Nationalism and Separatism

Hey, it's me again. I'm still in my learning phase on Revleft and I've thought about something that disturbed me. Most of lefties are in favor of Separatism (Independentism) but are against Nationalism (maybe it leads to rascism, I don't know). However, Independentism requires nationalism to prove that they're different (ethnicity) from the country they're currently in. Isn't it absurd to be for Separatism when it goes with nationalism ?

Thank you very much, comrades.

You're going to need to be much more specific than that. Each and every single question of national liberation is completely different - and at that, not every comrade comes to the same conclusions about individual cases for separation.

I'll take as an example my own country (Canada) and the province of Québec. Québec is the only province with a French majority in this country, and the québécois are viewed as distinct from francophone minorities within other provinces. Québec is recognized by our government as une nation au sien d'un Canada uni [a nation within a united Canada].

There is a thriving movement there advocating for Québec's succession from Canadian confederation. The current ruling provincial political party, the Parti Québécois, advocates succession.

I'll take a selection of the official positions of various communist organizations on the national question of Québec:

Parti communiste du Québec [Ideology: Marxist-Leninist]: Québec should have the right to self-determination and if the people of Québec choose in a democratic referendum to separate from Canada, then that succession should be recognized. However, separation should not be a goal for communists.

Parti marxiste-léniniste du Québec [Ideology: "anti-revisionist" Marxism-Leninism]: québécois communists should struggle for Québec's succession.

Parti communiste révolutionnaire [Ideology: Maoism]: Québec's sovereignty movement is controlled by bourgeois interests and the people of Québec are no longer subject to colonial oppression, so the sovereignty movement should be opposed.

So as you can see there's hardly consensus on the issue. And with every single issue of self-determination, you're going to find the same thing - differing opinions.

No, not necessarily. There's nothing "nationalist" about recognizing colonial oppression. For example, I don't think a single person on this board would claim that resistance to the occupation of Palestine is "nationalistic", it's just resistance to colonial oppression by an occupying power.

That being said, movements for separation may be motivated only by nationalism and not legitimate grievances with an occupying power, and as such we have to be very careful and (as I said before) treat each case separately.

I tend to make the following classifications:
There's the type of nationalism that stems from occupation/colonialism, and a type of nationalism rooted in tradition and local customs (like the basque or catalan independence movements).

The first, is another struggle against oppression and illegitimate authority, like many others.It's not "the best" kind of struggle (meaning that it doesn't target capitalism itself), but i feel it needs to be supported, because as an anarchist i support the abolition of all authoritarian human relationships that cannot justify themselves.
Also, communism is a system that can only be achieved by the people themselves, so i feel the local politics being a matter of the people themselves is a pre-requisite.

Of course the contrasting strategy is skipping whole thing, and using revolutionary defeatism, but i think that is even harder, and requires a much higher class awareness.
But both strategies involve the occupation/colonial elements getting the F off, so resistance and struggle is present either way, and should be supported.

The second kind, is bullcrap, and i don't see any reason connected to communism to support it, as it adds extra artificial separations and barriers between the workers of each side. And it's purely idealistic.

It kind of sounds like you have the formulation backwards, OP. Most people on here would not support "separatism" but many people are going to be in favor of some sort of "nationalism of the oppressed".

For instance, I believe that there is an oppressed black nation contained within the United States, kept in a strange limbo where it is only partially included into capital (and since capitalism can no longer be progressive, it cannot fully integrate the black-american nation). That said, I do not support the concept of black separatism.

You're absolutely correct; and it is one of the defining differences between leftism (which is on the terrain of capitalism) and communist positions (the revolutionary ideas of the working-class).

Support for any kind of national liberation, independence, separatism, in the name of 'the right of nations to self-determination' etc. has in practice lead the working-class into imperialist wars, support for factions of the ruling-class over another faction (the politics of the 'lesser evil')- all of which betrays the most basic tenants of Marxism: internationalism, workers of the world have no country.

I dig this, as a fellow traveller or whatever on the ultra-left. But this doesn't negate the reality of the situation, and I don't know if this situation does exist anywhere else in the world, but I have to imagine it does.

The US really does have these two nations, contained within its borders, who are not truly part of the United States, and who can no longer be incorporated into capital.

Can you refute the existence of a Black nation and an Indigenous nation within the United States? I'm not ready to call, necessarily, for any sort of "national-liberation", but we need to think about it, certainly the leftists have thought about it, they have positions on it. (which are maybe, partially correct in some ways) But we don't.

Actually something Debord wrote on the situation of American blacks in the early 1960's-

http://libcom.org/library/internatio...-10-article-10

is very interesting on this point. I think Hispanic workers in the US face a similar position as black workers did in the 1960's, facing up-close the inability of capital to provide durable reforms and properly integrate them into the productive process on 'equal footing' to white workers due to the political/social contradictions.

What value do you think a separate nation-state would have for native-americans or african-americans (if it were even possible for capitalism to allow it)? or the kinds of domestic liberation wars/urban guerillaism of the 1960's-1970's? I don't understand how supporting struggles on that terrain is beneficial to the struggle for communism and abolition of class society.

i can't and won't speak for the whole movement, or my particular tendency, but i personally am against both, in favor of global liberation. both nationalism and separatism involve one group dividing away from the greater whole, and it will take all of us to bring down every force of oppression present in the world. if one sequestered group manages to bring down one form of oppression but leaves the rest intact, all that does is open a power vacuum that the rest will quickly occupy, since controlling groups have shown themselves time and again to be nothing if not opportunistic.

Communists are internationalists, as comrade subcp correctly points out. But the conclusion they draw from this is entirely incorrect - it is in fact a departure from internationalism. As internationalists, we communists should oppose any oppression of the proletariat, including oppression on the basis of language. This, and not bourgeois pining for some imagined Heimat, underlies the Leninist policy on the nationality question. Separatism is not necessary; in fact it would be incorrect to force nations to separate if the will to do so does not already exist. But communists can not accede to dominant-nation chauvinism, especially not in the name of a dislike for reformism, real and imagined.

Thanks for the link.

Regarding hispanic workers today, I don't see how we can compare them to black workers in the 60s. Capital is going to integrate them on equal footing, surely you've been following all the support that exists (from both the republicans and the democrats) for amnesty and citizenship for undocumented workers here in the US? The Dems believe that they will score a solid voting bloc there from people who will support social spending, and the GOP sees a potentially religious conservative voting bloc there as well. The base of the GOP is raising hell about it, but the GOP don't give a fuck about their base. And this has been coming, back in the 90s with NAFTA and shit, hispanic people are being incorporated into capital.

But Black americans and Indigenous peoples of north america cannot be brought into capital, because of the conditions of their existence within this country. Right, "The Indian" is the anti-thesis of "America", the US, in both physical reality, and in its creation myth, centrally revolves around 1) the destruction of "The Indian" and 2) the labor of the black slave. So these two groups still exist here, but are fundamentally incompatible with empire.


I want to be clear that I do not advocate for the construction of any nation-state at all, based on oppressed nationality or not. I am for the immediate destruction of all states and state-forms. I don't think that black people having an autonomous region somewhere in north america will make them free. I'm just saying, that as a distinct nation, they do in fact exist, and we, as communist militants, have to engage with that fact. I don't have the answers, but I can conjure up some pretty scary possibilities about how these facts will make themselves apparent once collapse/revolutionary upheavel begins. (I think sometimes this shit, in some places, is going to look like a race war)

Although we live in capitalist-imperialist world that divides nations 1st 2nd and 3rd, and as long as these distinctions exist the oppressed third world countries must declare their autonomy and independence to rise up against the superpowers.

No. As long as class distinctions exist, the working class must declare its autonomy and independence to rise up against the capitalists.

The national question has not been entirely resolved in "the First World" either; consider the movement for Basque autonomy, for example, the status of Transnistria, indigenous nations in the United States and so on. Again, I think that agitating for independence would accomplish little, but if, for example, Dine workers are to reach a certain level of class consciousness, they need education in their own language, not language oppression by the dominant nation.

I agree with you that the 'terms' of exploitation are different- but I don't agree that race riots will be a feature in a future revolutionary outbreak. The legislative campaign doesn't speak to the actual, real world integration of immigrants (let alone Hispanic workers in general, including the large citizenship holding majority)- just like the civil rights campaigns of the 1960's did not completely integrate black workers on an equal footing with white workers (disparities still exist in things like wages, unemployment rates, etc.) I think it will be the same for Hispanic workers in general and immigrants without citizenship in particular, if a new civil rights-esque bill passes with a pathway to citizenship and amnesty.

I'm not sure about the use of the term 'nation'; if there are no differentiated states, I don't understand using that word over something more descriptive (community, ethnic group). It suggests that there ought to be a separate state for native and african americans just in the terminology.

I agree that communists must be involved in struggles that are either in the workplace or the community, and struggles against employers/landlords/the state (like the general strike of Hispanic workers in 2006, the fight against the company and outside the UFCW at the pizza factory in Wisconsin, etc.). I don't think that the typical leftist campaigns and behavior regarding minority workers is in the least helpful, and often comes off as patronizing, and most importantly does not advance the movement for communism.

But isn't the construction of the "Hispanic" label itself at some level a violence against and effacement of both indigenous and Afro-diasporic communities? Although the Census Bureau has officially de-racialized "Hispanic" with the categories of "White Hispanics" and "Non-white Hispanics", i.e., Afro-Latinos, Indios, and others, studies have shown that in reality, "Hispanic" is still treated as a racial label. For example, the social science researcher Lawrence Hirschfeld found that in Texas, the same "one blood drop rule" was applied to children of "White" and "Hispanic" parents in the same exact way as for "White" and "Black." The effectiveness of Arizona's SB 1070 and other similar laws such as those advocating tougher punishment for US citizens who "harbor illegals" lies in the ability of law enforcement to police bodies through "reasonable suspicion" based on identifying aspects of the constructed Indian racial "prototype" in "Hispanics." Thus undocumented "Whites" are comparatively privileged in this regard and would be likely to more easily be integrated by capital, but most of the people ("aliens") being fingered in the so-called immigration controversy are not "white."

The comparison of present day Hispanic workers with Blacks of the 1960s seems somewhat legit to me, if you think about Mexica/Xicano nationalism's Aztlan, which is still being pushed by some groups, and New Afrika/Black Belt Thesis, although I think it is more complex today. We need to rethink paradigms based on the historic (increasingly outdated) geographic separation of ethnic groups. Actually, I read a piece that I found pretty enlightening on this a while back: Black Liberation in the 21st Century: A Revolutionary Reassessment of Black Nationalism

Don't be fooled. There is no "national question" except why socialists would support nationalism. Nations based on language, territory require borders and workers have no country.

So the Palestinian workers should simply ignore the national oppression of the Palestinian people, or at least they should wait for the revolution to sort the entire mess out? Roma workers should just ignore how they are marginalised and attacked? Basque workers should ignore the exclusion that comes from not being able to use their language?

Saying nationalism is not the answer does not amount to arguing oppression should be ignored.

What is to be done, then? Should the workers wait for the revolution? Or should they participate in national liberation struggles? The latter is the Leninist policy; this talk of "nationalism" is ridiculous. Revolutionary Russia certainly did not support Great Russian nationalism.

Start workers councils without distinction of nationality. How can one country be liberated and not another?