Self-Determination and Socialist Revolution

(Quote of the Week)

In many of his writings, V.I. Lenin emphasized that the fight of subjugated peoples against their national oppression was a necessary link in the struggle of the international working class for socialist revolution. Lenin’s intransigent fight for the self-determination of nations, that is, the right to separate and establish an independent state, was crucial for the Bolshevik Party in winning the confidence of the various nationalities imprisoned within the tsarist empire.

Not only the right of nations to self-determination, but all the fundamental demands of political democracy are only partially “practicable” under imperialism, and then in a distorted form and by way of exception (for example, the secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905). The demand for the immediate liberation of the colonies that is put forward by all revolutionary Social-Democrats is also “impracticable” under capitalism without a series of revolutions. But from this it does not by any means follow that Social-Democracy should reject the immediate and most determined struggle for all these demands—such a rejection would only play into the hands of the bourgeoisie and reaction—but, on the contrary, it follows that these demands must be formulated and put through in a revolutionary and not a reformist manner, going beyond the bounds of bourgeois legality, breaking them down, going beyond speeches in parliament and verbal protests, and drawing the masses into decisive action, extending and intensifying the struggle for every fundamental democratic demand up to a direct proletarian onslaught on the bourgeoisie, i.e., up to the socialist revolution that expropriates the bourgeoisie....

Increased national oppression under imperialism does not mean that Social‑Democracy should reject what the bourgeoisie call the “utopian” struggle for the freedom of nations to secede but, on the contrary, it should make greater use of the conflicts that arise in this sphere, too, as grounds for mass action and for revolutionary attacks on the bourgeoisie.

—V.I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (January-February 1916)