The National and Colonial Questions, and Anti-Imperialism in Marxist Tradition: From the I International to the Baku Conference (1864-1920)

https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n42.02

Javier García Fernández
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7994-5477
Universidad de Granada, España
jgarciafer@ugr.es

Ramón Grosfoguel
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9051-1573
Universidad de California, Berkeley, USA
grosfogu@berkeley.edu

Abstract:

This article elaborates a critical review of Marxist thought from authors such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kaustky, Eduard Bernstein, Otto Bauer, Joseph Stalin, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Manabendra Nath Roy on the national, colonial and anti-imperialist question. We intend to bring together a new critical genealogy on the national question within Marxism that has not been recognised by so-called hegemonic Western Marxism. This is the relationship between the national question, the colonial question and the anti-imperialist question in the first Marxist tradition between the First International, the IWA and the Third International, the Komintern. This tradition incorporates reflections and analyses to think the question of the right to self-determination as one of the central elements of Marxist thought during the last third of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. The formulation of the right of nations to self-determination incorporated elements of the so-called national question, the colonial question and the Marxist critique of imperialism and is central to understanding the development of Marxist theory and the social movement from the First International (1864) to the Baku Conference (1920).

Keywords: National question, colonial question, anti-imperialism, right to self-determination, Marxism.