No to nationalism

 If nationalism was a recognised disease, its terrible toll on human life would excite the demand for a cure.

The Socialist Party does not support the slogan “Self-Determination”. Insofar as this word has any meaning it runs counter to the socialist view that the nation is a capitalist political institution. The whole idea underlying nationalism — that all the people of a particular nation (however defined, and that’s another problem) have some common interest — challenges the socialist analysis which says that the workers have no country and that the “national interest” is a fraud and a trick designed to get them to co-operate on the political field with their rulers. The task of the Socialist Party is to campaign, along with socialists in other countries, for the establishment of a socialist society all over the world.

One argument used in the past by advocates of nationalism has been that until the national question is settled the workers will never be able to recognise their worldwide community of interest in the abolition of capitalism. As against this, the Socialist Party points out that nationality problems never will be settled under capitalism. Hoodwinked by repetition from the mouths of their leaders, of the old fiction of the alleged community of interest between themselves and the employers, the workers are again to be privileged to defend the country they do not own. While the capitalist class dominates the civilised world, and owns and controls all the means of wealth production, the disposal of nations in this or that sphere of economic interest is not the business of the working class. The only hope lies in the deluded, toiling masses of wealth producers mustering under the crimson banner of socialism, determined to gain control of the machinery of government, including the armed forces, to use it as the agent of emancipation, and to usher in the system of society based upon the common ownership of the means of life; the social system wherein the interests of the human family shall form a harmonious whole. 

 

Most certainly, workers in Scotland there have plenty to complain about— no job prospects, low incomes, bad housing, etc,—but they are terribly mistaken in imagining that independence would in any way improve their position. They are suffering because they are property-less workers in a world where the means of life are owned by a privileged minority. Their problems are caused not by British rule but by capitalism.  The solution to the problems facing workers in Ireland is the same as that to those facing workers the world over. We must organise together to replace capitalism everywhere with a system based on democratic control and the common ownership of the planet’s resources. The struggle for such a socialist society has to involve implacable opposition to nationalism, of whatever variety, whenever it rears its ugly ahead.

Your birthright, like that of workers anywhere in a capitalist society, from New York to Moscow, from London to Peking, is that of a wage slave. Our "right" is the right to try and sell our mental or physical ability to produce wealth to any employer who thinks he can get a return on investment. Our "right" is to accept the poverty of employment or the dire poverty of the dole. Our "right" is the freedom to do what we are told, whatever the colour of the rag flutters at the top of the political masthead.

There is an alternative to permanent want and insecurity. As capitalism is a world system, however, we cannot end it solely by our own efforts. Rather than butcher one another, we must band together with our fellow members of the working class in other countries to organise a system in which the resources of the earth would be owned and democratically controlled by society as a whole and used to produce the things that all human beings need. This is the only action we urge you to consider.