What
those who want a better society should be doing is to campaign to
change people's minds, to get them to realise that they are living in
an exploitative, class-divided society and that the only way out is
to end capitalism and replace it by a new and different system. Once
a majority have come to this realisation, they will know what to do:
organise themselves into a socialist party to democratically win
political control and use it to bring about a socialist society.
That's what socialist politics should be about.
Across
the world nationalism has been rearing its ugly head again. Many on
the political left will argue that Scottish nationalism is somehow
progressive and should be encouraged. The Socialist Party says that
this is a dangerous poison being spread by the left.
The
working class – by definition the class that does not possess any
land or private property, including capital – has quite literally
nothing to gain from a situation where one group of rulers and owners
is replaced by another group. The
Socialist Party
argues that every nation-state is by its very nature anti-working
class. The “nation” is a myth as there can be no community of
interests between two classes in antagonism with one another, the
non-owners in society and the owners (the workers and the
capitalists). And the state ultimately exists only to defend the
property interests of the owning class at any given point in history
– which is why modern states across the world send the police and
army in to break strikes and otherwise seek to protect the interests
of the capitalists and “business” at every turn.
Constitutional
reform is of no benefit or relevance to us. It leaves our lives and
the problems the profit system causes completely unchanged.
Exploitation through the wages system continues. Unemployment
continues. A crumbling health service, a chaotic transport system, a
polluted environment, failing schools, rising crime and drug
addiction and the general breakdown of society all continue.
Naturally, nationalists wrap its claims for independence up in
democratic rhetoric. A “free” parliament in Edinburgh we are
told, would be an extension of democracy, bringing power nearer to
the people, so how can Socialists not be in favour of this? Yes,
Socialists are in favour of democracy, and socialism will be a fully
democratic society, but full democracy is not possible under
capitalism. Supporters of capitalism who talk about “democracy”
always mean only political democracy since economic democracy--where
people would democratically run the places where they work--is out of
the question under capitalism, based as it is on these workplaces
being owned and controlled by and for the benefit of a privileged
minority. As far as solving these problems is concerned, a sovereign
Scotland is just a useless irrelevancy.
You
can have the most democratic constitution imaginable but this won’t
make any difference to the fact that profits have to come before
meeting needs under capitalism. The people’s will to have their
needs met properly is frustrated all the time by the operation of the
economic laws of the capitalist system which no political structure,
however democratic, can control.
The non-owning class have a common interest, not with the owning class who live in the same area, but with people like themselves wherever they live. The interests of workers who live in Scotland are not opposed to the interests of those who live in England--or France or Russia or Japan or anywhere else in the world.
Nationalists like the SNP who preach the opposite are spreading a divisive poison amongst people who the Socialist Party say should unite to establish a frontier-free world community, based on the world’s resources becoming the common heritage of all humanity, as the only framework within which the social problems which workers wherever they live face today. This is why socialists and nationalists are implacably opposed to each other. We are working in opposite directions. Us to unite workers. Them to divide them.
Just because we are not prepared to back Scottish independence and break-up the United Kingdom does not mean that we are Unionists. We don’t support the Union. We just put up with it while we get on with our work of convincing people to reject world capitalism in favour of world socialism.
The
goal of the World Socialist Movement is not to assist in the creation
of even more states but to establish a real global community without
frontiers where all states as they currently exist will be destroyed.
In a socialist society communities, towns and cities will have the
opportunity to thrive – and people will no doubt feel an attachment
to places that are real and tangible – but the 'imagined
communities' that are nation states will be consigned to the history
books where they belong. We
always have a choice: we can continue to place our power as a class
into the hands of institutional leaders who use it to pursue the
narrow interests of a capitalist elite, or, we can take
responsibility for it collectively and democratically, use it to
further our own majority interest and, in the process, act in the
interests of all mankind.
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