Patriotism and Class Interest. (1916)

From the August 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whoever has more than a very slight acquaintance with Socialist literature will be aware that on nearly every conceivable subject connected with the mental and social aspects of man’s life, the Socialist has a view-point and opinion which is distinct from, and usually antagonistic to, that which is usually regarded as true. This is so because the Socialist holds as correct ideas which, carried to a practical conclusion, would overthrow and wipe out the present condition of society, whereas the ideas of the mass of the population to-day are essentially those which, are favourable to the continuation of the existing system. It is, therefore, only to be expected that the Socialist conception of patriotism, is one which is unacceptable to almost any other school of thought.

Patriotism is often taken to mean “love of one’s country,” but this is misleading, as what is really intended to be the object of this “tender affection” is not actually the country or territory itself, but the social group which occupies it. It is social solidarity which is the essential nature of patriotism. This is plainly to be seen when we consider the more primitive forms of society where, as is the case with cattle-rearing nomadic tribes, the territory occupied is only an incidental factor varying almost from day to day. Here it is actual kinship which is the social “bond of union.” But this is not the case in modern societies, the members of which may be, and usually are, different in point of language and race. But, providing that they are born within the territorial confines dominated by a particular social group, that group claims their allegiance. This is probably the cause of the existing confusion between the terms “country” and “nation.”

Thus far both bourgeois and Socialist theorists may agree ; but when we come to the conception of the modern function of patriotism we find an immediate divergence and antagonism of opinion. To the brain soaked with the orthodox ideas of capitalist society (and suck brains prevail to-day) the sentiment of patriotism appears as one of the very noblest that can animate the human mind. To work staunchly for the welfare of the “nation” is regarded as highly creditable, and as one of the greatest forces of human and social progress. No greater compliment exists than to be called “a patriot.” 

But we—the Socialists—repudiate this view of patriotism. We will have none of it. This sentiment of national solidarity is to us a snare and a delusion. It is in our view one of the most pernicious of the many superstitions which today benumb the minds of the workers—for it is the workers that we stand for : their interests are our interests.

An impulse of loyalty to the social whole is obviously only valid when there is unity of interest therein, and is incompatible with the existence of class antagonisms in the community, when these conflicting interests are well understood by the classes themselves.

The working class of to-day is, because it is property less, in a condition of economic subjection, and the idea that a subject class can look after its own interests and at the same time look after the interests of the society of which it forms a part is a delusion. The reason for this is clear. The existence of a subject class implies the existence of a dominant class. In its structure and its institutions the society is always such as to perpetuate the conditions of the respective classes—the ascendancy of the one and the subjection of the other. If, therefore, the servile class desires to be emancipated from thraldom (as it must do if and when it realises its condition and therefore its interests), it must be antagonistic to the social structure and to the class who would maintain it. Consequently any allegiance to the social whole on its part would be suicidal folly.

For many thousands of years now, the division into conflicting classes has been an outstanding feature of all the most advanced societies. Under the system of chattel-slavery, upon which basis the earliest forms of civilisation were reared, patriotism took an openly class character. Although the slaves were an integral, and indeed, a basic, part of these societies, yet the conditions of their life were such as to prohibit almost entirely any sentiment of loyalty to the social group in which they worked. In the first place the manner of their exploitation and oppression was so clear and open as to admit of no misunderstanding. Secondly, they had usually no tie of blood or language with their oppressors which could serve as “blinkers” as they so often do to-day. The immense hordes of slaves in Babylon, Greece, and Rome, were gathered from all parts of the known world ; they would in many cases remember the land and society of their birth, where they were free men. All circumstances, therefore, conspired to to wipe out any trace of social solidarity among them and to keep alive a hatred of their oppressors.

Of “mighty Babylon” Romaine Paterson, in his valuable work, “The Nemesis of Nations,” says,

“The fact that every new conqueror was hailed with acclamation by her populace is a proof of their immense weariness. Both Cyrus and Alexander were received with shouts of joy by a vast multitude assembled on the walls. A great mass of human beings sunk in slavery, and living in slums where life must have been at least as degraded as it is in Shoreditch, Hoxton, and other parts of modern London, can have possessed no national interests. The peril of the State was not theirs.” (Page 127.)

These slaves of Babylon had not learnt the lesson which the modern proletariat must learn—they looked to the new conquerors for their salvation instead of to themselves, only to find a change of masters and a slavery as intense as the old.

What patriotism existed in these antique societies was found solely among the freemen, who constituted what our “elite” bourgeoisie do—”society.” As the slaves vastly outnumbered the free population, armed slaves were exceedingly dangerous, and consequently we rarely find the slaves taking part in, or being trained for, war. Not until that great class conflict of the ruling classes known as the Peloponnesian War, did the slaves of the Greeks become fighting men, and only then on condition that they were freed from bondage. The ruling classes in the several Greek States were often at war with each other, but when a slave rising broke out they were united in their efforts to crush what they feared as they feared nothing else. We read that Athens on one occasion despatched to Sparta a large force of troops to aid in the suppression of a revolt of the helots.

* * *

Times have changed. Of Babylon we have but a memory and a few crumbling remains dug from the desert sands. Greece and Rome have long fallen. But the slavery remains—changed in form, yes, but the same in essence, and even more effective as a means of exploitation. Under the modern system of wage-slavery the robbery of labour still persists, but hidden under the hypocritical sham of liberty of contract. The antagonism of interests within the nation is with us to-day, just as it has existed in all societies based upon classes. Only upon a recognition of this conflict of the classes can the workers organise effectively with the aim of emancipation.

As capitalism develops it ever widens the breech between the toilers on the one hand, and the parasites of capital on the other. Ever-increasing wealth and riotous luxury among the bourgeoisie presents to the worker’s eyes a more and more glaring contrast to the pitiful condition of poverty in which he exists. This being the case it becomes ever more urgent from the capitalist point of view to devise new, and to perfect old, methods of effecting that mental stupefying process which has always been one of the chief bulwarks of class rule.

Religion, which has served the master class throughout history so well, and which was the main “opium of the people” in the old days of chattel-slavery and of serfdom, through the development of science which the present era-must needs in its own interest encourage, is becoming less and less effective as an instrument of class subjection.

Patriotism, of all creeds, has appealed most to the master class in its efforts to find a substitute for religion, and consequently it is being pushed with greater persistence year by year. It is easy to see why this has been so. A patriotic working class kills several birds with a single stone. First, it offers to the capitalists the delightful prospect of a working class innocent of all “narrow,” “selfish,” class interests, ready to sacrifice all for the “national good,” and content to exude from every pore their wealth-creating energy, under this “harmoni­ous” system, based upon a “just” division into “fair” wages and “reasonable” profits.

Secondly, by fostering a belief in national superiority it creates a mutual distrust and even hatred between the workers of the different nations. Thirdly, it makes possible a ready and willing fighting force, to wage the wars of the various national sections of the capitalist class, which are an inevitable effect of the workings of the present system.

Is not this prospect to our masters’ eyes truly a glorious one ? No wonder they spare no pains to achieve and maintain it ! Through their control of the channels of education, both in the schools and in the censorship, literary, and even (as they find it necessary) of the theatrical and the picture shows, even to the street-corner orator, they wield an enormous power of mental oppression. The perverted “histories,” nationalist “economics” and “sociology,” the glaring pomp and show of “our” national butchers the armed forces, the Empire Day pageants, boy scout and kindred movements, all bear witness to the truth of the above contention.

Those flunkeys of capital, commonly called labour leaders (because of their well-known social function of leading the lambs of labour to the clippers of capital to be shorn of their surplus wool [value] with as little display of irritation among the lambs as the circumstances will permit) are, as would be expected, useful helpers in this process of pumping patriotism into proletarians.

One of the leading lights of this fraternity of leaders, Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., President of the Board of Education, recently delivered himself thus :

“He was satisfied that the spirit which has prompted millions of men in all classes to volunteer (?) for service was in a large measure due to that love of country which our schools had fostered. He quoted passages from the publications of the Board to show that the Department was fully alive to the importance of inculcating a sane and healthy patriotism in the minds of the young and promised that any practical proposals for furthering this object would receive his most careful consideration.”—”Manchester Evening News,” 28.3.16). (Query ours.)

* * *

Against all this array of the mental and moral influences of capital the Socialist, brings the logic of his position by which he stands or falls. Against nationalism he preaches the class struggle and the solidarity of interest of the workers the world over. He points to the worldwide spread of capitalism, to the gradual equalising of the condition of the workers in every land, and the sameness of the problems which they have to face. To the jingo “history” which, places in the forefront the blast of the bugle and the roar of the cannon, and conceives history as the rise and fall, birth and death, conflict and alliances of nations, the Socialists confront the facts of sociology, which show that the foundations of society and the driving forces of social progress lie in its mode of acquiring its material subsistence ; that the basic factors in a society are not its politicians and its militarists, but the producers of wealth, not the sword and the cannon, but the tools, the machinery, and the land.

Ours is a hard task, but it must be faced and accomplished. The education of the proletariat as to its interests and destiny is the great work which we Socialists have set ourselves. Once get the seeds of class-consciousness implanted, the favourable soil created by capitalist conditions will cause it to root, and to spread the mighty undergrowth of the international league of the working class. Then will the mental agents of class oppression, among them patriotism, wither and die like the weeds they are.

But that time is not yet. To-day more than ever in the past is the clarion call of ’48 a vital and a stirring necessity, to awaken the giant frame of labour to shake off the leeches which suck his blood and fetter his might :

“WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE ! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT THE CHAINS WHICH BIND YOU, BUT YOU HAVE A WORLD TO WIN.”

R. W. Housley

Editorial: Socialism no accident (1982)

Editorial from the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The readers of the Sun may not have been aware of it, but when their man in the Falklands sent in his reports, couched as they were in glorious yobspeak (“Up Yours, Galtieri”), he was making his small contribution to bolstering a seriously misguided concept of history.

It is an established, popular notion that wars spring from the personal idiosyncrasies and failings of political leaders. In some cases, those leaders are supposed to be insatiably belligerent — like Galtieri. In other cases, they are described as bloodthirsty and genocidal — like Hitler or Menachem Begin. According to this theory, if there had been no Galtieri and no junta, there would have been no war over the Falklands. More peaceable leaders would never have tried to take by force that which was not theirs by “right”. On this theory, the Falklands war was something of an historical accident.

At home, we have seen this notion at work also in the case of the rail strikes by ASLEF and the NUR. These strikes, we were told, were the work of a minority of unreasonable, restless militants. Without them, the railways would operate smoothly, as workers and management co-operated to the benefit of everyone. By these standards, the rail strikes were also accidental.

Then there is the example of Margaret Thatcher, who is the butt of much anger as a stubborn, prejudiced and callous adherent to policies which. she insists, will be good for us even if they kill us in the process. Three million unemployed, and the intensifying pressure on workers’ living standards, are attributed to the historical misfortunes of Thatcher’s obduracy. Without her, we hear, there would be less unemployment — or even none at all — and easier, fuller lives for everyone.

But while it is true that people have a crucial influence on the course of history, and while there are important historical factors which might loosely be described as “accidents”, the fact is that history is basically not to be understood in such terms. The process of social development from the most primitive of societies to the present day has only one valid interpretation and that is as a continuous, predictable, evolution along a discernible course. On that concept, we not only understand what has happened in the past; we can foresee with some confidence what is likely to happen in the future.

The Falklands crisis did not spring solely from the determined belligerence of a handful of South American militarists. Latterly the Islands have assumed an increasing importance in the overall strategy of Argentinian capitalism, complicated by the possible presence of rich oil fields and the fact that historically the Falklands issue has been cynically used to stifle the realities of wage slavery in Argentina under a blanket of patriotism. The British ruling class, far from losing sleep over the “paramount” wishes of the Falklanders, have for decades been negotiating to pass the Islands over to Argentinian rule. This policy was no accident; it fitted in with the reality of Britain’s place in the conflicts of world capitalism.

The rail strikes cannot be explained in romantic terms, of militants against the true interests of the railwaymen. Workers on the railways, like those in other industries, were resisting a downward pressure on their wages and working conditions. Perhaps their effort was badly timed; when there is high unemployment strikes can have little muscle behind them. Perhaps the abrupt climb-down by the NUR was their acknowledgement that the time was not propitious. But in historical terms it was another incident in the continuing class struggle of capitalism and it will not be the last of its kind, as one side or the other takes advantage of the current conditions of the labour market.

The policies of the Thatcher government are not basically different from those of Callaghan, Wilson, Heath, Macmillan . . . Every government has to contest with the working class; that is part of their function as the administrative arm of the capitalist class. In most cases, governments in post-war Britain have been weakened in their efforts by the strength the workers have drawn from relatively high employment and demand for labour power. This meant that attempts to keep wages in check — pay pauses, wage freezes, social contracts, whatever name they went under — were easily undermined and, sooner or later, modified or abandoned. As Thatcher came to power, the slump in world capitalism had reached such depths as to enable a government to impose policies which until then had had scant chance of success. Thatcher, then, is no accident; she personifies an especially repressive, exploitative phase in capitalist history.

The importance of understanding that capitalism does not progress through a series of accidents is in the fact that the next stage in human history — socialist society — will evolve from the contradictions of the present and will not therefore be accidental. Indeed, the very conditions for that change have been, and are being, historically laid down.

Capitalism has provided the human race with the possibility of producing an abundance of wealth. It has developed the means of production, distribution and communication to the point at which a society in which the human race can live in material security is immediately available to them.

Capitalism has refined the class structure so that there are now only two classes in society. It follows from this that the revolution to bring about the next stage in social evolution must be the work of one of those classes, with the object of emancipating that class.

It is the working class who historically fit that bill; they are the revolutionary class under capitalism. They are the class who are to be emancipated, the class who produce the wealth of capitalism but have no effective ownership. To fulfil their historical, revolutionary role the working class must understand capitalism, and the need to abolish it. They must also be aware of the effectiveness of replacing capitalism with a society of common ownership and free access. Capitalism itself, in the everyday experience of its inability to meet the needs of its people — its wars, famine, repression, disease — provides the motivation towards such an understanding. Historically, capitalism works towards its own demise.

History can be left to condition itself; the work of human beings is to make their history, albeit with many “accidents . . . surprises . . . mistakes. . . ." On those terms, the human race is moving to the historical step of establishing the first social order based on the interests of the majority.

An I.L.P. “belief”. (1917)

From the August 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Independent Labour Party believes that the war was caused by the breakdown of class government in Europe. The peoples had no voice in policy before the war, and when they suddenly found themselves faced with “enemies” they had to fight.”

This statement contained in No. 1 Leaflet “The I.L.P. and the War” is not supported by facts or evidence of any kind ; it is merely a belief. Though whether the word “believes” applies to the first sentence only, or to the whole paragraph, it is impossible to say, nor does it matter much. The first sentence, expressing the belief that the war was caused by the breakdown of class government in Europe, if it is truly the belief of the I.L.P., is by far the most important statement, not only in this paragraph, but in the whole leaflet.

The writers fail to justify their belief. The master-class would ridicule it, and the Socialist would laugh at their self-inflicted credulity. What would be the attitude of the capitalist politicians ? First they would deny the existence of class government. Secondly they would claim that government was vested in the representatives of the people, was therefore democratic ; that government had not broken down, nor was it in the slightest danger of doing so. If the I.L.P. never anticipated this attitude it is politically sightless. If the capitalist position—so often expressed by its agents and spokesmen—was present in the collective mind of the I.L.P., they should not have been satisfied with the mere expression of a belief ; they should have shown in definite and unmistakable language that, in spite of capitalist boasting of the democratic nature of their system, class government exists. Moreover, they should have justified their statement that it had broken down.

They have done none of these things, it is, therefore, left to the Socialist to show the absurdity of their beliefs. In no country of Europe was there any government, at the outbreak of war, that showed signs of collapse. In every country of Europe—and the world—there was poverty and suffering, always on the increase, among the working class. There was discontent everywhere, but the suffering and discontent of the workers does not in itself mean the breakdown of capitalist government, on the contrary, it is proof of its power—and confidence in itself—to exploit and subjugate. At the outbreak of war, we are constantly being told, the Central Powers were organized and equipped for the struggle. That is to say, the working class of those countries were fully controlled and disciplined by the governing class. Obviously, class government had not broken down in those countries, but, on the contrary, had reached a high degree of perfection. In those allied countries where conscription was in vogue the military authorities, at the instigation of those who controlled the political machinery, gave orders for mobilisation and were obeyed almost to the last man. In this country the process was slower but just as sure. Everyone knows how the masters co-operated with their representatives in Parliament by “releasing” men fit for active service. But it is not everyone who knows how dexterously Mr. Asquith and his government, on behalf of the capitalist class of this country, engineered towards conscription. Had he been satisfied with having achieved his object and not boasted of his political dexterity, the workers would have been left to think that the Government had simply blundered from one pledge to another until conscription was accomplished, as much to their own surprise as other people’s. But the competition for ministerial portfolios often compels Ministers—however modest they may wish to be thought—to construe their actions in such a way as to gain them credit for acumen and foresight. Thus Mr. Asquith claimed that his government, by devious methods, had gained “compulsion by consent,” in the following utterance:

“Next, in the earlier stages of the war more men came in than we could effectively train and equip, and it was not until the beginning of last Autumn that the shortage of men, actual or prospective, became a serious problem. Compulsion, whatever may be said of its abstract merits or demerits, is alien to British traditions—(cheers)—and its introduction would have been viewed with the greatest suspicion in the absence of a proved case of absolute necessity by the vast bulk of Liberals, by a large body of Conservatives, and by practically the whole of organised labour. (Cheers.) I have consistently maintained ever since the recruiting problem became urgent that compulsion could only be practicable and made effective when at each stage of the road it was accompanied by general consent. That is exactly what has happened. Everyone who knows anything of our political life must be aware that such measures as have been passed by enormous majorities in Parliament this spring would even a year ago have encountered the most strenuous opposition, with most dubious prospects of survival.”

Whether this boast is true, or whether such a complexion had been given to a series of blunders, or whether the Government was dragged or forced along the road to conscription by the governing class, the result was the same and was never in doubt. The ruling class with their agents preserved their authority and achieved the same degree of power over the working class here, as the Allied and Central Governments exercised at the commencement. Clearly class government had not broken down in this country.

But possibly the I.L.P. intellect will object that these facts only apply to the period of the war, and that the outbreak of war placed the Government once more on their feet, or braced them for the struggle. But they cannot take this attitude in view of the concluding sentence in the paragraph quoted. “The peoples had no voice in policy before the war.” Quite so. The Government conducted the business of the ruling class in utter disregard and contempt for the working class, until they called upon them to defend “their” country—their country, who’s?-and the credulous—or should it be shuffling and treacherous ?—I.L.P. babble about the people who “suddenly found themselves faced with enemies they had to fight.” Had the people—that is the working class—understood their class position they never would have waited for the master class to choose enemies for them. But thanks to the I.L.P. and the rest of the parties and organisations that serve the master class, the workers have had but little chance of learning who are their real enemies. Had the workers of every country understood the nature of capitalist society and their own slave position, the governing class in each country would never have succeeded in persuading them that the workers of other lands could be their enemies. There is no possible ground of antagonism between the wage-slaves of one capitalist State and another. The antagonism that exists is entirely between the different groups of the governing class. When these groups fell out they knew that the workers under their control and domination could be relied upon to do the fighting in their interest. Had they entertained any doubts as to the docility of their wage slaves they would have hesitated before plunging into war. A working class really antagonistic to its rulers would use such an occasion to further its own object : they would face the enemy their experience pointed to ; not the enemies of their enemy.

Once again the real Socialist position must be emphasised. The I.L.P. complain that “the peoples had no voice in policy before the war.” Would there be any difference if they had? Without knowledge the workers can be led to support any policy that happens to be in the capitalist interest. We have seen the workers in the past—plastic as clay in the potter’s hands—led to conflict against those who are “their allies” to-day ; or fighting on the side of those who are designated as their enemies, and through all the sanguinary wars engendered by capitalist production and distribution they have remained a slave class under the domination of those, for whom they fought. Before wars can cease the workers must gain the knowledge that will enable them to prosecute the class war to a successful conclusion ; until that time arrives their lot must be to work the factory machine, or the machine gun, at the instigation and in the interest of the governing class.

F. Foan

War Propaganda, Past and Present (1950)

From the February 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

At a time when “bigger and better" reasons are being found every day for waging a third world war, this time against Russia, it is instructive to remember some of the main reasons given by ruling classes in the past for their wars. The truth, of course, is excluded from the start: for no capitalist will admit that wars are fought in order to protect his profits. So other reasons have to be invented.

Nationalism has always been one of the mainstays of war propaganda. In the sixteenth century, the great enemy of this country was Spain; the merchants of Spain had a monopoly of the trade of the great Spanish American Empire, and the British merchants naturally wanted this trade for themselves. So it was soon discovered that the rascally Spaniards were the unalterable enemies of the English people. Sentiments were spread abroad in Devon—from which county came a large number of the sailors who were expected to risk their lives fighting Spanish seamen—that one West-country man could fight three Easterners, and that one East Anglian could take on five Spaniards. This line of talk was a great success, and thousands of stout Devonian seadogs left our shores eager to win great glory for themselves, and even greater profits for their masters.

In the next century, the position changed. Spain, in decline, was no longer a powerful enemy, and the chief danger to English profits came from Holland. The Dutch had built up a large fleet, and while the energies of their English competitors were being diverted to civil wars, they captured a large part of the trade with the East and with the American colonies. But the natural resources of the Netherlands were not sufficient to support a long struggle with England on the sea, and the Dutch challenge was repulsed.

In the eighteenth century the place of enemy No. 1 was taken by France. In India, in the East and West Indies, in Canada, and in what is now the United States of America, the French were trying to build an empire for themselves at the same time as British merchants and manufacturers were also expanding their overseas trade. Collisions were inevitable. In the long series of wars between 1688 and 1815, Britain and France were always on opposite sides. It did not take our propertied classes long to find out that the French were ineradicably the enemies of all true Englishmen, and from this time dates the picture of honest beef-eating John Bull on one side of the Channel, and the sly frog-eating Frenchman on the other. Nelson was not going much further than thousands of his countrymen when he developed his inveterate hatred of the whole French people.

There were no prolonged wars for many years after Waterloo, largely because Britain had undergone its Industrial Revolution well in advance of the rest of the world; which gave it an economy much more productive than those of other nations, and made it economically almost unassailable. True, there were always fears about Russia's designs on India, and Russophobia was a fashionable disease. But the Russian economy was, in comparison with the British, almost completely undeveloped, and the only open struggle between the two countries—the Crimean War—ended in a victory for the British capitalists; Again, there were a few colonial wars, and trading wars on the outskirts of the Empire; but these were mostly local affairs, and a little propaganda about the inherent superiority of white men over those with skins of a different colour was sufficient to keep up the necessary martial spirit.

But with the end of the nineteenth century came the end of Britain's economic supremacy. Other European countries had been undergoing industrial revolutions, notably Germany. During the opening decade of the twentieth century it became obvious that the British capitalists would shortly have to defend their profits against the rising German capitalist class. Once again nationalism was summoned to the aid of the propertied classes of both sides. In Germany—especially between the two wars—it was proclaimed that Rhinelanders, Bavarians, people from Prussia and people from the Sudetenland, were (as H. G. Wells puts it) one pure and perfect "Nordic” race, all blue-eyed and blond. Correspondingly, in Britain, the discovery was made that the entire German race was unchangeably evil and aggressive. With incredible ease the old stories about the wickedness of our former enemies were dropped in favour of stories about the wickedness of the Germans. The lines in the song—”Frenchmen and Dutchmen, and Spaniards and such men, as foemen they fear them, the yeoman of England,” were changed to "Austro-Hungarians, and suchlike barbarians, as foemen they fear them,” and so on. There are Vansittarts in every generation, ready to preach about the essential evil of some race or other: and the Vansittarts of the last two generations have given their energies almost exclusively to attacking the German nation. To do this it was necessary to forget that the English people are in origin only an offshoot of this hated German people; but this was not too hard, since capitalist apologists have a lot of practice in forgetting inconvenient facts.

The leaders of the U.S.S.R. realise as well as the leaders of any other capitalist country the usefulness of racial propaganda in wartime. Russian writers during the last war—notably Alexei Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg—wrote about the immutable enmity of the Teuton and Slav races with as much fervour as any pre-Revolutionary Russian. And this is the country which claims to subscribe to international Socialism!

Religion has been used almost as much as nationalism in creating warlike feelings. It was found especially effective in wars against countries professing a different brand of Christianity to our own. Wars with France and Spain were turned into crusades for the defence of the Protestant religion against the Papists, and the Pope was freely called the “anti-Christ.” Both contestants always assumed that God was on their side, and the more foreigners were slaughtered, the higher rose the hymns of thanksgiving. “Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below, praise God from whom all blessings flow ” sums up the attitude of many Christians to war.

After the Industrial Revolution, the machinery of production become more complicated, and a system of elementary education for the working-class had to be introduced. But this had its drawbacks, since the more education the workers received, the more questions they asked. Still better reasons had therefore to be thought up to explain away the periodic wars which the capitalist system inevitably breeds. Attention was drawn to the vile systems of government under which the unfortunate foreigners suffered, and it was clearly demonstrated that our own hard-won democracy, and indeed all the inalienable rights and liberties of freeborn Englishmen were in grave danger of being overthrown. The usefulness of this argument was little, if at all, impaired by the fact that in both the 1914 and 1939 wars just as many countries with non-parliamentary systems of government (e.g., the British colonies and Russia) fought on the Allied side as fought against it. Another line of thought, which was put out after the actual fighting had begun, went something like this: granted that wars are bad, and that we must put a stop to them as soon as possible, let us finish off this war we have on our hands now, and then we can get down to the job of building a “lasting peace." This idea was not as prominent as it might have been in 1939, owing to its having been rather overdone in the 1914 holocaust, which was, par excellence (as you may remember) the war to end all wars.

British capitalism has now been on the down-grade for half a century, and the main world conflict at present is between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., each striving to build an economic empire for itself. When these two countries, and their allies, resort to open war, what will be the ostensible reasons for it? So far, little has been done in the racial field. It still remains for the Russians to prove the inextinguishable villainy, and natural aggressive passions, of the “Anglo-Saxons,” and for the British and Americans to prove the same things about the “Slav race.” But on the religious front the first shots have already been fired. Listen to Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of Cork and Orrery speaking from the pulpit at Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire, some months ago (Jersey Evening Post, 11/7/49): “The next war will be a religious war, fought with material weapons, but for a spiritual object.” The Russians are not behindhand. They realised in the last war how useful a Church can be to prop up the State, and now, their patriarchs and archbishops follow the Stalinist line as faithfully as the Anglo-American bishops follow the Anglo-American line. The propaganda about “fighting for peace” seems to be surpassing in volume even the 1914 agitation on that theme. It must be noticed that the Russians stole a march on the Americans by the speed with which they took advantage of the world-wide pacifist feelings which naturally follow every great war, and organized peace-conferences. But the Americans can be relied on to make it quite clear, either before or immediately after the outbreak of hostilities, that they too are engaging in war merely to preserve the peace. As for the attitude of the contestants to democracy, that goes without saying. Everyone is in favour of democracy, since now it means simply the kind of government of which you approve. The term Socialism is nowadays applied almost equally freely. Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, Attlee and Chiffley, Franco and Peron all claim that their systems are “Socialism" although they usually add a qualifying adjective, whether Soviet, or National, or Democratic. Even in one of the few countries in the world which will still admit being capitalist—the U.S.A.—Republican Senators regularly warn the electorate that Truman is steadily leading America to “Socialism.” So at least some of the countries on both sides in the third world war will be fighting for what they call Socialism. In fact, they will both, in their propaganda, take the same line about every point at issue. The Russians and their allies will be killing the Americans, and the Americans and their allies will be killing the Russians, with all the weapons at their disposal: and they will both claim to be doing it in defence of (1) peace, (2) God, (3) democracy, (4) “Socialism,” and (5) the mother-country, against the aggressive foreigner.

The only way the workers can put an end to this criminal farce, and prevent a third world war being fought, is to understand that society as at present constituted cannot avoid war, and that peace can only be permanently established by the overthrow of Capitalism and the setting up of a Socialist system of society.

Alwyn Edgar

New Year, old notions (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

As midnight chimed fireworks sparkled and people held hands, hugged and wished each other Happy New Year. Meanwhile in far too many places rather more dreadful pyrotechnics continued being unleashed.

Rockets erupted with fire and shrapnel in heavily populated built up areas, the deadly crackle of assault rifles continued to exact an inexorable toll of civilians and soldiers alike. The recently screened BBC series Vigil is being repeatedly realised in awful reality as military drones are launched by leaders utterly unconcerned about casualties, mere collateral damage.

While Russia and Ukraine continue their internecine conflict, their place in the headlines has been temporarily usurped by Israel’s determination to out-atrocity Hamas, apparently quite prepared to risk provoking Hezbollah into some futile act of bellicose response.

Two bombs in Iran have been exploded, amongst a crowd assembled to pay respects to a military man assassinated by an external power, seemingly by Islamic State. Muslims slaughtered by Muslims. The Middle East is demonstrating that the three Abrahamic religions, whatever they might profess otherwise, are no promoters of peace.

American evangelical Christians even claim the conflicts in and around Palestine have a divine purpose. Their government is seemingly prepared to continue supplying weaponry and support to those deemed politically righteous. Ukraine has even moved the birthday of Jesus, from their orthodox point of view, into line with their allies.

There is a common feature in all these conflicts; that is, the fundamental competitive nature of capitalism being expressed as nationalism. Zionist state, Palestinian two-states, Islamic State, or the states essentially created by the Bolsheviks now fighting it out.

In Britain, amongst those whose ‘socialism’ is in the Leninist tradition, there are arguments favouring one side or another in the conflicts. There are those who claim groups such as Hamas must not be criticised for their actions because they represent the oppressed.

How representative they actually are is debatable as there is no way of objectively assessing how many in Gaza actually lend Hamas their support. But even if they do it is hard to see how the seemingly random killing of a 1,000 plus Israelis advances Palestinian well-being. Especially as the response of Israel’s government was wholly predictable.

Political leaderships and their military ultimately will prioritise their nation’s state over the lives of the citizens. The common man, woman and child, are an expendable resource, self-replicating in the longer term, in the struggle for competitive advantage.

It is worth pointing out to those who profess their anti-imperialism through their partiality for this side or that in these armed conflicts that history is against them. A half century or so ago anti-American imperialism’s activists marched the streets chanting, ‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh, Vietcong are going the win’. They did, and fifty years later Vietnam is securely capitalist and well favoured by America.

However, in 1965, General Curtis E. LeMay, US Airforce Chief of staff, referring to North Vietnam said, ‘We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age’. Subsequently, an uncounted number of Vietnamese were killed by frequent bombing from altitudes so high there could be no pretence that military targets were identified, or that civilian casualties were unfortunate, but unintentional. There was also the widespread use of Agent Orange, a defoliant that caused widespread birth defects at the time and also in those conceived long after the war ended.

This campaign was conducted on behalf of the nation whose representatives are presently calling on Israel to moderate its action in Gaza, while continuing to supply the munitions.

Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Iraq subjected to ‘shock and awe’, Ukraine and Russia, Hamas and the IDF, all justified by national interests. It also raises the question of what constitutes terrorism. If it means inflicting terror on those on the receiving end, then terrorism is the default position of all nation states when pursuing their interests militarily, either actually or by threat.

Peel away the publicly stated rationales offered in justification, then competing nationalisms are exposed. Putin can accurately point to NATO expansion, but it’s Russian interests opposed to Ukraine’s, which has its own self-identified national interests to defend, that have led, once more, to war.

In the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia look on the present conflict with their own competing national interests in mind. One antithetical to Israel, the other perceiving benefit from a possible working relationship with Tel Aviv.

And so the behind the scenes discussions revolve around the one-state and the two-state solutions for Palestinians. As if by drawing more lines on maps nationalist divisions can be ameliorated if not wholly overcome.

Meanwhile British politicians continue to invoke Israel’s right to self-defence as if that mitigates somewhat the humanitarian tragedy being enacted. The moral high ground may seem an exalted place to stand, looking down on those seemingly too benighted to look up and see beyond their errors. But it is a cold, isolated place.

Not that the UK is exempt from nationalism, rather it is riddled with it. From coronations to Brexit to political divisions, its competitive nature all too apparent. This year’s general election will be promoted by the SNP as a de facto referendum on Scottish independence.

This demonstrates an essential feature of nationalism, which is that it is pitched against ‘the other’. The other in this case is England, as if there is something elemental to being Scottish that is fundamentally different to being English.

Surely, a denizen of Edinburgh has more in common with a Londoner than a crofter on Orkney, as the Londoner compared with a North Yorkshire hill farmer. Neighbours living next door to each other have similarities and differences. But their best interests are served by sharing their commonalities and their individual attributes.

Far better than killing each other over which flag should be saluted is ditching all the flags and working together to realise human potential throughout the world. A truly international commonwealth in which competition has been replaced by cooperation.

Gaza will be the present iteration of terror inflicted by the bellicose until the slaughter is put on pause before being unleashed elsewhere. Unless and until, that is, people decide, as we are well capable of doing, to abolish capitalism and its attendant nationalistic notions.

Dave Alton

Pro-Palestine or Anti-War? (2023)

From the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every weekend there have been protests and demonstrations about what is happening to the population of Gaza. Water, electricity and fuel are cut off. Hospitals, schools and residential buildings are bombed. Hundreds are killed every day and many more injured. Over a million have been displaced.

Naturally people are horrified by what they see on their television screens is happening and, equally naturally, want it to stop. So do we. Despite this, most politicians will only go as far as asking for a ‘humanitarian pause’ — after which the siege, the bombings, the killings, and the destruction can continue as before.

Some of the demonstrators are openly pro-Hamas chanting ‘from the river to the sea.’ Maybe some are doing it as an act of defiance as the government and the media have called for the police to ban it. But do they realise the implications of what, literally, they calling for — an Islamic state in the whole of Palestine including what is now Israel? How could that be achieved without further massacres and misery, if only because as much 40 percent of those living there are not Muslims but Jews and Christians who are likely to resist it? In any event, it doesn’t reflect the just-stop-the- killings sentiment of most people and even most demonstrators.

Others are calling for a ‘free Palestine’, by which they mean an independent state either alongside or incorporating Israel. That might reduce the added oppression which the population of the West Bank and Gaza now suffer but it would not solve the basic problem facing workers there of being excluded from the means of living and forced by economic necessity to work for those who own them on condition of producing profits for them. Nationalism is no solution; in fact, whether it is Jewish or Palestinian, it’s part of the problem.

The protests are unobjectionable as a simple protest against the horrors of war and a simple cry that the suffering caused by an ongoing war should just stop, naive as this may be. Given capitalism and the clash of interests between the profit-taking few that is built into it, no side in a war is going to stop just because innocent people are being killed, injured, displaced or otherwise ‘collateral damage’. States fight wars to win and will always do what it takes to achieve this, despite Geneva Conventions and so-called international humanitarian law.

As socialists we object not just to particular wars but to all wars and not just to all wars but to the system that breeds them — the worldwide capitalist system of competition for profits between rival capitalist groupings and the states that protect them which brings them into conflict over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets and investment outlets. In the present war the greater issue is who controls the oilfields in the Persian Gulf and the trade route out of it, with Israel being supported by the West to counter the threat there from Iran and Iran promoting militant Islamism to undermine Israel.

The solution in Palestine is not to establish a Palestine state nor to demolish the state of Israel. It’s not a one-state solution or a two-state solution or any sort of re-arrangement of frontiers and areas of political control. That would still leave the underlying economic system the same. It’s a worldwide system, without borders, where the Earth’s resources will have become the common heritage of all humanity and used to produce what people need rather than to make profits for the few who currently own and control them. That’s the only way to lasting peace not just in Palestine but throughout the world.

Adam Buick

Editorial: ‘God is Great!’ (2023)

Editorial from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

This was the vitriolic slogan enthusiastically chanted around a truck loaded with bodies. Those killed for being on the wrong side of the fence when it was unexpectedly breached. All too easy to view the unfolding horror of strike and counter strike as an escalating falling out of the faithful: Muslims versus Jews.

Actually it’s people killing people, state or quasi-state promoted murder. What divides them is nationalism. Palestinian nationality emerged from the collapsed Ottoman Empire, while Zionism was formed from long-standing hostility to Jews in Europe. Both products of world wars.

The immediate upsurge of violence is but the most recent manifestation of resentments and hatreds ignited by the formation of Israel on land formally occupied by Palestinians. Strip away the religious camouflage to reveal the fundamental cause of this and most, if not all, armed conflicts.

There is no significant difference with the ongoing mutual slaughter in the Ukraine, with soldiers/victims of both sides infused with nationalism. The flags of both sides flying over land that is the source, actual or potential, of wealth.

Land is the most basic element of wealth creation: for the production of food, the source of raw materials required by every manufacturing process. The labour involved in farming, raw material extraction, and turning those materials into usable commodities, creates the value from which profit is generated.

Therefore, who owns/controls a particular piece of real estate is a matter of financial importance. While it continues to be private concerns, or states on their behalf, workers will be employed to defend one particular plot, or even try to seize the plot of another group.

Such plots are dressed up as nations with defined borders which in reality are no more than lines on maps. Lines that are readily moved or erased and redrawn. So it was that on 14 May 1948 the state of Israel could be declared where, on the 13 May, there was no such state.

Cue 75 years of armed conflict, of full-scale battles and terrorist outrages, with constantly simmering violence just beneath the surface of seemingly quieter periods. There is occasional political talk of one-state or two-state solutions alongside militant groups on either side of the fence whose rhetoric comes close to genocidal.

Atrocity is stacked upon atrocity. Strategic gambles in which the chips are men, women and children wrapped in body bags. Both sides raise the stakes trying to force each other to throw in their hand and withdraw. Meanwhile everyone around them loses.

Except, of course, arms manufacturers. There’s never a famine of weapons, it seems.

There are self-proclaimed leftists who celebrate the latest killing spree on behalf of Palestinians. Just as those who cheered on the young men as they marched to their deaths in 1914. Nationalism then, nationalism now is the business, and it is big business, of sacrificing young lives en masse on bloody altars of profit.

God may not be great, but financial returns are, at least for a few.

Editorial: Palestine, the Arabs and the Zionists (1946)

Editorial from the August 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

As Socialists we are determined to end for all time the exploitation of one class by another. We sympathise with all the victims of capitalism, the exploited workers and peasants, the men and women robbed of loved ones or maimed in capitalism’s wars whether in the "victorious” or the vanquished countries, and the hundreds of thousands of homeless refugees. Among the latter are many Jewish people who seek escape from their present miserable plight by leaving the European countries where they have known much suffering and sorrow. Some among them would go to any country that offered them refuge, but most of the governments, faced with problems of housing shortage and threatening unemployment, not to mention the prejudice that still greets “foreigners," are more apt at expressing sympathy than at welcoming refugees. In one instance, that of Austria, where the Government has welcomed the application of 2,000 Austrian Jews to return to Austria from Palestine, the opposition comes from local authorities, the mayors of twenty-two principal towns having jointly protested for "economic reasons" (Manchester Guardian, 15/7/46).

Other Jewish refugees look only to Palestine for refuge, and some of these Zionists have as their declared aim to make Palestine a Jewish State. They are, in short, "nationalists," looking to solve their problems not by abolishing capitalism, but by creating one more national state in a capitalist world of national states and empires. Zionist nationalism, as such, is not different from the other nationalisms and we, as Socialists, are opposed to them all, British, Russian, American, Polish, Indian and the rest. The most that could be said for nationalist movements where directed against alien rulers was the argument that, with alien rule ended, it would be easier for the workers to grasp the fact that their enemy is capitalism, whether the capitalists are aliens or not. It is, however, clear, from the experience of the last half-century, that the exploiting class of each country finds it about as easy to set the workers against the workers of other countries as it was to set them against a foreign ruling class. It is only necessary to look at the national antagonisms stirred up between the workers of the countries of Europe to see how illusory was the old belief that when Czecho-Slovaks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Poles and others were freed from their respective foreign oppressors they would live amicably side by side. To the Socialist, what has happened is not surprising. What are called nationalist movements are essentially the movements of capitalist groups striving to drive out foreign exploiters so that they can mount the vacant saddle. Having achieved that aim capitalism continues to range one national group against another in the competition for markets and the endeavour to secure lines of transport and communications, sources of raw materials and strategic frontiers.

The spokesmen of nationalist movements do not in the main declare their capitalist objectives. British capitalism talks of bringing peace to the Middle East, or of helping the Jews and Arabs. Actually British Imperialism is in Palestine for reasons of Imperial strategy and to protect oil interests in that region, doubly important now that the base in Egypt is being evacuated and since, in recent years, enormous and cheaply accessible reserves of oil have been discovered in the Middle East Alongside the imperialist or investment interests of Britain, U.S.A., Russia and France in the Arabic-speaking countries a new factor is becoming of increasing importance. Among the 40 million Arabic-speaking peoples the old social structure and ways of life are being broken down by the development of communications, by trade, and by the growth of the petroleum and other industries. Capitalist industrialisation is making headway and with it its usual expression, nationalist movements.

It is against this background that the demand is made for the settlement of Jewish people in Palestine, with the usual irrelevant arguments so beloved of all nationalisms. The Principal Rabbi of the Federation of Synagogues, Kopul Rosen, writing to the Times (13/7/46), claims that those who work for the return of the Jewish people to Zion, "whether they be Zionists or non-Zionists, are fulfilling not a secular ambition, but the Divine will as revealed in the visions of Israel's prophets." Moslem Arabs can, of course, invoke a like Divine mission.

The spokesmen of some Zionist groups talk in a less fantastic but more threatening tone. In August, 1944, David Ben-Gurion, a Zionist leader, made the following belligerent declaration:—

"We shall go to Palestine in order to become a majority there. If need be we shall take the country by force. If Palestine proves too small . . . her frontiers will have to be extended."

(Quoted in Manchester Guardian, 3/7/46.) 

Such threats to crush Arab resistance and to annex neighbouring territory can, of course, be paralleled with statements of a like belligerency by some Arab nationalists. Like all stirring-up of nationalist antagonisms, these statements hinder development towards Socialism, the world’s only line of progress. Even on the short view of helping the homeless refugees their wisdom is more than doubtful. The Arabic-speaking lands claim that their record in the treatment of Jewish minorities is better than that of most countries. It is certain to deteriorate if the situation moves towards civil war in Palestine, for the reason, among others, that the Arab nationalists see behind the entry of Jewish refugees something else, invasion by more and more Anglo-American capital seeking to control the developing industries of the whole Middle East. 

If we had a Socialist world the population in all countries would welcome men and women rendered homeless by some failure of resources in the land they lived in. There would be no problem. Only capitalism and its wars, and the prejudices it engenders, make it a problem to-day, but at least the organised workers in all countries should have the insight and the humanity to realise their obligation to make it clear that they are willing to receive refugees. If unemployment is the fear, it is a mistaken one. Unemployment is a by-product of capitalism and is not caused or, in the long run, even aggravated by immigration.

On the vital question of the welfare of the working class and the Socialist Movement, we urge all workers, Jewish, Arab and others, to recognise their common interest in standing together as a class for the overthrow of capitalism. There are no circumstances justifying working-class support of capitalist governments or movements, including those that masquerade under the name of nationalism.

The Prospect for Socialism – What Will Happen After the War? (1939)

From the November 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

The outbreak of the second Great War prompts the question: What are the prospects for Socialism when the war comes to an end? While the last war was dragging on, Socialists, as may be seen from the columns of the Socialist Standard at the time, took an optimistic view. Seeing the gigantic senseless slaughter and knowing that the capitalist promises of a brave new world would never be fulfilled, Socialists held that the workers of all countries in vastly increased numbers would soon be brought to see the impossibility of any reconstruction, except on the basis of Socialism. It was too optimistic a view, as events proved.

Though disillusioned with pre-war Liberalism and Toryism, Kaiserism and Czarism, the workers found new illusions to keep them from the path to Socialism. Labourism, Bolshevism and Fascism occupied the void left by the collapse of the old parties and institutions. Must we, then, argue from this that optimism now is equally mistaken? Must we take the view that all is as it was and no progress has been made? That would indeed be a shattering blow to the Socialist movement and the principles on which it is based. Without self-deception it can be answered that the working class have made very real advances in understanding since 1914, and a moderate optimism now has a firm foundation.

No Enthusiasm for War

What are the grounds for optimism? One that first compels notice is the small amount of enthusiasm for the glories of war. Except perhaps among the young, there is now none of the intoxicated eagerness for battle and conquest that was in evidence in the warring countries in 1914. For years we have witnessed the Governments – particularly of the Dictator States, and not excluding Russia – using all the devices at their disposal to inculcate in the minds of the population an unthinking readiness for war and sacrifice, and a worship of the martial glories. Children of 10 years, and even younger, were being drilled and regimented and trained in the use of arms and taught that war was the supreme vocation of man. Yet the outbreak of this war has shown that the populations of all countries, without exception, prefer peace to war. The people of Italy, who were supposed to have been turned by the Fascists into a solid block thirsting for war and conquest, heaved a great sigh of relief that they were to remain out of the war at least for a time. All newspaper correspondents, in all countries, have agreed that the great mass of the men and women of Europe do not share the bellicose sentiments of the Hitlers and Mussolinis, and their counterparts in the democracies. In short, the great mass propaganda has been a colossal failure, and that fact is of importance, even though, with the progress of the war, it may later on be submerged as the tide of passion is inflamed by the slaughter of loved ones.

All Socialists Now

The other great change compared with 1914 is that the workers are seeking something better and different from the things they sought then, and are noticeably less easily fobbed off with promises merely to carry on capitalism on the old lines Dr. Goebbels, in one of his closer approximations to the truth, has said of the Germans that they are now a “politically-minded nation.” It is an exaggeration, perhaps, but the workers in all countries are, in the mass, more interested in fundamental political and social questions than they were 25 years ago, less attached to capitalist theories and more ready to give ear to anything which can even appear to be Socialistic. All those whose real purpose is to maintain the fundamentals of capitalism have had to take note of this change of working-class outlook. If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, “National Socialism” and kindred new disguises under which capitalism masquerades, is the tribute capitalism pays to Socialism. The workers will no longer vote, work or fight contentedly for capitalism, naked and unashamed, so the capitalist apologist must needs clothe his aims in Socialist phraseology. Hence the vague references in the speeches of British politicians to the need for building a new world after the war, and the plausible Labour Party argument that democracy must be safeguarded by winning the war in order that Socialism may in due course be achieved. Hence the Communist and Russian propaganda in defence of the Russian-German Pact, which represents it as a “victory for Peace and Socialism.” Hence the Nazi propaganda broadcast .over the wireless to the French workers which “attempts to convert the French listener with talks about social reforms in Germany and the necessity of ‘true Socialism’.” (Times, October 21st, 1939.) Hence the move by Hitler’s Government to allow Nazi speakers in Germany to promise radical reforms on the Bolshevik model, and the “suppression” of capitalism (Evening Standard, October 20th, 1939).

Only the very simple will conclude from this that Europe’s rulers have suffered a change of heart and become converts to Socialism. They are adapting themselves to the workers’ growing disillusionment with capitalism and hope in Socialism. They did not seek this change, but they could not prevent it. They have delayed it and are now using all their ingenuity and that of the tools and dupes to delay it still and side-track it into ends harmful or useless to the workers. They will fail, and the war they have now engaged in will hasten the eventual complete enlightenment of the working class. Robbed of the progress we expected after the last Great War, the Socialist movement can count on reaping a full harvest when peace comes again, no matter what course the war may take.

Edgar Hardcastle

What is Patriotism? (1937)

From the February 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Reprinted from "The Socialist Standard," December 1915)

The answer depends largely upon the point of view. From one standpoint patriotism appears as the actual religion of the modern State. From another it is the decadence and perversion of a noble and deep-rooted impulse of loyalty to the social unit, acquired by mankind during the earliest stages of social life. From yet another viewpoint, that of capitalist interests, patriotism is nothing more or less than a convenient and potent instrument of domination.

Its Origin
The word itself, both etymologically and historically, has its root in paternity. In tribal days the feeling of social solidarity, which has now become debased into patriotism, was completely bound up with the religion of ancestor worship. In tribal religion, as in the tribe itself, all were united by ties of blood. The gods and their rights and ceremonies were exclusive to the tribesmen. All strangers were rigidly debarred from worship. The gods themselves were usually dead warriors. Every war was a holy war. Among the ancient Israelites, for instance, the holy Ark of Jehovah of Hosts accompanied the tribes to battle. It was this abode or movable tomb of the ancestral deity that went with the Jews in their march through the desert, and even to Jericho, playing an important part in the fall of that remarkable city. All the traditions of the Jewish religion, in fact, were identified with great national triumphs.

A Bond of Union
Thus tribal religion was completely interwoven with tribal aspirations and integrity. Tribal “patriotism" and religion were identical. Indeed, without the strongest possible social bond, without a kind of “patriotism" that implied the unhesitating self-sacrifice of the individual for the communal existence, it would have been utterly impossible for tribal man to have won through to civilisation. Natural selection insured that only those social groups which developed this supreme instinct of mutual aid could survive; the rest were crushed out in the struggle for existence. Is it a matter for wonder if it be found that such a magnificent social impulse, so vital to the struggling groups of tribal man, received periodical consecration in the willing human sacrifices so common in primitive religious ceremonial? Bound up with the deliberate manufacture of gods for the protection of the tribe and its works, there is indicated a social recognition of the need for, and value of, the sacrifice of the individual for the common weal.

A Bond of Another Kind
This noble impulse of social solidarity is the common inheritance of all mankind. But being a powerful social force it has lent itself to exploitation. Therefore, with the development of class rule this great impulse is made subordinate to the class interests of the rulers. It becomes debased and perverted to definite anti-social ends. As soon as the people become a slave class “the land of their fathers” is theirs no more. Patriotism to them becomes a fraudulent thing. The “country” is that of their masters alone. Nevertheless, the instinct of loyalty to the community is too deep-seated to be eradicated so easily, and it becomes a deadly weapon in the hands of the rulers against the people themselves.

Patriotism and Religion Part Company
With the decay of society based on kinship, religion changed also, and from being tribal and exclusive it became universal and propagandist. “Patriotism” at the same time began to distinguish itself from religion. The instinctive tribal loyalty became transformed, by the aid of religion and the fiction of kinship, into political loyalty. In a number of instances in political society, as in Tudor England, the struggle for priority between religion and patriotism became so acute as to help in the introduction of a more subservient form of religion. Thus patriotism became emancipated from religion, and the latter became a mere accessory to patriotism as handmaiden of class rule.

Patriotism Always Obliges
Though universal religion did not split up at the same time as the great empire that gave it birth, patriotism did so. The latter has, in fact, always adapted, enlarged, or contracted itself to fit the existing political unit, whether feudal estate, village, township, county, kingdom, republic or empire. No political form has been too absurd for it to fill with its loyalty. No discordance of race, colour or language has been universally effective against it.

What, then, is patriotism in essence to-day? It is usually defined as being devotion to the land of our fathers. But which is the land of our fathers? Our fathers came from many different parts of the world. The political division of the world in which we live is an artificial entity. The land has been wrested from other races. The nation they call “ours” is the result of a conquest over original inhabitants, and over ourselves, by successive ruling classes. Unlike the free tribesmen we are hirelings; we possess no country.

The One Common Bond To-day
Nationality, of which patriotism is the superstition, covers no real entity other than that of a common oppression, a unified government. It does not comprise any unity of race, for in no nation is there one pure race, or anything like it. It does not cover a unity of language, for scarcely a nation exists in which several distinct languages are not indigenous. Nor is it any fixity of territory, for this changes from decade to decade, while the inhabitants of the transferred territory have to transfer their allegiance, their patriotism, to the new nation.

The only universal bond of nationality or patriotism that exists for us to-day is, then, that of subjection to a single government. Patriotism in the worker is pride in the common yoke imposed by a politically unified ruling class. Yet it is this artificial entity that we are called upon to honour before life itself. This badge of political servitude is called an object worthy of supreme sacrifice. The workers are expected to abandon all vital interests and sacrifice all they hold dear for the preservation of an artificial nationality that is little more than a manufactured unit of discord: a mere focus of economic and political strife.

Ignoble Exploitation
Thus one of the noblest fruits of man’s social evolution—the impulse of sacrifice for the social existence—is being prostituted by the capitalist class to maintain a system of exploitation, to obtain a commercial supremacy, and preserve or extend the boundaries of a superfluous political entity. The workers are duped by the ruling class into sacrificing themselves for the preservation of a politico-economic yoke of a particular form and colour. Many so-called Socialists have fallen headlong into this trap.

Had social solidarity developed in equal measure with the broadening of men’s real interests, it would now be universal in character instead of national. The wholesale mixture of races, and the economic interdependence of the whole world, show that nationalism is now a barrier, and patriotism, as we know it, a curse. Only the whole world can now be rightly called the land of our fathers. Only in the service of the people of the whole world, and not against those of any part of it, can the instinct of social service find its highest and complete expression. The great Socialist has pointed the way. He did not call upon the workers of Germany alone to unite. He appealed to the toilers of the whole world to join hands; to a whole world of labour whose only loss could be its parti-coloured chains. And in this alone lies the consummation of that tribal instinct of social solidarity of which patriotism is the perverted descendant.

Capitalism the Barrier
Capitalism, therefore, stands as the barrier the destruction of which will not only set free the productive forces of society for the good of all, but will also liberate human solidarity and brotherhood from the narrow confines of nationality and patriotism. Only victorious labour can make true the simple but pregnant statement: “Mankind are my brethren, the world is my country.” Patriotism and nationalism as we know them will then be remembered only as artificial restrictions of men’s sympathy and mutual help; as obstacles to the expansion of the human mind; as impediments to the needful and helpful development of human unity and co-operation; as bonds that bound men to slavery; as incentives that set brothers at each other's throats.

Despite its shameless perversion by a robber class the great impulse to human solidarity is by no means dead. Economic factors give it an ever firmer basis, and in the Socialist movement it develops apace. Even the hellish system of individualism, with its doctrine of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, has been unable to kill it. And in the great class struggle of the workers against the drones, of the socially useful against the socially pernicious, in this last great struggle for the liberation of humanity from; wage-slavery, the great principle of human solidarity, based upon the necessities of to-day and impelled by the deep-seated instincts of the race, will come to full fruition and win its supreme historical battle.

A Vile Use of a Noble Sentiment
That is our hope and aspiration. For the present, however, we are surrounded by the horrors of war added to the horrors of exploitation, and subjected to the operation of open repression as well as to the arts of hypocrisy and fraud. With the weakening power of religion to keep the workers obedient, the false cult of nationality and patriotism is being exploited to the full. Like religion, patriotism has its vestments, its ceremonies, its sacred emblems, its sacred hymns and inspired music; all of which are called in aid of the class interests of our masters, and utilised desperately to lure millions to the shambles for their benefit. Thus is an heroic and glorious social impulse perverted and debased to the support of a régime of wage-slavery, and to the furtherance of the damnable policy of the slave-holding class: to divide and rule.

F. C. Watts

The Curse of National Prestige. (1905)

From the August 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

The dawn of peace appears in the Far East

Slav and Mongol have faced each other on many a battlefield on land and sea, and victory has been uniformly with the new world power of Japan. This war was essentially a commercial war, as all wars are to-day carried on in the interests of commerce. All international relations, diplomatic and military, are becoming more and more commercial in their nature.

Some years ago the late Lord Salisbury declared that all wars in the future would be railway wars, and later he avowed that they would be tariff wars. He saw clearly as we Socialists see that war is but a manifestation of the antagonism of interests existing in the several national spheres of industry. We have only to look at recent wars in which European powers have been engaged to see that they have all been economic.

Norway and Sweden may be seen in a state of extreme tension because the ruling class of Norway believe that Sweden has been securing preferential commercial treatment through the appointment of a Consulate whose sympathies and interests were purely Swedish. Because of this commercial friction the Norwegian Storthting has passed a resolution deposing King Oscar and placing their country under the control of a provisional government.

Greece made war upon Turkey because she lusted after the rich olive groves of Crete. France and Germany were at war because France had ambitious thoughts of extending her boundaries to the Rhine while Germany was desirous of possessing the broad, smiling plains of Alsace and Lorraine. America fought with Spain for the possession of the plantations of Cuba and the Philippines. Britain crushed out the national independence of the Transvaal and Orange River Republics.

During the latter of those wars what was the fear of the ruling class as expressed in their Press? Not of the loss of life of the soldiers on the veldt, not of the thousands of children done to death by official incompetence, or something worse, in the concentration camps; not of the burning of homesteads and farmhouses in the Vaal; no, it was none of those things. The real fear was shown in the thrill of horror which was felt by the monied class in Park Lane or on ’Change when the rumour was current that Botha had blown up the Rand.

Nor is it a new thing for war to be fundamentally economic. In one stage of civilisation the food question causes tribe to fight against tribe, the fate of the defeated tribe being to serve as food for the victors. In another phase of civilisation the captured in battle are sent as helots to toil for the benefit of those who have vanquished them.

As Britain deliberately crushed out the trade and manufacture of Ireland and of India in the interests of her own manufacturers, so have countries sought for colonies and for extended territory in order to secure trade monopolies. In other directions the cloven hoof of commerce has displayed itself. Thus the union of the Parliaments of England and Scotland has ever been defended on the plea that it gave to the latter all the commercial privileges that the former had won for herself.

Although our contention that war has always been fundamentally economic can be justified from every historical epoch, yet it would be going too far to say that this has always been obvious. Many wars have appeared on superficial examination to be primarily religious, while others have been excused on the ground of maintaining national prestige. When recently the Baltic Fleet shot down innocent fishermen on the Dogger, when France ignored Germany in her arrangement with Britain, Spain and Italy as to her position in Morocco, in the thousand and one other occasions on which war has been in the air it has been the maintenance of national prestige which has been the excuse and the justification put forward.

In the worship of this fetich Britain replied to Russia’s seizure of Port Arthur by the seizure of Wei-hai-wei, and Germany by the fortification of Kiau-Chau. Britain having a sphere of interest, another phrase for a sphere of exploitation, Germany must have a sphere of interest in the province of Shantung, while France and Japan seek for similar enforced “concessions”.

The above remarks have been called forth by our witnessing dissension in the recently unified French Socialist party on the question as to whether the party should take part in wars carried on by the ruling powers of France. Among Socialists there appears some uncertainty as to the proper position to adopt with regard to this question, and a few remarks on the subject may not be out of place.

Beaconsfield, in his novel Sybil, declared that England was divided into two nations. These two nations are the nation of propertied and the nation of propertyless. The nation of the haves who do not work, and the nation of the have-nots who do. The question we have to determine for ourselves is, “Is the country of the propertied worth fighting for by the nation of the propertyless?”

I do not think it will be questioned by any Socialist that it is his duty to oppose the wars of the ruling class of one nation with the ruling class of another, and to refuse to participate in them. When Germany seeks to force war upon France so as to secure for herself special trade advantages with Morocco, it is for the millions of German and French socialists to declare in no uncertain voice that they will have no part or lot in the war. If they do this then there will be little fear of war. The military power of Russia has failed in the Russo-Japanese war largely because of the unrest among the Russian people, and the military power of Germany would be equally powerless against a revolt against war amongst the most intelligent of the political parties in the Fatherland.

With defensive wars the question becomes somewhat complicated. Is the Britain of the ruling class worth defending by the workers? Has the worker to-day – a wage-slave earning but a bare subsistence wage – anything to fight for? As it is the country is being conquered by the operations of the international capitalist. The British worker is to-day the employee of a limited liability company or of a trust whose shareholders are international, and it is the capitalist class who rule the political machine.

Were Germany to conquer France or France to conquer Britain, he would be ruled by no more alien class than rules him to-day. As the result of bring a citizen of a country which is nationally independent his condition is such that he has no guarantee from week to week of his power of earning his livelihood. Thirteen millions of him are living in a state of semi-starvation, and the individuals composing those thirteen millions are always changing. In the slum districts the conditions are such that crime is at a premium, and virtuous living at a discount, so much so indeed that it is a constant surprise that the results of these conditions are so good.

The worker to-day has nothing to fight for. The interests of his masters are not his interests. National prestige is not his prestige, but is used to force from other nations commercial treaties and conditions which in the end prove adverse to him.

What the Socialist has to realise clearly is that the interests of his fellow workers in other lands are nearer to his than are those of his master in his own country. The bonds which bind worker with worker, irrespective of nationality, are those of class solidarity. The meeting of Japanese and Russian on the platform at the International socialist Congress at Amsterdam in August last was but symbolic of this solidarity. From the capitalist-class of every country the worker is divided by a gulf of class antagonism which can be bridged only by the absorption of the capitalist-class in the working class, the result of the coming Social Revolution.

When the capitalist-class fully realises that they can no longer depend upon the working-class, when they find that the worker has at last come to understand his class position, and that he has no reason for fighting in his master’s interests against those with whom he has no personal quarrel, he, the capitalist, will see that it is impossible to appeal to national prestige, to patriotism, to the spirit of “our imperial race” and all the rest of the phrases used of old, and then it will be impossible to make war in so light a spirit, or to raise questions likely to create a tension between the ruling class of different nations.

It is for the worker to see that his position demands that he should fight only for his class emancipation, and that nothing, internal reform or national strife, should draw him away from his determination to fight for the realisation of the Socialist regime.

WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS! YOU HAVE A WORLD TO WIN.

Robert Elrick