A SPARK-INTERNATIONALE JOINT ISSUE
In the human spirit of sympathy for the departed, in the cooperative spirit of the outgoing coalition government, and in the immortal spirit of workers’ solidarity, Spark and Internationale, the papers of the Marxist-Leninist and Luxemburgist factions, have collaborated to distribute the following document. The late Rosa Luxemburg left this document, among many others in her extensive files, to her comrade Leo Jogiches, currently President of the Warsaw Soviet, formerly the leader-in-exile of Polish Social Democracy in Russia. The document came to light only after the conclusion of the Finnish War, as Comrade Jogiches was transferring his files to the Council House in Warsaw. Though it has been left behind somewhat by events, and reflects neither faction’s position perfectly, the leaderships of both factions agree that it would be in the Public’s best interest for this document to be distributed, read, and discussed as widely as possible both within the People’s Party and in the Republic as a whole. It is thus my pleasure to introduce to you the late Comrade Luxemburg’s thoughts on the national question in our Republic. Comrade Jogiches believes this document constituted her notes for a book on the subject, which, sadly, we will never see.
-Comrade Zimmerwald
ON THE NATIONAL QUESTION
Among other problems, the disruptions of the True Germans have brought into focus the nationality question. However, this most radical proposal comes from a faction whose outlook is fundamentally bourgeois. The formula of the right of the various nationalities of the VSVR to determine their fate independently even to the point of the right of governmental separation from the VSVR is proclaimed again with doctrinaire obstinacy as a special battle cry of Bismarck and his friends. It constitutes the axis of their internal policy for after their seizure of power.
One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Bismarck and his friends stick to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their otherwise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed towards other democratic principles. While they show a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage, in short, for the whole apparatus of the basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the “right of self-determination” inside the VSVR, they treat the of peoples to separate from the Republic as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism in their faction and in the People’s Party have to be stilled.
The contradiction that is so obvious here is all the harder to understand since the democratic forms of political life in each land, as we shall see, actually involve the most valuable and even indispensable foundations of socialist policy, whereas the famous “right of self-determination of nations” is nothing but hollow, petty-bourgeois phraseology and humbug.
If, despite all this, such generally sober and critical politicians as Bismarck and his friends, who have nothing but an ironical shrug for every sort of “utopian” phrase, have in this case made a hollow phrase of exactly the same kind into their special hobby. Bismarck and his friends clearly calculated that there was no surer method of binding the many nationalities within the VSVR to the cause of their faction, than that of offering them, in the name of the revolution and of socialism, the most extreme freedom to determine their own fate. We can only observe, unfortunately for them but fortunately for the cause of socialism, that their calculation was entirely wrong.
The best proof is Wallonia, which has played so frightful a role in the “rise” of the True German faction. Wallonian nationalism in the VSVR is a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty-bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country; it does not enjoy the support of the people, it is without any historical tradition, since Wallonia never formed a nation or government, and it is without any national culture, except for a few reactionary-romantic poems. It is exactly as if, one fine day, the people living in the Wasserkante should want to found a new Low-German nation and government! And this ridiculous pose of a few university professors and students was inflated into a political force by Bismarck and his friends for their own political advantage through their doctrinaire agitation concerning the “right of self-determination.” To what was at first a mere farce they lent such importance that the farce has become a matter of the most deadly seriousness – not as a serious national movement for which, afterward as before, there are no roots at all, but as a shingle and rallying flag of counter-revolution!
Instead of this hollow nationalistic phraseology, those comrades committed to socialism must defend tooth and nail the integrity of the VSVR as the stronghold of the revolution. We must oppose to all forms of separatism the solidarity and inseparability of the proletarians in all lands. So long as the socialist proletariat fights as a part of the closed revolutionary phalanx, it possesses a position of dominant power. It takes the majority in every parliament, it indoctrinates all armies; it reduces the bourgeoisies of the world to complete impotence, and it becomes master of its own fate in all countries.
-Comrade Luxemburg