7. The Decision of the London International Congress of 1896

This decision reads:

“The Congress declares that it stands for the full right of self-determination (Selbstbestimmungsrecht) of all nations, and expresses its sympathy with the workers of every country now suffering under the yoke of military, national or other absolutism; the Congress calls upon the workers of all these countries to join the ranks of the class-conscious (Klassenbewusste, those conscious of the interests of their class) workers of the whole world, in order jointly with them to fight for the overcoming of international capitalism and for the achievement of the aims of international Social-Democracy.”

As we have already pointed out, our opportunists, Messrs. Semkovsky, Liebman and Yurkevich, simply do not know of this decision. But Rosa Luxemburg knows it and quotes its full text, which contains the same expression as our programme: “self-determination”.

The question is, how does Rosa Luxemburg remove this obstacle that lies in the path of her “original” theory?

Oh, quite simply: … the centre of gravity here lies in the second part of the resolution … its declaratory character … only through a misunderstanding can one refer to it!!

Our author’s helplessness and confusion are simply astonishing. As a rule it is only the opportunists who point to the declaratory character of consistent democratic and socialist programme points, cravenly evading a direct polemic against them. Evidently it is not for nothing that this time Rosa Luxemburg has found herself in the sorry company of Messrs. Semkovsky, Liebman and Yurkevich. Rosa Luxemburg does not venture to state plainly whether she considers the resolution quoted correct or mistaken. She dodges and hides, as if counting on an inattentive and ignorant reader who forgets the first part of the resolution by the time he has read the second, or who has never heard of the debates in the socialist press before the London Congress.

But Rosa Luxemburg is very much mistaken if she imagines that, before the class-conscious workers of Russia, she can so easily trample on a resolution of the International on an important question of principle, without even deigning to analyse it critically.

In the debates before the London Congress, chiefly in the pages of the journal of the German Marxists, Die Neue Zeit, Rosa Luxemburg’s point of view was put forward, and this point of view was, in essence, defeated before the International! That is the heart of the matter, which the Russian reader should particularly bear in mind.

The debates turned on the question of the independence of Poland. Three points of view were put forward:

The resolution of the International reproduces the most essential and fundamental propositions of this point of view: on the one hand, an absolutely direct recognition, admitting of no misinterpretation, of the full right of all nations to self-determination; on the other hand, an equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for the international unity of their class struggle.

We think that this resolution is absolutely correct, and that for the countries of Eastern Europe and Asia at the beginning of the twentieth century it is precisely this resolution, and precisely with both its parts inseparably connected, that gives the only correct guide to proletarian class policy on the national question.

Let us dwell in somewhat more detail on the three points of view indicated above.

It is well known that K. Marx and Fr. Engels considered it the bounden duty of the whole of West-European democracy, and still more of Social-Democracy, to give active support to the demand for the independence of Poland. For the epoch of the forties and sixties of the last century, the epoch of the bourgeois revolution in Austria and Germany, the epoch of the “peasant reform” in Russia, this point of view was quite correct, and the only consistently democratic and proletarian one. So long as the masses of the people in Russia and in most of the Slav countries were still sunk in a dead sleep, so long as there were no independent, mass, democratic movements in those countries, the liberation movement of the gentry in Poland assumed an immense, paramount importance from the point of view of democracy, not only all-Russian, not only all-Slav, but all-European.

But while this point of view of Marx’s was quite correct for the second third or the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it had ceased to be correct by the twentieth century. Independent democratic movements, and even an independent proletarian movement, had awakened in most of the Slav countries, and even in one of the most backward Slav countries, Russia. Poland of the gentry had disappeared and given way to capitalist Poland. Under such conditions Poland could not but lose its exceptional revolutionary importance.

If the PPS (the “Polish Socialist Party”, the present-day “Fraki”) tried in 1896 to “fix” the point of view of Marx, which belonged to a different epoch, that already meant using the letter of Marxism against the spirit of Marxism. The Polish Social-Democrats were therefore quite right when they came out against the nationalist passions of the Polish petty bourgeoisie, showed the secondary importance of the national question for the Polish workers, created for the first time a purely proletarian party in Poland, and proclaimed the principle, of the greatest importance, of the closest alliance between the Polish and the Russian worker in their class struggle.

Did this mean, however, that at the beginning of the twentieth century the International could regard the principle of the political self-determination of nations, their right to secede, as superfluous for Eastern Europe and Asia? That would have been the height of absurdity, equivalent (theoretically) to recognising the bourgeois-democratic transformation of the Turkish, Russian and Chinese states as completed, and equivalent (in practice) to opportunism towards absolutism.

No. For Eastern Europe and Asia, in the epoch of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions that have begun, in the epoch of the awakening and intensification of national movements, in the epoch of the rise of independent proletarian parties, the task of these parties in national policy must be a two-sided one: recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination, since the bourgeois-democratic transformation is not yet completed and since working-class democracy consistently, seriously and sincerely, not in the liberal way, not in the Kokoshkin way, upholds the equality of nations; and the closest, indissoluble alliance in the class struggle of the proletarians of all the nations of a given state, through all and every vicissitude of its history, whatever reshaping of the frontiers of individual states the bourgeoisie may carry out.

It is precisely this two-sided task of the proletariat that the 1896 resolution of the International formulates. And precisely such, in its fundamental principles, is the resolution of the summer 1913 conference of the Russian Marxists. There are people to whom it seems “contradictory” that this resolution, in point 4, recognising the right to self-determination, to secession, seems to “grant” the maximum to nationalism (in reality the recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination means the maximum of democracy and the minimum of nationalism), while in point 5 it warns the workers against the nationalist slogans of any bourgeoisie whatever and demands the unity and amalgamation of the workers of all nations in internationally united proletarian organisations. But only utterly shallow minds can see a “contradiction” here, minds unable to understand, for example, why the unity and class solidarity of the Swedish and Norwegian proletariat gained when the Swedish workers upheld Norway’s freedom to secede and form an independent state.