The article published by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (USC) tells us that:
‘In another place Lenin stated that “large states can accomplish the task of economic progress and the tasks of proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie more successfully than can small ones.” But Lenin also wrote the following: “In 1905 Norway separated from Sweden… What does this mean? Did the people lose? Did the interests of culture lose? Or the interest of democracy? Or the interests of the working class from such a separation? Not at all!… The unity and closeness of the Swedish and Norwegian peoples in fact gained from the separation.” This contradiction in Lenin (the progressive nature of multinational states and the progressive nature of the dissolution of multinational states).’
Lenin, however, says no more here than when larger states separate it is better that they do so without conflict, if unity does not have the necessary support, in order that the primary unity sought – that of the working classes of the various nations – is less impaired. Whether Lenin got this right in this particular case is secondary to the general argument.
The article goes on to say that ‘Most of Lenin’s statements, nevertheless, were in support of preserving the integrity of the Russian Empire, in 1903 he considered its disintegration “an empty phrase as long as its economic development continued to bind its various parts more closely into one political whole.” The break-up of Russia, according to Lenin, would be a step backwards, “in contrast to our aim of overthrowing autocracy,” In 1913 Lenin wrote:
“Autonomy is our plan for the organization of a democratic state. Separation is not our plan at all… On the whole we are opposed to separation. But we support the right to separation.”
This, indeed, was Lenin’s position. Both from the necessary, and much to be desired, purposes of development of the productive forces and the unity of the workers’ movement within the Tsarist Empire, the Bolsheviks were opposed to disintegration. As the article goes on to say, “The aim of socialism is not only to destroy the division of humanity into small states and all national aloofness, not only the rapprochement of nations, but also their merging,”
The author of the USC article criticises the idea of multinational states: ‘History has not yet provided us with the example of nations in one state enjoying complete equality, because a state is not only class coercion, but also national coercion. The stronger nation in a multinational state always wishes to be the ruling one.’[1]
Other lessons from history are, however, ignored; such as nation states often being the creation of nationalism, upon which national antagonisms have facilitated wars based on capitalist competition. Nation states often contain national minorities and attempts to create single-nation states often result in odious oppression of national minorities. Nationalism is not the answer to the disease of national oppression that it itself engenders.
It might therefore also be said that History has not yet provided us with the example of nation states enjoying complete equality, because a state is not only an instrument of class coercion, but also of national coercion of one against another. Instruments of class oppression will not be equal when there is competition between them to increase the resources that they can exploit.
The article appears to agree with this but seems to see it as relevant only within multinational states, in which it says that ‘as long as the state — violence — exists, equal rights for nations will be impossible, no matter how democratic the state might be.’
The USC article quotes from a ‘Ukrainian Marxist’ in 1916 ‘disagreeing with Lenin’s statement that a democratic Russian republic would make the realisation of the national right of separation a possibility’:
‘It is ridiculous to speak of the possibility of the ruler of a capitalist state “safeguarding rights of nations to self-determination,” Every state, even the most democratic, and especially today in the age of imperialism, would not only never agree to the separation of oppressed peoples but would always aspire towards new territorial gains, to a further oppression of nations. Capitalist governments have always looked upon the “rights of nations to self-determination” as treason to the fatherland and have punished the guilty with the death penalty… A blind faith in the democratic and socialist advantages of Russia…is in no way an expression —as is often thought — of the Great Russian socialism. On the contrary…the national program of Russian revolutionary social democrats is nothing other than the repetition of Great-Russian liberal patriotic programs.’
This argument contains some measure of truth – that capitalist governments cannot be relied upon not to oppress smaller national groups within their Empire, and is even true against Lenin who believed at this time that only a bourgeois democratic and not a working class revolution was possible. It ignores, however, that national minorities within nation states separated from Empires will also often be oppressed.
In terms of the class nature of the revolution that Lenin at that time believed would occur, he foresaw the working class taking the lead in this bourgeois democratic revolution, ensuring its thoroughly democratic character. Above all, as we have seen from the earlier post, the purpose of the demand for self-determination of nations by Lenin was the unity of the working class; not a presumed higher unity among different classes within a separating nation, with such unity always being that of the working class united with its ruling classes in its subordination. It is precisely this ‘solution’ to national oppression that the USC article attempts to assert.
It is claimed that the greater number of Lenin’s contradictions come from the period of the First World War and Russian 1917 revolutions, attacking what it sees as the cultural implications of Lenin’s policy:
‘Lenin wrote, on the one hand, that it was impermissible to force the Russian language upon the peoples of Russia: “you cannot drive people to heaven with an oak-wood club.” But, on the other hand, he wrote that in Ukraine in the Donbas region ‘the assimilation of the Great Russian and Ukrainian proletariat is an incontestable fact, and this fact is undoubtedly a progressive thing,” even though Tsarist assimilation was precisely the “oak-wood club” that Lenin condemned. For the Tsarist regime forbade the Ukrainian proletariat its own schools and compelled the Ukrainians to learn only in Russian. In another place Lenin wrote that he was for assimilation as long as it was not forced. But where in history does one see an uncompelled, voluntary assimilation?!’
Let’s start at the end – it is exactly the objective of socialist revolution to remove all oppression. That the chronicle of oppression, including national oppression, continues to exist is not at all surprising, given the heretofore failure of socialism. It is also possible, and what matters most, is that what is meant by assimilation is that the political unity of the different national proletariats is not prevented by national cultural, ethnic or racial differences.
‘Assimilation’ does not in itself entail oppression of cultural differences, including in language, but it is not the role of socialism to push against voluntary cultural assimilation, rather to allow those who wish to retain or develop cultural distinctions not to be forced by the state to disavow their cultural practices or to suffer discrimination against them. The example of the Donbas region quoted by Lenin is instructive: Ukrainian independence and Ukrainian nationalism have now, very obviously, failed to unite the different proletariats of the region and only Ukrainian nationalists can claim that ‘decolonisation’, that is the suppression of the Russian language and culture, is now the solution.
[1] We will leave aside such cases as the United States (are these states separate nationalities?) or the UK, where claims for the oppression of Scotland are false, with this country playing an equal, even outsized role, in creation of an Empire. There are other cases such a Belgium and Switzerland where the existence of two and several nationalities within one state has been the case.
Back to part 8
Forward to part 10
Sráid Marx 
What is actually revealing is that the whole argument of the USC is set within the context of an acceptance of the continuation of bourgeois society. It is based upon formal logic, and stageism, of dealing with the issue within bourgeois society, as a discrete stage, whereas the whole of Lenin’s approach was based upon the idea that the task is the creation of international socialism.
For Lenin, a progressive resolution, even of the problems of the bourgeois revolution cannot, now, be achieved other than by the active involvement of the proletariat, and that proletariat should be led by Marxists to do so by proletarian, not bourgeois means, which is also the basis of Permanent Revolution. The petty-bourgeois socialists and nationalists of the USC, and many other groups have reconciled themselves to the continuation of capitalism, and simply resolving problems within that context which inevitably leads to tailism and opportunism/reformism, however they dress it up in rrrevolutionary verbiage.
It is of course true that in many places, feudal and other pre-capitalist relations have been overthrown, without the workers taking power. In many places, we have seen large peasant masses form the basis of the revolutionary overturn, as in China, Vietnam, Cuba and so on, but they did so on the basis not of a proletarian or even bourgeois-democratic revolution, but of a Peasant War, led by Bonapartist leaders such as Mao or Ho, or Castro, and many of the other such movements have had a similar character, or else have been simply the proteges of some external power.
In none of these cases did the transformation create the conditions for a democratic, even bourgeois-democratic transformation. On the contrary, in each case they installed Bonapartist regimes that were if anything more anti-working class than what went before them. The response to that that the condition of the masses, nevertheless improved, is irrelevant, because the condition of the masses everywhere has generally improved as a simple consequence of the process of social development and rising productivity, and need to raise the level of the education and health of the masses to bring that about. As Marx put it in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, it is to see the problem only in terms of whether the slaves are better or worse fed.
Lenin and Trotsky’s concepts start from the struggle for Socialism, not to solve the problems of bourgeois society. All of the approaches to the latter are based upon how they can be utilised to create the movement for the former. They see the bourgeois and national revolutions being carried out by workers and revolutionary peasants organised in soviets, as Trotsky set out in relation to the Chinese Revolution. It is these soviets that they sought to arm, and certainly not their class enemies, even when engaged in, some anti-colonial revolution. Unlike the USC, Lenin and Trotsky recognised the need to arm these soviets AGAINST, a nationalist bourgeoisie undertaking an anticolonial struggle, even if, for part of the way, the soviets engaged in a tactical alliance with them.
In China, the national bourgeoisie was organised in the KMT government, which was engaged in its “anti-imperialist” struggle against Britain, Japan, etc. But Trotsky argued vehemently against the Chinese workers and peasants subordinating themselves to the KMT, as the Stalinists did. Tactial alliances, in action, was one thing, but Trotsky made clear the need to arm not the KMT, but the workers and peasants themselves.
26) The arming of the workers and peasants is an excellent thing. But one must be logical. In Southern China there are already armed peasants; they are the so-called National armies. Yet, far from being an “antidote to the counter-revolution”, they have been its tool. Why? Because the political leadership, instead of embracing the masses of the army through soldiers’ soviets has contented itself with a purely external copy of our political departments and commissars, which, without an independent revolutionary party and without soldiers’ soviets, have been transformed into an empty camouflage for bourgeois militarism.
27) The theses of Stalin reject the slogan of soviets with the argument that it would be a “slogan of struggle against the government of the revolutionary Guomindang”. But in that case, what is the meaning of the words: “The principal antidote to the counter-revolution is the arming of the workers and peasants”?Against whom will the workers and peasants arm themselves? Will it not be against the governmental authority of the revolutionary Guomindang?
The slogan of arming the workers and peasants, if it is not a phrase, a subterfuge, a masquerade, but a call to action, is not less sharp in character than the slogan of workers’ and peasants’ soviets. Is it likely that the armed masses will tolerate at their side or over them the governmental authority of a bureaucracy alien and hostile to them? The real arming of the workers and peasants under present circumstances inevitably involves the formation of soviets”.
(Trotsky – The Chinese Revolution and The Theses of Comrade Stalin)