Re: Putin - Texas and the national factor- last post on this subject

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 6/24/2004 7:57:32 AM Central Standard Time, lookoverhere1@xxxxxxxxx writes:

From what I have been able to find, the Bolsheviks did not consider
Chechnyans as a national minority with a right of succession. 

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Reply

 

I read the material suggested at http://www.chechnyafree.ru/index.php?lng=eng&section=historyeng&row=6#gak_3 and found it very enlightening and interesting to say the least.

 

The field of politics that has been called the "national question" is very difficult and generally involved the issue of a lesser economically developed people drawn into or forcibly annexed by a dominating state. All state structures are made up of and made real by real people. Thus the dominating state is the dominating people or peoples.

 

The only reason the national question is a question is because someone else is debating your fate and future if you happen to be the sucker on the short end of the stick. Let's talk about the national factor and overthrow Leninism  . . . again.

 

I am for discarding the slogan "right of nations to self determination" and replacing it with something more accurate to today. Exactly what I do not know! What if you are not a so-called nation and getting the crap kicked out of you?

 

In the case of the Indian people in America we all know their plight and the wars of genocide against them. In the case of the African American we all know about slavery and segregation on one level or another. In the case of Mexico and the Mexican nationals and Chicano's we have an awareness of the theft of half of Mexico/s territory on one level or another.  Puerto-Rico and the Philippines need not be examined but pointed out. There are of course many other oppressed peoples within the filed of the multinational state that is the United States of North America.

 

What of the question of Appalachia!

 

The right of nations to self determination can be tricky if the dominate political group that advocates such right makes an assessment that ones group is not a nation.

 

Exactly what is a national minority? What is a minority?  What is an autonomous region within a multinational state structure? Better yet, what where these political and economic units and categories to the Soviet State and their ruling party?

 

What did these categories mean to the people ruled by the Soviet State?

 

On Pen-L I am willing to bet you cannot get three people who agree as to the political and economic meaning of the concept "national minority."

 

There is a political and economic logic behind oppression and subjugation of less economically developed and militarily protected peoples. Slavery in America was an economic category of the highest importance.

 

On Pen-L I am willing to bet you cannot get a dozen people who agree as to whether or not the African American people are a historically evolved people with a distinct culture that in history set them apart from say the Anglo-American people of the Northern portion of the American Union.

 

My point is simple: anyone that believes there is a simple answer to the "national factor" is following and fooling themselves. Self determination for nation's up to and including the formation of an independent state . . . what if you ain't a nation and this formula is only applicable within the context of the struggle against capital . . . foreign and domestic, during a historically specific time frame?

 

I am just saying that 1900s Russia is a hell of a lot different from 2004 America or 2004 Russia. Why drive your grandfathers Oldsmobile when you can get some new more green friendly ride?

 

One can of course really examine the internal dynamics of the "Black power" movement of the late 1960s up to the mid 1980s and come to some conclusions.  This period of reformulation of the national factor needs to be looked at. Lets take an example closer to home than the blacks in America, because the moment one says "black" everything gets screwy.

 

Take Texas . . . the Lone Star State. The Lone Star State . . OK . . . meaning one star on the freaking flag.

 

I currently live in Texas - recently, but this is not the first time I have been to Texas. My travel to Texas dates back to 1982. There are current s in Texas pushing for secession since the Alamos. In the latest edition of Texas Monthly there is a lead article basically called "Why They Hate US " and what is meant is not Americans being hated; but why the rest of America and the world hate "us" in Texas.

 

Is not Texas basically larger than Germany? All the secessionists minded in Texas most certainly want to leave the American Union. Some gravitate back to Mexico and others gravitate toward absolute independence from everyone with the Mexicans on the bottom of the social order.

 

Somebody got to mow the grass is the thinking of the latter trend. Is Texas a nation? Are the Mexicans in Texas national minorities or is the question a tad bit more complex and requires thinking and study?

 

What the hell is a national minority within Marxism. Who defines what?

 

There is a material difference - but material bound, between the newly arrived immigrant Mexican workers and the Mexicans and children of Atzlan that have been in Texas for maybe five or seven centuries.

 

Sure I have an opinion and cut my political teeth on the national colonial question.  This is not the point.

 

Let us assume that there was heavy handedness in dealing with the question of Chechnya - during the 1980s, which one author says was worse than during the Stalin era (see the source stated above). Maybe there is another resolution of the national factor that is out side the field of vision of most American revolutionaries at this particular point in time.

 

What if there is not resolution of the national factor but only partial resolutions until the abolition of class antagonism which is at least roughly 200 years away.

 

I see no evidence that says we are going to overthrow world bourgeois property in this decade or the next for than matter. I do not know where the decisive break will occur but we are talking about earth in my meaning and an extensive transition process of economic reformulation. 

 

In other words I do not condemn Putin in relationship to Chechnya but rather the whole lot of them, while acknowledging the very real barrier faced in the development of the material power of production and human thinking.  

 

Self determination as an abstraction?

 

What next "Free Texas?"

 

Now "Free Mississippi" has a certain appeal to me but where is it going to go?

 

Free Appalachia! They will quickly tell you that I am not one of those guys from New York.

 

See, we know about the national factor everywhere on earth except America.

 

Free Appalachia!

 

Melvin P.