Dear Editors – Is there a ‘Right of Nations to Self-determination’?

An organisation called Vote Palestine 2026 asked candidates in last month’s local elections to sign a pledge committing them, if elected to, among other things, ‘uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people’. One of our candidates replied as below; to which another candidate replied. Here is the exchange published in the comment section of the Brixton Buzz.

Dear Vote Palestine 2026,

Thank you for your email. I must respectfully decline to sign.

As an anti-Zionist Jew and socialist standing in Brixton North, I share your horror at the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. But I cannot endorse a pledge framed around national self-determination.

The nation state, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is a prison house of nationalities. It tells workers to wave flags and forget they have no motherland to defend. Israeli and Palestinian workers alike are exploited by the same global system of wage labour and capital.

National liberation is a trap. A new state means new masters under a new flag, while wage labour, property rights, and class rule stay intact. Council divestment treats symptoms, not the disease.

My goal is not another state but the abolition of the state itself: a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless world community where people cooperate freely. Real self-determination means workers recognising their shared enemy across all borders.

I stand with working people everywhere. I cannot sign a pledge that reinforces the nationalism keeping them divided.

Yours sincerely,
Anya Krycek
Socialist Party Candidate for Brixton North, Lambeth

Reply from Eduardo Salgado:
I think historically, things happen in stages. According to Marxism-Leninism (ML), national liberation often must precede, or be strategically aligned with, workers’ liberation because imperialism makes national independence a necessary first step to create the conditions for a successful socialist revolution. Lenin viewed the national struggle in colonized or oppressed countries as a key component of the overall world socialist revolution. The core reasoning is that national liberation acts as a necessary step to ‘clear the decks’ for direct class struggle, as it removes the foreign oppressor and allows the working class to battle its local bourgeoisie. Lenin says on this issue:

• Support the national liberation struggle against imperialism unconditionally.
• Maintain independent working-class organization and leadership within that movement.
• Use the liberation struggle to raise demands for socialist transformation (land reform, workers’ rights).

Rejoinder from our candidate:
The stageist model, national liberation as a necessary prelude to socialist transformation, is not merely strategically mistaken but theoretically incompatible with the abolition of capitalism. The historical record of national liberation movements demonstrates a consistent pattern: the ‘stage’ of national liberation does not clear the decks for proletarian revolution it institutionalizes a new form of capitalist state. The foreign colonizer is replaced by a national bourgeoisie that maintains wage labour, commodity production, and extraction. The nation is not a proto political reality waiting to be liberated, but a category produced by capital itself a way of organising populations into manageable units. To prioritise national liberation is to reinforce the very abstractions; nation, citizenship, the state that capital requires to function.

‘The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got’, from The Communist Manifesto (1848).

The Socialist Party position is that the proletariat has no stake in which bourgeoisie administers its exploitation. Anti-imperialism that stops at the nation state leaves exploitation intact. The state form itself prevents the direct social relations that would constitute a break with capital. Socialism cannot proceed through stages it must begin immediately in the content of struggle, as the practical activity of breaking with wage labour, money, and the state. National liberation changes the flag and people in government, it does not interrupt the reproduction of capital. To make it a ‘necessary step’ is to permanently defer the only act that could end exploitation: the immediate social transformation of society by and for the working class. We don’t seek the people’s commodity production we seek abolition of the proletariat.

Editors’ note:
Questioned on ITV on election day, Green Party leader Zack Polanski was reported as saying that ‘no country has a right to exist’. His critics saw this as a reference to Israel, but it would equally apply to Palestine, indeed to Britain and every other state. States may exist but have no ‘right’ to; which rather undermines the Vote Palestine pledge that many of his party’s candidates signed up to.

Next article: Cooking the Books 1 – All workers’ parties now? ➤