Originally posted by Lennie Jusche+--> (Lennie Jusche)Communists support oppressed nationalities fighting for liberation. That's a necessary part of defeating imperialism. Without it, there will be no world revolution.[/b]
This is the crux of the matter. Those who call themselves communists forget about the working class as soon as they see an armed nationalist with a red flag. Then they start to talk about 'oppressed nationalities'. What is this actually based on. A nice quote from Che Guevara sums it up:
Originally posted by Guevara+--> (Guevara)Each time a country is freed, we say, it is a defeat for the world imperialist system, but we must agree that real liberation or breaking away from the imperialist system is not achieved by the mere act of proclaiming independence or winning an armed victory in a revolution. Freedom is achieved when imperialist economic domination over a people is brought to an end.[/b]
It all sounds fine except for the fact that nations don't break out of the imperialist system, and actually national liberation wars become merely parts of faction fights between different capitalist states, just as Hizbullah are a tool, not completely controlled, but used, and supported by Iran, and Syria.
Lenin followed a line supporting national liberation as he believed that it would win the workers in the states bordering the new Soviet Republic to the communist cause.
Luxemburg pointed out how mistaken he was in 'The Russian Revolution':
Originally posted by Luxemburg
One after another, these ‘nations’ used the freshly granted freedoms to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself.
Just to go through what happened in the nations boardering Russia (I am sorry if this is a long quote, but it is worth talking about what actually happened):
Originally posted by International Review
*Finland: the Soviet government recognised its independence on the 18th of December 1917. The working class movement in this country was very strong: it was on the revolutionary ascent, it had strong links with the Russian workers and had actively participated in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. It was not a question of a country dominated by feudalism, but a very developed capitalist territory. And the Finnish bourgeoisie used the Soviet power's gift in order to crush the workers' insurrection that broke out in January 1918. This struggle lasted nearly 3 months but, despite the resolute support the Soviets gave to the Finnish workers, the new state was able to destroy the revolutionary movement, thanks to German troops whom they called on to help them;
*The Ukraine: the local nationalist movement did not represent a real bourgeois movement, but rather obliquely expressed the vague resentments of the peasants against the Russian landlords and above all the Poles. The proletariat in this region came from all over Russia and was very developed. In these conditions the band of nationalist adventurers that set up the 'Ukraine Rada' (Vinnickenko, Petlyura etc.) rapidly sought the patronage of German and Austrian imperialism. At the same time it dedicated all its forces to attacking the workers' soviets, which had been formed in Kharkov and other cities. The French general Tabouis who, because of the collapse of the central powers, replaced the German influence, employed Ukrainian reactionary bands in the war of the White Guards against the Soviets.
"Ukrainian nationalism... was a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country; it was without any historical tradition, since the Ukraine never formed a nation or government, was without any national culture... To what was at first a mere farce they lent such importance that the farce became a matter of the most deadly seriousness - not as a serious national movement for which, afterwards as before, there are no roots at all, but as a shingle and rallying flag of counter-revolution. At Brest, out of this addled egg crept the German bayonets" (Rosa Luxemburg, idem, pages 382-2);
*The Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania): the workers' soviets took power in this zone at the same moment as the October revolution. 'National liberation' was carried out by British marines: "With the termination of hostilities against Germany, British naval units appeared in the Baltic. The Estonian Soviet Republic collapsed in January 1919. The Latvian Soviet Republic held out in Riga for five months and then succumbed to the threat of British naval guns" (E.H.Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, page 317)
*In Asiatic Russia: "A Bashkir government under one Validov, which had proclaimed an autonomous Bashkir state after the October revolution, went over to the Orenburg Cossacks who were in open warfare against the Soviet Government; and this was typical of the prevailing attitude of the nationalists" (idem, page 324). For its part the 'national-revolutionary' government of Kokanda (in central Asia), with a programme that included the imposition of Islamic law, the defence of private property, and the forced seclusion of women, unleashed a fierce war against the workers' Soviet of Tashkent (the principal industrial city of Russian Turkestan).
*In Caucasia a Transcaucasian republic was formed, and its tutelage was fought over between Turkey, Germany and Great Britain. This caused it to break up into 3 'independent' republics (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan), which fiercely confronted each other, urged on in turn by each of the contesting powers. The three republics supported with all their forces the British troops in their battle against the Baku workers' Soviet, which from 1917-20 suffered bombardment and massacres by the British;
*Turkey: from the beginning the Soviet government supported the 'revolutionary nationalist' Kemal Attaturk. Radek, a member of the CI, exhorted the recently formed Turkish Communist Party thus: "Your first task, as soon as you have formed as an independent party, will be to support the movement for the national freedom of Turkey" (Acts of the first four Congresses of the CI). The result was a catastrophe: Kemal crushed without leniency the strikes and demonstrations of the young Turkish proletariat and, if for a time he allied with the Soviet government, it was only done to put pressure on the British troops who were occupying Constantinople, and on the Greeks who had occupied large parts of Western Turkey. However, once the Greeks had been defeated and having offered British imperialism his fidelity if they left Constantinople, Kemal broke off the alliance with the Soviets and offered the British the head of the Turkish Communist Party, which was viciously persecuted.
*The case of Poland should also be mentioned. The national emancipation of Poland was almost a dogma in the Second International. When Rosa Luxemburg, at the end of the 19th century, demonstrated that this slogan was now erroneous and dangerous since capitalist development had tightly bound the Polish bourgeoisie to the Russian Czarist imperial caste, she provoked a stormy polemic inside the International. But the truth was that the workers of Warsaw, Lodz and elsewhere were at the vanguard of the 1905 revolution and had produced revolutionaries as outstanding as Rosa. Lenin had recognised that "The experience of the 1905 revolution demonstrated that even in these two nations (he is referring to Poland and Finland) the leading classes, the landlords and the bourgeoisie, renounced the revolutionary struggle for liberty and had looked for a rapprochement with the leading classes in Russia and with the Czarist monarchy out of fear of the revolutionary proletariat of Finland and Poland" (minutes of the Prague party conference, 1912).
Unfortunately the Bolsheviks held onto the dogma of 'the right of nations to self-determination', and from October 1917 on they promoted the independence of Poland. On 29 August 1918 the Council of Peoples Commissars declared "All treaties and acts concluded by the government of the former Russian Empire with the government of Prussia or of the Austro-Hungarian Empire concerning Poland, in view of their incompatibility with the principle of the self-determination of nations and with the revolutionary sense of right of the Russian people, which recognises the indefeasible right of the Polish people to independence and unity, are hereby irrevocably rescinded" (quoted in E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol 1, p 293).
While it was correct that the proletarian bastion should denounce and annul the secret treaties of the bourgeois government, it was a serious error to do so in the name of 'principles' which were not on a proletarian terrain, but a bourgeois one, viz the 'right of nations'. This was rapidly demonstrated in practice. Poland fell under the iron dictatorship of Pilsudski, the veteran social patriot, who smashed the workers' strikes, allied Poland with France and Britain, and actively supported the counter-revolution of the White Armies by invading the Ukraine in 1920.
When in response to this aggression the troops of the Red Army entered Polish territory and advanced on Warsaw in the hope that the workers would rise up against the bourgeoisie, a new catastrophe befell the cause of the world revolution: the workers of Warsaw, the same workers who had made the 1905 revolution, fell in behind the 'Polish Nation' and participated in the defence of the city against the soviet troops. This was the tragic consequence of years of propaganda about the 'national liberation' of Poland by the Second International and then by the proletarian bastion in Russia. [2]
The outcome of this policy was catastrophic: the local proletariats were defeated, the new nations were not 'grateful' for the Bolsheviks' present and quickly passed into the orbit of British imperialism, collaborating in their blockade of the Soviet power and sustaining with all the means at their disposal the White counter-revolution which provoked a bloody civil war.
"The Bolsheviks were to be taught to their own great hurt and that of the revolution, that under the rule of capitalism there is no self-determination of peoples, that in a class society each class of the nation strives to 'determine itself' in a different fashion, and that, for the bourgeois classes, the stand-point of national freedom is fully subordinated to that of class rule. The Finnish bourgeoisie, like the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, were unanimous in preferring the violent rule of Germany to national freedom, if the latter should be bound up with Bolshevism." (Rosa Luxemburg, 'The Russian Revolution', Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, page 380)
From this it seems to me that Lenin, and the Bolshevik party's policy was not merely theoretically flawed it was disastrous.
This policy has been continued by leftists since then, and has been used to pull the working class into wars in support of different capitalist factions time, and time again.
Lennie writes:
Originally posted by Lennie Jusche
and all of this should go without saying.. in the "left" generally this is a non-issue.. it's only on this board that I've ever seen it come into question..
That is hardly surprising, Lennie. After all as Marx said:
Originally posted by Marx
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. It is in the interests of capital that workers are dragged into nationalist wars, not in their own interest. Currently every political party in Turkey is backing Hizbullah at least verbally. From the MHP (far right) through the AKP (religious), and the CHP (Turkey's equivalent of social democrats) to the TKP (Turkish Communist Party) there comes a call for workers to support one nationalist faction against another. Communists, however start from the interests of the working class.
I can understand the confusion that this leads you into:
Lennie
[email protected]
There are reactionary groups claiming to fight for the liberation of Kurdistan.. they should be condemned and opposed. Like those that attack workers, or use nationalism to oppose other oppressed nationalities (as I said above).
There are groups fighting for the liberation of Kurdistan that are progressive.. that fight imperialism as a necessary part of the fight for liberation..
And the confusion that it leads others into
chebol
The PUK, like the PDK, are the creations of decades on Kurdish struggle in northern Iraq, where the Iraqi regime and the US and UK sought to play off one group against another, but even before that, against the communists, socialists and the left.
These two Kurdish groups (as opposed to the left-wing PKK in Turkey) are anti-worker, right-wing, quasi-fascist organisations, who have spent much of the last period slaughtering left-wing opponents in the Kurdish liberation movement in Iraq, and elsewhere (they are vehement enemies of the PKK, and have occassionally launched cross-'border' attacks). They are not interested in a free kurdistan, but an "independent" one, with their right-wing policies and US backing, and the kurdish people under their control.
So who are these progressive Kurdish nationalists? Chebol seems to think that they are the PKK. Without going into too much detail this is an organisation which has had a campaign of shooting school teachers (who are mostly girls from working class, or peasant families sent there by the state) and has threatened to kill various leftists (even ones who support the Kurdish national struggle) if they operate in its areas. I can go into more details if anybody wants.
Which ones would you like to pick, Lennie? I am sure we can find many examples of whatever nationalist faction you choose attacking the working class.
As I said before, I understand how difficult it is for leftists to pick the ‘right’ nationalist faction to support. Communists don’t. They support the working class.
The working class must fight for its own interests, and these are directly opposed to those of all nationalists. National liberation has nothing to offer workers except death in war, and a change of bosses.
Devrim Valerian