From Insurgent Notes #12.
Thank you for this review. The reviewer and so far as I can tell the book seem to have captured both the great spirit and political importance of a figure but for whose tragic death the entire history of the twentieth century might (reviewer’s emphasis) have been different. I hope the book is widely read.
One passage in the review cries out for discussion. Since it occupies only one paragraph—indeed, less than a paragraph—in a long review, it may seem unfair to attach too much importance to it. But because it addresses a crucial issue of politics, one that has been subject to a lot of controversy, and also one on which there is reason to believe Luxemburg was mistaken, I think it worth calling attention to it. Here is the passage:
Luxemburg was both an innovative analyst and determined opponent of imperialism—the domination of the world by a handful of powerful or would-be powerful nations, but she had no sympathy for national self-determination as a political strategy—even, and perhaps especially when it concerned Poland, the country of her birth. She succinctly explained why: “Why speak of national self-determination? Under capitalism the nation does not exist! Instead we have classes with antagonistic interests and rights. The ruling class and the enlightened proletariat can never form one undifferentiated national whole.”
Luxemburg’s assertion that “under capitalism the nation does not exist,” while it may be true today when a truly global economy and global capitalist class has emerged, was not true a hundred years ago when she wrote it, at a time when a handful of imperialist powers not merely exploited the workers of the world but determined the fate of local and dependent elites who were denied the god-given right of every bourgeoisie to exploit its “own” populace.
More important, however is her “lack of sympathy for national self-determination as a political strategy.” (From the text it is not clear who is speaking, Luxemburg, the writer of the book, or the reviewer.) In the first place, the point at issue was not national self-determination, but the right of nations to self-determination. To defend a right is not to call for its exercise: case in point, the right of divorce, or the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Lenin emphasized that the right of self-determination was a slogan addressed to the workers of the oppressor nation, on the grounds that no people that oppresses another can itself be free. (“Labor in the white skin cannot be free where in the black is branded.” Also, see Marx on the relation of English and Irish workers.) At the same time he emphasized that the duty of communists of the oppressed nation was to argue for the closest possible ties with the workers of the oppressor nation, and to oppose attempts by the bourgeoisie in the former to promote notions of unified national interests. (For Lenin’s side of the argument with Luxemburg, see https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/)
I am aware that Lenin’s slogan was sometimes interpreted to justify support for the bourgeoisie of “backward” nations, the most notorious cases being the Comintern’s alliance with Mustafa Kemal (during Lenin’s lifetime) and later with Chiang Kai-shek (after Lenin’s death). But it didn’t have to. (I am also aware that the issue has been muddied almost beyond the possibility of clarification by the cynical maneuvers of the Stalinists, but that should not stop us from trying to understand the actual debate between Lenin and Luxemburg.) And the opposite error could also prove disastrous, as the Bolsheviks discovered to their sorrow in 1920 at the gates of Warsaw when, having temporarily abandoned the “Leninist” for the “Luxemburgist” position, and viewing as reactionary any concessions to Polish national aspirations, they found themselves opposed by the entire Polish nation, including its proletariat.
We communists do not believe in God. But we also know that attempts to suppress religion do not work, and that the demand for freedom of religion (and freedom for antireligious propaganda) is the only way to win the masses away from superstition.
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