File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9709, message 396


Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 11:58:50 -0400
From: james m blaut <70671.2032-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: Marxism vs. Maoism & nationalist 'socialism"


Neil:

1. Your fundamental mistake is to believe that there is just one form of
national independence movement and it is the 19th century form in which
European bourgeois communities formed their own bourgeois states in a
process of classic "bourgeois-nationalism" that was part of the rise of
capitalism. Essentially all Marxists believed, before about 1915, that this
was the essential nature of all national movmenets. In 1915-1916 Lenin
showed that national movements in colonies, like Ireland, are *not* simply
part of the rise of capitalism -- they are struggles against capitalism,
partly bourgeois but nonetheless progressive and revolutionary -- a
fundamentally different form of national movement.

2. Lenin desmolished the anti-natiional-liberation views of Bukharin and
Pyatakov in articles attacking their "imperialist economism." In 1918-19
Lenin did *not* lose the debate in  the Bolshevik party congress: he won
it. And in the 2nd Congress of the CI the issue was not whether or not to
fight against colonialism everywhere -- a unanimous opinion -- but how much
compromise should be allowed with bourgeois-nationalist elements in
colonies.

3. Since then, the overwhelming majority of Marxists, of all schools, have
supported national liberation struggles against colonialism and
neocolonialism.

!Viva Puerto Rico libre y socialista!

Jim Blaut  


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