Communism and
the National Question
The workers'
struggle to achieve the classless stateless society is worldwide.
It cannot be limited within the boundaries of any
one state or among the people of any ethnic group. Communism,
Scientific Socialism, Marxism or Bolshevik-Leninism, as it
is variously known, recognises this. Accordingly, those who adhere
to it operate to an international strategy and within an international
organisation: The Fourth International.
But, in doing so, they have to face many problems. The uneven and
combined economic, political and social development of different
areas of the world has created over and above the basic social struggle
of class against class, variations upon the form of that struggle
within different areas and involving the exploitation and oppression
of peoples whose categories overlap those of class.
One of the strongest of such groupings is that of the nation. It
has been described, definitively in the Bolshevik primer on the
subject by JV Stalin.
‘A
historically evolved, stable community of language, terri-tory,
economic life,
and psychological make-up, manifested in a community
of culture.’ Note
The nation and
the modern proletariat have one thing in common; both are the
product of Capitalist development.
The workers grew
in number
as the capitalists accumulated their surplus value by increasing
pauperisation, thus providing themselves with a pool of labour
to exploit through the wage system. The nation was developed
by the
capitalists' need for a commodity market under their own
control. Without this not only would the wage system not have got
beyond
its embryo form, but capital itself could not be amassed
effectively except by methods that only would be developed out
of the experiences
of its later period. The early capitalists, then, had to
create themselves
a secure market.
Its security was ensured by its stability (a home market could
scarcely develop under conditions of civil war), its common
language and territory.
In turn, these created a common economic life, and ‘psychological
make-up manifested in a community of culture’.
The needs created by the forms of capitalist accumulation are
not always, formally, the same (in under-developed workers'
states accumulation
is, of course, done under the plan rather than the market).
However, a stable unit of culture, language, territory and
economic life
is necessary for any economic development before Socialism
is achieved.
It can be said that all peoples must go through a national
form of unity. However, this is not to say that national societies
are already
universal. (It seems likely that as much as half the world's
population have only been assembled in nations, properly so-called,
in the quarter-century
since the Chinese revolution.)
Of course national development could not proceed smoothly.
In Western Europe, the development of several nations within
centuries
of each
other encouraged national wars. In Eastern Europe, the slow
development of capitalism resulted in the appearance of multi-national
states.
Here, dominant nations (Germans, Hungarians, Great Russians)
controlled but could not assimilate a number of nationalities,
until the development
of capitalism gave these latter the impetus to establish their
own independent national states.
Outside Europe, the national question was complicated in a
way similar to its Eastern European development. But by the
time
capital-ism
had developed to the extent of igniting national feeling in
Africa and Asia, it had reached its highest stage: Imperialism.
In less
than a century, the peoples of the earth were divided between
the established nations, before being given formal (or achieving
by force
of arms, real) political independence. This process has hastened
the development of national consciousness throughout the world
It is now foreseeable that all peoples will know national status
within a generation. However, in turn, this will merely be
the prelude to a greater international consciousness.
If the nations developed from the same processes as did the
working class, the two phenomena's claims are not identical.
On the one
hand, the nation includes all classes within itself, once it
has been formed.
On the other hand, its demands can be, and often are in blatant
opposition to those of the other nations, setting worker against
worker.
Nationalism, then, cannot be reconciled with internationalism
and is not to be confused with it. That it can be so is because
the facts
of the class struggle do not allow the simple counterposing
of workers' demands to national demands. The international
working
class cannot
ignore the claims of a nation when it is oppressed. If it does
so, bitter experience has shown two dangers. The first is that
it will
thus merely alienate its members in the oppressed nation and
force them into the arms of the nation's bourgeoisie who will
take the
lead in the national struggles. (The experience of the Irish
workers from 1916 to 1924 is relevant here.) On the other hand,
it will be
acting in a complacent manner to the counter-revolutionary
chauvinism of the oppressor nation's workers. Of course, opportunists
in
the working-class movement will support their nations' claims,
even where
they are the oppressors of others, on the plea that other-wise
they will lose their workers to their local bourgeoisies. However,
in
doing so, they, too, endanger their workers' real interests.
They encourage among them desires that can only be satisfied
by the exploitation
and oppression of other nations and demands that their local
capitalists can always trump. At the same time by aiding and
abetting national
oppression, they are cultivating hostility towards their own
nation among the nation or nations oppressed.
A further twist is provided by the fact that, occasionally,
what would otherwise be a valid claim of a nation against
oppression would, if granted, have disastrous effects on the course
of
the
international
class struggle. One example of this was the claim of the
French Republic to the restoration to it of Alsace-Lorraine between
1871 and 1914.
This was, in itself, a valid national claim; by occupying
the
territories claimed, Germany was committing a real act of
oppression against
France. Nonetheless Marxists could not support any attempt
by France to undo the wrong by force – albeit as a
war of liberation. Both the powers concerned were major,
eventually imperialist, powers
with international alliances. A ‘war of liberation
of Alsace-Lorraine’ could
not stop there; the peace of the whole world would be endangered
by it. A second example of a national claim at once valid
and counter revolutionary was the expansion of Germany in
1938: the Anschluss
with Austria and the occupation of the Sudetenland. Both
events were arguably (the first certainly,) the satisfaction
of legitimate
national claims. Nonetheless both meant the consolidation
of Fascist power and the recognisable advance of the world
towards war. These
objective considerations overruled talk of self--determination
for proletarian internationalists. However, here, the nature
of Nazi
Germany made the choice obvious for Marxists. Moreover, the
occupation of the Baltic States and of parts of Finland was
not self-determination
by the Russians. However, they did perform a progressive
function over and above the right of self-determination;
the workers' state's
right to protect itself from a Nazi threat. As such they
were supported by such Marxist critics of the existing soviet
regime as Leon Trotsky.
But it must be said :that such breaches of the principle
of support for oppressed nations are to be understood correctly
as tactical:
that they are forced upon Communists by the facts of the
revolutionary struggle and that they will be rectified with
that struggle's inevitably
victorious conclusion.
In general, then, except under specific material circumstances,
the Communists are in support of the democratic claims of oppressed
nations,
whether to independence, to a more equitable drawing of boundaries,
to the ending of oppression of their culture or to the abatement
of any other specific abuse. Beyond that Communists cannot
go: once the national claims step over the objective border
surrounding
the
nation concerned, the oppressed nation has become itself an
oppressor. Marx and Engels supported the German people's right
to a united
state. But when the German capitalists added to their new empire
by seizing
the French territories of Alsace and Eastern Lorraine, these
Communist leaders denounced those they had supported critically
the previous
day.
Support of the democratic claims of an oppressed nation is
not to be denied leaders of the workers of that nation – always
within the limits set above. But again, they cannot stop
at this any more
than the bourgeois leaders can. Whereas the bourgeois nationalists
place their national claims over and above what is objectively
democratic, the Communists place their revolutionary and
international duties
over their national ones. Not only must they withdraw from
even the democratic struggle on those rare occasions where
it weakens
the
international strength of the workers, but they must also
go beyond the achievement of the most democratic self-determined
national
state. 0nce that is achieved, once the oppressive power has
withdrawn its
claims, the Communists must support, if not take the lead
in, making any demand that their nation's state fuse as an
equal with the
now democratic ex-oppressor, or with any suitable or likely
partner. In this way the people of Tsarist Russia, once liberated,
first
established
their independent states and then (albeit with some exceptions)
fused themselves voluntarily into the present Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. Under imperialism, when the end of the
political oppression
merely means the continuation of economic exploitation by
other means,
this is only likely to be practicable under exceptional circumstances.
Nonetheless the Communists must continue to struggle against
any satisfaction with the national state, against national
pride, and
against feeling of hostility to other peoples.
These are merely general remarks on the Communist method of
handling national questions. Over and above them is the duty – in this
matter as much as in any other – to apply it in full consideration
of the facts of each case.
For other quotations to clarify this
theory of the nation see Appendix I. Back
Forward to Part 2
Back to Irish Trotskyism
|
|
