Lenin on national self-determination

Ukraine Has Removed 1,320 Statues of Lenin

“To imagine that a social revolution is conceivable without revolts of small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without the revolutionary outbursts of the petty bourgeoisie, with all its prejudices, without the movement of non-class-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against the oppression of the landlords, the church, the monarchy, the foreign yoke, etc. – to imagine that is tantamount to repudiating social revolution. Only those who imagine that in one place an army will line up and say, ‘We are for socialism’ and in another place another army will say, ‘We are for imperialism’ and believe that this will be the social revolution, only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic opinion could vilify the Irish Rebellion (Easter Day Rebellion) by calling it a ‘putsch.’

“Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.” (The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed UpCollected Works, Vol. XIX)

This quote shows up the hypocrisy of the IMT and other Trots in refusing to give even critical support to Ukrainian self-determination, and their smearing of Maidan as ‘fascist’, or even asserting that Ukrainian nationalism is nothing more than a tool of Western imperialism. Lenin supported the Irish nationalists even though they were also supported by German imperialism for its own cynical ends. Trotsky supported Algerian independence from France even if a hypothetical independence movement was sponsored by Fascist Italy. But according to Woods, Taaffe, North et al, Ukrainian independence is to be opposed as inherently reactionary, because it is backed by Western imperialism, and acts as a break upon a potential reunification of the former USSR on a socialist basis.

Imagine if a Ukrainian Marxist movement, instead of standing aside from the Maidan revolution and condemning it in sectarian fashion, had taken an active part in it and sought to inject it with socialist content. Maybe there wouldn’t be a preponderance of bourgeois reactionaries at the head of the Ukrainian national movement. Instead, by shunning it as inherently reactionary and politically impure, all the likes of the IMT have done is guarantee their impotence. I don’t expect to see a Trotskyist section in Ukraine any time soon.

Out of bitterness over the collapse of the USSR, many ‘Marxists’ and ‘Leninists’ are either hypocritically ‘neutral’ in the fight between Ukraine and Russian imperialism, or actively supporting Russia. They want Ukrainian workers to be slaughtered by an imperialist autocracy out of spite at the demise of the old workers’ state, and anger that most Ukrainian workers prefer bourgeois liberalism in the form of the EU to socialism or Marxism. Both Putin and Alan Woods are in agreement that the collapse of the USSR was the greatest disaster in world history. They now stand on the same side in the war on the Ukrainian nation.