The national question has taken different forms at different times. It is tied to the development of feudalism into capitalism and to the development of capitalism into its highest stage, monopoly capitalism (imperialism). Instead of a clear conception of the development of capitalism and the national question along with it, pro-nationalists mix up historical periods and create new ones as they push nationalism and liberal racism. To get the truth about the national question straight, it is necessary to get the history straight.
No one can say much “in general” about the national question. The national question rests on the law of uneven development, the law that capitalism develops at different rates in different nations. In Western Europe and North America, the competitive stage of capitalism brought fully developed nation-states as the only adequate expression of bourgeois economic needs. In other parts of the world, especially in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, development of independent nations did not keep pace. Instead, those areas became preserves for stronger capitalist powers. Originally, dominant nations oppressed colonies for mercantilist purposes. With the advent o monopoly capitalism, however the relations between oppressed and oppressor nations took on the characteristics which today we call imperialism.
Yet the universality of national oppression does not mean that the national question always takes a single form. The “question”–that is, the Marxist analysis of national oppression and its place in the proletarian revolutionary program–takes many different forms. We find the question and its answer in specific conditions of national oppression, in the particular oppression of one nation by another. A mechanical or blanket analysis of the national question is unacceptable. “... The national question does not always have one and the same character, the character and tasks of the national movement vary with the different periods in the development of the revolution.” (SCW: 11, p. 365.) Those who do not understand changes in the national question while recognizing the universality of national oppression under imperialism cannot lead the proletariat in this area or any other for long.
Stalin identifies nations as a product of rising capitalism, of the period of transition from feudal to bourgeois forms of economic relations:
A nation is not merely a historical category but a historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism. The process of elimination of feudalism and development of capitalism was at the same time a process of amalgamation of peoples into nations. (SSW, Cardinal: p. 56.)
In brief, the self-determination of nations is a demand of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. As such, it exists in two primary forms. One, an essentially pre-imperialist form, involves the struggle of oppressed nations against feudal domination, for example, in Tsarist Russia and Austria-Hungary.
Such a situation we call a multi-national state, characteristic of Eastern Europe before World War I. The other form, reaching full maturity only under imperialism, is the domination of colonies (and their arrest at the semi-feudal stage of development) by bourgeois-imperialist powers.
This distinction is important, for too many so-called social scientists–following the lead of Kautsky–persist in calling all domination of the weak by the strong “imperialism” and all oppressed nations “colonies.” Words may be used in that manner, but the different economic imperatives of different social systems must not be confused.
Colonial policy and imperialism existed before this latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and practised imperialism. But “general” disquisitions on imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background, the fundamental difference between social-economic systems, inevitably degenerate into the most vapid banality or bragging, like the comparison: “Greater Rome and Greater Britain.” Even the capitalist colonial policy of previous stages of capitalism is essentially different from the colonial policy of finance capital. (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Peking edition, pp. 97-98.)
Lenin designates 1876 as a watershed between pre-imperialist and imperialist colonial policies (P. 94). About that time, competitive capitalism in Western Europe gave way to monopoly capitalism and the imperialist dash to divide the world for raw materials (pp. 97-98). By 1914, the process had resulted in the complete partition of the world among the imperialist powers. Continued competition for redivision of the colonies resulted in imperialist war. World War I marked the maturity of monopoly capital in all the major industrial countries, including the U.S.
The two dominant forms of the national question, the multi-national state and the imperialist colony, correspond to specific historical forces of development. Multinational states existed and flourished long before the domination of finance capital. Austria-Hungary, for example, became a single political entity in 1815. Tsarist Russia oppressed the weaker nations on its borders all through the nineteenth century.
With the advent of the highest stage of capitalism, casually oppressing weaker border nations became insufficient. Monopoly capitalists had to monopolize sources of raw materials (and potential sources as well), not only to insure their own supply but to deprive competitors. As competitive capitalism gave way to imperialism, colonial oppression took the spotlight of the national question away from multi-national states.
The ascending development of monopoly capital went hand in hand with colonial oppression of a specific, imperialist type; the decline of multinational states was the other side of the same coin.
This process is reflected by the writings of our teachers who examined imperialism around the time of World War I. Lenin, for example, wrote in 1916 about the three types of countries in relation to self-determination of nations. Those three types he designated as the imperialist or oppressor nations, the multinational states of Eastern Europe, and the “semi-colonial countries and all colonies” like China and Turkey. He clearly distinguished between two types of oppressed nations and implied that the more important concern lay a that time with Eastern Europe where ” ... the twentieth century ... particularly developed the bourgeois-democratic national movements and intensified the national struggle.” In the colonies on the other hand, “... the bourgeois-democratic movements have either hardly begun, or are far from having been completed.” (Lenin on the National and Colonial Questions, Peking pamphlet, pp. 11-13.) In another place, Lenin elaborated:
The greater part of the dependent nations in Europe are capitalistically more developed than the colonies (though not all, the exceptions being the Albanians and many non-Russian peoples in Russia). But it is just this that generates greater resistance to national oppression and annexations! (“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” LCW:22, p. 338.)
Of course, by the early 1920’s, the attention of Marxists on the national question had shifted appreciably toward the colonies and away from the “capitalistically more developed” nations of Eastern Europe. Characteristic of the developing emphasis on the colonies is Lenin’s “Address to the Second All-Russian Congress of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East.” (LCW: 30, pp. 151-162.) Here, he points out how the national question has become part of the international struggle against imperialism, embracing all dependent nations regardless of their level of development.
Lenin’s analyses of 1916 and 1919 chart the development of the national question over a period of time. Between 1916 and 1919 the continued plunder of the First Imperialist World War taught revolutionaries that liberation of oppressed nations would come only in the defeat of imperialism and not by bourgeois reforms. And the October Revolution of 1917 showed them that imperialism can only be defeated by the dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry. With all other bourgeois-democratic demands, national liberation passed through the ascendancy of imperialism, the twilight of capitalism, and entered the era of socialism marked by the October Revolution and transformed into an element of the proletarian world revolution. Stalin portrayed the October Revolution as “establishing a tie between the peoples of the backward East and the advanced West, ... ranging them in a common camp of struggle against imperialism.” (“The October Revolution and the National Question,” SSW, Cardinal, p. 104.)
Mao Tsetung summarized the same development in describing the new aspect of the Chinese revolution.
Since these events [World War I and the October Revolution], the Chinese bourgeois-democratic revolution has changed, it has come within the new category of bourgeois-democratic revolutions and, as far as the alignment of revolutionary forces is concerned, forms part of the proletarian-socialist world revolution. (“On New Democracy,” MSW: 2, p. 343.)
The fight against imperialism became world-wide; in the context of that struggle, the fight for the liberation of colonies and all other aspects of the bourgeois-democratic revolution became the task of the proletariat. As if signaling this new orientation of the revolutionary movement, the multi-national states so prominent in Eastern Europe before World War I began to disappear. Russia’s proletarian revolution won self-determination for dependent nations. Austria-Hungary disintegrated. Germany consolidated its bourgeois-democratic revolution and its national question in the process. History nearly cleared the stage of multi-national states and focused the attention of anti-imperialist forces on the colonies.
The next brief historical period, ending with World War II, saw the. national question transformed from ”normal” relations of oppressed and oppressor nations into the worldwide united front against fascism. The struggle of the French people against German occupation was as much a national liberation issue as the anti-Japanese campaign in China. Mainly because of massive U.S. intervention and the errors and weaknesses of most European communist parties, the working classes of the western countries were unable to follow the lead of the Chinese and Albanians in turning victory over fascism into state power. The end of World War II marked a general return to more familiar forms of the national question, of dominant imperialist nations in Western Europe and North America and oppressed colonial nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The war, however, changed two things. The process of eliminating multi-national states and dependent nations of Eastern Europe was completed as all remaining remnants (e.g., Albania, Hungary, Lithuania, Bulgaria, etc.) fulfilled their bourgeois-democratic revolutions under the leadership of the proletariat. In two semi-colonies, China and Albania, peasants and workers brought the promise of the October Revolution to the colonial peoples by likewise turning their national liberation struggle into the dictatorship of the proletariat.
One other thing changed with World War II. The balance of forces between imperialist countries shifted in favor of the U.S. In its new role as Number One Imperialist Power, the U.S. showed nothing of its so-called democratic institutions in handling relations with oppressed nations. U.S. imperialism’s treatment of its colonies has been brutal and, if anything, imperialist plunder of the underdeveloped world has increased. But U.S. imperialists (and others) did alter their approach. With the example of the Chinese Revolution before them, oppressed peoples were not a-bout to put up with direct colonial relationships any longer. Forced to conceal the real operations of imperialism, the monopoly capitalists substituted neo-colonialism for direct colonial rule.
Especially symptomatic were all the independence movements of African nations in the 1960’s. For the most part led by the national bourgeoisie, these revolutions gained independence in name and some maneuverability among different imperialists. But in every case–including Algeria–imperialists maintained control with a thousand economic and political threads.
Carefully supervised by imperialist-dominated organizations such as the U.N., colonial “independence” supposedly ushered in a new era of understanding among nations. Any understanding on this basis varies little from the understanding taught us by the First Imperialist World War: imperialists “understand” they must oppress other nations; colonial nations “understand” they are oppressed nations and must overthrow imperialism. And Marxist-Leninists understand that national liberation only comes with anti-imperialist revolution under the leadership of the working class.
Such is the status of the national question in the world today. Such is the essence of the profound slogan of the Third (Communist) International: “Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the World Unite!” But as we progress in our study of “national questions” within the U.S., we will find that many pro-nationalists fail to deal with the inconsistencies that this analysis exposes in their line. Their distortions of Marxism prove that they seek to bend the essence of the national question to a liberal purpose. Symptomatic of their ignorance of historical development, pro-nationalists generally confuse the periods of bourgeois-democratic and proletarian-socialist revolution as they relate to the national question. They do it, however, in different ways.
The Communist League believes that the national question is everywhere and. always the same, a question of colonies under imperialist domination. “... Every question of oppressed nations involves the question of colonial oppression.” “ ... There cannot be an oppressed nation that isn’t a colony.” (“The Negro Nation–Colony of USNA Imperialism,” People’s Tribune, 6:7, July 1974, pp. 2 and 8.) Contrary to CL’s dictum, all oppressed nations are not colonies, as we have seen. But CL tries to prove otherwise with some “creative quoting” of Lenin.
In “A Caricature of Marxism and ’Imperialist Economism’”, Lenin lectures a Russian chauvinist on the nature of the national question in Russia. “A Russian Socialist who does not merely repeat what others say, but who thinks for himself, must realize that as far as Russia is concerned, it is particularly absurd to attempt to draw a serious distinction between oppressed nations and colonies.” (p. 255.) CL tries to turn this statement into proof that there is no difference between oppressed nations and colonies. Lenin set out to prove that different forms of national oppression existed in Russia and in Western Europe and the Communist League, with very little effort, can destroy the intent of his words and imply that Lenin endorsed their fantasy that “there cannot be an oppressed nation that isn’t a colony.”
The Revolutionary Union accomplishes the same task through the back door. They see different periods and different forms of the national question, and they quote Stalin extensively to show that objective factors change over time and space. Then they twist Stalin’s words, which teach a dialectical approach to history, into the bourgeois notion of relativity: the same thing can take as many diverse forms as we like without altering its essence; differences between phenomena, no matter how extensive, are simply a matter of quantity. The thrust of the R.U.’s entire approach to the national question is to pursue different “forms” past the point where they constitute a national question at all.
R.U. recognizes the two periods of the national question we have already analyzed. They say the first period corresponded to the elimination of feudalism in Europe and was therefore the “old” bourgeois-democratic revolution. After World War I and the October Revolution, the second period introduced the question of colonies where the bourgeois-democratic revolution is still an internal issue but is now in the hands of the proletariat which uses it as the first step to socialism in a two-stage revolution. This period they describe as “bourgeois-democratic of a new type.” Then, they ask, if there have been two periods –why not three?!
The Black national question in the U.S. today, however, while certainly a part of the world socialist revolution, is not in the period of new democratic revolution, but of proletarian-socialist revolution.
It is in a new, or third, period.
...Summing up the general development of the national question, it is essentially correct to outline three general historical situations: bourgeois-democratic of an old type, bourgeois-democratic of a new type, and proletarian-socialist. (“Living Socialism and Dead Dogmatism,” in Red Papers VI, p. 99.)
The “third period” they define as national questions which do not involve a bourgeois-democratic revolution at all. These national questions exist where there is a nation to be freed, but it is so integrated into the class structure of the oppressor nation–it is an “intra-state problem–that liberation only comes with proletarian revolution in the oppressor nation. Only one stage typifies this type of revolution and this type of national question.
The R.U.’s “third period” is an invention. Marxists, including Mao, have been quite content to designate the second period the era of proletarian world revolution, despite the number of stages in the revolution, be it one or two.
Where does the R.U. depart from Marxism in seeing the need for a third stage to fulfill that historical task? In the first place, they ignore the development that led from the first to the second phase of the national question. That makes it easy to skip over the historical justification for the third phase–it’s just there! In reality, the first period was typified by the multinational states of Eastern Europe, a product of incomplete bourgeois-democratic revolutions in capitalist and semi-feudal countries. The second period came about after World War I and the October Revolution (which the R.U. mentions) because (which the R.U. does not mention) those two events signaled l) the advent of the era of proletarian revolution and the division of the world into socialist and imperialist camps, 2) the succession of the proletariat as the agent for uncompleted bourgeois-democratic revolutions blocking the road to socialism, and 3) the transformation of the national question from an intra-state question of multi-national states to a world-wide question of colonies.
Unless the R.U. wishes to postulate that capitalism has passed into a “higher” stage than imperialism ’or that the historical era has gone beyond proletarian revolution, they have no evidence to support the idea of a “third period” for the national question. The first two periods rest on concrete conditions and changes in the nature of capitalism and the revolutionary movement. They reflect those changes. The R.U.’s “third period” reflects nothing but a metaphysical belief that the form of something can vary indefinitely without reference to the laws of development, not an analysis of a new development of imperialism and its relations of production. This they call making a “concrete analysis.”
The Communist League and the Revolutionary Union would appear to be completely at odds. One sees a continuous, unchanging, national question focused on the colonies. The other sees innumerable forms of the national question and creates new categories for the world revolution. Both are in error; both indulge in caricatures of Marxism for the same purpose. They want to picture the United States as a “multi-national” state which oppresses nations within its borders.