Sturgeon and the Scottish Nationalists recently made a call for an early second referendum on the question of sovereignty for Scotland. An independent Scotland is of little interest to the people of Scotland.
The Socialist Party calls itself world socialist. It supports the worldwide unity of working men and women.
The word patriotism is almost always used in a lying fashion. As for the Socialist Party, the revolutionary socialists, we repudiate the national anthem and flag. We see only two countries in the world: that of the privileged and that of the dispossessed.
All countries, no matter what political label is attached to them – are composed of two groups, one a small minority, but the other embracing the immense majority of the people.
The first group lack nothing. They are the big shareholders of the factories, the transport and communication industries, the retail store chains, the owners of great estates. Alongside them are the high officials of the state, ministers of government and senior civil servants, officers of the judiciary and the military.
And then we have the rest of us. The working men and women; petty officials, office and shop workers, who toil and sweat to enrich the wealthy.
Under the capitalist system, the owning and employing class remains sovereign and through their political power they subdue the working class. Nationalism in every nation masks the class antagonisms to the great profit of the ruling classes. Through it, they facilitate their domination and control. It serves as a bulwark of the privileged classes. The avowed aim of the armed forces, is to defend the country against a foreign threat; but once in uniform, when the barrack basic training has neutralised individual intelligence and initiative, removed the consciousness of one’s own interests, the soldier enforces the law in the service of the exploiters against fellow-workers.
Our compatriots are not the capitalists. Our compatriots are the socialist revolutionaries of the whole world who wage the class war and engage in the same battles as ourselves for the establishment of a better society. We shall bring about the Revolution, in order to lay hold of the social wealth usurped today by the minority. We shall transform private property into communal property. We shall work towards a society where the factories, mines, all the great enterprises will be administered like co-operatives, a more rational and more equitable organization of production, in which there will be well-being for all. Socialism will be a society far better than that of today. Our brothers and sisters is humanity.
The workers have no country. The differences which exist between the present countries are all superficial differences. The capitalist regime is the same in all countries; and as it cannot work without a minimum of political liberties, all countries which live under a capitalist system enjoy elementary liberties which cannot anywhere be denied any longer to the working people. Even in Iran and China, the autocratic regimes are being challenged.
No one any longer has a fatherland or motherland in the heterogeneous modern nations of today. The love for the land of one’s birth is foolish and absurd. We do not say that affection for the locality where a person was raised is not a natural sentiment very firmly implanted. Neither do we maintain that there are not fairly noticeable differences in culture, character and temperament of natives of various lands. The thing we oppose is the prejudice against the foreigner, discrimination against the outsider and newcomer. The Socialist Party aligns itself with the poor against rich, the exploited class against the ruling class, without taking into account the differences of nationality and language, or the frontiers created by accidents of history. The Socialist Party only fights to bring about a social organisation superior to all others, not only in its political form, but in the mode of production and distribution of wealth. We will not fight to defend existing countries or to create new nation-states.
In Scotland we may admire the sight of the hills and glens, the lochs and burns, but hopefully it teaches us to appreciate the scenic beauty of other regions of our planet. There are no country so superior to any other, that its peoples should sacrifice themselves for it.
If our anti-nationalist declarations causing us to lose support and votes, so be it. It grieves us little if we hurt the feelings of people to whom patriotic loyalty is a religion. Our fellow-workers who give their lives for the present countries are dupes. The only war which is not a deception is the class war, the expropriation of the capitalist class to return to the producers the social wealth accumulated by human genius of generations past. The class war is worthy of all.
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