Conghaileach
20th April 2003, 18:08
Vladimir Lenin
The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: July 1916
First Published: October 1916 in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata No.1
Source: Lenin's Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 22,
1964, pp. 320-360
10. THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1916
Our theses were written before the outbreak of this rebellion, which
must be the touchstone of our theoretical views.
The views of the opponents of self-determination lead to the conclusion
that the vitality of small nations oppressed by imperialism has already been
sapped, that they cannot play any role against imperialism, that support of
their purely national aspirations will lead to nothing, etc. The imperialist
war of 1914-16 has provided facts which refute such conclusions.
The war proved to be an epoch of crisis for the West European nations,
and for imperialism as a whole. Every crisis discards the conventionalities,
tears away the outer wrappings, sweeps away the obsolete and reveals the
underlying springs and forces. What has it revealed from the standpoint of
the movement of oppressed nations? In the colonies there have been a number
of attempts at rebellion, which the oppressor nations, naturally did all
they could to hide by means of a military censorship. Nevertheless, it is
known that in Singapore the British brutally suppressed a mutiny among their
Indian troops; that there were attempts at rebellion in French Annam (see
Nashe Slovo) and in the German Cameroons (see the Junius pamphlet*); that
in Europe, on the one hand, there was a rebellion in Ireland, which the
"freedom-loving" English, who did not dare to extend conscription to
Ireland, suppressed by executions, and, on the other, the Austrian
Government passed the death sentence on the deputies of the Czech Diet "for
treason", and shot whole Czech regiments for the same "crime".
* See pp. 305-19 of this volume. --Ed. [Transcriber's Note: See The
Junius Pamphlet. -- DJR]
This list is, of course, far from complete. Nevertheless, it proves
that, owing to the crisis of imperialism, the flames of national revolt have
flared up both in the colonies and in Europe, and that national sympathies
and antipathies have manifested themselves in spite of the Draconian threats
and measures of repression. All this before the crisis of imperialism hit
its peak; the power of the imperialist bourgeoisie was yet to be undermined
(this may be brought about by a war of "attrition" but has not yet happened)
and the proletarian movements in the imperialist countries were still very
feeble. What will happen when the war has caused complete exhaustion, or
when, in one state at least, the power of the bourgeoisie has been shaken
under the blows of proletarian struggle, as that of tsarism in 1905?
On May 9, 1916, there appeared in Berner Tagwacht, the organ of the
Zimmerwald group, including some of the Leftists, an article on the Irish
rebellion entitled "Their Song Is Over" and signed with the initials K.
R."[111] It described the Irish rebellion as being nothing more nor less
than a "putsch", for, as the author argued, "the Irish question was an
agrarian one", the peasants had been pacified by reforms, and the
nationalist movement remained only a "purely urban, petty-bourgeois movement, which, notwithstanding the
sensation it caused, had not much social backing".
It is not surprising that this monstrously doctrinaire and pedantic
assessment coincided with that of a Russian national-liberal Cadet, Mr. A.
Kulisher (Rech[112] No. 102, April 15, 1916), who also labelled the
rebellion "the Dublin putsch".
It is to be hoped that, in accordance with the adage, "it's an ill wind
that blows nobody any good", many comrades, who were not aware of the morass
they were sinking into by repudiating "self-determination" and by treating
the national movements of small nations with disdain, will have their eyes
opened by the "accidental" coincidence of opinion held by a Social-Democrat
and a representative of the imperialist bourgeoisie!!
The term "putsch", in its scientific sense, may be employed only when
the attempt at insurrection has revealed nothing but a circle of
conspirators or stupid maniacs, and has aroused no sympathy among the
masses. The centuries-old Irish national movement, having passed through
various stages and combinations of class interest, manifested itself, in
particular, in a mass Irish National Congress in America (Vorwärts, March
20, 1916) which called for Irish independence; it also manifested itself in
street fighting conducted by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a
section of the workers after a long period of mass agitation,
demonstrations, suppression of newspapers, etc. Whoever calls such a
rebellion a "putsch" is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire
hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living
phenomenon.
To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by
small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts
by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a
movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian
masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy,
against national oppression, etc. -- to imagine all this is to repudiate
social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, "We are for
socialism", and another, somewhere else and says, "We are for imperialism",
and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a
ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a
"putsch".
Whoever expects a "pure" social revolution will never live to see it.
Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what
revolution is.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a bourgeois-democratic revolution. It
consisted of a series of battles in which all the discontented classes,
groups and elements of the population participated. Among these there were
masses imbued with the crudest prejudices, with the vaguest and most
fantastic aims of struggle; there were small groups which accepted Japanese
money, there were speculators and adventurers, etc. But objectively, the
mass movement was breaking the back of tsarism and paving the way for
democracy; for this reason the class-conscious workers led it.
The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an
outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and
discontented elements. Inevitably, sections of the petty bourgeoisie and of
the backward workers will participate in it -- without such participation,
mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is possible -- and
just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their prejudices, their
reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and errors. But objectively they
will attack capital, and the class-conscious vanguard of the revolution, the
advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of a variegated and
discordant, motley and outwardly fragmented, mass struggle, will be able to
unite and direct it, capture power, seize the banks, expropriate the trusts
which all hate (though for different reasons!), and introduce other
dictatorial measures which in their totality will amount to the overthrow of
the bourgeoisie and the victory of socialism, which, however, will by no
means immediately "purge" itself of petty-bourgeois slag.
Social-Democracy, we read in the Polish theses (I, 4), "must utilise the
struggle of the young colonial bourgeoisie against European imperialism in
order to sharpen the revolutionary crisis in Europe". (Authors' italics.)
Is it not clear that it is least of all permissible to contrast Europe
to the colonies in this respect. The struggle of the oppressed nations in
Europe, a struggle capable of going all the way to insurrection and street
fighting, capable of breaking down the iron discipline of the army and
martial law, will "sharpen the revolutionary crisis in Europe" to an
infinitely greater degree than a much more developed rebellion in a remote
colony. A blow delivered against the power of the English imperialist
bourgeoisie by a rebellion in Ireland is a hundred times more significant
politically than a blow of equal force delivered in Asia or in Africa.
The French chauvinist press recently reported the publication in Belgium
of the eightieth issue of an illegal journal, Free Belgium.[113] Of course,
the chauvinist press of France very often lies, but this piece of news seems
to be true. Whereas chauvinist and Kautskyite German Social-Democracy has
failed to establish a free press for itself during the two years of war, and
has meekly borne the yoke of military censorship (only the Left Radical
elements, to their credit be it said, have published pamphlets and
manifestos, in spite of the censorship) -- an oppressed civilised nation has
reacted to a military oppression unparalleled in ferocity by establishing an
organ of revolutionary protest! The dialectics of history are such that
small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against
imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which
help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its
appearance on the scene.
The general staffs in the current war are doing their utmost to utilise
any national and revolutionary movement in the enemy camp: the Germans
utilise the Irish rebellion, the French -- the Czech movement, etc. They are
acting quite correctly from their own point of view. A serious war would not
be treated seriously if advantage were not taken of the enemy's slightest
weakness and if every opportunity that presented itself were not seized
upon, the more so since it is impossible to know beforehand at what moment,
where, and with what force some powder magazine will "explode". We would be
very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat's great war of liberation
for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement against
every single disaster imperialism brings in order to intensify and extend
the crisis. If we were, on the one hand, to repeat in a thousand keys the
declaration that we are "opposed" to all national oppression and, on the
other, to describe the heroic revolt of the most mobile and enlightened
section of certain classes in an oppressed nation against its oppressors as
a "putsch", we should be sinking to the same level of stupidity as the
Kautskyites.
It is the misfortune of the Irish that they rose prematurely, before the
European revolt of the proletariat had had time to mature. Capitalism is not
so harmoniously built that the various sources of rebellion can immediately
merge of their own accord, without reverses and defeats. On the other hand,
the very fact that revolts do break out at different times, in different
places, and are of different kinds, guarantees wide scope and depth to the
general movement; but it is only in premature, individual, sporadic and
therefore unsuccessful, revolutionary movements that the masses gain
experience, acquire knowledge, gather strength, and get to know their real
leaders, the socialist proletarians, and in this way prepare for the general
onslaught, just as certain strikes, demonstrations, local and national,
mutinies in the army, outbreaks among the peasantry, etc., prepared the way
for the general onslaught in 1905.
(Edited by CiaranB at 6:14 pm on April 20, 2003)
The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: July 1916
First Published: October 1916 in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata No.1
Source: Lenin's Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 22,
1964, pp. 320-360
10. THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1916
Our theses were written before the outbreak of this rebellion, which
must be the touchstone of our theoretical views.
The views of the opponents of self-determination lead to the conclusion
that the vitality of small nations oppressed by imperialism has already been
sapped, that they cannot play any role against imperialism, that support of
their purely national aspirations will lead to nothing, etc. The imperialist
war of 1914-16 has provided facts which refute such conclusions.
The war proved to be an epoch of crisis for the West European nations,
and for imperialism as a whole. Every crisis discards the conventionalities,
tears away the outer wrappings, sweeps away the obsolete and reveals the
underlying springs and forces. What has it revealed from the standpoint of
the movement of oppressed nations? In the colonies there have been a number
of attempts at rebellion, which the oppressor nations, naturally did all
they could to hide by means of a military censorship. Nevertheless, it is
known that in Singapore the British brutally suppressed a mutiny among their
Indian troops; that there were attempts at rebellion in French Annam (see
Nashe Slovo) and in the German Cameroons (see the Junius pamphlet*); that
in Europe, on the one hand, there was a rebellion in Ireland, which the
"freedom-loving" English, who did not dare to extend conscription to
Ireland, suppressed by executions, and, on the other, the Austrian
Government passed the death sentence on the deputies of the Czech Diet "for
treason", and shot whole Czech regiments for the same "crime".
* See pp. 305-19 of this volume. --Ed. [Transcriber's Note: See The
Junius Pamphlet. -- DJR]
This list is, of course, far from complete. Nevertheless, it proves
that, owing to the crisis of imperialism, the flames of national revolt have
flared up both in the colonies and in Europe, and that national sympathies
and antipathies have manifested themselves in spite of the Draconian threats
and measures of repression. All this before the crisis of imperialism hit
its peak; the power of the imperialist bourgeoisie was yet to be undermined
(this may be brought about by a war of "attrition" but has not yet happened)
and the proletarian movements in the imperialist countries were still very
feeble. What will happen when the war has caused complete exhaustion, or
when, in one state at least, the power of the bourgeoisie has been shaken
under the blows of proletarian struggle, as that of tsarism in 1905?
On May 9, 1916, there appeared in Berner Tagwacht, the organ of the
Zimmerwald group, including some of the Leftists, an article on the Irish
rebellion entitled "Their Song Is Over" and signed with the initials K.
R."[111] It described the Irish rebellion as being nothing more nor less
than a "putsch", for, as the author argued, "the Irish question was an
agrarian one", the peasants had been pacified by reforms, and the
nationalist movement remained only a "purely urban, petty-bourgeois movement, which, notwithstanding the
sensation it caused, had not much social backing".
It is not surprising that this monstrously doctrinaire and pedantic
assessment coincided with that of a Russian national-liberal Cadet, Mr. A.
Kulisher (Rech[112] No. 102, April 15, 1916), who also labelled the
rebellion "the Dublin putsch".
It is to be hoped that, in accordance with the adage, "it's an ill wind
that blows nobody any good", many comrades, who were not aware of the morass
they were sinking into by repudiating "self-determination" and by treating
the national movements of small nations with disdain, will have their eyes
opened by the "accidental" coincidence of opinion held by a Social-Democrat
and a representative of the imperialist bourgeoisie!!
The term "putsch", in its scientific sense, may be employed only when
the attempt at insurrection has revealed nothing but a circle of
conspirators or stupid maniacs, and has aroused no sympathy among the
masses. The centuries-old Irish national movement, having passed through
various stages and combinations of class interest, manifested itself, in
particular, in a mass Irish National Congress in America (Vorwärts, March
20, 1916) which called for Irish independence; it also manifested itself in
street fighting conducted by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a
section of the workers after a long period of mass agitation,
demonstrations, suppression of newspapers, etc. Whoever calls such a
rebellion a "putsch" is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire
hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living
phenomenon.
To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by
small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts
by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a
movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian
masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy,
against national oppression, etc. -- to imagine all this is to repudiate
social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, "We are for
socialism", and another, somewhere else and says, "We are for imperialism",
and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a
ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a
"putsch".
Whoever expects a "pure" social revolution will never live to see it.
Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what
revolution is.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a bourgeois-democratic revolution. It
consisted of a series of battles in which all the discontented classes,
groups and elements of the population participated. Among these there were
masses imbued with the crudest prejudices, with the vaguest and most
fantastic aims of struggle; there were small groups which accepted Japanese
money, there were speculators and adventurers, etc. But objectively, the
mass movement was breaking the back of tsarism and paving the way for
democracy; for this reason the class-conscious workers led it.
The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an
outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and
discontented elements. Inevitably, sections of the petty bourgeoisie and of
the backward workers will participate in it -- without such participation,
mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is possible -- and
just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their prejudices, their
reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and errors. But objectively they
will attack capital, and the class-conscious vanguard of the revolution, the
advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of a variegated and
discordant, motley and outwardly fragmented, mass struggle, will be able to
unite and direct it, capture power, seize the banks, expropriate the trusts
which all hate (though for different reasons!), and introduce other
dictatorial measures which in their totality will amount to the overthrow of
the bourgeoisie and the victory of socialism, which, however, will by no
means immediately "purge" itself of petty-bourgeois slag.
Social-Democracy, we read in the Polish theses (I, 4), "must utilise the
struggle of the young colonial bourgeoisie against European imperialism in
order to sharpen the revolutionary crisis in Europe". (Authors' italics.)
Is it not clear that it is least of all permissible to contrast Europe
to the colonies in this respect. The struggle of the oppressed nations in
Europe, a struggle capable of going all the way to insurrection and street
fighting, capable of breaking down the iron discipline of the army and
martial law, will "sharpen the revolutionary crisis in Europe" to an
infinitely greater degree than a much more developed rebellion in a remote
colony. A blow delivered against the power of the English imperialist
bourgeoisie by a rebellion in Ireland is a hundred times more significant
politically than a blow of equal force delivered in Asia or in Africa.
The French chauvinist press recently reported the publication in Belgium
of the eightieth issue of an illegal journal, Free Belgium.[113] Of course,
the chauvinist press of France very often lies, but this piece of news seems
to be true. Whereas chauvinist and Kautskyite German Social-Democracy has
failed to establish a free press for itself during the two years of war, and
has meekly borne the yoke of military censorship (only the Left Radical
elements, to their credit be it said, have published pamphlets and
manifestos, in spite of the censorship) -- an oppressed civilised nation has
reacted to a military oppression unparalleled in ferocity by establishing an
organ of revolutionary protest! The dialectics of history are such that
small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against
imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which
help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its
appearance on the scene.
The general staffs in the current war are doing their utmost to utilise
any national and revolutionary movement in the enemy camp: the Germans
utilise the Irish rebellion, the French -- the Czech movement, etc. They are
acting quite correctly from their own point of view. A serious war would not
be treated seriously if advantage were not taken of the enemy's slightest
weakness and if every opportunity that presented itself were not seized
upon, the more so since it is impossible to know beforehand at what moment,
where, and with what force some powder magazine will "explode". We would be
very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat's great war of liberation
for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement against
every single disaster imperialism brings in order to intensify and extend
the crisis. If we were, on the one hand, to repeat in a thousand keys the
declaration that we are "opposed" to all national oppression and, on the
other, to describe the heroic revolt of the most mobile and enlightened
section of certain classes in an oppressed nation against its oppressors as
a "putsch", we should be sinking to the same level of stupidity as the
Kautskyites.
It is the misfortune of the Irish that they rose prematurely, before the
European revolt of the proletariat had had time to mature. Capitalism is not
so harmoniously built that the various sources of rebellion can immediately
merge of their own accord, without reverses and defeats. On the other hand,
the very fact that revolts do break out at different times, in different
places, and are of different kinds, guarantees wide scope and depth to the
general movement; but it is only in premature, individual, sporadic and
therefore unsuccessful, revolutionary movements that the masses gain
experience, acquire knowledge, gather strength, and get to know their real
leaders, the socialist proletarians, and in this way prepare for the general
onslaught, just as certain strikes, demonstrations, local and national,
mutinies in the army, outbreaks among the peasantry, etc., prepared the way
for the general onslaught in 1905.
(Edited by CiaranB at 6:14 pm on April 20, 2003)