J. V. Stalin The October Revolution and the National Question

J. V. Stalin

The October Revolution and the National Question
November 6 and 19, 1918

Source : Works, Vol. 4, November, 1917 - 1920
Publisher : Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1953
Transcription/Markup : Salil Sen for MIA, 2009

The national question must not be regarded as something self-contained and fixed for all time. Being only part of the general question of the transformation of the existing order, the national question is wholly determined by the conditions of the social environment, by the kind of power in the country and by the whole course of social development in general. This is being strikingly borne out in the period of revolution in Russia, when the national question and the national movement in the border regions of Russia are rapidly and obviously changing their character in accordance with the course and outcome of the revolution.

I
THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION

In the period of the bourgeois revolution in Russia (February 1917) the national movement in the border regions bore the character of a bourgeois liberation movement. The nationalities of Russia, which for ages had been oppressed and exploited by the "old regime," for the first time felt their strength and rushed into the fight with their oppressors. "Abolish national oppression"—such was the slogan of the movement. "All-national" institutions sprang up overnight throughout the border regions of Russia. The movement was headed by the national, bourgeois-democratic intelligentsia. "National Councils" in Latvia, the Estonian region, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the North Caucasus, Kirghizia and the Middle Volga region; the "Rada" in the Ukraine and in Byelorussia; the "Sfatul Tsarii" in Bessarabia; the "Kurul-tai" in the Crimea and in Bashkiria; the "Autonomous Government" in Turkestan—such were the "all-national" institutions around which the national bourgeoisie rallied its forces. It was a question of emancipation from tsarism—the "fundamental cause" of national oppres-sion—and of the formation of national bourgeois states. The right of nations to self-determination was interpreted as the right of the national bourgeoisies in the border regions to take power into their own hands and to take advantage of the February Revolution for forming "their own" national states. The further development of the revolution did not, and could not, come within the calculations of the above-mentioned bourgeois institutions. And the fact was overlooked that tsarism was being replaced by naked and barefaced imperialism, and that this imperialism was a stronger and more dangerous foe of the nationalities and the basis of a new national oppression.

The abolition of tsarism and the accession to power of the bourgeoisie did not, however, lead to the abolition of national oppression. The old, crude form of national oppression was replaced by a new, refined, but all the more dangerous, form of oppression. Far from abandoning the policy of national oppression, the Lvov-Milyukov-Kerensky Government organized a new campaign against Finland (dispersal of the Diet in the summer of 1917) and the Ukraine (suppression of Ukrainian cultural institutions). What is more, that Government, which was imperialist by its very nature, called upon the population to continue the war in order to subjugate new lands, new colonies and nationalities. It was compelled to this not only because of the intrinsic nature of imperialism, but also because of the existence of the old imperialist states in the West, which were irresistibly striving to subjugate new lands and nationalities and threatening to narrow its sphere of influence. A struggle of the imperialist states for the subjugation of small nationalities as a condition for the existence of these states—such was the picture which was revealed in the course of the imperialist war. This unsightly picture was in no way improved by the abolition of tsarism and the appearance of the Milyukov-Kerensky Government on the scene. Since the "all-national" institutions in the border regions displayed a tendency to political independence, naturally they encountered the insuperable hostility of the imperialist government of Russia. Since, on the other hand, while establishing the power of the national bourgeoisie, they remained deaf to the vital interests of "their own" workers and peasants, they evoked grumbling and discontent among those. What were known as the "national regiments" only added fuel to the flames: they were impotent against the danger from above and only intensified and aggravated the danger from below. The "all-national" institutions were left defenceless against blows from without and explosions from within. The incipient bourgeois national states began to fade before they could blossom.

Thus, the old bourgeois-democratic interpretation of the principle of self-determination became a fiction and lost its revolutionary significance. It was clear that under such circumstances there could be no question of the abolition of national oppression and establishing the independence of the small national states. It became obvious that the emancipation of the labouring masses of the oppressed nationalities and the abolition of national oppression were inconceivable without a break with imperialism, without the labouring masses overthrowing "their own" national bourgeoisie and taking power themselves.

That was strikingly borne out after the October Revolution.

II
THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION

The February Revolution harboured irreconcilable inner contradictions. The revolution was accomplished by the efforts of the workers and the peasants (soldiers), but as a result of the revolution power passed not to the workers and peasants, but to the bourgeoisie. In making the revolution the workers and peasants wanted to put an end to the war and to secure peace. But the bourgeoisie, on coming to power, strove to use the revolutionary ardour of the masses for a continuation of the war and against peace. The economic disruption of the country and the food crisis demanded the expropriation of capital and industrial establishments for the benefit of the workers, and the confiscation of the landlords' land for the benefit of the peasants, but the bourgeois Milyukov-Kerensky Government stood guard over the interests of the landlords and capitalists, resolutely protecting them against all encroachments on the part of the workers and peasants. It was a bourgeois revolution, accomplished by the agency of the workers and peasants for the benefit of the exploiters.

Meanwhile, the country continued to groan under the burden of the imperialist war, economic disintegration and the breakdown of the food supply. The front was falling to pieces and melting away. Factories and mills were coming to a standstill. Famine was spreading through the country. The February Revolution, with its inner contradictions, was obviously not enough for "the salvation of the country." The Milyukov-Be-rensky Government was obviously incapable of solving the basic problems of the revolution.

A new, socialist revolution was required to lead the country out of the blind alley of imperialist war and economic disintegration.

That revolution came as a result of the October uprising.

By overthrowing the power of the landlords and the bourgeoisie and replacing it by a government of workers and peasants, the October Revolution resolved the contradictions of the February Revolution at one stroke. The abolition of the omnipotence of the landlords and kulaks and the handing over of the land for the use of the labouring masses of the countryside; the expropriation of the mills and factories and their transfer to control by the workers; the break with imperialism and the ending of the predatory war; the publication of the secret treaties and the exposure of the policy of annexations; lastly, the proclamation of self-determination for the labouring masses of the oppressed peoples and the recognition of the independence of Finland—such were he basic measures carried into effect by the Soviet power in the early period of the Soviet revolution.

That was a genuinely socialist revolution.

The revolution, which started in the centre, could not long be confined to that narrow territory. Once having triumphed in the centre, it was bound to spread to the border regions. And, indeed, from the very first days of the revolution, the revolutionary tide spread from the North all over Russia, sweeping one border region after another. But here it encountered a dam in the shape of the "National Councils" and regional "governments" (Don, Kuban, Siberia) which had been formed prior to the October Revolution. The point is that these "national governments" would not hear of a socialist revolution. Bourgeois by nature, they had not the slightest wish to destroy the old, bourgeois order; on the contrary, they considered it their duty to preserve and consolidate it by every means in their power. Essentially imperialist, they had not the slightest wish to break with imperialism; on the contrary, they had never been averse to seizing and subjugating bits and morsels of the territory of "foreign" nationalities whenever opportunity offered. No wonder that the "national governments" in the border regions declared war on the socialist government in the centre. And, once they had declared war, they naturally became hotbeds of reaction, which attracted all that was counter-revolutionary in Russia. Everyone knows that all the counter-revolutionaries thrown out of Russia rushed to these hotbeds, and there, around them, formed themselves into whiteguard "national" regiments.

But, in addition to "national governments," there are in the border regions national workers and peasants. Organized even before the October Revolution in their revolutionary Soviets patterned on the Soviets in the centre of Russia, they had never severed connections with their brothers in the North. They too were striving to defeat the bourgeoisie; they too were fighting for the triumph of socialism. No wonder that their conflict with "their own" national governments grew daily more acute. The October Revolution only strengthened the alliance between the workers and peasants of the border regions and the workers and peasants of Russia, and inspired them with faith in the triumph of socialism. And the war of the "national governments" against the Soviet power brought the conflict of the national masses with these "governments" to the point of a complete rupture, to open rebellion against them.

Thus was formed a socialist alliance of the workers and peasants of all Russia against the counter-revolutionary alliance of the bourgeois national "governments" of the border regions of Russia.
The fight of the border "governments" is depicted by some as a fight for national emancipation against the "soulless centralism" of the Soviet regime. But that is quite untrue. No regime in the world has permitted such extensive decentralization, no government in the world has ever granted to the peoples such complete national freedom as the Soviet power in Russia. The fight of the border "governments" was, and is, a fight of bourgeois counter-revolution against socialism. The national flag is tacked on to the cause only to deceive the masses, as a popular flag which conveniently conceals the counterrevolutionary designs of the national bourgeoisie.

But the fight of the "national" and regional "governments" proved an unequal one. Attacked from two sides — from without by the Soviet power of Russia, and from within by "their own" workers and peasants — the "national governments" were obliged to retreat after the very first engagements. The uprising of the Finnish workers and torppari 1 and the flight of the bourgeois "Senate"; the uprising of the Ukrainian workers and peasants and the flight of the bourgeois "Rada"; the uprising of the workers and peasants in the Don, Kuban, and Siberia and the collapse of Kaledin, Kornilov and the Siberian "government"; the uprising of the poor peasants of Turkestan and the flight of the "autonomous government"; the agrarian revolution in the Caucasus and the utter impotence of the "National Councils" of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan — all these are generally known facts which demonstrated the complete isolation of the border "governments" from "their own" labouring masses. Utterly defeated, the "national governments" were "obliged" to appeal for aid against "their own" workers and peasants to the imperiaIists of the West, to the agelong oppressors and exploiters of the nationalities of the world.

Thus began the period of foreign intervention and occupation of the border regions — a period which once more revealed the counter-revolutionary character of the "national" and regional "governments."
Only now did it become obvious to all that the national bourgeoisie was striving not for the liberation of "its own people" from national oppression, but for liberty to squeeze profits out of them, for liberty to retain its privileges and capital.

Only now did it become clear that the emancipation of the oppressed nationalities was inconceivable without a rupture with imperialism, without the overthrow of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nationalities, without the transfer of power to the labouring masses of these nationalities.

Thus, the old, bourgeois conception of the principle of self-determination, with its slogan "All power to the national bourgeoisie," was exposed and cast aside by the very course of the revolution. The socialist conception of the principle of self-determination, with its slogan "All power to the labouring masses of the oppressed nationalities," entered into its own and it became possible to apply it.
Thus, the October Revolution, having put an end to the old, bourgeois movement for national emancipation, inaugurated the era of a new, socialist movement of the workers and peasants of the oppressed nationalities, directed against all oppression—including, therefore, national oppression—against the power of the bourgeoisie, "their own" and foreign, and against imperialism in general.

III
THE WORLD-WIDE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

Having triumphed in the centre of Russia and embraced a number of the border regions, the October Revolution could not stop short at the territorial borders of Russia. In the atmosphere of the imperialist world war and the general discontent among the masses, it could not but spread to neighbouring countries. Russia's break with imperialism and its escape from the predatory war; the publication of the secret treaties and the solemn renunciation of the policy of annexations; the proclamation of the national freedom and recognition of the independence of Finland; the declaring of Russia a "federation of Soviet national republics" and the battle cry of a determined struggle against imperialism issued to the world by the Soviet Government —all this could not but deeply affect the enslaved East and the bleeding West.

And, indeed, the October Revolution is the first revolution in world history to break the age-long sleep of the labouring masses of the oppressed peoples of the East and to draw them into the fight against world imperialism. The formation of workers' and peasants' Soviets in Persia, China and India, modelled on the Soviets in Russia, is sufficiently convincing evidence of this.
The October Revolution is the first revolution in world history to provide the workers and soldiers of the West with a living, salvation-bringing example and to impel them on to the path of real emancipation from the yoke of war and imperialism. The uprising of the workers and soldiers in Austria-Hungary and Germany, the formation of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, the revolutionary struggle of the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary against national oppression is sufficiently eloquent evidence of this.

The chief point is not at all that the struggle in the East and even in the West has not yet succeeded in shedding its bourgeois-nationalist features; the point is that the struggle against imperialism has begun, that it is continuing and is inevitably bound to arrive at its logical goal.

Foreign intervention and the occupation policy of the "external" imperialists merely sharpen the revolutionary crisis, by drawing now peoples into the struggle and extending the area of the revolutionary battles with, imperialism.

Thus, the October Revolution, by establishing a tie between the peoples of the backward East and of the advanced West, is ranging them in a common camp of struggle against imperialism.

Thus, from the particular question of combating national oppression, the national question is evolving into the general question of emancipating the nations, colonies and semi-colonies from imperialism.
The mortal sin of the Second International and its leader, Kautsky, consists, incidentally, in the fact that they have always gone over to the bourgeois conception of national self-determination, that they have never understood the revolutionary meaning of the latter, that they were unable or unwilling to put the national question on the revolutionary footing of an open fight against imperialism, that they were unable or unwilling to link the national question with the question of the emancipation of the colonies.

The obtuseness of the Austrian Social-Democrats of the type of Bauer and Renner consists in the fact that they have not understood the inseparable connection between the national question and the question of power, that they tried to separate the national question from politics and to confine it to cultural and educational questions, forgetting the existence of such "trifles" as imperialism and the colonies enslaved by imperialism.

It is asserted that the principles of self-determination and "defence of the fatherland" have been abrogated by the very course of events under the conditions of a rising socialist revolution. Actually, it is not the principles of self-determination and "defence of the fatherland" that have been abrogated, but the bourgeois interpretation of these principles. One has only to glance at the occupied regions, which are languishing under the yoke of imperialism and are yearning for liberation; one has only to glance at Russia, which is waging a revolutionary war for the defence of the socialist fatherland from the imperialist robbers; one has only to reflect on the present events in Austria-Hungary; one has only to glance at the enslaved colonies and semi-colonies, which have already organized their own Soviets (India, Persia, China)—one has only to glance at all this to realize the whole revolutionary significance of the principle of self-determination in its socialist interpretation.

The great world-wide significance of the October Revolution chiefly consists in the fact that:

1) It has widened the scope of the national question and converted it from the particular question of combating national oppression in Europe into the general question of emancipating the oppressed peoples, colonies and semi-colonies from imperialism;

2) It has opened up wide possibilities for their emancipation and the right paths towards it, has thereby greatly facilitated the cause of the emancipation of the oppressed peoples of the West and the East, and has drawn them into the common current of the victorious struggle against imperialism;

3) It has thereby erected a bridge between the socialist West and the enslaved East, having created a new front of revolutions against world imperialism, extending from the proletarians of the West, through the Russian revolution, to the oppressed peoples of the East.

This in fact explains the indescribable enthusiasm which is now being displayed for the Russian proletariat by the toiling and exploited masses of the East and the West.

And this mainly explains the frenzy with which the imperialist robbers of the whole world have now flung themselves upon Soviet Russia.

Pravda, Nos. 241 and 250, November 6 and 19, 1918

Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2009). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit "Marxists Internet Archive" as your source.

V. I. Lenin FOURTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

V. I. Lenin
FOURTH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

Pravda No. 234,
 October 18, 1921
 Signed: N. Lenin

 Published according to the manuscript

 From V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition,
 Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966
Vol. 33, pp. 51-59.

Translated from the Russian
 Edited by David Skvirskyand George Hanna

Prepared © for the Internet by David J. Romagnolo, djr@cruzio.com (February 1998)

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FOURTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE OCTOBER
 REVOLUTION

The fourth anniversary of October 25 (November 7) is approaching.

    The farther that great day recedes from us, the more clearly we see the significance of the proletarian revolution in Russia, and the more deeply we reflect upon the practical
experience of our work as a whole.

    Very briefly and, of course, in very incomplete and rough outline, this significance and experience may be summed up as follows.

    The direct and immediate object of the revolution in Russia was a bourgeois-democratic one, namely, to destroy the survivals of medievalism and sweep them away completely, to
purge Russia of this barbarism, of this shame, and to remove this immense obstacle to all culture and progress in our country.

    And we can justifiably pride ourselves on having carried out that purge with greater determination and much more rapidly, boldly and successfully, and, from the point of view of its
effect on the masses, much more widely and deeply, than the great French Revolution over one hundred and twenty-five years ago.

    Both the anarchists and the petty-bourgeois democrats (i.e., the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who are the Russian counterparts of that international social type)
have talked and are still talking an incredible lot of nonsense about the relation between the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist (that is, proletarian) revolution. The last
four years have proved to the hilt that our interpretation of Marxism on this point, and our estimate of the experience of former revolutions were correct. We have consummated the
bourgeois-democratic revolution as nobody had done before. We are

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advancing towards the socialist revolution consciously, firmly and unswervingly, knowing that it is not separated from the bourgeois-democratic revolution by a Chinese Wall, and
knowing too that (in the last analysis) struggle alone will determine how far we shall advance, what part of this immense and lofty task we shall accomplish, and to what extent we
shall succeed in consolidating our victories. Time will show. But we see even now that a tremendous amount -- tremendous for this ruined, exhausted and backward country -- has
already been done towards the socialist transformation of society.

    Let us, however, finish what we have to say about the bourgeois-democratic content of our revolution. Marxists must understand what that means. To explain, let us take a few
striking examples.

    The bourgeois-democratic content of the revolution means that the social relations (system, institutions) of the country are purged of medievalism, serfdom, feudalism.

    What were the chief manifestations, survivals, remnants of serfdom in Russia up to 1917? The monarchy, the system of social estates, landed proprietorship and land tenure, the
status of women, religion, and national oppression. Take any one of these Augean stables, which, incidentally, were left largely uncleansed by all the more advanced states when they
accomplished their bourgeois-democratic revolutions one hundred and twenty-five, two hundred and fifty and more years ago (1649 in England); take any of these Augean stables, and
you will see that we have cleansed them thoroughly. In a matter of ten weeks, from October 25 (November 7), 1917 to January 5, 1918, when the Constituent Assembly was dissolved,
we accomplished a thousand times more in this respect than was accomplished by the bourgeois democrats and liberals (the Cadets) and by the petty-bourgeois democrats (the
Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries) during the eight months they were in power.

    Those poltroons, gas-bags, vainglorious Narcissuses and petty Hamlets brandished their wooden swords -- but did not even destroy the monarchy! We cleansed out all that
monarchist muck as nobody had ever done before. We left not a stone, not a brick of that ancient edifice, the social-estate system even the most advanced countries,

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such as Britain, France and Germany, have not completely eliminated the survivals of that system to this day!), standing. We tore out the deep-seated roots of the social-estate system,
namely, the remnants of feudalism and serfdom in the system of landownership, to the last. "One may argue" (there are plenty of quill-drivers, Cadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-
Revolutionaries abroad to indulge in such arguments) as to what "in the long run" will be the outcome of the agrarian reform effected by the Great October Revolution. We have no
desire at the moment to waste time on such controversies, for we are deciding this, as well as the mass of accompanying controversies, by struggle. But the fact cannot be denied that
the petty-bourgeois democrats "compromised" with the landowners, the custodians of the traditions of serfdom, for eight months, while we completely swept the landowners and all
their traditions from Russian soil in a few weeks.

    Take religion, or the denial of rights to women, or the oppression and inequality of the non-Russian nationalities. These are all problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The
vulgar petty-bourgeois democrats talked about them for eight months. In not a single one of the most advanced countries in the world have these questions been completely settled on
bourgeois-democratic lines. In our country they have been settled completely by the legislation of the October Revolution. We have fought and are fighting religion in earnest. We have
granted all the non-Russian nationalities their own republics or autonomous regions. We in Russia no longer have the base, mean and infamous denial of rights to women or inequality
of the sexes, that disgusting survival of feudalism and medievalism, which is being renovated by the avaricious bourgeoisie and the dull-witted and frightened petty bourgeoisie in every
other country in the world without exception.

    All this goes to make up the content of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. A hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty years ago the progressive leaders of that revolution (or of
those revolutions, if we consider each national variety of the one general type) promised to rid mankind of medieval privileges, of sex inequality, of state privileges for one religion or
another (or "religious ideas ",

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"the church" in general), and of national inequality. They promised, but did not keep their promises. They could not keep them, for they were hindered by their "respect" -- for the
"sacred right of private property". Our proletarian revolution was not afflicted with this accursed "respect" for this thrice-accursed medievalism and for the "sacred right of private
property".

    But in order to consolidate the achievements of the bourgeois-democratic revolution for the peoples of Russia, we were obliged to go farther; and we did go farther. We solved the
problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in passing, as a "by-product" of our main and genuinely proletarian -revolutionary, socialist activities. We have always said that
reforms are a by-product of the revolutionary class struggle. We said -- and proved it by deeds -- that bourgeois-democratic reforms are a by-product of the proletarian, i.e., of the
socialist revolution. Incidentally, the Kautskys, Hilferdings, Martovs, Chernovs, Hillquits, Longuets, MacDonalds, Turatis and other heroes of "Two and-a-Half" Marxism were
incapable of understanding this relation between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian-socialist revolutions. The first develops into the second. The second, in passing, solves
the problems of the first. The second consolidates the work of the first. Struggle, and struggle alone, decides how far the second succeeds in outgrowing the first.

    The Soviet system is one of the most vivid proofs, or manifestations, of how the one revolution develops into the other. The Soviet system provides the maximum of democracy for
the workers and peasants; at the same time, it marks a break with bourgeois democracy and the rise of a new, epoch-making type of democracy, namely, proletarian democracy, or the
dictatorship of the proletariat.

    Let the curs and swine of the moribund bourgeoisie and of the petty-bourgeois democrats who trail behind them heap imprecations, abuse and derision upon our heads for our
reverses and mistakes in the work of building up our Soviet system. We do not forget for a moment that we have committed and are committing numerous mistakes and are suffering
numerous reverses. How can reverses and mistakes be avoided in a matter so new in the history of the world

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as the building of an unprecedented type of state edifice! We shall work steadfastly to set our reverses and mistakes right and to improve our practical application of Soviet principles,
which is still very, very far from being perfect. But we have a right to be and are proud that to us has fallen the good fortune to begin the building of a Soviet state, and thereby to
usher in a new era in world history, the era of the rule of a new class, a class which is oppressed in every capitalist country, but which everywhere is marching forward towards a new
life, towards victory over the bourgeoisie, towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, towards the emancipation of mankind from the yoke of capital and from imperialist wars.

    The question of imperialist wars, of the international policy of finance capital which now dominates the whole world, a policy that must inevitably engender new imperialist wars,
that must inevitably cause an extreme intensification of national oppression, pillage, brigandry and the strangulation of weak, backward and small nationalities by a handful of
"advanced" powers -- that question has been the keystone of all policy in all the countries of the globe since 1914. It is a question of life and death for millions upon millions of people.
It is a question of whether 20,000,000 people (as compared with the 10,000,000 who were killed in the war of 1914-18 and in the supplementary "minor" wars that are still going on)
are to be slaughtered in the next imperialist war, which the bourgeoisie are preparing, and which is growing out of capitalism before our very eyes. It is a question of whether in that
future war, which is inevitable (if capitalism continues to exist), 60,000,000 people are to be maimed (compared with the 30,000,000 maimed in 1914-18). In this question, too, our
October Revolution marked the beginning of a new era in world history. The lackeys of the bourgeoisie and its yes-men -- the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, and the
petty-bourgeois, allegedly "socialist", democrats all over the world -- derided our slogan "convert the imperialist war into a civil war". But that slogan proved to be the truth -- it was the
only truth, unpleasant, blunt, naked and brutal, but nevertheless the truth, as against the host of most refined jingoist and pacifist lies. Those

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lies are being dispelled. The Brest peace has been exposed. And with every passing day the significance and consequences of a peace that is even worse than the Brest peace -- the
peace of Versailles -- are being more relentlessly exposed. And the millions who are thinking about the causes of the recent war and of the approaching future war are more and more
clearly realising the grim and inexorable truth that it is impossible to escape imperialist war, and imperialist peace (if the old orthography were still in use, I would have written the
word mir in two ways, to give it both its meanings)[*] which inevitably engenders imperialist war, that it is impossible to escape that inferno, except by a Bolshevik struggle and a
Bolshevik revolution.

    Let the bourgeoisie and the pacifists, the generals and the petty bourgeoisie, the capitalists and the philistines, the pious Christians and the knights of the Second and the Two-
and-a-Half Internationals vent their fury against that revolution. No torrents of abuse, calumnies and lies can enable them to conceal the historic fact that for the first time in
hundreds and thousands of years the slaves have replied to a war between slave-owners by openly proclaiming the slogan: "Convert this war between slave-owners for the division of
their loot into a war of the slaves of all nations against the slave-owners of all nations."

    For the first time in hundreds and thousands of years that slogan has grown from a vague and helpless waiting into a clear and definite political programme, into an effective
struggle waged by millions of oppressed people under the leadership of the proletariat; it has grown into the first victory of the proletariat, the first victory in the struggle to abolish war
and to unite the workers of all countries against the united bourgeoisie of different nations, against the bourgeoisie that makes peace and war at the expense of the slaves of capital,
the wage-workers, the peasants, the working people.

    This first victory is not yet the final victory, and it was achieved by our October Revolution at the price of incredible difficulties and hardships, at the price of unprece dented
suffering, accompanied by a series of serious reverses

     * In Russian, the word mir has two meanings (world and peace) and had two different spellings in the old orthography. --Tr.

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and mistakes on our part. How could a single backward people be expected to frustrate the imperialist wars of the most powerful and most developed countries of the world without
sustaining reverses and without committing mistakes! We are not afraid to admit our mistakes and shall examine them dispassionately in order to learn how to correct them. But the
fact remains that for the first time in hundreds and thousands of years the promise "to reply" to war between the slave-owners by a revolution of the slaves directed against all the
slave-owners has been completely fulfilled -- and is being fulfilled despite all difficulties.

    We have made the start. When, at what date and time, and the proletarians of which nation will complete this process is not important. The important thing is that the ice has been
broken; the road is open, the way has been shown.

    Gentlemen, capitalists of all countries, keep up your hypocritical pretence of "defending the fatherland" -- the Japanese fatherland against the American, the American against the
Japanese, the French against the British, and so forth! Gentlemen, knights of the Second and Two-and a-Half Internationals, pacifist petty bourgeoisie and philistines of the entire
world, go on "evading" the question of how to combat imperialist wars by issuing new "Basle Manifestos" (on the model of the Basle Manifesto of 1912[21]). The first Bolshevik
revolution has wrested the first hundred million people of this earth from the clutches of imperialist war and the imperialist world. Subsequent revolutions will deliver the rest of
mankind from such wars and from such a world.

    Our last, but most important and most difficult task, the one we have done least about, is economic development, the laying of economic foundations for the new, socialist edifice
on the site of the demolished feudal edifice and the semi-demolished capitalist edifice. It is in this most important and most difficult task that we have sustained the greatest number
of reverses and have made most mistakes. How could anyone expect that a task so new to the world could be begun without reverses and without mistakes! But we have begun it. We
shall continue it. At this very moment we are, by our New Economic Policy, correct-

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ing a number of our mistakes. We are learning how to continue erecting the socialist edifice in a small-peasant country without committing such mistakes.

    The difficulties are immense. But we are accustomed to grappling with immense difficulties. Not for nothing do our enemies call us "stone-hard" and exponents of a "firm line
policy". But we have also learned, at least to some extent, another art that is essential in revolution, namely, flexibility, the ability to effect swift and sudden changes of tactics if
changes in objective conditions demand them, and to choose another path for the achievement of our goal if the former path proves to be inexpedient or impossible at the given
moment.

    Borne along on the crest of the wave of enthusiasm, rousing first the political enthusiasm and then the military enthusiasm of the people, we expected to accomplish economic
tasks just as great as the political and military tasks we had accomplished by relying directly on this enthusiasm. We expected -- or perhaps it would be truer to say that we presumed
without having given it adequate consideration -- to be able to organise the state production and the state distribution of products on communist lines in a small-peasant country
directly as ordered by the proletarian state. Experience has proved that we were wrong. It appears that a number of transitional stages were necessary -- state capitalism and socialism
-- in order to prepare -- to prepare by many years of effort -- for the transition to communism. Not directly relying on enthusiasm, but aided by the enthusiasm engendered by the great
revolution, and on the basis of personal interest, personal incentive and business principles, we must first set to work in this small peasant country to build solid gangways to
socialism by way of state capitalism. Otherwise we shall never get to communism, we shall never bring scores of millions of people to communism. That is what experience, the
objective course of the development of the revolution, has taught us.

    And we, who during these three or four years have learned a little to make abrupt changes of front (when abrupt changes of front are needed), have begun zealously, attentively and
sedulously (although still not zealously,

page 59

attontively and sedulously enough) to learn to make a new change of front, namely, the New Economic Policy. The proletarian state must become a cautious, assiduous and shrewd
"businessman", a punctilious wholesale merchant -- otherwise it will never succeed in putting this small-peasant country economically on its feet. Under existing conditions, living as
we are side by side with the capitalist (for the time being capitalist) West, there is no other way of progressing to communism. A wholesale merchant seems to be an economic type as
remote from communism as heaven from earth. But that is one of the contradictions which, in actual life, lead from a small-peasant economy via state capitalism to socialism. Personal
incentive will step up production; we must increase production first and foremost and at all costs. Wholesale trade economically unites millions of small peasants: it gives them a
personal incentive, links them up and leads them to the next step, namely, to various forms of association and alliance in the process of production itself. We have already started the
necessary changes in our economic policy and already have some successes to our credit; true, they are small and partial, but nonetheless they are successes. In this new field of
"tuition" we are already finishing our preparatory class. By persistent and assiduous study, by making practical experience the test of every step we take, by not fearing to alter over
and over again what we have already begun, by correcting our mistakes and most carefully analysing their significance, we shall pass to the higher classes. We shall go through the
whole "course", although the present state of world economics and world politics has made that course much longer and much more difficult than we would have liked. No matter at
what cost, no matter how severe the hardships of the transition period may be -- despite disaster, famine and ruin -- we shall not flinch; we shall triumphantly carry our cause to its
goal.

October 14, 1921

சர்வதேச கொம்யூனிஸ்ட் இயக்கமும் தேசியப்பிரச்சனையும் ஆவணம்-1

சர்வதேச கொம்யூனிஸ்ட் இயக்கமும் தேசியப்பிரச்சனையும் ஆவணம்-1

THE RESOLUTION OF THE LONDON INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS, 1896
=============================================================

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The Right of Nations to Self-Determination

 7. THE RESOLUTION OF THE LONDON INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS, 1896

This resolution reads: 

“This Congress declares that it stands for the full right of all nations to self-determination [Selbstbestimmungsrecht] and expresses its sympathy for the workers of ever country now suffering under the yoke of military, national or other absolutism. This Congress calls upon the workers of all these countries to join the ranks of the class-conscious [Klassenbewusste—those who understand their class interests] workers of the whole world in order jointly to fight for the defeat of international capitalism and for the achievement of the aims of international Social-Democracy.”[1] 

As we have already pointed out, our opportunists—Semkovsky, Liebman and Yurkevich—are simply unaware of this resolution. But Rosa Luxemburg knows it and quotes the full text, which contains the same expression as that contained in our programme, viz., “self-determination”. 

How does Rosa Luxemburg remove this obstacle from the path of her “original” theory? 

Oh, quite simply ... the whole emphasis lies in the second part of the resolution ... its declarative character ... one can refer to it only by mistake! 

The feebleness and utter confusion of our author are simply amazing. Usually it is only the opportunists who talk about the consistent democratic and socialist points in the programme being mere declarations, and cravenly avoid an open debate on them. It is apparently not without reason that Rosa Luxemburg has this time found herself in the deplorable company of the Semkovskys, Liebmans and Yurkeviches. Rosa Luxemburg does not venture to state openly whether she regards the above resolution as correct or erroneous. She shifts and shuffles as if counting on the inattentive or ill-informed reader, who forgets the first part of the resolution by the time he has started reading the second, or who has never heard of the discussion that took place in the socialist press prior to the London Congress. 

Rosa Luxemburg is greatly mistaken, however, if she imagines that, in the sight of the class-conscious workers of Russia, she can get away with trampling upon the resolution of the International on such an important fundamental issue, without even deigning to analyse it critically. 

Rosa Luxemburg’s point of view was voiced during the discussions which took place prior to the London Congress, mainly in the columns of Die Neue Zeit, organ of the German Marxists; in essence this point of view was defeated in the International! That is the crux of the matter, which the Russian reader must particularly bear in mind.

The debate turned on the question of Poland’s independence. Three points of view were put forward: 

1. That of the “Fracy”, in whose name Haecker spoke. They wanted the International to include in its own programme a demand for the independence of Poland. The motion was not carried and this point of view was defeated in the International. 

2. Rosa Luxemburg’s point of view, viz., the Polish socialists should not demand independence for Poland. This point of view entirely precluded the proclamation of the right of nations to self-determination. It was likewise defeated in the International. 

3. The point of view which was elaborated at the time by K. Kautsky, who opposed Rosa Luxemburg and proved that her materialism was extremely “one-sided”; according to Kautsky, the International could not at the time make the independence of Poland a point in its programme; but the Polish socialists were fully entitled to put forward such a demand. From the socialists’ point of view it was undoubtedly a mistake to ignore the tasks of national liberation in a situation where national oppression existed. 

The International’s resolution reproduces the most essential and fundamental propositions in this point of view: on the one hand, the absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self-determination; on the other hand, the equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle. 

We think that this resolution is absolutely correct, and that, to the countries of Eastern Europe and Asia at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is this resolution, with both its parts being taken as an integral whole, that gives the only correct lead to the proletarian class policy in the national question. 

Let us deal with the three above-mentioned viewpoints in somewhat greater detail. 

As is known, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels considered it the bounden duty of the whole of West-European democracy, and still more of Social-Democracy, to give active support to the demand for Polish independence. For the period of the 1840s and 1860s, the period of the bourgeois revolutions in Austria and Germany, and the period of the “Peasant Reform” in Russia,[3] this point of view was quite correct and the only one that was consistently democratic and proletarian. So long as the masses of the people in Russia and in most of the Slav countries were still sunk in torpor, so long as there were no independent, mass, democratic movements in those countries, the liberation movement of the gentry in Poland assumed an immense and paramount importance from the point of view, not only of Russian, not only of Slav, but of European democracy as a whole.[2] [4] 

But while Marx’s standpoint was quite correct for the forties, fifties and sixties or for the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it has ceased to be correct by the twentieth century. 

Independent democratic movements, and even an independent proletarian movement, have arisen in most Slav countries, even in Russia, one of the most backward Slav countries. 

Aristocratic Poland has disappeared, yielding place to capitalist Poland. Under such circumstances Poland could not but lose her exceptional revolutionary importance. 

The attempt of the P.S.P. (the Polish Socialist Party, the present-day “Fracy”) in 1896 to “establish” for all time the point of view Marx had held in a different epoch was an attempt to use the letter of Marxism against the spirit of Marxism. The Polish Social-Democrats were therefore quite right in attacking the extreme nationalism of the Polish petty bourgeoisie and pointing out that the national question was of secondary importance to Polish workers, in creating for the first time a purely proletarian party in Poland and proclaiming the extremely important principle that the Polish and the Russian workers must maintain the closest alliance in their class struggle. 

But did this mean that at the beginning of the twentieth century the International could regard the principle of political self-determination of nations, or the right to secede, as unnecessary to Eastern Europe and Asia? This would have been the height of absurdity, and (theoretically) tantamount to admitting that the bourgeois-democratic reform of the Turkish, Russian and Chinese states had been consummated; indeed it would have been tantamount (in practice) to opportunism, towards absolutism. 

No. At a time when bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe and Asia have begun, in this period of the awakening and intensification of national movements and of the formation of independent proletarian parties, the task of these parties with regard to national policy must be twofold: recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination, since bourgeois-democratic reform is-not yet completed and since working-class democracy consistently, seriously and sincerely (and not in a liberal, Kokoshkin fashion) fights for equal rights for nations; then, a close, unbreakable alliance in the class struggle of the proletarians of all nations in a given state, throughout all the changes in its history, irrespective of any reshaping of the frontiers of the individual states by the bourgeoisie. 

It is this twofold task of the proletariat that the 1896 resolution of the International formulates. That is the substance, the underlying principle, of the resolution adopted by the Conference of Russian Marxists held in the summer of 1913. Some people profess to see a “contradiction” in the fact that while point 4 of this resolution, which recognises the right to self-determination and secession, seems to “concede” the maximum to nationalism (in reality, the recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination implies the maximum of democracy and the minimum of nationalism), point 5 warns the workers against the nationalist slogans of the bourgeoisie of any nation and demands the unity and amalgamation of the workers of all nations in internationally united proletarian organisations. But this is a “contradiction”  only for extremely shallow minds, which, for instance, cannot grasp why the unity and class solidarity of the Swedish and the Norwegian proletariat gained when the Swedish workers upheld Norway’s freedom to secede and form an independent state. 
  
Notes
 
[1] See the official German report of the London Congress: Verhandlungen und Beschlüsse des internationalen sozialistischen Arbeiterund Gewerkschafts-Kongresses zu London, vom 

27. Juli bis 1. August 1896, Berlin, 1896, S. 18. A Russian pamphlet has been published containing the decisions of international congresses in which the word “self determination” is wrongly translated as “autonomy”. —Lenin

[2] It would be a very interesting piece of historical research to compare the position of a noble Polish rebel in 1863 with that of the all-Russia revolutionary democrat, Chernyshevsky, who (like Marx), was able to appreciate the importance of the Polish movement, and with that of the Ukrainian petty bourgeois Dragomanov, who appeared much later and expressed the views of a peasant, so ignorant and sluggish, and so attached to his dung heap, that his legitimate hatred of the Polish gentry blinded him to the significance which their struggle had for all-Russia democracy. (Cf. Dragomanov, Historical Poland and Great-Russian Democracy.) Dragomanov richly deserved the fervent kisses which were subsequently bestowed on him by Mr. P. B. Struve, who by that time had become a national-liberal. —Lenin
    
[3] This refers to the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861. 
  
[4] Lenin is referring to the Polish national liberation insurrection of 1863–64 against the yoke of the tsarist autocracy. The original cause of the rising was the tsarist government’s decision to carry out a special recruitment aimed at removing the revolutionary-minded youth en masse from the cities. At first the rising was led by a Central National Committee formed by the petty-nobles’ party of the “Reds” in 1862. Its programme demanding national independence for Poland, equal rights for all men in the land, irrespective of religion or birth, transfer to the peasants of the land tilled by them with full right of ownership and without redemption payments, abolition of the corvée, compensation for the landlords for the alienated lands out of the state funds, etc., attracted to the uprising diverse sections of the Polish population—artisans, workers, students, intellectuals from among the gentry, part of 
the peasantry and the clergy. 

In the course of the insurrection, elements united around the party of the “Whites” (the party of the big landed aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie) joined it with the intention of using it in their own interests and, with the help of Britain and France, securing a profitable deal with the tsarist government. 

The attitude of the revolutionary democrats of Russia towards the rebels was one of deep sympathy, the members of Zemlya i Volya secret society associated with N. G. Chernyshevsky trying to give them every possible assistance. The Central Committee of Zemlya i Volya issued an appeal “To the Russian Officers and Soldiers”, which was distributed among the troops sent to suppress the insurrection. A. I. Herzen and N. P. Ogaryov published a   number of articles in Kolokol devoted to the struggle of the Polish people, and rendered material aid to the rebels. 

Owing to the inconsistency of the party of the “Reds”, which failed to hold the revolutionary initiative, the leadership of the uprising passed into the hands of the “Whites”, who betrayed it. By the summer of 1864, the insurrection was brutally crushed by the tsarist troops. 

Marx and Engels, who regarded the Polish insurrection of 1863–64 as a progressive movement, were fully in sympathy with it and wished the Polish people victory in its struggle for national liberation. On behalf of the German emigrant colony in London, Marx wrote an appeal for aid to the Poles. 

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/ch07.htm

V. I. Lenin

THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION

 AND THE RIGHT OF NATIONS

 TO SELF-DETERMINATION

 (Theses ) 

9. THE ATTITUDE OF RUSSIAIN AND POLISH SOCIAL-
DEMOCRATS AND OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL
TO SELF-DETERMINATION 

The differences between the revolutionary Social-Democrats of Russia and the Polish Social-Democrats on the question of self-determination came out into the open as early as 1903, at the Congress which adopted the Programme of the R.S.D.L. Party, and which, despite the protest by the Polish Social-Democrat delegation, inserted Clause 9, recognising the right of nations to self-determination. Since then the Polish Social-Democrats have on no occasion repeated, in the name of their party, the proposal to remove Clause 9 from our Party's Programme, or to replace it by some other formula. 

 In Russia, where the oppressed nations account for no less than 57 per cent of the population, or over 100 million, where they occupy mostly the border regions, where some of them are more highly cultured than the Great Russians, where the political system is especially barbarous and medieval, where the bourgeois-democratic revolution has not been consummated -- there, in Russia, recognition of the right of nations oppressed by tsarism to free secession from Russia is absolutely obligatory for Social-Democrats, for the furtherance of their democratic and socialist aims. Our Party, re-established in January 1912, adopted a resolution in 1913[60] reaffirming the right to self-determination and 
explaining it in precisely the above concrete sense. The rampage of Great-Russian chauvinism in 1914-16 both among the bourgeoisie and among the opportunist socialists (Rubanovich, Plekhanov, Nashe Dyelo, etc.) has given us even more reason to insist on this demand and to regard those who deny it as actual supporters of Great-Russian chauvinism and tsarism. Our Party declares that it most emphatically declines to accept any responsibility for such actions against the right to self-determination, 

The latest formulation of the position of the Polish Social-Democrats on the national question (the declaration of the Polish Social-Democrats at the Zimmerwald Conference) contains the following ideas: 

The declaration condemns the German and other governments that regard the "Polish regions" as a pawn in the forthcoming compensation game, "depriving the Polish people of the opportunity of deciding their own fate themselves ". "Polish Social-Democrats resolutely and solemnly protest against the carving up and parcelling out of a whole country ". . . . They flay the socialists who left it to the Hohenzollerns "to liberate the oppressed peoples ". They express the conviction that only participation in the approaching struggle of the international revolutionary proletariat, the struggle for socialism, "will break the fetters of national oppression and destroy all forms of foreign rule, will ensure for the Polish people the possibility of free all-round development as an equal member of a concord of nations". The declaration recognises that "for the Poles " the war is "doubly fratricidal". (Bulletin of the International Socialist Committee No. 2, September 27, 1915, p. 15. Russian translation in the symposium The International and the War, p. 97.) 

These propositions do not differ in substance from recognition of the right of nations to self-determination, although their political formulations are even vaguer and more indeterminate than those of most programmes and resolutions of the Second International. Any attempt to express these ideas as precise political formulations and to define their applicability to the capitalist system or only to the socialist system will show even more clearly the mistake the Polish Social-Democrats make in denying the self-determination of nations. 
=========================
 The decision of the London International Socialist Congress of 1896, which recognised the self-determination of nations, should be supplemented on the basis of the above theses by specifying: 
(1) the particular urgency of this demand under imperialism, 
(2) the political conventionalism and class content of all the demands of political democracy, the one under discussion included, 
(3) the necessity to distinguish the concrete tasks of the Social-Democrats of the oppressor nations from those of the Social-Democrats of the oppressed nations, 
(4) the inconsistent, purely verbal recognition of self-determination by the opportunists and the Kautskyites, which is, therefore, hypocritical in its political significance, 
(5) the actual identity of the chauvinists and those Social-Democrats, especially those of the Great Powers (Great Russians, Anglo-Americans, Germans, French, Italians, Japanese, etc:), who do not uphold the freedom to secede for colonies and nations oppressed by "their own" nations, 
(6) the necessity to subordinate the struggle for the demand under discussion and for all the basic demands of political democracy directly to the revolutionary mass struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeois governments and for the achievement of socialism. 

The introduction into the International of the viewpoint of certain small nations, especially that of the Polish Social-Democrats, who have been led by their struggle against the Polish bourgeoisie, which deceives the people with its nationalist slogans, to the incorrect denial of self-determination, would be a theoretical mistake, a substitution of Proudhonism for Marxism implying in practice involuntary support for the most dangerous chauvinism and opportunism of the Great-Power nations. 

Editorial Board of Sotsial-Demokrat, 
Central Organ of R.S.D.L.P. 

Postscript. In Die Neue Zeit for March 3, 1916, which has just appeared, Kautsky openly holds out the hand of Christian reconciliation to Austerlitz, a representative of the foulest German chauvinism, rejecting freedom of separation for the oppressed nations of Hapsburg Austria but recognising it for Russian Poland, as a menial service to Hindenburg and Wilhelm II. One could not have wished for a better self-exposure of Kautskyism! 

http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/SRSD16.html#c8

Engles Principle of Communism

The Communist Manifesto

V. I.Lenin On the Slogan for a United States of Europe

V. I.   Lenin
On the Slogan for a United States of Europe

V.I.LENIN 1915

''From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism—i.e., the export of capital arid the division of the world by the “advanced” and “civilised” colonial powers—a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary''.

Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 339-343. On the Slogan for a United States of Europ

Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 44, August 23, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat. 
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 339-343. 
Translated: 
Transcription\Markup: Charles Farrell 
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2003 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. 
Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. 

In No. 40 of Sotsial-Demokrat we reported that a conference of our-Party’s groups abroad had decided to defer the question of the “United States of Europe” slogan pending a discussion, in the press, on the economic aspect of the matter.[1]

At our conference the debate on this question assumed a purely political character. Perhaps this was partly caused by the Central Committee’s Manifesto having formulated this slogan as a forthright political one (“the immediate political slogan...”, as it says there); not only did it advance the slogan of a republican United States of Europe, but expressly emphasised that this slogan is meaningless and false “without the revolutionary overthrow of the German, Austrian and Russian monarchies”.

It would be quite wrong to object to such a presentation of the question within the limits of a political appraisal of this slogan—e.g., to argue that it obscures or weakens,

etc., the slogan of a socialist revolution. Political changes of a truly democratic nature, and especially political revolutions, can under no circumstances whatsoever either obscure or weaken the slogan of a socialist revolution. On the contrary, they always bring it closer, extend its basis, and draw new sections of the petty bourgeoisie and the semi-proletarian masses into the socialist struggle. On the other hand, political revolutions are inevitable in the course of the socialist revolution, which should not be regarded as a single act, but as a period of turbulent political and   economic upheavals, the most intense class struggle, civil war, revolutions, and counter-revolutions.

But while the slogan of a republican United States of Europe—if accompanied by the revolutionary overthrow of the three most reactionary monarchies in Europe, headed by the Russian—is quite invulnerable as a political slogan, there still remains the highly important question of its economic content and significance. From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism—i.e., the export of capital arid the division of the world by the “advanced” and “civilised” colonial powers—a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary.

Capital has become international and monopolist. The world has been carved up by a handful of Great Powers, i.e., powers successful in the great plunder and oppression of nations. The four Great Powers of Europe—Britain, France, Russia and Germany, with an aggregate population of between 250,000,000 and 300,000,000, and an area of about 7,000,000 square kilometres—possess colonies with a population of almost 500 million (494,500,000) and an area of 64,600,000 square kilometres, i.e., almost half the surface of the globe (133,000,000 square kilometres, exclusive of Arctic and Antarctic regions). Add to this the three Asian states—China, Turkey and Persia, now being rent piecemeal by thugs that are waging a war of “liberation”, namely, Japan, Russia, Britain and France. Those three Asian states, which may be called semi-colonies (in reality they are now 90 per cent colonies), have a total population of 360,000,000 and an area of 14,500,000 square kilometres (almost one and a half times the area of all Europe).

Furthermore, Britain, France and Germany have invested capital abroad to the value of no less than 70,000 million rubles. The business of securing “legitimate” profits from this tidy sum—these exceed 3,000 million rubles annually—committees of the millionaires, known as governments, which are equipped with armies and navies and which provide the sons and brothers of the millionaires with jobs in the colonies and semi-colonies as viceroys, consuls, ambassadors, officials of all kinds, clergymen, and other leeches.

That is how the plunder of about a thousand million of the earth’s population by a handful of Great Powers is organised in the epoch of the highest development of capitalism. No other organisation is possible under capitalism. Renounce colonies, “spheres of influence”, and the export of capital? To think that it is possible means coming down to the level of some snivelling parson who every Sunday preaches to the rich on the lofty principles of Christianity and advises them to give the poor, well, if
not millions, at least several hundred rubles yearly.

A United States of Europe under capitalism is tantamount to an agreement on the partition of colonies. Under capitalism, however, no other basis and no other principle of division are possible except force. A multi-millionaire cannot share the “national income” of a capitalist country with anyone otherwise than “in proportion to the capital invested” (with a bonus thrown in, so that the biggest capital may receive more than its share). Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, and anarchy in production. To advocate a “just” division of income on such a basis is sheer Proudhonism, stupid philistinism. No division can be effected otherwise than in “proportion to
strength”, and strength changes with the course of economic development. Following 1871, the rate of Germany’s accession of strength was three or four times as rapid as that of Britain and France, and of Japan about ten times as rapid as Russia’s. There is and there can be no other way of testing the real might of a capitalist state than by war.

War does not contradict the fundamentals of private property—on the contrary, it is a direct and inevitable outcome of those fundamentals. Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics.

Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states. In this sense a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists ... but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America, who   have been badly done out of their share by the present partition of colonies, and the increase of whose might during the last fifty years has been immeasurably more rapid than that of backward and monarchist Europe, now turning senile. Compared with the United States of America, Europe as a whole denotes economic stagnation.

On the present economic basis, i.e., under capitalism, a United States of Europe would signify an organisation of reaction to retard America’s more rapid development. The times when the cause of democracy and socialism was associated only with Europe alone have gone for ever.

A United States of the World (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the unification and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism—about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic. As a separate slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would hardly be a correct one, first, because it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others.

Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world—the capitalist world—attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states. The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic, which will more and more concentrate the forces of the proletariat of a given nation or nations, in the struggle against states that have not yet gone over to socialism. The abolition of classes is impossible without a dictatorship of the oppressed class, of the proletariat. A free union of nations in socialism is impossible without a more or less prolonged and stubborn   struggle of the socialist republics against the backward states.

It is for these reasons and after repeated discussions at the conference of R,S.D.L.P. groups abroad, and following that conference, that the Central Organ’s editors have come to the conclusion that the slogan for a United States of Europe is an erroneous one.


Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 339-343. On the Slogan for a United States of Europ

V.I. Lenin MATERIALISM and EMPIRIO-CRITICISM Chapter Five

V.I.   Lenin
MATERIALISM and EMPIRIO-CRITICISM

Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy

Chapter Five: The Recent Revolution in Natural Science and Philosophical Idealism

A year ago, in Die Neue Zeit (1906–07, No. 52), there appeared an article by Joseph Diner-Dénes entitled “Marxism and the Recent Revolution in the Natural Sciences.” The defect of this article is that it ignores the epistemological conclusions which are being drawn from the “new” physics and in which we are especially interested at present. But it is precisely this defect which renders the point of view and the conclusions of the author particularly interesting for us. Joseph Diner-Dénes, like the present writer, holds the view of the “rank-and-file Marxist,” of whom our Machians speak with such haughty contempt. For instance, Mr. Yushkevich writes that “ordinarily, the average rank-and-file Marxist calls himself a dialectical materialist” (p. 1 of his book).

And now this rank-and-file Marxist, in the person of J. Diner-Dénes, has directly compared the recent discoveries in science, and especially in physics (X-rays, Becquerel rays, radium, etc.[1]), with Engels’ Anti-Dühring. To what conclusion has this comparison led him? “In the most varied fields of natural science,” writes Diner-Dénes, “new knowledge has been acquired, all of which tends towards that single point which Engels desired to make clear, namely, that in nature ‘there are no irreconcilable contradictions, no forcibly fixed boundary lines and distinctions,’ and that if
contradictions and distinctions are met with in nature, it is because we alone have introduced their rigidity and absoluteness into nature.” It was discovered, for instance, that light and electricity   are only manifestations of one and the same force of nature.[2] Each day it becomes more probable that chemical affinity may be reduced to electrical processes. The indestructible and non-disintegrable elements of chemistry, whose number continues to grow as though in derision of the unity of the world, now prove to be destructible and disintegrable. The element radium has been converted into the element helium.[3] “Just as all the forces of nature have been reduced to one force, so all substances in nature have been reduced to one substance” (Diner-Dénes’ italics). Quoting the opinion of one of the writers who regard the atom as only a condensation of the ether,[4] the author exclaims: “How brilliantly does this confirm the statement made by Engels thirty years ago that motion is the mode of existence of matter.” “All phenomena of nature are motion, and the differences between them lie only in the fact that we human beings perceive this motion in different forms. . . . It is as Engels said. Nature, like history, is subject to the dialectical law of motion.”

On the other hand, you cannot take up any of the writings of the Machians or about Machism without encountering pretentious references to the new physics, which is said to have refuted materialism, and so on and so forth.

Whether these assertions are well-founded is another question, but the connection between the new physics, or rather a definite school of the new physics, and Machism and other varieties of modern idealist philosophy is beyond doubt. To analyse Machism and at the same time to ignore this connection—as Plekhanov does[5]—is to scoff at the spirit of dialectical materialism, i.e., to sacrifice the method of Engels to the letter of Engels. Engels says

explicitly that “with each epoch making discovery even in the sphere of natural science [“not to speak of the history of mankind”], materialism has to change its form” (Ludwig Feuerbach, Germ. ed., p. 19).[6] Hence, a revision of the “form” of Engels’ materialism, a revision of his natural-philosophical propositions is not only not “revisionism,” in the accepted meaning of the term, but, on the contrary, is demanded by Marxism. We criticise the Machians not for making such a revision, but for their purely revisionist trick of betraying the essence of materialism under the guise of criticising its form and of adopting the fundamental precepts of reactionary   bourgeois philosophy without making the slightest attempt to deal directly, frankly and definitely with assertions of Engels’ which are unquestionably extremely important to the given question, as, for example, his assertion that “. . . motion without matter is unthinkable” (Anti-Dühring, p. 50).[7]

It goes without saying that in examining the connection between one of the schools of modern physicists and the rebirth of philosophical idealism, it is far from being our intention to deal with specific physical theories. What interests us exclusively is the epistemological conclusions that follow from certain definite propositions and generally known discoveries. These epistemological conclusions are of themselves so insistent that many physicists are already reaching for them. What is more, there are already various trends among the physicists, and definite schools are beginning to be formed on this basis. Our object, therefore, will be confined to explaining clearly the essence of the difference between these various trends and the relation in which they stand to the fundamental lines of philosophy.

1. The Crisis in Modern Physics

In his book Valeur de la science [Value of Science], the famous French physicist Henri Poincaré says that there are “symptoms of a serious crisis” in physics, and he devotes a special chapter to this crisis (Chap. VIII, cf. p. 171).

The crisis is not confined to the fact that “radium, the great revolutionary,” is undermining the principle of the conservation of energy. “All the other principles are equally endangered” (p. 180). For instance, Lavoisier’s principle, or the principle of the conservation of mass, has been undermined by the electron theory of matter. According to this theory atoms are composed of very minute particles called electrons, which are charged with positive or negative electricity and “are immersed in a medium which we call the ether.” The experiments of physicists provide data for calculating the velocity of the electrons and their mass (or the relation of their mass to their electrical charge). The velocity proves to be comparable   with the velocity of light (300,000 kilometres per second), attaining, for instance, one-third of the latter. Under such circumstances the twofold mass of the electron has to be taken into account, corresponding to the necessity of over coming the inertia, firstly, of the electron itself and, secondly, of the ether. The former mass will be the real or mechanical mass of the electron, the latter the “electrodynamic mass which represents the inertia of the ether.” And it turns out that the former mass is equal to zero. The entire mass of the electrons, or, at least, of the negative electrons, proves to be totally and exclusively electrodynamic in its origin.[8] Mass disappears. The foundations of mechanics are undermined. Newton’s principle, the equality of action and reaction, is undermined, and so on.

We are faced, says Poincaré, with the “ruins” of the old principles of physics, “a general debacle of principles.” It is true, he remarks, that all the mentioned departures from principles refer to infinitesimal magnitudes; it is possible that we are still ignorant of other infinitesimals counteracting the undermining of the old principles. Moreover, radium is very rare. But at any rate we have reached a “period of doubt.” We have already seen what epistemological deductions the author draws from this “period of doubt": “it is not nature which imposes on [or dictates to] us the concepts of space and time, but we who impose them on nature"; “whatever is not thought, is pure nothing.” These deductions are idealist deductions. The breakdown of the most fundamental principles shows (such is Poincaré’s trend of thought) that these principles are not copies, photographs of nature, not images of
something external in relation to man’s consciousness, but products of his consciousness. Poincaré does not develop these deductions consistently, nor is he essentially interested in the philosophical aspect of the question. It is dealt with in detail by the French writer on philosophical problems, Abel Rey, in his book The Physical Theory of the Modern Physicists (La Théorie physique chez les physiciens contemporains, Paris, F. Alcan, 1907). True, the author himself is a positivist, i.e., a muddlehead and a semi-Machian, but in this case this is even a certain advantage, for he can not be suspected of a desire to “slander” our Machians’ idol. Rey cannot be   trusted when it comes
to giving an exact philosophical definition of concepts and of materialism in particular, for Rey too is a professor, and as such is imbued with an utter contempt for the materialists (and distinguishes himself by utter ignorance of the epistemology of materialism). It goes without saying that a Marx or an Engels is absolutely non-existent for such “men of science.” But Rey summarises carefully and in general conscientiously the extremely abundant literature on the subject, not only French, but English and German as well (Ostwald and Mach in particular), so that we shall have frequent recourse to his work.

The attention of philosophers in general, says the author, and also of those who, for one reason or another, wish to criticise science generally, has now been particularly attracted towards physics. “In discussing the limits and value of physical knowledge, it is in effect the legitimacy of positive science, the possibility of knowing the object, that is criticised” (pp. i-ii). From the “crisis in modern physics” people hasten to draw sceptical conclusions (p. 14).

Now, what is this crisis? During the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century the physicists agreed among themselves on everything essential. They believed in a purely mechanical explanation of nature: they assumed that physics is nothing but a more complicated mechanics, namely, a molecular mechanics. They differed only as to the methods used in reducing physics to mechanics and as to the details of the mechanism. . . . At present the spectacle presented by the physico-chemical sciences seems completely changed. Extreme disagreement has replaced general unanimity, and no longer does it concern details, but leading and fundamental ideas. While it would be an exaggeration to say that each scientist has his own peculiar tendencies, it must nevertheless be noted that science, and especially physics, has, like art, its numerous schools, the conclusions of which often differ from, and sometimes are directly opposed and hostile to each other. . . .

“From this one may judge the significance and scope of what has been called the crisis in modern physics.

“Down to the middle of the nineteenth century, traditional physics had assumed that it was sufficient merely to extend physics in order to arrive at a metaphysics of matter. This   physics ascribed to its theories an ontological

value. And its theories were all mechanistic. The traditional mechanism [Rey employs this word in the specific sense of a system of ideas which reduces physics to mechanics] thus claimed, over and above the results of experience, a real knowledge of the material universe. This was not a hypothetical account of experience; it was a dogma. . .” (p. 16).

We must here interrupt the worthy “positivist.” It is clear that he is describing the materialist philosophy of traditional physics but does not want to call the devil (materialism) by name. Materialism to a Humean must appear to be metaphysics, dogma, a transgression of the bounds of experience, and so forth. Knowing nothing of materialism, the Humean Rey has no conception whatever of dialectics, of the difference between dialectical materialism and metaphysical materialism, in Engels’ meaning of the term. Hence, the relation between absolute and relative truth, for example, is absolutely unclear to Rey.

“. . . The criticism of traditional mechanism made during the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century weakened the premise of the ontological reality of mechanism. On the basis of these criticisms a philosophical conception of physics was founded which became almost traditional in 7philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century. Science was nothing but a symbolic formula, a method of notation (repérage, the creation of signs, marks,

symbols), and since the methods of notation varied according to the schools, the conclusion was soon reached that only that was denoted which had been previously designed (fa&ctail;onné) by man for notation (or symbolisation). Science became a work of art for dilettantes, a work of art for utilitarians: views which could with legitimacy be generally interpreted as the negation of the possibility of science. A science which is a pure artifice for acting upon nature, a mere utilitarian technique, has no right to call itself science, without perverting the meaning of words. To say that science can be nothing but such an artificial means of action is to disavow science in the
proper meaning of the term.

“The collapse of traditional mechanism, or, more precisely, the criticism to which it was subjected, led to the proposition that science itself had also collapsed. From the   impossibility of adhering purely and simply to traditional mechanism it was inferred that science was impossible” (pp. 16-17).

And the author asks: “Is the present crisis in physics a temporary and external incident in the evolution of science, or is science itself making an abrupt right-about-face and definitely abandoning the path it has hitherto pursued?. . .”

“If the [physical and chemical] sciences, which in history have been essentially emancipators, collapse in this crisis, which reduces them to the status of mere, technically useful recipes but deprives them of all significance from the stand point of knowledge of nature, the result must needs be a complete revolution both in the art of logic and the history of ideas. Physics then loses all educational value; the spirit of positive science it represents becomes false and dangerous.” Science can offer only practical recipes but no real knowledge. “Knowledge of the real must be sought and given by other means. . . . One must take another road, one must return to subjective intuition, to a
mystical sense of reality, in a word, to the mysterious, all that of which one thought it had been deprived” (p. 19).

As a positivist, the author considers such a view wrong and the crisis in physics only temporary. We shall presently see how Rey purifies Mach, Poincaré and Co. of these conclusions. At present we shall confine ourselves to noting the fact of the “crisis” and its significance. From the last words of Rey quoted by us it is quite clear what reactionary elements have taken advantage of and aggravated this crisis. Rey explicitly states in the preface to his work that “the fideist and anti-intellectualist movement of the last years of the nineteenth century” is seeking “to base itself on the general spirit of modern physics” (p. ii). In France, those who put faith above reason are called fideists (from the Latin fides, faith). Anti-intellectualism is a doctrine that denies the rights or claims of reason. Hence, in its philosophical aspect, the essence of the “crisis in modern physics” is that the old physics regarded its theories as “real knowledge of the material world,” i.e., a reflection of objective reality. The new trend in physics regards theories only as symbols, signs, and marks for practice, i.e., it denies the existence of an objective reality independent of our mind and   reflected by it. If Rey had used correct philosophical terminology, he would have said: the materialist theory of knowledge, instinctively accepted by the earlier physics, has been replaced by an idealist and agnostic theory of knowledge, which, against the wishes of the idealists and agnostics, has been taken advantage of by fideism.

But Rey does not present this replacement, which constitutes the crisis, as though all the modern physicists stand opposed to all the old physicists. No. He shows that in their epistemological trends the modern physicists are divided into three schools: the energeticist or conceptualist school; the mechanistic or neo-mechanistic school, to which the vast majority of physicists still adhere; and in between the two, the critical school. To the first belong Mach and Duhem; to the third, Henri Poincaré to the second, Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Maxwell—among the older physicists—and Larmor and Lorentz among the modern physicists. What the essence of the
two basic trends is (for the third is not independent, but intermediate) may be judged from the following words of Rey’s:

“Traditional mechanism constructed a system of the material world.” Its doctrine of the structure of matter was based on “elements qualitatively homogenous and identical"; and elements were to be regarded as “immutable, impenetrable,” etc. Physics “constructed a real edifice out of real materials and real cement. The physicist possessed material elements, the causes and modes of their action, and the real laws of their action” (pp. 33-38). “The change in this view consists in the rejection of the ontological significance of the theories and in an exaggerated emphasis on the phenomenological significance of physics.” The conceptualist view operates with “pure abstractions . . . and seeks a purely abstract theory which will as far as possible eliminate the hypothesis of matter. . . . The notion of energy thus becomes the substructure of the new physics. This is why conceptualist physics may
most often be called energeticist physics,” although this designation does not fit, for example, such a representative of conceptualist physics as Mach (p. 46).

Rey’s identification of energetics with Machism is not altogether correct, of course; nor is his assurance that the   neo-mechanistic school as well is approaching a phenomenalist view of physics (p. 48), despite the profundity of its disagreement with the conceptualists. Rey’s “new” terminology does not clarify, but rather obscures matters; but we could not avoid it if we were to give the reader an idea of how a “positivist” regards the crisis in physics.

Essentially, the opposition of the “new” school to the old views fully coincides, as the reader may have convinced himself, with Kleinpeter’s criticism of Helmholtz quoted above. In his presentation of the views of the various physicists Rey reflects the indefiniteness and vacillation of their philosophical views. The essence of the crisis in modern physics consists in the breakdown of the old laws and basic principles, in the rejection of an objective reality existing outside the mind, that is, in the replacement of materialism by idealism and agnosticism. “Matter has disappeared"—one may thus express the fundamental and characteristic difficulty in relation to many of the particular questions, which has created this crisis. Let us pause to discuss this difficulty.
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Notes

[1] X-rays, Becquerel rays,radium—discoveries which, laid the basis for the development of atomic physics.

X-rays (Rontgen rays) are extremely short-wave electromagnetic radiation ’which can pass through media impenetrable by visible   light. They were discovered by the German physicist Wilhelm Konrad R6ntgen in December 1895 who described their main properties; later the nature of this radiation was discovered.

In 1896 the French physicist Antoine-Henri Becquerel, while studying the action of various fluorescent substances on photo graphic film, discovered that uranium salts affect such film in the dark even without previous exposure to light. By further experiments he showed that this action was due to a new form of radiation distinct from X-rays.

Investigating this new form of radiation, Pierre and Marie Curie established that it was due to a hitherto unknown property of matter, which they called radioactivity. As a result of their experiments two new radioactive elements were discovered: polonium and radium (1898). Later it was found that Becquerel’s rays consist of three components (alpha-, beta- and gamma-rays).

[2] This discovery was made by lames Clerk Maxwell. By generalising Michael Faraday’s experimental results in the study of electromagnetic phenomena he created the theory of the electromagnetic field, from which it followed that changes of the electromagnetic field are propagated with the speed of light. On the basis of his researches, Maxwell in 1805 concluded that light consists of electromagnetic vibrations. In 1886-89 his theory was confirmed experimentally by Heinrich Hertz, who proved the existence of electromagnetic waves.

[3] The study of radioactivity revealed the existence of a special kind of radiation: alpha-, beta- and gamma-rays. In 1903, Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy suggested that radioactivity was the spontaneous transformation of one chemical element into another. This was speedily confirmed by William Ramsay and Frederick Soddy, who discovered that helium was one of the products of radioactive disintegration of radon (1903). Shortly afterwards it was discovered that helium was formed by the disintegration of radium and other radioactiye elements showing alpha-radioactivity. This formation of helium was an important argument in favour of the theory of radioactive
transformations, and could only be explained by supposing that alpha-rays are the nuclei of helium atoms. This was confirmed in 1909 by the experiments of T. Rutherford and T. Royds.

[4] Lenin uses the concept of the ether, which was still generally accepted in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century. The idea of the ether as a special material medium filling all space and acting as the carrier of light, gravitational forces, etc., was put forward in the seventeenth century. Later, the notion of different forms of the ether, independent of one another (electromagnetic, magnetic, etc.) was introduced to explain various phenomena. 

Owing to the success of the wave theory of light, the concept of the luminiferous ether (Christian Huygens, Austin Frosnel and others) was especially developed; subsequently the hypothesis of a   single ether arose. As science developed, however, the concept of the ether came into contradiction with new facts. The untenability of the hypothesis of the ether as a universal mechanical medium was proved by the theory of relativity; the rational elements contained in the hypothesis of the ether were reflected in the quantum field theory (tile vacuum concept).

[5] Lenin repeatedly pointed out the limited nature of Plekhanov’s criticism of Machism. In 1905, in connection with his preface to the second Russian edition of Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbaeh and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Lenin wrote: “How petty are his sallies and ’pinpricks against the Machists! For me this is the more to be regretted since Plekhanov’s criticism of Mach seems to me essentially correct" (Lenin Miscellany XXVI, p.

21). In 1907-08, in the works Fundamental Problems of Marxism, Materialismus militais and others, Plekhnnov criticised Machism and its adherents in Russia (Bogdanov, Lunacharsky and others) and pointed out the fallacy of their attempts to combine Marxism with the subjective-idealist philosophy of Mach and Avenarius. In so doing, Plekhanov “was less concerned with refuting Mach than with dealing a factional blow at Bolshevism” (see p. 355 of this volume).

Plekhanov’s opposition to Machism played a positive part in defending Marxist philosophy from the attacks of the revisionists, but he did not give a deep theoretical analysis of empirio-criticism, and did not reveal the direct dependence of Machism on the crisis in natural science, confining himself to a criticism of the idealist epistemological views of some of its adherents.

[6] See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, p. 375. 94.

[7] See F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1959, p. 86.

[8] The description of the concept of mass given by Henri Poincaré and quoted by Lenin was in accord with the level of development of physics at that time. The development of the electronic theory that followed the discovery of the electron made it possible to explain the nature of the mass of the electron. Joseph John Thom son advanced the hypothesis that the actual mass of the electron is determined by the energy of the electromagnetic field (i.e., the inertia of the electron is due to the inertia of the field). The concept of the electromagnetic mass of the electron was introduced, and this mass was found to depend on the velocity of motion of the electron. The mechanical mass
of the electron, however, like that of any other particle, was regarded as unchanging. The existence of the mechanical mass should have been revealed by experiments on the dependence of the electromagnetic mass of the electron on its velocity. However, these experiments, performed by Walter Kaufmann in 1901-02, unexpectedly showed that the electron behaved as if all its mass was of an electromagnetic nature. Hence the conclusion was drawn that, in the case of the electron,   mechanical mass, which was formerly regarded as an inalienable property of matter, has disappeared. This circumstance gave rise to various kinds of philosophical speculations and statements about the
"disappearance of matter’, the fallacy of which was demonstrated by Lenin. The further development of physics (relativity theory) showed that mechanical mass also depends on velocity of motion and that the mass of the electron cannot be reduced wholly to electromagnetic mass.
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