Marxism, Zionism and the National Question - The Struggle For Political Rights As Integral To The Class Struggle (2/2)

Marxism, Zionism and the National Question

The Struggle For Political Rights As Integral To The Class Struggle (2/2)

This was a problem that existed, in general, with the Second International, which rather than being a unified, internationalist organisation of the global working-class, was instead merely a federation of national parties that had diplomatic relations, via the International. The problem with that was most clearly manifest as those national parties lined up behind their own bourgeoisie in WWI. It can be seen, today, in demands for an independent Scottish Labour Party. Similarly, it shows the need to build a single, EU-wide, labour movement and Workers Party.

The manifestation of this approach was epitomised by the demand for cultural national autonomy that was promoted by the Bund, as well as by the Austro-Marxists.

“This slogan (defended in Russia by all the bourgeois Jewish nationalist parties) contradicts the internationalism of Social-Democracy. As democrats, we are irreconcilably hostile to any, however slight, oppression of any nationality and to any privileges for any nationality. As democrats, we demand the right of nations to self-determination in the political sense of that term (see the Programme of the R.S.D.L.P.), i.e., the right to secede. We demand unconditional equality for all nations in the state and the unconditional protection of the rights of every national minority. We demand broad self-government and autonomy for regions, which must be demarcated, among other terms of reference, in respect of nationality too.

All these demands are obligatory for every consistent democrat, to say nothing of a socialist.”

“Social-Democrats have always stood and still stand for the internationalist point of view. While protecting the equality of all nationalities against the serf-owners and the police state we do not support “national culture” but international culture, which includes only part of each national culture—only the consistently democratic and socialist content of each national culture.

The slogan of “national-cultural autonomy” deceives the workers with the phantom of a cultural unity of nations, whereas in every nation today a landowners’, bourgeois or petty-bourgeois “culture” predominates.

We are against national culture as one of the slogans of bourgeois nationalism. We are in favour of the international culture of a fully democratic and socialist proletariat.”

“We, Latvian Social-Democrats, living in an area with a population that is very mixed nationally, we, who are in an environment consisting of representatives of the bourgeois nationalism of the Letts, Russians, Estonians, Germans, etc., see with particular clarity the bourgeois falsity of the slogan of “cultural-national autonomy”. The slogan of the unity of all and every organisation of workers of all nationalities, tested in practice in our own Social-Democratic organisation, is particularly dear to us.”

(Draft Platform for the Fourth Congress of Social-Democrats of the Latvian Area)

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