Extract from Socialism or Barbarism, CWO, UK, 1994. (I.N. - Canada)

In peace and in war, the bourgeoisie tries to get workers to identify with their ‘own’ country. For generations we have been told that we will all lose our jobs if we don’t work as hard as workers in other countries, precisely the same message that is given to workers everywhere.

In times of war we are told that we must fight our brothers and sisters in other countries as if they are any more responsible for the crimes of their bosses than we are for the crimes of ours! Workers’ interests are not those of the capitalists, if we remain entwined within the coils of competition with workers in other countries only the bosses will profit, and at our expense.

What of those countries which are in capitalism’s periphery? The internationalist communist left has never supported the so-called national struggles in capitalism’s periphery. We are told that these struggles are against oppression and are anti-imperialist. It is true that in many nations there are oppressed minorities but these minorities can gain little by identifying with the capitalist leaders of their nation or group.

The agony of the Palestinian people is not suffered by their bourgeoisie, with their apartments in New York, but by the proletariat of Gaza and the West Bank. Their real interests lie not with replacing their Israeli exploiters with Palestinian exploiters but in combining with workers everywhere to end all exploitation and with it all national oppression. This goes for all such tragic situations. To encourage the working class anywhere to take part in national movements is to encourage workers to die for capitalism.

In a deeper sense these struggles are not anti-imperialist. In the first place, to be effective militarily they must find an imperialist backer.The Vietnam War brought untold suffering to the Vietnamese but they could only wage it against the US by fighting with Russian imperialist support. Secondly, once the military struggle is over the newly ‘liberated’ state cannot stand aside from the network of imperialist relations making up the world economy. No state today can develop independently and, no matter how weak it’s economy, must submit to the exigencies of capitalist competition on the world market. Again, "independent" Vietnam had no choice but to turn to Western investors and bow to the demands of the IMF.

To those who argue that Marx supported certain independence movements or that Lenin supported a policy of granting self-determination, we reply that such mechanical ‘Marxism’ is not Marxism at all. Marx was writing at a time when he could see that capitalism was developing a working class, new technology, machinery and scientific thought. All the things necessary to make communism possible. As a result, Marx and Engels supported some nationalist movements where they thought it would get rid of feudal and other pre-capitalist social structures. This was the basis for a new area for capitalist development. In this ascendant period of capitalism it was possible for new independent capitalist nations to emerge and thus widen the basis for the creation of the working class, the future gravediggers of capitalism.

However since the opening of the present imperialist phase of domination of the planet no such independent capitalist formation is possible. It was Luxemburg ⁽¹⁾, not Lenin, who grasped this reality better despite her erroneous analysis of the roots of imperialism. The further development of capitalism this century has only underlined the correctness of Luxemburg’s position on the national question. Lenin had expected that the political struggle of the colonial nations would provoke a huge crisis of the system. In fact this did not happen because when decolonisation took place it simply cut the military costs of imperialism. It did not alter the economic relationship. In many instances decolonisation itself was part of an inter-imperialist struggle since it was forced on the older imperialist powers by the USA after its emergence as the dominant imperialist power in 1945.

Indeed, in the epoch of imperialism we can say that no imperialist power is independent since all states are part of an imperialist hierarchy in which there are only degrees of domination. Those states at the edge of the system are in the weakest position. Here, the local bourgeoisie, will occasionally use ‘anti-imperialist’ (i.e. nationalist) rhetoric to disguise the fact that they have simply become an integral part of capitalism’s global domination of the working class. The only sure path to liberation for the world’s workers is through the international class war, not through support for some bourgeois national liberation gang. The aim of the proletariat is the abolition of all nation states and all frontiers.

(1) Luxemburg, Rosa, 1870-1919. Outstanding internationalist revolutionary, executed by order of the German social-democratic government.