New faces, same story

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.

It is not imperfections in the political decision-making process that’s the problem but the profit system and its economic laws. And the answer is not democratic reform of capitalism’s political structure but the replacement of capitalism by socialism.  We are not nationalists--in fact we are implacably opposed to nationalism in whatever form it rears its ugly head--and we see the establishment of an independent Scotland as yet another irrelevant, constitutional reform. One of the last things the world needs at the moment is more states. Nationalism is based on the illusion that all people who live in a particular geographical area have a common interest, against people in other areas. Hence the supposed need for a separate state and a separate government to defend this separate interest. This flies in the face of the facts. All over the world, in all geographical areas, the population is divided into two basic classes, those who own the productive resources and those who don’t and have to work for those who do, and whose interests are antagonistic.
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.