Naturally enough, the attention of U.S. revolutionaries has been riveted on the neo-colonies and their wars of national liberation since World War II. As the correct historical focus of the national question at this time, that is justified. The revolutionary upsurge in those areas has been at a higher level than any proletarian movement in any imperialist nation since 1945. Most blows to U.S. imperialism have been dealt from this quarter and, while there is evidence that a new balance of forces will develop in the next period of the world revolution, we have much to learn from wars of national liberation.
But the communist movement in this country must also correctly assess the limitations of current national liberation struggles. Since they have provided the most action in recent years, untrained and idealistic progressives naturally assume they comprise the sole or primary revolutionary force in the world. Militant activity, outstanding today in the colonies, may soon shift closer to home, and if all we have learned to say is, “Support national liberation struggles,” we will find ourselves unable to understand other forces. Even worse, we will be unable to analyze those forces for the proletariat. Obviously, national liberation struggles will not win our revolution for us. We need an all-around understanding, based on Marxism-Leninism, of the nature of imperialism, of every form of class struggle and the strategy and tactics of each.
An example is the fight against racism in this country. No one can mistake the super-exploitation and heavy oppression reserved for blacks and other minorities by the U.S. ruling class. In recent years, even with the civil rights movement at its peak, the income gap between white and black families has grown. Police terror in the ghetto goes on unabated. Minorities comprise much more than their proportional share of the reserve army of labor. To combat this oppression and counteract its devastating influence on the proletarian movement, we must understand it fully. Instead of a class analysis to guide us, however, idealists in the movement notice two superficial facts that lead to a superficial conclusion. They notice that racial minorities in the U.S. live under worse conditions than the average –just like the colonies. They notice that those more oppressed in the U.S. are disproportionately Third World, i.e., non-caucasian–just like the colonies. The conclusion: minorities in the U.S. are really nations enslaved within these borders and the correct analysis of the problem is not racism but the “national question.”
Confusion reigns throughout this line. First we note the idea that these “internal colonies” make the U.S. a ”multi-national state.” As we have seen, multi-national states and colonies correspond to two different circumstances of the national question, in fact to two different periods in the development of capitalism. Yet recent documents on this subject have consistently confused those forms as a convenient path to the idea that people of color within the U.S. state comprise nations.
The State of the United States of North America. ...this state is a powerful omnipotent multinational state that exercises hegemony over the Anglo-American nation, the colonial Negro Nation and the colonial nation of Puerto Rico. In addition this State exercises its dictatorship over a number of peoples, including the Mexican national minority [and] the Indian people, ... (Communist League, Negro National and Colonial Question, p. III.)
This formula is a fiction based on the confusion of two entirely different historical phenomena and is, in fact, false on both counts.
The essence of the “internal colony” line runs like this. Just as the U.S. ruling class dominates colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, so it has created internal colonies or oppressed nations for the same purpose out of blacks, Chicanos Latinos, Asian-Americans and Native Americans. For example, this is the view implied when the October League describes rallies in defense of Billy Dean Smith in these terms: “In Watts, the Afro-American community participated in several rallies against the system that murders and oppresses Vietnamese in Vietnam and Black people at home” (The Call, December ’72, p. 16.)
These groups see internal colonies exactly the same way they view neo-colonies in the entire capitalist world. Lower wages and worse conditions for black “workers equal the supposed flight by imperialists to the Third World for cheap labor. Police repression in the ghetto, barrio, or reservation equals military action in Vietnam. Backwardness and low wages in the South are not due to unequal development of capitalism, or the racist division of the working class, but to domination of this “colony” by the imperialist North since the Civil War.
To be sure, the line varies with groups, especially on the point of whether or not the internal colonies still occupy specific territory. We just want to investigate the general idea that the U.S., as a multi-national state, is composed of various nations and, further, that those nations are colonies like Vietnam.
As we have seen, multinational states arose in specific historical circumstances, those being the earliest attempts of stronger semi-feudal nations to control weaker semi-feudal nations. Lack of development and technology in the oppressor nation made a far-flung empire of colonies out of the question, so small nations on the borders became the target of grasping absolutist regimes supported by small, weak and sycophantic oppressor nation bourgeoisies (or parts of them) which could not complete their own revolution. Stalin distinguishes the nation states of Western Europe from the multi-national states of Austria-Hungary and Russia. He remarks about the latter:
This peculiar method of formation of states could take place only where feudalism had not yet been eliminated, where capitalism was feebly developed, where the nationalities which had been forced into the background had not yet been able to consolidate themselves economically into integral nations. (”Marxism and the National Question,” SSW, Cardinal: p. 57.)
Lenin confirms this point, quoting Karl Kautsky in his Marxist period:
...States of mixed national composition (known as multi-national states, as distinct from national states) are “always those whose internal constitution has for some reason or other remained abnormal or underdeveloped” (backward). (“Rights of Nations to Self-Determination.” LCW: 20, p. 397.)
Of course, any form of national oppression creates backwardness in the oppressed nation. Lenin and Stalin, however, are speaking of retarded development also in the oppressor nation. Since the national question is always an element of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, we can approach this problem by expanding that definition and asking, “Whose bourgeois democratic revolution?” In multi-national states, the bourgeois revolution in the oppressor nation is at stake.
In fact, oppression of weaker nationalities often held back that revolution. The tsar did not hold onto nations on Russia’s perimeter as sources of raw material or as markets for investment of Russian capital. Russia had little industry to use the raw materials and little capital to export. Most capital in Russia before 1917 was British and French, and whereas those developed imperialist powers might have used Russia’s oppressed nationalities as colonies, they certainly looked on Russia itself in somewhat the same light. No one should believe that the Triple Entente (Britain, France, and Russia) was a partnership of equals.
It should be borne in mind that before 1914 the most important branches of Russian industry were in the hands of foreign capitalists, chiefly those of France, Great Britain and Belgium, that is, the Entente countries ... A considerable part of the profits of Russian industry flowed into foreign banks, chiefly British and French. All these circumstances, in addition to the thousands of millions borrowed by the tsar from France and Britain in loans, chained tsardom to British and French imperialism and converted Russia into a tributary, a semi-colony of these countries. (History of the C.P.S.U. (Bolshevik), International, 1939, p. 162)
Somewhat as reward for her services to British and French imperialism, Russia became “the prison house of nations,” a holding company for sources of British and French raw materials and investments. The Russian bourgeoisie had their own reasons for holding onto the oppressed nations and, of course, they did not free them when they had the chance. In the hands of the tsar, however, the tribute exacted from the oppressed nations was feudal in form. “The chief mainstay of the tsar was the feudal landlords.” (Ibid.) Maintaining the tribute system of exploitation denied the Russian bourgeoisie the agricultural base for industrial development and added to the overall structure of semi-feudal relations which impeded the democratic revolution.
One can compare the Russian situation with what happened in Germany, where the victory of capitalism made the multi-national state obsolete. The Prussians were able to unite other German states under their control, and as a capitalist and relatively developed nation, liquidated the internal national question.
Lenin refers to that process when he states:
...there is only one solution to the national problem (insofar as it can, in general, be solved in the capitalist world, the world of profit, squabbling and exploitation), and that solution is consistent democracy. (“Critical Remarks on the National Question,” LCW: 20, p. 22.)
He means bourgeois democracy, industrial development, the complete victory of the bourgeoisie over tsarism and feudalism. The German bourgeoisie fulfilled that victory; the Russian did not. Germany had no internal national questions outstanding when socialist revolution came upon the agenda of the day; Russia did. In 1917, when Russia finally completed its bourgeois revolution, it fell to the Russian proletariat to complete the process the German bourgeoisie had completed in Germany. Feudalism had to be overthrown in both cases; the schedule and the agent of victory differed.
Now, should we scorn the solution of the national question in Germany because it was accomplished by the bourgeoisie? The bourgeois solution certainly entails more oppression and drawn out suffering for the masses than the proletarian solution. However, Marxists know that the proletariat benefits when the bourgeoisie completes its historical tasks, for remnants of the bourgeois-democratic revolution left in the path to socialism constitute an obstruction, a diversion, an appendage of the old that must be severed before we proceed to the new. Where the bourgeoisie has not completed its revolution regarding oppressed nations, communists who deny the right to self-determination are guilty of chauvinism; where the bourgeoisie has succeeded, communists who seek national solutions to class questions pull the movement back to the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution just as surely as if they demanded the vote for women in the U.S. today.
Although intra-state national questions do not generally survive a thoroughgoing bourgeois-democratic revolution, democracy clearly does not solve the national-colonial question. The most democratic bourgeois republic will still oppress colonies. The national question in the world today is one of neo-colonialism, and not multi-national states or any combination of the two. In the colonies, national liberation has nothing to do with the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the oppressor nation, which is long since complete. The bourgeois-democratic revolution of the colony itself faces not only or primarily its own feudal aristocracy and comprador bourgeoisie, but the monopoly capitalist class of the imperialist nation.
We cannot be content to follow the R.U. in defining periods of the national question in reference only to the internal conditions of nations. The period of neo-colonialism is significant, not because of the number of stages in colonial revolutions, but because every blow struck for national liberation is a blow struck by the worldwide alliance of workers and oppressed peoples against worldwide imperialism. That is precisely what makes the liberation of the colonies the task of the proletariat, whether national liberation in a particular colony results immediately in the dictatorship of the proletariat or not.
Where does the U.S. stand in this analysis? It is an advanced imperialist country that dominates colonies and neo-colonies all over the world.. Those colonies are oppressed nations and have the unqualified right to self-determination. But internally, what links the U.S. to the old multi-national states of Eastern Europe? What feudal aristocracy stands behind the lack of democratic rights for blacks and other minorities? What group of landlords has control of the Southern United States, supposed territory of the Negro (or Black) Nation, using that control to impede capitalism? In fact, everything in the history of non-white minorities in this society, all their suffering and exploitation, point to the consolidation of capitalism and the rule of monopoly capital. Nothing in the development of the United States follows the pattern of the multi-national state.
Neither does the Southern U.S. or any other part of the country look anything like a neo-colony. No particular national bourgeoisie challenges the U.S. imperialists for rights to exploit the land and the people. U.S. monopoly capital allows industrial development in the South, both in agriculture and manufacturing. The major revolutionary class in the area, as in the nation at large, is the proletariat and not the peasantry, setting it off from neo-colonies in general.
In short, those who glibly speak of the U.S. as a multinational state pervert the Marxist analysis of social systems and development. Those who see special oppression visited upon “internal colonies” of the U.S. do not understand the relationship between colonies and imperialist nations. The “theoreticians” of the national question use both labels at once, showing only their facility for compounding one error with another. Having decided on faith that the national question, not racism, forms the material basis of discrimination in an advanced capitalist country, the multi-national state seemed a handy thing to call it. Combining such labels and the errors behind them confuses two different stages of the world revolution; using either one shows the pro-nationalists completely at odds with conditions in the U.S.
Denied all scientific evidence, the idealists return invariably to that one special aspect of the “internal national question” that supposedly divides the U.S. state into oppressed and oppressor nations and the only factor which those ”oppressed nations” share with neo-colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That factor is skin color.