Completely unavoidable. If you live under the boot of colonialism / imperialism, the most immediate and relevant contradiction to people's lives isn't class, it's nationality and race. When both the indigenous elites and non-elites of a colonized area share in the experience of imperial exploitation, that experience forms the basis of a common national identity that positions itself against the extra-national oppressor; that can elide class differences and be reinforced through pre-existing shared language, religion, customs, past polity inclusion, etc.
Lenin and even Stalin wrote much more extensively about the role of nationalism in revolution than did Marx, who, uh, had some hot takes on the nationalism of pre-WW1 south slavic countries and on imperialism in general.
Stalin defined a nation as "a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture," a definition that I'm sure a lot of modern anthropologists would denounce as overly-simplistic. But he, like Lenin and Mao and Sankara, wasn't writing from a perspective of pure scholarly inquiry, but with the intent to create a just-so definition that was workable in the context of opposing imperialism.
The contradiction of course being that even left-wing revolutionary nationalism must eventually give way to internationalism to fully realize a communist project. We're clearly not there yet.
Nationalism can arise as an inevitable result of imperialism and play an integral role in opposing it.
But it's still nationalism.
and apparently unavoidable, which fucking sucks
almost every revolution in the 20th century had a nationalist tinge to it, from cuba, to vietnam, to burkina faso
even 1917 wouldn't have been possible if nationalists hadn't been pissed at the tsar's losses at war (first against japan, then in ww1)
it's at the same time a tool that should be used and a problem that must be avoided
Completely unavoidable. If you live under the boot of colonialism / imperialism, the most immediate and relevant contradiction to people's lives isn't class, it's nationality and race. When both the indigenous elites and non-elites of a colonized area share in the experience of imperial exploitation, that experience forms the basis of a common national identity that positions itself against the extra-national oppressor; that can elide class differences and be reinforced through pre-existing shared language, religion, customs, past polity inclusion, etc.
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Lenin and even Stalin wrote much more extensively about the role of nationalism in revolution than did Marx, who, uh, had some hot takes on the nationalism of pre-WW1 south slavic countries and on imperialism in general.
Stalin defined a nation as "a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture," a definition that I'm sure a lot of modern anthropologists would denounce as overly-simplistic. But he, like Lenin and Mao and Sankara, wasn't writing from a perspective of pure scholarly inquiry, but with the intent to create a just-so definition that was workable in the context of opposing imperialism.
The contradiction of course being that even left-wing revolutionary nationalism must eventually give way to internationalism to fully realize a communist project. We're clearly not there yet.
deleted by creator