The petty-bourgeois socialists/nationalists and social-imperialists have based their subordination of the working-class to bourgeois-nationalist forces on false appeals to Lenin on The National Question. In fact, their argument has nothing to do with Lenin's position, but is, simply, a repetition of Stalin's distortion of it, as applied in the Chinese Revolution.
Trotsky sets out the crucial point.
“What tasks did Lenin set before the Comintern with regard to the backward countries?
“It is necessary to carry on a determined struggle against the attempt to surround the bourgeois democratic liberation movements in the backward countries with a Communist cloak.”
In carrying this out, the Guomindang, which had promised to establish in China “not a bourgeois régime”, was admitted into the Comintern.” (p 266-7)
In the whole post-war period, the “Left”, including those sections of it that proclaim themselves to be “Trotskyist”, followed the same course as Stalin, in China. Whilst paying lip-service to permanent revolution, they, in fact, threw their weight behind, not just bourgeois-nationalists that sought to cover themselves in socialist/communist camouflage, but also, outright reactionary, anti-working-class, nationalist forces, such as the Algerian NLF, Viet Cong, or the Khomeiniites in Iran, in 1979.
Their support for the corrupt, right-wing, anti-worker regimes in Ukraine and Russia, in which they have divided into two opposing reactionary imperialist camps, whilst continuing to use the same false appeals to Lenin for their subordination of the working-class, and international socialism, to the bourgeois-nationalists and imperialists, is the latest example, and, at the same time its culmination in a reductio ad absurdum – support for imperialism on the grounds of “anti-imperialism” - of that whole post-war development.
Lenin's position on The National Question was quite clear. We are in favour of the self-determination of the working-class, not of nations. Our goal is not, and as the theory of permanent revolution describes, cannot, now, be limited to the bourgeois-democratic, national revolution, but is the proletarian, international socialist revolution. But, in each case, since WWII, the petty-bourgeois “Left” has limited its goal to the former, and its politics, in relation to Ukraine, are simply a continuation of it.
It is the fact that our goal is international socialist revolution, as described in the theory of permanent revolution that determines the principle strategy and tactics, in our relations with other class forces in any such revolution. The reality of any such revolution is going to be that the revolutionary communist forces begin as a minority, and so must ally with other class forces, i.e. the poor peasants, and urban petty-bourgeoisie. Even large sections of the industrial workers may initially retain illusions in bourgeois-democracy. The point is that the materialist dialectic inevitably brings out the contradictions that expose those illusions, and split the workers from them, provided the communists respond accordingly. This is the point about the United Front, as a workers front, in action, as opposed to the Menshevist/Stalinist Popular Front, as an alliance of parties, usually on an electoral basis.
On every occasion, that strategy has been a disaster, not just in the 1920's and 30's, but, as seen with Popular Unity in Chile in 1973, as well as with the Lib-Lab Pact of the 1970's, and the French Popular Fronts of the 1970's and 80's, which first undermined the Stalinists, and then led to the inevitable disillusion and collapse of the "Socialists", who had initially benefited from it, opening the door to the rise of the petty-bourgeois Right of Le Pen. The latest, cobbled together, unprincipled Popular Front, in France, will fair no better. As with Macron, who symbolised the Popular Front in one man, as the basis of a purely electoral opposition to Le Pen, or as with Biden, it may win an ephemeral electoral victory against the Far Right, but only to dash illusions in it, as it fails and breaks apart on the rocks of its own contradictions, and unprincipled unity, and so, creates the conditions for an even greater surge of the Right.
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