Communist International 1920 Theses on the national and colonial question
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...