Preliminary Draft of some Theses on the National
and Colonial Questions.
The abstract or formal raising of the question of equality in general, including national equality, is inherent in bourgeois democracy by its very nature. Under the aspect of equality of human beings in general bourgeois democracy proclaims the formal or juridical equality of the proprietor and the proletarian, the employer and the employed to the great deception of the oppressed classes. This idea of equality, which is a reflection of the relations of industrial production, is transformed by the bourgeoisie into an instrument of struggle against the abolition of classes on the pretext of an absolute equality among human beings. A real demand for equality can be expressed only by a demand for the abolition of classes.
2. In conformity with its task of a struggle against bourgeois democracy and the denunciation of its lies and hypocrisy, the Communist Party, as the conscious leader of the struggle of the proletariat to cast off the yoke, must in the national question also consider chiefly not the abstract and formal principles, but, first, make a precise record of the historical and first of all the economical conditions of a people; second, it must distinctly separate the interests of the oppressed classes, the worker, the employed, from the general conception of national interests as a whole, which only mean the interests of the ruling class; third, it must make a similar clear separation of the oppressed-dependent nations not possessing equal rights with other nations, from the oppressing and ruling sovereign nations, as a counterweight to bourgeois-democratic lies, which screen the colonial and financial enslavement of a tremendous majority of the earth's population, by an
