Of course, as Marx sets out, here, this is not a moral question, as Sismondi had treated it, or as later the Narodniks treated it, and as today's petty-bourgeois, moral socialists treat it. As Marx says, here, and restates in Theories of Surplus Value, and in Capital, Value, Price and Profit, and elsewhere, the price of human progress is class society, and the price of the massive social process that capital and capitalism brings, which creates the potential for Socialism, is all of these huge variations of wealth, and the iniquities that go with it.
Similarly, as capitalism creates national markets, it also creates the nation state, by subordinating weaker regions, principalities and nationalities, and as the minimum scales of production and size of market grows beyond that of the nation state, as industrial capitalism exerts its dominance, in the era of imperialism, so the weaker and smaller nation states must be subordinated, in a progressive formation of much larger economic empires. As Trotsky put it in The Program Of Peace,
“Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in “regulating” the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers. The more developed the technique of capitalism, the greater the role played by finance capital and the higher the demands of militarism, all the more grows the dependency of the small states on the great powers. This process, forming as it does an integral element of imperialist mechanics, flourishes undisturbed also in times of peace by means of state loans, railway and other concessions, military-diplomatic agreements, etc. The war uncovered and accelerated this process by introducing the factor of open violence. The war destroys the last shreds of the “independence” of small states, quite apart from the military outcome, of the conflict between the two basic enemy camps.”
In other words, the bourgeois liberals, petty bourgeois, moral socialists, and social pacifists, who wish to deny the inevitability of this process, in the name of an abstract right of nations to self-determination, are simply utopians and reactionaries, not only because they deny the inevitable, but also because that inevitable outcome is, itself, historically progressive, even if brought about by brutal and objectionable means.
“The right of national self-determination cannot he excluded from the proletarian peace programme; but it cannot claim absolute importance. On the contrary, it is delimited for us by the converging, profoundly progressive tendencies of historical development. If this “right” must be – through revolutionary force – counter-posed to the imperialist methods of centralization which enslave weak and backward peoples and mush the hearths of national culture, then on the other hand the proletariat cannot allow the “national principle” to get in the way of the irresistible and deeply progressive tendency of modern economic life towards a planned organization throughout our continent, and further, all over the globe. Imperialism is the capitalist-thievish expression of this tendency of modern economy to tear itself completely away from the idiocy of national narrowness, as it did previously with regard to local and provincial confinement. While fighting against the imperialist form of economic centralization, socialism does not at all take a stand against the particular tendency as such but, on the contrary, makes the tendency its own guiding principle.”
(ibid)
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