“The nation state has outgrown itself – as a framework for the development of the productive forces, as a basis for class struggle, and especially as the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Leon Trotsky, Nashe Slovo, 4 February, 1916)
The workers have no fatherland. Such is the basis for the communist analysis of the national question. Throughout this century millions of proletarians have been mystified, mobilised,’ and slaughtered under the banners of patriotism, national defence, national liberation. In world wars and local wars, in guerrilla clashes and confrontations between huge state armies, the workers of all countries have been called upon to lay down their lives in the service of their oppressors. Nothing has been more clearly demonstrated this century than the stark polarity between nationalism and the international interests of the working class.
But because the proletariat can only learn the lessons of history through its own experience in the historical process, communists can only analyse the national question in historical terms, in order to establish why it is that opposition to all nationalisms and national struggles has become one of the class lines separating proletarian from bourgeois organisations.
Despite certain contradictions and limitations in their analysis – limitations which were themselves a product of the period – the founders of scientific socialism understood a fundamental point that has been all but lost today in the immense welter of confusion coming from fifty years of counter-revolution. For Marx and Engels there was no doubt that the nation state and national ideology were purely and simply a product of capitalist development, that the nation state was the indispensable basis for the growth of capitalist relations of production out of and against feudal society. Whatever the contradictions in their writings about the possibility of socialist development within the boundaries of the nation state, the overall perspective of Marx and Engels was based on an analysis of the world market and on the understanding that the future socialist or communist society would be a worldwide association of producers, a global human community; and the 1st International was founded on the recognition that the working class was an international class which had to link its struggle on an international scale.
Nevertheless, as communists and proletarian internationalists, Marx and Engels often gave their support to movements of national liberation, and their writings on this question have often been used by self-proclaimed ‘marxists’ today to justify support for ‘national liberation struggles’ in the present historical epoch.
But it is the fact that we are living in a different historical epoch than Marx and Engels which enables communists today to make opposition to ‘national liberation’ struggles a key element in any revolutionary world view. Marx and Engels were writing in the period of capitalism’s historical ascendancy. In that period the bourgeoisie was still a progressive and revolutionary class struggling against the fetters of feudal domination. Inevitably the bourgeois revolution against feudalism took on a national form. In order to break down the barriers to trade imposed by feudal local autonomy, customs duties, manorial rights, guilds, etc., the bourgeoisie had to unify itself on a national scale. Lenin was well aware of this when he wrote:
“Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically united territories whose populations speak a single language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national movements. Unity and the unimpeded development of language are the most important conditions for free and extensive commerce on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism. Therefore the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which the requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied.” (Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914)
From the formation of the citizen’s army in the French Revolution to the Italian Risorgimento, from the American War of Independence to the Civil War, the bourgeois revolution took the form of national liberation struggles against the reactionary kingdoms and classes left over from feudalism (the US slave owners were an exceptional case but still constituted a reactionary obstacle to capitalist development in America). These struggles had the essential aim of destroying the decaying political superstructures of feudalism and sweeping away the petty parochialism and self-sufficiency, which were holding back the unifying march of capitalism:
As scientific socialists, who based their opposition to capitalism on material and not moral grounds, Marx and Engels understood that socialism was an impossibility until capitalism had developed a real world market and the proletariat had become a truly international class. In their era, capitalist commodity relations were still the only basis for the progressive development of the productive forces. It is from this standpoint alone that revolutionaries of that time could give support to movements of national liberation. While there was not yet a fully developed world market, while a global industrial infrastructure had not yet been laid down, while the system was still expanding into the huge pre-capitalist regions of the world which existed then, and while the bourgeoisie was still capable of fighting feudalism and absolutism, it was necessary for the workers’ movement to play an active part in those national liberation struggles which were laying the material foundations for a future socialist revolution. And, indeed, in that epoch there was a genuine feeling of solidarity among the working class for a number of national liberation wars. The English textile workers, despite the hardships and unemployment caused by the American Civil War (the result of the blockade of cotton exports) gave their wholehearted support to the North and campaigned against the British ruling class’ tacit complicity with the Southern slave owners. In 1860, the dockers of Liverpool worked unpaid on Saturday afternoons to load supplies for Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily. Such attitudes contrast sharply with the workers’ present day indifference or hostility to the Left’s campaigns of support for nationalist movements.
But two things distinguished the revolutionary proletarian attitude to national wars in that period. First and foremost, communists did not recognize any abstract ‘right’ to national self-determination applying to all nations at all times.
National movements were supported only when they were seen to be contributing to a progressive development of world capitalism. For Marx and Engels one of the main criteria for judging whether or not a national movement was progressive was whether or not it challenged the power of Russian absolutism, which at that time was the bulwark of reaction on the whole continent of Europe – reaction not only against communism but also against bourgeois democracy, liberalism and national unification. Thus the German and Polish national movements were given support, while a number of Slavic nationalisms were opposed as reactionary because they were dominated by pre-capitalist classes and were being used by Tsarism to strengthen and extend Russian absolutism. Similarly in the capitalist colonies, while condemning colonial plunder and exploitation, communists did not rally to the support of every uprising by native lords and chieftains against the new imperialist masters. On the rising led by Ahmed Arabi Pasha against the British in Egypt, Engels wrote to Bernstein in 1882:
“I think we can well be on the side of the oppressed fellahs without sharing their monetary illusions (a peasant people has to be cheated for centuries before it becomes aware of it through experience), and to be against the English brutalities without at the same time siding with their military adversaries of the moment.”
Such movements were seen as attempts by native feudal or Asiatic despots to maintain their hold over ‘their’ peasants rather than as expressions of a revolutionary national bourgeoisie. On the other hand some popular colonial revolts – such as in China – were supported insofar as they seemed to provide a basis for an independent national capitalist development free of colonial domination, or as possible detonators to the class struggle in the oppressor country. This latter criterion was particularly applied to Ireland, where Marx considered that England’s domination of that nation was having the effect of retarding the class struggle in England and diverting class consciousness into national chauvinism.
We do not propose to enter into a discussion about whether or not Marx and Engels were right or wrong to give support to this or that national movement. In some cases, such as Ireland, the possibility for national liberation had already been crushed when Marx was still advocating it; in other cases, the support given to national movements has been ably vindicated by subsequent experience. What is important is to understand the framework according to which communists judged whether national movements were progressive or not. They did not base their judgements on the ‘feelings’ of oppressed peoples, nor on an eternal ‘right’ to national self-determination, nor even on the particular conditions obtaining in any given country. “Their taking up of such positions, correct or mistaken, were invariably determined in relation to an immovable axis: that which on a world scale favoured the maturation of the conditions for proletarian revolution was progressive and had to be supported by the workers.” (M. Berard, Rupture avec Lutte Ouvrière et le Trotskysme, Revolution Internationale, 1973)
Secondly, communists understood the capitalist nature of national liberation struggles. They therefore understood the need for the proletariat to maintain a strict political independence from the bourgeoisie even when the workers were supporting the bourgeoisie’s struggles against absolutism. There were no confusions about nationalist struggles led by bourgeois factions having a capacity to establish ‘socialism’ or ‘workers’ states’ in however deformed a way, which is one of the great mystifications of Stalinism and Trotskyism (such theoretical monstrosities are based on the idea that Stalinist regimes in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc, have a working class character). In the period of the bourgeois revolution, of ascendant capitalism, the proletariat was able to maintain its own permanent organizations and thus the strategy of ‘critical support’ by the proletariat for the progressive factions of the bourgeoisie was a possibility. Although there was always the danger – typified in the revolutions of 1848 – that the bourgeoisie would turn on the workers as soon as it felt able to do so, it was still the case that the bourgeoisie often relied on the working class to be the vanguard of national liberation wars, and that in that period the bourgeoisie was able to tolerate the independent existence of mass working class organisations within capitalism. The struggle of the working class for ‘democratic freedoms’ – right of assembly, press, trade unions, etc. – was not then the sham it is in the era of decadence when the bourgeoisie is unable to grant any real reforms to the proletariat. There was thus some possibility for the working class to engage in national wars for its own purposes and not as mere cannon fodder for the bourgeoisie.In the ascendant epoch, then, given certain guiding principles, there could be a debate within the workers’ movement about which national struggles to support. After 1914, as capitalism decisively entered its period of decline, its permanent historic crisis, the inevitable disjunction between objective conditions and the proletariat’s subjective awareness of these conditions prolonged the debate within the revolutionary camp. Some fundamental class lines – such as the need to destroy the bourgeois state – had already been assimilated by the revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century (after the experience of the Paris Commune). But other such class lines could only be definitively laid down through the bitter experience of the first imperialist world war and the revolutionary wave that followed. The counterrevolutionary role of unions, parliamentarianism, and Social Democracy was firmly established during the course of these events. But even so, during that hectic time, it was possible for an organisation to have a fundamentally revolutionary character and still retain profound illusions as to the nature of these institutions. As long as the revolutionary impetus of the whole class still retained a spark of life, it was possible for the mistakes and confusions of the class’s political emanations to be continually rectified in the light of proletarian experience; it is only with the final disappearance of the revolutionary wave that the class lines between organizations become firmly established, and what were once mistakes become the normal policies of counter-revolutionary tendencies. In this way the Bolsheviks were able for a time to lead the world revolutionary movement despite their lack of clarity on a number of questions; but their inability to learn all the lessons of the new period was equally to contribute to their becoming instruments of counter-revolution. This was the case not only with the question of unions, parliament, and Social Democracy where the Bolsheviks under the pressure of mounting counterrevolution attempted to apply formulae suitable only to the previous era, but also on the national question.
In effect, the discussion on the national question was being reopened some time before the new period had been unambiguously inaugurated by the imperialist world war. After 1871 the bourgeoisie of the major capitals no longer engaged in national wars of the old kind; the imperialist thrust of the latter part of the nineteenth century represented the rapid movement of capitalism towards its pinnacle – but the nearer it hurtled towards that point, the nearer also it approached its decline. The accelerating imperialist scramble of the pre-war decades, the intensification of economic problems, the rising tide of class struggle, were all-important signs of the approach of a new era, signs that were noted and discussed in the workers’ movement in the 1890s and early l900s.
Thus, for example, Rosa Luxemburg’s opposition to Polish national independence in that period was based on an understanding that the nature of Russia had changed since Marx’s day. Russia was now fast developing as a major capitalist nation, while the Polish bourgeoisie now had its interests linked to Russian capitalism. At the same time, the possibility of a class alliance between the Polish and Russian working class was opened up, and Luxemburg insisted that Social Democracy should do all in its power to cement this alliance, not campaign for the isolation of the Polish workers under the ‘independent’ exploitation of the Polish bourgeoisie. But still she held that the immediate task of the Polish and Russian working class was the establishment of a unified, democratic republic, not socialist revolution. Moreover she gave wholehearted support to the national rising of the Greeks against the Turks in 1896, and asserted in Reform or Revolution (1898) that the era of capitalism’s historic crisis had not yet opened up. Her differences with the rest of Social Democracy were still in the realm of strategy, a discussion about the best outcome of world events for the workers within capitalist society. The perspective of an immediate revolutionary unification of the world proletariat had not yet been realistically posed.
Nevertheless, the debates within Social Democracy at that time were an expression of changing historical conditions. On the one hand, Luxemburg’s ideas show a real understanding of the need to adapt to these changes. On the other hand, the sclerosis of the Social Democratic establishment not only showed an inability to understand new developments, but also showed signs of regressing in relation to the coherence of the 1st International. This regression was more or less inevitable given the context, of Social Democracy’s function in the workers’ movement. The main task of Social Democracy was to fight for reforms in the period of capitalist stability in the advanced countries; and the struggle for reforms took place on a specifically national terrain. Since the national bourgeoisie could concede reforms it became easy for the reformists to argue that the workers indeed had a plethora of mutual interests with their own nation. In 1896 the 2nd International began to adopt the fatal formula of a right of nations to self-determination, applicable to all peoples. The consequences of this were to become very clear in the ensuing decades.
Even though their de facto split from the Mensheviks in 1903 showed the Bolsheviks to be firmly within the revolutionary wing of the 2nd International, their position on the national question was that of the Social Democratic centre: the right of all nations to self-determination, enshrined in their 1903 programme. The tenaciousness with which the Bolsheviks clung to this position, despite opposition from without and from within, is best explained by the fact that Tsarist Russia was the perpetrator of national oppression par excellence (“the prison-house of nations”) and that as a mainly ‘Great Russian’ party in geographical terms the Bolsheviks considered that granting nations oppressed by Russia the right to secede as the best way of winning the confidence of the masses in these countries. This position, though it proved to be erroneous, was based on a working class perspective. In a period in which the Social Imperialists of Germany, Russia, and elsewhere were arguing against the right of peoples oppressed by German or Russian imperialism to struggle for national liberation, the slogan of national self-determination was put forward by the Bolsheviks as a way of undermining Russian and other imperialisms and of creating the conditions for a future unification of the workers in both oppressing and oppressed nations.
These positions find their clearest expression in the writings of Lenin in the period up to and including World War I. (The Leninist position was always the official Bolshevik policy on this question. But considerable opposition to it did come from the left of the party before and after 1917, from prominent Bolsheviks like Bukharin, Dzerzhinsky, and Piatakov. Bukharin in particular based his analysis on a concept of world economy and imperialism, which he said made national self-determination both utopian and incompatible with the proletarian dictatorship. With Marx and Engels, Lenin correctly saw that national liberation struggles had a bourgeois character. Moreover, he recognized the need for an historical approach to the problem. In The Right of Nations to Self-Determination he said that for revolutionary parties in the advanced western countries the demand for national self-determination had become a dead letter because there the bourgeoisie had already achieved the tasks of national unification and independence. But Lenin defended the Bolshevik retention of the slogan from Luxemburg’s criticisms on the grounds that in Russia and the colonial countries the bourgeois tasks of overthrowing feudalism and of achieving national independence had not yet been completed. Thus, in these areas, Lenin attempted to apply the methodology which Marx applied to nineteenth century capitalism:
“It is precisely and solely because Russia and the neighbouring countries are passing through this period that we must have a clause in our programme on the right of nations to self-determination.” (Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination)
According to Lenin, the national liberation movements which were proliferating throughout the colonial world at that time had a progressive content in that they were laying the basis for an independent capitalist development and thus for the formation of a proletariat. In these countries, the fight against pre-capitalist social structures was creating the conditions for ‘normal’ class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class, and therefore Lenin advocated the proletariat’s critical participation in these struggles:
“The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression and it is this content that we unconditionally support. At the same time we strictly distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness; we fight against the tendency of the Polish bourgeoisie to oppress the Jews, etc., etc.” (Ibid.)
Such a formulation clearly implies that the bourgeoisie is still capable of struggling for democratic freedoms and that therefore the proletariat can participate in these struggles while defending its own political autonomy. In other words, the bourgeois revolution was still a possibility in these regions. The proletariat of the backward regions should support such movements because they could guarantee democratic freedoms essential to the waging of the class struggle, and because they helped the material growth of the proletariat. The workers in the advanced oppressor countries should for their part support such struggles because in that way they could help to both weaken their ‘own’ imperialism and to win the confidence of the masses in the oppressed countries. (A reciprocal strategy was envisaged here, whereby revolutionaries in the oppressor nations recognised the right to secession of the oppressed nation, while revolutionaries in the oppressed nation did not advocate secession and stressed the need to unite with the workers of the oppressor countries.)
In Lenin’s writings on the national question there is a curious lack of clarity about whether the bourgeois revolution in the backward regions would be conducted mainly against native ‘feudalism’ or foreign imperialism. In many cases, the two forces were both equally enemies of independent national capitalist development, and the imperialists sometimes deliberately maintained pre-capitalist structures at the expense of native capitalism (strictly speaking the majority of these pre-capitalist structures were not feudal at all, but varieties of Asiatic despotism). On the other hand, the interests of pre-capitalist ruling classes often clashed violently with western capitalism, which threatened them with extinction. But in any case, Lenin’s theoretical analysis of imperialism, expressed most succinctly in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) led him to conclude that bourgeois revolutions were still possible in the colonial regions.
According to Lenin, imperialism was in essence a movement by the advanced capitalisms to offset the falling rate of profit, which had become intolerably aggravated by the high organic composition of capital in the metropoles. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin’s mainly descriptive approach to the phenomena of imperialism does not go to the heart of the question of the economic roots of imperialist expansion. But the idea that the high organic composition of capital in the metropoles forces them to expand towards the colonial regions is implicit in his concept of the “superabundance of capital” in the metropoles and the “super-profits” obtained by exporting capital to the colonial regions. The most important characteristic of imperialism was therefore the export of capital seeking a higher rate of profit in the colonies where cheap labour and raw materials were in plentiful supply. In thus prolonging their life through ‘super-profits’ obtained from colonial exploitation, the advanced capitals had become parasitic on the colonies and depended on them for their very survival – hence the world imperialist confrontation over the possession and acquisition of colonies. Such a vision divided the world up into imperialist oppressor nations, and the oppressed nations of the colonial regions. Thus the world-wide struggle against imperialism required not only the revolutionary efforts of the proletariat in the imperialist metropoles but also national liberation movements in the colonies, which by seizing national independence and breaking up the colonial system could deliver a fatal blow to world imperialism. It should of course be pointed out that Lenin did not adhere to the ‘Third Worldism’ idiocies of some of his self-proclaimed epigones, according to which the national liberation struggles actually provoke the revolutionary upsurge of the metropolitan proletariat by ‘encircling’ the advanced nations (the national liberation movements themselves having a ‘socialist’ character according to the Maoists, Mandelite Trotskyists, et al). And yet within Lenin’s work on imperialism the seeds of such confusion were already sown: his idea that the ‘labour aristocracy’ represented a stratum of the metropolitan proletariat which had been ‘bribed’ by colonial ‘super-profits’ to betray the working class can be easily transmuted into the Third Worldist conception that the entire western working class had been integrated into capitalism by imperialist exploitation of the Third World. (This glorious theory has, of course, been dealt severe blows by the massive new waves of working class struggle in the advanced capitalist countries since 1968.) Moreover, the idea that national liberation struggles can fatally weaken imperialism has also been taken up with a vengeance by those who want to justify their support for nationalist and Stalinist movements in the Third World. More important than these monstrous offspring of Lenin’s theory, however, is the fact that they provided the framework for the practical policies carried out by the Bolsheviks after they had been brought to power in Russia; policies which as we shall see were to actively contribute to the world-wide defeat of the proletariat at that time.Luxemburg’s critique of national liberation struggles in general and the Bolsheviks’ nationalities policy in particular was the most penetrating of any at the time because it was based on an analysis of world imperialism which went far deeper than the one developed by Lenin. In texts such as The Accumulation of Capital (1913) and The Junius Pamphlet (1915) she showed that imperialism was not merely a form of thievery perpetrated by the advanced capitals on the backward nations but was an expression of a totality of world capitalist relations:
“Imperialism is not the creation of one or any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will.” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet, 1915)
For Luxemburg the location of the historic crisis of capitalism was not to be found in the falling rate of profit alone, which taken by itself is being constantly offset by increasing the mass of commodities produced and sold. She argued that the specific roots of the historical crisis lay in the problem of realizing surplus value. In The Accumulation of Capital and Anti-Critique she demonstrated that the total surplus value extracted from the working class as a whole cannot be realised solely within the capitalist social relation, because the workers, not being repaid the full value created by their labour power, cannot buy back all the commodities they produce. At the same time the capitalist class (including in this case all those strata paid out of capitalist revenue) as a whole is unable to consume all the surplus because a portion of this must serve in the enlarged reproduction of capital and must therefore be exchanged. Consequently global capital is constantly forced to find consumers outside the capitalist social relation. In the initial stages of capitalism’s evolution there were still numerous non-capitalist strata inside the geographical areas of capitalist development (peasants, artisans, etc) who could serve as a basis for the healthy expansion of capital – although right from the beginning there was a constant tendency to seek markets in countries outside these enclaves: the industrial revolution in Britain was stimulated to a large extent by demand coming from British colonies. But as capitalist social relations became generalized throughout the original enclaves of capitalism the ‘push’ of capitalist production towards the rest of the world accelerated. Instead of competition between individual capitals for markets within the national framework, the emphasis was now on competition between national capitals for the remaining non-capitalist areas of the globe. This was the essence of imperialism, which is simply the expression of ‘normal’ capitalist competition on an ‘international’ scale, backed up of course by the armed state power which is the distinguishing characteristic of competition at this level. As long as this imperialist development was restricted to a few advanced capitals expanding towards a still considerable non-capitalist sector of the world, competition remained relatively peaceful, except from the point of view of the pre-capitalist peoples who were being plundered wholesale by imperialist cartels (i.e. China and Africa). But as soon as imperialism integrated the whole world into capitalist relations, as soon as the world market became completely divided up, then global capitalist competition could only assume a violent and openly aggressive character from which no nation, advanced or backward, could ‘hold aloof’, since every nation had been irresistibly drawn into the rat-race of competition over a saturated world market.
Luxemburg was describing a global historical process, a unified process. Because she understood that everything was ultimately determined by the development of the world market, she was able to see that it was impossible to divide the world into different historical departments: a senile capitalism on the one hand and a youthful, dynamic capitalism on the other. Capitalism is a unified system that rises and goes into decline as a single interdependent entity. The fundamental mistake of the Leninists was to assert that in some areas of the world capitalism could still be ‘progressive’ and even revolutionary, while it was decomposing in other areas. Just as their conception of ‘different’ national tasks for the proletariat in each geographic region betrayed a framework that begins from the standpoint of each national state in isolation, their concept of imperialism showed the same mistaken framework.
Having as her starting point the development of the world market Luxemburg was able to see that national liberation struggles were no longer possible when the world market was divided up by the imperialist powers. The first imperialist world war was decisive proof of the saturation of the world market. Henceforward there could no longer be any real expansion of the world market, but only a violent redivision of existing markets by imperialist powers robbing each other of their spoils, a process which in the absence of social revolution would inevitably lead to the collapse of civilisation. In this context it was impossible for any new nation state to enter into the world market on an independent basis, or to undergo the process of primitive accumulation outside this barbaric global chessboard. Consequently, “In the contemporary imperialist milieu there can be no wars of national defence” (Junius Pamphlet).
The very attempt of nations large or small to ‘defend’ themselves from imperialist attack necessitated alliances with other imperialisms, imperialistic expansion against yet smaller nations, and so on. All those ‘socialists’ who in World War I called for national defence of any kind were, in fact, only serving as apologists and recruiting agents for the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Although Luxemburg appears to have had certain confusions regarding the possibility of national self-determination after the socialist revolution, and although she never had the chance to develop her position in all its aspects, the whole thrust of her analysis is towards demonstrating that the productive forces evolved by capitalism had entered into violent conflict with capitalist social relations, including of course the imprisonment of the productive forces within the confines of the nation state. Imperialist wars were a sure sign of this insurmountable conflict and thus of the irreversible decay of the capitalist mode of production. In this context, national liberation struggles, once an expression of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, have not only lost their progressive content, but have been actively transformed into the imperialistic, cannibalising struggles of a class whose existence has become a barrier to further human progress.
Luxemburg’s ability to see that the bourgeoisie of any nation could only operate within the imperialist world system led her to sharply criticize the national policies of the Bolsheviks after 1917. Acknowledging that the Bolsheviks’ granting of national independence to Finland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, etc. was carried out with the intention of winning the masses of those nations to the Soviet power, she pointed out that, in fact, exactly the opposite had occurred:
“One after another, these ‘nations’ used the freshly granted freedoms to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself.” (Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918)
The idea that in the epoch of proletarian revolution, indeed on the very borders of the bastion of the revolution, there could be a congruence of interest between proletariat and bourgeoisie, was sheer utopia. No longer could the two classes derive any mutual benefit from the ‘independence’ of the nation. Now it was a fight to the death. The great perniciousness of the slogan of national self-determination was that it gave the bourgeoisie an ideological cover to pursue its class interests, which in such a period could only be the crushing of the revolutionary working class. Under the slogan of national self-determination the bourgeoisie of the countries bordering Russia massacred communists, dissolved the soviets, and allowed their territories to be used as a beachhead for the armies of German imperialism and the White reaction. Even in bourgeois terms, national self-determination for these countries was a mockery, because as soon as they broke away from the Russian Empire, the small nations of Eastern Europe fell under the heel of German or other imperialisms (and since then have been tossed from one imperialism to another until settling down under the wing of ‘Soviet’ imperialism). Not only did the Bolsheviks’ national policies give a free rein to the counter-revolution in the border nations, but on a wider scale they were to add a great ideological weight to the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie of the League of Nations, to the Wilsonians and others, whose own version of national self-determination was at that time entering into decisive conflict with the demands of international communism. And indeed since that time the Bolsheviks’ assertion of a ‘right’ of national self-determination has been used by numerous Stalinist, neo-fascist, Zionist, and other charlatans to justify the existence of any number of petty imperialist regimes.
When Luxemburg was formulating this critique, she was writing as a revolutionary expressing her profound solidarity with the Bolsheviks and the Russian revolution. And indeed so long as there was life in that revolution, so long as the Bolsheviks were attempting to act in the interests of the world revolution, their national policies (among other things) could be criticised as the mistakes of a revolutionary workers’ party. In 1918, when Luxemburg wrote her critique of their methods, the Bolsheviks were still pinning all their hopes on a proletarian revolution breaking out in the West. But by 1920, with the tide of revolution receding everywhere, the Bolsheviks were showing clear signs of losing confidence in the international working class. Henceforward, more and more emphasis was to be put on uniting the Russian revolution with the ‘national liberation movements’ in the East, movements that were seen to pose a dire threat to the imperialist world system. From the Baku Congress in 1920 to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 this emphasis steadily increased, while a growing amount of material aid was doled out to nationalist movements of many different complexions. The disastrous consequences of these policies barely penetrated the minds of the Bolshevik bureaucracy, which was becoming less and less able to distinguish the immediate national advantage of Russia from the interests of the world proletariat. Consider the case of Kemal Ataturk. Despite the fact that he had executed the leaders of the Turkish Communist Party in 1921, the Bolsheviks continued to see a ‘revolutionary’ potential in Ataturk’s nationalist movement. Only when the latter openly sought to compromise with the Entente imperialisms in 1923 did the Bolsheviks begin to reconsider their policy towards him, and by this time there was nothing revolutionary at all in the foreign policy of the Russian state. And Kemal was no accident but simply an expression of the new epoch, of the utter irreconcilability of nationalism and proletarian revolution, of the complete inability of any faction of the bourgeoisie to stand independently of imperialism. Similar Bolshevik policies ended in fiascos in Persia and the Far East. The ‘national revolution’ against imperialism was a dangerous myth that cost the lives of countless workers and communists. From then on it became more and more clear that national movements, far from challenging the hegemony of imperialism, could only become pawns in the imperialist chess game. If one imperialism was weakened by this or that national movement, then another imperialism would surely gain.
The next inevitable step was for ‘Soviet’ Russia herself to enter unambiguously into imperialist competition with the established capitalisms. With the world revolution in disarray, with the Russian proletariat decimated by civil war and famine, its last great attempts to regain political power crushed at Petrograd and Kronstadt, the Bolshevik Party had ended up as the managers and overseers of Russian national capital. And since in the epoch of capitalist decadence national capitals have no choice but to expand imperialistically, the foreign policies of the Russian state from the middle twenties, including support for ‘national liberation movements’ can no longer be seen as reflecting the mistakes of a proletarian party, but as the imperialist strategies of a great capitalist power. Thus when the Comintern’s policy of alliance with the ‘national democratic revolution’ in China led directly to the massacre of the Chinese workers after the Shanghai insurrection of 1927, it is incorrect to talk of ‘betrayals’ or ‘mistakes’ on the part of Stalin or the Comintern. By sabotaging the insurrection of the Chinese workers they were simply fulfilling their class function as a faction of world capital.
In the early twenties the proletarian reaction against the degeneration of the 3rd International was expressed politically through the groups of the so-called ‘ultra-left’. The Left Communists denounced the Comintern’s attempts to use the tactics of the old era when the necessity for the immediate conquest of power by the proletariat had rendered such tactics obsolete and reactionary. With the revolution still on the immediate agenda in the advanced capitals of the West, the most important disputes between the 3rd International and its left wing were those concerning the problem of setting up the proletarian dictatorship in these countries. The question of trade unionism, of the relation between the party and the class, of parliamentarianism, and of the united front were therefore the most burning issues of the day. On many of these questions the Left Communists defended an intransigent coherence that has been hardly surpassed by the communist movement since that time.
In comparison to these issues the national and colonial questions seemed to be of less immediate importance, and in general the Left Communists were not at all as clear on this problem as they were on others. Bordiga, in particular, continued to promulgate the Leninist thesis of a ‘progressive’ colonial revolt linking itself to the proletarian revolution in the advanced countries, an idea myopically defended by most of the ‘Bordigist’ epigones today. The German Left was certainly clearer than Bordiga. Many of the militants of the KAPD (Communist Workers’ Party of Germany) continued to defend the Luxemburgist position on the impossibility of national liberation wars. Gorter, in a series of articles called ‘The World Revolution’, published in the English Left Communist paper, The Workers’ Dreadnought (February 9, 16, 23; March 1, 15, 29; May 10, 1924), attacked the Bolshevik slogan of national self-determination and accused the 3rd International thus:
“You ... support the rising capitalisms of Asia: you urge the subjection of the Asiatic proletariat to their native capitalism.”
But at the same time Gorter spoke of the inevitability of bourgeois democratic revolutions in the backward countries and put all his emphasis on the proletarian seizure of power in Germany, England, and North America. As with many of the KAPD’s stands in defence of class positions, the rejection of national liberation wars was based more on a lively class instinct than on a profound theoretical analysis of the development of capital as a social relation which had entered its epoch of decline on a world scale. The truth was that the turbulence of the revolutionary period prevented revolutionaries from grasping all the implications of the new epoch; it was unfortunately the case that many of these implications were not clearly understood until the counterrevolution was firmly in the saddle in all countries.
With the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the movement of capital towards a new imperialist redivision of the world market, revolutionaries were forced to reflect more deeply than ever before on the reasons for that defeat and on the new developments in capitalism. This work of reflection was carried on by the fractions that survived the disintegration of the Left Communist movement in the middle and late twenties.
The remnants of the Italian Left in exile around the review Bilan made the most important contribution to the understanding of the decadence of the capitalist system, applying Luxemburg’s analysis of the saturation of the world market to the concrete reality of the new epoch and recognising the inevitability of a new imperialist world war unless halted by the intercession of the proletarian revolution.
It was the defeat of the Chinese proletariat, which for Bilan most sharply demonstrated the necessity for a revision of the old colonial tactics. In Shanghai in 1927 the workers staged a successful insurrection that gave them control of the entire city in the midst of a situation of ferment all over China. But the Chinese Communist Party, faithfully following the Comintern line of support for ‘national democratic revolutions’ against imperialism, led the workers to hand the city on a plate to the advancing army of Chiang Kai-Chek, then hailed by Moscow as a hero of Chinese national liberation. With the aid of local capitalists and criminal bands (and warmly applauded by all the imperialist powers), Chiang crushed the Shanghai workers in an orgy of mass murder. For Bilan these events conclusively proved that:
“The Theses of Lenin at the Second Congress (of the 3rd International) must be completed by radically changing their content. These Theses admitted the possibility of the proletariat giving its support to anti—imperialist movements, in so far as it created the conditions for an independent proletarian movement. From now on it has to be recognised, after these experiences, that the indigenous proletariat can give no support to these movements: it can become the protagonist of an anti-imperialist struggle if it links itself to the international proletariat to make, in the colonies, a jump analogous to that made by the Bolsheviks who were able to lead the proletariat from a feudal regime to the proletarian dictatorship.” (‘Resolution on the International Situation’, Bilan, no.16, February/March, 1935)
Bilan thus realised that the capitalist counter-revolution was world-wide and that in the colonies as everywhere else capital could only advance by “corruption, violence and war to prevent the victory of the enemy it has itself engendered: the proletariat of the colonial countries” (‘Problems of the Far East”, Bilan, no.11, September 1934).
But even more important than this was Bilan’s overall understanding that, in the context of a world dominated by imperialist rivalries and moving inexorably towards a new world war, the struggles of the colonies could only serve as testing grounds for new global conflagrations. Thus Bilan consistently refused to support either side in the local inter-imperialist struggles that succeeded each other in the 1930s: in China, Ethiopia, and Spain. In the face of the bourgeoisie’s preparation for a new world war, Bilan asserted that:
“the position of the proletariat of each country must consist of a merciless struggle against all the political positions which attempt to tie it to the cause of one or another imperialist constellation, or to the cause of this or that colonial nation, a cause which has the function of masking from the proletariat the real character of the new world carnage” (‘Resolution on the International Situation’, Bilan, no.16).
Almost alone with the Italian Left in refusing to become entangled in the imperialist death traps of the thirties were the Council Communists of Holland, America, and elsewhere. In 1935-6, Paul Mattick wrote a long article entitled ‘Luxemburg vs. Lenin’ (the first part of this appeared in The Modern Monthly September 1935, the second in International Council Correspondence, vol.11, no.8, July 1936). Here Mattick supported Lenin’s economics against the economic theories of Luxemburg, but nevertheless strongly defended Luxemburg’s political position on the national question as against Lenin’s.
Luxemburg’s criticisms of the national policies of the Bolsheviks, he wrote, appeared superficially to have been proved wrong. At the time of Luxemburg’s polemic against Bolshevik national policy, the main threat to the Soviet power seemed to come from military attack by the imperialist powers: Luxemburg had argued that the Bolsheviks’ national policy was giving a direct military opening for the imperialists to physically crush the revolution. In fact, the Bolsheviks had resisted imperialist intervention and the Russian Communist Party’s continued policy of giving support to national movements had helped to greatly strengthen the Russian state, but, as Mattick said, the price paid for this was so high that Luxemburg’s criticisms had been vindicated in the end:
“Bolshevist Russia still exists, to be sure; but not as what it was at the beginning, not as the starting point of the world revolution, but as a bulwark against it” (Paul Mattick, The Modern Monthly).
The Russian state survived, but only on the basis of state capitalism; the counter-revolution had emerged from within not from without. For the international revolutionary movement the ‘tactic’ of support, for national liberation wars utilised by the 3rd International had become a bloody weapon against the working class:
“The ‘liberated’ nations form a fascist ring around Russia. ‘Liberated’ Turkey shoots down the communists with arms supplied to her by Russia. China, supported in its national struggle for freedom by Russia and the Third International, throttles its labour movement in a manner reminiscent of the Paris Commune. Thousands and thousands of workers’ corpses are testimony of the correctness of Rosa Luxemburg’s view that the phrase about the right of self-determination of nations is nothing but petty bourgeois humbug”. The extent to which the “struggle for national liberation is a struggle for democracy” (Lenin) is surely revealed by the nationalistic adventures of the 3rd International in Germany, adventures which contributed their share to the preconditions for the victory of fascism. Ten years of competition with Hitler for the title to real nationalism turned the workers themselves into fascists. And Litvinov celebrated in the League of Nations the victory of the Leninist idea of the self-determination of peoples on the occasion of the Saar plebiscite. Truly, in view of this development, one must indeed wonder at people like Max Shachtman who still today are capable of saying: ‘Despite the sharp criticism levelled by Rosa at the Bolsheviks for their national policy after the revolution, the latter was nevertheless confirmed by results’.” (Mattick, The Modern Monthly. The quote by Shachtman appeared in The New International, March 1935.)
The only thing ‘confirmed by results’ was the correctness of the Luxemburgists and Left Communists in opposing the old Leninist position. As both Bilan and Mattick predicted, the national struggles of the thirties did indeed prove themselves to be preparations for another global imperialist war; a war in which Russia, as they also predicted, participated as an ‘equal partner’ in the slaughter. Those who had called upon the proletariat to take sides in the various national confrontations in the thirties now unhesitatingly participated in the second imperialist world war. The Trotskyists, having called the workers to support Chiang against Japan, the Republic against Franco, etc, continued with their anti-fascist and pro-national liberation verbiage all through the imperialist carnage, and added a new form of national defencism by demanding support for the ‘degenerated workers’ state’. Of course all these ‘defencisms’ could only be pursued by giving support, however ‘critical’, to the ‘democratic’ imperialisms.
World War II demonstrated with painful clarity how impossible it was for movements of ‘national liberation’ to fight against one imperialism without allying themselves to another. The ‘heroic anti-fascist resistance’ in Italy and France and elsewhere, Tito’s partisans, Ho Chi Minh’s and Mao Tse Tung’s ‘popular’ armies – all of these and many others functioned as useful appendages of the major Allied imperialisms against German, Italian, and Japanese imperialisms. And all of them during the war and immediately afterwards revealed their vicious anti-working class nature by calling on workers to slaughter each other, by helping to crush strikes and workers’ uprisings, by persecuting communist militants. In Vietnam, Ho aided the ‘foreign imperialists’ to crush the Saigon workers’ commune of 1945. In 1948, Mao marched into the cities of China, decreed that work must go on as normal, and forbade strikes. In France, the Stalinist Maquis denounced as ‘fascist collaborators’ the handful of internationalist communists who had been active throughout the occupation and the ‘Liberation’ in calling for the working class to fight against both blocs. And immediately after the war, the same Maquis underground ‘revolutionaries’ joined the De Gaulle government and denounced strikes as “weapons of the trusts”.
In the wake of World War II, the national movements in the colonies evolved in two ways, both of which continued within the dynamic established in the previous decades. In the first place, the years after World War II saw a massive trend towards a relatively peaceful decolonisation; despite the existence of powerful and sometimes violent national movements in India, Africa, and elsewhere, the majority of the old colonial powers readily acceded to the ‘national’ independence of most of their former colonies. In an article written in 1952, the French group Internationalisme (which had split from the Italian Left in 1944 over the question of the formation of a party in the midst of the deepening counter-revolution) analysed the situation thus:
“It was once believed in the workers’ movement that the colonies could only be emancipated within the context of the socialist revolution. Certainly their character as ‘the weakest link in the chain of imperialism’ owing to the exacerbation of capitalist exploitation and repression in those areas, made them particularly vulnerable to social movements. Always their accession to independence was linked to the revolution in the metropoles.
These last years have seen, however, most of the colonies becoming independent: the colonial bourgeoisies have emancipated themselves, more or less, from the metropoles. This phenomenon, however limited it may be in reality, cannot be understood in the context of the old theory, which saw colonial capitalism as the lackey pure and simple of imperialism, a mere broker.
The truth is that the colonies have ceased to represent an extra—capitalist market for the metropoles; they have become new capitalist countries. They have thus lost their character as outlets, which makes the old imperialisms less resistant to the demands of the colonial bourgeoisie. To which it must be added that these imperialisms’ own problems have favoured – in the course of two world wars – the economic expansion of the colonies. Constant capital destroyed itself in Europe, while the productive capacity of the colonies or semi-colonies grew, leading to an explosion of indigenous nationalism (South Africa, Argentina, India, etc). It is noteworthy that these new capitalist countries, right from their creation as independent nations, pass to the stage of state capitalism, showing the same aspects of an economy geared to war as has been discerned elsewhere.
The theory of Lenin and Trotsky has fallen apart. The colonies have integrated themselves into the capitalist world, and have even propped it up. There is no longer a ‘weakest link’: the domination of capital is.equally distributed throughout the surface of the planet.” (‘The Evolution of Capitalism and the New Perspective’, Internationalisme, no.45, 1952.)
The bourgeoisies of the former colonial empires, weakened by the world wars, found themselves unable to maintain the colonies as colonies. The ‘peaceful’ disintegration of the British Empire is the best example of this. But it was primarily because these colonies could no longer serve as the basis for the enlarged reproduction of global capital, having themselves become capitalist, that they lost their importance for the major imperialisms (in fact it was the more backward colonial powers like Portugal which clung most tenaciously to their colonies). Decolonisation was actually only a formalisation of an already extant state of affairs: capital no longer accumulated by expanding into pre-capitalist regions, but on the decadent basis of the cycle of crisis, war, and reconstruction, by waste production, and so on.
But the accession of the former colonies to political independence in no way represented their real independence vis a vis the main imperialist powers. After colonialism comes the phenomenon of ‘neo-colonialism’: the major imperialisms retain their effective domination of the backward countries by means of the economic stranglehold which they exert: the imposition of unequal rates of exchange, the export of capital by ‘multinational’ corporations or the state, and their general predominance on the world market which forces the Third World countries to gear their economies to the needs of the advanced capitals (via ‘monoculture’, establishment of cheap labour export industries by foreign capital, etc). And of course, backing all this up there is the armed might of the major imperialisms, their willingness to intervene politically and militarily to defend their economic interests. Vietnam, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Hungary, Czechoslovakia – these and other countries have been the scene of direct intervention by a major imperialism out to protect its interests from unacceptable political or economic change.
In fact ‘peaceful’ decolonisation is more an appearance than a reality. It takes place within a world dominated by military imperialist blocs, and it is the balance of forces between these blocs that determines the possibilities of peaceful decolonisation. The advanced capitals have shown themselves willing to agree to national independence only in so far as their former colonies remain under the domination of the imperialist bloc to which they adhere. Because World War II was only a redivision of an already saturated world market, it could only lead to a new global confrontation between the powers which came out on top after the slaughter had abated: in this case, primarily America and Russia. Consequently the second major trend after World War II was a whole new proliferation of national wars through which the major imperialisms sought to defend or extend their spheres of influence only Provisionally agreed upon after the world war.
The wars in China, Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East, and elsewhere, were all products of the balance of forces after World War II, as well as of the continuing inability of capitalism to provide for humanity’s most basic needs, and the extreme social decomposition of the former colonial regions. In these wars the main imperialisms rarely confronted each other directly: local conflicts served as mediations for the overriding conflict between the ‘Super Powers’. No less than during the world war itself, these wars demonstrated the continuing inability of the local bourgeoisies to combat the domination of one imperialist power without relying on another. If a national bourgeoisie escaped the tentacles of one bloc, it immediately fell into the maws of another.
To give a few examples:
Undoubtedly individual imperialist powers are weakened here and there by these wars and realignments. But each time one imperialist power is weakened, another becomes stronger. Only those who see something ‘non-imperialist’ in the Stalinist regimes can find something progressive in the passing of a country from one imperialist bloc to another. But whatever the theoretical contortions and fantasies of Trotskyism, Maoism, et al, in the real world the chain of imperialism remains unbroken.
This is not to imply that the local bourgeoisies are always merely puppets of the ‘Super Powers’. The local bourgeoisies have distinct interests of their own and these are also imperialist. Israel’s expansion into the Arab territories, North Vietnam’s invasion of the South and expansion into parts of Cambodia, India and Pakistan’s rivalries over Kashmir and Bengal – all these are necessitated by the iron laws of capitalist competition in the epoch of imperialist decay. In addition to acting as agents of the big imperialisms by accepting their aid, advice, and arms, local bourgeois factions themselves become imperialist pure and simple as soon as they grab control of the state. Because no nation can accumulate in absolute autarky they have no choice but to begin to expand at the expense of ether nations even more backward, and thus engage in policies of annexation, unequal exchange, etc. In the epoch of capitalist decadence, every nation state is an imperialist power. Nevertheless, it remains the case that all these local rivalries can only take place within the more global rivalries of the main imperialist blocs. The smaller countries have to follow the global demands of the major powers in order to win their help in furthering their own local interests. In certain exceptional cases, a previously minor power can accede to a place of considerable importance on the worldwide imperialist arena. China, because of its size and wealth of natural resources is one example, while a country like Saudia Arabia, was, for a strictly limited period, another. But the emergence of new major imperialisms hardly weakens the grip of imperialism as a whole. And even with these latter examples, the fundamental rivalry between the US and Russia continues to dictate world policy. China, for example, broke with Russia in the early sixties and attempted briefly to pursue an ‘autarkic’ policy. But the deepening of the world crisis, with its consequence of reinforcing the two main blocs, has increasingly forced China to integrate itself into the US bloc.
All the post-war developments have amply proved the falsity in this era of the tactic of giving support to national liberation movements in order to weaken imperialism. Far from weakening imperialism, these movements only serve to tighten its grip on the world, and to mobilise sections of the world proletariat into the service of one or another imperialist bloc.