We’re starting off with a very short one for the first week. This text was published in 1915, two years before the October revolution, and is sadly still highly relevant in the imperial core.
This reading group is meant to educate, and people from any instances federated with Lemmygrad are welcome. Any comments not engaging in good faith will be removed (don’t respond to hostile comments, just report them).
You can post questions or share your thoughts at any time. We’ll be moving on to a new text next week, but this thread won’t be locked.
You can read the text here.
While the notion is simple, i find this text very hard to digest. The world was very different when Lenin wrote this, it was a very multipolar world in that time, albeit these polars were imperialists competing for the distribution of the world while multipolarity now is about the right of self-determination.
The case of Russia is very interesting, a capitalist country that is ideologically reactionary but one way or another is found itself fighting for a globally progressive cause, the weakening of US hegemony throught the disarment of Ukraine, an US satellite state. Would this be the moment for the working class of Russia to organize to topple their oligarchy? Maybe it would be the prime time to do it even if it could potentially lead to an US invasion?
This is the reason I commented on the other thread about “On Protracted People’s War” and how it talks seemingly similar conditions but take very different stances. One is written from the perspective of revolutionaries on a reactionary country waging a war that is principally imperialist in character, the other from the perspective of a reactionary country defending from such a war.
The war in Ukraine is somewhere in-between, as there will be sectors of the Russia bourgeoisie that benefit from this war, but it also weakens the global hegemon (I disagree that we already have a multipolar world). On the other hand, it assures some measure of self determination for the peoples of Donbas and Ukraine.
From a very distant and somewhat ignorant perspective, (actual) revolutionary communists in Russia should not defend the overthrow of the Russian bourgeois state as an immediate objective (but a long term one). But they should have advocate for the immediate overthrow of the Ukrainian regime and, controversially, non-antagonistic autonomy from the Russian state and socialist restoration for the Donbas and Luhansk.
I think it is important in the context to see Ukraine as just a vassal of usa/nato and Russia as a 3rd party standing up for the LPR and DPR’s right to self determination. In a war for self determination against neo-imperialism we side with the anti-imperialists.
LPR and DRP are joining Russia as a practical response to the fact that they will never be allowed to be independent as long as usa and nato exist. Better to live as equals in a capitalists state than be an oppressed people under outright fascist imperialists.
It breaks down the nuance a bit further.
LPR/DPR have nothing to do with self determination because they are not nations. Russia and Ukraine are nations, both have their states, neither is fighting for self determination.
Donbass was not colonised by Ukraine, it’s a region of Ukraine with significant Russian population which is not unusual along borders.
This is a border dispute, of course people living there are affected, but that doesn’t make it a war for self-determination, otherwise all wars fought over territory would be wars of self determination.
The people living in the DPR and LPR disagree with you. For many of them this is about self-determination. It is about protection from a fascist regime that was seeking to exterminate them, their language, their culture and their religion. This is not a border dispute, that is completely ignorant of the reality of the situation and of how this started.
Go try and ask a person living in Donetsk what they think about the prospect of being left unprotected at the mercy of the Ukrainian Nazi regime that has been shelling them for a decade. All this started because the people there rose up against an illegal coup that brought to power a regime that declared everything Russian as anathema. The entire reason why there was a civil war for eight years in Ukraine is because of people fighting for self-determination. For autonomy or independence from a state that they felt no longer represented them and had become outright hostile to them. For them this is a war of national liberation.
This is not about a few people of another nationality living in a border area, these are entire regions, most of Eastern and Southern Ukraine in fact, that are and have been for centuries historically Russian, linguistically and culturally.
It is quite apparent that you don’t understand Ukraine, its national-ethnic composition or its history.(Edit: I should not have said that, i made unjustified assumptions about where you were coming from on this issue)The Banderite Ukrainian nationalist project, even if you wanted to ignore its deeply fascist character and roots, is a colonial one, in the sense that it seeks to establish a mono-linguistic ethnostate and erase the linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity of Ukraine by forcibly imposing the language, culture and historical national conception of a minority in the far west of Ukraine.
There is a continuum of culture and language in Ukraine going from East to West. The distinction between Ukrainian and Russian national identity is not at all as clear as you make it out to be. No, the DPR and LPR are not nations, they never claimed that, they (now) consider themselves part of the Russian nation, as did much of Ukraine to some degree before the Ukrainian nationalist re-education project began post 1991 and accelerating after 2014 to aggressively promote the idea that the entire territory of Ukraine should view itself as “Ukrainian” according to a strictly Western Ukrainian conception of that term that is explicitly and aggressively anti-Russian.
It is quite apparent that you don’t understand Ukraine, its national-ethnic composition or its history.
language, culture and historical national conception of a minority in the far West of Ukraine.
OK this is laughable. I was raised in Ukraine and I don’t need a Westerner to tell me I don’t understand it, especially one who seems to think Ukrainians are “a minority in the far West of Ukraine”.
There is a continuum of culture and language in Ukraine going from East to West.
I’m aware, thanks. The way I’ve been taught, Dnipro marks the border between Eastern Ukraine, which was always under Russian influence, and Western Ukraine, which had significant Polish influence and cultural ties. But the same goes for Russia. Ukrainian language was spoken all the way to the Don, the Cossack dialect has strong Ukrainian influence, and really entire Southern Russia is a mixture of Ukrainian, Georgian, Abkhasian, Ingush, Circassian, and other influences. Where exactly is the “ethnically and historically correct” border between Ukraine and Russia? I have no idea, maybe it’s along Dnipro, maybe it’s along Don, or anywhere in between.
Where is the legally correct border between Ukraine and Russia? That’s much easier, that was peacefully agreed in 1991. Should Ukraine pursue a return to those borders? Fuck no, that ship has sailed and it’s time for Ukraine to cut its losses and accept whatever peace it can have.
Your post with date-by-date history of the lead up to this conflict is spot on and I’m aware of those events. They still don’t justify invading a brotherly nation. Again, having been raised in the USSR I can’t support Russia’s wars on its neighbours, even if the fault lies mostly with the West.
Look at China, it manages to maintain sovereignty without killing large numbers of people in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and without waging wars on internal separatists like in Xinjiang.
No, the DPR and LPR are not nations, they never claimed that, they consider themselves part of the Russian nation, as did much of Ukraine to some degree before the Ukrainan nationalist re-education project began post 1991
Again, having grown up in Ukraine in the 80s, I can assure you people living there considered themselves Ukrainian, even Russian speakers like me.
Not nations? says who? regardless of your arbitrary (and incorrect) definition of “nation” they were autonomous and self governing for nearly a decade berfore the smo.
Whether they were colonized or not is irrelevant. The people of the LPR and DPR have the right to self determination. They have a right to fight for their freedom and they did that for 9 years. Russia started the SMO with the intention of assisting the LPR and DPR in defending from attacks by ukraine. The Russian offer to join was only extended after the zelensky government abandoned peace talks.
Calling it a border dispute is ahistorical.
Not nations? says who?
Lenin, Stalin, and Marxist-Leninist theory in general.
The people of the LPR and DPR have the right to self determination.
Not any more than people of Hong Kong or Taiwan. Because they are not nations.
Lenin and stalin never said shit about the LPR or DPR because they didn’t exist. Stop pretending you speak for them.
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. -Lenin, Marxism and the National Question
How does that not apply to the Donbass republics?
The people of hong kong and taiwan are nations and have self determination. They haven’t used their self determination to secede from china because it isn’t the majority position. They aren’t independent states but they are nations, just like Tibet is.
It was Stalin who wrote Marxism and the National Question.
There is no nation of Hong Kong, they are Han Chinese. There is no nation of Donbass, they are Russians and Ukrainians. The way you’re trying to read that quote from Lenin, every single town, every village, every district is a nation. That’s not at all what Lenin said.
Tibet does have it’s own language, territory, and culture, and so it is indeed a nation.
