Political ideology that defines the nation as a historical and political subject above the social classes, which would be reduced to components of the nation with specific national interests and tasks, that is, with their own interests and duties in the "common goal" of the prosperity of national capital.
The meaning of nationalism
Nationalism defines the nation as a historical and political subject above the social classes, which would be reduced to components of the nation with specific national interests and tasks, that is, with their own interests and duties in the "common goal" of the prosperity of national capital. Duties which of course include different forms of "loyalty" towards state power.
Every nationalism will include, with greater or lesser intensity, the demand for a "national culture" and for the national and democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution in the form of a permanent demand for "national sovereignty".
The critique of the concept of the nation as a historical subject, that is, the critique of nationalism, involves denying the existence of any "national program". The nation is not that unity with a destiny beneath which the bourgeoisie's leadership of society as a whole is concealed. It is, on the contrary, a set of classes in conflict, in which the proletariat represents a program antagonistic to everything the nation implies.
When one speaks of the "right of nations to self-determination", one uses the concept of the nation as a whole, as a homogeneous social and political unit. But that concept of "nation" is precisely one of the categories of bourgeois ideology that Marxist theory has subjected to a radical revision, showing that behind the mysterious veil of the concepts of "bourgeois freedom", "equality before the law", etc., a concrete historical content is always concealed.
In class society the nation does not exist as a homogeneous socio-political entity; rather, in each nation there are classes with antagonistic interests and "rights".
There is absolutely no social terrain, from the most basic material conditions to the subtlest moral conditions, on which the possessing classes and the conscious proletariat adopt the same attitude and appear as an undifferentiated "people".
In the sphere of economic conditions, the bourgeois classes defend the interests of exploitation, and the proletariat those of labor. In the sphere of legal conditions, private property is the cornerstone of bourgeois society; the interests of the proletariat demand that the propertyless be emancipated from the domination of property. In the sphere of the administration of justice, bourgeois society represents "class justice", the justice of the well-fed and the rulers; the proletariat defends humanity and the principle of taking into account the social influences on the individual.
In international relations, the bourgeoisie pursues a policy of war and annexation, that is, in the present phase of the system, a policy of restrictive tariffs and commercial war; the proletariat, by contrast, a policy of general peace and free exchange. In the sphere of sociology and philosophy, the bourgeois schools and the school that represents the proletariat stand in open contradiction (…)
Even in the sphere of so-called human relations, of ethics, of views on art, education, etc., the interests, the world outlook and the ideals of the bourgeoisie on the one hand, and those of the conscious proletariat on the other, constitute two camps separated from each other by a deep abyss. In those respects in which the formal aspirations and interests of the proletariat and of the bourgeoisie as a whole, or of its progressive section, seem identical or common, as for example in democratic aspirations, the identity of forms and slogans conceals a complete break in content and in practical policy.
In a society of this kind there can be no collective and unitary will, there can be no self-determination of the "nation". Whenever "national" struggles and movements have developed in the history of modern societies, they have generally been class movements of the leading bourgeois layer, which, at best, can represent to a certain extent the interests of other popular layers insofar as it defends, as "national interests", progressive forms of historical development, in which the working class has not yet separated itself from the mass of the "people" led by the bourgeoisie to constitute itself as a politically conscious and independent class. (…)
All these facts are enough to show that the "right of nations" cannot be determining, from the point of view of a socialist party, for the national question. The very existence of such a party is proof that the bourgeoisie has ceased to be the representative of the whole people, that the proletarian class no longer shelters under the protective mantle of the bourgeoisie, but has separated from it to become an independent class with its own social and political aims.
Since the conception of the "people", of "rights" and of the "will of the people" as a homogeneous whole is a relic of the epoch of latent and unconscious antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, it would be a flagrant contradiction for the conscious and organized proletariat to make use of it; a contradiction not in the realm of scholastic logic, but a historical contradiction. (…)
For social democracy, the question of nationalities is, above all, like all other social and political questions, a question of class interests. (…)
To sum up: capitalist development and the interests of the bourgeoisie require the creation of an independent national state, which later becomes an instrument of imperialist conquest. The interests of the proletariat tend only towards the democratic and cultural aims of the national movement, that is, towards the establishment of political institutions that guarantee, by peaceful means, the free development of the culture of all the nationalities living together in the same state. The working class firmly demands equal rights for all people of all nationalities. The national program of the working class is essentially different from the nationalism of the bourgeoisie.
Rosa Luxemburg. The National Question and Autonomy, 1908