The following article introduced Communist Voice vol . Marxism and the right of nations to self-determination by Joseph Green . One of the issues debated in this issue of Communist Voice is the right to self-determination of nations . It wasn't so long ago that most activists eagerly supported the national liberation movement in Africa and Asia and elsewhere . Today however most of the old colonial empires have fallen, and the main national movements seem to be fanatics massacring each other in the Bosnia and the Balkans .
Some people think so .
They hold that Marx and Lenin's support of the right to self-determination is outdated . They think that the national question is just a harmful diversion. The only struggle they will support is the straight struggle, direct to the future classless society, with no account taken of the twists and turns through which any real revolutionary movement develops . But a closer look at Yugoslavia shows that it is the denial of the right to self-determination which has turned the national problems into an inferno . When the old state-capitalist regime associated with Tito began to fall apart, most of the republics that composed Yugoslavia wanted, for better or worse, to separate .