Marxism and the National Question


Book Description

In this highly referenced volume, Stalin defined the nation and laid out the Marxist-Leninist position on national liberation. The results resounded throughout the colonial world. "What is a nation? A nation is primarily a community, a definite community of people. This community is not racial, nor is it tribal. The modern Italian nation was formed from Romans, Teutons, Etruscans, Greeks, Arabs, and so forth. The French nation was formed from Gauls, Romans, Britons, Teutons, and so on. The same must be said of the British, the Germans and others, who were formed into nations from people of diverse races and tribes. Thus, a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people."




Marxism and the National and Colonial Question


Book Description

Originally published 1934, a collection of articles and speeches on the nationalities question in the Soviet Union. Before the 1917 revolution, Stalin was the Communist Party's expert on the "nationalities problem"; after the revolution he became Commissar for the Nationalities in the early years of the Soviet Union. The nationalities problem was a debate over which national groups of the old Russian Empire were to remain a part of the new Soviet Union and which should form independent nations. The material in this book covers Finland, Georgia, Poland, and Ukraine; the national question in Yugoslavia; and many related topics.




Marxism & Nationalism


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The National Question


Book Description




Marx at the Margins


Book Description

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Through highly informed readings of work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. For this expanded edition, Anderson has written a new preface that discusses the additional 1879–82 notebook material, as well as the influence of the Russian-American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya on his thinking.




The National Question


Book Description

Provocative writings on the question of national self-determination and its relationship with socialism.




The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy


Book Description

This new, memorial edition features Connor's original thorough-going treatment of The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton, 1984). His study of the evolution of the relationship between communism and nationalism since 1848 demonstrates that Marx and Engels were eager to wed the world revolutionary movement to the forces of nationalism despite the incompatibility of the two aims. Refined by Lenin, a strategy for harnessing nationalism to the world cause in a prerevolutionary situation contributed to the rise of communism in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia; a plan to accelerate the demise of nationalism in a post-revolutionary situation was far less successful. The original study is situated between memorials to Connor by Donold Horowitz and Brendan O'Leary, a Tribute to Connor's contributions to the study of ethnonationalism, particularly his insightful assessment of "the unwithering national question" in Marxist-Leninist polities, and a new combined Afterword by Connor and Kaiser which reviews developments since 1984 and assesses the significance of the Marxist-Leninist experience for the study of nationalism.







The State and Revolution


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The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan


Book Description

The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of nationalist sentiment in East Asia, as in Europe. This comprehensive work explores how radical Chinese and Japanese thinkers committed to social change in this turbulent era addressed issues concerning national identity, social revolution, and the role of the national state in achieving socio-economic development. Focusing on the adaptation of anarchism and then Marxism-Leninism to non-European contexts, Germaine Hoston shows how Chinese and Japanese theorists attempted to reconcile a relatively new appreciation for the nation-state with their allegiance to a vision of internationalist socialist revolution culminating in stateless socialism. Given the influence of Western experience on Marxism, Chinese and Japanese theorists found the Marxian national question to be not merely one of whether the "working man has no country," but rather the much more fundamental issue of the relative value of Eastern and Western cultures. Marxism, argues Hoston, thus placed native Marxists in tension with their own heritage and national identity. The author traces efforts to resolve this tension throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and concludes by examining how the tension persists, as Chinese and Japanese dissidents seek identity-affirming modernity in accordance with the Western democratic model.