The National Question

Chapter 5 : The National Question and Autonomy
Capitalism transforms social life from the material foundations up to the top – the cultural aspects. It has produced a whole series of entirely new economic phenomena: big industry, machine production, proletarization, concentration of property, industrial crises, capitalist monopolies, modern industry, labor of women and children, etc. Capitalism has produced a new center of social life: the big city, as well as a new social class: the professional intelligentsia. Capitalist economy with its highly developed division of labor and constant progress of technology needs a large specialized staff of employes with technical training: engineers, chemists, architects, electricians, etc. Capitalist industry and commerce need a whole army of lawyers: attorneys, notaries, judges, etc. Bourgeois management, especially in big cities, has made health a public matter and developed for its service large numbers of physicians, pharmacists, midwives, dentists, as well as public hospitals w... (From : Marxists.org.)

Chapter 4 : Centralization and Autonomy
We have noted the general centralizing tendency of capitalism in the bourgeois states. But local autonomy also grows simultaneously out of the objective development and out of the needs of bourgeois society. Bourgeois economy requires as great a uniformity as possible in legislation, the judiciary, administration, the school system, etc., in the entire area of the state, and as far as possible, even in international relations. But the same bourgeois economy, in carrying out all these functions, demands accuracy and efficiency quite as much as uniformity. The centralism of the modern states is of necessity connected with a bureaucratic system. In the medieval state, in a serf economy, public functions were connected with landed property; these were the “concrete rights,” a kind of land tax. The feudal lord of estates was at the same time and by the same token a civil and criminal judge, the head of the police administration, the chief of military forces in a c... (From : Marxists.org.)

Chapter 3 : Federation, Centralization, and Particularism
We must turn next to another proposed form of the solution of the nationality question, i.e., federation. Federalism has long been the favorite idea of revolutionaries of anarchic hue. During the 1848 revolution Bakunin wrote in his manifesto: ”The revolution proclaimed by its own power the dissolution of despotic states, the dissolution of the Prussian state ... Austria ... Turkey ... the dissolution of the last stronghold of the despots, the Russian state ... and as a final goal – a universal federation of European Republics.” From then on, federation has remained an ideal settlement of any nationality difficulties in the programs of socialist parties of a more or less utopian, petit bourgeois character; that is, parties which do not, like Social Democracy, take a historical approach but which traffic in subjective ”ideals.” Such, for example, is the party of Social Revolutionaries in Russia. Such was the PPS in its transitional phase, when it had c... (From : Marxists.org.)

Chapter 2 : The Nation-State and the Proletariat
The question of nationality cannot be solved merely by presuming that socialists must approach it from the point of view of the class interests of the proletariat. The influence of theoretical socialism has been felt indirectly by the workers’ movement as a whole, to such an extent that at present there is not a socialist or workers’ party which does not use at least the Marxist terminology, if not the entire Marxist way of thinking. A famous example of this is the present Social Revolutionary Party of Russia, in whose theory – as far as one can speak of such – there are at least as many elements borrowed from the Marxist School as there are elements inherited from the Narodniki and the People’s Will. In like manner, all socialist groups of the petit bourgeois and nationalistic type in Russia have their own fancies which are solely “in the interest of the proletariat and socialism.” The Polish Social Democracy, now in decli... (From : Marxists.org.)

Chapter 1 : The Right of Nations to Self-Determination
First Published: In a series of articles on The national question and autonomy which appeared in Luxemburg’s Cracow magazine, Przeglad socialdemokratyczny, 1908-1909. Source: The National Question - Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg, edited and introduced by the late Horace B. Davis, Monthly Review Press, 1976. Translated: (from the Polish). Transcription/Markup: Ted Crawford/Brian Baggins. Public Domain: You can freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the source above as well as the Marxists Internet Archive. Recommended Prerequisites: The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement; The Polish Question at the International Congress in London Recommended Follow-up: Theses of the Editors of Gazeta Robotnicza: Imperialism and National Oppression; II The So-Called Right of Self-Determin... (From : Marxists.org.)