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Why socialists are internationalists PDF Print
Josh Lees 04 March 2010

“Workers of the world, unite!”
This famous slogan, inspired by Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, sums up the spirit of internationalism. It is still chanted today at workers’ strikes and demonstrations all over the world, over a century after it was inscribed on Marx’s tombstone. The red flag, the most iconic symbol of the struggle for socialism, embodies this principle of internationalism: the flag of no country; the flag of the workers of all countries, united despite the national divisions imposed on us by capitalism.
The world’s capitalists and their political representatives, of course, have their own brand of “internationalism”. They call it the “international community”, sometimes the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, etc. They hold summits, defended by police states, in 5-star resorts, while bemoaning world poverty. The rich countries dominate the poor. They make agreements to carve up the wealth, territory and even the peoples of the world between them. Sometimes they can’t reach agreement and diplomats make way for war machines. But they are always united when it comes to putting down working-class rebellions. As Marx put it, they are a “band of warring brothers”.
The need for working-class internationalism flows largely from recognition of the fact that capitalism is a world system. As capital organises itself across national borders, so too must workers if we are to have any chance of resisting, let alone overthrowing, this system of exploitation.
It was with this in mind that Marx devoted much of his life to founding and participating in the International Workingmen’s Association – known as the First International. Established in 1864, it was soon coordinating international support for strikes and preventing bosses using foreign scab labour. During a strike of London tailors, for example, The Times complained that master tailors had been unable to recruit European scabs because of “the Continental workmen having been informed by telegraph from the operatives’ committee of the state of affairs in London”.
Today the bosses try to use “globalisation” as a stick to beat down workers’ wages and conditions. They argue that workers in the West must accept cuts or else they’ll inevitably lose their jobs to cheaper labour off-shore. All too often union leaders capitulate to this logic and negotiate away hard-won conditions. Worse still, they sometimes join in the reactionary chorus blaming overseas workers or migrants for supposedly “taking Aussie jobs”. But as the efforts of the First International demonstrate, overseas workers are not our enemies, they are our vital allies. Jobs and conditions can only be saved with a fight, not by capitulation.
This kind of international solidarity is certainly not just a thing of the past. In 1998 the Howard government conspired with Patrick Stevedores to smash the Maritime Union of Australia, hoping to introduce non-union labour on the wharves and use this as a springboard to attack other organised workers.
The waterfront unions have one of the longest traditions of lending international solidarity to other groups in struggle. As far back as 1889, Sydney wharfies donated £500 to support striking London dockworkers. In 1938, wharfies in Wollongong started a national boycott of shipments of pig iron to Japan, which was using Australian materials to attack the Chinese. After World War II, the wharfies banned Dutch shipping bound for Indonesia, in solidarity with the Indonesian independence campaign. In 1967, the wharfies refused to load ships carrying munitions to assist the Vietnam War. Even now South Africa’s black unions remember the solidarity shown by Australian seafarers and wharfies in helping isolate the apartheid regime. In 1991, wharfies in Melbourne refused to unload ships carrying rainforest timber in solidarity with the native peoples of the Malaysian forests. And in 1995, wharfies banned French shipping during nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
When the MUA came under attack in 1998, thousands of Australian unionists rallied to defend the wharfies; so too did thousands around the world. In Japan, the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Holland, PNG and South Africa, waterfront workers took solidarity action. Wharfies in Los Angeles and San Francisco defied their own repressive industrial laws and refused to handle ships which had been loaded by scab labour in Australia.
 
Nationalism, racism and class
But internationalism is about more than just trade union solidarity. Another key aspect is opposition to nationalism. There are lots of good reasons to oppose nationalism, especially in a colonial settler state like Australia. Founded on genocide, originally an outpost of the British Empire, Australian nationalism and racism have always gone hand in hand. Just look at the way columnists and politicians repeatedly use so-called “Aussie values” and “border protection” as their launching pad for attacks on Muslims or refugees.
Nation states today cover the earth, criss-crossing it with militarised borders, imprisoning the mass of humanity into defined areas – or even detention centres for those who dare to flee without permission – while allowing the rich to come and go at will. But these bordered states are the relatively recent invention of capitalism. Driven by the needs of profit and competition, the capitalists require a labour supply, an infrastructure of transport and communications, central banks, repressive police forces, military forces and so on. This is all provided or ensured by the modern state.
At its heart, nationalism is something promoted by the ruling establishment to try to dupe the working class into thinking that loyalty to “their” nation should come before their own interests and loyalty to their own international class.
In this country, you are told to see yourself as “Australian” – with all the associated national myths of a supposed “fair go” etc. – and to think that therefore you have more in common with multi-millionaires like James Packer than with workers around the world, or even than your “foreign” co-worker. But in reality, the Australian state exists only to serve Australian capitalism and the tiny percentage of the population who exploit the rest of us. Nationalism is about papering over this class divide and promoting class collaboration with these parasites rather than seeing that they are our enemies.
It’s no surprise then, that those political parties and sections of the labour movement which have abandoned revolutionary struggle in favour of class collaboration have always ended up capitulating to nationalism as well. There was a particularly devastating betrayal at the outbreak of World War I. The Second International, the mass international socialist movement set up after Marx’s death, had been rhetorically committed to internationalism and a complete hostility to imperialist war. But most of the parties which made up the International were by now more concerned to make peace with capitalism than overthrow it. They had become reformist, not revolutionary, parties, fighting only for limited reforms while arguing that socialism would be achieved gradually at some point in the distant future by parliamentary means.
In abandoning revolutionary struggle, the reformist parties limited themselves to demanding what was possible within capitalism – in other words to what was acceptable to the ruling class and the capitalist state. This inevitably meant accepting the need for “their” capitalists to make profits, to be able to compete with others, and therefore to be backed up by a strong nation state. In fact, by arguing that socialism could be achieved through parliament, the reformists were now saying that the existing state was a vehicle for socialist transformation!
In Australia, the Labor Party from the very beginning was an enthusiastic supporter of Australian nationalism. It was the most vociferous supporter of the White Australia policy and has supported Australian imperialism ever since. When World War I broke out and millions of workers were sent off to kill each other, these “socialist” parties ended up supporting this imperialist slaughter.
A minority held firm to internationalist principles, including the Russian Bolsheviks. Lenin summed up their position: “turn the imperialist war into a civil war!” – in other words into a workers’ revolution. Within a few years they were proven right, as patriotic fervour gave way to horror and bitterness at the killing fields of Europe and deprivation at home. Eventually workers’ revolutions in Russia and Germany ended the war.
The experience of the Russian Revolution once again confirms the need for internationalism. Every Bolshevik had always agreed with the argument made by Lenin that “either the Russian revolution will raise the whirlwind of struggle in the West, or the capitalists of all countries will crush our revolution”. No serious Marxist thought socialism could exist in one country. Modern production is an international affair, a single product often containing parts and raw materials made in dozens of different countries. Added to this is the determined effort of world imperialism to crush any revolutionary example which might inspire rebellions elsewhere.
The eventual defeat of the revolutionary tide in the rest of Europe sealed the fate of the Russian Revolution. Isolated, blockaded and invaded, the revolution degenerated and was finally destroyed completely from within – by Stalin and the new ruling class of state bureaucrats he led to power. The rallying cry of his counter-revolution was “socialism in one country”, the complete abandonment of Marxist internationalism which accompanied Stalin’s abandonment of the working class and of genuine socialism. Those who try to argue today that socialism somehow exists in Vietnam or Cuba are in the tradition of Stalin, not Marx or Lenin.
Internationalism is a key principle which must be fought for today as much as ever. It is the only political basis upon which nationalism, racism and imperialism can be consistently opposed because it is based on an understanding of the class divisions which lie at the heart of these atrocities. And it is the only basis upon which socialism can be created.
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