Resolutions of the Summer 1913 Joint Conference of the Central Committee of the RSDLP and Party Officials¶
Core Argument¶
The Summer 1913 Joint Conference of the Central Committee and Party Officials produced a resolution on the national question that constitutes a definitive Marxist intervention against the rising tide of nationalism afflicting both the Russian state and the social-democratic movement itself. The core argument is that the working class can only wage a successful struggle against international capital and reaction through the amalgamation of workers of all nationalities into single, united proletarian organisations—political, trade union, co-operative, and educational. This unity is presented as the indispensable condition for combating the anti-proletarian aspirations of landowners, clergy, and bourgeois nationalists who cloak their agenda in the slogan of ‘national culture’.
The resolution draws on the RSDLP Programme as its theoretical foundation and responds directly to concrete political threats: the orgy of Black-Hundred nationalism, the growth of nationalist tendencies among the liberal bourgeoisie, and—critically—the attempts by the Caucasian social-democrats, the Bund, and the liquidators to annul the party programme by claiming that ‘cultural-national autonomy’ was compatible with it. The conference therefore polemicises sharply against the plan for ‘cultural-national’ autonomy, or the creation of institutions guaranteeing freedom for national development, which it identifies as the programme of all Jewish bourgeois parties and petty-bourgeois opportunist elements among the various nations. Such a division of educational affairs according to nationalities is denounced as harmful to democracy and to the proletarian class struggle.
The resolution advances a series of key claims. National peace under capitalism is attainable only under a consistently democratic republic that guarantees full equality of all nations and languages, recognises no compulsory official language, provides schools in all native languages, and prohibits any privileges whatsoever to any one nation. This requires wide regional autonomy and fully democratic local self-government, with boundaries determined by local inhabitants on the basis of economic and social conditions and national make-up. On the right of nations to self-determination—secession and independent statehood—the party must unquestionably champion this right, dictated by the unprecedented national oppression of the tsarist monarchy and by the struggle of Great-Russian inhabitants themselves for freedom, which requires eradicating Black-Hundred Great-Russian nationalism backed by traditions of bloody suppression and fostered by tsarism, reactionary parties, and Great-Russian bourgeois liberals. However, the right to self-determination must not be confused with the expediency of a given nation’s secession, which must be decided on its merits in each case according to the interests of social development and the proletarian class struggle. A warning is issued that landowners, clergy, and bourgeoisie of oppressed nations often use nationalist slogans to divide workers and dupe them while doing deals with the ruling nation’s exploiters.