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| Trotsky. Foto recortada; detalle. |
2.- The Question of Nationalism
[ For the Materialist Conception of the Negro
Struggle ]
Richard S. Fraser, 1955
The modern nation is exclusively a product of
capitalism. It arose in Europe out of the atomization and dispersal of the
productive forces which characterized feudalism.
Nations began to
emerge with the growth of trade and formed the framework for the production and
distribution of commodities on a capitalist basis.
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| R. S. Fraser, estatubatuar komunista |
Nationalism has a
contradictory historical development in Europe. Trotsky elaborated this
difference as the key to understanding the role of the national question in the
Russian revolution. In the first place the nations of western Europe emerged in
the unification of petty states around a commercial center. The problem of the
bourgeois revolution was to achieve this national unification.
In eastern Europe,
Russian nationalism appeared on the scene in the role of the oppressor of many
small nations. The problem of national unification in the Russian revolution
was the breakup of this oppressive system and to achieve the independence of
the small nations.
These were the two
basic expressions of the national question in Europe. But these two basic
phases of national development, corresponding to different stages in the
development of capitalism, each contain a multiplicity of forms and
combinations of the two phases [as is] not uncommon.
The national
question of Europe reveals problems such as the Scotch rebellions, wherein a
nation never emerged; Holland in its revolutionary war against Spain; the
peculiarity of the unification of Germany; the rise and breakup of the
Austro-Hungarian empire; the revolutionary transformation of the Czarist empire
into the USSR; and the many contradictory expressions of national consciousness
which were revealed in the October revolution; and lastly, the peculiar
phenomenon of the Jews: a nation without a territory.
But even these do
not exhaust the national question, for it appears as one of the fundamental
problems of the whole colonial revolution, and all the problems of national unification,
and national independence, dispersal and unification, of the centrifugal and
centripetal forces unleashed by the national questions, reappear in new and
different forms.
And we have by no
means seen everything. The African struggle, as it assumes its mature form will
show us another fascinating and unique expression of the national struggle.
What constitutes
the basis for nationalism? A people united by a system of commodity exchange, a
language and culture expressing the needs of commodity exchange, a territory to
contain these elements: all these are elements of nationalism. Which is
fundamental to the concept of the nation?
Language is
important but not decisive: the Ukraine was so Russified and the Ukrainian
language so close to extinction that Luxemburg could refer contemptuously to it
as a novelty of the intelligentsia. Yet this did not prevent Ukrainian
nationalism, when awakened by the Bolsheviks, to play a decisive role in the
Russian revolution, alongside the other nationalities.
It would be
convenient to be able to fasten upon geography as a fundamental to nationalism:
a common territory where in relative isolation a nation could develop. This
has, indeed, been the condition for the existence of nations generally; still
it would not satisfy the Jewish nation which existed for centuries without a
territory.
The one quality
which is common to all and cannot be dispensed with in consideration of any and
all of the nations of Europe, of the colonial world—the one indispensable
quality which they all possess, and without which none could exist; including
the old nations and the new ones, the large and small, the advanced and the
backward, the “classical” and the exceptional—is the quality of their
relation to a system of commodity production and circulation: its capacity to
serve as a unit of commodity exchange.
National
oppression arises fundamentally out of the suppression of the right of a
commodity to fulfill its normal economic function in the process of
technological development and to produce and circulate commodities according to
the normal laws of capitalist production.
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| Washington, 1982 |
This is at the
foundation of the national oppression of every nation in Europe and the
colonial world. This is the groundwork out of which national aspirations
develop and from which national revolutions emerge. It is this fundamental
economic relation of a people to the forces of production which creates the
national question and determines the laws of motion of the national struggle.
This is just as true of the cases of obscure nationalities who only achieved
national consciousness after the October revolution as it was for the
Netherlands, or France, or for Poland.
Comrade Breitman
is thoughtful not to put words into my mouth. But I wish he were equally
thoughtful in not attributing to me ideas which I think he has had every
opportunity to know that I do not hold. For when he contends that I am thinking
only of the classical examples of the national question, when I deny that the
Negro question is a national question, he is very wrong.
The Negro question
is not a national question because it lacks the fundamental groundwork for the
development of nationalism; an independent system of commodity exchange, or to
be more precise, a mode of life which would make possible the emergence of such
a system.
This
differentiates the Negro question from the most obscure of all the European
national questions, for at the root of each and every one of them is to be
found this fundamental relation to the productive forces.
The Negro question
is a racial question: a matter of discrimination because of skin color, and
that’s all.
Because of the
fundamental economic problem which was inherent among the oppressed nations of
eastern Europe, Lenin foresaw the revolutionary significance of the idea of the
right of self-determination.
He applied this to
the national question and to it alone. Women are a doubly exploited group in
all society. But Lenin never applied the slogan of self-determination to the
woman question. It would not make sense. And it doesn’t make very much more
sense when applied to the Negro question.
It would if the
Negroes were a nation. Or the embryo of a “nation within a nation” or a
precapitalist people living in an isolated territory which might become the
framework for a national system of commodity exchange and capitalist
production. Negroes, however, are not victims of national oppression but of
racial discrimination. The right of self-determination is not the question
which is at stake in their struggle. It is, however, fundamental to the
national struggle.
Despite his
protestation to the contrary, Comrade Breitman holds to a basically nationalist
conception of the Negro struggle.
This is contrary
to the fundamental course of the Negro struggle and a vital danger to the
party. Comrade Breitman’s conception of the unique quality of the Negro
movement is explained by him on page 9. In comparison to the nationalist
movements of Europe, Asia and Africa he says “Fraser sees one similarity and
many differences between them; we see many similarities and one big
difference.”
Of what does this
one big difference consist? According to Comrade Breitman, the only difference
between the movement of the Polish nationalists under Czarism and the American
Negro today is that the Negro movement “thus far aims solely at acquiring
enough force and momentum to break down the barriers that exclude Negroes from
American society, showing few signs of aiming at national separatism.”
Therefore, the only
difference between the Poles and the Negroes is one of consciousness. But this
proposition makes a theoretical shambles not only of the Negro question but of
the national question too. According to this analysis, any especially oppressed
group which expressed group solidarity is automatically a nation. Or an embryo
of a nation. Or an embryo of a nation within a nation. This would apply equally
to the women throughout the world and the untouchables of the caste system of
India.
If we must ignore
the fundamental economic differences in the oppression of the Polish nation and
the Negro people, and conclude that the only difference between them is one of
consciousness, then we have not only discarded Lenin’s and Trotsky’s theses on
the national question, but we have completely departed from the materialist
conception of history.
It is one thing
for Trotsky to say that the fact that there are no cultural barriers between
the Negro people and the rest of the residents of the U.S. would not be
decisive if the Negroes should actually develop a movement of a separatist
nature. But it is an altogether different matter for Breitman to assume that
the fundamental economic and cultural conditions which form the groundwork of
nationalism have no significance whatever in the consideration of the Negroes
as a nation.
The basic error in
Negro nationalism in the U.S. is the failure to deal with the material
foundation of nationalism in general. This results in the conception that
nationalism is only a matter of consciousness without material foundation. The
other subordinate arguments which buttress the nationalism conception of the
Negro question clearly demonstrate this error.
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| iSt, gero LKI |
