1920: M.N. Roy (centre, with black tie) with Vladimir Lenin (left) and Maxim Gorky (behind Lenin). An émigré communist party emerged in October 1920 in Soviet Tashkent under Roy’s guidance.
All the arguments employed against Lenin are claims on behalf of a national solution to national oppression. The USC article asserts that Lenin believed that ‘the separation of an oppressed people and its creation of an independent state divided the proletariats of various nations, while a bourgeois multinational state with a ruling nation in command united them.’ But this makes no sense.
If Lenin believed that bourgeois empires united workers, why did he oppose great Russian chauvinism, or even place such importance on the right to self-determination if the former did not divide workers and the latter was required in order to unite them? The article goes on to say that ‘state boundaries do not hinder the international drawing together of the workers of various nations. On the contrary, boundaries signify a respect for equal rights, and a real drawing together is only possible among equals.’
The world has by and large witnessed the end of multinational empires but where is the equality of nations? How does the imposition of different laws, rules and regulations of labour; the creation of separate national labour organisations; the creation of separate economic, social and political circumstances in general – giving rise to different struggles – lead to drawing workers together? Is not the point of the creation of such nations, from the nationalist point of view, that the different classes of the nation are ‘naturally’ to be separate from other nationalities and united within – workers with capitalists etc?
Since when was it possible for unequal nation states to achieve equality, and when did larger states stop imposing their interests on smaller ones, through political interference, economic coercion and war? Is Ukraine not dramatic proof of all of these, by the West as well as Russia? The author appears to recognise this when he writes that ‘modern American capitalism, which is not weighed down by feudal traditions, does not require the incorporation of other peoples into its state borders in order to dominate them.’ As we know, this hasn’t prevented repeated direct military invasion and occupation by it.
The socialist demand for the equality of nations means only the right to independence and not belief in the possibility of real equality between vastly different states. Their drawing together does indeed require the right to separation but rejection of the exercise of such a right can evidence that that this has already happened, to a greater or lesser extent. Ultimately only the removal of the capitalist imperative to accumulate capital can remove the dynamic of antagonism between capitalist states.
In the Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions for the Second Congress Of The Communist International, Lenin wrote that the 1914-18 war and the imperialists’ actions after it ‘are hastening the collapse of the petty-bourgeois nationalist illusions that nations can live together in peace and equality under capitalism.’
It is claimed in the USC article that the demise of the Tsarist multinational state after the First World War demonstrated the progressiveness of purely national formations, but the Second World War rather exposed the very restricted limits to this. Cold War conflict muted direct war in Europe after World War 2, but even the success of the European Union in muting conflict between the major powers within Europe has not made all states within it equal. The collapse of multinational Yugoslavia was not a progressive event, entailing war, ethnic cleansing and lasting bitterness and conflict. Again, the war in Ukraine demonstrates that nation state independence is no obstacle to the intrusion of the more powerful.
The author opposes what Marx, and subsequently Lenin, considered as progressive tasks: ‘it was unfitting for a workers’ social-democratic party to support even the “progressive” tasks of capitalism on the eve of the First World War, because these tasks were accomplished with steel and blood.’ As Marx said, capitalism had never ‘effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation’, but that through its ‘development of the productive powers of man . . . bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world . . .’ K Marx, The Future results of British rule in India, Collected Works Vol 12 p 221 and 222)
The author argues that Lenin’s concept of imperialism meant that ‘capitalism was decaying and that the only way out was through a socialist revolution and the disintegration of multinational and colonial empires. . . In this second period Lenin linked the resolution of the national question in Russia to the victory of the proletarian revolution’ and ‘considered that the peoples of Russia could unite again only in a union of republics with equal rights.’
In the Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions Lenin wrote at its beginning that ‘In conformity with its fundamental task of combating bourgeois democracy and exposing its falseness and hypocrisy, the Communist Party, as the avowed champion of the proletarian struggle to overthrow the bourgeois yoke, must base its policy, in the national question too, not on abstract and formal principles but, first, on a precise appraisal of the specific historical situation and, primarily, of economic conditions.’
In this document he noted that ‘from these fundamental premises it follows that the Communist International’s entire policy on the national and the colonial questions should rest primarily on a closer union of the proletarians and the working masses of all nations and countries for a joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow the landowners and the bourgeoisie. This union alone will guarantee victory over capitalism, without which the abolition of national oppression and inequality is impossible.’
In 1916, after writing his brochure on imperialism, he wrote against a political opponent – in A Caricature of Marxism – that ‘every sensible worker will “think”: here we have P. Kievsky telling us workers to shout “get out of the colonies”. In other words, we Great-Russian workers must demand from our government that it get out of Mongolia, Turkestan, Persia; English workers must demand that the English Government get out of Egypt, India, Persia, etc.’
‘But does this mean that we proletarians wish to separate ourselves from the Egyptian workers and fellahs, from the Mongolian, Turkestan or Indian workers and peasants? Does it mean that we advise the labouring masses of the colonies to “separate” from the class-conscious European proletariat? Nothing of the kind. Now, as always, we stand and shall continue to stand for the closest association and merging of the class-conscious workers of the advanced countries with the workers, peasants and slaves of all the oppressed countries. We have always advised and shall continue to advise all the oppressed classes in all the oppressed countries, the colonies included, not to separate from us, but to form the closest possible ties and merge with us.’
‘We demand from our governments that they quit the colonies, or, to put it in precise political terms rather than in agitational outcries—that they grant the colonies full freedom of secession, the genuine right to self-determination, and we ourselves are sure to implement this right, and grant this freedom as soon as we capture power. We demand this from existing governments, and will do this when we are the government, not in order to “recommend” secession, but, on the contrary, in order to facilitate and accelerate the democratic association and merging of nations. We shall exert every effort to foster association and merger with the Mongolians, Persians, Indians, Egyptians.’
In June 1920 ‘a precise appraisal of the specific historical situation’ meant that ‘world political developments are of necessity concentrated on a single focus—the struggle of the world bourgeoisie against the Soviet Russian Republic, around which are inevitably grouped, on the one hand, the Soviet movements of the advanced workers in all countries, and, on the other, all the national liberation movements in the colonies and among the oppressed nationalities, who are learning from bitter experience that their only salvation lies in the Soviet system’s victory over world imperialism.’
‘Consequently, one cannot at present confine oneself to a bare recognition or proclamation of the need for closer union between the working people of the various nations; a policy must be pursued that will achieve the closest alliance, with Soviet Russia, of all the national and colonial liberation movements. The form of this alliance should be determined by the degree of development of the communist movement in the proletariat of each country, or of the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement of the workers and peasants in backward countries or among backward nationalities.’
‘Federation is a transitional form to the complete unity of the working people of different nations. The feasibility of federation has already been demonstrated in practice both by the relations between the R.S.F.S.R. and other Soviet Republics . . . In this respect, it is the task of the Communist International to further develop and also to study and test by experience these new federations, which are arising on the basis of the Soviet system and the Soviet movement. In recognising that federation is a transitional form to complete unity, it is necessary to strive for ever closer federal unity . . . ; second, that a close economic alliance between the Soviet republics is necessary, otherwise the productive forces which have been ruined by imperialism cannot be restored and the well-being of the working people cannot be ensured; third, that there is a tendency towards the creation of a single world economy, regulated by the proletariat of all nations as an integral whole and according to a common plan. This tendency has already revealed itself quite clearly under capitalism and is bound to be further developed and consummated under socialism.’
He finishes the draft theses with the statement, that ‘complete victory over capitalism cannot be won unless the proletariat and, following it, the mass of working people in all countries and nations throughout the world voluntarily strive for alliance and unity.’ From all this it is clear that Lenin never departed from the view that the purpose of socialists, including in its national policy, was to create the maximum unity of the working class in its struggle for socialism.
The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign has published an article that usurps the purpose of the demand for national self-determination as argued by Lenin, from one of strengthening the unity of the working class across and between countries to one of supporting the creation of new capitalist states in order to create an (impossible) equality of states; one that somehow leads to working class unity. Internationalism as the unity of the working class regardless of nation has become the equality of nations, the solidarity of nationalisms with the retention of separate states and, by implication, the rights arrogated by them based on claims for the necessity of their existence.
The purpose is clear: to justify the war in Ukraine and the claims of the capitalist Ukrainian state on the subterfuge that these encompass the interests of its workers, which ‘Lenin’s contradictions’ have supposedly helped prevent from being appreciated. It has the merit of recognising that Lenin cannot be summoned in support of Ukraine in the war, thereby undermining the arguments of others who think he can.
Series concluded
Back to part 9
Sráid Marx 
I agree with all of this, except for one bit, at the start.
You quote the USC document’s, assertion, that Lenin believed that
‘the separation of an oppressed people and its creation of an independent state divided the proletariats of various nations, while a bourgeois multinational state with a ruling nation in command united them.’
And comment,
“If Lenin believed that bourgeois empires united workers, why did he oppose great Russian chauvinism, or even place such importance on the right to self-determination if the former did not divide workers and the latter was required in order to unite them?”
I think this is wrong. It is quite possible to consider that bourgeois empires, as capitalist empires, do objectively unite workers, whilst recognising that they might also do so by dividing them. It is not a contradiction in Lenin’s argument, but one that exists in the reality he is analysing and describing. Capitalist production objectively unites workers, via the labour process, placing them in the same material conditions, forming them into a class in itself, but at the same time it divides them against each other, via this very process. It creates craft divisions, divisions between male and female workers, young and old workers, workers in different industries, and regions of the same nation, let alone on the basis of ethnicity, religion and so on. Competition for employment, of itself divides workers.
The more primitive the stage of capitalist development, the mor significant these divisions are for it, in being able to operate on the basis of “divide and rule”. But, as Marx sets out in The Poverty of Philosophy, the thing that capitalist production does, via the operation of competition, is to create equality of labour, reducing it all to homogeneous, universal labour, as factory labour.
The US, turned the South into its own colonial empire, providing it with cheap agricultural products, and acting as a reserve of labour, just as Tsarist Russia did with Siberia, in the era of colonialism/mercantilism, where this unequal exchange played a significant role. The importance of that diminishes as imperialism replaces colonialism, and it is instead the export of industrial capital that becomes determinant, for the purpose of exploiting available labour for the purpose of extracting relative surplus surplus value. It sets in place, in all these areas where the capital is exported, the same development and equalisation of labour that occurs in the developed economies, which as Marx put it simply show to these other countries their own future. In fact, as Trotsky puts it, setting out this process of combined and unequal exchange, in opposition to the arguments of the Stalinists, mostly now utilised by the USC and petty-bourgeois nationalists, and “anti-imperialists”,
“Capitalism finds various sections of mankind at different stages of development, each with its profound internal contradictions. The extreme diversity in the levels attained, and the extraordinary unevenness in the rate of development of the different sections of mankind during the various epochs, serve as the starting point of capitalism. Capitalism gains mastery only gradually over the inherited unevenness, breaking and altering it, employing therein its own means and methods. In contrast to the economic systems which preceded it, capitalism inherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration of new territories, the surmounting of economic differences, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into a system of financial interrelationships. Thereby it brings about their rapprochement and equalizes the economic and cultural levels of the most progressive and the most backward countries. Without this main process, it would be impossible to conceive of the relative levelling out, first, of Europe with Great Britain, and then, of America with Europe; the industrialization of the colonies, the diminishing gap between India and Great Britain, and all the consequences arising from the enumerated processes upon which is based not only the program of the Communist International but also its very existence.”
(The Third International After Lenin)
Lenin and Trotsky never considered that national independence was a requirement for such economic development, and the playing out of this process of equalisation within imperialism.
“Lenin nowhere raised and never could raise the question as if the bourgeoisie of a colonial or a semi-colonial country in an epoch of struggle for national liberation must be more progressive and more revolutionary than the bourgeoisie of a non-colonial country in the epoch of the democratic revolution. This does not flow from anything in theory; there is no confirmation of it in history. For example, pitiful as Russian liberalism was, and hybrid as was its Left half, the petty bourgeois democrats, the Social Revolutionists and Mensheviks, it would nevertheless hardly be possible to say that Chinese liberalism and Chinese bourgeois democracy rose to a higher level or were more revolutionary than their Russian prototypes.”
(ibid)
On the contrary, the national bourgeoisie invariably uses national liberation struggles to further exploit the proletariat.
““A democratic or national liberation movement may offer the bourgeoisie an opportunity to deepen and broaden its possibilities for exploitation. Independent intervention of the proletariat on the revolutionary arena threatens to deprive the bourgeoisie of the possibility to exploit altogether.”
(ibid)
And in this last quote is the actual reason that Lenin raised the question of the right of national self-determination, later ditched, because it was being used by social patriots as code for “defence of the fatherland”, as the USC use it today, and the Bolsheviks replaced it with “the freedom to secede”. Lenin raised the question of the right of nations to self-determination/secede, not because he thought it impossible that different nations within a multinational state could achieve equality within the limits of capitalism (pace Switzerland, though also Scotland, Wales, Cornwall could be referenced in relation to Britain, etc.), but because, in the specific conditions of the Tsarist Empire (and other colonial empires) the concrete reality was that whilst capitalism objectively drives towards equality (as with his comments in respect of language), and universality, history and other factors ensure that it proceeds via a series of contradictions.
What Lenin did with raising the question of the right to national self-determination, was to try to head off the nationalists, by incorporating the struggle for equal national rights, into the proletarian revolution, and that is most clearly seen in relation to his polemic against Luxemburg and Pilsudski.
“See to what monstrous conclusions this monstrous logic leads, even from the viewpoint of the programme demand for Poland’s restoration. Because the restoration of Poland is one of the possible (but, whilst the bourgeoisie rules, by no means absolutely certain) consequences of democratic evolution, therefore the Polish proletariat must not fight together with the Russian proletariat to overthrow tsarism, but “only” to weaken it by wresting Poland from it. Because Russian tsarism is concluding a closer and closer alliance with the bourgeoisie and the governments of Germany, Austria, etc., therefore the Polish proletariat must weaken its alliance with the proletariat of Russia, Germany, etc., together with whom it is now fighting against one and the same yoke. This is nothing more than sacrificing the most vital interests of the proletariat to the bourgeois-democratic conception of national independence. The disintegration of Russia which the P.S.P. desires, as distinct from our aim of overthrowing tsarism, is and will remain an empty phrase, as long as economic development continues to bring the different parts of a political whole more and more closely together, and as long as the bourgeoisie of all countries unite more and more closely against their common enemy, the proletariat, and in support of their common ally, the tsar.”
(The National Question In Our Programme)
The USC have simply adopted the nationalist position of Luxemburg and Pilsudski, the same argument used by the SWP and pothers, to also justify their support for Brexit.
You write that ‘It is quite possible to consider that bourgeois empires, as capitalist empires, do objectively unite workers, whilst recognising that they might also do so by dividing them. It is not a contradiction in Lenin’s argument, but one that exists in the reality he is analysing and describing. Capitalist production objectively unites workers, via the labour process, placing them in the same material conditions, forming them into a class in itself, but at the same time it divides them against each other, via this very process.’
Very true.
I left open the possibility that such empires might not divide workers such that separation became inevitable: ‘Their [nations] drawing together does indeed require the right to separation but rejection of the exercise of such a right can evidence that that this has already happened, to a greater or lesser extent.’
The objective effects of capitalist production in creating and uniting workers is something I am currently writing about as a continuation of my series of posts on Marx’s alternative to capitalism. The posts on Oppressor and Oppressed deal with national oppression and while it is possible that multi-national states might not politically divide workers (I give the examples of Scotland, Switzerland and Belgium as examples in the previous post) this was generally not the case, hence the importance Lenin attached to the demand of right to self-determination/secession.
You write that ‘Lenin raised the question of the right of nations to self-determination/secede, not because he thought it impossible that different nations within a multinational state could achieve equality within the limits of capitalism (pace Switzerland, though also Scotland, Wales, Cornwall could be referenced in relation to Britain, etc.), but because, in the specific conditions of the Tsarist Empire (and other colonial empires) the concrete reality was that whilst capitalism objectively drives towards equality (as with his comments in respect of language), and universality, history and other factors ensure that it proceeds via a series of contradictions.’
I noted that Lenin believed that a democratic revolution in the Tsarist empire might lessen national oppression but that there was a measure of truth in the argument against him that no purely democratic revolution could guarantee this.
This raises the issue that it is not just ‘the specific conditions of the Tsarist Empire (and other colonial empires)’ and ‘history and other factors’, but the objective economic effects of the accumulation of capital, in uneven and combined development, that pose the national question again, with the necessity to oppose nationalism and put forward the right to secede as the correct socialist response. This is true of such relatively recent nationalist movements, such as in Scotland and Catalonia.
Much of the Left today would be aghast at the idea of not simply supporting the independence of colonies, as Lenin argued and set out in the post, but, as I quote: ‘We have always advised and shall continue to advise all the oppressed classes in all the oppressed countries, the colonies included, not to separate from us, but to form the closest possible ties and merge with us.’
This reflects the fact that nationalism won over socialism in the twentieth century so that the colonies went for independence, even from the most ‘democratic’ of bourgeois empires, and there were no strong enough socialist movements, never mind workers’ states, to attract them to the unity Lenin sought.
History has therefore proved, in the negative sense, that generally multi-national states cannot continue without the right to secession and, like capitalist exploitation itself, this has contradictory effects on the unity of the working class. The nations got their independence but as the post explains, inter-state rivalry and competition limits this independence of action, even for the strongest powers.
Again, I agree with most of your comment, here, but, you say,
“History has therefore proved, in the negative sense, that generally multi-national states cannot continue without the right to secession and, like capitalist exploitation itself, this has contradictory effects on the unity of the working class.”
I don’t think this is correct. Lenin in discussion the national question spoke of three time periods. (See here: https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2021/03/marxism-zionism-and-national-question_16.html). First the period during which the bourgeois national revolutions of the 18th/19th century were progressive, because they paved the way for the creation of the nation state, as a capitalist state that cleared away all impediments to rational, free capitalist development. During this period the nation state is the rational form. Secondly, the time period in which these capitalist nation states have already been established, and finally, in the imperialist period, when the nation state itself becomes an impediment on the rational and free development of capital, and where, it is the multinational state that constitutes is rational form.
The EU is the most obvious example of that, and its possible to argue that, in fact, Article 50, that enabled Brexit, was, from the perspective of imperialism, an irrationality, deriving from weakness. Its possible to argue that there are no purely nation states, which required a series of cultural conditions spelled out by Kautsky, Lenin and others, because widespread movement of peoples of different ethnicities and cultures has made that a thing of the past. In fact, the only nation states approaching such basis in “pure ethnicity”, with racist laws and so on, enforcing it, is Israel!
Britain is not just a multinational, multicultural state, because of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Cornwall, but also because of large distinct ethnically and culturally diverse communities within it. Th same is true of other countries across Europe, as well as of North America. Yet, I doubt that Britain would easily countenance the right of secession of Scotland, let alone of such a demand from say Muslim communities concentrated in specific areas, just as the US would not countenance, even, say Hawaii, exerting a right of secession, let alone acceding to the demand for a black nation state, being established within its borders, as has been argued for in the past by some Black Nationalists like Marcus Garvie, as a form of “Zionism” for an oppressed black nation. Indeed, Marxists would consider such a demand to, now, be reactionary.
Incidentally, the basis for the petty-bourgeois nationalists arguing for national self-determination, based on the rights of a clearly defined nation, cannot be applied to say, Taiwan, and yet, many of them, in the ranks of the social-imperialists, do so. Taiwan is comprised of ethnic Chinese, no different to the mainland, Chinese, and only came into existence as a result of the former Japanese imperialists occupiers, being persuaded by US imperialism, to hand it over to the murderous thugs of Chiang Kai Shek, and the KMT, as a counter to the Chinese Stalinists. In other words, a purely political separation driven by the needs of US imperialism, and nothing to do with national oppression, or national rights.
However, to get back to my main point, which is that Lenin’s use of the right to secede, was simply a device to get on side the revolutionary masses of the nations that were trapped within existing empires, and in total contrast to today’s petty bourgeois Left nationalists, his method was that of encompassing those bourgeois-democratic tasks within the proletarian revolution (permanent revolution), and to do so, by using proletarian not bourgeois means of struggle and organisation, i.e. the strike, occupation, soviet, arming of the workers, formation of militias, and so on, so that it is these forms of proletarian revolution, of workers state that bring about the bourgeois-democratic national tasks, and enable – though do not guarantee the success of – a flowing over to the proletarian revolution. Its that dialectical, revolutionary pespective that distinguishes it from the purely formalistic, reformist methodology of Stalinism/Menshevism, for which these are two distinct stages of social development.