Bourgeois revolution that takes the form of state separation (secession). Historically it occurred as the secession of regions with a distinctive bourgeois development from empires and feudal states, or as a bourgeois reaction against the domination of their territory by an occupier or colonizer.
The meaning of national liberation
Rising capitalism sees the expansion and rise of the bourgeoisie as the leading class. With the bourgeois revolutions the nation appears as the expression of the bourgeoisie's project of articulating society as a whole.
In the great empires in which regional bourgeoisies appear that can articulate an alternative for the whole territory of the estate-based state, the bourgeois revolution can take the form of national liberation, that is, of the separation of a territory from the dynastic state in order to become a national market under a national state of its own.
As long as there is no proletariat with a capacity to lead -as will be the case in the Russian empire and its most industrialized provinces, such as Poland or Finland, from 1900 onwards- these movements will be historically progressive. Progressive because they point towards the expansion of the world market, the development of a mass working class within the new borders and, therefore, the formation of the proletariat as a universal class.
The goal of national liberation is the emancipation of the bourgeoisie from a political and legal framework that constrains the development of capital. It therefore has no historically progressive meaning per se, but only when there is the possibility of an independent development of national capital which in turn makes possible the extension and development of the proletariat in a new territory.
The bourgeoisie's need to control the internal market is not the only material basis of national movements. There are other factors: militarism, which guarantees the sovereignty of the country while helping to open a passage to the world market; customs protectionism; a jurisprudence, an education system and new means of communication. Capitalism needs to secure the economic conditions of its growth and to set up in full the apparatus of a modern state. The bourgeoisie, in order to expand, needs both to develop its means of production and to strengthen its class power.
Thus the independent state constitutes the historically indispensable form of government that allows the bourgeoisie to pass from the defensive to the offensive, from the struggle for centralization to imperialist policy.
Rosa Luxemburg. The National Question and Autonomy, 1908
These conditions gradually disappear under imperialism, and definitively with the entry of capitalism into decadence.
The development towards the Great State that characterizes the modern epoch, and which gains in importance with the progress of capitalism, condemns from the outset the whole mass of mini- and micro-nationalities to political weakness. Alongside a few very powerful nations, which are the real managers of capitalist development because they possess the material and intellectual means indispensable to preserve their economic and political independence, "self-determination", the autonomous existence of the mini- and micro-nations, is ever more illusory.
This return to autonomous existence of all, or at least of the great majority, of the presently oppressed nations would only be possible if the existence of small states had possibilities and prospects for the future in the capitalist epoch. For now, the economic and political conditions proper to a great state are so necessary in the struggle for existence of the capitalist nations that even the politically independent small states, formally equal in rights, that exist in Europe play only a symbolic role and are most of the time puppets of other states.
Can one speak formally of "self-determination" for the formally independent Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Romanians, Serbs or Greeks, or even, in a certain way, for the Swiss? (…)
The second fundamental aspect of recent development that makes this slogan utopian is capitalist imperialism. (…) The result of this tendency is the permanent liquidation of the independence of an ever greater number of countries, peoples and entire continents.
Taking into account this development and the need of the great capitalist states for the struggle for existence on the international market, for world politics and for colonial possessions, "the most suitable for carrying out their functions under present conditions", that is, what best corresponds to the needs of capitalist exploitation, is not the "national state" -as Kautsky supposes- but the imperialist state. (…)
As socialists understand it, this right [self-determination] must, by its very nature, have a universal character, and the mere fact of recognizing it as such is enough to show that the hope of realizing this "right" under the existing system is a utopia in direct contradiction with the tendency of capitalist development, on the basis of which social democracy was constituted. To return to the goal of dividing all existing states into national units and delimiting them from one another on the model of the national states and small states is a desperate and, from a historical point of view, reactionary undertaking.
Rosa Luxemburg. The National Question and Autonomy, 1908
The impossibility of an independent capitalist development would become evident to the revolutionaries who were organizing the communist left in the semi-colonial countries, such as Antonio Gallo.
So what does the struggle for national liberation mean? Does the proletariat as such not represent the historical interests of the nation, in the sense that it tends to liberate all social classes through its action and to overcome them through their disappearance? But to do so it needs precisely not to be confused with the national interests (which are those of the bourgeoisie, since it is the ruling class), which are sharply contradictory both internally and externally. So that slogan is utterly false. (...)
Argentina's characteristics only confirm the need to apply the general laws of revolution and of historical dynamics that fundamentally hold for all the countries of the planet. One of the most characteristic features of capitalism is that its economy has ceased to coincide with national borders. If in the past -in relation to feudalism- these were a step forward, at the present time they are one of the greatest defects of humanity, along with nationalism, which is partly their consequence.
Economics, like politics, is nonetheless international. By creating world productive forces, dividing labor on a universal scale and forming a world market, capitalism prepares the necessary conditions for political forms to acquire an international character. This means that the backward country can, under external pressure, assimilate the historical stages of the advanced countries in every field. This dynamic conception of present-day society as a whole removes any real value from the distinction between countries ripe or unripe for socialism.
"Where is Argentina going? Popular Front or struggle for Socialism?" Antonio Gallo, 1935
In his debate with Mariátegui, Gallo denounces the Peruvian writer's "anti-imperialist agrarian revolution", because either it "means an alliance with a non-existent revolutionary and anti-imperialist bourgeoisie" or...
...it is a matter of resolving the democratic problems of the socialist revolution, that is to say, the expropriation of imperialist properties, the abolition of national, provincial and municipal debts, the national ownership of the land, to hand it over to the small farmers in possession for cultivation, the abolition of Church properties, in other words, all the problems not yet solved by the bourgeois-democratic revolution, [and] this is not an anti-imperialist agrarian revolution.
Because the proletariat, once raised to power, will not stop at an intermediate stage or government but, after solving those problems, will go further, towards the socialization of the means of production and exchange, the collectivization of the land, etc. This revolution can only be made by the proletariat, winning over or neutralizing, for its own ends, the urban and rural middle classes, not in alliance with the bourgeoisie but against it.
This is what we Marxists call socialist revolution, and to this resolution of the contradiction between the not yet fully unfolded stage of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution we give a character of continuity that we formulate, more concretely and clearly, as permanent revolution, in accordance with Marx's definition. That is the process of the October Revolution. This is the solution of Marx and Lenin. The other is that of Stalin and the Apristas, or what amounts to the same thing, a new edition of the Kuomintang, the alliance of all classes, national liberation.
"Where is Argentina going? Popular Front or struggle for Socialism?" Antonio Gallo, 1935
Not only is an independent development of national capital no longer possible; in general human terms, even if there is growth over more or less long periods, there is no genuine social development. The system long ago ceased to be progressive as a whole, and with it its most characteristic political form: the nation itself. From then on:
Revolutionaries must strip themselves of every national attribute, shake off the taints of patriotism like rubbish, in order to be in a position to organize the rebellion of wage earners wherever they may be, whatever uniform they are enlisted in.
G. Munis