The National Question in Our Programme¶
Core Argument¶
In the draft programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, the demand for “recognition of the right to self-determination for all nations forming part of the state” was included. An earlier clarification in Iskra had established that social-democrats oppose external interference in national self-determination, but are not bound to support every demand for it. The principal task is the self-determination of the proletariat within each nationality, not of nations as wholes, and the closest unity of the proletariat across nationalities must be pursued. Support for new class states or looser federal arrangements is permissible only in isolated, exceptional cases.
The Polish Socialist Party (PSP) protested this explanation, accusing it of vagueness and anarchism. Lenin counters that recognising a right does not oblige support for every exercise of it, just as recognising the right to form associations does not commit social-democrats to supporting any particular association. The PSP’s demand for unconditional national independence is a bourgeois-democratic phrase that obscures the class struggle. Marx and Engels, and later Kautsky, treated the Polish question conditionally, subordinating it to the class interests of the international proletariat. The historical context has changed: Poland is no longer the revolutionary vanguard, and St. Petersburg is now the more important revolutionary centre. The restoration of Poland before socialism is highly improbable but not absolutely impossible; the programme therefore does not tie the party’s hands but insists that a genuinely socialist party must not corrupt proletarian class-consciousness with bourgeois-democratic phrases or break the unity of the proletariat’s present political struggle. The PSP’s approach, which seeks to weaken tsarism by wresting Poland from it rather than by overthrowing it alongside the Russian proletariat, divides the proletariat and sacrifices its vital interests to bourgeois nationalism. The estrangement between working classes of different nationalities is a great evil; the solution is centralised organisation and complete unity, not separate parties or federation.
Lenin’s footnotes identify key publications and figures. Przedświt was the magazine of the PSP. Revolutsionnaya Rossiya was the paper of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, a petty-bourgeois party of agrarian socialists. Karl Kautsky, a leading theoretician of the SPD and Second International, later abandoned revolutionary Marxism. Die Neue Zeit was the SPD’s theoretical organ. Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung, edited by Marx in 1848-49, is described by Lenin as the unsurpassed organ of the revolutionary proletariat. Arnold Ruge, a Young Hegelian, briefly co-edited the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher with Marx. Lenin quotes Engels on the Polish question from 1848. Jarosław Dąbrowski and Walery Wróblewski were leaders of the 1863-64 Polish uprising who later became generals of the Paris Commune. Franz Mehring, a German communist, helped found the Spartacus League. Finally, Lenin refers to the crushing of the Paris Commune, noting that the Government of National Defence, which Marx called the ‘Government of National Defection’, failed to arm the workers for fear of revolution.