Marxism, Zionism and the National Question
The Abstract Right of Nations To Self-Determination (1/4)
But, these things can exist for nations and nationalities of widely varying sizes. One of the points that Lenin is making, here, therefore, in this polemic against Rosa Luxemburg, is the difference between the abstract right of nations to self-determination, and the concrete reality of whether such a right can ever be effected, or whether Marxists should advocate its implementation in any particular case. So, there have been literally thousands of nationalities in Man's history, and at least hundreds of nations, but many of them never made the cut, in terms of being large enough to be able to create a home market of sufficient size, upon which domestic capitalist production could ever be established, and, because the nation state is fundamentally a product of such capitalist production, without it, there is no objective basis for the creation of any such nation state.
Every nation state that has come into existence has done so by subordinating, and eliminating large numbers of other nations and nationalities within its borders. After the Norman Conquest, large numbers of people in Britain spoke Norman French, whilst many more continued to speak Anglo-Saxon. English developed as a merging of the two. The British nation state, in making English the national language drove out the languages of the smaller nations such as Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and so on. In France, the language of the Franks used by the political bureaucracy was made into the national language, and all the many languages of the various nations within its borders, such as Breton, Basque and so on, were eliminated, or at least subordinated.
In other words, what Lenin most certainly is not saying, here, is that every nation known to history, is destined to reach a minimum size required to create a capitalist economy, and thereby to form its own nation state. The vast majority of nations never did achieve that, and, consequently, were absorbed or suppressed by those that did, in the formation of the nation state of those larger nations. The right to self-determination is and only ever can be an abstract right.
Marx and Engels described this, specifically, in relation to some of these small nations in Europe. Those that had failed to reach the required minimum size, and so to be able to form themselves into nation states, Marx and Engels described as “Non-Historic Peoples”, and they viewed them as a whole – though, of course, this does not mean in terms of the individuals within them, or as some character trait – as being reactionary, because, in search of statehood, they aligned themselves with larger reactionary states, as a means of trying to achieve that goal. In Marx and Engels' day that was Tsarist Russia, today the same thing can be seen in reliance on the US for some, or on Russia, or various reactionary Arab regimes, or Iran, for others. Liberal interventionism encourages every such minority to shout “oppression” or “tyranny”, in order to get the backing of imperialism to intervene on its behalf, just as Trotsky described Russian liberals did, in order to get Slavic peoples, in the Balkans, to demand assistance, in order to justify Tsarist intervention against the Ottomans.
In this regard, Trotsky singled out the role of Pavel Miliukov. Trotsky writes,
“You are one of the initiators and inspirers of what is known as the 'Neo-Slavonic' movement, which comes forward not otherwise than in the name of the most respected general principles of civilisation, humanity and national freedom.
You have frequently, both in the columns of the press and at the tribune of the Duma, assured the Balkan allies – that is to say, the dynasties and dynastic cliques ruling in the Balkans – of the unaltered sympathies of so-called Russian society for their campaign of 'liberation'.”
(Writings On The Balkan Wars, p 285)
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