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In his book Troubled Times, Peter Hadden, one of the founders of our political tradition in Ireland, begins with a statement that “Irish history, especially recent history, is littered with the debris of organizations which have failed to comprehend or come to terms with” the national question in Ireland. And it’s not just in Ireland. The history of the left around the globe is strewn with the wreckage of groups and organizations that failed in their revolutionary tasks specifically because they were confronted by the national question in some case or other and they stumbled on it.
So what do we mean when we say “national question”? We do not mean what passport one holds. A nation is based broadly upon common language, common culture, and a shared history in a geographical place. The question, and how we come to a principled solution as Marxists, arises when a national minority is oppressed within a nation-state, or when a national minority seeks national self-determination and sovereignty from a nation-state. Another scenario in which we deal with this question is when a sovereign nation is invaded by another in the context of inter-imperialist conflict–wherein principled Marxists cannot just pick an imperialist side, but rather must point toward the political independence and organization of the international working class, and class appeals for solidarity across national lines, as a starting point.
Just over the last decade, we’ve seen the national question come up, time and time again, in Scotland, in Catalonia, in Ukraine, Taiwan, and Rojava. And now, with the end of the era of neoliberal globalization, the ruling class’s ability to maintain any kind of stable equilibrium among the capitalists of different nations is weaker than it’s been for many years. The central global conflict between U.S. Imperialism and Chinese Imperialism, means that both sides seek to exploit national tensions for their own ends, carving up the world, and attempting to divide the working class.
In conditions where organized working-class politics remain relatively weak and disorganized, layers of workers are more prone to turn to nationalism in an effort to understand the chaos of the world around them.
The most pressing and urgent manifestation of the national question right now is in Israel/Palestine. The Israeli state’s genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza, carried out through brutal massacre, bombardment, siege, and displacement, is one of the clearest instances yet in this new era of intensified national oppression. U.S. imperialism’s dogged support for Israel’s actions, which reached a particularly extreme point under Joe Biden’s presidency, and continues under Trump, makes a clear understanding of nationalism and self-determination all the more important for us right now.
The Gaza situation is posing the national question for the U.S. left with a greater urgency and more immediate consequences than we have seen in a long time. In line with what Hadden said about Ireland, many in the activist layer on the U.S. left are showing themselves not to be up to the task in confronting this question. From a lot of groups right now we see totally mistaken calls for uncritical support for reactionary leaders within oppressed national groups, for example Hamas in Gaza or the Houthis in Yemen. This short-sighted approach is a consequence of rigidly applying so-called “anti-imperialist” formulas in a way that actually fatally sabotages the task of building a genuinely international working-class movement against imperialism.
A Dialectical Approach
As Marxists, it’s always our duty to fight against oppressors, and to stand with the victims of oppression. There’s certainly no doubt that the Palestinians are subject to national oppression and that they have been for decades. At the end of 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu admitted openly that he never intended to pursue a two-state solution of any kind, and that he is “proud” to have prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza.
At the same time, though, our support for national self-determination does not come from any kind of romantic attachment to the foundation of new nation states. There’s a point in Troubled Times where Hadden states: “It is not for sentimental, but for entirely practical reasons that we are for a world plan of production to replace the anarchy of capitalism.” Similarly, it’s not for sentimental, but practical, reasons that we advocate for the right of national self-determination. In fact, our position on the national question comes from the fact that, first and foremost, we’re internationalists.
So, when national struggles have some progressive elements, we approach them dialectically. We distinguish between the nationalism of the oppressed and the nationalism of the oppressor, but at the same time recognizing that nationalism is an inherently bourgeois or petty bourgeois ideology. Left nationalism, historically, could be a step towards revolutionary Marxism, but it can also point back towards the dead end of capitalism.
It’s crucial that we don’t understand nationalism or each national struggle as if they all followed the same abstract model, because there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for every case. We shouldn’t think that our job is to come up with a single program that lays out a categorical approach to the national question. That’s not possible. Instead we have to address each situation carefully according to its specific political and historical dynamics, its balance of class forces, the shape of consciousness, and turns of events.
We all know that stirring up nationalism can be one of the ruling class’s most reliable tools for cooling down working-class anger by encouraging a false sense that everyone who’s part of the same country has the same interests. Sometimes this takes the form of xenophobia, scapegoating, and anti-immigrant prejudice. We’re all familiar with this in the U.S. as it’s been steadily on the rise under both Biden and Trump. Similar strategies are used by the ruling class and reactionary regimes in many countries from Turkey to South Africa where there have been vicious attacks on migrant workers.
In other circumstances, bourgeois nationalism serves to explicitly undermine the working class’ best tools for fighting back against capitalist exploitation. A good recent example of this is Ukraine in 2022, where the Zelensky government took advantage of the Ukrainian masses’ entirely justifiable anger about the Russian invasion, used it as an excuse to subordinate themselves to Western imperialism, and attack the language rights of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine and destroy the right of unions to collectively bargain. This was on the basis that labor rights supposedly undermined the unity of the Ukrainian nation in its struggle against Russia. This is a very clear-cut example of reactionary bourgeois nationalism.
We always stand for the right of nations to self determination. But we do not always advocate exercising that right. Because sometimes national struggles are the best and the most concrete way to sharpen and expand working-class militancy and build towards a revolutionary situation and sometimes they point in the opposite direction.
As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky articulated in his theory of Permanent Revolution, it is only the working class that can make good on the broken promises of the bourgeois revolution. This includes the freedom from national oppression. The way to actually win this national freedom is through the fight for socialism and, crucially, the extension of that struggle internationally.
Capitalism & The Nation State
As a starting premise, we have to be very clear that the nation state is a historical and political category, not a natural one. As Marx, Engels, and Lenin pointed out, the state in general emerged alongside the early rise of private property and the division of society into social classes. This is because the function of the state is to maintain class rule. However, it’s not the state in general, but the nation as a way of understanding and communicating common identity that is an entirely modern phenomenon that came into being along with the capitalist age.
Once again, a nation can be defined as an entity that shares a common geography, a common language and a common culture. Many ideologues of bourgeois nationalism in specific nations insist that their nation, their country, their nationality stretches all the way back into ancient times. For example, sometimes you’ll hear that modern Britain descends from the days of King Arthur or that the current state of Israel is just the continuation of the biblical Israelite kingdoms found in the Old Testament. No matter what country it’s coming from, this is false. It’s a propaganda move designed to make the injustices of the present seem unchangeable and set in stone. It’s similar to when bourgeois economists say that capitalism is just self-interested human nature and so any deviation from capitalism is unnatural. It’s a way of ideologically trying to protect the present and make it seem that it can’t be changed, or that it shouldn’t be.
The nation state emerged as part of the bourgeoisie’s revolt against the feudal domination of kings and aristocrats, mostly during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. This process was concentrated in major and more memorable events like the French Revolution. During this period, nationalism was a progressive force. The rising bourgeoisie could claim nationality instead of aristocratic title as a basis for political power, and they could use that as a basis to attack the privileges of the old nobility and the feudal ruling class.
On an economic level, the nation state played a hugely important role in developing the productive forces of society to the extent that we will ultimately require for socialism. Nations created unified larger national markets. Under feudalism, there were all kinds of cumbersome and labyrinthine internal customs barriers which served to enrich whatever particular localized aristocrats happened to benefit from them. These barriers were immense fetters on social productivity as a whole.
The new national framework was much more efficient for producing, consuming, and exporting goods. This was especially the case with the benefit of common and rationalized national legal systems that could regulate production and trade. Moreover, the adoption of shared languages increased the cohesiveness and the integration of national markets.
The nation played an extremely important role for the rise of capitalism. But capitalism has long since left its progressive phase behind and become a barrier to human development. As it did this, the reactionary elements of nationalism became clearer and clearer. Calls by the capitalist ruling class for patriotic unity and sacrifice served to obscure the class antagonisms lying at the heart of the system.
As the 19th century continued, and capitalism entered its monopoly phase, the stronger bourgeois nation states of western Europe sought to conquer and subjugate more and more of the globe in order to find new markets and raw materials to feed capitalism’s constant need for growth and expansion. As a result, the exact same bourgeois classes that had acquired their dominant positions through successful national struggles in Europe and America, now were carrying out the violent exploitation and oppression of other peoples all around the world. As the major states of Europe raced to establish as many colonies as they possibly could, their competition with one another over a shrinking world led to increasing inter-imperialist hostility between the different great powers. This hostility would explode into mass slaughter with the outbreak of the First World War. These are the dynamics of what Lenin identified as “the age of imperialism.”
In the centuries preceding this imperialist age, national struggles typically were struggles that aligned the rising bourgeoisie and the working classes temporarily in a fight against a decaying feudal system. These were examples of what Marxists call the “bourgeois revolutions.” Their progressive result was to establish the capitalist mode of production and a bourgeois democracy within which the modern working class developed. During the imperialist age, things shifted, so that nations, many newly formed, which had not yet established bourgeois democratic states of their own, were now facing subjugation by the established capitalist powers. These colonial relationships of imperialism left the smaller nations, underdeveloped, by stripping them of raw materials and resources to be turned into finished goods that were largely sent back to the imperial centers.
This created weak national capitalist classes in these oppressed countries: classes that were incapable of carrying out even a bourgeois struggle for national independence. Under these conditions, the international working class is the only force that’s capable of breaking the chains of national oppression.
The Transitional Program
One of the most important points regarding the national question is the need to approach it as an aspect of the transitional method. We need to understand the national question transitionally. We’re ultimately trying to create a world where national differences lose their importance altogether. Our goal is to fight against divisions separating the working class. We are working for international socialism but to get there we need the international working class to take power. To do that, we absolutely must support the national struggles of workers in places where national feeling runs deep but national self-determination has been consistently denied by capitalist and imperialist oppression.
Again, we must approach this as a practical issue. The key question is, as always: What position on the national question is it that’s going to bring us closest to greater class consciousness and greater class solidarity internationally, across national lines? This means that, at each moment, we have to engage in a careful and painstaking look at both the objective situation and the mood of society to figure out what formulations are going to work at each point.
One of the most enlightening parts of Troubled Times is the very nuanced, moment-to-moment, granular account of how our predecessors in our organization in Ireland dealt with the national question. Hadden details the comrades revising their slogans based on each new twist and turn in the situation, changing even single words to be more effective based on the reception they got among different layers of the working class in both Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. That is the kind of rigor we need to employ today.
We have a real responsibility to be precise in our formulations and our demands, and to do it every single time we’re confronted with the national question. Most urgently, right now, we need to adopt this approach towards Israel/Palestine. Truly, what our demands are, and the way that we present them, is of the utmost importance here.
A useful analogy, when it comes to thinking about the national question transitionally, is that it’s similar to how we engage with electoral politics. In both cases, we face both ultra-leftist and opportunist pressures. Just like bourgeois elections, nationalism and the nation state are bourgeois constructs. As a result, among certain elements on the left, some of whom see themselves as Marxist, there are quite strong ultra-leftist pressures to simply refuse to engage with the nation state or with elections, to grant no concessions to the very idea of national self-determination because it’s tainted by its capitalist nature. And this is wrong. But also wrong is the opportunist pressure to fall in line, to bend to nationalism or electoralism simply because it’s the dominant element in mass consciousness among the oppressed or left leaning people at that given moment.
According to this way of mapping it out, the pro-Hamas positions that we hear from elements on the US left, although they often come from groups that we typically think of as ultraleft, are actually opportunist positions. This is because they are concessions to the kind of narrow and exclusionary forces of particular nationalisms. Similar to the idea that we should concede a real socialist program for the sake of performing better in an election, it’s opportunist to concede international working-class unity in order to advance the interests of a specific national struggle. However, the bigger problem in this case is that the nationalism of Hamas or Fatah have been a complete dead end for the Palestinian masses themselves.
Lenin, Luxemburg & Stalin
We can see these pressures at work in the early 20th-century debates over how Marxists should navigate the increasing complexity of the national question while engaging in class struggle. During the period between the first, failed revolution of 1905 in Russia and the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin argued over whether socialists should support the struggles of oppressed nations.
Luxemburg’s position was that, in the age of mature capitalism, advocating the principle of national self-determination would always, in practice, mean fighting for the narrow interests of a specific native bourgeoisie belonging to the oppressed national group. Luxemburg’s ultimate conclusion was that it was always a mistake for Marxists to support any specifically national struggles, and these struggles could never truly coincide with the actual class interests of the workers.
Luxemburg was a brilliant thinker and a brilliant revolutionary and it’s understandable why she thought this. She was facing objective pressures of her own. She was strongly influenced by her experiences in the Polish Social Democratic movements. Poland, at the time, was still under the domination of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires. The loudest Polish supporters of a specifically nationalist program were the conservative petty bourgeoisie, so that’s who Rosa Luxemburg associated with any call for national self-determination.
But Luxemburg was wrong about the national question. She wasn’t approaching it in a dialectical way. Lenin, on the other hand, understood that opposing national discrimination was a necessary stage in cutting across divisions among the working class and building the cross-national solidarity of the workers’ movement.
There’s a particularly useful example that Lenin referenced in his arguments with Luxemburg: Norway’s secession from Sweden in 1905. Lenin’s discussion of this episode is as follows:
“The close alliance between the Norwegian and Swedish workers, their complete fraternal class solidarity, gained from the Swedish workers’ recognition of the right of the Norwegians to secede. This convinced the Norwegian workers that the Swedish workers were not infected with Swedish nationalism, and that they placed fraternity with the Norwegian proletarians above the privileges of the Swedish bourgeoisie and aristocracy.”
Similarly, it’s easy to see why Lenin drew so much from this example. The Russian working class at this time very much needed to recognize the right of other nations imprisoned within the Tsarist empire to secede, if they so chose. This was the only way to push back against Russian nationalism and to forge meaningful ties between Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Jewish, and all other nationalities of workers within the Tsarist empire.
That said, even though Luxemburg was mistaken in her position on the national question, she had one thing really right: she shared with Lenin a recognition that the fundamental goals of Marxism are internationalist. She was mistaken about how that should relate to specific struggles for national independence but, nonetheless, the principle of internationalism was something that she certainly saw and adhered to.
By contrast, Stalin’s position on the rights of nationalities in Russia’s orbit was fundamentally distorted and slanted by Russian chauvinism, even though Stalin himself was not Russian, but Georgian. This apparently strange and contradictory fact points to how positions on the national question emerge based on a broader political program, not as an inevitable consequence of individuals’ national background.
After the 1917 Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky argued with Stalin over whether the newly formed workers’ republics in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and elsewhere in the former Russian Empire should have the right to choose whether to join the new Soviet Russian state or whether to leave it. Stalin proposed that all these non-Russian republics should be granted only a formal autonomy but that, politically, they should be incorporated into Russia.
Lenin, on the other hand, argued for a genuinely voluntary, and a genuinely multi-national, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that would not just be the Russian Empire under another name. Lenin continued to uphold the right of the smaller nations to rule themselves independently of Russia as multiple socialist republics.
Unfortunately, with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution by the mid 1920s and the victory of the bureaucracy, Stalinism won, and the Stalinist line on the national question ultimately won out as well. In the Stalinist USSR, on paper, the non-Russian Soviet Republics were called part of an equal federation. But, in practice, all of them had to answer to Moscow. The Communist Parties themselves, regardless of whether it was in Ukraine or Kazakhstan or Georgia, traced back to Moscow in terms of final authority.
This non-internationalist, Stalinist model was a distortion of the Bolsheviks’ original positions. It laid the basis for the national resentment and tensions throughout the Soviet border republics that would turn into the bloodshed that we now see in Ukraine, in the Caucasus, and in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Self-Determination & Secession
There’s something important programmatically to take from all of this. In specific terms, the national question is frequently, even usually, a question about secession. This is not the only form it can take but, by far, it’s the most common. Our position when it comes to secession is that we unconditionally support the right of national minorities to secede. The only alternative would be for the nation that they are seceding from to crush them by force and that is incompatible with a Marxist position.
However, it’s crucial to see the difference between supporting the right to secession (right to self- determination) and putting forward or supporting the demand for secession in any concrete case. To take an analogy from Lenin, it’s similar to believing that, unconditionally, everyone should have access to divorce as a right, as opposed to saying that any specific divorce should or shouldn’t happen.
This distinction plays itself out in very concrete decisions about tactics and program. One of these decisions that Peter Hadden talks about in the book is about flying the tricolor flag of Irish republicanism. As Hadden discusses, our organization opposed the bans on the tricolor flag in Northern Ireland, which were oppressive towards the Catholic population there. However, we did not fly the flag ourselves, nor did we advocate for it to be carried.
There’s an analogy to be drawn with Palestinian national symbols and flags now. When we hear, as we sometimes do, that any flying of the Palestinian flag should be outlawed because it’s some kind of hate symbol, this is obviously reactionary and we should oppose such a ban. However, we would not fly these flags ourselves when we intervene in the movement against the Israeli occupation. This is primarily because we support the red flag of working class internationalism and do not support any national flag. While supporting Palestinian self-determination, carrying a Palestinian flag would specifically put us in an oversimplified national camp that would signal that we do not see a road to unity with the Israeli working class.
Applications Today
To understand the concrete applications of a Marxist approach to the national question today, it’s useful to draw a contrast between our position regarding Israel-Palestine and our position when it comes to Northern Ireland.
There’s a quote from Troubled Times where Hadden talks about the question of whether there were two nations in Ireland, Catholic and Protestant, or just one. Hadden says this:
“In this situation, to have pronounced that there were two nations and to have drawn the programmatic conclusions which follow from this would have been the height of folly. Militant (our organization at that time – Editor) would have ended up defending the fact of two states, arguing for socialism within the confines of each and only then putting forward the idea of a socialist federation to link the two.
“This position would have cut us off from the most revolutionary section of society – the Catholic youth. We would have found ourselves arguing against their best instincts in having to defend the fact of partition [the division of the whole island at the behest of British imperialism]. It would have left us lagging behind the most advanced of the Protestant working class, reinforcing sectarian prejudices rather than opening up class divisions.”
What’s noteworthy about this is that the position that Hadden very clearly and convincingly says was wrong in Ireland bears some resemblance to the position that we are now saying is right when it comes to Israel-Palestine. In that context we are arguing for the right of self-determination of both communities of the national divide, and we are arguing for workers states in the confines of each, by saying we want a socialist Palestine and a socialist transformation in Israel with an equal status for two national capitals in Jerusalem, linked with a socialist federation in the entire Middle East. We also call for the right of all Palestinians who were expelled from their lands since 1947 to return.
So what is it that makes that the correct line in this case when it was the wrong line when it comes to Ireland? This is precisely why it’s so important not to approach the national question in a mechanical way or to simply project the features of one situation onto another. Because, unlike in Ireland, Israel-Palestine is a situation where, indisputably, today we do have two separate nations.
There was not an established Israeli nation or Jewish nation leading up to 1948, which is why Trotskyists did not support the establishment of a state of Israel at the time. But through the creation of the Israeli state and massive waves of migration, an Israeli national consciousness developed. There is an Israeli nation now, just as there is a Palestinian nation now. It’s the Palestinian people who do not have an independent state . A one-state solution does not seem to be viable given the existing fears and tensions that have been stoked under capitalism between the two national communities.
That said, by no means do we stand in principle for a division of the land. If mass consciousness develops in a direction of common struggle against the ruling Israeli elite, the corrupt regional Arab regimes, and capitalism itself, it’s entirely possible that Jewish and Palestinian workers will see the commonality of their struggle and agree to form a bi-national socialist state. Such a massive change would require us to update our program for the region as well.
In Ireland there already were two sectarian states since 1922. So to accept the “two nations” position really meant accepting the Protestants were a separate nation and that Northern Ireland should be their state (ie accepting partition) or being for some form of repartition of Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, both historically terrible positions. This would have been kind of doing the bourgeoisie’s job for it.
With Israel-Palestine, on the other hand, it is the correct position to call for a socialist Palestine and a socialist transformation in Israel as part of a federation at this time. This is the position that would lead to genuine democracy and self-determination. This is the position that could lead to the national question ultimately losing its sharpness and losing its ability to divide workers in the region, and that’s our ultimate goal.
When it comes to exactly how we articulate this demand, something that we can take from the Irish situation is that we never want to force specific national demands that workers themselves are not bringing up. The working class of Palestine, facing extremely difficult conditions, has not yet put forward a fully cohered program in its own right. With a rapidly developing situation, the demands of Palestinian workers are in a state of flux. As such, it would be premature for us to come up with a highly specific set of demands as to how a Palestinian state should be implemented. However, it is clear that the most promising program that we can call for is a socialist Palestine and a socialist Israel.
We now live in an era of rising nationalism and conflict around the world, centered on the tensions between Chinese and US Imperialism. Trump’s imperialist vision includes the possibility of a trajectory towards possible US troops in Panama, Greenland and Taiwan. Chinese imperialism’s national crimes are centered around the Han domination of Tibet and Xinjiang. Both want overall hegemonic global power. The national desires and aspirations of people across the world are trampled underfoot by both regimes, as well as by myriad regional imperialist powers.
Ultimately our approach to the national question stems from the fact that we are an internationalist revolutionary organization, and that the working class is an international class. Our perspectives on any given national situation have to flow from our international perspectives, and we make no concessions to the narrow interests of bourgeois or petty bourgeois nationalism. But we must also recognize and take into account genuine working-class resistance to national oppression, and we have to craft our demands carefully but boldly to attract the most combative layers of the working class. This is necessary to assure that these workers are not left in a vacuum that results in their drifting towards the dead end of radical bourgeois nationalism. Only on this basis can we build the genuinely unified international working-class forces that can successfully confront and dismantle capitalism and national oppression.
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