Tag Archives: nation state

Oppressor and Oppressed (10) – separating nations or uniting workers?

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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

Oppressor and Oppressed (9) – Lenin’s contradictions

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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

Visiting Avignon

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DSC_0373This year I went to Southern France for my holidays, including Avignon, famous for its song ‘Sur le Pont d’Avignon.’ I was there just at the end of its annual arts festival so it was buzzing with life, hosting some fantastic busking musicians who could keep you entertained for hours while licking ice cream.  At least that’s what I did quite a lot of the time.

It’s also famous as the site of exile from Rome of the Popes, from 1309 to 1376, and has a very impressive Palais des Papes, which was their residence and is now a major tourist attraction.  As the audio guide to a visit explains, the palace demonstrated the secular as well as the spiritual (ideological) power of the papacy but the history untold is not one of the rise in the secular power of the papacy but of its decline from its zenith a century earlier.

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Boniface VIII, pope from 1294 to 1303, who liked to wear a crown, declared papal authority over the clergy and threatened France and England with excommunication. In 1300 he also pompously staged a Holy year, selling indulgences to finance his worldly domain. Overreaching himself however he planned the excommunication of the French king, who promptly arrested and imprisoned him in his castle in Anagni.  Even though subsequently freed by the people of the town he was a broken man and died a few months later in Rome.  The second next pope was enthroned in France and eventually establishing his seat of power in Avignon, the start of a series of French popes all largely dependent on the French monarch.

The Catholic theologian Hans Küng remarks that though such events might lead one to assume a tempering of papal claims, this was not the case.  Indeed the guide to the Palais deals a good deal with its vast system of financial management, required to finance building of the Palais and development of the papal bureaucracy:

“In the late Middle Ages, the Roman papacy increasingly lost its religious and moral leadership and instead became the first great financial power of Europe.  The popes claimed a spiritual basis for their worldly demands, of course, but they collected revenues with every means at their disposal, including excommunication and bans” (The Catholic Church)

It was in this period also that saw creation of the doctrine of papal infallibility, originally propagated by an eccentric Franciscan previously accused of heresy.  Apparently this early claim was not taken particularly seriously and was eventually condemned as the work of the devil and the ‘father of all lies’, only to be resurrected later in the nineteenth century.

For political reason the papacy moved back to Rome in 1377 but the next pope showed “such an excess of incompetence, megalomania and outright mental disturbance that there was reason for an automatic dismissal.” (Küng) So another pope, Clement VII was chosen except that the incompetent, megalomaniacal and mentally disturbed pope – Urban VI – didn’t accept this result and so they had a fight over it.  Upon defeat of his troops Clement VII took up residence in Avignon again.

Now we had two popes who excommunicated each other.  You can’t have too much of a good thing; so you had two colleges of cardinals, two Curias and two financial systems.  Clement was supported by France, Aragon, Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and Scotland plus some Germans while Urban was supported by the German Empire, parts of Italy, Flanders, England and some others.

In order to sort this mess out the cardinals met at a general council in Pisa in 1409, deposed the two popes and elected a new one.  Except neither of the existing popes accepted this result either, so the Catholic Church now had three popes! You really can’t have too much of a good thing and we now had a new holy Trinity.

Of course this couldn’t last and eventually the Church managed to get itself just the one pope.

I’d forgotten all this history while doing the tour of the Palais and it would really make for a ripping yarn if it was included in the audio guide to the tour.  But unfortunately some people don’t like the story history tells us.

Another thing I didn’t know was that the area of Avignon continued to be owned and governed by the papacy until the French revolution, only joining the rest of France in 1791.  In the meantime (the Michelin ‘Green’ Guide explains) Jews were confined to a ghetto, locked in at night, compelled to wear a yellow cap, pay dues to their Christian rulers and listen to sermons designed to convert them.

The incorporation of Avignon into a unified French state reminded me of another book I had read some years ago, ‘The Discovery of France’ by Graham Robb.  He noted that at the time of the revolution there were hundreds of small towns, suburbs and villages all more or less independent of any national state.  France was a name often reserved for the small ‘mushroom-shaped’ province centred on Paris.

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There was little common French national identity and no common language among ‘the French.’   As late as 1863 a quarter of recruits to the army spoke ‘patois,’ a ‘corrupt language’.  French seemed to be declining in some areas so that children forgot it when they left school.  Even half a century later some recruits to the French army in the First World War couldn’t speak French and there were reports of Breton soldiers being shot by their comrades because they were mistaken for Germans or because they failed to obey incomprehensible orders.

Most people in the 18th century didn’t travel far and their identity was a local one.  Robb quotes records of 679 couples from 1700 to 1759 showing that almost two thirds of the brides came from within shouting distance of their bridegroom: – “In Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, all but four of the fifty-seven women had married less than five miles from home. Only two of the six hundred and seventy-nine were described as ‘foreign’. This was not a reference to another land.  It meant simply, ‘not from the region.’”

Some of these towns and villages were “flourishing democracies” when France was an absolutist monarchy.  In one village, Salency, the children were never sent away to become servants, all were considered equal, and everyone worked the land. The village was conspicuously clean and tidy, harvests were abundant and crime was unknown.  Of course horizons were limited and no one was allowed to marry outside the village, which had only three surnames.

In another set of villages covering many square miles a clan called Pignou occupied an area in the northern Auvergne. All men over twenty elected a leader, there was no private property and all children in one village were brought up by a woman who ran the communal dairy.  Again people were forbidden to marry outside the clan and those who did were banished forever, “although they all eventually begged to be readmitted.”

So while the destruction of papal control over the mini-state of Avignon was obviously a progressive outcome of the French revolution the destruction of the much loved independence of many small communities by a remote, centralised state with its demands for standardisation, inevitable destruction of local customs (including language) and imposition of oppressive requirements, such as conscription into massive bloody wars, was not.

But such is capitalist progress.  Marxists understand its positive and negative aspects.  In fact understand that capitalist progress is a function of the contradictions and antagonisms within society that does not allow for real separation of good and bad.

Should it be rejected by seeking to go back to the past?  Obviously we can’t now go back to isolated village communities with no private property in the means of production in France or anywhere else but that is not how the question is posed today.

Today it is posed in terms of rejecting capitalist progress at the international level, also characterised by standardisation, centralisation and lack of democracy in favour of a return to more local, nation-state democratic forms.

Unfortunately much of the Left today is no longer confident about the future so seeks solace in the past.  But as we see, this past in the form of nation states was built upon its own brutality and disregard for peoples’ choices.

But just as the development of the nation state also heralded undoubted progress for humanity so also does the internationalisation of capitalism promise the grounds for a new and better society, a socialist one.  This is the ground upon which we must fight and seek to build an alternative.