No More Scotland - But the World

As the world economic crisis continues we can see the burden of the crisis being dumped on the shoulders of the working class. We can see government after government in the capitalist world enacting legislation with similar ends: to make the working class pay for the present crisis of capitalism. Throughout the world popular resistance is rising. The ruling class here and elsewhere are attempting to whip up chauvinism and nationalism. The working class is multi-national, composed of workers of many different nationalities. Their common identity is that they are all exploited by the capitalist class. All workers must strive to forge unity with their fellow workers of all nationalities in the common effort for full democracy and socialism. All sorts of “progressives” have been more and more resorting to the method of dividing the workers by advocating different doctrines designed to weaken the struggle of the working class. One such idea is nationalism, which advocates the division and splitting up of the working class on the specious pretext of protecting the interests of national culture or national independence.

Achieving “independence” under capitalism – private ownership, commodity production, the rule of the market, etc.– will not bring freedom and democracy for the working class. Instead, the working class will continue to be subjected to exploitation and wage slavery. That is why  nationalists of any stripe are charlatans, i.e., they are lying, when they claim that they are the champions of the democratic rights of the workers. They never have been and never will be because that is impossible. There cannot be a “Peoples Republic of Scotland”. Leftists who pick up the national flag has become accepted fare even in the Trotskyist ranks.

 The more wealth the predatory employing class amass, the greater becomes its greed and ambition to absorb and seize new wealth, and the more it intensifies its oppression of the people within its own country. Such domestic oppression will be all the more carried out under the cloak of nationalism. When it is to its own advantage does the ruling class use the slogan of nationalism to arouse the people. Nationalism means exclusiveness and isolation. Any nationalism finally implies that those people are better than all others. Is it not a deplorable mistake for the so-called revolutionary left to consider themselves allied in any way with the class that deceive workers for their own interests?

Class-conscious workers fight hard against every kind of nationalism. What class interest does nationalism serve? Would it aid the class struggle against capitalism or be a diversion from that struggle?  Class-conscious workers cannot rally under the national flag. Nationalism is always the tool of the bourgeoisie, historically. To speak of Scottish nationalism as a progressive force,  is to play the game of a section of the rich. No amount of secession can ever succeed in bringing freedom. The slogan of “independence then socialism” which claims to be progressive and revolutionary in no way constitutes a path towards socialism.

Socialists are internationalists and not nationalists. Even in the countries oppressed by foreign powers the goal of the struggle is not to try to repeat the process of the bourgeois-democratic revolution of nation-building but to develop the process of a socialist revolution.

The Socialist Party recognises these lies and this fakery. The solution cannot be a return to a romantic fictitious past. We must go forward to a really free, really classless society. Democracy can only be realised by a socialist revolution. Nationalism leads directly to a capitalist system  where the vast majority of the population still end up as exploited. The capitalist gangster clans will continue their class warfare over who will get to steal how much of Scotland’s resources. What’s needed is to organise class struggle against our rulers. If all workers joined in class struggle we could make short work of the bosses who accumulate billions off our labour, swearing devotion to the UK or to Scotland while stashing their wealth in off-shore banks and buying shares in foreign land-grabs, the modern equivalent of the Highland Clearances.

 The reality is that the enemy of the Scottish working class is capitalism. The friends of the Scottish workers are the English working class, who are exploited in common with them and live under the same economic system. It will be suicidal for the Scottish to fight in isolation. Hence it follows that it is the task of the Scottish workers is to stay united with their English counterparts

Unlike the deluded left nationalists, the Socialist Party will not tag along with, follow behind, or try to lead the nationalist movement. We will instead resolutely struggle against them by propagating socialism. We must constantly hammer home that the SNP and their ilk are nothing but tools of the ruling class. Deceived, as people will discover in the years to come, that they have been most cruelly misled and have been wasting their time fostering nationalist illusions.  Nationalism is divisive and destructive and ultimately only serves the bosses. Home rule does not eliminate class rule.

 A struggle for socialism is a struggle for democracy. Our struggle is to end exploitation – our own as well as everyone else’s. The destruction of capitalism is the collective workers struggle and the mobilising and uniting of the whole class, of workers of all lands, to take up the fight for the historic task of overthrowing capitalist rule and  building socialism is our mission. We cannot unite with those “socialists” who preach reformism and the accomplishment of their goals under capitalism. The Socialist Party position is a declaration of war for the end of the capitalist system and the establishment of the classless, communist society. A global cooperative community can only be built under the watchword, “Workers of the world unite!”