Communists and the National Question in the 21st Century

Stani Bjegunac takes a look at different approaches to the national question by historical communists and how we may approach issues of national oppression in a 21st-century context. 

Preface

It should not be surprising that the reason I chose to take part in this publication was due to my disappointment with the left in my country. I assume for the purposes of discussion, that the circle associated with this publication is of a communist sentiment and adopts a broadly materialist view of both history and studying the contemporary world. The topic I wish to discuss is one which inspires in me both unsurprised disappointment and even disgust, as well as constant fascination: the communist stance towards the national question. With that said I think the Left, at least those who consider themselves “revolutionary” has mostly gotten the national question wrong, which leads to all kinds of questionable politics, such as leftist support for Rojava, the Assad government in Syria (or the nationalist and Islamist opposition groups), North Korea’s right to own nuclear weapons and the Bolivarian “revolution” in Venezuela. I think this is so important considering how there still exist objectively unresolved national questions, like the oppression of Palestinians. Furthermore, agreement on the national question is of such importance to communist strategy because it includes two central issues, namely what our stance is vis-a-vis the bourgeois state and internationalism: that the revolution that overthrows capitalism must be international or it is a failure, and thus that we aim for the unification of the proletariat internationally across the many borders that divide it.

Introduction

The left has a problem with the national question. Apart from simple lack of debate, agreement, formulation and fresh theorization of the issue as it concerns the present, the actual positions that are offered are often flawed: from anarchists who talk about “Solidarity with Rojava”, to a whole swag of activists — leftist and otherwise — who “support” Palestinian, West Papuan or even Novorossian independence. On the other hand, the minuscule and historically marginal left communist sects which have been largely critical of the support of “socialists” for national liberation. These groups and circles of theorists, while often having thought-provoking positions and theories reading the question of nationalities (due to a commitment to principle and empirical analysis), are limited by naive reasoning that is both mechanical and lacking in nuance. These left communists have also been naïve insofar as they often ignore the actual practical implication of their own positions.¹

This essay is not intended to pick apart a bunch of positions and say why they are wrong. This leads to wasting time with a variety of particular opinions and unproductive sect-bashing. The purpose of this essay is, instead, to critique and clarify the basis on which the national question may be discussed by leftists and to make a fresh contribution to the communist understanding of the national question which is relevant to the 21st century, rather than something pulled straight out of 1917 or from boring Comintern sloganeering. Along the way, some proposals will be stated about particular topics that need to be studied more carefully.

The first section will be about 20th-century national liberation movements. I will draw out some of the general characteristics of the wave of nationalism of the 20th century as qualitatively distinct historical phenomena from the wave of bourgeois revolutions that struck Europe in the 19th century and earlier. Note that the epochal divide does not need to be drawn at 1900 exactly (or 1914 for the decadence theorists), perhaps it even goes back to the “New Imperialism” of the late 19th century. A historical periodization needs to be drawn up of 20th century nationalism.

In the second section I go back to Marx (and Engels) and review very briefly their support for nationalisms in their time. It is important to question why these important “founding fathers” of communism were such enthusiastic supporters of bourgeois causes. Were they wrong or were they right? What view of world history guided them to think this way? And were their views consistent with their self-professed “historical materialism”? I also look into some examples of how the national question has been argued by communists critical of the classic Comintern formulation on national liberation. This includes left-communists such as the International Communist Current (ICC) and International Communist Tendency (ICT) who take a hard stance against all nationalism based on an argument about the overall trajectory of capitalism. Other theorists such as Mike Macnair for example would not dismiss the progressive nature of national aspirations in many situations, but uses Marx’s statements about the necessity of class independence to argue against alliances with bourgeois nationalists for an approach of invariant class independence. The ICC on the other hand has a more elaborate approach of decadence theory that shapes its view of the of the national question. They use a historical periodization in which nationalism of different eras has different qualities depending on whether capitalism is ascendent and still progressive or in its decadent phase and therefore to be destroyed, having outlived its progressive characteristics. Decadence in this theory begins post-1914, which entails all national struggles can only have a reactionary anti-proletarian character and are not deserving of communist support like in the way. Marx is excused of his support for national struggles because he was living when capitalism was still ascendant and progressive. This distinguishes an invariant view based on basic principles of how the class struggle of the proletariat relates to the national bourgeoisie, and a more historically contingent view, both of which may arrive at similar political conclusions for present conditions.

In the third section, I will critically look at the actual practice of leftist groups in support of this or that nat lib or “anti-imperialism”.² I call this “remote control activism” and argue that it is ineffective.

In the fourth section, I will deal with the claims of oppressed nations and “progressive” nationalisms. Although national liberation is a faulty program for communists, we should not dismiss national oppression, and we should develop nuanced reasons for its “continuing appeal”.³

Next I look at the indigenous question in white settled states, like Australia or New Zealand. Communists have undertheorised the “indigenous question” and this I hope is a start. I write this mostly from my knowledge in my own country (Australia) and find the proposals of various leftists and indigenous activists (e.g. vague ideas about “decolonization”, “recognition”, “sovereignty”, “treaty”, land rights etc.) to be quite deficient. With this in mind, please consider the situation of the indigenous question in other places might be quite different. I conclude that communists need to think programmatically about the indigenous question from a resolutely proletarian internationalist perspective that accounts for the dispossession and systematic racism that indigenous peoples have experienced historically and continue to experience. In other words, what can a communist movement do for the indigenous people in the event of a proletarian revolution, and in the build-up to it? It is a serious issue in some countries that will not automatically go away and in the event of a global revolutionary wave it will have to be resolved or else capitalism will deal with it “blindly and bloodily”.⁴

The 20th Century: Nationalism Returns

At that time, I supported the October Revolution only instinctively, not yet grasping all its historic importance. I loved and admired Lenin because he was a great patriot who liberated his compatriots; until then, I had read none of his books.

—Ho Chi Minh, “The Path Which Led Me to Leninism”

After the Second World War, the world settled into a Cold War that would last four and a half decades. This split the international state system into two sides based on political allegiances, trade, and military might. From 1945-1991, this is how we should see geopolitics. The period after the war was a time when the major colonial empires had already broken up or were at the very least shadows of their former selves and in a state of decay. Even during the war, a number of nationalist movements in the former colonies (in which an important part of the war was fought) had become invigorated and some had even come to power like in Indonesia in 1945.

This is essentially the era that leftists around the world today — a diverse crowd who call themselves anti-capitalists, communists, socialists, anarchists, Marxists, anti-imperialists etc. — use as a reference point for their position on nationalism, in particular, the question of national oppression and support for national liberation. Arguably this reference point also extends back to the nationalist movements occurring at the time of the the revolutionary wave of 1917-1923 (e.g. the Chinese Civil War), when the Comintern supported “revolutionaries” outside of Russia, only to have these intrigues backfire against them anyway (e.g. Shanghai in 1923 or, less well known, Turkey in 1921).⁵ For such leftists, Lenin’s “Imperialism: The Highest Form of Capitalism” and the position of the Bolshevik party on the “right of nations to self-determination” are the theoretical and political guides to anti-imperialism. If they are not so sophisticated, those who fetishize third world nationalism do not bother with citing historical examples and give in to the liberal mode of political discourse, moralising: who is the aggressor, who is the most “progressive” force, who is resisting imperialist domination, who is the “representative” of an oppressed people, who is the greater or lesser evil,⁶ etc. This all, of course, disregards the complexities of the historical socialist debates about the national question.

These leftists who were enchanted by national liberation in the countries of the “imperialist core”, during the New Left, looked on these national liberation movements with reverence. Vietnam, China, Cuba, Algeria, Angola, Palestine, Nicaragua etc. Leftists disappointed with the “labor aristocracy” and low class-consciousness of their own country’s working class, who were allegedly “bought off” by imperialists, could see an image of themselves in the armed mass movements in other countries which were fighting the good fight, “surrounding the cities”, taking power, throwing out foreign imperialists, and apparently creating a new society, the living proof, if there ever was, of an alternative to the capitalist global order.

A simple historical analysis of the facts, in other words, an empirical argument against national liberation, is enough for communists to achieve clarity on this issue with regards to this era of “national liberation” nationalisms. To make things transparent, I have no illusions in the possibility of “socialism in one country”, a position which Marx and Engels did not hold to.⁷ In the 20th century, national liberation generally took these following characteristics.

Political Economy of Colonialism: Exclusionary and Exploitative Models of Colonization

In his commentary on the Israel-Palestine national question, Moshé Machover of the UK Labour Party referred to an important distinction between exclusionary and exploitative models of colonialism:

Marxists have distinguished two basic models of colonisation. In both models the indigenous people are dispossessed. However, in one model — the exploitative model — they are reintegrated economically as the main source of labour-power. The political economy of this model depends on exploitation of the labour of the indigenous people. In the second model — the exclusionary model — the settlers’ political economy does not depend significantly on indigenous labour-power, so the indigenous people are excluded: pushed aside, ethnically cleansed, and in some cases (as in Tasmania) exterminated. This distinction between two models of colonisation goes back to Marx, who made it en passant, and was theorised by Karl Kautsky.

As should be clear to any Marxist, the distinction between these two types of colonisation, with their very different political economies, is absolutely fundamental. It has many crucial consequences. In exploitative colonisation, the settlers are a small minority, and usually form a dominant exploiting quasi-class. This was the case, for example, in Algeria and South Africa. In contrast, wherever exclusionary colonisation took place, the settlers formed a new nation. Such was the case in North America, Australia and New Zealand. In fact, I do not know of any exception to this rule.

In the same interview, it is also noted that anti-colonial movements only succeeded in countries where the exploitative model of colonialism had been in operation. The problem of exclusionary colonialism and the indigenous population, in the case of white settler states, will be discussed later. It is fair to say that the material conditions resulting from an exploitative model of colonization allowed anti-colonial movements to arise and succeed while in the lands where the exclusionary model was in operation, this possibility was cut off by the absolute destruction of the native population through massacres, disease, and land-grabs.

Class Structure: Bourgeoisie (or Lack Thereof), Peasantry, Proletariat

In the colonies of the modern colonial empires (British, French, Dutch, Portuguese) the colonizers met the most variegated societies they had ever seen. Marxists to this day debate about whether the Incas or the Mughal Empire constituted a kind of “Asiatic mode of production”. These civilizations had a considerably different class structure to what was seen back in the Old World, yet with hierarchies that made them intelligible to foreigners upon contact: kings at the top; peasants and slaves at the bottom. On the other hand, the Australian aborigines and certain peoples in North America, were classless, tribal, living off the land as nomads, or engaging in small amounts of cultivation and fish-farming here and there.⁸ These things are historically worth seeing in terms of how the colonial systems were built, especially the way that colonizers acted with regards to the existing social structures they had found: making deals with local rulers and tapping into existing markets without fundamentally altering the mode of production (British India), conducting massacre and enslavement of the native population on plantations and mixing royal families (Caribbean, Mexico), or flat-out war of destruction and expulsion after treaties proved to be worthless (Australia, New Zealand, USA’s westward expansion in the 19th century).

Beyond all these particularities, by the beginning of the 20th century there was a world system of capitalism that had reached much of the Earth. Even in non-capitalist regions the global market was not far, and by the end of the century it would pull almost everyone into its orbit. Factories in Russia, funded by foreign capital, were forging steel for use in armaments which went into the First World War; British and German Banks were issuing notes in China; textile and garment workshops in India were exporting to the world. In the countries in which the decolonial movements occurred in the 20th century, which were as mentioned before, run on the exploitative model of colonization, it is safe to generalize that proletarians were in the minority and that peasants made up the bulk of society.⁹

National Liberation Party-Form

What restrains state rackets from mutual extermination is their awareness that cohesion and self-control assure their mutual survival. Below them, there’s the mass of humanity enclosed by exploitation and national frontiers. Dominant rackets have learned to negotiate and tolerate each other by coexisting in the state. The role of national mediation alters their function, from private looting to large scale administration and bureaucratic (and legal) access to the national treasure. In this form, modern politicians and functionaries buy themselves national pedigree, legitimacy, and incomes. But the racket remains the underlying state module. Dominant classes secrete them constantly, and in a democracy, this tendency is generalized in civil society. The fragmentation of commodity society and its consequent ‘war of all against all’, creates a fertile soil for rackets. As long as a strong Leviathan is not disturbed and undermined by this, rackets are tolerated even if legally proscribed.

Political rackets are informal specialist bodies, usually legal and aspiring to state domination. However, their reduced size forces them to an unstable and precarious existence. At most, they become pressure groups for parties that have gone beyond the racket stage. The larger the racket, the more it approximates a party, which contains a few rackets called tendencies or factions. Only extraordinary world and national events propel rackets to become mass parties and even attain state power. But these moments are few and far between. Most rackets have a relatively short existence. A few last for years, as torture chambers for their members…

Though political rackets seldom attain their goal of state power, their internal organisation mimics statist functions. The membership of the racket is its proletariat, and the leaders constitute a sort of portable mini-state. Rackets are essentially conservative, even if some of them, the Marxist and anarchist ones, spout radical or emancipatory messages.

—F. Palinorc, “Rackets” (2001)

In the countries in which decolonial movements grew and took power, there was invariably a party or at least a coalition of parties that had independence and their goal and aimed to lead that struggle. These parties engaged in “anti-imperialist” or “national liberation” fronts that encompassed organizations of a range of political positions; for example, the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Vietnam did not just contain the “communists” around Ho Chi Minh. These “fronts” were never quite so perfect, with different factions — “communist”, “anti-communist”, and others — fighting and murdering each other even after a period of cooperation, a most egregious example being the killing off of other political leaders by the Khmer Rouge before they had taken power.¹⁰ In the countries in which “socialism” was a decolonial force, the communist parties that came to power were “armed to the teeth” and politically and logistically supported by the USSR and its allies. It is hard to imagine the Vietnamese NLF or Castro’s revolutionaries coming to power without the tremendous force of arms. No amount of national will can make AK-47s materialize out of nowhere. Power does in a sense come out of the barrel of a gun.

These national liberation fronts and parties by their nature always involved the combination of people of a variety of class backgrounds: peasants of varying propertied status, proletarians, bourgeoisie. This, for example, found its expression in Mao’s theory of the “Bloc of Four Classes”. “Intellectuals” or the “intelligentsia” are not a class as such — they could be autodidact proles or petit-bourgeois professionals for example — however, their importance in certain movements should not be dismissed (e.g. the participation of Frantz Fanon in the Algerian independence movement) as often they rose to positions of leadership and were heavily involved. It is helpful, but not enough, to point to the class breakdown of the membership of these movements. The local football club is mostly made of working-class people, but that does not make it a proletarian organization that fights for the class as a class. It is thus important to see what their program was. Program, in this case, is not necessarily the stated goals of an organization or movement, but what its practice actually moves towards and achieves — its political content or movement. To judge this part of history we need to prioritize the assessment of actions over words.

National Liberation: Power and Program

Whether you consider the 20th-century national liberation movements to be strictly bourgeois revolutions or not, they were nonetheless bourgeois in their content.¹¹ What made the French revolution and the bourgeois revolutions before it different to the 20th century national revolutions was that the contradiction of civil society (i.e. between the proletariat and capital) had not yet emerged, and the proletariat was simply existing in the folds of the “Third Estate”. The French revolution was a milestone event, partly because it was the last democratic bourgeois revolution to occur before this class contradiction emerged, which it did in 1848, where the bourgeoisie was triumphant but the communist movement was not.¹²

Trotskyists continue to repeat the outdated refrain about how, in the backward countries, the bourgeoisie is/was too weak to complete the bourgeois revolution. However, the history of 20th century decolonization and developmentalism tells us that one way or another these “weak” bourgeoisies successfully completed it, albeit by calling upon their allies, by being heavily armed and by the use of a wide-sector of society (proletarians, peasants, intellectuals, petit-bourgeois) as their support in national liberation fronts. They may not have been very democratic and peaceful about it but they did the job (when has the bourgeoisie ever secured its political dominance without force?). For those that went under the banner of “socialism”, “socialism” was just the better model of modernization to the competing model of “Western” capitalism. The problem was never that the proletariat’s job was now to complete the bourgeois revolution, rather it was that the bourgeoisie conducted it and smashed what little proletarian autonomy there was in the process.

They not only conducted (to varying degrees) the political programme (the establishment of bourgeois state institutions) but a bourgeois agrarian programme of capital: land to the peasants, which helped to win the peasantry over to their side. However, in some cases (China and Vietnam) the victorious regime expropriated the peasants in the form of forced collectivization. ¹³ Resistance to collectivization was ruthlessly crushed. The Chinese collective farms were no idyllic paradise. One way or another this agrarian program expands that part of the population which is “doubly free” in Marx’s sense, setting the conditions for more comprehensive development, like industrialization, in attempts to “catch up” with the more developed countries. Until the end of the 20th century, developmentalist programs like nationalization of large capital and the transformation of class struggle into development could ensure some measure of class peace, as a kind of third world counterpart to social-democracy.¹⁴ Arguably this pattern has been repeated recently with the “petro-Peronism” of Chavez’s Venezuela.¹⁵

In any case, we do not live in such a world of peasant countries, colonial empires and “weak bourgeoisies” anymore: there is no room for additional bourgeois revolutions. Even in some middle-eastern countries where there are monarchs or dictators in charge, where bourgeois revolutions have never truly occurred and democracy is “foreign”, capital is nonetheless everywhere, and the proletariat makes up the mass of the population.¹⁶ We should have no illusions about the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie inevitably bringing with it democracy. Liberalism never lived up to its own promises of universalism and equality anyway.

Where the proletarians got in the way of the “anti-imperialist” “revolutionaries” they were ruthlessly repressed. Examples are abound:

• Vietnam: Suppression of the Saigon Commune of 1945 by the Viet Minh and later the massacre of Vietnamese Trotskyists by the Stalinists of the NLF.¹⁷
• Angola: Suppression of the Luanda dockers’ strike of 1975 by the MPLA-led state.¹⁸
• China: The Shanghai massacre of 1927 conducted by the Koumintang after the Communist Party had behaved as “bag-carriers” for the nationalists.¹⁹
• Cuba: The coercion of unions into not striking in the name of the “revolution”, the integration of the dictatorship into the union apparatus, persecution of the anarcho-syndicalists, many of whom were forced into exile by the new Castro government. The torture and killings of political opponents and a variety of other measures of terror against the working class.²⁰

National liberation movements, furthermore have created states which have gone on to engage in wars and oppress national/ethnic minorities. Indonesia, which won independence in 1945 from the Dutch empire, now conducts a policy of genocide in West Papua. In response, the Free Papua Movement has appeared. China, once part of the center of the “anti-imperialist” “socialist” bloc, is now ethnically repopulating Tibet with a mass influx of ethnic Han people. Vietnam went to war too with China and Cambodia after its reunification. Although a great number of Khmers were killed, Vietnamese, Chinese and muslim minorities were particularly targeted by the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian Genocide, until the Vietnamese forces put an end to it. If there is one special thing Uncle Ho could be commended for it was putting an end to a genuinely reactionary and genocidal anti-colonial nationalist movement.

Thus if we look at the history of nation-forming, it shows us that “anti-colonial” movements expelled their colonial rulers only to deepen and extend the modernization social process that began with colonization, including the very idea of nationality, onto themselves under a native ruling class.²¹ These movements were undoubtedly “progressive” in general because they overthrew colonial forms of exploitation — slavery or otherwise forced-labor, and wholesale plunder of the colony’s wealth for the metropole — and built the preconditions for communism (i.e. they kickstarted capitalist development).

Gender and National Liberation

An aesthetic element that has recently captivated foreign leftist supporters of national liberation movements, has been the image of women with guns. This gives a feminist cover to these national liberation movements — femme-washing them.  There is some truth here, because women may find the movement as a method of escape from particularly backward patriarchal traditions, as we have seen with some of the women fighters in the YPJ, who have escaped arranged marriages.²² But recent feminist theory which demands a closer examination of the nation-state as an organizer of gender relations points to a contradictory dynamic:

As postcolonial feminism in particular has compellingly showed, the nation-state as capital’s chief political form is not thinkable without the oppression of women. This occurs in a twofold manner. On the one hand, the nation as the allegedly homogenous community, with a common origin/destiny and kinship that is “attached” to the state, can only think of women as its symbolic markers as well as cultural and biological reproducers. This is true not only for ethnic conceptions of the nation as Kulturnation and Volknation, but also in those cases in which the nation as such is the driving force of liberation movements. Even when nationalism has played the role of a liberating force, such as in the context of the decolonization, and the issue of women’s rights has accompanied that of national independence, the results for women have often been disappointing. After independence, women’s role has frequently been reaffirmed as that of biological reproducers of the (new, liberated) nation. For instance, despite their key role during the Algerian war of independence from France and in the National Liberation Front, at the end of the conflict Algerian women did not gain the equality and rights they had wished for. One of the reasons for this limitation was, as Moghadam argues, that the struggle was one for “national liberation, not for social (class/gender) transformation.” In other words, the nation – any nation – cannot do without exercising its control over women’s bodies and women’s child-raising role, because the very future of the nation depends on them.²³

If nationalist movements have progressed in gender relations by smashing archaic forms of colonial exploitation and undermining traditional gender relations, they do so only to reconstitute gender in a more modern order. With this in mind, it will not be surprising to see the Kurdish women disappointed by a new patriarchal normality if a Kurdish nation-state is formed when they are no longer needed as soldiers, but as wives, mothers and wage-workers who will rebuild the fledgling nation.

Conclusions and Directions for Further Study

With this brief overview of 20th-century national liberation movements there are a few major conclusions I wish to make:

• 20th-century national liberation carried out a bourgeois program and was thoroughly anti-working class in character despite being progressive due to the overthrow of colonial forms of exploitation. The anti-imperialist fronts were heavily involved in the geopolitics of the time which played out as opposition between the Western/liberal/capitalist camp on one side and the “socialist” camp on the other.
• A balance sheet of 20th-century national liberation is still required to understand precisely what it achieved and how it differed from country to country. What has been written here is at best a starting point but it is not a comprehensive historical analysis colored with detail and nuance. Revolutionaries need to see how the poison of nationalism has been sowed in the hearts of the working class in every country in order to better combat it in particular situations.
• We need an understanding of how decolonization influenced the composition of the working class in these countries, especially now since the demise of the old developmentalist dictatorships. As these nations were formed through liberation from colonization this might have the effect of tightly binding proletarians to their nation-state.
• Perhaps the phenomenon of the national liberation party-form should also be more thoroughly investigated. Why was this a recurring pattern? How did these parties navigate their road to power? What can we learn about them now that we live in a world where various nationalist movements are on the rise? Not in order to copy them but to develop counter-strategies in the event that similar situations might emerge, which seems inevitable considering all the war that emerges out of a continuing capitalist crisis.
• An investigation is required into what are the implications of the end of the peasant question on contemporary and future nationalism? National liberation movements of the 20th century occurred in backward countries and relied on a peasant base, especially to form their armies, and carried out the aforementioned “agrarian program”. Obviously contemporary separatist movements do not have this resource at hand anymore.²⁴

Back to Marx: Progress and Class-Political Independence

In Germany, finally, the decisive struggle now on the order of the day is that between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy. Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it. Against the governments, therefore, the communists must continually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of the bourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisie would allegedly bring to the proletariat. The sole advantages which the proletariat would derive from a bourgeois victory would consist

(i) in various concessions which would facilitate the unification of the proletariat into a closely knit, battle-worthy, and organized class; and

(ii) in the certainly that, on the very day the absolute monarchies fall, the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat will start. From that day on, the policy of the communists will be the same as it now is in the countries where the bourgeoisie is already in power.

—Friedrich Engels, “The Principles of Communism” (1847)

It is quite an interesting thing that Marx and Engels, the key thinkers of communism, had lived in a time of bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie, at least in Europe and the Americas, was smashing the aristocracy or slavocracy, pronouncing liberty, equality and fraternity, conquering new lands, and “civilizing” the world under its order.

Neil Davidson very clearly summarizes the perspective they took which informed what they thought the position socialists should take towards nationalist movements:

Where Marx and Engels have important things which are directly about nations is in relation to the attitude socialists should take towards specific national movements. At heart, their attitude is based on whether the success of any movement – secessionist or irredentist – is likely to advance the possibility of the socialist revolution, although this was often in indirect ways. Essentially, they saw nationalism, in the sense of political movements leading to the establishment of nation-states, as part of the process of bourgeois revolution which would sweep away pre-capitalist forms and enable the conditions for the creation of a working class. This is the context in which they decided which nationalisms to support and which to oppose. Poland and Ireland are respectively oppressed and held back in developmental terms by the British and Russian Empires, and so had to be supported. Equally, national movements which relied on the great empires for their existence, such as pan-Slavism in 1848, had to be opposed. It is, of course, possible to agree with the latter conclusion with[out] accepting the mystified nonsense about “non-historic nations” that Engels sometimes used to support it.²⁵

Paul Mattick’s essay “Nationalism and Socialism”, which gives a good commentary on 20th-century national liberation, also summarizes it well:

“Progressive nations” of the last century [19th century] were those with a rapid capital development; “reactionary nations” were those in which social relationships hindered the unfolding of the capitalist mode of production. Because the “next future” belonged to capitalism and because capitalism is the precondition for socialism, non-utopian socialists favored capitalism as against older social production relations and welcomed nationalism in so far as it served to hasten capitalist development. Though reluctant to admit this, they were not disinclined to accept capitalist imperialism as a way of breaking the stagnation and backwardness of non-capitalist areas from without, and thus to direct their development into “progressive” channels. They also favored the disappearance of small nations unable to develop large-scale economies, and their incorporation into larger national entities capable of capitalist development. They would, however, side with small “progressive nations” as against larger reactionary countries and, when suppressed by the latter, would support the former’s national liberation movements. At all times and on all occasions, however, nationalism was not a socialist goal but was accepted as a mere instrument of social advancement which, in turn, would come to its end in the internationalism of socialism. Western capitalism was the “capitalist world” of the last century. National issues were concerned with the unification of countries such as Germany and Italy, with the liberation of such oppressed nations as Ireland, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and with the consolidation of such “synthetic” nations as the United States. This was also the “world” of socialism; a small world indeed viewed from the twentieth century. While national questions that agitated the socialist movement in the middle of the nineteenth century had either been resolved, or were in the process of being resolved, and, in any case, had ceased to be of real importance to Western socialism, the world-wide revolutionary movement of the twentieth century opened the question of nationalism anew. Is this new nationalism, which sheds Western dominance and institutes capitalist production relations and modern industry in hitherto under-developed areas, still a “progressive” force as was the nationalism of old? Do these national aspirations coincide in some manner with those of socialism? Do they hasten the end of capitalism by weakening Western imperialism or do they inject new life into capitalism by extending its mode of production all over the globe?

The position of nineteenth-century socialism on the question of nationalism involved more than preferring capitalism to more static social systems. Socialists operated within bourgeois-democratic revolutions which were also nationalist; they supported national liberation movements of oppressed people because they promised to take on bourgeois-democratic features, because in socialist eyes these national-bourgeois-democratic revolutions were no longer strictly capitalist revolutions. They could be utilized if not for the installation of socialism itself, then for furthering the growth of socialist movements and for bringing about conditions more favorable to the latter.

Marx and Engels supported certain nationalist movements, like German unification and Polish independence, insofar as they quickened the development of the pre-conditions for communist revolution. They were not interested in moralizing about oppressed nations or nationalism for nationalism’s sake and would have had no time for the intellectual advocates of so-called “national-cultural autonomy”, who do not seem to see a problem with the possibility of nationalities existing after the establishment of socialism.²⁶

It is also important to note Marx’s support for the Union side in the American Civil War.²⁷ The USA was already the most advanced capitalist nation of its time, but it was faced with a slaveholders’ rebellion in the South. It seems like one of the last examples Marx saw of the bourgeois state acting in a revolutionary capacity, in this case crushing the leftovers of the slave system, allowing the workers’ movement to progress, regardless of the intention of the statesmen, soldiers, and generals on the Union side.²⁸ Also worth noting is that Marx and Engels did not frame their support for nationalism in moral terms like the “rights” of the category of “oppressed” nations which Lenin talked about. Indeed, they supported the Hungarian national revolution, but as Rosa Luxemburg noted, the Magyar ethnic minority were known at the time for their oppression of the other nationalities/ethnic groups.²⁹ Their perspective was not about national oppression, but about bourgeois revolution accelerating the conditions which would make communism a possibility. It is worth mentioning that Rosa Luxemburg also takes on Marx and Engel’s approach in her methodology of looking at the class forces at work in specific cases (e.g. in Poland) to determine if socialists should support national independence.³⁰

Is there a tension between their advocacy for bourgeois causes and, at the same time, their stated commitment to the necessity of proletarian class-political independence as necessary for communist strategy? For some communists who dealt with this question, history is split into two phases, one where it is okay to support the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the other when it is time to fight for the proletarian revolution, which the Engels’ quote above suggests, although it would, of course, be adjusted to the varying situations of different countries: not all countries experience capitalist development in the same way and some had a bourgeois revolution before others. Can there be, however, a line that can be drawn when it is no longer viable for communists to support nationalist movements and what are the criteria for it? For certain Marxists, particularly left-communists, that hold to a strict decadence theory, a world-historical line is drawn at 1914, when the capitalist world went into decay. One of the strategic implications of decadence theory is that communists, to be true internationalists, must not support any nationalist movements — in other words, our era is qualitatively different.

I think some convincing criticisms have been made of this kind of decadence theory and so I am not going to deal with this any further.³¹

In short, anti-national communists can argue the national question problem from three main perspectives (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive):

• Decadence theory or something which gives alternate historical periodization or directionality to world capitalist development.
• An empirical statement of the anti-proletarian character of national liberation struggles, which has been presented above.
• From the perspective of an invariant communist principle of proletarian class-political independence, such as that advocated by Mike Macnair of the CPGB. His argument, learning from 20th-century national liberation relies on a pretty simple observation:

…the class contradiction between the working class and national bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries is stronger than the national contradiction between the bourgeoisie of the oppressed country and the bourgeoisie of the imperialist country. Notice that I am not saying that there is no such thing as imperialism, or that there is no such thing as national oppression: just that the class contradiction tends to be more fundamental, and that consequently, the anti-imperialist united front fails.³²

The last stance seems the most convincing to me. Regardless of whether Marx was right to support the nationalisms of his time, the age of bourgeois revolutions is over, the bourgeoisie has fulfilled its “historic mission” internationally and capitalism has conquered the world so much more thoroughly than it had in Marx’s time, that it is absurd to ask for more capitalist “progress”, especially when it seems like more of it will only lead to more of the war, ecological destruction, and misery which we are experiencing now, which you do not need a decadence theory to explain. The objective conditions for communism — the international spread of the capitalist mode of production, the immense forces of production based on mechanization (and now automation), and the international proletariat, the class which has nothing to lose but its chains, and which is the negation of all classes — have been ripe for a long time. Nothing lacks but a revolutionary movement.

Remote Control Activism

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

— Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

There is no shortage of leftists who assemble in the streets in protest against this or that act of imperialism. When a new war starts or a new country enters a war, you are bound to observe all kinds of ridiculous signs, slogans, leaflets, and cartoons at such protests. “Victory to the Iraqi Resistance” or something similar was in fact spouted by the SWP and the Stop the War Coalition in the UK in protests against the Iraq War. Leftists of all stripes take particular positions: who to denounce, who to “critically” or “unconditionally” support. Often their logic is that of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, in which case so-called “socialists” should really have no problem marching with Islamists — we are all fighting imperialism, right?³³ Anti-war coalitions will desperately seek support from whoever: businesspeople, politicians, foreign policy experts, and people who they would otherwise hate for their politics. With the seriousness of generals, they perform this farce as if they actually have any relevant outcome on conflicts happening thousands of kilometers away. The best these activist groups get out of it is some more paper sales and more recruits to keep these political rackets going. Left organizations need something horrific to be indignant about to keep their blood pumping. It makes people feel like they are doing something.

These rituals of opportunism simply save the consciences of activists from the inevitable fact that many will perish in bloodthirsty massacres, regardless of what slogans and marches are organized absent the international proletariat instaurating a dictatorship of the proletariat.

If we put the nonsense of their “positions” and slogans aside, and use, as a kind of reference point, the protests against the Iraq War, then it is pretty clear that this kind of “anti-imperialist” practice of protest is ineffective.

Before the Iraq War was launched, millions poured into the streets around the world in protest. It all came to nothing. The simple fact is that it was impossible to stop the Iraq War without overthrowing the state. Did we see any concrete attempts to foster resistance to the war inside the armed forces? It seems like the answer is no. It is not surprising, because the difference between the days of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War and now is that the invading force in Vietnam tried to fight a colonial war with an unreliable conscript army, which was receptive to the anti-war sentiment of the population back at home. But a gigantic modern military machine like that of the USA, staffed completely by professional enlisted personnel cannot be stopped by good old-fashioned civil disobedience. To be realistic, anything short of a dictatorship of the proletariat, with significant portions of the military splitting to the proletarian side, will mean the continuation of the war and crisis that is occurring across the globe.

Oppressor and Oppressed

As a postscript I’d like to answer a question before it is asked. The question is: “Don’t you think a descendant of oppressed people is better off as a supermarket manager or police chief?” My answer is another question: What concentration camp manager, national executioner or torturer is not a descendant of oppressed people?”

— Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism (1984)

It is pretty easy to see that the left sees the national question through a moralistic lens of “oppressor”, “imperialist” and “first world” nations against “oppressed”, “third world nations”. If any serious theory is cited it is simply to confirm existing biases and such theory e.g. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is simply accepted uncritically and out of historical context. The nationalism of an oppressed nation (e.g. the Palestinians) just as much implies class collaboration as that of the chauvinistic nationalism of oppressor nations (e.g. Israel). However, when internationalists make our anti-national critique we should be sensitive to nuances. We do not deny that there is oppression on the basis of nationality, otherwise, we would not have to deal with this question in the first place.

In the case of Israel and Palestine, it is clear that the Israeli military is engaging in a military occupation over Palestinian lands — it is doing the oppressing — and is armed with tanks, an air force, heavy artillery etc. while the Palestinian resistance fighters are simply armed with rocks, homemade weaponry, and some small arms — in other words, the forces are massively disproportionate. For these reasons, the left is quick to condemn, for example, Israel’s military crimes but will turn a blind eye to the repression of workers’ strikes and the murderous racketeering of Hamas or the idiotic adventurism of Stalinist national liberation fronts like the PFLP.

While we communists can say that: in war, the proletarians of various nations slaughter each other (that is to say, go against their class interest), and that “the main enemy is at home”, this should not hide us from the fact that proletarians who engage in nationalist causes often do with very real material pressures motivating them to act in the ways they do. They know what it is like to be under military occupation, to be dispossessed of their home, and turn into a desperate refugee.

The Kurds and Yezidis who have rapidly joined the YPG and YPJ, have done so because they are afraid of the genocidal terror perpetrated by ISIS, whether or not they seriously believe in all the ideological stuff spouted by Ocalan. In Indonesia, the formerly colonized have become the colonizers: with the Dutch gone, the West Papuans are left to the mercy of the Indonesian army. The Palestinians live under direct military occupation and outside the edges of Israeli settlements, so it is no surprise that ordinary people will throw stones and physically confront the security forces. While we should not forget the power of nationalist parties, with their patronage links and their armed thugs, we should also realize that not every part of a resistance to military occupation is a conspiracy controlled by a nationalist racket. We communists would be the last to condemn anyone who takes up arms to defend themselves or their family.

In the West Papuan example, there is plenty of resistance that falls outside of the well known Free Papua Movement³⁴: there are the tribal warriors in the remote jungle who spear Indonesian soldiers, the youths who throw rocks at cops, the rioters in the streets. We cannot just shrug off the people who engage in this activity as having “false consciousness” because they happen to not be acting as a class and are instead fighting against their oppression as an oppressed nation or ethnic group. They are not under “nationalist illusions”; they are directly reacting to material pressures, fighting for survival in many cases. We cannot ignore these facts. Without any powerful organized internationalist proletarian alternative to the barbarisms that surround them, an alternative beyond nations, what other hope do these people have?

The programmatic implications for communists are as follows:

• Maintaining class-political independence will be especially difficult in countries under military and colonial occupation. The reality of their daily oppression will mean that many workers will identify with a nationalist cause before they start to unite on a class basis and fight against their own bourgeoisie and those foreign to them. In addition, the repression that proletarians would face as a result of efforts to organize as a class would be intense. Principled communists in such oppressed nations would refuse to engage in opportunistic entryism into nationalist movements to “turn them to the left”. Their best hope lies in the class-struggle breaking out nearby to challenge the state regionally and internationally.
• In countries in which there are significant national or racialized minorities (e.g. Romas in Europe, African-Americans in the USA, Kurds in Turkey, Maoris in New Zealand), and where the situation requires it, communists should advocate for special caucuses within working class institutions to ensure that these minorities are included in class organization and are better placed to overcome language barriers and combat racism and nationalist chauvinism. This is not an argument for separatism, on the contrary, it would help national and racialized minorities abandon a nationalist consciousness in favor of integration through class struggle. In some countries, such a strategy is simply not necessary (e.g. in ethnically homogenous Japan and Korea), so it needs to be applied carefully to particular circumstances.
• Forming solidarity between workers of the oppressor and oppressed countries that goes beyond mere symbolic actions. To make such solidarity more effective across borders would require a better understanding of how migration affects class struggle and what dominant supply chains are liable to disruption along multiple points. What the BDS campaign against Israel lacks is understanding of how vast modern supply chains are: boycotts will not cut it.
• Given sufficient power of a communist movement to enact these tasks:
  • Initiating campaigns to resist conscription if it is ever introduced.
  • If possible, demand democratic reform of the military. Governments would be very reluctant to grant such demands, but in the case of a revolutionary situation, it is at least a good guarantee against the troops being used against workers, and would make foreign military interventions much more difficult.
  • Spreading defeatist propaganda, and encouraging and facilitating defection amongst the soldiers of all forces, and the split of the military along class lines.³⁵
  • Strategic blockages and sabotage of the key logistics and military industry.
  • An unapologetically universal end to national borders and the end of intra-national borders (e.g. the hukou system). Intra-national borders also effectively divide the working class, based on geography, into citizens and non-citizens. Freedom of movement for all.
  • Demand the end of oppressive laws that target people based on national, ethnic or racial status e.g. the “race powers” in Section 51 (xxvi) of the Australian constitution which allow the government to produce special laws for certain races.³⁶
• A realistic strategy must acknowledge that without an international dictatorship of the proletariat, imperialist wars will continue to ravage the world. Refuse to settle for any half-measures.

The Indigenous Question in (Settled) Settler-Colonial States

We have taken away their land, have destroyed their food, made them subject to our laws, which are antagonistic to their habits and traditions, have endeavoured to make them subject to our tastes, which they hate, have massacred them when they defended themselves and their possessions after their own fashion, and have taught them by hard warfare to acknowledge us to be their master.

—Anthony Trollope³⁷

In the Territory the mating of an Aboriginal with any person other than an Aboriginal is prohibited. The mating of colored aliens with any female of part Aboriginal blood is also forbidden. Every endeavor is being made to breed out the color by elevating female half-castes to the white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population.

—Northern Territory Administrator’s Report, 1933, p 7.³⁸

In spite of efforts to euphemize and hide pre-colonial history, it is no secret that in white settled countries (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA) the nation-state was founded on the dispossession and destruction of the indigenous population, and that many years after these countries have been invaded, the surviving indigenous people are subject to the most shocking conditions of life, as the most marginalized in a white supremacist society.³⁹There is a clear international pattern that indigenous people in these countries experience without exception: disproportionately lower life expectancy,⁴⁰ poorer health outcomes,⁴¹ poorer education, higher incarceration rates,⁴² lower employment rates, disintegration of family ties, higher incidence of drug abuse, and higher suicide rates compared to the general (largely white) population. This is not a coincidence. This section will concern matters associated with the indigenous question in Australia, the situation will obviously differ from country to country, where the history is different, although commonalities will exist.

To seek justice and remedy the racial inequality experienced by indigenous Australians (that is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples), indigenous activists and the left have proposed a variety of demands of which there is no general consensus (and which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, best seen as a bundle):

• Land rights (not simply the existing native title scheme)
• Parliamentary representation (a separate indigenous parliament that works with the Australian government, in order to better represent indigenous people)
• Indigenous independence or regional self-government (e.g. articulated in the form of indigenous regional autonomy (“sovereignty”) as part of more complicated Australian federation)⁴³
• A treaty or multiple treaties between indigenous and non-indigenous people.⁴⁴The treaties will formalize a collection of rights and responsibilities between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians e.g. to care for sites and artifacts of cultural significance, to maintain a standard of housing, health, and education for indigenous people or whatever else the treaty might specify. The treaty is best seen as a form of constitutionalism that will establish an institutional framework in the state for further reforms that are meant to be beneficial for indigenous people.⁴⁵

I do not propose to have all the answers. It is clear that it cannot be dealt with in the same way as the national question. I think communists have to really think hard about how to programmatically confront the indigenous question, just as we have to think hard about the national question or the question of whether to conduct electoralism. One thing that is clear however is that existing proposals do not fundamentally challenge the sovereignty of the Australian state, they are all essentially about how the state deals with this “racial problem”, how its “people” are represented, and they do not seem to assume or propose a break with the nation-state and capitalism.

It will be interesting to observe which sections of the indigenous population will reap the benefits of land settlements. It will be interesting to see, if it is implemented, regional indigenous governments as part of an Australian federation, with indigenous politicians who represent their people and set economic agendas, indigenous capitalists, indigenous cops and so on. Localist “sovereignty” schemes should be met with extreme skepticism for the possibility of the formation of an enriched stratum of the indigenous population, a “Black Bourgeoisie”. Remote regional governments would have to deal with economic development (this is a stated goal of treaty advocates by the way) one way or another, maybe requesting that resource-extraction or energy companies invest in their “communities” to produce “jobs” for people whose labor-power capital already mostly deems unnecessary. Plans for autarky (or “self-reliance”) in the bush are plain fantasy. Rights and responsibilities are the currency of a bourgeois state: formalized changes to land tenure, political administration and representation are things that, even if difficult, are totally achievable within its framework, but whether they actually have a positive effect on the lives of the majority of indigenous proletarians is another matter.

I would highly recommend that leftists in Australia, New Zealand, and other settled countries read a great text written about the relationship between class struggle and indigenous struggle in Hawaii—“Hawaii: Class Militancy or Cultural Patriotism?”—that deals with these kinds of problems. The promotion of shared culture by aspiring indigenous “community leaders” is something that should be criticized if it promotes an identity that undermines class solidarity.

Examples of what happens in NZ and Canada with indigenous people, where there are treaties and institutional frameworks that are more “progressive” and which activists in Australia are demanding a move towards, should also provoke criticisms. Indigenous people in NZ and Canada are still racially marginalized and worse off in every regard compared to whites. A recurring problem in the political consciousness of people in Canada is how they compare themselves to the USA to show “how much better things are than in the US”, the same applying for New Zealanders with Australia.

It is an undertheorised issue. The left often does not give enough criticism to these proposals, giving things over to aboriginal elders, “representatives”, and “leaders” to speak on behalf of “their people” at meetings and at rallies, and does not engage in any clear programmatic debate, preferring to engage in representations of white guilt and shouting slogans that sound right instead and expecting change to come about. Perhaps this is for fear of being labeled as uncaring or racist. This would go along with changes in anti-racist discourse towards standpoint epistemology in recent years. I will leave this issue with a few points for consideration:

• Indigenous Australians, and many indigenous populations throughout the world, are thoroughly proletarianized and highly urbanized.⁴⁶ This is the result of a gradual process of colonization. In colonial Australia there was a genuinely colonial settled or semi-settled region with a frontier, beyond which was simply a grand “unexplored” continent populated with indigenous people who still lived in traditional ways, albeit at war with settlers. That is no longer the case. Eventually, settler-colonies stop being colonies and actually complete themselves as settled nation-states, this was completed sometime in the 20th century. The last uncontacted people were found in 1984. More recently, an important effect of the Northern Territory (NT) Intervention was to remove children from their families, depopulate remote communities, and accelerate the urbanization of the indigenous population. The benefits for capital are obvious: this makes it easier for mining companies to get their hands on valuable land.
• Indigenous people are frequently used as an experimental population for the testing of welfare policies before they are implemented on wider society, e.g. income management and cashless welfare cards. The state can act with the utmost cruelty against them and get away with just as it has done with the NT Intervention. It is no secret that as a result of their exclusion from working life, many indigenous people are dependent on the dole — this is a tendency seen consistently since early colonialism. As a result, an important element of racism in Australia has been the resentment towards indigenous people for being “unproductive” and “lazy”, and this has always manifested itself among the resentful white working class time and again. More attention needs to be given to struggles centered around welfare, attempts at sabotaging or blocking such welfare experiments, and demands for dole freedom.⁴⁷ Rather than supporting policies by “progressive” politicians that will promise “development” and jobs for indigenous people on national parks, mines, oil/gas refineries or government admin (i.e. jobs for jobs sake), should we instead focus on fighting for the unemployed, and those deemed unnecessary by the labor market? This is a key element of the integration that would help to bring down resentful racist divisions in the working class.
• Some things are not salvageable. The disconnection of indigenous people from their traditional mode of living is real and mostly permanent. Some cultural practices remain but they are relics disconnected from the society that produced them. There is no way that people can go back to pre-colonial existence. To propose that you can, after a magical process of “decolonization”, is pure voluntarism, and radically understates the effects of colonization, and the permeation of the market into every aspect of life. Modernity must be accepted as the starting point of our politics. Proposals for some sort of infra-political cultural revival (like that advocated by Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance⁴⁸) within a perspective of “decolonization” will be at best futile in uniting and liberating indigenous people from racial oppression and at worst reactionary and have little relation to the reality of the largely proletarianized and urbanized indigenous people, creating a cultural veneer on the same capitalist social relations seen everywhere.
• The best thing a communist program can do for indigenous people in white settler states is, in addition to destroying the nation-state and its repressive apparatus in the dictatorship of the proletariat, is to meet universal demands — housing, healthcare, education, safety from violence, and others — that serve to eradicate uneven development, which is currently experienced most acutely along racial divisions. We are concerned here with lifting the status of the most excluded section of the proletariat, whose basic needs are hardly being met and who are faced with the violence of the state on a daily basis. No amount of infra-political “cultural” revival will deal with that. Just as the programs to lift the global south out of underdevelopment will be something that will need to start in the “first hundred days” of world revolution, so will the dictatorship of the proletariat have to give priority to pour a lot of resources into addressing the uneven development within a rich country like Australia, giving indigenous people for once, the real benefits of modernity that they have been excluded from. Modernity, socialist central planning, and the scientific mastery of nature are the ways to achieve this, not separatism and a return to tradition. These measures, however, must be implemented in a way in which the indigenous communities have control over how it is done, and this is compatible with the “self-government of localities” that is an essential part of communist republicanism. A degree of cultural autonomy is also compatible with this, for example, school lessons in the language, songs, and history of the local indigenous community.

A Fresh View

What matters for a communist organization and the development of our political positions is to prioritize programmatic unity over theoretical unity. This means that as long as we can practically work together, share a common set of basic positions and have a minimum basis for productive dialogue, having different theoretical explanations for different political “questions” is fine.

It is not enough to take the right “positions” and then to go into fruitless activism. The state machine is too powerful for large protests to stop wars. The state machine at the very least needs to be threatened to halt a war, but ultimately the state must be smashed and the rule of the bourgeoisie brought to an end in order to bring an end to war. The dictatorship of the proletariat that smashes it will be international and anti-national, not producing new national sovereignties, or it will fail.

Programs for returning what was “stolen” to “rightful owners” as a way of dealing with the national question has nothing to do with communism. It reduces a question of democratic rights to a question of land redistribution. If anything it has more in common with the Proudhonism which Marx critiqued in The Poverty of Philosophy. Communists do not wish to return lands to “rightful owners” any more than we want proletarians to reverse the passage of time and go “back to the land” as their peasant ancestors used to live. Rather we wish to abolish property, and nations. It should not be controversial for us to say that we want anyone to live wherever they damn well please. Yes, this means Africans and Arabs living in Europe, just as much as Jews living in Palestine. We have no place for reactionary appeals to ancestry or tradition, and ethno-racial claims to land. A socialist cosmopolitanism is essential, especially in an epoch where right-wing nationalism is in the ascendancy.

We wish to do away with the nation-state, something that some advocates of “decolonization” wish to do, but that does not mean that we advocate for backward social forms and petty localism e.g. tribal “self-rule”. ⁴⁹The communist goal is the universal liberation of humanity. With the overcoming of the capitalist system, there is no reason to group people into clans, tribes, nations, races and so on. National and racial oppression can only be finally overcome by negating the material conditions that enable them, not by fostering new nationalisms to compete with existing ones.

Even if previously it may have been justified for communists to make exception to their guiding principle of class-political independence of the proletariat and to support the bourgeois revolution, which took a national form, it is not the task of communists to liberate or build nations, in other words, to conduct the program of the bourgeoisie. Just because a certain historical endeavor (liberation of the colonies) was progressive did not mean that communists should necessarily have supported it, because ultimately it is our duty to take the side of the proletariat wherever it is. Bourgeois progress has been done enough and trying to further it would get in the way of our task, which is to participate in and enhance the international proletariat’s struggle to overthrow this system once and for all.

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1. E.g. International Communist Current (ICC), International Communist Tendency (ICT), and more recent groups like that around the Intransigence journal.
2. The two terms are often used in a related fashion, with national liberation seen as a strategy of anti-imperialism. This does not mean that communists who do not support national liberation movements cannot be opposed to imperialism as a necessary part of our strategy to overthrow the capitalist system.
3. Fredy Perlman, “The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism” (1984) 
4. Loren Goldner, “Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today” (2005)
5. see Macnair’s and Goldner’s commentaries on this
6. Comparison could be made to Marx’s over the top anti-Russian attitude (much like the anti-American attitude of the post-war left), seeing Russia as the absolute evil, the ultimate threat against revolution, towards which all other empires and nation-states were merely relatively evil, and framing his positions on the national question. This kind of attitude often expresses itself in a conspiracy-theory way of looking at politics e.g. the “continuous secret collaboration between the Cabinets of London and St. Petersburg” (“Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century”, quoted in Andrew Coates, “Imperialism, Anti-Imperialism and the Left: A Reply to Andrew Murray”).
7. In this regard, they were internationalists, regardless of the flaws in their positions on the national question. Left groups who side with reactionaries in demonstrations, which echo slogans like “British jobs for British workers” or “Multinationals Out!”, also lack a critique of the nation-state. Communists, more than anyone, are the ultimate supporters of a globalized world. We should be terrifying to right-wing “anti-globalist” conspiracy theorists!
8. Cameron Wilson, “Rethinking Aboriginal Australia’s Agricultural Past”, Bush Telegraph (2014.05.15)

   This is quite interesting as the British settled in Australia using a legal justification of terra nullius. Clearly, this is false, the Australian land mass was occupied by indigenous people for over 40000 years. But one thing that Europeans used to give a case for terra nullius was the lack of any cultivation of the land or any built structures indicating “settlement”. This too is false as recent archaeological evidence, which includes built structures, has shown. It seems, unfortunately, that the process of colonization has concealed this fascinating history. What is clear is that while many indigenous people lived a nomadic hunter-gatherer life prior to Invasion (the European descriptions of indigenous Tasmanians for example), some did indeed practice cultivation and fish-farming that went way beyond simply “fire-stick farming” — how well these practices were sustained and whether or not they developed social hierarchies as a result of increased surpluses is still an open question. Characterizing the Australian aborigines as living in “primitive communism” as Engels did is simply no longer adequate.

9. Of different kinds of course: there were differences in access to communal land, different amounts of private ownership and dependence on the market. I use it in a pretty wide sense. See the “Peasants and Their Struggles” section of “Background: Genesis of Zerowork #1” for differences and nuances in the category of peasants.
10. Luke Young, “Cambodian Political History: The Case of Penn Sovann”, Monthly Review (2013.11.01)
11. E.g. Bordiga referring to Mao, Ho Chi Minh etc. as “great romantic revolutionaries” (“Communism is the Material Human Community“)
12. “If we find in the history of modern societies “national” movements, and struggles for “national interests,” these are usually class movements of the ruling strata of the bourgeoisie, which can in any given case represent the interest of the other strata of the population only insofar as under the form of “national interests” it defends progressive forms of historical development, and insofar as the working class has not yet distinguished itself from the mass of the “nation” (led by the bourgeoisie) into an independent, enlightened political class…In this sense, the French bourgeoisie had the right to come forth as the third estate in the Great Revolution in the name of the French people, and even the German bourgeoisie in 1848 could still regard themselves, to a certain degree, as the representatives of the German “nation” – although The Communist Manifesto and, in part, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung were already the indicators of a distinct class politics of the proletariat in Germany. In both cases this meant only that the revolutionary class concern of the bourgeoisie was, at that stage of social development, the concern of the class of people who still formed, with the bourgeoisie, a politically uniform mass in relation to reigning feudalism.” Rosa Luxemburg, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, The National Question (1909)
13. The most severe occurred in Cambodia where the whole nation had to be sacrificed to produce rice for export, the resulting monies would, then, it was planned, be used to industrialize the country. See Gruppen Gegen Kapital und Nation, “‘If we have rice, we can have everything’: a Critique of Khmer Rouge Ideology and Practice” (2011.06.03).
14. Wildcat, “Das Ende der Entwicklungsdiktaturen” [“The End of the Developmental Dictatorships”], Wildcat-Zirkular №65 (2003.02).
    Wildcat, “Global Working Class“, Wildcat №98 (2015).
15. Friends of the Classless Society, “Venezuela and the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’”, Kosmoprolet №1
16. Lafif Lakhdar, “Why the Reversion to Islamic Archaism?”, Khamsin №8 (1981.07.10)
17. Ngo Van, In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (2010 [2000 & 2005])
18. ICC, “Nation or Class?” (2006 [1975])
19. ICC, “China 1927: Last Gasp of the World Revolution”, World Revolution №11 (2007 [1977])
20. Frank Fernández, “Castroism and Confrontation (1959–1961)”, Cuban Anarchism: the History of a Movement (2001)
21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983).
22. “‘Revolution Within Revolution’: How and Why Kurdish Women are Fighting ISIS”, Russia Today (2015.06.21)
23. Sara R. Farris, “The Intersectional Conundrum and the Nation-State”, Viewpoint Magazine (2015.05.04)
24. See Wildcat’s articles on this topic: “Beyond the Peasant International”, Wildcat №82 (2008) and “Global Working Class”.
25. Neil Davidson and Benjamin Birbaum, “State and Nation: An Interview with Neil Davidson”, Viewpoint Magazine (2016.04.25)
26. Referring to the Austro-Marxist position on the national question. See Michael Löwy’s article, “Marxists and the National Question”, New Left Review №96 (1976.03–04)
    

    Löwy’s (and others’) critiques of Marx’s and Engels’ position on the national question focuses on the problem of “non-historic nations” (which was raised primarily by Engels). While the idea is clearly mystical and bogus, Löwy does not seem to realize what Neil Davidson pointed out: “national movements which relied on the great empires for their existence, such as pan-Slavism in 1848, had to be opposed. It is of course possible to agree with the latter conclusion with[out] accepting the mystified nonsense about “non-historic nations” [emphasis mine] that Engels sometimes used to support it.” Löwy (not just in this text but in others) thus misses the point, and does not fully grasp the perspective of Marx and Engels which informed their attitude to the national question, instead he accepts all this idealist bullshit about what “subjectively” makes up a “nation”, and how the “national culture” (a reactionary idea if I have ever heard one) of “oppressed peoples” in itself is something for socialists to value. In other ostensible Marxists’ perspectives we see an abandonment of Marx and Engel’s historical perspective in favor of ethical, legalistic, and cultural-essentialist views of nations, for example the “rights” of nations (however defined) to “self-determination” would be absolute anathema to someone like Marx who had already, since the 1840s, been making a critique of bourgeois right, and whose class schema questions the very integrity of “nationhood”.

27. Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile: Political Writings (1973 [1848–1861]).
    See also: Donny Schraffenberger, “Karl Marx and the American Civil War”, International Socialist Review №80(2011.11).
28. “In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.” Capital, Vol. 1, p. 414 (1976 [1867])
29. “The Rights of Nations to Self-Determination“
    “It is easy to see what would have been the historical outcome of the victory of the Hungarians because the social and national conditions of that country insured the absolute domination of the Magyar minority over the mixed majority of the other, subjugated nationalities.”
30. Ibid.
31. Internationalist Perspective, “Internationalist Perspective and the Tradition of the Communist Left“, Internationalist Perspective №58–59 (2013–2014)
32. Mike Macnair, “The Misconceptions Around ‘Anti-Imperialism’” (2013.03.12),  and ‘”Anti-Imperialist United Front’: No Inherent Connection with the Working Class”, Weekly Worker №954 (2013.03.21)
33. See the parts about the anti-war movement in Aufheben, “Croissants and Roses: New Labour, Communalism, and the Rise of Muslim Britain”, Aufheben №17 (2009).
34. Also known as OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka).
35. Defeatist in the sense of opposing one’s own country’s war effort even if it results in that country’s defeat. This is the sense of the term in the context of the Zimmerwald conference, Lenin’s proposal of revolutionary defeatism, “turning the imperialist war into the class war” etc.
36. The Piping Shrike, “Caught in a Racial Trap” (2012.01.26). It is worth noting that these same racial powers are the basis upon which Australian indigenous land claims (native title) are currently established.
37. Trollope’s Australia (1966), pp. 134-142.
38. Quoted on p. 333 in Colin Tatz, “Genocide in Australia”, Journal of Genocide Research vol. 1 №3 (1999), 315-352. http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/99.pdf
39. There have been historical debates on whether this or that constitutes genocide. Regardless, the fact is that many indigenous people were killed off, through disease, through starvation, through massacres for the conquest of land and that their traditional mode of existence (whether they were hunter-gatherers or horticultural or agricultural societies) was completely, irreversibly wiped out. Genocide is almost too weak and simple of a word to describe such destruction.
40. Australia Institute of Health and Welfare, “Life Expectancy” in “Deaths in Australia” (2018.07.18) 
    https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/life-expectancy-death/deaths-in-australia/contents/life-expectancy
41. Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, “Healthy Lives”, Closing the Gap: Prime Minister’s Report 2018
42. “1.30  Aboriginal and Torres Strait people represent just 3% of the Australian population, but account for 27% of the adult prison population. The rate of incarceration has increased by 77% between 2000 and 2015. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women represent 34% of the female prison population while comprising just 2.2% of Australian women. Since the RCIADIC [Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody], the rate at which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are imprisoned has more than doubled, with men are being imprisoned at 11 times the rate of the general male population, and women at more than 15 times the rate of non-Indigenous women.

    1.31  There are also particular areas in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are disproportionately represented in the prison population. For example, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander offenders are more likely to be sentenced to short terms of imprisonment than their non-Indigenous counterparts, with a national median aggregate sentence length of 2 years, compared to 3.5 years for non-Indigenous prisoners. Hence, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are being incarcerated for lower order crimes for which diversion and rehabilitation may be a more appropriate response.”
    Australian Law Reform Commission, Incarceration Rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (DP 84) (2017.07.19) 

43. A few indigenous nations have even been declared independent. Creative Spirits, “Aboriginal Nations Declaring Independence”
44. This is good general introduction to the treaty issue: Creative Spirits, “Would a Treaty Help Aboriginal Self-Determination?”
45. Demands for indigenous recognition in the constitution, e.g. the Recognise campaign, have largely been denounced by the left and found dismal support from the indigenous population, because it is pretty clear that it will not achieve anything. That is why it was not included in the list. It is worth clarifying that the treaty advocates have nothing in common with recognition advocates.
46. “Contrary to popular belief, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population predominantly lives in Australia’s most populous areas, with about 60 per cent living in major cities and inner regional areas, and just over 20 per cent living in remote and very remote areas,” Mr Jarvis said.” Australia Bureau of Statistics, “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Population Nearing 700,000” (2013.08.30)
47. See, for example: Aufheben, Dole Autonomy Versus the Re-Imposition of Work (1998)
48. Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR), “Manifesto” (2014.11.12)
    Their slogan is “Resist. Revive. Decolonise.”
49. Ashish Kothari & Pallav Das, “Power in India: Radical Pathways to Self-Rule”, ROAR Magazine (2016.01.20)