Perish “the Patriot”.

 “I look upon the whole world as my fatherland...I look upon true patriotism as the brotherhood of man and the service of all to all...National independence? That means the masters' independence...The flag? Does it wave over a country where you are free and have a home, or does it rather symbolize a country that meets you with clenched fists when you strike for better wages and shorter hours?" - Helen Keller

The idea of national sovereignty is a notional fraud. A nation-state is not sovereign in its affairs. In practice, it means a mightier or the mightiest nation-state, regardless of law and ethics, may ‘sovereignly’ decide what is good for its own nation and by extension for the international community. What does the national identity of a nation really mean in today’s world? Are we not all citizens of the world, holding multiple identities (and in an increasing number of cases even multiple passports)? Our place of birth is accidental, but our duty to our class is worldwide. Socialism recognises no distinction between the various nations comprising the world. Socialism does not recognise national distinctions or the division of humanity into nations and races. The position of the Socialist Party in every country is one of hostility to the existing political order. The socialist movement is global in sentiment and scope and the name, the World Socialist Movement, was deliberately chosen as an aspiration to be achieved.  No socialist party can serve the “Nation” so long as the nation is divided into two warring classes—one which owns the wealth and one which produces the wealth and does not own it. No socialist party can serve the robbers and the robbed at the same time. To speak of the “Nation” when it is thus divided is camouflage to hide their support of the robbers because the great majority of the nation belongs to the class which is robbed.

 Every plutocrat, every profiteer, every exploiter, every oppressor will tell you that you must be loyal and patriotic to their particular “nation". Are you their ally or is your allegiance to your class, your own “nation”?  Workers must be united and act together. Solidarity must be the watchword. Political unity and industrial unity will give us the power to conquer capitalism and emancipate the workers of the world. As individual wage slaves we are helpless and our condition hopeless. As a class, we are the greatest power on Earth. The individual wage slave must recognise the power of class unity and do all to bring it about. That is what is called class consciousness. Class conscious workers recognise who their “nation” is. They join the union and the party of their class and gives their time and energy to work for the emancipation of their “nation.”  We do battle against the “nation” of the bankers and the bosses who applaud their own "patriotism" and who glory in robbery and plunder.  Patriotism, as generally understood, is an objectionable sentiment since it means the placing of one’s own country, its interests and well-being, above those of the rest of humanity. Patriotism, in its essence, is a readiness to die and to kill for abstraction, for what is largely a figment of the imagination. Nations are in no sense natural communities; they stand in stark opposition to the principles of mutual aid and solidarity upon which our very survival depends. This community of interests and of relationship or neighbourly feeling does not necessarily or exclusively apply to nationality. As a matter of fact, in ancient times it was the city-state rather than the nation-state which was its boundary.

The capitalists are good mystifiers: they want to have us believe that their interests as an oppressing class are the interests of all classes. Since the time of Marx, class conscious workers have combated the capitalists’ chauvinist appeals with appeals for the international solidarity of the working class. They have fought the attempts of the bourgeoisie to enlist the workers in their nationalist strivings with appeals for the joint class struggle of the workers of all countries against world capitalism. In The Communist Manifesto, 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.  It implied uncompromising opposition to the local state and its dealings with the rulers of other capitalisms – other members of the ‘band of warring brothers’ that constituted the capitalists at a world level. It also implied workers should organise in mutual solidarity across national borders. This was not a mere abstraction. Marx maintained 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. Marx and Engels maintained this approach throughout their political activities. It was also the position taken by Luxemburg.

At the same time as capitalism creates the objective basis for the fusion of nations, it tries desperately to erect artificial barriers between them, so as to maintain itself as a system of control. Thus, by setting nations one against the other, by inflaming national animosity, the bourgeoisie aims at consolidating national barriers in order to protect its part of the spoils of capitalist exploitation, to attack the class consciousness of workers and to sow strife in their camp. The working class faces a powerful and aggressive enemy which is solidly united despite certain contradictions within its ranks. The people’s army is not going to win the class war by dividing themselves according to borders.

Those of us in the Socialist Party are told that our critique of nationalism is resented by many supposed revolutionaries because they think that our criticism casts aspersions upon their sincerity as revolutionaries. The Socialist Party are told that we should accept that nations “exist” (even though we have seen that a common race, implying the same origin and purity of blood is but a fiction) Diseases exist as well. Is it that reason not to try and eliminate them? The real fight is the struggle of the dispossessed against the possessors and it is the only fight that matters. The national prejudices deliberately fostered by the governing class has to be fought by workers united against their common foe. For us, the workers, our weapon is solidarity, it is the awareness that we all form, whatever the language we speak or the colour of our skin, or the land of our birth, one single class exploited by a minority of capitalist parasites who are very much in agreement, despite their national rivalries, to crush us. Our duty as socialists does not permit us to spare the feelings of any particular group which directly or indirectly acts contrary to the interests of the working class. At the end of socialist meetings, it was once customary to sing “The Internationale”.