Luxemburg, Lenin, and Sankara on National Self-Determination

Introduction—National Self-Determination and the Contemporary Conjuncture

The questions of nationalism and national self-determination present a highly polarized contradiction within the global conjuncture. The tension of this contradiction animates both the general post-Cold War ideological landscape as well as a multitude of more circumscribed political conflicts across the globe. On one hand, certain struggles for national self-determination clearly orient themselves toward progressive, emancipatory, and revolutionary ends: Kurds in Rojava, the Sahrawi in Western Sahara, Palestinians in occupied Palestine, and Papuans in occupied West-Papua, among countless others. Yet it perhaps goes without saying, on the other hand, that some permutations of this category are both historically and presently aligned with reactionary forces. Nationalism has for centuries served and continues to serve as an ideological rallying point for the radical right and the forces of neo-fascism. We need only recall the mixture of horror, pity, and confusion that we collectively experienced roughly a year ago as a mob of unhinged Trump supporters—indeed emboldened at least in part by a certain idea of national self-determination—violently stormed the US Capitol building in order to overturn the results of the 2020 US Presidential election. Such is the apparent contradiction of nationalism at the level of theory: at once revolutionary and reactionary, progressive and regressive, uniting and dividing.

Between 1907 and 1914, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg notably engaged in a contentious exchange over the possible inclusion of a principle of the right of nations to self-determination within the official platform for the Communist Party. This crucial debate involved a much broader circle of socialist intellectuals such as Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, and Karl Kautsky. The strategic orientation of the Party in its struggle for socialism and, along with it, the methodological efficacy of historical materialism were at stake within these discussions, both in terms of the party’s immediate tactical goals as well as the tenets that would constitute the bedrock of its political line. However, the implications of a reconstruction of this debate, as we will demonstrate, extend well beyond the ambit of mere communist hagiography or the history of political theory.   

Lenin, who conditionally supported the principle of national self-determination and whose position on this question in 1919 was actually excised from the official platform of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), will provide us with the theoretical solution to the contradictory impasse of the national question. Lenin offers a dialectical strategy that marshals the principle of national self-determination as a tactical and pragmatic means for galvanizing the revolutionary energies of the masses and further consolidating their unity in struggle. For Lenin, national self-determination acts as a pragmatic fulcrum on which the weight of bourgeois oppression becomes critically reversed and thereby affirmatively leveraged against the grain of traditional nationalist ideology and conservativism of all types in order to propel society beyond the capitalist mode of production into a socialist future. 

The Theoretical Empiricism of Rosa Luxemburg’s Historical Dialectics

Luxemburg begins her discussion of the possible inclusion of a principle of national self-determination within the party’s program with a critique of the legal category of ‘right’ from the point of view of the party’s leadership duties toward the proletariat. She prescribes how the party should work toward “formulation of those practical social and political reforms which the class-conscious proletariat needs and demands in the framework of bourgeois society to facilitate the class struggle and their ultimate victory.” The correct orientation of the party should thus aim “to provide a direct, practical, and feasible solution to the crucial problems of political and social life, which are in the area of the class struggle of the proletariat.” Luxemburg then goes on to reject the proposed ‘right of nations to self-determination’ by distinguishing bourgeois political tendencies from revolutionary ones. This specific formulation of ‘national self-determination’, contends Luxemburg, “gives no practical guidelines for the day to day politics of the proletariat, nor any practical solution of nationality problems.” “[T]he only practical conclusion” she avers “[is] that it is the duty of [the proletariat] to struggle against all manifestations of national oppression.” For her, it is an important part of the struggle for socialism to fight the oppression of the working class inflicted by any nationalist bourgeoisie and, indeed, against its organ of class rule, the state. For the Polish Luxemburg, the repudiation of this principle was justified for reasons as much theoretical as personal, for to support the principle of national self-determination amid the ranks of Polish Social-Democratic parties at the time would mean siding with a particularly nasty and reactionary petty-bourgeoisie who rabidly advocated a regressive form of conservative nationalism. Hence she writes:

The substance and essence of the modern state comprise not freedom and independence of the “nation,” but only the class dominance of the bourgeoisie, protectionist policy, indirect taxation, militarism, war, and conquest. The bourgeoisie used to use the obvious technique of trying to cover up this brutal historical truth with a light ideological gauze, by offering the purely negative happiness of “independence and national freedom.”

In good materialist fashion, Luxemburg claims that it is history itself which can teach us that the principle of the national self-determination cannot and should not ever coincide with “the class position the proletariat.”

This eschewal of the concept of ‘right’ parallels Luxemburg’s famous distinction between ‘revolution’ and ‘reform’.  She remarks how the duty to combat national oppression does not derive from a unique “‘right of nations,’ just as, […] striving for the social and political equality of sexes does not at all result from any special ‘rights of women’ […]” Luxemburg opposes the discourse of ‘rights’ insofar as the category of right is par excellence an essential feature of bourgeois jurisprudence—what she denounces as a bit of “ideological metaphysics” which hypostatizes the eternal character of the category of ‘man’ and pronounces the triumphant historical finality of the present bourgeois social order. Luxemburg’s repudiation of the notion of ‘right’ as a historical reification of bourgeois categories clearly exhibits the influence of Engels’ distinction between “metaphysics” and “dialectics” that the latter works out in the famous pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Following this logic, Luxemburg highlights how historical materialist method breaks “once and for all with this type of ‘eternal’ formula”, insofar as “the historical dialectic has shown that there are no ‘eternal’ truths and that there are no ‘rights.’” The historical materialist does not simply deflate the bourgeois categories of “democracy,” “national freedom,” “equality,” by making reference to the unceasing progression of time, but instead provides a concrete account of their actual genesis, treating them “as expressions of certain definite historical conditions, as categories which, in terms of their material content and therefore their political value, are subject to constant change, which is the only ‘eternal’ truth.” In other words, Luxemburg affirms that the concepts of bourgeois society—which are regarded and treated as timeless, eternal and immutable by bourgeois society itself—are in truth only the circumscribed products of a historical and thus transient social order.

Using her terminology, it is the reformist position that spuriously maintains certain determinations of history to be eternal or transhistorically invariant—that is, unchanging across the broad span of time’s arrow—and, as such, fails to perceive the contradictory ebb and flow of class struggle beneath the ideological patina of bourgeois jurisprudence. On one hand, the reformist positions herself on the side of conservative and reactionary tendencies, further entrenching the juridical and cultural bulwarks of bourgeois society. The revolutionary position, on the other, affirms the dialectically mobile essence of all purportedly eternal categories, and, in grasping the struggle characteristic of their emergence and social legitimation, bears witness to the real motions of class struggle in historical development, aligning itself with the forces of progress and the inevitable advance of society beyond capitalism.

As we noted, Luxemburg’s formulation of this argument against national self-determination admits to an Engelsian conception of the dialectic. This conception of the dialectic posits a process of perpetual becoming that permeates all things social, material, natural, and ideal. Change, in other words, is the only constant, and even the most seemingly timeless phenomena will inevitably be dissolved into the inexorable flow of temporal becoming. It is precisely with respect to this methodological supposition regarding dialectics that Luxemburg’s position on the national question enters into a critical impasse. Epistemologically speaking the Engelsian conception of the dialectic derives from a theoretical tendency that Louis Althusser, in his watershed Reading Capital, names “empiricist”. The Engelsian dialectic is a perfect example of this tendency inasmuch as it sees becoming at work in all things both social and natural. According to Althusser, such theoretical productions uncritically presuppose—or perhaps rhetorically dissimulate in their act of construction—the subject position from which they articulate their ‘dialectical’ vision of the social whole. Embedded in the affirmation that everything changes is in fact the surreptitiously immobile position of the contemplative, humanistic subject.

Luxemburg’s denunciation of the slogan of national self-determination, however, does not stop at the level of formal critique. She in fact attempts to examine the historical determinants of the problem through a multitude of concrete cases despite being unable to break with the underlying assumptions of theoretical empiricism. On this basis, a highly stagist account of history begins to emerge, subsequently informing her conclusions about specific instances of struggles for national self-determination. Stagism is a vulgar Marxist conception of history that organizes historical time into determined periods (stages), mandating that society must pass through a specific fixed sequence (from feudalism to capitalism to socialism) in its necessary historical development. Luxemburg’s stageist argument against national self-determination supposes that nationalism is a key determinate for society’s transition from a feudal to a bourgeois capitalist mode of production, as the consolidation of European nation states in the 19^th century supposedly demonstrates. To advocate for a nationalism in the proletariat’s struggle for socialism would therefore amount to a regression or an anachronist misappropriation. Luxemburg consistently argues with great nuance that the precise aim of socialist struggle vis-à-vis bourgeois society is the deployment of various progressive elements of bourgeois society itself within a new configuration that might lead beyond capitalism. She nevertheless refuses to recognize the ideology of nationalism as one of these possible determinants. To wit, Luxemburg, from her empiricist position on the dialectic, can only conceive the contradiction of nationalism in a one sided fashion: nationalism is the operative ideology of the bourgeois class and thereby cannot thresh a practical path forward for the proletariat in virtue of its regressive and thus undialectical nature. From this angle, the promotion nationalism leads only to further fragmentation of work-class unity along identitarian lines and a regression to pre-capitalist feudal particularism or other forms of sectarianism on the international scene. In other words, Luxemburg’s argument suggests that Balkanization or a similar process of federal dissolution is the only possible result from the political actualization of the principle of the right of national self-determination.

Lenin’s Immanent Dialectics 

Lenin’s 1914 response to Luxemburg advances a markedly different understanding of dialectics with respect to the national question. Despite her insistence on the insurmountable “impracticality” of the principle of national self-determination, Lenin demonstrates how Luxemburg’s proposed alternative also misses the mark in terms of ‘being practical’ in the sense of a real alignment with the immanence of proletariat struggle. Lenin’s gesture thus highlights a performative contradiction between Luxemburg’s vehement emphasis on practicality and her inability to see the practical advantages of this principle. Lenin exhibits a profound astonishment that “Luxemburg, who declaims a great deal about the supposedly abstract and metaphysical nature of the clause in question, should herself succumb to the sin of abstraction and metaphysics.” Luxemburg fails to ask herself “whether the gist of the matter lies in legal definitions or in the experience of the national movements throughout the world.” Here the methodological difference between Luxemburg and Lenin clearly emerges: the national question can only be resolved from the point of view of actual working class struggle rather than a purportedly practical position whose real substance constitutes an abstract separation principles from their immanent actualization. Although Luxemburg expounds at length on the practical direction of the working class movement, her underlying empiricist orientation appears to hamstring any attempt of conceiving and actualizing such practicality. Luxemburg’s rejection of principle of national self-determination, despite its conceptual emphasis on practicality, appears as a wholly abstract negation. She eschews, in other words, the principle of national self-determination qua principle rather than beginning with the concrete relations of class and thus with the concrete social totality in whose struggles such a principle might or might not be in fact operative. Luxemburg’s abstraction thus does not in fact lie in her methodological criteria or procedures—for she obviously attempts to begin with conjunctural materials in her analysis—but in the position that in fact mediates her gestures of rejection or affirmation. Lacking methodological reflexivity in her theoretical production, she thus fails to accede to the point of view praxis—the structural point of view of the proletarian masses and their actual revolutionary struggle. As a consequence, Lenin suggests that she adopts the idealist fetishization of the national question as her point of departure in lieu of the reality of its immanent actualization. Luxemburg, simply put, argues against meticulously constructed straw-man. As Lenin clarifies:

The proletariat is opposed to such practicality. While recognizing equality and equal rights to a national state, it values above all and places foremost the alliance of the proletarians of all nations, and assesses any national demand, any national separation, from the angle of the workers’ class struggle. This call for practicality [on the part of Luxemburg] is in fact merely a call for uncritical acceptance of bourgeois aspirations.

In a manner quite close to Spinoza’s critique of teleology, Lenin’s thinking reverses the common sense logic regarding principles and their application. Rather than separating and evaluating principles in isolation from their object, he measures them always with respect to their immanent actualization in the ongoing struggle. Such a reorientation constitutes the nucleus of what we conceptually identify as the point of view of the working class. Luxemburg—analytically amputating telos from technique in a priori fashion—swiftly declares the impracticality of the national question and then goes on to speak vaguely about the possibility of ‘cultural autonomy,’ ‘federalism,’ and similar notions. Lenin, however, retorts that this accusation occurs exclusively “from the standpoint of the nationalist bourgeoisie of every nation, because the proletarians, opposed as they are to nationalism of every kind, demand ‘abstract’ equality; they demand, as a matter of principle, that there should be no privileges, however slight…” From the point of the view of the proletariat fighting against a nationalist bourgeoisie, the demand for national self-determination always appears abstract. Lenin therefore undermines the logic of Luxemburg’s critique of ‘reformist principles,’ asserting that to denounce the right to national self determination  

is as foolish and hypocritical as accusing those who advocate freedom of divorce of encouraging the destruction of family ties. Just as in bourgeois society the defenders of privilege and corruption, on which bourgeois marriage rests, oppose freedom of divorce, so, in the capitalist state, repudiation of the right to self-determination […] means nothing more than the defense of the privileges of the dominant nation and police methods of administration, to the detriment of democratic methods.

Not unlike Luxemburg, Lenin acknowledges how bourgeois society, as it emerges out of feudalism, contains progressive elements. However, to reject the right of national self-determination as impractical amounts to siding with a conservative, reactionary tendency which aims only for the maintenance of bourgeois hegemony, restricting the practical benefits of national self-determination to this class alone. Lenin sees the principle of national self-determination as a viable means among others to propel society forward into a new organization and corresponding mode of production.

Lenin loosely defines two periods of the development of capitalism which, as he tells us, differ “radically from each other as far as the national movement is concerned.” Lenin’s position requires something that one might hastily identify as a rigid stagism. However, under scrutiny, his historical methodology appears much less deterministic and mechanical than that of Luxemburg. Lenin writes that, chronologically speaking, historical stages are “not walled off from each other; they are connected by numerous transitional links.” On one side, there is the period of the “collapse of feudalism and absolutism, the period of the formation of the bourgeois-democratic society and state, when the national movements for the first time become mass movements…” On the other, we have “the period of fully formed capitalist states with a long established constitutional regime and a highly developed antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie…” Lenin characterizes this second period by

the absence of mass bourgeois democratic movements and the fact that developed capitalism, in bringing closer together nations that have already been fully drawn into commercial intercourse, and causing them to intermingle to an increasing degree, brings the antagonism between internationally united capital and the international working class movement into the forefront.

The rise of the age of imperialism transforms the demand for national self-determination from a historically bourgeois demand into an operative, internationalist principle for socialist struggle. Lenin saw this tendency already at work in Russia, yet his view also seems to presage the 4th International’s revised attitude to the colonial question in the decades after WW2. As demonstrated by the revolutions of Burkina Faso, Algeria, Guinea Bissau, Grenada, and Vietnam, among many others, the actualization of the principle of national self-determination played and continues to play a crucial role in the struggle for genuine socialism across the colonized world.

Lenin’s Two Pronged Approach to the National Question

Lenin’s stance on the national question has often been described as ‘two-pronged.’ The seeming ambiguity of his position arguably derives from his unique dialectical orientation that we have been working out up to this point. Lenin writes:

Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favor, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation.

Nationalism as an operative principle of an oppressed nation possesses “democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support.” Yet, we must “distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness; we fight against the tendency of the Polish bourgeois to oppress the Jews, etc.” Lenin at once affirms the principle of national self-determination “since bourgeois-democratic reform is-not yet completed and since working-class democracy consistently, seriously and sincerely […] fights for equal rights for nations” simultaneously with “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.” Hence the two ‘prongs’ of Lenin’s position, both affirming and eschewing nationalism at least at the level of abstraction or at the level of mere theoretical principles. At the level of praxis, however, such contradiction is immediately dissolved in the actualization of a concrete political line whatever direction it may take.

The dialectic, for Lenin, means first and foremost to reason and thus to strategize from the point view of praxis—from the vantage point of the actual struggle of the proletariat against oppression and towards a socialist future. Such praxis affirms the progressive, democratic, and indeed revolutionary potential of nationalism, but only insofar as this affirmation aligns within the real unity and aims of the working-class movement. What appears as contradiction from the point of individual, theoretical contemplation becomes dissolved from the point of view of praxis inasmuch as the decision is each time mediated by the concrete aims of a concrete struggle of the masses. Lenin therefore does not conceive dialectics as the mechanical imputation of a historical schema on to more circumscribed historical particulars, contrary to the many stageist deviations in the 60s and 70s that declared themselves ‘Leninists’, such as the Partie Communiste Française (PCF) among others. Rather, dialectics is, following a formulation of Lukacs, the thinking and moreover the strategizing with respect to the “actuality of revolution”. To think and act on the basis of the actuality of revolution intuits the mobile essence of a given society and its mode of production, permitting a both tactical and structural assessment of the real ongoing struggle of the masses for socialism within definite historical conditions.  

Thomas Sankara and the Burkinabé Revolution of 1984

As we noted above, Lenin’s ‘two-pronged’ approach to the question nationalism presages the more updated perspective of the 3^rd International vis-à-vis the still ongoing question of colonialism and colonial imperialism. The case of Burkina Faso and its revolution led by Thomas Sankara are exemplary in this regard and quite clearly confirms the viability of Lenin’s position in the debate on national self-determination and, moreover, highlights the viability of a neo-Leninist revival in the consideration of contemporary questions of colonialism and imperialism. In less than a year, Sankara’s regime successfully began to liberate Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta)—a transitional zone of passage between more populated and commercially important epicenters of French West Africa with little to no cultural or ethnic homogeneity—from the yoke of neo-colonial domination and a particularly repressive comprador bourgeoisie.

Rather than conceiving of a national identity on the basis of an ethnic or racial traditionalism, which is precisely what Luxemburg feared and rightly despised with regard to Polish nationalism in her day, Sankara’s political line constructed a new Burkinabé nationality that drew its strength and unification from the people’s struggle itself. The name ‘Burkina Faso’ is itself composite word from the Moré and Djula languages that roughly translates as ‘land of the upright people.’ In the gesture of renaming Upper Volta, Sankara gathers cultural and geographical heterogeneity into a unity, producing thereby a new space of dignity and pride which draws its force of its strength from the struggle of the people themselves. Clearly drawing a strategic lesson from Lenin and the historical struggles that he witnessed, Sankara’s thought and action assumed the point of view of praxis and thus the ‘actuality of revolution.’ As he states in a 1984 interview:

Fighting against obscurantism means allowing each individual of Upper Volta to elevate their level of political consciousness. It means being a people for itself and not for others and this is not easy insofar as access to knowledge is still controlled by the bourgeoisie and feudal forces. We are determined to confront them, and for that we intend to accelerate the process of democratization in order to drive them out.

The uphill battle against ideological obscurantism—common in colonial milieus of all sorts in both religious and secular-liberal forms and typically enforced and reinforced by imperialist forces—can be waged, according to Sankara, only with a particular nationalist inflection, that is, through “being a people for itself and not others.” The Burkinabé people thus constitute a national identity inasmuch as they are actively engaged class struggle, the real immediate struggle against the neocolonial comprador bourgeoisie, its complicity with the former French Colonial Administration and its countless oppressive economic and social policies. It is precisely on this point that Sankara’s dialectical thinking coincides perfectly with that of Lenin’s on the question of nationalism:

We didn’t import our revolution, let alone decide to export it. It is the result of a historical process—scientifically verified and inevitable—in the transformation of the struggles that the social classes have to wage against each other in order to achieve this form of revolution that only asks to be perfected, the same causes producing the same effects no matter the skies under which one finds oneself.

Here we must not confuse a conceptual recourse to history as an invocation of stagism advocated by Luxemburg. The Burkinabé national identity and thus Sankara’s fulcrum for revolutionary leverage is in no way a mere traditionalist invariant or even the passive result of the mechanical unfolding of history, rather the consolidation of such a people are the definite result of an active historical transformation internal to the Burkinabé conjuncture: the synthetic result of collective agency and its ability to intervene and shape the body politic. Burkina Faso therefore did not ‘import’ its revolution precisely because it was actively produced from within and from the point of the actual struggles of the proletariat. It therefore comes as no surprise that this genuinely African and revolutionary nationalism is echoed in a dictum which punctuated many of Sankara’s passionate speeches and also finds itself emblazoned upon Burkina Faso’s Coat of Arms: ‘La Patrie ou la mort, nous vaincrons! / Mother Nation or death, we shall overcome!’

Jared Bly

Jared Bly is a translator and graduate student in Philosophy at Villanova, University near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Jared is currently writing a dissertation on Marxist aesthetics that employs Althusserian ideology critique in an examination of the history and conceptuality of photographic technology.