The Right of Nations to Self-Determination

Clause 9 of the Russian Marxists’ Programme, which deals
with the right of nations to self-determination, has (as we have already
pointed out in
Prosveshcheniye ) [1] given rise lately to a crusade on the part of the opportunists. The Russian
liquidator Semkovsky, in the St. Petersburg liquidationist newspaper, and
the Bundist Liebman and the Ukrainian nationalist-socialist Yurkevich in
their respective periodicals have violently attacked this clause and
treated it with supreme contempt. There is no doubt that this campaign of a
motley array of opportunists against our Marxist Programme is closely
connected with present-day nationalist vacillations in general. Hence we
consider a detailed examination of this question timely. We would mention,
in passing, that none of the opportunists named above has offered a single
argument of his own; they all merely repeat what Rosa Luxemburg said in her
lengthy Polish article of 1908–09, “The National Question and
Autonomy”. In our exposition we shall deal mainly with the “original”
arguments of this last-named author.

1. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE SELF-DETERMINATION OF
NATIONS?

Naturally, this is the first question that arises when any attempt is
made at a Marxist examination of what is known as self-determination. What
should be understood by that term? Should the answer be sought in legal
definitions deduced from all sorts of “general concepts” of law? Or is it
rather to be sought in a historico-economic study of the national
movements?

It is not surprising that the Semkovskys, Liebmans and Yurkeviches did
not even think of raising this question, and shrugged it off by scoffing at the “obscurity” of the Marxist
Programme, apparently unaware, in their simplicity, that the
self-determination of nations is dealt with, not only in the Russian
Programme of 1903, but in the resolution of the London International
Congress of 1896 (with which I shall deal in detail in the proper
place). Far more surprising is the fact that Rosa Luxemburg, who declaims a
great deal about the supposedly abstract and metaphysical nature of the
clause in question, should herself succumb to the sin of abstraction and
metaphysics. It is Rosa Luxemburg herself who is continually lapsing into
generalities about self-determination (to the extent even of philosophising
amusingly on the question of how the will of the nation is to be
ascertained), without any where clearly and precisely asking herself
whether the gist of the matter lies in legal definitions or in the
experience of the national movements throughout the world.

A precise formulation of this question, which no Marxist can avoid,
would at once destroy nine-tenths of Rosa Luxemburg’s arguments. This is
not the first time that national movements have arisen in Russia, nor are
they peculiar to that country alone. Throughout the world, the period of
the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with
national movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the
bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically
united territories whose population speak a single language, with all
obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in
literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national
movements. Language is the most important means of human intercourse. Unity
and unimpeded development of language are the most important conditions for
genuinely free and extensive commerce on a scale commensurate with modern
capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its
various classes and, lastly, for the establishment of a close connection
between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, and
between seller and buyer.

Therefore, the tendency of every national movement is towards the
formation of national states , under which these requirements of
modern capitalism are best satisfied. The most profound economic factors drive towards this goal, and, therefore, for
the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilised world, the
national state is typical and normal for the capitalist period.

Consequently, if we want to grasp the meaning of self-determination of
nations, not by juggling with legal definitions, or “inventing” abstract
definitions, but by examining the historico-economic conditions of the
national movements, we must inevitably reach the conclusion that the
self-determination of nations means the political separation of these
nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent
national state.

Later on we shall see still other reasons why it would be wrong to
interpret the right to self-determination as meaning-anything but the right
to existence as a separate state. At present, we must deal with Rosa
Luxemburg’s efforts to “dismiss” the inescapable conclusion that profound
economic factors underlie the urge towards a national state.

Rosa Luxemburg is quite familiar with Kautsky’s pamphlet
Nationality and Internationality . (Supplement to Die Neue Zeit [2] No.11, 1907–08; Russian translation in the journal
Nauchnaya Mysl , [3] Riga, 1908.) She is aware that, after carefully analysing
the question of the national state in §4 of that pamphlet, Kautsky
arrived at the conclusion that Otto Bauer “ underestimates the
strength of the urge towards a national state” (p. 23 of the
pamphlet). Rosa Luxemburg herself quotes the following words of Kautsky’s:

“The national state is the form most suited to present-day
conditions, [i. e., capitalist, civilised, economically progressive
conditions, as distinguished from medieval, pre-capitalist, etc.]; it is
the form in which the state can best fulfil its tasks” (i. e., the tasks
of securing the freest, widest and speediest development of capitalism). To
this we must add Kautsky’s still more precise concluding remark that states
of mixed national composition (known as multi national states, as distinct
from national states) are “always those whose internal constitution has
for some reason or other remained abnormal or underdeveloped”
(backward). Needless to say, Kautsky speaks of abnormality exclusively in
the sense of lack of conformity with what is best adapted to the
requirements of a developing capitalism.

The question now is: How did Rosa Luxemburg treat these
historico-economic conclusions of Kautsky’s? Are they right or wrong? Is
Kautsky right in his historico-economic theory, or is Bauer, whose theory
is basically psychological? What is the connection between Bauer’s
undoubted “national opportunism”, his defence of cultural-national
autonomy, his nationalistic infatuation (“an occasional emphasis on the
national aspect”, as Kautsky put it), his “enormous exaggeration of the
national aspect and complete neglect of the international aspect”
(Kautsky)—and his underestimation of the strength of the urge to create a
national state?

Rosa Luxemburg has not even raised this question. She has not noticed
the connection. She has not considered the sum total of Bauer’s
theoretical views. She has not even drawn a line between the
historico-economic and the psychological theories of the national
question. She confines herself to the following remarks in criticism of
Kautsky:

“This ‘best’ national state is only an abstraction, which can easily be developed and defended theoretically, but which does
not correspond to reality.” ( Przeglad Socjaldemokratyczny , 1908, No. 6, p. 499.)

And in corroboration of this emphatic statement there follow arguments
to the effect that the “right to self-determination” of small nations is
made illusory by the development of the great capitalist powers and by
imperialism. “Can one seriously speak,” Rosa Luxemburg exclaims, “about
the ‘self-determination’ of the formally independent Montenegrins,
Bulgarians, Rumanians, Serbs, Greeks, partly even the Swiss, whose
independence is itself a result of the political struggle and the
diplomatic game of the ‘concert of Europe’?!” (P. 500.) The state that
best suits these conditions is “not a national state, as Kautsky believes,
but a predatory one”. Some dozens of figures are quoted relating to the
size of British, French and other colonial possessions.

After reading such arguments, one cannot help marvelling at the
author’s ability to misunderstand the how and the why of things . To teach Kautsky, with a serious mien, that small states are
economically dependent on big ones, that a struggle is raging among the
bourgeois states for the predatory suppression of other nations, and that
imperialism and colonies exist—all this is a ridiculous and puerile attempt to be
clever, for none of this has the slightest bearing on the subject. Not only
small states, but even Russia, for example, is entirely dependent,
economically, on the power of the imperialist finance capital of the
“rich” bourgeois countries. Not only the miniature Balkan states, but
even nineteenth-century America was, economically, a colony of Europe, as
Marx pointed out in
Capital . [4] Kautsky, like any Marxist, is, of course, well
aware of this, but that has nothing whatever to do with the question of
national movements and the national state.

For the question of the political self-determination of nations and
their independence as states in bourgeois society, Rosa Luxemburg has
substituted the question of their economic independence. This is just as
intelligent as if someone, in discussing the programmatic demand for the
supremacy of parliament, i. e., the assembly of people’s representatives,
in a bourgeois state, were to expound the perfectly correct conviction that
big capital dominates in a bourgeois country, whatever the regime in it.

There is no doubt that the greater part of Asia, the most densely
populated continent, consists either of colonies of the “Great Powers”,
or of states that are extremely dependent and oppressed as nations. But
does this commonly-known circumstance in any way shake the undoubted fact
that in Asia itself the conditions for the most complete development of
commodity production and the freest, widest and speediest growth of
capitalism have been created only in Japan, i. e., only in an independent
national state? The latter is a bourgeois state, and for that reason has
itself begun to oppress other nations and to enslave colonies. We cannot say
whether Asia will have had time to develop into a system of independent
national states, like Europe, before the collapse of capitalism, but it
remains an undisputed fact that capitalism, having awakened Asia, has
called forth national movements everywhere in that continent, too; that the
tendency of these movements is towards the creation of national states in
Asia; that it is such states that ensure, the best conditions for the
development of capitalism. The example of Asia speaks in favour of
Kautsky and against Rosa Luxemburg.

The example of the Balkan states likewise contradicts her, for anyone
can now see that the best conditions for the development of capitalism in
the Balkans are created precisely in proportion to the creation of
independent national states in that peninsula.

Therefore, Rosa Luxemburg notwithstanding, the example of the whole of
progressive and civilised mankind, the example of the Balkans and that of
Asia prove that Kautsky’s proposition is absolutely correct: the national
state is the rule and the “norm” of capitalism; the multi-national state
represents backwardness, or is an exception. From the standpoint of
national relations, the best conditions for the development of capitalism
are undoubtedly provided by the national state. This does not mean, of
course, that such a state, which is based on bourgeois relations, can
eliminate the exploitation and oppression of nations. It only means that
Marxists cannot lose sight of the powerful economic factors that
give rise to the urge to create national states. It means that
“self-determination of nations” in the Marxists’ Programme
cannot , from a historico-economic point of view, have any other
meaning than political self-determination, state independence, and the
formation of a national state.

The conditions under which the bourgeois-democratic demand for a
“national state” should be supported from a Marxist, i. e.,
class-proletarian, point of view will be dealt with in detail below. For
the present, we shall confine ourselves to the definition of the
concept of “self-determination”, and only note that Rosa
Luxemburg knows what this concept means (“national state”),
whereas her opportunist partisans, the Liebmans, the Semkovskys, the
Yurkeviches, do not even know that !

---
Notes:
[1]

See pp. 17–51 of this volume.— Ed .

[2]
Die Neue Zeit —theoretical journal of the German
Social-Democratic Party, published in Stuttgart from 1883 to 1923. It was
edited by K. Kautsky until October 1917, and then by H. Cunow. Some the
writings of the founders of Marxism were first published in this journal,
among them K. Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and Engels’s
“Criticism of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891”. Engels
often gave pointers to the editors of Die Neue Zeit and criticised
their deviations from Marxism. Other prominent leaders of the German and
international labour movement who contributed to the journal at the end of
the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries were A. Bebel,
W. Liebknecht R. Luxemburg, F. Mehring, Clara Zetkin, G. V. Plekhanov and
P. Lafargue. Beginning with the late nineties, after the death of Engels,
the journal regularly published articles by revisionists, including a
series of articles by E. Bernstein “Problems of Socialism”, which
launched a revisionists’ campaign against Marxism. During World War I the
journal took a centrist stand and supported the social-chauvinists.

[3]
Nauchnaya Mysl ( Scientific Thought )—a journal of a
Menshevik trend, published in Riga in 1908.

[4]

See Karl Marx, Capital , Vol. I, Moscow, 1959, p. 765.

p. 399