Rosa Luxemburg
The National Question
The National Question
1.
The Right of Nations
to Self-Determination
to Self-Determination
Among
other problems, the 1905 Revolution in Russia has brought into focus the
nationality question. Until now, this problem has been urgent only in
Austria-Hungary. At present, however, it has become crucial also in Russia,
because the revolutionary development made all classes and all political
parties acutely aware of the need to solve the nationality question as a matter
of practical politics. All the newly formed or forming parties in Russia, be
they radical, liberal or reactionary, have been forced to include in their
programs some sort of a position on the nationality question, which is closely
connected with the entire complex of the state’s internal and external policies.
For a workers’ party, nationality is a question both of program and of class
organization. The position a workers’ party assumes on the nationality
question, as on every other question, must differ in method and basic approach
from the positions of even the most radical bourgeois parties, and from the
positions of the Pseudo-socialistic, petit bourgeois parties. Social Democracy,
whose political program is based on the scientific method of historical
materialism and the class struggle, cannot make an exception with respect to
the nationality question. Moreover, it is only by approaching the problem from
the standpoint of scientific socialism that the politics of Social Democracy
will offer a solution which is essentially
uniform, even though the program must take into account the wide variety
of forms of the nationality question arising from the social, historical, and
ethnic diversity of the Russian empire.
In the program of the Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) of
Russia, such a formula, containing a general solution of the nationality
question in all its particular manifestations, is provided by the ninth point;
this says that the party demands a democratic republic whose constitution would
insure, among other things, “that all
nationalities forming the state have the right to self-determination.”
This program includes two more extremely important propositions on
the same matter. These are the seventh point, which demands the abolition of
classes and the full legal equality of all citizens without distinction of sex, religion, race ornationality, and the eighth point, which says that the
several ethnic groups of the state should have the right to schools conducted
in their respective national languages at state expense, and the right to use
their languages at assemblies and on an equal level with the state language in
all state and public functions. Closely connected to the nationality question
is the third point of the program, which formulates the demand for wide
self-government on the local and provincial level in areas which are
characterized by special living conditions and by the special composition of
their populations. Obviously, however, the authors of the program felt that the
equality of all citizens before the law, linguistic rights, and local
self-government were not enough to solve the nationality problem, since they
found it necessary to add a special paragraph granting each nationality the
“right to self-determination.”
What is especially striking about this formula is the fact that it
doesn’t represent anything specifically connected with socialism nor with the
politics of the working class. “The right of nations to self-determination” is
at first glance a paraphrase of the old slogan of bourgeois nationalism put
forth in all countries at all times: “the right of nations to freedom and
independence.” In Poland, the “innate right of nations” to freedom has been the
classic formula of nationalists from the Democratic Society to Limanowski’s Pobudka, and from the national
socialist Pobudka to the
anti-socialist National League” before it renounced its program of
independence.[2] Similarly, a resolution on the “equal rights of all nations” to
freedom was the only tangible result of the famous pan-Slav congress held in
Prague, which was broken up in 1848 by the pan-Slavic bayonets of
Windischgraetz. On the other hand, its generality and wide scope, despite the
principle of “the right of nations to self-determination” which obviously can
be applied not only to the peoples living in Russia but also to the
nationalities living in Germany and Austria, Switzerland and Sweden, America –
strangely enough is not to be found in any of the programs of today’s socialist
parties. This principle is not even included in the program of Austrian Social
Democracy, which exists in a state with an extremely mixed population, where
the nationality question is of crucial importance.
The Austrian party would solve the nationality question not by a
metaphysical formula which leaves the determination of the nationality question
up to each of the nationalities according to their whims, but only by means of
a well-defined plan. Austrian Social Democracy demands the elimination of the
existing state structure of Austria, which is a collection of “kingdoms and
princely states” patched together during the Middle Ages by the dynastic
politics of the Hapsburgs, and includes various nationalities mixed together
territorially in a hodgepodge manner. The party rather demands that these
kingdoms and states should be divided into territories on the basis of
nationality, and that these national territories be joined into a state union.
But because the nationalities are to some extent jumbled together through
almost the entire area of Austria, the program of Social Democracy makes
provision for a special law to protect the smaller minorities in the newly
created national territories.
Everyone is free to have a different opinion on this plan. Karl
Kautsky, one of the most knowledgeable experts on Austrian conditions and one
of the spiritual fathers of Austrian Social Democracy, shows in his latest
pamphlet, Nationality and
Internationalism, that such a plan, even if it could be put into effect, would by
no means completely eliminate the conflicts and difficulties among the
nationalities. Nonetheless, it does represent an attempt to provide a practical
solution of these difficulties by the party of the proletariat, and because of
the importance of the nationality question in Austria, we shall quote it in
full.
The nationality program of the Austrian party, adopted at the
Brünn Congress in 1899, says:
Because
national conflicts in Austria are obstructing all political progress and the
cultural development of the nationalities, because these conflicts result
primarily from the backwardness of our public institutions and because the
prolongation of these conflicts is one of the methods by which the ruling
classes insure their domination and prevent measures in the true interests of
the people, the congress declares that:
The final
settlement of the nationality and language question in Austria in the spirit of
equality and reason is primarily a cultural demand, and therefore is one of the
vital interests of the proletariat.
This is
possible only under a truly democratic regime based on universal, equal, and
direct elections, a regime in which all feudal privileges in the state and the
principalities will have been abrogated. Only under such a regime will the
working classes, the elements which really support the state and society, be
able to express their demands.
The nurturing and development of the national peculiarities of all
peoples in Austria are possible only on the basis of equal rights and the
removal of oppression. Therefore, state-bureaucratic centralism and the feudal
privileges of the principalities must be opposed.
Only under such conditions will it be possible to create harmony
among the nationalities in Austria in place of the quarrelling that takes place
now, namely, through the recognition of the following guiding principles:
Austria
is to be transformed into a democratic federation of nationalities (Nationalitätenbundesstaat).
The
historic Crown lands are to be replaced by nationally homogeneous self-ruling
bodies, whose legislation and administration shall be in the hands of national
chambers, elected on the basis of universal, equal, and direct franchise.
All
self-governing regions of one and the same nation are to form together a
nationally distinct union, which shall take care of this union’s affairs
autonomously. [That is, linguistic and cultural, according to the explanation
given in the draft by the party’s leadership.]
A special
law should be adopted by the parliament to safeguard the rights of national
minorities.
We do not
recognize any national privilege; therefore we reject the demand for a state
language. Whether a common language is needed, a federal parliament can decide.
The party
congress, as the organ of international social democracy in Austria, expresses
its conviction that on the basis of these guiding principles, understanding
among peoples is possible.
It solemnly declares that it recognizes the right of each
nationality to national existence and national development.
Peoples can advance their culture only in close solidarity with
one another, not in petty quarrels; particularly the working class of all
nations must, in the interest of the individual nationalities and in the
general interest, maintain international cooperation and fraternity in its
struggle and must conduct its political and economic struggle in closely united
ranks.
In the ranks of international socialism, the Russian Workers’
Party is the only one whose program includes the demand that “nationalities be
granted the right to self-determination.”
Apart
from Russian Social Democracy, we find this formula only in the program of the
Russian Social Revolutionaries, where it goes hand in hand with the principle
of state federalism. The relevant section of the political declaration of the
Social Revolutionary Party states that “the wide application of the principle
of federalism in the relations between individual nationalities is possible,”
and stresses the “recognition of their unlimited right to self-determination.”
It is true that the above formula exists in another connection
with international socialism: namely, it is a paraphrase of one section of the
resolution on the nationality problem adopted in 1896 by the International
Socialist Congress in London. However, the circumstances which led to the
adoption of that resolution, and the way in which the resolution was
formulated, show clearly that if the ninth paragraph in the program of the
Russian party is taken as an application of the London Resolution, it is based
on a misunderstanding.
The London resolution was not at all the result of the intention
or need to make a statement at an international congress on the nationality
question in general, nor was it presented or adopted by the Congress as a
formula for the practical
resolution of that question by the workers’ parties of
the various countries. Indeed, just the opposite was true. The London
Resolution was adopted on the basis of a motion presented to the Congress by
the social-patriotic faction of the Polish movement, or the Polish Socialist
Party (PPS), a motion which demanded that the reconstruction of an independent
Poland be recognized as one of the most urgent demands of international
socialism.[3] Influenced by the criticism raised at the Congress by Polish
Social Democracy and the discussion concerning this in the socialist press, as
well as by the first mass demonstration of the workers’ movement in Russia the
memorable strike of forty thousand textile workers in Petersburg in May 1896
the International Congress did not consider the Polish motion, which was
directed in its arguments and in its entire character against the Russian
revolutionary movement. Instead, it adopted the London Resolution already
mentioned, which signified a rejection of the motion for the reconstruction of
Poland.
The Congress – the resolution states – declares itself in favor of
the complete right of all nations to self-determination, and expresses its
sympathy for the workers of every country now suffering under the yoke of
military, national, or other despotism; the Congress calls on the workers of
all these countries to join the ranks of the class-conscious workers of the
whole world in order to fight together with them for the defeat of
international capitalism and for the achievement of the aims of international
Social Democracy.
As we can see, in its content, the London Resolution replaces the
exclusive consideration of the Polish question by the generalization of the
question of all suppressed nationalities, transferring the question from a
national basis onto an inter-national one, and instead of a definite,
completely concrete demand of practical politics, which the motion of the PPS
demanded the reconstruction of independent Poland-the resolution expresses a
general socialist principle: sympathy for the proletariat of all suppressed
nationalities and the recognition of their right to
self-determination. There can be no doubt that this principle was not
formulated by the Congress in order to give the international workers’ movement
a practical solution to the nationality problem. On the contrary, a practical
guideline for socialist politics is contained not in the first part of the
London Resolution quoted above, but in the second part, which “calls upon the
workers of all countries suffering national oppression to enter the ranks of
international Social Democracy and to work for the realization of its
principles and goals.” It is an unambiguous way of emphasizing that the
principle formulated in the first part – the right of nations to
self-determination can be put into effect only in one way: viz., by first
realizing the principles of international socialism and by attaining its
ultimate goals.
Indeed, none of the socialist parties took the London Resolution
to be a practical solution of the nationality question, and they did not
include it in their programs. Even Austrian Social Democracy, for which the
solution of the nationality problem was a question involving its very
existence, did not do this; instead, in 1899, it created for itself
independently the practical “nationality program” quoted above. What is most
characteristic, even the PPS did not do this, because, despite its efforts to
spread the tale that the London Resolution was a formula in ”the spirit” of
socialism, it was obvious that this Resolution meant rather a rejection of its
motion for the reconstruction of Poland, or at the very least, a dilution of it
into a general formula without any practical character.[4] In point of fact, the political programs of the modern workers’
parties do not aim at stating abstract principles of a social ideal, but only
at the formulation of those practical social and political reforms which the
class-conscious proletariat needs and demands in the framework of bourgeois
society to facilitate the class struggle and their ultimate victory. The
elements of a political program are formulated with definite aims in mind: to
provide a direct, practical, and feasible solution to the crucial problems of
political and social life, which are in the area of the class struggle of the
proletariat; to serve as a guideline for everyday politics and its needs; to
initiate the political action of the workers’ party and to lead it in the right
direction; and finally, to separate the revolutionary politics of the
proletariat from the politics of the bourgeois and petit bourgeois parties.
The formula, “the right of nations to self-determination,” of
course doesn’t have such a character at all. It gives no practical guidelines
for the day to day politics of the proletariat, nor any practical solution of
nationality problems. For example, this formula does not indicate to the
Russian proletariat in what way it should demand a solution of the Polish
national problem, the Finnish question, the Caucasian question, the Jewish,
etc. It offers instead only an unlimited authorization to all interested
“nations” to settle their national problems in any way they like. The only
practical conclusion for the day to day politics of the working class which can
be drawn from the above formula is the guideline that it is the duty of that
class to struggle against all manifestations of national oppression. If we
recognize the right of each nation to self-determination, it is obviously a
logical conclusion that we must condemn every attempt to place one nation over
another, or for one nation to force upon another any form of national
existence. However, the duty of the class party of the proletariat to protest
and resist national oppression arises not from any special “right of nations,”
just as, for example, its striving for the social and political equality of
sexes does not at all result from any special “rights of women” which the
movement of bourgeois emancipationists refers to. This duty arises solely from
the general opposition to the class regime and to every form of social
inequality and social domination, in a word, from the basic position of
socialism. But leaving this point aside, the only guideline given for practical
politics is of a purely negative character. The duty to resist all forms of
national oppression does not include any explanation of what conditions and
political forms the class-conscious proletariat in Russia at the present time
should recommen d as a solution for the nationality problems of Poland, Latvia,
the Jews, etc., or what program it should present to match the various programs
of the bourgeois, nationalist, and pseudo-socialist parties in the present
class struggle. In a word, the formula, “the right of nations to
self-determination,” is essentially not a political and problematic guideline
in the nationality question, but only a means of avoiding
that question.
II
The
general and cliché-like character of the ninth point in the program of the
Social Democratic Labor Party of Russia shows that this way of solving the
question is foreign to the position of Marxian socialism. A “right of nations”
which is valid for all countries and all times is nothing more than a
metaphysical cliché of the type of ”rights of man” and “rights of the citizen.”
Dialectic materialism, which is the basis of scientific socialism, has broken
once and for all with this type of “eternal” formula. For the historical
dialectic has shown that there are no “eternal” truths and that there are no
“rights.” ... In the words of Engels, “What is good in the here and now, is an
evil somewhere else, and vice versa” – or, what is right and reasonable under
some circumstances becomes nonsense and absurdity under others. Historical
materialism has taught us that the real content of these “eternal” truths,
rights, and formulae is determined only by the material social
conditions of the environment in a given historical epoch.
On this basis, scientific socialism has revised the entire store
of democratic clichés and ideological metaphysics inherited from the
bourgeoisie. Present-day Social Democracy long since stopped regarding such
phrases as “democracy,” “national freedom,” “equality,” and other such
beautiful things as eternal truths and laws transcending particular nations and
times. On the contrary, Marxism regards and treats them only as expressions of
certain definite historical conditions, as categories which, in terms of their
material content and therefore their political value, are subject to constant
change, which is the only“eternal”
truth.
When Napoleon or any other despot of his ilk uses a plebiscite,
the extreme form of political democracy, for the goals of Caesarism, taking
advantage of the political ignorance and economic subjection of the masses, we
do not hesitate for a moment to come out wholeheartedly against that
“democracy,” and are not put off for a moment by the majesty or the omnipotence
of the people, which, for the metaphysicians of bourgeois democracy, is
something like a sacrosanct idol.
When a German like Tassendorf or a tsarist gendarme, or a “truly
Polish” National Democrat defends the “personal freedom” of strikebreakers,
protecting them against the moral and material pressure of organized labor, we
don’t hesitate a minute to support the latter, granting them the fullest moral
and historical right to force the
unenlightened rivals into solidarity, although from the point of view of formal
liberalism, those “willing to work” have on their side the right of “a free
individual” to do what reason, or unreason, tells them.
When, finally, liberals of the Manchester School demand that the
wage worker be left completely to his fate in the struggle with capital in the
name of “the equality of citizens,” we unmask that metaphysical cliché which
conceals the most glaring economic inequality, and we demand, point-blank, the
legal protection of the class of wage workers, thereby clearly breaking with
formal “equality before the law.”
The nationality question cannot be an exception among all the
political, social, and moral questions examined in this way by modern
socialism. It cannot be settled by the use of some vague cliché, even such a
fine-sounding formula as “the right of all nations to self-determination.” For
such a formula expresses either absolutely nothing, so that it is an empty,
noncommittal phrase, or else it expresses the unconditional duty of socialists
to support all national aspirations, in which case it is simply false.
On the basis of the general assumptions of historical materialism,
the position of socialists with respect to nationality problems depends
primarily on the concrete circumstances of each case, which differ
significantly among countries, and also change in the course of time in each
country. Even a superficial knowledge of the facts enables one to see that the
question of the nationality struggles under the Ottoman Porte in the Balkans
has a completely different aspect, a different economic and historical basis, a
different degree of international importance, and different prospects for the future,
from the question of the struggle of the Irish against the domination of
England. Similarly, the complications in the relations among the nationalities
which make up Austria are completely different from the conditions which
influence the Polish question. Moreover, the nationality question in each
country changes its character with time, and this means that new and different
evaluations must be made about it. Even our three national movements beginning
from the time of the Kosciuszko Insurrection could be seen as a triple,
stereotyped repetition of the same historical play (that is, “the struggle of a
subjugated nationality for independence”) only in the eyes of either a
metaphysician of the upper-class Catholic ideology such as Szujski, who
believed that Poland had historical mission to be the “Christ of nations,” or
in the eyes of an ignoramus of the present-day social-patriotic “school.”
Whoever cuts deeper with the scalpel of the researcher more precisely, of the
historical-materialist researcher – will see beneath the surface of our three
national uprisings three completely different socio-political movements, which
took on an identical form of struggle with the invader in each case only
because of external circumstances. To measure the Kosciuszko Insurrection and
the November and January insurrections by one and the same yardstick – by the
sacred laws of the “subjugated nation” – actually reveals a lack of all
judgment and the complete absence of any historical and political
discrimination.[6]
A glaring example of how the change of historical conditions
influences the evaluation and the position of socialists with respect to the
nationality question is the so-called Eastern question. During the Crimean war
in 1855, the sympathies of all democratic and socialist Europe were on the side
of the Turks and against the South Slavs who were seeking their liberty. The
“right” of all nations to freedom did not prevent Marx, Engels, and Liebknecht
from speaking against the Balkan Slavs and from resolutely supporting the
integrity of the Turks. For they judged the national movements of the Slavic
peoples in the Turkish empire not from the standpoint of the “eternal”
sentimental formulae of liberalism, but from the standpoint of the material
conditions which determined the content of these
national movements, according to their views of the time. Marx and Engels saw
in the freedom movement of the socially backward South Slavs only the
machinations of Russian tsardom trying to irritate the Turks, and thus, without
any second thoughts, they subordinated the question of the national freedom of
the Slavs to the interests of European democracy, insisting on the integrity of
Turkey as a bulwark of defense against Russian reaction. This political
position was maintained in German Social Democracy as late as the second half
of the 1890s, when the gray-haired Wilhelm Liebknecht, on the occasion of the
struggle of the Ormian Turks, still spoke in that spirit. But by this time the
position of German and international Social Democracy on the Eastern question
had changed. Social Democracy began to support openly the aspirations of the
suppressed nationalities in Turkey to a separate cultural existence, and
abandoned all concern for the artificial preservation of Turkey as a whole. And
at this time it was guided not by a feeling of duty toward the Ormians or the
Macedonians as subjugated nationalities, but by the analysis of the material
base of conditions in the East in the second half of the last century. By this
analysis, the Social Democrats became convinced that the political
disintegration of Turkey would result from its economic-political development
in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that the temporary
preservation of Turkey would serve the interests of the reactionary diplomacy
of Russian absolutism. Here, as in all other questions, Social Democracy was
not contrary to the current of objective development, but with it, and,
profiting from its conclusions, it defended the interests of European
civilization by supporting the national movements within Turkey. It also
supported all attempts to renew and reform Turkey from within, however weak the
social basis for such a movement may have been.
A second example of the same thing is provided by the
diametrically opposite attitudes of Marx and Engels during the revolution of
1848 with respect to the national aspirations of the Czechs and the Poles.
There is no doubt that from the point of view of the “right of nations to
self-determination” the Czechs deserved the support of the European socialists
and democrats no less than the Poles. Marx, however, did not pay any attention
to that abstract formula, and hurled thunderbolts at the heads of the Czechs
and their aspirations for freedom, aspirations which he regarded as a harmful
complication of the revolutionary situation, all the more deserving of severe
condemnation, since, to Marx, the Czechs were a dying nationality, doomed to
disappear soon. The creators of The Communist
Manifesto put forth these views at the same time that they were defending
the nationalist movement of the Poles with all their strength, calling upon all
revolutionary and progressive forces to help our patriots.
The sober realism, alien to all sentimentalism, with which Marx
examined the national problems during the revolution itself, is shown by the
way he treated the Polish and Czech questions:
“The Revolution of 1848,” wrote Marx in his articles on the
revolution which appeared in February 1852 in the American paper, Daily Tribune,
calling
forth at once the claim of all oppressed nations to an independent existence,
and to the right to settle their own affairs for themselves, it was quite
natural that the Poles should at once demand the restoration of their country
within the frontiers of the old Polish Republic before 1772. It is true, this
frontier, even at that time, had become obsolete, if taken as the delimitation
of German and Polish nationality; it had become more so every year since by the
progress of Germanization; but then, the Germans had proclaimed such an
enthusiasm for the restoration of Poland, that they must expect to be asked, as
a first proof of the reality of their sympathies, to give up their share of the plunder. On
the other hand, should whole tracts of land, inhabited chiefly by Germans,
should large towns, entirely German, be given up to a people that as yet had
never given any proofs of its capability of progressing beyond a state of feudalism
based upon agricultural serfdom? The question was intricate enough. The only
possible solution was in a war with Russia. The question of delimitation
between the different revolutionized nations would have been made a secondary
one to that of first establishing a safe frontier against the common enemy. The
Poles, by receiving extended territories in the east, would have become more
tractable and reasonable in the west; and Riga and Milan would have been
deemed, after all, quite as important to them as Danzig and Elbing. Thus the advanced party in Germany, deeming a war with
Russia necessary to keep up the Continental movement, and considering that the
national reestablishment even of a part of Poland would inevitably lead to such
a war, supported the Poles; while the reigning,
middle-class party clearly foresaw its downfall from any national war against
Russia, which would have called more active and energetic men to the helm, and,
therefore, with a feigned enthusiasm for the extension of German nationality,
they declared Prussian Poland, the chief seat of Polish revolutionary
agitation, to be part and parcel of the German Empire that was to be.[7]
Marx treated
the Czech question with no less political realism:
The
question of nationality gave rise to another struggle in Bohemia. This country,
inhabited by two millions of Germans, and three millions of Slavonians of the
Czechian tongue, had great historical recollections, almost all connected with
the former supremacy of the Czechs. But then the force of this branch of the
Slavonic family had been broken ever since the wars of the Hussites in the
fifteenth century. The province speaking the Czechian tongue was divided, one
part forming the kingdom of Bohemia, another the principality of Moravia, a
third the Carpathian hill country of the Slovaks, being part of Hungary. The
Moravians and Slovaks had long since lost every vestige of national feeling,
and vitality, although mostly preserving their language. Bohemia was surrounded
by thoroughly German countries on three sides out of four. The German element
had made great progress on her own territory; even in the capital, in Prague,
the two nationalities were pretty equally matched; and everywhere capital,
trade, industry, and mental culture were in the hands of the Germans. The chief
champion of the Czechian nationality, Professor Palacky, is himself nothing but
a learned German run mad, who even now cannot speak the Czechian language
correctly and without foreign accent. But, as it often happens, dying Czechian
nationality, dying according to every fact known in history for the last four
hundred years, made in 1848 a last effort to regain its former vitality an
effort whose failure, independently of all revolutionary considerations, was to
prove that Bohemia could only exist, henceforth, as a portion of Germany,
although part of her inhabitants might yet, for some centuries, continue to
speak a non‑German language. [Revolution
and Konterrevolution in Deutschland, pp.57-62]
We quote
the above passages in order to stress the methods which
Marx and Engels used with respect to the nationality question, methods not
dealing in abstract formulae, but only in the real issues of each individual
case. That method did not, though, keep them from making a faulty evaluation of
the situation, or from taking a wrong, position in certain cases. The present
state of affairs shows how deeply Marx was in error in predicting, sixty years
ago, the disappearance of the Czech nationality, whose vitality the Austrians
today find so troublesome. Conversely, he overestimated the international
importance of Polish nationalism: this was doomed to decay by the internal
development of Poland, a decay which had already set in at that time. But these
historical errors do not detract an ounce from the value of Marx’s method, for
there are in general no methods of research which are, a priori, protected
against a wrong application in individual cases. Marx never claimed to be
infallible, and nothing, in the last resort, is so contrary to the spirit of
his science as “infallible” historical judgments. It was possible for Marx to
be mistaken in his position with respect to certain national movements, and the
author of the present work tried to show in 1896 and 1897 that Marx’s views on
the Polish question, as on the Eastern question, were outdated and mistaken.
But it is this former position of Marx and Engels on the question of Turkey and
the South Slavs, as well as on the national movement of the Czechs and Poles,
that shows emphatically how far the founders of scientific socialism were from
solving all nationality questions in one manner only, on the basis of one
slogan adopted a priori. It also shows how little they were concerned with the
“metaphysical” rights of nations when it was a matter of the tangible material problems
of European development.
Finally, an even more striking example of how the creators of
modern socialist politics treated the national question is their evaluation of
the freedom movement of the Swiss in the fourteenth century. This is part of
history, therefore free from the influence of all the expectations and passions
of day to day politics. The uprising of the Swiss cantons against the bloody
oppression of the Hapsburg despotism (which, in the form of the historical myth
of William Tell, is the object of absolute worship by the liberal-bourgeois
romantic idealist) was appraised by Friedrich Engels in 1847 in the following
way:
The
struggle of the early Swiss against Austria, the famous oath at Rytli, the
heroic shot of Tell, the immortal victory at Morgarten – all this represented
the struggle of restless shepherds against the thrust of historical
development, a struggle of hidebound, conservative, local interests against the
interests of the entire nation, a struggle of primitivism against enlightenment,
barbarism against civilization. They won their victory over the civilization of
that period, but as punishment they were cut off from the whole later progress
of civilization.[8]
To this
evaluation Kautsky adds the following commentary:
A
question mark could be added to the above concerning the civilizing mission
which the Hapsburgs were carrying out in Switzerland in the fourteenth century.
On the other hand it is correct that the preservation of the independence of
the cantons was an event which was conservative to the nth degree, and in no
way revolutionary, and that thenceforth the freedom of those cantons served as
a means of preserving an element of blackest reaction in the center of Europe.
It was those forest cantons which defeated Zwingli and his army in 1531 at the
battle of Kappel, and thereby put a stop to the spread of Protestantism in
Switzerland. They provided armies to all the despots of Europe, and it was the
Swiss of the forest cantons who were the staunchest supporters of Louis XVl
against the revolution. For this the republic raised a magnificent monument to
them in Lucerne. [Die Neue Zeit,
1904-1905, Vol.II, p.146.]
From the
point of view of the ”right of nations to self-determination,” the Swiss
uprising obviously deserves the sympathy of socialists on all scores. There is
no doubt that the aspirations of the Swiss to free themselves from the Hapsburg
yoke were an essential expression of the will of the “people” or a huge
majority of them. The national movement of the Swiss had a purely defensive
character, and was not informed by the desire to oppress other nationalities.
It was intended only to throw off the oppression of a foreign and purely
dynastic invader. Finally, this national movement formally bore all the
external characteristics of democratism, and even revolutionism, since the
people were rebelling against absolute rule under the slogan of a popular
republic.
In complete contrast to this movement is the national uprising in
Hungary in 1848. It is easy to see what would have been the historical outcome
of the victory of the Hungarians because the social and national conditions of
that country insured the absolute domination of the Magyar minority over the
mixed majority of the other, subjugated nationalities. A comparison of these
two struggles for national independence - the Hungarian in 1848 and the Swiss
five centuries earlier – is all the more significant since both were directed
against the same enemy: the absolutism of the Austrian Hapsburgs. The method
and the viewpoint on national politics of Marx and Engels are brought into high
relief by this comparison. Despite all the external evidences of revolutionism
in the Swiss movement, and despite the indisputable two-edged character of the
Magyar movement, obvious in the flunkeyism with which the Hungarian
revolutionaries helped the Vienna government to suppress the Italian
revolution, the creators of scientific socialism sharply criticized the Swiss
uprising as a reactionary event, while they supported fervently the Hungarian
uprising in 1848. In both cases they were guided not by the formula of “the
right of nations to self-determination,” which obviously was much more applicable
to the Swiss than to the Magyars, but only by a realistic analysis of the
movements from a historical and political standpoint. The uprising of the
fragmented peasant cantons, with their regionalism against the centralist power
of the Hapsburgs, was, in the eyes of Engels, a sign of historical reaction,
just as the absolutism of the princely power, moving toward centralism, was at
that time an element of historical progress. From a similar standpoint, we note
in passing, Lassalle regarded the peasant wars, and the parallel rebellion of
the minor knights of the nobility in Germany in the sixteenth century against
the rising princely power, as signs of reaction. On the other hand, in 1848,
Hapsburg absolutism was already a reactionary relic of the Middle Ages, and the
national uprising of the Hungarians – a natural ally of the internal German
revolution – directed against the Hapsburgs naturally had to be regarded as an
element of historical progress.
III
What is
more, in taking such a stand Marx and Engels were not at all indulging in party
or class egoism, and were not sacrificing entire nations to the needs and
perspectives of Western European democracy, as it might have appeared.
It is true that it sounds much more generous, and is more
flattering to the overactive imagination of the young “intellectual,” when the
socialists announce a general and universal introduction of freedom for all
existing suppressed nations. But the tendency to grant all peoples, countries,
groups, and all human creatures the right to freedom, equality, and other such
joys by one sweeping stroke of the pen, is characteristic only of the youthful
period of the socialist movement, and most of all of the phraseological bravado
of anarchism.
The socialism of the modern working class, that is, scientific
socialism, takes no delight in the radical and wonderful-sounding solutions of
social and national questions, but examines primarily the real issues involved
in these problems,
The solutions of the problems of Social Democracy are not in
general characterized by “magnanimity,” and in this respect they are always
outdone by socialist parties which are not hampered by scientific “doctrines,”
and which therefore always have their pockets full of the most beautiful gifts
for everyone. Thus, for example, in Russia, the Social Revolutionary Party
leaves Social Democracy far behind in the agricultural question; it has for the
peasants a recipe for the immediate partial introduction of socialism in the
village, without the need of a boring period of waiting for the conditions of
such a transformation in the sphere of industrial development. In comparison
with such parties, Social Democracy is and always will be a poor party, just as
Marx in his time was poor in comparison with the expansive and magnanimous
Bakunin, just as Marx and Engels were both poor in comparison with the
representatives of “real” or rather “philosophical” socialism. But the secret
of the magnanimity of all socialists with an anarchist coloration and of the
poverty of Social Democracy, is that anarchistic revolutionism measures
“strength by intentions, not intentions according to strength”; that is, it
measures its aspirations only by what its speculative reason, fumbling with an
empty utopia, regards as ̶good” and “necessary”
for the salvation of humanity. Social Democracy, on the other hand, stands
firmly on historical ground in its aspirations, and therefore reckons with
historical possibilities. Marxian socialism differs from all the
other brands of socialism because, among other things, it has no pretensions to
keeping patches in its pocket to mend all the holes made by historical
development.
Actually, even if as socialists we recognized the immediate right
of all nations to independence, the fates of nations would not change an iota
because of this. The “right” of a nation to freedom as well as the “right” of
the worker to economic independence are, under existing social conditions, only
worth as much as the “right” of each man to eat off gold plates, which, as Nicolaus
Chernyshevski wrote, he would be ready to sell at any moment for a ruble. In
the 1840s the “right to work” was a favorite postulate of the Utopian
Socialists in France, and appeared as an immediate and radical way of solving
the social question. However, in the Revolution of 1848 that “right” ended,
after a very short attempt to put it into effect, in a terrible fiasco, which
could not have been avoided even if the famous “national work-shops” had been
organized differently. An analysis of the real conditions of the contemporary
economy, as given by Marx in his Capital, must
lead to the conviction that even if present-day governments were forced to
declare a universal “right to work,” it would remain only a fine-sounding
phrase, and not one member of the rank and file of the reserve army of labor
waiting on the sidewalk would be able to make a bowl of soup for his hungry
children from that right.
Today, Social Democracy understands that the “right to work” will
stop being an empty sound only when the capitalist regime is abolished, for in
that regime the chronic unemployment of a certain part of the industrial
proletariat is a necessary condition of production. Thus, Social Democracy does
not demand a declaration of that imaginary “right” on the basis of the existing
system, but rather strives for the abolition of the system itself by the class
struggle, regarding labor organizations, unemployment insurance, etc., only as
temporary means of help.
In the same way, hopes of solving all nationality questions within
the capitalist framework by insuring to all nations, races, and ethnic groups
the possibility of “self-determination” is a complete utopia. And it is a
utopia from the point of view that the objective system of political and class
forces condemns many a demand in the political program of Social Democracy to
be unfeasible in practice. For example, important voices in the ranks of the
international workers’ movement have expressed the conviction that a demand for
the universal introduction of the eight-hour day by legal enactment has no
chance of being realized in bourgeois society because of the growing social
reaction of the ruling classes, the general stagnation of social reforms, the
rise of powerful organizations of businessmen, etc. Nonetheless, no one would
dare call the demand for the eight-hour day a utopia, because it is in complete
accordance with the progressive development of bourgeois society.
However, to resume: the actual possibility of “self-determination”
for all ethnic groups or otherwise defined nationalities is a utopia precisely
because of the trend of historical development of contemporary societies.
Without examining those distant times at the dawn of history when the nationalities
of modern states were constantly moving about geographically, when they were
joining, merging, fragmenting, and trampling one another, the fact is that all
the ancient states without exception are, as a result of that long history of
political and ethnic upheavals, extremely mixed with respect to nationalities.
Today, in each state, ethnic relics bear witness to the upheavals and
intermixtures which characterized the march of historical development in the
past. Even in his time, Marx maintained that these national survivals had no
other function but to serve as bastions of the counter-revolution, until they
should be completely swept from the face of the earth by the great hurricane of
revolution or world war. “There is no country in Europe,” he wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:
which
doesn’t have in some corner one or more of these ruins of nations, the remains
of an ancient people displaced and conquered by a nation which later became a
standard-bearer of historical development. These remains of nationalities,
mercilessly trampled on by history - as Hegel says – these national left-overs
will all become and will remain until their final extermination or
denationalization fanatic partisans of the counter-revolution, since their
entire existence is in general a protest against the great historical
revolution. For ex-ample, in Scotland the Gaels were the mainstays of the
Stuarts from 1640 to 1745; in France, it was the Bretons who were the mainstays
of the Bourbons from 1792 to 1800; while in Spain, the Basques were the
supporters of Don Carlos. In Austria, to take another example, the pan-Slavic
South Slavs are nothing more than the national left-overs of a highly confused
thousand-year-long development. [Aus dem
literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lasalle,
Vol.III, p.241]
In
another article, treating the pan-Slavs’ strivings for the independence of all
Slavic nations, Marx writes,
The
Germans and Hungarians, during the times when great monarchies were a
historical necessity in Europe, forged all those petty, crippled, powerless
little nations into one big state, thereby allowing them to participate in the
development of history which, if left to themselves, they would have completely
missed. Today, because of the huge progress of industry, trade, and
communications, political centralization has become an even more pressing need
than it was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What is not yet
centralized is being centralized. [Ibid., p.255.]
We
abandoned Marx’s views on the South Slavs a long time ago: but the general fact
is that historical development, especially the modern development of
capitalism, does not tend to return to each nationality its independent
existence, but moves rather in the opposite direction, and this is as well
known today as during the time of the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung.
In his most recent paper, Nationality
and Internationalism, Karl Kautsky makes the following sketch of the historical fates
of nationalities:
We have
seen that language is the most important means of social intercourse. As that
intercourse grows with economic development, so the circle of people using the
same language must grow as well. From this arises the tendency of unified
nations to expand, to swallow up other nations, which lose their language and
adopt the language of the dominant nation or a mixture.
According
to Kautsky, three great cultural communities of humanity developed
simultaneously: the Christian, the Muslim, and the Buddhist.
Each of
these three cultural groupings includes the most variegated languages and
nationalities. Within each one most of the culture is not national but
international. But universal communication has further effects. It expands even
more and everywhere establishes the domination of the same capitalist
production ... Whenever a closely knit community of communication and culture
exists for a fairly long time among a large number of nations, then one or a
few nations gain ascendancy over the government, the military, the scientific
and artistic heights. Their language becomes indispensable for every merchant
and educated man in that international cultural community. Their culture – in
economy, art, and literature – lends its character to the whole civilization.
Such a role was played in the Mediterranean basin until the end of ancient
times by Greek and Latin. In the Mohammedan world it is played by Arabic; in
the Christian, including Jews and atheists, German, English, and French have
become universal languages ... Perhaps economic and political development will
add Russian to these three languages. But it is equally possible that one of
them, English, will become the only common language ... The joining of nations
to the international cultural community will be reflected in the growth of universal
languages among merchants and educated people. And this union was never as
closely knit as it is now; never was a purely national culture less possible.
Therefore it strikes us as very strange when people talk always of only a national culture and when a goal of
socialism is considered to be the endowing of the masses with a national culture ... When socialist
society provides the masses with an education, it also gives them the ability
to speak several languages, the universal languages, and therefore to take part
in the entire international civilization
and not only in the separate culture of a certain linguistic community. When we
have got to the point where the masses in our civilized states can master one
or more of the universal languages besides their native language, this will be
a basis for the gradual withdrawal and ultimately the complete disappearance of
the languages of the smaller nations, and for the union of all civilized
humanity into one language and one nationality, just as the peoples in the
eastern basin of the Mediterranean were united in Hellenism after Alexander the
Great, and the peoples of the western area later merged into the Roman
nationality.
The variety of languages within our circle of civilization makes
understanding among members of the various nations difficult and is an obstacle
to their civilized progress. [Emphasis in the following paragraph is R.L.s] But
only socialism will overcome that obstacle, and much work will be needed before
it can succeed in educating entire masses of people to obtain visible results.
And we must keep in mind already today that our
internationalism is not a special type of nationalism differs from bourgeois
nationalism only in that it does not behave aggressively – that it leaves to
each nation the same right which it demands for its own nation, and
thereby recognizes the complete sovereignty (Soveränität) of each
nation. Such a view, which
transforms the position of anarchism concerning individuals onto nations, does
not correspond to the close cultural community existing between nations of
contemporary civilisation.
These last, in fact, in regard to economy and civilization, form
one single social body whose welfare depends on the harmony of the cooperation
of the parts, possible only by the subordination of all the parts to the whole. The Socialist International is not a conglomerate of
autocratic nations, each doing what it likes, as long as it does not interfere
with the equality of rights of the others; but rather an organism wherein the
better it works, the easier it is for its parts to come to agreement and the
more they work together according to a common plan.
Such is
the historical scheme as described by Kautsky. To be sure, he presents the
matter from a different point of view than Marx does, emphasizing mainly the
side of cultural, peaceful development, whereas Marx accents its political
side, an external armed conquest. Both, however, characterize the fate of
nationalities in the course of events, not as tending to separate themselves
and become independent, but completely vice-versa. Kautsky formulates – as far
as we know, for the first time in socialistic literature of recent times – the
historical tendency to remove completely all national distinctions within the
socialist system and to fuse all of civilized humanity into one nationality.
[K. Kautsky, Nationalität und
Internationaliät, pp.12-17 & p.23.]
However – that theoretician believes – at the present time
capitalist development gives rise to phenomena which seem to work in the
opposite direction: the awakening and intensification of national consciousness
as well as the need for a national state which is the state form “best
corresponding to modern conditions, the form in which it can most easily fulfil
its tasks.” [ibid.]
The “best national state is only an abstraction which can be
easily described and defined theoretically, but which doesn’t correspond to
reality. Historical development toward a universal community of civilization
will, like all social development, take place in the midst of a contradiction,
but this contradiction, with respect to the consolidating growth of
international civilization, lies in another area than where Kautsky seeks it,
not in the tendency toward the idea of a “national state,” but rather where
Marx indicates it to be, in the deadly struggle among nations, in the tendency
to create – alongside the great areas of civilization and despite them – great
capitalist states. The development of world
powers, a characteristic feature of our times growing in importance
along with the progress of capitalism, from the very outset condemns all small
nations to political impotence. Apart from a few of the most powerful nations,
the leaders in capitalist development, which possess the spiritual and material
resources necessary to maintain their political and economic independence,
“self-determination,” the independent existence of smaller and petty nations,
is an illusion, and will become even more so. The return of all, or even the
majority of the nations which are today oppressed, to independence would only
be possible if the existence of small states in the era of capitalism had any chances
or hopes for the future. Besides, the big-power economy and politics – a
condition of survival for the capitalist states – turn the politically
independent, formally equal, small European states into mutes on the European
stage and more often into scapegoats. Can one speak with any seriousness of the
“self-determination” of peoples which are formally independent, such as
Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Rumanians, the Serbs, the Greeks, and, as far as that
goes, even the Swiss, whose very independence is the product of the political
struggles and diplomatic game of the “Concert of Europe”? From this point of
view, the idea of insuring all “nations” the possibility of self-determination
is equivalent to reverting from Great-Capitalist development to the small
medieval states, far earlier than the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The other principal feature of modern development, which stamps
such an idea as utopian, is capitalist imperialism. The
example of England and Holland indicates that under certain conditions a
capitalist country can even completely skip the transition phase of “national
state” and create at once, in its manufacturing phase, a colony-holding state.
The example of England and Holland, which, at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, had begun to acquire colonies, was followed in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries by all the great capitalist states. The fruit of that
trend is the continuous destruction of the independence of more and more new
countries and peoples, of entire continents.
The very development of international trade in the capitalist
period brings with it the inevitable, though at times slow ruin of all the more
primitive societies, destroys their historically existing means of
“self-determination,” and makes them dependent on the crushing wheel of
capitalist development and world politics. Only complete formalist blindness
could lead one to maintain that, for example, the Chinese nation (whether we
regard the people of that state as one or several nations) is today really “determining
itself.” The destructive action of world trade is followed by outright
partition or by the political dependence of colonial countries in various
degrees and forms. And if Social Democracy struggles with all its strength
against colonial policy in all its manifestations, trying to hinder its
progress, then it will at the same time realize that this development, as well
as the roots of colonial politics, lies at the very foundations of capitalist
production, that colonialism will inevitably accompany the future progress of
capitalism, and that only the innocuous bourgeois apostles of “peace” can
believe in the possibility of today’s states avoiding that path. The struggle
to stay in the world market, to play international politics, and to have overseas
territories is both a necessity and a condition of development for capitalist
world powers. The form that best serves the interests of exploitation in the
contemporary world is not the “national” state, as Kautsky thinks, but a state
bent on conquest. When we compare the different states from the point of view
of the degree to which they approach this ideal, we see that it is not the
French state which best fits the model, at least not in its European part which
is homogeneous with respect to nationality. Still less does the Spanish state
fit the model; since it lost its colonies, it has shed its imperialist
character and is purely “national” in composition. Rather do we look to the
British and German states as models, for they are based on national oppression
in Europe and the world at large – and to the United States of America, a state
which keeps in its bosom like a gaping wound the oppression of the Negro
people, and seeks to conquer the Asiatic peoples.
The following table illustrates the imperialist tendency of
national conquest. The figures refer to the number of oppressed people in
colonies belonging to each country.
The huge figures quoted, which include around five hundred million
people, should be increased by the colossal addition of the countries which do
not figure as colonies, but are actually completely dependent on European
states, and then we should break these totals down into countless nationalities
and ethnic groups to convey an idea of the effects to date of capitalist
imperialism on the fates of nations and their ability to “determine
themselves.”
|
|
In Asia
|
|
In Africa
|
|
In America
|
|
In Australasia
|
|
|
Great Britain
|
361,445,000
|
40,028,000
|
7,557,300
|
5,811,000
|
||||
|
France
|
18,073,000
|
31,500,000
|
428,819
|
89,000
|
||||
|
Germany
|
120,041
|
11,447,000
|
—
|
448,000
|
||||
|
Holland
|
37,734,000
|
—
|
142,000
|
—
|
||||
|
Belgium
|
—
|
19,000,000
|
—
|
—
|
||||
|
Denmark
|
—
|
—
|
42,422
|
—
|
||||
|
Spain
|
—
|
291,000
|
—
|
—
|
||||
|
Portugal
|
810,000
|
6,460,000
|
—
|
—
|
||||
|
USA
|
7,635,426
|
—
|
953,243
|
13,000
|
Of
course, the history of the colonial expansion of capitalism displays to some
extent the contradictory tendency of the legal, and then political gaining of
independence of the colonial countries. The history of the breaking away of the
United States from England at the end of the eighteenth century, of the
countries of South America from Spain and Portugal in the twenties and thirties
of the last century, as well as the winning of autonomy by the Australian
states from England, are the most obvious illustrations of this tendency.
However, a more careful examination of these events will point at once to the
special conditions of their origins. Both South and North America, until the
nineteenth century, were the victims of a still primitive system of colonial
administration, based more on the plundering of the country and its natural
resources for the benefit of the treasures of European states than on a
rational exploitation for the benefit of capitalist production. In these cases,
it was a matter of an entire country, which possessed all the conditions for
the independent development of capitalism, making its own way by breaking the
rotting fetters of political dependence. The force of that capitalist thrust
was stronger in North America, which was dependent on England, while South
America, until then predominantly agricultural, met a much weaker resistance
from Spain and Portugal, which were economically backward. Obviously, such an
exceptional wealth of natural resources is not the rule in all colonies. On the
other hand, the contemporary system of colonization has created a dependence
which is much less superficial than the previous one. But the winning of
independence by the American colonies did not remove national dependence, it
only transferred it to another nationality – only changed its role. Take first
the United States: the element freeing itself from the scepter of England was
not a foreign nation but only the same English emigrants who had settled in
America on the ruins and corpses of the redskin natives – which is true also of
the Australian colonies of England, in which the English constitute 90 percent
of the population. The United States is today in the vanguard of those nations
practicing imperialist conquest. In the same way, Brazil, Argentina, and the
other former colonies whose leading element is immigrants – Portuguese and
Spanish - won independence from the European states primarily in order to
exercise control over the trade in Negroes and their use on the plantations,
and to annex all the weaker colonies in the area. Most likely the same
conditions prevail in India, where lately there has appeared a rather serious
“national” movement against England. The very existence in India of a huge
number of nationalities at different degrees of social and civilized
development, as well as their mutual dependence, should warn against too hasty
evaluation of the Indian movement under the simple heading of “the rights of
the nation.”
Apparent exceptions only confirm on closer analysis the conclusion
that the modern development of capitalism cannot reconciled with the true
independence of all nationalities.
It is true the problem appears much simpler if, when discussing
nationality, we exclude the question of colonial partitions. Such a technique
is often applied, consciously or unconsciously, by the defenders of the “rights
of nations”; it also corresponds to the position with respect to colonial
politics taken, for example, by Eduard David in the German Social Democracy or
van Kol in the Dutch. This point of view considers colonialism in general as
the expression of the civilizing mission of European peoples, inevitable even
in a socialist regime. This view can be briefly described as the “European”
application of the philosophical principle of Fichte in the well known
paraphrase of Ludwig Brone: “Ich bin
ich – was ausser mir ist Lebensmittel” (”I am myself – what is
outside of me is the means of life”). If only the European peoples are regarded
as nations proper, while colonial peoples are looked on as “supply depots,”
then we may use the term “nation-state” in Europe for countries like France,
Denmark, or Italy, and the problem of nationality can be limited to
intra-European dimensions. But in this case, “the right of nations to
self-determination” becomes a theory of the ruling races and betrays clearly
its origin in the ideologies of bourgeois liberalism together with its
“European” cretinism. In the approach of socialists, such a right must, by the
nature of things, have a universal character. The awareness of this necessity
is enough to indicate that the hope of realizing this “right” on the basis of
the existing setup is a utopia; it is in direct contradiction to the tendency
of capitalist development on which Social Democracy has based its existence. A
general attempt to divide all existing states into national units and to
re-tailor them on the model of national states and statelets is a completely
hopeless, and historically speaking, reactionary undertaking.[9]
IV
The
formula of the “right of nations” is inadequate to justify the position of
socialists on the nationality question, not only because it fails to take into
account the wide range of historical conditions (place and time) existing in
each given case and does not reckon with the general current of the development
of global conditions, but also because it ignores completely the fundamental
theory of modern socialists - the theory of social classes.
When we speak of the “right of nations to self-determination, “ we
are using the concept of the “nation” as a homogeneous social and political
entity. But actually, such a concept of the “nation” is one of those categories
of bourgeois ideology which Marxist theory submitted to a radical re-vision,
showing how that misty veil, like the concepts of the “freedom of citizens,”
“equality before the law,” etc., conceals in every case a definite historical
content.
In a class society, “the nation” as a homogeneous socio-political
entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation, classes with
antagonistic interests and “rights.” There literally is not one social area,
from the coarsest material relationships to the most subtle moral ones, in
which the possessing class and the class-conscious proletariat hold the same
attitude, and in which they appear as a consolidated “national” entity. In the
sphere of economic relations, the bourgeois classes represent the interests of
exploitation – the proletariat the interests of work. In the sphere of legal
relations, the cornerstone of bourgeois society is private property; the
interest of the proletariat demands the emancipation of the propertyless man
from the domination of property. In the area of the judiciary, bourgeois
society represents class “justice,” the justice of the well-fed and the rulers;
the proletariat defends the principle of taking into account social influences
on the individual, of humaneness. In international relations, the bourgeoisie
represent the politics of war and partition, and at the present stage, a system
of trade war; the proletariat demands a politics of universal peace and free
trade. In the sphere of the social sciences and philosophy, bourgeois schools of
thought and the school representing the proletariat stand in diametric
opposition to each other. The possessing classes have their world view; it is
represented by idealism, metaphysics, mysticism, eclecticism; the modern
proletariat has its theory – dialectic materialism. Even in the sphere of
so-called “universal” conditions – in ethics, views on art, on behavior – the
interests, world view, and ideals of the bourgeoisie and those of the
enlightened proletariat represent two camps, separated from each other by an
abyss. And whenever the formal strivings and the interests of the proletariat
and those of the bourgeoisie (as a whole or in its most progressive part) seem
identical – for example, in the field of democratic aspirations - there, under
the identity of forms and slogans, is hidden the most complete divergence of
contents and essential politics.
There can be no talk of a collective and uniform will, of the
self-determination of the “nation” in a society formed in such a manner. If we
find in the history of modern societies “national” movements, and struggles for
“national interests,” these are usually class movements of the ruling strata of
the bourgeoisie, which can in any given case represent the interest of the
other strata of the population only insofar as under the form of “national
interests” it defends progressive forms of historical development, and insofar
as the working class has not yet distinguished itself from the mass of the
“nation” (led by the bourgeoisie) into an independent, enlightened political
class.
In this sense, the French bourgeoisie had the right to come forth
as the third estate in the Great Revolution in the name of the French people,
and even the German bourgeoisie in 1848 could still regard themselves, to a
certain degree, as the representatives of the German “nation” – although The Communist Manifesto and, in
part, the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung were already the indicators of a distinct class politics of the
proletariat in Germany. In both cases this meant only that the revolutionary
class concern of the bourgeoisie was, at that stage of social development, the
concern of the class of people who still formed, with the bourgeoisie, a
politically uniform mass in relation to reigning feudalism.
This circumstance shows that the ”rights of nations” cannot be a
yardstick for the position of the Socialist Party on the nationality question.
The very existence of such a party is proof that the bourgeoisie has stopped being the representative of
the entire mass of the people, that the class of the proletariat is no longer
hidden in the skirts of the bourgeoisie, but has separated itself off as an
independent class with its own social and political aspirations. Because the
concepts of “nations,” of “rights,” and the “will of the people” as a uniform
whole are, as we have said, remnants from the times of immature and unconscious
antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the application of that
idea by the class-conscious and independently organized proletariat would be a
striking contradiction – not a contradiction against academic logic, but ahistorical contradiction.
With respect to the nationality question in contemporary society,
a socialist party must take class antagonism into account. The Czech
nationality question has one form for the young Czech petite bourgeoisie and
another for the Czech proletariat. Nor can we seek a single solution of the
Polish national question for Koscielski and his stable boy in Miroslawie, for
the Warsaw and Lodz bourgeoisie and for class-conscious Polish workers all at
the same time; while the Jewish question is formulated in one way in the minds
of the Jewish bourgeoisie, and in another for the enlightened Jewish
proletariat. For Social Democracy, the nationality question is, like all other social
and political questions, primarily a
question of class interests.
In the Germany of the 1840s there existed a kind of
mystical-sentimental socialism, that of the “true socialists” Karl Grün and
Moses Hess; this kind of socialism was represented later in Poland by
Limanowski. After the 1840s there appeared in Poland a Spartan edition of the
same – see the Lud Polski [Polish People] in the early 1870s and Pobudka [Reveille] at the end of that decade. This socialism strove for everything
good and beautiful. And on that basis, Limanowski, later the leader of the PPS,
tried to weld together Polish socialism and the task of reconstructing Poland,
with the observation that socialism is an idea that is obviously beautiful, and
patriotism is a no less beautiful idea, and so “Why shouldn’t two such
beautiful ideas be joined together?”
The only healthy thing in this sentimental socialism is that it is
a utopian parody of the correct idea that a socialist regime has, as the final
goal of the proletariat’s aspirations, taken the pledge that by abolishing the
domination of classes, for the first time in history it will guarantee the
realization of the highest ideals of humanity.
And this is really the content and the essential meaning of the
principle presented to the International Congress at London [in 1896] in the
resolution quoted. “The right of Nations to self-determination” stops being a
cliché only in a social regime where the “right to work” has stopped being an
empty phrase. A socialist regime, which eliminates not only the domination of
one class over another, but also the very existence of social classes and their
opposition, the very division of society into classes with different interests
and desires, will bring about a society which is the sum total individuals tied
together by the harmony and solidarity their interests, a uniform whole with a
common, organized will and the ability to satisfy it. The socialist regime will
realize directly the “nation” as a uniform will – insofar as the nations within
that regime in general will constitute separate social organisms or, as Kautsky
states, will join into one – and the material conditions for its free
self-determination. In a word, society will win the ability to freely determine
its national existence when it has the ability to determine its political being
and the conditions of its creation. “Nations” will control their historical
existence when human society controls its social processes.
Therefore, the analogy which is drawn by partisans of the “right
of nations to self-determination” between that “right” and all democratic
demands, like the right of free speech, free press, freedom of association and
of assembly, is completely incongruous. These people point out that we support
the freedom of association because we are the party of political freedom; but
we still fight against hostile bourgeois parties. Similarly, they say, we have
the democratic duty to support the self-determination of nations, but this fact
does not commit us to support every individual tactic of those who fight for
self-determination.
The above view completely overlooks the fact that these “rights,”
which have a certain superficial similarity, lie on completely different
historical levels. The rights of association and assembly, free speech, the
free press. etc., are the legal forms of existence of a mature bourgeois
society. But “the right of nations to self-determination” is only a
metaphysical formulation of an idea which in bourgeois society is completely
non-existent and can be realized only on the basis of a socialist regime.
However, as it is practiced today, socialism is not at all a
collection of all these mystical “noble” and “beautiful” desires, but only a
political expression of well-defined conditions, that is, the fight of the class
of the modern proletariat against the domination of the bourgeoisie. Socialism
means the striving of the proletariat to bring about the dictatorship of its
class in order to get rid of the present form of production. This task is the
main and guiding one for the Socialist Party as the party of the proletariat:
it determines the position of that party with respect to all the several
problems of social life.
Social Democracy is the class party of the proletariat. Its
historical task is to express the class interests of the proletariat and also
the revolutionary interests of the development of capitalist society toward
realizing socialism. Thus, Social Democracy is called upon to realize not the
right of nations to self-determination but only the right of the working class,
which is exploited and oppressed, of the proletariat, to self-determination.
From that position Social Democracy examines all social and political questions
without exception, and from that standpoint it formulates its programmatic demands.
Neither in the question of the political forms which we demand in the state,
nor in the question of the state’s internal or external policies, nor in the
questions of law or education, of taxes or the military, does Social Democracy
allow the “nation” to decide its fate according to its own vision of
self-determination. All of these questions affect the class interests of the
proletariat in a way that questions of national-political and national-cultural
existence do not. But between those questions and the national-political and
national-cultural questions, exist usually the closest ties of mutual
dependence and causality. As a result, Social Democracy cannot here escape the
necessity of formulating these demands individually, and demanding actively the
forms of national-political and national-cultural existence which best
correspond to the interests of the proletariat and its class struggle at a
given time and place, as well as to the interests of the revolutionary
development of society. Social Democracy cannot leave these questions to be
solved by “nations.”
This becomes perfectly obvious as soon as we bring the question
down from the clouds of abstraction to the firm ground of concrete conditions.
The “nation” should have the “right” to self-determination. But
who is that “nation” and who has the authority and the “right” to speak for the
“nation” and express its will? How can we find out what the “nation” actually
wants? Does there exist even one political party which would not claim that it
alone, among all others, truly expresses the will of the “nation,” whereas all
other parties give only perverted and false expressions of the national will?
All the bourgeois, liberal parties consider themselves the incarnation of the
will of the people and claim the exclusive monopoly to represent the “nation.”
But conservative and reactionary parties refer no less to the will and
interests of the nation, and within certain limits, have no less of a right to
do so. The Great French Revolution was indubitably an expression of the will of
the French nation, but Napoleon, who juggled away the work of the Revolution in
his coup of the
18th Brumaire, based his entire state reform on the principle of “la volonté generale” [the general will].
In 1848, the will of the “nation” produced first the republic and
the provisional government, then the National Assembly, and finally Louis
Bonaparte, who cashiered the Republic, the provisional government, and the
national assembly. During the[1905] Revolution in Russia, liberalism demanded in the name of the
people a “cadet” ministry; absolutism, in the name of the same people, arranged
the pogroms of the Jews, while the revolutionary peasants expressed their
national will by sending the estates of the gentry up in smoke. In Poland, the
party of the Black Hundreds, National Democracy, had a claim to be the will of
the people, and in the name of “the self-determination of the nation” incited
“national” workers to assassinate socialist workers.
Thus the same thing happens to the “true” will of the nation as to
the true ring in Lessing’s story of Nathan the Wise: it has been lost and it
seems almost impossible to find it and to tell it from the false and
counterfeit ones. On the surface, the principle of democracy provides a way of
distinguishing the true will of the people by determining the opinion of the
majority.
The nation wants what the majority of the people want. But woe to
the Social Democratic Party which would ever take that principle as its own
yardstick: that would condemn to death Social Democracy itself as the
revolutionary party. Social Democracy by its very nature is a party
representing the interests of a huge
majority of the nation. But it is also for the time being in bourgeois society,
insofar as it is a matter of expressing the conscious will of
the nation, the party of a minority which only seeks to become the majority. In
its aspirations and its political program it seeks to reflect not the will of a
majority of the nation, but on the contrary, the embodiment of the conscious
will of the proletariat alone. And even within that class, Social Democracy is
not and does not claim to be the embodiment of the will of the majority. It
expresses only the will and the consciousness of the most advanced and most
revolutionary section of the urban-industrial proletariat. It tries to expand
that will and to clear a way for a majority of the workers by making them
conscious of their own interests. “The will of the nation” or its majority is
not therefore an idol for Social Democracy before which it humbly prostrates
itself. On the contrary, the historical mission of Social Democracy is based
above all on revolutionizing and forming the will of the “nation”; that is, its
working-class majority. For the traditional forms of consciousness which the
majority of the nation, and therefore the working classes, display in bourgeois
society are the usual forms of bourgeois consciousness, hostile to the ideals
and aspirations of socialism. Even in Germany, where Social Democracy is the
most powerful political party, it is still today, with its three and a quarter
million voters, a minority compared to the eight million voters for bourgeois
parties and the thirty million who have the right to vote. The statistics on
parliamentary electors give, admittedly, only a rough idea of the relation of
forces in times of peace. The German nation then “determines itself” by
electing a majority of conservatives, clerics, and freethinkers, and puts its
political fate in their hands. And the same thing is happening, to an even greater
degree, in all other countries.
V
Let us
take a concrete example in an attempt to apply the principle that the “nation”
should “determine itself.”
With respect to Poland at the present stage of the revolution, one
of the Russian Social Democrats belonging to the editorial committee of the now
defunct paper, Iskra, in 1906
explained the concept of the indispensable Warsaw constituent assembly in the
following way:
if we
start from the assumption that the political organization of Russia is the
decisive factor determining the current oppression of the nationalities, then
we must conclude that the proletariat of the oppressed nationalities and the
annexed countries should be extremely active in the organization of an
all-Russian constituent assembly.
This assembly could, if it wished, carry out its revolutionary
mission, and break the fetters of force with which tsardom binds to itself the
oppressed nationalities.
And there is no other satisfactory, that is, revolutionary way of
solving that question than by implementing the rights of the nationalities to
determine their own fate. [Emphasis in the entire citation is RLs.] The task of
a united proletarian party of all nationalities in the assembly will be to
bring about such a solution of the nationality question, and this task can be
realized by the Party only insofar as it is based on the movement of the
masses, on the pressure they put on the constituent assembly.
But in what concrete form should the admitted right to
self-determination be realized?
Where the nationality question can be more or less identified with
the existence of a legal state – as is the case in Poland – then the organ
which can realize the nation’s right to self-determination can and should be a national constituent assembly whose special task is to
determine the relation of a given “borderland country” to the state as a whole,
to decide whether it should belong to the state or break away from it, to
decide its internal set-up and its future connection with the state as a whole.
And therefore the constituent assembly of Poland should decide
whether Poland will become part of a new Russia and what its constitution
should be. And the Polish
proletariat should use all its strength to insure that its class makes its mark
on the decision of that organ of national self-government.
If we should ask the all-Russian assembly to hand the solution of
the Polish national question over to the Warsaw sejm, I do not believe that
there is any need to put off calling that sejm until the Petersburg constituents
should take up the nationality question.
On the contrary, I think that the slogan of a constituent assembly
in Warsaw should be put forth now, at the same time as the slogan for an
all-Russian constituent assembly. The government which finally calls a
constituent assembly for all Russia should also call (or sanction the calling
of) a special constituent sejm for Poland. The
job of the all-Russian assembly will be to sanction the work of the Warsaw sejm, and in
the light of the different social forces involved in the Petersburg constituent
assembly, the more this is given on the basis of the real principles of
democracy the more decisively and clearly will the Polish nation express its
national will. It will do this most clearly in the elections to the sejm
especially called to decide the future fate of Poland. On the basis of this
sejm’s decisions, the representatives of the Polish and Russian proletariat in
the all-Russian assembly will be able to energetically defend the real
recognition of the right to self-determination.
Thus, the simultaneous calling of all-Russian and all-Polish
constituent assemblies: this should be our slogan.
The presentation by the proletariat of the demand for a
constituent assembly for Poland should not be taken to mean that the Polish
nation would be represented in the all-Russian assembly by any delegation of
the Warsaw sejm.
I think that such representation in the all-Russian assembly would
not correspond to the interests of revolutionary development. It would join the
proletariat and bourgeois elements of the Polish sejm by bonds of mutual
solidarity and responsibility, in contradiction to the real mutual relations of
their interests.
In the all-Russian assembly, the proletariat and bourgeoisie of
Poland should not be represented by one delegation. But this would occur even
if a delegation were sent from the sejm to an assembly which included
representatives of all the parties of the sejm proportionally to their numbers.
In this case, the direct and independent representation of the Polish
proletariat in the assembly would disappear, and the very creation of real
political parties in Poland would be made difficult. Then the elections to the
Polish sejm, whose main task is to define the political relations between
Poland and Russia, would not show the political and social faces of the leading
parties, as elections to an all-Russian assembly could do; for the latter type
of elections would advance, besides the local, partial, historically temporary
and specifically national questions, the
general questions of politics and socialism, which really divide contemporary
societies. (Here as everywhere I speak of a definite manner of solving the
nationality question for Poland, not touching those changes which may prove
themselves indispensable while resolving this question for other nations. – Note of the author of the cited article.) [The
above article appeared in Robotnik, the
organ of the PPS, no.75, February 7, 1906.- Note
of the editorial board of Przeglad Sozial-demokratyczny]
This article gives a moral sanction on the part of the opportunist
wing of Russian Social Democracy to the slogan put forth by the PPS in the
first period of the revolution: that is, to the Warsaw constituent assembly.
However, it had no practical result. After the dissolution of the PPS, the
so-called left wing of that party, having publicly rejected the program of
rebuilding Poland, found itself forced to abandon its partial program of
nationalism in the form of the slogan of a Warsaw constituent assembly. But the
article remains a characteristic attempt to give practical effect to the
principle of “the right of nations to self-determination.”
In the above argument, which we quoted in full in order to be able
to examine it from all aspects, several points strike the reader. Above all,
according to the author, on the one hand “a constituent assembly of Poland
should decide whether Poland should enter the formation of a new Russia and
what kind of constitution it should have.” On the other, “the Polish
proletariat should use its strength to insure that its class will make the
greatest mark on the decisions of that organ of national self-government. “
Here the class will of the Polish proletariat is expressly opposed to the
passive will of the Polish “nation.” The class will of the proletariat can
obviously leave “its mark” on the decisions of the Warsaw constituent assembly
only if it is clearly and expressly formulated; in other words, the class party
of the Polish proletariat, the Socialist Party, must have a well-defined
program with respect to the national question, which it can introduce in the
Warsaw constituent assembly a program which corresponds not to the will of “the
nation” but only to the will and interests of the Polish proletariat. Then, in
the constituent assembly, in the national question, one will, or “the
self-determination of the proletariat” will come out against the will or “the
self-determination of the nation.” For Polish Socialists, the “nation’s right
to self-determination” as an obligatory principle in fact disappears, and is
replaced by a clearly defined political program on the national question.
The result is rather strange. The Russian Social Democratic Labor
Party leaves the solution of the Polish question up to the Polish “nation.” The
Polish Socialists should not pick it up but try, as hard as they can, to solve
this question according to the interests and will of the proletariat. However,
the party of the Polish proletariat is organizationally tied to the all-state
party, for instance, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and
Lithuania is a part of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Thus, Social
Democracy of all of Russia, united both in ideas and factually, has two
different positions. As a whole, it stands for the “nations in its constituent
parts, it stands for the separate proletariat of each nation. But these
positions can be quite different and may even be completely opposed to each
other. The sharpened class antagonism in all of Russia makes it a general rule
that in the national-political question, as in questions of internal politics,
the proletarian parties take completely different positions from the bourgeois
and petit bourgeois parties of the separate nationalities. What position should
the Labor Party of Russia then take in the case of such a collision?
Let us suppose for the sake of argument, that in the federal
constituent assembly, two contradictory programs are put forth from Poland: the
autonomous program of National Democracy and the autonomous program of Polish
Social Democracy, which are quite at odds with respect to internal tendency as
well as to political formulation. What will the position of Russian Social
Democracy be with regard to them? Which of the programs will it recognize as an
expression of the will and “self-determination” of the Polish “nation”? Polish
Social Democracy never had any pretensions to be speaking in the name of the
“nation.” National Democracy comes forth as the expresser of the “national”
will. Let us also assume for a moment that this party wins a majority at the
elections to the constituent assembly by taking advantage of the ignorance of
the petit bourgeois elements as well as certain sections of the proletariat. In
this case, will the representatives of the all-Russian proletariat, complying
with the requirements of the formula of their program, come out in favor of the
proposals of National Democracy and go against their own comrades from Poland?
Or will they associate themselves with the program of the Polish proletariat,
leaving the “right of nations” to one side as a phrase which binds them to
nothing? Or will the Polish Social Democrats be forced, in order to reconcile
these contradictions in their program, to come out in the Warsaw constituent
assembly, as well as in their own agitation in Poland, in favor of their own
autonomous program, but to the federal constituent assembly, as members well aware
of the discipline of the Social Democratic Party of Russia, for the program of
National Democracy, that is, against their own program?
Let us take yet another example. Examining the question in a
purely abstract form, since the author has put the problem on that basis, let
us suppose, to illustrate the principle, that in the national assembly of the
Jewish population of Russia for why should the right to create separate
constituent assemblies be limited to Poland, as the author wants? – the Zionist
Party somehow wins a majority and demands that the all-Russian constituent
assembly vote funds for the emigration of the entire Jewish community. On the
other hand, the class representatives of the Jewish proletariat firmly resist
the position of the Zionists as a harmful and reactionary utopia. What position
will Russian Social Democracy take in this conflict?
It will have two choices. The “right of nations to
self-determination” might be essentially identical with the determination of
the national question by the proletariat in question that is, with the
nationality program of the concerned Social Democratic parties. In such a case,
however, the formula of the “right of nations” in the program of the Russian
party is only a mystifying paraphrase of the class position. Or, alternatively,
the Russian proletariat as such could recognize and honor only the will of the
national majorities of the
nationalities under Russian subjugation, even though the proletariat of the
respective “nations” should come out against this majority with their own class
program. And in this case, it is a political dualism of a special type; it
gives dramatic expression to the discord between the “national” and class
positions: it points up the conflict between the position of the federal workers’
party and that of the parties of the particular nationalities which make it up.
A special Polish constituent assembly is to be the organ of
realizing the right of the nation to self-determination. But that right is, in
reality, severely limited by the author, and in two directions. First, the
competence of the Warsaw constituent assembly is reduced to the special
question of the relation of Poland to Russia and to the constitution for
Poland. Then, even within this domain, the decisions of the “Polish nation” are
subordinated to the sanction of an all-Russian constituent assembly. The
assembly, however – if this reservation is to have any meaning at all – can
either grant or deny these sanctions. Under such conditions the unlimited
“right of the nation to self-determination” becomes rather problematic. The
national partisans of the slogan of a separate Warsaw constituent assembly
would not at all agree to the reduction of their competence to the narrow area
of relations between Poland and Russia. They wanted to give the assembly the
power over all the internal and external relations of the social life of
Poland. And from the standpoint of the “right of nations to
self-determination,” they would undoubtedly have right and logic on their side.
For there seems to be no reason why “self-determination” should mean only the
solution of the external fate of the nation and of its constitution, and not of
all social and political matters. Besides, the separation of the relation of
Poland to Russia and the constitution of Poland from the “general problems of
politics and socialism” is a construction which is artificial to the highest
degree. If the “constitution of Poland” is to determine – as it evidently must
– the electoral law, the law of unions and meetings, the law of the press,
etc., etc., for Poland, then it is not clear what political questions remain
for the federal constituent assembly to solve with respect to Poland. From this
point of view, only one of two points of view is possible: either the Warsaw constituent
assembly is to be the essential organ for the self-determination of the Polish
nation, and in this case it can be only an organ on the same level as the
Petersburg constituent assembly; or, the constituent assembly of Warsaw plays
only the role of a national sejm in a position of dependence on and
subordination to the federal constituent assembly, and in this case, “the right
of the nation to self-determination,” dependent on the sanction of the Russian
“nation,” reminds one of the German concept: “Die
Republik mit dem Grossherzog an der Spitze” [“The Republic with the
Grand Duke at the Head”] .
The author himself helps us to guess how, in his understanding,
the “right of the nation,” proclaimed in the introduction so charmingly in the
form of a Warsaw constituent assembly, is finally canceled out by the
competence and right of sanction of the Petersburg constituent assembly.
In this matter, the Menshevik journalist adopts the view that the
Warsaw constituent assembly will be the organ of national interests, whereas
the federal assembly will be the organ of the class and general social
interests, the terrain of the class struggle between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie. Thus, the author shows so much mistrust of the Warsaw organ of the
“national will” that he opposes the representation of that national sejm in the
Petersburg constituent assembly, for which he demands direct elections from
Poland to insure the best representation of the interests of the Polish
proletariat. The defender of two constituent assemblies feels instinctively
that even with universal and equal elections to the Warsaw assembly, its very
individual nature would weaken the position of the Polish proletariat, while
the combined entry of the Polish proletariat with the proletariat of the entire
state in a general constituent assembly would strengthen the class position and
its defense. Hence arises his vacillation between one and the other position
and his desire to subordinate the organ of the “national” will to the organ of
the class struggle. This is, then, again an equivocal political position, in
which the collision between the “national” point of view and the class point of
view takes the form of the opposition between the Warsaw and the Petersburg
constituent assemblies. Only one question remains: since the representation in
a federal constituent assembly is more useful for the defense of the Polish
proletariat, then why cannot that body resolve the Polish national question, in
order to insure the preponderance of the will and interests of the Polish
proletariat? So many hesitations and contradictions show how desirable it would
be for the “nation” and the working class to develop a common position.
Apart from this, we must add that the entire construction of the
Warsaw constituent assembly as the organ of national “self-determination” is
only a house of cards: the dependence or independence of nation-states is
determined not by the vote of majorities in parliamentary representations, but
only by socio-economic development, by material class interests, and as regards
the external political affairs, by armed struggle, war, or insurrection. The
Warsaw assembly could only really determine the fate of Poland if Poland had
first, by means of a successful uprising, won factual independence from Russia.
In other words, the Polish people can realize its “right” to self-determination
only when it has the actual ability, the necessary force for this, and then it
will realize it not on the basis of its “rights” but on the basis of its power.
The present revolution did not call forth an independence movement in Poland;
it did not show the least tendency to separate Poland from Russia. On the
contrary, it buried the remains of these tendencies by forcing the national
party (National Democracy) to renounce the program of the reconstruction of
Poland, while the other party (the PPS) was smashed to bits and also, midway in
the struggle, was forced to renounce this program explicitly. Thus, the “right”
of the Polish nation to self-determination remains – the right to eat off gold
plates.
The demand for a Warsaw constituent assembly is therefore
obviously deprived of all political or theoretical importance and represents
only a momentary tentative improvisation of deteriorated Polish nationalism, like
a soap bubble which bursts immediately after appearing. This demand is useful
only as an illustration of the application of “the right of a nation to
self-determination” in practice. This illustration is a new proof that by
recognizing the “right of nations to self-determination” in the framework of
the present regime, Social Democracy is offering the “nations” either the cheap
blessing to do what they (the “nations”) are in a position to do by virtue of
their strength, or else an empty phrase with no force at all. On the other
hand, this position brings Social Democracy into conflict with its true
calling, the protection of the class interests of the proletariat and the
revolutionary development of society, which the creators of scientific
socialism used as the basis of their view on the nationality question.
The preservation of that metaphysical phrase in the program of the
Social Democratic Party of Russia would be a betrayal of the strictly class
position which the party has tried to observe in all points of its program. The
ninth paragraph should be replaced by a concrete formula, however general,
which would provide a solution of the nationality question in accordance with
the interests of the proletariat of the particular nationalities. That does not
in the least mean that the program of the Social Democratic organization of the
respective nationalities should become, eo
ipso, the program of the all-Russian party. A fundamental critical
appraisal of each of these programs by the whole of the workers’ party of the
state is necessary, but this appraisal should be made from the point of view of
the actual social conditions, from the point of view of a scientific analysis
of the general tendencies of capitalist development, as well as the interests
of the class struggle of the proletariat. This alone can indicate a uniform and
consistent position of the party as a whole and in its constituent parts.
[2] Towarzystwo
Demokratyczne Polskie (Democratic Society/Polish), 1832-1862, was the
biggest organization of Polish emigrants in France and in England, professing
revolutionary and democratic views. After 1840, it was involved in preparing an
insurrection in the three parts of partitioned Poland.
Pobudka (Reveille),
also called La Diane, was a journal of the Polish National
Socialist Party published in Paris, 1889-1893.
Liga
Narodwa (National
League), founded 1893 as a successor of the “Polish League,” was a secret
political organization in Russian, German, and Austrian Poland. It promoted
class solidarity and nationalism; it represented the interests of the
propertied classes. In 1896, it founded the Party of National Democrats (Endecja),
which was considered bourgeois, with strong nationalist tendencies.
[3] The above motion
read: ”Whereas, the subjugation of one nation by another can serve only the
interests of capitalists and despots, while for working people in both
oppressed and oppressor nation it is equally pernicious; and whereas, in
particular, the Russian tsardom, which owes its internal strength and its
external significance to the subjugation and partition of Poland, constitutes a
permanent threat to the development of the international workers’ movement, the
Congress hereby resolves: that the independence of Poland represents an
imperative political demand both for the Polish proletariat and for the
international labor movement as a whole.” [Apparently note by R.L.]
[4] Only the German
branch of the Polish Socialist Party thought it relevant to include the London
Resolution in its program during its struggles with German Social Democracy.
After it joined the German Party again, the PPS adopted the Erfurt program as
its own without reservations.[5] [Apparently note
by R.L.]
[Confusingly
the note below is noted in the note above. Note by transcriber]
[5] The three partitions
(1772, 1793, 1795) had left Poland divided among Russia, Prussia, and Austria
(62 percent, 20 percent, and 18 percent of Polish territory respectively). The
Polish Socialists in each of the occupied areas cooperated in one or another
fashion with the Socialist parties of the partitioning powers, more closely
though with the German Social Democratic Party and the Austrian Social
Democratic Party (until 1898 there was no Russian Socialist Party).
Proletariat, founded in 1882 by Ludwik
Waryński, was called the first Polish Socialist Party. It signed an agreement
with the RussianNarodnaya Volya (People’s Will). After the
destruction of Proletariat in the late 1880s, three small
groups continued to function, the so-called “Second Proletariat,”
(Martin Kasprzak), the Union of Polish Workers (Julian
Marchlewski, Adolf Warszawski, Bronislaw Wesolowski), and the Association
of Workers. Simultaneously with the Proletariat. the Polish
People was organized by Bronislaw Limanowski in Portsmouth in 1881.
In 1892,
the leaders of the Polish Socialist groups of Austrian Galicia and German
Silesia formed distinct and separate Polish parties in their territories. In
November 1892, a congress of all Polish Socialists in exile created the united
Polish Socialist Party (PPS). PPS covered the Russian territories of Poland and
was closely related to the German-Polish Socialist Party and to the Polish
Social Democratic Party in Austrian Galicia. Until the foundation of the Social
Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP) by Rosa Luxemburg, Julian
Marchlewski, Adolf Warszawski, and Leo Jogiches in 1893, the Poles appeared as
one unit at international congresses.
The SDKP
saw itself as the direct successor to Proletariat. Its immediate
aim was a liberal constitution for the entire Russian empire with territorial
autonomy for Poland; Polish independence was specifically rejected. Up to the
First World War, the Polish Socialist movement remained sharply divided on the
issue of Polish independence. After the fusion of SDKP and the Lithuanian
Social Democrats (1899), the new party took the name of Social Democracy of the
Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL).
In 1911,
the SDKPiL split into two factions: the Zarzadowcy faction included Rosa
Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches-Tyszka, Marchlewski, and Felix Dzherzhynski, while the
Roslamowcy faction had as members Hanecki, Radek, the Brothers Stein, and
Bronski. Both factions passed out of existence with the formation of the Polish
Communist Party in 1918. This party was shortly declared illegal; it was almost
totally purged by Stalin in 1937. The direct successor of the Polish Communist
Party was the Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza), founded
in 1942.
The PPS
ceased to exist in 1948 when it was united with the PPR. The fusion of these
two gave birth to the present Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), the ruling
party in the Polish People’s Republic.
[6] Josef Szujski
(1835-1883), Polish historian and statesman, spokesman for a conciliatory,
pro-Austrian policy, co-author of Teka Stanczyka – a political
pamphlet opposing the independence movement in Poland.
Tadeusz
Kosciuszko (1746-1817), Polish general, supreme commander of the so-called
Kosciuszko Insurrection of 1794. Directed against Russia and Prussia – the main
beneficiaries of Poland’s partitions of 1776 and 1793 – the abortive
insurrection was followed by the third partition in 1795, which wiped Poland from
the map of Europe until she regained independence in 1918.
The
November Insurrection, 1830-31, in Russia-occupied Poland, was caused by an
intensified Russianizing policy. The pro-Russian Polish nobility and upper
military class were opposed by revolutionary intellectuals and the
lower-ranking army officers. When the sejm dethroned the tsar, an armed
conflict erupted which ended in Russia’s ultimately liquidating the sovereignty
of the rump Kingdom of Poland.
The
January Insurrection; 1863-64, was directly caused by the draft of Poles into
the tsarist army. Supported by peasants and civilians, the insurrection spread
to the Prussia- and Austria-occupied territories of Poland. It ended in defeat,
and the commander in chief, Romuald Traugutt, was hanged by the Russians.
[7] Actually, the
articles were written by Engels. But Marx submitted them, and it is perfectly
correct for Rosa Luxemburg to cite them as illustrating Marx’s technique of
analysis.
[9] In the minds of legal
formalists and professors, this development appears in the form of the
“degeneration of the national idea.”
The other
stream of nationalist trends appears in the strivings of nations which have
already gained political independence, to assert their superiority and
ascendancy over other nations. These strivings are expressed on the one hand in
the glorification of their past historical virtues or the present features of
their national character, the “soul,” or finally as completely undefined hopes
for a future cultural role, for some kind of a mission of destiny given to
certain nations, strivings which are now christened with the name of
nationalism. On the other hand, these political tendencies bring about the
expansion of the territorial boundaries of a given nation, the strengthening of
its global position by partitioning various other countries and by increasing
its colonial possessions—that is, the politics of imperialism. These movements
embody the further development of the national idea, but they represent a
contradiction of the original contents of that idea, and in its fatal results,
so degrading for civilization, it is impossible not to see the degeneration of that
idea and its death. It is obvious that the century of nationalities has
finished. We must await a new age, colored by new trends. – W.M. Ustinow, Idyeyu
Natsyonalnovo Gosudarstva (Kharkov: 1906). [Apparently note by R.L.]
Last updated on: 11.12.2008
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