Lenin CW-Vol. 23.pdf - From Marx to Mao

60V. I. LENINstop and think why we stressed this point in connection withthe national question.While the proletariat of the advanced countries is overthrowingthe bourgeoisie and repelling its attempts at counter-revolution,the undeveloped and oppressed nations donot just wait, do not cease to exist, do not disappear. Ifthey take advantage even of such a bourgeois imperialistcrisis as the war of 1915-16—a minor crisis compared withsocial revolution—to rise in revolt (the colonies, Ireland),there can be no doubt that they will all the more readilytake advantage of the great crisis of civil war in theadvanced countries to rise in revolt.The social revolution can come only in the form of anepoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariatagainst the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries and awhole series of democratic and revolutionary movements,including the national liberation movement, in the undeveloped,backward and oppressed nations.Why? Because capitalism develops unevenly, and objectivereality gives us highly developed capitalist nationsside by side with a number of economically slightly developed,or totally undeveloped, nations. P. Kievsky has absolutelyfailed to analyse the objective conditions of socialrevolution from the standpoint of the economic maturityof various countries. His reproach that we “invent” instancesin which to apply self-determination is therefore an attemptto lay the blame at the wrong door.With a zeal worthy of a better cause, Kievsky repeatedlyquotes Marx and Engels to the effect that “one must notinvent things out of his own head, but use his head to discoverin the existing material conditions” the means thatwill free humanity of social evils. When I read those oftrepeatedquotations I cannot help recalling the late andunlamented Economists who just as tediously ... harpedon their “new discovery” that capitalism had triumphed inRussia. Kievsky wants to “smite” us with these quotations: heclaims that we invent out of our own heads the conditions forapplying self-determination in the epoch of imperialism! Butwe find the following “incautious admission” in his own article:“The very fact that we are opposed [author’s italics] todefence of the fatherland shows most clearly that we will