In answering this argument, let’s examine the selections from Stalin’s writings that are most frequently cited in support of it:
A nation is a historically. constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture. (Emphasis Stalin’s.)... It goes without saying that a nation, like every other historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end ... A nation is not merely an historical category but an historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism. (Stalin, ibid., pp. 307, 313.)
It should also go without saying that the development of an oppressed nation is bound to be retarded and deformed; that, specifically, the capitalist class and capitalist relations of production within that oppressed nation are restricted in their development.
But is Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question the last word on the development of the national question? Not according to Stalin himself. In Foundations of Leninism (April, 1924), Stalin emphasizes the fundamental changes that have been brought about in the national question by the First World War, the October Revolution in Russia, and the wave of national liberation movements that swept through the colonial countries in the wake of the War and the Russian Revolution:
During the last two decades the national question has undergone a number of very important changes. The national question in the period of the Second International and the national question in the period of Leninism are far from being the same thing . . . Formerly the national question was usually confined to a narrow circle of questions, concerning primarily ’civilized’ nationalities. . . (through the victory of the October Revolution and the influence of Leninism) the national question was thereby transformed from a particular and internal state problem into a general and international problem, into a world problem of emancipating the oppressed peoples in the dependent countries and colonies from the yoke of imperialism. (Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, p. 71, “The National Question.”)
Since the great majority of the people of the dependent countries and colonies were peasants, Stalin also insisted that, more than ever, “in essence, the national question is a peasant question.” (Stalin, “Concerning the National Question in Yugoslavia,” Vol. 7 , p. 72.)
But what about a situation–like the U.S. today–where the national question is not in essence a peasant question and where it is in fact “a particular and internal state problem”? Under these circumstances, can the national question be transformed? Can a nation have a different function, play a different role in different historical periods within the same country, can it assume new features with the development of the society within which it arises and develops?
Stalin says that it can. In ”The National Question and Leninism (Reply to comrades Meshkov, Kovalchuk, and others),” written in 1929, Stalin points out that:
In the period preceding the First World War, when history made a bourgeois-democratic revolution the task of the moment in Russia, the Russian Marxists linked the solution of the national question with the fate of the democratic revolution in Russia. Our party held that the overthrow of tsarism, the elimination of of the survivals of feudalism, and the complete democratisation of the country provided the best solution of the national question that was possible within the framework of capitalism.
Such was the policy of the Party in that period. It is to this period that Lenin’s well-known articles on the national question belong, ... To this same period belongs Stalin’s pamphlet Marxism and the National Question. It is precisely . . . bourgeois nations that Stalin’s pamphlet Marxism and the National Question has in mind when it says that ’a nation is not merely an historical category but an historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism.’ (Stalin, The National Question and Leninism, Vol 11, pp. 366, 353.)
In this same reply, Stalin warns the comrades of the dangers of an undialectical approach to the national question:
One of your mistakes is that you regard the national question not as part of the general question of the social and political development of society, subordinated to this general question, but as something self-contained and constant, whose direction and character remain basically unchanged throughout the course of history. Hence you fail to see what every Marxist sees, namely, that the national question does not always have one and the same character, that the character and tasks of the national movement vary with the different period in the development of the revolution.
Logically it is this that explains the deplorable fact that you so lightly confuse and lump together diverse periods of development of the revolution, and fail to understand that the changes in the character and tasks of the revolution in various stages of its development give rise to corresponding changes in the character and aims of the national question, that in conformity with this the Party’s policy on the national question also changes, and that, consequently, the Party’s policy on the national question in one period of development of the revolution cannot be violently severed from that period and arbitrarily transferred to another period. (Stalin, ibid., p. 365.)
Stalin spends considerable time answering the specific argument of these comrades, who insisted that, since the proletariat had captured state power and built the Soviet Union-including within it various nationalities that had been oppressed under Tsarism–separate nations no longer existed in Soviet Russia. Stalin points out that these comrades are first of all confusing the question of nationhood with statehood–which is also a common error of those who deny there is a national question in the U.S. today.
But, more importantly, he points out that different nations still exist in the Soviet Union and will continue to exist for some time, even though in the socialist system they have been integrated into the economic and social life of the country as a whole much more fully than they had been under the rule of the autocracy and the bourgeoisie. Stalin insisted on this point because there was still a basis for the various nations to form separate states. A mis-handling of the national question by the proletarian state–based on the erroneous line that nations had ceased to exist under the new conditions–could lead to divisions among the various nationalities and the disintegration of the unified socialist state.
Obviously, we cannot apply this pamphlet of Stalin’s mechanically, either. The proletariat does not yet hold state power in the U.S. But we can apply Stalin’s method-the Marxist method of dialectical and historical materialism–to our own situation.
How does this apply to the U.S. today? We have shown that the Black nation today is not a peasant nation. It is a proletarian nation, a nation of a new type. By “nation of a new type” we mean a nation under new conditions.
What are these concrete conditions? The Black nation arose, like all nations, during the early period of capitalism. And, like all oppressed nations, its development was deformed and restricted. Even at the height of Black concentration in the plantation south, a considerable part of the Black bourgeoisie was not only weak and underdeveloped, but was actually forced to operate outside of the Black Belt.
And, during this same period, even when Black people made up a majority of the Black Belt population, there were a large number of people of a different nationality (whites) living in and around the area. Over the past 30 years, the Black concentration in the south has been broken up, the Black people have been dispersed throughout the country and transformed from peasant farmers to urban workers. But this is occurring under the conditions of decaying, dying capitalism–imperialism.
The last point is decisive. Unlike Russia, where the proletarian revolution followed very soon after the development of monopoly capitalism (imperialism) in that country; and immediately after the bourgeois-democratic revolution (February, 1917), in the U.S. the proletarian revolution has been temporarily held back and the period of imperialist rule temporarily prolonged.
Under these conditions, the break-up of the Black nation in the south has not and cannot mean that the Black people are assimilated into the society as a whole, that they simply merge into the class structure according to their relative numbers. Instead, Black people are overwhelmingly forced into the lowest, most exploited sections of the working class as a kind of caste; and, on the other hand, the class structure within the Black nation is reproduced, in its deformed character, within the present concentrations of Black population–the urban ghettos.
The national question in the U.S. today is in a different period than it was in Russia or in the U.S. before the development of imperialism, the First World War, the first successful socialist revolution and the ascendancy of the proletariat in all parts of the world.
With this in mind, let’s return to the argument that Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question provides the “proof that there is no longer an oppressed Black nation in the U.S. It is in this early pamphlet that Stalin writes:
There is no doubt that in the early stages of capitalism, nations become welded together. But there is also no doubt that in the higher stages of capitalism, a process of dispersion of nations sets in, a process whereby a whole number of groups separate off from the nations, going off in search of a livelihood and subsequently settling permanently in other regions of the state; in the course of this these settlers lose their old connections and acquire new ones in their new domicile and from generation to generation acquire new habits and new tastes, and possibly a new language. The question arises: is it possible to unite into a single national union groups that have grown so distinct? What are the magic links to unite what cannot be united? Is it conceivable that, for instance, the Germans of the Baltic Provinces and the Germans of Transcaucasia can be ’united into a single nation’? (Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, Vol. 2, p. 339.)
Is it true that today the Black people have “grown so distinct”? We don’t believe that it is. Their culture, based on their common historical and present day experience as a people, is still a single culture, whatever part of the country they inhabit. Is it possible for them to unite into a “single national union”? We believe it still is.
To understand this more clearly, we have to look more closely at the thrust of Stalin’s argument, and specifically at the incorrect line he is combatting. The heart of his pamphlet is directed against a group of Marxists who had degenerated into bourgeois nationalists. They argued that the working class should be separated along national lines, and that if an oppressed national group was dispersed throughout the state, then the “solution” to the national question was for the oppressed nationality to “constitute” itself a nation (as it was) and to be represented within the government along national lines.
More concretely, this scheme would have meant that the oppressed nationality would be given a certain percentage of the representatives of the legislative bodies, and all the members of that nationality, wherever they lived, would vote only for the representatives of their own nationality. “Cultural-National Autonomy” was the term for this. (Similar notions have been raised, from time to time, in the recent history of the U.S. revolutionary movement.)
In attacking this nonsense, Stalin pointed out that it could only divide the workers–artificially–along national lines. Why should a Jewish worker (for example) and a great-Russian worker, living next door to each other and working in the same factory, vote for different representatives in the government and be organized in different trade unions? This scheme, Stalin pointed out, had nothing in common with the Marxist position of upholding the right of oppressed nations to self-determination.
The real solution to national oppression–as far as a solution was possible under capitalism–was for the oppressed nationalities to exercise control over the cultural and educational institutions in the areas where they were concentrated, and for the bourgeois-democratic revolution to be developed as fully as possible. At the same time, oppressed nationalities had the right to form a separate state in the territory where they formed a nation.
Stalin’s argument–which was absolutely correct for the concrete situation in Russia in 1913–indicates the fundamental difference between the national question in Tsarist Russia and in the U.S. today. Stalin not only cited Switzerland as an example of the fact that democratisation of the country was the best possible solution to the national question (as long as the country was capitalist); he also cited the U.S. as another example!
Democratisation decisively did not solve the national question in the U.S. for the Black people (or other Third World people)! What Stalin had in mind in using the U.S. as an example was the question of the millions of European immigrants, who for several generations faced bitter national discrimination in the U.S. but who were gradually assimilated. Along with Lenin, Stalin pointed out in later writings that the national question in America was not at all solved for Black people. As we have shown, the Black nation in the U.S. was welded together exactly because the Black people were systematically excluded from the full development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in this country. The short-lived participation of the Black people in the bourgeois-democratic revolution ended with the betrayal of Reconstruction.
For these reasons, there are still real–and not magical–links that continue to unite the Black people into a national union–a nation of a new type, under new conditions–a proletarian nation, dispersed throughout the U.S., but, at the same time, concentrated within the urban industrial centers. This is reflected in the fact that the national consciousness of Black people–their consciousness as a people with a common culture, a common history of oppression and resistance down to today, and a common national origin in the Black Belt–is higher than it ever has been. At the same time the overwhelming majority of Black people are wage-workers, and their class consciousness is also higher than it ever has been.
The dual nature of the Black people–as members of an oppressed nation whose origin is in the Black Belt south, and as members of the single U.S. working class–is also reflected in the fact that, in recent years, with the further decline and the growing crisis of U.S. imperialism, there has been a tendency for some Black people to return to the south. But this occurs in the context of the tremendous changes in the productive forces–the mechanization of agriculture and the growth of industry–and in the relations of production: the virtual elimination of semi-feudal farming and the concentration of the former rural population, most dramatically Blacks, in the urban areas as wage-workers.
Black people who return to the south do not and cannot return to the farms–except in limited numbers as farm wage-workers. Blacks in the south live, in their greatest concentrations, in the urban ghettos, and they work–or seek work–in industry, service and trade.
This once again demonstrates that Black people today, north and south, are a nation of a new type: dispersed throughout the country, but concentrated in urban inner-cities, overwhelmingly working class and part of the single U.S. proletariat.
To sum up: the Black people today form a nation of a new type for two inter-related and inter-dependent reasons: (1) Historically they were welded together as a nation in the Black Belt; and (2) This historical and material basis of nationhood has not been eliminated, but transformed.