Marxism-Leninism considers all questions in their historical settings. Marxism-Leninists view bourgeois nationalism under the given historical conditions. Drawing a distinction between its different objective roles, they decide what different attitudes the proletariat should take toward it.
In the early period of capitalism, the national movement led by the bourgeoisie had as its objective the struggle against oppression by other nations and the creation of a national state. This national movement was historically progressive, and the proletariat supported it.
In the present period, such bourgeois nationalism still exists in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. This variety of nationalism also has a certain objective progressive historical significance.
The bourgeoisie of Europe, the United States, and Japan has established the imperialist system of colonial and semi-colonial oppression in many backward countries. In such colonial and semi-colonial countries as China, India, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Viet-Nam, Burma, Egypt, etc., bourgeois nationalism naturally developed. This was because the national bourgeoisie in these countries has interests antagonistic in the first place to those of imperialism, and in the second place to those of the domestic backward feudal forces. Moreover, these feudal forces unite with imperialism in restricting and hampering the development of the national bourgeoisie. Therefore, the national bourgeoisie in these countries is revolutionary in a certain historical period and to a certain degree. Bourgeois nationalism in these countries has a decidedly progressive significance when the bourgeoisie mobilize the masses in the struggle against imperialism and the feudal forces. As Lenin pointed out (in a speech delivered at the Second Congress of the Eastern Peoples), nationalism of this type “ has historical justification ” . Therefore the proletariat, with the aim of overthrowing the rule of imperialism and the feudal forces, should collaborate with this bourgeois nationalism which plays a defiantly anti-imperialist and anti-feudal role provided, as Lenin said, that these allies do not hinder us in educating and organizing the peasantry and the broad masses of theexploited people in a revolutionary spirit. The clearest example of this type of collaboration was that which existed between the Chinese Communists and Sun Yat-sen.
Sun Yat-sen’s nationalism was a form of bourgeois nation
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