When humanity has truly grown up, it will look back on the
division of the world into states, and the restriction of the right of humans
to travel, live, and work where they wish, as a kind of world apartheid. We
will wonder how we ever felt it was justified, or even meaningful, to speak of
a human being's statehood. We will understand, of course, the material history
and the social causes which lay behind states, in the same way that we
understand the history of apartheid itself, or slavery, or the treatment of
women as property or 'chattel'. But intellectual understanding does not educate
the imagination, and we will wonder how we ever managed to escape awareness of
the obvious fact that there is but one, common humanity, and that all rights
spring from it alone, and not accidents of race, sex, or geography. States are
pens into which humanity is divided for the purpose of being ruled over and
exploited by minorities. They exist to limit human freedom: money and goods
travel the world freely, while humans are kept in check by passports and border
controls.
If socialists oppose the state, how much more should they
oppose the nation-state. It is bad enough that people should be penned by the
world's rulers like cattle owned by farmers. It is worse that such states
should attempt to exclude those of the wrong 'people' or ‘race’. In attempting
to harness the power of struggles for the socialist cause, some have dragged
our movement into the mud of nationalism. The right of self-determination is
not national, but the right of every individual, and of all humanity. It
includes to right to determine where to live and work, regardless of states, or
borders, or 'nationality'. Humanity's freedom will not be won by building new
states, but by destroying them all.
We already have a one-world culture. Information flows
around the world. We reach a consensus on different issues through this very
rapid, decentralized information flow.
So already governments are less important. The Web has little concept of
national boundaries.
We cannot trust the capitalist system to be run in the
interest of workers. Everything we win in the course of class struggle can be
taken away again if we let down our guard. The only way to keep hold of the
gains we make is to get rid of the capitalist system and establish socialism. A
lack of local powers is not an argument for nationalism; it is an argument for
socialism.
Our task as socialists is to try to provide clarity on the class
basis for taking a position. And our position must always be based on what is
going to be in the interests of the working class movement. We socialists want
to show workers that their interests lie in the maximum unity of all workers
against all oppressors. We want them to identify their interests with the
oppressed everywhere, to discard the blood-stained Saltire along with the
blood-stained Union Jack. But we will not do that without understanding clearly
who are our friends and who are our enemies. Our job is to propagate a
class-conscious understanding in order to help workers discard harmful popular
prejudices. If we don’t do that, then there’s really not much point to our
existence, since it is only through discarding the beliefs that keep us
shackled to capitalist ideas that we will be able to build a movement capable
of building socialism.
The fact that good, well-meaning people have been misled
must not prevent us from seeking truth from facts. The fact that left-nationalists
Scots wish to see British capitalism weakened, and hope that by voting for
independence they will achieve this aim, does not prove that that is what will
actually happen. In Scotland nationalism gives workers a scapegoat for the ills
of capitalist society. “Don’t blame capitalism, blame the immigrants!” say the UKIP
to angry and disillusioned workers in England. And in Scotland the refrain is “Don’t
blame capitalism, blame the English!” That people are in the mood to fall for
this misdirection is a sign that they understand that something is wrong and
that something must be done. They have understood that this society is not
serving them but they still have not recognized the true “Auld Enemy” –
capitalism – as the cause of their woes.
Technology has increases productive power and efficiency.
This means we continually do more for less, thus we will approach a point where
ultra-efficient automation entails an extreme abundance of resources, thus
everything will be free, nobody will need to work. This situation is called
“post-scarcity”. Governments only exist to manage scarcity, they manage the
social dysfunction arising from scarcity, thus via eliminating scarcity you
eliminate all governments. All need for oppression becomes obsolete when
scarcity is vanquished thus dictators will not arise. This is the bigger
picture beyond the parochial concerns of borders on Earth.
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