty production, became employed in agriculture. The establishment of industrial hegemony, and the military and political dictatorship of European capital in the colonies, led the great majority of the native population to become “attached to the land” so to speak, and inevitably also to emigration of the surplus population to the industrial centres (such as the exodus of Persians, reduced to finding work in Baku), and the horrific mortalities that periodically desolate certain countries in times of scarcity (India).

The Role of European Capitalism

Therefore, European capitalism has retarded the economic development of the colonies, just as much as it has the development of culture; it has artificially maintained the old social forms and the old reactionary ideology. Certainly, it could not have manifested otherwise in this part of the world and, all things considered, it has fulfilled its role as unconscious revolutionary agent. Friedrich Engels himself recognised this “civilising mission,” even as it concerns former tsarist Russia. In a letter to Karl Marx on May 23, 1851, he wrote, “Russian rule, despite its wickedness, despite its Slavic dirtiness, has a civilising influence on the Black and Caspian Seas and on Central Asia, on the Bashkirs and Tatars.” But here he misses the point. Capitalism of “importation” has the particularity that, in the colonies, it does not in practice follow the same method as in Europe and America. It does not develop the land for capitalist production. The colonialists burn the land to clear it for agriculture, they grow all sorts of grains until the ground is rendered completely barren, and then they abandon it for new lands. It is intensive cropping in all its rapacious brutality. The ruined artisan is not transformed into the industrial proletarian, but is rather transported by force to the countryside, where he has to work as a half-serf day labourer, and becomes literally the rich landlord’s or director’s workhorse, a slave to European exploitation. The nomad who lost his herd meets the same fate. The autonomous petty producer, who does not go to sell his labour on a capitalist farm, is reduced to misery, and becomes the insolvent debtor to the local usurer and to the European commissioner. At the same time that it destroys the native small industry and ruins the agrarian economy, European capitalism reserves all the offices, all the honours and all the important posts to the bearers of “high culture”, to Europeans.

The European is engineer, overseer, commissioner, administrator; the native, labourer and farmer. Just as in capitalist society, the development of the productive forces is accomplished through the intensification of the dominion of capital over labour, in the colonies this development has augmented the class antagonisms between the dominating nation and the oppressed nation. European capitalism barely disturbed the native elites, nor the exploiters of the peoples it oppresses. The big landlords, the merchants, the native usurers, the clergy, and even the police are left at their posts, legitimised by habit, by religion and by history. Only, above them, new figures appeared; the representatives of the imperialist bureaucracy and European capital, the Christian missionaries and the commercial agents. To the feudal exploitation of the peasant by the big landlord, the usurer, and the despotic state was added the oppression of the whole nation by foreign capital. In addition, the European yoke, far from destroying the backwards civil and familial customs, the traditional ancestral ideology, did nothing but consolidate them, by making them dear to the oppressed masses, who see in them a form of conserving their national culture, as well as a weapon in their struggle for political autonomy and their own culture, against the violent assimilation by European capital. This is what explains the strength of pan-Slavism, pan-Mongolism, pan-Asianism (“Asia for Asians!”), and other analogous movements that tend to consolidate the position of the possessing classes in the oppressed nationalities.

“The desire to safeguard the old, backwards forms of production from the invasion of capitalism: this is the economic base that has realised, without difficulty, the unification of the immense masses dispersed across the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe.”1 Pan-Islamism as well as other, analogous movements are prominent examples.

European capitalism has not yet had the time to dissolve in the industrial furnace the population of the colonies and the half-enslaved peoples of the East, which the communist revolution and the European proletariat will break open. This is the fatal consequence of this imbalance in the development of different parts of the global economy, an imbalance that constitutes the very essence of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism has dug an abyss between developed industry and the backwards rural economy. Capitalism has created a contradiction between the production of articles of consumption and the production of the means of production themselves. It has created a collision between the industrial progress of Europe and the backwards economic state of the colonies. It is exactly the transformation of industrial capitalism into imperialism that has caused the world war.

During the imperialist war, many colonial peoples were forced to provide military contingents and working-class armies for the war in Europe. The imperialist war brought the national question to the forefront, on a world-historic and world economic scale. Relying on Turkey, German imperialism attempted to draw into its camp the peoples of the East. The Entente’s imperialism, by virtue of its international situation, naturally had to speculate instead on its relationship with the Latin and Slavic peoples of Europe.

The Military and Political Dictatorship of Conquest

The imperialist war stripped away from the colonies all the “advantages” of their connection with European capital—commodities, the technical and capital means of the Europeans—and at the same time added cannon-fodder and a multitude of raw materials to the usual colonial tribute. The political yoke was equally strengthened. The result of the war was, on the one hand, the spoils of Versailles, and on the other hand the proletarian revolution in Russia and the revolutionary crisis in Europe. Thus, the march of the revolution in the East was predetermined. The war inhibited the base, the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, not only for the national economy of each country in particular, but for the entire global economy. In Europe, the industrious and enterprising capitalist of peacetime—who, hiring labour everywhere and constantly searching for new available capital, would constantly flood the market with streams of commodities—has been replaced with the speculator, declared enemy of large consumption, conscious protagonist of the continual reduction of social production; likewise, in the East, the European travelling salesman, the “peaceful conqueror” has been replaced with the true conqueror, the peacemaker with gold epaulettes, clad in menacing armour made in the European military style, and equipped with a “mandate” for an indeterminate number of colonial slaves and for limitless territory. In Europe, civil war has created an economic necessity for military dictatorship. The awakening of the oppressed peoples of Asia to the struggle for their national existence has equally created an economic necessity of the strengthening of capital’s doctrine of conquest in the East. The military dictatorship in Europe, and the doctrine of conquest in Asia, have been the only means for capitalism to enlarge its base of production, amidst the global disorganisation and the general revolutionary crisis. Looting one to make gifts for the other, making gifts to this one to loot a third, and so on, without end: this is the real essence of the politics of international imperialism, obligated to zig-zag before the proletarian revolution in Europe and the colonial revolution in Asia.

From this peril emerges the community of interests and solidarity in the struggle. The alliance with the European communist proletariat has emerged as an urgent historical necessity for the peoples of the East. The grand course of world history has seen the collision of capitalism with its direct successors—the revolutionary proletarians—and with its bastards—the oppressed peoples. Capitalism has divided humanity into dominant and oppressed nations. The revolution has brought about the union of the workers of the dominant nations with the majority of labourers in the oppressed nations.

It is through the proletarian revolution in Russia that the global revolutionary crisis has begun. The victory of the proletariat in the empire of the tsars, this “prison house of nations,” has given this alliance a concrete manifestation. The Russian revolutionary A. I. Herzen wrote, “The Europeans consider Russia to be Asia; the Asians, for their part, consider Russia to be Europe.” This was the situation of tsarist Russia. In Europe, it fulfilled the role of the international gendarme; in Asia, it conducted the power politics of European bandits. As strange as it may seem, this ancient formula, if turned on its head, characterises the present situation. To the eyes of Europe, the bankers and the big proprietors, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic appears as the propagator of a terrible infection called “Asiatic bolshevism.” In the East, Russia finds itself as the bearer of the ideas of European communist revolution. It is in this phenomenon that we find the revolutionary importance of our geographic position between the East and the West. The Russian proletariat, the vanguard, had to practically resolve the accession of the masses of petty producers to the communist revolution; it had to resolve the question of the transformation of national movements from national-democratic into socialist-revolutionary…. The past march of historical development will sweep them to victory. Concentrated in the great halls of large industry, able to animate immense spaces, the proletariat, from the first, finds itself in a strategic position more advantageous than that of its enemies; the counterrevolution had to take the offensive from the outer reaches of the country, where it has attempted to draw upon the possessing and exploiting strata, upon the nations once oppressed by tsarism. In effect, all the prior history of Russia has been the “history of colonisation”!2

One of the first acts of the proletarian government was to enact “the declaration of the rights of the peoples of Russia” (2 November 1917), in which it recognised the right of self-determination, up to and including the right of separation from Russia—the right to form a distinct national state—for all the peoples of the old tsarist empire. Be that as it may, to manifest the right to national autonomy in the soviet form, it is necessary above all to overcome the historical contradiction between the Russian city and the non-Russian village, deprived of all national rights. It is necessary to win the confidence of the toiling masses of the oppressed nations, by eliminating the unconscious nationalism with which the backward elements of the Russian working masses are imbued; and by clearly demonstrating to the oppressed masses the true nature of soviet power, the power of the toilers. In truth, this task coincides with another: that of winning the masses of petty producers, the middle peasants of Central Russia to soviet rule; and it is this that will enable the solution. The counterrevolution will help to unmask bourgeois democracy before the eyes of the middle peasant, who sees, hiding behind the grand rhetoric of revolutionary socialism, a new landlord. The counterrevolution will contribute to eliminating the illusions of the labourers of tsarist-oppressed nations in national-bourgeois democracy. In effect, during the civil war, the counterrevolutionary nationalists have swerved to march openly behind the bellicose nationalist intellectuals, who present themselves as the old Russian police, as flag-waving Russian patriots, as European imperialists. Kolchak, Denikin, Mannerheim, Skoropadskyi, and the Allied and German generals have thus unmasked the Kirghiz “Alash Orda,” Petliura’s Ukrainian partisans, and many others.

The Separation of Classes

We can say without exaggeration that the separation between the classes of the oppressed nations has occurred only over the course of the civil war. It is through direct struggle, as class interests collide, that the masses have acquired revolutionary experience; and because of this revolutionary experience, they have moved on to new forms of social organisation. The Kirghiz steppes gave birth to “Alash Orda,” declared partisan of the Constituent Assembly in Samara which brought about the rise of Kolchak; and it was under Kolchak’s boot that the labouring Kirghiz masses consciously rallied to soviet power. Bashkiria underwent the same experience. Ukraine had to pass through an even longer series of successive stages: in the first place, the struggle between the Rada and soviet power put pressure on the new workers; next, the German general Eichhorn, in league with the ataman Pavlo Skoropadskyi; after them, Petliura and the French generals took their turn; then, the brief establishment of soviet power, overthrown by the unrest of the rural magnates and Petliura’s partisans; after that, the representative of a Russia “one and indivisible,” Denikin; and lastly, through the inevitable logic of the events, Ukrainian soviet power. Vynnychenko’s metamorphosis from leader of the bourgeois Rada to the vice-president of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic is the most telling of all these displays.

It is over the course of the civil war between the dictatorship of the proletariat and imperialism that soviet power has become the form of national autonomy and of class differentiation among the toiling masses of the oppressed nations. On the territory of the old Russian Empire, the alliance of the oppressed peoples with the revolutionary proletariat has taken shape in the form of the socialist federation of national soviet republics. The soviet revolution among the peoples of the East, who once formed an integral part of the Russian Empire, has bridged the gulf between the communist West and the revolutionary East.

The Russian proletariat knew to take advantage of their special situation, to simultaneously challenge the imperialism of millions of communists—of the European proletariat—and the threatening wall that is the revolting toilers in the East. Comrade Lenin well noted the international significance of various essential traits of our revolution, when he spoke of “the inevitable historical repetition, on the international scale, of what has occurred here.”3 Soviet power, that is the state form of the labouring masses, has been victoriously tested in practice in the revolutionary industrial city of Petrograd, as well as in the Russian hamlet of the Vyatka Gubernia; among the Tatar peasants dwelling on the Volga, as in the Ukrainian villages; in the East so strongly attached to its national customs, in the East where patriarchy reigns and where blood ties are still so important to everyday life, in the lands of the Kirghiz, in Bashkiria, in Turkestan and Azerbaijan. Everywhere, soviet power has demonstrated its strength. Karl Marx already noted this peculiarity of proletarian government in his critique of Paris Commune. “The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favour, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”4

The revolution accelerates the progress of events to the highest point. It accentuates class contradictions to the extreme, even in the most backwards areas. The long, historic learning process makes way for a learning process governed by the revolutionary method. Peoples and social classes develop, over the course of a few months, more than over dozens of years of normal development.

Soviet propaganda poster from 1921 targeting Muslim women, reads “Now I too am free.”

Oppressors and Oppressed

The world revolution against imperialism places the oppressors and the oppressed on the same level.

The transformation of bourgeois-national movements into social-revolutionary movements has its origins in the conflict of class interests—conflict that manifests with a particular acuity among nations engaged in the struggle for independence, and which can equally be provoked by an external influence: that of the international situation. The elimination of bourgeois domination in the advanced nations necessarily pulls the more backwards nations along the road of the soviet revolution. The counterrevolution then involves itself as an aggressor.

The dictatorship of imperialism unmasks bourgeois nationalism in the West as well as in the East. The dominant strata of the oppressed nations endeavour immediately to seize control of the state machinery and their class victims. For them, the national revolution is the expansion of the national foundation of exploitation. This expansion consists in the manufacturer, the merchant, and the large landlord expelling the foreign interlopers and creating their own state apparatus of class oppression. On the other hand, at the same time, “a class of intellectuals develops and their own written language transforms into a necessity of the national culture, even if in substance this culture had to be very international. And if a nation feels the need for a national intelligentsia, this class, in turn, feels the need for a great, intellectually developed nation.”5

The national bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intellectual class want to have their market, their stock exchange, their bureaucracy, their officer corps, their writers and journalists, their ministers, their representatives, their teachers and their musicians. At the start, their national need finds its expression in bourgeois development. But this need, in the global economic disorganisation and revolutionary crisis, inevitably falls into class contradictions in a nation that has won its national independence. Democracy, in the name of the national interest, transforms into a national bourgeois dictatorship. Finland, a country with ancient democratic traditions, is a poignant example. “It seemed to us,” writes Comrade Kuusinen, on the beginning of the revolution in Finland, “that parliamentary democracy opened a wide and straight path for our workers’ movement, leading right to our aim. Our bourgeoisie had neither army nor police; what’s more, it didn’t even have the possibility of organising them legally, as to do so they would need the assent of the socialist majority in parliament.”6 And nevertheless, the bourgeoisie organised its white guard and defeated the Finnish working class with the aid of the German imperialists.

Bourgeois democracy is now unable to ensure national peace in the countries that have become independent and which contain national minorities. This is the practical experience of Ukraine: “Petit-bourgeois democracy cannot maintain its power in Ukraine, as the internecine struggle fractures it into hostile parties.”7 The intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, in a nation that frees itself, profess an aggressive bourgeois nationalism, and this leads them to betray the cause of national liberation, to pass into the camp of the imperialists, from which they buy their bourgeois domination at the price of national freedom. The examples are legion: Latvia, Ukraine, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Georgia, the Musavat government in Azerbaijan, Greece, “the Israelite state of Palestine,” the pseudo-national state of Persia which, in fear of its soviet revolution, has thrown itself into the arms of the British, etc. The aggressive nationalism of the oppressed nations’ bourgeoisie and large landlords makes their countries into buffer states of the imperialist powers against the revolution. As a result, social conflict—class antagonism—manifests first of all in the domain of the national interest: the labouring masses reclaim their national independence from the yoke of the imperialists; the exploiting strata cling to their class privileges and, because the foreign yoke was, up until that moment, a powerful means of conserving the most reactionary forms of exploitation—in the east, feudal and patriarchal customs—, the revolutionary awakening of the labouring masses transports the revolution from the national terrain to that of social relations. The national question is raised as one of class inequality. The reason is perfectly clear: if industrial capital and the intelligentsia are, in the early stages, the protagonists of national liberation, the big landlords and the native bureaucracy are the declared partisans of European assimilation. The national revolution, waged against the foreign invaders and the native big landlords, therefore pushes the merchant class into the camp of imperialist puppets. Thus we reach this general conclusion: all the bourgeois-national movements led by the possessing strata—by the exploiting strata—have an objective tendency to adapt to imperialism, to enter into the imperialist system of the “great powers,” to transform into “buffer states” and colonies. At the outset, the strictly historic, unconscious tendency of all national-revolutionary movements of the labouring masses, in the colonies and in the half-enslaved countries, is to draw on a revolutionary state organisation, a class organisation borrowed from the proletariat of the advanced countries, to ensure the freedom of national development in the forming global socialist economy.

The advent of organs of autonomous revolutionary management—the anjoman of the first Persian Revolution, the experience of the eastern national soviet republics, the beginning of the revolutionary peasant movement in the East, the birth of communist movements in Persia, in Turkey, in China, and in the Indies—all this proves that the labouring masses of the East are marching towards the international federation of national soviet republics.

For the Grouping of Communist Elements

It was in understanding the above that the 2nd Congress of the Communist International decided to support national revolutionary movements in the colonies and in the backwards countries, but under the express condition that the truly communist elements of the future workers’ parties in these countries are grouped together and instructed in their special tasks, in the necessity that they combat the bourgeois-democratic movement in their own nations; the Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonies and the backwards countries, nevertheless without ever fusing with it; and in conserving at all price the independence of the workers’ movement, even in its embryonic form. In the East, as in the West, the way to soviet power has been paved by the process of capitalist development itself. In the West, it was paved by the transformation of “peaceful” industrial capitalism, of imperialism and bourgeois democracy into military dictatorship; in the East, by the implantation of capitalism as a foreign organisation of class domination, as a superstructure over the native society. In India, as the Indian communist Comrade Roy noted, “we are seeing, for the first time in history, an entire people being economically exploited by a true state power.”8 But it is not thus only in India. Russian Turkestan, up until the revolution, was in the same situation. Still today, we see the same state of affairs in Persia, in China, in all the colonies. As for the governmental organisation of the native exploiters, this is relatively weak in the East, where it adopts a purely feudal character.

On the subject of Persia, Victor Bérard had this to say: “Persia is neither a state nor a nation. It is the strange combination of a feudal anarchy and a centralised taxation system, the unstable mix of nomadic tribes and barely settled farmers, Moluk-us-Sawaif, as the natives say, monarchical federation or, more precisely, royal flock of nations.”9

The oppressive and exploitative character of state power is evident here. The base of all social life is the small farmer, ferociously exploited by the feudal state, by the large landowner, and by commercial capital, the true usurer.

The fact that, in the East, state power—as much the native feudal power as the power of the “invaders,” the European imperialists—manifests above all as the immediate exploiter of the population in the economic domain, has an immense political importance: no political revolution is possible in this situation without an economic revolution. Experience confirms this. “Just like their Western counterparts, the exploiting plutocracies of the Near-Eastern countries make every effort to give their rule the appearance of popular rule. The introduction of parliamentarism in Turkey and in Persia, as well as the transformation of Georgia (under the leadership of the Mensheviks), Armenia (under the leadership of the Dashnaks), and Azerbaijan (under the leadership of the Musavatists) into democratic republics, took place under the slogan of ‘Liberty and Equality.’ Nevertheless, every one of these politicians was incapable of providing even the illusion of democracy. The masses of people drown in unbelievable misery, while the agents of foreign imperialism swim in opulence. The land remains in the hands of its old owners, the old fiscal system remains in place, bringing immeasurable harm to the labourers, and the state not only tolerates, but encourages usury.”10

The Form of the Revolution in the East

The “bourgeois-democratic” revolution, in the East, inevitably takes the form of a dynastic revolution: it expands the privileges of the exploiters, but does not alleviate the burden of exploitation for the oppressed one bit. Native feudalism does nothing but assume the cast-offs of “European democracy.”

The East is living history. In some places, we still find remnants of the primitive communitarian society (clan, patriarchy), where patriarchal and feudal customs are conserved in full force. The religion of the East is simultaneously social and political. It consecrates the existing civil and familial order. It is the direct support for social inequality. It plays about the same role as Catholicism in the Middle Ages. “From the point of view of the orthodox Muslim, the theocratic Muslim state is the community of believers, of which the earthly representative is the ‘sultan’ (sovereign, leader); he is no more than the representative of God on Earth, a representative with a mission to take care—in conformity with the exigencies of ‘sharia’ (religious law)—of the civil and religious affairs of the community entrusted to him by God. To accomplish this, he, the ‘amiliami’ (the collectors of the ‘zakat,’ a ritual tax), and other civil servants receive a modest compensation of forty kopeks per day. The ‘zakat,’ which is meant to be used to help the poor, orphans, and invalids; to wage war against the infidels; in short, to serve the needs of society and the state, has become, in the hands of the latest Muslim sovereigns, a personal revenue that they use as they please, without any control and in an absolutely illegal fashion; the troops and even the popular militia, created to war against the infidels, to propagate Islam by force of arms, and to protect the community from outside enemies, are transformed bit by bit into the sovereign’s bodyguards, used to oppress the people and serving exclusively the personal or dynastic interests of these sovereigns. The Muslim community has been transformed into rayat, into herds of docile, mute slaves.”11

The centuries-long domination of the total surplus-value of labour was necessarily an obstacle to the expansion of social production, and it hindered all technical and economic progress. The primitive hoe (ketmen) and plough (omach) are still practically the only agricultural tools of the Central Asian farmer. There, capital is naturally stalled in its development; it has not gone further than usury and the sale of produce at the bazaar.

Religious law (sharia) defines property rights thus: “Property (mulk) is all that man possesses, whether it be the thing itself or its fruits.” This definition is the loyal reflection of primitive forms of production: religion recognises the proprietor’s right to sell the things that belong to him, as well as its “fruits”; it recognises his right to dispose of the surplus product of his natural goods.

A multitude of peoples in the East have not completely reached agricultural life in their evolution (the Kirghiz, the Turkomans, the Arabs, the tribal peoples of northern India, the Kurds, etc.). Nevertheless, among these peoples the survival of the primitive communal society has, over time, become a source of exploitation of the poor majority by the rich clan leaders. For example, we will look at the Kirghiz of the steppes. “Possessors of an extensive economy, the rich Kirghiz has already completely renounced physical labour; he is no more than the manager, the administrator; those who do the work are the day-labourers. The number of these labourers varies on average from seven to nine by economy, but there are economies where twenty labourers are exploited, or even more. A curious phenomenon to observe in the economy of the rich Kirghiz is the union of traits characteristic of modern capitalism with those of primitive nomadic society… The clan, despite its evident decomposition, still remains the legitimate proprietor of a given territory in the Kirghiz consciousness. The rich Kirghiz, abiding by this boundlessness of the right to use the land, covets considerable advantages: he puts to pasture his numerous herds without obstacle on all the territory of his relatives. Even up to the present, he has nothing pushing him to close off his land from that of the mass of the Kirghiz people.”12

The Task at Hand

From the above, we can easily understand why the Congress of the Revolutionary Peoples of the East (Baku, September 1920) recognised that “the soviet system is the only one which truly gives the labouring masses the possibility of taking power from their natural enemies, the upper classes (large landowners, speculators, high functionaries, officers), and to determine their own fate. Only soviet power empowers the poor labourers to take and keep the land from the landowners. The amalgamation of the soviets in large federations, and their autonomy within the framework of these federations: this is the only means for the toilers of different countries, who once warred among each other in the East, to pursue a peaceful existence, to destroy the foreign and native oppressors’ power, and to defeat all attempts by these oppressors to restore the old state of things.” To the forceful organisation of petty production and exploitation from above, the revolution substitutes the autonomous revolutionary organisation of the petty producers—the half-workers—in the form of the workers’ soviets. “Eliminate the prime cause of all oppression and exploitation—the power of the invading foreign capitalists and native tyrants (sultans, shahs, khans, beys, with all their bureaucrats and parasites)—seize power and exercise it in all domains (administrative, economic, and financial); refuse to fulfil any obligations to the feudal landlords and overthrow their authority; eliminate all personal and economic dependence on the landlords; abolish the large estates, under whatever legal form they may take; take the land from the large landlords without compensation or indemnities, and share it among the peasants, the farmers and the day-labourers who cultivate it”13: this is the task at hand. The alliance between the peasant soviet republics of the East with the soviet socialist republics of the West: this is the path that communism must pursue, to take hold of the entire global economy.

The proletariat of the West will help the toilers of the East with their knowledge, their technical expertise, and their organisational forces. The peasant soviet republics will provide the socialist industry of the West with the raw materials and fuel that it needs. Such an international division of labour between the city and the village, on the basis of amicable collaboration, is necessitated by the logic of the struggle against global economic disorganisation—the evident manifestation of capitalism’s decomposition. It is solely by this division of labour that we can eliminate the dependence of the Eastern people’s economy on the guardianship of the European and American banks, trusts, and syndicates.

The path to salvation of European industry, which suffers from a lack of raw materials and fuel necessary for its development, is the socialist industrial colonisation of the East. The soviets are not a repressive regime against the national customs and traditions of the peoples of the East; they will not drag these peoples by force into the kingdom of liberty. On the contrary, they will make them find their own path towards communism, by the cooperation of petty producers, by the organisation of public works (irrigation systems), and the formation of state enterprises.

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Communists and the National Question in the 21st Century

Stani Bjegunac takes a look at different approaches to the national question by historical communists and how we may approach issues of national oppression in a 21st-century context. 

FLN partisans fight for national independence in Algeria.

Preface

It should not be surprising that the reason I chose to take part in this publication was due to my disappointment with the left in my country. I assume for the purposes of discussion, that the circle associated with this publication is of a communist sentiment and adopts a broadly materialist view of both history and studying the contemporary world. The topic I wish to discuss is one which inspires in me both unsurprised disappointment and even disgust, as well as constant fascination: the communist stance towards the national question. With that said I think the Left, at least those who consider themselves “revolutionary” has mostly gotten the national question wrong, which leads to all kinds of questionable politics, such as leftist support for Rojava, the Assad government in Syria (or the nationalist and Islamist opposition groups), North Korea’s right to own nuclear weapons and the Bolivarian “revolution” in Venezuela. I think this is so important considering how there still exist objectively unresolved national questions, like the oppression of Palestinians. Furthermore, agreement on the national question is of such importance to communist strategy because it includes two central issues, namely what our stance is vis-a-vis the bourgeois state and internationalism: that the revolution that overthrows capitalism must be international or it is a failure, and thus that we aim for the unification of the proletariat internationally across the many borders that divide it.

Introduction

The left has a problem with the national question. Apart from simple lack of debate, agreement, formulation and fresh theorization of the issue as it concerns the present, the actual positions that are offered are often flawed: from anarchists who talk about “Solidarity with Rojava”, to a whole swag of activists — leftist and otherwise — who “support” Palestinian, West Papuan or even Novorossian independence. On the other hand, the minuscule and historically marginal left communist sects which have been largely critical of the support of “socialists” for national liberation. These groups and circles of theorists, while often having thought-provoking positions and theories reading the question of nationalities (due to a commitment to principle and empirical analysis), are limited by naive reasoning that is both mechanical and lacking in nuance. These left communists have also been naïve insofar as they often ignore the actual practical implication of their own positions.1

This essay is not intended to pick apart a bunch of positions and say why they are wrong. This leads to wasting time with a variety of particular opinions and unproductive sect-bashing. The purpose of this essay is, instead, to critique and clarify the basis on which the national question may be discussed by leftists and to make a fresh contribution to the communist understanding of the national question which is relevant to the 21st century, rather than something pulled straight out of 1917 or from boring Comintern sloganeering. Along the way, some proposals will be stated about particular topics that need to be studied more carefully.

The first section will be about 20th-century national liberation movements. I will draw out some of the general characteristics of the wave of nationalism of the 20th century as qualitatively distinct historical phenomena from the wave of bourgeois revolutions that struck Europe in the 19th century and earlier. Note that the epochal divide does not need to be drawn at 1900 exactly (or 1914 for the decadence theorists), perhaps it even goes back to the “New Imperialism” of the late 19th century. A historical periodization needs to be drawn up of 20th century nationalism.

In the second section I go back to Marx (and Engels) and review very briefly their support for nationalisms in their time. It is important to question why these important “founding fathers” of communism were such enthusiastic supporters of bourgeois causes. Were they wrong or were they right? What view of world history guided them to think this way? And were their views consistent with their self-professed “historical materialism”? I also look into some examples of how the national question has been argued by communists critical of the classic Comintern formulation on national liberation. This includes left-communists such as the International Communist Current (ICC) and International Communist Tendency (ICT) who take a hard stance against all nationalism based on an argument about the overall trajectory of capitalism. Other theorists such as Mike Macnair for example would not dismiss the progressive nature of national aspirations in many situations, but uses Marx’s statements about the necessity of class independence to argue against alliances with bourgeois nationalists for an approach of invariant class independence. The ICC on the other hand has a more elaborate approach of decadence theory that shapes its view of the of the national question. They use a historical periodization in which nationalism of different eras has different qualities depending on whether capitalism is ascendent and still progressive or in its decadent phase and therefore to be destroyed, having outlived its progressive characteristics. Decadence in this theory begins post-1914, which entails all national struggles can only have a reactionary anti-proletarian character and are not deserving of communist support like in the way. Marx is excused of his support for national struggles because he was living when capitalism was still ascendant and progressive. This distinguishes an invariant view based on basic principles of how the class struggle of the proletariat relates to the national bourgeoisie, and a more historically contingent view, both of which may arrive at similar political conclusions for present conditions.

In the third section, I will critically look at the actual practice of leftist groups in support of this or that nat lib or “anti-imperialism”.2 I call this “remote control activism” and argue that it is ineffective.

In the fourth section, I will deal with the claims of oppressed nations and “progressive” nationalisms. Although national liberation is a faulty program for communists, we should not dismiss national oppression, and we should develop nuanced reasons for its “continuing appeal”.3

Next I look at the indigenous question in white settled states, like Australia or New Zealand. Communists have undertheorised the “indigenous question” and this I hope is a start. I write this mostly from my knowledge in my own country (Australia) and find the proposals of various leftists and indigenous activists (e.g. vague ideas about “decolonization”, “recognition”, “sovereignty”, “treaty”, land rights etc.) to be quite deficient. With this in mind, please consider the situation of the indigenous question in other places might be quite different. I conclude that communists need to think programmatically about the indigenous question from a resolutely proletarian internationalist perspective that accounts for the dispossession and systematic racism that indigenous peoples have experienced historically and continue to experience. In other words, what can a communist movement do for the indigenous people in the event of a proletarian revolution, and in the build-up to it? It is a serious issue in some countries that will not automatically go away and in the event of a global revolutionary wave it will have to be resolved or else capitalism will deal with it “blindly and bloodily”.4

The 20th Century: Nationalism Returns

A mural is painted with the words: “PLO IRA ONE STRUGGLE.” Painted by the Irish Republican Youth Movement.


At that time, I supported the October Revolution only instinctively, not yet grasping all its historic importance. I loved and admired Lenin because he was a great patriot who liberated his compatriots; until then, I had read none of his books.

—Ho Chi Minh, “The Path Which Led Me to Leninism”

After the Second World War, the world settled into a Cold War that would last four and a half decades. This split the international state system into two sides based on political allegiances, trade, and military might. From 1945-1991, this is how we should see geopolitics. The period after the war was a time when the major colonial empires had already broken up or were at the very least shadows of their former selves and in a state of decay. Even during the war, a number of nationalist movements in the former colonies (in which an important part of the war was fought) had become invigorated and some had even come to power like in Indonesia in 1945.

This is essentially the era that leftists around the world today — a diverse crowd who call themselves anti-capitalists, communists, socialists, anarchists, Marxists, anti-imperialists etc. — use as a reference point for their position on nationalism, in particular, the question of national oppression and support for national liberation. Arguably this reference point also extends back to the nationalist movements occurring at the time of the the revolutionary wave of 1917-1923 (e.g. the Chinese Civil War), when the Comintern supported “revolutionaries” outside of Russia, only to have these intrigues backfire against them anyway (e.g. Shanghai in 1923 or, less well known, Turkey in 1921).5 For such leftists, Lenin’s “Imperialism: The Highest Form of Capitalism” and the position of the Bolshevik party on the “right of nations to self-determination” are the theoretical and political guides to anti-imperialism. If they are not so sophisticated, those who fetishize third world nationalism do not bother with citing historical examples and give in to the liberal mode of political discourse, moralising: who is the aggressor, who is the most “progressive” force, who is resisting imperialist domination, who is the “representative” of an oppressed people, who is the greater or lesser evil,6 etc. This all, of course, disregards the complexities of the historical socialist debates about the national question.

These leftists who were enchanted by national liberation in the countries of the “imperialist core”, during the New Left, looked on these national liberation movements with reverence. Vietnam, China, Cuba, Algeria, Angola, Palestine, Nicaragua etc. Leftists disappointed with the “labor aristocracy” and low class-consciousness of their own country’s working class, who were allegedly “bought off” by imperialists, could see an image of themselves in the armed mass movements in other countries which were fighting the good fight, “surrounding the cities”, taking power, throwing out foreign imperialists, and apparently creating a new society, the living proof, if there ever was, of an alternative to the capitalist global order.

A simple historical analysis of the facts, in other words, an empirical argument against national liberation, is enough for communists to achieve clarity on this issue with regards to this era of “national liberation” nationalisms. To make things transparent, I have no illusions in the possibility of “socialism in one country”, a position which Marx and Engels did not hold to.7 In the 20th century, national liberation generally took these following characteristics.

Political Economy of Colonialism: Exclusionary and Exploitative Models of Colonization

In his commentary on the Israel-Palestine national question, Moshé Machover of the UK Labour Party referred to an important distinction between exclusionary and exploitative models of colonialism:

Marxists have distinguished two basic models of colonisation. In both models the indigenous people are dispossessed. However, in one model — the exploitative model — they are reintegrated economically as the main source of labour-power. The political economy of this model depends on exploitation of the labour of the indigenous people. In the second model — the exclusionary model — the settlers’ political economy does not depend significantly on indigenous labour-power, so the indigenous people are excluded: pushed aside, ethnically cleansed, and in some cases (as in Tasmania) exterminated. This distinction between two models of colonisation goes back to Marx, who made it en passant, and was theorised by Karl Kautsky.

As should be clear to any Marxist, the distinction between these two types of colonisation, with their very different political economies, is absolutely fundamental. It has many crucial consequences. In exploitative colonisation, the settlers are a small minority, and usually form a dominant exploiting quasi-class. This was the case, for example, in Algeria and South Africa. In contrast, wherever exclusionary colonisation took place, the settlers formed a new nation. Such was the case in North America, Australia and New Zealand. In fact, I do not know of any exception to this rule.

In the same interview, it is also noted that anti-colonial movements only succeeded in countries where the exploitative model of colonialism had been in operation. The problem of exclusionary colonialism and the indigenous population, in the case of white settler states, will be discussed later. It is fair to say that the material conditions resulting from an exploitative model of colonization allowed anti-colonial movements to arise and succeed while in the lands where the exclusionary model was in operation, this possibility was cut off by the absolute destruction of the native population through massacres, disease, and land-grabs.

Class Structure: Bourgeoisie (or Lack Thereof), Peasantry, Proletariat

In the colonies of the modern colonial empires (British, French, Dutch, Portuguese) the colonizers met the most variegated societies they had ever seen. Marxists to this day debate about whether the Incas or the Mughal Empire constituted a kind of “Asiatic mode of production”. These civilizations had a considerably different class structure to what was seen back in the Old World, yet with hierarchies that made them intelligible to foreigners upon contact: kings at the top; peasants and slaves at the bottom. On the other hand, the Australian aborigines and certain peoples in North America, were classless, tribal, living off the land as nomads, or engaging in small amounts of cultivation and fish-farming here and there.8 These things are historically worth seeing in terms of how the colonial systems were built, especially the way that colonizers acted with regards to the existing social structures they had found: making deals with local rulers and tapping into existing markets without fundamentally altering the mode of production (British India), conducting massacre and enslavement of the native population on plantations and mixing royal families (Caribbean, Mexico), or flat-out war of destruction and expulsion after treaties proved to be worthless (Australia, New Zealand, USA’s westward expansion in the 19th century).

Beyond all these particularities, by the beginning of the 20th century there was a world system of capitalism that had reached much of the Earth. Even in non-capitalist regions the global market was not far, and by the end of the century it would pull almost everyone into its orbit. Factories in Russia, funded by foreign capital, were forging steel for use in armaments which went into the First World War; British and German Banks were issuing notes in China; textile and garment workshops in India were exporting to the world. In the countries in which the decolonial movements occurred in the 20th century, which were as mentioned before, run on the exploitative model of colonization, it is safe to generalize that proletarians were in the minority and that peasants made up the bulk of society.9

National Liberation Party-Form

What restrains state rackets from mutual extermination is their awareness that cohesion and self-control assure their mutual survival. Below them, there’s the mass of humanity enclosed by exploitation and national frontiers. Dominant rackets have learned to negotiate and tolerate each other by coexisting in the state. The role of national mediation alters their function, from private looting to large scale administration and bureaucratic (and legal) access to the national treasure. In this form, modern politicians and functionaries buy themselves national pedigree, legitimacy, and incomes. But the racket remains the underlying state module. Dominant classes secrete them constantly, and in a democracy, this tendency is generalized in civil society. The fragmentation of commodity society and its consequent ‘war of all against all’, creates a fertile soil for rackets. As long as a strong Leviathan is not disturbed and undermined by this, rackets are tolerated even if legally proscribed.

Political rackets are informal specialist bodies, usually legal and aspiring to state domination. However, their reduced size forces them to an unstable and precarious existence. At most, they become pressure groups for parties that have gone beyond the racket stage. The larger the racket, the more it approximates a party, which contains a few rackets called tendencies or factions. Only extraordinary world and national events propel rackets to become mass parties and even attain state power. But these moments are few and far between. Most rackets have a relatively short existence. A few last for years, as torture chambers for their members…

Though political rackets seldom attain their goal of state power, their internal organisation mimics statist functions. The membership of the racket is its proletariat, and the leaders constitute a sort of portable mini-state. Rackets are essentially conservative, even if some of them, the Marxist and anarchist ones, spout radical or emancipatory messages.

—F. Palinorc, “Rackets” (2001)

In the countries in which decolonial movements grew and took power, there was invariably a party or at least a coalition of parties that had independence and their goal and aimed to lead that struggle. These parties engaged in “anti-imperialist” or “national liberation” fronts that encompassed organizations of a range of political positions; for example, the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Vietnam did not just contain the “communists” around Ho Chi Minh. These “fronts” were never quite so perfect, with different factions — “communist”, “anti-communist”, and others — fighting and murdering each other even after a period of cooperation, a most egregious example being the killing off of other political leaders by the Khmer Rouge before they had taken power.10 In the countries in which “socialism” was a decolonial force, the communist parties that came to power were “armed to the teeth” and politically and logistically supported by the USSR and its allies. It is hard to imagine the Vietnamese NLF or Castro’s revolutionaries coming to power without the tremendous force of arms. No amount of national will can make AK-47s materialize out of nowhere. Power does in a sense come out of the barrel of a gun.

These national liberation fronts and parties by their nature always involved the combination of people of a variety of class backgrounds: peasants of varying propertied status, proletarians, bourgeoisie. This, for example, found its expression in Mao’s theory of the “Bloc of Four Classes”. “Intellectuals” or the “intelligentsia” are not a class as such — they could be autodidact proles or petit-bourgeois professionals for example — however, their importance in certain movements should not be dismissed (e.g. the participation of Frantz Fanon in the Algerian independence movement) as often they rose to positions of leadership and were heavily involved. It is helpful, but not enough, to point to the class breakdown of the membership of these movements. The local football club is mostly made of working-class people, but that does not make it a proletarian organization that fights for the class as a class. It is thus important to see what their program was. Program, in this case, is not necessarily the stated goals of an organization or movement, but what its practice actually moves towards and achieves — its political content or movement. To judge this part of history we need to prioritize the assessment of actions over words.

National Liberation: Power and Program

Whether you consider the 20th-century national liberation movements to be strictly bourgeois revolutions or not, they were nonetheless bourgeois in their content.11 What made the French revolution and the bourgeois revolutions before it different to the 20th century national revolutions was that the contradiction of civil society (i.e. between the proletariat and capital) had not yet emerged, and the proletariat was simply existing in the folds of the “Third Estate”. The French revolution was a milestone event, partly because it was the last democratic bourgeois revolution to occur before this class contradiction emerged, which it did in 1848, where the bourgeoisie was triumphant but the communist movement was not.12

Trotskyists continue to repeat the outdated refrain about how, in the backward countries, the bourgeoisie is/was too weak to complete the bourgeois revolution. However, the history of 20th century decolonization and developmentalism tells us that one way or another these “weak” bourgeoisies successfully completed it, albeit by calling upon their allies, by being heavily armed and by the use of a wide-sector of society (proletarians, peasants, intellectuals, petit-bourgeois) as their support in national liberation fronts. They may not have been very democratic and peaceful about it but they did the job (when has the bourgeoisie ever secured its political dominance without force?). For those that went under the banner of “socialism”, “socialism” was just the better model of modernization to the competing model of “Western” capitalism. The problem was never that the proletariat’s job was now to complete the bourgeois revolution, rather it was that the bourgeoisie conducted it and smashed what little proletarian autonomy there was in the process.

They not only conducted (to varying degrees) the political programme (the establishment of bourgeois state institutions) but a bourgeois agrarian programme of capital: land to the peasants, which helped to win the peasantry over to their side. However, in some cases (China and Vietnam) the victorious regime expropriated the peasants in the form of forced collectivization. 13 Resistance to collectivization was ruthlessly crushed. The Chinese collective farms were no idyllic paradise. One way or another this agrarian program expands that part of the population which is “doubly free” in Marx’s sense, setting the conditions for more comprehensive development, like industrialization, in attempts to “catch up” with the more developed countries. Until the end of the 20th century, developmentalist programs like nationalization of large capital and the transformation of class struggle into development could ensure some measure of class peace, as a kind of third world counterpart to social-democracy.14 Arguably this pattern has been repeated recently with the “petro-Peronism” of Chavez’s Venezuela.15

In any case, we do not live in such a world of peasant countries, colonial empires and “weak bourgeoisies” anymore: there is no room for additional bourgeois revolutions. Even in some middle-eastern countries where there are monarchs or dictators in charge, where bourgeois revolutions have never truly occurred and democracy is “foreign”, capital is nonetheless everywhere, and the proletariat makes up the mass of the population.16 We should have no illusions about the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie inevitably bringing with it democracy. Liberalism never lived up to its own promises of universalism and equality anyway.

Where the proletarians got in the way of the “anti-imperialist” “revolutionaries” they were ruthlessly repressed. Examples are abound:

  • Vietnam: Suppression of the Saigon Commune of 1945 by the Viet Minh and later the massacre of Vietnamese Trotskyists by the Stalinists of the NLF.17
  • Angola: Suppression of the Luanda dockers’ strike of 1975 by the MPLA-led state.18
  • China: The Shanghai massacre of 1927 conducted by the Koumintang after the Communist Party had behaved as “bag-carriers” for the nationalists.19
  • Cuba: The coercion of unions into not striking in the name of the “revolution”, the integration of the dictatorship into the union apparatus, persecution of the anarcho-syndicalists, many of whom were forced into exile by the new Castro government. The torture and killings of political opponents and a variety of other measures of terror against the working class.20

National liberation movements, furthermore have created states which have gone on to engage in wars and oppress national/ethnic minorities. Indonesia, which won independence in 1945 from the Dutch empire, now conducts a policy of genocide in West Papua. In response, the Free Papua Movement has appeared. China, once part of the center of the “anti-imperialist” “socialist” bloc, is now ethnically repopulating Tibet with a mass influx of ethnic Han people. Vietnam went to war too with China and Cambodia after its reunification. Although a great number of Khmers were killed, Vietnamese, Chinese and muslim minorities were particularly targeted by the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian Genocide, until the Vietnamese forces put an end to it. If there is one special thing Uncle Ho could be commended for it was putting an end to a genuinely reactionary and genocidal anti-colonial nationalist movement.

Thus if we look at the history of nation-forming, it shows us that “anti-colonial” movements expelled their colonial rulers only to deepen and extend the modernization social process that began with colonization, including the very idea of nationality, onto themselves under a native ruling class.21 These movements were undoubtedly “progressive” in general because they overthrew colonial forms of exploitation — slavery or otherwise forced-labor, and wholesale plunder of the colony’s wealth for the metropole — and built the preconditions for communism (i.e. they kickstarted capitalist development).

Gender and National Liberation

Palestinian Motherhood by Sliman Mansour

An aesthetic element that has recently captivated foreign leftist supporters of national liberation movements, has been the image of women with guns. This gives a feminist cover to these national liberation movements — femme-washing them.  There is some truth here, because women may find the movement as a method of escape from particularly backward patriarchal traditions, as we have seen with some of the women fighters in the YPJ, who have escaped arranged marriages.22 But recent feminist theory which demands a closer examination of the nation-state as an organizer of gender relations points to a contradictory dynamic:

As postcolonial feminism in particular has compellingly showed, the nation-state as capital’s chief political form is not thinkable without the oppression of women. This occurs in a twofold manner. On the one hand, the nation as the allegedly homogenous community, with a common origin/destiny and kinship that is “attached” to the state, can only think of women as its symbolic markers as well as cultural and biological reproducers. This is true not only for ethnic conceptions of the nation as Kulturnation and Volknation, but also in those cases in which the nation as such is the driving force of liberation movements. Even when nationalism has played the role of a liberating force, such as in the context of the decolonization, and the issue of women’s rights has accompanied that of national independence, the results for women have often been disappointing. After independence, women’s role has frequently been reaffirmed as that of biological reproducers of the (new, liberated) nation. For instance, despite their key role during the Algerian war of independence from France and in the National Liberation Front, at the end of the conflict Algerian women did not gain the equality and rights they had wished for. One of the reasons for this limitation was, as Moghadam argues, that the struggle was one for “national liberation, not for social (class/gender) transformation.” In other words, the nation – any nation – cannot do without exercising its control over women’s bodies and women’s child-raising role, because the very future of the nation depends on them.23

If nationalist movements have progressed in gender relations by smashing archaic forms of colonial exploitation and undermining traditional gender relations, they do so only to reconstitute gender in a more modern order. With this in mind, it will not be surprising to see the Kurdish women disappointed by a new patriarchal normality if a Kurdish nation-state is formed when they are no longer needed as soldiers, but as wives, mothers and wage-workers who will rebuild the fledgling nation.

Conclusions and Directions for Further Study

With this brief overview of 20th-century national liberation movements there are a few major conclusions I wish to make:

  • 20th-century national liberation carried out a bourgeois program and was thoroughly anti-working class in character despite being progressive due to the overthrow of colonial forms of exploitation. The anti-imperialist fronts were heavily involved in the geopolitics of the time which played out as opposition between the Western/liberal/capitalist camp on one side and the “socialist” camp on the other.
  • A balance sheet of 20th-century national liberation is still required to understand precisely what it achieved and how it differed from country to country. What has been written here is at best a starting point but it is not a comprehensive historical analysis colored with detail and nuance. Revolutionaries need to see how the poison of nationalism has been sowed in the hearts of the working class in every country in order to better combat it in particular situations.
  • We need an understanding of how decolonization influenced the composition of the working class in these countries, especially now since the demise of the old developmentalist dictatorships. As these nations were formed through liberation from colonization this might have the effect of tightly binding proletarians to their nation-state.
  • Perhaps the phenomenon of the national liberation party-form should also be more thoroughly investigated. Why was this a recurring pattern? How did these parties navigate their road to power? What can we learn about them now that we live in a world where various nationalist movements are on the rise? Not in order to copy them but to develop counter-strategies in the event that similar situations might emerge, which seems inevitable considering all the war that emerges out of a continuing capitalist crisis.
  • An investigation is required into what are the implications of the end of the peasant question on contemporary and future nationalism? National liberation movements of the 20th century occurred in backward countries and relied on a peasant base, especially to form their armies, and carried out the aforementioned “agrarian program”. Obviously contemporary separatist movements do not have this resource at hand anymore.24

Back to Marx: Progress and Class-Political Independence

Battle at Soufflot barricades at Rue Soufflot Street on 24 June 1848 by Horace Vernet

In Germany, finally, the decisive struggle now on the order of the day is that between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy. Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it. Against the governments, therefore, the communists must continually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of the bourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisie would allegedly bring to the proletariat. The sole advantages which the proletariat would derive from a bourgeois victory would consist

(i) in various concessions which would facilitate the unification of the proletariat into a closely knit, battle-worthy, and organized class; and

(ii) in the certainly that, on the very day the absolute monarchies fall, the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat will start. From that day on, the policy of the communists will be the same as it now is in the countries where the bourgeoisie is already in power.

—Friedrich Engels, “The Principles of Communism” (1847)

It is quite an interesting thing that Marx and Engels, the key thinkers of communism, had lived in a time of bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie, at least in Europe and the Americas, was smashing the aristocracy or slavocracy, pronouncing liberty, equality and fraternity, conquering new lands, and “civilizing” the world under its order.

Neil Davidson very clearly summarizes the perspective they took which informed what they thought the position socialists should take towards nationalist movements:

Where Marx and Engels have important things which are directly about nations is in relation to the attitude socialists should take towards specific national movements. At heart, their attitude is based on whether the success of any movement – secessionist or irredentist – is likely to advance the possibility of the socialist revolution, although this was often in indirect ways. Essentially, they saw nationalism, in the sense of political movements leading to the establishment of nation-states, as part of the process of bourgeois revolution which would sweep away pre-capitalist forms and enable the conditions for the creation of a working class. This is the context in which they decided which nationalisms to support and which to oppose. Poland and Ireland are respectively oppressed and held back in developmental terms by the British and Russian Empires, and so had to be supported. Equally, national movements which relied on the great empires for their existence, such as pan-Slavism in 1848, had to be opposed. It is, of course, possible to agree with the latter conclusion with[out] accepting the mystified nonsense about “non-historic nations” that Engels sometimes used to support it.25

Paul Mattick’s essay “Nationalism and Socialism”, which gives a good commentary on 20th-century national liberation, also summarizes it well:

“Progressive nations” of the last century [19th century] were those with a rapid capital development; “reactionary nations” were those in which social relationships hindered the unfolding of the capitalist mode of production. Because the “next future” belonged to capitalism and because capitalism is the precondition for socialism, non-utopian socialists favored capitalism as against older social production relations and welcomed nationalism in so far as it served to hasten capitalist development. Though reluctant to admit this, they were not disinclined to accept capitalist imperialism as a way of breaking the stagnation and backwardness of non-capitalist areas from without, and thus to direct their development into “progressive” channels. They also favored the disappearance of small nations unable to develop large-scale economies, and their incorporation into larger national entities capable of capitalist development. They would, however, side with small “progressive nations” as against larger reactionary countries and, when suppressed by the latter, would support the former’s national liberation movements. At all times and on all occasions, however, nationalism was not a socialist goal but was accepted as a mere instrument of social advancement which, in turn, would come to its end in the internationalism of socialism. Western capitalism was the “capitalist world” of the last century. National issues were concerned with the unification of countries such as Germany and Italy, with the liberation of such oppressed nations as Ireland, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and with the consolidation of such “synthetic” nations as the United States. This was also the “world” of socialism; a small world indeed viewed from the twentieth century. While national questions that agitated the socialist movement in the middle of the nineteenth century had either been resolved, or were in the process of being resolved, and, in any case, had ceased to be of real importance to Western socialism, the world-wide revolutionary movement of the twentieth century opened the question of nationalism anew. Is this new nationalism, which sheds Western dominance and institutes capitalist production relations and modern industry in hitherto under-developed areas, still a “progressive” force as was the nationalism of old? Do these national aspirations coincide in some manner with those of socialism? Do they hasten the end of capitalism by weakening Western imperialism or do they inject new life into capitalism by extending its mode of production all over the globe?

The position of nineteenth-century socialism on the question of nationalism involved more than preferring capitalism to more static social systems. Socialists operated within bourgeois-democratic revolutions which were also nationalist; they supported national liberation movements of oppressed people because they promised to take on bourgeois-democratic features, because in socialist eyes these national-bourgeois-democratic revolutions were no longer strictly capitalist revolutions. They could be utilized if not for the installation of socialism itself, then for furthering the growth of socialist movements and for bringing about conditions more favorable to the latter.

Marx and Engels supported certain nationalist movements, like German unification and Polish independence, insofar as they quickened the development of the pre-conditions for communist revolution. They were not interested in moralizing about oppressed nations or nationalism for nationalism’s sake and would have had no time for the intellectual advocates of so-called “national-cultural autonomy”, who do not seem to see a problem with the possibility of nationalities existing after the establishment of socialism.26

It is also important to note Marx’s support for the Union side in the American Civil War.27 The USA was already the most advanced capitalist nation of its time, but it was faced with a slaveholders’ rebellion in the South. It seems like one of the last examples Marx saw of the bourgeois state acting in a revolutionary capacity, in this case crushing the leftovers of the slave system, allowing the workers’ movement to progress, regardless of the intention of the statesmen, soldiers, and generals on the Union side.28 Also worth noting is that Marx and Engels did not frame their support for nationalism in moral terms like the “rights” of the category of “oppressed” nations which Lenin talked about. Indeed, they supported the Hungarian national revolution, but as Rosa Luxemburg noted, the Magyar ethnic minority were known at the time for their oppression of the other nationalities/ethnic groups.29 Their perspective was not about national oppression, but about bourgeois revolution accelerating the conditions which would make communism a possibility. It is worth mentioning that Rosa Luxemburg also takes on Marx and Engel’s approach in her methodology of looking at the class forces at work in specific cases (e.g. in Poland) to determine if socialists should support national independence.30

Is there a tension between their advocacy for bourgeois causes and, at the same time, their stated commitment to the necessity of proletarian class-political independence as necessary for communist strategy? For some communists who dealt with this question, history is split into two phases, one where it is okay to support the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the other when it is time to fight for the proletarian revolution, which the Engels’ quote above suggests, although it would, of course, be adjusted to the varying situations of different countries: not all countries experience capitalist development in the same way and some had a bourgeois revolution before others. Can there be, however, a line that can be drawn when it is no longer viable for communists to support nationalist movements and what are the criteria for it? For certain Marxists, particularly left-communists, that hold to a strict decadence theory, a world-historical line is drawn at 1914, when the capitalist world went into decay. One of the strategic implications of decadence theory is that communists, to be true internationalists, must not support any nationalist movements — in other words, our era is qualitatively different.

I think some convincing criticisms have been made of this kind of decadence theory and so I am not going to deal with this any further.31

In short, anti-national communists can argue the national question problem from three main perspectives (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive):

  • Decadence theory or something which gives alternate historical periodization or directionality to world capitalist development.
  • An empirical statement of the anti-proletarian character of national liberation struggles, which has been presented above.
  • From the perspective of an invariant communist principle of proletarian class-political independence, such as that advocated by Mike Macnair of the CPGB. His argument, learning from 20th-century national liberation relies on a pretty simple observation:

…the class contradiction between the working class and national bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries is stronger than the national contradiction between the bourgeoisie of the oppressed country and the bourgeoisie of the imperialist country. Notice that I am not saying that there is no such thing as imperialism, or that there is no such thing as national oppression: just that the class contradiction tends to be more fundamental, and that consequently, the anti-imperialist united front fails.32

The last stance seems the most convincing to me. Regardless of whether Marx was right to support the nationalisms of his time, the age of bourgeois revolutions is over, the bourgeoisie has fulfilled its “historic mission” internationally and capitalism has conquered the world so much more thoroughly than it had in Marx’s time, that it is absurd to ask for more capitalist “progress”, especially when it seems like more of it will only lead to more of the war, ecological destruction, and misery which we are experiencing now, which you do not need a decadence theory to explain. The objective conditions for communism — the international spread of the capitalist mode of production, the immense forces of production based on mechanization (and now automation), and the international proletariat, the class which has nothing to lose but its chains, and which is the negation of all classes — have been ripe for a long time. Nothing lacks but a revolutionary movement.

Remote Control Activism

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

— Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

There is no shortage of leftists who assemble in the streets in protest against this or that act of imperialism. When a new war starts or a new country enters a war, you are bound to observe all kinds of ridiculous signs, slogans, leaflets, and cartoons at such protests. “Victory to the Iraqi Resistance” or something similar was in fact spouted by the SWP and the Stop the War Coalition in the UK in protests against the Iraq War. Leftists of all stripes take particular positions: who to denounce, who to “critically” or “unconditionally” support. Often their logic is that of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, in which case so-called “socialists” should really have no problem marching with Islamists — we are all fighting imperialism, right?33 Anti-war coalitions will desperately seek support from whoever: businesspeople, politicians, foreign policy experts, and people who they would otherwise hate for their politics. With the seriousness of generals, they perform this farce as if they actually have any relevant outcome on conflicts happening thousands of kilometers away. The best these activist groups get out of it is some more paper sales and more recruits to keep these political rackets going. Left organizations need something horrific to be indignant about to keep their blood pumping. It makes people feel like they are doing something.

These rituals of opportunism simply save the consciences of activists from the inevitable fact that many will perish in bloodthirsty massacres, regardless of what slogans and marches are organized absent the international proletariat instaurating a dictatorship of the proletariat.

If we put the nonsense of their “positions” and slogans aside, and use, as a kind of reference point, the protests against the Iraq War, then it is pretty clear that this kind of “anti-imperialist” practice of protest is ineffective.

Before the Iraq War was launched, millions poured into the streets around the world in protest. It all came to nothing. The simple fact is that it was impossible to stop the Iraq War without overthrowing the state. Did we see any concrete attempts to foster resistance to the war inside the armed forces? It seems like the answer is no. It is not surprising, because the difference between the days of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War and now is that the invading force in Vietnam tried to fight a colonial war with an unreliable conscript army, which was receptive to the anti-war sentiment of the population back at home. But a gigantic modern military machine like that of the USA, staffed completely by professional enlisted personnel cannot be stopped by good old-fashioned civil disobedience. To be realistic, anything short of a dictatorship of the proletariat, with significant portions of the military splitting to the proletarian side, will mean the continuation of the war and crisis that is occurring across the globe.

Oppressor and Oppressed

As a postscript I’d like to answer a question before it is asked. The question is: “Don’t you think a descendant of oppressed people is better off as a supermarket manager or police chief?” My answer is another question: What concentration camp manager, national executioner or torturer is not a descendant of oppressed people?”

— Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism (1984)

It is pretty easy to see that the left sees the national question through a moralistic lens of “oppressor”, “imperialist” and “first world” nations against “oppressed”, “third world nations”. If any serious theory is cited it is simply to confirm existing biases and such theory e.g. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is simply accepted uncritically and out of historical context. The nationalism of an oppressed nation (e.g. the Palestinians) just as much implies class collaboration as that of the chauvinistic nationalism of oppressor nations (e.g. Israel). However, when internationalists make our anti-national critique we should be sensitive to nuances. We do not deny that there is oppression on the basis of nationality, otherwise, we would not have to deal with this question in the first place.

In the case of Israel and Palestine, it is clear that the Israeli military is engaging in a military occupation over Palestinian lands — it is doing the oppressing — and is armed with tanks, an air force, heavy artillery etc. while the Palestinian resistance fighters are simply armed with rocks, homemade weaponry, and some small arms — in other words, the forces are massively disproportionate. For these reasons, the left is quick to condemn, for example, Israel’s military crimes but will turn a blind eye to the repression of workers’ strikes and the murderous racketeering of Hamas or the idiotic adventurism of Stalinist national liberation fronts like the PFLP.

While we communists can say that: in war, the proletarians of various nations slaughter each other (that is to say, go against their class interest), and that “the main enemy is at home”, this should not hide us from the fact that proletarians who engage in nationalist causes often do with very real material pressures motivating them to act in the ways they do. They know what it is like to be under military occupation, to be dispossessed of their home, and turn into a desperate refugee.

The Kurds and Yezidis who have rapidly joined the YPG and YPJ, have done so because they are afraid of the genocidal terror perpetrated by ISIS, whether or not they seriously believe in all the ideological stuff spouted by Ocalan. In Indonesia, the formerly colonized have become the colonizers: with the Dutch gone, the West Papuans are left to the mercy of the Indonesian army. The Palestinians live under direct military occupation and outside the edges of Israeli settlements, so it is no surprise that ordinary people will throw stones and physically confront the security forces. While we should not forget the power of nationalist parties, with their patronage links and their armed thugs, we should also realize that not every part of a resistance to military occupation is a conspiracy controlled by a nationalist racket. We communists would be the last to condemn anyone who takes up arms to defend themselves or their family.

In the West Papuan example, there is plenty of resistance that falls outside of the well known Free Papua Movement34: there are the tribal warriors in the remote jungle who spear Indonesian soldiers, the youths who throw rocks at cops, the rioters in the streets. We cannot just shrug off the people who engage in this activity as having “false consciousness” because they happen to not be acting as a class and are instead fighting against their oppression as an oppressed nation or ethnic group. They are not under “nationalist illusions”; they are directly reacting to material pressures, fighting for survival in many cases. We cannot ignore these facts. Without any powerful organized internationalist proletarian alternative to the barbarisms that surround them, an alternative beyond nations, what other hope do these people have?

The programmatic implications for communists are as follows:

  • Maintaining class-political independence will be especially difficult in countries under military and colonial occupation. The reality of their daily oppression will mean that many workers will identify with a nationalist cause before they start to unite on a class basis and fight against their own bourgeoisie and those foreign to them. In addition, the repression that proletarians would face as a result of efforts to organize as a class would be intense. Principled communists in such oppressed nations would refuse to engage in opportunistic entryism into nationalist movements to “turn them to the left”. Their best hope lies in the class-struggle breaking out nearby to challenge the state regionally and internationally.
  • In countries in which there are significant national or racialized minorities (e.g. Romas in Europe, African-Americans in the USA, Kurds in Turkey, Maoris in New Zealand), and where the situation requires it, communists should advocate for special caucuses within working class institutions to ensure that these minorities are included in class organization and are better placed to overcome language barriers and combat racism and nationalist chauvinism. This is not an argument for separatism, on the contrary, it would help national and racialized minorities abandon a nationalist consciousness in favor of integration through class struggle. In some countries, such a strategy is simply not necessary (e.g. in ethnically homogenous Japan and Korea), so it needs to be applied carefully to particular circumstances.
  • Forming solidarity between workers of the oppressor and oppressed countries that goes beyond mere symbolic actions. To make such solidarity more effective across borders would require a better understanding of how migration affects class struggle and what dominant supply chains are liable to disruption along multiple points. What the BDS campaign against Israel lacks is understanding of how vast modern supply chains are: boycotts will not cut it.
  • Given sufficient power of a communist movement to enact these tasks:
    • Initiating campaigns to resist conscription if it is ever introduced.
    • If possible, demand democratic reform of the military. Governments would be very reluctant to grant such demands, but in the case of a revolutionary situation, it is at least a good guarantee against the troops being used against workers, and would make foreign military interventions much more difficult.
    • Spreading defeatist propaganda, and encouraging and facilitating defection amongst the soldiers of all forces, and the split of the military along class lines.35
    • Strategic blockages and sabotage of the key logistics and military industry.
    • An unapologetically universal end to national borders and the end of intra-national borders (e.g. the hukou system). Intra-national borders also effectively divide the working class, based on geography, into citizens and non-citizens. Freedom of movement for all.
    • Demand the end of oppressive laws that target people based on national, ethnic or racial status e.g. the “race powers” in Section 51 (xxvi) of the Australian constitution which allow the government to produce special laws for certain races.36
  • A realistic strategy must acknowledge that without an international dictatorship of the proletariat, imperialist wars will continue to ravage the world. Refuse to settle for any half-measures.

The Indigenous Question in (Settled) Settler-Colonial States

Aboriginal Australia. Cultural-linguistic groups are shown in different colors.

We have taken away their land, have destroyed their food, made them subject to our laws, which are antagonistic to their habits and traditions, have endeavoured to make them subject to our tastes, which they hate, have massacred them when they defended themselves and their possessions after their own fashion, and have taught them by hard warfare to acknowledge us to be their master.

—Anthony Trollope37

In the Territory the mating of an Aboriginal with any person other than an Aboriginal is prohibited. The mating of colored aliens with any female of part Aboriginal blood is also forbidden. Every endeavor is being made to breed out the color by elevating female half-castes to the white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population.

—Northern Territory Administrator’s Report, 1933, p 7.38

In spite of efforts to euphemize and hide pre-colonial history, it is no secret that in white settled countries (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA) the nation-state was founded on the dispossession and destruction of the indigenous population, and that many years after these countries have been invaded, the surviving indigenous people are subject to the most shocking conditions of life, as the most marginalized in a white supremacist society.39There is a clear international pattern that indigenous people in these countries experience without exception: disproportionately lower life expectancy,40 poorer health outcomes,41 poorer education, higher incarceration rates,42 lower employment rates, disintegration of family ties, higher incidence of drug abuse, and higher suicide rates compared to the general (largely white) population. This is not a coincidence. This section will concern matters associated with the indigenous question in Australia, the situation will obviously differ from country to country, where the history is different, although commonalities will exist.

To seek justice and remedy the racial inequality experienced by indigenous Australians (that is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples), indigenous activists and the left have proposed a variety of demands of which there is no general consensus (and which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, best seen as a bundle):

  • Land rights (not simply the existing native title scheme)
  • Parliamentary representation (a separate indigenous parliament that works with the Australian government, in order to better represent indigenous people)
  • Indigenous independence or regional self-government (e.g. articulated in the form of indigenous regional autonomy (“sovereignty”) as part of more complicated Australian federation)43
  • A treaty or multiple treaties between indigenous and non-indigenous people.44The treaties will formalize a collection of rights and responsibilities between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians e.g. to care for sites and artifacts of cultural significance, to maintain a standard of housing, health, and education for indigenous people or whatever else the treaty might specify. The treaty is best seen as a form of constitutionalism that will establish an institutional framework in the state for further reforms that are meant to be beneficial for indigenous people.45

I do not propose to have all the answers. It is clear that it cannot be dealt with in the same way as the national question. I think communists have to really think hard about how to programmatically confront the indigenous question, just as we have to think hard about the national question or the question of whether to conduct electoralism. One thing that is clear however is that existing proposals do not fundamentally challenge the sovereignty of the Australian state, they are all essentially about how the state deals with this “racial problem”, how its “people” are represented, and they do not seem to assume or propose a break with the nation-state and capitalism.

It will be interesting to observe which sections of the indigenous population will reap the benefits of land settlements. It will be interesting to see, if it is implemented, regional indigenous governments as part of an Australian federation, with indigenous politicians who represent their people and set economic agendas, indigenous capitalists, indigenous cops and so on. Localist “sovereignty” schemes should be met with extreme skepticism for the possibility of the formation of an enriched stratum of the indigenous population, a “Black Bourgeoisie”. Remote regional governments would have to deal with economic development (this is a stated goal of treaty advocates by the way) one way or another, maybe requesting that resource-extraction or energy companies invest in their “communities” to produce “jobs” for people whose labor-power capital already mostly deems unnecessary. Plans for autarky (or “self-reliance”) in the bush are plain fantasy. Rights and responsibilities are the currency of a bourgeois state: formalized changes to land tenure, political administration and representation are things that, even if difficult, are totally achievable within its framework, but whether they actually have a positive effect on the lives of the majority of indigenous proletarians is another matter.

I would highly recommend that leftists in Australia, New Zealand, and other settled countries read a great text written about the relationship between class struggle and indigenous struggle in Hawaii—“Hawaii: Class Militancy or Cultural Patriotism?”—that deals with these kinds of problems. The promotion of shared culture by aspiring indigenous “community leaders” is something that should be criticized if it promotes an identity that undermines class solidarity.

Examples of what happens in NZ and Canada with indigenous people, where there are treaties and institutional frameworks that are more “progressive” and which activists in Australia are demanding a move towards, should also provoke criticisms. Indigenous people in NZ and Canada are still racially marginalized and worse off in every regard compared to whites. A recurring problem in the political consciousness of people in Canada is how they compare themselves to the USA to show “how much better things are than in the US”, the same applying for New Zealanders with Australia.

It is an undertheorised issue. The left often does not give enough criticism to these proposals, giving things over to aboriginal elders, “representatives”, and “leaders” to speak on behalf of “their people” at meetings and at rallies, and does not engage in any clear programmatic debate, preferring to engage in representations of white guilt and shouting slogans that sound right instead and expecting change to come about. Perhaps this is for fear of being labeled as uncaring or racist. This would go along with changes in anti-racist discourse towards standpoint epistemology in recent years. I will leave this issue with a few points for consideration:

  • Indigenous Australians, and many indigenous populations throughout the world, are thoroughly proletarianized and highly urbanized.46 This is the result of a gradual process of colonization. In colonial Australia there was a genuinely colonial settled or semi-settled region with a frontier, beyond which was simply a grand “unexplored” continent populated with indigenous people who still lived in traditional ways, albeit at war with settlers. That is no longer the case. Eventually, settler-colonies stop being colonies and actually complete themselves as settled nation-states, this was completed sometime in the 20th century. The last uncontacted people were found in 1984. More recently, an important effect of the Northern Territory (NT) Intervention was to remove children from their families, depopulate remote communities, and accelerate the urbanization of the indigenous population. The benefits for capital are obvious: this makes it easier for mining companies to get their hands on valuable land.
  • Indigenous people are frequently used as an experimental population for the testing of welfare policies before they are implemented on wider society, e.g. income management and cashless welfare cards. The state can act with the utmost cruelty against them and get away with just as it has done with the NT Intervention. It is no secret that as a result of their exclusion from working life, many indigenous people are dependent on the dole — this is a tendency seen consistently since early colonialism. As a result, an important element of racism in Australia has been the resentment towards indigenous people for being “unproductive” and “lazy”, and this has always manifested itself among the resentful white working class time and again. More attention needs to be given to struggles centered around welfare, attempts at sabotaging or blocking such welfare experiments, and demands for dole freedom.47 Rather than supporting policies by “progressive” politicians that will promise “development” and jobs for indigenous people on national parks, mines, oil/gas refineries or government admin (i.e. jobs for jobs sake), should we instead focus on fighting for the unemployed, and those deemed unnecessary by the labor market? This is a key element of the integration that would help to bring down resentful racist divisions in the working class.
  • Some things are not salvageable. The disconnection of indigenous people from their traditional mode of living is real and mostly permanent. Some cultural practices remain but they are relics disconnected from the society that produced them. There is no way that people can go back to pre-colonial existence. To propose that you can, after a magical process of “decolonization”, is pure voluntarism, and radically understates the effects of colonization, and the permeation of the market into every aspect of life. Modernity must be accepted as the starting point of our politics. Proposals for some sort of infra-political cultural revival (like that advocated by Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance48) within a perspective of “decolonization” will be at best futile in uniting and liberating indigenous people from racial oppression and at worst reactionary and have little relation to the reality of the largely proletarianized and urbanized indigenous people, creating a cultural veneer on the same capitalist social relations seen everywhere.
  • The best thing a communist program can do for indigenous people in white settler states is, in addition to destroying the nation-state and its repressive apparatus in the dictatorship of the proletariat, is to meet universal demands — housing, healthcare, education, safety from violence, and others — that serve to eradicate uneven development, which is currently experienced most acutely along racial divisions. We are concerned here with lifting the status of the most excluded section of the proletariat, whose basic needs are hardly being met and who are faced with the violence of the state on a daily basis. No amount of infra-political “cultural” revival will deal with that. Just as the programs to lift the global south out of underdevelopment will be something that will need to start in the “first hundred days” of world revolution, so will the dictatorship of the proletariat have to give priority to pour a lot of resources into addressing the uneven development within a rich country like Australia, giving indigenous people for once, the real benefits of modernity that they have been excluded from. Modernity, socialist central planning, and the scientific mastery of nature are the ways to achieve this, not separatism and a return to tradition. These measures, however, must be implemented in a way in which the indigenous communities have control over how it is done, and this is compatible with the “self-government of localities” that is an essential part of communist republicanism. A degree of cultural autonomy is also compatible with this, for example, school lessons in the language, songs, and history of the local indigenous community.

A Fresh View

What matters for a communist organization and the development of our political positions is to prioritize programmatic unity over theoretical unity. This means that as long as we can practically work together, share a common set of basic positions and have a minimum basis for productive dialogue, having different theoretical explanations for different political “questions” is fine.

It is not enough to take the right “positions” and then to go into fruitless activism. The state machine is too powerful for large protests to stop wars. The state machine at the very least needs to be threatened to halt a war, but ultimately the state must be smashed and the rule of the bourgeoisie brought to an end in order to bring an end to war. The dictatorship of the proletariat that smashes it will be international and anti-national, not producing new national sovereignties, or it will fail.

Programs for returning what was “stolen” to “rightful owners” as a way of dealing with the national question has nothing to do with communism. It reduces a question of democratic rights to a question of land redistribution. If anything it has more in common with the Proudhonism which Marx critiqued in The Poverty of Philosophy. Communists do not wish to return lands to “rightful owners” any more than we want proletarians to reverse the passage of time and go “back to the land” as their peasant ancestors used to live. Rather we wish to abolish property, and nations. It should not be controversial for us to say that we want anyone to live wherever they damn well please. Yes, this means Africans and Arabs living in Europe, just as much as Jews living in Palestine. We have no place for reactionary appeals to ancestry or tradition, and ethno-racial claims to land. A socialist cosmopolitanism is essential, especially in an epoch where right-wing nationalism is in the ascendancy.

We wish to do away with the nation-state, something that some advocates of “decolonization” wish to do, but that does not mean that we advocate for backward social forms and petty localism e.g. tribal “self-rule”. 49The communist goal is the universal liberation of humanity. With the overcoming of the capitalist system, there is no reason to group people into clans, tribes, nations, races and so on. National and racial oppression can only be finally overcome by negating the material conditions that enable them, not by fostering new nationalisms to compete with existing ones.

Even if previously it may have been justified for communists to make exception to their guiding principle of class-political independence of the proletariat and to support the bourgeois revolution, which took a national form, it is not the task of communists to liberate or build nations, in other words, to conduct the program of the bourgeoisie. Just because a certain historical endeavor (liberation of the colonies) was progressive did not mean that communists should necessarily have supported it, because ultimately it is our duty to take the side of the proletariat wherever it is. Bourgeois progress has been done enough and trying to further it would get in the way of our task, which is to participate in and enhance the international proletariat’s struggle to overthrow this system once and for all.