We refer in particular to the difficulty that many movements and parties, including within the international communist movement, would still have today, in 2023, in fully understanding the links that can unite the national liberation struggles of all peoples, still subjected to diktat and oppression, with those for the advent of socialism.
We include, of course, among all these struggles to defend the nation, the one waged in Quebec for our own independence. There was a time when all these links were systematically emphasized by the international communist movement. We refer in particular to the whole period when the 3rd Communist International was still very much alive.
Proof of this change in attitude can be found in the growing fear that many of these movements and parties now have of any support for nationalist movements of any kind. It’s as if even the word “patriotism”—a term with which we identify ourselves more than ever, and which at the same time implies the importance of defending not only nations, but also their right to full sovereignty, both politically and economically—had become something pestiferous, totally negative and reactionary.
As Communists, we much prefer the word “patriotism” to the more ambiguous “nationalism”. Having said that, the analysis that patriotic or nationalist movements are completely reactionary seems to us to be completely disconnected from our own reality. At the same time, this was not the preferred approach in the days of the 3rd Communist International. We’d like to think that the Nazis, like most extreme right-wing movements, used the term “nationalist” for themselves (they also called themselves “socialists”, hence the term “national-socialist”) was just another imposture, since all fascists then (and now) were, and remain, first and foremost instruments in the hands of big business.
Who else, throughout the whole of the 2nd World War, worked tirelessly to defend the interests of peoples and nations, if not first and foremost the communists themselves? And not just in certain countries, but wherever these fascists had invaded large parts of the planet, as in Asia.
Wherever the issue arose, there was no hesitation in appealing not only to the working people, but also to the nation, and in calling for a patriotic war against these same fascists.
And who else, if not the communists and the USSR, played a major role in inspiring, encouraging and supporting the struggle to decolonize the Third World?
Today, all this seems a long way off in the eyes of many. It’s as if capitalism, now in its supreme stage of imperialism, with what is now also known as capitalist globalization, meant that national issues were now settled, or almost all settled, and that wanting and continuing to insist on ever-greater attention being paid to these issues had become not only outdated, but retrograde and out of touch with reality, when in fact the opposite is true.
To this we should also add the fact that the process of decolonization, which began mainly at the end of the 2nd World War, is still largely incomplete. Even if the right to self-determination is now widely recognized by the United Nations as a fundamental right, it must also be acknowledged that this right is still flouted by many member countries of this same organization.
The other argument, supposedly the most convincing, that capitalist globalization renders increasingly obsolete the need to strengthen nations, and their respective sovereignty, doesn’t hold water either. In fact, the presence and strengthening of nations is becoming no less pressing, but on the contrary, more necessary than ever, precisely to combat the afflictions of this globalization.
Failure to understand this can only make you, whether you like it or not, an accomplice to globalization, as well as an accomplice to maintaining the status quo of the current world order.
There was a time when Communists weren’t so afraid to talk about all this. Still in the days of the 3rd Communist International, we went even further, characterizing even struggles against national oppression as reserves for revolution, in the same way as struggles against the oppression of women, or struggles against fascism, or the struggle for peace, because of their ability to engage all sorts of other sections of society in the revolutionary process, far beyond the working class alone. Not only that, but all these struggles always have the potential to challenge, wherever they may erupt, the established order that allowed such scourges to spread in the first place and, above all, to continue to consolidate.
Proof of this is provided by the fact that many socialist revolutions were initially developed on the basis of one or more of these same struggles, all of which had the characteristic of being multi-classist.
We Quebec communists are also convinced that we will never be able to achieve anything truly constructive and lasting in our fight for socialism if we don’t also take to heart, from the outset, the struggle for our own national rights.
One of the arguments often used to stifle these same areas of struggle is the fact that, at the same time, there are a number of people who are often closely associated with extreme right-wing movements. But here again, such arguments don’t really hold water.
For one thing, you’ll always find far-right people just about everywhere, and if that’s all you had to rely on, there’d be nothing left to do. Far-right movements literally hate anything progressive, anything reminiscent of the left, and they hate communists and their program for socialism even more.
But will this prevent them from reaching out to workers, where they gather and organize, just so they can more effectively (in their minds still) counter left-wing advances? Of course not.
Secondly, and assuming that they do indeed end up taking up more and more space in these same movements, based on their own particularly fraudulent program, then far from discouraging us, this should convince us to work even harder within these same movements to combat their ideas too.
Yes, in many places (such as the Ukraine), fascist forces are making full use of a form of nationalism to further their particularly reactionary aims. And not without a certain irony, this very particular “nationalism” also seems to be increasingly popular with many of our “thinking” elites in many countries. This is all to be expected, given that this type of “nationalism” serves the forces of reaction and the status quo, both at home and on the international stage.
But should this lead us to question our own attitude towards all other nationalist or patriotic movements, especially since such movements, such as those in Ukraine, are above all completely perverted? Absolutely not. In any case, such a generalization would be more metaphysical than reasoned.
Some may be surprised to hear us say this, but it’s still true, and brings us back to what we said earlier about how national struggles can often also be a reserve for revolution. Yes, and depending on how the situation develops, they could just as easily end up becoming a reserve for counter-revolution. But this will depend more on who’s in charge, within that same movement, than on whether that same movement is reactionary by nature. Almost innately so.
As mentioned above, the struggle for our national rights may no longer be posed in exactly the same way, for many peoples and nations, since some of you have indeed become sovereign, some for a long time, though their sovereignty often remains more formal than anything else. But everywhere, the question of sovereignty, whether already achieved or not, continues to arise, not less so, but with even greater acuity. At home, this means saying loud and clear: “For independence and socialism in Quebec”. Elsewhere, it could take other forms, except that almost everywhere, we agree, the question of sovereignty remains front and center.
Yes, in the United States, which continues to outrageously dominate the rest of the world, the question can’t really be asked, but it’s like the exception that proves the rule.
Unsurprisingly, it’s often the same people who don’t understand any of this, who seem just as incapable of understanding what might be happening on the international stage, and who are often on the wrong side of the fence when it comes to taking a stand on this or that position. We refer in particular to the famous war in Ukraine.
Many people are quick to cry out that national movements could include not only workers, but also many petty-bourgeois and even bourgeois citizens.
Far be it from us to pretend that tensions between different social classes in the same nation, which would always be in the position of the dominated rather than the dominant, wouldn’t also end up reverberating within all the different nationalist movements. Because that’s obviously not the case, as can be seen from everything that’s been said above, and at the same time it’s quite normal.
When elements of a certain social class, the bourgeoisie for example, finally decide to intervene more in the defense of our sovereignty, whether to claim it (if it still doesn’t exist, even on paper), they obviously make their own contribution with their own class visions.
But should this make us forget our own ultimate goals: socialism and communism? Absolutely not.
What we do note is that right-wing bourgeois elements can just as easily go off on left-wing tangents, depending on events, while the reverse can be just as true, by the way.
Which also leads us to say that not all nationalist-type struggles are to be treated in the same way, either.
When, at the same time, it’s clear that a struggle to better defend our sovereignty, or to acquire our full independence once and for all, when we don’t even have it yet, or to choose the kind of future we want and with whom we’d like to build it, when all this contributes objectively and clearly to pushing back the forces of imperialism, as is currently the case in the Donbass, as well as in Crimea, to speak more specifically of these 2 regions, then we shouldn’t hesitate to take sides with such struggles.
When peoples rise up against old diktats and demand not only an end to injustice, but also greater sovereignty for themselves, as has been the case for years in South America, but also in Asia, and increasingly in Africa, even if by means that others might describe as different from what we ourselves have become accustomed to, then it should be just as much the case.
Here in Quebec, we would also claim that the struggle for our own independence would not only have enormous potential to challenge the power of Canadian imperialism, as well as that of neighboring American imperialism, but could just as well contribute to the development of other potentially equally revolutionary contestations throughout the rest of the American continent.
Unsurprisingly, the American authorities have always been against this independence project, and remain so today. The various changes of government in Washington, whether Democrat or Republican, have followed one another over the years, without ever changing this line of conduct towards us. That should tell you a lot.
Just know that we don’t really have the choice of having to fight on this other terrain at the same time, but that doesn’t scare us from the rest. We hope that these few comments, drawn from our own experience in Quebec, will be of benefit to many others, elsewhere in the world.
For us, internationalism and patriotism need not be systematically opposed. Both can in fact complement each other, and communists can and should play a role in achieving this.
How we achieve this will be a matter for each of the different revolutionary forces, in each country and nation. Because even if our struggle is, by its very nature, international, at the same time we have to recognize that it will necessarily also have a primarily national dimension.
Only in this way can we build even more solidly the unity of all revolutionary forces across the planet.
We are equally opposed to the idea that one party or group of parties should have the only “right line”, and that those who disagree should be sidelined. We are equally opposed to the attitude that the end always justifies the means, and who would therefore also be prepared to endanger our places of exchange, just because they couldn’t tolerate anyone disagreeing with them.
Proletarians, oppressed peoples and nations, unite!
Long live the unity of communist and anti-imperialist movements worldwide!
The Central Executive Committee of the PCQ
Consideration
It’s not just about Quebec independence, but about the whole anti-imperialist content of defending and taking into account the sovereignty of peoples that is explained in our text…
This is the angle from which we want to address the question. This is fundamental, because some claim that nationalism contributed to the dismantling of Yugoslavia and the USSR. But it was its reactionary aspect as a reserve for counter-revolution that came into play. When we say that the nation, and its defense as an independent and sovereign entity, is a reserve of revolution, as stipulated by the Third International, it is to insist that socialism, the regime destined to replace imperialism in those parts of the world where communists are leading the national struggle, has no future unless it takes the nation into account.
If the struggles of the Republic of North Korea and China for their national integrity, sovereignty and independence have an anti-imperialist meaning and character, it is precisely because they take into account the national entity as a whole, and not just the separate part of the nation.
In our struggle to have Quebec’s national rights recognized in the face of Canadian communists, we have come up against accusations of narrow nationalism. These communists, we were told, did not want to recognize the revolutionary vocation, in Canada and the world, of Quebec’s national struggle. In the same way, those who identify all nationalism with the right or the extreme right make the fundamental error of neglecting this fundamental question for the socialist revolution in their country and in the world.
This is opportunism and revisionism in the sense that it revises essential considerations of Marxism-Leninism on the question of who leads and orients the revolution towards socialism and its consolidation, in China and Korea, for example.
If war breaks out between Taiwan and China, or between North and South Korea, the Third World War will take on the character of a struggle against the ultimate liberation of these two countries from American imperialism. Similarly, Quebec’s national liberation struggle will take an anti-imperialist turn in Canada, weakening its position as a puppet state of the United States. Quebec’s liberation struggle, seen as a national liberation struggle, in the same way as China’s struggle for complete independence by freeing Taiwan from the clutches of U.S. imperialism, is in principle an anti-imperialist struggle, and those who do not recognize this find themselves limited in their vision of the socialist revolution, because they overlook a fundamental reserve of this revolution, thus risking the national struggle falling into the camp of counter-revolution led by the extreme right or ultranationalists, as in Ukraine, i.e. in its reactionary aspects.
Russia’s struggle, like Quebec’s struggle for independence, has an eminently anti-imperialist character, since it is the basis of another struggle for socialism, of which it is a reserve.
That’s why our text addresses the anti-imperialist nature of the national struggle, opportunism in the international communist movement on this question, and revisionism in that it reviews the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism elaborated and completed by the Third International under Dimitrov’s leadership.
The ideological struggle on this question makes a clear distinction between right-wing nationalism and revolutionary nationalism (or patriotism), since both are distinguished by whether or not they contribute to the preservation of socialism or its advent in countries where it has not yet been achieved.