[Part of Groundings in the Communist World Outlook. Click here for the table of contents.]

Introduction

• When communists use the phrase “the national question,” we’re referring to the way the world is divided into separate nations, how some of those nations oppress other nations, how oppressed nations can liberate themselves, and how we can get beyond the division of the world into nations.
• Even without any theoretical and historical understanding of the national question, we all see how the US exploits and oppresses other nations around the world, and how in the US there is a division between the white oppressor nation and oppressed nations and nationalities such as Black people, Indigenous people, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Mexican immigrants, etc.
• This session will first lay down a theoretical and historical understanding of the national question, and then analyze how the national question plays out in the world and in the US today and explain how communist revolution can answer “the national question,” i.e., get rid of national oppression and the division of the world into nations.

Nation formation (theoretical)

• Nations are a historically constituted social formation tied with the rise of capitalism. They are fundamentally a bourgeois form of social organization, driven by the bourgeoisie’s need for a unified home market, where its capital is accumulated.
• Prior to capitalism, there were different ways of organizing human societies (examples: gatherer-hunters, city-states, empires with a power center and periphery with people of different cultures, feudal lordships, etc.).
• The rising bourgeoisie drew on pre-existing forms of organization, territorial boundaries, and culture, and also consciously constructed borders, organization, and culture to cohere modern nations and states that governed them. Example of consciously constructing the nation: the rise of the newspaper, which used a common language and created a common discourse to unify people into a nation. Nation construction involved flattening differences, assimilation to the common language and culture, and forcible incorporation into the common territory.
• The result was nations (e.g., England, France, the United States): (relatively) stable communities of people with a common language, territory, economic life, and culture.
• All those aspects of nations are crucial to forming a unified home market. The bourgeoisie needs a common language to advertise products, needs a unified territory as a unit for production and distribution, etc.
• This makes the nation a bourgeois form of social organization, and something us communists are ultimately trying to get beyond to create a world community of freely associated people, without borders or national divisions.
• Theoretical note, especially to those leading the discussion: Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question is a largely correct exposition of the national question, but it tends to ignore the subjective aspect of nation formation (how the bourgeoisie cohered people into nations through conscious ideological and political work and territorial conquest), instead explaining the characteristics of nations in a way that suggests them to be pre-existing, objective phenomena.

Nation formation (historical)

• Nation formation started with the rise of capitalism in Western Europe, in countries where the bourgeoisie became the dominant class: the Netherlands, England, France.
• In the nineteenth century, the process of nation formation was brought to a conclusion almost everywhere in Europe. For example, Italy and Germany were latecomers, going through national unification movements that brought together different people into a unified territory and went from various dialects to a common language. (Theoretical note: the subjective factor in nation formation tends to be more evident in latecomers.)
• Nation formation was a process of uneven development, within Europe and around the world. That uneven development was the basis for oppressor nations, oppressed nations, and national minorities.
• Within nations, there remained people who were not fully part of, or oppressed as a people within, the “unified nation,” and they became oppressed nations and national minorities within the nation-states they lived in. Examples in Europe: Jews, Gypsies. In the US: Black people, Indigenous people, Chicanos.
• In the world as a whole, established capitalist nation-states joined in a longer imperialist history of domination over foreign peoples and territories. The bourgeoisie spread the nation as a form of social organization around the world through imperialism. European settlers formed new nations in some parts of the world (the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Peoples who were dominated by imperialism were constituted into oppressed nations, usually through a process that started with colonial control and today takes the form of formally independent nation-states under imperialist domination. Examples: Angola, Puerto Rico (not independent), the Philippines, etc.
• Colonial borders were imposed by foreign imperialists, and drew together people from different cultures. Colonies and the independent states that were formed out of them usually wound up having one dominant nation within them and various nationalities in subordinate positions. Examples: Mestizos and whites vs. Indigenous and Black people in Latin America, the Tutsi vs. Hutu divide in Rwanda.
• Migration has increased with the rise and consolidation of capitalism as a global system. When immigrants from an oppressed nation move to an imperialist country, they are either assimilated into the dominant nation (the Irish becoming white in the US) or become an oppressed nationality within their new home country (Mexicans in the US, Pakistanis in England).
• The result of uneven development in nation formation is two basic divisions:
  • On a world scale, between imperialist countries and oppressed countries
  • Within multi-national nation-states, between a dominant, oppressor nation and oppressed nations and nationalities

How does communist revolution go about eliminating the division between imperialist and oppressor nations vs. oppressed nations and nationalities?

• We uphold the right of nations to self-determination. Oppressed nations have the right to cast off foreign domination and national oppression and determine their own destiny.
• The right of nations to self-determination, however, is not the horizon we are fighting for. It is fundamentally a bourgeois right. But it remains a crucial and just struggle so long as there are oppressed nations.
• We advocate and fight for communism, a world beyond divisions into nations, and to get there we build multinational and international organizations and multinational socialist states. Our world outlook is proletarian internationalism: We are internationalists, fighting for the interests of an international class, the proletariat.
• How to apply those two principles (right of self-determination, fighting for a communism) has long been a subject of controversy, with two basic errors: liquidating the national question and just seeing the struggle as a purely class struggle, or tailing nationalism by substituting the communist outlook with a nationalist one (or tailing a nationalist one). The second error is the more common one among people attracted to our politics today.

What do those principles mean for us in the US? Let’s take this up first in relation to the division in the world between imperialist countries and oppressed countries, and then in relation to internal workings of the multinational US nation-state.

The US is today the world’s top imperialist power. The Manifesto of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries starts out by laying down how the US became top imperialist power through wars of aggression and exploiting the world’s people and resources. The moral and strategic implications of that fact are that, to quote the Manifesto, “communists in the US have a particular responsibility to oppose US imperialism and stand with the oppressed people of the world against the US imperialist bourgeoisie. Thus communists must expose the many crimes of US imperialism and develop anti-imperialist resistance ‘behind enemy lines,’ especially against US military intervention and wars of aggression. Doing so can not only put a wrench in the functioning of the US war machine, but can also challenge the people of the US to oppose their own bourgeoisie and recognize that the privileges we have in the US rest on the backs and blood of the oppressed nations. Communists are revolutionary defeatists—we welcome the defeats suffered by ‘our’ bourgeoisie and train the masses in internationalism. Besides opposing ‘our own’ bourgeoisie, internationalism also means extending political support to and conducting propaganda among the people of the US about revolutionary struggles and people’s wars around the world.”

After the revolution, our internationalism leads us to the position that, in the words of the Manifesto, “There is nothing sacred about the current borders of the US. Puerto Rico, Guam, and other US territories will be granted immediate independence after the revolution. The borders of the new socialist territory, established by the outcome of revolutionary civil war, will only serve to defend the proletariat’s power against bourgeois forces seeking to bring back capitalism, and never to oppress other nations.”

Now let’s focus on the national question in relation to the internal dynamics of the US. The Manifesto explains that: “Founded on the genocide of indigenous people, theft of their land, and the exploitation of slaves kidnapped from Africa, the US expanded through numerous trails of tears, blood, and exploitation, ultimately consolidating its North American territory through a war of aggression against Mexico.”

The result of this history is that the US is a multinational state with a dominant white oppressor nation and various oppressed nations and nationalities within its borders. The best way to understand this fact is to examine the Black national question:

• Black people were forged into an oppressed nation through being brought here as slaves, forced into a common economic life (plantation slavery), language (English, with African inflections), and territory (the US South), with a common culture emerging on that basis.
• The Civil War ended slavery. It could have led to self-determination for Black people and full democratic rights, but instead the Southern plantation aristocracy was restored and the masses of Black people were exploited as sharecroppers, while discrimination and national oppression reigned in the North.
• The next historical change was the Great Migration, where millions of Black people moved from the rural South to cities in the Northeast, Midwest, West, and South from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s. This transformed the Black nation. The agrarian question was eliminated, with sharecroppers going out of existence as a class. Most Black people migrating from the rural South became proletarians, concentrated in the lowest rungs of the proletariat, but class differentiation among Black people increased.
• Resolution/non-resolution to the Black national question in the 1960s: the struggle of Black people resulted in an end to legal segregation and discrimination and the granting of formal democratic rights to Black people. But Black people remained an oppressed nation, still facing discrimination and national oppression, and concentrated in the lowest rungs of the proletariat.
• Since then, the oppressed Black nation has become more geographically dispersed, but is still concentrated in Black proletarian neighborhoods (and a few mixed class or middle-class ones). The South is still a place of importance to the Black nation, but not as much as it was up until the 1960s. There is greater class differentiation within the Black nation. Deindustrialization turned many Black proletarians into a permanent reserve army of labor, and the bourgeoisie dealt with this by allowing the drug trade to grow (employment) and locking up large numbers of Black proletarians in prison (containment). There is still national oppression in various forms—intense ones for Black proletarians (examples: prison, police brutality), but less intense ones outside the proletariat. There is less internal cohesion to the Black nation today, with common culture perhaps the most coherent aspect of the Black nation today.

The Black national question still gives rise to, or is a core part of, many of the most explosive contradictions in US society (example: 2020 rebellions), which makes it of great strategic importance for revolution in the US. Other national questions in the US have their own dynamics and are also of strategic importance: Puerto Rico, Indigenous, Chicano, Hawaii, immigrants, Mexican proletarians in the US.

What’s the communist strategic approach to these national questions in the US? How will communist revolution in the US end national oppression?

• We uphold the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, but that’s not the end point of what we’re fighting for and secession is not desirable or likely all that viable, except for in the case of foreign territories such as Puerto Rico.
• Our goal is a multinational socialist state, with an end to national oppression, and specific policies worked out concerning autonomous areas. As the Manifesto of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries states, “Giving expression to the rights of autonomy and self-determination for the US’s Indigenous people and oppressed nationalities and nation(s) will be determined by the concrete demands, desires, and struggles of oppressed peoples and policies developed by the new socialist government. Within the multinational socialist state, all forms of discrimination will be banned and genuine equality between languages and cultures will be put in practice by government policy, and the principle of raising the bottom up will also guide the allocation of resources to oppressed peoples. The future socialist state will welcome any and all immigrants who want a fulfilling life within the new socialist society, and resources will be allocated especially for refugees escaping precarious situations caused by US imperialism.”
• Along the way, all struggles against national oppression are just, and some are of crucial strategic importance. As the Manifesto of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries states, “Communist revolution in the US, as in all countries, must be made by a united front under the leadership of the proletariat. This alliance of classes is what possesses the various strengths and numerical force capable of defeating bourgeois rule. In the US, the solid core of the united front is the unity between the multinational proletariat and its goal of communism, on the one hand, and the struggles of the various oppressed nationalities and nation(s) within the US for their liberation. This is a strategic recognition of the fact that white supremacy, the genocide of Indigenous peoples and theft of their lands, the history and ongoing oppression of Black people from slavery down to today, the seizure of Mexican and overseas territories, and the oppression and exploitation of various immigrants are at the foundation and functioning of capitalism-imperialism in the US. Uniting with the struggles of the various oppressed nationalities and nation(s) within the US and diverting them towards revolutionary objectives will thus be a crucial means by which the united front under the leadership of the proletariat will be built.”

Discussion questions

How and why were nations formed? What makes a nation a nation? How is the nation, as a form, tied up with capitalism?

How was nation formation different in different circumstances and on different continents?

How and why did uneven development lead to unequal power between different nations?

What are the two basic divisions between different nations in the world? Why does capitalism depend on and thrive with these divisions?

Why do most, if not all, nation-states have a dominant or oppressor nation and various oppressed nations/nationalities and national minorities within their borders?

How and why can communists uphold the right of oppressed nations to self-determination while fighting for a communist world, without national divisions or even the nation as a form of social organization?

How does the communist world outlook, with proletarian internationalism at its core, differ from a revolutionary nationalist world outlook?

How does US imperialism get its power from exploiting and oppressing the people of the world?

What does it mean to be proletarian internationalists in the US context?

How was the US built through the oppression of peoples and nations/nationalities within its territory (and as part of expanding that territory)?

How were Black people in the US formed into an oppressed nation? What is the state of the oppressed Black nation today?

What are other important national questions in the US, and what are their specific dynamics?

How is the struggle against national oppression within the US part of proletarian revolution in the US?

Key terms

nation, national oppression, oppressor nation, oppressed nation

home market

national unification movements

uneven development

nation-states

national minorities

formal independence

self-determination

bourgeois right

proletarian internationalism

multinational socialist states

nationalism, nationalist world outlook

the Black nation

democratic rights

solid core of the united front under the leadership of the proletariat