BY JACK BARNES
The following selection is from the 1990 Socialist Workers
Party resolution "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War,"
published in issue no. 11 of the Marxist magazine New
International. These excerpts appear under the heading, "The
fight for national self-determination: the only road toward a
world without borders." New International no. 11 is copyright
(c) 1998 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp., reprinted by
permission.
1. In bringing to power and consolidating a workers and peasants regime, the socialist revolution opens the beginning of the end of the centuries-old history of national oppression, divisions, and enmities.
a) The fight against national oppression is always intertwined with radical agrarian reform to liberate the rural toilers from
(1) precapitalist forms of exploitation, by expropriating the landlord classes and abolishing all forms of feudal and semifeudal rents, including compulsory labor duties; and
(2) capitalist exploitation under the rents and mortgages system, by nationalizing the land, guaranteeing the right of peasants to till the soil, and ensuring them adequate means to do so (low-interest credit, seed, fertilizers, tools, and cooperative production and marketing facilities).
b) The advance toward socialism is possible only on the basis of guaranteeing the right of national self- determination to all oppressed nations and nationalities, as well as forging a voluntary federation of workers and farmers republics.
(1) The socialist revolution sounds the bell of "nation time" for oppressed nations and nationalities.
(2) This course was advanced by the Bolshevik leadership under Lenin's guidance following the October 1917 revolution.
(a) As the October victory in Russia gave an impulse to revolutionary uprisings elsewhere throughout the old tsarist empire, the communist leadership began to forge a voluntary federation of the various republics organized on the basis of soviet power -both where the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established (as in Russia and the Ukraine), as well as where it could not yet be established but revolutionary workers and peasants governments had come to power (as in most of the Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics).
(b) Lenin insisted on a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not a new "Soviet" nationality with patriotism used as cover for maintenance and expansion of Great Russian chauvinism and bourgeois nationalism; not a new "socialist nation-state" suppressing minority nationalities; and not a federation limiting itself to formal equality, but one that took affirmative action to develop the economies and culture of the oppressed nations in order to close the historical gap in social and economic conditions between them and the formerly oppressor Russian nation.
(c) National self-determination, like other democratic rights, is subordinate to defense of the workers state in face of counterrevolutionary assault and imperialist aggression. The denial of national rights, however, weakens rather than strengthens the defense of a workers state. The Soviet republic's policy on national self-determination and its revolutionary agrarian reform were key to mobilizing the peasantry and the victims of tsarist national oppression behind the workers' struggle during the civil war against the combined military forces of imperialism and the domestic landlords and capitalists.
(d) Defense of the workers state itself is subordinate to initiatives by the revolutionary leadership of the state to advance the world struggle for national liberation and socialism (e.g., the transfer of crack Cuban troops and equipment to Angola to win the battle of Cuito Cuanavale; preparations to aid the FMLN, Panama).
(3) The Communist International adopted the Bolsheviks' course on the right to self-determination as the foundation of communist policy on the national question.1...
6. "Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!" was the slogan raised by Lenin to summarize the international communist policy of unconditional support for national liberation struggles against imperialist oppression.
a) The regimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China have reversed this policy of political solidarity and material assistance to the fight for national liberation, subordinating these struggles to the national diplomatic interests of the castes and their unending search for stable relations with imperialism.
b) Unlike the imperialist ruling classes, the castes do not directly exploit Third World nations through the export of capital. But the castes are complicit with imperialist exploitation through the benefits they reap from unequal trade at prices determined by the world market.
c) The Communist Party of Cuba is the first mass communist leadership of a workers state since the Bolsheviks to carry out a proletarian internationalist approach to the fight for national liberation from imperialist oppression and exploitation.
(1) Following a course explained most clearly by Che Guevara on behalf of the revolutionary government in a February 1965 speech to the Afro-Asian Conference in Algiers, Cuban communists advocate a conscious policy by the more industrially developed workers states to close the gap in economic and social conditions with less developed workers states, workers and farmers governments, and regimes in the Third World arising from popular revolutionary struggles.
(a) They demand that trade with such governments not be based on prices of production reflected in the world market, which embody and perpetuate the exploitative transfer of labor time from oppressed nations to imperialist countries. Instead, trade should take into account the widely differing levels of labor productivity among these nations in order to foster development aimed at more equitable relations.
(b) They propose that the more economically advanced workers states provide direct aid to foster the industrialization and economic and social development of countries that face a legacy of imperialist plunder.
(2) The Cuban government and Communist Party have applied this policy in their fight for preferential trade and pricing policies for Mongolia, Vietnam, and Cuba within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or Comecon) trading bloc.2
(a) The Cuban government and party have advocated that similar CMEA policies be applied toward Grenada, Nicaragua, Angola, and other governments established through victorious popular revolutions or under fire from imperialism.
(b) To the degree allowed by its own limited resources, Cuba itself sends internationalist volunteers and provides unstinting help to advance the social and economic development of such countries.
(c) In advancing these policies, communists in Cuba link them to the call for united action to demand that imperialism cancel the Third World debt, to the call for a New International Economic Order that establishes trade and barter arrangements that cease transferring the fruits of labor from oppressed nations to industrially advanced ones, and to the call for greater social and economic justice in Third World countries themselves.
1 See Lenin's report and theses on the national and colonial question in Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings of the Second Congress, 1920, vol. 1, pp. 211-16, 283-90, part of the Pathfinder series, The Communist International in Lenin's Time.
2 The CMEA was founded in 1949 at Moscow's initiative with the stated purpose of coordinating trade and investment policies of the Soviet and Eastern European workers states. In subsequent years Mongolia (1962), Cuba (1972), and Vietnam (1978) joined the council. Yugoslavia was not a member but participated in some CMEA bodies. Albania withdrew in 1961. North Korea and China were never CMEA members or associates. The CMEA announced in January 1990 that it would begin functioning on the basis of world market prices payable in hard currency, and officially dissolved eighteen months later, in June 1991.