What Independence?

The Left Nationalist Fantasy

“Words and illusions vanish; facts remain.”

The capitalists are good mystifiers: they want to have us believe that their interests as an oppressing class are the interests of all classes. Since the time of Marx, class conscious workers have combated the capitalists’ chauvinist appeals with appeals for the international solidarity of the working class. They have fought the attempts of the bourgeoisie to enlist the workers in their nationalist strivings with appeals for the joint class struggle of the workers of all countries against world capitalism. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels insisted that ‘the working men have no country’. They argued that the nation state was alien to the interests of the proletariat and that in order to advance their interests workers must ‘settle matters’ with the bourgeoisie of each state, that workers must challenge the power of their ‘own’ capitalist class directly.  It implied uncompromising opposition to the local state and its dealings with the rulers of other capitalisms – other members of the ‘band of warring brothers’ that constituted the capitalists at a world level. It also implied workers should organise in mutual solidarity across national borders. This was not a mere abstraction. Marx maintained that workers must free themselves of patriotism and national superiority in their own interests, for without discarding these aspects of bourgeois ideology they would never themselves be free. Marx and Engels maintained this approach throughout their political activities.  It was also the position taken by Luxemburg.

Those of us in the Socialist Party of Great Britain are told that our critique of nationalism is resented by many supposed revolutionaries because they think that our criticism casts aspersions upon their sincerity as revolutionaries. Our duty as socialists does not permit us to spare the feelings of any particular group which directly or indirectly acts contrary to the interests of the working class. At the end of  socialist meetings it was customary  to sing “The Internationale”. It was not Flower of Scotland, Scotland the Brave or Scots Wha Hae. Have those “socialists” forgotten the workers of the world anthem? The patriotic fever of the Scottish referendum is so prevailing that the convener of the Scottish “Socialist" Party shares the table with a capitalist hedge fund manager to determine independence referendum strategy.  Cooperation of the classes implies an abandonment of the class struggle.

The Socialist Party are told that we should accept that nations “exist” (even though we have seen that a common race, implying the same origin and purity of blood is but a fiction) Diseases exist as well. Is it that reason not to try and eliminate them? The real fight is the struggle of the dispossessed against the possessors and it is the only fight that matters. The national prejudices deliberately fostered by the governing class has to be fought by English and Scottish workers united against their common foe. For us, the workers, our weapon is solidarity, it is the awareness that we all form, whatever the language we speak or the colour of our skin, or the land of our birth, one single class exploited by a minority of capitalist parasites who are very much in agreement, despite their national rivalries, to crush us.

Independence and “socialism” is the Scottish nationalists favorite bait for workers. At this moment in time Trotskyists are engaged in a patriotic effort to persuade the working class that Scottish independence would mark a step forward towards its own liberation, a step towards socialism. Nothing could be further from the truth. With the conditions that prevail today in this country, the independence of Scotland  would not mean a step forward towards socialism. In all likelihoods it would be a step backwards.  The people who parade the banner of “independence and socialism” around, to catch the attention of  workers, are perpetuating a number of falsehoods.  The “Left” nationalists would have us believe  the task is to transform bourgeois independence into a socialist independence. In reality, they find themselves in the camp of those promoting division of the working class.

The Independence referendum is not about independence. lf the nationalists wins, Scotland will not be independent. The SNP is a capitalist party. It works on behalf of the capitalists. That means the union of Capital, Edinburgh to Brussels to London to Wall St. The nationalist is merely trying to keep more of it “within the family”.

Are we to believe that home-grown national businesses are somehow less exploitative than foreign companies and less subject to the impact of the general capitalist crisis? Capitalist enterprises, inevitably move towards becoming monopolies, regardless of the nationality of their owners. Capitalism created nations, but, in its development, created at the same time the conditions for their disappearance by multiplying all kinds of relationships between nations, within one country or on a world-wide scale. But at the same time as capitalism  creates the objective basis for the fusion of nations, it tries desperately to erect artificial barriers between them, so as to maintain itself as a system of control. Thus, by setting nations one against the other, by inflaming national animosity, the bourgeoisie aims at consolidating national barriers in order to protect its part of the spoils of capitalist exploitation, to attack the class consciousness of workers and to sow strife in their camp. Independence means the creation of national barriers by restrictions so as to consolidate the capitalists class privileges.

 Whatever twists and turns lie down the road in the fight for socialism in Scotland, one thing is certain: the success of that struggle depends on achieving the greatest possible unity of the working class, it is utterly ridiculous to argue that the working class ought to divide itself into two different countries in order to accomplish this unity. It is completely absurd to justify this with the false argument, disproven many times, that the battle for socialism would be easier if it were led by a more nationally “pure” and homogeneous working class. Working class unity is a must right now if effective resistance is to be mounted to the crisis measures imposed by the capitalists. Unity is necessary to stand up against all the attacks on our democratic rights. The working class faces a powerful and aggressive enemy which is solidly united despite certain contradictions within its ranks. The people’s army  are not going to win the class war by dividing themselves according to borders. Those who dress up as “socialists” in order to push nationalism on the working class are the objective allies of the capitalists. Supporting Scottish independence in the name of socialism is a hoax. It is up to the working class to show we will not be duped by political nonsense and deceitful rhetoric. Instead fight for your own cause, for your interests – for socialism.

Karl Marx wrote:
“What then does the German philistine want? He wants to be a bourgeois, an exploiter, inside the country, but he wants also not to be exploited outside the country. He puffs himself up into being the “nation” in relation to foreign countries and says: I do not submit to the laws of competition; that is contrary to my national dignity; as the nation I am a being superior to huckstering.
The nationality of the worker is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is labour, free slavery, self-huckstering. His government is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is capital. His native air is neither French, nor German, nor English, it is factory air. The land belonging to him is neither French, nor English, nor German, it lies a few feet below the ground. Within the country, money is the fatherland of the industrialist. Thus, the German philistine wants the laws of competition, of exchange value, of huckstering, to lose their power. at the frontier barriers of his country! He is willing to recognise the power of bourgeois society only in so far as it is in accord with his interests, the interests of his class! He does not want to fall victim to a power to which he wants to sacrifice others, and to which he sacrifices himself inside his own country! Outside the country he wants to show himself and be treated as a different being from what he is within the country and how he himself behaves within the country! He wants to leave the cause in existence and to abolish one of its effects! We shall prove to him that selling oneself out inside the country has as its necessary consequence selling out outside, that competition, which gives him his power inside the country, cannot prevent him from becoming powerless outside the country; that the state, which he subordinates to bourgeois society inside the country, cannot protect him from the action of bourgeois society outside the country.
However much the individual bourgeois fights against the others, as a class the bourgeois have a common interest, and this community of interest, which is directed against the proletariat inside the country, is directed against the bourgeois of other nations outside the country. This the bourgeois calls his nationality.” -  Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s book