NATIONAL QUESTION AND PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION IN THE MODERN IMPERIALISM Robert Bibeau

By the same author

How to computerize the schoolLes Publications du Québec, CNDP, L’Ingénierie éducative, 1996

The «project» of Fatima. Psychological study of case.Editions L’Harmattan, Psychanalyse et Civilisations, 2012

Worker’s Party Manifesto Éditions Publibook, Essai, 2014

The narcissism, neurosis of a period.Psychological study of case Éditions Publibook, Psychologie, 2015

Publishing House: L’Harmattan

Translation by Claudio Buttinelli. Roma.

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SUMMARY

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1 National question and proletarian revolution

CHAPTER 2 Ferguson, Minneapolis, Dallas, same proletariat, same fight

CHAPTER 3 The Marxists and the national question

CHAPTER 4 Nationalism and Socialism

CHAPTER 5 Marxism, Nationalism and national struggles today

CHAPTER 6 Leninism or Marxism ? The imperialism and the national question

NOTES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Translation by Claudio Buttinelli. ROMA.

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PREFACE

ROBERT BIBEAU

Contrary to the claims of "separatists" and in spite of the media hype surrounding some nationalist events (Brexit, Catalan and Scottish referendums, Flemish and Quebec separatism) the national question is less and less present in the mind of international proletariat. To tell the truth, there is only the right and the bourgeois left to ignite about the chauvinistic nationalist trifles. The deepening of the systematic economic crisis of imperialism causes big political, military and social disorders, the resurgence of nationalist, gregarious vague desires in the petty bourgeois is among them, it will pass. It is necessary to go back to Lenin, the Bolsheviks and to the Russian Revolution to redraw the origin of the confusion generated between the bourgeois struggles of national liberation (called of national independence) and the internationalist anti-capitalist struggles of the proletarian class. Afterward, Stalin carried the banner of Russian National-Bolshevism higher than that of the German National-Socialism and the USSR crushed the German power of Krupp and Messerschmitt, before collapsing in his turn. After the national-Bolshevism, the national-Maoism mounted the Trojan horse of the bourgeois nationalism and made struggling between the "Three worlds"; the "national-imperialist" world of both superpowers; the "national-capitalist" world of the secondary powers and the "national-Third-World" world of the non-aligned countries - preys of the first two worlds and that the Maoist China would have liked enfeoffing -. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Stalin, begun, began the economic capitalist "take off" in China and assured to this emerging power the industrial and financial means of his globalized ambitions. The misfortune of Chinese capital is that its rise occurs when the globalized capitalist mode of production, at its declining imperialist stage - completes its conquest of the planet. The globalized imperialism, having reached its peak can only decline. That is to say, the capital in China, India and Africa complete the proletarianization of the last semi-feudal farmers, the conquest of the last markets, and the exploration of the last regions of peripheral resources. A century after the prediction of Lenin, the world popular uprising is on the agenda and the Chinese proletariat (and not the Chinese farming community as thought by Mao) could give the international insurrectionary start. This evolution determines that the national question will have less importance in the world policy because both classes which struggle for the hegemony are both social classes arisen from the industrial, urban and global capitalist development - the decadent multinational capitalist class and the emerging international proletarian class. From this titanic war will be born surely the communist proletarian mode of production that we do not know and that the

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proletariat will have to learn to control, if at least "the avant-garde" of the bourgeois left can keep silent and let make the revolutionary working class. In this booklet we gathered some texts dealing with the national question. Some of these authors adopt a "Marxist" posture and condemn any position which, in their opinion, does not correspond to the "Marxist" standard. This sectarian and dogmatic behavior is the inheritance of the Second, Third and Fourth International and the integration of these organizations to the bourgeois State apparatus. The "bolshevization" of left organizations was marked by the exclusion of the "dissidents" and the glorification of the gurus by their express couriers, recruited under the militarized "democratic centralism", in order to "protect" the "ideological purity" and the sectarian loyalty towards these ephemeral galleys. Who has not ever heard about the "Little father of the people" and about the "Great Helmsman"? 

This exclusion, which struck at first the opposition of German, Dutch, Polish, Italian and French left, has afterward infiltrated the sects stemming from this opposition. Today, every left-wing sect practises the exclusion, the division and the refusal to discuss, isolating fiercely his activists of any proletarian influence. Evaluating the level of concordance of a class political line with a statutory reference, whether he is Marx or Engels, Bukharin or Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin, Mao or Gramsci, is a dogmatic ideological, dialectical anti-materialist practice, which does not allow to validate an analysis of class, and which succeeds hardly in measuring the conformity of a thought with that of a made sacred and motionless dogma. For our part, we don’t adhere to any sect, to any dogma, totally enfeoffed that we stand with the proletarian class, with its revolutionary interests and with the historic and dialectical materialistic method. 

Robert Bibeau. Director of the web magazine http://www.les7duquebec.com/

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CHAPTER 1

National question and proletarian revolution (1)

Robert Bibeau

Nation and nation-state two banners of the bourgeois left

Nation and nation-state are singular forms of the relations of production generated by the capitalist mode of production (MPC). When this production had peaked and the fundamental contradiction, governing this system, had begun to impede the valuation of capital; when the national relations of production appeared too narrow to allow the expanded reproduction of capital and the development of social productive forces, nation and nation-state became obstacles of which the MPC sought to divest, hoping thus to generate a new era of globalized prosperity. In 1971, the abrogation of Bretton Woods agreements puts an end to monetary barriers in front of the extreme urgency to liberalize and globalize the international trade (2). The efforts to transform the US national dollar in currency of international trade, as well as the embezzlements to bring to the foreground the euro as alternative currency of the world trade, or still, the shenanigans to substitute the Chinese national yuan or the Special Drawing Rights (DTS), show the difficulties of globalized financial system (3).Neither the preservation, nor the conversion of the national relations of production will be able to ensure the sustainability of this dying mode of production. The fundamental contradiction that governs this system is not located between the international productive forces and the national relations of production, but within the same social productive forces, between the dead - constant - automated and digitized capital - already valued, absorbing the living – variable capital - the social workforce, generator of surplus value still not valued by the marketing of products, this is all the drama of this mode of production and the limit of its expansion.

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The international proletarian class must not tag along the national bourgeoisies to try to preserve the “national” relations of production, subjected to the vicissitudes of the systemic crisis of globalized capitalism. The outdated, bourgeois national structures are inoperative in front of the systemic crisis of the capitalist mode of production. All national and/or multinational structures of capitalism, UN, ICC, IMF, WB, OECD, NATO, EU, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Commonwealth of Independent States, are obsolete and will have to be destroyed by the popular uprising.  Under no circumstances the bourgeois national State can become an agent of emancipation of the proletarian class. Instead, the bourgeois national State and the bourgeois nationalist ideology, that would want to legitimize it, are the organizers of the oppression of the working class, unique revolutionary class under the decadent capitalism. Since the emergence of modern imperialism, last phase of the capitalist mode of production, the struggles of so-called “anti-imperialist national liberation” are reactionary wars led by nationalist, chauvinistic bourgeoisies to ensure their status of prison guard of the interests of an imperialist alliance against another one. 

Apogee and decline of the American imperialism

The United States of America, first imperialist power in the twentieth century, were inexorably pushed against France (which they acquired Louisiana in 1803), against Canada (war of 1812), against the rests of the Spanish Empire (1819), against Mexico (1845-1853), then two factions of the American capital turned the one against the other one, the slave Confederacy of the South, against the capitalist Union of the North (1861-1865). More than 620 000 workers-soldiers left the life in this national war, then, the redone unity, the bloodthirsty step westward resumed. Later, they will attack the British commercial and industrial Empire and the Second French Empire which they disintegrated in order to impose the modern - financial – imperialism instead of the old colonial-commercial imperialism, which could not survive because it provoked the ire and the constant uprisings of the colonial national bourgeoisies, wishing to free itself politically from oppressive metropolises, to settle as national intermediaries of the exploitation of the local labor force, delivering themselves the capital gain to the globalized imperialism. All the wars of the so-called "national liberation" will concern this crucial point: what part of the exploitation of local paid employment will be monopolized by the national bourgeoisie and what part will be paid to the foreign capitalists? It is what the American president Theodore Roosevelt understood before Lenin and the Bolsheviks, chauvinistic nationalist feeling that the US exploited to dislodge the competing commercial colonial ex-powers and substitute the financial imperialism on which Lenin wrote splendidly by specifying that even set against the colonial-commercial capitalism the financial imperialism exploits not less the proletarian class, unique producer of capital gain and sworn enemy of the globalized capitalism.

When it seemed obvious that the Bolsheviks did not intend to share the fruits of the exploitation of the Soviet national proletariat with the Western imperialism, the conflict degenerated at war total between the empire of the

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soviets and the Western empire, managed at first by Europe and then by America. The war to be finished entered then in a phase which, after many misadventures, ends in 1991 with the dreadful person Boris Eltsin, annoys mortuary thurifier of the Union of the Soviet socialist republics.

During a century the United States were the allies of these Third-World nationalist bourgeoisies (pseudo non-aligned) wishing to share with the Western war traders a part of the capital gain produced locally. And you saw Mandela strutting about on the stages of the antiapartheid of the UN (that the South Africans undergo even today), Ho Chi Minh, Chou en lai, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, Tito, Nasser, Gandhi, and the others, all happy to collaborate with the American capital, to obtain their national sustenance, more plentiful than what proposed them Stalin, Khrouchtchev and Brezhnev, leader of an prefinancial, outmoded industrial empire. Today, we see Castro - the brother of the other one - who travels his way of Canossa to obtain a safe-conduct of the United States for his integration to the mode of capitalist production.

We can’t lead an anti-imperialist war if it is not also an anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist and anti- bourgeois war. Any and all these struggles of so-called national political liberation have led to the consolidation of nationalist, capitalist factions and to the alienation of the national proletarian class. Whether it is USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Algeria, Cuba, Angola, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Eastern countries, Albania, South Africa, Nepal or Palestine etc. many nationalist experiences that without the elimination of the capitalist mode of production, source of all the alienations, have turned into a nightmare for the over-exploited proletarian class of these gangrenous countries and which must now release from his new jailers.

Reforms or revolution?

It is true, however that in vein attempts to save their capital and their dying mode of production the internationalist capitalist class tries to dismantle the old relations of production and the old structures of national governance for transforming them into something multinational, but having the same economic, political, legal, diplomatic and military exploitative and repressive functions. These transformations of the apparatus of imperialist governance don’t aim at transforming the essence of the capitalist mode of production, but to adapt it to the new requirements of the modern imperialist political economy. The efforts of leftists and populists to direct these reforms, does not constitute a contribution to the reversal of capitalism, no more than the Luddite artisans who would break the spinning machines in the England of 19th

century did not contribute to emancipate the British proletariat.

Thus, Brexit is not a resistance to US imperialism, but a joining the Chinese imperialism, and a demand for renegotiation of the agreements with the European imperialism which will bring nothing to the British proletariat. These futile efforts on behalf of the reformist oligarchy prolong only the agony of this dying mode of production, just like the songs of the nationalist left and the

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complaints of sycophants of the reactionary right to preserve these old national shells.

The mode of production must be replaced. The only solution is to create a new mode of production, not socialist, but proletarian communist. From this new mode of production will arise new relations of production adapted to this new way of producing, communicating, distributing, exchanging and sharing not goods, filled with despoiled capital gain, but social assets for the collective reproduction of the life in society, because you should never forget that the purpose of any mode of production is to assure the conditions of reproduction of human life. We know very little about this new proletarian mode of production – from the name of the class that will bring to light from its hands, from its experience and his knowledges -. The only things we know with certainty is that this mode of production will be international, global, in the service of Man – without social class - no mercantile (goodbye goods, capital gain, profit, currency, capital, private property, wage-earner and State). This new mode of production will not especially look like what we knew under the capitalism in its Western, Soviet, Chinese, Cuban, Korean, Vietnamese, Albanian or Third World versions. We also know that this new proletarian mode of production, which will not meet the purposes of widened reproduction of the capital as mode of struggle against the rarity, will succeed in filling all the human social needs, ultimate purpose of a socialized mode of production.

Marx wrote

Marx warned the international proletariat against the reactionary bourgeois nationalism and he registered in the Manifesto these two maxims: "The proletariat has no country” and “Workers of all countries unite!" To introduce the popular uprising, then the proletarian revolution, Marx did not appeal to the "oppressed people", to "exploited nations", to the "impoverished farmers" or to the "nutty petty bourgeois". When Marx observed that the objective conditions of the proletarian revolution were not absolutely united in this beginning of triumphant capitalism, he called for dissolving the First International preventing from becoming a den of reformist bureaucrats – and parasitic petty bourgeois, hired by bourgeois power and fed by contributions of the despoiled working class.

Here is an extract of the correspondence of Marx concerning exactly these chauvinistic nationalist divisions plotted by the Victorian capital to divide the forces of international proletariat within the British Empire: “England has now a working class split into two enemy camps: English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his living condition. He feels about him member of an imperious nation, becoming, therefore, an instrument of his aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland and strengthens thus their power on himself. Religious, social and national prejudices are erected against the Irish worker. He behaves towards him more or less as the “white poor people” towards the blacks in the old slave States of the American Union. The Irishman gives tit for tat widely. He sees in him at the same time the accomplice and the blind

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instrument of the English domination in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially maintained and instigated by the press, the sermons, the funny magazines, in brief by all means which the classes in power have. This antagonism constitutes the secret of the impotence of the English working class, in spite of its good organization. It is also the secret of the persistent power of the capitalist class, of which it is fully conscious”(4).

Lenin and the Bolsheviks made just the opposite. In the feudal - pre-capitalist, Tsarist Russia - they constituted in Russian national political Party - in Russian secret military sect - under a Russian petty bourgeois management -; they are seized the direction of the bourgeois democratic revolution supported by the illiterate farming masses, eager to expropriate and share the land and the agricultural means of production in order to erect the mercantile, then industrial, capitalist mode of production, under the name of New Political Economy (NEP). In fact, there is no new socialist, political, intermediary economy between capitalism and communism, and the feudal Tsarist Russia could deliver only to the capitalist mode of production, preliminary to the coming proletarian revolution. The mode of "socialist" production was the naming of the methods of construction of the capitalism of State in Soviet.

By the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks have placed the Russian small proletariat, weak and inexperienced, in the trailer of the grasping farming masses and the greedy petty bourgeoisie and it could not be there otherwise, given the pitiful state of the Tsarist economy.

We must recall that the proletarian revolution is not a revolt of misery and poverty against the disparities, the inequities or against the opulence and wealth of billionaires as believes every petty bourgeois frustrated of not receiving what he considers as his fair partnership share.

The popular uprising will be the reversal, by the suffocated population, of the paralyzed capitalist mode of production and not the “socialist” management of capitalist State apparatus as practiced by the bourgeois lefts in these different “socialist” countries, all became capitalist. The proletarian revolution, which will follow, will assure the construction of the communist proletarian mode of production. The Bolshevik nationalist Revolution and the other anti-colonial revolutions have made the demonstration that a mode of production can’t be evaded or by-passed. To lead an anti-capitalist revolution, it is necessary to live under the capitalist mode of production. To lead a proletarian revolution, it is necessary a proletarian class fully developed, educated, experienced in the anti-capitalist class struggle, at first on the economic front, then on the political front and finally on the ideological front of the class struggle. In Russia, the bourgeois national democratic revolution has knocked down the feudal order and assured the building of a capitalist society which Stalin has realized in a masterly fashion, beyond all expectations, as the German capital was going to learn it, proving as well as the Russian National-Bolshevism was more efficient than the German National-Socialism.

Seventy years later, the Russian Bolshevik-Stalinist nationalist work would know its karma in the "Perestroika - Glasnost"; in the collapse of Soviet

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imperialist alliance and of its Russian national center, paralyzed in the relations of production of the industrial State capitalism, but especially unable to provide the expanded reproduction of the Sovietized State capital and to pass in the financial capitalism. It is just in the emergence of liberalized, private financial capital, in competition on the world market with the Western capital, that the Russian capitalism found its second breath. The Maoist China, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and his exegetes, has pursued the same bourgeois nationalist path, without the Chinese State collapses, but simply by giving way to the national and international financial capital. Today, we see the emergence of the Shanghai Cooperation Association, around the nationalist China and the nationalist Russia, each capitalist powers have agreed on his role within this imperialist alliance to which the nationalist India and the nationalist Pakistan recently have joined (5). This new imperialist alliance faces the Atlantic imperialist alliance of which NATO is the military wing. We will come back.

National liberation or proletariat liberation?

In 1955, for the revolutionary proletariat, there is nothing reassuring in these international shenanigans and in these preparations of war derived from the national chauvinism of “non-aligned” countries.(6)  This “chauvinist mind of Bandung“ was the proof that the proletarian class had to reject any association with the Third Word bourgeoisies, which for seventy years have made with the proletarians the cannon fodder for their embezzlements and the stepping stone of their ambitions with the complicity of the gentrified left. Since the end of the Second World War we observed 215 armed conflicts in the Third Word, all aroused or activated by the capitalist powers and we noticed that none of these "struggles of national liberation" provided the freedom to the proletarianized insane persons.

Just like the petty bourgeoisie, the farming community, rich or poor, is not more a revolutionary class. The farming community was at the heart of the Third Word feudal mode of production and one of the driving forces for the passage from the feudal relations of production to the trade and then industrial capitalist relations of production, through the creation of a private land domain, at first divided up, then the development of the capitalist mode of production has forced to group in huge mechanized and irrigated agricultural exploitations where the farming community has been gradually transformed into rural proletariat. It is this agricultural proletariat, impoverished, deprived of any property, having only its workforce to be sold to survive that the urban revolutionary proletariat will mobilize for leading the international proletarian revolution, not for seizing the governance of the bourgeois State, not for making it “the socialist State of the whole people”, but to eradicate it.

Today, a century after the forecast of Lenin, the objective conditions of the proletarian social revolution are finally met. The first of these conditions is the full development of the means of production in plenty, the existence of a huge

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globalized proletarian class, educated, trained, “trendy”, experienced in the class war, impoverished and threatened in its survival, but conscious of its class interests and obliged to reverse its conditions of alienation for avoiding its destruction. Here is the alternative that appears to the international proletariat to which are joined 350 million Chinese proletarians and almost the same number of Indian proletarians in the great march of the starved gang. The emancipation of the proletarian class will be the work of the same class (7).

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CHAPTER 2

FERGUSON, MINNEAPOLIS, DALLAS, SAME FIGHT (8)

Robert Bibeau

Let us take a few moments to observe, starting from a concrete example, the way that the bourgeoisie, via its media in its pay and with the complicity of the leftist petty bourgeoisie, transforms a struggle of resistance class-against-class into an inter-racial reactionary conflict.

It is false to claim that the murder of black citizens by US cops is a "blunder", the "error" of an overzealous, inexperienced or terrorized police officer, or still a racist aggression. This is not the American population which terrorizes the police, this is the police which terrorizes the American proletarians of every race, color and ethnic backgrounds.

More than 500 US citizens are killed by police bullets since 2016 and the carnage continues every year, with the implicit approval, if not the explicit recommendation of US authorities. In the USA in addition of the judicial death penalty, the State practices also the extrajudicial, preventive, repressive death penalty, just as the US military abroad applies it on the various fronts of its murderous "commitments". Gaddafi and Bin Laden were two famous victims, as others, less known. At the time of President Obama, every Tuesday, in the Oval Office, individuals were sentenced to death, without trial by the leader of the White House, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!

This systematic policy of police repression against the black proletariat in particular, but also against Latinos, against the homeless, against the Amerindians, against the Asian slaves of “sweats shops" of the poverty and against the illegal immigrants, is made without racial discrimination, contrary to the lies propagated by the media of capital. This repression aims not at a particular race, ethnic group or minority, but rather targets the proletarian social class, the lumpen-proletariat, the sacrificed homeless, in order to provide examples to local populaces and to terrorize them. The underlying message to these thousands of police murders is as follows: "People of misery, angry proletarian always poorer, do not resist your conditions of existence and alienation; otherwise we will kill you relentlessly to terrorize you, as each can see it on these videos broadcasted on social networks".

In short, the police murder of Minneapolis is part of a terrorist State plan which aims at scaring the American people in resistance ... whatever is the race or color of the people murdered on the street. As we have always written, the most evolved American proletariat, the most advanced proletariat, the one who lives under the most degenerate, most depraved, most desperate and most

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terrorist capitalist dictatorship because the most frightened and most conscious of his membership of class.

The economic situation of US imperialism is catastrophic and what forces the Yankee capital to increase its pressures over the US proletariat, beyond the imagination, and this simply to stay afloat, the head over the systemic crisis which the US capital has already lost in the hands of their foreign imperialist competitors (notably China, but also Germany and Europe).

What the American capitalists have learnt, two years ago in Ferguson and Dallas (5 dead and seven wounded policemen) is that the American proletariat is armed and dangerous and that if they do not let themselves to be wrapped by racist trifles like: blacks - against Latinos – against Whites - against Native Americans - against Blank Panthers and other racial embezzlements as the media in the pay propagate, then the American bourgeoisie could be at risk in front of the rise of the class resistance of the US proletariat, without distinction of race or ethnic group. These are not the blacks who are aimed by police murders, they are the proletarian angry Resistance fighters. But be careful, the proletariat is neither terrorist, nor anarchist, nor individualistic, and he will have to answer, as conscious and organized class, collectively supportive, the provocations of the disqualified US capital (9). 

CHAPTER 3

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THE MARXISTS AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION (10)

PIERRE SOUYRI

In this chapter we present the reading scores of Pierre Souyri, published in the Annals of July, 1979, concerning the volume of Georges Haupt, Michel Lowy, Claudie Weill, entitled The Marxists and the national question, 1848-1914. We enamel his scores of our comments identified by letters EDITOR'S NOTE.

Pierre Souyri wrote this about the Marxism and the national question: «By establishing this issue which gathers some of the texts whose publication marked out the stands, alternately complementary and opposite, of the theorists of the Second International on the national question, G. Haupt, M. Lowy and C. Weill took care of not favoring the conceptions of the Bolsheviks. This choice has not only the advantage to make know to the readers points of view whom the hegemony of Russian Marxism had rejected in the oversight; it also allows to break with a commonplace and nevertheless unbearable representation which orders the history of the Marxist theories, as if there was a Marxism establishing a coherent and completed system, of which the Bolsheviks would have regained control on the methodology and the concepts to emerge, finally, after all other theorists of the period of Second International have endlessly roamed, on the fair and necessary solution of the national question, as of all the others.

When the theorists who refer to Marx are forced by circumstances - the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe then in Asia - to rethink the question of the nationalities of which Marx and especially Engels had mainly taken care at the time of the revolutions of 1848, they end up in the writings of the "founding fathers" only fragmentary, sometimes contradictory indications and in any case very strongly dated. Marx and Engels who thought that the antagonism of capital and labor constitutes the essential spirit of the historic process of the modern society, had given to the national question only a marginal and subordinate status.

This one interested them only as far as the national fact interfered with the class struggle and as far as the formation of big nations could favor the growth of capitalism and at the same time that of the proletarian negation of the bourgeois society. Envisaging the national aspirations only under the angle of their possible consequences for the class struggle, Marx and Engels gave legitimacy only to the national struggles which could weaken the European counter-revolution. From there their support for the Polish nationalism which raises itself against the power of tsarism and, later, for the Irish nationalism whose victory, they believe, would favor at the same time the intensification of social struggles in England and Ireland. From

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there also their furious hostility to the South Slavs who were used by the counter-revolution in 1848 and their hatred for Pan-Slavism which becomes the instrument of the Russian expansion. Engels, especially, multiplied against the South Slavs the offensive epithets. M. Lowy, who relieved some of the most unfortunate forecasts of Engels on the future of the Slavic nations and of some others, shows, however, that the furies of Engels are the furies of a revolutionary and not those of a German chauvinist and a blind Slavic-phobe. Proceeding to a superficial and erroneous analysis of the causes of the counter-revolution, Engels rejects inequitably all the responsibility on the Slavs, without perceiving that the failure of the revolutions of 1848-1849 has roots of class in the heart even of the revolutionary nations. 

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Contrary to Souyri we do not observe "proletarian revolutionary nations". And, if there are revolutionary nations, these are inevitably bourgeois revolutionary nations aspiring to the capitalism as mode of production, assuring their full national development until its negation and its exceeding. For two centuries the Left was unable to understand that the "failures" of the proletarian revolutions of nineteenth century and twentieth century are not due to tactical errors, but to the underdevelopment of the capitalist mode of production which had not reached its ultimate – imperialist- stage - and as consequence to the digital, economic, political and ideological underdevelopment of his gravedigger, the proletarian class. It is impossible to lead an anticapitalistic proletarian revolution in a feudal peasant society or in a rapidly expanding capitalist society. What the German society, post Spartacist proved, stumbling and raising until the modern era, where it reached the proletarian revolutionary maturity. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Pierre Souyri continues: «Besides, the same Engels who attributes occasionally to the Slavic peoples a reactionary essence, had not less called, in 1848, to the reversal of the Empire of Hapsburgs which impeded the liberation of Slavs and Italians. The fact remains that Engels had analyzed the national problems by using repeatedly the Hegelian concept and foreign to the historic materialism of "people without history", without Marx formulates the slightest criticism against the pre-Marxist Hegelianism of his comrade. When the later generations end up forced to revive the question of the nationalities in the Marxist theory, they start from an inheritance which is most uncertain and G. Haupt underlines all the difficulties with which is going to collide their company».

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The reader will have noted here the petty-bourgeois intellectual position of Pierre Souyri which raises the issue in terms of "reviving the question of the nationalities in the Marxist theory" as if a proletarian revolutionary had to worry about a Marxist, theoretical posture in front of a problem which raises the revolution. A proletarian revolutionary has the duty to find a proletarian revolutionary answer to a practical problem which raises the organization of the proletarian revolution. We will see later what a proletarian has to make about the bourgeois national question. It is not the theoretical enrichment of Marxism that worries us, but the progress of the revolution. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Pierre Souyri adds: «At first difficulties related to the terminology and concepts which do not allow always to differentiate clearly States, nations and nationalities and which make arise uncertainties and controversies all the more lively as the Marxists are captive of the Western models of the formation of the nations which do not allow them to understand what is coming true in Central and South-Oriental Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. There, unlike what had passed in the Western countries where the States had been the instruments of gathering and unification of the nations, the States appear only to the last stage, long after the nations began to assert themselves by becoming aware slowly of themselves as communities of language and culture. The Marxists had, besides, to make violence often to their own habits of thought to succeed in admitting that there were not only, as said by J. Guesde, "two nations; the nation of the capitalists, of the bourgeoisie, of the property-owning class on one side, and from the other one the nation of the proletarians, the mass of the underprivileged persons, the hard-working class" and that the proletariat could feel concerned by national claims and not only in its backward and badly cleared layers of bourgeois ideology. G Haupt shows how, in the late nineteenth century, the progress of the industrialization in the Empire of Hapsburgs upsets the social and national composition of the proletariat and makes appear below the layer of the German skilled workers, loads of laborers stemming from different nationalities of the Empire and which feel at the same time socially and nationally oppressed. "To be a Czech in Vienna means to be proletarian". From then on, refusing to consider the national aspirations or to grant them only a reluctant attention in the name of a rigorous automatic internationalism amounts to locking the socialism into petrified positions which risk making it foreign to the real proletariat. As the socialism spreads towards the Eastern Europe, then towards the extra-European countries, the Marxists are forced to revise their problem of the national question and to reconsider their vision of the historic movement. It is necessary for them "to de-westernize" the Marxism,

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admitting that is not true that the increasing internationalization of the economic life is enough to produce a homogenization of the civilization and of the cultures opening the perspective of an overtaking of the national peculiarities and that there are, at least, counter-tendencies which make the penetration of capitalism in "the peoples without history" ends not in their assimilation, but in their national awakening». 

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By means of searching to justify the chauvinistic nationalism Souyri ends up finding some skeletons in the wardrobe. He does not make here something of originality. All the chauvinistic nationalists will tell you that it is necessary to be nationalist because the proletariat is molded - contaminated - by nationalist ideas - just like he is contaminated by religious ideas - bourgeois aspiration - bourgeois culture – just as the proletariat believes very often that he does not exist as social class - because all the propaganda of the bourgeois media denies his existence. In a class society, the dominant ideas are those of the ruling class. In a bourgeois national capitalist society, the dominant ideas are those of the bourgeois class, until the day when the same bourgeoisie is forced to reject her own nationalist ideology to make evaluate it towards the imperialist internationalism in order to conform to the necessities of international markets; to the migrations of proletarians on road towards new foyers of exploitation; to the need of expropriation of natural resources and to the need of the import of goods and capital came from international horizons. Souyri would not have written that if he had simply understood that the internationalist fruit does not appear in the ex-nationalist bourgeoisies became globalist. So, what is the importance that "in the Western countries the States were the instruments of the gathering and unification of the nations, while in the Eastern countries the States appear only to the last stage, long after the nations began to assert themselves by becoming slowly aware of themselves as communities of language and culture"? Today the ex-Soviet empire was balkanized - split up in nation-state, "freed" dominated - despoiled by a handful of huge imperialist monopolies represented by nationalist political puppets. Sometimes it is enough to wait that the wheel of history has completed a cycle to see the world under a different angle. There was a time where the capital was national, today it became international as the proletariat, the class which will knock down it. For the revolutionary proletarians is reactionary to team up with the reformist petty bourgeoisie and with the small national capital to try to slow down the world history march towards the emergence then the collapse of declining imperialism. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Pierre Souyri, pursuing his criticism, writes: «In this historic evolution of Marxism, the contribution of the Austrians, of Otto Bauer especially, constitutes a crucial step. Doubtless the Austro-Marxists are especially worried to prevent the explosion of the multinational empire gathered by the Hapsburgs and to contain the centrifugal forces which threaten to disintegrate their own party. This concern led Otto Bauer to elaborate a conception of the nationality which amputates the problem from its political dimension and disregards the class character of the cultural productions. O. Bauer will be attacked by the extreme left of socialist movement – A. Pannekoek and Strasser, who persist in considering that he can’t have, for the proletariat, specific national interests -, and by Kautsky who does not admit that the advent of the socialism can be followed by a deepening of national differences and by the Bolsheviks which will question the "psycho-cultural" conceptions of the nation which have elaborated the Austro-Marxists and the solutions which proposes the Austrian social-democracy to solve the national question. Nevertheless, the Viennese theorists contributed to shake the inertia of the Second International. Their searches have opened the way to the idea that the birth of nations did not belong inevitably to the past of Europe and of the world and that the proletarian internationalism could not turn the back on the aspirations of the oppressed nationalities».

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We hope to be excused for this repetition, but the argument is recurrent. What are the "aspirations of the oppressed nations"? What nations oppress the oppressed nations? A certain Quebec bourgeois left went as far as inventing "the oppressed French-speaking Quebec class-nation", by «the oppressive English Canadian class-nation» (sic), the membership of class being fixed by the dominant language in each of these communities. This fascist mystic results from the German, Austrian, French and other social fascists. A nation consists of a human community which before having certain linguistic, moral and cultural similarities is moved at first by antagonisms of class, a little (bourgeois) portion of the nation exploits a big (proletarian) portion of the nation and it is the mother of all the social contradictions. A portion of the nation is inclined to lead the national war, up to the last proletarian if necessary, while another portion of the nation aspires to the peace up to the last bourgeois if required. Thus, a small portion of the French-speaking Quebec nation became rich, prosperous, by exploiting the paid work of Quebec proletarians and by requiring always more aids from the bourgeois State. Today, this portion of the nation is owner of big international conglomerates, whereas a big part of the French-speaking and English-speaking Quebec nation is debt-ridden, sells daily its labor force dirt-cheap - receives always less service from the Quebec national State and migrates outside the "national homeland" (sic) to end up «to be used" in English or in French. The proletarians abandoned any religion and lose interest in the demagogic bourgeois policy. The situation is identical between the two opposing classes which compose the rest of the Canadian whole, mainly of English language. The situation is

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identical in the Amerindian nations. What nations are oppressed – what nations are oppressive in Quebec and in Canada? None. We can identify an oppressed social class - independently of the language of his members and we can identify an oppressive social class - independently of the language of his "members". A Canadian English-speaking capitalist exploits the Canadian proletarians, he does not exploit the capitalists of the Quebec nation with whom he makes a lot of business, and conversely for the Quebec capitalists in "business" with the capitalists besides of Canada and the whole world. The interests of the Quebec capitalists have nothing in common with those of the Quebec proletarians. We shall return on these questions. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Let us return to the reading scores of Pierre Souyri: «When, on the eve of the war, Lenin approaches in turn the national question, his reflection can be supported on the whole searches made since Marx and who has widely spread and transformed the theoretical field of socialism. But he succeeds in renewing almost completely the problem of relationships between the national aspirations and the socialism because he thinks of it according to the theme of the disparities of development which the capitalism prints to the historic process and to the fracture which occurs in the backward countries between the democratic bourgeois tasks and the proletarian tasks of the revolution. The erasure of the national peculiarities by the development of capitalism, which had underlined for a long time Kautsky, continues, but it becomes, in the twentieth century, contemporary of a national awakening which arouses the expansion of the imperialist capital towards the backward countries. These two movements are not necessarily contradictory insofar as it is up to the proletarian movement to push until its term the democratic revolution whose national aspirations constitute only an element. In the theoretical system of Lenin, the nationalism of the oppressed peoples ends up so integrated into a coherent strategy of the revolution. It fits into a more general process through which the realization of the national aspirations prepares the decay of the national senses of identity and constitutes even the condition. As for Marx or Rosa Luxemburg, the national aspirations have for Lenin no intrinsic interest. They are recognized only to be used for the purposes of a movement which implies their overtaking. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to notice today that the Leninist conception did not stand the test of the events. M. Lowy shows that the history did not stop denying the conceptions and the forecasts of Engels. Yet, although for different reasons, it's the same for those of Lenin. Most of the nations constituted after 1918, then after the disintegration of the colonial empires, were not made on the basis of a subordination of the national aspirations to the proletarian movement. It is even the opposite which occurred mostly: even in countries where there was a labor movement, this one has been integrated into the national struggle and has constituted a simple force of supplement for the nationalism which led to the formation of bourgeois

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States or bureaucratic States which found their main fulcrum in the peasant guerrilla warfare. The big strategy drawn up by the Bolsheviks is coherent only in the abstract or in the imagination of the theorists: it did not find a referee in the practice».

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The big strategy drawn up by the Bolsheviks, as written here by Pierre Souyri, did not suffer incoherence or a lack of practical correlation. The Bolsheviks ended up at the head of an anti-feudal bourgeois democratic revolution led by the Russian bourgeoisie managed by Kerensky and leaning on an immense enslaved and starved farming community to which the Bolsheviks brought the support of the rising Russian small proletariat - so rising as was the industrial capitalist mode of production in Tsarist Russia -. The Bolsheviks have snatched the direction of this bourgeois revolution from Kerensky, by joining the farming community thanks to the reformist slogan "Bread, Peace, Earth". As excellent tactician, Lenin has forged a theory adapted to this practice of class struggle in a context of war of bourgeois national liberation that he decked out epithets of "anti-impérialist and socialist", imagining even a new mode of production on horseback between capitalism and communism which he called the socialism of the New Political Economy (NEP). The Russian Revolution was actually an anti-imperialist revolution, but not against the modern imperialism, ultimate phase of the capitalist mode of production, but against the decadent feudal imperialism, ending its existence and having to give way (as it had made centuries previously in the countries of the old Europe) to the rising capitalist mode of production - a custom-made revolutionary task for the revolutionary bourgeoisie, but certainly not for the rising proletariat, which will have to wait for another a century. We are there today. The modern (capitalist) imperialism has completed its expansion up to the plains of Gange and Yang Tsé. Here is the proletarian rose of the whole world, it is up to you. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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CHAPITRE 4

NATIONALISM AND SOCIALISM (11)

PAUL MATTICK

In this chapter we analyze an important text of Paul Mattick entitled "Nationalism and socialism" published in English in The American Socialist in September, 1959, in French in Front Noir (February, 1965) and in ICO n°99 in November, 1970. Once again our comments are identified by letters EDITOR'S NOTE.

Mattick writes there: «the non-utopian socialists favored the capitalism as against the older social relations of production and welcomed the nationalism in so far as it served to hasten the capitalist development. Though reluctant to admit this, they were not disinclined to accept the capitalist imperialism (…). They also favored the disappearance of small nations unable to develop large-scale economy (…). They would, however, side with small “progressive nations” against the larger reactionary countries. (…). At all times and on all occasions, however, the nationalism was not considered as a socialist goal.

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Everywhere the capitalist mode of production was built shielded from the national borders, including in Soviet Union, in Maoist China, Vietnam, Korea and in Cuba, etc. These borders have authority to protect for a while the tribal, feudal, peasant, ethnic peculiarities and local trade, which the capitalism crushes and destroys in the long run in order to build up, with difficulty sometimes as proved by the birth of nationalisms in the Middle East and Africa. Everyone can appreciate the transparency of the summary presented by Mattick which concentrates the quintessence of the petty bourgeois socialist thought on the struggles of national liberation and against "the political imperialism" since Bukharin, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao. The gurus of the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy present the imperialism as a policy of big powers and oppose "the return of these parts of the country to the pre-capitalism", historic process of return to the past, which even the American war criminals did not succeed in imposing to the Vietnamese persons, and which the butchers "Khmer Rouges" did not succeed in imposing to the Cambodians. Moreover, it is unfortunately false to claim, as Mattick says, that "never the nationalism was considered as a socialist objective". EDITOR'S NOTE. 

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Let us follow the thought of Mattick. He writes: «Is this new nationalism, which sheds the Western dominance and institutes the capitalist relations of production and the modern industry in hitherto underdeveloped areas, still a “progressive” force as was the nationalism of yesterday? Do these national aspirations coincide in some manner with those socialist ones? Do they hasten the end of capitalism by weakening the Western imperialism or do they inject a new life into capitalism by extending its mode of production all over the globe?

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The big capital and his theorists have insinuated that there would be a Western relationship of domination against the Oriental civilization. Here, Mattick insinuates that "the new nationalism establishes the relationships of capitalist production and the modern industry in the underdeveloped regions". According to the proletarian dialectical materialistic theory it is the development of the productive forces and of the means of production that establish the development of a certain type of relationship of production (the nation-state) and an (bourgeois nationalist) ideology which the bourgeois intellectuals name "Western civilization" if it is soaked of Western feudal artifacts and "Eastern civilization" if it is soaked of Eastern feudal artifacts. These capitalist relations of production - everywhere the same because the industrial capitalist mode of production is everywhere the same - in turn, strengthen the development of the means of production. So, it is the industrial development of Asia that required the emergence of national capitalist relations of production (during the phase of emergence), in Maoist China in particular, country which developed a strong industry shielded from its national borders and which now as this capitalist nation state reached the ultimate, imperialist stage of development, integrating the globalized financial capital. China tries, thus, to bring down the tariff barriers of his competitors, in order to conquer their Eastern or Western markets. The capitalism is the condition of the nationalism which strengthens it until the capitalism, arriving at the end of its contradictions, enters into an imperialist phase and brings down the national borders and repudiates the nationalist ideology. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Mattick adds: «However, at the end of the century, is the imperialism, not the nationalism, which was on the agenda. The German “national” interests became imperialist interests competing with the imperialisms of other countries. The France’s “national” interests were those of the French empire, as Britain’s were those of the British Empire. The control of the world and the sharing of this control between the great imperialist powers determined “national” policies. The “national” wars were imperialist wars, culminating in worldwide wars».

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New demonstration (above) of the socialist-idealist-bourgeois thought about the imperialism which Bukharin, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, have left the Third International and the nationalist Communist parties (euro-communist in particular) and that the Trotskyists and other right-wing and left-wing oppositions adopted. "It is the imperialism and not the nationalism which is on the agenda of the battle", writes the author establishing an opposition between imperialism and nationalism. The imperialism is not a policy of major power oppressing the small nationalist countries as Bukharin suggested. There is no French, British, German or American imperialist mode of production. The imperialism is the national capitalist mode of production with maturity, it is everywhere the same. The modern (capitalist) imperialism is the financialized, globalized capital that tries insignificantly to compensate for the depreciation of the means of production with the increase of the labor productivity and making it by the increase of its organic composition, what plunges it more profoundly into its contradiction. The peculiarity of any capitalist country, no matter how small or big it is, is to reach the ultimate stage of capitalist evolution - the imperialist stage where the capitalist relations of production can’t assure anymore the development of the social productive forces, preventing from this fact the mode of production from reproducing in order to assure the growth of the capital; leaving the proletariat useless, orphan of his alienating master; forcing him to become emancipated or to disappear. It is then, not on a national scale - what the Marxists had understood instinctively by denouncing the vague desires of building the mode of communist production in a single country -, but on an international scale that the proletarian revolution will be led. The revolutionary policy of the proletariat does not make his own the democratic and bourgeois national struggles of liberation which are only wars between capitalist clans for the control of the bourgeois State apparatus and sources of capital gain. EDITOR'S NOTE. 

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On Paul Mattick's tracks we discover: «A consistent international socialism, as represented, for instance, by Rosa Luxemburg, opposed the Bolshevik “national self-determination. For her, the existence of independent national governments did not alter the fact of being controlled by imperialist powers because the latter dominate the world economy. The imperialist capitalism could neither be fought nor weakened, through the creation of new nations: but only by opposing the capitalist supra-nationalism with the proletarian internationalism. These movements belong to the capitalist society just as its imperialism. But “utilizing” these national movements for socialist purposes, could only mean depriving them of their nationalist character.

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How a Lilliputian proletarian class, inexperienced in the class struggle on the economic, political and ideological fronts, derived from archaic means of production, in the edge of the ascending industrial capitalism, always in expansion in numerous regions of the world, and not having still conquered certain countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America; how could this emerging class impose the proletarian internationalism which it did not even suspect and would come only with the imperialist phase of evolution of the mode of production? EDITOR'S NOTE.

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And Mattick adds: «The First World War produced the Russian Revolution and, whatever its original intentions, it was remained a national revolution. Although expecting help from abroad, it never extended help to outside revolutionary forces, except where such help was dictated by Russian national interests. The Second World War and its aftermath brought the independence for India and Pakistan, the Chinese Revolution (...). Apparently, the time for national emancipation has not come to an end, and obviously, the rising tide of anti-imperialism does not serve the world-revolutionary socialist purposes».

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What "liberation" and what "self-determination" for the proletarians of the South-East Asia, for those of Africa and Middle East? In an analysis of proletarian class of the political economy, every concept has a class meaning. So, for us revolutionary proletarian, the term "liberation" can mean only the liberation from the exploitation, from the class alienation, from the yoke of the capitalist mode of production. In what some proletarians of South-East Asia, China, Africa, Middle East, between 1945 and 1975, were emancipated? We thus are understanding that the socialists, communists, patriotic united fronts, popular fronts and other nationalist bourgeois lefts consider as a "liberation" the fact that they have seized the direction of the construction of the bourgeois capitalism in their respective national States. The proletarian class, in the course of internationalization under the modern imperialism, knows his new jailers, but it is not always emancipated. EDITOR'S NOTE. 

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Paul Mattick becomes bolder and rules: «What this new nationalism really indicates, these are the structural changes of world capitalist economy and the end of nineteenth-century colonialism. The “white man’s

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burden” has become an actual burden instead of a blessing. The returns from colonial rule are dwindling while the costs of empire are rising».

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The revolutionary proletarians reject firmly any racist charge about the "white man’s burden". There is the capitalist white man who oppresses the proletarian white man as well as the proletarian black man. The proletarian white man does not oppress the proletarian black man. They are both oppressed and exploited by their racial, ethnic or linguistic congeners. So, contrary to what writes Mattick, the profits of the capitalist exploitation in the emerging colonized countries - recently arrived in the industrial mode of production and reproduction – don’t decrease, these are the profits realized in the dominant countries, the first ones capitalized, the Western countries which decreased result of two factors: A) the price increase of the cost of reproduction of the labor force in the industrially advanced countries; and B) the increase of the organic composition of the capital - the capitalists mechanize the production in order to increase the productivity and the exploitation rate of the labor force in order to reduce the global quantity of social labor force whose cost of reproduction is increasing. The chauvinistic and reactionary nationalism aims only at making accept these sacrifices to the national working class. The Northern white capitalists did not hesitate to relocate their factories of the North (white) southward (black) or eastward (yellow) when it became profitable. The capitalist, just like the proletarian, is internationalist and knows that the capital has no homeland, no color and no smell. We wrote and we repeat it, a nation or an oppressed people and a nation or an oppressor people do not exist. Under the capitalist mode of production various social classes are in confrontation and from these confrontations are born the conditions of exploitation and oppression of the metropolitan proletarian class and the conditions of exploitation and oppression of the proletarian class of countries-ex-colonies, also called "emerging" capitalist countries now that is advantageous to exploit them industrially. This uneven and combined development is destined to be modifies as demonstrated by the constant phenomena of industrial relocation. It is in this respect that the national capital becomes world, building his gravedigger, the international revolutionary proletariat. In the passage which follows, Paul Mattick expose exactly the deep incomprehension of the whole leftist, opportunist and reformist left in what concerned the imperialism which he considers as an evolution of the politics of domination of the economic major powers from the colonialism to the neocolonialism. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Mattick writes: «Generally speaking, the colonialism no longer pays, so that it is in part the principle of profit itself which calls forth a new approach to imperialist rule. Two world wars destroyed more or less the

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old imperialist powers. But these did not lead to the end of imperialism, which, though it evolves new forms and expressions, still spells economic and political control of weaker by stronger nations (…). America was not an imperialist power in the traditional sense. She made sure the profit of the imperial control, more by the "diplomacy of the dollar" than by the direct military intervention".

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The nations and nation-states are residues of the ascending capitalist mode of production and they are called to disappear in the international "melting pot". The wars can’t "lead to the end of the imperialism" as suggests Mattick. The wars are the result of the evolution of imperialist political economy in its contradictory - dialectical – development and constitute the ultimate tactics of the capitalist system to try to surmount its contradictions. As for the "dollar-diplomacy" which would have replaced the "gunboat-diplomacy", we notice simply that the United States intervened militarily on 200 occasions since the end of the Second World War; that the capitalists who dominate this country led their country to the war 220 years over his 240 years of existence. It appears that the military power of the Western imperialist Alliance is very active in the defense of its interests - not national-, but interests of the international monopolistic, financial in particular capitalists, via the diplomacy of the gunboat, the aircraft-carrier, the missile and the drone. The diplomacy of the dollar and the diplomacy of the gunboat are two complementary tactics. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Paul Mattick asserts then: «None of the European nations is actually able to prevent the complete dissolution of its empire, except with America’s help. But this help subjects these nations, as well as their foreign possession, to American penetration and control. In falling “heir” to what is left of the declining imperialism, the United States has no urgent need to rush to the defense of West European imperialism. «The Anti-colonialism» is not an American policy deliberately designed to weaken the Western allies (…), but was chosen to strengthen the free world. »

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The American capitalist mode of production is not at war against the European, Russian or Chinese capitalist mode of production. There is an alliance of competing companies having reached the imperialist phase of capitalist evolution and all are in competition the ones against the others, but also in competition against the "emerging" and globalized capitalist companies. It are not the countries which are "emerging», it are the large companies of the countries of the South that group together in conglomerates to face the Western monopolies.

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It is there where shoot quite naturally their imperialist development. A recent survey of the NGO OXFAM reveals that together ten bigger corporations of the world have income more important than governmental income of 180 combined countries, that's it the imperialism. These immense conglomerates are exchanged consumer goods, but also means of production - capital - it is at this moment when intervene banks and financial markets, and they are divided markets after horse-trading otherwise the war. The very fast evolution of the capitalist relations of production among these "emerging» conglomerates and in these "emerging" countries already places them in conquerors' position towards the old Western mentors. Does the proletariat have to take a stand in favour of these "emerging" national capitalists or in favour of the old international capitalists? Neither the one, nor the other one obviously.

So, China, which has not completed the integration of 350 million of his farmers in its "national" productive forces, is already in race for the robotization of its industrial production in order to reach a bigger productivity bringing it to support the world imperialist competition and to sacrifice millions of proletarians who tomorrow will have no choice but to rebel and to destroy - not the "Chinese nation", or the Chinese «emerging» imperialism-, but the capitalist mode of production in China as contribution to the world proletarian revolution. EDITOR'S NOTE. 

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Mattick continues: «Deprived of imperialist potentialities, Germany, Italy, and Japan no longer have an independent policy. The progressive decline of the French and British Empires reduces these nations to secondary powers. At the same time, the national aspirations of less developed and weaker countries can’t be realized except if they fit into the power schemes of the dominating imperialisms».

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In what Germany and Japan were deprived of imperialist capacities? The force of a capitalist power – in imperialist phase – depends on its industrial economic - commercial - financial and ultimately military abilities. The Soviet Russia taught these things to the Germany of Hitler. The United States of Roosevelt taught these things to the Japan of Hiro-Hito. China produces and consumes half of the world industrial products, cement, energy, rubber, chemical product, steel, copper, aluminum, etc. So, China in 2016 has bought half of the industrial robots marketed by Germany, Japan and Korea. The Chinese industrial production represents 55 % of GDP of this country and occupies 45 % of the total workforce, namely 350 million proletarians and 350 millions of others are waiting for their integration, it is twice the total population of the United States. In the United States, 70 % of GDP concerns the consumption of goods, which this

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country does not produce and less than 10 % of the national GDP results from the industry, very widely from the industry of the loss-making and parasitic armament. Less than 12 % of the American proletariat works in the productive industry, fortunately its rate of productivity is very high. This capitalist power, at its declining imperialist stage, don’t have any more for a long time in front of the increase in importance of their replacements not national, but international which even if they do not wish to put themselves ahead militarily, will be forced to do it. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Paul Mattick does it again and reaffirms with stubbornness his incomprehension of the concept of imperialism, ultimate phase of any mode of production. He writes: «The erosion of Western imperialism, it is said, creates a power vacuum in the until then subjugated regions. (…). The national revolutions in capitalistically retarded countries are attempts at modernization through industrialization, whether they merely express opposition to foreign capital, or are determined to change the existing social relations. But whereas the nationalism of the nineteenth century was an instrument of development of the private capital, the nationalism of the twentieth century is predominately an instrument of development of State capitalism. (…) the current nationalism carries new knocks to a world market (…)".

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The nationalist "revolutions" in the backward regions have never expressed opposition to the capital and did not change the capitalist social relationships, but rather have strengthened them. The nationalism is no longer the specific and universal mode of the relationships of capitalist production, but a method of development ideologically directed in a sense, in the last century and in another sense in the present century, according to the fertile imagination of socialists and leftists. The nationalism was and will be always the ideology of the ascending bourgeois class - whatever is the country where it develops. At the beginning the nationalism opposes the free world market, then after a phase of national capitalization, it wishes its multinational integration in the big imperialist world market. It is also true for the cradle Europe of capitalism, for America and Oceania where it was transplanted, in Asia where it was spread out, and in Africa where it was imposed. EDITOR'S NOTE.

**********.Paul Mattick writes then: «Behind the nationalist movements there is, naturally, the pressure of poverty, which is growing more explosive as the discrepancy between poor and rich nations. The international division of labor as determined by private capital formation implies the

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exploitation of poorer by richer countries and the concentration of capital in the advanced capitalist nations. The new nationalism opposes the concentration of capital determined by the market, as to assure the industrialization of the underdeveloped countries. (…). Today, private enterprise and government control operate now simultaneously in each capitalist country and also in the world at large. So that the subordination from the private competition to the national competition is merciless (…)".

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On behalf of theorizing the principle of the imperialism and to set it against the national aspirations of the "poor parts of the country" towards the "rich parts of the country", Mattick sets the deprived national capitalism against the public national capitalism. The capitalist State would be an entity independent from the dominant capitalist class. To say it differently, there would be on one side the capitalist class and from the other side the capitalist State managed by bureaucrats and independent State caciques having their own schedule of development. As writes Mattick, the capitalist State is an organization derived from the development of the mode of production - it is a component of the capitalist relationships of production - and in it the bourgeois State can only meet the needs of development of this mode of production. There can be no subordination of the private competition in the national competition, both complement each other. This State jams in its functioning only when the mode of production, entangled in its contradictions, jams itself. We can say then that the objective and subjective conditions of the revolution are gathered. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Mattick adds: «At the base of the national aspirations and imperialist rivalries, lies the actual need for a world-wide organization of production and distribution, as the geologist K. F. Mather has pointed out, “the earth is far better adapted for occupation by men organized on a world-wide scale, with maximum opportunity for free exchange of raw materials and finished products, than by men who insist upon building barriers between regions, even so inclusive as a large nation or an entire continent». Second, because the social production can be fully developed and can free human society from need and misery only by international cooperation (…)».

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According to Mattick: "If it is not used in human purposes a struggle between nations will produce (…) the elimination of the capitalist competition". Tremble capitalists and proletarians of the whole world, you have to accept the industrial cooperation if not the capitalist competition

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will disappear. But, we could say, it is exactly what wish the big international monopolies, which denied their "nationality" and which make everything to absorb their opponents and to eliminate their competitors, wherever they are, except that the laws of the capitalist political economy make the thing impossible and that even if this objective was reached it would not solve the fundamental contradiction of the capital. Under the mode of capitalist production, there is no contradiction such as "the national aspiration opposed to the imperialist rivalries". Why? Because the imperialism is the outcome of the national capitalist development. The imperialism is the child of national capitalism and as his father - that he kills upstart with maturity - the imperialism has authority to extend and to reign over the capitalist humanity after the parricide of the nationalism too much restricted to allow to reproduce. Let us start again, the globalized capital is cramped in the structure of national governance and it tries to break this yoke to give itself the conditions for its reproduction. Yet, this national governance serves the interests of the petty bourgeoisie so numerous in imperialist advanced society (in the tertiary sector in particular). This national governance suits the small capital not still monopolistic, but which aims at becoming it shielded from the national borders became null and void for the big capital. A class war bursts, thus, within the bourgeoisie (petty - middle - upper) for the control of the national State apparatus, the big capital to make it burst; the small capital and the petty bourgeoisie to protect and strengthen it. Inevitably, it is the big capital which wins, but this war of reactionary class, bourgeois inter-factions, does not concern the revolutionary working class which notes it, nothing more. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Let us continue with Mattick: «While a positive attitude toward nationalism betrays a lack of interest in socialism, the socialist position on nationalism is obviously ineffective, as well as the countries which are oppressing other countries. A consistent anti-nationalist position seems, at least indirectly, to support the imperialism (…) the socialists are not required for the launching of struggles for national autonomy; as the various “liberation” movements in the wake of the Second World War have shown. (…) the nationalism could not be utilized to further socialist aims, nor was it a successful strategy to hasten the demise of capitalism». 

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Paul Mattick claims that a class struggle against the national capitalism would be a support for the imperialism, nevertheless, should we not lead the anticapitalistic war to lead the anti-imperialist war? The imperialism is not a foreign economic and political power. The imperialism is the ultimate stage of development of the capitalist mode of production, as we wrote previously. In other words, any bourgeois capitalist State and any national capitalist class which controls this State are destined to evolve until

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become integrated into an imperialist alliance and to pursue thus their competitive struggle against the other States and against the other bourgeois classes - but especially, against the world proletarian class of which they pull their capital gain. This internationalist integration is made at first on the economic plan through trade, investments of capital (IDF), stock-exchange negotiations, exchanges of currencies, takeovers of companies, loans, credit, debt, etc. The revolutionary proletariat has no control over this competitive war between capitalist factions which are linked into one another through the competition, he can only undergo the consequences. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Paul Mattick writes then: «On the contrary, the nationalism destroyed the socialism, by using it for nationalist purposes. It is not the function of socialism to support the nationalism, even though the latter battles the imperialism. Fighting the imperialism without simultaneously discouraging the nationalism means to fight some imperialists and to support others, because the nationalism is necessarily imperialist or illusory.

The national self-determination has not emancipated the laboring classes of the advanced countries. It will not do now in Asia and Africa. The national revolutions, as in Algeria for instance, will promise little for the lower classes, save indulging on more equal terms in national prejudices. Doubtless, this means something to the Algerians, who have suffered from a particularly arrogant colonial system. But the possible results of Algerian independence are deducible from those in Tunisia and Morocco, where the existing social relations have not changed and the conditions of the exploited classes have not improved».

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This time, we are in complete agreement with Paul Mattick. EDITOR'S NOTE.

CHAPTER 5

MARXISM, NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL STRUGGLES TODAY (12)

DAVID McNally

In this section of the volume, we reproduce the David McNally's text, a Canadian left-wing activist who presents in "Marxism, nationalism and national struggles today" an excellent synthesis of the leftist nationalist

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ideology. We reproduce the text such as published in 1996 as discussion paper by The New Socialist Group, translated into French by the group La Gauche. Throughout the text we present our reflections in italic characters followed by letters EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Part One: The Nationalism Challenge to Marxism

1. The nationalism dominates the world policy - and it is made with surprising ease. Open any daily newspaper, listen to discussions at work or school, watch or listen to any news program, look at the courses taught at universities and you will find that the division of the global population into entities called "nations" is overwhelmingly taken for granted. As I write these words, the Summer Olympic Games are underway in Atlanta. All the athletes of these Games are organized by nation-states, they represent "their" state, and they wear its colours and its flag. The medals won by these athletes belong to their country; they bring to their country honour and pride. Every day, a tally of medal, standings by nation, is provided to the millions upon millions of people who are following this event.

For the vast majority of people, there is nothing odd, insidious or dangerous about any of this. They take for granted that they are members of a nation-state; they take pride in its alleged accomplishments; they suffer when their nation is embarrassed or humiliated (remember Ben Johnson’s affair?). It rarely, if ever occurs to them, that the nation-state system is a recent creation in human history, that most human societies have had no concept of nation whatsoever, and that the rise of the nation-state system corresponds to the international development of capitalism. Moreover, rarely does the idea enter in the political debate that the nation-state system is the political form that regulates, controls and disciplines people in a way that facilitates their exploitation by capital. Most of the time, we inhabit a mental universe in which discussion of things are taken in national terms - Japanese cars, Canadian steel, American movies, Russian athletes, Jamaican music and so on – and are part of the common-sense that organizes our political and cultural understanding of the world. Even the rise of virulent ethno-nationalisms - like those in the ex-Yugoslavia, or those which are killing hundreds of thousands persons in Burundi and Rwanda at the moment, rarely cause us to question the idea of nation or our own nationalism. It is overwhelmingly the other person's nationalism that is considered as a problem and almost never our own.

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What of amazing in the fact that under the mode of capitalist production, the bourgeois ideology is dominant and covers, with its lead screed, the

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whole society and social classes, of which it controls almost all the institutions and the media? ? However we dispute the assertion of professor McNally in the effect that the nationalism dominates the world politics. The nationalism languishes slowly under the assaults of the international economic activities of the world capital EDITOR'S NOTE.

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2. For all these reasons, the nationalism represents arguably the greatest challenge to Marxism. "The workers have no country", declared Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. In this spirit, Marxism launched the first political movement that thought in international terms that looked for the world-wide human emancipation and declared that the elimination of the nation-state was its highest goal. The International Workingmen's Association (often known as the First International), launched in 1864, represented the form of organization that fit this outlook of an international political movement of the working class. Yet, the period of nearly 150 years since the publication of the Communist Manifesto has been one in which the working class movements have tended (outside of the interlude of 1917-23 or so) to become increasingly dominated by nationalism. Labour movements are almost entirely national organization; they generally seek to organize workers in a given country with little thought of their sisters and brothers elsewhere. More than this, they are dominated by nationalism: they tend to support import controls (and other forms of national protectionism) to protect "our jobs" and "our way of life". It is no exaggeration to say that left nationalism is the dominant ideology of labour movements throughout the world.

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These observations, being truthful, what are supposed to think of it? Is it necessary to conclude that since the misled proletarian class - without dominant revolutionary proletarian ideology in its ranks - without influential proletarian organization, should give up and to rally to the bourgeois nationalism, to the struggles of bourgeois national liberation to get the society out of the feudalism and get it in the capitalism and carry out the two successive revolutions as proposed by Lenin? Certainly not, because both revolutions in waterfalls are not practicable as proved by the Russian, Chinese, Cuban and other revolutions. It is necessary to know that these pseudo-scientific analyses of the capitalist political economy are false even if trade unions, organizations of the bourgeois left and intellectuals with leftist bias propagate them. Every proletarian revolutionary has to set to work and instead of trying to find among this jumble with leftist bias the most "Marxist" explanation - too often the most dogmatic - he has to make a research, analysis job of the concrete reality, by spreading the results and discussing these ideas with whoever wants to discuss. In brief, we recommend that the revolutionary proletarians

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deviate from any political party, any organization of the dogmatic and sectarian bourgeois left, heiress of the Second, Third or Fourth International. It is necessary to break the anti-proletarian cordon sanitaire which the sectarian, union petty bourgeoisie, the subsidized NGO, the anti-globalist, eco-socialist, leftist, opportunist and reformist civil society have built around the proletarians. EDITOR'S NOTE. 

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Yet, unless the hold of nationalism can be broken, the prospects are really weak for the policies of socialist internationalism. For this reason, the discussion "on the national question" is present in a recurring way within the socialist movement. In what follows, I intend to review some of the key elements of Marxist debates over nationalism, to look at their strengths and their weaknesses, and to apply some of the insights that this survey provides to discussing on national questions in Canada today.

Part Two: The national question from Marx to Trotsky

3. The persistence of nationalism and the reality of national struggles have forced the socialists to return regularly to this issue. But it has to be acknowledged that generally things have not gone well in this area. The vast majority of socialists have adapted or are accommodated to nationalism; they have come to see their project as involving a more enlightened and humane running of the national state (and not its elimination in the course of an internationalizing struggle against "the wretched of the earth"). A small minority of socialists have simply tried to ignore the realities of national struggles, endlessly issuing calls for international unity of the world's workers that move almost no one and which ignore the real, concrete national questions. There are some important cases where socialists have struggled to find a genuinely internationalist ways of relating to realities of national oppression. The Marx's attitude towards Ireland in the 1860s and the Lenin's approach to the oppressed peoples of Tsarist Russia stand out in this regard. Before looking at these examples, however, I want to spend a few moments on the first two trends to which I've alluded.

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The struggle of the revolutionary proletariat against the capitalist mode of production is not a crusade, a "more human and illuminate way to manage the bourgeois national State". It is a war to be finished where the proletariat either will disappear under the thermonuclear bombs of the decadent capital, which will have nothing to do with this not valuable living capital; either the proletariat will knock down the national and international capital in order to give himself the capacities of creating a

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new revolutionary mode of production. Contrary to what claimed by the Bolsheviks, there is no socialist state reformist alternative or of peaceful coexistence between the capitalist mode of production and the communist proletarian mode of production. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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4. The world socialist movement first developed a mass character in Germany beginning in the late 1880s. Germany at that time was a monarchy with a parliament whose electorate was a small minority of the adult population. Over the years, more and more workers received the right to vote, and has been the party of the working class, the Social Democratic Party (often known by its German initials, SPD), which became a major political force. The SPD soon became identified with "capturing" the German state, not overthrowing it. As a result, SPD leaders became more and more influenced by the idea of the national interest. Increasingly, leading figures began to defend the idea of a "progressive" German colonialism. An SPD government, they suggested, would not free German colonies; it would simply treat them better. So powerful, so committed was the identification with the nation-state that the SPD leadership came out in favour of the German government’s entry into the First World War Most parties of the so-called Second International (founded in 1889) quickly followed suit.

5. In the forefront of the socialist opposition to the War were the Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, and the Russian Marxist V. I. Lenin. Both denounced the War as a feature of imperialism and as part of the competitive struggle of the major capitalist powers to divide up the globe. Luxemburg and Lenin developed the policies of international socialist opposition to the War and they argued that the workers should refuse to support "their" national ruling classes and that they should work to turn the social crises that the war would eventually induce into class wars of workers against the capitalist system.

6. Luxemburg and Lenin thus contributed to a vitally important internationalist and anti-imperialist current within the socialist movement. Despite their significant agreements in this area, they differed strongly on the question of the socialist attitude to national struggles. Luxemburg claimed that in the age of imperialism and a full internationalizing of capitalism, the national struggles were out-mode. So powerful was the world economy, that the idea of an economically independent nation-state had become ridiculous. «In the mid-nineteenth century, she argued, the national wars broke up the old empires and created new bourgeois-democratic states and this had been progressive. But that age had passed. In the epoch of international capitalism, it is reactionary to support the creation of new nation-states. The task now was to mobilize the international working class against the world capitalism". In the era of rampaging capitalism, there can be no

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more national wars", she declared. The national struggles "can serve only as a means of deception", of duping the masses. The Rosa Luxemburg's position has strength: its principled internationalism, its vigorous opposition to nationalism. But it also has, as Lenin argued, two crucial weaknesses. First, she papers over the hierarchical character of the relationships between nations – in reality some dominate and others are oppressed – and her position can lead the socialists to a position of indifference or neutrality in the struggles between “opprimantes” nations and oppressed nations.

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Let us look again at these concepts of "ruling, oppressing and exploitative nations" and of "dominated, oppressed and exploited nations" hierarchically differentiated, asserts the professor McNally. Let us agree at first that a nation is not a social class, it is rather a group of social classes. In a nation people have an activity - a job - conditions of existence - the one sells his labor force - his only property or almost - the other one buys means of production and labor force in order to make capital gain, source of its wealth of its capital after all. Goods which others finally sell and resell to the proletarians who embezzle their salary, eroded by inflation. Between these various social classes nothing in common, no common mentality, the proletarian needs the peace to reproduce, the capitalist comes to war to assure the reproduction of his capital. Sometimes even the language is different from a social class to another one, which does not create however a class linguistic oppression. If the French capitalist ruling class and its State oppress the Ivory Coast peasant and proletarian classes it is not the French working class which benefits from this exploitation of class and it is not the Ivory Coast capitalist class which is exploited and oppressed by his French mentors, which, on the contrary, awards emoluments, subcontracts and participations in the shareholding of the multinationals of the capital, which we are wrong to qualify as French, Belgian or American multinationals. In brief, the French nation does not exploit the Ivory Coast nation. By the way, after a while the French and Ivory Coast billionaires co-opt within boards of directors in Ivory Coast, in France and somewhere else in the world. Recently, we announced that a first Vietnamese billionaire bought shares in a multinational chemical company, the same which had produced "the orange agent" whose effects make still die the Vietnamese children, whose parents, knock out themselves in the death « sweatshops", property of this Vietnamese billionaire. There are no exploited-oppressed nations, just like there are no oppressing-exploitative nations; there are only oppressed social classes and oppressing social classes living for the first ones under the oppressive boot of the national prison guards and of their State which every bourgeois "nationalist" clan would want to control for his profit. For a century, since the Bolshevik and Maoist victories, the communists and the leftists of the whole world suggested substituting themselves to the unreliable and shaky nationalist bourgeoisies in order to achieve the bourgeois democratic revolutions, hoping to continue until the "socialist" revolution

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on road towards the communist mode of production. They all failed, not because of the reformist revisionist and opportunist traitors, but because the objective economic conditions, the development of the productive forces in these backward countries from an industrial point of view, required the preliminary development of the capitalism. The "communist" leaders thus ended up in the position of frames of the so called State capitalism on road towards the communist proletarian mode of production via the market economy and the socialized mode of production which was never something else than the totalitarian state way towards the capitalism, then the imperialism, as demonstrated by the history of the USSR and the "communist" China. In the history there has never been a "struggle of proletarian national liberation" there have been only struggles of a national bourgeoisie, or of a faction of these ones, using national peasant and proletarian social classes as cannon fodder for the defense of their actions and ambitions as demonstrated by all the bourgeois wars of liberation national where the proletariat ended up, after many difficulties, to wage war to release himself from his new national gaolers. Without global economic liberation, there is no national political and ideological liberation. Worse, at the time of the globalized modern imperialism it is impossible for a national section of the international proletariat to lead an emancipatory revolution in an only, or in two or three countries. The coming proletarian revolution will be global or it will not be. EDITOR'S NOTE. 

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Secondly, the position of Rosa Luxemburg underestimates the importance for the socialists of advocating the rights of oppressed peoples to self-determination as a way to challenge the national-chauvinism that infects the workers and the dominant nations. According to Lenin, the Luxemburg's error, in other words, has to do with the fact that she looks at national struggles only from the relatively abstract level of the world economy. In so doing, she loses sight of their concrete political dynamics, the way in which such national conflicts shape the terrain of political struggle and working class consciousness. If the Marxists must be really part of political debates in society, argues Lenin, an abstract and timeless position of the sort "all national struggles are out-mode" is useless. Instead, the revolutionary socialists must try to assess how given national struggles affect the general terrain of political struggle in society, and work out their approach from there. Lenin presented the thesis which he developed in this area as an elaboration of the position which Marx had taken on the struggle for Irish independence. In truth, the Lenin's position was more original than that. He developed a quite novel approach to the whole issue of national struggles. But let's begin with the Marx’s position on Ireland, and we will see what Lenin went with it.

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The professor McNally penetrates here at the heart of the Leninist theory. McNally explains that Lenin makes some pirouettes and invites us to follow him to trace: 1) he notices that the proletariat is influenced by the hegemonic bourgeois ideology, by the chauvinistic nationalist ideology in particular. Indeed, in a class society the ideology of the ruling class is hegemonic, we have already written it. 2) Lenin in pragmatic tactician asserts that the "socialists have to try to understand how given national struggles affect the general ground of the political struggle (…) it is necessary to build an initiative on this basis" suggest Lenin. You will have noted that Lenin does not still propose that the communists seize the direction of the bourgeois nationalist struggles, but simply "that they build an approach!?..." We know today that this approach will consist, for the communist parties of the Third International in particular to substitute themselves to the shaky bourgeois nationalists, or then to follow the national bourgeoisies in order to assure the capitalist democratic revolutions. 3) Lenin tries to seal the coffin of Rosa Luxemburg and the revolutionary internationalists by calling Marx to the rescue. We will return there. EDITOR'S NOTE. 

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7. Marx and Engels had originally put little stock in the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. In 1848, for example, they held that the labor movement of Britain mass of this time (known as Chartism) would deal with this problem. They saw the Irish question as a fairly minor aspect of the working class struggle in Britain, and they often faulted the Irish nationalists for failing to ally themselves with Chartism. After the decline of Chartism, as the anti-Irish feeling started to play a more and more important role in British politics, and as the Fenian movement for Irish independence surged forward again in the 1860s, the Marx's position changed again.

The Marx's thesis took the following form. Firstly, he claimed that the anti-Irish sentiment, by tying the English workers to an identification with their own rulers, was the biggest obstacle to an independent working class politics.

«The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself as a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class» (Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question)

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Secondly, Marx now argues that the national struggle in Ireland was the key which will switch on the workers' revolution in England. In that respect, he acknowledged that it was a reversal of his earlier view: «For a long time, I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime through the ascendancy of English working class. A deeper study has convinced me of the opposite: the English working class will make nothing decisive, here in England, as long as it will break in a clearest way, in its Irish policy, with the policy of the ruling classes; as long as it will not make, not only common cause with the Irish people, but still will not take the initiative of the forced dissolution of the Union of 1801 and of its replacement by an equal and free confederacy». (Marx and Engels, Ireland and Irish question. Page 294).

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In the above extract Marx makes an error perfectly understandable at this beginning of the labor political movement. Marx believes that the proletariat has to get organized in vast party of mass and must present an electoral platform to the bourgeois elections. A program of class including proposals as "the forced replacement of the Union by an equal and free confederacy". More than one century of vote-catching history of the labor parties in the world teaches us that from a revolutionary point of view there is nothing to expect neither from these vote-catching mass political parties nor from the proletarian participation in the bourgeois elections. We know now that the spontaneous insurrectionary and revolutionary movement develops differently, in particular by strengthening the contempt and the complete rejection, which anyway the proletariat develops instinctively, however unpleasant it might seem to the candidates of "left", towards the bourgeois State and its governance, towards the electoral masquerades and the chauvinistic nationalism. In that we can assert that the working class is at the forefront of "the avant-garde". EDITOR'S NOTE.

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The experience of rethinking the Irish question tended to be of more general importance for Marx and Engels. It leads Marx, for example, to coin his wonderful reflection: "any nation that oppresses another forges its own chains". In many respects, what Lenin did was to retake this insight and apply it systematically.

The empire of the Russian Tsars contained dozens upon dozens of oppressed national communities. By trying to organize a working class movement across the Tsarist Empire, the Russian Marxists inevitably came up against nationalist aspirations. Many Russian Marxists dismissed this, suggesting that the national issues had no place in a Marxist movement. Lenin's early writings pay little attention to these questions. But over time,

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the national question came to play a more and more important role in his thought. By the First World War, he had developed a fairly distinctive attitude towards this issue. The Lenin's view has the following elements…

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Why was Lenin forced to develop a nationalist policy during the Russian Revolution? Because the Bolsheviks did not manage an anticapitalistic proletarian revolution, the capitalism is in its infancy and the proletariat almost non-existent in the semi-feudal Russian society, in the peasant masses formed mainly by mujiks, almost slaves, subjected to the feudal relationships of production, where the elements, constituting of a nation, were in development. The only thing missing was the capitalist nation state which Stalin will quickly set up. To lead a proletarian revolution is required a vast educated, experimented, pauperized proletariat, conscious internationally and connected to the other fractions of the world proletariat. To make a success of their capitalist democratic revolution and bring down the mode of feudal production Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to mobilize and surround the backward, illiterate peasant masses, in a vast uprising "to give the earth to those who work the earth" (which will not last for a long time), within the framework of local or regional communities of membership and so the Leninists will strengthen the bourgeois nations of all Russia at the same time as they will build a strong State capitalism, rather powerful to face the German capitalism. Nothing of revolutionary proletarian in all this. That’s why, with the Stalin’s death, Khrouchtchev will have no trouble to strengthen the Russian nationalist influence on the Soviet multinational set on which Vladimir Putin «is navigating today. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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First, in an imperialist world order there is a hierarchy among nations which inevitably produces nationalist revolts. Second, the key problem for Marxists is how to find an internationalists base in a world dominated by national conflicts. Third, the crucial strategic problem is to try to displace the workers from nationalist feeling to internationalist feeling. Fourth, the biggest obstacle to doing so is the nationalism of workers in the dominant nations (as Marx argued about English workers in the case of Ireland) which leads them to identify with their ruling class; which reinforces the nationalism of workers in the oppressed nations (since the latter do not see that the workers of the dominant nation are the least bit sympathetic to their aspirations to be free from national oppression). What follows from this, according to Lenin, the Marxists should support the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, including their right to form an independent State.

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Why the fact that the capitalism develops at different speeds in various countries would produce national "revolts" if it is only because the bourgeoisies of these diverse countries are forced to be in confrontation for markets? What do we have to think of these observations of Lenin and his conclusion on «the right of nations to self-determination"? In 1917, and we add in 1949, at the time of the "bourgeois nationalist Liberation of China by the Revolution of new democracy", the objective and subjective conditions of the internationalist proletarian revolution were not absolutely gathered and for this reason the proletarian revolution was impossible. A mode of production can be overturn as long as it does not have to harness all the productive forces that it is wide enough to contain (to reproduce), what was far from being the case for the rising industry of Tsarist Russia, the same for the Maoist China of 1949. It is this sad reality which forced the opportunist contortions of Lenin, then of Mao, to justify that communists manage these bourgeois nationalist democratic revolutions. EDITOR'S NOTE. 

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The key to Lenin's argument is its focus on the political unlike the Luxemburg's largely economic argument. Lenin insists that the nationalism represents crucially a political division within the working class. The Marxist approach takes this political division as its starting point in an effort to overcome it. To this goal, the key question is not the economic viability of a given nation-state, but what tactics will be most effective for building the class solidarity and the internationalism. And Lenin's answer is clear: undermine the national chauvinism of workers in the dominant nation by campaigning openly for the right of oppressed nations to determine their own futures. To win workers in an oppressed nation such a position would represent a major blow to nationalist identifications.

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This reasoning of Mr. McNally is the opposite of a dialectical materialistic approach. The relationships of production ensue from the development of the productive strengths and other means of production and not the opposite. What will make the internationalist proletarians; these are not the endless moralizing of the "communists" and other nationalist opportunist left, but the same development of the globalized capitalism which will force the internationalization of the working class in the practice, in the policy and in the ideology, what is a fait accompli today. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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Lenin made clear that this did not mean that the Marxists would like to see more and more independent nation-states. On the contrary, as Marxist

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internationalists, it favoured the federations that brought more workers into a common political life. But, all such federations should be voluntary. Forcible, coercive or oppressive forms of political association were to be opposed.

«If we demand the freedom of secession for the Mongolians, Persians, Egyptians and all other oppressed nations without exception, it is not because we favour the secession, but only because we defend the voluntary association as distinct from forcible association. (13).

Supporting the right of nations to self-determination thus became a key element in a strategic approach towards the building of international solidarity of workers. Not to support this right means to align oneself with the dominant nationalism. That means to operate with an abstract internationalism which fails to acknowledge the importance of the experience of domination, or what Lenin called "the psychology that is so important in the national question" (Collected Works, v. 19, Page 499). The international solidarity requires, in other words, that the workers in the dominant nations must be the most vigorous advocates of the right of oppressed peoples within "their" state to self-determination (including their right to secede).

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But where from comes this idea that an "oppressed" people can self-determine and become emancipated in "his" bourgeois national State? The bourgeois national State (classic or Soviet capitalist) is never the State of «a whole people» and especially of the proletariat, but it is always the State of the ruling class which oppress this proletariat. The State is the first instrument of alienation of the oppressed class. If this class wishes to become emancipated, it has to begin by destroying this chauvinistic national bourgeois democratic State. So, in Soviet Union, after decades of capitalism of State the nationalism, the chauvinism, the archaic religion and all these decadent bourgeois ideas are prosperous and they came to the open at the time of the «Perestroika-Glasnost» The pious wishes of Bolsheviks about to grant the national self-determination have never allowed only a people or an ethnic minority to leave the lap of the Soviet State. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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At the same time, Lenin defends such a principled opposition to the dominant nationalism that enables the workers of the oppressed nation to move from nationalism to socialism.

While the socialists of the oppressor nations advocate the right of the oppressed to self-determination, the socialists of the oppressed nations "must attach a prime significance to the unity and the alliance of the workers of the oppressed nations with those of the oppressor nations;

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otherwise these Social-Democrats will involuntarily become the allies of their own national bourgeoisie" (14). In a similar spirit, the Theses on the National and Colonial Questions of the Communist International insisted that, even when supporting bourgeois national struggles against colonialism, the socialists should insist upon "the class independence of the proletarian movement".

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In what country did we see the workers of the so-called "oppressed nation" to pass from nationalism to communist internationalism, by the spontaneous magic of the artificial "national liberation"? It is rather the opposite which we observe. Proletarians indifferent to the bourgeois chauvinistic nationalist ideas enthralled by these reactionary ideas, imprisoned that they are in fratricide national wars where their homes are destroyed in the name of the homeland. We think for our part that when the objective conditions of the world proletarian revolution will be mature, the bourgeois nationalist question will not be anymore an important question; especially not for the internationalist proletariat and it will not be because of the «Communists». EDITOR'S NOTE.

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This analysis has considerably strengthened the ability of socialists to engage seriously with the current national struggles without abandoning their socialist objectives. For these reasons, we can learn much from Marx's writings on Ireland and from Lenin's discussions on the national question. At the same time, these writings offer little more than guidelines. After all, defending the right to secede does not tell absolutely under what conditions one should advocate it. Rather than providing a formula that can simply be applied in each and every context, they are a starting point to guide our analysis. To try to use them is not a substitute to a serious analysis. Before proceeding to discuss how, we might use these insights in our approach of national struggles in the Canadian State, it is important to comment on the issues of nationalism and internationalism as they burst out in the period after Lenin's death in 1924. The world communist movement shifted from internationalism to nationalism under the impact of the degeneration of the revolution of 1917 in Russia and the rise of Stalinism.

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The Revolution of 1917 was, from the beginning to the end, a struggle of national liberation of the national bourgeoisies of various Russia, which rushed to adhere to the Bolshevik party while the corrupt aristocracy migrated massively towards Europe or still raised cutting weapons to defend its decadent feudal mode of production. The Stalinism was not the gravedigger of the Russian proletarian revolution because this proletarian revolution has never taken place - the small Russian proletariat, weak and inexperienced, was very incapable to lead such a

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revolution on the vast Russian continent and still less to export it all over the world. Besides, Stalin made the demonstration that he had correctly understood the Soviet national urgency which consisted in building quickly a national capitalism and an industrialized nation state. Surrounding with enemies, just like the Bolshevik Russia, the pseudo-revolutionary adventurism of Trotsky frightened, that's why this bourgeois intellectual was removed. Stalin did not modify the Bolshevik nationalist policy; he simply applied it and accelerated. Leaning on this nationalism the "Little father of the people" was able to require the biggest Stakhanovist sacrifices to the Russian farmers transformed into proletarians and to assure thus the fast industrialization of the country, preparing it to face the German imperialism. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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As early as 1923, the idea of "national Bolshevism" was being developed in the German Communist Party. Once Stalin declared that it was possible to build "the socialism in one country", the door was opened to the idea of distinct national struggles for socialism, terms of reference of the dominant nationalisms. So, for example, the Communist Party of Canada soon discovered that Canadian nationalism was "progressive"; meanwhile, the CP members in Quebec who tried to promote a more nuanced understanding of the Quebec national struggle were regularly expelled for "bourgeois nationalism".

One of the great historic contributions of Leon Trotsky was to have resisted the notion of the struggle for socialism as being a national struggle and to have held firm to Marxist internationalism. For all their terrible problems, the Trotskyist groups played an important role in keeping such ideas alive at a time when nationalism dominated the left. The Trotsky's distinct contribution in this period was his theory of "permanent revolution". Originally formulated as a strategic view of the coming Russian revolution, in the late-1920s, Trotsky reformulated it as the theory of the relationship between national and class struggles in the age of imperialism.

8. The theory of permanent revolution was a brilliant and original contribution to Marxist thought. Rejecting the schematic, linear, and mechanistic idea that every society had to pass through given historic stages before the struggle for socialism can be posed, Trotsky argued that the concrete analysis of the class dynamics in any given society had to be made in the context of its relationship to the world economy. Thus, while most Russian Marxists argued that Russia first had to undergo a "bourgeois democratic revolution" against Tsarism and then complete a stage of capitalist development before the struggle for workers' power might be on the agenda, Trotsky argued that the Russian bourgeoisie was too frightened by the growing power of a precocious Russian proletariat to lead the struggle against the Tsarist monarchy. Frightened that the revolutionary movement for liberal democracy would spark on

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mass strikes and bring an insurrectionary proletariat to the streets fighting for its distinctive class demands (as had indeed happened in 1905), the Russian bourgeoisie has quickly abandoned such a struggle, he maintained. As a result, the leadership in the anti-Tsarist struggle would pass to the proletariat which would put its unique stamp on the movement, pushing it towards the struggle for workers' democracy. Borrowing a phrase from Marx, Trotsky described this as the "permanent revolution"- what begins as a revolutionary movement for liberal democracy and that pass over into a struggle for socialist democracy and workers' power.

The Trotsky's theory (developed in 1905-1906) proved to be a profound anticipation of the class dynamics of the revolutionary process of 1917. Under the impact of the revolutionary movement in China in the 1920s, Trotsky soon extended the theory from Russia to the colonial world in general. In the colonies, he suggests, that the same pattern must be apply: a frightened bourgeoisie pulls back from the anti-colonial struggle; the latter will triumph only if led by a revolutionary party of the working class. While there were some important insights gained from this argument, it ran the risk of over-generalization (sic). After all, in the absence of a self-organized and combative working class as that of the Russian workers' movement of 1905 and 1917, why should petty bourgeois or bourgeois groups inevitably pull back from leading national struggles? Indeed, they didn't. In countries like India, Algeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh and dozens upon dozens more, the nationalist movements has not been led by the working class and indeed established independent nation-states. In China, the so-called Communist Party led such a struggle with no semblance of working class self-activity, and with no creation of organs of workers' democracy.

The world after 1945 saw a whole succession of national independences in which the working class movements played no meaningful role. Clearly, this requires some revision of Trotsky’s theory. Whatever its strength, it can’t be used as a universally-valid prediction about national struggles in the age of imperialism. Some Trotskyists attempt to debate about these events that clearly failed to conform to Trotsky's theory. Others, however, continue to cling dogmatically the letter of Trotsky's account. The largest U.S. Trotskyist group (Socialist Workers Party) produced a document in 1974 for example, which argues: "In the imperialist epoch, the national bourgeoisie in the industrially backward countries betrays its own revolution and the bourgeois democratic tasks, including the achievement of national independence can be carried out only through the socialist revolution" (15).

9. Now, the fact that this claim is obviously false (i.e. that the national independence can be achieved without socialist revolution) don’t seem to matter. Trotsky had said it, therefore it must be true. But many Trotskyists, who defend such a line, started to see socialist revolutions and workers' states everywhere: in Algeria, in Egypt, wherever a

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progressive-sounding nationalist regime took power. After all, if the national independence can’t be achieved without socialist revolution, then the achievement of national independence could only mean that such a revolution had occurred. The fact that nothing of resembling a socialist revolution can be identified -- like millions of oppressed peoples taking to the streets and winning the rank and file of the army to their side, like mass strikes and workplaces occupations, like new institutions of popular self-government springing up in the workplaces and communities - did not seem to matter. Going much farther than had Trotsky; some groups began to argue that there was a hidden logic which drove all nationalist struggles onto the road of socialist revolution. Even if they didn't know it, bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalists were actually making workers' revolutions. The primacy of workers' self-emancipation quickly disappeared (since almost any social group could now create the socialism).

And, inevitably, the line between nationalism and socialism became blurred. After all, if the anti-imperialist nationalism automatically grows over into socialism, then the line between the two is quite fluid. Some Trotskyists who gravitated towards such views eventually went over to a more or less uncritical embrace of progressive-looking nationalism (Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada) and gave up on the whole idea of permanent revolution and its insistence on independence of working class and its socialist organization within the national struggle. This was the evolution of the American SWP.

I make these points because they underline how important is to resist simple formulas when we talk about national struggles. There is no general law or dynamic of national struggles today (and there never has been). One of the errors of many Marxists has been to search for one rather than undertaking the much more important task of developing a concrete analysis of particular national struggles at a given historic conjuncture. With this warning in mind, I want shortly to turn to some preliminary considerations on national struggles in the Canadian State. But first, I want to point out some of the areas in which the Marxist account of nationalism remains weak so that we might be aware that these areas must be labor sectors for developing a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of nationalism in the modern world.

Part Three: The problems of the Marxist theory of nationalism

10. One of the great strengths of Marx's views on Ireland and of Lenin's writings on the national question is that they provide a way of supporting the national struggles of oppressed peoples without championing any kind of nationalism per se. This makes their legacy a most important one. But having said this, we must acknowledge that neither Marx nor Lenin really provide us a theory for understanding the biggest problem which we face in this area: the incredible power and persistence of

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nationalism and national identifications. Rather than a short-lived or episodic "diversion" of a more powerful class consciousness, the nationalism has dominated and continues to dominate the thinking of the vast majority of working class and oppressed peoples. I do not claim to have all the answers as to why this is so. But let me outline four partial explanations that deserve to be explored and developed.

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11. The first issue is what might be called the attractions for the citizenship. Remember that early working class movements were formed in circumstances where the vast majority of working people did not have the vote. For that reason, the struggle for democratic rights, especially the right to vote, figured prominently in socialist agitation. Indeed, the socialism - usually known by the name social-democracy - often appeared to be largely about the inclusion of the working class within capitalist democracy. As a result, a whole historic tradition developed in which the capitalist democracy was criticized simply for not being inclusive enough. As a result, the question of the form of capitalist political power - the bourgeois nation-state - and its inherent problems (bureaucratism, national definitions of citizenship, separation of economic and political power) were rarely raised. This meant that the working class movements generally sought the full rights of citizenship within the capitalist democracy. One can’t deny the importance of this struggle. After all, the struggle for bourgeois democratic rights, the battle to be considered a full member of society is of fundamental significance. But in the process, the working class often become attached to this as a sort of ideal; they had little connection with the political traditions which put forward a profound criticism of the inherent limits and biases of the same liberal democracy. Thus, a basically liberal-capitalist definition of rights and citizenship sunk very deep historic roots in working class movements - in which people are treated as utterly separate entities called "individuals" who come together in competitive economic markets and who are regulated according to laws which recognize only the rights of individuals (and their families) who are largely buyers and sellers of goods and services (all of which is one aspect of what is often referred to as "reformism"). It has to be said that the Marxists have paid little attention to the ideological power of these notions of citizenship, often preferring simply to focus the corruption and the character of "sell-out" of leaders who betrayed the socialist movement. If we are to develop a serious alternative to reformism, however, it will be necessary not only to denounce the "bad leaders", but, more important, to find ways of advancing a critique of capitalist democracy and citizenship that acknowledges the importance of rights while we are advancing a critique of their limits which can resonate in the experiences of working class, rather than sounding like a set of crude slogans.

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You will have noted that the intellectual titles his chapter: "The problems of the Marxist theory of nationalism", indicating by there that the object of his study is not the nationalism hinder to the proletarian revolution in the concrete practice of the class struggle, but the Marxist theory for itself, its purity and its defense against the deviationist impurity (sic), activity which constitutes in itself a proletarian deviationism. The intellectual did not think that "the incredible obstinacy of the chauvinist and reactionary nationalism" was bound with the incredible obstinacy of the mode of capitalist production which does not stop it any more staggering and getting up, a crisis after the other one. The reformist left whom in a certain time we called "left-wing opportunist" or "right-wing revisionist" has always pilfered in periphery of the proletarian class, looking for a not too binding posture by which she could sell their aspirations aiming at keeping the "democratic bourgeois nationalist" regime, or to reform it until to make it acceptable to the working class. The petty bourgeois was always the social base of the leftism, anarchism and terrorism which are only radical variants of the reformism. The petty bourgeoisie, included its intellectual section - social class destined to the disappearance under the imperialist evolution of the capitalist mode of production – clings desperately to the peculiarities of national capitalism, which assured his subsistence such as the bourgeois right, the parliamentary representation, the "democratic" governance of the immense tentacular bourgeois State. All this leads the petty bourgeois subclass to adhere to all the struggles for the defense of the bourgeois "democratic" rights (urban gentrifying, feminism, genre, LGBTW, rights of animals, communitarianism, secularism, social justice, defense of the welfare recipients and the SDF, tuition fees, schooling, health care, environment, urban agriculture, ecology, consumption and overconsumption, voluntary poverty, charity for the Third World, decolonization, nationalism, pacifism, antiracism, rights of the prisoners, urban cycling, naturism, nutrition, etc.), everything and anything excepted the struggles of the proletarian class which it considers too radical, sometimes violent, and which are not made public by the media "people" and by those of formatting in the pay. The petty bourgeoisie is very sensitive to this aspect of media visibility and current trend. This is linked to its social and cultural practice. The petty bourgeoisie has as main function to assure the services of reproduction of the population, under any relationship. The petty bourgeois conceives the class struggle as a mission and a voluntary work where he has to raise awareness and advance the willingness of the oppressed, that the petty bourgeois considers incapable to understand their oppression and their poverty. For the petty bourgeois if he manages to convince enough people to a cause, they will overcome by the petition, because the petty bourgeois believes sincerely in the bourgeois representtaive democracy - necessarily it is his livelihood. The petty bourgeois does not understand that to lead a social revolution there is the need of a revolutionary situation which will mobilize spontaneously the workforce required - there is nothing to make for it - the economic crisis will provide there. The real question will be then - not how many proletarians are mobilized - but towards what purpose are they managed? By its daily struggle, on the economic front in particular, the

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proletarian class knows the pusillanimity of the "rights-privileges" and the "ephemeral social benefits" torn away temporarily despite the dictatorship of the big capital. The proletarian class knows that the bourgeois dictatorship is "shut up", while the bourgeois democracy is "I’m not interested". No more than the mobilization of the working class as cannon fodder in the wars of bourgeois national liberation has related anything at all in the proletariat - the mobilization of the working class in the bourgeois wars for the defense of the "freedom, the democracy, the right to negotiate" and the pseudo "rights and social benefits" will relate anything at all, otherwise the experience of the struggle and the disappointments. Under the systematic economic crisis of the capitalism, there is no program of reform. It is the reversal of the bourgeois State and the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and its replacement not through "the socialist economy", but by the proletarian-communist mode of production which are the objectives of the proletarian social revolution. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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12. Related to this issue there is a second problem: the state-centered versions of socialism that have dominated the 20th century. Across a whole historic period, most of the left presented the state ownership as the social and economic essence of socialism. Marx had put the entire emphasis of his critique of capitalism on what he called the social relations of production, what means the relationships of domination, control, alienation and exploitation that dictate how wealth is produced in a capitalist society. What followed from this emphasis was the idea that the socialism entails the development of new relations of production based upon dis-alienated forms of control and self-management of production by working people. The workers' control of production and new institutions of popular self-government are at the heart of such a perspective.

During the era in which the Stalinized Communist Parties dominated the left (1925-1980 or so), these commitments were lost. The State ownership of the means of production and "the planned economy" were said to be the essence of the new society. Despite their best intentions, many Trotskyists also placed the emphasis here. As a result, the idea that the State ownership is inherently progressive, indeed that it is inherently socialist, became very widespread on the left. This contributed to the "State-centered" politics in which the ideas of state regulation and state planning were elevated to a prime position in socialist propaganda. One consequence of this was that the oppressive nature inherent to the nation-state was rarely broached. In fact, to this day, many on the left continue to push such a view, seemingly oblivious to the mass hostility to centralized state bureaucracies that has developed - for good reason - among the ranks of working class in huge parts of the world.What is entirely lost in such "state-centered" socialist politics (what we would call socialism from above) is that the nation-state arose with the development of capitalism by bourgeois classes who sought to integrate the national markets with a uniform system of laws and taxes, a common

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language, a unified government, and a national army to defend and advance their claims against "foreign" capitalists (and to put down domestic revolts when necessary). Also lost is a strong sense of the inherently bureaucratic form of bourgeois democracy (emphasized by Marx in The Civil War in France).

Finally, the state-centered versions of socialism tend to lose sight of the fact that the national structures and institutions nation-states perpetuate the division of the world into "us" (who belong to a given nation) and a "them" (foreigners, outsiders, etc.). The consequence of state-centered socialism, then, has been to reinforce the nationalism at the expense of internationalism.

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Contrary to what claims McNally it is not the socialism, which "leads to the development of new relationships of production based on not alienated forms of control and self-management of the production by the working class", but the mode of communist production, which can stand out only after a long and considerable development of the productive forces under the liberal, totalitarian, or socialist capitalism. By the way, the working class then has authority to disappear (under the communism).

The fundamental contradiction of a mode of production (whatever it is) lies always in the process of production and not in the social relationships of production. So, what disqualifies the capitalist mode of production is that the capital does not manage anymore to be valued in enough big quantity to assure its widened reproduction what determines the implosion of the social relationships of production, cause social unrests, aggravates the opposing class struggles until the uprising and potentially the revolution. It is not the role of the proletarian revolutionaries to create the objective conditions of the economic, political, then social, crisis all this will be spontaneous, mechanical and out of control. What will be the role of the proletarian revolutionaries will be to stimulate and bend this spontaneous insurrectionary popular movement until make it carry out its historic mission, destroy the old mode of capitalist production, to transform then this popular uprising into proletarian revolution, what means building the new mode of proletarian-communist production. Having said that, professor McNally is right to underline that "As a result in the socialists the idea of the property of State is in itself progressive (…). One of the consequences of this was that the oppressive nature inherent to the nation-state was rarely attacked…" by the nationalist reformist left. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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13. This brings us to the third point: the politics of space. The Marxists have been, curiously, indifferent to questions of space, especially to what concerns the identities of people which have spatial and geographic points of reference. Yet, the personal memories invariably have spatial

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dimensions: we think of ourselves as having been born in a certain place, having lived, grown up, worked, gone to school in various places, and so on. Now, for most of human history, the relationships to space have had nothing to do with the belonging to a nation. In truth, people belong to groups with both smaller and larger spaces. But the capitalism constructed what Benedict Anderson has described as "imagined communities". The nations are thus, in part, imaginary constructions - organized around symbols like flags, anthems, national colours, and largely artificial myths and histories, connected with administrative units called nation-states. We need only observe a phenomenon like the Olympic Games to realize the attractive power of these imagined communities. Millions of people who have never met Silken Laumann or Donovan Bailey nevertheless act as if they are "their own flesh and blood", glorying in their victories, agonizing in their defeats.

I say this not because I think there is anything inevitable about national identifications, on the contrary. But unless the revolutionary socialist understand that such identifications speak to a real need - the desire to belong to a community with others, to have some sense of common purpose - then we will underestimate the sense in which mass socialist movements of the future will have to help to develop truly internationalist feelings of community that is connected with both local and global experiences. It will not be enough to have a "vanguard" which tells that the nationalism is their enemy; it will be necessary to create new experiences of space based upon forms of organization that create new solidarities and new identifications, forged in common struggle, that go beyond the nation-state.

14. And this brings me to my fourth point: the rise of nationalism in the age of globalization. The economic globalization bursts out; barely any corner of the globe has been untouched by the considerable ascendancy of transnational corporations and by global financial markets. Most nation-states are economically smaller than the big transnational companies and the world monetary markets move sums around every day that massively exceed the holdings of any central bank (see my article "The end of the Nation-States?", New Socialist n.3, May-June 1996). These global economic entities are wreaking havoc on people’s lives: the factories close, whole communities are destroyed, the social services are savaged: as communities' hospitals, schools, post offices and so on disappear, all in the name of globalization.

In such circumstances, the nationalism often becomes the first and most accessible means for understanding and resisting these forces. We must remember that a national government might appear as a lot closer and a lot more tangible than some transnational or the electronic global money market centered in cyberspace. Yet, demanding that the national state protect "us" against global capital slides almost inevitably into seeing the problem in national terms. The foreigners (and what is foreign) become the enemy of our security and well-being. Nasty and unscrupulous politicians quickly become the adept at fuelling and manipulating such

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sentiments. So, the US autoworkers engage in bashing Japanese cars, disaffected youth in Germany get pulled into firebombing hostels full of Turkish migrant labourers, people in California support the propositions cracking down on "illegals" from Mexico, English-speaking Canadians denounce "greedy" Quebeckers. Serbs, Croats and Muslims are pitted against one another in the former Yugoslavia; the Hutus and Tutsis find themselves in bloody conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi – and the list goes on.

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The professor, starting from a bad diagnosis proposes a bad cure. The "economic globalization" is neither a spectre which bursts out suddenly nor the fruit of a bad "liberty killer and neoliberal" policy, from which the «accomplice» bourgeois State could protect the proletariat. The bourgeois State is not accomplice, it is the craftsman of the globalization and can be on no account the solution to the troubles of the capitalist economy and much less of its proletarian victim. The ruling class and his national State control nothing in the deepening of the crisis of capitalism. What is this "us" whom the reformists use? The "us" citizen - voter - consumer - collaborator of State, transcending the class interests. It is against this type of petty bourgeois reformism that the proletariat has to protect itself. The revised, wrinkled bourgeois national State, last donjon deducted from the nutty capitalist fortress, is not the last refuge for the revolutionary proletarian class which on the contrary has to invest to destroy it and not to make his "socialist" State. We know that the mind of petty bourgeois capitulation has already contaminated the spirit of the distraught proletarians, we know that the union business bureaucracies, that the mercenaries of the industry of the NGO and other associations of the bribed civil society have already heavily raged in the proletarian ranks and that the list of their misdeeds is again going to lengthen, nevertheless, the duty of the proletarian revolutionaries is to indicate relentlessly our merciless enemy, the capitalist class and his nationalist bourgeois State - class against class - because the proletariat has no homeland, this is our motto. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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It's no accident then, that in this period of fierce restructuring of capital, of old and new nationalisms are rearing their heads - and many of them in a most virulent and violent way. Rarely, we head the clarion cry of the anti-colonial nationalisms of the 1950s and '60s, since most of these have been thoroughly discredited by their failures to meet hopes for development. And in a context of anger and despair, where the left and the labour movement appear to be spent forces, the right-wing ethnic nationalisms seize the political initiative. But, there is nothing, once again, of inevitable about any of this.

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But it would be foolhardy to underestimate the upsurge of nationalism of which we are witnessing in this era of globalization. And it should remind us that the need for socialists to underline their internationalist commitments is perhaps more pressing than at any time since the bulk of the left embraced the nationalism in 1914. To do so, we will need to take up the important insights offered by the tradition of socialist internationalism and develop them more thoroughly in relation to questions like the politics of space, nation-states and economic globalization, and the critique of the form of the bourgeois nation-state from the perspective of socialism from below.

Part Four: the national questions in Canada today

15. Canada is a product of the imperialist expansion of the European powers. Established as settlement, Canada has based its domination upon the oppression and domination of aboriginal peoples and of the French settlers who populated New France and other parts of the Canada conquered by Britain in 1759. Canada was founded upon the oppression of these groups; for this reason, the Canadian politics is shaped by two main national struggles, those of native peoples (or the "First Nations") and those of the Quebecois.

16. Because the native peoples were economically marginalized, politically disenfranchised, and horribly oppressed by the apartheid policies of the Indian Act, they have had a difficult time finding the levers by which to exercise political pressure. It was largely in the midst of the explosion of social protest in the 1960s and early 1970s that the politically organized native movements began to make their mark. Inspired by groups like the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement of the US, the native activists began to engage in much more militant and concerted forms of struggle (16).

Since the upheavals of the late 1960s and early '70s, there have been efforts to professionalize the native movement, to make it a more conventional lobbying effort. At the forefront of this shift there has been the leadership of the Assembly of First Nations. Much of the focus of the AFN has been on the constitutional change, in particular the attempt to get recognition of the "inherent right to self-government" for the native peoples enshrined in the Constitution Act (AANB). It is vital that the socialists support this demand. Given that the native peoples never consented to being governed by the Canadian state, their inherent right to choose whatever form of self-government they desire, must be acknowledged and defended.

At the same time, we must recognize that a whole layer of native activists (many of them were the young generation of the AFN leaders) rejects the focus on constitutional change and land claims through the

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courts that dominates the mainstream native politics. These activists have been in the forefront of direct action forms of civil disobedience like road and highway blockades and occupations of historic native lands of the sort that we've seen at Oka, Gustafsen Lake and Ipperwash. It is vital that the socialists, while defending the demands of a group like the AFN, also try to organize solidarity with these more militant forms of native struggle. We must make it clear that we support the militant native self-organization and the self-activity and that we blame the colonialist practices of the Canadian state for any violence which occurs.

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It is maybe essential that the "socialists" support the aspiration for the autonomy of the headmen of the First nations which wish to administer kitties and gifts of charity, granted by the governments to the native bands, with the aim of obtaining their membership in the despoilment of the resources of the reserves, but it is not a fight for the native proletarians who wish rather to concentrate their efforts on the reversal of the mode of capitalist production in cooperation with their Canadian proletarian comrades. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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17. The national question which dominates the official politics in Canada is that of the Quebecois. This has to do with the fact that, wanting to profit from the agricultural and commercial development of New France, and wishing that the French farmers continue working their land, the British colonizers were not interested in displacing the people of the colony. While the native peoples were increasingly pushed to the margins of economic life, things were more complicated with the French settlers. Initially, the British tried to suppress the Catholic Church and the French language. They soon realized, however, that they would need an alliance with the French elite,- landlords, clergy, and a few capitalists - if they were to govern the area effectively. As a result, while is locking New France into a relationship of colonial domination by British-appointed authorities, they also made concessions: tolerance for the French language, the Catholic Church and the French legal Code. When the push came in the 1860s to integrate the British colonies in North America, Quebec was granted a further concession: the restoration of its own legislative assembly. As a result, a political entity was created (the province of Quebec) which housed the second largest provincial population in the country, a vast majority of whom were French-speaking, and which was home to some of its most important centers of agriculture, manufacturing and commerce. This meant that the grievances from Quebec had usually to be negotiated by the predominantly English-speaking ruling class.

While the nationalist pressures, regularly emanated from Quebec (and could become quite frustrating for them at times of war), as long as the

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Catholic Church dominated the cultural and political life, the Quebec nationalism did not seem especially threatening for the Canada's ruling class. That changed in the 1960s with the rise of a secular middle class and a new labour movement is breaking with the stranglehold of the Church and the appearance of a new kind of nationalist movement (which crystallized ultimately in the creation of the Parti Quebecois). The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the October crisis of 1970 (in which the Trudeau government used the army and police state measures to crush the Front de la Liberation du Quebec), the militant general strike of 1972, and the election of a PQ government under Rene Levesque’s direction in 1976, all combined has led to move the "Quebec question" to the forefront of political debate. And this has remained for a period of thirty years. Moreover, the obsession of federal politicians to resolve the Quebec question has been exploited by right-wing politicians suggesting that in the midst of hardship for most, the Quebeckers were looking for getting a "special treatment".

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18. In the first instance, the attitude of socialists must be clear; Quebec is an oppressed nation within the Canadian state. Initially conquered by British imperialism, the Canadian State continues to deny the democratic right of Quebec to determine its own future. The socialists defend the Quebec's right to self-determination including its right to secede from the Canadian confederation (this does not mean to accept the right of the Quebec government to deny the same right to the native peoples). But from here, things get more complicated. As I pointed out above, there are no general rules or universal law which instructs the socialists if they must defend or oppose the separation or the secession. To sort that out, we need a concrete analysis.

Basically, the socialist attitude should probably be something like Marx's was on Ireland. If a powerful, united workers' movement shows the capacity to address the problems of national oppression, then the national separation is unnecessary. Marx thought that this was the case in Britain during the period of Chartism which peaked in 1848. But, if chauvinism towards the oppressed nation becomes a continual means of blocking the development of independent working class politics, then it makes sense to advocate the independence as a way of removing the national antagonism that holds back left-wing politics.

Whatever one might say about the past, I believe a good case can now be made that in the aftermath of the debate over law 101 and 172 (the Quebec's recent language laws), over the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, and the enormous hostility that has been generated in all the country to the idea of granting the Quebec recognition as a "distinct society", the anti-Quebec chauvinism functions in the same way as the anti-Irish chauvinism in the 1860s: as a way of binding the English-speaking workers with their rulers and the traditions of the Canadian state. All attempts to deal with the national demands coming from

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Quebec are soon met with a powerful opposition from a considerable portion of ordinary English-speaking people. In the midst of such anti-Quebec outcries, the national identity of united working people with the traditions of the Canadian state is affirmed. We can address the question like advocating a "new equal and free confederation" which Marx proposed in the case of England and Ireland, so as to define our position on this issue.

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It was an error on behalf of Marx to suggest to the workers inviting themselves in a bourgeois nationalist problem. This demonstrates its political inexperience, reflection of the immaturity of the consciousness of British working class at the beginning of the industrial capitalism. It is necessary by no means within the competence of the proletariat to resolve the constitutional, legislative and parliamentary problems between two nationalist bourgeoisies and between two capitalist States at war. The proletariat would want what he could not, him who possesses as only power and only wealth only its labor force to be sold without even the opportunity to refuse. The British proletariat of this time as the current Canadian proletariat have to maintain no illusion of this nature, there will be new "confederacy" of the really free and egalitarian soviets between the proletarians of the earth only when the dictatorship of the proletariat will stand out under a proletarian communist mode of production. The legal superstructure rests on the fundamental infrastructure, never the opposite. Far from taking away the proletariat of a nation, or other nationalist trifles, the opportunist attitude of the left Socialist-nationalist is only creating confusion and accrediting the myth of the national oppression and a possible "national political liberation", outside a fundamental economic emancipation of the proletarian class. EDITOR'S NOTE.

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I should make clear at this point that my suggestion that the socialists should probably advocate the Quebec independence has nothing to do with thinking that a new Quebec State would be inherently progressive, or that the struggle for it would inevitably unleash a radical social movement. On the contrary, unlike the comrades of Gauche socialiste, I think that an independent bourgeois Quebec achieved without a massive upheaval is very much a possibility. As a result, an independent Quebec State with immigration controls, racist practices and hostility towards native peoples seems to me quite possible. Indeed, I think that the comrades of Gauche socialiste err when they suggest that the bourgeois nationalists in Quebec (like Lucien Bouchard) don't really want an independent state and that the socialists should try to outflank them by being more sovereigntist than the "sovereigntists". I think, in fact, that

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such a position runs the risk of being insufficiently critical of Quebec nationalism and of the nation-state as a political form.

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Professor McNally summarizes perfectly the point of view of the bourgeois intelligentsia, left-wing and right-wing, about the Quebec national question. However, the dialectical materialistic point of view of the revolutionary proletariat is very different. We have already explained it for a long time, a nation is never oppressed, a nation is never oppressive. Under the mode of capitalist production, the dominant social class exploits and oppresses first the class alienated by its own nation, and if this capitalist class is at the head of an industrial, trade infrastructure and of multinational business, it exploits and oppresses also the proletarian class of foreign countries. The Canadian working class does not benefit from the exploitation of the proletarians of the province of Quebec, or of native proletarians living on the reserves or out of them and therefore we can say that this alienated working class does not exploit the Quebec and native fractions of the international proletarian class. Furthermore, the Quebec section of the Canadian capitalist class obtained all the political and legal powers which were required to assure his blooming as section of ruling class within the Canadian federal whole. Thus we can assert that the Quebec capitalist class is not oppressed by the Canadian capitalist class of which it is part and to whom it supplied so many political marionettes. The emergence of business billionaires of Quebec on the international scene is a convincing demonstration. Everything happened during the negotiations of the British North America Act (AANB). On this occasion (1867) the Quebec national bourgeoisie, by obtaining the control of his bourgeois State apparatus as well as the opportunity to participate in the governance of the Canadian bourgeois State apparatus, assured so its development. Better, contrary to the claims of the left and the bourgeois right, the Quebec government then obtained the right to secede (separation-self-determination -right to have at disposal the Quebec proletariat). As proof, the Quebec chauvinistic nationalist government held two referendums on the national question (1980 and 1995) and if it had gained either of these referendums Quebec would be now a sovereign capitalist State assuring the exploitation of the multiethnic Quebec proletarian class and the despoilment of the proletariat of other countries. The Quebec capital as segment of the Canadian capital reached the threshold of imperialist development of the capitalist economy. As everywhere else, the so-called struggle of "national political liberation of Quebec people", without economic liberation from the international capitalist yoke, would have resulted for the workers through the consolidation of the position of his Quebec jailers. The systematic crisis of the international imperialism would strike so hard the multiethnic Quebec proletariat that the multiethnic Canadian proletariat which would have both the internationalist historic mission to knock down their capitalist class and to destroy their respective State in order to set up the mode of

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proletarian-communist production. The Quebec and Canadian proletarian class refused to play this chauvinistic nationalist game and in every Quebec or Canadian referendum the internationalist working class refused to become entangled in the unrefined plans of the capitalists and their accomplices of the gentrified left. Really the Canadian proletarian class does not need a rearguard "national-socialist avant-garde". EDITOR'S NOTE.

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19. One further point should be made with respect to national questions in Canada. Much of the left which addresses these issues came up in an era when immigrants and people of colour had not yet organized politically. Often, the socialists talked as if there was a homogenous entity called "English Canada" in a way which seemed blind to the multi-ethnic, multi-racial character of the country. As a result, the systematically racist character of the Canadian State was often underplayed or ignored. This is something that should be redressed. The socialists should not "privilege" the native and Quebec questions in a way that seems to ignore the racial oppression of Canada's peoples of colour. For this reason, a consistent commitment to anti-racism must go hand in hand with a principled commitment to the rights of aboriginal and Quebec people to self-determination.

20.  The national questions are likely to be of even greater importance in world politics in the years ahead. The revolutionary socialists have an obligation to try to find ways of dealing with the debates and crises that these will create. This will not always be easy. If we can use the historic contributions of past Marxists to guide our analyses, we must be on guard against dogmatic and simple-minded responses which fail to do justice to the complexity of the issues involved. And while supporting the right of oppressed nations to determine their future, we must never lose sight of one of the vital features of socialism from below: its commitment to a world community without nation-state.

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CHAPTER 6

LENINISM OR MARXISM? THE IMPERIALISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION (17)

L’OUVRIER COMMUNISTE

Comment of Robert Bibeau, January 2017

The newspaper L’Ouvrier Communiste has published in October 1929 an article facing the Leninist position and the position which the newspaper attributes to Rosa Luxembourg (Junius). We consider important to publish this crucial article and to comment on it.

In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx had defined the nationalism, of which decked out itself the bourgeoisie, as the class solidarity of the exploiters which turned "within the borders against the proletariat" and "outside the borders against the bourgeoisie of the other countries". Marx added that "the brotherhood", generated by the capitalist relationships of production between the various bourgeois nations would be hardly more brotherly than that one generated among the different classes of a same nation. For Marx, the destructive phenomena, induced by the capitalism in a country, reproduce in gigantic proportions internationally (18). By sticking to this analysis, presented by Marx at the beginning of the industrial capitalism, the European lefts concluded that these contradictions between the different national bourgeoisies pushed the country squires in the proletarian camp, particularly those of the colonial countries. Lenin, in his texts, presents a synthesis of this position adopted by the Bolsheviks. 

Unfortunately, the left did not complete his duties. At first, the farming community is a big enemy of the mode of communist production and a fanatic defender of small agricultural capitalism. The capital knows these things and before expropriating the local country squire to group the plots of land, mechanize and industrialize the agriculture, it begins by starving him before proletarianizing him. The Bolsheviks of Soviet Union did not know how to make otherwise. The development of the means of production and consequently of the needs in raw materials and in new productive forces, and the necessary expansion of markets, has pushed the capitalist mode of production to free itself from trade barriers - national borders - in brief, to extricate itself from the national cocoon which became a prison against the capitalist expansion in imperialist phase. The development of the capitalist mode of production had as consequence that all national bourgeoisies were forced to merge in vast capitalist alliances dividing up the fruit of the expropriation of the capital gain according to the investment and the risk-taking. What determines the membership of a national economy in an imperialist alliance or in another one is always the level of interdependence between the different economies constituting this alliance. The proletarian class has no influence

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on these alliances and never has to support an alliance against another alliance.

So, the united States were the biggest economic and military risk takers, and they were the first beneficiaries of the imperialist expansion of the capitalist mode of production. That’s what did not understand Stalin when he asserts "The capitalism can offer to the peoples of the colonial and semi-colonial dependent countries only dependence and economic retardation, maniac exploitation, interethnic massacres, wars and poverty. It is obvious that no imperialist country has an interest in helping other bourgeois countries to be equipped with an autonomous industry and agriculture for fear of contributing to forge a competitor. Any development aid contains thus in germ its antithesis and aims at hindering a really independent national economic development" (19).

Today, following the waves of industrial relocation, it is easy to contradict Stalin and to demonstrate that the capital has no homeland and that it migrates from a country to another one according to the expected profit rate. The capitalist accounting does not become established anymore according to the countries, but according to the large international companies. They spread everywhere where they can get involved to extirpate the precious profit which gives them life.

If the Bolsheviks and the Communist parties of the Third International supported the political struggles of the so-called "national liberation and for the right to self-determination of people", it was because these parties were under the influence of the nationalist petty-bourgeoisie which wanted to seize the direction of the struggles of the peasant masses inclined to sacrifice their life to appropriate their means of production (the land), that they made a success in many countries with the consequences which we know. Without economic, political or ideological emancipation. Today, everything is to be resumed since the beginning with, from one side, a rich experience accumulated on the occasion of these missed «proletarian» revolutions and on the other side a confusion multiplied tenfold in the ranks of the proletarian class. 

The article of the comrades of L’Ouvrier Communiste, appeared in 1929, must be remembered because it shows that the revolutionary proletarian ideology had not died even at that time of absoluted domination of national Bolshevism. The acuteness, the depth and the correctness of their class analysis about the bourgeois national question comfort us on the capacities of our class, has always stayed on course on the revolution in spite of the big storm.

Robert Bibeau. January, 2017. Director. Http: // www.les7duquebec.com

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Here is the article of L’Ouvrier Communiste

The current conflict of China with Russia and the war threats which result from this inter-imperialist incident, as moreover from all those who brings us from day to day the current event, indicate the imminent possibility of a new world war and impose us a renewed attention for the problem which the release and the development of the war of 1914 had placed then so brutally in front of the Marxist left of the Second International.

On this field, very important differences were shown between the Leninist elements (reduced in the case in point to Lenin and Zinoviev who drafted to them only the Socialdemokrat) and the majority of this left (especially consisted by the elements of Germany, Poland and Holland). It is important to notice the isolation of the Russian Bolshevism in its particular position on the national question in front of the other currents. It is probably not by a simple chance that the Bolshevism or Leninism was already on this field in contradiction with the Western proletarian ideology.

For a long time these divergences, of a fundamental importance for the development of the international revolution, were kept under the plug by the diverse elements of Third International. Just like the majorities, the so-called Leninist, Trotskyist or Bordiguist cataloged oppositional, have always pretended to ignore the antagonism of the Luxembourgist and Bolshevik tendencies. Prometeo, which published recently an Amédée Bordiga's article on the "national question" does not point out what the contents of this article adorned to move away from the Leninism to get closer to Luxembourg. It is advisable to add that the same Bordiga contributed to maintain in the shadow these differences, which existed for an about fifteen years in the Marxist left, by veiling them from the coat of the Bolshevik discipline. It is only in his conference on Lenin of 1924 that he makes a vague allusion to this divergence and shows in a diplomatic sentence his sympathy for the anti-Leninist tendency of the Marxist left in the Second International.

In fact, the death of Luxembourg and the exclusion of the leftist elements such as the Dutch Tribunistes and the German Communiste-Labor Party (K.A.P.D) outside the Third International, allowed the Leninism to dominate undisputed the tactics of Comintern in the national question as well as in all the other questions.

It is necessary thus to highlight at first the Marxist position on this particular problem, such as it stands out unmistakably quotations adduced by the same Zinoviev and Lenin. In Against the Current it is called upon the opinion of Marx in the Communist Manifesto: "the workers have no homeland". Let us reproduce in its entirety the passage of the manifesto where Marx and Engels explain their thought on the question of the homeland in touch with the working class: "The workers have no homeland. We can’t rob to them what they do not have. As the proletariat of every country has to conquer, first of all, the political power, to set up

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itself as ruling class of the nation, become itself the nation, it is still there national, although by no means in the bourgeois sense of the word. Already the national demarcations and the antagonisms between the peoples disappear more and more with the development of the bourgeoisie, the freedom of trade, the world market, the uniformity of the industrial production and the conditions of existence which correspond to it. The proletariat in the power will remove them much more. His common action, in countries civilized at least, is one of first conditions of his emancipation".

Lenin gives here an exact interpretation of the text of Marx by recognizing that the socialist revolution can’t win within the limits of the old homeland, that she can keep in the national borders, that her concerted action, as says exactly Marx, in the civilized countries at least, has one of the first conditions of the emancipation. It is clear that here Karl Marx implies in the advanced proletarians a high sense of the internationalism already before the revolutionary victory, and that he sees a base for the development of the revolution. The expression of nation, applied to the social whole which dominates the proletariat and which he identifies gradually to himself, is formal as the meaningless residue left by the bourgeoisie in its fall. She allows by no means asserting that Karl Marx thought of the distinct existence of any "socialist homeland".

It emerges clearly, besides, that the national limits lose their economic and political meaning already under the bourgeois regime and that they are intended for a complete abolition by the development of the proletarian power. The later development of the capitalist economy showed completely the correctness of this thesis by realizing the universal unity of the market of raw materials, outlets and capital. The last war completed to unmask the nationalism as an ultra-reactionary survival not expressing any more the interests of an autonomous social formation, but being of use as ideological disguise to the imperialist realities.

The petty bourgeois of all kinds and the labor aristocracy of monopolies are the vehicles of patriotism only as far as their subjection to the big capital which makes it his marionettes, alternating the comedy of the national defence with that of Wilsonnism, Locarnism, etc. The workers have no reason of attachment to the national demarcations, what is shown by the labor internationalism; it is obvious that the historic base of its struggles and its revolutionary experiences will lead the proletariat to abolish the borders as soon as it will have realized the taking of the power in more than a country. The ethnic character of the nationalities finishes losing any value, the fusion of the most disparate ethnic elements is for a long time a commonness, and the "natural" borders no more than the ethnic borders don’t resist to the current civilization.

So the internationalist thesis of the Marxism does give to no error; the expression which summarizes it: "the workers have no homeland" is of an irrevocable clarity, marking the real division between the bourgeois nationalism and the proletarian internationalism, the later historic

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development has unmasked the clearly bourgeois character of the patriotic and national ideology. And however Lenin did not erase completely from his "Marxist" conception the influence of this patriotic ideology, which the Western Marxist elements pushed away completely.

It is interesting to notice that, when Lenin is involved in controversy with the reformists, he assumes the ultra-left attitudes, whereas when he is involved in controversy with the ultra-lefts, he takes reformist attitudes. This eclectic position is generalized in him in all the questions. The oscillations of his centrism are very well characterized in works as The proletarian Revolution and the renegade Kautsky on one hand and the "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder from the other hand. In the passage quoted from Against the Current (page 18 of the first volume) Lenin is involved in controversy against the reformists and social-traitors. He becomes purely internationalist, he reminds the Marxist expression: "the workers have no homeland" (20). Being involved in controversy against the Dutch Nieuwenhuis and comparing him to Gustave Hervé, he asserts that the latter said a stupidity: "when this axiom: "any homeland is only a milk cow for the capitalists" he drew this conclusion: "The German monarchy or the French Republic, it is all one for the socialists".

Lenin writes "When in his resolution, which he proposes at the congress, Hervé declares that for the proletariat is "absolutely indifferent" that the country is dominated by such a national bourgeoisie, he formulates and defends a nonsense, worse than that of Nieuwenhuis. He is indifferent not at all to the proletariat of being able, for example, to talk freely his mother tongue either to undergo a national oppression which comes to be added to the class exploitation. Instead of pulling premises which announce the socialism, this deduction, that the proletariat is the only class which will fight up to the end, certainly against any national oppression, for the complete equality of the rights of nations, for the right of nations to have at disposal of themselves, instead of it, Hervé declares that the proletariat does not have to take care of the national oppression, that he ignores the national question generally".

Naturally Lenin adopts in this circumstance his favorite method of the analogies to be able to refuse a theory by the treason of a man. But it does not much matter for us. What most important is the contents of this passage which summarizes the Leninist theory on the national question. And he claims to pull this particular conception to him and to the Bolsheviks from the premises which announce the socialism!

Now it has already admitted with Marx that "the workers have no homeland", that the national question can have no interest for the working class. Marx says clearly that we can’t abduct to them (to the proletarians) what they do not have. And nevertheless from this passage of Lenin emerges clearly that we can abduct the homeland to the workers, that this one is not only a privilege of the ruling classes, that it is also an advantage of the exploited classes. Indeed "it is not indifferent to undergo a national oppression which comes to be added to the class exploitation". Here

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emerges clearly the contradiction between the Marxist thought and the Leninist thought. For Lenin the proletariat has to take an interest in the national question, he has to be against any national oppression, namely against any oppression of the homeland, that, according to Marx it does not have and it can’t abduct. For Lenin the proletariat is even the paladin of the national defence, because he represents the only class which will struggle up to the end, in particular against any national oppression.

These are, there, doubtless the sources of national-Bolshevism. And when we will have thought of the meaning of the Leninist thought, we will not wonder that Bukharin said in 1923: "The conflict between France and Germany of 1923 is not a simple repetition of the conflict of 1914. It has rather a national character. Consequently the P.C.A. will have to say clearly to the working class of Germany that only she can defend the German nation against the bourgeoisie, which sells the national interests of her country".

And indeed, was not Germany, in the mind of Leninist thought, an oppressed country? There is no doubt. German regions were oppressed by the French occupation; it was "duty" of the German workers, to struggle up to the end for the liberation of these regions! For the liberation of Germany from the oppression of the Alliance. Everybody knows well the results of the application of the Leninist tactics in 1923 in Germany.

It emerges from this disastrous experience that, when the proletariat starts to defend "his homeland", "the oppressed nation", he reaches an only result that is to strengthen his own bourgeoisie. But it will be necessary to highlight another very obvious contradiction, which exists in the articles of ‘Against the Current’ to realize the ambiguous nature of National-Bolshevism. In the article ‘The prowlers of Zinoviev’ (page 70 of the first volume) he states: "As long as the capitalist States exist, that is as long as the world imperialist policy dominates the internal and external life of the States, the right of nations to have at disposal of themselves has, either in peace or at war, no slightest importance. Furthermore: in the current imperialist environment there is no place for a war of national defence and any socialist policy, which disregards this historic environment and which wants to turn from the isolated base of an only country, is from the beginning built on the sand".

As we have just noticed, the imperialism deleted any possibility of a national war in the Marxist meaning of the word and the opinion of Karl Marx of 1871 found a solid base in later development of the capitalist imperialism. Yet, in the aforesaid passage it would seem that the Leninism gets closer in its general line of this opinion. But it is not the case. In his controversy against the Polish social-democrats Lenin develops in this way his thought in contrast with the latter: "Obviously the Polish authors ask the question of "the defense of the homeland" so differently from how asked our party. We push away the defense of the homeland in the imperialist war (…). Obviously the authors of the Polish theses push away the defense of the homeland generally speaking, that is even for a

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national war, considering maybe that the national wars, in the imperialist era, are impossible".

It is obvious that in this passage Lenin asserts that for him the national wars are not still finished and that he admits the defense of the homeland in a national war. We see clearly that here even the Leninist ideology is contradictory with the Marxism and with herself. For Lenin the reality oscillates between two poles which deny mutually. On one hand he recognizes the terrible reality of the imperialist war, which pulls its apparent origin from a national conflict, from the other hand he becomes attached desperately to an ousted, outmoded nationalism, which he wants forcibly to make relive. And that’s why he looks for examples in national uprisings which unmasked successively their reactionary character and which brought no advantage to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. Lenin asserts this: "The socialists want to use for their revolution all the national movements which are launched against the imperialism. The more the struggle of the proletariat against the common front of the imperialisms is at the moment clear, the more the internationalist principle becomes essential who says: a people who oppresses other peoples cannot be free himself" (21).

In his controversy with Junius's brochure (page 154, second volume) the thought of Lenin in this question becomes clearer. For Lenin exists a clear demarcation line between the national wars and the imperialist wars: "Only a sophist (page 158) could try to erase the difference between an imperialist war and a national war…".

And below he asserts even the possibility of a big national war: "If the imperialism outside Europe also remained during about twenty years, without leaving no place to the socialism, for example because of an American-Japanese war, then would be possible a big national war in Europe".

Junius (Luxembourg) maintains, as Marxist, coherent, that it can no longer be made national wars and Lenin exclaims that it would be false "to spread the appreciation of the current war to all the possible wars under the imperialism, to forget the national movements which can occur against the imperialism". And he adds that even a big national war is possible! Here the contradiction, between his thought and the Marxist thought, makes more and more acute, because for the same Zinoviev the war of 1870-71 closed the era of the big national wars in Europe.

In vain, page 122-23 of the same work, Lenin tries to get out of trouble in his controversy against the Polish social democrats, by resorting to the thought of Engels contained in the work The Pô and the Rhine. His contradiction with the Marxism is not less clear. Engels believes that the borders of the big European nations were determined in the historic course, which realized the absorption of several small and not viable nations, integrated more and more into a big one by the language and the sympathies of the populations. This thesis of Engels is already very weak

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from the historic point of view. But especially Lenin is obliged to notice that the reactionary, imperialist capitalism breaks more and more often these democratically defined borders. Yet, it is necessary to notice that the way of seeing the influence of the capitalism in the upheaval of old borders, which Engels would consider as "natural", does not meet at all the governing idea of the Marxism contained in the Manifesto of the Communists in the aforesaid passage: "Already the national demarcations and the antagonisms between the peoples disappear more and more with the development of the bourgeoisie, the freedom of trade, the world market, the uniformity of the industrial production and the conditions of existence which correspond to it".

This process of disappearance of the national demarcations is not considered by Marx as a reactionary phenomenon, such as claimed by Lenin. Lenin considers all this process and the way of envisaging, put into practice by the Polish social democrats, as "the imperialist economy". This is what he says about it: "The old "economists", leaving only a caricature of the Marxism, taught to the workers that "what is the economy" matters only to the Marxists. Do the new "economists" think that the democratic state of the victorious socialism will exist without border (in the kind of a complex of sensation without subject?).

"Do they think that the borders will be determined only by the needs for production? In reality these borders will be determined democratically, that is according to the willingness and the sympathies of the population. The capitalism influences by the violence on these "sympathies" and thereby adds new difficulties to the work of merger of the nations". (22)

There is a clear contrast between the Leninist thought and the Marxist thought. For Marx the bourgeoisie, the economic organization of capitalism remove the borders, eliminating the national difficulties, for Lenin the capitalism increases these difficulties. We can notice that the bourgeoisie was progressive in 1848 and reactionary in the imperialist phase. It would be there a distinction which would not serve a lot, because the growth of the world economy did not stop since then, even through great crises to determine a more and more intimate merger between the national populations, and sometimes the fusion of the national elements.

The Leninian thought does not also realize from the artificial side of the so-called national feelings fed expressly by the bourgeoisie. She does not realize that in some layers of the population the chauvinistic feelings are a simple result of their economic conditions. That today the love of the homeland is relegated in these layers that we have already indicated above.

The Leninist thought appears to us here as a historic anachronism, a backward step. He wants to realize the unity of the peoples by returning on a historic base, which the Marxism already considered in 1848 as endangered. The Leninian thought on this field, ignored by the Western communist activists, can be definitely defined as reactionary.

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Instead of disputing national feelings, that the bourgeoisie has all the interest to keep alive, she encourages them, legitimate them, in fact a moral base of development of the socialism. Nobody will doubt one moment, by reading the controversy of Lenin against Junius that the sophism is on his side. Indeed what is the only argument that he can add against Rose Luxembourg? The subtle pretext which the dialectic can slide in the sophism. And he for this reason makes appeal to the dialectic of the Greeks which has to make nothing with the materialistic dialectic, which is not a method outside the reality, but a method in the same reality. Because this national war (the little Serbia which rebels against the big Austria) had been transformed into the imperialist war not in the abstraction, but in the reality. She proved clearly that the sophism was, concerning the wars and the national questions, on the side of Lenin.

But before reviewing the historic events which came to confirm this judgment, it will not be bad to fix in a clearer way the thought of Lenin by a quotation which can give rise to no contesting in its contents. In the article against the Junius's brochure (page 158, second volume) Lenin asserts clearly his faith in the national wars and spreads his theory to the colonial question: "National wars - he says - are not only likely, are inevitable, in a time of imperialism, on the side of colonies and semi-colonies. In the colonies and semi-colonies (China, Turkey, Persia) there are populations reaching all in all up to a billion men that is more than half population of the globe. The national emancipative movements, in this respect, are, or already very strong, or are growing and, in maturation. The continuation of the emancipative national policy of colonies will be necessarily in national wars which they will commit against the imperialism. From wars of this kind can lead to a war of the current imperialist big powers, but they can also bring nothing, it will depend on numerous circumstances".

We noticed until now the contradictions between Marxism and Leninism in the field of the national question. We pointed out the clear contrast between the national-Bolshevik thesis of Leninism and the Marxist internationalism of the German leftists, the Poles and the Dutch people. Those who will have read or will read the article ‘The communism and the national question of Bordiga on Prometeo’ of September 15, 1929 will notice that this contrast (being hidden) also existed between the thought of Italian left and the Leninist thought.

It is not about a sheer chance there. The anti-Marxist Leninism hid in the field of the national question a deep difference of objective conditions between Russia and the other European countries. The objective bases of the next Russian Revolution were not purely socialist and in the Leninist thought occurred this strange contamination of proletarian and bourgeois elements which collided against the clearly Western labor thought. The Russian objective conditions were already reflected in their contrast in the thought of the future leader of the October Revolution.

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These considerations, which have nevertheless their theoretical base, in the conception of historic materialism and which contain the judgment of the national conception of Leninism, would not know how to be enough, if they don’t support on the historic bankruptcy of national-Bolshevism. Many communist activists believed until now that the tactics applied by the Leninism, Boukharisme and Stalinism had to make nothing with the Leninism, they thought that these tactical lines of International Communist was a degeneration of the pure line of Bolshevism. It has been due also to the diplomatic attitude of some leftist opponents, which as we have already pointed out at the beginning of this article, hid serious disputes with the Leninism, by appealing to the degeneration of the Bolshevism. The Zinovievist, Boukharinist, Stalinist and even Trotskyist slight differences get loose not at all from the authentically Leninist national-Bolshevism.

That's why we were obliged to resort to numerous quotations of Lenin so that the not fanaticized communist workers, who read and reflect, can understand that the national-Bolshevism has a unique source which is in the Leninism.

But thus let us pass to the analysis from the later historic process to the theoretical foundation of national-Leninism to notice the anti-proletarian nature and its definitive bankruptcy.

We have already seen that Lenin in contrast with the Marxist thesis of 1871, envisaged the possibility of a big national war in Europe, we saw that Lenin considered a duty of the proletariat to defend the oppressed nation. For the Leninists in 1923, in the period of the occupation and economic war of the Ruhr, Germany made a national war. They asserted that following the treaty of Versailles Germany had become an oppressed nation. That's why Bukharin, in the quotation already adduced, considered that the German proletariat had to defend the nation. Zinoviev in Rote Fahne of June 17, 1923 asserted that the communists are the real defenders of the country, people and nation. Bukharin and Zinoviev was then Leninist, pure Bolshevik. Had not Lenin in Against the Current planned the "national big war"? Certainly Zinoviev forgot his article of the Maradeurs, but had not Lenin forgotten in 1916 his considerations of 1914 against the reformists? Radek, exalting Schlageter and being amicably involved in controversy on Rote Fahne with the fascist Réventlow, was himself also a consequent Leninist, because he thought of defending the oppressed Germany against the imperialism of the Agreement and the treacherous German bourgeoisie. Certainly Ruth Fischer exceeded a little the limits of Leninism, when she proceeded in front of the racist students to her justification of the fascist anti-Semitism to save the oppressed homeland, but it was there only a misdemeanor due to an excessive temperament. Just only as Leninist in Paul Frœlich when he wrote in Rote Fahne on August 3, 1923: "It is not true that we other communists were, during the war, antinational persons. We were against the war, not because we were anti-German, but because the war served

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only the interests of the capitalism… for this same reason we do not deny the national defence where she is put in the agenda!"

Lenin said that he pushed away the defense of the homeland in an imperialist war, but not in a general way? We see clearly that neither Zinoviev, nor Boukharin, nor Radek, nor Frœlich betrayed the Leninism in their strategy of 1923. It was the only Leninism which killed the German revolution, it was the national-Bolshevism which, by claiming to save the nation against the German bourgeoisie, saved the bourgeoisie against the German proletariat. We took away the attention of the proletariat from his main objective: the struggle against the international capitalism, as a consequence we removed so the German stateless persons from the stateless persons of the other nations, by chatting about national oppression, national treason of the German bourgeoisie and other petty bourgeois songs. What were the results of the consequent application of the Leninist national tactics in the German 23? That the proletariat was defeated, that the German bourgeoisie strengthened so much that Bukharin in 6th Congress of Communist International saw himself forced to reveal us the resurrection of the German imperialism!

And so the Leninist national ideology at least with regard to the "European national big war» ended up its grave in the German 23. And behind this grave appears the bloody image of the author of Junius's brochure who shouts: "there is no more national war under the capitalist imperialism".

But if the European national big war ended up its grave in German 23, the small national wars of colonies and semi-colonies (Turkey, Persia and China) are also dead in the swamp of the imperialist reaction. They also were not able to escape from the influence of the historic environment dominated by the capitalism. The history of the Chinese and Turkish national wars, is the history very known of Kémal Pacha and Chang-Kai-Chek. These are two bloody tragedies where the proletariat and the Turkish and Chinese communists played the role of the victim. The Russia of Lenin, of the Bolshevism, of the socialist construction gave weapons for these national wars to Chang-Kai-Chek and to Kémal Pacha; the latter, immediately pulled in the circle of the imperialist policy, have made with the imperialists the unique front against the proletariat, they shot the weapons which Russia supplied them against the proletariat and the communists. And nevertheless have been applied in these circumstances the pure Leninist tactics, contrary to what Trotsky and his followers say. It was told the Chinese proletariat, to the Turkish proletariat to defend its homeland oppressed by the imperialists and the agents of the imperialists; it was proclaimed the crusade of nations oppressed against the imperialism. Had Lenin also recommended the use of the unique front of nations oppressed against the imperialism?

We can’t certainly claim that the struggle for the defense of the oppressed nation could be reconciled with the revolutionary interest of the workers, because the struggle of the proletariat against the capitalism and the international imperialism is the struggle against his own bourgeoisie, not

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in the name of its nation, but in the name of the international proletariat. What was most important in China for the Chinese and international proletariat was the entrance of the Chinese working class in the proletarian revolutionary struggle and not in the national struggle, which was reactionary in its essence, which could lead in no case to the national emancipation of China, but in every case to the link of the Chinese bourgeoisie with the imperialism. Can we call today national wars, conflicts which can’t take away from the historical environment of the imperialism? No, obviously. Therefore, the ideology of the national wars, of the homeland not capitalist, non-imperialist has ended up completely in terrible defeats and in a sea of proletarian blood. And the holy crusade of nations oppressed against the oppressor imperialism is transformed into a link of native bourgeoisies and against the world proletariat.

If in China and in Turkey the legend of the national war resolved into a tragedy, in Afghanistan and in Persia she died under the light breezes of the history in the farce of Amanoullah.

The same colonies, Egypt, India, these countries which include million men and for which Lenin hoped to unchain in their national fire against the imperialism of the capitalist giant, do not allow us a national war. Because in Swaraj, Wafd, etc. the native bourgeoisie has already lost its national aggressiveness, and she looks for the compromise, for the alliance subjected with the imperialist giant. And nevertheless the relentless Leninists still prepare new nationalist crusades, that is, new massacres of colonial proletarians instead of preparing the socialist revolution by the development of the consciousness of the proletariat of the same countries.

What conclusions can we pull from this analysis of thoughts and facts on the national question?

There is no national question for the proletariat, that the workers can take no advantage of the existence for them of a homeland and that they do not have to take care of national oppressions, of right of the nations to have at themselves disposal. The proletariat develops its movement, makes its revolution as class and not as nation. Immediately after the victory of the proletariat in several nations, the borders can only disappear. The Leninist thesis of the national autonomy of the socialist States is a nonsense. Lenin asserts that as long as the State exists, the nation remains a necessity. Yet, the nation is only a product of the bourgeois State and not of the proletarian State. The proletarian States can only tend to unify and to eliminate the borders. Much better: the socialism as economic and social order can be realized only on the basis of the total disappearance of the borders. The abolition of the national economic differences can’t be realized without the abolition of the national limits which are moreover artificial and conventional. The proletarian dictatorship, the labor State, which is not the bourgeois State has only a universal character and not national, democratically unitarian and not federative. The Marxist communists do not have to build the

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United States of Europe or of the world, their purpose is the universal Republic of the labor councils.

The Marxist communists have to propagate consequently among the wide labor masses the hatred for the homeland, which is a way for the capitalism to sow the division between the proletarians of various countries. They have to advocate among the wide labor masses the necessity of the fraternization, the international union of all the proletarians in all the countries. They have to fight with fierceness not only all the chauvinistic, fascist or social-democrat tendencies, which poison even the labor circles, but also all the masked tendencies, which would try to give any basis to the national ideal. They have to fight against the legend of the national wars, the legend of the anti-imperialist popular crusades. They have to anchor by using the historic experience, in the depths of the proletarian masses the faith in the victory of socialism, only on purely classist, purely internationalist bases.

It will be necessary consequently to carry all our efforts on the rebirth of the real Marxist internationalism, in which the social-reformists and the national-Bolsheviks have created confusion.

We know very well that only our propaganda can realize this effort to bring among the masses the internationalism and to develop it up to an unknown degree until now. We know that our propaganda, while being necessary, will not have the slightest influence, if the later developments of the historic process did not take care to confirm it. But we also know that these developments can only push the proletariat towards the positions which the real internationalists have never betrayed, that Rosa Luxembourg has kept up to the death.

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Notes

(1) Robert Bibeau (2016) National question and proletarian revolution. Url: http://les7duquebec.com/7-au-front/question-nationale-et-revolution-proletarienne

(2) Robert Bibeau (2016) The gold-bearing mysteries, finally revealed. Url: http://www.les7duquebec.com/7-au-front/les-mysteres-aurifaires-enfin-reveles/Bretton Woods Agreement. Url: http://www.les7duquebec.com/actualites-des-7/le-troisieme-stade-de-la-crise-systemique-mondiale/

(3) Special Drawing Rights. Url: http://www.les7duquebec.com/7-dailleurs-invites/mort-et-resurrection-du-veau-dor-americain/

(4) Marx to S. Meyer and A. Vogt, in Marx-Engels, Correspondances. Url: https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/correspondance.htm

(5) Robert Bibeau (13.10.2014) United States - China, the big confrontation. Url: http://www.les7duquebec.com/actualites-des-7/e tats-unischine-la-grande-confrontation/Robert Bibeau ( 10.07.2016 ) Alliance of Shanghai against European Union. Url: http://www.les7duquebec.com/actualites-des-7/alliance-deshanghai-contre-union-europeenne/

(6)Conference of Bandung. Wikipedia. Url: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conf%C3%A9rence_d e_Bandu ng

(7) Luniterre (21.07.2016) Controversy with Robert Bibeau. Url:https://tribunemlreypa.wordpress.com/2016/07/22 /unnouvel-echange-polemique-avec-robert-bibeau/

(8)Robert Bibeau (8.07.2016) Fergusson, Minneapolis, Dallas, same proletariat same battle. Url:http://www.les7duquebec.com/7-dailleurs-invites/ferguson-minneapolis-dallas-proletariat-meme-combat/

(9)Robert Bibeau (8.07.2016) Fergusson, Minneapolis, Dallas, same proletariat same battle. Url:http://www.les7duquebec.com/7-dailleurs-invites/ferguson-minneapolis-dallas-proletariat-meme-combat/

(10) Pierre Souyri (1979) Reading scores. We used the version of Pierre Souyri’s text published on the blog Spartacus on 23.07.2016 URL: http://spartacus1918.canalblog.com/archives/2016/07/20/34091094.html The Pierre Soury’s reading scores concern the volume of Georges

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Haupt, Michel Lowy, Claudie Weill. The Marxists and the national question, 1848-1914. Paris, Maspero. 1974. 391 p. Reading score of Pierre Souyri published in the Annals in July-August 1979. The book was reprinted by Harmattan, Paris, in 1997.

(11) Paul Mattick (1959) Nationalism and socialism. Published in English in The American Socialist in September 1959, in French in Front Noir (February 1965) and in ICO n° 99 (November 1970).

(12) David McNally (1996) Marxism, nationalism and national struggles today. Discussion Paper of New Socialist Group. Translation from English by La Gauche. Not published notes.

(13) Quoted in James M. Blount, The National Question: Decolonising the Theory of Nationalism. Page 67.

(14) Lenine. Selected works. Vol. 1. Moscow Editions. Page 409.

(15) Socialist Workers Party (1974) The dynamics of the world revolution today. SWP. Page 137.

(16) New Socialist (1996) Red Power, an interview with Howard Adams. New Socialist. No.2. March-April 1996.

(17) L’Ouvrier Communiste, n°2/3. October 1929. Leninism or Marxism? Imperialism and national question. Url: https://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/documents-historiques/1929-10-leninisme-ou-marxisme-limperialisme-et-la-question-nationale-goc/

(18) Karl Marx (1848) About the national system of political economy of Friedrich List. Speech on free trade.

(19) Stalin (1913)  The Marxisme and the national and colonial question. Url: http://spartacus1918.canalblog.com/archives/2016/07/20/34091094.html

(20) Lenin. Zinoviev (1914-1915) Against the current. Translated by V. Serge and Parijanne. Page 213. Url: Http: // gallica.bnf.fr / ark: / 12148 / bpt6k96333462Lenin.

(21) Lenin. Zinoviev (1914-1915) Against the current. Translated by V. Serge and Parijanne. Page 139. Url: Http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96333462Lenin.

(22)The «economists» formed a trend of the Russian social-democracy granting an absolute importance to the struggle for the partial economic claims.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

SUMMARY

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1 National question and proletarian revolution

CHAPTER 2 Ferguson, Minneapolis, same proletariat, same fight

CHAPTER 3 The Marxists and the national question

CHAPTER 4 Nationalism and Socialism

CHAPTER 5 Marxism, Nationalism and national struggles today

CHAPTER 6 Leninism or Marxism ? The imperialism and the national question

NOTES

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