Lenin on the National Question¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s approach to the national question was rooted in an uncompromising class analysis, rejecting any form of nationalism—whether that of the oppressor or the oppressed—as a bourgeois diversion from the international unity of the proletariat. The chapter argues that Lenin opposed the very concept of an ‘official’ state language or any privileged status for a particular nationality, seeing such measures as instruments of inequality. However, he was equally hostile to the reactionary exclusiveness of the petty bourgeoisie of oppressed nationalities, who demanded ‘national-cultural autonomy’ and glorified their own language and culture as a cover for their own oppressive ambitions. Lenin insisted that the slogan of workers’ democracy was not ‘national culture’ but the international culture of democracy and the working-class movement.
The chapter draws heavily on Lenin’s Critical Remarks on the National Question and The National Programme of the RSDLP. It reproduces his fundamental Marxist proposition that every nation contains both bourgeois culture—dominant and reactionary—and rudimentary elements of democratic and socialist culture arising from the conditions of the toiling masses. The demand for a general ‘national culture’ is therefore a bourgeois fiction that obscures class divisions. Lenin polemicises directly against the Bundists, who advocated cultural-national autonomy and separate schools on national lines, which he condemned as the most refined and harmful form of nationalism, anti-democratic in its segregation of children by nationality.
Against this, Lenin advanced the demand for the right to self-determination, a democratic principle that no nation should be held within another state against its will. Yet the chapter stresses that this did not oblige Marxists to defend separatism. Lenin explicitly stated that, all other conditions being equal, big states are preferable to small ones. The nation-state, like private property, is an obsolete institution. The proletariat welcomes the assimilation of nations, provided it is not founded on force or privilege. The ultimate goal is not new frontiers but the elimination of all frontiers in a socialist united states of the world.
The chapter emphasises Lenin’s insistence that Marxists of an oppressor nation—the Great Russians—must fight their own bourgeoisie’s oppressive policies and defend the rights of the oppressed. This was necessary to demonstrate to non-Russian workers that Russian workers had no interest in keeping them in chains. The slogan of self-determination was thus a means to secure the unity of the working class across national lines, not a concession to separatism. Lenin was implacably opposed to separate organisations for workers of oppressed nationalities, demanding instead the unconditional unity and complete amalgamation of workers of all nationalities in all working-class organisations—party, trade union, cooperative, and educational. The chapter concludes that Lenin never made the slightest concession to nationalism, including that of the oppressed, and that his entire line of argument was motivated by a burning belief in internationalism and the revolutionary mission of the proletariat.