1. What Is Meant by the Self-Determination of Nations?

Naturally, this question comes first when attempts are made to examine so-called self-determination in a Marxist way. What should be understood by it? Should the answer be sought in legal definitions deduced from all sorts of “general concepts” of law? Or should the answer be sought in a historical and economic study of national movements?

It is not surprising that the Semkovskys, Liebmans and Yurkeviches did not even think of raising this question, but shrugged it off with simple sniggering about the “obscurity” of the Marxist programme, apparently not even knowing, in their simplicity, that the self-determination of nations is dealt with not only in the Russian programme of 1903 but also in the resolution of the London International Congress of 1896 (of which in detail in its proper place). Far more surprising is the fact that Rosa Luxemburg, who declaims a great deal about the supposedly abstract and metaphysical nature of the clause in question, has herself fallen into precisely this sin of abstraction and metaphysics. It is Rosa Luxemburg herself who continually lapses into general reasoning about self-determination (even to the point of quite amusing speculation about how the will of a nation is to be ascertained), without anywhere putting the question clearly and precisely: does the essence of the matter lie in legal definitions or in the experience of the national movements of the whole world?

A precise formulation of this question, which a Marxist cannot avoid, would at once have destroyed nine-tenths of Rosa Luxemburg’s arguments. This is not the first time that national movements have arisen in Russia, nor are they peculiar to her alone. Throughout the world the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been bound up with national movements. The economic basis of these movements is that, for the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must conquer the home market; there must be political unification of territories whose population speaks a single language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in literature removed. Language is the most important means of human intercourse; unity of language and its unimpeded development are among the most important conditions for genuinely free and broad commercial exchange on the scale of modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its separate classes, and lastly for a close connection between the market and each and every owner, big or little, seller and buyer.

The formation of national states, which best meet these requirements of modern capitalism, is therefore the tendency (aspiration) of every national movement. The profoundest economic factors drive towards it, and for the whole of Western Europe, more than that, for the whole civilised world, the national state is therefore what is typical and normal for the capitalist period.

Consequently, if we want to grasp the meaning of the self-determination of nations, not by juggling with legal definitions or “inventing” abstract definitions, but by examining the historical and economic conditions of the national movements, we shall inevitably reach the conclusion that the self-determination of nations means their political separation from alien national bodies, the formation of an independent national state.

Later on we shall see still other reasons why it would be wrong to understand the right to self-determination as meaning anything but the right to a separate state existence. For the present we must deal with Rosa Luxemburg’s attempt to “dismiss” the inescapable conclusion that there are profound economic grounds for the striving towards a national state.

Rosa Luxemburg is perfectly familiar with Kautsky’s pamphlet Nationality and Internationality (supplement to Die Neue Zeit, No. 1, 1907–08; Russian translation in the journal Nauchnaya Mysl, Riga, 1908). She knows that Kautsky, after a detailed examination of the question of the national state in § 4 of that pamphlet, came to the conclusion that Otto Bauer “underestimates the strength of the urge to create a national state” (p. 23 of the pamphlet cited). Rosa Luxemburg herself quotes Kautsky’s words: “The national state is the form of state most suited to present-day conditions” (that is, to capitalist, civilised, economically progressive conditions, as distinguished from medieval, pre-capitalist and so on), “it is the form in which the state can best fulfil its tasks” (that is, the tasks of securing the freest, widest and speediest development of capitalism). To this must be added Kautsky’s still more precise concluding remark that states of mixed national composition (known as multinational states, as distinguished from national states) are “always states whose internal constitution has for one reason or another remained abnormal or underdeveloped” (backward). It goes without saying that Kautsky speaks of abnormality exclusively in the sense of failure to correspond to what is best adapted to the requirements of a developing capitalism.

The question now is: how did Rosa Luxemburg treat these historical and economic conclusions of Kautsky’s? Are they right or wrong? Is Kautsky right in his historical-economic theory, or is Bauer, whose theory is at bottom a psychological one? What is the connection between Bauer’s undoubted “national opportunism”, his defence of cultural-national autonomy, his nationalistic infatuations (“an occasional strengthening of the national element”, as Kautsky put it), his “enormous exaggeration of the national element and complete neglect of the international element” (Kautsky), and his underestimation of the strength of the urge to create a national state?

Rosa Luxemburg has not even raised this question. She has not noticed the connection. She has not thought over Bauer’s theoretical views as a whole. She has not even contrasted the historical-economic and the psychological theories of the national question. She confines herself to the following remarks against Kautsky.

And in corroboration of this emphatic statement there follow arguments to the effect that the development of the great capitalist powers and imperialism make the “right to self-determination” of small peoples illusory. “Can one seriously speak,” exclaims Rosa Luxemburg, “of the ‘self-determination’ of the formally independent Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Rumanians, Serbs, Greeks, partly even the Swiss, whose independence is itself a product of the political struggle and the diplomatic game of the ‘European concert’?”! (p. 500). What best corresponds to conditions is “not the national state, as Kautsky believes, but the predatory state”. Some dozens of figures follow on the size of the colonies belonging to Britain, France and so on.

Reading such arguments, one cannot help marvelling at the author’s ability to miss the point! To teach Kautsky, with a grave air, that small states are economically dependent on big ones; that a struggle is going on among the bourgeois states for the predatory suppression of other nations; that imperialism and colonies exist, all this is a ridiculous, childish attempt at cleverness, for none of it has the slightest bearing on the subject. Not only small states but even Russia, for example, is entirely dependent economically on the power of the imperialist finance capital of the “rich” bourgeois countries. Not only the miniature Balkan states but even nineteenth-century America was, economically, a colony of Europe, as Marx pointed out in Capital. Kautsky, like every Marxist, is of course perfectly well aware of all this, but it has nothing whatever to do with the question of national movements and the national state.

Rosa Luxemburg has substituted for the question of the political self-determination of nations in bourgeois society, of their independence as states, the question of their economic independence and autonomy. This is as intelligent as if someone, discussing the programme demand for the supremacy of parliament, that is, of the assembly of people’s representatives, in a bourgeois state, were to expound his perfectly correct conviction that big capital is supreme under every regime in a bourgeois country.

There is no doubt that most of Asia, the most densely populated part of the world, consists either of colonies of the “great powers” or of states that are extremely dependent and nationally oppressed. But does this commonly known circumstance in any way shake the undoubted fact that in Asia itself the conditions for the most complete development of commodity production, for the freest, widest and speediest growth of capitalism, have been created only in Japan, that is, only in an independent national state? That state is a bourgeois state, and for that reason has itself begun to oppress other nations and to enslave colonies; we cannot say whether Asia will have time, before the downfall of capitalism, to become crystallised into a system of independent national states, as Europe did. But it remains an undisputed fact that capitalism, having awakened Asia, has called forth national movements everywhere in that continent too; that the tendency of these movements is towards the creation of national states in Asia; and that it is such states that ensure the best conditions for the development of capitalism. The example of Asia speaks in favour of Kautsky and against Rosa Luxemburg.

The example of the Balkan states likewise speaks against her, for anyone can now see that the best conditions for the development of capitalism in the Balkans are being created precisely in proportion to the creation of independent national states in that peninsula.

Consequently, the example of the whole of progressive civilised mankind, the example of the Balkans and the example of Asia all prove, in spite of Rosa Luxemburg, that Kautsky’s proposition is absolutely correct: the national state is the rule and the “norm” of capitalism; the state of mixed national composition is backwardness, or an exception. From the standpoint of national relations, the best conditions for the development of capitalism are undoubtedly provided by the national state. This does not mean, of course, that such a state, on the basis of bourgeois relations, could exclude the exploitation and oppression of nations. It only means that Marxists cannot lose sight of the powerful economic factors that give rise to the urge to create national states. It means that “self-determination of nations” in the Marxists’ programme cannot, from a historical-economic point of view, have any other meaning than political self-determination, independence as a state, the formation of a national state.

On what conditions the bourgeois-democratic demand for a “national state” is to be supported from the Marxist, that is, the class-proletarian, point of view will be dealt with in detail below. For the present we confine ourselves to the definition of the concept of “self-determination”, and need only note further that Rosa Luxemburg knows what this concept means (“national state”), whereas her opportunist supporters, the Liebmans, Semkovskys and Yurkeviches, do not even know that!