Commentary
Last month as part of my commemoration piece on the anniversary of the great Chinese Revolution of October 1949 (See The Heroic Age Of The Chinese Revolution, October 26, 2008.) I mentioned that the thorny question of militants supporting and raising the call for the right of national self-determination in the pre-revolutionary period in China before 1949 was filled with potholes. Clearly up until 1941 this question was fairly simple in the fight against Japanese imperialism that had been waged for most of the 1930’s. That situation got much dicier once the Chinese fight became a part of the inter-imperialist war in the Pacific between American and Japan. More so when Chiang Kai-shek (old style) and his KMT forces subordinated themselves under American military command. (The question of the Chinese Red Army organized as the Fourth and Eight Route Armies that did not do so is a separate question).
I also mentioned in that commentary that I believed, and still believe, that in light of my readings on the Chinese application of the right to national self-determination under conditions of military subordination to imperialist policy the question of whether we should have raised the slogan of independence for Kosovo earlier this year, given its still virtual position as a UN protectorate, has to be reevaluated. I repost that part of my commentary here believing this to be a still open question although I am more inclined today to say, at this preliminary point, that militants should not have raised nor today should raise this call. Comments, please.
From “The Heroic Age Of The Chinese Revolution, October 26, 2008.”
“Finally, while we are discussing the question of the national right to self-determination in its Chinese application I should mention that our support for, or call for that right is not absolute. The right to national self-determination is one of the more important rights associated with the bourgeois revolutions. Thus it is a democratic rather than an explicitly socialist demand. Our approach, as least as I have come to look at it in going over the checkered history of this question in the international working class movement, is to take the national question off the table and put the class question to the fore. Sometimes that axis does not come into play. In the Chinese context the early self-contained struggle against Japanese imperialism made it applicable.
Once the war in the Pacific turned into an inter-imperialist rivalry with the entry of the United States into the equation as de facto leader of Chinese military forces (through the personal agency of General Stilwell as symbolic figure of that transference) then for socialist purposes the national question was off the agenda. At that point one gets into a choice of which imperialist camp one wants to support. No thank you. In a further twist to the Chinese situation revolutionaries COULD support the CCP’s New Fourth Route and Eight Route Armies (essentially red armies) which were independently fighting the Japanese despite the formal arrangements with the KMT government.
All of this is by way of saying that this thorny question of the national right to self-determination is, with the delays and defeats of the socialist revolution, still with us. Case in point- Kosovo. Earlier this year I called fro independence for Kosovo as a reflection of that right to self-determination. After thinking about that situation in light of my recent reading of the Chinese situation in 1941, I am not at all sure that that was a correct call under the circumstances. In the abstract Kosovo certainly qualifies as a nation. Certainly, unless it separated from Serbia, the national question would trump the class question (and that does not exclude the national rights of those Serbians still in Kosovo). Thus, while it is not out of the question for revolutionaries to support the same national rights as the Western imperialists do (as is clearly the case here) the NATO factor as the de fact guarantor of Kosovar independence makes me extremely uneasy about that earlier call for independence. I think the better course is right now to support the “real” right to national self-determination in combination with a call for ALL NATO troops out of Kosovo now!”
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