One World - One People

The world, as they say, is getting smaller every day. The marvels of modern communications have diminished the geographical obstacle of distance.  The world economy, the global market, is more integrated today than we ever before realised. Yet the world remains divided up into nations, with frontiers and barbed wire, passports, and immigration controls, customs duties and 180 or so varieties of currency. Nations are demarcated by states, which have carved up the whole world into often quite arbitrary patches of territory in the last couple of centuries. The world is also in crisis. The crises produce turmoil. Despite this, states remain jealous of their sovereignty, competing with each other for shares in world production and trade to manage and command national economies.

Socialist solidarity springs the practical experience of the workers who felt that they had to cooperate with each other across frontiers and boundaries in order to defend their interests, their wages, and their working conditions. The day-to-day experience of a man standing alongside a foreigner brought an understanding of common interests, an instinctive kind of internationalism. In the ranks of the working class there went on an incessant competition and scramble for jobs. While the capitalist engaged in commercial rivalry and trade wars, fighting for markets, the workers were competing with each other for a place on the factory floor, often underselling the price of their labour. Socialists are well aware of this very real and unedifying element in the existence of the working classes in a society where dog-eat-dog competition permeated every aspect of social life. This strife can only end with the abolition of private property in the means of production – that is, with the abolition of capitalism.

The aim of the modern labour movement is to curb the competitiveness of the workers, to bring under control that individualism which made them an easy prey for capitalist exploitation. The aim of the labour movement is to instill in the workers the sense of solidarity which would benefit them all as a class. That was the origin of the trade unions and the origin of modern socialism. ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ is nothing else but a call to eliminate the effect of competition between workers within each country and to eliminate it also on an international scale. From this point of view, nationalism was, in the first instance, the workers’ self-destructive competitiveness; internationalism was their solidarity transcending national boundaries.

 Marx and Engels insisted that ‘the working men have no country’. They argued that the nation-state was alien to the interests of the proletariat and that in order to advance their interests workers must ‘settle matters’ with the bourgeoisie of each state, that workers must challenge the power of their ‘own’ capitalist class directly. This opened the possibility of ‘the common interests of the whole proletariat, independently of all nationality’. It also implied practical activity by workers to organise in mutual solidarity across national borders. Socialists maintain that workers must free themselves of patriotism and national superiority in their own interests, for without discarding these aspects of bourgeois ideology they would never themselves be free.

We oppose nationalism. By nationalism, the bosses really mean that workers must respect capitalist borders. These borders are artificial; they exist to divide workers and keep different sets of bosses in power. Workers need no borders. Workers in one part of the world are not different from or better than workers in another. Nationalism creates false loyalties. Workers should be loyal only to other workers, never to a boss. We endorse the revolutionary slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!"