V. I.

Lenin

A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism

5. “Monism And Dualism”

Reproaching us for “interpreting the demand dualistically”,
P. Kievsky writes:

“ Monistic action of the international is replaced by dualistic propaganda .”

That sounds quite Marxist and materialistic: monistic action is
contrasted to “dualistic” propaganda. Unfortunately, closer examination
reveals that it is verbal “monism”, like the “monism” of
Dühring. “if I include a shoe brush in the unity mammals,”
Engels wrote exposing Dühring’s “monism”, “this does not help it to
get mammary glands.” [3]

This means that only such things, qualities, phenomena and actions that
are a unity in objective reality can be declared “a unity”. It is this “ detail ” that our author overlooks!

He thinks we are “dualists”, first, because what we demand,
primarily, of the workers of the oppressed nations—this refers to the
national question only— differs from what we demand of the
workers of the oppressor nations.

To determine whether P. Kievsky’s “monism” is the same as
Dühring’s, let us examine objective realities .

Is the actual condition of the workers in the oppressor and in
the oppressed nations the same, from the standpoint of the national
question?

No, it is not the same.

(1) Economically , the difference is that sections of the
working class in the oppressor nations receive crumbs from the
superprofits the bourgeoisie of these nations obtains by extra
exploitation of the workers of the oppressed nations. Besides, economic
statistics show that here a larger percentage of the workers
become “straw bosses” than is the case in the oppressed nations, a
larger percentage rise to the labour aristocracy . [1]

That is a fact. To a certain degree the workers of the oppressor
nations are partners of their own bourgeoisie in plundering the
workers (and the mass of the population) of the oppressed nations.

(2) Politically , the difference is that, compared with the
workers of the oppressed nations, they occupy a privileged
position in many spheres of political life.

(3) Ideologically , or spiritually, the difference is that they
are taught, at school and in life, disdain and contempt for the workers of
the oppressed nations. This has been experienced , for example, by
every Great Russian who has been brought up or who has lived among Great
Russians.

Thus, all along the line there are differences in objective
reality, i.e., “dualism” in the objective world that is independent of
the will and consciousness of individuals.

That being so, how are we to regard P. Kievsky’s assertion about the
“monistic action of the International”?

It is a hollow, high-sounding phrase, no more.

In real life the International is composed of workers divided into oppressor and oppressed nations. If its
action is to be monistic , its propaganda must not be the
same for both. That is how we should regard the matter in the light of real
(not Dühringian) “monism”, Marxist materialism.

An example? We cited the example of Norway (in the legal press over two
years ago!), and no one has challenged it. In this concrete case taken from
life, the action of the Norwegian and Swedish workers was
“monistic”, unified, inter nationalist only because and insofar
as the Swedish workers unconditionally championed Norway’s freedom
to secede, while the Norwegian workers raised the question of secession
only conditionally . Had the Swedish workers not supported Norway’s
freedom of secession unconditionally , they would have been
chauvinists , accomplices of the chauvinist Swedish landlords, who
wanted to “keep” Norway by force, by war. Had the Norwegian workers
not raised the question of secession conditionally , i.e.,
allowing even Social-Democratic Party members to conduct propaganda and
vote against secession, they would have failed in their internationalist
duty and would have sunk to narrow, bourgeois Norwegian nationalism. Why?
Because the, secession was being effected by the bourgeoisie , not
by the proletariat! Because the Norwegian bourgeoisie (as every other)
always strives to drive a wedge between the workers of its own and
an “alien” country! Because for the class-conscious workers every
democratic demand (including self-determination) is subordinated
to the supreme interests of socialism. For example, if Norway’s secession
from Sweden had created the certainty or probability of war between Britain
and Germany, the Norwegian workers, for that reason alone , would
have had to oppose secession. The Swedish workers would have had the right
and the opportunity, without ceasing to be socialists, to agitate against
secession, but only if they had waged a systematic, consistent and
constant struggle against the Swedish Government for Norway’s
freedom to secede. Otherwise the Norwegian workers and people
would not , and could not , accept the advice of the
Swedish workers as sincere.

The trouble with the opponents of self-determination is that they
confine themselves to lifeless abstractions, fearing to analyse to
the end a single concrete real-life instance. Our concrete statement in the theses that a new Polish state is quite “achievable” now ,
given a definite combination of purely military, strategic
conditions, [2] has not been challenged either by the Poles or by P. Kievsky. But no one
wanted to ponder the conclusions that follow from this tacit
admission that we were right. And what follows, obviously, is that
internationalist propaganda cannot be the same for the Russians
and the Poles if it is to educate both for “monistic action”. The
Great-Russian (and German) worker is in duty bound unconditionally to
insist on Poland’s freedom to secede; otherwise he will, in fact, now be the lackey of Nicholas II or Hindenburg. The Polish worker
could insist on secession only conditionally, because to
speculate (as do the
Fracy [4] ) on the victory of one or the other imperialist bourgeoisie is
tantamount to becoming its lackey. Failure to understand this
difference, which is a prerequisite for “monistic action” of the
International, is about the same as failing to understand why “monistic
action” against the tsarist army near Moscow, say, requires that the revolutionary forces march
west from Nizhni-Novgorod and east from Smolensk.

*     * *
Second, our new exponent of Dühringian monism reproaches us for not
striving to achieve “the closest organisational unity of the various
national sections of the International” in the event of a social
revolution.

Under socialism, P. Kievsky writes, self-determination becomes
superfluous, since the state itself ceases to exist. That is meant as an
argument against us! But in our theses we clearly and definitely say, in
three lines, the last three lines of section one, that “democracy, too, is a form of state which must disappear when the state
disappears”. It is precisely this truism that P. Kievsky repeats—to
“refute” us, of course!—on several pages of his §r (Chapter I), and repeats it in a distorted way . “We picture to
ourselves,” he writes, “and have always pictured the socialist system as
a strictly democratic [!!?], centralised system of economy in which the
state, as the apparatus for the domination of one part of the population
over the other, disappears.” This is confusion, because democracy
too is domination “of one part of the population over the
other”; it too is a form of state. Our author obviously does not
understand what is meant by the withering away of the state after
the victory of socialism and what this process requires.

The main point, however, is his “objections” regarding the era of the
social revolution. He calls us “talmudists of self-determination”—what
a frightening epithet—and adds: “We picture this process [the social
revolution] as the united action of the proletarians of all [!] countries,
who wipe out the frontiers of the bourgeois [!] state, who tear down the
frontier posts [in addition to “wiping out the frontiers”?], who blow up
[!] national unity and establish class unity.”

The wrath of this stern judge of the “talmudists” notwithstanding, we
must say: there are many words here, but no “ideas”.

The social revolution cannot be the united action of the proletarians
of all countries for the simple reason that most of the countries
and the majority of the world’s population have not even reached, or have only just reached, the capitalist stage of
development. We stated this in section six of our theses, but P. Kievsky,
because of lack of attention, or inability to think, did “not notice”
that we included this section for a definite purpose, namely, to refute
caricature distortions of Marxism. Only the advanced countries of
Western Europe and North America have matured for socialism, and ii
Engels’s letter to Kautsky ( Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata ) [5] Kievsky will find a concrete illustration of
the real and not merely promised “ idea ” that to dream of the
“united action of the proletarians of all countries” means
postponing socialism to the Greek calends, i.e., for ever.

Socialism will be achieved by the united action of the proletarians,
not of all, but of a minority of countries, those that have reached the
advanced capitalist stage of development. The cause of Kievsky’s
error lies in failure to understand that. In these advanced
countries (England, France, Germany, etc.) the national problem was solved
long ago; national unity outlived its purpose long ago;
objectively , there are no “general national tasks” to be
accomplished. Hence, only in these countries is it possible now to
“blow up” national unity and establish class unity.

The undeveloped countries are a different matter. They embrace the
whole of Eastern Europe and all the colonies and semi-colonies and are
dealt with in section six of the theses (second- and third-type
countries). In those areas, as a rule, there still exist oppressed
and capitalistically undeveloped nations. Objectively , these
nations still have general national tasks to accomplish, namely,
democratic tasks, the tasks of overthrowing foreign oppression .

Engels cited India as an example of such nations, stating that she
might perform a revolution against victorious socialism, for Engels was
remote from the preposterous imperialist Economism which imagines that
having achieved victory in the advanced countries, the proletariat will
“automatically”, without definite democratic measures, abolish
national oppression everywhere. The victorious proletariat will reorganise
the countries in which it has triumphed. That cannot be done all at once;
nor, indeed, can the bourgeoisie be “vanquished” all at once. We
deliberately emphasised this in our theses, and Kievsky has again failed to stop and think why we stressed this point in connection with the
national question.

While the proletariat of the advanced countries is over throwing the
bourgeoisie and repelling its attempts at counter-revolution, the
undeveloped and oppressed nations do not just wait, do not cease to exist,
do not disappear. If they take advantage even of such a bourgeois
imperialist crisis as the war of 1915-16—a minor crisis compared with
social revolution—to rise in revolt (the colonies, Ireland), there can be
no doubt that they will all the more readily take advantage of the
great crisis of civil war in the advanced countries to rise in
revolt.

The social revolution can come only in the form of an epoch in which
are combined civil war by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the
advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and
revolutionary movements, including the national liberation movement, in the
undeveloped, backward and oppressed nations.

Why? Because capitalism develops unevenly, and objective reality gives
us highly developed capitalist nations side by side with a number of
economically slightly developed, or totally undeveloped,
nations. P. Kievsky has absolutely failed to analyse the objective
conditions of social revolution from the standpoint of the economic
maturity of various countries. His reproach that we “invent”
instances in which to apply self-determination is therefore an attempt to
lay the blame at the wrong door.

With a zeal worthy of a better cause, Kievsky repeatedly quotes Marx
and Engels to the effect that “one must not invent things out of his own
head, but use his head to discover in the existing material conditions”
the means that will free humanity of social evils. When I read those oft
repeated quotations I cannot help recalling the late and unlamented
Economists who just as tediously... harped on their “new discovery” that
capitalism had triumphed in Russia. Kievsky wants to “smite” us with
these quotations: he claims that we invent out of our own heads the
conditions for applying self-determination in the epoch of imperialism! But
we find the following “incautious admission”in his own article:

“ The very fact that we are opposed [author’s italics] to
defence of the fatherland shows most clearly that we will actively resist suppression of a national uprising, for we shall thereby be
combating imperialism, our mortal enemy” (Chapter II, §r).

To criticise an author, to answer him, one has to quote in
full at least the main propositions of his article. But in all of Kievsky’s
propositions you will find that every sentence contains two or three errors
or illogicalities that distort Marxism!

1) He is unaware that a national uprising is also “defence of
the fatherland”! A little thought, however, will make it perfectly clear
that this is so, since every “nation in revolt” “defends”
itself, its language, its territory, its fatherland, against the oppressor
nation.

All national oppression calls forth the resistance of the broad masses of the people; and the resistance of a nationally oppressed
population always tends to national revolt. Not infrequently
(notably in Austria and Russia) we find the bourgeoisie of the oppressed
nations talking of national revolt, while in practice it enters
into reactionary compacts with the bourgeoisie of the oppressor nation
behind the backs of, and against , its own people. In such cases
the criticism of revolutionary Marxists should be directed not against the
national movement, but against its degradation, vulgarisation, against the
tendency to reduce it to a petty squabble. Incidentally, very many Austrian
and Russian Social-Democrats overlook this and in their legitimate
hatred of the petty, vulgar and sordid national squabbles—disputes and
scuffles over the question, for instance, of which language shall have
precedence in two-language street signs—refuse to support the national
struggle. We shall not “support” a republican farce in, say, the
principality of Monaco, or the “republican” adventurism of “generals”
in the small states of South America or some Pacific island. But that does
not mean it would be permissible to abandon the republican slogan for
serious democratic and socialist movements. We should, and do, ridicule the
sordid national squabbles and haggling in Russia and Austria. But that does
not mean that it would be permissible to deny support to a national
uprising or a serious popular struggle against national oppression.

2) If national uprisings are impossible in the “imperialist era”,
Kievsky has no right to speak of them. If they are possible, all his fine-spun talk about “monism” and our “inventing”
examples of self-determination under imperialism, etc., etc., falls to
pieces. Kievsky defeats his own arguments.

If “we” “actively resist suppression” of a “national uprising”—a case which P. Kievsky “ himself ” considers
possible—what does this mean?

It means that the action is twofold, or “dualistic”, to
employ the philosophical term as incorrectly as our author does:
(a) first, it is the “action” of the nationally oppressed proletariat and
peasantry jointly with the, nationally oppressed bourgeoisie
against the oppressor nation; (b) second, it is the “action” of the proletariat, or of its
class-conscious section, in the oppressor nation against the
bourgeoisie of that nation and all the elements that follow it.

The innumerable phrases against a “national bloc”, national
“illusions”, the “poison” of nationalism, against “fanning national
hatred” and the like, to which P. Kievsky resorts, prove to be
meaningless. For when he advises the proletariat of the oppressor countries
(which, be it remembered, he regards as a serious force) “actively to
resist suppression of a national uprising”, he thereby fans
national hatred and supports the establishment of a “bloc with
the bourgeoisie” by the workers of the oppressed nations.

3) If national uprisings are possible under imperialism, so are
national wars. There is no material political difference between the
two. Military historians are perfectly right when they put rebellions in
the same category as wars. Kievsky has unwittingly refuted not only
himself, but also
Junius [6] and the Internationale group, who deny the possibility of national wars under imperialism. And this denial is
the only conceivable theoretical ground for denying self-determination of
nations under imperialism.

4) For what is a “national” uprising? It is an uprising aimed at the
achievement of political independence of the oppressed nation,
i.  e., the establishment of a separate national state.

If the proletariat of the oppressor nation is a serious force (in the
imperialist era, as our author rightly assumes), does not its determination
“actively to resist suppression of a national uprising” imply assistance in creating a separate national state? Of course it does.

Though he denies the “achievability” of self-determination, our brave
author now argues that the class-conscious proletariat of the advanced
countries must assist in achieving this “unachievable” goal!

5) Why must “we” “actively resist” suppression of a
national uprising? P. Kievsky advances only one reason: “...we shall
thereby be combating imperialism, our mortal enemy.” All the
strength of this argument lies in the strong word “mortal”. And this is in keeping with his penchant for strong words
instead of strong arguments—high-sounding phrases like “driving a stake
into the quivering body of the bourgeoisie” and similar Alexinsky
flourishes.

But this Kievsky argument is wrong . Imperialism is as much our
“mortal” enemy as is capitalism. That is so. No Marxist will forget,
however, that capitalism is progressive compared with feudalism, and that
imperialism is progressive compared with pre-monopoly capitalism. Hence, it
is not every struggle against imperialism that we should
support. We will not support a struggle of the reactionary classes
against imperialism; we will not support an uprising of the
reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism.

Consequently, once the author admits the need to support an uprising of
an oppressed nation (“actively resisting” suppression means supporting
the uprising), he also admits that a national uprising is
progressive , that the establishment of a separate and new state,
of new frontiers, etc., resulting from a successful uprising, is
progressive .

In none of his political arguments is the author consistent!

The Irish Rebellion of 1916, which took place after our theses had
appeared in No. 2 of Vorbote , proved, incidentally, that it was
not idle to speak of the possibility of national uprisings even in
Europe.

---
Notes:
[1]
See, for instance, Hourwich’s book on immigration and the condition of
the working class in America, Immigration and Labour .— Ed .

[2]

 — Lenin

[3]

This is from Engels’s Anti-Dühring , Moscow, 1959, pp. 63–64.

[4]

Fracy (“Revolutionary Faction”)—the Right wing of the Polish
Socialist Party (P.S.P.), a reformist nationalist party founded in 1892 and
led by Pilsudski. While advocating independence for Poland, the
P.S.P. conducted separatist nationalist propaganda among the Polish
workers, endeavouring to discourage them from joint struggle with the
Russian workers against the autocracy and capitalism.

In 1906 the party split into the Left P.S.P. and Right P.S.P. or
Fracy. The latter continued the P.S.P. nationalist and chauvinist policy
before, during and after the First World War.

[5]

Reference is to Engels’s letter to Kautsky of September 12, 1882. Lenin
cites it in his article “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up”
(see present edition, Vol. 22, pp. 352–53).

[6]

Junius was the pen-name of Rosa Luxemburg.