The national question

Clearly, each national group has a natural and indisputable entitlement to speak its language freely, live in accordance with its customs, retain its beliefs and

Rituals, draw up its school books and have its own managerial establishments and agencies; in short, to maintain and develop its national culture in every sphere. It is obvious that this clear and specific stance has absolutely nothing to do with narrow nationalism of the “separatist” variety which pits nation against nation and substitutes an artificial and harmful separation for the struggle to achieve a natural social union of toilers in one shared social communion.

In our view, national aspirations of a natural, wholesome character (language, customs, culture, etc.) can achieve full and fruitful satisfaction only in the union of nationalities rather than in their antagonism. One peoples struggle for liberation leads naturally to the same chauvinistic struggle on the part of other peoples and the upshot, inevitably, is isolation and animosity between the different nations. Of necessity, this appreciation of the national question, a profoundly bourgeois and negative one, leads on to absurd and bloody national conflicts.

The speedy construction of a new life on socialist foundations will ineluctably lead to development of the culture peculiar to each nationality. Whenever we Makhnovist insurgents speak of independence of the Ukraine, we ground it in the social and economic plane of the toilers. We proclaim the right of the Ukrainian people (and every other nation) to self-determination, not in the narrow, nationalist sense of a Petliura, but in the sense of the toilers’ right to self-determination. We declare that the toiling folk of the Ukraine’s towns and countryside have shown everyone through their heroic fight that they do not wish any longer to suffer political power and have no use for it, and that they consciously aspire to a libertarian society. We thus declare that all political power of whatever provenance, that seeks to rule and direct by means of constraint and arbitrariness, is to be regarded by the toiling Ukrainian masses as an enemy and counter-revolutionary. To the very last drop of their blood they will wage a ferocious struggle against it, in defense of their entitlement to self-organization.

Needless to say, in the society founded on truly soviet foundations, such as we have spelled them out, the question of proportional representation and other political procedures do not arise.