In this highly referenced volume, Stalin defined the nation and laid out the Marxist-Leninist position on national liberation. The results resounded throughout the colonial world. "What is a nation? A nation is primarily a community, a definite community of people. This community is not racial, nor is it tribal. The modern Italian nation was formed from Romans, Teutons, Etruscans, Greeks, Arabs, and so forth. The French nation was formed from Gauls, Romans, Britons, Teutons, and so on. The same must be said of the British, the Germans and others, who were formed into nations from people of diverse races and tribes. Thus, a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people."

Originally published 1934, a collection of articles and speeches on the nationalities question in the Soviet Union. Before the 1917 revolution, Stalin was the Communist Party's expert on the "nationalities problem"; after the revolution he became Commissar for the Nationalities in the early years of the Soviet Union. The nationalities problem was a debate over which national groups of the old Russian Empire were to remain a part of the new Soviet Union and which should form independent nations. The material in this book covers Finland, Georgia, Poland, and Ukraine; the national question in Yugoslavia; and many related topics.

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Through highly informed readings of work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. For this expanded edition, Anderson has written a new preface that discusses the additional 1879–82 notebook material, as well as the influence of the Russian-American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya on his thinking.

This new, memorial edition features Connor's original thorough-going treatment of The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton, 1984). His study of the evolution of the relationship between communism and nationalism since 1848 demonstrates that Marx and Engels were eager to wed the world revolutionary movement to the forces of nationalism despite the incompatibility of the two aims. Refined by Lenin, a strategy for harnessing nationalism to the world cause in a prerevolutionary situation contributed to the rise of communism in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia; a plan to accelerate the demise of nationalism in a post-revolutionary situation was far less successful. The original study is situated between memorials to Connor by Donold Horowitz and Brendan O'Leary, a Tribute to Connor's contributions to the study of ethnonationalism, particularly his insightful assessment of "the unwithering national question" in Marxist-Leninist polities, and a new combined Afterword by Connor and Kaiser which reviews developments since 1984 and assesses the significance of the Marxist-Leninist experience for the study of nationalism.