THE POLICY OF THE MLNV AND MARXISM LENINISM
Which is the practical consequence of the Marxist-Leninist political philosophy with regards to the national problem? A revolutionary internationalist policy must be directed to the wage-earners of the oppressive country as well as those of the oppressed one. Lenin formulated this policy in a polemic with Kievski regarding the separation of Norway from Sweden. In the case of the Basque Country this policy would be the following:
1) The communist wage-earners of the rest of the Spanish State should not advise the separation to their class brothers of the Basque country, because separatism breaks with the necessary political principles of proletarian internationalism; but neither should they deny them the freedom to decide by themselves, because this would imply to take sides with the imperialist bourgeoisie of the Spanish State. Therefore, its duty is to unconditionally recognize the right to separation to the wage-earners of the oppressed nation.
2) The Basque communists, would not cease being it by voting against the separation of Euskadi. They would only be counterrevolutionaries if they actively join the centralist reactionary proletariat of the Spanish State. So that the recognition of the right to self-determination of Euskal Herria on part of the conscious workers of Euskadi, is conditional, that is, only if these workers grouped in the proletarian party could propagandize and vote against the separation.
This last thing is obviously today purely hypothetical, because in an ideological and political backward moving situation of the wage-earners, the existence of a subversive organizational option of the Basque proletariat is absolutely impossible. But to arrive to such a situation, certain favourable political conditions have been created. The class struggle is not a creation of the social agents in conflict but results from the economic contradictions of that society. On the contrary the subjective or political conditions of the struggle are determined by those engaged in it; and that determination stems from the prevailing projects of society in one and the other side.
In such a way, it is clear that the hegemonic reformist nationalism in countries of complete capitalistic structure -as is the case of Euskadi- has contributed decisively to the strategic defeat of the Spanish proletariat as part of the anti-Franco movement to the interior of the Spanish State well before the fall of the USSR. According to this logic, ETA continues still today being the most important obstacle in the implementation of the proletarian policy conducive to the construction of a communist organizational alternative in Spain. This obstacle is even greater if we consider the counter-revolutionary function of the political opportunists’ inside job in the MLNV, carried forward by a big number of intellectuals who are self-proclaimed communist. The added difficulty originates from the propagandistic display with political base in this movement, of the categories and the speech of a historical materialism "ad hoc" conveniently mutilated by this intellectuals to gloss over and give Marxist-Leninist legitimacy to a political project, that of ETA, thoroughly divorced from that revolutionary tradition.
And here it is necessary to say that the seduction for arm struggle that organizations as ETA exercise, only manifests the deviation to which political ignorance can lead. This prevails in wide sectors of the natural working class vanguard. The political character of a social movement is not defined by the forms of struggle it adopts nor by the means of action it employs, but, above all, by its manifest power strategy, by its program, by its political project.
Which is the political project that according to the KAS alternative the MLNV will implement to solve the dispute with the Spanish State? In the first place, it excludes the non Basque proletariat. But not only that. The social base to support its project of self-determination is Euskal Herria, or rather, the Basque "people". Consequently, the political subject of the process is a social multi-class conglomerate whose political expression is the group or historical block of power formed by the proletariat and the small and medium Basque bourgeoisie. Therefore, the decision of a "democratic" proposal on the future of Euskal Herria outside the Spanish and French States is not of proletarian and international nature but of a nationalistic and burgess reinforcement. This must be logically so, as the inclusion of the Basque bourgeoisie in the "democratic" decision process, guarantees that the new national State should as an unavoidable condition of existence, recognize and legalize politically and institutionally the capitalist exploitation, that is to say, the continuity of all legal and political jurisdictions of the private property over the means of production.
In our work on the crisis of capitalism, we said that the accumulation process - also in the late stage – takes place in a kind of Hegelian dialectic of identity of the opposites, between the small and medium capitals and the large economic conglomerates, from where two trends result: one that economically and socially decimates the medium capitals while the other revitalizes them. Marx referred to this typical capitalist phenomenon on chapter XV of book III, where he emphasizes the importance of medium capitals "that gather on their own” in keeping competition as an incentive of accumulation, without which "the fatuous fire" of reproduction would be extinguished and the system "would fall in inertia". But perhaps it was Rose Luxembourg in a polemic with Bernstein who better achieved to explain it:
<<The middle capitalist layers find themselves, just like the workers, under the influence of two antagonistic tendencies, one ascendant, the other descendant. In this case, the descendent tendency is the continued rise of the scale of production, which overflows periodically the dimensions of the average size parcels of capital and removes them repeatedly from the terrain of world competition.
The ascendant tendency is, first, the periodic depreciation of the existing capital, which lowers again, for a certain time, the scale of production in proportion to the value of the necessary minimum amount of capital. It is represented, besides, by the penetration of capitalist production into new spheres. The struggle of the average size enterprise against big Capital cannot be considered a regularly proceeding battle in which the troops of the weaker party continue to melt away directly and quantitatively. It should be rather regarded as a periodic mowing down of the small enterprises, which rapidly grow up again, only to be mowed down once more by large industry. The two tendencies play ball with the middle capitalist layers. The descending tendency must win in the end.
The very opposite is true about the development of the working class. The victory of the descending tendency must not necessarily show itself in an absolute numerical diminution of the middle-size enterprises. It must show itself, first in the progressive increase of the minimum amount of capital necessary for the functioning of the enterprises in the old branches of production; second in the constant diminution of the interval of time during which the small capitalists conserve the opportunity to exploit the new branches of production. The result as far as the small capitalist is concerned, is a progressively shorter duration of his stay in the new industry and a progressively more rapid change in the methods of production as a field for investment. For the average capitalist strata, taken as a whole, there is a process of more and more rapid social assimilation and dissimilation>> (Rose Luxembourg
"Reform or Revolution" Cap. II)
According to Lenin’s previsions which the history of capitalism has fully confirmed, in the stage where the phenomena of the globalization and international unity of capitals has already ceased being a trend, projects as that of ETA are the political expression of one of the poles of the dialectical contradiction between the bourgeoisie indicated by Marx and Rose, a truly Hegelian aufheben in the strategic identity of the opposites to the interior of the capitalist system, between the democratic trend of the small and medium capital and the antidemocratic trend of the oligopolies, where the intended symbiosis between nationalism and "socialism" is completely achievable, but can not go further than an antimonopoly State capitalism necessarily unstable, condemned to unavoidably gravitate towards the sink of the centralization of capitals. The current policy of international isolation and aggression against Iraq and Yugoslavia - the weakest links in the chain of State capitalist regimes - is the most eloquent test in this matter:
<<National struggle, national insurrection, national secession are fully “achievable” and are met with in practice under imperialism. They are even more pronounced, for imperialism does not halt the development of capitalism and the growth of democratic tendencies among the mass of the population. On the contrary, it accentuates the antagonism between their democratic aspirations and the anti-democratic tendency of the trusts." Point 4)
To the extent to which it cannot prevent the game of the mercantile and financial links between countries of unequal development, national self-determination is perfectly compatible with economic colonialism of the politically sovereign countries of smaller relative development and its contingent interlocking in the geoestrategy political struggles between the international bourgeoisies. As is the recent case of the successive wars for independence that the imperialistic coalition sponsored diplomatically and supported economically and logistically to spoil the anachronistic and reactionary project of self-development of the national Yugoslav capital.
<<In this situation it is not only “achievable”, from the point of view of finance capital, but sometimes even profitable for the trusts, for their imperialist policy, for their imperialist war, to allow individual small nations as much democratic freedom as they can, right down to political independence, so as not to risk damaging their “own” military operations (having in sight their political and economic objectives). To overlook the peculiarity of political and strategic relationships and to repeat indiscriminately a word learned by rote, “imperialism”, is anything but Marxism. >> (Ibid. What is between brackets is ours)
In politics, as in many other aspects of the class struggle, a majority of people that speak in name of Marxism-Leninism act regarding the national question as if the internationalist line formulated by Lenin wouldn’t exist. Even more than necessary it is peremptory, therefore, to face the nationalistic bourgeois that pass themselves as Leninist with this theory. Knowing that freedom is the knowledge of the need. Recalling that all effective struggle for socialism in each concrete situation, does not depend on what some fraction of the proletariat or any given group or political organization recons, likes or is interested in doing in each given moment. But what the objective conditions tell you to, determined by the laws that preside the development of the real movement of capitalist society. Hic Rhodas, hic salta.
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