Capitalism has produced two seemingly contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, it gave birth to the modern nation-state. On the other, it created a world market that binds humanity together in a single global economic system. As Marx and Engels observed, capitalism constantly expands beyond national boundaries, drawing every corner of the globe into its orbit.
However, this process does not unfold evenly. Capital accumulates at different rates, political power is distributed unequally, and development proceeds unevenly across regions and nations. It is precisely this uneven and combined development that reproduces national divisions and continually generates new national conflicts.
For Marxists, nations are neither eternal nor natural communities. They are historical products that emerge under specific material conditions. The rise of capitalism fostered national markets, standardised languages, centralised political institutions, and shared cultural identities, creating the modern nation. However, capitalism develops through hierarchy rather than harmony. While some nations become centres of wealth and power, others are condemned to dependency, underdevelopment, and oppression.
The national question therefore arises not as an abstract cultural issue but as a concrete expression of the contradictions of class society.
It was in this context that Lenin formulated the principle of the Right of Nations to Self-Determination. Lenin argued that socialists must defend the democratic right of every nation to determine its own political future, including the right to secede and form an independent state. This position did not stem from a romantic attachment to nationalism. Rather, it flowed from the recognition that genuine unity between workers of different nations cannot be built upon coercion.
If a nation is denied the right to determine its own destiny, one cannot expect to trust appeals for international solidarity. The defence of self-determination is therefore a prerequisite for working-class unity, not a rejection of it.
However, support for the right of self-determination does not imply uncritical support for every nationalist movement or leadership. Marxists distinguish between defending a democratic right and endorsing a particular political programme. When an oppressed people struggle against political repression, economic exploitation, or national subjugation, socialists support their right to resist. At the same time, they retain the right, and indeed the responsibility, to criticise the class interests and political limitations of nationalist leaders, especially when those leaders represent capitalist or landlord elites.
Trotsky developed this understanding further through the theory of Permanent Revolution. He argued that struggles against national oppression frequently expose deeper social contradictions that extend beyond the limits of nationalism itself.
National liberation movements often mobilise workers, peasants, students, and the poor on a mass scale, creating opportunities for broader class struggles to emerge. For this reason, socialists must not stand outside such movements as passive commentators. They must engage within them, champion the interests of the oppressed, and fight to build an independent working-class alternative.
Trotsky’s position on the struggle of Black Americans in the United States remains particularly relevant. During the 1930s, he argued that revolutionary socialists should support any genuine mass movement of African Americans for national or democratic rights, even if its leadership was not socialist.
The decisive question was not the ideological purity of the leadership but whether the movement represented a real struggle by an oppressed people against their oppression. Where masses are in motion against injustice, revolutionaries must participate, intervene, and seek to deepen the struggle rather than merely criticise it from afar.
The same method applies to national movements today. Wherever national oppression, political exclusion, or economic exploitation gives rise to collective resistance, Marxists should reject both blind support and sectarian dismissal. Their task is to defend democratic demands while advancing an independent class perspective. They must support struggles against oppression without dissolving themselves into nationalism.
Whether the movement is among Baloch, Sindhis, Pashtuns, Muhajirs, Kashmiris, or any other oppressed nationality, the essential question is not whether nationalism exists, but why it exists. What conditions have produced it? What forms of oppression sustain it? What social forces are driving it? And what possibilities exist for linking the struggle against national oppression to the struggle against class exploitation? Simply denouncing such movements as “bourgeois nationalism” explains nothing and offers no path forward.
This is where the Marxist tradition of Lenin and Trotsky sharply diverges from the Stalinist approach. Stalinism tends to view the national question through the lens of state interests and bureaucratic control. As a result, the principle of self-determination is frequently subordinated to the needs of the state, while national movements are dismissed as obstacles rather than understood as expressions of real social contradictions. By contrast, the revolutionary Marxist tradition approaches the national question dialectically, analysing each movement in its concrete historical context rather than through rigid formulas.
Ultimately, Marxism does not seek to preserve nation-states forever. Its goal is a world free from exploitation, oppression, and artificial divisions, a world in which humanity is united not by force but by shared freedom and collective prosperity. However, such a future cannot be achieved by denying oppressed nations their democratic rights. There can be no voluntary unity where there is coercion, and there can be no internationalism built upon national oppression.
Genuine socialist position therefore combines two inseparable principles: unwavering opposition to all forms of national oppression and unwavering commitment to the political independence of the working class. Only through this synthesis can the struggle for national liberation become part of the broader struggle for human emancipation and socialist transformation.