Nationalism and the 'national question'

This series: The Northern Ireland crisis of 1968-9 and the left Part 4 Part 1: Why Northern Ireland Broke Down Part 2: The Irish Workers' Group, I S and the "Trotskyist Tendency" Part 3: Why Northern Ireland Split on Communal, Not Class, Lines Part 4: When militant sloganeering meant promoting communal war Part 5: When socialists looked to "Catholic Power" ; and Part 5 Section 2 Part 6: SWP (IS) and Northern Ireland in 1968-9: Advocating civil war — until it starts! ; and Section 2 Part 7: The end of the old order in Northern Ireland ; Section 2 ; Section 3 Part 8: IS/SWP conference, September...

The history of capitalism is filled with examples of nations conquering nations, taking control of territories, plundering economies, downgrading language and culture and treating the conquered peoples as less than equal. Russia under the Tsar was a "prison-house of nations": the ethnic Russian majority oppressed other nationalities within that country mercilessly. One of Lenin's big contributions to Marxism was consistent democracy on the national question. "We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part...

What follows is a summary of the political and ideological traditions on which Workers’ Liberty and Solidarity base ourselves. Isaac Newton famously summed up the importance of studying, learning, and building on forerunners. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, he wrote, referring to René Descartes, his contemporary Robert Hooke, and presumably also to his direct predecessor Isaac Barrow. In science few people think they can neglect the “tradition” and rely on improvisation. In politics, alas, too many. The summary here, written in 1995, starts as...

1. An abstract or formal conception of the question of equality in general and national equality in particular is characteristic of the bourgeois democracy by its very nature. Under the pretence of the equality of the human person in general, bourgeois democracy proclaims the formal legal equality of the proprietor and the proletarian, of the exploiter and the exploited, and thus deceives the oppressed classes in the highest degree. The idea of equality, which is itself a reflection of the relations of commodity production, is transformed by the bourgeoisie, under the pretext of the absolute...

The Theses on the National and Colonial Question of the Second Congress of the Communist International, which met in July-August 1920, are one of the most important documents of revolutionary socialism. We reprint this text over on page 16. They were drafted by Lenin and amended in important respects by the Congress. The world dealt with in the resolution has long ago passed into history, bar a remnant here and there. It was a world of great colonial empires ruled from London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Lisbon. (The Dutch had a large empire in the East Indies, now Indonesia; the Belgians...

These are two of Lenin's most important pamphlets on the question: The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914); and The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up (1916). Trotsky sums up the Bolsheviks' ideas and practice in The Problem of Nationalities , a chapter from The History of the Russian Revolution . Most of Luxemburg's writings on the national question are not available online, but The Junius Pamphlet, Chapter 7 sketches of the basics of her approach. For ideas from the AWL on some national conflicts today, see links on this site for Israel-Palestine and Ireland .