The National Programme of the RSDLP¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s 1913 article, written in the wake of the Central Committee Conference resolution on the national question, argues that the national programme of the RSDLP is not a peripheral matter but a direct expression of the party’s fundamental struggle against petty-bourgeois opportunism. The core narrative thrust is that the national question has re-emerged because of the counter-revolutionary period after 1905, and that the party must defend its existing programme—specifically Section 9 on the right of nations to self-determination—against two distinct but equally dangerous deviations.
Lenin establishes the historical and theoretical context by tracing the formation of Russian Social-Democracy. Unlike in Europe, the party took shape before and during the bourgeois revolution, and its internal struggles were not primarily over Marxism itself (which had already triumphed theoretically) but over petty-bourgeois theories disguised in “almost Marxist” phrases. He draws a direct line from Economism and legal Marxism through Menshevism to liquidationism, arguing that the same pattern of opportunist deviation recurs on the national question. The old Iskra (1901-03) had to fight the nationalist waverings of the Bund, while at the Second Congress in 1903, Polish social-democrats—Rosa Luxemburg in particular—tried to cast doubt on the right to self-determination. Ten years later, the struggle continues along these same two lines.
The key polemic is directed against two targets. First, the Bund and its allies, who have adopted the Austrian programme of “cultural-national autonomy” from Otto Bauer. Lenin dismisses this as the most refined and harmful nationalism, corrupting workers with the slogan of national culture and anti-democratic school segregation. He notes that even the Austrian Social-Democrats rejected cultural-national autonomy at Brünn in 1899, adopting only territorial autonomy as a compromise. In backward Russia, he charges, the microbes of West-European opportunism produce whole epidemics: Bauer’s “forgetfulness of internationalism” has given rise to the complete acceptance of cultural-national autonomy by all Jewish bourgeois parties and petty-bourgeois trends.
Second, Lenin attacks the liquidators, represented by Semkovsky, who echo Rosa Luxemburg’s proposal to remove Section 9 from the programme. He ridicules Semkovsky’s confusion over whether a central parliament should vote for or against secession, pointing out that the right to self-determination means the seceding region decides for itself—just as Norway decided its secession from Sweden in 1905. The denial of this right, Lenin insists, plays into the hands of reactionary Great-Russian nationalism, which oppresses 57 per cent of the population. He cites Plekhanov’s 1903 defence of the draft programme: to abandon the demand for self-determination would make the slogan “Workers of all countries, unite!” a shameful lie. The article concludes that denying this right in present-day Russia is undoubted opportunism and a refusal to fight the still all-powerful Great-Russian nationalism of tsarism.