Anti-Nationalism 4/5

The lies that kill

The problem of nationalism cannot be wished away. To do away with it will mean to eliminate the present the system that fosters it. This system ensures that a minority owns and controls the means  which wealth is produced and distributed whilst the vast majority who actually does the production owns nothing. The resources and wealth of the world must be owned and controlled by all humanity. Under such an arrangement, no one will care who goes where or who belongs where. Then nationalism and its present brutalities would have been buried.

We are facing critical situations for which socialism is the sole remedy. The socialist movement strives to trample down national boundaries, recognising the common link between the workers of every land— their poverty and slavery indicts the ruling-class as a robber class, establishes the fact, that poverty need not exist, that slavery can be abolished by the workers themselves, and that the quarrels of the ruling class are of no concern to the working class. The working class of the world have a common bond that transcends every tie of race or nationality—their urgent need for emancipation. What matters the name of the country of your birth, if you are a slave in that country? If you look at the problems that affect the vast majority of the working class in every country, you soon realise that nationalism, and concern for artificial borders between people, hold no solutions. Without you the masters are helpless; without you, the State collapses.

 What bond is it that identifies you with your lordly capitalist? You are chained to his machines, in his factories and workshops, and driven by a need to produce wealth for him. You are the robbed, he is the robber; you are the slave, he is the master. A bond of shame, a tie that is a degradation to every wage-slave. If you are loyal to the class that exploits, you are a traitor to your own class. It is in the interest of your masters that you should be divided by national and religious barriers. It is up to you, then, to study your class position in society, which is cosmopolitan and anti-religious in character. For it is only by so doing that you will become free in the truest sense of the term. Socialists do not care whether the capitalist class divides the World among themselves by rivers and seas, or by the lines of latitude and longitude. What concerns him, is the class ownership, which he works and organises to abolish.

Nationalism is, therefore, an illusion that has no basis in reality and is nothing short of an ideology that seeks to enhance the profit-making interests of the capitalist class. The only real division that exists between human beings is their access to the resources and wealth of the world. In this money-dominated world, the minority ruling class (the capitalists) own and control these resources and wealth - the land, factories, the transport and communication network, etc. The working class has no access to these and has to sell their mental and physical labour power to the former in return for peanuts.

The concept of nationality, the idea that an area dominated by a privileged class which thrives on the enforced poverty of that area's productive class, should grant to the latter the right to live there providing its members accept their wage-slave status and endorse the right of the privileged to live on their backs is offensive to any intelligent working man or woman. Those who promote such nonsense are the real enemies of our class and there will be no lasting peace in the world until the workers refuse to line up behind all the various brands of nationalism.

The cause of Socialism is and must be universal. The working class cannot emancipate itself nationally. So long as you are living in a society that forces you to be a wage slave, you must, if you wish to be free, join hands with your fellow workers of all countries in the task of securing "the world for the workers." Members of the Socialist Party have long since turned a deaf ear to the empty phrases of nationalism, and, instead, look forward to the day when our planet shall be a land of peace and prosperity—its wealth owned and controlled by its workers. This object, we claim, is far more worthy of the attention and support of workers than the empty phrases and chimeras of the nationalists.