The Patriotism Disease

Are you proud to be a Scot? Does the hair on the back of your neck rise when they play 'Flower of Scotland'? Do you get goose-pimples when the Saltire flutters and you hear the skirl of bag-pipes and the whirl of kilts. If so, you are suffering from that nastiest of diseases of the mind, known popularly as patriotism — otherwise known as nationalism — and it can afflict people of all countries and even of regions which aspire to become countries.

Only by rejecting the myths of national and racial identity can the world be won by and for all of its inhabitants. As knowledge of the real cause of our problems (capitalism) and the real basis of our strength (class unity) develop, the appeal of the nationalists will evaporate. The whole thing about nationalism is its idiotic delight in some accident of language, accent or local behaviour. The whole horror of nationalism is its resolve to differentiate from others who doesn't share its particular language, accent or local behaviour.The Socialist Party fully understands every person on the planet today community. We all love to sing together. We all love to dance together. Yet we also enjoy differences. That makes us human.  The Socialist Party is without nationalism, religion or racialism. We are socialists. We are in the process of becoming truly human. That is the appeal of socialism. The flag-waving nationalists are not happy about this. As workers, we can have no greater weapon in our struggle against the bosses than knowledge. Understanding the perversion of nationalist sentiment is to us as powerful as all the filthy weapons that our class enemies can muster to defend their minority power. No amount of distortion history by our class enemies will stop socialists from pursuing that task, inspired by fellow class-conscious workers who have struggled before we were born. The capitalist uses patriotism, and national independence as a means of provoking national hatreds and are not concerned at all with the interests of the working class, but only with protecting their own property, markets, investments, and so on. Fighting to gain or protect national independence serves no interest, except that of the capitalist class. It solves no problem, not even that of nationality, for each success by one nationalist movement creates other similar problems. 

Workers constantly compete with each other. We are taught to do so from a very early age.  We also engage in the competition of "our" country against all the rest.  The media persistently refer to “us” and “them”. We learn while we are still young that “my” country is never wrong and is always right; the pernicious sentimentality of nationalism. The capitalist class may claim allegiance to the country of his or her birth but will nevertheless move investments from one part of the world to another according to the potential for profit.  The ideal world for the capitalist class is one where national boundaries are only political boundaries posing no serious obstacles to the movement of money.  Despite national boundaries, different cultures and languages, we are all part of the world system of capitalism whose lifeblood is competition. The capitalist class recognise the global character of capitalism and despite the competition between individual capitalists or between sections of capital, in the final analysis they act as a class with common interests. Workers would also do well to recognise not only the global character of capitalism but the necessary consequence of that - the common class interest that unites workers wherever they happen to have been born. The Socialist Party awaits the time that destructive nationalist ideas will be replaced by the socialist rallying call of "Workers of the world unite". We are the international working class and we have a common interest. To unite against ruling classes everywhere and to establish a world community based on the Earth s resources being the common heritage of all humanity where every human being will no longer be a subject of one or other artificial state but where, wherever we live or work or whatever our language or culture, we will all be citizens of a united world. What sort of narrow-minded nationalism is this in a world where over half of our fellow human beings are destitute and eight hundred millions of them are starving? Are we to check that they are "our” people before we think of positive policies to end their, and our, common poverty?

It is the socialist contention that human beings, wherever they are from, are much more similar than they are different. All of us have certain needs and socially produced desires which, by co-operating as humans, we can satisfy. Socialism, which can only be established worldwide, presents the possibility of people from different backgrounds and with different cultures (many of which they may want to retain in a world socialist society) combining our abilities to jointly provide for our common needs. To do this we must socialise the means of producing and distributing wealth by placing them in the hands of the democratically organised world community. Within a socialist society decisions will be taken at various geographical levels, depending on the nature of the decision to be made. Whatever difficulties the organisation of world society, based on production solely for use, will create, it will be a far more harmonious society than capitalism can ever possibly hope to be. Ending capitalism, with its national frontiers, is a matter of urgency.  World socialism offers a temptation to the political imaginations of those whose minds have been narrowed by the ideology of nationalism. There is no way to obtain a world with no borders without creating a world which is united by the common interests of its inhabitants and there is no way to achieve such an identity of interests except by establishing socialism.