A case against nationalism

On September 19^th 2014, the population of Scotland voted narrowly against secession from the United Kingdom in a referendum. The No side eked out a narrow victory in an exceptionally  high turnout. Nationalism runs deep. National identity is a much debated, and hotly contested, concept. Yet despite continued national prejudice and xenophobia outbreaks, there are the growing bonds of a cosmopolitan commonality.

National independence is a much exaggerated myth. Every country is dependent and many vested interests welcome globalisation of their economy. They have twisted their nationalist arguments to justify getting the trade unions to help capitalists become "more competitive". National chauvinism has divided the workers, and undermined the class struggle in the face of ever more sweeping attacks on wages and jobs. It’s no accident then, that in a period of a global crisis of capital, old and new nationalisms are rearing their heads—and many of them in a most virulent and violent fashion despite that many independence movements have been thoroughly discredited by their failures to meet peoples’ hopes. Instead, memories are short and nasty, divisive, increasingly ethnic nationalisms are being promoted in one part of the world after another. In an atmosphere of anger and despair, right-wing ethnic nationalisms, particularly of right-wing ethnic varieties, quite often seize the political initiative.

Every day, the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems try to outdo each other as to how they would restrict immigration further. Political leaders are promoting myths, mistruths and lies simply to win votes. We should welcome immigration, not try to restrict it. We definitely should not be making it more difficult for new immigrants. The influx of eastern Europeans is nothing new to the labour movement, particularly in Scotland. There has been an absence of a class response, and particularly a trade union one, to foreign workers. Instead there is an expectation that the capitalist state will protect the ‘privileges’ of the native-born worker.

At the beginning of the 20th century in Lanarkshire, there was much vitriol against Lithuanian incomers. They were employed in the iron works and the coal pits, and they too were accused of wage-cutting and scabbing. Nevertheless, the Lanarkshire County Miners’ Union, in the space of some 15 years, went from offering support to miners willing to strike against Lithuanian workers to demanding that Lithuanian miners in Lanarkshire should not be deported. During those 15 years, the Lithuanians had joined the union in large numbers and were active in it. Unionisation was the key to improved relations between the Lithuanian labour force and the LCMU.

Once the Lithuanians began to respond positively to local strike demands, the other allegations made against them were simply not an issue. The adoption of a more class-conscious attitude and the strength of their newfound loyalty to the union was in part due to the fact that the union had taken some very positive steps to encourage Lithuanian membership, such as printing the rules in Lithuanian and offering entitlement to claim full benefits.

We suggest fellow workers refresh their class-struggle credentials with a read of ‘A Voice from the Aliens’ from 1895 and one of the earliest appeals against immigration controls.

Fear-mongering and divisive politics play well in creating more xenophobia and it has a long history, as we have shown. But those who fall for the propaganda should know that keeping out immigrants with a ‘fortress Britain’ (or a ‘fortress Europe’) has not and will not solve our problems and make us better off. It is not migration which weakens the working class: it is immigration controls. Immigration controls are weapons by which the capitalists can discipline the working class. By deeming a group of people ‘illegal’, you create a section of the class who risk everything if they raise their head above the parapet and attempt to fight for a decent wage and conditions of work. By creating a variety of ‘legal’ groups of workers, but with different, limited rights, immigration controls create what they hope to be a more malleable and exploitable section of migrant workers, which in turn undermines all workers. We can only address this by fighting for equal rights for all workers - which means no immigration controls, along with demands for secure contracts and a living wage.

The plea that immigration controls should be imposed and certain foreigners excluded should have no place in a workers’ movement that is calling upon the exploited of all the world to unite for their emancipation. Any policy for the exclusion of other suffering wage-slaves is more consistent with the attitudes of the callous capitalist class rather than of the movement whose proud boast it is that it stands uncompromisingly for the oppressed and downtrodden of all the world. Immigrants have just as good a right to enter this country as British workers have in exiting it.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain will not sacrifice principle and jeopardise our goal for some immediate advantage. We will not spurn fellow workers lured here by the glimmer of hope that their burdens may be lightened by the promise of some improvement in conditions. If revolutionary socialism does not stand unflinchingly and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a false pretence.

If the Socialist Party risk losing support because we refuse to call for the border gates to be closed in the faces of our own brothers and sisters, we will be none the weaker for spurning such tactics to acquire false friends. All the votes gained would do us little good if our party ceases to be a revolutionary party, yielding to public opinion to modify our principles for the sake of popularity and membership numbers.

In the centenary year of when other supposed socialists abandoned the workers’ internationalism and embraced national chauvinism - with one group under HM Hyndman going as far to demonstrate their patriotic ardour by setting up a National ‘Socialist’ Party - we in the Socialist Party are the party of all workers, regardless of place of birth. We stand resolutely for world socialism and if this is too encompassing for some despite them paying lip-service to the claim - so be it. We shall leave them to their various national ‘socialisms’.

Marx didn’t advocate open borders because at the time he wrote border controls didn’t exist. So no-one can definitively assert what he would have said then which is true enough (and fortunately for him nor was there any asylum-seekers rules and restrictions for political refugees), but Eleanor, his daughter, was particularly active in distributing the statement, “The Voice of the Aliens’, which we recommended as a read. We will quote from it:

 “To punish the alien worker for the sin of the native capitalist is like the man who struck the boy because he was not strong enough to strike his father.” 

Anyone is free to continue to see things from the point of view of market-town parochialism. But there are consequences. You start by defending national borders against the incoming tide of cheap labour, motivated by the purest of socialist principles, and one day you find yourself patriotically supporting your country’s right to defend its front line trenches in some far-off country.

We think we can definitely say what Karl Marx’s views on immigration controls would have been. His programme was for the abolition of nation-states and the international unity of the workers. He saw with his own eyes the effects on the British working class of mass Irish immigration and argued for their incorporation into the working class, not their exclusion. His analysis of capital was that it always creates a reserve army of labour, constantly pushing workers out of jobs and pulling workers into exploitative labour relations. Ireland is a good example, losing a third of its population. Living standards went down for the masses because the reserve army of labour was maintained, so profits went up. Capital cannot serve the interests of the working class. Successful resistance to capitalism makes it malfunction. But the campaign for immigration controls will turn out to be a campaign to attack benefits and restore capital to rude health. It is not enough to reform capitalism; that only makes it malfunction. We have to replace it with the economy of the working class: an international task.

It has been asked what Marx would have done today. We can easily answer by describing what the First International, of which he was a member, did. They organised!

The International announced that “the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries” and that “Each member of the International Association, on removing his domicile from one country to another, will receive the fraternal support of the Associated Working Men”. Furthermore, “To counteract the intrigues of capitalists - always ready, in cases of strikes and lockouts, to misuse the foreign workman as a tool against the native workman - is one of the particular functions which our society has hitherto performed with success. It is one of the great purposes of the Association to make the workmen of different countries not only feel but act as brethren and comrades in the army of emancipation.”

The International consequently addressed fellow workers: “Help us, then, in the noble enterprise, help us to bring about a common understanding between the peoples of all countries, so that in the struggles of labour with unprincipled capitalists they may not be able to execute the threat which they so often indulge in, of using the working men of one country as instruments to defeat the just demands of the workmen in another. This has been done in the past, and seeds of discord and national antipathies have been thereby created and perpetuated. A part of our mission is to prevent the recurrence of such evils, and you can help us to achieve our aims.”

Marx, in the name of the International, writes: “If the Edinburgh masters succeeded, through the import of German labour, in nullifying the concessions they had already made, it would inevitably lead to repercussions in England. No-one would suffer more than the German workers themselves, who constitute in Great Britain a larger number than the workers of all the other continental nations. And the newly imported workers, being completely helpless in a strange land, would soon sink to the level of pariahs. Furthermore, it is a point of honour with the German workers to prove to other countries that they, like their brothers in France, Belgium and Switzerland, know how to defend the common interests of their class and will not become obedient mercenaries of capital in its struggle against labour.”

There is never an appeal to the capitalist state to impose immigration laws, but a call to the workers to unionise.

Borders are a means by which capitalists protect their assets, which include us. It is immigration controls that give employers greater power over migrants, particularly new arrivals or those who are dependent on them for their visa status, a power they do not always have over native workers. Nationalism is a huge barrier to developing class-consciousness. Borders cause workers in countries to care less about the other workers in the world. Across the world, national states are imposing ever more restrictive immigration policies. Nevertheless, people have become more internationalised and are acquiring a cosmopolitan identity.

Making the demand, ‘No borders’, reveals the importance of border controls to capitalist social relations - relationships dependent on the practices of expropriation and exploitation. The rights of property consist of the right to exclude others, while anti-nationalism is a part of a global reshaping of societies in a way that is not compatible with capitalism or of the state. Socialists must reject the concept of borders that are used as control devices over labour. By opposing the idea of borders we begin to perceive nation-states as ‘theirs’ and not part of ‘our world’.

To end with another quote from the First International: “The poor have no country; in all lands they suffer from the same evils; and they therefore realise that the barriers put up by the powers that be, the more thoroughly to enslave the people, must fall.”

We in the Socialist Party seek an end to exploitation, an end to racism, national chauvinism and anti-immigrant discrimination. When people say we are "utopian", they mean either that it is not possible to run society truly democratically, without the ownership of practically everything by a few wealthy people. They are wrong because this society is already largely run through the collective efforts of billions of people. The whole world economy operate only on the basis of widespread cooperation between workers. But under capitalism, the direction of all this collective work and the distribution of its fruits are dictated by a few wealthy capitalists, many of whom make their profits simply through gambling in those giant casinos called stock-exchanges markets. We don't need them to run society. In fact, they are destroying society.

The left's nationalism who cannot think outside of the myth of national interest has given massive ideological assistance to the conservative right wing. It shows up in their opposition to immigration, though they have been shamed into whispering about it since the cruder message of UKIP has come to dominate. We are taking a blunt message into this election campaign: nationalism is racist and reactionary. Defeating the right politically requires a war against the chronic nationalist ideological infection in the working class. We believe that better jobs with better pay cannot be achieved by keeping out immigrants. The problem is capitalism and we see it as our responsibility to explain this to those sections of the working class that blame foreigners for job losses, low wages, poor housing and cuts. We are socialists, not social workers, and we do not aim to help workers find individual temporary relief. We are for a collective fight on class lines. We are for revolutionary change.