Lenin, National Liberation and Palestine

Gus Woody reviews Imperialism and the National Question recently published by Verso. 

The publication by Verso of a collection of Lenin’s writings, Imperialism and the National Question, is heartbreakingly timely. Israel has been engaged in an intensification of its genocide of the Palestinian people since October, with Gaza levelled and threats of further displacement into Egypt. The Palestinian struggle for national liberation and the resistance to it from forces of world imperialism are centre stage.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore states in her introduction to this collection, ‘Lenin showed how we reveal the new world through criticism of the old.’ (p.23) In reading him grapple with questions of national liberation, he is a contemporary in our resistance to the genocide.

The collection contains Lenin’s two pamphlets The Right of Nations to Self Determination (1914) and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Along with these are key articles from 1913 to 1916 tackling national self-determination. Closing out the collection are the theses on the national question presented to the 2nd Congress of the Communist International in 1920, and then some of the final letters and memos from Lenin’s testament in 1922 – particularly his dying struggle against Stalin’s undermining of Georgian claims for national self-determination.

Most of these texts are written following the outset of the First World War, wherein Lenin attempted to grapple with the new world system and the collapse of socialist anti-militarism in 1914. Out of these ashes came not only the two Russian Revolutions of 1917, but also the roots of many of the national liberation struggles of the rest of the 20th Century. Whilst there is certainly more that Lenin wrote on the national question, the pieces in this collection give a good insight into how communists approach national liberation.

Caught between forces to his left, who wanted to broadly avoid the national question by simply suggesting that workers on either side of a conflict between nations should immediately unite, rejecting national claims, and those on the reformist right who were abandoning principles of worker internationalism by supporting their nation in imperialist war – Lenin argues that true liberation for the global working class requires engagement with national liberation struggle.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Contribution

To open a discussion of these texts, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a leading Marxist and thinker of abolitionist struggle against the prison system, provides a striking introduction. In her piece Gilmore links together ideas of self-determination for the nation, with self-determination on the personal level, and how this links to abolition and liberation politics more generally. She reads Lenin’s writings as an attempt to grapple with the concrete messiness of social reality whilst holding as a touchstone the necessity of real liberation. As she states:

‘If the struggle for domination under capitalism consists of the struggle over territory as economic territory, then self-determination is both in dialectical antagonism to control from outside or above and replete with its own internal struggles, none of which has an automatic outcome, anti-capitalist or otherwise.’ (p.11)

Which is to speak, as with Stuart Hall, of a ‘Marxism without guarantees’, an understanding that we are fighting for our freedom, on a complex terrain, with no pre-determined route to revolution.

In this way, Gilmore also opens up an understanding of Lenin as an anti-colonial thinker, as ‘someone other than the West’ (p.3). She effectively shows that this anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics is one that is crushingly relevant today:

‘The organised violence of imperialism continues to stalk the earth in the form of its fleshly and ghostly remnants – accumulated underdevelopment – and viscerally in contemporary unequal relations of power that rush value upward, by way of elites, to the ‘economic north’, wherever the owners might reside. But in its muscular liveliness, self-determination hasn’t disappeared from the earth’s surface, nor wholly been absorbed into the system of nation-states mostly disciplined by debt and developmentalism.’ (p.2)

Although many previously directly colonised nations have ‘formal’ self-determination, Gilmore points out that true self-determination, in national and personal form, has not been secured. This links to the extensive radical thinking developed by Gilmore and others on abolitionism, which ‘arose in creative antagonism to the widening scope of militarism, police, prisons, and punishment as all-purpose solutions to social problems’ (p.16). Here Gilmore links together the ideas of abolitionism, as an ongoing resistance to attempts to hold people against their wills, to Lenin’s wider project of opposing forms of national oppression. 

Reviewing the history of the last hundred years of imperialism, Gilmore points out that nothing has terrified world capitalism more than attempts to give true content to self-determination:

‘Put differently, all the assassinations and coups and structural adjustment happened not despite anti-colonialism but in response to it.’ (p.17)

Nowhere is this more prescient than in the ongoing genocide against Palestine, repeatedly justified through invocations of October 7th and the refusal of the legitimacy of the resistance of the Palestinians as colonised people. Gilmore’s introduction deserves serious study, not least of all for its linking together of the previously disparate concerns of abolitionist, anti-imperialist, and Marxist movements – a liberation politics which terrifies the forces of imperialism and capitalism, whilst linking together previously disparate forms of opposition. 

National struggle and imperialism

What then does Lenin say? The twofold intervention that this collection highlights is the argument that Marxists must operate on the terrain of national self-determination and understand this as part and parcel of class struggle in a system of world imperialism.

Crucial here are the two larger pamphlets. The Right of Nations to Self Determination (1914) argues that socialists must recognise rights of national self-determination in their political projects – particularly regarding independence struggles against empires. We could not, in Lenin’s view, assume workers could immediately abandon all national claims and that national struggle was alien to socialist struggle. As Neil Davidson astutely summarised:

‘He argued that withholding support from national movements seeking to escape great empires … had two detrimental effects: one was to hand over leadership to the bourgeois nationalists in the former; the other was to implicitly endorse the continued rule of the latter. Support for national demands should of course be openly undertaken with the purpose of weakening the support of workers for nationalism, and in this context several questions have to be asked. Does support strengthen or weaken the capitalist or imperialist state? Does it strengthen or weaken the class consciousness and organization of the working class? Does it strengthen or weaken the tolerance of people of different nations or ‘races’ for each other?’

In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin attempted to provide a popular outline of various analyses of how capitalism was developing at his time, and what this meant for the prospect of revolution.  He highlights how the tendency towards monopoly amongst capitalist production leads to the increased integration of industrial and banking capital, then varying forms of contestation between imperialist states with significant monopolies. Against Kautsky’s erroneous conception of ‘ultra-imperialism’, whereby increased integration of capitalist production globally promotes peaceful solutions between states, Lenin pointed out that increased alliances merely postpone conflict:

‘Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics.’ (p.223)

This should act to arm us every time capitalists talk of ‘history’s end’, world peace, or the like being possible under capitalist production. Capitalist alliances are temporary, and capitalist competition tends towards colonialism and conflict. This is particularly relevant as ecological breakdown is reducing capitalist access to resources, and will encourage a variety of conflicts, subterfuges, and strategies between states and businesses.

Self-Determination and democracy

It is worth reflecting on how Lenin understands national liberation in relationship with revolutionary democracy. This comes out forcefully in the 1915 article, The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination:

‘The proletariat cannot be victorious except through democracy, i.e., by giving full effect to democracy and by linking with each step of its struggle democratic demands formulated in the most resolute terms. It is absurd to contrapose the socialist revolution and the revolutionary struggle against capitalism to a single problem of democracy, in this case, the national question. We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary programme and tactics on all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular election of officials, equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc. (p.117)

For Lenin, socialist revolution pushed through and gave full content to the democratic ideals only formally promised in the era of bourgeois nationalism – only the workers and oppressed could give true content to the meaning of freedom, democracy, self-determination, and liberation. To secure what Marx and Engels once strikingly called ‘the association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ there must be recognition between workers globally. For this recognition to really occur, for there to be meaningful democracy amongst workers, there must be an acknowledgment of the right of workers to make national claims. As he states:

‘We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede.’ (p.122)

If there is any article in this collection that best sums up Lenin’s approach to national liberation, and revolutionary politics generally, it is The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up, when Lenin takes to task socialists who were dismissive of the Irish Easter Rising of 1916:

‘Whoever calls such a rebellion a “putsch” is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon.

To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.-to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a “putsch”.

Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.’ (p.264)

It’s a striking image to imagine Lenin, stuck in political exile in Zurich, in émigré radical circles, writing a prescient and direct understanding of the importance of the Easter Rising. Despite the distance, the lack of information, this man immediately grasps precisely how important the Irish liberation struggle was to the wider revolutionary struggle. Rather than be dismissive in the aftermath of its crushing, hiding in the comfortable view that the Rising had nothing to do with socialist revolution, he understood it was all part of the terrain of our struggle.

This is Lenin engaging with what Lukacs calls ‘the actuality of revolution’, taking quite seriously the fact that revolutions are ‘messy’ affairs. They include various classes and social strata, embodied in different organisations and forms of living. What Lenin does argue for is the hegemonic role of the workers in the mass revolutionary moment – a subtle but crucial difference to the idea of a monolithic workers’ revolt. When everything is in play, workers will play a role in alliance with other classes, but only by guarding their political and organisational independence, and building their political acumen and strength, can they seize the moment. As he states in 1913, when discussing how socialists prevent themselves merely tailing bourgeois nationalists:

‘But, to prevent this recognition from becoming an apologia of nationalism, it must be strictly limited to what is progressive in such movements, in order that this recognition may not lead to bourgeois ideology obscuring proletarian consciousness.’ (p.42)

Lenin walks a tightrope. On one hand, we do not simply tail nationalist movements, we understand nationalism in general to be a reactionary creed. On the other hand, to be a revolutionary and democratic tradition, Marxism must operate on the terrain of national struggle, strengthening the proletarian and socialist elements of this, understanding the national claim as a subordinate arena in the global class struggle.

Reading Lenin in the context of the Gaza genocide

There is a fundamental difference between those who are unambiguous in the ending of the Zionist project and the desire for a singular secular democratic Palestine, and those who hide behind revolutionary rhetoric to avoid the ‘problem’ of Palestinian national liberation against settler colonialism. It is impossible to read this collection from Verso and not reflect on this.

Some socialists argue that peace will come through united action of the Israeli and Palestinian working classes, but this analysis cannot be divorced from the ongoing settler colonialism. Just as for Marx and Lenin, as shown in these writings, there was no true internationalism from English workers without the minimum recognition of the Irish right to secede and the necessity of a united Ireland, there is no true internationalism amongst the Israeli working class as long as they refuse to recognise the over 75 years of settler colonial occupation and the necessity of the collapse of the Zionist entity. It is only from here that we begin discussing any progressive role for the Israeli settler working class – that they organise and begin from a point of recognising their own state should not exist. Yet some continue to put forward an analysis which takes as given the idea that we are dealing with two developed capitalist states, containing workers who must merely unite against nationalism on both sides. Often this leads to quite conservative results. But it is not simply the case that the Israeli working class are hoodwinked by the Israeli ruling class, it is that as settlers they have an ongoing interest in refusing Palestinian claims to self-determination and basic humanity. Just like Lenin demonstrated to Luxemburg and others, we cannot avoid the concrete situation – ongoing settler colonialism, as a key bastion of Western imperialism in the wider Middle East, which will only be broken through the national liberation of Palestine.

As Asad Haider states around the importance of the Palestinian struggle for us today:

‘This is not an abstract justice or humanitarianism which would look at a colonial situation and plead for an end to hatred and fighting, a kind of humanist variation of the common formulations of the mainstream media which attribute Palestinian deaths to “conflict” rather than to the Israeli army. In this colonial situation, the struggle for universal emancipation is necessarily the struggle for Palestinian self-determination.’

Such a sentiment is expressed perfectly in the slogans ‘in our millions and our billions, we are all Palestinians’. The core of such a sentiment can be found, despite so much time, again and again in the writings of Lenin and it is crucial that Verso have summarised these interventions to arm us anew. To give the final word to Lenin:

‘The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene.’ (p.266)