NATIONALISM IS AN ANACHRONISM: Long live revolutionary intercommunalism! (Tom Watts)

Huey P. Newton pointed out in his historic speech at Boston College in 1970, when he introduced his “Theory of Revolutionary Intercommunalism”:

“Marx and Lenin felt, with the information they had, that when the non-state finally came to be a reality, it would be caused or ushered in by the people and by communism. A strange thing happened. The ruling reactionary circle, through the consequence of being imperialists, transformed the world into what we call ‘Reactionary Intercommunalism.’ They laid siege upon all the communities of the world, dominating the institutions to such an extent that the people were not served by the institutions in their own land.”

He was referring to what Stalin pointed out in Foundations of Leninism:

“’Developing capitalism,’ says Lenin, ‘knows two historical tendencies in the national question. First: the awakening of national life and national movements, struggle against all national oppression, creation of national states. Second: development and acceleration of all kinds of intercourse between nations, breakdown of national barriers, creation of the international unity of capital, of economic life in general, of politics, science, etc.

“’Both tendencies are a world-wide law of capitalism. The first predominates at the beginning of its development, the second characterises mature capitalism that is moving towards its transformation into socialist society’ (see Vol. XVII, pp. 139-40).

“For imperialism these two tendencies represent irreconcilable contradictions; because imperialism cannot exist without exploiting colonies and forcibly retaining them within the framework of the “integral whole”; because imperialism can bring nations together only by means of annexations and colonial conquest, without which imperialism is, generally speaking, inconceivable.”

What wasn’t “conceivable” to these great revolutionary thinkers was the appearance of neoliberalism and the alternative to annexations and colonial conquest of “dollar diplomacy” and debt bondage. When Lenin summed up the two historical tendencies in the national question, he didn’t conceive that the secondary aspect could become primary as capitalist-imperialism evolved and gained temporary global hegemony.

The “Cold War” did not end with the conquest of the “Socialist Camp” by capitalist-imperialism but as a result of the capitulation of the new capitalist oligarchies that arose and seized power from within, due to the rise of modern revisionism among the Party and State bureaucracies and defeat of the proletarian forces. This great setback to the World Proletarian Socialist Revolution, however, has only served to hasten the decline of capitalist-imperialism by accelerating and intensifying the internal contradictions of capitalism. The new capitalist oligarchs of Moscow and Beijing are quite willing to do business with the capitalist-imperialists, but on their own terms and without completely subordinating themselves to the ruling circle of U.S. monopoly capitalists.

Instead, they compete aggressively and threaten to become imperialist rivals for global hegemony. This is driving the ruling circle to extreme aggression to consolidate their global dominance while the balance of power is still in their favor. This has become the basis of the principle contradiction in the world, which we in the United Panther Movement (UPM) sum up as; between the need of the capitalist-imperialists to consolidate their global hegemony and the chaos and anarchy they are unleashing – including the threat of nuclear war – by attempting to do so.