From issue 55 of New Socialist Magazine
The legacies of national liberation
By David Finkel
To grasp the changes that the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s produced, suppose first that you were looking at a world atlas circa 1960. On the continent of Africa alone, you’d find countries with names like Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, South West Africa, French Equatorial Guinea, Belgian Congo and the like. The transformation from that map to Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, etc. far transcends the names on paper – it marked practically a new epoch, a change every bit as profound as the collapse of Stalinism and the 1990s transition from the Cold War to corporate globalization.
Some aspects of the transformation were not anticipated by classical Marxist theories of imperialism, which had developed in the wake of the late 19th century carving up of the world into colonial empires. For decades thereafter it was assumed that what Lenin called “the highest stage of capitalism” required colonial empire, whether for the looting of raw materials or the export of capital from the metropolitan center. Based on this understanding, it appeared that those competing colonial empires would be dismantled only under the impact of international socialist revolution.
We should state at the outset that for Marxists, the right of nations to self-determination is important for several reasons. First, it is a legitimate democratic right, valid in and of itself whether or not it has direct revolutionary implications. Second, it is often a necessary condition for independent class politics, because the working class in an oppressed or colonized nation tends to see itself having interests in common with “its own” native capitalist class. Third, the struggle for national liberation may indeed bring revolutionary possibilities to the fore both in the oppressed nation and in the oppressor state. In any case, as Marx noted long ago in the case of Britain and Ireland, no working class can free itself while it is a participant in subjugating another people.
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