Regarding “Lenin’s articles referred to by Eric Blanc, and the article by Franz Mehring, which Lenin quotes at length in one of those articles. I hope to see the 1896 article by Karl Kautsky “Finis Poloniae?” today or tomorrow. I plan to put them all up on mlwerke.de (well, German language only there). ”

Done. They are both online now. I spent some time inbetween learning more about Web design and the CSS formatting language by renovating http://www.dgb-chor.frankfurt.de
Karl Kautsky’s article “Finis Poloniae?”
Kautsky replies to Rosa Luxemburg who argued in an article published in “Die Neue Zeit” that the demand for the reconstitution i.e. reunification of Poland would no longer be the first item on the agenda for Polish revolutionaries. This article by Rosa Luxemburg, an article by a supporter of the PPS line countering Luxemburg’s arguments, and Rosa Luxemburg’s rejoinder are in preparation. Also three articles providing statistical data on the Russian economic policies in their part of Poland.

Franz Mehring’s article “Die polnische Frage” (The Polish Question), a part of his 1901 introduction to volume 3 of “Aus dem literarischen Nachlaß von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels” (articles not yet published in book form until then). Mehring looks back half a century on the articles on Poland in the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” (New Rhenanian Gazette), pointing also to some factual errors in those articles (actually written by Engels).

When writing my previous comment, I was actually not sure about Eric Blanc’s claim that Lenin was “[n]either advocating [n]or even necessarily supporting Polish independence”. In the meantime, I have read Lenin’s articles referred to by Eric Blanc, and the article by Franz Mehring, which Lenin quotes at length in one of those articles. I hope to see the 1896 article by Karl Kautsky “Finis Poloniae?” today or tomorrow. I plan to put them all up on mlwerke.de (well, German language only there).

What I understand from those articles is that the whole revolutionary workers movement had put the demand for the re-establishment of Poland on a back burner, not just Lenin.

The question is, how could the demand to re-establish the pre-division Poland be realized? In the course of the 1848/49 European revolution, it was quite clear: a revolutionary war against Czarist Russia, by the German, Hungarian and Polish nations. Even the “King in Prussia” Friedrich-Wilhelm IV explained in March 24, 1848 to a delegation of Poles from Prussian occupied Poznań demanding a “national reorganisation” of the province, that Russian troops would appear in Poznań, if the province could have a free national development “with or without my will”. The Hohenzollern prince did not want to fight this war.

But in 1903? In 1905? As a practical demand by Russian workers? Would they then call for a revolutionary war by the Czarist Russia against Prussified Germany and Kakania (the k und k double Monarchy of Austria-Hungary)? To raise question shows its absurdity. Or should the demand for the re-establishment of Poland be just for inconsequential Sunday talks?

While the slogan “the nation which oppresses another nation is forging its own chains” is always true, the concrete next step is not the identical same, independently of time and place, of social development and political constellations.

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(*) PIDE – the secret police of the fascist Salazar regime in Portugal.

The Polish people had been engaged in an independence struggle since 1848 and before. That struggle deserved support. In such a situation, to limit oneself to the “right of self-determination” in the abstract is a form of abstention.

That stated, we know as Marxists that the “struggle of the Polish people” is an arena in which counterposed social classes contend for leadership, advancing counterposed programs, and we have a lot to say on that side of the question.

John

Eric Blanc may refer to the German communists campaign in the 1848 revolution, when their daily newspaper, the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” declared Poland to be a “necessary nation” (might be termed the “only indispensable nation” to use the words of Madeleine Albright and the current POTUS).

I recommend to read Frederic Engels’ series on the Poland debate in the Frankfurt national assembly, which decided on July 27, 1848, to annex the larger part of Prussian occupied Poland to Germany, i.e. to include it in the Deutscher Bund (German League, the form of German national unity created by the 1815 Vienna Congress), especially the August 19 one. (In German: http://mlwerke.de/me/me05/me05_319.htm ,)

Engels explains that the two major German powers, Prussia and Austria, became subordinate to the Russian Czar by taking their share of divided Poland. By becoming oppressors of Poland, together with Russia, they were forced to stay absolutist monarchies.

To free itself, the German nation had to give freedom to Poland, but this would bring her inevitably in a war with Russia.

For Marx and Engels and their comrades, the 1848 revolution would have to create Germany, Hungary, and Poland as independent and unified republics, and this could be accomplished only by a revolutionary war against Russia. This common war of those three nations would also create favorable conditions to agree on borders between the territories of those nations in a friendly manner.

This revolutionary war against Russia as the necessary means to achieve freedom for Poland, Hungary and Germany as independent republics, is systematically played down by Social Democrats and Stalinists alike.

But the revolution failed, since the German bourgeoisie sided with the forces of reaction, in Italy, in Prague and in Posen, and then … the times they are a-changing.

Germany was unified in a crippled form in 1871, capitalism developed, and also in Russia. In his book on the devolepment of capitalism in Russia, Lenin tried to prove that the capitalist mode of production had become the dominant mode of production in the Czaris empire. A Russian proletariat emerged, and a Russian revolutionary workers party came into existence.

Half a century after the 1848/49 European revolution, a revolutionary war against Russia was no longer on the agenda. The war of 1914-18 was not a revolutionary war.

And “a revolutionary war against Russia” could also not be the central perspective of a Russian revolutionary proletarian party, as Lenin worked to form.

And as the revolutionary party based mainly in the oppressor nation in that “prison hous of nations”, as the Czarist empire was also called, Lenin argued that this party, to be successfull, had to fight all forms of Great Russian chauvinism, had to do away with all instruments of national oppression, had to garantee the inalienable right of self-determination, including separation, of all oppressed nations and nationalities, but would not try to impose those nations any form of solution of how they would determine their national future, separation of union with Russia based on a freely taken decision. If the revolutionary workers party, mainly based in Russia, would make prescriptions for the nations oppressed by their own oppressor, they would already infringe the the right of self-determination of those nations.

The art of revolutionary leadership has to be based on a scientific analysis of the concrete situation, by based on the historic situation of the moment. There is no one-size-fits-all solution independent from the concrete reality.

The only eternal rule is: The nation with oppresses another nation forges her own chains (*)

This principled stance was the core of what Marx and Engels did and said in their times and Lenin in his times. The concrete political strategy and tactic may differ in time and place.

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(*) BTW, Nestor Gorojovsky of Argentina once told me that this slogan originates from his country, brought to Spain by a delegate to a congress of the short-lived Spanish republic of the early 1800s, who had to absorb the lesson that they had to give freedom to Spain’s colonies in the Americas, in order to achieve their own freedom in Spain.

This work shold be translated in many language!

Here is the link..

Dr. abraham Weizfeld

PhD UQAM, M.A. York U., B.Sc. UdeW

saalaha@fokus.name

514 284 66 42

Montréal

Nation, Society and the State :

the reconciliation of Palestinian and Jewish Nationhood

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000425888/NATION–SOCIETY–AND–THE-STATE.aspx

https://independent.academia.edu/AbrahamWeizfeld

Skype/Yahoo/Twitter : eibieman

http://www.youtube.com/abraham.weizfeld/

https://utoronto.academia.edu/CPRAACRP