Some sectors of the North American Left are convinced that Puerto Ricans in the United States do not belong to the Puerto Rican nation; that this community is merely a 'national minority' -- an ethnic subdivision of a different nation, the United States. This national-minority theory bears some resemblance to the old idea of the 'melting pot', or at least to its liberal variant ('Puerto Rican-Americans', 'ethnic heritage', 'minority rights', etc.), but there is one crucial difference. The national-minority theory is said to be grounded in Marxism, and specifically in a doctrine derived from a 1913 essay by Stalin, 'Marxism and the National Question'.1 In essence, the argument is simple. Stalin listed the attributes which, in his opinion, an ethnic group must possess to qualify as a nation. This was Stalin's famous 'definition of the nation', which became the orthodox Marxist concept of the nation, accepted by most Marxists, Stalinists and non-Stalinists alike, down to recent times. Complementing the concept of 'nation' was the concept of 'national minority', a term which designated ethnic communities that failed to qualify as nations.
The distinction was terribly important. Real nations had the potential to become independent states, and deserved the right of self-determination. National minorities had no such potential, and were fated to dissolve, in political terms, through assimilation. Moreover, national forms of political struggle were justifiable for nations, but not for national minorities. One of Stalin's crucial criteria for nationhood was the possession of undivided national territory. Ethnic communities which were fragmented or dispersed were not real nations: They were national minorities. Puerto Ricans living in the United States must be, by this criterion, a national minority. The same judgment must apply to many other communities around the world, including, for instance, West Indians, Africans, and Asians in Europe and Koreans in Japan. All such groups are national minorities, doomed to dissolution and enjoined from engaging in national forms of struggle.
But there are two Marxist theories dealing with minorities. And there are two very different kinds of minorities, each succumbing to its own distinctive analysis. Puerto Ricans do not fall within the purview of Stalin's theory, but within another theory which was prefigured in Marx's and Engels' analysis of the Irish community in England and was then developed into a general theory by Lenin in the period 1915-1923. The fundamental difference between the two theories has to do with the facts of colonialism and imperialism. Lenin provided the first comprehensive analysis of imperialism, and of modern colonialism.2 In the process, he developed a theory of nations which applies to colonial nations, like Puerto Rico and the Puerto Ricans. Stalin, in 'Marxism and the National Question', barely mentions colonial nations, and his theory of nations and minorities does not in any case work for colonies. Even for the non-colonial nations of Europe, in fact, the theory is only applicable to an early period in their history, the 'epoch of rising capitalism', an epoch which ended almost everywhere with the outbreak of the First World War. All of this notwithstanding, Stalin's 1913 article was significant as a contribution to Marxist theory and to the Russian revolutionary struggle -- a judgment concurred in by many non-Marxist scholars as well as Marxists (even by Trotsky!).3 But the theory does not apply to Puerto Ricans. Lenin's theory, by contrast, does apply. And Lenin's theory compels the conclusion that Puerto Ricans in the United States are still part of the colonial nation of Puerto Rico.
The Theory of National Minorities, J. M. Blaut