If there is any fundamental Marxist concept to the defense and further elaboration of which Trotsky tirelessly contributed, it is the conception of the obsolescence of the national states, the international thrust of the proletarian revolution, and the necessity of an international framework for the building of socialism. These ideas run through the entirety of his works from his first significant writings of the 1905 period and the polemies of the first world war to the tracts of the crucial period of his struggle against Stalin (the years of The Third International After Lenin and Permanent Revolution) and the articles of the period of exile in Mexico, right up to the eve of the second world war.
Historical Crisis of the National State and the Necessity of Socialism
It is sufficient to recall a few brief points. As early as 1905, Trotsky wrote that "the proletariat's work will not, of course, be confined within the limits of a single state. The very logic of its position will immediately throw it into the world arena."1 He later returned to and further spelled out the same idea in Results and Prospects. This concept flows from, among other things, the analysis that "the time for national revolutions is past, in Europe anyway, and so is the time for national wars. •.. We are living in the era of imperialism, which means not only a system of colonial expansion but also a very distinctive type of domestic regime. It is no longer a matter of a bourgeois nation opposing an old regime, but of the proletariat opposing the bourgeois nation." (1905, p. 322.)
In 1914, when the international socialist movement was torn by the war, and the commonplaces of patriotic rhetoric were being unfurled, Trotsky returned on several occasions to the same theme: "The forces of production which capitalism has evolved," he wrote in the preface to a series of articles which appeared in Golos, 2 "have outgrown the limits of nation and state. The national the present political form, is too narrow for the state, exploitation of these productive forces. The natural tendency of our economic system, therefore, is to seek to break through the state boundaries. The whole globe, the land and the sea, the surface as well as the interior, has become one economic workshop, the different parts of which are inseparably connected with each other. This work was accomplished by capitalism. But in accomplishing it the capitalist states were led to struggle for the subjection of the world-embracing economic system to the profit interests of the bourgeoisie of each country. What the politics of imperialism has demonstrated more than anything else is that the old national state that was created in the revolutions and the wars of 1789-1815, 1848-1859, 1864-1866, and 1870 has outlived itself, and is now an intolerable hindrance to economic development.
"The present War is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit. ..." (pp. 20-21.)
"Yet at the same time it proclaims the downfall of the capitalist system of economy. ... World production revolts not only against the confusion produced by national and state divisions but also against the capitalist economic organization, which has now turned into barbarous disorganization and chaos." (pp. 22-23.)
"For the economically backward countries of Europe," Trotsky continues, "the War brings to the fore problems of far earlier historic origin-problems of democracy and national unity. ... Yet in the present epoch it is quite impossible to treat these questions in and by themselves. They are utterly devoid of an independent character." (pp. 24-25.)
The conclusion this implies is the formulation of a slogan that was to generate lively polemies at the time it was advanced and in other periods as well under different formulations: "In these historical circumstances the working class, the proletariat, can have no interest in defending an outlived and antiquated national 'fatherland,' which has become the main obstacle to economic development. The task of the proletariat is to create a far more powerful fatherland, with far greater power of resistance-the Republican United States of Europe, as the foundation of the United States of the world." (p. 28.)
We have made a rather long quotation from a littleknown work because it effectively synthesizes Trotsky's ideas on the historic crisis of the national state and on the inevitable subordination of national problems - themselves legitimate-to the logic of imperialist interests. He absolutely did not ignore the existence of national problems and aspirations, but he regarded it necessary always to keep in mind the overall framework and to struggle against any mystification aiming to conceal from the masses the most profound causes of imperialist slaughter. Let us add in passing that, except for the divergences on the formulation of the socialist United States of Europe, Lenin's position was essentially the same: He did not question the possibility of the birth of national movements in small oppressed countries, but he emphasized that the Belgian or Serbian question could not be posed in the abstract outside the context of the struggle between the two opposed imperialist camps, which in the final analysis defined the nature of the conflict. 3
In The Third International After Lenin Trotsky's concept is reasserted in the form of a criticism of the Stalinist concept of socialism in one country. "The productive forces are incompatible with national boundaries. Hence flow not only foreign trade, the export of men and capital, the seizure of territories, colonial policy, and the last imperialist war, but also the economic impossibility of a self-sufficient socialist society. The productive forces of the capitalist countries have long since broken through the national boundaries. The socialist society, however, can be built only on the most advanced productive forces, on the application of electricity and chemistry to the processes of production including agriculture; on combining and generalizing, and bringing to maximum development the highest elements of modern technology.... How then can socialism drive the productive forces back into the boundaries of a national state which they have violently sought to break through under capitalism?"4
In conclusion, "the invincible conviction that the fundamental class aim, even more so than the partial objectives, cannot be realized by national means or within national boundaries, constitutes the very heart of revolutionary internationalism." (p. 72.)
Finally, in the last months of his life, when war had already broken out, Trotsky denounced in the most resolute fashion the new mystification by which attempts were being made to camouflage the imperialist nature of the conflict behind "national" or "democratic" pretexts. "Our whole-hearted recognition of the right of every nation to self-determination," he wrote, among other things, "does not alter the fact that in the course of the present war this right does not have much more weight than thistle-down."5 And, conjuring the prospect of a socialist Europe in one of his typical rough outlines of the future, he stated: "For Europe economic unification is a question of life and death. ... Europe must become Socialist United States if it is not to become the cemetery of the old culture. A socialist Europe will proclaim the full independence of the colonies, establish friendly economic relations with them and, step by step, without the slightest violence, by means of example and collaboration, introduce them into a world socialist federation. The USSR, liberated from its own ruling caste, will join the European federation, which will help it to reach a higher level. The economy of the unified Europe will function as one whole. The question of state borders will provoke as few difficulties as now the question of administrative divisions inside a country. Borders inside the new Europe will be determined in relation to language, and national culture by the free decisions of the populations involved.
"Will this seem utopian to 'realistic' politicians? To the cannibals in their time the giving up of human flesh was utopian." 6
July 31,1972
Self-Determination and Proletarian Politics
His analyses of the fundamental nature of the conflicts of our age and the assertion of the necessity of passing beyond national boundaries in no way led Trotsky to ignore or minimize the national question. During the first world war, in The Bolsheviki and World Peace, he summed up the conditions of peace in the following slogans: "No contributions [indemnities]. The right of every nation to self-determination. A United States of Europe without monarchies, without standing armies, without feudal ruling castes, without secret diplomacy."7 At the same time, as to Russia, he identified among her central tasks the recognition of the right of autonomy for the nationalities oppressed by the czarist empire. Moreover, it is precisely the period of war and revolution that permitted him, as it did Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership, to define with greater precision and clarity the terms of the national question. The most lucid synthesis of these concepts is contained in precisely the masterful chapter of the History of the Russian Revolution entitled "The National Question."
"Language," writes Trotsky, "is the most important instrument of human communication, and consequently of industry. It becomes national together with the triumph of commodity exchange which integrates nations. Upon this foundation the national state is erected as the most convenient, profitable and normal arena for the play of capitalist relations. In Western Europe the epoch of the formation of bourgeois nations, if you leave out the struggle of the Netherlands for independence and the fate of the island country, England, began with the great French revolution, and was essentially completed approximately one hundred years later with the formation of the German Empire.
"But during that period when in Europe the national state could no longer contain the productive forces and was overgrown into the imperialistic state, in the East— in Persia, the Balkans, China, India -the era of national democratic revolutions, taking its impetus from the Russian revolution of 1905, was only just beginning. The Balkan war of 1912 marked the completion of the forming of national states in southeastern Europe. The subsequent imperialist war completed incidentally the unfinished work of the national revolutions in Europe leading as it did to the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary, the establishment of an independent Poland, and of independent border states cut from the empire of the tzars."8
The author then recapitulates the main points of the Leninist concept of the intransigent defense of the right of self-determination against counterposed deviations. This concept-it should be remembered -implies two specific points. The first is that the defense of the right of selfdetermination does not imply that the revolutionary party automatically upholds any demand for independence or of secession (in other words the question of principle is distinct from the question of what position to take in each specific case). The second is that in regard to the party and to the organization of the proletariat in general, Bolshevism does not renounce its centralist concepts, even while struggling against any national-federalist tendency.
More generally, the Leninist view was based on the premise that the solution to the national question represented in principle a historically progressive factor. Its point of departure was the consideration that national oppression prevented great masses of the petty bourgeoisie and even some layers of the workers from understanding the social origins of their exploitation: As social oppression was reduced the actual social dialectic would stand out more clearly, the masses would attain a higher level of political consciousness, and they would begin to settle accounts directly with their own bourgeoisie.
In 1917 Lenin completely shared the conclusion that Trotsky had sketched out earlier in defining the theory of permanent revolution: In the context of the age of imperialism, the final phase of capitalism, it was henceforth impossible to conceive of a dynamic of struggle for national independence implying a bourgeois nationaldemocratic stage sharply separated from the socialist stage of the revolution. Consequently the proletariat would take the head of struggles aiming at a resolution of the national question, which could in fact be resolved only to the extent that the capitalist regime was overthrown. As for Trotsky, having called to mind that the Bolsheviks were in agreement in principle on the right of self-determination, he added immediately: "However, the question of power was decisive even though the temporary leaders of the party revealed themselves absolutely incapable of understanding the irreducible contradiction between the Bolshevik slogans on the national and on the agrarian questions on the one hand, and on the other hand the maintenance of the imperialist bourgeois regime, even if camouflaged under democratic forms." That is what the theory of permanent revolution meant concretely in 1917; that is why "the nationalist torrent spilled into the bed of the October Revolution" and, more generally, why national revolutions appear as the "stairsteps of the world revolution of the proletariat."
It is possible here to answer the question of whether the national question must be subordinated to the interests of the proletarian revolution. The Bolsheviks were reproached for such a subordination, it is well known, having revealed their hypocrisy in the matter, according to their adversaries, at the time of the Georgia incidents in 1921, for example.
The case of Georgia is quite specific, and it is known that both Lenin and Trotsky were troubled at the military intervention and opposed the methods later used in the region by the tendency of the party inspired by Stalin. An essay published by Trotsky in 1922, independent of his decision to go along with the official explanation of the intervention, incontestably demonstrated in any case that Georgia was absolutely not independent, but was tied in integrally with the interplay of reactionary national and international forces that had launched the war against the Soviet republic. Aside from Georgia, in any case, Trotsky never concealed the fact that the national question could not be considered an absolute priority, and like Lenin he explained the reasons for this through the polemics on Belgium and Serbia at the time of the first world war.
"Understanding how important this principle [the right 898
of self-determination] was in the age of transition to socialism," he wrote in his essay On Georgia, "our party did not for a minute turn the democratic principle of self-determination into a dominating factor above all other historic requirements and tasks."9 In the History of the Russian Revolution the assertion is even sharper: "This subordination of belated national revolutions to the revolution of the proletariat follows a law which is valid throughout the world. Whereas in the nineteenth century the fundamental problem of wars and revolutions was still to guarantee a national market to the productive forces, the problem of our century is to free the productive forces from the national boundaries which have become iron fetters upon them."10
The question thus could not be posed in the abstract, as if it were a matter of choosing between national revolution and proletarian revolution conceived as absolute entities. The proletariat would have to uphold national demands even if their realization would end up with the formation, for a rather long period of time, of national states ruled by the bourgeoisie (in that this would represent a step forward and an objective prerequisite of socialism). But in the context of the age of imperialism this is a quite improbable hypothesis. The imperialist bourgeoisie crushes underfoot and destroys, out of a necessity intrinsic to the system, all nationalities and their independence. As to the national bourgeoisie, it is incapable of playing a significant anti-imperialist role. Thus the resolution of the national question, just like the other bourgeois-democratic tasks, hereafter is up to the proletariat and will be accomplished only by means of a revolution under the hegemony of the proletariat (supported by all the exploited layers of the urban and rural population).
Strategy for the Colonial Countries
We thus hit upon another fundamental aspect of Trotsky's view of the national question. In the struggle against the bureaucratic caste which had forced its hegemony on the party, the state, and the Communist International itself. Trotsky launched a closely reasoned polemic against the Stalinist notions, which were very close to former Menshevik concepts, by sketching, on several occasions, the lines of a revolutionary strategy for the colonial and semicolonial countries.
It is sufficient to recall, for example, his position regarding the Sino-Japanese conflict, which combined a
10. History of the Russian Revolution, p. 55. On this subject see other passages in the essay On Georgia and The Bolsheviki and World Peace, p. 171. See also in Stalin the following passage, interesting from the standpoint of method: "It was Lenin's view that the right of self-determination was merely an application of the principles of bourgeois democracy in the sphere of national relations. A real, full-blooded, all-sided democracy under capitalism was unrealizable; in that sense the national independence of small and weak peoples was likewise 'unrealizable.' However, even under imperialism, the working class did not refuse to fight for democratic rights, including among them the right of each nation to its independent existence." Stalin, Harper & Bros., N. Y.-London, 1941, pp. 153-54.
systematic critique of the role of the "national" bourgeoisie and of Chiang Kai-shek with the description of the progressive character of the struggle of semicolonial China against Japanese imperialism (it is very valuable to recall the "instruction" untruthfully attributed in literature on the subject to Trotsky "not to prevent the Japanese empire from occupying China"). Recall also the lucid pages on the necessity of a significant anti-imperialist struggle in Latin America (implying a condemnation of the Stalinist line of collaboration with the "democratic" imperialism of the United States) or on the orientation to be followed in the revolution in India:
"In the event that the Indian bourgeoisie finds itself compelled to take even the tiniest step on the road of struggle against the arbitrary rule of Great Britain," we read in a 1939 letter, "the proletariat will naturally support such a step. But they will support it with their own methods: mass meetings, bold slogans, strikes, demonstrations and more decisive combat actions, depending on the relationship of forces and the circumstances. Precisely to do this must the proletariat have its hands free. Complete independence from the bourgeoisie is indispensable to the proletariat, above all in order to exert influence on the peasantry, the predominant mass of India's population. Only the proletariat is capable of advancing a bold, revolutionary agrarian program, of rousing and rallying tens of millions of peasants and leading them in struggle against the native oppressors and British imperialism."11
Note should be taken of Trotsky's contribution during the thirties to a correct solution to the question of the Blacks in the United States, which had become during the preceding debate a burning issue of the day. Combating any misunderstanding and resistance in the ranks of the revolutionary movement itself, he asserted the validity of the principle of self-determination for Afro-Americans also and grasped the very great importance that a movement of Blacks would have as a driving force of the revolution in the United States. In a discussion that remains very current, he drew a parallel with prerevolutionary Russia and explained: "The Russians were the European Negroes. It is very possible that the Negroes also through the self-determination will proceed to the proletarian dictatorship in a couple of gigantic strides, ahead of the great bloc of white workers. They will then furnish the vanguard."12 This is a guideline to be reflected on by advocates of any kind of workerism formulated in terms of sterile schemas.
Catalonian Question and a Meaningful Hypothesis
Nor did Trotsky minimize the importance of national demands in the period between the two wars even in certain countries of Western Europe. In analyzing the Spanish crisis from the beginning of the thirties he emphasized the importance of the democratic task of self-determination for Catalonia. "The separatist tendencies," he wrote,
"present the revolution with the democratic task of national self-determination. These tendencies were accentuated, to all appearances, during the period of the dietatorship. But while the 'separatism' of the Catalan bourgeoisie is only a pawn in its play with the Madrid government against the Catalan and Spanish people, the separatism of the workers and peasants is only the shell of their social indignation. One must distinguish very rigidly between these two forms of nationalism. Precisely, however, in order to draw the line between the nationally oppressed workers and peasants and their bourgeoisie, the proletarian vanguard must take the boldest and most sincere position on the question of national self-determination. The workers will fully and completely defend the right of the Catalans and Basques to organize their state life independently in the event that the majority of these nationalities express themselves for complete separation. But this does not, of course, mean that the advanced workers will push the Catalans and Basques on the road of secession. On the contrary, the economic unity of the country with extensive autonomy of national districts would represent great advantages for the workers and peasants from the viewpoint of economy and culture." 13 The essential criteria for orientation on the national question spring up once again in the clearest way.
In terms of method, it is interesting to call to mind a hypothesis advanced by Trotsky on the eve of the second world war:
"If a new war ends only in a military victory of this or that imperialist camp; if a war calls forth neither a revolutionary uprising nor a victory of the proletariat; if a new imperialist peace more terrible than that of Versailles places new chains for decades upon the people; if unfortunate humanity bears all this in silence and submission then not only Czechoslovakia or Belgium but also France can be thrown back into the position of an oppressed nation (the same hypothesis can be drawn in regard to Germany). In this eventuality, the further frightful decomposition of capitalism will drag all peoples backward for many decades to come. Of course if this perspective of passivity, capitulation, of defeats and decline comes to pass, the oppressed masses and entire peoples will be forced to climb anew, paying out their sweat and blood, retracing on their hands and knees the historic road once already travelled
"Is such a perspective excluded? If the proletariat suffers without end the leadership of social-imperialists and the communo-chauvinists; if the Fourth International is unable to find a way to the masses; if the horrors of war do not drive the workers and soldiers to rebellion; if the colonial peoples continue to bleed patiently in the interests of the slaveholders; then under these conditions the level of civilization will inevitably be lowered and the general retrogression and decomposition may again place national wars on the order of the day for Europe."14
It is significant that during the first world war Lenin advanced a similar hypothesis, on the purely theoretical level. 15 Neither of these hypotheses were actually realized in history, quite as the authors themselves had expected. But the very fact that they expressed these views confirms on the one hand that they attributed a very great importance to the national question, and on the other that they confined themselves to proceeding in their arguments from an objective context-real or potential - and not from a schema transformed into an absolute norm.
The National Question in the Transitional Stage
Upon the specific development in the Soviet Union of bureaucratic degeneration, the national question arises also for the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. Trotsky made a new contribution during some of the most troubled yet productive years of his life in grappling with and clarifying the terms of the problem in a new context.
The problem had already been stated in the program of the Left Opposition, which denounced the rebirth of
Great Russian chauvinism and nationalism during the NEP period and prior to the first five-year plan: "Bureaucratism, sustained by the spirit of Great-Power chauvinism, has succeeded in transforming the Soviet centralization into a source of quarrels as to the partition of official positions among the nationalities. It has spoiled the relation between the center and the frontiers. It has reduced to nothing, as a matter of actual fact, the significance of the Soviet of nationalities. It has carried bureaucratic guardianship over the autonomous republics to the point of depriving the latter of the right to settle land disputes between the local and the Russian population. ... In these circumstances 'nationalization'
of the local apparatus takes place at the expense of the national minorities. ..." To thwart these tendencies it was necessary to effect a resolute turn by adopting a series of precisely specified measures which could be summed up in the slogan "Return to the Leninist position." 16
In The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936, an entire chapter ("Nation and Culture") is devoted to this aspect of Stalinist degeneration. According to Trotsky, national oppression had taken on a special character: "It is a question, therefore, not of the oppression of one nationality over another in the proper sense of the word, but of the oppression of the centralized police apparatus over the cultural development of all the nations, starting with the Great Russian." 17
But Trotsky refined these ideas especially with respect to the Ukrainian question, which he discussed in several important works. "... despite the giant step forward taken by the October Revolution in the domain of say, for twenty years; if the present war ends in victories like Napoleon's and in the subjugation of a number of viable national states; if the transition to socialism of non-European imperialism (primarily Japanese and American) is also held up for twenty years by a war between these two countries, for example, then a great national war in Europe would be possible." ("On the Junius Pamphlet," Collected Works, Vol. 22, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, p. 310.)
The Revolution Betrayed, Pathtinder Press, 1970, p. 177. 006
national relations,"
he wrote in July 1939, "the isolated proletarian revolution in a backward country proved incapable of solving the national question, especially the Ukrainian question, which is, in its very essence, international in character. The Thermidorian reaction, crowned by the Bonapartist bureaucracy, has thrown
• the toiling masses far back in the national sphere as well."18 Hence the legitimacy of the aspirations of independence which are concretized in the slogan "For a united, free, and independent workers' and peasants' Soviet Ukraine."19 Moreover, Trotsky was convinced that to the extent that a revolutionary regeneration is attained in the Soviet Union an independent Ukraine "might subsequently join the Soviet Federation; but voluntarily, on conditions which it itself considers acceptable." (Writings (1939-40), p.72.)
Nor does Trotsky confine himself in this case to a proclamation of abstract principles, but expresses a principled demand in a historically determined context. The national discontent of the Ukrainians was one of the contradictions born of bureaucratic degeneration. The problem thus is to exploit this contradiction in the framework of the worldwide struggle against bureaucracy: "... the national uprising ... represents nothing else but a single segment of the political revolution." (Writings (1939-40), p. 77.)
But the slogan of independence for the Ukraine produced an additional implication. At the time Trotsky was writing, part of the Ukrainian population was subject to Polish, Hungarian, and Rumanian rule. The demand for independence and unity of the Ukraine could thus play a disruptive role in this direction as well: "The same slogan opens up for the proletarian party the opportunity of playing a leading role in the national Ukrainian movement in Poland, Rumania and Hungary." (Writings (1939- 40), p. 176.) In this sense the Ukranian question could acquire "an enormous importance... [not only for] Southeastern and Eastern Europe, but also [for] Europe as a whole," (p. 72) and "The program of independence for the Ukraine in the epoch of imperialism is directly and indissolubly bound up with the program of the proletarian revolution." (p. 73.)
The orientation set by Trotsky with respect to the Ukraine retains its usefulness in similar situations which arose after the second world war. It suggests an essential criterion in weighing the national problems in the countries of Eastern Europe to which Moscow bureaucratic rule has given birth. That is why the Fourth International introduced into its program "the slogan of the independent and sovereign Soviet Socialist Republics of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, while at the same time advocating the confederation of all these workers' states on a strict basis of equality, in one or several democratic federations of workers' states."20
The Trotskyist view of the national question is thus strictly integral with the general conception of the revolutionary dynamic of our time, and in the final analysis it is no more nor less than a particular expression of the concept of permanent revolution, the fulcrum of the entire body of Trotskyist thought.
Notes
1. 1905, Vintage Books, 1971, p. 310.
2. The Bolsheviki and World Peace, Boni and Liveright, 1918. 896
3. For the polemics on the socialist United States of Europe, see the first part of The Third International After Lenin and Vol. 22 of Lenin's Works.
4. The Third International After Lenin, Pathfinder Press, 1970, pp. 52, 53.
5. Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40), Merit Publishers, 1969,
6. "World Situation and Perspectives," interviews in the St. Louis Dispatch, March 10, 17, 24, 1940; as cited in Writings (1939- 40), pp. 25, 26.
7. The Bolsheviki and World Peace, p. 231.
8. History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960, p. 36.
9. Between Red and White, Communist Party of Great Britain, 1922, p. 83. This edition of the essay On Georgia is reprinted by University Mierofilms, Inc., Ann Arbor-London, 1962.
11. "An Open Letter to the Workers of India," in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-39), Merit Publishers, 1969, p. 38. See also pp. 15-16.
12. On Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, Merit, 1967, p. 18 July 31, 1972
13. The Revolution in Spain, published in pamphlet form by the Communist League of America in March 1931; translated by Morris Lewitt. Full text is available in L. Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931-1939), Chap. 5, Pathfinder Press, 1972.
14. "On the Character of the Coming War." Writings (1938- 39), p. 15.
15. "If the European proletariat remains impotent,
16. The Real Situation in Russia, Harcourt, 1928, pp. 103- 104, 107.
18. "Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads." in Writings (1939-40), p. 75.
19. "The Ukrainian Question," ibid., p. 72.
20. Fourtn International, Number 1, Winter, 1958, p. 71.