The Right of Nations to Self-Determination
Introduction
Section summary
Lenin explains why he is answering a wave of attacks on Clause 9 of the 1903 party programme, the right of nations to self-determination, by the Liquidator Semkovsky, the Bundist Liebman and the Ukrainian Yurkevich. All of them, he says, merely repeat Rosa Luxemburg’s long Polish article of 1908–09, “The National Question and Autonomy”, so it is her arguments he will mainly examine.
Clause 9 of the programme of the Russian Marxists, which speaks of the right of nations to self-determination, has lately (as we have already pointed out in Prosveshchenie) called forth a whole crusade of the opportunists. The Russian Liquidator Semkovsky in the Liquidators’ St. Petersburg newspaper, the Bundist Liebman and the Ukrainian National-Socialist Yurkevich have all fallen upon this clause in their organs, treating it with an air of the greatest contempt. There is no doubt that this “invasion of the twelve tongues” of opportunism against our Marxist programme is closely connected with the present nationalist vacillations in general. A detailed examination of the question raised therefore seems to us timely. Let us note only that not one of the opportunists named has advanced a single independent argument: they all merely repeat what Rosa Luxemburg said in her long Polish article of 1908–09, “The National Question and Autonomy”. It is with the “original” arguments of this last author that we shall most often have to deal in our exposition.