Against the Nats and Independence

WORLD SOCIALISTS

The All Under One Banner (AUOB) group are planning the largest ever march for Scottish independence in Glasgow next month, Saturday, May 4. It hopes to attract more than 100,000 people.

Manny Singh of AUOB declared, “The message is simple and it has not changed. Scotland must become an independent country, and Scotland needs to decide its own future.”

Members of the Socialist Party ask in what way is the life of a Scottish wage slave basically different from that of an English, an American, or the Chinese wage-slave? There is no basic difference in the way of life of the world’s working class because we all suffer from the same problems such as poverty and insecurity. Independence from England will not cure the poverty and insecurity of the Scottish workers, because we will still be subject to the wages, labour and capital relationship.

Workers have more in common with people like ourselves in other countries than with the privileged owning class of the country where we happen to have been born and work. The world-wide working class has a common interest, to end its exploitation and solve its problems, to join together to establish a world without frontiers in which the resources of the planet will have become the heritage of all, so that there can be production to meet needs and not for profit. One World - One People, where cultural differences will still be celebrated, but where we’ll all be citizens of the world.

The interest of the working class in all countries is to reject all nationalism and to recognise that they have a common interest with people in other countries in the same economic situation of being obliged to sell their mental and physical energies in order to get a living. That interest lies in working together to establish a world-wide society of common ownership, democratic control, and production for use, not profit.  

Independence will not give the people of Scotland effective control over their own affairs.It is only feasible in a class-free, money-free, frontierless society. It is for the Scottish workers to see that their position demands that they should fight only for their class emancipation and that nothing, constitutional reform or national independence, should draw them away from their determination to fight for the realisation of socialism. What is the “independence” some Scots yearn after, if it means being trapped inside the confines of capitalism?