Issued by the Central Committee of the RCP for Discussion in the Party¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, issued by the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party for internal party discussion, advances a rigorous Trotskyist analysis of the national question in the context of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. Its core argument is that a genuine struggle for national freedom is impossible under capitalism and imperialism; it must be subordinated to and integrated with the programme of socialist revolution and the construction of a United Socialist States of Europe. The party condemns national oppression universally, refusing to limit its critique to Nazi Germany. It explicitly targets the hypocrisy of the Allied powers, denouncing the national oppression carried out by French, Belgian, Dutch, British, and American imperialists, particularly those operating under the cover of democracy.
The chapter’s key polemical thrust is directed against three interrelated forces: Stalinism, Social Democracy, and the bourgeois-led national resistance movements in Europe. It argues that the European ruling classes, having collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, now serve as agents of Anglo-American imperialism and the Kremlin. The Stalinist and social-democratic parties are condemned as counter-revolutionary for subordinating the working class to bourgeois leadership. The resistance movements themselves, despite containing thousands of sincere proletarian fighters, are dismissed as agencies of one or another imperialist power, incapable of delivering genuine national freedom. The party advocates for implacable hostility toward these movements’ leadership while simultaneously pursuing a tactic of entryism—sending revolutionary cadres into the resistance to build a conscious proletarian opposition and win the best militants for the socialist revolution.
The chapter draws heavily on the Marxist theory of permanent revolution, asserting that the bourgeoisie in all European countries has outlived its progressive historical role. In the West, the bourgeois-democratic revolution is long completed; in the Balkans, the bourgeoisie is incapable of completing it due to its ties to landed property and its fear of a militant proletariat. Any future bourgeois-democratic phase would be unstable and constitute, in essence, a bourgeois counter-revolution. The party therefore rejects as a petty-bourgeois deviation the notion that Nazi domination levelled class distinctions or that the next revolutionary phase is equivalent to a democratic revolution to be led by the proletariat. Transitional democratic slogans—Constituent Assembly, freedom of press and speech, soviets—must be inscribed within the socialist programme, not treated as independent goals.
The chapter concludes by addressing the national question within the Soviet Union. It condemns the Great-Russian Stalinist bureaucracy for stifling the national aspirations of Ukrainians, Balts, and other minorities. While supporting the right of these nations to secede, it insists that secession is a reactionary utopia unless conceived as part of a struggle for Soviet democracy, the overthrow of Stalinism, and unification with the United Socialist States of Europe. Ultimately, the chapter asserts that national self-determination is an illusion under imperialism and capitalism; only the proletariat, united under the Fourth International, can solve the national and socialist problems through revolutionary class struggle.