I’m torn between “Every people deserves the right to self-determination” and “Catalunya is richer than Spain, so it’s the bourgeosie wanting to split off from the poors and pay less tax”
“Every people deserves the right to self-determination”
Here’s the thing: this isn’t really true, is it? There isn’t really a universal right to “self determination”, if there was we’d have to acknowledge the right of those successionist yahoos who want to true some random county in Montana into AnCapistan to legalize child marriage. We recognize people should be ruled by a government that represents them, and in examples like colonialism that right is being blatantly violated, but that doesn’t mean every group of 10 or more people who are unhappy with their government has some universal right to form their own little country. If we did the whole world would be a patchwork of micro-nations the size of Rhode Island.
if there was we’d have to acknowledge the right of those successionist yahoos who want to true some random county in Montana into AnCapistan to legalize child marriage… every group of 10 or more people who are unhappy with their government has some universal right to form their own little country. If we did the whole world would be a patchwork of micro-nations the size of Rhode Island.
Yeah but those aren’t a people.
Now if you ask me to define “What’s a people? What’s a nation?” I can’t give you a cut-and-dried definition that will fit all cases. If you want to say ten people are a nation it’s a clichéd old schoolground argument (parodied in Ulysses: “A nation is the same people living in the same place. —By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.”) but use common sense. Catalonia has a language and hundreds of years of history. The Kurds have a language and thousands of years of history. Ten people in a township isn’t comparable.
I’m sceptical about independence movements in general. Overwhelming majority of newly independent countries go absurdly nationalistic and anticommunist. The only ones that turned out to be at least acceptable were explicitly leftist from the beginning.
Read Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm
Nationalism derives from the bourgeoisie and intellectual middle class that develops as a result of capitalism, but national oppression can make it a cause of the working class. Not all “nationalism” is the same and must be evaluated dialectically on a case by case basis
But it goes both ways when the bourgeoisie use nationalism to keep its control over the working class even after successful secession. In fact, the same nationalism can swiftly go from somewhat positive to very negative thing, like Polish nationalism that almost instantaneously went from national liberation goals to anticommunism and national oppression against ethnic minorities in newly independent Poland.
I believe Mao also argued similarly, that some construction of nationalism among oppressed peoples is beneficial in encouraging anti-colonial, anti-imperialist movements and that it’s different from nationalism found in imperialist countries.
Yes! Mao argued that it wasn’t just nationalism, but their nationalism was internationalism because a defeat for the Japanese imperialists was a victory for all working people including the Japanese working class.
independence movements in colonized countries, even the ones that went left afterward involved to some extent rightist nationalists. the only event conforming to your general rule is the dissolution of the USSR, which distinctly marginalized the left since the left are the ones who were overthrown. other countries it’s not so discrete, look at Africa or South America, leftwing and conservative independence movements have both been successful, and have often overthrown each other after independence.
Independence movements in post-WW1 Europe also mostly produced right-wing nationalistic countries with short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic as the only exception (that got crushed by other newly formed countries).
Former colonies is murkier question, but even there there things often didn’t improve for the left (although interference from imperial powers often played a decisive role in shifting the political dominance to rightists there).
Every people deserves the right to self-determination
I’ll support a nationalist struggle if it directly helps the left but I feel like anything in the white/european sphere outside of the territory wanting to do a USSR 2 should just be ignored. Like how does an independent Catalonia get us communism? It’s just going to be another state in the EU, maybe left leaning but it will still be capitalist. Look at Ireland, the IRA is fucking dead, even if they got back north Ireland at this point it wouldn’t fucking matter as it’s just libs running it.
This says the IRA run the biggest party, idk: https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/07/22/inside-sinn-fein-the-men-and-women-behind-irelands-biggest-political-party/
Sinn Fein is sucdem, the Ira lost much of its Marxist roots before the troubles even started. And sure they are left for Western Europe, but Ireland is largely irrelevant now to modern leftists. Their support for Palestine is nice but it’s a mostly empty gesture, they still have an Israeli embassy ffs. Ireland has been integrated fully into the imperial core like South Korea was in the 21st century.
they still have an Israeli embassy ffs.
They may not in a few hours, voting on today’s agenda. China has an Israel embassy.
Hot take but Catalonian isn’t even a dialect, it looks like it’s just an accent. If you go on catalunyan wikipedia it is identical to spanish with just minor spelling differences (that they seem to forget to use occassionally). Like if Catalunyan is a language then New Yorker and Bostonite are languages.
Catalan isn’t even from the same branch of Western Romance languages as Castillian. That’s just ignorant.
