2. The Historically Concrete Presentation of the Question

The categorical requirement of Marxist theory in investigating any social question is that it be placed within definite historical limits, and then, if it refers to a particular country (for example, the national programme for a given country), that account be taken of the concrete features that distinguish that country from others within the same historical epoch.

What does this categorical requirement of Marxism mean when applied to our question?

First of all it means that two periods of capitalism, radically different from the standpoint of the national movements, must be strictly distinguished. On the one hand, there is the period of the collapse of feudalism and absolutism, the period of the formation of bourgeois-democratic society and the bourgeois-democratic state, when the national movements for the first time become mass movements and in one way or another draw all classes of the population into politics through the press, participation in representative institutions and so on. On the other hand, there is the period of fully formed capitalist states with a long-established constitutional regime and a highly developed antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie, a period that may be called the eve of capitalism’s downfall.

Typical of the first period is the awakening of national movements and the drawing into them of the peasants, the most numerous and the most sluggish section of the population, in connection with the struggle for political liberty in general and for national rights in particular. Typical of the second period is the absence of mass bourgeois-democratic movements, when developed capitalism, bringing ever closer together and intermingling nations already fully drawn into commercial intercourse, brings to the fore the antagonism between internationally united capital and the international working-class movement.

Of course, the two periods are not walled off from each other; they are connected by numerous transitional links, and the various countries also differ in the rapidity of their national development, in the national composition and distribution of their population, and so on and so forth. There can be no question of beginning to draw up the national programme of the Marxists of a given country without taking account of all these general historical and concrete state conditions.

And it is here that we come up against the weakest point in Rosa Luxemburg’s arguments. With extraordinary zeal she embellishes her article with a collection of “strong” words against Clause 9 of our programme, declaring it to be “sweeping”, “a platitude”, “a metaphysical phrase”, and so on without end. It would be natural to expect an author who so admirably condemns metaphysics (in the Marxist sense, that is, anti-dialectics) and empty abstractions to set us an example of a concrete historical examination of the question. The question is one of the national programme of the Marxists of a definite country, Russia, in a definite period, the beginning of the twentieth century. No doubt Rosa Luxemburg raises the question of what historical period Russia is passing through, and of what are the concrete features of the national question and the national movements of that particular country in that particular period?

Rosa Luxemburg says absolutely nothing about it! You will not find in her work even a shadow of an analysis of how the national question stands in Russia in the present historical period, or of what the special features of Russia are in this respect!

We are told that the national question in the Balkans is presented differently from that in Ireland; that Marx appraised the Polish and Czech national movements in such and such a way in the concrete conditions of 1848 (a page of extracts from Marx); that Engels appraised in such and such a way the struggle of the forest cantons of Switzerland against Austria and the battle of Morgarten, which took place in 1315 (a page of quotations from Engels with the appropriate comments from Kautsky); that Lassalle regarded the peasant war in Germany in the sixteenth century as reactionary, and so on.

It cannot be said that these remarks and quotations are distinguished by novelty, but at all events it is interesting for the reader to be reminded again and again of exactly how Marx, Engels and Lassalle approached the analysis of concrete historical questions in individual countries. And on rereading these instructive quotations from Marx and Engels one sees with particular clarity what a ridiculous position Rosa Luxemburg has placed herself in. She preaches eloquently and angrily the need for a concrete historical analysis of the national question in different countries at different times, but she makes not the slightest attempt to determine what historical stage in the development of capitalism Russia is passing through at the beginning of the twentieth century, or what the special features of the national question in this country are. Rosa Luxemburg gives examples of how others have treated the question in a Marxist fashion, as if deliberately stressing how often the road to hell is paved with good intentions and how often good advice covers up an unwillingness or inability to follow it in practice.

Here is one instructive comparison. In her argument against the slogan of Polish independence, Rosa Luxemburg refers to her work of 1898, which proved the rapid “industrial development of Poland”, with its manufactured goods marketed in Russia. Needless to say, absolutely nothing follows from this on the question of the right to self-determination; it only proves the disappearance of the old Poland of the gentry, and so on. But Rosa Luxemburg always passes imperceptibly to the conclusion that among the factors uniting Russia and Poland the purely economic factors of modern capitalist relations now predominate.

But then our Rosa turns to the question of autonomy and, although her article is entitled “The National Question and Autonomy” in general, she begins to prove that the Kingdom of Poland has an exclusive right to autonomy (see Prosveshchenie, 1913, No. 12, on this). To support Poland’s right to autonomy, Rosa Luxemburg characterises the state system of Russia by features that are evidently economic, political, social and sociological alike, by a sum of features which together make up the concept of “Asiatic despotism” (Przegląd, No. 12, p. 137).

It is generally known that a state system of this kind possesses very great stability whenever completely patriarchal, pre-capitalist features predominate in the economy of the country and commodity production and class differentiation are scarcely developed. If, however, in a country whose state system is distinctly pre-capitalist in character there exists a nationally delimited region where capitalism is developing rapidly, then the more rapidly that capitalist development proceeds, the sharper the contradiction between it and the pre-capitalist state system, and the more likely the secession of the progressive region from the whole, a region connected with the whole not by “modern capitalist” but by “Asiatic-despotic” ties.

Thus Rosa Luxemburg does not get her facts to agree even on the question of the social structure of power in Russia in relation to bourgeois Poland; and as for the question of the concrete historical features of the national movements in Russia, she does not even raise it.

That is a question with which we must now deal.