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Title: Against Nationalism
Author: Anarchist Federation
Date: 2009
Language: en
Topics: nationalism, anti-nationalism
Source: Retrieved on 19 October 2010 from http://libcom.org/library/against-nationalism][libcom.org]].  Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=4738, retrieved on July 9, 2020.
Notes: Published in September 2009, an analysis of nationalism, where it comes from, and why anarchists fundamentally oppose it.

Anarchist Federation

Against Nationalism

Preface

This pamphlet has its origins in a particular time and place, with the

impetus behind it coming from the Israeli state’s military campaign in

the Gaza strip in late 2008 and early 2009. As the record of atrocities

and the death toll mounted, coming to a final stop at around 1,500 dead,

large protests took place around the world, with a significant protest

movement developing in Britain. This movement took the form of regular

street protests in cities, a wave of 28 university occupations around

the country and occasional attacks against companies supposedly

implicated in the war. There were also, depressingly, actions with clear

anti-Semitic overtones. [1]

Anarchist Federation members were involved in a range of ways, being

present on street demonstrations and involved in a number of

occupations. As anarchists, we are opposed to war, militarism and

imperialism, and see a powerful movement against these forces as a vital

part of internationalism in action and the process of building the

confidence necessary for a social movement against the state and

capitalism.

However, we were unimpressed by the way in which support for the

‘Palestinian resistance’ — in other words Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa

Martyrs brigade and the other proto-state forces in the region — became

mixed in with the legitimate revulsion felt as the bombs and shells fell

onto the heads of ordinary Gazans. These groups — which called on

ordinary Palestinians to ‘martyr’ themselves for the nation — have a

clear history of repressing workers’ struggles at gunpoint, oppressing

women, gays and lesbians, and spreading the virulently reactionary

doctrines of nationalism and Islamism. As the war ground on, they showed

their true colours by attempting to indiscriminately kill Israelis,

settling scores with their rivals through summary executions, and making

political capital out of refugees by preventing them from accessing

medical aid over the border.[2] As ordinary Palestinians fled in droves,

ignoring the calls from militant groups and their Western cheerleaders

to throw themselves upon the pyre and join the ‘resistance’, the true

face of that ‘resistance’ became apparent.

As anarchist communists, we have always opposed nationalism, and have

always marked our distance from the left through vocally opposing all

nationalism — including that of ‘oppressed nations’. While we oppose

oppression, exploitation and dispossession on national grounds, and

oppose imperialism and imperialist warfare, we refuse to fall into the

trap so common on the left of identifying with the underdog side and

glorifying ‘the resistance’ — however ‘critically’ — which is readily

observable within Leninist/Trotskyist circles. We took this stance on

Northern Ireland in the past, and take it on Israel/Palestine today.

Therefore, in order to give context to the text that follows and show

our analysis in a practical context, we reproduce as appendices two

texts which AF groups circulated as leaflets during the campaign, and

which were utilised by other anarchist comrades in the UK, such as

locals of the anarcho-syndicalist Solidarity Federation and Organise! in

Northern Ireland. We hope that this text will circulate as widely as our

original leaflets did, which were translated into Spanish and Polish and

reproduced as far away as Central America, and open debate within the

wider anti-state communist movement.

September 2009

The nation and nationalism

Whenever we involve ourselves in everyday life, we find ourselves

defined in national terms. When we use our passports, when we apply for

a job, when we go to hospital or when we claim benefits, we come up

against our national status and the possibilities or handicaps that

follow. When we travel, turn on the television, open the paper or make

conversation, the categorisation of people into one of several hundred

varieties of human being looms in the background, often taking centre

stage. We are all assumed to belong to a national group, and even those

people who can claim multiple national identities are still assumed to

be defined by them. The division of the world’s population into distinct

nations and its governance accordingly is a given, and seems as

straightforward as anything occurring in nature. When we say, for

example, that we are British, Polish, Korean or Somalian we feel that we

are describing an important part of ourselves and how we relate to the

world around us, giving us commonality with some people and setting us

apart from others

Bureaucracy makes this intuition more solid. Nationality is its most

fundamental category — determining what rights and privileges we have

access to, whether we are inside or outside the community of citizenship

which nationalism presumes, and ultimately whether we are a valid,

‘legal’, person. When we come across bureaucracy, the various

definitions assigned to us by it loom large: gender, nationality and

race in particular. These things seem to be as obvious a part of

ourselves as eye colour or blood type, and more often than not go

unquestioned.

But despite appearing a fundamental attribute of ourselves and others,

the principle of nationality is also fundamentally problematic. On one

level, it defines itself. To a bureaucracy nationality just is. You have

the right passport, the right entitlements, or you don’t. However, as

with all social questions, we are dealing not with some ‘natural’ aspect

of the human condition, but with a form of social organisation which has

both an origin and a rationale. So we come up against the question,

‘what is a nation?’

Common sense seems to provide the usual answer: a ‘people’ share a

culture, a history, an origin, a community, a set of values, and,

usually, a language which make them a nation. People within the nation

share a commonality with one another which they lack with foreigners.

From this point of view, the world is made up of such nations; it always

has been and always will be. But the ideology of nationalism, regardless

of which ‘nation’ we are discussing, is a political one, describing the

relationship between ‘the people’ and the state. The nation-state is

seen as the outgrowth of the national community, its means of conducting

its business and the instrument of its collective will and wellbeing; at

the very least a one-on-one correspondence between nation and state is

seen as the usual, natural and desirable state of affairs, with any

international co-operation, business and organisation progressing from

this starting point . This rhetoric is assumed even in states which do

not bother to claim legitimacy through representative democracy.

But when we attempt to uncover the qualities which make some

collectivities of people a nation and others not, we encounter problems.

When we attempt to articulate what ‘Britishness’, ‘Gambianess’ or

‘Thainess’ might be about, we are in trouble. Nationalist partisans will

offer suggestions, but these are always fashionable banalities, whether

they are ‘honour’, ‘loyalty’, ‘liberty’, ‘fairness’, or whatever else is

current. A handful of iconic national institutions will be pointed to,

and a great many more ignored. Nationalisms on this level are unlike

political ideologies, there is no definite model for the organisation of

society, and there is no unity of principle or program; the unity

assumed is an arbitrary one.

There are no observable rules to clearly define what makes a national

‘people’, as opposed to other forms of commonality. The usual

prerequisites are a shared language and culture. But this shared,

culture is difficult to define, and we often find as much cultural

variation across populations within nations as between them. Two Han

Chinese are assumed to share a commonality as ‘Chinese’ and a natural

solidarity on this basis even if they speak mutually incomprehensible

‘dialects’. Likewise, understanding continuity between the historical

‘national culture’ and what actually exists requires some dubious

reasoning — for example, how is someone in Athens who speaks modern,

Attic-derived official Greek expressing the same culture which built the

Acropolis, (itself a Greek culture which lacked a Greek nation)? This

‘nation’ must often include many who do not meet its supposedly defining

attributes; regional, linguistic, cultural, religious and sometimes

‘national’ minorities. This fact that nation-states often exhibit as

much variation within their geographic bounds as across them is obvious

in many postcolonial African states or in Indonesia for instance, and

even in less exotic locales such as Switzerland.

Nonetheless, nationalists often reduce the question down to a narrative

of ‘human nature’, in which ‘peoples’ simply cannot mix without

conflict, making the natural state of affairs the ‘self-determination’

of nations through their sovereign states. Such thinking is usually

mired in the pseudo-science of race, making an appeal to historical

just-so stories and misplaced naturalistic myths. To assume that

‘peoples’ are defined by their antagonism to other ‘peoples’, but that

they are antagonistic because they are different ‘peoples’ is circular

thinking. There is still no clear reason why certain groups deserve

national status and others don’t. Antagonism between particular

metropolitan areas has a longer pedigree than supposed national

antagonism does, but the population of such areas are not assumed to

have access to national status on these grounds.

Moreover, there are countries, such as Madagascar, and areas, such as

large swathes of Latin America, where the ‘race’ of the population is a

mixed one. In Madagascar, the ‘Madagascan people’ is in fact a localised

mix of populations of African and Austronesian settlers. The same

applies to less exotic locations too. The ‘English people’ are a mix of

waves of conquest and settlement, their supposed ‘national culture’ even

more mongrelised than their genetic ‘race’.

Nationalism, then, is a strange thing that is everywhere, intuitively

‘common sense’ but impossible to precisely describe, a basic principle

of structuring the entire population of the world but a principle which

doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.

However, things weren’t always this way. For most of history people

didn’t have a particular nationality, or overlapping claims on them,

which defined their person in such fundamental but elusive ways, let

alone any nationalism to accompany it. Though ‘common sense’ tells us

that national divisions are a thing as old as humanity, the reality is

rather different. Nationalism is a creation of the modern world, and is

bound up with the development of a certain kind of society, which today

is worldwide and total in its reach — capitalism.

The origins of nationalism

Capitalism and the modern nation-state developed at the same time in the

same place, in Europe in the 16^(th) to 19^(th) centuries. The evolution

of the nation-state and capitalism were bound up, each catalysing the

development of the other. Capitalism took hold in a certain time and

place not by accident but because the conditions were right to breed it;

it required a fragmented arena of competing states with embedded

mercantilist interests (though they were not for a good time the

‘nations’ we’d recognise), and for that reason evolved in Europe rather

than in the Ottoman Empire, Manchu China or any of the other land

empires that dominated much of the world.

Like capitalism itself, the idea of the modern nation-state didn’t

appear from nowhere, but developed out of pre-existing conditions.

However, capitalism as a total economic system and the world of

sovereign nation-states are historical novelties, standing in contrast

to a long history of feudal and imperial state forms. The modern

nation-state is a product of the revolutions of the Eighteenth century

which marked the decline of the feudal period and the rise of capitalism

as a world system. But the phenomenon did not fall from the sky upon the

storming of the Bastille[3], it was nurtured and developed as capitalism

itself evolved and matured.

The technological innovations associated with the earliest developments

of capitalism laid the foundation for the subsequent evolution of

nationalism. The production and circulation of printed books was one of

the very earliest capitalist industries. Once the initial market of

Latin-speaking Europeans was glutted, the production of books in

localised languages oriented towards the small but growing literate

strata in Europe would have an important role in creating a language of

administration and high culture, and the foundations of what could be

claimed as a ‘national culture’ in later centuries — with significant

nation-building implications in the cases of what would become Germany

and Italy. The reformation[4] (its own success deeply associated with

that of the printing industry) combined with the rising power of the

merchant class in imperial states — whose own success at exchanging

commodities acted as a beachhead for the capitalist social relations in

Europe — would lead to the establishment of several states which were

neither dynastic monarchies nor city-states. They were not the

nation-states of developed capitalism, but were significant steps

towards them.

The merchants, traders and bankers which had previously operated at the

fringes of feudal economies played an increasingly central role as

European empires spread around the world. Their trade in the plunder of

the colonies — both riches and slaves — would make them vital to the

workings of their economies, and the progressive dominance of European

imperialism swelled their numbers, wealth, and political significance.

Their density in the Seventeen Provinces in the Low Countries would spur

the rebellion there, and the subsequent creation of the Dutch republic

in 1581 was a portent of what would follow. The commercial successes of

the merchants of the empires would lead to their influence redoubling

into the societies that launched them. In Britain the enclosure of

common land[5] , the development of industry under the pressures of

commerce and the outcompeting of small producers by industrial

capitalist pioneers would create a dispossessed working class with no

choice but to labour for private employers — in other words it would

lead to the establishment of capitalism proper. The industrial

capitalist would replace the merchant as the leading player of the

bourgeois class.

Concurrently, with the beginning of the end of the feudal world, and the

transition to a world centred on the interests of the ascendant

capitalist class, the state was redefined. The era of monarchs and

subjects was replaced by the era of ‘citizens’. A period of competing

dynasties gave way to the modern period of competing nations. Following

the revolutions in France and America, the liberal conception of the

state which laid the basis for nationalism solidified. It wasn’t

programmatic, and didn’t need to be, as it wasn’t conjured into reality

from the minds of intellectuals but from the needs of a developing class

society to create the conditions for its own perpetuation.

The idea was articulated in French Declaration of Rights[6] of 1795 as

follows:

“Each people is independent and sovereign, whatever the number of

individuals who compose it and the extent of the territory it occupies.

This sovereignty is inalienable”.

This understanding of the role of the state stood in contrast to the

absolutism of earlier periods. Now it was the ‘people’ who were

sovereign, not the person of the divinely ordained ruler. But during

this period there was no clear definition of what made a ‘people’. It

was circular, and relied on the territory and population of existing

states, as at this point there was little in the way of attempts to

define national citizenship or ‘peoples’ on linguistic, cultural or

racial grounds. It was nearly always a question of practicality. The

‘science’ and library on national definition would not explode until a

century later.

When attempts at definition did occur at this stage, such as during the

second half of the Eighteenth century, nations were understood on the

basis of their domination by specific states. The French Encyclopédie, a

work usually understood as encapsulating enlightenment thought prior to

the revolution and published in volumes in the 1750s and 60s, defined

nations in such a way. There was no assumption of ethnic, linguistic or

cultural homogeneity — to the enlightenment theorists, a nation was

nothing more than a great number of people defined by proper borders and

all subject to the same regime of law.

The revolution would build on this nation of subjects to create the

nation of citizens; the nation became those capable and willing of the

conditions of citizenship, expressed through the state. This

understanding is still preserved in the rhetoric — if not the practice —

of the nationalism of one of the nations created in the revolutions of

the late 1700s: Americans are those who sign up to ‘Americanism’ and

aspire to be Americans. For the bourgeois revolutionaries, the

theoretical community of ‘citizens’ — however it was defined —

represented the sovereignty of the common interest against the narrow

interests of the crown, though of course this was not the reality of the

class society they presided over.

The understanding of nationality in terms of ethnic, cultural and

linguistic distinctiveness came later, in the course of intellectual

debates about what made a nation, and what ‘nations’, however defined,

deserved expression through a nation-state. Once the principle of the

state as the expression of the sovereign ‘people’ was established, the

process of definition of ‘peoples’ intensified throughout the Nineteenth

Century. The political theorist John Stuart Mill mulled over the

criteria of common ethnicity, language, religion, territory and history.

But even as thinkers were debating where the ‘people’ came from, the

issue was mostly understood in terms of practicability. Which ‘peoples’

should make nations was a question of viability, and the nations which

were viable were often actually existing ones. Eligible new nations

needed the economic or cultural basis to make them sustainable, as was

the case with the creation of Italy and Germany in the second half of

the Nineteenth century. The difficult question of turning populations

into peoples, and peoples into nations only produced vague answers, but

largely relied on the size of the population, association with a prior

state, having a viable cultural elite (as with the Germans and Italians)

and most importantly, a history of expansion and warfare, which has the

virtue of creating an outside to unite against. Ireland was exceptional

in possessing a national movement of the kind that would appear later

much earlier on — indeed it would provide the archetypal model to

nationalisms manufactured in later years, such as those of the Indians

and Basques. However the viability of this movement was regularly

dismissed on practical grounds.

Nonetheless most of the ‘peoples’ who would come to form ‘nations’ later

on still did not see themselves in national terms, and did not see a

moral aberration in rule by elites who spoke a different language, for

the main reason that there were no unified national languages in a world

of local dialects and widespread illiteracy. Even the role of the

‘official’ languages had little in common with the status of modern

national languages. They were the product of expediency, and had nothing

to do with any ‘national consciousness’. This had been the case for some

time. In England, for instance, the elite language progressed from

Anglo-Saxon, to Latin, to Norman, to the hybrid product of Norman French

and Anglo-Saxon that was early English. The language spoken by elites

remained an irrelevance to an illiterate subject population. Even in

later periods the picture was the same — in 1789 only 12% of the French

population spoke ‘proper’ French, with half speaking no form of French

at all. Though a shared Italian-speaking elite culture was essential to

the formation of an Italian state in the Nineteenth Century, the Italian

language was only spoken by about 2.5% of ‘Italians’ on unification; the

population at large spoke a variety of dialects which were often

mutually incomprehensible.

There had been occasional and limited attempts at telling national

origin stories in earlier centuries — such as the stories circulating in

Sixteenth century France about the descent of the French (i.e. its

elite) from the Franks and from Troy. However, these were limited to

small literate circles and functioned to rationalise royal and/or

aristocratic rights, rights which were defended much more frequently,

effectively and popularly by claims to divine orders or to Roman

precedent. These stories were the consequence of a small literate elite

sharing the same language and institutional privileges communicating

with each other, a starting point for the nationalism of later

centuries. They in no way indicated a modern, popular ‘national

consciousness’. They lacked the popular motive force of nationalism, the

understanding that the state should express the wellbeing of the nation

as a whole, and the constitution of this nation on a popular level. When

the old dynasties attempted to reconcile themselves with modern

nationalism in the age of its dominance they did so at their own peril:

Kaiser Wilhelm II, though increasingly marginalised during the First

World War, positioned himself as the nation’s leading German, therefore

implying some form of responsibility to the German people and national

interest — and thus the conclusion that he had failed in this

responsibility, the very conclusion which led to his abdication. Such

ideas would have been unthinkable in earlier years where the right of

the Kaiser was inviolable and accountable to no-one.

As the Nineteenth century progressed, so too did the idea that all

peoples had a right to self-determination, irrespective of questions of

viability. The Italian Nationalist and philosopher Giuseppe Mazzini

would pose the formula ‘every nation a state, and only one state for

each nation’ to resolve ‘the national question’. This way of thinking

consolidated towards the end of the century, at the same time that

nationalism had gained a common currency amongst the masses. The

proliferation of nationalist and ‘national liberation’ movements in the

late 1800s is striking — the birth of Zionism alongside Indian,

Armenian, Macedonian, Georgian, Belgian, Catalan movements, along with

many others occurred in this period, though whether these specific

movements had any traction among the wider population is another matter.

Though in earlier periods there had been some ethnic or linguistic

groups which understood themselves as in some way distinct from their

neighbours, the translation of this into the need to have a nation-state

of each and every grouping was a new phenomenon. And even prior to this,

the ‘commonality’ which was used to define the nation, however it was

understood, was something produced by the modern period — modern

printing, education, transport and communications led to the erosion of

local linguistic variation and a public culture which would allow for

the idea of the nation to take hold. This wouldn’t have been possible in

earlier periods where this infrastructure for breaking down cultures

which could be specific from one village to the next didn’t exist. The

national language, often a prerequisite for functioning nationalism, was

a contemporary invention, requiring increased literacy, circulation of

people and the erosion of parochial, feudal social relations, as we have

seen. Contrary to the fantasies of nationalists, who see the shared

language as the basic bond on which the nation-state is based, a common

national language was the creation of the developing modern state.

By the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, the idea that each

‘people’ had a moral right to their own nation-state was solidly

established. The concerns about viability which defined earlier debates

had disappeared. It was now a right of ‘peoples’, defined in whichever

way, to a state of their own. To be ruled by another nation or its

representatives was abhorrent (in theory at least — imperialism had its

own logic). It was during this period that the ethnic and linguistic

definition of the ‘nation’ came to dominance over earlier forms. The

competing imperialist nation-states of contemporary capitalism were

fully-formed, and movements advocating resistance to and secession from

them understood their activity and ultimate aims in terms of creating

new nation-states.

The development of modern nationalism was bound up with the fact that

the modern capitalist state, with an exploited population educated to a

higher level than its feudal predecessors, required more from its

citizens than the passive peasantry of earlier periods. It required a

socially unifying force, and to integrate the working class into the

state regime — it needed the active allegiance of the population, rather

than the immiserated passivity of the peasants. The invention of

patriotism filled this need. A consciousness of and allegiance to the

‘fatherland’ or ‘motherland’ was developed became commonplace through

the European nation-states of the final third of the Nineteenth century.

The development of the term ‘patriotism’ tells us all we need to know.

The ‘Patrie’, the ‘homeland’ which forms the basis of the term, was

defined prior to the French revolution as simply being a local area of

origin, without national implications. By the late Nineteenth century,

it was the imagined community of the nation, which demanded mass

participation. Combined with the new pseudoscience of race, which had

become so important in replacing paganism as the justification for

imperial dispossession of various local populations, the ideology of

national supremacy was born.

This principle reached its apogee in the First World War and the period

following it. Late nineteenth century jingoism was transformed into an

ideology of total war, of mechanised slaughter between militarised

national blocs. Every aspect of life was subsumed under the ‘national

interest’; internal disputes had to be suspended for the sake of the

nation’s supremacy and — given every combatant state claimed the war was

a defensive one — survival. Following the end of this capitalist

bloodbath, the European map was redrawn on national lines. An attempt

was made to put the ideal of ‘every nation a state’ into practice, and

the ‘Wilsonian idealism’[7] of ‘national self-determination’ was made a

geopolitical reality. The break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into

new nation-states was an attempt to solve the problem of ‘oppressed

nations’. It didn’t work, for reasons which are integral to nationalism

— these new states were not homogenous, and were themselves were full of

new minorities.

The principle of ‘self-determination’ of ‘peoples’ once accepted, has no

end, hence the rapid diffusion of antagonistic minority nationalisms

throughout the world, with few countries untouched by them. The

fundamental principle of nationalism is that national collectives of

human beings have a right to self-determination in and through ‘their’

nation, but when it comes down to it, it is impossible to define exactly

which groups of people are ‘nations’ and which aren’t, and there are

always smaller and smaller groups claiming this mantle.

Nationalism, then, is something with a very real history and origin. Its

power lies in the way it is presented as a natural state of things, and

the assumption that national divisions and national determination are a

natural part of human life, always have been and always will be.

Anarchists take a very different view. The same period of history which

created the nation-state and capitalism also created something left out

of nationalist accounts — the dispossessed class of wage-workers whose

interests stand in opposition to those of the capitalist nation state:

the working class. This class which is obliged to fight in their

interests against capital are not a ‘people’, but a condition of

existence within capitalism, and as such transcend national borders.

This antagonism led to the development of revolutionary perspectives

challenging the world of capitalism, and posing a different world

entirely. Our perspective, anarchist communism, is one of these.

Why do anarchists oppose nationalism?

Anarchists in the class struggle (or communist) tradition, such as the

anarchist federation, do not see the world in terms of competing

national peoples, but in terms of class. We do not see a world of

nations in struggle, but of classes in struggle. The nation is a

smokescreen, a fantasy which hides the struggle between classes which

exists within and across them. Though there are no real nations, there

are real classes with their own interests, and these classes must be

differentiated. Consequently, there is no single ‘people’ within the

‘nation’, and there is no shared ‘national interest’ which unifies them.

Anarchist communists do not simply oppose nationalism because it is

bound up in racism and parochial bigotry. It undoubtedly fosters these

things, and mobilised them through history. Organising against them is a

key part of anarchist politics. But nationalism does not require them to

function. Nationalism can be liberal, cosmopolitan and tolerant,

defining the ‘common interest’ of ‘the people’ in ways which do not

require a single ‘race’. Even the most extreme nationalist ideologies,

such as fascism, can co-exist with the acceptance of a multiracial

society, as was the case with the Brazilian Integralist movement[8].

Nationalism uses what works — it utilises whatever superficial attribute

is effective to bind society together behind it. In some cases it

utilises crude racism, in other cases it is more sophisticated. It

manipulates what is in place to its own ends. In many western countries,

official multiculturalism is a key part of civic policy and a

corresponding multicultural nationalism has developed alongside it. The

shared ‘national culture’ comes to be official multiculturalism itself,

allowing for the integration of ‘citizens’ into the state without

recourse to crude monoculturalism. If the nationalist rhetoric of the

capitalist state was of the most open, tolerant and anti-racist kind,

anarchists would still oppose it.

This is because, at heart, nationalism is an ideology of class

collaboration. It functions to create an imagined community of shared

interests and in doing so to hide the real, material interests of the

classes which comprise the population. The ‘national interest’ is a

weapon against the working class, and an attempt to rally the ruled

behind the interests of their rulers. The ideological and sometimes

physical mobilisation of the population on a mass scale in the name of

some shared and central national trait have marked the wars of the

Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries — the bloodbath in Iraq

rationalised in the name of Western democratic culture and the

strengthening of the domestic state in the name of defending the British

or American traditions of freedom and democracy against Islamic terror

are recent examples.

Ultimately, the anarchist opposition to nationalism follows a simple

principle. The working class and the employing class have nothing in

common. This is not just a slogan, but the reality of the world we live

in. Class antagonism is an inherent part of capitalism, and will exist

irrespective of whether intellectuals and political groups theorise

about its existence or non-existence. Class is not about your accent,

your consumption habits, or whether your collar is blue or white. The

working class — what is sometimes called the proletariat — is the

dispossessed class, the class who have no capital, no control over the

overall conditions of their lives and nothing to live off but their

ability to work for a wage. They may well have a house and a car, but

they still need to sell their ability to work to an employer in return

for the money they need to live on. Their interests are specific,

objective and material: to get more money from their employers for less

work, and to get better living and working conditions. The interests of

capital are directly opposed: to get more work out of us for less, and

to cut corners and costs, in order to return a higher rate of profit and

allow their money to become more money more quickly and efficiently.

Class struggle is the competition between these interests. Even

non-productive workplaces are shaped by these rules, as they are the

fundamental principles of capitalist society. The interests of capital

are expressed through those with power, who are likewise obliged to

maintain these interests in order to keep their own power — owners of

private capital, the bosses who make decisions on its behalf, and the

state which is required to enshrine and defend private property and

ownership rights.

The ‘national interest’ is simply the interest of capital within the

country in question. It is the interest of the owners of society, who in

turn can only express the fundamental needs of capital — accumulate or

die. At home, its function is to domesticate those within a society who

can pose antagonism with it — the working class. This antagonism, which

is inherent to capitalism, is one which anarchists see as being capable

of moving beyond capitalism. We have to struggle in our interests to get

the things we need as concessions from capital. This dynamic takes place

regardless of whether elaborate theories are constructed around it.

Workers in China or Bangladesh occupying factories and rioting against

the forces of the state are not necessarily doing it because they have

encountered revolutionary theory, but because the conditions of their

lives mean they have to. Similarly class solidarity exists not because

people are charitable but because solidarity is in their interests. The

capitalists have the state — the law, the courts and prisons. We only

have each other. Alone we can achieve very little, but together we can

cause disruption to the everyday functioning of capitalism, a powerful

weapon. Of course, class struggles are rarely pure and unsullied things,

and they can be overlaid with bigotries and factional interests of

various kinds. It is the job of revolutionary groups and anarchist

organisation in the workplace to combat these tendencies, to contribute

to the development of class consciousness and militancy and to

complement the process by which divisions are challenged through joint

struggle which takes place within struggles of significant magnitude.

The ruling class are fully aware of these issues, and are conscious in

acting in their interests. Solidarity is the only thing we can hold over

their heads, and for that reason the state takes great care to get us to

act against our own interests. Nationalism is one of their greatest

weapons in this regard, and has consequently served an important

historical purpose. It lines us up behind our enemies, and demands we

ignore our own interests as members of the working class in deference to

those of the nation. It leads to the domestication of the working class,

leading working class people to identify themselves in and through the

nation and to see solutions to the problems they face in terms of it.

This is not terminal as we already know; circumstances can force people

to act in their interests, and through this process ideas develop and

change. To take a dramatic example from history, workers across the

world marched off to war to butcher one another in 1914, only to take up

arms against their masters in an international wave of strikes,

mutinies, uprisings and revolutions from 1917 onwards.

Nonetheless, nationalism is a poison to be resisted tooth and nail. It

is an ideology of domestication.

It is a weapon against us. It is an organised parochialism, designed to

split the working class — which as a position within the economic system

is international — along national lines.

Ultimately, even if we lay aside our principled and theoretical

opposition to nationalism, the idea of any kind of meaningful national

self-determination in the modern world is idealism. Nations cannot

self-determine when subject to a world capitalist market, and those who

frame their politics in terms of regaining national sovereignty against

world capitalism, such as contemporary fascists and their fellow

travellers, seek an unattainable golden age before modern capitalism.

The modern world is an integrated one, one where international

‘cooperation’ and conflict cannot be readily separated, and which are

expressed through international institutions and organisations like the

UN, WTO, World Bank, EU, NATO, and so on. The nationalist fantasy is an

empty one as much as it is a reactionary one. Anarchists recognise as

much in their opposition. We will return to this point later.

Before we go further, it is necessary to preempt a common and fallacious

‘criticism’. We do not stand for monoculture. We do not seek to see the

rich diversity of human cultural expression standardised in an anarchist

society. How could we? The natural mixing of culture stands against the

fantasies of nationalists. National blocs are never impervious to

cultural influence, and culture spreads and mingles with time. The idea

of self-contained national cultures, which nationalists are partisans

of, is a myth. Against this we pose the free interchange of cultural

expression in a free, stateless communist society as a natural

consequence of the struggle against the state and capitalism.

The anarchist communist opposition to nationalism must be vocal and

clear. We do not fudge internationalism. Internationalism does not mean

the co-operation of capitalist nations, or national working classes, but

[i]the fundamental critique of the idea of the nation and nationality.

The left and the ‘national question’

The contemporary sight of leftist groups supporting reactionary

organisations and states is something frequently criticised by a number

of voices for a number of reasons. The revulsion at the sight of

self-proclaimed socialists cheerleading organisations like Hamas,

chanting “we are all Hezbollah” at ‘anti-war’ demonstrations, and

supporting regimes which repress workers’ struggles, imprison and

execute working class activists, oppress women and persecute gays and

lesbians is entirely justified. But the manner of thinking which allows

for this to happen has a long pedigree. The way in which Marxist

movements accommodated to nationalism, and in many cases functioned as

the midwives of nationalist movements and nation-states every bit as

objectionable as their western counterparts is the foundation of

contemporary ‘anti-imperialist’ nationalism, and understanding the

relationship between the workers’ movement and nationalism is vital to

understanding modern ‘wars of national liberation’ and the response to

them.

Marx himself, as on so many questions, did not provide any one clear

position which we can accurately attribute as categorically ‘his’. The

Communist Manifesto, despite comprising a patently non-communist

program, concluded with the famous call, ‘workers of the world, unite!’,

expressing the internationalist opposition to the domestication of the

working class by nationalism. At the same time, Marx and Engels shared

the standard liberal-nationalist view of the time that the principle of

nation-building was consolidation, not disintegration. Engels famously

remarked that he did not see the Czechs surviving as an independent

people for this reason. For some time Marx and Engels supported the

‘national liberation’ of Poland (and consequently a movement for

independence led by aristocrats) for strategic reasons — striking a blow

against autocratic Russia and, in their view, defending capitalist

development and therefore the preconditions for socialism in Western

Europe. His attitude to Ireland was marked by similar tactical

considerations. Discussing the rights and wrongs of this approach in a

period of developed world capitalism is academic, and beyond the remit

of this pamphlet. But it is clear that in many ways Marx was reflecting

the widespread views of the early to mid 19^(th) century liberal

nationalism as it has been outlined above.

The leftist demand for national self-determination as a right was

current at the same time it became so more generally and debates over

the ‘national question’ animated the second international, with the

conflict on the question between Lenin and the Polish-born Marxist Rosa

Luxembourg becoming notorious. Lenin’s positions were typically

contradictory, though in the main he argued on similar grounds to Marx

on the matter — national liberation should be supported in as far as it

advanced the development of the working class cause and the

preconditions for socialism. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks were vocal in

their support of ‘the right of nations to self-determination’, following

the passing of a resolution by the second international supporting the

‘complete right of all nations to self-determination’.

This view was opposed by Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg recognised that the

matter of ‘national independence’ was a question of force, not ‘rights’.

For her, the discussion of the ‘rights’ of ‘self-determination’ was

utopian, idealist and metaphysical; its reference point was the not the

material opposition of classes but the world of bourgeois nationalist

myths. She was particularly vocal on this point when arguing against the

Polish socialists, who used Marx’s earlier (tactical) position as a

permanent blessing for their own nationalism.

Nonetheless, it was the Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia, leading

the counter-revolution in that country. Following the civil war, their

support for the ‘right of nations to self-determination’ led to some

curious experiments in ‘nation-building’ which stood in parallel with

the efforts of Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty in Europe a few

years previously.[9] The creation of ‘national administrative units’ for

various non-Russian ‘nations’ within the newly proclaimed USSR was a

result of the assumptions of Soviet bureaucrats, not due to some will to

nationhood of the Uzbeks, Turkmen and Kazakhs. Of course, with the

crushing of the Russian revolution by the state-capitalist regime under

the control of the Bolsheviks, who systematically destroyed or co-opted

both the organs of self-management the working class had developed for

themselves and the revolutionaries who defended them (such as the

anarchists), the question was rendered null, as the Bolsheviks’ sole

consideration was their own power. Like its Western rival, the USSR used

the rhetoric of ‘self-determination’ and ‘independence’ to expand its

own sphere of dominance.

Still, the principle that nations had an inherent right to

self-determination against ‘national oppression’ had gained a

commonsensical dominance amongst the workers’ movement, as it had

amongst the wider population.

National Liberation Struggles

Following their consolidation of power during the civil war, Bolshevik

policy swiftly took on the nationalist character that could be expected.

In 1920, the Bolsheviks granted support to the bourgeois nationalist

movement in Turkey under Kemal Pasha for the blow its victory would

strike to British imperialism. This was the first stage in the use of

support for ‘anti-imperialist’ ‘national liberation struggles’ as

Bolshevik geopolitical strategy. For the working class in Turkey, it was

disastrous, resulting in the vigorous crushing of strikes and

demonstrations by the new Turkish republic. Similarly the Kuomintang —

the Chinese nationalist movement — were extended Soviet support, leading

to the slaughter of insurrectionary workers in Shanghai. The new ruling

class in Russia extended their support to such anti-working class forces

in the name of defending the revolution. Some of these forces would

paint their nationalist state-capitalism in the colours of communism,

but nonetheless represented movements to establish a viable nation-state

with an exploited working class and a commodity producing (state-)

capitalist economy.

The influence of this development on the left throughout the world was

profound, compounding the place of support for ‘national liberation

struggle’ as a basic part of the ‘common sense’ of the workers’

movement. This did not just apply to the various breeds of

state-socialists — the Trotskyists, Maoists and Stalinists, but also had

its effect on some anarchists.

For the Stalinists, whose politics in any case had nationalism in its

blood, ‘national liberation struggles’ were seen to undermine US

machinations, to the benefit of the USSR — which supported such

struggles materially or politically in pursuance of its own imperialist

objectives. For the Maoists and those influenced by the Cuban

revolution, smashing western imperialism through national liberation was

necessary to allow the peasant-worker movements of those countries to

rapidly develop their economies to (in their claims) the benefit of the

population. For the Trotskyists, various historical schemes were

developed explaining why imperialism was, as described by Lenin, the

highest form of capitalism, and why the defeat of imperialism by

national liberation forces was in the interests of the socialist cause.

This was joined and compounded by the wave of Third-Worldism in the

1960s which was in many ways a reflection on the failure of the unrest

of that period to materialise into a revolutionary movement, happening

as it did at the same time as the decomposition of Western colonialism.

Building on the ground laid by Lenin’s writings, the Western working

class was seen as dominated by a ‘labour aristocracy’ based on the

extraction of wealth from the victims of imperialism, and the hope for

socialism lay with the ‘self-determination’ of non-Western peoples. The

relativistic support of exotic movements for their opposition to

‘imperialism’, reduced down to US imperialism, continues to this day,

and can be seen in the enthusiasm of Western leftists for reactionary

Islamists.

This view is of course fallacious and reactionary, placing national

antagonism before class antagonism. But in the post-war period, the

international, postcolonial left had an effective monopoly over national

liberation movements. Stalinism had long since accommodated itself to

flag-waving nationalism, in many instances being indistinguishable in

its rhetoric from fascism proper. The left had taken a leading role in

the anti-fascist resistance movements in Europe during the war, allowing

for these groups to claim the nationalist mantle upon liberation and to

act as the leading representatives of the liberated ‘will’ of the

nation. A striking example is the leading role in the Greek resistance

during the second world war of the Stalinist and patriotic EAM-ELAS ,

who were not above publicly decapitating anarchist militants and

murdering rivals in the resistance and workers’ movements[10]. In the

post-war period, this consolidation of leftism with patriotism

determined the left character of various colonial national liberation

movements, making nationalism a key component of the left

internationally, and the left the midwife of nationalist movements

around the world.

Unfortunately, anarchists are not impervious to such views. Many

anarchists have managed to defend struggles for ‘national liberation’ —

that is, struggles for one form of the state against another — in terms

of the struggle against oppression, the basic currency of anarchist

politics. By their reasoning, as anarchists oppose the various

oppressions of the contemporary world; the exploitation of the working

class, the oppression of women and sexual and ethnic minorities, we must

also oppose the oppression of one nation by another. There is some basis

for this in the classical anarchist tradition, such as in Bakunin’s

notorious statement: “every nationality, great or small, has the

incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature.

This right is simply the corollary of the general principal of freedom”.

More recently, Murray Bookchin claimed in Society and Nature that “no

left libertarian ... can oppose the right of a subjugated people to

establish itself as an autonomous entity — be it in a confederation ...

or as a nation-state based in hierarchical and class inequities.”

Similarly, leftists often conflate opposition to imperialist war with

support for national liberation, or at least muddy the waters of

conversation enough to make the confusion inevitable. This is to turn

the justified horror felt against such wars on its head, and to move

from a position against war to a position for war — as waged by the

underdog side. History is replete with examples, from some anti-Vietnam

war protestors chanting the name of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh

to some leftists proclaiming ‘we are all Hezbollah now’ during the

protests against the bombing of Lebanon by the Israeli state.

This support of the underdog state or state in waiting must be opposed.

There is no essence of national resistance, no essential oppressed

national spirit which is being channelled by the national liberation

forces. They are real organised forces with their own aims and goals —

to set up a particular form of exploiting state, with particular

factions in control of it. The nation is not something primordial to be

repressed, but a narrative constructed by the capitalist state in the

course of its development. Though the imperial structure comes to be

part of the apparatus of exploitation over the working class in the

territory affected, the rearrangement of this exploiting apparatus in

favour of a ‘native’ state is a reactionary goal. As we have seen, the

logic of nationalism is an inherently reactionary one, in that it

functions to binds together classes into one national collectivity.

Moreover, simply in practical terms, the principle of nationalism has no

end; the new, ‘independent’ states always contain minorities whose own

‘national self-determination’ is denied. Secondly, the forms of

exploitation set up by ‘native’ rulers after struggles of national

liberation are in concrete terms in no way preferable to the methods of

the ‘foreigners’. Workers in North Korea are oppressed by a native

‘communist’ state comparable in brutality to the European fascist

dictatorships of the 20^(th) century, workers in Vietnam are exploited

by an capitalist export-led economy, workers in Zimbabwe, free of

British imperialism, are now preyed on by a gangsterish ‘native’ regime.

Many more examples are not difficult to find. All these countries

experience class struggle of a greater or lesser intensity. Class

struggle is part of the fabric of capitalism, including despotic

state-capitalism of the Bolshevik model, and this will be the case

irrespective of whether the ruling class faced at any particular time

are drawn from ‘native’ ranks or not.

Moreover, these ‘liberated’ states, once freed from the national

oppression of Western colonialism, have proven to be fully capable of

launching brutal wars of their own. The case of Vietnam is instructive.

Immediately after re-unification in 1976, which came following the

withdrawal of US troops in 1973, Vietnam was embroiled in a series of

wars across the Indochinese subcontinent. This started with a brutal

territorial war with the Khmer Rouge, who had come to power following

the savage US bombing of Cambodia, resulting in the occupation of that

country by Vietnamese troops. This led to Vietnam’s domination of the

region, supported by Soviet imperialism. Laos was effectively a client

state of Vietnam, which maintained military bases in the country and

forced the Lao government to cut its ties with China. In 1979, as a

consequence of Vietnam’s war with its Cambodian client, and various

border incidents and conflicting territorial claims, China invaded the

country, leading to tens of thousands of deaths and the devastation of

Northern Vietnam.

The ‘liberation’ of nations from the yoke of imperialism has led to

further cycles of war in other parts of the world, with many 20^(th)

century national movements being directed against new, post-colonial

states rather than Western powers. Sri Lanka is an example of the

lingering scars of Western imperialism conjoining with the power plays

of communalist ruling classes, leading to a downward spiral of war and

ethnic-nationalist violence as competing national movements throw

‘their’ working classes into conflict with one another.

The British imperial administration in Sri Lanka instituted a system of

communalist representation on the Island’s legislative council from the

mid-19^(th) century, establishing antagonism between the minority Tamils

and majority Sinhalese which continues to this day. After the

introduction of universal suffrage, and eventually the granting of

independence after WW2, the access of Tamils — who before this point had

been over-represented in government — to privileged positions was

squeezed, deepening separatist sentiment alongside increasing

discrimination against the Tamil minority. The colonisation of

Tamil-speaking areas by the Sinhala government, the establishment of

Sinhalese as the official language, and the banning of Tamil books,

newspapers and magazines imported from Indian Tamil regions all lay the

foundations for the rise of Tamil militant groups and the Sri Lankan

civil war.

The growth in size of militant groups such as the notorious Liberation

Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was fuelled by the real grievances faced by

Tamils, especially after the Black July pogroms in 1983 in which

hundreds of Tamils were massacred. However, the idea that the LTTE is

the guardian of Tamil national self-defence fades when it is remembered

that among their earliest targets were rival Tamil nationalist and

Communist groups, such as Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation, which was

effectively wiped out by the LTTE in 1986. After the LTTE became the de

facto government in a number of Tamil areas, it turned on the new

minorities — Sri Lankan Muslims, who were ethnically cleansed from the

region through evictions, intimidations and eventually massacres,

including the machine-gunning of men, women and children who had been

locked inside a mosque. Significant numbers of Sinhalese workers who

remained in LTTE-controlled areas suffered similar fates. Nationalism,

even that of ‘oppressed nations’ offers nothing but further rounds of

violence and conflict, the division of the working class on national

lines, and their sacrifice to the ‘national interest’, whether that of

the existing state or those of states in waiting.

The absence of Western imperialism does not bring peace, and national

liberation does not lead to self-determination, an impossibility in the

capitalist world. This is due to the very nature of the nation-state,

which is imperialist by nature.

All nation-states are imperialist

‘Imperialism’ has a long history, with its forms and varieties

stretching back as far as the forms and varieties of the state and class

society. As the word describes many different projects by many different

states in various periods, we have to clarify what it means in the

context of advanced capitalist society. The Roman Empire was different

to the British Empire; contemporary imperialism is different still. This

does not mean imperialism isn’t something we can identify. Still, we

have to define more precisely the phenomenon we are describing.

The power of the classical empires of the ancient world stemmed from the

conquest of land and the mobilisation of its resources. The continuity

between state control of land and Imperial power made their imperialism

the archetype; its most basic and transparent form.

The ‘foreign policy’ of contemporary capitalist nation states seems a

world away. But in the modern world, imperialism is as embedded in the

working of states as at any time in history. The functioning and nature

of imperialism changed along with the economic organisation of the

society it was part of. As the form of the state in an agrarian slave

society is different to that of a developed capitalist society, so too

is the imperialism of that state. But despite the multitude of changes

the world has since undergone, the state remains the actor of

contemporary imperialism. This may seem a strange comment in a world

where the leading powers are liberal democracies which send innumerable

functionaries to innumerable meetings, summits, forums and international

organisations. Nonetheless, imperialism is absolutely vital to the

functioning of capitalist societies, and its success is inseparable from

the success of leading powers.

The pressures of capitalism transformed the imperialism which preceded

and nurtured it. The wave of speculative investments which flooded out

of Europe from the 1850s as capital sought profitable investment led to

an intensification of imperialist activity, with states impelled to

protect and regulate the interests of capital within their national

bounds. This would intensify after the 1870s. The direct British

government of India after the mutiny put its interests in jeopardy is

one early example (previously it had been ruled by a British company),

and the ‘scramble for Africa’ from the 1880s to the First World War

represented the definitive transformation of the ‘informal Imperialism’

of earlier decades to a system of direct rule in which Imperialist

powers carved up the world between them.

As we know, this system broke apart following the Second World War and

during the period of decolonisation through the second half of the

Twentieth century. However, the essential dynamic by which states act to

the benefit of capital within the country in question by the

manipulation of geopolitical inequalities remains as an essential part

of the makeup of the capitalist world.

The state must act to further the interests of the capital — what is

often called the ‘business interests’ — of the country over which it has

jurisdiction. Within the country in question it nurtures capitalism, it

enshrines the property laws it requires in order to exist, it opens

spaces of accumulation for capital, it rescues capital from its own

destructive tendencies (sometimes against the protests of particular

capitalists) and manages class struggle through the combination of

coercion and co-option: it can and does smash strikes, but it also

grants unions a role in managing the workforce and thus creates a

pressure-valve for class struggle. The state is the ‘collective

capitalist’; it is the guarantor and underwriter of the capitalist

system.

This function also extends to ‘foreign policy’. The state negotiates

access for domestic companies to resources, investment, trading and

expansion abroad. The success of this process brings profits flowing

back into the country in question and by enriching its business and the

‘national economy’, the state secures the material basis of its own

power: it increases its own resources, wealth and ability to project

itself. It is therefore not simply a puppet of ‘corporate interests’,

but is an interested party in its own right.

At the same time the state must seek to avoid its own domination, it

must marshal its resources — military, diplomatic, cultural and economic

— to maintain its own international position. There is constant struggle

— whether at the roundtable with ‘international partners’ discussing

trade policy or at arms in international ‘hotspots’ and ‘flashpoints’ —

to ensure that the ‘national interest’ is advanced abroad and defended

at home. These interests are furthered by maintaining, defending and

manipulating inequalities which exist within capitalism across

geographical space. For example, these asymmetries are today often

expressed through phenomena such as regional monopolies, unequal

exchange, restricted capital flows, and the manipulation of monopoly

rents. Imperialism is about the mobilisation of these differences to the

benefit of the economy of the state in question — meaning the capital

within it. This is the normal functioning of the world economy, and is

visible for example in US mobilisation of the International Monetary

Fund and World Trade Organisation to the benefit of US financial

industries or in Chinese manoeuvres in sub-Saharan Africa. States must

participate in this system of constantly shifting balances of power

irrespective of intentions, as those unable to ward off or manage these

pressures will be totally dominated by them.

War comes to have an obvious function. Imperialist interventions can

occasionally be motivated by specific quantitative gains, such as the

exploitation of a specific resource. More often, however, the question

is one of geopolitical strategy and outflanking other power blocs in

order to maintain regional or international power. Resources are usually

seen in strategic terms, not in terms of simple exploitation. If

exploitation of Iraqi oil had been the US’ sole aim in the Persian Gulf,

it would have been far cheaper and easier to leave Saddam in power and

negotiate access. The question was one of militarily controlling this

strategic resource, hence the invasion of Iraq. Control of Middle

Eastern oil, which has a continued shelf-life beyond that of rival

reserves, would grant the US effective control over the world economy,

and specifically the economies of China, Russia, Japan and Europe, with

their rival financial and manufacturing industries.

Similarly, the occupation of Afghanistan had little to do with

exploiting particular resources, and everything to do with controlling a

strategic point in the Caucasus and projecting into the spheres of

influence of Russia and China. Afghanistan was occupied by the British

and Russians for similar strategic reasons. The war in Vietnam ran the

risk of damaging short — term capital accumulation, but nonetheless

formed part of a grander imperial strategy which stood to benefit the

interests of US capital by securing the leading global role of the US

and making the ‘free world’ safe for investment and exploitation.

However, when faced with these practices, leftists often draw

questionable conclusions. Following the logic of support for national

liberation struggles, and the need to discover a proxy to support,

leftists will often cheer-lead the regimes of states which are subject

to the machinations of Western Imperialism. However, ‘national

oppression’ has nothing to do with class struggle, and the support for

regimes which are active in the suppression of ‘their’ workers and the

persecution of minorities in the pursuit of ‘anti-imperialist’ politics

is completely reactionary. It also fails to understand imperialism,

which is a consequence of a world capitalist system. States and national

capitals which have an uneven relationship with larger powers will also

have different asymmetric relations with other powers. The ‘victims’ of

Western Imperialism have their own agendas, and imperialist policies of

their own. Iran and Venezuela, for instance, certainly do; Venezuela in

advancing its interest by expanding its sphere of influence around Latin

America, and Iran in doing the same in Iraq, Lebanon, Africa and

elsewhere.

Imperialism does not simply emanate from a handful of big powers,

oppressing smaller countries and extending their reach across the world.

Undoubtedly there are imperialist policies that are much more successful

than others. But the nation-state has imperialism in its very blood.

Even if a state wished to stay ‘civilised’ and avoid the dynamics of

imperialist competition and conflict, it would be forced to defend

itself against attempts to prey on this weakness by other powers, using

methods of greater or lesser directness. As a result, states with less

capacity to project themselves align with those with more, using a logic

that a child could understand.

After nationalism

A common question remains however. If anarchists do not line up

alongside the left in supporting national liberation struggles, and in

demanding national self-determination, what is it that we support? What

is our alternative?

On one level, the question itself should be rejected. There are many

things we do not support on principle, and are never required to offer

an alternative to. Refusing to support something actively reactionary in

its aims is preferable to ‘doing something’ which stands against our

fundamental principles. Nationalism can offer nothing except further

rounds of conflict, which look set to increase in number and severity as

national competition over the world’s dwindling energy resources

increases. When conflict is framed in national terms — understood as the

conflict between an oppressed and an oppressor nation — the working

class necessarily loses out.

Internationalists are familiar with the hysterical response with which

interventions can be met. To many, ‘Resistance’ to Imperialist

warmongering is beyond question and criticism — antagonists to specific

imperialist projects cease to have agency, aims or objectives as the

capitalist faction they are; they are simply ‘the resistance’ and as

such are beyond criticism. Leftist support for the ‘Palestinian

resistance’, for instance, follows such a logic — it extends even to

groups such as Hamas, which repress workers’ struggles, break up pickets

at gun point, oppress women and brutalise and kill gays and lesbians.

But all this is forgotten once Hamas are subsumed into ‘the resistance’,

and to criticise ‘the resistance’ is beyond the pale. To bring a class

perspective to the issue, to publicise the fact that the forces of

national liberation act exactly like the capitalist forces they are and

defend the interests of capitalism, the state or the state in waiting

against any independent working class struggles, or even the threat of

them, is tantamount to siding with imperialism. Refusing to side with

one faction by this logic is effectively the same as siding with the

other.

The problem is that the tendency to see the world in national rather

than class terms is deeply engrained in the psychology of the left, as

much as it is in wider society. Though leftists may be capable of

criticising nationalism in their own back yard, they are incapable of

doing it when faced with exotic foreign movements.

This reflects the powerlessness of the left. When faced with brutal war

and the slaughter of populations in distant parts of the world, a proxy

is sought in response to their own lack of agency. Supporting the

underdog side — the ‘resistance’ — forms a substitute.

However, when faced with wars in other parts of the world, we must face

the reality that there is little we can do to stop this or that

particular war. Boycotts of the goods of one of the antagonist nations

(for example in the repeated calls for the boycotting of Israeli goods)

have little effect, despite the positive feelings that ‘doing something’

might entail. Class struggle, in the arena of war and in the antagonist

nations is the only strategy we can support if we seek a world without

wars — of national liberation or otherwise.

Struggling from a class position — advancing the material interests of

the working class, rather than fighting on the terrain of nationalism,

is what stands to break free of the binds of nationalism. All national

forces share an interest in preventing independent workers movements,

and ‘national liberation’ forces share a history of suppressing

independent workers action — the IRA for example acted to maintain

cross-class unity behind Irish republicanism by breaking strikes during

the class struggles of the 1920s. More recently Hamas has broken up

strikes by teachers and government employees. Nationalism is to be

opposed because it binds workers together behind it; class struggles are

supported because they pose the possibility of severing this bind, and

the risk of this severance strikes terror into nationalist movements.

The principle of taking a class line, rather than a national line, must

also inform our politics in the countries we reside in. Nationalism is a

powerful force, and it holds a strong influence over the working class

around the world. In Britain, where identity and communalism are

constantly marketed and mobilised in official discourse, the need to

belong to a people, community or cultural group fills a powerful

function, and offers dispossessed, powerless people something important

to belong to, something above and beyond the dreary monotony of daily

life. Nationalism is packaged and sold as another commodity, it is a

spectacle of participation in a society that is defined the separation

between our needs and desires and the reasons for our day-to-day

activity. The idea of being part of a community, having a heritage to

claim and something above and beyond immediate reality to take pride in

is very powerful.

As a result, nationalism can overlay and distort class struggles;

material struggles can become struggles in the defence of the national

interest, struggles for the reorganisation of the nation through the

application of a different form of government and against other sections

of the working class defined on national, racial or sectarian grounds.

There are plenty of historical examples of racist strikes against black

workers, against immigrants or to other reactionary ends, from dock

workers striking in defence of Enoch Powell to the loyalist Ulster

workers’ council strike against power-sharing in Northern Ireland.

Even day to day struggles can be infused with nationalism, through the

deployment of nationalist myths in discourse, and through the

nationalism of the unions. The appearance of national flags at

demonstrations, pickets and rallies around the world is not uncommon.

However, consciousness develops in the course of struggle. Revolutionary

consciousness does not gain a leading position in society as a result of

the conversion of the entire population to anarchist positions — it does

not come about as a result of winning the ‘war of ideas’ in the arena of

democratic debate. Propaganda is useful and necessary, but its purpose

is to build political minorities which can join in struggles, winning

respect for anarchist ideas and applying them in practice. Revolutionary

consciousness comes about as a result of mass struggle, and class

struggle is immanent to capitalism.

It is through mass struggle that consciousness develops. Under

capitalism, ‘pure’ struggles rarely exist. It is through struggle in the

defence of material working class interests, related to material demands

— more pay, less hours, access to services, eventually against work and

capitalism altogether — that the bonds of nationalism can be severed by

posing the incompatibility of our needs with the needs of capitalism to

stay profitable. The separate interests of classes become apparent in

such struggles, and the ability to draw the conclusion that the

capitalist system itself must be destroyed can and has spread like

wildfire.

Internationalist political groups and organisations have an important

role to play in agitating against nationalism, and in countering

nationalist tendencies in struggles as they develop. We must stand

staunchly against militarism, nationalism and war, and agitate on a

practical basis accordingly. We must counter nationalism within the

working class, offering solidarity around class interests as the

practical course through which working class people can defend their own

interests. Against the left, and its proposed reorganisation the

capitalist world of nation-states, we stand firmly for a world without

borders, without nations and without states, for a world based on free

access to the products of human activity, for the satisfaction of human

needs and desires; a co-operative, stateless world in which human beings

can realise their full potential as creative beings. In the struggle

towards that ultimate aim, we are firm in our stance that workers have

no country, that the working class must unite across all divides, and

that solidarity of all workers is the principle on which any future

victories rely.

To conclude, we here make some suggestions for the activities of

anarchists when faced with nationalism in the countries they operate,

and when faced with nationalism when engaging in anti-war activities.

Firstly, class struggle anarchists should be organising in the workplace

wherever possible, and engaging in the support of strikes and other

actions which aid the development of class consciousness. Anarchists

should network with other libertarian militants, and in the workplace

they should be arguing for libertarian tactics such as mass meetings and

direct action. Anarchists in the workplace in the course of maintaining

a class perspective should also argue against the division of the

working class along lines of race or nationality, and should advocate

solidarity across all boundaries, a solidarity which has the tendency to

develop as workers of different backgrounds come together in struggle.

Similarly, anarchists should counter the nationalist myths which hinder

practical working class solidarity; lies about immigrants stealing jobs

and housing should be opposed with the reality of the situation, that

the reasons for our day-to-day problems lie in the fact that the

capitalist system does not function to meet our needs, and isn’t

supposed to.

Secondly, anarchists have always been involved in anti-militarist and

anti-war activism. This is no different today, and anarchists are to be

found on the street in protests against the wars which imperialism

entails. When faced with national liberationist arguments and

nationalist responses to war, we should be engaging with the justified

revulsion felt when faced with war, but opposing nationalist analysis

with an internationalist, class perspective.

These are not small tasks, but they are vital ones, and must be central

to the activity of the anarchist movement in the here and now.

Appendices: Statements on the Gaza War

No State Solutions in Gaza (20th January 2009)

One thing is absolutely clear about the current situation in Gaza: the

Israeli state is committing atrocities which must end immediately. With

hundreds dead and thousandswounded, it has become increasingly clear

that the aim of the military operation, which has been in the planning

stages since the signing of the original ceasefire in June, is to break

Hamas completely. The attack follows the crippling blockade throughout

the supposed ‘ceasefire’, which has destroyed the livelihoods of Gazans,

ruined the civilian infrastructure and created a humanitarian disaster

which anyone with an ounce of humanity would seek an end to.

But that’s not all there is to say about the situation. On both sides of

the conflict, the idea that opposing Israel has to mean supporting Hamas

and its ‘resistance’ movement is worryingly common. We totally reject

this argument. Just like any other set of rulers, Hamas, like all the

other major Palestinian factions, are happy and willing to sacrifice

ordinary Palestinians to increase their power. This isn’t some vague

theoretical point — for a period recently most deaths in Gaza were a

result of fighting between Hamas and Fatah. The ‘choices’ offered to

ordinary Palestinian people are between Islamist gangsters (Hamas,

Islamic Jihad) or nationalist gangsters (Fatah, Al-Aqsa Martyrs

brigades). These groups have shown their willingness to attack working

class attempts to improve their living conditions, seizing union

offices, kidnapping prominent trade unionists, and breaking strikes. One

spectacular example is the attack on Palestine Workers Radio by Al-Aqsa

Martyrs Brigades, for ‘stoking internal conflicts’. Clearly, a ‘free

Palestine’ under the control of any of these groups would be nothing of

the sort.

As anarchists, we are internationalists, opposing the idea that the

rulers and ruled within a nation have any interests in common.

Therefore, anarchists reject Palestinian nationalism just as we reject

Israeli nationalism (Zionism). Ethnicity does not grant “rights” to

lands, which require the state to enforce them. People, on the other

hand, have a right to having their human needs met, and should be able

to live where they choose, freely. Therefore, against the divisions and

false choices set up by nationalism, we fully support the ordinary

inhabitants of Gaza and Israel against state warfare — not because of

their nationality, ethnicity, or religion, but simply because they’re

real living, feeling, thinking, suffering, struggling human beings. And

this support has to mean total hostility to all those who would oppress

and exploit them — the Israeli state and the Western governments and

corporations that supply it with weapons, but also any other capitalist

factions who seek to use ordinary working-class Palestinians as pawns in

their power struggles. The only real solution is one which is

collective, based on the fact that as a class, globally, we ultimately

have nothing but our ability to work for others, and everything to gain

in ending this system — capitalism — and the states and wars it needs .

That this seems like a ‘difficult’ solution does not stop it from being

the right one. Any “solution” that means endless cycles of conflict,

which is what nationalism represents, is no solution at all. And if that

is the case, the fact that it is “easier” is irrelevant. There are

sectors of Palestinian society which are not dominated by the would-be

rulers — protests organised by village committees in the West Bank for

instance. These deserve our support. As do those in Israel who refuse to

fight, and who resist the war. But not the groups who call on

Palestinians to be slaughtered on their behalf by one of the most

advanced armies in the world, and who wilfully attack civilians on the

other side of the border.

WHOEVER DIES, HAMAS AND THE ISRAELI STATE WIN

Solidarity with the Victims of War (25th January 2009)

The atrocity in Gaza

As the dust settles, the extent of the atrocities which the Israeli

state has committed against the population of the Gaza strip has become

clear. Thousands are dead, killed in the savage bombing of one of the

most densely populated places on earth. Israel has used banned white

phosphorous munitions in civilian areas, shelled aid convoys, schools,

shelters and mosques full of people. It has destroyed aid stockpiles

with white phosphorous shells. Over 90,000 people have been displaced.

Gaza’s economy and infrastructure, already devastated by the blockade,

have been destroyed. With the ceasefire signed, the continued blockade

will mean further war against the civilian population by other means.

A two state solution?

As the bombs rained down every party and group put forward their vision

for ‘fixing’ the problem and their vision of the future for

Palestinians. But understanding what we can’t do is the first step to

understanding what we can. We have to be clear about the ways we can

stop such atrocities happening.

A ‘two state solution’ based on 1949 or 1967 borders isn’t going to come

about except through a massive change in the global balance of power.

This will inevitably lead to more conflicts elsewhere. Two states with

borders as they currently stand would create a Palestine as dominated by

Israel as the territories are now. Even if the ‘one state solution’

became a reality, the Palestinian working class would remain an

underclass of cheap labourers. It would be like the end of Apartheid in

South Africa. The colour of those in charge changed but left the vast

population in the same dreadful state of poverty and hopelessness as

before.

It is also true that we cannot call on ‘our’ state to reign in Israel.

Firstly, the state will not concede anything to us unless the working

class — the vast majority of us who can only live off our ability to

work for others — is in a confident enough position to force those

concessions through collective action. Secondly, it is madness to expect

Britain to impose ‘civilised’ behaviour on an ally such as Israel.

Britain has taken part in the occupation in Iraq which has resulted in

the deaths of 1,033,000 people. The only state which has any ability to

reign in Israel is the US. The US will only do this when Israel’s

actions threaten its national interest. Moral outrage will not win over

dominating the region.

Solidarity with working class struggles

We must stand in firmly in solidarity with the victims of state warfare.

The terrorised population of Gaza did not heed Hamas’ call to resist

through ‘martyrdom’, or to undertake suicide attacks. They fled en

masse. They showed no willingness to carry out a ‘resistance’ on behalf

of their masters which would have meant certain death. Whilst

Palestinians fled the onslaught, demonstrations were held in Israel by

those refusing to serve the war machine. These refusals to heed the call

of the state or the ruling party to fight deserve our support and

solidarity.

We cannot support Hamas, or any of the other factions in Gaza or the

West Bank against Israel, however ‘critically’. Hamas’ record of

repressing the attempts of workers to improve their living conditions is

well known. They have escorted striking teachers back to work at

gunpoint, and have closed down medical facilities where staff attempted

to strike. Both Hamas and Fatah have made kidnapping and assassination

attempts on the same trade unionists. Hamas execute those forced by

necessity into sex work, and persecute gays and lesbians. They offer as

little to ordinary Palestinians as their rivals in secular nationalist

groups, such as Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, who attacked the Palestine

Workers Radio for ‘stoking internal conflicts’. Real internationalism

means recognising that the rulers and ruled within a ‘nation’ have

nothing in common. In this case, this means supporting the efforts of

ordinary Palestinians to improve their conditions. We support them

against either Israel, as in the struggles organised by village

committees in the West Bank, or against the ‘resistance’ movements which

police the population. Our solidarity must be with the victims of war.

These are overwhelmingly Palestinian but also workers, Jewish, Arab and

others, killed by mortars and rockets in Israel. This cannot be because

of their race, nationality, or religion, but because they are living,

thinking, feeling and struggling human beings. And we must stand against

all those who would sacrifice them to their own ends. Ultimately the

only solution to endless global conflict and war is for working class

people, the dispossessed majority who must sell their time and energy to

those who own and control society, to struggle in our interests

collectively, against their exploitation, and against divisions such as

gender and race. This means struggle against the capitalist system which

creates endemic war and which must exploit us to survive. From this we

can set about taking control of our own lives, and putting an end to a

world of warring states and states-in-waiting which has produced

atrocities such as those in Gaza.

[1] A Tesco Metro supermarket in Stepney had its windows smashed and the

words ‘kill Jews’ were daubed on the wall

[2] Hamas prevented Gazans from reaching a field hospital on the Israeli

side of the border at Erez at the end of January. See Dozens believed

dead in reprisal attacks as Hamas retakes control, The Guardian,

30/01/09

[3] The inhabitants of Paris attacked the notorious fortress-prison in

1789 to secure gun-powder, sparking off the French Revolution. The

revolution is often seen as the point marking the transfer of power from

the old aristocratic class to the ascendant capitalist classes.

[4] The wave of religious and social upheaval across Europe which

established Protestantism and saw the decline in power of the Catholic

Church.

[5] The private seizure of the common grazing lands of the traditional

village, which was important to the development of capitalism on two

fronts: first by laying the basis of the commodification of land in

tandem with the market-led developments in agriculture, and secondly by

dispossessing swathes of the population who were then forced to become

wage-labourers.

[6] The document laying out the universal, fundamental rights of French

citizens following the French revolution. These rights were understood

to be based on human nature.

[7] Woodrow Wilson, the US president at the war’s end, was instrumental

in framing nationality and self-determination as the path to orderly

world affairs.

[8] A fascist movement in Brazil which, given its inability to mobilise

the masses on racial lines, took up the slogan of “Union of all races

and all peoples” while utilising the same rhetoric about communism,

liberalism etc as its European relatives.

[9] The Versailles treaty ended the war — with the terms being dictated

by the Allies and the redrawing of Europe taking place using principles

of nationality where feasible.

[10] EAM’ being ‘Greek People’s National Liberation Army’, ‘ELAS’ being

‘National Liberation Front’ and the organisation of which it was the

armed wing. Both were dominated by the Stalinist Greek Communist Party,

which attempted to take power after the German defeat.